Simply after the revolutionary work he recounted in Awakenings, Oliver Sacks wrote in a be aware to the music therapist at Beth Abraham Hospital: “Each illness is a music downside; each remedy is a musical answer.” He was quoting Novalis — the younger German poet and thinker who, whereas working in a salt mine and learning arithmetic, geology, physics, and biology, was composing tortured and transcendent poems impressed by the demise of his teenage beloved.
Novalis is without doubt one of the characters who animate Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (public library) — the story of a circle associates and lovers in late-eighteenth-century Germany who refined their concepts in ricochet — concepts that formed our current understanding of artwork and nature, thoughts and actuality, the world and ourselves as operate and functionary of it.
After the formidable Germaine de Staël popularized their concepts outdoors Germany, the tendrils of their affect went on to the touch Coleridge and Emerson, Whitman and Joyce, sinking into the very soul of the trendy world and its self-regard.
Having beforehand written about Alexander von Humboldt and the “invention” of nature — within the sense of the start of its fashionable conception — Wulf now chronicles the “invention” of the trendy self, the Ich, within the mental kiln of the identical time and place, revealing the 2 to be inseparably associated, reminding us that we are able to’t perceive nature if we don’t perceive ourselves or look after one with out caring for the opposite.
She calls them the Jena set, after the city in Duchy of Saxe-Weimar the place they constellated their transportable universe of radicalism, and writes:
They had been rebellious and felt invincible. Their lives grew to become the playground of this new philosophy. And the story of their tiptoeing between the facility of free will and the hazard of turning into self-absorbed is important on a common stage. The Ich, for higher or worse, has remained centre stage ever since. The French revolutionaries modified the political panorama of Europe, however the Jena Set incited a revolution of the thoughts. The liberation of the Ich from the straitjacket of a divinely organised universe is the muse of our considering in the present day. It gave us probably the most thrilling of all powers: free will.
In opposition to the grain of their time, they exercised their free will in open marriages and long-term monogamies with out marriage. With names that sounded alike and mental passions that fired alike, they grew to become a form of hive thoughts fixated on celebrating the self and got down to “symphilosophize” — a time period they invented for the mental symbiosis and symphonic artistic collaboration on the coronary heart of their life. Wulf writes:
Taken collectively, the data out there within the minds of those that lived in Jena was like an excellent residing encyclopaedia protecting an unlimited vary of topics from antiquity to comparative anatomy, from electrical energy to Spanish literature, from philosophy to poetry, from historical past to botany.
Amongst them, in fact, had been Goethe and Schiller, whose intergenerational friendship was the mental and inventive anchor of each of their lives. Humboldt flits out and in of the scene, together with his experiments in galvanism and his passionate devotion to the online of life. However there are additionally central characters now practically forgotten — the influential brothers August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, who believed that they had been “all a part of the identical household of magnificent outlaws” and stood towards Rousseau of their conviction that each girls and boys deserved a rigorous schooling; the younger Friedrich Schelling, who at age eleven had knowledgeable his lecturers that they’d nothing else to show him and had turn out to be the youngest professor appointed on the College of Jena at twenty-three, who “radiated infinity,” and who believed that “thoughts is invisible nature, whereas nature is seen thoughts” and instructed his college students:
So long as I actually am similar with nature, I perceive what residing nature is in addition to I perceive myself.
There was Novalis, who “regarded the atypical with marvel” and “slept little and labored exhausting” — at his poetry and within the salt mines — and believed that we and the world are an built-in system, every indispensable to the opposite, in order that our activity is to “catch sight of ourselves as a component within the system.” Wulf writes:
His notebooks are stuffed with greater than a thousand sections which analyse, synthesise and join every part from music to physics, poetry to chemistry and philosophy to arithmetic. And he did so with a fluidity and lightness that reveals a thoughts vast open to every part. Novalis started to assemble his concepts and materials beneath typical headings, comparable to archaeology, faith, nature, politics, drugs, and so forth, but in addition beneath extra uncommon groupings, comparable to “idea of the longer term,” “musical physics,” “poetical physiology” and “idea of excitation.”
It was Novalis who supplied the closest factor they needed to a founding credo of Romanticism:
By giving the commonplace the next which means, by making the atypical look mysterious, by granting to what’s identified the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise.
However by far probably the most colourful character is Caroline Schlegel, who was to the German Romantics what Margaret Fuller was to the American Transcendentalists. Vivacious, opinionated, educated far past the gendered limits of her time, Caroline hung out in jail for her revolutionary leanings, had a child by a younger Napoleonic soldier after a fiery one-night stand, and was animated by what she referred to as “a agency, nearly instinctive want for independence.” She besotted each Schlegel brothers, married one in what was at base an amicable friendship, and took the younger Schelling as a lover, turning into the good love and muse of his life. The slight squint of her blue eyes solid the mesmerizing everybody into the “magic circle” of the group. “We’ve to construct a poetic world out of ourselves,” Novalis instructed her as he declared her the beating coronary heart of that world.
All of them believed within the energy of language. “You haven’t simply to hold out revolutions,” Friedrich Schlegel wrote, “you must communicate them too.” Nobody spoke them extra revolutionarily than the younger Schelling, whose lectures enchanted a era of thinkers with an entire new approach of seeing the world — his college students referred to as it his “poetry of the universe.” Wulf writes:
For millennia, thinkers had turned to their gods to know their place and function within the unknowable divine plan. Then, within the late seventeenth century, a scientific revolution started to light up the world. Scientists had peered by way of microscopes into the trivialities of life or lifted new telescopes to the skies to find Earth’s place within the universe. They’d dissected human hearts to find out how the physique functioned and categorised vegetation, animals and minerals in neat classes to impose order on the world by which they lived. They’d calculated the space between the Solar and Earth, described how blood circulated by way of the physique, and sailed to Australia, a “new” continent some ten thousand miles away on the opposite aspect of the world. They’d found oxygen and used arithmetic to outline the legal guidelines of planetary movement and gravity.
The Enlightenment had actually enlightened. However this new rational strategy had additionally created a sure distancing from nature and excluded the roles of feeling and sweetness. Nature had turn out to be one thing that was investigated from a so-called goal perspective. Gentle, for instance, was not appreciated for its kaleidoscopic play of iridescent colors, Novalis stated, however for its refraction and “mathematical obedience”: therefore its elevation to the time period “Enlightenment” itself. This was why Schelling’s college students fell for his or her younger professor. He reunited what the scientific revolution had separated: nature and humankind. Regardless of how a lot scientists noticed, calculated and experimented, there was one thing emotional, one thing visceral and maybe inexplicable about humanity’s connection to nature. Nevertheless we really feel it, nature can soothe, heal or just fill us with pleasure. Schelling gave us the philosophical rationalization.
And by doing so, his philosophy of oneness grew to become the heartbeat of Romanticism.
In consonance with William Blake’s lifelong devotion to turning art into a lens on the universe, the Jena set understood that as a result of we’re a part of nature, the merchandise of our artistic creativeness are how nature examines itself, comprehends itself, and coheres. Wulf considers how Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism “grew to become the philosophical underpinning of Romanticism”:
An art work — a portray, a sculpture, a poem — was subsequently the expression of the union between the self and nature. No matter an artist produced was created by nature by way of her or him. Nature — the unconscious product of the self — and the aware self got here collectively within the inventive creation. Artwork was subsequently important to be able to make sense of the world, Schelling declared. Neither rational thought nor probably the most correct scientific devices held the important thing to understanding the world. Artwork was the finite or concrete illustration of the infinite. Artwork opened “the holiest of holies,” Schelling wrote. It was the revelation of the universe by way of the artistic manufacturing of an artist.
These had been concepts all the Jena set shared. Friedrich Schlegel proclaimed that “all artwork ought to turn out to be science and all science artwork.” Novalis insisted that “science in its perfected type should be poetic” and that “laboratories will likely be temples.” Caroline Schlegel prophesied that “when the world goes up in flames like a scrap of paper, artistic endeavors would be the final residing sparks.”
Artworks solely ever spring from the actual vantage level of a selected genuine self — an Ich — and that is the enduring legacy of the primary Romantics.
However all nice concepts, if adopted not critically however cultishly, run the chance of metastasizing into dogmas. In the present day, we live with one such metastasis of Romanticism in our staggering epidemic of selfing — relatively than connecting us to one another and the residing world as kindred components in a system, the infected Ich has folded us unto ourselves: residing proteins of ego. It’s by returning to the unique philosophy, earlier than its mutation, that we stand an opportunity of reclaiming the self as a crucible of creativity and a portal of connection to nature.
Wulf reclaims the legacy of the Romantics:
Life is a negotiation between our rights as a person and our function as a member of a group, together with our obligations in direction of future generations who will inhabit this planet. How can we stay a significant life by which we decide the course of our path whereas additionally being a morally good individual? How will we reconcile private liberty with the calls for of society? Are we egocentric? Are we pursuing our goals? Are we treading on another person’s liberty? Are we wanting solely after ourselves? Or others? Or each? We’ve entered a social contract with one another and with our governments, agreeing to abide by legal guidelines and conventions — but this solely works if we’re free and belief each other on the identical time.
The Jena Set believed that now we have to take heed to our selves — to be “egocentric” within the sense of being conscious of and in command of our personal being and free will.
[…]
The “Artwork of being Egocentric,” within the context of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, additionally means understanding one’s place on this nice interconnected residing organism that’s nature. “Since we discover nature within the self,” certainly one of Schelling’s college students concluded, “we should additionally discover the self in nature.” Being egocentric in that sense means comprehending and recognising the idea of unity with the universe. Not harming the planet subsequently means not harming your self.
With an eye fixed to Novalis’s insistence that “with out excellent self-understanding we’ll by no means study actually to know others,” she provides:
Provided that we’re totally conscious of ourselves — of our wants, our needs, and of our ideas — can we actually embrace the opposite. This emphasis on the Ich means being “self conscious” because the prerequisite for “being conscious and anxious for the opposite.” Solely by way of self-awareness can we really feel empathy with others. Solely by way of self-reflection can we query our behaviour in direction of others. Self-examination in that sense is for the larger good — for us, for our wider group, for society generally and for our planet.
Complement Magnificent Rebels with poet, painter, and thinker Etel Adnan — a modern-day Romantic, writing in her nineties — on the self and the universe, then revisit the Schelling-influenced Emerson on how to trust yourself and Whitman’s Humboldt-inspired poem “Kosmos.”
