Le « chaînon manquant »

The works of Ernst Haeckel are characterised by visual and aesthetic qualities that inspired many writers and artists. Haeckel, on the contrary, was hardly interested in art as such and even less in literature. In the first part of the contribution, I examine the argumentative role of aesthetics in Haeckel’s works and I discuss the question why Haeckel never developed an explicit literary aesthetics within his “monistic” philosophy. In the second part, I present a reading of the essay-manifest Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie (“The scientific foundations of poetry”) by Wilhelm Bölsche, Haeckel’s populariser. I argue that the programme Bölsche develops can be seen as Haeckel’s “missing” literary aesthetics.