Kant's Organicism

Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

Jennifer Mensch

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226022031
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Because it laid the foundation for nearly all subsequent epistemologies, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has overshadowed his other interests in natural history and the life sciences, which scholars have long considered as separate from his rigorous theoretical philosophy—until now. In Kant's Organicism, Jennifer Mensch draws a crucial link between these spheres by showing how the concept of epigenesis—a radical theory of biological formation—lies at the heart of Kant's conception of reason.   As Mensch argues, epigenesis was not simply a metaphor for Kant but centrally guided his critical philosophy, especially the relationship between reason and the categories of the understanding. Offsetting a study of Kant's highly technical theory of cognition with a mixture of intellectual history and biography, she situates the epigenesis of reason within broader investigations into theories of generation, genealogy, and classification, and against later writers and thinkers such as Goethe and Darwin. Distilling vast amounts of research on the scientific literature of the time into a concise and readable book, Mensch offers one of the most refreshing looks not only at Kant's famous first Critique but at the history of philosophy and the life sciences as well.

ONE

Generation and the Task of Classification

Mechanism and the Principle of Life

Locke’s theory of classification is a subject that has long received scholarly attention. Relatively little notice has been taken, however, of the special problems that were posed for taxonomy by its inability to account for organic processes in general. Classification, designed originally as an exercise in logic, becomes immediately complicated once it turns to organic life, and the aims of taxonomy become thereby caught up with the special problems of generation, variation, and inheritance. Locke’s own experience with organic processes—experience gained through his early work in botany and medicine—suggested to him both the dynamism of nature and the necessary artificiality of an a priori system of classification. Locke’s attitudes toward nature were not uncomplicated, at times presenting a blend of seemingly opposed commitments. But these were precisely the grounds upon which he could recognize the need to disentangle the epistemic, cognitive aspect of taxonomy from the attempt being made by taxonomists to create a natural system. In the end, it was this disentanglement that would both pave the way for Linnaeus’s successful creation of an artificial system of classification and open the door to its subsequent attack by Buffon and his followers. By the middle of the eighteenth century, natural history would be wrested from the hands of taxonomy, but this path could not have been laid without Locke’s work to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of classification. The path from Locke to Buffon thus traced the first stages of a revolution in our approach to nature, from an approach marked by the search for divisions between the parts of nature to an attempt at something that could be equally attuned to its unity. Questions about generation, classification, natural history were defining investigations in the life sciences by the middle of the eighteenth century, and insofar as these formed the backdrop for Kant’s own interests in natural history, the history of these questions must be examined as well.

Locke’s approach to questions concerning the generation and classification of nature is best introduced by way of a brief reminder regarding Aristotle’s and Boyle’s roles in providing the backdrop for Locke’s discussion. It is well understood that Aristotle’s empirical investigations into organic processes were founded on his metaphysical account of the soul. Whether it was referred to as an animating principle or an entelechy, the soul explained the experience of a formative force in all living things; it made sense of life as an inner motion and of reproduction and growth as movement toward a specified goal.²³ In the seventeenth century, however, Aristotle’s account of the souls of plants and animals was under attack from a number of fronts. The foremost of these attacks stemmed from religious precepts, flowing almost directly from Calvin’s insistence that God’s agency be accepted as the only source of activity in the natural world.²⁴ This position supported the kind of mechanical philosophy being promoted by Galileo and Descartes as well, since in their view nature was a realm filled with animate machines. From this philosophical perspective everything in nature was reducible to mechanical principles including, and especially, the organic body itself: the workings of muscle and tendon could be depicted as systems of pulleys, the heart likened to water bellows, and the nerves could be imagined to work like so many vibrating strings leading up to the head.²⁵ Calvin’s Reformationist tenets thus easily combined with mechanical philosophy to describe nature as a collection of complex machines whose internal mechanisms were dependent upon God. But the central problem with this portrait of nature, a problem increasingly felt over the course of the seventeenth century, was that even the most elaborately imagined mechanisms could not account for the most constant experiences of organic life. They failed to explain the processes by which organisms were able to maintain and reproduce themselves, and they made no sense at all of the processes of inheritance despite the fact that breeders and horticulturalists were everywhere engaged in the attempted manipulation of them. And these sorts of everyday tensions between theory and practice were only compounded by the epistemic problems seen to be facing classification.

Because classification requires criteria for sorting, the determination of what can serve as criteria for this sorting is the first task in setting up a taxonomical system. For most of the history of classification leading up to Locke, the goal of taxonomy had been to create what systematists described as a “natural system,” that is, a system that was capable of mirroring the divisions that were thought to exist within nature itself. The theoretical basis for this belief in natural divisions had been provided by Aristotle. In Aristotle’s account, the formative force of the soul was responsible for directing organic processes toward a specified end, for moving an organism from a merely potential existence to a complete form. But in its formative capacity the soul not only explained, for example, why acorns become oaks; it was thought to serve also as the discriminating judge when it came to determining the essential features required for an oak to be an oak. It was as a result of this kind of work that nature could be understood to have divided itself up according to essential features, to have produced, in other words, a set of essential divisions underlying the possibility of a natural system.²⁶ But while Aristotle took such essential divisions to be real in nature, he was himself unconfident that the classificatory process of logical subordination could be adequately applied to biological life, for, as he saw it, it could never be clear to the taxonomist what nature itself had taken to be the essential or subordinate features of a given organism.²⁷ As Aristotle conceived of the problems facing taxonomy, the difficulties lay primarily on the side of the taxonomists and their ignorance with respect to nature’s essential divisions. This problem went a step further for seventeenth-century mechanists, however, insofar as corpuscular ontology had rejected not only the soul as a basis for discerning essential differences between living organisms but the very notion of essential divisions existing within matter at all.

Corpuscular ontology had received its most concerted defense in the work of Robert Boyle, a thinker who was as much concerned with an extirpation of the chemical principles of Renaissance naturalism as he was with advancing his new corpuscular philosophy. He embraced corpuscular ontology in part, therefore, because it eliminated the possibility of irreducible elements—the mercury, salt, and sulfur of the Paracelsians—by taking matter to be substantially identical in all its parts.²⁸ Differentiation within matter, according to Boyle, occurred only as a result of shifts in the relative size, texture, and motion of the corpuscles. This meant that all material objects were the result of nonessential patterns of aggregation, patterns that had been produced by what Boyle described as a material “convention” or “stamp” upon an indifferent collection of matter.²⁹ But while this kind of corpuscular ontology allowed Boyle to respond to the iatrochemists, it also meant that he would be incapable of providing essential criteria by which inorganic matter could be meaningfully identified and sorted.³⁰

When it came to accounting for organic matter, Boyle had appealed to a physicalist view of seminal principles. For Boyle, the sheer complexity of organic life exceeded the chance that its original formation had been due to the principles of secondary motion alone. Against the theory proposed by Descartes and his followers, therefore, Boyle argued for an original act of divine artifice that “did more particularly contrive some portions of that matter into seminal rudiments or principles, lodged in convenient receptacles (and, as it were, wombs), and others into the bodies of plants and animals.” These seminal principles took on a formative function in directing the material unity of the organism, for “some juicy and spirituous parts of these living creatures must be fit to be turned into prolific seeds, whereby they might have a power, by generating their like, to propagate their species.”³¹ Although Boyle did not describe the exact means by which the formative work of the seminal principles operated, he clearly considered the process to be physical as opposed to soul driven:

I very well forsee it may be objected, that the Chick with all its parts is not a Mechanically contriv’d Engine, but fashion’d out of Matter by the Soul of the Bird . . . which by its Plastick power fashions the obsequious Matter, and becomes the Architect of its own Mansion. But not here to examine whether any animal, except Man, be other than a curious engine, I answer that this Objection invalidates not what I intend to prove from the alledg’d Example. For let the Plastick Principle be what it will, yet still, being a Physical Agent, it must act after a Physical manner, and having no other Matter to work upon but the White of the Egg, it can work upon that Matter but as Physical Agents, and consequently can but divide the Matter into minute parts of several Sizes and Shapes, and by local Motion variously context them.³²

Boyle’s commitment to a material interpretation of the work done by the seminal or plastic principle was clear from his appeals “Physical Agents.”³³ Finishing the point, he explained “that the Formative Power (whatever that be) doth any more than guide these Motions, and thereby associate the fitted Particles of Matter after the manner requisite to constitute a Chick, is that which I think will not easily be evinc’d.”³⁴

Boyle’s efforts to blend a corpuscular ontology with an account of seminal principles left open questions, however, regarding the coherence of mechanical approaches to nature. This incoherence was clearest with respect to taxonomical issues, since the ontology underlying the corpuscular theory of matter appeared to make classification impossible at the same time that the uneasy addition of materially conceived seminal principles were supposed to allow for it in the case of organic life. It was these strands in Boyle’s thought that were most carefully taken up for consideration by John Locke. And it was here that Locke’s own experience in medicine and botany would lead him to recognize the need to separate the problem of classification from the account of ontology. Taxonomy was a process of naming, according to Locke, and as such it was an endeavor that said more about decisions made by the taxonomist than it did about nature. And nothing could demonstrate the arbitrary nature of classification as much as could the fluid processes of organic generation and growth.

Locke’s attitude toward the problems posed by biological generation developed in stages, with the first dating from his years at Oxford. As this time is well documented, it is perhaps enough here to recall that it was during these years that Locke learned of Descartes’s mechanical philosophy; took a course on chemistry from the German Peter Stahl; read medical works by Harvey, Sennert, and the Galenists; created a personal Herbarium; and, of course, became acquainted with Robert Boyle and his corpuscular science.³⁵ It is in the so-called Morbus entry of 1666–1667, a text written while Locke was known to have been reading Boyle’s Origin of Forms and Qualities, that we find an early response to the physical rendering of the “plastic principle” at work in generation. In this short and unfinished set of remarks, Locke was interested in determining “a more rational theory of diseases” based on the notion of seminal principles. As he defined them, “By seminal principles or ferments I mean some small and subtle parcels of matter which are apt to transmute far greater portions of matter into a new nature and new qualities.”³⁶ Such principles, according to Locke, could perhaps explain the functioning of diseases, since these too seemed to transform the body’s material into something new—that is, into the disease itself. Locke admitted that “how these small and insensible ferments, this potent archeus works I confess I cannot satisfactorily comprehend,” but he was clear that it could not be operating according to the mechanical procedures that had been suggested by Boyle for the “straining” of particles by variously sized pores. As Locke saw it, only the transformative force of seminal principles could adequately explain the appearance of the “hard and consistent parts of the chicken” from out of the “soft and liquid” parts of the egg, and with respect to botany, only seminal principles could make sense of plant generation at all.³⁷ Describing this transformative force, Locke noted that “this change seems wholly to depend upon the operation or activity of this seminal principle, and not on the difference of the matter itself that is changed, so several seeds set in the same plot of earth change the moisture of the earth which is the common nourishment of them all into far different plants which differ both in their qualities and effects, which I think is not done by bare straining the nourishment through their pores which in different plants are of different shapes and sizes.”³⁸ Regardless of how one is to interpret Locke’s understanding of this “potent archeus” at work as the transformative force in generation, what the “Morbus” entry on disease makes clear above all is Locke’s early skepticism regarding a mechanically reductive explanation of generation. This early hesitation can in fact be seen to have continued throughout Locke’s work, even as his theories increasingly showed the influence of corpuscular science.

In 1667 Locke left Oxford for London, where he became for many years a close associate of Thomas Sydenham. Sydenham, typically described as England’s foremost physician of the seventeenth century, was also interested in the problem of disease, and his widely read Observationes Medicae attempted to provide a natural history of the various species of disease on the models provided by botanical systems of classification. Like Locke, Sydenham took diseases to function by virtue of some kind of transformative power, a capacity to change the body’s humors through the processes of “metamorphosis” into the disease itself. “The said humours,” as Sydenham explained it, “become exalted into a substantial form or species; and these substantial forms or species manifest themselves in disorders coincident with their respective essences.”³⁹ Sydenham’s examples of this process of “exaltation” were always botanical, with mistletoe, moss, and fungi frequently cited as examples of a tree’s essence having been transformed into a wholly new species.⁴⁰ Sydenham believed that a natural system could be created on the basis of essential features in the plant kingdom, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Kant’s Organicism
• 1. Generation and the Task of Classification
• 2. Buffon’s Natural History and the Founding of Organicism
• 3. Kant and the Problem of Origin
• 4. The Rebirth of Metaphysics
• 5. From the Unity of Reason to the Unity of Race
• 6. Empirical Psychology in Tetens and Kant
• 7. Kant’s Architectonic: System and Organism in the Critique of Pure Reason
• Epilogue: A Daring Adventure of Reason
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index