Scientific Anxiety, The Sea and Being

The poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, published a few years before Darwin published The Origin of Species, explores the issue of religion in contrast to the emerging scientific, rational view of human origin. German philosopher Martin Heidegger held the view that “No biology of parentage can answer why we came into being. Neither do we know toward what our existence has been projected, apart from our position in relation to our death” (Hornsby). Heidegger’s concepts of “being” and “thrownness” can be applied to the narrator’s struggle to reconcile these conflicting views of reality. It should be noted that Heidegger was a philosopher of the twentieth century, and the use of his philosophy in this essay emphasizes a contemporary reading of Victorian anxiety. Heidegger believed that philosophy should aim to examine the meaning of being (Hornsby). The struggle to understand human “being” is central to the Victorian struggle between science and religion that the narrator of this poem experiences on a personal level