Tuesday, May 13, 2025

Enlightenment/Romantic

On this day:
1515
Mary Tudor, Queen of France, and Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk are officially married at Greenwich.
1568
Battle of Langside: The forces of Mary, Queen of Scots, are defeated by a confederacy of Scottish Protestants under James Stewart, Earl of Moray, her half-brother.
1865
American Civil War: Battle of Palmito Ranch – in far south Texas, more than a month after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, the last land battle of the Civil War ends with a Confederate victory.
1940
World War II: Germany’s conquest of France begins as the German army crosses the Meuse. Winston Churchill makes his “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech to the House of Commons.
1943
World War II: German Afrika Korps and Italian troops in North Africa surrender to Allied forces.
1948
1948 Arab-Israeli War: The Kfar Etzion massacre is committed by Arab irregulars, the day before the declaration of independence of the state of Israel on May 14.
1960
Hundreds of University of California, Berkeley students congregate for the first day of protest against a visit by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Thirty-one students are arrested, and the Free Speech Movement is born.

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The United States currently owns nearly 70 percent of the land in the State of Utah. The relative percentage of federal lands in Eastern states is trivial by comparison where the federal government owns less than 1 percent of the land in Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island, and less than 3 percent of the land in Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

About half of the federal land in Utah has been designated as National Parks, National Forests, National Conservation Areas, and the like, or is being used in service of one of the federal government’s enumerated powers—e.g., as a federal military installation, courthouse, office building, or the like. But the rest of the federal land in Utah—about 34% of the State’s territory—is “unappropriated” land that the United States is simply holding, without formally reserving it for any designated purpose.--Utah website

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Moderna and pharma giant Merck are developing an mRNA-based cancer vaccine, mRNA-4157 (V940), for people who’ve had high-risk melanomas removed.
The results have been impressive.
This targeted platform therapy is now being applied to other malignancies.

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Enlightenment/Romantic

A quick summary of the Enlightenment/Romantic conflict:

For a time, the rationality of the Enlightenment seemed to hail the final triumph of human reason. Soon, the laws that operated behind the universe would all be known, and humankind would be able to create the future it wanted. At least that is how it seemed for a while.

If Copernicus is the most easily identifiable figure to mark the start of the Enlightenment, then the German philosopher Immanuel Kant can be most readily recognized as signaling the beginning of the Romantic Revolution. Romanticism emerged from a sense of disillusionment with the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment thinkers, pursuing reason, had backed themselves into a corner. The philosopher David Hume took reason to its ultimate skeptical end. Hume showed that ultimately we can know nothing. We have only the perceptions of the senses, and there is no way to know if those perceptions correspond to any outside world, whether it be the physical world of time and space or any transcendent realm of spirit. In fact, there was no way to know if there was any reality outside of our sense perceptions at all. Hume fell into such despair over this profoundly skeptical trap that he was known to frequent public backgammon games to take his mind off humanity's predicament.

A second problem of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution disaster. What started as a revolt against tyranny with the aim to put in place a government created according to the highest principles of enlightened thought turned into a blood bath, demonstrating the lowest side of human character. What did it mean? What had gone wrong?

The Romantic thinkers began to feel that the Enlightenment was suffocating them and squeezing the spirit, passion, and morality out of existence. Kant, in response, created a new vision of reality. He rejected the universe of discoverable universal laws and instead envisioned a growing universe created in part by human choices and human will.

The Enlightenment saw a universe that was mechanical and run by fixed laws. The Romantics saw an organic universe, growing with acts of will. Human will and freedom were sacred, whereas the Enlightenment centered on human reason and rationality.

The Romantics were skeptical of science. In Frankenstein, the great Romantic novel by Mary Shelly, a scientist creates life only to discover that his creation is beyond his control and destroys him and those around him. The Romantics felt that the Enlightenment notion that the universe was knowable and controllable was naive. The universe was infinite, mysterious, and ultimately unknowable. Yet we are a part of it, and therefore, if we give ourselves to our deepest yearnings, we will be part of the creative part of the universe. For the Romantics, the highest human value was not rationality, but authenticity, moral integrity, and passion. The Romantics were the first to value these things for their own sake, regardless of where they were aimed. A Christian in the Middle Ages would never admire the zeal a Pagan demonstrated for a heathen faith. The Christian would simply see the zealous Pagan as more dangerous. The Enlightened thinker didn’t admire the passion of the monk’s love of God, instead, the monk seemed all the more foolish. The Romantic admires even the passion of her enemies. To die for one's ideals is the highest good, no matter what the ideal. 
Robert E. Lee? A loyal Buchenwald guard?

If the Enlightenment thinkers had felt shackled by the superstition of the Middle Ages, the Romantic thinkers felt that the natural laws of the Enlightenment were a straitjacket. The Romantics loved to break rules, to snub laws, and live as utterly unconventionally as possible. They were unconventional in dress, in lifestyle, and in thinking. As poets, playwrights, and novelists, they broke literary styles, and their great musical composers, perhaps Beethoven, the greatest of all, were notorious for breaking musical convention.

In Germany, the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Goethe set the stage for a Romantic Revolution. This revolution would erupt in the English poets Byron, Shelly, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. All of these writers had a tremendous impact on the developing thought of America at the start of the 19th century and have become a deep part of the consciousness of America. The Transcendentalists of Concord represent the American Romantic Revolution. And they were reading all of the Romantic philosophy, literature, and poetry coming out of Europe. Can the American mind be understood without understanding Romanticism?-- from Carreira

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