I remember the first time I encountered a pierced eyebrow. I was sixteen, travelling with the debate team from my high school in the quiet suburbs of Bangalore to the busy city center for a regional meet. I had managed to get the team together only by promising the other boys that there would be girls there.
Being well practiced, we won the debate. But, chatting with the girls afterward, we found that they disdained our pleasure in victory, along with our hand-me-down polyester ties and blazers, our identical short-back-and-sides haircuts. The French revolutionaries changed the political landscape of Europe, but the Jena Set incited a revolution of the mind.
In the manner of such works—and consistent with the Ich philosophy that she chronicles—Wulf tells us a fair amount about her own self. I quit my studies, sold my few possessions and moved to London. Perhaps the reason I am reluctant to join her ardent advocacy for the Jena Set has something to do with the ways in which my own path to philosophy differs from hers: no E. Does the broader Romantic fixation on the autonomous self make sense where it matters?
There are writers who struggle to write and others who struggle to stop. A steady and ominous undertone to all the cogitation and copulation is the rise of Napoleon, a Romantic figure in his own way, from the ashes of the revolution in France.
Such drama, such freedom—in so small a town, and in so unfree an age. How was it possible? The background to the new Ich philosophy was the revolutionary work of Immanuel Kant. The rhetoric of freedom and self-determination must have appealed to the young Fichte, the son of a ribbon-weaver in Saxony.
