Romanticism

Over the summer while working as a swim coach, I was trying to stay on the clock for a few extra minutes to get paid a little more. To buy myself some extra time, I asked my assistant aquatics director, “Do you think we as humans are nothing more than a series of interconnected biochemical pathways or is there something more?” Unfortunately, he was not in the mood and forced me to clock out, but ignoring the silly context, this has always been a recurring question. In my later blogs, I will continually return to different lenses that attempt to answer this question, but for now, I’ll focus on the lens of Romanticism and how it navigates this impenetrable question, and the potential uses it serves.

The technical definition of Romanticism stems from the late 18th and early 19th century ideas regarding the inability to capture the sublime, and basking in the ineffability of human existence/consciousness. Essentially, it was a backlash against the Enlightenment, arguably the period in history in which humans believe they were closest to playing the role of God. The Enlightenment posited a paradigm of thought grounded in the ideals of knowledge and truth. The world was composed of a finite number of puzzle pieces waiting to be unraveled and conjoined together to form absolute truth. Principles of truth, light, and rationality were fetishized to transcendental levels. To the Romanticists, the idea that humans could be turned into monotonous beings oriented with the purpose of discovering the truth was boring. As far as I know, humans would like to believe that they themselves are conscious of this mystical thing known as life. When everything in life becomes oriented with the purpose of being rational and learning more knowledge, the Romanticists believed that humans were fading away from their own consciousness. They were degenerating into a phase of sleepwalking where they could blindly reify the truth from their pursuit of knowledge.

I’m sure if you read a thinker like Dostoevsky or Nietzsche, they could provide a far better rendition of how the human experience is sublime and beautiful. What I am trying to provide is how exactly this lens could be useful in tackling the question I posed at the beginning of the blog and how I incorporate it in my life.

Returning to the idea of consciousness, modern science and the Occam’s razor argument against Dualism are more likely to verify the claim that we as humans may be nothing more than a series of interconnected biochemical pathways, meaning there is no non-physical/transcendental substance that creates consciousness, but Romanticism can circumvent this existential problem. The idea of having a transcendental consciousness does not really matter. Saturating ourselves with the most intense emotions and portrayals of beauty is what matters. Agonizing over the question of what constructs our own consciousness proves that our consciousness exists through the Romanticist lens. Shifting over to a more realistic situation where this question is not the only thing plaguing your mind, we can truly see the uses of Romanticism.

Romanticism magnifies emotions to be the sole purpose of life. This is especially useful for facing hardships in life. Undoubtedly, hardships carry a variety of negatively defined emotions like anger, anxiety, resentment, etc. Initially, it may seem negative to increase the negativity of these emotions, but quite the opposite. Through magnifying the emotion while attaching the depth of the emotion experienced to the causality of consciousness, any negative experience simply becomes a confirmation of your own agency. We are given the option to sit there and just bask in the absurdity of life. We can grasp onto the idea that the emotion will fade, and we must strive to hold onto it the best we can before facing the barrage of unknown sensations the future will present us. It is more obvious why this would be useful to apply to positive emotions. A state of happiness becomes elevated to a state of ecstasy.

Romanticism provides a basis for viewing life with a little more clarity. It urges us to neglect the events that occur in our life in order to better focus on the sensation itself. No matter what situation you find yourself in, you can ground yourself by living in the immediate synchronicity of an emotion that provides an aesthetic to life. There’s a great Homer quote in the Iliad that captures this idea: “Any moment might be our last. Everything is beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” I’ve interpreted this quote as saying that even mortality does not seem so daunting when the synchronic time is expanded to your true reality.

I’d just like to recap that everything I say in my blog is my way of interpreting these ideas. Most of the time, I use a variety of lenses to rationalize my life. I haven’t found a unitary truth since I don’t abide by a single meta-narrative, but I guess that’s what everyone is trying to figure out. Everybody has their own way of using different lenses to justify the present character they are, and why they do or do not have agency when the argument that our consciousness is constructed from entirely physical entities is completely valid.

The later blogs I write on this topic will probably have some overlap. It is very difficult for philosophy and meta-narratives to exist in a vacuum.

I hope everyone enjoyed their winter break and is doing well!