Romanticism and the Divided Brain

How human history is shaped by neural anatomy

“Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast,
each seeks to rule without the other.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, a movement erupted in Europe that Isaiah Berlin (in his fantastic lectures on Romanticism, on which some of this article is based) would later call “the most dramatic shift in the history of European consciousness”. From the order of the century of Enlightenment, of “le siècle des lumières”, broke forth with violence a new mode of thinking about the world and of being in the world.

Romanticism would shape the European cultural and political landscape for centuries to come, from the French revolution and the rise of nationalism all the way to the fascist dictatorships 150 years later. It had lasting effects on philosophical movements such as French existentialism and postmodernism, and has redefined the place of the artist and the meaning of art within our societies. It transformed how the Western world thinks about morality, freedom, beauty, and belonging.

As with all tectonic shifts in human history, a lot of different factors can end up contributing, and it can be tricky to parse out the main causes of Romanticism suddenly erupting out of the structure and order of the Enlightenment. Did it arise from the ideas of influential thinkers like Kant or Rousseau who (perhaps unwittingly) inspired an ideal of human freedom that was to take…