Tot despre modelul grec în cultura română: parabole ... - Caiete Critice

Romanticism and Chaos Theory
kinesis [...] all these are different aspects of
the same polarity of configuration”. 15
Kepes’ perspective here is similar to
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s view according to
which there are two secrets of nature:
“motion or change, and identity or rest”;
and to Arthur Koestler’s view: “the universe
is made of only one stuff with a finite
set of basic geometrical patterns in an infinite
number of dynamic variations” 16 .
In the evolution of arts there are, on
the other hand, according to Wladyslaw
Tatarkiewicz, three movements: primitivism,
maturity and decadence. This is the
archetypal creation-destruction cycle which
chaos theory empirically observed. The
three movements correspond to the specific
periods, the romantic, the classic, and the
baroque 17 . This phenomenon reflects the
transformational dynamics of the cultural
phenomenon as a dynamic mode of the
spirit.
For romanticism, as Friedrich Schlegel
had pointed out, the fact is significant that
art, and especially poetry, does not move
through history as though through an indifferent
medium which does not influence
expression; on the contrary, even the
essence of art is involved in the process of
evolution – this idea is considered by
Katharine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn
as being Schlegel’s main contribution to aesthetics
18 .
In other words, the romantics saw in history
and art, science and poetry, man and
nature, an evolutionary monad of the spirit.
Romantics like Novalis, William Blake,
John Clare, John Keats, Mary Shelley, etc.,
valorize disorder, the negation of order.
Novalis sees in genius the one who intertwines
all extremes, Blake praises excess as
a way towards wisdom, Clare speaks about
“disordered graces” of nature or even about
the “disordely divine”, Keats speaks of the
birth of a poem like the leaves and branches
of a plant, Mary Shelley uses the monstrous
dimension, potential in any scientific
attempt, to throw light on a potential future
of mankind which might come to pass if
man does not evolve intellectually to a complexity
that should match the complexity of
the scientific knowledge accumulated exponentially
as we move on in time and history.
It is also interesting to notice that,
although John Clare for instance didn’t
know much grammar, this fact, ignoring
therefore the rules of grammar (which
points to a disorder on a linguistic level),
paradoxically led to the creation of many
beauties, as John Taylor 19 noticed.
Disorder or chaos is thus seen by the
romantics as a manifestation of freedom,
without which for romantics there can hardly
be any beauty whatsoever, even if such
risks are involved as pointed out by Mary
Shelley.
Novalis understands “disordered” as the
progressive, therefore the romantic.
Likewise, Blake proclaims, through Orc, the
energy at the basis of creation, revolution as
an absolute necessity on the path towards
salvation.
Through her negative example of the
uses of science, Mary Shelley most likely
envisages a revolution in the ways in which
science is to be tackled – namely with
increasing human responsibility as the levels
of global complexity increase, with a
view to preserving this pristine freedom of
life devoid of man’s artificial constructs,
which however, if accepted as part of
nature’s plan, should not diminish that natural
pristine freedom, but should expand it
– human civilization being a total experiment
for the creation of more freedom and
not for the creation of forms of slavery, intellectual,
natural, social, political, or othwerwise.
15 G. Kepes, The New Landscape, 1956, pp. 286-287, apud Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, 1989, p. 389.
16 Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, 1989, p. 389.
17 Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, Istoria esteticii, vol. 1-4, 1978, vol. 1 Estetica Anticã, pp. 82-83.
18 Katharine Everett Gilbert ºi Helmut Kuhn, Istoria Esteticii, 1972, p. 332.
19 John Taylor, Introduction to Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, January 1820, apud Mark Storey,
ed., John Clare, The Critical Heritage, 1995, p. 47.
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