Romanticism and Symbolic Revolution

The article aims at describing and defining the notion of 'symbolic revolution' proceeding from the fundamental change of vision and thinking represented by the European Romantic movement. Having as its theoretical background the ideas and remarks on symbolic revolutions of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Baudrillard, together with the new theoretical perspective on the phenomena of historical mutation and transformation formulated by Michel Foucault, the study points out that Romanticism, far from being just a literary and cultural movement, represents a radical change of existential attitude, a decisive transformation of the ways the human experience is produced, lived and passed on - a fact that determines, in extremely rare historical moments, a mutation of symbolic reference systems. Like the scientific revolutions described by Thomas Kuhn, the symbolic revolutions are radical transformations of the perceptive and emotional patterns that determine, in their turn, reversals of conceptual, behavioral, and comprehension patterns. At the end of a symbolic revolution, the previous world, together with its values and social hierarchies, falls into 'the other side', into the reality from 'behind the mirror'. From the new perspective, the right side becomes left side and vice versa; at the same time, the objects, people and past social practices acquire the strange and upsetting reflections of alterity. The passage from a symbolic order to another and the reversals of the perceptive and emotional patterns are the two sides of the same ontological and gnoseological transformation.