There have been attempts to subsume Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution under either one of two distinct intellectual traditions: early Victorian natural science and its descendants in political economy (as exemplified by Herschel, Lyell, or Malthus) and the romantic approach to art and science emanating from Germany (as exemplified by Humboldt and Goethe). In this paper, it will be shown how these traditions may have jointly contributed to the design of Darwin’s theory. The hypothesis is that their encounter created a particular tension in the conception of his theory which first opened up its characteristic field and mode of explanation. On the one hand, the domain of the explanandum was conceived of under a holistic and aesthetic view of nature that, in its combination with refined techniques of observation, was deeply indebted to Humboldt in particular. On the other hand, Darwin fashioned explanations for natural phenomena, so conceived, so as to identify their proper causes in a Herschelian spirit. The particular interaction between these two traditions in Darwin, it is concluded, paved the way for a transfer of the idea of causal laws to animate nature while salvaging the romantic idea of a complex, teleological and harmonious order of nature.

Recent Darwin scholarship has provided grounds for recognising the Origin as a literary as well as a scientific achievement. While Darwin was an acute observer, a gifted experimentalist and indefatigable theorist, this essay argues that it was also crucial to his impact that the Origin transcended the putative divide between the scientific and the literary. Analysis of Darwin's development as a writer between his journal-keeping on HMS Beagle and his construction of the Origin argues the latter draws on the pattern of the Romantic or Kantian sublime. The Origin repeatedly uses strategies which challenge the natural-theological appeal to the imagination in conceiving nature. Darwin's sublime coaches the Origin's readers into a position from which to envision nature that reduces and contains its otherwise overwhelming complexity. As such, it was Darwin's literary achievement that enabled him to fashion a new 'habit of looking at things in a given way' that is the centrepiece of the scientific revolution bearing his name.

Though the Romantic era is often imagined as the " age of revolution, " recent criticism in the field has seen renewed interest in Romanticism's relationship to evolution, including the resurgence of such topics as organicism, vitalism, natural history, and natural philosophy, as well as other salient themes from the physical and life sciences. This essay offers a contextual introduction for a cluster of articles around the topic of evolution as a concept for literary theory and criticism in Romantic studies, articles that focus critical attention on complex evolutionary ideas like contingency, chance, species transformation, monstrosity , extinction, and the inhuman. The aim of Romantic Evolutions is to reimagine prevailing notions of evolution by tracing their modern origins to literary, cultural, and scientific discourses of the transitional period 1775–1859, a time that witnessed the genesis of the modern idea of " literature " alongside of the emergence of specialized disciplines, such as geology, biology, physiology, chemistry, psychology, and anthropology. Instead of searching through 18th-and early 19th-century science for " forerunners " to the Darwinian revolution, the essays in the volume focus attention on the important contributions of Romantic poets, philosophers, and scientists who have too often been overlooked by the empirical sciences. And yet, by shifting the central focus away from Darwin and his theory of natural selection, contributors also revisit his relationship to Romanticism with fresh eyes. Taken together, the volume seeks to provoke a reevaluation of our current understanding of the Romantic conception of evolution, one that will open new critical perspectives and orientations for scholars within and beyond the field.

Arguing that aesthetic preference generates the historical forms of human racial and gender difference in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin offers an alternative account of aesthetic autonomy to the Kantian or idealist account. Darwin understands the aesthetic sense to be constitutive of scientific knowledge insofar as scientific knowledge entails the natural historian’s fine discrimination of formal differences and their dynamic interrelations within a unified system. Natural selection itself works this way, Darwin argues in The Origin of Species; in The Descent of Man he makes the case for the natural basis of the aesthetic while relativizing particular aesthetic judgments. Libidinally charged – in Kantian phrase, “interested” – the aesthetic sense nevertheless comes historically adrift from its functional origin in rites of courtship.

Charles Darwin's revolutionary theories of evolution and natural selection have not only had a profound influence on the fields of biology and natural history, but also provided fertile territory for the creative imagination. This lavishly illustrated book accompanies an exhibition organized by the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, in association with the Yale Center for British Art, that will coincide with the global celebration of the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). The essays in this exceptionally wide-ranging book examine both the profound impact that Darwin's ideas had on European and American artists and the ways in which his theories were influenced by the visual traditions he inherited. In works by artists as diverse as Church, Landseer, Liljefors, Heade, Redon, Cezanne, Lear, Tissot, Rossetti, and Monet, from imaginative projections of prehisto...

In this paper I propose to understand the current paradigm shift in biology as the origination of a biology of subjects. A description of living beings as experiencing selves has the potential to transform the current mechanistic approach of biology into an embodied-hermeneutic one, culminating in a poetics of nature. We are at the right moment for that: The findings of complex systems research, autopoiesis theory, and evolutionary developmental biology are converging into a picture where the living can not longer be described in terms of causal mechanisms (as is, e. g., the Watson-Crick “central dogma”). Instead, organisms bring forth themselves physically and thereby generate a hermeneutic standpoint, interpreting external and internal stimuli interfering with their auto-creation according to embodied values. This can be observed empirically during embryonic develoment, where genetic instructions do not act as orders, but rather as perturbations being interpreted by an auto-maintaining developmental centre. The notion of organic subjectivity opens the living realm to a hermeneutic perspective. Since any encounter has a meaning and is interpreted accordingly, it creates a perspective of innerness or self. This self experiences all external and internal stimuli as values. The innerness is coextensive with the material dimensions of biochemical processes as their other, or symbolic, side. By this process the subjective perspective of organisms is open to other’s experience. Meaning and value become visible, as they are generated in material, embodied form. Instead of being separate from nature as pure “mind” or “language”, man shares with any other being the same “conditio vitae” of experienced meaning and expressive feeling.