Enlightened Romanticism

Gadamer points out that the Enlightenment operated on “an unshakable premise: the scheme of the conquest of mythos by logos.” For the Enlightenment, this represented a progress.

Romanticism assumed the same development, but considered it a tragic lost. Romantics found “that olden times – the world of myth, unreflective life, not yet analyzed away by consciousness, in a ‘society closed to nature.’ the world of Christian chivalry – all these acquire a romantic magic, even a priority over truth.”

Romanticism produced the historiography of the 19th century, but given romanticism’s continuity with the Enlightenment, 19th century historiography can just as easily be considered “the fulfillment of the Enlightenment, as the last step in the liberation of the mind from the trammels of dogma, the step to an objective knowledge of the historical world.”

Gadamer proposes dispensing with the mythos-to-logos scheme altogether, recognizing the inherence of mythos in logos, the role of prejudice and authority.