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Sean Carroll

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Sean Carroll (continued)

As we've often mentioned here on Mindscape 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

Sean Carroll

it's physics or economics or psychology or anything like that.

Sean Carroll (continued)

But of course, as today's guest Andrea Wolff 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 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.

Sean Carroll

She's been a number of books, but there's actually a sort of reverse chronological

Sean Carroll (continued)

trilogy that she's just completed. Her most recent work is called the Traveler, about Georg or George Forrest 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

Sean Carroll

Cook to the South Seas for three

Sean Carroll (continued)

years in the 1770s and came back

Sean Carroll

and wrote about it.

Sean Carroll (continued)

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 Jena circle in the 1790s. And Foster was related to them. You know, he actually interacted with them. But it was a group of intellectuals, big names like Goethe and Hegel and Schilling and Fichte, 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. One of the peripheral figures there was Alexander von Humboldt, who was the protagonist, if you want, the subject of Andrija's previous book to that called the Invention of Nature. Humboldt again was a traveler and a naturalist, much like Foster. 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 inner 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.

Sean Carroll

So let's go. Andrea Wolfe, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

Andrea Wolff

Thank you for having me.

Sean Carroll

So this is a slightly different kind

Sean Carroll (continued)

of podcast than I usually do because

Sean Carroll

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, you know, I do notice that, and I do. I do recognize that. So that's why I want to do, you know, 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?

Andrea Wolff

Very much so. I think I am interested in the ideas. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm. I don't think, you know, I don't like to be in a category. So I, 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 the life they lived. 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 other 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're a hermit, you don't really exist in a vacuum. So we are all part of a community, of a family, 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.

Sean Carroll

And I love the idea of the connections between the people whose lives you're discussing and other people and 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.

Andrea Wolff

Yes. So I wrote a book about Alexander von Humboldt called the Invention of Nature. And he's probably, you know, the most famous man who, in my, in the books I've written, who. 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 all. 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. He'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 trilogy the wrong way around. I noticed this, the one I, the one I just published should have been the first one. But that never works like this, does it? So I started off with Humboldt 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 it. They are, you know, they are very important and for the way we think today. And also, you know, in Foster's 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, what can we learn something from that? So, and that's that's something that was very important for me in this book

Sean Carroll

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 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.

Andrea Wolff

I think it's definitely themes that are important in the kind of coming together of modernity. 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, you know, 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 thread in this web, you know, 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.

Sean Carroll

Right.

Andrea Wolff

One of the what I think his life is a really good example why you should also look at the life of someone when you look at the ideas. Because he. So he's born in 1754 in Gdansk, so in today's Poland, then part of Royal Prussia. He was, 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 wunderkind really who picked up languages and scientific concepts kind of like this. I mean, quite extraordinary.

Sean Carroll

So what was he, sorry, what languages was he translating to and from Rush?

Andrea Wolff

So he spoke Russian, English, German and French.

Sean Carroll

And he's 12 years old.

Andrea Wolff

He's 12 years old and so he translates into English, which is not his mother tongue.

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Andrea Wolff

In English, he. He basically picked up on the journey from Russia to England because they were traveling on an English ship.

Sean Carroll

Sure. As one does.

Andrea Wolff

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 this is, you know, 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, labyrinth of icebergs and tropical islands in the. In the South Pacific. But for George Foster, 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 Western, 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 in talking about black people as being an inferior race. So his attitude, George Young, George Foster's attitude to the indigenous people is very, very unusual. He. 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. He sees a water martyr in Tahiti, 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 a highly unusual attitude and completely different to most people. And. And I think also proof 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. 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, 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 kind of open to other ideas. But I think it's also because he was a traveler. He was always, and, and for the rest of his life he remains like this. He's always in transit. He's this perpetual outsider. If you are 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, on the resolution. So there's a, 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.

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Sean Carroll

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?

Andrea Wolff

He was 17.

Sean Carroll

17.

Andrea Wolff

He was 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, on it being on a sailing boat and, you know, a sailor 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.

Sean Carroll

Yeah.

Andrea Wolff

Never dry. I mean, it must have been absolutely horrendous. But then they go New Zealand, Tahiti, Tonga, Vanuatu Archipelago, the Marquesas, Easter island, and they go back and forth. So they're, 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, 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, you know, because I don't understand enough. But there's a, 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 route of Polynesian migration 200 years before DNA analysis and archaeological studies prove it. And, you know, 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?

Sean Carroll

Yeah.

Andrea Wolff

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, what 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 there 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, 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 va', a, which is the Kanu, and Tahitian or vaca in, 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 Humboldt sees that nature is connected, he sees that really more as an ethnographer, how everything, how humans are all connected.

Sean Carroll

And tell me more about the expedition itself.

Sean Carroll (continued)

Is it just one ship?

Sean Carroll

How many people are on it?

Andrea Wolff

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 things. If I do one proper circuit and I can't find land, then, you know, if there's a southern continent, it's covered in ice and that's, you know, no good. For the British, there's nothing they can exploit. So it is. 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, you know, the Europeans are superior. So they, they. They arrive there, the ship is pretty battered from the kind of icebergs, and they kind of set up all these workshops, and the. The forest kind of echoes with hammers and saws and. 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 are wounded and murdered, and he's, you know, just shocked by it.

Sean Carroll (continued)

And just as a footnote, I understand

Sean Carroll

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.

Andrea Wolff

No, he really didn't. I think there were. I mean, it did not help that George Foster's father, Reinhold, was a 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. He. He asked him for jewel. 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.

Sean Carroll (continued)

And is this kind of expedition something

Sean Carroll

that is paid for by the government? By the British government? I mean, that's a. 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

Sean Carroll (continued)

to learn things and come back with what you've learned.

Andrea Wolff

Well, I wish it would just be learning things. This is very much a kind of imperial endeavor. So to set the scene so this, you know, so the. The. There's the Seven Years War in Europe, which is from 1756 to 1763. And it's. 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 it's colonial possessions. And after the war, Britain really emerges as the kind of dominant global power. France not particularly pleased about that. So France begin. 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. 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 sails to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the transit of Venus there, which is the first. Really, the first global international scientific collaborations where scientists all over the world observe this one moment when Venus crosses the kind of burning disk of the sun. And they measure the distance, or they measure the entry and 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 the kind of a colony for. 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. 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 find, you know, to write reports about the soils. They find the plants. They find the temperament. The temper and the temperament of the indigenous people, the local people, you know, just to see, you know.

Sean Carroll

Yeah.

Andrea Wolff

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.

Sean Carroll

And nominally, Forster's job was as a naturalist. He was trying to learn about plants and animals. He branched out into human beings very obviously, but, I mean, what did he learn about the plants and the animals?

Andrea Wolff

So he's the assistant naturalist and the draftsman. And 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 birth from New Zealand, they will kind of like cling to the branches and look at. 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 Endeavor voyage, and they had brought back quite a lot of plants already. So Reinhold Foster, George's father, is constantly complaining that they spend 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, you know, 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 accounts. So he's a born storyteller. His descriptions really sing off the page. But he's also 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. Faster is. I mean, even turns the icy world of Antarctica into shades of kind of purple, green and blue. So he's. He writes this book which makes him famous because he brings these different worlds, but also these different people into the kind of parlors 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 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 Tanner. 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.

Sean Carroll

And what were the societies of the South Seas like back in the day? What kind of government did they have?

Andrea Wolff

So very different. And he kind of. He approached every island to kind of trying to understand, which was difficult. But he, you know, he would. You know, he. He thought. And he was mostly right, he thought that they 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, it shaped his political thinking, which then later made him a revolutionary in, in Europe, not by reading French philosophers, but by what he had seen in the South Pacific.

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Andrea Wolff

But.

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Sean Carroll

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, 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.

Andrea Wolff

Yeah, I mean he's, he, he comes back and he becomes really, for a few years, you know, he, he becomes so famous, he becomes a public intellectual. He picks a very public fight with immanuel Kant, who wrote this. This essay about the human races, in 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 Forstner 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 shapes, 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 really a fight about methodology.

Sean Carroll

Yeah.

Andrea Wolff

You know, how do we. How do we gain knowledge? So there's Immanuel Kant, who's never left Konigsberg, famously.

Sean Carroll

Not a traveler.

Andrea Wolff

Yeah, yeah, not a traveler at all. Who in 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 Kant replies 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 unit, which is. It's really the kind of. It's the. It's the battle of the methodologies, which are, you know, at the. 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 Mainz, 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 Mainz. 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, because suddenly, when the. You know, when the French revolutionaries declare all men, of course, all men equal, they promise at least the possibility of a new society, a society which is built on the power of ideas and freedom. And so Forster 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 mines, and instead of being worried about the invaders, Forster welcomes Them and he wants to establish a German Republic because 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 him all his life. So and he, when he returns from the resolution voyage, 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 Mainz 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 is one thing to support what happened at the beginning, another thing to kind of initiate a German revolution and then to support the kind of bloodshed in France. You know, it's not going to make him popular in Germany but he thinks that, I mean he's, 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 in 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, his adventures start when he's 10 so you don't have like 20 years of like he went to school, to this school and his teacher thought he was clever. You know, you go straight into like a wild expedition and then you don't have this, you know, I mean even revolutionaries, even you know, explorers, they, most of them end up with a quite boring last few decades if they, you know. Yeah, if they get Humboldt, 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.

Sean Carroll

And I guess 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, 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.

Andrea Wolff

Yes, I mean, he's, you know, he, 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, of mankind and he 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 a, you know, he's also, you know, today he would be called a feminist because he's, 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's, he believes in the education of girls. He's a proud father of daughters. So he's, he's very unusual in that respect. And the society he lives in does not approve at all. And there are, I mean, he has these, not just public fights with Immanuel Kant, but also with other, other thinkers where, you know, anyone who writes that slavery is good or that, you know, there are inferior nations, he criticizes and he uses, I mean he, 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.

Sean Carroll (continued)

And then you also have a book,

Sean Carroll

Magnificent Rebels, about the Jena circle, which you can tell us about. But as a segue, is there a connection between Forster and the Jena circle?

Andrea Wolff

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 Carolina Schlegel and she is or was a very good friend with Foster. So she lived in Mainz during the kind of, you know, the establishment of the Mainz Republic. So when she afterwards moves to Jena, she kind of brings his ideas with her. So they kind of, they, they talk about him, they read his writings and he's very much admired because also he's, he is really the, he's, he's a stepping stone from the Enlightenment to the Romantic. Right, 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, for the young Romantic. So he's, he's, he's almost this kind of first stepping stone away from pure enlightenment thinking to something slightly different, you know, which then becomes kind of full blown romanticism.

Sean Carroll

So who is in the Jaena's Herkel? There's some recognizable names in there.

Andrea Wolff

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, as a lot of them are called Friedrich. So Friedrich 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 Novalis. And then we have an extraordinary woman who was called, well to give her her kind of full name, Caroline Michaelis Boehme Schlegel. Schelling. So she, 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 a, 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 Mainz, she gets imprisoned for being a sympathizer with the French revolutionaries. In prison she discovers that she's pregnant after a 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, gives her a new name and a new beginning and they move to Jena. And this is really the beginning of the, the Yena set. I Forgot one very important one, which is Fichte, who is a philosopher, who kind of puts the self in the center of his. 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. In one day, with some luck in Jena, you would have seen more famous people than in a whole century in another town. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. So they, 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 Carolina's house and they work together. And, 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 answer. So many people will say, you will think of the paintings of Casper 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, they, they, 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 it's. To romanticize means to unite humankind with nature and to unite human arts and science. And for me, that was always the kind of. The 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 sciences 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 dischantment of the. Of the world, this kind of more and more materialistic world. So they, they, they believe that Romantic poetry can kind of bring together these kind of very different disciplines and create something completely new with it.

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Sean Carroll

Would they have thought of themselves as

Sean Carroll (continued)

opposing the enlightenment or kind of developing

Sean Carroll

it in a different way?

Andrea Wolff

I think developing it mostly, but they're also very young and contrary, you know, of course. So, you know, 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 they, I think one of the, 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 Fisher, for example, with his philosophy of the self. He would, he would develop quite a lot of that in front of his students. So his students, instead of, you know, 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 Jena, wanting to see these new young professors who are really trying to change the world and who are shouting from their lecternes about their kind of new ideas.

Sean Carroll

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.

Andrea Wolff

Yes, I think it was really. I mean, I think we, 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 in. 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 determined by your place of birth, the class you were born into, the ruler of, the nation you live in. 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 their 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, an emphasis on the self, on the subjective kind of view of the world. And so it's. It's Fichte who, he kind of takes ideas from Immanuel 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, and he says there's the self, the Ich, 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 Ich. 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, Fichte 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 most empowering thing. I mean, combined with the French Revolution, which is, you know, explodes really into Europe and no one is unaffected by this, 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, and it, and you know, the French Revolution really proved, 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.

Sean Carroll

And I guess there, I don't be overly simplistic about it but, but if we were to come down on did they win or lose, the Romantics, this image of the self and free will

Sean Carroll (continued)

and so forth, incredibly powerful and influential and lasting.

Sean Carroll

The aspirations to a unity of art and science may be less successful in terms of the modern world.

Andrea Wolff

Yes, I think I've been talking about this. The arts and the science did this kind of very weird division for a long time and I find it, 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 are 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, you know, and you think that it really comes together and works together, you know, curiosity, imagination, part of, you know, the arts and sciences. I think. So I think they, that 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, it's, you know, 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, it's a, it's a balancing act which began back then in 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, 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, and it's a negotiation, which.

Sean Carroll

Right.

Andrea Wolff

We still kind of do. And, you know, and I think it's, I mean, we undoubtedly live in a, in a society that is obsessed with the self. I mean, there's a whole generation called the Mies 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 Fichte 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, the power of the choice how to be and how to act. It is not about being selfish. We've just kind of gone down this kind of selfish route 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. Most scientists will have, you know, the, one of the reasons why they've become a scientist is because they, you know, they, 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.

Sean Carroll

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.

Andrea Wolff

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.

Sean Carroll

And so the last person to talk about, although the first book in your belatedly realized trilogy was the Invention of Nature, talking about Alexander von Humboldt.

Sean Carroll (continued)

And was he connected to the Yena circle at all?

Andrea Wolff

Yes, he was. That's why it's a trilogy. He was. So he is actually part of the, of the, of the Jena group. He not in the inner circle, but definitely in the outer circle. So he comes to Jena for the first time in 1794 because his brother Wilhelm von Humboldt lives in Jena and he visits him and he, he then meets the kind of group, he, and in particular Goethe. So the friendship with Goethe, between Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt is important for both of them. Them actually. So when, when Humboldt 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 Humboldt, he's Goethe's kind of natural history thinking has been as he set himself in hibernation. And meeting Humboldt 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, you know, 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, 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 Humboldt a, you know, slightly stronger emphasis on subjectivity. And Humboldt himself says that Goethe has given me new organs to see the world because the Jena set 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 Humphry 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 is, you know, and that, and that's what Humboldt is, what Humboldt does. He, he really wants to also inspire this sense of wonder in nature. So for me, Humboldt inspired by first Georg Foster, because Humboldt, Humboldt always said throughout his long life that Georg Foster inspired him to go on his own exploration and inspire, you know, really guided his ways of thinking about nature and politics and then also the, the Yena 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, of the rainbow by sending the kind of the light through a prism. So, and, and Humboldt does both, you know, he, he gives us this kind of bond between the subjective and the objective, between the emotional and the rational. So he's that bridge between the arts and the sciences.

Sean Carroll

And it wasn't just for his personal benefit. Like you can make the case that Humboldt was a, or the founder of the idea of environmentalism.

Andrea Wolff

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 this is, you know, these are the Spanish colonies. So he sees a lot of plantations, for example, and how that, you know, 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 centers. I mean, he didn't understand CO2 yet, but he understood that is 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 Muir, 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 whole. He understands, I mean, it's simple things. Like he sees, for example, at the Venezuelan coast, he sees how ruthless pal fishing has completely destroyed the oyster stock. So he kind of, so he, you know, he watches, he looks around and he kind of sees the consequences of the kind of the devastating effects of humankind's intervention in nature.

Sean Carroll

And like Forster, he wasn't just about nature. He noticed things about human beings and racial hierarchies and things like that.

Andrea Wolff

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 Humboldt is traveling through South America, he sees again and again how, for example, the, 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 it, and he says that made him a kind of a lifelong abolitionist. So he's, he's very much influenced by Forster's way of kind of looking at humans. But I think, and that's the interesting thing about both of them, they don't, they don't ever just see nature and humans as separate things. You know, it's all, we're all part of one thing. So. And Humboldt 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, of this one beautiful planet that is ours. Just messed it up really badly.

Sean Carroll

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 types who are pretty darn racist, violent or whatever. So can you say more about maybe what are the, 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.

Andrea Wolff

I mean, I think it's always a combination. I mean Humboldt for example, I mean Humboldt comes from a Prussian aristocratic family. Very, very different background to Foster for example. But he feels absolutely stifled by Prussian society and by his upbringing. And I think one of the reasons is because he was, well, I mean most historians, me included, think 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 kind of German society. And I think it's the same for Foster. There's, you know, he is an outsider, he's kind of this, it is always in transit. Humboldt is always in transit. So there's, there's a sense of movement, of not being stuck with your, with you know, in a place or in a. I mean Humboldt himself calls, that 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, I do think that traveling, and I don't mean traveling like the Instagram generation traveling, you know, to a point to 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, mind. It doesn't have to be fit, you know, you have to have the, the open mindedness to travel to other places, to other concepts, to other ideas, to allow yourself to be challenged by others. You know, that, you know, I, 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's for me traveling in my mind. And I think, you know, they were all very willing to do that to, 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. Yeah, you know, there are people who just are different and maybe that's. 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.

Sean Carroll

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 lost the ability to do that? Is that a little bit less common or is it just my selection bias?

Andrea Wolff

I think it's slightly less common. I do think so, but I think it can still happen a little bit. I'm a. I'm a member of a writers club in, In. 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 Reuters. And, and it just, you know, it felt, it felt, you know, it feels like a community. Community. I mean, we've both been to the Santa Fe Institute. That feels like a community.

Sean Carroll

Yeah.

Andrea Wolff

So, you know, I think there are still these, 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 on the nose is somewhere, but we just don't really know because we don't have the. We don't have that distance yet.

Sean Carroll

I just worry that if all these people lived in the present day, they would just have podcasts rather than getting together and talking to each other.

Andrea Wolff

I know. I mean, I think, I do think. I do think that is being, you know, being together. I mean, the Yena said in particular for them being together, drinking together, eating together, reciting poems together, that was very much part of it to. 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 mute look.

Sean Carroll

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.

Andrea Wolff

Exactly. We'll do that.

Sean Carroll

Thanks very much, Andrew, for being on the Mindscape podcast.

Andrea Wolff

Thank you for having me.

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Andrea Wolff

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