Naturalising Purpose: From Comparative Anatomy To The Adventure of Reason'

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

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Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. xxx (2006) xxxxxx
Naturalising purpose: From comparative anatomy to the adventure of reason

Philippe Huneman
Institut dHistoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS), 13 rue du Four, 75006 Paris, France
Abstract Kants analysis of the concept of natural purpose in the Critique of judgment captured several features of organisms that he argued warranted making them the objects of a special eld of study, in need of a special regulative teleological principle. By showing that organisms have to be conceived as self-organizing wholes, epigenetically built according to the idea of a whole that we must presuppose, Kant accounted for three features of organisms conated in the biological sciences of the period: adaptation, functionality and conservation of forms. Kants unitary concept of natural purpose was subsequently split in two directions: rst by Cuviers comparative anatomy, that would draw on the idea of adaptative functions as a regulative principle for understanding in reconstituting and classifying organisms; and then by Goethes and Georoys morphology, a science of the general transformations of living forms. However, such general transformations in nature, objects of an alleged archaeology of nature, were thought impossible by Kant in 80 of the Critique of judgment. Goethe made this adventure of reason possible by changing the sense of explanation: scientic explanation was shifted from the investigation of the mechanical processes of generation of individual organisms to the unveiling of some ideal transformations of types instantiated by those organisms. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Georges Cuvier; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Morphology; Adaptation; Organism; Explanation
In his classic book Form and function, E. S. Russell conceived the history of biology as torn between two poles: the concept of formanatomy-oriented biologyand the
E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Huneman). 1369-8486/$ - see front matter 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2006.09.004
Please cite this article as: Philippe Huneman, Naturalising purpose: From comparative anatomy ..., Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. (2006), doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2006.09.004
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concept of functionphysiology-oriented biology.1 The famous GeoroyCuvier debate over the possible unity of plans across the animal world, later analysed by Toby Appel, can be (and has been) interpreted in those terms.2 Here I show the fruitfulness of considering how Kants philosophy of biology can be situated in this framework. This will lead to some interesting results concerning form and function in biology, and the fate of the main Kantian ideas in the nineteenth century. I will argue that Georges Cuviers zoology, as well as Goethe and Etienne Georoy Saint-Hilaires morphology, the two sides of the formfunction debate, inherited some of the features of the Kantian theory. The basic claim is that purposiveness, in a Kantian sense, can be elaborated either in a formal sense, or in a functional sense; and whereas the latter meaning was instantiated by Cuviers comparative anatomy, the former meaning was developed in Goethes morphological work. The poet intended such a liation when he said retrospectively that he initiated the adventure of reason that Kant explicitly prohibited in 80 of his Critique of judgment. I will rst briey sketch some major points of the Kantian thesis regarding organisms, and then I will follow its inuences on Cuviers comparative anatomy. Secondly, I will address the notion of type involved in the Kantian concept of archaeology of nature, and trace its development in the idea of morphology, as it was conceived and realised rst by Goethe and then by Georoy. This will show how, by turning the word archaeology from a mechanicalreal to a processideal meaning, the Kantian adventure of reason was eventually undertaken.3 1. Kants theory of the organism First, I will sketch Kants ideas of natural purpose and organisms, and how they were related to the state of biological sciences at the end of the eighteenth century, by showing how they were connected to his theories of races and heredity. This will allow me to understand how in the third Critique purposiveness became a transcendentally legitimate concept able to capture three features of organisms, namely adaptation, function and inheritable form. The very concept of an organized being [organisierte Wesen] should be located in the metaphysical context of Kants concept of purpose. Kants speculation on organized beings was continuously concerned with this problem of purposiveness, for which he nally found a solution in the third Critique. Since his precritical texts, Kant had emphasized the need for a non-mechanistic understanding of the phenomena manifested by organized beings, not satised with the extant theories vindicating the mechanistic stance, such as formulated by Albrecht Haller or Herman Boerhaave. In the Only proof of the existence of God (1763), he rejected accounts of generation which rested on Newtonian laws of nature applied to preformed germs, arguing that no really scientic theory of epigenesis existed (the ones proposed by Pierre-Louis Maupertuis or Georges-Louis Le Clerc Buon were not intelligible).4 In the Dreams of a ghost seer (1766) he found mechanical
Russell (1916). Appel (1987). 3 Reill (2005), Ch. 5, suggests a genealogy of the adventure of reason that parallels the one here sketched, but also emphasizes other arguments, mostly pertaining Naturphilosophie. 4 Kant (1910), Vol. 2, p. 114.
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physiology correct from a methodological point of view, but asserted that it missed the point that was settled by Georg Ernest Stahls Theoria medica vera (1708),5 namely, the uniqueness of the organic realm, while pointing out that Stahls theory as such was not rational enough.6 Kant tried to ll this gap between what was oered as scientic explanations and what is required for a proper understanding of organisms, with some works in the eld of physical geography. Here he needed to work through the concept of human species, which was a natural-historical one at the time. As is well known, Kant elaborated his own theory of generation in his essays on race (from 1775 onwards), alongside contemporary works by Caspar Wol and Friedrich Blumenbach.7 Kants theory had both a Buonian characterfocusing on the denition of races, and suggesting a mechanism in order to explain their appearanceand a Blumenbachian charactersince it asserted an epigenesis disposed to reach a type.8 It characterized germs and dispositions (Keime und Anlagen) as reproductive powers inherited by the ospring of an individual. Germs indicate the future features of organisms, and sound a little more preformationist than the dispositions, which indicate the ability to respond to a potential milieu. Phillip Sloan (2002) distinguishes between a strong preformationism, defended by Nicolas Malebranche and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, which made use of the concept of germs, germs being like individual shapes pre-existing in the zygote, and a weaker form of preformationism, the one of Charles Bonnet and Haller, which made use of predispositions rather than germs.9 But in any case, both concepts were used by Kant to provide an epigenetic answer to the problems of the conservation and the variation of form through the generations. Both the process of generation and the criterion for races are concerned with such concepts. A race has to be something robust across the generations, so, when it is mixed with another race, the result has to consist of something from each of them. That is why the outcome of any racial interbreeding has always to be a half-breed: this indicates that something from the reproductive power of each race is conserved through the generations. Reciprocally, the criterion for races, such as skin colour, must be a hereditary trait which is constantly mixed when we cross two races. Kant emphasized the dierence between skin colour, which is a race criterion, and hair colour, which can persist or disappear when an individual of a given hair colour mixes with an individual of another hair colour and hence is contingent regarding the race.10 This means that the germs and dispositions, from which a determinate race stems, are preserved despite external inuences. In contrast with Buon and Blumenbach, who thought that the diversity of races could be derived from a single one by the action of environment (and, above all, climate), Kant thought that the races
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For example in the preliminary essays, such as On the dierence between organism and mechanism. Kant (1910), Vol. 2, p. 331. 7 Among several papers on Kants theory of generation, see Lenoir (1980), Richards (2000), Zammito (2007, Forthcoming), and Huneman (2007, Forthcoming). 8 Briey stated, while Wol in his Theorie generationis (1758German edition, Theorie der Generation, 1763) insisted on a generalized vis essentialis that would underpin the whole developmental process in the living world, Blumenbach conceived of an epigenesis directed by a Bildungstrieb, for example a Trieb directed towards the formation, Bildung, of an individual of a special type. He explains those dierences in his 1789 essay Uber das Bildungstrieb, published together with an essay of Wol and one of Born in Zwei Abhandlungen. See Blumenbach (1792), pp. 2629. 9 On germs and dispositions, see Sloan (2002). 10 Determination of the concept of human race, Kant (1910), Vol. 8, p. 100.
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are produced by the activation of some germs inherent in their reproductive power, and according to the situation.11 What shall propagate, must already have been posited in the reproductive force, as an antecedent determination for an occasional development, adequate to the circumstances in which the creature could be engaged and in which it has constantly to maintain itself.12 Circumstances and climate are only occasions of the manifestation of hidden dispositions. Therefore, Kants conception of races, and hence of the preservation of form through reproduction, is at the same time a logic of adaptation. Dierent races of a species, placed in dierent lands and circumstances, manifest dierent features, each tting those dierent circumstances. This is adaptation, and can be explained by the activation of the proper disposition, in each race stem, by the milieu. The set of germs and dispositions is an original organization [originar Organization],13 transmitted to every generation, and able to adapt the beings to new circumstances, given that this stem includes the requisite dispositions.14 The third Critique formulates the concept of natural purpose, in order to elucidate the possibility of such a theory. Briey, a natural purpose is a peculiar kind of relationship between a whole and its parts, in which we judge (in a reective manner) the whole to condition the form and relations of the parts, and does it in a kind of epigenetic manner, meaning that those parts build themselves from themselves according to this whole. Certainly, the dependence of the parts on the whole obtains also in the case of a watch. But in natural entities the parts produce themselves and the other parts according to the whole (65).15 This product of nature, being organized [like a watchpurposiveness] and organizing itself [contrary to a watchnaturally], is called a natural purpose. The original organization of the essays on race becomes, here, the idea of a whole, which has to be posited by us, as a principle of cognition [Erkenntnisgrund], at the origin of the living thing.16 We can not understand the functioning of an organism unless we presuppose an idea of the whole that constrains the forms and relationships of the parts; and we can not understand the emergence of an organism unless we presuppose this idea, as an original organization that governs how the parts produce the whole and the other parts. But this presupposition of a whole is required by our cognition, and, hence, is internal to our faculty of judgment. Notice that if it were a real causal principle, it would be a technical production, not a natural purpose.17 A real causal principle would be the plan of a designer, and we describe the entire process as proceeding from this plan to the actual product. Yet in the case of natural purposes, it is necessary and sucient that the idea
On this issue see Huneman (2005), pp. 107120. On the dierences between human races, Kant (1910), Vol. 2, p. 435; my translation. 13 On this issue, see Zammito (2007, Forthcoming). 14 For example, some of those dispositions that dene race, pre-adapt people to distinct climates. See Alix Cohen (in this issue): she characterizes this part of the doctrine as epigenesis of multiple predispositions. 15 Put in modern terms, Kants concept means that cells produce themselveswhich is a natural productivity but that the cells they produce are subordinated to the wholefor example. a cell in a muscle will give a muscle cell rather than a brain cell. Subordination to the whole alone is not enough to understand this production, since it obtains also for machines, but without the subordination to the whole the productivity of cells is not understandable, and is not even describable. 16 See Kant (1910), Vol. 2, p. 418; my translation. 17 The whole does not determine the part as a causebecause then it would be a product of artbut as a principle of cognition of the systematic unity of the form and the binding of all the plurality [nicht als Ursache denn da ware es ein Kunstproduktsondern als Erkenntnisgrund der systematischen Einheit der Form und Verbindung alles Mannigfaltigen] (lbid., Vol. 5, p. 365).
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of a whole is thought as a cause by us. We judge how the organized being organizes itself under this idea of the whole as a principle of cognition, which means that parts cause each other according to a kind of production for which we have no analogue either in nature or in our technical productions (see the end of 65). Indeed, according to the familiar Kantian distinction, we can conceive of this causation but we cannot really know it. Kant used the term formative force rather than the usual motive forces of physics to account for this production.18 He attempted here a sort of deduction, from the transcendental differences between organism and mechanism to those forces overwhelmingly used by contemporary scientists when they addressed living entitiesforces such as Wols vis essentialis or Blumenbachs Bildungstrieb, or the vital forces of the physiologists from the end of the nineteenth century such as Johann Glauber, Thomas Unzer, Jiri Prochaska or even Haller.19 I thus support Reills (2005) contention that Kants Critique of judgment belongs to the program of those who have come to be called Enlightenment vitalists (even if program has to be taken in a very loose way).20 However, Kant was the rst to see the need of a philosophical justication of those concepts (and the subsequent need for sorting good and bad uses of them). He maintained that what matters is the form of the argumentwhich goes from the elucidating concept of natural purpose to the recognition that organisms are those entities in the world to which it applies, and, nally, to the distinction between formative and motive forcesrather than using the concept of formative forces actually to identify organisms. Hence, the epigenetic character of organized beings is derived from the necessities of our cognition of organisms.21 It is important to note that the vocabulary of dispositions and germs, albeit relevant for Kants theory of generation and heredity in the essays on race, is absent from the third Critique.22 This fact is signicant because the project in the Critique is dierent from the biological theory stated in the precritical essays on race. In his critical work Kant theorized about the justication and the limits of such a biological theory. It could even be argued that his rethinking of those theories was one incentive for writing the third Critique, since the kind of science presented in the earlier essays contrasted with the physical sciences, the transcendental analysis of which he gave in the rst Critique and the Metaphysical foundations of natural science (1786). Rather than a theory of generation of the kind put forward in the essays on race, the third Critique considers the possibility of any theory of this kindwhence the dierence of lexicon. Kants thinking on epigenesis warrants particular attention. In 81 of the Critique of judgment he advocated generic preformationism, as opposed to either individual preformationism (which is classical preformationism) or epigeneticism.23 Generic means here that the dispositions and germs proper to a species are basically already present at the
For this distinction see McLaughlin (1990) Ch. 2. Deduction here is not to be taken in Kants technical sense, however it retains the idea that this argumentation is supposed to entail both the legitimacy of some uses of the concept, and a demarcation between legitimate and illegitimate uses of it. 20 Reill (2005). 21 This is the central point of 77 of the Critique of judgment. For commentary see Huneman (2007b, Forthcoming), Ch. 9. 22 One might nd some occurrences, such as Kant (1910), Vol. 5, p. 420, but its not as pervasive as in the Essays on races. 23 For an interpretation of generic preformationism dismissive of any account of Kant as an epigeneticist on the same lines as Blumenbach, see Zammito (2007, Forthcoming).
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beginning of embryogenesis, and their relationship with the environment provides the guidelines for the embryogenetic process, even if the mechanisms at stake in this process are to be explained in natural physical terms. Compared to classical preformationism, according to which God created the individuals as miniatures that are later unfolded through the mechanical laws of nature, Kant was closer to epigeneticism, according to which individuals are clearly a result of a process of development and display a kind of relationship between their parts which is precisely not the development governed by mechanical laws. But compared to radical epigeneticism, Kant held a unique position since he contended that embryo-environment interactions alone are not likely to explain embryogenesis: he supported a moderate epigeneticism rather than the radical epigeneticism that we nd by Herder or even by Caspar Wol. It is important to recall that at the time epigeneticism was bound to spontaneous generation; radical epigeneticism implied spontaneous generation.24 Kant absolutely rejected spontaneous generation, however, because it implied that the dispositions and germs within organisms are mechanically caused, and that the fundamental distinction between occasional and ecient causes of varieties (which lies at the basis of the concept of species), and hence the dierence between species and varieties and thus the boundaries of species, would vanish. This means that he excluded every version of epigeneticism that would lead to spontaneous generationas has been made clear by John Zammito.25 Herders idea of a plastic force was the prime example of such a speculation. This kind of radical epigeneticism implied the denial of two epistemological boundaries: the boundary between organized and unorganized beings; and the boundary between species. Kant held that the boundary between species is a requisite of reason, as is indicated in the Appendix of the Transcendental dialectic of the rst Critique, since without the conservation of species there would be no order of nature, no possibility of ascribing natural kinds, and in the end no possibility of comparing empirical things and hence no empirical knowledge at all.26 The review of the rst part of Herders Ideas is explicit about this second issue: As regards the issue of the hierarchy of organisms, its use with reference to the realm of nature here on earth leads nowhere : : : The minuteness of dierences when one compares species according to their similarity is, in view of such a great multiplicity of species, a consequence of this multiplicity. But a parenthood [Verwandschaft] according to which either one species springs from another and all of them out of one original species or as it were they originate from one single generative mother womb, would lead to ideas that are so monstrous that reason shrinks back.27 In eect, reason cannot endorse the perspective of an all pervasive creative force with no limits, and creating freely any kind of species and varieties, since any systematic order of nature would thereby be lost.
The consequence of spontaneous generation was a crucial point of controversy between Haller (who rejected epigeneticism for this reason) and Wol (who implicitly acknowledged that epigeneticism might entail spontaneous generation but did not discuss it explicitly), see Roe (1980). 25 See Zammito (2002), pp. 232 passim. 26 Kant (1910), Vol. 5, A651/B679. 27 Review of Herders Ideen: I, ibid., Vol. 8, p. 52; my translation.
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With regard to the boundary between organized and unorganized bodies, its denial would be as likely to undermine the whole order of nature. In a Lecture on metaphysics, Kant wrote about Leibnizs scala naturae: This is the so-called continuum of forms [continuum formarum], according to the analogy of the physical continuum [continui physici], where the minerals commence the order, which goes through the mosses, lichens, plants, zoophytes through the animal kingdom up to human being. This is nothing more than a dream whose groundlessness Blumenbach has shown.28 Therefore, for Kant the name of Blumenbach represented the discontinuity between organized and unorganized bodies. Since Blumenbach postulated the Bildungstrieb as inherent in living matter, and conceived the aim of the Bildungstriebthe type realised at the end of the embryogenetic processas immanent to this Trieb, Kant could see in his embryology the perfect example of an epigeneticism within the limits of simple reason.29 Generic preformationism meant moderate epigeneticism, in contrast to both preformationism (Leibniz, Malebranche or Haller30) and radical epigeneticism (Herder). Kants doctrine of organisms implied generic preformism, which is a kind of epigeneticism subordinated to the conservation of forms. Finally, the concept of natural purpose, as presented in the Critique of judgment, concerns three capacities of organisms: functions and the physiological activities of organisms; heredity and the power of conserving forms as original organizations; and adaptation (established by the geographical investigation of the distribution of organisms, as it is indicated by the opportunistic appearance of varieties). The key feature of this tripartite concept, in contrast to traditional notions of teleology applied to physiology and natural history, is its critique of utility. Kant emphasized internal purposiveness as the only legitimate sense of purposiveness, as is made clear in 63 of the Critique of judgment. One might object that utility, in the sense of external purposiveness, is not wholly rejected in the book since from 67 on Kant authorized the use of this concept in the consideration of the nature as a whole. However, those passages have to be read in their context, that is, in the course of Kants argument. His point is not to reject relative purposiveness or utility as such, but to argue that it is not the original meaning and hence the proper use of the concept. Once we have legitimized the concept of purposiveness as internal purposiveness, and stated that some entities do realize it (organisms as self-organizing entities) we can use external purposiveness and see nature as a system of ends, but only as a secondary step of our reasoning, as we see, for example, in 67, 68, 75, 83 and 84. To quote but one passage: Once we have discovered in nature a power to produce products that can be conceived by us only in accordance with the concept of purposes, we are entitled to go further and judge even those things (or their relations, although purposive), which do not render it necessary to look for another principle of their possibility beyond the mechanism of blind ecient causes, as belonging to a system of purposes.31 External purposiveness is only a subordinated sense of purposiveness, which
Ibid., Kant (1910), Vol. 18, p. 762; my emphasis; translation modied from Kant (1997). See Blumenbach (1781). 30 Hallers idea of preformation, like Bonnets, was weaker in the sense that he held that dispositions rather than forms were preformed. However, the point is that in Kants theory dispositions are not only developed by interactions with environment, they are also selected amongst all the dispositions proper to a species, whereas for preformationists the dispositions characterise the individuals and thus must be developed. This is precisely the epigeneticist character that distinguishes Kants generic preformationism from Hallers weak preformationism 31 Kant (1910), Vol. 5, p. 380.
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depends upon the legitimacy of the concept of internal purposiveness. External or relative purposiveness do depend on the fact that some beings in this world full the concept of natural purpose, for example organisms; if there were no organisms, there would be no external purposiveness, but we can not say the reverse. So the course of the argument of the Critique of judgment exhibits stages of decreasing degrees of necessity: internal purposiveness is necessary to do any biological science (or investigations of nature in a world where there are organisms); external purposiveness is necessary when we want to consider nature as a whole on the basis of this biological discourse, and so on. But my only concern here is that the very meaning of purposiveness has changed: its primary feature is not utility (which is relative purposiveness). That is why 6465, which are the crucial sections concerning organisms since they present the purposive character of organized beings, do not use the lexicon of means and ends, but the lexicon of parts and wholes.32 Traditionally, adaptation meant, rstly, that animals are useful to one anothersuch an idea leading to the concept of natural economy as expressed by Linnaeuss school; and, secondly, that the parts of an animal are always useful to it.33 This notion of adaptation provided a double-faced concept of design: organisms are designed, and their design is such because they take part in a general design of nature which prescribes to them the role they have to full. In contrast to this immediate equation of purposiveness and utility, in 66 of the third Critique, means and ends (hence utility) are not independent and primitive concepts in physiology, but their use is subordinated to the fact that entities have previously been judged to be natural purposes, which contains a reference to their epigenetic character.34 That is why in 68 Kant formulated the teleological principle in a strict connexion with heredity: one cannot say immediately that nothing is gratuitous in an organism (as the Critique of pure reason mentioned with regard to physiologists35), but, nothing in an organized being is non-purposive if it is preserved in the beings propagation [Fortpanzung].36 Generally, these utility assertions are not testablethis was emphasised by Kant ever since the Only ground for a proof.37 The question then arises what the criterion of a genuine utility could be, given that most of the presumed accounts of apparent utility can be ruled out as explicable by the eects of natural laws. Here, with the epigenetic ability of each part to produce other parts according to a pattern which is epistemologically necessarily presupposed, we have a robust criterion of nality that avoids utility. Biological teleology is no longer the craft-like or technical conception of a whole like a machine, but is similar to the concept of art: in a living creature, as in a work of art, parts are not useful for anything external to the organism, but their form and relations are necessary, with respect to the whole and also to the other parts. Both are purposive, but with a work of art, we cannot say what it is for, hence its relationship with a putative design is not the same as in craftwork. The design of organisms does not objectively result from intentions, and thus it cannot be reconstructed as designed by an intelligent entity in order to full
On this point see Huneman (2006, Forthcoming). See the texts presented in Limoges (1979). 34 Kant (1910), Vol. 5, p. 376. 35 Kant (ibid., Vol. 3, A688/B716), mentioned that physiologists presuppose that all in an organism has its utility and its intention. This presupposition is precisely what Cunningham has reconstructed as the working hypothesis pervasive in all of classical physiology. See Cunningham (2003). 36 Kant (1910), Vol. 5, p. 420; my translation. 37 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 98.
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some useful role. Even if we are required to conceive of a designer, since the idea of design logically entails the idea of a conceptualizing entity, this idea remains a requisite proper to our cognition, a reective requisite, we do not have to posit an objective designer in reality.38 Since purposiveness is conceived in terms of a relationship between parts and wholes, rather than (as it was earlier) in terms of a relationship between means and ends as in technological purposiveness,39 the conservation of form in organisms can be conceived as a major instance of purposiveness, on a par with adaptation and function. Neutralising utility implies that nality is no longer committed to a demiurgic view of creationa purpose is no longer some designers purposeand thus teleology is in some weak sense naturalised. The idea of a whole is a necessary principle of knowledge: this necessity makes the nality real for biologists, but, as a principle of cognition, this reality is posited by the biologist alone and is not an objective feature of nature like the physical laws (65). And the so-called formative forces which form the original type of an individual are regulative forces, as Larson (1979) has argued, because they are correlated with this epistemological position of an idea of a whole. This idea of a whole could be captured by the concept of norm, which Ginsborg (2001) puts to the fore. I interpret norm as the kind of intelligibility that is not entailed by a mechanical description of the whole process of production. When we consider an embryological process, for instance, we have to make sense of the distinction between a normal processwhen the chicks embryo develops into a chickand a teratological processwhen the same embryo develops into a legless chicken. But since the same laws and the same causes are at stake in the two processes, the laws of the understanding and the mechanical explanation that is based on them cannot make sense of this distinction. Since simply stating that the majority of chickens give rise to chickens is not satisfactory, we have to recognize that norms are immanent to development and pertain to another kind of intelligibility than the mechanical one.40 This second kind will be the teleological stance since we wish to say that the norm is satised when the type chicken is reached by the process. Hence the idea of a whole through which we consider the part is represented in embryology as the type of an embryological process; and this type is a norm. The only visible historical consequence of the Kantian notion of regulative concepts given that the subtleties of Kants position were lost in the development of the German philosophy and science, allowing scientists to refer indierently to Kant and to Schelling, ignoring the huge dierences between their positionsis that the original organization is accepted as an epistemological absolute, upon which the mechanical explanations of development have to be built. According to Ginsborg, this organization has the epistemological status of a norm; this proposition makes it dicult to understand how a norm could fail to be realized, because it seems that the original organization is always there. However, we could consider some partial failures to enact the potentialities within the original organization; those failures would result from mechanical process that, due to external interactions, could not unfold what was in the original germs and dispositions. If the original organization is normative, so that its intelligibility is distinct from one in which the parts are moments of a mechanical process, then it can be argued that there is no contradiction
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Mc Laughlin (1990) states a similar argument by forging a dierence between nal cause and formal cause. On this idea of teleology, see Mc Laughlin (1990), Ch. 1. Lewens (Forthcoming) makes this point in comparing two models of the concept of function.
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between those two legislations, but rather that in any biological judgment they must be articulated together. Yet if the Kantian emphasis on the regulative status of this norm is undermined, as occurred with the scientists considered in the following and even with Blumenbach,41 then the norm becomes an absolute, something that absolutely prescribes the course of processes in nature, so that mechanical processes are, so to speak, deriving from it, rather than merely occurring in accordance with it. The indierence of Kants followers in physiology to the subtleties of his philosophical position explains why the contrast between a so-called teleo-mechanist or Kantian school and the Naturphilosopher is not as clear-cut as Lenoir (1980) wanted it to be.42 But I argue that Kants conception grasped some important features of the developing biological sciences, especially comparative anatomy; many of the dimensions of Kantian teleology were realized there. My claim is that Russells function biology and form biology are two ways of accentuating the Kantian concept of natural purpose, two ways pervasive in nineteenth century comparative anatomy. 2. Cuviers comparative anatomy and teleology I will now show how Cuviers comparative anatomy, that is historically explicitly related to Kants idea of organisms, instantiated the Kantian idea of regulative principles of teleological judgement, proper to the science of living things, in the form of the main principles that zoologists and paleontologists should use. In his Lectures on comparative anatomy (1802) Cuvier invoked Kants denition of an organism, when he stated that the reason of the way of being of each part lies in the whole.43 This quotation is not a chance occurrence. Cuviers biological thinking had been partly formed in a German context: he had studied at the Stuttgarts Caroline academy from 1787 to 1788, and throughout his life maintained a correspondence with Christian Heinrich Pfa, the German professor of medicine and chemistry. In these letters it can be seen that between 1788 and 1790 he speculated in a Blumenbachian manner about the derivation of the races. Cuvier met Carl Friedrich Kielmayer in 1785 and studied dissection with him, and in 1792 he asked Pfa for transcriptions of Kielmayers lectures on physiology. Kielmayer was an important gure in the naturalisation of teleology with his acknowledgement of and classication of forces in the animal reign.44 To establish his allegiance to Kants principles, which he knew very well, however, is dicult solely on the basis of manuscripts of his lectures, yet we can suppose that he taught some Kantian ideas. For Cuvier, comparative anatomy aims at knowledge of the functioning animal. He held that the machines which are the object of our investigations cannot be disassembled without being destroyed.45 Therefore, the comparisons between two species performing the same function dierently enable us to understand what an organs function is and
On this point see Richards (2000). However, Reill (2005) defends the dierence between Kant and Naturphilosophie, arguing that Kant is in a moderate sceptical tradition proper to the Enlightenment that he called Enlightenment vitalism, which reacted to the absolutism of mechanical explanation in natural sciences, and that Naturphilosophie, with its absolute ambition and its totalistic view of nature, broke with this tradition. 43 Cuvier (1805), p. 6; my translation. 44 On Kielmayer and his inuential unpublished discourse of 1794, see Richards (2002), Ch. 3, Reill (2005), pp. 191195, and Coleman (1973). 45 Cuvier (1805), Vol. I, p. v; my translation.
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how this organ functions. In this manner we also see what would follow from the presence and the lack of an organ, and from its union with another organ. For example, animals which have relatively small lungs have a big liver, while insects whose bodies are like a big lung have no liver; Cuvier concluded that the liver removes from the blood its combustible principle.46 So, we can explain functions, and we do that because there is no longer a one to one correspondence between a function and an organ, but two series of correspondences, that between one function (such as locomotion) and several organs in several groups, and that between one organ (such as the anterior member of vertebrates) and several functions. Thereby the gap between structure and function becomes epistemologically productive in establishing the anatomical comparison into a physiological instrument of knowledge.47 But not any combination of organs is possible. All combinations, possible or realised in the animal kingdom, are submitted to the principle of the conditions of existence, which Cuvier added is vulgarly called principle of the nal causes. According to this principle, all the organs concur to a common purpose; hence, the alterations of one of them produce an inuence over all the others.48 This common purpose is the existence of the animal in its milieu. Having to survive, the animal must be able to exert its vital functions in a manner and following an order which are not constrained by the milieu. For example, a carnivorous animal must be able to chew its prey, so it will have teeth, but it must also be able to catch its prey, so it must have prehensile organs and claws, and must move quickly, and see things at a distance. The existence of one physiology function (namely here carnivorous digestive system) entails the corresponding adaptations. But contrary to Ospovat,49 it is not that adaptation is perfect, rather it is that the emphasis on physiological function makes ipso facto its realization perfect: if an animal is to be carnivorous, its organization has to be such and such to full digestive and ingestive functions, and since it will be able to eat meat, its organization must be well tted to catch prey, and hence will be adapted to its milieu. It is not that the animal is held to full a role that is predened, rather it means that its functional coherence is able to cope with its milieu in an adapted manner. The principle of the conditions of existence leads to another principle, the principle of the correlation of parts. The principle is a regulative one, providing a rule for knowledge, be it anatomical or paleontological. Famously, Cuvier showed how he could infer the complete animal from one singular fossil bone in the prologue of the Investigations on the fossil bones of quadrupeds, entitled Discourse on the revolutions of the earth (1805). Of course, his claim was quite exaggerated, but it is clear that, like Kants idea of a whole as Erkenntnisgrund, the principle of the correlation of parts, applied to a part of an animal, makes intelligible the form of the part and its connections to other parts. Cuvier did not claim that the animals are built to reach a goal, but rather that we must presuppose a principle according to which the parts are linked and the functions to which they contribute co-ordinate themselves.
Ibid., p. 5. It is still disputed whether Cuviers concept of function means the fullment of an adaptive role (an interpretation widely defended by Ospovat (1978), and subscribed to by Amundson (2005), pp. 4144, or whether this notion has to be primarily understood in a physiological sense, independently of environmental demands, as claimed by Caponi (2004). See our position below. 48 Cuvier (1817), p. 46; my translation. 49 Ospovat (1978).
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The use of the principle of correlations by Cuvier in reconstructing extinct vertebrates clearly illustrates Kants idea of a regulative principle. The partshere, for example, the bones of the legs and claws or jaware conditioned by the total form of the animal (more precisely, the viable, functioning form). And the necessity that links those parts to the whole is not the same as the causal necessity of mechanismssince there might have been some dysfunctional and abnormal vertebrates in which parts are misconstruedbut is a kind of conceptual necessity. If X is a specic kind of animal, and if a part is so and so and if it is the part of a carnivorous animal in general, then the other parts must be so and so; but nothing in the physical laws of nature guaranteed that this animal had to be viable and live. It is not because it lived that it had its parts correlated in such a way, but it is because its parts were correlated in such a way that it could live. The correlations assumed by the principle of the conditions of existence are necessary correlations that pertain to another kind of necessity than that of the mechanisms of nature. Paleontology as well as comparative anatomy are rational investigations of those specic necessities, neither of which would be possible without such regulative principles. Cuvier thus reassessed the Kantian dismissal of the equivalence of utility and nality in natural history: while Kant threw away relative nality in 63 of the Critique of judgment, Cuviers principle focused on the animal itself as existing, thereby discrediting relative purposiveness in favour of internal purposiveness. The totality of relationships instantiated by an organism is a condition of possible existence in a given milieu: so it is an adaptive structure, articulating adaptive functions oriented towards the proper functioning of a given physiological structure. Here, we meet again the Kantian idea that the regulative principles in biology should ascribe an adaptive dimension to the structures set at the origin of life Kants idea of an original organization, with its adaptive dispositions. Cuvier did not, of course, create comparative anatomy. He made extensive use of Vicq dAzyrs studies in his Discourse on comparative anatomy (1764), particularly the idea that there is a constant conjunction between supercial organs and hidden vital organs, which implied that any classication based on visual criteria had to state actual functional correlations, and, most of all, of Vicqs suggestion that comparative anatomy should not be devoted to the study of external organs, but must takes viscera into account. But Cuvier settled it into the natural teleological framework he inherited through his German formation. Cuvier might be regarded as a follower of Kant. His emphasis on function and adaptation renders his discourse faithful to Kants position. Concerning spontaneous generation, for example, he argued that organic matter is organized from the beginning. This organization is to be conceived not so much as a structure as a kind of motion, what he called tourbillon vital, since he had no real way to describe it with satisfactory concepts. But what is important here is the boundary drawn between organic and inorganic matter, and the fact that the laws of inorganic matter do not allow us to explain or predict the characteristics of organisms, since pure chemistry applied to the tourbillon always tends to its destruction. Cuviers presentation of vital organization is the synthesis of Kants insistence on the boundary between organized and unorganized beings, and Stahls idea of a generalized ght between organic matter and chemistry, which involves a dynamic relation between the organized and the unorganized.50 Regarding generation,
One can see a parallel here to his contemporary Bichat, who argued that life is the set of forces which resist death at the beginning of his Physiological investigations on life and death (Bichat, 1800).
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Cuvier would advocate a kind of epigeneticism close to that of Blumenbach: rstly, because in epigenesis the sets of conditions of existence are articulated in their general features, exactly in the same way that germs and dispositions are articulated in Kants conception, so that external causes can not modify them arbitrarily; and, secondly, because they are given from the beginning, rather than constructed through the eect of the environment according to mechanical laws. Although those questions are not central to comparative anatomy, they would be answered by Cuvier in a quasi Blumenbachian or Kantian manner. More generally Cuviers emphasis on adaptive functions as a regulative principle settled his position on the xity of species. As Ospovat (1978) has argued, Cuviers idea that animals are adapted to their milieu makes unconceivable any transformation of species, as he would argue against Lamarck and later Georoy. Only catastrophesand not a process inherent to living speciescan account for the extinction of prehistoric species. This result ts Kants considerations in the review of Herder. Cuviers argument, relying on the principle of the conditions of existence (that justies ascribing adaptive functions to organisms), and hence on a regulative principle proper to biological knowledge, would not have been disavowed by Kant. However, I will now argue that another interpretation of the regulative judgment would allow gures like Goethe or Schelling and later Georoy Saint-Hilaire to overcome this Kantian caveat. 3. Kants archaeology of nature I will now consider Kants idea of an archaeology of nature, which he incidently mentions in 80 of the third Critique. This discussion marks a shift from his position in the review of Herder and the doctrine of generation and heredity that Kant presented there, because it is implicitly based on a concept of type. This discussion will allow us to understand the reading of Kant undertaken by those, like Goethe, who will be concerned by a science of biological form. In 80 of the Critique of judgment, Kant considered comparative anatomy and the possibility of an archaeology of nature. His point was that the possibility of a real common parenthood between the species is attested by the extensive analogies of form that comparative anatomy unveils, a parenthood that would mean a mechanistic derivation of the entire living realm. The quest for parenthood is justied by the rational requirement for systematicity: according to the Appendix of the Dialectic of teleological judgment, this requirement entails that one has to presuppose and seek Verwandshafte amongst the nat ural entities. Since there are genuine causal relationships between instances of biological varietiesunlike the genera of minerals, for examplethe idea occurs of a system of genera of organisms with causally real (e.g. generational) links. Animal diversity could then be produced by mechanical transformations acting upon a unique pattern or type. The visible morphological homeomorphisms between species are clues to the real processes of transformation: So many genera of animals share a certain common schema on which not only their bone structure but also the arrangement of the other parts seems to be based; the basic outline is admirably simple but yet was able to produce this great diversity of species, by shortening some parts and lengthening others, by the involution of some and the evolution of others. Despite all the variety among those forms, they
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seem to have been produced according to a common archetype, and this analogy among them reinforces our suspicion that they are actually akin; produced by a common original mother.51 This is an archaeology of nature, and seems to reject the transcendental bipartition between teleology and mechanism: apparently, we could reduce teleology to a mechanical production of the multiple species. When the archaeologist of nature considers these points, he is free to have that large family of creatures (for that is how we must conceive of them if that thoroughly coherent kinship among them is to have a basis) arise from the traces that remain of natures most ancient revolutions, and to have it do so according to all the natural mechanisms he knows or suspects. He can make mother earth (like a large animal, as it were) emerge from her state of chaos, and make her lap promptly give birth initially to creatures of a less purposive form, with these then giving birth to others that became better adapted to their place of origin and to their relations to one another, until in the end this womb rigidied, ossied, and conned itself to bearing denite species that would no longer degenerate, so that the diversity remained as it had turned out when that fertile formative force ceased to operate.52 But this archaeology, according to Kant, cannot go further than the rst, simplest, species, so it is still necessary to presuppose an original organization, and thus teleology remains uncorrupted: And yet in giving this account, the archaeologist of nature will have to attribute to this universal mother an organization that purposively aimed at all those creatures, since otherwise it is quite unconceivable how the purposive form is possible that we nd in the products of the animal and plant kingdoms. But if he attributes such an organization to her, then he has only put o the basis for his explanation and cannot pretend to have made the production of those two kingdoms independent of the condition of requiring nal causes.53 Kants target here was spontaneous generation, as a form of radical epigeneticism. In considerations of the history of life, radical epigeneticism is a consequence of theories that conceived races and varieties as created by contingent circumstances: under such a view, there would be no limit to the creation of races or species. Herder was still Kants principal target here, and reading these passages in the Critique of judgment we cannot but remember Herders argument in Ideas for a philosophy of the history of humanity (1784): It is undeniable that given all the dierences of living creatures on the earth, generally a certain similarity of structure or a principal form seem more or less to govern, a form that mutates into multiple varieties. The similar bone structure of land animals is obvious: head, rear, hands and feet are generally the chief parts; indeed the principal limbs themselves are formed according to one prototype and vary in almost innite ways.54
51 52 53 54
Kant (1910), Vol. 5, p. 418; translation modied from Kant (1987), p. 305. Ibid., p. 419; my emphasis; translation modied from Kant (1987), p. 305. Ibid.; translation modied from Kant (1987), p. 305. Herder (1985), Vol. 6, p. 63; my translation.
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It seems that Herder represented for Kant the consequences of theories which regarded varieties as deriving solely from the action of the environment. The paradigm for such theories is Buon; indeed, Kants account of one main argument supporting this Herderian project in 80 is reminiscent of Buons famous paragraph on the natural history of the ass.55 But such a hypothesis has some supporting evidence, so that even the most perspicuous scientists get attracted by it, which becomes for them a daring adventure of reason: a hypothesis like this may be called a daring adventure of reason, and one that has probably entered, on occasion, even the minds of virtually all the most acute natural scientists.56 Kants reconstruction of such a program was twofold. Firstly, he pointed out that it is based on evidence from comparative anatomy: the forms of animals seem to be generated from one another through homeomorphisms. Recall that under the name history of nature [Geschichte der Natur] Kant advocated a consideration of nature viewed through the laws of reproduction and heredity, which establishes real genera (e.g. genera dened by the reproductive criterion), opposing such a theory to a description of nature [Naturbeschreibung] (e.g. Linnaean natural history).57 Incorporating the evidence from comparative anatomy would be an argument for extending the history of nature towards an archaeology, which means a generation of the whole organic nature (and not only races and species) from brute matter. Secondly, Kant considers a kind of Buonian theory of races, which states that the environment causes the transformation of stockshence, races and even species could be generated from one another. It could be argued along these lines that, in the end, the correspondence between environment and races is reached through the purely causal action of environmentto this extent 80 speaks about the emergence of tter varieties (giving birth to others that became better adapted to their place of origin and to their relations to one another58), which suggests some progress. Thus the transformations of forms through homeomorphisms would introduce the idea of a generalized archaeology of nature according to mechanistic laws, with a sort of Buonian theory providing the mechanisms for these developments. But Kant insisted that even such a theory presupposes an original organization and teleology, since it is based upon some initial organisms. Nevertheless, conceptually speaking, the adventure of reason is grounded in the Kantian schema itself: if a species is dened by germs and dispositions, potentially adaptive, found in an original organization, and if the several varieties are dierent subsets variously activated in this organization, we could say the same thing for species compared to a genus, and so on. So it could be expected that the third Critique would examine this hypothesis. Kants argument here, however, is more complex than his previous attack on Herder. A restricted archaeology of nature concerning the species of living beings is transcendentally possible according to his own principles of germs and dispositions, and that a variety might be included in a set of dispositions is ultimately a matter of empirical testing. This
Buon (1753), Ch. VII. Kant (1910), Vol. 5, p. 421; translation modied from Kant (1987), p. 307. 57 For example, see Ueber den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie (ibid., Vol. 8, p. 163), translated in Kant, 2001). 58 Ibid., Vol. 5, p. 419; translation modied from Kant (1987), p. 305.
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is not a priori inconsistent in the judgment of mere reason. So here reason does not shrink back (as he wrote about Herders Ideas). Organized beings generate organized beings: it is generatio univoca, not generation equivoca, which mixes organized and unorganized beings. The question is whether this generation is homonymous or heterogeneous, meaning whether an organization of a given type generates only organization of this type or not. This is strictly an empirical issue; one can empirically assess whether some new features of an organism manifest a set of previously non-manifested dispositions or not. Experience however does not show an example of it. The only generation we know from experience is a generation that is not only univocalas opposed to aequivoca, from unorganized materialbut also homonyma, where the product shares even the organization of what produced it. As far as our empirical knowledge of nature goes, we do not nd anywhere a generatio heteronyma.59 We have no evidence for such a transformation since empirically we only know generation within a species: no one has witnessed individuals of a species giving birth to individuals of another species. Therefore a more radical archaeology, one advocating the transformation of species, is not empirically plausible. Transformationism is transcendentally possible but deprived of any empirical evidence. This paragraph of the Critique of judgment appears less radical than the review of Herders Ideas, because it does not state that an archaeology of nature is impossible. In the third Critique the perceived danger is no longer the suppression of the principle of species as a maxim of order, which would be challenged by a restricted archaeology of nature (e.g. transformism). In eect, the order of nature has already been guaranteed by the demonstration of the autonomy of the reecting power of judgment in the Introduction of the text. The same reecting power of judgment has as its principle the presupposition of the general purposiveness of nature (e.g. its systematicity) and the concept of natural purposes. As long as the concept of natural purpose is preserved, namely, as long as the boundary between organisms and brute matter is not attacked, then the presupposition of systematicityrelying on the same power of reecting power of judgmentremains intact.60 Hence, unlike what Kant said in the review of the Ideas, one can conceive of a restricted archaeology of nature according to mechanical laws, to the extent that this archaeology rests on the presupposition of an original organization. The truth or falsity of such a scientic hypothesis is just a matter of fact. This dierence is a consequence of the shift Kant eected in the
Ibid., p. 421; translation modied from Kant (1987), p. 307. More precisely, since the principle of the purposiveness of nature is given by the reecting power of judgment, we will have a unity of empirical laws. The order of nature is then warranted, and whether or not all the original organizations pertain to one and the same organization, and hence all the species turn out to be races of a single original species, is an empirical question; however, in both cases the organic nature is ensured to be systematic (the question being to what degree). The same reecting power of judgment transcendentally ensures this systematicity and the concept of natural purpose, so no restricted archaeology of nature, that is, no derivation of several kinds of original organization as realizations of natural purposes, can threaten this systematicity (in contrast to Kants argument in the review of Herder). But if there is no natural purpose, if original organization is proved to result from inorganic nature, then we can not rely on this systematicity, and the order of nature is threatened. One might object that natural purposes (hence the discontinuity between organic and inorganic nature) challenge the systematicity of nature, and that this is precisely the problem of the Antinomy. But the fact of natural purposes threatens here another kind of systematicity, the universal system of mechanical laws, which is more a priori, and is not this systematicity established by the power of judgment.
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Critique of judgment when he ascribed the concept of purposiveness to the power of judgment rather than to reason (as in the rst Critique).61 But what is relevant for subsequent developments in the study of organized beings is that Kant grounded the archaeology of nature on comparative anatomy, with his aim being to dismiss any purely mechanical generation of species and whole nature.62 His arguments are precisely the features noted by zoologists: in some species, two bones of a parent species become one by fusion. But, as I am about to show, Kants argument describing the clues for an archaeology of nature that he rejected, will be used by Goethe to initiate this archaeology and then to dare the forbidden adventure of reason. 4. Science of form: reinventing the archaeology of nature I will now show in which manner Goethes project of a science of forms as science of transformations relies on the same premises as Kants idea of archaeology of nature, but nevertheless reaches an opposite result regarding the legitimacy of an adventure of reason, and thereby opens new pathways for morphology, as is attested by Etienne Georoy Saint-Hilaires main achievements.63 A major step in the constitution of a science of form is Goethes botany and zoological morphology and its concept of primordial type or Urtypus. Although Goethes inuence as a scientist is dicult to establish since he was perceived primarily as an artist by his contemporaries,64 he still had scientic disciples, such as Voigt, especially of his Metamorphosis of plants, and his general approach towards the organic world was diused in the general culture of Naturphilosophie. Goethe acknowledged that his program was highly inuenced by Kant: Then the Critique of judgment fell into my hands and with this book a wonderful period came into my life.65 Yet in a retrospective memoir, Goethe said that in the 1790s, together with Herder, he embarked on precisely the adventure of reason that had been prohibited by Kant.66 First of all, it is important to recognize the proximity of Goethe and Kant concerning the idea of organic purposiveness. Goethe shared with Cuvier the rejection of nal causes as considerations of utility. Whereas Cuvier, after Kant, rejected utility as an operative concept, Goethe went even further in this dismissal. He explicitly acknowledged that it was
61 Phillip Sloan (in this issue) defends the view that 80 belongs to Kants progressive distancing of himself from the ideal of a history of nature, and marked a return to his defence of the more traditional Naturbeschreibung. The critical turn, by casting doubt on any account of origins in the Dialectic of teleological judgment, rendered an investigation of the history of organic nature from its beginningshence the very notion of a history of naturequite problematic. However, the case considered by Kant in 80 is very specic, because, with regard to organisms (as opposed to nature in general), the history of nature and the description of nature are not two epistemologically discrete programs: description might be a clue for history, since anities (Verwandschafte, in the Appendix of the Dialectic of teleological judgment) cover some of the causal processes of descent. It is a reworking of the relationships between Naturbeschreibung and Naturgeschichte in the specic case of the organic realm, rather than a re-evaluation of those two programs in general. 62 I use the denition of mechanism from 64, which states that mechanical explanation proceeds from the parts to the whole, notwithstanding the criticisms of Hannah Ginsborg (2004) addresses to McLaughlins interpretation of mechanism along those lines in McLaughlin (1990). 63 On Goethes method, see Amrine, Zucker, & Wheeler (1987), and Richards (2002), pp. 413491. 64 On this issue, see Steigerwald (2002). 65 The inuence of modern philosophy, in Goethe (1995), p. 29. 66 Anschauende Urteilskraft, in Goethe (1987), Vol. XII, pp. 9899, and Goethe (1995), p. 32.
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thanks to the third Critique that the antipathy (he) felt toward ultimate causes was now put in order and justied.67 The contradiction between this relative or external purposiveness (which 63 of the Critique dismissed) and biology is explicitly stated: the progress of natural philosophy has been obstructed for many centuries by the conception that a living being is created for certain external purposes and that its form is so determined by an intentional primal force.68 The language of conditions is substituted for the language of purposes: The statement the sh exists for the water seems to me to say far less than the sh exists in the water and by means of the water. The latter expresses more clearly what is obscured in the former; i.e. the existence of a creature we call sh is only possible under the conditions of an element we call water, so that the creature not only exists in that element, but also develops there.69 This kind of deationist account of purposiveness ties together Cuviers program in comparative anatomy and Goethes morphology, with both being closely concerned with Kants formulation of natural purposiveness, or epistemological purposiveness without transcendent intentions. Goethes concern was to establish the type of living creatures, both in botany and in morphology, and this appears clearly connected to Kants reference to a common archetype mentioned above.70 Goethe started with the desire to nd the primordial plant, the Urpanze he thought he had recognized in the botanical gardens of Palermo.71 He then moved toward the denition of an original form from which all the stages of a plant could be constructed. In fact, the Metamorphose of Plants shows that a leaf can become all of these stages, through some regular transformations; and all the plants as cycles of transforming leaves appear to be deducible from a general pattern of transformation in a nongenealogical but ideal or morphological manner. Hence there are two levels of morphological processes, the rst one (cycles of the leaf) allowing us to understand the second one (the system of plants). Metamorphosis is thus an ideal process of generation of the principal vegetal forms. Such a transforming leaf, of course, becomes transcendental because it is less a real thing than a concept of a non-physically attested entity used to describe the real processes. That is why Goethes type is a dynamical one, as Brady (1987) shows, a dynamical scheme through which two plants can be related because they can both be situated in the same transformation process, a process that happens ideally, not physically It is exactly like homeomorphisms allowing us topologically to relate two gures, this homeomorphing having not yet been used actually to produce a gure. Goethe writes: The organ which expanded on the stem as a leaf, assuming a variety of forms, is the same organ which now contracts in the calyx, expands again in the petal, contracts in the reproductive apparatus, only to expand nally as the fruit.72 (Such a description of the various features of plants belongs to the same lexicon of homeomorphisms that 80 of the Critique of judgment used about skeletons at about the same time, as discussed
67 68 69 70 71 72
The inuence of modern philosophy, in Goethe (1995), p. 29. Toward a general comparative theory, in ibid., pp. 5455. Ibid., p. 53. Kant (1910), Vol. 5, p. 418. April, 1789, Italienische Reise, Goethe (1978), Vol. 15, p. 237. Metamorphosis of plants, 115, in Goethe (1995), p. 98.
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above.) This sentence provides a good way to spell out the contrast between a genealogical or archaeological explanation and an ideal explanation: the actual sequence of events does not matter in the ideal one. What is regarded as temporally earlier forms can be described as modications of later forms, so long as one is speaking ideally. They are dierent manifestations of the same organ. This concern for a type then impinged on Goethes anatomical work, taking him even closer to 80 of the Critique of judgment. In 1795, he began to publish similar views about comparative anatomy of the vertebrates, arguing that the bone will be for them what the leaf was for the plants.73 Goethe wished to suggest an anatomical archetype, for example a general picture containing all the forms of animals as potential, one which will guide us to an orderly description of each animal.74 Hence, we conceive an invariant, the animal type, through recognition of constancies between species. This type allows us to describe individual species in terms of the archetype, and to trace descriptively a particular part of the archetype through all the major genera.75 Those transformations of the archetype highlight hidden continuities in the series of animal forms. There is a gulf between the os intermaxillare of the turtle and the elephant, and yet an intermediate series of forms can be found to connect the two! What none would deny of the entire body could here be shown in a small part of it.76 Following this reasoning Goethe discovered the intermaxillary bone in humans in 1784.77 The lines of juncture, in the vertebrae, are analogous in several species, including human beings and the monkey. Therefore, if the monkey has this bone, it should exist within human beings in a masked manner. So the type, as a construct, allows us to discover non-immediately manifest entities. Albeit ideal, types are a way to uncover empirical regularities, so the contrast between physical processes and morphological-ideal connections should not be too sharp, since the novel intelligibility established by Goethe resides precisely in their articulation. Goethes vertebral theory of the skulllater to be refuted by Huxleyis analogous to the botanical theory of the Urpanze. The form of the entire animal is conceived through the regular transformation of one abstract or transcendental element. The form, as type, is understood through being reinserted in the process of the logical transformation of an archetype. That is why for Goethe the science of form is ipso facto a science of transformations. In this context, Goethe could claim that he achieved this critically forbidden program of archaeology of nature. Notice that unlike Kant, the types are accessible through empirical phenomena; and on the other hand they are more metaphysical than Kants regulative ideas, since Goethe would infer their objective existence from their necessity for our cognition of organic morphologies, since they are somehow visible.78
73
As I had earlier sought out the archetypal plant I now aspired to nd the archetypal animal, Preface to On morphology, in ibid., p. 68. 74 Outline for a general introduction to comparative anatomy commencing with osteology, in ibid., p. 118. 75 Ibid., p. 119. 76 An intermediary bone is present in the maxillar jaws of man as well as in the animals, in ibid., p. 116. 77 Whereas his essay was written and began to be circulated in 1784, it was only published with his morphological works in 1820. On this episode, see Richards (2002), pp. 371377. Herderit is worth notingwas enthusiastic about this idea, which of course gave support to the kind of archaeology of nature he vindicated and that Kant rejected. 78 Given their cognitive function, and the fact that they are not immediately given in phenomenal data, I call them transcendental to emphasize that they work in our knowledge of the living work in a similar manner than Kants regulative ideas, notwithstanding that Goethe would account for them in a dierent manner.
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But in these developments of his theory of type Goethe departed radically from Kant: Kants point was to restrain mechanism as an exploration of types; while Goethes point was an ideal reconstruction of Urtypus with analogies, without regard for the mechanical laws according to which the dierent empirical instances of types derive from one another. In Goethes account, the rst part of Kants argument about the archaeology of nature, namely the connection of the idea of types and inclusion of types in broader forms, or the morphological part, became disconnected from its second part, namely issues about the processes of mechanical generation. Empirical production of tokens or real processes were bracketed by Goethe, allowing him to propose a science of forms, e.g. a science guided by and directed towards the construction of the zoological type. The explanation of the empirical forms and of their relations is not the numerous real mechanical processes that underlie the production of organisms. Goethes neutralization of the Kantian veto of a generalized archaeology of nature was a shift in the idea of explanation, which separated explaining from identifying some processes. As Goethe stated in the Metamorphosis, knowledge of plants means establishing the rules of transformation through which nature can produce the most varied forms through modifying one unique organ.79 Even if in the end the ideal connections of types and their derivation from archetypes might refer to real processes, they do not involve the same explanatory strategy as physical mechanical causal processes underlying the generation of individual organisms; and unlike in Kant the discovery of the geometrical connections of types is linked only to this ideal-morphological explanatory strategy. In this viewpoint, the restricted archaeology of nature, which was for Kant logically possible but empirically false, becomes true because the same set of empirical evidence is no longer needed. Even if no one has experienced heteronymous generationa wolf generating a dog, for exampleit is no longer important since production of types as deriving from a transcendental archetype is not understood to be an actual physical process. The type of an animal is still a product, but a product of ideal transformations (whereas the instantiation of a type is a product of a mechanical transformation: generation); exactly as the form of the petal is the product of the ideal transformations of a transcendental leaf, but not in the same sense as a concrete petal is the product of generation.80 This schema of explanation makes Goethes position on epigenesis understandable. On the one hand, he totally agreed with epigeneticism, and approved of the theories of Wol and Blumenbach.81 He argued that the kind of generation of plants through the continued and repeated action of the same force on elementary parts, which accounts for the epigenesis of plants, was seen by Wol but better understood in his own Metamorphosis of plants.82 But
Metamorphosis of plants, 3, in Goethe (1995), p. 76. Obviously, Goethe was not indierent to the physical processes of generation, and he shared with Herder the concern for physical origins of life. He says, for instance: our daily conversation was concerned with the primal origins of the water-covered earth and the living creatures which have evolved on it from time immemorial. Again and again we discussed the primal origin and its ceaseless development (Preface to On morphology, in ibid., p. 69). However, even if this formulation would not resist the objections to such a project stressed by Kant in 80 of the Critique of judgment, I am arguing here that Goethes conception and achievement of morphology itself, with its idea of type, is logically independent from those concerns and avoids Kants critique. 81 The formative impulse, in Goethe (1995), p. 35. 82 During the development of the plant, he saw that the same organ contracts and narrows constantly, but did not see that this reduction alternates with an expansion. He saw that the volume diminished, and did not recognize that in the same time the organ gets rened; hence he wrongly ascribed to an atrophy this way to perfection.
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closer examination, as emphasized by Joan Steigerwald (2002) reveals that this agreement hides a dierence of explanatory interest. While Wol and Blumenbach are interested in the controlled perturbations of development that unveils the specic stages and antagonisms of embryogenesis, Goethe is concerned with the construction of a type of plant that underlies the whole process.83 Where Wol emphasized the vis essentialis, which is a kind of transcendental force guaranteeing the continuity of the embryological process, Goethe highlighted the transcendental leaf, the form which is acted upon by the forces. That was the meaning of his critique of Blumenbach.84 Here there is a common ground between Kant (emphasizing self-organization as denitive of organisms, as found in 65 of the Critique of judgment) and the early embryologists that is alien to Goethe, who was pursuing another line of thought. But the interesting point, is that Goethes reference to Kant when he wrote of the adventure of reason85 situates the problematic of type within the Kantian problem of determining the boundaries of an original organization, that Kant addressed in 80. The crucial point here is the shifting context of the archaeology of naturefrom Kants question about the limits of mechanism to Goethes attempt to draw a logic of form, which was later to be reinforced by Schellings Naturphilosophie. If indeed Goethe can be seen as a non-professional scientist (since he was above all a poet), a strong connection can be made between Naturphilosophie and comparative anatomy and the later transcendental morphology. For example, the connection between Oken and Owen is now well knownPhillip Sloans as well as Philip Rehbocks work on this period of biology have been essential to reincorporate this kind of science into the main history of science.86 The gure most faithful to Goethes program was the French naturalist who inherited the tradition of Naturphilosophische morphology, the one who has been accused of being speculative (especially by Cuvier in their famous debate at the Museum in 183087) namely Etienne Georoy Saint-Hilaire. Goethes famous words to Eckermann in 1830, about forgetting the political French revolutions in favour of the debate at the museum, acknowledge the proximity between his program and Georoys. Aiming to state the most general type in the animal kingdom, Georoy departed from Goethe in creating his own concept of form. In his Anatomical philosophy he did not consider the shape of each bone, but rather the relationships and the positions of the bones connected to one another. He was thus able to determine the invariants, despite the changing shapes of bones by fusion, widening, sharpening, etc. His rule was named principle of connections. Commenting upon it, he indicated that he prohibited any consideration of
83 The laws of Lebenskraft were purely functional; Goethes law, in contrast, addressed strictly formal constraints (Steigerwald, 2002, p. 299). 84 Admittedly, the theory of encasement quickly becomes unacceptable to the well-educated. Nonetheless, any theory of accommodation will have to presuppose something which adapts and something to which it adapts; if we want to avoid the concept of preformation we will arrive at a concept of predelineation, predetermination, prestabilization or whatever we wish to call the process which would have to occur before we perceive a thing (The formative impulse, in Goethe, 1995, p. 36). These words are similar to Kants theory of generic preformationism, of course. However, in the context of Goethes morphology and botany, the general idea of Kant, who linked his original organization with adaptive dispositions, is accentuated rather towards a structuralist interpretation, stressing the form rather than the forces of development. 85 Goethe also quotes Kants acknowledgment to Blumenbach in 81 of the Critique of judgment, (ibid., p. 35). 86 See his Introduction to Owen in Sloan (1992) or Sloan (2003), and Rehbock (1983). 87 Regarding these accusations, and Georoy and Naturphilosophie, see Apel (1987).
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form and use, reinforcing Cuvier and Goethes dismissal of nal causes.88 Thus he still stood in the Kantian territory of a naturalised teleology. The principle of connection led Georoy to acknowledge a unique plan across Cuviers four embranchements. Whereas Cuvier distinguished the vertebrates and articulates (the insects and the crustaceans), through his principle of connections Georoy correlated the six segments of the insects structure with the six vertebras of the vertebrate spine: while the rst three segments stem from a decomposition of the vertebrates skull, the following three correspond to thorax, abdomen and coccyx. He could then identify the articulated organisms with the vertebrates, because the connection plan of the segments stays the samean animal lives in or out of its spinal column.89 Finally, this unity was also applied to the internal organs: a lobsters structure can be connected with a mammals structure by rotating the lobsters spinal cord 180 degrees. With this principle a rule is provided to design the most general forms transmitted by heredity, and to determine how the animals are build. Two important consequences follow. Firstly, for Georoy form is no longer the visible shape but is now an invisible setting that is grasped only through the principle of connections, because it no longer concerns the organs but just the materials of the organs.90 Only this invisible form can ground the genealogical connection between species, be this connection understood as ideal or as real.91 Of course, neither the genuine production of individuals nor the production of types (this is only the case with Schelling) is not at stake here, but only their reconstruction.92 In a way, Georoys principles enable the biologist to grasp what Kant labelled an original organization. Hence, the second point: the type, as thought by Georoy, is constructed in our judgment about the animals; this would allow his disciples to assert a large unity of plan. It is not a law of naturesuch as the a priori laws of physicsbut is a totality reconstructed a posteriori by us in order to describe the living creatures, and to put some order into the functional diversity of animals. Therefore, the guiding principle of connections is a regulative principle in a Kantian sense. For this reason, it is possible to trace it back to the original organization without violating the strictures placed on reecting power of judgments by Kant. The adventure of reason is possible with no unfaithfulness to Kant, since the archaeology of nature has shifted from a mechanical strategy to a regulative reconstruction of the invisible forms underpinning the dierent compositional structures of organisms. As a Naturphilosopher, Georoy in fact achieved the archaeology of nature Kant formulated. He explicated the
Georoy Sainte-Hilaire (1818), p. 445; my translation. Georoy Sainte-Hilaire (1820); my translation. 90 Georoy Sainte-Hilaire (1990), p. 6. 91 It is still unclear if in Georoys school and his German transcendental disciples the ideal morphological derivation was really separated from the natural sense of production of species. In Richards (1992), Richards argues that they were actually evolutionists, conceiving real processes in nature, and that Darwin inherited some of their ideas about progress. However, the kind of processes they had in mind, if any, were not at all the same as the Darwinian ones. As to Georoy, he became more and more a Lamarckian. But concerning the issue addressed here, Georoy belonging to a tradition of form-biology and its relationship to Kantian purposiveness, this is not so relevant. 92 Of course, generation is closely related to the establishment of types, since some derivations can only be seen at early embryonic stages. Hence embryology is relevant for Georoys program, whereas it is not for Cuviers program. This relevance will have important consequences in later morphology, both German and English. See Ospovat (1980), and Balan (1980).
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regulative principle that is involved in the idea of natural purpose when this purposiveness is understood in a formal sense. The types that can be reconstructed in this manner are not, of course, principles of production, but principles of cognitionexactly in the sense that Kant distinguished these two senses of teleology, the technical and the biological sense, in 65 of the Critique of judgment. The only domain where types are productive in the third Critique is art. Yet for Goethe, types were more real and objective than they were for Kant, and this surely encouraged his undertaking the adventure of reason. Since he found in Kant the idea of a proximity between art and nature, allowing him to say that works of art are created through the same operations that the scientist uses to understand nature, he transferred the productivity of types in art to the productivity of nature, and then conceived the archetypes as producing the various species. He endowed archetypes with existence, hence for him forces were operating to give rise to types. However, those creative forces were not the usual physical forces involved in the generation of individual organisms; and for him only a kind of artistic intuition was able to give access to them.93 His conception of the production of types, as well as Georoys, was still demarcated from causal physical mechanisms. Robert Richards (2002) has argued that some individuals elaborated on Kants remark in 80 of the Critique of judgment to undertake an idealist-morphologist program. Phillip Sloan (in this volume) rightly emphasises that those, like the Naturphilosophen who thought they could rely on Kants idea of organisms to grant their program in morphology, in fact misconstrued Kants theory. This is clearly correct, but my purpose here was to understand how they misread it. My answer is that they switched the meaning of explanation from the causalmechanistic one to the idealformal. However, since Cuvier did not need this switch to elaborate his own program, I agree with Sloan that he was indeed the most faithful follower of Kant.
5. Conclusion I have tried to show that Kants concept of natural purpose ties together three forms of purposiveness in biology, on each of which it confers the same legitimacy based on transcendental considerations: function, adaptation and form (including its conservation). I focused primarily on the third point, as represented by Goethe and mostly clearly achieved by Georoys principle of connections. In Georoys Anatomical philosophy as well as in Cuviers comparative anatomy and palaeontology can be found what Kant would have called regulative principles, which lead to specic reconstructions of organismstwo ways of apprehending what Kant called original organization of organisms. The archaeology of nature that Kant famously forbade in the third Critique could be undertaken by Goethe and his followers precisely because they shifted its meaning, eliminating the mechanistic reading of archaeology of nature that Kant held and replacing it by a formal reading. Archaeology of nature then became a eld of reconstructing types, formal types rather
93 This intuition of a continuously creative nature, of mental participation in its productivity (Goethe, 1987, pp. 12, 98; 1995, p. 32) is one of the reasons Goethe suggested when he stated his undertaking of the adventure of reason; however, I want to argue that this was accompanied by a shift in the idea of explanation that was essential in overcoming Kants objection. That is why scientists like Georoy, disagreeing with Goethe about the role of art in science, still shared this adventure.
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than functional types, and was nally achieved by Georoys principle and his vindication of the unity of type. The GeoroyCuvier debate is thus not reduced to a misunderstanding, as Russell regarded it after Goethe, rather it concerned two heterogeneous conceptions of life. But the common language they spoke was the framework of naturalised teleology, in which two distinct principlesthe Cuvierian and the Georoyanwere available as rules to construct an explanation of the proper features of living things, neither with commitments to a causal explanation by mechanical laws. In this context, the debate appears as a split between two axes in naturalised teleology. The rst one is teleology as adaptation, and would be indicated, in the concept of original organization, by the concept of disposition. The second axis is form-biology, best exemplied by Georoy, which followed the implications of the regulative presupposition of an invisible type hereditarily transmitted, a type which is not given a priori but must be a posteriori reconstructed. Even if form-biology neutralised the functional and adaptational aspects because form is prior to adaptation to a milieu, as Georoy was led to emphasize, it is important to remember that the very concept of a form as transmissible and as invisible presupposes some of the teleological features stated by Kant with his original organization. Naturalising teleology was therefore the very strategy of thinkers like Kant and Blumenbach, and has been conceptually formulated in Kants work through the concept of natural purpose. Form-biology and adaptation-biology were two heterogeneous biological options that developed from this concept. Hannah Ginsborg (2004) distinguishes two kinds of mechanical inexplicability in Kant: the rst one, linked to the rst criteria of natural purposesirreducibility of wholes to the parts, which obtains also with machines; and the other one, linked to the second criteria, which is proper to natural purposes, and is the epigenetic character of the organism, since it self-organizes. A hypothesis would be that the rst kind of inexplicability concerns the rst reading of natural purposes, the functional-adaptive one (note that Cuviers principle of conditions of existence could be renamed conditions of functionality and applied to any machine : : :); and the second kind would concern the second reading of natural purposes, the one which deals with conservation of forms and was represented by Goethe and Georoy. This is very sketchy; one argument, however, could be found in Amundson (2005). The author claims that functional biology, represented by Cuvier and later by the Neo-Darwinists, for whom conditions of existence prevail on unity of type, was not very interested in embryological processes. On the other hand, the structuralists were inclined to study those processes. Hence the epigenetical character of organisms stated by Kant might be the proper focus of the form-oriented reading of natural purposes.
6. Uncited references Cohen (2006), Kant (1998), Owen (1992), Sloan (2006).
Acknowledgements I thank Tim Lewens, Joan Steigerwald and an anonymous reviewer for their corrections and precious comments and suggestions.
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