The problem stated in the article by Lee exceeds the frame of “enlightment” and “romanticism”. (BY the way, in Germany, nobody would ever dare calling the late morphologist Goethe a romanticist, for he is the German Classics Prototype itself. He himself said on the topic of the Classic and the Romantic: “Das Klassische ist das Gesunde, das Romantische das Kranke.” [The Classic is the healthy, the Romantic is the ill.] (trans. by myself; please note that I am German and thus not the best at translating German into English))

To get back to topic: I agree that Romanticism was indeed a movement in order to reclaim the given pre-subject-object flow of life that was lost by the means of greek philosophy transported in Christianity.

I do, at this point, rather not like to inform you about all of the thoughts thought by German philosophers in order to reclaim a natural state of perception. The stream of them is not appreciated and is called “Lebensphilosophie”. Philosophers of this stream are: Carl Gustav Carus, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Bergson, Ludwig Klages, Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey.

One might probably know, that Nietzsche strongly criticized Romanticism while himself being called a Romanticist by Thomas Mann. Anyway, I do not agree to understand Romanticism in the way Lee does, due to the fact, that Romanticism is a cult of weakness celebrating after-life.

I’m reminded of the 1990 film “Mindwalk”. The dialog between the three main actors, especially their discussions of looking at Man as a part of the system as opposed to a separate entity are incredible still now when watched.

IIRC, the film isn’t available on DVD but luckily it’s up on Google for anyone who would like to watch it.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9107401959308808776&q=mindwalk#

I had a email exchange with Fritjof Capra, whose work the movie is based on, and who was happy to see the film was available for those who wanted to see it.

I’d like to expand on some of what Lee has laid out. I do so not to criticize his thesis. I find his formulation refreshing in many ways that are not often seen elsewhere, and that belong at the heart of the Dark Mountain.

To begin, I agree that certain terms are commonly thrown as epithets and that this short-circuits discussion and closes off any elucidation of deeper questions. This is a rampant problem affecting most public discourse today. It is yet one more sign that it is not that we are asking for, or even hoping for an end to the current civilization; but merely witnessing it’s destruction all around us. The confusion of our witness as a stand-in for actively looking to cause harm does more violence to our condition than does our desire to make plain what is there to be seen.

Lee does a good job of lifting Romanticism up out of the mire and of laying out the distinctions between Romanticism and Enlightenment thinking. These are key points concerning the struggles that have led us to our current conditions.

Where I would like to take this further, resting on his shoulders really, since without his points established I’d not have a place to stand. There is behind this whole argument an assumption about historical periods. They do not exist as a firm consensus of what was thought at any point in the past, but within a continuously shifting perception of what we imagine people at other periods of time to have thought and felt. By close reading and immersion we can get a sense of how a past period’s thought can be useful to us, but to expect anything else is problematic no matter whether the period in question seems to support our sense of right or wrong.

Part of the pathological state of modernist thinking is expressed in a belief that the past is a smorgasbord from which we can adopt stances. We can no more adopt a Romantic pose than we can a Newtonian pose. We’re not there, and more importantly, we have the curse and the benefits of all those years of experience beyond what they knew. We cannot ignore any of that or put it aside. The attempt – not that I’m saying Lee has tried to do this, but it is another assumption floating around the ideas we struggle with – An attempt to use Romanticism as anything beyond a guide, is doomed to fail by its willed naivete.

I would say that much of the reaction that took place in the twentieth century, that supremely reactive time, was just such an effort. Within the overall reductivist mode of thought, various anti-rational movements rose and fell in succession in reaction to the consequences of modernism, consequences that were fully visible to those with eyes to see by September 1914. Many of these movements attempted to resurrect Romanticism, including the Hippie-hood of my youth. They were, each more and more quickly than the last, subsumed and co-opted by the modernist juggernaut and metabolized into mere fashions and intellectual posing. We have the advantage of having all the horror and thwarted yearning of that century behind us. It is our responsibility to take these lessons to heart and not repeat their failings.

There is a related issue, also brought to light by Lee’s post. The use and misuse of the term “myth.”

Once again, one of the keys to the Dark Mountain Project is that the question of myth is addressed directly, and rightly in my mind, as central to what needs to occur today. The deterioration of the idea of myth, especially in the last hundred or so years, is at the heart of the current pathology. Once again, we have the benefits of experience. We look back at how this came to be and what it has wrought. We are in a position our predecessors did not have available to them. We have an awareness of the dangers and the results of the slippery slope they fell down. We are in a position to recast and reformulate myth as a force that had been central to the human enterprise for most of our several hundred thousand year existence as a species.

I tend to see what we are going through as an opportunity to mature as a species. We come out of a long and mostly forgotten childhood followed by a rather brief and startling adolescence. As adolescents we gained incredible powers that outstripped our maturity. We took on poses of cynicism and irony that attempted to shelter us from our fears of what we did not understand. Also, as with any adolescents, left unchecked, our powers have become fatally destructive and anarchic. We must now strive to grow towards a maturity that is not a “return” to childhood, but a consolidation and integration of our powers with an increased sense of responsibility to a longer view, to a life-affirming ethos.

Our chances of success don’t enter into an assessment of whether we must do this, a sense of tragedy as central to the human condition needs to replace the egotistical, adolescent wishes after immortality and no-fault “happy endings.”

The reduction of the term “myth” to a pejorative is a prime example of the immaturity we need to overcome. We cannot accomplish this by attempting to go backwards, fitting ourselves into memories of consolations from childhood. We need to forge new, aware relationships to myth, and develop myths and rituals – practices – that lead us to living within the realities of our human condition.

Ideally – this term itself a concept that smacks of reductive habits of thought – we would like to be going through this maturation at a time when our prospects for its accomplishment were more propitious instead of at a time of epochal crisis; but that’s not our situation; and perhaps, as with any initiation from adolescence to adulthood, it cannot be accomplished without a “fear and trembling and a sickness unto death!” We don’t have a choice in the matter, but it is possible that without this crisis we’d not have had any chance for this “initiation!”

To recap: I agree with Lee that we need to look carefully with nuance at historical movements of thought, so long as we maintain a clear sense that they are not available as “costumes” to be put on. Along with demanding a discourse that doesn’t rely on short-cuts to discount opposing views, we have a necessity to delve deeply and be ready to learn from the past.

We need to keep our eyes firmly on the underlying question, as illuminated in the Dark Mountain Manifesto – Manifesto, that quaintly archaic term held lightly as a warning of the traps the last few centuries’ manifestos have fallen into.

We need to take myth away from its current misuse as a disparaging term of derision and establish it in its rightful place as the mechanism by which humans find and share a sense of meaning and establish norms of behavior that act to channel effort into paths that are life-affirming in the broadest sense. We need to do this while maintaining that while linear notions of progress are unrealistic, we live within linear time and must fit our actions to our conditions today. Whether our prospects are rosy or dire, we achieve maturity by facing all that our reality puts in front of us.