Now, on the "romantic" side of this I wanted to build upwards on material about the way in which logic or intellect relates
to emotion and instinct in the human psyche.
That is to say, to work from have disparate parts of the human mind work together, to how individuals and groups of individuals
relate at all levels of society.
I was hoping for a natural and harmonious development from a philosophy of life through to philosophy of society encompassing moral, political and economic matters.
So I start with logic and emotion, and I'm looking for parallel pairs at higher levels, like reason and romanticism.
I'm thinking romanticism here, partly because it seems to be opposite to reason (particularly valuing emotion and deprecating
logic) and partly because I have the idea that this is the beginning of a line of thought which comes down to the modern day
through existentialism.
To do this I need to know something about the romantic movement, and I start reading Isaiah Berlin.
Of course the picture gets more complicated (don't confuse me with facts!).
I struggled for a while trying to find the right dichotomy to tell my story, but eventually decided that this structure would
not hold water.
Gellner was one factor, for he wrote this book called "Reason and Culture" and I thought at first that he was talking about
the same thing.
But his culture and my romanticism are not at all the same thing, and, worse, his crusade is to promote rationality against
the reactionary irrationality of culture.
Romanticism has too many diverse faces, but the face that I wanted involved the affirmation of human identity against the
dogmatic intellectual imperialism of enlightenment rationality.
Gellner was batting for reason against authority (insofar as I have been able to understand him, which isn't very far), while
I am more interested in limiting reason to it proper scope, and understanding its relation to our emotions and the respective
roles of these in shaping our society and its institutions.
Anyway, the two dimensional game plan (a one dimensional contrast or conflict appearing at several different levels) no longer
seemed credible, and I have to find a way to cope with greater complexity.