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This book offers a bold rethinking of how modern ideas of life, nature, and subjectivity took shape in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German thought. Moving beyond familiar narratives based on Kantian autonomy or Romantic irrationalism, it uncovers a vitalist tradition stretching from Herder to Schiller and Goethe, one that understood nature as dynamic, self-forming, and internally animated by life-force. Drawing on philosophy, the life sciences, and aesthetics, this innovative study reveals how these thinkers challenged mechanistic models of matter and resisted strict divisions between mind and nature. In doing so, they developed a historically contingent and embodied concept of subjectivity in which reason emerges from natural, cultural, and physiological processes rather than standing outside them. By situating this tradition within debates about epigenesis, form, and development, the book not only reshapes our understanding of German intellectual history but also sheds new light on contemporary debates about naturalism, posthumanism, and theories of life.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.