Henrik Steffens

Henrik Steffens (Henrich Steffens in German) was born in Stavanger on 2 May 1773 and died on 13 February 1845. He was a philosopher, scientist and poet, and one of the leading figures of the Naturphilosophie, the Romantic movement that sought to understand nature as a unified, living whole. His distinctive contribution was to combine speculative thought with a solid grounding in the natural sciences of his day.

As a young man he moved with his parents to Copenhagen, where he studied theology and natural science. He lectured at Kiel in 1796 and two years later went to Jena to study under Friedrich Schelling. In Freiberg he came under the influence of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In 1801 he published Beiträge zur inneren Naturgeschichte der Erde, his most successful scientific work, in which he defended a Neptunist account of the Earth's origins against the Vulcanist view later associated with his Freiberg companion Alexander von Humboldt. Back in Copenhagen in 1802, he gave a series of lectures that are said to have introduced German Romanticism to Denmark; among those who attended were Oehlenschläger and Grundtvig. The Danish authorities were not welcoming, and in 1804 he took up a chair at Halle. He later served as a volunteer officer in the Prussian army during the war against Napoleon, and from 1811 to 1832 he was professor of physics at Breslau before moving to Berlin.

His central idea was the principle of individualisation: as organisms rise higher in the scale of development, their forms become sharper and their individuality more definite. Steffens sought to derive this principle from geology, whereas Lorenz Oken reached a similar theory through biology. His scientific arguments led Schelling and Schleiermacher to modify their own positions.

He also wrote religious and political works, such as Karikaturen des Heiligsten, and an autobiography, Was ich erlebte, completed in his last years. His influence remained strong in Scandinavian Romanticism, and although the positivism of the twentieth century pushed his ideas aside, interest revived with the Anthropocene as a resource for interdisciplinary thinking about ecology and the Earth sciences. The Henrik Steffens Professorship at Humboldt University in Berlin, funded by the Norwegian government, bears his name.