Is Romanticism Just Escapism?

Oct 10, 2022
4 min read

Updated: Jun 19

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 wasn't really attacking imagination. He was basically warning that imagination wasn’t enough. That it also needs tradition and an interaction with the past.

Fair play, and I don’t think the Romantics would disagree with this. Novalis, for example, wasn't trying to erase tradition. In fact, he was building on it. The Blue Flower came from centuries of myth and poetry.

But lets move on to someone who really had it in for the Romantics—the Marxist, Adorno. He really hated it, and criticized imagination directly. And truthfully, he touches on something that I think a lot of people relate to, namely that Romanticism is about retreating into private fantasies instead of dealing with real social problems.

Caspar David Friedrich Morgen im Riesengebirge 1810

"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."

Taken on its face, this seems like strong stuff, but if you look closely, it's just another take on Schopenhauer's point. Because looking at them together, they kind of get back to a central principle:

Romanticism mistakes imagination for reality.

And to tell you the truth, if Romanticism was just about daydreaming, then I'd agree with them. But that's not what the Romantics said or believed.

William Blake put it this way.

"Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow."

Carl Philipp Fohr - Knight before the Charcoal Burner's Hut

While this may sound extreme, his point is that imagination isn't a distraction from reality, but rather how we engage in reality more deeply.

But I hear you saying —“deeply?” – what does that actually mean? Moreover, what does it mean for society?

And this is where I think 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.

Imagination actually creates things.

And not just art either. Paintings and novels. It creates communities, movements, inventions. Relationships. In fact, think about it, every meaningful change in society started with someone imagining a different reality from the one in front of them.

Listen to Einstein:

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas

imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."

As they say, "Knowledge tells us what is, but it’s imagination that helps us to see what could be." So imagination is something that matters far beyond just the individual. It impacts all of us.

Let’s go back to Richard Rorty, he makes that exact point.

"Reason can only follow paths that the imagination has broken."

It’s only imagination that can create those new paths. Recall Rorty’s comments on forging a community, and how our ability to imagine the lives of other people is at the center of building a more humane society. This doesn’t happen if we aren’t able to see beyond ourselves (if we don’t engage in a reality more deeply).

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.

And this is exactly what Emerson was getting at when he said:

"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.