I have just finished reading Andrea Wulf’s book on the Jena Idealists and one of the strongest points of origin of the Romantic worldview.

As she closed the book after a chapter about the wider influence of the Jena Set after the devastating defeat of the Prussians by Bonaparte in 1806, she wrote a final reflection on the art of being selfish. It is a striking use of a word we generally associate with children and adults with some kind of personality problem or are generally devoid of empathy for others. I head this posting with a cartoon of two small brats arguing over the possession of a toy. If an adult, like the boys’ father (assuming they are brothers) or a teacher finds them, one or both will be punished for selfishness and be told that “others come before you”.

I have just found this review of the book Jena Romanticism and the Art of Being Selfish: On Andrea Wulf’s “Magnificent Rebels”. Anthony Curtis Adler finishes his criticism with these two paragraphs:

In the epilogue, Wulf speaks of an “art of being selfish.” It is hard to know what this means if not the art of civil society, the art of being oneself with others — of realizing oneself through concrete relations with others. The Jena Set, to be sure, can teach us something about this, but so can many others who came before — and after. And few of their lessons are simple or easy. Certainly not Novalis’s declaration that “without perfect self-understanding we will never learn truly to understand others.” Wulf, citing this quotation approvingly, addresses her readers in a parabasis: “Let Novalis’s sentence roll in your mind for a moment.” Then she adds, without so much as paragraph break to give it time to roll: “What he meant was that we are morally obliged to turn inwards in order to be good members of society.”

Novalis’s sentence is strange and austere. By making any understanding of the other dependent on a degree of self-understanding that could never be achieved, it shatters the very project of self-understanding. But Novalis also writes, in a passage cited by Heidegger: “The peculiar property of language, namely that language is concerned exclusively with itself — precisely that is known to no one.” If there is one thing we learn first and best from the Jena Romantics, it is that the element of freedom, and hence of political life, is not just bodies and souls and “Ichs,” but language. It is not the art of “being selfish,” but of reading and criticism, of encountering fragments in their potential and becoming. This is the last thing that Magnificent Rebels, with its glib moralizing, emotional ventriloquizing, and cinematic immediacy, could teach.

I did get vague impressions that Wulf was being quite moralising about her perception (if historical) of the behaviour of the Jena Set, particularly their “interior decor, comings and goings, squabbles, and affairs“. My impression was that the gossipy tone was to take us the readers into that far off world of the late eighteenth century in order to get a better appreciation of the philosophical content. I think she wanted to make a point about the originality of what we would call today self-consciousness. This critic, Anthony Curtis Adler, seems quite dismissive of Novalis having anything original to offer, whether in concepts or in language.

The fundamental question, as Europe emerged from centuries of feudalism, was whether human beings were property and chattel, or conscious beings with freedom and rights that came in proportion to moral duties in respect to others. Is not the aristocracy or nobility of spirit the choice of acting and behaving and something that lifts us above greed, hunger and fear of punishment? We have to negotiate within ourselves this freedom and our responsibilities as a member of a community. Do we claim freedom at the expense of the other person’s? These are questions of the social contract and our moral conscience.

As I mentioned above, selfishness is a word now associated with uneducated children or adults with a personality problem. I remember my church history professor at Fribourg teaching us a fundamental principle – that we should not judge the past by the present, that we should not commit anachronisms. The Jena philosophers used the word Ich, German for I or ego in Latin. I have not studied the works of these men personally or searched for a word like Selbstsüchtigkeit. In any case, relatively few of those documents were translated into English, and my German is far from being good enough (New Year resolution?).

In the context of later thought (sorry for the anachronism), I would see a more noble and innocent meaning. In Idealism, we find nature in ourselves, in our own personal experience, and we find ourselves in nature. I have experienced this whilst climbing up mountains in Switzerland or my native Lake District, walking a dog through a forest in springtime or sailing along the cliffs of Brittany. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the author of Self-Reliance, described this time as an age of introversion.

At the end of the same century, Oscar Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison:

It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history. People have tried to make him out an ordinary philanthropist, or ranked him as an altruist with the scientific and sentimental. But he was really neither one nor the other. Pity he has, of course, for the poor, for those who are shut up in prisons, for the lowly, for the wretched; but he has far more pity for the rich, for the hard hedonists, for those who waste their freedom in becoming slaves to things, for those who wear soft raiment and live in kings’ houses. Riches and pleasure seemed to him to be really greater tragedies than poverty or sorrow. And as for altruism, who knew better than he that it is vocation not volition that determines us, and that one cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs from thistles?

Indeed what about altruism in a world where others do not care about us. We do good for others because love is better than hate. However, Wilde said:

But while Christ did not say to men, ‘Live for others,’ he pointed out that there was no difference at all between the lives of others and one’s own life. By this means he gave to man an extended, a Titan personality. Since his coming the history of each separate individual is, or can be made, the history of the world. Of course, culture has intensified the personality of man. Art has made us myriad-minded. Those who have the artistic temperament go into exile with Dante and learn how salt is the bread of others, and how steep their stairs; they catch for a moment the serenity and calm of Goethe, and yet know but too well that Baudelaire cried to God — “O Seigneur, donnez moi le force et le courage De contempler mon corps et mon cœur sans dégoût”.

Wilde clearly refers to Emerson and Goethe. Walking the treadmill and eating slops in Reading Gaol was certainly a bitter test against the temptation of resentment and hatred. On his release, Wilde came to France and died in a hotel room in Paris from the illness he had contracted in prison.

From a Christian perspective, it would now be relevant to go into the notion of personalism as distinct from individualism. There is an excellent book by John D. Zizioulas, a Greek Orthodox theologian, who wrote Being as Communion, Studies in Personhood and the Church. By being a member of the communion of the Church, a human being becomes an image of God. The Ich comes by grace and not by nature, which introduces a notion of dualism the Idealists sought to reconcile. Zizioulas opposes the notion of individual from person who has acquired personhood through baptism and membership of the Church. The book is cleverly written, but I react against this prod by the apologist and the inquisitor.

Another work I have is Andrew N. Woznicki’s Karol Wojtyla’s Existential Personalism. The late Pope John Paul II insists more on enchantment and the sense of wonder, something he may have inherited from Idealism and Romanticism (though he was fundamentally a Thomist) and his bitter experience with both Nazism and Communism. Many traditionalist fanatics have accused Wojtyla of wanting to replace the supremacy of God with a “cult of man”, but such an understanding is in my mind unjust and inaccurate.

I recommend Alan Watts, Behold the Spirit, written in 1947. There are some excellent blogs on the internet. Dr Michael Martin – The Center for Sophiological Studies and The Druid Stares Back (not paywalled) and his YouTube channel. There is also Rod Dreher’s Diary, which is paywalled. I am brought to think of medieval cathedral libraries with chained books! Rod Dreher has written Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. This book is available as a paperback or for Kindle. These works and internet resources help us see the Ich or self in a modern light. Dr Martin has a keen interest in the Jena Idealists and Novalis in particular. These are ways, in my opinion, to becoming a mature Christian.