The introduction to my dissertation, THE EPISTEMIC FOUNDATIONS OF GERMAN BIOLOGY, 1790–1802, originally published in May 2017.
In 1790, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) publishes the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In what has become a famous turn of phrase, he asserts that there is “no Newton for the blade of grass,” which means that it is not possible to have a science of organic nature in the same way that it is possible to have a science of inorganic nature. He argues that the limits of the understanding and the mechanical principles of natural science preclude any explanation of organized beings, that is, plants and animals. Because organized beings exhibit a reciprocal causality, in which parts cause the whole at the same time that the whole causes the parts, they are inexplicable according to the principle of mechanism, by which parts can only be cause of the whole, but not vice versa. Kant’s criterion for a proper science of nature requires explanations of phenomena only according to the principle of mechanism. Since organized beings are mechanically inexplicable, there cannot be a science of them. There is, therefore, no possibility for a science of life, no possible Newton for the blade of grass. “To make such an attempt or to hope” for the contrary, Kant says, “would be absurd” (AA V:400).1
Yet, in 1802, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776–1837) publishes the first volume of his work, Biologie, oder Philosophie des lebenden Natur für Naturforscher und Aerzte (Biology, or Philosophy of Living Nature for Natural Researchers and Physicians), which is just such an attempt. Over the next twenty years, he will continue to publish additional volumes, with the sixth and final one appearing in 1822. Treviranus’s text is notable for being the first to define “biology” as a science of life, making him the first author to use the word in its modern sense. According to Treviranus, biology studies the forms and conditions of life’s appearances as well as its causes; it will, importantly, proceed without concern of its use to other sciences or to the art of medicine. Living organisms are to be studied for their own sake and without immediate regard for the practical application of the resulting knowledge. In sum, this new science will occupy itself solely with the explanation of the living organism.
Thus stand the bookends of the present study, bookends which bid us to ask what occurred in the twelve years since Kant declared the impossibility of biology, so that Treviranus, duly aware of Kant’s arguments, nonetheless had the gall to advance a science of life against the better judgment of the Sage of Königsberg. We will answer this question by presenting a new interpretation of the philosophy and science of life as it developed in the last decade of the eighteenth century.
Histories of Biology
Scholars have long focused on this period because it is the historical moment in which life first became a scientific object for study.2 Michel Foucault is perhaps most well-known for identifying this moment in The Order of Things (1966): “Historians want to write histories of biologies in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history” (2005, 139). Foucault’s claim concerns the purported passage from natural history to biology that occurs at the turn of the nineteenth century. Consequently, he considers them to be two radically different enterprises. Natural history deals with living things and is concerned with life itself only insofar as it is one taxonomic property among others. For natural history, then, Foucault says, “Life does not constitute an obvious threshold beyond which entirely new forms of knowledge are required” (2005, 175). Conversely, he thinks, biology views life in just this way, as a transgressive object that consequently requires its own particular mode of inquiry (see Gutting 1989, 168–9).
Foucault’s account is successful in reminding us how different the study of life must have been in the late eighteenth century. Nearly all the concepts that are fundamental to a twenty-first-century understanding of biological life are unknown during this period. Not until 1839 will Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann first propose the theory of the cell. Not until 1858 will Charles Darwin first propose his theory of evolution. Not until 1862 will Louis Pasteur publish his Germ Theory of Disease. Not until 1900 will Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak-Seysengg rediscover Gregor Mendel’s work on heredity. Not until 1953 will James Watson and Francis Crick propose the double helix model of DNA. Not until 1995 will Craig Venter first sequence the complete genome of an organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae. We must imagine, then, the late eighteenth-century attempt to understand living beings without the concepts of cell, evolution, germ, gene, and so much more. In fact, if Foucault is right, then we must imagine this beginning of the science as an attempt to understand living beings without the concept of life itself, or, as contended here, without the dynamic concept of the organism.
Foucault’s intention in The Order of Things lies beyond the history and philosophy of biology. He is concerned more broadly with how the nature of knowledge differs across historical epochs. Hence, his account is necessarily limited vis-à-vis the history of biology, a limitation which manifests itself in at least two important ways. First, Foucault’s history is too francocentric. While figures that are the stars of his narrative like Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and George Cuvier certainly deserve attention for their roles in the history of biology, their prominence comes at the expense of passing over the essential contributions made by German philosophers and scientists. It is precisely these figures who are the focus of this dissertation. Second, as intimated in the passages above, Foucault maintains that biology effectively supplants natural history; the emergence of the former, he argues, totally displaces the latter. While we, too, will find that criticisms of natural history’s aims and methodologies abound in the late eighteenth century, which, indeed, fuel the need for a new science of life, we also find that these criticisms by no means halt the practice of natural history. The collecting, organizing, and describing characteristic of it continue through the period (and still continue today) unabated. Although the total supersession of natural history by biology makes for an undoubtedly stronger narrative, it is simply an overstatement of what actually occurred.
But Foucault is not the only historian of eighteenth-century life science to envisage a caesura where there is only a continuum, as does Timothy Lenoir. No other scholar of eighteenth-century German life science has provided a more comprehensive or enduring interpretation of the period than Lenoir. Across a series of publications in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lenoir develops his “teleomechanist thesis,” which holds that the progress of biology rests “on an explanatory framework uniting the principles of both teleology and mechanism” (1982, 2). He argues that the historical development of teleomechanism resulted in different versions of it that continued well into the nineteenth century. Excluded from this development, however, is any form of Naturphilosophie, as put forth, for example, by F. W. J Schelling and Treviranus. Lenoir writes, “On closer inspection the view that German biology in the early nineteenth century was shaped by the Naturphilosophie turned out to be illusory” (ibid., 5).3 Hence, Lenoir’s history rests on a divide between the real and pseudo pioneers of biology.
Scholars, however, have begun to rebut this view. In his extensive work, The Romantic Conception of Life (2002), Robert J. Richards shows just how inextricable Naturphilosophie was from the development of biology in the late eighteenth century. Of historians like Lenoir who want to erect a barrier between the excesses of Naturphilosophie and the true contributors to biology, Richards writes, “I believe these historiographic attitudes have excised the heart of nineteenth-century biology, which pulsed to more fascinating rhythms than can be imagined when dissecting the dried corpus of the discipline. When that biology has its lifelines secured by reattaching them to the thought and culture that animated it, I believe we will discover that many of its main themes have been played out in a Romantic mode” (2002, 4). The present study takes heed of Richards’ own tact, for, as will be shown, the epistemic foundations of biology are populated by concepts formulated and developed by Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.
Nevertheless, Lenoir’s teleomechanism thesis remains one of the best interpretations of early life science in Germany because it offers (the exclusion of Naturphilosophie, notwithstanding) a unified view of biology’s progress. Its wide acceptance was anticipated in its warm reception upon publication. T. H. Levere calls Lenoir’s book, The Strategy of Life (1982), “sound, original, and fascinating,” praising “his account of the research program [for bringing] coherence to almost a century of biological research within a framework whose existence and importance had not previously been clearly delineated” (1983, 552). David Knight concludes his review as follows: “It is hard to praise too highly Lenoir’s synthetic study” (1984, 558). For scholars turning to life science in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century after the publication of Lenoir’s work, it has become obligatory to begin with his interpretation and generally affirm it, disagreeing only with this or that detail.4 There are, though, exceptions. Most notably, in his review of Lenoir’s The Strategy of Life, K. L. Caneva writes:
Having struggled to come to terms with its complex and often confusingly presented thesis, I am still not confident that I have done the book full justice. I am quite sure that the book contains many serious mistakes in historical analysis; and I am reasonably sure that a sufficiently recast account would be able to salvage something for the importance of a Kantian program something like the one he has attempted to describe. But I do not find it enlightening to embrace (for example) Blumenbach, Reil, von Baer, Liebig, and Schwann within a common teleomechanist ‘program.’ (1990, 300)
Caneva is the exception, and although he presents several caustic criticisms of Lenoir’s work, he offers no alternative that could amend or replace it, which is, admittedly, an unfair expectation of a book review. Yet, scholars who have been critical of Lenoir’s interpretation and who have begun to furnish new ones on the beginnings of German biology and its subsequent development have only offered partial interpretations (Nyhart 1995; Richards 2000; Zammito 2012). They have replaced parts of Lenoir’s interpretive machine without ever rebuilding its engine.
What, then, is this interpretation that has caused such controversy? Lenoir states his position as follows:
My thesis is that a consistent, coherent and well-developed research programme guided the development of the life sciences in Germany in the period from 1790 through the mid-1850s, and that this programme was both theoretically and empirically progressive. I call this programme teleomechanism, for it was an approach to the phenomena of life based on an attempted unification of the best features of the teleological and mechanical frameworks of explanation. This research programme did not spring on to the stage of history full-blown from the head of Zeus. Its formulation took place over a period of several years, in the early 1790s, and several persons contributed to the formulation and articulation of its various components. The hard core and negative heuristic was provided by Immanuel Kant in aspects of his work devoted to the problem of teleological judgment, most clearly formulated in his Critique of Judgment (1790).5
Lenoir uses the language of the philosopher of science, Imre Lakatos, to interpret the development of biology that begins with Kant and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) around 1790. A “research program” provides a guide for future research. In the passage above, Lenoir refers to the “negative heuristic” of the research program, which contains the “hard core,” that is, the basic theoretical commitments that are not to be altered or rejected. Lenoir identifies teleomechanism as the hard core. Kant provides the basis for this research program’s hard core by demonstrating the potential, heuristic use of a teleological principle in the explanation of organic beings; this principle is heuristic because it does not provide the explanation itself, but rather only enables or leads to an actual mechanical explanation. In short, teleomechanism is “the notion that biology requires the assumption of purposive organization at the basis of any investigation into the mechanisms conditioning and sustaining life” (Lenoir 1981a, 306). This purposiveness, then, must always be kept at an arm’s length, for it is only a methodological principle; that is, it is something imputed by the researcher to the organized being and never constitutive of that being itself. The intricate arguments supporting Kant’s arguments regarding this approach will be discussed below; however, the present explication suffices to allow an understanding of Lenoir’s interpretation. Teleomechanism becomes the foundation of biology by offering rules for investigation that advise the use of teleological principles as a means to mechanical ones, since only the latter guarantee scientific explanations. Moreover, although Kant formulated the initial research program, it also spurred several improved variants, which stretched from the 1790s until the 1850s (ibid., 298). Lenoir divides these variants into three stages—vital materialism, developmental morphology, and functional morphology—which indicate the comprehensive force of his interpretation. He can chart the genealogy of the teleomechanist research program as effectively directing the course of biology over a timespan of sixty years. If we couple this with the relative paucity of competing comprehensive interpretations, we can understand the wide acceptance of teleomechanism.
In contrast to Lenoir’s interpretation, Richards’ account does not offer the same conceptual unity. Richards’ methodology focuses on biography, so that connections are principally made according to “the attitudes, the intellectual beliefs, the emotional reactions” of the thinkers in question (2002, 5). While this methodology is powerful in showing the transmission of ideas, nexus of responsible agents, and material conditions responsible for shaping the science’s history, we never receive a unified account to rival Lenoir’s teleomechanism. Hence, our aim is to offer that rival account. We maintain that teleomechanism is an inadequate framework for understanding the epistemic foundations of biology. In its place, we assert that these foundations are constituted by the concept of the living organism and thus will present, in this work, its genealogy and the ideas that were necessary for its conceptualization.
The Historical Context of Early Life Science
To begin to make sense of the burgeoning philosophy and science of life in the late eighteenth century, one must be aware of three points of reference, which would have invariably shaped the thinking of any scholar in this period. These three events are significant because they represent the discovery of vital capacities previously unknown. These discoveries, in turn, disrupted longstanding ideas about what a living organism could do and thereby introduced unresolved controversies about the most basic questions of life.
Irritability and Sensibility
First, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of Albrecht von Haller’s papers that he gave before the Royal Society of Sciences of Göttingen on April 22 and May 6, 1752. Published the following year as De partibus corporis humani sensibilibus et irritabilibus (On the Sensible and Irritable Parts of the Human Body), this work uses experimental research to make a definitive distinction between irritability and sensibility in animals. Owsei Temkin argues that Haller’s contribution lies in his experimental method, rather than in his results, since irritability and sensibility had been discovered long ago (Haller 1936, 1).6 Haller himself acknowledged as much in the treatise, citing several important predecessors (42–6). Most important of these, Francis Glisson (1597–1677), originally coined the term, “irritability,” and identified it as a natural perception that is not accompanied by sensation. Yet, with respect to Glisson and others in general, Haller thought that they all fell short in failing to offer sufficient experimental evidence for their conclusions. Consequently, none could offer as clear of an account of the difference between irritability and sensibility as Haller did.
What, then, are these properties? Irritability refers to any part in the body, “which becomes shorter upon being touched” (Haller 1936, 8). Haller concluded that nothing in the animal body is irritable but the muscular fiber, which underlies several parts in the body, in addition to the skeletal muscles that initially come to mind; for example, the bladder, esophagus, stomach, etc. are all irritable, whereas the vessels, cellular membrane, fat, skin, nerves, etc. are not (ibid., 40). Moreover, Haller concluded that the heart is the most irritable of the organs, exhibiting the power to contract forcefully upon the slightest provocation. A further facet of the treatise is the denial that irritability is a function of the soul, a position held at the time by some followers of G. E. Stahl like Robert Whytt, whom Haller addresses directly in the text (28). He opposed their position by showing that irritable organs maintain this capacity after death and after being severed from the body, which would not be possible if they were controlled by the soul, since this severance, either by death or amputation, would also be the severance of the irritable part from the soul. Irritability, then, is demonstrated to be independent of the soul; to the contrary, the basis of it, Haller maintains, is in the “fabric of the parts.”
The separation of irritability from the soul follows upon another, more important one, that is, between irritability and sensibility. Sensibility refers to any part of the body, “which upon being touched transmits the impression of it to the soul” (1936, 9). A part is sensible, then, if one is conscious of it being stimulated. Hence, the skin is sensible, because one can sense or be aware of a stimulus applied to it. Not many of the body’s organs, however, are as accessible as the skin, for one may wonder whether the brain, bone marrow, glands, lungs, and so on are sensible or not. For his experiments on sensibility to be successful, Haller must conduct them on live animals. Whereas humans can respond directly and clearly whether an organ is sensible upon stimulation, a nonhuman animal cannot. Instead, it can only indicate sensibility through conspicuous signs of pain and distress. The identification of the body’s sensibility thus entails a slew of gruesome experiments: Haller uses heat, spirit of wine, scalpel, lapis infinalis, oil of vitriol, and butter of antimony on conscious animals to ascertain whether parts are sensible or not (ibid., 10). Haller, though, is not immune to the suffering of these animals. Regarding the 190 animals that he examined in several different ways since 1751, he admits feeling a reluctance for “a species of cruelty,” which “could only be overcome by the desire of contributing to the benefit of mankind, and excused by that motive which induces persons of the most human temper, to eat every day the flesh of harmless animals without any scruple” (ibid., 7). In general, though, the benefit that Haller thinks his study provides is nothing less than a “new division of the parts of the human body” (ibid). By isolating these two properties, Haller offers a new set of criteria to identify parts of the body, which could be neither irritable nor sensible like a tendon, sensible and irritable like a muscle, insensible but irritable like a gland, or not irritable but sensible like a nerve. In this identity matrix—and the experimental method used to complete it—lay the foundation for an improved physiology, which, in turn, promised further advances in medicine.
It is perhaps quite fitting that in the latter half of the eighteenth century, sensibility and irritability take on lives of their own after leaving Haller’s pen by becoming the models for the Lebenskräften (vital forces), which sometimes diverged significantly from the irritability and sensibility of Haller’s treatise. In general, Lebenskräften were understood to be forces exclusive to organic beings, unlike the physical forces (for example, gravity) common to all bodies, whether they were organic or not. In the 1790s, interest in the vital forces reached such a high level that the period may be described without hyperbole as “Lebenskraftmanie.” Treatise after treatise was published on precisely this topic.7 Indeed, every principal thinker considered in the present study devotes at least some of his (sometimes critical) attention to them.
Problem of Generation: Preformation vs. Epigenesis
Second, we cannot investigate eighteenth-century life science without briefly reviewing its most fierce debate: How do living organisms come to be? This question, in the parlance of the 1700s, is the problem of generation. Investigation of the problem is nothing new, for it is documented to have begun as early as Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, and perhaps even earlier with Alcmaeon of Croton (fl. ca. 500 BCE). Their preferred object of consideration, the generation of the chick, also remained the entryway to investigation in the eighteenth century, serving as the locus of an extended debate between the now familiar Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) and Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1735–1794).
Haller averred preformationism, a theory of generation with multiple variations and nuances; in general, it explains generation through the preexistence of an embryo created by God at the time of Creation.8 The embryo awaits its preordained development either in the maternal egg (as the ovists, like Haller, believe) or in the male spermatozoon (as the animalculists believe). The theory of preformation gained its first clear proponent in Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), whose position we find stated in a typical defense of the doctrine by George Garden (1649–1733) in his paper for the Royal Society:
And Indeed, all the laws of Motion which are as yet discovered, can give but a very lame Account of the Forming of a Plant or Animal. We see how wretchedly Descartes came off, when he began to apply them to this Subject. They are formed by Laws yet unknown to Mankind; and it seems most probable, the Stamina of all Plants and Animals that have been, or ever shall be in the World, have been formed ab Origine Mundi, by the Almighty Creator, within the first of each respective Kind. And he who considers the nature of Vision, that it does not give us the true magnitude, but the proportion of Things, and that what seems to our naked Eye but a Point, may truly be made up of as many Parts as seem to us to be in the whole visible World, will not think this an absurd thing. (1693, 3)
This short passage reveals the motivation behind preformation theory. The predominant theory of explaining matter at that time (inaugurated by Descartes) rested on mechanical laws of motion. Since those laws seem incapable of explaining the generation of living beings (which is where Descartes failed so badly), another theory is needed that could both preserve the mechanical theory of matter and explain living beings. That is, whence the complex structure of life, given the relative simplicity of mechanical forces? Preformation fits the bill because if the general structure already exists, then mechanical laws only need to explain the living being’s development, not its origin. This theory also is also popular because it accords squarely with the Christian doctrine of Creation.
Haller’s version of preformation maintains that the structure of a living being has already been given, and that its further growth and development can thus be explained mechanically, in line with our explanation above. Fertilization, then, is just the initial push that puts the machine into motion. Preformationism, therefore, solves the problem of how to account for the structure of organized beings, how a chick emerges from what seems like an undifferentiated, homogenous mass. Haller resolves this difficulty by maintaining that the basic structure of life has always existed, but that it is just too small to be seen. However, once this invisible germ receives stimulation and nourishment via fertilization, it grows and develops solely through mechanical means.
The theory of epigenesis faces the same difficulty in explaining generation, but responds to it in a wholly different manner. William Harvey (1578-1657) coined the term “epigenesis” in the seventeenth century, though it is a theory that has roots that are much older. Although Harvey exercises an epistemic modesty concerning how it actually occurs, by “epigenesis” he means the gradual generation of a germ from an undifferentiated primordium. Epigenesis continues to have this basic sense in the eighteenth century, though it is expressed with different nuances by life scientists like Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759), Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), and Caspar Friedrich Wolff, the last of whom argues that no embryo can preexist in the egg or spermatozoon, appealing to the principle: “What one does not see is not there.” Instead, he asserts that the embryo must be formed anew each time. What structures unorganized matter and brings forth this new embryo is Wolff’s vis essentialis. The interpretation of this essential force already varies in Wolff’s time, but he posits it as a principle sufficient to explain the vegetative processes, that is, growth, nutrition, and self-differentiation, in both plants and animals (Gasking 1967, 104–6; Roe 1981, 114). In short, the essential force is what organizes matter into life.
Haller and Wolff debate the question of generation throughout their lifetimes. From 1758 until 1789, they exchange letters and publish vying papers. The debate revolves around the development of the chick, and, specifically, the formation of blood vessels in the area vasculosa, the development of the heart, Haller’s membrane-continuity proof of preformation, and the formation of the intestines (Roe 1981, 50–83). Despite their prolonged exchange, and the various contributions they each make to understanding generation, neither preformation nor epigenesis emerge as capable of explaining how life comes to be. Neither theory is ultimately decisive in explaining how an organized being grows, develops, and reproduces.
The Enigmatic Polyp
Perhaps nothing contributes more to the perpetual disagreement over generation than the small aquatic animal known as the polyp in the eighteenth century and as the Hydra today. Abraham Trembley (1710–1784), a Swiss naturalist, discovers the remarkable little creature, as a tutor to the two sons of the Count of Bentinck in Holland. He and the boys would collect bugs and plants to look at under the microscope. One day, the boys tell Trembley that a supposed plant had just walked across the jar. Trembley is quite puzzled, because the organism is green and seems to be a plant, but it is also motile and seems to exhibit other animal characteristics.
Upon further observation, he notices that the tentacles of the polyp are not equal across each individual, and he reasons that they might be roots or at least akin to them, since roots are also unequal in number across individual plants. If the tentacles are roots, he thinks, then it should be possible to sever them without killing the polyp. Given this result, he would then have confirmation that it is a plant, but if it died, then he would know it is an animal. To his surprise, neither of the two cases occur. Rather, both the severed part and the original individual regenerate their lost matter, both becoming complete animals again! At once, Trembley recognizes that the situation is unlike any regeneration already then known. It differs, for example, from the crayfish because its severed antennae do not themselves become whole crayfish again—only the missing part is restored. In the polyp, though, each severed part becomes a whole new polyp, and the injured polyp completely restores itself. Trembley first communicates his findings in 1740, and an eloquent account of them are published in the Histoire de l’Academie des Sciences of 1741:
The story of the Phoenix who is reborn from its ashes, fabulous as it is, offers nothing more marvelous than the discovery of which we are going to speak. The chimerical idea of Palingenesis or regeneration by Plants & Animals, which some Alchemists believed possible by the bringing together and the reunion of their essential parts, only leads to restoring a Plant or an Animal after its destruction; the serpent cut in half, & which is said to be rejoined, gives but one & the same serpent; but here is Nature which goes farther than our chimeras. From one piece of the same animal cut in 2, 3, 4, 10, 20, 30, 40 pieces, & so to speak, chopped up, there are reborn as many complete animals similar to the first. (as cited in Roe 1981, 23)
The polyp, in short, is a vexed phenomenon in the eighteenth century: it exceeds the expectations of naturalists and all foregoing modes of explanation. How can this creature regenerate itself ad infinitum? The polyp thus poses a challenge to preformation theory because preformed germs do not seem able to account for this remarkable property. This challenge is so severe that it even causes Haller, preeminent defender of preformation theory, to defect briefly to epigenesis upon learning of the creature’s regenerative abilities.
Course of the Argument
The polyp also plays a significant role in catalyzing Blumenbach to turn against preformationism, a shift we analyze in detail in Chapter One. Blumenbach’s conversion from preformationism to epigenesis is motivated by his discovery of the Bildungstrieb or formative drive. The drive is Blumenbach’s attempt to intervene in the stalemate plaguing the question of generation—the formative drive is supposed to prove once and for all the undeniable truth of epigenesis. We find, however, that as innovative and resourceful as Blumenbach’s efforts are, they are not the coup for which he hopes, since defenders of preformation would not have found anything in his theory that would have compelled them to change their positions. Moreover, his arguments about generation ultimately leave us bemused, for he insists on the inexplicability of life without ever saying why it must be so. For Blumenbach, the researcher is by no means barred from knowledge of living beings, but he is barred from the knowledge of life itself.
Immanuel Kant also asserts this inexplicability; however, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), he demonstrates why it must be the case. Before arriving, however, at his answer, Chapter Two presents an analysis of the intellectual relationship between Blumenbach and Kant. Because this relationship is central to Lenoir’s teleomechanism thesis, the new interpretation given in this study is essential for a new understanding of the beginning of biology as it unfolds between these thinkers. Lenoir’s interpretation (in addition to several others) hold that Blumenbach benefits from Kant’s philosophical insight, which thereby imbues the former’s life science with a more precise methodology. On the contrary, we observe that it is Kant who is indebted to Blumenbach, for without him Kant would have never formulated the organism concept.
In Chapter Three, we analyze this concept of the organism, which appears for the first time in Kant’s third Critique, and thus constitutes an essential part of the epistemic foundations of biology. Explicating the organism concept requires us to analyze Kant’s arguments concerning the limits of human cognition, which finally explains why life must be inscrutable. Hence, Kant’s third Critique turns out to be a strange text: we find, in the same work, the invention of a concept that will be essential to the foundation of biology, and an argument showing that this foundation is eternally inscrutable.
In Chapter Four, despite its purported inscrutability, we find that the organism becomes a mainspring for every naturalist and philosopher investigating the living world in the 1790s. We track the concept’s reception in three key figures: Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765–1844), Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813), and Friedrich W. J. Schelling. As diverse as each of them are, we discover that they each employ the organism concept to establish laws of the organic world; that is, they anticipate possible forms of a science of life. This anticipation requires, in the case of Kielmeyer, the application of the organism concept not only to the individual plant or animal, but also to entire populations, kingdoms, and nature itself. We find him postulating laws about the relations within and across the organic world. With Reil, however, we find a rebel. He denies the legitimacy of Kant’s organism concept, yet also takes it as his foundation. Reil adopts a materialist position, asserting that knowledge of the physical composition and components of organisms is all that is needed to explain them. Physics and chemistry are enough to know living nature. We find, finally, that Schelling affirms the concept of organism, while, at the same time, challenging the entire Kantian framework on which the concept is built. All of nature becomes, for Schelling, an organism. Moreover, his attention to the organism allows him to formulate its logic even more dynamically than Kant could. The organism, for Schelling, is a third kind of being, not identical to matter, but also not divorced from it, and not immaterial like the soul, but in possession of something like its freedom.
This dynamic logic of the organism reappears in Treviranus’s Biologie, to which we return in the Conclusion. He stakes out what it means to have a science of life, while in conversation with the scientists and philosophers analyzed in our study. While his science of life is not yet the modern discipline of biology—not yet the laboratories, molecular analyses, and modeling so familiar today—the living organism is the foundation of his treatise. It is the basis for first recognizing and thinking the biological as a distinct domain of scientific knowledge.
1 “AA” refers to the Akademie-Ausgabe of Kant’s collected works. The abbreviation is followed by reference to volume number and page number(s). Wherever possible, standard English translations have been cited; in all other cases, translations have been made by the author. Detailed bibliographic information will be found in the Works Cited.
2 See, e.g., François Jacob’s The Logic of Life: “Until the end of the eighteenth century there was no clear boundary between beings and things…. There was as yet no fundamental division between the living and the non-living” (1982; 33).
3 More recently, Peter Hans Reill has echoed this view in his work, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (2005). His primary objective in the book is to delineate a movement that he calls “Enlightenment Vitalism,” which challenged the then predominate mechanical philosophy by arguing that matter was not affected by a chain of external causes, but rather had its own internal causes through which it acted. In delineating this movement, Reill is adamant to demonstrate that it is distinct and should not be conflated with Naturphilosophie or romanticism, a conflation that previous scholars have, in his view, unfairly perpetrated. He writes, “Rather than seeing Naturphilosophie as vitalism’s logical conclusion, I interpret it as its negation, as a thoroughgoing critique of the epistemological, methodological, and linguistic assumptions that undergirded Enlightenment Vitalism” (2005, 14). However, to disentangle clearly one movement from the other is impossible, as Zammito (2016) has recently demonstrated.
4 See, for example, Nicholas Jardine’s Scenes of Inquiry. He writes, “It has been shown [several texts of Lenoir are cited] that this scheme for the pursuit of mechanical (and chemical) explanations within a teleological framework was widely followed by natural historians, anatomists and physiologists in the German lands; and it has been suggested, rightly I believe, that there are close affinities between it and George Cuvier’s widely followed functional approach to comparative anatomy” (1991, 32). Brandon C. Look also affirms Lenoir’s teleomechanist program (2006, 372). Finally, although Renata Schellenberg acknowledges arguments to the contrary, she still affirms Lenoir’s claim that Kant was particularly “fruitful” for Blumenbach in clarifying the physiologist’s ideas (2011, 102).
5 In the following year, Lenoir nuances his position: In full disclosure, Lenoir adds nuance to these claims in the following year: “My principal thesis is that the development of biology in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century was guided by a core of ideas and a program of research set forth initially during the 1790s. The clearest early formulation of those ideas is to be found in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant…. I do not claim that German biologists discovered a program of research in Kant’s writings which they set out to realize in practice. The evidence indicates rather that in the latter part of the eighteenth century a number of biologists were seeking to establish a foundation for constructing a consistent body of unified theory for the life sciences which could adapt the methods and conceptual framework of Newtonian science to the special requirements of investigating biological organisms. Kant stepped into this ongoing dialogue and set forth a clear synthesis of the principal elements of an emerging consensus among biologists” (1982, 2).
6 The present review of Haller’s treatise is based on a reprint of the 1755 English translation. This anonymous translation, which made use of the 1755 French translation as indicated by the inclusion of its preface by its translator, Simon André Tissot, is based on an emended text by Haller. The changes reflect Haller’s attempt to respond to criticisms of his treatise in its initial form.
7 Consider, for instance, the following sample: Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s “Über die Verhältnisse der organischen Kräfte” (1793), Alexander von Humboldt’s “Aphorismen aus der chemischen Physiologie der Pflanzen” (1794), Christof Wilhelm Hufeland’s “Ideen über Pathogenie und Einfluss der Lebenskraft auf Entstehung und Form der Krankheiten” (1795), Johann Christian Reil’s “Von der Lebenskraft” (1795), J. D. Brandis’s “Versuch über die Lebenskraft” (1795), and Theodor Georg August Roose’s “Grundzüge der Lehre von der Lebenskraft” (1797). We will discuss Kielmeyer’s and Reil’s texts in the fourth chapter.
8 But Haller did not always aver preformation. As a student of Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), he began his career supporting preformation but converted to epigenesis in the 1740s after Trembley published his findings on the polyp. He returned, in the end, to preformation after his extensive study of chick generation (Roe 1981, 22–6).
