The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

 

Arrival
 
Now at last we’ve overcome all the obstacles in our path, and left them behind us too, on rails as smooth as the ones you’ve been on for so long. And alongside yours, too. I’m unspeakably happy . . . and this valley is already a dear friend.
 
Caroline Schlegel to Luise Gotter, 11 July 1796
 
1
 
‘A happy event’
 
Summer 1794: Goethe and Schillers
 
On 20 July 1794 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe heaved himself into the saddle and rode from his house in the centre of Weimar to Jena, where he planned to attend a botanical meeting of the recently founded Natural History Society. It was a hot summer that would soon turn into a glorious autumn – long sunbaked months during which pears, apples, sweet melons and apricots ripened four weeks early and the vineyards produced one of the century’s greatest vintages.
 
On the fifteen-mile ride from Weimar to Jena, Goethe passed farmers scything wheat in golden fields and great haystacks awaiting storage as winter fodder in the barns. After a couple of hours of riding through flat farmland, the countryside began to change. Little villages and hamlets snuggled into gentle dips, and then the forest closed in and the fields disappeared. The land became more hilly. Shellbearing limestone cliffs rose to the left, exposing the geological memory of the region when this part of Germany had been a landlocked sea some 240 million years ago. Just before he reached Jena, Goethe crossed the so called Snail, the steep hill named after the serpentine road that wound up to its top.
 
Then, finally, he saw Jena beneath him, nestled in a wide valley and held in the elbow of the Saale River with the jagged outline of the forested mountains behind. These were more hills than mountains, perhaps, but the views were spectacular – and the reason why Swiss students in Jena lovingly called the surrounding area ‘little Switzerland’.
 
Goethe was the Zeus of Germany’s literary circles. Born in Frankfurt in 1749 to a wealthy family, he had grown up amidst comfort and privilege. His maternal grandfather had been the mayor of Frankfurt and his paternal grandfather had made his wealth as a merchant and tailor. Goethe’s father didn’t have to work and had instead managed his fortunes, collected books and art, and educated his children. Though a lively and bright child, Goethe had not shown any excep-tional talents. He loved to draw, was proud of his immaculate handwriting and enjoyed the theatre. When the French had occupied Frankfurt in 1759 during the Seven Years War and their commander had been billeted at the Goethes’ house, young Goethe had made the best of it by learning French from the occupying forces.
 
He had studied law in Leipzig and worked as a lawyer, but also began to write. In the mid-1770s he had been thrust into the public eye with the publication of his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther – the story of a forlorn lover who commits suicide. Goethe’s protagonist is irrational, emotional and free. ‘I withdraw into myself and find a world there,’ Werther declares. The novel captured the sentimentality of the time and became the book of a generation. A huge international bestseller, it was so popular that countless men, including Carl August, the ruler of the small Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, had dressed like Werther – wearing a yellow waistcoat and breeches, blue tailcoat with brass buttons, brown boots and a round grey felt hat. Chinese manufacturers even produced Werther porcelain for the European market.
 
It was said that Werther had caused a wave of suicides, and forty years after its publication the British poet Lord Byron joked with Goethe that his protagonist ‘has put more individuals out of this world than Napoleon himself ’. The Sorrows of Young Werther had been Goethe’s most vivid contribution to the so-called Sturm und Drang – the Storm and Stress movement – which had elevated feelings above the rationalism of the Enlightenment. In this period, which had celebrated emotion in all its extremes, from passionate love to dark melancholy, from suicidal longings to frenzied delight, Goethe had become a literary superstar.
 
The eighteen-year-old Duke Carl August had been so enraptured by the novel that he had invited Goethe to live and work in the duchy in 1775. Goethe was twenty-six when he moved to Weimar; and he knew how to make an entry, arriving dressed in his Werther uniform. During those early years the poet and the young duke had roistered through the streets and taverns of the town. They had played pranks on unsuspecting locals and flirted with peasant girls. The duke loved to gallop across the fields and to sleep in hay barns or camp in the forest. There had been drunken brawls, theatrical declarations of love, naked swimming and nightly tree climbing – but those wild years were long gone and Goethe had turned his back on his Sturm und Drang phase.
 
In time, both poet and ruler calmed down, and Goethe had become part of the duchy’s government. The small state had just over a hundred thousand inhabitants – tiny in comparison to the five million people of nearby Prussia, or other powerful states such as Saxony, Bavaria or Württemberg. With a mostly agrarian economy – grain, fruit, wine, vegetable gardens as well as sheep and cattle – the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar had little trade and manufacturing, yet it maintained a bloated court of two thousand courtiers, officials and soldiers, all of whom had to be paid. The town of Weimar itself had a provincial feel. Most of the seven hundred and fifty houses had only one storey and such small windows that they felt gloomy and cramped inside. The streets were dirty, and there were only two businesses in the market square that sold goods which could be classed as luxury items – a perfumery and a textile shop. There wasn’t even a stagecoach station.
 
Goethe became Carl August’s confidant and his privy councillor – so trusted that it was rumoured that the duke didn’t decide anything without the poet’s advice. In time, Goethe took charge of the royal theatre and of rebuilding the burned down castle in Weimar, in addition to several other well-paid administrative positions, including the control of the duchy’s mines. He also worked closely with his colleague in the Weimar administration, minister Christian Gottlob Voigt. A diligent worker, Goethe was never idle – ‘I never smoked tobacco, never played chess, in short, I never did anything that would have wasted my time.’

 
In 1794, Goethe was forty-four and no longer the dashing Apollo of his youth. He had put on so much weight that his once beautiful eyes had disappeared into the flesh of his cheeks and one visitor compared him to ‘a woman in the last stages of pregnancy’. His nose was aquiline, and like so many contemporaries, his teeth were yellowed and crooked. He had a penchant for stripy and flowery long waist-coats, which he buttoned tightly over his round belly. Unlike the younger generation, who often wore fashionable loose fitting trousers, Goethe preferred breeches. He wore boots with turned-down tops and always his tricorne. He kept his hair coiffed and powdered, with two carefully pomaded curls over his ears and a long, stiff ponytail. Knowing that everybody was watching him, he always made sure to be properly dressed and groomed when he went out. Ennobled by the duke in 1782, he was now Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and lived in a large house in Weimar, where he often tried and failed to work amid a constant stream of strangers knocking on his door to gawp at the famous poet. He loathed these disruptions almost as much as he hated noise, in particular the rattling of his neighbour’s loom and the skittle alley in a nearby tavern.
 
Goethe might have turned his back on the Sturm und Drang era, but it seemed as if his creativity had done the same to him. For years he had failed to produce anything remarkable and his plays were no longer widely staged. He fussed over his writings for years. More than two decades earlier, he had begun to work on his drama Faust but only a few scenes had been published. He had rewritten and changed his tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris so many times – from prose to blank verse, back to prose, to its final version in classical iambic verse – that he called it his ‘problem child’. And though he was the director of the Weimar theatre, he preferred to stage popular plays by his contemporaries rather than his own.
 
Botany was now Goethe’s favourite subject, and the reason he often came to Jena. He was overseeing the construction of a new botanical garden and institute in Jena. Originally founded in 1548 as a medicinal garden, the university’s existing botanical garden had been used to train physicians, but Duke Carl August had asked Goethe to extend and move it to a new location, just north of the old town walls. Goethe enjoyed every aspect of the project because it united his deep love of nature and beauty with scientific rigour. He was looking forward to the meeting of the Natural History Society.
 
Excerpt from : Magnificent Rebels : The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

 

Penguin Random House

In the 1790s, an extraordinary group of friends led a revolution of the mind that still frames our way of being and living. This is their story.
 
Andrea Wulf’s unforgettable, Costa Prize winning The Invention of Nature transported us across the globe with one of the most extraordinary scientists who ever lived, Alexander Von Humboldt.
 
Now she is back with another story of German thinkers who changed the world – and whose ideas still matter profoundly to how we live today.
 
Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics. Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.
 
We’re still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet.
 
The first Romantics changed the world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.

Video of lecture, The Conduit, London. 
 
 
The Conduit, September 2, 2022

An interview with acclaimed biographer Andrea Wulf on her thrilling, and timely, story of a group of friends who changed the world. Andrea is in conversation with broadcaster Kirsty Lang.
 
In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends from the small German town of Jena changed the world. They were the first Romantics, and their ideas transformed society and shaped the way we lead our lives today.
 
In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf, the Costa Prize-winning author of The Invention of Nature, tells the riveting story of this revolutionary band of poets, novelists and philosophers. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. And through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heart-breaking grief and radical ideas, they launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thinkers of the time.
 
The lives of these Magnificent Rebels are as relevant today as ever as we, like they, walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community, and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet.
 
Andrea Wulf was born in India, moved to Germany as a child, and now lives in London. She is the award-winning author of five books. Her previous book, The Invention of Nature, was an international bestseller and won more than 10 awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Award 2016, Costa Biography Award 2015, the Inaugural James Wright Award for Nature Writing 2016 and the LA Times Book Prize 2016. Andrea has written for many newspapers including the Guardian, LA Times and New York Times. She was the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013 and a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. She appears regularly on TV and radio.
 
Kirsty Lang is a writer, broadcaster and former foreign correspondent. A familiar voice on BBC Radio 4 Kirsty has been a presenter on Front Row, The World Tonight and Last Word. This year she took over as the first female host of the fiendishly difficult Round Britain Quiz, the longest running game show in Europe. She is also Chair of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Newcastle and a regular contributor to the Sunday Times Culture magazine.
 
5 x 15 Stories, September 6, 2022. 

Website Andrea Wulf

A philosophy student attending a concert in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1797 could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. Seated in one row were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest writer of the age; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher of the moment, whose packed lectures attracted students from across Europe; Alexander von Humboldt, just setting out on a career that would transform our understanding of the natural world; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, then making a name for himself as a writer, critic and translator. It seemed extraordinary to see so many famous men lined up together.
 
Except that it wasn’t, not then in Jena, a quiet university town at the heart of Germany of only 800 houses and fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. For a brief period, as the 18th century gave way to the 19th, Jena had a claim to be the intellectual capital of Europe. The nation’s finest minds were gathered there.
 
It happens very occasionally that exceptionally talented people congregate in one place for a while, to encourage and stimulate one another. Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s was such a town. In this exhilarating book Andrea Wulf tells the story of what she calls “the Jena set”, a group of mainly young writers and poets who came together in “this lovely crazy little corner of the world”, as Goethe described it.
 
At the core of the Jena set were the Schlegels, August Wilhelm and his wife, Caroline, who worked together on translating Shakespeare’s plays into German verse; Friedrich, August Wilhelm’s younger and more quarrelsome brother, also a writer and critic, who for a while was in love with Caroline; the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (“Novalis”), almost the personification of Goethe’s Young Werther in his melodramatic posturing and adoration of a sickly, pubescent girl; and the serious young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, whose naturphilosophie envisaged the self as at one with everything living, and who conceived of art as the expression of this union.
 
This group saw themselves with some justification as cleverer, wittier and more poetic than anyone else. In their own eyes they were “the chosen ones”. Like other young people of their generation across Europe, they were inspired by the upheaval of the French Revolution, a challenge to established authority and ideas everywhere. Their irreverence inevitably led to feuds, first between the upstart Schlegels and the venerable poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, and later between Schelling and Fichte. Caroline’s refusal to conform to convention earned her widespread disapproval, especially from other women. Eventually she would divorce August Wilhelm and marry Schelling, 12 years her junior. Despite this, the three remained on good terms.
 
One reason why Jena became such a magnet for independent thinkers was the unusual constitution of the university, which allowed its professors comparative freedom. The most prominent of these was Fichte, who declared that “the source of all reality is the Ich” – a word with no exact equivalent in English. Fichte’s concept of the Ich placed the self at the centre of everything, always an attractive idea to self-regarding young people.
 
Goethe had been attracted to Jena from his home in nearby Weimar by the presence of Schiller. While Goethe was staying in Jena he and Schiller would meet daily, since they lived only a few minutes’ walk from each other. They made an odd couple as they strolled around town together, the cadaverous playwright towering above the older and now corpulent poet. Like the young English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller collaborated closely, editing each other’s work and suggesting improvements and changes. After Schiller’s death, Goethe would strive unsuccessfully to complete his unfinished work.
 
Goethe and Schiller were father figures to the group of younger writers and thinkers who gravitated to Jena. Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man would become a founding document for this new generation of thinkers, who called themselves romantics.
 
Goethe was a true renaissance man, as interested in science as he was in literature. For him, another attraction of Jena was the company of the young scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The two formed “our little academy”, carrying out dissections and experiments together, including electrical experiments on animals – “galvanism”. To the romantics, electricity seemed the fuel of life. It was no coincidence that Frankenstein’s monster would be brought to life by a massive electrical charge. Electricity also provided a fresh, almost irresistible metaphor. In its incessant and impassioned debate the Jena set was “electrified by our intellectual friction”; while apart, one of their number lamented the absence of “the electricity I feel with them”.
 
This is indeed an electrifying book, in its illuminated portraits, its dynamic narrative and its sparking ideas. Wulf writes clear, flowing prose, which is a pleasure to read. It’s informed by scholarship without being bogged down by jargon. Her book begins with an autobiographical prologue, explaining how, as the impulsive child of progressive parents, she chose to leave school early, rather than going to university, and became a single mother at a young age, learning in the process to balance free-spiritedness and responsibility. This introduction is appropriate, because her experience mirrors that of the woman at the heart of the story, Caroline Schlegel.
 
The Jena set broke up in 1803, dispersing across Germany and beyond in a general exodus. Magnificent Rebels ends with a dramatic set-piece chapter as French troops arrive in Jena in 1806, plundering the town and setting fire to buildings, before the battle that ends in devastating defeat for the Prussian army. The victorious emperor slept that night in Goethe’s bed. For the Jena set, Napoleon was not an enemy but a hero. They admired him as a force of nature. Ominously, Fichte began to talk about the “Ich” of a nation.
 
In her epilogue Wulf traces the influence of the Jena thinkers on subsequent generations: through the English romantic poets, especially Coleridge, and via him the American transcendentalists (Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman), on to the thoughts of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce, and into the present. We have so far “internalised the Ich”, the author argues, that we no longer recognise it. What was revolutionary is now standard: we are all romantics now. And all this began in a small town in Germany more than 200 years ago.
 
 
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf review – big ideas from a small town. By Adam Sisman. The Guardian, September 11, 2022. 

For a few years at the turn of the 19th century, Jena, a small university town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was an intellectual Shangri-La. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Though its population was barely 4,500, Jena was for a while home to many of the leading German thinkers of the time—Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schiller, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived 14 miles away in Weimar, was a frequent visitor and collaborator.
 
Andrea Wulf, born in India and raised in Germany, impulsively moved to England in her late teens and adopted the English language as her professional medium. She finds kindred spirits in the proudly independent, unconventional prodigies of Jena. They inspire in her the extravagant boast that “the last decade of the eighteenth century saw more famous poets, writers, philosophers and thinkers living in Jena in proportion to its population than in any other town before or since.” The Athens of Aristophanes, Democritus, Plato, Protagoras, Sophocles, and Thucydides, like the Princeton of Freeman J. Dyson, Albert Einstein, Clifford Geertz, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, and Erwin Panofsky, might, per capita, have outshone even Jena. However, Wulf’s central assertion is indisputable: “The Jena Set changed our world. They did so irrevocably. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and way of understanding the world without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.”
 
Wulf titled her 2015 study of the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt (who often visited his older brother, the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Jena) The Invention of Nature. Like recent popular books that make broad historical claims—for example, that the Scots invented the modern world or that the Irish saved civilization—Magnificent Rebels credits the Jena Set for “the invention of the self.” Its members initiated the Romantic movement and redefined romanticism to mean an emphasis on subjectivity, a preference for emotion over reason, an exaltation of the imagination, a reverence for the natural world, and a yearning to poeticize science. Fichte was not the first philosopher to take the Ich as his starting point (René Descartes’s cogito ergo sum did that 150 years earlier), but a preoccupation with the self would be inherited from Jena by thinkers as disparate as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ayn Rand, and Martin Buber, and it would manifest itself in the institutionalized cravings of consumer society. The German Romantics predated and inspired poets and philosophers in Britain, France, and the United States. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was so enthralled by the Jena thinkers that much of his Biographia Literaria is plagiarized from Schelling.
 
Members of the Jena Set are not strangers to anyone conversant with German cultural history. Much has been written in German about the subject, including Peter Neumann’s Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits, published in 2018 and translated into English earlier this year. And though English-language readers surely have heard of Goethe, they might be unfamiliar with his contemporaries and confused by the profusion of Friedrichs—Schelling, Schiller, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher. Wulf begins with a list of dramatis personae and, relying on letters, journals, and published texts, proceeds to recount the stories of distinct personalities during troubled times. Her book is a collective biography of talented and productive men and women who worked brilliantly together, apart, and in opposition.
 
The story begins with Schiller, the first of the major figures to reside in Jena. Already famous for his 1781 play The Robbers, he founded the journal Die Horen, which drew many of its contributors to the town. The polymath Goethe came to Jena to supervise its botanical garden. His was an inductive mind, working from the specific to the general, but he developed a close friendship with Schiller, who worked from the general to the specific. Yet it was the house at Leutragasse 5, shared by poet August Wilhelm Schlegel, his free-spirited wife, Caroline, plus August’s younger brother, Friedrich, and Friedrich’s lover, Dorothea, daughter of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, that became the cradle of German Romanticism. There, August and Caroline translated Shakespeare’s plays into versions that turned the Bard into the quintessential Romantic. Many German speakers consider the couple’s translations superior to the original. The philosopher Fichte and the poet Novalis spent many hours in the Schlegel household in conversations that fertilized their own work. During one dazzling four-day session, writes Wulf, “they composed poems, drafted philosophical treatises, edited essays, set up scientific experiments and translated passages from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Shakespeare.”
 
But these were high-strung, competitive, and libidinous people, and their idyllic creative community was doomed to dissolve. Dependent on income from teaching, some members of the Jena Set resented it when the charismatic speakers Fichte and Schelling drew students away from their own lectures. After Friedrich Schlegel attacked Schiller in print, neither spoke to the other. Soon, other enmities developed. For a while, August Schlegel seemed complaisant about the openly adulterous relationship between Schelling and his own wife, Caroline, but numerous sexual transgressions and rivalries also fractured the group. The translator Tieck dismissed the Leutragasse coterie as being “like a big farm full of pigs.” Dysentery ended the promising life of Caroline Schlegel’s 15-year-old daughter, Auguste, in 1800, months before tuberculosis killed 28-year-old Novalis. Increasingly, disease and death took a toll on the Jena Set.
 
Germany would not become a state until 1871, and in its 1,500 jurisdictions, no central authority could enforce censorship. The Jena Set, then, was relatively unshackled by convention. Inspired by the spirit of the French Revolution, its members saw their own revolution founder in spasms of freedom. By 1806, when Napoleon Bonaparte arrived to “liberate” Jena, most of its authors had already left. The invading French army, which many had welcomed as a force for liberté, égalité, et fraternité, left the town in ruins
 
Jena-Gadda-Da-Vida : The brief flowering of an intellectual mecca in 1790s Germany. By  Steven G. Kellman. The American Scholar, September 1, 2022

Today, the German city of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, is the world centre of the optical and precision industry; but in the 1790s it spawned an even more marketable commodity. It was then a small medieval town on the banks of the river Saale with crumbling walls, 800 half-timbered houses, a market square and an unruly university. Here, in the philosophy department, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a young professor inspired by Immanuel Kant and the French Revolution, proclaimed from the pulpit his theory of the ‘Ich’. ‘A person,’ he roared, ‘should be self-determined.’ In an age of absolute power and the divine right of kings, the idea of free will was an incendiary device and Fichte freewheeled his way through each lecture. ‘Attend to yourself,’ he instructed his mesmerised followers; ‘turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self.’ Fichte’s lectures, says Andrea Wulf in her engrossing new book, re-centred the way we understand the world. It’s little wonder that intellectuals flocked to Jena.
 
Magnificent Rebels is a group biography about the decade between 1794 and 1804 when a cohort of writers, philosophers and translators, ignited by the cries of liberty, equality and fraternity coming from Paris, turned Jena into a hub of revolutionary thinking. The book is also a beginner’s guide to German idealism. It’s no mean feat to explain such hefty theories in layman’s terms, and Wulf does so without, as Byron said of Coleridge, needing to explain her explanation.
 
The grandfather of what she calls ‘the Jena set’ was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther turned suicide into an art, or group-think. Goethe, who lived with his mistress and son in nearby Weimar, was first invited to Jena by the playwright Friedrich Schiller, who began lecturing at the university in 1789. Their friendship initiated what Goethe described as a ‘new era’ in his writing. The effect of Jena turned Goethe into a ‘demi-god’ for a new generation of readers.
 
The town muse was Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, a ‘politico-erotic’ fire-ball who, together with her young daughter Auguste, had spent six months in prison in Königstein in 1793. Caroline and her second husband, the poet, critic and translator August Wilhelm Schlegel, came to Jena in 1796, where the couple translated, for the first time, Shakespeare into German verse. Their translations are still the standard edition in Germany. It was August Wilhelm who coined the term ‘Romantic’ to describe the new sensibility whose impact was also being felt in the English Lake District. ‘Speak nothing but German,’ Coleridge (unsuccessfully) counselled Wordsworth: ‘Live with Germans. Read in German. Think in German.’
 
August Wilhelm was joined by his younger brother, the writer Friedrich Schlegel, who was himself in love with Caroline. (‘One look is all it takes’, Friedrich said of her.) Friedrich brought along his best friend, the poet and mining inspector Friedrich von Hardenberg, who used the pen name Novalis. ‘My whole self,’ said Novalis, ‘is a system of fragments’, and together with Schlegel, he invented the Romantic fragment. Schiller and the Schlegels were then joined by the young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who taught at the university between 1798 and 1803. The similarity of names makes this a difficult book to follow after a glass or two of wine, but keeping up with the Jena set is challenging in other ways too.
 
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ said Wordsworth of the French Revolution, ‘but to be young was very heaven.’ Jena, now the centre of this heaven, was actually very hell. Caroline Schlegel described it as a ‘den of murderers’, and she wasn’t far wrong. Jena reduced the whole world to a town which could be crossed in ten minutes flat; no one read the newspapers and nothing was discussed beyond gossip and the new philosophy. Everyone hated everyone else and did all they could to stymie each other’s careers with bad reviews. One of Schiller’s poems, wrote Friedrich Schlegel, was so bad it was best read backwards.
 
Schiller and the Schlegels were thereafter mortal enemies, as were Schiller and Alexander von Humboldt, Schiller and Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling. While Schiller, who never left his house, hated everyone except Goethe, Fichte was not only hated by all his colleagues but those students who didn’t buy into his philosophy threw bricks through his windows. These attacks – which took place night after night for five months and once nearly killed his father-in-law – must have been, said Goethe, ‘a most disagreeable way’ for Fichte ‘to have the existence of a non-Ich proven to him’.
 
Everyone equally hated Friedrich Schlegel. One look, apparently, was all it took: ‘People prefer to observe me from a distance,’ he said, ‘like a rare and dangerous beast.’ They similarly hated his wife Dorothea, who in turn hated Caroline Schlegel, who hated Schiller’s wife Charlotte. ‘The minute she’s out of the house,’ Caroline said of Charlotte, ‘you should fire up two pounds of incense to purify the air.’ When Friedrich Schlegel’s friend, the poet and translator Ludwig Tieck, moved to Jena in 1799, everyone hated Frau Tieck too: ‘Oh, that wife! That wife!’, Friedrich complained to Caroline Schlegel.
 
Caroline is the heroine of the story, not least because she internalised the Ich-philosophy which, Fichte stressed, applied only to men. A woman, Fichte insisted, had to submit her own Ich to that of her husband. Caroline, accordingly, changed husbands three times, divorcing August Wilhelm in 1803 in order to marry Friedrich Schelling, who was, she said, ‘the kind of man who bursts through barriers’.
 
One reason the Jena set idealised the mind is because their bodies were so imperfect. The illnesses they suffered – gout, tapeworm, ‘nervous fevers’, infections, coughs and tumours – were treated by the local quack Dr Stark with the usual leeches, poultices, enemas and blood-lettings. When Caroline was given a mustard plaster made of horseradish to cure her sleeplessness, it inflamed her leg and led to cramps. Her daughter Auguste died after being prescribed laxatives, of all things, to stop her dysentery. Schiller, who experienced such ill health in Jena that his major organs were destroyed, was discovered after his death to have had a ‘hard, petrified sponge’ instead of a heart, which made Friedrich Schlegel laugh. One of the book’s finest chapters is an account of Novalis’s 14-year-old fiancée undergoing an operation on her liver without anaesthetic. The doctor who killed her was, of course, the wretched Stark.
 
Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession. Wulf does not draw the analogy, but Jena was a prototype of Silicon Valley, a factory in which a handful of geeks open up our skulls and rewire our brains. The Jena set invented the self, and in doing so invented us all; we now think with their thoughts and feel with their emotions. They paved the way for Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself’, Freudian psychoanalysis and Hitler’s fascism, the ‘Ich’ of a nation. Jena was the birthplace of self-consciousness, self-obsession, selfishness and selfies – the whole business of me, me, me and me too.
 
How the quarrelsome ‘Jena set’ paved the way for Hitler : A group of warring 18th-century intellectuals, devoted to the theory of the ‘Ich’, left a dangerous legacy. By Frances Wilson. The Spectator, August 27, 2022.

Ralph Waldo Emerson : Vision of Independence

There’s a treacherously placed bookstore in my neighborhood. To go almost anywhere from my apartment, I have to pass Walden Pond Books, and it’s next door to my usual coffee shop, so even if I didn’t decide to go in on the first pass, I probably will on the second. Many of the references in my own book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, are ones that I encountered here, in books like Braiding Sweetgrass, Spell of the Sensuous, and The Genius of Birds. The influence is so strong that when I see my book at Walden Pond, I think of it as a mushroom that grew in the store.

This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as an English major, I was quickly drawn into his writing about time and perception: nature was a “mutable cloud, which is always and never the same,” and the task was to “[detect] through the fly, through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species, through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.” There was an acid-trip quality to it that I both recognized and admired.

Reading Emerson’s essays did not feel like reading other books. Later, when I tried to describe the experience to a friend, I asked, “Have you ever read a book that made you feel, like, drunk?” Emerson’s aphorisms are forceful, his cadences dizzying, his appeal to individual will seductive. Normally I am an orderly, chapter-per-day kind of reader, using up a pack of Post-it flags and then typing up the important quotes later. But my copy of Emerson’s Essays has only one Post-it flag, in the introduction by Douglas Crase (an Emerson quote: “It seems the one lesson which this miraculous world has to teach us, to the sacred, to stand aloof, and suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon us and bereave us of our infinitude”). After that, I lost my bearings. I was always just somewhere in the book, underlining and circling, hunched over, my face too close to the page.

I had been primed for Emerson’s vision of transcendence. A month earlier, I’d taken my yearly trip to the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, just north of Monterey, California. My ostensible purpose was to see the migrating shorebirds—including the sandpipers whose murmurous flocks contain more than a little of the transcendental—but it was also just to recover and hear myself think. I had never been much of a public person, and I’d been caught off-guard by the publicity around How to Do Nothing. I was soon buried under the pile of obligations and opinions that followed. At times, it felt like I no longer knew what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought. I felt desperate for some kind of clarity.

After roaming the hills at Elkhorn Slough until the preserve closed at 5, I decided impulsively against going straight home. Instead I drove due east and, even though it was 100 degrees and I’d already been walking all day, started up a steep trail near Fremont Peak in San Juan Bautista. I was propelled by more than mere curiosity; I was trying to leave something behind. There was an unforgiving quality to the dry and tree-less hillside, with a hot wind that drew a rasping, rattling sound from the pods of alien-looking milk vetches. Both literally and figuratively, I felt I was gasping for air. When I reached the top of the trail, the sun was beginning to set on the Diablo Range across the valley, casting it in an otherworldly shade of purple. I was filled with a volatile mix of emotions. Sweat evaporating, I wrote in my notebook that “the pain I feel is the will trying to act” and that “the real self, let out of the cage, doesn’t want to go back in again.”

The “will” I wrote of was not exactly mine; it was an artist’s will, an out-of-range frequency to be listened for with great effort. Emerson’s Essays addressed and galvanized this self-as-listener, especially in “The Over-Soul.” I felt drawn to his theological model of self-abandonment and visitation, not unlike the way the writer Simone Weil described love and attention, or the way the painter Agnes Martin would wait, alone for days and weeks, for a vision of perfection. Emerson writes, “The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it.” I recognized my own longing for absolute clarity, my own breathless hike, in Emerson’s description of an “ascension of state,” where “[w]ith each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspired and expires its air.”

“The Over-Soul” is my favorite essay, but Emerson is better known for “Self Reliance,” that famous paean to individualism. This is the one where Emerson declares that “[w]hoso would be a man must be nonconformist,” and disdains society as “a join-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” Again, the writing is seductive. For anyone adrift in the world, it is reassuring to hear that “[n]othing can bring you peace but yourself,” or that mental will can triumph over fate. It can really be this simple: “In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations.”

I was far from immune to this essay. I underlined “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” But the more I looked back on it, the more I began to wrestle with the essay’s blind spot. I didn’t immediately see it, because the blind spot was also my own.

The wrestling started when I went home for Thanksgiving. My family gatherings are small: my parents, my uncle, and I gather in my grandmother’s house, which is part of a community of small houses for the elderly. This year, as soon as we walked in the door, I was confronted with a dilemma. My mother immediately joined my grandma in the kitchen, whereas my dad went down the hall to a room where my uncle was sitting. When I asked my mom if they needed help in the kitchen, she shooed me away, so I headed down the narrow hallway to hover on the periphery of a conversation about the upcoming election primaries. This division will be all too familiar to many: women working in the kitchen, men talking politics in the next room.

As I leaned awkwardly against the wall because there wasn’t a third chair, the conversation continued as if I weren’t there. My gaze wandered over to an interesting tableau across the room. Resting on a shelf was something I’d never noticed: a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, that favorite novel of libertarians. The main character is an uncompromising, iconoclastic, and self-made modernist architect who shared Emerson’s disdain for society and certainly followed his advice, to “suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon you and bereave you of your infinitude.”

Next to The Fountainhead was a careful pencil drawing of a black-headed gull in a frame. After staring at it for a few moments, I finally recognized this drawing as my own. I wondered why I would have drawn my grandmother a black-headed gull, an East Coast bird that I’d likely never seen, and then realized that I had drawn it years ago, before I had become a birder. I had likely been looking for a pleasant and generic subject for a drawing, googled “seagull,” and drawn one of the results, without distinguishing among them. (There’s technically no such thing as a “seagull,” only different kinds of gulls.)

Unexpectedly, everything congealed in that moment: the different rooms, the drawing, The Fountainhead, “Self Reliance,” and the critiques I had seen of How to Do Nothing. Just as I had studiously reproduced the form of the gull without knowing what it was, I saw that I had absorbed from my family and my upbringing a specific brand of individualism, valorizing and transmitting it unknowingly. I’d done this throughout my entire life, but especially in How to Do Nothing. Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude, so similar to Emerson’s, a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming into focus. The women in the kitchen made the mens’ conversation possible, just as my trip to the mountain—and really all of my time spent walking, observing, and courting the “over-soul”—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied, upper-middle-class, half white and half “model minority,” a walkable neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t seen it.

Just the night before, I had watched Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, a series of interviews in different locations with contemporary philosophers. While the documentary’s other subjects appear alone, Judith Butler takes a walk around the Mission District of San Francisco with Sunaura Taylor, an activist for disability and animal rights. Taylor was born with arthrogryposis and uses a wheelchair. At one point, Butler says, “I’m just thinking that … nobody goes for a walk without there being something that supports that walk outside of ourselves. And that maybe we have a false idea that the able-bodied person is somehow radically self-sufficient.”

                                              Clip from Examined Life

Taylor, whose condition affects the use of her hands, tells Butler about the time she lived in Brooklyn and would have to sit in a park for hours psyching herself up to get coffee alone. “In a way it’s a political protest for me to go in and order a coffee and demand help,” she says, “simply because, in my opinion, help is something that we all need.” After they stop into a vintage store to get Taylor a sweater because it’s gotten chilly, Butler revisits this story:

       My sense is that what’s at stake here is really rethinking the human as a site of interdependency. And I think, you know, when you walk into the coffee shop … and you ask for the coffee, or you, indeed, even ask for assistance with the coffee, you’re basically posing the question, do we or do we not live in a world in which we assist each other? Do we or do we not help each other with basic needs? And are basic needs there to be decided on as a social issue and not just my personal, individual issue or your personal, individual issue? So there’s a challenge to individualism that happens at the moment in which you ask for some assistance with the coffee cup. And hopefully, people will take it up and say, yes, I, too, live in that world … in which I understand that we need each other in order to address our basic needs. And I want to organize a social, political world on the basis of that recognition.

This conversation came back to me in that little house at Thanksgiving. My grandmother, otherwise healthy, had been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s. After we all assembled in the living room, she showed me the medical alert device (also known as a “panic button”) hanging around her neck, and pointed to a small console in the corner of the room that would contact my parents if she pressed the button. Weeks earlier, she had fallen in this same living room and, unable to move or reach the phone, lay on the floor for many hours until my dad came by for his regular visit.

    

My immediate reaction to her story and to the button was one of terror at the contingency of the whole thing. It made my grandma seem uniquely dependent. But as I reflected on the panic button in the context of Butler’s “challenge to individualism,” it began to look more like an advanced, concrete version of an interdependence that we each bear in some form from the moment we are born. If my grandma was now hanging on by this particular thread, it simply highlighted the many other threads that keep us all aloft. It was also an intense physical illustration of the way that freedom is constrained by factors outside of one’s control—the very “wheel of Chance” Emerson thought we could afford to ignore.

In 1930, James Truslow Adams, the writer who coined the term “American dream,” wrote an essay called “Emerson Re-read,” in which he tried to account for why Emerson’s essays enchanted him as a youth but felt hollow for him as an adult. This image of independence just feels too easy, he says, noting that “economic evils trouble our sage not at all.” Adams suggests that Emerson’s self-reliance was part of an optimistic current in American thought that went hand in hand with material abundance and westward expansion. Indeed, “Self Reliance” was written five years before the term “manifest destiny” was coined, an era that celebrated the lone, able explorer setting out to tame a (supposed) wilderness. The contemplative tradition has often been supported from the outside, a hallmark of the affordances of leisure—the way that philosophy in ancient Greece was dependent on a servant class. The concept of self-reliance has always relied on something else.

None of this is to say that “Self Reliance” isn’t useful as a model of refusal and commitment. In his own time, Emerson was an outspoken opponent of slavery, the Mexican-American War, and the removal of Native Americans from their land. In our time, we could surely use the reminders to examine our relationship with public opinion and to maintain a sense of principled intuition. The best version of Emerson’s individualism is bracing, like a splash of cold water to the face, or a friend shaking you by the shoulders in order to snap you out of a daze. But for me, as for many others, everything outside the self fades away too quickly in “Self Reliance”: all of the people and circumstances that have influenced my experience of independence, my conception of my self, and even the very terms with which I think. It hides the losses that appear as my gains. And by placing the will so high above circumstance, it projects an untruthful image of equal opportunity in which the unfortunate should have just tried harder.

The tensions between agency and situation, between the individual and the collective, have never been easy to resolve. I’m trying to learn to live in the messy space between. Here, you can be both your own and not your own, responsible to communities without exhibiting the dreaded groupthink, and bound by one commitment: to examine your commitments, forever. Sometimes—many times—I’m wrong. And when I am, that is a time for listening to others, not for “keep[ing] with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” I’m reminded of an archaic form of the noun “reliance,” where it means the opposite of a dependent; a reliance was someone on whom you depended. When I examine my identity, I do see an inalienable spirit grasping for infinity. But in the very same place, I also see an intersection of historical and cultural vectors, held up by a web of countless reliances.

 Emerson’s writing contains a version of the self-not-self paradox, even if it’s with eyes directed upward and inward, not outward. After all, besides “Self Reliance,” the other thing he’s most associated with is the philosophy of transcendentalism, which can entail a transcending of the self as much as it does transcending society. This is the stuff that made me feel drunk, where the boundaries of the self are breached in a meeting with something else. In “The Over-Soul,” “[o]ur being is descending into us from we know not whence … I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.” In “Circles,” the universe is “fluid and volatile”; the soul “bursts over that boundary on all sides”; and the heart “refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions.” In “History,” an individual is not a single entity but “a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.”

When Emerson writes that “[t]houghts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and … go out of minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened,” it almost sounds like he’s describing that day at Walden Pond Books, when the Essays found their way into my unsuspecting hands. I think of my book-mushroom growing there, the “flower and fruitage” of my encounters so far. It’s a story that belongs both to me and to my reliances. I will keep coming back to the store, retreating to the mountain, having conversations, sitting alone, tracing a path that is more a spiral than a straight line. And hard as I might work, I will be anything but self-made.

The Myth of Self-Reliance. By Jenny Odell. The Paris Review, January 15, 2020

During Harvard University’s commencement week in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson took the podium at the annual meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa society. The group, composed of the top students in the graduating class, was gathered in the First Parish Church in Cambridge. Emerson, the class poet of his own Harvard class a decade before, and a writer and philosopher of growing stature, had been chosen as the honored guest to address the future intellectual elite of New England. 

The event was a capstone in a week of ceremony and tradition. That changed when Emerson began to speak.

In his speech, titled “The American Scholar,” Emerson called for the young country to develop a national intellectual life distinct from lingering colonial influences. He also delivered an incisive critique of his audience, condemning academic scholarship for its reliance on historical and institutional wisdom. The eponymous scholar, he argued, had become “decent, indolent, complaisant.” To become more than “a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking,” a scholar must begin to engage with the world for oneself.

Emerson was an unlikely critic of the country’s intellectual establishment. The son of a Unitarian minister, he had attended Harvard Divinity School and taken a position after graduation as a junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church. But the loss of his young wife to tuberculosis shortly after his ordination—just 16 months into their marriage—had shaken the foundation of his faith, and he had begun to chafe against the restrictions of institutionalized knowledge.

A similar frustration with New England’s dominant religious and academic culture was growing among many of the region’s other young intellectuals. In 1836, Emerson had joined a handful of them in founding the Transcendental Club. As Emerson laid out in his essay “Nature,” published the same year the club began, the transcendentalists sought freedom from the “poetry and philosophy of … tradition” and “religion by … history.” They believed that moral truth should be sought not in accepted wisdom, but through individual thought and experience.

With “The American Scholar,” Emerson gave voice to the movement’s individualism: envisioning an independent American intellectual culture premised not on any kind of nationalist pride—nor on any particular doctrine or political system—but on a dedication to independence itself. He would later define the “American idea” he sought to promote through his work simply as “Emancipation.”

The speech elicited praise from many of Emerson’s fellow transcendentalists and anger from the Harvard administration; after giving a similarly critical address at the divinity school the following year, he was banned from speaking on campus for three decades.

But “The American Scholar” had made its mark. Emerson’s speech left a particular impression on two members of the Harvard community, a troublemaking undergraduate named James Russell Lowell and a recent alumnus named Oliver Wendell Holmes.

“The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the Revolution politically independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought,” Lowell later wrote, “till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water.”

Holmes called the speech America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson’s appeal for cultural independence coincided with the nationwide struggle toward another kind of emancipation. As transcendentalism began to take root in New England, abolitionism was gaining fervor across the Northern states. The debate over slavery seeped into churches, literature, and colleges, dominating conversations about America’s future.

Though he was initially hesitant to speak publicly about slavery, by the 1840s Emerson came to believe that American culture could be used to advance the cause of emancipation. He wasn’t alone: His view was shared by many other transcendentalists and prominent New England abolitionists. In May 1857, he convened at the Parker House Hotel in Boston with several of them, including Lowell, Holmes, and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Together they founded a magazine dedicated to advocating abolitionism and promoting American voices: The Atlantic Monthly.

The mission statement printed in the first issue of The Atlantic that November echoed Emerson’s expansive philosophy. The founders disavowed prejudice and promised to “be the organ of no party or clique,” and to pursue morality and truth no matter where they stemmed from or led to. They sought too to advance American writing and the “American idea” “wherever the English tongue is spoken or read”—a reflection of Emerson’s desire for a national intellectual identity that could transcend the country’s institutions and borders.

In his earlier work, Emerson had emphasized the importance of great American writers who could offer insight into national life and introduce readers to new moral truths. “We love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or in an action or in looks and behavior has yielded us a new thought,” he wrote in 1844. “He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.” He saw the same potential in The Atlantic. He backed Lowell for the role of founding editor, believing that he would act as an effective guide for the publication rather than pander to its readers.

He also supported the choice to exclude bylines from early issues of The Atlantic, explaining, “The names of contributors will be given out when the names are worth more than the articles.” In fact, the magazine included the work of some of the nation’s most notable literary figures, many of them connected to Emerson through his work and his carefully cultivated intellectual circles.

As his influence had grown as a writer and lecturer, Emerson had helped inspire and support some of the 19th century’s best-known American writers. Primary among these young protégés was Henry David Thoreau, whom Emerson befriended in the late 1830s. He introduced Thoreau to transcendentalist ideas, encouraged him to begin writing journal entries and essays, and provided him land with which to conduct his experiment in simple living. In 1840, Emerson urged another friend and protégé, the journalist and women’s-rights activist Margaret Fuller, to publish Thoreau’s first essay in the Transcendental Club’s magazine, The Dial (a publication that Emerson also helped establish). Following Thoreau’s early death, in 1862, Emerson helped champion Walden and secure the book and its author vaunted positions in the pantheon of American literature.

In 1842, Emerson gave a lecture appealing for a distinctly American writer who could give voice to the yet “unsung” nation. In attendance was a 22-year-old Walt Whitman, who was determined to answer his call. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman later said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”

In 1855, Whitman paid for his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, to be printed at a local shop, and sent one of the first copies to Emerson. Emerson responded soon after with a laudatory letter. “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” he wrote.

Inspired by the positive response, Whitman passed Emerson’s letter on to an editor at the New York Tribune and quickly paid to produce a second edition of Leaves of Grass. He printed a phrase from Emerson’s letter on the book’s spine: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

Early issues of The Atlantic featured Whitman’s poetry and Thoreau’s essays, along with short stories from Louisa May Alcott, the daughter of Emerson’s close friend Bronson Alcott; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson’s neighbor in Concord, Massachusetts; and Henry James, a friend of Emerson’s by way of his father. The community he had created would help establish the new magazine, and further his vision for a generation of American writers who could put the spirit of the young country into words.

Emerson’s vision of emancipation shone through in the magazine’s approach to slavery, women’s rights, and labor rights, among other topics, in the years that he served as a regular contributor. He himself became a leading voice for abolitionism in The Atlantic as the country entered the Civil War, making a passionate moral case that the nation could not survive unless slavery was extinguished.

In one of his most famous lectures, “American Civilization,” published in the magazine’s April 1862 issue, he reiterated his call for independence from the past. “America is another word for Opportunity,” he observed. “Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence in behalf of the human race; and a literal slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies of this people.”

He beseeched the government to abolish slavery immediately and permanently. After Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation six months later, Emerson hailed the measure as a “heroic” and “genius” step forward in the long fight for moral governance—a fight that would not end when slavery did, but that would continue to march toward ever greater political liberty.

In other essays for the magazine, he urged readers to seek their own freedom outside the bounds of politics. A measure of individual solitude, he wrote, was necessary for the endurance of society. He argued that power was derived from wisdom, and wisdom from the accumulation of personal experience. And the best personal experience was to be found walking in nature alone: nature that “kills egotism and conceit; deals strictly with us; and gives sanity.” Out of nature, he believed, could grow good and wise men; out of good and wise men, perhaps, a good and wise nation.

Published over the course of 50 years, his dozens of essays, poems, and lectures in The Atlantic were an encapsulation of the same vision of independence that he’d outlined in “The American Scholar” and that had, by the time he co-founded the magazine, earned him international recognition.

But while Emerson’s work was widely read in his time, none of his writing for The Atlantic—nor the hundreds of other essays, lectures, poems, and books he produced over the course of his career—has endured as popular reading in the way of contemporaneous works like Alcott’s Little Women or Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The selections from Emerson’s expansive body of work that have found places on modern syllabi or in anthologies are, in the way of most literary classics, more often referenced than read. He remains perhaps one of the most cited American authors, but his words surface now mainly in the form of decontextualized aphorisms and inspirational quotes: “To be great is to be misunderstood,” or “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

Reading Emerson’s essays, it’s not hard to understand why his words have found their most enduring currency in this form. As the literary critic Alfred Kazin observed in a July 1957 Atlantic article, “Emerson’s genius is in the sudden flash rather than in the suavely connected paragraph and page.”

His writing, on the scale of pithy phrases—or even of paragraphs or brief sections—can be eloquent, clear, moving. On the scale of whole works, however, he charts convoluted, snaking routes toward his point. He overuses rhetorical questions; he tends toward rambling tangents; he dwells overlong on obscure concepts and metaphors; he becomes mired in dense, verbose passages that are at best tangential to his core ideas.

And his ideas were often as convoluted as his writing. He enshrined individualism, urging readers to “trust thyself” rather than being drawn in by “the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages” or relying “on Property, or the … governments which protect it.” But he dismissed the idea of deep or lasting individuality, insisting that truth was ultimately universal and “within man is the soul of the whole … the eternal ONE.” He argued that society suppressed liberty and that “the less government we have, the better.” But he also asserted that “government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party,” and called for the state to promote virtue and to protect and secure individual rights. He spoke out against the immorality of slavery and the forced removal of Native Americans. But he also espoused a belief in absolute racial hierarchy even decades after he became a vocal abolitionist.

Yet even these inconsistencies were consistent, in the broadest sense, with Emerson’s American idea. For him, emancipation was an eternal work in progress—dependent on an unlimited openness to change, and an endless accrual of new insights and observations. Over the course of a lifetime, he noted, any single person accumulates knowledge through successive years of education, experience, and imagination; over the course of many lifetimes, society en masse incorporates the knowledge of individuals into a broader understanding of the world. He regarded perfect understanding as unachievable, so to him, virtue lay not in achieving it but rather in trying to move closer to it—imperfectly, inconsistently, humanly, the only way it could be done.

In this way, his ideas persist at the very heart of American culture, largely decontextualized from any particular piece of his work.

“Emerson, by no means the greatest American writer .... is the inescapable theorist of virtually all subsequent American writing,” the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom wrote in a 1984 article for The New York Review of Books. “From his moment to ours, American authors either are in his tradition, or else in a countertradition originating in opposition to him.”

Even if Emerson’s most influential lectures and essays are no longer universally read, the works he helped bring to life—such as Thoreau’s Walden and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—endure as cornerstones of the nation’s literature. His essays shaped a tradition of American essay-writing. His poetry gave rise to some of the country’s greatest poets: Emily Dickinson treasured a book of his verse; Robert Frost called him his favorite American poet. Even Hawthorne and Herman Melville, co-signers of The Atlantic’s founding manifesto who expressed reservations about the transcendentalist movement—what Melville once, after attending one of Emerson’s lectures, referred to as “myths and oracular gibberish”—committed a distinctly Emersonian individualism to the page with characters such as Hester Prynne and Captain Ahab.

Transcendentalism went on to inform subsequent generations of philosophical and religious thought, including the existential musings of Friedrich Nietzsche and the civil disobedience of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Though Emerson never ventured into the visual arts, he influenced the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Great men,” Emerson wrote, “exist that there may be greater men.” So he set out to build a culture that could evolve beyond any one moment or person, even himself.

Emerson’s house in Concord is surrounded by more famous historical sites. About a mile to the north lies the reconstructed bridge where one of the first battles of the American Revolution was fought in 1775. To the south stretches the northern shore of Walden Pond, where Thoreau retreated to “live deliberately” for two years, beginning in the summer of 1845.

Between them, the boxy white house rises up from the edge of the Cambridge Turnpike like an afterthought, an unremarkable Federal-style structure distinguished from its neighbors only by two neat signs proclaiming it to be “The Home of RALPH WALDO EMERSON.” Of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who traveled to the town in 2018 seeking some insight into the nation’s history—and some resplendent fall foliage—just 3,000 stopped by to see the home.

Emerson purchased the house in 1835, in the early stages of his new career as a writer and lecturer. When he first moved in, he set out to cultivate a garden. He planted hemlocks when his oldest son was born; pine trees after delivering “The American Scholar”; a fruit orchard as his first collection of essays launched him into international fame.

“I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world,” he wrote in 1841. More than a century and a half later, by the side of the Cambridge Turnpike, some of the things he planted still grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s American Idea. By  Annika Neklason. The Atlantic, November 28, 2019.

“Listen to me!  . . . Do not, above all confound me with what I am not.”  Friedrich Nietzsche’s plea, of course, was in vain. Even while alive but in a state of complete mental collapse, his sister began an egregious misappropriation of his writings.  She cultivated and perpetrated readings of Nietzsche sympathetic to German nationalism and anti-Semitism. This “German Nietzsche” as the avatar of the Aryan superman has generally collapsed, and after the fall of the Third Reich a reassessment of Nietzsche began.

In the latter part of the 20th century a wholly new interpretation has emerged. Nietzsche has become the avatar of a world without God and the prophet of postmodern relativism. In a great feat of intellectual alchemy, Nietzschean skepticism has been fused with Marxist social consciousness to produce Progressive gold.  What Harold Bloom calls “French Nietzsche” has swept through Academia and is now in its latter orthodoxical iterations.

Nietzsche has been described as a philosopher who is easy to read but difficult to understand. This is, at least in part, because of his seemingly fragmented and provocative aphoristic style and his disinclination to articulate any kind of philosophical system. He often appears to contradict himself, and he makes no attempt to reconcile his seemingly disparate views. Nietzsche as philosopher is, therefore, difficult to place into any kind of historical continuity and, in fact, he himself is often critical if not dismissive of the great philosophers of his age:  Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stewart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer, and so on. At some point, many end up on the barb of his ruthless wit. And Nietzsche never even mentions Karl Marx by name, while routinely denouncing the emergent socialistic movements as resentful secular Christian heresies. Nietzsche has little unqualified good to say about individual modern philosophers—save one: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Nietzsche loved Emerson from first to last. Nietzsche’s interest in and admiration of Emerson began when he was still a schoolboy and continued throughout his productive life. He studiously annotated and copied whole passages from German translations of Emerson’s essays. In 1884, Nietzsche described Emerson as, “a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit” and pronounced Emerson to be, “the author who has been the richest in ideas in this century.”And commenting on a collection of Emerson’s essays, Nietzsche wrote: “Never have I felt so at home in a book, and in my home, as—I may not praise it, it is too close to me.” 

Nietzsche’s admiration of Emerson has been largely ignored by modern scholars, at least until quite recently. My own contention is simply this: understanding Nietzsche’s affinity for Emerson is not only essential in understanding Nietzsche, but it is a way of confronting our current psychological fragmentation and ideological isolationism.

Nietzsche’s identification with Emerson is elemental. Both Emerson and Nietzsche subscribe to a unified Heraclitan universe of perpetual change and conflict, what Nietzsche describes as a, “monster of energy  . . . eternally self-creating . . . eternally self-destroying,” a vast “play of contradictions” in what Emerson describes as a “series of balanced antagonisms.” This is Emerson’s “power and form,” Nietzsche’s “Dionysian and Apollonian,” or what he would eventually call “will to power.” A human being is then a force of nature, what Emerson calls, “a piece of the universe made alive” and human thinking, human consciousness itself is a natural phenomenon. All human ideas are expressions of various human life forms, and philosophy is essentially what Nietzsche calls, “a kind of atavism of the highest order.”And like all forms, human cultures and civilizations are sublimations of this paradoxical play of contrary and conflicting powers.

Both Nietzsche and Emerson emphasize the importance and integrity of the individual. This is not for some ideological or romantic reason but because it is only as individuals that we can know who we are and how reality works. “Nothing,” says Emerson, “is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind.” The individual is the locus of experience, and Nietzsche and Emerson are, above all, the most empirical of philosophers. What we can elementally know of reality we know firsthand as individuals, not as members of some group, nor by some explanation of reality received from others. What we can most importantly receive from others is not “instruction,” says Emerson, but “provocation”—and provocation is precisely what Nietzsche receives from Emerson.

Emerson, not unlike Nietzsche, articulates no systematic philosophy; he has no particular theory of history or of social or economic relations.  “Life,” for Emerson “is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy.” Emerson understands human thinking as the absorption of sense experience and its transformation by individual human consciousness, by what he calls “the fire of his mind.” Ideas are not merely human projections but experience transformed by the fire of thought; thinking is not so much the generation of ideas as it is the combustion of experience.

Nietzsche and Emerson are minds on fire; both inhabit a world of what Emerson calls “perpetual revelation.” “We stand before the secret of the world,” writes Emerson, “where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.” In such a dynamic understanding of reality, truth cannot so much be known, as it can be experienced or embodied. It is the scholar’s conceit to think of Nietzsche and Emerson as simply generating ideas and concepts to be analyzed by others.

We are, as Vedic thinkers have long affirmed, simultaneously observers and participants in reality; “We animate what we can,” says the “Hindoo of Concord,” “and we see only what we animate.” The nature of the reality we experience reflects the nature of who we are. This understanding of ourselves as simultaneously observers and participants is a key to understanding Nietzsche’s affinity with Emerson and key to understanding subsequent misreadings of both. Existence is neither a purely objective phenomenon nor a purely subjective one—but a dynamic of inner and outer forces. Existence is a poetic phenomenon.   

As powerful and helpful as human concepts are, we always risk being seduced by our own “ideals” (or, for Nietzsche, “idols”) and drawn away from what Nietzsche calls “reality as it is.” Emerson, from his seminal essay “Experience”:

  “The great gifts are not got by analysis . . .  We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation.  Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, – a narrow belt.”

Living on the equator of life is dealing with Nietzsche’s reality as it is, and it is the poet who best understands that we are creative beings in a creative universe. The poet, Emerson asserts, “stands among partial men for the complete man.” It is the poet who has the greatest power to “name” the world and who articulates and affirms the unity of seemingly antagonistic aspects. Fully understanding the limits of skepticism and analysis and the necessity of creativity is why Nietzsche refers to himself as, “an artistic Socrates.” Philosophizing itself is a creative act.

Understanding and accepting the poetic nature of existence requires accepting and confronting the limited nature of human knowledge. This is Nietzsche’s “tragic insight” or “tragic wisdom,” which is the most elemental truth of our existence. Tragic insight acknowledges ourselves as simultaneously observers and participants in reality. Simply analyzing or observing nature no matter how closely will not relieve us of our responsibility to confront paradoxical reality. We may break down reality into its pieces, but ultimately we live by wholes not parts; it is we who generate order and meaning from our experience.

It is precisely this human tendency to shrink from the poetic and tragic nature of existence and to confuse our ideas or interpretations of reality with reality, which informs both Emerson’s and Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity.  But even before Emerson’s controversial “Divinity School Address” at Harvard in 1838, Christianity as a whole comprehensive system, especially in Europe, was in decline. It would be Nietzsche, almost a half century later, who would best articulate the nature and consequences of this world historical event. Nietzsche would become the prophet of the death of God and the emergence of a kind of human being new to human history: the shallow, nihilistic last man.

When Emerson died in 1882, America was still somewhat of a frontier society, in Walt Whitman’s words, “a great poem” yet in the process of writing itself. Well into the twentieth century Emerson would come to seen as the philosopher of sunny optimism and individual self-realization, ultimately ignored or dismissed in the world of academic philosophy. 

Nietzsche’s Europe of this time was still an expanding imperial power, but it was also experiencing the beginnings of what would become its own civilizational disintegration. Nietzsche would become famous for his insights into the great transformations, which have come to define the modern world. He is, to this day, the “bad boy” of European philosophy, variously condemned by some as the prophet of decay and nihilism, while praised by others as the avatar of ferment and liberation. All the while, Nietzsche’s debt to Emerson has largely been forgotten. 

Understanding the nature of Nietzsche’s affinity for Emerson is to return to the powerful and persistent relevance of both. It is precisely the neglected Emersonian aspect of Nietzsche which signifies a return to observing and contemplating the spectacle of reality as a whole, as a vast unified play of forces of which we are always participants. A return to Emerson is a return to the integrity of the individual as the locus of experience and a turn away from our narrow, fragmented and increasingly dysfunctional ideologies and abstractions. A return to Emerson is a return to philosophy, a return to faith in our ability, not only to contemplate antagonistic forces, but to articulate how antagonistic forces interconnect and how we fit into the whole tragic spectacle. 

Nietzsche’s respect and admiration for Emerson persisted throughout his entire life because Nietzsche’s fundamental understanding of reality persisted: we are tragic beings in tragic universe. Commenting on the passing of Emerson, Nietzsche wrote: “In Emerson, we have lost a philosopher”

Nietzsche’s First Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Chris Augusta.  Merion West ,  May 21, 2019.