Richards presents two major theses here. First, that German Romantic science was not a dead end, but led directly to Darwin's theories of evolution. Second, that the personal sexual behavior of the Romantics was linked to a view of nature itself as sexualized. The present reviewer actually agrees with Richards on these points, yet still found this a disappointing and unbalanced book.
Richards is obsessed with Goethe. This is all very proper and German, and no doubt leads to brownie points in the form of research grants. It is also a woefully unfair and lopsided view. We get all the details about Goethe's mistresses, such deathless poetry as "I have fallen so in love with her/It's if I had drunk her blood" (where is Buffy when you really need her?), the intermaxillary bone, the Urplanze, and so on and on. This maximization comes at the price of minimizing every other contemporary thinker. Herder is dismissed as merely a sidekick of Goethe - indeed, since the bibliography doesn't list the Suphan edition (page 562) one may wonder if Richards even bothered to read the "Ideen" in full. Among the younger Romantics, only Schelling receives anything like a fair discussion. Alexander von Humboldt, who as a scientist and explorer had enormous and lasting influence not only on the German but European and American scientific scene, and whom Darwin himself credited with inspiring him, is given particularly derisive and cursory treatment, and one suspects more than a whiff of homophobia here. Chamisso, who was inferior to Goethe as a poet, but overwhelmingly superior to him as a scientist, doesn't even get so much as a footnote.
There could be a good book written on romantic science and its continuing if unacknowledged influence - but this isn't it.
Robert J. Richards is the only scholar that has offered a huge and conclusive amount of evidence on the Darwin's true anti-mechanistic prespective. His previous little book showing albeit succintely a similar perspective, "The Meaning of Evolution", was injustely ignored. Now Professor Richards offers us a long, vivid and brilliant reconstruction of the german romantic frame we need to undertand adequetely de meaning of Darwin's true evolutionary prespective. Orthodox neo-darwinist an neo-sythetic (mechanistic) views are still jailed into the positivistic received view. Kuhnian trends haven't produced here a significative conceptual turn because their inability to cope with the "internalistic" challenges the natural selection theory actually posses. Richards displays masterfully in the book the socio-cultural dimensions of the problem, but knows also very well how to go far. If we undestand a conceptual problem we can reconstruct their socio-institucional history, the reverse not being true. The unprejudiced conceptual commitments Richards assume on evolutionary theory, particularly on natural selecction's concept, enables him to show us conclusively the strong and commnly ignored bonds that brings together Kant, the Romantic conception of life and Darwin work. Nobody concerned shoul ignore this book and perspective in advance.
