The philosophy of postromanticism

Claudia Moscovici

The obvious question in calling anything post- or neo-something is: how exactly it is “post” or “neo”? How, in other words, is it new and original and not simply anachronistic and repetitive? From a certain perspective this question is daunting—and calls for rigorous explanation—and from another it’s very easy to address. Let me begin with the easy part. No artistic movement, philosophy, theory or model of thought claiming to resuscitate some former model of thought can, no matter how hard it tries, bring it back to life as it was. The reawakening of a movement is not like the awakening of Rip Van Winkle after years of slumber, where the character remains essentially the same and only the world around him has changed. In other words, the manifestations of romanticism today cannot possibly be identical to those that existed during the eighteenth- and ninetheenth- centuries because the societies in which they are created today and the writers and artists who create them now are radically different from the individuals and societies that existed two or three hundred years ago.

Since sensuality and passion are central to both romanticism and postromanticism, I can begin by mentioning the obvious fact that their representations have to differ in these two movements. How could it be otherwise, when ideas about gender and the actual behavior and lives of men and women have changed almost beyond recognition? With them, so did our understanding of love, sexuality and sensuality, the way we express it, what we find beautiful, what we find erotic, and our attitudes towards all of this. Unless one were copying a nineteenth-century poem or forging a romantic painting, it would be impossible to write or paint exactly in the same way as the romantics did given how much our lives and social universe have changed and given the way our context influences our perceptions, talents, sensibilities and ways of seeing and representing the world.

Neoclassicism, the movement that found its inspiration in classical Greek and Roman art and culture, offers a good case and point. So in offering a brief sketch of postromanticism—by pursuing its philosophical implications, as I did with romanticism—I will begin to describe the similarities and differences between these two movements. Inevitably, so is postromanticism. But to say in a general fashion that no artistic movement or model of thought is exactly like its precursor still doesn’t explain the specific nature of their differences. Yet we would never confuse neoclassical sculptures and paintings—David’s allegorized representations of Napoleon, for instance—with Hellenistic art because they were obviously immersed in the values, ways of seeing and history of their times. To neoclassical critics such as Winkelmann, nothing compared to the purity, simplicity and beauty of classical art.

I. (Post)romantic Aesthetics: Verisimilitude, expressivity and sensuality

Don’t you see that, for my work on modeling, I have not only to possess a complete knowledge of the human form, but also a deep feeling for every aspect of it? I have, as it were, to incorporate the lines of the human body, and they must become part of myself, deeply seated in my instincts. I must feel them at the end of my fingers …My object is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see. Auguste Rodin (from Anthony Ludovici, Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin, 1926).

Romantic and postromantic aesthetics share three principles or approaches to art:
1) verisimilitude or a “naturalist,” true-to-life, representation of objects and especially of human figures, their main object of representation;
2) a primary emphasis upon the expression of emotion in art;
3) a focus upon the beauty of sensuality. These are, roughly, postromanticism’s coordinates in a kind of three-dimensional space of art history.

What makes an artistic movement unique is in some respects analogous to what makes a person unique. Suppose you want to define—or describe—the particularity of a person you know well and care about. Usually what you do is list a set of important or dominant traits: his sensuality, his intelligence, his obsessions, his like for certain sports, his creativity, his tastes and dislikes, etc. Now it’s obvious that you’ll find many individuals who share with him some of these traits. But if you have described him well and thoroughly enough, nobody will share all or even most of the traits you listed. This is the process I’ll follow in this chapter to present the coordinates of postromanticism. Each of the features I will list, by itself, will not be sufficient to distinguish postromanticism from other artistic movements. But if I do my job well, the combination of qualities I attribute to postromanticism will give it a specific place in (so to speak) art-historical space that no other artistic movement has occupied or can occupy.

Before we begin outlining the coordinates of postromanticism, let’s take one obvious and quite legitimate objection. In a moment I will say, for instance, that the expression of emotion defines postromantic aesthetics. One can immediately object that emotion is often prevalent in many movements in art and, in fact, that few of them are completely devoid of emotion. Impressionism can be said to be emotive; expressionism and abstract expressionism are even more so. So what makes postromanticism unique?

I have two answers to this question. First, I believe that few other movements place emotion at the foreground of every part of the artistic process: the inspiration of the artist; the emotion expressed by the artistic object itself; the impact upon the viewers. Emotion may exist in most art, but it’s rarely the most essential characteristic of all aspects of an artistic movement. Romanticism and postromanticism share a rare and all-pervasive emphasis upon emotion.

Suppose, however, that the person making this objection answers that the same can be said about German expressionism. She grants me that, for instance, rococo art or Impressionism don’t privilege emotion in the same way that romanticism does, but she can still point to several other artistic movements, such as expressionism and abstract expressionism, that clearly do. How do I answer this more fine-tuned follow-up objection? By falling back upon my original statement that describing a movement takes several, not just one, coordinates. Which is why I define postromantic aesthetics in terms of at least three features:
1. verisimilitude; 2. the primary emphasis upon the expression of emotion; 3. the embodiment of sensuality. It’s unlikely that other movements, aside from romanticism of course, will share the intersection of all three points in the same way.

The description of postromantic aesthetics, moreover, can be thought of as only one axis in a three-dimensional philosophical space. I’ll also give the details of two other axes: postromantic ontology (or sense of being in time) and ethics (that privilege passion). Furthermore, in these last two sections of the chapter I explain some of the differences between romanticism and postromanticism. This is hardest to do given that, obviously, postromanticism is heavily inspired by romanticism. This three-axis sketch of the coordinates of postromanticism—in terms of its aesthetic, ontological and ethical qualities--will hopefully give readers a better idea of what I mean by this movement and what constitutes its specificity. My biggest hope, however, remains that this description, which is largely philosophical, will inspire artists and writers to find in its outlines a blueprint impression for their own art.

a) Verisimilitude:

The aesthetic revolution that occurred during the twentieth-century is unprecedented in the history of Western art. Even the invention of one-point perspective and the soft shading that gives the illusion of depth (chairoscuro) during the Renaissance didn’t change aesthetic standards as radically as the creation of non-repesentational, or what has also been called “conceptual” art. Since Marcel Duchamp we have come to believe that a latrine, if placed in a museum, is a work of art. Since Andy Warhol we have come to accept that brillo boxes and other ordinary household objects, if placed in a museum, are objets d’art. And since Jackson Pollock and the New York School of abstract expressionism we have come to realize that what may appear to be randomly spilled paint, globs and other kinds of smudges are not only artistic, but also considered by many to be the deepest expressions of human emotion.

Once art took a conceptual turn, it also became philosophical. As Arthur Danto argues, for four to five hundred years, in representational art, what constituted art was obvious. The only question that was always difficult to determine was: is it good art? By way of contrast, Danto explains, conceptual art compels viewers to think about the very nature of art. The postmodern answer to this question is not only philosophical–namely, that art is a concept because it cannot be identified visually, just by looking at it--but also sociological. Art is, as Danto declares, whatever the viewing public and especially the community that has the power to consecrate it--by exhibiting it in galleries and museums, buying it, writing books and albums about it, etc-- says it is.

A priori, art can be anything. A brillo box, a toilet seat. But it isn't everything for the simple reason that not everything is consecrated as art. What may seem, by older standards, to be art—such as contemporary impressionist-style paintings--may not be considered art (but only cheap imitation) by the public or critics, while, conversely, what doesn’t seem art—a brillo box—can be perceived as the highest achievement of artistic genius.

As noted, what makes twentieth- and twenty-first century art conceptual is the fact that what makes it be “art” can no longer be seen with the eye. We can’t see the aesthetic difference between the brillo boxes we discard and Warhol’s brillo boxes. Yet one is called trash and the other pop art. Clearly, it’s not the physical qualities of the object, but the assumptions of a community that determine what (good) art is. I cannot dispute this argument—made in different ways by Pierre Bourdieu and Arthur Danto--because, given everything I observe is being called art, I see it as the most compelling explanation of the term “art” as it’s being used today. Having conceded the artistic nature and value of nonrepresentational art, however, postromantic aesthetics argues that just because nonrepresentational art is valued doesn’t mean that contemporary representational art should be dismissed.

To explain the conceptual revolution that occurred in art at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth century, some art historians claim that photography practically eliminated the need for representational art, or the kind of art that tries to imitate “nature” by depicting faithfully what the eye can see. We can add in parentheses, as As E. H. Gombrich observes in The Story of Art, that the notion of the representation of what the eye can see has changed throughout the history of art. Needless to say, it too is shaped by social assumptions. Nonetheless, the difference between a kind of art that aims at faithful visual imitation of the three-dimensional qualities of physical objects and one that doesn’t remains relatively easy to discern.

For instance, even without reading the descriptive title of the painting, it’s clear to tell by just looking at Renoir’s Girl Bathing (1892) that it features a nude girl bathing. Without the explanatory (or deceptive) title, however, it would be impossible to know what Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (1911) is supposed to represent. In fact, the title highlights, by way of contrast, the non- or even anti-representational nature of this painting. The last thing that might occur to those who look at it–if it were not for the title--is that it shows a nude. And, indeed, from a visual perspective Renoir’s painting does while Duchamp’s painting doesn’t represent a nude.

The invention of photography had a lot to do with the move away from visual representation. To say that photography eliminated the need for representational art, however, is an overstatement. Undoubtedly, the invention of the camera encouraged artists to experiment with other means of representation in the same way that the invention of machines displaced hand-made crafts. The camera probably did for painting what the industrial revolution did for artisanship. But that doesn’t mean that artisanship--or hand-made beautiful objects--are no longer valuable. For what the human imagination, sensibility, eye and hand can create will always be somewhat different from what can be made with the aid of machines. The texture, sense of color and vision that are captured by painters are not identical to those that photography can produce, even though photography can bring us closer to visual reality and even though photography can be artistic.

Verisimilitude, or the true-to-life physical representation of objects, already existed in classical Greek, Hellenistic and Roman art, all of which rendered the beauty, movement and sinouosity of the human body especially palpable in their breath-taking sculptures. In classical Greek and Hellenistic art in particular, the human body conveyed (what was perceived as) the essence of beauty: the material embodiment of divine powers and aesthetic qualities in the human form. While Greek paintings and sculptures showed knowledge of human anatomy, movement and foreshortening, it’s Renaissance artists who discovered the two other key components of verisimilitude: one point-perspective and shading, which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to two-dimensional painted forms. Gombrich and other art historians credit the architect Filipo Brunelleschi with the invention of one-point perspective as it was enthusiastically adopted by Italian Renaissance painters. Perspective entailed the application of geometrical principles to convey in painting the relative size of objects in terms of their distance from one another and from the viewer. (The Story of Art, 228-9).

The most famous Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci, added another dimension to making the objects represented in art appear almost real. His famous painting of Mona Lisa is said to deceive the viewers into believing that the woman’s eyes move, returning and even following their gaze with her eyes. Likewise, many have speculated about the meaning of Mona Lisa’s ambiguous smile, whose lips have a mobility that renders her at once impenetrable and expressive. Leonardo was able to achieve these complex visual and psychological effects through the technique called sfumato, or the smoky blurring the contours of the object depicted—in this case, especially the corners of Mona Lisa’s eyes and mouth—to leave their outline and expression more open to interpretation.

The study and representation of human anatomy and of nature, foreshortening, capturing human movement and expression, one-point perspective and the creation of soft shadows which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to painted forms -- all these techniques which took centuries to develop have the magical effect of making objects represented by art come to life before our eyes. This kind of naturalistic art is not necessarily “realistic” in the sense of capturing human life as it is. As we know, for example, some of the paintings of the surrealists were realistic in their anatomically accurate and three-dimensional representation of the human body, but fantastic in their rendition of reality.

In its preference for visual resemblance (as opposed to realism or plausibility), postromanticism argues that the artistic techniques that give a sense of three-dimensionality and life-like quality to art are difficult skills that require immesurable patience and talent and are worth preserving and appreciating in art today. There is no reason to discard the masterful qualities that made art artistic for five hundred years. Nor do such techniques have only a historical value. In an artistic world that prides itself upon pluralism, openness and variety, artists who desire to continue the legacy of realistic representation should be able to coexist with those that repudiate it. Postromanticism presents not a rival, but an alternative to modern and postmodern conceptual art. For in a world of such diverse tastes and sensibilities, there’s certainly room for both.

b) Expressivity: Art and Emotion

We tend to associate art and emotion. The romantic notion of art as the product of an emotive, sensitive and inspired artist who creates masterpieces to move and elevate the public has not altogether disappeared from the popular imagination. Yet, unfortunately, in recent history—particularly since the movement of art for art’s sake in the nineteenth century and the formalist and conceptual currents of the twentieth century—emotion has almost disappeared from art itself. Even in the movement of conceptual art most closely associated with emotion and spirituality—abstract expressionism—the emotion is a part of the process of artistic creation and palpable in the moving effect of art upon (some) viewers rather than readily recognizable in the artistic object itself. There is, of course, no eternally valid rule that dictates that emotion should be an inherent part of a work of art—or of any part of the artistic process, for that matter. And, in fact, art has not always existed as separate from artifact and artistic objects have not always been valued for their expressive powers.

For the ancient Egyptians, to offer one notable example, art served a largely symbolic and religious function. Tombs, busts and paintings were used as a means of preserving and glorifying the souls of kings, queens and other privileged members of society. E.H. Gombrich informs us that, appropriately enough, one Egyptian word for sculptor was “He-who-keeps-alive.” Egyptian artists depicted the human figure not as they saw it, nor to express or provoke emotion, but to capture the essence of an important person’s spirit by representing his or her body from its most characteristic angles. The face was shown in profile; the eye from the front; the shoulders and chest from the front; the legs from the side, with the feet seen from the inside and toes pointed upward. (The Story of Art, 60-1). For millenia Egyptian figures had a frozen and immobile, non-expressive look that strove to freeze the souls of powerful men and women in time and to safeguard their pleasures and happiness in the afterlife.

Greek art was perhaps the first—and certainly the most influential art in the Western tradition-- to capture the essence not only of the human spirit, but also of the human form, with all its movement and powers of expression. In Greek art, we feel, even the body seems infused with a soul. Myron’s famous sculpture of the discus thrower, Discobolos (c. 450 B.C), which is of the same era as the better known works of the sculptor Pheidias, displays the beauty, poise, force and movement of a young man’s efforts to launch the discus he holds in his hand. The sculpture is not entirely naturalistic—in the sense that athletes who would try to assume the same position would not be able to throw the discus very far. Nonetheless, it captures the elegance, athleticism and eloquence of the male body in the first blush of its youth. Part of this sculpture’s naturalism lies in the way it conveys movement and emotion through the positioning and poise of the body. More generally, classical Greek and Hellenistic sculptures rarely look stiff or contrived because of the way in which the human form is balanced: often in a position of counterpoise, with the weight shifted upon one leg, which allows sculptors to reveal the subtle curvatures of the body.

While classical Greek sculpture tends to focus upon the beauty of the human form, Hellenistic art—the art of the empires founded by Alexander the Great’s followers—places increasing emphasis upon the expression of emotion. The kinds of feelings represented in Hellenistic sculpture, however, are not those of everyday people in ordinary circumstances. Rather, Hellenistic art usually exhibits the emotions of extraordinary individuals engaged in tragic conflicts. To offer one well-known example, the sculpture Laocoon and his sons (175-50 B.C.)—executed by Hagesandros, Anthenodoros and Polydoros of Rhodes--immortalizes the story of a priest who is being punished by the gods for forewarning the Trojans not to accept a giant horse which, as it turns out, carried inside it enemy soldiers.

This sculpture was rediscovered in Rome in 1506 and many art historians believe that what was found was not the original sculpture, but a Roman copy. Whether it is the original work or not, The Laocöon Group made a strong impression upon Italian Renaissance sculptors, especially Michelangelo. Laocoon is frozen in an image of terrible anguish since his punishment consists of having to witness two gigantic snakes emerge from the sea and suffocate with their coils his beloved sons. Hellenistic art, at least in this representative sculpture that would become a favorite during the Renaissance and the neoclassical periods, privileges the expression of a kind of emotion that is at once mythical and dramatic: mythical in its literary and religious references; dramatic in its depictions of human tragedy.

The painting and sculpture of the Renaissance masters continues to focus upon the expression of emotion on a grand scale and to grapple with the unknowable connection—as well as the unbridgeable hiatus--between the human and the divine. Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave (1513), for example, reveals the moment when the slave lets go of earthly life as his soul escapes towards heavenly existence. Despite the twists and turns of his beautiful, muscular form, the slave’s body breathes the resignation, tranquiliy and spirituality of the transition from life to death. Emotive expression, Michelangelo shows so well, is not primarily located in the face. The whole body, every movement and gesture, expresses coherently and in unison the feelings and attitudes reflected in the face.

This total, eloquent expressivity of Renaissance sculpture reaches its apex, many believe, in Lorenzo Bernini’s The ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645-52). The sculpture represents the sixteenth century mystic in a state of rapture. We witness the moment when the angel of God pierces the young nun with a golden arrow, provoking the paradoxical feelings of pleasure mixed with pain and of sensual abandon mixed with divine illumination. As she swoons, half-closing her eyes and slightly opening her lips with ecstasy, Saint Teresa becomes the very embodiment of religious fervor, spiritual attunement and passion. Even the drapery that enfolds her body swirls and twists around her with the same mixture of passive yet passionate frenzy visible on her face.

But what about the expression of more modest, individuated feelings? In the modern period, few artists were as thoughtful and successful in showing the relation between human form and feeling as Auguste Rodin. Despite the religious allusions of The Gates of Hell, Rodin brings emotion down to earth by materializing a passion that functions not as a connection between the human and the divine, but an intimate and profound connection between lovers. Perhaps nobody has described Rodin’s most sensual and moving sculpture, “The Kiss,” as eloquently as his friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy:

The man’s head is bent, that of the woman is lifted, and their mouths meet in a kiss that seals the intimate union of their two beings. Through the extraordinary magic of art, this kiss, which is scarcely indicated by the meeting of their lips, is clearly visible, not only in their meditative expressions, but still more in the shiver that runs equally through both bodies, from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet, in every fiber of the man’s back, as it bends, straightens, grows still, where everything adores—bones, muscles, nerves, flesh—in his leg, which seems to twist slowly, as if moving to brush against his lover’s leg; and in the woman’s feet, which hardly touch the ground, uplifted with her whole being as she is swept away with ardor and grace.

Rodin revealed human love and life as a process of mutual creation. Passion is not only a union with those we desire and adore, but also an elevation through shared feelings and sensuality which is always in process, never complete. His representations of the fragility of our mutual creation were as incohate, vulnerable yet compelling as the material shapes that seemed to emerge only part-finished from the bronze or block of stone. In the expression of the beauty, erotic fervor and intensity of human emotion—the main features of postromanticism—Rodin has yet to be matched. Which is why I consider him as the main precursor of postromanticism.

We have seen that art can serve many different purposes in different contexts such that it’s impossible to define it in relation to any set of common qualities, including emotion. Yet, as I have also suggested, when emotion is materialized in art, it renders artistic objects all the more poignant, moving and palpable for the viewers. The expression of emotion not only touches us, but also enables us to connect to artistic beauty in a way that’s unique and irreplaceable. This is why postromantic art continues the romantic legacy of expressing the fragility, contingency and intensity of human emotion at each stage of the creative process: the emotive experience and inspiration of the artist; the expressivity of artistic representations, and the emotional impact upon viewers. Emotion and art don’t have to be connected. But what beautiful and meaningful art is produced when they are!

c) The beauty of sensuality

Quite justifiably, we believe that there’s a fine line between sensuality and sexuality. We also believe that there’s a difference between pornography and art. In fact, these two distinctions often blend into one another. We regard art as sensual and pornography as more overtly sexual. Warding off the charge of pornography, photography, sculpture and painting often veil the human body, especially the more eroticized female nude, by representing it in aesthetic poses and allegorical situations that evoke thoughts, emotions and dreams, not only carnal desires.

If the boundary between pornography and art is so heatedly debated, however, it’s partly because it’s drawn by our own subjective reactions. Who is to say that an aesthetic pose elevates the mind and not just the senses? Romantic and postromantic art confront this problem by illustrating palpably the distinction beween sensuality and sexuality. Like romantic art, postromantic art and poetry celebrate the beauty of the human body and of sensual images and relations. I invoke the broad concept of beauty (in the abstract) only to limit it to a category that’s easier to define and more relevant to postromantic art: the beauty of sensuality. Let me explain why.

Philosophers, from Plato and Plotinus to Shaftesbury and Diderot, despite their overwhelming differences, have described beauty as an underlying harmony that has a pleasing sensory effect. In so doing, aesthetic philosophers confront several problems already anticipated by Socrates in The Symposium and The Phaedrus—two of Plato’s dialogues that deal most directly with the concept of beauty. How can we account for changing standards of beauty? Is there an underlying notion of beauty that can apply equally well to the magic of a sunset, a pretty woman and a beautiful painting? And if there is, then how can such a general definition serve to explain specific categories of the beautiful, such as the beauty of human beings, of emotions, of architecture or of classical art? Moreover, is it really helpful to define beauty in terms of other difficult concepts, such as harmony, order or agreability? Doesn’t this process lead to an infinite regress of definitions, each unknown defined in terms of yet another unknown, as Socrates had cautioned? Not having found satisfactory answers to these questions, I’m daunted by the difficulties inherent in defining beauty in the abstract. The beauty of sensual images, imagery and objects seems to me a more broachable subject as well as one that’s more useful to understanding romantic and postromantic art. So let us ask: what is sensuality? And why does it have the power to move us?

As is customary, I’ll begin with a provisional definition. Sensuality is that which titillates the senses without making any specific promises or, much less, delivering. Sensuality leaves our desires, wishes, expectations, emotions, thoughts and impulses in a state of confusion and ambiguity. It provokes what Descartes has called a sense of admiration or wonder that is inseparable from pleasure yet far removed from satisfaction.

Sensuality has little to do with degrees of unveiling, with explicitness. Like sexuality—its foil and companion—it’s more of a psychological than a physical state. Just imagine the following images placed side by side: one featuring a woman who is fully dressed, with bright red lips puckered in a kiss and a come-hither gaze. Her body is clothed, but her (supposed, staged) intent is crystal-clear. The effect is sexual. Next to it imagine a picture of a woman who is completely nude. Her looks are understated; her demeanor and glance ambiguous. The viewer is not sure what she desires, thinks or feels. Physically she is revealed. Psychologically, however, she remains a mystery and an enticement. The effect is sensual.

This hypothetical example leads me to supplement my initial description of sensuality. I will now say that sensuality hints at human subjectivity—at implicit desires, needs, dreams and thoughts—in both the viewer and the viewed. Sexual images and imagery--even when the women or men represented are clothed—tend to strip the image of its psychological content, reducing it to a few body parts in the viewed and a few analogous needs in the viewers. By way of contrast, sensuality, even when the women or men represented are nude, veils the body in a psychological richness and depth that touches upon the artistic.

To probe a little further the nature of sensuality, let’s consider another illustration. I’ll borrow my second example from Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her (Hable con Ella), one of my favorite movies. The story focuses upon the obsessive love and desire of Benigno, a male nurse, for a young and beautiful ballerina named Alicia. Upon meeting her, Benigno is entirely captivated by the young woman. Yet he doesn’t get the opportunity to know Alicia and neither do we, the viewers. Because almost as soon as they meet, she’s hit by a car when crossing the street and lapses into a coma. All we see of Alicia after the accident is her body; her purely physical beauty. Conversely, as Benigno takes care of his beloved, talks to her and treats her as a human being capable of understanding and responding to him, we become intimately familiar with his personality. We come to understand his loneliness, his obsessive love, his uncontrollable urges, his devotion.

In coming to multidimensional life for Benigno, however, Alicia also comes to life before our eyes. Almodovar has the immense talent of bringing out psychological richness and intensity in sensual depictions of physical beauty. Through Benigno’s loving gaze, care and compassion, we see more in Alicia than a beautiful body even though that’s exactly what she’s become as a result of the car accident. Sensual art and photography perform the same magical operation. They give birth to a soul, to a living personality, in representing sometimes nothing more than the body, its movements and expressions. Which is why our own responses to these images tend to be more complex than physical desire. Sensual photography, literature and art call for the viewer’s or reader’s participation in imagining another person, another life. They’re not just stimulating; they’re creative.

Philosophers have long been fascinated by the way in which sensuality rivets the attention and stimulates the mind. Although René Descartes is best known for being the father of rationalism, he’s also one of the most sensitive readers of sensuality and emotion. His reflections on the subject were prompted by his discussions with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Christina of Sweden, both of whom were cultivated, sensitive and emotional women who found that Cartesian rationalism could not explain the better part of human behavior. Why do we fall in love? Why do we desire? Why do we feel? Why do we respond to beauty? To address these important questions, Descartes wrote The Passions of the Soul (1649).

That which touches our senses, emotions and thoughts, the philosopher explains, ignites the response of admiration or marvel. Admiration is not a coup de foudre, or the feeling of falling in love on the spot. It is, in Descartes’ own words, “a sudden surprise of the soul which manifests itself in considering with special attention objects which seem rare and extraordinary” (The Passions of the Soul, 116). To catch our attention, these objects or subjects have to either be or appear to be rare and special. Alicia may have been an ordinary girl, but in Aldamovar’s movie, despite being deprived of the capacity to think, feel and speak, she appeared tragically unique in her predicament, sympathetic, moving.

Sensual images or scenarios—especially when artistic--have the power to transform what may be ordinary into something–or someone—quite extraordinary. In turn, as Descartes elaborates, our appreciation of sensual beauty has calmer, more thoughtful manifestations than stimulating our visceral drives and emotions: “And this passion has something special about it since we don’t notice that it’s accompanied by any transformation of the heart or the blood as we do with the other passions” (116). Which is not to say that this more psychological form of passion is less forceful. On the contrary, as Descartes explains: “Which doesn’t prevent it from having a lot of force, caused by surprise or marvel, which is to say, the sudden and unforseen reception of an impression which changes the movements of the soul” (117).

For Descartes, passion is the opposite of action. An action is something one does through an act of will. By way of contrast, a passion is what happens to someone involuntarily. Not all passions, however, overwhelm the senses and unleash complex sensations, thoughts and feelings. In fact, the kind of passions that provoke such unsettling, exciting movements—that attract our admiration--are quite rare. So how do sensual representations motivate, to use Descartes’ expression, the movements of the soul? By triggering complex forms of identification in us, the readers or viewers. By taking a two-dimensional image on a screen or series of words on a page and creating the contours of other human beings with rare powers to captivate the attention and inspire the imagination. Sensual photography, creative writing, cinema and art reflect back into our eyes not so much another human being as our own complexity. The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil has said that when a very pretty woman looks in the mirror, she doesn’t know there’s more to her than her external beauty. Whereas when an unattractive woman looks in the mirror, she knows there’s more to her than meets the eye. In sensual romantic and postromantic art and literature, it’s apparent that even beautiful and sensual images are much more than meets the eye.

II. Postromantic ontology: Ephemeral being in fugitive time

As the hold of theology weakened during the eigteenth- and nineteenth- centuries, modern philosophers have rarely resisted the temptation of thinking about ontology, or the branch of philosophy that examines how beings exist in time. Today, as philosophy has been for the most part detached from science, this topic appears to have more to do with physics than with philosophy. Since the humanities and sciences have become specialized, increasingly complex and parted ways during the Enlightenment, few philosophers—with the possible exception of logicians, epistemologists and philosophers of science—attempt to explain the nature, transformations and origins of the universe.

Nonetheless, philosophers remain enthralled by the connection between time, the vast universe of being and (human) existence. Ontologists ask: what is being? What is (human) existence? This century many of them have asked, more specifically, what are we to make of the fact that we’re mortal; that we don't know why we exist; that our lives are a split second in time? Such questions have intrigued most of the important twentieth-century philosophers, including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Buber and Levinas. Their answers have determined the course of existentialism, phenomenology and even the postmodern philosophy that followed them.

How does postromanticism view the relation between (human) existence and time? Following modernity and postmodernity, it’s difficult to retain an ontological faith in eternity even to the limited degree that Baudelaire did. So the conception of existing in time I will sketch below will be this-worldly yet not strictly materialist. We’re not only a collection of atoms that will eventually disperse—as the famous materialist philosophe Diderot had said--because there’s something irreducibly mystical and spiritual about being thinking and feeling human beings. Postromanticism places spirituality in the midst of the sole human life we’re given, abandoning the longing for the beyond but not the feelings of transcendence associated with it.

In its focus upon intersubjectivity—or the relation between self and other, especially between lover and beloved—postromanticism doesn’t address directly the subject of social virtue, as Rousseau did. Its inspiration can be more readily found in Martin Buber’s and Levinas’s models of intersubjectivity. With major differences, however. Buber and especially Levinas depict a self that aspires towards the other-worldly. In the case of Levinas, as is true of platonic and idealist thought in general, the lover uses human love as a way of learning to show a higher love for divinity. The beloved—which, in Levinas’s writing, is always a woman or feminine--is obviously not divine. In fact, she’s much more carnal and imperfect than her implicitly male or masculine lover. Yet she exists to train the lover to adore her with a kind of absolute, transcendent spirituality that she, a mere mortal, does not deserve. Like in Plato’s Symposium, in Levinas’s writings human love is only instrumental; a ladder connecting the human to the divine. Buber and Levinas give us an ontology that evokes and continues the idealist tradition. Postromanticism presents an ontology where existence and being—both the love and the lovers—are this-worldly and privileged over and above everything else. To these general statements about romantic and postromantic models of being in time, I would like to add a few more specific ideas:

Raison d’être. Knowing that, in the bigger scheme of things, we live only a split second’s worth of time motivates us to concentrate as much meaning, pleasure and devotion as we can in our earthly existence.

Youth. Postromantic literature, poetry and art, like romantic art, tends to privilege the beauty of youth and the freshness of youthful emotions. Youth poses an irresistable temptation. Often, it’s the most beautiful moment of our lives, when all impressions are fresh; when feelings seem intense and genuine. As we age, it’s easy to feel nostalgic for this irretrievable period of time. Youth is also associated with beauty, especially feminine beauty. Images of youthful femininity pervade so much our views of sensuality, attractiveness and desire that, even if we sometimes find such views regrettable and even oppressive, they’re almost inescapable. Yet in some respects, the beauty of youth deserves the attention and admiration it gets. Aesthetically and emotionally, it is undeniably appealing.

Nostalgia. Youth may be attractive, but we inevitably age. Postromantic art and poetry evokes memories to help infuse youth in those who are no longer young. It stirs the imagination to nourish nostalgia not as a malady, but as a source of renewed energy and strength. There are at least two kinds of nostalgia. The first is what I would call circumstantial nostalgia. This form of nostalgia characterizes those who can no longer fully live life in the present and are obliged to live it mostly in the past: the very old; the very ill; those who are physically confined or incapacitated. Mersault, Albert Camus’s main character in The Stranger, captures the essence of circumstantial nostalgia. When he’s charged with murder and put in jail, all Mersault has left of life is his memories and his past. This becomes the chief sustanence for his existence and reflections as a prisoner. The man who captured the essence of living only in the present—an existentialist—becomes a man capable of only living in the past—a nostalgic.

The second type of nostalgics are those I call constitutional nostalgics. The best example of this nostalgia is represented by the character of Marcel in Proust’s Rememberance of things past. Here the narrator, despite being young and free, finds inspiration for art in recalling and recreating his past. Constitutional nostalgics are, like Marcel, nostalgic by nature, not by circumstance. They tend to live life by focusing upon their memories, privileging the past over the present. For them, the past is always more interesting and more poignant, especially when it’s enhanced by the imagination and when its negative aspects are elided from memory. Postromanticism, like romanticism, indulges in both kinds of nostalgia, but always with a keen awareness of the brevity of human life and of the importance of the present.

The Present. It’s logically impossible to be a true nostalgic without also living and treasuring the present, at least at some point in one’s existence. Those who never appreciate the human bonds, emotions, thoughts and events they live in the present lack the resource of memories and the experiences to remember and enjoy later. True nostalgics live in the present as much as in the past.

The Future. The future is the receding horizon of postromanticism. We all know that what may seem, from the point of view of each day, a life as vast as the ocean, is actually small, fragile and finite. We will all, one by one, reach the limits of our finitude. This knowledge is part of what fostered for the existentialists an attitude of defiance and despair in the face of life’s seeming futility and absurdity. For the romantics and postromantics, however, the awareness of human mortality encourages an attitude of making the most out of human life; of linking together the moments that seemed precious in our past to generate the present energy to create, to the best of our abilities, a meaningful future. A life worth living.

III. Postromantic Ethics: Passion

Passion was the core of the romantic movement and it is also, along with sensuality and the appreciation of beauty, the focal point of postromanticism. Sensuality and passion hardly seem separable since we tend to experience them together. It’s almost impossible to imagine passion without the excitement, agitation and upheaval of the senses and emotions that we associate with sensuality. At the same time, however, sensuality and passion are opposites. Sensuality is the acute sensibility to beauty and to the myriad of potential delights it promises. It’s a way of seeing beauty in the world, in both human beings and objects, which is why I have described it in relation to perception and art. Such beauty is so vast and all-pervasive—a kalon, or sea of beauty as Plato’s prophetess, Diotima had said—that it’s not necessarily anchored by any preference; bound by any attachment. Every week we may gaze at dozens of attractive persons, inspiring scenes and beautiful paintings or sculptures. Sensuality moves our eyes from object to object, stirring our desires, dreams and solipsistic emotions, but not necessarily capturing our devotion.

Much as sensuality, in its link to perception, evokes the aesthetic and epistemological dimensions of postromanticism, passion constitutes its ethics. This doesn’t mean that postromanticism mandates that human beings should not appreciate a multitude of objects or beings. But it does unabashedly declare: love is special. So many of us fall passionately in love and such feelings are so miraculous that they seem to defy explanation. Yet, at the same time, they are so important that they have inspired thousands of writers, poets, philosophers and artists throughout history to depict passionate love. Not everyone does or should fall deeply in love. But those who do, we tend to believe, are very lucky. If passionate love is a privileged form of human experience that has intrigued us since the beginning of time, then it’s certainly worth examining in our times.

Like romanticism, postromanticism focuses above all on the expression of passionate love. Yet, in our day and age--an age so imbued with feminine and feminist sensibilities--one can no longer speak of the asymmetrical love between a male poet or artist and his ethereal muse, which has long been the dominant cliché of romanticism. Postromantic love is reciprocal and symmetrical. Nor does postromanticism preserve the instrumental view of passion as a means of reaching something higher than human experience; of moving from the human to the divine, as we see in idealist traditions of love from Plato, to the Renaissance neoplatonists, to the romantics. In postromantic poetry, literature and art, passion begins with earthly life and never transcends it.

Definition:

So what is postromantic passion? Above all, passion is a focalization of the senses, thoughts and emotions upon one primary subject. I call it an ethics because it implies considering at every step one’s attitude and actions towards the beloved and, conversely, his or her actions and feelings towards oneself.

The trancendent in the contingent:

The beloved is not randomly chosen. Even if meeting him or her occurs by accident—as do most human encounters—the fit between the lovers feels so right that it appears to be determined by a higher force. The intervention of that higher force cannot be proven. Nonetheless, it has a certain metonymic logic similar to the one described by the Stoics, who perceived the imprint of divine will in the beauty and harmony of the universe. Postromanticism thus spiritualizes, but only gently and lightly, passionate love. It doesn’t necessarily express a belief in divinity, but an elevation of emotion and humanity. Passionate love is that which uplifts one’s creative and life energies, as if by force of destiny, with the elegance, sense of wonder and inevitability of something that appears to transcend human experience but doesn’t.

The artist and the muse:

With so many successful women artists in the world and, more generally, with so many women encouraged to pursue their talents, it’s impossible nowadays to retain the romantic idea of the artist as male and the muse as female.

When the passion is shared, both members of the couple can inspire and engage in creativity.

Idealization and lucidity:

While romanticism tends towards the idealization of the beloved, postromanticism claims that the beauty of love and of the beloved often lies in his or her imperfection. For the romantic poets the muse was other-worldly. Only through her nonexistence could she embody aesthetic ideals. She was not a woman, but a dream. In postromanticism, however, the source of inspiration is not a “crystallized” or idealized object of the imagination—as the novelist Stendhal had described love--but a contingent person who is known in the smallest details of his or her reality. Which is not to say that postromanticism follows the legacy of realism or naturalism. In postromanticism, unlike in naturalism, the mundane aspects of the lovers and of love never become scientifically predictable, mythical or grotesque, as they do, for instance, in Zola’s naturalist fiction. Postromanticism declares: real love is endearing and unique; a product of a rare fit between two individuals who, through their mutual devotion, create lasting values in an ephemeral life.

Focalization:

We tend assume that the romantic life is synonymous with the adventurous life; the life of a tourist: traveling everywhere; having a multiplicity of relationships; experiencing each type of woman or man as one samples exotic dishes from distant parts of the world. Yet when one glides only on the surface of life, it’s difficult to be immersed in passion. For passion requires time to become deeper, richer and more intimate; it requires focalization so that it will not disperse and become a flash of intensity that’s one episode among a hundred others. In losing focus, passion also loses intensity and significance.

Energy:

Passion is a mutual consumption that gives rather than depleting energy. Like a windmill, like any rhythmic movement, it generates while absorbing energy, but not all by itself, but from the external impetus of two individuals' continual efforts to live for and with each other.

Symmetry:

Passion is constantly reinforced by symmetrical dialogue. The lovers negotiate everything and feel equal in the relationship. Which doesn’t mean that they’re identical. In fact, often passion becomes more exciting when the lovers share differences in temperament, point of view, opinion. Yet there’s no conventional division of spheres in postromanticism. One person is not necessarily more submissive, the other more authoritative; one person is not necessarily more emotive, the other more rational. The differences are unique to each couple, not necessarily polarized. They are diffused, varied and less predictable than in the romantic complementarity between masculine and feminine.

Reciprocity:

Reciprocity, which was largely ignored by the romantic movement, is the pillar of postromanticism. Passion that is mostly solipsistic—one human being’s dream or projection upon an idealized person—is not real. It may be a desire or even a strong infatuation. But only once feelings, thoughts and desires are shared, do we enter the realm of passionate love.

Proximity and distance:

The romantic male artists and their muses, even when they coupled in real life, appeared infinitely distant in art because the descriptions of women were so often veiled and disguised. The romantics privileged the metaphors of woman as muse, angel, Salomé or femme fatale; of woman as all the more desirable because mysterious, multiple, changing and unattainable. In this tantalizing play and disguise of feminine identity, the difference between romanticism, modernism and postmodernism is almost effaced. Postromanticsm doesn’t need feminine mystery and masquarade to cultivate desire and love. Which doesn’t mean that it declares love as transparent. It trusts that passionate love generates its own dynamics: a constant movement between creating and lowering barriers which, unlike the romantic vision of the femme fatale who fans desire through strategic advancements and withdrawals, is reciprocal and not planned. Passion moves with the regularity and sponteneity of the tide. The lovers must remain close, within each other's gravitational field, for these movements to last.

Breathing:

Passion is nourished by a proximity and intensity of communication so strong that it seems as if the lovers are breathing each other's air. Without suffocating. The withdrawals are themselves part of the process of breathing. They are periods of inhaling air, of absorbing life experience and knowledge, in order to exhale it back to the other; to have a renewed life energy to offer one’s beloved.

Thinking:

Postromantic passion is characterized by a rhythm and emotion which are genuine and spontaneous yet thoughtful at the same time. In this respect, it resembles Wordsworth’s romanticism, that had described passion as a processed, contemplated rather than immediate and visceral emotion. Without the mediation of thought, passion risks being just a passing fancy; a gust of wind. And winds quickly change direction. Passion is a symbiotic relation between two individuals who enable each other to interconnect the important aspects of human life, including sensation, emotion and thought. Passion engages all of our faculties.

Devotion:

Passion is a long-lasting devotion. It’s not a commitment or responsibility in the way more institutionalised relations are, where the primary connection is external to the relationship. In other words, in passion the connection is not made by conventional morality and law. But the result is more spectacular. Because devotion, a term evocative of religious experience, has transcendental dimensions. Passion is a secular form of adoration.

Fidelity:

We tend to believe that virtue is a more reliable foundation for fidelity than passion, but postromanticism says that’s not the case. Virtue is often tested in the face of temptation and experienced as a tension between conscience and desire. All too often, the desire is more immediate and stronger. Passion reduces that tension and alleviates its pangs. In passion, the obsessive desire and focus upon a primary object is so strong that the energy left for others is weaker and more superficial, thus not posing a real threat to the relationship.

Jealousy and Possessiveness:

If philosophers from Plato to Kant cautioned against passion, it’s largely because they associated it with negative emotions such as jealousy, posessiveness and hate, which occur when love turns full circle and collapses upon itself. The romantics, from Goethe to Constant, often confirmed this negative impression in describing how the force of passion leads to madness, murder and suicide. It’s undoubtedly true that passion is often accompanied by feelings of jealousy and possessiveness. Yet as we’ve seen in the discussion of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloïse, that’s not necessarily a bad sign. In moderation, jealousy and possessiveness are a declaration of love. Their manifestation indicates: I know you desire others and that others are desirable to me, but I need and am grateful for the uniqueness of our attraction and feelings. Jealousy in moderation rekindles the flame of passion. It says: out of all the desirable persons we meet, I still chose you and you me. Jealousy in excess snuffs out the flame of passion. It says: I don’t trust you; you’re not freely mine. Rather than loving you, I possess you.

Ritual:

Passion is a ritual rather than a habit. A repetition of activities that appear always new, always exciting, because they’re primarily motivated by emotions and desires. In lasting love, one needs the repetition of activities as one needs to breathe air or eat regularly, rather than going through the motions today out of inertia, because one did it yesterday. In its rhythm and intensity, the repetition of acts in passionate love—eating, going to a movie, dining out--resembles the repetition of religious rituals.

Erotism:

Postromantic passion is erotic in a way that’s intensely sensual and at the same time radically different from diffused sensuality. In passion, the physical longing for another is stimulated by knowledge and love of that person, rather than the love being motivated primarily by desire. That’s what makes passion different from the muliplicity of human attraction. While sensuality is a feast for the senses, passion is above all food for the soul. Postromanticism places passion at its center, declaring: life and art would be emptier and more impoverished without such exquisite nourishment.