René Descartes
René Descartes (1596 –1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. Much ensuing Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are still studied closely to this day and thus has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy'. This title is justified due both to his break with the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy prevalent at his time and to his development and promotion of the new, mechanical sciences. His fundamental break with Scholastic philosophy was twofold. First, Descartes thought that the Scholastics’ method was prone to doubt given their reliance on feeling as the source for all knowledge. Second, he wanted to replace their final causal model of scientific explanation with the more modern, mechanistic model. The ideas, expressed in his book Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur (Meditations on First Philosophy-1641) are generally considered the starting point of modern Western philosophy, and with good reason. In this one brief text, Descartes turns many Aristotelian doctrines upside down and frames many of the questions that are still being debated in philosophy today. Among other things, Descartes devalues the Aristotelian notion that all knowledge comes via the senses and feelings .It was in these and others in which he tried to create a perfectly rational philosophy, free of all false assumptions and emotional judgment. Descartes famous quote “I think therefore I am” is against the ideologies of the Romantic era as it presents being as the all important without any regard to emotion or feeling. The die was cast by Descartes and by many others of his time, and the revolution of reason survived and grew. Therefore Descartes is often considered one of the most important founders of the Enlightenment, which was what the Romantic Era was in retaliation to.
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Denis DiderotPhilosophers of the Romantic era started to think differently in regards to the human mind and soul. Philosophers praised theories that ‘to feel is too exist,’ ‘man in his natural is good’ and that ‘the greatest evils come from ourselves.’ Denis Diderot was one of the most influential philosophical key thinkers of the Romantic Movement. Diderot was arrested in July of 1749 after writing an encyclopaedia that consisted of more than 7,000 articles and 3,000 diagrams. Diderot was arrested for releasing publications that expressed ‘thinking differently.’ Diderot’s encyclopaedia suggested that there was no place for God and that civilisation had usurped his once prominent position. The encyclopaedia was banned and viewed as ‘the work of the Devil.’ Without Diderot’s arrest, close friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have not come to his epiphany that ‘man is free and everywhere he is in chains’ which came to him on one of his routine visits to Diderot at the Bastille prison. Romantic philosophers studied the mind with the same depth and detail as scientists of the time were studying the human body. Romantic’s expressed their newfound value of feelings over thoughts and sought to see an end to the inhumane system of control that reached right across France and Europe. Ideas of liberty that rooted amongst Diderot and his companions set off a new train of thought that quickly spread worldwide. More importantly, philosophers became empowered by the potential power of the people, releasing works that foreshadowed: ‘the people is the foundations of the state. It is in the hands of the people that national power resides. The people is everything’ The Romantic Movement celebrated free will and free love and encouraged its next generation to carry on the philosophies that were to change the way humans interacted and respected themselves for the rest of time.
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Immanuel KantThe Enlightenment Era valued explaining the world objectively based only on reasoning, facts and logic. It attempted to explain the world through a series of scientifically proven laws that could account for all aspects of the universe. Examples of this can be seen in the works of scientist’s such as Isaac Newton, who determined to explain the world through laws of science. This belief, that the world could be explained through rational laws, was the basis of enlightenment theory. Thus the world was entirely interpreted through objective views, as the Enlightenment Era sought to order the world through universal laws and rational facts.
Immanuel Kant born 22 April 1724 was a German philosopher who is widely considered to be a central figure of modern philosophy. He argued that human concepts and categories structure our view of the world and its laws, and that reason is the source of morality. Immanuel Kant is greatly responsible for the philosophical paradigm shift that took place in the Romantic Period. In his publication, the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argued that we do not see “things in themselves”, rather we only understand things from a human point of view, from a perspective. Kant valued the mind and perspective, over the ability to rationalise and analyse.This led directly to the Romantic idea of idealism, the belief that the external world is formed and created by the interpretation from the mind. Thus the subjective viewpoint became hugely valued as the primary method of understanding the world as the individual’s perspective became incredibly important as idealism held that it was the individual’s interpretation that was key to understanding. This is evident throughout many, if not all, of the Romantic prescribed texts. One excellent example is Coleridge’s poem This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison in which Coleridge, instead of describing what he physically can see, describes what he imagines he would see if he was able to go on the walk with his friend, the “gentle-hearted Charles”. The Romantics valued subjective viewpoints in interpreting the world, rather than the objective. This view contradicts the values of the Enlightenment Era, which the Romantics saw to be the incorrect way of understanding life.
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Jean-Jacques RousseauJean- Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a Swiss philosopher, writer and essayist born in Geneva, Switzerland Moving to Paris in 1742, Rousseau became renowned for his radical socio-political ideas that aligned him with a group of fellow Enlightenment thinkers known as the philosophes. He shared their fierce hatred of France’s social hierarchy and is well known for challenging the feudal system that coddled the ‘elite’ upper-class. These ideas, as expressed in his book, Du Contrat Social (the Social Contract- 1762) would go on to become the founding principles of The French Revolution that erupted 11 years after his death in 1778. Thus, Rousseau is considered to be one of the most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment. However, Rousseau also pioneered ideas that would become fundamental to another radical movement of the 18th century: Romanticism. Rousseau’s values were very different to the quantitative mindsets of other Philosophes, such as those of his good friend, the devout rationalist Denis Diderot. Rousseau instead focused upon concepts such as nature, individualism and emotional expression that identified strongly with the early Romantics and would later become defining values of the movement. For example, he pioneered the concept of the noble savage, and revered the primitive natural lifestyle, a nostalgia that was reiterated within later Romantic texts. Rousseau also idealised nature, as is recorded within his unfinished book published in 1782, Reveries of a Solitary Walker. He believed that society was unnatural and designed to oppress and devalue the needs of the individual- “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” He was especially critical of institution, arguing that it favoured materialism at the cost of what is truly important: individual emotion-“to feel is to exist.” This championing the chaos of individual emotion became central to Romantic art and opposed the neoclassical art of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, Rousseau’s criticism of institution and reverence of nature are also identifiable within later works of the movement. Thus, Rousseau is often considered to be the father of Romanticism.
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