Romanticism has little to do with what most people imagine it to be today. Early Romanticism in particular was anything but ” enthusiastic” and dreamy. “Gushers” were, on the contrary, even an enemy for the Romantics. Likewise, the Romantics did not want to return to nature, as the Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau propagated. Nor did they substitute feeling for the rational. And they were certainly far removed from all kitsch. The Romantics had virtually nothing to do with all these descriptions that are common today. More to the point, they had much in common with the Cynics of antiquity. Real romantics was real cynics.
Take the following statement:
Man exists in the truth. If he reveals the truth, he reveals himself. He who betrays the truth betrays himself. We are not talking about lying here, but about acting against conviction.
Novalis. Aphorismen. 39
Without a doubt, Novalis belongs to the real romantics. And the above quote alone proves that he also belongs to the real cynics.
But after I had already finished this article and was still further interested in Novalis, I now found the following quote. So I felt with the romantics, like with Erasmus of Rotterdam. First I discovered their similarities with the Cynics. Then I found an explicit confirmation that they are quite aware of that:
The most healthy constitution under a maximus of stimuli represents the king, – the same under a minimum of stimuli – the real cynic. The more equal both are, the more easily and unchanged they could confuse their roles, the more their constitution approaches the ideal of the perfect constitution. So the more independent the king lives from his throne, the more he is king. All charms are relative – are magnitudes – except for One, which is absolute. […] This stimulus is – absolute love. A cynic and a king without it, are only titulatures.
Novalis, op.cit.
One must insert two things here: First, Novalis means an ideal king, not historical models. He writes that anyone who does not understand that he is not describing real kingships here should move on; he would then not understand anything else that he writes either.
And then he wants all people to become kings. He could have also written, “gods”. Then he would have been exactly at the Cynic virtue goal, the fully liberated self would be the complete realization of the divine, we would become God.
In the quotation Novalis shows that he understood the Cynics better than most. Poverty is not the ideal, as it is often read, but independence from the strange, devotion to one’s own, to God.
At the center of Romanticism is not sentimentalism, but the search for the right life. And this consists, as for the Cynics, in parrhesia: in speaking and living the truth, in self-realization.
For the truly religious, there is no sin.
Novalis, op.cit.
This sums up exactly what Parrhesia stands for for us Cynics: we need only one virtue: self-realization. And: no Rights, just Mights.
And the second essential aspect, besides parrhesia, was for romantics, the revaluation of the ruling values of the Enlightenment:
The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like the life on the organic body. One dephilosophized the sciences: what remains? Earth, air and water.
Novalis, op.cit.
Elsewhere, Novalis is even more explicit: science limited to reason finds only dirt. This may be the source of the misunderstanding that Romanticism emphasizes feeling instead of reason.
The Romantics do not want to go “back to nature”, nor do they want to neglect reason in favor of feelings. Novalis, for example, was a natural scientist and ran a mining company. He had to and could deal with numbers. What the Romantics criticized was that only numbers should still play a role. Romantics warned of consequences for humanity that we are just now beginning to feel in full.
They found that the glare of enlightenment made things invisible. And they sought truth in the twilight or in the night.
Their mood was not optimistic, not characterized by the rapturous “anything goes” of the Enlightenment. They were rather melancholic. They found that the glare of enlightenment made things invisible They sought truth not in the bright light, but in the night or in the twilight.
Also the pictures of Casper David Friedrich stand for this. His sunsets are by no means kitschy, but are intended to make longing for the truth visible..
Romantics also stand, quite comparable to Socrates, for a religious renewal.
By no means were they atheists. They considered atheism as a result of the Enlightenment as stupid as the system of the ruling churches as godless. They are thus still miles ahead of today’s rabble, who make fun of every religion just because they feel the godlessness of the big churches, but have lost God over it.
Romantics stood for the will to might and against the will to desert, to nihilism as a result of the Enlightenment. Immer mehr fand ich heraus: Real romantics are real cynics.
Learning from romantics today means learning to survive.
