Creaturely lives: Romanticism and the rhetoric of natural history

The essence and modalities of human nature are a pervasive concern of German letters during the second half of the eighteenth century. The anthropological literature of the period (Herder, Forster, Rousseau) is particularly adept at giving expression to this concern. Surveying the five decades between 1760 and 1810, my study argues that eighteenth-century anthropology is surreptitiously driven by a materialist rhetoric whose scope and intensity suggests an imperfect separation, in anthropological thought, between the human and the creaturely. The complex figure of thought that defines creaturely consciousness is not fully revealed instantly; it is revealed over time, in a process of deepening awareness that reaches its climax in the Romantic reception of the anthropological legacy. The study's underlying assumption, then, is that the prehistory of Romantic thought in Germany is, in many respects, a prehistory of the posthuman.;The first chapter shows that a strong current of post-humanist rhetoric distorts the humanist message early on, during a period in which the question of human nature begins to receive an extraordinary amount of attention, slowly occupying intellectual ground held by more traditional disciplines such as theology and metaphysics. In the 1760s and 70s, seminal figures such as Herder and Forster pioneer a movement, referred to by Herder himself as "anthropology," which revolves around a question that would dominate German letters for several decades: Was ist der Mensch? What is man? One of the chief concerns of this emerging field is to establish a rapport between the self and its cultural or historical other. I argue that Herder's and Forster's proto-hermeneutic attempts to reach out to the other are undermined by a materialist rhetoric that in fact presents a serious obstacle to cross-cultural understanding.;The focal point of chapters two and three is the philosophy of German Idealism, represented by two of its most exemplary figures, F.W.J. Schelling and Friedrich Holderlin. While German Idealism is usually conceived as a revisionary yet highly reverential reaction to Kant's critical philosophy, it is often overlooked that this reaction occurs under anthropological premises. Among the many indicators pointing towards an anthropological provenance of Idealist thought, none is more revealing than a growing recognition, among the Idealists, of the material aspects of human life. Schelling for instance, after making an initial, truly herculean effort to assimilate the laws of nature to the laws of the mind, soon acknowledges that human life rests upon an "irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason by the greatest exertion but always remains in the depths.";The final chapter investigates a Romantic paradigm of Offentlichkeit , or publicity, which can be characterized as a dialectic of solitude and sociability, and its involvement with creaturely life. Influenced by Rousseau, who blames his "too affectionate, too loving and too tender heart" for his sullenness and misanthropy, Novalis and Tieck explore the semiotic implications of a discursive pattern that considers solitary speech the most effective form of public discourse. Their response revolves around the "heart of stone," a metaphor frequently found in Romantic texts. The owner of the heart of stone is held in thrall by the natural world, which nurtures in him a longing for precious, inanimate objects so intense that he no longer feels any affection for his fellow human beings. By situating a petrified signifier at the center of the libidinal economy, the image of the calcified heart brings Rousseau's dialectic of solitude and sociability to a jarring halt.;The study closes with an epilogue on Durs Grunbein, a contemporary poet and essayist whose oeuvre helps us to understand the current status of humanity's entanglement with creaturely life.