The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [130]
In Hegel’s thinking, the ‘whole’was represented by the state. Its purest form was the Prussian monarchy, which was absolute. Hegel said: ‘The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realisation of absolute truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom - that freedom which had its own absolute form itself as its purpose.’It was the duty of the individual to maintain the independence and sovereignty of his own state, if need be by means of war. Nations related to each other in a state of nature. Their relations were not, therefore, to be judged legally or morally. Their rights were what they individually willed, and the interest of the state was each state’s highest law.
Haeckel believed in this ‘best of all possible states’philosophy, and when, in 1860, Darwin was published in German, Haeckel found scientific support for his views. He saw in Origin a way to bring together the idealism of Hegel with the German Romantic movement’s search for cosmic principles which would unite man and nature.
Romanticism had been popular in Germany since the beginning of the nineteenth century. For the Romantics, nature was in a constant state of ‘becoming’, developing all its forms in the Great Chain of Being. The Romantic view was that all aspects of nature were relevant to the development of society and expressed themselves in religion, art and mythology, as well as in the social structure. Through examination of this Kultur would come an understanding of the entire cosmos.
Darwin provided a way of making this possible because he united the natural and the social worlds. Man was part of nature. Moreover, recent discoveries by researchers such as Jan Purkinje and Theodor Schwann, who had been working on cellular growth, seemed to show that all creatures shared the same basic type of cell.
In 1862 Haeckel began lecturing on Darwin all over Germany. According to Haeckel, Darwin’s theory represented no less than a new cosmic philosophy. In showing how, through evolution, man had developed from the animal, Darwin proved that inevitable change was the principal mechanism at work in the historical process and that the overthrow of ‘tyrants’who stood in the way of change was justified. Haeckel had been in Italy in 1859, just before Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi had expelled the occupying Austrians and almost united the country.
The Lone wanderer communes with the elemental forces of nature. Haeckel’s cosmic philosophy appealed to the irrational and was to endow Nazism with its mystical fervour.
The young Haeckel (left), on a collecting expedition in the Canary Islands, 1867.
In 1860, at an athletics meeting in Coburg, he had also seen a vision of a ‘single people of brothers’, a super-race. Darwin showed him how this might be achieved. Haeckel used Origin as a basis for his new philosophy. He called it ‘monism’, to differentiate it from ‘dualism’, the view that separated man and nature. To the Monist, man was at one with the animals. He could lay no claim to being a separate and special creation. He had no soul, only a superior degree of development. Haeckel wrote: ‘As our mother Earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam of the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature.’
Darwin had shown that human society and biological nature were one. Society must therefore be ruled by the same laws of competition, conflict and aggression. Nations must fight to survive as organisms did, or perish.
If Germany was, as Haeckel thought, a superior culture, it could only remain superior by ensuring the survival of what individuality it possessed. Recent philological theories of the existence of a European proto-language, called Aryan, strengthened the argument for racial purity. The mongrel languages which had developed from Aryan were the evil results of internationalism. Haeckel felt that racial differences were fundamental, there being greater differences between Germans and Hottentots than between sheep and goats. Mankind