The Sense of Wonder

The Romantic endeavor to provide us with answers that inspire further questioning.

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Sometimes Romanticism is seen as a reaction against the Enlightenment, but the truth is more complicated. Rather than seeking to negate or disparage the value of reason and the other values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism embraced those values while at the same time subverting certain aspects of them. For example, in, The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world (2010)[1], Iain McGilchrist distinguishes between the ethos of Romanticism and that of the Enlightenment on the basis that, while proponents of the Enlightenment regarded the quest for truth or beauty as a kind of adversarial engagement between opposing sides which would be ‘won’ by the correct side, Romanticism saw beauty and truth as arising from ‘the coming together of opposites into a fruitful union’[2].

In British Romanticism and the critique of political reason (2016), Timothy Michael asserts that the idea that there was a conflict between the kind of imagination championed by Romanticism and the use of reason, only arose after the era of Romanticism and that, ‘the defense of the imagination in the Romantic period is simultaneously a critique or a vindication of par­tic­u­lar forms of reason’. By ‘critique’ Michael explains that he does not mean…