Nosferatu , dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1922. © Friedrich- Wilhelm-Murnau- Stiftung .

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MATTHEW VOLLGRAFF

1. Halfway through Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s classic vampire film Nosferatu (1922), the gripping narrative is brought to an abrupt halt by a visit to the laboratory of Professor Bulwer. The audience plays voyeur as the Paracelsian doctor inducts his pupils into the “mysterious essence of nature” with a lesson on carnivorous plants. Murnau here inserts footage taken by his friend, the science cinematographer Ulrich K.T. Schulz, of a Dion aea muscipula —otherwise known as the Venus flytrap. 1 In the scene, an unsuspecting fly lands on the plant’s open lobe, and within the blink of an eye it is devoured, to be digested by the gastric juices of its vegetal crypt. “Isn’t it,” the professor asks his students with a devious glance, “just like a vampire?” 2 Why should the Venus flytrap provoke horror and dread in the viewer, as if it were some monstrosity in defiance of nature? Let us suppose that what unsettles is not just the plant’s carnivorous diet but its sudden, jerky motion and subtle sensitivity. The plant’s uncanny aspect lies precisely in this mixture of kinesis and aesthesis , like the disquieting liveliness of the undead. Since antiquity, vegetal life has occupied an ambiguous position in classifications of nature, vacillating between life and death, organic and inorganic, animal and mineral. 3 Throughout the history of Western philosophy it crops up again and again as a threshold and a limit to knowledge. “Soulless yet living,” writes the philosopher Michael Marder, “the plant seems to muddle conceptual distinctions and to defy all indexes for discerning different classes of beings in keeping with the metaphysi - cal logic of ‘either/or.’” 4 (Or, as Thomas Aquinas long ago declared, “the acts of the vegetative soul do not obey reason.”) 5 The plant’s unstable claim to vitality is radically interwoven with questions of semblance and appearance: In the absence of certain visible signs, plants only “seem to live.” 6 Aristotle, in the History of Animals , asserts that “the whole genus of plants, while it is devoid of life as compared with an animal, is endowed with life as compared with other

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 corporeal entities.” 7 In this light one could say that plants possess a rela - tive life, a spectral vitality that ebbs and fades according to the observer’s changing perspective. To the extent we conceive of vegetables as passive and inert, then the rapacious animal movements of an insectivorous plant like the Dion aea muscipula will always appear to disturb the order of nature—like Murnau’s vampire, a kind of parasitic perversion within the hierarchy of the living. 8 “Vita in plantis est occulta,” Aquinas wrote in the thirteenth century. 9 Life in plants is hidden. It is hidden because plants supposedly lack the faculties that distinguish the animate from the inanimate: sensation and locomotion. Aristotle, Aquinas’s authority in matters of natural history, defined plant life in terms of this lack; all that remained to the “vegetable soul” were the faculties of nutrition, generation, and reproduction. 10 And yet this obscene psyche , this parte maudite of natural history seems to all but beg to be exposed, to be visualized. In Aquinas’s adage that plant life is hidden, we may hear the echo of Heraclitus’s aphorism that “Nature likes to hide,” and recall that this recondite nature— physis— shares its root with phyton , the Greek word for plant.

2. Scientists, artists, and philosophers have long been fascinated by the “inner life” of plants. 11 In the early twentieth century, however, the ancient notion of the anima vegetativa was revived with an unprecedented viru - lence. This came about in large part thanks to the emergence of cinematic media and the epiphany of vegetal movement it revealed. 12 At the same time, major epistemic shifts in the natural sciences ensured that the nature of plant life at the turn of the century hardly resembled the con - ceptions of the ancients. Among other things, Darwinism had overturned the theonomic order of Aristotle’s classes of being. Replacing the antique model of a layered, hierarchical pyramid of life with a fluid, arboreally branching rhizome, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary paradigm posited the existence of “missing links” not only between animal and human but also between plant and animal. 13 The hunt for these missing links motivated Darwin’s own, still under - appreciated botanical research. “It has always pleased me to exalt plants in the scale of organised beings,” he writes in his autobiography. 14 Darwin did give plants a boost further up the evolutionary ladder, lifting them onto the lower rungs of animal life. Over a period of twenty years the great naturalist focused his attention on vegetable specimens in which motion predominated, such as climbing plants or insectivorous species such as the Drosera .15 His last published work, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880) employs exacting graphical methods to transcribe their

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Wilhelm Pfeffer. Cinematographic study of geotropic curvature in Impatiens glanduligera , 1898–1900. Reproduced with permission of the Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover (DOI: 10.3203/IWF/B–450).

movements. Such “time-lapse media” helped convince lay read - ers that “apparently inert plants could move, sleep and were sensitive and therefore much like animals.” 16 Observing that the plant’s radicle, or root tip, appeared to receive impressions from sensory organs and to direct motor responses, Darwin compared it with an animal brain. 17 The wider botanical community of his time viewed Darwin as an isolated amateur who carried out hobby experiments in his country house in Down. Germany was where the most important developments in botany were taking place in the late nineteenth century, plant physiology having been professionalized in German research universities long before it was consolidated in England and France. Though most of this research followed mechanistic guidelines, explaining vital processes exclusively in physico - chemical terms, some German botanists commended and extended Darwin’s research into vegetal sensation and move - ment. In 1901 Gustav Haberlandt controversially proclaimed the existence of sensory organs in the plant kingdom, and botanist Wilhelm Pfeffer replicated Darwin’s country-house experiments in his state-of-the-art Leipzig laboratory. 18 Not long before, Pfeffer had produced one of the first time-lapse films of plant growth, furnishing undeniable evidence of the prodigious “power of movement” in plants. 19 Around the same time, Ernst Haeckel’s monistic evolutionism exerted an inescapable influence in Germany and abroad on pop - ular understandings of life. 20 Haeckel proposed the existence of a host of hybrid single-celled organisms, “ Mischwesen ” suspended between the plant and animal kingdoms. 21 Increased attention to these microorganisms also contributed to reshaping the idea of plant life. In 1895, the botanist Ferdinand Cohn argued that if Aristotle had only known about the zoospores of algae or fungi, which move about freely in search of light and sustenance and whose sensory organs are independent of their organs of move - ment, then the Greek philosopher would surely not have denied powers of movement and sensation to the vegetal soul. 22 The Hungarian-born German naturalist Raoul Francé, a stu - dent of both Haeckel and Cohn, stretched this idea to its logical limit. According to Francé, plants possessed not only sensation and movement but a rudimentary intelligence, memory, and unconscious drives. Together with August Pauly and Adolf Wagner, Francé formed a faction of biologists known as the “psychovitalists,” who maintained that the only logical view of nature was a form of teleological animism. 23

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 “Kinetogramm of a hop shoot, which illustrates the progression of a nutation movement.” From Raoul Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , vol. 2 (1907).

Where Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection emphasized the role of external environmental factors on evolutionary change, the psychovitalists favored the transformist model of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in which the internal impulses of the organism were held to drive adaptation. 24 By fulfilling a given “need,” the psychovitalists believed, every creature, down to the smallest paramaecium, proved its ability to enact “ratio - nal” purposive judgments. 25 The roots of human psychology, Francé thus hinted, could be found in the substance of protoplasm. 26 In a roundabout return to Aristotle’s doctrine, the psychovitalists made self-movement the cri - terion of ensoulment, resolutely blurring all distinctions between plant and animal. 27 In his 1905 book Das Sinnesleben der Pflanzen (The sensory life of plants), Francé stated that, in terms of its sensory life, the lowest animal . . . is wholly comparable with the highest plant. The difference, which at first glance causes animals to appear as living and plants as lifeless, is due only to the tempo of events. . . . [Vegetal] movements have been photographed and transferred to a cinematograph, and then reproduced at the tempo of animal move - ments. They have a fantastic picture of some fabulous being in tremendous agitation. 28 Two years later, in the second volume of his magnum opus Das Leben der Pflanze (The life of the plant), Francé additionally claimed that plants expressed their passions through movement. 29 The analysis of their motion with the help of a specially produced Kinetogramm was meant to prove that plants, despite their considerable deficits of consciousness, carry out expressive movements just as human beings do. 30 Hence, time- lapse media visualized not only the outward motion of the plant but its invisible inner emotions. Expressive movements such as the spiraling nutations of a sprout or the swaying motions of algae stood in stark contrast to these intelligent plants’ otherwise rational, goal-oriented behavior. 31 Calling these barely perceptible vegetal gestures “luxury movements” ( Luxusbewegungen ), Francé believed he had therein found the biological precursors and “archetypes” ( Vorbilder ) of art. 32 Francé effectively identified the artistic with the atelic , tracing both birdsong and the products of human artistry alike back to the same ludic expressive activity. This involuntary and unconscious Ausdruckst ätigkeit would, he hoped, someday provide the foundation for a “biological theory

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Karl Blossfeldt. Aconitum (Monkshood, Enlarged 5.4x) , before 1926. From Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst (1928). © Karl Blossfeldt Archiv / Ann and Jürgen Wilde, Cologne, Germany /Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

of art and the natural-scientific foundation of aesthetics.” 33 Even in his botanical writings Francé drew a distinction between teleological “utilizations of a stimulus” ( Reizverwertungen ) and expressive movements ( Ausdrucksbewe- gungen ), which have no goal beyond their own exercise. 34 These terms derived from his friend Oskar Kohnstamm, a physician and neurolo - gist whose book Kunst als Ausdruckstätigkeit: Biologische Voraussetzungen der Ästhetik (Art as expressive activity: Biological preconditions of aesthetics) had also appeared in 1907. 35 In this polemic against biological functionalism, Kohnstamm defined expressive activity as an aesthetic exception to the “absolute purposiveness of natural forms,” 36 pronouncing “in biological form what classical aesthetics had in mind with the ‘purposiveness and disinterestedness’ of the Beautiful.” 37 This was the sense, then, in which Francé could divine “ Urformen der Kunst ” in the proto- Jugendstil spiraling dance of the sprouting grain— well before Karl Blossfeldt’s book of plant photographs by that name revealed these analogies to the wider public. 38 Yet, if Kohnstamm’s theory aided Francé in grasping the “otherwise completely unfathomable dance movements [ Tanzbewegungen ]” of algae under the microscope, more advanced techniques of visualization soon rendered it superflu - ous. 39 Upon their publication in 1928, Blossfeldt’s magnified exposures disclosed the very same, no-longer-indifferent nature with an uncanny immediacy, enabling a critic like Walter Benjamin to witness “the shoots of a monk’s-hood unfold like the body of a gifted dancer.” 40

3. In his 1920 book Die Welt des Tänzers (The world of the dancer), the choreographer Rudolf von Laban professes that no science could even remotely equal the insights he had gained from his observation and study of human movement—no science, that is, but plant biology. 41 The lead - ing theorist of Ausdruckstanz goes on to compare dancers’ movements to the tropisms of plants and, inversely, vegetal motion with human movement. 42 The comparison is anything but metaphorical; rather, it presupposes an essential connection between human aesthetic sensa - tions and the intrinsic formal dynamics of things. Why, Laban asks, does the weeping willow exert such a saddening, melancholic effect on the viewer? The tree owes its “gestural power” ( Gebärdenkraft ) to its innate formal tension: a negative geotropism pushes the trunk toward the sky,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Spread from Der Querschnitt 5, no. 10 (October 1925). Left: Albert Renger-Patzsch. Brassia verrucosa , 1922. © 2017 Albert Renger-Patzsch Archiv / Ann u. Jürgen Wilde, Zülpich / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Gerhard Riebicke. Tanz im Freien , before 1925. © Gerhard Riebick e/Bodo Niemann, Berlin.

while a positive geotropism draws the branches back to the earth. Laban seeks to fos - ter a similar polarity in the “psychic tropisms” of his dance pupils. “As the flower turns to the light, as the ani - mal speeds toward its food and grasps it, so, too, does the dancer guide the reactive capacities of his being to the experiences of tension that affect him. And who and what thing is not here a dancer?” 43 Laban’s conjunction of plants and dance reflects the widespread inter - est in the Weimar Republic for a choreography that would unite art and nature. In a spread from a 1925 issue of the illustrated revue Der Querschnitt (The cross-section), for instance, Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photograph of an orchid finds itself next to a nude dancer, as though the one were imitating the other. 44 Yet this hardly compares to a film released not long afterward, in which time-lapse footage of plants in motion are interspersed with live Ausdruckstanz dancers, under the direction of Laban’s student Max Terpis. The quasi-educational Kulturfilm , directed by Max Reichmann, is called Das Blumenwunder (The miracle of flowers) and premiered in Berlin on February 25, 1926. 45 A unicum in cinema history, this sixty-three-minute spectacle consists almost entirely of plants growing and dying in fast motion, intermittently punctuated by mimetic interpretive dances. 46 The narrative—what little of it there is—begins with a group of boisterous girls desecrating a flowerbed. Their transgression summons the spirit Flora (played by Maria Solveg), who admonishes them not to uproot the flowers, which, she says, “are alive just like you.” Through a didactic demonstration of the time-lapse procedure, Flora ushers the girls, and the audience, into a parallel chronotope in which the plants move at a human tempo. When a few solo dancers sneak into this mesmerizing parade of accelerated plant movement, they masquerade accordingly as vegetative creatures. The assimilation of figure and flower takes place at once ges - turally and technically: where the Wigman School choreographer Daisy Spies mimics the birth pangs of the hyacinth blossom, a purposeful fade stresses their totemic identification. As late as 1931, the young Rudolf Arnheim could still call Das Blume nwunder “certainly the most fantastic, thrilling and beautiful film ever made.” 47 Ironically, the picture was initially conceived as advertising propaganda by I.G. Farben for the promotion of a new nitrogen fertil - izer. 48 Despite these lowly beginnings, Das Blume nwunder became a massive hit, surpassing box-office expectations. Critical responses were

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Das Blumenwunder , dir. Max Reichmann, 1925. A lady slipper orchid metamorphosing into Max Terpis. © absolut MEDIEN GmbH.

rapturous. The film was described as exposing the “becoming of élan vita l” and of proving “the existence of everything super- natural.” 49 Presumably the reviewers were not referring to the Ausdruckstanz numbers, which today pale in comparison to the graceful movements of the plants. 50 Why did this awkward reanimation of vegetal life seem like such a revelation to the filmgoing public? Accelerated plant growth on film was nothing new; the history of vegetable cinematography goes back to the late 1890s. 51 Yet in Das Blume nwu nder , technol - ogy seems to have finally mastered the secrets of mute nature. As Benjamin would later write, “it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye.” 52 The nature that spoke to Reichmann’s camera in particular was a reenchanted nature, a fantastic regression to childlike magic. 53 Benjamin almost cer - tainly had Das Blumenwunder in mind when he wrote that when “we accelerate the growth of a plant through time-lapse photog - raphy . . . a geyser of new image-worlds hisses up at points in our existence where we would least have thought them possible.” 54 And in his essay dedicated to the film, the Nietzschean philoso - pher Theodor Lessing similarly marvels at how the most ancient belief of vanished antiquity, that saw an elf embodied in every flower, a wood-nymph or demon in every tree, finds unawaited confirmation thanks to a mod - ern technology that, sheerly by changing the pace of life’s flow, can transform living flowers into expressive shapes [Ausdrucksgestalten ] with an animal or human expression. 55 Lessing furthermore draws attention to the fundamental para - dox at the heart of the film: By permitting access into alien temporalities, time-lapse cinematography relativized the anthro - pocentric metrics of time. 56 Das Blume nwu nder thematizes this early on, as Flora initiates her chorus of girls into the lifeworld of flowers. “The vital rhythm of mankind is the pulse,” she tells them, “the coursing of blood cells.” When she raises one child’s wrist to the camera lens, the shot fades into microcinemato - graphic footage of magnified blood plasma flowing through her veins and arteries. “One pulse corresponds to a human second,” an intertitle informs us. Flora then lets the clock race, demon - strating how “twenty-four hours, one day in the life of a human being, is equal to one second in the life of a flower.” According to the nineteenth-century Baltic German biologist Karl Ernst von Baer, a creature’s phenomenological sense of time depends on

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Das Blumenwunder , dir. Max Reichmann, 1925. Daisy Spies as “Hyacinth.” © absolut MEDIEN GmbH.

the speed at which its bodily fluids circulate. 57 Lessing extrapo - lates the consequences of this correspondence in a vivid thought experiment. “If my pulse were slower,” he speculates, “my expe - rience of the world would assume an uncanny velocity. I would see flowers racing around like ghosts, palpating, grasping, spiraling and flailing wildly.” As the pulse decelerates still fur - ther, space-time dilates into a vision of apocalyptic proportions: Animals turn into fleeting shadows, the sun becomes a flying comet with a bloody tail, and the stars transform into a gigantic horde of shimmering fires. “Since nature works with unlimited timeframes,” Lessing concludes, the “human optic of time may well be just one great illusion.” 58 Yet just as the film makes nature beat to a frenetic, inhuman pulse, it also reterritorializes the plants’ accelerated movements by suggesting anthropomorphic or theriomorphic analogies. Time-lapse cinematography thus corroborates not only the fun - damental relativity of time but a corresponding relativity of species. 59 If, as Aby Warburg held, “the magical worldview rests on the belief in the fluid boundaries between man, animal, plant and mineral,” then Das Blume nwunder performs a spectacular magic act—a mimetic leap across the scala natur ae.60 While Arnheim praised the film for promoting plants to the rank of liv - ing beings, this seemingly came at the cost of discarding their very vegetal identity. The film, in his words, shows plants using “expressive gestures exactly like those to which we are accus - tomed in men and animals.” 61 In a similar vein, Lessing marvels at the fact that, through a simple condensation of duration, “we see that the same passions are at work in plants as in animals, only drawn out to great lengths.” 62 Like Francé before them, both writers were convinced that the plant’s “gestures” conveyed gen - uine emotions. The difference was that their conviction took root no longer in the light of the laboratory but in the darkness of the cinema. In Lessing’s view, Das Blume nwunder instructs viewers precisely that “nature is neither movement nor life, but the expres - sion of soul [Ausdruck der Seele ].” 63

4. How can we intuit the feelings and thoughts of other minds from mere sensory data? Moreover, how do we know that another mind is there in the first place? Such were the questions that preoccupied the philosopher Max Scheler in his 1923 book Wesen und Formen der Sym pathie (The Nature of Sympat hy), a penetrating analysis of the condi -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 tion of possibility of Mitgefühl , or “fellow-feeling.” 64 Scheler’s answer to these questions underscores the role of expression in our experience of the world. “Our primary knowledge of Nature,” he writes, “is a knowl - edge of the expressive aspect of living organisms. . . . Such knowledge precedes knowledge of the inanimate, physical world. The primitive, like the child, has no general acquaintance with ‘deadness’ in things: all experience is presented as one vast field of expression.” 65 At stake in the problem of expression was a defense of the fundamental intersubjectivity of experience. A star student of Edmund Husserl’s, Scheler distanced himself from the master phenomenologist’s growing emphasis on the cogito and his “Cartesian postulate that ‘consciousness is primar - ily self- consciousness.’” 66 By contrast, he took the “total indifferentiation between self and other” as his point of departure. 67 We apprehend our own psychic states by the same means we apprehend those of others, Scheler claims; namely, by what he calls “internal perception.” 68 As the philosopher argues in Sy mpathy , there is no very crucial difference between self-awareness and the percep - tion of mind in others. Such perception occurs, in both cases, only so far as the state of the body is modified in some way and so far as the mental state to be perceived is translated into some sort of expression or other physical modification. 69 But Sy mpathy also takes aim at his former teacher Theodor Lipps’s theory of empathy, or Einfühlung . Lipps had adapted the concept of Einfühlung from aesthetics, where it refers to the psychophysical dynam - ics of perception underlying human responses to art and architecture. 70 Robert Vischer’s treatise Über d as optische Formgefühl (On the Optical Sense of Form , 1872) introduced Einfühlung as an embodied act of “pen - etrating into the phenomenon,” leading to the “rhythmic enlivening and revitalization” of the “dead phenomenon through the viewer’s motoric imitation of the object.” 71 Through Einfühlung , the viewer herself ani - mates the inanimate, whether it is a work of art or a natural form. 72 For Lipps, all forms of aesthetic pleasure can always be reduced to “self- enjoyment.” 73 Taking this idea one step further, he then transfers this aesthetic process onto interpersonal psychology at large. Just as we might project vitality into a Greek column—for instance, by empathetically resonating with its spatial tension, rhythm, and mass—so, too, we under - stand the feelings of other subjects through an act of “inner imitation” (innere Nachahmung ). 74 Only by referring back to one’s experience and one’s own body is it possible, according to Lipps, to grasp the inner life, the “soul” of others. In Scheler’s view, Lipps’s “projection” model suffers from fatal errors.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Das Blumenwunder , dir. Max Reichmann, 1925. Passiflora scene. © absolut MEDIEN GmbH.

For one thing, empathy theory fails to distinguish between other minds and the “merely aesthetic projection of content and char - acter . . . into a portrait, for instance, or . . . a personage belonging to the world of art, in the gestures of an actor.” 75 It mistakenly puts persons and artifacts on equal footing. Worse still, by taking the ego as its starting point, empathy theory inevitably leads to con - clusions that can be described only as solipsistic, “for it can only serve to confirm the belief that it is my self which is present ‘all over again,’ and never that this self is other and different from my own.” 76 This invective against mortifying what is actually living, and reifying what is really ensouled, comprises part of Scheler’s larger ethical project and cultural critique. 77 “The realization that certain seen movements represent expressive movements already presupposes knowledge of the presence of another mind of some kind. The recognition that they are ‘expressive’ is not the source but the outcome of this belief.” 78 In this regard the theory of empathy reflects the mechanistic outlook of “post-Cartesian biology,” which, treating all matter as fundamentally dead, fails to see life as life. 79 Instead, it seeks to “interpret the appearance of life as due to projective empathy—life itself as an objective fact of nature having been already explained away in mechanical terms.” 80 Scheler argues instead for “the existence of an independent, objective phenomenon of ‘life,’ given in external perception.” 81 In the place of Einfühlung he speaks of a “ kosmovitale Ein sfühlung ,” a quasi-Franciscan sentiment of oneness with all of cosmic life. 82 The relationships between expression and experience have a fundamental basis of connection, which is independent of our specifically human gestures of expression. We have here, as it were, a universal gra mmar , valid for all languages of expression, and the ultimate basis of understanding for all forms of mime and pantomime among living creatures. 83 From this vantage, the study of expression seemed poised to “provide a phenomenological basis for the knowledge of life” that would give biology an independent place among the sciences. 84 If expressive acts constitute the only genuine means of determining “consciousness, sensation and mentality” within the scope of those living organisms whose minds— lacking language—are otherwise opaque, then a closer study of expres - sion, Scheler speculates, will provide new insights into the psychology of the child, the animal, and “perhaps even the plant.” 85 And there he leaves matters.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Max Scheler. Manuscript of lecture “ Leib und Seele ” [Body and soul], 1926. “The most peculiar phenomenon in this film is the growth of vines seeking out solid objects.” Nachlaß Max Scheler, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München .

5. All that changed three years later, when Scheler went to the movies with his friend, the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. The film the two Max’s saw together that day was none other than Das Blumenwunder . At least one of them emerged from the theater a changed man. In a letter to his ex-wife, Marit Fürtwangler, Scheler reports his experience watching flowers “breathing, burgeoning and dying. The natural impression that plants possess no soul vanished altogether.” 86 The tenured philosophy professor describes how—during one scene in which creeping vines grasp desperately into the void for a support—he could barely hold back his tears. The vines’ “turbulent search,” their “satisfaction” and “frustration,” evidently convinced Scheler that the psychic life of plants much resem - bled his own. 87 The scene that most affected him was that of the Passiflora vine. As an on-again, off-again Catholic, he was bound to know of the leg - endary plant that grew on Christ’s cross and was moistened by his blood. 88 These reflections were not confined to personal letters but quickly found their way into Scheler’s university lectures as well. A passage from one 1926 lecture could have been spoken by Francé: “It is forever clear to anyone who has seen this film that plants only (and I mean only!) seem inanimate [ unbeseelt ] because of the temporal slowness of vegetal life processes.” 89 Lest there be any doubt about which film he meant, Scheler’s notebook contains a sketch of the turbulent vines that had so affected him in Das Blume nwunder . The lecture also includes a strangely confessional admission by Scheler, whose writings up until that point had hardly indicated the least interest in plant life. His tone carries the pathos of a convert: “These new facts [presented by the film] have precipitated a profound reversal of our judgment of the extent and breadth of psychic life.” 90 Cartesianism, he continues, had long treated the “ensoulment” of nonhuman beings— even of higher animals—as an illusion. But isn’t it rather a limit in our ability to understand the foreign psyche, that makes both lower animals and plants seem devoid of soul? Are we not too closely bound to our own form of spiritual life, and therefore presume that far too much is inanimate that is actu - ally ensouled? 91 For Scheler, the gains made by human reason had also incurred losses. “Evolution is never merely a progress, for it always involves decay as well.” 92 European civilization, in particular, seemed to have lost sight of what other cultures had known all along. The philosopher positively compares the apparently naive attitude of the so-called Naturvölker , or

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 “natural peoples,” to the deanimated outlook of contemporary “mecha - nistic” scientists. In Sympathy , for instance, he counters Lipps’s empa - thy theory with the ideas of the French ethnologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, for whom the mentalité primitive perceives the world much as a child does: as a field inhabited by other ensouled, expressive subjects. 93 Without renouncing a certain colonial condescension, Scheler strives to normalize this primordial animistic mode of perception, perhaps in hopes that it might someday return. 94 If animism was making a comeback anywhere during the 1920s, it was in the cinema—that “animistic language,” in the words of Jean Epstein, that lends “a semblance of life to the objects it defines.” 95 As responses to Das Blume nwunder attest, the newest technologies seemed to awaken in their audience an archaic, even regressive potential for sympathetic perception that closely resembled a primitive or childlike vision of the world. 96 The French filmmaker Germaine Dulac, who viewed “flower-blooming films as the first real examples of ‘pure cinema,’” contended that “in these plant studies the ‘barrier between things and us’ no longer existed.” 97 Das Blume nwunde r’s pantheistic reenchantment of nature corresponds as much to Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of mystical participation as it does to the Aristotelian vision of an ensouled organic nature. When the Cartesian revolution severed the “soul” from vital functions (in particular, those specifically vegetal capacities of nutrition, generation, and reproduc - tion), it also separated psychology from physiology. 98 The nascent cinema seemed to mend this rift, on the one hand, by reanimating what the with - ering gaze of scientific rationalism had petrified. On the other hand, it unsettled the old vitalist antithesis of animate life and inanimate matter. As the filmmaker Epstein proclaims, “there is no more of an essential difference or insurmountable barrier between matter and spirit than there is between the living and the non-living. The same profoundly unknown truth manifests itself as alive or inanimate, endowed or devoid of soul, according to the duration through which it is considered.” 99 Epstein’s words recall the notion of relative life that Aristotle invoked with regard to plants. 100 Yet, for the twentieth-century cineaste, this con - tingent vitality was a manifest function of its technical apparatuses of capture. In a recent article examining notions of cryptobiosis, or latent life, historian of science Sophia Roosth poses the freighted question, “How quickly must life proceed to count as life?” 101 By dilating and con - tracting its duration, time-lapse revises the knowability of life itself. In this sense it recalls Gaston Bachelard’s concept of the phenomenotech - nique, according to which “science does not merely describe the world, but actually produces new phenomena in the course of its work.” 102 That was precisely the question: Did Das Blume nwunder reveal a hitherto

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 hidden face of natural phenomena, or did it fabricate these phenomena anew? For Scheler as for so many other spectators, the uncanny expres - sivity of those restless plants undercut the very epistemic conventions by which animate and inanimate are told apart. 103 The ghost in the machine was none other than the anima vegetativa .

6. The question remains why Scheler, despite his evident familiarity with the problems of empathetic projection, studiously ignored the techno - logical mediation behind his experience of vegetal passions. The conse - quences of his epiphanic experience at the movies might have remained insignificant had the experience not impacted so radically on his subse - quent philosophical efforts. His last book, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (The Human Place in the Cosmos ) was written in 1927, one year before his untimely death, and was intended both as a personal testa - ment and a starting point for the intellectual movement known as philo - sophical anthropology. 104 Later associated with such figures as Helmuth Plessner, Ernst Cassirer, Arnold Gehlen, and Adolf Portmann, philo - sophical anthropology aspired to find a nonmetaphysical solution to the problem of the human being—Nietzsche’s “not yet determined ani - mal.” 105 Scheler’s Die Stellung des Menschen inaugurates this pursuit with a reprise of Aristotle’s biopsychic hierarchy: plant, animal, man. Presupposing that the highest levels must include the other, “lower” life - forms, Scheler methodically reconstructs the essence of the human being from the bottom up, beginning with plants. 106 Philosophical anthropol - ogy thus logically begins as a philosophical botany. Just one year after having witnessed Das Blume nwunder , the film was still fresh in the philosopher’s mind. In Die Stellung des Menschen Scheler reiterates (using almost exactly the same words as in his emo - tional letter to his ex-wife) how “the impression one has that plants are devoid of in wardness [Innerlichkeit ] stems from the slowness of their vital processes. Under time-lapse photography this impression disap - pears completely.” 107 From Scheler’s point of view, cinematic techniques had revealed a hidden truth: the psychic interiority of the plant. But what did this “interiority” or inwardness actually consist of? As critical as he was of scientific positivism, Scheler nonetheless felt compelled to establish his new enterprise on solid scientific ground. Yet the idea of any kind of “interiority” in plants would have met with fierce resistance from experts in the field. By 1927, botanical research seemed largely to have discredited Darwin’s notion of a plant “brain” in the root tip, and even experimental attempts to produce a simple reflex arc in the vegetable kingdom had come up short. 108 Scheler seems ready at first to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 capitulate to the scientists: He refers to experiments carried out by the Dutch botanist A.H. Blaauw which suggested that the plant’s impulsion toward light, or phototropism, depends not on any internal transmission of stimuli but simply on a local and chemically moderated inhibition of growth on the plant’s lighted side. 109 The “expressive movements” of plants could be explained perfectly well by mechanistic means. Yet the philosopher ultimately reckons with this evidence not by deny - ing the interiority of the plant “soul” but by proposing an infrapsychic model almost indistinguishable from a physico-mechanical force. The plant is possessed not by a soul but by an internal drive , a blind impul - sion of feeling ( Gefühlsdrang ) comparable to expanding stream pressing ever outward. “Devoid of consciousness, sensation, and representation,” plant life is described as ecstatically possessed by this surging wave of chthonic pressure. 110 These ecstatic vegetables thus literally express themselves. “We do already find the primordial phenomenon [Urph änomen ] of expression in plants,” Scheler writes. “There is a certain physiognomy of their internal states, of the states of their impulsion as the inwardness of their life.” 111 Far from the rational, homunculus “soul” of the psycho - vitalists, Scheler redefines the plant as the impossible incarnation of a “drive” that is undecidably both biological and psychological. 112 In trying to turn Aristotle’s privative definition of the plant into a positive one, Scheler instead produces a paradoxical kind of “bare life.” His anima vegetativa delimits an “inwardness” without center and an emotion without self. 113 Such speculations about the inner lives of plants reveal at least as much about the human being as they do about vegetables. Scheler’s attempts to transcend a sheerly anthropomorphic relation to the living world reflect his persistent ambivalence toward human nature. Hence, if he does not dismiss the vegetal gestures of cinematic spectacle as mere projections of his own subjectivity, that is because he considers man a “cosmomorphic” being who recapitulates all other life forms within him - self. 114 Yet in doing so, he simply invests plant life with all of the obscure drives and unrepresentable forces that ultimately produce the human being. Thus the primordial “impulsion of feeling” in plants becomes the very bedrock of Scheler’s anthropology, the source of a primordial “impres - sion of reality that precedes all functions of representation.” 115 This unrepresentable “reality” (Wirklichkeit ), he adds, is always accompanied by an experience of anxiety ( Angst ). 116 It is the same phobic frisson that unites the Venus flytrap in Nosferatu with the frantic vines of the Passiflora in Das Blume nwunder . Tinged with equal parts wonder and fear, the cinematic animation of the plant was the secret source of this irrational “reality” that at once escapes the knowledge of life and questions the limits of the human.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Notes 1. Together with director Wolfram Junghans, Schulz would go on to produce such popular-scientific films as Grüne Vagabunden (1933) and Das Sinnesleben der Pflanzen (1938). 2. “ Nicht wahr ,” reads the original intertitle: “ wie ein Vampyr !” 3. On the tradition of the scala naturae and the gradual hierarchy of lifeforms, see the classic work by Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). 4. Michael Marder, Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 28. 5. See Marder, 17. 6. Aristotle, De Anima , 410b, in On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath , trans. W.S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library 288 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 59. 7. Aristotle, Historia animalium , trans. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1910), 8–10 [588b]. 8. In his essay “F.W. Murnau, C.D. Friedrich, and the Conceit of the Absolute Spectator,” MLN 120, no. 3 (2005): 647, Kenneth Calhoon insightfully interprets the vam - pire’s unclassifiable mode of existence in light of Roger Caillois, as one of many possible “mimetic assimilations of the animate to the inanimate.” See Roger Caillois, “Mimesis and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (December 1984): 31. 9. Marder, 27–28, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica , q. 69, art. 2. 10. On the increasingly biopolitical significance of the “vegetative,” see Marder, 52–53. 11. See Hans Werner Ingensiep, Die Geschichte der Pflanzenseele: Philosophische und biologische Entwürfe von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 2001); and Heino Hayungs, Die Lehre von der Beseeltheit der Pflanze von Fechner bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: August Hoffmann, 1912). 12. On cinema’s role in Wilhelmine German science, see Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 13. See J. David Archibald, Aristotle’s Ladder, Darwin’s Tree: The Evolution of Visual Metaphors for Biological Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 14. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882 , ed. Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 135. 15. On the botanical research of Charles Darwin and his son Francis, see Peter G. Ayres, The Aliveness of Plants: The Darwins at the Dawn of Plant Science (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). 16. Oliver Gaycken, “The Secret Life of Plants: Visualizing Vegetative Movement, 1880–1903,” Early Popular Visual Culture 10, no. 1 (2012): 55; and Soraya de Chadarevian, “Laboratory Science versus Country-House Experiments: The Controversy between Julius Sachs and Charles Darwin,” British Journal for the History of Science 29, no. 1 (March 1996): 22. 17. “It is impossible not to be struck with the resemblance between the . . . movements of plants and many of the actions performed unconsciously by the lower animals,” Darwin writes. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle, . . . having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.” Charles

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Darwin and Francis Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants (London: John Murray, 1880), 571–573. On the historical background and later reception of this study, see Craig Whippo and Roger P. Hangarter, “The ‘Sensational’ Power of Movement in Plants: A Darwinian System for Studying the Evolution of Behavior,” American Journal of Botany 96, no. 12 (December 2009): 2115–2127. 18. Gustav Haberlandt, Sinnesorgane im Pflanzenreich: Zur Perception mechanischer Reize (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1901); and de Chadarevian, 40. For a contemporary survey of research on plant sensitivity, see Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (New York: Scientific American; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). 19. “Humanity would have developed a different and much more correct representa - tion of the lively activities in the plant,” Pfeffer asserts, “if all or the majority of vegetable organisms carried out directly perceptible movements, as, for example, the Mimosa pudica .” Wilhelm Pfeffer, “ Die Anwendung des Projectionsapparates zur Demonstration von Lebensvorgängen,” Jahrbücher wissenschaftliche Botanik 35 (1900): 743, quoted in Oliver Gaycken, “‘The Swarming of Life’: Moving Images, Education, and Views through the Microscope,” Science in Context 24, no. 3 (September 2011): 370. 20. A comprehensive examination of Haeckel’s system can be found in Bernhard Kleeberg, Theophysis: Ernst Haeckels Philosophie des Naturganzen (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2005). Compare Jürgen Sandmann, “ Haeckels Entwicklungslehre als Teil seiner biologistischen Weltanschauung ,” in Die Rezeption von Evolutionstheorien im 19. Jahrhundert , ed. Eve-Marie Engels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 326–346. 21. Professional scientists were less keen on Haeckel’s belief, advanced in his 1879 lecture Zellenseelen und Seelenzellen (Leipzig: Kröner, 1909), that the organism was composed of a confederation of individually ensouled cells. 22. Ferdinand Cohn, Die Pflanze , vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Breslau [Wrocław, Poland]: Kern, 1896), 74. 23. August Pauly, Darwinismus und Lamarckismus: Entwurf einer psychop hysischen Teleologie (Munich: Reinhardt, 1905), 17–18. 24. For this reason, the term psychovitalism was used interchangeably with psycho- Lamarckism ; though, as Raymond Ruyer comments, “we can ask as a matter of fact whether every Lamarckism is not psychological.” Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism , trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 210. One of Lamarckism’s perceived advantages was that it gave the organism an active role in evolution where Darwinian “natural selection” effectively left this process to chance. Not that these mod - els were mutually incompatible: Darwin himself believed in the inheritance of acquired traits and accorded it a minor role in evolution alongside natural and sexual selection. Only retroactively did a neo-Darwinian faction (led in Germany by August Weismann) reduce his evolutionary system to natural selection alone. See Wolfgang Lefèvre, “ Der Darwinismus-Streit der Evolutionsbiologen, ” in Kurt Bayertz, M. Gerhard, and W. Jaeschke, eds., Der Darwinismus-Streit , vol. 2 of Weltansch auung, Philosophie und Naturwissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007), 19–46. Neo- Lamarckism , a term coined by the American entomologist Alpheus Spring Packard, expanded Lamarck’s emphasis on the inheritance of acquired traits to encompass the direct action of the environment, or of the will. See Adolf Wagner, Geschichte des Lamarckismus: Als Einführung in die psycho-biologische Bewegung der Gege nwart (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1908). An authoritative work on alternative evolutionary theories around this time is Peter Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Dar winian Evo lution Theories in the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Decades ar ound 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); on Lamarckism, see 58–106. Regrettably, Bowler’s account, which focuses on Britain, France, and America, omits many of the concurrent movements and developments in German-speak - ing countries. The fate of neo-Lamarckism in the latter half of the twentieth century was inextricably linked with the calamitous effects of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. See Loren Graham, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 25. “The utilization of resources is the sign of intellect, or: wherever we see resources being utilized, psychic energy was at work.” Pauly, 184. 26. Raoul H. Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , vol. 2, Das Pflanzenleben Deutschlands und seiner Nachb arländer (Stuttgart: Kosmos, 1907), 428. 27. Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , 2:410. They thereby revived the Romantic topos of the plant as a merely sessile or dormant animal. Compare Gustav Carus, Natur und Idee, oder das Werdende und sein Gesetz (Vienna: Braumüller, 1861), 297. Aristotle proposes a similar plant-animal analogy, comparing roots to the “heads of animals eating a con - coction of predigested earth.” Whippo and Hangarter, 2116. On plant-animal and plant- mineral analogies in early modern science, see Phillip C. Ritterbush, Overtures to Biology: The Speculations of Eighteenth-Century Naturalists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 57–108. 28. Raoul H. Francé, Das Sinnesleben der Pflanzen (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1905), 86; translated by A.M. Simons as Germs of Mind in Plants (Chicago: Kerr & Company, 1911), 144. 29. This idea is anticipated in Gustav Theodor Fechner’s extraordinary book Nanna oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (Leipzig: Voß, 1848). Best remembered today as the founder of psychophysics, Fechner also advanced a panpsychistic view of the uni - verse in which animals, plants, and even the earth itself are imbued with various degrees of soul. On Nanna and its reception, see Ingensiep, Geschichte der Pfl an zenseele , 368–432. In the view of the biologist Gustav Wolff, Fechner intuitively understood the heliotropic movements of plants—their “striving toward the light”—as “expressive movements” ( Ausdrucksbewegungen ). Gustav Wolff, Leben und Erkennen: Vorarbeiten zu einer biologischen Philosophie (Munich: Reinhardt, 1933), 218. Compare the productive reflections on Fechner, psychovitalism, and plant life in Ernst Cassirer, Kulturphilosophie: Vorlesungen und Vortrage 1929–1941 , vol. 5 of Nachgelassene Ma nuskripte und Texte , ed. Rüdiger Kramme (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004), 116–120. 30. Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , 2:430. In his later book Die Seele der Pflanze (Berlin: Ullstein, 1920), Francé says of the “grammar of the plant language”: “it is a language of semaphores. They discourse like Neapolitan fishermen: with gestures and signs” (94). 31. Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , 2:430–431. 32. Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , 2:430. 33. Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , 2:429. 34. With this categorical division of vegetal movements, Francé intended to irrefutably demonstrate the viability of Lamarckism to stimulate future research. Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , 2:428. 35. Oskar Kohnstamm, Kunst als Ausdruckstätigkeit: Biologische Voraussetzungen der Ästhetik (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1907). Kohnstamm’s interest in such expressive manifestations was motivated in large part by his role as personal psychiatrist to a num -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 ber of prominent artists. Patients of his sanatorium in Königstein-am-Taunus included the expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the conductor Otto Klemperer, poets Stefan George and Karl Wolfskehl, as well as the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. 36. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 20. Compare Oskar Kohnstamm, “ Die biologische Sonderstellung der Ausdrucksbewegung,” Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie 7, no. 5 (1906): 205–223. 37. Oskar Kohnstamm, “ Intelligenz und Anpassung,” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 4 (1905): 138. In the judgment of what Kant calls a “free beauty,” for instance, “no concept of any end [ Zweck ] for which the manifold should serve the given object and thus which the latter should represent is presupposed.” That Kant’s paradigmatic exam - ple for this is a flower is no coincidence. Kant, 114. Roland Schacht’s article “ Kants Ästhetik und die neuere Biologie,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 26 (1913): 359–369, heralds Kohnstamm’s theory of Ausdruckstätigkeit as the realization and con - firmation of Kantian aesthetics by positive scientific means. 38. Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst: Photographische Pflanzenbilder (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1928). Usually translated into English as Art Forms in Nature , but more liter - ally “Primordial forms of art,” this book represents a pinnacle of new objectivity pho - tography. See also Ernst Fuhrmann, Die Pflanze als Lebewesen: Eine Biographie in 200 Aufnahmen (Frankfurt: Societäts-Verlag , 1930). 39. Francé, Das Leben der Pflanze , 2:431. Kohnstamm cites this very passage in his article “ Psychologische Grundbegriffe, II: Zweckhaft und Nutzlos,” Zeitschrift für den Ausbau der Entwickslungslehre 2 (1908): 348. In one of his last letters, written March 15, 1832, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe likens a climbing plant’s spiral nutations to a kind of dance, though not without entreating his addressee to “forgive this anthropomorphism.” Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Kaspar Graf v. Sternberg (1820–1832) , ed. F.T. Bratranek (Vienna: Braumüller, 1866), 283. 40. Walter Benjamin, “News about Flowers,” review of Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst: Photographische Pflanzenbilder , 1928, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 1, 1927–1930 , ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 156. 41. Rudolf von Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920), 224. My thanks to Alexander Schwan for this reference. 42. Laban, 224–227. 43. Laban, 225. 44. See Janet Janzen, Media, Modernity and Dynamic Plants in Early 20th Cen tury German Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 100–102. 45. Interestingly, Laban produced a dance-play titled “ Die Wunderblume ” in 1917 in Ascona, Switzerland. See Evelyn Dörr, Rudolf Laban: Das choreographische Theater (Norderstedt, Germany: Books on Demand, 2004), 103–104. 46. On Das Blume nwunder , see the pioneering article by Janelle Blankenship, “‘ Film- Symphonie vom Leben und Sterben der Blumen ’: Plant Rhythm and Time-Lapse Vision in Das Blume nwunder ,” in Intermedialites: Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques 16 (2010): 83–103. The essay volume and exhibition catalogue Gehen blühen fließen: Naturverhältnisse in der Kunst , ed. Ines Lindner (Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst , 2014), contains no fewer than five essays devoted to Das Blume nwunder , and Janzen dedicates a chapter to the film in Media, Modernity and Dynamic Plants , 93–127.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 47. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (1932; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 115. 48. See Benjamin Steininger, “ Kinematographie und Katalyse: Die Zeit der Chemie in ‘Das Blumenwunder, ’” in Gehen blühen fließen , ed. Lindner, 231–244. 49. Kurt Pinthus, “ Das Blume nwunder ,” Das Tagebuch 7, no. 2 (1926): 974, quoted by Blankenship, 92–93; and Oskar Loerke, Tagebücher 1903–1939 , ed. Hermann Kasack (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1956), 137, quoted by Blankenship, 92. 50. One Viennese reviewer writes, “In certain moments of breathless transfixedness, one almost has the sensation of shamelessly touching something forbidden with one’s eyes, of seeing things that are not permitted. . . . Never before was a human being witness to their [i.e., plants’] suffering, pains, desires, their small habits, the zestful force with which they boldly overcome all obstacles. Now the borders have opened. Man, animal, plant, they obey the same laws, perhaps we could even hear their voices if we only knew the wavelengths of those sounds, if we had the apparatuses to make them accessible to our ears. And perhaps in the not-too-distant future, stones and crystals, so long thought to be lifeless, will reveal to us their growth, their breathing.” Alice Schmutzer, “ Das Blumenwunder: Anläßlich der Aufführung des ‘Urania’-Films ,” Neue Freie Presse , no. 22,199 (4 July 1926): 11. 51. See Gaycken, “The Secret Life of Plants.” Janzen’s bibliography includes a helpful compendium of early twentieth-century German plant films. See Janzen, 189–203. 52. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version)” (1939), in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1927–1930 , ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 266. 53. In defiance of the “disenchantment of the world” that Max Weber identifies as the price of modernity, the film’s pantheistic portrayal of nature can be read as a late-romantic response to the dramatic mechanization, urbanization, and industrialization of early twentieth-century Germany. “Our age is characterized by rationalization and intellectu - alization, and above all, by the disenchantment of the world [ Entzauberung der Welt ],” Weber proclaimed in 1917. “Its resulting fate is that precisely the ultimate and most sub - lime values have withdrawn from public life.” Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures , ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 30. One of those values was “community,” which is vividly invoked in Das Blume nwunder ’s Fechnerian vision of spiritualized nature. In her book Modern Nature , Lynn Nyhart tracks how anxieties around the modernization of nineteenth-century German society contributed to the emergence of a new biological con ception of nature, defined precisely in terms of an ecological “community,” or Gemeinschaft . Lynn Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 54. Benjamin, “News about Flowers,” 156. 55. Theodor Lessing, Blumen (1927; Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2004), 170. 56. At one point, ballerinas from the Prussian State Opera leap across the screen in slow motion, as though to acclimate their movements to a vegetal pace. 57. Lessing, 170–171. Compare with Blankenship’s analysis of Das Blume nwunder in light of the contemporary theories of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, himself decisively influenced by Baer. 58. Lessing, 172. 59. As the psychovitalist Adolf Wagner avers, “Striving, struggle, prevailing, suffer -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 ing and perishing, in short: ‘life’ is what equalizes man, animal and plant.” Adolf Wagner, Vorlesungen über vergleichende Tier- und Pflanzenkunde (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1912), 30. 60. Aby Warburg, “ Reise-Erinnerungen aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo Indianer ,” in Werke in einem Band , ed. Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 592. Decades later, the French filmmaker Jean Epstein would describe how “accelerated motion, at the same time that it intensifies life, uncovers a quasi vege - tal soul among minerals, a quasi animal soul among plants, while slow motion, which disanimates and devitalizes beings, erases the most human expression in people, fostering in them the return and domination of the tried and true harmony of instinctual gestures.” Jean Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), trans. Christophe Wall-Romana (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014), 33. 61. Arnheim, 115. This impression was not unique to popular cinema. Oliver Gaycken relates how, around the turn of the century, devices of motion analysis “refined the ana - logical apprehensions of similarity between plants and animals by focusing on specific similarities between plant and animal movements, which formed the basis of the sup - position that these movements could constitute evidence of an evolutionary link between the two kingdoms.” Gaycken, “The Secret Life of Plants,” 51. 62. Lessing, 180. One could draw countless parallels to German popular-scientific cinema before and after Das Blumenwunder . In Max Friedländer’s educational short film Die Seele der Pflanze (1922), the narration is unrepentantly romantic: “Mute is the language of nature which surrounds us: silent—and yet, there lives a soul in the body of the plant!” Not only are feelings of pain ascribed to vegetal subjects, but even “murder - ous desires.” The narrator of Hubert Schonger’s nature film Pfl anzen Leben (1933), mean - while, comments more soberly, “it is no exaggeration to claim that distinct temperaments can be discerned from plants’ movements.” Both films hinge on the use of time-lapse cinematography. 63. Lessing, 169. If Lessing’s unorthodox definition of nature seems to carry traces of Kohnstamm’s vitalistic Ausdruckstätigkeit , it is no less indebted to a virulent discourse of expression in the Weimar period. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, the term Ausdruck connoted a prerational epistemic medium and an originary form of intersubjective communication that demanded collaborative investigation between the life sciences, psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics. The history of this vibrant inter - disciplinary moment has so far received little scholarly attention. Two important excep - tions are Frederic Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); and Norbert Meuter, Anthropologie des Ausdrucks: Die Expressivität des Menschen zwischen Natur und Kultur (Munich: Fink, 2006). 64. Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Bonn: Cohen, 1923); translated as The Nature of Sympathy , trans. Peter Heath (London: Routledge, 1970). Wesen und Formen der Sympathie is an expanded and heavily revised version of a much shorter book titled Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (Halle: Niemeyer, 1913). 65. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 218. 66. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952 , trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 29–30. Husserl explicitly denies legitimacy to somatic expressivity as a form of knowledge. For him, “facial expression and the various gestures which involve speech without commu -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 nicative intent . . . are not expressions in the sense in which a case of speech is an expres - sion, they are not phenomenally one with the experiences made manifest in them in the consciousness of the man who manifests them, as in the case with speech. In such man - ifestations one man communicates nothing to another: their utterance involves no intent to put certain ‘thoughts’ on record expressively, whether for the man himself, in his solitary state, or for others. Such ‘expressions,’ in short, have properly speaking, no meaning .” Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations , vol. 1, trans. D.N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 187–188; emphasis in original. It is difficult to imagine an attitude more diametrically opposed to Scheler’s. 67. Merleau-Ponty, 30. 68. The distinction between inner and outer perception “has nothing to do with what is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ for any given individual. ‘Inner perception’ is essentially concerned with apprehension of the mental, and it makes no difference to this whether perception is of oneself or another.” Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 244. 69. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 251. 70. For a synoptic history of the concept, see Andrea Pinotti, L’empathie: Histoire d’ une idée de Platon au posthumain , trans. Sophia Burdet (Paris: Vrin, 2016); and Robin Curtis and Gertrud Koch, ed., Einfühlung: Zur Geschichte und Gegenw art eines ästheti - schen Konzepts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009). 71. Robert Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics (1872), in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 , ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 94. 72. See Vischer, 21–23. 73. See Juliet Koss, “The Limits of Empathy,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (March 2006): esp. 143–144. 74. See Theodor Lipps, Lei tfaden der Psychologie (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1903), 191–195. 75. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 241. 76. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 242. 77. Spyros Papapetros’s enlivening book The Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) rethinks the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and architecture from the perspective of inanimate matter and its various vitalizations. Far from exorcizing the ancient spirits of animism, modernity here becomes legible as something like its psy - choanalytic displacement. 78. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 241. “Even the appearance of life itself is likewise to be explained in terms of an empathic projection of our own feeling of life, i.e. of a psychological fact” (241). 79. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 242. As Dennis Des Chene explains, Descartes’s radical proposal was to “eliminate the living as a natural kind. The science of life is henceforward to be, not the science of a special part of nature consisting in those things that live, and that therefore have souls, but an extension of physics. Descartes’ Principia , had it been completed according to plan, would have moved without a break from explaining the behavior of magnets to explaining the behavior of plants.” Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 2–3. 80. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 215.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 81. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 241–242. 82. Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie , 121–123. 83. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 11. 84. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 242. 85. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 214. The word in the original German is Pflanzenpsychologie . Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie , 246. Scheler may have been familiar with Francé’s book Pflanzenpsychologie als Arbeitshypothese der Pflanzenphysiologie (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1909). He definitely knew Kohnstamm’s Kunst als Ausdruckst ätigkeit , to which he refers in an essay from 1913. See Max Scheler, Schriften aus dem Nachlaß , vol. 1, Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre (Munich: Francke, 1957), 93. 86. Wilhelm Mader, Max Scheler in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt , 1980), 117–118, quoting Max Scheler to Marit Furtwängler, 3 March 1926, in Nachlaß Max Scheler, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München , Ana 385, E11, 267. 87. Scheler to Furtwängler, 3 March 1926. As Blankenship points out, “the intertitles evoke a highly emotive and almost expressionist language of primitive rhythms and animalistic desire, which could also be used to characterize the rhythm of Ausdruckstanz itself: ‘ Urgewalt ’ (primal force), ‘ sich kramphaft [sic ] bewegend ’ (with a cramped move - ment), ‘ verzweifelt ’ (desperate), ‘ kämpfend ’ (struggling).” Blankenship, 98. 88. See Lessing, 183–185. Even beyond the manifest Christian undertones to Scheler’s concept of sympathy, his phenomenological approach exhibits strong links specifically to Catholic mysticism. Both Scheler and his student Edith Stein—who wrote her 1916 dissertation on The Problem of Empathy —were converts from Jewish backgrounds (though Scheler’s later commitment to the church was decidedly ambivalent). Karol Wojtyła (who later became Pope John Paul II) wrote his habilitation thesis on Scheler and later canonized Stein. 89. “ Leib und Seele ,” in Nachlaß Max Scheler, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München , Ana 315, CA, II, 4, 25–26. Not everyone shared this interpretation of the film. The writer Alfred Döblin addressed readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung as follows: “Perhaps some of you saw the remarkable film a few years ago that showed plants moving in time-lapse. Sequences of plant growth, which ordinarily lasted days or weeks, were condensed into a few minutes, and here one saw vines coiling and roots grasping in sometimes unearthly, frightful ways, one saw plants jolting up as if they’d had a thrill, and some people left the film asking themselves: What is one supposed to do now? One definitely can’t eat animals, all of a sudden plants are alive too—now I’m afraid to even bite into a cabbage leaf.” Alfred Döblin, “Die Pflanze als Lebewesen ” (1931), in Kleine Schriften III: 1925–1933 , ed. Anthony W. Riley (Zurich: Walter, 1999), 288–289. 90. Scheler, “ Leib und Seele ,” 26. 91. Scheler, “ Leib und Seele ,” 26. 92. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 32. “Our conceptions of life as everywhere ‘evolving’ towards the human, and of man himself as progressing throughout his history towards present-day civilization, have been profoundly modified in one essential respect: we now realize that in this evolution, life and mankind have not only acquired essential capacities, but have also lost them. Thus man has all but lost the animals’ capacity for specialized identification, and many of their instincts, thanks to the hypertrophy of his ‘intellect’; just as the civilized man has all but lost the primitive’s capacity for identifi -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 cation and the adult that of the child” (31). Compare Scheler’s key work Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values (1913–1916), trans. Manfred Frings and Roger Funk (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 287–288. 93. “In the case of the primitive, so well described by Levy-Brühl [ sic ], we might . . . say that everything whatsoever is given, for him, as ‘expression,’ and that what we call development through learning is not a subsequent addition of mental elements to an already-given inanimate world of material objects, but a continuous process of disen - chantment, in that only a proportion of sensory appearances retain their function as vehi - cles of expression, while others do not. Learning, in this sense, is not animation, but a continual ‘de-animation’ [ Entseelung ].” Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 239. Compare Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris: Alcan, 1910). The German translation of Lévy-Bruhl’s book ( Das Denken der Naturvölker [Vienna: Braumüller, 1921]) was edited by the Austrian sociologist Wilhelm Jerusalem, who together with Scheler and Karl Mannheim is credited with establishing the field of Wissenssoziologie , or “sociology of knowledge.” See Max Scheler, ed., Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens , Schriften des Forschungsinstituts für Sozialwissenschaften in Köln 2 (Munich, 1924). 94. In his posthumously published notebooks, however, Lévy-Bruhl repudiates his earlier theory of a great divide between “prelogical” primitive and “logical” civilized thought: “There is a mystical mentality which is more marked and more easily observ - able among primitive peoples than in our own societies, but it is present in every human mind” (August 29, 1938). Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality (1949), trans. Peter Rivière (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 100–101. 95. Jean Epstein, “On Certain Characteristic of Photogénie (1924),” in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History /Anthology, 1907–1939, Volume 1: 1907–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 316. 96. In 1920, the writer Colette gave a vivid report of children’s animistic and mimetic responses to a scientific film of plant movement. See Paula Amad, Counter-archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 243–254. 97. Amad, 253. Elsewhere Dulac writes, “if we look at the sprouting grain, thanks to film we will no longer have only the synthesis of movement of growth, but the psychology of this movement.” Germaine Dulac, “From ‘Visual and Anti-visual Films’” (1928), trans. Robert Lamberton, in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism , ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 32, quoted in Blankenship, 87. Dulac’s film Thèmes et variations (1928) includes a remarkable sequence in which a ballerina’s arms are matched to the frantic, sped-up growth of a bean sprout. 98. See Des Chene, 6. 99. “As with lives, there can also be ‘spontaneous generations’ of spirit, produced by the mere variation of temporal dimensions.” Epstein, The Intelligence of a Ma chine , 33. 100. On the transition of conceptions of life from Aristotle to Descartes and beyond, see Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life , ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (1952; New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 75–97. 101. Sophia Roosth, “Life, Not Itself: Inanimacy and the Limits of Biology,” Grey Room 57 (October 2014): 57. 102. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-Century

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 Histories of Life , trans. G.M. Goshgarian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 26–27. 103. Scheler’s reaction to the film registers a conflict between two distinct forms of knowing: between the objective, logical Wissen and the more intuitive, sensuous Kennen (terms corresponding roughly to French savoir and connaissance ). On the influence and ramifications of these two epistemic modalities within German art, architecture, and design culture, see Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 104. Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung , 1947); available in English translation as The Human Place in the Cosmos , trans. Manfred Frings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009). 105. See Joachim Fischer, Philosophische Anthropologie: Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2008). 106. He was directly inspired by a 1924 work by his friend, the botanist Hans André, who describes each of these as “levels of emanation” following the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. See Hans André, Der Wesensunterschied von Pflanze, Tier und Mensch (Habelschwerdt [ Bystrzyca Kłodzka , Poland ]: Franke, 1924). André denies that the plant even possesses a body in the strict sense (27–34). 107. Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos , 12; Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos , 7–8. 108. See, for example, the discussion of tropisms in Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism , vol. 2 (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 1909), 9–16. 109. Scheler, The Human Place , 8. He likewise dismisses Haberlandt’s hypotheses on the sensory organs of plants. Compare Anton Hendrik Blaauw, “ Licht und Wachstum II,” Zeitschrift für Botanik 7 (1915): esp. 531; and Leo Brauner’s retrospective pro et contra “Die Blaauwsche Theorie des Phototropismus ,” in Ergebnisse der Biologie 2, ed. Karl von Frisch et al. (Berlin: Springer, 1927), 95–115. 110. Scheler, The Human Place , 7. In his posthumously published fragments, Scheler describes a form of “ecstatic knowledge” that can be obtained only by “shutting off” the mind and drives. In an evident parody of Husserl, he refers to this as the “Dionysian reduction.” Such “techniques of vital ecstasy” could well describe Scheler’s own prac - tice as a sympathetic spectator of Das Blume nwunder . See Max Scheler, Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik , vol. 2 of Schriften aus dem Nachlass , ed. Manfred Frings (Bern: Francke, 1979), 251–254. By contrast, Scheler’s student and colleague Helmuth Plessner approaches things with the sober gaze of a trained biologist: “naturally it makes an impression when one sees the movements of a cucurbit vine or a bindweed in fast motion, as it ‘searches’ for support . . . [but] there is not the least reason to assume sensi - tive or even centrally mediated processes as the basis of these phenomena.” Without naming Scheler explicitly, Plessner goes on to criticize unmistakably his romantic con - ception of the plant as “the embodiment of giving self-surrender, the ecstatic impulse of feeling [ ekstatischen Gefühlsdrang ] . . . It is a betrayal of the essence of the plant . . . to view it symbolically, . . . as the expression of a force, of a soul.” Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (1928; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), 224–226. 111. Scheler, The Human Place , 9. 112. Compare Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life , 67. Today botanists are paying increas - ing attention to plants’ cognitive, communicative, and sensorial capabilities. Not with -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00252 by guest on 25 September 2021 out controversy, botanist Stefano Mancuso and others have paid their respects to Darwin by establishing the field of “plant neurobiology.” See Michael Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant: A Radical New Way of Understanding Flora,” New Yorker , December 23–30, 2013, 92–105; and Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (London: Island Press, 2015). Other voices counter, perhaps still more radically, that “brains and nerve cells are not necessary for intelligent behaviour”—as one chapter in Anthony Trewavas’s illuminating book Plant Behaviour and Intelligence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014) is titled. These contemporary approaches to the subject of plant psychology bear the unmistakable stamp of twentieth-century developments in cybernetics, cognitive science, and artifi - cial intelligence, eschewing the lingering spiritualism prevalent among the historical fig - ures discussed in this article. 113. As Marder mischievously suggests, “the notion of the soul as interiority is itself an offshoot of animal physiology. . . . Psychic interiority is an idealized image of the digestive tract, and what it holds inside may not be too different from the contents of the latter.” Marder, 25. 114. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy , 105. In Marcus Hahn’s formulation, Scheler “thinks ‘man’ as the bio-philosophical suspension [ Aufhebung ] of the organic, imagin - ing the human body both as a phylogenetic archive and as the unspecialized being that outclasses the hierarchy of lifeforms.” Marcus Hahn, “ Die Stellung des Gehirns im Leben: Gottfried Benn und die philosophische Anthropologie Max Schelers ,” in Disziplinen des Lebens: Zwischen Anthropologie, Literatur und Politik , ed. Ulrich Bröckling et al. (Tübingen : Narr, 2004), 93. Elsewhere Scheler calls the human being a “ Gesamtkunstwerk of animal nature.” Max Scheler, “Notizen zum Anthropologiekongress Salzburg (1926),” in Schriften aus dem Nachlaß , vol. 3, Philosophische Anthropologie , ed. Manfred Frings (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987), 108. 115. Scheler, The Human Place , 11; translation modified. “According to recent research,” Scheler remarks, the vegetal Gefühlsdrang “appears to have its location in the human brain stem, which is probably also the center of the endocrine glands that medi - ate between somatic and psychic processes” (11). 116. Scheler, The Human Place , 11.

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