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self-expression against enforced confor-
mity, and for the unity of mind and na-
ture, even as an increasingly industrial
society seemed intent on prising them
apart. It stood, finally, for a richer pic-
ture of human life in an age of growing
bureaucracy, for passion in an age of arid
rationality. What’s not to like?
A
ndrea Wulf ’s fine and thorough
book is not only a narrative but an
argument—a working-through of a
problem that she introduces at the be-
ginning. “The liberation of the Ich from
the straitjacket of a divinely organised
universe,” she writes, “gave us the most
exciting of all powers: free will.” But this
freedom was, she says, in tension with
“the pitfalls of selfishness.” Her book
thus aims to provide an account of the
“balancing act that the Jena Set nego-
tiated between the tunnel vision of in-
dividual perspective and their belief in
change for the greater good.”
The old question of whether free will
is consistent with our acts being deter-
mined by something we do not choose—
gods, fate, physics, genes, neurons—
doesn’t seem to be the point here. Rather,
the significance of our freedom has to
be understood as ethical, in a way that’s
connected to Socrates’ central question:
How are we to live? The fact that we
are free to choose not to follow the dic-
tates of any religion or moral code—
that the universe enjoins no particular
way of life on everybody—leaves the
answer to that question genuinely and
terrifyingly open.
There have always been renegades
who refused to answer that question
with an appeal to the laws of God or
men. What distinguished this particu-
lar group of rebels? Not simply the fla-
grancy with which they violated old-
fashioned morality—history has no
shortage of that sort, either—but the
way in which they aspired to make their
lives and thought align. Wulf asks, with
some trepidation, “How do we recon-
cile personal liberty with the demands
of society? Are we selfish? Are we pur-
suing our dreams?”
Fichte himself was accused in his day
of “Ich-fetishism.” Yet Wulf points out
that nothing in his philosophy was in-
imical to morality. As Kant had said be-
fore him, freedom isn’t at odds with mo-
rality; it’s an essential condition of it.
The reason sheep (and cacti and boul-
ders) have no obligations is that they
lack the distinctively human faculty of
choice. But the Romantics sought to
push this idea further. As the Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor has observed,
self-determining freedom—“the idea
that I am free when I decide for myself
what concerns me, rather than being
shaped by external inf luences”—is
closely twinned with the powerful mod-
ern ideal of “authenticity.” Individual-
ity, Friedrich Schlegel declared, “is the
original and eternal within man.” Con-
formity with the norms of society, per-
haps even with the laws of God, is a
failure to listen to an “inner voice.” Look-
ing outside the self for a model to live
by is futile; it can be found only within.
Self. Expression.
For Schiller, it came to rankle: “I find
all that individuality shimmering on
every page repulsive,” he said of the
Schlegels’ work. Plenty of later polem-
icists took his side of the argument. Tay-
lor, writing in the early nineteen-nine-
ties, when the public culture was full of
eloquent critics of contemporary nar-
cissism—Allan Bloom and Christopher
Lasch were two of the most influen-
tial—was more earnestly ambivalent
about this Romantic innovation than
those critics were. Responding to Bloom’s
“The Closing of the American Mind,”
a learned, reactionary diatribe about the
self-obsession and relativism of youth
culture, Taylor complained that Bloom
“doesn’t seem to recognize that there is
a powerful moral ideal at work here,
however debased and travestied its ex-
pression might be.” In Taylor’s account,
that powerful ideal is properly articu-
lated in the thought that there is “a cer-
tain way of being human that is my
way”—that, if I fail to be myself, “I miss
the point of my life.”
And yet the culturally inf luential
forms of Romanticism keep coming up
against a basic problem: our selves are
not private property. They are, as Tay-
lor puts it, “dialogical,” generated by our
interactions with others. The most mag-
nificent of rebels find themselves thrown
into the arms of another orthodoxy. The
high-school punk rejects the culture of
the mainstream only to embrace a sub-
culture with norms no less exacting; how
different a goth looks from everyone else,
and yet how similar to every other goth.It is no surprise that it should be so; we
need other people to be anybody at all.
Even the pierced eyebrow achieves
its meaning within a web of social con-
ventions. I can choose the adornment
but not what it signifies. What, in any
case, would be the point of self-expres-
sion if no one understood what we were
expressing? Would Robinson Crusoe
bother getting a tattoo?
Wulf presents “the demands of so-
ciety” and “personal liberty” as antag-
onistic, but the relationship is more
complicated than that. Some social de-
mands—for tolerance, say—are essen-
tial requirements of liberty, and, indeed,
of authenticity. (How easy was it to be
a punk in the Soviet Union?) Authen-
ticity is, in any case, a limited ideal. What
that arch-Romantic, Shakespeare, had
his Polonius say—“This above all: to
thine own self be true, /... Thou canst
not then be false to any man”—is at best
optimistic. Didn’t four years of watch-
ing Donald Trump teach us that an au-
thentic man—surveys of his supporters
confirm that he is widely regarded as
such—needn’t be a truthful one?
The path from idealism to narcissism
is short: make reality wholly dependent
on the mind and we lose the sense of
there being something independent of
us. Iris Murdoch eloquently describes
what it is like to be “confronted by an
authoritative structure which commands
my respect.” She was writing about the
experience of learning Russian, but the
point applies equally well to a student
of math or botany. The work, she says,
“leads me away from myself towards
something alien to me, something which
my consciousness cannot take over, swal-
low up, deny or make unreal.”
The Jena Romantics were, in just this
way, at their most appealing when they
were at their busiest, and so led away
from themselves: running journals,
counting syllables, out in nature look-
ing at the veins on a leaf. They were fac-
ing up to the challenges imposed on
them by a reality that they could not
pretend to control. The Jena Roman-
tics were at their least appealing, in turn,
when they were at their most “authen-
tic,” given over to the unfiltered self-ex-
pression of their highly fallible Ichs. They
had a seemingly infinite capacity for
pettiness. They ended friendships over
critical reviews, and changed from al-