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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 4

4.4 Living nature

The Romantic movement challenged in this way the idea that the human mind was passive. But nature too, for the Enlightenment, had been passive, and furnished with entities that were passive. Romanticism challenged this also.

The concept it reached for in asserting its alternative view was the concept of life. Living things have always suggested the idea of spontaneity. Animals of course have no appearance of being passive. They were characterised by the Greeks as things possessing the power of movement - animal souls, belonging to entities with with the capacity to respond to stimulation. But plants have something of the same apparent power too. They don't generally move about, but they do spring up out of seeds in a way that has always been recognised as distinctive and highly significant. So the Romantics expressed their opposition to the prevailing deterministic view of the natural world by insisting that it was alive.

By implication, the insistence that things in nature and everything belonging to it were 'alive' militated against the reductionist nostrums of established science. There were also plenty of explicit statements to this effect. Goethe (not classed by historians as a Romantic, but belonging to the late 18th Century and a powerful critic of Enlightenment science) conducted an investigation into the nature of colour, and the human experience of colour, because he thought the reductionist treatment offered by Newton profoundly misconceived. More well known are the pronouncements of the later Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, with a vision of nature as anything but the endless jostling of colourless, odourless, tasteless, mindless particles:

(The Prelude 1, 490 4, 499 501)

Nature is a cathedral of Presences, for Wordsworth, not a matrix of particles, as this famous invocation makes clear.

Goethe, courtesy Gonçalo L. Fonseca who has a convenient Goethe page Goethe saw nature as an agent too: 'Nature! ... She lives in countless children, and the mother - where is she? She is the sole artist, creating extreme contrast out of the simplest material, the greatest perfection seemingly without effort, the most definite clarity always veiled with a touch of softness. Each of her works has its own being, each of her phenomena its separate idea, yet all create a single whole.' Goethe [sic], 'Nature' (ascribed to Tobler, 1783) in Scientific Studies, p. 3.

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Reason, Nature and the Human Being in the West
Part of a module of the MA in Values and the Environment Lancaster University
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