Abstract
Louis Dupré. The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013; Pp. x+387.: ISBN: 978-0-268-02616-5, $36.00 (pbk).
The Quest of the Absolute completes Louis Dupré’s ambitious trilogy on the “spiritual sources of modern culture” (337). Dupré, who is now professor emeritus at Yale, embarked on this endeavor in Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (Yale, 1993) and continued it in The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (Yale, 2004). Across these volumes, Dupré argues that the nominalist theology of the late Middle Ages drove a wedge between creator and creation. This meant that the links between the mind and a rationally ordered reality were no longer secured by a transcendent God. In light of the resulting epistemological uncertainty, the great project of the Enlightenment was to “establish a new foundation of truth in reason alone” (338). The Romantics became increasingly skeptical of reason’s ability to bear this weight, though: “In the early nineteenth century, the suspicion that the principle of pure rationality was insufficient to serve as the exclusive ground of consciousness became a certainty” (338).
Against the at times reductionist models of epistemology and human subjectivity offered up by Enlightenment figures like Locke and Condillac, the Romantics described a complex and even mysterious subject. Dupré concludes that for novelists as different as Goethe, Austen, and Jean Paul, “What is uniquely Romantic [about their work] is that the person has become a question to himself” (190). The most significant Romantic philosophers, meanwhile, plumbed the depths of subjectivity in the hopes of transcending it: “[S]ince there appeared to be no way to escape the mind’s self-enclosed subjectivity, idealist philosophers as well as Romantic poets trusted that a more fundamental exploration of the grounding subject would lead to a groundless absolute, in which the opposition between mind and reality would cease to exist” (338). They aimed to reforge, albeit it in different ways, links sundered at the dawn of modernity.
Given this overarching narrative, it is unsurprising that Dupré offers a particularly strong chapter on the “philosophical foundations of Romantic thought.” Kant vanquished Locke’s sensationalism for the Romantics, and he established the central ideal of autonomy, but he also heightened anxieties about humans’ ability to grasp reality, about their lack of access to the thing-in-itself. Modern science reinforced this anxiety by opening up an unsettling gap between the everyday perception of reality and “what mathematical physics, often in conflict with common sense, proclaims to be the truth about nature” (276). Romantic philosophers responded to these anxieties in brilliant (if often highly speculative) ways. While many of these philosophers are little read today, they exerted a powerful influence on twentieth-century philosophy. Fichte established the distinction between Sein and Dasein that Heidegger would later appropriate. Goethe’s emphasis on the irreducibly subjective nature of scientific observation anticipated Husserl’s phenomenology. The “hardly remembered” French philosopher Maine de Biran provided Bergson with some of his key terminology. But the long neglected Schelling is “the philosopher of the Romanticism”: His thought gave philosophical support to the aspirations of the Romantic movement in Germany. The ontological significance he ascribed to the aesthetic intuition, his symbolic interpretation of nature, and the particular emphasis he placed on freedom made his entire philosophy an integral part of the Romantic quest of the absolute. Later generations have neglected him, possibly because his thought was closely linked to Ficthe’s Idealism … Our neo-Romantic age, however, appears to be rediscovering the profundity of Schelling’s thought. (294)
Dupré also offers a strong chapter on religion. He notes that Romanticism was part of a “religious revival,” and the foremost Romantics often framed their search for the absolute in “religious terms.” It was often a markedly heterodox revival, though. Dupré wonders, for instance, if the systematic theology of even a self-appointed defender of Christianity like Schleiermacher presents “a new religion or a new interpretation of the traditional one … ?” (332). Dupré also considers the gnostic currents in Romanticism, the Romantics’ extensive engagement with classical mythology (especially the figure of Dionysus), and Hugo as a poet of religious unrest.
Yet Dupré’s study begins not with philosophers or theologians, but with three chapters on the Romantic “quest of the absolute” in English, German, and French poetry. These chapters include rich insights, but they rely heavily on the summary and exegesis of individual poems. Later chapters on ethics, aesthetics, and political thought, in addition to those on philosophy and religion, strike a more satisfying balance of close attention to specific works and broad analysis of contexts and tendencies.
While Dupré is usually quite charitable in his engagement with other scholars, he singles out Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s influential 2001 study Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity for uncharacteristically harsh criticism. This is worth dwelling on, since scholars of Romanticism might rightly argue that the two studies illuminate each other. Löwy and Sayre define Romanticism as a reaction to the alienation produced by emerging industrial capitalism. Dupré, however, claims that this is an “insufficiently comprehensive” approach: “Romanticism obviously involved more than the question of the existence of a particular economic system” (3). However true this is, Dupré misleadingly characterizes Löwy and Sayre’s project as a narrow one. It too offers a supple way of conceptualizing what unifies the Romantics without collapsing differences between them. According to Löwy and Sayre, Romantics share a sense of alienation, but they respond to it in many—sometimes contradictory—ways: nostalgia for the Middle Ages, escape into nature, calls for revolution, and so forth. Indeed, Löwy and Sayre have helped to renew serious attention towards non-Marxist, and frequently Christian, critiques of capitalism.
Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity and The Quest of the Absolute actually complement each other quite nicely. Consider how the two studies handle John Ruskin. Dupré gives 11 pages to Ruskin’s expansive work on aesthetics. Only as an aside does he mention that “Ruskin even devoted two books, Unto This Last (1862) and Time and Tide (1867), to the social problems created by industrialized labor” (140). Löwy and Sayre, on the other hand, give a whole chapter to Ruskin’s social criticism. Dupré sees Romanticism as being driven primarily by ideas. He argues, for instance, that “if we claim that Romanticism formally begins with the French Revolution, we must add that it was not the result of that political event. It consisted in a radical transformation of modern consciousness supported by a systematic rethinking of its intellectual foundations” (274). Dupré emphasizes the Romantics’ anxiety about the elusive “thing-in-itself” while Löwy and Sayre emphasize their anxiety about “dark Satanic mills,” about the material transformations of modernity. Both shine light on the complexity of history.
In sum, Dupré offers an erudite introduction to Romanticism with an original focus. It will interest specialists but will also work well in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses. (It would pair nicely with Warren Breckman’s excellent 2007 reader Romanticism: A Documentary History, for instance). It is a fitting capstone to his trilogy on the “spiritual sources” of modernity, which promises to be a reference point for years to come.