From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Sun Dec 10 2000 - 14:26:06 MST
In a message dated 12/10/00 12:02:16 PM Central Standard Time,
namacdonald@stthomas.edu writes:
> > I have a piece in the weekend issue of an Australian newspaper, The
> > Brisbane CourierMail, at
> >
> > http://www.couriermail.com.au/
>
> "A rebound was inevitable, when Romanticism played up "authentic" blinding
> passion at the expense of reasoning. Now we know better."
>
> We do? At least the Romantics knew how to live and write great poetry.
> Rationally, they also bucked the trends of their time- many of them were
> atheists. I'd rather be in their camp than that of the "rationalists" of
> any era.
Yes, we do know better now. Sure, the Romantics SEEMED to be continuing on
with the cultural impetus that began with the Enlightenment, but in fact they
represented a turn down a blind alley of relativism and subjectivism.
Perhaps the standard academic post-modernist canon taught in the liberal arts
establishment makes it seem like the progression from the rationalism of the
Enlightenment to the subjectivism of Romanticism was some kind of inevitable
historical necessity, but it wasn't. Sure the young Byron and the young
Shelley cut a fine figure tossed by their emotional winds, but their passions
lead historically to the confused subjectivist dogmas of the 20th century
and, also as a matter of historical fact, to the passions of such political
dogmas as modern nationalism and the intellectual glorification of violent
social revolution.
Romanticism supplied the energy behind Western "counterculture" from its
birth with Rousseau until the 1960s. But now, with the ascendancy of
postmodernism, Romanticism has become the mainstream of Western intellectual
culture. How ironic that the "outsider" has become the paradigm
"establishment" figure! The fact is that the truly energetic counterculture
today derives from a revitalized Enlightenment, now that real scientific
understanding has begun to fulfill the promise of the original Enlightenment
program.
In the 50s "cool" people read Meade and Marcuse and Marx and could feel good
about maintaining their ideological progressiveness in the face of the
conformity of "the man in the gray flannel suit"; today people in the know
read Dawkins and More and Kurzweil and look forward to a REAL revolution,
while the mainstream of academia slowly dissolves in a self-congratulatory
puddle of subjectivist nonsense.
> > Just shuffling those memes into visibility like a trouper...
>
> Well then, zeig heil!
I wonder what this could mean.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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