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Nature of History MASTERARBEIT History of Nature – Nature of History Notions of Time and Space in Eighteenth-Century Historiography and Natural History MASTERARBEIT Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Master of Arts (MA) an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz vorgelegt von Florian MEIXNER, BA am Institut für Geschichte Begutachter: Univ.-Prof. Dr. phil. Simone De Angelis Graz, 2015 EIDESSTATTLICHE ERKLÄRUNG Ich versichere, dass ich die Masterarbeit selbstständig verfasst, andere als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel nicht benutzt und mich auch sonst keiner unerlaubten Hilfe bedient habe. Graz, am 17.07.2015 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 1. The End of the Scale ....................................................................................................... 6 1.1. A Problem Arising ......................................................................................................... 6 1.2. The scala naturae in Eighteenth-Century Natural History ............................................ 7 1.2.1. Nature in One Dimension ...................................................................................... 7 1.2.2. The Problem of Species – Linnaeus, Buffon and Bonnet ...................................... 9 1.2.3. Nature without Change ........................................................................................ 12 1.2.4. Preformationism vs. Epigenesis ........................................................................... 14 1.3. “Cette chaine n’existe pas” – Emerging Criticism on the Chain ................................. 17 1.3.1. Missing Links....................................................................................................... 17 1.3.2. Leibniz, his Curve and the Problem of Infinity ................................................... 19 1.4. A Net to Save the Scale – ‘Multidimensionalizing’ the scala naturae ........................ 21 1.4.1. Johann Hermann and his Tabula Affinitatum Animalium (1783) ........................ 21 1.4.2. From the Scale to the Net – Entering the Second Dimension.............................. 25 1.4.3. Affinities as Ordering Principle ........................................................................... 31 1.4.4. Spatial Limits of the Two-Dimensional Network ................................................ 32 1.5. The Comparative Method in Natural History .............................................................. 35 2. A Matter of Time .......................................................................................................... 38 2.1. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck – A New Approach ................................................................. 38 2.1.1. Back to the Scale .................................................................................................. 38 2.1.2. A Theory of Natural Change ................................................................................ 43 2.2. Ideas of Change in Eighteenth-Century Thought......................................................... 47 2.2.1. The Count and the New World – Buffon’s Concept of Degeneration ................. 47 2.2.2. Only Matter Matters – The Materialists and Change ........................................... 50 2.2.3. Past and Future States – Charles Bonnet’s Palingénésie ..................................... 53 2.2.4. The ‘Other’ Leibniz ............................................................................................. 57 2.2.5. A Power of Change – Blumenbach and his Bildungstrieb .................................. 59 2.3. A Question of Time ...................................................................................................... 62 2.3.1. Back to Lamarck .................................................................................................. 62 2.3.2. Change without Time? ......................................................................................... 63 2.3.2.1. Buffon Again ............................................................................................... 63 2.3.2.2. Bonnet and Time .......................................................................................... 66 2.3.3. Lamarck’s Escalator – A New Dimension........................................................... 66 2.4. Interim Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 68 3. Excursus: Earth in Time and Nature in Space – Eberhard August von Zimmermann’s Geographische Geschichte der Menschheit ...................................... 69 4. Inventing History – Historical Thought in the Eighteenth Century ........................ 75 4.1. Comments on Eighteenth-Century Historiography ...................................................... 75 4.2. Historia – Grasping an Early Modern Concept ........................................................... 76 4.3. Seperating Histories ..................................................................................................... 78 4.4. Dimensions of the Past – The ‘Multidimensionalization’ of History .......................... 81 4.4.1. Bossuet and the Linearity of History ................................................................... 81 4.4.2. Synchronicity and Geographical Space ............................................................... 83 4.4.2.1. Gatterer’s Nexus rerum universalis ............................................................. 83 4.4.2.2. History and Space ........................................................................................ 86 4.4.2.3. History Outside Europe................................................................................ 87 4.4.3. Expanding Time – Past, Future and Progress within ........................................... 89 4.4.4. Pushing Dimensional Boundaries – Cultures across Time and Space ................. 92 4.5. ‘Anthropology’ and the ‘History of Mankind’ – Reconnecting History and Nature ... 94 4.5.1. The Rise of Anthropological Thought ................................................................. 94 4.5.2. Man as the Link – the ‘History of Mankind’ ..................................................... 100 4.5.3. Remarks on Herder and Kant ............................................................................. 105 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 108 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 112 Primary Sources ................................................................................................................ 112 Secondary Literature ......................................................................................................... 116 List of Figures ....................................................................................................................... 120 Introduction Within the broader context of the history of the life sciences, the late eighteenth century is perceived as a period of fundamental changes in the conceptualization of nature as a system. Over the last decades, the transition from the static Early Modern notion of the natural world towards nineteenth-century theories of natural change – and mutability in particular – has been addressed by many historians of science. It is, above all, Arthur O. Lovejoy who has provided the term ‘temporalization’ in order to describe the processes concerning the natural world and the prevalent concept of the scale of beings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Within a specific historiographical tradition – following Michel Foucault, Reinhard Koselleck and others –, eminent historians like Wolf Lepenies1 used terms like ‘temporalization’, ‘processualization’ or ‘acceleration’ to describe rather than really explain the apparent changes within the realm of natural history. By introducing or readopting these terms, historians of science – or of ‘biology’, as we would call it today – tried to summarize the general shifts that took place in the second half of the eighteenth century and which would ultimately lead towards evolutionary thought, paving the way for Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection. The goal was, or so it seems, to discover the roots of Darwin’s epochal theory in the preceding centuries and to describe the transitions that made the emergence of something like the Origins of Species possible. For quite a long time, the natural sciences of the eighteenth century were actually rather – even if not explicitly –seen in the aftermath of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and as the prelude to the rise of the sciences in the nineteenth century. In the examination of the history of the life sciences, it becomes clear that the innovations and insights of the eighteenth century were overshadowed by what came afterwards. Thus, it is not surprising that, in many cases, the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were merely seen as the “time before Darwin” and, equally, scientific achievements and transitions of that period simply classified as “pre-Darwinian”2. This approach towards eighteenth-century natural history and its debates about classifications, mutability and progress inevitably led to some kind of distorted perspective and created the impression of historical teleology. As a 1 Cf. LEPENIES, Wolf:
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