There has long been a persistent tension, a binary opposition in my thinking, between romanticism and enlightenment, faith and reason, spirituality and science. It was first awoken in my in depth research into the essence of technology, as it revealed itself as little more than an interaction with nature; and as my research into the philosophy of mind, agency, and time suggested, it was not all that clear that such interactions were intentional. All of that appeared to coalesce in Spinoza’s monism, his idea that there is only one substance, that each of us – and everything else that exists: rocks, trees, stars, time, even god – is part of a single thing, a single substance. Habermas claimed the ascendancy of the existential fissure in the Axial Age – the time of classical Athens, around 500BCE give or take. Neitzsche agreed, blaming Socrates, and looking instead to the pre-socratics for wisdom. Carlo Rovelli, whose The Order of Time I’m just about finished (such a lovely book – more on that later), goes to Anaximander (610 -546 BCE, roughly) to understand his modern science (in particular quantum mechanics) and its real meaning. However, most people today would identify the French Revolution and the late eighteenth century as being the true breaking point, when the Divine Right of Kings was abandoned, and Science asserted itself as our true…well, our true faith.

The Romantics rejected the enlightenment and its scientism, and I’ve never had the opportunity to dive in and understand them until recently – and I began in Germany. I have just finished Helmut Smith’s Germany: A Nation in its Time, and Simon Schama’s Citizens, and so Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, seemed a good step into German Romanticism. Her book describes a few years around the turn of the nineteenth century, immediately after the French Revolution and before the fall of Napoleon, in the sleepy town of Jena in what is today central Germany. There a group of striking women, along with Goethe, Schelling, Novalis, Fichte, the Schlegel brothers, and occasionally Hegel – who later called Napoleon the soul of the world on seeing him riding out, shortly after the Battle of Jena in 1806 – cavorted and frolicked and wrote and argued and philosophized their way through a few fevered years around the university. Beginning with Fichte’s ich philosophy, of the self, and declaring that nature was in effect an invention of the self, at least as Schelling saw it. Schelling for his part saw nature in Spinozan terms, as one great organic whole, with a distinctly transcendental quality. To return to my starting dichotomy, Fichte’s ich was a highly scientific entity, while Schelling’s Natur was in many respects so much more, and so much less than that.

Hegel took on Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in his Phenomenology of Spirit. And yet, it seems, he rejected it. I’m not sure what this means, but in my reading of it – and in particular his view of history as a progression in the consciousness of freedom – Hegel’s is less a romantic idea, and more an enlightenment construct: it is the ultimate individualist manifesto.

Romanticism as a term has its roots in fiction – in the novel, in the ideal, the invented, perhaps you might say the unreasonable. Novels are escapist, they are romantic in the modern sense, loves lost and loves won, culminating in weddings and happy endings. Life is usually not like that, and so the idea of a political or intellectual movement being characterized in such terms was hardly affirmative. Yet it also captured ideas of feeling, of emotion, that while immeasurable in terms of the new science, were no less real for that. Hayek recognised this need in his Nobel speech in 1974, entitled The Pretence of Knowledge, when he lamented that ‘…in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement.’ In other words, nebulous concepts such as sentiment and confidence, which in his view were highly predictive of market behaviour, were often demoted as extraneous factors.

On the one hand then we have a highly empirical scientism, a version of the Cartesian cogito, outlined by Fichte in his Foundation of Natural Right. Here, Fichte uses science to argue for an independent self, though consciousness is acknowledged as a social phenomenon. Nevertheless, each conscious agent appears in this work as an a priori real entity, which appears (to me at least) to be classic enlightenment hubris. Fichte is no Romantic, and Wulf’s work, though convoluted with too many characters and sometimes difficult to follow – having two Schlegel brothers is itself challenging! – cannot avoid representing Fichte as one step removed from the group. He may have provided an intellectual catalyst, but the rejection of the enlightenment came from the others – Schelling, Novalis, and the rest.

As our age continues to trundle along, aghast at persistent wars, inquality, poverty, and a failure of the most spectacular technology to deliver real change, that undercurrent of resistant aestheticists continues to bubble along. Whether popping up on the right, as quasi-religious rejectionists with their negative slogans (lock her up / drain the swamp etc.), or Marxist idealists on the left, believing in pipe-dream communism, even the center seems to ask the question ‘is this it?’ Religion failed, and now science has failed too. Where is the Hegelian synthesis? Where is the positive next step on the road? Hegel used to argue, though not in these express terms, that history was a series of thesis, antithesis and synthesis whereupon the synthesis would become thesis, and the cycle would begin again. If religion, spirituality and romanticism were the thesis, and enlightenment, science and economics the antithesis, then what synthesis can mediate between these two?