Magnificent Rebels

When you read this brilliantly evocative and vividly written book – which you must – you will understand why Rupert and Merlin Sheldrake encouraged me so strongly to read it. It received universally stellar reviews when it came out in hardback last year, and was chosen by many critics as their book of the year. Subtitled ‘the first Romantics and the invention of self’, it tells the story of the ‘Jena Set’ – an extraordinary group of men and women who came together in the late 1790s. They walked, thought, conversed, argued, laughed, ate and drank in taverns together amidst a frenzy of creative activity unleashed with the energy of the French Revolution. These included Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegel and von Humboldt brothers, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck and later on Hegel. However, one of the strengths of the book is bringing out the role and presence of some extraordinarily talented women, notably Caroline Boehmer-Schlegel-Schelling, but also Caroline von Humboldt, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Johanna Fichte, and Sophie Kuehn.

In the prologue, the author writes that ‘we live in a world in which we tiptoe along a thin line between free will and selfishness, between self-determination and narcissism, between empathy and righteousness.’ She continues: ‘Underpinning everything are two crucial questions: Who am I as an individual? And who am I as a member of a group and society?’ It was Fichte who burst on the scene with his philosophy of Ich, maintaining during his first lecture in Jena that ‘people should be self-determined, never letting [himself] be defined by anything external.’ The Jena Set exemplified the power of ideas and words, putting forth a vast amount of output in terms of books, essays, reviews, plays, poetry and aphorisms. Harsh mutual criticism led to major fallouts, and one of Goethe’s characteristics was go-between diplomacy while he kept on cordial terms with all parties. The animation of their conversations is conveyed in a series of breathless questions, while the seasons, scenery, journeys and multiple characters and their mutual encounters are lyrically evoked in a rich and inimitable prose style.

At a time when England only had two universities, there were 50 in the decentralised Germanic States, and some 3,000 published writers. This encouraged a greater freedom of expression – though there were limits - reflecting the Enlightenment maxim of sapere aude and the use of one’s own reason. Goethe and Schelling both contributed to the elaboration of a new Naturphilosophie as a counterpoint to the mechanistic scientific revolution. The Set wanted to weave together reason and feeling, ‘prose and poetry, nature and art, mind and sensuality; the earthly and the divine, life and death.’ (p. 18) In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller attributed the horrific excesses of the French Revolution to its emphasis on reason rather than feeling, an issue reflected in our own time and forming the basis of Iain McGilchrist’s magisterial cultural work on the need to balance left with right hemisphere thinking. A number of Network Members - notably Brian Goodwin, Henri Bortoft, Arthur Zajonc, Margaret Colquhoun and Stephan Harding - have contributed to a revival of a qualitative Goethean Science. Such a counterpoint to the power of the mechanistic metaphor is no less essential today.

As I mentioned, Caroline Boehmer-Schlegel-Schelling plays a central role in the narrative and in the relationships between various people. While she was married to August Wilhelm Schlegel, they translated many Shakespeare plays, really putting him on the map within German culture. Her conversation was sparkling and provocative, and she wrote many erudite reviews published under her husband’s name. As a 15-year-old, she had already declared: ‘I never flatter, I say what I think and feel.’ She is introduced already in the prologue where the author describes how she was imprisoned with her young daughter by the authorities in 1793. Her life was further complicated by the fact that she was not only widowed with a young daughter, but pregnant by a French soldier. August Wilhelm comes to her rescue and they marry in 1796.

In 1797, Alexander von Humboldt arrives and sets to work with Goethe. He and his brother had been instilled with ‘a love of truth, liberty and knowledge’ – surely the true spirit of science and philosophy. Goethe’s influence led the younger man to an approach that combined scientific data with emotional responses: ‘Nature must be experienced through feeling…. the external world only exists for us so far as we receive it within ourselves.’ (p. 132) Such an approach harmonises subjective and objective, qualitative and quantitative, inner and outer. Meanwhile, Novalis asserted that most of the scientific community ‘had tried to strip anything subjective, irrational and emotional from their disciplines and methods. He further complained that the Enlightenment ’had stripped all feeling and spirituality not only from knowledge but also from life itself.’ (p. 152, 241) Readers may recall that Einstein remarked that not everything that counts can be counted. This ‘symphilosophising’ process embodied the essence of romanticism, first articulated in the pages of the Schlegels’ journal Athenaeum. (p. 163) With the looming prospect of the merging of human and machine, we need a comparable revolution to uphold our spiritual essence in the face of dehumanising impulses.

Schelling’s philosophy of organism conveys a living world of oneness. Unlike Fichte, he did not define the Ich in opposition to the non-Ich. He had been appointed the youngest ever professor of philosophy at Jena at the age of only 23, and his lectures electrified the students as he developed his ideas with fizzing creativity. He wrote that ‘Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind’, encouraging his students to discover themselves in walks and exploration, cultivating the roles of feeling and beauty. Hegel arrived in 1801, and was still finishing his Phenomenology of Spirit when the French army arrived in Jena in 1806 (it is interesting to learn how much of art was looted and sent back to the Louvre in Paris). He built on Schelling’s work, explaining how the mind developed an understanding of both itself and of reality (see article by Linda Zagzebski in this issue), moving from consciousness to self-consciousness and finally to ‘absolute knowing’ – his articulation of ‘the spirit knowing itself in the shape of spirit’ seems to me a textbook definition of gnosis. (p. 316) Hegel describes with a sense of awe how he saw the Emperor on horseback – the world soul. Luckily, his manuscript made it to the publishers, although it repudiated Schelling’s elevation of art: ‘It was time to rid philosophy of enthusiasm, imagination and feeling.’ (p. 336) He saw the end of history as the stage when ‘humankind lived in a society ruled by the universal right to freedom’ - this is precisely what is now under threat with current trends towards technocratic totalitarianism and groupthink consensus, the antithesis of Humboldt’s ‘love of truth, knowledge and liberty.’

If the Jena era came together as a creative spring, it underwent its natural and melancholic decline as the group was ‘scattered across the world.’ The epilogue recounts the aftermath and subsequent lives of the main protagonists as well as their deaths. Their collective endeavour was ‘something bigger than an individual life.’ One of the most tumultuous episodes was August Wilhelm Schlegel’s life with the formidable Madame de Stael. Wilhelm von Humboldt founded University of Berlin based on Bildung as self-emancipation and learning to think for oneself. This in turn exerted a profound influence on Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, who all set about learning German. The final pages return to the initial questions I refer to in the second paragraph. I think that the Jena influence as well as our growing understanding of interconnectedness reinforces Schelling’s contention that we must understand our place in ‘this great interconnected living organism that is nature’ with the implication that in harming nature we are harming ourselves. Wulf adds the injunction from Novalis that we should be aware and concerned for the other, combining self-reflection, self-examination and empathy. Surely a good place to end as well as to start. This book will almost certainly be my strongest recommendation of the year, so I recommend splashing out on the hardback – you will not regret it.