Monistic Visions and Colonial Consciousness: Ernst Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe

As Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), Germany’s leading proponent of Darwin’s theories of evolution during the latter half of the nineteenth century, set off on his Bildungsreise to the East in the fall of 1881, his hopes and dreams of finding new scientific truths in the data of exploration were expressed in terminology echoing his emerging monistic Weltanschauung, in which all material forms are seen as constituted by a soul (Geist), by a single creative principle. His report, collected as the Indische Reisebriefe (1882),¹ depicts the experiences of his journey through the Suez Canal, a week in Bombay, and several months in Ceylon, today’s Sri Lanka, and reflects his growing conviction that the sciences converge with other forms of empirical analysis.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, evolving philosophical and scientific models, primarily Marxism and Darwinism, had begun to reshape the intellectual landscape – debates about human knowledge and its social and political repercussions became linked with the status and political agency of the academic community. Thus Haeckel’s trip to India occurs at a time of acute intellectual challenge, a challenge to those Enlightenment precepts to which he and others adamantly adhered. Yet Haeckel and others, such as Carus Sterne, Adolf Bastian, and Rudolf Virchow, were beginning to reconsider how to apply these precepts in this new era, beyond the kind of social exclusions that various scientific debates of the times showed were threatening the German university’s role as a continued force in Enlightenment, as discussed briefly in the first section of this article. As a result, Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe, though it rarely receives more than brief mention among biographers and critics, offers unique insight into how a major German intellectual projects his Enlightenment values. While Haeckel’s report exhibits many characteristics of the explorer thoroughly analyzed in Johannes Fabian’s work, this article emphasizes how Haeckel’s travel narrative projects an emerging German identity onto a foreign culture, a new “imagined community” that would purportedly allow for the evolution of reason and society rather than restricting it (Anderson).

This article explores how Haeckel’s perceptions of India embody his revision of Enlightenment ideals in the monist context rejected by state and institutional science of the early Empire, as these new definitions of truth, understanding, and the scientific community project onto an “other.” In other words, this article will investigate how Haeckel’s new scientific ideals played out in new geographies, to borrow Russell Berman’s term, as “new ways of writing the world” – for Haeckel, an imagined portrayal of a now lost pristine Naturvolk in Ceylon (Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel 1). Haeckel’s world of science was indeed a portrait – a work of art – but a portrait of a world in need of redrawing, rewriting, and rescripting.

In the case of Haeckel, geography is understood here in the literal sense, similar in this regard to the experience of the writer-engineer Max Eyth in Egypt (N. Berman 49), to explore how Haeckel transposes these European cultural conflicts onto Ceylon, in order to reveal how he pursues the rediscovery of a pure natural world – a unity of the spiritual and physical spheres. The pursuit of this strategy will provide insight into how Haeckel creates a geography of the “other,” a territory in which the enlightened German Wissenschaftler/traveller envisions the Orient, producing a very specific kind of German “Oriental” discourse. It will show how Haeckel authorized a kind of German scientific Orientalism through his use of science, thus challenging Russell Berman’s suggestion that Enlightenment “may also be the vehicle for a genuine knowledge of another culture,” arguing instead that even Haeckel’s scientific knowledge of the Orient is filtered by a colonial consciousness (Enlightenment or Empire 17).

This particular trip to India is uniquely intertwined with the science of the day, notably with monism, which views the universe as a unity of both organic and inorganic nature and could be defined as a quasipantheistic nature religion (Holt). In an 1892 essay, Der Monismus als Band zwischen Religion und Wissenschaft, Haeckel posits, for instance...