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2019, The BARS Review
Review by Daniel Vázquez Calvo (Complutense University of Madrid) of Charles Morris Lansley, Charles Darwin’s Debt to the Romantics: How Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe and Wordsworth Helped Shape Darwin’s View of Nature. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018. Pp. 274. £60. ISBN: 9781787071384.
This thesis is a comparative study of the descriptions of nature made by two types of cognitive subjects: on the one hand, renowned poets from English Romanticism such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats; and on the other hand, two remarkable Naturalists, Alexander von Humboldt, and, most especially, Charles Darwin. The aim of this thesis is to make explicit the onto-epistemological features of the worldview on which both types of cognitive subjects build their landscape descriptions. The analysis of the respective lexicons should help clarify whether the acquisition of descriptive and explanatory knowledge about the functioning of nature, the main purpose of the Naturalists Humboldt and Darwin, are, or are not, determinant factors capable of changing the worldview of the observers of nature in such a way that it leads them to adopt a “disenchanted” worldview, in the Weberian sense. This question is all the more relevant as Darwin himself had occasionally commented on the influence of his scientific activity in his aesthetic sensibility, terms that seem to confirm the thesis of disenchantment. In turn, this question is framed within a problem, one that is more general and historiographically very studied, the relationship of form and the substance of Darwin’s work with Romanticism. This thesis addresses this problem by making explicit the respective the onto-epistemological presuppositions.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
The Darwinian Tension. Romantic Science and the Causal Laws of NatureThere 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.
Natural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been widely debated in the field of the social sciences. This paper explores the social negotiation of boundaries in the Encyclopédie and romantic science. Highlighting the importance of imagination and aesthetics to the scientific realms, we perceive a different comprehension of the scientific field through the empirical study of how scientific demarcation is constructed. Works by Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Humboldt illustrate how reliable science was performed through atypical scientific methods. After pointing out the links between literary, artistic, and scientific works, we then debate a series of changes that framed the scientific imagery of romantic and encyclopaedic sciences.
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.
Romanticism On the Net
The Fertile Darwins: Epigenesis, Organicism, and the Problem of Inheritance2016 •
This essay explores the Darwinian imagination-an approach to exploring the basic ontology of nature that was shared by both Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles Darwin. It focuses on Erasmus and Charles's respective theories of generation, especially as laid out in Zoonomia (1794) and The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), and their derivation from the longstanding opposition between theories of epigenesis and panspermia. Erasmus Darwin's thinking, in particular, was torn between relatively closed and open conceptions of how organic structures assemble and reproduce. Charles, by contrast, worked hard to fashion his theory of pangenesis into a capacious model that would account for interactions of inheritance and development across all levels of physical and temporal scale. Yet beneath disagreements over the distribution of agency between matter and different sexual partners, both argued for an anti-holist, anti-organic ontologythat consistently cleared space for more open, more contingent, and ultimately more ecological theories of nature. Ultimately this required a rejection both of the Romantic conception of organic life and Romantic aesthetics, in particular, the notion that the unity of aesthetic experience communicated something about the unity of natural systems. Finally, I will argue that Charles Darwin's pangenic model-which relies upon the functional assemblage of elements derived from different lineages, on different timescales, and with distinct, non-overlapping, and incompletely integrated capacities-offers a unique way of understanding the problem of intellectual inheritance and the relation between the Darwins themselves. If most approaches to this problem have posited either a lineal genealogy of intellectual inheritance, or situate their work as reflections of a larger historical context, pangenesis can help to imagine intellectual history beyond our typically lineal or atmospheric models of influence.
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.
Aesthetic modes and categories of perception and judgement were crucial to the development of Charles Darwin's " theory of descent with modification through natural selection. " Indeed, Darwin understood the aesthetic as fundamentally constitutive of the natural historian's method. In the closing retrospect of the journal of his circumnavigation as ship's naturalist on HMS Beagle (1836), Darwin assesses his experience in aesthetic terms—of pleasure and pain, wonder and horror, the picturesque and sublime—rather than in terms of acquired scientific knowledge. Darwin's account of the voyage makes aesthetic discrimination the main technique of natural-historical observation: it affords cognition of the natural world as a complex interplay of formal differences constituting a dynamic totality, a living system. A key aesthetic category, the sublime, articulates the awful discrepancy between human and natural scales of history, event, and meaning. Darwin makes a strategic appeal to the aesthetic to justify his new vision of nature to the Victorian public, overriding its scandalous ethical and political implications, in On the Origin of Species (1859): " There is grandeur in this view of life. .. from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. " As well as the exposition of an argument, the Origin is a treatise on method. Darwin trains his readers to appreciate the evaluative scrutiny of formal difference that characterizes the operation of natural selection itself. The opening chapter, on artificial selection, proposes the domestic animal breeder as a " connoisseur, " expert in assessing minute morphological variations without concern for an ultimate end—that is, the improvement of the race. The figure is an analogue for natural selection, the motive principle of which is the fine but decisive discrimination (for life or death) of individual differences. The " powers of discrimination and taste " determine human evolution—constituting its medium, the semi-autonomous domain of culture—according to Darwin's next synthetic statement of his theory, The Descent of Man.
Romanticism on the Net
Evolution and Literature: The Two Darwins Introduction Romanticism on the Net2016 •
Biographical Dictionary of Literary Influences: The Nineteenth Century, 1800-1914
“W. E. B. DuBois”; “Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.” In Derek Blakeley; John Powell; and Tessa Powell, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Literary Influences: The Nineteenth Century, 1800-1914 (New York: Greenwood, 2000). *Choice Outstanding Academic Title“W. E. B. DuBois”; “Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.” In Derek Blakeley; John Powell; and Tessa Powell, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Literary Influences: The Nineteenth Century, 1800-1914 (New York: Greenwood, 2000). Pp. 138-140, 440-441. Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2001.
2012 •
Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
The Intuitions of Analogy in Erasmus Darwin’s Poetics2011 •
2015 •
2010 •
Victorian Network
The'Emerson Museum'and the Darwin Exhibit: Observation, Classification and Display in the Early Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin2010 •
Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies
Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of William Wordsworth:'Excitement without the Application of Gross and Violent Stimulants'2007 •
2019 •
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
A Naturalist's Vision of the Tropics: Charles Darwin and the Brazilian Landscape2000 •
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: …
The Face of Nature: Precise Measurement, Mapping, and Sensibility In the Work of Alexander Von Humboldt1999 •
Studies in English Literature
Review of Jewish Feeling in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (p. 1007)2018 •
Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy, Part IX: Darwin (1809-1882), 226-230.
Response to Richards2016 •
2008 •
Bulletin of Latin American Research
Appropriating the ‘Unattainable’: The British Travel Experience in Patagonia2008 •
2018 •
BELS - Bulletin of Enviromental and Life Sciences
CHARLES DARWIN AND ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE ‘FOLLOWERS’ OF ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT2020 •