Abstract
Eduard Loewenthal (1836–1917), whose work earned him six nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, was to become one of the most outspoken opponents of German Darwinism. He pleaded for an alternative explanation for the origin of species that would preserve the unique moral status of the human race: static discharges in primordial clouds of aether simultaneously imbued the various species with life. Thus, from the beginning, humans were different from animals. Loewenthal made his theory of creation by lightning, or “Fulguro-Genesis,” the central myth of his own rational religion. The essay examines the theory of Fulguro-Genesis and its concomitant religion, Cogitantism, in the context of Loewenthal’s life and work as well as Loewenthal’s place in the field of German-Jewish history.
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Notes
- 1.
Loewenthal wrote the play Arnold von Brescia in 1855 and first published it 2 years later (Loewenthal, 1857, 95–123).
- 2.
To distinguish his own thinking from the direction taken by the German Darwinists, Loewenthal later changed the appellation on his calling card, designating himself a “rational naturalist,” while Büchner and other Darwinists became in his parlance “materialist naturalists” (Loewenthal, 1875).
- 3.
Civil marriage was made legal in the German Reich in February, 1875. In a few places it had existed earlier, for example, in the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen since 1855 (Overath, 1987, 167–182).
- 4.
The Cogitant Academy was officially inaugurated in Dresden on October 27, 1867, with a public lecture by Loewenthal. Regular classes were to start on November 12, 1867 (Loewenthal, 1867).
8. References
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7. Acknowledgment
This essay draws on original research for the thesis, entitled “Politik und Weltanschauung bei Eduard Loewenthal,” which I submitted to the University of Munich in 2007 for the Magister degree. I wish to thank David A. Rees for his valuable suggestions as well as for the original translations of the German verses cited. I am also indebted to both him and Suzan R. Z. Rees for their assistance with the English text of the essay.
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Rees-Dessauer, E. (2012). In the Beginning There Was Lightning: Fulguro-Genesis and Eduard Loewenthal’s Religion of Religions. In: Swan, L., Gordon, R., Seckbach, J. (eds) Origin(s) of Design in Nature. Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4156-0_14
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