Is Romanticism Just Escapism?
Updated: Oct 8
Why imagination matters far beyond the individual
There's one criticism that I occasionally hear about the Blue Flower and on the surface, it seems like it makes some sense. The criticism goes like this: Life is hard, people have responsibilities. Dreams don't pay bills. At some point you’ve just got to grow up.
It's a fair question, but let's unpack it because there are some smart people who have used versions of this very argument.
Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, did not like Romanticism. He believed that Romantics were just fooling themselves, and that they would end up miserable, that they were wrapping suffering in beautiful language.
"The Romantic movement is a symptom of our diseased civilization, and represents a form of self-delusion that leads to misery and disappointment."
TS Elliott thought that imagination alone was insufficient and that it needed tradition.
"Tradition... It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year... Tradition... involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence."
Before moving on, let me say that Elliot’s critique seems a little different.
He was saying that you needed to supplement imagination with tradition and an interaction with the past. Fair play. The Romantics would agree. Novalis, for example, built his concept of the Blue Flower on centuries of myth and poetry.
So let’s move on to a real enemy of the Romantics—the Marxist, Adorno. He criticized the Romantic concept of imagination directly.
And on the surface at least his point is something a lot of people relate to. In a nutshell, he is saying that imagination presents a danger when it justifies a retreat into a private world (escapism) rather than dealing with society’s ills.
"Romanticism is a form of bourgeois ideology that reinforces the dominant social order by encouraging individuals to seek refuge in private fantasies rather than engage in collective action to change the world."
This is essentially a recast version of Schopenhauer’s basic principle:
Romanticism mistakes imagination for reality.
But this is not what the Romantics believed:
Blake:
"Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow."
Blake’s point is that imagination actually allows us to engage in reality more deeply.
So what does he mean by “Deeply?”
This is where the critics and the Romantics are kind of talking past each other. Because while Schopenhauer and Adorno see imagination as private, the Romantics see it as generative. By "deeply" they mean that:
Imagination actually creates things.
Art of course, paintings, novels. But also communities, inventions, relationships, movements. How does society change without someone imagining a different future?
Einstein:
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."
Let’s return to our friend Richard Rorty:
"Reason can only follow paths that the imagination has broken."
Our ability to imagine the lives of other people is at the center of building a more humane society. In other words, imagination is one of the foundations of solidarity.
I think about all these years I spent in the garden with my daughter. The books that arrived afterwards were never the point. We were imagining worlds together, creating stories. And those experiences are what helped to create our relationship. They created the memories that shape us now and helped to shape how we see the world. That's what imagination does.
So it's really not just about the individual. It’s not just some kind of private longing like the critics would have you believe. Imagination spills outward. And it drives the world. It’s the very foundation of possibility.
Emerson:
"The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man."
Because the Blue Flower isn’t about escaping reality. In fact, it's the opposite. It's about seeing possibilities that don’t yet exist. It's recognizing that meaning and beauty are not distractions from life. They're part of what makes life worth living. And part of what brings us together.
So to all the critics who thought that the Romantics were disengaging from reality, the Romantics might simply reply:
Your reality is too small.
Continue on the 📚 Philosopher's Trail
The Blue Flower was never reserved for artists
