Jena and the Invention of the Self

Jena 1779

The “story” — for it is a story that will be told — opens with a scene in the parlor of a house in the university town of Jena. The residents have gathered of an evening, after a day filled with poetic and other intellectual production, to discuss projects on which they have been working in seclusion in their rooms during the day. It is late in the year 1799, and on this evening tea, cheese, pickled herring, and potatoes are the fare, and Dante is on the agenda for discussion. Another evening might offer criticism of a long poem about Nature, or the progress on a translation of a play by Shakespeare. The participants include August Wilhelm Schlegel, his wife Caroline and his brother Friedrich, Friedrich’s lover Dorothea Veit (daughter of renowned philosopher Moses Mendelssohn), Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, and Friedrich Schelling. On other evenings Wilhelm von Humboldt and his brother Alexander von Humboldt might make an appearance, not to forget Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Significantly missing is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who had been forced earlier in the year to resign his position at the university for a pamphlet he wrote that suggested he approved of atheism.

We are in Jena, as I said, a decade after the French Revolution, and the political events it unleashed had been prefaced by the works of philosophers, who celebrated the potential of individuals to conceptualize the world on their own. No more monarchs telling you what to think, nor husbands or fathers, no more marriage for that matter if you didn’t feel like it. Freedom of the individual and self-determination were now the plan going forward. In 1799, Napoleon was Consul, and all believed that the Revolution was over, and the ancient regime a thing of the past. “Time has been divided into a before and an after.” Those talking about Dante on that evening in Jena were living that new life.

The parlor scene described above opens a small book about which I wrote a short review back in 2022 for the TLS: Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits, by Peter Neumann. (It appeared in German as Jena 1800. Die Republik der freien Geister in 2018, and in English translation by Shelley Frisch in 2021.) It was hard to do the book complete justice in a short review, but the appearance in 2022 of another book that also focuses on the Jena set and its “free spirits” has led me to consider here both books in tandem. This is Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf. (Wulf is also the author of The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt's New World, concerning Humboldt's five-year journey to South America.). The publisher of Wulf's new bestseller (Penguin Random House) kindly sent me a copy to review on my Goethe blog.

Schiller and Goethe in Jena

After all, Goethe is also an important player in both books. He was living in Weimar at the time, with Christiane Vulpius, and he often mounted his horse and traveled to Jena, which was within the Saxe-Weimar principality. This was after getting to know Schiller better in 1794, when Goethe was at a low point in his literary production, and Schiller was also in a bit of slump. I am not sure whether Wulf was attempting to make the contrast, but the story of the friendship, lasting little more than a decade — Schiller died in 1804 — produced enduring works on the part of each and a profitable new direction in their lives. It was Schiller, whom Wulf calls “the unsung hero of the Jena set,” who brought the parlor residents together, first inviting August Wilhelm Schlegel to move to Jena and contribute to his literary journal Horen. Schlegel and Caroline took up lodging in Jena in 1796, and were soon followed by Friedrich, who, despite his vast literary knowledge and acumen, seems to have been unable to hold down a job.

While the authors of these two books cover the same period, from 1794 to 1806, their approaches are very different. Neumann is himself a poet and is “scenic” throughout: we learn, for instance, of bedbug infestations in the room that Fichte rents in Berlin after being forced to leave Jena. After such a chapter opening, Neumann then goes back and forth in time in the person's life before bringing us back to the present moment. Wulf proceeds chronologically, amassing an impressive amount of research. Both books end with the Battle of Jena in 1806 and the sight of a barefoot Hegel observing Napoleon’s march through the town: French troops have appropriated his shoes on their raids of Jena’s houses and cupboards. It is a very complicated story that Neumann and Wolf tell.

"Louche devotees of free love and free thinking"

Wulf says of the Jena set that it “changed our world.” Jena itself seems in some respects to have been a sleepy town: no public theater and opera performances there. And yet it was the “intellectual and cultural capital” of Germany in these years, because of the university: Schiller, August Schlegel, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel drew hundreds of students to their lectures, who, along with dueling and breaking the windows of the houses of professors they disapproved of, were reveling in the new age of freedom of thought. So, there are two stories here. One concerns a new philosophy, the beginnings of what has been called German Idealism, which had its roots in the university in Jena. (BTW, there were a couple of dozens universities at this time in Germany lands, and only two in England.) The other is about the luminaries in the Jena circle, the people who might be said to be living out, avant la lettre, the new philosophy. They were people who you might say knew God and the world. The caption on the above illustration of the luminaries comes from a New Yorker review of Wulf's book entitled “Ego Trip: The early Romantics and their troublesome legacy.”

“Flux” was the theme of my TLS review, a period in which all the old certainties were giving way. The immediate impulse for a radical change in thinking about those certainties was the French Revolution of 1789, but Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which appeared in 1781, had already prefaced the move away from traditional metaphysical explanations of God and the world. Two philosophers following in this “critical tradition” were Fichte and Schelling, both of whom are featured players in the two books. Fichte (“regarded as Immanuel Kant’s intellectual heir” per Neuman) came to the university in Jena in 1794. He was recommended for his academic position by none other than Goethe. Schelling didn’t arrive until 1798, but he was likewise Goethe’s beneficiary in receiving a position at the university.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte is as impenetrable a thinker as is Kant, but what he formulated was an “idea” that would become a “reality.” According to Fichte, the “I” founds the external world. He thereby inaugurated the notion of self-consciousness, self-determination, and the self’s relationship to all the other selves in the surrounding world. Fichte was an “ideas” person, so he may not have been aware of what we now know, namely, that the growth of commerce and the rise of technology had begun already by the 19th century to free people from traditional paths of life. Men were the first not to have to follow in the footsteps of their fathers. Fichte himself, for instance, was the son of a village ribbon weaver, who through good fortune received an education that eventually led him to the university and his philosophical career. No longer bound by class identities, one's notion of one's “self” naturally changed. So it is that after two-plus centuries of material progress there are people today who envision liberation even from genetic restraints. We believe that we can be “self”-determined if we choose. It was the “starting point” from which the Jena set developed what became known as “Romanticism.”

Influenced by the new philosophy, the Schlegels and the Humboldts and others had a wide reach. August and Friedrich Schlegel published a journal, Athenaeum, which was outrightly provocative and disputatious, dedicated to freedom of thought and word. The political revolution in France may have failed, but now one had time to think about aesthetics and to practice self-determination. August Schlegel would go on to spend nearly a dozen years traveling with Madame de Stael, assisting her in the writing of her famous book Germany, which, in its English translation, disseminated the ideas of the Jena circle, in particular the concept of the “unity of humankind and nature, which was at the core of 'Romanticism.'” It would influence such writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. After Napoleon’s exile in 1814 and the continent began again to be peaceful, the English began their travels to Germany. Not mentioned in either book is George Eliot, who “lived openly” (another Jena refinement) as soulmate with George Lewis. They traveled to Germany together in 1854, and Lewis later produced his Life of Goethe (1875).

Napoleon before Jena, 1806, by Ernest Messonier

While reading Wulf’s account in particular, I could not help thinking of the kind of excitement of the Boomer generation (my own), which believed it had discovered the truth about the world and was wildly and excitedly transmitting it. Speech was heavily censored in the 18th and 19th centuries, because of which Fichte lost his position as professor in Jena, but free speech, the center of his philosophy, lives on. Wulf writes that Fichte did not intend for his ideas to be “a narcissistic celebration of the self.” Like the philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment and, later of “true socialism” (see my blog post on this subject), he believed that free individuals would be moral individuals and make the world better for everyone. But nothing stays the same. Strikingly, the Jena figures didn’t like free speech when it concerned criticism by others of their own work. But they welcomed the devastation of Jena in 1806, as Wulf writes, because it meant the “end of History.” Hegel asserted that Napoleon’s victories culminated in the end of “feudal system” and the emergence of democracy and universal right to freedom. So many Napoleon's since then, and we are still waiting for that great emancipation.

BTW, re the image of Goethe and Schiller walking across the Jena town square: Wulf writes that Goethe was no longer the slender youth of the writer of The Sorrows of Young Werther at the time of his visits to Jena. Indeed, he was quite corpulent, enjoying the home cooking of Christiane Vulpius. For Goethe at home in Weimar in 1799, see my review of Charles Lewinsky's hilarious novel Rauch und Schall, which appeared in a recent issue of TLS.

Image credits: History Today; History Wall Charts; Javi Aznarez;

Alexander von Humboldt (and a little Goethe)

 

Humboldt's Naturgemälde

Alexander von Humboldt has attracted some interest in recent years. (In what follows, I am assuming  that readers have heard of Humboldt’s famous five-year South American expedition, but, if not, I recommend the Britannica link.) First, in 2006, there was Daniel Kehlmann’s delightful novel Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt), in which Humboldt shared the stage with the mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss. It was followed in 2015 by The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf, an in-depth biography that offers a  “global view” of Humboldt and his scientific achievements. As Wulf writes early on, the individual disciplines we recognize today as “science” — chemistry, physics, astronomy, and so on — were taking on distinct form by the end of the 18th century, breaking away from natural philosophy, which subsumed natural phenomena within a metaphysical framework. Humboldt was an experimentalist par excellence (as Wulf writes, “a man who discarded a life of privilege to learn how the world works”), but was not content to examine natural phenomena in isolation (think of Linneus’s neat classification of plants), but sought to study them within larger relationships in which they were embedded. Humboldt’s conception is graphically on view in his famous Naturgemälde der Anden, a depiction of the volcanoes Chimborazo and Cotopaxi in cross section, with detailed information about plant geography. (Click on the image above to enlarge.) The illustration was published in The Geography of Plants, 1807, in a large format. Wulf also trace Humboldt’s influence on later generations, especially writers and others who are concerned with the effects of human habitation of the Earth  (e.g., Thoreau and Ernst Haeckel), including subjects like deforestation and climate change.

A third book on Humboldt, by Maren Meinhardt, appeared in 2018 -- A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things -- which I discussed briefly in a post several years ago. Meinhardt was probably in the process of writing her own book on Humboldt in 2015, as can be seen by a long article she published in the magazine Guernica that year. (Very readable, much to be recommended.) She must have felt blind sided by the appearance of Wolf’s book, but she has produced a very different kind of study. It is a “life,” and not, as in Wulf, “a global Humboldt.” One learns more about the man close up. Meinhardt’s notes, for instance, which include the bibliographic references, are only thirty pages (in contrast to Wulf’s walloping 120 pages), and are drawn for the most part from contemporary documents, including correspondence.

Humboldt and Bonpland at Mt. Chimborazo, Ecuador

In places this biography is uncomfortable reading. Humboldt’s obsessive quests for knowledge of the natural world seemed reflected in several relationships, apparently non-sexual, with various men. Meinhardt treats these, quoting from effusive letters, which may suggest homosexuality, but, interestingly, there was one man whom he would seem to have known closest, Aimé Bonpland, and with whom he inhabited the closest quarters during their American travels, but with whom apparently no sexual relationship occurred. Meinhardt, and Wulf to some extent, deals with the Humboldt mother-son relationship, which seems to have had little room for close emotional contact. In Meinhardt, however, one learns that Humboldt’s desire to understand natural phenomena in terms of relationships also extended to his views of those between humans.

Which brings me to Goethe, who plays a major role in both books. In fact, already the second chapter of Wulf’s book is entitled “Imagination and Nature: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Humboldt.” It is a very thorough discussion of Goethe’s scientific pursuits, which the relationship with Humboldt revivified on their first meeting in Jena in 1794. Wulf’s wealth of bibliographic sources allows her a closer look at their get togethers. (For instance, it was freezing cold in Jena in December of that year: “The frozen Rhine became a thoroughfare for French troops on their warpath through Europe.”) It was a period when Goethe’s scientific ideas found little resonance among contemporaries, including Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) or his essays on optics (Beiträge zur Optik, 1791), a preface to his theory of colors. Meeting Humboldt, a “sparring partner,” caused him to start working on his scientific studies more intensely. We also learn that the young Goethe who had stormed Europe with his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was now corpulent, “with a double chin and a stomach cruelly described by one acquaintance as ‘that of a woman in the last stages of pregnancy.’ His looks had gone — his beautiful eyes had disappeared into the ‘fat of his cheeks’ and many remarked that he was no longer a dashing ‘Apollo.’”

Chemical attractions in Elective Affinities

So be it. It is only in chapter 9 that Goethe gets his own chapter in Meinhardt, the title of which is “Chemical Attractions.” While discussing the coming together of Humboldt and Goethe and its electrifying effect on Goethe’s enthusiasm for scientific matters (Humboldt had by 1794, writes Meinhardt, “developed an almost obsessive interest in the idea of animal electricity, generally referred to as ‘galvanism’”), she focuses on the literary effect, namely, Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, in which the relationships between natural phenomena offer a model for those chemical and human relationships portrayed in the novel. As Meinhardt writes: “Goethe puts his characters in the positions of chemical substances in the course of an experiment.” Further, “the novel is strongly preoccupied with the equilibrium that needs to be maintained,” but that, in the case of the relationship between Eduard and Charlotte, is disturbed by new elements. “Chemistry, following its inevitable course, quickly goes beyond the experimental setting and draws the characters into a destructive maelstrom.” Wulf mentions the novel in her study, but only in passing. Similarly, Meinhardt’s focus on the milieu of the first meeting of Humboldt and Goethe brought out something I had not known, namely, the role Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander’s brother, played in “engineering” the course of events that led to the fabled encounter between Schiller and Goethe, which was followed by dinner at the home of Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt in Jena in July of 1794. The rest is literary history.

Another chapter in which Goethe plays a role takes place after Humboldt’s famous American tour, when he and a group of friends, despite the warlike conditions in Europe, plan a trip to Italy in 1797. It is entitled “Goethe’s Caravan,” and at some point, according to Meinhardt, Goethe actually considered joining the group. The group venture “went south,” so to speak, not to Italy, but by now, Humboldt’s renown as a scientist “smoothed his path wherever he went.” His brother Wilhelm and Caroline did go to Italy, however, where they were neighbors with the German-Danish writer Friederike Brun, about whom I wrote a blog post back in 2012 in connection with “Goethe in Venice” and have also written an essay on Brun that appeared in this volume.

Like Fuseli (see previous post), Humboldt doesn’t inhabit a single world, escapes easy classification. He was “one of the most captivating and inspiring men of his time” (writes Wulf) and the most famous scientist of his day. The 100th anniversary of his birth, September 1869, was celebrated all over the world. Imagine that the streets of downtown New York City were lined with flags, and posters with his picture appeared on building fronts. Today, of course, as Wulf writes, very few outside of academia have heard of him, although that is probably only true in North America and the European world. Humboldt's name is everywhere in Latin America and in several African countires. According to the Alexander Humboldt Foundation, mountain peaks, bodies of waters, and entire regions bear his name, including the Humboldt Current.

Image credit:  Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten / Hermann Buresch; Sofatutor