Science and Romanticism

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.