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

Andrea Wulf

Thank you for having me.

Andrea Wulf

But the ideas come from people.

Andrea Wulf

Very much so. I am interested in the ideas — I've done a lot of history of science, I've done philosophy — but I'm really interested in who had these ideas. We tend to think about the work of someone, or the idea of someone, as a kind of standalone thing, and we forget it was very much influenced by the life they lived. A poet, for example: we read the poem or the drama or the novel, but that is very often shaped by what that person had just gone through in their life.

Andrea Wulf

And if we focus on a person, we tend to focus on one person, and we forget that — unless you're a hermit — you don't really exist in a vacuum. We are all part of a community, a family, a group of friends, a country, a nation. So I'm interested in these threads and connections, but also in who were the people who gave us the ideas of the Enlightenment or Romanticism. I'm interested in particular in the so-called long 18th century, from the late 17th century to the early 19th, because a lot of who we are today is shaped by what happened during that time.

Andrea Wulf

Yes. I wrote a book about Alexander von Humboldt called The Invention of Nature, and he's probably the most famous man in the books I've written. He said that everything in nature is connected, that nature is a kind of living organism where everything hangs together, from the smallest insect to the tallest tree. He gave us a concept of nature that very much shapes us today. But he was also part of a group of young romantics who came together in a small town in Germany called Jena — that's my other book, Magnificent Rebels. And they were again very interested in this idea that humans and nature belong together, that we are all part of one system.

Andrea Wulf

Then my latest book is about Georg Forster. It's called The Traveller, and there I really wanted to look at humanity itself. I've written a trilogy the wrong way round, chronologically. The one I just published should have been the first, but that never works, does it. I started with Humboldt, and through Humboldt I came across the others. In Forster's case it's really a reminder of the importance of our common humanity. He returned from Captain Cook's second voyage with a deep-seated belief in the equality of races, which, given our current climate, I find an inspiring and hopeful story — but also an important one. How can someone brought up in a deeply racist society be so open-minded? Can we learn something from that?

Andrea Wulf

These are definitely themes important in the coming together of modernity. If you look at Humboldt, his way of looking at nature as a living organism — not a mechanical system, not a machine you put together, but a living organism — was a very new idea, and one that has shaped our understanding of nature to this day. Because he understands that if it is a living organism, this web of life, then if you pull one thread you might unravel the whole thing. So he's the first to really warn about harmful, human-induced climate change — and of course we are living with the consequences of ignoring him.

Andrea Wulf

Then you have Forster, who was Humboldt's mentor. I came across Forster through Humboldt, and he's a quite extraordinary human being.

Andrea Wulf

His life is a really good example of why you should look at the life of someone when you look at the ideas. He was born in 1754 in Gdańsk — today's Poland, then part of Royal Prussia. He became a traveller at the age of ten, when he accompanied his difficult and tempestuous father, as a botanist, on a wild expedition through Russia. Just before his twelfth birthday his father took young Georg to London, where the boy became the family's breadwinner by translating popular, bestselling travel accounts. He picked up languages and scientific concepts extraordinarily quickly.

Andrea Wulf

He spoke Russian, English, German and French.

Andrea Wulf

He's twelve years old, and he translates into English, which is not his mother tongue. English he basically picked up on the journey from Russia to England, because they were travelling on an English ship. At sixteen he starts to attend the learned meetings of the Royal Society. He has no formal education, but quite an extraordinary one — the Royal Society at that time is the place where all the great ideas are exchanged. Then at seventeen he joins Captain Cook's second voyage, the Resolution. It's a voyage of extremes — they sail through labyrinths of icebergs and tropical islands in the South Pacific — but for Forster it really is a voyage of human interaction, and he returns with an unshakable belief in humankind.

Andrea Wulf

Which is very unusual. This is a time when almost everybody in Western Europe is deeply racist, where explorers looked at indigenous people with arrogance at best and utter disgust and brutality at worst, where European philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and David Hume had no qualms in talking about black people as an inferior race. Young Forster's attitude is very unusual. He believes they are humans like everybody else. He does not see them as savages or barbarians. He even turns against Rousseau's idea of the peaceful noble savage, because he sees warfare in Tahiti, for example. He says every society has good and evil; the world is not neatly divided into the virtuous and the immoral. It's a complex tapestry of the many shades of human lives and experiences.

Andrea Wulf

We tend to say that in the 18th century it was inevitable to be racist — that's just the way people were. His life proves that it was a choice even back then. It is not an unavoidable way to see the world. He does not talk about indigenous people as half-human or half-monkey. He sees them as people who have their own value systems and cultural norms, and he says he is not going to use European norms or morals to judge them — vice and virtue are relative concepts.

Andrea Wulf

There are many reasons for this. One is that he was still very young, his mind still malleable, open to other ideas. But it's also because he was a traveller. For the rest of his life he remains in transit, this perpetual outsider — and if you're an outsider yourself, you tend to be kinder to other outsiders. He doesn't even know which country he belongs to. By seventeen he's lived in Russia, Prussia and England, and then goes off on the Resolution. There's an open-mindedness that comes from very much not being part of a nation — something we sometimes forget today, when everybody seems to be crawling behind their national boundaries.

Andrea Wulf

He was seventeen when he joined, and twenty when they came back. At twenty he had seen more of the world than most people ever do. They sailed 75,000 miles — roughly three times around the equator. They spent a lot of time in the icy polar seas of Antarctica, looking for the fabled southern continent that many scientists believed had to exist to counterbalance the northern landmass. Just imagine being on a sailing boat, which can't reverse, among icebergs — freezing cold, the ropes frozen stiff, the sails like metal plates, the woollen clothes always wet, never dry. It must have been horrendous. But then they go to New Zealand, Tahiti, Tonga, the Vanuatu archipelago, the Marquesas, Easter Island, back and forth. They go three times back to Antarctica, zigzagging through the South Pacific, visiting several places several times, so they get to know the people who live there.

Andrea Wulf

For example, they go three times to Queen Charlotte Sound, at the northern tip of the South Island of New Zealand, and spend weeks there — not just a quick stop, because they have to repair the ship. Because Georg is so linguistically talented, he picks up words and languages, though he always says he doesn't understand everything — their form of government, for example. But there's a great open-mindedness. And because he likes ideas, he's the sort of scientist who, by comparing the different languages across the South Pacific and the distribution of breadfruit trees, works out roughly the route of Polynesian migration — 200 years before DNA analysis and archaeological studies prove it.

Andrea Wulf

The breadfruit tree, which he loves eating because it's a food staple in Tahiti, has no seeds. Because it has no seeds, he knows it can only be cultivated by humans — but he wonders where it originally came from. When he returns, he looks through botanical books and finds there were breadfruit trees with seeds in Indonesia. So he comes to two conclusions: they must have been transported by someone across the ocean, and the agricultural sophistication of the Polynesians is extraordinary, because through selective breeding they turned the original smaller, seeded breadfruit into this larger, nutritious one. Then he looks at the languages and sees they're connected — sometimes just one letter different: va, the canoe in Tahitian, vaka in Tongan, waka in Māori. Where other explorers see an empty South Pacific with a few islands, he sees threads of migration. He sees how everything is connected — just as Humboldt sees that nature is connected, Forster sees, as an ethnographer, how all humans are connected.

Andrea Wulf

Two ships — the Resolution, the bigger one, and the Adventure. Altogether 200 men under Captain Cook, and they set sail in July 1772. They end up doing a full circuit around Antarctica, because Cook wants to establish that if there is a southern continent, it's covered in ice and no good for the British — nothing they can exploit. As they encounter islanders, the crew uses firearms to exert power, and with time Forster gets more and more dismayed by this. The very first time they land in New Zealand he's still very much an Enlightenment thinker who believes the Europeans are superior. The ship is battered, they set up workshops, and the forest echoes with hammers and saws, and he says, look at all the art and industry we bring to the savages — their life will be so much better. And then within six weeks he's done a complete turnaround. He starts criticising the European influence. By the end he says the Europeans just bring death and disease, that it would have been better for the inhabitants of the South Seas never to have encountered the English, because he sees again and again how they are wounded and murdered.

Andrea Wulf

No, he really didn't. It didn't help that Forster's father, Reinhold, was a quite terrible person with a temper. He managed to have fights with everybody on the Resolution, even the unflappable Cook — who is well known for his calm character. He gets thrown out of the great cabin a few times. He's not an easy man, and after that Cook was just: I am not having that ever again.

Andrea Wulf

I wish it were just about learning things — this is very much an imperial endeavour. To set the scene: there's the Seven Years' War in Europe, from 1756 to 1763, described as the very first global conflict, because it was fought in North America, Europe and India. After the war, Britain emerges as the dominant global power. France is not particularly pleased, so France and England begin to look at the South Pacific for more colonies. Even Cook's first voyage, the Endeavour, which had a scientific purpose — observing the transit of Venus from Tahiti in 1769, one of the first global international scientific collaborations, where scientists all over the world measured the entry and exit times of Venus to work out the distance between Earth and Sun — even that also landed in Australia, and we all know what came from that.

Andrea Wulf

So even with a scientific purpose like finding the southern continent, it is an imperial endeavour. It's financed by the British Admiralty, and Cook has precise instructions: to write reports about the soils, the plants, and the temperament of the local people — to see whether they might be turned into slaves, whether they would fight.

Andrea Wulf

He's the assistant naturalist and the draughtsman, and he doesn't have much choice about going — his father decides it. He's not a very talented draughtsman when he starts: his early birds from New Zealand cling to the branches as if about to fall off. But he becomes very good. They collect a lot of plants, shoot birds, dissect fish. They don't really come back with discoveries as such, because Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, on the Endeavour voyage, had already brought back a lot. Reinhold Forster constantly complains they spent too much time in Antarctica, where there's not much to get, writing angry entries in his journal: how am I going to be famous when I come back?

Andrea Wulf

What Georg Forster then does is write a travel account very different from earlier ones. He's a born storyteller — his descriptions sing off the page — but also an intuitive ethnographer. Where Columbus struggled to describe South America as anything but green, and saw the naked indigenous people as uncivilised, Forster turns even the icy world of Antarctica into shades of purple, green and blue. His book makes him famous, because he brings these different worlds and different people into the parlours of European houses. And what they come home with is not really their collections but their ethnographical ones — mourning costumes from Tahiti, baskets from Tonga, weapons from Tanna. Importantly, because they're early ethnographers, these are traded, not stolen, and they give a good idea of Polynesian culture before European contact. His contribution to science is more in ethnography than as a naturalist.

Andrea Wulf

Very different, and he approached every island trying to understand it, which was difficult. But he thought — and was mostly right — that they were more egalitarian than European societies, or that where they had a class system, as in Tahiti, the boundaries were much more fluid. That shaped his political thinking, and later made him a revolutionary in Europe — not by reading French philosophers, but by what he had seen in the South Pacific.

Andrea Wulf

He comes back and, for a few years, becomes a famous public intellectual. He picks a very public fight with Immanuel Kant, who wrote an essay about the human races arguing there are four races, all defined by the colour of their skin, with Europeans as the pinnacle of creation. And Forster says, hold on a second — all the people I've seen on my voyage don't fit into your neat categories, because nature is connected by nuances and by shades, not by sharply divided categories. Kant is not pleased, and writes another article attacking Forster, and it ends up being a fight about methodology.

Andrea Wulf

There is Immanuel Kant, who has never left Königsberg —

Andrea Wulf

Not a traveller at all — and Forster, who is this traveller. Forster accuses Kant: how can you make these statements if you've never travelled and never seen these people? And Kant replies: how can you come up with anything if you don't travel with a theory in mind? So it's all about whether you start with an idea and then find your proofs, or start with your observation and then form your theory. It's the battle of the methodologies, which is at the nexus of the Enlightenment — how do we gain knowledge?

Andrea Wulf

Then he ends up in Mainz, about 80 miles from the French border. In 1789 the French Revolution happens just across the border, and he watches it like a gripping drama, because when the French revolutionaries declare all men equal, they promise the possibility of a new society built on the power of ideas and freedom. In 1792 the French take Mainz, and instead of being worried about the invaders, Forster welcomes them and wants to establish a German republic. From the age of ten, travelling through Russia, he had seen the harsh reality of despotism and inequality — these are the themes that obsess him all his life. He fights for freedom, for equality, and against racism and white supremacy. He becomes co-founder of the Mainz Republic, Germany's first republic, very short-lived. He travels to revolutionary Paris to ask whether the Mainz Republic can join the French Republic, but by then the Prussians have retaken Mainz, so he's declared an outlaw and a traitor and cannot go back.

Andrea Wulf

He is in Paris during the brutal Reign of Terror, and despite the bloodshed he still supports the revolution, which makes him very unpopular in Germany. He is dismayed by it — he really does not like violence — but he thinks a return to despotism would be worse. He dies in 1794 at the age of thirty-nine. It's a short but packed life, which for a biographer is fabulous, because his adventures start when he's ten. You don't get twenty years of school; you go straight into a wild expedition — all the ideas without the tedious boredom of daily life.

Andrea Wulf

It's not mainstream thinking at all. He's one of the very first to use the term human rights. Unlike the American and French revolutionaries, who firmly excluded women, slaves and non-Europeans, he includes them — he talks about the general rights of mankind, meaning all people, from every part of the world, of every gender. He's way ahead of his contemporaries. Today he'd be called a feminist: he believes in equality between men and women, admires independent, strong-minded women, is married to one, believes in the education of girls, and is a proud father of daughters. The society he lives in does not approve at all. He has public fights not just with Kant but with other thinkers, and he uses reviews cleverly — I really enjoy writing reviews, it's a jewel of a form, short but you can bring in your own opinion — purposefully choosing books either pro- or anti-slavery to elaborate his own view.

Andrea Wulf

Very much so. Among the young romantics who come together in Jena, there is one extraordinary woman, Caroline Schlegel, who was a very good friend of Forster's. She lived in Mainz during the establishment of the Mainz Republic, and when she later moves to Jena she brings his ideas with her — they talk about him, they read his writings. He's much admired, because he is really the stepping stone from the Enlightenment to the romantics. On the one hand he values observation and rational thought; on the other he underlines the importance of subjectivity, feelings, art and imagination, which become very important for the young romantics. He's almost the first stepping stone away from pure Enlightenment thinking towards what becomes full-blown Romanticism.

Andrea Wulf

It's a group of rebellious thinkers, philosophers and writers. There's Goethe; Schiller, the famous playwright who wrote The Robbers; Friedrich Schelling, a young philosopher who comes up with a philosophy of oneness, where we as humans are part of nature. Then the Schlegel brothers, literary critics, very unconventional, who take on the literary establishment — August Wilhelm Schlegel, the older one, is also a famous Shakespeare translator. On the periphery, later on, there's Hegel, and the poet Novalis.

Andrea Wulf

And there's the extraordinary woman — to give her full name, Caroline Michaelis Böhmer Schlegel Schelling. She carries the name of her father and of her three husbands, which tells you something about her character. She was the daughter of a famous German scholar, open-minded and wild and free-spirited. She married young, was widowed, went to Mainz, was imprisoned as a sympathiser with the French revolutionaries, and in prison discovered she was pregnant after a wild night with a nineteen-year-old French soldier — pretty outrageous behaviour. When she leaves prison she's treated as an outlaw, and the older Schlegel brother, August Wilhelm, comes to her rescue, marries her, gives her a new name and a new beginning, and they move to Jena. That's really the beginning of the Jena set.

Andrea Wulf

I forgot one very important one — Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher who puts the self at the centre of his philosophy. They all come together in the mid-1790s in this small town of 4,000 people, which most people outside Germany have never heard of, and it becomes the nexus of a new philosophy of Romanticism. In one day in Jena, with some luck, you would have seen more famous people than in a whole century in another town. They believe that working together — not each in their little study — will create a greater philosophy. They sit together in Caroline's house and work together.

Andrea Wulf

They are the very first to use the word Romanticism in its new, literary meaning. If you ask people what Romanticism is, you get so many different answers. Many think of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich — lone figures in moonlit forests. Others think the romantics were all against reason and celebrated irrational thinking. Others think of passionate declarations of love, or candlelit dinners. But for them Romanticism was something much more complex, unwieldy and dynamic. They basically said that everything is romantic poetry — from a piece of music to a painting, even a scientific experiment — because to romanticise means to unite humankind with nature, and to unite the arts and the sciences.

Andrea Wulf

That was always the thing I found so fascinating about them: this bringing together of the arts and sciences, which at that point were beginning to separate. Look back to someone like Leonardo da Vinci — interested in engineering, botany, sculpture, mathematics. But with the Enlightenment, and the sciences becoming more and more specialised, you get that separation between the arts and the sciences. The romantics are really trying to fight against this disenchantment of the world, this more materialistic world. They believe romantic poetry can bring these very different disciplines together and create something completely new.

Andrea Wulf

Mostly developing it. But they're also very young and contrary — part of being young is standing up against the literary and scientific establishment. It was part of the fun to take those stuffy older thinkers and say, we are doing this very differently. One important aspect for them was that it was quite ephemeral — not about coming up with a finished theory. Fichte, for example, would develop much of his philosophy of the self in front of his students. Instead of listening to the philosophy of Aristotle, they saw their professor developing something new and dynamic before their eyes, which was incredibly thrilling. Students flocked to Jena to see these young professors shouting about their new ideas from the lecterns, trying to change the world.

Andrea Wulf

Yes. We have to paddle back a little and think about the world they were brought up in. This is a world where most of Europe is held in the iron fist of absolutism, where your life is determined by your place of birth, the class you were born into, the ruler of the nation you live in — you don't have a lot of choice or freedom. And it's a world where thinkers believe there are absolute, God-given truths. Then philosophers come along and say the only certainty we have is that the world is experienced by the self. So there's a shift, an emphasis on the self, on the subjective view of the world.

Andrea Wulf

It's Fichte who takes ideas from Immanuel Kant and puts them in another framework. He says the self determines how we see the world — the self is the source of all reality. There's the self, and the non-self, which is the external world: animals, plants, nature. He says the self posits its own being, and through that powerful initial positing it also creates the non-self — the external world, not in itself, but in our mind. Everything we understand of the external world is shaped by our self, and what that does is give us free will.

Andrea Wulf

That is an incredibly powerful thing, and it happens just after the French Revolution. Without the French Revolution, Fichte would not have come up with this — his philosophy is sparked by its ideas. So you have a bunch of brilliant scientists, thinkers, philosophers and poets, all given this idea of free will and self-determination — the most empowering thing. Combined with the French Revolution exploding into Europe, no one is unaffected by this moment. It gives us a power we didn't have before, and it proves that a revolution is a revolution of ideas — that ideas, words, philosophy are more powerful than weapons and swords and kings and queens. It's almost impossible for us to imagine what that must have felt like.

Andrea Wulf

Yes. I've been talking about this weird division between the arts and the sciences for a long time, and I find it hard to understand why it's still with us. When I look at education, six-year-olds get put into boxes — you are so mathematical and logical, you are so artistic and creative — and that's it, you're going to be a scientist, you're going to be an artist. When you think it really comes together and works together: curiosity, imagination, part of both the arts and the sciences. So that experiment pretty much failed.

Andrea Wulf

And the self has remained, for better or worse, at centre stage of our lives. We still have this tension between free will and self-determination on the one side, and not being selfish and narcissistic on the other. It's a balancing act that began back then and which we are still walking. Underpinning it are two crucial questions: who am I as an individual, and who am I as a member of a society? How can I live a life in which I fulfil my dreams and capabilities while being a morally good person within the restraints of society? It's a negotiation we still do. We undoubtedly live in a society obsessed with the self — there's a whole generation called the Me Generation — but we've forgotten where this came from. When Fichte put the self at the centre of his philosophy, he never wanted a narcissistic celebration of the self. He always said that freedom comes with moral duty — our freedom extends only as far as we don't impinge on someone else's. It gives us the power of choice about how to be and how to act; it is not about being selfish. We've just gone down the selfish route a little too much.

Andrea Wulf

It's the same with the arts and sciences — we've divided them and decided these are two different paths that won't overlap. But you are a scientist; all the scientists I know say that imagination and curiosity are incredibly important in their work. Most became scientists because they felt a wonder of nature as a child or teenager and wanted to understand it — but it's something we don't really talk about in the sciences. It's almost peer-reviewed out of you.

Andrea Wulf

Exactly. How do we reconcile our personal liberties with the demands of a society? That's a negotiation we have to deal with on a daily basis.

Andrea Wulf

Yes — that's why it's a trilogy. He's part of the Jena group, not the inner circle but definitely the outer circle. He comes to Jena for the first time in 1794, because his brother Wilhelm von Humboldt lives there, and he meets the group, and in particular Goethe. The friendship between Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt is important for both. When Humboldt arrives in 1794 he's in his twenties, a very bright, very much Enlightenment scientist who believes in reason, rational thought, observation, experiments, his instruments. And Goethe is Germany's most famous poet, but also a scientist — a great example of the arts and sciences coming together. When he meets Humboldt, Goethe's natural-history thinking, which had been in hibernation, is like rain falling on a dry patch of earth, sprouting all over. These two men really like each other. They experiment together, dissect frogs and mice, go to lectures, do experiments with light and optics and botany, watch caterpillars hatch.

Andrea Wulf

But at the same time it's Goethe who inspires Humboldt to move a little away from very objective science. He basically says: it is the eye through which you see the world, but it is your eye, so this shapes the way you see the world. He gives Humboldt a slightly stronger emphasis on subjectivity, and Humboldt himself says that Goethe has given him new organs to see the world — because the Jena set has this greater emphasis on the self. When Humboldt sets off on his five-year exploration of South America, he sees this new world through the new eyes Goethe has given him. He carries 42 scientific instruments, each wrapped individually; he's obsessed with measurement, climbs volcanoes and sets up his instruments every few hundred yards. But — and this is important — he's not just interested in empirical data. He always says that in order to truly understand nature, you also have to feel it. It's a bit like Humphry Davy, whose journals describe his observations of an experiment on one page and his feelings on the other. Humboldt wants to inspire a sense of wonder in nature.

Andrea Wulf

So for me Humboldt is inspired first by Georg Forster — Humboldt always said Forster inspired him to go on his own exploration, and guided his ways of thinking about nature and politics — and then by the Jena set. Humboldt is the bridge between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. On the one hand you have Isaac Newton, who says rainbows are created by light refracting through raindrops; on the other, romantic poets such as John Keats, who says Newton has destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by sending the light through a prism. Humboldt does both — he gives us the bond between the subjective and the objective, the emotional and the rational. He's that bridge between the arts and the sciences.

Andrea Wulf

Yes. Because Humboldt sees nature as an interconnected whole, he also sees the dangers of destroying it. As he travels through South America, he warns about the destruction of forests, monoculture, irrigation — because although you think he's always in the wilderness, he's not; these are the Spanish colonies, and he sees plantations that have entirely destroyed forests. He's the first to explain the fundamental functions of the forest for the ecosystem — its ability to store water, to enrich the atmosphere with moisture, to protect against soil erosion. When he comes back he talks about harmful, human-induced climate change, in 1800. And in 1832 he writes a paragraph saying irrigation and deforestation are terrible, but what's really bad are the gases coming out of the industrial centres. He didn't understand CO2 yet, but he understood this was not good for the environment. I've always called him the forgotten father of environmentalism. He inspires people like John Muir and George Perkins Marsh, who become more politically active. Humboldt doesn't do that himself, but because he sees nature as a web of life, he understands. He sees at the Venezuelan coast how ruthless pearl-fishing has completely destroyed the oyster stock — he sees the devastating effects of humankind's intervention in nature.

Andrea Wulf

Yes, because he was very much guided by Forster's ideas — they were friends, Forster was his mentor, fifteen years older, and they travelled together through Europe. As Humboldt travels through South America, he sees again and again how the colonists and missionaries treat the indigenous people. He sees slavery; one of the first things he sees on arriving in South America is a slave market, and he says that made him a lifelong abolitionist. But the interesting thing about both of them is that they never see nature and humans as separate things — we're all part of one thing. Humboldt talks about how one breath of life is poured over plants, animals, rocks, humans, mountains, the whole planet — one breath of life, because we are all part of this one beautiful planet that is ours. We've just messed it up really badly.

Andrea Wulf

It's always a combination. Humboldt comes from a Prussian aristocratic family — a very different background from Forster — but he feels absolutely stifled by Prussian society and his upbringing. One reason is that, as most historians including me think, he was gay. So he too is an outsider in a certain respect, and finds a certain freedom when he travels, away from German society. It's the same for Forster — always in transit. Humboldt is always in transit; he calls himself a citizen of the world. He lives for many years in Paris, then moves back to Germany. There's a fluidity about where they belong which is very important.

Andrea Wulf

I do think that travelling — and I don't mean travelling like the Instagram generation, going to a spot to photograph what everyone has already photographed — I mean travelling to discover, and not in a colonial way. You can also travel in your mind. You have to have the open-mindedness to travel to other places, other concepts, other ideas, to allow yourself to be challenged by others. I find it very difficult that you can't criticise people any more. I really like a fiery discussion — I don't have to agree with someone; that, for me, is travelling in my mind. They were all very willing to do that, didn't feel the need to conform, because there was already something different in their lives — I don't need to conform, because I'm anyway not like everybody else. It's difficult in hindsight to say whether it's their upbringing, or whether they were just different — there are people who just are different. But I like to believe it has a lot to do with being willing to step out of your comfort zone, intellectually but also physically.

Andrea Wulf

I think it's slightly less common, but it can still happen a little. I'm a member of a writers' club in London, and I had my book launch yesterday, and it was a bunch of wonderful, very different writers and friends of writers, and it felt like a community. We've both been to the Santa Fe Institute — that feels like a community. So there are still these places. And in hindsight, when we look back at this time, we may see them more clearly. I'm pretty sure people who lived in the 18th century were not really aware they were doing something extraordinary, or that the group they were hanging out with was extraordinary. So maybe it's happening right now, under our noses, but we just don't know, because we don't have the distance yet.

Andrea Wulf

I know. For the Jena set in particular, being together — drinking together, eating together, reciting poems together — was very much part of it. But not to end on a down: there is something really remarkable in that I can speak to you. I'm sitting in London, you're in America, and we can have a conversation. That's beautiful. There are nice things about it too — though it would be nicer if we could now go and have a meal and continue talking.

Andrea Wulf

Exactly. We'll do that.

Andrea Wulf

Thank you for having me.