Dead French Intellectuals are Boring

The trouble with "Enlightenment" and "Romanticism"

“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” Francisco de Goya. Goya is much more interesting than a bunch of dead French intellectuals.

I can hardly describe the ire of how much I hate TVTropes. Since I just posted an image by Goya you can use the face of the cat and that’s my stare at TVTropes. TVTropes is many things and none of them are any good. It’s a hub of perverts, an advertisement for conspicuous consumption, and a bunch of autistic people who decided that since autistic people aren’t supposed to understand metaphors they were going to turn everything into metaphors and ignore every other meaning works possess from literal ones to other devices such as metonymy.

One of the things I think TVTropes is the worst at is relentlessly promoting the idea of “Enlightenment vs. Romanticism” in our culture, though I’ve heard that in college classes and I’ve heard that in annoying, not particularly bright political discourse as well. The trouble is there’s literally no such thing as Enlightenment vs. Romanticism. While no one called anything “the Age of Enlightenment” until centuries later, I do think there was a real event that was being referred to, which was that before the French Revolution, French intellectuals came into existence. You know, the annoying people who still exist today (it’s probably not all French intellectuals but I can’t easily think of any exceptions except maybe Camus and he’s still kind of annoying sometimes, ditto for Baudrillard, all the rest just seem really useless and I can’t think of anything mildly productive they ever said.) I guess Voltaire is mostly good despite also being really of annoying off and on just like the rest of them that I can think of, but that brings up how much people Romanticize Voltaire anyway, like actual Goethe, or during today Aurelio Voltaire, Ada Palmer, etc.

The fact is, for one, the American Revolution happened before the French Revolution. People seem to think the French Revolution happened first because it was primitive and barbaric like they think Subway is cheap because it’s bad, but that’s just their associations misfiring. The French Revolution started on May 5 1789. In fact, the play Sturm und Drang which gave the name to the Sturm und Drang movement was first performed on August 1 1777. The French Revolution postdates Sturm und Drang, which is generally considered hyper-Romantic and is literally about someone who goes to fight the British monarchy with the American colonists and not, as people would stereotypically expect by negative depictions of “Romanticism,” about some kind of throne-and-altar defense of King George, by 12 years. The French Revolution postdates the American Revolution by 11 years, and it postdates what’s often considered to be the beginning of the “Sturm und Drang movement” (which precedes the play Sturm und Drang) which was 1773. Basically nothing about “Romanticism” had anything to do with the French Revolution.

Additionally, I don’t even think it had much to do with “the Enlightenment.” France and Germany have historically had a lot of enmity with each other, and I think that’s mostly what’s meant by “the Enlightenment” and “Romanticism,” but the thing is aside from “Sturm und Drang” actually preceding the French Revolution, I don’t think Romantics were literally just watching everything “the Enlightenment” did and reacting against it. Virtually all famous German Romantics were bona-fide naturalists and physicists, unlike Enlightenment French public intellectuals who were, well, French public intellectuals. So much for “Romantics” hating science. Maybe in England but England is such a non-factor in this debate. England is important once the British Empire really gets going, not in the “Enlightenment” vs. “Romantic” “debate” which is just French vs. German, except, the Germans really don’t seem to care for the most part. It’s basically just the French being ticked off at the Germans and the fact that other people like the Americans and the British are mostly following along German thought instead of French though.

Never mind some of the really obnoxious “counter-Enlightenment” thinkers, who I think are also a real demographic but… they’re also all French, umm, de Maistre is French, Rousseau if you consider him counter-Enlightenment is French. Germans like Novalis even if they were morbid were still literally called that because Novalis literally ran a mine which was why he was “breaker of new ground” and he was interested in geology and botany and half the plot about his book is about Urpflanze (blue flower) and returning to the golden age… of Atlantis, not throne-and-altar conservatism. Not really “counter-Enlightenment” at all, just entirely unconcerned with French thinkers and kind of a convenient target since he wrote a bunch of poetry about the night and “ooooh that’s against light!” No, it’s just a bunch of edgelord poetry about nighttime, not a declaration that science and engineering are useless by a guy who literally ran a mine and knew way more about science and engineering than any of the froo-froo French intellectuals. Of course they don’t teach you that in school though because they just teach fake garbage in college humanities courses which is probably the single best reason to cancel them. The lazy bums just lie all day and I’ve always known that, I’ve had to point out Goethe didn’t hate science in a class where we were reading Faust and half the things during a certain part are because Goethe was a physicist and a naturalist and he was poking fun at theories by people he thought were basically idiots in his book and putting forth his own in his book.

The fact is “counter-Enlightenment” is itself just an Enlightenment idea, not in some kind of sophistic way where without the Enlightenment there wouldn’t be the counter-Enlightenment, but because all the “counter-Enlightenment” thinkers are also just French intellectuals or some people who learned from that tradition. None of them are German “Romantics” or English “Romantics” or American “Romantics” (Transcendentalist, Gothic, etc.) Yes, Romanticism largely opposes “the Enlightenment,” but it also largely aligns with it, because it’s basically just an independent thing by people who don’t really care about French public intellectuals which just got invented a bit before the French Revolution happened and that ticked everyone off. “Romantics” seem to be mostly classical liberals politically, you know, kind of like the American Revolution, not people arguing for some kind of psychological roll-back of human cognitive hardware so that everyone stops thinking of themselves as an intellectual and becomes a mindless member of the feudal hierarchy just like the good old days. Which also literally preceded the French Revolution anyway.

The fact is the only people who care that much about French public intellectuals are other French intellectuals or people who consider that their primary tradition, not German naturalists or people on the American frontier or British industrialists, and I’m not going to pretend French public intellectuals have ever mattered all that much with this “Enlightenment vs. Romanticism” garbage (read: I’m mad the Germans are winning the culture wars even though they’re just winning by not getting involved and actually using reason rather than talking about it.)