From alienation to Romantic love

Many Romantics portrayed their contemporary age in terms of fragmentation and alienation, and saw this fragmentation further duplicated within the individual. In response to this perceived disconnectedness, they described their work as a search for a new transcendence and unity of separate spheres, modelled after remote historical

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periods, particularly the Middle Ages (Schlegel, Scott), or notions of religious unity (Chateaubriand, Novalis) or unity within the realm of nature (Coleridge, Hölderlin, Wordsworth). This Romantic self-description has led many later critics to see Romanticism as a conservative nostalgic by-product of the decline of the feudal order and the rise of industrialism. Whereas, within feudal society, each individual had a designated place according to religion, profession, family, age and sex, the eighteenth century uprooted the individual from these pre-determined positions, thus both necessitating and allowing for self-definitions. However, as other critics have pointed out, the claim for a state of disconnection turned out to be quite productive for the Romantics. The greater the distance between fragmented individuals is believed to be, the greater the intensity of perception, vision and feeling could be in compensating for this distance. Indeed, emphasizing distance and fragmentation allowed the Romantics to focus productively on those techniques that simultaneously unite and separate the individual spheres. Thus, the key tension at work within Romanticism, namely that between the radical uniqueness of the individual on the one hand and the desired self-annihilation and mystic fusion in a universal order on the other, opened the way for new modes of perception and communication.

One of the key ‘media’—to use a term coined by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann—of Romanticism was love. Precisely because each individual is increasingly understood as a world in himself or herself, a strong medium was required that nevertheless bridges the gap between individuals, thus establishing, for example, family units in a society that rejected arranged marriage. Love accomplished this by making the singularity of the loved one the magnifying glass through which one experienced the world and oneself (see de Staël, On the Influence of the Passions on the Well-Being of Individuals and of Nations, [De l’influence des passionssur le bonheur des individus et des nations] 1796).

The totality of perception made possible by Romantic love also allowed for an appreciation of sexuality as one legitimate aspect of love. To love meant to love relationality. The price of this love was the preservation of the very distances that love set out to overcome.

Still, Romantic love preserved the asymmetry between the sexes, with the man’s love reflecting the nature of relation (as Luhmann puts it: the man loves loving), and the woman simply loving the man. Whereas this imbalance ensured a more direct emotional involvement of the woman, it bared her from reflection and thereby also from gaining a self. In his Philosophical Studies (Philosophische Studien, 1800), Novalis made explicit that which seems to underlie most thought around 1800: The man has to master his nature and to accomplish law and control for the Individuo…. The woman has to obey nature— and to master her individual.’

From alienation to Romantic love