The Roots of Romanticism

Rating:
Summary: An amazing book.
Review: Amazing, powerful detective work of the roots, the meaning and the aftereffects of Romanticism. Berlin uses a very nice plain "writing" style which can be easily comprehended, and yet it is beautiful enough and complex enough to give you great insights into one of the most tremendous movements in man's history. A great introductory work for the novice. This is how philosophical equiry should be like.

Rating:
Summary: An amazing book.
Review: Amazing, powerful detective work of the roots, the meaning and the aftereffects of Romanticism. Berlin uses a very nice plain "writing" style which can be easily comprehended, and yet it is beautiful enough and complex enough to give you great insights into one of the most tremendous movements in man's history. A great introductory work for the novice. This is how philosophical equiry should be like.

Rating:
Summary: Revolt against the Enlightenment
Review: If you never heard Berlin lecture, you've missed something very special. Twenty-five years ago I heard the BBC broadcasts of these lectures and was hooked - the sparkle and fizz and force of IDEAS explored and played with by a mind of great clarity, power and humour. This is a superb introduction to the change in values that transformed European thought, art, society - even economics - two centuries ago. Berlin's asides, aphorisms and apercus are more stimulating than most books.

Rating:
Summary: I've Had better
Review: Isaiah Berlin is a good scholar and a colorful writer. However, his book The Roots of Romanticism, I did not find helpful. I suppose maybe if one approached this book with no prior knowledge of romanticism, maybe than it might provide some useful information. But if one is looking for further insight this is not the book.
My main critique with this book is its lack of conciseness. Beginning with the first two sentences the author makes this quite clear: "I might be expected to begin, or attempts to begin, with some kind of definition of romanticism, or at least some generalisation, in order to make clear what it is that I mean by it. I do not propose to walk into that particular trap." (p. 1)
No, instead Mr. Berlin walks into the trap of ambiguity. I understand that this book was originally a series of lectures, however, to say that one will not commit himself to particular meaning is absurd because, if 'truly' practiced this is a nonsense word. Maybe Mr. Berlin is purporting ambiguity as the 'definition' and in that case the introduction becomes ironical. In either case this book is filled with many more cases of such ambiguity. For example, in the rest of the chapter Mr. Berlin gives out a hodgepodge of 'everybody' else's definition and then commits himself to none.(This might have been a great lecturing device, but it is burdensome to the reader.) However, in practice Mr. Berlin attaches himself to the meaning of Romanticism as a historical movement: "I shall do my best to explain what in my view the romantic movement fundamentally came to. The only an sane and sensible way of approaching it, at least the only way that I have ever found to be at all helpful, is by slow and patients historical method." (p. 20)
The one thing that I did find interesting in this book was the comments on Hamaan the critic of Kant. As a historical figure Hamaan is virtually forgotten in most discussions on philosophy or romanticism.
These comments on Hamaan are better discussed in Mr. Berlin's book Three Critics of the Enlightenment. (I would recommend this to the reader). Also, for more recent scholarship on the interaction of Kant and Hamaan see Kuen's biography on Kant. For a better picture of Romanticism I would recommend Kierkegaard's book Either/Or.

Rating:
Summary: that last review sucks
Review: This book may have its faults, but ambiguity and lack of concision are not among them. What the reviewer before me failed to realize is that the Isiah Berlin of 1965 was pulling against a strongly ahistorical approach to philosophy that had completely dominated the English-speaking scene for 30 or 40 years. Berlin's deliberate refusal to start out with a clearly defined conception of Romanticism strikes me as a brave and bracing move. To try to understand a philosophical movement by tracing out important moments in its intellectual history--this project marks an entirely different way of doing philosophy, one that Berlin himself helped reintroduce as a completely legitimate philosophical methodology.

That being said, this is a difficult book, in certain ways. I can see why it might appear to be sprawling and slightly lacking in direction. It's not (I would probably even want to quarrel with Berlin over just how directly he thinks Romanticism points us towards liberalism, but that's not really important here). Berlin is a historical thinker (something very different than a historian of philosophy), and his references can be fairly difficult to keep up with (especially if you're really trying to pay attention to how they all fit together). But he's also a good enough writer that you can fake your way through any of the stuff you're not entirely grounded in yet.

Isiah Berlin is an important philosopher--one who gets glossed over all too often (and he's a philosopher who calls our attention to other philosophers who get glossed over all too often). He's fun to read, and that's more important than people tend to realize or admit. The previous reviewer ("I've Had Better") recommended Berlin's Three Critics of the Enlightenment as a work with a little more philosophical depth. I think that's probably right. But I'll also add my own recommendation, going in the other direction: Concepts and Categories is a wonderful collection of essays, each of which is entirely self-contained, completely unambiguous, and painstakingly precise. For the reader who likes things straight and simple.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: This is a brilliant series of lectures by one of the most outstanding humanist scholars of the twentieth century. His style is simple yet elegant, his expositions of even the most obscure thinkers are lucid and crisp. This really is a wonderful and important book.

Berlin sees Romanticism as a reaction to the universalism and exaggerated rationalism of the Enlightenment. He sees Montesquieu's relativism and Hume's skepticism as early assaults on this dominant frame of mind, but for the most part Romanticism is the creation of German thinkers. The link to German resentment against French pomp and superficiality is well known. The connection with the spirituality of German pietism, on the other hand, is largely ignored in other works on the subject, but convincingly argued in this book. Berlin gives clear and comprehensible accounts of the sources of Romanticism in the writings of Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Kant(!), Fichte, and Schelling. Especially the thought of the unknown Hamann and the aesthetics of Schiller struck me as fascinating, partly because of Berlin's gracious, flowing style which is both description, quotation and explanation at the same time. The author is also able to mix epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics in a holistic fashion, an accomplishment the Romantics would surely laud.

If I have to make one complaint, and it is perhaps not even that relevant, it might be that Berlin ignores Fichte's 'principle of right', which determines the limit of my individual freedom by the effects my free actions have on the freedom of other people. This is interesting because Berlin in his concluding remarks describes the "surprising" result that Romanticism, because of its insistence on both free will and the incompatibility of values, becomes a forceful defense for liberal pluralism and tolerance. In my opinion, this is not such a great surprise: if we scrutinize the ethics of the early Fichte, we will see that this connection is present even in the gestation of the Romantic movement.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: This is a brilliant series of lectures by one of the most outstanding humanist scholars of the twentieth century. His style is simple yet elegant, his expositions of even the most obscure thinkers are lucid and crisp. This really is a wonderful and important book.

Berlin sees Romanticism as a reaction to the universalism and exaggerated rationalism of the Enlightenment. He sees Montesquieu's relativism and Hume's skepticism as early assaults on this dominant frame of mind, but for the most part Romanticism is the creation of German thinkers. The link to German resentment against French pomp and superficiality is well known. The connection with the spirituality of German pietism, on the other hand, is largely ignored in other works on the subject, but convincingly argued in this book. Berlin gives clear and comprehensible accounts of the sources of Romanticism in the writings of Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Kant(!), Fichte, and Schelling. Especially the thought of the unknown Hamann and the aesthetics of Schiller struck me as fascinating, partly because of Berlin's gracious, flowing style which is both description, quotation and explanation at the same time. The author is also able to mix epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics in a holistic fashion, an accomplishment the Romantics would surely laud.

If I have to make one complaint, and it is perhaps not even that relevant, it might be that Berlin ignores Fichte's 'principle of right', which determines the limit of my individual freedom by the effects my free actions have on the freedom of other people. This is interesting because Berlin in his concluding remarks describes the "surprising" result that Romanticism, because of its insistence on both free will and the incompatibility of values, becomes a forceful defense for liberal pluralism and tolerance. In my opinion, this is not such a great surprise: if we scrutinize the ethics of the early Fichte, we will see that this connection is present even in the gestation of the Romantic movement.