Richard Eldridge. The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. 251. $54.95 cloth/$19.95 paper.

Selections of essays are always queried as to what holds the individual pieces together. In answer to that question, you could say of this book's first part, composed of five essays and bearing the title "Kant and Post-Kantian Romanticism," that it accomplishes an informed and informative tracing of how one goes from the philosophy of Kant to the poetry of Holderlin; and of the six succeeding essays, gathered under the heading of "Twentieth-Century Philosophical Romanticisms: Wittgenstein, Cavell and the Arts," that they all argue that romanticism in our time has translated itself into the present of "ordinary language" philosophy in and as this way of doing philosophy finds itself turning back to literature, finds itself (as Cavell has put it) calling for literature, and specifically for romantic literature.

Eldridge, a philosopher by profession, presents a romanticism that is to be received and understood as the literary heir of an Enlightenment which Kant understood and performed not as "the coming to domination of instrumental reason" (59) but as "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage" (38), the perilous advance of the species into the maturely self-reliant trust "that a lived sense of order and meaning can be reachieved in human cultural life, but without dogmatism and despotism" (58). As so unsponsored, we find ourselves in the "processes of [an] actual" (101), as much culturally determined as naturally given, and almost always both nurturing and stifling. The "picture of free human personality or subjectivity with aspirations to expressive power finding itself encountering cultural forms that simultaneously enable and inhibit these very aspirations is the image of the human person in the world that is to be found...

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