Born as Lorenz Okenfuss on his father's farm near Bohlsbach bei Offenburg, Germany, Lorenz Oken shortened his rustic-sounding surname to prevent ridicule. Oken studied medicine at the University of Freiburg, but transferred to the University of Göttingen, where he took his medical degree in 1805. Oken taught medicine at Göttingen from 1805 to 1807 and at the University of Jena from 1807 to 1819.
While at Jena, Oken developed and correlated his interests in natural science and romantic philosophy. As he began to publish these ideas, Oken became a popular and controversial figure throughout the German-speaking world. In 1816, he founded the periodical Isis to showcase his views on science, philosophy, politics, and culture. Suppressed several times, it finally ceased during the 1848 Revolutions. Oken was an early supporter of nationalist student movements and other anti-conservative causes. Because he played an active part in the notorious Wartburgfest of October 1817, Isis was banned in Jena in 1818 and a coalition of his ideological and personal enemies, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), eventually forced him to resign his Jena professorship.
Except for one semester at the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 1821-1822, Oken was out of academia until he became professor of physiology at the University of Munich in 1827. Again, his disputes caused trouble, and he had to resign that post in 1832. From 1833 until his death, Oken was professor of natural history at the University of Zurich. Among his students there were Albert von Kölliker (1817-1905) and Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli (1817-1891).
Besides hundreds of articles in Isis, Oken's thought is contained in two massive, multivolume works, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (Textbook of Natural Philosophy) and Allgemeine Naturgeschichte für alle Stände (Universal Natural History for all Ranks). His romantic philosophy of nature consisted mainly in affirming the unity, interdependence, and equilibrium of all living things. Although he offered not much scientific evidence, he declared that higher animals were not created, but evolved from lower animals. More specifically, simple microscopic life was self-created when conditions favored it, and all other forms of life evolved from that time. He speculated on the origin of bone, especially the vertebrae and skull, and concluded that the skull evolved from specialized vertebrae.
The dominant philosopher of Oken's time, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-831), who wrote a dialectical, idealist, anti-romantic philosophy of nature, not only disagreed with Oken's reduction of human spirit, animal life, and plant growth to entirely natural or material states of affairs, but also thought that Oken himself was misguided. Yet Oken's fearless enthusiasm for defying authority, engaging in scientific and philosophical polemics, and asking fundamental questions about the origin and differentiation of life set the stage for the fierce controversies over evolution that occurred in the generation after his death. In particular, many of Oken's ideas, such as that of the primeval slime, foreshadowed those of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Oken also organized some of the first productive international scientific congresses.
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