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 A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP 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. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. 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 vitalism, 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 Plato, 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, Immanuel Kant 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,