176 struggling with the worldlove and pursuit of a worthy task. Th e impenetrability of the other
person to a mind imprisoned, to a greater or lesser extent, within itself
seemed to make love all but impossible. Th e failure to support and de-
velop a credible understanding of how we change the character as well
as the content of the social and conceptual structures that we inhabit
threatened to deny us any conception of a task worthy of the devotions
of a life. Th us, we seemed condemned to overcome illusion only by ex-
periencing despair, which is another form of illusion.
As a per sis tent tendency in the consciousness of contemporary soci-
eties, romanticism shows how susceptible this hidden and undeveloped
orthodoxy about self and others has been to a series of missteps. Th ey
are not just errors of vision; they are also mistakes of direction in the
decisions we make about what to do with our lives. At stake in the con-
test between romanticism and this inexplicit orthodoxy is the shape of
our moral experience. Th at orthodoxy requires us to re orient the way
we live. Th e illusions of romanticism represent a form of despair about
our ability to do so.
Th e mistake of early romanticism and of its aft erlife in the worldwide
pop u lar romantic culture of today is its reliance on a series of formulaic
expressions and behavior as ways to achieve and to support love. Reli-
ance on these formulas is at war with two other aspects of the romantic
vision in all its forms: faith in spirit or life, by opposition to structure
or routine, and recognition of the inexhaustibility of the self: the im-
possibility of containing the self within any set repertory of forms and
arrangements. In the light of such faith and recognition, formulaic ro-
manticism proves to be self- contradictory and self- defeating.
When, however, we cast off this primitive romanticism, we come to
the deeper and more enduring features of the romantic heresy. Th is
heresy has two aspects; each of them represents the misstatement of a
truth vital to the message of the struggle with the world in all its reli-
gious and secular forms.
One aspect of the romantic heresy is the war against routine and
repetition. Th is war repeats, in the realm of views about the relation of
self to others, the romantic account of the relation of self to structure.
In this domain, the place of an institutional or conceptual setting is oc-
cupied by the infl uence of routine and repetition. Like structure, with
which they are closely associated, repetition and routine freeze life and