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 Modernism witli
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
Early Moholy-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 naturecentric ideologies that arose during the late nineteenth
century as a revival of Nature Romantioism impacted
upon the thinking and work of modernist artists,
architects, planners, critics, and other oultural
producers.' Because so many of these modernists
were also fascinated by technology, and because
technology normally has been seen to be "in
opposition to" a nature-oentric, or "biocentric," point
of view, this aspeot of Modernism has been largely
lost to view. What has been forgotten is that while
some modernists did focus on "nature,"^ its forms
and processes, in their work, others found ways to
"naturalize" technology, and strove to help build
technologies that harmonized with the environment
and with human needs. These streams of
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 nature-centric in their thinking must be
historicized and confronted, and cannot be allowed
to taint the historical alliance between Modernism
and Biocentrism.
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
also the breathtaking advances in biological
science, particularly genetics, over the past few
decades; of hot-button political issues such as the
ethics of stem-oell research; we increasingly are

74

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 Enlightenment, termed the "natural," I think it
imperative that we gain a better understanding of
the ways in which attitudes toward "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 "nature" as such. And yet a closer
examination of almost any genre of modernist
artistio and cultural production reveals an active
interest in the categories of "life," of the "organic,"
even of the destruction of the environment 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 regard, 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" among 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 finde-sicle discourse around nature and the
participation of important figures in it, has

The Monistenbund

(\

Neo-Vitalism

Lebensphilosophie
)

k/i
Anarchisnn

J)

The Retormbewegung

Biologisnn

Neo-Lannarckisnn
The Neue-Naturphiiosophie

Organioism/Holisnn
THE BIOCENTRIC DISCOURSE INTERSECTION.

insufficiently contextualized modernist culture.

When not ignoring the interconnections between
nature-centric ideology and Modernism, historians
were denying it, emphasizing, instead, its antinatural, so-called "meohanistio" 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 scientific vein, by the once
influential but now all-but-forgotten AustroHungarian biologist and popular scientific 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
our inseparability from and dependence on
"nature," and which emphasized flux or becoming,
rather than stasis or being, in nature. It oan most
suooinctly be characterized as Naturromantik
updated by nineteenth-century biologism. Others
have referred to it in German as Biophiiosophie
(Biophilosophy). The cognate English term
"biocentrism" has a history of usage. The 1933
edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines

"biocentric" as "treating life as a central fact,"' while

in his introduction to Hans Prinzhorn's study of the
art of mentally disabled 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
with, and dependence upon, the self-regulating
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 "biocentrism," 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. While distinguishable from each
other, these groupings (Monism, aspeots of
Anarohism, Lebensphiiosophie, Holism/Organioism,
Biologism, The Reformbewegung, Neo-Vitalism,
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 paradigmatio soience of
the age, as well as an anti-anthropocentrio worldview
and an implied or expressed environmentalism.
Indeed, the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries
was characterized by a revival of aspects of
Romantioism, among them an intuitive, idealistic,
holistic, even metaphysical attitude toward the idea
of "nature," of the experience of the unity of all life.

75

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 "groups of movements that, without
or with ties to the great reactionary movement of
Romanticism, wish to renew the Gestalt of the
human heart." He then provides an illustrative list:
"Fechner, Bergson, Phenomenology, Vitalism, the
circle 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 it in 1992:
ft is hardly accidental that... modernism... arises
... simultaneously with modern biology. The two
viewed in tandem ... offer the most substantial
proof for the unity of cultural development and
pose a significant challenge to those who claim
that large concurrent cultural movements
usually have little impact on each other. And it is
... the vitalism inherent in early modern biology
that must concern us if we hope to grasp why
modernism has emerged at a particular moment
under specific cultural conditions.''
It is not surprising, therefore, that my and others'
research have indicated a pervasive interest on the
part of many early- to mid-twentieth-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 critics
Ern' Kllai and Herbert Read; the artists Hans Arp,
Constantin Brancui, Alexander Calder, Arthur
Dove, Max Ernst, Pavel Eilonov, Naum Gabo, Raoul
Hausmann, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Hoch, Paul
Klee, Frantisek 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 Tatlin, Kurt Schwitters, and Wtadystaw
Strzeminski; 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
Saarinen, Tapio Wirkkala, Rssel Wright, Frank
Lloyd Wright, and Eva Zeisel were, during various

76

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
artistic 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,
decentering the human species in favor of the
totalizing eighteenth-century constructs "nature" and
"life." In place of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
Enlightenment call for a "return to nature," which
implied a dualistic division between the "human" and
the "natural," humansrather than as producers of
culture, nature's "other"were now seen to be part
of this larger whole 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 and
happening, world and processes of the world melt
into one, into the notion of the natural.... 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 time: "The artist cannot do without 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 semiorganic forms, his amoeba-like suggestions ... teach
us to understand the language spoken by the
universe itself."" The English organicist philosopher
so influential on English Neo-Romanticism, Alfred
North Whitehead, wrote of the realization 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
activities."'^ 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, Jackson

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
moves, 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 into the highly oharged political
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 Einsfhlungthe praotice and thinking of
Frano, Klages, Jacob von UexkCill, Oswald Spengler,
and others oonstituted an interwar biooentrism that
was both more biologistic and functionalist
(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
degradation. As an outgrowth of fin-de-sicle
Kulturkritik in 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 thundered: "Horrible are the
effects that 'progress' has had on the aspect of settled
areas. Torn is the connection between human oreation
and the earth, destroyed 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
identical."" 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 Bioznose (eoosystems).

Just as we stand to profit from observing the

workings of Bioznose in nature, we stand to
benefit from our observation of naturally ooourring
technologies. Technologies of all kinds, including
non-human ones, and our ability 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 MoholyNagy, 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.
Frano, in his many popular publioations,
emphasized the importanoe of natural and
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 ideology of Biut und
Boden." British historian Anna Bramwell has
termed the intellectual-political movement toward
ecological views of nature and environmental
preservationist ideas underway sinoe about 1880
"ecologism."^'' Ecologism is thus a oategory of
intellectual history closely related to though not
identical with biooentrism.
As suggested by the use made of France's writings,
this environmental concern sometimes had a
sinister, indeed dangerous, edge 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 Socialist
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.'"^" Indeed, Bramwell 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

77

acted as a kind of black hole of history, distorting any

ideas that passed by it much as the powerful
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 its shadow in both directions along 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
biologistic nature-centrism of National Sooialist
ideology, all biooentrism has since been tainted,
though through an interesting case of selective
memory and marking, the post-war environmental
movement has tended to be exempted from this.^^
The problem is not necessariiy
with 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 anti-materialistic, anti-mechanistic, antitechnological, and nature-centric aspects of
biocentrism place it into what Jackson Lears
has termed "antimodernism."^^ While Lears's
"antimodernism" was a North American cultural
trend related to the Arts and Crafts movement, it is
nowperhaps somewhat unfelicitouslybeing
employed in an expanded sense to refer to the
ambivalent attitude toward modernity. Both "antimodernism"what Gianni Vattimo has, I think,
more happily termed "the crisis of humanism"and
modernity were socio-cultural phenomena that
were accelerating in the late nineteenth century.^^
Moreover, as we have seen, the biologistic and
monistic nature-centrism of Nazism renders the
biocentrism of the artists and thinkers we are
dealing with here problematic, and some will see
any biocentric infusions into modernist artistic
practice as "reactionary," even Fascist, moves.
Apart from the ahistorical and anachronistic
aspects of such views already pointed to, however,
the cases of Ern Kllai, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah
Hoch, Moholy-Nagy, Hannes Meyer, Lucia Moholy,

78

Lazar El Lissitzky, Walter Benjamin, and other

Leftist biocentric intellectuals who promoted a
rapprochement between "nature" and modernity
precisely during the rise of a biocentric Fascism,
demonstrate that the interrelations between
"antimodernity," modernity, biocentrism, and
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 War stripped away the myths surrounding
Nietzsche's own phiiosophy but it never
chaiienged the myth surrounding Nietzsche's
roie in German history. That myth was simpiy that
Nietzsche was unequivocaiiy the phiiosopher of
the German right. The reaiity 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 change German cuiture^
Nietzsche's much-maligned Will to Power is,
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
politics; "Power for Nietzsche has essentially
nothing to do with politioal 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 it over. It is
important, furthermore, to avoid anachronisms, false
logical assooiations, and premature conclusions.
One must come to expect the unexpected, "unholy"
alliances, as it were. Just as antimodernity was
espoused by members of both the Left and Right,
the political position of biocentrically 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, change, metamorphosis, formation,
and formlessness; an eternally burgeoning lifecomplex, of the privileging of "Becoming" over
"Being,""" of the passage from informe to form and
back again. With roots in the thinking of Heraclitus,
and central to the work of philosophers from
Goethe and Nietzsche"' to Bergson, the centrality

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 artists and designers who
were biocentric in their thinking worked in the style
of "Biomorphio Modernism"; 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 no necessary
connection between ideological background and
style. Thus, other artists such as Moholy-Nagy,
Lissitzky, and van der Rohe followed Raoul France
in regarding all technologies, inoluding human
ones, as part of the larger complex 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
indication of the fact that biocentric cultural
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 oonstruct then, 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 chapter 2 of rriy
Ph.D. dissertation "Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic
Modernism: Biocentrism, Lszi Moholy-Nagy's 'New Vision'
and Ern6 kllai's Bioromantik" (University of Toronto, 1998).
See: http://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/1657.
Parts of it 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 publications on
Modernism and modernist art 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 naturecentrism and some artists; on Biomorphic Modernism in art,
design, and architecture; on organic ideology in modern
architecture; as well as on the wider subject of nature,
organicism, and Modernism; few comprehensive studies on
the conneotions between biocentrism and modernity or
biooentrism and Modernism 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: Permutations ;n Science and Culture (Dordrecht: D.
Reidel, 1986); Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds..
The Crisis of Modernism: Bergson and the Vifalist Controversy
(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 Christin Kempf, eds.,
Spielarten des Qrganischen in Architektur. Design und
Kunst (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2005); Botar and
Wnsche, Biocentrism and Modernism {r\. 1).
4.

Shorter Qxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. "biocentric"

5. James L. Foy, introduction to Artistry of the Mentally III by

Hans Prinzhorn (1922; reprint, Springer-Verlag, 1972), X.
6. For example, Arne Naess (the Norwegian philosopher 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
chap. 2 in Oliver Botar, "Prolegomena to the Study of
Biomorphic Modernism (n. 1).
8. Max Soheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (1913, 2nd
ed. 1922; reprint, Bern: Francke, 1973), 82-104. On Scheler
see Eleanor Jain, Das Prinzip Leben: Lebensphilosophie
und esthetische Erziehung (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang,
1993), 120-1.
9. Scheler, 104.
10. Raoul France, Plasmatik: Die Wissenschaft der Zukunft
(Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1923).
11. George Rousseau, "The Perpetual Crises of Modernism and
the Traditions of Enlightenment Vitalism: With a Note on
Mikhail Bakhtin," in Burwick and Douglass (n. 3), 20.
12. Raoul France, Plants as Inventors (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. Herbert Read, Education
Panatheon Books, 1945), 16.

Through

Art (New York:

79

17. Reported by Robert Motherwell to Jonathan Fineberg, 15

January 1979, Greenwich, CT, in Jonathan Fineberg, Art
Since 1940: Strategies of Being (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1995), 481.
18. Claude Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock: Meaning and
Significance {Hew York: HarperCollins, 1992), 135.
19. Lszi Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (1929; 1932; reprint.
New York; W. W. Norton, 1938), 198.
20. Botar, "Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic
Modernism" (n. 1), 226.
21. See the classic, if late (1953), formulation of similar ideas in
Martin Heidegger's ideas on this in "The Ouestion
Concerning Technology," in Martin Heidegger, Basic
Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York; Harper and
Row, 1977), 283-317.
22. Ludwig Klages, "Mensch und Erde" (Humanity and Earth),
in Klages, Mensch und Erde. Elf Abhandlungen (Stuttgart;
Alfred Krner, 1973), 10, 12.
23. France, Die Pflanze als Erfinder (Plants as inventors)
(Stuttgart; Kosmos, 1920), 72.
24. Ibid.
25. See R. R. Roth, "The Foundation of Bionics," Perspectives in
Biology and Medicine 26, No. 2 (Winter 1983); 229-42 and
Robert Bud, The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60-3.
26. See Botar, "Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic
Modernism" (n. 1), chap. 4.
27. On Darr, see Anna Bramweli, Blood and Soil: Walter Darr
and Hitler's 'Green Party'(Bourne End, UK: Bucks, 1985).
28. Anna Bramweli, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 13-4.
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 expression of this type of view, see Daniel Gasman,
HaeckeTs Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (New
York: Peter Lang, 1998).
33. Bramweli and Pois have begun to point out the
oommonalities between Nazi nature ideology and that of
the environmental movement, commonalities they both
find disquieting.
34. For a historical analysis of the role of biocentrism within
Nazi ideology, see Pois (n. 29), e.g., 133.

80

35. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the

Transformation of American Cuiture, 1880-1920 (New York:
Pantheon, 1981).
36. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and
Hermeneutics In Postmodern Culture (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1988), 35-6.
37. On the Biocentrism 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 MohoiyNagy Reconsidered (New York: The Graduate Center, City
University of New York, 2006); and Botar, "The Roots of
Lszi Moholy-Nagy's Biocentric Constructivism," in Eduardo
Kao, ed.. Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2007), 315-44. On Kllai see, e.g.. Botar, "Ern
Kllai, Bioromanticism and the Hidden Face of Nature," THE
STRUCTURIST 23I2A (1984-1985): 77-80. Research has shown
just how complex the picture really is: see Hartmut Nowacki,
Zwischen Lebensphilosphie und Stalinismus. Philosophische
Anstze in der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands
(1918-1933) {Munich: Profil, 1983); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary
Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and
the Third Reich (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press,
1983); Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism:
Aesthetics,
Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA; Stanford
University Press, 1993); Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps:
The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War,
1914-1925 (Pmceton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1989);
Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth,
Art and Culture in 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 Stambaugh, The Other Nietzsche (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994), 127-8.
40. On this idea as expressed through art, see Alexander
Dorner, "The Designer as Energy in the Self-Changing Life
Process" in his The Way Beyond 'Art': The Work of Herbert
Bayer {Hew York: Wittenborn Schultz, 1947), 32ff.
41. See Stambaugh, 22-3, 97.
42. There are a number of publications on this. See, for
example, Isabel Wnsche, "Lebendige Formen und
bewegte Linien: Organische Abstraktion in der Kunst der
Klassischen Moderne" (Living forms and moving lines:
organic abstractions in the art of classical modernity), in
Floating Forms: Abstract Art Now (exh. cat.) (Ludwigshafen:
Kerber Verlag, 2006), 10-22.

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