The Roots of Romanticism
Borrowed from Isiah Berlin
The First Attack on Enlightenment Chapter two
Enlightenment………………
All genuine questions can be answered
All these answers are knowable
All the answers must be compatible with one another
Rationalist answers……………………………………………………………
Not by revelation
Not by tradition
Not by dogma
Not by self-inspection
Reason only…………………………………………………………………………
Deductively (mathematical sciences)
Inductively (sciences of nature)
Abandon
Could be applied to morals, politics, aesthetics, human opinion
Ideal forms towards which all life was tending
Inner objective ideal towards which nature and man tended
Bind together the eternal and the objective
Reality, life, nature, the ideal – are identical
The formal, the noble, the symmetrical, the proportional, the judicious
Science will make people happy, free, virtuous and just
Reality
Enlightenment was a pale substitute for the creative energies
Kind of an artificial toy
Kind of a lifeless model
No relation to human
A creative clash of opinion
Dead harmony and peace
Nothing before love of God
Reduce your vulnerable surface
Be as little wounded as possible
Reason is a whore
Spiritual events have an infinite significance
The bliss of the human soul
Is not happiness
It is rooted in the untrammeled realization of its powers
The body is a picture of the soul
A ghost palpitating inside this machine
.
.
Transmuting
What is this highly praised reason with its
universality
infallibility
overweeningness
certainty
self-evidence
It is a stuffed dummy which the howling superstition of unreason has endowed with divine attributes
When we think
,
We think in symbols
,
We think in words
,
All translation is in principle impossible