Critical Planetary Romanticism: Religious and Scientific Sources for a New Materialism

Facing planetary environmental crises, philosophers and theorists have critiqued the human exceptionalism of dominant forms of science. Yet today is not the first moment in which technological and political change have spurred efforts to rethink humanity’s place in the world. This book turns to the nineteenth-century German Romantic tradition to find resources for a new approach―critical planetary romanticism―that foregrounds the irreducible entanglement of all living and nonliving things.

Whitney A. Bauman argues that German Romantic figures such as Ernst Haeckel represent a vital alternative path for critical thought that strikingly anticipates contemporary new materialisms. Their thinking about evolution and ecology did not separate humans from the rest of the natural world but instead foregrounded an immanent understanding of the world from a position within it. Bauman traces the theological and religious influences on Romantic ecology, revealing how Christian as well as Indic and Islamic thought shaped scientific understandings of nature. Considering the history of scientific racism associated with Haeckel, he shows that critical planetary romanticism addresses the various embodied experiences of humanity and how they are shaped by power relations. At the same time, he challenges postmodern and critical theories to engage with the nonhuman world and the entirety of the planetary community. A bold intervention into environmental philosophy, Critical Planetary Romanticism reconceives new materialism and in so doing lays the groundwork for a new planetary politics.

Whitney A. Bauman is professor of religious studies at Florida International University. A cofounder of the interdisciplinary research platform Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, he is the author of Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (Columbia, 2014) and coauthor of Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty: Wrestling with Wicked Problems (2019), among other books.