Abstract
Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.
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Notes
See Foucault (1994) and Jacob (1976) (both of whom draw heavily on the work of Georges Canguilhem), for now classical theses about life’s “invention” at 1800, premised on a deepening cleft between organic and inorganic nature. On the ascendancy of epigenesis over preformation theories by 1800 and the Romantic turn toward organicism, see Roe’s definitive history (1981), as well as Müller-Sievers (1997), Richards (2002), Reill (2005) and Packham (2012). Indebted to the distance Roe and Reill put between “epigenesis” and “self-organization,” and to Müller-Sievers’s critique of organicist ideology, I would add that Romantic epigenesis theory was not monolithic: it cannot be uniformly identified with strong-form organicism, and non-Kantian alternatives persisted alongside and after Kant. On the disciplinary autonomy and institutionalization of biology, see Nyhart (1995, pp. 1–64); on the supposed impasse of mechanical explanation see Roger (1963)—for hints to the contrary, see Wolfe (2010).
Extremely valuable studies that equate Romantic science with organicism include Armstrong (2003), Cunningham and Jardine (1990), Hamilton (2009), Gasking (1967), Roe (1981), Reill (2005), and Zammito (2006a, 2012); Burwick (1987) is an important but largely unheeded exception. Müller-Sievers (1997), Gigante (2009), Pfau (2010) and Mensch (2013) exemplify a tendency, even among important and high-quality studies, to use “epigenesis” and “self-organization” interchangeably. Kant’s preeminence in this literature has much to with the interdisciplinary labor of reconstituting “Romantic Science”—once a contradiction in terms—as a worthy object of study between the now separate domains of literature, science, and philosophy. It is a matter of extraordinary interdisciplinary convenience that the two wings of the Critique of the Power of Judgment conjoin a serious philosophy of biology to the aesthetic philosophy most frequently summoned to explain European “Romanticism” as an artistic exigency—all with the rigor and prestige of the critical Kant, to whom humanists are indebted for their very notion of critique.
On the Recherches and their importance as the expression of Lamarck’s “transformist synthesis” to which the contemporary scientific community responded, see Corsi (1988, pp. 121–185).
I use the adjective “epigenesist” rather than “epigenetic” in order to avoid anachronistically conflating the science of epi-genesis, which preceded the advent of molecular genetics, with the science of epi-genetics, which has built upon and revised molecular genetics since the middle of the twentieth century. Such a distinction is required in order to specify the historical and theoretical relationship between epigenesis and epigenetics, which is one concern of the present article and topical collection.
In addition to specific responses to Lenoir (Richards 2000, 2002; Zammito 2006a, b, 2012), note the steady stream of publications devoted to Kant and the life sciences, including edited collections (Steigerwald 2006a, b; Huneman 2007a, b, c), individual papers (Van de Vijver 2006; Helbig and Nassar 2016), and monographs (Mensch 2013; Huneman 2008).
See Zammito’s similar suggestion vis à vis Kant’s epistemological constraint of biological rationality to heuristic status: “Kant is harbor for those who seek epistemological shelter from the hard problems of ‘function talk’ and naturalism” (2006a, p. 766).
Operating at the center of the English “Lunar Society,” an influential midlands network of savants (including the likes of Joseph Priestley, Thomas Beddoes, Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Mathew Boulton, Josiah Wedgewood, and James Keir), Erasmus Darwin’s inventions and publications (in poetry and prose) spanned botany, geology, chemistry, optics, mineralogy, industrial engineering, pedagogy and comparative mythology (Uglow 2002; McNeil 1987; Golinski 1992; Bewell 1989b, 2009; Heringman 2004; Jackson 2009; Goodman 2012; Kelley 2012). A young Samuel Taylor Coleridge lauded Darwin as “the first literary character in Europe” (King-Hele 1977, p. 260), but in fact, the precise extent of Darwin’s European influence has yet to be reconstructed. Zoonomia was translated, in short order, into German, French, Italian, and Portuguese; Darwin’s reception in the “Göttingen School” is attested by the two-volume work that Blumenbach’s student Christoph Girtanner devoted to the “the Darwinian system” in 1799. See Girtanner (1799); and, on Girtanner’s Kant-reception, Zammito (2003).
Consider, in this context, William Harvey’s searching last chapter of Of Generation, which speculates that the best way to clarify his provisional theory of epigenesis might be to take seriously the common impressionability of the brain and the uterus, both of which are capable of retaining forms and making conceptions (1653, pp. 539–566). On this specific analogy in Harvey in connection to the wider role that analogy plays in Renaissance natural philosophy and epistemology, see Goldberg (2013).
Two caveats to the term “neural.” First, we must, with Darwin, “distribute” the neural “over every part of the body,” refraining from the temptation to figure it as anatomically residing in the brain: “for the medullary substance of the brain not only occupies the cavities of the head and spine, but passes along the innumerable ramifications of the nerves” (Darwin 1794, p. 10). Second, we must understand that, with Whytt and against Haller, Darwin conceived the nervous system as continuous with the fibrous parts of the body, which was also to establish a continuum between the faculties of “irritability” and “sensibility” that other physiologists kept apart. The medullary substance of the nervous system, Darwin argues, “lays aside its coverings, and is intermixed with the slender fibres, which constitute [the] muscles and organs of sense” (Darwin 1794, p. 10).
I am thinking primarily of Catharine Malabou’s influential engagement with epigenetic plasticity from the perspective of continental philosophy (Malabou 2016), and of Developmental Systems Theory, both of which are discussed in the conclusion. At the intersection of the cybernetic tradition and the autopoiesis of Maturana and Varela, contemporary “Second-Order Systems Theory,” meanwhile, abjures “any naive conception of autonomy as the absolute self-sufficiency of a substantial subject,” especially under ecological pressure. It nonetheless (openly and rigorously) defines its conception of emergence as autopoetic self-organization for which “operational closure” is the prerequisite to relation (Clarke and Hansen 2009, pp. 7, 9–10). See also Feltz et al. (2006).
Zammito regularly and forcefully points out Kant’s persistent hostility to epigenesis and the fact that the third Critique “made epigenesis over into Kant’s variant of preformation”—but nonetheless accepts “self-organization” into his definitions of epigenesis and is not troubled by Herder’s dismissal of the term “Epigenesis” in the Ideen, which is characterized as the source of Kant’s exposure to an epigenesis “too radical for his taste” (2007, pp. 60, 54, e.g.; 2003, p. 88). Huneman casts “generic preformation” as “moderate epigeneticism” (2006, 2008), though as Kant himself points out, the compromise might as well be called “moderate preformationism.” See also Huneman’s interesting interpretation of Wolff’s vis essentialis as an “epistemological requisite” in the Kantian vein (Huneman 2007b, 2008).
The next two paragraphs summarize an argument made at greater length in Goldstein (2017).
Now, it is undeniable that some of Harvey’s formulations about the cause of epigenesis retroactively fit the paradigm of “self-organization”: for instance, Harvey writes of a “formative faculty” that “aquires and prepares its own material for itself” (see Zammito 2007). But other, less frequently quoted formulations narrate the embryonic body as passively “constituted out of the same matter, by which it is sustained and augmented.” Here the circular causality of epigenesis is told from the perspective of the nutritive matter as it “takes some shape,” thereby engendering the organism whose body it builds: “so soon as there is a Nutriment, there is a creature to be nourished” (Harvey 1653, pp. 222–228).
For an overview, see Van Speybroeck et al. (2002).
“For there is nothing in nature (as a sensible being) the determining ground of which, itself found in nature, is not always in turn conditioned; and this holds not merely for nature outside of us (material nature), but also for nature inside of us (thinking nature)—as long as it is clearly understood that I am considering only that within me which is nature” (§84, 302).
“Now we have in the world only a single sort of beings whose causality is teleological, i.e. … represented by themselves as unconditioned and independent of natural conditions but yet as necessary in itself” (§84, 302).
In aesthetic judgment, “One must not be in the least biased in favor of the existence of the thing,” since “what matters is what I make of this representation in myself” (Kant 2000, p. 91).
On the threat of naturalization represented by epigenesist science (above all in the person of Herder), see Zammito (2003, 2006a) and Helbig and Nassar (2016), who argue that what Kant borrows from Blumenbach in making analogies about the “self-organization” of reason between the first and third Critiques is above all the tactic of placing an enabling boundary between specific domains of inquiry. Just as Blumenbach declared a radical separation between organic and inorganic entities, thereby securing biology its independence from physics, Kant separates the domain of reason from the domain of nature, thereby securing metaphysics its independence as a domain of study. Metaphysics is thus “self-forming” and “self-born” in the sense that it is not engendered by natural forces and therefore not susceptible to naturalistic explanation (p. 106).
See Lamarck (1809) and Williams (1994); though beyond the scope of this article, at stake is a tradition that extends into the “Organic Selection” theory of James Mark Baldwin and his interlocutors. Erasmus Darwin stresses that, this being generation and not Creation, the embryo is not strictly “a new animal.” Since “part of the embryon-animal is, or was, a part of the parent,” it arrives on the scene of generation with a touch of experience. As Darwin puts it, the embryo “may retain some of the habits of the parent system”—another phrase worth pausing over for the epigenesist path it charts outside both preformation and sheer self-making (Darwin 1794, p. 480).
See Oyama (1985) for the theory of “ontogeny of information” that constitutes perhaps the most lucid, late twentieth-century elaboration of this longstanding relationship.
In fact, the “nerve structure” provided by Hallerian physiology, as Herder apostrophized it in 1778, offered nothing less than “a medium of sensation for the minded human being”– a phrase whose bodily commitment might outstrip the present day language of “embodiment” to affirm that the “delicate silver bonds” of the nervous system in fact en-mind the body they never cease to be (Herder 2002a, b, p. 205).
Compare Goldstein (2014) for this dimension of Herder’s approach to sensation and cognition.
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This is an Original Research Article destined for the Topical Collection "Sketches of a conceptual history of epigenesis" guest edited by Charles Wolfe and Antonine Nicoglou.
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Goldstein, A.J. Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology. HPLS 40, 13 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0168-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0168-8