Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination
308
Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253029706 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press (Ips) |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2017 |
| Series: | New Jewish Philosophy and Thought |
| Pages: | 308 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
Hans Driesch and the Revival of Naturphilosophie
We may begin this chapter with Oskar Goldberg's own brief piece, "The Development of Biology." Goldberg wrote this essay for the English-language publication Science and Culture when he was living in the United States. At the opening of the essay Goldberg writes, "Since the times of the ancient Greeks there are two trends in biology, the science of life: mechanism and vitalism." Goldberg claims that in his day "vitalism has conquered by the weight of the fact." He briefly characterizes the transition from Aristotle's vitalism to Cartesian mechanism and the return to vitalism with the work of the biologist Hans Driesch. Driesch's vitalism rests on his discovery, which I describe in more detail below, that after the first mitosis of the fertilized sea-urchin egg, the cells remain "pluripotent," that is, they can each become a full organism if separated properly from one another. This discovery led Driesch to postulate a non-mechanical principle present within the cells that he called the "entelechy." This is a term that Driesch takes from Aristotle, so it would seem that biology had come round to its origins. But Goldberg asks at the end of the essay, "Is it actually true that we came back again to Aristotle?" He answers: "No, it is not. We have gone much, much further back. We have gone back many thousands of years to the primeval thought of the Kabbalah. ... The experiments of Driesch are an excellent proof of the ancient Kabbalistic thought. It seems to be that the Kabbalistic sentence to which we refer is completely unknown. Therefore we want to quote it here: 'The whole is not the sum of its parts. There is not the sum alone and the part alone. Truly, that is so: the whole is contained in any of its parts' "
The principle that the whole is not the sum of its parts is, I argue in what follows, the essential axiom of Naturphilosophie. Hans Driesch, as Goldberg points out, led the way in making this holistic axiom the guiding principle of a new era in the science of biology. Driesch himself probably did not know of the connection between his holistic biology and "ancient Kabbalistic thought," but he was definitely aware that he was returning to biology's roots in early nineteenthcentury Naturphilosophie. The resurgence of Naturphilosophie that Driesch led in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth has received less attention from historians of science than it deserves. Without understanding this renewed interest in Naturphilosophie we cannot appreciate Oskar Goldberg's rather audacious attempt to fuse Kabbalah with Driesch's vitalist biology. In this chapter I thus trace the rebirth of Naturphilosophie in Germany.
A letter of Oskar Goldberg written in 1922 offers further evidence not only of Goldberg's own interest in Naturphilosophie but also of its growing importance at that time. Goldberg wrote the letter to the University of Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschan in 1922 asking him to be his faculty sponsor on a dissertation. Goldberg hypothesized that individuals with exceptional psychic and physiological powers ("holy men") were at the center of the formation of the ethnic groups making up the archaic world of humanity. Goldberg explains that he had gathered data on the exceptional physiological control shown by a certain yogic practitioner he had met in Geneva before the outbreak of the First World War and by other such religious adepts during a military-diplomatic trip to Indian Tibet at the beginning of the war. Von Luschan declined to be Goldberg's dissertation sponsor, suggesting that Goldberg's work, since it seemed more concerned with religious sectarianism than anthropology proper, might fit better within the Philosophy faculty, perhaps with Ernst Troeltsch as sponsor.
Goldberg's letter in response to von Luschan's rejection is quite interesting. In reply to von Luschan's point that environmental and climatic conditions are more important than religious factors in the formation of ethnicities, Goldberg writes that the question about the relative importance of environment and physiology in ethnicity formation is related to the "philosophical dispute between mechanism and vitalism." He then adds, "In the natural-philosophical circles with which my position is closely associated [In naturphilosophischen Kreisen, denen ich nahestehe], the present view is that when it comes to the processes that maintain life the mechanistic factor lies much more at its basis than does the vitalistic factor, but that when it comes to the origin of life the prospects of mechanistic explanation grow dimmer as we acquire deeper insights into the unities of cellular structure." Goldberg goes on to explain that he personally believes that the chasm separating the organic from the inorganic is not as great as the vitalists believe, because even molecular interactions cannot be explained entirely on mechanistic principles as "the effects of a part on the surrounding elements." He asks, "Why is it, for example, that the atomic complex 12, carbon, has the inherent capacity to form an interlocking chain in the special way it does?" Goldberg then claims, "This capacity cannot be produced by the atomic environment; it arises far more from the inwardness of the carbon atom itself [aus dem Innern des Kohlenstoffatoms selbst]." Goldberg concludes, "There is an autonomy not only in organic nature but also in inorganic nature, an inner specificity of lawfulness [eine innere Eigengesetzlichkeit], and it seems to me that the question concerning the cause of atomic properties is in principle no different than the question concerning the number 30, why it possesses the number theoretical properties that it does, properties that no prior nor later number possesses." Since even the properties of inorganic objects cannot be explained on mechanistic principles, all the more must "organisms possess inner form-building capacities, and this is the significance of the physiological factor" in the construction of ethnicities. Although Goldberg hopes to persuade von Luschan that his dissertation does in fact lie within the discipline of anthropology and that Troeltsch would not be an appropriate dissertation advisor, he concludes his response with a possible "solution" (Ausweg) that perhaps von Luschan would help him with: "In this connection [doing the dissertation in Philosophy], I would like to mention that a solution does present itself, but it still would require your good offices if it were to have a hope of success. The disciple of Professor Stumpf, the psychologist Professor Köhler, is currently lecturing on Naturphilosophie and is holding natural philosophical seminars. It is perhaps not entirely out of the question that he might consider my work even in its present form as a piece of natural philosophy." Carl Stumpf, a student of Franz Brentano, was not only Wolfgang Köhler's teacher; he was also the supervising director of Edmund Husserl's dissertation. In fact, Husserl dedicated his 1900 Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) to Carl Stumpf. The intersection of phenomenological psychology and vitalist Naturphilosophie in the early decades of the century had become by 1922, when Goldberg is writing to Luschan, one of the most productive areas of work in German philosophy and psychology, especially at the University of Berlin. Husserl himself began to be centrally concerned with the phenomenology of animal life.
Erich Unger, Goldberg's slightly younger friend and closest philosophical ally, was also committed to the renewal of Naturphilosophie. In an undated letter quoted in a biographical note appended to his posthumously published Das Lebendige und das Goettliche (The Living and the Divine), Unger explicitly states that he hopes to carry forward the goal of the Naturphilosophie of the early "romantic" thinkers like Schelling and Goethe, only in a more methodologically exacting and scientifically informed manner. Unger's book, although it was published posthumously in 1966, was written around 1940. It shows the unmistakable traces of Unger's deep engagement with Driesch and the phenomenological vitalism of the 1920s. Unger's description of the unity of life nicely captures one of the basic themes of what I call "neo-Naturphilosophie." It also shows clearly how far removed neo-Naturphilosophie was from Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie.
The living in the world is an actual unitary object throughout all biological formations. It is reproduced in the living wave of the generations. This unity encompasses all the species and forms of living things, and thus the living in the world is a total-object (Gesamtgegenstand). It is not a concept that is displayed in each species, the concept of life "in general," that constitutes this real unity in the sense of a total-object. It is not some postulated real Platonic universal or hypostasis, an idea or an immaterial image or immobile paradigm beyond space. The unity is the actual tidal wave of life that is formed from the numberless generations of species. It courses throughout the ages of the world. It is a total-object because it has arisen from something unitary in reality (etwas Einheitliches in der Wirklichkeit), the primary and proper referent of the term "the living." It may be that this something has released one species after another or it may be that it provides the starting point for all species out of a common, self-differentiating originary organism. It the task of logic to describe the image of this total-object in all its details and to distinguish it from mere concepts or universals in the platonic sense with which it is often confused.
What Unger here is describing as "the common, self-differentiating originary organism" is what the embryologist and philosopher Hans Driesch, as I explain in what follows, calls the "entelechy of entelechies." For Naturphilosophie and neo-Naturphilosophie alike, evolution, properly understood, is the unfolding of a single unitary life principle, a super-entelechy, throughout all the branches of life's phylogenetic tree. The philosopher F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854) is generally credited with providing the theoretical foundations of Naturphilosophie in a number of works written from 1798 to 1810. Alexander von Humboldt, perhaps the greatest German scientist of that era, endorsed Schelling's Naturphilosophie and provided a succinct formulation of its guiding principle: "to arrive at a higher point of view, from which all formations and forces reveal themselves as one, living, internally active whole of nature. Nature is not a dead aggregate. She is 'for the enthusiastic researcher,' as Schelling expressed it in his wonderful essay on the plastic arts, 'the holy, eternally creative, primary force of the world, who actively generates and produces all things out of her self.'"
The biologist Lorenz Oken (1779-1851) took Schelling's Naturphilosophie further than any other scientist of the day. Oken provided a detailed vision of what a philosophically grounded science of life would look like, with his extraordinary attempt, following the Aristotelian principle of taxonomy adumbrated in De anima, to organize all living forms in accordance with variations in the relative strengths and weaknesses of the organism's sensorium — from touch (the lowest sensory modality) through vision (the highest). Following Schelling's lead, Oken formulated his taxonomic system within the framework of an idealist metaphysics based on the polarity of a positive, centrifugal principle (identified with light in the natural world) and a negative, centripetal principle (gravity). This polarity arises from out of an undifferentiated condition (pure Identity) in which the polarity is only a latent potentiality. As the polarity emerges into actuality, there evolves a proliferation of ever more complexly balanced configurations of the positive and negative forces, from the mineral world (where crystalline shapes reflect the positive-negative balance) up through plants and animals. Not unlike the Leibnizian world of monads within monads, Oken's universe is a harmoniously balanced system in which each part refracts the whole at various levels of perfection.
Oken published a concise version of his system in his 1802 Foundations of the Philosophy of Nature. In 1810 he completed the first edition of his massive Handbook of the Philosophy of Nature, a collection of 3,652 numbered paragraphs beginning with the derivation of all numbers from zero (with plus one and minus one representing the latent polarity in zero) and concluding with a description of how "man expresses the ultimate goal or purpose of Nature's design." In the preface to the third edition of 1843, Oken summarizes his systematic classification of living things into five fundamental orders of advancing complexity, each representing one of the five senses:
The first principles of the present work I laid down in my small pamphlet entitled Grundriss der Naturphilosophie. ... I still abide by the position there taken, namely, that the Animal Classes are virtually nothing else than a representation of the sense-organs, and that they must be arranged in accordance with them. Thus, strictly speaking, there are only 5 Animal Classes: Dermatozoa [Haupthiere], or the Invertebrata; Glossozoa [Zungenthiere], or the Fishes, as being those animals in whom a true tongue makes for the first time its appearance; Rhinozoa [Nasenthiere], or the Reptiles, wherein the nose opens for the first time into the mouth and inhales air; Otozoa [Ohrenthiere], or the Birds, in which the ear for the first time opens externally; Ophthalmozoa [Augenthiere], or the Thricozoa [Haarthiere], in whom all the organs of sense are present and complete, the eyes being moveable and covered with two palpebrae or lids.
At the pinnacle of the fifth and highest order (Augenthiere) stands the human being. The human being is the microcosm of the entire system of living things, "the universal portion of nature." Falling short of human perfection, all other animals are "irregular men." Since Oken believed that the embryonic development of each organism went through the stages of all "lower" orders, the human not only is the microcosm in which one can view the universal system of all living things but also human ontogenesis recapitulates the unfolding of the system from Dermatazoa to Ophthalmazoa.
Throughout his decades-long career at the University of Jena, Lorenz Oken remained a towering figure within German biological science. Stephen Jay Gould has described him as "one of the best comparative anatomists and embryologists of his day; his embryology of the pig and the dog (1806) are classics." By the late nineteenth century, however, the case for orthodox Darwinism had triumphed over Oken's philosophical taxonomy based on the model of the human sensorium. The Darwinian Ernst Haeckel became the reigning scientific figure at the University of Jena (and, indeed, Germany as a whole). Oken's idealist Naturphilosophie and its sensorial taxonomy of living forms were dismissed as nothing more than fanciful speculation. They were dismissed, that is, until Hans Driesch returned to Oken's work and once again sought to provide an idealist foundation for the science of biology.
It is generally believed that Naturphilosophie met its demise in the middle of the nineteenth century with the rise of the positivist model of explanation in the physical and chemical sciences and with the emergence of Darwin's explanation of evolution on the basis of random phenotypical change and the survival of the fittest. But Naturphilosophie did not entirely succumb to these forces: it underwent a significant revival in the late nineteenth century that continued well into the early decades of the twentieth century. This revival included many of the most respected scientists of the period, Hans Driesch most notably. The philosopher Theodore Ziehen in 1922 wrote a monograph titled Grundlagen der Naturphilosophie (Foundations of the Philosophy of Nature) with the aim of explaining and supporting the "revitalization of the investigations of Naturphilosophie" [Widerbelebung der naturphilosophischen Untersuchungen]. The Nobel laureate in chemistry for 1909, Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932), founded the journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie in 1902. The journal continued for ten years, publishing articles written by many of the major scientists and philosophers of the period, including Ernst Mach, Friedrich Ratzel, Victor Goldschmidt, Max Planck, Hans Driesch, and Wilhelm Fliess.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. Hans Driesch and the Revival of Naturphilosophie2. Georg Cantor and the Mathematics of God3. Goldberg's Ontology and Unger's Politics and Metaphysics4. The Reality of the Hebrews and YHWH's Battle for the Earth5. Gershom Scholem, Oskar Goldberg, and the Meaning of Jewish HistoryConclusion: Ghosts and the Vitalist ImaginationAppendix I: Thomas Mann's Critique of The Reality of the HebrewsAppendix II: Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte and Oskar Goldberg's Kabbalah InterpretationBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
The only fully developed analysis of Oskar Goldberg in English. It is also the most philosophically, scientifically, and mathematically informed inquiry into his work. Bruce Rosenstock has done a great service to the scholarly world.
The only fully developed analysis of Oskar Goldberg in English. It is also the most philosophically, scientifically, and mathematically informed inquiry into his work. Bruce Rosenstock has done a great service to the scholarly world.