APPROACHES TO ORGANIC FORM BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Editor

ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University

Editorial Advisory Board

ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College of the City University of New York

VOLUME 105 APPROACHES TO ORGANIC FORM Permutations in Science and Culture

Edited by FREDERICK BURWICK University of California, Los Angeles

D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY

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DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER/TOKYO Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Poblication Data

Approaches to organic form.

Boston studies in the philosophy of science v. 105) Includes index. 1. Organism (Philosophy) 2. Aesthetics. I. Burwick, Frederick. II. Series. 0174.B67 vol. 105 001'.01 s (146) 87-23482 [B105.074) ISBN-13: 978-94-010-8237-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-3917-2 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-3917-2

Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.

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All Rights Reserved © 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1987 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial Preface VB

FREDERICK BURWICK / Introduction ix

Acknowledgments xix

RICHARD OLSON / On the Nature of God's Existence, Wisdom and Power: The Interplay between Organic and Mechanistic Imagery in Anglican Natural Theology- 1640-1740 1

NINA GELBART / Organicism and the Future of Scientific Utopia 49

WALTER D. WETZELS / Art and Science: Organicism and Goethe's Classical Aesthetics 71

KARL J. FINK / Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny: A Classic Formula of Organicism 87

STUART PETERFREUND / Organicism and the Birth of Energy 113

FREDERICK BURWICK / Kant and Hegel: Organicism and Language Theory 153

J. DRUMMOND BONE / Organicism and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry 195

JAMES MCGEACHIE / Organicism, Culture and Ideology in Late Victorian Britain: The Uses of Complexity 211

PAUL DOUGLASS / "Such as the Life Is, Such Is the Form": Organicism Among the Moderns 253

List of Contributors 275

Index of Names 279

v Organic form? The problem of mechanical vs. organic form is visibly evident in this photograph of the Lithoptera muelleri, a radiolarian whose silica skeleton is geometrically symmetrical. Radiolarians reproduce by budding, binary fission, or multiple fission. The daughters rapidly regenerate the symmetrical form. Fossils preserved in the radiolarian ooze on the ocean floor date from the Precambrian era.

VI EDITORIAL PREFACE

Frederick Burwick's modest but comprehensive and insightful intro• duction is preface enough to these sensible essays in the history and philosophical criticism of ideas. If we want to understand how some in• quiring and intelligent thinkers sought to go beyond mechanism and , we will find Burwick's labors of assembling others and reflect• ing on his own part to be as stimulating as anywhere to be found. And yet his initial cautious remark is right: 'approaches', not 'attainments'. The problems associated with clarifying 'matter' and 'form' are still beyond any consensus as to their solution. Even more do we recognize the many forms and meanings of 'form', and this is so even for 'organic form'. That wise scientist-philosopher-engineer Lancelot Law Whyte struggled in a place neighboring to Burwick's, and his essay of thirty years ago might be a scientist's preface to Burwick and his colleagues: see Whyte'S Accent on Form (N. Y., Harper, 1954) and his Symposium of 1951 Aspects of Form (London, Percy Lund Humphries 1951; and Indiana University Press 1961), itself arranged in honor of D' Arcy Thompson's classical monograph On Growth and Form. Philosophy and history of science must deal with these issues, and with the mixture of hard-headedness and imagination that they de• mand.

ROBERT S. COHEN

Vll INTRODUCTION

The title, Approaches to Organic Form, was meant to announce the variety in critical and historical methodologies represented in this collec• tion of essays. Although it was not intended, the title may also confess that "approaches" fall short of "attainments." There is, after all, an inherent difficulty in adequately defining "organic form." Attempts to define a structure, shape, or form as organic inevitably lapse into the shoddy logic of petitio principi or post hoc, propter hoc. Because it emerges through process, organic form resists definitions which try to identify form as if it were fixed and definite. Thus it is more apt to discuss the forming and shaping, rather than the form or shape. Even without insisting on structural definition, the concept of "organic form" remains problematic: while it may refer to the morphological features of an organism, it may also describe the unity which is supposed to result when one avoids the mechanical imposition of external laws and allows a work to develop "from within." In other words, the term "organic form" may refer to natural phenomena or it may be a metaphor in a particular system of philosophical discourse. "Organicism" is an "ism," "organism" isn't. While much of modern thought is conveniently categorized into "isms," it is a mistake to deal with the constituent ideas without acknowledging the philosophical or ideological system, the "ism," to which it belongs. The idea of organic unity, as it had been defined by , Aristotle, Plotinus, Longinus, was re-discovered and elaborated in the Renaissance. As an "ism," however, organicism did not emerge until the eighteenth century, when the arguments on growth and process, the reciprocity of part and whole, content and form, were systematized in polemical opposition to mech• anism and vitalism. Having assumed the universality of mechanical principles, the mech• anists argued that an entity, even living organisms, functioned merely in response to external laws of matter and motion. The vitalists attempted to privilege living organisms by declaring that life itself was a phe• nomena which could not be explained by physical, chemical, or me• chanicallaws. The organicists opposed both the mechanists and vitalists

IX x INTRODUCTION by postulating the dynamism of biological organization. The relation between the parts and the whole could not be explained by arbitrary principles (mechanism) nor by appealing to some invisible additive (vitalism); rather, biological processes had to be understood in terms of the intimate interaction between parts and whole. Among the biological processes are ingestion, excretion, reproduc• tion, but also the behavioral activities, the "higher physiology" of gathering nourishment, mating, nurturing off-spring, forming families, herds, colonies. Organicism, thus extended, contemplates the bee-hive as well as the bee, the coral-reef as well as the nullipores or corals, and man's dwellings and culture as well as the human being. The organicist seeks to explain language, religion, and science in terms of the physi• ological organization of man's mind, body, and organs of perception. The fact that humanity has developed a mathematics based on the number ten is seen as a natural development from the rudimentary tallying with five fingers on each hand. Admittedly, organicism as it turns from the organism itself to its actions and environment shifts the significance of "organic form" from its description of the organism to an application that is metaphorical and analogical. As long as the reciprocity can be convincingly determined between the organism and the patterns or products of its activity, the argument of "organic form" is capable of rigorous analogy. It should be recognized, however, that many critics wield the term "organic form" purely as metaphor and avoid all claims of genetic or physiological priority. Because aesthetic organicism usually avoids reference to bio• logical and perceptual processes, its arguments tend to be metaphorically prescinded from the organic context. Thus Gian Orsini cautioned that "organicism refers to the ultimate result, not to the genesis but to the relation of the parts in the work once the whole process of composition is finished. ,,1 In his critical philosophy, utilized the concepts of organic unity and form to describe the inherent structure of reason and set forth the criteria of ethics and aesthetics. Crucial to his argument is not only the priority of mind over the thing perceived, but also the autonomy of mind. Certainly, in an age that was caught up in the ideological turmoil of monarchical and aristocratic hegemony vs repub• lican individualism, the political implications were quite evident in the philosophical position of a mechanism, which argues the imposition of external laws, and an organicism, which assumes autonomous organiza- INTRODUCTION xi tion through internal laws. Kant dismissed as inadequate any moral code that was heteronomous (i.e., based on an external scheme - religious, social, or political - of reward and punishment). The only truly moral behavior is autonomous, adhering to that imperative which is determined from within. Art, as Kant recognized, cannot be autono• mous: it cannot reproduce; it requires an artificer. Nevertheless, it produces pleasure because it creates the illusion of organic teleology. 2 In an organism, "every part is reciprocally ends and means"; in art, the harmony of the parts analogically evokes the sense of organic wholeness. From Kant, Schiller took the notion of he autonomy (the illusion of autonomy) to postulate his aesthetic principle of freedom ("Freiheit in der Erscheinung"). "The beauty of poetic representation," so Schiller explains the paradox of the organic reciprocity of form and content, "is the free self-determination of nature bound in the chains of language."3 Organicism, as it was absorbed into the romantic ideology, supported arguments of aesthetic as well as social and political autonomy, but its applications could be turned to radically different purposes, as we will see in Nina Gelbart's discussion of eighteenth-century utopia, J. Drum• mond Bone's analysis of Shelley'S poetics, and James McGeachie's study of late Victorian ideology. In the essays commissioned for this edition, the intention was to build upon the example of Organic Form: The Life of An Idea, by G. S. Rousseau (ed.) (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). In that volume, Gian Orsini traced the historical background in Aristotle and Plato; Philip Ritterbush discussed the aesthetic response to the study of form in the life sciences; and William Wimsatt pondered the literary problems of the organic metaphor. In the present volume, the effort has been made to extend the discussion to include the appropriation of organicism in religion and social thought, to deal more explicitly with particular developments in science and aesthetics, and to sample the historical relevance of organicism from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The Anglican tradition of natural theology was intended both to prove the existence of God and to illuminate his power, wisdom, and goodness. The latter problem involved a fundamental tension between those whose aesthetic focused on order, clarity, and efficient design - and who thus appealed to mathematical and mechanistic images in locating the nature of God's creation; and those who reveled in the complexity and fullness of God's creation - and who thus appealed to the variety and complexity of the organic world to demonstrate his XlI INTRODUCTION power and goodness. Richard Olson, "On the Nature of God's Exis• tence, Wisdom and Power: The Interplay between Organic and Mecha• nistic Imagery in Anglican Natural Theology - 1640-1740," explores this tension in the works of Ralph Cudworth, John Ray, and Joseph Butler, perhaps the greatest organicist natural theologians; and in the writings of Robert Boyle and Walter Charleton, who emphasized the simplicity of the "mechanistic" natural law on the cosmic scale. Al• though the natural theologies have generally been criticized for lopping off a heel or toe of religion to make it fit into the glass slipper of science, Olson argues that the charges are far less applicable to the organicists than to the mechanical philosophers. The placing of utopia in the future, its transformation from "no place" into "good time" or "euchronie," is widely recognized as the great innovative contribution of the Enlightenment to the utopian tradition. But the reason for this new faith in the realizability of utopia, attributed vaguely to the idea of progress, has never been satisfactorily explained. Nina R. Gelbart, in "Organicism and the Future of Scientific Utopia," argues that the ct.anging scientific tastes reflected in the "voyages imaginaires" that proliferated in 18th century France hold an important clue for understanding this development. Around 1750, when these utopian novels changed from static "speaking pictures" to dy• namic visions of an unfolding utopian future, they also rejected Newto• nian mechanistic science and embraced instead an organic view of nature. As the example of Louis-Sebastien Mercier's L'An 2440 with its Leibnizian inspiration clearly shows, the cosmos came to be seen as a growing, changing organism whose processes manifested themselves over time, and human was now understood as a vital, evolving whole continually striving to realize its potential. The adoption of organicism by the utopists also reenforced their radical political inclina• tions, serving not only as scientific doctrine but also as social strategy. Forty years before the Mesmerist craze and the "democratic" "citi• zen's" science of the Jacobins, the organicism of the utopists played a crucial role in challenging the existing social and political order. Always oppositional in function, the organic utopias of the Enlightenment became aggressively so in the decades preceding the French Revolution. Goethe's aesthetics, which he never presented in a systematic fashion, belong in part to the fairly broad tradition of the anti-mechanist move• ment of European Romanticism. To the extent that his views on aesthetics are rooted in an organic view of reality, they show a definite INTRODUCTION xiii affinity to, in fact they seem to grow out of, the peculiar brand of an animistic world view popular in 1800: the . In part, however, Goethe's concept of art as an organic whole developed out of his special empiricism which manifested itself in concrete and meticu• lous observation of natural phenomena. In "Art as Organicism: Obser• vations on the Genesis of Goethe's Aesthetics," Walter D. Wetzels analyzes the dual perspective: the philosophical, highly speculative ambiance as developed by Baader and Schelling, and the concrete, phenomenological pursuits of the "realist," the "scientist" Goethe. In the context of the former and in analogy to the latter, Wetzels sets forth the central aspects of Goethe's "organic" aesthetics. In 1801, Daniel Jenisch published his Universalhistorischer Uberblick der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, a work which organized human forms of culture into a taxonomy and, at the same time, ex• plained the theories and principles by which these forms evolved into a single comprehensive structure. Jenisch drew on various eighteenth• century writings for his theories but made at least one independent contribution to the history of anthropology: he established a critical and scientific language for the examination of descriptive and theoretical materials on culture. Karl J. Fink opens his study of "Ontogeny Reca• pitulates Phylogeny: A Classic Formula of Organicism," with an account of Jenisch's criticism of Rousseau's view of the origin and development of natural man. Fink then moves to a discussion of the way in which he integrated Lessing's notion of the perfectability (Vervollkommung) of mankind with the mechanisms which produced this state of human existence, with Herder's concept of physio-psychological drives (Triebe) and Kant's principles of natural attraction and repulsion. The results of this study will show that Jenisch's metalanguage of culture represents a comprehensive statement on the evolutions of human forms of existence as they were known at the end of the eighteenth century. When Schelling in his Naturphilosophie insisted upon the shift from matter-based physics to energy-based physics, he argued that electricity, magnetism, and chemical affinity provided the primary constitutive energy of the universe. Biological and physical functions exhibit the same constitutive energy. In his chapter on "Organicism and the Birth of Energy," Stuart Peterfreund traces the teleological implications of the principle of immanence and shows how the mechanical and material conceptions came to be absorbed within the pervasive doctrine of formative power. Citing the recent work of Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, xiv INTRODUCTION

Peterfreund observes that contemporary physics elaborates rather than undermines the teleological premises of constitutive energy as formu• lated by Kant and the post-Kantian Naturphilosophen. While Peter• freund agrees with P. M. Harman's assessment that the concept of energy has "provided the science of physics with a new and unifying framework and brought the phenomena of physics within the mechani• cal view of nature, embracing heat, light, and electricity, together with mechanics, in a single conceptual structure," he sees reason to modify Harman's dismissal of Rankine's "energetics" (1855) for a formalism rendered untenable by the "the uncertainty of hypotheses regarding the nature of matter."4 Although "energetics" obviated the necessity of choosing between a Newtonian conception of matter, with its five attributes of extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and inertia, and, say, a Daltonian conception of matter, with its heterogenous chemical "atoms," the concept of energy did have something rather important to say regarding the general nature of matter. Further, the concept of energy was not divorced from those concerns with process and change evident in organic matter and motion, the energeia as indwelling principle posited by Aristotle. If one examines the status of energy as structuring metaphor in the English cultural milieu at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the synchronic similarities are readily evident. In virtually all serious uses of the metaphor, energy is taken to mean an indwelling force or principle that is responsible for outcome, which is usually ordered and usually positive. As a principle of mind as well as of matter, energy has organic implications. Because of the dominance of Kantian and Hegelian philosophical systems, there has been a historical tendency to place the language theories of the romantic period, according to the apparent epistemologi• calor sociological presumption of the organic metaphor, into the respective Kantian or Hegelian context. Most notably, the language theories of Adelung, Ast, the Schlegels, Bopp, Grimm, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Becker have all been interpreted in such terms. Humboldt, for example, has been read as a Kantian, an Hegelian, and as a Weimar Classicist. From a more encompassing vantage, Noam Chomsky has called Humboldt's language theory Cartesian, for Humboldt's attempt "to reveal the organic form of language" and his failure "to face the substantive question: what is the precise character of 'organic form' in language" were the consequence of his perpetuating the Cartesian assumption "that the sequence of words in a sentence corresponds INTRODUCTION xv directly to the flow of thought.,,5 Chomsky groups together as Carte• sian, along with Humboldt, both Herder and Schlegel. He might as well have included Kant, Hegel, and the whole host of romantic theorists. The discrimination that is wanting here can be effected by facing that question which Chomsky claimed Humboldt left unexplored: "what is the precise character of 'organic form' in language." Frederick Burwick, in "Kant and Hegel: Organicism and Language Theory," examines the organic metaphor as it actually appears in Kant and Hegel, addressing specifically how they see language as an intimate and necessary activity of mind. Through a detailed examination of the word "organic" and com• pounds from the same root in Shelley's prose, J. Drummond Bone, in "The Paradox of Organicism in Shelley's Defence of Poetry," investi• gates the difficulty in holding together two aspects of the organic in British Romantic poetics: the becoming, open, timeless along with the whole, unified, closed. Notions of completeness and perfection are inwoven with notions of process and becoming in a way which both characterizes and strains the rhetoric of Shelley's prose, which is itself a type of this tension in Romantic thought. The implications of this doubleness for the form of "organic" poetry are discussed at the theoretical level. It is argued that the "slippage" in the use of the word and the difficulties found in particular forms are not necessarily a sign of muddled thinking on the theorists' and poets' part, but a linguistic equivalent of - or rather the linguistic fact of - a genuine paradox. In his, "Organicism, Culture, and Ideology in late Victorian Britain: the Uses of Complexity," James McGeachie argues for a rhetoric of complexity in literary and philosophical writing of the late nineteenth century. Arguing with both Terry Eagleton and the Edinburgh "strong programme,"6 McGeachie presents his critique of the representation of organicism in the works of G. H. Lewes, Walter Pater, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Henry Sidgwick, and Arthur Balfour. In explicating the ideologi• cal structure of the organic tropes, McGeachie calls attention to the ways in which the verbal description replicates social, economic, institu• tional formations. Although he does not develop the connection in his present essay, he has observed that these late Victorian writers embue their organic tropes with a degree complexity that is analogous to although distinct from the difficulty and obscurity of early literary modernism. When in 1930 T. S. Eliot wrote that "words like emergent, organicism, XVI INTRODUCTION biological unity of life, simply do not arouse the right 'response' in my breast," he was expressing his disgruntlement with the terminology of organicist aesthetics, particularly that school of "evolutionists" that had emerged in response to Bergson's L'evolution creatrice (1907). Nevertheless, Eliot's criticism owes much to Romantic organicism, to Coleridge, to Bergson and Croce who adapted Intuition and Insight for a truly "modern" aesthetic, one T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound could subscribe to. Eliot defines poetry as concerned with living things and their "laws of growth," and the New Criticism adheres to this principle. In theory and in practice, modernism harkens back to Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare. It is appropriate, then, for Paul Douglass to borrow Coleridge's phrase "Such as the Life is, Such is the Form" as the title for his study of organicism among the moderns. After tracing the argument from Coleridge's statement (ca. 1818) that "poetry is opposed to science," and that all work of genius creates its own "organic form," Douglass turns to a discussion of modernist discomfort with the implied "fatalism" of organicist ideas. Modernism, itself a self-conscious at• tempt to create the New, must believe in novelty. It must also, how• ever, explain that novelty as merely an organic extension of the old, else it fails into the trap of discontinuity. The fragmentation of the poem must serve to reach a more strenuous unity. Or else it may be said to have given the "appropriate form" (in Coleridge's term) to a cacapho• no us world. In its ambivalent posture toward organicism, modernism found a tension which it could raise to the level of an aesthetic value in itself, portraying a patterned world haunted by the mechanist assump• tions of its own "heroes," a world in direct conflict with the adaptive and creative powers of art - and searching in that very conflict for the work's innate form and function.

University of California, Los Angeles FREDERICK BURWICK

NOTES

1 G. N. G. Orsini, "Organicism," Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribners, 1973), III, 421-427. 2 Immanuel Kant, Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch• gesellschaft, 1975); Kritik der reinen Vernunft B xxviii, II. 31; Kritik der Urteilskraft, §§65-66 , Y, 483-490. INTRODUCTION XVll

3 Friedrich Schiller, Siimtliche Werke (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1960); Kallias Brie/e, V,394-433. 4 P. M. Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development 0/ Nineteenth• Century Physics (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 1-2,59. For Peterfreund's references to Feigen• baum, see Chapter V, note 2. 5 Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 53-54. 6 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology. A Study 0/ Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1976); David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); Barry Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editor would like to acknowledge his gratitude to his mentor, the late Professor Gian Orsini, and to his colleague, Professor G. S. Rous• seau. To the former he owes his initiation into the complexities of organicism; to the latter he owes not just the encouragement in editing this book but the very plan for the book itself. He also expresses his thanks to Professor Robert S. Cohen who advised him during the early phases of soliciting contributors and who offered wise counsel through the final preparation of the collection.

XIX