We all of us have a philosophy, whether we know it or not. It’s the way we face life, dour or hopeful, cynical or romantic. It’s our raft of preconceptions – and this excellent book explores where these ideas come from.
My own life philosophy takes in nature, science, art, finding a balance between cleverness and awareness, And exploring. These themes came to the fore at the time of the French Revolution in the small east German university town of Jena.
Andrea Wulf’s book chronicles the lives, loves and ideas of the Jena set, beginning with Goethe and Schiller. Liberal intellectuals in Germany were ignited by the triumph of the French revolutionaries. It opened up a whole new prospect of human freedom, independent of the dictats of a local prince, king or emperor.
Next to arrive in town was the boorish, self-made but brilliant philosopher Johanne Fichte. Hundreds of students queued to pay the fees for his lectures. In them he expounded his liberating theory of the Ich, the aware-self, which alone creates all the reality we experience. It offered a new version of free will.
Other key members of the group were Schiller’s friends, the polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt and his wife Caroline. Wilhelm’s  brother Alexander von Humboldt would become internationally celebrated as a botanist and world explorer, who wrote about his discoveries in a poetic and imaginative style.
Then there was August Wilhelm Schlegel and his wife Caroline. Together they translated the works of Shakespeare into highly acclaimed German verse editions. A book by August actually helped to make Shakespeare fashionable and acceptable again in England.
There was the young idealist poet Novalis, who gave up his will to live after the death of his very young fiancée.  He eventually recovered to write the famous poetic sequence Hymns to the Night.
August Schlegel’s talented but disruptive younger brother Friedrich began a literary feud with Schiller. He launched a rival literary magazine in which he wrote disconnected but brilliant fragments, anticipating modernism by a century. It was an aesthetic of finding truth in chaos.
For me the climax comes in the Naturphilosophie of the mining engineer and philosopher Friedrich Schelling. All of these thinkers had been looking for a way to embrace the idealism of the French Revolution without the excesses of the Reign of Terror – or the war and despotism that followed.
They wanted to unite reason and the emotions, they wanted to explore the wonders of science and nature, and they believed that imagination, art and poetry were the key to unifying and balancing these things. And several of them also wanted sexual freedom, to run their lives in their own way, without being limited by religion and social rules. Â
Schelling, whose lectures came to eclipse Fichte, argued that human beings are themselves a product of Nature. So when people produce art to make sense of their world – it is actually nature which speaks through them. It is a unified vision which also resolves the endless historic feud between the idealists and materialists.
The university town of Jena was smashed in the autumn of 1806, when Napoleon declared war on Prussia and secured a crushing but bloody victory nearby. The university never recovered.
But the influence of the passionate ideas of the Jena set can be traced through Coleridge and the English romantics, Madame de Stael, Thomas Carlyle, and in America Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Finally these ideas were translated into ground-breaking free verse by the self-educated genius Walt Whitman. Another reminder that you can’t separate the philosophy from the person who creates it and chooses to endow it with belief.
https://www.johnmurraypress.co.uk/?s=magnificent+rebels
SB