Creature

Not all life scientists in the nineteenth century were comfortable calling living beings organisms. Feeling the field of inquiry restricted by all that organicism ruled out and all that it reduced to autotelic principles of... [ view full abstract ]

Not all life scientists in the nineteenth century were comfortable calling living beings organisms. Feeling the field of inquiry restricted by all that organicism ruled out and all that it reduced to autotelic principles of self-organization and autonomy, they sought a less narrow but no less rigorous concept for talking about life in the least reductionist terms. So, instead, they called living beings creatures.

           To make creature a keyword for C19 Environmental Humanities is to recover a broad nineteenth-century discussion of life that speaks to contemporary calls for a collaborative and democratic approach to environmental issues. It is also to be reminded that environment has not always been synonymous with ecology, biology, or even nature. The creature concept opened ontogeny and evolution to the formative influence of environments natural and social, from the protoplasmic to the symbolic. It retained a space amidst ascendant objectivism and atheism for a resolute agnosticism that let the God of preformation converse with the mechanism of natural selection and the “creative force” of epigenesis. And, most important for the humanities, the creature gave nonscientists an idiom for making viable arguments about the creative, even poetic, activity of environmental factors in the formation of life. Eclectic in method and antireductionist in aim, participants in this discussion—among them Richard Owen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sanders Peirce, Ernst Haeckel, and Henri Bergson—promoted creative and collaborative conceptions of the relationship between creatures and their environments, conceptions that speak to the need for creative and collaborative solutions to our own environmental concerns.