Abstract
We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.
Highlights
89 Page 2 of 39 once symbolized perfection
From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was restored
Following Stephen Jay Gould, we propose to treat the cycle as a set of concepts and metaphors, and a canonical icon which epitomizes a major tradition of visualization and conceptualization (Gould, 1997)
Summary
Cycles run through the life and environmental sciences and medicine in the early twenty-first century. Omnipresent today, cycles are among the oldest ways of framing human existence, and of thinking about life and death, health and disease, as well as daily and seasonal rhythms of regeneration. We consider such cyclic and circulatory metaphors as a long-term historical theme. The quasireligious faith in the “eternal” cycling of “immortal” matter hid the inability of technical solutions to deliver on promises that they would close the cycle (Schramm, 1995) He argued, cycles gain ideological power by implying restoration but denoting processes that seldom return to their starting point in any strict sense. Combining historical and systematic approaches, Toepfer proceeded by period and sub-discipline, and ventured a four-fold typology: material cycles, such as of
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