090058 UE Concepts of "Nature" in Nineteenth-century Philosophy and Literature (2017S)

This course focuses on the idea of “nature” in 19th century philosophy and literature. Our topic will be placed in the context of current debates on “materialism,” for which German idealism offers an indispensable genealogy. As a philosophical term linked especially with the era of the Enlightenment, materialism usually deploys reductive and mechanistic causal explanations of spiritual phenomena on the basis of matter alone. However, nineteenth century concepts of nature challenge this understanding, suggest closer links between nature and spirit, and imply the irreducibility of the human subject to the natural substratum out of which it emerges. We will explore this problematic with an emphasis on the Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel, which also necessitates a consideration of the interactions between philosophy and the contemporary life sciences. These debates will offer the discursive background for our reading of Modern Greek literature as it emerges at the beginning of the 19th century both in the Heptanese and in mainland Greece. A focus on nature and the natural will allow a new appreciation of Romantic “organicist” thinking, of the “correspondences” between the terrestrial and the spiritual realm, and of symbolic and allegorical language in poetry. At the end of the course we will turn our attention to a different chapter in 19th century conceptions of nature, the natural, and the biological in the aftermath of Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking theories, and we will consider their influence and transformation in literature with an emphasis on the work of Emmanouil Roidis.