Goethe and Ernst Haeckel

I recently posted on a Victorian "scientific materialist," John Tyndall, who, like his friend Thomas Carlyle, was a Goethe enthusiast. Goethe was a great poet, but it was his reach into so many areas of human life, especially science, indeed the seeming comprehensiveness of Goethe's vision, that must have impressed the Victorians. By the mid-19th century scientific exploration of the earth and empirical science had come up with some pretty astonishing results. Scientific men and women, too, were figuring out all the secrets of material life, in the process demystifying God's creation. As for the spiritual side of things, well, there was literature, and who better to provide inspiration than Goethe? For instance, his poem "Prometheus," in which indeed man is shown pushing God aside.

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was another famous Victorian, who also was much influenced by Goethe and by German Romantic writers. Yes, he was actually Prussian, but I think it's fair to extend the term to intellectual figures like Haeckel, who has so much in common with famous Victorians like Charles Darwin. Indeed, it was Haeckel who explained "Darwinism" to the world, in his book Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1868), which was a bestseller in English as The History of Creation (1876).

I have mentioned before on this blog Robert Richards' book on German "Romantic science." Richards has also written a biography cum intellectual history entitled The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought. I have not had a chance to look at it yet, but Steven Marx recently drew my attention to Haeckel, who is the subject of the film Proteus, an animated documentary that explores the 19th-century's engagement with the oceans and the undersea world. Haeckel's name is particularly associated with the microscopic life form known as radiolarian, one-celled creatures with intricate mineral skeletons found in every ocean. They exist in unimaginable numbers -- about 6,000 varieties have been identified -- and the decaying bodies form an ooze that covers the sea bottom. Remains of radiolarians date to the beginnings of the Cambrian period, ca. 530 million years ago. I include one of Haeckel's illustrations of radiolarians here, but others can be found in Kunstformen der Natur or, in English, Art Forms in Nature.

I thought the use of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in Proteus a bit far-fetched and indeed not even really applicable, but the film nicely brought together the polymathic endeavors of the 19th century, in this case Haeckel, Darwin, and the 70,000 nautical-miles journey of the Challenger Expedition of 1872-76. The report of the Challenger expedition included catalogues of 4,000 previously unknown species. The publication of its results has been described as "the greatest advance in the knowledge of our planet since the celebrated discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries."

As the film Proteus points out, another mammoth Victorian project in this same period was the laying of a transatlantic telegraph cable, the work of another amazing Victorian, Cyrus West Field, an American businessman.

 

The Challenger expedition discovered that the deepest part of the world's oceans was the Mariana trench, which is also the deepest natural location of the earth's crust.

Haeckel, according to Richards, detected "archetypal structures" as the basic forms of different animal groups, forms that could be comprehended only by the mind's eye: Anschauung, as Goethe called it. Haeckel believed, however, that the essence of such forms could be rendered by the artistic hand, and it is the very beauty of his own paintings that made Haeckel's many books so popular.

Haeckel was also something of a controversialist, up to our own day. Even though his works were banned by the Nazis, biologists like Stephen Jay Gould have claimed that Haeckel's works contributed to their racial theories. More on that another time.

Pittsburgh

At a certain point in a conference, it is necessary to have a break. That happened to me on day two. I gave my paper at 9 a.m. that morning. At 10:40 Robert Richards gave the keynote speech, in which he maintained that Goethe and Schelling had anticipated Darwin's theories, including those of species generation. Bob, by the way, has written a fascinating book, which I have used in my own research, called The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Some of us then went to lunch at the Carnegie Museum cafe, after which, at 1:30, facing the prospect of a talk entitled "Epistemology of Sensing and Feeling in Goethe's Faust I," I decided to take a break and go instead to see some paintings in the Carnegie Museum of Art.

What is it I like about museums? Probably being by myself for an hour. Solitary museum visits also replicate my first experience of museums, when I was 18 and visiting Europe for the first time. Europe: that means, museums, right? There was a lovely small museum in Paris, then called the Jeu de Paume, devoted solely to the Impressionists. For a person who had never been to a museum before, the Impressionists are immediately accessible. Thus I would spend hours there, taking notes in a small notebook I always carried and trying to decipher the French in the labels next to the paintings. I was particularly intrigued by the phrase "nature morte."

Despite the fact that Pittsburgh was once an important industrial city and that the Fricks and Mellons established their fortunes there, the art acquired by those men has gone for the most part elsewhere, to the Frick Museum here in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Wahington, D.C. (the Mellons). Thus, there is not the fullness of representation at the Carnegie Museum of Art, despite being the obvious recipient of the largesse of Andrew Carnegie (though many of the older public buildings in the city bear the Carnegie profile), that you find at, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The paintings in the first two galleries are in fact arranged in a very 19th-century style, as in the charming scene of schoolgirls drawing.

What I find interesting about the three paintings below, by Edvard Munch, Pierre Bonnard, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, is that they were painted within the same decade, from 1904 to 1914. The same for the painting at the top, "The Picnic" by Maurice Prendergast, a wonderfully cheery painting from 1914. (Check out this better image of the painting at the Carnegie website.) If you look at a painting by Raphael or any of his contemporaries, you usually assign it to a "period," in their case the Renaissance. The very different styles of the paintings by Munch and his contemporaries, however, are indicative of what we now called "Modernism" or even modernity itself: multiplicity of  styles, without any authoritative one, an era when art is about individual sensibility and is dependent for its reception on taste, but mostly on the marketplace.

It should be mentioned that the Carnegie is a very public- and family-friendly museum. Besides the schoolgirls who were drawing in the galleries (above), the large rooms invited antics from the two munchkins below.