Blanckaert (1993) Buffon and the Natural History of Man. Writing History of the Foundathional Myth of Anthropology

HISTORY

THE

OF

HUMAN

SCIENCES

___

Vol. 6 No. 1

© 1993 SAGE (London, Newbury Park and New Delhi)

13

Buffon and the natural

history of

writing history and the ’foundational myth’ of

man:

anthropology

CLAUDE

I

THE

BLANCKAERT

CIRCLE OF EVALUATIONS

From the end of the 18th century, the naturalists and then the historians who

them unanimously hailed Buffon as the founder of anthropology. Today’s historians may not of course accept this joint verdict, but if they do, they face a twin paradox which appears to deny any basis to the title ’founder’. The first element of paradox is located in the source, the Histoire naturelle de l’Homme of 1749, for nothing here, in Buffon’s text, indicates awareness of any radical innovation or of an explicit project concerning the founding of a new

copied

own

science. In this

nine articles on anthropology follow a clearly articulated sequence, and while the text treats its subject exhaustively, it has no real critical relationship to either old or contemporary sources. In accordance with his stated method (Buffon,1954 [’De la maniere d’etudier et de traiter l’histoire naturelle’]: 10) Buffon studies ’successively’ and ’in order’ man’s attributes, first and foremost his metaphysical attributes, then his anatomical and physical characteristics according to age, sense functions and geographical variations. Within the limited scope of a monograph the Natural History of Man presents the great ’picture of logically pursued speculations’ that Buffon proposed in his theoretical statements as the ideal way of representing ’facts and things’ in nature (Buffon, 1954 [’Histoire naturelle des mineraux. Du fer’]: 28). What it therefore presents,

work, the

Downloaded from hhs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF WINNIPEG on August 21, 2015

14

whose unique quality and basically, are ways of testing a methodological novel status are indisputable. This, then, is the first conundrum. Buffon did ’found’ anthropology. But culturally speaking, he may not have quite realized canon

what at stake in his book, at least during the years of its composition.’ The second paradox arises out of a rational examination of the theoretical conditions for this foundational act. Surprisingly, few authors use a body of to found a science? As a reasoned arguments to justify this. What does it general rule, reminders that Buffon came first seem to be self-justifying, through lack of information about what prompted him or any consensus about what his motives might have been. We simply have to accept as self-evident what history repeatedly tells us, namely that ’... the name with which these studies must open, for the natural history of begins with him, is Buffon’ (Herve, 1918:195). To talk in the same breath about ’the birth of anthropology’ and the Natural Htstory of Man is less to explain the fundamental properties of the work itself or the conditions of possibility of such an ’event’ as to wheel in the age-old commonplace to the effect that ’French anthropology in the 19th century is characterized by the direct link to Buffon’ (Kremer-Marietti, 1984: 319). In fact, the historian must register this consensus as largely unexamined, generations of anthropologists having preached the same message, laying aside their ideological divergences in order to agree on this point. Thus Paul Topinard compared Buffon to ’a star whose radiance illuminates all branches of science, and whose warmth causes their flowers to blossom and their fruit to ripen’ (Topinard, 1885: 32-3), while Cuvier acknowledged that he had ’shown the way forward’ him as having enabled anthropology ’to (Cuvier, 1845: 153) and Paul Broca take its first steps’ (Broca,1876: 5). On the occasion of the jubilee celebrations for the centenary of the Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris, created in 1859, a medal was struck bearing Buffon’s likeness; he was described as ’having commenced, in Man that already contained the germ of a complete outline for 1749, a Treatise anthropology’.2 To declare outright that he founded a science is to mark out his historical position as the founder of a school and to recall both the theoretical bonds formed within a research community and a genealogy of knowledge: ’If we leave out Arist Aristotle, otle, who has a somewhat remote claim to the title, Buffon was name finally the founder of anthropology. Since Aristotle, in fact, meriting the epithet anthropologist has occurred to us; after Buffon they became numerous’ (Topinard, 1885: 32-3); ’After Buffon came Camper’ (Jehan, 1857: 294); ’... various authors, amongst whom I shall principally cite de Pauw and Camper, followed his example, with differing degrees of success’ (Cuvier, 1845 : 153) ; ’the natural history of man, anthropology, is a recent invention, for it was Buffon and Blumenbach who in a way instituted it. Unfortunately, it was not from that excellent school that...’ (Hollard, 1853: v). At the institutional level, it was again a matter of legitimizing socially a tradition which systematically confused academic and research interests, as was was

mean

man

saw

on

no


14

whose unique quality and basically, are ways of testing a methodological novel status are indisputable. This, then, is the first conundrum. Buffon did ’found’ anthropology. But culturally speaking, he may not have quite realized canon

what at stake in his book, at least during the years of its composition.’ The second paradox arises out of a rational examination of the theoretical conditions for this foundational act. Surprisingly, few authors use a body of to found a science? As a reasoned arguments to justify this. What does it general rule, reminders that Buffon came first seem to be self-justifying, through lack of information about what prompted him or any consensus about what his motives might have been. We simply have to accept as self-evident what history repeatedly tells us, namely that ’... the name with which these studies must open, for the natural history of begins with him, is Buffon’ (Herve, 1918:195). To talk in the same breath about ’the birth of anthropology’ and the Natural Htstory of Man is less to explain the fundamental properties of the work itself or the conditions of possibility of such an ’event’ as to wheel in the age-old commonplace to the effect that ’French anthropology in the 19th century is characterized by the direct link to Buffon’ (Kremer-Marietti, 1984: 319). In fact, the historian must register this consensus as largely unexamined, generations of anthropologists having preached the same message, laying aside their ideological divergences in order to agree on this point. Thus Paul Topinard compared Buffon to ’a star whose radiance illuminates all branches of science, and whose warmth causes their flowers to blossom and their fruit to ripen’ (Topinard, 1885: 32-3), while Cuvier acknowledged that he had ’shown the way forward’ him as having enabled anthropology ’to (Cuvier, 1845: 153) and Paul Broca take its first steps’ (Broca,1876: 5). On the occasion of the jubilee celebrations for the centenary of the Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris, created in 1859, a medal was struck bearing Buffon’s likeness; he was described as ’having commenced, in Man that already contained the germ of a complete outline for 1749, a Treatise anthropology’.2 To declare outright that he founded a science is to mark out his historical position as the founder of a school and to recall both the theoretical bonds formed within a research community and a genealogy of knowledge: ’If we leave out Arist Aristotle, otle, who has a somewhat remote claim to the title, Buffon was name finally the founder of anthropology. Since Aristotle, in fact, meriting the epithet anthropologist has occurred to us; after Buffon they became numerous’ (Topinard, 1885: 32-3); ’After Buffon came Camper’ (Jehan, 1857: 294); ’... various authors, amongst whom I shall principally cite de Pauw and Camper, followed his example, with differing degrees of success’ (Cuvier, 1845 : 153) ; ’the natural history of man, anthropology, is a recent invention, for it was Buffon and Blumenbach who in a way instituted it. Unfortunately, it was not from that excellent school that...’ (Hollard, 1853: v). At the institutional level, it was again a matter of legitimizing socially a tradition which systematically confused academic and research interests, as was was

mean

man

saw

on

no


15

when A. de Quatrefages de Br6au, professor of the Natural History of Man at the Paris Museum of Natural History, recalled the origins of the chair awarded him in 1855: ’For the first time, the science of Buffon, Blumenbach and Prichard would find official interpreters’ (Quatrefages,1867: 28). In any case the explanations appear useless. For once an author is declared ’immortal’,3 or if the inaugural move puts him in a perspective of scientifically validated rationality, neither his motives nor the origin of his ideas can be debated. The founding can then be identified as what Bachelard called ’an epistemological act’, a modern version of the stroke of genius or moment of transcendental illumination (Bachelard, 1965: 254): ’... anthropology was born from a great idea that occurred to Buffon’ (Jehan, 1857: 294). Or, similarly, in P. Flourens’ words: ’It was enough for Buffon to produce a few luminous remarks for the natural history of man to be created’ (Morel,1857: 9). Such is the

the

case

’power of genius’ (P. Flourens).

remember here that

epistemological act constitutes absolute barrier to historiographic explanation rather than a substitute for it. It therefore has to be examined in its turn. With hindsight, the ’great idea’ attributed to We

must

Buffon deserved to be looked

at

an

an

in its context. What should have been

examined,

detailed instances thereby reducing the number of redundant references, where the novelty of the Natural History of Man positively identifiable through number of displacements of interest, themselves responsible for founding new, specifically anthropological object relations. First of all, there is a philosophical discussion about the naturalization of Buffon studied way as he studied the other animals, species in the is seen according substituting for a metaphysics of the soul a science where were

was

a

man:

our

same

man

his situation in the world, cut off from the Creator and beholden for his attributes to nature alone. Secondly, there is a methodological argument concerning the accurate use of documents: while creating a synthesis of contemporary ideas about the relationship between man and the animals, Buffon moved the critical focus towards the history of man by eliminating the mythological backdrop of half-human half-animal creatures, such as men with tails, who clutter fanciful bestiaries from Pliny to B. de Maillet, Maupertuis and Linnaeus. And thirdly, we have a programmatic argument concerning the constitution of a completely new field of research: as a naturalist, Buffon went beyond the individual to study men collectively, as a species. He authorized diversity in the new science of anthropology by concentrating on the description of nations seen in their own right, according to their physical differences and ’moral’ specificity. Taking note of these arguments neither explains them nor makes their origin intelligible, however. Buffon had already put them forward in various articles, and more often than not, in trying to make them more explicit, one ends up paraphrasing them. The question of the conditions of possibility of Buffon’s ’great idea’, from which anthropology was born, is therefore not raised. to


16

There is a good reason why this strange historiographic situation has persisted so long. Those authors who investigated the origin of the science of man were its founder. Most understood this founalready convinced that Buffon dational act to be more absolute than relative, an event unannounced by anything tangible, already there, inherent in such a radically novel concept. Most took for granted the trajectory ’his’ science followed, seeing the formation of a discipline and its subsequent destiny as immanent in the fact of its foundation. Georges Gusdorf, taking up a view already expressed by Paul Topinard in the 1880s, judged that Buffon’s works, with their ’broad scope’ and their ’complementary’ was

perspectives were

era, mapping out the mental space of the starting point for a discipline that thenceforth constituted the natural history of Accepted by the European scientific community as a whole, they ...

the

new

man.

of assumptions that were referred to without having to be explicitly cited. More specialized researchers opened up new areas in order to investigate this or that aspect of their field, their work finding its place within the discipline without any difficulty at all. (Gusdorf, 1972: 380) constituted

a set

Reversing the relationship of temporal causality, historical writing did not escape this tautological circle: Buffon had to be the founder because he had founded anthropological science. Insofar as developments in anthropology had proceeded in directions already indicated by ’seminal ideas’ in the reference text a logical necessity. To the extent that (here, the Natural History of Man), this any piece of critical modelling brings major presuppositions into the text it is applied to, Buffon’s argument acquired kind of open-ended theoretical availability that made it possible to discover in it, at various points in time, article by ways of justifying the foundational myth. Hence the conclusion, in Jean Piveteau, written in 1954 and republished in 1988: ’He truly created the natural history of man, opening up vast horizons for the science and setting out vast plans that it has not subsequently been able to fulfil and execute’ (Piveteau, was

a

new

an

1988: 206). The

remains, and it remains foundational. The critical models have but all are articulated around ’burning topics which Buffon takes up

text

changed, unambiguously

on

modern

81 ). Recognized

’the equal takes into consideration the influence exerted by his

positions’ (Laissus,

1988:

as

of Charles Darwin, if one ideas on man and animals over nearly a whole century’ (Poliakov, 1971 : 162), Buffon has been mythified and magnified. The credit he has enjoyed throughout this long story makes it impossible to set him up, using an artifice of epistemological criticism, against other ’founding fathers’ such as Montaigne, Lafitau or Rousseau - whose fate in the major writings of structural anthropology we know all too well. No, the cultural problem lies elsewhere. To exit from the circle of tautological evaluations without organizing the history of anthropology according to some


17

exclusive ’finality of truth’ (Bachelard), the historian must in his turn historicize his relationship to the idea of foundation and try to understand it in terms of changing protocols of reading. He has therefore to look at it through the eyes of those scientists from both the more distant and the more recent past for whom the Natural History of Man was, as of right, one of the authorized ’classics’ of the discipline. The text alone does not make clear why it is topical. Its modernity derives from a whole range of interpretations by competent readers, i.e. professional readers able to piece together a lexicon, experimental codes and representations. Through familiarity with the text, authors imposed certain didactic constraints, a typology of Buffon’s articles, an implicit classification, even a clear hierarchy of those of his views deemed consistent ’interesting’. Before pinpointing in our turn significant features of the French annals of anthropology, we should note that the writing of history, at least in this instance, exists only in a reflexive posture. Internal analysis of the book as object is not enough. Thus going back to Buffon in no way entails forgetting comments and choices made essentially during the 18th and 19th centuries; instead, it means implicating them as documentary evidence in the historical process of the production of meaning. A whole science depended on it; that much is undeniable. or

II

BUFFON

IN

HISTORY,

OR HOW TO BECOME

A FOUNDER

’Buffon wanted to create a Complete History of Man considered as individual and species. He succeeded insofar as it was possible in his time.... In a word, in spite of its imperfections and the equally inevitable lacunae, the fact that Buffon’s work earned for him the title of founder of Anthropology was justly deserved.’ Why did he create this science? Because he had a ’plan of study’. Why did he decide on this plan of study? Because he understood, like Linnaeus, ’that and the various human groups spread across the surface of the globe fell within the scope of their studies’ (Quatrefages, 1887: V-VII). Saying nothing about the theoretical ’presuppositions’ behind such a position or why they were necessary, Cuvier’s century justified retrospectively what was clearly a hagiographic promotion. And justify is the significant word here, the word we must remember. For positivist scientists, such a celebration of Buffon brought with it a good many potential problems. First, his great work, the Histoire naturelle g6n6rale, had lost its evocative power since the 1800s. One way of discrediting an author and of refuting his philosophical claims was to underline the eloquence of his style.’ After Buffon’s death in 1788, supporters of Linnaeus and Cuvier joined forces to ridicule his ’cosmological novels’ or to invalidate his ’knowledge’. ’So the naturalists have finally lost their chief; this time Count Buffon is really dead and buried.’6 In his posthumous eulogy man


18

for Daubenton, Cuvier judged that Buffon’s eloquence ’seemed to be employed against his own reason before leading other people’s reason astray’. His ’pompous style’ had been adopted ’in ladies’ dressing rooms’ and ’scribblers’ studies’ (Cuvier, 1800: 442, 452). After 1767, having alienated Daubenton, hitherto responsible for the anatomical and descriptive part of the natural history they were collaborating on, he had loosed his imagination against nature. Unlike his successors, the anatomists Petrus Camper, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach or Georges Cuvier, ’Buffon had opposed baring nature’s skeleton, a process which nevertheless brought zoology and comparative anatomy into being’ (Serres, 1854:13). At the time, it was stated that he had been obstacle to the scientific expression of modern natural history. In the 1830s there was another change of direction in scientific opinion thanks to the initiators of the so-called ’philosophical’ school, Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1838). Their disciples, such as Armand de Quatrefages de Br6au, defended Buffon, but by taking up this critical position they proved how the reputation of the naturalist of the King’s Garden had been overturned (cf. Appel, 1987:15, 26, an

49, 186-7). His Treatise on Man, a fragment of the complete work, was not treated with the same suspicion. It would remain the basic reference text for observers of man in the 19th century. But its irrefutable and enduring scientific relevance had to be rethought and rewritten in analytical conformity with the technical requirements of a concept of science unknown to Buffon. Accounts of his modernity at that time thus stressed instead archaic features of the first chapters of the Natural History of Man: ’In it, science is far behind the knowledge of our era, and theoretical views that were discredited long ago play far too important a part’ (Quatrefages, 1867: 12). The work had been judged: it was thenceforth deemed to be made up of disparate articles themselves comprising a mass of digressions; dealing with its subject from several different points of view, it offered no apparent unity; above all, in its approach to knowledge, it bore the conceptual and ideological stamp of the Enlightenment. Bringing Buffon up to date meant forgetting his eloquent disquisitions on man and the mechanistic Cartesian view of animal behaviour that Condillac, Com6lius de Pauw and Cuvier had openly condemned (Condillac, 1981 [1755]; de Pauw, 1770: Vol. II, 62-3 7) , as well as the ’philosophical’ passages arguing against sexual continence (Buffon, 1971 [’De 1’enfance’: 57, et ’Addition a 1’article de la pubert6’: 69-70]), assumptions about virginity (Buffon, 1971 [’De la puberte’]: 85 ff.) or the use of swaddling clothes for infants (Buffon, 1971 [’De 1’enfance’]: 57, 69-70). These articles, which soon appeared dated and were rapidly forgotten, had been considered just as important by the first generation of Buffon’s anthropological disciples, such as Julien-Joseph Virey or Lacep6de (Virey: an. IX; Lacepede, 1821). Their Natural History of Man, replete with references to Rousseau and Buffon, maintained the synthetic ideal of the 1749 edition, as well as its social standpoint and its philosophical argumentation -


19

they frequently reproduced verbatim, as did Daubenton or Valmont de Bomare (Daubenton, 1782: XIX-LXXXXII; Valmont de Bomare, an. VIII-1800: Vol. VII, 8-152). They still demanding, for anthropology, fields of research and subjects for investigation that hygienist medicine would monopolize during the Empire and Restoration periods, and together with their doctrinal master they considered that ’the general picture of the human species’ had to follow ’nature’s direction’ (Lacepede). However important their testimony may have been for the nevertheless not indicative of the deeper history of the human sciences, it of ideas that would produce the institutionalization of French dominant anatomists. anthropology, henceforth under the control of the

which

were

was

movement

now

In order to work out its relationship to Buffon’s text in such a way that emergent science got the best of the deal, the positivist 19th century had to cancel

ideological debts. Three ways of resolving the problem were worked out, and they allowed Buffon to be recognized in spite of his philosophy and in disqualified, according to the spite of the General Natural History, which experts, by its over-adventurous arguments. First of all, the spirit of synthesis of the Natural History of Man would be that he valued, rather than its out-of-date analyses. Buffon’s first great merit the first author to deal ex had studied in all his guises: ’Buffon professo with the natural history of man’ (G. Cuvier, 1843: 173). Cuvier’s judgewould last well beyond the end of the century and is repeated even Man, the idea of synthesis allowed the Natural Applied to the Treatise History of Man to be modernized in spite of its old-fashioned ideas. From the Buffon recognized as having ’established’ or ’pointed to’ all the ’fundamental components’ of academic anthropology, he granted the privilege of having anticipated the questions, provided clues to the answers, and developed the rigorous reasoning that all combined to promote him to the rank or less distant of ’precursor’ of the science eventually validated by his disciples. Topinard’s remarks illustrate perfectly this process of ’retroany such

was

was

man

was

...

ment

now.

on

moment

was

was

more

celebration’ : Buffon

founded what would soon be designated anthropology, whose main branches he sketched out: man in general, considered at all ages as animal from the morphological and biological point of view; the description of the races, their origins and their intermixing; finally, the comparison of man with the apes and other animals from the physical and physiological point of view, and then the study of his characteristics, his place amongst other beings and his origin. These amount to the three branches of anthropology made distinct by Broca: general, special and ...

an

zoological. (Topinard,

1885: 48; Dougherty, 1980:

325)

the way anthropology was to emerge as a discipline would henceforth follow on from other choices. Having been accorded such distinction by his successors, Buffon would be quoted in support of the ’true scientist’s’

Secondly,


20

attachment to fact-based realism. His moderation in technical matters, his criticism of sources, his wide reading and his prudent theorizing would all be applauded. It is not really so paradoxical, perhaps, to claim that ill-concealed anti-Buffon attitudes in fact showed the Natural History of Man in a good light: ’What is so remarkable is that this genius, at once so profound and so bold, who did not always wait to have the facts before pronouncing his verdict, was so moderate in this work that he avoided any kind of system, as it were, and that nowhere was what he wrote more true’ (Edwards, 1841: 110-11). The third consequence was that from that point onwards a selective reading of the Buffonian anthropological corpus became inevitable. The opening discourse on the ’nature of man’, which restated the substantial duality of Homo duplex and which was to maintain its paradigmatic appeal for all spiritualist, anthropocentric and finalist interpretations, would be discreetly disposed of. To found anthropology, judged Paul Broca, a ’healthier philosophy’ was needed: ’it was only in the last century that scientists ... dared finally tackle anthropological studies. While Linnaeus was assigning a place to man in his zoological classification, Buffon writing his Natural History of Man, and the first great milestone in our science turned out to be one of the masterpieces of our literature’ was

(Broca, 1874: 415). In the 19th century, it became clear that the importance of Buffon’s contribution to the foundation of a science of man was directly proportional to the importance accorded thenceforth to racial considerations in establishing ’the natural history of human societies’ and to studying their geographical distribution and classifying them according to their place on the evolutionary scale of civilization: ’The Newest part of this Natural History of Man is the chapter on

the Varieties amongst the human species. Here, Buffon combines admirable erudition with an even more admirable sagacity’ (Flourens, 1850: 157). Scientific commentators all agreed that in this chapter ’the whole of Buffon’ could be found; ‘... it is impossible not to admire the marvellous sagacity of a man who, having such imperfect materials at his disposition, was able to make many correct deductions and draw so many correct conclusions from them’ (Quatrefages, 1867: 13). The comparative study of human groups, started by Buffon in 1749, was what summed up the importance of his work:

fell swoop, Buffon virtually created the natural history of man, and he brought it into the world in the form of a masterpiece: his ‘article’, as he called it, with characteristic simplicity, a chapter too easily forgotten, which nevertheless constituted one of his major claims to fame, the ’Varieties amongst the Human Species’, the first treatise ethnology. Anthropology and especially ethnology had not existed before Buffon. Anatomically, individual man had been studied in great depth; physiologically, rather less so. Meanwhile, the predilections and methods of those who studied man from the intellectual angle were matched only by their In

one

on


21

lack of experience and even greater lack of success. Humankind had not been studied at all, and the constitution of the groups that make it up had not even been considered. It was only after Buffon that the science of Varieties, or human races, his real intellectual offspring, was born and was able to grow. (Herve, 1918: 195) From

this

moment

onwards, by indicating the

progress made after him and

thanks to him, the limitations of Buffon’s undertaking could be pointed out without invalidating his enterprise as a whole. ’He examined the different races ... he tried to determine their characters. Treating this subject for the first time, his work was naturally imperfect’ (Cuvier, 1845: 153; Broca, 1874: 415). The objectivized split between the science of the individual (medicine) and the science of the human species (anthropology), a foundational split for positivists of both yesterday and of today, provided guarantees for an area of competence whose epistemological frontiers were closed. In a single gesture, it reflected the new direction taken by anthropological research and the corresponding changes in the sociology of its institutions in all the senses of that term. Witness the comments made much later, in 1959, by H. V. Vallois, secretary general of the Paris Anthropological Society: ’Once Buffon, in his Natural History of Man... had shown the interest of a study of man which studied him not as an individual, as a doctor of medicine does, but as a zoological group, as only a naturalist can lost interest in do, the great establishment then called the Jardin du Roi such research’ (Vallois, 1960: 296). Reduced to just its final chapter, Buffon’s ’scientific’ anthropology gained in autonomy while simultaneously losing the support provided by a system of internal rules and a wider intellectual context which probably justified its general orientation. Far from looking at the Natural History of Man in isolation, as has been done since the last century, Buffon emphasized the logic of his system, which provided the basis of the objectivizations that followed. At the end of the article ‘On the Nature of Man’, for example, he made perfectly explicit the link he saw to be necessary between the general examination of the phenomena of reproduction and the formation of the foetus, a central topic in the first chapters of the History of the Animals of 1749 and the article ’On Childhood’. By reducing anthropology more and more to its ’factual’ and ethnographic content, deliberately to neglect the systematic effect of this construction. posterity This is why not only the positivist critics of the past but those who have reproduced their views more recently rule out any investigation of the theoretical conditions in which a new disciplinary field can appear. By putting the spotlight, late in the day, on a fragment arbitrarily detached from the Natural History of Man, they ended up creating an evolutionary method that became the hallmark of anthropology in the first half of the 19th century. Flourens was thus able to speak of Buffon’s ’treatise on the varieties amongst the human species’ as ’the first important step of its kind’ (Flourens, 1838: 362). never

was


23

isolated author. The preferential treatment is not reflected in the work of just article ’Man’ in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia reveals the ’We have followed of from the divergence from the future one

same

moment

man

norm:

his formation or the beginning of his life, until the moment of his death. This is what constitutes the natural history of many In 1773, Alexandre Sav6rien’s negative attitude was even more marked: To this particular history of man the Naturalists of our time add the general

history of Mankind. This history contains the varieties amongst the human species.... And their relations degenerate into a traveller’s tale that in way resembles a natural history: customs, ways of life, the laws of different peoples not being at all the object of this science. (Saverien, 1773: no

LXXIII-LXXIV) of the first popularizers of what was then called Antropology [sic], would in 1778 once more take up the general scheme of the Natural History of Man. Like Daubenton he spends a good deal of time on the description of the ages of man and the sexual behaviour of the species, and devotes but a few lines to the geographical varieties of humanity. Knowledge of savage and civilized peoples belongs to ’a general history of peoples rather than the natural science of man’: ’All I need say is that M. de Buffon is the first of the Naturalists to describe the varieties of human species and that this description is by the least interesting part of this fine and indeed great work’ (Saverien, 1778: 230). At the other extreme from this first appropriation of Buffon’s text, valorization from the naturalist standpoint of the chapter on the varieties amongst the human species would proceed, from the beginning of the 19th century, from another conception of science and from other ideological issues, particularly ones connected to the anthropological debate that was now focusing the problem of the origin of the races (Blanckaert, 1981). It would also be connected with the rehabilitation, in the framework of a certain geographical or ’ethnographic’ conception of the Buffon corpus, of travel literature, under the heading of customs and local manifestations of human intelligence. From one period and from one school to another, certain of Buffon’s anthropological articles were thus overvalued. Other articles were annexed to them; for example, ’The Pongo and the Jocko’, where the author, following Edward Tyson, was attempting a summary of the resemblances and differences between man and ape (Wokler, 1976). Others disappeared as it were through not being mentioned; such as the ages of man, the analysis of sense experience, the depiction of the human face, the reflections on death. Also forgotten were the emotions long statistical tables in the section ’on probabilities concerning life spans’ which 200 pages, to Buffon’s familiarity with mathematics, and bore witness, over Social Arithmetic’. Selective reading which he continued to study in his ’Essay throughout the 19th century transformed the ideological scope of his discourse as well as its contents in terms of knowledge. Buffon was enrolled by

Saverien,

one

no means

on

on

some

on


24

amongst anthropologists, spiritualists and materialists alike. He numbered the animals (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,1859: 171, note 1), but he seen as of the precursors of the doctrine of the ’human reign’ (Quatrefages,1867: 11 ). In the made into a transformationist (Hovelacque, 1882; he Darwinian Topinard, 1883), then a prehistorian (Bloch, 1901; cf. Harvey, 1992). What is more, the importance accorded to the concept of the natural history of and the extent to which it is understood varies according to the viewpoints of professionals. Because of their situation, professionals reproduce their prejudices and interests in their reading protocols. Any discourse of knowledge of a positivist kind is normative in principle and will always tend to prescribe an authorized meaning. To understand better Buffon’s anthropology and its specific destiny as the science of the human species, the historically constituted effects of meaning must be analysed and then integrated into the commentary. these terms is it possible to escape, albeit only partially, from the Only ’philological illusion’ (see Benrekassa, 1979) and the network of unilateral identifications and value judgements that mortgage all historiographic underterms involved in any act of takings. It is this dialectical tension between the scientific appropriation, ’source-text’, and, lined up opposite, the accumulated evidence for its status as obligatory ’reference-text’, that the historian must be man

was

era

one

was

man

on

two

a

an

clear about if he is

understand the extent of the Buffonian ’revolution’ in anthropology. In exactly the same way, the accessible part of the basic corpus must be taken into account along with the type of critical reading superimposed upon it by the various schools which, historically, in the very act of recognition by which they appropriated it, discovered in it their own identity. Moreover, if the doctrinal unity of Buffon’s work makes cutting it up into sections appear contrived, we have to conclude, together with Jacques Roger, that ‘... in fact, man is everywhere present in the Natural History, explicitly or implicitly ...’ (Roger, 1979: 253). Putting it another way, we might say that a philosophical matrix governs the work as a whole. We should therefore take up the invitation to investigate the standard anthropological corpus and the areas in which it enjoys exclusive rights, but also go further, and open up its discursive space to wider interpretations (see Duchet, 1971b: 230-1). By virtue of their very subjects and the multiple effects of complementarity, symmetry or redundancy that in the end determine certain late texts, one must necessarily take into account philosophical works such as the discourse ’On the Nature of Animals’, ’The Epochs of Nature’, or certain supplements to the Natural History. There are no longer any limits to what we may select. III

to

FROM

THE

SCIENCE

PHILOSOPHY OF MAN TO THE OF

THE

HUMAN

SPECIES

The Buffon legend gains much from the extraordinary way in which the Seigneur de Montbard rose in society, just as it does from the list of his scientific titles:


25

Jardm du Roi, which he brought to ’the pinnacle of its glory’ (Laissus, 1986: 316), permanent treasurer of the Royal Academy of Sciences, member of the French Academy and the academies of Berlin, London, St Petersburg, Bologna, Florence, Edinburgh and Philadelphia - by the end of his known and recognized as life Buffon illustrious naturalist. He nevertheless remained a philosopher and shared with the thinkers of his time what Michele Duchet has called a kind of ’militant impatience’. As for his the nature of man, which reflections frequently critical of the order and the values of the ancien régime, they imbued with ’reformist zeal’ (Duchet, chief administrator of the

was

on

an

were

were

A list of recent editions of Buffon’s works 1971 b: 20).

books about him reveals even more clearly, to the modern reader, how this appointment with philosophical history came about. In 1954, Jean Piveteau published extracts from the Natural History of Man in Buffon’s Philosophical Works, which constitute Volume XLI of the ’Corpus general des philosophes franqais’. Not very long ago, the late Jacques Roger used the words ’A Philosopher in the King’s Garden’ as the subtitle to his remarkable biography of Buffon. For although Buffon touched circumspectly on polemical political topics, preferring, as he himself said, to keep a low profile rather than swing from a gibbet, and though he took with his official position, Buffon very literally the duty of restraint that shared the critical positions of the philosophes, such as their naturalism and their anticlericalism. Thus he concluded his Epochs of Nature with a picture of ideal society which had ’arrived at the best form of government possible’, capable of perfecting human nature in peace and comfort. He quoted in eulogistic terms the Lettre sur les aveugles, which had earned Diderot a stay in prison at Vincennes (Buffon, 1971 [’Du sens de la vue’]: 181, note a; Roger, 1963) and inspired many of Rousseau’s reflections in his Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes by giving him in advance grounds for believing that quite possibly ’vice only produced in society’ (Buffon, 1971 [’Varietes dans 1’espece humaine’]: 297; Starobinski, 1971: 380-92). As Michele Duchet has shown in her erudite critical edition of the treatise On Man, Buffon provided the Encyclopaedia with article while also anticipating the ’Lockeian Adam’ (Fellows and many Milliken, 1972:125), a fiction where original man awakes to the world by means of his senses, providing the model for the allegory of the statue developed later by Condillac and Charles Bonnet (Buffon, 1971 [’Des sens en general’] : 214-19; or

came

an

was

an

Marcos, 1986). There are many such items dispersed throughout the Natural History of Man. Based a sensualist epistemology and an ’ideology’ of human nature and the progress of societies that is both normative and polemical, they bear witness to Buffon’s social preoccupations. ’In this way, Buffon’s anthropology is not fundamentally different in its structure and its ideological aspects from those of the other philosophers’ (Duchet, 1971b : 20). Michele Duchet thus demolishes the concept of foundation, going as far as to recognize, in the works of Buffon, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire and Helvetius, ’several possible Enlightenment on


26

anthropologies’ (ibid.: 479). Even when marked out by a relationship of conformity such as this - ’In the very first place, of course, the Natural History of Man’ (ibid.: 13) - Buffon does not benefit from any retrospective privileges. Though he ’points the way’ (Duchet, 1971a: 7-36), ’it is, however, only a question of internal transformation of the sensualist system, not of a that to consider Buffon as philosophy’ (Duchet,1971b: 21). But is it not the of the Encyclopaedists invalidates or minimizes the theoretical differences that characterize his human science? Did the anthropological system responsible for his scientific constitute the classic theme of simple variant ’human nature’ or of many possible ways of problematizing it? We can be sure of nothing here. The modern verdict flies in the face of history while the subsequent development of the human sciences provides unarguable new

an

case

one

renown

on

a

one

evidence that Buffon’s ’internal transformation of the sensualist system’ proposed a new kind of knowledge and a research programme to carry it further echoes of the ’anthropoforward, whereas within two generations logies’ of Diderot, La Mettrie Helvetius were heard (cf. Moutaux, 1988: 314~). The antithetical division of science and philosophy is therefore of very little if one grants that the posthumous distinction accorded to explanatory value, the Intendant of the King’s Garden owed much to his prudent style, his superficial spiritualism, his academic fame and his international audience. In fact, Buffon wrote about the human condition ’in the margins of his century’ and as a naturalist.’° He renewed the criteria and the objective methods required for deciding upon the place of species in nature because he was ’a naturalist, not a philosopher. If he entered the philosophical debate, it was not to found the science he wanted to build, but to have it accepted’ (Roger,1979: 257). It is very obvious that he combined the scientific and the philosophical genres, but according to J. Roger, it was fundamentally a matter of making a number of covert moves intended to provide science, cloaked in the fashionable thought of his century, with a solid base in its own right (Roger, 1989a: chs 11, 12). It is precisely the real, effective, operational difference represented by Buffonian anthropology that have to construct, just as posterity did, by putting to good historiographic use not only the consensus amongst authors but their disagreements too. Buffon’s sensualism neither proves nor disproves his allegiance to the philosophical movement. What is more, Jean Piveteau showed how the ’Cartesian Buffon’ of the ’Discours’ and the ’Vues generales’ on nature contradicted the ’sensualist Buffon’ directly associated with the ’true creation’ of the natural history of man, ’Buffon the observer, the naturalist’ (Piveteau, 1988:188). This is the one still claimed by natural scientists, who find nothing ’philosophical’ there, in the restrictive, or, for them, crippling sense of the word. Once they have reread the first, forgotten chapters of the Natural History of Man, which deal in particular with ontogeny and sexual anthropology, historians too agree about this (Brahimi, 1980). In 1749, having considered the inner man and established the spirituality of the no

or

even

our

we


27

write a history of the human body and to go through the ages of man, from birth to death. Four chapters were devoted to this topic, traditionally part of medical ’anthropography’ rather than natural history. In the 19th century it was recognized as a ’very fine work of physiology and psychology’, and ’an eloquent picture of the physical and moral development of man’ to which ’nothing could be compared’ (Jehan,1857: col. 364&dquo;). For the first time, man was treated ’just like other living creatures, from the material angle’, while Buffon’s ’psychological research’ on the senses brought him an ’extraordinary reputation’ (Cuvier, 1843: 174). For Buffon, everything these descriptions entailed rightfully belonged to the natural history of man. Today, the principle responsible for their coherence within the unity of a single text has been forgotten. This is why Otis Fellows and Stephen Milliken judged Buffon’s efforts in anthropology, along with his observations and commentaries, as ’among the least formalized, the least rigorous, the least systematic, of all his writings. His

soul, Buffon proposed

to

freewheeling, loosely impressionistic’ (Fellows and Milliken, 1972: 136; see also 137). However, far from being devoid of order, the work responds precisely to the methodological proposal outlined in the opening discourse of the Natural History, which used the following terms to make clear the object of inquiry and the type of knowledge sought:

general approach usually

seems

history of the individual, but that must include their begetting, the number of young produced, the

The history of an animal must not be the of the whole species of such animals; it

gestation and of birth, the nurture provided by mothers and fathers, the kind of education received, their instincts, their habitat, their food, the ways in which they obtain it, their customs, their cunning ... (Buffon,1954 [’De la maniere d’etudier et de traiter l’histoire naturelle’]:16)

period

of

Though conforming to this epistemological guideline, the first chapters of the Natural History of Man dealt, as the author it, only with the history of the the ’Varieties amongst the individual. In his judgement only the chapter Human Species’ had any bearing the history of the species studied according to varieties of colour, form and ’natural temperament’ l’naturel’] (Buffon, 1971 [’Varietes dans 1’espece humaine’]: 223). The first articles in the Treatise Man, the senses, did not, however, have purely ideographic value. like the chapters The description of the different stages of human development presupposed a comparative, ’ethnographic’ examination of behaviour and customs, linked to changes in the individual’s circumstances. Climatic geography and travel literature constantly cited to account for physical and physiological variations in the human body dietary regimes that corresponded to saw

on

on

on

on

a

were

or

environment and nationality. As soon as he was treated as an animal, man appeared in all his empirical singularity. In the history of an animal species, each specimen was the equivalent of its generic type. The rigorous demands of instinct, the circumscribed limits of its ’natural homeland’ [patrie naturelle] and


28

specialized alimentary habits combined to repress individuation. All this can be talked about in general terms. But such thing applied to man, whose subject to the influence of a great diversity of cosmopolitan species sometimes almost contradictory physical milieux, and whose intelligence, whether used for good or for ill, did not obey the mechanisms of a putative single ’inner material feeling’ [sentiment matériel intérieur]. This is what Buffon remarked upon in the article ’On Puberty’: ’what contrasts among the customs of different nations! what contrary ways of thinking!’ (Buffon, 1971 [’De la longer enough to declare outright, with a flourish of puberte’]: 90). It necessary to show that their style, that intellectually equal; it actions and their works showed ’variety’ and diversity because they possessed no

was

was

men

no

were

was

free and independent souls. Buffon did not contradict Descartes; instead, he took him literally : ’... for it is not enough to have a good mind, the main thing being to apply it well’ (Descartes, 1963 [1637]: 25). Furthermore, ’superstitions’, ’prejudices’, ’contrary opinions’ about what could be seen to represent ’la belle nature’ demonstrated that one could not claim to be examining the ’nature’ of man without the aid of ethnographic documentation. There are in Buffon a good number of normative statements about the conduct of the wise man or rules of behaviour that obey ’natural law’ (Hoffmann, 1977: part 4, ch. 4). But the tyranny exercised by men and oppressive civil laws took little account of prescriptive remarks touching on sexuality and marriage in particular. In order to ’study man’ with the kind of ’philosophical impartiality’ that ’leaves the meanings of words intact’ (Buffon, 1971 [’De la puberte’]: 76), one has, according to the programmatic phrase used by Charles de Brosses, to renounce all ’possibilities’: ’... it is not a matter of imagining what he [man] might have been able to do or ought to have done, but to examine what he did’

(de Brosses,

1988

[1760]: 143t2).

’witness and actor’ in contemporary debates that were as much about paediatrics and sexuality as the origin of our ideas, true or false, Buffon ’summoned up examples from Negroes to Siamese tribesmen, if need be, to bear witness to the absurdity of our customs’ (Roger,1989a: 226). By means of a more controlled but still polemical use of travellers’ tales, the savage of the philosophers, whether Iroquois or Tahitian, was less frequently called upon, as As

a

he had previously been from La Hontan to Rousseau, to provide lessons on good the human race behaviour for corrupt Europeans. Buffon ceased expatiating in the manner of Rousseau, who put aside all ’facts’, the better to seek right and reason. Rousseau conjectured, while Buffon stated. The former rejected ’all scientific books (Rousseau, 1964 [1755]: 125’3), while the latter sought in them ’historical truths’, restricting himself, as he puts it in the first paragraph of the chapter on the ’Varieties amongst the Human Species’, to ’what is most general and moreover proven to be true’. Hence the approval of those who continued his the art of examining evidence, of critical inquiry, which is work: ’... surrounded by so much difficulty in ethnology, taken so far’ (Herv6, 1918:196). on

never was


29

by a whole series of epistemological decisions of this kind that Buffon, according to his successors, ’laid the foundations of the natural history of and of ethnography, or the description of peoples’ (Broca,1874: 415). Obliged to treat the natural reality of the ages of dialectically, by integrating it in the ever-changing symbolic universe of rites and popular customs, Buffon did not generalize much about physical questions, even if he did often interpret what of a in the claimed to be ’nature’s wishes’ to his advantage. It complete comparative history of the species that he condemned ’the kind of madness that made girls’ virginity into a living entity’ (Buffon, 1971 [’De la in nature’s name, again, and against the principle of puberte’] : 85). It ecclesiastical celibacy, that he published the long confession of a sex maniac and denounced ’overlong retention of seminal fluid’ as responsible for states of dementia and epilepsy (Buffon, 1971 [’Addition a 1’article de la puberte’] :100-7). A philosopher’s discourse, doubtless, anticipating Diderot’s naturist, libertarian and irreligious pamphlet, the ’Supplement au voyage de Bougainville’, which of chastity in the arms of a portrayed devout priest being led to break his young native girl, a text where a Tahitian, an epicurean and a master of rhetoric, also declares that the strange precepts of the priest’s religion ’contrary to the general law of living beings’ (Diderot, 1964: 455 ff.; quotation, 480). However, Buffon also provided himself with other reasons for writing than the critical a question of creating inventory of the analysis of contemporary mores. It human condition: ’Puberty, the accompanying circumstances, circumcision, to castration, virginity, impotence - these are too essential to the history of allow us to suppress related facts’ (Buffon, 1971 [’De la puberte’]: 76). And further on, apropos of virginity, he concludes his reflections by justifying his reports not only the compilation of source-materials: ’... just as in a story sequence of events and the factual circumstances, but also the origin of the most I could not influential opinions and errors, I believed that in the history of avoid speaking of his favourite idol, the one to whom he makes most sacrificial offerings’ (Buffon, 1971: 85). Buffon’s analyses remain brief: where aetiology is concerned, he blames superstitions and men’s jealousy, passions and selfinterest, along with the rest of his century. But the result of his empirical and technical and textual inquiry counts less than the impetus he gave to documentary genre, ethnography, henceforth subordinated to a history of At the beginning of the 19th century the anthropology of the sexes, to take just essential chapter in Julien-Joseph Virey’s this example, would constitute Natural History of Mankind. It would remain an important disciplinary component in the institution of French ethnography for many years, as is shown by the instructions ’concerning the specific ethnic characteristics of the reproductive system in the various human races and their differences or particular variations’ published in 1871 under the auspices of the Paris Ethnographic Society. Almost certainly written by Clemence Royer, this questionnaire for travellers dealt with the anatomical and physiological characteristics of the sexual It

was

man

man

were

name

was

own

was

vows

a

were

was

an

man

one

man

a

man.

an


30

organs of different

peoples, particularities of puberty in different milieux, the ’ceremonies, habits and superstitions relating to menstrual crises’, ’vices against nature’ linked to hot climates, hygiene, social status and ’certain customs, beliefs, prejudices and superstitions’, and practices of circumcision and infibulation in relation to their ’physical and moral causes’ - and so (Calmette, Duhousset, on

Hervey-Saint-Denys, de Labarthe, de Rosny and Royer, 1871). All in all, a very Buffonian questionnaire. Another aspect of Buffon’s thought justifies retrospectively his patient

The author of the Natural History of empirical inquiry into the variations in are to understand Man does not speak of ’human nature’, if by that expression a set of essential, inalienable qualities guaranteeing a certain kind of being, an shared by all men, something that might incline the species to certain obligatory forms of behaviour. Though a philosopher concerned with progress, he proposed conjectural hypothesis about the necessary development of societies. Buffon’s most certainly endowed, by virtue of a divine gift, with thought, and through his capacity to communicate ideas, with the idea of the perfectibility of the species. All individuals, whether savage or civilized, rational potential and ability to evolve. They possessed the ’equal in the eyes of nature’. But they could not make most of their constitutive differences into anything ’meaningful’, as he put it, without organizing their power of action over nature collectively and in the context of a society based upon law. Turning the species’s aptitudes into actual behaviour thus conditional and depended upon social factors. Interwoven with biographical elements, this entrepreneur’s view of reason taking possession of brutish nature (he describes it as ’hideous and dying’) allows Buffon the financier, landowner and master blacksmith, to offer a dynamic picture of human nature overcoming obstacles and taking calculated risks. Without going into all the details of the argument - something that would require far copious documentation than is possible here (Blanckaert, 1992) - the upshot is that ’the value of man’, as reflected in Buffon’s productivist terminology, is not an absolute given: it has to be maintained and can be fails to realize his potential: ’man himself, in retroceded if, like the savage, the pure state of nature, unenlightened, and stripped of all the support of society, produces nothing, builds nothing’ (Buffon, 1829-31 [’Le Castor’]: Vol. 15, 317). According to Buffon, the perfectibility of the species implied, in order to become concrete, an ongoing, active process whereby it produced and reproduced ceaselessly; all of which presupposed human labour, meaning the work involved in cultivating the earth or overcoming the natural forces which gave material otherwise abstract essence. By using technology to alter natural reality to the processes, man’s worth acquired value in relation to his project, which appropriation or mastery of the terrestrial globe, the cultivation of the earth, the domestication of savage species and control of the energy that physical forces can provide. Cultivated nature, ’draped in magnificent and pompous attire’, man.

we

essence

no

man was

were

same

was

more

man

was

an

was

was

turned into

a

mirror which reflected its

own

greatness and


superiority.

31

would thus proclaim: ’I do, therefore I am’. Rephrasing Descartes, Buffon’s This conception of man’s place in nature proved to be decisive as regards the direction subsequently taken by Buffon’s naturalist anthropology. It has three man

main features, which we will now summarize. First of all, by placing man straight away in the practical situation of appropriating the physical world and having to cope with the uncertainties of civilization, Buffon neutralized the traps involved in philosophical attribution. What happened to the species was no longer guaranteed by natural law, nor were its direction and choices ordered in purely rational ways or determined by clear and distinct ideas. Thought, freedom and perfectibility had no meaning unless tested against reality. Virtualities had to be lived. The minds of men, in their concrete reality, differed ’in every way or not at all’ (Buffon, 1954 [‘L’Asne’]: 356): ’There are so many automata amongst the human species! And education and reciprocal communication so augment the quantity and the vivacity of feelings! What a difference, in this respect, between the savage and the man in a policed society, and between a peasant woman and a woman of the world!’ (Buffon, 1954 [’Les animaux carnassiers’]: 367). Secondly, civilization produced its own truth and value. In a policed society, men had as it were tamed themselves, and represented the concept of a specific, perfectible human nature. This was the consequence of the epistemology peculiar to Buffon. He refused definitions based upon intrinsic properties and in all his work, according to Cassirer, he prepared the way for ’a vision of nature which instead of deducing destiny from being, deduced being from destiny and explained being by destiny’ (Cassirer, 1966: 107). Hence a significant change of perspective. In answer to the question ’What is man?’, Buffon’s activist philosophy replied to all intents and purposes that he is a differentiated animal living in political societies and capable of thought and words who, by means of concerted plans of action and the natural means available to him, or created by him, tries to abolish in himself the signs of his animality. The 19th century would take this definition further, but without contradicting it. Thirdly, the civilized white man, model of all that was ’true and beautiful’ (Buffon, 1971 [’Varietes dans 1’espece humaine’]: 319), represented both a prototype and an unchallengeable, perfect example of what variations amongst the species had produced. The savage became the ’degenerate’ antithesis to all this. Buffon’s European-centred anthropology was largely presented as the solution to an enigma: given the unity of the human species and, in ideal terms, the equality of nations, how could one account empirically for all the different time-scales in man’s development, the resulting divisions, and the ’debased genius’ (C. de Pauw), of savage peoples? What were the mechanisms, both material and social, that caused man to degenerate in relation to his ’truth’ and his ’beauty’? Why did men - the plural being the operative word - vary in their ’natural character’? The positivist epistemological tradition holds that a new science is inaugurated


32

against the dominant by a critical break from established ideologies, in a philosophy. Now naturalist science, the science of the human species, depended in part the philosophy of the entrepreneur and agent in the world he had himself humanized. Customs and ’the national genius of different peoples’ part of nature, and thus, a fortiori, of natural history. From that point on, and for all the disciples of ’the eloquent historian of nature, the illustrious M. Buffon’ (Valmont de Bomare), ’the picture of the general products of that intelligence, in the necessary complement of their each of the races of the human species, has made of its portion of the qualities history.... The use that each human nature shared out should therefore be the subject of their historian’s research; he should strive to present a faithful image of it’ (Lacep~de, an. IX-1801: 7-8). Without giving leverage to reductionist materialism in the style of La Mettrie or Cabanis, Buffon brought together and consolidated empirical studies of the ’physical’ and ’moral’ characteristics of a variety of human groups by ’the bringing to earth of the &dquo;whole&dquo; of man’, as Sergio Moravia put it (1980: 250the totality of his being, physical, social and intellectual, that Buffon 214): ’It wanted to deal with in his Natural History of Man’ (Roger, 1989a: 210). Thereafter, the word ’philosophy’ would operate two different levels. The first level involved specific rationalization of man’s mode of spatiotemporal integration in the world - something which does indeed appear to smack of an ideology of human nature. After the revolutionary period, Buffon’s disciple Julien-Joseph Virey would make this unspoken naturalist agenda get outside it.... Our explicit: ’... nothing is outside nature, nothing within its purview.’ Man himself, ’this sciences, arts and industry all creature that reigns above all creatures ... remains subject to nature’s laws, like move

man

on

were

was

race

was

on

a

can

come

the lowliest animal. How could he not realize that it is in his interest to know himself, together with all that surrounds him, gives him life and causes him to

die?’ (Virey, 1817: 542). The second level brought

into

corpus of methodological fruitful in ways that transcended

play a

principles parochial

designed to make this philosophy preoccupations, set in the context of a progressive problematic of knowledge. or less the This is meaning Buffon ascribes to the word ’philosophy’: ’It where the only to that a philosophy without defects would be time invoked general effects, but in which one would at the seek to increase their number while striving to generalize particular effects’ (Buffon, 1954 [’Histoire generale des animaux’]: 249). The Natural History of Man displaced the philosophical issue, moving from solid nominalist a priori requirements to a position open to empirical solutions (Buffon, 1971 [’De la nature de 1’homme’]: 43’~). Man in the state of nature as natural understood in terms not as important as man in nature, of his concrete relationship to the world. As a naturalist and an entrepreneur, Buffon supplied proof that terrestrial circumstances defined for the socialized in framework of necessary, changing actions that individual way more

seems

one

me

were

causes

same

or

man

was

man

was

a


no

33

uniform. The physical and mechanical aspects of his animal nature had created conditions for him which he could not avoid confronting (Buffon, 1954 [’Nomenclature des singes’]: 390). But environmental constraints weighed even man the heavily cosmopolitan animal, since the natural world was so diverse and, occasionally, so hostile to him. Certain climates discouraged human activity, others were favourable to it. For Buffon, man was partially a product of the earth he lived on, forming with it a concrete, necessary totality: ’Thus the earth makes the plants, the earth and the plants make the animals, while the earth, the plants and the animals make man’ (Buffon, 1954 [’Les animaux sauvages’]: 362). The type of existence of communities that might be situated very close to each other could be completely different, according to whether beneficial or more arduous conditions of physical geography obtained. Buffon could in this way contrast the description of the Ainou people, close neighbours of the civilized Japanese, bringing all available causal factors into play. more

on

The province of Ye~o, which is in the northern part of Japan, though situated in what should be a temperate climate, is nevertheless very cold, sterile and mountainous. Consequently, the inhabitants of this region are different from the Japanese and the Chinese; their behaviour is gross and arts ... they live like brutal, and they have neither social savages, and nourish themselves with whale fat and fish oil; they are very lazy and around almost naked ... in they wear dirty clothes. Their children general, they are more like the northern Tartars, or the Samoides, than like the Japanese. (Buffon, 1971 [’Varietes dans 1’espece humaine’]: 236-7; mores nor

run

emphasis added)

This example shows quite clearly the new cognitive scheme Buffon set up in order to get inside the philosophers’ seemingly impregnable rationalist bastion. A pluralist and differential anthropology would be defined in this way, but the initial stance probably had a philosophical origin: if man justified himself first and foremost by his works, human creativity, like the new liberty that flowed from it, implied a mastery, however relative, of natural forces - which amounted to saying an awareness of necessities. But what would liberty in the abstract be had no opportunities for physically making use of it? Knowing man’s like, if real situation in the world forced a recognition, within a single thesis, of his specific potential, his actual practices and the location of his settlements. The whole pattern formed a system (Sloan, 1973). To understand man, in a dualist, Cartesian framework, it would thereafter be necessary to take note of the demands of physiology and to think hard about the disruptive, inhibiting or dynamic part played by customs, predominant behaviour patterns, modes of subsistence, and education, all of which had to be closely correlated to overall climatic conditions. One example will be enough to make manifest Buffon’s pragmatic convictions. It bore upon one of the central issues of ’Enlightenment anthropology’’6: did the faculty of judgement react adversely to the influence of man

even


34

climatic variations? In 1748, in L’homme-machine, and without going into details, La Mettrie implicated the weight of hereditary influences, food and the ’chaos of diverse elements that float in the immensity of the air’. He drew from this the conclusion that’... such is the power of Climate that a Man who changes from one to another feels the change in spite of himself. He is like ambulatory plant that has transplanted itself; if the climate is no longer the same, it is normal that the plant should degenerate or improve’ (La Mettrie, 1987: 72-3). In De l’homme, a posthumous work published in 1773, Helv6tius formally replied that this could not be the case without contradicting the very essence of understanding, defined as ’the capacity to see the resemblances and the differences’ between objects, and to recognize their ’suitability or unsuitability’: an

Some ... attribute intellectual differences to the physical differences between latitudes. But to prove this, keeping to the given definition of the human mind, we would have to name a country where men noticed neither the differences nor the resemblances between objects, their suitability or unsuitability for us. Such a climate has yet to be discovered. (Helvetius, 1989 [1773]: Vol. 1, 223, note a; cf. also 207-8, note b) nor

of the mind as endowed with the faculty to compare, could not therefore be invalidated by degrees of heat or cold or by the way the location was configured. Buffon deliberately swept away all generalizations. Without getting directly involved in a polemic with the ’rabble of philosophizers’ against whom Rousseau was soon to stress the advantages of on the spot observation (Rousseau, 1964 [1755]: 212), he accumulated empirical evidence of proof in favour of the hypothesis of climatic and telluric determination: The canonical

image

The air and the earth have

great deal of influence upon the shapes of men, animals and plants: within one canton one only has to examine the men who live higher up the hillsides or on the hilltops, and to compare them with those who live in the middle of the neighbouring valleys, to discover that the former are agile, alert, well proportioned and quick-witted, and that the women are generally pretty, whereas on the flat, low-lying land, where the earth is heavier, the air thicker and the water less pure, the peasants are slower and less well proportioned as well as being slow-witted, while the women are nearly all ugly. (Buffon, 1971 [’Varietes dans 1’espece a

humaine’]: 320, emphasis added)

Without any further show of feeling, Buffon’s philosophical anthropology faced up to real life’s often sordid material conditions. Poverty was imprinted upon faces and penetrated bodies. Inequality, actual and contingent, could cancel out the potential formal equality of mankind. Climate ’forged the soul’ and harmony between bodies. Nothing had therefore been decided in advance when judgements were made in observation-based sciences. To be answerable to its own criteria, theory had thus to give way to the practice of the inventory. If the


35

individual or the groups with which he entered into relations were not equivalent to the species as a whole, the naturalist had to provide himself with numerous facts before having ideas, and not jump ahead of empirical inquiry. Any innovatory research depended upon an appreciation of these factors. The first stages of reflection could not involve attempting to imagine outcomes endings. This is why the Natural History of Man is built on the basis of a break from the philosophy of universal man, and maps out the way forward for an unheard-of discipline that can be called ’anthropology’ or ’the science of the human species’. This displacement of interest and of emphasis explains the importance retrospectively accorded to Buffonian anthropology by 19th-century naturalists. Buffon came up against the physical and social geography of conditions and climates, the whims of custom, alimentary traditions and variations in the body less integrated. Beneath all these variables, once social which made it ordered, he sought to discover laws, that is to say, objectivized regularities, recurrent properties and correlating levels (Buffon, 1954 [’De la maniere d’etudier et de traiter 1’histoire naturelle’]: 25&dquo;). Prior to any demonstration, the inventory of the human phenomenon, the ordered repertoire of travel literature, takes on its full meaning here. ’Anthropology is for Buffon the science that allows two concepts to be entertained at once: the unity of the human species and its diversity’ (Duchet, 1971a: 17). Man in himself, universal and abstract, was put into a subservient position with respect to concrete variables. Circumnavigation of the globe had accumulated all kinds of information about distant peoples. ’These documents had to be put into kind of order.... This is what Buffon did, taking as his basis the idea Hippocrates had two thousand years earlier called the influence of air, water and place’ (Topinard,1885: 45). It was very obviously the case that speculation not lacking in all this, but it had technical alibis with equivalents in the work of Rousseau, Diderot or Helvetius, as Michele Duchet acknowledges. Buffon did not enunciate in explicit nomothetic form his conception of the place of men in nature, but the overall organization of his anthropological discourse constitutes an invitation to found such laws by testing them against facts. From Lacep6de to Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the Buffon school, using examples he provided, would speak of ’the laws of nature’ and would grant him the status of a legislator of natural history. Both an empiricist and an inductivist, Buffon recorded effects of similarity which by virtue of repetition made up ’the essence of physical truth’ (Buffon, 1954 [’De la maniere d’etudier et de traiter 1’histoire naturelle’]: 24). He renounced intuitive definition of essences and did not concern himself, as the metaphysicians did, with conjecture primary causes of recorded phenomena. Buffon understood the word ’law’ according to its new, Newtonian meaning, defined by Montesquieu in 1748 as dealing with the ’necessary relationships derived from the nature of things’ such that ’each instance of diversity is uniformity, each change constancy’ (Montesquieu, 1964: book 1, part 1, 530). In the chapter entitled ’Varieties amongst the Human or

more

or

some

was

no

over


36

Species’ Buffon distinguished at least three laws, three grand principles or general effects immanent in the human phenomenon. Rapidly summarized, the first law consisted of a law accounting for regular

degeneration according to isothermic lines and articulated around the concept of ‘climate’.’8 This law particularly responsible for controlling skin colour modifications, from white to black, and height variations in individuals and ethnic groups. It also formed the basis of the theory of climates. It probably owed much to Buffon’s reading of Charron’s Treatise Wisdom, which likewise was

on

derived the differences in men from ’the diverse moods of the world’, but for the Age of Enlightenment as a whole it was an unquestionable truth based upon experience, over and above the views of Hippocrates, Bodin or Montesquieu.’9 The second law accounted for uniformity of physical types subject to uniform life-styles, a simple adaptation of the first Newtonian rules concerning philosophical reasoning, while the third was concerned with correlating the aesthetics of human shapes and the state of society. This flowed directly from Buffon’s a priori views on civilization, which he declared to be the natural norm. This third law more or less subsumed the previous ones, but was in competition with them on their own aetiological ground. Society in itself constituted a milieu, whose ’climate’ not without influence on men’s physical appearance and on the development of their abilities. Customs could change men as surely as atmospheric conditions, the direction a river flowed or the altitude of settlements. was

accustomed to an ordered, calm and docile life, and which, because its interests are looked after by a good government, is neither exposed to poverty nor lacking the basic necessities, will for that reason alone be composed of stronger, better looking and better built men than a wild and independent nation where each individual, unaided by society, is obliged to provide his sustenance, suffer in turn hunger or excess of food that is often bad, be exhausted by work or boredom, experience the rigours of the climate without being able to protect himself from them and, in a word, act more often like an animal than a man. Assuming these two different peoples living in the same climate, we would have every reason to believe that the men belonging to the wild nation would be darker, uglier, smaller and more wrinkled than those of the policed nation. (Buffon, 1971 [’Vari6t6s dans 1’espece humaine’]: 270,

A

policed society living in relative ease,

own

emphasis added)

great many passages Buffon points out complex, inextricably interlinked situations. Not only did laws have cumulative effects at particular times and places, but the many and varied forms of social retribution added their own variable and contradictory material reality to the results of natural determinism. Man and world came together to form a system that developed outwards (civilization) or turned inwards against itself (savagery). Retroactive effects were In

a


37

thus multiplied. Climate and soil influenced community life - coming from arid desert lands the ’free and independent’ Moors would of necessity be nomads and thus an ’errant’ people (Buffon, 1971 [’Varietes dans 1’esp6ce humaine’]: 276) but society in its turn modified the physical milieu. Through its own inbuilt dynamics it could in the selfsame way civilize a wilderness and control carnivorous animals. In a word, it could redeem untended nature which, for Buffon, was growing inexorably cooler (Buffon, 1962 [’7e 6pique’]: 213 ff.;

Hanks, 1966:173-~).

Because it confronted

unexpected complexities, the natural history of does not resemble philosophies of the contemporary with it. Buffon first ’to have attempted, in terms of the two great axes of time and space, to rediscover relationships attributable to the nature of things and capable of accounting for variety’ (Salomon-Bayet, 1978: 312-13). Anthropology henceforth meant working and speaking, bound to the circumstances in which he and lived, the subject of his history. Just as the reciprocal interaction of milieu bore witness to the vicissitudes of civil history, so time played its part, adding to disorder, without it being possible to draw conclusions of a predictive kind. Buffon sought deterministic rules beneath the appearance of phenomena. at the time rigorous - they allowed causal But the deterministic factors analysis - and partial. Exhaustive and critical information and observations garnered from travel narratives supported the theoretical reform of knowledge and the indefinite and concrete documentation of a science of the species quite capable of refuting itself or being ’perfected’: ’... modern travellers have exact data, the kind required to perfect Buffon’s immortal Essay’ provided man

man

was

man

man

were

same

more

From the end of the 1770s onwards, in the to the article entitled ’Varieties amongst the Human Species’, Buffon

(Bory de Saint-Vincent, 1825: 279).

supplement

made justificatory claims for the new regime of truth: In the entire sequence of my work on natural history there is perhaps

single article

more

not a

likely to require additions and even corrections.... I variety in human species thirty years ago and several

that article on voyages have occurred in that space of time, some of which were undertaken and chronicled by educated men: using the new knowledge brought back to us I shall try to reorganize things according to the most the exact truth, either by doing away with certain facts that I affirmed basis of too slender evidence, giving too much credence to the first travellers, or by confirming those impugned or mistakenly denied by critics. (Buffon, 1971 [’Addition a 1’article des varietes dans 1’esp~ce wrote

on

humaine’]: 321-2) The new discipline, nourished by travel literature, developments in comparative anatomy and the progress made in physiology, was soon to become the site of struggles for supremacy between specialists. Buffon created a research paradigm that provided a means of expression to a ’normal science’, in Thomas


38

Kuhn’s sense, meaning the kind of enigma-solving activity characteristic of progressive research (Kuhn, 1972: esp. chs 2 and 3). The paradigm provided the hard kernel of unquestioned evidence that remained articulated around the theory of the degeneration of savage peoples. For Buffon, as we have seen, civilization placed itself between the socialized subject and the physical framework of his existence in such a way as to shape a totally new and authentically human environment. When this social milieu was lacking, or when living conditions proved too rigorous, too hard, man degenerated individually and collectively. Because he lost the prerogatives peculiar to his species he also failed to relate in a truly social way to his own animality. When the social bond was stretched too far the individual found himself back in the condition of an atomized animal, outside nature. The Australians, who ’have no houses ... and live higgledy-piggledy in groups of twenty or thirty men, women and children’, were ’perhaps the most wretched people in the world, and of all men those who closest to brutes’ (Buffon, 1971 [’Varietes dans 1’espece humaine’]: 247-8). For observer of society who noted nuances suggesting a general mechanism, the proof provided by the degradation of the Tartars or the inhabitants of New Holland took on even greater weight: ’... in our own regions country people are uglier than town-dwellers, and I have often noticed that where poverty is less acute than in other neighbouring communities, the men are also better constituted and the villages less ugly’ (Buffon, 1971 [’Vari6t6s dans 1’espece humaine’]: 319-20). For more than a century this body of structured assertions provided a virtually unchallenged model for understanding human society. Popularized as received wisdom by the monogenist school, whose official leader Buffon became retrospectively (Topinard, 1885: 33), the degenerationist paradigm pointed the scientific community towards a corpus of ’principles 2’ explained by a basic conceptual scheme that provided a methodological direction in which empiricism and comparativism were governed by the same Newtonian rules and where ’live issues’, curious anomalies even, simply awaited technical validation. Finally, it furnished internal criteria for judging the legitimacy of solutions that had been thought satisfactory.2’ The enduring success of Buffon’s axiomatics, firmly attached as they were to his ethnocentric certainties, and yet open to research in the field (Roger, 1989b), is ample proof of the ideological solidarity amongst the researchers who associated themselves with a programme judged ’interesting’, in the words of H. V. Vallois. Most anthropologists, from J. F. Blumenbach, C. de Pauw and J. G. Zimmerman to J. Hunter and P. Camper, unreservedly acknowledged white Christian civilized man as the human prototype. This proposition, dispersed among many other unsuspected matters of belief, is at the heart of the paradigm. It was not something that could be challenged. Because of this, the programme rapidly gained in autonomy, and 19th-century authors, unconcerned by the philosophical or sociological roots of the new scientific discipline, identified Buffon’s logic, put to the test in the ’Varieties amongst the came

an


39

the official

of its birth. ’Much has been written about the human races since Buffon. I immediately discount the work of Camper, Blumenbach and M. Cuvier, for in the first place these fine works came after Buffon and then, if one takes the broad view, the deeper view, the overall view, Buffon’s work remains without equal’ (Flourens, 1850: 158). In the ongoing context of this ’vast movement’ whose ’initial instigator’ he became, Buffon was considered to be a theorist of the idea of race. Rare indeed were the authors, such as Topinard, who admitted that it was a manifest error, that he had ’never indicated an exact number of races’ and that the divisions between them were ’too imprecise, and too subordinate to variations in milieux for him to commit himself on this point’ (Topinard,1885: 64). The founder had perforce to be a classifier too. Blumenbach thought Buffon had divided humanity into six great varieties, Flourens made it four and Honor6 Jacquinot came back to six.... The monogenists, who argued for gradual transitions between varieties of humans rather than racial divisions, preferred to follow literally the teachings of the Intendant of the King’s Garden, agreeing with Buffon ’that all men are the same man tinted by the colour of the climate’ (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1856: 4322); ‘... their division into four fundamental groups, essentially characterized by colour, emerges from an attentive reading of his book rather than being formally expressed in it’ (Quatrefages, 1867, 1423). Topinard and Quatrefages were perfectly correct. Nevertheless, Buffon’s science would not have been judged ’complete’ without a more immediate topical relationship to what since the 1830s was called ethnology, that is, the science of race. Unanimously, Blumenbach had been recognized as its founding father. In the years from 1870 to 1880, in a nationalistic context exacerbated by the Franco-Prussian war, two strategies for historiographic writing were adopted, both of which allowed Buffon to be valorized to the detriment of his distinguished emulator. First of all, the two thinkers were associated in the expression of a common scientific ideal: ’Buffon’s and Blumenbach’s works and those of the naturalists who followed them, whether closely or more distantly, had placed the comparative study of human groups on a sound footing’ (Quatrefages,1867: 15). Then an attempt was made to diminish the Gottingen anatomist’s fame and with it the strength of his heuristic analyses. According to Topinard, Blumenbach was Human

Species’,

as

announcement

after Buffon, the greatest figure in the history of anthropology. Some have put him in the first rank, but we do not share their opinion.... Buffon had a breadth of vision that Blumenbach never possessed. The latter was a kind of Daubenton; he was inspired by Buffon and complemented him. These two kinds of minds had to follow one another in order to ensure the full development of the emergent science. After them, we can say that anthropology had been founded. (Topinard,1885: 57) ...

With the

promotion of the idea of permanence of the races (Blanckaert, 1988)


40

the

degenerationist paradigm

directly challenged by

the polygenists.24 However, the factual criticisms that were brought to bear on Buffon’s theoretical edifice concentrated, significantly, on the matter of foundational evidence. For example, around 1860, Broca attacked James Cowles Prichard, the most eminent representative of English monogenist naturalism. Prichard was, however, recognized in France as the successor of Buffon and Blumenbach. He was ’essentially of the Buffon school’ (Quatrefages, 1867: 17). Broca sought to accumulate empirical proof against ’Prichard’s so-called law concerning the degrading of skin colours as one moves further away from the Equator, from one zone to another’ (Broca, 1877: 357) - a straightforward adaptation of the theory of climates, popular since the 18th century. In actual fact, however, Broca was to a greater or lesser extent bringing the arguments of his theoretical adversaries up to date because, by invoking Buffon as armed adversary, he helped found him again as a contemporary authority. The law in question was of course Buffon’s. was

an

IV

CONCLUSION: DO FOUNDERS HAVE TO

BE

FOUNDED?

As

we come

to

the end of this

study

it appears that Buffon’s elevation

to

the

much to the didactic tradition of anthropologists’ pantheon has to ation or academic eulogy. Even if one refuses to accept this evaluation, note that his ’foundational’ text, the Natural History of Man, is still called into centuries later, in the framework of a professional activity, that of the service, natural sciences. Successive rereadings of the work by generations of anthropologists have confirmed its modernity but also ended up obliterating everything of the most reliable pieces of which, for the intellectual historian, makes it memoir-writing of the 18th century. The image proposed by G. Herv6 at the end of the last century, the image of the creator of scientific ethnology, or the study of race, is still reproduced, and the celebration of the bicentenary of Buffon’s death, in 1988, added little to it. Hence an unexpected consequence: whereas he is still valued by naturalists as an ’observer of different human types’ (Taquet, 1988: 8), a judgement that is doubly suspect, since the Histoire naturelle does not involve neither an observer anatomist any problematic of ’types’ and since he of types,25 Buffon has been de-legitimized by anti-racist critics, and described as a of the ’most influential spokesman for ’youthful bourgeois pride’, champions of the Enlightenment [who] built the foundations of the following century’s scientific racism’ (Poliakov, 1971 : 165-6). The eulogy has discovered its contradictory double in a rhetorical genre Aristotle called epidictics. Praise that has value judgement, and blame are, however, two aspects of the little place in historiography. To avoid subscribing to it, may put forward three regulatory requirements that will stand as provisional conclusions. First of all, without giving in to the mythology of an always topical, even commemor-

owes

one

two

one

nor an

was

one

one

same

we

more


41

the historian has to take account of an undeniable reality: through his followers, Buffon was perceived, transfigured and enthroned as the wish to undo legislator and founder of the natural history of man. Unless history, it is therefore useless to re-examine this representation in order, for example, to set it against other conceptions of scientificity which he could not have credited. We should not question the basis of this representation, certainly, but we must check it, put it into historiographic perspective and understand it in terms of the interaction between a text and its readers, in order to analyse Buffon’s place in the history of anthropology. Secondly, we have to recognize the powerful influence on evaluations of Buffon’s contribution to the discipline of the idea made popular in France by Bachelard and Althusser of an opposition or ’epistemological break’ between science and ideology. Because too involved in the decided that he philosophical movement it became necessary, in order to ensure the importance of his ’scientific revolution’, to take the opposite line, to the effect that ’his certainly less original’ than his science, and to all philosophical thought intents and purposes useless (Piveteau,1988: 206). Conversely, to say that he was ’more a philosopher than a naturalist’ (Lester, 1963: 1358) amounts to placing him among the ’intuitive’ thinkers, or the kind of system-builders concerned with propagating false knowledge or hastily contrived certainties unconfirmed by observation. Using Buffon as example, Michele Duchet has shown convincingly how much the naturalist’s scruples, his prudent critical attitude towards documents and his curiosity ’indirectly contributed to the science of man’ (Duchet, 1971b: 232-3). Following up J. Roger’s ideas, have tried to show that the conception of man developed by Buffon, far more important in its implications than it is said to be, in no way created an obstacle to the expression of a naturalist science. On the contrary, it justified theoretically the necessity of seeing man’s activity at the centre of nature as well as the scientific treatment, from both the naturalist and the ethnographic points of view, of certain traditional philosophical questions. Buffon’s often vaunted ’return to concrete facts’, only concerned with truths of experience, is as indissociable from his sensualist epistemology as it is from his entrepreneur’s way of posing problems. The science-ideology opposition is not therefore particularly useful from the historiographical point of view. The third requirement is at radical. The historian trivial and does not have the power to found founders. In the first part of this article, by throwing light on the multiplicity of appropriations made by the natural history of man, we tried to show how each period - or each author - constructed a preferential image of the founder of anthropology. The idea of a founder is not neutral. Everyone individualizes ’his’ Buffon, and the atomized and selective image that dominates at such and such a date cannot but seriously distort understanding of the ’source-text’. In the second part of this article, and without casting doubt on the stereotype

visionary Buffon,

we

someone

was

was

an

we

once more

more


42

of ’Buffon, the founder of anthropology’, we went beyond the normal limits of the traditional historiography of the area in order to understand how Buffon, starting from a particular philosophy of man, was led to posit the requirement of a discourse not of the individual but of the human species. It nevertheless seems that the necessarily overdetermined notion of foundation is of very little relevance and of little instrumental value in the history of the human sciences. It compels the historian to personalize the birth of the discipline, within an almost exclusively biographical register. The problematic question of ’foundation’ takes more or less the form of the question: ’Under what theoretical conditions can abstract reflection on the relationship between man and the world depart from the particular logic of its author in such a way as to symbolize, for generations of disciples, the base reference of all scientificity?’ The question is badly formulated. On the one hand it individualizes the creative act of an ’immortal’ scientific genius alone with his thoughts in the solitude of his study. On the other hand, it reintroduces the all too notorious epistemological break insofar as the epistemological act is considered in absolutist terms as ’une saccade du g6nie scientifique’ (Bachelard), a sudden shift or ’mutation’ of knowledge that as it were occurs without any historical preparation, without being in any way called for by the social and intellectual context. Finally, and above all, the idea of foundation cannot be dissociated from a disciplinary point of view. It functions in the regressive mode, in other words along the present-past axis of recurrent history. This disciplinary history can be seen, to use Stefan Collini’s metaphor, as guilty of ’tunnel vision’ (Collini, 1988: 391). In 1988 Paul-Marie Grinevald declared in connection with the birth ’the founder of this new science; together of ’the science of man’ that Buffon with Linnaeus, he elevated natural history to the level of a self-sufficient discipline that claimed man himself as one of its objects of inquiry’ (Grinevald, was

1988:103). The task of historians of the human sciences is not easy. Rarely, if ever, do we have available at the origin of a discipline perfectly construed theories The birth of a attributable to the brain of a single area of study or the way it gains its autonomy is a social and collective event rather than an individual fact, event that occurs in the dimension of ’longue dur6e’ and rarely stands out like a bright light punctuating the line of time. In any case, the history of the human sciences has as its objective to illuminate the real genesis of disciplines. Only by taking infinite precautions can it make use of recurrence, however carefully checked. Recurrence leads necessarily to retracing the internal history divided up, without taking account of the of disciplines as they are intellectual basis or the cross-disciplinary alliances which alone permit the emergence of specialisms. In the same way, the idea of foundation that we use all too readily in order to pinpoint the birth of the different human sciences turns out to be a simple historiographic artefact (Blanckaert, 1990). It has heuristic value than the notion of the precursor, so abused, in times past, in the man.

new

an

now

no


more

43

authors who use this of science. We may add here that the notion in connection with Buffon seem inevitably to contradict themselves. For example, Georges Gusdorf himself demonstrated in numerous works that ’the 18th century did not invent anthropology’ (Gusdorf, 1969: Vol. 2, 178 ff.; Gusdorf, 1972: 354). More recently, Francis Affergan has asserted that Linnaeus and Buffon ’could rightly be considered as the founders of anthropological method’, despite having previously put forward the thesis that ’without any doubt, modern anthropology finds its source in the 16th century’ (Affergan, 1987: 228, 225). One cannot have it both ways.... As soon as one acknowledges that no science can exist without a method appropriate to the object of inquiry, the antinomous nature of such a judgement becomes evident. On the other hand, these contradictions make explicit the fact that the trend towards the secularization of studies of man, towards the recognition of exotic peoples and the naturalization of the total human phenomenon, a movement that covers the entire classical age, found in Buffon an official interpreter without equivalent in his century. The specialists agree that most of Buffon’s themes, the comparison of man and animal, the theory of climates, degenerationism, monogenism, and so on, were not original contributions. Yet he was responsible for a ’... manner of bringing together in the same study considerations traditionally divided between different fields of knowledge’ (Roger, 1989a: 223-4). On the strength of this, Buffon is an essential landmark in the slow constitution of anthropology. He achieved a synthesis of the acquisitions of his predecessors and his contemporaries, but his exemplary value stems above all from the way he put order into the study of documentary evidence, in a field whose boundaries he redefined. He created, or rather crystallized, a technical and scientific genre, the natural history of man, whose pre-existing elements were scattered throughout inscribed in parallel research traditions. In conclusion, it seems the literature possible to relativize the badly founded notion of the founder without minimizing Buffon’s contribution, his historical significance and his ideological

history

numerous

new

or

ambiguities (Sloan, 1973: 310-11 ). A developing science depended found

on

T’he Natural History

of Man, work that extending the boundaries of a

possess the functional capacity of knowledge. ’Buffon enlarged all the questions he touched on, furthermore, he created new questions’ (Flourens, 1850: 155). As soon as the ’varieties’ and therefore the variations in man became the central issue to be elucidated, the was

to

sociological mechanisms responsible for creating thus created, diversified. A discipline racial differences became that would rapidly differentiate between its objects of inquiry and its techniques of inquiry. It can be seen then that without any kind of break, the Buffonian retrospectively discovered a scholarly solution in what Thomas ideology of Kuhn called a ’disciplinary matrix’, a hard kernel of statements, principles, deductive links and exemplary cases that allowed work proofs to proceed within a framework of cumulative knowledge. At the origin of this process of analysis of the biological

and

more

was

man

on


one

44

neither the stroke of intuitive genius of a solitary ’crystallization’ there scientist a ’great idea’ divorced from its social pre-text. Instead there is a complex process whose contextual and biographical foundations, as well as future academic and nationalistic issues, are revealed by epistemological analysis. was

nor

Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris

Translated by Anthony Cheal Pugh

NOTES ’The This paper was initially presented at the September 1990 Lancaster conference Nature of the Human Sciences in the 17th and 18th Centuries’. The author would like to thank Anthony Pugh for his very fine translation of the paper and for his helpful editorial suggestions. The editors would like to express their gratitude to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (GO 890) for their assistance in publishing this translation of M. Blanckaert’s essay. on

later, in 1753, in the ’Discours sur la nature des animaux’, Buffon would himself’ (Buffon, of ’this important science, which has as its object

1 Some years

speak

man

1954: 317). 2 Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société

d’Anthropologie de Paris,

11e

série,

1

(1960): 270.

The medal is reproduced p. 269. 3 From 1764, P. Camper hailed the natural history of man of the ’immortal Buffon’ (Camper, an. XI-1803: 476). Similarly, de Quatrefages: ’Buffon’s work on the history immortal naturalist’s most glorious achievements’ of of man ... is on

one

4

5

6

our

(Quatrefages, 1867: 12). ’The notion of epistemological acts, that today oppose to the notion of epistemological obstacles, corresponds to the way scientific genius can suddenly develop in a new, unexpected direction’ (Bachelard, 1965: 25). See I. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s valuable testimony and Daubenton’s judgement, quoted by F. Bourdier (1952: 60-1). G. Cuvier, letter to Pfaff, quoted in Courtès (1970: 21). we

shallow as that of Descartes, but which only differs from it, basically, in respect of the terms used’ (Cuvier, 1845: 161). 8 Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, par une Société de Gens de Lettres (1765, Neufchastel: S. Faulche, Vol. 8, p. 257). The chapter on ’Varieties amongst the Human Species’ is summarized in the article ’Humaine 7 ’One finds in Buffon

Espèce’, ibid., pp.

an

outlook that is

not as

344-8.

9 For an overview of the

ed.,1979.

suppression of references to materialist authors, see O. Bloch,

the Philosophes and their circle, see Roger Bourdier and François (1951: 228-32) and Fellows (1963: 610

10 On Buffon’s isolation and his relationship

(1962: CXII-CXIV), ff.). 11 Also,

an

anonymous article entitled

to

’Buffon’, in Nouvelle biographie générale deputs


45

les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours, sous la direction du Dr Hoefer (1855, Paris: Firmin Didot frères, Vol. 7, col. 738). 12 Cf. Buffon’s epistemological remarks in the preface to Hales, La Statique des Végétaux in Buffon (1954: 5, col. b). 13 The expression ’let us begin by setting aside all facts, for they have no bearing on the question’ can be found on p. 132. 14 Buffon is quoted on p. 251. 15 That this is inspired by Locke seems certain. See J. Locke, Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain [An Essay on Human Understanding], translated by D. Coste (1983, Paris: Vrin, book 3, ch. 6, para. 22 ff.). 16 In 1734, after the publication, a year earlier, of the Essai des effets de l’air sur le corps Human Bodies] by J. Arbuthnot, the humain [Essay Concerning the Effects of Air Academy of Pau set a competition on the following question: ’Does the difference in climates where men are born contribute to the differences in their intellects?’ (Ehrard,

,

on

1981: 697).

epistemological role of the observation of recurrent events, see Sloan (1992). The problematic of climate is everywhere exemplified in Buffon’s anthropology. The addition to the article the ’Variétés dans l’espèce humaine’, refines the concept of climate by of a synthetic definition. See Buffon (1971: 388). See Dougherty (1980), in particular appendix 1, ’Charron et Buffon’. On the theory of

17 On the

18

on

means

19

20

21

22 23 24

25

climates in Buffon’s time, see Ehrard (1981: part 3, ch. 11). Buffon’s notion of climate had already been worked out by l’Abbé d’Espiard in his Essais sur le génie et le caractère des nations (1743). D. A. Godron, speaking of the action of climate, refers to the ’principle applied by Buffon to Man’, in Godron, 1872: Vol. 2, 8. In Buffon’s work, the classic example of the solving of this kind of enigma is provided by the explanation of the unity of type manifested by the Americans. He first thought the obstacle to a solution to be ’invincible’. The way he solved the problem showed how effective the paradigm was when applied. See Buffon, 1971 (’Variétés dans l’espèce humaine’): 292 ff. The original text can be found in Buffon’s article entitled ’Le lion’ (Buffon, 1954: 378). Buffon, who ’did not want classification, even in zoology, did not fail to propose it for the varieties of humans’ (Quatrefages, 1867: 13). Victor Courtet would speak in these terms of ’the imperfection of Buffon’s system’ (quoted in Boissel, 1972: 117-18). Cf. Leguebe (1963: 121), who states that the explanation in terms of climates proposed by Buffon ’gives such malleability to the concept of race that it is no longer possible, in such conditions, to propose a classification comprising clearly distinct categories’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Affergan, F. (1987) Exotisme et altérité. Essai sur les fondements d’une critique de l’anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Appel, T. A. (1987) The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate. French Biology in the Decades before Darwin New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

.


46

Bachelard, G. (1965) L’activité rationaliste de la

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