The "metaphor of life": Herder's philosophy of history and uneven developments in late eighteenth-century natural sciences

History and Theory

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 322-347

  Palti, Elías ^a  

^a UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE QUILMES   (Argentina)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149364849     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00095     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. F. Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, transl. J. Anderson (London, 1972), 491-492
2. Max Rouché, La Philosophic de l'histoire de Herder (Paris, 1940), 25 and 91. A. Gilles opens his classical Herder (Oxford, 1945) by affirming that "his function seems to me to be the counterpart of that of Kant, his great opponent, in the making of the mind of modern Germany [remember that it was written in June, 1944]. He formulated its emotional content, as Kant formulated its intellectual content" (v)
3. In Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley, 1955)
4. Robert T. Clark qualifies that concept. Against Kant, Clark praises Herder's "courage" to refuse the imperialist attempts of his own nation against the Russians' pretensions in the European East
5. Edgar Schlick, Metaphorical Organicism in Herder's Early Works (Paris, 1971), 119.
6. Meinecke, Historism, 491-495.
7. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie, 44-45 [this and other translations from foreign languages to English are mine].
8. Herder, "Plastik," in Werke (Berlin, 1877), VIII, 64
9. cited by Marshall Brown, The Shape of German Romanticism (Ithaca and London, 1979), 29.
10. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophie of the History of Man (London, 1803), I, 16.
11. Lambert, "Cosmological Letters," in Theories of the Universe, ed. M. Munitz (New York, 1957), 258
12. Kant, "Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens," in Munitz, ed. , Theories of the Universe, 241.
13. Cited by Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernicun World, transl. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 539 (the source is not provided, but it is Herder's newspaper, Adrastea [see below, p. 341])
14. see Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature [Cambridge, Mass. , 1990], 20)
15. Herder, Auch eine Philosophic, 66.
16. Cited by Blumenberg, The Genesis, 539
17. cited by Clark, Herder: His Life and Thought, 246).
18. Herder, "Essay on Lyrical Poetry" (1766), Selected Early Works, 1764-1767 (University Park, Pa. , 1991), 70.
19. see also the analysis of this debate by A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe [Baltimore, 1968])
20. Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea [1936] (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), chapter 9: "The Temporalizing of the Chain of Being," 242-287
21. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie, 60.
22. Herder, Outlines, I, 186.
23. Herder, Sdmtliche Werke, VI, 299ff.
24. Herder, Auch erne Philosophie, 37.
25. Herder, "Essay on Lyrical Poetry," Selected Early Works, 79.
26. The idea of "force" was applied by eighteenth-century scholars to explain chemical processes. Force theories contended with ether theories. The latter invoked imponderable fluids and atomic collisions to account for chemical processes. These were termed mechanical. Force theories, instead, explained them by appealing to attractive and repulsive forces between atomic centers. Since active powers were here involved, these theories were called dynamical. Both parties, however, were founded in Newton's writings. The "dynamists" had as their source the "Queries" to the Opticks. In these, Newton appealed to "forces" to explain action at distance (see Trevor Levere, Affinity and Matter:Elements of Chemical Philosophy, 1800-1865 [Oxford, 1971], "Introduction")
27. The Satyr was a genius gifted with powers, who persecuted and raped the innocent Psyche
28. Herder, Sdmtliche Werke, VIII, 178.
29. As Ennemoser said later in his Physiognomical Observations (1820): "In the whole nature there is nothing that does not reveal any active life, spiritual or interior, through its external physical existence, or in it. Each being expresses, by virtue of its personality, the permanent qualities of a singular spirituality. There is, therefore, a physiognomy of everything which belongs to nature" (quoted by A. Göde von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism [New York, 1941 J, 272)
30. Quoted by Göde von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism, 250
31. Quoted by Hugh Barr Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), 146 (source not provided). We know that Herder received electrical treatments (minor shocks), as the Galvanists suggested, in order to re-establish the inner balance of forces
32. Galvani's experiments with frogs' legs (1789) marked a watershed in the history of our images of nature. According to his experiments, muscular movements could be explained as result of the action of "animal electricity," later called "galvanism." It would soon be concluded from this that all the movements of the vegetal and animal organisms, and indeed of the whole universe, responded to the action of an agent of this kind. This, in turn, would lead to the thought that inorganic matter was subject to the same laws of animate organization. This was in great part the background for the emergence of romantic philosophies of nature (and also of the animist tendencies that prevailed in its literature). Ritter, whose lectures are landmarks in the development of German Romanticism, did not doubt the possibility of reducing those hidden forces to demonstrable physical essences. He affirmed also that man would soon produce mirrors to reflect electricity and magnetism (J. W. Ritter, Fragmente aus dem Naclasse eines jungen Physikers [Heidelberg, 1810], I, 161-162, quoted by Blumenberg, The Genesis, 621)
33. At the end of the eighteenth century, diverse theories competed in this field. Jung-Stilling, together with Mesmer, affirmed the priority of magnetism. "Animal magnetism," Jung-Stilling said, "demonstrates that we indeed possess an inner being, a soul, which is the divine spark of the eternal spirit that possesses will and reason, and a cover of light, inseparable from it. The luminous matters, electrical, magnetic and galvanic, and the ether's, all seem to be the same being, under different modifications" (quoted by Göde von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism, 71)
34. English translation: Herder, Outlines of a Philosophic of the History of Man (London, 1803).
35. Herder, Idea de la Humanidad (Buenos Aires, 1954), 46.
36. Herder, Outlines, II, 294.
37. A different perspective can be found in Frederick Beiser's Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800 (Cambridge, Mass. , 1992), 201-215. Beiser holds that Herder endorsed radical, and even anarchist, political views
38. Herder, Samtliche Werke, VIII, 18.
39. Herder, Sämtliche Werke, XVI.
40. quoted by Brown, The Shape, 30.
41. Herder, God: Some Conversations, 178.
42. Lambert, Cosmological Letters; in Munitz, Theories of the Universe, 252.
43. Herder has been seen among other things as an "early positivist" (Martin Schütze, "The Fundamental Ideas in Herder's Thought," Modem Philology 18 11920-1921 ], 65-78
44. cited by Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science, 8). The classical text that opens the debate, and whose title is already explicit enough, is Max Rouché, Herder Précurseur de Darwin? Histoire d'un Mythe (Paris, 1940)
45. W. Zimmerli has denounced the anachronism implicit in this view ("Evolution or Development? Questions Concerning the Systematic and Historical Position of Herder," in Herder Today: Contributions from the International Herder Conference, Nov. 5-8, 1987, Stanford, California, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer [Berlin and New York, 1990], 5)
46. See Shirley A. Roe, Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate (Cambridge, Eng., 1981) 146-147
47. See Toby A. Appel, The Geoffroy-Cuvier Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin (Oxford, 1987), 40-47
48. O. Temkin, "German Concepts of Ontogeny and History around 1800," in The Double Face of Janus and other Essays in the History of Medicine [Baltimore, 1977], 384-385
49. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970).
50. Roe, Mutter, Life, and Generation, 155.
51. Alasdair Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind., 1988), 396