Science and Romanticism

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.

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.

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.

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.”