Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 17.05.2014 16:31, Monte Davis wrote:

> "The whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It's what happened to the 
> Enlightenment, isn't it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on 
> itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap 
> thrills and false emotion."
>
> Hannah, in Stoppard's "Acadia"I
>
> On May 17, 2014 5:26 AM, "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com 
> <mailto:against.the.dave at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians
>
>     http://www.openculture.com/2014/05/the-british-library-puts-online-1200-romantic-and-victorian-literary-treasures.html
>
>


"One of the theses advanced by Carl Schmitt in his *Political 
Romanticism 
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=6760&ttype=2>* 
(MIT Press, 1986, tr. Guy Oakes; German original first appeared in 1919 
as *Politische Romantik*, 2nd ed. 1925) is that romanticism is a form of 
occasionalism. As Schmitt puts it, “Romanticism is subjectified 
occasionalism.” (PR 17) In this set of notes I attempt to interpret and 
develop this thought. I will take the ball and run with it, but I won’t 
quit the field of Schmitt’s text. Before proceeding, a preliminary point 
about metaphysics needs to be made.

1. Metaphysical commitment is unavoidable. (PR 17) Every person assumes 
some metaphysical stance or other, tacitly or expressly, whether or not 
he is conscious of assuming it. That is to say: he takes something or 
other to be ultimate or absolute or foundational or finally 
authoritative. For some this is God, but for others it is “humanity, the 
nation, the individual, historical development, or even life as life for 
its own sake, in its complete emptiness and mere dynamic.” (PR 17) 
Secularization is the process whereby God is replaced by some such 
mundane ersatz. But the replacement of God by the individual, say, or by 
the revolution, does not alter the fact that something is being taken as 
absolute, as an ultimate focus and locus of meaning. The only question 
is whether this is something transcendent or something immanent (worldly).

Someone who attempts to reject every absolute soon finds himself 
affirming one willy-nilly. To say, “I accept nothing whatsoever as 
absolute!” is to accept as absolute the rejection all absolutes. After 
all, a relativized rejection of all absolutes would be one that 
countenances circumstances in which absolutes would be affirmed. To 
claim that all is a matter of perception or perspective, that there are 
no absolute truths or absolute moral standards, is to posit some 
principle of perspectivism or relativism as an absolute principle. A 
relativized or perspectivized perspectivism undercuts itself.

2. Romanticism is a metaphysical attitude that places the individual 
subject at the center. The romantic does not free himself from divine 
control in order to submit to some temporal power such as the state; his 
attempt is to free himself from every external power. Romanticism puts 
the individual human being in the place of God.

3. God stands to the world as creator to creature. Divine creating is 
causing in a preeminent sense, a causing to exist, a bringing into being 
/ex nihilo/. But the human individual is in no position to create the 
world out of nothing. At best, he can operate upon the world and change 
it in minor ways. He can bring about changes in what exists, but cannot 
bring about what exists. But even this is hard work and so does not 
interest the romantic. You see, this fellow is a bit of a slacker. To 
operate upon the world effectively, to cause real changes in it, one 
must understand its causal structure, its nomological order and 
intrinsic intelligibility. One must study hard science. I cannot 
manipulate worldly realities for my use and benefit unless I understand 
their intrinsic properties. To work upon the world, I must understand it 
workings (/Wirkungen/ = effects) and these have causes.

The romantic, however, substitutes /occasio/ for /causa/. (PR 16-17). He 
does not want to work upon the world. That would require submitting to 
the world and its laws. The romantic would rather play God and create 
something /ex nihilo/. That’s easier, more fun, and more ‘creative.’ He 
must be creative at all costs, and original to boot! Originality is a 
high value among the romantically inclined just so long as it is 
understood that he is the /fons et origo/. The source that interests him 
is not rooted in reality but rooted in him. He takes originality to be 
connected with novelty. What he wants is the new, not the true. Truth 
implies correspondence to a pre-given reality possessing an intrinsic 
intelligibility demanding his intellectual submission. The romantic, 
however, prefers dominance over submission. But he would dominate the 
world, not by working on it – which is hard work and requires an 
understanding of the world’s intrinsic workings – but by telling 
stories, painting pictures, and the like, with the world as the mere 
occasion of the telling and the painting, etc.

So the romantic subject treats the world as an occasion, an opportunity, 
for his romantic productivity. For the romantic, things cease to be what 
they are, substantial mind-independent unities, acting and being acted 
upon in a world governed by causal laws; they become instead starting 
points for endless novels. (PR 20)

It helps to recall that ‘romantic’ refers us back to /Roman/, novel. The 
romantic, then, takes worldly data as mere occasions for his 
fictionalizing and poeticizing. Incapable of making the world, he makes 
up stories about it and enjoys the experiences he conjures up by so 
doing. Fabricating and fictionalizing, the romantic finds an ersatz for 
/creatio ex nihilo/.

4. Schmitt’s idea, then, is that to understand romanticism one must 
understand it as a species of occasionalism. But what exactly is 
occasionalism? Classically, occasionalism is a theory of causation in 
which secondary causes – causes in the natural world – are mere 
occasions of divine activity. It is a theory according to which God is 
the only genuine or productive cause and every thing else that looks 
like a cause is but an ‘occasional cause,’ a mere condition of the 
exercise of divine activity. Suppose a bolt of lightning hits a tree and 
the tree explodes into flame. If you believe in the efficacy of natural 
events, then you say that the bolt of lightning *caused* the tree to 
burn. But if you are an occasionalist like the Muslim al-Ghazali 
<http://www.epistemelinks.com/Main/Philosophers.aspx?PhilCode=Algh>or 
the Christian Malebranche 
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/malebranche/>, you interpret the same 
appearances in a different way: you say that there are two 
spatiotemporally contiguous events with one occuring before the other, 
but that there is no worldly connection between the two other than 
spatiotemporal contiguity and temporal successiveness. Thus there is no 
causing on the world’s ‘horizontal plane’ that links the two events. The 
exploding into flame is not brought about by the bolt of lightning 
contacting the tree; the former is brought about by God ‘vertically’ on 
the occasion of the lightning strike.

Classically, then, occasionalism is at once both a theory of causation 
and a theory of how God is related to the world: God commands all the 
power and the world commands none. Theologically, this fits nicely with 
Islam’s emphasis on the radical transcendence, unity, and omnipotence of 
Allah. Omnipotence here means not only that God can do everything that 
is (metaphysically) possible to do; but also that God actually does 
everything that gets done. All doing is divine doing, appearances 
notwithstanding.

Schmitt’s idea can be understood in part as follows. The romantic adopts 
a metaphysical stance in which the individual human subject is the 
center, the final authority, the ultimate arbiter of the good, the true, 
and the beautiful. The individual subject takes over the role of God. 
The romantic subject must be creative and original at all costs. Since 
he cannot create the world /ex nihilo/, he creates fictions /ex nihilo/. 
He withdraws aesthetically from the world and its demands and enters a 
private world in which he is the “master builder in the cathedral of his 
own personality.” (PR 20) Worldly realities are thus demoted to the 
status of mere occasions of his romantic productivity."


http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/12/carl-schmitt-on-romanticism-as-a-form-of-occasionalism.html


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