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A Philosophy of Self Meets World
Andrea Wulf on the Jena collective’s emphasis on self-determination
Andrea Wulf wrote The Invention of Nature (which I previously read) about Alexander von Humboldt, and during her research for that, she came up with another book project: Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (Knopf, 2022).
Around 1800, Berlin was a small city with “literary salons, a couple of renowned theatres and a thriving publishing industry” but no university. A group of philosophers and artists “intoxicated by the French Revolution,” Wulf says, set up in Jena, about 150 miles to the southwest.
Jena had a university with about 800 students who socialized over “tea, coffee, beer and tobacco” and “a thriving local economy of bookbinders, printers, tailors and taverns.” Though there was no performance or gallery art, there was a culture of late-night arguments about literature, and, since 1785, the town had a pro-Kantian philosophy newspaper, the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. (Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804, was still breathing.)
Through introspection, the philosophers known as the Jena Romantics made a publication called the Athenaeum and explored questions like (as Wulf puts it): “Who are we? What can we know? How can we know? and What is nature?” Kings may have been…
