ARGUMENT WITH ISAIAH BERLIN

The Roots of Romanticism, 1965, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Princeton: NJ, Princeton University Press, 1999)

I.

Floundering about in the historical record (acknowledging its necessity, but also noting its inability to ‘account’ for the uprising/insurrection of Romanticism), Berlin dismantles French Rationalism (Rousseau included) to find Germany and Protestant Pietism as source and place of the revolt … Tracking Herder (ignored in Paris by the French illuminati), Berlin ransacks nonetheless the precursors to High German Romanticism (Idealism), focusing on Hamann and little known literary moments en route to Kant … Hume is noted (a vast influence on Kant), while Voltaire and the Encyclopedists are dismissed as sophists … What remains unsaid (or only inferred) is that it is, after all, the pursuit of Truth (metaphysical ‘fire’) that moves all forms and variants of Romanticism, from the elegiac to the pathetic to the monstrous (the divine, inhuman), and that such is the actual ‘place’ (non-place) Berlin fails to locate/access in the historical record, because it  is simply never to be found there ‘as such’ (there is no ‘It’ without the primordial fold/division) …

Notably encountering Kant, friend of Hamann (a deranged, Northern ‘mystic’ in Berlin’s estimation/‘book’), the facts of Romanticism dissolve away, into a rarified ‘space’ (the rational-irrational a priori) always at stake in insurrectional/titanic turns toward what might be known and what remains obscure (what might be known without quite knowing ‘it’ …) …

II.

When Berlin discusses/dismantles 18th-century French rationalism (neo-classicism) we hear but do not see the paintings of David, perhaps referencing, in passing, the (unseen and unmentioned) paintings of Poussin … “Just as mathematics deals in perfect circles, so the sculptor and the painter must deal in ideal forms.” (“The First Attack on the Enlightenment”, p. 28) … For Berlin, such first appeared in the arts and, then, pervaded ethics and politics (p. 25) … What is meretricious in painting is the severe (rational) geometric parti underlying pictorial works (the devastating ‘interior’), or that which is not lost on the Romantics, most surely, in fact, the main point (perspectival and otherwise) with Kant’s three critiques …

Berlin indulges scholarship (a form similar in spirit to the Annales school) wherein a masterful mélange of historical material is amassed to determine the outcome of the inquest … In itself ‘rational’, it is also given to a type of art-historical journalism that verges on gossip (Nerval’s lobster, Novalis’ blue flower, etcetera) … To amass tales, quips, judgments is to concede defeat in advance, insofar as criticism is wholly otherwise, and it is criticism that lies at the vanishing point of all romanticisms -- criticism of two worlds, and why they are not one world …

GK 12/06/06