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The Organism As Ontological Go-Between: Hybridity, Boundaries and Degrees of Reality in Its Conceptual History Charles Wolfe

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The Organism As Ontological Go-Between: Hybridity, Boundaries and Degrees of Reality in Its Conceptual History Charles Wolfe The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history Charles Wolfe To cite this version: Charles Wolfe. The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Elsevier, 2014, 48, pp.151-161. 10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.06.006. hal-01233194 HAL Id: hal-01233194 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01233194 Submitted on 24 Nov 2015 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. The organism as ontological go-between hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history Charles T. Wolfe Centre for History of Science, Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences Ghent University Blandijnberg 2, B-9000 Ghent [email protected] Forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Abstract The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles – sometimes overt, sometimes masked – throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life, but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene, but also, historiographically, as part of an outdated ‘vitalism’. Indeed, the organism, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the ‘body’ than to the ‘molecule’, is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, sometimes even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature, while other approaches reject or attack it with equal force, assimilating it to a mysterious ‘vitalist’ ontology of extra-causal forces, or other pseudo-scientific doctrines. This paper does not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either in terms of scientific validity or historical coherence; nor does it return to the well-studied issue of the organism-mechanism tension in biology. Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the emergence and transformation of the concept of organism, but has not emphasized so much the way in which organism is a shifting, ‘go-between’ concept – invoked as ‘natural’ by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others, over and against the natural world. The organism as go-between concept is also a hybrid, a boundary concept or an epistemic limit case, all of which partly overlap with the idea of ‘nomadic concepts’. Thereby the concept of organism continues to function in different contexts – as a heuristic, an explanatory challenge, 1 a model of order, of regulation, etc. – despite having frequently been pronounced irrelevant and reduced to molecules or genes. Yet this perpetuation is far removed from any ‘metaphysics of organism’, or organismic biology. Keywords Organism, as go-between, organicism, vitalism, mechanism Introduction The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles – sometimes overt, sometimes masked – throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very ‘valuative’ or normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social (Canguilhem, 2002, Gissis, 2009). Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life (for instance, in the sense that biology is a science of organisms or is nothing; Grene and Depew, 2004). Similarly, at a more conceptual level, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the ‘body’ than to the ‘molecule’, the organism is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, perhaps even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature (from Hegel onwards, and explicitly with thinkers such as Kurt Goldstein and, with more metaphysical investment, Hans Jonas; see Wolfe, 2004, 2010). Conversely, it has also been the target of some influential rejections, classically in Dawkins’ vision of the organism as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene (Dawkins, 1976), but also, at a historiographic level, as a denunciation of ‘vitalism’ in the history of science (Schiller, 1978) or, as Laublicher has noted, in the kinds of attacks that go beyond scientific claims and counter-claims (Laubichler, 2000), assimilating its concept to a mysterious ‘vitalist’ ontology of non-causal forces, or some other ‘pre’- or ‘pseudo’-scientific doctrine; or at least, “a highly contestable notion” (Sterelny and Griffiths, 1999, p. 173). Biologists of a reductionist persuasion will target any notion of a ‘force’, ‘principle’ or other transcendent ground which causes physical and chemical processes in the body while itself being extra-causal, uncaused, immaterial. Here, I do not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either in terms of scientific validity or historical coherence; nor do I return to the classic issue of the organism-mechanism tension which has particularly been studied in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century 2 biology (Hein, 1972, Allen, 2005). It has been observed that we have numerous histories of genetics, but no history of organism (Laubichler, 2000). We have studies of the emergence and displacements of the term (Cheung, 2006) but not of the shifts in concepts of organism as parts or foundations of a science (Peterson, 2010 is a step in this direction, for twentieth-century organicism). Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the transformation of the concept of organism (Huneman and Wolfe eds., 2010), but there is an aspect that has not been emphasized so much (except perhaps under the heading of ‘metaphors of organism’ in Schlanger, 1971): the way in which organism is a shifting, ‘go-between’ concept – invoked as ‘natural’ by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others over and against the natural world. It can also be described as a hybrid (sometimes expressing a kind of complex mechanistic view, sometimes a foundational subjectivity), a “boundary concept” or “trading zone” (Star and Griesemer, 1989, Galison, 1999). The organism concept also often deliberately shifts, whether we call this a nomadic concept or, in my terms, an ontological go-between, between metaphysical and empirical levels of discussion – something that both metaphysicians and historians of biology often miss sight of. Which hybridity is at issue, and what do I understand by the organism as ontological go- between? One might think that the former refers to the diversity of its meanings, uses, metaphors and reference points. And indeed, diversity, metaphor and reference all have a distinguished pedigree in our efforts at conceptualizing the history of science. Evelyn Fox Keller has emphasized (with reference to Max Black) that metaphor “can serve important positive functions in scientific explanations” (Keller, 2003, p. 118). She uses the language of productivity: “metaphoric utterances can be scientifically productive just because they open up new perspectives on phenomena that are still obscure and ill-defined and about which clarification is achieved only through a process of groping—in other words, on the kinds of phenomena that scientists take as the objects of their investigations” (ibid.). Yet it is not enough to insist on the presence of metaphors in scientific cognition. Precisely as regards the productivity of concepts such as organism, we need to add at least two further dimensions to Fox Keller’s defense of the role of metaphors. A useful further suggestion is Mieke Bal’s, that concepts are “tools of intersubjectivity” (Bal, 2002, p. 22); they do more than metaphors, because “they offer miniature theories, and in that guise, help in the analysis of objects, situations, states and other theories” (ibid.). But if we were to follow this line of thought, we would be completely blind to the polemical dimension of the organism concept: it is much less about consensus and more about trying to insist on something missing from scientific practice. In addition, neither the insistence on the positive role of metaphors in science, nor the focus on “travelling concepts” can yield any sense of the problem of the organism’s ontological status, whether in the traditional sense of the organism as biological individual, or the sense of organism as ontological go-between. To 3 be fair, Bal seems to identify some aspect of the latter when she speaks of the “propagation of a concept that emerges in one field, in another field that changes its meaning and whose meaning it, in turn, changes, constitutes
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