If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? ○ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Consider the immediate cultural background of the 18th century romantic, Coleridge: His Romanticism, as evidenced by the quote, is only tokenly a negation of the 17th century notion of the thinking man, by which instead “the thinking man” to him means the well-rounded, progressive man, or modern man.

Reason:
Coleridge still favors the notion of mind-body duality and implicitly the misconception of the superiority of Reason over Emotion, starting with Descartes in the 17th century (vs. the more practical Montaigne of the 16th century). Wrong for human life in my opinion, because the thinking human mind is not close to being capable of considering enough variables to know what is happening to humanity in the resulting proliferation and acceleration of late civilization’s organization and technology.

Emotion:
The main thrust of Romanticism was to soften and thereby validate the hard rise of scientific certainty and industrial revolution. It effectively introduced artistic or symbolic release of our emotional human nature in facilitation of the newly emerging hard-rational endeavor. Romanticism was not an effective movement to abolish industry. So Romanticism and Rationalism still work together today to push humanity hard into and through technological singularity.

p.s. This apart from Coleridge’s musing apparently excluding woman.

The purpose of being human is to be human = human existentialism. 19th through 21st century existentialism or humanness qualified by “thinking” and “(individual) progress” is not human existential. It is machine-existential.