Romanticism: The Importance Of Reason During The Enlightenment

During the seventeenth century the Enlightenment period believed in the importance of reason. The philosophers and writers during this time focused on what exactly it meant to be a human. The Enlightenment saw the universe has a machine that runs on its own and has set laws. They believed the universe was knowable through reason and controllable. There are three main actions that pushed the people from Enlightenment to Romanticism. First, was Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher can arguably be the first person to start the Romantic Revolution. Second, the French Revolution, this revolt contended on governmental decree established by reason, not monarchist heredity. Third, the Enlightenment thinkers pursued reason to much, which to the Romantic

Basically Kant was intrigued, according to an article by S. Snyder, “by how we can know that the world we experience is real and not just the product of our minds. His solution was that we can never be fully certain about the world outside of our minds, but we can be somewhat more certain about the categories our minds impose upon the world.” Kant was skeptical about idea of the self, which is what the Enlightenment thinkers strived on, but Romantic thinkers seized on the idea that the individual mind could play a part in ordering, shaping, and imposing meaning on the world. During the 18th century the rise of drastically unconvinced philosophers questioned the being of an individual self. David Hume argued that the self was only a product of situation that our culture gave us. This was not our true self. Romantic writers, philosophers, and artists tried to restate the significance of the self. Their art and criticism focused on reflection and analyzing one’s self. They went inward to scrutinize the human mind’s relationship to the world. Kant paved the way for men like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; English Romantic poets who’s Lyrical Ballads transformed poetry by using common dialectal, natural metaphors, and an accentuating the poet’s own