Reproduction without polarity in the work of Johann Wilhelm Ritter
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Reproduction without polarity in the work of Johann Wilhelm Ritter Jocelyn Holland1
Received: 24 February 2020 / Accepted: 28 September 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The theories of reproduction that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century exhibited a range in experimental thinking about concepts of gender and sexuality. This essay focuses on the work of a writer who proposed an unusual alternative to polarity-based ideas of reproduction. Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810) was a physicist and friend to the German Romantics and someone whose writing also shares many interests with German Naturphilosophie. The essay discusses how, inspired by ideas from the alchemical tradition, Ritter challenged conventional thinking about reproduction in two significant ways: by linking it to the idea of rotation, and by using the figure of the androgyne to understand reproductive models in terms of triads, rather than oppositional pairings. A further objective of this essay is to consider which aspects of the alchemical tradition proved the most useful for Ritter’s experimental thinking and to show how he integrated them with reflections on contemporary scientific developments around 1800. Keywords Ritter · Schelling · Reproduction · Rotation · Alchemy
1 Introduction Theories of reproduction dating from the latter part of the 18th century, regardless of whether these theories were framed in terms of literary, scientific, or philosophical models, generated a wide spectrum of experimental thinking that also played out in terms of reflection on sex and gender differences. It has been noted, for example by Peter H. Reill, that during that time period “gender, often interpreted in terms
* Jocelyn Holland [email protected] 1
California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
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of sexuality, increasingly occupied a more important place within the competing discourses of generation” (Reill 2005, p. 221). One should be clear, however, as Susanne Lettow has also observed, that “a polarized hierarchical understanding of gender developed only around 1800” and that “the cultural process of ‘polarization’ and ‘differentiation’ of the sexes was not a linear development; rather, during the period, both one-sex and two-sex models overlapped as they were favored by different authors” (Lettow 2014, p. 4). In this essay I show how Johann Wilhelm Ritter, a writer influenced in equal measure by German Romanticism and Naturphilosophie, proposed a peculiar alternative to ideas of reproduction based on a hierarchy of two sexes.1 What makes this example an interesting one for the history–and philosophy–of science is that it does not quite fit with the otherwise convincing argument Reill has put forth wherein “the Naturphilosophen made gender and used it to define sex” in that they “placed the male at the pinnacle of all creation” (Reill 2005, pp. 229, 235). One can find evidence for adding a caveat to this claim in various passa
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