Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

All ideas have a history, no matter how inevitable and well-entrenched they may seem to us today. The later Enlightenment was a heady time when people were exploring new conceptions of nature, humanity, and the self. Andrea Wulf is a writer of narrative histories, examining the origins of ideas through the lives of the people who explored them. In this episode we discuss three of her books: The Invention of Nature, about Alexander von Humboldt and environmentalism; Magnificent Rebels, about the Jena circle of Romantics including Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, and others; and most recently The Traveller, about George Forster, an early naturalist, ethnographer, and champion of human equality. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/06/08/356-andrea-wulf-on-enlightenment-nature-romanticism-and-modernity/   Support Mindscape on Patreon. Andrea Wulf was born in India, raised in Germany, and studied design history at the Royal College of Art, London. She is the author of seven books. She is a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Invention of Nature won multiple prizes, including the Royal Society science book prize and the LA Times book prize. Web site Amazon author page Wikipedia

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As we've often mentioned here on Mindscape, our focus is on ideas, how we understand the world in the biggest possible sense of that term, trying to figure out what the theories are, how they fit with data, whether it's physics or economics or psychology or anything like that. But of course, as today's guest, Andrea Wolfe reminds us, ideas come from people. So even though it's important to understand, the ideas, sometimes if you really want to understand the ideas and you want to understand why we have some ideas rather than others, it helps you to look at the people who invented these ideas and the historical context in which they are embedded. And in physics or in other sciences in chemistry or whatever, it's very often, at least apparently straightforward to pinpoint where the ideas come from, right? The moment in time when someone came up with the idea. Actually, that's harder even in the very physical sciences than you might think, because ideas are kind of in the air and they're shared and they finally appear somewhere. But in the more human side of

things, in culture, in literature, and art, and even in politics and philosophy, it can very often be harder to pinpoint where the ideas come from. Their gestation is a little bit slower. And by the time they get to us, by the time we have a certain idea, what about, you know, liberty or free will is an idea we talk about, or the individual and themselves and their relationship to the world. All these kinds of ideas are just so embedded in who we are, how we talk about where we are in the world, that it's hard to imagine a time when they weren't there, or at least they weren't there in the same way that they're there now. So that's kind of what we'll be talking about today. Andre has written a series of books.

She's been a number of books, but there's actually a sort of reverse chronological trilogy that she's just completed. Her most recent work is called The Traveler about Georg or George Forster, who was a German naturalist and travel writer. He was arguably the first travel writer in the modern sense. He went on an expedition with Captain Cook to the South Seas for three years in the 1770s, and came back and wrote about it, both about the naturalist kind of things that he discovered, the plants and the animals, but also as an ethnographer,

as talking about the human beings who he met, and actually standing up for their dignity against the kind of racial hierarchies that were present at the time. And then she had another book. The previous book was called Magnificent Rebels about what she labels the Yenna Circle in the 1790s. And Foster was related to them.

He actually interacted with them, but it was a group of intellectuals big names like Gerta and Hegel and Schilling and Fichter. And they hung out in this tiny little town in Jena and basically invented what we now call romanticism as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And one of the peripheral figures there was Alexander von Humboldt, who is the protagonist, if you want, the subject of Andrea's previous book to that called The Invention of Nature. And Holmolt again was a traveler and a naturalist, much like Foster. And he visited South America and he came back with enormously intricate measurements of temperature and pressure and magnetic fields and also observed the various kinds of plant life and so forth. But he really focused following the romantics in the anus circle on the connections between different things. It wasn't just a collection of this and that. It was the interactions, the systems level view.

And not only systems level of how plants talk to each other, but plants and animals and nature and humanity. So there is actually kind of a common thread of inventing a whole bunch of really deep ideas about the unity of nature, about the connections between art and science, about the connection between individuals and collectives and our responsibility to the world broadly. that is being invented at this moment in the late 18th century, the birth of modernity. So it's fun to both think about these big ideas for their own sakes, but also to think about the people who came up with them and why they did that and what we can learn from them. So let's go. Andrea Wolf, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

Thank you for having me. So this is a slightly different kind of podcast than I usually do because you're a historian, which I don't usually do, but also you're kind of a narrative, biographical historian. You're actually focused on people. And my whole thing is I try to ignore the people and just talk about the ideas. But the ideas come from people. Well, exactly. And I do notice that.

And I do recognize that. So that's why I want to do the occasional departure. of style. So, I mean, tell us a little bit about that idea, that the ideas come from people. I mean, how conscious is your methodology in writing these wonderful books that are both biography and history and intellectual books? Very much so, I think, I am interested in the ideas. I mean, I'm not, I'm, I don't think, you know, I don't like to be in a category. So, you know, I am kind of a historian. I've done a lot of history of science.

I've done philosophy. So I think, you know, I'm interested in the ideas, but I'm really interested in who had these ideas because I think we sometimes tend to think about the work of someone or the idea of someone as a kind of standalone thing. And we forget that it was very much influenced also by their life they live. So, you know, like a poet, for example, we read the poem or we read a drama or a novel. But that is very often influenced by what that person just went through in their life.

So that are the things I'm interested in. But also I think because we tend to focus, if we focus on a person, we tend to focus on one person. And we also forget that we don't really, unless you are a hermit, you don't really exist in a vacuum. So we are all part of a community of a family, a group of friends, at work, in a country, in a nation. So I'm interested at these kind of threats and connections. But then also, who were the people who have given us

the ideas of the Enlightenment or romanticism, for example? And I'm interested in particular, the kind of the so-called long 18th century, so kind of from the late 17th century to the early 19th century because I think a lot of the ideas we have today or who we are today is shaped by what happened during that time. And I love the idea of the connections between the people whose lives you're discussing

and other people in their culture and all those things because that also is a theme at the intellectual level because the people who you talk about are to oversimplify things a lot, famous for drawing connections between different parts of the natural world? Yes, so I wrote a book about Alexander von Humboldt called The Invention of Nature, and he's probably the most famous man who, in the books I've written, he said that everything in nature is connected,

that nature is this kind of living organism where everything hangs together from the smallest insect to the tallest tree. So he gave us really this concept of nature that very much shapes us. today. But he was also part of a group of young romantics who came together in this kind of small town in Germany called Jena. That's my other book, Magnificent Rebels. And they were very much interested again in this idea that humans and nature belong together, so that we are part of this one kind of system. And then my latest book is about George Foster. It's called The Traveler. And there I really wanted to look at humanity itself.

So it's kind of, I've written a kind of triology the wrong way around. Yep, I noticed this. The one I just published should have been the first one, but that never works like this, does it? So I started off with Humbold and then through Humboldt, I kind of came across the others. But they are, you know, in terms of the history of ideas, I think, they are, you know, they are very important. and for the way we think today. And also, you know, in Fasters case, really a reminder of the importance of ideas of humanity, our common humanity. So he was someone who returned from Captain Cook's second voyage with a deep-seated belief in the equality of races,

which, you know, given our current climate at the moment, I find a very, you know, inspiring. story and a hopeful story, but also a very important story, you know, how can someone who was brought up in a deeply racist society be so open-minded? You know, can we learn something from that? And that's something that was very important for me in this book. And I'm tempted, and you'll tell me how accurate this is, but, you know, the time period we're talking about the late 1700s, basically. The common theme of the three books might be cast as something like the, you know, the time period, we're something like the invention of modernity. But I'm not sure what modernity is, and I'm not sure if that's the common theme.

So maybe you can help us out. No, I think it's definitely themes that are important in the kind of coming together of modernity. If you know, if you look at Humboldt, his way of looking at nature as a living organism, So not as a mechanical system and not a machine that somehow kind of, you know, you put together, but as a living organism, that was a very new idea and an idea that has shaped our understanding of nature, I mean, to this day, but also because he then understands that, well, if it is a living organism, if it is this kind of web of life, then if you pull one threat in this web, you might unravel the whole thing.

So he's the first to really talk about and warn about harmful human-induced climate change, which, of course, is, you know, we are living with the consequences of ignoring him. And then you have Foster, who is, you know, he's a, he was Humboldt's mentor, actually. So I came across George Foster through Humboldt. And he, he, he's a quite extraordinary human being. So I'm going to talk a little bit about him that his ideas make more sense, I think. Right. One of the, I think his life is a really good example, why you should also look at the life of someone.

And when you look at the ideas, because he, so he's born in 1754 in Gerdon, so in today's Poland, then part of Royal Prussia. he became a traveler, and my book is called the traveler for that reason, he became a traveler at the age of 10 when he accompanied as a botanist his rather difficult and tempestuous father on a wild expedition through Russia. Just before his 12th birthday, his father took young George to London, where the young boy became the family's breadwinner by translating popular and best-selling travel accounts. He was a bit of a bunderkind, really, who picked up languages and scientific concepts kind of like this.

I mean, quite extraordinary. So what was he, sorry, what languages was he translating to and from? Rush. So he spoke Russian, English, German, and French. And he's 12 years old. He's 12 years old. And so he translates into English, which is not his mother tongue. Right.

And English, he basically picked up on the journey from Russia. to England because they were traveling on an English ship. Sure, as one does. As one does. At the age of 16, he starts to attend the learned meetings of the Royal Society. So he has no formal education, but quite an extraordinary education. If you think that the Royal Society at that time is the place where all the great ideas are exchanged. And then at 17, he joins Captain Cook's second voyage.

the resolution. And he, so this is a, you know, voyage of extremes where they kind of sail through, you know, labyrinths of icebergs and tropical islands in the South Pacific. But for George Foster, it really is a voyage of human interaction. And he returns with an unshakable belief in humankind, which is very unusual.

So this is a time when, I mean, almost everybody in the Western society in Western Europe is deeply racist, you know, where explorers have looked at indigenous people with arrogance at best and utter disgust and brutality at worst, where European philosophers such as Emmanuel Kant, or David Hume, they have no qualms. talking about black people as being an inferior race. So his attitude, young George Foster's attitude to the indigenous people is very, very unusual. He believes that they are humans like everybody else.

He does not see them as savages or barbarians. So he also turns against Rousseau's idea of the kind of peaceful, noble savage. Because he sees a war marauder in Tahit, for example. He says, so, you know, this is not the kind of peaceful savage, in quotation marks, who lives in this kind of happy natural state. He says every society has good and evil. The world is not neatly divided into virtuous and immoral. Quite the opposite. It's this kind of complex tapestry of the many shades of human lives and experiences. And that, you know, it's an highly, unusual attitude and completely different to most people.

And I think also prove that we tend to say that in the 18th century, you know, it was kind of inevitable to be racist. That's just, you know, the way people were. And I think his life really proves that it was a choice even back then. It is not an unavoidable way to see the world. And so I became, interested in why, you know, how is it possible that this young man thinks so differently. You know, he does not talk about the indigenous people as half humans or half monkeys,

half human. He sees them as people, humans who have their own kind of value system and cultural norms. And he said, you know, I am not going to use European norms or morals to judge them. Vice and virtue are relative concepts, he says. And I think there are many reasons for this, but I think one reason is that he was still very, very young. You know, it's almost like his mind is still quite malleable. You know, he's going to open to other ideas. But I think it's also because he was a traveller. He was always, and for the rest of his life, he remains like this. He's always in transit. He's this perpetual outsider. If you're an outsider yourself, you tend to be nicer to other people who are outsiders.

And he does not feel, he doesn't even know which country he belongs to because by the time he's 17, he's lived in Russia, in Prussia, in England, and then he goes off on the resolution. So there's an open-mindedness, I think, that comes from a very, very much not being part of a nation, which is something I think we sometimes forget today when, you know, everybody seems to be crawling behind their kind of national boundaries. And so it was George Forster and his father, who were both on this second voyage of Captain Cook.

So how old was the younger one? How old was George? He was 17. 17 when he joined and he was 20 when they came back. So at the age of 20, he has seen more of the world than most people will ever do. So they sailed 75,000 miles, roughly the same amount. as if they had gone three times around the equator. They spent a lot of time in the icy polar seas of Antarctica

because they were looking for the fabled southern continent, which many scientists back then believed had to exist to counterbalance the landmass in the northern hemisphere. So, I mean, just imagine, you know, being on a sailing boat, and, you know, a sailing boat which can't reverse, being in a kind of, you know, amongst icebergs, not a great thing. It's freezing cold, so cold that the ropes are kind of frozen stiff, the sails are like metal plates.

They wear woolen clothes, which is always wet, never dry. I mean, it must have been absolutely horrendous. But then they go New Zealand, Tahiti, Tonga, Vanuatu Acapulago, the Marquesa, Easter Island. And they go back and forth. So they go three times back to Antarctica. So they're really zigzagging through the South Pacific, and they go to several places several times.

So they get to know the people who live there. So for example, they go three times to Queen Charlotte Sound, which is at the northern tip of the South Island of New Zealand. So they, and they spent weeks and weeks there. So it's not just a quick stop because they have to repair the ship. And so they really get to know the people. And because George is so linguistically talented, he kind of picks up words and languages,

although he always says, like, you know, I don't understand everything. I don't understand their kind of form of government, for example, because I don't understand enough. But there's a great open-mindedness, which I think allows him to approach this differently. And then because you like ideas, he is this prescient scientist who looks, A, at, or by comparing the different languages across the South Pacific and the distribution of breadfruit trees, he works out roughly, you know, the root of Polynesian migration. 200 years before DNA analysis and archaeological studies prove it.

And I think it's just extraordinary. So the breadfruit tree, for example, which he loves eating, because that's one of the kind of the food staples in Tahiti, for example. But he notices that they don't have any seeds. Now, because they don't have seeds, he knows that they can only be cultivated by, humans. But he wonders, you know, where does, where, where do they originally come from? Yeah. So when when he returns, he, he kind of looks through botanical books in libraries and he finds that there were, that there were some breadfruit trees with seeds in Indonesia. So he

So he comes to get two conclusions. One is they must have been transported by someone across the ocean to the South Pacific Islands. And the sophistication of the agricultural methods of the Polynesians is extraordinary. Because through selective breeding, they basically turned the kind of original smaller breadfruit, which has seeds into this kind of larger, nutritious kind of. bigger breadfruit tree. So he, you know, and then he looks at the languages and he sees, well, they're kind of connected.

Sometimes it's just one letter that is different. So you have like Vā'a, which is the canoe in Tahitian or Vaka in Tongan or Waka in Maori. So he works that out. And then so where others, where other explorers see this empty South Pacific Ocean with like a few islands, he sees threats of migration. So he sees how everything is connected. So just as Holmwald sees that nature is connected, he sees that really more as an ethnographer, how everything, how humans are all connected. And tell me more about the expedition itself. Is it just one ship? How

many people are on it? So there's two ships. It's the resolution, which is the bigger ship and the adventure. Altogether, it's 200 men under Captain Cook, and they set sail in July 1772. And as I said earlier, they're trying to find this kind of southern continent. And they end up doing a full circuit around Antarctica because Cook wants to work, you know, wants to things, if I do one proper circuit and I can't find land, then, you know, if there's a southern continent, and it's covered in ice, and that's no good for the British. There's nothing they can exploit. So it's a three-year voyage.

They kind of zigzag across the South Pacific, and as they encounter islanders, the crew uses firearms to kind of exert power. And with time, George Foster kind of gets more and more dismayed by this. So it's quite interesting to see this. So the very first time they land in New Zealand, he still is very much an enlightenment thinker

who believes in the Europeans are superior. So they arrive there. The ship is pretty battered from the kind of icebergs, and they kind of set up all these workshops, and the forest kind of echoes with hammers and sores. And he says, look at all the art and industry we bring to the savages and their life is going to be just so much better. And then within six weeks, he's done a complete turnaround. So within six weeks, he starts

criticizing the European influence. And he says, by the end of the voyage, he says, Europeans just bring death and disease. It would have been much better for the inhabitants of the South seas if they had never encountered the English because he sees again and again how they're wounded and murdered and he's just shocked by it. And just as a footnote, I understand that this was Cook's second voyage. He never had any scientists on his voyages after that, right? He didn't want any more scientists. No, he really didn't. I think there were, I mean, it did not help that George Foster's father, Reinholt, was really quite a terrible person.

I mean, he had quite a temper. He, I mean, he managed to have fights with everybody on the resolution, even with a quite unflappable cook. So, cook is really quite well known for his kind of calm character and personality. And he managed to kind of upset him. Once he asked him for duel. I mean, he gets chucked out of the kind of great cabin a few times. So he's not an easy man.

And I think after that, Cook was just like, I am not having that ever again. This man is just unbearable. And is this kind of expedition something that is paid for by the government, by the British government? I mean, it seems like a long journey with uncertain results. I mean, I'm happy that they made it back. but it just seems kind of wonderfully quirky from our modern point of view, the idea you would go off for years and just poke around and try to learn things and come back with what you've learned.

Well, I wish it would just be learning things. You know, this is very much an kind of imperial endeavor. So to set the scene, so there's the seven years war in Europe, which is from 1756 to 1763. And it's been described as the very first global conflict because it was fought in North America, Europe, India. I mean, it's not just Europe. It is really Europe and its colonial possessions.

And after the war, Britain really emerges as the kind of dominant global power. France not particularly pleased about that. So France and England begin to look at the South Pacific, at something, you know, maybe they can kind of find a few more colonies there. So even expeditions such as Cook's first voyage, the Endeavour Voyage, which had a very scientific purpose, which was to observe the transit of Venus. And so Cook's sails to take. Tahiti in 1769 to observe the transit of Venus there,

which is really the first global, international scientific collaborations where scientists all over the world observed this one moment when Venus crosses the kind of burning disk of the sun and they measure the distance, or they measure the entry in the exit time of Venus, and through that they can kind of measure the distance between Earth and sun. But that only works if you have lots of scientists doing that together.

So that was the original reason for the Endeavour Voyage. However, they also landed in Australia. And we all know what came from that. So that becomes a colony for Britain. And it is, you know, even with a scientific purpose, like finding the southern continent, it is an imperial endeavor. So it is not like, oh well, you know, we just want to find out a few things. So yes, it is very much financed by the British government, by the British Admiralty.

And Cook has very precise instructions to write reports about the soils they find, the plants they find, the temper, the temper and the temperament of the, indigenous people, the local people, you know, just to see, you know, couldn't we kind of go in there and just, you know, turn them into slaves or something like that? Will they fight us? So this is, this is very much an imperial endeavor. And nominally, Forster's job was as naturalist. He was trying to learn about plants and animals. He branched out into human beings very obviously. But, I mean, what did he, what did he learn about the plants and the animals? So he's, so he's the assistant naturalist and the draftsman.

And he, you know, he has not a lot of choice in going on the endeavor because his father decides it. He's not a very talented draftsman when he starts. So when you look at his early birds from New Zealand, they will kind of like cling to the branches and look at it. They're about to fall off. But he becomes very, very, you know, becomes very, very good. So they could collect a lot of plants. They shoot birds.

They kind of dissect fish. And they don't really come back with any discoveries as such, because Joseph Banks, who was a botanist and Daniel Solander, they were on the Endeavour voyage, and they had brought back quite a lot of plants already. So Reinhold Foster, George's father, is constantly complaining that they spent too much time in Antarctica. Obviously, there's not much to get in terms of plants.

So he's really annoyed about that. And he just writes these very angry long entries in his journal. Like how can we find anything here? How am I going to be famous when I come back? So they don't come back with enough really to make a kind of splash in the scientific world. And what George Foster then does is he writes a travel account of this voyage, which is very different to earlier travel account. So he's, I mean, he's a born storyteller.

His descriptions really sing off the page, but he's also a very intuitive ethnographer. So where Christopher Columbus, for example, described or struggled to describe South America as anything but green. I mean, literally the landscape is green. The trees are green. And the indigenous people are naked, which for Columbus means not civilized. Foster is, I mean, it even turns the icy world of Antarctica into shades of kind of purple, green and blue. So he writes this book which makes him famous because he brings these different worlds, but also these different people into the kind of parlours of European houses.

And that is actually, I think, what they bring. what they come home with. It's not their actual collections, except in terms of they bring back a lot of ethnographical collections. So they come back with these extraordinary kind of mourning costumes from Tahiti, baskets from Tonga, weapons from Tana. So which are, and I think that's quite important, which are, because they're early ethnographers, they are actually traded, so they're not stolen.

And they give us a really good idea of Polynesian culture before European contact. So I think that his contribution to science in that respect is more on the kind of in ethnography than as a naturalist. And what were the societies of the South Seas like back in the day? What kind of government did they have? So very different. And he approached every island kind of trying to understand, which was difficult. But he thought, you know, he thought, and he was mostly right.

He thought that there were more egalitarian than European societies. Or if they had a kind of class system, like they had, for example, in Tahiti, the kind of boundaries were much more fluid. So he was very much interested in that. And it shaped his political thinking, which then later, made him a revolutionary in Europe, not by reading French philosophers, but by what he had seen in the South Pacific. And let's, I mean, there's just too many other things I want to talk about. So let's kind of wrap that up.

I mean, you mentioned that Forster gets involved in the revolution in France. I mean, he died relatively young, but he managed to pack a lot of living into the period between coming home from the Cook expedition and when he finally died. Yeah, I mean, he comes back and he becomes really, for a few years, you know, he becomes so famous, he becomes a public intellectual. He picks a very public fight with Imano Kant, who wrote this essay about the human racism, which Kant wrote that there are four different human races all defined by the color of their skin with, you know, Europeans as the kind of pinnacle of creation.

And Foster says, like, hold on a second. All the people I've seen on my voyage don't fit into your neat categories because nature is really connected by nuances and by shades, not by these kind of sharply divided kind of categories. And Kant is not very pleased about that. So Kant then writes another article attacking Foster. And it ends up being a really a fight about methodology. Yeah.

You know, how do we, how do we gain knowledge? So there is Emmanuel Kant who's never left Kunix back. Famously not a traveler, yeah. Yeah, not a traveler at all. Who, and then you have Foster, who's this traveler. So Foster accuses Kant and says, like, how can you make these statements if you have never traveled and you have never seen any of these people? And Knavlyss and says, how can you come up with these things if you don't travel with a theory in mind?

So it's all about, you know, do you start with an idea and then you find your proofs? Or do you start with your observation and then you form your theory? Which I think was, you know, that was a kind of fascinating, which is really the kind of, it's the battle of the methodologies, which are, you know, at the nexus of the enlightenment. You know, how do we, how do we gain knowledge? How do we form our theories? So then after a while, he ends up in mines, which is only about 80 miles from the French border, about 20 miles west of Frankfurt,

which most people maybe know as a German town. So, but he ends up in minds. and then a few months later in 1789, the French Revolution happens just across the border. And he watches this as if he's watching a kind of gripping drama unfold. Suddenly, when the French revolutionaries declare all men, of course, or men equal, they promise at least a possibility of a new, society, a society which is built on the power of ideas and freedom.

And so Foster sees that there is the real possibility of a new reality just across the border. So he's absolutely gripped by this. And in 1792, the French, so there's a war, so a lot of European nations are fighting against the French and they're kind of dangerous ideas of revolutions. So the French take minds, and instead of being worried about the invaders, Foster welcomes them, and he wants to establish a German republic. Because he's from the age of 10 when he traveled through Russia, he's seen the kind of harsh reality of despotism and inequality.

And these are really the themes that obsess them all his life. And when he returns from the resolution voyage, he fights for the rest of his life, he fights for the rest of his life. he fights for freedom, equality, and against racism and white supremacy. So he becomes a revolutionary, and he becomes the co-founder of the so-called Mainz Republic, which is Germany's first republic, very short-lived, only a few months. He then travels to revolutionary Paris to ask the French government if the Mainz Republic can become part of the French Republic. by the time he's doing that, the Prussians have taken minds back.

So he's declared an outlaw, basically. I mean, he's a traitor. He cannot go back to Germany. So he is in Paris during the brutal reign of terror. But despite seeing this bloodshed, he still supports the revolution, which makes him very unpopular in Germany. It's one thing to support what happened at the beginning, another thing to kind of initiate a German. German revolution and then to support the kind of bloodshed in France, you know, he's not going to make him popular in Germany. But he thinks that, I mean, he's dismayed by it.

He really does not like violence, but he thinks that the return to despotism would be worse. So he supports the French revolutionaries. And then, and I'm not going to give away how he dies, but he then dies and he then dies. 1794 at the age of 39. So it's a short life, but it's really quite a packed life, which for biographer is just fabulous because you, you know, because his, his adventure start when he's 10. So you don't have like 20 years of like, he went to school, you know, to this school and this teacher thought he was clever.

You know, you'd go straight into like a wild expedition. And then you don't have this, you know, I mean, even revolutionaries, even. you know, explore us. Most of them end up with a quite boring last few decades if they, you know, if they get Humbold, not, at most of them.

So for biographer, this kind of short, tight life is great because you have all the ideas without the kind of the tedious boredom of, you know, daily life of your main character. And I guess, I

I have a mixed feeling about the whole story. I mean, there's a kind of inspirational aspect of he was someone who apparently truly held the best kind of enlightenment ideals, right? He was for equality, but for real, like, for people of other races also. But at the same time, like, that was a very tiny minority view. And he, you know, had to swim upstream a lot. And it took quite a while for it to catch on. Yes. I mean, he's, you know, it's not mainstream thinking what he's doing at all. I mean, he's, he's one of the very first to use the term human rights, for example. And unlike the American and the French revolutionaries who very firmly excluded women, slaves and non-Europeans, he includes that. You know, he talks about the general rights of men of mankind and it means all people. from every single part of this world and of every gender. So he's way ahead of his contemporaries. I mean, he's also, you know, today he would be called a feminist because he believes in the equality between men and women. He marries, I mean, he admires independent and strong-minded women. He's married to one.

He believes in the education of girls. He's a proud father of daughters. So he's very, he's very, very, very unusual in that respect and that the society he lives in does not approve at all. And there are, I mean, he has these not just public fights with Imano Kant, but also with other thinkers where, you know, anyone who writes that slavery is good or that, you know, there are inferior nations, he criticized. And he uses, I mean, he uses quite cleverly. He writes a lot of reviews. And the beauty about, I mean, I really enjoy writing reviews because it's a kind of little, it's like a jewel of writing.

You know, it's just the, it's short, but you can all, you know, you obviously describe the book you are reviewing, but you can also bring in your own opinion. So he uses, he purposefully chooses books that are either, pro or anti-slavery and then uses those to kind of elaborate his own opinion. So they're kind of these sharp, short forms of text, which he uses kind of in a very, I think, tailored way. And then you also have a book, Magnificent Rebels about the Jena Circle, which you can tell us about, but as a segue, is there a connection between Forster and the Jainah Circle? There is, very much so. He is.

So the young romantics who come together in Jena, the magnificent rebels, there is one extraordinary woman there called Karolina Schligel. And she is or was a very good friend with Foster. So she lived in mines during the kind of, you know, the establishment of the Mines Republic. So when she afterwards moves to Jena, she kind of brings his ideas with her. So they kind of, they talk about him, they read his writings. He's very much admired because also he's, he is really the, he's a stepping stone from the enlightenment to the Romanticist, to the Romantics.

So he is, because on the one hand, he really, I mean, he very much values observation and rational. thought, but he also underlines the importance of subjectivity, feelings, art, and imagination, which are, of course, subjects that become very, very important for the young romantic. So he's almost this kind of first stepping stone away from pure enlightenment thinking to something slightly different, which then becomes kind of full-blown romanticism. So who is in the Janus Herkel? There's some recognizable names in there. Yes.

So it's a group of rebellious thinkers, philosophers and writers, including Goethe, Schiller, who's the kind of famous playwright who wrote The Robbers. Then we have Schelling, who was Friedrich Schelling. There has a lot of them are called Friedrich. So Fritry Schelling. who is this young philosopher who really comes up with a philosophy of oneness where we, you know, we as humans are part of nature. Then you have the Schlegel brothers who are literary critics, really, very unconventional, who kind of take on the literary establishment. August Schlegel, the older one, is also a very famous Shakespeare translator.

And then we have, in the periphery, we have, later on we have Hegel, he pops up there. We have the poet Novales. And then we have an extraordinary woman who was called, well, to give her her kind of full name, Caroline Michaelis, Boehmel Schelling. So she has the name, she carries the name of her father,

but also of her three husbands, which shows you a little bit what kind of character she might have been. So she was the daughter of a famous German scholar, and she was very open-minded and wild and free-spirited.

And so she married young, she was widowed, She then goes to mind. She gets imprisoned for being a sympathizer with the French revolutionaries. In prison, she discovers that she's pregnant after Wild Ball Night with a 19-year-old French soldier, you know, all pretty outrageous behavior. And so when she leaves prison, she is really treated as an outlaw. And then the older Schlegel brother, August Schlegel, he marries her.

He comes to her rescue. He marries her and gives her a new name and a new beginning. And they move to Jena. And this is really the beginning of the Jena set. I forgot one very important one, which is Fichter, who is a philosopher who kind of puts the self in the center of his philosophy. So they all come together in the mid-1790s in this kind of small town in Germany, which, you know, most people outside.

Germany have never heard of 4,000 people and it becomes the kind of the nexus of a new philosophy of romanticism. And so in one day with some luck in Yena, you would have seen more famous people than in a whole century

in another town. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. So they believe that working together, not everybody in their kind of little study, but working together will create a kind of greater philosophy. You know, it's about the kind of the group. So they become, they kind of sit together in Karolina's house and they work together.

And they are the very first to use the word romanticism in its kind of new meaning, in its kind of literary meaning. So they, and they, you know, today, I mean, if you, I mean, and I've tried this a lot of times. If you ask people, what's romanticism? You get so many different answers. So many people will say, you know, think of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, kind of these kind of lone figures and moonlit forests and others think, oh, the romantics, they were all against reason and celebrated irrational thinking.

And others think of, you know, passionate declarations of love or candlelight dinners. But for them, romanticism was something. much more complex and unwieldy and dynamic. And they basically said that everything is romantic poetry. So from a piece of music to a painting, even a scientific experiment is romantic poetry. Because they said to romanticize means to unite humankind with nature and to unite arts and science.

And for me, that was always the kind of thing that I did find so fascinating about that, this kind of bringing together the arts and sciences, which at that point, we're beginning to kind of really separate. So if you look back much earlier to someone like Leonardo da Vinci, for example, they, you know, this is someone who's interested in engineering and botany and sculpture and mathematics. So this, but in the, with the enlightenment and with the kind of, you know, with the science is becoming more and more specialized, you have that kind of separation between the arts and the sciences more and more. And the romantics are really trying to kind of fight against this dischargment of the world,

this kind of more and more materialistic world. So they, they believe that romantic, poetry can kind of bring together these kind of very different disciplines and create something completely new with it. Would they have thought of themselves as opposing the Enlightenment or kind of developing it in a different way? I think developing it mostly, but they're also very young and contrary. Of course. It is also part of being young and contrary to kind of stand up against the kind of literary establishment and the scientific establishment. It was part of the fun also to kind of take those stuffy older kind of thinkers and say,

like, we are doing this very differently. And I think one of the important aspects for them was also that it was quite ephemeral. So it was not about coming up with a theory that was finished. You know, it's all about. So Fichter, for example, with his philosophy, of the self, he would develop quite a lot of that in front of his students. So his students, instead of listening to, I don't know, the philosophy of Aristotle or something like that, they actually saw how in front of their eyes, their professors were developing

something very new and dynamic. And that was also incredibly thrilling for the students. So you suddenly have all these students really flocking to, um, Yenna wanting to see these new young professors who were really trying to change the world and who were shouting from their lecterns about their kind of new ideas. And my impression is that a big emphasis was put on sort of a changing conception of the self as previously you would have thought of yourself in terms of what categories you belong to and you would try to be a good Catholic or baker or whatever. and the romantics wanted you to sort of be yourself for yourself to express something more inward.

Yes, I think it was really, I mean, I think we have to kind of paddle back a little bit and think about, you know, what's the kind of world they were brought up? So this is the world when most of Europe is kind of held in the iron fist of absolutism, when your life is pretty much, you know, determined by your, you know, determined by your, you your place of birth, the class you were born into, the ruler of the nation you live in. So you don't have a lot of choice or freedom. And it's a world where thinkers believe that there are absolute truths, that there's a kind of they're God-given truths.

And then you have this kind of philosophers who come along and say, well, the only certainty we have is that the world is experienced by the self. So there is a shift and emphasis on the self, on the subjective kind of view of the world. And so it's Fichter who he kind of takes ideas from Emmanuel Kant and he kind of puts them in another framework. And he basically says that the self, determines how we see the world.

The self is the source of all reality. And he says there's the self, the I, and then there's the nicht-Ich, the non-self, which is basically, you know, the external world, the kind of animals, plants, nature. And he says that the self posits its own being, and not only that through this kind of powerful initial kind of positing, it also creates the non-eich, so the external world, not in itself, but in our mind.

So everything we understand of the external world is shaped by our self. And what it does is it gives us free will. And that is an incredibly powerful thing. And this, you know, and this happens just after the French Revolution. So without, I think without the French Revolution, Fichter would have not come up with. So, you know, his philosophy is sparked by the ideas of the French Revolution. But this happens at the same time. So you have a bunch of brilliant scientists, thinkers, philosophers, poets,

who all are given this idea of. free will and self-determination. And it's just the best empowering thing. I mean, combined with the French Revolution, which is, you know, explodes really into Europe and no one is unaffected by this moment. It is, you know, it's a very, very powerful moment, I think, in the, in the history of who we are, how we understand us. It gives us a power that we didn't have before.

And, you know, the French Revolution really also proves that a revolution is a revolution of ideas. So ideas, words, philosophy is more powerful than weapons and swords and kings and queens. And I mean, you know, I think it's almost impossible for us to imagine what that must have felt. And I guess they're, I don't be overly simplistic about it, but if we were to come down on, you know, did they win or lose the romantics? Like this image of the self and free will and so forth, incredibly powerful and influential and lasting, the aspirations to a unity of art and science may be less successful in terms of the modern world. Yes, I think, you know, that, I've been talking about this, the arts and the science, this kind of very weird division for a long time. And I find it quite hard to understand why it's still, you know. I mean, when I look at, you know, education, like six-year-olds get put into these kind of boxes.

Oh, you were kind of so mathematical and logical and you were so artistic or creative. And, you know, that's it. You're basically, you know, you're going to be a scientist and you're going to be an artist. And you just think that it really comes together and works to where. you know, curiosity, imagination, part of, you know, the arts and sciences, I think. So I think that experiment kind of pretty much failed. And but I think, you know, and if the self has remained for the better or the worse at center stage of our life, it's definitely, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, that we

still have this kind of tension between free will and self-determination on the one side and not being selfish and narcissistic on the other side. You know, it's a balancing act which began back then and which we are still walking. And I think underpinning this are two crucial questions. One is, who am I as an individual and who am I as a member of a society? So how can I live a life in which I fulfill my dreams and my, you know, opportunities, possibilities, capabilities, with the kind of, you know, being a morally good person, with the kind of restraints of society. And it's a negotiation, which we still kind of do. And, you know, and I think it's, I mean, we undoubtedly live in a society that is obsessed with the self.

I mean, there's a whole generation called the Me's generation. And I think, you know, we kind of circle around ourselves, but we've kind of forgotten where this came from. And, you know, when Fichter put the self in the center of his philosophy, he never, you know, he never wanted this kind of narcissistic kind of celebration of the, of the of the self because he always said that freedom comes always with our moral duty you know our freedom is only as far as we are not impinging on someone else's duty so it's you know freedom gives us this you know the power of the choice how to be and how to act um it is not about being selfish we've just kind of gone down this kind of selfish root a little bit too much.

And it's, you know, it's about finding the kind of balance. And in a way, with the arts and the sciences, it's the same. You know, we've almost like we've divided it and kind of decided these are two different paths. They're not going to overlap. This is it. When, I mean, you are a scientist. All the scientists I know say that imagination is incredibly important in their work.

Curiosity is incredibly important. And most scientists will have, you know, one of the reasons why they've become scientists is because they, you know, they felt this wonder of nature at some stage as a child or as a teenager. And they want to understand this wonder. But it's something we don't really talk about in the sciences. It's almost like peer reviewed out of you. Yeah, yeah. Well, I like the word negotiation that you used. I mean, the enlightenment left us with.

this legacy, that there are individuals and they are sort of the locus of freedom and responsibility, but then there's also society, right? That, you know, we do interact with other individuals. We have collective interests and responsibilities, and we don't always negotiate fairly between those. Like you say, there's a bit of a tilt toward the selfishness and the egoism of the individual. Yes, exactly, exactly. So, you know, we've, you know, how do we reconcile, our personal liberties with the kind of demands of a society. And that is a negotiation that we have to deal with on a daily basis. And so the last person to talk about, although the first book in your belatedly realized trilogy, it was the invention of nature talking about Alexander von Humboldt.

And was he connected to the Janus Circle at all? Yes, he was. That's why it's a triology. he was so he is actually part of the of the of the yenna of the yenna group he not in the inner circle but definitely in the outer circle so he comes to yena for the first time in 1794 because his brother william von humbold lives in yenna and he visits him and he he then meets the kind of group he and in particular gerte so the friendship with gertr between gertr and alexander von humbold is important for both of them, actually. So when Holmbold arrives in 1794, he's in his 20s.

He's this young, very bright scientist, very much an Enlightenment scientist who believes in kind of reason, rational thought, observation, experiments, his instruments. And then you have Goethe, who is Germany's most famous poet. But he's also a scientist. I mean, Goethe is a kind of great example. of the arts and the sciences coming together. So when he meets Holmbold, he's some Goethe's kind of natural history thinking

has been, as he said himself, in hibernation. And meeting Holmbold is just like rain falling on a kind of a dry patch of earth. And, you know, it's just sprouting all over. And these two men just really, really like each other. And they experiment together and they kind of dissect frogs and mice and people and they go to lectures together and they do experiments with light and optics and botany and they watch kind of caterpillars hatch so they really go into this scientific thinking but at the same time it is Goethe who inspires Humboldt to just move a little

bit away from this very, you know, in quotation marks, objective science. So he, he basically says, well, it is the eye through which you see the world, but it is your eye. So this will shape the way you see the world. So he gives Holmbold a slightly stronger emphasis on subjectivity. And Holmbold himself says that Goethe has given me new organs to see the world. Because the Jena's said has this greater emphasis on the self. Humboldt, when he sets off on his five-year exploration of South America after his visits to Jena, he sees this new world through these new eyes that Goethe has given him, through a kind of greater emphasis on subjectivity. So you have Humboldt exploring South America with, I mean, he carries 42 scientific instruments, like all wrapped individually.

He's obsessed with measurements. Very sympathetic. He climbs up, he climbs up, you know, volcanoes and sets up his instruments every few hundred yards and measures everything. But, and I think that's very important, he's not just interested in empirical data. He also always says, in order to truly understand nature, you also have to feel it. So it's a bit like, I think it was Humphrey Davy, who his journals have, on the one page, he describes his observations of an experiment. And on the other page, he describes his feelings. And that's, you know, and that's what Humbold is what Humboldt does. He really wants to also inspire this sense of wonder in nature. So for me, Humboldt, um, inspired. inspired by first, Georg Foster,

because Humboldt always said throughout his long life that Georg Foster inspired him to go on his own exploration and really guided his ways of thinking about nature and politics. And then also the Jena said, but Humboldt is the bridge that bridges the enlightenment and romanticism. He is the connection. I mean, he's the, you know, you have on the one hand, you have, I don't know, Isaac Newton who says,

rainbows are created by light refracting through raindrops. And on the other side, you have romantic poets such as John Keats, who says, Newton has destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by sending the kind of the light through a prism. And Holmboldt does both. You know, he gives us this kind of bond between the subjective and the objective between the emotion and the rational. So he's that bridge between the arts and the sciences. And it wasn't just for his personal benefit.

You can make the case that Humboldt was a or the founder of the idea of environmentalism. Yes. So because Humboldt sees nature as an interconnected whole, he also sees the dangers of destroying it. So as he travels through South America, he warns about the destruction of forests, monoculture, irrigation, because although you know, you think he's always in the wilderness, he's not. I mean, these are the Spanish colonies.

So he sees a lot of plantations, for example, and how those plantations have entirely destroyed forests. And then as he travels, he sees this destruction. And he is, for example, the very first to explain, the fundamental functions of the forest for the ecosystem. So he talks about the forest ability to store water, to enrich the atmosphere with moisture, to protect against soil erosion.

And when he comes back, he talks about harmful human-induced climate change. In 1800, pretty extraordinary. And in 1832, he writes a paragraph where he kind of says, you know, irrigation, deforestation, all really terrible. And then he says, what's really bad are the gases that come out of the industrial centres. I mean, he didn't understand CO2 yet, but he understood that this is not good for the environment.

So, you know, I've always called him the kind of forgotten father of environmentalism. He, you know, he really understands the threat to nature and he warns about it. And then, I mean, he then inspires people just, you know, like, John. Mure or George Perkins Marsh who then take this and become more politically active in it. Humboldt does not do that but he he because he sees nature as this web of life this interconnected hole he understands I mean it's simple things like he sees for example at the Venezuelan coast he sees how ruthless pearl fishing has completely destroyed the oyster stock so he kind of under so he you know he watches he looks around

And he can have seen consequences of the kind of the devastating effects of humankind's intervention in nature. And like Forster, he was not just about nature. He noticed things about human beings and racial hierarchies and things like that. Yes. And I think, you know, because he says he was very much guided by Foster's ideas. I mean, they were friends. So he, you know, Foster was his mentor. Foster was 15 years older.

They traveled together through Europe. And as Holmboldt is traveling through South America, he sees again and again how, for example, the colonists and the missionaries treat the indigenous people. You know, he sees slavery there. I mean, one of the very first things that he sees when he arrives in South America is a slave market. And he says that made him a kind of a lifelong abolitionist.

So he's very much influenced by four. hostess way of kind of looking at humans. But I think, and that's the interesting thing about both of them, they don't ever just see nature and humans as separate things. We are all part of one thing. So Hombard talks about how one breath of life is poured over plants, animals, rocks, humans, mountains, the whole planet is one breath of life, he calls it, because we are all part of this one beautiful planet that is ours.

It's just messed it up really badly. I do wonder about what lessons we can learn about, you know, how these people had the strength of conviction to resist racism or environmental degradation or whatever. I mean, you mentioned before Foster was young at the time and he was a bit of an outsider, but I don't know about that. I think there's a lot of young, outsider-y types who are pretty darn racist. and, you know, violent or whatever. So can you say more about maybe, like, what are the characteristics of these people that gave them

what we would, I hope most of us today consider to be these virtuous ways of thinking about the world? I mean, I think it's always a combination. I mean, Holmbold, for example, I mean, Holmberg comes from a Prussian aristocratic family, very, very different background to Foster, for example. but he is he feels absolutely stifled by Prussian society and by his upbringing and I think one of the reasons is because he was I mean most historians me include the thing that he was gay so he you know he's again he's a kind of outsider in a certain respect and he finds a certain freedom when he kind of travels and is you know away from country German society and I think it's the same for Foster there's you know he is an

cider. He's kind of this, it is always in transit. Hombard is always in transit. So there's a sense of movement of not being stuck with your, with, you know, in a place or in a, I mean, Humbold himself calls, also calls himself as a kind of citizen of the world. He lives, you know, for many, many years in Paris. Then he moves back to Germany. So I think there's a certain fluidity in where we belong, which is very important. I think, I do think that traveling, and I don't mean traveling like the Instagram generation, traveling, you know, to a point, photograph a spot which everybody has kind of been on. That's not what I mean. I mean kind of traveling to discover, and I don't

mean discover in a colonial way. You know, I think you can also travel in your mind. It doesn't have to you have to have the open-mindedness to travel to other places, to other concepts, to other ideas, to allow yourself to be challenged by others. You know, I find it very, very difficult that you can't criticize people anymore. You know, I really like a kind of fiery discussion with someone. You know, I do not have to agree with someone. That is for me traveling in my mind. And I think, you know, they were all very willing.

to do that, to not want, they didn't need, they didn't feel the need to conform because there was something in their life that was already different. And that's maybe the reason why they then celebrate that, you know, I don't need to conform because I'm anyway not like everybody else. But I think, you know, it's very,

it's very difficult in hindsight to kind of say, what, you know, is it because of their upbringing? Maybe they were just different, you know, but you know, there are people who, just are different. And maybe that's what they were. But I, you know, I like to believe it has a lot to do with being willing to kind of step out of your comfort zone, intellectually, but also physically. And I guess the last thing is, this might be a downer sort of last thing, but I can't help but feel jealous of all these stories of people having these salons with the great intellectual

minds of their lives, reinventing what it means to be human and think about nature. Have we, Have we lost the ability to do that? Is that a little bit less common or is it just my selection bias? I think it's slightly less common. I do think so. But I think it can still happen a little bit. You know, I'm a member of a writers club in London. And I had my book launch yesterday.

And, you know, it was a bunch of, you know, wonderful, wonderful, very different writers and friends of writers. And it just, you know, it felt, you know, it feels like a. community. I mean, we've both been to the Santa Fe Institute. That feels like a community. So, you know, I think there are still these places. And I think in hindsight with history, when we look back at this time, we might see them also more clearly. I'm pretty sure that people who lived in the 18th century were not really quite aware of, you know, that they were doing something extraordinary or special maybe or that the group of people they were hanging out with was

pretty extraordinary if you look back 200 years so maybe you know this happens right now under under noses somewhere but we just don't really know because we don't have the we don't have that distance yet i just worry that um if all these people lived in the present day they would just have podcasts rather than getting together and talking to each other i know i mean i think i do i do think that being together, I mean, the Jena said in particular, for them being together, drinking together, eating together, reciting poems together, that was very much part of it. If we don't want to end on a down, but on the positive side, I mean, there is also something really remarkable that I can speak to you.

You know, I'm sitting in London, you are in America, and we can, you know, we can have a conversation. That's beautiful. So there are also nice things about it. But it would be nicer if we now could go and, you know, have a music together and continue to be. Look, that would be nice, but like you said before, it's a negotiation. This is a wonderful thing that we can have this conversation and then share it with a bunch of people out there on the internet. And next time we're both in Santa Fe, we'll go out and have that drink.

Exactly. We'll do that. Thanks very much, Andre, Will, for being on the Minescape podcast. Thank you for having me. Thank you.