What we love, we are.

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. Art as opposed to science.”
--Phaedrus

I tend to have mostly “romantic” friends. It is difficult when they are always making passes. It took me awhile to come to understand what romantic means in terms that are not related, necessarily, to love. To continue on a direction of my previous post, I think that being a romantic is somehow related to nature. But, in contrast, I also think that being classical in thought, is also related to nature. Both areas of thought have different aspects of how they understand nature and the world. The romantic sees the world as beauty, they look at the trees, see the wind, hear the birds, and then they go and write, paint, photograph, talk, discuss, etc. about all of these things. They like to play in the dirt. The classical understanding of nature, from my perspective, tends to be more of an understanding of how nature works, and why it works. Instead of seeing it from the outside, they understand it from the inside. Romantics are not necessarily concerned with the way things work, only that they work. From my understanding though, if we didn’t have the classical people to help the romantics understand life, then the world would just be overrun with people that have a lot of emotional energy and no way to understand it all—there would be SO much art produced that no one would care because everyone would be doing it.

That might be stretching it a little.

When we are young, we are trying to understand the world in terms of being “classical” only we don’t know that’s what we are doing. We want to know how everything works. What it’s made of, how it got there, where it is going etc. But then at some point in our lives our ideas change. Instead of what it’s made of, we ask why it looks the way it does. We talk about our thoughts instead of our toys. Our ideas slowly turn from Ninja Turtles to the color of the turtles and their belts. As I’m writing this I am trying to think of when in my life I came to this understanding of ideas, of feelings and emotions instead of actions and physical things, and for the life of my I can’t remember or think of a time when I had my first “romantic” idea, moment, thought, experience. Shouldn’t that be a turning point in our lives? Shouldn’t that be remembered? When we start to not only understand the world around us, but we start to understand the world around us that we can’t see. Each person’s experience is obviously going to be different. Some early on, some late. Some parents guide their kids towards romanticism early, some still haven’t had their own romantic experiences.

All this to say that romantic and classical people co-exist and without each, it would get to be just a bit too much to bear.