"Firstly, things turn out differently, and secondly, than you think." This phrase comes from Wilhelm Busch. Since his day, life and prosperity in Europe have depended on science and technology. Before both became a profession, people like Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were driven by their curiosity about nature and undertook their observations in order to find their own place in the cosmic structure.
After the great minds came simpler people such as Christian Friedrich Boehringer or Heinrich Emanuel Merck, who, for example, wanted to reduce infant mortality and provide antipyretics and therefore built up the research-based companies from their pharmacies that soon made up what we know today as the pharmaceutical industry. This development gave the industrial revolution a solid scientific basis, which was supported and promoted by the philosophy of this era, known as the Enlightenment. Its social dimension included the conviction that the world could be grasped and understood rationally. In the 18th century, people were convinced that an enlightened person only needed to ask rational questions about the world in order to answer them just as rationally and then know what was going on. With the growing trust in rationality at the end of the 18th century, people believed that the future of the world could be predicted and the history of society could be planned, with science playing a decisive role in this.
But then came the 19th century and with it the Romantic revolution. While the Enlightenment believed it could use rational means to say how people's plans could be implemented in a goal-oriented way, Romanticism cut short this world view. It showed that people had to say goodbye to the unambiguousness they had hoped for and that there were no reliable answers to questions about the right course of action. The idea emerged that reason alone could not clearly clarify what should be done for the good of humanity, because the associated decisions involved moral values that people had to create themselves, which turned them into artists who ultimately designed their world and themselves in it. People have exploited and lived out this creative freedom - with global consequences. The future is unpredictable and remains open. Who would want it any other way?
