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Romantic Upheavals, Modern Movements

This chapter discusses the relation of existentialist thinking to Romanticism and modernism. From the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, some philosophers and writers devoted their efforts to subjective aspects of existence, embracing Enlightenment philosophy’s focus on individual freedom while rejecting its rationalist constraints. This chapter shows the relevance for existentialism of the rebellion by Romantic thinkers against the cult of reason and what they considered its modern disenchanted vision of a world seen through the prism of mathematics and wholly determined by material forces. Often in conflict with the dominant philosophical positions of their time, these thinkers privileged individual subjectivity and freedom, feeling, and imagination, along with an aesthetic program for philosophy. This chapter shows that the creative philosophies of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky emerged in critical contest with Romanticism, and would in turn feed the existentialist impulse of modernist literature in the following century.