/lit/ - Literature

>>16206862
Based.

Romanticism is subjectified occasionalism because an occasional relationship to the world is essential to it. Instead of God, however, the romantic subject occupies the central position and makes the world and everything that occurs in it into a mere occasion. Because the final authority is shifted from God to the genius of the ''ego," the entire foreground changes, and that which is genuinely occasionalistic appears in a pristine fashion. It is true that the old philosophers of occasionalism, such as Malebranche, also possessed the disintegrative concept of the occasio. However, they recovered law and order in God, the objective absolute. And in the same way, a certain objectivity and cohesion always remain possible whenever another objective authority, like the state, takes the place of God in such an occasionalist attitude. It is different, however, when the isolated and emancipated individual brings his occasional attitude to realization. Only now does the occasional display the total consistency of its repudiation of all consistency. Only now can everything really become the occasion for everything else. Only now does everything that will happen and all sequential order become incalculable in a fantastic manner, which is precisely the immense attraction of this attitude. That is because this attitude makes it possible to take any concrete point as a departure and stray into the infinite and the incomprehensible — either in an emotionally fervent fashion or in a demonically malicious fashion, depending upon the individuality of the particular romantic. Only now does it become clear how much the occasional is the relation of the fantastical, and also — again, varying with the individuality of the particular romantic — the relation of intoxication or the dream, the relation of the adventure, the fairy tale, and the magical game.

"It is often difficult for Taine to bring off his explanation of romanticism as the art of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The question of what the politically revolutionary bourgeoisie has to do with the art of Wordsworth or Walter Scott, for example, became all too obvious. In such cases, the French critic availshimself of the claim that here the political movement has "disguised" itself as a revolution in literary style. This explanatory device is entirely characteristic of the sociological and psychological thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, the economic conception of history employs it in a rather naive fashion when it speaks of the religious or artistic disguise, reflection, or sublimation of economic conditions. Friedrich Engels has provided a paradigmatic case of this phenomenon in his characterization of the Calvinist dogma of predestination as a religious disguise for the relentlessness of the capitalist struggle of competition. But the tendency to see a "disguise" everywhere goes much deeper than this. It does not merely correspond to a proletarian disposition, but is rather of more general significance. To a great extent, all ecclesiastical and state institutions and forms, all legal concepts and arguments, everything that is official, and even democracy itself since the time it assumed a constitutional form are perceived as empty and deceptive disguises, as a veil, a façade, a fake, or a decoration. The words, both refined and crude, in which this is encompassed are more numerous and forceful than most of the corresponding idioms of other times; for example, the references to "simulacra" that the political literature of the seventeenth century employs as its characteristic shibboleth. Today the "backstage" that conceals the real movement of reality is constructed everywhere. This betrays the insecurity of the time and its profound sense of being deceived. An era that produces no great form and no representation based on its own presuppositions must succumb to such states of mind and regard everything that is formal and official as a fraud. This is because no era lives without form, regardless of the extent to which it comports itself in an economic fashion. If it does not succeed in finding its own form, then it grasps for thousands of surrogates in the genuine forms of other times and other peoples, only to immediately repudiate the surrogate as a sham."