Jacob Moleschott and the Conception of Science in the 19 Century

MASTER THESIS IN PHILOSOPHY LAURA MENEGHELLO - 3299538 Jacob Moleschott and the conception of science in the 19 th century Scientific materialism as “totalizing” worldview First Supervisor: Prof. Dr. P. G. Ziche, Faculty of Philosophy Second Reader: Prof. Dr. L. T. G. Theunissen, Faculty of Natural Sciences Third Reader: Prof. Dr. P. M. L. Steenbakkers, Faculty of Philosophy Academic Year 2009-2010 Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 3 Bibliographical note ................................................................................................................ 15 1. Jacob Moleschott’s conception of science: inclusive materialism .................................. 16 1.1. Jacob Moleschott: materialist, positivist, monist? ....................................................... 16 1.2. Physiology in the 19th century and the conception of organism ................................. 19 1.3. Materialistic science and its relation to the philosophical tradition ........................... 25 2. Scientific materialism and the philosophical tradition ................................................... 30 2.1. Feuerbach ......................................................................................................................... 30 2.2. Kant, Schelling and Hegel .............................................................................................. 44 2.3. Goethe ............................................................................................................................... 55 3. Popularization of science between moralizing, religious and nationalistic tones: scientific materialism as “totalizing” worldview ................................................................. 65 3.1. The relation between epistemology and ethics, and the conception of objectivity .... 65 3.2. The image of science: science as religion ....................................................................... 77 3.3. Science and politics: a new science for a new nation ................................................... 81 Conclusion: Moleschott and D’Annunzio ............................................................................ 92 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 95 2 Introduction “And while I was watching that great man of Science, I had in mind the verse pronounced by Demogorgon in the Prometheus Unbound by the divine Shelley: - This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory [...]!”1 It was the famous Decadent poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who, reviewing Jacob Moleschott’s speech Per una festa della scienza (1887) in the newspaper La Tribuna , which he was working for, wrote these words about that old and renowned scientist. But how could a personality such as D’Annunzio, whose poetry is characterized by a kind of mysticism, glorification of heroism, dispraise of middle-class mediocrity and philo-aristocratic nationalism, dedicate these words to a materialistic scientist like Moleschott? If we stick to the standard picture of scientific materialism, the tone and the content of the article by D’Annunzio are quite incomprehensible. Indeed, according to that standard image, which has been exerting its influence on historical and philosophical studies at least from Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus (1914) onwards, passing through Gregory’s Scientific materialism in the 19 th century (1977) and up to the latest biography about Moleschott by Cosmacini (2005), scientific materialism was a radically innovative movement, which affirmed the superiority of science on every other form of knowledge, and which thus aimed at excluding all non-scientific disciplines from the domain of true knowledge. The materialistic conception of science has at its turn been depicted as purely empiricist, having eliminated every metaphysical ambition, as implying a clear and radical rupture with the philosophical tradition and, finally, as being atheistic and completely separated from, or even opposed to, religion. Starting from such an idea of materialistic science, D’Annunzio’s statement is rather problematic; hence, the necessity of a revision of the standard image of scientific materialism becomes pressing: this is precisely what we are going to do in this work, which is a case study about scientific materialism in the 19 th century and the image of science. We are going to approach this topic mainly through the work of the scientist, politician and philosopher Jacob 1 My translation from FSM, B III 8 (copy of D’Annunzio’s article “Su Iacopo Moleschott”, published on La Tribuna n. 301, 4 novembre 1887, typewritten by M. L. Patrizi and Carlo Moleschott around 1901): “E mentre io guardava quel grande uomo della Scienza, mi suonava nell’animo il verso che canta Demogorgon nel Prometeo liberato del divino Shelley: - This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory – là soltanto è la Vita, la Gioja, l’Imperio e la Vittoria!” 3 Moleschott, a physiologist of Dutch origins whose scientific and political work in the new- born Kingdom of Italy is very significant in order to understand the background and implications of scientific materialism in the late 19 th century, as well as for the understanding of its reception in the late 19 th and early 20 th century. Research on Moleschott, up to now, has been quite scarce, and anyway always limited to a strictly biographical level: Moleschott was himself writing an autobiography, Für meine Freunde. Lebens-Erinnerungen von Jacob Moleschott , which has been published posthumous in 1894, and not much work has been done to investigate the background of the information supplied by Moleschott himself. Basing our research on Moleschott’s unpublished manuscripts, which are conserved in the archives of the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna, we will sketch a far more complex picture of scientific materialism, of Moleschott’s view on science and of the cultural and political function of scientific popularization in the framework of the Italian historical situation of 1870-1900. Scientific materialism: a form of monism? Materialistic science is usually considered to be one part of that general movement called “positivism”; positivism and materialism are in fact related to each other in many respects: first of all, they flourished around the same period of time (basically the second half of the 19 th century); secondly, they played the same role in the society of the time, which included the “popularization” of scientific ideas; thirdly, they both set for themselves the task and the project of integrating science, philosophy, politics and religion in one all-encompassing worldview. The term “positivism” has been coined by Saint-Simon in 1830 in order to indicate the scientific method and its extension to the domain of philosophy. It had actually already been used by Condorcet, during the Enlightenment, to indicate something which was experimental in its method and concretely useful in its function, but Saint-Simon and his school used it for the first time to indicate the peculiar character of scientific knowledge. 2 It was the French philosopher Auguste Comte who theorized on it in his Cours de philosophie positive (1830- 42), describing an anti-metaphysical approach, and it has since then characterized one of the most important currents of thought in European philosophy and culture in the second half of the 19 th century. Comte interpreted science as well as history and society as a continuous and 2 Cioffi, F., Gallo, F., Luppi, G., Vigorelli, A., Zanette, E., 2000. Diálogos . III. Milano: Mondadori, p. 116. 4 necessary progress, and argued for the use of the scientific positivistic method in all fields of knowledge. Herbert Spencer further developed the doctrine of a progressive evolution of social history, modeling his thought on the evolutionistic theory. The fact that Moleschott abundantly quoted Spencer in his sketched Anthropologie shows that he knew his doctrines and was inspired by them. 3 Positivism has been mostly interpreted in a mechanistic and deterministic sense, if not even in a reductionistic sense, i.e. as being in favour of a reduction of all disciplines to the scientific method, and of all phenomena (be they natural, social or historical) to the same fundamental laws. But, in fact, we will show that what we find in scientific materialism is a definitely organicistic viewpoint, and a strong presence of explicitly religious, rhetoric and literary elements, whose importance for scientific ideas and the image of science the materialists are completely aware of. The same problem pertains to the interpretation of Moleschott’s thought: he is generally considered to be a materialist, but his contemporaries interpreted him as a monist 4. The standard interpretation of scientific materialism, which has been the dominant view since the end of the 19 th century, depicts it as naïf scientism, which pretended to deny the very existence of everything which could not be defined in terms of matter and force; scientific materialism has thus been described as fundamentally reductionist, physicalist and mechanistic. Interestingly, this view was common to detractors 5 of materialism, to historians 6, and even to those who presented themselves as continuing the materialistic tradition 7 (and who, thus, where continuing that tradition only insofar as it had been interpreted in a certain way). But, in

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