Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

by Andrea Wulf

Goethe felt an urgent need to talk about his scientific studies. Exchange and dialogue were essential to discovery, he said.

The influence and inspiration worked both ways. As Alexander later recalled, the time in Jena ‘affected me powerfully’. Goethe changed the way he understood the natural world, moving him from purely empirical research towards an interpretation of nature that combined scientific data with emotional responses. ‘Nature must be experienced through feeling,’ he wrote later to Goethe, insisting that those who tried to describe the world by simply classifying plants, animals and rocks would never come close. Together with a growing emphasis on the subjectivity of the Ich-philosophy, Alexander von Humboldt’s perspective shifted, and almost fifty years later he would write in his international bestseller Cosmos that ‘the external world only exists for us so far as we receive it within ourselves’. Nature, ideas and feelings ‘melt into each other’.

The young scientist was directed only by ‘naked, analytical reason’, lacked imagination and sensibility, and was propelled by vanity. Put simply, Schiller said, Alexander von Humboldt had a big mouth and was a show-off.

This is jealosy. Alexander, it seems to me, was full of the joy and wonder of discovering new things about nature and the World.

Schiller had had enough of the young hotheads. This whole generation was just too self-centred and highly strung, he thought.

he tried to make sense of the world by looking inwards and practising what he called his ‘Sichselbstfindung’ – the ‘Finding Oneself’ – inspired by his deep reading and analysis of Fichte’s works.

This is about Novalis.

And as Novalis had already noted in his Fichte studies, the uniting force was love. Love was the bridge between the Ich and the non-Ich, between the real and the ideal, between the mind and the physical world of the senses.

Raised by a devout and stern Moravian father, Novalis had never embraced his father’s beliefs but lamented the loss of feeling and imagination in the Christian Church. Poetry and love, he now said, should be the centre of his new religion. ‘I have religion for dear Sophie, not love,’ he wrote.

Sometimes he was frightened by all the data and figures, he said, but the sciences had ‘wonderful healing powers’. Like ‘opiates’, they relieved his pain and gave him comfort.

Regards Novalis.

Science, poetry and art belonged together. It was all one.

Also the feelings of Novalis.

‘The sciences must all be poeticised,’ Novalis wrote from Freiberg. Yes, shouted Friedrich Schlegel, yes, why not? He too would turn physics into music, Friedrich said: ‘what I really want is to make Euclid singable.’ A poet understood the world better than a scientific mind, the friends believed, because the language of science was too mechanical and atomistic. ‘Poetry’, Novalis insisted, ‘is true absolute reality.’[*5]

William Wordsworth would write in the new preface of Lyrical Ballads that good poetry was ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.

Schelling’s new universe was alive. Instead of a fragmented, mechanistic world where humans were little more than cogs in a machine, Schelling conjured up a world of oneness. The living and non-living worlds, he explained, were ruled by the same underlying principles. Everything – from frogs to trees, stones to insects, rivers to humans – was ‘linked together, forming one universal organism’.

As Schelling put it: ‘Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind.’ If mind and nature really were one, it meant that we must have direct access to and understanding of the workings of nature.

This was the opposite of Newton’s automata-like universe that was ruled by natural laws. ‘Philosophy applied to nature’, Schelling said, ‘has to raise it up out of the dead mechanistic world it appears to be caught in.’ The natural world was no longer God’s well-ordered clockwork or a piece of divine artistry – it was alive.

I wish I'd discovered writings like this when I was much younger. It would have been wonderful for my college-age and young adult self to have been able to ponder and explore this.

Novels were still seen as an inferior literary form. Some thought them shallow and sentimental, worrying that women in particular were in danger of being seduced to irrationality or even immorality.

This according to the literary establishment. The surrounding text recounts how Frederich Schlegel and Novalis disagreed with this. Schlegel "believed that the novel was the genre best suited to expressing the spirit of the modern age."

To have religion, Schleiermacher wrote, was to ‘drink in the beauty of the world’. His religion was a ‘sacred music’ that accompanied humanity. Neither priests nor rationality nor moral arguments paved the way to faith. All that was needed was imagination.

Goethe had equipped him with ‘new senses’, and it was with those new senses that Alexander von Humboldt had explored South America. And though he had travelled with forty-two scientific instruments, he wasn’t just interested in empirical data. Like his old Jena friends, he believed that feelings and imagination were essential tools for making sense of the external world. With his books he wanted to feed ‘the desire for knowledge and the powers of imagination at the same time’.

The path may have looped and zigzagged but the direction had been forward, towards a self-determined life.

Instruments, measurements, data and rigorous observation alone were not enough, he said, because ‘what speaks to the soul, escapes our measurements’.

‘Every language contains its own world view,’ he explained, asserting that ‘in this sense each nation is a mental whole, a particular form of humanity characterised by a specific language.’

Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander's brother, became interested in languages and this relates to him.

Fichte never intended his ideas to be a narcissistic celebration of the self. Instead, he always insisted that our freedom was tightly interwoven with our moral obligations. ‘Only those are free’, he told students during his first lecture series, in 1794, ‘who will try to make everyone around them free.’ Freedom gives us the choice as to how to act and behave, and elevates us above base instincts such as greed, hunger or fear. Freedom always brings along its twin: moral duty.

Novalis wrote in 1797. Life’s most important task was to grasp the self because ‘without perfect self-understanding we will never learn truly to understand others’. Let Novalis’s sentence roll in your mind for a moment. What he meant was that we are morally obliged to turn inwards in order to be good members of society.

Wow! This underscores the traditional advice to "Know Thyself".

Only if we are fully aware of ourselves – of our needs, our wishes, and of our thoughts – can we truly embrace the other.

This emphasis on the Ich means being ‘self aware’ as the prerequisite for ‘being aware and concerned for the other’. Only through self-awareness can we feel empathy with others. Only through self-reflection can we question our behaviour towards others. Self-examination in that sense is for the greater go...

"Self-examination in that sense is for the greater good-for us, for our wider community, for society in general and for our planet." The last sentence of the book.