I joined Rupert Sheldrake and David Lorimer to discuss Wulf’s brilliant book on the “Jena set” (the Schlegels, Schiller, Goethe, Caroline, Novalis, Schelling, etc.).
“Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self” by Andrea Wulf
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6 responses to ““Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self” by Andrea Wulf”
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I am still trying to sort out how German Idealism connected to the emergence of ‘National Socialism’ in Germany which is suggested in Anne Harrington’s 1996 book–‘Reenchanted Science’– about the history of what became of the ‘romance’ of German Idealism. Even though there were some who were deeply drawn to and influenced by it, like Kurt Goldstein–who is featured in an important chapter in the Harrington book–whose life was turned upside down when one of his lab assistants reported him to the Gestapo. And had to run for his life…
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I think blaming the idealists and romantics for Nazism is like blaming Emerson and the transcendentalists for Trumpism. “Self-reliance” and all that…
Sure, Fichte tried to drum up German nationalist spirit, but one must consider this in historical context, as Napoleon’s army was then occupying the fragmented German speaking territories. Much of this narrative about idealism/romanticism inspiring fascism grew out of British and American anti-German propaganda during the world wars. I just don’t find it a fair reading.
I do agree, though, that we must be careful about organicist conceptions of society, making sure to remember the prevalence of symbiogenesis and the permeability of membranes, etc. Organisms are not closed systems.
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I actually do agree with your assessment, Matthew. The benefits far outweigh the risks. But the real risks are there. Kurt Goldstein was a deeply committed Goethean scientist and a great admirer of Goethe. This comes out very clearly in his book, ‘The Organism’, in which he generates an astounding description of a ‘holistic biology’ based on his extensive experience caring for German soldiers with head injuries sustained in WW I. His deep admiration for Goethe and Goethe’s approach to a science of the whole organism is evident as well in his personal memoir. But that was not sufficient to protect him when things went awry.
There is a need for deep caution when one generates the clarion call for individual freedom and does not take fully into account the potential negative consequences of opening things up. There was already a long, dark history of a deeply ingrained problem that Jungian protegé and wonderful thinker about the nature of consciousness (eg. in his remarkable book, ‘The Origins and History of Consciousness’), Erich Neumann, referred to as the ‘Old Ethic‘ which is the tendency to suppress, repress, and project one’s personal Jungian ‘Shadow’ rather than taking full responsibility for it, learning from it, and integrating it into one’s own personality–ie. to do the hard work required by the ‘New Ethic’. And, in that context, taking down restrictions on individual freedom and giving the self license, can allow some deeply disturbing things to begin to happen. But what I am saying is that there is an inevitable need for caution and care when one leans into the desire for individual freedom. The other side of the coin which cannot be ignored is ‘responsibility’ and the undeniable requirement to care for the Other. Because, if we come to the realization of how relations take priority over the relata, there is an inherent and inescapable obligation to the task of preserving and protecting ‘alterity’. I may be free, but without a ‘You’ with whom I am in relation, there is no ‘Me’. Indeed, ‘organisms are not closed (entirely autonomous) systems’! As much as we may be told about the importance of preserving individual freedoms. This becomes a very significant issue when looking at the work of Heidegger and comparing it to the work of his former associate and admirer, Emmanuel Lévinas, who became deeply disappointed in the direction of Heidegger’s subsequent choices.
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I very much agree with Rupert Sheldrake’s point about the fundamental point that differentiated Kant from Schelling. Kant assumed that mind and world were fundamentally separate–which followed along the lines of nominalism and what the late John Deely critiqued and called ‘The Way of Ideas’–implying that Mind and Nature are fundamentally separated and that the world as it truly is is not accessible to us. Schelling had a powerful influence on Peirce (which he admitted to) and his recovery of semiotics and what Deely refers to as ‘The Way of Signs’–which is, in essence, ‘The Way of Relationality’–and the idea that the reason why we have a chance of understanding the world from a process/relational perspective is because we are completely immersed in and inseparable from the natural world and are an indisputable part of it, and, in fact, an emergent product of it. As an aside, the idea of Mind and Nature as fundamentally interconnected is also reminiscent of the philosophical ideas of Gregory Bateson. There are deep implications for how we do science and have been caught up, due to the overriding dominance of nominalism, in materialistic scientism which excludes mind and consciousness as subjects available for scientific study. To understand this fundamental limitation and the urgent need for it to be undone, I strongly recommend the book, ‘The Blind Spot. Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience‘ written by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. Which is a book that I highly commend to whoever is interested in how the reigns that have been placed on science as a result of the prioritization of the relata over the relations, must be undone. Why? Because the nominalistic Aristotelian assumption that the relata are prior to relations is fundamentally limiting, which is being addressed now in the writing of philosopher James Filler. And is associated with the 20th century phenomenologists, who also recognized the need for a return to the idea that it is, in fact, the relations which are primordial rather than the relata. Or, as Deely put it, the relations are ‘supra-subjective’, while the relata are ‘subjects.’ It is the relations that make the ‘intersubjective’ real. And it is the real that is the truly ‘concrete’ while the physical actuality is an abstraction. And as Whitehead points out, due to the dominance of nominalism, we are deeply at risk for making the ‘Aristotelian error’ of assigning ‘misplaced concreteness’ when we take the material ‘relata’–what we tend to call ‘physical actuality’–rather than the relations as ‘concrete’. Which is where we then go astray and fall into the ‘trap’ of Newtonian mechanistic thinking–ie. that the world and its content are functionally based on ‘clock time’.
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“The Blind Spot” is at the top of my stack of books to read. Thompson has long been an important influence.
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‘The Blind Spot’ is an extremely important book, IMHO, that has been reviewed favorably by Alex Gomez-Marin in Science magazine https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38422148/, and by Robert Crease in the LA Review of Books here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-scientists-cant-see-on-adam-frank-marcelo-gleiser-and-evan-thompsons-the-blind-spot/.
Evan Thompson’s work ‘back in the day’ with Maturana and Varela in the early days of ‘Neurophenomenology’ (along with lots of other folks) was, I think, of key importance in opening up a new vista on organic-based functionality. Here is a link to a key address Evan Thompson gave some time ago in memory of Francisco (Javier) Varela (Garcia)… https://achrafkassioui.com/library/Evan%20Thompson%20-%20Tribute%20to%20Francisco%20Varela.pdf
And the ‘tie that binds’ between Evan Thompson’s father and Gregory Bateson means that Evan has a very solid grounding in the whole idea that ‘Mind’ and ‘Nature’ are deeply unified and inextricably bound together. This is the idea, I would think, of the ‘Religio‘ that was referenced by John Vervaeke in his talk at the Thinking with Iain McGilchrist conference you put together. And in the work of philosopher, James Filler– who John cited, in which Filler makes a very clear and cogent argument for ‘relationality as the ground of ontology‘ tracing this idea all the way back to Anaximander and Heraclitus, and showing how Aristotle kind of messed things up by focusing on and prioritizing the relata over the relations–presumably because the relata are more directly evident to the human sensorium. What we are now in desperate need of is a ‘re-balancing’ that puts the emphasis back on relationality as primordial. Without the relations, the relata are not connected into an organized functional entity–they are just disconnected and ‘hanging out’ as isolates. The tricky part is that BOTH living organisms and fabricated mechanisms are functional relational systems. BUT, as the late Robert Rosen showed in his theoretical work in relational biology, they are categorically distinct. Mechanisms are very nice structures mathematically. They can be readily modeled with predicative mathematics, are strictly deterministic, and admit to an ‘ontology of states.’ Not so for living organisms which require impredicative mathematics. Which means that the mechanistic formalism, which forms the foundation for ‘simple’ relational systems, does not work in addressing the task of adequately characterizing the functionality of living organisms, which are ‘complex’ relational systems. Mechanisms operate on physical ‘clock time’. Living organisms operate on experiential ‘relational time’ or, to use Bergson’s term, ‘Duration’. This is fundamental and it is of great significance, IMHO. It is why the ‘left hemisphere’ will never be able to ‘hack’ the ‘right hemisphere’. It is also relates directly to the Incompleteness Theorems of Kurt Gödel. The problem for the left hemisphere is that it desires certainty and completeness, but it does not have the ‘chops’ to get there. The right hemisphere has the ‘chops’ but does not speak directly through language–just affect- and somatic-based ‘feeling’ or what we might call ‘intuition’. That is the human ‘predicament’–pretty much in a nutshell.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?