Nature as a teacher

The 'organic concept' as developed in the writings of the early German romantics is perhaps not as well known as it might be. In brief, the concept, a fusion of the philosophies of Fichte and Spinoza, sought to unify the natural, physical world and the mental world into an organic whole (see Beiser, 2003). In this model, nature is the absolute and the mind is one part, the most highly developed part, of that whole. There is only a difference in degree and not a distinction in kind, between the mental and the physical. According to this theory, the mental activity of the genius (the artist or the philosopher) is but nature coming to its self awareness. Nature remains indeterminate and inchoate without humanity. But as plenty of Romantic poets have demonstrated through their work, it may also be true that humans can discover or reflect on their own self through exposure to nature.

There can be little doubt that humans have transformed their environment to a far greater degree than other species. This capacity for transformation and rapid change lend to humankind a somewhat precarious destiny. We may use our extraordinary capacities of imagination and love to live in friendship with and amongst human and nonhuman others, or we may continue to believe that the earth serves man and remain 'masters of the mystery that the earth breathes'. As the most complex manifestation of nature, the romantics understood quite well that humans bore a heavy burden. With the benefit of an aesthetic and moral education that taught the individual how to truly love what is not of themselves as a family, as community, we might at least approach wholeness. Friedrich Schlegel once wrote that to 'follow nature' is the only precept of a moral education. (See Beiser, 1996: 152) Why did he say this? Because Schlegel thought that despite humanity's elevated position, nature may remain the best teacher of all. Nature can teach us how to live well…

All geography is homesickness

Photo by Flickr user ☻mrhappy☻ and made available under Creative Commons

We could say of the study of geography, as the German Romantic philosopher and poet Novalis once said of philosophy, that it embodies a kind of homesickness; "the urge to be at home everywhere in the world". It was observations of an escalating divorce of humans from nature, our original home, which partly accounted for the emergence of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a recent study of the rise of the 'geographical imagination' in this period, Tang's (2008) intriguing thesis is that the origin of modern geography as it arose in the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter can partly be found in the Naturphilosophie and landscape aesthetics of the early German Romantics. This rich body of thought provided much inspiration for these early geographical luminaries but most pertinent for our theme is that in their search for a "deeper, pre-reflexive unity" the Romantics "contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to the making of the modern geographical imagination that was predicated on the fundamental unity of man and nature." (Tang, 2008, pp.12) Although theories of the close interrelationship between man and the earth can of course be found much earlier than the nineteenth century, it is arguably only in this period that such theories moved substantially beyond a rigidly deterministic stance represented in a somewhat encyclopaedic fashion. With the emergence of geographical science, this interrelationship was now seen as altogether broader and more complex. Indeed, for the most optimistic it suddenly appeared possible to