Impossible Individuality (ebook)

Argumento de Impossible Individuality (ebook)

Studying major writers and philosophers--Schlegel and Schleiermacher in Germany, Wordsworth in England, and Chateaubriand in France--Gerald Izenberg shows how a combination of political, social, and psychological developments resulted in the modern concept of selfhood. More than a study of one national culture influencing another, this work goes to the heart of kindred intellectual processes in three European countries. Izenberg makes two persuasive and related arguments. The first is that the Romantics developed a new idea of the self as characterized by fundamentally opposing impulses: a drive to assert the authority of the self and expand that authority to absorb the universe, and the contradictory impulse to surrender to a greater idealized entity as the condition of the self's infinity. The second argument seeks to explain these paradoxes historically, showing how romantic individuality emerged as a compromise. Izenberg demonstrates how the Romantics retreated, in part, from a preliminary, radically activist ideal of autonomy they had worked out under the impact of the French Revolution. They had begun by seeing the individual self as the sole source of meaning and authority, but the convergence of crises in their personal lives with the crises of the revolution revealed this ideal as dangerously aggressive and self-aggrandizing. In reaction, the Romantics shifted their absolute claims for the self to the realm of creativity and imagination, and made such claims less dangerous by attributing totality to nature, art, lover, or state, which in return gave that totality back to the self.0Acknowledgents Introduction 3 1 Two Concepts of Individuality I) Friedrich Schleiermacher: The Divided Self 18 II) Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Whole Man 27 III) Politics and the Psyche 35 IV) Toward European Romanticism 50 2 Friedrich Schlegel I) Irony as Possession and Demystification of Infinity 54 II) The Road to Revolution 67 III) The Birth of Romanticism 112 3 William Wordsworth I) Criminals and Prophets 139 II) The Road To Revolution 147 III) The Radical Wordsworth 170 IV) A Tenuous Resolution 207 4 Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand I) Le Vague des Passions 240 II) Chateaubriand the Revolutionary 252 III) The Reversal 278 IV) Transition: Religion and Selfhood 290 Conclusion 308 Notes 313 Bibliography 335 Index 347