Achieving a human understanding

A quote from Marie Curie referenced by Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto in his book "A Foot in the River":

"There is nothing to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Another by Isaiah Berlin who explains why we should accept and adopt pluralism:

There is a plurality of values, which men can and do seek...And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding."

Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto goes on:

This position differs from cultural relativism. It does not say, for instance, that all cultures can be accommodated. One might exclude Nazism, say, or cannibalism. It leaves open the possibility of peaceful argument about which culture, if any, is best. It claims, in Berlin's words, 'that the multitude values are objective, part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary creations of men's subjective fancies'."

(All quotes are from Chapter 8, "Towards the planet of apes")

See also this old blog post that is relevant to this topic.

The importance of becoming against all odds

"To be free is nothing, to become free is very heaven."
Fichte, untraced, quoted in The Roots of Romanticism, The Restrained Romantics, by Isaiah Berlin

Berlin explains that "Fichte's whole notion is that man is a kind of continuous action [...]. In order to rise to his full height he must constantly go on generating and creating." (ibid, The Restrained Romantics). He continues by saying that "[Y]ou felt yourself properly only in a moment of resistance or opposition" (ibid, Unbridled Romanticism).

Thus, a romantic has to be active. He has to be not only when the world prevents him to do so, but also when his goal is unreachable. If he can reach his goal, the combat is not worthy. The romantic can fully experience life only when he tries to climb an impossible summit. Only in this situation, he will be able - indeed will be obliged - to express the fullness of her or his heart. Fichte's quotation and Berlin's explanations remind me the poetic lyrics of Mano Solo, a french-speaking singer, in Le Monde Entier:

"Si tu m'avais demandé, moi je t'aurai dit
Que dans la vie ce qui compte
c'est pas l'issue mais c'est le combat"

or André Gorz speaking of writing in Lettre à D., histoire d'un amour:

"Ce n'est pas ce qu'il écrit qui est le but premier de l'écrivain. Son besoin premier est d'écrire."

See also this quotation from Gandhi (in French) from Cedric's blog.

Cultural relativism according to Herder

"What is the ideal form of life? We cannot be both Greek and Phoenician and medieval, and Eastern and Western, and Northern and Southern. We cannot attain to the highest ideals of all centuries and all places at onces."
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, The True Fathers of Romanticism

We might be not be able to understand anymore the mind of the Greeks, but I still would believe that we can understand the minds of other peoples which are our contemporaries. In the first case, you cannot experience anymore the life of the Greeks beyond their writings, which are an imperfect - but still rich - way to know a people. In the second case, you can become or try to become one of them, although you might never be entirely accepted by the visited communauty, except if you are one these excentric English travelers ready to disguise to discover what is officially forbidden to the foreign.

"Le romantisme, c'est la révolution"

"Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie du siècle, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Dance of Death, indeed Death itself. It is Shelley's dome of many-coloured glass, and it is also its white radiance of eternity. It is the confused teeming fullness and richness of life, Fülle des Lebens, inexhaustible multiplicity, turbulence, violence, conflict, chaos, but also it is peace, oneness with the great 'I Am', harmony with the natural order, the music of the spheres, dissolution in the eternal all-containing spirit. It is the strange, the exotic, the grotesque, the mysterious, the supernatural, ruins, moonlight, enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the Floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational, the unutterable. Also it is the familiar, the sense of one's unique tradition, joy in the smiling aspect of everyday nature, and the accustomed sights and sounds of contended, simple, rural folk - the sane and happy wisdom of rosy-cheeked sons of the soil. It is the ancient, the historic, it is Gothic cathedrals, mists of antiquity, ancien roots and the old order with its unanalysable qualities, its profound but inexpressible loyalties, the impalpable, the imponderable. Also it is the pursuit of novelty, revolutionary change, concern with the fleeting present, desire to live in the moment, rejection of knowledge, past and future, the pastoral idyll of happy innocence, joy in the passing instant, a sense of timelessness. It is nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially the East, and in remote times, especially the Middle Ages. But also it is happy co-operation in a common creative effort, the sense of forming part of a Church, a class, a party, a tradition, a great and all-containing symmetrical hierarchy, knights and retainers, the ranks of the Church, organic social ties, mystic unity, one faith, one land, one blood, 'la terre et les morts', as Barrès said, the great society of the dead and the living and the yet unborn. [...] It is, in short, unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular, in the paintings of nature for example, and also mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art's sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death."
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, In Search of a Definition

In summary, Romanticism contains in one single hat all the conflicting feelings of the woman and of the man.

Beethoven, a figure of the Romantic movement

"The figure who dominates the nineteenth century as an image is the tousled figure of Beethoven in his garret. Beethoven is a man who does what is in him. He is poor, he is ignorant, he is boorish. His manners are bad, he knows little, and he is perhaps not a very interesting figure, apart from the inspiration which drives him forward. But he has not sold out. He sits in his garret and he creates. He creates in accordance with the light which is within him, and that is all that a man should do; that is what makes a man a hero."
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, In Search of a Definition