Beyond Posthumanism: The German Humanist Tradition & the Future of the Humanities by Alexander Mathäs

Author:Alexander Mathäs [Mathäs, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2020-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.2. Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), Memory of a Wooded Island in the Baltic Sea (Oak Trees by the Sea) (1834–35). Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Figure 6.3. Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), The Goethe Monument (1832). Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Even though Carus blamed science for contributing to the fragmentation of nature, he also stressed its importance for a better understanding of nature. For instance, he encouraged artists to pursue scientific training and criticized paintings that did not observe the most fundamental principles of nature’s laws, such as gravity (BüLm 141). One of his assumptions was that science allows humans to get closer to nature after they had become alienated from it in the process of civilization. Carus shared with many of his philosophical mentors, such as Schiller and Herder, the idea that being human means having the ability to step outside of nature and reflect on it (CGS 4:64).22 This capacity enables humans to perceive nature from a dual perspective: its physical appearance and the reflection of it. Thus Carus’s bifurcated vision distinguishes classicist aesthetics from mimetic realism and is a prerequisite for the creation of art (CGS 4: 105–7).23 The mystification of nature in art is a technique of mediation that not only makes nature’s inner laws accessible to human perception but also points to their spiritual, eternal meaning (CGS 4:108). Thus science and neoclassical art elevate the depiction of nature from a mere subjectivist rendition of a momentary mood to a level of abstraction that hints at its universal and transcendent quality (CGS 4:91).

The dual perspective of nature also reveals itself in the dialectic of transformation and permanence. In Carus’s landscape paintings, the opposition is apparent in the contrast between the change of seasons and the view of the horizon that points to the permanence and infinity of the sky (oaks on the seashore; landscape in spring; cemetery in the moonlight).

Carus’s Naturphilosophie and His Politics of Race

The assumption of a discernable correspondence between nature’s spiritual essence and its physical appearance gave rise to the discipline of physiognomy, of which Carus also became a proponent. Based on the premise that physical appearance is an expression of a person’s character, physiognomy utilizes “scientific” observation and description of physical characteristics—such as size, shape, and other traits of body parts—to come to a conclusion about the essential internal qualities of a certain individual or an entire group of individuals. The goal of Carus’s efforts to categorize human behavior according to physiognomic traits—laid out in his Symbolik der Menschlichen Gestalt (Symbolism of the Human Form) (1858)—was to arrive at a reliable distinction between transitory and essential features of the human species: “Eine andere Anforderung geht dahin, dass die Symbolik Zufälliges und Momentanes vom Wesentlichen und Bleibenden gehörig unterscheide” (Another requirement is that symbolism must distinguish between short-lived arbitrary and permanent essential phenomena) (Carus, Symbolik 13). Romantic nature philosophy’s realization that the human organism is part of a continuously evolving nature, subject to constant transformation even before birth and after death, undermined the subject’s autonomy. Hence

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.