I have used the term willful obversity to avoid, on the one hand, the hob-goblin of evil that Bloom's satanic impulse conjures up, though his analysis of the romantic stems from Milton's own extended (and obversely sympathetic) analysis of the Edenic myth, or the elevation of academic snarkiness that 'ironist' seems to justify, though there too one could argue that American moral and political discourse is irony deficient. Nevertheless, the romantic impulse is clear enough -- the rebellion against conventional mores, against settled senses of the good, particularly when that settled good is not good for me. The use of 'conventional,' however, can pass by too easily. It is a term used in modern discourse almost as a pejorative. The conventional is set not only against the trivially unconventional -- the one who thinks, to use the current cliche, outside the box, improvising improved means to unimproved ends. If one finds the conventional truly and deeply limiting, and one must find the conventional limiting if one is to assert and be recognized as an individual qua individual, then too the conventional is set not only against the trivially unconventional, but against that which is more authentic at least for me, against my own private perfection.
A deeper irony emerges, and it stems from the close examination of language as an epistemological impediment brought it to the fore. We use language to point at reality, but language itself is conventional through and through. If one begins using unfamiliar words in unfamiliar ways, one becomes not only unconventional, but incomprehensible to others. Moreover, Chinese is not an oddly translated form of English, but a way of speaking about the world whole unto itself, with its own lexicon and its own grammar, a lexicon and grammar to varying degrees incommensurate with English -- part and parcel of a Chinese, as opposed to English, form of life. The same holds true, or so it seems, for most socially constructed human activities, for most forms of life. They are, to use the linguist's term, coherent, but arbitrary. There is no direct correspondence between the words we use to describe reality and reality, divine or otherwise, and insofar as our ways of talking about reality are conventional through and through, fraught with conventions that have developed over time in response to emergent historical contingencies, they could well have been otherwise and could well become otherwise.
An even deeper irony emerges, and it stems from the predicating assumptions. If there is nothing but what we have constructed for ourselves, if our private perfection is to have any public meaning, it must not only free itself from an over-arching convention that has gone somehow awry, but must communicate itself. Therein lies the rub. The governing intentionality of the romantic project is to create a "private perfection," but to do so the individual must differentiate itself from other individuals qua individuals, and the more thoroughly one differentiates one's self, the more thoroughly one speaks and acts outside the conventional, the more incomprehensible and alienated one becomes. Much madness might be divinest sense, but it is still much madness. If one is to assert and be recognized as an individual qua individual, and to do so comprehensibly, one cannot escape the question of "human solidarity" and one's contingent place within a form of life that must be reformed -- not tweaked, but reformed whole cloth. The romantic project is essentially revolutionary. The existing form of life must be destroyed, and a new form of life placed in its stead, and one must become not only an individual qua individual, but to use Emerson's term, a representative man, and what the representative man represents is the zeit-geist of a new human potential, becomes the catalyst for a new human solidarity.
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