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2 - The impact of German Idealism and Romanticism on biology in the nineteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2013

By
Robert J. Richards
General editor
Nicholas Boyle  and
Liz Disley
Edited by
Karl Ameriks
Robert J. Richards
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Nicholas Boyle
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Liz Disley
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Karl Ameriks
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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Summary

  1. All art should become science and all science art;

  2. poetry and philosophy should be made one.

  3. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente, 115

Many revolutionary proposals entered the biological disciplines during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theories that provided the foundations for today's science and gave structure to its various branches. Cell theory, evolutionary theory and genetics achieved their modern form during this earlier time. The period also saw a variety of new, auxiliary hypotheses that supplied necessary supports for the more comprehensive theories. Ideas in morphology, embryology, systematics, language and behaviour began to proliferate. These scientific developments forced a reconceptualisation of nature and the place of human beings therein. The legacy for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been a materialisation and mechanisation of the most fundamental processes of life. From our current perspective, it is easy to look back and assume that the foundational ideas of our contemporary science must have had the same character as they now seem to manifest. I think a closer inspection of biological science of this earlier period will reveal a discipline whose philosophic assumptions are quite different from those of its present incarnation. This becomes especially vivid when we focus on the contributions of German Idealism and Romanticism to the biology of the earlier dispensation.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Impact of Idealism
The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought
 , pp. 105 - 133
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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