THE VEGETATIVE SOUL
SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy Dennis J. Schmidt, series editor
THE VEGETATIVE SOUL From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine
Elaine P. Miller
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2002 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Elaine, 1962– The vegetative soul : from philosophy of nature to subjectivity in the feminine / Elaine Miller. Miller. p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary continental continental philosophy) philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5391-X (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5392-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy of nature—Germany—History—18th century. century. 2. Botany—Germany—History—18thh century. 3. Philosophy of Botany—Germany—History—18t nature—Germany—History—19th century. century. 4. Botany—Germany—History—19 Botany—Germany—History—19th th century. century. 5. Feminist theory. 6. Subjectivity. I. Title. II. Series. B2748.N35 M55 2002 113'.0943'09034—dc21 2002075918
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABBREVIATIONS INTRODUCTION ONE
vii ix 1 KANT
19
The English Gardent TWO
GOETHE
45
The Metamorphosis of Plants THREE
HÖLDERLIN
79
Gleaning FOUR
FIGURES OF PLANT VULNERABILITY
99
Empedocles and the Tragic Christ FIVE
HEGEL
119
The Self-Sacrifice of the Innocent Plant SIX
NIETZSCHE
149
The Ivy and the Vine CONCLUSION
DISSEMINATION, RHIZOMES, EFFLORESCENCE
181
The Legacy of the Vegetative Soul in Twentieth-Century Thought NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
201 219 233 v
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In a preface, written, naturally, when the rest of the work has already been done, one is often at pains to bring together the way in which the work was initially projected with its present form, as if one had known from the outset in what particular ways it would unfold. Somehow one must show the coherence of the various parts, the way in which each of them “naturally” develops out of the other. While one has certainly believed this to be the case, one is always aware there is no way that one can present this study after the fact as a straightforwardly sustained “argument.” As one proceeds, things get out of one’s “own” control and change, without giving any explicit direction for them to do so. And yet, this is precisely the way in which all writing progresses. It is also the way in which a plant grows. When a seed first opens and allows the signs of root and stem to emerge, one cannot tell what kind of plant it will become. Indeed, to the untrained eye, the leaves of the plant give no indication of its eventual flower, nor does the flower somehow imply the particular form of its fruit. I initially became interested in plant anatomy and growth through descriptions in philosophical texts from the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. What is intriguing about plants, and certainly what thinkers from Goethe to the German Idealists and Romantics and Friedrich Nietzsche found fascinating about them, is the lack of immediately comprehensible or recognizable signs of the direction in which they will grow, the way in which, as a plant develops, one of its parts will completely metamorphose into another, leaving little or no trace of its earlier form, and the astonishing adaptability of plants to the vicissitudes of their environments. The seeds and growth of a book necessarily reflect interactions with others who inspire, read, discuss, and criticize it or its ideas. I would like to thank the DePaul University philosophy community, and especially: Michael Naas, whose language and philosophical stance were vii
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The Vegetative Soul
always something to which to aspire; Peg Birmingham, who could be counted on to come up with bright guiding ideas at a moment’s notice; and David Farrell Krell who gave inspiration, motivation, and direction from beginning to end. Daniel Selcer and Anna Vaughn read my work from its inception and helped prune its growth, while Daniel Price spent many much appreciated hours carefully commenting upon and discussing ideas. A summer research grant and an assigned research leave at Miami University gave me the time to complete this book in its current form. Emily Zakin provided many valuable insights into its continued development and revision. Celeste Friend gave generously of her time and ideas. My family gave me support in many ways that allowed me to continue and thrive. Mark Bryant generously gave me the computer on which it was originally written. I would like especially to thank my mother, Susan Miller, for proofreading, childcare, and belief in me even when she didn’t understand. Sheila Croucher’s encouragement and creative input helped me overcome more than one mental impasse at the last minute and were immensely appreciated. Jane Bunker and Kelli Williams of SUNY Press were the most helpful of editors. Finally and most importantly, I could not have written this book without Ferit Güven’s intellectual and emotional support. He was there when I chose to follow philosophy and showed me a way beyond the conventional path; this book would never have been written had I not met him. As critic and friend, he, more than anyone, witnessed and fostered its expansive and contractive metamorphoses. I dedicate it to Sofi Nur, who was born just as I was finishing the final manuscript, and who convinced me of what I have formally argued, that the most beautiful creations transcend any calculation.
ABBREVIATIONS
All abbreviated references refer first (and sometimes only) to original language editions, except in the case of Schopenhauer. When two page numbers are given, separated by a slash, the first number refers to the original language edition and the second number refers to the English translation (e.g., GE 575/54). Two abbreviations separated by a slash indicates that the title is significantly different in English; in this case the second abbreviation refers to the English title. Numbers given after the abbreviation but before the comma refer to volume numbers (e.g., J III, 25). Unless otherwise noted, all references to Kant will be to Ak. (the “Academy Edition”). There will be no reference to the English pagination when the English translators include pagination from the original language edition in their translations (e.g., KU, KrV). All English translations may have been modified. All references will be to page numbers unless otherwise noted (e.g., § = section number).
1. Works by Kant Ak
Kants gesammelte Schriften. Berlin: Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902). Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1913.
KrV
Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Ak. III). Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Lewis White Beck. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965.
KU
Kritik der Urteilskraft (Ak. V). Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
ix
x
The Vegetative Soul
2. Works by Goethe GA
Gedenkenausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche , 24 volumes. Edited by Ernst Beutler. Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1949.
MP
Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen. Stuttgart: Verlag Freies Geistesleben, 1992.
SS
Scientific Studies. Edited and translated by Douglas Miller. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988.
3. Works by Hölderlin WB
Werke und Briefe. Edited by Friedrich Beißner and Jochen Schmidt. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1969.
H
Hyperion (WB 1). Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1994.
TE
Der Tod des Empedocles (WB 2: 463–566). Version number (1–3) given before page number.
GE
Grund zum Empedocles (WB 2: 570–83). Essays and Letters on Theory. Translated by Thomas Pfau. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988 (50–61).
4. Works by Hegel W
Werke. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970.
J I
Jenaer Systementwürfe I: Das System der Speculativen Philoso phie. Edited by Klaus Düsing and Heinz Kimmerle. Gesammelte Werke 6. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1975.
J II
Jenaer Systementwürfe II: Logik, Metaphysik, Naturphilosophie. Edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Johann Heinrich Trede. Gesammelte Werke 7. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1971.
J III
Jenaer Systementwürfe III: Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes. Edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Johann Heinrich Trede. Gesammelte Werke 8. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976.
PN
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Translated by Michael John Petry. New York: Humanities Press, 1970.
Abbreviations
xi
TJS
Hegels theologische Jugendschriften. Edited by Herman Nohl. Tübingen: Verlag von J.C.B. Mohr, 1907. Early Theological Writings. Translated by T. M. Knox. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948.
GCS L PS
Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal (TJS). Die Liebe (TJS). The Phenomenology of Spirit . Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
5. Works by Nietzsche KSA
Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe . Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. Berlin and Munich: Walter de Gruyter and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980. Cited by volume number (in italics) and page number.
HKG
Werke. Historische-Kritische Gesamtausgabe . Edited by Hans Joachim Mette and Karl Schlechta. Munich: C.H.Beck’sche Verlag, 1935. Cited by volume number (in roman numerals), section (in italics) and page number.
KGA
Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe . Edited by Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, and Karl Pestalozzi. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993. Cited by volume number (roman numerals), section (in italics) and page number.
BT
The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
GS
The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
UM
Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Cited by number (1–4) and page number.
WTP
The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1969.
6. Other works WWR Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation . Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Indian Hills, CO: The Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958. Cited by volume number (1–2) and page number.
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INTRODUCTION
When something in our observation of nature takes us aback, when we find our usual way of thought inadequate for its comprehension, we are well advised to look about for parallels in the history of thought and understanding. —Goethe, “The Spiral Tendency in Vegetation”
In “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,” Rainer Maria Rilke tells an allegory of nature rather than a narrative in his version of the story of Orpheus’s descent to Hades to find his dead wife, Eurydice. 1 Rilke begins with the descent of Orpheus and Hermes “like veins of silver ore” into Tantalus, the realm of stone, also called “the deep uncanny mine of souls.” Blood “heavy as porphyry” wells up around them as they approach the part of Hades where human souls abide. On the way out of Hades, Orpheus, the musician with the power to make the trees pull themselves up by the roots to dance, to magnetize the stones, now walks powerless and alone, forbidden to look back to check if Hades has kept his promise to bring Eurydice to join him once they have passed the gates of the underworld. Orpheus loses all of his customary equilibrium in his eagerness to rejoin his beloved, who is walking behind him with Hermes. Rilke chooses to describe Orpheus’s state of mind in the vocabulary of unreflective and restless animal instinct. As Orpheus walks out of Hades he “devours the path” ahead of him “in large, greedy, unchewed bites.” He who had the power to enchant the beasts of the field loses control of his own state of mind as if it were an unrestrained animal: “His senses felt as though they were split in two; his sight would race ahead of him like a dog, stop, come back, then rushing off again, would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn—but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.” In addition, Rilke draws attention to Orpheus’s arms, which have fallen to his sides
1
2
The Vegetative Soul
so that he is no longer aware of the delicate lyre “that had grown into his left arm, like a slip of roses grafted onto an olive tree.” The poet also describes Eurydice, like the lyre that represents Orpheus’s music and his power to entrance nature, as a plant. She is “like a fruit suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,” and closed, like “a young flower at nightfall.” Her vegetative nature is the dream-like absorption of her position on the brink of life and death. In the misty dark of the underworld, Rilke writes, “she was already root.” Hades has promised that if she can pass through the gates of Hades without being glimpsed by her husband, her animation will return to her. But Orpheus’s impatient animal-like senses, consciousness, and desire ensure that Eurydice will remain rooted in Hades when he cannot resist the temptation to turn around to see her. One might be tempted to say that Rilke is simply following a tradition that equates plant life with femininity and passivity, animal life with activity and masculinity, and the mineral with the mysterious and inanimate. It is certainly not difficult to find examples of such pairings in the history of literature and philosophy. One can also find many examples of the linkage of the plant with the oriental, with what is passive, needlessly decorative, unable to act in its own best interest. But Rilke’s figuration does not simply reiterate these tired metaphoric equations. For it is what is most conscious and most willful in Orpheus that betrays him, and it is what is most plantlike about him, his lyre, that has given him his identity precisely in allowing him to exceed himself. Orpheus’s power as a poet and a musician, a power symbolized by the lyre, is what makes him capable of creating a rapture that made it possible for listeners to forget the bounds of earthly individuation. If Rilke is not guilty of simply perpetuating common associations, if, on the contrary, he pushes these connotations to their limits and in doing so brings the very oppositional structure they imply into question, we might inquire into the origin of this multiple metaphorical tension. The late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were a time of great change in the paradigms of natural history, and in philosophy. The question of how one represents nature came to the fore in a way that had never been questioned before. The plant and the animal were separated and differentiated as the two major divisions of living organic nature. The science of life, biology, and the basic unit of that life, the organism (in its current sense), were invented as the focus of natural science moved from categorization and classification to the observation of the living body. At the same time, philosophers began to question to what extent the configuration of the organism was to become the template for philosophical thought and scientific order, and how one particular bodily figure had already influenced scientific and philosophical paradigms prior to the ascendance of organic form.
Introduction
3
In Friedrich Nietzsche’s notebooks written before and around the time of the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, he mentions, almost in passing, that the “vulgar perspective” of our own animal bodies is reflected in almost every thing to which we assign value (HKG 1:3, 388). Such a disparaging statement would seem surprising coming from Nietzsche, the famed “inverter of Platonism,” if one took it out of context and understood by it that somehow Nietzsche was advocating a perspective that would go beyond the bodily and eschew the sensuous in favor of the purely intelligible. This is manifestly not what Nietzsche means. Rather, he implies, we do something strange in projecting the particular dimensions and qualities of our own bodies onto every other thing we see or think. Such a practice leads to obvious anthropomorphisms of nature—think of talking rivers, mountains with faces, and trees that walk in Disney cartoons—but it also invites a certain reductionist view of the way in which nature gives of itself. Philosophers and historians of science are beginning to realize that classical paradigms of the scientific method have frequently assumed the very perspective Nietzsche is criticizing. For example, Evelyn Fox Keller, a biologist and leading contemporary feminist critic of science, writes: Much of contemporary evolutionary theory relies on the representation of the “individual”—be it the organism or the gene—that is cast in the particular image of man we might call the “Hobbesian man”—simultaneously autonomous and oppositional, connected to the world in which it finds itself, not by the promise of life and growth, but primarily by the threat of death and loss—its first and foremost need being the defense of its boundaries. In psychological terms we might say that such an individual betrays an idealized conception of autonomy, one that presupposes a radical conception of self, and that simultaneously attributes to the relation between self and other an automatic negative valence—a relation, finally, not so much of independence as of dynamic opposition. 2
Keller goes on to specify that the paradigm of biological building block, which has been described in terms recalling an aggressive animal fighting against other forces of nature, has been carried over into both contemporary evolutionary theory and genetics by conventional scientific language rather than by explicit intention. It is interesting to note that even today, when contemporary physics has radically transformed our understanding of the universe, the science of biology remains entrenched in fundamentally the same linguistic and thus interpretive structures that it has had since Francis Bacon published De Interpretatione Naturae.3 Indeed, Keller goes on to show that although the locus of vital activity in biology has shifted in the twentieth century from the visible organism to the physico-chemical structure of the components of
4
The Vegetative Soul
the organism, the central figure for biology—the gene—is still conceived of as an individual on a smaller scale. Biology has redefined life itself as a code or cryptogram still understood as a self-defending entity, and the goals of biological science have shifted from observation to intervention or “control that promises effective mastery over the processes of making and remaking life,”4 effectively perpetuating this paradigm on another level. In other words, if the organism has been articulated in the past— as we will see that it has—in analogy with a machine, it is now being projected as the possible product of manipulative techniques whose results rather than actions can be tracked. This book examines the relationship between the paradigm of the organism, its description in the language of confrontation and selfpreservation, a description I will refer to as an “animal” metaphor for individuation, and the depiction of subjectivity in the same terms, terms that have been called “masculine” from their provenance in the description of the Hobbesian man of the state of nature. The congruence is based on the rhetoric of description rather than on any explicit position held by Hobbes or any other philosopher on the status of women. This is to say, rather than criticizing any particular philosopher’s position on the status of woman and on whether or not she may properly be called a subject, I am focusing on the metaphorical use of language to describe political subjects when it is applied to the realm of nature, and, conversely, the language used to describe nature when it is employed to legitimate particular descriptions of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Such uses of rhetoric, because of their subtlety, are often overlooked, and their detrimental potential thereby underestimated. My contention is that “nature” is always presented as symbolized, and that nature and culture both negatively define each other and are the sources for each others’ symbolization. Thus a change in the symbolics of nature necessarily brings about a change in that of culture. Following Luce Irigaray, given that the symbolization of nature has traditionally been aligned with terms used to describe the feminine, this change might have the possibility of restructuring or even creating feminine subjectivity in a way that would make a real difference to women. In particular, I am interested in a historical period in which paradigms of individuation in nature seemed to be shifting, and how this both reflected and influenced ways of thinking about subjectivity. The natural figure that began to attract the attention of scientists and artists alike was that of the plant, whose body is configured quite differently than that of the animal. The term vegetative soul is taken from Aristotle, but refers, here, to a theory of subjectivity that evolves from what M. H. Abrams has dubbed “vegetable genius,” the eighteenth and nineteenth-century idea of genius as the plantlike relationship of the creative mind to nature as
Introduction
5
the place from which it springs forth without individual agency and indeed lacking full transparency to self as to its reason for being. 5 The vegetative soul is radically opposed to the figure of organism as autonomous and oppositional; its stance toward the world is characterized by the promise of life and growth, not the avoidance of death and loss. Further, its individuation is much less radically defined, is subject to metamorphosis, and maintains an identity that transfigures itself over time. The metaphor of plant growth for subjectivity is thus constitutive rather than merely decorative or fanciful. Finally, characteristics of the vegetative soul resonate with an important facet of recent feminist theory, in particular of French feminism, namely, the possible configuration of a feminine subject that is neither atomistic nor confrontational. The relationship between what we loosely call “nature,” on the one hand, and the human creativity that includes the attempt to make sense of that same “nature,” on the other, has often been conceived of as the locus of the earliest of metaphors. Metaphor itself has been described as the result of a slow progression in human cognition from the immediate and the sensory to the abstract and conceptual. The story goes something like this: the earliest humans had much more intimate contact with the natural environment, which they strove to master and in the face of which they were extremely vulnerable, but whether in domination or in subordination they had a fundamental relationship with the raw, natural elements that is unknown to most human beings today. The first civilizations arose as a result of the taming of nature through the development of agriculture and the domestication of animals, as well as the taming—through a social contract that exchanges certain freedoms for the guarantee of protection—of naturally hostile initial relationships between human beings. “Culture” itself could not emerge until this initial double mastery of nature and of human nature had reached a stage of some stability, so that the visual arts, music, and writing were all products of leisure and of a secure and sedentary life. The earliest mythologies were personifications of the forces of nature and allegorizations of natural processes. As culture and language progressed, a transfer slowly took place from raw, immediate, sensuous experience to more abstract notions. These non-sensory concepts could only be put into language by referring them in turn to the elements of original experience, which explains the etymological derivations of many abstract words whose roots point to sensory experience yet which designate ideas that cannot be empirically presented. The nouns of our language, as a result, are a complicated mixture of names of things that can be ostensively designated and conceptual or metaphysical terms that have lost all contact with the experience from which they were derived.6 Such metaphysical terms may be called “dead” metaphors.
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The Vegetative Soul
One of the many problems with such a reading of metaphor is that from the outset it presupposes a clear division between nature and culture, between sensory and non-sensory, between figurative and literal meanings in language, and it further presumes a parallel structure between the opposing terms of this set of contraries, so that, for example, metaphorical language results from the replacement of a primitive language closely bound to nature with a “higher” language of abstract terms that nevertheless can only be articulated with reference to the sensory. Classical metaphysical thinking is inaugurated in such assumptions even before one begins to look at the history of philosophy. Furthermore, such a story presumes a unidirectional progression from the natural and the sensory toward the cultural and the intelligible, without taking into account the influence of particular assumptions about culture that already orient the way in which nature is understood. Indeed, there may be no pure experience of nature; in order for “nature” to appear to us in an intelligible way, it must be signified through a historical discourse. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany the question of how one articulates nature formed an important part of scientific and philosophical discourse, producing many thinkers—among them, Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, G. W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche—who were acutely aware of this reciprocal relationship between nature and culture. In order to situate this discourse, it will be instructive to go back in time to the first division between a sensible and an intelligible realm. One of the most striking metaphorical appropriations of the relationship between nature and human expression in ancient literature occurs at the end of Plato’s Phaedrus. The first two-thirds of the dialogue consist of a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, who are arguing, ostensibly, over the meaning of love and the relative merits of the non-lover and the lover. Just when Socrates’ climactic speech has ended, Phaedrus has acquiesced, and it seems the dialogue is coming to a close, Socrates shifts the conversation to the topics of speech writing and rhetoric, and finally to writing and reading. Although the connection between the various scenes is clear—the entire argument was sparked by the communication of an inscribed speech of Lysias that Phaedrus carries around with him hidden under his robe—the structure of the dialogue strikes one as unbalanced and strangely organized, since it arrives at no “natural” conclusion. This is particularly noticeable given that the subject of Socrates’ discussion of rhetoric is precisely the proper organization of discourse. Socrates says to Phaedrus, “But I do think you will agree to this, that every discourse must be organized, like a living being, with a body of its own, as it were, so as not to be headless or footless, but to have a
Introduction
7
middle and members, composed in fitting relation to each other and to the whole.”7 Though a “living being” (zoon) might be any type of living thing, the words headless (akephalon) and footless (apoun) make a clear reference to the animal body. Even though Greek science included no notion of “organism,” the ideal of “organic unity” in writing certainly plays a role in Plato’s dialogue. In this case, Socrates projects the unity perceived in a natural entity onto a human activity as an ideal form. But the choice of image is not arbitrary. The animal body, with its perceived qualities of being self-enclosed, self-propelled, and, to a degree, self-sufficient, has always been the predominant metaphor for organization and unity in both philosophical and nonphilosophical writing. The animal body is perhaps the only organism that has the qualities ascribed to “good writing”: a clear beginning, middle, and end that fit together into a coherent whole, and form a “living” structure.8 A little later in Phaedrus, Socrates asks Phaedrus whether a “serious farmer” who possesses seeds capable of bearing fruit will plant them in a “Garden of Adonis” in the middle of summer where they will mature rapidly and then die within eight days. Phaedrus agrees that only one who is planting for amusement and not in order to harvest fruit will act in such a manner. Plato draws parallels between writing and strewing seed carelessly (for amusement), and between speech and the deliberate planting of seeds in the earth that a farmer does. Indeed, according to Marcel Detienne, a complete semantic framework arose in ancient Greek associating the gardens of Adonis with impotence, immaturity, and impermanence.9 Socrates thus can draw on the cultural opposites of purposeful activity and amusement, which in turn are characteristics projected upon living speech and writing. Detienne shows how an entire series of binary oppositions, including the association of women with the gardens of Adonis and men with purposeful harvesting, can be drawn with respect to the comparison. 10 In addition, Plato’s description of serious husbandry employs characteristics usually associated with animal procreation. First, the person who plants, that is, the dialectician, sows words that are “not barren” (akarpoi) (277A) in the minds of others, a description that could apply to either animals or plants. The proper mode of planting requires “eight months” to come to fruition (276B), a period that could suggest the development of a human embryo in the womb more readily than an agricultural harvest. The discourse generated in this manner will give birth to “legitimate offspring” (huieis genesious) and have “descendants” (ekgonoi) or “brothers” (adelphoi) (278A-B). Somehow, despite the move from animal to plant imagery, the plant has been supplanted in favor of the “organic” body with head, torso, and feet, coherent beginning, middle, and end, with which Socrates began when describing
8
The Vegetative Soul
speech. The metaphor gains complexity by the fact that animal and plant husbandry, like speech and writing, have become entwined to the degree that one is not always sure what is being promoted and what denigrated. For is Phaedrus itself not a series of oxymorons? It is a dialogue that places speech above writing, but which, like the speech of Lysias that Socrates mocks, is itself written down. The dialogue promotes the virtues of an organic animal-like structure, yet it has a plant-like body with no clear logic holding its beginning, middle, and end together. Unlike animals, plants live through a process of metamorphosis and growth; that is, morphological adaptation characterizes vegetative life. The plant does not grow from an essentially formed infant to a larger, but essentially and proportionately the same, adult. 11 Parts of plants evolve into each other: as Goethe wrote in The Metamorphosis of Plants, a work that transformed the science of botany in the late eighteenth century, a plant’s leaf becomes the flower, the flower the fruit. Plants do not move on their own from one place to another, but they can continue to grow to no specified end; in other words, there is no point at which a plant can be definitively designated as an individual. Animals have a definitively individuated shape from birth onward; they simply grow larger, and do not transmogrify entirely. Other than certain species, such as frogs and butterflies, animals do not undergo complete metamorphosis. The plant represents that organism whose origin, though hidden, seems accessible, because its history can be read in the sequence of its metamorphoses. The animal carries its own metamorphosis within it only as a memory, a trace of its past existence in the womb, or as a possibility, as sperm or egg. The plant is in touch with its origin, always contiguous with both its source and its destination. Yet it is the very separability of the animal body that informs the way we value a work; we insist that a work should be complete, whole, “organic,” that its beginning and its end should be clearly defined and should make sense, as if coherence were intrinsically bound to separation and independence. Animal bodies, unlike those of plants, have discrete organs. The specialization and differentiation of the animal body as well as its organs lends itself to the notion of an individual. Animals can move and carry everything they need for sustenance with them. Both of these factors lead to a picture of an animal with an identity: even as it ages, it can be identified as itself through time, if only through its bodily appearance. It is difficult if not impossible, on the other hand, as both Goethe and Nietzsche note, to identify a plant as an individual: where does it begin and where does it end? What part of it is “it,” and what part its offspring? A plant is dispersed, multiple, in many places at many times even as it remains rooted. Metamorphosis, as Goethe describes it in The
Introduction
9
Metamorphosis of Plants, is characterized by an alterity inscribed into identity. This means that a plant has no strict identity over time in the way an animal does. The terms organic and organism in the sense of “having an organized physical structure” as applied to a living being, came into their familiar usage only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Long after Aristotle, the employment of the word organon from ergon, or “work,” referred to the opposite of what would now come to mind with the word organic, namely, to a tool or instrument. In French anatomical studies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, “organic” referred to the organs of the animal body in analogy with tools, in what was observed to be their mechanical functioning. According to Phaedrus, by contrast, speech is superior to writing precisely because of its proximity to the living, breathing body. Writing, to Plato, is mechanical, distant, and mediate; one strews ink on the page in the way that a flower exposes its pollen to the wind ( Phaedrus 276C). For Plato, the plant’s sexual functioning can be understood in analogy with the artifice and distance of writing. The term organic is thus a prime example of a multiple metaphorical structure that can neither be said to “transfer” an observation from nature onto a cultural phenomenon, nor conversely a cultural image onto nature, but which performs the complicated intertwining of the two realms that is perhaps inherent in every act of language. The word culture, too, has a complicated history. The original network of meanings surrounding “culture” linked it to the controlled cultivation of plants in an agricultural setting, the same “serious planting” that Plato refers to. The meaning of “culture” underwent a transition in the eighteenth century from a noun of process, referring to the tending of something (usually a plant or animal) to a usage that designated everything human that did not spring directly from nature. 12 This development parallels the eighteenth-century modification of the way the two sexes were viewed, from a continuum-based differentiation predicated on the assumption of a basic homology between both the genitals and the roles of men and women, to a binary opposition that presupposed the incommensurability of the two. 13 Both developments probably arose from the gradual shift from an agriculture- to an industry-based economy. Both thus show the way in which the description of nature can fundamentally change depending on the way in which culture has already been transformed. Friedrich Hölderlin shows his awareness of the cultural assumptions informing the discourse of the organism by using the term organic (organisch) to designate human activity, the organized reflected principle of spirit and of art in the sense of the Greek techne. “Organic” in
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The Vegetative Soul
Hölderlin’s theoretical work indicates all human projection onto nature, all giving of form to what inherently cannot be captured in form, whereas “aorgic” (aorgisch) refers to nature prior to any human representation of it. Hölderlin understood that every human turn toward nature, whether as a purportedly “neutral” observing scientist or as an artist, is in some way an appropriation and thus a transformation of it. The debate that arose in eighteenth-century European literary circles between the relative merits of “mechanical” and “organic” theories of literature is ironic, given the etymology of “organic.” Hölderlin’s was one of many nineteenth-century efforts to unite mechanical and vitalistic views of nature, to overcome a distinction that he recognized as fruitless.14 Distinctions such as mechanistic/organic are mutually informed. If nature can never be approached by human beings without being altered, or, as Hölderlin put it, formed , then tracing the form such structuring has taken becomes the focus of philosophical inquiry rather than the establishment of an opposition between ways of approaching nature that violate it, and those that follow its “natural” coming-to-presence, since to approach nature is to transform it. Both mechanistic and organic “models” of literature and science rely on essentially the same “formation” of nature. The notion of organic form resulted from an analogy of the workings of animal organs with perfectly functioning mechanisms, mechanisms that can provide their own motivating force. Whether one considers the “building blocks” of nature or of literature to be atomistic elements or organized wholes whose purpose lies within themselves, one is assuming that nature consists of self-enclosed bodies that have interactions with each other. In other words, the form of the human body—which is an animal body—seems to inform both major approaches to nature up until the twentieth century. The ideal of “organic” form as it came into popular usage in the nineteenth century implicitly rests upon the same image that Plato advocates in the Phaedrus: an animal body with head, torso, and feet, each of which can be easily distinguished from the other and whose limits are somehow prescribed and not exceeded. In reaction to this reductionist understanding of organicity, certain literary and philosophical theories in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries advocated the unfolding of the plant as the form that literary and philosophical creation and human subjectivity take. These emerged in reaction to “mechanistic” theories of science, literature, and philosophy rather than to the limitations of thinking natural form as predominantly animal-like. However, the analogies between the workings of the animal body and the functioning of a machine make the advocacy of a plant figure rather than an animal one not as surprising as it might initially seem. The shift to the notion of “vegetable genius”
Introduction
11
allows one to avoid the description of individuals primarily as selfenclosed purposive centers. The plant moves around the opposition of inside and outside, for in the process of the metamorphosis of the plant, as Goethe was perhaps the most eloquent in declaring, what was contracted and contained expands and becomes surface; the plant moves beyond the opposition of male and female, for both sexes often exist side by side in the same flower; the plant renders the opposition between passive and active superfluous, for the motivating force of the plant cannot be identified as consciousness or intention. This is not to suggest that there is some other more “originary” way of approaching nature; when I discuss an alternative, “plant-like” notion of the organic or of subjectivity, this will not be put forward as a less aggressive twisting into shape of some preexisting passive reality; such an assumption would simply repeat the traditional oppositional structure between nature and culture. “Nature,” then, in the broader argument of this book, refers to that which is symbolized as nature (as opposed to culture), although by virtue of being called “natural” it is sometimes presented as if it were essentially and inevitably figured in a particular way. The opposition is between two sets of symbols that reciprocally define each other, not between two ontologically distinct realms. Nature will not be understood as a blank slate upon which a human story will be written, nor as a piece of wax that takes on intelligible form only through the seal of human inquiry. Nature is always a symbolized nature. A historical change in the conception of nature, then, both reflects and engenders a transformation in culture, and what I shall try to do here is examine a small segment of this history at a time when a direct challenge was being made to the dominant form of understanding nature, as one large animal organism or as a collection of smaller animal forms. The animal body became the privileged figure for the organization of speech (in Plato) and writing (after Plato). To see the plant, by contrast, as the metaphor of metaphors, is to focus on the provisionality of plant morphology and the way in which every form of the plant metamorphoses into another; it is also to emphasize the fact that a plant cannot be specified as an individual in the same way that an animal can. A plant-like reading might unfold something like this: one may start with an idea, or start with a very straightforward reading of a text. Then the “seed” metamorphoses into a “stem,” “node,” or “leaf,” and without any specific intention on the part of the author it begins to transform itself into something else. Then a commentary, or a poem, or something overheard contributes to the reading, and it metamorphoses again. One’s final reading will never be final, never exhaustive. A truly philosophical reading can perhaps never be envisaged from the outset. The
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The Vegetative Soul
reading will always grow beyond the initial frame around which it is structured. The body of a plant is never given in advance. One doesn’t know how it will look, how big it will get, which tendrils will extend farthest, how much fruit it will bear. Its size is not prescribed, and the extent of its metamorphosis can never be predicted. The plant always has one or more open end(s), turned toward metamorphosis and toward unspecified growth. In addition, a part of a plant can break off or be cut off from the whole, sprout roots and be replanted as its own “individual”—a seemingly arbitrary part of the plant, not its seed or “child”—a fact that Hegel found monstrous and Goethe fascinating. In a way, we might say that a plant is monstrous, displaying its sexual organs in the form of a beautiful flower. The flower, the symbol of incipient innocent love in human culture, is proffered as a symbol of hesitant hope, of admiration. Yet what could be a more blatant sign: what we are actually handing each other are truncated sexual organs. In addition to seeing flowers as symbols of beauty, we eat, drink, burn, and inhale plants; we apply them to wounds, make houses from them, clothe ourselves with them. Plants are a source of intoxication. The plant both is and is not an individual, in the Nietzschean sense. A plant has the comportment of an alert passivity, the attendant receptivity of a flower turning its face toward the sun. Martha Nussbaum writes of the fragility of goodness, of the etymology of the Greek “arete as plant; a kind of human worth that is inseparable from vulnerability, an excellence that is in its nature other-related and social, a rationality whose nature is not to attempt to seize, hold, trap, and control, in whose value openness, receptivity, and wonder play an important role.”15 In a later essay on love, Nussbaum writes from the perspective of one recently healed after a damaging affair: “Could it be that to write about love, even to write humbly and responsively, is itself a device to control the topic, to trap and bind it like an animal—so, of necessity, an unloving act?” She continues, “What I am after, it seems, is a noncontrolling art of writing that will leave the writer more receptive to love than before.”16 The fragility and tenacity of the plant make it an apt figure both for writing and for a reconfigured subjectivity. It is interesting to note that the words leaf , Blatt , and feuille all refer to part of a plant and part of a book, as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass makes explicit. Whitman writes: “Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting/Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them/And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.” 17 Hölderlin and Nietzsche open themselves up to this absolute fragility, this risky yet productive exposure to utter uncertainty toward which Whitman’s poem and Nussbaum’s account gesture. Only in giving up the guarantee of survival of
Introduction
13
the theoretical performativity of their own texts can their writing can unfold authentically. The readings of Hölderlin and Nietzsche are intended to illustrate this uneven rhythm, this rupturing of the possibility of continuity. Kant and Hegel, conversely, are determined survivors, even if to be such is ultimately to deny the fragility of the human relationship to the realm of nature. At the same time, a dialogue of sorts takes place between, on the one hand, Kant and Nietzsche, and on the other, Hegel and Hölderlin, with reference to these very questions. If Goethe seems out of place, seems to mar the structure of pairing, of symmetrical opposition, of chiasmic transfer, this is not inappropriate. Goethe appears in this study as an example of one who gave himself the task of attempting an explicitly “plant-like” way of thinking, and who ruptured any possibility of binary opposition. Two parallel crossings thus result, one between Hegel and Hölderlin, the other between Kant and Nietzsche. Goethe will be the somewhat neutral yet vital term at the center of these two crossings. Goethe’s work The Metamorphosis of Plants gives crucial content to the figure of plant growth, as it marks an important transformation in botanical paradigm—from classification to morphology—that gave rise to the new interest in plant growth. Chapter 1 focuses on Kant’s Critique of Judgment , and particularly on what Kant calls the “Technic of Nature” in the Critique of Teleological Judgment. Kant connects the critique of assumptions of purposiveness in the natural sciences to aesthetic judgment through an attempted synthesis of nature and art, a “technic” (from the Greek techne, or “art”) of nature. This technic allows for the subjective conceptualization of nature as an organic, that is, purposive, whole by virtue of the organism’s affinity to our own selves and to the constitution of our minds as reciprocally means and ends. This affinity opens up the Romantic and Idealist possibility of describing subjectivity variously in analogy to an animal, a plant, or a crystal. Kant’s motivation for creating the technic of nature was to allow for the introduction of final causes into systematic or totalizing explanations of nature while proscribing them as constitutive of specific knowledge of nature. While Kant recognizes that introducing final causes into nature is an illegitimate move from the point of view of knowledge, like Hegel after him he believes that only in doing so can one provide a satisfactory holistic explanation of natural phenomena. Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgment delineates the limits of purposiveness with respect to the possibility of truly knowing nature in the same way that his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment delineates the limits of human understanding in relation to human reason. Kant’s concern with prescribing limits reflects his preoccupation with clear individuation and with the separability of one
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The Vegetative Soul
kind of explanation from another. Yet Kant’s toleration of ambiguity and even creativity in the question of the ways in which we represent nature when we consider it as a whole, together with his description of natural genius, inspired the entire nineteenth-century discussion of the ways in which human subjectivity relates to nature and how different ways of considering subjectivity can result from and influence the ways in which we conceive of nature in general. Chapter 2 turns to Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants , and more generally to Goethe’s attempt to approach art and the study of nature in a manner he saw as parallel to Kant’s. In contrast to Kant, Goethe strives not to fashion nature as art, but rather to understand the principles of art to be natural. Goethe observes metamorphoses in plant development and the phenomena of color and subsequently tries to approach art from the standpoint of metamorphosis. The rather startling notion of somehow “becoming a plant” or letting something like “plant truth” impress itself upon one’s organs, which inaugurates Goethe’s method of “objective thinking,” leads to a highly original theory of art and of scientific study that exemplifies what I call a “plantlike” way of reading. Goethe specifies that nature must be understood in terms of the process of formation (Bildung) rather than form (Gestalt), which catalyzed the movement in studies of nature from the static categorization and classification of species to the observation of the living organism. Goethe called his vision of nature the “rhythm of vital power” (der Rhythmus des Lebenskraft), and this, I argue, profoundly influenced literary and philosophical ways of considering human being and human interaction with the natural world. The question of the rhythm of life recurs as a constant theme in Friedrich Hölderlin’s theoretical studies of Greek tragedy, in his novel Hyperion , and in his effort to write a tragedy, The Death of Empedocles. Chapter 3 examines all these texts, but in particular the one that best exemplifies the trope of human subjectivity as plant. Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion traces the life of a human being as a series of metamorphoses that proceed with the rhythm of forward movement and countervalent reversals. Hyperion can be connected to Hölderlin’s theoretical writings on tragedy, particularly with reference to the tragic caesura, a figure that encapsulates the contracting and expanding rhythm that Goethe designated the rhythm of life. The caesura relates to the question of the temporality of the understanding of human existence as plant metamorphosis, an existential temporality that evades the notion of time as a continuum that can be divided into uniform segments. Chapter 4, a “hinge” chapter that moves from the foundational discourse of Kant and Goethe to the thinkers who were influenced by their rethinking of nature, discusses the proximity of Hölderlin’s subse-
Introduction
15
quent work, The Death of Empedocles, composed between 1797 and 1800, to Hegel’s contemporaneous writings on Christianity, when the two friends were both living in Frankfurt. By way of transition from Hölderlin’s study of nature and the temporality of human existence to Hegel’s philosophy of nature, it examines the similarities between Hölderlin’s Empedocles and Hegel’s tragic Christ. Both historical figures are described in terms of “plant” vulnerability and both ultimately die, but the difference in their deaths—both willing, but one the result of suicide, the other a self-sacrifice—exemplifies the disparity between human life as “plant” and as “animal.” The understanding of human as plant does not attempt to incorporate death into a larger, transcendent meaning that would make the life that is now over into a meaningful individual in memory. What I call “animal” individuation, on the other hand, is never satisfied with withering or coming to a natural end, but must take up even death into a larger meaning in order to refer life to a greater end. Hegel’s philosophy of nature, like Kant’s, will rely heavily on teleological explanations, but will omit Kant’s proviso that such explanations cannot ever be the object of knowledge. Chapter 5 traces the trajectory of Hegel’s philosophy of nature from the 1803–1804 lecture courses he gave at the university in Jena to the final version that was published and then revised in several editions of the Encyclopedia. In particular, the early lecture notes manifest a parallel structure between the transformation in Hegel’s portrayal of Christ, on the one hand, and the change in his description of nature, on the other. Specifically, the change in emphasis from a tragic Christ to a resurrected Christ—the latter further forms the middle term in a dialectical logic— parallels the move away from living and dying nature to a nature that is nothing more than the prehistory of spirit, a nature that must be left behind in order for “real” philosophy to begin. The figure of sacrifice is as characteristic of the plant in Hegel’s Naturphilosophie as it is of his Christ who agrees to die for the sake of a higher divine manifestation. Chapter 6 is devoted to Nietzsche’s earliest writings, from his notebooks as a university student in Leipzig in 1868 to the plans before, after, and including his first published work The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche originally planned to write a dissertation on the notion of teleology after Kant, and this interest continued even though the work was never fully carried out. Nietzsche is interested in the physiology of knowledge and of art, and advocates a return to the bodily, the sensuous, and the earthly. Along with this well-known “reversal of Plato,” however, Nietzsche also sustains a critique in his earliest, unpublished writings, of the natural science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specifically of the “discovery” of the organism and its consequent elevation to the status of the defining trope of scientific knowledge.
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The Vegetative Soul
Nietzsche points out that “individuation” is a feature of language, based in turn upon a perspective that takes the animal body as its point of departure. Western languages obscure the process-like nature of being through a language and an ontology composed of things that are perceived to be self-enclosed, self-motivated, and that seem to perdure through time. Nietzsche read Kant and Goethe on teleology and intended to respond to their views in his proposed doctoral dissertation. Considered from this perspective, Nietzsche is a thinker whose concerns begin and end with a consideration of the human being’s place in the natural world. Nietzsche’s suspicions about the limits of consciousness as a distinguishing human feature belong to a broader critique of anthropomorphism in the natural sciences. Finally, Nietzsche’s discourse on individuation takes as its point of departure the argument that orients this study, namely that Western philosophy and language, while deemphasizing the bodily and the sensuous, proceed from what Nietzsche calls a “crude perspective,” a grobe Perspektiv, the closest matter, the perceived form of our own (animal) bodies. The conclusion refers to Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, and in particular to Luce Irigaray, in an attempt to bring to light the contemporary offshoots of the questions this book examines in a historical context. Beginning with a reading of Aristotle, Irigaray inaugurates a critique of the way in which women have been aligned with vegetative life in the history of metaphysics. Irigaray subverts the plant in its role as a metaphor for passivity and unconsciousness, qualities traditionally associated with the feminine, such that it turns into a productive metonymical structure. Irigaray uses the rhetorical configuration of “efflorescence” to designate a blossoming or blooming forth that cannot be enclosed within the traditional boundaries of embodiment and philosophical discourse, and which may have the possibility of transforming it. Irigaray focuses on the redemptive possibilities inherent in the very metaphors that have been used to reduce the feminine to the silent, concealed ground of Being. Plant growth, characterized by metamorphosis and indefinite individuation, provides one of the most striking and pervasive examples of such a guiding principle in Irigaray’s work. Thus, Irigaray’s use of plant figures continues at the level of feminine subjectivity a critique that had as its original focus the relationship between humans and nature. Though I emphasize Irigaray’s work as the contemporary continuation of the brief promise of Idealist and Romantic Naturphilosophie, clearly her work does not arise in a vacuum. Twentieth-century postmodern critique resurrects the “vegetative soul” in the form of the critique of the modern subject. If the nineteenth-century exploration of alternative possibilities for the description of nature and subjectivity was
Introduction
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ultimately obviated by a return to the hegemony of the autonomous, enlightened, self-preserving individual emphasized from Hobbes to Kant, it returns in the form of twentieth-century critiques of the language of science and of the persistent use of masculine characteristics to describe the subject, as well as of the incorporation of the “liberation” of women within a masculine paradigm advocated by equality feminism. Both because this critique has particular importance for feminist theory and because of Irigaray’s use of figures culled from nature and in particular from plant life, I consider her work to be the continuation of the nineteenth-century project I am examining here. Romantic thought broadly conceived is often portrayed as nothing more than an impassioned, yet ultimately ill-informed reaction against the growing power of the natural sciences and their paradigms of human being and growth, much in the same way that feminist critiques of science are often dismissed today. As a response, what I try to show with my detailed outline of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie, for example, is that the seeds of this discontent are sown within the very context that gives rise to the strongest tools for the critique of Enlightenment subjectivity. In spite of the ultimate triumph of animal form in Kant and Hegel, their philosophies are rich mines for an alternative conception of nature, and this historical confluence is of course not accidental. I see Irigaray, along with Derrida, Deleuze, and others, as carrying on this rich tradition, but distinguishing herself in giving particular emphasis to the alignment of plant subjectivity with the feminine. This alignment is subtly present even in the texts of Goethe, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche. I do not mean to suggest that these men were proto-feminists; however, revisiting their texts on the philosophy of nature from the point of view of the vegetative soul may reveal productive possibilities for feminist philosophy. Irigaray’s philosophical “strategy” is to approach canonical texts from the history of philosophy and to show the non-obvious places in which misogyny is concealed, such as in the portrayal of the plant in the philosophy of nature. At the same time, one might equally delve for the places in which possible answers to these problems might be found. What I try to emphasize throughout with the turn to the plant is not the plant’s passivity, projected onto it precisely in comparing it to the animal organism, although one might point to the expectant receptivity of the flower that turns its broadest surface toward the sun. The plant appears as the form of finitude and vulnerability, but also of transformation and renewal. We are accustomed to perceiving the world through a body that is so close that we have forgotten its complexities, and because we project its self-enclosed individuation onto everything that we perceive and think, the world cannot appear in all its possible strangeness. The plant is not the form of the world but the possibility of
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The Vegetative Soul
reforming the world; by taking a closer look at another possibility of bodily formation, we may perhaps regain some of the wonder that is the condition of all science, philosophy, and art. If we recall once again the ancient story of Orpheus’s death, we remember that he angered Dionysos’s followers by neglecting to honor the god. Orpheus instead named Helios (the sun), whom he called Apollo, the greatest of gods. Orpheus’s dismemberment at the hands of Maenads may be a fitting counterpart to his sundered state of mind in Rilke’s poem. Both in opposing the ecstatic Dionysian religion and in turning around to make sure that Eurydice was there, to appropriate her, Orpheus performs the classical metaphysical gesture against ambiguity and for totalization or inclusion. In this Apollinian gesture of always trying to make sense of even the most baffling of natural phenomena he loses his beloved and his life. When nineteenth-century theorists considered the vegetative soul, they were returning to the original meaning of the word vegetable, which in Greek and Latin refers to life, growth, wakefulness, and, in particular, vigilance (a word with a common root). The words for life that infuse the meaning of the plant contrast with the roots of the word animal , which in Greek refers to wind or breath and in Latin to the soul of self-motivated things, and thus to the mind or spirit in opposition to the living body. What I here call the vegetative soul, in contrast to the animated soul, emphasizes rootedness, vulnerability, interdependence, and transformative possibility rather than a separation of soul from body, actualization, and a stance of aggressiveness and self-preservation. The vegetative soul encompasses a thinking rooted incontrovertably in the body, but a bodily thinking that is itself indefinitely individuated and subject to metamorphosis.
1
KANT The English Garden
For art is only perfect when it looks like nature and nature succeeds only when she conceals latent art. —Longinus, “On the Sublime” We cannot help admitting that [Kant] entirely lacks grand, classical simplicity, naïveté, ingénuité, candeur. His philosophy has no analogy with Greek architecture that presents large, simple proportions revealing themselves at once to the glance; on the contrary, it reminds us very strongly of the Gothic style of architecture. For an entirely individual characteristic of Kant’s mind is a peculiar liking for symmetry that loves a variegated multiplicity, in order to arrange this, and to repeat this arrangement in subordinate forms, and so on indefinitely, precisely as in Gothic churches. In fact, he sometimes carries this to the point of trifling, and then, in deference to this tendency, goes so far as to do open violence to truth, and treats it as nature was treated by old-fashioned gardeners, whose works are symmetrical avenues, squares and triangles, trees shaped like pyramids and sphere, and hedges in regular and sinuous curves. —Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
The use of vegetative metaphors to describe the form of human intellection and appreciation of nature cannot be separated from the late 19
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The Vegetative Soul
eighteenth and early nineteenth-century incorporation of an explicitly aesthetic dimension to scientific inquiry. This project had its roots in the philosophy of Kant and in the aesthetico-scientific project of Goethe. Kant’s Critique of Judgment inspired the philosophical use of organic metaphors to describe human thinking in its relationship to nature conceived as a whole. In The Mirror and the Lamp , M. H. Abrams argues that nineteenth-century conceptions of art were distinctive and revolutionary in that they posed and answered aesthetic questions solely in terms of the relation of art to the artist, rather than to the world or to an audience. 1 He describes “German Theories of Vegetable Genius” as having their provenance in the idea that genius is both natural and unconscious, springing forth spontaneously in the mind of one who cannot explain the rule according to which he or she produces a work of art. 2 This explanation does not adequately address the implications of the nineteenth-century German philosophical and literary use of vegetative metaphors. While drawing on already existing literary tropes, Kant’s articulation of genius, upon which these thinkers based their understanding of vegetable subjectivity, goes far beyond a description of the provenance of fine art and is not limited to the interiority of the artist. Kant’s third Critique aims not only to explain art, but to use it as a powerful means of binding together the human needs to understand nature (science) and to gain from it confirmation of the power of human freedom, the objects of his first and second Critiques. Abrams traces the genealogy of the concept of vegetable genius from the publication of the English theorist Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), which was translated into German twice within two years of its publication, to Johann Georg Sulzer’s Sulzer’s dictionary of aesthetic terms (1771–1774), (1771–1774), to J. G. Herder’s Herder’s theory of the organic and all-encompassing order of natural growth in “On the Knowing and Feeling of the Human Soul” (1778). 3 All of these works share the common claim that genius, the human capacity for intellectual and artistic greatness, is as much a product of nature as are organisms, and that the inability of human beings to account for the origin of genius is due to its plantlike provenance in unconscious blossoming or flourishing. Kant’s understanding of genius plays an important part in his theory of the organism as unconsciously teleological, moving toward a natural purpose of which it is not explicitly aware. His linkage of the theory of genius with his critique of teleological judgment, and thus to the very possibility of delineating an allencompassing philosophical system, led theorists who followed him to describe the relationship of the human mind to the natural world in terms of vegetative growth. For Kant this linkage provides an important regulative principle for judgment, that is, understanding an organ-
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ism as a natural purpose is something that guides human investigation into nature by virtue of an analogy with our own purposiveness. Goethe, who was respected both for his contributions to the natural sciences and to art, recognized his own fortuitous proximity to Kant—fortuitous, for, for, while the two thinkers were writing contemporaneously, neither was directly influenced by the other’s work—when he read a copy of the Critique of Judgment and proclaimed it in exact accord with his own The Metamorphosis of Plants.4 What both Kant and Goethe strove to accomplish in intertwining the realms or “infinite worlds,” as Goethe put it, of art and nature, was twofold: first, to discredit unreflectively ontological eighteenth-century scientific assumptions of final causes in nature, and second, to reintroduce purposiveness in nature as an aesthetic requirement for the creation of satisfactory, satisfactory, that is, systematic, scientific explanations. The use of vegetative metaphors for thinking in post-Kantian philosophical thought assumes the problematic that Kant carefully outlines in the third Critique. Adequately understanding “vegetable genius,” then, requires a comprehensive reading of this work. Kant and many of the philosophers who followed his lead sought to reconcile the laws that bind human conceptual understanding and sensory imagination in the observation of the external world with the freedom of human reason in its potentiality to transcend nature through art. If Schopenhauer’s criticism of Kant’s Kant’s philosophy in the opening citac itation initially strikes us as misconceived, it is perhaps because we are accustomed to think, with Derrida, that “a paradigmatics of the flower orients the third Critique,” that “Kant always seeks in [the flower] the index of a natural beauty, utterly wild, in which the without-end or the without-concept of finality is revealed.”5 What could be farther from the beauty of wildflowers than artificially pruned, geometrically shaped hedges? Schopenhauer’s observation is instructive nevertheless, but here the analogy will be revised. Although Kant structures the entire Critique of Judgment around the paradigm of the wild plant, this plant has a unique character in that it is wild only within the strict limits of a gardener’s plan that situates, tends, and prunes it to preserve its appearance of wildness. Kant’s meditation on the purposiveness of nature follows the scheme of the English garden of the eighteenth century. This garden, also known as a “sublime” garden from the tradition of imitating Italian It alian landscape paintings out of which it originated, had the paradoxical quality of being cultivated to look wild; at the same time great care was taken to make sure the wilderness never exceeded predefined limits. For Kant, in the same way, scientific explanations of nature can only be deemed adequate insofar as they are supplemented by or transformed into art. Such an endeavor takes its cue from nature itself, however, projecting onto
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The Vegetative Soul
nature as a system or as a whole the perfect (and purposive) form observed in the organism. Because of the rigorous limits prescribed by Kant on what can be deemed knowledge of nature, such an explanation remains part of the realm of art rather than strictly speaking of science. Thus, though he will not use the language of vegetable genius, ge nius, Kant introduces the framework that allows it to arise. This framework presumes that the complex process of creating satisfactory human descriptions of nature follows the forms observed within nature, and that the aesthetic properties of holistic explanations of nature form the basis for judging those explanations to be better or worse, more or less fruitful. In the first Introduction to the Critique of Judgment , Kant discusses the tension that arises between the attempt to describe the natural world solely in terms of empirical observations, on the one hand, and the need that the human mind feels to classify nature under laws and classes, and ultimately as a system, on the other. other. Kant determines an exigency of going beyond the classificatory system of the Critique of Pure Reason, which describes the determinate structures of human cognition as the basis for finding regularity and predictability in nature. Such structures describe a formal pattern that explains the uniformity of human experience of the world of natural appearances, but do not lend a systematic wholeness to this pattern, a wholeness that alone will satisfy the human need to find a purposiveness in nature. Kant calls this demand for integrity and totality “artificial” (künstlich) in that it is not derived from ordinary empirical cognition; he goes further to state that “so far as we think of nature as making itself specific in terms of such a principle, we regard nature as art .” .” This necessity of conceiving nature as constituting a purposive whole is something that judgment carries a priori within it. Kant calls the a priori principle that makes only a holistic explanation of nature satisfactory to the human mind a “technic of nature,” taking “technic” from the Greek word, techne, for art. Kant also claims that certain natural forms have an absolute purposiveness, by which he means that their shape or inner structure is of such a character that we must, in our power of judgment, base their possibility on an idea. We must do so because purposiveness purposiveness is a lawfulness that something contingent may have insofar as it is contingent. Insofar as nature’s products are aggregates, nature proceeds mechanically, as mere nature; but insofar as its products are systems—e.g., crystal formations, various shapes of flowers, or the inner structure of plants and animals—nature proceeds technically, i.e. it proceeds also as art . The distinction between these two ways of judging natural beings is made merely by reflective judgment . (KU 217’–18’)6
According to Kant, reflective judgment, unlike determinative judgment, is characterized by a certain freedom of expression in that it
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results from a spontaneity in the play of the cognitive powers whose harmony with each other forms the basis of this pleasure, a spontaneity that makes the concept of purposiveness suitable for mediating the connection of the domain of the concept of nature with that of the concept of freedom (KU 197). Kant privileges the form of the natural structures, and of the organism in particular, as the shape or figure that best manifests the nature of the relationship of human cognition to nature. The human mind, Kant believes, is attuned to and reflects forms of nature such as the crystal, the plant, and the animal, and it is this affinity to these forms that requires human thinking to value and preserve nature as its kin. This observation was to have an enormous influence on the literature and philosophy of the nineteenth century in Germany. Kant privileges organized beings in nature, stating that they have an “absolute purposiveness” (KU, First Introduction 217’). The absolute nature of the purposiveness of the organism has its origin in the human apprehension of it, and not (at least not demonstrably) in itself. Insofar as humans cognize nature on the basis of cause and effect or dissection of its parts, Kant implies, natural explanations can be mechanical ones. As soon as one attempts to make any claims about the whole, however, however, Kant maintains the absolute necessity of human cognition proceeding technically, making of nature an art in which organisms viewed purposively play a central part. Thus, although ultimately Kant’s Kant’s conservatism and anthropocentrism will not allow him to transgress the boundaries of subjectivity understood as precise individuation, his critique of the science of his day would have a crucial influence on the Romantic and Idealist reconceptions of the organic understood as the relationship between humans and nature, and of Enlightenment descriptions of subjectivity. This is why Kant must be read as providing the grounding for the “vegetative soul” of nineteenth-century German thought. Understanding the two halves of the Critique of Judgment , namely, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment in a similarly organic way, that is, as interdependent and mutually informing components of an attempt to unify the realms of nature and freedom through art, then, allows for a more complete understanding of the third Critique . Kant’s seemingly odd juxtaposition of critiques of aesthetic and teleological judgment has a strong inner coherence that cannot be sufficiently demonstrated by merely pointing out that both types of judgment are reflective rather than deterministic. Rather, judgments of teleology in nature can be included in scientific explanations precisely and only because these judgments are aesthetic in nature. Teleological judgments’ status as “art” allows Kant to include them in descriptions of nature without
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thereby permitting an unreflective, romantic, or “enthusiastic” element to intrude into science without severe qualification or pruning. In a well-known passage of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, “Human reason is by nature architectonic. That is to say, it regards all our knowledge as belonging to a possible system, and therefore allows only such principles as do not at any rate make it impossible for any knowledge that we may attain to combine into a system with other knowledge” (KrV A 474 = B 502). Since humans can cognize only by making systems, nature itself will have to be encompassed by that architectonic. Our minds can cognize only what is clearly individuated. This is what we have referred to as the individuation that is based upon the animal body. At the same time, Kant clearly recognizes this projection of unity to be a “false” interpretation, opening the door to multiple possible conceptualizations of the relationship of the human being to nature. This is the aspect of Kant’s philosophy that Schopenhauer is criticizing when he compares Kant’s philosophy to an artificially pruned garden. Of course, Kant’s point is that it is impossible to speak of nature as a totality “in itself” in terms of knowledge, but imperative nonetheless to do so for aesthetic reasons. The circumvention of the natural such a philosophy implies remained a problem that captivated post-Kantian philosophy in Germany. Thinkers such as Schelling attempted to return to “nature in itself” rather than to a fiction about nature, while, by contrast, Hegel radicalized Kant’s elimination of the natural. The Critique of Judgment attempts to provide a reconciliation of nature—as a system of deterministic laws that conform to human understanding—with human reason as a product of that very natural system that possesses a freedom that exceeds it. Explanations that are teleological for aesthetic reasons force judgment simultaneously to address nature and to go beyond it. Aesthetic judgment has its roots in sensation; at the same time, the explanation of the constitution of aesthetic judgment must make manifest why judgment cannot be derived from rules or determined by concepts. Teleological judgment can never be matched by a corresponding cognition of the human mind, but by assuming that nature is purposive the philosopher can resolve a series of antinomies that the human mind could never otherwise overcome. Kant approaches the lacunae inherent in aesthetic and teleological judgments by immediately emphasizing the performative aspect of aesthetic and teleological judgment. There are always two levels on which both theoretical and practical philosophy can be understood, that is, in terms of the principles that ground them, and in terms of applications of these principles. For example, Kant might distinguish between geometry and the practical applications of geometry to illustrate the two levels of the theoretical, and between the categorical imperative and an actual decision to act
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morally to illustrate the practical.7 Reflective judgment, by contrast, manifests only the performative aspect, that which can be reduced neither to the purely theoretical nor to the purely practical. Reflective judgment is always an act: it consists in deeming something to be beautiful, sublime, or purposive. Kant distinguishes between several different types of practical propositions around which rational decisions orient themselves. The first two, a priori and empirical practical propositions, “assert the possibility of an object through our power of choice” and thus always belong to our knowledge of nature and to the theoretical part of philosophy. This is because in such a case the will has no choice but to follow principles according to which the understanding functions. The third type of practical proposition has its principle in the idea of freedom and can give us no insight into the possibility of the object, but rather directs action in such a way that it can be called a moral precept. “All other propositions of performance,” Kant writes, might be called “ technical rather than practical,” since these performatives “belong to the art of bringing about something that we want to exist,” rather than reacting to something that already exists. Immediately after this Kant writes, “Hence all precepts of skill belong, as consequences, to the technic of nature.” In addition, Kant specifies that he will “also” henceforth use the term “technic” in other cases, “namely, where we merely judge [certain] objects of nature as if they were made possible through art” (KU 199’–200’). These judgments are thus based neither in the theoretical nor in the practical insofar as “practical” is understood to imply grounding in freedom. “Technical” judgments in this specific sense, then, will always rest upon a kind of sophisticated “wishful thinking” in which one desires something to be what one can never know it to be, or one behaves as if something were what it is not. Specifically with reference to nature, Kant defines the “technic of nature” as “nature’s ability to produce [things] in terms of causes . . . [which is] basically quite identical with the mechanism of nature,” such that “we have falsely interpreted the contingent agreement of that ability with our concepts and rules of art . . . whereas it is merely [the result of] a subjective condition under which we judge that ability” (KU 391; my emphasis). Although the interpretation is “false,” we retain it because we have none that better serves to explain nature. In the transition from the Analytic of the Beautiful to the Analytic of the Sublime in the Critique of Judgment , Kant similarly distinguishes between the proximity of beautiful objects and the relative isolation of beautiful (natural) views whose “distance prevents us from recognizing them distinctly.” The distance of the view gives the human being a certain leeway to see nature “as if” it were other than it actually is. Humans
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usually find nature (as opposed to crafted objects) beautiful, Kant claims, not because they actually like what is presented before them, but because “taste seems to fasten not so much on what the imagination apprehends in that area, as on the occasion they provide for it to engage in fiction [dichten], i.e., on the actual fantasies with which the mind entertains itself as it is continually being aroused by the diversity that strikes the eye” (KU 243). Nature in itself is not beautiful, Kant implies, but only becomes so by virtue of the fictions that humans create about it. These fictions, in turn, require a certain distance from the object upon which they are based. When we find a bird’s song beautiful, for example, we are, Kant says, projecting our affection for what we consider to be a cheerful little creature onto the song, so that if we heard an artificial reproduction of the exact notes (and knew that they were artificial), we would not find them beautiful (KU 243). Likewise, if we had the anatomy of the bird’s vocal chords before our eyes as we heard its song, we would lose our liking for the sound. Our taste for the beauties of nature is largely constructed on the fictions in which we involve it; from a distance we see nature as alive, animated, and constantly growing, but these are qualities we admire in human creativity that we project onto “nature” as a “false” unity in the sense of falsity indicated above. The technic of nature is informed by the notion of “organism” or “organized being” as the privileged individual that underlies Kant’s discussion of teleology. These beings, Kant writes: first give objective reality to the concept of a purpose that is a purpose of nature rather than a practical one, and which hence give natural science the basis for a teleology, i.e., for judging its objects in terms of a special principle that otherwise we simply would not be justified in introducing into natural science (since we have no a priori insight whatever into the possibility of such a causality). (KU 376)
The perception of organized beings as self-organizing allows them to be referred to as natural purposes, according to Kant (KU 374). Natural purposes, in turn, form the basis for judging nature as a whole teleologically, as a system of purposes. This principle applies only subjectively as the maxim that “everything in the world is good for something or other; nothing in it is gratuitous” (KU 379), and is a regulative rather than constitutive principle. This principle then relies on the peculiarity (Eigentümlichkeit) of human understanding, namely, that it cannot rest satisfied with purely mechanical explanations, but must follow the demand of reason that “subordinates such [natural] products . . . to the causality in terms of purposes” (KU 415). The phrase “causality in terms of purposes” refers not only to final causality in contrast to simple mechanical cause-effect relationships, but also to the creative capacity of
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the human mind to conceptualize nature according to the metaphysical possibilities that are closest to its own perceived form. In writings preceding the Critique of Judgment , Kant explicitly opposed the notion of “plant thinking” or “vegetable genius,” instead using plant metaphors to characterize what was most sluggish and unresponsive in human thought. In his Universal Natural History (1755), Kant explicitly compares the human being to a plant—precisely at that point where human sensuality occludes the possibility of attaining reason: When one regards the nature of most men, man seems to be created as a plant, to draw in sap and grow, to propagate his kind, and finally to grow old and die. Of all creatures he least achieves the end of his existence, because he consumes his more excellent fitnesses for such purposes as lower creatures achieve more securely and decently with less. He would indeed be the most contemptible of all, at least in the eyes of true wisdom, if the hope of the future did not lift him up, if there were not a period of full development in store for the forces shut up in him. 8
He continues, “If one seeks the cause of the obstacles that keep human nature in such deep abasement, it will be found in the grossness of the matter in which his spiritual part is sunk, in the inflexibility of the fibers and sluggishness and immobility of the sap/fluid that should obey its stirrings.”9 By contrast, in the turn toward the ideal and the totalizing power of reason, the human mind rediscovers its animal vigor (a word that Kant uses to describe the sublime) in its fundamental opposition to the forces of nature. Kant’s contemporary, the British literary theorist Edward Young, expressed the contrasting popular view when he wrote in his 1758 manifesto Conjectures on Original Composition that “an Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature, it rises spontaneously, from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made.”10 Kant’s description of genius in the third Critique, written thirty-five years after the Universal Natural History , strikingly contrasts with his earlier description of vegetable nature by following this conceit and making genius the unconscious channel for the forces of nature as they provide the closest possible expression of the supersensible in finite form. For Kant, however, the fact that genius could never know the rules for its own art placed artistic achievement forever below the power of rational thought, for “judgment, which in matters of fine art bases its pronouncements on principles of its own, will sooner permit the imagination’s freedom and wealth to be impaired than that the understanding be impaired.”11 Finally, Kant’s directive that organic unity may be projected upon products of nature in order to understand them through the subjective a priori principle of reflective judgment ultimately
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allows the principle of what we have called “animal” form to direct the way in which we judge nature as beautiful or purposive. In her study of Kant,12 Susan Meld Shell observes that in both the Anthropology (X:165) and the Universal Natural History (I:357), as well as in the Critique of Judgment , Kant reworks the traditional divide between the male as active principle (efficient cause) and the woman as passive recipient (material cause) in the sexual act. The obliteration, in Cartesian science, of the traditional Aristotelian distinction between efficient and material causation tended to undermine this hierarchy. Shell suggests that Kant’s description of the predicament of human reason of being hopelessly hindered by sexual desire, physical attraction, and sensory enticements points to a larger problem with generation itself. She writes that the dreaded contingency of “the very act of generation—traditionally the emblem of man’s man’s rational, and formal supremacy—threatens to dissolve into unregulated and hence ‘loathsome’ fecundity.” Against this threat: only God’s inseminating spirit (which assures, among other things, the eternity of biological species) is proof, while man’s physical generative power descends to the level of the plants. The plantlike passivity traditionally associated with the female principle of generation infects, in Kant’s account, the male principle as well, at least insofar as it remains within the nexus of the physical. It is not in generating, but in resisting generation for the sake of a higher sort of attraction, that man’s spirit uplifts itself.13
The same problem can be seen in Kant’s advice to young men in the Anthropology: “If we want to keep our power of sensing lively we must not begin begin with with strong strong sensatio sensations ns . . . we must must rather rather forego forego them at at first first 14 and mete them out sparingly so that we can always climb higher.” higher.” Here “animality,” or Stoic individuation, would refer to the deferral of the immediate gratification that Kant seems to associate with the untrammeled growth of vegetative life. Nevertheless, Kant’s description of the involuntary spontaneity of the active, transcendental subject inspired German Idealism’s understanding of Geist , or spirit, as the interdependent relationship of this dynamic spontaneity with the ontological ground of nature, often conceptualized as a plant-like, metamorphosing growth. Even Hegel, for example, writes a passage that strikingly follows Kant’s directive in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: The more rigid conventional opinion makes the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more it tends to expect a given philosophical system to be either agreed with or contradicted; and in an explanation of the system sees only
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one or the other. It does not grasp the difference in philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, so much as it sees contradiction in difference. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one could say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way, through the fruit the blossom is demonstrated to be a false existence of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of the plant in its place. These forms do not just distinguish themselves from one another, they also supplant each another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but each is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (W 3:12/PS, 2)
While Hegel compares the very movement of historical Spirit to the metamorphosis of a plant, Kant restricts his analogy to the consideration of nature as a system or organized whole. Hegel will reintroduce historical purposiveness in no artistic sense in the very place where Kant forbids the determinative use of final causes in the explanation of nature. The danger that Kant foresees is that any a ny discussion of the necessity of a teleology of nature appears to turn the idea of a natural purpose into a principle that is constitutive of natural purpose itself (KU 405). Kant writes, “The universal supplied by our (human) understanding does not determine the particular; therefore even if different things agree in a common characteristic, the variety of ways in which they may come before our perception is contingent” (KU 406). A cognitive power that could proceed synthetically from whole to parts, rather than analytically from concepts to empirical intuitions, would be one of a “complete spontaneity of intuition [Anschauung].” Although such a spontaneous intuition can be conceived of by us only negatively, negatively, that is, as not discursive, we can characterize it as a power of cognition something like the one Kant mentions in the Analytic of the Sublime, where he emphasizes that if humans were pure intelligences, there would be no need for judgments of beauty and sublimity (KU 271). According to Kant, the limitations on the possibility of human understanding of nature lead humans to create artworks; the technic of nature is the primary example of this art. Among all the sensory things that humans cognize, it is only with reference to the beautiful, the sublime, and the purposive, though in different ways, that the mind makes no appeal to concepts. The beautiful and the sublime, along with the teleological explanation, reverse the directionality of cognition: the mind begins from the particulars rather than from a universal. The particular has a contingent aspect that is not present in the universal. Thus, the reflective judgment of beauty or sublimity is faced with a predicament parallel to that of the mind when it attempts to unify the manifold in nature. Our understanding achieves cognition only through a harmony
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between natural characteristics and our power of concepts, a harmony that Kant calls “very contingent” (KU 406). Unlike the products of nature, laws of nature are not subsumed under the concepts of the understanding, and thus they are particulars from the point of view of human understanding, since it is unable to determine them. Because the laws are multiple, the mind feels the need to bring them together into a unity (Einheit). The technic of nature is deployed as the answer whenever the mind is confronted with a series of particulars that precede any universal concepts it can provide. This is the fundamental connection between aesthetic judgments and teleology: both begin with particulars and work toward a unity. Kant makes this explicit in the first introduction to the Critique of Judgment , where he mentions formulas that were in vogue at the time, such as “Nature does nothing in vain; Nature makes no leap in the diversity of its forms; Nature is rich in species and yet parsimonious in genera.” Kant calls these formulas the “transcendental utterance of judgment [by which] it stipulates to itself a principle for [considering] experience as a system, and hence for its own needs.” The basis of such an utterance is a “presupposition” that “judgment makes for its own use, for the sake of unifying empirical laws, so that it can always ascend from what is empirical [and] particular to what is more general.” Only by presupposing such a principle can we “engage in experiences in a systematic way” (KU 399). Kant indicates a distinction between the way in which he uses the word aesthetic with reference to science in the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Critique of Judgment by indicating the incommensurability of the “aesthetic intuition” and the “aesthetic judgment” (KU 222’). Although in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant used “aesthetic” to refer to presentations of the understanding (pertaining to sense perception, aisthesis in the original sense of the word), he specifies in the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment that he will henceforth apply the term aesthetic solely to acts of the power of judgment. The earlier, broader sense of “aesthetic” is defined in the third Critique as one in which “the form is inevitably transferred to the object, though the object only as phenomenon” (KU 222’). In Kant’s earlier works, “aesthetic” always refers to the science of knowledge attained through sense perception. However, Kant specifies that in the Critique of Judgment “aesthetic” will henceforth not refer to a way of perceiving that involves a sensible intuition that allows us to cognize objects, but only to a way of presenting that arouses feelings of pleasure and displeasure (KU 410’). Kant juxtaposes the critique of teleological judgment to his discussion of the beautiful and of the sublime because the discovery of a structural consonance within mechanically derived empirical knowledge of nature (through teleological judgment) results in a feeling of
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great pleasure: “It is a fact that when we discover that two or more heterogeneous empirical laws of nature can be unified under one principle that comprises them both, the discovery does give rise to a quite noticeable pleasure” (KU 187). What Kant designates as the “beautiful” is that which pleases by virtue of its form or its sensuous presence, without reference to anything beyond that presence as beautiful. By “sublime,” Kant means that which moves human judgment out of the realm of nature as it is into the realm of nature as it ought to be. Both of these moments inform the technic of nature: the beautiful reveals the essentially technical (purposive) structure of nature and invites the investigation of how such a form is possible. The sublime makes rational beings look inside themselves for “what use we can make of our intuitions of nature so that we can feel a purposiveness within ourselves entirely independent of nature.” In the combined movements of judgments of the beautiful and judgments of the sublime in nature, the three faculties of the mind come together: in judgments of beauty, the faculties of imagination and understanding cognize the natural scene without bringing it under a determinate concept, whereas judgments of the sublime result from a disruption of the harmony between the understanding and the imagination that flings the imagination toward the ideas of reason. Although the imagination cannot comprehend the magnitude (Größe) of what it is observing, and for this reason the understanding cannot subsume the observation under a concept, the unity of the faculties is nonetheless able to feel the superiority of the human mind (through the faculty of reason) over nature. Kant’s Kant’s discussion of sublimity forms a transition to the consideration of nature as purposive, specifically with reference to how the technic of nature informs the notion of organism as the privileged individual that underlies Kant’s Kant’s discussion of teleology. teleology. It is in this final relationship of sublime to natural purposiveness that one can most clearly recognize the analogy Schopenhauer makes of Kant’s work to the crafted garden. However, the analogy works best not by comparing, as Schopenhauer did, Kant’s architectonic to the French gardens of Versailles, but rather by seeing the systematic aestheticization of science as akin to the construction of the English garden, that is, as carefully groomed in order to appear perfectly natural. In the technic of nature, nature is conceived as art in an explicit attempt to avoid the mechanistic model of the universe. For this reason, the living organized being, which Kant describes as a “product of nature nature . . . in which which ever everyth ything ing is a purpos purposee and and recip reciproc rocall allyy also also a means” (KU 376) provides the perfect figure for a vitalistic conception of nature which at the same time precludes the risky move of actually ascribing a kind of subjectivity or living nature to nature as a whole.
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What Kant means by seeing nature according to an analogy with art (KU 246) stems from the dual human pleasure in observing nature. While on one level the human being takes pleasure in nature as it is (in its beauty), on another level human pleasure results from seeing nature as it ought to be, in terms of morality (KU 179). This “ought to be” is a picture of nature as teleological, moving toward purposes, that is, toward regulative ideas such as the good, human betterment, and God. But we cannot verify any “artistic,” that is, teleological, judgment of nature, since nature as purposive can only be part of the noumenal realm. Therefore, since the technic of nature remains an art—in the sense of a constitutive metaphor—and not an object of knowledge, the mental capacity proper to it is self-reflective judgment rather than understanding or reason. As we have already seen, Kant specifically calls the technic of nature a “false interpretation” of nature as a kind of production that is in agreement with “our concepts and rules of art.” art. ” Seeing nature in terms of final causes as a special kind of natural production is “merely the result of a subjective condition under which we judge that ability” (KU 391). At the same time, nature’s revelation of itself as purposive is a priori for us, but the faculty proper to this necessary yet false interpretation is reflective judgment, which, rather than looking at nature in terms of determinate concepts or external conditioning factors, looks back only at itself. Kant specifies what he means by “analogy” (in a qualitative, i.e., nonmathematical sense) in a long footnote in the Critique of Teleological Judgment. The analogical relationship allows human beings to make judgments about things they cannot definitively know based on an identity of the relation between causes and effects in the unknown and a known area (KU 464). Human knowledge is limited, according to Kant, to what we can be directly conscious of, but we can make justified inferences on the basis of analogy. Thus, for example, we can infer aspects of animal behavior based on our conscious knowledge of human behavior, that is, we can understand animal behavior on the basis of an “analogue of reason,” and this understanding can be judged “correct.” Similarly, Kant writes, we can legitimately conceive of the purposiveness of the “supreme world” by analogy with the products of human art, although we cannot thereby conclude that the two types of purposiveness have the same properties. In another note, Kant equates analogy with the indirect presentation of an idea according to its effects or consequences (KU 351). Through analogy with art, that is, in outlining nature in terms of final causes, one can organize nature into the interaction of self-enclosed purposive centers, in other words, what we have called the individuation of animal bodies. Just as we project purposiveness onto animals by analogy with the structure of our own cog-
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nitive processes, we project the relationship between this presumed purposiveness and the body onto all other natural phenomena. As with judgments of sublimity, the understanding of the purposiveness of nature can only be formed with respect to culture or civilization (Kultur), that is, to the non-natural or technical gathering of human beings. Animals do not have cultures, though they form groups. The word for culture or civilization, Kultur, comes from the Indo-European root kwel -, meaning “to revolve,” “to sojourn,” or “to dwell,” whose extended form, kwelos, becomes telos in Greek, meaning the “completion of a cycle.” The root forms the basis of the words cultivate and teleology, in addition to culture. All these words have to do with settling, tilling the land, harvesting, making plans and carrying them out. Kant’s specification of “skill” as a requirement for culture refers us again to techne, the quintessential activity that distinguishes humans from all other natural beings. It also links teleology to culture and art, that is, to nondemonstrability. Culture, which implies discipline (Zucht) along with skillfulness (Geschicklichkeit), forms “the ultimate purpose that we have cause to attribute to nature with respect to the human species” (KU 431–32). In the Methodology of Teleological Judgment, Kant designates the human being as “Lord of Nature.” If nature is regarded as a teleological system, Kant implies—keeping the conditionality of the technic of nature intact—then the human being is the ultimate purpose of that system. Human beings are the only natural beings to have the capacity to refer both nature and themselves to a purpose that can be independent of and external to nature. It is skill that leads ineluctably, according to Kant, to inequality among people, class structures, and even war. In this case, “nature still achieves its own purpose, even if that purpose is not ours” (KU 432). Teleology is thus used to explain seeming injustices that humans cannot otherwise understand. Discipline, on the other hand, is a “negative” condition that liberates the will from an entanglement with natural things. It is directed toward the progressive elimination of animal characteristics, and thus indirectly leads to the production and refinement of art and morality (KU 433). This movement manifests the privilege given to the perceived separability (at least in principle) of the human from nature. The point of discussing Kant’s opening up of the possibility of ascribing final causes to nature through the trope of a (necessary) aesthetic fiction is to show how this technic of nature can be (and was) further applied to speculations about the nature of human subjectivity, especially in its relationship to the natural world. It is important to understand the way in which Kant negotiates the sticky problem of final causes, not because this issue is equally pressing in the science or
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philosophy of nature of today, but because it can help explain the ways in which alternative conceptions of the subject, particularly ones that do not presuppose separatedness from nature and atomic isolation, can arise and be legitimated. Thus, we will examine Kant’s technic of nature at some length. Kant rejects both dogmatic (intentional) and fatalistic (unintentional) interpretations of the notion of the purposiveness of nature from the beginning. There will be no appeal to a God whose existence can be known, nor to a necessary objective purposiveness inherent in nature (Kant attributes this view primarily to Spinoza). Rather, teleological judgments about nature say nothing about nature itself, but everything about the way in which humans cognize nature. Teleological judgment is not constitutive of determinative judgment, but merely regulative for reflective judgment (KU 396). It deals not with the content of nature, but with the form of the human framing of nature. Teleological judgment is a human techne, which means that although it may be necessary for the possibility of any other human achievement, primary among all other techne, and even though it may stand in for a deity that cannot be proven, it remains a techne and nothing more. Kant calls the concept of natural purposes a foreigner (Fremdling) in natural sciences, but a foreigner that looks strangely familiar to human reason. Nature itself gives us the hint (Wink) that if we were to use the concept of final causes “we could perhaps reach beyond nature and connect nature itself to the highest point in the series of causes” (KU 390). Reason has an intimation (Ahnung) that this is the right direction in which to go, even if this “rightness” cannot ever be proven. The words hint and intimation intentionally convey a certain reserve with respect to teleological judgment. Like judgments of beauty and sublimity, which must both be universally communicable—even though they cannot be expressed in the language of concepts—and exemplify a universal rule that we are unable to state, the justification of the use of teleological judgment can only be indirect. This principle “is of such a kind that we can only point to it (anzeigen), but can never cognize it determinately and state it distinctly” (KU 412). Like the sublime, which works its effects only from a distance, the judgment of purposiveness can be effective only when the as if holds it at bay. The relationship between human understanding and the perceived final causes of the particulars of nature (either products or laws), like that between understanding and imagination in the judgment of beauty, is called a harmony (KU 407). The word harmony, which recurs constantly in the critique of aesthetic judgment and the critique of teleological judgment, comes from the Greek harmos, meaning “joint,” and is related to the English words “arm” and “art.” A harmony is a fitting together of
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parts, a jointure, and for Kant this word always retains its relationship to techne. The technic of nature, which understands nature as purposive, is necessary for us in addition to the mechanistic picture of nature in terms of natural laws and causes because our understanding proceeds in one direction only, according to Kant. We can cognize natural objects only by beginning with a universal, supplied by our understanding, and then by subsuming particulars under it. If our understanding could proceed from particulars to universals, Kant implies, there would be no need to distinguish between mechanistic principles and teleological ones. However, since we always begin with universals, only then making judgments about particulars, “the particular, as such, contains something contingent.” Even laws of nature can be taken as particulars by the faculty of reason, which then demands a unity (Einheit) in which these particulars can be joined. The principle under which even the contingent becomes law, or the “lawfulness of the contingent,” is called purposiveness (KU 404). The relationship of unity or systematicity and final causes is brought to the fore in the final section of the Critique of Teleological Judgment, entitled “Of the Union [Vereinigung] of the Principle of the Universal Mechanism of Matter with the Teleological in the Technic of Nature” (“Von der Vereinigung des Prinzips des allgemeinen Mechanismus der Materie mit dem teleologischen in der Technik der Natur”) .15 This is the union Kant has been waiting for, the union to which he must appeal, inasmuch as all divisions in his work up to this point still stand apart in apparent dispersion. The technic of nature must specifically reconcile the assumption that every particular in nature can be subsumed under a universal with the obviously wide range of specifics that distinguish one particular from another of the same general kind by explaining the diversity in terms of purposiveness. Reason must be disciplined into neither being seduced into a transcendental explanation of pure purposiveness without mechanical causes (“poetic raving”), nor explaining everything natural only mechanically (“fantasizing”) (KU 410–11). The union [Vereinbarkeit ] of explanations in terms of mechanical causes and teleological accounts lies in “nature’s supersensible substrate,” and Kant admits that “for human reason both ways of representing [Vorstellungsarten] how such objects are possible cannot be fused together [zusammenschmelzen]” (KU 414). Thus, they must be used in conjunction with each other to the extent that such a practice results in a better understanding of nature. The same implicit assumption is made in terms of the ranking of final causes. Kant rests the reconciliation on a conditional statement: [Human] existence itself has the highest purpose within it; and to this purpose [the human] can subject all of nature as far as he is able, or at least
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he must not consider himself subjected to any influence of nature in opposition to that purpose.—Now if things in the world, which are dependent beings with regard to their existence, require a supreme cause that acts in terms of purposes, then the human is the final purpose [Endzweck] of creation. For without the human, the chain of mutually subordinated purposes would not have a complete ground. It is this legislation, therefore, which alone enables man to be a final purpose to which all of nature is teleologically subordinated. (KU 435; my emphasis)
The “if” is crucial here, for it reminds us that in the Critique of Judgment we are always dealing with a conditional, human creation, a technic of nature formed around, and as a system of, natural purposiveness, which can never be matched by a corresponding cognition of the human mind. We can never know that nature is purposive, though to behave as if it were is the only way to resolve a series of antinomies that the human mind can never otherwise overcome. Nietzsche criticizes this move of Kant’s, this way of slipping purposiveness in through the back gate, more than any other aspect of the critique of teleological judgment. Like the sublime English garden of the eighteenth century, meticulously planned and landscaped to look wild, the technic of nature is, at least on one level, a paradox. Nature is most “itself” for us when it is most unnatural, that is to say, when it is art, or at least when it is understood in analogy to human art.16 A little farther down, in the same section, Kant goes on to distinguish between beautiful objects and beautiful views: “In beautiful views of objects, taste seems to fasten not so much on what the imagination apprehends in that area [Feld], as on the occasion they provide for it to engage in fiction [dichten], i.e., on the actual fantasies with which the mind entertains itself as it is continually being aroused by the diversity that strikes the eye” (KU 243). The notion of fiction that we have referred to above is crucial for understanding the relationship between Kant’s understanding of aesthetics and the principle of natural teleology. As we have seen, Kant understands the technic of nature in terms of an analogy with human art. We recall that in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant defined an “analogy of experience” as “a rule according to which a unity of experience may arise from perception” (KrV A180 = B223). In the third Critique he calls the particular kind of art he is employing “fiction,” based on a distinction first made in the first Critique 17 between a being of our reasoning (ens rationis ratiocinantis) and a being of reason (ens rationis ratiocinatae) (KU 468), or between an objectively empty concept used merely for reasoning (conceptus ratiocinans) and a rational concept that is a basis for cognition confirmed by reason (conceptus rationcinatus) (KU 396). The former term of each of these distinctions is also called “fiction” (dichten) by Kant (KU 467).18 In “fic-
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tion,” in this very specific sense, our reason is unable to prove the objective reality of what it posits, but can only use what is posited regulatively for reflective judgment (KU 396). Kant gives, as an example of an ens rationis ratiocinantis, the notion of spirits that exist in the universe that think but have no bodies. The fiction we engage in if we try to think of such things (by taking away, in the spirit of Descartes, “everything material and yet suppos[ing] that it retains thought”), can never be established as objective reality (KU 468). In the case of considering things of nature as natural purposes, Kant insists that “we do not know whether the concept is an objectively empty one that [we use] merely for reasoning (conceptus ratiocinans), or is a rational concept, a concept that is a basis for cognition and is confirmed by reason (conceptus ratiocinatus) (KU 396). We can never know, then, whether the teleology of nature is a fiction or a rational concept. Kant says that we will have to be satisfied with calling it a fiction while we continue to assume that it mirrors the ideas of human reason, since without it we would not be able to cognize nature at all. Again, we can see the importance of the distance that the “as if” introduces into the analogical structure. It is important to note that in these theoretical sections, as opposed to the actual discussion of the art of poetry (Dichtungskunst), Kant always uses the verbal form of the word dichten. Perhaps “fictioning” or poetizing, then, would be a more appropriate, if awkward, translation for this word. One should also keep in mind that dichten does not simply mean to write fiction or poetry, in the literary sense of the word, but, like the Latin root of the word “fiction,” which comes from facere, “to do,” “to fictionize” means “to make,” or “to compose”; this etymology links “fiction” to techne. In this sense it is related to the jointure of the word “harmony.” In addition, dichten, in German, can mean “to seal” or “to close tightly,” or “to thicken or jell,” and Kant may have this double entendre in mind, especially with reference to the technic of nature, which provides closure to an otherwise open-ended system. Kant bases the technic of nature upon the figure of the organism. By contrasting the structure of an organized natural being with a mechanical human creation, such as a watch, Kant cautions the reader against understanding the technic of nature merely in analogy to human art. Kant’s fear stems not from the suspicion that the technic of nature will be understood as an artwork in itself, but that it will be read as an extension of the human artist-artwork relationship, that is, as the product of some explicit intention on the part of a divine being. The possibility of proving the existence of a god who orchestrates the technic of nature has never been broached; Kant brackets such issues as undemonstrable. He writes, “We say far too little if we call [nature and the ability it displays in organized products] an analogue of art , for in that case
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we think of an artist (a rational being) apart from nature” (KU 374). Organized being “is not conceivable or explicable on any analogy to any known physical ability . . . not even . . . to human art” (KU 375, my emphasis). In order to understand the seeming contradiction between this statement and the passages we examined earlier that explicitly described the technic of nature in analogy to art, we must return to the first introduction to the third Critique: When we consider nature as technical (or plastic), because we must present its causality by an analogy with art, we may call nature technical in its procedure, i.e., as it were, artistic. For we are dealing with the principle of merely reflective and not of determinative judgment (determinative judgment underlies all human works of art), and in the case of reflective judgment the purposiveness is to be considered unintentional and hence can belong only to nature [but not to art]. (KU 251’)
Purposiveness cannot be understood in analogy to art when art is linked to intention and to an artist. Indeed, Kant draws a very sharp distinction between the notion of purposiveness within the organism itself, and the notion of purposiveness extrapolated from the organization of the organism. The organism is the sole natural entity whose possibility can be thought only with reference to natural teleology, even when it is considered apart from any relation to any other thing. The structure of the organism therefore justifies the practice of introducing the notion of purposiveness into natural science in the first place (KU 375). Kant defines the organism as a natural product “in which everything is a purpose and reciprocally also a means,” in which nothing is gratuitous (purposeless) or attributable to a mechanism” (KU 376). Any natural scientist who has dissected a plant or animal body, says Kant, cannot but recognize the inherent purposiveness of its every part, both in serving its own individual purpose and in working in conjunction with the other organs (KU 376). The natural body is also purposive in that it can reproduce itself without aid from external causes. To this limited extent, purposiveness has an “objective reality.” The problem arises when people want to extend the notion of purposiveness from the internal workings of an organism to the natural world itself, as if the latter were nothing but a huge organism in which we, as well as all other natural things, are interdependent organs. This move has no external justification, warns Kant. Just as we cannot assign the purposiveness of nature an objective reality in analogy to art (as if God were a supreme craftsman with the intention of crafting the natural world), we also cannot assign it objective reality in analogy to the body of an organism. Indeed, the whole structure of the Analytic of Teleological Judgment suggests that, rather than projecting the fiction of the organism
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onto the natural world, the fiction of the natural world (the technic of nature) delimits the structure of the organism, and from this, the structure of the architectonic. Shell explains this phenomenon in the following way: Nature becomes organismlike to—and only to—the extent that man himself, in his capacity as user of nature (rather than as God’s or nature’s tool ), enacts the form-giving role that had to be referred, at the level of organic life, to the supersensible substrate. Man himself, in other words, by virtue of a Tauglichkeit [affinity] that “grows” in him with nature’s help and yet without prejudice to his freedom, straddles the otherwise mysterious boundary between mechanism and intentional causation. 19
As we noted earlier, the Greek organon, from which the word organism stems, means “tool.” In Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs , the German Romantic writer Novalis speculates about the beginning of naming and conceptual thought and the influence of this development on the way in which the universe was viewed by human beings, and in ruminating on this phenomenon both explicates and illustrates Kant’s imperative that descriptions of nature most naturally and pleasurably follow organic form. Novalis tends to privilege light and crystal formation rather than vegetative growth, but the principle is identical: organic form is a tool that human beings use to systematize and organize the manifold of nature as a whole: It must have been a long time before people started to think of indicating the manifold objects of their senses with common names and of setting themselves over and against them. Repetition [Übung] developed this practice, and with this development came divisions and articulations that one can readily compare to the refraction of a stream of light. So gradually our inner nature split up into manifold powers and with perpetual practice this tendency towards fragmentation intensified. Perhaps, if human beings have lost the power to remix these dispersed colors of their spirit and thus to recreate the old simple state of nature at will or to bring about new, manifold connections between them, it is just due to the pathological tendency of later human beings. . . . We can, for this reason, consider the thoughts of our ancestors about things in the world to be a necessary product, a self-representation of the state of earthly nature at that time, and we can accept these in particular as the most fitting tools [Werkzeugen] of the observers of the universe, as the primary relationship at that time, of the universe to its inhabitants, and of its inhabitants to it. . . . At the very least one feels certain of a contingent, mechanical [werkzeugliche] origin of [explanations of nature], and even for the despisers of the rule-less creations of the imagination this portrayal is
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meaningful enough. . . . For this reason poetry has become the favorite tool of the true friend of nature, and in poetry about nature this radiates most brilliantly.20
As we have also already noted, Friedrich Hölderlin used the word organic to refer to the natural world subsequent to human intervention, not to a biological or chemical classification. Thus, the organic, at least for Hölderlin, was explicitly aligned with the technical, but with a technical that does not presume any specific intention in the sense of an efficient cause. Hölderlin called the natural world prior to any human imposition upon it the “aorgic”; the alpha-privative prefix indicates that which has nothing to do with the organon. There is much in the Critique of Judgment that suggests that Kant, too, shared this understanding of the organic as being thoroughly stamped by the technical. The technic of nature precedes art as such, for it dictates the conditions under which such a thing as art can arise. Only within the limits prescribed by the technic of nature (which cannot be traced back to an intention, thus to an artist) does the conception of artist—an individuated body capable of having intentions that separate it from any other individuated body and allow it in turn to create something outside of itself to stand on its own, in the world, as another individuated body—make sense. According to Kant, determinative judgment underlies all human works of art understood as intentionally created by an artist (KU 251’). Perhaps, in the spirit of the Critique of Judgment , where the beautiful is that which causes liking without interest, and the sublime is that which is large without being measurable or fear-inducing without any immediate threat of danger, the technic of nature is art without an artist, contrary to what Abrams claims. Nature (subjectively) figured as an organized being by analogy with an artist manifests in human cognition characteristics of both symbolic and schematic hypotyposis. The presentation of nature as organized being is a symbolic presentation in that it manifests itself according to a particular image (that of an organism), but at the same time Kant goes to great lengths to demonstrate that no image outside the realm of the organic is possible. In “The Sublime Offering,” Jean-Luc Nancy aligns symbolism and fiction in “a logic of representation (something in the place of something else),” and counterpoises them to the schematism of the aesthetic judgment, which, as Kant writes in §35, is a “schematizing without a concept” (KU 36–37). However, Kant keeps discussions of fiction and symbolization separate, and fiction is not to be confused with making something nonimagistic present in the form of an arbitrary and alterable figure. Rather, fiction seems precisely to take the role of the schema, and does so “without a concept.” We must keep in mind the close etymological relation of dichten to logos itself.
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The first introduction to The Critique of Judgment calls the propensity to understand nature as art judgment’s “own concept” (KU 204’). The concept of the technic of nature is a priori for judgment in order to allow it to investigate nature, as a principle of its reflection. However, judgment “can neither explain this technic nor determine it more closely” (KU 214’). Judgment creates the technic for two reasons: in order to reflect in terms of its own subjective law, and in order to investigate nature in a way that harmonizes with natural laws (which are its own laws in turn). Kant explicitly calls this performance “artificial” (künstlich) (KU 215’). Kant contrasts techne in the form of a technic of nature with a mechanical instrument because the mechanical explanation of the universe is modeled upon something like a machine, which is a product of intentional human techne. The process of reflective judgment is called “technical” when it judges nature purposively; Kant specifies that in this process “[reflective judgment] deals with [given appearances] technically rather than schematically” (KU 213’). Here the technic of nature stands in for the schematism as an a priori principle for reflective judgment. Both aesthetic and teleological judgments “need” the critique of judgment: teleological judgments need it because “if left to themselves” they “invite reason to inferences that may stray into the transcendent”; aesthetic judgments need it because they “require laborious investigation in order to keep them from limiting themselves . . . to just the empirical, and hence to keep them from destroying their claims to necessary validity for everyone” (KU 241’). Aesthetic and teleological judgments are reciprocally disciplinary, then, for opposite reasons. If the technic of nature, in the end, can make no definitive claims as to the “nature” of nature in itself (noumenal nature), this is not because it is arbitrary, merely one in many possible interpretations of nature. Kant stipulates that the teleological is the place to which the mind turns when it is incapable of conceiving the possibility of a natural object through the principle of mechanism alone: All we can do is this: if we happen to find natural objects whose possibility is inconceivable to us in terms merely of the principle of mechanism (which in the case of a natural being always has a claim [to being applied]), so that we must rely also on teleological principles, then we can presume that we may confidently investigate natural laws in accordance with both principles (once our understanding is able to cognize [how] the natural product is possible on the basis of one or the other principle) without our being troubled by the seeming conflict that arises between the two principles for judging that product. For we are assured that it is at least possible that objectively, too, both these principles might be reconcilable in one principle (since they concern appearances, which presuppose a supersensible basis). (KU 413)
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Judgment turns from the mechanistic to the teleological explanation in the same way that within the judgment of the sublime the imagination turns to reason when the imagination is incapable of comprehending the sublime. Kant assumes that the teleological principle is the only possible supplement to a purely mechanical world view, that without reference to final purposes humans could not make sense of nature at all. The fiction (dichten) human minds create about nature seems to have something of the same relation to human reason that time has to the understanding. The teleology of nature schematizes human cognition of nature. There is a mutual interplay between nature and human thinking about nature/creating from nature, in which each determines the other. At one point, Kant calls the aesthetic idea “the counterpart [Gegenstück, Pendant] of a rational idea” (KU 314). The aesthetic idea is a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate concept is adequate, and therefore no language can express an aesthetic idea completely. A rational idea is a concept to which no presentation of the imagination can be adequate. Both types of idea are necessarily mediated by the presentation of the imagination. The impact of each on the other forever changes its direction. A strange materiality emerges from the encounter of the natural and the spiritual, which becomes, in the end, what we refer to as “nature.” Like a plant, the technic of nature grows without consciousness, and like the English garden it is a studiedly “wild” art, designed to look like untamed nature, but still ruled by the “form” of reason. Nature read as organized being requires human science to mediate its possible flight into fantasies of divine beings and supernatural causes whose existence can never be known. The Abbé du Bos wrote in 1719 that genius “is . . . a plant which shoots up, as it were, of itself; but the quality and quantity of its fruit depends in a great measure on the culture it receives.”21 Similarly, Kant’s technic is a garden that must be cultivated and pruned. Through the technic of nature the notion of the organism, and from it the conception of the human as technician arises. If the technic of nature is a garden, its product, paradoxically, is not a plant but an animal, an animal whose structure derives from its separability from other organisms, its self-sufficiency, its autonomy, and its ultimate security in the face of the power of nature that threatens to overwhelm it. Kant’s technic of nature sets the scene for a new way of considering nature and scientific study of nature. From Goethe through Nietzsche, every philosopher in Germany will have to confront Kant’s critique, and the portrayal of science as an (at least partially) aesthetic endeavor opened the doors to the possibility of creating new paradigms of nature and consequently of culture, including the cultivation of plant life that grows outside of the confines of a formal garden.
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At the end of the Analytic of the Beautiful, Kant comments that nature is most agreeable to human taste when it is diverse, luxuriant, “subject to no constraint from artificial rules” (KU 243). The description resonates with theories of the new garden, called the landscape garden, expounded by architects, poets, and essayists from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century in England. In his essay “Of Gardens,” Francis Bacon directs a gardener to have at least a part of the garden “framed, as much as may be, to a Natural wildnesse.”22 Joseph Addison, one of the earliest proponents of the cultivated-to-look-wild landscape garden, writes, “Tho’ there are several of these wild Scenes [of nature], that are more delightful than any artificial Shows; yet we find the Works of Nature still more pleasant the more they resemble those of Art.”23 The English garden was designed in explicit opposition to the formal constraints of French classical gardens, exemplified by the grounds of Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles. These French gardens were characterized by angular geometrical lines, severely clipped greenery, and disciplined flower beds. Yet if the English landscape garden looked more natural, it remained equally cultivated. The German taste of the time followed that of the English garden planners. In “On the Sublime,” Friedrich Schiller writes, “Who does not prefer to tarry among the spiritual disorder of a natural landscape rather than in the spiritless regularity of a French garden? Who would not marvel at the wonderful battle between fecundity and destruction in Sicily’s plains, or feast his eyes on Scotland’s wild cataracts and mistshrouded mountains, Ossian’s vast nature, rather than admire in straight-diked Holland the prim victory of patience over the most defiant of the elements?”24 In a footnote to “Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” Schiller comments on the necessity of the contrast of art and nature in order for humans to find something “naive.” Schiller’s use of “naive” follows Kant’s aesthetic of the beautiful closely, except that it refers only to things that are revealed as fresh, natural, innocent, and of course unattached to any determinate purpose. Schiller writes, “Nobody would find naive the spectacle of a badly tended garden in which the weeds have the upper hand, but there is certainly something naive when the free growth of spreading branches undoes the painstaking work of the topiarist in a French garden.” 25 Thus, nature in Schiller’s understanding of Kant (the account follows the third Critique closely) can be seen as truly natural only with reference to the artificial, even if only by contrast. It has even been argued that the new congruence between the human mind and nature propounded by thinkers such as Kant and Goethe and developed by writers of the Romantic movement had its provenance in the landscape gardening movement of the eighteenth century.26 We will read this relationship not in terms of the
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linear model of “influence,” but rather as a chiasmic figure; we do not assume a preexisting view of nature that somehow shapes philosophical thinking, but rather insist that nature itself is created in human thinking about it, from which new philosophical thinking gains its character in turn. Finally, as a natural being, human being itself is profoundly affected by shifts in thinking about nature.
2
GOETHE The Metamorphosis of Plants
Kant never took any notice of me, although independently I was following a course similar to his. I wrote my Metamorphosis of Plants before I knew anything of Kant, and yet it is entirely in the spirit of his ideas. —Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann [A]t the exact moment when Kant’s work was completed and a map through the bare woods of reality was sketched, the Goethean quest for the seeds of eternal growth began. —Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” When something has acquired a form it metamorphoses immediately to a new one. If we wish to arrive at some living perception of nature we ourselves must remain as quick and flexible as nature and follow the example she gives. —Goethe, “The Purpose Set Forth” (from On Morphology )
Up to this point we have concentrated on the importance of form in Kant’s technic of nature. Reflective judgment must proceed, when examining organisms, on the assumption that basic organizational frameworks inherited or constructed by natural scientists, such as system, purpose,
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and order, correspond to empirical reality, although this unity cannot be known or proven. The feeling that results when the unity one has assumed seems to correspond to what one finds empirically is one of pleasure, the same feeling one has when one makes an aesthetic judgment of beauty. In aesthetic judgments, whether of beauty, sublimity, or purposiveness, reflection attempts to create a unity out of that which cannot be subsumed under a concept. Kant calls the assumption of unity “an occupation of the understanding conducted with regard to a necessary purpose of its own,” which is then taken up by judgment and ascribed to nature (KU 187). Kant’s aim, as we have seen, was to avoid confirming the existence of final causes in nature while allowing them as inevitable procedural assumptions (as contingent, yet as also indispensable) for the purpose of doing natural science. However, Kant also expresses sympathy with the desire to find Ur-phenomena and even the Ur-mother (KU §80): “We would still prefer to hear others offer hope that if we had deeper insight into nature, or could compare the nature [we know] more broadly with the parts of it we do not yet know, then we would find nature ever simpler as our experience progressed and ever more accordant despite the seeming heterogeneity in its empirical laws” (KU 188). If, on the other hand “we are told that a deeper or broadened knowledge of nature based on observation must ultimately meet with a diversity of laws that no human understanding can reduce to a single principle,” Kant writes, “then we will be content with that too” (KU 188). Thus, although the reality behind the form remains open-ended (since unknown), Kant has already traced the trajectory of philosophy, which must proceed according to the assumption of a progressive order, according to a scheme of organized individuation similar to the organization that the pre-critical understanding projects onto nature . Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, writing at the same time as Kant, also eschews the anthropocentric notion of the purposiveness of nature, yet continues to look for the origin Kant declares we will never know exists, although “origin” will have a specific meaning that may initially seem counterintuitive. This is because Goethe reinterprets the very meaning of “origin,” from a “what” or a “where” to a “how,” from a location to a process. This shift marks a significant change in the ideology governing the search for a source: while Kant would prefer to ultimately find a single, unifying, simple origin, Goethe admits from the outset that the quest for a simple in the sense of singular origin is a fruitless one, since the principle underlying all of natural development is a multiple and self-transformative one: thus, the Ur-plant or originary principle of life in any form for Goethe, though sought after, will never be found in a unique and irreducible form. Goethe recognizes many of his own ideals in Kant’s work, but shifts the focus of the inquiry from the form that both inquiry and
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judgment take to the question of form itself. Though Kant questions the correspondence of the technic of nature to a noumenal realm, the structure of the technic itself is a priori for reflective judgment. Whether noumenal nature corresponds to nature as we perceive it or not, Kant believes that in order to think meaningfully about nature within the limits of human understanding one would at some point have to presume the purposiveness of nature. Moreover, this purposiveness has a form that can be delimited, as much of the third Critique demonstrates. For Goethe, by contrast, nature—whether noumenal or phenomenal (for essential reasons, as we will see, Goethe does not make this distinction)—always remains an open-ended question, a mystery from which the veil can never be entirely torn. This is perhaps because, for Goethe, form, or morphe, is always tied to metamorphosis; the organism is not part of a system so much as a rhythm of life-forces. At the conclusion of his The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe distinguishes between the regular, successive temporality of development from stem to leaf, and the eruptive emergence of flower and fruit. Together the two movements form a kind of natural rhythm, which Goethe calls der Rhythmus des Lebenskraft.1 Emile Benveniste has analyzed the linguistic roots of the word rhythm as it was used in ancient Greek tragedy and philosophy,2 and has shown that the meaning of rhythm as we understand it today originated not, as commonly understood, from an observation of nature, specifically of the ebb and flow of the ocean’s waves, but from a particular determination of the original signification of rhythmos. All etymological dictionaries, Benveniste notes, cite the verb rhein, “to flow,” as the root of rhythmos. The problem lies not with the morphological derivation of rhythmos from rhein, but from the extrapolation that the notion of rhythm had been taken from the observation of waves. In ancient Greek, rivers “flow,” but oceans neither flow nor are said to have a “rhythm.” The terms that describe the movements of the waves are entirely different. However, Benveniste cites numerous examples—from Aristotle, Democritus, Leucippus, Herodotus, Archilochus, Anacreon, Aeschylus, and Plato—to show that the original meaning of rhythmos is synonymous with skhema, or “form.” However, “rhythm” is a very particular determination of “form,” one that Benveniste describes in the following way: There is a difference between skhema and rhythmos; skhema in contrast to ekho (“je me tiens”) is defined as a fixed “form,” realized and viewed in some way as an object. On the other hand, rhythmos, according to the contexts in which it is given, designates the form in the instant that it is assumed by what is moving, mobile and fluid, the form of that which does not have organic consistency; it fits the pattern of a fluid element, of a letter arbitrarily shaped, of a robe which one arranges at one’s will,
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of a particular state of character or mood. It is the form as improvised, momentary, changeable. Now, rhein is the essential predication of nature and things in the Ionian philosophy since Heraclitus and Democritus thought that, since everything was procured from atoms, only a different arrangement of them produced the difference of forms and objects. We can now understand how rhythmos, meaning literally “the particular manner of flowing,” could have been the most proper term for describing “dispositions” or “configurations” without fixity or natural necessity and arising from an arrangement which is always subject to change. 3
This passage could describe the vision of nature that underlies all of Goethe’s studies of natural phenomena, with one significant specification. Goethe understands nature in terms of form—as rhythm in the sense outlined above—but not in terms of atomic particles; one might align Goethe with Heraclitus, but not with Democritus. Form, for Goethe, is nothing but a fleeting manifestation, a resting point of that which is always on the verge of metamorphosis. Indeed, Goethe suggests that the use of the word Gestalt (form) in the German studies of natural history of his time is misleading, since “with this expression they exclude what is changeable and assume that an interrelated whole is identified, defined, and fixed in character.” 4 Rather, Goethe proposes the substitution of the word Bildung (formation) for Gestalt , in order to convey the perpetual motion of all natural and particularly organic manifestation. In other words, Goethe understands form as “rhythm” in the ancient sense that Benveniste explicates. Such an insistence on the equal importance of both form and force clearly shows Goethe’s awareness that the way one approaches nature cannot be separated from what one thinks nature is. In other words, science is not merely a question of the interpretation of a preexisting reality, in terms, for example, of mechanism or of vitalism, of forces or of isolatable particulars. Rather, “reality” is actually created in and reflected by the chosen approach. Thus, the manner of approaching nature cannot be judged simply by its quantitative results (the amount of information gathered, the number of phenomena explained), but must also be questioned qualitatively, in terms of the way nature is configured by it. Here for the first time we encounter what we have named the “vegetative soul” explicitly. We note, with Goethe, the congruence of his depiction of nature with the Kantian outline of a technic of nature in the Critique of Judgment . It is a congruence that Kant himself would not, most likely, have accepted. Yet the third Critique would leave a strong legacy, which Kant could neither predict nor delineate. The great debate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries over the way in which natural history (the term biology was just coming into use) was to be pursued, including the critique of the Cartesian mecha-
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nistic picture of the universe, involved more than a switching of metaphors for nature. As Goethe developed his studies of metamorphosis in meteorology, in insects, in animal skeletons, in plants, and in color, he came to the conclusion that the principle of all organic nature was metamorphosis, a phenomenon that depends upon both form and force. The natural entity that demonstrates the principle of metamorphosis with greatest clarity, according to Goethe, is the plant. Accordingly, when Goethe sets out to find the Ur-plant, the plant that will prove to be the singular origin of all plant life, he is searching for the plant that demonstrates most irrefutably that metamorphosis is the source of all organic development. Furthermore, as we have cited Goethe in the final epigraph to this chapter, metamorphosis occurs as a phenomenological event that transforms the scientist or observer as much as what is being observed. Goethe’s advocacy of the metamorphosis of the scientist that must accompany observation of the metamorphosis of nature anticipates the twentieth-century discourse in the philosophy of science of the way in which the collection of empirical data is already shaped in advance by the theory it is supposed to support or refute. It is interesting to note, as Ernst Cassirer does with great surprise, 5 the reaction of Goethe, who was strongly anti-Newtonian (precisely by virtue of his strong belief that the scientist’s own thinking cannot be separated from his or her observation of phenomena), to the writings of Kant. Goethe writes of the Critique of Judgment , the one work of Kant’s that excited his enthusiasm: “To this book I owe one of the happiest periods of my life. Here I saw my most diverse interests brought together, artistic and natural production handled the same way; the power of aesthetic and teleological judgment mutually illuminated each other.”6 In the mind of Goethe, at least, there was much common ground between his own Metamorphosis of Plants and Kant’s Critique of Judgment . Goethe goes on to say precisely where he finds the sympathy: “The inner life of art as of nature, their mutual working from within outward, were clearly expressed in the book. It maintained that the productions of these two infinite worlds exist for their own sake, and that things that stand beside each other do indeed exist for each other but not purposely on each other’s account.” 7 Goethe’s approbation of Kant is based on Kant’s discussion of teleological judgment, and particularly on the way in which Kant makes room for strictly limited assumptions of the purposiveness of nature while insisting that such assumptions will always remain heuristic fictions that are impossible to prove. Goethe had already expressed strong criticism of unreflective assumptions of final causes in the study of nature by the time he read the Critique of Judgment .
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At the same time, a single reference of Kant’s to the possibility of a unique source of all life—the Ur-mother—reminded Goethe of his own quest for Urphänomene, originary phenomena from which all other life forms had evolved. The notion of a single origin of all plants held such importance for Goethe because he believed that if he could find an origin that conformed to the assumption that the principle of all life is constant metamorphosis he would then be able to unify all of nature into a whole. This whole needed to have a material origin, yet still encompass an ideal. In a brief passage of the Critique of Judgment , Kant considers the tendency to entertain a “daring adventure of reason,” as he puts it, “that has probably entered, on occasion, even the minds of virtually all the most acute natural scientists” (KU 419). The tendency Kant describes in some ways fits Goethe’s project exactly: natural forms in their variety share certain common arrangements of parts that lead one to hypothesize that they may all have been produced according to a common archetype “by a common Ur-mother” (KU 418). The various animal and plant genera, Kant goes on, manifest the principle of purposes from human beings “all the way to the polyp, and from it even to mosses and lichens and finally to the lowest stage of nature discernible to us, crude matter.” The “archaeologist of nature” envisages Mother Earth as a “large animal emerging from her state of chaos” giving birth, from her womb, to “creatures of a less purposive form,” creatures that in turn give birth to creatures even less purposive in form. Indeed, Kant even seems to refer to one of Goethe’s scientific achievements, the discovery of the a small bone in the jaw that is the same in all mammals including human beings. Although Goethe made this discovery in 1784, it was not published until 1820, so it is unlikely that Kant, who did not know Goethe, had heard about it. Nevertheless, Kant writes, “So many genera of animals share a certain common schema on which not only their bone structure but also the arrangement of their other parts seems to be based,” and he refers to this as a “common archetype,” the same words Goethe uses in 1820 in a published paper on comparative anatomy.8 At the end of this “daring adventure of reason,” Kant imagines the original womb itself eventually ossifying and being reduced to giving birth to only one determinate species. Of course, Kant entertains such a thought only as a mental exercise, whereas Goethe spent much of his life trying to prove that in fact all living beings had originated from a common archetype. Forty years after the publication of The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe expresses the difference he sees between crude assumptions of purposiveness and his own assumption of metamorphosis as an explanatory principle of nature: “The teachers of utility would believe they had lost their God if they could not worship the one who
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gave the ox its horns so that it could protect itself. Permit me, however, to honor the one whose realm of creativity was so great that after thousands of plants he made one more that contained all the rest in it, and after thousands of animals one being, that contains them all: the human being.”9 This understanding of the human being as the result of the development of other animals opposes the poetic image of the original mother as the source of all life. The Ur-phenomenon will not be an origin in the sense of a chronological or ontological cause of life. Rather, it will posit the structural coherence of all nature, and not simply explain all nature with reference to the human being. Goethe does use the image of the Ur-mother giving birth to a fully formed series of creatures in a poem entitled “Metamorphosis of Animals” (1806); here he emphasizes the fact that animals spring “completed” from the womb, lacking only certain protective or utilitarian features such as teeth or horns. For this reason, Goethe finds plants, which emerge and then undergo a series of completely transformative metamorphoses, to be clearer indicators of the principle of metamorphosis inherent in all life. This principle is present in animals as part of their history; according to Goethe, the anatomical archetype of animals contains “the forms of all animals as potential.” In animals, “the particular can never serve as a measure for the whole,”10 yet Goethe spent months in Italy looking for the particular Ur-plant. Kant makes it clear that he is entertaining the hypothesis of the Ur-mother only as an imaginative form of the technic of nature. 11 The fact that the hypothesis is imaginative, however, does not mean that it or a form of it is not necessary. Kant admits that the nature—or limitation—of human knowledge is such that nature cannot be completely explained according to mechanistic principles. Inevitably, such an investigation would be unable to explain organisms fully; at this point, science has the right to invoke final causes, keeping in mind that this is an artistic or heuristic procedure, and not a source of determinate knowledge. Yet Kant seems to make an illegitimate move on his own terms in claiming, later in the third Critique , that the human being is the final cause of nature by virtue of its noumenal nature (KU 435). The noumenal status of the human being as end and never as means—not its erect posture, developed brain, or living habits—led Kant to posit the human being as the creature of highest purposiveness. For Goethe, by contrast, the human being could only be considered to hold the (potential) forms of all the other animals within it by virtue of its physical form. In the section of the Critique of Judgment entitled “On the Final Purpose of the Existence of a World, i.e., of Creation Itself,” Kant expresses this noumenal purposiveness of the human being:
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Now in this world of ours there is only one kind of being with a causality that is teleological, i.e., directed to purposes, but also so constituted that the law in terms of which these beings must determine their purposes is presented by these very beings as unconditioned and independent of conditions in nature, and yet necessary in itself. That being is the human being, but the human considered as noumenon. . . . Now about the human, as a moral being, (and so about any other rational being in the world), we cannot go on to ask: For what [end] [quemin finem] does he exist? His existence itself has the highest purpose within it; and to this purpose he can subject all of nature as far as he is able, or at least he must not consider himself subjected to any influence of nature in opposition to that purpose. Now if things in the world, which are dependent beings with regard to their existence, require a supreme cause that acts in terms of purposes, then the human is the final purpose of creation. For without the human the chain of mutually subordinated purposes would not have a complete basis. Only in the human, and even in him only as moral subject, do we find unconditioned legislation regarding purposes. It is this legislation, therefore, which alone enables man to be a final purpose to which all of nature is teleologically subordinated. (KU 435; my emphasis)
The conditional nature of this statement is only implicit, and a strange but silent transfer takes place almost imperceptibly from the natural to the moral world order. Since human beings are the only natural beings who also have a moral or noumenal being, and since humans necessarily judge reflectively in terms of purposes, humans have no choice but to judge nature purposively, and yet they themselves must be the final purpose of this natural order, since in fact (at least as far as their own limited cognition permits them to know) they are the only members of the hierarchy: final purpose because the only real purpose. The pre-critical Kant did not have trouble espousing the idea of natural purposiveness, in, for example, his 1777 essay “Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen,” in which he argues that geographically the various races are distributed so that climate and race suit each other as “a precaution of nature.” Using another curious plantlike analogy, Kant describes individuals born with “seeds” (Keime) and tendencies (Anlagen) stored within them to meet the particular contingencies of a geographical climate. In a drawn-out argument with Georg Forster, Kant subsequently outlined the position that would become his own in the Critique of Judgment . An organism can never be arrived at in terms of mechanical causes alone, which leads to the subjective necessity of creating explanations in terms of final causes, since purposiveness arises only within ourselves. 12 Goethe continually reacted against the tendency to see everything in nature as produced for the sake of human beings, yet he approved of the Kantian solution of making purposiveness a product of the power of reflective judgment as opposed to a quality inherent in natural things:
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The human being is in the habit of valuing things according to how well they serve his purposes. It lies in the nature of the human condition that man must think of himself as the last stage of creation. Why, then, should he not also believe that he is its ultimate purpose? Why should his vanity not be allowed this small deception? Given his need for objects and his use for them, he draws the conclusion that they have been created to serve him. Why should he not resolve the inner contradictions here with a fiction rather than abandon the claims he holds so dear? Why should he not ignore a plant which is useless to him and dismiss it as a weed, since it really does not exist for him? When a thistle springs up to increase his toil in the fields he blames it on the curse of an angry god or the malice of a spiteful demon rather than considering it a child sprung from all of nature, one as close to her heart as the wheat he tends so carefully and values so highly. 13
Note the difference between this formulation of the purposiveness of nature, criticized by Goethe, and the earlier description of the human being as the animal that contains the forms of all other animals within it. The sarcastic criticism here is directed toward purposiveness understood as an intentional relationship of the human being with the rest of nature, while the earlier passage referred to the internal structure of the human organism. Thus, Goethe would agree with Kant that a technic of nature is analogous to human art only insofar as “art” does not presuppose an intention on the part of an artist. 14 The critique of teleological theories that understand the whole of nature to have been created in the service of human desires and needs recurs in Goethe’s literary work with reference to the relationship between nature and the work of art. A whole tradition in the late eighteenth century equated genius with vegetable nature, but tended to further embellish this association with an anthropocentric understanding of nature. The most well known proponent of the vegetable theory of genius was Johann Gottfried von Herder, who in his 1778 essay “On the Knowing and Feeling of the Human Soul,” equates the human soul with a seed that is unaware of “what impulses, powers, vapors of life streamed into it at the instant of its coming into being.”15 Goethe rejected the implications of Herder’s essay, which describes a sort of spiritual food chain in which the plant draws in water and earth and refines them, the animal eats the plant and further refines it into animal fluids, and the human transforms both plants and animals into the noblest of stimuli.16 Paul Hazard comments on the eighteenth-century practice in botany, which illustrates a broader practice in science generally, of trying to fit the universe and all of its products into a sort of preconceived scheme or pattern, calling it a “Great Ladder of Creation on which not a rung was missing. . . . Discontinuity was excluded a priori. . . . At all costs, every compartment must be filled.” 17
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Positing final causes was also a common practice of the natural science of Goethe’s day. For example, the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) suggested that herbivores were placed on earth in order to control the plant population, predators to limit the herbivores, and human beings to hunt and thus regulate the carnivorous predators. This was the kind of simplistic theory of purposiveness at which Kant took umbrage, writing, “[O]n this alternative, though man might in a certain respect have the dignity of being a purpose, in a different respect he would hold only the rank of a means” (KU 428). In other words, the “purpose” of the human being could conceivably be reduced, on such an interpretation, to a mere regulator of animal populations, a predator on a higher level. This led Kant to posit the purposiveness of the human in its nonbodily, or ideal, nature. Goethe, who still believed that he could find an actual physical specimen of an Ur-plant, was told rather bluntly by Friedrich Schiller (himself a Kantian) that the Ur-plant, too, was ideal, and not realized or realizable in the phenomenal world. Goethe recounts the exchange in the following way: We reached [Schiller’s] house, and our conversation drew me in. There I gave an enthusiastic description of the metamorphosis of plants, and with a few characteristic strokes of the pen I caused a symbolic plant to spring up before his eyes. He heard and saw all this with great interest, with unmistakable power of comprehension. But when I stopped, he shook his head and said, “That is not an observation from experience. That is an idea.” Taken aback and somewhat annoyed, I paused; with this comment he had touched on the very point that divided us. It evoked memories of the views he had expressed in “On Grace and Dignity;” my old resentment began to rise in me. I collected my wits, however, and replied, “Then I may rejoice that I have ideas without knowing it, and can even see them with my own eyes.”18
Goethe’s approbation of Kant stemmed from his own antipathy toward the assumption of anthropocentric purposes assigned to natural beings, what Kant referred to as determinate purposes. Although Kant, too, eschewed vulgar expressions of final cause such as claiming that a river was created to provide irrigation for fields, or that plants had sprung forth to provide sustenance for animals, he ultimately assigned the status of “final purpose of the existence of the world” to the human being. Goethe would object even to this qualified statement of purposiveness. Instead, Goethe expresses a constant repugnance toward the very idea of final causes, and read the world as the stage of mutual interactions between human beings—as one type of organized being among others—and the rest of nature:
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When in the exercises of his powers of observation the human being undertakes to confront the world of nature, he will at first experience a tremendous compulsion to bring what he finds under his control. Before long, however, these objects will thrust themselves upon him with such force that he, in turn, must feel the obligation to acknowledge their power and pay homage to their effects. When this mutual interaction becomes evident he will make a discovery which, in a double sense, is limitless; among the objects he will find many different forms of existence and modes of change, a variety of relationships vitally interwoven; in himself, on the other hand, he will find a potential for infinite growth through constant adaptation of his sensibilities and judgment to new ways of acquiring knowledge and responding with action. 19
Goethe begins with the assumption that all things in nature work incessantly upon each other, and that no natural phenomenon should be studied without also taking into account all the other phenomena that are contiguous to it. What Kant called the “noumenal” nature of human beings does not exempt the human mind from the exigency of openness toward transformation. Indeed, if Goethe had made a strict distinction between mind and body, it is the human mind that would demonstrate a greater tendency toward metamorphosis, and the body that is trapped in a completeness and rigidity with which it is born. The mind is capable of response to the greater nature of which it is a part. However, Goethe understands sense perception and thinking, whether conceptual or speculative, to be inseparable, so that the comparison between mental and physical human capacities is not appropriate. Goethe ultimately became more and more convinced that the only unitary principle that could explain the development and continuation of the natural world was metamorphosis. He writes: “I will go so far as to assert that when an organism manifests itself we cannot grasp the unity and freedom of its formative impulse without the concept of metamorphosis.” 20 Goethe’s scientific work on the metamorphosis of plants and animals (the second work was never finished) and on the theory of color, together with his literary writings that combined scientific discoveries with narratives of human life, stimulated a philosophical movement in Germany in the direction of a conjunction of idealism and the philosophy of nature, a combination that precisely sought to undermine the dichotomy that had been drawn between the realms of the ideal and the natural, between the mind and the body, between thinking and sense perception. Goethe understands the process of metamorphosis to be the originary phenomenon that escapes the nomenclature of either substance or ideal frame. Metamorphosis is grounded in nature but cannot be contained in any determinate form; nevertheless, there is nothing ideal
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about the process of one form changing into another. The Ur-plant, then, would be the plant that manifests most clearly the principle that every part contains the potential to turn into every other, that all form is constantly on the t he verge of becoming other. other. What makes the search for an Ur-phenomenon so difficult is that it is not an origin as a single unified location. Goethe objects to Kant’s statement in the third Critique that the human intellect, as an intellectus ectypus (one that requires images in order to understand), is inferior to a possible intellectus archetypus that could first comprehend the whole, and from the whole, the parts (KU 408). Only through the sensuous observation of ever-creating ever-creating nature, thus through the intellectus ectypus, according to Goethe, can the human being be considered to take part in the eternally ongoing process of nature by virtue of the metamorphosis of its intellect; this cannot be achieved if one posits the human subject standing over and against nature as if “lifted into a higher region” and proximate to a higher essence.21 Having an intellectus ectypus is important for Goethe because it allows the human being to be both a scientist and an artist. Goethe’s Goethe’s objection to two tendencies in the science of the late eighteenth century—first, as we have seen, the uncritical assumption of final causes in nature, and second, the endless search for analogies among the different realms of nature—complicated his quest for Ur-phenomena. Goethe believed in strictly separating the plant, animal, and mineral realms of organic nature for the purposes of scientific study because of the tendency to understand both the plant and the mineral as deficient animals when a continuum of nature was presumed. Against Linnaeus, Herder, Herder, and F. F. W. J. von Schelling, among others, thinkers whose work otherwise influenced him greatly, Goethe objects that the search for analogies only conducts one’s knowledge horizontally, and brings one no closer to an origin. In addition, Goethe warns, when one makes analogies one suppresses difference by emphasizing similarities. 22 The primary way in which characteristics of one realm had been projected onto another was the characterization of non-animal life forms as deficient animals, or even more specifically, specifically, as distant imitators of humans. For similar reasons, Goethe does not understand the world itself as one large organism: such an assumption implies overt anthropormorphism and fosters the projection of a host of assumptions about the organism as animal onto the realms of both living and non-living, animal and nonanimal.23 This caution accords with the later concern expressed in theories of vegetable genius, namely, the desire to avoid the reduction of all explanations to atomic, self-enclosed, “animal-like” qualities The description of plants as “inverted animals” can be traced back to Plutarch’s Plutarch’s report that “Plato, Anaxagoras, and Democritus think that a plant is an animal fixed in the earth.” 24 The roots of plants, because
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they are the place where plants take in nourishment, were long thought to be analogous to the heads of animals. a nimals. Since the flowers of plants contain their sexual organs, plants seem to be simultaneously burying their heads in the sand and displaying their genitals to the heavens in vulgar insouciance. The classification of one group as the “inversion” of the other was a common practice that held sway until the eighteenth century. This included the description of women’s sexual organs as the inversion of men’s, a theory first put forth by Galen that influenced anatomical treatises through the eighteenth century. century.25 By the nineteenth century, century, inversion had became a psychological rather than a physiological term, as evidenced in Freud’s Freud’s discussion of sexual aberrations. 26 Ironically, overturning the “inversion” thesis, both in sexual morphology and in the classification of natural species, resulted in a polarization and a hierarchization that had existed to a lesser degree before the divisions were made. Goethe’s intent, for example, was to free plants from the stigma of being considered inferior to animals. However, However, Hegel and others used the strict division between plants and animals precisely in order to justify a hierarchical schematization of nature. The particular analogy of plants to deformed, deficient, or inverted animals illustrates the overwhelming dominance of animal forms upon the structure of all kinds of thinking and knowledge, even the thinking of other kinds of nature. Goethe specifically rejects the imposition of the form of individuation upon plant life: Although a plant or tree seems to be an individual organism, it undeniably consists only of separate parts which are alike and similar to one another and to the whole. How many plants are propagated by runners! In the least variety of fruit tree the eye puts forth a twig which in turn produces many identical eyes; propagation through seeds is carried out in the same fashion. 27
Although such a statement might seem to be self-evident, the primary method of botanical studies in Goethe’s Goethe’s day, day, besides identification and elaborate classification of genera and species, was the inference of the anatomical structures and functions of plants by analogy to animal bodies. For example, Linnaeus, against ag ainst whom Goethe’s mature theory of the metamorphosis of plants is primarily directed, believed that to illustrate the generation of plants, one must understand it from the point of view of animals. Linnaeus had the following to say about plant sexuality: “The calyx is the bedchamber, bedchamber, the corolla the curtains, the filaments the spermatic vessels, the anthers the testes, the pollen the sperm, the stigma the vulva, the style the vagina, the germen the ovary, ovary, the pericarp 28 the fecundating ovary, and the seed the ovum.” This is carried over to a more general botanical analogy: “The belly of plants is the ground; the
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chyliferous vessels, the root; the bones, the trunk; the lungs, the leaves; the heart, the heat [of [ of plant tissues]; hence the ancients described a plant as an inverted animal.”29 In researching the metamorphosis of plants Goethe also takes a polemical stance against Linnaeus for reducing the study of plants to the cataloguing of their parts, for examining the plant not in its living intercourse with the other natural phenomena contiguous to it, but as a dead and dissected inventory of components. Such a strategy again assumes that plants, or for that matter all living things, are individuals that can be isolated; it tends to treat plants according to an analogy with animal bodies. Kant had already shown that Linnaeus tacitly assumed that nature was purposive by not questioning the possibility of the order and systematizability of natural phenomena.30 For: it is clear that reflective judgment, by its nature, cannot undertake to classify all of nature in terms of its empirical variety unless it presupposes that nature itself makes its transcendental transcendental laws specific in terms of some principle. Now this principle can only be that of [nature’s] appropriateness for the power of judgment itself, [i.e., for judgment’s attempt] to find among things, [despite] their immense diversity in terms of [all the] possible empirical laws, sufficient kinship to be able to bring them under empirical concepts (classes), and bring these under more general laws (higher genera), and so arrive at an empirical system of nature. (KU 215’)
Kant adds in a footnote, “One may wonder whether Linnaeus could have hoped to design a system of nature if he had had to worry that a stone which he found, and which he called granite, might differ in its inner character from any other stone even if it looked the same, so that all he could ever hope to find would be single things—isolated, as it were, for the understanding—but never a class of them that could be brought under concepts of genera and species” (KU 215’). Kant’s Kant’s critique is devastating because the claim of naturalists of the late eighteenth century was that they were doing purely empirical, that is, observational and descriptive, study, then using the power of their minds to select common characteristics from the diversity in order to classify the different genera and species. What Kant demonstrates is that the attempt to be objective and purely descriptive is informed by a host of assumptions about nature: that nature tends toward ever greater perfection, that everything in nature has a purpose, that kinds are unified and hierarchically structured, that all parts of nature fall into natural divisions under which individuals can be named. Naturalists’ assumptions about natural order shaped their observations, rather than the other way around. Goethe takes this critique one step farther by changing the order in which natural phenomena are usually considered.
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Rather than assuming that plants fall into exactly the same categories as animals, but on a hierarchical lower level, he takes as a s his point of departure the idea that the simplest and most universal of natural phenomena structure all natural forms. Through his studies of nature Goethe eventually came to reject the possibility of any real natural individual, that is, of a natural entity that is clearly demarcated and can be designated as a unity: No living thing is unitary in nature: every such thing is a plurality. Even the organism that appears to us as individual exists as a collection of independent living entities. Although alike in idea and predisposition, these entities, as they materialize, grow to become alike or similar, unlike or dissimilar. In part these entities are joined from the outset, in part they find their way together to form a union. They diverge and then seek each other again; everywhere and in every way they thus work to produce a chain of creation without end. 31
Goethe understands nature instead as a collection of vital forces that mutually transform one another. This depiction forms the basis of the vegetative soul, and for an alternative plant-like model of subjectivity that others would graft onto Goethe’s Goethe’s theory of nature. The basis of natural growth is the process of formation rather than the substrate of form, so that every natural being is subject to constant metamorphosis. For the human being this metamorphosis takes place, at least as far as we can be aware of it, on a level that might be called spiritual or even magical, intimately involving both the mind and sensory perception. In 1812, after the publication of his Theory of Color, Goethe wrote to Carl Windischmann, who had written a favorable review of the work: The incredible discoveries of chemistry have already given powerful expression to the element of magic in nature, so that we need not be afraid to approach her in a higher sense, stimulating and encouraging a dynamic, inspired view in all people. We have no need to concern ourselves with atomistic, materialistic, mechanistic approaches, approaches, for these ways of thought will never lack for supporters and friends. 32
This interest in the magical qualities in nature can be seen not only in Goethe’s Goethe’s scientific studies but also in his literary works. The most well known example is the novel Die Wahlverwandschaften, or Elective Affinities, as the title has been translated. The English title does not attest as well as the German to the scientific origin of the idea around which the narrative is constructed. The word Wahlverwandschaften was a strictly technical term used in eighteenth-century chemistry to indicate substances that when brought together immediately lay hold of and
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mutually affect each other, becoming, in their union, a new substance.33 Goethe was particularly impressed by the way in which apparently lifeless chemical substances would spring into activity when they came into contact, seeking each other out, attracting, seizing hold of, and intimately uniting with each other, destroying one or both of the original elements in the process. Another less often remarked discussion of a natural phenomenon precedes that of magnetism or chemical attractions in Elective Affinities. The novel opens with a scene of Eduard grafting new shoots onto young trees. Goethe uses this image to illustrate his belief that the capacity of plants to graft onto each other is analogous to chemical combination and to magnetic attraction, that parallel natural processes unite the realms of chemistry, physics, biology, and human love. Unlike animals, plants can actually grow together as one when properly brought into contiguity, contiguity, which further complicates the notion of natural individuality. individuality. The theme of grafting thus alternates with that t hat of the union and separation of chemical and magnetic phenomena. Goethe identifies what he considered to be the “two great driving forces of nature” as polarity (Polarität) and enhancement or intensification (Steigerung). Polarity, according to Goethe, is a property of nature insofar as it is thought of as “natural,” and intensification is a property of nature thought of as spiritual. He calls polarity “a state of constant attraction and repulsion” and intensification “a state of ever-striving ascent.” These two forces affect mind and body equally: “Since matter can never exist and act without spirit, nor spirit without matter, matter, matter is also capable of undergoing intensification and spirit cannot be denied its attraction and repulsion.”34 Following, among others, Leibniz, Lessing, Herder, Baader, and Schelling, Goethe regards the phenomenon of magnetism as “originary” in the same sense that the metamorphosis of plants is: neither phenomenon belongs strictly to either the realm of matter or that of spirit, neither fluctuation can be called purely qualitative or purely quantitative. Baader called the “polarity of conjoining [Bindung] and liberating [Befreiung]” the “key” to all nature. 35 Goethe ultimately uses the concept of polarity to explain metamorphosis in The Metamorphosis of Plants in terms of expansion and contraction, as well as to explain the theory of color. It is important to remember that polarity signifies, for all of these thinkers, more than simply a material phenomenon. Indeed, polarity was considered to be spiritual, both in the sense that it was significant for understanding human freedom and thinking, but also in that it was a universal explanatory principle for all natural phenomena. Intensification, a continual process through a series of augmenting stages (Steigerung), together with polarity, characterize metamorphosis as Goethe describes it. Intensification refers to a series of stages in the
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transformation of one shape or form into another such that the end form might not bear any traces of the beginning. Intensification occurs through polarity; for example, the plant metamorphoses into ever more specialized limbs or members (Glieder) through successive expansions and contractions. Whatever most transforms itself manifests the highest spirituality; parts of the plant (to take just one example) that do not change through growth, such as the root, are considered least important. The fact that Goethe carries out such observations primarily “empirically” with reference to plant metamorphosis does not in any way vitiate his conviction that such a process is characteristic of all life, just as he expected that the process that the principle of polarity or magnetism manifested physically show itself equally in human relations and in elemental chemistry. Goethe does not simply use his scientific studies to provide colorful metaphors for his literature, but believes that if a scientific principle is worthwhile, it will be relevant for all the forms that life takes. Both Schelling and Hegel also use the notions of polarity and intensification; Schelling describes intensification in terms of potencies, and Hegel creates out of this conception of potencies the different levels of actuality of the Begriff .36 The plant holds a fascination for Goethe for some of the same reasons that Hegel ultimately dismisses it: plant parts seem to sustain the broadest possible contact with the world. The shape of a leaf is spread out, thin and flat, to provide maximum exposure to the sun; the roots and stems and leaves of the plant proliferate to allow it to bring in as much moisture, oxygen, and light as possible, to make it grow as widely as it can, with no limitations prefigured into it. A plant is, to a greater extent than any animal, conductor, blossom, and possible victim of its immediate environment. It cannot avoid taking in poison if it is intermixed with the water that flows around its roots. Not shaped like a container, the plant strictly speaking neither excretes nor ingests; it simply provides a conduit for whatever fluids, gases, and soluble particles with which it comes into contact. It cannot run from danger, nor refuse to “eat” or “drink.” By contrast, a plant can be broken off from its origin and replanted, and the fragment will generate a plant as large as the one from which it came. Thus, a plant’s future (like the trajectory of a human life, Goethe would say) is open-ended, unpredictable, contingent, fragile. This more than anything, it seems likely, leads Goethe to concentrate first and foremost on the realm of vegetable life in his study of nature. Human art, however, tends to shape nature according to the qualities science has attributed to the organism. In Elective Affinities Goethe expresses this thought through the Captain, who says that the human being appropriates every other part of nature for itself: “And that is how he treats everything he discovers
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outside himself; his wisdom and his folly, his will and his caprices, he lends to the beasts, the plants, the elements and the gods.” 37 In the opening scene of Faust , Faust invokes the spirit of the Earth (Erdgeist), who addresses him, as it might have addressed Goethe, with the words: Du hast mich mächtig angezogen An meiner Sphäre lang’ gesogen
You pulled me in powerfully Have long been sucking at my sphere38
The word suck conveys the compulsive quality of the search into the essence of organic life. The action of sucking is characteristic, however, not of the animal, who roams the earth and sips from its surfaces, but of the plant, whose organs for the procuring of fluids probe deep into the soil and remove its fluid through a manipulation of pressure. Thus, the thoughtful, creative, or curious human being is described in terms of the plant: transfixed, demanding, capable of changing what it receives into myriad forms, vulnerable. The Earth-spirit then describes its own eternal activity: In Lebensfluten, im Tatensturm, Wall ich auf und ab Webe hin und her! Geburt und Grab, Ein ewiges Meer, Ein wechselnd Weben, Ein glühend Leben, So schaff’ ich am sausenden Webestuhl der Zeit, Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid.
In tides of life and storm of deeds, I well up and descend, Weave back and forth! Birth and grave, An eternal sea, A changing tapestry, An ardent life I create at the whirring loom of time, And weave the Godhead’s living mantle.39
This description of the Earth-spirit is directly based on Goethe’s scientific studies, in which he concludes that polarity, an alternation of expansion and contraction, given here in terms of a metaphor of weaving together two strands, was the way in which all organic life appears. To call this a “form” in any static sense would be misleading, for the Urphenomenon precisely expresses that location where form and content, frame and enframed, structure and phenomenon, cannot be separated. The fabric woven out of the opposing forces, the material nature of the organic, is the weaving, as are the strands and their interrelatedness. Here, Goethe seems to invoke the rhythm of the waves that Benveniste declares to be a mistaken derivation; yet the connection to the incipient
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force of metamorphosis is preserved. In Elective Affinities this Ur-phenomenon is magnetism or attraction beyond the power of human willpower, expressed in terms of chemical substances that must unite when they are placed in proximity, and in terms of plants, which when placed in proper contiguity will grow together like the edges of a wound. In The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister, the coming of age of a young man is described in the terms of the metamorphosis of a plant. For every forward movement there is a corresponding pull backward, and the reshaping of a human being takes place always only through both growth and retrogression. Goethe considers the scientific theories of evolution and epigenesis to be inadequate to explain the origin of organic life. Epigenesis, as described in the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (which Goethe reread after noticing a reference to it in Kant’s Critique of Judgment ),40 assumes the existence of a vis essentialis, a life force that had a generative power and preceded the material formation of organisms. Goethe understands “force” and “matter” to be concomitant phenomena, inseparable from each other. Blumenbach’s theory places force prior to matter, thus anthropomorphizing force, according to Goethe, into a kind of artist who brings form forth. Such a theory contains an implicit assumption of intentional purposiveness. Goethe equally objected to the theory of evolution because it credits environmental, and thus non-living factors, with the directive power of shaping organisms. According to Goethe, developed and complex organic life can arise neither solely because of what is contained in germinal form in primitive organisms nor as the result of contingent environmental influences. 41 In the introduction to the illustrated German edition of The Metamorphosis of Plants, Rudolf Steiner notes that Goethe and Darwin, while starting from similar observations of plants, came up with opposing hypotheses about the origin of plant life. From the fact that all external distinguishing marks of plants are impermanent and constantly changing, Darwin concluded that there was nothing constant in plant life. Goethe, on the contrary, adduces from the same observation that what is constant about plant life must lie deeper than appearances. Goethe’s goal is to find this element common to all external variability, while Darwin seeks the origins of variation in singular (and external) causes. 42 Goethe distinguishes three types of plant metamorphosis: regular (regelmäßig), irregular, and contingent. Regular metamorphosis can also be called “progressive,” while the irregular type is retrogressive (rückschreitende). The third type of plant metamorphosis occurs through contingent, external causes such as pollination through the flight of insects. Goethe calls irregular metamorphosis “weak and ineffective,” and contingent metamorphosis “monstrous,” and from the
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beginning decides to leave any study of these types of metamorphosis to a later date, “in order to reach our aim in the surest way.” 43 Although Goethe rules out irregularity and contingency here, he held Zufall , contingency or chance, in the highest esteem. As the Greek tyche, it is one of the “Orphic” words, along with “daimonic,” “eros,” and “ananke,” that he describes in his poem “Primal Words, Orphic” (1817–1818). 44 The section of the poem entitled “The Contingent” begins as follows: Die strenge Grenze doch umgeht gefällig Ein Wandelndes, das mit und um uns wandelt
The strict boundary obligingly shifts A changeling that plays with us and around us [or: A changeling that alters with us and about us easily circumvents the strict boundary]45
As the poem explicitly goes on to suggest, life can proceed one way and then immediately shift to its contrary. This quality permeates the natural. However, Goethe specifies that a work cannot be written about the contingencies in metamorphosis, for the completion of such a work would render its subject matter predictable, chartable, and thus no longer a product of chance. In plant life Goethe discovers evidence of a spiritual nature not generally associated with vegetation. Rather than characterizing plants, as many have, as “innocent” or “passive,” Goethe observes the immediate and constant contact plants have with the sun and the open air, an atmosphere that he calls “rarefied.” We can see, in a conversation with Eckermann (1828), exactly how Goethe considers the spiritual effects of particular environments and external influences: Wine contains powers of productivity of a very significant kind; but it all depends on the conditions and time and hour, and what aids one person may harm another. There are more distant powers of productivity in rest and in sleep; but there are also such powers in movement. Such powers lie in water, and most particularly in the atmosphere.—The fresh air of the open fields is the true place where we belong; it is as if the spirit of God breathes unmediated on humans there, and a divine power exerts its influence.—Lord Byron, who spent many hours a day in the open air, sometimes riding horseback at the edge of the sea, sometimes sailing in or rowing a boat, sometimes bathing in the sea and exercising his bodily strength by swimming, was one of the most productive people that has ever lived. 46
Given this understanding of the intimate relationship between atmosphere and organism, it is not surprising that Goethe was fascinated with
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plants, which have an even more immediate exchange with the environment than animals do. Goethe ascribes the initial development of leaves from the leaf stalk to a growth toward the light from openings that are already present in the seed in the form of potential nodes. He explains metamorphosis primarily through the concept of anastomosis (literally: the process of the opening of mouths), a term used to designate the connection of branches in rivers, blood vessels, or, as in this case, in the veins of leaves. In describing anastomosis, Goethe does seem to relapse into an “animalization” of plants of a sort. He describes plant parts as “wings” (the two initial leaves of the cotyledon), “eyes” (the source of nodes from which stems will branch out), and “mouths” (the stoma). However, this is standard botanical terminology. It is through these openings of various kinds, these extensions out into the world, stretching toward water, gases, and sunlight, that the spiritual can have its influence. “Anastomosis” refers to the process of expansion and contraction or of diremption and unification in terms of the forms created by this continual process. Goethe concludes that the relative coarseness of plants growing at lower altitudes or underwater is due to a lack of abundant and rarefied natural gases that causes these plants to grow to a lesser spiritual level. In other words, the environment and the plant are not seen as two separate entities working upon each other, but as two inseparable sides of a formative process. In his discussion of the transition to flowering, Goethe notes that in cases where plants are frequently nourished (Nahrung —referring to water or fertilizer, rather than to the effect of the sun), their flowering is hampered, because the plant is too busy drawing off the coarser juices of the immediate nourishment to be able to develop flowers. When the plant is deprived of nourishment, however, the transformation takes place unhindered. Goethe ties in this observation of nature to the way in which human genius must be tended. He tells Eckermann, “My advice is . . . to force nothing, and rather spend unproductive days and hours doing nothing, or sleeping, rather than wanting to produce something— in which one will later have no joy—on such days.”47 Letting the plant (or the mind) lie still without the interference of excessive coarse nourishment allows for the production of “highly purified juices” (höchst reine Säfte) that when present in the plant effect the metamorphosis from leaf to calyx, the outermost protective sheath of the flower that resembles both leaf and petal. The calyx is formed through the contraction of already formed leaves around one axis, so that they become closely packed in a circle. In their highly proximate state, the leaves “anastomose through the influence of the highly purified juices” (MP 36).
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Goethe at times seems to name the leaf as that part of the plant from which and into which all other parts metamorphose, as the form of the Ur-plant, but “leaf” is used in a metaphorical sense, where “metaphor” indicates not a physical mask for a spiritual reality, but precisely the point at which the ambiguity or confluence of physical and spiritual must be maintained, where the two realms cannot be distinguished. “Leaf” does not correspond to either a concept or an object. In his “Italian Journey,” Goethe calls the leaf the “veritable Proteus” that lies hidden under what we are accustomed to speaking of as a leaf. 48 Although Goethe’s understanding of the Ur-plant, as well as his entire point of departure as a botanist, would seem to open him to the Kantian critique of being enmeshed in determinate concepts as opposed to a universal idea, Goethe recognized his own affinity with Kant’s project. In his Maxims and Reflections, Goethe expressed what he understands to be the treason of Kant’s collapse of the sublime in nature into the architectonic of human reason in ironic terms: “When Ur-phenomena stand unveiled before our senses,” Goethe writes, “we become nervous, even anxious. The sensory person seeks salvation in astonishment, but soon that busy matchmaker, Understanding, arrives with her efforts to marry the highest to the lowest.”49 The notion of “leaf” as “Proteus” encompasses the process of metamorphosis. The plant is always leaf “backwards and forwards,” that is, it is potentially leaf, or just-having-been-leaf, so that all three dimensions of time are incorporated into the Ur-plant. In order to fully understand Goethe’s conviction that the material and the spiritual are inextricably intertwined, and that this imbrication both can be viewed in nature and must be described in scientific explanation, it is necessary to take a close look at Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants. Though the book is presented as a scientific description of the growth of plants, it constantly refers back to phenomena of human development, as we have seen in the descriptions of the mutual influencing of plants on and by their environment, and as we will see in the definitions of terms such as metamorphosis and anastomosis. What follows is an outline of the central arguments of that work. The plant grows through an initial expansion (Ausdehnung) of stem and leaves from the seed, followed by a contraction (Zusammenziehung) in the development of the calyx. Thus Goethe relates the phenomenon of plant metamorphosis to cosmic (and universally explanatory) phenomena such as magnetism and polarity. The corolla of the flower, the next to emerge, does so through an expansion. The petals of the flower are larger, softer, more colorful, and more fragrant than the calyx, which Goethe takes as evidence of the corolla’s greater refinement as a stage of metamorphosis. However, according to Goethe, the highest degree of purity of vegetal juices would appear white and colorless (MP
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42). Goethe’s theory that the metamorphosis of plants takes place through the progressive refinement of juices is based on the medical work of Hippocrates and Paracelsus. Expansion is followed in turn by another contraction, this time of the petals into the stamens that will bear the anthers, the organs at the top of the stamen that secrete and discharge pollen. Goethe describes with obvious wonder the way in which the same petal that emerged as an expansion of the calyx (itself a contraction of a collection of leaves, that expanded from the initial cotyledon), now rolls up or thickens, at the middle and at the sides, to become the stamen. This phenomenon can be observed in the tulip, in which half of the petal remains green, as a part of the calyx, and the other half rises up colorfully as part of the corolla. Some flowers are doubled, meaning that some petals remain as petals of the corolla, while others form stamens with anthers. There is no separated and coexisting network of organs; rather, each part metamorphoses into the next, although some part of each always remains in excess of the process. Thus, Goethe writes, “we are made even more aware of the alternating effects of contraction and expansion by which nature finally attains its goal” (MP 43). The notion of “spiritual anastomosis,” by which Goethe explains the sexual reproduction of flowers, stems from this fundamental polarity of contraction and expansion. Like a river, which begins with one stream but branches out into a network of capillaries, giving it many branches yet only one mouth, the plant expands and contracts by the branching out of what was once unified (through expansion) and the subsequent reunification of those various strands in a form that differs from their original unity. Thus, seed becomes stem becomes leaf becomes calyx becomes corolla becomes “nectaries” (called “gradual transitions from petals to stamens”), and nectaries become stamens and carpels, each division leading to a smaller and more specialized organ. Anastomosis refers to a process that continues throughout the life of the plant rather than a stage in plant growth. In sexual reproduction, anastomosis occurs “on a spiritual level.” At least Goethe is inclined to say it does, “in the belief that, at least for a moment, this brings the concepts of growth and reproduction closer together” (MP 50). In so doing, Goethe wants to show that the male and female organs—of the plant, for now—are intimately related (both are metamorphoses of the same organ) to the point of being identical, at least in a “spiritual” way. Thus, male and female are manifestations of outwardly divided yet inwardly closely related structures.50 This form provided a model for later Idealist theories of diremption and reunification. Both male and female are produced by spiral vessels, as are all the organs of the plant. Goethe identified the “spiral tendency” in plants as
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“the basic law of life.” Plants have a vertical tendency that controls the upward growth and the resiliency of the plant, and an axial tendency that provides nourishment and controls the development of nodes and specialized organs. Goethe goes farther, calling the vertical tendency the “spiritual staff” or the “vital principle” of the plant, the axial tendency the principle of “eager development.” In his discussion of these tendencies Goethe comes closest to anthropomorphizing the plant, and we can plainly see a parallel to principles of “spiritual” human growth. When the vertical tendency is neglected, for example, Goethe writes, the plant will “lose itself in the rush to develop an excessive number of eyes.” 51 Goethe ascribes the contractive growth of plants to the spiral vessels, and the expansive growth to the sap vessels. When the sap vessels have greater strength, the plant grows upward and outward, and when the spiral vessels predominate specialized organs are created. When male and female parts emerge, they do so out of a momentary overcoming of the expansive force by the contractive force. An excess of expansive force remains, and is released by the squeezing motion, as it were, of the formation of the reproductive organs. Through this excess of expansive force, the male stamen and its yearning anther full of pollen move toward the female style, equally stretching forward in the working off of the excess expansion. They meet, unite, fertilize, but always only “on a spiritual level.” Goethe identifies the fruit of the plant as the stage of greatest expansion, and the seed that of greatest contraction. He explains the growth of the fruit through a complex series of metamorphoses that include both contraction and expansion, however. The pod containing seeds develops from a leaf folding over and contracting together. These pods then merge together around an axis to form the fruit capsule. Finally, the pods, drawing juices from the entire plant, direct these juices into their merged mass in order to nourish and expand it. Goethe had the interior of a sample of such a distended pod analyzed, and discovered therein what he called a “pure air” (eine reine Luft), which he took to play a part in the engorgement and swelling of the fruit. Thus, Goethe identifies six separate stages of plant metamorphosis, all of which he claimed were simply reconfigurations of already present parts through expansion and contraction. They were, to recapitulate, 1) the expansion from the seed to the development of the stem leaf, 2) the formation of the calyx through contraction, 3) the growth of flower petals through expansion, 4) the shaping of the reproductive parts through contraction, 5) the appearance of the fruit through expansion, and 6) the formation of the final seed that disperses through contraction. The culmination of the developmental process of the plant in a point of contraction might seem to point to a Hegelian notion of final
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interiorization, as far as it can go in plant form. However, Goethe’s emphasis is never on the final point, but always on the process. The seed always remains poised to reexpand. The process remains that of a fluctuation, an alternation, a rhythm, and the fact that one part metamorphoses out of another means that the two are intimately related, as well as equal: one cannot take the other up into itself. Goethe next turns to the nodes, those swollen points on a plant where a leaf, bud, or other organ diverges from the stem to which it is attached. In his Philosophy of Nature Hegel dismisses plants as “monstrous” because of their capacity to break off from the parent and become plants in their own right, so that not just the seed and the reproductive organs take part in continuing the species, but any random and arbitrary cutting can be replanted and sprout roots. Goethe takes this feature of plants to be anything but monstrous. The development of eyes—those places that are so similar to ripe seeds in their status as “potential plants”—at the site of the nodes promises the indefinite expansion of the plant, which refuses to remain as a single individual. The plant becomes both undefined and multiple. The only way in which eyes and seeds can be distinguished as origin once a plant has sprouted and grown its own roots, especially in plants with a less differentiated structure, is by “an act of reason” (MP 63). Thus, seeds and eyes are virtually indistinguishable once sprouted, and closely related. Nevertheless, the eyes are responsible for a feature of plant growth that cannot proceed from a simple seed. This is the formation of composite flowers and fruits, multiple blossoms or fruits gathering around a single calyx. Although the eye, according to Goethe, must be considered to be a separate small plant “planted” on the parent plant in the same way a seed would be planted in the ground, it receives “purer juices” from the parent plant (being situated higher up in the metamorphic process) than the seed would directly from the earth, and the eye can often produce calyx and flower without needing to go through the prior stage of metamorphosis from seed to stem to leaf. In other words, the first stage of metamorphosis itself is contracted or compacted in the second stage of sprouting from an eye. Indeed, Goethe goes on to hypothesize that the difference between perennial and annual plants lies precisely in this ability to compact various stages into a shorter time span. What takes a perennial such as a fruit tree six years to achieve, an annual can fit into the space of a single season. Goethe explains the difference according to the greater purification or rarefaction of juices in annuals. The eye’s position higher up in the process of metamorphosis than the seed allows growth from the eye to proceed at an accelerated rate, skipping some of the intermediate stages and proceeding directly from stem to calyx.
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Goethe rejects Linnaeus’s theory that even for annuals, normal growth was intended by nature to take six years, one year for each of the stages we have mentioned above, even though he does accept the stages as those of metamorphosis. Linnaeus’s theory of prolepsis, or anticipation, stated that when a plant blossomed or produced fruit before the six years were up, this was due to an anticipation of up to six years’ growth. In other words, Linnaeus wanted to specify a “normal” growth rate and explain all exceptions in relation to this. While Goethe accepts that plants expand and contract at different rates, he took as his point of departure not the tree—which Linnaeus had observed—but the annual plant, where to speak of six years’ growth seems absurd. Goethe bypasses Linnaeus’s explanation based on the flowering and fruit-bearing tree by making the explanatory principle metamorphosis between stages and not the classifiable stages within the life of the plant. The temporal explanation by means of annual stages has the disadvantage of having to account for every exception to the rule of six years’ growth. Metamorphosis, by contrast, states that the basic and only organ of the plant is the leaf, and that the leaf undergoes various metamorphoses— into root, stem, flower, fruit, seed—as a result of expansion and contraction depending on what type of juices flow into it, these in turn depending in part on the contingencies of its environment. A plant that only receives crude juices will be merely a vegetating plant, according to Goethe, and not produce flowers or fruit. A plant in which rarefied (geistigen) juices predominate will bear flowers and fruit (MP 75). We can easily foresee the analogies Goethe would be able to draw between plant morphology and human spiritual development. Goethe’s analysis bears on a revised sense of temporality that arose with the positing of the notion of “organism” and the central position it assumed in the science of the eighteenth century. Elizabeth Von Thadden argues that the first observations of organic life through a microscope (from 1625 on), and particularly the proof of the self-reproductive nature of an organism after it has been divided (von Trembley’s experiments with polyps in 1740, A. v. Haller’s work in the field of vivisection), led to the establishment of the organism—as an ordered and simultaneously dynamic whole—as the primary metaphor for wholeness. Of course, the functions of the organism, its growth, reproductive capacity, and irritability all call for a different conception of the temporality of wholeness. No longer can the whole be regarded as somehow outside of time.52 These experiments are particularly interesting for our discussion here, since the question they raised was precisely the propriety of the distinction between plants and animals. Willey describes Trembley’s experiment, in which he cut polyps up into several parts and each part became a fresh polyp: “They are propagated by cuttings,
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therefore they must be animals. No, that won’t do; they must be both plant and animal together.”53 This blurring of the distinction between plant and animal precisely on the question of where a body begins and ends intensifies questions of individuation and selfhood. Goethe focuses on the annual plant because of the contraction and intensification of the successive temporal process he observes there, not because he is attempting to regard generation as outside of time. Goethe writes, “If we consider a plant insofar as it externalizes [äußert] its lifeforce [Lebenskraft], we see this occurring in a dual manner: first through growth, in that it puts forth stem and leaves, and then through reproduction [Fortpflanzung], which culminates in the formation of flower and fruit” (MP 75). The temporalities of the plant’s two ways of “externalizing” or “expressing” life-force are completely different. The vegetative growth is a sequence of individual developments occurring successively, one from the other. The formation of the fruit and flower occurs “simultaneously,” or “all at once,” according to Goethe. For Goethe, “simultaneity” refers to the greatest possible contraction of life forces into a compressed or dense moment, what he describes, in his autobiography, as a moment where “time contracts and space expands.” Goethe calls moments like this “daimonic” when they occur in the context of human existence. 54 Goethe goes even farther in trying to adjust the structure of his own thinking to the natural form of things. He writes appreciatively of the compliment given him by a reader who characterized his scientific thinking as “objective” (gegenständlich) in the peculiar sense of conforming to objects: “He says that my thinking works objectively. Here he means that my thinking is not separate from objects; that the elements of the object, the perceptions of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it—that my perception itself is a thinking and my thinking a perception.”55 Goethe inaugurated the idea of a kind of bodily thinking, thinking as vigilant receptivity that waits for the body to be imprinted by the other natural forces about it, for their truth eventually to manifest itself, however partially, upon it, rather than an aggressive setting upon nature and attempting to force its secrets from it, in the Kantian or Hegelian manner. In response to the compliment, Goethe seeks to make this thinking explicit. He writes: “Nature will reveal nothing under torture; its frank answer to an honest question is Yes! Yes!—No! No!”56 This understanding of the ambivalence of nature’s manifestations when subjected to observation and experiment has lost some of the radicality it must have had when Goethe first put it forth. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, Newton’s influence had just worked something of a revolution in scientific method. Scientists believed it was
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possible to obtain results that were untainted by theological assumptions or “outdated” world views simply through empirical methods. Goethe’s proviso that the scientist, too, must be as open to metamorphosis as the nature he or she is observing admits from the outset that the scientist is as likely to get no comprehensible answer as he or she is to be enlightened by the dominant scientific method of observing—and prodding—nature. Goethe’s method of observation is not “objective” in the well-worn, little-reflected-upon sense in which it is often used in contradistinction to “subjective.” Rather, Goethe was well aware of the impossibility of observation without bringing a host of assumptions to bear upon the “facts,” the impossibility of “objectivity” as it is commonly assumed. In the preface to his Theory of Color, Goethe writes: An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never met, even by those who make it: i.e., that empirical data should be presented without any theoretical context, leaving the reader, the student, to his own devices in judging it. This demand seems odd because it is useless simply to look at something. Every act of looking turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act of reflection into the making of associations; thus it is evident that we theorize every time we look carefully at the world. 57
This observation sounds quite familiar today, but it was written almost two hundred years before the time of Thomas Kuhn.58 In his essay “The Experiment as Mediator Between Subject and Object,” Goethe observes that the propensity to make connections between isolated phenomena increases in an inverse ratio to the lack of instances upon which the unity is posited, a tendency that he links to the pleasure the human mind takes in projecting coherence onto what appears to be chaotic. Goethe, like Kant, finds this tendency to be unavoidable; unlike Kant, however, he does not specify the conditions under which such a systemization would be acceptable, but rather outlines the method through which its rashness can be mitigated. Again like Kant, Goethe specifies that this tendency “springs by necessity from the organization of our being.”59 Both botany and chromatics, the subjects of The Metamorphosis of Plants and Theory of Color, Goethe’s two most important scientific works, deal with what one commentator calls “boundary situations,” contexts in which “it can become immediately evident that all perception is grounded in a realm beyond the split between subject and object.”60 When analyzing both botanical development and the play of light, we do not actually see plant growth or light itself, but rather must construct them out of our knowledge of their structure: “Thus for Goethe, botany and chromatics were valuable not only for the intrinsic interest and dignity of their subject matter, but above all because of their propaedeutic value; because there the contribution of the perceiving sub-
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ject to the construction of the phenomenon is immediately apparent.” 61 Although Goethe also conducted studies in animal skeletal metamorphosis (osteology) and meteorology, studies that also took metamorphosis as their basis, the principles of transformation of form were not as immediately evident in these areas. Goethe’s method of studying plant morphology consists in both careful observation and expectant waiting. He wrote, “My question to the object is answered by what is in me,” thus rejecting a simple opposition between inside and outside, or between subjective and objective knowledge. Goethe believes that the only way a human being can have access to the truth of nature was by letting nature imprint itself on the human body. Goethe is aware that nature is not independent of the way in which it is approached by the human observer, that we structure nature in turning our thought to it. The method of objective thinking assumes a mutual influencing between natural and cultural development in the very way an organism interacts with its physical environment. As the same commentator puts it, “Goethe’s scientific ideal is to allow oneself to be transformed in following the transformations of the phenomena. Thus, for Goethe, the ultimate aim of science is nothing other than the metamorphosis of the scientist .”62 Scientific discoveries in their early stages, writes Goethe, conceal as much as they reveal, and can paralyze the very progress they hope to set in motion: “Like an architect who enters a palace by the side door and then tries to relate everything in his descriptions and drawings to the minor aspect he encountered first.” 63 If the scientist and thus science metamorphose along with nature, there can never be only one “natural” way for humans to pursue their knowledge of nature. In the end the notion of a whole (or a totality, in Kant’s sense) can only be constructed from the point of view of the observer in his or her capacity as synthesizer, but this whole has none of the implications of stability or endurance in space and time because form is understood as rhythm. Unity becomes a purely discursive concept. In an essay on style, Goethe stipulates that an artist becomes great and decisive only to the degree that in addition to his talents he is also an educated botanist; when he knows, from the roots up, what the influence of the various parts are on the thriving and the growth of the plant, when he recognizes its identifying characteristics and its reciprocal effects, when he observes and reflects upon the successive development of the leaves, flowers, the fertilization, the fruit and the new seeds. Then he will not simply show his taste by choosing among appearances, but through a proper presentation of qualities he will also set us to wondering and instruct us. In this sense one would be able to say that he has a style. 64
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Goethe himself strove to be “plant-like” in the sense we have been using all along: to wait, listen, write, to claim no overarching morality nor any theory that refused the possibility of constant revision. Goethe’s literary characters almost always have the quality of being strangely unformed. They do not themselves know exactly where they are going or how they will reach their goals. Any person who seems to know and to plan in advance for his or her future will inevitably go astray through circumstances beyond human control. In Elective Affinities, each of the four main characters is magnetically drawn against his or her explicit will to crosspollinate—this metaphor is not made explicit but is entirely consonant with Goethe’s scientific knowledge and his belief in the interrelatedness of all natural phenomena—with the mate or intended mate of the other. In Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship the protagonist constantly makes plans to leave the squalid theatrical company with which he becomes involved while on a business trip for his father, and then sinks back into it without any reason given for his lack of resolve. These characters are plants that grow and twist toward the light no matter what direction it comes from, but the light represents no ultimate good or even a consistent path. In his brilliant essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” Walter Benjamin refers to a commentary on Goethe’s novel by the literary critic Friedrich Gundolf, a disciple of Stephan George. Gundolf compared the fateful existence of the four characters in Elective Affinities to the life of plants, aligning seed, blossom, and fruit with Goethe’s conception of law, fate, and character. Benjamin objects strenuously to this interpretation on the grounds that “fate . . . does not affect the life of innocent plants.”65 On Benjamin’s view, the culpability of the characters is central to the narrative. However, the attribution of innocence to plants is misplaced with reference to Goethe. Hegel (taking much, it is true, from Goethe’s Metamor phosis of Plants in describing vegetable nature) is the thinker who indelibly inscribes the plant with the attribute of “innocence,” in both the Philosophy of Nature and the Phenomenology of Spirit . For Goethe, however, metamorphosis and vulnerability in the face of the overwhelming influence of natural forces can be seen most clearly in plants, and this alone makes them commensurable in some way with human experience. Goethe never calls the plant innocent. It is the plant’s visible metamorphosis, and not its lack of consciousness or intention, that distinguishes it. Even so, the issue of lack of self-consciousness may be significant, though not in the sense to which Benjamin objects. Eckermann has recorded a long monologue of Goethe’s from April 1829 on the human situation, and on the question of whether humans can know themselves: “Throughout the ages people have said and repeated,” Goethe went on, “that one should strive to know oneself. This is a strange injunction, that
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up till now no one has satisfied, and no one actually should satisfy. With all his sense perceptions and drives, the human being is instructed by appearances, by the world around him, and his job is to learn to know it as far as possible, and to make himself of as much service to it as required for his purposes. Himself he can only know when he enjoys something or suffers, and thus he will be taught about himself through suffering or joy, by whatever he seeks for or seeks to avoid. Besides, the human is a dark being [ein dunkles Wesen]; he knows not whence he comes nor where he is going, he knows little of the world and least of all about himself. I don’t know myself either, and God must safeguard me from that too.” 66
This belief is paramount in Elective Affinities. Eduard and Charlotte, lovers who were not allowed to marry in impetuous youth, but who have come together in calmer middle age after both of their more suitable spouses have disappeared, through death or divorce, now plan and execute the perfect life together. Their relationship is based on open communication and complete trust, their lives are divided into times for worthy occupation and times for pleasure, and the particular symbol of their successful planning is the extensive gardens—English gardens— they are planting, complete with paved walkways and a pavilion that claims the most auspicious view of their entire estate. Yet precisely this situation of an ideal relationship built on long-term love and trust, responsibility, and mature planning erupts into the most chaotic of reversals: each of the spouses falls under the spell of an overwhelming attraction to one of their two long-term house guests. Eduard spiritually connects with Ottilie, while Charlotte is like a seed blown toward the Captain. The odd—perhaps monstrous, by some accounts, especially that of the character called “Mittler” or “mediator”—flowering of this cross-pollination is a child born of the sexual intercourse between Eduard and Charlotte who nevertheless resembles both Ottilie and the Captain, a child apparently propagated through a kind of “spiritual anastomosis.” Despite the superbly well-planned gardens that surround them, the protagonists succumb to nature’s way of perpetuating the plant species. Eduard takes great pride in the trees he has planted that have grown up tall and strong and seemingly permanent, but he himself is uprooted from his home by his unseemly love for Ottilie. The cause of the chaos, Goethe implies, is that human beings project their own desires of what nature is to be onto nature, an act that may proceed smoothly, but may also go awry. Like Kant in the third Critique, Goethe criticizes the notion that nature can be tamed into a “standing reserve”—to use a Heideggerian term—that serves the purposes of human beings. With the arrival of the Captain into Eduard and Charlotte’s lives, it seems that the project of the garden will be even more properly carried out, for the Captain has surveying tools and
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map-making skills. After looking at the Captain’s map, Eduard sees “his possessions taking shape on the paper like a new creation. It seemed to him that only now was he coming to know them, only now did they really belong to him.”67 But the projections on the map lead, if anything, to a plan with only the appearance of naturalness. Charlotte expresses the ideal of the English garden, after months of constructing walkways, pavilions, and artificial lakes: “If we are to enjoy our gardens they have to look like open country; there should be no evidence of art or constraint, we want to breathe the air in absolute freedom.” 68 Thus, Charlotte speaks like Kant, while the nature they seek to subdue nevertheless ultimately escapes their domination. The artificial lake drowns the child, and the pavilion becomes a grave. As Benjamin puts it, “At the height of their cultivation . . . they are subject to the forces that cultivation claims to have mastered, even if it may forever prove impotent to curb them.”69 A passage from the final section of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit , expresses the essence that Goethe tried to capture in the notion of the Ur-phenomenon and of metamorphosis. Speaking of himself, Goethe writes: He thought he could discover in nature—both animate and inanimate, with soul or without soul—something that manifests itself only in contradictions, and thus could not be grasped with any concept, still less with one word. It was not godlike, for it seemed irrational; not human, for it had no understanding; not diabolical, for it was beneficent; not angelic, for it often betrayed a malicious pleasure. It was like chance, for it gave no evidence of continuity; it was like Providence, for it suggested coherence. All that limits us it seemed to penetrate; it seemed to play willfully with the necessary elements of our existence; it contracted time and expanded space. It appeared to take pleasure in the impossible alone, while it rejected the possible with contempt. To this principle, which seemed to intervene between all other principles to separate them and to bind them together, I gave the name of daimonic, after the example of the ancients and others who had maintained something similar. I tried to save myself from this fearful thing, by taking refuge, as is my habit, behind an image. 70
We have already referred to this passage, above, for the “daimonic” is another word for the Ur-phenomenon. Goethe “takes refuge behind an image,” such as the image of the leaf in the metamorphosis of plants, but the image is not a “mere” image in the sense of a dispensable mask that may be removed in order to view the reality, however terrifying, beneath it. The idea of the daimonic is the idea of fate in Elective Affinities, according to Benjamin.71 For Goethe this idea signifies the
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beautiful that “comes forth to the limit of what can be grasped in the work of art.”72 Yet the limit becomes the impetus for yet another metamorphosis, yet another image in the process of Bildung that replaces the static sterility of the Gestalt. The Ur-phenomenon is not a terminus, but contains within its very essence the promise of an unending process that brings forth life, nature, and human thought. Goethe’s scientific-aesthetic project thus supplemented the intense interest excited by Kant’s third Critique, while his usage of plant metamorphosis to discuss both nature and subjectivity sparked nineteenthcentury literary and philosophical interest in what we have called the vegetative soul. We will now move to a literary work to see how the project of incorporating new models of the organism, particularly in the field of botany, led to a reconception of human subjectivity and its place within the natural world.
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“Nature,” Klingsohr replied, “is to our soul [Gemüt] what a body is to light. [The body] restrains [the light], refracts it into particular colors; it kindles on its surfaces or in its interior a light such that when the light equals its darkness, it makes the body clear or transparent, and when it exceeds the darkness it emerges from it to illuminate other bodies. But even the darkest body can by water, fire, and air be made bright and shining.” “I understand you, dear master. Human beings are crystals for our souls. They are transparent nature. . . . But tell me, dear master, whether or not I am right: it seems to me that just when one is most intimate with nature, one is least able and least willing to say anything about it.” “That depends on how one takes it,” Klingsohr replied. “Nature is one thing for our enjoyment and our heart, another for our understanding [Verstand], for the directive ability of our worldly powers. One must be careful not to neglect either one in favor of the other. There are many people who know only one side and disregard the other. But one can unite [vereinigen] the two and thereby come out well [sich wohl befinden]. It is a pity that so few think of this capacity to shift freely and easily within themselves, so that through a proper separation they can secure for themselves both the most purposive and the most natural uses of their powers. Generally one [use] hinders the other, and a helpless inertia
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gradually arises, so that if such people really want to rise up with all their powers, they fall into confusion and conflict, and everything stumbles clumsily all over itself.” —Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen
Goethe’s writing provides only one example of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century’s fascination with the trope of plant life. Botanical terminology taken directly from scientific works began to pervade writing, from literary criticism to literature itself to philosophy. This cross-pollination of science and art can be seen in German literary works from Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde to Hölderlin’s Hyperion, and in philosophical works such as Friedrich Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit . What is particularly interesting about these thinkers’ appropriation of the plant trope is their refusal to understand metaphor and analogy as purely decorative devices. As with Kant’s third Critique and Goethe’s literary and scientific writings, aesthetics and science were assumed to mutually inform each other. In the fragment entitled “The Oldest Program Towards a System in German Idealism” (1796), whose authorship has to this day not been unequivocally established,1 the question of the relationship between philosophy and art, science, and nature comes to the fore. It is interesting to note that the fragment could have been written either by the poet Hölderlin, or by the supreme philosopher of reason, Hegel (or for that matter by their mutual friend, Schelling). These three thinkers, while studying at Tübingen Seminary, read Kant’s third Critique together and plotted a new union of science and art, one that might effect in German philosophy a rebirth of the glory of Ancient Greece. The author(s) write(s): Mythology must become philosophical, and the people rational, while philosophy must become mythological, in order to make the philosophers sensuous. Then eternal unity will prevail among us. No more the contemptuous glance, no more the blind quaking of the people before their sages and priests. Only then can we expect the equal formation of all forces, in particular persons as well as in all individuals. No longer will any force be suppressed; then universal freedom and equality of spirits will prevail!2
The injunction that philosophy must become sensuous points to the importance placed on including aesthetic judgments in the conceptualization of thinking. Whether the text was written by Hölderlin, by Hegel, or by Schelling, the dispute as to its authorship shows the prox-
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imity of the three thinkers’ views with reference to the project of unifying science and art by lending philosophy a sensuous nature and art a philosophical grounding. In the 1800 novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, written by Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), a contemporary of the three thinkers, one encounters a striking analogy in which the relationship between the innermost nature or “soul” of the human being (the German word is Gemüt ) and the natural world is compared to the visual interaction of body (Körper) and light. We have seen the importance of the analogical structure in Kant’s Critique of Judgment , as well as the mistrust with which Goethe views the growing popularity of the use of analogy in the natural sciences. Yet Novalis puts this analogy into the speech of a character who has often been assumed to represent Goethe, namely the poet Klingsohr. 3 We open a discussion of Hölderlin by citing Novalis because this strange analogy exemplifies the concern that begins with Kant’s technic of nature in the third Critique and grows into a constant theme in German Idealism, namely, the articulation of the position of the human being within and vis-à-vis the natural world. The analogy expresses a relationship that concords with Goethe’s understanding of the way in which human thinking and the natural environment interact in the creation of philosophy, science, and art. The human being is only to be privileged by virtue of the power of human thinking to manifest truths about nature. In turn, still following Kant, the way in which these truths can be best expressed involves an aesthetic dimension. Nature is to our “soul” what a body is to light, the poet Klingsohr explains to Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the protagonist of Novalis’s story; the body restrains the light and refracts it into particular colors. The light in turn kindles a glow on the surface or in the interior of the body such that when the light equals the darkness of the body, it makes the body first translucent and then transparent, and when the light finally exceeds the darkness it issues forth to illuminate other bodies. In the same way, Klingsohr implies, nature restrains the human soul and refracts it into particular forms of determinate knowledge, including studies of nature itself. However, before the soul can serve to illuminate other things (which occurs when the light exceeds the darkness), it first must make the original body (nature itself) transparent. Self-knowledge, too, as a particular form of knowledge, proceeds only out of knowledge of nature; each kind of knowledge can be achieved only by virtue of the illumination of the human soul after it has passed through nature. Selfknowledge and knowledge of nature implicate each other, as is indicated by a reversal of direction in the analogy. Initially, the soul is compared to light and nature to a body. The sentence begins with what nature does, namely, it restrains and refracts the power of the soul. But then
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what kindles a glow on the surface or in the interior of the body cannot be nature illuminating the human mind, but must be the reverse, since nature was compared to a body. Knowledge of nature and self-knowledge are mutually dependent. The German word Gemüt means something like “ownmost disposition” or “inner nature,” or what is “in one’s heart of hearts.” Hölderlin will refer to something similar when he writes of what is most innig , most intimate or intense. Gemüt is sometimes translated as “mind” or “intellect” or “spirit.” The first two translations are particularly misleading, since, as can be seen here, the Gemüt is at times specifically contrasted to the narrower faculties of cognition such as Verstand (Understanding) or Vernunft (Reason). Because of the importance of the word Geist for German Idealism, in a sense that in no way corresponds to what we might think of as an individual’s “spirit,” this word is also not appropriate. Since none of these expressions tersely captures what Gemüt means, I translate the word as “soul,” with the qualification that this word has nothing to do with the Christian implications of the eternity of the soul and its relationship to God. Rather, as Schiller put it, “soul” is nothing other than the unity of our inner life. Indeed, “soul” is what is common to all human beings, and as such, cannot be individuated or hence pluralized. The passage thus reads “our soul” rather than “our souls.” Novalis equates restraint (zurückhalten) with refraction, the breakdown of a unity into its parts. The German for “refraction” is simply brechen, “to break.” As human powers of understanding direct themselves against nature, the unbroken unity of the human soul is transformed into the specific powers of understanding, reason, will, and judgment, just as white light is refracted into the colors of the spectrum upon striking a body. Without the particular radiance produced by the prism-like quality of nature, we could not know ourselves; in other words, we know ourselves only in and through nature. Heinrich understands Klingsohr to mean that “human beings are crystals for our soul— they are transparent nature.” Yet “transparent” here does not mean selfevident. Nature is the crystal through which human knowledge, on the one hand, and enjoyment of nature, on the other, can arise. The human being is limited to knowledge of the refraction of his or her own disposition through nature. As light bends and separates as it passes through a prism, human nature becomes manifest to itself only as it passes through nature. The passage encapsulates with particularly striking imagery a question that pervades the literature and philosophy of post-Kantian Germany. The questioning centers around the constitution of the human mind and its relation to the world of nature conceived both physically
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and spiritually. Novalis and other German thinkers of his time consider an intimate and direct knowledge of nature to be the sine qua non of knowledge of any other sort. The period of German Idealism historically coincides with the beginning of the movement to separate the disciplines of empirical science from those of philosophy, literature, and art. At the same time, however, all these disciplines merge and complement each other to a degree unparalleled before and since then, as if to reach their greatest unity before inevitably having to diverge. The tension between these two potentialities results in a series of complex and compelling deliberations on how to characterize the relationship between the world (both natural and cultural, if such a distinction can even be made— putting this distinction into question was part of the issue) and the human intellect. In addition, and paradoxically, this tension prefigures the reduction of nature to the object of scientific and technological research in the century following it, as the act of separating out becomes cut off from the original phenomenon of refraction. Klingsohr’s vision of human powers united with nature, yet prone—through an overabundance of knowledge—to forgetfulness of the source from which all forms of knowledge came, illustrates the human tendency toward fragmentation, on the one hand, and toward an overly lyrical relationship with nature that neglects understanding, on the other. Novalis chooses the prism or the crystal because it encapsulates a relationality within a particular object. By itself, the crystal is nothing but a transparent piece of glass. Light, too, is invisible and unremarkable until it is refracted into the colors of the spectrum. The conjunction of light and crystal—and by virtue of the analogy, between human disposition and nature—causes both to fundamentally change, but in such a way that they remain transformed only when they are together. Alone, each goes back to its former state. What is interesting about the analogy is not Novalis’s articulation alone, which at times becomes confusing and seemingly inconsistent, but rather the depiction of an active mutual influencing that cannot be said to be “contained” in any determinate thing or image but is purely relational. Thus, as it was for Kant, the analogical structure is crucial to the articulation of this relationship between human being and nature. Kant privileges the form of any natural thing; for Novalis (and for Hölderlin) the choice of the natural figure upon which the analogy is based is crucial; whatever represents the relationship must be capable of presenting both form and transformation, both the distinction between and the mutual interdependence of the relata. The prism and the light define and transform each other. Friedrich Hölderlin turns to the structure of plant life with its manifold growth and metamorphosis to express this same relationality. Plants manifest the alert receptivity that Hölderlin understands to be the
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role of the human Gemüt within the natural world. In her study of Hölderlin and tragedy, Françoise Dastur describes Hölderlin’s understanding of the relationship of the soul to nature as a “system of receptivity,” which encompasses on one side the human heart and spirit, and on the other the “fire of heaven, the dimension of the divine under whose influence man develops in following the law of succession.”4 The “fire of heaven” is not something transcendent, but is manifested in the natural world. The figure of the crystal still suggests an inanimate substance that is struck or animated by a divine light coming from elsewhere. Plants, by contrast, are alive; their flourishing requires both a force from within and nourishment from the environment that actually changes their inner constitution. Thus, plant growth can manifest even more clearly than the interaction of crystal and light the relationship between environment and formation. Plants are preferred to animals as symbols because plant life always remains in contact with all its sources of nourishment, because of the capacity of plants to break off and form new life when severed from their origin, and because of their growth through metamorphosis. What does it really mean to understand human nature as plantlike, that is, not merely to describe human striving toward an ideal in terms of plant metaphors in the reductive sense (such metaphors are fairly predictable: cultivation, strong roots, branching out, receptive ground, seeds of imagination, fertile soil), but to articulate human identity in an ideal state as plant-like? In his novel Hyperion, Hölderlin presents the metamorphosis of plants as a figuration of human life itself. Such an articulation makes the human mind part of an essentially interconnected and interdependent nature, perhaps necessary for manifesting it in its particular forms but nevertheless only one among its many forms. Specifically, the plant trope seems to imply a completely different temporality of thought and a markedly distinct model of human identity, one that understands individuation as something beyond either consciousness or bodily form. The plant flowers forth, continually exceeding, if only by a tiny tendril, any attempt to frame or contain it. Yet at the moment of metamorphosis, as Goethe had shown, it contracts sharply back into itself. The contraction will be followed by another expansion, and another contraction, the process continuing until the death of the plant. Plant growth, unlike animal growth, will never reach a definite conclusion so that one could say that the plant is now completely developed and all its parts contribute to its identity. The plant may be mutilated, severed from itself at any point, and yet continue to grow, perhaps as multiple individuals. The kind of intellectual life Hölderlin espouses in Hyperion is one based on the model of the plant and its characteristics of metamorpho-
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sis, contraction and expansion, and indefinite growth. Using the trope of plant metamorphosis to describe subjectivity etches an alterity into identity, a return to “self” as de-formed, monstrous. In the novel, Fate (Schicksal), as in Greek tragedy, organizes human development, just as the environment governs the fortuitous growth and reproduction of the plant. Fate is not for or against human beings, but simply completely indifferent to them. Fate is not something that can ever be known. Hyperion remarks, “I once saw a child put out its hand to catch the moonlight; but the light went calmly on its way. So do we stand trying to hold on to ever-changing Fate” (H 318/22). Nature is absolute unmittelbare Wirklichkeit , absolute unmediated reality. Hölderlin does not present nature as a set of cryptic ciphers pointing toward an absolute, but understands it to be the unmediated absolute, and the human mind a part of it. Like Novalis, Hölderlin emphasizes the interaction of human thinking and nature. Images of nature used by Hölderlin do not function as metaphors in a reductive sense, since they do not stand in or substitute for some other (supersensible) signification. Indeed, for Hölderlin speculation about nature had above all to avoid the implication that the human being was superior to the other components of the natural world. The “I” of the vegetative soul as articulated by Hölderlin is a subject whose vulnerability never evolves into a mastery that would allow it free reign over the realm of nature. Its unconscious source exceeds its conscious agency and renders it always susceptible to the natural context that surrounds it. The question of mastery and of the impossibility of understanding nature as a progressive, self-ameliorating teleological process will dominate Hölderlin’s writings and color his lifelong debate with Hegel. For Hölderlin, in contrast to Hegel, the gravest threat to reflective human existence is the belief that it understands its own provenance and objective clearly, that it succeeds best where it separates itself most from its natural origin. In an early version of Hyperion , Hölderlin writes, “The higher nature elevates itself above the animal [das Tierische], the greater the danger of fading away into transience [Vergänglichkeit] .”5 The structure of Hyperion resembles that of Goethe’s fruit-bearing plant: it proceeds in successive stages, each of which bursts forth and expands, only to eventually pull back in on itself in order to prepare for a metamorphosis into the subsequent stage. Because this development involves transformation and regression as well as growth and progression, Hyperion becomes a meditation on identity, time, and memory. Plants lack self-identity and through their growth embody the simultaneous drives of desire and resistance. Because of the cycle of constant metamorphosis, a plant cannot come back to itself as itself,
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since what it “is,” bodily speaking, will have fundamentally altered. There can be no going out and returning to the same “I,” if “I” can be said, even hypothetically, of a plant. The model for plant “consciousness” is thus deformed in an essential sense, such that each stage of growth in the life of the central character, Hyperion, is simultaneously 1) a moment of contraction and the signal for metamorphosis, 2) a moment of self-reflection by virtue of that moment of contraction, and 3) a distortion of a sort, where perception is exposed as fallible, akin to looking in a mirror and seeing a face one does not recognize. Thus, the subsequent stage is not a bringing-to-completion of a former stage that lacked something, but rather a fundamental de-formation and affirmation of open-endedness. These are the moments that we will identify as “plant-like.” The final chapter of the first book of Hyperion takes a polemical stance against Kant’s Critique of Judgment by castigating German philosophy for privileging reason over beauty. Hyperion’s figuration of human existence as “plant”6 gives less importance to consciousness of purpose than to moments of vision. Humans can hope for no more than flashes of pure joy in the face of beauty, to be followed inevitably by suffering and lack of comprehension. “Philosophy,” Hyperion states in a climactic speech, “springs from the poetry of an eternal, divine state of being.” For its part, poetry is “the beginning and the end of philosophical knowledge” (H 367/66). The person who has not “at least once” in a lifetime felt “full, pure beauty in himself,” when the powers of his being played interwoven with each other [ineinander spielten] like the colors in the rainbow, who has never felt the intimate harmony that arises among all things only in hours of exaltation—that person will not even be a philosophical skeptic, his mind is not even capable of tearing down, let alone of building up. (H 367/66)
The words play of powers are reminiscent of Kant’s description of judgments of beauty, which result in a free play of the imagination and the understanding. Hölderlin declares poetry to be the originator and the terminator of philosophy, and not the reverse. In the third Critique, Kant separates the philosopher from the genius in making the philosopher the “pruner” who “clips the wings” of the too-enthusiastic poetic genius, introducing “clarity and order” and “guidance,” making the ideas of genius “durable, fit for approval that is both lasting and universal, and [hence] fit for being followed by others and fit for an ever advancing culture” (KU 319). The philosopher is thus, in Kant’s words, “far superior to those who merit the honor of being called geniuses,” for the art of genius is limited, “a boundary is set for it beyond which it cannot go” (KU 309). The artist, according to Kant,
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gives the “material” for the products of fine art, but the “form” of art can only be provided by an academically trained expert (KU 311). Hölderlin upsets this hierarchy. Intellect and reason (Verstand and Vernunft ),7 rather than genius, are severely limited in Hyperion’s view. Intellect alone simply remains in a state of impoverishment: Intellect is without beauty of spirit, like a servile journeyman who constructs the fence out of rough wood as it has been sketched out for him, and nails the prepared posts together for the garden that his master intends to plant. The entire business of intellect is makeshift. By putting things in order, it protects us from folly, from injustice; but to be safe from folly and injustice is, after all, not the highest level of human excellence. (H 368/68)
To be human, to reach for the highest level of excellence, requires a willingness to make oneself vulnerable, to expose oneself to uncertainty. German philosophy has demanded the reverse, according to Hyperion, in claiming that: “One must be reasonable, must become a self-conscious spirit [selbstbewußte Geist] before one is a human being [Mensch], must be a shrewd man [Mann] before one is a child; the oneness of the whole person, Beauty, is not allowed to thrive and ripen in him before he cultivates and develops himself” (H 368/68). From the beginning of Hyperion , Hölderlin uses the trope of plant life to criticize the excessive analysis that kills, exemplified in German philosophy and science. In the preface, Hölderlin calls the novel a delicate plant that will wilt in human hands if treated wrongly: “Whoever merely smells my plant, knows it not, and whoever merely picks it, in order thus to learn about it, also does not know it.” (H 295/1). This becomes a theme that recurs throughout Hyperion: thinking, real thinking, requires a kind of life-blood running through it, a vital sap that excessively disciplined and hyperrational philosophy will kill as surely as the superficial glance of an unreflective observer. The ideal or spiritual, like Nature itself, must be treated with reverence by a thinker who is both truly involved in what he or she is examining and not overly inclined to dissect. The novel unfolds as a series of letters in which Hyperion recounts his life to a distant friend. The first letters describe his childhood. As an adult looking back on his past, Hyperion recounts the gradual transformation of his unreflective enjoyment of nature into a fragmenting education about nature that resembles the “refraction” described by Klingsohr. Hyperion describes this change as the feeling of one who awakens from a pleasant dream; he further intensifies the awakening by comparing it to a nightmare. This nightmare marks the first metamorphosis of the young Hyperion. The moment of separation from nature is akin to
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the psychoanalytic description of separation from the mother, but it is even more radical; for it is not just a separation from the source, but the moment of realization that what one had taken for a transcendent other is lodged in one’s own imperfect being. Hyperion writes, “It is as though I see, but then I become afraid again, as if it were my own shape that I saw; it is as if I feel it, the spirit of the world, like the warm hand of a friend, but I wake up and realize that I am grasping my own finger” (H 300/6). The modality of the dream is touch, but the modality of awakening is vision, and the latter is the most abrupt and unambiguous of the senses. The movement from tactility to visibility accentuates the passage from a union with nature to a separation from it. The first part of the passage describes Hyperion looking in a mirror and being shocked at the reflection of someone he does not recognize. This enigmatic, brief, yet crucial passage encapsulates the broader question Hyperion addresses, namely, the relationship between the human being as individual and nature in both a physical (the warm touch of a friend) and spiritual (the spirit of the world) sense. The realization that “one is grasping one’s own finger” when one thought one was being touched by the warm hand of a (spiritual) friend is affectively the reverse of the moment of calm awareness of the superiority of one’s faculty of reason over the realm of sensible nature (as Kant would have it). Although the story is told as an awakening from a dream (the quintessential philosophical metaphor for the process of enlightenment), the nightmare happens as Hyperion awakens, and not within the dream itself. The human being in Hölderlin’s writing is never completely easy in the world, but always remains fragile and vulnerable, like a young sapling in a storm. The Kantian revolution, which further emphasizes the finitude of the human being, results in terror rather than in a feeling of superiority. Thus, the first moment of monstrous mirroring occurs when one believes, through education, that the only source of all representations of wholeness is one’s own insignificant self. Such vaunted wholeness is the contribution of an unreflective practice of natural science such as the post-Newtonian scientific method that Goethe criticizes. The earliest phase of metamorphosis takes the soul through refraction into moments of particular knowledge that isolate Hyperion from his (self-posited) origin. Hyperion simultaneously feels a multiplicity and a singularity within himself that is exacerbated by the study of science (Wissenschaft) in school. With the knowledge he learns in school, Hyperion’s “pure joy” is disturbed: “I became so properly rational among you, learned so fundamentally to separate myself from what surrounds me, that I am now isolated in the beautiful world, thrown out of the garden of Nature, where I grew and bloomed, and I am withering in the noonday sun” (H 298/4).
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Only as a mature person, in recognizing that his childhood was the only time when he unreflectively enjoyed the bounty of nature, does Hyperion understand what it means to “turn back into the All of Nature in blessed self-forgetfulness” (H 297/3). Here Hölderlin follows Schiller, who in his account of the naive and the sentimental claimed that a child could not really be considered naive, since naiveté presupposes a victory of nature over art. Children, who have no real knowledge of art, can be innocent but not naive. Hyperion’s childhood, therefore, can only be described in recollection, with the retrospection of one who has become an artist.8 At the outset, Hyperion writes, “we only have concepts of that which once went bad and then was made good again; of childhood and innocence we have no concept” (H 298/4). Hölderlin links the formation of concepts and a particular kind of naming to destruction and death. Again, Hölderlin seems to be responding to the third Critique, which allows nature to be approached only as science or as art. Hölderlin is also responding to the neo-Kantian philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In a letter to his brother, written just before the publication of Hyperion, Hölderlin provides a clear account of the Fichtean-inspired philosophy that informs his novel, although at the same time it fundamentally alters Fichte’s position. There is within man a striving into the infinite, an activity that indeed does not allow him any permanent barrier, no stagnation, but strives to become increasingly widespread, free, independent; this drive to infinite activity is restricted; the infinite drive to unrestricted activity is necessary to the nature of a conscious being (of an “I,” as Fichte calls it), yet the restriction of this activity, too, is necessary for a conscious being, for if the activity were not restricted, not imperfect, this activity would be everything, and nothing would exist outside of it; if, then, our activity did not suffer any resistance from the outside, then nothing would exist outside of us, and we would know nothing, we would have no consciousness. 9
This passage recalls, in more theoretical terms, Klingsohr’s analogy of Gemüt to light. Both require a restraining force in order to come to full manifestation, and both presume an infinite striving (streben) as source. This is not a coincidence; both Hölderlin and Novalis sat in on Fichte’s lecture courses in Jena in 1794. Hölderlin’s objection to Fichte’s philosophy begins with the words “yet the restriction of this activity, too, is necessary for a conscious being.” Fichte defined consciousness and being in terms of pure freedom and pure activity, and taught that it is merely a fallacy on the part of natural consciousness to believe that being is imposed upon by outside objects. 10 This primary “illusion” is the belief that an external non-ego imposes itself upon the “I.” In rejecting such an illusion, Fichte tries to show that consciousness imposes
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what is perceived to be the not-I upon itself.11 In its effort to become pure activity, the “I” wages a constant battle against what is perceived to be the passivity of the not-I, which is really a passivity inherent within itself. However, the deduction of the ontological status of the “I” and “not-I” is not possible at a theoretical level, where it will always be confronted with the not-I as an apparently incontrovertible fact. Although Fichte insists on the role of limitation (Einschränkung), resistance (Widerstand), and inhibition (Hemmung), especially in the later parts of the Science of Knowledge, he always makes clear that this action originates in the absolute ego, and not in an external world. Only at the practical level of moral action, following Kant, does Fichte find the possibility of transcending the limitations of natural consciousness. Fichte’s description of moral activity is, however, much more violent than Kant’s: “Moral action is, then, some sort of terror; it is an aiming by the finite ego at a pure and always ideal unity that forces it to consider the non-ego as an obstacle, against which violence is constantly required.”12 According to Wilhelm Dilthey, Alabanda, the character in Hyperion who advocates a violent overthrow of the current order, is based on Fichte. 13 In emphasizing the finitude of the “I” and the “necessary restriction” that must “come from the outside,” Hölderlin in effect rejects the notion of the absolute ego that is the source of all being. Nature is no longer the pure negative of the absolute ego, no longer merely a permanent and illusory obstacle to pure activity. Instead, nature becomes a resource of humanity, for without the outside world there could be no consciousness at all. In claiming that limitation or restraint in addition to infinite activity is necessary for conscious being, Hölderlin rejects the possibility of a pure unification of human consciousness with nature. Indeed, as we will see, even the hopefulness toward the ideal of unification displayed in Hyperion will wane in Hölderlin’s later works. At the very foundation of consciousness there must be, for Hölderlin, a mutual reciprocity of passivity or receptivity and activity or spontaneity; he accords no priority to pure activity. Passivity is not something to be overcome. Hölderlin shifts the locus of the infinite back to desire, since activity will never be able to achieve infinity. Consciousness can then be explained as the infinite drive coming up upon the limitations of human existence. The theme of the necessity of both expansion and contraction— or of unbridled desire tempered by restraint—as ontological principles, can be seen in the major authors of German Idealism, as well as in Goethe’s nature philosophy. In a revival of Neo-Platonism, Johann Gottfried Herder and Franz Hemsterhuis argue that the proper articulation of this movement between individuation and union, called Vereinigungsphilosophie, can be found through the figures of eros (Hem-
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sterhuis) or friendship (Herder). 14 In Hyperion, Hölderlin criticizes the simplistic form of Vereinigungsphilosophie without referring to anyone in particular, saying that “philosophy is more than the blind demand for a never-ending progress of the unification and division of a possible substance” (H 369/68). Schelling and Hegel, too, incorporate the dynamic of expansion and contraction. For Schelling, Hemmung , or “inhibition,” is the way in which natural products are brought forth out of the expansive infinite unfolding desire that is nature’s original tendency. For Hegel, this duality of principle is introduced within the sphere of human activity. If any living thing were eternal or infinite, if it never died or had no limit in space, then its concept could never be detached from its individual empirical existence. For Hegel restraint is intimately linked to naming, language, and the science and history that are based upon them, rather than referring to a world-creating force. The way a plant grows parallels Hölderlin’s discussion of the movement between human striving for the infinite without barriers, based on the Platonic eros, and the restraint that allows for the emergence of consciousness. A plant, as Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants shows, grows through a series of expansive and contractive movements that are very different from the formation of an animal. Plants strive for the sun, but they must also grope in the dark for moisture. They can seemingly expand indefinitely, but they are limited by the presence of the natural elements that arrive only contingently. Hyperion’s life moves back and forth between the extremes of utter exposure and complete withdrawal. As Hyperion’s beloved Diotima—named after the spokeswoman of Eros in Plato’s Symposium—tells him, “You would never have known the equilibrium of beautiful humanity so purely if you had not lost it to so great an extent” (H 373/72). The “equilibrium” (Gleichgewicht) is the balance struck between the two poles of an “eccentric orbit,” between infinite desire and resistance. It is not a balance struck by Hyperion himself, but a “ripening” that occurs as experience in both success and suffering. Hölderlin links sublimity to time and death in his essay Das Werden im Vergehen (“Becoming in Passing Away”), written only a year after the publication of the second volume of Hyperion: Dissolution as necessity, from the viewpoint of ideal memory, becomes as such the ideal object of a newly unfolded life, a look back at the path that had to be traversed from the beginning of the dissolution up to where out of this new life a memory occurs of the dissolution, and out of that, as the explanation and the unification of the hiatus and the contrast that occur between what is new and the past, the memory of the dissolution can follow.15
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This passage describes the trajectory of Hyperion exactly. The novel traces the memory of a dissolution, the dissolution of Hyperion’s beloved Diotima’s life and of everything that Hyperion has ever projected. In her death, Diotima becomes the ideal object (in memory) of Hyperion’s newly unfolded life, a life that will unfold only after the novel ends. Only in recollection can the hiatus between what was (a love affair, heroic aspirations) and what was always already to have been (dissolution, disappointment) be explained and unified. In life, Diotima manifests more than any other finite human being the irreversible path toward passing away, a destiny that becomes clear only after her death. Hölderlin describes her as part of the plant world in order to emphasize her imminent dissolution within the narrative of Hyperion’s life, and to connect her with the “plant happiness” of youth, before one realizes the separation from nature that growing older entails. There are two levels to this union and dissolution, “two ideals of our existence,” described in the language of plants in the original preface to Hyperion.16 The first ideal is the “condition of highest simplicity” (called a Pflanzenglück or Pflanzenleben, “plant happiness” or “plant life,” in other earlier versions of the work), a harmony found in the “simple life of nature,” without any contribution from human individuals. In his theoretical essays on tragedy, Hölderlin calls nature prior to any human intervention (even in the sense of philosophizing) “aorgic.” The other ideal is the “condition of highest development” that humans are capable of giving themselves, a condition that Hölderlin calls the “organic” in those same essays. Hölderlin refers to both ideals, again in an early preface that did not appear in the final version of the published Hyperion, as two points between which the “eccentric orbit” (exzentrische Bahn) of all human life essentially runs. “Eccentric,” from the Greek ekkentros, literally means “moving out from a center.” Like a plant, which develops from a seed and continues to move outward in indefinite metamorphosis and development, human subjectivity is shaped by both a constructive or expansive effect of positive ideals, and a corrective or contractive reverse effect of negative or painful experience. The terminology of “aorgic” and “organic” refers to the polemical forces of infinite drive and encapsulating figuration. Hölderlin understands the central struggle of Greek tragedy to occur between the conflicting drives of the “organic”—understood as the peculiarly human activities of “self-action” (Selbsttätigkeit), art, and reflection—and the “aorgic,” defined as the “unconceivable, the unfeelable, the unlimited” (GE 574/54). The aorgic is the unrepresented manifestation of nature. The organic, on the other hand, from its root word organon , refers to the realm of nature only insofar as it is structured through human thought and activity.
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In Hyperion the tension between the aorgic and the organic ideals is played out between youth and maturity, or in plant terms, between initial wild growth and eventual decay. Hyperion describes his youth in terms of a wild plant: “I grew up like a vine without a post, and the wild tendrils spread themselves aimlessly about on the ground”(H 301/7). Before finding an older mentor, Hyperion recalls, he “grasped at everything, was grabbed by everything, but . . . only for the moment, and the unweeded powers exhausted themselves to no avail” (H 301/7). The image of the wild plant is tied to the temporality of the moment, the being that lives only for itself without thought of future or past, and with an expansion or desire that meets with no resistance. When Hyperion first begins to mentally “awaken,” his heart is “like the young plant, when it opens itself to the morning sun, and stretches its small arms towards the infinite heavens” (H 299/5). The name of Hyperion’s first teacher, Adamas, means “man” in Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi, and comes originally from the Hebrew adhama , or “earth.” It is also the name of the first man, created by God out of earth, whose story is told in the Old Testament and the Koran. Hyperion says of Adamas, “Like a plant whose peacefulness soothes a striving spirit and returns a simple sufficiency to the soul— thus he stood before me” (H 302/8). Adamas provides the soil for the seed that is the young Hyperion. Hyperion calls himself the “reverberation of [Adamas’s] silent inspiration [Begeisterung],” and adds, “the melodies of his being repeated themselves in me” (H 302/8). Both descriptions work against the common theme of coming of age as a process of individuation. Hyperion’s first encounters with the world beyond his home country immediately result in a profound dissonance. In describing Hyperion’s unease, Hölderlin juxtaposes animal images with those of corrupted plants. Animal figures provide the shadows to make the world of verdant nature stand out more vividly. Ruing the contemporary lack of interest in the past, Hyperion says, “[I]t seemed to me . . . as if human nature had disintegrated into the multiplicities of the animal world.” He immediately reinforces this image with that of an unkempt garden or ungleaned fruit: “As everywhere, here too men were particularly overgrown and rotten” (H 310/15). Hyperion compares humans to “animals that howl when they hear music”; they “laugh when the talk is of the beauty of the soul and the youth of the heart”; they are wolves that run away from fire when they “turn their backs like thieves” at the appearance of “a spark of reason” (H 310/15). Hyperion expresses his own impossible task as “seek[ing] grapes in the desert and flowers in the ice field” (H 311/16). Various people in the narrative who believe that one should live completely in one’s own time, and not in nostalgic memories
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of the past, mock Hyperion’s idealism. Hölderlin compares the contemporary preoccupation with the present to a “howling northwind” that “runs over the blossoms of our soul and buries them as they are budding” (H 304/9). But upon his return to his homeland, Hyperion finds he can no longer live as one with nature. Each thing in nature has become separate and singular: “Now I no longer said to a flower, you are my sister! and to the springs, we are of one kind! now, like an echo, I faithfully gave each thing its name” (H 330/33). Here “naming” refers to a reductive nominalism, bestowing names as artificial and arbitrary symbols to things in order to refer to them, and understanding universals and ideals simply as products of language. Hyperion’s prior tendency to call the flower his sister and the spring “of his kind” coincided with a vision of the human being as persisting on the same level as all other forms of nature, but providing, through its language, a means of manifesting beauty. In The Birth of the Clinic, discussing the contrast between diagnoses and treatments within roughly a one-hundred-year period, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Michel Foucault puts forth the thesis that a “mutation in discourse,” a “semantic or syntactical change” took place, in which the individual body became the site of subjective symptoms, replacing a perception of disease as a strange locale of a sometimes fantastically imagined natural order of disease superimposed upon the natural order of things. Foucault calls the older manner of perceiving disease “a region where ‘things’ and ‘words’ have not yet been separated, and where—at the most fundamental level of language—seeing and saying are still one.”17 Although it may seem an exaggeration to compare this analysis to Hyperion , Hölderlin, albeit much more implicitly, is making a similar point here. Foucault makes no judgment of the relative merits of the two approaches. By contrast, Hölderlin seems to mourn the transition to giving things their (“proper” is implied) names, associated with the ascendancy of a new “empirical” way of doing science, of which the particulars of the beginnings of contemporary medical science were one part. Interestingly, Foucault refers to the older order of disease as one based on a “botanical model,” quoting Sydenham quoted by Sauvages: “He who observes attentively the order, the time, the hour at which the attack of quart fever begins, the phenomena of shivering, of heat, in a word all the symptoms proper to it, will have as many reasons to believe that this disease is a species as he has to believe that a plant constitutes a species because it grows, flowers, and dies always in the same way.”18 The relegation of disease to the individual body conceived of as an autonomous, self-enclosed, and yet thoroughly classifiable as a type, parallels the move to situating truth in the presence of a subject to itself.
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Just after this description of the transformation in naming, Hyperion writes, “Like a river flowing past arid banks, where no willow leaf mirrors itself in the water, the world flowed past me untouched by beauty” (H 330/33). Only through Diotima does Hyperion feel reunited (through love) with both the human realm and the beauty of the natural world. In an earlier version of Hyperion, Hölderlin writes that the moment of meeting Diotima is itself “like a peaceful Arcadia, where blossoms and shoots sway in the eternal still air, where the harvest ripens without the midday sultriness, and the sweet grapes flourish . . . where one knows nothing of anything but the eternal spring of the earth.” 19 Hyperion and Diotima enter a kind of new Eden in which they are given the chance to name every natural thing anew in a way that will reflect the interrelatedness of all nature. The names they give link different parts of nature together under the trope of vegetation, rather than remaining singular, ostensive designations: “We named the earth one of the flowers of the sky, and we named the sky the infinite garden of life” (H 341/43). Here “naming” refers not to a reductive nominalism but to a letting-things-appear as they are, in their infinite interconnectedness. Naming is a “calling” (heißen) in Heidegger’s sense, a “letting-reach,” or, in the original significance of the word heißen in Sanskrit (which Heidegger does not provide), an invitation. 20 If the divine calls things into being, the human recognizes this calling in giving things names. Unlike an animal, whose death is not visible on its countenance until extreme old age, the short life of a flower, its fleeting moment of flourishing, are so familiar that a newly-cut flower exudes the inevitability of wilting, and the vision of spring flowers blooming makes us mindful of the seasons. From the very moment that Hyperion and Diotima kiss for the first time, she begins to wilt, as a flower will droop if its petals are fingered. Diotima as flower (a comparison Hölderlin explicitly makes) must bear the brunt of the confluence of desire, resistance, and love. Hyperion, at the height of love, sees with sudden lucidity the inevitable dissolution of their union. Hyperion describes the moment in terms of a shipwreck: “I see, I see how it must end. The rudder has dropped into the tide and the ship, like a child caught by the feet, is seized and flung against the cliffs” (H 362/62). The image again provokes a nightmare. One cannot help but picture the child, its feet grasped by a violent adult, being flung against a cliff in an improbable but strikingly visual evocation. Hölderlin reacts against the tendency to separate the human mind from the rest of nature, as if nature were an object over and against human understanding. We are taught to see nature as something objective that we can study and from which we can distinguish ourselves. Hölderlin implies that the human being outside the trellis of nature is
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isolated, and that only through love can it truly become an individual, that is, re-enter the natural world as a part that significantly contributes and relates to the whole. The human’s privileged position as the possessor of self-consciousness also makes it the most vulnerable of natural beings. Hyperion mourns, “Nothing can grow, nothing so profoundly wither away, as the human” (H 330/33), and further: “What is the human? I could begin; how is it, that there is such a thing in the world, that is like a chaos, ferments or decays, like a rotten tree, and never flourishes to ripeness? How does Nature endure this sour one among her sweet grapes?” (H 332/35). Precisely in separating itself off from the rest of nature, the human being effects its own destruction. In plant terms, this decay is called fermentation: Humans began and grew up from the happiness of plants, and grew until they ripened; from that point on they have fermented ceaselessly, from inside and out, until now the human race lies there infinitely disintegrated, like a Chaos that seizes all who still feel and see with vertigo; but beauty flees from the lives of humans upward into Spirit; what was nature, becomes ideal, and when the tree is withered and weathered all the way up from the bottom, a fresh crown still emerges from it, and turns green in the sunshine, as its trunk once did in its days of youth; Ideal is, what nature was. (H 350/51)
Fermentation leads to Chaos, and Chaos to disintegration, the fragmentation of what was once whole. The trope of fermentation appears again and again in Hölderlin’s poetry, most often as die gährende Zeit , time gone sour or rancid, catastrophic time, but also the time of das Werden im Vergehen, “becoming in passing away.” The beautiful parts of a plant—its leaves, flowers, fruit, and stem or trunk—have a darker counterpart in the roots, which hide underground in the darkness and thrive on rot and excrement. In a letter to Hyperion, Diotima writes that the plant that was Athens has now been turned upside down, that the roots are now in the air and the flowers in the ground, that “the leaf has turned itself,” and “the dead now go above, on the earth, and the living, the divine, are under it . . .” (H 410/107). Humans are inverted trees with respect to history.21 While the “same” trees persist, for example, among the ruins at Athens, human beings and their creations break and die. The fragility of human being and happiness is manifest in the image of dessicated roots choking in air and green leaves losing their color and freshness in the smothering soil. There is no escaping this fate, however, for to be a human being is to be spiritually vulnerable, just as the plant is absolutely subject to the contingencies of its environment. Hölderlin may also be making a veiled reference to Aristotle’s De Anima, where the roots of plants are said to correspond to the heads of
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animals, so that the growth of plants is completely heterogeneous to that of animals (416a1–10). Empedocles had explained both the erect head of animals and the upward growth of plants by appealing to the natural upward direction of fire, the element of the soul. If plants’ “souls” are in their roots, which Aristotle says is the case “if we are to identify and distinguish organs by their functions,” then plants are always inverted with respect to humans. If Hölderlin is making reference to this passage, then perhaps modern humanity is being called the inversion of the natural human order. Thus, to conceive of each human being as isolated and identified primarily by the aggressive defense of its own perceived boundaries is to kill the natural open-endedness of human subjectivity and its vulnerability, its intimate relationship to the natural world and to other human beings.
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4
FIGURES OF PLANT VULNERABILITY Empedocles and the Tragic Christ
The genuine philosophical act is suicide; this is the real beginning of all philosophy, the direction in which all the needs of philosophical devotees go, and only this act corresponds to all the conditions and distinguishing marks of transcendental action. —Novalis, Fragment (1797)
Initially, nothing seems more distant from the tragic insights of Hölderlin than the optimistic philosophy of Hegel’s dialectic. We will ultimately characterize Hegel’s method as a repudiation of the vegetative soul, a replacement of the unconscious vulnerability of the plant trope by the cognitive vigor and aggressive self-preservation of the animal. In early writings, however, Hegel surprisingly brings up many of the same themes that we have been discussing with reference to Hölderlin. In contrasting Hegel’s obsession with Christ with Hölderlin’s equal enthusiasm for the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles—both of whom are described by these thinkers as figures of plantlike vulnerability—one sees most clearly where the two thinkers began to take separate paths. These paths diverge in the nuances of the motif of self-sacrifice as opposed to that of suicide. 1 Thus, although in some respects Hegel’s logic seems to follow the contours of the vegetative soul, ultimately, his work embraces animal individuation, albeit on the grandest of scales.
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This chapter will serve to mark the contrast, arising from the closest of proximities, between the embrace and the rejection of the vegetative model of individuation and subjectivity. In his 1910 essay on Hölderlin, Wilhelm Dilthey was the first to show the connection between Hölderlin’s Empedocles and Hegel’s depiction of Jesus Christ in the early essay that has been posthumously entitled “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal.” 2 Christoph Jamme’s study “Ein ungelehrtes Buch”: Die philosophische Gemeinschaft zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt 1797–1800 elaborates on this connection in the work of Hegel and Hölderlin. 3 In 1797 and 1798, when both Hölderlin and Hegel were living in Frankfurt, Hegel composed the fragments later collected by Hermann Nohl under the title “The Spirit of Christianity and its Destiny” (1799) 4 and Hölderlin wrote the first version of a tragedy entitled The Death of Empedocles, which was subsequently never completed. Hölderlin completed the second and third drafts in Homburg, near Frankfurt, and it has been argued that in particular the third draft shows the influence of Hegel on his work. Hölderlin arguably influenced Hegel’s conception of the historical Christ in an equally significant manner. Through a chiasmic transference, Hölderlin’s Empedocles takes on more and more of the characteristics of Hegel’s Christ, while Hegel’s Christ becomes a Greek, so that in the end neither figure resembles its historical counterpart so much as it testifies to the themes that lie at the heart of German Idealism. In 1797 Hölderlin had already been serving as a tutor to the Gontard family in Frankfurt for two years when through his connections he found Hegel a similar post with another family there. Letters exchanged between the two friends bear witness to the great joy they took in each other’s company. During the two years that Hegel and Hölderlin both lived in Frankfurt they spent most of their time together, and their thoughts recorded at the time are remarkably similar, although Hegel presented his ideas as a study of the historical Jesus and Christianity, Hölderlin as a tragedy about the philosopher Empedocles. According to Pöggeler, the philosophical encounter between the two friends culminated in a new thinking of the phenomenon of beauty as a tragic process.5 At this period in his life Hegel came to consider Jesus to be a tragic down-going figure in the same way that Hölderlin described Empedocles. The historical figures of Christ and Empedocles share many characteristics that Hegel and Hölderlin emphasized: both Jesus and Empedocles proclaimed themselves to be divine or intimate with the divine, both had a small loyal following but a greater antagonistic resistance in the form of the power of a positive, tradition- and law-governed religion, and both met untimely deaths, Jesus through a willing self-sac-
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rifice at the hands of the government, Empedocles as a (rumored) suicide. It is precisely the differences between these two figures, however, that will set the tone for the sharp divergence of Hegel’s and Hölderlin’s philosophy in later years. The parallels between Hegel’s description of Jesus and Hölderlin’s description of Empedocles are striking, although the differences, not least among them Hölderlin’s pointed choice of a pagan figure in contrast to his seminary-colleague’s portrait of the historical Christ, must not be overlooked. The progressive “graecification” of Hegel’s portrait of Christ is in many ways more remarkable than the Christology of Hölderlin’s Empedocles, considering that both Hölderlin and Hegel had been brought up in pious Christian homes and had attended theological seminary together. Both Hölderlin and Hegel expressed a strong dissatisfaction with Christianity as it was then practiced, but unlike Hölderlin, who, outside of some of his lyric poetry never directly addressed Christian themes, Hegel consistently attempted to redirect the orientation of the contemporary study of Christ and Christianity. Although Hegel was later to abandon his understanding of Christ as a tragic figure, the image of self-sacrifice endures and becomes the emblem of the dialectical method. In fact, the nexus of life, death, and resurrection is the figure of the logical Aufhebung , so the transition from Christ as tragic to Christ as triumphantly resurrected parallels Hegel’s transition to the dialectic that originated in the Jena Logic (1804–1805), and marks the beginning of his detachment from Hölderlin. Several themes appear repeatedly in Hölderlin’s three drafts of The Death of Empedocles and in Hegel’s fragments on Christianity (which, for the sake of ease of reference, we will refer to under Nohl’s title, “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate”), as well as the fragment known as “Love,” all of which are dated from 1797 to 1799. These themes, which do not follow particular divisions in any of the texts, but can be found throughout, are (1) the question of bondage and mastery, which is bound up with a particular understanding of positivity; (2) the description of the tragic figure, in this case either Empedocles or Christ; (3) the nuances of the difference between suicide and self-sacrifice; and finally, (4) the way in which individuation, as a product of a dynamic between unity and separation, is understood. The last theme, that of the cosmic alternation between unity (Vereinigung) and separation (Trennung), as we have already seen, forms the basis for so much of the philosophical discourse in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most commentators agree that Vereinigungsphilosophie was the focus of much of Hölderlin and Hegel’s discussion during the two years they spent together in Frankfurt. Hegel takes up Hölderlin’s plant metaphorics as a way of describing
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unity in difference in the fragment “Love.” This fragment, generally thought to be at the inception of Hegel’s dialectic, considers the relationship between love and human mortality. Like Hölderlin’s passage in Hyperion , where Hyperion writes that he and Diotima were unified in love as male and female are conjoined in the calyx of a flower (H 347/49), Hegel, too, describes love in terms of the plant. To say that lovers are independent of each other, writes Hegel, means only that each of them may die and thus they can think of the possibility of being separated through death; this does not imply an actual separation.6 In the same way: To say that salt and other minerals are part of the makeup of a plant and that these carry in themselves their own laws governing their operation is an alien reflection and means no more than that the plant may rot. But love strives to annul [aufzuheben] even this distinction [between the lover as lover and the lover as physical organism], to annul this possibility [of separation] as mere possibility, to unite [vereinigen] even the mortal element, to make it immortal (L 380/305).
Hegel goes on, in “Love,” to describe the lovers’ attempt to overcome their mortality through the creation of a child. The child represents the effort to nullify death. Here, aufheben is understood simply as the removal of the alien or the external understanding, and not in the sense of Hegel’s later dialectic. 7 Hegel continues with the plant metaphor. The child is only a punctual unity, like a seed: The lovers cannot allocate [the child] in such a way that a manifold will be present in it, for in their union no opposition is worked out, it is free of all division; everything through which the newly created child is a manifold can have an existence, it must draw into itself, oppose to itself, and unify with itself. The seed turns ever more and more toward opposition and commences; each stage of its development is a separation, in order to recapture on its own the entire realm of life. And so now is: the unified [das Einige], the separated [die Getrennten], the reunited [das Wiedervereinigte]. The united ones [die Vereinigten] will separate again, but in the child the union itself [die Vereinigung selbst] remains undivided. (L 381/307)
The version of this essay included in the collection edited by Hamacher includes a sentence referring to the seed, which Hegel later struck from the paragraph. In this sentence, inserted immediately after the first mention of the seed, Hegel writes, “[The seed] becomes plant; from the most united [Einigste] it goes through the animal to human life—the separable, however, returns to the condition of separability;
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but the spirits [of the lovers] become more united than before, and that which was still separated from determinate consciousness is completely shared; all points at which one had touched the other, or had been touched by the other, in other words that had felt or thought alone, are reconciled, the spirits are exchanged.”8 Aside from the cryptic significance of the rest of the sentence, the passage—within the expression of love, the production of the seed—from plant to animal to human prefigures Hegel’s mature philosophy of nature. Hegel’s understanding of organic life will comprehend far more than a summary of the current scientific research. The plant is here understood as “the most united” but also as that which cannot experience love, having never known separation. In “The Spirit of Christianity and its Destiny,” Hegel presents Jesus as the incarnation of love. There is nothing un-biblical about this characterization, but Hegel’s description contrasts with his earlier Kantian interpretation of the teachings of Christ. Here Hegel understands love precisely in contradistinction to duty: “‘Love has conquered’ does not mean the same as ‘duty has conquered’“ (L 296/247). Love provides a particular contrast to duty because one would never want to call a feeling love if it had been commanded, if the feeling arose out of a sense of duty. Love produces no imperative. Sounding very similar to Hölderlin in Hyperion, Hegel writes, “[T]o love God is to feel oneself in the ‘all’ of life, with no restrictions, in the infinite” (L 296/247). The comparison strikes one particularly when one reads Hegel’s “The Life of Jesus” (TJS 73–136), written only three years earlier, in which the practical philosophy of Kant is put into the mouth of Jesus, and Christian morality is described as a version of the categorical imperative. In “The Spirit of Christianity and its Destiny,” in contrast, Hegel names the Kantian doctrine of morality, that is, giving the law to oneself, as precisely what love, and thus Christianity, is not . Love itself is incomplete in nature, Hegel writes: “Every reflection annuls love, restores objectivity, and with objectivity we are once more on the territory of restrictions.” Representative thinking is restrictive and thus even to think “love,” or “God,” which are infinite, is to restrict them; “the infinite cannot be carried in this vessel [Gefäß]” (L 302/253). The image of the vessel (Gefäß) is repeated in Hölderlin’s theoretical essay “The Ground for Empedocles,” composed in order to explicate his effort at writing a third version of his tragedy The Death of Empedocles (GE 570–83/53–61).9 Empedocles as tragic figure resembles Diotima in Hyperion insofar as both are victims; Diotima becomes the temporally and spatially limited (transitory, mortal) vessel in which love is for a moment contained. This “vessel,” however, is in Hölderlin’s eyes as necessary as it is inadequate, as he explains in the case of Empedocles:
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Thus Empedocles was supposed to become a victim of his time. The problems of the destiny in which he grew up were to appear to resolve themselves within him, and this solution was to present itself as an apparent, temporary one—as is the case with more or less all tragic personas , who
in their characters and utterances are all more or less attempts to solve the problems of destiny, and all of whom negate themselves [sich aufheben] to the degree that they are not universally valid, except in the case that their role, their character and its utterances present themselves as something transient and momentary, so that the one who seemingly resolves destiny most completely also presents himself most clearly in his transitoriness, and, in the progress of his attempts, as a victim. (GE 578/57)
Hölderlin wrote three unfinished versions of the Empedocles tragedy, in the progression of which one can trace the growing influence of Hegel on his thinking, as well as the progressive frustration Hölderlin was feeling in the question of the possibility of writing a “Greek” tragedy at the turn of the nineteenth century in Germany. In the first version of The Death of Empedocles, Pausanias, the son-like disciple of Empedocles, cites love as the reason he might be required to denounce his master: “No! By your magical spirit, man, I will not, do not want to revile you, even if the necessity of love bade me do so, you loved one! then die, and thus bear witness to yourself. If it must be” (TE 1, 520). Love is also the restrictive vessel in which Empedocles ultimately cannot be contained, although it is love for and from a whole people, not a single lover. But love is not mentioned in the second or third versions. Hölderlin describes the tragic writer’s choice of alter ego, of principal character, in a striking way. He insists that it must be a “foreign” subject matter, far from one’s own mood and world, yet “sufficiently analogical” to be able to “preserve” the writer’s own sensibility “as in a vessel [Gefäß].” The writer “conveys” his sensibility into the vessel of the foreign matter and preserves it there, then moves away from his own subjectivity (Ich-heit) entirely and expresses only the “deepest intensity.” Only in this stark contrast can “destiny” express “its secret most clearly” (GE 572/52). Hölderlin seems to suggest that somehow the infinite can be captured, if only provisionally, within a vessel, but that this vessel must be chosen explicitly for its foreignness. Only this distance will allow for the momentary presentation of what otherwise could not be brought to language. Along with the notion of concealing oneself in the foreign, having first safeguarded one’s sensibility within it, as in a vessel, and then moving away from any linkage to one’s own self, Hölderlin de-emphasizes consciousness. Hölderlin writes that Empedocles will gain perspicacity in losing consciousness “when he is less with himself [bei sich] and insofar as he is less conscious of the fact that with and for him the speechless
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gains speech, that with and for him the universal, the less conscious gains the form of consciousness and particularity . . .” (GE 574–75/54–55). The plant as an organism without consciousness becomes an appropriate figure for this displacement. Hölderlin recognizes above all the human tendency to try to straighten things out, to make the world intelligible, yet he resists the safety of this effort. In letters to his brother and his friend Neuffer, written in 1798, Hölderlin contrasts the efforts of philosophy and poetry. To his brother Karl, he writes, “Human beings ferment [gären], like everything else that ripens, and the only thing that philosophy needs to concern itself with is to make that fermentation proceed in a way that is as neutral and passable and short as possible.”10 Philosophy, according to Hölderlin, can only neutralize suffering; it cannot create joy or even reproduce passion. For this reason Hölderlin chooses to be a poet and a novelist rather than a philosopher, for only in art can the essential deformation that humans undergo through resisting nature be reproduced. In his letter to Neuffer of November 12, 1798, Hölderlin writes, “Now what mostly takes up my thought and my senses is what is living in poetry. I can feel so deeply how far I still am from it, and yet my entire soul aches for it and it often seizes me in such a way that I have to cry like a child. . . .” But, he continues, “[t]here is indeed a hospital where every unhappy poet of my kind can flee with dignity—philosophy. But I cannot leave my first love and the hopes of my youth, and I would rather perish without recourse than to part from the sweet company of the muses. . . .”11 Art requires both the proximity of devotion and a certain distance: it may be tragic for Oedipus to go mad, but when Hölderlin does, it is merely sad. When Hölderlin puts his thoughts into Hyperion’s “recollections” or into Empedocles’ thoughts before committing suicide, those “experiences” are transformative, like the plant that only returns to itself as other. In early writings Hegel’s proximity to Hölderlin strikes one doubly in view of the transformation (in light of Hegel’s more wellknown philosophical writings) we now know it will take. As we have already intimated, however, this is not a straightforward case of one thinker influencing another, or of two thinkers mutually bringing their thoughts closer together. Rather, Hegel’s later fragment, “Love,” is closest not to Hölderlin’s third draft of The Death of Empedocles, but to the first, and Hegel’s description of love will be structurally similar to Hölderlin’s first outline of Hyperion in the journal Thalia. Moreover, in the second and third drafts of The Death of Empedocles, Hölderlin begins to emphasize the themes that also predominate in Hegel’s analysis of the history of Christianity and the relationship between Jesus and Judaism, namely, the positivity of tradition and the master/slave relationship inherent in both religions. Finally,
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Hölderlin’s Empedocles, over the course of three versions, changes from a beloved but misunderstood and perhaps hubristic individual into an aggressive opponent in a fight with tradition, as simultaneously the representative of religion, the priest Hermokrates, takes on in a more and more exaggerated fashion the role of the spokesperson of tradition and the law. Hegel’s Christ, on the other hand, reverts from being an advocate of the categorical imperative to the stance of a tragic figure who had to die because of his opposition to the same kind of tradition and law. It has already been argued many times that the third version of The Death of Empedocles marks a definitive turning point away from the Greeks and toward Christianity for Hölderlin. For example, Mark Ogden argues that even Hyperion is latently more Christian than Greek in emphasis, and tries to show that both Diotima and Empedocles are Christ figures. Such a thesis does not explain why Hölderlin chose, even after long discussions with Hegel, to present his ideas under the aegis of Greek tragedy. Ogden takes Hegel’s great interest in Hölderlin’s work during the Frankfurt years to be evidence of the Christianity inherent in Hölderlin’s work, but one can also argue convincingly that Hegel’s writing of this period took on a decidedly Greek bent, particularly in the revised description of Jesus.12 Indeed, the changes in the Empedocles drafts do suggest a turning in the way Hölderlin was thinking of Empedocles. The fact that Hölderlin’s last major work was the translation of Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus, and that Hölderlin’s commentaries on these works return to the same themes that are expressed in “The Ground for Empedocles,” however, testifies to the limits of this thesis. Certainly, one might argue that the second two versions of The Death of Empedocles bear the mark of the Hegelian concerns of positivity and servitude much more than the first. In the Thalia-Fragment , the first published preface to Hyperion, Hölderlin identifies two overwhelming desires of human beings that manifest what is worst and what is best about human life: “The human being would like to be in everything and above everything, and the epitaph on Loyola’s tomb: non coerci maximo, contineri tamen a minimo can mean as much the all-desiring, all-subjugating, dangerous side of humans, as the highest, most beautiful condition they are capable of attaining. In what sense they should be valid for each person his free will must decide” (WB 1: 440). Hegel’s “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” is organized around a similar distinction. Hegel distinguishes three stances that define the fundamental relationship between human being and world within a religion. The first stance is a desire to dominate, or, as Hölderlin would put it, a desire to be above everything. The second stance is one of total servitude or bondage, the result of a positive religion. The third stance is that of love. In Hegel’s revised understanding
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of Jesus, the demand of moral duty is seen to be insufficient. In Christ there is a unity that goes beyond a promise or a demand that can be concretely realized. In “Christ,” Hegel sees an analogy to the Greek concept of beauty. As a historical person, Christ embraces both morality and human weakness. However, the history of Christianity has developed into something merely positive, by which term Hegel means that which has a determinate content. Hegel describes the relationship of human beings to nature in the Old Testament prior to Abraham as a desire for mastery or domination, and contrasts Noah to the Greek Deucalion and Pyrrah. Noah set himself over and against nature as something to be tamed, and thus his relationship to the world was characterized by hostility: “Against the hostile power [of nature] Noah saved himself by subjecting both it and himself to something more powerful” (GCS 244/182), defending himself even against the rage of God. With Abraham appears the beginning of the “fate” of the Jewish people, which Hegel identifies as unconditional submission to the stronger, that is, to the law of God. Abraham “snaps the bonds of communal life and love” (GCS 185/246). Unlike Cadmus and Danaus, who went in quest of a land where they might be free and love, Abraham “wanted not to love, wanted to be free by not loving” (GCS 246/185). Hegel considers the second attitude, that of servitude or bondage (Knechtschaft) to be epitomized in Moses, who retreats from Egypt with his people in order to “vanquish without fighting.” Such a stance manifests “thoroughgoing passivity” with respect to the world and destiny (GCS 252/194). Hegel calls such an attitude “orientally beautiful” in that it relinquishes itself to the threat of the loss of all pleasure and all fortune: “He brought before the slavish spirit the image of itself, namely, the terror of physical force” (GCS 253/195). Hegel connects this attitude to Kant’s practical reason. The only difference lies in the fact that in the Old Testament spirit, unquestioning adherents to a religion make themselves slaves to a lord external to themselves, while the Kantian listens to his own command of duty, and thus carries his lord in himself. Both are slave mentalities (GCS 266/211). This marks a sharp departure from Hegel’s earlier adherence to Kantian morality and his former depiction of Christ. At the same time, however, Hegel follows Kant in linking the oriental and the passive. Jesus, in Hegel’s post-Kantian “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” raised himself above morality (GCS 266/212). Christ preaches pleroma, the fulfillment of the law. Pleroma indicates a correspondence of one’s inclination to act with the command of the law, which Hegel calls “an ‘is’ that is the complement of possibility,” or an “is” that is the synthesis of subject and object. The law does not remain an opposition
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between a particular subject and a universal command such that the particular is mastered by the universal; rather, law and inclination are no longer distinguishable. The relationship is one of identity in difference, and thus is called “fulfillment” rather than “correspondence.” This, Hegel asserts, is “life and love” (GCS 268–69/215). The law is rendered superfluous by the love that reconciles the dominant, positive content with the possible action: “In reconcilability the law loses its form, the concept is displaced by life” (GCS 269/215). For example, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” can be recognized as valid for the will of every rational being, and thus can be instituted with the categorical imperative. However, such a commandment is limited, for it can only put forth an “ought” or a “should,” whereas what Jesus did was to replace the “ought” with a higher modality, the “is” of loving virtue. Since a command implies an opposition between a commander and something resisting the command, its deficiency is immediately apparent in contrast to a congruence of law and inclination that does not imply such a positive, oppositional stance. Hegel showed that laws only gain their force by assuming a particular that must bow to their commands. The concept of fate, by contrast, implies the human being who fights against it to exactly the same degree that law implies a particular bowing in obedience to it. It is thus a thoroughly Greek rather than a Hebraic concept. For this reason Hegel, under the influence of his discussions with Hölderlin, chose to present Jesus as a tragic figure rather than as a commander of duty, and saw in this transformation the difference between law and pleroma. The characterization of Jesus as tragic, far from casting him in a stronger role, makes him all the more vulnerable. Nevertheless, it also presents Jesus as one who attempts to reconcile rather than one who commands subjugation to the law. In other words, Christ does not struggle against fate in this desire to himself gain the upper hand, for Hegel understood domination, as the inverse of servitude, equally to imply the paradigm of slavishness: Punishment represented as fate is of a quite different kind. In fate, punishment is a hostile power, an individual thing, in which universal and particular are united in the sense that in it there is no cleavage between command and its execution; there is such a cleavage, however, when law is in question, because the law is only a rule, something thought, and needs an opposite, a reality, from which it acquires its force. In the hostile power of fate, universal is not severed from particular in the way in which the law, as a universal, is opposed to the human or to his inclinations as the particular. Fate is just the enemy, and man stands over against it as a power fighting against it. Law, on the contrary, as universal, is lord of the particular and has subdued this person to obedience. The trespass of the man regarded as in the toils of fate is therefore not a rebellion of the subject
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against his ruler, the slave’s flight from his master, liberation from subservience, not a revivification out of a dead situation, for the person is alive, and before he acts there is no cleavage, no opposition, much less a mastery. (GCS, 280/228–29)
Fate differs from punishment for not following a law precisely because it metes out its suffering without regard to guilt or innocence. In describing fate, Hegel obviously refers not to a Christian, but to a Greek, and particularly an Oedipal, sensibility: But fate has a more extended domain than punishment has. It is aroused even by guilt without crime, and hence it is implicitly stricter than punishment. Its strictness often seems to pass over into the most crying injustice when it makes its appearance more terrible than ever, over and against the most exalted form of guilt, the guilt of innocence. (GCS 283/232–33)
When the struggle against fate becomes overwhelming, and reconciliation is impossible, the tragic hero has no choice but to withdraw in unhappiness, since subservience to a determinate law does not remain an option. Hegel refers to Jesus in this position as a plant, with the same description he later uses to characterize the “beautiful soul” in the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Like a sensitive plant, he withdraws into himself when touched. Rather than make life his enemy, rather than rouse a fate against himself, he flies from life. Hence, Jesus [Luke xiv.26] required his friends to forsake father, mother, and everything in order to avoid entry into a league with the profane world and so into the sphere where a fate becomes possible” (GCS 286/236). Jesus possesses the highest freedom, that of the possibility of renouncing everything in order to keep himself intact, but Hegel interprets this retreat as a “loss of life,” for it implies renunciation of all larger social and political ties, whether family or larger community. This would be Hegel’s ultimate criticism of Hölderlin himself, and Hölderlin’s life was one of the targets of the “beautiful soul” critique in the Phenomenology of Spirit (W 3: 464f/PS 383f). Hegel describes Jesus explicitly as “fighting against fate” in these passages. The death of Jesus, like that of Empedocles, stems from a conscious recognition of necessity. Hegel’s portrait of Jesus’ fate could apply equally to Hölderlin’s Empedocles: The fate of Jesus was that he had to suffer from the fate of his people; either he had to make that fate his own, to bear its necessity and share its joy, to unite his spirit with his people’s, but to sacrifice his own beauty, his connection with the divine, or else he had to repel his nation’s fate from himself, but submit to a life undeveloped and without pleasure in itself. In neither event would his nature be fulfilled; in the former case he would
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sense only fragments of it, and even these would be sullied; in the latter, he would bring it fully into his consciousness, though he would know its shape only as a splendid shadow whose essence is the highest truth; the sensing of that essence he would have to forgo and the truth would not come alive in act and in reality. Jesus chose the latter fate, the severance of his nature from the world, and he required the same from his friends. . . . But the more deeply he felt this severance, the less he could bear it calmly, and his actions issued from his nature’s spirited reaction against the world; his fight was pure and sublime because he knew the fate in its entire range and had set himself against it. (GCS 329/286)
Because Jesus’ life itself is not fulfilled, he becomes a tragic figure. Hegel’s critique returns again and again to what he regards as the most ignoble of positions, that of bondage with respect to a law or tradition, acting merely out of unquestioning obedience, even if what one does is virtuous. Hegel’s denunciation of Judaism rests entirely on the law-centeredness of that tradition. Both sides of the relation of domination and of slavishness rest upon this positivity understood in terms of blindly following the law. In “The Ground for Empedocles,” Hölderlin writes something similar of Empedocles: “He was not capable of the negative violent spirit of renovation that moves against the defiant anarchic life that will tolerate no influence, no art, that only strives by way of opposition” (GE 581/60). Empedocles, too, seeks a unity that is not simply the inverse relation to opposition. He does not seek to lead the people so much as to become one with them through a demonstration of the way in which art and nature can be reconciled. Hölderlin explains the tension that exists between Empedocles’ expectations and the limited understanding of the people he tries to convince: They must see the unity between them and the man, yet how can they? In that he complies with them to the utmost degree? yet in what? At the point where they are most doubtful about the union of the extremes in which they live. Now, if these extremes consist in the opposition of art and nature, then he must reconcile nature with art before their very eyes, precisely at the point where it is most inaccessible to art. . . . He does [this] with love and reluctance (for the fear of becoming positive must naturally be his greatest, out of the sense that he will the more surely perish the more truly he expresses what is most intense) , gives up the attempt; now
they believe everything to be completed. He recognizes them in this. The illusion under which he had lived, that he had been as one with them, now ceases. He withdraws and their feelings toward him cool. (GE 582/60; the words in italics are a footnote that Hölderlin wrote to the text)
Here we can see that Hölderlin perceived the tragic problem of Empedocles to be very close to Hegel’s depiction of the struggle of
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Christ, not concerning the question of the unification of nature and art, but the perception of positivity as the greatest danger. 13 What Hölderlin calls “the fear of becoming positive” is the belief that “everything is completed.” This is the same difficulty that Hegel perceived in the practice of Christianity. Rather than perceiving faith as an open-ended process that needs to be constantly renewed, a positive understanding of religion identifies truth with events that have already occurred, or laws that have been inscribed. Empedocles, too, was reluctant to perform acts that would make the people believe in him for fear that the act (of reconciling art and nature) would be considered accomplished for all time. We recall that Hegel thought love to be the Christian analogue to the Greek notion of beauty. What both Hölderlin and Hegel considered to be the greatest danger facing a doctrine of truth, beauty, or love, was the possibility of its movement beyond an exceedingly fragile balance between unconcealment and discourse. The moment a vision is transformed into a determinate doctrine, translated into statements, laws, definitions, it loses its “intensity” (Innigkeit). If Christ or Empedocles becomes a leader with a doctrine of positive, determinate content, then his followers become slaves. Both beauty and love are autonomous, determinate entities that can ever be fully described; rather, like the growth of the plant, they are only in the process of their metamorphoses, and the direction of their development can never be prescribed or predicted. Although the discourse of servility (Knechtschaft) is already present in the first draft of The Death of Empedocles, with the subsequent drafts it becomes a more and more prominent theme. The first version includes a scene in which Empedocles, having determined that he will leave Agrigento and go to throw himself into Mt. Etna, liberates his servants, telling them to disperse and not to seek to follow him, for if they join him in opposition to the organized religion of the priests, they will become slaves. This is meant in a double sense: not only will they be returned to a life of servitude that they had never experienced in Empedocles’ household, but in taking a determinate stand (as “disciples”) with Empedocles against the prevailing authorities, they will simply be repeating the gesture of positivity that they are opposing. Hegel makes the same comment about Jesus’ disciples after his death. They carry on the rituals without preserving what the life represented. In the second version of The Death of Empedocles, Hölderlin sets up a much more immediately recognizable opposition between Empedocles and the priest Hermokrates, from the beginning of the drama. Both sides speak aggressively. Hermokrates calls Empedocles an Abgott , an “idol,” literally ab-Gott , “away from God” (TE 2, 533). Whereas in the first version, the people first agree to take Empedocles back among
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them, then beg him to stay, so that his departure appears to be a selfwilled act (though it may be commanded by the gods), in the second version he is presented as a perceived enemy of the people. Hermokrates, speaking to Mekades, makes the role of tradition and religion with respect to the people explicit: “Thus we tie a blindfold around human eyes, so that they may not feed too richly on the light” (TE 2, 527), and says that Empedocles is too powerful (TE 2, 528). In the first version, Hölderlin puts Jesus’ words (Luke 22:24), “Father! I will thank you, when the bitterest is once more taken from me” (TE 1, 521), into the mouth of Pausanias, Empedocles’ disciple. In the second version, however, Empedocles berates the gods for forsaking him: “Where are you my gods? Woe! You have left me now like a beggar. . . . Alone! Alone! Alone!” (TE 2, 536–37). In the third, final, and likewise unfinished version, questions of identity merge with the power struggle. In a negation of the Old Testament divine proclamation (Exodus 3: 14), Empedocles tells Pausanias “I am not the one I am” (TE 3, 557, my emphasis). As if to emphasize this point, Manes, the strange Doppelgänger of Empedocles, here appears on the scene. Manes is an Egyptian, the Oriental opposition to Empedocles’ Greek (as for Hegel the Jewish Moses contrasted to the occidentalized Christ). Manes calls Empedocles a Trugbild , an “illusion,” but in response to Empedocles’ “Who are you?” answers “I have told you many things, on the distant Nile” (TE 3, 560). Already, both time and space have entered a realm of confusion; the voyage Empedocles urges Pausanias to take rather than sacrificing himself along with him ranges from the Italy of the Roman empire to a visit to Plato. The anachronisms forward and back can be explained by the words “everything recurs [es kehret alles wieder] ” (TE 3, 559–60). In his turn, Manes asks Empedocles, “O tell me who you are! and who am I?” (TE 3, 562). Are you: . . . the new savior [who] calmly seizes the rays of Heaven, and lovingly takes what is mortal to his breast, And the strife of the world is mollified. Between the gods and humans he mediates And they again live nearby, as they did before. And so that, having appeared, the son shall not be greater than the parents Nor the holy spirit of life remain bound Forgotten over him, the singular, So he turns aside, the idol of his time, He breaks his own good fortune, too happy for him
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So that through a pure hand the necessary may happen for the pure And returned what he possessed, purified, to the elements That had glorified him. Are you the man? the same one? are you this? (TE 3, 562) Empedocles berates Manes for “tempting” him (recalling Satan’s three temptations of Christ in Matthew 4) into thinking of himself as a savior, as lord over the world. Yet Manes the omniscient’s words are significant, particularly when he foresees that Empedocles (or Christ) must “turn aside” in order that the following of the “son” shall not acquire a positivity on Earth that would make him appear greater than his parents, for as human he is only one (Einzige); he both encompasses the entire unity in himself, and at the same time retains his origin and his destiny. Hegel makes a similar observation in “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” comparing the Trinity to a tree: A tree that has three branches makes up with them one tree; but every “son” of the tree, every branch (and also its other “children,” leaves and blossoms) is itself a tree. The fibers bringing sap to the branch from the stem are of the same nature as the roots. If a tree is set in the ground upside down it will put forth leaves out of the roots in the air, and the boughs will root themselves in the ground. And it is just as true to say that there is only one tree here as to say that there are three. (TJS 309/261)
However, Hegel presumes the unity of the tree (although he chooses it for its simultaneous capacity to be both one and many), and does not take into consideration the fact that the plant may become fragmented or multiple through cuttings or seeds that could isolate themselves from the origin. Hegel insists that it is “just as true” to say that the tree is one as three, unlike Goethe, who insisted that no plant can be called an individual. Hegel recognizes the ambiguity of definition, yet he clearly privileges the unifying gesture over that which would take each branch to be one of a multitude. This marks a clear distinction between Hölderlin and Hegel even in this most “Christian” or “Hegelian” of the Empedocles drafts, 14 and foreshadows Hegel’s philosophy of nature, for the conversation between Manes and Empedocles at the end of the unfinished draft attests to the fundamental ambiguity Hölderlin felt about the possibility of redemption, and thus the possibility of unifying what has become multiple. First, Hölderlin has Empedocles set to cast himself, not into the arms of a heavenly Father, but into the very earthly Father Aetna, also called the “dark Mother.”
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Second, Empedocles tells Manes that the very positivity of Manes’ description of the savior itself has prevented Empedocles from being able to carry out his suicide: Manes: Empedocles: Manes: Empedocles: Manes: Empedocles: Manes: Empedocles:
How is it with us? Do you see so clearly? You ask me that? You who can see all things? Let us be silent, o son! and always learn. You taught me in the past; today learn from me. Have you not told me everything? O no! So now you are going? I am not going yet, O old one, From this good green earth my eyes should not depart without joy. And I still want to think on past time, The friends of my youth, the dear ones, That now live in distant Hellas’ happy cities, The brothers, too, who cursed me, so it had to be, Leave me now, when the sun goes down over there You will see me again. (TE 565)
Empedocles is uneasy with the description of one who “turns aside” so that the “necessary may happen” and the pure “may return, purified to the elements.” He refuses to commit suicide “without joy.” The suicide is not an act in the interest of a final result; specifically, Empedocles is not sacrificing himself for the sake of a higher unity. Though he promises that he will be seen again, the reference is not to a second birth, but to a temporary deferral of death. In “The Ground for Empedocles,” Hölderlin explains tragic struggle in terms of the inevitable struggle between nature and art that will result if humans try to attain knowledge of nature (GE 715/53). Through the interaction of nature and art (that is, all human working upon nature, whether physical or theoretical), nature becomes “more organic, through the forming, cultivating man,” whereas simultaneously humans become “more aorgic, universal, infinite” (GE 715/53). However, “in the middle,” writes Hölderlin, “there lies the struggle and the death of the individual, that moment when the organic discards its I-ness [Ichheit], its particular existence that had become an extreme.” This sounds suspiciously like a Hegelian moment of transition from particular to absolute, except that Hölderlin specifies that at the same time “the aorgic must increasingly concentrate against the extreme of the particular and must gain a middle point and become the most particular” (GE 716/54). In other words, the movement is more of a turning inside-out
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or a looping of endpoints back to a midpoint than a progression. Hölderlin presents the death of the individual as a real, narrative event: in Empedocles, the philosopher throws himself into Aetna, while in Hyperion , Diotima perishes. Hölderlin writes of Empedocles, “[H]is fate presents itself to him in a momentary union which, however, has to dissolve, though, in order to increase” (GE 718/55), and this is equally true of Hyperion. Hölderlin writes of the most intense, or intimate (innig) sensibility (Empfindung), which is the sensibility of the tragic hero: “The most intense sensibility is exposed to transitoriness [Vergänglichkeit] precisely to the degree to which it does not deny the true temporal and sensuous relations” (GE 572/52). On the one hand, this intensity is what will make the hero stand out from everyone else (seeming to assure his longevity, at least in terms of history). On the other hand, precisely since it is the most intense sensibility, the sensibility of the hero is somehow compelled not to deny “the true temporal and sensuous relations,” which are, presumably, that everything becomes in passing away (“das Werden im Vergehen”). In not denying these relations, the hero “exposes” himself to “transitoriness” in the highest degree, that is, he himself is most subject to the laws of transience (in despair flinging himself into the abyss, for example). At the same time, he becomes the sensibility itself, which implies his destruction as individual in any event; death simply confirms this event. The life of the most intense is the most vulnerable. Yet this is not a pathetic observation, to be accompanied by sadness or pity. The vulnerability comes through exposure to temporality and becoming, but is not separable from it by means of, say, a culture that appreciates art or philosophy—or recognizes prophecy—more. Hölderlin understands the tragic hero to be out of joint with time, but he also understands that time is ever out of joint with heroics. However, there seems to be another resonance of this passage, which suggests that the denial of the laws of time and space (causality, succession) is sometimes precisely what is needed for art. Hölderlin writes in parentheses at the end of the statement that it is also lyric law to deny the true temporal and sensuous relations, if “intensity as such can be maintained there [in the denial] less profoundly and hence more easily” (GE 572/52). In effect, a crossing takes place in tragedy: that which is most conscious (the individual human) loses consciousness, and in doing so lends speech and consciousness to that which is normally mute and unconscious, that is, to unorganized nature (the aorgic). Hölderlin writes that insofar as Empedocles becomes more conscious of the fact that what is being spoken becomes “unspeakable or not-to-be-spoken,” that is, lends itself less and less to the possibility of determination and thus becomes more and more universal, ineffable, and “unconscious,” the
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contraries—organic and aorgic, consciousness and unconsciousness, particular and universal—come together in him and unite (GE 576/55). However, in the process Empedocles himself, as determinate, conscious individual, must perish, for he is “too intense, too singular.” Hölderlin describes the opponent of the tragic hero as “tied to consciousness,” one who “seeks to solve the problems of the time in a different, more negative way”: “His virtue is understanding, his goddess necessity. He is destiny itself, only with the exception that the contending forces inside him are tied to a consciousness, to a point of separation (Scheidepunkt) that keeps them facing one another in a clear and controlled manner, that ties them to a (negative) ideality and gives them a direction” (GE 583/61). Here it seems that Hölderlin could be describing either Kant or the later Hegel. In fact, however, this passage testifies to the discussions Hegel and Hölderlin must have been having before and around this time. Hegel’s chief concern in describing the historical development of Christianity in “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” was to distinguish between the original message of love Jesus preached and the positive doctrine created by the church over the years, a doctrine Hegel thought made it resemble the Judaism it originally diverged from more closely than the teachings of Christ. The tragic Christ Hegel describes lives and dies on earth, and fails in completing his task because of the opposition he finds in already established religion. He is misconstrued after his death. The positivity Hegel describes in the Christian religion results from the disciples “forgetting” once they no longer have the man among them. Hegel mourns Christianity as the possibility of a living religion, set apart from the dead unity of a concept: A living bond of the virtues, a living unity, is quite different from the unity of the concept; it does not set up a determinate virtue for determinate circumstances, but appears, even in the most variegated mixture of relations, untorn and unitary. Its external shape may be modified in infinite ways; it will never have the same shape twice. Its expression will never be able to afford a rule, since it never has the force of a universal opposed to a particular. Just as virtue is the complement of obedience to law, so love is the complement of the virtues. By it all one-sidednesses, all exclusivenesses, all restricted virtues, are annulled. There are no longer any virtuous sins or sinning virtues, since it is the living interrelation of men in their essential being. In it all severances, all restrictions, disappear, and so, too, the limitations on the virtues cease to exist. Where could there be room for determinate virtues when no right remains to be surrendered? (TJS 246)
Through the death of Christ this possibility evaporates for Hegel. From the ashes of the tragic life of Christ, however, Hegel ultimately
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retrieves the structure of resurrection, which, together with the phenomenon of spirit manifesting itself externally, becomes the fundament of dialectical logic. If early German Idealistic speculation is based on the model of tragedy, only Hegel takes this trope to a further possibility that redeems the tragic moment and gives the negative a function and an end toward which to move. The movement from tragic Christ to resurrected Christ in Hegel’s thought marks the transition to the dialectic, even in its manifestation in the philosophy of nature. The life of Hegel’s plant, like that of his Christ, is valued for its structure and not for its earthly existence. Hegel regards Jesus’ life on earth, in its tragic nature, as a failure. Jesus was not able to overcome the positivity of the religious tradition of his time, he was not able to form a community or have a family, in order to be able to exist with all the ethical implications of a full life. Indeed, the proximity of Empedocles and plant and Jesus and plant is not simply fortuitous. In the logic of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, the plant is the middle term, just as Christ is the middle term of the Trinity. The plant, too, will sacrifice itself for the sake of the birth of spirit—yet in a manner altogether alien to the pre-suicidal reflections of Hölderlin’s Empedocles. Unlike the fragility of Hölderlin’s plant tropes, Hegel’s symbols will ultimately retain their metamorphosing form while gaining the hardiness and tensile strength of the structure of resurrection. Parallel to the development, in Hegel’s thought, from an emphasis on the historical Christ to a retention of Christ purely as a structure of Aufhebung as resurrection, the plant (and thus the human as plant) goes from a living, concrete existence to the abstract form of metaphoric metamorphosis. In doing so, it will take on the unyielding configuration that we have called animal individuation.
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5
HEGEL The Self-Sacrifice of the Innocent Plant
ON A PET POODLE (December 19, 1798) He runs in wide circles on the plain; we are his point of return; He searches in the earth, he spots me, and soon gambols toward me. Now where is he? He has found playmates. They tease, flee, and search each other out; The hunter becomes the hunted. But see, now they’ve run too far. Come here! The word tears him free of his instinct and forces him back to his master. But a bitch pulls him off to the right again. Stop! Come back! He doesn’t hear. The stick awaits you [deiner]. I don’t see him any longer. He is slinking back along the hedge, his bad conscience slows his steps. Come to me! You [du] circle me from a distance, wagging your tail, he must— Have you all [Ihr] never seen what Must means? Here you [Ihr’s] will see it. He can’t do otherwise. You [du] scream at the blows: obey the commands of the master. —G.W.F. Hegel
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The poem with which we open is one of Hegel’s lesser known literary efforts. It has none of the poignancy of “Eleusis,” dedicated to Hölderlin, nor the innocence of some of his more lyrical nature poems. One of Hegel’s biographers describes the poem as an interplay of “playful freedom, natural necessity, estrangement of self and return to self.”1 On this account, the description of Hegel’s interaction with his pet poodle could almost encapsulate the dialectical method for which Hegel would later become famous. Both the poem and the explanation certainly have a foreboding ring of what is to come; at the time of the poem’s composition Hegel had broached neither the philosophy of nature nor the dialectical method. Perhaps it is not frivolous to see in this “playful description” an ominous sign of what would become Hegel’s attitude toward nature in general in his mature works. The poem describes a dog that runs about on a flat open space outdoors, always returning to the master who is walking with his friends. But the dog, a mere animal without language or rationality, is distracted by other dogs, and, in particular, by a female dog who pulls him away from the spiritual, human, cycle of the master that Hegel indicates is higher than the natural, instinctual, sexual cycle that tempts the dog away. The master shouts “Stop!” and “Come back!” The words “tear [the dog] loose” from mere instinct, but he is weak, and the natural drive pulls him away again. The master shouts, and awaits the dog with a stick, determined to teach through pure force what could not be communicated rationally. Though the dog cannot understand the words, the blows of the stick teach him the superiority of reason over pure natural impulse. Hegel addresses his friends, inviting them to learn a lesson from his actions. The plural pronoun Ihr, rather than the familiar du with which he addresses the dog, indicates that when he asks, “Do you see what ‘Must’ means? Now you see it,” Hegel is speaking to his companions. The “Must” Hegel refers to is the necessity of nature. Because the dog acts according to nature, Hegel somewhat excuses him: “He cannot do otherwise.” In spite of this, the dog is beaten, in order that he may learn to obey his master. One cannot help visualizing a patronizing young Hegel, his face either calm and smiling or red with righteous indignation, repeatedly beating his dog with a stick “for his own good” for not realizing that heeding the master is spiritually higher than indulging in the pleasures of the senses. The alternation of perspective within the poem, though probably the result of carelessness rather than explicit poetic intention, intensifies the uneasy feeling the poem creates in the reader: in the moments when Hegel speaks of the dog as “he,” he (Hegel) is distant and descriptive, if utterly anthropocentric: “He runs in wide circles on the plain, we are his point of return.” Yet as soon as he speaks directly as master to the
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dog he becomes shrilly insistent upon the necessity of the lower animal’s obedience and subservience (“You scream at the blows: Obey the commands of the master”). At this moment the pet dog becomes a metonym for nature itself, and the relationship of master and dog can serve as an analogy to the way in which Hegel will approach nature. If, as Mueller puts it, this poem illustrates the cycle of freedom, natural necessity, estrangement of self, and return to self, then the “self” of the dog is understood only in its relationship to a higher level of nature, namely to the human being. As we will come to see, this is indeed the case with every level of organic nature as Hegel describes it in the later versions of the Encyclopedia. However, it is difficult to understand the leap from the essays on Christ as a tragic figure that Hegel wrote while still in Frankfurt to the philosophy of nature outlined in the Encyclopedia, first published in 1817, without examining the early philosophy of nature found in the lecture courses Hegel gave in Jena in the years following his departure from Frankfurt.2 Hegel’s philosophy of nature exhibits the imbrication of descriptions of nature with assumptions about the nature of human being and thinking and its place within the natural world. Purportedly providing a neutral description of nature and its processes, the philosophy of nature lectures ultimately provide implicit justification for spiritual hierarchies ranking the place of men and women, Europeans and non-Europeans, Christians and non-Christians within both history and contemporary politics. Hegel’s lectures on nature thus provide important insight into his understanding of subjectivity. Hegel’s mature philosophy of nature ultimately subordinates all of nature to the progression of spirit, a progression that culminates in human subjectivity understood to be gained at the price of its natural origin. In the hierarchy of Hegel’s philosophy of nature animals are higher than plants and minerals, but each manifests a lesser degree of (at least potential) spirit; together, they form part of nature as the history of spirit. These are the three stages of organic development that Hegel describes in the short section of his Philosophy of Nature entitled “Organic Physics.” With Goethe and other contemporaries such as Novalis and Schelling, Hölderlin believed that examining the human relationship with nature can illuminate fundamental truths about human existence, and that human being can be understood only in conjunction with nature. For Hegel, by contrast, nature has a value only in the process of understanding the primitive beginnings of what will evolve into spirit, that is, into human thought and action. Hegel finds a value in studying nature only as a means of understanding the history of spirit, that is, of understanding a spiritual history or ancestry of life forms leading up to the creation of the human being.
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According to Hegel, all of nature is both necessary and contingent; necessarily bound by the laws of physics and biology, but subject to irrational changes of form that are the result of chance rather than freedom. Nature cannot control the erratic birth of misshapen or monstrous exceptions to the general pattern, “intermediate and defective forms” (W 9: 36/PN 1: 216), and this is what excludes it from a place in the present progression of spirit. Nature is characterized by caprice and disorder, irrationality and the impossibility of being conceptualized, but none of these characteristics is to be confused with freedom. Hegel calls this identification of natural caprice with freedom a “confusion,” the result of “sensuous and unphilosophical thinking” (W 9: 35/PN 1: 215). Spirit is destined to be the master of nature. In the introduction to the “Philosophy of Nature” in the Encyclopedia, Hegel calls nature the Abfall , or the refuse, of spirit (W 9: 28/PN 1: 209).3 In this introduction Hegel emphatically contrasts nature with the products of human reason and genius: Every product of the spirit, the very worst of its imaginings, the capriciousness of its most arbitrary moods, a mere word, are all better evidence of God’s being than any single object. It is not only that in nature the play of forms has unbounded and unbridled contingency, but that each shape by itself is devoid of the concept of itself. Life is the ultimate that nature in its existence drives toward, but as a merely natural idea life is given over to the irrationality of externality. . . . If spiritual contingency or caprice goes forth into evil , that which goes astray is still infinitely superior to the regular movement of stars, or the innocent life of the plant, because that which errs is still spirit. (W 9: 28–29/PN 1: 209–10)
Hegel repeatedly describes plants as “innocent,” presumably because though they share a lack of consciousness with other organic entities, they share life and practices such as nourishment, respiration, and reproduction, with animals. Innocence remained an attribute linked to the plant even after the influence of Romantic literature had waned. Hegel’s attribution of innocence to plant life has broader implications than might seem immediately obvious, as we will see when we examine the degree to which his characterization of nature influenced his interpretation of human culture. Stones are obdurate and ignorant, because they do not even possess the possibility of life. Plants are naïve and innocent, and as such will be compared to and symbolize the Orient, pagan religions, and women. According to Hegel, natural forms develop in a system of stages (Stufen) that proceed one from the other, such that each is the “truth” of the one that precedes it. This does not mean that he believes in a strange evolution in which plants are actually created out of stone or
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animals out of plants. Indeed, Hegel insists that the progressive model of nature is not one that occurs in time, since it is a spiritual, rather than a biological model. The concept (Begriff) is the substratum that persists through these changes, and nature remains pure exteriority with reference to it. In other words, Hegel discounts natural time and natural development, and gives importance only to the way in which nature appears from the point of view of spirit. 4 Hegel specifies that metamorphosis can have value as an explanation only with reference to the concept, since “only its alteration is development” (W 9: 31/PN 1: 212). Metamorphosis in an individual natural entity, such as a plant or a butterfly, cannot be a principle of development but is limited to that existent individual alone. In his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel criticizes Goethe for making metamorphosis the central explanatory principle of nature for the reason that, according to Hegel, metamorphosis is an account that relies on merely quantitative change. Hegel understands metamorphosis as “a single idea which persists in the various genera and in the same way in each particular organ, so that these genera and organs are only reorganizations of the form of one and the self-same type.” In the notion of metamorphosis, Hegel argues, difference is inadequately emphasized (W 9: 33). Hegel’s own account of nature, then, emphasizes the qualitative leap that is accomplished in each of the three stages he identifies in organic nature. Unlike Schelling, Hegel identifies three distinct stages of stone, plant, and animal, forming three hierarchically distinct units in the development of nature that correspond to the three moments of dialectical logic. This kind of thinking led to Schelling’s criticism that Hegel’s philosophy gives up any claim to knowledge of real existence and becomes purely negative, merely logical, or “logicizing.”5 Hegel in turn sarcastically criticized Schelling’s picture of nature as “a night where all cows are black,” 6 referring to the impossibility of knowing nature without contrasting it to the negative of spirit, the vacuity (as Hegel saw it) of understanding nature itself to be the absolute. For Schelling (as for Goethe), the organic world exhibits the same combination of finite product and infinite progression that human intelligence does: “One may say that organic nature furnishes the most obvious proof of transcendental idealism, for every plant is a symbol of the intelligence.”7 Ironically, Schelling’s positive choice of plant as symbol is given for reasons that are nearly identical to Hegel’s reasons why plants can have no true subjectivity: For the plant, indeed, the material that it appropriates or incorporates into itself under a particular form is already preformed in the natural environment; but whence, then, is the material to come to the intelligence, since
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it is absolute and alone? Since, therefore, it produces the material no less than the form from out of itself, it is the absolutely organic. In the original succession of presentations it appears to us as an activity which is unceasingly at once both cause and effect of itself; cause, insofar as it produces; effect, insofar as it is the produced. 8
Indeed, for Schelling, nature itself is intelligence, and thinks itself, not in analogy to human thinking, but as nature. Schelling does not claim that the human intellect works in the way that a plant grows, but rather that the growth of a plant exhibits the kind of intelligence that nature is. 9 Nature itself is a visible manifestation of the ideal, a manifestation of a power of reason that is not limited to human consciousness. In this sense, Schelling is very close to Goethe. Although Schelling’s ideas catalyzed Hegel’s interest in nature, Hegel would ultimately take his philosophy of nature in quite a different direction. Until he joined Schelling at the University of Jena in 1801, Hegel had not concerned himself with the philosophy of nature in general, concentrating instead on topics that concerned human nature— religion, history, ethics—which would remain his priority throughout his life. For Hegel nature remains a known, conceptualized nature, only to be approached through the assumption that it has already been filtered through the human understanding.10 Schelling named intelligence something that preceded and was a condition for the possibility of conscious human understanding. Hegel’s philosophy of nature in its mature form might be called, rather than a metaphysics of nature, a metaphysics of the compounded human knowledge of nature. Hegel’s account covers an astonishing range of scientific theories and speculations, ranging from Aristotle to Paracelsus, from Jakob Böhme to medieval alchemical theories, from Goethe to Schelling, to an enormous number of contemporary scientific theories.11 Hegel’s emphasis on speculative natural philosophy, mysticism, and alchemy reflects his approach to nature, which never pretends to be a strictly empirical or scientific one (in the way many scientists today would understand that term), but rather seeks to understand nature always from the way in which it has been taken up by humans. Hegel’s dialectic, however, is based at least partly on a plant model; its ultimate symbol, that of Christ as God born in human form, dying and being reborn spiritually, has appeared in almost every archaic religion under the form of the god of the harvest (some of its manifestations are Dionysos and Adonis). Hegel presents the progression from stone to vegetable to animal, mirrored by a parallel development in religion from deities of light to deities of plant, animal, and finally to human-based deities, as a hierarchy. I will argue that Hegel’s philosophy of nature
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develops in a way that parallels his movement from an emphasis on a tragic Christ to the formal logic of resurrection. In other words, nature, for Hegel, has an importance only as the determinate existing reality that provides a basis for a transcendent structure. As the Jesus who failed his mission and died succumbs to the Christ who is reborn after death, the plant succumbs to the animal, and, more importantly, the open-ended form of plant metamorphosis will be incorporated by the assimilating power of the animal organism. Thus, the development of Hegel’s philosophy of nature, however unintentionally, provides an apt figure for the transformation of the attempt at a “vegetative” subjectivity back into the more familiar Enlightenment (masculine) model that ultimately prevailed after the decline of German Idealism’s influence. This movement, in turn, will follow the all-important move from the open-endedness of desire to the encapsulation of desire in an end. Hegel’s reconfiguration of Kant’s teleology of nature illustrates the move from a Hölderlinian plant-like nature that moves with the human being in a constant rhythm—a rhythm of expansive desire and contractive recognition of finitude—to a containment of desire within a definitive structure. Although the first part of the Phenomenology of Spirit explicitly works against an animal-like understanding of desire, the form in which spirit unfolds ultimately rejects the open-endedness and indeterminacy of the plant form in favor of the incorporation of the animal. Indeed, Hegel’s story of nature is a fable presented as science, a fable that ends in the self-sacrifice of the plant for the sake of the animal, and the sacrifice of nature as a whole for the sake of spirit. This progression follows the same pattern that Hegel discerns in the replacement of religions that worshipped powers of nature, such as the cult of Dionysos, by religions that worshipped a transcendent god. In Christianity, particularly, the natural and living are transformed into spirit as the symbolic and the (resurrected) dead. For Hegel, the difference between plant and animal will be less something purely biological or purely spiritual than part of the story of the gradual transition from matter to spirit, a movement from one term to another of a whole series of bipartite distinctions: from distance to proximity, from fragmentation to wholeness, from dependence to freedom, from multiplicity to oneness, from passivity to activity, from positivity to negativity, from weight to lightness, from rigidity to fluidity, from female to male, from plant to animal, from oriental to occidental, from mere oscillation to movement in time. Hegel’s tripartite philosophy of nature does not remain, even in his own corpus, the small, necessary, but hidden tail of the trajectory of spirit. The division into rock, plant, and animal is only one metonymic name for a structure that reappears in almost every area of spirit that
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Hegel examines. But it is particularly powerful because it is taken to be the description of a natural order; the hierarchy will then permeate other hierarchies and provide their “natural” justification. The following passage demonstrates that for Hegel the plant provides an irreducible metaphor in the sense of juxtaposing the natural and the cultural in such a way that one not only illuminates the other but also provides its implicit warrant and foundation. The difference between men and women is that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling. When women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions. Women are educated—who knows how?—as it were by breathing in ideas, by living rather than acquiring knowledge. The status of manhood, by contrast, is attained only by the stress of thought and much technical exertion. 12
Hegel employs the structure of nature as he has outlined it to justify “naturally” (and thus incontrovertably) the hierarchies he draws in human realms. The same technique will be used to delineate the history of art and the history of religion. Not only women, but non-Christian and non-European “orientals” will be placed on the side of the stone and the plant. The progression of rock-plant-animal will provide the model, both in terms of outward form and inward development, for the progression (and progression is always a progress, from primitive to advanced, from ignorant to enlightened) of spiritual forms. Time and again Hegel sees history repeating itself through these basic forms. The vegetable becomes the form of woman, of onion domes and stylized lotus carvings, of passivity and as yet unalleviated ignorance, of Judaism and Islam and Hinduism and the East in its most blatantly generalized shape as Other. Hegel conceives of nature prior to the intervention of human understanding—perhaps because he began by studying geological nature—as a congealed mass, a lump of lava or amber in which spirit is preserved, to be freed only by the melting power of thought. Once, looking at the starry sky, Hegel commented that it was “an immobile exhibition, a formal model that represents an eternal past in mute hieroglyphics that can only be freed from its ossification through recognition [Erkennen].”13 The spirit of nature is hidden, and can only be brought out by the understanding mind that penetrates and melts the rigidity of what is merely contingent in itself. Thus, nature prior to the penetrating force of human thought somehow resembles the realm of earth before anything that grows has sprung from it.
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Indeed, much of Hegel’s early philosophy of nature has to do with the sun and the earth as systems, and with more abstract notions within physics and chemistry such as the breakdown into forces and elements. While the 1803–1804 lectures contain references to plant and animal life, what remains of the 1804–05 notes mention only sections dealing with the “System of the Sun,” the “Earthly System,” the “process of the material” and “physics.” Here, Hegel is almost exclusively concerned with space, time, the formation of masses or bodies, and movement. In his earliest lectures, Hegel seems to consider earth and rock to be inorganic nature. The science of geology was just beginning to form at this time, a fact that explains why Hegel did not include a section on geological nature within the study of organic nature until the later Encyclopedia. Nevertheless, from the beginning, “earth” is always the starting point of organic nature in order to retain the tripartite structure that is necessary according to Hegel’s logic. The need to divide organic nature (as well as everything he studied) into three parts stemmed from Hegel’s growing conviction that the dialectical method not only could be “applied” to nature but also actually manifested the structure inherent in all natural and historico-spiritual progression or development. Moreover, if it could be shown that nature, too, followed the tripartite movement Hegel had already studied in human accomplishments, this would strengthen the dialectical thesis, apparently manifesting it as a natural order. In the Science of Logic, in the section that addresses the question of whether life can properly be called a category of the science of logic, Hegel explains his principle of division in the following way: in its first determination, life is the process of the living implicit within itself; the second determination is the exteriorization of the first and its recognition of an other, and the third determination is the unity of the first and second, self and other, in itself. This structure follows the unfolding of God-Christ-Holy Spirit. 14 If we understand every instance of the tripartite structure to repeat, however distantly, the event of immediate presence/incarnation/resurrection, then the figure of the plant parallels the figure of Christ, since both Christ and plant—which Hegel describes between mineral and animal nature— are middle terms, figures for the externalization of an implicit concept. On another level, nature itself is the middle term of externalization between logic and spirit. Three sets of note fragments from Hegel’s Jena lectures from the years 1803 to 1806 have been compiled. Of these, the 1805–1806 collection is the most complete, and, as might be expected, the most developed. The 1803–1804 lecture notes contain a section on organic nature entitled “On the Organic and the Philosophy of Spirit,” but the notes on minerals, plants, and animals are combined, and the philosophy of spirit
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soon overtakes them in emphasis. The 1804–1805 lecture notes as they remain contain no mention of the organic. The 1803–1804 lecture notes already show the direction the 1805–1806 lectures will take. As the middle term in every presentation—between logic on the one hand, and the philosophy of spirit on the other—nature itself is in Hegel’s terms always the externalization or alienation (Entäusserung) of the concept. For Hegel the term Äusserung always indicates contingency and limitation. Only after nature has been elevated into the realm of spirit, which occurs only when it essentially burns, can it be considered as part of the necessary history of the progression of spirit. Within the presentation of nature, the plant is this middle term or exteriorization: if the earth is inert, “implicit” nature (an sich), the plant is the first externalization of what cannot even yet be called potential in the earth, while the animal literally ingests the plant in order to achieve a relative self-sufficiency the plant can never attain. This relationship is already clearly presented in Hegel’s first lectures on organic nature. In the 1803–1804 fragment “So allgemein abgesondert von der Erde . . .” Hegel begins by calling the earth a “jelly” in which nothing is distinguished, an “absolute having-flowed into one” (JI 210). It has the “seed of life” in it, but not the seed of any determinate life. It is “permeated by the absolute concept” (JI 210). Spirit is referred to as “the liquid” or “the flowing” (das Flüssige), and “the flowing is the absolute communication of that which itself, according to its nature as a beingoutside-of-itself, in which the absolute concept realizes itself and in its absolute opposition, has its simplicity as existing” (JI 210). This explains why Hegel uses the language of melting to describe the transition from nature to spirit; nature, for Hegel, refers to the rigid and the determinate, to the object, whereas spirit is the realm of freedom. Thus, the fact that plant and animal, unlike stone, contain fluids within them, points to the greater spirituality of their existence. From the characterization of earth as jelly, that is, as the most congealed form of nature, Hegel immediately goes on to identify the chief distinguishing feature between the plant and the animal as the fact that the plant “cannot retain this fluid in itself,” and thus does not have a unity of its internal and external world (JI 211). The animal, by contrast, because of its self-enclosed (beschlossen) interior of circulating fluids (principally blood) that do not pass from it into either the earth or the air, carries the spiritual liquidity within itself. The universal fluid merely flows through and then outside the plant, whereas the animal holds this universal element within itself as a part of itself (JI 211). Here we see explicitly the parallel drawn between self-enclosedness and spirituality, and the linkage between “animal individuation” and subjectivity.
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In the 1805–1806 lecture notes, Hegel expands the commentary on vegetable nature considerably, although the extensive study of botanical work such as that of Goethe and of Linnaeus that characterizes the description of plant life in the Encyclopedia is missing. In the course of time between the first and the third series of early lectures Hegel strengthens his argument for the deficiency of the plant by expanding the description of the plant structure in detail. The emergence of the plant marks the first time that the earth opens itself up to the growth of something higher than it is. Thus, for the first time earth is as subject. Whereas “prior to” the emergence of organic nature—earth seems to occupy a preorganic realm that is situated between the inorganic and the organic—the earth tended toward the formation of autonomous, completed, singular bodies, such as the sun, the moon, and the comets, in nurturing the seeds of plant life the earth is sublated into mere elements, into minerals that nourish the plant (JIII, 129). Just as the plant will serve the animal, the earth here seems to serve the plant. Since, however, the plant is nothing more than the process of these elements that pass through it along with light, water, and air, the earth cannot be said to be for the plant; rather, the earth is still immediately one with the plant (JIII, 129). The plant is nothing more than an organic extension of the earth. The plant is a specific kind of its own (Gattung), but it cannot be considered an individual because it is never opposed to itself. Rather, it remains a singular thing, since even collections of plant “individuals” remain indifferent to each other, as an aggregation rather than an integrated whole (JIII, 129, note 3). We recall that Hegel’s principal objection to Hölderlin (and to Christ seen as tragic) was that “beautiful souls” withdrew from society rather than becoming part of an ethical community. Even the plant’s relationship to the earth is an indifferent one—Hegel notes that plants can be nourished chemically and grow equally well without their being sown in the earth. From experiments such as these, Hegel believes that plants get no real nourishment from the earth, but only from water and the air. Plants as seeds are thus simply the “power of the earth,” giving the earth the potential for growth (JIII, 130). At the same time, however, plants yearn for the light in the way that solitary human beings yearn for the companionship of lovers and friends. The beautiful soul is thus something like a potato in a dark cellar that starts to sprout eyes at the sight of the tiniest crack of light coming through a window high above (JIII, 132). The plant in conjunction with the earth becomes pure possibility; earth in itself is potency, but not in a determined, immediate sense. The seed of the plant is essential power, the first transition to “life” (JIII, 131). This introduces a famous passage included in the additions (Zusätze) to the Encyclopedia. Hegel describes the moment of germination from the seed in terms of a pagan mysticism:
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This safeguarding of the seed in the earth is therefore a mystical, magical act—as the infant is not just this helpless human form that gives no indication of reason, but is in itself the power of reason, something quite other than this thing [dies] that cannot speak or do anything rational; and baptism is precisely this solemn recognition of fellowship in the realm of spirit. So putting, letting the seed [fall] in the earth is this mystical act, [the recognition] that there are secret powers in it that still slumber, that in truth it is something other than this thing [dies] that is just there; the magician who gives this seed that I can crush in my hand an entirely other significance—a sense like that which makes of a rusty lamp a mighty spirit—is the concept of nature; 15 the seed is the force that conjures the earth to serve it with her power (JIII, 131; cf. W 9: 396/PN 3: 68).16
The seed (in the earth) is to the plant as the (baptized) infant is to the adult. The seed is, as Hegel puts it, “essential power,” pure potentiality (JIII, 131). Nature is the “magician” who provokes the transition from inorganic to organic nature through the invocation of the seed. Yet the “magician” is no personification, but expresses a pure relationality between earth and seed, the power that flourishes when the seed is placed in the sympathetic environment of the earth. The relation between a seed, a thing that is tiny and seems insignificant and can be crushed easily between one’s fingers, and earth, which has no possibility of bringing forth life on its own, is a relation of negation. The “magician” is the negating power of seed in conjunction with earth, the force that allows the earth to bring forth life. The earth itself cannot be possibility in this early version of the philosophy of nature, for Hegel equates organic life with possibility, and as yet he does not consider anything other than plants and animals to be organic. Thus, the seed, unlike any inorganic form, is never merely “this thing that is just here,” merely existing in its present form. It always exceeds the realm of simple ostensive definition and thus has something mystical about it, like a rusty lamp that when rubbed produces a genie.17 However, Hegel emphasizes immediately that the plant’s capacity to actualize this potentiality is limited. Unlike Goethe, Hegel does not understand the metamorphosis of plants to be anything other than an “increase” [Vermehrung], a growth, a getting-larger (JIII, 131). Using Herder-like analogies, Hegel explains that every part of the plant could serve as every other: for example, the root of a plant is nothing but an inverted tree with its branches planted in the earth (JIII, 137). The plant is a simple structure, its parts indefinitely repeated, an empty receptacle for a constant streaming-in (Einströmung). It cannot regulate or oppose this constant stream both in and out of it, thus Hegel calls it an “unmediated” relationship to the external world (JIII, 131–32). The
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only “negativity” in the sense of oppositionality in the plant is the fact that it has a dual directionality; it both takes in and exudes water and the gases of the air. The plant also generates no warmth within itself. The animal carries fire within itself in the heat of its blood, the excitability of its fever, Hegel will say. Fire marks the extreme of natural proximity to spirit, but fire must come from within, not be ignited accidentally and externally, for heat is the product of conflict, inner opposition, which alone will lead to spirit. However, the potential flammability of the plant (dead plants, with their crystallized sugars, burn) marks its position on the verge, teetering between spiritless stone and spirit-receptive animal. But, says Hegel, the plant could go over into stone (in dying) as easily as it could burn. We will soon see that there is another, less literal process through which plants can also become part of the cycle of fire: their conversion into food for animals, in which combustion is digestion. Hegel differentiates the plant from the earth and from the animal in terms of individuation. In the realm of earth and stone, there is no meaning to the word individuation. There is no scientific basis on which to call soil, stone, or even geological formation “one”; the divisions we make are purely arbitrary. The case is similar for the plant, according to Hegel, for it, too, is arbitrarily individuated (JIII, 137). Parts of plants can be broken off and replanted, and there is never a time when one can say that a plant has reached its full growth. Self-movement might be a criterion for individuation, but plants are incapable of this. This, of course, relates to the observation that plants cannot come back to themselves as themselves, for the term self becomes superfluous in light of the lack of individuation. The process of sexual reproduction provides the ultimate test of the possible spirituality of the different realms of organic life. According to Hegel, there can only be a real sexual encounter between male and female when one has a “doubled being,” two separate bodies (JIII, 139–40). The complete organic being reflects itself in action and reaction to other, different organic beings. The process of reflection with regard to nature refers literally to physical contact. Reflection, thus, combines sensitivity (which distinguishes organic from inorganic life) and reactivity to other elements of organic life. Hegel calls the reproductive process of plants “only a representation [Vorstellung] of the sexual relationship” (JIII, 139) because one cannot say that an individual plant has contact with other individual plants through the reproductive process. The plant is not permeated by sexuality, but has it only as its surface, or in some detachable part of it. Unlike Hölderlin (as well as, among others, Friedrich Schlegel in Lucinde), who saw in the inclusion of the male and female within the flower’s corolla evidence of a higher spiritual union, Hegel insists that the partners must be able to separate
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physically in order to come together. The dissemination of pollen, for Hegel, is no “spiritual anastomosis,” but rather an all-too-natural dissipation of the possibility of true contact. Nevertheless, Hegel sees the flower as a high point of plant development. The color and the smell of the flower manifest fire in its most ethereal form: “Colors of fire: cornfield yellow, cornflower (blue), poppy (red)” (JIII, 141). But all these qualities are only for others, never for the plant itself. In the same way, the reproductive functions of plants must be seen as being as much digestive processes as much as they are sexual, “or perhaps even more so” (JIII, 143). The animal’s digestive organs work together as a coherent whole, yet cannot be thought of separately from the animal in which they exist; nor can they be considered to permeate every aspect of the animal body. Similarly, the reproductive organs of the plant are a system that is a part of, but does not permeate, the flower; nor can it be said to be “for the flower” in terms of pleasure. The first signs that the plant has manifested the concept can be seen only with the emergence of the fruit, which occurs with the demise of the flower and indicates the self-sacrifice of the plant: “Plants offer themselves as food to higher organisms, to be eaten. This is their vocation” (JIII, 144). Just as the scent, the color, and the reproduction of a plant are for others, so the plant itself can be a manifestation of spirit only—and thus, truly is only—in giving itself over in death to be eaten by a higher organism. In the process of fermentation, whether within an animal stomach or in the preparation of human food and drink, the plant finally gives off its own heat and transforms light into fire (JIII, 145). The plant gives itself in sugar, wine, vinegar, and bread. This is its downfall, but also its uplifting; it becomes part of “der Lebenslauf der Toten,” the curriculum vitae of the dead. Thus, the plant, like Christ, lays its life down for the sake of something. There is a fundamental difference between the figure of self-sacrifice that Hegel describes in both cases and Hölderlin’s examination of suicide. Self-sacrifice implies the offering of oneself for the sake of the progression of a larger whole. Suicide, on the contrary, at least for Hölderlin, is an act of desperation or perhaps of atonement, but does not expect to achieve specific results. For this reason, Hegel’s figure of the plant comes more and more to resemble the resurrected Christ as opposed to the tragic Christ. Even the products of the fermented plant, bread and wine, are the symbols of the Eucharist. Bread and wine allow Christ to be resurrected through their ingestion. 18 What we have called an animal metaphorics of subjectivity implies this completion—this integration of all loose ends, including death itself, into a higher unity. Just as Christ was born of a virgin, Hegel writes, “the fruit is not the maternal body” of the seed (JIII, 146). The fruit of the plant
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has the doubled principle in itself, the sugary, winey, the mealy, the sticky —the potable and the edible—the former the spiritual, the latter the bodily, the former the one that has most come into itself [selbsti gen] , the latter the subsistent [bestehenden] . Neutrality, the watery, becomes fiery; this spirituality is the highest degree to which the plant can come into itself [höchste Selbstigkeit]; but this coming-into-itself does not become the blood of the plant, but only its death—intoxicating drinks. (JIII, 146)
The equation of plant and the feminine as necessary for the progression of spirit (as virgin, unadulterated matter) without herself being incorporated into it is implied. Hegel’s articulation of the subject excludes woman from the state unapologetically; here we see its natural justification. The register of terms that get aligned with the plant includes the feminine, the oriental, the non-Christian, and even Christ insofar as he is God in the body of a man. Thus, Hegel always remains in the logic of resurrection, where to be reborn spiritually is to lose the body. In his introduction to the Philosophy of Nature in the Encyclopedia, Hegel calls nature “spirit estranged from itself,” and as such “only the corpse of the understanding.” Here Hegel explicitly draws the parallel between nature as middle term and Christ: “In Christ the contradiction [of the Idea in its infinite freedom and in the form of individuality] is posited and overcome, as His life, passion, and resurrection: Nature is the son of God, not as the Son, but as abiding in otherness” (W 9: 25/PN 1: 206). Nature is to spirit what the son is to god insofar as nature is the pure exteriority of the concept; nature is not “as” the son, however, since it abides in otherness and never gets taken up into spirit. In the following sentences Hegel identifies nature—as an area to be examined by philosophy—with a human appropriation of nature, namely with a religion that deifies nature. He calls nature (as an indirect manifestation of spirit) a Dionysian entity. Nature is spirit which has “let itself go” (ausgelassen), in the manner of “a Bacchic god unrestrained and unmindful of itself” (W 9: 25/PN 1: 206). The identification of nature with the Dionysian clearly indicates that Hegel relegates any importance of nature to the deep past of spirit, to the prehistory or the coming-to-be of spirit, as, for example, the living artwork. 19 Just as the Dionysian, viewed from the point of view of spirit, is only one preparation among others for the manifestation of Christianity, nature is only a preparation for spirit. The juxtaposition of the two images of Bacchic reveler and corpse seems strange only until one recalls the scene of Euripides’ Bacchae to which Hegel is surely referring, and specifically to the moment when Pentheus, the skeptic who does not recognize the divinity of Dionysos (or Bacchus), is ripped apart by ecstatic worshippers, among
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them his own mother. In “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,” 20 Georges Bataille points us toward another passage in Hegel, this time in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where dismemberment is also the key image: Death—if we wish so to name that unreality—is the most terrible thing there is, and to uphold the work of death is the task which demands the greatest strength. Impotent beauty hates this awareness, because understanding makes this demand of beauty, a requirement which beauty cannot fulfill. Now, the life of spirit is not that life which is frightened of death, and spares itself destruction, but that life which assumes death and lives with it. Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment . It is not that (prodigious) power by being the positive that turns away from the negative, as when we say of something: this is nothing or (this is) false and, having (thus) disposed of it, pass from there to something else; no, spirit is that power only to the degree to which it contemplates the negative face to face (and) dwells with it. This prolonged sojourn is the magical force [Zauberkraft] which transposes the negative into Being. (W 3: 36/PS 19)
Death is called an “unreality” because Hegel refers here not to the bodily death of the philosopher contemplating spirit, which would effectively bring an end to any investigation, but rather to the recognition of the inevitability of death as what individuates humans and sets them apart from the rest of nature. Most human beings rarely face death until it becomes an unavoidable “reality” for them or someone that they know. The knowledge of death as death (as my death) is what allows the human being to see itself as a singular and irreplaceable being. Thus, death differs fundamentally from all other negativities in that it is not determinate, but absolute. The transformation of the human from a natural to a spiritual being occurs with a direct confrontation with this recognition of absolute finitude. Although dismemberment (Zerrissenheit) would seem to point directly to the Dionysian or Bacchic, as Hegel states explicitly in the passage cited from the Philosophy of Nature, the continuation of this same passage places the responsibility for the reanimation of the corpse on a more Christian notion of resurrection through the human intellect: Nature is, however, only implicitly [an sich] the Idea, and Schelling therefore called her a petrified [versteinerte] intelligence, others even a frozen intelligence; but God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and lift themselves up to spirit. God is subjectivity, activity [Tätigkeit], infinite actuosity, in which the other is only momentary, remaining implicit within the unity of the idea, because it is itself this totality of the idea. (W 9: 25/PN 1: 206)
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What Hegel calls coming to life, however, will imply the death of nature. In another surprising juxtaposition, Hegel next compares nature to Lucifer: Nature is the negative because it is the negative of the Idea. Jacob Boehme says that God’s first-born is Lucifer; and this Light-being [Lichtwesen] directed his imagination inward onto himself and became evil: that is the moment of difference, of otherness held fast against the Son who is otherness within love. The ground and meaning of such conceptions, which occur wildly in an oriental style, is to be found in the negative nature of nature [Natur der Natur]. (W 9: 30/PN 1: 211)
Such conceptions are called “wild” and “oriental,” and it is interesting to note that Hegel will call plants, too, beings of light. Indeed, “wild,” “oriental,” “light,” and “plant” all have connections to the Dionysian as well. Although Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, like many of his philosophical writings, is tripartite in structure, it is only with the description of plant life that Hegel begins to make the series of normative binary distinctions we referred to above. Hegel’s mapping out of the transition from stone to plant to animal nature, in addition to performing the structure of Aufhebung as resurrection, mirrors Hegel’s description of the movement, in human history, from ancient Eastern civilizations such as those of China, India, and Egypt (all of these are generally treated as a whole) to the civilization of the ancient Greeks to that of Christianized Western Europe. In other words, the fact that Hegel took up the philosophy of nature after already having sketched out a philosophy of history and human development takes on a more and more prominent role in his articulation of the structure of nature itself. Much of the vocabulary of plant development is mystical and specifically refers to the Dionysian religion, especially in its pre-Greek “Asiatic” history. Hegel effectively dismisses the history of humanity until the time of the Greeks by regularly gathering Indian, Chinese, and Arabian cultures together in a time that parallels the presentation of stone, or geological nature. Such cultures remain so entirely identified with the primitive past of humankind that Hegel regards them as fossils. In the same way, nature as a whole will appear as a fossil in relation to spirit. Plant nature characterizes the transition from Eastern into Greek civilization. Greek art and religion, according to Hegel, contain the first glimmers of a symbolism that goes beyond a deification of the potencies of nature. Hegel’s fascination with and ultimate dismissal of what he will call “plant religion” and “plant nature” is linked to the widespread preoccupation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the rebirth of interest in—and commitment to—ancient Greece and its art, literature, and philosophy.
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In his mature philosophy of nature, Hegel bases the first division of his hierarchy between the three realms of organic nature on the capacity to die in the bodily sense. The division between geological nature and plant nature is based on this difference. Although geological formations perdure immeasurably longer than do the lives of individual plants (and animals), stones do not possess an internal contradiction that is capable of destroying them. It is the possibility of sickness and death, along with the necessity of sexual opposition, that privileges animate over inanimate nature and even over plants, which merely cease to live and never have truly mated, for speculation subsists in the resolution of contradiction, and resolution cannot occur when there is no interior contradiction or opposition (W 9: 338/PN 3: 10). Hegel distinguishes between the three realms of organic nature in terms of their potential for self-reflective subjectivity, a potential that is related to the possibility of death by virtue of the three moments that characterize life, namely sensitivity, irritability or reactivity, and reproduction. All three of these capacities imply a finite entity that in some way reaches out to others of its kind in a relation of desire. The stone possesses none of these characteristics; it cannot propel itself; it resembles a skeleton, and it is not divided from other stones as other. Even the solar system is merely a “mechanical organism,” vulnerable to falling victim to an external power rather than capable of dying. Hegel refers to geological nature as “the realm of earth” with reference to the four Aristotelian elements of earth, air, fire, and water. The plant, by contrast, particularizes itself in a sense, but cannot be truly differentiated from other individuals, nor can one really say where a plant, as individual, begins or ends: in the leaf, the stem, the roots, all of these together, or perhaps in the subsidiary nodes? The plant has “no power over its members,” which can fall from it, die, or even become independently growing plants, according to a seemingly arbitrary pattern. Thus, the plant “is only able to maintain itself in the face of its mutation by leaving what changes in a state of indifference” (W 9: 437/PN 3: 110–11). Hegel calls plant life the “realm of water,” though he also refers to it as dependent on light. The animal kingdom, however, is the “realm of fire,” a domain in which the individual is easily separable from the group, completely self-animated, and possesses sensation, defined as the “faculty of finding oneself within oneself” (W 9: 341–42/PN 3: 13–14). The section on “Plant Nature” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature begins by contrasting the plant’s body “articulated into parts which are separate and distinct ” with the uniformity of rock, but cautions that this life form “is only the first, immediate stage of subjective vitality” in which “the objective organism and its subjectivity are still immediately identical” (W 9: 371/PN 3: 45). Hegel regards the plant
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as something whose oneness is only a composite of a number of different “individuals” (bud, stem, etc.) rather than having a “subjective unity of members [Gliedern],” in other words, as a collection of sin gularities rather than as an individual. The differences of organic parts existing within the plant are merely the result of a “superficial metamorphosis,” according to Hegel (W 9: 371/PN 3: 45). Because of this, the plant can only relate to an other that is identical to itself, namely, to another part of itself. It can have no true subjectivity because it does not and cannot come back to itself after departing from itself toward an other that it recognizes as not-itself (as the animal will be able to do): “The growth of the plant is an assimilation into itself of the other, but as a self-multiplication, this assimilation is also a going-forthfrom-itself. It is not a coming-to-self as an individual, but a multiplication of individuality, so that the one individuality is only the superficial unity of the many. The individuals remain a separated plurality, indifferent to each other . . .” (W 9: 374/PN 3: 47). Nevertheless, the plant manifests the beginnings of spiritual life: the plant in its growth through “unrest” (Unruhe) foreshadows the category of desire that will determine the animal and be the defining characteristic of the human. The insufficiency of this primitive “desire” to make the plant (or any system based upon it) truly subjective (inwardturning or reflective) is obvious in Hegel’s description, in The Phenomenology of Spirit , of the primitive “flower religion” as “innocent,” like the beautiful soul. Hegel takes the fact that animals feed on and incorporate dead plants to be evidence of the provisionality of this religious stage. As we have seen, the plant comes closest to spirituality when it symbolically takes the place of the human body and blood in the forms of bread and wine used in the sacrament of the Eucharist. The self-sufficiency of the plant’s expansion through metamorphosis—its strength in the eyes of Goethe, Schelling, and Hölderlin—renders it a mere series of (qualitatively identical) repetitions for Hegel. The plant has no relation to itself as itself because its only relation is to an absolute other that has complete power over it, namely, the physical environment: “This outer, physical self of the plant is light, towards which it strives, in the same way that the human seeks humans” (W 9: 374/PN 3: 48). Here Hegel’s description of the plant resembles that of Abraham in “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” and of the oriental in general. A human only attains self-consciousness in the struggle for recognition (from other human beings), but the plant is not commensurate with its environment in that its striving for light is blind; it is pulled to light by a sheer necessity that has nothing to do with desire. The plant’s striving for self is “rather being-drawn-out-of-itself, so that its return into itself is a perpetual going-forth, and conversely” (W 9:
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374/PN 3: 48). The plant is rooted to one spot, and cannot will itself to change place; its element is space, and not time (W 9: 375/PN 3: 48). Its motion and its place are never contingent in the sense of being free, but always determined by the environment. The plant’s relationship to the external world can never be interrupted. Thus, for Hegel plants can never be used as symbols of intelligence or of spiritual development. “The relationship of the plant to the outer world,” writes Hegel, “could be an interrupted relationship only if the plant existed as something subjective, only if, as a self, it had a relation to its self” (W 9: 377/PN 3: 50). A plant is incapable of cutting off its own relationship to earth, water, and light. It cannot move to a new place, it cannot refuse to take in water or light, it cannot even temporarily halt its infinite process of taking in and releasing, whereas the animal capacity to delay eating, to refuse nourishment, even to kill itself, manifests its relation to itself. This relationship is, on the most fundamental level, a willing one, a relationship of desire that is satisfied or frustrated in the outer world. Perhaps Hegel’s obsession with intestines (among all the animal organs he most frequently specifies the viscera, the innards, die Eingeweide) is linked to the fact that the length of the animal digestive process, the coils and chemicals along the way, allow the animal to rest between periods of ingestion and excretion, giving it time to think and to have a feeling of lack (and thus desire), leading to a relationship with itself.21 The animal “transcends its shape,” and does not have to “interrupt its growth in its digestive and sexual process” (W 9: 437/PN 3: 110). Contingency and interruption are the conditions of possibility for subjectivity and spirituality. Hegel contrasts his own view to that of Goethe in The Metamorphosis of Plants . For Goethe the fact that a plant exhibits a miraculous multiplicity of metamorphoses while remaining fundamentally identical both in idea and in nature is evidence of its unity as a “spiritual conductor (geistige Leiter).” To Hegel, however, this metamorphosis is “only a development of shape” and thus “stands midway between the crystal of the mineral sphere and the free, animal shape” (W 9: 393/PN 3: 65). The “shape” of the mineral sphere is crystalline, dominated by the straight line, while the “shape” of the animal is “oval, elliptical” (W 9: 393/PN 3: 65). If one examines the interior organs of animals they are all rounded, and this is also the form of the trajectory of self-consciousness. The “shape” of the plant is a mixture of the two, combining the straight line of the stem with the honeycomb of the cells and the spiral fibers. Hegel objects that these seemingly curved lines do not develop “inwardly into a rounded shape,” and that “in the leaf, surface predominates” (W 9: 393/PN 3: 65). The claim about the superficiality of plant metamorphosis is
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defended with reference to its physical structure. A plant’s structure can lead it anywhere, with no essential curvature backward, and thus no absolute necessity for it to come back to itself. A part of the plant changes into another; a stem can sprout roots even if it is plucked from the top of the plant, can become another individual. This signifies, for Hegel, utter contingency and open-endedness. The “individualization” of plants, namely their sap, color, taste, and smell, comes only from an external source, that is, from light. The plant’s relationship to space is “merely abstract” since it has no mastery over the placement of its parts in space. There is no contingent determination of place. Since the plant has no relationship with itself as pure soul, that is, since it cannot entirely cut itself off from the sensuous, its unity comes only from space, and “it is not yet pure time within itself” (W 9: 375/PN 3: 49). Plant movement is mere “oscillation,” only the beginning of self-movement that is never contingent. The human has the possibility of willfully “annihilating” (vernichten) its place, and thus of positing itself purely in time. Once again, time only is where humans are, although in a later passage Hegel will call the circulation of sap within the plant a “quivering of vitality . . . restless [unruhige] Time” (W 9: 404/PN 3: 76). However, the time of nature is essentially only in the present (from a human point of view; for itself, nature has no time), for past and future emerge with the subjective representations of memory and fear or hope.22 Hegel associates sensation or feeling (Empfindung) with the internal bodily processes that generate heat. Since the plant is unable to generate heat for itself, it must not be able to feel, and thus cannot “tolerate itself as other,” cannot “venture into conflict with other individualities” (W 9: 378/PN 3: 52). As such, it does not return into itself, and therefore has no self-feeling either. Indeed, Hegel will later go so far as to say that it is only in decaying and fermenting, during which processes they give off heat, that plants approach a passage to spirituality. In dying, plants can generate heat and thus become spiritual products such as bread and wine. The plant attains the threshold of spirituality only in sacrificing itself. In the process of the formation of the plant, Hegel also objects that the “collection [Zusammennehmen] of self-preservation in a unity is not a merging [Zusammenschließen] of the individual with itself, but rather the production of a new plant-individual, the bud ” (W 9: 394/PN 3: 67). The new individual is an other to the plant, not a part of itself. In the animal, according to Hegel, this development would lead to the visceral process, but since the plant has no digestive organs, its development is purely external, directed only outwardly. When the process of developmental specification is turned outward instead of inward, rather than
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the formation of specialized organs that would mediate the organism’s relationship with the external world, there is simply a multiplication of individuals, all of which are equally vulnerable to the elements. However, the plant does possess what Hegel calls “an essential side of [the] organic process” in that “it infects, negates, and assimilates [zum Seini gen macht] what comes to it from outside” (W 9: 395/PN 3: 67–68). Nevertheless, this process can never be deferred, and in the end the plant is always at the mercy of the immediate environment. The plant is regarded as deficient because of its unmediated relationship with the environment. A plant cannot but poison itself, if poison is anywhere in its immediate environment, whereas animals feel need, can sense a deficiency or an excess, and regulate their intake accordingly. This distinction will have important implications for Hegel’s criticism of Dionysian religion and the “oriental” tendency to overflow limits and collapse in languidity. As Derrida puts it, also in relation to Hegel, “subjectivity always produces itself in a moment of occidentalization.”23 Or, we might say, every moment of Aufhebung is an occidentalization, since alleviation is always a lightening in the sense of trimming the excess, setting boundaries, defining the individual by excluding its other. Hegel calls emanationist models of nature, which posit a unidirectional overflow from the divine into nature without the return back into the ideal, “conceptions that proceed from wildly orientalizing tastes” (W 9: 30/PN 1: 211). Like the animal, Hegel writes, “the plant . . . perpetually kills itself, in that it sets up an opposition between itself and Being” (W 9: 408/PN 3: 80). In animals this gradual “suicide” is the formation of the skeletal system, whereas in plants it is the buildup of woody tissue. Hegel compares this process to “the diremption of the individual in the past into vital activity as such [Lebenstätigkeit] that is external to it and into the system of organic formations constituting the material substratum and residuum of the process” (W 9: 408/PN 3: 80). Thus, Hegel links the division of plants and animals into rigid structure and fleshy surface to the cosmic process by which pure activity and materiality are separated. Nature is nothing more than the “residuum” of this process; again, Hegel compares nature to a skeleton or a corpse. The process of selfdestruction, in that it is a change effected from within rather than as a result of external influences, is a sign of progress rather than deterioration when considered from the point of view of life in general. Death is not possible for the stone—it already is death, if “death” as residuum is the “calcareous” within the plant or animal. In death, the plant becomes wood, which is “combustibility as potentiality of fire without itself being heat” (W 9: 408/PN 3: 80), that is, as potentiality of a union-withself without itself being the satisfaction of union. At the same time, the
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plant is described as indirectly “satisfied” or “realized” when the animal digests it, at which time the plant becomes heat or energy. Both the animal and the plant, then, carry death within them, the plant in its woody substructure, the animal in its skeleton. Both are susceptible to disease, which will render them progressively more rigid. Yet by virtue of their capacity to maintain the tenuous equilibrium between rigidity and fluidity, disease and health, life and death, both the plant and the animal are on the way to spirit. However, the animal is capable of individually encapsulating this capacity and carrying it around with it. For Hegel, the superiority of the animal over the plant is its possibility of a return-to-self after the process of going outside itself in order to satisfy desire, resulting in a notion of self as inner, subjective universality over and against externality. By contrast, the self of the plant “does not maintain itself” after going outside itself (W 9: 412/PN 3: 84). Since the plant’s relationship to light takes the place of its relationship to itself, it cannot unite with the universal, it cannot understand itself as self, as plant, as “I.” It cannot even desire the “not-I,” as an animal can. It merely “fashions itself into a light-plant.” It cannot become light, but becomes in the light, so that its being is determined solely by something external to it. Interestingly, Hegel links this inability to return to self with the lack of sense perception. The lack of a self-like character means that what in an animal would be sight, hearing, etc., becomes merely color, light, and shape in the plant, that is, the external counterparts of sense perception taken as qualities. The animal organism, by contrast, recapitulates the whole of organic nature, symbolizing the process of subjectivity defined as “selfrelating in the face of externality” (W 9: 435 /PN 3: 108). Only the structure of the animal body—which, unlike the plant’s body, allows for a clear distinction between interiority and exteriority, as well as a distinction between what is essential and inessential (assimilation and excretion), attached and detached, active or passive, transported or left behind—allows the animal to be the symbol of subjectivity, of spirit, of the vitality that will no longer have anything to do with life in the biological sense, since vitality and activity will be attributes of spirit, not matter. Because of its structure, the animal body makes the rest of nature revolve about it: “the animal organism is the microcosm, the center of nature” (W 9: 435/PN 3: 108). Its capacity for spontaneous movement and its self-enclosed body allow it to experience, to the greatest degree possible within nature, the essential exteriority of nature. It becomes the subject of an isolated existence, making of the rest of nature an object for the purposes of its own existence. It no longer depends upon inorganic nature, but feeds solely on lower organic forms, forms that have already assimilated the inorganic into themselves. The animal appropriates
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nature as exteriority into something “for itself.” Nothing else in nature— other than its own instincts, other animals, and death—is capable of resisting it, thus the animal becomes a kind of analogue to a “subject” over and against nature as an object.24 Hegel calls resistance the condition of subjectivity. The animal is characterized by the presence of drives (Triebe), literally “pressures” that push it in the direction of food, sexual activity, shelter, or strife. The human animal possesses, beyond these natural pressures, the possibility of suppressing the pressures, withstanding the impulse, interrupting the natural thrust. Humans pass from sensation to conception only by inhibiting their natural impetus, which is an inhibition of its own at the outset.25 The freedom of movement of animals is their counterpart to human freedom. Plants, as we have seen, are too open to everything; their lack of resistance leads to the impossibility of subjectivity. Indeed, the conclusion of the section on vegetable nature in the Philosophy of Nature makes it clear that Hegel regards the culmination of vegetable nature to be the plant’s capacity to lay itself down for the sake of animal nature, a self-immolation in the form of food, fuel, wine, and oil. The processes of being digested, combusted, fermented, or distilled represent the only means by which plants can generate heat, contributing in an indirect way to the animal realm, the realm of fire. The moment of passage from stone to plant was a moment, if not of self-sacrifice, at least of unconditional surrender: “It [the geological organism] overcomes [aufhebt] its rigidity, and unfolds into subjective animation. Nevertheless, it excludes this animation from itself, and surrenders it to other individuals” (W 9: 361). The moment of passage from plant to animal is even more decisive. The fruit is a sign of the downfall of the plant, for as fruit ripens it assures its own death. 26 Hegel’s final words are unambiguous: “The plant is a subordinate [untergeordneter] organism whose destiny is to proffer itself to the higher organism in order to be consumed by it. . . . [The] animal process, which is higher than that of the plant, is its [the plant’s] ruin [Untergang]” (W 9: 429/PN 3: 101). Georges Bataille’s study of the figure of sacrifice in Hegel’s work, excerpted from a study on the thought of Alexander Kojève, sheds light on the strange transition from plant to animal read as a kind of inevitable self-sacrifice. Bataille writes, “The problem of Hegel is given in the action of sacrifice.”27 Hegel’s philosophy, Bataille argues, is a philosophy of death in that it is death alone that separates spirit from nature. Even more specifically, Aufhebung is always a figure of sacrifice. Death alone, writes Bataille, “assures the existence of a ‘spiritual’ or ‘dialectical’ being, in the Hegelian sense.”28 This is because through knowledge of its (animal, bodily) death, the human carries an incomparable negativity within it, which, though it causes it anguish, also allows
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it to negate nature and in so doing see itself as somehow separate from the totality of all natural things. This separation, of course, is the necessary condition of knowledge of any kind, and its possibility rests on the capacity for language. Bataille’s observation takes as its basis Kojève’s linkage of language and death in Hegel.29 Kojève cites Hegel (in a way that both clarifies and considerably simplifies Hegel’s language) in the Phenomenology of Spirit as saying that all conceptual thinking is equivalent to murder, since language cannot refer to a determinate living entity, but only to an abstract concept.30 Only that which is finite can be detached from its concept, since if anything existed outside of time or eternally, its concept would be that thing and not its counterpart in language. Bataille writes in a similar vein: “For Hegel, it is both fundamental and altogether worthy of astonishment that human understanding (that is, language, discourse) should have had the force (an incomparable force) to separate its constitutive elements from the Totality. These elements (this tree, this bird, this stone) are in fact inseparable from the whole.” 31 Only language has the “monstrous force of the understanding” that can negate nature, separate humans from the totality, and give things names. Yet although humans possess the ability to negate nature in this fashion, they cannot avoid the consequence that in so doing they also negate themselves to the extent that they, too, are animals, or natural beings. Any kind of human understanding is thus a form of (self-)sacrifice, predicated on death. For it is only as a separate and irreplaceable being, that is, as the object of its own knowledge, that the human can be terrified by death and thus know itself as the one who can die: “The only true death supposes separation and, through the discourse which separates, the consciousness of being separated.”32 Humans gain knowledge by sacrificing the animal in themselves. Thus, Bataille sees sacrifice as the key to understanding dialectic. And so, we may understand the plant’s self-sacrifice as following this prescribed pattern, in a nonconscious manner. Indeed, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature as a whole concludes with a scene of sacrifice. Hegel does not go beyond the tripartite division of stone, plant, and animal to make the human a final stage of natural development. As we have seen, with reference to the realm of nature, human beings are animals. However, in order to make the transition to spirit, nature must “become an other to itself” in order to “recognize itself as idea”: “The goal of nature is to kill itself [sich zu töten] and to break through its rind of immediate, sensuous existence, to consume itself like the phoenix in order to come forth from this externality rejuvenated as spirit” (W 9: 538/PN 3: 212). Bataille makes the point that humans can never be revealed to themselves fully if one takes Hegel’s point to its natural conclusion, for
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in theory it is the death of the natural, animal body that will allow for this revelation. However, human beings cease to be at the death of their bodies: “In order for man to reveal himself ultimately to himself, he would have to die, but he would have to do it while living—watching himself ceasing to be. In other words, death itself would have to become (self-)consciousness at the very moment that it annihilates the conscious being.”33 This has been accomplished, historically and across cultures, by means of the practice of sacrifice, Bataille argues. In the sacrifice, the ones who perform the rite identify themselves with the animal that is killed: “And so he dies in seeing himself die, and even, in a certain way, by his own will, one in spirit with the sacrificial weapon.” 34 In his lectures on fine art, Hegel discusses the possibility of finding beauty in nature, and concludes that nature itself cannot be beautiful. Rather, only by understanding it as the “sensuous manifestation of the concrete Begriff ” can nature be considered beautiful. Beauty depends, then, on a presupposed conceptual unity. To illustrate exactly what he means by this perception of a unity that is presupposed, Hegel gives the example of the division of organic nature into three realms. He writes: “When confronted with the variety of the external presentation in each of these realms, the sense-perception surmises a controlling unity intelligible to mind, a progress subject to laws of thought, visible no less in the formation of mountain ranges than in the orderly succession of plant-life and of the animal races.”35 We may conclude from the existence of the three realms of nature, “as already foreshadowed by its truth regarded as a process rising from plane to plane, that there is an inward necessity inherent in the conceptual articulation of its divisions, and do not confine ourselves only to the purely imaginative conception of it as a world conforming on its exterior side only to a final end.” 36 Hegel thus takes Kant’s technic of nature one step farther. The division of nature into three realms is necessary not only transcendentally in conformity with its preconceived logical structure (in concordance with a subjectively presupposed final end) but immanently in the way in which the movement from stone to animal unfolds. Indeed, Hegel, as might be expected, asserts that the beauty of the animal marks the culmination of the possibility of beauty in nature, just as the animal realm, in Hegel’s construction of nature, is the highest development of organic nature. Hegel employs natural forms again and again as evidence of the parallel unfolding of human development. For example, in the section on architecture in his lectures on the philosophy of art, Hegel uses the stages of nature as justification for the progression of art. He divides the history of architecture into three successive stages: symbolic, classical, and romantic. Beginning with the architecture of India and Egypt, he
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writes: “The Pyramids, despite all the wonder they arouse of their own accord, are really nothing but crystals. . . .”37 He then proceeds to the description of the development of architecture toward the classical style, and remarks particularly on the column, whose natural organic form is the tree, “plant life generally, a stem, a thin stalk which strives upwards in a vertical direction.” Other plant forms can be found in the decoration of Egyptian architecture: the ear of corn, the flower, the shape of an onion, a “reed-like efflorescence of leaf from the bulb.” 38 Eventually these plant forms are entwined with shapes of animal and even human figures. The column, which emerges out of these imitations of nature, “originates in the natural form,” but then “submits to the uniformity and scientific precision of form,” 39 in the same way that spirit emerges out of the ashes of nature. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion , Hegel addresses the popular characterization of genius as plant-like, growing out of the roots of unconscious inspiration. Herder, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Schelling are the best-known adopters and adaptors of this view, but Hegel most likely addresses his critique to the general popularity of such a notion. Hegel’s chief objection to the description of genius as plant-like is that spirit can be attained only as a result of a diremption followed by a unification of the opposing forces. The “unity” of the plant, as we have seen, is one that is never broken or interrupted: Plants are in this condition of unbroken unity. The spiritual, on the contrary, is not in immediate unity with its nature; the truth rather is that in order to attain to the return to itself, it has to work its way through its infinite dualism or division, and to win the state of accomplished reconciliation by wrestling for it. This is by no means a state of reconciliation which is there from the outset, and this true unity is attained to by spirit only by separation from its immediate character. 40
Hegel delineates a similar progression in The Phenomenology of Spirit with regard to the history of religion, a progression, in this case, from the worship of light to religions with plant and animal deities. As Derrida has observed, plant self-sacrifice repeats itself precisely three times in the history of the progression of religion as chronicled by Hegel.41 First, the innocent flower religion gives way to the warring animal religion. Then animal religion is followed by Bacchic cults that imbibe the fermented fruit. Finally, wine becomes the symbol of Christ’s blood along with that other product of fermented plant life, bread, the symbol of Christ’s body. Hegel writes: The silent essence of self-less nature in its fruit [Frucht] attains to that stage where, self-prepared and digested, it offers itself to life that has a
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self-like nature [dem selbstischen Leben]. In its usefulness as food and drink it reaches its highest perfection; for in this it is the possibility of a higher existence and comes into contact with spiritual being-there. In its metamorphoses, the Earth-spirit [Erdgeist] has developed, partly into an autochthonous, powerful [selbstkräftigen] substance, partly into a spiritual fermentation [geistigen Gährung]: in the first case it is the feminine principle of nourishment [weiblichen Prinzip der Ernährung], in the other the masculine principle, the self-impelling force [sich treibenden Kraft] of self-conscious being-there. 42
Of course, the “masculine” principle that can impel itself recalls the distinguishing mark of the animal, its self-driven nature. The reference to the Erdgeist comes from Goethe’s Faust . The digestion of bread and wine by human beings marks the attainment of the highest possible stage for plants. Goethe, upon reading Hegel’s description of plant life, wrote in a letter to Eckermann: By chance a passage from the preface to Hegel’s Logic 43 came into my hands. It goes as follows: “The bud disappears in the bursting forth of the blossom, and one could say that it was refuted by it; in the same way through the fruit the blossom is revealed as a false existence, and as its truth, it takes its place. These forms suppress each other as incompatible with each other, but their fluid nature makes them, at the same time moments of organic unity, in which they not only no longer struggle against each other, but one is as necessary as the other; and this same necessity first creates a life out of the whole.” It is really not possible to say anything more monstrous. To want to destroy the eternal reality of nature through a poor sophisticated game [schlechten sophistischen Spaß], seems to me unworthy of a rational man. 44
Goethe, like Hölderlin, was interested not so much in the differences between the three realms of nature—which he, too, distinguishes—but in the spaces between them. Goethe emphasized that what he strove for was “to linger at the points where the different realms meet each other and appear to turn into each other [ineinander überzugehen scheinen].”45 What Hegel saw as the contingency and conceptlessness of the physical world, Goethe (and Schelling) understood as the willfulness and freedom of nature. Whereas Hegel complained of the deficiency and irrationality manifest in the deformities of nature, Goethe insisted that the rule and its exception are intimately related. Hegel deplored the plant-like “leakage of nature into singularity [Einzelheit],” while Goethe saw in the same an endless creativity manifesting the infinite. What was for Hegel a mindless combination of accident and necessity, was for Goethe evidence of an infinite volition within the realm of law. 46
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Goethe was not the only thinker to find Hegel’s philosophy of nature “monstrous.” Schelling, in On the History of Modern Philoso phy, writes: However commendable one must find Hegel’s impulse to recognize the merely logical nature and significance of the science which he found before him, however commendable it is, in particular, that he revealed as logical relationships the logical relationships which previous philosophy concealed in the real, one must yet admit that his philosophy, as it is really carried out (precisely because of the pretension to objective, real significance), has become a good deal more monstrous than the preceding philosophy ever was . . .47
What made Hegel monstrous to Goethe and Schelling and presumably to Hölderlin was his conception of nature as nothing more than an incarnation of the Begriff . This is a monstrous incarnation in that it reduces nature to a passing moment of spirit, to a body whose metamorphoses have been duly tracked and noted down, a body whose temporality, retrospectively, is locked in the past- and future-lessness of a scientific object. Human subjectivity, insofar as it believes it can overcome its plantlike fragility, loses sight of its connection to the life-anddeath rhythms of nature and its provenance in the unconscious.
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6
NIETZSCHE The Ivy and the Vine
The human being knows the world to the degree that he knows himself, i.e. its depths unveil themselves to him to the degree that he is astounded by himself and by his own complexity. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente We are dizzy at the thought that perhaps the will, in order to come to art, poured itself out in these worlds, stars, bodies, atoms. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente
It might initially seem surprising to include Nietzsche in a discussion about the philosophy of nature and its effects on historical conceptions of subjectivity. Yet Nietzsche is as well known for his critique of the ego and of the primacy accorded to consciousness as for his indictment of modern science and of uncritical assumptions of teleology in nature, and all of these themes play important roles in the broader examination of the relationship between studies of nature and of the human being. Furthermore, Nietzsche in fact did study Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgment and consider it with reference to Goethe’s philosophy of nature. For these reasons and because Nietzsche provides probably the most radical nineteenth-century attempt to rethink subjectivity, individuation, and the place of the human being, his work is a fitting culmination to the consideration of the vegetative soul. 149
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Curt Paul Janz, Nietzsche’s biographer, cites the following letter from Nietzsche to Paul Deussen in 1868: The realm of metaphysics, as well as the province of “absolute truth,” have been irremediably lowered to the ranks of poetry and of religion. From now on, whoever wants to know something will have to accommodate himself to the relativity of all knowledge: thus, for example, all the great naturalists. Metaphysics may be, for some, one of the needs of the soul, it is essentially edification; on the other hand, it depends on art, notably the art of the composition of ideas. It turns out that metaphysics has no more to do with what one calls “the true, or the thing in itself” than religion or art. Besides, when you receive my doctoral dissertation at the end of the year, you will find in it numerous passages where this question of the limits of knowledge will be explicated. I have chosen as my subject “The Idea of the Organism in Kant,” half philosophical, half natural science. I have almost finished my preparatory work.1
Although Nietzsche eventually gave up the dissertation topic on the idea of the organism in Kant as unsuitable for a philological project, one cannot deny the impact Kant must have had on Nietzsche from early on. The choice of Kant as the subject of a dissertation at a time when Nietzsche had already discovered and read Schopenhauer—and precisely the notion of the organism in Kant, a subject Schopenhauer hardly mentions in The World as Will and Representation —shows us that the wellknown picture of the early Nietzsche as entranced by Schopenhauer, and familiar with Kant only through Schopenhauer, is not entirely accurate. Indeed, a set of notes and drafted paragraphs entitled “Zu Schopenhauer,” written some time between October 1867 and April 1868 attest to Nietzsche’s early critical stance toward Schopenhauer. In these notes Nietzsche criticizes Schopenhauer for attempting to explain the world according to only one very particular assumption, such that “the thingin-itself takes on one of its possible forms” (my emphasis), an attempt that Nietzsche immediately and decisively evaluates as “unsuccessful” (HKG 1:3, 118). However, he later adds, “The errors of great men are worthy of respect, since they are more fruitful than the truths of smaller ones” (HKG 1:3, 353). Nietzsche’s critique of the centrality of the organism in the natural science of his day, and the resulting anthropomorphism of scientific depictions of nature, perhaps surprisingly agrees with and extends, rather than attempting to refute, the organic-centered philosophy of Kant and Goethe, even though they would most likely have disapproved of the extremes to which he takes their views. Nietzsche employs the language of force in order to counter atomistic or mechanical world pic-
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tures that reduce being to a collection of present-at-hand entities and to explain how it is that in a world composed of fluctuating energies, we perceive things as interrelating objects. The understanding of nature against which Nietzsche aims his critique still characterizes some contemporary scientific standpoints. Nietzsche would argue that each of the “building blocks” of biology, such as the organism, the gene, or the strand of DNA, for example, is an objectivized fiction. Nietzsche agrees with Kant that it is the constitution of the human intellect, the categories of the understanding and the forms of intuition, that gives the impression of discrete objects that perdure in space and time, but called this capacity a weakness and a limitation of human cognition: We must always remain skeptical with regard to all of our experiences, and say, for example: we can assert the eternal value of no “law of nature,” assert the eternal persistence of no chemical quality; we are not finely tuned enough to see the supposed absolute flow of becoming: the perdurant is there only thanks to our unrefined organs which summarize and display that which really does not exist at all. The tree is something new at every moment: we assert form because we are incapable of perceiving the most precise absolute movement. (KSA 9, 554)
Although from his earliest notes on nature on Nietzsche’s critique takes Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgment as its point of departure, he uses Goethe’s scientific writings as a way of adapting Kant’s view to his own perspective. Specifically, the debate that Nietzsche sets up centers around the question of whether one chooses to understand nature traditionally in terms of a kind of hierarchical progression that ranks different stages as organic forms or broad categories that encompass qualitatively different contents, or, alternatively, whether one describes natural becoming as the coincidence of force and restraint such that neither implies an originary source or a priority over the other. For Nietzsche, something like a “thing in itself” cannot be thought of as the condition for the possibility of human cognition, nor can the constitution of the human mind be thought of as prior to the forms that it perceives. For Nietzsche, “form” and “individuation” are other names for “energy” or “excess” perceived in particular ways, names that developed historically out of a need for survival. The organism itself is a name for the most fortuitous coincidence of excess and individuation, the organization of forces most conducive to survival. In addition, “organism” for Nietzsche does not coincide with “individual” in the sense of the animal body, for, as Nietzsche notes early on, citing Goethe against Kant, no living thing is really an individual. This caveat works both spatially, in the sense of there being no definitive individual, and temporally, in the sense of the tree being something new at every moment. Nietzsche writes in
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1872, “[T]here is no form in nature, for there is no inner and no outer” (KSA 7 , 465). For Nietzsche, what we describe as “nature,” as much as culture, reflects strategic priorities. The critique of teleology and the organism in Kant, in typically Nietzschean fashion, plays itself out in his later thought in multiple and nonsystematic ways. On the one hand, Nietzsche continues to be fascinated with the idea of the organism, both as an idea of self-regulating purposiveness and self-sufficiency that regulates the way in which we desire and indeed, in Kant’s sense, to which we require the natural world to conform, and as an obstacle to a force-centered ontology of will to power. On Nietzsche’s view, the fiction of the organism, understood as the natural individual par excellence, formed the basis of the modern account of how consciousness developed and the subsequent belief in the substantiality and individuality of the human ego. Thus, Nietzsche’s critique of the organic and of teleology cannot be separated from his discussion of consciousness and of language, which he alternately blames for its creation and perpetuation of a subject-centered metaphysics and excuses for merely manifesting the effects of an already existing conception of subjectivity based on the form of our animal bodies. From the beginning Nietzsche links the Western metaphysical history of the doctrine of individuation (both physical and spiritual) with the perception of organic form, caring little that individuation as a philosophical issue predates any discussion of the organism. Organism, for Nietzsche, can be included in a more general category of substance, or atomism, or any doctrine that divides the world up into self-enclosed forms. In addition to criticizing the unreflective conflation of the self-enclosed form of the animal or specifically the human body with individuation, Nietzsche proposes alternative figures for more accurately conceptualizing individuation in order to avoid reification. He invokes a metaphorical register that links madness, plant growth, and the feminine as transgressive figures for individuation. In 1873, Nietzsche spent some time studying Goethe, specifically the Conversations with Eckermann, but also Goethe’s writings on natural science, which he had begun to read as a student in Leipzig. One of the passages in the notebook reads, “Goethe, then, is exemplary: tempestuous naturalism that gradually becomes rigorous dignity. As a stylized person, he rose higher than any other German. . . . One reads Eckermann and asks oneself if ever any person has come so far into a noble form in Germany. From there to simplicity and greatness is indeed a bigger step; however, we must never believe ourselves capable of leaping beyond Goethe, but must rather, like him, always begin anew” (KSA 7 , 686). A notebook dating from the summer and fall of 1873 contains many references to Goethe, and Goethe’s name appears in the second
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Untimely Meditation as well.2 Nietzsche writes, among a series of seemingly unconnected notes: “The sense of history: a metamorphosis of plants. Example” (KSA 7 , 485). Tracing the background of such a note necessitates an examination of Nietzsche’s comments on metamorphosis, on anthropomorphism in studies of nature, on consciousness, on plants themselves, on the organic, and on individuation in general. Nietzsche’s respect for Goethe’s insights into nature can be seen over the years in passages quoted from Goethe’s scientific writings. In his notes for a proposed dissertation in 1868, Nietzsche uses Goethe to argue against Kant. In 1871 Nietzsche’s notebooks are full of references to Goethe, particularly when Nietzsche is remarking on the power of particular representations of nature. For Nietzsche, Goethe embodied the capacity to see nature simultaneously with the eye of the philosopher and with the eye of the artist. Nietzsche grants the greatest power to the capacity to see nature aesthetically, a power that Goethe above all possessed: “The cult of nature. That is our most truthful artistic feeling. The more powerfully and magically nature is presented, the more we believe in it” (KSA 7 , 305). Nietzsche is always concerned with the representation of nature, which in turn informs the way in which human beings look at themselves and their position in the world. For the most part this is an unreflective process. In a notebook written in from late 1873 to early 1874, Nietzsche laments, “We are all thoughtless naturalists, and that indeed with full knowledge” (KSA 7 , 741). Despite the proliferation of “knowledge” about natural phenomena, or perhaps as a result of this plethora of data, we tend to think less and less about the way in which we represent nature. The discourse of modern science is a quantitative one that seeks always to increase the number of natural phenomena that it can explain. The will to knowledge in the form of science increasingly cuts the human being off from its history, both natural and cultural: Now this is how the modern German believes in the aeterna veritas of his system of education, of his kind of culture: and yet this belief would crumble away, as the Platonic state would have crumbled away, if the necessary lie were for once countered with a necessary truth: the truth that the German possesses no culture because his education provides no basis for one. He wants the flower without the root and the stem: consequently he wants it in vain. That is the simple truth, a coarse and unpleasant truth, truly a necessary truth. It is in this necessary truth, however, that our first generation must be educated; they will certainly suffer the most from it, for through it they will have to educate themselves, and in opposition to themselves moreover, to a new custom and nature and out of an old and first nature and custom: so that they could say to themselves in old Spanish: Defienda me Dios de my, God guard me from myself, that is to say from the nature already educated into me. (KSA 1, 328/119; my italics)
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The old Spanish saying, which echoes a passage from Meister Eckhart’s sermons that Nietzsche also esteemed, 3 indicates the potential of human knowledge to conceal as much as it reveals. Nietzsche invokes the prayer to God to protect me from myself as an act that must constantly remind one of the provisionality of any explanation of nature or of culture, or, as is more plausible here, of subjectivity. The root and stem of the flower represent the historical context that informs the way in which knowledge is represented. Knowing a flower without taking its root and stem into account resembles addressing a disease by attacking its symptoms rather than its cause. Nietzsche does not suggest a search for origins here, however. He accepts Kant’s dictum that “things in themselves” cannot be known. Rather, he enjoins the scientist to become aware of historical, social, and cultural factors that affect the ways in which nature is described. In praying, “God guard me from the nature already educated into me,” the philosopher, Nietzsche writes, following Goethe, “does not seek truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world in human beings” (KSA 7 , 494). After reading Goethe’s scientific writings in 1869, Nietzsche adopts the terminology of metamorphosis. The overwhelming presence of the god Dionysos in all the notebooks written around the time of The Birth of Tragedy and beyond attests to the importance of the idea of metamorphosis for Nietzsche. Dionysos is the god of metamorphosis, whose symbols, the mask, the ivy, and the vine, all exhibit the plant-like characteristics of indefinite sequentiality and unpredictable transformation. Walter F. Otto describes the Dionysian plants in the following way: The vine and the ivy are like siblings who have developed in opposite directions and yet cannot deny their relationship. Both undergo an amazing metamorphosis. In the cool season of the year the vine lies as though dead and in its dryness resembles a useless stump until the moment when it feels the renewed heat of the sun and blossoms forth in a riot of green and with a fiery elixir without compare. What happens to the ivy is no less remarkable. Its cycle of growth gives evidence of a duality which is quite capable of suggesting the twofold nature of Dionysos. First it puts out the so-called shade-seeking shoots, the ascendant tendrils with the well-known lobed leaves. Later, however, a second kind of shoot appears which grows upright and turns toward the light. The leaves are formed completely differently, and now the plant produces flowers and berries. Like Dionysos, it could well be called the “twice-born.”4
In a passage entitled “Goethe’s Attempt,” from his 1868 dissertation proposal, Nietzsche links the structure of metamorphosis to the separation of the concept of growth, development, and transformation
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from the idea of an originary source. Nietzsche writes that the theory of metamorphosis derives the organism from a cause that is undiscoverable, and adds, “[T]his precisely proves that it is the correct human path” (HKG 1:3, 380). Nietzsche uses Goethe to approach and modify Kant’s position. Kant inaugurated what Nietzsche refers to as “tragic philosophy” in forever cutting the knower off from the thing-in-itself. Like Kant, Nietzsche recognizes the power of the drive to ascertain origins and the need that science and philosophy have to account for the emergence of beings; Nietzsche follows Kant in the conviction that such an explanation reflects the structure of human inquiry rather than any essence of being. Using Kant’s language from the third Critique, Nietzsche writes in a notebook: “The philosopher’s description of nature: he knows insofar as he poetizes or fictionizes [dichtet], and poetizes insofar as he knows” (KSA 7 , 439). Metamorphosis as Nietzsche understands it improves on the Kantian technic of nature in that it circumvents the issue of source by positing a constant transformation of everything into everything else. This perennial self-transformation of becoming, the eternal recurrence of the same, the principle of metamorphosis, and the provisionality of any theory of individuation, all reflect the register of self-overcoming values that Nietzsche evokes in his discussion of the organism since Kant. From early on Nietzsche assumes that each individual existence is a transformative mask for the manifestation of an eternally repeating temporal becoming. A passage from an early notebook states that “every hero is a symbol of Dionysos” (KSA 7 , 156). For example, Nietzsche writes, “Socrates is at the same time Prometheus and Oedipus, but Prometheus before he stole the fire, and Oedipus before he solved the riddle of the sphinx. Through him a new mirroring of both representations was inaugurated” (KSA 7 , 228). Nietzsche emphasizes what Socrates lacked that Prometheus and Oedipus possessed, namely their tragic nature. This is to say, Socrates embodied the same explanatory power that Oedipus and Prometheus did, but with a completely different tonality. Oedipus before he solved the riddle of the Sphinx and Prometheus before he stole the fire have none of the mythic and tragic proportions they took on after each of the experiences for which they became known. Socrates took away an essential wonder from the description of the human condition, a wonder of which Oedipus and Prometheus are not proponents so much as victims. Socrates imposed the law of truthfulness and singularity upon a multiple mythical nature, whereas Oedipus and Prometheus perished in the reinforcement of that mythology. Kant, in initiating the first modern tragic philosophy, carried through the final implications of that truthfulness “against” modern science. The following fragment makes this explicit:
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The person who doesn’t believe in the truthfulness of nature, but rather sees overall metamorphoses, coverings-up, masquerades, gods in bulls, natural grounds full of wisdom in horses, nymphs in trees—now, if he himself imposes the law of truthfulness, also believes in the truthfulness of nature against him. (KSA 7 , 482)
In this veiled reference to Kant, who denied the possibility of knowing the truthfulness of nature as thing-in-itself, Nietzsche rejects the moral imperative that Kant’s imposition of the human law of understanding onto nature nonetheless implies: “Not in knowledge, but in creating lies our recuperation. In the most elevated of appearances, in the noblest of confusions lies our greatness. If the universe has nothing to do with us, then we want to have the right to despise it” (KSA 7 , 459). The imperative to “save” knowledge in the face of the limitations Kant placed upon it strikes Nietzsche as the modern-day version of a Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor despite his or her contemptibility or pettiness. Nietzsche sides with Goethe against Kant in the attack on anthropomorphism, even though Goethe understood his own position to be very close to Kant’s. While Goethe recognized the radicality of Kant’s efforts to limit the anthropomorphic aspirations of teleological natural scientists of the day, Nietzsche ultimately judges Kant the most anthropomorphic of all scientists, not in having assigned purposes to natural things that serve human beings, but in something much larger: in that, having forever severed human knowledge from the real essence of being, Kant still insisted that the entire universe conform to the laws of human cognition and bend to the imperatives of human morality. Nietzsche notes with appreciation that “Goethe took the place of human beings in nature and surrounding nature itself to be more mysterious, more puzzling, and more daimonic than his contemporaries did” (KSA 7 , 684). Nietzsche was aware of the prevailing practice in eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century studies of nature to assign purposes to natural things; in addition, he knew of both Kant and Goethe’s critique of teleological science’s tendency to trace all purposes back to utility for the human being’s needs. Nietzsche admired Goethe for both his acquiescence in the mysterious and impenetrable in nature, for the fact that he was not only a scientist but also and at the same time an artist, and for Goethe’s self-reflective complication of Kant’s anthropocentrism. These later notes reflect those in the draft of Nietzsche’s dissertation proposal, composed, as we have already noted, during his student years in Leipzig, sometime in 1868. Nietzsche entitles the draft “Teleology since Kant.”5 A twenty-page series of notes and drafts of paragraphs shows that Nietzsche did read Kant’s Critique of Judgment , as is indi-
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cated by a full bibliographical reference and page numbers as well as numerous direct quotations from the text. Apparently the Critique of Teleological Judgment was of primary interest to the young Nietzsche. Nietzsche begins with a reading list, presumably one he had read prior to what he wrote, since another reading list, with the heading “to be read” follows the unfinished essay. The initial reading list includes Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment , as well as Kuno Fischer’s commentary on Kant (HKG 1:3, 371). The first section, “On Teleology,” begins with the observation that optimism and teleology go hand in hand. This theme resurfaces in The Birth of Tragedy, where modern science is linked to post-Socratic “Greek cheerfulness.” In the published work, Nietzsche speculates that the Greeks became more and more optimistic and superficial with the dissolution of their culture; he pairs logic and science in general to the equation of knowledge with progress. The sole weapon one could wield against the doctrine of purposiveness, Nietzsche writes in 1868, would be the discovery of a proof of something that is not purposive. This discovery would prove that even the highest reason (Vernunft) has been only sporadically effective, and that there is thus room for multiple lesser “reasons.” Nietzsche accepts Kant’s conclusion that purposiveness is part of the human understanding of (specifically organic) nature rather than anything objectively inherent in nature itself. But, he says, the existence of things that are not purposive demonstrates that there is no unity in the teleological world (HKG 1:3, 372). He then proposes an “Empedoclean point of view” in which the purposive is just one case among many, the purposive being the exception rather than the rule. Among other things, “Empedoclean” science will presuppose that any underlying “truth” about nature will remain hidden from human understanding, and that the components of nature are erratic and arbitrary impulses that can only sometimes be interpreted as rational purposes. The truth of nature thus reveals itself as fully irrational, even if it can occasionally be represented as rational (HKG 1:3, 372). Nietzsche begins “Teleology Since Kant,” the next section, by quoting Kant’s assertion that the purposiveness of the organic as well as the lawfulness of the inorganic are brought to these phenomena by human understanding rather than inhering in nature. After an introductory set of paragraphs, Nietzsche abruptly switches to a polemical mode: “There is no question that is necessarily solved through the assumption of an intelligible world” (HKG 1:3, 373). What Nietzsche most objects to is the hierarchizing of purposes. Even if we can assign purposiveness to a thing, the most we can conclude is the existence of reason, but we have no right to judge it as either a higher or a lower reason, or to
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appeal to a purposiveness that is beyond sensibility. While delegitimatizing claims of purposiveness in nature, Kant nevertheless continues to privilege the thing-in-itself. This Nietzsche sees as implied in Kant’s critique of teleological judgment when Kant makes the illicit move toward ranking purposes. Nietzsche then quotes Goethe to the effect that every living thing is no individual, but rather a multiplicity. Even insofar as it appears to us to be an individual, it remains a gathering (Versammlung) of living being (Wesen) (HKG 1:3, 376). Kant makes a leap, according to Nietzsche, in proceeding from the definition of the organized body as that thing whose parts are purposively connected with each other to the notion of the organism as a purposive being per se (HKG 1:3, 378). Nietzsche argues that mechanism linked with causality could provide the same explanation for the organism, and that this in itself is enough to set Kant’s definition aside (although not enough to embrace a mechanical picture of becoming or any other definitive explanation of the meaning of the organism and of life). What Kant claims, Nietzsche says, he does only out of his prior conviction that there is nothing comparable to the purposive relationship of the organism; thus, Kant begins with an implicit judgment that already ranks the organism highest in terms of purposiveness. The purposive, Nietzsche argues, arose as a particular case of the possible. In other words, life, the root of purposive explanations, evolved as one configuration out of infinite mechanically composed constellations or possibilities of constellations (what Pierre Klossowski might call, commenting on Nietzsche’s later work, fortuitous encounters of forces),6 among which countless others could have been capable of life (HKG 1:3, 379). Kant denies that life could have originated out of mechanical forces, but, Nietzsche writes, what we can know is only the mechanical, even if our understanding organizes itself according to purposiveness. What lies beyond our concepts (Nietzsche, following Kant, considers concepts to be “mechanical”) is fully unknowable by Kant’s own claim. In terms of our own organization the only knowledge that we are conditioned to understand would indicate a mechanical origin of all things. Thus, the purposive explanation involves a creative leap, as well as the elimination of countless accidental details in order to reach the simplicity of the unified and self-enclosed individual. What we call “individuals” are actually multiplicities. In reality there are no individuals, or rather, Nietzsche writes, “individuals” and “organisms” are nothing but abstractions. In the section entitled “Goethe’s Attempt” Nietzsche writes, as we have already noted, that metamorphosis sees the organism deriving from a cause that is undiscoverable, and that for this reason metamorphosis must be the correct explanation of nature (HKG 1:3, 380). One does not try to seek the final cause
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of inorganic nature because here one can see no individuals, only forces. This means that since, on Nietzsche’s view, everything can be traced to the inorganic (i.e., to “blind forces”), one can no longer believe in purposes. By “blind forces” Nietzsche here refers not to anything determinately inorganic (since “force,” too, will be called a fiction—although a privileged one—imposed by human understanding onto the fundamentally unknowable) but to what cannot be individuated except “mechanically,” that is, through concepts. What is capable of life is formed only through “an endless chain of failures and half-successful attempts” (HKG 1:3, 381). Since in nature only inorganic forces prevail, things that appear to be purposive are only appearances, and their purposiveness is “our idea” (HKG 1:3, 381). Organisms manifest only forces that work blindly. Face to face with the unknown, human beings have no recourse except to invent concepts, but these concepts can only bring us to a collection of apparent qualities that will not ever make the leap to a living body (Leib). This applies equally to the notions of force, substance, individual, law, organism, atom, and final cause (HKG 1:3, 383). To derive the general origin of organic life from observing nature’s means of providing for and preserving organisms would not characterize the Empedoclean way of doing science, Nietzsche writes. It is, however, the Epicurean way. By “Epicurean way,” Nietzsche is referring to the atomic understanding of being, in which a whole can be derived from a sum of parts, and which allows for an end-point in the endless process of dividing matter. Such an understanding takes an isolatable body (what we have called an “animal” form) as its point of departure. Nietzsche’s line of reasoning proceeds as follows: The question is precisely, what “life” is, whether it is just a mere principle of order and form (as with the tragedy), or whether it is something entirely different: against this it must be conceded that within organic nature in the relationship of organisms to each other no other principle exists that does not also exist in inorganic nature. The method of Nature in the treatment of things is equal, she is an impartial mother, equally severe towards inorganic and organic children. (HKG 1:3, 385–86)
This passage both echoes and reverses the fragment “Die Natur” that was thought to have been written by the young Goethe. This fragment contains many passages like the following: “[Nature’s] children are without number. From none does she withhold all gifts, but upon her favorites she lavishes much and for them she sacrifices much.” 7 In inorganic nature, as we have already noted, “individuals” do not exist except as abstractions. If Nature is equally severe toward her inorganic and her organic “children,” then the organism, too, is a fiction created to explain life purposively in a way that will allow human beings to feel important.
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Nietzsche now returns to the question as to whether the force that creates the thing is identical to the force that preserves it. To elaborate on what he has characterized as an “Empedoclean” way of understanding nature, he asks, what is “organism” other than formed life? But if the organism’s parts are not necessary to it, in other words, if forms other than the organic can be thought of that would equally support life, then one cannot argue that the essence of the organic lies in its form; purposiveness is not reducible to form. On the other hand, one also does not want to say that the organism is mere life without form. Thus, Nietzsche concludes, life has as many different purposivenesses as forms (HKG 1:3, 386–87). This relates to Nietzsche’s perception of Empedocles’ doctrine of movement. Empedocles posited a cosmic vortex, “the contrary of ordered movement” (KSA 7 , 552). In the same way, given Nietzsche’s understanding of the relationship between space and time, the organism cannot simply be the result of a single, linear, ordered progression of forms. The polemic against Kant is directed not toward Kant’s ultimate conclusion, that purposiveness is brought to nature by human understanding, which Nietzsche agrees with; rather, Nietzsche objects to the assumption that the form organisms have taken follows a singular purposiveness, that we assume that nature was created in the best possible way (even if one admits that this assumption is only a structure of our way of thinking about nature). In this claim Nietzsche follows Goethe, who was already aware that nature is not independent of the way in which it is approached by the human observer. Goethe had insisted that scientific discoveries conceal as much as they reveal, and advocated a metamorphosis of the scientist parallel to the observed metamorphosis of natural phenomena. Nietzsche got his idea of “multiple purposivenesses,” multiple possibilities for understanding nature’s tendencies, from reading Goethe. The notion of a whole, in the end, can only be constructed from the point of view of the observer in his or her capacity to synthesize, but this whole has none of the implications of stability over time. Life is possible under an astounding number of forms, then. Each of these forms is purposive in a sense, but there are as many types of purposiveness as forms, not one overarching teleology. Nietzsche objects to “rationality” defined as the principle of sufficient reason—the greatest possible narrowing down of a field of possibilities. He writes, “In human life we make a progression in the purposive: we only call it ‘reasonable’ [vernünftig] when a very narrow choice is available. When a person finds the only purposive way in a complicated situation, we say that he is acting rationally. However, when one wants to travel all over the world and follows any old road, one is acting purposively but not rationally.” This reductive notion of rationality cannot even begin to touch on the expla-
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nation of life: “When we speak of purposive concepts and causes, we only mean: out of a living and thinking thing a form is intentionalized [intentionirt], in which it wants to appear” (HKG 1:3, 387). In other words, “form” always implies a reduction or abstraction of life. The scientific grasp of life rests ultimately on nothing but static forms conceived as unitary and monolithic individuals. These forms do not comprehend the “eternally becoming” (ewige Werdende) that life is. “Forms” are analogous to “individuals,” for both words are used to describe organisms conceived as unities in the sense of purposive centers. However, there are unities only for our intellect: “Every individual has an infinity of living individuals in itself” (HKG 1:3, 387) This observation is taken directly from On Morphology, where Goethe writes: “No living thing is unitary in nature: every such thing is a plurality. Even the organism that appears to us as individual exists as a collection of independent living entities.”8 Here Nietzsche also explicitly links the notion of individuation to the perceived unity of the animal body: “It is merely an unrefined [grobe] perspective, perhaps first taken from the body of the human being” (HKG 1:3, 388).9 Nietzsche’s statements here are very similar to later claims that he makes at the time of writing The Gay Science, such as the one with which we began.10 Nietzsche, like Goethe, will ultimately privilege the figure of the plant for the ramifications it introduces into the facile notion of organism as individual. If the organism is not an individual, nothing can be, for as Kant showed, nothing more coherent and cohesive exists naturally than self-motivating and self-regulating organism. Finally, Nietzsche asks whether human beings need final causes to explain that something lives. He concludes that teleology is not necessary to account for life, but only to justify it. We do not need final causes to explain the life of a thing, for “‘life’ is something that is entirely obscure, that we can shed no further light on through final causes.” Moreover, purposiveness is no absolute notion, but only relative to perspective (HKG 1:3, 388–90). Nietzsche thus agrees with Kant that purposiveness lies only in human reflective judgment, but objects along with Goethe to the assumption that purposiveness is the only form under which humans can cognize nature. He ends the passage with a question: If “life” as a concept is linked to human consciousness, then what in nature brought about human existence? Did a lack of self-consciousness cause the concept of “life” to arise? Was the notion of life conducive to the formation of self-consciousness, did it induce human beings to reflect on their position? Humans are unable to approach “life” in general from anything other than a human perspective, in analogy to human life. The division into organic and inorganic, then, arises out of human observation of what is similar to and alien to the human being, and the subsequent demand for an explanation that arises from such an examination.11
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In the second Untimely Meditation Nietzsche again addresses the issue of the purposiveness of nature directly and in a way that recalls Goethe’s diatribe against the teleologists of the early nineteenth century: To what end the “world” exists, to what end “humankind” exists, ought not to concern us at all for the moment except as objects of humor: for the presumptuousness of the little human worm is the funniest thing at present on the earthly stage; on the other hand, do ask yourself why you, the individual, exist, and if you can get no other answer try for once to justify your existence as it were a posteriori by setting before yourself an aim, a goal, a “to this end,” an exalted and noble “to this end.” Perish in pursuit of this and only this—I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing animae magnae prodigus [careless of life], in pursuit of the great and the impossible. (KSA 1, 319)
In a notebook he used from late 1870 to early 1871, Nietzsche quotes Goethe: “the human never grasps how anthropomorphic he is” (KSA 7 , 103). The quest to explain the origin of the human species struck Nietzsche as humorous given the utter lack of attention paid to its possible demise through apathy and cynicism. Nietzsche’s barbs are not aimed solely at contemporary popular philosophy in this respect, but also, again, at the natural sciences, and particularly at the growing popularity of the theory of evolution, which he took to be the height of anthropomorphic fantasy: Contemplation of history has never flown so far, not even in dreams; for now the history of mankind is only the continuation of the history of animals and plants; even in the profoundest depths of the sea the universal historian still finds traces of himself as living slime; gazing in amazement, as at a miracle, at the tremendous course humankind has already run, his gaze trembles at that even more astonishing miracle, the modern human himself, who is capable of surveying this course. He stands high and proud upon the pyramid of the world-process; as he lays the keystone of his knowledge at the top of it he seems to call out to nature all around him: “We have reached the goal, we are the goal, we are nature perfected.” (KSA 1, 313)
All the hidden implications for the importance of the human being as the purpose of nature strike Nietzsche as what is insidious about theories that purport to approach nature “neutrally,” yet which explain the evolution of human beings as the pinnacle of nature. Nevertheless, Nietzsche advocates an attentive anthropocentrism that does not reduce the human being to self-evident platitudes rather than suggesting that it is possible to practice science without being anthropocentric. In the year 1872–1873, Nietzsche’s continuing concern
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with the critique of the self-serving implications of research into nature is reflected in the following note: “All natural science is just an attempt by humans to understand the anthropological: or, to be more correct, always to return, after vast detours, to humans. The inflation of humans to a macrocosmos in order to say at the end, ‘you are, at the end, what you are’”(KSA 7 , 449). All natural science, then, is just a garrulous method of describing the human being. Such an effort, however, assumes from the outset the self-evident nature and the explicability of the human being. For Nietzsche, by contrast: “The human being knows the world to the degree that he knows himself, i.e. its depths unveil themselves to him to the degree that he is astounded by himself and his own complexity” (KSA 7 , 456). An excessive focus on singular origins that tends to privilege the unambiguous, the individual, and the unified, leads to an equal neglect of the question of the meaning and the complexity of the position of the human being in the natural world. Nietzsche mocked natural science’s belief that it can circumvent world views, subjective projection, theological assumptions, and the like through carefully controlled observation and strictly empirical methods. Another notebook entry lists all the pre-Socratic philosophers as having an anthropomorphic explanation of being (KSA 7 , 456–57), and Nietzsche also recognized that metamorphosis itself, at least in Ovid’s sense, is an anthropomorphic mythology that sees all of nature solely in its connection with the human being. In this sense Nietzsche is very close to Kant: teleological explanations are never demonstrable, yet they are an inevitable characteristic of any human explanation of nature by virtue of the very obvious fact that they are produced by humans. The notion of objectivity is simply one of many metamorphoses of the human story about nature. Nietzsche advocates a transformed anthropomorphism that would recognize the complexity of this being called human as well as the utter impossibility of coming upon a single universal explanation of what we are. This revised anthropomorphism involves the recognition of the necessary use of masks in explaining any natural phenomenon, not the attempt to do away with masks or a lapse into despair: The philosopher of desperate knowledge will be absorbed in blind science: knowledge at any price. For the tragic philosopher the fact that metaphysics only appears anthropomorphically completes the image of existence. He is not a skeptic. Here is a concept to create: skepticism is not the goal. The drive to knowledge, having reached its limits, turns itself against itself, in order now to proceed to a critique of knowing . Knowledge in the service of the best life. One must oneself want the illusion—therein lies the tragic. (KSA 7 , 428)
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Here, “wanting the illusion” refers to a complicated recognition of the provisionality of all individuation, combined with an acknowledgment of the need for masks in order for what would be otherwise ineffable to come to representation. Nietzsche’s critique of the primacy accorded to consciousness is much more well known than his discussion of teleology and the organism, yet these discourses form parallel critiques. This is because what Nietzsche criticizes in the privilege accorded to consciousness is the same anthropocentric teleological ideology he sees hidden within it that privileges the human being as the final purpose of the organic. The basis of this hierarchy within the organic, as Nietzsche understands it, is the classification that distinguishes between non-living organic material (minerals), living but unconscious organisms (plants), conscious but not selfconscious organisms (animals), and self-conscious organisms that possess the capacity to articulate their self-consciousness (humans). Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness in The Gay Science, published in 1882, is well known. Here he writes: Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and least powerful. . . . If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity—in short, of its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would have long disappeared! Before a function is fully developed and mature it constitutes a danger for the organism, and it is good if for that time it is heartily tyrannized! Thus consciousness is properly tyrannized—not least by our pride in it! One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of the human being; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, and most original in it. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude! One denies its growth and its intermittences! Takes it for the ‘unity of the organism’! (KSA 3, 382–83/GS 84–85)
Nietzsche uses the vocabulary of “tyrannization” (tyrannisiren) to indicate the imposition of a unified structure upon something that is not inherently a unity. The passage goes on to say that the importance humans accord to conscious thinking has the advantage of hindering a precipitous development of consciousness (since it is assumed to already have reached the height of its powers); such a restraint effects the appearance of unity. The illusion of unity, in turn, functions as a protective mechanism in the development of the organism. Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness predates The Gay Science, however. Nietzsche’s notes from both before and after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy show that consciousness was an early target of cri-
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tique, specifically with regard to the distinction between the Apollinian and the Dionysian aesthetic impulses. As Nietzsche makes explicit in certain passages, “Dionysian” refers to the chaotic mass of impulses that only come into some semblance of order and possibility of articulation through the intervention of “Apollinian” forms of imagistic representation and language. Much of this aspect of the Apollinian/Dionysian discourse originally stemmed from Nietzsche’s reading of Schopenhauer in a way that amplifies Kant’s technic of nature through a consideration of those aspects of human thought that are not present to consciousness. 12 While the unconscious force of nature passes through the human being only in the form of vegetable genius, according to Kant, for Nietzsche this process characterizes all of human cognitive activity. Schopenhauer’s discourse on the problematic nature of the word I (connected with consciousness), which he calls the seat of the “greatest equivocation” (WWR II, 224), was one of his most long-lasting legacies in Nietzsche’s thought. Schopenhauer pinpoints the locus of human perplexity as the traditional placement of the “I” or “ego” in consciousness, in that “I” is insolubly linked to individuation (to the “I think” of Kant). According to Schopenhauer, the real essence of human nature lies in the unconscious will, not in the consciousness, and the human will is distinctive precisely (and only) in that while it, like all things, is subordinate to the unindividuated Will (Schopenhauer’s thing-in-itself), it can know itself to be so. Knowing this (self-consciousness) is not the apex of being, but merely the edge that is accessible to human cognition. What we refer to as “I” is equivocal by virtue of its position between two distinct senses of self, according to Schopenhauer: on the one hand, “I” belongs to the phenomenal realm, but at the same time it experiences itself as a part of the noumenal realm, that is, of the unindividuated Will. Thus, the meaning of “I” changes with reference to the aspect of being to which one is referring. For example, Schopenhauer believes that depending on which way one looks at “I” one either understands bodily death to be one’s complete end, or one realizes that one’s personal phenomenal appearance “is just as infinitely small a part of my true inner nature as I am of the world” (WWR II, 491). For Nietzsche, the meaning of “I” is irreducibly ambiguous rather than limited to these two determinate possibilities that define themselves solely in opposition to each other. Indeed, Nietzsche complains that the predicates that Schopenhauer attributes to his will are too determinate for something that is supposed to be unthinkable and unknowable, and that they thus must be derived simply in opposition to the world of representation. Here, Nietzsche has a better grasp of Kant than Schopenhauer does, since for Kant the move to describing the thing-in-itself would be illegitimate.13
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Schopenhauer attempts to avoid this oppositional structure by describing the “I” of consciousness in terms of a plant metaphor. The “I” would be the mediating structure between the representation and the realm of the unrepresentable: We can consider the plant as such a symbol of consciousness. As we know, it has two poles, root and corona; the former reaching down into darkness, moisture and cold, and the latter up into brightness, dryness and warmth; then as the point of indifference of the two poles where they part from each other close to the ground, the collum or root-stock. The root is what is essential, original, perennial, whose death entails the death of the corona; it is therefore primary. The corona, on the other hand, is the ostensible, that which has sprouted forth, that which passes away without the root dying; it is therefore the secondary. The root represents the will, the corona the intellect, and the point of indifference of the two, namely the collum, would be the I, which, as their common extreme point, belongs to both. (WWR II, 202; my emphasis)
For Schopenhauer, the “I” is the point of indifference by virtue of belonging both to the will and to the intellect, and thus by virtue of its capacity for both unity and multiplicity with reference to the separate realms of the noumenal and the phenomenal. This identification of the will with the root as “what is essential, perennial,” and the corona with what is merely “ostensible” uses the figure of the plant to perpetuate a metaphysical distinction into sensible and intelligible by playing on the root’s concealedness to explain the connection between the two realms. The human intellect, then, would be nothing but the mediating structure between the phenomenal and the noumenal realms. Again, Nietzsche would object that such a characterization gives the will determinate characteristics by simply describing it in opposition to the corona. Such an opposition perpetuates the traditional equation of the plant with the “inverted animal.” Nietzsche, by contrast, would define the “I” as indifferent only in the sense of pure potentiality, the possibility of becoming excessive with reference to the physical individual, the potential to become multiply other while remaining itself. In other words, the plant, for Nietzsche, becomes a privileged metaphor not because it is half revealed and half concealed, with the concealed half responsible for the life of the whole, but because the plant, unlike the animal, does not manifest itself as an individual. This possibility of excess derives from the impossibility of ever definitively representing or giving determinate qualities to the Dionysian. For Schopenhauer, like Kant, the “I” of the artistic genius is analogous to the organic body, but in a more specific way: “Only the genius . . . is like the organic body that assimilates, transforms, and produces. For
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he is, indeed, educated and cultured by his predecessors and their works; but only by life and the world itself is he made directly productive through the impression of what is perceived; therefore the highest culture never interferes with his originality” (WWR I, 235). The imitators in art, on the contrary, are like “parasitic plants” that “suck their nourishment from the works of others,” or even “like machines that take what is put into them and mince it very fine and mix it up, but can never digest it”(WWR I, 235). Plants are images of parasitism because of their connection to the source from which they receive nourishment, and because of the traditional equation of the vegetative with the passive. Nietzsche, by contrast, profoundly mistrusts the equation of the “I” with the individuation of the organic. In a later notebook, Nietzsche writes tersely: “The I—not to be confused with the organic feeling of unity” (KSA 9, 446). We recall the passage cited above in which Nietzsche criticized the organic feeling of unity as coming from a “crude” or “unrefined” perspective, originating out of the human’s proximity to its own body (HKG 1:3, 388). Here, Nietzsche echoes Kant’s claim that the human being most effectively and aesthetically unifies its conception of itself through reflective judgment patterned after the form of the organism, yet criticizes the human tendency to limit that unification to the crude outlines of its own body. The animal organism, as Schopenhauer had demonstrated in great detail, manifests decay and waste as much as grace and beauty. Schopenhauer was concerned with the self-regulating functions of the organism, which naturally include both excretion and death. When material is excreted, it has been excluded from a necessary role in the perpetuation of the embodied entity, has been designated as other than the individuated thing itself, in opposition to the part of the food that has been assimilated within the cells of the living being. Only with the notion of an organism, which must excrete waste in order to regulate itself, does the concept of excess come into play, as Nietzsche observes in a much later notebook (KSA 9, 509–10). Plants live in constant contiguity with their own excess, perhaps taking it in again in other forms. Of course, the same is true for animals—and Nietzsche’s point is that no organism is an individual—but the analogy is less striking. Schopenhauer explicitly links nourishment with life, and excretion with death, claiming that they differ only in degree from each other (WWR I, 277). The organic is superior to the inorganic because it can get rid of excess, and the animal is superior to the plant because it can leave its excess (i.e., to a certain degree, its death) behind. For Nietzsche, a reification of any particular set of boundaries that defines itself in opposition to excess or waste is problematic. Nietzsche was still thinking about the limitations of seeing the organic as the central metaphor for science and for art in 1881:
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I am always astounded when I think about going out into the open air, how everything acts upon us with such marvelous [herrlichen] determinateness, the forest thus and the mountain thus, and that there is no confusion and oversight and hesitation in us with respect to our sensations. And yet at one time it must have been somehow chaotic and utterly unsettled; only over immense stretches of time can everything be bequeathed so definitively; people who felt essentially differently about spatial distances, light, color, etc., were forced out and could only reproduce with difficulty. This kind of feeling other must have, over many thousands of years, begun to be perceived as “madness” [Verrücktheit] and avoided. One no longer understood; one let the exception fall to the side and perish. (KSA 9, 531)
The “marvelous determinateness” with which everything acts upon us is the consequence of a selective imposition of boundaries based on the notion of the organism as individual and in the imperative notion of sustaining the life of the individual. The word herrlich contains the root Herr, or “master.” We see things as bounded into individuals based on the perception of our bodies as self-enclosed things as opposed to other self-enclosed things. The mountain is seen as separate from the valley, from the plateau on which it rests, from which it rises up. We think of a forest as an entity—but where are the lines drawn that bound its beginning from its end? We perceive things as separate, and we believe that these delimitations are universal, but, Nietzsche wonders, was there a time, perhaps a time before language was inscribed, in which the boundaries did not exist, when the world was chaotic, when the limits between things were mutable and unfixed? The perception of objects as perduring in space and time gradually arose as a shield against the abyss. The passage continues: A monstrous cruelty has existed since the beginning of everything organic, eliminating everything that somehow “felt other.”—Science is perhaps only a continuation of this process of excretion; it is completely impossible unless it recognizes the “average human being” as the highest “measure,” to be preserved by every means.—We live in the remnants of the sensibilities of our ancestors: likewise in the petrification of feeling. They composed and fantasized—but the decision as to whether particular compositions and phantasms should remain alive was made through the experience of whether one can live with them, or whether they destroy one. Errors or truths—if only life were possible with them! Gradually an impenetrable net has formed. We come to life entangled in it, and science too cannot disengage us. (KSA 9, 537)
Nietzsche posits a slow evolution of our representations of space and time, a flux that is moving at a rate too slow to be perceived, just as he speculates that the absolute becoming of the world occurs at a rate
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too fast for our unsophisticated organs of sensation to perceive. One might cite the differences between languages that give many words for what in another tongue would be named as one thing, or that gather together under one name what another language would name as distinct entities as evidence for the adaptation of individuation to environment. Nietzsche tries to think the thoughts of people who “feel essentially differently about distances in space, light, color, etc.” This is the vocabulary of the artist, who plays with perspective, shading, and tone to make these things somehow mysterious and prominent, who pulls us out of the ordinary way of seeing things to make the ordinary uncanny. It is the selective process of the organism that makes the notion of excretion, excess, waste—and thus the delimitation into things that are selfenclosed on the one hand, and whatever overflows or is not necessary to the whole on the other—possible. Organic unity is the origin of the notion of otherness. This notion of otherness extends within the category of the organic to the subdivisions of animal, plant, and mineral. Perhaps reflecting Schopenhauer’s division of being into chaotic, irrational will and ordered representation, Nietzsche also refers to this otherness that is the condition of possibility for individuation, separability, hierarchy, and ultimately knowledge, as a “madness” at the very edge of representation. Representation, which is fundamentally provisional, must present itself as constant and coherent to be the basis of knowledge, prediction, and calculation, the fundaments of survival. Nietzsche equates “madness” with a radical transformation in one’s way of looking at spatial distances, light, and color. This understanding of madness has its origin in the relationship he describes in The Birth of Tragedy between Apollinian and Dionysian aesthetic forces. The Dionysian, though it is associated with a relaxation of the borders of individuation, never manifests itself as pure lack of boundedness. It is the between, the border at the edge of individuation, the transformative force that most easily can be understood with reference to the phenomena of intoxication, ecstasy, and madness, physical experiences that allow human beings to recognize the provisionality of individuation. Nietzsche describes “madness” not as mental illness but as an essentially different way of considering spatial distances, light, and color, a possibility that is at the very origin of the emergence of determinate or enduring ways of perceiving. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche uses the word “lunacy” (Wahnsinn or Wahnvorstellung) to indicate a fundamentally other way of looking at individuation. This understanding of madness has its origin in the Dionysian celebration, which, as is well known, involved intoxication, ecstatic possession by the god Dionysos, and a feeling of unity with nature. Specifically, in this state the Dionysian worshipper experienced a relaxation of
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the ordinary bounds of individuation. Much of the discussion of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy centers around the description of this process. In a series of (sometimes fragmentary) notes from 1870 to 1871, Nietzsche meditates on the nature of this madness. He begins by distinguishing between “higher” and “lower” forms of consciousness. The “lower” form of consciousness is what we ordinarily refer to as consciousness, whereas the “higher” form refers to a Dionysian awareness of the provisionality of sensory individuation. The higher form of consciousness recognizes both the provisionality of individuation and its necessity, as Nietzsche articulates in a rather bizarre fragment: In the highest forms of consciousness unity is restored: in the lower [forms] it constantly shatters. Elevation or weakening of consciousness is thereby = individuation.—Consciousness, on the other hand, is only a medium for the continuing existence of individuals. Here is the solution: lunacy [Wahn] commands as the means of seeing the intellect. (KSA 7 , 163)
Nietzsche associates consciousness with a shattering of unity into representation. Each representation is engendered by a Wahnvorstellung , a “mad representation,” in that it is the result of the suppression of countless equally viable possibilities. 14 As Martin Heidegger notes in his essay on the poetry of Georg Trakl, wana, the original root of Wahn, means ohne, or “without.”15 As a philologist, it is very likely Nietzsche used this word in full understanding of its etymology. Thus, a Wahnvorstellung would be that which is “without representation,” that to which no representation can be commensurate, though it may only come to consciousness as represented. Literally all conscious representation, then, is mad. However, Nietzsche uses Wahn in two senses: both as the “elevation of consciousness,” and its weakening. The first sense of madness is mania as Plato discusses it in dialogues such as Ion and Phaedrus, the madness that inspires poets and other artists, and the madness evoked by the worship of Dionysos. The second sense of madness refers to the forgetting of the process of coming into representation such that the provisionality of the representation becomes concealed in its seemingly static nature. Nietzsche understands the evolution of individuation to be a process that has nothing to do with consciousness. When he talks of “madness” he refers to that which cannot be fully grasped by or explained with reference to consciousness. Both Kant and Schopenhauer, according to Nietzsche, made the mistake of understanding individuation as the product of consciousness (KSA 7 , 111). The organs of cognition, such as the categories of the understanding, whether in animals, plants, or people “are only the organs of conscious cognition” (KSA 7 ,
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111). Whatever consciousness of “real individuation” there could be would have to be recognized as a Wahnvorstellung with respect to ordinary cognition, that is, as remaining outside the limits of ordinary cognition, and even outside the limits of language (which is why, in naming it, one can only call it “mad” or “without”). As soon as a Wahnvorstellung is recognized as such, it becomes a part of conscious thought, and at that point the will must create another: As soon as the madness is resolved as such, the will—if it wants us to continue differently—must create a new one. Education is a continual exchange of one madness for another, nobler one, i.e. our “motives” in thinking become ever more spiritual, belonging to a larger generality. . . . (KSA 7 , 117)
In this sense the Wahnvorstellung somewhat resembles a Kantian reflective judgment, which creates a singular universal out of a particular, which thus can never be determinate, neither subsumed under a concept nor fixed in language. Eventually, however, it gives rise to determinacy, and insofar as it does, new forms must be created in the logic of metaphoricity that Nietzsche outlines in “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense.” Nietzsche also calls madness “the (self-) revelation of instinct in the form of conscious spirit” (KSA 7 , 98). “Madness” names the possibility of a different way of dividing up consciousness, a possibility that is no longer given any credence, except, perhaps, in the realm of art. Nietzsche continues, “art is the form in which the world appears in the madness [Wahnvorstellung] of its necessity” (KSA 7 , 98). “Madness” also refers to excess, in particular to a plant-like blossoming that exceeds the bounds of “organic” unity. Another trope for the Nietzschean transformation of the ordinary understanding of individuation is the reconstitution of Zagreus after his dismemberment by ecstatic Maenads. The refitting of the Dionysian after it has been subjected to fragmentation results in an individual that is always open to the indeterminacy of the future, and that can never be re-subsumed under previous forms of unity and universality. In “Disgregation of the Will,” Hamacher expresses this phenomenon as the “disunity of unity and the possible but neverachieved unity of the differentiated.” This is an individuality that is opposed to the forms of consciousness and of history heretofore, “it too is subject to the principle of (dis)articulation.” It recognizes that it, too, is always on the verge of dissolution, it is perpetually exposed to an unknown future: “If the Dionysian finds deliverance from the affliction of individuation, it is only in the fleeting forms of interpretation, appearance, and therefore, yet again, individuation.”16
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A passage taken up into the collection The Will to Power illustrates how the question of the priority of organic unity and its linkage to consciousness relate to Nietzsche’s critique of individuation, and how Goethe’s plant becomes a trope for a new conception of individuation. Although the formulations have changed from the earliest notes for his proposed dissertation, Nietzsche still considers the way in which natural science and human endeavor have mutually influenced each other and created unreflective axioms that have come to be taken for the truth. Nietzsche’s critique is directed equally at assumptions about the knowledge of nature as pursued by the sciences, supposedly distinct from human projections upon it, and at truisms about human nature. The themes come together in the meditation about power as that which is common to both nature and culture: How does it happen that the basic articles of faith in psychology are one and all the most arrant distortions and counterfeits? “The human strives after happiness,” e.g.—what in that is true? In order to understand what “life” is, what kind of striving and tension life is, the formula must apply equally well to trees and plants as to animals. “What does a plant strive after”—but here we have already invented a false unity that does not exist: the fact of a millionfold growth with its own and quasi-its-own initiatives is concealed and denied if we posit a crude unity “plant.” That the very smallest “individuals” cannot be understood in the sense of a “metaphysical individual” and atom, that their sphere of power is continually changing—that is the first thing that becomes obvious; but does each of them strive after “happiness” when it changes in this way—? (KSA 13:52/WTP 704)
Nietzsche clearly considers no organism to be a unity, and he uses the plant to illustrate this claim. This comes directly from his dissertation proposal, but continues to be present as a claim in a notebook dated from 1887 to 1888. Likewise, Nietzsche continues to insist that even the smallest of atomic particles cannot be understood in terms of a “metaphysical individual” but must be taken as a useful fiction. The passage continues: But all self-expansion, incorporation, growth is a striving against something that resists [etwas Widerstehendes]; motion is essentially tied up with conditions of displeasure; that which is here the driving force must in any case desire something other if it desires displeasure in this way and continually looks for it—for what do the trees in a primeval forest fight each other? For “happiness”? —For power! The human has become master over the forces of nature, master over his own savagery and licentiousness; the desires have learned to obey and to be useful.
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The human in comparison with a pre-human—presents a tremendous quantum of power—not an increase in “happiness”! How can one claim that he has striven for happiness? (KSA 13:52/WTP 704)
To contest the organic individual statically conceived Nietzsche employs the language of individuation continually under the threat of being overcome by excess. Using Goethean science, he perceives that the organic can best be used against itself, in a move from the organism understood as a self-enclosed, self-regulating contained form to the organism as metamorphosing and self-overcoming. The plant can represent, as it most often has, the passive and easily cultivated or the source of necessary nutrition, but it can also symbolize the beauty of finitude and the wonder of metamorphosis. The body of the plant expresses the recalcitrance of the natural, its resistance to the language of isolation and self-enclosure, the impossibility of capturing all phenomena within the vocabulary of determinate individuation. In a note from 1870–1871, Nietzsche calls for a cultural transformation in the form of a “new generation of individuals” that will redefine the individual as transgressive of its own apparent bodily form. Nietzsche now describes this transformed individual not only in terms of madness, or as a plant, but also as feminine. All three characterizations remain imbricated in various notes. In order for woman to complete the state, she must have the power of divination. In the highest sense, Pythia; where this ability arises elsewhere, it is a sign of the “individual” [“Einzelne”]. Blind Tiresias as seer, Pythagoras Lycurgus as symbol: originally properly Apollinian births. Evidence that one feels this: one builds shrines to Sophocles (as the genius of healing). Individuals [Einzelnen] should be the mothers of a new generation of individuals. (KSA 7 , 147–48)
This note occurs in the context of the discussion of Wahnvorstellung . If we are to understand madness as the very attempt to disclose what is beyond determinate representation precisely through representation, that is, through language, what is the status of this linkage of the feminine with a new sense of individuation, namely, the encapsulation of the excessive through a provisionary, metamorphosing individual? What does it mean to assign the delimitation of individuals to the “mothers” of being? In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche names these “mothers” as madness (Wahn), will, and woe (Wehe), perhaps referring to Pythia, Antigone, and Cassandra. In the same notebook Nietzsche goes on to ask: “Why did culture not become feminized?—in spite of Helen, in spite of Dionysos?” (KSA 7, 146). The question arises out of Nietzsche’s observation that “the
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voice of nature speaks out of [women]” in ancient Greek culture. He gives as evidence the name Pythia, the priestess of the Delphic oracle (and the prime example of one who speaks in “mad representations,” the madness of her speech resulting both from the fact that she is possessed in mediating the oracle, and in that she translates what is essentially not commensurable to human understanding into language). Both Helen and Pythia disrupt a linear structure; Helen’s abduction disrupts the political history of the Greeks and provides one of the great narratives by which subsequent history defines them, and Pythia, as the mouthpiece for the gods, provides divine answers to questions that cannot be answered by human beings. Antigone stands for another way of understanding the tragic individual, namely, by contrasting it to the individual as determined by its place within a human hierarchical structure such as the state, the contemporary political counterpart to the overarching universal that gave the medieval individual its identity. Such an individual, as described, for example, by Hegel, would be thoroughly determined by the totality of its logical, historical and social conditions such that no genuine force of determination can be attributed to the individual by which it might distance itself from the teleological movement dictated to it. Hegel ascribes the political status that allows for self-determination to man alone. Woman, in this structure, has no voice other than as the mouthpiece of the family or divine law. Nietzsche here suggests a new understanding of individuation beyond this division: The individual [Einzelne] of the state’s purpose—now, however, comes the individual of the world’s purpose, a mass of individuals [Individuen] melted together, the human as work of art, drama, music. . . . Here is the higher possibility of existence, also in the destruction of the state. (KSA 7 , 148)
Because Dionysian worship involved an ecstatic overcoming of bodily individuation and a feeling among the worshipers of fusion with the rest of nature, Nietzsche takes it to be exemplary for his transformed description of art. In defying the logic of affiliation to the laws of the state, Antigone transcends ordinary individuation. At the same time, however, as a clear spokesperson for the law of the family that leads her to defy the state, Antigone represents the Apollinian individual. Nietzsche regarded Sophoclean tragedy as the highest point that Greek tragedy reached (KSA 7 , 81), so that Antigone embodies the integration of the Dionysian into the Apollinian. Nietzsche aligns the mad and the feminine in their transgressive power: “The madness of women is other than that of men: culture has something masculine or feminine to it according to which of them dom-
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inates in upbringing [Erziehung].” He continues, “[T]he correct position of women: dismemberment of the family”; then, “[W]oman has to bear children, and thus is there for the best vocation of human beings, to live as a plant ” (my emphasis). “Living as a plant” indicates a passive yet fecund existence, embodying “power” in the sense of the “possibility” that fulfils the highest vocation of human existence. Yet how does bearing children lead to a “dismemberment of the family”? Nietzsche always aligns the figure of the mother with Dionysos. Recall Agave, who aided in the dismemberment of her own son, Pentheus, in Euripides’ Bacchae. The image of the mother, as Derrida has shown, 17 is not a straightforward one, and Nietzsche allies this image with that of the plant. If culture has not developed in a feminine way, Nietzsche implies, it is to the detriment of human existence, which thereby is deprived of nature’s true voice. Dionysos is placed on the side of the feminine; in The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysos is called the “eternally creative primordial mother [Urmutter], eternally impelling to existence” (KSA 1, 108).18 When the Dionysian breaks the spell of individuation “the way lies open to the Mothers of Being [Müttern des Seins]” (KSA 1, 103). Nietzsche seems to choose the plant for the same reason he speaks of the possible feminization of culture: for its fragility and vulnerability, and yet at the same time what he calls its “excess of power” symbolized by its beauty and its tenacity for survival in the face of existence: The plant, that in ceaseless struggle for existence only brings forth blossoms that will wilt, looks at us with the sudden eye of beauty after it is relieved of this struggle through a fortunate disaster. . . . Nature exerts itself to come to beauty: if this is somehow achieved, then it concerns itself with the reproduction of the same: to which purpose it employs a highly artistic mechanism between the animal- and plant-world, when it is a matter of perpetuating a single flower. (KSA 7 , 167–68)
One can, of course, only speculate as to what Nietzsche means in these admittedly sketchy notes. Nietzsche points to the feminization of culture and links it to the beauty of the plant in ways that will only be fleshed out in subsequent philosophy. Yet clearly Nietzsche links madness, femininity, contingency, and vegetative growth in a metaphorical register that is intended to destabilize the rhetoric of the philosophy of nature and of individuation heretofore. The plant is put forth in analogy to the “mad representation” and to the feminine because of the fleeting nature of its bloom. Any representation is “mad,” because it turns consciousness away from “reality” and toward “illusion” or the mask; yet since the representation is arbitrary, to the extent that one recognizes its provisionality it also turns
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consciousness toward the awareness of the inadequacy of the mask and the impossibility of naming anything “behind” it. The relationship between beauty and death that we see in nature should provide insight into the nature of art, an insight that humans prefer to overlook. This insight is present in the Critique of Judgment , and implicit in Kant’s tragic philosophy in general, but Kant withdraws from the implications of his own description. This absolute finitude corresponds to our knowledge of the world, for we are tied to a limited perspective: “For the plant the whole world is plant, for us, human” (KSA 7 , 469). Nietzsche echoes Kant while substituting “measuring subject” for “knowing subject”: The statement: there is no knowledge without a knowing subject, or no subject without an object and no object without a subject, is quite true, but the most extreme triviality. We can say nothing about the thing-in-itself because we have pulled the perspective of the one who knows, i.e. the one who measures, out from under our own feet. A quality exists for us, i.e. is commensurate [angemessen] to us. If we take away the mass, what then is the quality? What things are, however, is only to be proven through a measuring subject placed next to them. Their qualities in themselves only concern us insofar as they have an effect upon us. Now we have to ask: how did such a measuring being originate? The plant is also a measuring being. (KSA 7 , 468)
The vocabulary of measuring and adequation or commensurateness (Angemessenheit) is familiar from Kant’s Critique of Judgment , and evidently, from the reference to the “thing-in-itself” and the impossibility of knowledge of things independently of their relationship to a measuring subject, Nietzsche is responding to Kant here, although it is to Kant in general and not specifically to the third Critique. Nietzsche takes up the question that Kant brackets, that is, the question of how the human came to be the sole measuring being to which knowledge is calibrated. Nietzsche emphasizes the act of measuring, and not the measurement. He departs from Kant in his reinterpretation of measure and of organism, and this departure can be seen in the naming of the plant as a measuring being. Like a plant, the new individual requires a conducive atmosphere in order to flourish. In a short piece that Nietzsche calls “Fragment of an expanded version of the ‘Birth of Tragedy,’” (KSA 7 , 333–49), Nietzsche speaks of both a “double art,” which refers to ancient Greek tragedy, and to a “double genius.” Nietzsche calls the “double genius” a “mysterious connection between state and art.” The ancient Greeks cultivated the right atmosphere for the birth of genius through alternating periods of war and peace:
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With this mysterious connection between state and art, between political craving and artistic creation, between battlefield and artwork, of which we have a presentiment here, we understand by “state,” as we have said, no more than the iron shackles that compel the process towards a society: while without the state, in the natural bellum omnium contra omnes, society cannot put down roots in greater units and over and above the sphere of the family. (KSA 7 , 344)
While the formation of a stable community is a prerequisite for the coming-into-being of art, it also leads to fierce warfare. But with the creation of the “state,” power becomes concentrated in a particular spatiotemporal configuration, and it is this power that is required for the creation of art. Thus, in the intervals between wars, when power has time to accumulate, “the effects of conflict that have been inverted and compressed are given enough time to germinate and ripen, so that as soon as there are several warmer days, the brilliant blooms of genius will be allowed to sprout forth” (KSA 7 , 344). Here genius is explained through the fortuitous encounter of favorable forces that results, again, in vegetative growth that does not know its why. If every individual is the result of a chance encounter, this means not only that its formation is beyond its own control, but also that it is preceded and will be succeeded by a flow of forces that will always exceed its boundaries. It is in a receptivity to this excess, a welcoming of its indeterminacy, the absolute openness to its future, that the productivity of the individual lies. This “productivity” lies closer to the qualityless freedom described by Meister Eckhart than to the economically informed notion of productivity by which we judge “individuals” in the technological age. In the second Untimely Meditation, we recall, Nietzsche refers to this notion as a saying in old Spanish, Defienda me Dios de my, or “God guard me from myself” (KSA 1, 328). This is another formulation of Meister Eckhart’s “I pray to God to rid me of God” that Nietzsche cites in The Gay Science (KSA 3, 533). In asking “God” to protect “me” from “myself,” and in praying to “God” to rid me of “God,” one appeals to the overthrow of determination, one rejects the reductiveness of assigned qualities in favor of the openness of ambiguity.19 Nietzsche describes this freedom in terms of the cultivation of a garden that is very different from the sublime English garden, in another passage, this time from The Dawn: What remains free for us. One can act like a gardener with one’s impulses,
and, as only a few know, cultivate the seeds of wrath, sympathy, deep thought, vanity, to be as fecund and profitable as a beautiful fruit on a trellis; one can do this with the good and the bad taste of a gardener, as it were, in a French or an English or a Chinese style; one can also let nature
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prevail and only look after them here and there for the sake of a little decoration and cleansing; finally, one can also let the plants grow up according to naturally favorable conditions and hindrances, and without any knowledge or reflection, let them fight out their own battles—yes, one can take pleasure in such a wilderness and can will precisely this pleasure, if one gets what one needs from it. All of this remains free for us: but how many of us know that it remains free for us? Don’t most people believe in themselves as faits accomplis? Haven’t the great philosophers still left their seal on this prejudice, with their doctrines of the unalterability of character? (KSA 3, 326)
Nietzsche uses the word freedom here in Meister Eckhart’s sense, not as a freedom to do something but freedom as indetermination. In a notebook from 1872–1873, Nietzsche speculates on the origin of the notion of Eigenschaften. This word, which can be translated as “qualities” or “properties,” is also sometime translated as “possessiveness,” especially in Meister Eckhart, because of the etymology of the word, which includes the word eigen, meaning “own.” Nietzsche is very vigilant in keeping the original meanings of words in mind, and so his critique of Eigenschaft has resonances for his critique of subjectivity, and of the human tendency to see itself as the ultimate individual. Nietzsche writes that human beings believe that their qualities (Eigenschaften) lead to action, when in fact it we infer qualities from actions. We assume that there are qualities because we see actions in a determinate way. Thus, first there is an action that we subsequently link to a quality. The word for a quality emerges from the word for an action—and this relationship, carried over to all things, is what we call causality: “First ‘seeing,’ then ‘face’” (KSA 7 , 483). This leads to a language of being and not becoming, an ontology of objects rather than events. It is interesting to note that Meister Eckhart also considered actions, including “good works” such as helping the poor, donating money, etc., to be “qualities” that had no meaning in and in fact hindered the relationship to the divine.20 For Meister Eckhart and other medieval mystics, to give “God” determination even to the extent of bestowing the name of “God” was to reduce the divine to the level of a conceptually accessible entity. This would extend, at least for Nietzsche, to the words me and myself .21 The individual’s orientation toward an uncertain future means that as language, as mask, it will always remain on the verge of metamorphosis, at the limit of determination: “It knows no other and recognizes no God who could betoken its determinate destiny.” 22 The organism is the primary example of the place where the individual is in most danger of being reified. Even our bodies are nothing more than fictions, appearances generated by a momentary encounter of forces. The figure of Dionysos, represented, as he/she most often was, as a kind of scarecrow,
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a column with clothes wrapped around it and topped with a mask that hides what has always already just slipped away, yet which continues to hold the constant promise of being reborn under another metamorphosis, symbolizes the monstrous individuality that Nietzsche finds under the rubric of tragedy. Walter Otto describes the mask of Dionysos in the following way: “The mask is pure confrontation—an antipode, and nothing else. It has no reverse side—‘Spirits have no back,’ the people say. It has nothing which might transcend this mighty moment of confrontation. It has, in other words, no complete existence either. It is the symbol and the manifestation of that which is excruciatingly near, that which is completely absent—both in one reality.”23 Thus, we have come full circle, from the constraints of the English garden that exhibits itself to be wild and naturally growing within the constraints laid down by a skillful gardener, to the vigilant receptivity of the tender who knows that he or she is free to let the undetermined remain ambiguous, to let the plant spread where the environmental conditions are favorable, without knowing in advance what direction its growth will take. In Getting Back Into Place, Edward Casey calls the garden that place with the greatest “capacity to exhibit a range of relations between the naturally given and the intentionally cultivated.”24 Gardens, like the plants that grow in them, are characterized by both “liminality and transitionality,”25 at the border between nature and culture, and at the limit of their mutual transformability. Nietzsche’s project mirrors Kant’s deformatively, turning the imperative toward totality and unity into an open-ended vegetative growth.
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Conclusion
DISSEMINATION, RHIZOMES, EFFLORESCENCE The Legacy of the Vegetative Soul in Twentieth-Century Thought
The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen. —Angelus Silesias
Nineteenth-century German literary and philosophical thought sowed the seeds of the displacement of binary metaphysical oppositions and the questioning of the atomistic conception of the subject that became such important focal points for twentieth-century Continental philosophy. The twentieth-century critique of subjectivity, which starts explicitly with Nietzsche and continues through the philosophical schools of phenomenology, genealogy, deconstruction, and French feminism, among others, builds indirectly on Kant’s critique and the massive reworking of metaphysics into an organic, living growth by German Idealism. The concern that links these movements is a search for the assumptions or presuppositions that underlie classical metaphysical tenets, particularly modern metaphysics, which grounds truth in the rational self-transparent subject. Martin Heidegger for example, using a plant metaphor, writes: 181
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Descartes, writing to Picot, who translated the Principia Philosophiae into French, observed: “Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches that issue from the trunk are all the other sciences.” Sticking to this image, we ask: In what soil do the roots of the tree have their hold? Out of what ground do the roots—and through them the whole tree—receive their nourishing juices and strength? What element, concealed in the ground, enters and lives in the roots that support and nourish the tree? What is the basis and element of metaphysics? What is metaphysics, viewed from its ground?” 1
Here, a tree, a form of plant, is likened to an individual, to philosophy considered in its entirety. Clearly there is no one model for plant growth, and clearly one might challenge the metaphor of plant growth on the basis of the tree, which appears, especially as Descartes describes it, to be a self-sufficient individual in the same way that an animal is. Yet Heidegger’s point is to ask about the surrounding environment upon which the tree is dependent and in which it is fixed. The roots of a plant in this image, which must remain enclosed by a concealed ground in order to allow the rest of the plant to flourish, reflect the silent ground that metaphysics rarely questions, the unspoken assumptions that make it possible. The aspect of modern metaphysics that Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, and others question is the assumption that this ground can be found in the metaphysics of presence, and in particular in the animallike configurations of the thinking “I,” the rational subject, whose boundaries are known to itself and defensible. This is certainly where Descartes found the roots of metaphysics to be securely grounded. At the same time that they trace the assumptions that metaphysics makes, however, the critiques of these thinkers do not seek an alternative univocal origin; displacing the fiction of this origin is one of the things the plant-like reading seeks to achieve. Heidegger speaks of the “groundless ground” of Being with reference to the rose, which is “without why,” in the words of the seventeenth-century mystic and poet Angelus Silesius. 2 Heidegger’s interest in this line from a poem occurs in the context of his study of Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing is without a why, without grounds. Heidegger considers how a rose can simultaneously be grounded—insofar as it becomes an object for human cognition, as we can deduce the causal mechanism at the origin of its blooming—and be without why—insofar as it does not explicitly take itself into consideration, does not “insert itself in between its blooming and the grounds for blooming, thanks to which grounds could first be as grounds.”3 Heidegger goes on to interpret the fragment as saying that “humans, in the concealed ground of their essential being, first truly are when in their own way they are like the rose—without why.”4 For Heidegger, heeding and uncovering this concealed ground of human
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essential being, that which is prior to calculative thinking, causal determination, and human action considered in terms of explicit conscious agency, is philosophy’s task in confronting the hegemony of the modern subject which has been characterized in just such ways. To trace a linear history of influence between the thinkers whose work we have been considering and what has been called postmodern critique would be to configure the history of thought in the manner we have called animal lineage, as a straightforward heritage linking bodies of work. The thought of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and to a lesser extent Goethe and Hölderlin, has been disseminated in twentieth-century Continental philosophy and feminist theory in a manner that more resembles vegetable growth, as political intervention and transformative interpretation. As Jacques Derrida writes in “Otobiographies,” his reading of Nietzsche: We are not, I believe, bound to decide. An interpretive decision does not have to draw a line between two intents or two political contents. Our interpretations will not be readings of a hermeneutic or exegetic sort, but rather political interventions in the political rewriting of the text and its destination. This is the way it has always been—and always in a singular manner— 5
Here Derrida refers to the appropriation of Nietzsche’s work for both fascist and anti-fascist purposes, and the same argument might apply to his own appropriation and transformation of Heideggerian critique. A straightforwardly hermeneutical reading seeks to uncover univocal roots of meaning of a work, to analyze its origins and codify its meaning. Such a reading would kill a plant, if indeed a text is a plantlike growth. The transformative style of thinkers like Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, by contrast, envisions texts and interpretations as vegetative growth, untraceable to singular or determinate origins, disseminating and productive rather than reducibly polysemic and analytic. Derrida’s notion of dissemination, Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of the rhizome, and Irigaray’s trope of efflorescence all explicitly perform what we have called a plant-like reading. A disseminating reading of texts recognizes that interpretation is always productive or fecund rather than simply investigative and analytical. It resists totalization and subverts any attempt to master a reading definitively. A rhizomatic reading emphasizes nonlinearity and a genealogical refusal of unique unified sources or meanings. Efflorescence complicates the notion of the atomistic subject and the singular, phallic reading, while subverting and transforming the tradition with a metamorphic, ivy-like growth. In the preface to Dissemination, Derrida draws our attention to the metaphorical register in the history of philosophy that encompasses Nature conceived as a book, the notion of logos spermatikos, and the
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equation, most explicitly articulated by Plato, of writing with strewing seed, speech with animal insemination. Dissemination, understood as the multiple, antisystematic fecundity that occurs when seed is blown to the wind rather than the reductive, purposive insemination of animals, is described by Derrida as “the heterogeneity and absolute exteriority of the seed” which “constitute[s] itself into a program, but . . . a program that cannot be formalized . . . [which] does not take a form saturated with self-presence in the encyclopedic circle.”6 Aligning itself most explicitly against Hegel, but also against the onto-theological project of the history of metaphysics in general, Derrida calls dissemination a resistance to the “effacement of seminal difference through which the leftoverness of the outwork gets internalized and domesticated into the ontotheology of the great Book.”7 The “great Book” is Nature, conceived by medieval thinkers to be God’s book, written in such a way that it is representative and true, an ordered totality that gives the reader a structured idea of the seemingly chaotic logos scattered like seed among its forms, articulated retroactively as the origin of all its diverse forms. Derrida then turns to Novalis, who, in his philosophical fragments entitled “Pollen” (Blüthenstaub) envisioned an Encyclopedia that would “complete” Nature as it inscribed it. Derrida asks how one can think the identification of Nature with a Book if the book is what completes it, and what is signified about completedness as such by the fact that Novalis never finished this Encyclopedia.8 True to the vision of the nineteenth-century vegetative soul we have been considering, Derrida speculates that the Novalisian Encyclopedia signifies that which goes beyond the “always-already-constitutedness of meaning and of truth within the theo-logico-encyclopedic space, of self-fertilization with no limen.” 9 Deleuze and Guattari expand upon the various kinds of “plant structures” that different kinds of philosophical and literary efforts employ. In “Rhizome,” the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari sketch three general figures of a book: the rootbook, the radicle-system or fascicular root-book, and the rhizomebook.10 The root-book, exemplified in the world of plants by the tree, traces the image of the world, the roots of the book imitating the “world-tree.” Deleuze and Guattari ask, “How could the law of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division between world and book, nature and art?”11 The root-book or tree-book constitutes itself as the reflection of nature, as the One that becomes two. We might add that this root-structure, explicitly seen in Descartes’ analogy of metaphysics to the roots of a tree, is the method of individuation based on the animal body as well. Deleuze and Guattari argue that “in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular
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system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one.” 12 The rootbook opens upon all classification according to binary logic: nature and culture, natural reality and spiritual reality, literature and philosophy, annual and perennial plant. This system of classification lay at the heart of botanical research, epitomized by the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus), in the time of Goethe. Think of the family tree, the charts of families of languages, which begin at point X and proceed by dichotomy. Binary logic rules the classical book, according to Deleuze and Guattari, and still dominates psychoanalysis, linguistics, structuralism, and, of course, computer technology and information science. The second figure of the book, in Deleuze and Guattari’s introduction, is that of the fascicular root, or radicle system. When the principal root of a plant has been aborted or its tip destroyed, an indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots appear on it, and the plant as a result undergoes an intensified growth. This description parallels an experiment performed by Linnaeus that Goethe describes in The Metamor phosis of Plants, in which a young tree was placed in a pot that was too small for it. Obviously the smaller pot would not allow the primary roots to expand to their normal degree, and so secondary, smaller roots took over the process of nourishing the plant. Linnaeus based his theory of prolepsis on the immediate flourishing of the plant that resulted as the tree bore blossoms and fruit very quickly, long before its usual six years of development. The theory posits that the plant anticipates many years of development at once by compressing the successive stages through time. This phenomenon also resembles the gardens of Adonis described in Plato’s Phaedrus. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, in this case the primary root’s unity still subsists in the form of potentiality: its past or future may be unified, or at least the promise of unity remains since its structure is a fragmentation of a former whole. They give the examples of William Burroughs’s cut-up method (folding one text into another), Joyce’s shattering of the linear unity of language, and Nietzsche’s aphorisms. Such a structure does not really break with the root: “The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos.”13 The third book-type, and also plant-type, is that of the rhizome. Rhizomes grow horizontally rather than vertically, putting out a multiplicity of small roots and shoots without any one central root or stem. Rhizomes connect any point to any other point, and have no identifiable beginning or end, but are always in the middle, on the way: “When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis.” 14 Rhizomes have no territory; they may spread with the wind and cover any amount of ground, since they grow outward rather than upward. They
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are acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying, “all manner of beginnings.”15 Deleuze and Guattari cite the diary of Franz Kafka, who wrote, “Things . . . occur to me . . . not from the root up but rather only from somewhere in their middle. Let someone then attempt to seize them, let someone attempt to seize a blade of grass and hold fast to it when it begins to grow only from the middle.” 16 Deleuze and Guattari, like Goethe and Hölderlin, emphasize the adaptability of the transplanted shoot of a plant, the fact that a brokenoff part can reattach itself and from the point of adaptation take up further stages of metamorphosis: “[A] new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch.”17 Hegel calls this ability of the plant a kind of monstrosity, but Goethe counters that such an adaptation manifests flexibility, not monstrosity. Goethe’s observation seeks to refute the metaphor of the seed as self-enclosed and purposive, a metaphor that plays into the depiction of the plant as homologous to an animal, and thus a deficient animal. Deleuze and Guattari also connect the arboreal structures of technical production with the West, and rhizomatic growth patterns with the East: “The East presents a different figure: a relation to the steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads.” 18 This account is a reversal, in terms of approbation, of the traditional binary oppositions Detienne traces in The Gardens of Adonis between “superficial, lightweight plants” with no roots and no fruit, and “serious, solemn, rooted” plants, the former associated with women and the East, the latter with men and the West. Goethe was deeply interested in the plant culture of the East, and his West-Oestlicher Divan (1819) has much to say on this theme. In Europe in the nineteenth century, the Turkish “language of flowers,” used to pass secret messages between lovers, 19 seized the popular imagination. The “language of flowers” came to signify any secret code of writing that did not follow the rules of ordinary discourse, in precisely the sense of the multiple significations and nonlinear branchings-out described by Deleuze and Guattari. In spite of the fascinating analogies Deleuze and Guattari draw between the different kinds of plant growth and various styles of writing, and in spite of the obvious value of challenging the received understanding of the proper way of writing, it seems necessary to question any pairing that relies—as Deleuze and Guattari’s account ultimately does— on the traditional definition of metaphor as a lively description that illuminates the structure of another reality that lies behind it, in this case, the description of plants that stands in for the description of writing.
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Instead, here metaphor might be understood as an intertwining that reads two things in terms of one another in such a way that no priority can be drawn, no implication that one figure represents, or stands in for, the other. While a productive metaphor brings two things together, it does so in such a way as to still remind one of the provisionality of such a juxtaposition and the space between the terms of the juxtaposition. As Sarah Kofman puts it in her study of Nietzsche and metaphor: On the one hand there is no metaphor without a stripping away of individuality, without masquerade and metamorphosis. To be able to transpose, one must be able to transpose oneself and one must have conquered the limits of individuality: the same must partake in the other, must be the other. At this level metaphor is founded on the ontological unity of life represented by Dionysos. But if there is metaphor it is because this unity is always already in pieces and can only be reconstituted when symbolically transposed into art. Beyond individual separation, symbolized by the dismemberment of Dionysos, metaphor allows for the reconstitution of the originary unity of all beings, symbolized by the resurrection of the god. On the other hand metaphor is linked to the loss of the proper understood as the essence of the world, which is indecipherable and of which man can have only representations which are quite improper. 20
This understanding of metaphor allows the possibilities of representation itself , the hiatus between the terms, rather than one particular reading or representation, to come to presence. The “loss of the proper” is an absolute loss, without the possibility of recuperation, rather than being a plenitude which, though unknown, supplements and fulfills the provisionality of the metaphorical bond. The difference between a “living” and a “dead” metaphor would lie in the fact that one still experiences the rhythm of the new metaphor, creating the impression of living growth (physis) that Aristotle declared to be the quality of the best metaphors. 21 For Aristotle, of course, metaphorical speech supplements nonmetaphorical discourse, adding interest and liveliness rather than content. Irigaray uncovers a less generous reading of plant growth in Aristotle’s theory of the soul. In De Anima Aristotle introduces the notion of the vegetative soul as one component of the irrational part of the soul, namely that component responsible for simple growth and alteration. This soul, unlike the sentient soul (the other part of the irrational soul), is shared by both plants and animals, hence its name. The nutritive or vegetative soul is also associated with reproduction, particularly with the womb and fetation. The vegetative soul reappears in discussions in the Nicomachean Ethics, Generation of Animals, and Politics to indirectly bolster, among other things, claims about the role of women in
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political life.22 The explanation of the Aristotelian vegetative soul— which gained force in its adoption by medieval Scholasticism—contributes to an argument dispersed through various works of Aristotle justifying the inferior political status of women. The part of the argument that concerns us here rests on the claim that since the vegetative soul predominates over the rational soul in women by virtue of their capacity for bearing children, women by nature are not suited to rule. Irrationality is thus directly linked to the perceived primacy of the reproductive capacity in women via the vegetative soul. Western philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have repeated the analogy of men to animals and women to plants by virtue of their (perceived) respective characteristics of activity and rationality, on the one hand, and passivity and lack of rationality, on the other. In works spanning her intellectual career, Irigaray takes up the metaphor of the plant again and again, both to criticize the negative way in which it has traditionally been used to characterize the ontological status of woman, and, increasingly to subvert the traditional metaphor in the productive notion of efflorescence. In doing so, Irigaray gives an indication as to the language in which a feminine subject, as opposed to a “concept of femininity,” might be couched. In “How to Conceive of a Girl,” Irigaray considers Aristotle’s analogy of women to plants. She writes: The substance of the plant, like that of any (female) being, cannot move, or move beyond, the ontological status assigned to it. Once and for all. It is not capable of any less or any more. 23
Woman is supposed to have an essence that defines her as woman, once and for all. She is relegated to the status of nature or matter, and in this sense can do no more than assist or ground man in the actualization of his subjectivity. Irigaray’s project of performing a subversion of a traditional metaphor such that it turns into a productive metonymical structure takes the German nineteenth-century discourse on vegetable genius as its productive ground. Critique does not exhaust the philosophical scope of Irigaray’s effort; she attempts to move beyond simple historical critique, as important as this activity is, toward a positive feminist philosophy. In The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, and even more explicitly in Elemental Passions, Irigaray uses the rhetorical configuration of “efflorescence” to designate a blossoming or blooming forth that cannot be enclosed within the traditional boundaries of embodiment and philosophical discourse. Efflorescence—a figure that implies metamorphosis and indefinite individuation—forms the positive facet of Irigaray’s cri-
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tique of Aristotle and of the history of metaphysics. This critique can be read as aimed at the primacy of traditionally “animalistic” metaphors that emphasize self-enclosedness, self-preservation, and strict identity over time, qualities that among other philosophical constructs, could be predicated of the fiction of the (masculine) subject. Among other contemporary feminist critics of the articulation of subjectivity in the history of metaphysics, Irigaray stands out in her attempt to reconsider the Enlightenment conception of the atomistic subject (the Hobbesian man) through her use of specifically natural, yet nonhuman and even non-animalistic forms to think sexual difference and feminine subjectivity. Irigaray’s use of the trope of efflorescence reminds us that the flowering subject is always a sexed subject, a multiple subject, and a subject-in-becoming. Irigaray’s work stands out among other twentieth-century critics of the history of the way in which subjectivity has been configured in that she envisions the possibility of another kind of subjectivity. She does not assume, as others upon whose work she builds do, that the subject qua subject necessarily is constituted according to the model of the animal, and thus must be left behind. Her politics of subjectivity, motivated by an interest in the ethical and political empowerment of women, does not rest content with dissecting and critiquing the history of metaphysics, but grafts a positive vision onto the destructive insights of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Irigaray proposes a feminine model of subjectivity, one that returns to a close connection to the philosophy of nature, and in particular to the figure of the plant. In doing so Irigaray is not suggesting that a return to unmediated nature—in itself an impossible task—would bring about a meaningful change for women. Rather, she implies that a return to and reworking of the symbolics of nature might be a place from within the social or symbolic order from which to retroactively restructure the ways in which women’s embodiment, natural role, and passage into subjectivity are thought, and thereby to effect a real change for women in the cultural order. By “real change” I mean that such a restructuring would not merely manipulate the existing conception of subjectivity in order to make room for women, thereby leaving its implicit masculinity intact, but would make room for sexual difference. This distinguishes her philosophy and makes her the heir to nineteenthcentury Naturphilosophie, a title we must recognize that she might well not wish to claim, especially given her critique of Hegel’s philosophy of nature and its link to his treatment of the feminine. Yet Irigaray herself explicitly links women to the vegetable world. Irigaray transforms the negative association of woman with plant into a positive possibility, first by recalling pre-patriarchal cultures where goddesses were associated with the vegetable world:
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One might well wonder if women are closer to the vegetable world than to the animal world, as was claimed by certain ancient philosophers, and particularly by female cultures, although, it is true, in different ways. Could it be that in this proximity there lies an accurate explanation of her relation to passivity? Woman’s receptivity would not be restricted to her relation to man alone but would extend to the natural economy, especially the cosmic one, with which her equilibrium and growth are more closely associated. Her so-called passivity would not then be part of an active/passive pair of opposites but would signify a different economy, a different relation to nature and to the self that would amount to attentiveness and to fidelity rather than passivity. A matter, therefore, not of pure receptivity but of a movement of growth that never ultimately estranges itself from corporeal existence in a natural milieu. In which case, becoming is not cut off from life or its placing. It is not extrapolated from the living nor founded in a dead character. It remains attentive to growth: physiological, spiritual, relational.24
Irigaray associates plantlike growth and the feminine with nature, much in the way these figures have traditionally been linked, but with a different agenda. For Irigaray, there is a grave danger in the fact that nature has been appropriated by an approach that seeks to harness and utilize it without recognizing the loss such a process involves. This loss, in her view, includes an occlusion of the bodily and its intimate relationship to the spiritual, the forgetting of the rich ground of possibility in favor of the certainty of the actual and the conceptual. The narrowly scientific and technological world view leaves no room for nature as excess, as that from which human beings arise and over which they ultimately have no absolute control, an excess that guarantees the possibility of change in the depiction of sexual difference. As Margaret Whitford analyzes it, nature, for Irigaray, is that which is symbolized as nature (as opposed to culture or the symbolic), but, more explicitly, it is “those parts of himself that the male imaginary has split off and projected—into the world, on to women.” 25 Nature, as we have emphasized in other contexts, is not a pre-symbolic, untouched realm to which one can retreat, from which one flees, or which one can symbolize at will. For Irigaray, one might add, nature is not an essentialized, fixed nature attached to a sex, but is part of a hierarchized system (as we have seen most clearly in Hegel’s philosophy of nature) that is legitimized by virtue of being presented as natural and inevitable. At the same time, however, I would argue that for Irigaray “nature” also represents the possibility of transformation of that order through a restructuring of the feminine imaginary (thereby effecting the possibility of a feminine subjectivity) by way of reworking the symbols of nature.26 Whitford quotes Irigaray in saying that according to Hegel, women remain in the plant world rather
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than acceding to the animal, as part of the “in itself” rather than “for itself,” interpreting this as merely a claim that women need to move beyond the “natural” into the “social.” However, in other places Whitford shows how Irigaray uses existing symbols of femininity to transform the symbolic order, which I believe is precisely what she is doing with vegetal figures as well. “Nature,” then, signifies the exhilarating possibility that ideas and traditions may be either recouped or transformed. Irigaray writes in Sexes and Genealogies: “Once the natural, familial, female, or, if you like, nocturnal spirit, is sacrificed, the dark rootedness of nature is rejected in favor of a sightless era of concepts. This sightlessness seems to consist in the unconsidered, unconscious destruction of our senses.”27 A tendency toward metonymical profusion (itself characteristic of vegetative growth) rather than either blind conceptual language or metaphorical substitution characterizes Irigaray’s strategy of transformative mimesis. Rather than simply pointing out the flaws of traditional philosophy’s linkage of the feminine with the earth or nature, Irigaray focuses on the redemptive possibilities inherent in the very metaphors that have been used to reduce the feminine to the silent, concealed ground of Being, just as a “plantlike” reading transforms its textual object in a metamorphic growth. Plant growth provides one of the most striking and pervasive examples of such a guiding principle in Irigaray’s work. The figure of efflorescence functions not simply as one of many poetic figures, but as a privileged figure in Irigaray’s work, as the metaphor, as it were, for metonymy, the underlying structure of language that metaphor presupposes. A metaphor for metonymy would repeat its displacing function endlessly, so that, in spite of its privilege, the very nature of plant metamorphosis would make it impossible for this figure for femininity to take over as a metaphor for woman in a substitutive logic that would simply replace the phallus with veiled lips, or the measured and autonomous animal with the interconnected and vulnerable plant. Rather, the figure of efflorescence provides support for Irigaray’s imagining of a feminine subject through an open-ended inquiry into and transformation of thinking about language, becoming, and individuation. Irigaray criticizes Aristotle for allowing everything he says about nature to be “already co-opted by prescriptions that direct or interpret his findings.”28 But in a stranger turn, she goes on to write: The plant may indeed conform to her own purpose, but an other has to certify this. And that other must speak, and speak, moreover, as a philosopher. She may be fully herself, and in herself, but an other has to declare that this is the case. Thus, her development is subject to definitions coming from an other. 29
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Without any specific declaration on Irigaray’s part, the plant moves from an analogy to woman to a metonym for woman, such that the critique of the philosophy of nature becomes a critique of the architectonic of philosophy, which restricts woman to a prescribed category defined in terms of an other that alone can be actualized and affirm her purpose in her place. I have repeatedly used the word metonymy rather than metaphor to characterize Irigaray’s use of figurative language, and this shift in vocabulary is significant. In an essay entitled “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids,” Irigaray, in the context of critiquing “science” (always placed in scare quotes) for its neglect of fluidity in favor of the study of solids, links this neglect with psychoanalysis’ neglect of feminine sexuality, which is fluid. She writes: And if anyone objects that the question, put this way, relies too heavily on metaphors, it is easy to reply that the question in fact impugns the privilege granted to metaphor (a quasi solid) over metonymy (which is much more closely allied to fluids). 30
Irigaray’s critique is aimed at Jacques Lacan’s discussion of metaphor and metonymy in “The Agency of the Letter,” 31 which, she implies, privileges metaphor over metonymy in much the same way that phallocentrism neglects the feminine. Lacan’s understanding of metaphor and metonymy, drawn from Roman Jakobson’s linguistic theory, aligns metaphor with the vertical substitution of one signifier for another, and metonymy with horizontal contiguity, in a way that recalls the contrast of tree and rhizome. Jane Gallop suggests a metonymic or “feminine” reading of Lacan which, by “supplying a whole context of associations” that are present in the text, yet not explicitly combined, form an argument in favor of aligning the privilege accorded to metaphor with the hegemony of the masculine in psychoanalytic theory.32 Gallop warns against the “temptation” of “misreading” Lacan’s text as a straightforward neglect of metonymy (and of the feminine), and observes instead, in a very Irigarayan manner, that metonymy functions in the manner of a dark, latent, ground upon which metaphor depends and indeed is grounded. Her argument persuasively shows that although to read the tradition as perpetuating a straightforward neglect of metonymy would be to misread it, nevertheless, metonymy’s role has historically functioned in a way that strikingly parallels Irigaray’s critique of the role of the feminine in the history of philosophy. Lacan writes, for example, that “metonymy is there from the beginning, and it is what makes metaphor possible.” 33 Irigaray’s claim is that the feminine, insofar as it has been a part of philosophical discourse and formulated as part of an ontological struc-
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ture, has always played the role of ground, of source, of that which is to be contained, but in such a way that a making actual of feminine possibility paradoxically involves its own negation. To the extent that woman is granted an autonomous identity, she receives this status only thanks to an assimilation into a masculine conception of subjectivity, much in the way that the concealed ground feeds the roots of the tree. As Irigaray puts it in The Forgetting of Air, “[T]he other is nothing more than the assimilation of the mourning of the other, projected into the ‘free.’”34 By reviving metonymy Irigaray seeks to avoid the substitutive logic of metaphor, refusing to erect feminine metaphors in the place of overturned masculine metaphors of subjectivity. The mourning of the other Irigaray refers to here resonates with her discussions of Antigone and of the story of Demeter and Kore-Persephone.35 Both Antigone and Kore are entombed under the earth, relegated to a silent subterranean existence, though both also provide a silent (unacknowledged) propagating force. Antigone’s defiance of the law of the state, at least in Hegel’s interpretation, upsets the feminine configured as spiritualizing force. She buries her brother to assure his entrance into the public realm of memorial, and thus his subjectivity, if only in memory, but her own transgression results in a burial that has no immediate positive outcome, that seems merely disruptive, but that also signifies the possibility of transformation. Kore’s ingestion of pomegranate seeds ensures the necessity of her remaining underground for the winter months of every year, yet it is her very annual appearance at the end of this exile that provides for the blossoming, fruitfulness, and harvest upon which human life depends. The feminine in both cases can be interpreted as a vehicle for blossoming forth who does not herself achieve the liberation and autonomy presupposed of a (Western, masculine) conception of subjectivity, but who nevertheless marks the possibility of another kind of subjectivity. We recall that Hegel distinguished between the plant and the animal by noting the fact that the plant “cannot retain . . . fluid in itself,” so that it is incapable of maintaining a unity between its internal and external world (JI 211). Because of its self-enclosed interior of circulating fluids, the animal carries spiritual liquidity within itself. The universal fluid merely flows through and then out of the plant, whereas the animal holds what Hegel calls the “universal element” within itself as a part of itself (JI 211). This explanation informs Hegel’s analogy of woman to plant and man to animal: woman can be, at most, the unconscious vessel of subjectivity, the in-itself and not for-itself, a vessel through which spirit flows and which nourishes the animal, just as the feminine provides the spiritualizing capacity for the masculine, exemplified in Antigone’s burial of her brother, Polynices.
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Irigaray recognizes the precariousness of her chosen metonymics of vegetative growth, precarious in its very proximity to the tradition it seeks to critique and transform. In her famous discussion of Hegel’s Antigone in Speculum of the Other Woman, “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” Irigaray begins with two epigraphs from Hegel’s Philoso phy of Nature. She consistently draws a connection between the philosophy of nature and Hegel’s discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit . Such a connection is at first consideration not at all self-evident, but, as we have seen, Hegel clearly draws a connection between the feminine and the vegetative, one that contrasts strikingly with Irigaray’s own intertwining of the two, but in which she nevertheless discerns redemptive possibilities: Clearly, according to Hegel, the dead man is the one who finally finds peace. He is no longer internally split, no longer in constant polemos . But it might be possible to have another peace: that of living plant growth. The ensemble of the Hegelian system, apart from a few errors and uprootings, in fact resembles this. Could the secret model for his philosophy overall be the plant? But, within the system, as it unfolds on the conscious level, it seems that one can escape from singularness only through the order of death or of the dead man. This idea or conviction seems linked to the split of body and spirit that is established following the sacrifice of the female to the State and man’s access to citizenship and to a neutered culture. 36
The difference Irigaray notes between “living plant growth” and the plant that is associated with death recalls the logic of sacrifice according to which Hegelian nature unfolds in its progression from plant to animal. The split between body and spirit that results, epitomized in the discussion of the plant that in laying itself down ferments into communion fare of bread and wine, reminds us that despite his own description of his system as a metamorphosing plant, Hegel’s model remains that of Deleuze and Guattari’s tree-book, a tree that does not consider its nurturing ground. Irigaray notes the problematic aspects of the (Hegelian) discourse, yet reads it beyond its intention, in what Elizabeth Grosz calls the “viscosity” or superabundance of the text, its resistance to ownership. 37 Irigaray’s implicit argument seems to be that if the very phallogocentricity of the tradition perpetuates itself through concealed metaphorical structures, it is exigent for feminist philosophy not just to reveal and dismantle these metaphors, but also to engage and displace them productively according to the logic of metonymy. The scientific and philosophical tradition has prided itself on being separate from rhetoric, has defined itself in denigrating “literary” language. Irigaray subverts
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traditional metaphors as a rhetorical weapon against the tradition that has worked to exclude and at the same time to assimilate women. In refusing to simply reject metaphors that have historically been associated with women, Irigaray makes a statement against the politics of assimilation which masks phallogocentrism with the veneer of neutrality. As Patricia Huntington explains in Ecstatic Subjects, “Metaphorical transference entails evoking new images of women’s autonomy from the ‘surplus of meaning’ of the metaphor ‘Woman’ as represented in patriarchy.”38 However, as she is quick to remind us, “The feminine utopian moment, though concerned with the future, does not erect the ‘feminine’ as a new transcendental signified.” 39 It is important to note that the “new” images that are invoked are culled from the “surplus of meaning” of the metaphor “Woman” as represented in the patriarchy . This explains why Irigaray chooses a metaphor, that of the plant, that has traditionally been associated with the devalorization of women. Irigaray recognizes that one must not naively believe that it is possible to simply start anew, as if it were easy to reach a vantage point outside of the symbolic order. However, because there is an excess, or surplus of meaning onto which the imaginary opens up, because this excess is that which will always exceed any finite symbolic system, it is possible to subvert traditional metaphors productively while retaining a connection to their source. As Whitford puts it, Irigaray focuses on the imaginary of the history of metaphysics, that is, its repressed, unacknowledged foundation in the unsymbolized maternal-feminine. Yet the imaginary is a structural and not a developmental or chronological stage, so that “symbolic and imaginary form a system, in which we cannot understand one without the other. . . . Change in the imaginary must bring about change in the symbolic and vice versa.”40 Imaginary and symbolic are contiguous, and Irigaray chooses to strategically address the imaginary by echoing and transforming existing symbols of femininity. Whitford emphasizes that Irigaray’s work deliberately takes on male metaphors that describe femininity in order to effect “a possible restructuring of the imaginary by the symbolic which would make a difference to women.”41 This process draws on the rhizomatic displacement of metonymy rather than the substitutive logic of metaphor. In a continuation of the critique of Hegel in which she contrasts the Hegelian, sacrificial use of plant metaphors with “living plant growth,” Irigaray writes, in a way that echoes Goethe, “In fact it is possible to go beyond singularness by obeying growth, by sharing in the universal natural rhythm. This sharing is indeed more universal than a single death. Obviously, the universality of nature is complex, but it is ceaselessly a figure both complete and changing , finished and open, globally peaceful in its achievements,” a figure like that of the plant. She
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goes on to critique the Hegelian sacrifice of nature to spirit: “Because it refuses any debt to nature, the return to nature can only be of the order of death.”42 Not content with a simple destruction of the concept of subjectivity, Irigaray considers the invocation of a feminine transcendental, a feminine universal, or a feminine subjectivity to be a central part of displacing the way in which women’s desire as well as interpersonal relationships among each other have been historically mediated through the masculine. However, although the feminine subject is not to be understood in terms of atomistic or self-preservational identity, she is equally not to be associated with a kind of indefinite fusion or chaotic origin. To posit the feminine subject as formless would be to leave the traditional equation of the feminine with matter, with undifferentiated origin, intact. As Irigaray writes in The Forgetting of Air: She, she-of-ever, older and newer than every history, stays within beginning’s awakening. Inborn infancy. A passage never completed between inside and outside, night and day, midnight and midday, permanent dawn, she joins these in the portal chink of her awakening. . . . She is never closed, never open. With neither the defined contours of a completed development nor the gaping openness of a chaos from which everything can issue. Ever being born: the living female one. 43
The opposition of atomistic individual versus undifferentiated exterior itself must be subverted. This is where the individuation characteristic of plant metamorphosis (never completely inside, nor completely outside) becomes important for Irigaray. Irigaray’s claim is that the possibility of a different relationship to the transcendental can only emerge if the feminine is granted its own specificity in its relation to language. As Irigaray writes in the preface to the Japanese edition of Elemental Passions, “The paradigms of masculine transcendency, which is sometimes considered neutral or bisexual, must be modified in order to establish a feminine transcendency.”44 Such a specificity, like the organism of the plant in contrast to that of the animal, would “reject all closure or circularity in discourse—any constitution of arche or of telos.”45 The articulation of a feminine subject, likewise, must render any attempt to co-opt it into predetermined structures of “neutral” subjectivity problematic. In Elemental Passions, Irigaray asks a question of a presumably masculine interlocutor: [D]o you want the flower to open only once? The unveiling of the opening would then belong to you. The beauty or truth of the opening would be your discovery. Proposed and exposed in one definitive blossoming. The nightly closing of the flower, its flooding back into itself
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would not take place. Either it would not yet know the sun and would be in the oblivion of sleep, or you would already have unveiled it and it would never return to the shadows. Its becoming would be arrested when you revealed it by day. Growth suspended in ecstasy, the ideal flowering for you. 46
Here Irigaray seems to be discussing reading and interpretation as much as fixation in an essentialized identity. “Woman,” as part of the historical metaphorical register that includes, as we have seen, both “plant” and “nature” in its range, marks that moment that cannot be decided, which always destabilizes in advance the possibility of fixing its ground. Real flowers open and shut, unfold and then withdraw, have a temporal existence. To appropriate this unveiling would be to freeze blossoming into an eternal present, an ideal flowering that reflects the solidity of metaphorical appropriation. The “return to the shadows” is as necessary a facet of the metaphor of growth, metamorphosis, and blossoming as is expansion and disclosure. Here again Irigaray makes a plea for an understanding of nature that does not ultimately refer back to an atomistic subject or self that controls, subdues, and ultimately kills or fixates its natural movement. The flowering must not, in other words, be assimilated into a dialectic that would make it constantly available. At the same time, as Whitford reminds us, for Irigaray, “If multiplicity is to be celebrated, it has to be after sexual difference and not . . . by simply bypassing it.”47 We tend to dismiss flowers as rhetorical flourishes, but Irigaray is doing more than decorating her text. A flower opens up more than once. Its “unveiling” is not a definitive, univocal one, but is periodic, episodic. In The Forgetting of Air, Irigaray writes: Indefinitely open and closed, she unfurls this strange world where outside and inside unite in a light embrace. Never set out, the contours wed each other in overflowing growth that never quits the medium that gives rise to it. That never abandons the body that gives it life. That does not set itself up with the haughty affirmation of a form that draws its vigor from that from which it parts. It rather abides in the delicate entwining of all dimensions: horizontal efflorescences. 48
The horizontal efflorescences combat the vertical, hermeneutical reading style that seeks to expose the root, a structure that mimics the erect posture of the tree or the animal, in particular the human animal. We have seen that vegetative imagery has been used to connote exactly the contrary of the kind of reading promoted here, through metaphors of grounding and rootedness. This is why Deleuze and Guattari are so careful to distinguish between different kinds of “plant” readings. Thus,
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at the same time that Irigaray uses positive images of efflorescence to connote what she in other places calls a “sensible transcendental,” a kind of Kantian universal in the sense of reflective judgment that arises out of and cannot be separated from the sensuous particular, she also uses the language of “blooming” to indicate a certain masculine usurpation of the feminine ground for the sake of its own fecundity. In The For getting of Air, she uses the French verb s’épanouir to indicate this tumescent, appropriative blooming, and efflorescence to refer to a feminine blossoming that overcomes the ontological status assigned to it by the history of metaphysics. She asks: “Do the installations put into place by man to position himself as man cloak the fact that he makes his own nature bloom only at the price of squaring up and masking nature?” 49 And further: “Must letting-be be understood as letting man’s thinking be unfolded/deployed, or as letting nature bloom?” 50 This secondary blooming is a source that conceals the ground from which it arose, the “whole” (gendered feminine).51 The secondary source comes about only by the masculine appropriation of the feminine into what Irigaray calls a creation of physis out of techne,52 which she associates with Heidegger’s work. The expansion of the concept of physis as bring-forth, to render the distinction between physis and techne problematic, is akin to the expansion of masculine subjectivity to make room for the feminine in a process of assimilation. What Irigaray here calls a “forgetting of air” is a forgetfulness of the silent ground out of which all conceptualization arises, the unconscious ground of nature for which Heidegger himself searched fruitlessly, that is, the feminine as it has been figured in the history of metaphysics. “Saving” this ground from oblivion involves not a total rejection of the rhetoric that has structured it, but rather a subversion of that rhetoric’s privileged metaphorics in a way that will reveal the strength of the concealed feminine within. Efflorescence privileges the gesture of an opening at the very source of philosophizing, one that by virtue of its very open-endedness forecloses the possibility of a stable grounding. By using metaphors of plant growth Irigaray emphasizes the indefiniteness of individuation and the possibility of multiple, simultaneous origins. Efflorescence opens up roots and routes, advocating movement over stasis, temporalizing over eternity or timeless origins. In identifying the purposive with the human mind’s interaction with nature, Kant gave the history of philosophy an invaluable means of complicating the simple binary distinction between universal and particular, between conditioning rule and conditioned or determined situation, between necessity and freedom. Irigaray follows the third Critique by taking the product of reflective judgment, the figure of the plant conceived out of the observation of metamorphosis, grafting, and perennial fecun-
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dity, as the basis for a provisional universal that enunciates the importance of sexual difference for grounding any ethics. Irigaray reacts against the totalizing, colonizing power of hegemonic philosophical narratives, such as the Hegelian one, that make every outside an inside, every other the same, by proposing, as Hölderlin had, an alternative structure of alterity in metamorphosis and germination. Rather than negating difference, efflorescence is productive of difference. For Irigaray, efflorescence marks the break that inaugurates, but cannot be reduced to, language, symbolics, identity, and order. This break might be seen in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, which, as we have already noted, Irigarary reads through Hegel’s appropriation of it in the Phenomenology of Spirit . In his discussion of Antigone Hegel aligns the masculine with subjectivity, the polis, and freedom, and the feminine with the family, the private sphere, blind adherence to the divine law, and the repetition of the cyclical time of reproduction. As such, woman is described as acting “unconsciously,” in the sense of the genius, whose unconscious channeling of nature’s forces makes her unable to articulate the rules for the production of her art. Antigone is unconscious, according to Hegel, because she follows the law of the family, which is also the divine law and hence the law of nature insofar as it pertains to human beings. Her lack of consciousness stems not from her refusal to question the authority of the law of the family, but from her incapacity to articulate her reasons in terms of a decision. Yet Antigone does not withdraw, unlike the “beautiful soul” criticized by Hegel, or the purely unconscious artist in the tradition of vegetable genius. Her proscribed intervention into the political marks the withdrawing ground of sexual difference. Irigaray critiques Hegel’s reading as manifesting Western metaphysics’ tendency to reduce the feminine to the unconscious, silent ground, or to a negating force. Antigone’s position is somewhat different, and Irigaray focuses on her as a woman who stands between the two laws. Irigaray views Antigone as neither a free citizen who refuses to submit to the law of the state nor an unconscious vessel for the divine law, but rather as the very moment of the possibility of transformation or displacement rather than dialectical subsumption of this binary opposition. In transgressing Creon’s edict Antigone expresses Kant’s reflective judgment, by constituting her purpose from a particular rather than subsuming a particular act under a law. She marks the fragile possibility of a third path between the absolute determinism of law and the unreflective conception of freedom presupposed by the discourse of rights. Irigaray thus complicates her reading of the place of the feminine configured as silent ground in the history of metaphysics by emphasizing efflorescence as both a non-originary or nondeterminate origin (an
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origin that withdraws from articulation), and as that which inaugurates subjectivity. As particular, the plant represents the claim that the subject is sexed and finite and thus the impossibility of conflating masculinity with neutrality or universality. As indefinitely individuated and often dually sexed, it resists any possibility of recuperation in a single mode. As such, the metonym works productively to multiply readings and significations. Its signature precludes the temptation to closure, resists an end that will never come. Books do come to an end eventually, however. What this study has sought to do is both to investigate a facet of nineteenth-century Natur philosophie and its antecedents that has been too little studied except as a literary trope, and to suggest that the figure of vegetable genius transformed into the “vegetative soul” might provide a fruitful alternative to the recently much-denigrated figure of the modern subject. It is interesting to me that the critique of the configuration of the subject was already in place as early as the nineteenth century, and that even though we might want to insist that German Idealism remains a metaphysical system based on the primacy of the subject, we must also concede that the form of that subjectivity has little in common with the atomistic subject found in Descartes and Hobbes, among others. It is appropriate to conclude with a suggestion toward another beginning, another opening, since that is what a plantlike reading does. Contemporary Continental philosophy, with its figures of dissemination, rhizomatic growth, and efflorescence, clearly has discerned the possibilities in the language of vegetative growth.
NOTES
Introduction 1. In The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke , ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1989), 48–53. 2. Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Lan guage, Gender, and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992), 116. 3. Ibid., 93f. 4. Ibid., 96–97. 5. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). 6. In “White Mythology,” Jacques Derrida discusses this description of the relationship between metaphor and metaphysical language with reference to Anatole France’s The Gardens of Epicurus (210–18). In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 209–71. 7. In Plato I (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus), trans. H. N. Fowler, ed. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, The Loeb Classical Library, 1914), 264C. Hereafter cited by section number in parentheses within the text. 8. Of course, one must introduce the caveat here that the animal body valued by Plato is admired for its compactness and self-sufficiency, its “members” and its “tools,” not for its materiality and its sensuality. 9. Marcel Detienne, “The Seed of Adonis,” in The Gardens of Adonis, trans. Janet Lloyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 102. 10. Ibid., 107. 11. It should be noted that in this statement and what follows I am referring to the perceived qualities of plants (and, for that matter, animals) from the point of a nonspecialist, those observable characteristics of plants that lend themselves to being incorporated into metaphors of vegetative growth. I am not suggesting that a botanist could not find counterexamples to every description of plants I include here.
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12. See Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 37. 13. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 14. For more on this debate, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), especially chapter VII, “The Psychology of Literary Invention: Mechanical and Organic Theories.” Chapter 3 will address Hölderlin’s figuration of nature. 15. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 20. 16. Martha Nussbaum, “Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 262. 17. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: The Modern Library, 1921), 110.
Chapter 1. Kant: The English Garden 1. The Mirror and the Lamp , 184–225. 2. Ibid., 201–13. 3. Ibid., 198–204. 4. “Einwirkung der Neuern Philosophie,” GA 16, 875/“The Influence of Modern Philosophy,” SS, 29. 5. Jacques Derrida, “The Sans of the Pure Cut,” in The Truth in Painting , trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 85. 6. All references to the first, longer, introduction that Kant wrote for the third Critique, an introduction that is not included in many standard contemporary German editions of the Critique of Judgment , will be indicated by a prime after the page number. This introduction can be found in Volume 20 of the Akademie edition of Kant’s works. 7. See KU 197’f. 8. Immanuel Kant, ( Ak I), 356/ Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, trans. Edmund Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academy Press, 1981), 188–89. 9. Ibid. 10. Edward Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” in The Com plete Works, Poetry and Prose, ed. James Nichols (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968), 552. 11. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Ak. V)/ Critique of Judgment , trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987),§50. 12. The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
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13. Ibid., 69–70. 14. (X:165). English translation by Mary J. Gregor, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 42. 15. Pluhar’s rendering of the title as “How the Principle of Universal Mechanism and the Teleological Principle can be Reconciled in the Technic of Nature” is quite misleading. There is no question of a struggle between conflicting forces that will then become reconciled with each other. Rather, as I have attempted to show above, the drive towards unification, an actual merging (Vereinigung) of the two principles, is at stake. 16. The question here is of the legitimacy of the assumption of final causes, not the deduction of the necessity of causality in general. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant is concerned with deducing causation from pure a priori principles. In the third Critique, Kant is not discussing the limits of causality in general, but rather the assumption that everything in nature was created for a specific purpose, usually for the sake of some human activity. 17. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant first makes the distinction between conceptus ratiocinati (rightly inferred concepts) and conceptus ratiocinantes (pseudo-rational concepts) (KrV A 311 = B 368); hence, the distinction is a negative one. Later, Kant allows that an ens rationis ratiocinatae is posited “only problematically . . . in order that we may view all connection of the things of the world of sense as if they had their ground in such a being [a divine being]” (KrV A 681 = B709). In the Critique of Judgment Kant uses the “being of reasoning” in the latter, positive sense, with the emphasis on the as if . 18. I have retained the translation of dichten by “fiction,” as rendered by Pluhar. On the second sense of dichten as “thickening” or “thick-ing,” see Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 253–54. 19. Embodied Reason, 258. 20. In Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe, Band 1: Das dichterische Werk Tagebücher Briefe (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978), 204–5. See the epigraph to the next chapter for a similar description from Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. 21. Abbé du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, trans. Thomas Nugent (London, 1748), II, 32. 22. “Of Gardens” (1625), in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620–1820, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), 55. 23. From The Spectator, No. 414, 25 June 1712. Reprinted in The Genius of the Place, 141. 24. Schiller, On the Sublime, 203–4. 25. Ibid., 90. 26. See, for example, John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, Introduction to The Genius of the Place, 39. This volume gathers theoretical writings on gardening of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and shows the influence of Burke’s concepts of the beautiful and sublime, in particular, on English landscape gardening. The authors argue that the English garden was both a result and expression of a new relationship between man and nature, becoming a sym-
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bol for a harmony between inward and outward, mind and nature, very much in the same spirit that animated Kant’s Critique of Judgment . See also Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941) for an excellent description of the eighteenth century in England, particularly the first chapter entitled “The Turn of the Century.”
Chapter 2. Goethe: The Metamorphosis of Plants 1. MP, §113. 2. Emile Benveniste, “The Notion of ‘Rhythm’ in its Linguistic Expression,” Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 281–88. Cf. the accounts of Thrasybulos Georgiades and Heidegger discussed in David Farrell Krell, Lunar Voices, chapter 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 57f. Heidegger praises Georgiades for translating rhythmos as “coinage,” “imprint,” or as chains and fetters such as those that bind Prometheus to his rock. Rhythm thus understood “suggests measure and order rather than the uninterrupted and unpunctuated flux of the Heraclitean panta rhei” (62). 3. Benveniste, 285–86. 4. “Die Absicht eingeleitet,” GA 17 , 13–14/“The Purpose Set Forth,” from On Morphology, SS, 63. 5. Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two Essays, trans. James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945). Cassirer’s comments on the relationship between Goethe and Kant are treated in the second essay of this book, “Goethe and the Kantian Philosophy,” 61–98. 6. “Einwirkung der Neuern Philosophie,” GA 16, 875/“The Influence of Modern Philosophy,” SS, 29. 7. Ibid. 8. SS, 118–19. 9. GA 24, 459. 10. SS, 118. 11. See KU, §75. See also James L. Larson, Interpreting Nature: The Science of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 181–82. 12. I am indebted to James L. Larson’s discussion in “The Scale of Diversity,” Interpreting Nature, 85–91, for this account. 13. “Versuch einer allgemeinen Vergleichungslehre,” GA 17 , 226–27/ “Toward a General Comparative Theory,” SS, 53. 14. Kant, too, of course, argues against all naïve teleology. See for example KU, §82. 15. J. G. Herder, “Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele,” in Sämtliche Werke, VIII, 223, 226. Cited by Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp, 205. 16. Ibid. Herder, 175–76; Abrams, 204.
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17. Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 137–38. 18. “Glückliches Ereignis,” GA 16, 867–68/“Fortunate Encounter,” SS, 20–21. 19. “Das Unternehmen wird entschuldigt,” GA 17 , 11/“The Enterprise Justified,” in SS, 61. 20. “Bildungstrieb,” GA 17 , 176/“The Formative Impulse,” in SS, 36. 21. “Anschauende Urteilskraft,” GA 16, 878. 22. See Johannes Hoffmeister, Goethe und der deutsche Idealismus: Eine Einführung zu Hegels Realphilosophie (Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1932), 38–43. 23. See Elizabeth von Thadden, Erzählen als Naturverhältnis—“Die Wahlverwandschaften”: Zum Problem der Darstellbarkeit von Natur und Gesellschaft seit Goethes Plan eines “Roman über das Weltall” (Munich: Wil-
helm Fink Verlag, 1993), 54–55. 24. “Causes of Natural Phenomena,” in Plutarch’s Moralia, 11, trans. F. H. Sandbach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 149. 25. See Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud , 1–24. 26. Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Aberrations,” in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York: Harper Collins, 1962), 2–7. 27. “Die Absicht eingeleitet,” GA 17 , 15/“The Purpose Set Forth,” SS, 64. 28. Linnaeus, Sexes of Plants [1760], aphorism 146. Cited in Ritterbush, 110. 29. Ibid., aphorism 147. 30. For a detailed account of this argument, see “Kant and the Critique of Teleology,” in Larson, Interpreting Nature, 170–82. 31. “Die Absicht eingeleitet,” GA 17 , 14/“The Purpose Set Forth,” from “On Morphology,” SS, 64. 32. GA 19, 686/Letter to Carl Windischmann (1812), quoted by Douglas Miller in the introduction to SS, x–xi. 33. R. J. Hollingdale, Translator’s Introduction to J. W. von Goethe, Elective Affinities (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 13. 34. “Erläuterung zu dem aphoristischen Aufsatz ‘Die Natur,’” GA 16, 925/“A Commentary on the Aphoristic Essay ‘Nature,’” SS, 6. 35. See Johannes Hoffmeister, Goethe und der deutsche Idealismus, 28–29. 36. See Hoffmeister, sections on Schelling and Hegel. 37. GA 9, 39/ Elective Affinities, 50. 38. Faust (bilingual edition), trans. Peter Salm (New York: Bantam Books, 1962), 32–33. 39. Ibid. 40. Blumenbach was a German anatomist, physiologist, anthropologist, and zoologist who wrote Über den Bildungstrieb (On the Formative Impulse, 1781). See KU, 424. Goethe’s own essay “Bildungstrieb” (“The Formative Impulse,” from On Morphology, 1820) (GA 17 , 174–76/SS, 35–36) criticizes Blumenbach’s theory of epigenesis.
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41. “Bildungstrieb,” GA 17 , 174–76/“The Formative Impulse,” SS, 35–36. 42. See Rudolf Steiner, Einleitung in Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schrifen (excerpt) in Goethe, J. W. von, Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (Stuttgart: Verlag Freies Geistesleben, 1992), 14. 43. MP, 21. 44. GA 1, 523. 45. The double reading is probably intentional; thanks to David Krell for pointing out the alternate translation. 46. GA 24, 681. 47. Ibid., 680. 48. Italienische Reise III, GA 11, 413. 49. Maxims and Reflections, SS, 303. 50. See Rudolf Steiner, note to MP, 50. 51. “Über die Spiraltendenz der Vegetation,” GA 17 , 154/“The Spiral Tendency in Vegetation,” SS, 106. 52. For a discussion of the contrast between the time of nature and the time of art in the late eighteenth century, see Von Thadden, Erzählen als Naturverhältnis. 53. Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 139. From Abraham Trembley, Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de Polypes d’eau douce . . . , 1744. 54. Dichtung und Wahrheit , GA 10, 840. See also Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corngold, in Selected Writings Volume 1 (1913–1926), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 55. “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges Geistreiches Wort,” in GA 16, 879/“Significant Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase,” SS, 39. 56. Maxims and Reflections, SS, 307. 57. “Vorwort,” Zur Farbenlehre, GA 16, 11/Preface,” Theory of Color, SS, 159. See also “Erfahrung und Wissenschaft,” GA 16, 869–71. 58. I am referring, of course, to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the revolution that this work generated in the philosophy of science in the 1970s. 59. “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Subjekt und Objekt,” GA 16, 844–55/“The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject,” SS, 11–17. 60. Frederick Amrine, “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist,” in Goethe Yearbook, Volume V, ed. Thomas P. Saine (Columbia, SC: Goethe Society of America, 1990), 202. 61. Ibid., 202. 62. Ibid., 194. 63. J. W. von Goethe, “A General Observation, “ SS, 42. 64. “Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil” (1789), GA 13, 66. 65. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 307. 66. GA 24, 359. 67. GA 9, 29/ Elective Affinities, 40. 68. GA 9, 198/ Elective Affinities, 218.
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69. Benjamin, 304. 70. GA 10, 840. The English translation is based on that of John Oxenford in Goethe: The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Volume 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 422–23, with some modifications. 71. Benjamin, 316. 72. Ibid., 341.
Chapter 3. Hölderlin: Gleaning 1. The fragment is written in Hegel’s hand, but contains ideas more often associated with Schelling or Hölderlin; it has variously been attributed to all three writers. Translated as “The Oldest Program Towards a System in German Idealism” by David Farrell Krell, Owl of Minerva 17:1 (Fall 1985): 8–13. 2. Ibid., 12–13. 3. Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Hans Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel, 3 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978), 1: 237–413/ Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1964). Translation modified. 4. Françoise Dastur, Hölderlin: Tragédie et Modernité (Paris: Encre Marine, 1992), 94. 5. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Fragmente von Hyperion” (WB 1: 442). In Hölderlin’s later work, The Death of Empedocles, the question of transience comes to the fore. 6. This interpretation could be contested with reference to a letter from Hölderlin to his friend Neuffer in September 1792, where Hölderlin expresses some of the vegetable associations we have discussed above in the following line: “You will laugh that the idea came to me, here in my plant-life, of composing a hymn to audacity. Indeed, a psychological riddle!” (WB 2: 807). 7. In Hyperion Hölderlin uses Vernunft (Kant’s “Reason”) and Verstand (Kant’s “Understanding”) interchangeably. 8. Friedrich Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, trans. Julias A. Elias (New York: Felix Ungar Publishing Co., 1966), 91. 9. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Letter to His Brother (April 13, 1795), Essays and Letters on Theory, 128–29. 10. My account of Fichte’s philosophy here is indebted to Jacques Taminiaux’s article “The Young Hölderlin,” in Poetics, Speculation, and Judgment , trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 93–110. 11. See, for example, the Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre, where Fichte engages in a lengthy polemic against other philosophers of his day for not recognizing that finitude and restriction are attributes of the reflecting self, and not the result of the imposition of something external. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), 58f.
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12. Ibid., 102. Taminiaux also quotes a passage from Jules Vuillemin, a preeminent twentieth-century commentator on Fichte: “Moral action in Fichte is the fire that devours the moments of time and individuals. Being is in the ashes remaining after the struggle. The ashes testify that there was a struggle, but it belongs to the dead to bury the dead. Fire, which is pure act and ungraspable [element], only asserts itself in the absolute nothingness of every determined being. Loving nature and finitude does not devolve on us.” Jules Vuillemin, “Fichte,” in Les philosophes célèbres, ed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Mazenod, 1956). 13. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Friedrich Hölderlin,” in Poetry and Experience, Volume 5 of Selected Works, ed. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 340. 14. See Dieter Henrich, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), 9–16. 15. “Das Werden im Vergehen,” WB 2: 643. The title was given to this essay by a publisher, not by Hölderlin himself. 16. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Das Thalia-Fragment,” WB 1: 439–40. 17. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xi. 18. Ibid., 7. 19. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Fragment von Hyperion,” WB 1: 439–60. 20. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 117. 21. Aristotle, On the Soul , trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 89.
Chapter 4. Figures of Plant Vulnerability: Empedocles and the Tragic Christ 1. In addition to other sources cited, see also Dieter Henrich, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971); Johannes Hoffmeister, Hölderlin und Hegel (Tübingen: Mohr, 1931); Ernst Cassirer, “Hölderlin und der deutsche Idealismus” in Idee und Gestalt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971). 2. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Friedrich Hölderlin,” in Poetry and Experience, Volume 5 of Selected Works, ed. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 360f and 367f. 3. Christoph Jamme, “Ein Ungelehrtes Buch”: Die philosophische Gemeinschaft zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt 1797–1800,” Hegel Studien 23 (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1983). See also Christoph Jamme, “Hegel and Hölderlin,” Clio 15:4 (Summer 1986): 359–77.
4. A reminder that all citations from these fragments are taken from Herman Nohl, Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (Frankfurt a. M.: Minerva, 1966); trans. T. M. Knox in Hegel, Early Theological Writings, ed. T.M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948). The Nohl edition not
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only groups together fragments under a title not chosen by Hegel, giving the impression that they are a planned whole rather than a collection of unfinished pieces, but also does not distinguish between the first and second versions of the writings. The fragments in their original form are collected along with a booklength commentary by Werner Hamacher in Pleroma—zu Genesis und Struktur einer dialektischen Hermeneutik bei Hegel (Frankfurt a. M.: Verlag Ullstein, 1978), together with previously unpublished fragments from the Frankfurt period. For ease of reference, we will cite from Nohl’s edition, hereafter TJS with pages first from the German, then the English translation. 5. Otto Pöggeler, Hegels Jugendschriften und die Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes (Habilitation, Heidelberg, 1966). Referred to by Jamme in “Hegel and Hölderlin,” 363. 6. TJS, 379/305. 7. See Jamme, “Ein Ungelehrtes Buch,” 275. 8. Hamacher, Pleroma, 364–65. 9. Beißner and Schmidt date the essay as written the earliest in August or September 1799, thus probably after the composition of the second version, and just before beginning the third version. 10. “Letter to his Brother,” 4 July 1798, WB 2: 877–78. 11. “Letter to Neuffer,” 12 November 1798, WB 2: 880. 12. In The Problem of Christ in the Work of Friedrich Hölderlin (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1991). 13. Of course, the choice of tragic figure still divides Hegel and Hölderlin irrevocably, especially with reference to the question of art. It is not as though one could be substituted for the other. Yet both figures were healers and soothsayers whose followers eventually turned against them and precipitated their deaths. 14. Jamme contends that the third version of The Death of Empedocles reflects Hegel’s influence on Hölderlin. See “Ein Ungelehrtes Buch,” 354f. This is also the view of Pöggeler in Hegels Jugendschriften 146f. Ogden argues that all three Empedocles drafts are inherently Christian in orientation.
Chapter 5. Hegel: The Self-Sacrifice of the Innocent Plant The epigraph is cited in Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben (Berlin, 1844), 83. My translation. Rosenkranz assumes from the form that Hegel meant this strange piece to be a poem, a set of distichs. 1. Gustav Mueller, Hegel: The Man, His Vision and Work (New York: Pageant Press, 1968). 2. Upon the death of his father, Hegel received a small inheritance, enough to go to Jena and enlist the help of Schelling, who was already a professor there, to become a Privatdozent at the university. Hegel taught three lecture courses as a Privatdozent from 1803 to 1806, fragments of which have been preserved from Hegel’s own manuscripts and those of his students and put together as the Jenaer Systementwürfe . We will be examining the first and third sets of these notes, omitting the second since there are no remaining notes to indicate that Hegel lec-
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tured on organic nature. After Hegel moved to Jena in 1801 and began lecturing at the university, he lived and worked closely with Schelling; it is generally assumed that Hegel’s turn to the philosophy of nature—an area of philosophy that had not concerned him, at least thematically, prior to 1801—was a result primarily of his association with Schelling. From his Jena period onward Hegel orients both his attention and his critique toward the Schellingian philosophy of nature. From the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) to the mature “Philosophy of Nature” in the Encyclopedia, Hegel is manifestly extricating himself from what he considers to be the lack of rigor of Schelling’s views. 3. Petry translates “Abfall,” euphemistically and evasively, as nature’s “falling short of itself.” For further commentary, see Johannes Hoffmeister, “Hegels Naturphilosophie,” in Goethe und der deutsche Idealismus: Eine Einführung zu Hegels Realphilosophie (Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1932), 79. 4. See Nicolai Hartmann, Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), 485. 5. F. W. J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 133. 6. W 3: 22/PS, 9. 7. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 122. 8. Ibid. 9. Of course, it is important to remember that the System is an early work, written while Schelling was still strongly under the influence of Fichte. Nevertheless, the System elucidates a methodology that Hegel was to perfect in the Phenomenology of Spirit , the path from the individual consciousness to the objective social order, so it seems not unfair to contrast Schelling’s views at this point with those of Hegel between the Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia. In Schelling’s own words, what he sought to perform in the System was the clarification “of that which is utterly independent of our freedom, the presentation of an objective world which indeed restricts our freedom, through a process in which the self sees itself develop through a necessary but not consciously observed act of self-positing.” See the “Introduction” to the System of Transcendental Idealism by Michael Vater, Ibid., xi–xv. 10. See Hoffmeister, Goethe und der Deutsche Idealismus, 62. 11. Ibid., 64. 12. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right , trans. T. M. Knox (Chicago and London: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1952), 134. Addition to §166. 13. Hegel, cited in Hoffmeister, Goethe und der Deutsche Idealismus, 72. 14. See Vittorio Hösle, “Pflanze und Tier,” in Hegel und die Naturwissenschaften, ed. Michael John Petry (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1987), 381. 15. The editors note that the meaning of the phrase “der Begriff, der Natur” is somewhat ambiguous. The fact that the article of “Natur” is in the genitive case seems to indicate “the concept of nature,” but the comma between the two terms could indicate a meaning such as “is the concept, is nature.” The student notes from which this was taken were corrected from die to der, so although the editors chose the former meaning, what Hegel actually said is unclear.
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16. Thanks to David Farrell Krell and Niklaus Largier for their help with this translation. 17. This passage bears a striking similarity to, and therefore was probably heavily influenced by, Jacob Boehme’s account of the relationship between seed, plant, and earth in “On the Divine Intuition.” For example, Boehme writes in chapter 3 of this work, “So that when I see a herb standing, I may say with truth: This is an image of the Earth-spirit, in which the upper powers rejoice, and regard it as their child; for the Earth-spirit is but one being with the upper, outward powers.” Jacob Boehme, “On the Divine Intuition,” in Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings, trans. John Rolleston Earle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 198. 18. For a discussion of the importance of the symbols of bread and wine in Hegel’s philosophy, see John Sallis, “Bread and Wine,” Philosophy Today 41: 1, 4 (Spring 1997): 219–28. See also the Phenomenology of Spirit (W 3: 527/PS, 438). 19. “The moving impulse is, however, the many-named light-being [Lichtwesen] of the sunrise and its tumultuous life, which, as soon as it is released from its abstract being, first enters into the objective existence of the fruit, then, surrendering itself to self-consciousness, attains genuine actuality in it—now roams about as a band of frenzied women, the unrestrained revelry of nature in its self-conscious form” (W 3, 527/PS 437–38). Translation modified. 20. Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 9–28. 21. Cf. Plato’s Timaeus, 73A. Plato writes, “The gods set the ‘abdomen,’ as it is called, to serve as a receptacle for the holding of the superfluous meat and drink; and round about therein they coiled the structure of the entrails, to prevent the food from moving through quickly and thereby compelling the body to require more food quickly, and causing insatiate appetite, whereby the whole kind by reason of its gluttony would be rendered devoid of philosophy and of culture, and disobedient to the most divine part we possess.” Plato, Timaeus, Critias Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, trans. The Rev. R. G. Bury, Litt.D. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), 191. 22. See Hartmann, 489. 23. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavy and Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 239. In Glas, Derrida creates columns that oppose the arborescent logic of Hegel to the cryptogammic structure of Genet’s literature. The cryptogam sheds its spores throughout the text without ever appearing, on the surface, as a supporting structure of the text. Rather, the cryptogam signifies a pervasive growth and a decay that Hegel cannot prevent from setting in, a growth that will ultimately bring down the columns to their tombs. 24. In this paragraph I follow Jacques D’Hondt, “Le Concept de la Vie, chez Hegel,” in Hegels Philosophie der Natur: Beziehungen zwischen empirischer und spekulativer Naturerkenntnis,” ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and M. J. Petry (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986), 138–50. 25. See Derrida, Glas, 25. 26. In Glas, Derrida writes: “Heating signifies life in general, organic life and spiritual life, the consuming destruction of life. Natural life destroys itself in
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order to relieve itself in(to) the spiritual life. Heating permits assimilation, digestion, nutrition, interiorization, idealization—the relief. The Aufhebung is a fermentation (fervere, fermentum) in nature and in natural religion, a fervor when religion interiorizes or spiritualizes itself. In coming back to itself in the heat, in producing itself as self-repetition, spirit raises itself, relieves itself, and like gas or effluvium holds itself in sublime suspension above the natural fermentation” (235). Thus, the death that the fruit signals also signifies a preparation for selfsacrifice in the interest of the production of spirit. 27. Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” 18. 28. Ibid., 12. 29. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel , ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969), 140f. 30. Kojève refers very generally only to Chapter VII of the Phenomenology of Spirit , but the following passage at the end of the section “The Revealed Religion” seems to be the exact place that he is interpreting Hegel: “The death of the mediator as grasped by the self is the supersession of his objective existence or his particular being-for-self: this particular being-for-self has become a universal self-consciousness, just because of this, and the pure or non-actual spirit of mere thinking has become actual ” (W 3: 571/PS 476). 31. Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” 14. 32. Ibid., 16. 33. Ibid., 19. 34. Ibid. 35. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art , 4 Volumes, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975), Vol. I, 178–79. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., Vol III, 53. 38. Ibid., 59. 39. Ibid., 61. 40. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. from the second German edition by the Rev. E. B. Speirs, B.D., and J. Burdon Sanderson, in three volumes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: The Humanities Press, 1974), 279. 41. See Derrida, Glas, 233–34. 42. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , CC. VII B. b. The translation is that of the translators of Glas, 234, with modifications. 43. I assume Goethe means the Phenomenology of Spirit . 44. Cited in Hoffmeister, 82. 45. Cited in Hoffmeister, 43. 46. See Hoffmeister, 81–82. 47. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, 136.
Chapter 6. Nietzsche: The Ivy and the Vine 1. Letter to Paul Deussen, early May 1868, quoted in Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie (3 volumes), (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag), 1, 239.
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2. “We have recently been informed that, with his eighty-two years, Goethe outlived himself: yet I would gladly exchange a couple of Goethe’s ‘outlived’ years for whole cartloads of fresh modern lifetimes, so as to participate in such conversations as Goethe conducted with Eckermann and thus be preserved from all and any up-to-date instruction from the legionaries of the moment. In relation to such dead, how few of the living have a right to live at all!” (KSA 1, 310/UM1, 106). 3. “Ich bitte Gott, dass er mich quitt mache Gottes!” (I ask God to rid me of God), in Sermon #52, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A. and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 202. 4. Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult , trans. Robert B. Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 153–54. 5. The Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe editors give the date of the unfinished essay, “Die Teleologie seit Kant,” as no later than May 1868. Nietzsche’s own account of his student years in Leipzig, which goes through Easter 1868, does not mention the work, although he notes a study on Schopenhauer that comes immediately before the teleology essay in the volume. Thus, the notes on Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft and the unfinished essay were probably written sometime in the spring of 1868 (HKG 1:3, 371–93). 6. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux , 52f. 7. Goethe copied the passage, actually written by Georg Christoph Tobler, into a notebook found in GA 16, 921. In 1828 Goethe rediscovered the fragment and could not recall having written it, although he comments that it “reflect[s] accurately the ideas to which my understanding had then attained” (GA 16, 925). 8. GA 17 , 14/SS, 64. 9. Cf. KSA 13, 52/WP, 704. 10. See in particular notebook M III I (KSA 9, 441–575). 11. The reading list for the future that follows Nietzsche’s essay on teleology includes Schopenhauer’s essay “Über den Willen in der Natur,” Schelling’s Ideen zu Einer Philosophie der Natur, and Schelling’s System des Transcendental Idealismus. It is unclear whether Nietzsche ever read Schelling after this. 12. “Where Kant distorts, marginalizes, and obscures the thought of the unconscious, Schopenhauer emphasizes and develops it.” See Nick Land, “Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche and Modern Thought , ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 244. 13. Nietzsche’s earliest writing on Schopenhauer, an essay “Zu Schopenhauer” composed some time between October 1867 and April 1868, around the time of his very first reading of The World as Will and Representation, calls Schopenhauer’s work a “failed attempt,” declares that it is “riddled with contradictions,” and states that Schopenhauer “[t]akes predicates from the world of appearances to describe the will rather than leaving it indeterminate.” Schopenhauer “allows human (and thus not at all transcendental) characteristics to characterize the unity of the will wherever he feels like it” (HKG, 1:3, 352–61). Nietzsche continues, “the errors of great men are worthy of reverence because they
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are more fruitful than the truths of the little ones” (HKG 1:3, 353). As the third Untimely Meditation shows, Nietzsche continued to value Schopenhauer for having revealed his own vocation to him and as the model of an educator, not because he agreed entirely with the content of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For an account of Nietzsche’s early sustained critique of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, see John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 60ff. These notes, as Sallis argues, demonstrate conclusively that even at the time of the composition of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche was critical of Schopenhauer, and thus the work is not thoroughly determined by Schopenhauerian metaphysics. See also Michel Haar, Schopenhauer et la force du pessimisme (Monaco: Éditions de Rocher, 1988). It is unclear why Nietzsche repeats some of the errors he accuses Schopenhauer of, namely the attribution of human characteristics to the will, in The Birth of Tragedy, but perhaps it was designed to appeal to the ardent Schopenhauerian, Richard Wagner. 14. According to Hans Vaihinger, in Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986), the discourse on madness comes directly from Wagner’s theoretical writings. However, Nietzsche also quotes Goethe on nature in a notebook: “Gesetzt es wäre wahr—dann fehlt der Wahn: bei grossen Din gen, die nie ohn’ ein’gen Wahn gelingen” (KSA 7 , 666). 15. Martin Heidegger gives this etymology, and relates “without” to being “away.” The “madman” is the one who has “departed,” one who has chosen another path. This concords with Nietzsche’s understanding of the mad representation as one that articulates in language what cannot be captured in determinate form by indicating its own provisional nature. See Heidegger, “Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Verlag Günther Neske, 1959), 53. 16. Werner Hamacher, “‘Disgregation of the Will’: Nietzsche on the Individual and Individuality,” Reconstructing Individualism, ed. T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, and D. E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 114. 17. See Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), and “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” trans. Avital Ronnell, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985). 18. We recall that Kant used the same expression (Urmutter) in the Critique of Judgment to describe the limits of the teleological fantasy, which yet is the necessary form under which human understanding must approach nature, embracing it as an Urmutter who gives birth to all the various individual species (KU §80). 19. See Meister Eckhart’s Sermon #52 in Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, 202. 20. See Meister Eckhart, Sermon #2, 177ff. 21. This is also the spirit in which Robert Musil named his master work The Man Without Qualities. The passage from The Dawn, above, was an important one for Musil, who read Nietzsche as very close to medieval mysticism. For more on this topic, see Dietmar Goltschnigg, “Die Bedeutung der Formel ‘Mann Ohne Eigenschaften,’” Musil-Studien 4 (1973): 325–47.
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22. Hamacher, “‘Disgregation of the Will’: Nietzsche on the Individual and Individuality,” 128. Hamacher goes on: “Indeterminate it remains, despite the most various determinations it may experience, open to all futurity and withdrawn from the constatation of the propositional discourse” (128–29). 23. Dionysus: Myth and Cult , 91. 24. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World , 168. 25. Ibid., 169.
Conclusion. Dissemination, Rhizomes, Efflorescence 1. In “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1975), 265. 2. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 35ff. 3. Ibid., 37. 4. Ibid., 38. 5. Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” in The Ear of the Other: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name, 32. 6. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 53. 7. Ibid., 45. 8. Ibid., 52. 9. Ibid., 53. 10. My suspicion is that in Goethe’s writings on botany and his impatience with the botanical classification system of his time, we can see the glimmerings of the idea of the rhizome-book, the book that would not follow the slow-growing tree with clearly observable stages of growth and clearly distinguishable organs. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1987), 3–25. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Ibid. 13. “Introduction: Rhizome,” 6. 14. Ibid., 20. 15. Ibid., 21. 16. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken, 1948), 12. Cited in “Introduction: Rhizome,” 23. 17. Ibid., 15. 18. Ibid., 18. 19. Different flowers as well as their positions or various other manipulations were assigned meanings, so that a bouquet sent to a lover would have a signification, from invitation (“come tonight”) to question (“Is your husband
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home?”) to affirmation (“You are beautiful”). In France, in particular, many treatises “explaining” this practice were published in the nineteenth century. Goethe’s West-Oestlicher Divan includes poems on secret writing using flowers and fruit. See “The Secret Language of Flowers in France,” in Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 20. Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 14. 21. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1410b, 12. 22. See De Anima (415a 15–416b 30); Nichomachean Ethics (1102a 33); Politics (1254a 35–1254b 15) and (1260a 5–30); Generation of Animals (736a 25–737a 30) and (787a 26–30). 23. Luce Irigaray, “How to Conceive of a Girl,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 163. 24. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History , trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996), 38–39. 25. Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 95. 26. In the final chapter of Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Whitford uses the language of social contract, specifically the philosophy of Rousseau, to clarify an argument she is making about Irigaray’s philosophy. She argues that Irigaray’s philosophy can be conceptualized as saying that “women are still, symbolically, in the ‘state of nature’ and need to be brought into the social contract” (170), assimilating social order and symbolic order. Whitford’s aim is admittedly to bolster her cogent argument that Irigaray’s apparently biologistic remarks about the female body and about nature are in fact statements about the adequacy or inadequacy of the symbolic order and the place allotted therein to women. Indeed, conceptualizing the difficult synthesis of the terminology of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectic used by Irigaray in terms of social contract theory does render it considerably clearer. I nevertheless find it problematic to describe Irigaray as a contract theorist, since, as Whitford acknowledges, she draws much more often on Hegel, who is an anti-contract theorist, for good reasons, it seems to me, most prominent among them the problematic status of the subject and its relation to the social order in social contract theory. I am not sure it is even conceivable to reconcile Irigaray’s conception of the feminine subject with social contract theory. 27. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 113. 28. “How to Conceive of a Girl,” 163. 29. Ibid., 162–63. 30. Luce Irigaray, “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids,” in This Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 109–10. 31. Jacques Lacan, (crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977), 146–78. 32. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 128ff. 33. Lacan, Le Séminaire III: Les Psychoses (Paris; Seuil, 1981), 259. Cited in Gallop, 129.
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34. Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 23–24. 35. See, for example, The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 110–16; Sexes and Genealogies, 110–15; “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, 167; and “How to Conceive of a Girl,” 214–26. 36. Sexes and Genealogies, 112–13. 37. Elizabeth Grosz, “Irigaray and the Divine,” in Transitions in Continental Philosophy, ed. Arleen Dallery et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 118. 38. Patricia Huntington, Huntington, Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 127. 39. Ibid. 40. Philosophy in the Feminine, 76. 41. Ibid., 89. 42. Sexes and Genealogies, 112–13. 43. The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, 107–108. 44. Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York: Routledge, 1992), 4. 45. “Questions” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 153. 46. Elemental Passions, 31–32. 47. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, 84. 48. The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, 106. 49. Ibid., 18. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 44. 52. Ibid., 87.
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INDEX
Abraham, 107, 137 Abrams, M.H., 4, 20, 40 Achilochus, 47 Addison, Joseph, 43 Adonis, 124, 186 Aeschylus, 47 Agave, 175 “Agency of the Letter, The” (Lacan), 192 Alchemy, 124 Allegory: of natural processes, 5; of nature, 1 Anacreon, 47 Analogy, 32; of art and technic of nature, 36; as decorative device, 80; emphasis on similarity in, 56; of experience, 36; indirect presentation of ideas and, 32; inference and, 32; metaphysics/tree roots, 184; plant morphology/spiritual development, 70; purposiveness and, 38; use in natural science, 81 Anastomosis, 65; spiritual, 67, 75, 132 Anaxagoras, 56 Animal life: activity and, 2; as center of nature, 141; culture and, 33; differentiation in, 8; digestive process, 138; dominance of, 57; freedom of movement in, 142; humans as result of development
of, 51; individuation in, 8, 32, 128; masculinity and, 2; origin in womb, 51; as privileged figure of organization of speech, 11; procreation and, 7; purposiveness projected onto, 32; as realm of fire, 136; self-enclosed aspect of, 128; self-preservation of, 99; self-propelled qualities of, 7; self-sufficiency of, 201n8; specialization in, 8; spirituality of existence of, 128; suppression of desire by, 142; as symbol of subjectivity, 141; warmth generated by, 131 Anthropocentrism, 54, 156, 162 Anthropology (Kant), 28 Anthropomorphism, 150, 153, 156 Antigone, 173, 174, 193, 194, 199 Antigone (Sophocles), 199 Apollo, 18 Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister, The (Goethe), 63, 74
Architecture, 144–145 Aristotle, 4, 9, 28, 47, 96, 97, 124, 136, 187, 188, 189, 191 Art: analogue of, 37–38; children and, 89; of composition of ideas, 150; creation of, 81; determinative judgment and, 38; distance and, 105; double, 176; as fiction, 36; human, 38; human creation of,
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Art (continued) 29; imitators in, 167; inner life of, 48–49; judgment of, 41; knowledge of, 89; metaphysics and, 150; nature and, 13, 14, 21, 22, 27, 31, 36, 89, 111, 114, 176; physiology of, 15; principles of, 14; progression of, 144; proximity of devotion and, 105; refinement of, 33; science and, 21, 80; state and, 176; technic of nature and, 32, 40, 53; teleology and, 33; union with science, 80, 81; “wild,” 42 Atomism, 152; Enlightenment conception of, 189 Atonement, 132 Aufhebung , 102, 140, 142, 211 n26 Bacchus, 133 Bacon, Francis, 3, 43 Bataille, Georges, 134, 142, 143, 144 Beauty: death and, 176; distance and, 26; fictions of, 26; judgment of, 28, 29, 31, 34; love and, 111; in nature, 26, 144; in objects, 36; reason over, 86; structure of nature and, 31; unity and, 144; in views, 36 Begriff , 147 Being: absolute ego and, 90; annihilation of, 144; anthropomorphic explanation of, 163; concealed ground of, 16, 191; conscious, 144; emergence of, 155; groundless ground of, 182; imperfect, 88; moral, 52; mothers of, 173; natural, 54; noumenal, 52; organized, 38; rational, 38 Benjamin, Walter, 45, 74, 76 Benveniste, Emile, 47, 48, 62 Bildung , 48, 77 Birth of the Clinic, The (Foucault), 94 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 3, 154, 157, 164, 169, 170, 173, 175 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 63 Boehme, Jacob, 124, 135, 211 n17
Bondage, 101 Botany, 72 Boundaries: of embodiment, 188; existence of, 168; imposition of, 168; lack of, 169 Caesura, 14 Casey, Edward, 179 Cassandra, 173 Cassirer, Ernst, 48–49 Causality, 26 Cause: efficient, 28; final, 32–44, 46, 48–49, 51, 54, 56, 159; material, 28 Chaos: disintegration and, 96; fermentation and, 96 Christ: comparison to Empedocles, 100, 101; death of, 109; as God in human form, 124; morality and, 107; portrayal by Hegel, 15; reconciliation and, 108; resurrected, 15, 117, 125, 132; self-sacrifice of, 132; temptations of, 113; tragic, 15, 99–117, 125, 132 Christianity: history of, 105; notion of resurrection in, 134 Chromatics, 72 Cognition: achieving, 29–30; conscious, 170; determinate structures of, 22; directionality of, 29; empirical, 22; human, 5, 42; individuation and, 24; of natural objects, 35; of nature, 23, 34; ordinary, 171; particulars in, 29, 30; power of, 29; through making systems, 24; unity and, 30 Conceptus ratiocinantes, 36, 37, 203n17 Conceptus ratiocinati, 36, 37, 203n17 Conjectures on Original Composition
(Young), 20, 27 Consciousness: de-emphasis on, 104; defining, 89; development of, 152; ego and, 165; elevation of, 170; forms of, 170; foundation of, 90; “I” of, 166; individual, 210 n9;
Index
individuation and, 170; as infinite drive on limitations of existence, 90; as last development of the organic, 164; levels of, 170; limits of, 16; losing, 104; madness and, 171; natural, 89, 90; the not-I in, 89–90; plant, 86; primacy accorded to, 164; of purpose, 86; representation and, 170; technic of nature growth without, 42; transcendence of, 90 Conversations with Eckermann
(Goethe), 45, 64, 65, 152 Creativity, 146; human, 26; realm of, 51; relationship with nature, 5 Creon, 199 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 36, 38, 40, 41, 48–49, 50, 51, 75, 80, 81, 86, 157, 176, 203 n26 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 20 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 20, 22, 24, 30, 36, 157, 203 n16, 203n17 Culture: animal life and, 33; defining, 9; defining nature, 4; discipline and, 33; dissolution of, 157; emergence of, 5; feminine development of, 175; Greek, 157; nature and, 6, 11, 185; pre-patriarchal, 189; skill as requirement for, 33; teleology and, 33; transformations in, 11 Darwin, Charles, 63 Dastur, Françoise, 84 Das Werden im Vergehen (Hölderlin),
91 Dawn, The (Nietzsche), 177–178 De Anima (Aristotle), 96–97, 187
Death: beauty and, 176; of Christ, 15; as death, 134; deferral of, 114; excretion and, 167; formation of concepts and, 89; of the individual, 115; of plant life, 15; possibility of, 136; recognition of inevitability of, 134, 136; as self-
235
conscious, 144; self-sacrifice and, 143; sublimity and, 91; threat of, 3; as unreality, 134 Death of Empedocles, The
(Hölderlin), 14, 15, 100, 103, 105, 111, 112 Deconstruction, 189 De Interpretatione Naturae (Bacon), 3 Deleuze, Gilles, 16, 17, 183, 185, 186, 197 Demeter, 193 Democritus, 47, 48, 56 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 17, 21, 140, 145, 175, 182, 183, 184, 201 n6, 211n21, 211n26 Descartes, René, 37, 182, 184, 200 Desire, 91; containment of, 125; encapsulation of, 125; open-endedness of, 125; realms of organic nature and, 136; suppression of, 142 Destiny, 107 Detienne, Marcel, 7, 186 Deussen, Paul, 150 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume), 157 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe), 76
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 90, 100 Dionysos, 124, 125, 133, 154, 155, 169, 170, 173, 175, 179 Diremption, 67 Discontinuity: exclusion of, 53 Discourse: mutation in, 94; of the organism, 9; organization of, 6; philosophical, 101; quantitative, 153; of science, 153; of servility, 111 Disease: botanical model, 94; natural order of, 94; perception of, 94; susceptibility to, 141 “Disgregation of the Will” (Hamacher), 171 Dismemberment, 134 Dissemination, 183–184; nonmetaphorical, 187; philosophical, 188 du Bos, Abbé, 42
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The Vegetative Soul
Eckhart, Meister, 154, 177, 178 Ecstatic Subjects (Huntington), 195 Efflorescence, 183; as blossoming, 16; function of, 191; implication of metamorphosis, 188; indefinite individuation and, 188; positive images of, 198; productive notion of, 188; rhetorical configuration of, 188 Ego: absolute, 90; consciousness and, 165; critique of, 149; individuality of, 152; substantiality of, 152 Einheit , 30 Elective Affinities (Goethe), 59, 60, 61, 63, 74, 75 Elemental Passions (Irigaray), 188, 196 “Eleusis” (Hegel), 120 Empedocles, 99–117; comparison to Christ, 100, 101; doctrine of movement, 160 Encyclopedia (Hegel), 121, 122, 127, 129, 133, 209 n2 English gardens, 19–44, 179, 203 n26 Ens rationis ratiocinantis, 36, 37 Ens rationis ratiocinatae, 36 Epicurean way, 159 Epigenesis, 63 Equilibrium, 91 Eros, 90–91 Eucharist, 132, 137, 145 Euripides, 175 Eurydice, 1 Evolution, 3, 63 Existence: eccentric orbit in, 92; final purpose of, 54; of god, 37; highest purpose within, 35; ideals of, 92; knowledge of, 123; limitations of, 90; origin of, 161; as plant metamorphosis, 14; purpose of, 52 Experience: analogy of, 36; negative, 92; unity of, 36 “Experiment as Mediator Between Subject and Object, The” (Goethe), 72 Fate, 85, 108; defining, 109; punishment and, 108, 109; struggle against, 109
Faust (Goethe), 62, 146
Fear, 139 Feminine, the, 28; alignment with private sphere, 199; configured as spiritualizing force, 193; individuation and, 173; irrationality and, 188; linked to earth, 191; madness and, 174; neglect of sexuality of, 192; as passive recipient, 28, 175; placid development of, 126; plant life and, 2, 16, 17, 126, 133, 152; principle of nourishment, 146; reduction to silent, 16; role of ground in, 192–193; subjectivity and, 16, 189; symbols of, 191; transformation of individual and, 173 Feminist theory, 183, 188; vegetative soul and, 5 Fermentation, 96, 105, 139 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 89, 90, 208n12 Fiction, 36; about nature, 42; art as, 36; Kant on, 40; of the natural world, 39; of the organism, 38–39; teleology of nature as, 37 Fire: natural proximity to spirit of, 131; potential flammability of plants and, 131, 140–141 Fischer, Kuno, 157 Force: anthropomorphizing, 63; blind, 159; creative, 160; inorganic, 159; matter and, 63; preserving, 160 Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, The (Irigaray), 188,
193, 196, 197, 198 Form: as analogy to individual, 161; energy and, 151; natural, 22, 48, 144, 152; organic, 39; possibility of life under, 160; purposiveness of, 160; as resting point, 39; spiritual, 126; static, 161; system of stages in, 122 Formation: as basis of natural growth, 59; of organisms, 63 Forster, Georg, 52
Index
Foucault, Michel, 94, 182 Fragmentation: individual, 186; tendency toward, 39, 83 Freedom: human, 20; of imagination, 27; as indetermination, 178; of movement, 142; purposiveness and, 23; realm of, 128; spirit and, 128 Freud, Sigmund, 57 Friendship, 91 Galen, 57 Gallop, Jane, 192 Garden: artificially pruned, 24; crafted, 31; cultivated-to-look-wild, 19–44, 43; English, 19–44, 179, 203n26; French classical, 43; landscape, 43, 203n26; liminality of, 179; sublime, 21; technic of nature as, 42; transitionality of, 179; Versailles, 43 Gardens of Adonis, The (Detienne), 7, 186 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 161, 164, 177 Geist , 28, 82 Gemüt , 82, 84, 89 Genealogy, 181 Genetics, 3, 4 Genius: artistic, 166; as channel for forces of nature, 27; defining, 42; equated with vegetable nature, 53; Kant on, 20; origin of, 20; as plant-like, 145; poetic, 86; as relationship of creative mind to nature, 4–5; vegetable, 4, 10–11, 21, 22, 27 George, Stephan, 74 “German Theories of Vegetable Genius” (Abrams), 20 Gestalt , 39, 77. See also Form God: existence of, 37; inseminating spirit of, 28; law of, 107; love of, 103 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 45–77, 145, 146, 147, 183, 195; animalization of plant life by, 65;
237
on anthropocentric purposes, 54, 162; on art, 21; emphasis on process of growth, 69; on final causes, 54, 56; foundational discourse of, 14; on human superiority, 51; imposition of individuation and, 57; influenced by Kant, 45, 46; literary works, 59, 80; on magnetism, 60; on meaning of origin, 46; on metamorphosis, 8, 11, 14, 45–77; mistrust of use of analogy in science, 81; in natural science, 21; on noumenal nature of humans, 55; objective thinking and, 14; on observation, 72; organic-centered philosophy of, 150; on plant life, 11, 13; principles of art and, 14; process of formation in nature and, 14; on purposiveness of nature, 46; rhythm of vital power and, 14; scientific achievements of, 50; scientific method of, 73; separation of realms by, 56; theory of nature, 59; views of Linné, 56, 57, 58 “Goethe’s Attempt” (Nietzsche), 154, 158 Grafting, 60 Grosz, Elizabeth, 194 “Ground for Empedocles, The” (Hölderlin), 103, 114 Growth: basis of, 59; natural, 20, 59; plant life, 66, 67, 68, 69 Guattari, Félix, 16, 183, 185, 186, 197 Gundolf, Friedrich, 74 Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis Harmony, 34 Hazard, Paul, 53 “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice” (Bataille), 134 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6, 13, 17, 91, 119–147, 183, 193, 195, 209n2; alignment of masculine with subjectivity in, 199; atti-
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The Vegetative Soul
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (continued)
tude toward nature, 119–147; on Christianity, 15; criticism of Goethe, 123; on death, 134–135; debates with Hölderlin, 85; denunciation of Judaism, 110; description of love, 102; dialectical method of, 99, 120, 127; dissatisfaction with Christianity, 101; domination and, 108; on fate, 109; in individuation of plant life, 131; on innocence of plants, 74; interpretation of culture, 122; interpretations of teachings of Christ, 103; mature philosophy of nature, 103; on natural time and development, 123; obsession with intestines, 138; philosophy of nature, 15, 121, 127; on plant deficiency, 129, 140; on plant life, 11; on polarity, 61; portrayal of Christ, 15, 99, 100; relationship with Hölderlin, 100, 104, 105; repudiation of vegetative soul by, 99; on sensation, 139; on sexual function, 131–132; on subjectivity, 121, 142; understanding of organic life, 103 Heidegger, Martin, 95, 170, 181, 182, 183, 198, 204 n2 Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Novalis), 79–80, 81 Helen, 173 Helios, 18 Hemsterhuis, Franz, 90 Heraclitus, 48 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 20, 53, 56, 60, 90, 145 Hermes, 1 Herodotus, 47 Hippocrates, 67 History, natural: pursuance of, 48 Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 200 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 6, 13, 79–97, 145, 183; criticism of excessive analysis in science and philosophy,
87; debates with Hegel, 85; on discourse of the organism, 9–10; dissatisfaction with Christianity, 101; intellectual life, 84; interest in Empedocles, 99, 100; isolation of being outside nature and, 95–96; metamorphosis as figuration of life, 84; on poetry, 86; on relationship of soul to nature, 84; relationship with Hegel, 100, 104, 105; rhythm of life and, 14; on structure of plant life, 83–97; on systems of receptivity, 84; trope of fermentation and, 96; use of “aorgic,” 40, 92, 93, 114; use of “organic,” 40 “How to Conceive of a Girl” (Irigaray), 188 Human: ability to recognize inevitability of death, 134; action, 121; art, 38; capacity for greatness, 20; capacity for language, 143; creation of art, 29; creativity, 26; as creature of highest purposiveness, 51; as dark being, 75; as final cause of nature, 51; as final purpose of creation, 36; as final purpose of existence of the world, 54; as final purpose of organic, 164; freedom, 20; identity, 84; as irreplaceable being, 134; judgment, 31; knowledge, 32, 51, 82; as last stage of creation, 52; limits of consciousness and, 16; as “Lord of Nature,” 33; nature and, 16; noumenal status of, 51, 52, 55; place in world, 16; position within natural world, 81; projection of own desires, 75; reason, 21, 24, 28; relation of soul to natural world, 81; as result of development of other animals, 51; selfknowledge, 74–75; subjectivity, 147; as technician, 42; thought, 121; as users of nature, 39; vulnerability, 96 Hume, David, 157
Index
Huntington, Patricia, 195 Hyperion (Hölderlin), 14, 80, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 93, 105 Idealism, 13, 23; aorgic, 93; German, 28, 81, 82, 83, 90, 100, 117, 200; organic, 93 Imagination: apprehension of, 26; comprehension of sublime by, 42; evil and, 135; freedom of, 27; judgment of beauty and, 31; presentation of rational ideas and, 42; reason and, 42; sensory, 21; understanding and, 31; understanding observances, 31 Impotence, 7 Individuation, 2, 71; adaptation to environment, 169; “animal,” 15, 24, 32, 99, 128; arbitrariness of, 131; beyond consciousness, 84; borders of, 169, 170; cognition and, 24; consciousness and, 170; end of, 15; energy and, 151; evolution of, 170; the feminine and, 152; indefinite, 188; lunacy and, 169; madness and, 152; metaphor for, 4; metaphysical history of, 152; necessity of, 170; organism and, 151; organized, 46; otherness and, 169; overcoming bodily, 174; plant life and, 139; provisionality of, 155, 164, 170; self-movement and, 131; sensory, 170; subject to metamorphosis, 5; thinking about, 191; transcending, 174; understanding, 101; union and, 90; unity of animal life and, 161; unity and separation in, 101; vegetative model, 100–117; of vegetative soul, 5 Inhibition, 90, 91 Innocence, 89 Intellect: limitations of, 87 Intellectus ectypus, 56 Intersubjectivity, 4 Intuition: aesthetic, 30; of nature, 31; spontaneity of, 29
239
Inversion: in classification systems, 56, 57 Irigaray, Luce, 16, 17, 182, 183, 187, 195; feminine symbolization of nature, 4; images of efflorescence in, 183, 198; linking of women to vegetable world, 189–190; on nature, 190; on politics of assimilation, 195; politics of subjectivity of, 189 Irritability, 136 “Italian Journey” (Goethe), 66 Jakobson, Roman, 192 Jamme, Christoph, 100 Janz, Curt Paul, 150 Judaism, 107, 110 Judgment: aesthetic, 23, 24, 30, 41, 46, 80; analogical relationships and, 32; of art, 41; of beauty, 28, 29, 31, 34, 86; critique of, 41; derivation of, 24; determinative, 22, 23, 34, 38; human, 31; making, 32; mechanistic, 42; power of, 30; of purposiveness, 34; reflective, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 32, 34, 38, 41, 45, 47, 52, 58, 161, 199; roots in sensation, 24; self-reflective, 32; of the sublime, 31, 42; as sublimity, 29; technical, 25, 41; technic of nature and, 41; teleological, 23, 24, 30, 34, 36, 41, 42, 48–49, 158; transcendental utterance of, 30; unifying empirical laws and, 30 Kafka, Franz, 186 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 13, 17, 90, 158, 183; anthropocentrism of, 156; articulation of genius, 20; critique of natural sciences, 13; on culture, 33; defining organism by, 38; describing natural world, 22; designation of beauty by, 31; on determinate purposes, 54; discussion of fiction, 40; doctrine of morality of, 103; elimination of
240
The Vegetative Soul
Kant, Immanuel (continued) the natural by, 24; final causes and, 33–34, 46; foundational discourse of, 14; on genius, 20, 27; human freedom and, 20; impact on Nietzsche, 150; judgments of beauty by, 86; liking for symmetry, 19; natural beauty and, 21; on natural purposes, 34; on nature as system, 29; nature as thing-in-itself and, 156, 176; organic-centered philosophy of, 150; philosophy of nature, 15; on propositions of performance, 25; on purposiveness of natural forms, 21, 22; on rational decisions, 25; representation of nature by, 14; on symbolization, 40; technic of nature and, 34–44; on teleological judgment, 24; transcendental utterance of judgment and, 30; understanding of aesthetics, 36; understanding of organic, 40; use of organic metaphor by, 20 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 3 Klossowski, Pierre, 158 Knowledge: at any price, 163; of art, 89; determinate, 80, 81; dominance of animal life on, 57; drive to, 163; empirical, 30; human, 32, 51, 82; limits of, 32, 150; mechanical, 158; of nature, 13, 22, 30, 80, 81, 82, 83, 124; philosophical, 86; physiology of, 15; potential to conceal, 154, 160; progress and, 157; representation and, 169; saving, 156; scientific, 15; of self, 149; systems of, 24; will to, 153 Kofman, Sarah, 187 Kojève, Alexander, 142, 143, 211 n30 Kuhn, Thomas, 72 Lacan, Jacques, 192 Language: of abstract terms, 6, 143; of “blooming,” 198; capacity for, 143; conceptual, 191; of confrontation, 4; conventional scien-
tific, 3; deliberate planting of seeds and, 7; describing nature, 4; expression of aesthetic ideas and, 42; figurative, 6, 192; of flowers, 186; of force, 150–151; imagistic, 165; of isolation, 173; linear unity of, 185; literal meanings in, 6; of melting, 128; metaphorical use of, 4, 6; metaphysical, 201 n6; of nonsensory concepts, 5; primitive, 6; of science, 17; of self-enclosure, 173; of self-preservation, 4; thinking about, 191; universals as products of, 94; of vegetable genius, 22 Law: bondage and, 110; divine, 199; fulfillment of, 107; of God, 107; inclination and, 108; judgment, 30; natural, 35; of nature, 34, 35, 41; pleroma and, 108; of the state, 193; subjective, 41; superfluous, 108; of time and space, 115; transcendental, 58; of transience, 115; unifying, 30 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 11 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Hegel), 145
Leibniz, Carl von, 60, 182 Leucippus, 47 Life: end of, 15; rhythm of, 14; as series of metamorphoses, 14 “Life of Jesus, The” (Hegel), 103 Light, 80, 81, 83; and crystal, 83 Limitation, 90 Linnaeus. See Linné, Carl von Linné, Carl von, 54, 56, 57, 58, 70, 129, 185 Literature: mechanistic models, 10; organic models, 10 Logic, 128, 157; binary, 185; dialectical, 117, 123; of metaphor, 193; of sacrifice, 194; substitutive, 193 Logos spermatikos, 183–184 Longinus, 19 Love, 106–107; beauty and, 111; in The Death of Empedocles, 104; duty and, 103; entry to natural world and, 96; expression of, 103;
Index
of God, 103; incomplete in nature, 103; meaning of, 6; mortality and, 102; as restrictive vessel, 104; superfluous law and, 108 “Love” (Hegel), 102, 105 Lucifer, 134 Lucinde (Schlegel), 80 Madness, 152; conscious representation and, 170, 171; defining, 169; the Feminine and, 174; mania and, 170; nature of, 170; as self-revelation of instinct, 171; understanding, 169, 173 Magnetism, 60, 63, 66 Manes, 112, 113, 114 Masculine, the: as active principle, 28; correspondence to animal life, 126; science as, 17; self-conscious being-there, 146 Mastery, 101 Maxims and Reflections (Goethe), 66 Meaning: of “I,” 165; of love, 6 “Mechanics of Fluids” (Irigaray), 192 Memory, 139 Metamorphosis: alterity inscribed into identity in, 9; constant, 50, 85; contingent, 63, 64; as correct explanation of nature, 158–159; cosmic phenomena and, 66; development of natural world and, 55; as development of shape, 138; existence as, 14; expansion/contraction and, 60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 71, 84, 85, 86, 90, 91; as explanatory principle of nature, 50; extent of, 11; grounded in nature, 55; importance of leaf in, 70; inability to be contained, 55; individuation subject to, 5; of intellect, 56; intensification and, 60, 61; irregular, 63, 64; multiplicity of, 138; organisms and, 48–49; as phenomenological event, 48–49; plant life and, 8, 11, 45–77; polarity and, 60; process of, 66; productive juices and, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70; pro-
241
gressive, 63, 124, 125; quantitative change and, 123; regular, 63; retrogressive, 63; science and, 48–49, 72, 73; simultaneity and, 71; stages of, 68–69; superficial, 137, 138–139; terminology of, 154; undiscoverable cause and, 155; wonder of, 173 “Metamorphosis of Animals” (Goethe), 51 Metamorphosis of Plants, The
(Goethe), 8, 9, 13, 14, 21, 45–77, 91, 185 Metaphor, 192; animalistic, 189; constitutive, 32; “dead,” 5, 187; as decorative device, 80; defining, 5, 187; early, 5; feminine, 193; for individuation, 4; living, 187; male, 195; of metaphors, 11; metaphysical language and, 201 n6; for metonymy, 191; organic, 20; for organization, 7; for passivity, 16; redemptive, 16; rhythm of, 187; of subjectivity, 193; subversion of, 188; understanding, 80; for unity, 7; vegetative, 19 Metaphysics, 150; absolute truth and, 150; analogy to tree roots, 184; history of, 189; of presence, 182; reworking of, 181 Meteorology, 73 Metonymy, 192; metaphor for, 191; for woman, 191 Mimesis: transformative, 191 Mirror and the Lamp, The (Abrams), 20 Morality, 32; Christian, 103, 107; refinement of, 33 Mortality: creation of child and, 102; love and, 102; overcoming, 102 Moses, 107, 112 Mysticism, 124 “Naive and Sentimental Poetry” (Schiller), 43 Naming, 94, 95 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 40
242
The Vegetative Soul
Nature: allegory of, 1; alternative conceptions of, 17; anthropomorphisms of, 3; art and, 13, 14, 21, 22, 27, 31, 36, 89, 111, 114, 176; articulation of, 6; assumptions about, 58; beauty in, 26, 144; caprice and, 122; changing descriptions of, 9; classificatory system and, 22; cognition and, 23; condition of highest development in, 92; condition of highest simplicity in, 92; contingent, 122; continuum of, 56; cult of, 153; culture and, 4, 6, 11, 185; dominant form of understanding in, 11; final causes in, 13, 21, 32, 33–44, 46, 48–49, 51, 54, 56, 159, 203n16; form and, 48, 152; geological, 136; as “great Book,” 184; Hegel on, 15; hierarchical schematization of, 57, 123, 190; human framing of, 34; human projection onto, 10; human understanding of, 29; inability to explain completely, 51; inner, 82; inner life of, 48–49; irrational changes in, 122; Kant on, 15; knowledge of, 13, 22, 30, 80, 81, 82, 83, 124; laws of, 30, 34, 35, 41; magic in, 59; mechanical views of, 10, 35; mechanisms of, 25; metaphysics of, 124; metonyms for, 121; as morality, 32; nature of, 41, 135; necessity of, 120; noumenal, 41, 47, 51; as object of research, 83; observations of, 32; organic, 2, 10, 13, 39, 48–49, 121, 127; as organized being, 23, 40; origin of, 46; as other to itself, 143; poetry and, 39, 120; power of, 42; predictability in, 22; as prehistory of spirit, 15; progressive model, 123, 124, 125; pure experience of, 6; purposiveness and, 21, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 46, 47, 48–49, 52, 58, 158, 162; race and, 52; as reality, 85; reductionist
view of, 3; regularity in, 22; relationship with creativity, 5; representations of, 2; resistance to, 105; as resource of humanity, 90; separation from, 87–88, 88, 92, 94, 96; simplicity of, 46; speculation about, 85; spirit and, 122; as spirit estranged from itself, 133; studies of, 80, 81; subjective conceptualization of, 13; subjectivity and, 14; superiority of human mind over, 31; symbolized, 4, 11; as system, 26, 29; taming of, 5; technical structure of, 31; technic of, 13, 22, 25; teleology of, 32, 33, 37, 42, 149; time and, 139; transformation of, 10, 59; transition to spirit, 128; transparent, 79, 82; truthfulness of, 156, 157; unification of, 50; union with, 88 Naturphilosophie (Hegel), 15, 17 Neo-Platonism, 90 Newton, Isaac, 71 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 13, 149–179, 183; anthropomorphisms of nature and, 3, 153, 156; on Apollinian/Dionysian aesthetic impulse, 165, 169, 174; on art, 15; on consciousness, 152; critique of consciousness, 164; critique of ego, 149; critique of natural science by, 15; defining organism, 151, 152; on Epicurean way, 159; fascist/anti-fascist uses of work, 183; on form, 151; indictment of science, 149; on individuation, 149, 151, 172; madness and, 152, 169, 170; on metamorphosis, 153, 154–155; metaphor and, 187; on perspective of animal body, 3; on physiology of knowledge, 15; on plant life, 8; on purposiveness, 36, 160; references to Goethe, 152–153; on Schopenhauer, 150, 213n13; on subjectivity, 149 Noah, 107 Nohl, Hermann, 100
Index
Nominalism: reductive, 94, 95 Novalis, 39, 79–80, 81, 83, 99, 184 Nussbaum, Martha, 11 Obedience, 121 Objectivity, 163 Oedipus, 155 “Of Gardens” (Bacon), 43 “Oldest Program Towards a System in German Idealism, The” (1796), 80 On the History of Modern Philosophy (Schelling), 147
“On the Knowing and Feeling of the Human Soul” (Herder), 20, 53 On Morphology (Goethe), 161 “On the Organic and the Philosophy of Spirit” (Hegel), 127 “On a Pet Poodle” (Hegel), 119 “On the Sublime” (Longinus), 19 “On the Sublime” (Schiller), 43 “On Truth and Lies in an ExtraMoral Sense” (Nietzsche), 171 Organic: consciousness as last development of, 164; defining, 9; designating human activity, 9–10; form, 39; as human activity of selfaction, 92; humans as final purpose of, 164; material nature of, 62; as metaphor for science and art, 167–168; in natural world, 40; nature as, 13, 48–49, 121; unity, 27, 169, 172; wholeness and, 8 Organism: as abstraction, 158; atomism and, 152; as coincidence of excess, 151, 167; components of, 3–4; defining, 9, 38, 39; development of, 164; discourse of, 9; discovery of, 15; establishment as primary metaphor for wholeness, 70; formation of, 63; as formed life, 160; functions of, 70; in Greek science, 7; as individual, 161; individuation and, 151; interaction with environment, 73; invention of, 2; metamorphosis
243
and, 48–49; perpetual motion of, 48; purposiveness within, 23, 38, 152; reductionist view, 10; rhythm of life-forces and, 47; self-regulation and, 152, 167; shaping, 63; as stamped by technical, 40; structure of, 38, 39; technic of nature and, 37; temporality and, 70; undiscoverable cause for, 158–159; visible, 3 Organon, 9, 39 Oriental: linked to passive, 107; plant life and, 137 Orpheus, 1, 18 Osteology, 73 Other: asassimilation of mourning of the other, 193; relation to self and, 3; transcendent, 88 Otherness, 169; individuation and, 169 “Otobiographies” (Derrida), 183 Otto, Walter, 154, 179 Ovid, 163 Paracelsus, 67, 124 Passivity, 2, 16, 28, 107, 167, 175 Pentheus, 133, 175 Perception: sense, 30, 55; as thinking, 71; unity of experience and, 36 Persephone, 193 Phaedrus (Plato), 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 185 Phallocentrism, 192, 195 Phenomenology, 181, 189 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 28–29, 80, 109, 125, 134, 137, 143, 145, 194, 199, 209 n2, 210n9, 211n30 Philosophy: architectonic of, 192; beginning of, 99; change in, 2; configuration of organism and, 2; Continental, 183; creation of, 81; feminist, 188; hyperrational, 87; levels of, 24; mechanistic views of, 10; of nature, 121, 209 n2; need to account for emergence of beings in, 155; neutralization of suffering by, 105; principles of, 24; sensu-
244
The Vegetative Soul
Philosophy (continued) ousness in, 80, 81; speculative natural, 124; of spirit, 127, 128; tragic, 155, 176; trajectory of, 46 Philosophy of Nature (Goethe), 69, 121, 123, 133, 134, 135, 136, 142, 143, 194 Plant life: actualization of potentiality in, 130; as aggregation, 129; animalization of, 65; axial tendency of, 68; as beings of light, 135; botanical terminology and, 80; capacity to form new life, 84; changes in inner constitution, 84; classifications, 185; as collection of singularities, 137; comparisons to animal life, 56, 57; compression of stages of growth, 185; consciousness of, 86; Eucharistic symbols and, 132, 137, 145; evolution of parts in, 8; extent of metamorphosis in, 11; feminine nature of, 2, 16, 17, 126, 133; fragility of, 11; fragmentation in, 113; fruit as sign of downfall of, 142; grafting capacities, 60; growth of, 66, 67, 68, 69; images of parasitism in, 167; individuation and, 131, 139; as inferior to animal life, 56, 57; innocence of, 74, 122; intelligence and, 124; interiorization in, 69; lack of consciousness in, 105; lack of consciousness with other organic entities, 122; lack of differentiation in, 136; lack of individuation in, 8; lack of resistance in, 142; lack of warmth in, 131; metamorphosis and, 8, 11, 29; metaphor of growth for subjectivity, 5; as metaphor of metaphors, 11; moment of flourishing in, 95; “monstrosity” of, 11, 69, 147, 186; morphological adaptation in, 8, 186; movement beyond sexual opposition, 11; multiple models for, 182; open-ended future of, 61, 125; oriental links, 2; origin of,
48–49, 50, 63; pagan mysticism and, 129–130; passage to animal life, 142; passivity and, 2, 16, 28, 167, 175; perennial/annual, 69, 70, 71, 185; perpetuation of, 75; potential flammability of, 131, 140–141; provisionality of morphology in, 11; as realm of fire, 142; as realm of water, 136; receptivity of, 83–84; regular/eruptive emergences of, 47; relationship to external world, 138; relation to environment, 61, 65, 96, 140; role of earth in, 129; root systems, 185; seed as essential power, 129–130; self-sacrifice and, 119–147, 125, 132, 142, 145; sexual function, 9, 57–58, 67, 131–132; shape and, 138; spiral tendency of, 67–68; spiritual nature of, 64, 128, 137; subjectivity and, 123–124, 137, 142; temporality of development in, 47; tenacity of, 11; transformative metamorphoses of, 51; transformative possibility of, 17; truth and, 14; unfolding of, 10; unity of, 63, 145; vulnerability of, 15, 17, 99–117, 175; yearning for light by, 129 Plant religion, 135, 137 Plato, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 47, 56, 91, 185, 201n8, 211n21 Pleasure, 46; loss of, 107 Pleroma, 107, 108 Plutarch, 56 Poetry, 51; as beginning and end of philosophical knowledge, 86; as friend of nature, 39; metaphysics and, 150; nature, 120 Polarity, 60, 62, 66; intensification and, 60, 61; spiritual nature of, 60 Positivity, 101; danger of, 111; of tradition, 105 Power, 2; cognitive, 29; of concepts, 30; generative, 28, 63; of judgment, 30; of nature, 42; of the
Index
soul, 80, 81; spatio-temporal configuration, 177; of thinking, 81; transgressive, 174; will to, 152 “Primal Words, Orphic” (Goethe), 64 Principia Philosophiae (Picot), 182 Procreation: characteristics of, 7 Prolepsis, 70, 185 Prometheus, 155, 204 n2 Propositions: empirical, 25; moral precept, 25; a priori, 25, 27, 41 “Purpose Set Forth, The” (Goethe), 45 Purposiveness: absolute, 23; analogy and, 38; brought to nature by human understanding, 160; as case of possible, 158; of form, 160; Goethe on, 46; independent of nature, 31; intentional, 63; as intentional relationship of human to nature, 53; judgment of, 34; as lawfulness of the contingent, 35; multiple, 160; natural, 21, 22, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 46, 47, 48–49, 52, 58, 158, 162; of organisms, 23, 38; as “our idea,” 159; as part of human understanding of nature, 157; projected onto animal life, 32; reflective judgment and, 52, 161; relation to perspective, 161; self-enclosed, 32; self-regulating, 152; spontaneity and, 23; theories of, 54 Pythia, 173, 174 Race, 52 Rationality: as principle of sufficient reason, 160, 182; reductive notion of, 160–161 Reactivity, 136 Reality: creation of, 48; natural, 185; nature as, 85; objective, 37, 38; reflection of, 48; spiritual, 66, 185 Realm: of creativity, 51; of earth, 126, 136; of fire, 136, 142; of freedom, 128; of nature, 4, 85, 92; noumenal, 47, 165, 166; phenomenal, 165, 166; of water, 136
245
Reason: analogue of, 32; architectonic, 24; being of, 36; existence of, 157; hindered by sexual desire, 28; human, 21, 24, 28; imagination and, 42; limitations of, 87; over beauty, 86; sufficient, 160, 182; superiority of human mind and, 31; totalizing power of, 27; understanding in relation to, 13 Redemption, 113 Reductionism, 3, 10 Reflection, 131 Relationships: analogical, 32; art/artist, 20; atmosphere/organism, 64–65; beauty/death, 176; cause/effect, 26–27, 32; cognition/nature, 23; Goethe/Kant, 21; human/nature, 16, 23, 24, 83, 107; human/world, 106; ideal, 75; love/mortality, 102; nature/culture, 6; nature/human thinking, 42; philosophy/art/science/nature, 80; plant/space, 139; soul/nature, 84; space/time, 160; unity/final causes, 35; world/intellect, 83 Religion: history of, 145; interiorization of, 211n26; metaphysics and, 150; natural, 211 n26; plant, 135, 137, 145 Representation: consciousness and, 170; knowledge and, 169 Resistance, 90, 91, 142 Restraint, 91, 151, 164 Resurrection, 117 Rhetoric, 4, 6 “Rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari), 184 Rhizomes, 183, 185, 186 Rhythm: defining, 204 n2; as determination of form, 47; meaning of, 47; of metaphor, 187; of waves, 62 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 2 Rock-plant-animal progression, 126, 127, 128, 135, 136, 138, 140 Romanticism, 13, 23
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The Vegetative Soul
Sacrifice, 15, 144; logic of, 194 Schelling, F.W.J. von, 24, 56, 60, 61, 80, 91, 123, 124, 134, 145, 146, 147, 209n2 Schiller, Friedrich, 43, 54, 82, 89 Schlegel, Friedrich, 80 Scholasticism, medieval, 188 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19, 21, 24, 31, 150, 165, 166, 167, 169 Science: aesthetic dimension of, 20, 42; art and, 21, 80; blind, 163; classificatory system and, 22; as continuation of process of excretion, 168; creation of, 81; critiques of, 192; empirical, 72, 83, 94; feminist critiques of, 17; language of, 17; as masculine, 17; mechanistic models, 10; metamorphosis and, 72; need to account for emergence of beings in, 155; neglect of fluidity in, 192; organic models, 10; purposiveness in nature and, 21; quantitative discourse of, 153; revolution in method, 71; systematic aestheticization of, 31; union with art, 80, 81; utility for human needs and, 156 Science, biological, 3, 4 Science, botanical: classification in, 13; morphology in, 13 Science of Logic (Hegel), 127 Science, natural, 46; centrality of organism in, 150; final causes and, 54; as garrulous method of describing the human, 163; observation of living body in, 2; organism as focus of, 2; as unreflective practice of, 88; use of analogy in, 81 Scientific method, 3 Self: conception of, 3; relation to other and, 3 Self-consciousness, 74, 87, 96, 138, 161, 165 Self-destruction, 140 Self-knowledge, 80, 81, 82 Self-movement, 131 Self-organization, 26
Self-preservation, 18, 99, 139, 189 Self-sacrifice, 99, 101, 132, 142, 143 Self-sufficiency, 152, 201 n8 Self-transformation, 155 Sensitivity, 136 Separation: from mother, 88; from nature, 87–88; from the source, 88 Sexes and Genealogies (Irigaray), 191 Sexual function, 136; in humans, 9; inversion theory in, 57; of plant life, 9, 67; roles in, 28 Shell, Susan Meld, 28, 39 Silesius, Angelus, 181, 182 Simultaneity, 71 Slavishness, 109, 110, 111 Socrates, 6, 7, 155 Sophocles, 199 Soul: comparison to light, 81; elements of, 97; humans as crystals for, 82; nature and, 81; rational, 188; refraction and, 88; theory of, 187; as unity of inner life, 82 Space, 127; expansion of, 71; laws of, 115; plant relationship to, 139 Speculum of the Other Woman
(Irigaray), 194 Speech: animal body as privileged focus of organization, 11; metaphorical, 187; superiority to writing, 9 Spinoza, Baruch, 34 “Spiral Tendency in Vegetation, The” (Goethe), 1 Spirit: animal life as symbol of, 141; bodiless, 37; conscious, 171; degrees of, 121; Earth, 62; fire as proximity to, 131; as flowing, 128; historical, 29, 121; inseminating, 28; as interdependent relationship, 28; as master of nature, 122; nature as passing moment of, 147; philosophy of, 127, 128; prehistory of, 15; progression of, 121; in realm of freedom, 128; rejuvenation as, 143; self-conscious, 87; thinking, 37; transformation into, 125; transition from nature, 128; transition to, 143; unity of, 103
Index
“Spirit of Christianity and its Destiny, The” (Hegel), 100, 103, 107, 113, 137; doctrine of morality and, 103 Spontaneity: in cognitive powers, 23; of intuition, 29; ontological ground of nature and, 28; purposiveness and, 23 Steiner, Rudolf, 63 Subjectivity, 121, 128; alignment with masculine, 199; animal life as symbol of, 141; contingency and, 138; critiques of, 17; depiction of, 4; describing, 13; Enlightenment, 17, 23; feminine, 4, 16, 189; historical conceptions of, 149; human, 4, 10, 33, 92, 121, 147; interruption and, 138; masculine conception of, 193; metaphors of, 5, 193; modern critique of, 181; nature of, 33; occidentalization and, 140; of plant life, 11, 17, 123–124, 137, 142; politics of, 189; positive ideals and, 92; production of self in, 140; relation to nature, 14; resistance as condition of, 142; rethinking, 149; self-reflective, 136; theory of, 4; vegetative model, 100–117, 125 “Sublime Offering, The” (Nancy), 40 Suffering, 109 Suicide, 101, 114, 132; as genuine philosophical act, 99 Symposium (Plato), 91 System of Transcendental Idealism
(Schelling), 80 Technic of nature, 22, 25, 30, 81, 165; art and, 29, 32, 36, 40, 53; defining, 25; as false interpretation of nature, 32; form in, 45; as garden, 42; growth without consciousness, 42; harmony and, 34–35; judgment and, 41; nature as is/ought to be, 31; as paradox, 36; a priori concept of, 41; Urmother and, 51 Teleology: art and, 33; injustice and, 33; judgments of, 23; justification
247
for life and, 161; natural, 23, 32, 36, 37, 149 “Teleology Since Kant” (Nietzsche), 156–157 Temporality: existential, 14 Theory of Color (Goethe), 59, 72 Thinking: aesthetic judgments and, 80; about becoming, 191; beginning of, 39; calculative, 183; conceptual, 39, 55, 143; conceptualization of, 80; conscious, 164; dominance of animal life on, 57; equivalence to murder, 143; human, 81; about individuation, 191; about language, 191; objective, 73; as perception, 71; power of, 81; sense perception and, 55; speculative, 55; as vigilant receptivity, 71; wishful, 25 Time, 127; as continuum, 14; contraction of, 71; cyclical, 199; laws of, 115; natural, 123; nature and, 139; sublimity and, 91 Touch, 88 Tragic hero, 115, 116 Trakl, Georg, 170 Truth, absolute, 150 Unity: beauty and, 144; breakdown of, 82; of chemical substances, 63; of the differentiated, 171; as discursive concept, 73; disunity of, 171; eternal, 80; of experience, 36; of feeling, 126; final causes and, 35; ideal, 90; individuation and, 101; of inner life, 82; for intellect, 161; metaphor for, 7; in natural entities, 7; organic, 27, 169, 172; of plant life, 145; punctual, 102; pure, 90; reflection and, 46; science and art, 80; of spirit, 103; of the tree, 113 Universal Natural History (Kant), 27, 28 Universe: Cartesian picture of, 48–49; mechanistic model of, 31; observations of, 39; as viewed by humans, 39
