356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Sean Carroll** (0:55)
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 Wulf, 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, in 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. Andrea has written a series of books. She's written 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 Traveller 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 Jena circle in the 1790s.
And Forster was related to them. And 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. 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 Humboldt again was a traveler and a naturalist, much like Forster, 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 Jena 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.