Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter IV (Part 9)

(Pictured: Faust.) I am happy to present the ninth post of Chapter IV of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER IV

ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE IDEAL  (Part 9)

The varieties of what one may term the rationalistic error, of the endeavor of the intellect to emancipate itself from perception and set up as an independent power, are numerous. The variety that was perhaps formerly most familiar was that of the theologian who sought to formulate intellectually what must ever transcend formulation. The forms of the rationalistic error that concern our present subject can be traced back for the most part to Descartes, the father of modem philosophy, and are indeed implicit in his famous identification of thought and being (Je pense, donc je suis [I think, therefore I am. —Ed.]). The dogmatic and arrogant rationalism that denies both what is above and what is below itself, both the realm of awe and the realm of wonder, which prevailed among the Cartesians of the Enlightenment, combined, as I have said, with pseudo-classic decorum to produce that sense of confinement and smugness against which the original genius protested. Man will always crave a view of life to which perception lends immediacy and the imagination infinitude. A view of life like that of the eighteenth century that reduces unduly the rôle of both imagination and perception will always seem to him unvital and mechanical. “The Bounded,” says Blake, “is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a Universe would soon become a Mill with complicated wheels.”

The mechanizing of life against which the romanticist protested may as I said be largely associated with the influence of Descartes. It is not however the whole truth about Descartes to say that he forgot the purely instrumental rôle of the intellect and encouraged it to set up as an independent power. As a matter of fact he also used the intellect as an instrument in the service of outer perception. Taking as his point of departure the precise observations that science was accumulating, he sought to formulate mathematically the natural law. Now the more one reduces nature to a problem of space and movement, the more one is enabled to measure nature; and the method of exact measurement may be justified, if not on metaphysical, at least on practical grounds. It helps one, if not to understand natural forces, at least to control them. It thereby increases man’s power and ministers to utility. In a word, the intellect when thus pressed into the service of outer perception makes for material efficiency. In a sense science becomes scientific only in proportion as it neglects the qualitative differences between phenomena, e.g. between light and sound, and treats them solely from the point of view of quantity. But the penalty that science pays for this quantitative method is a heavy one. The farther it gets away from the warm immediacy of perception the less real it becomes; for that only is real to a man that he immediately perceives. Perfectly pure science tends to become a series of abstract mathematical formulae without any real content. By his resort to such a method, the man of science is in constant danger of becoming a mere rationalist. At bottom he is ignorant of the reality that lies behind natural phenomena; he must ever be ignorant of it, for it lays hold upon the infinite, and so must elude a finite being like man. But the desire to conceal his own ignorance from himself and others, the secret push for power and prestige that lies deep down in the breast of the man of science as in that of every other man, impels him to attach an independent value to the operations of the intellect that have only an instrumental value in the service of outer perception and to conceive that he has locked up physical nature in his formulae. The man of science thus falls victim to a special form of metaphysical illusion. The gravity of the error of the scientific intellectualist is multiplied tenfold when he conceives that his formulae cover not merely the natural law but the human law as well, when he strives, like Taine, to convert man himself into a “walking theorem” a “living geometry.” This denial of every form of spontaneity was rightly felt by the romanticists to be intolerable.

Goethe contrasts the smug satisfaction of Wagner in his dead formula that give only what is external and secondary, with Faust’s fierce craving for immediacy and therefore his impatience with an analysis that gives only the dry bones from which the vital breath has departed. Wagner is a philistine because he is not tormented by the thirst for the infinite. Faust, on the other hand, reaches out beyond the mere intellect towards the spirit that is behind the shows of nature, but this spirit appears to him and reduces him to despair by declaring that he is trying to grasp something that is not only infinite but alien to him. Instead of turning from this alien spirit to the spirit that is relevant to man, a spirit that sets bounds to every inordinate craving, including the inordinate craving for knowledge (libido sciendi), Faust gives himself to the devil in what was, in the time of the youthful Goethe, the newest fashion: he becomes a Rousseauist. Instead of striking into the ascending path of insight, he descends to the level of impulse. Seen from this level the power by which we multiply distinctions seems to him, as it was to seem later to Wordsworth, not merely secondary but false, and so definition yields to indiscriminate feeling (Gefühl ist alles [Feeling is everything. —Ed]). In general the Rousseauistic reply to the Cartesian attempt to identify thought and being is the identification of being with emotion (Je sens donc je suis [I feel, therefore I am. —Ed]).

The Mephistopheles of Goethe has often been taken as a symbol of the iconoclastic and Voltairian side of the eighteenth century. The rationalists assailed the traditional forms that imply a superrational realm as mere “prejudice” and, failing to find in insight a substitute for these discarded forms, they succumbed in turn to the emotionalists. A “ reason” that is not grounded in insight will always seem to men intolerably cold and negative and will prove unable to withstand the assault of the primary passions. The reason of a Plato or an Aristotle is on a different footing altogether because, as I have said, it includes an element of inner perception. One may note here that the difficulties of the present subject arise in no small degree from the ambiguities that cluster about the word reason. It may not only mean the imaginative insight (1) of a Plato and the abstract reasoning of a Descartes but is often employed by the classicist himself as a synonym of good sense. Good sense may be defined as a correct perception of the ordinary facts of life and of their relation to one another. It may be of very many grades, corresponding to the infinite diversity of the facts to be perceived. A man may evidently have good sense in dealing with one order of facts, and quite lack it in dealing with some different order of facts. As the result of long observation and experience of a multitude of minute relationships, of the facts that ordinarily follow one another or coexist in some particular field, a man’s knowledge of this field becomes at last, as it were, automatic and unconscious. A sea captain for example acquires at last an intuitive knowledge of the weather, the broker, an intuitive knowledge of stocks. The good sense or practical judgment of the sea captain in his particular calling and of the broker in his is likely to be greater than that of less experienced persons. One cannot, however, assert that a man’s good sense is always in strict ratio to his experience. Some persons seem to have an innate gift for seeing things as they are, others a gift equally innate for seeing things as they are not.

Again the field in which one displays one’s good sense or practical judgment may fall primarily under either the human law or the natural law, may belong in Aristotelian phrase to the domain either of the probable or of the necessary. To take a homely illustration, a man is free to choose the temperature of his bath, but only within the limits of natural necessity—in this case the temperature at which water freezes and that at which water boils. He will show his practical judgment by choosing water that is neither too hot nor too cold and this so far as he is concerned will be the golden mean. Here as elsewhere the golden mean is nothing mechanical, but may vary not only from individual to individual but in the same individual according to his age, the state of his health, etc. In determining what conforms to the golden mean or law of measure there must always be a mediation between the particular instance and the general principle, and it is here that intuition is indispensable. But even so there is a centre of normal human experience, and the person who is too far removed from it ceases to be probable. Aged persons may exist who find bathing in ice-water beneficial, but they are not representative. Now creative art, in distinct ratio to its dignity, deals not with what may happen in isolated cases but with what happens according to probability or necessity. It is this preoccupation with the universal that as Aristotle says makes poetry a more serious and philosophical thing than history. There enters indeed into true art an element of vital novelty and surprise. But the more cultivated the audience to which the creator addresses himself the more will it insist that the surprise be not won at the expense of motivation. It will demand that characters and incidents be not freakish, not too remote from the facts that normally follow one another or coexist, whether in nature or human nature. One needs, in short, to deal with both art and life from some ethical centre. The centre with reference to which one has good sense may be only the ethos of one’s time and country, but if one’s good sense has, as in the case of the great poets, the support of the imagination, it may pass beyond to something more abiding.

(1) The phrase imaginative insight is, I believe, true to the spirit of Plato at his best, but it is certainly not true to his terminology. Plato puts the imagination (φαντασια) not only below intuitive reason (νους) and discursive reason or understanding (διανοια), but even below outer perception (πιστις), He recognizes indeed that it may reflect the operations of the understanding and even the higher reason as well as the impressions of sense. This notion of a superior intellectual imagination was carried much further by Plotinus and the neo-Platonists. Even the intellectual imagination is, however, conceived of as passive. Perhaps no Greek thinker, not even Plato, makes as clear as he might that reason gets its intuition of reality and the One with the aid of the imagination and, as it were, through a veil of illusion, that, in Joubert’s phrase, “l’illusion est une partie intégrante de la réalité” [Illusion is an integral part of reality —Ed. ] (Pensées, Titre xi, xxxix). Joubert again distinguishes (ibid. Titre iii, xlvii, li) between “l’imaginative” which is passive and “l’imagination” which is active and creative (“l’oeil de l’âme” [“the eye of the soul” —Ed.]). In its failure to bring out with sufficient explicitness this creative rôle of the imagination and in the stubborn intellectualism that this failure implies is to be found, if anywhere, the weak point in the cuirass of Greek philosophy.