Abstract
The aesthetically optimistic view of life in the last paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species contrasts with the evidence in his autobiography of a supposed perceptive colour blindness to the magnificence of nature. Accepting the theory of evolution as one of the scientific theories that has contributed to disenchantment, my aim is to delve into the Darwinian perception of natural beauty and solve this contrast of perceptions within the framework of the Weberian concept of “disenchantment of the world.” To do this, I have carried out a computer-assisted study of Darwin’s language focusing on the frequency of aesthetic-emotional and religious adjectives and adverbs in the six editions of the Origin. A semantic analysis of the lexicon shows that, although disenchanted, Darwin perceives nature as aesthetically enhanced. I arrive at the conclusion that Darwin’s alleged colour blindness does not come from a loss of his capacity to aesthetically perceive nature, but from his loss of religious belief.
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Notes
I will use Nora Barlow’s edition (2005) of Darwin’s autobiography.
This memory is included in Journal of Researches: “no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” (Darwin 1860a, p. 503).
There is extensive bibliography on the concepts of disenchantment, enchantment and re-enchantment. I highlight here three of the most informatively exceptional works: Graham (2007); Taylor (2011); Josephson-Storm (2017).
A significantly extended version of this paper containing the full results of my research has been published at History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences journal (Jiménez-Pazos 2021).
As a representative landmark of the literature that defends scientific knowledge as a route to an aesthetically strengthened perception of nature, I recommend the preface to the work Unweaving the Rainbow (Dawkins 1998).
Other studies have also analysed computationally particular aspects of Darwinian lexicology. See, for instance, Sainte-Marie et al. (2011); Hidalgo-Downing (2014). For an online comparative study of lexical variations in the six editions of OS, I recommend the Online Variorum of Darwin’s Origin of Species (Bordalejo 2012), available at http://darwin-online.org.uk (van Wyhe 2002).
The texts have been taken from http://darwin-online.org.uk (van Wyhe 2002) and have been adapted via the use of text mining strategies, in order to be processed in WordSmith Tools.
To abbreviate, I will refer to this kind of adjectives as religious.
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Acknowledgements
Departamento de Educación del Gobierno Vasco. Programa Postdoctoral de Perfeccionamiento de Personal Investigador Doctor. Grant code: POS_2019_2_0012.
Funding
Departamento de Educación del Gobierno Vasco. Ayudas para Apoyar las Actividades de Grupos de Investigación del Sistema Universitario Vasco. Project code: IT1228-19.
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Jiménez-Pazos, B. Darwin Puzzled? A Computer-assisted Analysis of Language in the Origin of Species. Topoi 41, 561–571 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-021-09744-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-021-09744-3