Philosophical Foundation (Summary)
Proponent: The Principle of Natural Goodness
Philosophical Foundations of Romanticism
• Earl of Shaftesbury’s View of natural goodness
• Herder’s organic view of History
• Post-Kantian German philosophers’ epistemological concerns
• Burke’s inquiries into the sublime and the beautiful
• Percy’s Researches in the Folk literature
• Walpole’s and Volney’s Concern with the past
• Goethe’s celebration of the rebel
• Rousseau's doctrines of man’s noble nature and the evil’s society
1. Earl of Shaftesbury
Empirical Study
He studied man as a unit in himself and secondly in his wider relations to the larger units of society and the universe of mankind.
Principle: Harmony or Balance based on the general ground of good taste or feeling as opposed to the method of reason.
Note: The virtue of Benevolence (Altruism) – concern for others (Wishing to be good/charity) as indispensable to morality
Close parallel between the moral and the aesthetic criteria: Just as there is a faculty which apprehends beauty in the sphere of art, so there is the sphere of ethics a faculty which determines the value of action
Moral sense/Conscience
2. Johann Gottfried von Herder
Organic View of History
Thoughts: Embodied in “Outline of Philosophical History of Humanity”
The philosophy stresses the “one must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel ones way into everything. “The historian” should be the “regenerated contemporary” of the past and history and science “instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit.”
3. Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
German Philosopher from Prussia (Age of Enlightenment)
Defined Enlightenment as an age shaped by Latin motto
(“Dare to Know”)
Thoughts: maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free from the dictates of external authority.
He asserted that, because of