PD Smith

The Tragic Sense of Life

23 July 2008 | Darwin, Haeckel, Reviewing, RJ Richards, TLS | 2 comments

The Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment has just pub­lished my review of The Trag­ic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeck­el and the Strug­gle over Evo­lu­tion­ary Thought, by Robert J. Richards. It is an immense­ly impres­sive work of biog­ra­phy and intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry, and a fit­ting tes­ta­ment to a com­plex and con­tra­dic­to­ry char­ac­ter, a man Richards describes as a “poly­mor­phic sci­en­tist-artist-adven­tur­er”.

Tragic sense of lifeIn his own day, Haeck­el was a huge­ly con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure and a hate-fig­ure for many Chris­tians because of his relent­less har­ry­ing of their beliefs. His­to­ri­ans have sav­aged Haeck­el’s rep­u­ta­tion and Richards accepts that he was “a man of con­tra­dic­tions”, a dri­ven char­ac­ter and a divi­sive fig­ure.

But Richards suc­ceeds bril­liant­ly in re-estab­lish­ing Haeck­el as a sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tist and a major play­er in the his­to­ry of evo­lu­tion­ary thought. Richards is par­tic­u­lar­ly good at trac­ing the ori­gins of Haeckel’s “Roman­tic evo­lu­tion­ism”. As the author of an ear­li­er and equal­ly impres­sive study of how Roman­ti­cism shaped bio­log­i­cal thought in the first half of nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, The Roman­tic Con­cep­tion of Life (2002), Richards is ide­al­ly qual­i­fied for this task.

Before World War I, more peo­ple learned about evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry from Haeck­el than any oth­er source, includ­ing Darwin’s own writ­ings. In The Descent of Man, Dar­win him­self praised one of Haeckel’s books, say­ing “if this work had appeared before my essay had been writ­ten, I should prob­a­bly nev­er have com­plet­ed it.” Richards por­trays Haeck­el as an unjust­ly for­got­ten genius, a fig­ure of “star­tling cre­ativ­i­ty, tire­less indus­try, and deep artis­tic talent”. Richards argues that Haeck­el was Darwin’s “authen­tic intel­lec­tu­al heir”.

You can read my review in this week’s TLS (25 July), or read a longer ver­sion here.

2 comments so far:

  1. Paul Halpern | 27 July 2008

    Very inter­est­ing review about an impor­tant sci­en­tist whose career was almost lost to his­to­ry. Pity about the mis­take with the three iden­ti­cal embryo illus­tra­tions; it is a shame when a sim­ple mis­take under­mines some­one’s basic argu­ments. We see that hap­pen­ing often in pol­i­tics; many in the pub­lic tend to focus on the errors can­di­dates make rather than on their ideas and achieve­ments.

  2. PD Smith | 28 July 2008

    Thanks Paul. Yes, one small mis­take can have big con­se­quences…