Reproduction versus metamorphosis: Hegel and the evolutionary thinking of his time
- PDF / 653,534 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 46 Downloads / 130 Views
Reproduction versus metamorphosis: Hegel and the evolutionary thinking of his time Márcio Suzuki1
Received: 20 February 2020 / Accepted: 9 July 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Several problems with Hegel’s conception of the organism in the Encyclopaedia are due to the separation between individual life in Nature and the universal life of the Concept. This discontinuity between ontogenesis and phylogenesis in his dialectics of organic life will be studied here by following his presentation of physiological development, especially reproduction, and by reconstructing the historical model he criticizes—Leibniz’s organic machines and their development in Buffon’s Natural History—a model that was also of crucial importance to the philosophy of nature of Schelling and his followers. Keywords Hegel · Philosophy of nature · Buffon · Reproduction · Metamorphosis · Evolution A la mémoire de Gérard Lebrun, vingt ans après son départ.
The main merit of John Zammito’s recent book on the Gestation of German Biology (Zammito 2018) is unquestionably the double historiographical revision it proposes. On the one hand, Zammito shows how ambivalent Kant’s Third Critique was for the constitution of biology as a science in the late 18th century and early 19th century; at the same time, he reveals that Romantic Naturphilosophie was not a barrier, but, on the contrary, served as the path leading to the establishment and institutional consolidation of biology as a science in Germany. For the history and philosophy of the life sciences, this revision implies re-thinking all the criticism about Romanticism’s lack of scientificity, which also entails re-discussing Hegel’s evaluation of * Márcio Suzuki [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of São Paulo, Av. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, 315, São Paulo 05508‑100, Brazil
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
M. Suzuki 31 Page 2 of 22
the shortcomings of his Romantic opponents. While in the case of Kant, despite his reservations about the French vital materialists, there can still be seen a kind of continuity between him and the German Romantics—this continuity being largely due to ambiguities in his texts and to misunderstandings on the part of his readers1— Hegel is a figure of rupture, or at least wants to appear as such. If so, what is the significance of this rupture for the history of biology in Germany? The following text proposes a discussion of this question by examining the problems Hegel poses for himself as he moves away from the trajectory that links French vital materialism to Romanticism. The main problem of his philosophy of nature is perhaps the existence of two types of “evolution” within it (an individual, empirical, “evolution” and a rational one linked to the formation of genera and species), and this duplicity is responsible for a discrepancy between ontogenesis and phylogenesis in his way of conceiving Nature. To understand this discontinuity is fundamental if one wants to answer the much-debated issue of Hegelian “evolutionism,” a matter
Data Loading...
