Category: Thought

Ecce Homo and the Eternal Recurrence in Practice

I have spent the past two months reading Nietzsche. I had already read many of his works when at university, where I was lucky enough to have a teacher who seemed, with his dashing good looks and masterful command of the lecture hall, to embody Nietzsche’s idea of the superman himself. This time, however, I was reading them not for an essay, but for myself.

Nietzsche as self-improvement, as self-knowledge, is of course a dangerous path to follow. But I reasoned to myself that as I am no longer a teenager, I must be immune, or at least somewhat resistant, to the worst excesses of misinterpretation that people tend to employ as they let a cursory acquaintance with the philosopher allow them to be a complete asshole to everyone around them. Reading through Walter Kaufmann’s biography of Nietzsche also helped.

The last of Nietzsche’s works that I have made it to is his autobiography, Ecce Homo: How one Becomes What one is. I didn’t write about Nietzsche’s other books because I didn’t feel sufficiently confident in my grasp of them to write usefully about them. Check back in a few years, and maybe we’ll be there. Karl Jaspers used to tell people never to be satisfied with a passage of Nietzsche’s until they had found a passage elsewhere saying the exact opposite; this approach does not make for a decent blog post, but nor does resorting to rather weather-beaten interpretations that add nothing new. I would want to be able to go through Nietzsche with a knife (one of his favourite images is that of a vivisectionist), finding nuances in what at first seems absurd. This will take both time and living. And so, you are spared, for now.

Ecce Homo is not just an insane attempt at writing about oneself, it is also a fascinating attempt, I think, at putting into practice one of Nietzsche’s key ideas from his mature period – that of the eternal recurrence. That is the lens through which I will interpret the book in this piece, as a wilful struggle with his own history to say of every moment of it not just that it was worth it, but even that it was good. To affirm, where others would be resigned or even negative.

We begin with aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, also known as The Joyous Science. Here Nietzsche first suggests (“What if…”) the idea that things may run back on themselves in a loop. Here it is a mere thought experiment, but later on, Nietzsche even had plans of proving it scientifically and aimed to study seriously the natural sciences to find the necessary evidence. (Kaufmann notes that commentators seem unsure whether Nietzsche actually believed he had stumbled upon a secret truth of the universe, or whether it was and remained just an experiment. As far as I am concerned, it’s not important.)

Here is the aphorism in full:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?

If life is repeated, over and over, exactly as it was, then that makes every action have unlimited significance. It also means that every action that we take out of cowardice, that we regret, will haunt us for the rest of time. But Nietzsche does not ask us to act differently, per se. He asks instead “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?” to withstand such a thought. The problem of cowardly actions is not as great as the problem posed by every minor, meaningless action, the ones that day by day cover our lives in sticky meaninglessness. The eternal recurrence is a demand primarily for a change in attitude. We must say to ourselves that everything that happens is just as we wanted it, and vest our actions with significance, affirming them for their essential value in making us who we are.

Growth, in modern-day parlance “personal development”, is everything to Nietzsche. And an attitude of affirmation (“the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained”, so he informs us of the eternal recurrence), where we desire everything that happens to us, joyous or sad, awesome, or awful, is most likely to lead to the achievement of our most full potential.

The Gay Science is, of course, not the only work of the eternal recurrence. Thus Spoke Zarathustra treats the theme in greater detail, and it returns, briefly, in some other of his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil, and in his notes. Here is an extract from Zarathustra which gives some indication of the creative process of reformulating one’s life into something one can affirm:

               I walk among men as among fragments of the future: of that future which I scan.

And it is all my art and aim to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance.

               And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet and reader of riddles and the redeemer of chance!

               To redeem the past and to transform every “it was” into an “I wanted it thus!” – that alone I would call redemption.

              

The eternal recurrence is a creative act, where life is treated as an artwork. If everything experienced can be transformed successfully into a masterpiece, then that is enough – we do not ask questions about the experiences, we have eyes only for the work. Thus should we live, building a being of ourselves that makes use of everything that has ever happened to us, so that we could discard nothing, and everything – when experienced again – would appear to us joyfully, as a piece of the grand puzzle that is our developed self. 

Where, then, does Ecce Homo fit in? Written in a final burst of creativity, alongside The Twilight of the Idols, The Wagner Case, and The Antichrist, it was finished only a few weeks before Nietzsche went mad on the streets of Turin, allegedly after seeing a horse being beaten. It was almost as if he foresaw the end of his life and wanted to wrap it up nicely. Thus does it seem with hindsight, but it is more likely that he saw the end of a particular period of his authorship, and wanted to bookend it before carrying on. It is interesting to note in connection with this, for example, that The Antichrist is not given a chapter here, while all his other major books are. This is because itwas supposed to be the first volume of the epic Revaluation of all Values – it belongs to the new Nietzsche.

Ecce Homo is an autobiography, it is “one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written,” as Michael Tanner notes in my volume’s introduction. It ranges from “manic self-celebrations” to “parodistic orgies”, “high spirits”, and even “a tone of elegy”. Not only does it have a remarkable tonal range, but it is also full of outright lies about Nietzsche’s past which anyone can check up on with little difficulty. As a book, then, we oughtn’t go to it to work out what Nietzsche lived or even felt – we should go to it to see him crafting his life into something he can affirm. This is where its particular curiosity lies. After reading all of his other books, Ecce Homo is like seeing the practice of what had hitherto been simply theory.

The more we understand of his actual autobiography, the more challenging his interpretations of his life seem. The key moments – his friendship and break with the composer Richard Wagner, his unhappy three-way relationship with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée that cost him the friendship of both, his general ill-health, and his awful sister – are here transformed or disguised, so that saying anything negative about his life seems impossible.

Of Wagner, a man against whom he had written a book (The Wagner Case), whose Human, All too Human, was written after the crisis of their break, Nietzsche has only positive things to say. “Richard Wagner was by far the most closely related man to me… The rest is silence.” The reference to silence seems to suggest some resentment repressed, but Nietzsche does not stop here. Later on, he writes “I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life”. Why, how? Here he comes closest to expressing explicitly the project of Ecce Homo: “as I am strong enough to turn even the most questionable and most perilous things to my own advantage and thus to become stronger”, he can do this. The praise of Wagner as a man contrasts with Nietzsche’s savagery about his work. But the friendship was what was lived, and it is the friendship that needs affirming. 

Wagner is that big dark spot in Nietzsche’s life without which he may never have become himself: thus, Wagner was necessary. Other things were too. “It is my sagacity to have been many things and in many places so as to be able to become one person – so as to be able to attain one thing. For a time I had to be a scholar”, he says of his work as a university professor. He thanks his own sickness for allowing an easy, natural break with Wagner: “it permitted, it commanded forgetting”. He even thanks “Fräulein Lou von Salomé”, a woman of “astonishing inspiration”. The reality of their friendship was much less fun, but Nietzsche, without giving details (in the case of Salomé, he definitely seems to prefer silence), does at least allow himself to mention one of his characteristic views: “Pain does not count as an objection to life”.

In the chapter “Why I am so Clever”, Nietzsche decides to really embrace his role as a life coach. He tells us in great detail all the important “little things” we need to thrive: “nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness”. We get a detailed description of what to drink and eat, of the importance of knowing “the size of one’s stomach”, and how to relax (walking). This may seem ridiculous to us in the era of self-help, but to his readers, this emphasis would have been scandalous, for the alternative sources of personal growth and development – “all the concepts “God”, “Soul”, “Virtue”, “Sin,” “the Beyond”, “truth”, “eternal life” – are chucked out as only getting in our way. Now, in exploring those things that made him healthy – in his sense of affirmatively-minded, rather than physically fit – Nietzsche is giving a formula for living so life can be affirmed.

To turn everything into a blessing, to respond creatively to absolutely every stimulus – that is how I understand the command of the eternal recurrence. The creative response, however, is not merely individual pieces of art, but a holistic picture of the entire self. Life as art – as one long unbroken masterpiece of affirmation and reformulation. Within Ecce Homo, we see both the attempt to make a life-picture, and we also see the individual works of art that burst out of Nietzsche’s receptivity, such as this poem he wrote about Venice after the experience of hearing lovely music:

Lately I stood at the bridge

in the brown night.

From afar there came a song:

a golden drop, it swelled

across the trembling surface.

Gondolas, lights, music –

drunken it swam out into the gloom…

My soul, a stringed instrument,

touched by invisible hands

sang to itself in reply a gondola song,

and trembled with gaudy happiness.

– Was anyone listening?

Is Ecce Homo successful as the practice of some concept of affirmation, of laying the groundwork for life to eternally recur? We must ask late Herr Nietzsche, hurtling repeatedly back through his own life, to see what he thinks. As for us, there is enough here to see the book as a struggle to affirm that does not always work. Nietzsche successfully praises the friends who left him or whom he himself left. He finds such joy in certain moments that we can almost taste it – take, for example, the moment he completes the forward to The Antichrist: “The forward was written on 3 September 1888: when in the morning after this writing I stepped outside I found awaiting me the loveliest day the Ober-Engadin had ever shown me – transparent, glowing in its colours, containing in itself every antithesis, every mediant between ice and south”.

And yet, there is a lot of dissatisfaction here too. My book’s introduction by Michael Tanner notes the book’s parodistic elements, almost to excuse this. Any autobiography is self-centred and a little egotistical, so isn’t Nietzsche merely parodying that when he gives himself chapter titles like “Why I am So Wise”, “Why I Write Such Good Books”, and “Why I am a Destiny”? Yes and no. I don’t read this as a sign of his oncoming madness either. What we have here, however, is a struggle to justify himself against a world that just doesn’t seem to care about the way that he has completely overturned it. Yes, he says that some people are born “posthumously”, and he does praise Georg Brandes, the Danish academic who first started popularising him. But as for the Germans? All he heard were crickets, and it hurt him.

And so, he became more strident, his voice reaching a pitch that hurts to listen to, as if his assurances that he is perhaps the greatest human being ever to have lived is what was missing, the final push needed to convince people that they should take him seriously. “I come from heights no bird has ever soared to, I know abysses into which no foot has ever yet strayed, I have been told it is impossible to put a book of mine down”. “I am not a man, I am dynamite”. “I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense – smell – the lie as lie … My genius is in my nostrils”. Of course, I write my “ha!” in the margin at such things. And there’s no denying that these are fun, brilliant descriptions. But it’s also sad. This is the desperate yelling of a lonely man into the void.

Or, perhaps, not even a void, but something still worse. Because the other sign of Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction in Ecce Homo comes from his feeling that he is already being misunderstood, that he is about to be misunderstood in terrible ways. (As indeed he was, after his scummy fascist sister started controlling his memory and his works, peddling them to the Nazis as the supreme justification of their hate). The closer we approach the end of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, the more he begins his aphorisms with the question “Have I been understood?” And less, because of his increased desperation and extremity of imagery, can we say “yes” to him.

Let’s take one example from the final chapter, “Why I am a Destiny”:

“I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against  everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified… There will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth.”

Here’s what Kaufmann, whose book saved Nietzsche from the Nazis for new generations, writes: “He speaks of “war” even when he is evidently thinking of strife, of “power” rather than “self-perfection”. This approach generally works with Nietzsche’s other books, like The Gay Science, but by the time we look at his later works, it really is impossible. In Ecce Homo, he seems to want violence, not just of the spirit to “overcome” itself, but also between individuals, countries, men and women. Is that what he really means here? He hated nationalism, especially German nationalism, he really seemed to think that only weaker people would seek power over others as a substitute for power over themselves. But that’s not obvious at all here.

Nietzsche’s ambiguity about violence coming from his outrageous language, (“I am a nuance”, from the chapter on Wagner, I can imagine him yelling at me), just demonstrates the degree that he felt frustrated with his work’s reception, no matter how much the rest of the book is an attempt to tell us that his life was great. As an attempt to write eternal recurrence, “the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of all things”, is still the way I would read Ecce Homo. That the attempt is not wholly successful should not distract us from the sheer weight of affirmation that we do come across in the book: “supreme affirmation born out of fullness, of superfluity, an affirmation without reservation even of suffering, even of guilt, even of all that is strange and questionable in existence.”

This is a positive message, and if we do end up reading Nietzsche looking for some suggestions on how to improve our lives, it is one of the best things to take away. That he failed is of no matter to us. He thought he still had time… Let’s hope we do.  

Glaciers, Climate and Humility

In The Age of Wonder Richard Holmes describes the delight at the discovery of nature’s secrets that animated both artists and scientists around the time of the Romantics. Wonder, that sense of awe in the face of the mysterious and great, drove men and women to explore the world on ship and saddle and plumb its depths and farthest reaches. Few things were more exciting than glaciers, those vast marble-white creatures that sit at the tops of the world and lour down at us mortals beneath.

It was the investigation of glaciers that led to the discovery of the climate and its changes which are of vital importance to the present day. Surprisingly enough, however, it was not until the late 20th century that fears began to focus on global warming rather than global cooling. Initially, it was these masses of ice who were our enemy, unpredictable beasts whose movement downwards was felt to be unstoppable and perfectly destructive. The cooling of the planet would decimate crop yields and lead to mass starvation and social unrest, and as late as the 1970s the CIA was preparing for such a potentiality.

We know now, of course, that the present problem we face lies not in cooling, but in heating. After first briefly looking at the history of our understanding of the climate, I briefly consider the relationship between the technological mastery of the earth and human nature.

It was a Genevan scientist, Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who set off the beginnings of our understanding of the climate towards the end of the 18th century. A committed Alpinist, in his Voyages dans les Alpes he first used the word geology but was puzzled by the question of why we did not freeze to death during the night. This seems slightly silly at first glance, but if you shuffle off your knowledge of modern science you can see it for the challenge it once was. When the source of most of our heat is clearly the sun, why does that heat not disappear the moment the sun sets in the evening? Saussure built a kind of mini greenhouse in the 1770s and thus discovered that the atmosphere itself is capable of holding heat long after its sources have been removed.

One problem was resolved, but others remained. In the 19th-century, people were interested in whether there had been an Ice Age at all – not just the posthumously christened “Little Ice Age” of the 16th to 19th centuries – but an actual period of frozen wastes and mass starvation. This was proven by Louis Agassiz, another Swiss scientist with a passion for glaciers. In 1837, he suggested that there had indeed been an ice age, and the evidence was all around us – valleys, gorges, mountains, and so many boulders and stones thrown far from their homes. Agassiz evocatively termed glaciers “God’s great plough” for their work. For proposing that global temperatures had indeed been much lower, and for an extended period of time, Agassiz can be thought of as the founder of the idea of climate and its changes.

Finally, John Tyndall, a British scientist with a passion for the Alps, began investigating glaciers and their movements. Building upon the work of the others above, he realised that some gases, in particular carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) and water vapour, contributed to the greenhouse effect that Saussure had discovered. This was not enough to cause concern about a changing climate. It was only when the Swedish professor Svante Arrhenius began modelling the effects of changing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, reaching conclusions that are not too far from our modern models, that cause and effect were truly linked. Arrhenius himself was not worried. Writing at the end of the 19th century, he believed carbon dioxide concentrations were rising very slowly, and that it would take over three thousand years for figures to double. That was far enough down the road, and in any case, he held the view, not uncommon until relatively recently, that warming could only be a good thing – making the world more hospitable and increasing the yields of crops.

Of course, at the end of the 19th-century things were indeed so. This did not last. As the 20th century got underway the world only produced more and more carbon emissions from new inventions such as cars, the widespread electrification (on a coal power basis) of developed countries, and from a growing population that wanted to consume more and more. How exactly the world would change was still a subject of contention, rather than the consensus it is now, but there was no denying that the atmosphere was indeed changing. An American scientist, Charles David Keeling, created the famous Keeling Curve using data gathered at the Mauna Loa meteorological observatory in Hawaii (and then elsewhere too). This showed in unambiguous terms that the amount of carbon dioxide within the atmosphere was growing, and growing fast.

The Keeling Curve, courtesy of the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The shocking thing, and the one that really gives those sceptics who claim that the climate has always changed (and it has, that is true) and that humans have nothing to do with it no legs to stand on, is when we consider the curve over a longer period, as below.
The uptick is quite extraordinary, going far beyond the natural cycles beforehand. And it shows no signs of stopping.

It is amusing to think that we once thought that the ice was our problem, but not without its symbolic interest. Imagine a man or woman, standing before a glacier. The difference in scale is extraordinary. Unlike mountains, which are relatively stationary and thus pose no threat except to climbers, and bodies of water, which can be fished and dammed and bridged, glaciers are a force of nature that seems completely unmasterable. (These scientists were mostly writing before Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite in 1867). If a glacier came, or if the temperature dropped, death would seem inevitable. Crops would fail, and cities would be swept away. And that would be it.

The damage from cooling is easy to visualise – just last year the world was rocked by images of French farmers, huddled around grape vines with torches, an almost medieval scene, as they tried to prevent a cold snap from destroying their harvest. But such images also reveal the problem with this great fear of cooling – it is so clearly remediable by heating. Houses could be insulated even in the 19th century, trees could be chopped for firewood, coal could be burned, and warmer clothes could be worn. If one were really being chased by glaciers, then of course a couple of (hundred thousand) sticks of dynamite could be used to break up the beasts and let what sun remained work upon them more effectively.

This fear of cooling reflects, we can say, the legacy of a pre-Enlightenment view of humanity, one where we were small and vulnerable to the world and God’s whimsy. The Enlightenment was not just a time of new knowledge, it was also a time of new mastery and power over nature, individuals, and whole societies. Glaciers appeared as something that, in spite of our advances, remained frightening and uncontrollable – an uncanny reminder that we were not as great as we thought we were. A kind of living white injunction to be humbler. But then we kept advancing, and soon we no longer feared even them. Human arrogance had won out. The kind of arrogance that was the darkest legacy of the Enlightenment because it allowed us to commit the terrible social experiments of the 20th century (Stalinism, fascism, and so on), convinced us that we not only had the might but also the right, to change the world.

In the case of the climate, we really could have benefited from learning our lesson in humility the first time around. The world is warming rapidly, the human and other animal toll is likely to be massive and, worst of all, entirely avoidable. But unlike with battling glaciers, where one is not a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but actually capable of fighting back effectively, we cannot so easily deal with heating. Fire brings warmth, but what takes it away? Even if you have the answer, it comes to mind far less readily than fire does to the question of creating warmth. We can take our clothes off, but public decency demands we exercise this ability within certain limits, and in any case, there are only so many clothes we can take off before we need to look at other options.

Fridges and air conditioners are not the solutions they may seem to be. Both of them actually worsen the problem because of their own chemical and electricity demands, which leads to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But even beyond that technical point, both fridges and air conditioners cool a small area, and an enclosed one. Hold the fridge door open and open all your windows and the cooling effects are so much reduced as to be essentially imperceptible. A fire might work the same way, but it heats much more effectively than these objects cool. And in terms of fuels, a fire can eat anything, whereas these things require electricity, which is comparatively complex to produce.  

Pretty much everything in the world is about heating. We heat oil to distillate it into its component parts, which we then heat to make our internal combustion engines work, build new chemicals, or power our power plants. We heat our food before we eat it, we heat our homes, and the production of the dyes we use in everything around us is dependent on heat too. Plastic is basically the result of heating certain chemical compounds to certain temperatures. The same is true of metals. How do you go from iron to steel? The answer, with some intervening steps, is heat.

Even when heating is not the primary factor, heat is the waste product. A gas-fired power plant heats water to produce steam, which puts a turbine into motion, generating electricity. What is left over is that heat. The smashing of mined ore that is part of its processing also produces heat. Within the home, our devices heat up when we use them too much. I am currently balancing my computer on a book so that it does not heat my lap. And speaking of my lap, the human body provides us with another example of heat’s omniprevalence. We heat up as we think, exercise, in a word live, and then lose that heat through things like sweating.

A glacier is an easy example of a cooling climate, the bad guy to be fought. When the climate warms, there is no such enemy coming. Instead, things just die. Deserts grow, plants don’t, natural disasters like hurricanes increase in frequency, and bad weather events like snowstorms and heat waves do too, but in all of these cases we are dealing with something essentially diffuse and impersonal. The problem cannot be dynamited away. And because it is a global problem, it is not as if we could just throw down a fridge and be done with it. Being a global problem, it is harder to accept it as our particular problem. A growing glacier is a specific issue for a specific place, while a shrinking glacier is a general loss, but because of its generality, we end up being only able to care so much about it.

This psychological issue is perhaps the main reason why so few people do any of the things that we can do to reduce global warming. (The complicating issue, one beyond the scope of this piece, is about whether individuals or corporations should be more responsible for emissions). Fire and heat are both easier to arrange than things to cool, they also have a more obvious effect with their burning. Likewise, the delayed effect of climate change, where today we are seeing the consequences of emissions released into the atmosphere quite literally before I was born, means that there’s an element of resignation in dealing with global warming which means that some people may simply not bother doing what they can.

I noted that at the time when people feared the return of the glaciers, they had every reason to do so, being comparatively less able to fight them off. Technological change prevailed, and the Enlightenment dream of power over all things was allowed to continue. Humans need to learn humility, but I doubt climate change is going to teach them it. Some of the most promising developments in fighting against carbon dioxide overproduction are likely to have the effect of letting us “off the hook” for our failure to reduce our consumption earlier. I have in mind technologies such as those for direct air capture, essentially giant reverse air conditioning units that suck carbon out of the air at immense cost and electricity demand, or perhaps nuclear fusion, which was in the news earlier this month.  

Of course, the alternative to being let off the hook – and I should be clear that these technologies are unlikely to save us, only compensate somewhat for our utter inability to do anything about reducing our demand for fossil fuels – is to watch our world disintegrate in fire and brimstone, metaphorically speaking and literally too in some places. A loss of diversity, a loss of nature, a loss of human life in the developing world, in particular, all of this is a catastrophe, even if it’s not “the end of the world”, only the end of “our world.” None of us wishes to see that either.

What then will change us? What then will bring humility? What then will lead a majority of us to take actions to build a better world, rather than continue statically upon the destructive paths that others have laid for us? I wish I knew. The world is a wondrous place, but wonder has not done enough, nor even has fear. Time will tell, I hope, what thing truly is needful. The alternative is not encouraging to think about.

This post was inspired by Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, and the information on the scientists comes primarily from it.

The Birth of Romanticism – Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels

I always love these books that try to recreate the world out of which an idea arose. No matter how significant I am told a thought is, it seems unimportant until I can see the people who came up with it, how it affected them and why they needed it in their lives. Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb, which I read last year, or Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, are all such books. Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, which deals with the thinkers surrounding the University of Jena in Germany around the beginning of the 19th century, is yet another. What distinguishes Wulf’s contribution is that it also has a lot in common with the works of Richard Holmes, whose “Glorious” naturally adorns the dustjacket. By this, I mean that Wulf’s book is as much a story as it is an engagement with the ideas. Yet Wulf’s attempt to craft all this into a story is both Magnificent Rebels’ strength and its weakness.

The story takes us from 1794 to 1806, with a prologue and an epilogue to tidy things up. A short time period, but veritable anni mirabiles for the arts, philosophy, and world. In the tiny town of Jena, almost everyone worth knowing in German culture was gathered together, at a time when the German people were about to make earth-shattering contributions to the world after so many centuries of doing very little (the exception being Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, who helped set the stage). Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Tieck represented poetry and prose, then there were the Schlegel brothers and Fichte and Schelling and finally Hegel for philosophy and theory. Wulf also draws our attention to the women – in particular, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel and Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. They were every bit as important in theorising – and writing – as their husbands, and Magnificent Rebels helps put them back in the intellectual arena.

These names listed above are the foundational figures in Romanticism. Yes, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, but here we have the heavy stuff, the theory and the ideas that gave German – and later European Romanticism – its intellectual heft. (Coleridge, we learn, never made it to Jena, but he still stole verbatim an awful lot of Schelling and was instrumental, alongside Carlyle, in popularising German thought in the Anglophone world). We have the idealisation of love, the obsession with the infinite, nature, experience and the importance of the self which all came ultimately to characterise Romanticism, such as any of us may be able to put our fingers on what it actually means.

Wulf’s primary intellectual contention is that these guys helped place the individual at the centre of the world for the first time. The philosopher Fichte, in particular, declared that you must “attend to yourself; turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self. Such is the first demand that Philosophy imposes upon the student. We speak of nothing that is outside you, but solely of yourself.” Wulf uses the historical context to explain how revolutionary this was. At the time, in the German states one needed permission from the ruler to divorce, and often to travel too. Not just women, but even men were heavily restricted in their individual autonomy. The philosophers of Magnificent Rebels, so we learn, set off a chain reaction of self-centredness (in good ways and bad) whose ramifications are still being felt to this day.

So why Jena? Jena was a small town, but its university became famous in this brief period because it was perhaps the best place in Germany for freethinkers. The reason for this was that it was a prime example of the dysfunctional governance that characterised much of “Voltaire’s Nightmare” – the Holy Roman Empire. Jena’s university was governed, at the same time, by the rulers of the four Saxon states – Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and Saxe-Meiningen. As you can imagine, this meant that nobody could agree on the rules and those that were agreed upon were practically impossible to enforce. This was one factor.

The second factor was friendship. Magnificent Rebels is to a large extent a paean to the power of friendship to achieve massive leaps forward in any area where friends strive together. Everyone invited their friends and relatives so that even if someone did not have a teaching position at the university at Jena, they still had plenty of good reasons to be there. In the evenings all these clever people got together and drank and thought and read – what Novalis called “symphilosophising” because, like a symphony, it was a group activity. Everyone built atop the other. Fichte built atop Kant’s philosophy, then Schelling atop Fichte, and Hegel atop them both, so that by the time the book ends it is no longer possible for any of the philosophy described to be comprehended by a normal human being such as your humble reviewer.

Friendship builds a wonderful thing, and then the ideal begins to fall apart for the same reason. Where we could perhaps have had twenty or thirty years of greatness, personalities get in the way. Fichte gets himself kicked out of the university for not knowing when to shut up, Schiller gets offended the entire time and loses all his friends but Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel is unable to do anything that would make him money and is far too combative for his own good. Novalis and then Schiller are killed by disease, and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Caroline divorce. Everything and everyone break up, and then the French invade and ransack the town and that really puts the nail in Jena’s coffin.

Wulf’s story takes us through all of these characters’ lives, although with so many of them to meet, we cannot get too close to them. We get a rough idea of what they were each about, but not as much as I would have liked. I got the impression that Wulf was herself defeated by some of Schelling and Fichte’s notorious twaddle, which is fair enough. I learned that Goethe was fat and Schiller was always ill. The main thing that Wulf does in Magnificent Rebels is deal with their interconnections. How their relationships with one another changed over the years, through feuds and fights. We feel ourselves caught up in this whirlwind of creativity, and that’s probably the book’s best quality.

More than the reorientation towards the individual, Magnificent Rebels details the ideas that the early Romantics threw down that taken together hint towards what Romanticism as a whole might mean. We get Fichte’s self-centredness, “My will alone… shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe”, Friedrich Schlegel’s emphasis on the importance of words, “the letter is the true magic word”, and Novalis’s legendary definition: “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise”.

Nowadays we tend to think of Romanticism as slightly dangerous in its irrational tendencies. This isn’t entirely borne out in the book. It is holistic rather than anti-rational, though often its thinkers’ desire to make everything pulsing and interconnected went up against what the scientists were telling them. It was only growing old and the French armies that turned many of these theorists from dreamy, passionate believers in a new world into much darker figures of reaction and nationalism. If Wulf’s book has a message for us today, it is that the Romantics of Jena changed our world, but their gifts are ours to use or misuse. They liberated us by freeing our sense of self from being the exclusive possession of a monarch. But they also made possible the terrible self-centeredness and materialism that are destroying this liberated world. Reflection, the turn inwards, is a thing that needs to be learned again and again, by successive generations, and Magnificent Rebels is of clear value beyond teaching us history because it helps us do just that.

For me, the main thing I got out of the book was this sense of collaboration and its power. This year I held a little gathering of my own at my family’s home in Switzerland. For just over a week, I and several friends were treated, under the watchful eyes and extremely talented housekeeping of my girlfriend, to brilliant food and equally sparkling conversation. Each day we walked upon the forested mountains, or bathed in mountain lakes, or reached the foot of the glaciers. It was, in a word, divine. One evening I stood outside with a friend and discussed the intricacies of interpreting ancient biblical texts – he is studying Ancient Hebrew in Israel – on another day, we discussed the development of atonal music in a mountain restaurant. I can think of nothing better.

What is obvious to me is just how much I grow when I am surrounded by good company. However much I am grateful to books like this, and the voices of the dead that they contain, the real world is all that much more rewarding. There is no passion that fully withstands the cooling of its ink upon the page. Yet where could I find another Jena? I was at Cambridge, of course. There are quite a lot of clever people there. But now I am no longer there; the world has swallowed me up. Still, one mustn’t lose heart. Many of the figures who flit through Magnificent Rebels spent only a few years in Jena before having to leave, and still they left their mark upon their friends and the world. Life is long, making friends is hard, but one day, we may hope, we shall each of us have our Jena.