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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).