"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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which led to this position. Renaissance humanism insisted on the primacy of reason
and put man in a central position in the universe (Abrams 79). Reason was “considered
the distinctively human faculty … as opposed to the instinctual appetites and the ‘animal
passions’ in ordered human life” (ibid.). Jonathan Bate describes nature’s decentralised
position in 18 th Century Enlightenment thought. “The Enlightenment had a discourse of
rights, taken up in moral and political science, and a discourse of nature, taken up in the
natural sciences. But… only on its margins did it have a discourse of the rights of nature.
Romanticism frequently proclaims those rights” (2000: 244). Nature, as a human
abstraction, does not (strictly speaking) have or qualify for rights. Semantic quibbles
aside, Bate is pointing to the call by the Romantics for human reverence towards nature
and a resultant conservation of the environment. Williams describes this environmental
awareness not as Romantic, but as “green” (1980: 80), and adds “in Wordsworth and
beyond him, there came the sense of nature as a refuge, a refuge from man; a place of
healing, a solace, a retreat” (80). Livingstone as a Romantic materialist does not see
nature as a refuge but rather as a life-support system. He repeatedly refers in articles and
in his poetry to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and to Darwinism.
Williams accurately notes that Darwin’s notion of natural selection passed into
popular imagery through the idea of the fittest “meaning those best adapted to a given
and variable environment became ‘strongest’, ‘most ruthless’. 18 The social jungle, the rat
race, the territory-guarders, the naked apes: this, bitterly, was how an idea of man reentered
the idea of nature” (82). Livingstone discards the more comforting
Wordsworthian notion of nature as a nurturing mother, but he does view nature as a
teacher or guide (albeit a harsh one) and expands the Romantic sublime, through an
informed scientific approach, to present a new worldview which has not yet been
labelled. The best I can offer is Romantic materialism. Julian Huxley 19 makes a plea for
Evolutionary Humanism (where humanism refers to humankind as responsible and
progressive intellectual beings):
18 It was Herbert Spenser and not Charles Darwin who coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” (Silver
289) and “strongest” is not necessarily accurate. A more correct term would be “most suited to conditions”.
19 Julian Huxley (grandson of Charles Darwin’s ‘campaigner’ T.H. Huxley) is better known for his
postulation of a new evolutionary synthesis, introduced in his book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis
(1942). John Gribbin and Michael White argue that the publication of this book, 60 years after the death of
Darwin, marked the moment when Darwinism finally became established as the best explanation of how
evolution works (294).