NINETEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT: DEFINITIONS
Nineteenth Century Philosophy refers to the work of philosophers ranging from the late eighteenth century (such as Fichte and the German Idealists) to the late nineteenth century. Eric Hobsbawm refers to the period 1789–1914 as the 'long nineteenth century.'
Phases
The Counter-Enlightenment is a term used to refer to a movement that arose in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in opposition to the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Isaiah Berlin was one of the first to popularise the concept of a Counter-Enlightenment movement that he characterised as relativist, anti-rationalist, vitalist and organic, and which he associated most closely with Romanticism.
Romanticism (c.1785 - c.1830): an artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. It coincided with what is often called the "age of revolutions" -- including the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions -- an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and practice of poetry (and all art), but the very way we perceive the world. Rejecting most metaphysical systems, Romanticism was of the view basically that each person (and humankind collectively) must create the system by which to live. The emphasis of the Enlightenment on the objective was replaced by an emphasis on the subjective, leading to idealism, the view that the external world is largely a creation of our minds. The Imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to 'read' nature as a system of symbols. While particular perspectives with regard to Nature varied considerably--nature as a healing power, nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unified whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself.
Romantic Literary Theory: Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The 'poetic speaker' became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet. Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's "Song of Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components. Confessional prose narratives such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Chateaubriand's Rene (1801), as well as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron's Childe Harold (1818), are related phenomena. The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric. Stylistically, they utilised the language of everyday people, boldness, free experimentation, inspiration, use of local colour (everyday characters, popular literary forms like the ballad, folksongs). As opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time and/or place also gained favor, for the Romantics were also fascinated with realms of existence that were, by definition, prior to or opposed to the ordered conceptions of 'objective' reason. The Romantic artist sometimes took public stands, or wrote works with socially or politically oriented subject matter, reacting strongly to examples of social and political injustice. Yet at the same time, another trend began to emerge, as they withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining boundaries of bourgeois life.
Victorianism (c.1830 - c.1890): The Victorian era of the United Kingdom corresponded to the period of Queen Victoria's rule from June 1837 to January 1901. This was a long period of prosperity for the British people, as profits gained from the overseas British Empire, as well as from industrial improvements at home, allowed a large, educated middle class to develop. Some scholars extend backwards the beginning of the period — as defined by a variety of sensibilities and political concerns that have come to be associated with the Victorians — five years to the passage of the Reform Act 1832. Victorianism is the name often given to the attitudes, art, and culture of the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century, especially with reference to English-speaking peoples and the British Empire. The term is often used in a pejorative sense to underscore the contradiction between a manifest emphasis on morality (to the point of puritanism), self-control, and the virtues of maintaining a top-down social hierarchy, on the one hand, and a latent immorality.
Fin de Siecle (c.1890 - c.1914): a cultural movement between 1880 and the beginning of World War I (1914). The term commonly encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning. Traditionally, the term 'fin de siècle' is most commonly associated with French artists and movements, especially French aestheticism, decadence, impressionism and symbolism, and those in England and elsewhere affected by the cultural awareness characteristic of France at that time. However, the expression is also used to refer to a European-wide cultural movement. The ideas and concerns of the fin de siècle influenced the decades to follow and played an important role in the birth of modernism.
Schools of Thought
(American) Transcendentalism: a group of new ideas, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau above all, in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. Transcendentalism began as a protest against the general state of culture and society at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among Transcendentalists' core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.
(Proto-)Existentialism: a reaction against traditional philosophies, such as rationalism and empiricism, that seek to discover an ultimate order in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world, and thereby seek to discover universal meaning, it is a movement that emerged during the nineteenth century, in the work of philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche especially and authors like Dyodor Dostoevsky, but was further developed by twentieth century philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism generally postulates that the absence of a transcendent force (God) means that the individual is entirely free, and, therefore, ultimately responsible. It is up to humans to create an ethos of personal responsibility for themselves, outside of any branded belief system. In existentialist views, personal articulation of being is the only way to rise above humanity's absurd condition of much suffering and inevitable death. It posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them.
German Idealism: a philosophical movement in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries associated with the work of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment. The term 'idealism' here is the view that the properties we discover in objects depend on the way that those objects appear to us as perceiving subjects, and not something they possess 'in themselves,' apart from our experience of them.
Key Concepts
Hermeneutics: the term 'hermeneutics' (from the Greek word Ερμηνεύς, 'interpreter') is thought to be derived from the name of the Greek god Hermes who functioned in classical mythology to relay to humans messages sent by the gods. (Hermes was often depicted as playing tricks on those he was supposed to give messages to, often altering the messages and influencing the interpretation thereof.) From at least the Middle Ages, the term 'Hermeneutics' was closely tied to the attempt to formulate principles designed to ensure the correct interpretation of the Bible and related texts in the Christian tradition. However, more recently, it has come to be used in a broader sense to denote the study of the theories and methods involved in the interpretation of texts more generally. Modern hermeneutics, which takes its lead from its principal exponent in the nineteenth century, Friedrich von Schleiermacher, has come to denote a particular method of interpretation the goal of which is to use the language of the text in question (either oral or written) to 'get inside,' as it were, the author's mind and thereby identify his intention, that is, the specific meaning which s/he has imparted to the words in question.
Historicism: the view that the particularity of all phenomena must be grasped in relation to the social and historical context(s) in which they emerged and subsequently developed. Maurice Mandelbaum offers a classic definition: "Historicism is the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through considering it in terms of the place which it occupied and the role which it played within a process of development" (History Man and Reason). Historicists adopt a genetic approach to understanding phenomena, that is, they seek to understand things in terms of their historical genesis and social location. Historicism may be summed up in relation to two principal trends: a cosmogony defined in terms of change as opposed to stasis and a propensity to conceptualise things via genetic explanations (i.e. by understanding their origin).
Philology:
Positivism: a term coined by the founder of the Social Sciences, Auguste Comte, it holds, basically, that the truth is located 'out there' in the real world and waits merely to be discovered precisely because the facts exist independently of any theories or human observation and may be apprehended through the senses. It refers to the view that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge produced through the strict application of the Scientific Method.
Scientific Method: this refers to the application of a body of techniques for investigating phenomena the goal of which is to acquire new knowledge or, at least, integrate and/or correct previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must gather observable, empirical and measurable evidence according to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of
- Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena culminating in the collection of data,
- the formulation of a hypothesis designed to explain the evidence accumulated in this way,
- the prediction, on the basis of this hypothesis, of other phenomena, or the quantitative prediction of the results of new observations (in effect, at this stage, the consequences of the hypothesis in question are deduced),
- the testing or verification of the predictions made in this way via experimentation.
Utilitarianism: the idea (associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) that the moral worth of an action is solely determined by its contribution to overall utility in maximizing happiness or pleasure as summed among all persons. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome—the ends justify the means. Utility — the good to be maximized — has been defined by various thinkers as happiness or pleasure (versus sadness or pain). It may be described as a life stance with happiness or pleasure as of the ultimate importance.
