cuck

Recent reads

Added 2022-07-16 11:30:59 +0000 UTC

I had the idea of occasionally posting about books that I've read relatively recently, as a way of staying active on Patreon, making recommendations and thereby hopefully also connecting to patrons. Please let me know if that's a worthwhile idea and if you'd be interested in posts like this.

This is The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin. It was originally delivered as a lecture series (which you can actually listen to on YouTube) and later transcribed into a short book. I read this last year and it almost singlehandedly awakened my interest in the early German romantics. It's an attempt to understand German romanticism as a larger intellectual movement, which, despite its many contradictions, managed to transform the landscape of European thought, and it engages with the movement mainly through big names like Kant, Schiller, Fichte and Schelling. (For those who are surprised to see Kant here, Berlin argues that, although Kant's general philosophical disposition tends to be almost anti-romantic, it is his uncompromising insistence on human freedom that places him in the romantic "canon").
My favorite thing about Isaiah Berlin is his capacity to paint the big picture when it comes to the history of ideas, recounting intellectual developments in broad strokes. This work is him doing exactly that. Given how accessible it is, I'd recommend it even to people who have no prior philosophical knowledge