botar. modernism and biocentrism. understanding our past in order to confront our future

7/23/2019 Botar. Modernism and Biocentrism. Understanding Our Past in Order to Confront Our Future

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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


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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


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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


6/8

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.


7/8

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 .


8/8

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