僕たちはロマンチック

河合先生の展開しているハムレットの理解はロマン派に引きずられているのではないかという指摘は的を得ているのかもしれません。ハムレットの例だけでなく、現代の我々にもロマン派的な見方、考え方が今でもひきづっている点がいろいろとありそうです。そういう意味で記事のタイトルとつけてみました。

ただ、だからといってロマン派はダメだというような見方は前の時代を批判的にしか見れない紋切り型に陥ってしまう危険性もあります。それに、１９世紀のひとがどのように感じ取ったか、どのような点に関心を持ったかという受容の歴史も、シェイクスピア当時の感じ方と違うとしてもそれはそれで同じように興味深いと思うのです。

ハムレットの台詞にもまさにその点をついた有名なものがあります。動画では１分あたりからです。日本語は河合先生の本からの引用です。



For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

何事もやりすぎは、芝居の目的に反する。芝居の目的とは、昔も今も、いわば自然に向かって鏡を掲げること、つまり、美徳には美徳の様相を、愚には愚のイメージを、時代と風潮にはその形や姿を示すことだ。

ちょっと強引ですが、今読み始めた本は、ロマン派が科学的な発見の原動力になったのではないかという面白い視点からのものです。

The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon (2014/12) John Tresch 商品詳細を見る

In the years immediately following Napoleon’s defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment’s emphasis on mechanics and questioned the rising power of machines, seeking a return to the organic unity of an earlier age and triggering the artistic and philosophical movement of romanticism. Previous scholars have viewed romanticism and industrialization in opposition, but in this groundbreaking volume John Tresch reveals how thoroughly entwined science and the arts were in early nineteenth-century France and how they worked together to unite a fractured society.

Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today.

Essential reading for historians of science, intellectual and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and art historians, The Romantic Machine is poised to profoundly alter our understanding of the scientific and cultural landscape of the early nineteenth century.

下記の書評にあるように、romanticとmechanicalはemotionとreason,
artistsとtechnocratsのように相容れないつい概念のように思えますが、両者が影響を与えながら一つの時代を作り上げたという視点は面白そうですよね。

NOVEMBER 6TH, 2012
Science’s Last Romantics
by Courtney Fiske

Historian John Tresch’s first book, The Romantic Machine, concerns itself with complicating the binary invoked by its title: the opposition, long entrenched in Western culture, between the romantic and the mechanical, and all of the ancillary antagonisms that this divide conjures—emotion versus reason, spirit versus matter, artists versus technocrats. Illuminating a spectrum of heterodox approaches grouped under the umbrella term “mechanical romanticism,” Tresch makes an insistent and compelling case for why the current cultural impasse between science- and creative-types is far from inevitable. In this vision, sound science need not transpire without a lyrical core, while efficiency need not obviate moments of effusive, ecstatic connection.