“Alexander von Humboldt: Between Enlightenment Vitalism and Romantic Naturphilosophie”

Peter Reill (UCLA)

In this paper, I will analyze the position of Alexander von Humboldt in the transition from late eighteenth-century vitalism to German Romantic Naturphilosophie. Rather than placing Humboldt in either camp, I will argue that he attempted to mediate between them, producing a form of science that partook of basic positions derived from vitalism, which he developed during his years in Germany and Paris, but also included positions drawn from Naturphilosophie’s desire to create philosophically informed comprehensive and unifying sciences such as biology. In the process, Humboldt forged a vision of science that over time stood in stark contrast to the emerging sciences of the nineteenth century that increasingly emphasized disciplinary separation and specialization. Thus, his last and most influential work, Cosmos, (which developed themes already present in his Ansichten der Natur) though a best seller amongst the educated reading public soon was dismissed by scientifically-trained specialists as “mere” popular science. By the beginning of the twentieth-century, Humboldt was virtually removed from the pantheon of great scientists, especially in non-German speaking lands. Only recently has there been a reevaluation of his larger scientific program, leading many to argue, as Wulf claims, that he “invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today.” Though I believe such a claim exaggerated, this paper will trace the manner in which Humboldt combined elements of both Enlightenment vitalism and Romantic Naturphilosophie to construct his unique view of science and nature.

“Kielmeyer: Nature’s Experiments”

Joan Steigerwald (York University)

In the years around 1800 several publications appeared attempting to define a science of life. Assertions of the need for a science of life emerged in the context of anxieties over the disappearance of a distinct domain for life, in the face of encroachments from the physical sciences that claimed to answer that question. The articulations of that domain were accordingly also an attempt to delineate what life is not, or to demarcate a boundary between the living and nonliving. Works by Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus explored these questions by drawing attention to the material conditions of organic vitality, and tracing physiological functions in the simplest forms of life. This paper examines Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s contributions within this context. He proposed regarding the different relations of organic powers in different individual organisms and in different natural kinds as “nature’s experiments” with viable and abiding forms of life. That nature produced different living forms or relations of powers and processes under different physical conditions suggested that purposeful living organisms were not given, but formed from the materials of the world. Kielmeyer also investigated experiments on the spontaneous generation of life. His project for a comparative physiology and the history of life thus drew upon nature’s own experiments as his experimental system. Although Kielmeyer’s sketches of such a project remained unpublished, his lectures were widely circulated, and contributed to the questioning of the limits and viable forms of life at the turn of the nineteenth century.

“Lamarckiana”

Jessica Riskin (Stanford University)

My subject is the politics of the emergence and spread, between about 1740 and 1820, of two major, related ideas: first, the idea of biology as a distinct science of life, and second, the idea of what we would now call “evolution,” but I will call it “transformism” to avoid reading aspects of later theories back into these early ideas about species-change. The person who chiefly pioneered both of these ideas was the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, author of the term “biology” and of the first theory of species-change and professor of natural history at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris. In 1802, Lamarck defined “biology” as one of three parts of “terrestrial physics,” the part comprehending everything to do with living bodies, especially their organization and its “tendency to create special organs.” In other words, the idea that living things compose and transform themselves was central to this original definition of “biology.” The paper will examine the political history of these conjoined ideas, transformism and a science devoted to its study, which carried with them an atmosphere of materialism, radicalism and anti-clericalism. This atmosphere became especially troubling toward the end of the nineteenth century to people such as the German Darwinist biologist August Weismann, who offered a definitive new interpretation of Darwinism that eliminated any whiff of Lamarckism. He and other neo-Darwinists were so successful that even today, Lamarck’s name is still in bad odor. His ideas themselves cannot tell us why; only their history can do that.

“On the Progress Physiology Has Made since Haller: Ignaz Döllinger and the Legacy of the Eighteenth Century”

John Zammito (Rice University)

Ignaz Döllinger (1770-1841) was decisive in consolidating the experimental physiology of the eighteenth century to lay the foundations for the disciplinary practices of the nineteenth, as one of his most notable publications makes clear in its very title: On the Progress Physiology has made since Haller (1824). He stood at the forefront of his generation in life science, and thus his conception of the field – and his sense of the philosophy of science that it required – can be taken to capstone the whole development which made Naturphilosophie not only congenial but generative for emergent biology. He clearly drew his philosophical orientation from the Naturphilosophen but he also advanced experimental physiology after the fashion of Haller. Indeed, he embodied the decisive continuity from Albrecht von Haller through Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Christoph Heinrich Pfaff, Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Christian Reil and Gottfired Reinhold Treviranus, to the generation of his own students, Karl Ernst von Baer and Heinz Christian Pander, as well as to their key contemporaries, Johannes Müller and the discoverers of cell theory, Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann, with whom no one can doubt that biology as a special science had taken form.