Moving Things into Certain Places”
Nature, Culture and Art as Practice in Victorian Writing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12880797 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philipp Erchinger (University of Exeter, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 11 |
| Pages | 786-800 |
| Publication date | 2012-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2012.00923.x |
| OpenAlex | W1930684180 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 33 |
The essay takes the debate over Darwin’s method of reasoning, by analogy, from ‘artificial selection’ to ‘natural selection’ as a sample case to explore some of the epistemological issues that this method raised. It, moreover, explicates the relevance of these issues for the study of Victorian literature. Darwin, I argue, uses the arts of breeding and gardening as a model to study the nature of life, but this broached the question of whether a modelled version of nature can be sufficiently similar to nature ‘as it really is’ to warrant the logical step from the one to the other. Indeed, while many other naturalists maintained that human practices of domestication interfere with the laws of nature in an irregular way, making a difference between the ‘cultivated’ and ‘the wild’ that rules out the possibility of claiming them to be alike, Darwin’s argument is premised on the assumption of a continuity between the natural and the cultural according to which these domains have – in the medium of human practice – always already been crossed. As the essay shows, this assumption, encapsulated in the metaphor of ‘natural selection’, implies an integrative concept of ‘nature’ converging with the one that has been spelled out by J.S. Mill, who was involved in a fierce debate with W. Whewell about these matters. For ‘nature’, in Mill’s sense, does not exclude but include the many ways in which it is realised by human culture or art. Science, as a cultural practice, can therefore never fully grasp or domesticate nature from the outside but only – by “moving things into certain places” (Mill) – draw out its potentialities from the inside. The essay concludes by making a case for an approach to Victorian writing which does not cling to a theoretical distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘science’ but analyses how this distinction is, in practice, constantly drawn afresh
Aesthetics · Analogy · Argument (complex analysis · Biology · Charles darwin · Darwin (ADL · Darwinism · Domestication · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literal and figurative language · Metaphor · Mill · Natural (archaeology · Natural selection · Naturalism · Political science · Relevance (law · Selection (genetic algorithm · Sociology · The arts · Warrant · Computer Science · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · History of Science and Natural History · Law · Philosophy · Artificial Intelligence · Ecology
The Cambridge Companion to the 'Origin of Species'
On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or, The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life /
The Cybernetic Brain
On the Origin of Species
Experiment and the Making of Meaning
Experience and prediction
Human Nature and the Limits of Science
Keywords (Routledge Revivals)
Personal Knowledge
Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century
Darwin's Plots
Individualism, Decadence and Globalization
Darwin’s analogy between artificial and natural selection
Metaphor
Context of discovery and context of justification
Darwin's metaphor. Nature's place in Victorian culture
We Have Never Been Modern
The practice of everyday life
Ways of Worldmaking
The Mangle of Practice
The Perception of the Environment
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,09 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2015 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |