This book offers a bold rethinking of how modern ideas of life, nature, and subjectivity took shape in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German thought. Moving beyond familiar narratives based on Kantian autonomy or Romantic irrationalism, it uncovers a vitalist tradition stretching from Herder to Schiller and Goethe, one that understood nature as dynamic, self-forming, and internally animated by life-force. Drawing on philosophy, the life sciences, and aesthetics, this innovative study reveals how these thinkers challenged mechanistic models of matter and resisted strict divisions between mind and nature. In doing so, they developed a historically contingent and embodied concept of subjectivity in which reason emerges from natural, cultural, and physiological processes rather than standing outside them. By situating this tradition within debates about epigenesis, form, and development, the book not only reshapes our understanding of German intellectual history but also sheds new light on contemporary debates about naturalism, posthumanism, and theories of life.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

STEPHEN KLEMM is an assistant professor of German in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. His research focuses on German philosophy and literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century with a focus on the intersections of epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and science.

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Mind, Matter, and the Philosophical Landscape Around 1800

Chapter 1. Mechanism, Vitalism, and the Scientific Context of Herder’s Metaphysics

Chapter 2. Vital Force and the Structural Foundation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy

Chapter 3. Herder’s Dynamic Naturalism

Chapter 4. Naturalism in Schiller’s Aesthetic Education

Chapter 5. Goethe, Morphology, and Becoming

Conclusion

Acknowledgments 

Notes

Bibliography

Index