Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self

03/24/23 • 66 min

2 Listeners

For centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these systems and at great cost swap them for others that more evenly distribute power and authority. Cosmic forces preordained one’s role within a transcendental order...but then, across quick decades of upheaval, philosophy and politics started celebrating self-determination and free will. Art and science blossomed as they wove together. Nothing was ever the same.

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we engage with returning guest, New York Times best-selling author of seven books and SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf, about her latest lovingly-detailed long work, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self. In this episode we explore the conditions for an 18th century revolution in philosophy, science, literature, and lifestyle springing from Jena, Germany. Over just a few years, an extraordinary confluence of history-making figures such as Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Novalis helped rewrite what was possible for human thought and action. Admist a landscape of political revolt, this braid of brilliant friends and enemies and lovers altered what it means to be a self and how the modern self relates to everything it isn’t, inspiring later British and American Romantic movements. Arguing for art and the imagination in the work of science and infusing art with reason, Jena’s rebels of the mind lived bold, iconoclastic lives that seem 200 years ahead in retrospect. We stand to learn a great deal from a careful look at Jena and the first Romantics...maybe even how to replicate their great successes and avoid their self-implosion in the face of social turbulence.

If you value our research and communication efforts, Please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage — in particular, you may wish to celebrate ten years of free online courses at Complexity Explorer with SFI Professor Cris Moore’s Computation in Complex Systems, starting March 28th. Learn more in the show notes...and thank you for listening!

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Related Reading & Listening:

Episode 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde

Episode 61 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous Idea

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
by Andrea Wulf

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
by Andrea Wulf

Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
by Lewis Hyde

Episode 37 - The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales...

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Related Reading & Listening:

Episode 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde

Episode 61 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous Idea

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
by Andrea Wulf

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
by Andrea Wulf

Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
by Lewis Hyde

Episode 37 - The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales...

Previous Episode

Carlos Gershenson on Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems

How do we get a handle on complex systems thinking? What are the implications of this science for philosophy, and where does philosophical tradition foreshadow findings from the scientific frontier?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

In this episode we speak with Carlos Gershenson (UNAM website, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, Twitter), SFI Sabbatical Visitor and professor of computer science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he leads the Self-organizing Systems Lab, among many other titles you can find in our show notes. For the next hour, we’ll discuss his decades of research and writing on a vast array of core complex systems concepts and their intersections with both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions — a first for this podcast.

If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.

For HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, please help us improve our scicomm by completing a survey linked in the show notes.

Or just a copy of the recently resurfaced SFI Press Archival Volume Complexity, Entropy, and The Physics of Information.

There’s still time to apply for the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students – apps close March 15th.

Or come work for us! We are on the lookout for a new Digital Media Specialist, an Applied Complexity Fellow in Sustainability, a Research Assistant in Emergent Political Economies, and a Payroll, Accounts Payable & Receivable Specialist.

You can also join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Mentioned & Related Links:

Carlos publishes the Complexity Digest Newsletter.

His SFI Seminars to date:
A Brief History of Balance
Emergence, (Self)Organization, and Complexity
Criticality: A Balance Between Robustness and Adaptability
Festina lente (the slower-is-faster effect)
Antifragility: Dynamical Balance

W. Ross Ashby & The Law of Requisite Variety

Hyperobjects
by Timothy Morton

How can we think the complex?
by Carlos Gershenson and Francis Heylighen

The Implications of Interactions for Science and Philosophy
by Carlos Gershenson

...

Next Episode

Mason Porter on Community Detection and Data Topology

1 Recommendations

One way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music starts to make itself apparent in the avalanche of data and new analytical approaches that a century of innovation has availed us. But just as with new music genres, it requires a trained ear to attune to unfamiliar order...what can we learn from network science and related general, abstract mathematical approaches to discovering this order in a flood of numbers?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and in every episode we bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we speak with SFI External Professor, UCLA mathematician Mason Porter (UCLA Website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Wikipedia), about his research on community detection in networks and the topology of data — going deep into a varied toolkit of approaches that help scientists disclose deep structures in the massive data-sets produced by modern life.

I know it comes as a surprise, but this is our penultimate episode. Please stay tuned for one more show in May when SFI President David Krakauer and I will reflect on major themes and highlights from the last three-and-a-half years, and look forward to what I’ll be doing next! It’s been an honor and a pleasure to bring complex systems science to you in this way, and hope we stay in touch. I won’t be hard to find.

Thank you for listening.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Mentioned & Related Media:

Bounded Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics on Networks
SFI Seminar by Mason Porter (live Twitter coverage & YouTube stream recording)

Communities in Networks
by Mason Porter, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, & Peter Mucha

Social Structure of Facebook Networks
by Amanda Traud, Peter Mucha, & Mason Porter

Critical Truths About Power Laws
by Michael Stumpf & Mason Porter

The topology of data
by Mason Porter, Michelle Feng, & Eleni Katifori

Complex networks with complex weights
by Lucas Böttcher & Mason A. Porter

A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs
by Abigail Hicock, Yacoub Kureh, Heather Z. Brooks, Michelle Feng, & Mason Porter

A multilayer network model of the coevolution of the spread of a disease and competing opinions
by Kaiyan Peng, Zheng Lu, Vanessa Lin, Michael Lindstrom, Christian Parkinson, Chuntian Wang, Andrea Bertozzi, & Mason Porter

Social network analysis for social neuroscientists
Elisa C Baek...