Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self

For centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these systems and at great cost swap them for others that more evenly distribute power and authority. Cosmic forces preordained one’s role within a transcendental order…but then, across quick decades of upheaval, philosophy and politics started celebrating self-determination and free will. Art and science blossomed as they wove together. Nothing was ever the same.

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we engage with returning guest, New York Times best-selling author of seven books and SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf, about her latest lovingly-detailed long work, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self. In this episode we explore the conditions for an 18th century revolution in philosophy, science, literature, and lifestyle springing from Jena, Germany. Over just a few years, an extraordinary confluence of history-making figures such as Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Novalis helped rewrite what was possible for human thought and action. Admist a landscape of political revolt, this braid of brilliant friends and enemies and lovers altered what it means to be a self and how the modern self relates to everything it isn’t, inspiring later British and American Romantic movements. Arguing for art and the imagination in the work of science and infusing art with reason, Jena’s rebels of the mind lived bold, iconoclastic lives that seem 200 years ahead in retrospect. We stand to learn a great deal from a careful look at Jena and the first Romantics…maybe even how to replicate their great successes and avoid their self-implosion in the face of social turbulence.

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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Related Reading & Listening:

Episode 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde

Episode 61 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous Idea

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
by Andrea Wulf

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
by Andrea Wulf

Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
by Lewis Hyde

Episode 37 - The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales

“Nature” (1844)
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Blue Planet (BBC)
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