What is New Romanticism? From Novalis to Rorty
更新日：10月8日
New Romanticism: Dream, But Do the Work
It's easy to romanticize creativity. You get this great idea in your head, but then when push comes to shove you get nowhere with it. In fact, it’s easier than ever to get a great ideas, but it’s also never been easier to stop right there.
And that's where I’d like to start this, because it kind of is a nice segue into what philosophy has done for a long time. It's kind of either one or the other—imagination or reality. Either you look to ground everything in reason, or you tend to float around in the clouds and try to escape the big questions through imagination.
Jazzy
But this is where Rorty comes in. He doesn't want you to do either. He wants to keep it “jazzy.” Because Rorty, in a way, was like a jazz musician. He loosened things up. (Cornel West liked this analogy.)
For Rorty, philosophy was not about finding foundations or searching for some kind of solid ground, it was “contingent.” It was about finding better ways to describe things—like the jazz musician—improvising new phrases. Building new vocabularies. For a lot of people, myself included, this was a big relief. It felt like a door opening. But the question then is:
What kind of room did it open into?
If you step inside and look around, you see that it's a place that looks kind of familiar. You know the names—Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, etc—they’re all in there. And then in the center of it all, there’s my favorite—Novalis. He’s busy trying to improvise a bridge between imagination and reason.
Because the Romantics of the early 1800s were dealing with something similar to what we are dealing with today.
The Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment pushed reason and explanation, and this made the Romantics nervous. Although they could see the benefits of reason and science, they pushed back because they saw their world being flattened. To them, the Enlightenment’s rationality had limits. Imagination was a lot more than decoration, it was central.
This is sounding familiar.
Rorty’s basically saying the same thing, minus all that 19th century transcendence talk and metaphysical romance....
His aptly named book - “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” (the book that shook me from my Kantian journey) blows up the whole “mirror” metaphor of traditional philosophy – that language mirrors some kind of truth out there.
Everything is contingent. Language mirrors nothing. It’s just a tool. A story, a metaphor. Sounds Romantic.
But Rorty’s Romanticism is pragmatic, and that’s the “New’ part of New Romanticism. Dream, but do the work.
How would Novalis react to this?
His worldview is perhaps best summed up by this one statement (my favorite):
"Philosophy is really homesickness – the urge to be at home everywhere."
This could’ve come from Rorty. Language is a tool, and we are all really looking for home. Look at Novalis’s fragments, one long project. Despite using the metaphysical vernacular of his time (stars, dreams. etc) he understands that it’s all one ongoing, open conversation.
In fact, you could say that he sounds very much like Rorty’s modern day “ironist” or “imaginative storyteller” who deals in metaphor.
So what now?
In this brave new world of tech, the New Romanticism of Novalis and Rorty says to keep your agency and use all this technology as a tool—build, create— because what you build matters. Imagination responds—like in Sparkle Valley.
So be “a pragmatist with a romantic soul.” (Rorty)
Because imagination shapes the world and it gives back what you bring to it. That's the twist. So dream, but do the work.
Continue on the 📚 Philosopher's Trail
When nothing is worth loving.
Continue Exploring
If you want to see these ideas inside Sparkle Valley
→ The Blue Flower — the symbolic heart of the philosophy
→ Emily
If you want the practical side
→ 5 Ways to Tap into Blue Flower Power — practical ways to re-connect
If you want the deeper philosophical roots
→ Thin Places— where meaning breaks through
→ Sparkle Valley as Redescription — Rorty influence