Romanticism in science

Romanticism during the Age of Reflection (c. 1800–40) was an intellectual movement that originated inWestern Europe as a counter-movement to the late-18th-century Enlightenment. Romanticism incorporated manyfields of study in the arts and humanities, but it also greatlyinfluenced 19th-century science.[1]

In contrast to Enlightenment mechanistic natural philos-ophy, European scientists of the Romantic period heldthat observing nature implied understanding the self, andthat knowledge of nature “should not be obtained byforce.” They felt that the Enlightenment had encouragedthe abuse of the sciences, and they sought to advance anew way to increase scientific knowledge, one that theyfelt would be more beneficial not only to mankind but tonature as well.[2]

Romanticism advanced a number of themes: it promotedanti-reductionism (the whole was more valuable than theparts alone) and epistemological optimism (man was con-nected to nature), and encouraged creativity, experience,and genius.[3] It also emphasized the scientist’s role inscientific discovery, holding that acquiring knowledgeof nature meant understanding man as well; therefore,these scientists placed a high importance on respect fornature.[4]

Romanticism declined beginning around 1840 as a newmovement, positivism, took hold of intellectuals andlasted until about 1880. As with the intellectuals whoearlier had become disenchanted with the Enlightenmentand had sought a new approach to science, people nowlost interest in Romanticism and sought to study scienceusing a stricter process.

1 Romantic Science vs. Enlighten-ment Science

As the Enlightenment had a firm hold in France duringthe last decades of the 18th century, so the Romanticview on science was a movement that flourished in GreatBritain and especially Germany in the first half of the19th century.[5] Both sought to increase individual andcultural self-understanding by recognizing the limits inhuman knowledge through the study of nature and the in-tellectual capacities of man. The Romantic movement,however, resulted as an increasing dislike by many intel-lectuals for the tenets promoted by the Enlightenment;it was felt by some that Enlightened thinkers’ emphasison rational thought through deductive reasoning and the

mathematization of natural philosophy had created an ap-proach to science that was too cold and that attemptedto control nature, rather than to peacefully co-exist withnature.[6]

According to the philosophes of the Enlightenment, thepath to complete knowledge required a dissection of in-formation on any given subject and a division of knowl-edge into subcategories of subcategories, known as reduc-tionism. This was considered necessary in order to buildupon the knowledge of the ancients, such as Ptolemy, andRenaissance thinkers, such as Copernicus, Kepler, andGalileo. It was widely believed that man’s sheer intel-lectual power alone was sufficient to understanding everyaspect of nature. Examples of prominent Enlightenmentscholars include: Sir Isaac Newton (physics and math-ematics), Gottfried Leibniz (philosophy and mathemat-ics), and Carolus Linnaeus (botanist and physician).

2 Principles of Romanticism

Romanticism had four basic principles: “the originalunity of man and nature in a Golden Age; the subsequentseparation of man from nature and the fragmentation ofhuman faculties; the interpretability of the history of theuniverse in human, spiritual terms; and the possibility ofsalvation through the contemplation of nature.”[7]

The above-mentioned Golden Age is a reference fromGreek mythology and legend to the Ages of Man. Ro-mantic thinkers sought to reunite man with nature andtherefore his natural state.[8]

To Romantics, “science must not bring about any splitbetween nature and man.” Romantics believed in the in-trinsic ability of mankind to understand nature and itsphenomena, much like the Enlightened philosophes, butthey preferred not to dissect information as some insa-tiable thirst for knowledge and did not advocate whatthey viewed as the manipulation of nature. They sawthe Enlightenment as the “cold-hearted attempt to extortknowledge from nature” that placed man above naturerather than as a harmonious part of it; conversely, theywanted to “improvise on nature as a great instrument.”[9]The philosophy of nature was devoted to the observationof facts and careful experimentation, which was muchmore of a “hands-off” approach to understanding sciencethan the Enlightenment view, as it was considered toocontrolling.[10]

Natural science, according to the Romantics, involved re-

1

2 4 NATURPHILOSOPHIE

jecting mechanical metaphors in favor of organic ones; inother words, they chose to view the world as composedof living beings with sentiments, rather than objects thatmerely function. Sir Humphry Davy, a prominent Ro-mantic thinker, said that understanding nature required“an attitude of admiration, love and worship, [...] a per-sonal response.”[11] He believed that knowledge was onlyattainable by those who truly appreciated and respectednature. Self-understanding was an important aspect ofRomanticism. It had less to do with proving that manwas capable of understanding nature (through his bud-ding intellect) and therefore controlling it, and more todo with the emotional appeal of connecting himself withnature and understanding it through a harmonious co-existence.[12]

3 Important works in Romanticscience

When categorizing the many disciplines of science thatdeveloped during this period, Romantics believed that ex-planations of various phenomena should be based uponvera causa, whichmeant that already known causes wouldproduce similar effects elsewhere.[13] It was also in thisway that Romanticism was very anti-reductionist: theydid not believe that inorganic sciences were at the top ofthe hierarchy but at the bottom, with life sciences nextand psychology placed even higher.[14] This hierarchy re-flected Romantic ideals of science because the whole or-ganism takes more precedence over inorganic matter, andthe intricacies of the human mind take even more prece-dence since the human intellect was sacred and necessaryto understanding nature around it and reuniting with it.Various disciplines on the study of nature that werecultivated by Romanticism included: Schelling’sNaturphilosophie; cosmology and cosmogony; devel-opmental history of the earth and its creatures; thenew science of biology; investigations of mental states,conscious and unconscious, normal and abnormal;experimental disciplines to uncover the hidden forcesof nature – electricity, magnetism, galvanism and otherlife-forces; physiognomy, phrenology, meteorology,mineralogy, “philosophical” anatomy, among others.[15]

4 Naturphilosophie

Main article: Naturphilosophie

In Friedrich Schelling's Naturphilosophie, he explainedhis thesis regarding the necessity of reuniting man withnature; it was this German work that first defined the Ro-mantic conception of science and vision of natural philos-ophy. He called nature “a history of the path to freedom”and encouraged a reunion of man’s spirit with nature.[16]

4.1 Biology

The “new science of biology” was first termed biologieby Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1801, and was “an indepen-dent scientific discipline born at the end of a long pro-cess of erosion of 'mechanical philosophy,' consisting in aspreading awareness that the phenomena of living naturecannot be understood in the light of the laws of physicsbut require an ad hoc explanation.”[17] The mechanicalphilosophy of the 17th century sought to explain life asa system of parts that operate or interact like those of amachine. Lamarck stated that the life sciences must de-tach from the physical sciences and strove to create a fieldof research that was different from the concepts, laws,and principles of physics. In rejecting mechanism with-out entirely abandoning the research of material phenom-ena that does occur in nature, he was able to point out that“living beings have specific characteristics which cannotbe reduced to those possessed by physical bodies” andthat living nature was un ensemble d'objets métaphisiques(“an assemblage of metaphysical objects”).[18] He did not'discover' biology; he drew previous works together andorganized them into a new science.[19]

4.2 Goethe

Johann Goethe's experiments with optics were the directresult of his application of Romantic ideals of observa-tion and disregard for Newton’s own work with optics.He believed that color was not an outward physical phe-nomenon but internal to the human; Newton concludedthat white light was a mixture of the other colors, butGoethe believed he had disproved this claim by his ob-servational experiments. He thus placed emphasis on thehuman ability to see the color, the human ability to gainknowledge through “flashes of insight”, and not a mathe-matical equation that could analytically describe it.[20]

4.3 Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt was a staunch advocate of em-pirical data collection and the necessity of the naturalscientist in using experience and quantification to under-stand nature. He sought to find the unity of nature, and hisbooks Aspects of Nature and Kosmos lauded the aestheticqualities of the natural world by describing natural sci-ence in religious tones.[21] He believed science and beautycould complement one another. (See Humboldtian Sci-ence.)

4.4 Natural history

Nichols (2005) examines the connections between sci-ence and poetry in the English-speaking world duringthe 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on the works ofAmerican natural historian William Bartram and British

4.8 Chemistry 3

naturalist Charles Darwin. Bartram’s Travels throughNorth and South Carolina, Georgia, East andWest Florida(1791) described the flora, fauna, and landscapes of theAmerican South with a cadence and energy that lent it-self to mimicry and became a source of inspiration tosuch Romantic poets of the era as William Wordsworth,Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake. Darwin’swork, includingOn the Origin of Species by Means of Nat-ural Selection (1859), marked an end to the Romantic era,when using nature as a source of creative inspiration wascommonplace, and led to the rise of realism and the useof analogy in the arts.[22]

4.5 Mathematics

Alexander (2006) argues that the nature of mathematicschanged in the 19th century from an intuitive, hierarchi-cal, and narrative practice used to solve real-world prob-lems to a theoretical one in which logic, rigor, and in-ternal consistency rather than application were key. Un-expected new fields emerged, such as non-Euclidean ge-ometry and statistics, as well as group theory, set the-ory and symbolic logic. As the discipline changed, sodid the nature of the men involved, and the image ofthe tragic Romantic genius often found in art, literature,and music may also be applied to such mathematiciansas Évariste Galois (1811–32), Niels Henrik Abel (1802–29), and János Bolyai (1802–60). The greatest of the Ro-mantic mathematicians was Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), who made major contributions in many branchesof mathematics.[23]

4.6 Physics: Electromagnetism

Christensen (2005) shows that the work ofHans ChristianØrsted (1777–1851) was based in Romanticism. Ørsted’sdiscovery of electromagnetism in 1820 was directedagainst the mathematically based Newtonian physics ofthe Enlightenment; Ørsted considered technology andpractical applications of science to be unconnected withtrue scientific research. Strongly influenced by Kant'scritique of corpuscular theory and by his friendship andcollaboration with Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1809),Ørsted subscribed to a Romantic natural philosophy thatrejected the idea of the universal extension of mechani-cal principles understandable through mathematics. Forhim the aim of natural philosophy was to detach itselffrom utility and become an autonomous enterprise, andhe shared the Romantic belief that man himself and hisinteraction with nature was at the focal point of naturalphilosophy.[24]

4.7 Astronomy

Astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822) and his sis-ter Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), were intensely ded-

icated to the study of the stars; they changed the publicconception of the solar system, the Milky Way, and themeaning of the universe.[25]

4.8 Chemistry

Sir Humphry Davy was “the most important man of sci-ence in Britain who can be described as a Romantic.”[26]His new take on what he called “chemical philosophy”was an example of Romantic principles in use that in-fluenced the field of chemistry; he stressed a discoveryof “the primitive, simple and limited in number causesof the phenomena and changes observed” in the physicalworld and the chemical elements already known, thosehaving been discovered by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier,an Enlightenment philosophe.[27] True to Romantic anti-reductionism, Davy claimed that it was not the individ-ual components, but “the powers associated with them,which gave character to substances"; in other words, notwhat the elements were individually, but how they com-bined to create chemical reactions and therefore completethe science of chemistry.[28][29]

4.8.1 Organic chemistry

The development of organic chemistry in the 19th cen-tury necessitated the acceptance by chemists of ideas de-riving from Naturphilosophie, modifying the Enlighten-ment concepts of organic composition put forward byLavoisier. Of central importance was the work on theconstitution and synthesis of organic substances by con-temporary chemists.[30]

4.8.2 Popular image of science

Another Romantic thinker, who was not a scientist but awriter, was Mary Shelley. Her famous book Frankensteinalso conveyed important aspects of Romanticism in sci-ence as she included elements of anti-reductionism andmanipulation of nature, both key themes that concernedRomantics, as well as the scientific fields of chemistry,anatomy, and natural philosophy.[31] She stressed therole and responsibility of society regarding science, andthrough the moral of her story supported the Romanticstance that science could easily go wrong unless man tookmore care to appreciate nature rather than control it.[32]

John Keats' portrayal of “cold philosophy” in the poemLamia,[33] influenced Edgar Allan Poe's 1829 sonnet “ToScience”, and Richard Dawkins' 1998 book, Unweavingthe Rainbow.

4 8 REFERENCES

5 Decline of Romanticism

The rise of Auguste Comte's Positivism in 1840 con-tributed to the decline of the Romantic approach to sci-ence.

6 See also• History of science

• Humboldtian science

• Naturphilosophie

• Positivism

7 Notes[1] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism and

the Sciences, p. xxi.

[2] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p. xii.

[3] Molvig, Ole,History of the Modern Sciences in Society lec-ture course, Sept. 26.

[4] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.xiv.

[5] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.xii; Cunningham, A., andJardine, N., ed. Romanticism and the Sciences, p.22.

[6] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, pp.3–4.

[7] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.4.

[8] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, pp.2–4.

[9] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.4.

[10] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.xii.

[11] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.15.

[12] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.xiv; Cunningham, A., andJardine, N., ed. Romanticism and the Sciences, p.2.

[13] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.15.

[14] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.19.

[15] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.6.

[16] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.31.

[17] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.47.

[18] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.63.

[19] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.57.

[20] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.16–17.

[21] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.15.

[22] Ashton Nichols, “Roaring Alligators and Burning Tygers:Poetry and Science fromWilliamBartram to Charles Dar-win,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society2005 149(3): 304–315

[23] Bossi and Poggi, ed. Romanticism in Science

[24] Dan Ch. Christensen, “The Ørsted-Ritter Partnership andthe Birth of Romantic Natural Philosophy,”Annals of Sci-ence 1995 52(2): 153–185

[25] Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Gen-eration and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Sci-ence (2009)

[26] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.20.

[27] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.31–42.

[28] Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism in Science: Sci-ence in Europe, 1790–1840, p.31–42.

[29] Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Gen-eration and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Sci-ence (2009)

[30] Reinhard Löw, “The Progress of Organic Chemistry Dur-ing the Period of the German Romantic 'Naturphiloso-phie' (1795–1825),” AMBIX 1980 27(1): 1–10

[31] Shelley, M. Frankenstein, p.26–27.

[32] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.20.

[33] Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticism andthe Sciences, p.3.

8 References

• Alexander, Amir R. “Tragic Mathematics: Roman-tic Narratives and the Refounding ofMathematics inthe Early Nineteenth Century,” ISIS: Journal of theHistory of Science in Society 2006 97(4): 714–726

5

• Bossi, M., and Poggi, S., ed. Romanticism inScience: Science in Europe, 1790–1840. Kluwer:Boston, 1994.

• Cunningham, A., and Jardine, N., ed. Romanticismand the Sciences. (1990). excerpt and text search

• Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson, eds.Literature, Science and Exploration in the RomanticEra: Bodies of Knowledge (2007) excerpt and textsearch

• Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: The Roman-tic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty andTerror of Science (2009) ISBN 978-1-4000-3187-0, focus on William Herschel the astronomer andHumphry Davy the chemist

• Holland, Jocelyn. German Romanticism and Sci-ence: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis,and Ritter (2009) excerpt and text search

• McLane, Maureen N. Romanticism and the HumanSciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse ofthe Species (2006) excerpt and text search

• Murray, Christopher, ed. Encyclopedia of the ro-mantic era, 1760–1850 (2 vol 2004); 850 articlesby experts; 1600pp

• Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Sci-ence of the Mind (2005) excerpt and text search

• Snelders, H. A. M. “Romanticism and Natur-philosophie and the Inorganic Natural Sciences,1797–1840: An Introductory Survey,” Studies InRomanticism 1970 9(3): 193–215

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