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ESSAY REVIEW
The Ecology of Romantic Biology
Kenneth Caneva*
ROBERT J. RICHARDS. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in
the Age of Goethe. (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations.) xix+587 pp.,
frontis., illus., bibl., index.
In
its exhaustive survey of essential primary sources, its
sympathetic yet incisive analysis, and its masterful interweaving
of the lives and ideas of his dozen protagonists, the
bulk of Robert Richards's Romantic Conception of Life constitutes
the best synthetic account I have ever read of the
scientificespecially biological
aspects of German Romantic philosophy. The
author has explored all imaginable sources and mined them
for every relevant nugget of
1830, Richards has charted the philosophical
and scientific ideas of German Romantic thinkers "as
their ideas emerged from the intellectual legacy to which
they were heir, from their immediate scientific experiences,
and especially from their more intimate personal relationships"
(p. xviii). The amount of biographical detail may tax the
patience of the reader who wants to know what the
significance is of this or that fact, but the picture
that results is all the richer for having been so
fleshed out, and it well illustrates Richards's point
that an adequate understanding of German Romantic philosophy
cannot be divorced from the interconnected lives of the people
who created it. "Out of these intellectual and
personal interactions came a mode of thought that
emphasized creative becoming, development, and self-realization"
(p. 200). Richards is especially good, for example, in
showing the connections between Goethe's art and science
in the context of his lived life, in particular his aesthetic
response to both women in the flesh and the female as
an abstraction. Nor did he thereby ignore the importance
of Goethe's response to both Kant's and Schelling's
philosophical enterprises.
Indeed,
the book invites reflection on what it means to understand
a philosophical system like Schelling's, which evolved from
work to work without ever achieving canonical form, which
employed concepts and modes of thought largely alien to
most of us, and which we may be tempted to
judge incapable of being understood in sensible terms. By
taking seriously the philosophical and scientific problems of
Schelling et alia, and by engaging their works with a
sympathetic suspension of self-blinding criticism, Richards has
succeeded not only in making accessible many of the most
abstruse and seemingly strange ideas of Kant, Fichte, and
Schelling but also in situating those ideas within the
interactive context of the scientific work of (in
particular) Blumenbach, Kielmeyer, Reil, and Goethe, as well
as of the literary, philosophical, and theological endeavors
of the Schlegels, Novalis, Schleiermacher, and (again) Goethenot to mention the thrice-married Caroline
Michaelis Bφhmer Schlegel Schelling. We understand what
makes sense in context, and we best understand
philosophical and scientific ideas as answers to specific
problems. Richards notes that, for Romantic biologists, "both
in art and science, comprehension of the whole had to
precede that of the parts" (p. 12). In a similar
vein, his comprehensive analysis of Romantic thinkers and
their thoughts provides the essential context for understanding
the diverse particulars.
Richards
himself does not draw boundaries around the scientists versus
the philosophers versus the literary figures, nor does he
need to. He does distinguish a subset of Romantics from
a larger set of Naturphilosophen in terms of the
former's addition of aesthetic and moral elements to the
latter's general concern with "the organic core of
nature, its archetypal structure, and its relationship to
mind" (p. 516), but he seldom invokes the
distinction or bothers to identify just who was which.
Such omissions, however, do not detract from the book's
cogency, since the terms were not enlisted to do
explanatory work. Richards's Romanticism is not an archetype
but, rather, an evolving set of interacting ideas
enunciated by specific historical personages.
Alongside
its major themes, Richards's book contains a wealth of
related insights and suggestions. For example, he offers
a plausible resolution of the dispute between Goethe and
Lorenz Oken over the vertebral character of the skull,
a resolution that nicely illustrates his comment regarding
Goethe's refashioning of himself in memory and memoir:
"An event's significance may only be realized at a
later time, when memory and judgment have fleshed out
their consequences" (p. 503). And Richards nicely
explicates Schelling's notion of dynamic evolution in
terms of his rejection of Erasmus Darwin's "genealogical"
evolution. Against many claims to the contrary, Richards
argues convincingly that both Schelling and Goethe imagined
organic evolutionthe progressive development of higher from
lower organisms
to have been a real occurrence in real
time.
Of
course it is hardly to be expected that Richards would
get it all right, even if he is usually a reliable
guide. When he writes that the explanation of natural
phenomena in Schelling's system requires "a framework of
interactive polar forces, that is, of fundamentally organic
powers" (p. 139), and asserts that, for Schelling, "the
laws of chemistry derived from higher organic laws"
(p. 287), he misses the opportunity to discuss the
centrality to Schelling's philosophy of his conception of
a hierarchy of laws applicable to (typically three)
different levels of dynamic interaction, and he fails to
recognize that "organic" applies only to the
highest level, not also to the more basic and lower inorganic
levels. Richards apparently misses the significance of the
passage he quotes in which Schelling noted "the
continuous and steady progress of nature toward organization"
(p. 290).
Richards's
translations are generally serviceable insofar as they
accurately convey the sense of the original, but they are
sometimes imprecise as translations. The quotation from Kant
on pages 230231, while it does not distort Kant's
sense, is in fact an edited fusion of two separate
sentences from the original. Similarly, the first two
sentences in the long quotation from Kant's Kritik der
Urteilskraft on page 232 are a grammatically recast and
edited-down rendition of a single sentence in the
original
and, as such, are more a
paraphrase than a translation. In the long quotation from
Schelling on page 145 Richards omitted translating the
important qualifying words "ohne es erreichen zu
kφnnen" at the end of the first sentence, and here
as elsewhere he has failed to indicate emphasis in the
original text (usually Sperrdruck in Schelling). And occasionally
the translations threaten to fall short of even the
serviceable. Where Schelling wrote specifically "das Universum"
Richards offers, generically, "a universe"; nor does "a
general mutuality of substances" intelligibly render "eine
allgemeine Wechselwirkung der Substanzen" (p. 157). Where
Richards has Herder saying "and so no human eye
can penetrate the realm of the unborn, the great
ΰλα[matter] or Hades," a more accurate rendering
would be "and so arose the realm of the unborn, the
great ΰλη [sic] or Hades, into which reaches
no human eye" (p. 223; "[matter]" is Richards's
interpolation). To Richards's credit, his expanded references
make it possible to check such passages in editions other
than the ones he has cited.
In
the "Epilogue" that constitutes, as it were,
the book's teleological culmination, Richards seeks "to
demonstrate ... that
Since
this Darwinian epilogue is by far the weakest chapter in
the book, it would be unfortunate if the considerable
strengths of the more than five hundred pages devoted to
"Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe"
were overshadowed by the author's overreaching in his
less-than-fifty-page epilogue, especially since claims about
Darwin will likely interest more people than an in-depth
representation of German Romantic science and philosophy.
Much of Richards's case consists in attacking a
simplistic counterimage of in Richards's terms, on "the Romantic
conception of nature that underlay his theory of
evolution" (p. 514). "The nature that
Such
scanty evidence as Richards is able to adduce for his
strong claims sometimes even goes against them. For
example, he asserts that "the nature to which
selection gave rise was perceived in its parts and in
the whole as a teleologically self-organizing structure" (p.
534), whereby Richards identifies natural selection as the
Darwinian analogue to the Romantics' goal-directed Bildungstrieb
(p. 479). I just don't see the supposed teleological
commonality. Two long passages Richards quotes in this
regard demonstrate the weakness of his claim. In the
first, from the Origin, a quasi-personified "Nature"
scrutinizes every variation, "rejecting that which is bad,
preserving and adding up all that is good" (p. 534).
In the second, from the "Essay of 1844," a
supposed "Being"here explicitly masculine
oversees the selection process (p. 536).
Alas for Richards's attempt to link
precisely the image Richards has insisted
that the Romantics firmly rejected. Purposefulness was not
a part of nature for
Given
the fact that Richards was concerned both to trace
Goethe's historical influence on science and to
rehabilitate Goethe's science as good sciencehe was "not simply a good
scientist for the time, but a good scientist for all
time" (p. 408)
one is not surprised to find that, more
broadly, he was concerned not just to exhibit Romantic
science within its own context of intelligibility but
also to claim for it a substantial positive role in the
unfolding story of nineteenth-century biology on the wider
stage of Darwinian evolution. As noted, Richards's earlier
book, The Meaning of Evolution, makes a convincing case for the
importance to the development of
in particular, morphological archetypes and
recapitulation both ontogenetic and phylogenetic. In attempting
to do similar rehabilitative work for Romantic notions of
aesthetics, morality, and teleology, Richards has overplayed
his hand. This is unfortunate, because although it falls
short of its goal, The Romantic Conception of Life can serve
as a model for how to do thick-description,
biographically contextualized history of ideas. In a just
world it will be appreciated for what it has accomplished
in making accessible and intelligible a vast body of
often abstruse material concerning a major episode in cultural
history, in the history of philosophy, and in the history
of the life sciences.
Department
of History, 219 McIver Building,
1
Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological
Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
To the
Editor:
In
his essay review of my book The Romantic Conception of Life:
Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (683),
Kenneth Caneva plays both the critical good cop and the
critical bad cop. In the initial part of his essay, as
he surveys the first 550 pages of the book, he
infuses praise sufficient to inflate the most inelastic
of egos. When he acknowledges that the book is "the
best synthetic account I have ever read of the
scientific
especially
biological
aspects
of German Romantic philosophy," well, the author can
only humbly accept the sentiment. As he expands on this
view, the author can only admire the acuteness of Caneva's judgment. In the second part of
the review, however, a distinct falling off of critical
acumen occurs. Indeed, another kind of judgment slips
into the review.
Caneva
makes two kinds of rough complaint, one concerning parts
of the translation, the other concerning the last fifty
pages of the book. The book is interlarded with translations
from German Romantic poetry, plays, letters, scientific treatises,
and philosophic works. On the one hand, Caneva says that
the translations "accurately convey the sense of the
original," but, on the other, he thinks I've
distorted two passages in Kantthough
preserving their meaning
by
altering their German surface structure: either by
joining some separated phrases or by dividing a longer
sentence. Kant's original sentences are often sinuous and
complex hydras that can strangle meaning when rendered
word for word in English. Moreover, English lacks certain
grammatical markers present in German (e.g., gender of nouns
and pronouns), so that some shifting of noun phrases and
pronoun clauses is required in order that the English
not be neutered of meaning. The job of the
translator, as even Caneva suggests, is to retain the
sense of the original
without,
however, mechanically constructing a pony that no
sensible reader could comfortably ride. Of the almost 100
pages devoted to Schelling, with a considerable amount of
translation leavening the discussion, I will admit to
having dropped a phrase in one of his sentences, a
phrase that simply does not change the basic meaning of
the sentence. Even Homer nods. From those 100 pages,
Caneva detects two other defective translations. One seemingly
occurs when I substitute an English indefinite article ("a")
for a German definite article ("das");
I do believe, though, the English captures exactly
Schelling's meaning. What is trot-literal in an isolated
phrase would, if injected into the translation, make the
English stumble along. The second supposed defect amounts
to translating a very vague German phrase with a
vague English phrase. I suppose the objection here is
that I was too literal in my rendering. I believe, though,
that if my discussion of Schelling's philosophy up to
that point has been followed, the phrase, which occurs in
a footnote, is as clear as possible. Most of
Schelling's early treatises were little-changed lectures that he
gave at
The
second half of Caneva's review is
devoted to the last eight percent of the book. In the
epilogue, I make a case for the impact of German
Romanticism on plenty
of straw still left in that man, I wager. Well, the reader
can judge the adequacy of my account. But I can't refrain
from making a final observation about Caneva's
assessment. I argue that reading Alexander von Humboldt's
Personal Narrative of his own trip to South and
ROBERT J. RICHARDS