Enlightenment Vs. Romanticism;
or,
The Head Vs. The Heart
We are all familiar with the proverbial battle between and the heart, logic and emotion, science and art. Well, this struggle also epitomized the differences between the Enlightenment (or Neoclassical) Era and the Romantic Period. Now, I don't mean romantic period like the summer fling you might have had last year when you stayed out until ten o'clock ('those summer nights...") but rather capital "R" Romantic, designating the philosophy and time period, instead of an adjective you hope will apply to whomever you are crushing on.
Some of the differences between the schools are fairly obvious and can be related to variances in viewpoints today, as well. Following on the heels of the Renaissance, the rebirth of Western civilization after the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment valued science, logic, and reason as a means of conquering nature and progressing toward the more industrialized world we know today. Even the arts were concerned with intellectual, metaphysical subjects, rather than an outpouring of emotion. Architecture, engineering, and landscape design were heavily focused on symmetry, sharp angles, and neat patterns. In short, the Enlightenment wanted to overlay a grid on nature.
The Romantic movement, on the other hand, emerged as a sort of counter-culture to the ideals of the Enlightenment. In many ways, the Romantics were similar to the Beat generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. Some the main concerns of the Romantics were the increasing pace of life, pollution, working conditions, and disconnect from nature resulting from the Industrial Revolution. And they expressed their discontent with the Enlightenment ideology primarily through poetry (although the pinnacle of Romantic literature is, arguably, a novel: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). The Romantics were also big on the individual experience, as opposed to the collective, experiencing awe in nature, and (not surprisingly) emotion. Rather than a neat and tidy English garden, they preferred ruins and less-manicured "wild" nature in their back yards, reflecting their resistance to the notion of "taming" or controlling the natural world.
Source: The Language of Literature: British Literature. McDougal Littell, 2008.
Here are a few videos delineating some of these differences in a little more detail:
Some of the differences between the schools are fairly obvious and can be related to variances in viewpoints today, as well. Following on the heels of the Renaissance, the rebirth of Western civilization after the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment valued science, logic, and reason as a means of conquering nature and progressing toward the more industrialized world we know today. Even the arts were concerned with intellectual, metaphysical subjects, rather than an outpouring of emotion. Architecture, engineering, and landscape design were heavily focused on symmetry, sharp angles, and neat patterns. In short, the Enlightenment wanted to overlay a grid on nature.
The Romantic movement, on the other hand, emerged as a sort of counter-culture to the ideals of the Enlightenment. In many ways, the Romantics were similar to the Beat generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. Some the main concerns of the Romantics were the increasing pace of life, pollution, working conditions, and disconnect from nature resulting from the Industrial Revolution. And they expressed their discontent with the Enlightenment ideology primarily through poetry (although the pinnacle of Romantic literature is, arguably, a novel: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). The Romantics were also big on the individual experience, as opposed to the collective, experiencing awe in nature, and (not surprisingly) emotion. Rather than a neat and tidy English garden, they preferred ruins and less-manicured "wild" nature in their back yards, reflecting their resistance to the notion of "taming" or controlling the natural world.
Source: The Language of Literature: British Literature. McDougal Littell, 2008.
Here are a few videos delineating some of these differences in a little more detail:
Fermat's Last Theorem
Iterated Algorithms & Fractals
Chaos Theory, Entropy & The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Arcadia (The Place)
Sir Isaac Newton
Euclid
Lord Byron
Iterated Algorithms & Fractals
Chaos Theory, Entropy & The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Arcadia (The Place)
Sir Isaac Newton
Euclid
Lord Byron
