In Critical Fragment Nr. 115, Friedrich Schlegel remarks: “all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.” Written in the swell of revolutionary fervor, both of the political kind – the French Revolution, and of the philosophical kind – Kant’s Copernican Revolution, Schlegel’s push to unite such disparate realms of human inquiry was revolutionary in its own right. And it was a call echoed by many German romantic thinkers as they sough to push their contemporaries to rethink the relation between scientific and aesthetic methods.
Now, some two hundred years later, the disciplines are even more isolated from each other than ever before, so I think it is worth re-examining what might be gained by a more unified approach to understanding nature. I take my lead from Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who claimed that the empirical methods of the natural sciences were necessary but not sufficient to achieve an understanding of nature. To come to an ever more complete understanding of nature (which in broad strokes can be understood as a collection of living forces), one needed to understand not only mechanistic laws, but also the very idea of nature as a whole. For Humboldt the realm of value, especially aesthetic value (ideas of beauty, pleasure, play), is essential to our understanding of nature. Those who approach nature with only empirical methods threaten to kill the “living breath of nature.”
--What is the “living breath of nature”?
--What does an aesthetic-scientific approach to nature amount to?
--How does the presentation of nature change when we are interested in depicting both the quantifiable and the non-quantifiable aspects of nature?
--What pleasures does nature offer and why are these pleasures valuable to us?
Now, some two hundred years later, the disciplines are even more isolated from each other than ever before, so I think it is worth re-examining what might be gained by a more unified approach to understanding nature. I take my lead from Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who claimed that the empirical methods of the natural sciences were necessary but not sufficient to achieve an understanding of nature. To come to an ever more complete understanding of nature (which in broad strokes can be understood as a collection of living forces), one needed to understand not only mechanistic laws, but also the very idea of nature as a whole. For Humboldt the realm of value, especially aesthetic value (ideas of beauty, pleasure, play), is essential to our understanding of nature. Those who approach nature with only empirical methods threaten to kill the “living breath of nature.”
--What is the “living breath of nature”?
--What does an aesthetic-scientific approach to nature amount to?
--How does the presentation of nature change when we are interested in depicting both the quantifiable and the non-quantifiable aspects of nature?
--What pleasures does nature offer and why are these pleasures valuable to us?
Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert
Department of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
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