Kielmeyer and the Organic World

Texts and Interpretations

Lydia Azadpour, Daniel Whistler, Lydia Azadpour, Daniel Whistler

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350196711
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350143487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ecology

Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765-1844) was the 'father of philosophy of nature' owing to his profound influence on German Idealist and Romantic Naturphilosophie. With the recent growth of interest in Idealist and Romantic philosophy of nature in the UK and abroad, the importance of Kielmeyer's work is being increasingly recognised and special attention is being paid to his influence on biology's development as a distinct discipline at the end of the eighteenth century. In this exciting new book, Lydia Azadpour and Daniel Whistler present the first ever English translations of key texts by Kielmeyer, along with contextual and interpretative essays by leading international scholars, who are experts on the philosophy of nature and the formation of the life sciences in the late eighteenth century. The topics they cover include: the laws of nature, the concept of force, the meaning of 'organism', the logic of recapitulation, Kielmeyer and ecology, sexual differentiation in animal life and Kielmeyer's relationship to Kant, Schelling and Hegel. In doing so, they provide a comprehensive English reference to Kielmeyer's historical and contemporary significance.

Chapter 1

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Lydia Azadpour and Daniel Whistler

This is the first English-language volume dedicated to the work of Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765–1844). It includes the first ever English translation of his famous 1793 Speech, On the Relations of Organic Forces in the Series of Organisations, in which he establishes nothing less than a conceptual framework for the understanding of the living natural world and its interactions. Further key texts by Kielmeyer are translated in Part Two of the volume and are followed, in Part Three, by a series of interpretations of his work that attempt to show its significance for both historical and contemporary reflections on nature.

In sum, these translations and commentaries aim to make sense of the recent resurgence of interest in Kielmeyer’s project of conceptualizing organic nature among anglophone historians of philosophy and science, for whom he has increasingly come to represent not only the ‘father of philosophy of nature’, as Cuvier once described him¹, but also a key figure in the development of the life sciences in general. As long ago as Timothy Lenoir’s Strategies of Life in 1982, Kielmeyer’s contribution (alongside those of Kant and Kielmeyer’s teacher, Blumenbach) to the ‘teleomechanism’ of early German biology had been appreciated²; however, it was not until the 2000s that Kielmeyer fully resurfaced in anglophone scholarship. One important landmark was Iain Hamilton Grant’s influential Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, in which the significance of Kielmeyer’s ‘dynamic natural history’³ was acknowledged not just in terms of its influence on F. W. J. Schelling and other philosophers of nature, but also in its own right. Indeed, according to Grant, Kielmeyer intervenes in transcendental philosophy to ‘convert … [Kant’s] phenomenal and somatic nature … into a priori dynamics.’⁴

If these are some of the recent historical precedents, then the years 2017 and 2018 marked a real watershed moment: two significant English-language works have appeared which are in large part founded on the demand to take Kielmeyer seriously. Hence – drawing on an earlier resurgence of German-language scholarship on Kielmeyer in the 1990s (one inaugurated by Kai Kanz’ Philosophie des Organischen in der Goethezeit and continued by Thomas Bach’s Biologie und Philosophie bei C. F. Kielmeyer und F. W. J. Schelling) – Andrea Gambarotto’s Vital Forces, Teleology and Organization subjected Lenoir’s earlier work to scrutiny by focusing on Kielmeyer’s mediating position between Blumenbach and many later developments in biology. The 1793 Speech, he writes, stands as ‘the earliest Systemprogramm for biology as a unified science in Germany’ insofar as it ‘implements Blumenbach’s framework and its lexicon but, instead of applying it to the individual organic body, applies it to all organic nature.’⁵ Kielmeyer makes possible for the first time ‘biology as a general, unified field – one concerned with the laws that regulate the organization of all living nature.’⁶ Likewise, for John H. Zammito in The Gestation of German Biology (which appeared some months earlier), Kielmeyer’s Speech contributes substantially to the creation of the scientific domain of biology, but such a founding gesture, nevertheless, goes far beyond the Göttingen connection to Blumenbach (still emphasised by Gambarotto) to ultimately encompass ‘the essential impetus of the life sciences since Haller’⁷, one ‘that offered a systematic basis for the emergent science’.⁸ Even more recently, Joan Steigerwald’s 2019 Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life has furthered this anglophone Kielmeyer-renaissance by pointing to the importance of his ‘cross-disciplinary … explorations of the boundaries between organic and inorganic processes’.⁹

This volume constitutes the next step in this explosion of interest in Kielmeyer’s biological programme and, in particular, furthers anglophone research on Kielmeyer in relation to three broad contexts: (a) in terms of the emergence of biology as ‘a general, unified field’ with its own distinct disciplinary identity; (b) in terms of his receptions in Idealism, Romanticism and the philosophy of nature; and (c) in terms of the intrinsic conceptual interest of his own thinking – that is, as a philosophical and scientific figure in his own right. The commentaries that make up Part Three of this volume contextualize him within the history of the life sciences, within philosophies of nature, Idealisms and Romanticisms; they discuss his relevance to contemporary theoretical perspectives on the organism, on ecology and on the social effects of developments in life science; and they analyse Kielmeyer’s use of concepts of force, recapitulation, sexual difference and natural law. This volume, then, is an attempt to provide a comprehensive point of departure for future English-language research on Kielmeyer’s historical and contemporary significance.

The Alpha and Omega of Philosophy of Nature

In order to contribute further to the growing case for why Kielmeyer matters, it is worth spending a moment on one example: his central importance to the evolution of comparative physiology at the turn of the nineteenth century in Idealism and philosophy of nature.

In 2001, Frederick Beiser inaugurated a decisive shift in the way in which English-language German Idealism scholarship approached the various attempts at the turn of the nineteenth century to philosophize about nature with the following programmatic statement:

Above the portals of the academy of absolute idealism there is written the inscription, ‘Let no one enter who has not studied Naturphilosophie.’ Without an understanding of at least the central doctrines, basic arguments and fundamental problems of Naturphilosophie, the absolute idealism of Schelling and Hegel is all but incomprehensible.¹⁰

Despite the compelling nature of this call to arms, it is nonetheless surprising that so few readers of German Idealism – Beiser himself, sometimes, included – have heeded it. Research on Hegel, Schelling and the early German Romantics still tends to be undertaken in isolation from serious study of the details of nature-philosophical doctrines. Beyond small pockets of Schelling scholarship, the domains of speculation, experimentation and analysis in the philosophy of nature remains unknown to many. Grant’s 2006 claim still holds true: the writings of philosophers of nature remain ‘largely unread’.¹¹

Kielmeyer, however, can here act as a ‘gateway thinker’, for not only does he mediate between philosophy of nature, Kant and the life sciences in a genuinely transdisciplinary fashion, he is also a frequent source for later nature-philosophical thinking. It is Kielmeyer – rather than Kant, Leibniz or even Goethe – whose paternity of philosophy of nature is most frequently asserted, because it was his 1793 Speech (On the Relations of Organic Forces in the Series of Organisations) that took on the dual status as the first proper document of German philosophy of nature itself and as catalyst for much of the research into the organic that was to follow over the next twenty years. The Speech directly or indirectly inspired every major contribution to the philosophy of the organism in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century – and its role as origin for the nature-philosophical tradition is encapsulated in Schelling’s 1798 comment that it marked ‘the advent of a new epoch in natural history’¹². Nevertheless, it is also true that to reduce Kielmeyer merely to the role of precursor alone would be to ignore his continued – if relatively silent – presence over the subsequent decade. Indeed, one of the major frustrations for the later generation investigating the organic world was how little Kielmeyer went on to publish after 1793: his researches were made known only by way of the circulation of unofficial manuscripts, correspondence or the gossip of his Karlsschule and Tübingen students.¹³

His continued renown among philosophers of nature in the late 1790s can be gleaned from a debate that took place between Schelling and A.C.A. Eschenmayer at the turn of the century. In his First Outline of the System of Philosophy of Nature, Schelling had mentioned Kielmeyer among a list of philosophers capable of ‘providing a comparative physiology’ – ‘a science not yet attempted’, but which, when accomplished, would greatly further the cause of philosophy of nature.¹⁴ And in one of his 1801 reviews of the First Outline, Eschenmayer – a former student of Kielmeyer at the Karlsschule – exploited this passing reference. He makes use of his insider knowledge of Kielmeyer’s research to substantiate Schelling’s hope and so portray Kielmeyer’s ‘second coming’ – his return to the fray of academic publication – as the long-awaited messianic completion of the science of philosophy of nature. For Eschenmayer, the future of philosophy of nature depends on nothing less than the production of ‘the first lines of a physiologia comparata of both plants and animals.’ And he continues

Perhaps Prof. Kielmayer [sic] in Tübingen might make known to us his results in these fields … Unfortunately, this wealthy property owner provides so little assistance to our poor public funds. I mean here his invaluable zoology, a work in which he has equally invested his power and his time, two aspects which – in other minds not capable of subduing the natural law of inertia – stand typically in an inverse proportion. Furthermore, [this is] a work in which felicitous analogies and inductions and frequent intellectual insight (divination, as it were) have long been developed from the highest principles of philosophy of nature.¹⁵

According to Eschenmayer, therefore, Kielmeyer does not solely occupy the position of ‘father’ of philosophy of nature; rather, he is cast as the ‘Messiah of nature-philosophical reason’ as well. Kielmeyer is seen to both have begun the intellectual epoch and to pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Contributors
• Chapter 1: Editors’ Introduction
• Chapter 2: Kielmeyer’s Fame and Fate
• Part I: Kielmeyer’S 1793 Speech
• Chapter 3: On the Relations between Organic Forces in the Series of Different Organisations, and on the Laws and Consequences of these Relations
• Part II: Selected Unpublished Texts by Kielmeyer
• Chapter 4: On Natural History
• Chapter 5: Ideas for a Developmental History of the Earth and its Organisations: Letter to Windischmann, 1804
• Chapter 6: On Kant and German Philosophy of Nature: Letter to Cuvier, 1807
• Part III: Interpretations
• Chapter 7: Force and Law in Kielmeyer’s 1793 Speech
• Chapter 8: Organic Physics as a Phenomenology of the Organic
• Chapter 9: The Path of the Great Machine: Kielmeyer’s Economy of Extinction
• Chapter 10: Recapitulation All the Way Down? Philosophical Ontogeny in Kielmeyer and Schelling
• Chapter 11: Kielmeyer and the Cybernetics of the Organic World
• Chapter 12: Reproduction, Production and the Earth: The Place of Sex in Kielmeyer’s ‘Economy of the Organic World’
• Chapter 13: Mechanics beyond the Machine in Kielmeyer and Eschenmayer
• Chapter 14: The Logic of Organic Forces: Hegel’s Critique of Kielmeyer
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright