13 - May Flies and Horseshoe Crabs: Romantic and Post-Romantic Consciousness, Institutions, and Populations

Summary

The extraordinary power of Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (1970) was, in the first instance, a consequence of the collective interpretative insight of the contributors, such as Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, M. H. Abrams, and Paul de Man. Yet the critical acumen of these critics was itself enabled by elective affinities between many of their theoretical orientations, especially psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and Romantic literature itself. Some of these affinities had genealogical origins: as Henri Ellenberger documented in The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970), Freud's concept of the unconscious was heavily indebted to Romantic-era authors such as F. W. J. Schelling, while deconstruction and poststructuralism relied on an assimilation of Martin Heidegger's philosophy with an anthropological version of G. W. F. Hegel's Romantic-era idealism (Descombes; Borch-Jacobsen 1–20). Bloom’s, Hartman’s, and de Man's scintillating illuminations of Romantic structures of intergenerational antagonism, ambivalence toward nature, and approaches to poetic language (among other topics) were thus in part a consequence of these critics’ uncanny reinventions and reoccupations of Romantic-era approaches.

If there is a lesson here for the project of revisiting relationships between Romanticism and consciousness in light of early twentieth-first-century neuro-approaches, it is that these latter are most likely to have a real interpretative grasp on the literature of the period when they themselves resonate with, or even have their distant origins within, Romantic theories, practices, and approaches. This is, at any rate, my approach here, and I suggest that a basic conceptual matrix first established in the Romantic period persists in many contemporary neurological accounts of consciousness. This conceptual matrix connects three kinds of agents or entities – institutions, individuals, and populations – by means of two kinds of process: automatic processes that occur below the level of consciousness and self-conscious acts of cognition. While we can discern this conceptual matrix in the work of many Romantic-era authors and discourses, I focus here on the debate among Edmund Burke, William Godwin, and Thomas Malthus over the foundations of social order. Burke argued that social order required that traditional institutions do some of our thinking for us (a claim echoed in Germany by Hegel).