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

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscodcast. 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 Wolf, 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, and art, and even in politics and philosophy, it can very often be harder. depend 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, um, 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. Andre has written a series of books. He's been a 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 Traveler. about Georg or George Forster.

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