Romanticism: A German Affair
by rüdiger safranski
northwestern, 376 pages, $35
During the early Romantic era, subjective sentiments and an often solipsistic quest for personal fulfillment began to challenge Enlightenment ideals of rational dialogue. John Keats’s 1817 plea “for a life of sensations, rather than thoughts” flamboyantly embraces an anti-rational tendency that, a generation earlier, had swept up German poets and intellectuals alike. Felt intensity and subjective urgency came to legitimate experiences as intrinsically meaningful. At times, they were invested with transcendent significance. By contrast, propositional cogency, communal obligation, and inherited norms were increasingly marginalized or repudiated altogether as unacceptable constraints on subjective flourishing.
