Charles Wolfe
comments on Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005)
Sydney, HPS, 2007
Introduction
Reill’s initial claim is that the 18th century shouldn’t be treated as
‘mechanistic’ (deterministic? quantitative?), in contrast to the classic,
Adorno/Horkheimer view acc. to which Enlightenment = calculative rationalism. This
is actually a point made in a variety of places (reprised p. 251f.). More original is his
suggestion that the response to mechanism breaks down into ‘neomechanists’
(Condorcet, D’Alembert, Laplace, etc.) and ‘vitalists’ (p. 6). What about materialism,
then? Someone like d’Holbach doesn’t quite fit this. Nor, earlier, does Toland. Nor La
Mettrie (about whom Reill, quoting Vartanian [p. 269, n. 4], acknowledges that he
‘organicizes’ mechanism, but doesn’t see that this might call into question his own
opposition between mechanism and vitalism1). Etc. But still, a helpful branching out
picture.
Similar reminder that there is kind of a Renaissance revival (p. 7). That is,
similar modification of some of the received view.
It is important for the historiography of vitalism that Reill locates both
vitalism and ‘neomechanism’ within a skeptical framework — i.e., given the “mid18th-century critique of hypothetical thinking” (p. 5), which carries the Enlightenment
away from system-rationalism as in the previous century, two fundamental strategies
arise “to satisfy the objections raised by the skeptical critique of reductive rationalism
and uniformity” (p. 6): “neomechanism” (as described above) and the view Reill calls
“Enlightenment vitalism” (ibid.). Thus, “True to the skeptical critique of causation
and forces, vitalists agreed that active life forces could not be seen directly, nor could
they be measured” (p. 8; the general point is repeated at the end of the book, p. 252). I
don’t think other scholars (Rey, Duchesneau, Williams) have seen this. Connects
Also strange comment that Leibniz’s notion of “living machines” provided “the basis for La Mettrie’s
attack upon a strict constructionist definition of organization in Man a Machine” (pp. 61-62): in fact La
Mettrie is nothing of a Leibnizian (unlike Diderot), and it’s not clear what “constructionist” means
here. However, it makes sense to say, as Roselyne Rey does in her history of vitalism in France, that
Leibniz was its major philosophical influence.
1
1
obviously to the ‘Newtonian analogy’ theme. And makes vitalism seem like rather
less of a metaphysics.
This enables Reill, then, to claim that ‘vitalism’ is a better category — for the
historian, presumably — than the binary opposition between mechanism and
organicism (p. 11). I’m not sure I totally see this, but it’s clear that in classic works on
the period, notably Roger (and in a different way, Canguilhem) there is far too much
polarization of this sort (as noted also by Gaukroger with regard to Descartes). Of
course, the vitalists themselves indulge in a good deal of polarization.
And he doesn’t just want to focus on some isolated figures, vitalists; “my
claims are much stronger” (p. 10): to define a figure called ‘Enlightenment Vitalism’
as a key representative figure, and one which is not an ideal type but a real type (p.
11). Nice point — at least one I agree with, and which runs counter to a lot of German
scholarship (slightly partisan): Naturphilosophie is not the logical culmination of
vitalism. “Rather than seeing Naturphilosophie as vitalism’s logical conclusion, I
interpret it as its negation, as a thoroughgoing critique of the epistemological,
methodological, and linguistic assumptions that undergirded Enlightenment Vitalism”
(p. 14; restated p. 235). In a nutshell, Naturphilosophie seeks to overcome mediation
and assert unity, community, etc., whereas vitalism is about mediation (not least
between mechanism and organicism). (Think of split between Goethe and Diderot.)
Recalling the skeptical motif, Reill claims (rightly I think) that “The
Naturphilosophen shunted aside the late Enlightenment’s epistemological modesty,
branding it timid and sterile, replacing it with an epistemological aggressiveness” (p.
209), of which Novalis is characteristic (one shouldn’t disdain hypotheses, and one
shouldn’t limit oneself to an empiricist method).
Reill returns to this distinction later on, and refers to the frequent invocation of
Naturphilosophie as the ‘other’ of Enlightenment (which he doesn’t disagree with).
But his story changes the Manichean opposition between a ‘bad’ Enlightenment and a
‘good’, holistic Naturphilosophie by putting vitalism at centre stage, and insisting that
it is not to be assimilated to Naturphilosophie and/or Romanticism. Granted, “there is
no doubt that Romantic Naturphilosophie could not have been constructed without
concepts generated by Enlightenment vitalists” (p. 200). But “in its goals,
assumptions and conclusions, Romantic Naturphilosophie differed radically from
Enlightenment vitalism” (ibid.), in its intellectual and scientific agenda – even if the
critique of mechanism is an important shared theme. (One might say that vitalism
2
does not try and reject science and create a ‘counter-science’ in the largest sense
possible, as Naturphilosophie does.)
Prologue
On the von Humboldt brothers. Unity of art and science, ‘language of nature’
(Jordanova), a kind of unity which is the opposite of the split between Natur- and
Geisteswissenschaften.
In this sense they are indeed like Diderot and various Enlightenment thinkers,
at least of the more naturalistic variety – not Rousseau, for instance2 – for whom
investigations into Nature and into culture are part of one unified project (although
then one runs into the ‘Linnaean’ problem of the place of man in a natural system, 3 as
e.g. in the pathos of the article ‘Encyclopédie’, by Diderot:
One consideration above all must not be lost sight of, and that is that if man
or the thinking, contemplating being is banished from the surface of the earth,
this moving and sublime spectacle of nature becomes nothing but a sad and
mute scene. The universe is dumb; silence and night overtake it. Everything
changes into a vast solitude where unobserved phenomena occur in a manner
dark and mute. It is the presence of man that makes the existence of beings
interesting; and what could we better have in view in the history of those
beings, than to yield to this consideration? Why not introduce man into our
opus, as he is placed in the universe? Why not make of him a common
center? Is there some point in infinite space from which we could more
advantageously originate the immense lines which we propose to extend to
all other points? What stirring and agreeable reaction of those beings towards
man, and of man toward them, would not result?4
This is part of what is interesting in the project of ‘natural history’.5)
Point, again, that this is part of the Enlightenment, not a ‘counterEnlightenment’ (Hermeticism etc.) and/or a ‘proto-Romanticism’ (pp. 28-29). (See
the comment above about vitalism versus Naturphilosophie.) And then perhaps there
are various Enlightenments (a banality, but one uttered here as a quotation of S.
2
Thus it seems odd to me to locate Rousseau within the genre of natural history as Reill does (p. 63 &
276, n. 112): Rousseau is an ardent anti-materialist, and the natural history program is, in the main, a
materialist program.
3
As Phillip Sloan puts it, “The central issue in anthropological theory of the period concerned the
status of man in the growing taxonomic systematization of nature... Linnaeus had triggered the
problem by his inclusion of man among the Quadrupeda in the order Anthropomorpha, along with the
apes and sloths” (Sloan, “Buffon, German biology, and the historical interpretation of biological
species,” British Journal for the History of Science 12 (1979), p. 124).
4
Diderot, s.v. “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie, vol. V, 641c; trans. Philip Stewart (modified), in
Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert, collaborative translation project
(http://www.hti.umich.edu/d/did/)).
5
A point made in Georges Gusdorf’s Les sciences humaines et la pensée occidentale, V: Dieu, la
nature et l’homme au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Payot, 1972) and more recently by Emma Spary in
her contribution to The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. Clark, Golinski, Schaffer (Chicago, 1999).
3
Shapin). — My reaction to this, at least initially, is that the older idea of ‘national’
Enlightenments might not be so bad after all, thinking about vitalism. That is, instead
of Reill’s vision in which there is a vitalistic Enlightenment which is German and
French (and more), and it is also not just a marginal ‘counter-Enlightenment’, I might
suggest that the vitalism of a Bordeu in France is very different from German
vitalism, in its relation to materialism. (And here we get back to basic differences
between Lumières and Aufklärung, regarding religion and the like.)
ch. 1 (Buffon)
p. 35f.: important distinction between mechanism and mathematical
explanations. This plays out to some extent in the medical theories of the earlier part
of this period (iatromechanism is not always formulated with regard to mathematics);
and cf. the distinction between a ‘quantitative approach’ and ‘mathematization’ (see
in thesis-nts ‘Géométrie’).
p. 37, interesting point (from Margaret Jacobs) that mechanism gradually
came to be associated with conservatism or at least orthodoxy. This is true in someone
like Toland, and Diderot (cf. his ‘anti-Newtonianism’, in which chemistry plays an
important role6). But of course not true of Voltaire, or Maupertuis (who then seems to
‘falsify’ the category again: Maupertuis is a borderline materialist, interesting in
living matter, with a proto-genetic theory; but he is also a Newtonian; one would then
have to distinguish between a mechanistic line of development of Newtonianism –
incl. D’Alembert – and a more ‘analogical’ line of development, which gets one to
vitalism.7 I am not proposing this as a hard and fast ‘historical’ claim but, for now, as
a conceptual distinction.)
p. 38: “Hume’s skeptical analysis of causation was but one instance . . . of the
reevaluation of the mechanical natural philosophy.” — Sure… but having nothing to
do with vitalism, or a vitalistic vision of Nature. (However the Humean program in
‘moral science’ or the ‘science of human nature’ may be said to transcend the
Nature/culture split, too; and he’s not much of a Newtonian despite older prevailing
views.8)
6
Reill notes, correctly, the importance of chemistry for vitalistic ideas in the 18 th c. (pp. 67, 70).
But then there is Haller, who complicates this picture too, by being both a kind of supra-mechanist
and employing Newtonian analogies to articulate physiological laws!
8
See Eric Schliesser’s very helpful entry on Hume and Newtonianism in the Stanford Enc. of
Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-newton/
7
4
Buffon’s relation to mechanism etc. is partly more complicated than Reill
says, because he was, at least in part of his career, something of a Newtonian: he
translated the Vegetable Staticks (1727) by the ‘medical Newtonian’ Stephen Hales
(on plant physiology and measurement of circulation of fluids; Statique des végétaux
et analyse de l’air (1735)) – and, perhaps more importantly, Newton’s Méthode des
fluxions (1740). And he worked on the calculus of probabilities (as noted in fact by
Reill, p. 41). Yet, like Diderot in particular, he has a rejection of mathematical
abstractions in favor of the new, emerging life sciences (the idea that these are
reducible to physics which in turn is mathematizable is not an 18th-century view). The
essay with which he begins the Histoire naturelle – a kind of prelude –, “De la
manière d’étudier et de traiter l’histoire naturelle,” speaks of the “abuse [i.e. over-use,
over-reliance on] of mathematical sciences,”9 and influenced Diderot’s rejection of
the foundational character of mathematics, and emphasizes that calculation is of
limited value in presenting nature as a whole10 – species are just constructs. Indeed, a
kind of constructivism is at work in his view of mathematics, since he describes
mathematical truths as being merely “definitional truths” (“vérités de définition”),
which as such are always “exact and demonstrative,” but also “abstract, intellectual
and arbitrary.”11 Of course, one can also say that he is a ‘mutated Newtonian’, one
who transfers the idea of force / gravity to the biological domain (as Reill notes, p.
43).
On the status of human beings in Buffon (p. 39) and this kind of naturalistic
view, see my comment above and footnote 2; and quote from Buffon given p. 53.
The comments on the new emphasis on history in Buffon (p. 41) are
interesting also with regard to Hume, and to the emergence of a ‘historical’ approach
to knowledge in the 18th century (from Bacon and Locke, actually); see work by Dario
Perinetti incl. his essay on the philosophy of history in the Cambridge Hist. of 18th c.
Philosophy.
p. 42, the comments on hermeticism etc. I think are wrong (cf. p. 84). It’s true
that Buffon is something like a vitalist, or at least has a theory (an important part of
his overall theory) of living matter. But … (And furthermore, it’s a bit awkward to
make Buffon the source of Enlightenment vitalism. Of the major Montpellier vitalists,
Buffon, Œuvres philosophiques (Paris: PUF, 1954), p. 24a (hereafter OP).
A. Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), p. 187.
11
OP, p. 24a.
9
10
5
several, including Bordeu, had started to publish their works before Buffon’s Histoire
naturelle started to appear in 1749; and Reill leaves out [so far] 17th-century figures
like Francis Glisson, who are certainly influences.)
p. 54: I think it’s wrong to equate Buffon with Vico’s verum ipsum factum
principle (which is to some extent of Baconian provenance).
So: Buffon as ‘Enlightenment vitalist’. — Sure, but he is also a kind of
reductionist. Unlike the self-proclaimed vitalists. But it’s true that the distinction
between living matter and dead matter is a key one for him, even if he also
complicates the distinction.
ch. 2 (Chemistry)
…
p. 75: I don’t think it’s right to equate Stahl and Buffon theoretically. Diderot
is a mediating figure between the two, whose presence in this story would make it
make more sense.
p. 79 (aether). This is important. Materialization / substantialization of the
world (also p. 93, “substantialized force”). Related to usage of concept of ‘animal
spirits’, which is a medico-physiological concept with materialist philosophical
overtones (a type of matter with animate properties).
p. 84: this claim – that late 18th c naturalism is about hidden things, thus incl.
vitalism – is debatable (I mean just that, not that it’s wrong, but it should be debated;
on the one hand there is a kind of opacity and recognition that the naturalist doesn’t
deal with essences – Locke, Diderot, etc. – but on the other hand it’s not an
‘irrationalist’ position either; can perhaps be seen in pragmatist terms; complicating
the issue is the vitalist fondness, notably in Barthez, for the ‘Newtonian analogy’
which posits an unknown ‘x’, calls it ‘vital force’ and then seeks to develop an
account of phenomena from it12). — David: how is this really Newtonian? Where is
the science?
pp. 89-90, on ‘oeconomy of nature’. I agree this is an important theme.
Notably from Linnaeus, who has a book of that title – De oeconomia naturae – that
appears the same year as Buffon’s HN, vol. 1 (1749). But this kind of emphasis on
On the latter idea, see TS Hall’s important but rather opaque article “On Biological Analogs of
Newtonian Paradigms,” Phil. of Science (1968).
12
6
equilibrium is not something they all agree on. The more ‘Epicurean’, radical strand
of Enlightenment thought emphasizes disorder and randomness; order as human
projection.
Chemistry. Nice line of Reill’s: “The subsumption of chemistry under the
general categories of the mechanical laws of matter and motion had dethroned it from
the preeminent position it once occupied in Renaissance and early modern natural
philosophy” (p. 72). Boerhaave is interesting indeed here. Stahl also, inversely (but
also complicated situation whereby chemistry is both the science that defines the
difference between organic and inorganic bodies, and the science that threatens to
take away the specificity of the organic, in a kind of ‘2nd-order reductionism’). —
What about iatrochemistry?
ch. 3 “Within the circle of organized life”
p. 118, important to note (not original to Reill) that Montpellier vitalism takes
as its targets both mechanism and animism. — This has interesting implications for
the metaphysical, or non-metaphysical nature of this kind of vitalism, i.e., as I put it in
another place, it means that 18th c. vitalism in France
is a kind of 'Neither-Nor' which seeks to navigate in between the conceptual
Charybdis and Scylla of Mechanism and Animism, the two competing
models of the late 17th-early 18th century. Mechanism (in many forms:
Descartes; Boerhaave; Borelli and Italian micro-anatomy; Hoffman) misses
the distinctive features of living beings from a medical and physiological
point of view (so the vitalist argument goes); Animism (chiefly Georg-Ernest
Stahl) which relates all vital functions to an organizing principle called the
Soul, does actually 'see' those distinctive features but accounts for them with
an unwieldy metaphysics, etc. etc. It is important not to confuse vitalism with
animism, as it really strives to find a intermediate way between these two
positions.
The latter point is probably the most important. Given that, what to make of
vitalism in the period, then? We might claim it is more "heuristic" than
"ontological"; its recurrent invocations of a Newtonian method by which one
posits an 'x' to explain phenomena, rather than actually claiming there is an x
= vital force with magical properties, go in this direction. We might also
point to its 'patient-centred' approach, as a criticism of the disembodied, and
'atomistic' character of mechanistic physiology and medicine; it brings in a
more temporal dimension. The latter aspect makes the "holistic" or
"organismic" dimension of vitalism a bit more manageable, more 'pragmatic'
and less 'metaphysical'.
p. 121, mechanism (incl. Boerhaave) as target – certainly not for A. von Haller
(as I’ve noted earlier), arguably the greatest figure in the life sciences in the later
7
‘chunk’ of the mid-18th century (I would have said ‘the later 18th century but I noticed
that Reill names, perhaps legitimately, Blumenbach – Haller’s successor in Göttingen
– to this title; Haller is chiefly active 1740s-1775). Nor for La Mettrie.
Similarly, note that mechanism is not a monolithic category by any means.
Harvey ≠ Descartes ≠ Baglivi/Borelli ≠ Boerhaave, all of whom are ‘mechanists’ (as
well as Boyle?). Boerhaave is quite happy to criticize Cartesian mechanism and to try
and integrate other elements therein. There are also people like Claude Perrault (the
brother of Charles who wrote the famous children’s tales like Puss in Boots) or
Fontenelle who combine mechanical and chemical models:
Le Corps humain considéré par rapport à une infinité de différents
mouvements volontaires qu’il peut exécuter, est un assemblage prodigieux de
Leviers tirés par des Cordes. Si on le regarde par rapport au mouvement des
liqueurs qu’il contient, c’est un autre assemblage d’une infinité de Tuyaux et
de Machines Hydrauliques. Enfin si on l’examine par rapport à la génération
de ces mêmes liqueurs, c’est encore un assemblage infini d’Instruments, ou
de Vaisseaux Chymiques, de Filtres, d’Alambics, de Récipients, de
Serpentins, etc. … Le plus grand appareil de Chimie qui soit dans tout le
Corps humain, le plus merveilleux Laboratoire est dans le Cerveau. C’est là
que se tire du sang ce précieux Extrait, qu’on appelle les Esprits, uniques
moteurs matériels de toute la Machine du Corps.
(Fontenelle, Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 1707)
Now, part of where mechanism gets ‘complexified’ is the nervous system. It’s fine in
Paduan anatomy to work on muscles, veins, bones; but (a) what actually is ‘active’ in
the muscles? (Irritability – Whytt to Haller), and (b) what about the communication of
impulses through the body (something Descartes tries famously to model in his
Treatise on Man)? Notion of sympathy, for one thing (cf. e.g. Reill, p. 129 bottom, on
Whytt; p. 140).13 Further comments on nervous system, p. 148f.
Discuss concepts of ‘organization’ and ‘animal economy’ (both presented on
p. 136). Organization we talked about. The point that didn’t quite emerge is my claim
that this concept might be more ‘mechanism-friendly’ than that of organism (which is
ultimately a concept taken over and extended in German Romanticism /
Naturphilosophie).
As to ‘animal economy’, it’s a tricky concept because some figures speak of it
in mechanistic terms, such as Boerhaave (“Vocatur φυσιολόγικη, οϊχονομία humana,
13
NB, although it has nothing to do with our topic: when Reill mentions Smith and Barthez on
sympathy, p. 141, he is omitting Hume and Hutcheson. Sympathy’s ‘life’ as a moral concept in
Scottish moral thought is far more important than what Reill indicates.
8
doctrina de usu partium”14); but Mandeville, who studied in Leyden at the same time
as Boerhaave, seems to distinguish the animal economy from mere ‘structure’, like
vitalists will do, saying that the study of Harvey and Borelli helped him “understand
the Oeconomy as well as the Structure of the Body,”15 i.e. these are two distinct
things. But in the main, it is an anti-mechanistic concept. Fifty-sixty years later, the
Montpellier vitalist physician Ménuret de Chambaud declares quite bluntly, in his
article for the Encyclopédie entitled precisely “Œconomie Animale,” that with the
mechanists,
le corps humain devint entre leurs mains une machine extrêmement
composée, ou plutôt un magasin de cordes, leviers, poulies & autres
instrumens de méchanique, & ils pensoient que le but général de tous ces
ressorts étoit de concourir au mouvement progressif du sang, le seul
absolument nécessaire à la vie […]. On crut que le mouvement s’y faisoit,
suivant les lois ordinaires qui ont lieu dans toutes les machines inorganiques ;
on traita géométriquement le corps humain ; on calcula avec la derniere
sévérité tous les degrés de force requis pour les différentes actions, les
dépenses qui s’en faisoient, &c. mais tous ces calculs qui ne pouvoient que
varier prodigieusement, n’éclaircirent point l’oeconomie animale. On ne fit
pas même attention à la structure organique du corps humain qui est la source
de ses principales propriétés (Enc. XI, 364b).
Indeed, it seems that there was a school of ‘Hippocratic physicians’ in Paris in the
later 16th century, including Louis Duret, who spoke of an “oeconomia naturalis,
vitalis et animalis” and referred back, not just to Hippocrates but to Paracelsus.16 If we
recall the Linnaean fondness for the vocabulary of ‘oeconomy’ (e.g. oeconomia
naturalis), this should tell us that animal economy is connected to the old analogy
between microcosm and macrocosm. (Of course, for Paracelsus, even such a term as
anatomia referred to the correspondence between stars and the body ; cf images of the
‘zodiac man’ – type that term into Google Images and you’ll see.) A 19th-century
medical dictionary defines the term as meaning “the set of laws governing the
organization of animals and plants. It was Charlton [=Charleton? CW] who used this
expression in this sense first, in 1658, but since Haller the term ‘economy’ has also
14
Boerhaave, Praelectiones academicae in proprias institutiones rei medicae, ed. Haller, Venice, 1753,
vol. I, § 33, p. 48.
15
Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, in Three Dialogues (1st ed.
1711), 2nd corrected ed. (London: Tonson, 1730; reprint, Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Reprints, 1976), p.
21; later on (p. 75) he distinguishes between “anatomy and animal economy” (see also p. 143).
16
Bernard Balan, « Premières recherches sur l’origine et la formation du concept d’économie
animale », p. 301.
9
been used to designate the sum of parts which comprise organized beings.”17 All of
this ends up being quite bound up with Stahl and his ‘animism’.
— speaking of Stahl (p. 123f.), here are some comments by other scholars on
his notion of organism, as opposed to mechanism:
the significant feature is neither the laws of physics or chemistry, nor the adherence
of phenomena to the laws of motion. We may take for granted that natural
phenomena obey these laws and that this constitutes mechanism. The truly significant
question is whether the phenomena exhibit a goal or direction or end. If so, then we
deal with organism and the mechanical activities, serving as means to that end, are
instruments. The mechanical configuration is then an organon.18
and:
When Stahl writes about the organism, he does not mean a body ‘endowed with
organs’. ‘Organic’ to him means a coordinated and integrated whole, the ‘organism’,
adjusting to its environment both on a conscious and unconscious level (sensually,
emotionally and mentally) with immediate physiological results. Thus Stahl’s
medical theory is essentially a theory of a holistic, self-determined ‘organism’. His
understanding of the organism is not equivalent to 19th-century vitalism because he
did not centre his theory on the function of specific organs in the body. His definition
of the organism is encompassing, equating ‘life’ with the ability of the whole
organism to organise change. The ‘organ’ of perception is not somatic at all ; it is the
sum of all perceptual processes, and he calls this the soul.
...
‘The life of the body which is organic’ expresses what Stahl was trying to achieve : it
is nothing less than a substantiated theory (based on case observations and medical
logic) that the soul and the body are a unity. Life is organic and life is the active soul
working within the structures and substances of the body. Its limit, but not its essence,
is the body.19
As to Haller (p. 130f.): importance of concepts of irritability/sensitivity.
p. 132, bottom: Bordeu vs Haller on irritability. This is a bit obscure in
general, and possibly of limited interest to people who aren’t historians of vitalism.
Indeed, some of it amounts to rivalry on Bordeu’s part, in relation to Haller. But
philosophically there is an important point here: Bordeu is reconfiguring this property
so it is a basic property of matter (and denying the functional-dualist distinction
between irritab and sensib, in Haller; same denial in Barthez [same rivalry], p. 141).
In other words, he is creating a direct link between physiology and philosophical
materialism.
Littré & Robin, Dictionnaire de médecine (Paris, 12th ed., 1865), art. “Économie,” p. 486.
L.S. King, The Philosophy of Medicine, pp.146-147.
19
J. Geyer-Kordesch, « Stahl’s Radical Pietist Medicine and its Influence on the German
Enlightenment », in A. Cunningham & R. French, eds., The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth
Century, pp. 69, 77.
17
18
10
p. 138: “this skepticism…led Enlightenment vitalists to reintroduce the idea of
occult qualities into their work” — cf. our earlier discussion about Newtonian models,
and Reill’s gloss on Barthez, p. 143. Indeed I’d disagree with this statement. Part of
why I don’t quite accept his whole idea of ‘Enlightenment vitalism’.
p. 146: confusing usage of a priori and a posteriori by Blumenbach?
ch. 4, ‘Metamorphoses of Change’
Surprising that Harvey coins the word ‘epigenesis’ (p. 57). Should be more discussion
of this term and its ramifications (consider cases of Kant, Diderot).
Other question (Alan): after Harvey on epigenesis, why are there all these debates in
the next century? Why preformationism again as a doctrine?
Epilogue
Foucault (p. 255); irony that Reill doesn’t see challenge Foucault poses to his
project, re ‘Life’.
Strange idea to begin and end the book with analysis of von Humboldts.
Partial connection lying in Reill’s (odd?) claim that the vitalist view essentially treats
nature as history, or at least as having a history. (In some vague Goldsteinian way one
can see how this might be.) And indeed the fusion of nature and history is the Von
Humboldt theme.
Still, impression of disparate material put together. Reill certainly seems to
know a lot about both the French and German Enlightenments, though. But how is it
really put together? Doesn’t he paper over a lot of crucial differences between what it
might mean to be a vitalist in France and in Germany? In 1749 in France and in 1780
in Germany? On the other hand, his point about Naturphilosophie (that it has falsely
been identified with vitalism and should be decoupled from it) seems to indicate he is
not just a ‘lumper’ (but a splitter). What about England then? And earlier vitalism?
But his book aims to revise the picture of the Enlightenment.
11
***
NB Cuvier has a brilliant, devastating critique of Naturphilosophie in his Rapport
historique sur les progrès des sciences naturelles (1810), II, « Histoire naturelle », p.
235.
Particular themes:
* Modification of notion of cause and effect (p. 7 bottom). Cf. notion of ‘cercle
d’action’ in vitalist medicine, as discussed in Wolfe and Terada, ‘Animal Economy’,
forthcoming in Science in Context (2008).
* Synergy (p. 7 / 259 n. 20, p. 126).
Quibbles:
— p. 259, n. 21, careful not to get confused re. Kant, who despite his fondness for
Stahl etc., is by no means a vitalist (compare Spinoza) – indeed, cf. what Reill
describes about Kielmeyer (cf. Sciences-nts) in relation to Kant;
— Goethe is not the same sort of thinker as Bordeu at all! (p. 138)
— In general I’m surprised at the absence of Condillac from the story, as he is
the main (certainly the first) theorist of signs in the Enlightenment, a
prominent sensationist … but not a vitalist.
see also: S. Gaukroger on Reill on vitalism and mechanism in Enlightenment,
http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2005/11/gaukroger.html
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