Andrea Wulf on the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Invention of the Self

Narrative historian Andrea Wulf traces how a handful of writers and naturalists around 1800 — the Jena Romantics and Alexander von Humboldt — grew out of the Enlightenment yet broke with it, handing modernity two of its deepest inheritances: the free, self-authoring individual, and nature seen as a single living web.

Key ideas

1. Ideas come from people, and people come from communities. Wulf writes biography as intellectual history: an idea is shaped by the life its author lived and by the circle they lived it in. Her reverse-chronology trilogy — Humboldt (The Invention of Nature), the Jena set (Magnificent Rebels), and Georg Forster (The Traveller) — reconstructs the ‘long eighteenth century’ as the workshop where much of who-we-are-today was forged.

2. The Jena circle invented Romanticism as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, not a revolt against it. Around 1795 a few hundred yards of one small German town held Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schelling, Fichte and, at the edge, Hegel and Humboldt. They were the first to use romantic in its modern literary sense — ‘to romanticise’ meant to reunite what the Enlightenment was pulling apart: humankind with nature, and art with science.

3. Fichte put the self at the centre — and gave modernity free will and its dark twin, narcissism. Building on Kant, Fichte held that the self posits its own being and, through that act, constitutes the external world as we know it. Coming just after the French Revolution, this was intoxicatingly empowering: the individual as the source of reality and the author of their own life. Wulf traces the ‘me generation’ back to this moment — and stresses that Fichte’s freedom always carried a matching moral duty.

4. Humboldt is the bridge from Enlightenment reason to Romantic feeling. An instrument-obsessed empiricist who carried 42 devices up the Andes, Humboldt was taught by Goethe that the observing eye is your eye — that subjectivity belongs in science. He saw nature as one interconnected organism, ‘one breath of life’ over rock, plant, animal and human, and so became the forgotten father of environmentalism, warning of human-induced climate change as early as 1800.

5. Openness was a choice, not an accident of the age. Forster returned from Cook’s second voyage believing in the equality of all peoples when almost every European thinker — Kant and Hume included — did not. Wulf reads his life as proof that racism ‘was a choice even back then’, and links his and Humboldt’s open-mindedness to a shared condition: the perpetual outsider, always in transit, never fully claimed by any nation.

Summary

Enlightenment reason and the Romantic turn to the self

Carroll opens on his usual quarry — ideas — but concedes Wulf’s premise that ideas come from people. Her period is the ‘long eighteenth century’, from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, because so much of the modern self is minted there. The Enlightenment prized reason, observation and absolute, often God-given truths; the world was a mechanism to be measured. Then a generation of young philosophers answered that the only certainty is that the world is experienced by a self. That shift — from external, given truth to the subjective standpoint — is the hinge of the whole conversation, and it lands on a Europe still largely held in the ‘iron fist’ of absolutism, where birth fixed your station.

The Jena circle and its short-lived intensity

For a few years in the mid-1790s the town of Jena — four thousand people — became the nexus of a new philosophy. Wulf’s cast: Goethe, already Germany’s most famous poet and himself a scientist; the playwright Schiller; the young philosopher Schelling with his philosophy of oneness; the literary-critic Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm a celebrated Shakespeare translator; the poet Novalis; the incoming Hegel; and Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, the free-spirited woman at the group’s social centre, who carried Forster’s ideas into the set. They worked together, believing collaboration would yield a greater philosophy than solitary study. Fichte developed his philosophy of the self live in front of his students, who flocked to watch a professor invent something new before their eyes. The intensity was deliberately ephemeral — the point was not a finished doctrine but a dynamic, unfolding one — and it did not last.

The free self and its double edge

Fichte’s move, drawn from Kant, was to make the self the source of all reality: it posits its own being and thereby creates the ‘non-self’, the external world, in the mind. What this gave people was free will — and, arriving in the wash of the French Revolution, it felt like the most empowering idea imaginable, proof that a revolution of ideas outweighs kings and swords. Wulf draws the long line to the present: the self has stayed ‘centre stage’, for better and worse. We are, she says, a society obsessed with the self and have forgotten where the idea came from — and forgotten Fichte’s condition that freedom is bounded by moral duty, extending only as far as it does not impinge on another’s. The result is a permanent negotiation between self-determination and not being merely selfish, between the individual as locus of freedom and the claims of society.

Humboldt’s web of nature

Alexander von Humboldt sits in Jena’s outer circle, befriending Goethe on his 1794 visit. He arrives an Enlightenment empiricist — reason, instruments, measurement — and leaves with Goethe’s gift of subjectivity: the eye that sees the world is your own, so feeling belongs alongside data. On his five-year South American expedition he measures obsessively yet insists that to understand nature you must also feel it. His central idea — that everything in nature is connected, that nature is a living organism in which ‘everything hangs together from the smallest insect to the tallest tree’ — reframes nature from machine to web of life. Pull one thread and the whole may unravel: watching plantations, deforestation and ruined oyster beds, he becomes the first to warn of harmful, human-induced climate change, and the unacknowledged founder of environmentalism who later inspires John Muir and George Perkins Marsh.

The legacy in modernity

Wulf’s throughline is the coming-together of modernity in the late 1700s: nature as living web, the sovereign self, and the aspiration to reunite art and science. On the ledger, the self and free will won and endure; the union of art and science largely failed — she laments a schooling that still sorts six-year-olds into ‘logical’ and ‘creative’ boxes, though every working scientist she knows relies on curiosity and imagination they are not supposed to mention. She closes on community: the salons where people reinvented what it was to be human depended on being together — drinking, eating, reciting — and she wonders, half-joking, whether the same figures today would merely have podcasts. Yet, she and Carroll agree, that a Londoner and a Californian can hold this very conversation is itself something the Jena set would have prized.

Speakers

• Andrea Wulf — narrative historian; author of The Invention of Nature (Alexander von Humboldt), Magnificent Rebels (the Jena Romantics) and The Traveller (Georg Forster).
• Sean Carroll — host; theoretical physicist and author, Mindscape.

See also

• Enlightenment — the reason-and-observation project the Jena circle grew out of and pushed beyond
• Peter Singer on Sentience, Effective Altruism, and the Ethics of Doing Good — a fellow Mindscape guest, on the ethics side of the Enlightenment inheritance
• Sean Carroll — host