Beyond Humboldt. On the Darwinian perception of time in nature

Abstract

This article tests the widespread scholar agreement that detects in Darwin’s Journal of Researches a stylistic-ideological influence from Humboldt’s works. With this aim, I compare passages from Darwin’s Journal and Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur devoted to the analysis of the influence of the passage of time on the geological landscape in order to determine whether Darwin’s and Humboldt’s descriptions of nature implicitly contain each author’s conception of nature. I show that the description of the Humboldtian perception of time reveals a romantic-naturalistic conception of nature that assumes time and its influence on nature as an aesthetic object. In contrast, a scientific-naturalistic conception of nature that uses the concept of time as a speculative tool for the scientific analysis of the geological landscape underlies the Darwinian perception of time.