The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.06.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A historical and philosophical evaluation of the concept of organism.

  • Examination of the organism as metaphysical and as empirical concept.

  • Suggestion that the organism is an ontological go-between.

  • Presentation of the organism as hybrid, boundary, and limit-case.

Abstract

The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles—sometimes overt, sometimes masked—throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life, but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene, but also, historiographically, as part of an outdated ‘vitalism’. Indeed, the organism, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the ‘body’ than to the ‘molecule’, is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, sometimes even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature, while other approaches reject or attack it with equal force, assimilating it to a mysterious ‘vitalist’ ontology of extra-causal forces, or other pseudo-scientific doctrines. This paper does not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either in terms of scientific validity or historical coherence; nor does it return to the well-studied issue of the organism–mechanism tension in biology. Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the emergence and transformation of the concept of organism, but has not emphasized so much the way in which organism is a shifting, ‘go-between’ concept—invoked as ‘natural’ by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others, over and against the natural world. The organism as go-between concept is also a hybrid, a boundary concept or an epistemic limit case, all of which partly overlap with the idea of ‘nomadic concepts’. Thereby the concept of organism continues to function in different contexts—as a heuristic, an explanatory challenge, a model of order, of regulation, etc.—despite having frequently been pronounced irrelevant and reduced to molecules or genes. Yet this perpetuation is far removed from any ‘metaphysics of organism’, or organismic biology.

Introduction

The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles—sometimes overt, sometimes masked—throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very ‘valuative’ or normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social (Canguilhem, 2002, Gissis, 2009). Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life (for instance, in the sense that biology is a science of organisms or is nothing; Grene & Depew, 2004). Similarly, at a more conceptual level, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the ‘body’ than to the ‘molecule’, the organism is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, perhaps even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature (from Hegel onwards, and explicitly with thinkers such as Kurt Goldstein and, with more metaphysical investment, Hans Jonas; see Wolfe, 2004, Wolfe, 2010). Conversely, it has also been the target of some influential rejections, classically in Dawkins' vision of the organism as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene (Dawkins, 1976), but also, at a historiographic level, as a denunciation of ‘vitalism’ in the history of science (Schiller, 1978) or, as Laublicher has noted, in the kinds of attacks that go beyond scientific claims and counter-claims (Laubichler, 2000), assimilating its concept to a mysterious ‘vitalist’ ontology of non-causal forces, or some other ‘pre’- or ‘pseudo’-scientific doctrine; or at least, “a highly contestable notion” (Sterelny & Griffiths, 1999, p. 173). Biologists of a reductionist persuasion will target any notion of a ‘force’, ‘principle’ or other transcendent ground which causes physical and chemical processes in the body while itself being extra-causal, uncaused, immaterial.

Here, I do not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either in terms of scientific validity or historical coherence; nor do I return to the classic issue of the organism–mechanism tension which has particularly been studied in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century biology (Allen, 2005, Hein, 1972). It has been observed that we have numerous histories of genetics, but no history of organism (Laubichler, 2000). We have studies of the emergence and displacements of the term (Cheung, 2006) but not of the shifts in concepts of organism as parts or foundations of a science (Peterson, 2010 is a step in this direction, for twentieth-century organicism). Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the transformation of the concept of organism (Huneman & Wolfe, 2010), but there is an aspect that has not been emphasized so much (except perhaps under the heading of ‘metaphors of organism’ in Schlanger, 1971): the way in which organism is a shifting, ‘go-between’ concept—invoked as ‘natural’ by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others over and against the natural world. It can also be described as a hybrid (sometimes expressing a kind of complex mechanistic view, sometimes a foundational subjectivity), a “boundary concept” or “trading zone” (Galison, 1999, Star and Griesemer, 1989). The organism concept also often deliberately shifts, whether we call this a nomadic concept or, in my terms, an ontological go-between, between metaphysical and empirical levels of discussion—something that both metaphysicians and historians of biology often miss sight of.

Which hybridity is at issue, and what do I understand by the organism as ontological go-between? One might think that the former refers to the diversity of its meanings, uses, metaphors and reference points. And indeed, diversity, metaphor and reference all have a distinguished pedigree in our efforts at conceptualizing the history of science. Evelyn Fox Keller has emphasized (with reference to Max Black) that metaphor “can serve important positive functions in scientific explanations” (Keller, 2003, p. 118). She uses the language of productivity: “metaphoric utterances can be scientifically productive just because they open up new perspectives on phenomena that are still obscure and ill-defined and about which clarification is achieved only through a process of groping—in other words, on the kinds of phenomena that scientists take as the objects of their investigations” (Keller, 2003). Yet it is not enough to insist on the presence of metaphors in scientific cognition. Precisely as regards the productivity of concepts such as organism, we need to add at least two further dimensions to Fox Keller's defense of the role of metaphors. A useful further suggestion is Mieke Bal's, that concepts are “tools of intersubjectivity” (Bal, 2002, p. 22); they do more than metaphors, because “they offer miniature theories, and in that guise, help in the analysis of objects, situations, states and other theories” (Bal, 2002).

But if we were to follow this line of thought, we would be completely blind to the polemical dimension of the organism concept: it is much less about consensus and more about trying to insist on something missing from scientific practice. In addition, neither the insistence on the positive role of metaphors in science, nor the focus on “traveling concepts” can yield any sense of the problem of the organism's ontological status, whether in the traditional sense of the organism as biological individual, or the sense of organism as ontological go-between. To be fair, Bal seems to identify some aspect of the latter when she speaks of the “propagation of a concept that emerges in one field, in another field that changes its meaning and whose meaning it, in turn, changes, constitutes the primary feature of a concept, both as asset and liability, or risk” (Bal, 2002, p. 32). Yet propagation is still not enough. Because part of the ‘go-between’ quality I would like to bring out in what follows, leads us to ask: is the variety of meanings and references of ‘organism’ an epistemic issue? A confirmation that we should be content to be instrumentalists in science and not ascribe any innate reality to the entities under discussion? And if, in contrast, it enters into ontology, in what sense? I will suggest that we need to include under the heading of the organism's ontological status, both some of its conceptual productivity via its hybridity, and its historical diversity (which typically would serve as an excuse for the instrumentalist to ignore or bracket off ontological considerations). It is a “limit case,” not per se an object of inquiry “in the day-to-day operations of the scientist in the laboratory,” but rather the reflection, “sometimes quite philosophical, regarding scientific issues that do not adhere to the usual stipulations of empirical warrant. Yet they are issues which scientists feel compelled to make pronouncements regarding them” (Peterson, 2012). Indeed, Peterson mentions, in addition to matter itself, and human cognition, the nature of organisms as one of these limit cases. The concept of organism is never pure or analytically unresolvable. It is always partly constructed or modified or borrowed from elsewhere, including when its asserted in its valuative terms, over and against ‘mechanistic science’, or ‘atomism’, ‘reductionism’ and other equally elastic and often ideological categories. It shifts between realms, but it is also a hybrid in esse.

Section snippets

The hybridity of the concept of organism, which functions alternatively as a polemical concept, a model of order or of regulation, an explanatory challenge, and more broadly, as what I'll call an ontological go-between, can serve as a defense of the concept, by showing that it continues to be productive, as a heuristic, but also precisely as something other than a construct or metaphor, in different contexts despite having frequently been pronounced ‘caduc’, irrelevant, reduced to molecules or

From the heyday of psychophysics in the nineteenth century to the triumphant reductionist proclamations of biochemists such as Emil Du Bois-Reymond and Jacques Loeb in the next generations, for whom life had to be a matter of biochemistry (thus Loeb insisted on the unlimited scope of biochemical explanations: “we cannot allow any barrier to stand in the path of our complete control and thereby understanding of vital phenomena” (cit. in Allen, 2005, p. 273; see Loeb, 1964)), we often encounter

While Stahl insists on the ontological uniqueness of organism, Leibniz, for whom “everything in nature is to be explained mechanically” (Leibniz, first essay on Stahl, 1708, cited from the bilingual edition in Carvallo, 2004, p. 73) and who often explains bodies in terms of size, shape and motion, discusses organisms as particular, but special cases of a mechanical universe: he calls them “machines of nature,” which he defines as machines in their most minute parts (“moindres parties”),

Machine and organism are in interplay here, with the concept of organism being articulated, partly (in Leibniz) or wholly (in Stahl), in contradistinction to the concept of machine, with at least two different dimensions involved. One is the type of individuality that is being argued for: what kind of individual is the organism? Indeed, all or most theories of organism attempt to justify the existence of a particular kind of individuality. For Claude Bernard, “the physiologist and the physician

In this back and forth movement of definitions between living body and machine, including multiple degrees and gradations of both, where the mechanical model is ‘frontloaded’ with increasingly chemical and biological features, and the models of the living body incorporate a variety of mechanistic and structural features, it is hard to distinguish clearly between the metaphysical level and what we would today call the scientific level. This is also the case when the model takes an existing

Conclusion

Rather than seeking to articulate an organism concept on a strictly empirical basis (including in the ‘organizational’ sense developed in Wolfe, 2010), I have tried to do so by insisting on what I have called its hybridity and its status as an ‘ontological go-between’. Usually, the concept of hybridity refers to a condition or state (notice how the potential dynamism within such a condition will then most likely fade into the background) of impurity, whereby there is a co-existence or

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Claudia Alexandra Manta, Adam Ferner, and Anya Plutynski for their suggestions and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

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