Romanticism against the Machine Romanticism

German Romanticism: Novalis and the Depths of the Spirit

I feel ecstasies and inexpressible raptures in blending, so to speak, into the system of beings and in making myself one with the whole of nature. (Rousseau 1782a, 95)

Like Rousseau, the German Romantic movement emphasized feeling and sentiment, celebrated the “I” (especially the “I” of the artist), and wrote about nature in an entirely new way. My summary of the main features of the movement are based on my interpretation of writings by the Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis and guided by Safranski’s study of German Romanticism (2007), Black’s study of romanticism (2002), and Taylor’s remarks on Romanticism in his Sources of the Self (1989).

Against the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, the German Romantics focus on feeling and imagination. Against secularization, they try to reenchant the world. Novalis hopes for the rebirth of a religious age (Safranski 2007, 82). Romantics are bored with the secularized everyday and search for the extraordinary and the wonderful. Safranski writes:

What unites Romantics is their discontent with normality, with conventional life. … And so it was precisely to protect normal life from disenchantment that they continually sought new sources of mystery. They found it in the poetic spirit, in imagination, in philosophical speculation, and sometimes too in the realm of politics, albeit a fantastically done up politics. (Safranski 2007, 126)

Novalis argues that modernity has dispelled our childlike sense of wonder. Like Rousseau, the German Romantics value childhood because of its presumed innocence.¹ Modernity, the Romantics argued, has little space for the child in ourselves. Moreover, it is believed that Nature had been downgraded to a machine: Novalis argued that the modern way of thinking had “made heretics of imagination and feeling … and turned the infinite, creative music of the universe into the uniform clattering of a monstrous mill … a mill grinding itself” (Novalis 1799, 144). Against this predictable dullness, the Romantics use poetry in order to bring back the mystery, which gives them an epistemology of revelation and surprise:

The sense for poetry has much in common with the sense for mysticism. It is the sense for the particular, personal, unknown, mysterious, for that which is to be revealed, what necessarily happens by chance. It represents that which cannot be represented. It see what cannot be seen, feels what cannot be felt etc. (Novalis 1799, 162)

Against secular(ized) Protestantism and against the Enlightenment aim to shed the light of science and reason on everything, the Romantics make room for darkness, for the mystery and the supernatural, for what cannot be fully known, for what does not reveal itself to the daylight of reason, and for surprises. As Safranski wrote, the Romantic spirit “loves the remoteness of past and future, the surprises of the everyday, the extreme, the unconscious, dream, madness, the labyrinth of reflection” (Safranski 2007, xiv). The night, the place and time of mysteries, becomes interesting. In his Hymns to the Night (1800) Novalis wonders what the “dark night” is holding under its cloak, what grabs “unseen” at his soul (51). The “secretive” night (11) is home to “creative Love” (19) and is sacred, holy (23). It is “the mighty womb of revelations” (29) where the gods withdrew. The night is also the time of passion, love, and madness. “All passion is enchantment,” Novalis writes, and he sees enchantment in charming girls (Novalis 1799, 106). At the same time, the religious is also connected with love: God is love (123). Furthermore, the Romantics embrace the exotic, especially “the Orient” with its supposed erotic qualities and magic, and “the Gypsies.” This orientalism is once again related to the night, which opens up possibilities for sexual freedom and enchantment. And of course the psyche is also part of this “night”; it becomes a realm the Romantics want to explore exactly because of its darkness and mystery. Our selves are not clear to us. As Taylor remarks, Romanticism, understood as counter-Enlightenment, denies self-transparency: we are “full of contradictions,” “our self is a mystery to us” (Taylor 1989, 357). Novalis writes:

We dream of traveling through the universe—but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us—the mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds—the past and future—is in ourselves or nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows. (Novalis 1799, 25)

The internal world (night, spirit, mystery, truth) is thus contrasted with the external world (day, profanity, dullness, deception). Indeed Romanticism’s desire for transcendence is inherently and explicitly Platonic. Novalis (1799) writes that “the heart is full, the world is empty.” Human beings live “only in the realm of ideas” (29). He complains about the “inadequacy of the earthly bodily form as the expression and instrument of the spirit dwelling within” (41). He dreams of a human being who is “truly independent of nature” and “capable of separating himself from his body” (75). Novalis even suggests modifying the body in order to use it as a tool that is capable of anything (78). Behind and below the shadows and the dullness of everyday life and objects (“the dull catalog of common things,” as Keats put it in his poem “Lamnia”), Romantics seek the magical and the mythical. Friendship and love, for instance, become mysteries: one ought to speak about them “only in rare, intimate moments, silently agreeing about them” since “many things are too delicate to be thought, even more are too much so to be discussed” (27).

In response to the Enlightenment rejection of religion and myth, the Romantics create new myths, often by drawing together elements from existing myths. In Hymns to the Night (1800) Novalis tells such a syncretic myth: a narrative that starts with a lost “golden age” that is then contrasted with today’s alienated existence. First, there is “the all-joyful Light,” “the wonder, the splendour of the earth’s kingdoms” with its youth and “loving, maternal goddess” (25). But then the world lies “sunken in a deep vault” (11) and “in the heart’s strings, deep sadness blows” (11):

In times now passed. … Rivers, trees, flowers and animals had human sense. The wine poured by a visible fullness of youth—a god in the grapes—a loving, maternal goddess, growing upwards in full, golden sheaves—love’s sacred intoxication a sweet duty to the fairest of god ladies—Life, like spring, thundered down through the centuries, an endlessly bright feast of heaven’s children and earth’s inhabitants … it was Death who interrupted. … The gods disappeared with their retinue—Nature stood alone and lifeless. An iron chain held it in arid count and strict measure. … Gone was the imploring faith, with its all-changing all-relating divine twin, imagination. A cold north wind blew unfriendly over the frozen plain, and the rigid place of wonders dissipated into the ether. Into the deeper sanctuary, into the soul’s higher realm the world’s soul drew up with its powers. (Novalis 1800, 25–27)

But in the end, Novalis thinks, there will be “a new golden age with dark infinite eyes, a prophetic, consoling time, working miracles and healing wounds, and sparking the flame of eternal life—a great time of reconciliation” (147). This amounts to a concept of salvation, albeit not the orthodox Christian one. Novalis mixes pagan myth with Christian narrative (and he mixes prose and verse, typical for the romantic aesthetic). The intoxication of the golden age is pagan, Dionysian. Yet the metaphors he uses to describe the great reconciliation are straightforwardly Christian: “The stone is lifted—Humanity is risen—… At the last supper” (33).

The imagination is used as an instrument to get to the mystery, the myth, and the magic that otherwise remain unseen in the shadows of the dull daily world. The imagination is a technique of revelation and liberation, of lifting the stone, of restoring life. Against what the Romantics call the “philistine”—“someone who tries to explain away the wondrous and mysterious and reduce it to the standards of normalcy” and who lacks imagination—the Romantics have faith in “the transformative power of the imagination” (Safranski 2007, 131). The imagination has “magical or synthesizing power” (Novalis 1799, 135). Instead of the Philistine everyday life, the Romantics want adventurous, mysterious, extraordinary lives. This is also why they celebrate childhood, which is seen as a golden age (41). We must not betray our childhood dreams and live in a fairy tale; indeed history itself must become a fairy tale, in which nature and spirit merge:

In a true fairy tale everything must be marvelous—mysterious and unconnected—everything must be animated. … The whole of nature must be mixed in a strange way with the whole of the spirit world. (Novalis 1799, 125)

According to the Romantics, the world is ful of mystery. But we do not always see that “we live in a colossal novel” (135), and therefore the Romantics had to do some work to evoke the mystery, invite the spirits, reanimate and reenchant the world. They wrote books, they held séances, and they were interested in people who were banned by the Enlightenment: miracle healers, prophets, exorcists—everyone and everything irrational and incomprehensible, including ghosts and demons. As we also will see in the next chapters, this list included science and technology. Johann Wilhelm Ritter, for instance, did experiments with galvanism and electricity (Safranski 2007, 50). Romantics do everything to escape “the wasteland of disenchantment” (136). Novalis defended what he called “the Romanticization of the world”: “the world must be made Romantic. … By endowing the commonplace with a higher meaning, the ordinary with mysterious respect, the known with the dignity of the unknown, the finite with the appearance of the infinite, I am making it Romantic” (Novalis 1799, 60).

Reenchantment was not only a means to make the world less boring; it was also a defense against nihilism. It was an attempt to restore value and meaning to what they perceived as a disenchanted world. Later Nietzsche asks the same question: When God is explained away, is there still meaning? The Romantics answer by bringing in God and gods and mystery. Their urge for reenchantment, combined with transcendentalism, leads Romantics to embrace “poets, madmen, saints, prophets” (Novalis 1799, 61), individual and communal madness, and magic. Interestingly, in Novalis’s romanticization, reenchantment also includes a transformation of the sciences: “magical chemistry, mechanics, and physics” (22) and “magical astronomy, grammar, philosophy, religion” (125). To understand this, one has to better understand the Romantic project, which was not only about poetry, literature, and (other) art but reached into science and philosophy and was not concerned only with the self.

Indeed, it is important to add nuance to the picture of Romanticism as antirationalist and as entirely self-absorbed, which is a caricature of Romanticism. The picture is more complex. On the one hand, it is true that Romanticism rebelled against what its adherents experienced as the cold world of rationalist science and philosophy. They work on establishing a poetry that, “like a bejeweled India, will stand more captivatingly and more colorfully over against the cold, dead Spitzbergen of that stuffy understanding” (Novalis 1799, 148). On the other hand, it would be misleading to portray Romantics as being concerned solely with poetry, magic, and religion, with themselves and with dreaming and escaping to another reality. Novalis, for instance, argued for transcending the self—he even echoes the mystic’s phrase that “self equals nonself” (59)—and ascribed to the artist the social responsibility of guiding others toward magical truth. He also recommended critical contemplation. Influenced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his aim was to merge philosophy and poetry, rational argument and imagination; he did not reject the former. He also advised artists to not only look inward but also, in a second step, achieve “an active outward gaze—autonomous, constant observation of the external world” (27). Moreover, after contrasting logical-atomistic thinking with poetic intuition, which “hates rules and fixed form” and celebrates the “wild, violent life” that “reigns in nature,” Novalis argues that in the artist, both kinds of thinking and doing come together: in the artist “living reflection comes into being” (51, Novalis’s emphasis). Thus, in contrast to the caricature that is often made of them, Romantics are not necessarily self-absorbed or mere dreamers, and at least some of them aspired to a synthesis of the fixed and the dynamic, the rational and the intuitive, the ruled and the wild. Their focus was often on “intellectual contemplation” (66) rather than worldly activity (although many were also engaged in social reform), but intellect itself was broadly understood. Furthermore, there were not only more connections between science and Romanticism than many people think; for many, science was a significant part of their project. Romantics wanted to unite religion, philosophy, and science. As Ferber puts it:

It is one of the accomplishments of the Enlightenment that most thinkers take for granted that religion, philosophy, and science are distinct domains with their own projects and procedures. … This was not the view characteristic of Romanticism. Constantly striving for unity between subject and object, feeling and knowledge, fact and value, truth and beauty, Romantics typically saw these three domains as one. … Most of them embraced the Enlightenment, but sought a new synthesis whereby faith, science, and reason … would be different faces of the same universe, and that all of them would express the cultivation, or Bildung, of the human spirit. (Ferber 2010, 89)

This meant also that there were many practical links between science and Romanticism. For instance, Friedrich Schelling was interested in new developments in chemistry, electricity, and magnetism, which “seemed to reveal forces within living bodies, not to mention action at a distance” (Ferber 2010, 90). Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani suggested that electricity and magnetism were vital, animating forces. Percy Shelley took his scientific instruments with him on travels. And Mary Shelley was interested in all these new scientific developments and used them in her novel Frankenstein (90–92). (I say more about the connection between science and Romanticism in chapter 4.)

Note that one should not paint a caricature of Enlightenment philosophers either. For instance, there are indications that Kant, usually regarded as a prime example of an Enlightenment nonromantic or even antiromantic (see, for instance, Safranski 2007), was not only negatively but also positively influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg himself was a mixed figure. Living in eighteenth century Sweden, he was an Enlightenment engineer, mathematician, and scientist, but he also became known as a mystic. He had mystical visions that he claimed revealed the world of spirits to him: “the other world,” heaven and hell, the community of angels and other beings. He believed that the phenomenal world is the face of heaven (Thorpe 2011, 54)—at least that in the “Golden Age,” though after the Fall, we can no longer see this and are no longer in the company of angels (55). He was followed by the English poet William Blake and influenced the German Romantics, including Schelling and Novalis. Swedenborg’s visions do not seem acceptable to an Enlightenment mind, and indeed Kant thought Swedenborg was mad. But Thorpe has argued that Kant had an ambivalent attitude toward Swedenborg and that Swedenborg even influenced him.

Kant not only wrote about Swedenborg’s visions in his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, published in 1766 (visions that Kant regarded as those of a madman but apparently considered interesting enough to write about). According to Thorpe, he was also drawn to Swedenborg’s conception of heaven as a community of spirits and his suggestion that it is up to us to choose which spiritual community we belong to. This, Thorpe argues, influenced his ethics, in particular Kant’s notion of “a realm of ends as an ideal community that we should strive to be members of” and his account of moral judgment: when we think morally about what maxims we should adopt, we “think about whether it would be possible to be a member of a community of individuals with such characters” (Thorpe 2011, 57). This connection with mysticism is interesting and helps in understanding Kant’s view: without the link to Swedenborg’s Romantic mysticism, Kant’s notion of the realm of ends and its link with the kingdom of heaven is indeed rather puzzling. While Kant objected to regarding the phenomenal world as a symbol of the spiritual world (Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences), Thorpe’s arguments suggest that Kant and Swedenborg shared the idea that there is a spiritual community (Kant: “intelligible” community), an other world where spirits interact: “the mature Kant conceives of the intelligible world/realm of ends as a community of spirits in real interaction” (66), indeed interaction between disembodied beings—to which Kant added: a community of spirits governed by laws “given by the members of the community itself” (71). In this sense, Kant’s (moral) philosophy was more “mystical” than usually presumed, and in any case partly developed in “dialogue” with the mystical visions of a romantic spirit-seer.

Furthermore, Kant’s epistemology famously makes a distinction between a “noumenal” realm and a “phenomenal” realm and assumes that the noumenal realm remains fundamentally unknowable. Although the relationship between Kant and Romanticism is complex and deserves more elaboration, this idea brings him at least close to Romantic epistemology’s emphasis on the unknowable—there are limits to knowledge—and the Romantic view that reality is always a human construction, that experience always has a subjective dimension.

These links between Romanticism and philosophy are not coincidental. There was what one could call a Romantic philosophy. Novalis, for instance, was not only a poet but also a philosopher, that is, someone who, as Novalis (1799) himself wrote, “lives on problems as the human being does on food” (68). The philosophy he practiced was transcendentalist: Platonist, but also Idealist and what we would now call relativist. Novalis saw the world as “a communication—a revelation of the spirit” (81), and long before postmodern philosophers, he argued that there is no objective truth. According to Novalis and in line with the Idealist philosophies of this time, the world and the human being are a trope of the spirit (67, 105). This also means that language plays a crucial role in thinking. Long before twentieth-century thinkers, Novalis recognized that a text can have many meanings (108) and that there is a sense in which language speaks (to put it in twentieth-century terms). Taking a radical antirepresentationalist view, he writes that language “is concerned only with itself” and that languages “constitute a world of their own. They play only with themselves, express nothing but their own marvelous nature” (83). This autonomous aspect of language, or at least the claim that language conditions our thinking, implies that to change thinking, one has to create a different language (an insight that Heidegger shares in the twentieth century). The Romantics set out to create new languages. They wanted to change the world by means of language. The world transformed by the linguistic imagination: this is Novalis’s “magical idealism” (135). Moreover, long before twentieth-century thinking about metaphor, Novalis suggests that “all cognition, knowledge etc. may well be reduced to comparisons, resemblances” (60). And like Enlightenment philosophers, he was committed to “the republic of learning” and a “community of all knowledge” (39).

However, in contrast to Enlightenment rationalists, the Romantics thought that this language and knowledge can never be merely scientific. As Friedrich Schlegel argued, we should not try to reduce the complexity of the world, as science tries to do, but embrace the chaos. This chaos can be found in the personal self, in the communications and relationships between human beings, and in the universe as a whole—with God being the absolutely incomprehensible, the “overcomplex” (Safranski 2007, 36). Embracing the chaos within yourself is necessary for true progression in understanding. But chaos, Novalis thought, is not enough. Instead he proposes a synthesis when he describes the genius as combining the best of the Philistine and the poet. The Philistine is an orderly person, and that order enables him to quickly gain insight, but then, at a rather early point, further understanding is blocked. Instead the poet gains insight through imagination, but there is confusion. The genius, however, combines order and confusion, and this renders him “progressive” and “perfectible” (Novalis 1799, 32).

In this sense, there is a progressive side to Romanticism, but because of their view of knowledge and the psyche, Romantics are skeptical about the idea that progress can be achieved by means of rationality and self-government (individual and collective). Safranski claims that in contrast to Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant, “the Romantics saw deeper into the human abysses, and were thus less apt to trust the rationality of self-assertion and self-interest” (Safranski 2007, 112). There is what Johann Gottfried Herder called “living reason,” which is part of “the darkness and creativity of life” (6); we need a philosophy of life. Romantics hope for encounters that change everything (29). The Romantics love new beginnings and conversions. Herder has a conversion experience “exactly as Rousseau had felt his great inspiration twenty years earlier under a tree on the road to Vincennes: the rediscovery of genuine Nature beneath the crust of civilization” (3). The German Romantics are poets, writers, and playwrights. The Romantics want a revolution, but it is mainly a revolution that sheds ink, not blood. Poetry will change the world. Give power to the imagination. Every activity can have beauty. The wall between imagination and life, art and life, literature and life needs to be demolished. Everything is and should be connected to everything. (32) Art is not a leisure activity one does to enjoy oneself; it is a project to construct reality and change the world. As Black puts it:

The romantic revolution in culture was not about artistic self-indulgence. Art was life because culture was the means to directly fashion a conscious world within which one lived. The romantic subject was often represented as a poet-magician conjuring new realities through discourse. … Art was the primary means to re-enchant the world; it restored a world that was damaged by instrumental rationality to itself. (Black 2002, 27)

Thus, both religion and politics are conducted by aesthetic means, if not replaced by art. Art will save us, and it will save the world. Schiller argued that art involves all our faculties: not only intellect, but also imagination and feeling, for example. Everything can be interesting. Novalis admired Goethe’s “linking of small, insignificant incidents with more important events” (Novalis 1799, 27). We are part of a larger picture and a larger history. Individuals are part of the history of communities, the history of the nation, and the history of the spirit. The “I” is at the center, the subject, but because of their idealism, Romantics draw the whole world into this “I.” We are part of life, of nature, of the history of the spirit, and at the same time that history unfolds itself in us. As Taylor (1989) summarizes Herder’s view, “Herder offered a picture of nature as a great current of sympathy, running through all things. … Man is the creature who can become aware of this and bring it to expression” (369).

That said, the “I” does not merely express something that is already there, and in this sense a focus on expression is misleading to characterize the romantic view. The epistemology developed here rejects the picture of a gap between an independent, objective reality and a separate subject. Object and subject are entangled, and knowledge is the result of active creation. According to Taylor, “What the voice of nature calls us to cannot be fully known outside and prior to our articulating/definition of it. We can only know what realizing our deep nature is when we have done it” (Taylor 1989, 376). But since there is no independent reality, this articulating is at the same time creating. Reality manifests itself, reveals itself, in the creation of new form rather than in “the reproduction of forms already there” (379). Active creation by the “I” is key, and the artist is the model human being who reimagines and reshapes the world. Everything is in the “I” and everything can change through the “I.” Fichte offered the concept of such a “dynamic, world-grounding, world creating” I (Safranski 2007, 42). The artist will create a new world. The task of the artist is no longer mimesis but creation. It is not even expression, Novalis argued. Poetry has its own voice and creates its own reality. It is artificial, intuitive, and spontaneous. At the same time, this “I” is always connected to nature. There is a “creative power that works throughout Nature,” as Herder thought (7), and indeed a creative power that works through the individual. Fichte thought that this power works in us unconsciously (45).

The emphasis on individual creation means that individual difference and individual originality become important. But Romantic artists also understood themselves as part of a community of artist-citizens. This suggests a communitarian model of politics, according to which every citizen is an artist (Black 2002, 27). Moreover, sometimes this world creating and this Fichtean “I” takes a collective shape. The Romantics speak of the German Kulturnation (Schiller) and the Weltgeist who has chosen the Germans for cultivating humanitas in Europe (Safranski 2007, 114). Fichte speaks of the people (Volk). More generally, the idea is that we cannot just step out of the social bond and leave the community. Romantics search for folk traditions and create a national culture.

Another political direction Romantic thinking takes us is—perhaps surprisingly—to Marx. Instead of interpreting and poeticizing the world, Marx thought that it was time to change it. His early philosophy was romantic: in his writings of the 1840s (Marx 1844, 1846), when he is concerned with alienation versus self-expression and spontaneity, but even in Capital (1867) where his thought sometimes takes on gothic features (see below). Here I focus on the early Marx.

Consider Marx’s view of estranged labor and alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which is all about threats to life, spontaneity, and self-realization. First, the worker “puts his life into the object,” but the object is then alienated from him (Marx 1844, 70). Second, the worker is also alienated from the production activity in which he does not “affirm” but “denies himself”: he “does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind” (72). There is no longer “spontaneous activity,” and there is a “loss of his self” and loss of free activity (73). Third, man is estranged from his species being: estranged labor threatens man as a “free being” (74), since there is no longer free, conscious life activity. Man is also estranged from “his spiritual essence, his human being” (76). Fourth, there is estrangement from others, and man performs his activity under “the yoke of another man” (79). This emphasis on life, freedom, and spontaneity is romantic.

In The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1846), Marx’s Romanticism takes on a materialist form but remains focused on life and liberation. Outlining the premises of the materialist conception of history, Marx and Engels start from “living human individuals” (31), and it is said that they “express their life” (31). The “materialist” point is that “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life” (36). What people say and imagine is based on this “life-process” (36). Starting with the “flesh,” the authors aim at “ascending from earth to heaven” (36). “The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process” (36). This life process is social. Similarly, language arises only from “the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men” (44). For Marx, liberation is not about self-consciousness but is “real liberation,” which can be achieved only “in the real world and by real means” (38). Surprisingly perhaps, these means include technology, the high tech of the time: Marx writes that “slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine” (38).

The early Marx thus defends a kind of material romanticism that combines a romantic interest in spontaneity and life and resistance against alienation with a materialist outlook, emphasizing the material basis and even seeing technology as a tool for social change. But this materialism does not alter the focus on ending alienation, on liberation and expression, and on transforming the modern world. With Black, we can also point to Marx’s emphasis on praxis (reason alone is not sufficient for emancipation) and his love of the grotesque (Black 2002, 4). (I say more about the gothic Marx later in this chapter.) Marx shows that romanticism can be political.

There are of course other political romanticisms too—for instance, Heidegger’s romantic turn to National Socialism, which he interpreted as a new beginning, “a new historical moment of authenticity” (Safranski 2007, 248), and of course National Socialism itself—although as Safranski and others have argued, National Socialism had also a modern-scientific face. It is true that there is a romantic discourse about the nation and the people, and there is of course an irrational side to Nazism. But Safranski argues that for a race-biological ideology, Goebbels turned not to Romanticism but to the sciences: the Nazis “regretted the lack of a biological, racial element in the Romantic concept of Volkstum” (242). Based on his reading of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Safranski argues that it was in social Darwinism, “vulgarized science” (246), rather than in Romanticism, that National Socialism found the source for its anti-Semitic and murderous ideology. The Nazis thus (mis)used science and in fact developed “a highly technological, industrially productive, autobahn-building society” (243). If there is a romanticism in such a world, Goebbels suggested in a speech, it is a romanticism that seeks reenchantment in the results of modern technology (244). Could not the same be said of our time? It seems that Goebbels understood something that Heidegger did not: romanticism and modern technology are not necessarily opposed.² (See the next chapters.)

What does Romanticism imply for thinking about nature? According to the German Romantics, nature is not an objective collection of things, as science reveals it to be; instead nature is enchanted and has also subjective qualities. For Novalis nature “remained so marvelous and incomprehensible, so poetic and infinite, in spite of all efforts to modernize it” (1799, 145). It remained spiritual and subjective. The subject sees itself mirrored in nature. Sometimes nature even unites with this “I,” and vice versa. The subject-object dichotomy vanishes in what Nietzsche later would call “the Dionysian” (Nietzsche 1872): the Romantics desired re-union with nature. Consider again Rousseau’s ecstasies when his “I” was absorbed by the whole: nature is a means to forget the self and immerse oneself in the whole. In Friedrich Schleiermacher, this becomes more explicitly a mystical experience. As in Rousseau, disappearance of the self is not experienced as threatening but as enjoyable: it is “a feeling of melting in love” (Safranski 2007, 91). This does not mean that afterward, everything in life becomes unimportant; rather, as Safranski puts it beautifully, “the things of life” are “relativized against the horizon of immensity. They retain their seriousness, but lose their oppressive heaviness” (91).

More generally, the reenchantment of Romanticism is geared toward reunification: reunification with nature, with others, with the whole. Romanticism, says Taylor (1989), aims at “bringing us back in contact with nature, healing the divisions between reason and sensibility, overcoming the divisions between people, and creating community. … We ought to recognize that we are part of a larger order of living beings, in the sense that our life springs from there and is sustained from there” (384). This aim of reunion and reunification thus at the same time concerns “nature,” “community,” and a “religion.” It also refers to the original meaning of religion, which is about re-ligare: the aim is to connect again, link again, reunite. Indeed, the idea is to link up with something greater than yourself: community, society, the world, being, God, and so on (see also Taylor 1989, 427).

However, although the Romantics are clearly religious, their view, like Rousseau’s, takes distance from institutional religion—the religion of hierarchy, priesthood, and church. In this sense it is, like Protestantism, more “individual.” Yet the feeling of being connected to the whole is extended to the feeling of being connected to others. The Romantics want to share experience, build community, and ground friendships (Safranski 2007, 91). Like Catholicism and perhaps unlike Protestantism, it is a sensuous religion. In Catholicism, Safranski says, “beauty is deemed to glorify the divine” (96). In Romantic religion, boundaries between the aesthetic and the religious are blurred. Furthermore, not all Romantics excluded religious intermediaries. Novalis, for instance, took distance from organized religion and emphasized religious feeling, but he also argued that “nothing is more indispensable for true religious feeling than an intermediary” since human beings are incapable of sustaining an immediate relation with the godhead (Novalis 1799, 35). In contrast to Catholicism, however, Novalis thought that human beings should be free in their choice of intermediary, and that everyone is a priest in the sense that our whole life is a divine service: “Ordinary life is a priestly service—almost like that of the vestals. We are occupied with nothing other than the preservation of a sacred and mysterious flame” (107). On the whole, Romanticism is significantly different from the main religions of its time. It is not anti-Christian but certainly more “pagan.” It is, like Rousseau’s religion, more (like) a nature religion. The Romantics perceived the divine in nature: if not everywhere, then at least “in certain landscapes and configurations of human relationships” (Safranski 2007, 107). Even if most Romantics were still heavily influenced by Christianity (consider again Novalis’s Christian metaphors of salvation), they also looked to other sources of religion and spirituality. For instance, they turned to ancient Greek times to find different myths and religious experiences. Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet who influenced Heidegger, is part of this movement. In his poetry, the gods are fleeting (108): sometimes they show themselves, and then they are gone again. There is appearance and disappearance, revealing and hiding. The gods can leave traces when they are gone. The Romantics also searched for religious experience in the East. Later in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche celebrated, in true Romantic fashion, the Dionysian. I will say more about this, as it illuminates the influence of Romanticism and, indeed, Nietzsche’s version of romanticism.

Nietzsche and Wagner, like Novalis and other Romantics, turned to the creation of new myths, and both looked to antiquity for a regeneration of Western culture. They wanted to bring back the gods and the myths. Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human (1878) about the artist that his art aims at inspiring “unrest” and “disorder”; it is not about truth but about everything a true Romantic desires:

[The artist] does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions for his art, that is the fantastic, the mythic, uncertain, extreme, belief in something miraculous about genius: thus he thinks the continuation of this manner of creating is more important than a scientific dedication to truth. (Nietzsche 1878, 103–104)

Given this focus on creation rather than (scientific) truth, the artist “does not stand in the front ranks of the enlightenment” but remains a “child or youth,” and his task is “the juvenescence of mankind” (104); he reenchants the world with his artistic effects. Nietzsche explains that the Enlightenment has forced feeling out of the religious, but feeling did not disappear: it “throws itself into art”: “The wealth of religious feeling, swollen to a river, breaks out again and again, and seeks to conquer new realms” (105).

Nature is also an important focus point for Nietzsche. A true Romantic, Nietzsche sees the tremendous (das Ungeheure) in nature (Safranski 2007, 192). He sees nature as “a great reservoir of amoral force, with which we must not lose contact” (Taylor 1989, 445). Again there is the aim of reuniting oneself with what is larger. Nietzsche and other German nineteenth-century thinkers turned to ancient Greek culture to retrieve a sense of this. Earlier the Romantics already had an interest in Dionysian mysteries of rebirth and renewal. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the gods and the demons are back. Nietzsche retrieves the Dionysian as a drunken unity with the world—an experience of self-dissolution not so different from Rousseau and Schleiermacher. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he contrasts the Dionysian with the Apollonian and talks about dreams and intoxication (14). Inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche is interested in those moments when reason is suspended and the self is forgotten through intoxication:

Under the influence of the narcotic potion hymned by all primitive men and peoples, or in the powerful approach of spring, joyfully penetrating the whole of nature, those Dionysiac urges are awakened, and as they grow more intense, subjectivity becomes a complete forgetting of the self. (Nietzsche 1872, 17)

Trying to retrieve the Dionysian, Nietzsche refers to the ancient Greeks and, before that, Asia Minor and Babylon. He sees the same Dionysian power in medieval German singing and dancing. In the “Dionysiac magic,” humans and nature are reconciled (17). Even social differences are (temporarily) suspended:

Now the slave is a free man, now all the rigid and hostile boundaries that distress, despotism or “imprudent fashion” have erected between man and man break down. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, each man feels himself not only united, reconciled, and at one with his neighbor, but one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been rent and now hung in rags before the mysterious primal Oneness. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk, and is about to fly dancing into the heavens. His gestures express enchantment. (Nietzsche 1872, 17–18)

However, here it is not poetry but music that is the main form of art used as a means of reunification. According to Nietzsche and later twentieth-century countercultural romantics, music can help to bring about this unity and a different level of consciousness. Music and art can reconnect us to life, liberate us. Perhaps this art needs to be speechless in order to keep the mystery intact; at least words become less important. It is the music that enables intoxication, ecstasy, Eros. As Safranski (2007) remarks, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra dances, and much like the Indian god Shiva (203).

All this is, of course, a further development of the Romantics’ interest in the special, the mysterious, and the extraordinary. But as the metaphor of the night already indicated, this is not necessarily pleasant or beautiful in the ordinary sense of the words. Romantics share an interest in “beautiful chaos” and in what was known as “the sublime”: nature is not only beautiful; it can also be frightful and inspire awe. Nature can be “ecstatic, wild, horrific” (33). This leads us to British Romanticism, including Gothic. I will also further explore the social dimension of Romanticism.

British Romanticism and Beyond: Sublime Nature, Gothic Castles, and Romantic-Socialist Utopia

Where there are no gods, ghosts reign. (Novalis 1799, 148)

Against secularization and a Protestantism that was experienced as quasi-secular,³ the British Romantics also sought to reenchant the world. The British Romantic writers and poets around 1800 argued that poetry should be about feelings. William Wordsworth famously said that it should begin with “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” And of course nature was important: Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and others wrote about the beauty of the Lake District. They were interested in aesthetic experiences such as the sublime. There was also an interest in horror and terror, which later developed into what we may call the gothic version of Romanticism. Writers and artists turned to medievalism against the industrial revolution and the associated urbanization. Later in the nineteenth century, there was also a strong interest in utopia. In order to complement rather than repeat what has been said about Romanticism in the previous pages, I will not discuss the thinking of (early) Romantics such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, or William Blake but instead focus on three topics that defined Romanticism in nineteenth-century England: the sublime, the gothic, and utopia.

Burke’s Sublime: First Explorations of the Incomprehensible Darkness; Deformity and Lack of Form

The Romantic age is also the age of the sublime. For instance, in their paintings Joseph Mallord William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich depicted sublime scenes such as storms and mountains. But what is the sublime?

In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke had argued, against Plato, Aristotle, and the classicism of his time, that the aesthetic should not be reduced to what is pleasing. In classic thinking, aesthetics is about beauty defined in terms of proportionality, regularity, and perfection, which are pleasing to the eye. But Burke—closer perhaps to ancient tragedy than to ancient philosophy—added the category of the sublime, which is not immediately pleasing but quite the opposite: it invites fear, pain, awe, and horror, although there is then pleasure in knowing that one is at a safe distance or that it is not real. Burke writes: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature … is Astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (101). He also mentions terror: “Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever … the ruling principle of the sublime” (102).

Thus, the sublime creates feelings of horror and terror. But at the same time, one feels safe. It is our imagination that creates the terror. As Kant wrote in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), “The astonishment bordering on terror, the horror and the awesome shudder, which grip the spectator in viewing mountain ranges towering to the heavens, deep ravines and the raging torrents in them, deeply shadowed wastelands including melancholy reflection, etc., is, in the view of the safety in which he knows himself to be, not actual fear, but only an attempt to involve ourselves in it by means of the imagination” (152). But the emotion is real. Burke (1757) defines terror as a kind of pain: not pain related to physical suffering but pain caused by “the operation of the mind suggesting the danger” (162), which “raises the emotions of the body” (164). What creates the terror and the horror, according to Burke, is lack of clear knowledge. The metaphors and images he uses therefore are the night or the twilight:

To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds. (Burke 1757, 102)

Thus, the sublime does not only have to do with ugliness and deformity but, ultimately, with formlessness, absence of form—or at least absence of a clear form. Burke also refers to Milton’s portrait of Satan. There is eclipse and twilight, mist and revolution. Poetry raises obscure images. He says that in nature, but also in paintings, “dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those have which are more clear and determinate” (106). He associates the sublime with the absence of bounds, with infinity, with confusion. The lack of knowledge and certainty produces terror. There is a shadow, a voice, but the eye and the mind cannot clearly discern what it is that causes our fear. We cannot represent the darkness:

But when this grand cause of terror makes its appearance, what is it? Is it not, wrapt up in the shades of its own incomprehensible darkness, more aweful, more striking, more terrible, than the liveliest description, than the clearest painting could possibly represent it? (Burke 1757, 106–107)

To explain how the sublime is related to uncertainty, lack of form, and our inability to represent, Burke reads a passage from the book of Job: we enter the night, there is fear and trembling, and there is a spirit, but we cannot discern its form. If we try to represent it by means of painting, it would become grotesque. Poetry, Burke suggests, does not have this problem and produces “serious passion” by means of “its chimeras, its harpies, its allegorical figures” (107). Similarly, as already mentioned, such passions are produced by nature’s “dark, confused, uncertain images” (106). In religion, sublime images are evoked to suggest the majesty and awe of the divine: “Every thing terrible in nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence” (112).

After this aesthetics, psychology, and indeed epistemology of the sublime, it is time for the Gothic. As inheritors of Burke’s sublime, Goths set themselves the task of “assembling as many horrid phantoms as their imaginations could suggest” (107). Burke already described the colors and sounds of the sublime, which include black and deep purple (122); “excessive loudness,” which is to overpower the soul and noises of thunder and artillery (123); and sudden beginnings and pain—all of which will become attractive in gothic art and, later, in twentieth-century gothic subcultures. Gothic writings further explore the wonder, terror, and horror—in nature and elsewhere.

Gothic Castles, Monsters, and Vampires

The history of gothic is long and complex (for an overview, see Groom 2012).⁴ An important element in the English context is the rise of Protestantism and the “imaginative void” it left (Groom 2012, 34). In sixteenth-century England, Protestantism had wiped out a substantial part of Roman Catholic culture and ritual with the dissolution and pillage of monasteries, the execution of religious leaders, the rejection of the “superstitious” worship of saints and relics, and effectively a dismantling of “the whole calendar of customs and lore—the fabric of everyday life” of the earlier period (34). The result was that by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not much earlier, many people in England were nostalgic about the lost medieval, Catholic past. More generally, artists started to explore and reconstruct their ancient past in search of the wonder and the mystery that had been wiped out by Protestant and rationalist (quasi-) secularization. Combined with an interest in the more carnal, material, and violent aspects of human history and culture, including “sex, rape, torture, dismemberment, decapitation, death” (36), this resulted in what is usually called “Gothic.” There was an interest in ruins, which reminded people of the medieval past (some “ruins” were actually newly built); more natural, “wild,” chaotic Romantic English gardens were created; and Gothic literature emerged in which haunted castles were filled with everything the Gothic imagination could dream up: ghosts, crypts, graves, animated corpses, hidden skeletons, secret passages and labyrinths, Catholic ritual, nightmares, demons, devils, witches, inexplicable whispers and groans, murder, sex, rape, vampires, and all else that was seen as dark, forbidden, supernatural, and “superstitious.” In literature, Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, published in 1764, is usually seen as a seminal text that introduces many of these themes. Many more gothic novels followed.

Romantics eagerly created and consumed this Gothic terror and horror, these sublime, shivering pleasures that one could enjoy in the safety of the home. It is questionable if it even makes sense to distinguish between Romanticism and Gothic in this context: it seems entirely justified to speak of Gothic-Romanticism or of Romantic-Gothic here to emphasize and express how much both are entwined in English art and literature around 1800. There is clearly a shared interest in the extraordinary, the supernatural, the medieval past, the night. It makes sense, therefore, to confuse both terms, especially in relation to this time and context. I propose to interpret Gothic as a darker form of Romanticism that flourished around 1800 in England but also had a deep and broad influence across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Let me briefly indicate some of the Gothic-Romantic themes.

First, in architecture, Gothic-Romanticism means looking back to what was taken to be the medieval past. Ruins of castles, monasteries, churches, and graveyards became favorite anchors for the Gothic-Romantic imagination. They referred back to the romanticized past, but also showed how nature and architecture could go together, how there may be organic growth and integration of the human and the nonhuman. It was also clearly a way to explore the decay of form and order: maybe there is beauty in deformity. Gothic-Romanticism also humanizes, or at least animates, the building. In The Stones of Venice (1853), John Ruskin sees imperfection as a key feature of a Gothic building: the buildings are “expressive of the artisans and builders who made them” (Groom 2012, 108).

This leads us to a second theme, which we can also find in Ruskin: Gothic-Romantic art had a keen interest in the grotesque, and in whatever may happen in the night—that is, in the nonrational parts of the human psyche—and in mysterious knowledge. In The Stones of Venice Ruskin writes about the grotesque and the sublime, about terrible images and visions that come uncalled in dream (151), when the imagination escapes conscious control. Sleep is sacred and reveals secrets to us. Insofar as our minds are imperfect, we are musical instruments used by divine power, tablets on which the divine truth is written (152)—sublimely or grotesquely. Ruskin adds, “And the fallen human soul, at its best, must be seen as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it; and the wider the scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it obtains an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as the winds and vapors trouble the field of the telescope most when it reaches farthest” (153). (Interestingly, Ruskin uses technology here as a metaphor.) For Romantics and Goths, the night is a time when the creative imagination is released, an imagination that may lead us to truths that perhaps cannot be accessed in daytime, truths that need the distortion of dream to reveal themselves to us. Next to Enlightenment self-government, the absence of self-government is seen as a gateway to higher truths. Art needs dream, madness,⁵ and inspiration.

Much later, Freud, in full Romantic and Gothic fashion, writes about dreams and the unconsciousness, and like many Romantics expresses an interest in sexuality, violence, and what he will call the uncanny (Freud 1919). Like Romantics, Freud accepted that the human mind is unknowable to itself. There are unconscious processes, dreams and nightmares. As Hugh Haughton rightly suggests in his introduction to The Uncanny, Freud, with his “aesthetics of anxiety,” his economy of awe, terror, and dread, stands firmly in the tradition of Burke’s thinking about the sublime (Haughton in Freud 1919, xli) and more generally in the gothic tradition. After World War I, psychoanalysis reports from “the psychic underworld of the death drive” (xlii) and becomes even more gothic and romantic than it already was. The uncanny is about death, dead bodies, spirits, ghosts. It is about the supernatural. In the first half of the twentieth century, the child is no longer Rousseau’s innocent child; there is horror in the child and terror in the nursery. We are no longer at home in and with ourselves (the German word Freud uses is unheimlich, literally unhomely). War and death are inside and outside our selves. The uncanny is familiar but at the same time mysterious. As in gothic and romanticism, the familiar becomes unfamiliar and strange. There are forbidden things and hidden things. There are monsters. And there is a lack of clarity about the nature of things: we do not know if the doll is living or not living. We don’t know if the machine is living or not living. As in Gothic, Freudian psychoanalysis discusses not only psychological but also epistemological issues. It is a gothic-romantic technique of revealing, uncovering that which is hidden, that which lies waiting to visit us, uncalled, in the dark night when rationality sleeps. (I say more about Freud later, in chapter 4 and elsewhere.)

Third, Gothic was of course an aesthetic movement and found expression in art, architecture, and literature. But it was also connected with science and technology. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), we see echoes of a Romantic but also, and especially, a Gothic science interested in the unseen, the carnal, and the mystery of life: the blood when the body is opened up, the forces of electricity, the mysteries of the psyche, the possibility of reanimating a corpse. More generally, there is an interest in the boundary of life and death. This is all Romantic and Gothic. But this Gothic and Romantic science did not only take place in the realm of imagination; Mary Shelley was familiar with Percy Shelley’s experiments with chemical apparatus and materials. When she imagined that life could be bestowed on a corpse by using electricity, she was responding to what she had heard about scientific experiments in her day. For example, the Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini used electricity to stimulate limbs of a human corpse (figure 2.1). Earlier, Galvani already investigated the effect of electricity on frogs. Mary Shelley knew about “galvanism” and discussed it with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron on the evening before she had her “waking dream” that inspired her novel (see below).

Figure 2.1 Romantic-Gothic science: Aldini’s galvanism experiments. Source: Giovanni Aldini, Essai theórique et expeŕimental sur le galvanisme, avec une seŕie d’expeŕiences faites en preśence des Commissaires de l’Institut national de France, et en divers amphithéâtres anatomiques de Londres, plate 4 (Paris: De l’Imprimerie de Fournier fils, 1804). (Image courtesy Wellcome Library, London, no. L0029560. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0029560.html.)

Moreover, it is true that Mary Shelley was critical of science; her novel is usually read as a warning against science and technology. It is hubris against the gods. But her message was far more subtle and nuanced than many contemporary readers think: she was writing not so much against science and technology as such, but against a science and technology that became abstracted from life, family, and society; against a science unconcerned with its consequences. As Hindle writes in his introduction, the novel is about “the dangers of putting the ‘abstracted’ pursuit of knowledge before collective responsibility and happiness … science and abstraction will soon become cold, unless they derive new attractions from ideas of society” (xxix). To put it in the language of duty ethics: science has duties and scientists have duties: duties toward society and toward the technologies they create. As the monster says in the novel, “Do your duty toward me, and I will do mine toward you and the rest of mankind” (Shelley 1818, 96). Perhaps Shelley suggests that Romantic and Gothic science may avoid this detachment and irresponsibility and merge with life and imagination. The reanimation of a corpse is thus a symbol of the aim of Romantic-Gothic science: to reenchant, reanimate dead modern science, marry it with life, give it the divine spark. Shelley argues against a science and technology that is without “destination” (125), against a science and technology that kills life by means of its cold “machinations” (180).

There are of course more Romantic and Gothic elements in the novel. Mary Shelley, having read Rousseau, portrays the monster as initially innocent, before it becomes corrupted by evil society. Furthermore, like other Gothic and Romantic writers, she sets out to descend into the darkness of her mind. And of course there is the famous, highly Romantic-Gothic narrative about how she created the novel. Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley sit together in a villa in Switzerland. They tell each other ghost stories and talk about the possibility of reanimating a corpse, perhaps through galvanism. Then, after midnight, Mary Shelley had a “waking dream” about a scientist who created life. She writes, in true Gothic fashion:

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. (Shelley 1818, 9)

Yet again this Gothic moment is fully in line with the Romantic-Gothic science of its day and with the Romantic-Gothic reimagining of the history of science. Shelley writes:

The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. (Shelley 1818, 46–47)

It is this kind of magic science that renders the scientist in the novel “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (51), indeed “the creation of a human being” (52). It is magic and gothic, but at the same time there are material instruments (56) and devices (79), and there is hard work. When the scientists sees “the dull yellow eye of the creature open” (56), this is a dream and a horror, but it is also the result of work: the work of a Romantic-Gothic science that combines “dark passions” (90) with scientific experiments. (I will say more about this Romantic-Gothic science in chapter 4.)

Even in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a Gothic novel par excellence that is all about superstition and vampires (with all their sexual and violent aspects) and set in Transylvania (seen as the place where, historically, the Goths came from), we can also see elements of Gothic science. On the one hand, Dracula offers everything one expects from a Gothic novel. It is full of horror, of course. It is, in a proto-Freudian fashion, about desires for sex and power, about something dark inside that takes over us (rather than something clear and external). It is about Victorian “fear of, yet desire for, sex,” says Hindle (in Shelley 1818, xii). It testifies to the Romantic-Gothic interest in emotions, in what we now call the unconscious. As a Romantic tale, it is about wildness, strangeness, and lack of knowledge. Stoker (1897) calls the Carpathian Mountains “one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe” (8), and says that city dwellers “cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter” (29). The novel is about a “stranger in a strange land” (31) where “many strange things” happen (32). It is about “the Un-Dead” (275) and the “unknown and terrible” (383). There is blood—“trickling over my chin” (38), a castle, gypsies, a crucifix and other “idolatrous” (41), religious, and superstitious things. In the moonlight young women whisper together and laugh (53), and there is “the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin” (54). There is Romantic-Gothic longing for “the pagan world of old” (175), for the “carnal” (275), and for the mysterious and the dark, which had been suppressed by science and quasi-secularized religion. There is hope for “spiritual guidance” that comes in sleep (333). There is nostalgia for tradition and for people who are “brave, and strong, and simply, and seem full of nice qualities” (464). All this seems to suggest a longing for returning to a lost world, an ancient past. Technology seems to be out of sight.

Yet there is far more science and technology in Dracula than most readers notice. Next to superstitions there are also “the latest scientific techniques and technological products” such as typewriters, phonography, telegrams, and blood transfusions (xxvii). The occult is not seen in opposition to science. Like Frankenstein, there is an interest in the new science of the day, which speaks of electricity and other hidden and previously unknown forces. For example, it is said that “there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in a strange way” (411). Groom even argues that the new technologies and media of the time are central to the plot:

Dracula Gothicizes technology: typewriting, train timetables, the phonograph, telegrams, and the newspapers, as well as medicinal drugs (sedatives and laudanum) and pioneering surgery (blood transfusions and brain operations). Occult machineries suffuse the book: radio communication, for instance. (Groom 2012, 97–98)

The novel also suggests ideas about evolution and degeneration: maybe we become wolves. Fear of degeneration was part of the public scientific discussions of the day.

Later, Gothic artists will also happily use the new media and technologies of their time, such as the cinema. Groom writes, “Rapidly innovated special effects and camera techniques made the moving image a stunning new tool in representing not only fantastic visions, but also in making the familiar mysterious” (Groom 2012, 122). These are, of course, very Romantic aims. After magic lantern shows and photography helped to bring back the ghosts and spirits, twentieth-century Gothic cinema enabled artists to animate new monsters, vampires (e.g., Nosferatu based on Stoker’s novel), and other strange and grotesque figures to the screen. Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster return. The horror film was born, influenced by Gothic. And Freud is always present. Room is made for sex, violence, exorcism, witchcraft, and so on. In countries with a culture rooted in Protestantism such as the United States, there is a high demand for what is normally repressed. There is also science fiction with Gothic elements such as Alien. William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer and cyberpunk⁶ are influenced by Gothic. And film has enabled billions of people to consume reconstructions of the past. Gothic horror and Romantic medievalism also influenced and continue to influence computer games, and Goth culture is present in contemporary digital culture more generally; consider, for example, interest in cyborgs and steam punk. (In chapter 4, I say more about twentieth-century science fiction and cyberpunk.)

Gothic has also influenced music. For instance, as a child Richard Wagner was impressed by Gothic through Carl Maria von Weber’s Romantic opera Der Freischütz, and today’s rock music has its gothic currents. Consider heavy metal and especially death metal and black metal, which have themes such as death, sex, Satanism, occultism, horror, paganism, mysticism, nature, non-Christian ritual, taking the position of the outsider, anarchy, modification of the body—all of which can be understood as being a core part of Gothic and Romantic culture. And there is music that is described as “Goth music” such as Joy Division and Sisters of Mercy and Nick Cave. In this music, there is again no opposition between Gothic and technology. For instance, Sisters of Mercy has always used a drum machine. Music itself is also a technological practice, and the history of music is also a history of music technology/computer technology: from drum machine to laptop. Thus, in music, the darkest Gothic themes merge seamlessly with contemporary technology. (In chapter 4 I return to Shelley and say more about Romantic science in Britain and France, and I develop my argument that Romanticism and science/technology were not always opposed. In later chapters, I also link romanticism to contemporary digital culture.)

Fourth, Gothic also had a social and political dimension. There is also a Gothic politics, even if this is not always explicit. Dracula, for instance, can be read as expressing fears about immigration and indeed about the “other.” And one could argue that there is a Gothic element in nineteenth-century socialism, including—perhaps surprisingly—Marx.

Marx and Marxian thought is usually interpreted as representing Enlightenment thinking. Yet there are certainly Romantic elements in Marx—for instance, in his analysis of alienation in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844 in which he regrets the loss of self-realization, spontaneity, and (inner) life. But there are also Gothic elements. First, as Jacques Derrida has alluded to with the title of his book Specters of Marx (1993) and his “hautology,” the ghostly and the spectral are certainly present in Marxian thought and especially in The Communist Manifesto (1848), which famously begins with the phrase, “A spectre is haunting Europe” (2). Marx clearly uses a very Gothic metaphor here. But, interestingly, Gothic is also present in Capital, in particular the figure of the vampire. For instance, in volume 1 of Capital (1867), Marx writes, “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (342). And there are more references to the vampire metaphor in Marx. It makes sense to interpret him as outlining what Neocleous calls a “political economy of the dead” (2003). Marx sets up a distinction between living labor and dead labor. Capital, with its desire for accumulation, sucks life out of the workers. It sucks up living labor. Like a vampire, it lives (is undead) only “thanks to the sensuousness of the living” (Neocleous 2003, 683). Instead, Marx suggests in a Romantic fashion that we should live spontaneous and creative lives, and we should choose life rather than the vampire of capitalism. The myth he suggests is very Romantic: first there is the paradise of undisturbed living labor; then there is a Fall when capital rises among the living and sucks the living labor. Amedeo Policante (2011) summarizes what we could call the Fall of labor: “At the beginning it is creativity, living labor. At the beginning, it is the free play of human beings transforming the life-world of nature through the productive power of their minds and bodies. … At the end, it is capital” (abstract). In other words, Marx’s socialism is more Gothic-Romantic than one may expect; it fuels his early Romantic analysis of alienation but also his political economy in Capital.

Marx is also Romantic and Gothic when he views the world of capital as a world that is magical: it is “a world where magic, in the form of fetishism, remains an integral part of the totality of the social relations of production” (Policante 2011, 4). Indeed, Marx writes in Capital about “the whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor on the basis of commodity production” (Marx 1867, 169). There is fetishism: the products of labor appear alive. Consumerism starts as a romance. But soon we are again on a Gothic-Romantic horror ride. The products of labor appear alive, according to Marx, because they are based on the vampiric process of sucking up living labor. “The surplus value extracted by the blood of the workers exists in the factory in the form of commodities” (Policante 2011 11); everything is transformed into surplus value. We enter “the gothic realm of the monstrous” (19). The workers become zombies and become part of a demonic, mechanical monster. Their life is transformed into commodities, and then into capital—indeed the only subject left (17). Dracula travels to London. Marx has turned political economy into a horror story.

David McNally further connects Marx’s monster metaphors to tales of the grotesque in folklore, literature, and popular culture. In his book Monsters of the Market (2011), vampires enter the stage again, but also Frankenstein, corpses, rebel monsters, specters, alchemy, the occult, witchcraft, and fetishism. He starts with the economic crisis that started in 2008, which, he said, produced zombies and vampires: “the rich devoured the poor,” and investment banks resembled vampires looking for blood (1). But he also points out that the monstrosity of capitalism is usually invisible and has become normalized: “What is most striking about capitalist monstrosity … is its elusive everydayness” (2). With his monsterology, McNally sets out to reveal these monsters, to study the monstrous forms of everyday life in a capitalist system. Monster stories tell us something about how we experience “capitalist commodification” (2). As we sell our “life-energies” to the market, we imagine the risks to our bodily integrity in the form of zombie and vampire tales (3). These “body-panics,” McNally argues, are thus part of the anxieties we experience under capitalism (4). Again, this interpretation is based on Marx’s Capital, which is read as “a mystery-narrative that seeks out the hidden spaces in which bodies are injured and maimed by capital” (4). Like Neocleous and Policante, McNally highlights Marx’s words about capital—dead labor lives by sucking living labor—and argues that the use of these metaphors is not merely rhetorical. If Marx made capitalism into “a modern horror-story,” McNally argues, he did so because he wanted to depict the actual horrors of capitalism in his time (13). His concept of abstract labor, for instance, can be read as a kind of dismemberment: Marx argued that capitalism detaches “labor and its products from the concrete and specific individuals who perform unique productive acts, treating all work as effectively identical and interchangeable.” Labor thus becomes “disembodied” (14). This mutilation of labor and of the workers happens by means of the machine, a “mechanical monster” (15). Similarly, use value becomes transformed into something ghostly: the world of value is “spectral” (125). McNally writes, “Commodities thus inhabit a world of ‘magic and necromancy’ in which sensuous things (use-values) are mysteriously transformed into entities of an altogether different order (values), as if by alchemy. Through these reversals, material goods metamorphose into bearers of something ghostly” (126). How more gothic can socialism get?

Marx turns out to be closer to, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, than expected. Indeed, as Lena Wånggren (2013) interprets the TV series, its vampires, werewolves, demons, and other creatures have social and political significance: the series criticizes a system of exploitation in which people are slave-laborers, but next to the normalization McNally writes about, it also shows resistance, fighting back. We are stimulated to fight off “the last demons of capitalism.” We are encouraged to fight “some very real monsters out there,” “some neoliberal vampires” (n.p.). Marx is back, and gothic-romanticism is his companion.

But Marx’s Gothic socialism does not stand alone when it comes to nineteenth-century efforts to combine (Gothic) Romanticism and social criticism. Later William Morris, for instance, influenced by Ruskin’s arguments against industrial mass production, also evoked the Gothic-Romantic spirit against industrial capitalism and consumerism. Of course it may be true that “the Victorian Gothic Revival was only made economically and physically possible by the profits and workforce of industrial capitalism” (Groom 2012, 110); nevertheless, Romanticism—Gothic and otherwise—had always displayed genuine, serious, and strong social-political interests. Moreover, Romanticism helped to shape various forms of socialism. I next comment on the social-political dimension of Romanticism by zooming in on William Morris, which will again involve comments on Ruskin and Marx.

Romantic-Socialist Utopia: Morris, Ruskin, and Marx

We shall be our own Goths, and at whatever cost break up again the new tyrannous Empire of Capitalism. (William Morris in Commonweal, 1890)

Romanticism is sometimes presented as a mere “aesthetic” or “cultural” movement, but as my overview of German Romanticism has suggested, it always had a political side. Many Romantics were politically active and took part in political action or explored alternative forms of society and community, inspired, for instance, by medieval or ancient Greek culture. Moreover, that political aspect did not necessarily have a conservative nature (let alone that it always and necessarily prefigured Nazism). Although in the first half of the nineteenth century many Romantics turned conservative and many were nationalists—indeed even, like Herder, helped to invent it—–the early Romantics were very sympathetic to the French Revolution, if only because revolution means sudden change, an epochal event in our lifetime we can be part of. There was also internationalism (e.g., Byron, see also the many travels and translations), and later romanticism was often entangled with socialism and other progressive currents. Black writes about the early romantics:

While German romanticism became unmistakably conservative in the early nineteenth century, this does not justify ignoring the extraordinary vision of radical democracy evident in the early texts. … The early romantics were anything but racist. They believed deeply in cultural authenticity: they extended tolerance and pluralism to all cultures, and are regarded as a major source of contemporary multiculturalism. (Black 2002, 32)

It is this side of romanticism that enables Black to argue for “a romantic, critical imagination built upon a solidarity that projects outward from deep, textured, and extensive relationships with real people, not distance and category,” which he thinks is “the only means by which the articulation of local and global might effectively be imagined” (144). This democratic and open aspect of romanticism, however, is based not on abstract reason but rather on empathy and is rooted in people and places; the global is connected to the local.

Whether or not we want to endorse this view, clearly this interpretation has its source in Romanticism; apparently there is also this open and progressive face of Romanticism. And as I have shown, there are romantic and gothic elements in Marx. More generally, as Black has argued, Romanticism is not necessarily “oblivious to production, structure, and social responsibility” (Black 2002, 153). On the one hand, it is true that an economy of abundance and the consumer culture made possible that—at least for some people—“pleasure was increasingly projected onto imaginary experiences, images, and dreams” (154), and this is all the more the case today. (See also Campbell on consumerism and romanticism later in this chapter.) On the other hand, Romanticism also had a critical side. It was critical of the Enlightenment liberalism of Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill, and it opposed utilitarianism and “aggressive individualism” (154–155). Later in the nineteenth century, the arts and crafts movement had clear romantic roots and socialist aspirations. I focus on the latter movement in order to further support this claim, in particular on the thinking of William Morris.

In response to the industrial revolution with its mass production and the beginnings of consumerist culture, the arts and crafts movement proposed a return to traditional craftsmanship and skills. Its aesthetic was also romantic in its medievalism and interest in folk art. Flourishing at the end of the nineteenth century, it was heavily influenced by Ruskin, who had his views on aesthetics but also voiced social criticism; he had already argued against the industrial revolution with its mechanized production and instead proposed independent workers who designed their own things. He introduced what he called “arts and crafts.” For Ruskin, free creation in the form of working with your hands gives pleasure and happiness; mechanization is not good for the soul. He praised “the perfect workmanship of the Renaissance” (Ruskin 1853, 13) and argued that “all great art is the work of the whole living creatures, body and soul” (181). But according to his followers, the problem was not so much the machine itself but rather the factory system of production and the related specialization of labor, which robs workers of their independence and leads to a loss of skill. (Note again that the early Marx, in writings that were hardly less romantic, emphasized the loss of the opportunity of self-realization and discussed other forms of alienation.) While the arts and crafts movement is often seen as a movement that is about decorative arts, it is much more than that: it is also a program of social reform, and one with a clear Romantic-Gothic side to it. This is particularly clear in the thinking of William Morris.

Morris was part of the so-called Pre-Raphaelites: artists, architects, and writers in Oxford and Birmingham who turned to medieval art and methods. Like Ruskin, Morris had an interest in Gothic. Like Ruskin, he opposed the gap between intellectual design and manual, physical, and material creation, created by industrial production methods. Instead, he argued, we should learn skills and master techniques ourselves. Designing and making should be integrated. Morris experimented with stone carving, wood carving, embroidery, metalwork, and the making of illustrated manuscripts.⁷ He also founded a company that made decoration for homes such as wallpaper and stained glass, and he founded a press for which he designed his own typeface. His designs were influenced by medievalism and the Gothic. He also created what we would call today bio-inspired forms: organic, natural forms were his model. And there was enough room for romantic-gothic mystery and darkness. All this was very romantic, albeit with one crucial difference: Morris was not only a thinker and a dreamer, but invented his own hands-on version of romanticism, which had a far more material and indeed social side to it than Rousseau’s pre-Romantic musings or than the early Romanticism in Germany around 1800. Morris opposed the (neo-)classist style not only because it was cold, unnatural, and disenchanted; he also opposed it because he thought it was not practical and it was imperialist. His version of romanticism would entail not only a new aesthetics but also a social vision and a material-technological vision. It was about writing and art, but also about work, industry, and technology. Morris proposed to add “the utmost refinement of workmanship to the freedom of fancy and imagination” (Morris 1890, 201), and this focus on workmanship and a wide range of crafts distinguished him from the German romantics earlier in the century and, indeed, from the Parisian bohemian and fin-de-siècle romantics in his own time, who were equally influenced by the romantic-gothic current but restricted their workmanship to the fine arts. With what we could call his material romanticism, Morris at the same time went beyond romanticism, or at least beyond early romanticism and beyond the mainstream conception of romanticism. (I return to this issue in chapter 4.)

Morris was romantic in his medievalism but also in his utopian moments. Utopia has two sides, which were also present in Morris. On the one hand, there is a looking backward to the past, nostalgia for a time that has passed (medieval times, for instance, were reconstructed and recreated) but is seen to hold a treasure of knowledge and truth for our own time. On the other hand is a forward-looking side that hopes for a time in the future when everything will be better. A time and place in the future is constructed; it does not yet exist but is projected as an ideal time and place. Both sides of utopia have in common that they transcend the present. The romantic modern subject is always somewhere else, at a different time. It is homeless and presentless.

At first sight it also seems as if the romantics only dream, and remain passive when it comes to action. However, in practice both sides—forward looking and backward looking—were often connected to actionist and practical programs: these could be conservative or even reactionary, artistic, politically or otherwise but also progressive and socialist. In the case of Morris, the last is the more fitting category. Morris was not only a dreamer. He also wanted to reform: he wanted to reform design and society. His recommendation that the craftsman-designer work in a medieval, nonindustrial way was not only based on his reverence for what he imagined to be the great medieval past with great art and architecture; it was also a proposed intervention in the mode of production and therefore in the kind of society he experienced. It was a protest against the misery of industrial-capitalist society. As Clive Wilmer puts it, “Morris’s desire to improve design was inseparable from his desire to improve society” (Wilmer in Morris 1890, xxviii). Although Morris was not altogether opposed to machines as such (see also below), he saw what mechanization did to workers and to society. He wanted to bring back the independence of the worker and the beauty that had been lost on the road to industrial progress. For this purpose, he created things but also engaged in politics. He founded the Socialist League and advocated the socialist world revolution. He knew Engels and was a friend of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. He wanted a classless society, and in this sense he was a Marxist. Like Marx, he was leading a bourgeois kind of life and—contrary to his longing for the countryside and like many contemporary eco-romantics—he lived in an urban environment: his main home was in London, not rural Oxfordshire. However, unlike Marx, Morris engaged himself in material production and proposed an alternative production method instead of predicting and hoping that industrial society under capitalism would transform itself into something else. And in contrast to Marx, he sympathized more with religion: religion in the form of Christianity (in his early days he even considered becoming a priest) but also the paganism and the values and virtues that he found in Iceland (personal courage, craftsmanship, the unimportance of social distinction or wealth, health, and closeness to nature—see again Wilmer in Morris 1890, xxxi). He was also romantic in his belief that human society develops in a natural, organic way.

In 1890 Morris published his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, which uses the utopian dual movement of backward looking/forward looking to develop a vision of an alternative society. His romantic socialism (or socialist romanticism) becomes very clear in the novel. Morris dreams of a world before the Fall of industrial revolution. He sketches a future world that is “a picture of fourteenth-century life” as Morris imagines it (47). We find ourselves in an idyllic world without industrialization, private property (122), big cities, money, divorce, and class system. There is no “class-murder” (99). There is “nothing ‘modern’” (61) about people’s appearance and lives. People live in harmony with nature and are not self-centered. Architecture is inspired by “Gothic” and “Saracenic and Byzantine” styles (62). When the main character (the visitor, the traveler coming from the modern industrial past) suggests the idea of being paid for work, this is considered a joke. People take pleasure in building houses, paving streets, and gardening. They experience what presumably the 1840s Marx also wanted: they find pleasure in work; work is “genuinely amusing” (68) instead of dull. All work is pleasurable (122). There is no opposition between work and self-realization. The pleasure in the work creates beauty, which in turn gives pleasure: “Pleasure begets pleasure” (96). Artists have “sensuous pleasure in the work itself” (123). But in Morris’s utopia, art is not reserved for a specific category of people; in his Romantic utopia, everyone is an artist, and everyone experiences work in this pleasurable way. There is also plenty of time to enjoy the rural and natural environment. The main character expresses his wish to “lie under an elm-tree on the borders of a wheat-field, with the bees-humming about me and the corn-crake crying from furrow to furrow” (170). He watches beautiful ladies with “delicate sunburnt cheeks” (175) and girls playing on the grass after bathing (193). Nature is beautiful, and nature includes humans. There is no longer a desire to enslave nature since nature is not seen as something external (200). Because people live in a natural way, they become what today we would describe as “enhanced” humans: the girls are “specimens of very much improved types which I had known in other times” (203). Yet this enhancement is not achieved by means of technology; it is accomplished by living and working according to nature. Little could be more romantic (even, and perhaps especially, in its contemporary form) than what Morris describes as “that passionate love of the earth”: a life which connected to the seasons and which is to be enjoyed. Morris opposes this passion for a life close to the earth to “the prevailing feeling among intellectual persons” in this time, which is a distaste for the earth (225). And the book as a whole is a romantic journey of the self. As Carol Silver (1982) has argued, Morris combines Marxism and romance: he is an enchanted wanderer who embarks on a quest for love, fellowship, and a new self. At the same time, the book is a social vision. Morris’s imagination is romantic, but with a strong social side to it. His romanticism and medievalism is not merely escapist; it fuels thinking about how to change his society. At the end of the novel, Morris asks us “to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness” (228). The religious tone fits again the romantic drive. But at the same time, Morris’s romanticism is more practical than romanticism ever was before, and at least as politically engaged, social, and material as the other socialisms of his time.

This engaged and progressive side also becomes clear when we zoom in on Morris’s view of machine technology. I already noted that Morris was not opposed to the machine as such, an important point in the light of my discussion about romanticism and technology in the next chapters.

In general Morris was far more positive about machines than one may suppose. He thought that machines could release us from the mechanical part of labor. In News from Nowhere (1890) he is even lyrical about their wonders: “It may be fairly said that the great achievement of the nineteenth century was the making of machines which were wonders of invention, skill, and patience” (126). Here the wonder of romanticism meets the machine (see also the next chapters). But the problem, in Morris’s view, is that machines are used for “the production of measureless quantities of worthless makeshifts” (126). This is unacceptable to Morris the romantic and Morris the craftsman, who are disappointed with the ugliness and the low quality and lack of craftsmanship of the products of the industrial world. But as he clarifies in his lecture “How We Live and How We Might Live” (1884), this “amazing machinery” has also significant negative social consequences: it has become our monstrous master. Morris argues that we should not be the slaves of machines and that they should not “injure” the beauty of life—the beauty of products but also the beauty of the people and of the collective life:

I have spoken of machinery being used freely for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive part of necessary labour; and I know that to some cultivated people, people of the artistic turn of mind, machinery is particularly distasteful, and they will be apt to say you will never get your surroundings pleasant so long as you are surrounded by machinery. I don’t quite admit that; it is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays. (Morris 1884, n.p.)

Thus, according to Morris, the problem is not machines as such but that we use machines to enslave people. Machines themselves are not the main problem; ownership and social relations are (see also the Luddites later in chapter 4). And if machines themselves are a problem at all, Morris thought, it is because they do not enable us to experience pleasure in work. But this does not lead Morris to reject machines altogether. Instead of proposing to ban machinery, he offers a different social-technological vision: he predicts that at first, there would be “a great development of machinery for really useful purposes,” but when people realize that some things can be done more pleasantly by “using hand-work rather than machinery,” they will “get rid of their machinery” and cease to be “slaves to the monsters which we have created.” In other words, “the elaboration of machinery … will lead to the simplification of life, and so once more to the limitation of machinery” (n.p.). Thus, for Morris, there is no need to fight against the machines, no need to try to destroy them; instead he thinks people will move to handwork because of its intrinsic pleasure and worth.

Like other romantics, Morris believed that dreams could change the world. And by designing and making things, he contributed to this in a very material way. Yet in practice, Morris’s beautiful decorations were available only to the rich. He and his friends did not manage to end slavery, and the story he had in mind did not seem to play out in reality. Next to his socialist aspirations, he also had a conservative side: he preferred feudalism over capitalism. Because of his romanticism, Morris was nostalgic and perhaps, as Engels said, sentimental. But his romanticism also enabled him to develop a vision not only of a different style in art and design, but also of an alternative society. Both visions deserve a place in the history of romanticism and the history of socialism.

The opposition to mechanical existence and the claim that machines should not be our masters will be shared by many philosophers of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see the next chapter). Morris’s “people of the artistic turn of mind”—say, romantic artists—who care about making beautiful things are of course also to be found in later times, and the idea that machines should not bereave us from beauty will also be echoed in later art and in contemporary times, even in places where one might not expect it (see my arguments about information and communication technologies and Steve Jobs later in chapter 4). A more direct heir of Morris’s thinking and that of earlier romantics, however, is to be found in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which shaped the roots and background of romanticism in the early twenty-first century. In the next section, I say more about this, and more generally about romanticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

2 Romanticism

The Birth of Romanticism in France: Rousseau’s Nature

German Romanticism: Novalis and the Depths of the Spirit

British Romanticism and Beyond: Sublime Nature, Gothic Castles, and Romantic-Socialist Utopia

Burke’s Sublime: First Explorations of the Incomprehensible Darkness; Deformity and Lack of Form

Gothic Castles, Monsters, and Vampires

Romantic-Socialist Utopia: Morris, Ruskin, and Marx

Romanticism in Contemporary Times: From the Counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s to Contemporary Romanticism

Romanticism in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Art, and Culture

Counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s: Rock ’n’ Roll Romanticism and (Anti‒)Consumerism

We Are Still Romantics

Notes