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7/23/2019 Botar. Modernism and Biocentrism. Understanding Our Past in Order to Confront Our Future
1/8
MODERNISM AND BIOCENTRISM:
UNDERSTANDING OUR PAST IN ORDER TO OONFRONT OUR FUTURE
OLIVER A I BOTAR
OLIVER A. I. BOTAR is Associate Professor of Art History at
the University of Manitoba. His special interest in art history
is early twentieth-century Central European M odernism w itli
a focus on Hungary and Germany, plus Biocenfrism and
Modernism in eariy- to mid-century art, architecture, and
photography. He is the author of Technical Detours: The
EarlyMoholy-Nagy Reconsidered
{2006 .
(See in this issue
a review of his
A
Bauhausier in
Canada: Andor
Weininger in
the
50s
(2009) on page 142).
In this article
I
wish to review ways in which the nature-
centric ideologies that arose during the late nineteenth
century as a revival of Nature Romantioism impa cted
upon the thinking and work of modernist artists,
architects, planners, cri t ics, and other oultural
producers.' Because so many of these modernists
were also fascinated by technology, and because
tech nolo gy norm al ly has been seen to be in
oppos ition to a nature-oentric, or bioce ntric, point
of view, this aspeot of Modernism has been largely
lost to view. What has been forgotten is that while
some mode rnists did focus on nature, ^ its forms
and processes, in their work, others found ways to
naturalize technolog y, and strove to help b uild
technologies that harmonized with the environment
and w i th human needs . These s t reams o f
Modernism form a significant part of our oultural
heritage, a heritage that is now crucial to recover if
we wish to confront the challenges and uncertainty
we face. The fact that some on the extreme Right
were natu re-c entr ic in the i r th ink ing must be
historicized and confronted, and cannot be allowed
to taint the historical alliance between Modernism
and B iocentrism.
Global warming, the death of the coral reefs, mass
extinotions of animal and plant species, desertifioation
of enormous tracts of
land,
the destruction of rain
forests and boreal forests around the globe; since
the period of the waning of Modernism over the
past forty or so years, we have beoome increasingly
aware of the advent of an environmental crisis of
gigantic, almost unimaginable, proportions. Given
a lso the b rea th tak ing advances in b io log ica l
science, particularly genetics, over the past few
decades; of hot-button political issues such as the
ethics of stem-oell research; we increasingly are
reminded of the central role played by the science_
of biology in our worldview and of the definition
and control of life. With the requirement, therefore,
to rethink our relationship with what we have, since
the Enlightenm ent, term ed the natura l, I think it
imperative that we gain a better understanding of
the ways in which attitudes towar d nature and
life have shaped our culture, i.e., through the ways
in whioh they helped form both modernity and
Modernism. It is widely assumed that modernist
oulture had little awareness of this looming crisis
or even of natur e as suc h. An d yet a close r
examination of almost any genre of modernist
artistio and cultural production reveals an active
interest in the categor ies of life, of the organ ic,
even of the destruct ion of the envi ronment in
modernity. As a historian it is my responsibility to
address the history of the developing awareness of
these crises. Clearly the histories of environmentalism
and biology are central to this task. However,
cultural history, inoluding its components of art
history, design history, architectural history, the
history of urban planning, etc., also has an important
role to play in this re gard, partioularly within a context
in which there has been such willful ignorance of an
aspect of our oommon cultural inheritance. A denial of
an awareness of our place in nature am ong the
moderns may act as a justification for a continued
disavowal of such conoerns. Or it may result in the
unfair characterization of modernist culture as having
been somehow against nature, and therefore as
having been
oniy
a part of the problem. What we
now know is that many members of the various
modernist cultural movements were early adherents
of the emergent environmental consciousness that
permeated
fin-de-sicle
culture.
The role played in the development of Modernism
by nature-oentric ideologies of the late nineteenth
to mid-twentieth centuries, that is, during the years
after the rise of the soienoe of biology in the
nineteenth century, is an important new area of
research.
Indeed, there has been a serious lack in
cultural history which, by virtually ignoring the fin-
de-sicle
d i sco u rse a ro u n d n a tu re a n d t h e
par t i c ipa t ion o f impor tan t f igu res in i t , has
7/23/2019 Botar. Modernism and Biocentrism. Understanding Our Past in Order to Confront Our Future
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Neo-Vitalism
Anarchisnn \
Biologisnn
The Monistenbund
\
k i
N
Organioism/Holisnn
Lebensphilosophie
)
J)
The
etormbewegung
Neo-Lannarckisnn
The Neue-Naturphiiosophie
THE BIOCENTRIC DISCOURSE INTERSECTION.
insuf f ic ient ly contextua l ized modern is t cu l ture.
When not ignoring the interconnections between
nature-centric ideology and Modernism, historians
were denying i t , emphasizing, instead, i ts
anti -
natural,
so-ca lled meo hanistio aspects.^
It is my contention that it is impossible to fully
comprehend modernist culture without properly
framing the nature-centric
Weltanschauung
of early
twentieth-century Europe. Beoause there was no
category within the field of oultural history that
described this
Weltanschauung,
in my 1998 Ph.D.
dissertation I proposed the use of the German term
Biozentrik, or Biooentrism, for its designation, a
term used principally during the first half of the past
century by the German philosopher Ludwig Klages
and also, in a more scientif ic
vein,
by the once
in f l u e n t i a l b u t n o w a l l -b u t - f o rg o t t e n Au s t ro -
Hungarian biologist and popular scientif ic writer
Raoul Heinrioh France. I defined
Biozentrik
as the
intersection of that bundle of opinions, theories,
ideas,
and practices that privileged biology as an
epistemological souroe as well as the conoept of
o u r i n se p a ra b i l i t y f ro m a n d d e p e n d e n ce o n
nature, and which emphasized flux or
becoming,
rather than stasis or
being,
in nature. It oan most
suooinct ly be character ized as Naturromantik
updated by nineteenth-century biologism. Others
have referred to it in German as
Biophiiosophie
(B io p h i l o so p h y ) . Th e co g n a te En g l i sh t e rm
bioc ent rism has a history of usag e. The 1933
edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
def ines
biocentric as treating life as a central fact, ' while
in his introduction to Hans Prinzhorn's study of the
art o f menta l ly d isabled people,
Bildnerei der
Geisteskranken, James L. Foy writes that Biocentrism
provides an outlook on man through a new kind of
reoognition of man's intimate and inescapable kinship
wi th ,
and dependence upon, the self-regulat ing
animal,
vegetable and inorganic worlds ; ' ' that is,
through a kind of anti-anthropocentrism. Biocentrism
continues to be employed in that sense today, though
it now carries a much stronger oonnotation of radical,
deep
environmental thinking.'^
In defining bioce ntrism , what I did was identify a
series of groupings which, while differing from each
other in certain respects, shared a set of themes,
attitudes, and
topoi
relating to nature, biology, and
epistemology. Whi le d is t inguishable f rom each
o ther , these g roup ings (Mon ism, aspeo ts o f
Anarohism,
Lebensphiiosophie,
Holism/Organioism,
Biologism, The
Reformbewegung,
Neo-Vital ism,
Neo-Lamarckism') held in common a set of tenets
that included a belief in the primacy of life and life
prooesses, of what Bergson termed the
lan vital:
and a belief in biology as the paradigm atio soience of
the age, as well as an anti-anthropocentrio worldview
and an implied or expressed environmental ism.
Indeed,
the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries
was character ized by a rev iva l o f aspects o f
Romantioism, among them an intuitive, idealistic,
holistic, even metaphysical attitude toward the idea
of nature, of the experience of the unity of all life.
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what German philosopher Max Scheler referred to
as Vitalmystik and its kosmovitale Einsfhlung; its
cosmo-vital feeling of unity. Scheler describes the
revival in 1913 as group s of movements that, without
or with ties to the great reactionary movement of
Romant ic ism, wish to renew the
Gestalt
of the
human hea rt. He then provide s an illustrative list:
Fechner, Bergson, Phenomenology, Vitalism, the
c i rc le around Stefan George and the Youth
Movement. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche referred to this
unity of life as All-Leben (the All-Life), while Raoul
France referred to it as
Plasma.
When we see the names Nietzsche, Scheler, Bergson,
George, and terms such as phenomenology, we know
that we are at the very center of modernist discourse,
both philosophical and cultural. As George Rousseau
put itin1992:
ft
is
h ardly accidental
that
modernism... arises
... simultaneously with modern biology.
he
tw o
viewed in tandem ... offer the most substantial
proof for the unity of cultural development and
pose a signif icant challenge to those wh o claim
that large concurrent cultural movements
usually have little
impact
on
each other And it
is
... the vitalism inhere nt in ea rly mo dern biology
that must concern us if we hope to grasp w hy
modernism has emerged at
particular
moment
under specific cultural conditions.
It is not surprising, therefore, that my and others'
research have indicated a pervasive interest on the
par t o f many ear ly - to mid- twent ie th-century
modernist cultural practitioners in this particular set
of ideas, practitioners, and theorists as varied, and
as central to the modernist cultural project, as the
photographers Ansel Adams, Lucia Moholy, Albert
Renger-Patzsch, and Edward Weston; the crit ics
Ern'
Kllai and Herbert Read; the artists Hans Arp,
Constant in Brancui , Alexander Calder, Arthur
Dove, Max Ernst, Pavel Eilonov, Naum Gabo, Raoul
Hausmann, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Hoch, Paul
Klee,
Frant isek Kupka, Katarzyna Kobro, Franz
Marc, Andr Masson, Mikhail Matiushin, Joan Mir,
Lszi Moholy-Nagy, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi,
Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Yves Tanguy,
Vladimir Tat l in, Kurt Schwitters, and Wtadystaw
Strzeminsk i ; the designers, town planners, and
architects Alvar Aalto, Roberto Burie-Marx, Charles
and Ray Eames, Antonio Gaudi, Friedrich Kiessler,
Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero
Saar inen,
Tapio Wirkkala, Rssel Wright, Frank
Lloyd Wright, and Eva Zeisel were, during various
periods of or throughout their careers, biocentric in
their thinking. Here in Canada, the same can be
said for artists as central to our national modern
art ist ic psyche as Paul-mile Borduas, Bertram
Brooker, Emily Carr, Lyonel Lemoine Fitzgerald,
Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley.
The list could be made much longer.
The biocentric attitude rejected anthropocentrism,
decenter ing the human species in favor of the
totalizing eighteenth-century constructs nature and
l i fe . I n p l ace o f Jean-Jacques R ousseau ' s
Enlightenment call for a return to nature, which
implied a dualistic division between the hum an and
the natural, humans rather than as produ cers of
culture, nature's other w ere now seen to be part
of this larger who le of nature . Everything humans
did and produced was now seen as part of nature,
and hence explicable in its terms. Nietzsche called
for a wholesale rethinking of ethics and morality in
the light of this stupendous shift in
Weltanschauung .
As Raoul France put it in the early twenties, [S]een
from the height of our contemplation[,] existence an d
happening, world and processes of the world melt
into one , into the notion of the na tura l.... There is only
one law. We, natural beings, can only repeat the law
of protoplasm and the structure of the world. The
laws of mechanics are exemplified before our eyes
in the objects of nature. '^ Paul Klee phrased it thus
at that t ime : The art is t can not do wi thout his
dialogue with nature, for he is a man, himself of
nature, a piece of nature and within the space of
nature . '^ Max Ernst wrote that Arp 's soft sem i-
organic forms, his amoeba-like suggestions ... teach
us to understand the language spoken by the
universe itself. The English organicist philosoph er
so influential on English Neo-Romanticism, Alfred
North Whi tehead, wrote of the real izat ion that
human beings are merely one species in the throng
of existences. These are animals, the vegetable, the
microbes, the living cells, the inorganic physical
activit ies. '^ Herbert Read articulated this attitude
thus: What we have to find ... is some touchstone
outside the individual peculiarities of human beings,
and the only touchstone which exists is
nature.
And
by nature we mean the whole organic process of life
and movement which goes on in the universe, a
process which includes man, but which is indifferent
to his generic idiosyncrasies. '''
In answer to Hans Hofmann's warning not to paint
his work by heart but rather from nature, Jack son
7/23/2019 Botar. Modernism and Biocentrism. Understanding Our Past in Order to Confront Our Future
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Pollock replied, I
am
nature.... Your theories don't
interest me . '' Elsewhere he said that my conoern
is with the rhythms of nature, the way the ocean
mov es, I work inside out like nature. ' Perhaps
most succinct was Moholy-Nagy, who inoluded the
following heading in his book
The New Vision:
The
biologioal pure and simple taken as the guide. '''
Within the biooentrio disoourse, however, I disoern a
rupture around World War One, and a subsequent
emergence in to the h igh ly oharged po l i t ica l
landsoape of Weimar Germany. From a more
romantically inclined
Neue
Naturphiiosophie,as Raoul
Frano termed turn-of-the-century biooentrism
suffused with what Max Scheler referred to as
kosmovitale Einsfhlungt
praotice and thinking of
Frano, Klages, Jacob von UexkCill, Oswald Spengler,
and others oonstituted an interwar biooentrism that
wa s b o th mo re b io l o g i s t i c a n d f u n c t i o n a l i s t
(as defined by von Uexkll in his
Biologische
Weltanschauung
deolared in 1916 and Frano in his
Objective or Biooentrio Epistemology announoed
in 1920 ) and also more pessimistio, as artioulated by
Klages'
Biozentrik.
It was as a concomitant of intenwar biooentrism that
people in Germany became aware of environmental
degradat ion. As an outgrowth of
fin-de-sicle
Kulturkritikin Germany, Ludwig Klages^' systematioally
oonsidered this danger, and he laid blame with
materialism, industrialism, and technology; in short,
with modernity. At a lecture given for the founding
meeting of the
Freideutsche Jugend
(Free German
Youth) in 1913, Klages thundere d: Horrible are the
effects that 'progress' has had on the aspect of settled
areas.
Torn is the connection between human oreation
and the
earth,
des troyed for centuries, if not for ever, is
the ancient song of the landscape.... The reality behind
the facade of 'utility,' 'eoonomio development' and
'Kultur,'
is the destruction
France, however, was no
Kulturpessimist
(oultural
pessimist) with respect to technology; he was not
against technology per se. For France, the Law of
the World ensures that, in the end, the teohnology
of the organic and the technology of humans, are
i den t i ca l .
Just like non-human teohnology, he
argued,
our teohnology is built up of oombinations
of seven basio technical forms or Grundformen.^''
If human technology is a subset of organic ( natural )
teohnology, then it is not something foreign to or
necessarily destructive of our ioznose(eoosystems).
Just as we stand to prof i t f rom observ ing the
work ings of Bioznose in natur e, we stand to
benefit from our observation of naturally ooourring
technologies. Technologies of all kinds, including
non-human ones, and our abi l i ty to learn from
them, Frano termed
Biotechnik,
a predeoessor of
today's bionios or biotechnology. ^= A number of
important International Construotivist artists and
arohiteots of the interwar period (inoluding Moholy-
Nagy , Hannes Meyer , Mies van der Rohe ,
Friedrich Kiessler, and Lazar El Lissitzy)^*^ were
enamored of Frano's ideas, and incorporated
them into their work and thought.
F ra n o , i n h i s ma n y p o p u la r p u b l i o a t i o n s ,
e mp h a s i ze d t h e imp o r ta n o e o f n a tu ra l a n d
historioal preservation in the
Heimat,
a view that
fed as easily into anarchist notions of oultural and
eoonomic autonomy and harmony as it did into
Walter Darr 's
Vikisch
ideo logy o f
Biut und
Boden.
Bri t ish h is tor ian Anna Bramwel l has
termed the intellectual-polit ical movement toward
ecolog ica l v iews of nature and environmenta l
preservationist ideas underway sinoe about 1880
ecologism. ^ ' ' Ecologism is thus a oategory of
intellectual history closely related to though not
identical with biooentrism.
As sugges ted by the use made of France's writings,
th is env i ronmenta l concern somet imes had a
sinister, indeed dange rous, ed ge to it. Robert A. Pois
has identified a Religion of Nature within National
Sooialism, a fusion of neo-Romantio nationalistio
nature mysticism with a mean-spirited biologism,
thus highlighting the Nazis' partioipation in some of
the popular intelleotual trends of their time.^=* As Pois
puts it, Even the oore of the National S ocialist
religion of nature was not something utterly alien to
Western/Central European cultural history in general,
and that of Germany in partioular. In part it was
rooted in a general
malaise
that was a byproduct of
material progress, a malaise which found articulation
in 'the return to nature.' ^ Ind ee d, Bram well has
confirmed this eoologioal side of Nazism as part and
paroel of the general ecologistic tradition. With the
coming to power in Germany in 1933 of National
Sooialisman aspeot of whioh was essentially a
biooentrio variant of Fascism^'the political context
of biocentrism in general shifted greatly.
Because of the inestimable horror brought on by the
Nazis' polioies, the period of National Socialism has
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acted as a kind of black hole of history, distorting any
ideas that passed by i t much as the powerfu l
gravitational field of the black hole does even the
seemingly unalterably vectorial phenomenon of light
itself. This distortion, like that exercised by those
great gravitational sinkholes, can act retroactively as
well as subsequently. The psycho-social trauma of
National Socialist political power was such that it
casts i ts shadow in both d i rect ions a long the
temporal axis, resulting in historical absurdities such
as the retroactive characterization of Nietzsche, Ernst
Haeckel,
and indeed all pre-World War One monists
as Nazis avant-ia-ieftre.^^ Eurthermore, because of the
biologist ic nature-centrism of National Sooial ist
ideology, all biooentrism has since been tainted,
though through an interest ing case of select ive
memory and marking, the post-war environmental
movement has tended to be exempted from this.^^
The p rob lem is no t necessariiy wi th the
environmentalist movement or its goals, nor with
biocentrism in general, but with a crude if emotionally
understandable approach to history of a kind of guilt
by association. While it is important to determine the
role biocentrism played in the historical catastrophe
of World War Two Europe (Bramwell and Pois have
begun to examine this question), one need not throw
the baby out with the bathwater.^
These ant i -mater ia l is t ic , ant i -mechanist ic , ant i-
t e ch n o lo g i ca l , a n d n a tu re -ce n t r i c a sp e c t s o f
b iocentr ism p lace i t in to what Jackson Lears
has te rme d an t imodern ism. ^^ Wh i le Lears 's
ant imod ernism was a North Am erican cultural
trend related to the Arts and Crafts movement, it is
nowperhaps somewhat un fe l i c i tous lybe ing
employed in an expanded sense to refer to the
ambivalent attitude toward modernity. Both anti-
mo dern ism wha t G ianni Vatt imo has, I th ink,
more happily termed the crisis of humanism and
modern i ty were socio-cu l tura l phenomena that
were accelerating in the late nineteenth century.^^
Moreover, as we have seen, the biologistic and
monist ic nature-centrism of Nazism renders the
biocentrism of the art ists and thinkers we are
dealing with here problematic, and some will see
any biocentric infusions into modernist art ist ic
practice as reactionary, even Fascist, moves.
Apar t f rom the ah is to r ica l and anachron is t i c
aspects of such views already pointed to, however,
the cases of Ern Kllai, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah
Hoch,
Moholy-Nagy, Hannes Meyer, Lucia Moholy,
Lazar El Lissitzky, Walter Benjamin, and other
Left ist biocentric intel lectuals who promoted a
rapprochem ent between nature and modernity
precisely during the rise of a biocentric Fascism,
d e mo n s t ra te t h a t t h e i n t e r re la t i o n s b e twe e n
a n t imo d e rn i t y , mo d e rn i t y , b i o ce n t r i sm , a n d
politics are far more complex than one would think,
given prevailing attitudes among historians today.='
Seth Taylor's revaluation of Nietzsche's influence is
exemplary with respect to my critique of prevailing
historical aftitudes;
The Nietzsche renaissance after the Second
Worid Warstripped awa y themyths surrounding
Nietzsche s own phiiosophy but it never
chaiienged the myth surrounding Nietzsche s
roiein erman
history
That myth wassimpiy tha
Nietzsche w as unequivocaiiy the phiiosopher of
the ermanright Thereaiity was quite different
Long before the German right appropriated
Nietzsche s phiiosophy in defence of German
cuiture, the Expressionist ieft used that same
phiiosophy to try and chang e G erman cuiture^
Nie tzsche 's much-ma l igned Wi l l to Power i s ,
according to Joan Stambaugh, to be understood
as the force determining the pattern of becoming in
the world (a pre-Bergsonian ian vitai), and not
as the Nazis understood ita justification for power
pol i t ics; Power for Nietzs che has esse nt ia l ly
nothing to do with polit ioal power or any sort of
power over others. In Nietzsche's radically dynamic
view of the world, whatever does not increase in
power automatically decreases. There is no stasis,
no status
It is crucial for historians to at least attempt to deal
with complexity rather than paper i t over. I t is
important, furthermore, to avoid anachronism s, false
logical assooiations, and premature conclusions.
One must come to expect the unex pected , unholy
al l iances, as i t were. Just as ant imodernity was
espoused by members of both the Left and Right,
the po l i t ica l posi t ion of b iocentr ica l ly minded
individuals was often fluid, moving between these
poles,
sometimes avoiding both.
As we have seen, implicit in biocentric views are the
themes of flux, chang e, m etamorphosis, formation,
and formlessness; an eternal ly burgeoning l i fe-
com plex, of the privi leging of Be com ing over
Being,
of the passage from informe to form and
back again. With roots in the thinking of Heraclitus,
and centra l to the work of ph i losophers f rom
Goethe and Nietzsche ' to Bergson, the centrality
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of formlessness and its temporal corollary, flux, is
implicit in organicist biological views of nature, and its
representation is pivotal to biomorphic Modernism.
Indeed,
many of the art ists and designers who
were biocentric in their thinking worked in the style
of Biomorphio Mo dernism ; that is, in a style that,
with its evocative swells, curves, and arabesques,
echoed the forms of cells, organelles, and fetuses,
and so was in some sense seen by artists to figure
the conceptions of life, origins, and nature. ^ But
when it comes to Biocentrism, there is nonecessary
connection between ideological background and
style.
Thus, other art ists such as Moholy-Nagy,
Lissitzky, and van der Rohe followed Raoul France
in regarding al l technologies, inoluding human
ones,
as part of the larger com plex of nature,
and therefore they felt justified in working in more
technologically or geometrically oriented styles while
espousing nature-centric views.
This stylistic and political heterogeneity is only one
ind icat ion of the fact that b iocentr ic cu l tura l
practitioners formed neither a coherent sohool nor a
movement. They formed, rather, a broad-based trend
that was not usually conscious of itself, but that
reflected a wider intellectual movement within the
cultural fabric of modernity. But this was the case
even with regard to this wider intellectual movement.
Rather than describing a self-conscious movement, I
see the term Biocentrism as a frame, a frame that
enables us to take note of phenomena or aspects of
them that would otherwise go unnotioed. It is a
historical oonstructthen,rather than a term describing
some putative or rediscovered aspect of historical
reality. And like many useful frames, the more one
looks through them, the more one sees. It is time to
recover this history fully, to understand how the artists,
architects, critics, designers, photographers, urban
planners, and so on attempted to forge a culture in
modernity that attempted to take cognizance of our
place in nature, and on occasion even attempted to
actas France would have put itin aocordanoe
with natural law.
NOTES
1. This article is based on the introduction and chap ter 2 of rriy
Ph.D.
dissertation Prolegom ena to the Study of Biomorphic
Modernism: Biocentrism, Lszi Moholy-Nagy's 'New Vision'
and Ern6 kllai's Bioromantik (University of Toronto, 1998).
See: h t tp : / / tspace. l ibrary .u toronto.ca/handle/1807/1657.
Parts of i t were inoorporated into the introduction and
chapter 1 of the forthcoming anthology Biocentrism and
Modernism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate), Oliver A. I. Botar and
Isabel Wnsche, co-editors.
2. I mean nature in the current sense as the other of culture.
3. I do not wish to rehearse here the many publication s on
Modern ism and modern is t ar t theory that ignore the
question of nature and modernist culture. Pick up almost
any standard history and you'll see what I mean.
While there is a comparatively large literature on nature-
centrism and some artists; on Biomorphic Modernism in art,
design, and architecture; on organic ideology in modern
architecture; as wel l as on the wider subject of nature,
organicism, and Modernism; few comprehensive studies on
the conneotions between biocentr ism and modernity or
biooentrism a nd M odernism exist. The basic references in this
regard remain: Lancelot Law Whyte, ed..Aspects of Form: A
Symposium on Form and Nature in Art (1951), preface by
Herbert Read (Bloomington and London: Indiana University
Press, 1961); George S. Rousseau, ed.,Qrganic Form: The
Life of an Idea (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan
Paul,
1972); Frederick Burviiick, ed.. Approaches to Qrganic
Form: P ermutations ;n Science and Culture (Dordrecht: D.
Reidel, 1986); Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds..
TheCrisis of Modernism: Bergson and theVifalist ontroversy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
To date, only two works that attempt to offer a wider view of
the connection between organicism and modernist art ,
arohitecture, and design have been produced: Annette
Geiger, Stefanie Hennecke, and Christ in Kempf, eds.,
Spielarten de s Qrgan ischen in Architektur. Design und
Kunst (Berl in: Dietr ich Reimer Verlag, 2005); Botar and
Wnsche,Biocentrism and Modernism
{r\
1 ).
4. Shorter Qxford English Dictionary,3rd ed., s.v. bioc entr ic
5. Jame s L. Foy, introduc tion to Artistry of the Mentally IIIby
Hans P rinzhorn (1922; reprint, Springer-Verlag, 1972), X.
6. For exam ple, Arne Naess (the Norwegian philosophe r of
Deep Ecology ) and the American ecological philosopher
Paul Taylor employ it in their publications. See Paul Taylor,
Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics
(Prinoeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 245ff. and on
Naess, J. J. Clarke, ed., introduction to Voices of the Earth:
An Anthology of Ideas and Arguments (New York: Braziller,
1994), 13.
7. For detailed discussions of these groupings, see chap. 1 in
Botar and Wnsche, Biocentrism and Modernism (n. 1) and
c h a p . 2 in Ol iver Botar, Prole gom ena to the Study of
Biomorphic Modernism (n. 1).
8. Max Soheler, Wesenund Formen der Sympathie(1913, 2nd
ed . 1922; reprint, Bern: Francke, 1973), 82-1 04 . On Scheler
see Eleanor
Jain,
Das Prinzip Leben: Lebensphilosophie
und esthetische Erziehung (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang,
1993),
1 2 0 - 1 .
9. Scheler, 104 .
10.
Raoul France, Plasmatik: Die Wissenschaft der Z ukunft
(Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1923).
1 1 . G eorge Rousseau, The Perpetual Crises of Modernism and
the Traditions of Enlightenment Vitalism: With a Note on
Mikhail Bakhtin, in Burwick and D ouglass (n. 3), 20.
12.
Raoul France,PlantsasInventors(New York: Albert and Charles
Boni, 1923), 10,58.
13.
Paul Klee, The Nature of Nature, vol. 2 Notebooks (1923;
reprint, ed. Jrg Spiller, trans. Heinz Norden, Woodstock,
NY: Overlook Press, 1992), 6.
14. Max Ernst, Arp (exh. flyer) (New York: Art of This Century,
1944), unpag.
15.
Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (1938; reprint.
New York: The Free Press, 1968), 112.
16.
H e r b e r t R e a d , Education Through Art (New York :
Panatheon Books, 1945), 16.
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17.
Reported by Robert Motherwell toJonathan Fineberg,15
January 1979, Greenwich,
CT, in
Jonathan Fineberg,
Art
Since 1940: Strategies of Being (Englewood Cl i f fs,NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1995), 481.
18.
Claude Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock: Meaning and
Significance {Hew York: HarperCollins, 1992),135.
19. Lszi Moholy-Nagy, Th e
New
Vision(1929 ; 19 32; reprint.
New York; W. W. Norton, 1938),198.
20 .
B o t a r, P r o l e g o m e n a to the S tudy of B i o m o r p h i c
Modernism (n. 1), 226.
21 .See the classic,if late (1953), formulationofsimilar ideasin
M a r t i n H e i d e g g e r ' s i d e a s on th is in The O u e s t i o n
Concern ing Techno logy , in Mar ti n He idegger , Basic
Writings, ed.Dav id Farrell Krell (New Y ork; Harpe rand
Row, 1977), 283-317.
22 .
Ludwig Klages, Mensch
und
Erde (Humanity and Earth),
in Klages, Mensch undErde. Elf Abhandlungen (Stuttgart;
Alfred Krner, 1973), 10,12.
23 . F rance ,
Die
Pflanze
als
Erfinder (Plants
as
inventors)
(Stuttgart; Kosmos, 1920),72.
24. Ibid.
25 . SeeR. R.Roth, The FoundationofBionics, Perspectivesin
BiologyandMedicine 26, No.2(Winter 1983); 22 9-4 2and
Robert Bud, The Uses
of
Life:
A
History
of
Biotechnology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60-3.
26 .
SeeBotar , Pro lego mena to theStudy of B iomorph ic
Modernism (n. 1), chap.4.
27.
OnDarr, see Anna Bramweli, Blood andSoil:Walter Darr
and Hitler's 'GreenParty'(Bourne End, UK: Bucks, 1985).
28.
Anna Bramwel i , Ecology in the 20th Century: A History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 1 3- 4.
29. Robert
A.
Pois, National Socialism
and the
Religion
of
Nature {London:Croom Helm, 1985), 10-1,
39.
30. Ibid.,
170.
31 .
Ibid.
32 .
For an expressionofthis typeofview,seeDaniel Gasm an,
HaeckeTs Monism and theBirthof Fascist Ideology (New
York: Peter Lang, 1998).
33 . B r a m w e l i
and
Po is have be gun
to
p o i n t
out the
oommonalities between Nazi nature ideology andthatof
the environmental movement, commonal i t ies they both
f ind disquiet ing.
34 .
For a historical analysis of theroleof biocentr ism within
Nazi ideology, see Pois (n. 29), e.g.,
133.
35 . Jackson Lears,
No
Place
of
Grace: Antimodernism
and
the
Transformation of American Cuiture, 1880-1920 (New York:
Pantheon, 1981).
36 . G iann i Va t t imo ,
The End of
Mod ernity: Nihilism
and
Hermeneutics
In
Postmodern Culture (Balt imore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1988), 35-6.
37 .
On the
Biocentr ism
of
these
and
other artists,
see, e.g
Botar, Prolegomena
to
the Study
of
Biomorphic Modernism
(n .
1),
chap.
4;
Botar, Technical Detours: The Eariy Mohoiy-
Nagy Reconsidered (New York:TheGradu ate Center, C ity
Universityof NewYork, 2006);andBotar, TheRootsof
Lszi Moholy-Nagy's Biocentric Constructivism, inEduardo
Kao, ed..Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond (Cambridge,MA
MIT Press, 2007), 315-44.OnKllai see, e.g.. Botar, Ern
Kllai,
Bioromanticismand theHidden FaceofNature, THE
STRUCTURIST
3I A (1984-1985): 77-80. Research has show
just how complex the picture really is: see Hartmut Nowacki,
Zwischen Lebensphilosphie und
Stalinismus.
Philosophische
Anstze in der Kommun istischen Partei Deutschlands
(1918-1933) {Munich: Profil, 1983); Jeffrey Herf,Re actionary
Modernism: Technology, Culture,
and
Politics
in
Weimar and
the Third Reich (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press,
1983) ; Andrew Hewi t t , Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics,
Politics,
and the
Avant-Garde (Stanford,
CA;
Stanford
University Press, 1993); KennethE.Silver, EspritdeCorps:
TheArt of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World W a
1914-1925 (Pmceton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1989);
Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde F ascism: The MobilizationofMyth,
Ar tandCulturein France, 1909-1939 (Durham,NC:Duke
University Press, 2007 ).
38 . Seth David Taylor, Lett-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics
of
German Expressionism, 1910-1920 (New York: Walter
de
Gruyter, 1990), 230.
39 . Joan S tambaugh ,
The
Other Nietzsche (A lbany: State
UniversityofNew York Press, 1994), 12 7-8 .
40 .
Onthis idea asexpresse d through art, seeA lexander
Dorner, The DesignerasEnergy in theSelf-Changing Life
Process in hisThe Way Beyond
Art :
The Workof Herbert
Bayer {HewYork: Wittenborn Schultz, 1947), 32ff.
41 . See Stambaugh, 22-3,97.
42 .
There are a number of p u b l i c a t io n s on th i s . See, fo
e x a m p l e , I s a b e l W n s c h e , L e b e n d i g e F o rm e nund
bewegte Linien: Organische Abstrakt ion in derKunstder
Klass ischen Moderne (L iv ing forms andmoving l ines:
organic abstract ions in the art of classical modernity),in
Floating Forms: Abstract Art No w(exh. cat.) (Ludwigshafen:
Kerber Verlag, 2006), 10 -22 .
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