TY - JOUR
AU - Stowell, John
AB - Itmayseemsurprising that Darwin, author of such defining scientific works as the Origin of Species, wrote in detail about aesthetics.1 Indeed, many of Darwin’s most explicit engagements with aesthetic philosophy have gone almost entirely unremarked. Aiming to reformulate previous approaches to his aesthetic thought, this essay will refer to a range of works that have not hitherto been critically examined in this manner. By reading Darwin’s publications in the light of his personal notebooks, I hope to demonstrate an under-appreciated coherence in those public discussions of beauty and aesthetics. Darwin wrote before the modern academisation of science, and, as Gillian Beer notes in Darwin’s Plots, the ‘common language of scientific prose and literary prose [in] this period allowed the rapid movement of ideas and metaphors to take place’.2 Operating in the open fields of Victorian natural history, this transferral of language, metaphor, and idea is at the heart of the stylistic strategy through which Darwin transformed contemporary natural-theological arguments. Before providing a general exposition of my argument it is useful to situate its direction against a series of critical trends in contemporary Darwin studies. A narrowed focus upon pictorial and visual media is characteristic of many recent works concerning Darwin’s engagement with aesthetics and beauty, including book-length studies by Julia Voss and Jonathan Smith.3 A common theme of this ‘visual turn’ is a perceived tension internal to any linguistic exposition of evolutionary thought; in the words of Smith: Darwin found language a slippery commodity. He was trying to deny the existence of a supervising agent in the evolution of species, yet agency is built into the structure of grammatical form. He was trying to refuse human beings a privileged spot in the natural order, yet human language is necessarily anthropomorphic.4 Allegedly, a paradox inheres in the causal representation of a non-teleological process, as discursive presentation strays close to the logocentric scheme of creation it seeks to eschew. For Voss this leads to the necessity of dual representation – between discourse and figure – and in an attempt to escape ‘grammatical’ teleology criticism has increasingly drawn attention to the ‘images’ of evolution rather than the ‘medium of language’ in its expository function.5 The comparative advantage of Beer’s account is an attention to language from literary perspectives, but Darwin’s Plots similarly stresses the ‘problems Darwin faced in precipitating his theory … against the grain of the language available to tell it in’.6 Contrary to these assumptions, I shall argue that questions of style and theoretical cognition can be productively refocused by a more detailed analysis of Darwin’s explicit engagement with aesthetic thought, and that a more coherent relation to beauty is discoverable on both thetic and tropological registers. It is worth sketching the general architecture of my argument, as this attempt to rethink the problem of beauty across the Darwinian corpus entails a degree of dialectical complexity. Darwin’s seemingly non-scientific digression through categories such as ‘beauty’ and ‘wonder’ can be shown as centrally important to his transformation of the nascent biological field.7 The daring of Darwin’s utilisation of beauty is to put what he considers a ‘metaphysical’ judgement to work as a way of rethinking biological materialism.8 Although I begin by exploring Darwin’s later definitions of beauty, I will subsequently frame the second strand of my argument by returning to the early notebooks and how they conceive of aesthetic concepts as operative within a scientific domain. This is informed by engaging with Darwin’s analysis of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art.9 I hope to show that the use of aesthetic concepts within the scientific explanation of beauty is not the symptom of a circular theoretical construction but can instead be demonstrated as a way of understanding the dialectical immanence of scientific discovery in the human domain; a biological process discovering itself as such. On a stylistic register I move on to show how this recursive argument can be seen operating in Darwin’s recuperation of the rhetoric of natural theological design. Through an explicit critique of scientific prose style Darwin demonstrates a truth operating in the tropology of natural theology – in its notions of design and adaptation – that can be literalised through the process of natural selection. By this, aesthetic categories become a privileged vehicle for understanding natural selection as a mode of autopoiesis without teleology.10 Through a recursive understanding of beauty, I hope to demonstrate that previous engagements with Darwin’s aesthetics have been fundamentally incomplete, and my final understanding of these imbricated concerns I term the dialectic of anthropomorphism. Critics who focused upon the perceived impotence of language in Darwin’s account failed to understand a paradoxical movement of aesthetic logic as the dialectical success it represents. This essay, then, will seek to explore Darwin’s use of aesthetics on the horizon of the scientific truth claim. I begin here by exploring Darwin’s late definitions of beauty. Although the notebooks of 1837–40 maintain a constant dialogue with aesthetic concerns, his published works do not provide a concerted effort to demarcate the scope of the aesthetic domain until the fourth edition of The Origin of Species (1866), or, via the theory of sexual selection in The Descent of Man (1871), systematically define it.11 In The Descent of Man, Darwin offers an explicit definition of ‘beauty’ or the ‘aesthetic capacity’ on two occasions.12 His definition is imprecise, but makes several distinct modalities of beauty the fundamental determinants of the aesthetic: ‘I refer here only to the pleasure given by certain colours, forms, and sounds, and which may fairly be called a sense of the beautiful.’13 The basic formulation, the ‘pleasure’ of some form of sensory being-in-the-world, is predicated by a secondary series of psychological faculties determined by education; as with ‘cultivated men such sensations are, however, intimately associated with complex ideas and trains of thought’.14 As I will subsequently discuss in my analysis of the notebooks, this division underlies a common problem in the disentanglement of the biological ground of aesthetics from a process of acculturation. Darwin’s definition is echoed by a second reformulation in which the ‘aesthetic capacity’ is opened across a range of senses and forms throughout the animal kingdom: the senses of man and of the lower animals seem to be so constituted that brilliant colours and certain forms, as well as harmonious and rhythmical sounds, give pleasure and are called beautiful; but why this should be so, we know not.15 Darwin’s ‘definition’ maintains the near-synonymy of aesthetics to beauty but only adumbrates a series of stimuli that ‘seem’ open to sensory enjoyment or ‘pleasure’. He does not present a clearly delimited concept of beauty but an inductively open principle of pleasure. What this definition holds as inaccessible, ‘why this should be so’, is a claim that much of the Descent seeks to ameliorate through the provision of the theoretical frame of sexual selection. Although I return to the Descent at the close of my argument, it is important to note that Darwin’s reticence concerning issues of beauty is more easily understood by reference to the fourth edition of the Origin and the definition and delimitation of beauty provided there.16 Darwin attempts to limit the conceptual ambiguity of beauty within a particular polemical dispute with natural theological considerations of teleology; ‘with respect to the view that organic beings have been created beautiful for the delight of man, – a view which it has lately been pronounced may safely be accepted as true, and as subversive of my whole theory’.17 Darwin obviates purposive arguments by limiting ascriptions of beauty to a purely subjective sphere: ‘I may first remark that the idea of the beauty of any particular object obviously depends on the mind of man, irrespective of any real quality in the admired object; and that the idea is not an innate and unalterable element in the mind’.18 The rhetorical necessity of Darwin’s argument is best understood through the context of natural theology and arguments of design. Within such an intellectual dispositif beauty broaches both transcendental and material domains, knotting theology to the biological world under the broad architectonic scheme of creation. When authors in the tradition of natural theology understood beauty as an objective property of creation, they sanctioned a logic through which the subjective consideration of aesthetic judgement could be directly subsumed into a divine order of aesthetic facticity. The pervasive tradition of natural history that Darwin challenged is exemplified by Paley’s Natural Theology, an argument grounded by the perceived ‘order and beauty of the universe’.19 The overwhelming majority of Darwin’s contemporaries maintained that natural beauty stood as a concrete evidence of divine teleology. Darwin himself, in the Recollections (1876), admits to both the influence of Paley in his youth and its uneasy constellation with beauty: The old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue, for instance, the beautiful hinge of the bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man.20 However, if the question of the ‘beautiful hinge’ is reduced to a human order of taste, it remains inadmissible for Darwin to open the aesthetic domain to animal psychology. A similar problem, the ‘Doctrine of Utility’ had troubled Darwin since the first edition of Origin (1859), but it is only in the text of 1866 that he feels compelled to stress sexually selected characteristics by explicitly denying the ‘absolutely fatal’ notion that ‘every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its possessor’ or ‘beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety’.21 Rather than reducing ascriptions of beauty to a purely subjective judgement, Darwin develops a second law for biological structures that can be ‘called useful only in rather a forced sense … [as] many structures now have no direct relation to the habits of life of each creature’.22 Caught between the scientific demand of causative explanation and the attempts of natural theology to interpret the perfection of the world – in the words of Argyll, a teleological ‘machinery by which a great purpose has been accomplished in Nature’ – Darwin’s struggle is to recuperate the scientific potential of ‘beauty’ as both means and object of explanation.23 As I will show, through the explanation of sexual selection Darwin attempts to develop a psychological framework in which the capacity to feel beauty is ascribed to a universal aesthetic faculty broadly possessed by animals.24 This schema mediates between the objectivity of taste as a psychological possession and the partially relativised subjectivity of individual tastes and determinate aesthetic judgements. By stressing and reconceptualising an epiphenomenal understanding of beauty, Darwin reintroduces a loosely normative paradigm of taste through a second selective process operating at a distinct level of biological structure. Because the aesthetic domain is transcendentally purposeless, it can be circumscribed by the broader logic of biological law: the law of sexual selection. To explore the intellectual context and genesis that will illuminate the seemingly paradoxical demands of Darwin’s later aesthetic, I now turn to the earliest period of Darwin’s evolutionary thought via an analysis of his personal notebooks. Written in the aftermath of his return to England on HMS Beagle in October 1836, these documents highlight the co-development of his aesthetics alongside his evolutionary hypothesis – long before either was made public. The full breadth of Darwin’s reading and interest in what he terms the ‘metaphysical’ concern of aesthetics is not discussed in his published scientific corpus, and, as I have mentioned, its influence upon his wider writing has not been made explicit in previous studies.25 Following the first expression of evolution by natural selection in the Notebook B (1837), Darwin explored the wider ramifications of his theory by situating evolutionary thought within the history of philosophical discourse.26 These notebooks are crucially important, but surprisingly under-studied, as they represent the space in which Darwin trialled the aesthetic co-ordinates that subsequently recurred throughout his publications. The notes, however, are dense and fragmentary. In order to provide discursive coherence to the portions of the notebooks concerning aesthetics, my argument will move forward in a more reconstructive and expository mode. This is the first time this task has been attempted. The three notebooks I will refer to – M, N, and the so-called ‘Old Notes’ – consist of the speculative sketches Darwin made on the ‘Metaphysical’ implications of his selective hypothesis.27 Alongside discussions on anthropology, theology, and ethics, he explores the possible impact of natural selection on aesthetics. The richness of these documents resides in the fact that they were not meant to be read at all. Freed from the constraints of conventional rigour or the stylistic demands of publication, Darwin was able to toy with complex and sometimes contradictory ideas that would have been incendiary in the bourgeois public sphere. In order to frame Darwin’s concept of beauty in the notebooks it is important to show how he understands aesthetics as a subset of metaphysics, and correspondingly, how he attempts to transform this entire domain by a materialistic reduction of metaphysics via the theory of natural selection. A sense of his loose and distinctly operational definition of metaphysics as a function of psychology is offered, alongside the recognition of a problematic dimension inherent to recursive thought: To study Metaphysic, as they have always been studied appears to me to be like puzzling at Astronomy without Mechanics. – Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself. – the mind is function of body. – we must bring some stable foundation to argue from.28 A materialist psychology, in which the ‘mind’ is made a ‘function of body’, is figured as analogous to the Newtonian advance by which ‘Mechanics’ revolutionises the field of ‘Astronomy’. Darwin’s mistrust of the previous co-ordinates of metaphysical thought, grounded by the ‘citadel’ of transcendental psychology, is combined with a renewed framework for empirical study, the possibility of a ‘stable foundation’. The metaphysical domain is mapped onto the co-ordinates of psychology and eclipsed by them, as Darwin’s attempt at a unifying explanation of mind is galvanised by a unifying theory of biology. That natural selection may provide the foundation for an assault on a priori idealisms (including theological thought), is figured via a private joke that subverts the basis of western philosophy in the representative figure of Plato: ‘Erasmus says in Phaedo that our “necessary ideas” arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience. – read monkeys for preexistence’.29 The framework of a priori knowledge is transformed by a theory of inheritance that shifts the transcendental element of ‘necessary ideas’ towards the gaze of the scientist who might study primates instead. The shattering of a metaphysical concept that sees innate knowledge as evidence of a ‘soul’ is achieved by the demotion of humans from a transcendental position to biological commonality with the animal. Darwin’s iconoclastic leap does not eliminate the problem of metaphysics so much as provide a playful reconfiguration of its history and premises: ‘Origin of man now proved. – Metaphysic must flourish. – He who understands baboon will would [sic] do more towards metaphysics than Locke.’30 The replacement of Locke by a baboon underlines the radical nature of transmutational thought for Darwin, as prior philosophy is rendered obsolete by a natural history of the ‘habitual action of thought-secreting organs’.31 Through a glandular figuration of mind Darwin opens thought to the same register of explanation as any other product of the body, and eliminates the logic of mind/body dualism by showing the immanent but epiphenomenal character of metaphysics qua ‘secretion’. The material and physiological unity of animal senses is used to deduce the common unity of animal psychology: ‘It would indeed be wonderful, if mind of animal was not closely allied to that of men: when the five senses were the same.’32 Through the permeability of the senses, empirical data becomes the idea, and the idea is ontologically grounded by materialism through the combination of the percept with the common evolutionary explanation of organs of sensation. Having given an outline of Darwin’s psychological materialism, I will now focus on how Darwin’s early synthesis of natural history and aesthetics is structured through an explicit engagement with eighteenth-century art theory. Looking back at the key passages of his life and work in the Recollections, Darwin refers to a surprising figure: Sir Joshua Reynolds.33 In the immediate aftermath of the Beagle’s return, Darwin mentions, he ‘read with much interest’ Reynolds’s fifteen Discourses on Art, making numerous notes on Reynolds’s text.34 Almost no academic attention has been given to Darwin’s reading of Reynolds’s aesthetics, and this is surprising considering that this reference in the Recollections is Darwin’s most explicit endorsement of an art theorist.35 Darwin was aware of the difficult and sometimes contradictory interplay of aesthetics with natural science, but apropos the Discourses made the claim that ‘Sir J. Reynolds explanation’ was a way to eliminate such a Gordian tangle: ‘Beauty is instinctive feeling, & thus cuts the Knot.’36 What does Darwin mean by this knot, and how would Reynolds’s thought be capable of untying it? For any understanding of the relationship between Reynolds’s aesthetic and Darwin’s psychological ‘metaphysics’, it is useful to immediately foreground two divergent but interrelated functions, one cognitive, the other affective. Regarding Reynolds’s ‘X discourse’, Darwin notes that the attraction of fragmented classical statuary shows ‘the perfection of this science of abstract form’ and is ‘the source of … the highest enjoyment in mutilated statues’.37 In this passage the mind works through an imaginative supplement that reconstructs the wider form of an incomplete stimulus through a ‘science of abstract form’. The fragmented empirical series represented by ‘mutilated statues’ is brought within the register of a synthesising ‘enjoyment’, such that Reynolds’s pleasure in art can take on an epistemological function in Darwin’s psychology: beauty takes on a functional role in the intellectual account of mental processes. Reynolds himself rarely mentions pleasure as a determinant of art during the Discourses, and, indeed, maintains a neoclassical idealism in which a ‘beauty or truth … is formed on the uniform eternal and immutable laws of nature’.38 There is an apparent divergence between Darwin and Reynolds, as the former grounds aesthetics through a hedonistic psychology. Darwin details possible forms of phenomenological pleasure, beginning with the play of a ‘harmony of colours’, which have an ‘absolute beauty’, or ‘the splendour of light, especially when coloured’.39 Colour bears an ‘absolute beauty’, and ‘music’ is brought within an analogous field of aesthesis through the commonality of pleasure.40 Here, in opposition to the intellectual synthesis described by Reynolds, instinctive pleasure is the criterion of the aesthetic beyond any intellective supplement of reason or faculty of imagination. Although initially Darwin’s reading of Reynolds appears to maintain a critical distance from the Discourses, Darwin introduces a more amenable ‘pleasure of imagination’ linked to ‘recall’, memory, and cultural forms.41 Earlier excluded by ‘absolute pleasure’, the ‘former thoughts’ of ‘experienced people’ give rise to a ‘pleasure’ of ‘imagining’, a learned intellectual category in which Darwin places the determination of ‘poetry’.42 The educability of taste is reintroduced in Notebook N as Darwin continues his reflection upon the culturally conditioned aspects of ‘acquired taste’.43 This, however, fails to tally with the ‘instinctively beautiful’ as previously described. For example, an ‘Old man at Cambridge observed the ignorant, merely looked at picture[s] as works of imitation’ such that ‘pleasure in the beautiful (distinct from sexual beauty) is acquired taste’.44 The pleasures of the arts are distinct from ‘sexual beauty’, although music is ‘extremely primitive’ and akin to the ‘tastes of mouth & smell’.45 The dual register of pleasure corresponds to a splitting of aesthetics between the ‘primitive’ psychological aspects of ‘sexual beauty’, ‘music’, and ‘taste and smell’ and a cultural achievement capable of understanding the products of art as more than mimetic procedures.46 Besides this initial division a further split develops: are these primitive traits hereditary, or are they a function of habit? This division not only replicates that of Darwin’s psychology, but is one that occupies Reynolds in ‘Discourse VII’. For Reynolds, an analogous split occurs between an ‘immutable verity’ and ‘apparent or secondary truths proceeding from local and temporary prejudices, fancies, fashions, or accidental connection of ideas’.47 Reynolds denigrates ‘secondary truths’ in favour of the knowledge of an ‘immutable verity’ achieved by study. The denigration of ‘apparent truths’ is linked to a pedagogical frame in which taste is coached through the Platonising conceit of eternal truths. Interestingly, however, for Reynolds this process is an inversion of the genealogical priority of ‘fancies’ or ‘fashions’ insofar as, psychologically, they ‘have still their foundation, however slender, in the original fabric of our minds’.48 Darwin inverts Reynolds’s hint at a facultative psychology of beauty by stressing the biological ground of the aesthetic (against the idealism of Reynolds’s didactic neoclassicism) while maintaining the methodological aspects of Reynolds’s aesthetic phenomenology. Although beset by a lack of grammatical synthesis, in Notebook N Darwin initially appears to suspend the logical resolution of a latent contradiction between habit and inheritance: ‘Is our idea of beauty, that which we have been most generally accustomed to: – analogous case to my idea of conscience. – deduction from this would be that a mountaineer takes born out of country yet would love mountains.’49 The ‘generally accustomed’ beauty that takes on the aspect of inheritance is transformed through the Lamarckian portion of Darwin’s psychology that maintains the contradiction of ‘absolute pleasure’ against the ‘accustomed’ while also situating the resolution of such an aporia within the register of evolutionary thought.50 The cultural evolution of habituated taste and artistic achievement is opened to biological process by becoming psychically heritable: ‘The existence of taste in human mind, is to me clear evidence, of the general ideas of our ancestors being impressed on us.’51 Through Darwin’s theoretical model of a psychological genealogy of taste, the basic pleasures of aesthesis have ‘not been acquired by education’ but are opened to accumulated cultural mobility.52 A continuing ambiguity exists as to the objects that elicit that pleasure, insofar as when ‘forms change, so must [the] idea of beauty’.53 One possible higher pleasure is the scientific gaze mediated through the forms of scientific aesthesis, and Darwin carefully considers this in Notebook M. For example, the division of the scientific process generates a series of specialised aesthetic states: ‘I a geologist have illdefined [sic] notion of land covered with ocean, former animals, slow force cracking surface &c truly poetical. (V. Wordsworth about science being sufficiently habitual to become poetical).’54 As Darwin links the ‘poetry’ of geology to pleasure by reference to Wordsworth, a whole succession of further pleasures of observation is opened: the botanist might so view plants & trees. – I am sure I remember my pleasure in Kensington Gardens has often been greatly excited by looking at trees at great compound animals united by wonderful & mysterious manner. – There is much imagination in every view, if one were admiring one in India. & a tiger stalked across the plains, how ones feelings would be excited, & how the scenery would rise.55 The plurality of scientific methods entails a plurality of aesthetic pleasures. This ‘wonderful & mysterious manner’ of pleasure and ‘imagination in every view’ elicits an important excitation of the mind in Darwin’s psychology, and explains his understanding of how a scientific philosophy of mind might account for its own existence in the terms of its own theory. Darwin’s understanding of Comte is crucial here, as the aesthetic supplement to reason can be analysed in terms of Comte’s anthropological stages of knowledge.56 In an (imagined) epoch before the framework of laws supporting positivist accounts of inductive sciences – ‘before having analogy to guide one to conclusion that any one fact was connected with law’ – aesthetics represents a critical stage of material knowledge or savoir faire: ‘All Science is reason acting systematizing on principles, which even animals practically know art precedes science – art is experience & observation.’57 This pre-scientific empirical phenomenology is a state of knowledge which even ‘animals practically know’. ‘Experience & observation’ are the necessary components of ars at the basis of every science, and aesthetics, as pleasure or displeasure discovered through primary cognitive play, operates at the threshold between sensation and ‘higher’ thought. An engagement with aesthetic discourse allows Darwin to understand the aesthetic as a propaedeutic to science. Functionally, beauty and pleasure operate as modes of defamiliarisation, enabling the scientist to face facts anew outside ‘ordinary lines of association’: ‘When learning facts for induction, one is obliged carefully to separate its memory from all ordinary lines of association. – is totally distinct from learning it by heart.’58 Through the aesthetic phenomenology of induction, Darwin hints at an ‘embryology’ or ‘ontogenesis’ of method, a vision that later shares its logical form with Haeckel’s famous biological metaphor of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: the aesthetic genesis of each scientific thought is glimpsed as the anthropological genealogy of scientific history.59 I now return to Darwin’s published works to show how his later conceptions of beauty can be illuminated by the preceding analysis of his notebooks. Charting the use and rhetorical development of his aesthetics between the time of the notebooks and the publication of the Origin, I would like to contrast Darwin’s Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia with a contemporary text on a similar subject: The Aquarium, by P. H. Gosse.60 For Gosse, the ‘study of natural science … brings us, in some sense, into the presence of God’.61 Explicitly, the aesthetics of wonder are drawn into the theological domain of design: the wondrous contrivance in planning, and skill in executing his works, is seen in the multitudinous varieties of form in the creatures, in the correspondence of part with part, in the perfect adaptation of organs to their uses, in the wonderful and unerring instincts of animals, in their relations to the places which they inhabit, and in the general bearing of the details of creation on the order.62 The experience of wonder shocks the observer into a form of religious veneration for ‘contrivance’, ‘adaptation’, the ‘multitudinous variety of form’, and an intimate network of ‘order’. This wonderful order is replicated at every possible level of structure, such that even the minutiae of the material world have a homiletic accessibility. Take for example the humble periwinkle and the ‘machinery’ of its tongue:63 It is wonderful to see; – perhaps not more wonderful than any other of God’s great works, never less great than when minutely great; but the action and the instrument, the perfect way in which it works, and the effectiveness with which the vegetation is cleared away before it, all strike the mind as both wonderful and beautiful.64 The ‘minutely great’ facts, figured through the metaphor of design and the instrument, ‘strike the mind’, and draw the immediacy of the gaze towards the totality of the divine structure. This direct and successive relation with transcendent structure subsumes the fact within an immediate a priori framework, and excludes the methodological ambivalence of facticity that eludes an established interpretative frame. Drawing attention to the force of brute facticity against the spontaneous recuperative power of theology, Julia Voss claims that it was Darwin’s ‘insistent focus on the imperfections, deficiencies, and peculiarities of living things’ that armed him with the ‘unusual perspective’ required to catalyse such a profound transformation of natural history.65 Voss asserts that Darwin ‘noticed and recorded phenomena, that his colleagues, who viewed nature as a work of art, failed to notice’.66 Although I broadly agree with Voss, I feel that Darwin’s scientific practice was not a renunciation of art or aesthetic thought per se, but rather an intensification of the cognitive and epistemological power of categories normally disregarded as ‘purely’ aesthetic. I wish to give a determinate example of this by contrasting the preceding analysis of Gosse’s Aquarium with the language of Darwin’s Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia, showing how Darwin inverts the theological tropes of wonder and beauty through a form of scientific détournement. Although writing before the public expression of evolutionary thought, he rhetorically privileges the diverse variety and profusion of barnacles, with the observer struck by a ‘wonderful assemblage of beings’.67 The scientific gaze is caught by ‘beautiful and unique contrivance[s]’ outside a theological context, and across the two volumes of the Monograph Darwin repeatedly mentions the ‘beautifully adapted’ outside any argument of design.68 The ‘beautifully adapted structure’ is no longer maintained relative to the teleological stasis of a single perfect form, but is ‘remarkable’ insofar as it is ‘extremely variable’.69 Furthermore, the ‘beautifully contrived’ is thrown to a similarly ‘surprising’ ‘variability’.70 For Darwin, a cluster of ‘remarkable’ and ‘surprising’ facts are registered as an insistent phenomenological demand, such that the beauty of variability itself becomes insistently striking. Amid these ascriptions of beauty Darwin inserts a series of cryptic references to evolutionary thought, for example the larval stage of the barnacle as homologous with the metamorphosis of an archetypical crustacean: ‘It is really beautiful to see how the homologies of the archetype cirripede, as deduced from the metamorphoses of other cirripedes, are plainly illustrated during the maturity of this degraded creature, and are demonstrated to be identical with those of the archetype Crustacean.’71 In this passage, beauty returns to the register of pleasure, but pleasure obtained by theoretical clarity and the desire to seek it. The common ‘metamorphoses’ of crustacea prompt us to speculate on the ‘archetype’ and draw our attention to possible failures of the argument of Richard Owen’s transcendental anatomy.72 As Darwin stresses the interest of the ‘beautifully constructed and modified carapace’ of Balanus species, this complexity is explicable ‘not, to use Professor Owen’s term, by mere vegetative repetition’ but by their commonality of ‘resemblance to animals universally considered of a higher rank’: beauty is implicated in the search for a common ancestor.73 By the publication of the Origin, Darwin had transformed the theological aesthetics of wonder into a phenomenological tool of scientific method. Empirical wonder is allied to a renewed scientific edifice and opens the mind to a secularised framework of biological explanation: ‘It is a truly wonderful fact – the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity – that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other.’74 A defamiliarisation effect returns, in which the ‘wonderful fact’ punctures the ‘familiarity’ by which that facticity is ‘overlooked’. The aesthetic gaze – its lineage visible all the way from Reynolds – takes its place as an initiating moment of the empirical gaze. In line with this change, Darwin’s prose style follows the patterns first laid down in the Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia, with clusters of repeating tropes becoming central to his handling of beauty in the Origin. ‘Beauty’ or ‘beautiful’ occur twenty-eight times in the first edition of Origin, and ‘beauty’ and ‘adaptation’ are specifically constellated eight times.75 For example, as Darwin discusses variation and selection in nature the phrase is used twice in succession as ‘beautiful co-adaptations … in the woodpecker and the mistletoe … in the humblest parasite … in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze’, to form a catalogue of those ‘beautiful adaptations’ found ‘everywhere and in every part of the organic world.’76 The ‘beautiful adaptation’ is central to the argument of the Origin as attention is devoted to the plenitude of the natural world as an index of its mutability and ‘wonderful’ diversity. These ‘striking and complex co-adaptations’ are linked to other common figures utilised as part of Darwin’s phenomenology of biological wonder.77 Through a cluster of ‘remarkable cases’ that range from a ‘marvellous amount of diversification’ to a ‘remarkably small degree’, both quantitative extremes or horizons of structure are maintained under the same vocabulary of empirical wonder.78 The epistemological necessity of representing the profusion of nature for the human observer or reader, while simultaneously maintaining the ‘prodigious amount of difference’ or ‘extraordinary amount of modification’ (without resorting to anthropomorphic elision), continually tests and trials the use of beauty throughout the Origin.79 Whereas, for many, the ‘exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life’ were straightforward evidence of divine teleology, for Darwin the ‘beautiful co-adaptations’ of the ‘woodpecker and mistletoe’ are open to a fundamental question: ‘how have all those exquisite adaptations … been perfected?’80 Darwin’s utilisation of natural beauty as the adaptive relation to niche provides a new content and form of analysis, but it occasions a whole series of attendant problems. It has become a critical commonplace to note the difficulty that Darwin faced in his use of anthropomorphisms in the formation and articulation of his theory. For example, according to Beer, ‘It is extraordinarily difficult to eradicate the language of intention from accounts of evolutionary development’ and ‘Darwin himself never fully succeeded’.81 Robert Young makes a similar point: ‘Darwin was faced with the seemingly impossible problem of providing directionality without progression.’82 Rather than shying away from these problems I want to explore exactly how a transformed aesthetic takes on a central role in the possible conceptualisation of natural selection in the Origin. In order to broach this, I will examine Darwin’s own explicit consciousness of the advance his aesthetic scheme makes in the use of metaphor as a cognitive device in scientific style. For Darwin, natural selection is bound to metaphor; indeed, its key Malthusian elements are metaphor: ‘I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence, in a large and metaphorical sense.’83 The evidence for natural selection is rendered thinkable by a condensed frame of metaphor: ‘As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants … I use for convenience’ sake the general term of struggle for existence.’84 Through natural selection Darwin was able to conceptualise a diffuse web of relations – an invisible ‘struggle’ within an ecosystem – as a single interrelated process of causation. The cognitive tool of metaphor allows him to nominate the process of natural selection as a determinate law rather than a disparate series of unrelated genealogical processes: ‘It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working.’85 This production, however, is not one with a determinate teleology or one that produces perfection. Indeed, the locality and relativity of adaptive process render idealistic measures of perfection illusory, as ‘Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it has to struggle for existence.’86 This environmental relativity ‘is the degree of perfection attained under nature’, and the ‘struggle for existence’ generates a dynamic, interrelated poiesis, in which a transcendental ‘degree of perfection’ disappears.87 Darwin utilises a scientific metaphor to invert the order of anthropomorphic design it has been suggested it bolsters. Indeed, the use of such metaphor is an intrinsic part of what I term the dialectic of anthropomorphism, insofar as the theory of sexual selection sublates the logic of its metaphorical, all too human, foundation by revealing itself through a figural mode as the function of an empirically and naturally determinable psychological faculty. This is the logical leap undertaken in Darwin’s later thought, which uses the language of design to eliminate the claim of design to biological understanding. In an initial motion the theological attribution of teleological perfection is relativised by the frame of complex ecologies of beauty. The second, dialectical transposition takes place when the language of Darwin’s contemporaries is exposed as veiled metaphor by the ‘metaphorical’ vehicle of natural selection: Naturalists however, use such language only in a metaphorical sense: they are far from meaning that during a course of descent, primordial organs of any kind … have actually been modified into skulls or jaws. Yet so strong is the appearance of a modification of this nature having occurred, that naturalists can hardly avoid employing language having this plain signification. On my view these terms may be used literally; and the wonderful fact … is explained.88 In Darwin’s view previous generations of ‘naturalists’ faced a series of facts that were unexplainable within their current theoretical framework. Thinkers were forced into a metaphorical register in which the ‘appearance of a modification’ could only be made partially congruent with their conceptual apparatus. However, on Darwin’s ‘terms’ the ‘wonderful fact’ is brought within a theoretical domain in which clarity and ‘plain signification’ return. Natural selection turns from catachresis to scientific law through a seemingly anthropomorphic vector that utilises but subsequently banishes the human exceptionalism of aesthetic categories. In combination with the psychological insights gained from the notebooks, aesthetic procedures become the paradoxical sign of our animality in search of self-understanding. Through the dialectic of anthropomorphism, beauty operates as the cognitive device required to think the logic of ‘beautiful adaptation’ and a process of natural selection. By this figuration of natural selection Darwin uses the beautiful adaptation as a near-Kantian trope that indexes the purposive without purpose; structures evolve without determinate concept or telos.89 Through the inversion of anthropomorphic schemes, Darwin re-focuses upon beauty and art in terms of natural selective ‘production’: ‘Can we wonder, then, that Nature’s productions should be far “truer” in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship.’90 Reynolds’s link between beauty and truth returns in an inverted form as the ‘ateleological’ design of natural selection produces a biological architecture of truth. The categories of human art are incapable of doing justice to the ‘infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other’ and their ‘infinite diversity in structure’, but remain a necessary detour in resolving their thinkability.91 In order to discover an indigenous aesthetics of adaptive complexity, the ‘infinitely’ overdetermined network of a biological domain is mapped onto the ‘beautiful contrivance’ and ‘beautiful coadaptation’ as a principle of consistency: ‘I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection.’92 Darwin’s aesthetics of selection describes nature as an auto-poetic machine in which beauty is rendered as the ‘infinite’ becoming-beautiful of the ‘complexity’ of adaptive relations; the process of beauty is never exhausted, and the finality of telos never attained. The famous closing passage of the Origin voices this quasi-Lucretian vision of the world in which beauty and a scientific process are explicitly linked: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.93 Once again, on a cognitive level, the unity of the ‘fixed law’ helps conceptualise the infinite and transitive production (‘being … evolved’) of ‘endless forms’ as part of a single immanent process. As I mentioned, this ‘wonderful’ consciousness of beauty has a fundamental role in suturing the aporia of non-intentional design implied by evolutionary thought. By tying the ‘beautiful adaptation’ to a process of design without teleology, the psychological schema of pleasure from the early notebooks can be brought to the fore. Modulated by the aesthetics of wonder through a pre-empirical phenomenology of the fact, beauty becomes a formative moment in the progress of scientific methodologies; the beauty of the natural world is a pleasurable supplement that drives attention and desire on the part of the scientist while facilitating a structuring of experience by the synthesising form of aesthetic cognition. Although the objects and methods of biological aesthetics are transformed by the Origin, Darwin still grounds the aesthetic faculty in an almost exclusively human domain of pleasure. The discussion of sexual selection ordering The Descent of Man allows him to broaden the aesthetic faculty, ascribing identical psychological properties to a wide number of organisms in the terminal movement of the dialectic of anthropomorphism. For example, in the ‘Sense of Beauty’, the ‘female bird admires the beauty of her male partner’ and in doing so ‘must receive some kind of pleasure’.94 Through an inversion of the ‘Doctrine of Utility’, if led to ‘deny the female Argus pheasant can appreciate such refined beauty’, the scientist is subsequently ‘compelled to admit that the extraordinary attitudes assumed by the male during the act of courtship, by which the wonderful beauty of his plumage is fully displayed, are purposeless’.95 For Darwin this is paradoxically inadmissible, ‘a conclusion which I for one will never admit’.96 Despite its apparently epiphenomenal aspect, animal aesthetics cannot be reduced to a sign of purely adventitious variation. In order to conceptualise the logic of beauty, Darwin must theorise the internal splitting of natural selection to explain a series of objects that display no utility within its original theoretical framework: ‘ornaments of many kinds, the most brilliant tints, combs and wattles, beautiful plumes, elongated feathers, top-knots, and so forth … must be highly important to them [male animals], for they have been acquired in not a few cases at the cost of increased danger from enemies, and even at some loss of power in fighting with their rivals’.97 Although Darwin glimpses the modern theory of sexual selection as a fitness indicator, what I believe he means to show is that the ‘brilliant’ and ‘beautiful’ ‘ornaments’ of organisms are selected because the psychology of pleasure, once developed by natural selection, operates independently and against the demands of a single criterion of selective utility. Darwin explicitly pressures the facultative ‘possession’ of ‘taste’ displayed by birds, that seem to him ‘On the whole … the most aesthetic of animals, excepting of course man’.98 By holding that birds ‘have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have’, Darwin gestures towards a large-scale aesthetic transference between species, with humans ‘decking their heads with borrowed plumes, and using gems which are hardly more brilliantly coloured and the naked skin and wattles of certain birds’.99 Once more the rhetorical scheme of anthropomorphism inverts the theoretical base it supports, as bowerbirds, with an ‘almost human’ aesthetic sense, construct ‘highly decorated halls of assembly’ that ‘must be regarded as the most wonderful instances of bird-architecture’.100 Darwin figures birds as possessing art and decorative ‘architecture’, and as birds derive ‘pleasure’ from the beautiful, ‘beauty’, as a category of judgement and ‘taste’, operates as a synthetic figure between anthropomorphic and objective categories of animal psychology. Tying this psychological possession back within evolutionary and physiological genealogy, the elements of human exception are disseminated throughout the biological domain in order to return the human to a naturalistic order: Everyone who admits the principle of evolution, and yet feels great difficulty admitting [other organisms] could have acquired the high taste implied by the beauty of the males, and which generally coincides with our own standard, should reflect that the nerve-cells of the brain in the highest as well as in the lowest members of the Vertebrate series, are derived from those of the common progenitor of this great Kingdom.101 A gesture to the simplest materialism, the ‘nerve-cells’ of the brain, is made to ground the most complex theoretical negotiation that traverses ‘this great Kingdom’. Beauty and its analogues are made animal, and the metaphysical domain brought back to earth: ‘Turning now to the social and moral faculties. In order that primeval men, or the ape-like progenitors of man, should have become social, they must have acquired the same instinctive feelings which impel other animals to live in a body; and they no doubt exhibited the same general disposition.’102 Thirty-three years later, Darwin’s thought still circles around the jottings of the notebooks. That which seems most uniquely human, the ‘social and moral faculties’, are ‘instinctive feelings’; the same instinctive feelings of the ‘metaphysics’ of 1838. Sociality and sympathy ‘impel’ in a way which is bound to the same psychological schema as beauty. Although in many ways Darwin’s thinking about the ‘instinctive feeling’ changed little in those years, in others it became both transformed and transformative. The beauty he set to work through a reading of Reynolds’s Discourses marks the length of his writing and ties together multiple strands of rhetorical, cognitive, and theoretical necessity. Darwin’s thought did not so much eliminate the importance of aesthetic categories as reformulate their centrality, away from the contexts of natural theology and towards a renewed sense of scientific wonder; wonder at the infinite becoming of an interrelated world, alive and immanently conscious to the beauty of itself in the eyes of creatures from humans to butterflies to birds. There is grandeur in this view of life. Footnotes 1 Unless otherwise noted, references to Origin are to the 1st edn.: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Preservation of Life (London 1859). 2 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn. (Cambridge 2009) p. 41. 3 Julia Voss, Darwin’s Pictures, trans. Lori Lantz (New Haven, Conn. 2010); Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge 2009). 4 Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, p. 16. 5 Voss, Darwin’s Pictures, p. 12. 6 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 3. 7 For the classic philosophical account of the central role of non-scientific categories in historical scientific activity, see Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 4th edn. (London 2010). 8 Darwin expressly categorises his speculation as ‘metaphysical’ in two bound notebooks and in an associated collection of notes. In Cambridge University Library (CUL), these are Notebook M, 1838, CUL-DAR125; Notebook N, 1838–9, CUL-DAR126; and the so-called ‘Old & useless notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points’, 1837–40, CUL-DAR91.4–55. Transcriptions of all Darwin’s notebooks can be found in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (Cambridge 1987). 9 Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert Wark (New Haven, Conn. 1997). 10 For a useful philosophical account of material causality as immanent self-organisation (autopoietic system) see Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, rev. edn. (London 2013). 11 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Preservation of Life, 4th edn. (London 1866); Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edn. (London 1874). 12 Descent of Man, pp. 93, 616. 13 Ibid., p. 92. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 584. 16 Darwin includes additions to this effect under the guise of the ‘Utilitarian Doctrine How Far True: Beauty How Acquired’ in Origin Of Species (4th edn.) p. 237. 17 Ibid., p. 238. In 1866–7 the immediate intellectual pressure facing Darwin on the issue of beauty appeared to be the forthcoming publication of The Reign of Law by George Campbell, eighth duke of Argyll (London 1867). 18 Origin of Species (4th edn.) p. 239. 19 William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, 12th edn. (London 1809) p. 40. 20 A problem of censorship exists in the posthumous publication of Darwin’s religious views, as although Darwin includes this passage in the autograph manuscript of the ‘Recollections’ of 1876, his son Francis Darwin removed it from its proper place during the publication of the ‘Autobiography’ or ‘Recollections of the Development of My Mind and Character’ in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin, 3 vols. (London 1887) pp. 26–108. Almost every expression of Charles Darwin’s critical engagement with theology is annexed to a later chapter of the first volume. This fragment of text is therefore found instead at page 307 of the first volume. 21 For Darwin’s first engagement with the ‘Doctrine of Utility’ see Origin of Species (1st edn.) p. 199. See also Origin of Species (4th edn.) p. 237. 22 Origin of Species (1st edn.) p. 199. 23 Argyll, Reign of Law, p. 131. 24 In Part II of The Descent of Man (pp. 207–556) Darwin largely structures his discussion through the successive description of sexually selected variations across the animal kingdom. Concomitantly, he deduces and ascribes some – at least primitive – sense of beauty to, among others, even annelids, crustaceans, molluscs, and insects. Apropos complex organisms, he is firmly convinced that vertebrates possess an apprehension of beauty to a surprisingly sophisticated extent. 25 Although there was some minor attention in a recent collection: Sabine Flach and Barbara Larson (eds.), Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History (London 2013). However, as Dana Carluccio notes in a recent review of this volume, it was ‘trained more narrowly on visual aesthetics than the title might suggest’: Isis, 107/4 (Dec. 2016) pp. 826–7: 827. 26 Charles Darwin, Notebook B, 1837–8, CUL-DAR121. 27 CUL-DAR125, CUL-DAR126, CUL-DAR91.4–55. 28 CUL-DAR126.5. 29 CUL-DAR125.128. 30 CUL-DAR125.84e. 31 CUL-DAR125.8. 32 CUL-DAR91.8a. 33 Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. F. Darwin, i. 49. 34 Ibid. 35 Although throughout his publications Darwin makes reference to many literary figures and visual artists, this is the only explicit endorsement of a theoretical aesthetic text in his published works. 36 CUL-DAR125.32. 37 CUL-DAR91.10. 38 Reynolds, Discourses, p. 141. 39 CUL-DAR125.36. 40 Ibid. 41 CUL-DAR125.39. 42 Ibid. 43 CUL-DAR126.19. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Reynolds, Discourses, p. 141. 48 Ibid. 49 CUL-DAR126.26. 50 Lamarck developed a theory in which the acquired characteristics of organisms were transmitted to their offspring. Darwin was heavily influenced by Lamarck, but largely rejected the evolutionary mechanism proposed in his major work, Philosophie zoologique. However, Darwin clearly found Lamarckian inheritance an attractive explanation of cultural issues, perhaps in part because of the historical absence of sociological categories. The copy of Philosophie zoologique that Darwin read is held in Cambridge University Library: Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique; ou, Exposition des considérations relatives à l’histoire naturelle des animaux, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Paris 1830). 51 CUL-DAR126.27. 52 CUL-DAR126.28. 53 Ibid. 54 CUL-DAR125.40. For the reference to Wordsworth see Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford 2010) pp. 595–616. 55 CUL-DAR125.41. 56 Darwin writes, in CUL-DAR125.81, that ‘at the Athenaeum Club’, he ‘was very much struck with an intense headache after good days work which came on from reading review of M. Comte Phil’. The exact digest he read appears to be an anonymous review from July 1838: ‘Cours de Philosophie Positive, 2 tom., 8vo. Paris: 1830–1835’, The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, 67 (July 1838) pp. 271–308. 57 CUL-DAR126.12; CUL-DAR126.14. 58 CUL-DAR126.16. 59 Ernst Haeckel, natural historian and embryologist, belonged to the younger generation of life scientists profoundly influenced by Darwin’s thought. Haeckel is known for promulgating the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, holding that the embryological development of individual organisms provides a representation of the evolutionary lineage of their species. 60 Charles Darwin, A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia, with Figures of all the Species, 2 vols.; vol. i: The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes (London 1851), vol. ii: Living Cirripedia, the Balanidæ, (or Sessile Cirripedes); the Verrucidæ (London 1854); Philip H. Gosse, The Aquarium, an Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, 2nd edn. (London 1856). 61 Gosse, The Aquarium, p. 203. 62 Ibid. p. 202. 63 Ibid., p. 28. 64 Ibid. 65 Voss, Darwin’s Pictures, p. 12. 66 Ibid. 67 Darwin, Cirripedia, i. 212. The importance of Darwin’s insistence upon this form of beauty was only made clear retroactively, by the publication of the Origin – the profuse variation present in the natural world is the prerequisite for the operation of selective processes. 68 Cirripedia, i. 97, 179; ii. 152, 73. 69 Ibid., i. 73. 70 Ibid., ii. 306. 71 Ibid., ii. 588. 72 Richard Owen, a major figure of Victorian natural history, used comparative anatomy to develop a theory of archetypical schemes that map the organisation of biological structures. In Owen’s theory of archetypes, the homologies between organisms are viewed as a manifestation of several transcendental anatomical plans ordering their creation and production rather than as evidence of genealogical proximity. For the clearest expression of this theory see Richard Owen, On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London 1848). 73 Darwin, Cirripedia, ii. 20. The genus Balanus comprises several common and ubiquitous sessile barnacles. They lend their name to the major sub-order of the sessile barnacles, the Balanomorpha. 74 Origin of Species, p. 128. 75 Ibid., pp. 60, 61, 109, 197, 224, 392, 469. 76 Ibid., p. 60. 77 Ibid., p. 132. 78 Ibid., p. 151. 79 Ibid., p. 153. 80 Ibid., p. 60. 81 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 19. 82 Robert Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge 1985) p. 85. 83 Origin of Species, p. 62. 84 Ibid., p. 63. 85 Origin of Species (4th edn.) p. 95. 86 Origin of Species (1st edn.) p. 201. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., pp. 438–9. 89 Although Darwin appears to have had some dim knowledge of Kant, this seems to have been entirely mediated by his reading of Coleridge. See CUL-DAR91.33. Beyond this I can find no evidence that Darwin had first-hand knowledge of Kant’s work. In the similar logic of their consideration of beauty, there appears to be a genuine convergence of thought between Kant and Darwin. However, Darwin’s use of this philosophical ‘trope’ differs from Kant’s, insofar as Darwin utilises the logic of beauty as a way of understanding the form of structural processes. Kant, of course, is attempting to guarantee an unmotivated and indifferent movement of pure aesthetic judgement by eliminating the subsumption of forms by a determinate concept. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Nicholas Walker (Oxford 2009). 90 Origin of Species, p. 84. 91 Ibid., p. 127. For a philosophical discussion of the cognitive uses of functional design and artifactuality in biological thought see Tim Lewens, Organisms and Artifacts: Design in Nature and Elsewhere (Cambridge, Mass. 2004). 92 Origin of Species, p. 109. 93 Ibid., p. 490. 94 Descent of Man, p. 92. 95 Ibid., p. 400. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., p. 496. 98 Ibid., p. 359. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., p. 414. 101 Ibid., p. 617. 102 Ibid., p. 129. © The Author, 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - On the Origins of Beauty: Aesthetics and Method in the Works of Charles Darwin
JF - The Cambridge Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/camqtly/bfx022
DA - 2017-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/on-the-origins-of-beauty-aesthetics-and-method-in-the-works-of-charles-c9XDrS3jJX
SP - 364
EP - 385
VL - 46
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
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