Oecologie · The German Sources of Ecology

Originally, ‘ecology’ was more than just the name of a biological subdiscipline. When its inventor, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, first coined the term (German: ‘Oecologie’) in his 1866 work General Morphology, he was in fact shaping the contours of a larger philosophical project rooted in German anthropology and aesthetics. The aim of this ERC research project is to uncover this forgotten enterprise and to assess its implications. To do so, it proposes a radical change of perspective, broadening the view from the scientific dimension emphasized by Haeckel’s successors to its philosophical sources. By analyzing Haeckel’s original interpretation of the metaphor of oikos (‘habitat’, ‘dwelling’) and oikeiosis (‘adaptation’, ‘appropriation’), the project traces the shift in emphasis from the viewpoint of an external and distant God to the living organism’s own capacities for adaptation and domestic ‘householding’; it examines the place of the human organism in this ecology, as a natural being, as a human housekeeper, as part of a larger household, and as an aesthetic spectator, representing and visualizing the world from within and from the terrestrial habitat. Using a transversal methodology situated at the intersection of conceptual history, history of philosophy, history of science, aesthetics and philology, Oecologie explores the context of the emergence of this first strand of ecological thought in nineteenth-century European evolutionism (1), its philosophical sources and its debt to earlier thinkers in the German tradition, such as Kant, Alexander von Humboldt and Goethe (2), its ambiguous history of reception both in Germany and abroad (3). Last but not least, it examines the actuality and relevance of such an ecology for environmental studies and the contemporary sciences, which are struggling to regain their lost unity, to refocus on the human being, and to bridge the gap between the scientific and political strands of ecology (4).