HALLER, ALBRECHT von. - Writer and scientist, b. in Bern on 16 Oct. 1708, d. there on 12 Dec. 1777. Eminent anatomist and physiologist, he also concerned himself with mathematics, philosophy, and politics.
As a writer, he owes his fame to the poem Die Alpen (1729), in which he shapes the “myth” of the good mountaineer, a happy man whom ignorance preserves from the evils of the city, a true pupil of nature. The poem is an important stage in pre-Romantic naturalism, which denies original sin, Redemption, and ascent to God through Grace. In Haller, in fact, “the natural goodness of man, which finds on earth in natural happiness its reward, is the first, mythical form of a doctrine of the immanence of values” (Antoni, q.V. bibliography).
BIBL.: A. Farinelli, A. von H., in L'opera di un maestro, Turin 1920, pp. 224 ff. (with earlier bibliography at p. 349); S. d'Isay, A. von H., Leipzig 1930; C. E. Engel, La littérature alpestre en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe et XIXe siècle, Chambéry 1930, see index; M. Hochdorfer, The conflict between the religious and the scientific views of A. von H., Lincoln (Nebraska) 1932; C. Antoni, La lotta contro la ragione, Florence 1942, pp. 16 ff. Precise indication of the most recent bibliography in J. Körner, Bibliographisches Handbuch des deutschen Schrifttums, Bern 1949, pp. 202–203.