Jerry Lacony Killingsworth

Romantic Response-to-the-Enlightenment Jerry Lacony Killingsworth

The Romantic Response-to-the-Enlightenment was artistic, philosophical, and literary, and the movement from about 1780-1850 in Europe and America was, in the most general way, a reaction to the rational-intellectual-scientific-and-technological domination-and-the industrial revolution. In my own terms it was a movement from the techne truth impulse, based on believing, thinking, knowing, and having ideas as the basis of knowing and having and toward the natural-organic impulse of the instinctual-intuitive-and-poetic, based on sensing, feeling, seeing, and being, as in experience. The feeling was that reason was limited in dealing with human experience and existence, and that the intuition, the instinctual, and the imaginative should be directly involved in the traditions of philosophy, literary, and the arts. It was intended to be a transformation that focused on the essential goodness and creativity of human nature, and the values that were not expressed in the technical-and-rational views.