01.25.09
Evolution and aesthetic judgment
Review Of A New Book on Haeckel, The Tragic Sense Of Life.
This review raises too many questions to consider all at once, but here’s an interesting quote:
But what is Romanticism? An aesthetic appreciation of nature and a love of travel, painting and poetry are some common denominators among Richards’s Romantics. Most of them also have a certain pantheistic tendency to see God in or as nature. But more important to Richards is the Romantic notion that aesthetic judgment is required in the study of life. Animal forms are diverse and changeable, but beneath the unstable appearances, the Romantic expects to find underlying unity, purpose, and ideal forms or archetypes. These, the Romantic holds, cannot be seen directly or inferred logically but must be envisioned by the mind’s creative faculties. Similarly, organic change and progress must also be envisioned in terms of archetypal sequences.
The problems with Romantic biology are not inconsiderable, but the proposition that Darwin rendered all of that obsolete is false.
The rediscovery of evolution (after the original of the Greeks) in the Enlightenment spawned a whole spectrum of perspectives on its meaning, and the fiction that Darwin solved the problem once and for all is one of the greatest distortions in the history of science, and of modern thought.
Much of the Romantic Naturephilosophie derailed in its own metaphysics, but the passage cited above shows that the issues won’t go away: “the Romantic notion that aesthetic judgment is required in the study of life” echoes down to our own time as a challenge to the gross oversimplifications of Darwinism.
It should be noted that the study of the eonic effect almost automatically summons up this history of Romantic biology, but then seizes high ground with an austere Kantian perspective that can avoid some of the confusions of later mystical biology.
Check out the material here: Kant’s Challenge, along with related essays in that chapter of World History And The Eonic Effect.
The study of the eonic effect provokes the crisis of contradictions that leads to the examination of transcendental idealism, and this suggests that biologists are in trouble with their reductionist definition of the organism: isn’t an organism an entity that might transcend space and time?
This devastating possibility remains to haunt the simplificities (?? nice neologism, I meant ’simplicities’) of Darwinian rejection of essentialism.
As to the question of aesthetic judgment, the eonic effect shows examples of the way that historical entities connected with dynamical processes require ‘aesthetic judgments’ to assess their place in those evolutionary processes. Consider, Art, Evolution, And The Tragic Genre, and the almost devastating correlation of the tragic genre in the Axial Age, and instantaneous waning in its wake. Aethetic jugment is thus connected directly to historical/evolutionary reasoning.
Darwinism just can’t follow into that realm.