Romanticism

Romanticism begins as a reaction and becomes a revolution. What it reacts against is the Enlightenment’s confidence that reason is the supreme human faculty — that the world can be understood, organized, and improved through rational analysis. The core Romantic claim is that the most important truths about human experience cannot be reached by reason alone. They require imagination, feeling, and a willingness to confront that which exceeds our capacity to understand. Shelley elevates imagination over reason; Emerson dissolves the boundary between self and nature; Rousseau insists on the authority of individual feeling. This is the intellectual world of Melville’s Moby-Dick — a novel that contains chapters on cetology and the technical details of whaling, but whose deepest subject is something that resists knowledge entirely: the white whale, blank and inscrutable, onto which Ahab projects all his fury and meaning, and which remains, finally, unknowable.