Romanticism and Nihilism

Here is a lengthy excerpt from Simon Critchley's Very Little...Almost Nothing, a book that has been captivating me for the last week:

The problem for which romanticism attempts to provide a solution is that of how to reconcile the values of the Enlightenment--secularization, humanism, the libertarian and egalitarian values of republicanism, the primacy of reason and the ubiquity of science--with the disenchantment of the world that those values seem to bring about. The post-religious or post-traditional values of the Enlightenment somehow fail to connect with the fabric of moral and social relations, with the stuff of everyday life, and lead instead to the progressive degradation of those relations. Such is, as I have said above, the dialectic of nihilism.

The problem faced by romanticism is what might count as a meaningful life, or as a meaning for life, after one has rejected the founding certainties of religion. To return to the theme with which I began these lectures, philosophy--and this is its unhappy consciousness--asks questions and should ask questions which have the same form as religious questions, but without the possibility of finding a religious response to those questions. This is philosophy's essential disappointment. Philosophy is atheism arising out of the experience of nihilism, but it is an uneasy atheism.

Critchley goes on to document the failure of romanticism as it is popularly perceived, but he finds within romanticism a possible escape route. In any case, the failures of romanticism are of crucial importance because, as Critchley states, romanticism poses the most plausible solution we have to nihilism.