The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition

Romanticism was a major movement in philosophy and art in the later 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. The Romantics in England and Germany were predominately reacting against the heavy emphasis on Rationalism and Empiricism, which were largely based on the scientific discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton and argued for a mechanical view of the universe. Enlightenment philosophy strongly emphasized the importance of reason in human morality and behavior, and challenged the traditional Christian conception of the world by placing more emphasis on determining the objective, verifiable laws of nature through observation and experimentation.

In the late 18th century, many German philosophers reacted against these heavily rationalist tendencies by closely examining the imagination and emotions. Georg Hegel is considered the most influential of the German Idealist philosophers (who emphasized the primacy of the mind), with his book Phenomenology of Spirit introducing the idea of Absolute Knowing, in which a person can access the interconnectedness of humanity, nature, and the universe. German writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also began writing works that centered human feeling and subjectivity, with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) becoming an important forerunner of Romanticism.