This is a group biography of the Jena Set, a group of playwrights, poets, professors, novelists, scientists, and philosophers, who gathered around the university town of Jena at the turn of the nineteenth century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller were the rambunctious group’s mentors, rivals, foils, antagonists, friends, and inspirations. The feelings were somewhat mutual. Often complicated relationships were involved.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte might be said to have been the philosophical originator of the subjective perspective, which most distinguished the Jena Set. “The only certainty, Fichte told his students, was that the world was experienced by the self—by the ‘Ich’. The Ich, he said, ‘originally and unconditionally posits its own being’ and through this powerful initial act the ‘non-Ich’—the external world that included nature, animals, other people and so on—came into existence…. This ‘non-Ich’ was everything ‘which is different from and opposed to the Ich’. That didn’t mean that the Ich creates the world, rather it creates our knowledge of the world. Put simply, the world is the way we think it is.”
Schiller, although closer in age to the rest of Jena Set, was paired more with Goethe in his role as part-time mentor and counselor to the young, unruly crew. “Among Schiller’s own [journal] Horen contributions was Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, a long essay composed of twenty-seven letters addressed to his Danish aristocratic patron. Over more than one hundred pages Schiller argued that art was the tool for an alternative revolution to that of France…. Reason, rationality and empiricism had brought powerful knowledge, but what was missing was the refinement of moral behaviour. All the knowledge in the world could not develop a person’s sense of right and wrong…. ‘Utility is the great idol of our time,’ Schiller wrote, ‘to which all powers pay homage.’ Profit, productivity and consumption had become the guiding light of modern societies…. But it was beauty that transports us towards ethical principles and makes us better people…. For Schiller, taste and beauty were the bulwark against brutality, greed and immorality…. Beauty, Schiller now argued, had the ability to unite our sensual and rational sides…. The struggle between the sensual and the rational was a battle between the heart and the head which neither could win…. Only art could mediate the two.”
The Jena Set was a diverse and talented lot. “During that spring of 1797 the Jena Set met almost every day. ‘Our little academy,’ as Goethe called it, was very busy. Wilhelm von Humboldt was labouring over a verse translation of one of Aeschylus’s Greek tragedies, which he discussed with Goethe. Meanwhile, Goethe was working on his prose poem Hermann and Dorothea, for which he consulted the older Humboldt brother on verse metre, while conducting experiments with Alexander [von Humboldt] for which they set up an optical apparatus to analyse light and to investigate the luminescence of phosphorus. August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel worked on their Shakespeare translations, while Schiller was writing his play Wallenstein. Interested in everything—art, science, and literature—their interdisciplinary approach would become a major theme as their thinking evolved…. In the afternoons or evenings, after they finished lecturing at the university or working at home, they all rushed along the cobbled streets to Schiller’s apartment near the Old Castle. Here, in Schiller’s parlour, Goethe recited his poems and others presented their work until late at night. Over the course of several evenings in the middle of March, Wilhelm von Humboldt read Fichte’s latest edition of the Wissenschaftslehre aloud to everybody. After that, he read extracts from Friedrich Schlegel’s publication on ancient Greece and Rome as well as August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel’s translation of Julius Caesar, and Alexander von Humboldt presented the results of his animal electricity experiments.”
Although Novalis was often stuck working at his family’s mines, he regularly rode on horseback the five hours to Jena to commune with his friends. Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel’s pet project was the genre of intentionally written fragments. “Novalis had written more than one hundred fragments of various lengths, collectively published under the title Pollen. Another set of more than four hundred were simply called Fragments and mostly written by Friedrich Schlegel but also included several dozen by Caroline and August Wilhelm…. Pollen and Fragments, became the foundational texts of a new movement, launching Romanticism on the public stage—it was ‘our first symphony’, as August Wilhelm Schlegel said. It was here, on the pages of the [journal] Aethenaeum, that the term ‘romantic’ was coined and first used in print in its new literary and philosophical meaning.” Friedrich Schlegel declared, “Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the society poetical; poeticise wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humour.” Novalis added, “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise.” Wulf explains further, “They wanted to romanticise the entire world, and this meant perceiving it as an interconnected whole…. Romantic poetry was unruly, dynamic, alive and forever changing, they believed, and should not be corseted by metric patterns because it was a ‘living organism’. Its essence was ‘that it should forever be becoming, never perfected’, Friedrich Schlegel explained. It was inherently incomplete and unfinished…. Ideas were formulated, overturned and discarded. They were not interested in a closed system bound by rigid rules but in a world view that was open and in flux…. At the centre of everything was poetry—but not poetry as we understand it today. The friends turned back to the original ancient Greek term poietikos—‘creative’ or ‘productive’. For them, romantic poetry could be anything: a poem, of course, but also a novel, a painting, a building, a piece of music or a scientific experiment…. Friedrich Schlegel believed that the novel was the genre best suited to expressing the spirit of the modern age. Novalis agreed and even spoke about spending his entire life working on one novel—never completed, forever being written, infinitely evolving and thereby filling a library with what would be the ultimate romantic project.”
At the end of 1798, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling moved to Jena, taking up a professorship of philosophy. “Where Fichte’s Ich was shaped by its opposition to the non-Ich, Schelling believed that the self and nature were identical…. Schelling now insisted that everything was one…. Schelling’s new universe was alive. Instead of a fragmented, mechanistic world where humans were little more than cogs in a machine, Schelling conjured up a world of oneness. The living and non-living worlds, he explained, were ruled by the same underlying principles. Everything—from frogs to trees, stones to insects, rivers to humans—was ‘linked together, forming one universal organism’…. He reunited what the scientific revolution had separated: nature and humankind.” Schelling explained, “At the first moment when I am conscious of the external world, consciousness of my self is there as well, and vice versa—at my first moment of self-awareness, the real world rises up before me.” On the nature of the human mind, he expanded, “Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind…. As long as I myself am identical with nature, I understand what living nature is as well as I understand myself.”
Schelling arguably provided a synthesis for the evolving philosophical ideas of the Jena Set. The rest of its various participants would almost certainly not have agreed. “Goethe had always believed that the process of gaining knowledge—Erkenntnis—came through direct observation. Most idealists, including Fichte, rejected this idea and insisted that all knowledge of reality originated in the mind. But not Schelling. He was an idealist who believed that ‘absolutely all of our knowledge originates in experience’…. During those autumn weeks in 1799, Schelling prepared his new lecture series…. Published a few months later as the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling’s lectures introduced aesthetics and the arts as the tools that reveal the union between the subjective world of the self and the objective world of nature…. Schelling explained that it was the unconscious self which brought the external world into existence, and through this act it became the conscious Ich. ‘The objective world’, Schelling believed, ‘is merely the original, still-unconscious poetry of the mind.’”
Although much older than the rest, Goethe ended up being the glue that held this bickering, backstabbing, and brilliant crew together. He counseled, cajoled, and mended broken friendships. Through his poems, plays, and novels, as well as his scientific experiments, he also offered inspiration. “So much had changed since Goethe and Schiller had first spoken after the meeting of Jena’s Natural History Society on that hot July day in 1794. Goethe had watched everybody leave: first Fichte, in 1799, then the Schlegel brothers, and finally Schelling and Caroline, in 1803. They were not alone. The ‘current exodus’, as Goethe described it, continued with the departure of several other professors…. As quickly as Jena had risen, it seemed to tumble.” Living to the last in nearby Weimar until his death in 1832, Goethe would proclaim, “I took in and used whatever came before my eyes, my ears, my senses. Thousands of individuals contributed to the creation of my works—wise people and fools, intellectuals and idiots, children, men in their prime, and old people…. I often reaped what others had sown. My life’s work is that of a collective.”
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