tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post9102887836974276154..comments2024-03-28T11:33:16.271-05:00Comments on Adventus: The treachery of the pursuit of happynessUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-27463117381046285182014-01-10T11:44:23.003-06:002014-01-10T11:44:23.003-06:00Thank you, that was very instructive. I thought i...Thank you, that was very instructive. I thought it might have something to do with the value of the individual. What beautiful poem, <i>Elegy</i>, by the way. <br /><br /><i> The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:<br />Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,<br /> And waste its sweetness on the desert air.<br /><br />Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast<br /> The little tyrant of his fields withstood;<br />Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,<br /> Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.</i> trexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16838170190127187564noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-24617931897206512392014-01-10T10:20:12.246-06:002014-01-10T10:20:12.246-06:00Windhorse: long story, but basically the idea of ...Windhorse: long story, but basically the idea of the individual qua individual, or self-worth being intrinsic to your existence rather than a function of your parentage, wealth, ancestry, etc., began with the Romantics.<br /><br />Wordsworth also gave us the idea that childhood had intrinsic value and was not just the adolescent period before you became useful as a human being. The entire idea, now enshrined in the popular mind as Freudian psychology, that childhood was formative of the adult, began with Wordsworth: "The Child is Father to the Man," after all.<br /><br />Romanticism as a whole was a reaction to the reduction of humanity (mostly workers, never owners) to fodder for the machine. The idea that an individual life was itself worth living just because it was a life, was novel in Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" (where no one buried there was a Great Man of History, but their lives should be valued nonetheless) and became central to Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron and Shelley (in greater and lesser ways, especially as Byron's claim to fame was that he was such a young and dashing peer, and so already born "valuable").<br /><br />It's the value of the individual and the importance of childhood, which we now take for granted, that I was referring to (mostly).Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-15875755741914481842014-01-10T09:49:37.126-06:002014-01-10T09:49:37.126-06:00The great concern of Romanticism was the impact of...<i>The great concern of Romanticism was the impact of the Industrial Revolution, but they never engaged the fight so much as gave us an alternative to it (and in doing so invented the modern idea of humanity, a shift in perspective as profound as Augustine's invention of self-consciousness, albeit thoroughly in line with the saint's insights).</i> <br /><br />Could you elaborate on this? It sounds interesting but I don't quite get your meaning. What was the modern conception of humanity given by Romantics, and what former conception did it oppose?<br /><br />Windhorsetrexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16838170190127187564noreply@blogger.com