What's the difference between nihilism and romanticism?

Question

I've read enough the difference between fatalism, pessimism, absurdism, ...etc.

What's romanticism? How is it different than nihilistic existentialism?

Answer 1

Kill em all and let God sort them out.  Nihilism

Why can't we all just get along? Romanticism

Answer 2

"Romanticism is the conceptual school of art. It deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned—in the words of Aristotle—not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.

“Introduction to The Fountainhead"; Ayn Rand

"Romanticism holds that Spirit, or the Absolute, is essentially creative; the ultimate ground of all things is primarily an urge to self-expression, and all that it has brought into being is but a means to its fuller self-realization. If the Absolute of Fichte is a moralist, and that of Hegel a logician, then that of the Romanticists is primarily an artist."

Dictionary of Philosophy: Runes

http://www.ditext.com/runes/r.html

"Nihilism: The doctrine that nothing, or nothing of a specified and very general class, exists, or is knowable, or is valuable. Thus Gorgias held that

Nothing exists;

Even if something did exist it could not be known;

Even if it were known this knowledge could not be communicated.

Schopenhauer's pessimism and denial of the Will expresses a nihilistic attitude toward the so-called values of the world. As a social doctrine Nihilism is the belief that progress is possible only through the destruction of all social and political organizations."

Dict. of Phil.

SO----to answer "what is the difference," we would have to say that Romanticism has a vision of life as man's spirit as the great creator of all that is metaphysically "might be and ought to be."

Whereas nihilism would deny that what "might be and ought to be" could never be known.

Answer 3

The romantic has an ideal (lets say a person, or plan) and thinks this ideal is utopia.

An existentialist has an ideal and thinks it is a unique, ineffable whim that has no objective reality.

A nihilist thinks the world is a distopia. And existential nihilist thinks HIS world is a distopia and everyone else are a bunch of deluded romantics who can't understand him. To other people, his position is a romantic stance. To him it is h**l.

Answer 4

Nihilism is belief in nothing, romanticism is a glossed over fantasy version of reality.