Science and Romanticism

How can we define a functional & dysfunctional relationship?
My position on the subject and how this affects the content.
Presentation includes;
Bowlby – Attachment Theory
Styles & characteristics of Attachment Theory
Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Close Romantic Relationships Research Report
Ending Relationships
References

Review of :

Alberto Bonchino, Materie als geronnener Geist. Studien zu Franz von Baader in den philosophischen Konstellationen seiner Zeit, Baaderiana, vol. I, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2014, pp. 169; Franz von Baader, Jugendtagebücher 1786-1793. Mit Vorwort und kritischem Kommentar, Baaderiana, vol. II, eds. A. Bonchino & A. Franz, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017, pp. 224; Aufklärung und Romantik als Herausforderung für katholisches Denken, Baaderiana, vol. III, eds. A. Bonchino & A. Franz, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015, pp. 254.

Frankenstein is a speculative narrative that asks, what would happen if man created human life without the biologically and relationally necessary woman and with indifference to God? What if Adam were to reject his own Creator and create life after his own fleshly or material image? Mary Shelley's answer to these questions is not a triumphant humanist manifesto, nor is it an ironic subversion of a supposedly outmoded theistic perspective. Rather, she offers a philosophical nightmare revealing the horrific consequences of methodological naturalism taken to its logical conclusion. Frankenstein explores the ideological vacuum engendered by scientific materialism and examines the spiritual bankruptcy of replacing theism with secular humanism. Victor Frankenstein's transgressive autonomy, grounded in scientific materialism, results in a reductionism that ultimately leads to existential despair, individual crisis, and communal disintegration.

Originally published in: Herausforderung Biologie: Fragen an die Biologie – Fragen aus der Biologie. Ed. Rüdiger Heinze, Johannes Fehrle, and Kerstin Müller. Münster; Berlin; Vienna; Zurich; London: LIT, 2010. 83–112. Print. --- This is an early study for my 'Habilitation' thesis "Natur / Poesie", in which I wrote about German Romantic scientists as literary writers. This particular article was inspired by an Ethics in Biology class at the University of Freiburg, where I presented on two of 'my' writers,  Johann Wilhelm Ritter and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert - largely forgotten today, but highly regarded at their time. The organizers of this class then invited me to write up my results for a volume of selected contributions to their class - which I gladly did.

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.

The purpose of this book is to present the first complete history (based on all known documents) of a pivotal event in homeopathic history involving the use of dual remedies. As Santayana stated, those who do not remember their history are condemned to repeat it. Historical knowledge, what the Greeks called historia, is fundamental to becoming a genuine practitioner of the remedial art, a Heilkünstler, as Hahnemann termed it.
Conventional homeopathy, by ignoring, denying or suppressing the facts of the dual remedy affair, condemns itself to a partial, one-sided and superficial treatment of the myriad of diseases afflicting mankind. The history here unfolded is due to extensive examination of the sources in the light of new insights regarding Hahnemann’s medical system, Heilkunst, based on a new inter-linear translation of the extended Organon (that is, including its full references) by Steven Decker.
The complete results of the extensive collaboration of the authors regarding Hahnemann’s writings have been published in Homeopathy Re-examined (2001) and its successor, The Dynamic Legacy: from Homeopathy to Heilkunst (2002). The latter is available as an on-line book (completely searchable and cross-linked) from the publisher. The reader is encouraged to read this last work for the more extensive context and understanding of Hahnemann’s complete medical system, Heilkunst. As research proceeds, this work is continually being expanded and refined.
The reader also is referred to the public material available on the Internet through the website, www.heilkunst.com.

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.

The purpose of this book is to re-examine basic concepts in the conventional homeopathic medical field necessary to a genuine practitioner of the remedial art, as Hahnemann would say (Heilkünstler), in the light of new insights based on a new inter-linear translation of the extended Organon (that is, including its full references) by Steven Decker.
The complete results of the extensive collaboration of the authors regarding Hahnemann’s writings have been published in Homeopathy Re-examined (2001) and its successor, The Dynamic Legacy: from Homeopathy to Heilkunst (2002), available as an on-line book (completely searchable and cross- linked) from the publisher. The reader is encouraged to read this last work for the more extensive context and understanding of Hahnemann’s complete medical system, Heilkunst. As research proceeds, this work is continually being expanded and refined.
The reader is also referred to the public material available on the Internet through the website, www.heilkunst.com.

Essay review of
RICHARD HOLMES, THE AGE OF WONDER. HOW THE ROMANTIC GENERATION DISCOVERED THE BEAUTY AND TERROR OF SCIENCE and
AMIR ALEXANDER, DUEL AT DAWN. HEROES, MARTYRS, AND THE RISE OF MODERN MATHEMATICS
in: Academische Boekengids 84 (2010)

This essay explores Percy Shelley’s "The Triumph of Life" as a strategic revival of Lucretian poetic science: a materialism fit to connect the epochal, romantic interest in biological life to the period’s pressing new sense of its own historicity. Shelley mobilizes Lucretian natural simulacra to show how personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time, exercising a poetics of transience that resists the triumphalism characteristic of both historiography and vitalist biology in the post-Waterloo period. Representing aging faces as mutable registers of the ‘‘living storm’’ of a post-Napoleonic interval, The Triumph depicts the face-giving trope of prosopopoeia as the unintended work of multitudes—demonstrating a nineteenth-century possibility of thinking biological, historical, and rhetorical materialisms together.

Walt Whitman’s prominent and consistent use of the word “atom” from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass to the 1891-92 deathbed edition has prompted much debate about the sources and meanings of the term in his work. This interest in the concept is not surprising, given his fascination with the changing world of science, philosophy, and technology around him. Indeed, perhaps no scientific idea experienced more development in the 19th century than the atom. Both the increasingly detailed scientific understanding of the atom and chemical processes more generally, as well as the ancient atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius undoubtedly contributed to Whitman’s idea of the atom. Yet, I argue that neither atomic theory fully captures the way Whitman uses the term in his poetry. The poet’s ideas more closely mirror the Naturphilosophie of F.W.J. Schelling, a German philosopher who rejected the Enlightenment and Epicurean picture of atoms as “dead mechanism,” was intimately familiar with the cutting edge of chemistry in his own time (though he would be viewed as too speculative and non-empirical by the next generation of chemists), and advanced his own view of nature as “active,” “dynamic,” and “autonomous.”

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) munkásságával, Magyarország iránti érdeklődésével és magyarországi recepciójával 2004-ben kezdtem el foglalkozni, az Amerikai Egyesült Államokban, egy amerikai-német kutatási együttműködés résztvevőjeként. A Frank Baron professzor (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Kansas) által vezetett projekt a Max Kade Center for German-American Studies nevű intézményhez kapcsolódott, a Kansas állambeli Lawrence-ben. Az együttműködés egyrészt Alexander von Humboldt munkái angol nyelvű fordításainak a digitalizálását, megjegyzetelését, és az interneten való közzétételét célozta, a művek grafikus megjelenítésével és kereshetővé tételével egyetemben. Másrészt, a projekt köré nemzetközi kutatócsoport szerveződőtt, amelynek további feladata különböző, a tagok egyéni érdeklődésének megfelelő tudománytörténeti tanulmányok elkészítésése volt. A The Humboldt Digital Library: A Global Network of Knowledge címet viselő projekt azóta lezárult, eredményei hozzáférhetők, ld. http://www.avhumboldt.net/index.php?page=136
A jelen tanulmány ennek az időszaknak a kiadatlan kutatási eredményeire (Sz. Kristóf 2006), valamint az azóta megjelent munkáimra (Sz. Kristóf 2014a; 2014b; 2017a; 2017b; 2018) támaszkodik, illetve „A tudományos tudás áramlásának mintázatai Magyarországon, 1770-1830” című, csoportos NKFIH projekt (ELTE, 2016-2020, azonosító: 119577) tette lehetővé.

Goethe’s late life science project, the journal On Morphology – and the living specimens it investigated – were unusually heterogeneous and decadent forms. This piece examines Goethe’s neglected essay on the botany of “Dissipation” for the way it subverts vitalist and idealist discourses in biology to rethink living form under the aspect of its material dispersion. Here Goethe begins to substitute events that are non-procreative, but perhaps communicative, for the questions of embryogenesis and organization that had been foundational to the early life sciences. What, the morphologist asks instead, might life look like from the perspective of the particulate losses that mediate between beings? What forms of representation would be adequate to this view?

Christoph Hufeland, one of the most prominent and celebrated physicians of the late 1700s and early 1800s in Germany and the Western medical world, even to this day, is presented as having been critical of the vitalist stream of medicine at the time, in particular of the period of controversy over the so-called Brunonian system, based intially on the work of the Scottish physician, John Brown. Hufeland has become a symbol of medical orthodoxy. The various honors bestowed upon him then and since, as well as his continued positive references in medical history, attest to that perception.
And yet, a closer examination of what he himself called his ‘medical credo’ and “the key and commentary to my other works,” as it organizes the principles underlying them into a system,  is quite revealing. Contrary to what is generally held, Hufeland was a proponent of the stream in German medicine and physiology concerning the workings of a vital activity and energy system, termed Lebenskraft, and in particular the generative side of that life force, called by Blumenbach, Bildungstrieb. He was also cognizant of the scientific works of one of his patients, Wolfgang von Goethe, which also formed a major part of this dynamic stream in German scientific thought and medicine. A closer look at Hufeland’s 1800 masterpiece reveals a dedicated scientist, setting out the foundation for a truly rational system of medicine and understanding of physiology based on laws of vital nature that stand above, yet incorporate and integrate those related to inert nature, insofar as they operate within the living organism and bio-economy.

This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the problem of agency. It explores the turn in Erasmus Darwin’s later works toward a distributed model of organic agency and against the commitment to epigenesis featured in The Botanic Garden (1789–91) and Zoonomia (1794). Taking up Darwin’s discussion of elective affinity in Phytologia (1800), and its influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1809 novel, Die Verwandshaften, I explore the implication of Darwin’s analysis of the ontology of life for current debates over the distribution of agency and responsibility in the Anthropocene, with particular reference to Donna Haraway’s “sympoeisis,” Jane Bennett’s material ecologies, and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia. Finally, the article explores how this distribution of organic agency conditions the poetics of The Temple of Nature (1803), and revises the cosmogony of Darwin’s earlier poetry.

After the defeat of Napoleon in June 1815, the redefinition of the “nation state” heightened a dynamic vision of the world that placed process and unity at the center of European thought. So overwhelming was this perspective that the most influential scientists and philosophers of the age developed a fascination with the physical forces—magnetism, electricity, heat, light—that define our world in order to capitalize on nature’s potential for societal development. The desire to harness the power of nature was not an aspiration for the natural sciences alone, but one shared by the arts in the nineteenth century. Romantic opera, an amalgam of all the arts, allied itself with many of the exploratory visions of the age through its desire to electrify audiences with a bevy of new images and sounds in order to create an entirely unknown visual and sonic landscape. Never before in the history of opera were the separate artistic forces of sound, image, and text brought together to present such a unified vision of nature itself. By examining the sound and the representation of the forces of nature in the operas of Gaetano Donizetti, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Carl Maria von Weber, Musicologist Mark Pottinger illuminates not only the artistic goals of early nineteenth-century opera, but also the overarching theories of the scientific community and their connection to a romantic vision for society.

This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the problem of agency. It explores the turn in Erasmus Darwin’s later works toward a distributed model of organic agency and against the commitment to epigenesis featured in The Botanic Garden (1789–91) and Zoonomia (1794). Taking up Darwin’s discussion of elective affinity in Phytologia (1800), and its influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1809 novel, Die Verwandshaften, I explore the implication of Darwin’s analysis of the ontology of life for current debates over the distribution of agency and responsibility in the Anthropocene, with particular reference to Donna Haraway’s “sympoeisis,” Jane Bennett’s material ecologies, and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia. Finally, the article explores how this distribution of organic agency conditions the poetics of The Temple of Nature (1803), and revises the cosmogony of Darwin’s earlier poetry.

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic ''self-organization'' as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the episte-mological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant's heuristics of autonomous ''self-or-ganization'' in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought's critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigen-esis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of ''self-organization,'' allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.

Having just finished reading Thomas Streeter's (2011a) new book, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet, when the news of Steve Jobs' passing broke I couldn't help but wonder how Streeter's argument about the mythic American narrative of entrepreneurs could help us to understand the outpouring of media eulogies that remembered him as a visionary entrepreneur, a hero, and a genius who changed the world. To better understand the media memory and posthumous celebration of Steve Jobs as ...