Romanticism DBQ Romanticism was a late 18th century movement that was a reaction against what was considered the ‘excessive rationality and scientific narrowness’ of the Enlightenment era. Romantics sought to conserve the idea and customs held in the Middle Ages. They viewed the middle ages as a representation of the social stability and religious reverence that was lacking from their own era. Romantics held the mystery of nature, the glorification of history, and the emotion of religion, in high regard. These views were formed in retaliation the the Enlightenment Era and defined the characteristics of Romanticism.
In the quote below Rand explains why she rejects religion outright, and she believes man himself deserves the attention: Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man… But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions.
As we see in this segment of Document 6 “Reason is in the estimation of the philosopher what grace is to the Christian. Grace determines the Christian's action; reason the philosopher's.” the philosophers of the Enlightenment strove to explain everything by means of logic and reason which was a mindset that was pioneered during the Scientific Revolution. Essentially, Enlightenment thinkers took the rational mindset from scientific discoveries of the Scientific Revolution and began to apply it to society. Isaac Newton's discoveries established the principles of the Enlightenment. At the time, discovery was looked at with skepticism as people had become accustomed to the bible being the only source of information about the world.
Browning’ poetry explores the consequences of obsession. How effectively does F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby deal with this issue in a different context and form? An idea that continually preoccupies and intrudes on a person’s mental and physical state is a term referred to as 1obsession and can lead to a character’s salvation or undoing. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s, “Sonnets from the Portuguese”, composed in the Victorian age of unparalleled power and industrial revolution, reflects significantly on the ideas of obsession and it’s ramifications through figurative language, poetic devices and techniques. Ideas such as idealistic love and societal expectations are heavily embedded within the Petrarchan sonnet form, which, on the
1) Evaluate the ways in which the different approaches to Enlightenment held by France, Britain, and America impacted their own societies. Thesis: The extreme and different approach of to Enlightenment of the French alienated it from the British and Americans, and also led to the destruction of the country. Both America and Britain had a moderate reform, while the French had an extreme upheaval that led to its ruin. All three Enlightenments were based on the same concepts of reason, liberty and justice. Britain built their Enlightenment on ‘social virtues’, not reason.
In this case, nature was considered as unpredictable, had a great potential for extreme disasters and had uncontrollable power. The terrifying and violent images of nature invented by artists during the romantic period recalled the 18th century aesthetics. In British and French paintings of the early eighteenth century, the presentation of the struggle of man against the power of nature highlights this sensibility. Romanticism, which cannot be expressed using a single technique, attitude or style, is characterized by a highly subjective approach, such as visionary quality and emotional intensity (Tekiner, 2000). The context of romanticism can be equated to a reaction against the enlightenment age.
When you hear romanticism, you think lovey dovey? No. It is actually a time frame in the 19th century that was a reaction against much of the thought of the Enlightenment. You could say it was a challenge against the Enlightenment views of not only human beings but of the natural world. The Romantic writers and artist used imagination but in the end it was all reality, where everyone really understood it.
In the seventeenth century, European intellectuals developed a new understanding of scientific endeavor, namely to discern natural causes through quantitative measurement. Galileo first challenged the Scholastic supposition that mathematical astronomy was merely ancillary to natural philosophy, and by the middle of the century, both the Cartesian and Newtonian mechanical systems had placed mathematics at center stage, disdaining qualitative physics as irrelevant, unknowable, and misleading. Consistent with their methodology, the mechanists tended to reduce the ontological reality of the natural world to its quantitative aspects, implicitly or explicitly eliminating all categories other than extension, time, space, and motion. In this interpretation, Descartes’ treatment of matter as extension merely formalized an intellectual aesthetic that even his adversaries held in practice. We can easily see this penchant for quantification in Newton’s belief that all physics is mechanical, but we might not expect to find a mania for quantity among those who held a more poetic view of reality.
Since the days of Aristotle, the concept of a tragic hero has been a part of storytelling and literature. A tragic, or romantic, hero is someone who begins at a noble position, but has a tragic flaw that ultimately leads to the character’s demise. Often, this character realizes this flaw, but not before it is too late. In Shakespeare’s tragic play, Othello, the title character is a romantic hero. His rapid downfall is a result of his passionate love, so intense that it greatly hinders his rational thought.
The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx both believed that objective and rational principles governed the historical process. Hegel’s idea is that each of the stages or ideas that have been overcome to reach a “totality” are true. “The totality is the product of that process which preserves all of its “moments” as elements in a structure, rather than as stages or phases”. For Hegel, it was the dialectical clash of opposing ideas that moved history into the next stage. Marx believed Hegel’s view was too abstract and metaphysical in nature and did not address the problems of the real world.