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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 4

4.5 Romanticism gives a new authority to feeling

We have highlighted by Wordsworth the new significance attached by Romanticism to feeling. The Presences he has registered invest, he says, the whole natural world with feeling. He thinks of the way in which the wind imparts a swell to the ocean, and explains that that is how we are to understand the workings of the 'Presences': they make

(The Prelude 1, 490 4, 499 501)

Novalis courtesy International NOVALIS Gesellschaft

Nature and natural things were in this way thought of by the Romantics (or at least by the Wordsworthians) as capable of supporting 'feeling', but also a new perspective was taken towards the feeling that went on in human beings. As I have pointed out, feeling had not been neglected by Enlightenment science: it had been regarded as an important part of the human machine. But for the Romantics it had an altogether different significance. They looked upon feeling rather as a much earlier tradition had looked upon reason: it was our guide to right behaviour.

  'The heart' as the poet and writer Novalis puts it,

(Cited by Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 371.)

There was a long tradition before the 18th Century and before modern science which thought of the experiences we now identify as emotions of one kind or another as distracting or misleading. Plato suggests the picture of the soul of a person split into parts, with reasoning often in conflict with desiring. Our reason might tell us to do one thing, while our desires tell us not to. For example, our reason might tell us the water is poisoned, but our desire to drink might drive us to swallow the poison nevertheless (MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, p. 39).

In medieval thought you have the idea that it was the role of reason to tell you what you ought to do, and that a weak person, even knowing what s/he ought to do, might be preyed upon by anger, or fear, or envy, or whatever and stopped from acting as s/he knew s/he ought. Medieval thought had the reason as the compass of a person's ship. It showed the way, from which however the storms of 'feeling' might mislead.

In re-evaluating the role of feeling in human life the Romantics had more than Enlightenment rationality to oppose therefore. The condemnation of feeling went back a long way, and had taken a variety of different forms.

"[William Cowper, the 18th Century poet] makes a sketch of the object before him, and there he leaves it. Wordsworth, on the contrary, is not satisfied unless he describe not only the bare inanimate outward object which others see, but likewise the reflected high-wrought feelings which that object excites in a brooding self-conscious mind. His subject was not so much nature, as nature reflected by Wordsworth." Bagehot, article first published in National Review July 1855, reprinted in Cowper - Poetry and Prose, ed. H.S. Milford, Oxford, 1930, Clarendon.

Nature as a moral source

Feelings were important for the Romantics partly because they thought of them as the way in which Nature manifests itself to us. In heeding our feelings therefore we are heeding the promptings of Nature. The early revolutionary Herder did most to articulate this conception, but it is there in William Blake. It is also, famously, in Wordsworth.

See Taylor, Sources of the Self, Ch.21.

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Reason, Nature and the Human Being in the West
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