Conclusion

This chapter reviews why the disgust with omnipresent political activity is the greatest incentive to Romanticism. It highlights how politics induced an estrangement from the entire social world and with it a mixture of hatred and anxiety about the future of European culture as a whole. It also explains the reasons why the romantic suffers from political claustrophobia while the social theologian allowed political and cultural involvement to encompass its faith. The chapter analyzes how the new justification of some form of politics as culturally valuable and intellectually necessary answers the quasi-politics of despair. It also talks about skepticism as an attitude of expectation that leads to the unhappy consciousness.

The Romantic Mind

This chapter investigates how Romanticism found its first clear expression in the aesthetic revolt against the Enlightenment. It discusses the awakening of the “unhappy consciousness” even before Romanticism appeared in the literary world, which was at odds with society and every established faith. It also describes how Romanticism was nourished by two streams of feeling: a longing for a more purely aesthetic culture and a profound disgust for the rationalist excesses of the Enlightenment. The chapter provides the distinction between romantic feeling and Romanticism proper, which is particularly important in tracing the origins of the movement. It mentions Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the first great example of romantic feeling, although his philosophy is not romantic at all.

The Romanticism of Defeat

This chapter looks into the possibility of pure Romanticism no longer existing in the present day, while the “unhappy consciousness” flourishes as never before. It talks about how Romanticism does not express itself today in spontaneous outbursts of feeling, noting that the change in tone has not brought Romanticism an inch closer to traditional philosophy. It also mentions how the unhappy consciousness has become acutely aware of itself as the realization that God is dead and how it analyzes its condition with a detachment unknown to the earlier romantics. The chapter examines the distance between the unique self, the increase of the surrounding world, and the unhappy consciousness that openly admits its sense of meaninglessness in the present. It discusses the survival of aesthetic idealism in its negative form as a basis for social criticism.

The End of Radicalism

This chapter explores what answers can be offered to counsels of social despair. It explains why Romanticism refuses to analyze the social world with any degree of thoroughness. It also discusses how Christian fatalism subjects modern history to an excess of simplification in order to satisfy its sense of outrage. The chapter talks about Jean-Paul Sartre, who very characteristically notes that the conformism of Americans is due to their universal rationalism and optimism, although this spirit is no longer encountered among social philosophers in America. It mentions President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points as the last great document to testify of the faith that the advantages of democratic government appeal to all.