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Full Idea
Romanticism seems to me the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred.
Gist of Idea
Romanticism is the greatest change in the consciousness of the West
Source
Isaiah Berlin (The Roots of Romanticism [1965], Ch.1)
Book Ref
Berlin,Isaiah: 'The Roots of Romanticism' [Pimlico 2000], p.1
A Reaction
Far be it from me to challenge Berlin on such things, but I think that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century (though acting more slowly and less dramatically than romanticism) may well be more significant in the long run. Ideas filter down.
| 7822 | A neo-Stoic movement began in the late sixteenth century [Lipsius, by Grayling] |
| 7504 | Modern science comes from Descartes' view that knowledge doesn't need moral purity [Descartes, by Foucault] |
| 19635 | Hegel produced modern optimism; he failed to grasp that consciousness never progresses [Hegel, by Cioran] |
| 7662 | Romanticism is the greatest change in the consciousness of the West [Berlin] |
| 8060 | In the 17th-18th centuries morality offered a cure for egoism, through altruism [MacIntyre] |
| 8021 | The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality [MacIntyre] |
| 8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |
| 9307 | Modern Western culture suddenly appeared in Jena in the 1790s [Svendsen] |
| 19648 | Since Kant we think we can only access 'correlations' between thinking and being [Meillassoux] |
| 19674 | The Copernican Revolution decentres the Earth, but also decentres thinking from reality [Meillassoux] |
| 21855 | Only in the 1780s did it become acceptable to read Spinoza [Lord] |
| 20678 | The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari] |
| 20686 | For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari] |