Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences

Abstract

This rich collection of papers by leading figures in the field concerns the “co-emergence of the concepts of race, gender and reproduction in the decades around 1800” (1). The editor, Susanne Lettow, notes that these have “rarely been studied in relation to each other” (1), and this motivated the collection, which was based upon conferences she sponsored in Vienna at the Institute for the Human Sciences as part of her research project “The Symbolic Power of Biology: Articulations of Biological Knowledge in Naturphilosophie around 1800.” The upshot, she notes, was to discern “resonances” but the concepts were “rarely parallelized or treated as analogies”—and above all, despite anticipations of the nineteenth-century dogma “that sex and race are biological givens indicating cultural and social status,” no “idea of biopolitics as a unified paradigm” had consolidated by 1800 (7, 8). I will return to this point later, but let me start with the observation that while race and gender are altogether familiar frame-concepts, “reproduction” is somewhat less so, and therefore deserves initial consideration.Indeed, Lettow argues that reproduction served as the linchpin of the co-emergence: “concepts of race and gender … became systematically intertwined via reflections on reproduction” (7). Even more, she accentuates the novelty of the term. While “generation” and “production” were long-established concepts in the discourse of the life sciences, the concept of “reproduction,” she argues, emerged only at the middle of the eighteenth century, in direct response to the startling experimental results presented by Trembley regarding polyps and their regenerative capacities (25–28). On this basis, a radical rethinking of generation arose, problematizing notions of preformation, of the animal soul, and of organic functions more generally. Indeed, Lettow notes, François Jacob, in his influential Logic of Life, pointed to Buffon's uptake of these matters as giving “a wider meaning” to the term reproduction (28). That is, Buffon used it to encompass distinctively organic processes like nutrition and growth, in addition to generation specifically. Moreover, he concentrated his theoretical interest upon the perpetuation of species, as contrasted with individual organismic life, thus adopting what Lettow calls “a genealogical perspective that surpasses the individual” (28).This impetus culminated, for Lettow, in a hardening of lines in German Naturphilosophie, which she sees as the “cultural invention of new myths of origin” that structured “the relation of the individual to the supra-individual” and “contributed to the emergence of a biopolitical gaze” (23–24, 37). My sense is that, despite her qualifications of the view, there is all too much teleology in Lettow's conception; it is the “biopolitical gaze” that is her ultimate concern, and what she uncovers in the eighteenth century, and a fortiori in German Naturphilosophie, is appraised primarily in terms of how it anticipates the ultimate consolidation of that ideological frame (and Foucault's formulation of it).Strikingly, this ideology-critical interest on Lettow's part assimilates and indeed accentuates Peter Hanns Reill's construction of the divide between the Enlightenment and Naturphilosophie. Lettow cites Reill throughout her essay, and she is not alone. Florence Vienne also structures her contribution around Reill's conceptualization of the relation between the Enlightenment and Naturphilosophie. As Reill well knows, I have never been convinced of the sharp split he has attempted to insert, in his great work Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, between the eighteenth-century vitalists he celebrates and the German Naturphilosophen he so cordially despises. His contribution to this collection sets out with a very candid acknowledgment of his motivation: he wishes to save the Enlightenment from the postmodernist critiques to which it has recently been subjected by deflecting that criticism to the Naturphilosophen (66). While I agree with him that the postmodernist conception of the Enlightenment is rank caricature, I do not find it historically plausible or conceptually sensible to offer them an alternative scapegoat. What is bad history vis-à-vis Enlightenment is, simply, equally bad history directed at Romantic Naturphilosophie. Indeed, Romantic Naturphilosophie has been disparaged for more than a century already by positivism, and it strikes me as telltale that postmodernism and positivism might collude here, as they have in so many other important ways that already arouse suspicion.To return to history, let us consider the three-step periodization that Lettow and Vienne offer in their respective accounts, in explicit conformity with Reill's reconstruction of the epoch. First, there is the moment around midcentury when the (French) vitalists first establish their new paradigm. The key figure, here, for all concerned, is Buffon. Then, there is a late-eighteenth-century German cluster, in which Blumenbach is the key figure, closely followed by Kant and distantly by Herder. Finally, there is the generation of the Naturphilosophen around Schelling and (Reill's favorite bête noire) Lorenz Oken. That is, indeed, the indisputable developmental trajectory, but—Reill et al. notwithstanding—it is not self-evident that this has to be read as degeneration.What Reill, Lettow, and Vienne detect is a hardening from the terminological flux of the eighteenth century into rigid dichotomies by 1800. These, moreover, show a distinctly political (they mean reactionary) obsession with hierarchy and order, perhaps occasioned by the trauma of the French Revolutionary epoch. Lettow seems to believe that the argument that the individual organism is expendable in the perpetuation of species is a rationalization for political hierarchy and subordination. Thus, when Schelling argues that for Nature as process (natura naturans) each concrete instantiation or product (natura naturata) is a failure to achieve the Absolute, this is taken as a warrant for the (political) sacrifice of the individual. But Buffon certainly asserted the same principle, and so did von Baer, as Jocelyn Holland cites in a very useful footnote. It would be very hard to take them to be propagating such a political inference! And, indeed, a brief consultation with most evolutionary biology faculties today might turn up the same “reactionary” judgment about species replication. Even more problematically, Lettow argues “a polarized, hierarchical understanding of gender developed only around 1800” (4). This “dualistic construction of gender … obsessed Romantic Naturphilosophen like Oken” (9). (This is Lettow's editorial characterization of Vienne's thesis.) Reill himself claims: “the Naturphilosophen located hybridity in the female and considered it a fault” (77). That was for him part and parcel of a wider flaw in Naturphilosophie: the “familiar naturphilosophisch principle that creation was spontaneous, universal, and made manifest in the appearance of polar duality” (74) betokened a “yearning for order, clarity, and hierarchy” (73). Sexual hierarchies, racial hierarchies, political hierarchies—all found aid and comfort in Naturphilosophie, and vice versa.I confess, I find this altogether too neat and cozy for history. I am far more taken with Holland's bracingly different characterization of Romantic “procreative discourse,” in which she finds “a rejection of stable hierarchies and categories” (83), exemplified in the conceptual friction between Zeugung and Fortpflanzung in the era. And I find Alison Stone's subtle consideration of sexual polarity in Schelling's Naturphilosophie far more attentive to the nuances and complexities of the issue. For one thing, I contest firmly the notion that polarization and hierarchy of gender “developed only” around 1800. It was in fact entrenched in the cultural history of the West (and not just the West) going back millennia. Subordination of women did not begin in 1800, and it is not even clear that it received distinctly new ideological formulations then. All of this gets imbricated, for several of the authors—including Reill, Lettow, and Stone—in the rather controversial “one-sex” versus the “two-sex” models of sexuality articulated by Thomas Laqueur. The notion that the “one-sex” model (which he clearly traces back all the way to Aristotle) was more derogatory of the female than the “two-sex” model becomes a central concern in the collection's effort to grasp how Schelling conceived sexual difference in his philosophy of nature. Presumably a “two-sex” model shows the female more respect. Stone is clear that Schelling was not clear about these two alternatives (which, of course, he did not have presented to him as such). As the question gets stated in her reconstruction, is it true in Schelling's conception that “the female pole is only the negative of the male pole, not a positive in its own right” (260)? Hegel, she finds, more clearly adopts such a stance.The question is how to construe Schelling's notion of sexual difference in terms of his whole philosophy of nature, and whether, once we have done so, there is warrant for political-cultural suspicions of accentuated denigration of women. While Reill makes a compelling case (and Vienne with him) about Oken (and Carus), and Stone makes a similar case against Hegel, I think the case of Schelling remains importantly ambiguous. Accordingly, I cannot accept the generalization in Reill's claim that Naturphilosophie altogether “located hybridity in the female and considered it a fault.” (77) In addition, I cannot comprehend what it means to “locate hybridity” in the female (how does one make dialectical sense of that?), and still less why it would be a fault in that philosophy, for I do not accept Reill's claim that rigid dualities fit the “yearning” of Naturphilosophie, as opposed to unity. Finally, I do not concede that the aspiration to unity itself is, in Lettow's loaded terms, “nostalgia for the return to (imaginary) origin(s).” (34, 37) Contemporary “biopolitics” is overshadowing historical reconstruction, here, and, as Alison Stone puts it, even contemporary feminist politics would do well not to imagine that sexual difference is automatically reactionary (277).To return to the beginning, Lettow herself judges that 1800 Germany did not see the consolidation of the “biopolitical gaze.” So, let's stop seeking to anticipate it there! I find far more interesting her suggestion that the conceptual ferment around 1800 was connected to “the process of the temporalization of nature and the emergence of the life sciences” (1). The discussions of these issues in the collection are among the most interesting. But, before concluding with a consideration of these, I wish to turn first to an equally rich harvest from the collection on the matter of race and its connection to developments in natural history. Renato Mazzolini gives the discussion a powerful start with a reconstruction of European research into skin color in the period after 1640. What he shows is, first and most importantly, that “color preceded the notion of race,” i.e., “prejudice against colored people … [was] antecedent to … race” (145). For a substantial period in the early modern era, it was culture, not physical features that preponderated in the European consideration. When we ask why the issue of skin color became important, Mazzolini judges that it “arose from Europeans’ evaluations of their own religion (Christianity) and military, commercial and civil domination” (151). The key empirical evidence (he terms it “positivist,” alas) for this is that skin-color research focused entirely on black skin. “Not a single work whose title referred to the skin color of the Chinese or Amerindians was published” (138). There were thirty-eight recorded dissections of Africans, and none of the others. The commercial-political relation between Europeans and Africans codified in the slave trade made this the obsessive focus, so that the “scientific classification” followed the cultural prejudice and social abuse.The important point Mazzolini draws is the effort in the eighteenth century to infer cultural capacities from skin color (or at least systematically correlate them). Thus, Mazzolini points to the development in Linnaeus's System of Nature from four geographical races associated with skin color alone, in 1735, to four races distinguished not merely by geographical location but by temperament and cultural dispositions in 1758. Mazzolini even suggests that to incorporate the “ancient quaternary scheme” of the temperaments, the essential duality of black/white got amplified arbitrarily with “red” and “yellow” to achieve a proper four-fold schema (144). But he concludes that in upholding this new schema, skin color began to appear insufficient, and there was a turn to cranial form (again dominated by the black/white dichotomy, as in Camper's “facial angle”) and a turn also to aesthetic characterizations. In his contribution, Staffan Müller-Wille also stresses the eighteenth-century concern to connect skin color to temperament and culture, and the way that aesthetics inserted itself into the discourse.Beauty figures crucially in Sara Figal's exploration of the origins of the “Caucasian” designation for Europeans. She links it to the fascination with Circassian slave women, and the eroticized exoticism of European fascination with the harems of the Middle East (Orientalism). The point Figal makes is that it seems bizarre to locate the origins of European “ethnic purity” and superiority in the Asian and indeed utterly hybrid and relatively barbaric Caucasus. She establishes the indispensability of the beauty of Circassian women in this fantasy, which accommodated to the Biblical legend that Noah's ark landed in the Caucasus. That enabled a second crucial component of this genesis story: the Caucasian race was not only the European race; it was the primordial origin of all the human races. Figal suggests this is a bizarre set of associations for Europeans and she asks when and why it arose. The canonical date is 1795, when Blumenbach used the designation “Caucasian” for the first time to characterize the Europeans (164; 177). He himself admitted that this was influenced by the beauty of the skull of a “Georgian woman” in his collection, even as he conceded that this aesthetic preference was a European bias (174). Figal points out that the term “Caucasian” had already been used by Blumenbach's colleague at the University of Göttingen, Christoph Meiners, in a text of 1786, in which Meiners distinguished only two races: the Caucasian and the Mongolian. (This is in significant tension with Mazzolini's emphasis on the black/white dichotomy.) For Meiners the dichotomy was between civilized and barbaric, beautiful and ugly (and perhaps, Germanic and Slavic). But Blumenbach was no fan of Meiners, and he certainly made no explicit reference to Meiners when he adopted the term “Caucasian” (178). Figal leaves us with some very important historical mysteries to resolve. But she makes it incontrovertible how sexuality and aesthetics figured centrally in the genesis of European “scientific” racism.What Müller-Wille and Robert Bernasconi add to this illuminating characterization of eighteenth-century race discourse carries us back directly to the developments in natural history that form such an important theme in the collection and with which I wish to conclude this consideration. Lettow makes very clear that race is linked powerfully to reproduction via the notion of heredity: “intergenerational transmissions of bodily traits resulting from reproduction” (4), as she summarizes the reconstruction developed by Müller-Wille and Rheinberger in their important study. In his contribution to the volume, Müller-Wille elaborates on that earlier discussion. He affirms Kant's central importance in the connection of race with hereditary reproduction, and he seeks the origins of Kant's ideas not only in Linnaean classifications but also in the Spanish colonial theory of castas: elaborate schemes of varying mixtures of races, with distinct temperamental and cultural concomitants.What Bernasconi points out is the utter centrality of this question of stable reproduction of bodily traits in the motivation of Kant's thinking about race, which he has brought so fruitfully under scrutiny. Bernasconi argues that it was just this concern that led to Kant's entire conception of reproduction in terms of Keime and Anlagen, namely to establish how it could have been possible for a single original human race to have generated permanent varieties in skin color that conformed to determinate laws in their subsequent interbreeding. Only the postulation of a set of fixed endowments at the origin of the human species, and only the similar postulation that the expression of any one such possible trait foreclosed in perpetuity the expression of all the others, could account for what Kant called race, as contrasted with contingent variety, within the single human species. Monogenism, in his view, could only be defended on such a basis. That underscores Bernasconi's particular thesis in his contribution, namely that Kant's theory of races was not in fact disputed or refuted by Blumenbach's critique of Keime in theories of generation. Blumenbach's critique had a different target (preformation as single-sex generation and encapsulation from creation—omne ex ovo, in Harvey's classic formulation). Blumenbach's project could be and was accommodated into a discourse of race and natural history that retained the concept of Keime along Kantian lines. As Bernasconi correctly maintains, Blumenbach never intended to dispute Kant's sense of Keime—he had ample opportunity to have done so, had he wished. Indeed, Blumenbach, like the entire German intellectual community, fully accepted Kant's theory of race by the later 1790s, so much so that he altered his own theory explicitly in conformity with Kantian notions. (244–45)These are very fruitful points to which, in a spirit of reciprocation, I will “offer a few friendly amendments” (256). First, Bernasconi suggests that Blumenbach's 1789 version of his famous Bildungstrieb study is “a completely different essay” from the original version of 1781. I have studies those texts very closely and I cannot agree. There are some incremental additions, but the bulk of the text—and more crucially, most of the argument—remains largely intact, as the editor of the modern reprint has also noted, notwithstanding Blumenbach's repeated claims to the contrary. Hence it is these exaggerated claims to difference that should draw our historical consideration. Second, Bernasconi suggests that Blumenbach “seems never to have embraced natural history in Kant's sense and especially not in his writings on human varieties.”(245). I concur that there is nothing of Kant's natural history in the writings on human varieties, but I suggest that Blumenbach was centrally concerned with the historicization of natural history especially in his writings of the early 1790, the Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte. Moreover and most importantly, I think it is important to question Kant's continued loyalty, by the 1790s, to the project of natural history along the lines he so forcefully propounded in 1775. While I agree with Bernasconi that Phillip Sloan goes too far in suggesting that Kant abandoned these notions, I do believe that Kant became far more ambivalent about them. In that sense, Blumenbach was in fact more loyal to them than Kant by the 1790s. But this is a dispute in which Bernasconi and I have indulged for almost as long as I have indulged in the earlier dispute with Reill over Naturphilosophie.There is a notable confidence shared by several of the authors in the collection concerning the successful transformation of Naturgeschichte in Germany by 1800 from traditional descriptive classification to a new developmental archaeology of nature. I am taken aback to see Joan Steigerwald maintain that “the critique of traditional natural history as a merely descriptive and artificial register … had become commonplace in the later eighteenth century” (115). To be sure, the alternative had been aggressively asserted; but Naturbeschreibung was far from displaced, even (or especially) in the case of Kant. This is most vivid in his exchange with Georg Forster. Natural history around 1800, as Nicholas Jardine articulated it, stood in a crucial state of transition, not entrenchment. Recent work by Paul Ziche and Olaf Breidbach on the specific developments at the key site of the University of Jena confirm this theoretical-conceptual openness. Indeed, this is the decisive point that I propose regarding the collection: we find not a fixation around 1800, but a very fruitful flux—out of which the biological sciences could swiftly gestate over the next decades. Holland makes this a crucial aspect of her study. Steigerwald, in the context of a disappointingly negative assessment of G. R. Treviranus, makes a similar point: “in the years around 1800 it was difficult to define a science of biology, to determine what was meant by life, organic phenomena, or living organisms, and to specify methods for their investigation” (106). As it turns out, Steigerwald uses this to suggest greater clarity and propriety in Kant's approach to the life sciences and greater indeterminacy in non-Kantian conceptual ventures—Naturphilosophie and Treviranus, whom she cuts off a bit too utterly from Schelling—than I find warranted. That, in a fashion, rounds back to Peter Hanns Reill's negative judgment of the epoch.While I have found occasion to problematize aspects of this collection, that only underscores its interpretive importance for the current research in the field. In sum, both specialists and neophytes regarding the developments in philosophy and physiology, race and gender around 1800 will find a substantial banquet of ideas and insights in this exemplary volume. It will be a springboard for many future elaborations.