Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800 9781503623897

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SELF-GENERATION

EDITORS

Timothy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

SELF-GENERATION Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 18oo Helmut Miiller-Sievers

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

1997

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1997 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data are at the end of the book Stanford University Press publications are distributed exclusively by Stanford University Press within the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America; they are distributed exclusively by Cambridge University Press throughout the rest of the world.

To lone, next door

Acknowledgments

This study, based partly on my German book Epigenesis: Naturphilosophie im Sprachdenken Wilhelm von Humboldts (Schoeningh, 1993), was finished during my tenure at the National Humanities Center in 1994-95. The staff and my colleagues at this marvelous institution, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which so generously funded the year in North Carolina, deserve my deepest gratitude. Paul Anderson, with a grant from the Office of Research at Northwestern University, began translating the first versions of the English manuscript. My friends and colleagues Peter Fenves, Whitney Davis, Michal Ginsburg, and Geza von Molnar gave invaluable help and encouragement during all stages of this project. Helen Tartar, Janet Mowery, and Jan Spauschus Johnson of Stanford University Press accompanied the project with exemplary patience and expertise. Dave Jemilo and the staff at the Green Mill, as always, provided a congenial space for discussion. Rick Wells and Cindy Polemis eased the last stages of writing with their friendship and wondrous hospitality. H.M.-S.

Contents

Introduction: The Epigenetic Turn

I

I.

From Preformation to Epigenesis

26

2.

Self-Generation in Philosophy: Kant

48

3· Self-Generation ofPhilosophy: Fichte

65

4· Epigenetic Origin in Language: Herder and Humboldt

90

5· Marriage and Self-Generation: Goethe with Beaumarchais Notes

122

Bibliography

173 203

Index

217

SELF-GENERATION

Introduction: The Epigenetic Turn

Introducing the revised version of the Critique if Pure Reason to a less-than-receptive audience, Kant, in a now proverbial analogy, likened the procedure of his philosophy to that of Copernican astronomy: both propose a change in the position of the observer in order to explain apparently errant or contradictory phenomena. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolve round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success ifhe made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects. If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility. (CR B xvi-xvii) 1

Kant's analogy has proven to be as successful as it is deceptive. Its pathos was borrowed from the early stages of the Scientific Revolution when the pyres and prisons of the inquisition still threatened the free dissemination of scientific facts. His later conflicts with state authorities notwithstanding, Kant's position was never close to being imperiled, and the dissemination of his critical philosophy

2

Introduction

was threatened first by indifference and later by the zeal and hostility ofhis own admirers. More important, however, Copernican astronomy and transcendental philosophy move in opposite directions. The heliocentric hypothesis positions the observer at the periphery of the planetary system to allow for a simplified account of the periodicity of orbits. Its irrepressible, though not painless, success depended to a not small degree on the assurance that it would leave everything as it is. Kant's philosophy, on the contrary, moved the observing subject back to the center of its own epistemic universe in order to explain the periodic deadlock between positions in science and metaphysics. It left nothing as it was, or more precisely, it introduced the threat of nothingness into the relationship between observer and phenomenon. Even though Kant wanted to profile his philosophy as the philosophical equivalent to the Copernican turn in science, as its foundation even, its fundamental gesture is nonetheless undeniably ptolemaic-to say nothing of the coy appeal to give his system a try when the very nature of experience is at stake in Kantian philosophy. Kant's central concern in the Critique if Pure Reason was not simply to position the subject at the focal point of its categorical system and then rely on the force of evidence to hold the constellation in orbit: that attitude had led to the ambiguities that afflicted Copernican, or more recendy, Newtonian science. While over the course of the eighteenth century evidence for the accuracy ofNewton's system had become overwhelming, the nature of the relationship between its elements remained famously occult. Kant knew that in order to avoid this shortcoming, and thus to restore metaphysics to her rightful queenship, he had to link the categories to their center deductively rather than have them revolve around it in regular yet preformed orbits. The only way to achieve such a deduction without falling back on dogmatic positions was to conceive of this linkage as some form of generation. By 1787 the excitement over the conquests of astronomy had died down anyway, and the pathos sought in the analogy to the triumph of applied geometry sounded curiously hollow and anachronistic. The sciences commanding the most interest in the last

Introduction

3

decades of the eighteenth century were those concerned with the phenomena of life, and at the very heart of his philosophy, rather than in the dubious genre of preface, Kant indeed resorted to an analogy from the young life sciences in the hope of clarifying that most important, yet also most obscure, section of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. Mter reworking the argument substantially, Kant ends with a summarizing paragraph in which the logical structure of the deduction is cast in the terms of a crucial debate in contemporary physiology. There are two ways, Kant argues, to understand the origin of the categories: they can be thought to originate in experience and to grow gradually to the degree of importance that philosophy accords them; in this case, however, they are admittedly not a priori and thus fail to account for the structure of experience that transcendental philosophy needs to elucidate. There remains, therefore, only the second supposition-a system, as it were, of the epigenesis of pure reason-namely, that the categories contain, on the side of the understanding, the grounds of the possibility of all experience in general .... A middle course may be proposed between the two above mentioned, namely, that the categories are neither self-thought first principles a priori of our knowledge nor derived from experience, but subjective dispositions of thought, implanted in us from the first moment of our existence, and so ordered by our Creator that their employment is in complete harmony with the laws of nature in accordance with which experience proceeds-a kind of priformation-system of pure reason. Apart, however, from the objection that on such an hypothesis we can set no limit to the assumption of predetermined dispositions to future judgments, there is this decisive objection against the suggested middle course, that the necessity of the categories, which belongs to their very conception, would then have to be sacrificed. (CR B 167-68) The theory of epigenesis, formulated by Aristotle, had only recently been reintroduced by scientists to account for the specificity of living beings. It stated that organisms generate themselves successively under the guidance of a formative drive. The occurrence of epigenesis in the transcendental deduction, as well as in other, equally important contexts of Kant's philosophy, is only one

4

Introduction

initial indication of the paramount importance the notion would assume in the decades to come. 2 The dispute over Kant's legacy in philosophy and literature, after all, does not revolve around the possibility of a priori geometry or physics, but around the possibility of a philosophical comprehension of the phenomena of life. Fichte's Trieb, Schelling's philosophy of nature, to say nothing of Hegel's lebendiger Begriff, declare themselves to be so many attempts at breathing life into Kant's philosophy, and the romantic insistence on the autogony of the self in poetry and in the novel of development [Bildungsroman] also relies on the acceptance of epigenetic forms of origination. The genealogy and function of epigenesisthis is the thesis of the following study-provides an altogether unique means by which to understand the momentous and irrevocable changes in philosophy, language philosophy, and literature at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. And yet this is not a chapter in the history of (scientific) ideas: the present study seeks to avoid the Copernican assumptions made in disinterested and external surveys of conceptual fields. The reasons for this avoidance are not so much abstractly methodological as they are specific to the debate between epigenetists and preformationists. The concept of epigenesis has been, since its inception, polemic; it allows philosophical and literary discourses to account for their own origin without recourse to extraneous causes. Epigenesis is thus the condition of the possibility of any claim to absoluteness, be this a philosophical or literary absolute. The only form under which the absolute can be said to exist is the organism, since only organically can the interminable chain of causes and effects be bent back onto its own origin, and only as organic can a discourse claim to contain all the reasons for its own form and existence. This means that the discourses of epigenesis have a tendency to close themselves off against specific criticism and "objective" presentation. "Organic" indeed became the ultimate praise in philosophical and aesthetic judgment in the period of the epigenetic turn, a status the word has not lost since. On the other hand, preformationism, the theory "defeated" by

Introduction

s

epigenesis, assumed that all organisms were preformed at the creation of the world and that science (i.e., natural history) had to explain nothing more than the necessary causes for their coming into existence. This account, which in its most successful versionovism-maintained that all human beings were encapsulated, one generation within its predecessor, in Eve's ovaries, prided itself on relying on mechanical explanations only. In the wake of preformationism's defeat, "mechanical" has become the ultimate objection to philosophical and literary products. A critical history of epigenesis, therefore, has to disorganize, or mechanize, its discourses, to inspect the claims of epigenesis through the lenses of preformationism. More precisely, all claims to sufficient or even complete causality, with which epigenesis has superseded preformation, have to be reduced or impoverished to the state of necessary causality only. That is, all statements that claim to account for the reasons through which something comes into existence-like the epigenetic statement that father, mother, and their desire for one another contain all possible causes for their progeny-have to be analyzed as to the reasons without which they cannot succeed. Such an analysis can take different forms: that of a presentation of conflicting scientific theories, of a localization of scientific theories within the social conditions they serve, of an expansion of epigenetic figures into philosophical arguments, of close readings of epigenetic arguments, of comparative interpretations of literary texts. In the chapters that follow I try to show the fruitfulness of each of these approaches. This seemingly partisan revindication of the culture of mechanicism is all the more justified because the obliteration of preformation by epigenesis is a purely textual event. As the first chapter shows, there is no discovery, no experiment, no microscopic evidence that would demonstrate, beyond doubt and according to the parameters established by the scientific community, the superiority of epigenesis. Hypothetically proposed at first as the more economical way to account for the generation of living beings, epigenesis is soon taken, without any significant advance in reproductive physiology, as the irrefutable and sufficient foundation of organic life.

6

Introduction

But the lack of scientific evidence for the epigenetic explanation was not simply due to the primitive state of physiological research at the end of the eighteenth century. Unlike the Copernican and Newtonian hypotheses, which relied upon the promise of ultimate experimental verification-a promise Kant seems to hold out by prefacing his project as an experiment-no microscope or telescope will ever show epigenesis. And it was this noumenal status of the concept that ensured its foundational function. Kant and the early epigenetist researchers at the University of Gottingen knew well that epigenesis is a transcendental concept in precisely this "mechanical" sense: we assume it because all other assumptions come at too high a metaphysical cost. But the following generation of philosophers and scientists took epigenesis "organically'' as the generative power of reason as such. The reconstruction of this expansion of epigenesis in various fields of knowledge is the theme of the following pages. The imposition of epigenesis as a last source, or instance, might well be called an ideological operation, and the present study an exercise in the critique of ideology. Indeed, the uses to which the epigenetic argument is put in the codification and institutionalization of gender roles shows all the signs of an ideological "interpellation." But epigenesis is more: it is the form of a last instance, the sheer possibility of mundane origination, void of all substance-be it biological, linguistic, or even economic-which in the process of appearance could be distorted. Epigenesis generates ideologies by suggesting that their origin be natural. What contemporary Marxism takes to be the sufficient origin and function of ideologies, to ensure the reproduction of the relations of production, must therefore be stripped of its metaphorical economism and taken literally. 3 Epigenesis reorients the questions of reproduction, relationality, and productivity. In the process of this reorientation any reference to a natural state of things, necessary ingredient to any critique of ideology, is precluded. Epigenesis is the very discourse that brings the distinction between artificial and natural relations into play in the first place, so its critique as ideology would take on a purely tautological dimension. If methodological presuppositions have to be exhaustively ac-

Introduction

7

counted for-which is by no means a foregone conclusion in the event of factual historical insight (which the present study hopes to provide)-Nietzsche's "domination formation" (Herrschaftsgebilde) is a much more promising notion with which to capture the success of epigenesis. Scientific, moral, philosophical, aesthetic, and political arguments and developments all contribute to this formation, each of them objective and local enough, but in combination a selffeeding and overarching whole. The description of a domination formation shows, as it were, the X-ray image of the dead, artificial, and mechanical bone structure of arguments and practices claiming to be alive, natural, and organic-in Nietzsche's case Christianity and its subdiscourses, such as moral philosophy, classical philology, and Wagnerian music. In the present case the advantage of this view lies in the recognition that the proposed reduction of epigenetic to mechanical claims cannot be simply nostalgic, even though the conviction that eighteenth-century culture is superior to the Rauschkultur of the nineteenth century runs admittedly through the following pages. But this superiority can appear only in retrospect, for only then practices or theories of a past period-such as the preformationist intuition that marriage is possible only if it is arrangedare freed from the shackles of political domination (in this case aristocratic patriarchy) and can become genuine insight. The counterhistorical orientation of this study expresses itself not only in the attempt to preserve lost insight, but also in the formal resistance to the epigenetic pull in the movement from ... (preformation) to ... (epigenesis). Apart from the fact that the period under investigation does not know of rigid divisions between disciplines, the concurrent study of science, philosophy, philosophy of language, and literature should help to avoid the proclaimed teleologies of these discourses. This does not mean that-to take the two extremes-scientific treatises should be interpreted as literary texts, or literary texts as conveyors of scientific fact. With very few exceptions, both of these approaches have proven to be disappointing to the expectant members of the opposite scholarly community. Interdisciplinarity can itselfbe an epigenetic ruse. The following chapters respect the discursive limits between disciplines

8

Introduction

and present the rise of epigenesis within the contexts of science, philosophy, philosophy of language, and literature with only the most rudimentary references to external factors. Yet this obedience to the epigenetic pull is counterbalanced by the fact that each subsequent chapter encapsulates its predecessor in much the same way that in the preformationist model one generation contains the next: completely, but without organic relation. This is to say that in the last chapter all those aspects discussed in its antecedents should be present, without, however, appearing organically connected. The individual chapters, too, contain within themselves repeated reformulations of the epigenetic problematic on their respective levels of discussion. In these repetitions the concept of epigenesis itself undergoes a change. It is de-substantialized from a scientific "fact" (which it never was) to a literary form (in which form it is always unsuccessful). Another way of describing this change is to point out that the earlier chapters primarily use the noun form, epigenesis, and that in the course of its repetition it is repositioned as an adjective, epigenetic. Based on the research on the emergence of epigenesis presented in the first chapter, the characterization "epigenetic thought" or "epigenetic language" used in the last should be understood as abbreviations-miniatures-of complex developments. In the last chapter the individual sections contract increasingly until they, too, become monadic elements containing, or reflecting, all of the previous analyses. It might seem that with the progression from science to philosophy, to philosophy oflanguage, and finally to literature the presentation bows to the romantic-that is, epigenetic-hierarchy of discourses. But each of the analyses tries to show that the ideas of scientificity, autonomy, originality, and self-expression proposed with reliance on the epigenetic model either fail or carry unbearable consequences. The persistence of this failure, the broken promises of harmony between body and mind, between nature and freedom, between language and self, are thematic in what Goethe called his "best book," Elective Affinities (Die Wahlvenvandtschaften). The motivation to close this study with punctual interpretations of a romantic novel, then, comes not from the conviction that literature, as the

Introduction

9

most comprehensive dimension, contains or even sublates all other discourses, but that it represents the failure of reconciliation and containment in the most comprehensive way. This is not due to any superior insight on the part of the poet (even if the poet in question is a scientist and philosopher in his own right), but to the romantic project ofliterature, which is that failure. Remarks like these sound suspiciously like "theory," and, cryptic and paradoxical as they seem, they do not help to elicit much sympathy for contemporary literary theory, let alone further the understanding between the fields of literature and the history of science. This is not the place to elaborate on the need for literary theory, or rather for a philosophical understanding of literature, or to discuss the complex systematic and historical reasons for its tendency toward incomprehensibility. Whatever the theoretical presuppositions of the present reading of Beaumarchais and Goethe, they do have to be verified in the process and result of the interpretation; faced with the dilemma, in this format, to elaborate on general aspects of "theory" or to proceed with the readings, the choice was obvious. But one general observation has suggested itself in the course of this study: the relationship between literature and science cannot, in however refined a manner, be conceived as that of form and content. The various gestures of submission with which both historians of science and scholars ofliterature have tried, increasingly in recent decades, to vivify their atrophied relations in the name of a unified field ofhurnanities are, in fact, demeaning to both discourses. Literary texts do not contain scientific theorems as their subject matter, and science is not in need of the support of literary ornamentation. The mourning over their past and the hope for their future identity result from the ultimate romantic conviction, nourished by unavowed beliefs in an absolute of which both science and literature are tragically fallen fragments. Needless to say, these convictions represent the unavoidable end of epigenetic thought, an end that idealist thought has had to contemplate with particular intensity. Unless the analysis can show how science informs the literary text, unless it raises science from the unfathomable depth of the content

10

Introduction

to the surface of writing, unless the writing of science crosses over into the science of writing, the relationship between literature and science will always remain anecdotal at best. Reading and presenting this scientific information-the Latin translation of Einbildungrequires serious engagement with the history and theory of science and literature. The aversion to "theory" and the concomitant conversion to purely or predominantly historical investigations in contemporary literary studies not only underestimates the complexity even of "past" and "superseded" scientific discourses; it also disregards the stature of the very authors it tries to protect by ignoring the information in their texts. The present study achieves the crossbreeding of literature and science only imperfectly, and it may well have produced a monster rather than a successful hybrid. Independently from the success of the experiment, however, each of the following chapters presents either new material or known material in a new context, so that even those skeptical about the legitimacy of this hybridization should find some material to inform themselves. The first chapter presents the main points in the debate about biological origination as it unfolded during the eighteenth century. Condensation of the material was advised in particular because students of this debate, and ofEnlightenment and post-Enlightenment physiology in general, are fortunate to be able to rely on some of the finest studies in the area of History of Science. 4 What is missing, however, is an appraisal of the social context favoring the transition from preformationism to epigenesis. Preformationism in its prevalent form-ovism-confined the male role in generation to that of a necessary cause alone; on the basis of their experimentum crucis, Bonnet's demonstration of the parthenogenesis of aphids, preformationists found themselves conceiving of generation as tendentially parthenogenic. Surely this conception has left traces in the legal and social context. But even such impressive works of social history as L. Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage, while succeeding in presenting marriage as an institution highly responsive to changes in its discursive context, make little or no mention of contemporary paradigms of generation, let alone analyze their influence on the modes and ideologies of child production.

Introduction

I I

New historicists, such as T. Laqueur in his aggressively titled Making Sex, have construed an intricate web ofboth discursive arguments and evidential material with which to capture the enigma of the body or, more bluntly, that of sex. Each strand of the web serves to defamiliarize the other in a by now familiar play of pictorial intimation and discursive distancing. The protestations of bewilderment at historical changes-"neither advances in reproductive biology nor anatomical discoveries seem sufficient to explain the dramatic revaluation of the female orgasm that occurred in the lateeighteenth century and the even more dramatic reinterpretation of the female body in relation to that of the male" 5 -that support these studies are colored with more than just a tinge of disingenuity. They cover the narrowness of perspective and the resistance to interpreting historical change as changes of and in interpretation. For the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century-a period, one might say, in which change became constant-this is a thoroughly inadequate position. Not only does this period, with its still undifferentiated borders between disciplines, require a certain breadth of approach, it also is the period in which scientific discoveries have to answer the demands of, and are shaped by, a thorough interpretation of all natural phenomena. No amount of pictorial evidence can substitute for this demand of and for interpretation, and the introduction of its discursive equivalent, "the body," does not solve any interpretative problems. The resulting nonchalance with which large expanses ofhistory are perused-in Laqueur's case virtually the totality of Western history-cannot but astonish anyone familiar with the complexity of the problems at hand. 6 The desire to demonstrate ad oculos the victimization of"the body" is, furthermore, in complete conformity with the desire of the domination formation epigenesis, in which sexuality undergoes precisely the kind of secretion-dirty, and therefore an all the more attractive secret of epigenetic propagation-against which the advocates of "the body" relish railing. Epigenesis, with its insistence on spiritual residues in physiological processes, is itself the discourse that produces the body as a possible subject of oppression. Without an acknowledgment of this recursive argumentation, no truly critical study of romantic life sciences is possible.

12

Introduction

While research in the social ramifications of these biological paradigms is beyond the scope of the present study, inferences are made about the relationship between preformation and prearranged marriages. In conformity with the program of "shrinking" sufficient to necessary reason, this claim is justifiable ex negativo: in those epigenetic treatises not exclusively concerned with the physiology of generation-Herder's Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, W. v. Humboldt's Ober den Geschlechstunterschied und seinen Einjluss auf die organische Natur, Schiller's Uber die iisthetische Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, to name only the most visible ones-and in moral philosophies informed by epigenetic presuppositions, such as Fichte's Naturrecht, the celebration of sexual union as an expression of natural love is invariably coupled with expressions of disgust over unnatural, arranged relations. The claim is not that preformation was the biological basis of the practice of arranging marriages, but that in a period in which everything was measured against a rational standard-the Enlightenment-preformationist accounts of generation provided the scientific basis on which arrangement was possible without being a flagrant crime against nature. Epigenesis seeks to invalidate arrangement as much as it contradicts preformation: parental choice is as exterior to the will of the child as one ovum is to the one it encapsulates. Scientific arguments and treatises against preformation contain a clearly legible political subtext: anti-aristocratic sentiments against the high-handedness of parental choice extol the democratic staunchness of the heart. Polemic against arranged marriages is therefore sustained by a discourse on love not as passion, but as a legitimate, interior force of self-foundation. Invariably, it espouses the cause of woman's liberation from the unnatural obligation to the previous generation in favor of her dedication to her new family, from her preformed past as a daughter, that is, to her epigenetic future as a mother. As Friedrich Kittler has shown with particular intensity, in these crosswise connections and inversions lies the historical specificity of the "Discourse Network 1 8oo." 7 Kant's uses of epigenesis are emblematic of the character of his thought. Whether he mentions the concept explicitly or polem-

Introduction

13

icizes against its enthusiastic proponents, an irreducible openness and "duplicity" marks his pronouncements. As the parentheses and the added gleichsam [as it were] in the text of the Deduction, the doubled formulations in Riflexionen, and the catachresis "generic preformation" in the Critique ofjudgment show, for Kant epigenesis is nothing more, but also nothing less, than an analogy. The second chapter tries to circumscribe as pedantically as necessary the consistency of Kant's position. This seems all the more advisable because Kant came under attack from two sides for precisely this rhetorical use of epigenesis. Fichte accused him of favoring what has been called the "avoidance of theory in the matter of self-consciousness"8; Herder and Humboldt (and quite a few more German philosophers starting with the same letter) criticized him for his resistance to giving his philosophy a resonating, linguistic body. Both attacks, and their rebuttal, have informed most responses to Kant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The perspective of epigenesis not only adds a new dimension to these often-discussed problems; it also may provide an understanding of the unique strength in Kant's refusal to assume a unified and unifying source in his philosophy. Despite all protestations to the contrary, the structure of his system remains architectonic, not organic, and his claim to have completed, with the Critique oj]udgment, the arch of his critical reuvre, brings to mind Kleist's aperfu that the architectonic strength of an arch comes from the fact that all stones collapse at the same time. The third chapter concentrates on the origin ofFichte's Science of Knowledge for multiple reasons. Fichte's much-repeated original insight is an insight into the meaning and consequences of epigenetic originality. For Fichte, philosophy cannot hope to ground itself if it continues to conceive of reflection as containment rather than as generation. The manuscript Practische Philosophie, the second part of Eigne Meditationen zur Elementarphilosophie, consists of preparatory notes for the "practical" part of The Science oj" Knowledge in which this insight is for the first time consistently presented. It thus allows insight into the origin of idealist originality. The text of these notes is highly condensed and at times cryptic, and therefore in need of

14

Introduction

contextualization and commentary. Ideally the benefit of this explicative labor on those parts of the manuscript concerned with natural philosophy is an enhanced understanding of the genealogy and procedures of idealist thought. All switches distinguishing critical from idealist modes of argumentation are thrown over here: the dissolution of the quadruple structure at the center of the Critique if Pure Reason in favor of the categories of relation, the shift in interest from the mathematical to the dynamical, from representation to expression, from the architectonic to the organic. What is more, this shift, which in retrospect and in the incessant self-interpretations of idealist philosophers is construed as resulting from movements on the part of the organic body of philosophy itself, appears in Practische Philosophie as motivated by a decision. Not so much by Fichte's personal decision to make a splash in Jena (although this clearly played a role), but by a move, unprecedented even by the Kantcritiques ofJacobi and Reinhold, to stop the gap in philosophy, to make philosophy, or rather the philosophy of philosophy, originate in the infinite wealth of the organic rather than in the resources of finitude. In its numerous reformulations and new beginnings, Fichte's thought of the absolute origin is increasingly directed against the very possibility of a decision at the origin of philosophy, and his original decision in Practische Philosophie is a decision to end all decision. The apparent liberality of his oft-quoted "which philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is" 9 is contradicted by every argument in The Science if Knowledge, not to mention his Philosophy of Right or his political oratory. The illiberality of this philosophy of freedom becomes especially apparent where philosophical generativity, or rather, generality, assumes jurisdiction over the natural relationship of the sexes. Fichte's misogyny and the masculinism of so many idealist thinkers has systemic rather than personal roots. The prospective gain from the explication of this structure of Fichte's and, by extension, of idealist thought, along with the translation and commentary of a small portion of Practische Philosophie, had to win out over the difficulty of presenting the natural choice in this context, Schelling's philosophy of nature. To orient a meaning-

Introduction

I

5

ful discussion of his philosophy, it would have been necessary to reconstruct the status of southern German pietism and ofSpinoza's philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century in Germany. At the other end looms the outcome of Schelling's philosophy, where the question of freedom, since Kant has motivated the philosophical acceptance of epigenesis, is so radicalized that it is no longer the epigenetic origins of beings in the world but the epigenesis of the world as such that is at stake. Without considering these two ends, any discussion of Schelling's Naturphilosophie is likely to degenerate into fruitless professions offaith. Recent debates about his status as a forerunner of"self-organization" and chaos theory are, for the most part, vitiated by the triple lack of information about the history of idealist thought and about contemporary and modern scientific discourse. Schelling's contributions to contemporary debates might rather be found elsewhere than in the present desire for holistic theories of nature. Not the least of these is the fact that, throughout his reuvre and even in the periods of polemical relations, he remained one ofFichte's best readers and interpreters. Just as the epigenetic ideology of love-based marriage attempts to eliminate any asymmetry between the obligations of duty and the call of nature, so do epigenetic philosophies of language strive to close the gaps between thought and language, sign and signification, intention and meaning. Not incidentally is the modern institution of marriage, promoted so fervently by both Herder and Humboldt, based on a linguistic act. For the speaking (and marrying) animal to be able to make and keep promises, language can no longer be an exterior tool, regardless of whether it is preformed by God or arises, in a generatio aequivoca, from the mud of sensations. The epigenetic co-emergence oflanguage and thought, for which both Herder and Humboldt argue, leads to the claim of the essentiallinguisticity of reason. This claim contains, explicitly or implicitly, an attack on the supremacy of philosophy in the name of everyday language. The linguistic turn thus taken, and the ensuing concentration on linguistic models of communication rather than on philosophical questions of relation, continues to shape the greater part of contemporary debates.

I

6

Introduction

The fourth chapter tries to establish the descendence of this linguistic turn from the epigenetic turn in the two cases of J. G. Herder and W. v. Humboldt. In the history oflanguage philosophy, as well as in the history of German letters, Herder has come to occupy a place wholly incommensurate with the importance of his thought. His opposition to the speechlessness ofKantian philosophy is seen as a paradigmatic vindication of the rights of feeling and sensuality against the aridity and artificiality of scholastic philosophy. But at no time did Herder reach the philosophical, literary, or even humane niveau of those with whom he so ardendy wanted to compete. The continuing enthusiasm for Herder's work, evident in the incomparable parallel publication of two critical and massively annotated editions, can only be understood within the neverending oedipal drama that characterizes so much of Germany's institutional philosophy and Germanistik. The shadow ofKant, himself a Hagestolz (bachelor) and therefore all the more vulnerable to the charge of insensitive rigidity, was, and still is, identified with the mercilessness of the law, against which Herder, courageously and tragically isolated, rebelled in the name oflanguage, poetry, and sensuality. Kant's cold enlightenment, which allegedly has triumphed in theoretical philosophy and in the institutions of the bourgeois state, continues to squelch the uprising of the lower faculties and deny man the enjoyment of his entire humanity. 10 So goes one of the foundational myths of traditional Germanistik (the other involving Schiller and his equally heroic wresding with Kant). Particularly astonishing in this scenario is the contention that Kant's thought had ever sought, or gained, alliance with political power. It is based on the same misreading of the constitutive ruptures and avoidances in Kant's thought that had motivated Fichte's reorganization of transcendental philosophy. But in Herder's case it is all the more disingenuous because he, the superintendent of the Lutheran clergy in Sachsen-Weimar, had justified his own Metacritique of the Critique cif Pure Reason with the fact that Kantian thought had caused seditiousness in the minds of young seminarists and thus interfered with the exercise ofspiritual and political power. In the preface to his edition of Herder's works the editor Suphan reminds us:

Introduction

17

If we follow Herder's assurances in the prefaces to both works [i.e., in both parts of the Metacritique] (which are repeated convincingly in the letter to his closest friends) and Caroline's [Herder's wife's] notes for the biography, it was predominantly, even exclusively the experience in his office and in his close vicinity that drove him into open battle. "I did it," the dedicatory lines to Georg Muller in the Metacritique read, "from, and in, pure courage, to counter the decay in academic education. I could do no other. So help me God!" As the "Memories" recount in detail, Herder, in his duty as examiner, had to make the sad observation that the academic formation [Bildung] and morality of his young theologians had suffered badly under the influence of a premature and overzealous study of critical philosophy. 11 In reviews and other treatises Kant tried from time to time to talk sense into his former student, but Herder's treatise On the Origin of Language shows that the instability of Herder's arguments, sustained mostly by strident rhetoric that did not change even after Sturm und Drang had long passed, was beyond repair. As soon as Hamann reminded him of some of the consequences ofhis position, Herder immediately recanted. The decision not to include J. G. Hamann's writings in this discussion about the origin of language is difficult to justify. But again, a reconstruction of the pietist context in which Hamann argues for the divine, or at least nonhuman, origin of language would have to be very thorough if it were to wrest Hamann from the Protestant orthodoxy that traditionally administers his thought. The relationship of sexuality and language in his thought (both signs of a constitutive lack rather than of unfettered productivity) seems indeed beyond the altercation of preformation and epigenesis that this study attempts to elucidate. From the inception of his published writing under the wings of Schiller, W. v. Humboldt-the "noble flathead," as Nietzsche called him 12 -has merged the domains of sexuality, love, marriage, and linguistic and aesthetic representation. His attempt to base his later extensive empirical work on a transcendental epigenesis oflanguageon the generation oflanguage from the intercourse of thought and tone [Laut]-remains aporetic and conceals, like Fichte's philosophy, a constitutive element of violence. Threatened by the dissemination

I

8

Introduction

of the linguistic sign, Humboldt reacts with a conception oflinguistic expression as the incessant insemination of meaning into the linguistic material. Of the two souls in Humboldt's breast-the philosopher oflanguage and the obsessive empirical linguist-the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have strongly valued the former and regarded Humboldt's immense interest in the details of marginal languages as something of a hobbyhorse of the retired statesman. This bias, fueled by the desire to establish a pure lineage from "IndoGermanic" to the German language, has had unfortunate consequences for the preservation of Humboldt's papers. Slowly, this trend is being reversed. A new critical edition will include for the first time the quantitatively and qualitatively astonishing empirical material from which he drew in his later work. 13 The future of Humboldt, it is to be hoped, will lie in his work on non-European languages rather than in his adherence to that "silver-gleaming humanism" (Nietzsche) that his private writing so clearly belies. Marriage is the theme in which all the strands of preformationist and epigenetic thought are tied into a knot. Able to communicate their desire, adjusting it to the heed of nature, physiologically contributive in the generation of their offspring, the partners in modern marriage are wedded to the success of the epigenetic project. In the last chapter, the reading of Goethe's novel Die Wahlvenvandtschaften against the backdrop of Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro also intends to bring to fruition all the elements of preformationist and epigenetic thought and practice discussed in the previous chapters. But it is not only for thematic reasons (and not for the undeniable pleasure ofjuxtaposing Goethe's opaque and somber novel with the transparency and brilliance ofBeaumarchais's perfect play) that the contrast between these texts promises to be productive. The antecedent chapters insist that epigenesis and preformation cannot be contained in the position of theme or content but always have formative consequences for their Darstellung. This formative relationship obtains beyond the boundaries of genre and thus allows for the juxtaposition of two seemingly disparate texts. Coupling generically identical but generatively opposed works- Le Nozze di Figaro and Fidelio, for example-is not the only and often not the most pro-

Introduction

19

ductive way to let differences appear. The obvious coupling of the two seminal novels of preformationism and epigenesis, L. Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, is such a case: the expanse of presentation, at least in the present frame, would far have exceeded the gain in insight. Only a few very preliminary remarks must suffice. Tristram, while admitting in the first line of the novel of all possible constellations in the generative process-"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me" 14-seems to sectle for the patrilinear form of preformationism, moved, like Bonnet, by the aesthetic, or sublime, attraction of the theory of encapsulation. Tristram's problem is that he is so preformed that he can hardly be conceived. So interminable is the causal chain, so regular and predictable even the provisions for his generation that it can come about only as an interruption, as an interruption that, reverberating backward through the infinite network of causally linked events, becomes the defining mark of the narrative. Fueling the narrator's search for the causes determining his present state, the generative interruption to which he owes his existence becomes itself part of the narrative, not least because, like all empirical events (and unlike the transcendental necessity of epigenesis) it could also have happened otherwise. His obsession with musing about the circumstances of his own conception, and the sexual connotation of most of the narrated events, are thus consequences of Tristram's animalculist stance and not a poetic or even national preference. For the same reason, Tristram's account, mired in the thesis ofKant's Third Antinomy, according to which all things in the world, even interruptions, must have a cause, is, of course, interminable and thus defeats its stated purpose of giving testimony for the singularity of the self. 15 In the process of this failure, the narrative, already in its typographical form, thoroughly discredits any attempt to make language the property of the self-not only is it an untimely question that starts Tristram's story, but the characters are also all the time entangled in their own elocutions, and not even proper names are exempt from accidental or historical deformation.

20

Introduction

The epitome of epigenetic literature, the Bildungsroman, rests on quite different presuppositions. It opts for the antithesis in Kant's scenario by claiming a free cause and formation of the self; for the protagonist of the novel of development his conception is not merely inexplicable (and therefore a hidden source of endless narration), but properly unknowable by the linear processes of the understanding. The parental activity at his origin can only be fantasized, since it did not occur with the narcissistically too humiliating predictability of clockwork, and, like all of its future imitations, it remains shrouded by the darkness of inhibition and taboo. The search for the self is thus oriented toward a future in which, as Wilhelm Meister hopes, it will have formed itself. This structure at least promises narrative closure, however violendy the closing devices (like the Turmgesellschaft) might turn out to have interfered with the seemingly free process of Bildung. 16 Language, in order to function as an expression of the self, must emancipate itself from its subsidiary state as a means of conversation and commerce: it must shed all vestiges of futility and equivocation (irony and humor) and become full, literary speech. But Wilhelm Meister's attempt to speak Hamlet from the stage and thus to fulfill his fantasy ofliterary self-speech in the public sphere ends in even greater dependence on the archive and its agents. In both novels the logic in the defeat of their purposes is that of their underlying concepts of generation. Yet it is ultimately futile to demonstrate Tristram's failure to come to an end if this failure, and its criticism, are, in a sort of humorous Hegelianism, already accounted for by all internal and external aspects of the text. Conversely, Goethe's Meister project, begun in the Lehtjahre but stretching far into the later years of his writing, is far too complex to be analyzed in such limited space. It is no accident, however, that Wilhelm Meisters Wandetjahre peters out-that is, fails-with admiring and almost envious remarks on the surefootedness of Sterne's humor, an idiom that Goethe and his heroes of self-formation never mastered. Any reading of Die Wahlvenvandtschaften steps on highly contested ground. The contest is about the very possibility of a science

Introduction

21

of literature (Literatunvissenschaft). Published at a time when the interpretation of contemporary literature tried to prove its right to participate, alongside classical philology, in the literary education of university students, written by an author who had restored pride in the nation's literary identity at a time of political fragmentation and heteronomy, released by the author to an expectant group of admirers with tantalizing statements promising an interpretatio authentica, the novel means everything for the profession of literature, certainly in Germany. It would therefore be a disaster if it did not mean anything. The fear of meaninglessness, which arises in every close reading of Die Wahlvenvandtschqften, can, of course, be sublimated by joy over the infinite wealth of the text. In Goethe's case, this view seems all the more justified by the author's image as a poeta doctus, conversant in virtually all major and minor fields of knowledge of his time and profusely self-reflective about his own literary achievements. This allows for a mode of interpretation that both conserves the sanctity of the poetic word and explicates its content. The patron saint of this profession is, of course, Eckerman, the St. John of Goethe scholarship whose closeness to the master's heart guaranteed the validity of his conjectures while his philological stubbornness demonstrated independence and objectivity. 17 The contributions of traditional Goethe scholarship do enhance our understanding of the novel. Studies such as J. Adler's "Eine fast magische Anziehungskraft" have done invaluable work in uncovering the chemical discourse of Goethe's time; and Buschendorf's Goethes mythische Denkform has attempted to show how Goethe encodes Renaissance and alchemical imagery into the mise-en-scene of Die Wahlvenvandtschqften. These studies are based on the assumption that all readers-those in Goethe's time as well as we moderns-misunderstood the book, or at least missed something in the wealth of allusions woven into its texture by Goethe the alchemist, botanist, philosopher, civil servant, Freemason, lover, husband, etc. Following Goethe's intimations that there "is no line [in the book] that was not experienced" and that Die Wahlvenvandtschqften is "the only larger work in which I have consciously worked according to one

22

Introduction

underlying idea," they are motivated as a search for the secret, for the meaning of the poet's word. 18 But there just might be no secret, no meaning. This is the contention of]. Horisch: "The hermeneutically inspired art of interpretation has foundered on Goethe's 'best book' -it cannot be understood." 19 In a series of incisive readings, Horisch has shown that Die Wahlvenvandtschaften, and much of the rest of Goethe's later work, must be read as riddles rather than as secrets, and that the impossibility of meaning does not result in muteness or, as is the fear of so many, in arbitrariness. Rather, the exposition of the impossibility of meaning in the novel proceeds by steps of demonstrable logic that lead invariably into the realm of the semiotic, the philosophical, or the psychoanalytic. The distinction between secret and riddle can also be configured as that between symbol and allegory. The pertinence of this distinction for any understanding of Die Wahlvenvandtschaften arises not from theoretical decisions alone. The novel, as its tide unmistakably announces, is concerned with the status of science and its meaning within a defined social context. Nowhere does Goethe reflect more intensely on the nature of language, on the conflict between its symbolic intention and its allegorical outcome, than in his scientific and metascientific writings. The very possibility of natural science, or mme precisely, of epigenetic natural philosophy, hinges, just as much as the profession of literature, on the symbolic strength of language. The intensity of the debate over the nature of symbol and allegory in Goethe's time is indicative of its enormous stakes. 20 Walter Benjamin in his essay "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" (in Gesammelte Schriften) has attacked the profession administering the book at its crucial symbol, the figure of Ottilie. The sobriety of his analysis, however deeply concealed in the esoterism of his diction and composition, finds expression in the unparalleled resistance against the beauty of the novel's female protagonist. Ever since Bettina's "you are in love with her, Goethe, I have suspected it for a long time, this Venus has emerged from the raging sea of your desire," 21 interpreters, in their attempt to come close to the author, have also fallen for the "heavenly child"; and the scene in which Ottilie, alone

Introduction

23

and in desperation, rips open her shirt to show her breasts for the first time to the sky has in fact had countless glassy-eyed observers. Against this background it is difficult to overestimate the importance and range of Benjamin's labor to expose the shallowness of Ottilie's beauty. For at the same time it reveals the banal irreverence of those interpreters who virtually climb into Goethe's bed for a better look at the action, and it bases this criticism on a thorough interpretation of a historical mode ofliterary expression. The profession ofliterature, especially in Germany, has well understood the enormity of this attack and, since the essay could not be stopped like the Habilitationsschrifi, has treated it, and continues to treat it, with its two most potent weapons, silence and exorbitant praise. Despite the radicality of the gesture, repeated in the appendix to his dissertation and in the famous chapter on symbol and allegory in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin's relationship to Goethe remains highly ambivalent. 22 In the essay, Benjamin does not subject Goethe's text to a close allegorical reading, and while he proceeds to demonstrate the irrevocable decadence ( Verfollenheit) of his symbolic language, he even exceeds Gundolf in the awe of the poet's sublime existence. Nowhere does this ambivalence become more evident than in Benjamin's decision to undertake a messianic reading of the novella. 23 Based on the versions of epigenetic thought contained in the novel and presented in the preceding chapters of this book, the present interpretation tries to show that the relationship between novella and novel is in fact one of inversion in the sense of reading, and that, furthermore, the cosmos of Die Wahlverwandtschaften is explicitly sealed off against the irruption of hope and transcendence. Preformation and epigenesis, the last chapter tries to show, stand in the same relation to each other as allegory and symbol. Historical and philosophical developments seem to have rendered the former obsolete, but the older form reappears inscribed'upon its descendant. The irrepressibility of allegory is the main reason for de Man's call for a theory ofliterature. His problematization of purely historicalliterary studies is fueled by his diffidence in regard to the epigenetic self-formation of literary history, to all claims of organic

24

Introduction

development in national and supranational literatures. He has expressed his option for disrupted, local, repetitive readings in the failure of his own texts to coalesce into an organic whole. Behind the negativity of his assessment, the superiority of this "melancholy spectacle" 24 over his own wartime constructions, in which the organic body of national literatures was to expel all alien elements, is readily discernible. While de Man's "indifference to philosophy" as a separate discipline has restituted to the literature of Romanticism its intellectual wealth, it has also encouraged a certain Fluchtigkeit, or carelessness, in the interpretation of complex philosophical arguments. In maintaining a clearly separated ascendance from historical via philosophical to literary material, the present study seeks to avoid the confusion and self-isolation threatening the de Manian enterprise. This reading of Die Wahlveru;andtschaften hopes to suggest that the arid conceptualism of de Manian discourse has to be irrigated with historical research and anchored more firmly in the history of philosophy. Where historical interest and competent philosophical interpretation are joined together in an allegorical reading, the analysis can rightly claim to provide genuine insight. 25 No mention is made within the text of the contemporary scientific discourse of biological generation. This is, of course, due to the enormous complexity and specialization of these developments. But it is safe to say that even the discovery of the structure and function ofDNA has not solved the riddle ofbiological generation. Both aspects, preformation and epigenesis, are nowadays dominant in different fields of investigation. Molecular biology seeks to decipher the preformed text of heredity, whereas embryology allows for epigenetic freedom in morphogenesis. 26 On a larger scale, the desire for epigenesis seems to be answered by chaos theories and their application in autopoietic accounts ofbiological genesis. The metaphysical basis of epigenesis, the assumption that subjective forces share in the formation of living organisms, is here dissolved into the recursivity of regulatory information in the organism's relationship to its environment, and the specificity of organic matter and the productivity and endless variability of its forms is explained as

Introduction

25

arising from the infinite, indeed sublime, repetition of preformed segments. Autopoeisis and its universal enlargement, chaos theory, claim to bring down the wall between mechanicism and organicism. One cannot· but marvel at the historical appropriateness of this program. All modes of differentiation shall become entirely immanent; all traces of intervention by exterior forms of powers, which this study attempts to read in the altercation between preformation and epigenesis, shall be explicable as a function of the system. Already systems theory manages to convince many that societies, rather than being exterior and potentially unjust formations of oppression, are in fact organic systems as innocent as the eye of a frog. Epigenesis, it seems, even if only as a form, does not stop winning.

CHAPTER 1

From Preformation to Epigenesis

Mise en abfme and Dissemination: The World According to Preformationism The philosophical charges of the Scientific Revolution against scholastic Aristotelianism had been primarily directed against the fourfold conception of causality. For a Galileo, a Descartes, or later a Newton, natural science and its rigorous laws were to be based only on direct, "efficient" causality; everything else would leave open the gates to just the type of speculation that had hampered the progress of scientific research during the "Dark Ages." As a consequence of this rejection, Aristotle's doctrine of the epigenesis of organisms, which, in one form or another, had been widely accepted until the beginning of the seventeenth century, also fell into disrepute. He had maintained that, with the generation of each new organism, the male causaformalis (conveyed by the semen) impressed its mark onto the female causa materia lis (the menstrual blood). 1 Yet Descartes's attempt to supplant Aristotelian epigenesis with a mechanistic doctrine of generation, in which the origin and morphogenesis of living beings could be derived from the motion and infinite divisibility of matter alone, proved to be thoroughly unconvincing. So obviously was it at variance with the accepted standards and results of contemporary research that even his followers could not support it. Failure in this crucial area thus threatened to ruin the entire Cartesian edifice. 2

From Preformation to Epigenesis

27

The case of Decartes's premature embryology showed that if anti-Aristotelian science was not to founder on the momentous question of the origin of organisms, then the answer had to be located outside the physical world; if the complexity of organisms was such that mechanistic accounts would not satisfY the self-imposed standards of explanation, their origin had to be placed direcdy in the hands of God. This is precisely the objective ofpreformationism: to maintain and secure-against the irritation posed by the complexity of organic phenomena-the claim for a thorough and rational determination of the material world. Preformationists assumed that the germs of all living beings were preformed and had been since the Creation. 3 According to some, they were scattered throughout the world and found their way into the cospecific body, which hosted and later delivered them through inhalation and ingestion. Had not the enhanced capacity of the microscope revealed that water, earth, and air were full of semenlike miniature animals? In the words of Charles Bonnet, a leading preformationist, this was the scenario of total dissemination of nature's germs, troubled only, as the critics were quick to point out, by the ultimate contingency in the relation between seed and host body. The alternative and widely accepted hypothesis presumed that germs were encapsulated in one another like Russian dolls; in this view Eve would have carried all the embryos of all future human beings in her ovaries. For this second option Bonnet found the equally felicitous concept of mise en abfme. 4 It is not through willful appropriation that both concepts have been reborn in recent aesthetic theories: 5 preformationism sought to overcome its exacting intuitive difficulty not only with philosophical arguments (such as the infinite divisibility of matter), but even more convincingly with arguments taken from the arsenal of mid-eighteenth-century aesthetics. In preformation, proclaimed Bonnet (who, incidentally, was blind), we have a classic case of the sublime, the result of one of the supreme efforts of the mind upon the senses. The different orders of infinitely small [beings] nested [abimes] with one another that this hypothesis allows, overwhelms the imagination without alarming reason. . . . The second hypothesis, in disseminating the germs in every

28

From Preformation to Epigenesis

direction, turns air, water, earth, and all solid bodies into vast and numerous store-rooms where nature has deposited her principal wealth. (Considerations, p. 37) And with a candor yet unencumbered by the demands for sober scientific inquiry, Bonnet extols the aesthetic, novelistic quality of his theory: All that which I have said concerning generation one should not take but for a sort of novel [pour un roman]. I, for one, am inclined to consider it from that perspective. I feel that I have given but an imperfect account of the phenomena. But I would like to ask whether other hypotheses are any more satisfactory. Let me make two observations on this account. First, I could not bring myself to abandon a theory so beautiful as that of the preexisting germs just to embrace purely mechanical explanations. Second, it seemed to me that one would have to try to get a deeper understanding of the way in which [organic] development works before attempting to penetrate [the question] of generation. (Ibid.) Nothing new, therefore, emerges in the preformationist realm of forms; nature is bereft of any productive energy. 6 This is as much the result of philosophical or aesthetic choices as it is dictated by the impossibility of undercutting an established level of physiological description: that is, before the general acceptance of the cell theory, every investigation of organisms had to proceed not only from the visibility but also from the functional interdependence of the individual organs. 7 No organ could originate from a smaller unit or ever be isolated from other organs. Whatever was visible-for example, in the microscopic investigation of a hen egg-had to be always an organ; and if one organ was visible, then somehow all others had to be developed as well. 8 A perspective into the deep structure of organisms opened up only after the specificity of organic life-in contrast to mechanical phenomena in nature-was securely defined and delimited in scientific theory. The question of visibility will become significant-even if not decidable-in the confrontation between Haller and Wolff. Interestingly, it appears to have been of no decisive importance to preformationist theory whether the encapsulation was presumed

From Preformation to Epigenesis

29

in the female egg (ovism) or in the spermatozoon (animalculism). A comprehensive philosophy of gender that might have capitalized on these physiological differences was not yet in place. As the anatomical tables of the Encyclopedic, for example, show, men and women stood, anatomically and physiologically, in inverse relationship to each other. 9 More important than the nature of their difference was the constancy of the species, which both ovism and animalculism guaranteed by means of preformation. Only epigenesis, with its claims of total determination, is inseparably linked to what some have called the "classical" philosophy of gender. With regard to the question of visibility, one would think that animalculism (of which Leibniz, among others, was a fervent advocate)10 held an insurmountable advantage since the spermatozoon, unlike the female ovum, could be observed through the microscope. But animalculists, like the proponents of dissemination, had to face the difficulty of justifYing the tremendous waste of preformed germs within the exemplary economy of nature; moreover, the selection of the surviving spermatozoon seemed to be subject to radical chance. These difficulties, together with Bonnet's discovery of the parthenogenesis of aphids and Spallanzani's in vitro fertilization of frog eggs, helped ovism to gain "scientifically" the upper hand by the middle of the eighteenth century. 11 To be sure, the acceptance of one version of preformationism over the other-just like the acceptance of epigenesis-had tremendous practical consequences. Kant, in his astonishingly objective way, mused about whether everything in the character of the child depends solely upon the man or the woman. The system of ovulorum presupposes that if the woman had been with another man she still would have produced the same children; that of animalculorum, that if the man had been with another woman he still would have had the same children. This is very practical; for in the first case a man has to take into account the character of the woman and her family [race], whereas in the second he does not need to do this, but only the woman has to take into account the family [race] of the man. With epigenesis one has to take both into account: first, because of the alternative, second, because of the mixing. 12

30

From Preformation to Epigenesis

Within the world of preformationism, the ultimate biological insignificance of the generative partner-the woman in the case of animalculism or, usually, the man in ovism-calls for practical and external considerations to motivate the choice, whereas the epigenetic framework, in which there is always an "alternative," opens up the possibility of free choice of the partner. The preformationist separation of generation and choice-in other words, of sexuality and love-which increasingly threatened the social fabric of the ancien regime in Europe, is thus opposed by the mutual choice (romantic love) of those partners who desire to "mix" children. 13 Preformationism is the proper scientific theory behind the practice of arranged marriages in the eighteenth century. The friction between physiological (and societal) destination and emotional inclination is the subject of countless literary and dramatic treatments such as Marivaux's Le ]eu del' amour et du hazard, de Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses, Lessing's Emilia Gaiotti, Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, and others. The last chapter of this study, by juxtaposing one of the paradigmatic comedies ofpreformationism, Beaumarchais's Mariage de Figaro, with one of the mourning plays of epigenesis, Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, attempts to demonstrate just how much becomes visible in both literary texts from the perspective of generative biology. With all its difficulties and shortcomings, preformationism was justified, particularly in France, as a front against the Aristoteleanism of the "schools" and, by implication, of the Catholic Church. It entailed a rejection of Aristotle's "fuzzy" causality, and, fantastical though the theory of encapsulation might seem, it laid down standards of scientific inquiry by excluding the assumption of ever more forces (such as vital forces) as an explanation for irreducible phenomena in nature. It is within these parameters that the Count of Buffon mounted his counterattack. Buffon's Challenge A new front against preformationism was opened when Newtonian physics conquered the Continent. Newton's corpuscular theory of

From Preformation to Epigenesis

3r

matter proved to be just as consequential for the discussion of generation as the spectacular successes of his French heralds and followers in determining the reality of gravitational forces (evidence for the oblateness of the pole, 1737; mathematization of the irregularities of the lunar orbit, 1749; prediction ofHalley's Comet, 1759). Squarely in the tradition of antischolastic polemics, Newton had refused to define the nature of his fundamental force; he emphasized instead its heuristic importance and, as an incontrovertible sign of its scientificity, the possibility of mathematizing it. But his refusal to elaborate on nature, materiality, and range of gravitational forces was confined to the dogmatic part of his teaching; his alchemical speculations downright invited the amplification and translation of his concept of force into the realm of living things. Could not magnetism and electricity, he asked, fulfill the same role for living beings that gravitation did for inanimate matter? 14 The question seemed all the more appropriate since the success of gravitation had shown that natural forces, to be scientifically acceptable, do not have to answer to "naive" ontological questions about their origin and nature. No one involved in the debate about generation could resist the appeal ofNewton's concept offorce, in which the explanatory range of the old doctrine of causae appeared to be reconciled with the demands of rigorous scientific procedure. 15 Whether as quasimechanical attraction of molecules (as suggested by Buffon and Maupertuis) or eventually as formative force (as suggested by the epigenetists), the Newtonian concept of force and its self-proclaimed status as qualitas occulta supplied the debate about generation with new energy. The Count de Buffon was one of the great heralds of Newtonian science in Europe. A mathematician at heart and not given to awe inspired by the sublime, he held only scorn for the hypothesis of encapsulation: "Man would be bigger in relation to the spermatic worm of the sixth generation than the circumference of the universe is in relation to the smallest particle of matter that can be observed under the microscope .... This thesis seems to become less likely as its object become smaller."~6 . In his extremely successful and influential Histoire naturelle

32

From Preformation to Epigenesis

(I750-1804) Buffon proceeded from the assumption that the living body appropriates through nourishment small, irreducible particles, "molecules organiques" (Histoire, vol. 2, p. 54); these molecules then are transformed into components of the various organs by dint of an interior mold-the famous "moule interieur" (Histoire, vol. 2, p. 35). Once the growth of the body is completed, these formed but no longer needed molecules are stored in the seminal fluid. According to Buffon, the generation of a new organism consists in the equal mixing of male and female seminal fluid, in which the formed molecules "recognize" one another-propelled by an analogon of the attractive force-congregate, and thus build the corresponding organ in the embryo. This theory allowed for the conjunction of hitherto separate physiological processes, "nourishment, development, and reproduction are therefore effects of one and the same cause" (Histoire, vol. 2, p. 48). Buffon's hypothesis had the great advantage over its preformationist competitors of explaining the similarity of children "at times to the father, at times to the mother, and sometimes to the two together" (Encyclopedie, p. 569). Moreover, it operated with a concept of nature that comprises both totality (the fixity of the species and their hierarchy) and specification into invisibly small and discrete units (the organic molecules). With the molecules organiques and the moule interieur Buffon thus had "discovered" an active inner principle that avoided both Linne's purely external system of classification and the general passivity of nature in the hypotheses of preformationism. All of this he achieved without rupturing the continuum of phenomena indispensable to the discourse of natural history. 17 The universal activity of nature guaranteed the reproduction of organisms and the constancy of species without the intervention of the Creator. Thus Buffon summarizes his position in Histoire

naturelle: An animate, organic matter therefore exists universally spread out in all

animal or vegetable substances, which serves equally their nourishment, their development, and their reproduction .... Therefore, there are no preexisting germs, no germs contained, the one within the other, on to infinity; rather, there is an always active organic matter, always tending to

From Preformation to Epigenesis

33

mold itself, to assimilate and to produce beings like those which receive it .... All [species] will continue to exist by themselves as long as they will not be destroyed by the will of the Creator. (Histoire, vol. I, pp. 425-26) Against Buffon's naturalistic narrative of generation, the preformationists could point to several experimentally secured findings, such as the established function of the ovaries and the still unresolved status of the spermatozoa. If these little animals were to be identical with Buffon's molecules organiques, they would have to be present in a female "liqueur seminale" as well. In fact, Buffon believed to have made this discovery in the vivisection of female dogs in heat; but since he proceeded from the assumption that the secretion of this fluid is triggered only in the progenitive act, the hypothesis and its possible experimental verification controverted each other. 18 Regarding the problem of classification in natural history, Buffon confronted the system of Linne (which was, to be sure, built on the sexuality of plants, but only on morphological identity and specific differences in their reproductive organs) with "that which is real in a subject" (Histoire, vol. 1, p. 61), that is, the capacity to generate fertile offspring. 19 This emphasis on the function of sexual reproduction rather than on morphological inspection for the identification of species was one of the sources of irritation with which the Histoire naturelle would be received in Germany. In Buffon's writings, not to mention in his style, the irresponsible image of an overflowing sexuality emerged; a sexuality that one must learn not to control, because otherwise one might dam the flux of molecules and, by so doing, act against oneself and against nature. In an appendix to the chapter on puberty in his De !'Homme, Buffon mischievously recounts the story of a young man whom religious celibacy had driven to the brink of insanity before his family showed compassion and let him cure himself-instantaneously!-through sexual activity. 20 All of this, of course, confirmed the worst fears of German pietists about the dissoluteness and immorality of the ancien regime. Buffon's theory of generation, operating under the assumption of physiological equality between the sexes, follows in a long tradition that regards the female sexual organs as an inversion of the

34

From Preformation to Epigenesis

male's, and vice versa; any fundamental inequalities between men and women would thus arise from their respective social positions and could be remedied by education. 21 A further natural consequence is the emphasis on the active role of women in sexual intercourse, who-Buffon here is tactfully polite but clear-must feel pleasure in the act of generation in order to secrete the liqueur seminate required for successful conception. In scientific debates, adherents of this "double semence" -hypothesis (that the embryo arises out of the mixing of male and female semen) could scarcely refrain from the insinuation that their adversaries had erected their ovist theory on their inability to satisfy their wives. 22 In a countermove, preformationists such as the pietist Haller pointed to the unchaste aspects ofBuffon's theory: On account of several factors, and in particular on account of the insensitiveness of many conceiving women and animals, it is in my opinion very improbable that, except in an exceedingly unchaste person, a juice is poured out in the act of generation. That this wanton juice is not poured out within the mother, and consequently is not indispensable for generation, is nothing less than proven. 23 Haller's Apology Insisting on the one-sidedness of the progenitive act, Haller breaks with a thousand-year-old medical belief that the female orgasm was necessary for the generation of new life; and this insistence would be perpetuated in epigenetic physiology and philosophy of gender even when it was no longer scientifically "needed;' supported only by the "classical" separation of masculine activity from feminine passivity. 24 In addition to these differences in sexual politics, in the German context Buffon's pangenesis fell victim to the storming German intellectual elite's disapproval of everything French and aristocratic. The newly advanced philosophy of Greek naturalness barely tolerated the highly civilized talk of this French nobleman whose elevated literary style quickly brought him under suspicion of scientific dishonesty. 25 The mutual exclusion of style and scholarship would soon become a characteristic of German academic discourse.

From Preformation to Epigenesis

35

In "strictly scientific" terms the repression of libertine pangenesis (one might recall here the sexuality of de Sade's women) and the renewal of preformationism in the 1 76os is the work of the three best and most influential experimentalists and scientific publicists of the time: Bonnet, Haller, and Spallanzani. Their experiments, which were masterpieces of planning, execution, and description and seemingly incontestable, were used by their authors "falsely" as proofs for preformation. Especially in the case of Haller and Bonnet, anti-Enlightenment and religious motives shine through the scientific fleece. 26 Bonnet strove, above all else, to demonstrate the continuity and harmony of Creation, which would be threatened by the acceptance of matter endowed with formative forces. For him, nature was arranged, from stones to angels, on a ladder of natural beings, 27 in which there could be no new beginning, but only development-evolution: Every organized body grows by development. At the moment at which it begins to be visible, one sees in it, very much in miniature, the same essential parts that it will later present in larger form. Whatever effort we make to explain mechanically the formation of even the smallest organs, we will never come to an end. We are therefore led to think that all organized bodies that now exist existed before their birth within the germs or organic corpuscles. The act of generation, therefore, can be nothing other than the principle [beginning] of the development of the germs. (Bonnet, Considerations, pp. 29-30) Albrecht von Haller, a recent convert to preformation, also insisted on the continuity of creation. 28 It is true that, departing from purely mechanistic models, Haller recognized living forces, but for him, studiously avoiding any thought of self-organization, these forces were not formative. In his doctrine, irritability [Reizbarkeit] and sensibility [Empfindsamkeit, also the name for the contemporary literary fashion] were just qualities of muscles and nerves respectively, experimentally substantiated by the first large-scale experiments on living animals. Yet the party line of"official" Newtonianism forbade any further speculation as to the common ground and function of these forces. As a consequence, Haller's zoning of the body into irritable and sensitive parts proceeds largely by experi-

36

From Preformation to Epigenesis

mentation and, when necessary, by decision, without, however, translating these decisions, as his idealist followers will do, into a consistent philosophical vocabulary. 29 Sensitivity, for example, although clearly a sign of femininity for Haller, is not yet part of the receptivity = materiality = naturalness equation that figures so prominently later-for example, in Schelling's philosophy of physiology. This lack of physiological mediation-the mere hope that somehow physiological findings mean something-might account for the desperate religious zeal with which Haller and his close followers propagate their theory. In his embryological experiments with hen eggs Haller insisted that the first observable entity was the heart, the irritable muscle per se, which during conception would be terrified into action by the "rotten odor" of semen and which then pumped up, as it were, all other organs. 30 Generation, very much in harmony with Haller's pietism, strongly resembles a gradual spiritual awakening. And this closed economy of the organism, into which life is "knocked" from the outside and which is terminated by external death, can serve as a religious and moral bastion against the openness and transitoriness of the Buffonian model where, at least since puberty, the organism is always dying and where the physiological (and sexual and political) exchange with the outside is of vital and mortal importance. 31 It comes as no surprise that Haller numbered among his close friends and admirers Auguste Tissot and]. P. Frank. Tissot (one of the influential philosophische Arzte [philosophical physicians] so important for Schiller and his generation) not only displayed his medical concern for the well-being of the professoriate (always threatened by such swiftly striking diseases as constipation, contortion of the spinal cord, and general hypochondria) but also addressed the new generation of educators with the enormously successful treatise L'Onanisme, thus striking up the campaign against masturbation that so altered the relationship between educators and children toward the end of the eighteenth century. 32 Tissot's treatise is one of the key documents of "the implantation of perversion" (Foucault), representing, in sharpest contrast to Buffon, the liqueur seminale as a treasure, the squandering of which would rob the body of its vital equilibrium and lead to spiritual and bodily decay. Haller, who had

From Preformation to Epigenesis

37

fathered eleven children in three marriages, is cited by Tissot as chief scientific witness for the similarity of sexual intercourse to epileptic fits. 33 J. P. Frank's System einer vollstandigen medicinischen Polizey [System of complete medical police] is exactly that; long chapters, such as "On the mother's duty to breastfeed and its influence on the welfare of the state;' treat the manifold obligations to be imposed on the primary caretakers, who-notoriously unreliable by their very nature-had to be supervised by a special police so that the state could gain control over all aspects of child rearing. Quite in contrast to the nonchalance with which Buffon responded to the theological threats against his work, Haller's poetry, his apologetic writings, and his diary show that the coherence of his position is due to the suppression of extraordinarily strong doubts and scruples. 34 True, the preformationist model guaranteed the continuity of all beings in natural history, but Haller also had to shoulder the burden of theodicy; that is, he had to admit that the existence of all the misbegotten and the monsters had been scheduled in the plan of creation. 35 Not surprisingly, Haller's poetry, universally hailed as the formal beginning of German lyric poetry, is saturated with almost baroque doubt about the establishment of the world and the sanity of the human mind. 36 Its "personal" tone, its immediate self-expression, which for any self-respecting Germanist still seems to be the unmistakable seal of quality in lyric poetry, first breaks through in the famous "Trauerode, beim Absterben seiner geliebten Mariane," a dirge for his beloved first wife. 37 The poem takes on quite a different meaning, however, if one knows that Haller infected Mariane as well as two subsequent wives with a venereal disease and thus for all practical purposes killed them. He made sure of this by having autopsies conducted and through secret correspondence with colleagues, a circumstance that helps one understand the self-accusations and torment in his diaries and poems. 38 All of this has been conveniently forgotten by the historians of German literature, because it would locate the origin of German poetry at the site of a foundational murder. The apologetic position of preformationism which, as the case

38

From Preformation to Epigenesis

of Haller shows, is forced to justifY every monstrosity in nature and among humanity for the sake of the unity of the "tableau," was for the first time challenged in 1759 on a level that at least matched, if not surpassed, the scientific and experimental thoroughness of Haller and his scientific industry. Caspar Friedrich Wolff (I 734- I 794), in whom Goethe later discovered an "excellent predecessor," attempted in his dissertation, Theoria Generationis (1759), and in the expanded German edition, Theorie von der Generation (1764), to establish the scientific proof of epigenesis. Wolff's Epigenesis Right from the outset Wolff attacked preformationism [praedelineatio] at its philosophically weakest point: "Those who teach the systems of preformationism do not explain generation but maintain that there is none." 39 Wolff's own theory of epigenesis, in contrast, promised to explain the emergence of the organism not as a gradual unfolding (or evolution) of preformed germs, but, in conformity visible in all of nature, as an actual production of something new. Thus the dialogical (and polemical) Theorie maintains: "Hitherto I have said that you cannot show me in all of nature a single example of a phenomenon that would be brought to light by way of evolution; rather, all phenomena that take place in the world are produced or brought forth by physical causes in the most exact and fullest sense" (p. 51). According to Wolff, the unorganized, fluid material out of which the organisms emerge has the capability to consolidate itself[" solidescibilitas substantiae anima lis;' Theoria, p. 54]; these consolidations, from which the individual organs grow successively, are regulated by an "essential force" [vis essentialis]. It is this force, the first of many avatars of a grounding generative force, that guides the transformation of the nutritive juices into discrete matter and into organs. Since every organ grows from its predecessor, the necessary coherence of the organism is ensured. 40 Thus, the passive principle of solidescibilitas, as an attribute of organic matter (of the nutritive juices), and the active vis essentialis as the agent of distribution and formation, provide the sufficient reason for the growth of

From Preformation to Epigenesis

39

vegetable and animal organism: "Vis essentialis cum solidescibilitate succi nutritii constituunt principium sufficiens omnis vegetationis tum in plantis tum etiam in animalibus." 41 This constellation, however, still does not explain the original origin of an organism: if indeed consolidation is the result of a transformation of the nutritive juices, then there must already be an organ or agent fit to undertake this transformation. Moreover, there is not yet a sufficient reason why the emergence of an organism should commence at a certain point in time. Wolff solves this difficulty by postulating "a nutrient perfect to the highest degree" (Wolff, Theorie, p. 249) that does not need to be transformed itself but achieves the first consolidation spontaneously and then precipitates all subsequent formations. In order to account for the temporal origin of the organism, Wolff concludes that this perfect nutrient must come from the outside. It is, of course, the male semen, and the temporal origin of every organism is called conception. It might seem fastidious on Wolff's part to pursue his argumentation down to the level of conception, but he rightly recognized that for an epigenetic theory the intercourse of the sexes must change in status quite dramatically. To put it into the philosophical parlance in which Wolff was trained, sexual intercourse is no longer just the necessary reason-that without which an organism cannot emerge; rather, it is the sufficient reason-through which the organism is produced. The romantic ideology of love is built upon this physiological and philosophical shift. Since for preformationism the constancy of forms was guaranteed by creation, its overarching framework could remain standing irrespective of whether the germ was located in the woman or the man. Indeed as the work ofBonnet on aphids shows, the preformationist argument, in its standard ovist form, had a remarkable tendency toward self-sufficient parthenogenesis. It also maximized the insecurity of fatherhood such that pater semper incertus became pater semper indifferens. It is precisely this indifference that legitimized the custom of prearranged marriages in the Age of Enlightenment. Through the "originality" of generation in Wolff's epigenesis-

40

From Preformation to Epigenesis

in which every organism arises from a mechanical "nothing" -the continuity of nature is threatened. This is why Wolff and his followers have to make the drive to continue nature-that is, to generate organisms, an integral part of their hypotheses. This drive also restores some dignity to man's biological contributions and thus helps to rearrange the reason for marriage. Sexuality, preformationism's amusing and bewildering mystery, now becomes the vital link ensuring the continuous production of natural forms: The growth of the animal ... stops at a certain time. Meanwhile, however, the mixture ofblood and nutritive fluids remains the same, much as before, when new body parts were still formed. From this arises a sensation hitherto unknown to the animal-a kind of anxiety, but a pleasant anxiety-of which the restless animal nevertheless strives to rid itself, not knowing how to do it. The sensation increases at the sight of an animal of the same kind and different sex. All of this ends with nothing else than the union ofboth sexes; by this means all unrest, all anxiety is taken away from the animal all at once. (Theorie, p. 254) Although still expressed in somewhat Lucretian terms, these are the beginnings of a modern "physiological" theory of heterosexual love-a key ingredient in the epigenetic mix of arguments. No longer does the awakening of a slumbering embryo in one of the partners bring the offspring to light, but animals of different (which in epigenesis always means complementary) sexes, both with specific physiological investments, copulate-not even knowing howfor the sake of generation. As soon as this sequence is interpreted from the standpoint of an organizing philosophy (such as Fichte's) in which physiological processes must be deducible from the transcendental constitution of self-consciousness, the void named by Wolff's "anxiety" -as a condition of sexual union-will be filled with the philosophically grounded principle oflove. Wolff's metaphysical interests are quite evident in his Theoria, a medical dissertation composed in the style of a philosophical treatise. 42 His vis essentialis responded to the argumentative need in epigenetic systems to postulate an organizing, formative, and thereby ultimately spiritual force, which, taking the place of the missing causal link, could ·account for the transition from unorganized to

From Preformation to Epigenesis

41

organized state. The philosophical attraction of preformationism had been precisely its ability to present an exhaustive causal chainan advantage it shared with the sort of"hard" biological materialism proposed by Diderot-without losing sight of God in the process. Because of the irreducible postulate of a formative force, Wolff's approach, along with that oflater epigenetists, became vulnerable to the charge of vitalism or animism; these labels, however, obscure the explanatory need of epigenesis to somehow specifY a principium essendi for the constancy of the species. 43 Haller and his school doggedly and successfully fought Wolff's theses. Since both had before them the same embryological findings and were essentially in agreement about the visible development of the hen embryo, their debate revolved "only" around the interpretation of these facts. Haller had argued that even if only the heart were visible in the beginning, the entire body had to "be there" as well, since, by definition, no organ could exist in isolation. Wolff, in contrast, could not resign himself to the fact that one should be able to see one organ-a smaller part of the body-but not the body itself, and this suggested to him the successive emergence of the organs. Haller had the well-known limitations of the microscope on his side, Wolff the standards of rational thought. In a discursive frame in which the organ was the smallest admissible unit (many of Wolff's tables show that he had actually observed cells) and in which existence was not necessarily predicated upon visibility, the debate could not be resolved. 44 Or rather, it was decided as so many undecidable academic debates are: by means of institutional power. In this game Haller, who enlisted Bonnet in his defense, clearly held the better hand. Wolff did not obtain a professorship in German lands and finished his career, appropriately enough, as curator of the teratological collection at the Academy in Petersburg. 45 Blumenbach 's Formative Drive With this maneuver the advancement of epigenetic theory was held in check for only a short time. In 1781 there appeared the small treatise Ober den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschiifte [The for-

42

From Preformation to Epigenesis

mative drive and its relation to the business of procreation] written by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a former student of Haller's who soon became the towering figure in German and European life sciences. With this publication epigenesis became the undisputed model of thought in the life sciences. Blumenbach opened his essay with the question: "What occurs within a creature that has given itself up to the sweetest of all impulses and that now, impregnated by a second, shall give life to a third?" (Uber den Bildungstrieb, p. 9) and discusses two alternative answers: either evolution (i.e., the development of preformed embryos), or epigenesis (i.e., successive self-organization). Blumenbach poignantly describes preformationism ala Haller: "What they call conception is nothing but the awakening of the sleepy embryo by the irritation of the male semen, which incites the tiny heart to its first beats, etc." (p. 23). And in a deft move he attacks preformationism, which had drawn so much argumentative strength from the lex continui naturae, on its own ground: "He [Haller] assumes that the infinitely small human germ that had wandered from the ovary into the womb is now supposed to be attached to it by means of the placenta. And how is this? In no other way than through grafting its microscopic umbilical vessel onto the gigantic blood vessels of the uterus" (pp. 53-54). By equating Haller's hypothesis with the artificiality of botanical grafting, Blumenbach stigmatized preformationism as discontinuous and hence unnatural. Epigenesis, by contrast, is natural and organic: one life is not crammed upon the next but forms itself from still unformed material. Such formation, however, must be driven and controlled by a force that guarantees the regularity of natural organisms. Blumenbach found it at his summer resort. As he recounts in the treatise, natural conditions and the absence of academic obligations inspired him to sever the tentacles of countless freshwater polyps, to scoop out their eyes, and to cut them in half. He thus established that organisms would strive to replace the removed parts by themselves, but, significantly, in a smaller size than before their unfortunate encounter with the natural scientist. 46 This, as well as the healing process of human injuries, demonstrated

From Preformation to Epigenesis

43

to Blumenbach that an organic force strove to develop all available organic material into its original form and functional ability; if the organism were injured, the same force would reestablish and preserve it as well as possible. From all this Blumenbach concluded that in the previously unformed generative matter of the organized body, after it attained its maturation and arrived at the place ofits destiny [namely, the womb], a particular, lifelong active drive is stirred up to initially shape its definite form, then to preserve it for a lifetime, and if it by chance becomes mutilated, to reestablish it if possible. A drive, which consequently belongs to the life forces, but which is distinct just as clearly from the other kinds oflife force of the organized body (contractility, irritability, sensibility, etc.) as from the general physical forces ofbodies; which appears to be the foremost, most important force for all generation, nutrition, and reproduction and which can be designated (in order to distinguish it from the other forces of life) by the name formative drive (nisus formativus). (Uberden Bildungstrieb, pp. 31-32) Here, as well as in his influential Manual cifthe Elements cifNatural History, Blumenbach navigates through the Scylla of vitalism and the Charybdis of materialism by appealing to the explanatory principles ofNewtonian physics: I trust it is unnecessary to inform the greater part of my readers, that the term Formative Impulse [Bildungstrieb], like the names applied to every other kind of vital power, of itself, explains nothing: it serves merely to designate a peculiar power formed by the combination of the mechanical principle with that which is susceptible of modification; a power, the constant agency of which we ascertain by experience, whilst its cause, like that of all other generally recognized natural powers, still remains, in the strictest sense of the word-"qualitas occulta." This, however, in no way prevents us from endeavoring, by means of observation, to trace and explain the effects, and to reduce them to general principles. (Elements, p. 12) The conjunction of formative drive and receptive material, therefore, sustains a theory of generation in which no longer "wrapped up" organisms await their awakening, but in which the formative drive provides the reason for the transition from unorganized matter to organic corporations. Yet this reason figures as a purely regulative principle, whose further mechanical or physiolog-

44

From Preformation to Epigenesis

ical derivation might well be impossible. Blumenbach's thesis seems to form a synthesis of Haller's and Buffon's theories of generation insofar as the formative drive contains somehow the preexisting form of the organism, while the organizable matter is accorded some degree of activity. It is not a complete synthesis, however, since the manner of preexistence need no longer be specified, at least not with recourse to the kind of physiological explanations that Buffon, with the precarious doctrine of the moule interieur, still felt compelled to provide. Against his epigenetic predecessor Wolff, Blumenbach could assert that the vis essentialis only regulated the deployment of nutrition and as such always depended on nutritive material; it therefore had no claim to essentiality and could not be put forward as a principle fit to ground the regularity of formsY Blumenbach's new version of epigenesis proved to be so successful in part because he consciously utilized the formative drive in a manner conforming with what Kant would call the regulative principle of teleological judgment. 48 Kant's critical philosophy of science-not only the Critique ofJudgment (1790), but even the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781)-provided important arguments, like that of the function of regulative principles, to those who were willing to listen. These arguments enabled scientists to determine the range of their problems and to avoid the trap of answering questions outside their fields, precisely the temptation that had led to the inconsistencies in Haller's, Buffon's, and Wolff's systems. With Kant, it became possible for scientists to confidently forgo the quest for the origin of natural phenomena without giving up their claim to scientific rigor. The distinction between the analytic and the dialectic of pure reason-between the determination of what can be known scientifically and what must be exposed as dialectical illusion-and in particular the proof of the antinomic character of questions concerning the origin of and in the world, freed science from a burden of proof tinder which it had suffered as precritical natural history and that had led to untenable metaphysical assumptions. At the same time, Kant received considerable impetus and important arguments for the construction of his natural philosophy from the work of Blumenbach and his school. This is

From Preformation to Epigenesis

45

evident from the repeated references to Blumenbach in Kant's natural philosophy, especially in the Critique ofJudgment (pp. 421-24), where Kant gives his cautious philosophical blessing to the epigenetic model, and to Blumenbach's formative drive in particular. 49 For Kant, too, the specific determination of what is to be understood philosophically as an organism is dependent upon the assumption of a generative and formative force. The presence of this force is the d!fferentia specifica between machines and living organisms: Hence an organized being is not a mere machine. For a machine has only motive force. But an organized being has within it formative force, and a formative force that this being imparts to the kinds of matter that lack it (thereby organizing them). This force is therefore a formative force that propagates itself-a force that a mere ability [of one thing] to move [another] (i.e., mechanism) cannot explain. (CJ, p. 374 [§ 65])

But even before the extensive reflections on the domain of natural philosophy and its objects in the Critique ofjudgment, Kant seized upon the model of epigenesis as a means of self-interpretation. Compelled by the almost universal misunderstanding of his argument, Kant attempted, in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), to dispel the "darkness" and difficulties of the first Deduction of the Categories. In an effort to clarify the central problem of the a priori nature of the categories, he framed the summary exposition in the new language ofbiological generation in the 178o's: There are only two ways in which we can account for a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible. The former supposition does not hold in respect of the categories (nor of pure sensible intuition); for since they are a priori concepts, and therefore independent of experience, the ascription to them of an empirical origin would be a sort ofgeneratio aequivoca. (CR B I 66-67)

The advocates ofgeneratio aequivoca believed in the spontaneous generation oflower living beings out of dead matter such as mud or carcasses. 50 This theory was no longer seriously discussed around 1787, at least not as a possible cause of the origin of complex organ-

46

From Preformation to Epigenesis

isms: Kant evidently wanted to associate his opponents, in this case the empiricists, with scientific backwardness. There remains, therefore, only the second supposition-a system, as it were, of the epigenesis of pure reason-namely, that the categories contain, on the side of the understanding, the grounds of the possibility of all experience in general. . .. A middle course may be proposed between the two above mentioned, namely, that the categories are neither self-thought first principles a priori of our knowledge nor derived from experience, but subjective dispositions of thought, implanted in·us from the first moment of our existence, ·and so ordered by our Creator that their employment is in complete harmony with the laws of nature in accordance with which experience proceeds-a kind of priformation-system of pure reason. Apart, however, from the objection that on such an hypothesis we can set no limit to the assumption of predetermined dispositions to future judgments, there is this decisive objection against the suggested middle course, that the necessity of the categories, which belongs to their very conception, would then have to be sacrificed. (CR B 167-68) 51

Epigenesis thus is the only adequate model for the deduction of the categories, for the certification of their origin and consequently of their validity. If Kant is to maintain the claim that the categories are necessary and universal-that is, that they are a priori concepts of the understanding fundamental for experience-then they can neither spring up spontaneously with experience nor be innate: they must be "self-thought." They cannot be implanted, since even such an appealing construction as a preestablished harmony between human mind and nature would not ensure the lawfulness of human cognition, would expose it to the threat of the most radical contingency-a treacherous God-haunting Descartes's nightmare. Only if they are self-produced can the categories guarantee transcendental apriority and, by implication, cognitive necessity and universality. Organisms similarly organize or form themselves freely-on the basis of given material-without ever violating the generic forms dictated by the laws of nature. And just as the natural scientists, in order to avoid relapses into rational cosmology or onto-theology, should search no longer for the ultimate causes of this organization, the ground of the categories needs no longer be explainable in

From Preformation to Epigenesis

47

empirical terms: "This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as litde capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgment, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition" (CRB 145-46). Kant's self-interpretation of the transcendental turn in philosophy by means of an analogy from contemporary biological discourse shows that the success of epigenetic theory is more than merely the replacement of one scientific paradigm with another: an entirely new method of argumentation and legitimization is introduced into a variety of discourses. It is remarkable even for the hardened historian of discourse that the debate between epigenesis and preformation was "decided" without any new experimental findings. Only the advent of cellular and molecular biology would show that the dispute was based on a series of spectacular experimental errors. 5 2 As the case of Kant begins to show, a merely historical reconstruction of the "scientific" facts and terminology is not sufficient to understand the energy unleashed by the victory of epigenetists over their preformationist predecessors. Kant is the first to admit that philosophy has a peculiar interest in epigenesis; the interpretation of his and Fichte's thought from the perspective ofbiological generation shows just how closely the fate of idealist philosophy is tied to the concept of epigenesis.

CHAPTER 2

Self-Generation in Philosophy: Kant

Epigenesis in Philosophy Why does Kant employ the formula "epigenesis of pure reason"? Certainly it is not to secure a physiological foundation for the deduction of the categories. Neither does he want to legitimize the categories by tracing their origin to the intercourse of sensibility and understanding in the fashion of a Buffonian theory of generation: such a parentage of the faculties would undercut the a priori objectreference of the categories that the deduction had undertaken to prove. Kant's adoption of epigenesis is motivated by the metaphysical elasticity of this theorem, which eschews both the dogmatic and skeptical aporiae of alternative scenarios of origin: the thought of epigenesis allows an autonomous origin of natural products without, however, threatening the continuum of nature. 1 For the epigenetist, the emergence of a living being can be described as the successive organ formation from parental generative matter under the guidance of a formative force. In this process the origin of a species repeats itself in each individual so that the mere exteriority of Bonnet's scala rerum-of which the individual was only a preformed and predetermined rung-is broken. 2 It is this originality, this immanent self-creating force within the concept of epigenesis,

Self-Generation: Kant

49

that Kant seized and employed in the second deduction of the categories to show the skeptics how the understanding brings forth the laws of nature. To cite the characteristic image with which Kant turns against Hullie, epigenesis provides the model for the "selfdelivery [Selbs~ebiirung] of our understanding (including reason), without impregnation by experience" (CR B 79 3). 3 What produces and delivers itself is an organism. Accordingly, the critique of reason and the metaphysics defined by it cannot assume the form of a mere aggregate. The parts of the system must coalesce into a structured, articulated whole, in which all "organs" are mutually determined and expand not by external addition but through inner growth, "like an animal body, the growth of which is not by the addition of a new member, but by the rendering of each member, without change of proportion, stronger and more effective for its purposes" (CR B 861). As an articulated organism, the system of pure reason is a network of purposes that becomes comprehensible only through an underlying "concept provided by reason-of the form of a whole-in so far as the concept determines a priori not only the scope of its manifold content, but also the positions which the parts occupy relatively to one another" (CR B 86o). The system, as was true for the categories upon which it is based, can neither be formed accidentally "in the manner of lowly organisms, through a generatio aequivoca from the mere confluence of assembled concepts, at first imperfect, and only gradually attaining to completeness," nor preformed from an "original germ, in the sheer self-development of reason" (CR A 83 5); only epigenetically does it contain its own foundation. Although these methodological reflections occur at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, it might be tempting to read the second part of the Critique ofJudgment, for which just this definition of organism is fundamental, as a self-interpretation of pure reason. The Critique of Teleological Judgment, then, could be understood as providing more than an analogy for the isomorphy of reason and the products of nature. Such a reading would suggest that, in the products of nature, reason, so stark and forbidding in the Critique of Practical Reason, would be naturalized, and nature, always in danger

50

Self-Generation: Kant

offalling into complete unintelligibility, spiritualized. It is exactly at such points that the gulf separating Kant's critical philosophy from the idealist systems becomes visible. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel will indeed utilize the Third Critique in such a way that the definitions of organic phenomena serve as the interpretive matrix of epistemological problems. But for Kant the concept of reason [ Vernunftbegriff] that establishes the purpose for the critical system remains a determining concept and is not, as in the philosophy of nature, a heuristic device. Systems of philosophy do not grow by themselves (as much as their authors may want to give the impression that they do) but issue from the-ultimately contingent-a priori forms of intuition, categories, and ideas detected in the transcendental investigation. The doctrine of the thing in itself, in particular, categorically prevents any causality between entities of thought and products of nature upon which such organicity could be grounded. 4 The analysis of the Wissenschqftslehre will show that Fichte, in order to argue for the total organicity of his system, had to remove precisely these barriers by eliminating the thing in itself and by endowing the I with absolute productivity. He legitimized his procedure by calling Kant's deliberate reservations hesitation and timidity. Antinomies of Generation Kant insisted that every theory of generation ultimately rests on hypothetical assumptions and thus is a matter of practical decision rather than of objective truth. He indicates this fact, embarrassing though it might be to the practitioners of scientific physiology, by making a possible confrontation between epigenesis and preformation part of his exposition of the Dialectical Inferences of Pure Reason. Here, under the title "Antinomies of Pure Reason," Kant exposes the contradictions to which cosmological questions invariably lead. In these debates-whether the world has a beginning, whether there are simple substances, whether there is freedom in nature, whether there is a necessary being-the contradictions ultimately

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5r

arise from the divergent interests of two faculties: the understanding insists on universal validity of its categories (such as the successivity of cause and effect), while reason demands closure in its succession of ideas. Kant divided the four antinomies, following the division of the table of categories, into two groups-after all, "human reason is by nature architectonic (CR A 474, B 502). The first two-the mathematical antinomies-concern the possibility of grasping the totality of phenomena both in maximal extension and in intensity. The dynamical antinomies oppose statements on the conditions of phenomena and thus refer to noumena only. While the fallacy of the first set consists in overestimating the capacity of our sensibility, the latter set overestimates the capacity of the categories . .The historical shift from preformationism to epigenesis in the explanation of the origin of organic life can be configured with Kant as a transition from a mathematical to a dynamical perspective; as a shift in interest from the problem of possible completion of given knowledge (which is the "business" of the understanding) to the problem of its production (which is the highest question of reason). Preformationism, as Bonnet's and Haller's treatises have shown, does not admit elements that could not at least potentially be mastered by the categories of the understanding and the conditions of sensibility. Morphogenesis is started by a material cause-the semen-and directed by the heart according to a materially given form. The younger generation is derived in a strictly determinate manner from the older, the most striking image of which surely is the theory of encapsulation. Within the series of phenomena, generation is perfectly understandable; the few remaining mysteries will be solved once the instruments and concepts of the understanding have been perfected. At the same time, the first cause of the series of organic generations-God-is expelled from the realm of scientific inquiry and thus is supposed to ground it, as it were, from the outside. Kant's objections, had he chosen to discuss generation in connection with the antinomies, would have targeted the illegitimate extension of causal inference over the whole span of organic

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generativity, and the assumption that a noumenon should at the same time be ground and part of a causal chain. The mathematical antinomies are characterized by the fact that both thesis and antithesis are "wrong" insofar as they presuppose the accessibility of phenomena in their totality. The dynamical thesis and antithesis, on the other hand, are both "right" as long as it is clear that they concern different realms of inquiry; strife [Widerstreit] arises only from the surreptitious crossing from one area into the other. Epigenetists, conscious of this fact, no longer pretend to account for the completion of the causal chain; they attempt to solve the riddle of generation by positing the possibility of natural originality as such. Epigenesis would thus be aligned with the thesis of the third antinomy, and its adherents would maintain that there is causality through freedom. Beginning with C. E Wolff's version-historically still untouched by Kantian criticism-epigenesis withstands the discoveries of the dialectic of pure reason. The laws of causality still hold within the realm of observable facts: children are clearly the product ofboth their parents, the semen functions as nutritive matter, and the ability to solidity (solidescibilitas) appears to be a wholly mechanical force. But the individual organs are no longer subjected to the hierarchy of the heart, which, as it were, pumped them up and nourished them. In his debate with Haller, it was of decisive significance for Wolff that at the earliest observable stages of embryonic development the heart was still not formed while other organs and parts of the body were already grown and visible: consequently, the heart could not be the preformed cause of all organ development and nutrition. In Wolff's exposition of epigenesis-exemplary for all his successorsthe unconditioned vis esssentialis intervenes in the place of the causal heart. However, this essential force is not (as Haller had maintained for his vital forces) a completely observable appearance open to the explanation of the understanding: In my dissertation I troubled myself no further with this [force] than declaring it an essential force proper to vegetable bodies. It is sufficient to know that it is there and that we recognize it from its effects, which is all that is required to explain the emergence of the parts. Even less important

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is the name by which we designate it; only I must mention that by means of this force everything in vegetable bodies, for which we ascribe life to them, is effectuated; and on account of this I have named it the essential force of these bodies, because a plant would cease to be a plant if this force were taken away from it. In animals it occurs just as well as in plants, and everything that animals have in common with plants depends solely on this force. (Wolff, Theorie, p. r6o) Wolff leaves unanswered the question about the specificity of the vis essentialis and thus avoids an entanglement in the dialectic of questions that ask after first causes. Although writing twenty-two years before the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason, Wolff takes account of the purely regulative function that the concept of such a force can have. For in every respect it is with this force that organisms begin (demand of reason); yet it is perceptible only by its effects. Unlike objects of cognition, it cannot, therefore, be positively determined but serves only as a postulate. Kant will speak of a "principle of reason which serves as a rule, postulating what we ought to do in the regress, but not anticipating what is present in the

object as it is in itself, prior to all regress." 5 Although the antinomies showed that a quarrel like the one between preformationists and epigenetists cannot be properly resolved by purely scientific arguments, 6 Kant did not hesitate to characterize the two antithetical positions. Kant would call Wolff's theory, which postulates a beginning on the basis of freedom within the all-encompassing determinism of the laws of nature, the "dogmatism of pure reason." Regardless of all content, it is the more popular stance, and it satisfies the speculative interest of reason insofar as with it "the entire chain of conditions ... can be grasped completely a priori." But above all, it expresses the practical interest of reason "in which every well-disposed man, if he has understanding of what truly concerns him, heartily shares" (CR B 494-95). While the bad infinity of preformationism conceals its own theological presuppositions, critical epigenesis at least admits its origin in human interest and thus makes a debate between "well-disposed" men possible. Only where the vis essentialis and its avatars are taken to prove apodictically the presence of freedom in nature, and where

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the heuristic value of such concepts is exchanged for that of efficient causality, does the irreconcilable strife between the two factionseach right in its own way-arise. The shift from the mathematical to the dynamical register in the debate of generation illustrates the practical and philosophical investments to which neither side, for the obvious reasons of scientific objectivity, is prepared to fully own up. Kant's antinomical schema shows that with the (re-)emergence of epigenesis the problem of generation is dislocated from the field of theoretical investigation to the domain of practical reason. 7 It thus becomes understandable why, for the succeeding idealist systems, which claim to be systems of freedom, epigenesis gained such paramount importance. The Generation ofPractice The discussion in the antinomies of reason had shown that theories of biological origination can never claim the status of knowledge. Kant's preference for the epigenetic model was motivated by its greater economy and potential harmony with the system of reason. Now here is this better exemplified than in the reflections to which Kant subjects other crucial parts of the critical project with the aid of the epigenetic model. The chapter on the paralogism of pure reason defends the highest instance of theoretical reason, the "I think," against the attempts of rational psychology to turn it into an object of empirical research and thus prove scientifically the immortality of the soul. But by arguing that the soul-the I as object of the inner sense-can never attain the status of an object because it always stands in its own light, Kant also attacks idealist positions that, starting with Fichte, claim that scientific knowledge of the I is not only possible but is even the generative basis of all further knowledge. Both the intelligibility and the impenetrable opacity of the I, in fact all the findings resulting from the critique of the paralogisms, can be supported by means of the epigenetic hypothesis. Kant notes: With epigenesis we have to suppose that the soul belongs to the intelligible world; that it does not occupy a place in space, that an organic body, once it has emerged through generation, contains within itself the condition,

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henceforth to be spiritualized [beseelt] by the intelligible, vivifying principle; and that in the body the soul is not locally, but only virtually present. 8

These theoretical reflections prepare the way for a similar epigenetic scrutiny of the principles of practical philosophy. The Critique of Practical Reason itself, conformable to its field of inquiry, does not address or include biological theories. Nonetheless it can be presumed per analogiam-and the idealists will strive to turn this presumption into knowledge-that for a creature whose most important qualification is "the idea of freedom as a faculty of absolute spontaneity" (p. 50), the descent from an absolutely preformed and predetermined biological chain would, to say the least, not be very becoming. The interpretative value of epigenesis is once again evident in Kant's reflections on moral philosophy. In a move strikingly similar to the employment of epigenesis as an elucidation of categorical origin, Kant characterizes the principle by which moral action has to renounce any causal relation to its possible success in epigenetic terms: "The principium of morality is autocracy of freedom with respect to all happiness, or epigenesis ofhappiness according to the universal laws of freedom." 9 Even in these gnomic remarks Kant resists the temptation to assign a unified source to the autonomy of the subject; he underscores the openness of his determinations by doubling the reflection in perfectly symmetrical halves separated by the nonexclusionary "or" [vel]. The combination oflaw-guided development and free, spontaneous origin, which had attracted Kant to the concept of epigenesis in the first place, is here extended to define the totality of consequences of moral action. Since our actions, strictly speaking, never make us a link in any causal chain, since there is always a gap between intention and actualization, reality, Kant seems to say, presents itself to us as an organism: equally unpredictable, yet equally familiar. In a further step, the organicity of reality then provides the ground upon which the subject can experience itself as a moral agent: "The epigenesis of happiness (self-creation) from freedom, which is limited by the conditions of universality, is the ground of moral feeling." 10 If the deduction of the categories is the center of Kant's episte-

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mological project, these remarks are at the very heart of his ethical thought, and in both instances he calls on the concept of epigenesis. From the context ofKant's philosophy it is clear that epigenesis can function as a ground because it is itself groundless, because it stands for the groundless self-originality that alone makes cognition scientific and actions moral. Hence Kant's reservations about the possibility of establishing the principle of epigenesis with the same scientific rigor as, say, the law of gravitation. If the moral subject is to maintain its freedom, it will have to treat its environment as organically evolving, which, contrary to modern misconceptions, means that it cannot be properly understood.

Antinomies ofJudgment Even in the Critique ofJudgment, designed to reconcile the conflicting goals of reason and understanding, the practical concerns evoked by "organic products of nature" and specifically by their generation seem to be irrepressible. Under the same tide of antinomy, Kant exposes the problems teleological judgment faces with regard to products of nature, or organisms. On the one hand, it appears unavoidable to judge events and products of nature according to the measure of human understanding and its categories, in particular according to the temporally irreversible succession of condition and conditioned. Without this category of causality-the Critique of Pure Reason had already demonstrated this-there could be "no cognition of nature at all in the proper sense of the term" (CJ, p. 387). The understanding requires that the "production of material things and their forms" be reconstructed completely and without a gap (ibid.). The antithesis claims: "Some production of material things is not possible in terms of merely mechanical laws" (ibid.). To give the antithesis all its weight, it must be remembered that "events," "things," or "products" of this kind cannot be comprehended even empirically within the frame of"ordinary" causality; the grounding concept of teleology, as Kant has presented it so far, is just as constitutive of its object as the concepts of the understanding.

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In contrast to the forms of objects of the first kind which, just like the categories governing them, are necessary, the form of the products of nature appears accidental to the understanding and, to begin with, to reason: reason's need for the closure of a causal chain is contradicted by the inexplicability "of the conditions attached to their production." Therefore, to account for a product of nature, reason is forced to regard "the product as if it had come about through a causality that only reason can have. Such a causality would be the ability to act according to purposes (i.e., a will), and in presenting an object as possible only through such an ability we would be presenting it as possible only as a purpose" (CJ, p. 370). What distinguishes organic formations from mechanical products is therefore the manner of their production or, by consequence, the presuppositions reason must supply in order to explain their generation. The topic of organic generation thus emerges as a leitmotif that structures the entire presentation of teleological judgment. All further definitions of these curious things called "natural purposes" or "organisms" are founded upon this distinction: "An organized product rif nature is one in which everything is a purpose and reciprocally also a means. In such a product nothing is gratuitous, purposeless, or to be attributed to a blind natural mechanism" ( CJ, p. 376). In violation oflinear causality employed by the understanding, of an organism are defined as being "reciprocally cause and parts the effect of their form" (CJ, p. 373). Kant calls these parts "instrument (organ)" [Werkzeug (Organ)] and, more precisely, "generative organ"; and he further declares that in them a formative force must be presupposed, "a formative force that this being imparts to the kinds of matter that lack it (thereby organizing them). This force is therefore a formative force that propagates itself-a force that a mere ability [of one thing] to move [another) (i.e., mechanism) cannot explain" (CJ, p. 374). Kant illustrates this reciprocal causality in natural purposes with the threefold determination of a tree's productive ability. First, "with regard to its species the tree produces itself" (CJ, p. 371), thus providing material ground for classificatory systems in natural history.

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Second, "a tree also produces itself as an individual" (ibid.). This productive ability is different from generic and from simple growth, because it requires a "separating and forming ability of very great originality" (ibid.). Third, the tree produces itself by regenerating mutilated parts, by accepting grafts, and so forth. This "self-help" (ibid.) of organisms had been one ofBlumenbach's most powerful arguments to prove the existence of a formative drive and, as a consequence, to demonstrate epigenetic propagation. 11 In organic beings, Kant argues, "normal" causality [nexus tif.Jectivus] is conjoined with a causality of final causes [nexus finalis]; their parts or organs mutually produce themselves, and the entire organism is endowed with a formative force that "originally" causes and secures for organisms their individuality (cf. CJ, pp. 373-73, and CR B 715). These features of the concept of organism finally lead to the dissolution of the antinomy ofjudgment: as Kant had already shown in the third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason, thesis and antithesis are in fact compatible. The antinomy presented in the Critique ofJudgment results from a contradiction between two different modes ofjudgment. The task of determinative judgment is to subsume the particular objects of nature under the laws of the understanding; with respect to the validity of these laws, necessity is its modus operandi. Yet, in order to explain the life of organized natural beings we must impute a purposeful force that created and continues to guide them accordingly. Thus, their origin cannot be explained with any semblance of necessity; they are contingent in the broadest sense. 12 The antithesis of the antinomy-that the form of some natural "things" cannot be determined with necessitycontradicts the very principle of determinative judgment; it thus must belong to another faculty, that of reflective judgment. As maxims of judgment, as practical resolutions of reason, both forms of causality, the mechanical and the "technical," can exist side by side. Even more, they have to coexist, since without reliance on mechanical causality no cognition of nature would be possible at all, whereas technical or purposive causality is required for the cognition of individual products of nature: "For we cannot even think them as

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organized things without also thinking that they were produced intentionally" (CJ, p. 398). The antinomy ofjudgment thus issues a call [Beruf]: We are to explain all products and events of nature, even the most purposive ones, in mechanical terms as far as we possibly can (we cannot tell what are the limits of our ability for this way of investigating); yet, in doing so, we are never to lose sight of the fact that, as regards those natural products that we cannot even begin to investigate except under the concept of a purpose of reason, the essential character of our reason will still force us to subordinate such products ultimately, regardless of those mechanical causes, to the causality in terms of purpose. (CJ, p. 415)

The assumption of a will working behind nature's back is thus derived from the peculiar competition between understanding and reason. This will's further explication is the task of theology alone; teleology in Kant's reordering is a heuristic principle that comes into force once the mechanical explanations have come to their necessary end (CJ, p. 411). Reflective judgment supposes that the will underlying nature is characterized by the same property that distinguishes itself-namely, autonomy. For reflective judgment does not bring appearances under concepts in order to make possible their cognition, but takes itself as principle: hence its autonomy. Only under the presupposition of this autonomy can the illusion of an antinomy be prevented: Hence all semblance of an antinomy between the maxims of strictly physical (mechanical) and teleological (technical) explanation rests on our confusing a principle of reflective judgment with one of determinative judgment, and on our confusing the autonomy of reflective judgment (which holds merely subjectively for our use of reason regarding the particular empirical laws) with the heteronomy of determinative judgment, which must conform to the laws (universal or particular) that are given by understanding. (CJ, p. 389)

The conditions of the possibility of the cognition of nature are thus secured by means of a postulated isomorphy between cognizing faculty and cognized natural product. The autonomy of judgment, consequently, must be complemented by "a cause that has spon-

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taneity (which, as such, cannot be matter) without which no basis for those forms [of natural products] can be given" (CJ, p. 41 1). The Economy of Generation In the systematic whole of critical philosophy the Critique r.ifJudgment is supposed to heal the rift between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom thematized in the third antinomy of pure reason. Practical reason, Kant summarizes his position from the Second Critique, "presupposes its own causality as unconditioned (as far as nature is concerned), i.e., its own freedom" (CJ, p. 403); it does so not to claim any ability for constative judgments about what is, but only about what ought to be. Practical reason demands that the possibility be given of turning its free decisions into reality; it is, therefore, legitimized to act as though no insuperable discrepancy existed between what is and what ought to be, between reality and possibility: its universal regulative principle is-although postulated merely subjectively-of "no less validity" than if it were objectively grounded (CJ, p. 404). One way Kant conceived of both freedom and success for practical reason was to treat the result of moral action as a sort of epigenetic creation. Similarly, Kant argues, the idea of an inner purposiveness of nature serves as a subjective, regulative principle of judgment, as a principle that does not deem how nature is but how it ought to be, so that we are able to cognize it coherently (ibid.). This is how the "primacy of the pure practical reason" takes effect in natural philosophy (CPR, pp. 124-26). In order for practical reason to realize freedom in its projects, a certain measure of contingency must be encountered in nature. However, since absolute contingency would contradict the conditions for a possible cognizability of nature, it must be externalized in the form of a will, from which perspective all occurrences in nature have a recognizably purposive character. It was the great advantage of epigenetic theory in the form advanced by Blumenbach that it could be brought into harmony with the claims of practical reason and with those of the theoretical

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understanding. After all, the problem of the generation of natural products ultimately is the interface through which transcendental philosophy has to communicate with the metaphysics of nature and with the empirical sciences. That is the reason why, in the Critique cif Judgment, the description of the particularity of organisms always begins with their generation. That is also the reason why the competing models ofbiological generation are the only scientific theories discussed at any length in Kant's text. Theories of generation, which, like preformationism, "denied the formative force of nature to individuals, so as to have them come directly from the hand of the creator" (CJ, p. 423), also deny productivity in nature and, what is more, erase the expression of freedom in individual formations. On the other hand, epigenesis-Kant also calls it the "system of generic priformation, since the productive power of the generating beings, and therefore the form of the species, was still preformed virtualiter in the intrinsic purposive predispositions imparted to the stock" (CJ, p. 423)-is not only empirically the more successful theorem: Reason would from the start be greatly in favor of the kind of explanation [it offers]. For in considering those things whose origin can be conceived only in terms of a causality of purposes, this theory, at least as far as propagation is concerned, regards nature as itself producing them rather than as merely developing them; and so it minimizes appeal to the supernatural, [and] after the first beginning leaves everything to nature. (But it does not determine anything about this first beginning, on which physics founders in general, even if it tries to use a chain of causes, of whatever kind.) (CJ, p. 424) Kant bestows equal philosophical honors on the concept offormative drive, which had become coterminous with epigenesis in the discourse of generation; as an "ability of matter" (ibid.) it effects the individual formation of the products of nature. The formative drive is also-as the tree-example had already shown-the drive for continual production or, as the case may be, preservation of organisms; it is the expression of a will for self-preservation in nature. This assumed will, only superficially a concession to theology, is thoroughly consistent with the critical system. For Kant is interested in

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the formative drive, and in epigenesis in general, just as much for what this model explains as for what it posits outside its limits: "The system of epigenesis does not explain the origin of the human body, but rather indicates that we know nothing about it" (Kant, Vorlesungen zur Metaphysik, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 28, p. 761). Thus Kant, with his consecration in the Critique ofJudgment, popularized epigenetic theory, without, however, giving up his skepticism about any metaphysics of nature constructed upon such a theorem. In the extraordinarily rich history of the concept of formative drive after Kant and Blumenbach-including the thought of Schiller, Fichte, Holderlin, Moritz, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Humboldt, and many others-this reserve, and with it the consciousness of practical participation in the construction of natural sciences, was soon given up. 13 Kant affects the same reserve with regard to the relation of the sexes, which, as Wolff tried to demonstrate, needed to be grounded in epigenesis. Indeed, here Kant allows for an extrinsic purposiveness in nature, which he normally so tenaciously contests: There is only one [case where] extrinsic purposiveness is connected with the intrinsic purposiveness of organization. This [case] is the organization of the two sexes as related to each other to propagate their species. Here, although we must not ask what is the end for which the being had to exist [as] so organized, [that being] still serves as a means extrinsically related to a purpose. For here, just as in the case of an individual, we can always go on to ask: Why did such a pair have to exist? The answer is: This pair is what first amounts to an organizing whole, even if not to an organized whole in a single body. (CJ, p. 425) Such a blind and providential naturalness in the relation of the sexes forestalls any question concerning the subjective impulse for generation. Nowhere in Kant is there an indication that he would take a feeling so incoherent as love-practically free yet guided by natural forces-seriously. 14 Wherever this happens, in the systems succeeding and surpassing critical philosophy, a metaphysics oflove complements and sustains the physiology of the formative drive: it inherits the role of qualitas occulta and serves as a supposed end point

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of the causal chain. This occult origin of organisms in love henceforth obscures the "technical" aspects of sexuality, which since the beginning of the nineteenth century have always been in need of a particular pedagogical enlightenment. Epigenius The problematic of generation also guides the juxtaposition of aesthetic and teleological judgment in the Critique of]udgment. 15 Kant judges both the objet d'art and the product of nature according to a standard of purposiveness; indeed, the definition of purpose and purposiveness is first given in the critique of aesthetic judgment (§ 10). In order to come to terms with the purposiveness proper to products of nature, judgment had to consider them according to their form of generation; and it was prompted, in pursuit of this origin, to suppose a will as a consequence of which organisms would make sense. Now the products of fine art, according to Kant, ought to appear as if they are products of nature: "Art can be called fine [schon] art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature" (CJ, p. 3o6). The lack of (mechanical) rules, which in the case of the product of nature compels one to assume a creative will, is a positive determination for the product of fine art. Fine art, like an organism, ought to appear to have no explicable ground: "Therefore, even though the purposiveness in a product of fine art is intentional, it must still not seem intentional; i.e., fine art must have the look of nature even though we are conscious of it as art" (CJ, pp. 306-7). The solution to this obvious paradox begets Kant's doctrine of genius. 16 Nature is at work in the genius as his innate creative force; as "nature in the subject" she produces fine art through him (CJ, p. 175). A genius is unable to reconstruct any ofhis particular productions because the force working within him slips away from every rule and every conceptuality. Yet it is not the singularity of the product or the act of production that prevents conceptual registration; a genius will create works that remain inexplicable to himself. The ability to repeatedly deliver "unruly" works of art is called

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originality and is part of Kant's conclusive definition: "Genius is the exemplary originality of a subject's natural endowment in the free use of his cognitive powers" (CJ, p. 3 I 8). With "genius" and "originality" Kant chose two concepts for his aesthetics that refer not merely etymologically to the dominant theme of generation in the Critique ofTeleologicalJudgment. The concept of originality is also featured in the discussion of things as natural purposes (CJ, p. 371); there it is the faculty to "separate and form" that guarantees individuality to the products of nature. Originality of the forming faculty differentiates organisms from purely mechanical "educts"; originality of the genius differentiates a product of fine art from a mechanical imitation. Whereas in aesthetics genius represents the natural side of art, in natural philosophy the formative drive represents the artistic side of nature. These interconnections come to light in the cautious manner peculiar to Kant and the claim of his philosophy; and it was precisely this caution, his tendency to postulate rather than determine, and his concession that there remained problematic areas in philosophy that his critics, from Fichte and Schiller onward, castigated as the deplorable incompleteness of his system. According to Kant-this warrants repeated emphasis-there need not be epigenesis and an original formative drive for human freedom or art inspired by genius to have a reason; rather, the results of the natural sciences and the findings of a critique of reason allow us to proceed as if this formative drive existed. The reproach that such Kantian pronouncements stem from a fundamental indecisiveness was raised from the standpoint of systems believed to be further developed; systems, in which a higher degree of inner "connectivity" -or organizationwas equated with a stronger claim to truth. Kant stuck to his distinction: "organism," "formative drive," and "epigenesis" are regulative concepts of reflective judgment.

CHAPTER 3

Self-Generation ofPhilosophy: Fichte

Land Surveyor and Apostle Kant saw himself as the land surveyor employed by Queen Metaphysics; he was proud to have "not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but ... also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place" (CR B 294). Fichte was concerned with the generation, the production of knowledge, rather than with charting: "The science of knowledge [Wissenschaftslehre] invariably attests to the fact that only as generated [erzeugt] does it acknowledge the I as pure and does it place it at the beginning of its deductions." 1 But Fichte, who after all had started his career as Kant's double, went to great lengths to disavow this paradigm shift from applied geometry (the feudal science per se) to bourgeois preoccupations with physiological generation. He insisted on presenting The Science of Knowledge as an organic outgrowth ofKantian philosophy and, at the same time, as an unfolding and exegesis of the Kantian letter. Evangelical references abound whenever Fichte speaks about his relationship to Kant; he projected himself as the philosopher whose system-unmarred by the negativity of critique-was just an amplification and organization ofKant's doctrine. That is why the opera-

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tive concept for his reinterpretation of critical philosophy is also the key concept of Christian hermeneutics: spirit, or Geist: This is not the place to show, what can manifestly be shown nonetheless, that Kant also knew very well what he did not say. Nor is it the place to give the reasons why he neither could nor would say everything that he knew. The principles established and yet to be established here are obviously the basis of his own, as anyone can convince himself who is willing to make a study of the spirit ofKant's philosophy (which should not indeed be lacking therein). (Fichte, Science of Knowledge, p. I 7 I) At times the tone of Fichte's preaching of the Kantian gospel reaches truly apostolic heights: At all times I have said and I say it here once more that my system is not different from Kant's-i.e., it contains the same view [Ansicht] of the problem, but in its procedure it is entirely independent of the Kantian presentation [Darstellung]. I have said this neither to hide behind a great authority nor to try to find outside support for my doctrine, but in order to tell the truth and be just [urn die Wahrheit zu sagen und gerecht zu seyn]. ( Versuch einer neuen Darstellung, Gesamtausgabe, pt. I, vol. 4, p. I 84) And just like his apostolic model, Fichte, fighting not only the infidels but also the philistine literalists [Buchstiibler] among the Kantians, 2 dissolves the text of philosophy into pure spirit: "The Science of Knowledge is of a kind that cannot be communicated by the letter merely, but only through the spirit" (Science of Knowledge, p. 250). Hence the well-known problems of presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre, evident in its torturous history of repeated reformulation and halting publication, hence the employment of traditional protestant, even pietist, appeals to his listeners and readers: "Concentrate only upon yourself avert your gaze from everything that surrounds you and direct it toward your interior; such is the first demand philosophy makes on its apprentice" ( Versuch einer neuen Darstellung, Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, vol. 4, p. 186). These are the methodological consequences of a philosophy that attempts to generate organic structures from within rather than just accommodating them, as Kant seemed to have done, in the system ofknowledge.

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Kant's meditations had shown that organisms, as they had emerged under the auspices of epigenesis, posed a formidable problem for a philosophy in search of secure grounds of all experience. Their growth, their autokinesis, but above all their origination revivified modes of thought long believed buried with the rest of scholastic reasoning, most prominently among them the infamous causae finales. There is a lucid restatement of this problem in Kant's

Opus postumum: The word final cause (causa jirialis) literally contains the concept of a causal relationship on the part of something which precedes (in the sequence of conditions), but which, nevertheless, is also to succeed its own self (in the sequence of causes and effects)-for which reason it appears to contain a contradiction with itself For one thing cannot be the beginning and (in the same sense) the end of the same real relationship. (P. 30) Except, Fichte says, the absolute I. Fichte's "original insight;' his critique of the reflexive structure and ultimate ungroundedness of Kant's transcendental apperception, is to be seen-and unwittingly has been seen-in the terms of the preformation-epigenesis debate. 3 While he commends Kant for having demonstrated the epigenetic origin of the categories, Fichte charges him with having stopped short of a truly epigenetic account of self-consciousness. The "I think" upon which, according to the transcendental deduction, all our representations depend was for Kant a void thought, a tautology so shallow that all attempts at elucidating its "inside" would run aground. 4 Fichte, in his endeavor to close this gap, argues that Kant's mode of addressing this problem is still vitiated by vestiges of preformationism. For Kant had argued that the I that would think itself-that would make itself object of its thought-would always have to presuppose another I to which it would be given, or, as Kant was fond of saying, in which it would be contained, and so forth ad infinitum. This structure in which one set of objects becomes accountable only if it is contained in a larger "parental" set is, of course, precisely that of preformationist encapsulation. To escape this regress Fichte maintains that the I must be given to itself immediately, that it must produce, generate, or posit itself

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without external "kick-off" [Anstoft]. As a consequence, the mode of apprehending such an autoproduction has to change from objectifYing experience to intellectual intuition. Fichte repeats that such an intuition does not overstep Kant's reservations about intellectual intuition if both elements-intuiting and intuited I -are conceived as absolutely active and always codependent. To the Kantian fallacy of a preformed I that can never get at its own origin Fichte thus opposes the reciprocal structure of intellectual intuition in which the totality of the I is given while its constituent parts are still distinguishable. This is clearly an organic structure. Fichte's absolute I and his admission of intellectual intuition thus complete the situation of organisms in the center of both natural and theoretical philosophy. In a gesture foreshadowing Schelling and Hegel, Fichte sustained this movement from philosophical preformationism to total epigenesis of reason by folding the Third Critique onto the Critique cif Pure Reason, by uncovering and utilizing Kant's aesthetics and teleology as a veiled epistemological discourse. Constituting the very crease of this folding, practical philosophy and its postulations were revealed as the conditions under which such a reverse reading becomes possible. As a consequence, the epistemological territory so painfully staked out in the Critique of Pure Reason, except for such peaks as the transcendental apperception and the antinomies, sank below the threshold of philosophical perception and turned into the wasteland of "philosophy of the understanding" [ Verstandesphilosophie].

Practische Philosophic Enacting the self-proclaimed originality in form and content of The Science cif Knowledge, Fichte obscured the evidence for such a procedure; in the first published version of the Science of Knowledge it can be recovered only with extensive interpretative effort. But its traces are almost uncannily present in the unpublished preparatory sketches for The Science cif Knowledge, the manuscript Practische Philosophie from 1 794· 5 This soliloquy, with its ungrammatical sentences and often non-

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successive organization, its frequent halts and stops, its self-addressed admonishments ("This demonstration is so easy, and because of my desultory mode of thinking I almost would have been guilty of an important omission") and outbursts of satisfaction ("Again a good find"; "That is exactly what we wanted!") offers an almost uncannily close look at the birth of idealist philosophy (PP, pp. 213, 238, 250). With the possible exception of the "Alteste Systemprogramm," no document of idealist philosophy conveys as much of the excitement that must have inspired young philosophers in the 1790's. Especially in the second half of the second part of the manuscript, where Fichte construes his own philosophy of nature, the concept of epigenesis turns out to be of paramount importance. The first part of the manuscript contains, in a raw and nondiscursive form, experimentations with and meditations on the sequence of reflections that, later, in The Science ofKnowledge, will lead to the "deduction of representation" -that is, to the point at which the facti city of the not-I is deduced and the sequence of deductions that will constitute the theoretical part of The Science of Knowledge come to an end. 6 Fichte develops here the generation of quantity and quality-Kant's "mathematical" categories-as resulting from the activity of the absolute I. Once the reality of the not-I is demonstrated, however, the direction of argumentation is reversed: whereas the first, "theoretical" part descended from the positing of the absolute I through an "artificial" series of deductions initiated by the scientist ofknowledge to the facticity of the not-I, now-and it is here that practical philosophy begins for Fichte-in an ascending, "organic" series the already reflective but unconscious relation of the intelligent I to the not-I is once again reflected and thus made conscious. 7 For Fichte, this doubled reflection is practical because the intelligent I (not to be confused with the absolute I) depends on the reality of the not-I as its object of cognition; this dependency, however, contradicts the demand of the absolute I for autonomy. Kant's inability to hold on to the unity of the I in face of this difficulty had, in Fichte's reading, led to the assertion of three irreducible faculties with various degrees of independence: sensibility, understanding, and reason. To prevent such fragmentation-which

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is, after all, the raison d' etre of a science of knowledge-the I as intelligence must strive to overcome this dependency: Inasmuch as A; [the intelligent I] is dependent, it stands in contradiction to A. [the absolute I]. Now comes as a middle term~ [the practical I] and demands that dependent receptivity, since dependent it is, receive always that which agrees with A•. Now the determinations given to receptivity either depend on us (free actions) and there ~ demands it rightfully, and can demand it (categorical imperative.) or they do not depend on us. (Moral Theology.) ... Striving aspires to make them all dependent on us, to make them adequate to the inner law of the I. (PP, pp. r82-83) Striving, then, is that unconscious activity that fuels the I and that observing reflection is able to bring onto the plane of consciousness whenever striving encounters an object that conforms with its own goals. It represents the practical condensate of the absolute activity of the I without, however, having causality. Striving might be endowed with purpose, but not with causality, since otherwise it could not be distinguished from will: I have already brought activity into philosophy through the action of the I in the determination of its self. An activity about which it cannot be said [that] it has causality is a mere striving. ... Preliminary definition: Striving is an activity that does not relate to its object like cause to effect. The purpose of striving is this relation. With this transition I have still not designated a higher faculty of desire, but only a faculty of desire in general. (PP, p. r83) As appears ever more clearly in Practische Philosophic, Fichte defines desire no longer as potential faculty but as expressive force. Inasmuch as it does not function as effective cause in the practical relation of the I to the not-1, however, the striving force itself cannot become an object of thought. In order to integrate this force into its discourse, practical philosophy after Fichte has to appeal to the very feeling that it first introduced into the chain of reasoning:

Striving is not a thought and can therefore not be defined positively, i.e., be deduced, but only negatively by something contradicting it. Striving is the relation of the subject to the object, like cause to effect, which nonetheless should not be recognized as cause and effect. - This I cannot think. Very

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well! You should not. You only should not think anything that is wrong: what is right you can only feel. Feeling is opposed to thinking. 8 The activity of striving-grounding, yet itself without ground and cause, apprehended only by feeling-bears an enormous argumentative burden in Practische Philosophic and later in The Science rf Knowledge. It becomes the bridge, allegedly sought in vain by Kant, between theoretical and practical faculty, that "unknown root" to which the foundational problems raised in the Critique ofjudgmentunity of nature, harmony of reason and nature-may ultimately be retraced. Practical philosophy as "striving philosophy" (PP, p. 265) is no longer the domain of a separate faculty of desire, but ground for the entire system of philosophy. Theoretical and practical philosophy may henceforth be distinguished only in a secondary fashionthat is, according to their position in the sequence of reflection. It is the fundamental force of striving-still before it is broken down into "drive," "feeling," and "longing" 9 -to which the organization of the philosophical system, postulated yet not achieved by Kant, is entrusted: This demand, that everything should conform to the self, that all reality should be posited absolutely through the self, is the demand of what is called-and rightly so-practical reason. Such a practical capacity of reason has been postulated hitherto, but not proved. The injunctions issued now and then to the philosophers, to prove that reason was practical, were therefore fully justified.-Now such a proof must be carried out in agreement with theoretical reason itself, and the latter should not be ousted from the case by mere decree. (Science of Knowledge, pp. 232-33) This proof of reason's ability for action, based on the concept of striving, succeeds only by annihilating the specific difference between theoretical and practical reason: This can be achieved no otherwise than by showing that reason cannot even be theoretical, if it is not practical; that there can be no intelligence in man, ifhe does not possess a practical capacity; the possibility of all presentation is founded on the latter. And this proofhas now just been effected, in showing that, without a striving, no object at all is possible. (Ibid.)

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Having established the methodological primacy of the "alldecisive practical" reason, 10 Practische Philosophic demonstrates what an aesthetics and a philosophy of nature based on such a philosophical unconscious would have to look like. 11 Chapter by chapter the Critique ofjudgment is incorporated into the organism of the science of knowledge. First the faculties of sensation [Empfindung] and intuition [Anschauung] are vivified as so many "lower" stages in the expression of striving. This is where Fichte reorganizes Kantian aesthetics along the trajectory of striving-it is a testimony to the overwhelming power the Third Critique must have had over Fichte and his contemporaries, but also a rare document by a philosopher who very quickly succumbed to the gravitational pull of practical concerns and abandoned aesthetics in favor of moral, legal, and political applications ofhis system. The presentation ofFichtean aesthetics ends with the deduction of the sublime; striving exceeds the limitation of the lower faculties and enters the realm of knowledge. Since quantity and quality as mathematical categories had been generated in the manuscript preceding and grounding Practische Philosophic, the Eigne Mediationen zur Elementarphilosophie, striving, having graduated to the form of judgment [Urteilskraft], now performs a reordering of the categories of relation. 12 From striving's perspective, judgment is doubly unfree in that it is subject to the jurisdiction of the understanding and its categories and is dependent upon the data of experience. Were judgment to realize its striving for freedom by ignoring the categories, were it to impose its own law, it would dissolve the understanding and become will; if, on the other hand, it were to abstract from all that is given through experience, it would no longer be distinguishable from pure imagination. Since "the final purpose of striving in general is to make the not-1 dependent on the I" (PP, p. 241)-that is, to realize its categorical imperative-and since furthermore the categories as products of the I represent "the I-ness of judgment" [das Ichliche der Urtheilskrqft] (PP, p. 242), the striving of judgment can consist only in a "confounding" [Verwechslung] of the remaining categories of relation.

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Judgment should strive to order something that is not given (neither through receptivity nor through intuition) .... In its ordering it wants to be independent from anything given-this can only mean that it expects after a given a.) a certain b., which should follow not according to any of these categorical laws, but according to the laws of its own striving. Thus judgment has a proper inner law of ordering (like receptivity and the imagination), which becomes conscious only if something is found that is adequate to it. I.e., it is a certain order dependent solely on the pure I, which the I strives to produce in the not-1. (PP, p. 241) The categories of relation stand, as Kant had established in the Analogies of Experience, in a certain hierarchical relation (Fichte says "sequence" [Reihe]) to one another. If the striving ofjudgment wants to assert itself, if it wants to become conscious and free, then it must posit something in nature that would correspond to the confounding of the categories of relation: Even the sequence (that is, not the a priori determined sequence, but the contingent one) should be dependent on the I. What kind of sequence would the I prescribe. I believe a sequence that would not be a sequence: i.e., removal of all external constraints in positing the sequence. It must be possible that accidens can be thought as substance and vice versa, cause as effect and vice versa, and community as not-community, as isolation. (PP, p. 241-42)

Confounding This then is Fichte's program for liberating natural philosophy from the bonds of the understanding. Each of the "confounded" categories must yield-or, as Fichte says, encounter-one irreducible phenomenon that Kant could integrate only with an appeal to the suprasensible and with his "artificial" distinction between the two types ofjudgment. From the confounding of the categories of substance and accidens results the phenomenon of motion, for only a moving or changing body can be accidens (changeable) and substance (permanent), and vice versa: "A moving body is permanent in time; it remains the same, but [is] changeable in space; and conversely, change-

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able in time I moving/ because it stays constant in space: because it keeps the same limitation" (PP, p. 243). Void of all bodies within it, space remains substantially unaltered, and moving bodies are of only accidental importance; yet motion can be ascertained only if the moving body preserves its substantial identity. Then Fichte inverts this configuration: a body can move and change over time-a house decay and collapse, for example-only if it does not lose its spatial identity. The first perspective is predicated upon Newton's concept of absolute space and time within which motion and change can be measured-on a perspective, that is, that Kant had shown to be dictated by the necessity of the understanding. For the alternative version, Fichte adopts Leibniz's thesis of relative space according to which the substance (identity) of a body over time is discernible only if the object takes "its" space with it. While these alternatives, in isolation, refer to the concept of passive motion and the lawful behavior of mechanical objects, with the confounded concept of motion, judgment, according to Fichte, has brought "life, an analogue ofjreedom, into nature" (PP, p. 243). Insofar as it satisfies the striving of judgment, motion, with all its ensuing physical determinations, is a practical concept. The system of Newton's physics and the discourse of natural forces that his physics had produced (to say nothing of the physico-theological proof of God's existence), are justified no longer by the theoretical understanding and its unilinear categories; they become part of an energetic and ultimately practical philosophy: "[Motion] may not be conceived without a certain vim locomotivam, the opposite of the vis inertiae of matter-points to a primum motorem. . . . From this emerges the vis centrifuga of the body, the vis loco motiva, the Newtonian doctrine of attraction, which are all perfectly commensurate with the striving system of the human spirit" (PP, pp. 244, 250). Fichte "encounters" the concept of active, internal motion first, because he goes down the list of relational categories; with this step, long before the assurances to the contrary, he is in evident conflict with Kant who-as Fichte well knew-had mentioned such a derivation of motion from pure concepts, repeatedly and at crucial

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junctions ofhis argument, as one of the cardinal fallacies of uncritical philosophy. 13 Confounding the correlates of the second relational categorycausality and dependence-yields, as was to be expected, the concept of purpose. Again Fichte's genetic procedure bypasses the epistemological difficulties associated with the thought of purpose in Kant's work. He posits the first link of a sequence of events as striving (a.), the second as its effect (b.): "The effect b. appears only when it is not needed in an entirely different sequence. b. belongs to a certain sequence, and according to a certain law, which however is not its effective cause; rather a. is a cause from an entirely different sequence, namely, the sequence of time. Abstracted from the cause of a. itself, no other cause for a. may be found than its effect b." (PP, p. 254). Striving, Fichte had determined at the outset of the practical part, undercuts the categorical definition of causality. b.-as the effect or result of striving-cannot belong to the same causal sequence as the striving (a.) lest the understanding encounter only products of its own making and is therefore only and always successfully practical. It also cannot belong to a totally independent chain of cause and effect since in this case the understanding would continue to hold striving in its categorical grip. In order to produce a "genetic" concept of purpose, Fichte must navigate between the cliffs of randomness-inherent, as Kant had shown, in any concept of purpose-and a mere definition of will. The only relation, then, that judgment can confound between the elements of the two sequences is the temporal one. Every time a. occurs b. (its effect) occurs also-this is "normal" causality. But if a. is itself exempt from mechanical causality ("abstracted from the cause of a.")-if it is, for example, itself the "result" of a striving-then the regular occurrence of b. would be the only way to account for the regularity of a. The cause could be determined by its effect; mechanical causality would be confounded into purpose. And since the categories of relation are hierarchically connected, purpose is the striving of motion, is "the law, that proscribes a direction, that posits the purpose for the hitherto blind striving for motion" (PP, pp. 254-55).

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This "material" derivation of purpose is a crucial junction in Fichte's system. Necessary though it may be for the success of any idealist philosophy of nature, purpose is a concept ineluctably bound to intentionality and thus to a level of philosophical discoursepractical philosophy in the "old" order-the generability of which Fichte has yet to demonstrate. Purely natural purposes, to put it in Kantian terms, reverse the order of temporal succession and would in their indefiniteness destroy the very possibility of experience. Striving, although introduced by Fichte as an unconscious activity, does not "encounter" the phenomenon of purpose but recognizes itself as purposeful. Fichte's groping for examples in this second confounding shows that there are no pure purposes to be encountered in the not-I but only organisms the origin and life of which can be explained by means of an underlying purpose. Organisms, however, will only be the result ofFichte's confounding of the third category of relation and have thus not yet been "encountered." Indeed, the transplantation of pure purpose into the discourse on nature occurs only at the cost of a petitio principii. For Fichte's "preliminary definition" of striving already contained the notion of purpose: "Striving is an activity that does not relate to its object like cause to effect. The purpose of striving is this relation" (PP, p. 1 83). The deduction of purpose thus seems to justify a later remark in the margins of the manuscript: "It is terrible that I never pursue the path systematically but always spot in advance what I want to find" (PP, p. 258). In order to dispel doubts about this crucial point, Fichte thus admonishes himself: "Give examples 1.) The equilibrium of the fluid [body]. At the surface of water A you draw a bucket of water at place b. Then the entire surface slants and fills up b. again. In the sequence of time the slant is a cause, the filling up an effect; but conversely, the filling up is the purpose of the slant" (PP, p. 254). While one might object that this entire sequence-except, of course, for the decision to draw the bucket-can be explained in the irreversible terms of hydrostatics, the second example introduces striving's natural counterpart, the formative drive. Blumenbach had argued that one indication for the presence of such a drive was the self-healing ability of all organisms; and Kant had used trees to

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illustrate the nonmechanical, generative power of organisms: "2.) Restoration of injured parts (self-healing) of organized bodies. You peel a tree; the internal organization restores the bark. (The labor of the tree is the cause, the new bark is its effect; yet conversely also the purpose of the labor, and the labor consequence of this purpose)" (PP, p. 254). Since the internal organization produces purposive activity, Fichte will interpret it as the material manifestation of the concept of purpose, as drive [Trieb]. This assumed drive then will make it possible-just as it did for Blumenbach and Kant-to reverse the reading of the chain of cause and effect. Only for Fichte this is no longer just a heuristic assumption. But first Fichte confounds the last category of relation, community [ Wechselwirkung]. As Kant had shown in the Third Analogy, this category determines the experience of simultaneity and wholeness. Fichte therefore works with the example of the whole and its parts. All parts in a whole are continuous and limit each other; from this emerges the whole: B is a part of A, and conversely, A is a part of B. Is that possible in space alone. It seems not; therefore one would have to involve time: but what is a whole in time. It arises through successive completion. At moment a, A is not yet a whole; it passes through the moments b, c, d, and then it becomes [a whole] perhaps only at e. (PP, p. 245) Judgment strives after a whole that it presupposes if it is given a part; it anticipates what a part will be like once it becomes a whole. In this last confounding, judgment develops the concept of organic growth. This concept contains the former two, since growth is a form of motion; and in organisms, whole and part stand in purposive relation to one another. With this definition of growth as successive completion rather than as gradual aggrandizement, Fichte subscribes to the epigenetic model of morphogenesis. What is more, with the deduction of growing organisms the concepts realized by the striving of judgment are shown to grow organically from one another; the three categories of relation, confounded and taken together, posit, or enable the encounter with, "organized natural products" (PP, p. 246).

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This progressive, generative tendency of the striving of judgment leads Fichte to fundamental reflections upon his position toward what he perceives as the disjointed, inorganic argumentation of Kant's philosophy. Purposiveness is no longer a form of judgment; on the contrary, from the meditations on striving results a "material law of the drive, i.e., that which prescribes its purpose. Instead of the Kantian concept a natural purpose is based on a posited striving" (PP, p. 255). Replacing Kantian categories-accused ofbeing mere concepts for activities-with a deduction of the activities that result in these categories is, as Schelling clearly saw, the fundamental idealist gesture. Fichte's confounding, in which two antinomical determinations are turned around the temporal axis-the axis ordering the dynamical categories-is thus a germinal form of natural dialectics. In Schelling's elaboration, the three confoundings will turn into the three potencies under which the "dynamic process" of nature can be comprehended. 14 But for Fichte it is the I that strives for organization, which it perceives in itself; its ideal is "a thoroughly organized matter; the whole universe should be an organized whole; and every little part of this universe [should be] an organized whole belonging necessarily to this whole" (PP, p. 247). The distinction between mechanical and teleological explanations of nature, a pivotal point of Kant's considerations, is thus abolished in favor of a natural philosophy built on the "system of striving": How can a teleological system be brought into accordance with sheer mechanism, [a question) Kant also has sought to answer.... In my system [this question] does not even arise: since this entire kind of teleological judgment is based on a striving of the faculty of judgment, which should, and has to be, in conflict with theoretical judgment; and strives to incorporate it. In its ideal, i.e., in the thoroughly organized universe, there is no mechanical judgment, but only a teleological one. (PP, pp. 262-63)

It comes as no surprise that in this totally organized universe

"Blumenbach's system, which presupposes the formative drive and the adoption of that which convenes to each body" rises to constitutive

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power (PP, p. 256). In the cycle of becoming and dying, which Fichte deduces from the successivity of the three "categor[ies) of striving" (PP, p. 254), there must be place for natural generation: Something about generation in relation to the preceding observation. The grain of seed has a motive drive according to laws, with the purpose of organization. This drive is suppressed. For the seed is ripe, it has its peifection, it is fully organized: it lies dead for the sake of this; in order to be effective again it must be damaged, it must be destroyed. By this means its drive is set into motion and it labors until the full attainment of the goal. The organization has an attainable goal. (PP, p. 259) This account of epigenetic generation can be integrated into the striving system with all the more conviction since it is sanctified (as the notion of a purposeful death already intimates) by Fichte's hermeneutic role models, John and Paul: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24). "You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or some other grain" (1 Cor. 15:36-37). The spiritual residue of the drive situated in the seed, with its purposeful striving according to self-imposed laws, nourishes for Fichte, at least in principle, the hope that Kant had categorically called "absurd," the hope "that perhaps some day another Newton might arise who would explain to us, in terms of natural laws unordered by any intention, how even a mere blade of grass is produced."15 Rejecting preformationist notions of envelopment, Fichte writes: "The blade is not enveloped in the seed; rather the drive (the spiritual in it) works the unorganized matter, according to its law of formation, into a blade, as a means toward the seeds. Its purpose is fulfilled with the maturation of the seed" (PP, p. 259). In such considerations the products of nature are divested of their radical contingency, which had prompted Kant to legitimize the use of teleological judgments; others could also be cited, such as Sdtze zur Erlduterung des Wesens der Thiere (Gesamtausgabe, pt. 2, vol. 5, pp. 421-30).

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Fundamental Force With the generative, yet ungenerated activity of striving-the material flip side of the transcendental activity of the J1 6 -Fichte introduces a fundamental force or energy that feeds the individual drives (e.g., the formative, cognitive, and communicative drives). It is this energy that guarantees the coherence of the philosophical system and the immediate applicability of the transcendental chain of reasoning for every field of knowledge. Thus he proclaims in a contribution to the journal Die Horen (which the editor Schiller refused to accept): "This and all the other particular drives and forces, which we could call thusly, are merely a particular employment of the one indivisible fundamental force [untheilbare Grundkraft] in humanity, and one has to be careful not to interpret these expressions in this or in any philosophical writing differently." 17 Kant, with polemical firmness, had cautioned against just such figures of explanation, in which the totality and universality of the claim would obliterate the critical distance. Here is one of his many exhortations in this regard: True metaphysics knows the limits of human reason, and one of the hereditary faults it can never deny is this: it cannot and must not ever think up any .fUndamental forces a priori (because then it would construe nothing but empty concepts); it can do nothing but reduce those with which it is acquainted by experience (insofar as they are only apparently different, but fundamentally identical) to the smallest possible number and search for the appropriate .fUndamental force, in the case of physics, within the world, in the case of metaphysics (that is, to demonstrate one [force] that is no longer dependent) outside the world. But of a fundamental force (since we know about it only by its relation of a cause to an effect) we cannot give any other concept and find any other name than one that is taken from the effect and that expresses just this relation. 18

It transpires from Fichte's foundation of natural philosophy by means of a confounding of the relational categories that his procedure always turns around the axis of time. This is a consequence of the fundamental force of striving. Since the epigenetic origin of the categories is no longer-as is the case with Kant-a heuristic as-

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sumption, and since the locus of their origination, the I, is no longer an inert, empty space, transcendental philosophy after Fichte has to make transparent the absoluteness and lawfulness of the I's activity. Therefore, the application of these categories is no longer, as Kant had argued, a matter of" a priori determinations of time in accordance with rules" (CR B 1 85), determinations, that is, of unilinear time by means of which categories are finitized, but an effect of the infinite activity of the absolute I. The phenomena that striving judgment encounters, or rather, produces-motion, purpose, organisms-are, by virtue of the reversed and confounded temporal sequence, infinite and thus an affirmation of infinite subjective activity. The transgression of Kant's indictment of fundamental forces for the sake of a deeper grounding of philosophy results therefore also in a translation of subjectivity into the producer of time.

The Laws ofEpigenetic Sexuality If organic phenomena indeed have their origin in the activity of the I, as Practische Philosophic tries to work out for the first time; if for an understanding of organisms epigenetic assumptions have to be made; and if it is, as Fichte's methodological innovations show as well as Schelling's and Hegel's, a necessary feature of idealist philosophy to let the phenomena of consciousness emerge before our eyes-then idealist philosophy can justifiably said to be peiforming epigenetic origination rather than just acknowledging or incorporating it. Practische Philosophic is only a first rough sketch of this endeavor; it is not only formally incomplete but also conceptually fissured. This became especially clear when in the execution of the master program-successive overcoming of posited objectivity through self-realization-judgment was said to encounter purpose, its own formal procedure, as a "material" configuration of the not-I. Schelling, here again Fichte's best reader, will close this fissure by deriving organisms straight from the second category of relation and by determining community as the community of organisms-that is, as the organic universe. But this gap in Fichte's chain of deduction is

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significant; it constitutes a stalling moment of self-recognition that is overcome only by heightened rhetorical and conceptual efforts. The same moment occurs in Fichte's Sittenlehre and his Naturrecht, two treatises on applied practical philosophy, since the Wissenschqftslehre had shown that reason is always practical. In these extraordinarily rigid works Fichte's deductions again cover the whole field, from the first absolute principle of autoactivity to the duties of the lowly classes "to honor the members of the higher classes" or the philosophical necessity for the "presentation of the passport at the border." 19 The moment of self-recognition occurs here in the encounter with femininity. We know already from the beginning of Practische Philosophie that the I, in order to arrest its own traceless activity, posits itself as passive. The practical treatises turn this theoretical necessity into a practical encounter and bestow the role of passive matrix for the develpment of the I on women. This constellation not only demonstrates on the highest philosophical level the tight connection between postcritical epigenetic approaches and misogyny; it also has to be regulated by almost medieval strictures because it contains a possibility that would effectively destroy Fichte's dialectics: passivity that would posit itself as passivity. Already in The Science of Knowledge, the successive unfolding of the "science of the practical" had led to a further specification of the activity called striving, the translation, that is, of the I into the not- I. The need to fix and to limit the "self-productive striving" had yielded the proper definition of drive: But a self-productive striving that is fixed, determinate and definite in character is known as a drive. (The concept of a drive implies 1.) that it is founded in the internal nature of that to which it is ascribed; hence, that it is brought forth by the causality of the latter upon itself, i.e. through the fact of its own self-positing. 2.) that, precisely for this reason, it is something fixed and enduring. 3 .) that it aspires to causality outside itself, but that, insofar as it is to be merely a drive, it has no causality solely through itself.-Hence the drive is merely in the subject, and by nature does not issue beyond the latter's sphere.) 20 The "science of morals" points out that it is through the concept of drive that the I, always suspect of pure intellectuality, experiences

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itself as belonging to nature, and that, if indeed cognizing is positing, nature, too, has to be conceived as "driven": The drive is my attribute insofar as I am nature, not insofar as I am intelligence; for intelligence as such has, as we have seen, not the least influence upon the drive. Consequendy, the concept of drive is synthetically united with the concept of nature, and the former is to be explained from the latter; and everything that is thought by means of the latter concept is thought as a drive. (SSL, Gesamtausgabe, pt. I, vol. 5, p. I u) Drive as posited striving connects the I with nature and can thus function as a warranty that the dichotomy of is and ought, of which Fichte and his followers accused Kant's practical philosophy, may indeed be overcome, that a seamless transition from theoretical to practical philosophy is in fact possible. With the intermediary assumption of the drive, Fichte believes he accomplished what was unthinkable for Kant, namely, "to make freedom conceivable even from natural philosophy" (ibid., p. 129). In order to complete the deduction of the moral law with all its specifications, Fichte proceeds to determine more precisely the "driven" naturalness of the I. The confounding procedure ofjudgment, known and used since Practische Philosophic, again yields the determination of the I as organism: its coherence cannot be explained on the basis oflinear causality, which characterized the drive in its undetermined form. 21 Furthermore, individual organisms in a thoroughly organic nature must entertain "driven" and lawful relations; unlike dead, self-sufficient matter, they require other organisms for their maintenance: This natural law may be expressed as follows: every part of nature strives to unite its being and its activity with the being and activity of another determinate part of nature, and if one considers the parts extended in space, to flow together in space with them. This drive is called the formative drive [Bildungstrieb], in both the active and the passive sense of the word; the drive to form and to undergo formation: and it is necessary in nature; not an alien ingredient, without which it [nature] could still exist. (Ibid., p. I 17) With this conceptualization of the formative drive the "middle term," 22 as Schleiermacher quickly recognized, was secured with

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which to connect in an instinctive, yet lawful way the I not only with nature, but also with other driven I's. Seventeen years after Blumenbach formally introduced the term to solve an impasse in physiology, Bildungstrieb can now be used divested of all narrow scientific connotations. 23 Its extraordinary flexibility, amplified by the uncontrollable polysemy of the word Bildung, helped it rise through the ranks of philosophical concepts to the transcendental point where theoretical, practical, and natural philosophy find their articulation. But Fichte, at least in his private notebooks, displays an almost Nietzschean clairvoyance with regard to the intrinsic violence in concepts such as "Bildung" and "modification": "The human being has an irresistible drive to assume rational beings outside of itselfand to modify . . . and form their reason through his own: the human being wants to dominate [der Mensch will herrschen]" (Siitze, Gesamtausgabe, pt. 2, vol. 5, p. 165). Such violence, however, runs deepest not when the I goes about its business of overcoming the obstacles posed by the not-I or other l's-that is only rational aggression inherent in the I's progress. Violence wells up to the published surface of the system when the Fichtean I faces the possibility of necessary passivity. As Practische Philosophie has shown, passivity as mere positedness is comparatively easy to deal with; and given the universality of their reasonable equipment, other active, positing I's will in the end be able to restrain their violent impulses and harmonize within a reasonable state. But for the deduction of natural law the intercourse between the sexes has to be incorporated, and Fichte has to achieve this incorporation on a level that is both natural and able to sustain the fabric of a lawful community. Here again, the parameters of an epigenetic philosophy of nature come to bear on the construction of the system. No longer the system of predetermined forms and mechanical procedures, nature, endowed with infinite epigenetic productivity, has to find an internal way to limit and concretize the activity of her forces in specified forms. The transition from natura naturans to natura naturata, that is, has to be accounted for without recourse to external

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factors, such as God's intervention or the rationality of classificatory schemata. The great advantage of epigenetic interpretations was to provide such an account by supposing the activity of a specific formative force that, though essentially unitary, appears in nature always as split into complementary-that is, sexual-counterparts. Relentless activity is the essence of this force; it is, after all, posited by the primordial activity of the absolute I. The decisive interpretation of Fichte and his fellow philosophers of gender-supported, to be sure, by a long tradition stretching back to Aristotle, but a decision nonetheless insofar as it follows no logical necessity-is to identifY the pole of activity in nature with the male, and to reserve for the female the function of passive, material boundary, which is to keep the male force from traceless self-consummation. Complementary sexual differentiation thus guarantees both the absolute productivity of natural drives and the naturalness of specific forms. 24 If, as Fichte argues, the essence of femininity is passivity or suffering [Leiden], woman's sexual drive also is essentially passive. Drives are natural forces on their way to subjectivity, and the apparent contradiction in the term "passive drive" can easily be overcome by a reference to Newton's equally passive inertial forces. As Practische Philosophic had intimated, and as all of Fichte's subsequent writings would bring out in great detail, reason consists in the I's ability to bring its own drives-its own nature-before itself; drives are defined as lack (of causality), and the necessity of their satisfaction ensures the naturalness of the I as much as the subjectivity of, or in, nature. It is apparent that the relentless combativeness of this scenario is due to a conception of self-consciousness as absolute activity. This is precisely what makes the deduction of female nature so difficult for Fichte. While the male can posit his own active drive as an object of satisfaction without violating the conditions of rationality, the sexually active passive woman would risk banishment from the species: It is absolutely against reason that the other [sex] propose to itself the satisfaction of its sexual drive as an end, because in that case it would make a mere passivity its end. Hence, the female sex, because of its inner disposi-

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tion, is either not rational, which contradicts our presupposition that all human beings should be rational; or this disposition cannot become developed in consequence of its particular nature, which is a self-contradiction, because we would have to assume a disposition in nature that nature does not accept; or, finally, it [the other sex] can never propose to itself the satisfaction of its sexual drive as an end. Such an end and rationality cancel each other out entirely. (Naturrecht, Gesamtausgabe, pt. r, vol. 4, p. 97) The problem is considerable: woman must not abandon herself to her sexual drive but must still give herself in order to comply with the law of epigenetic procreation. To solve the quandary, a supplement has to help overcome this paradoxical female disposition: "Love, therefore, is the shape under which the sexual drive in the woman appears ... and this love is the natural drive of the woman to satisfy a man" (ibid., p. 100). Again the Leitmotiv of love sounds in an epigenetic account of generation; not, as in preformationist or pangenetic versions, as an exhortation or physiological expedient, but as the ground that alone renders the otherwise irrational intercourse of the two sexes philosophically tolerable. Fichte's intransigent systematicity allows a rare glimpse at the philosophical archeology of human, not religious, love. While woman has to love, to satisfy, in order to cover up her shameful disposition, man, out of generosity dictated by reason, feels pity for her-that is all human love amounts to. The fragility of this interplay between shame and condescension is bolstered by the absolute impossibility of its opposite. The revulsion expressed in the imagined reversal of roles shows how vital love is for the erection ofFichte's idealist system: "There is no man who would not feel the absurdity to reverse the roles, and to assume in man a similar drive to satisfy a need of woman; a need the existence of which he can neither presuppose in woman nor imagine himself the instrument of without feeling ashamed to the innermost depths ofhis soul" (ibid., p. 101). Should woman nonetheless pursue the satisfaction ofher-evidently undeniable-drive, the very possibility of ethical relations, of Sittlichkeit, would be threatened: "The sexual drive of the woman in its rawness is the most revolting and

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most disgusting phenomenon in nature; and at the same time it demonstrates the absolute absence of all morality. The unchasteness of a woman's heart, which consists in an unmediated expression of her sexual drive, even if it would never erupt in any action, is the basis for every vice" (SSL, Gesamtausgabe, pt. I, vol. 5, p. 289). 25 Such bourgeois atrocities in Fichte's practical philosophy are the philosophical fallout of constitutive epigenetic presuppositions. The generative force of the absolute I repeats in philosophy the same gesture with which Blumenbach, assuming the working of an autokinetic drive on malleable organic matter, had struck down mechanistic physiology. While Kant's critical project was concerned with the limits of knowledge and thus with the finitude of the subject, Fichte's trickle-down model of absolute subjectivity seeks to encounter its own infinity within its field of knowledge. For this endeavor, as Practische Philosophic has shown in nuce, the phenomena of natural organization and in particular the epigenetic mode of organic origination provide the decisive point of transition insofar as their "confounded" temporal structure demonstrates the presence of subjectivity and infinity in nature. Fichte thus exceeds Kant's demonstration of the epigenetic origin of the categories and the heuristic assumption of natural purposes by arguing that not only do we know nature a priori, but that nature is a priori. 26 Translated into the territory of moral philosophy, human sexuality, as the performance of the origin of natural infinity and freedom in the form of a new human being, becomes in Fichte's pugnacious dialectics the site of unreasonable decision and violence. The acceptance of women into the realm of subjectivity-required by the universality of reason-thus coincides with their transcendental disenfranchisment: "Whether or not every human and civic right is due to the female sex as much as to the male [sex] could be a question only for him who doubts whether or not women are fully human. We are not doubtful about this .... But a question could certainly arise as to what extent the female sex could even want to exercise all her rights" (Naturrecht, Gesamtausgabe, pt. I, vol. 4, p. I29). It is the relentless negativity of Fichte's thought that supports

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these and other positions. The (male) I is not threatened by what it must negate but by what it cannot negate. As the Meditations have shown, the fundamental operation of subjective activity is the confounding of given, linear, time structures. This activity would become impossible if the structure to be confounded were already performing the confounding. Translated into intersexual relations, this impossibility would arise if women were to present themselves as always already anticipating man's negating or dominating impulse. To put it simply: "Take me" is a command from which the Fichtean I can only turn in revulsion. The specter of an originary female masochism that will haunt the discourse on female sexuality for a long time to come raises its head in Fichte's epigenetic philosophy of the I. It will function as an important motivation for confining the sphere of female activity but also as a convenient cover for the delights of suffering negated to the male subject. Figaro accepting the smacks of Suzanne at the end of Le Mariage is a reminder of the latter, Ottilie's servility, which excites every man in Die Wahlverwandtschafien (and every German scholar before Benjamin), an instance of the former. To escape this consequence, to erase "the trace of absolute passivity,"27 philosophy would either have to recast the epigenesis of subjectivity as the last and highest result of a history of self-consciousness originating in an originally sexualized nature (Schelling), or to explore the possibility of integrating the Fichtean scandal of self-negating negativity by making it the foundational element of the system (Hegel). The intraphilosophical assault on Kant's critical position by means of an all-out epigenetic approach to subjectivity, of which Fichte represents the first, decisive wave, was flanked by a second, corollary movement that often amounted to an attack against philosophy as such: the proposition of an epigenetic origin oflanguage. The language epigenetists were less concerned with the ultimate groundlessness than with the alleged purity of pure reason; and the unwillingness, or impotence, of certain (unmarried) philosophers to properly address the question oflanguage was often attributed to the impotence of philosophy vis a vis the "reality" or "sensuality" of

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language. Language, the fully developed position will maintain, is the ultimate epigenetic product inasmuch as at its very inception it combines materiality and intellectuality; language is the twin brother of or even the rightful heir to the position of transition and mediation that in "proper" philosophical discourse was accorded only to organisms.

CHAPTER 4

Epigenetic Origin in Language: Herder and Humboldt

Kant's Silence The quest for a satisfactory explanation for the origin and status of language at the end of the eighteenth century is, historically and structurally, related to the debate about the origin ofliving beings. As one of the more popular themes for academy competitions, it was discussed with intense public participation and had split the monde savant into opposing camps of those who argued that the origin of language was natural (or animalistic) and those who insisted that it was divine. 1 Clearly recognizable in these alternatives are the two biological models Kant had rejected in favor of the epigenesis of the categories: generatio aequivoca-that is, the gradual growth of inorganic matter into organisms (or of empirical knowledge into knowledge a priori), and preformationism, the creation of all natural forms since the beginning of the world (or the implantation of categories into the mind by "our maker"). Kant's rejection of these alternatives was based on the impossibility of either side's satisfying the conditions for knowledge a priori: generatio aequivoca might produce some amount of knowledge, which, however, would always lack universality and thus could not be systematized (just as the emergence of living beings from unspecified matter would leave open the all-important question of the

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fixity of natural forms); preformed categories, on the other hand, would allow for a semblance of a priori cognition but, because their origin would remain inscrutable, this cognition would be forever disjointed from its objects and thus radically contingent (just as the preformed forms would exclude all productivity and thus render nature an ultimately meaningless machine). As the case of Herder and Humboldt shows, any theory of the origin of language conscious ofKant's philosophy would ultimately have to confront these same difficulties. Kant had vindicated epigenetic originality for the categories as long as they referred to possible experience. While the process of this origination remained offlimits for critical philosophy, a circumscription of its locus was possible. Kant circumscribed it as the "I think" that was responsible for assigning every use of the categories-every thought-to a subject (analytical unity), as well as for the identifying function (A = A) inherent in any act of judgment of which the categories are but condensed forms (synthetic unity). 2 The critique of the "inhumane" emptiness of this locus, from which, according to Kant, "all use of the understanding, even all of logic, and, after that, transcendental philosophy" (CR B 134 n.) depended, had been the starting point for Fichte's insistence on philosophy's task to demonstrate the generation of knowledge. Yet the primogeniture of philosophy in the inheritance of these fundamental theoretical problems, which Fichte was so fond of evoking, had been disputed much earlier when Kant's student J. G. Herder intervened in this debate with the poignantly anti-Kantian treatise, On the Origin if Language, of 1770. Fittingly, from then on the problem of language and knowledge seems to have been bequeathed mainly through the identity of initials: Herder's position, along with that of Kant, was criticized-if not vilified-by their mutual friend, the incommensurable J. G. Hamann; and the Fichte student W. v. Humboldt effectively ended this debate with his university reform and his late writings on language in the 182o's and 183o's. Humboldt's application of fully developed epigenetic reasoning to the debate about the origin and function of language would, after lying dormant for about a century, again become the

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source of inspiration and criticism for such antagonistic positions as those ofHeidegger and Habermas. Not that Humboldt had found a solution. Just as the epigenesis of organisms was not a solution but a positioning that allowed specific investigations into morphogenesis to proceed without each time calling into question the nature of scientific procedure as such, Humboldt's epigenesis oflanguage(s) was successful in opening the interior of language-semantics, phonetics, grammatical structures-to historical investigation without having to constantly demonstrate the referentiality or signification of these elements. As a student of Fichte, Humboldt saw language largely as a means of autoactive subjectivity and thus shared in the consequences of an overpowering and ultimately hysterical dialectics. Language, the developed epigenetic argument would state, rather than just being grafted onto one of the branches of cognition, is born from the intercourse of thought and sensibility. By that very fact it testifies to the irreducible unity of sensibility and understanding; it is an expression and an overflow of the infinite activity and productivity of the subject. Languages, like organisms, are endowed with a formative force, and their value can be measured according to the complexity of their articulation. Kantian formalism, by contrast, is speechless and needs to be supplanted by a linguistic philosophy that encompasses the whole human being. Hopelessly logocentric as this position might sound today, it was instrumental in redrawing the institutional borders between philosophy, linguistics, and literary studies in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Herder's arguments for the state's responsibility to bring up its youth linguistically able, nationally conscious, and politically reliable are taken up, in a slightly more cosmopolitan form, by Humboldt in his proposals for the reform of Prussia's higher education. Humboldt's writings and reforms positioned linguistic studies-historical and theoretical linguistics, classical philology, literary hermeneutics-at the heart of a system ofhigher education whose declared aim was the recruitment of motivated and able civil servants. Against this backdrop, the "linguistic turn" in the 196o's and 1970s, advocated as a further liberation oflinguistics from

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the strictures of philosophy and literary studies, loses much of its emancipative charm. The arguments directed against the stifling compartmentalization of the university in the 196o's curiously resemble the objections made almost two hundred years earlier against Kant's philosophy. 3 From the perspective ofHerder and Humboldt, Kant's refusal to unify his philosophical projects under the aegis oflanguage seemed all the more outdated and stubbornly scholastic, since to them disciplined philosophy as such was to be overcome; it was but a preparatory stage in a comprehensive theory of communicative action. Common to their arguments-Hamann's extraordinary position is only obliquely involved in this debate-is the claim that language is not a superadded means of communication or an aesthetic play but an immediate expression of reason, and thus a genuine and spontaneous subjective activity. For Kant, by contrast, language is always pathological. As he remarks repeatedly, the first appearance oflanguage (not necessarily its origin) is the cry to announce one's own existence-a cri de passion in the literal sense-which even in its more articulated versions is forced into passively received, historically contingent languages. 4 Against this assumption, Herder and Humboldt had to show that the process oflanguage acquisition is in fact a sort of active anamnesis-hence their philosophical and practical preoccupation with "modern" pedagogics as a technique of eliciting knowledge rather than training it. Furthermore, for Kant any concept of language as such is, of course, empty inasmuch as language, ifever there was one, has undergone indelible historical mutations and "exists" only as the plurality of individual languages. 5 It is therefore unfit to immediately express the universality ofreason. Herder will ultimately reject the principality of reason as vacuous and replace it with his ideas about the organic nature of historical development; Humboldt seeks to escape such consequences with a twofold approach: he argues for an implicit hierarchy oflanguages according to their degree of articulateness, in which the ideal language would also be the most rational one, and he concedes the inadequacy of languages to the universality of reason with his famous thesis of the radicallinguisticity of worldviews.

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Ultimately, for Kant the expulsion oflanguage from the realm of pure reason is motivated by the impossibility of securing identitywhich is one of the conditions of categorical thinking-by means of language. The "I think" in its emptiness can never be replaced by the "I speak" -not only would this result in the unintelligible chatter of a doubled language (much like Bertie Wooster's frequent" 'I say,' I said"), and not only would such an act always be subject to the contingency of individual languages and their performative loops, 6 but the "I speak" would also always be threatened by the Cretan's "I lie," by the logical opacity and literary dubiousness by means of which language maintains its own unreasonable afterlife. 7 In the generation debate, Kant's reservations about language show that the epigenesis of the categories does not tolerate next to it the epigenesis of a less specific mode of conception-languagewithout giving up the critical void in its origin. This is the reason why Herder and Humboldt anticipate and apply the Fichtean strategy of demonstrating rather than postulating the epigenesis of the categories, only this time by insisting on their inalienably linguistic nature. As the discussion of Fichte's procedure and its results have shown, the necessary distance upon which the critical enterprise was built is thus given and filled up, and theory, as the case of Humboldt shows perfectly well, is always concerned with its practical implantation. Kant's silence must, therefore, be heard as his refusal to unify the two sources of cognition under the name oflanguage. It is not a fear of language; it is even less a fear of the aesthetic seduction of language. As the relevant paragraphs in the Critique ofJudgment show, Kant's definition of symbolic hypotyposis as an essentially allegorical procedure might indeed be a solitary light in the theory ofliterature during the long dark night ofRomanticism. 8 A Price Question The Berlin Academy of Science had wondered in its Preiifrage of 1769 whether human beings, "abandoned to their natural faculties," are capable of inventing language. 9 The very first sentence of Her-

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der's essay, "Already as an animal the human being has language" (pp. 87 I 697), 10 changes the parameters of the investigation. With enormous rhetorical expenditure he proceeds to show that the choosing between empirical and divine origin is unproductive: both modes of arguing are circular or-an even stronger criticism coming from a student of Kant-tautological. Indeed, Herder's rejection of Condillac's and SiiBmilch's hypotheses follows much the same model Kant would use in the deduction of I787. The transition from inarticulate cri de passion to general concept in the sensualist scenario remains just as inexplicable as God's gift oflanguage, which always presupposes an understanding of the gift. The only way to demonstrate the humanity of language, therefore, is to expose the "necessary genetic cause [Grund] for the emergence of a language" (pp. I o8 hI 6) _11 Herder's treatise thus yokes together the necessity or naturalness oflanguage with its inventive freedom under a higher tautology, that of human essence: "Language has been invented! Invented as naturally and necessary to the human being as the human being was a human being" (pp. I I 8 I 734). This reorientation of the original question toward the Grund in which contradictory modalities-freedom, associated with the sensualists; necessity, conjured by the theologians-still coalesce in nonexclusionary unity is a perfect example of epigenetic questioning, and as such a daring anticipation oflater developments in natural philosophy. 12 The first step in this reorientation is the liquidation of the rigid division between the faculties, by means of which Enlightenment anthropologies had defined the human being. Unlike his ancestors, who were composed of a certain number of sensory and intellectual faculties that lay dormant until provoked by the appropriate stimulus (Buffon's Adam is the most charming of these creatures), 13 Herder's man is sustained and driven by one unitary, foundational force: Call this entire disposition of man's forces understanding, reason, reflection, call it what you will. It is all the same to me, as long as you do not take these names to stand for separate forces, or for gradual increments of animal forces. It is the total arrangement of all human forces, the total economy of his sensuous and cognitive, of his cognitive and volitional nature; or rather,

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it is the unique positive force of thought, which, together with a particular organization of the body, is called reason in the human being and becomes technical prowess [Kunsifert(gkeit] in the animal, which in him is called freedom and becomes instinct in the animal. (pp. 109-I0/717) Force = Reason = Freedom: this is the equation Herder uses in attempting to unhinge the circular or tautological constructions of his predecessors. But the constancy of the equation is threatened from the outset, as the positivity of force and reason is offset by the negativity of freedom. For Herder, freedom is nothing-the equivalent of the absence of instinctual bonds, of "limitation to a single point" (pp. I I I 17 I 9); and force and reason are therefore endlessly bound to supplement this fundamental lack of orientation. All invocations of the positivity, unity, and originality in the fundamental force notwithstanding, 14 this supplementary function afflicts reason and its natural expression, language, with a negativity that will ultimately destroy the autogenetic construction. It is this negativity that Herder calls man's "Besonnenheit" or reflection-"the moderation of all forces into this general direction" (pp. I I3/72o). It functions, on the one hand, as the anthropologically constitutive restraint of instinctual desire, and on the other as the moment of interruption in the continuous flow of mental stimuli, and therefore as the possibility of recognition and repetition. Herder's own archeology, his rewriting of the language of Genesis into the genesis of language in the example of the woolly white lamb drowns these systematic aspects in a host ofbiblical and philosophical allusions. Amidst the rhetorical and logical bombast, one aspect of Herder's example is of particular interest within a history of the epigenetic argument. In the last part of his "proof" Herder talks about the limits imposed upon the human being qua sensible animal: No sensuous creature can feel outside itself[without a distinguishing mark] for there are always feelings which it has to repress, annihilate as it were, since it can forever apprehend the difference between two only by means of a third. Thus through a distinguishing mark? And what was that other than an interior distinguishing word [innerliches Merkwort]? The sound of bleating, apprehended by a human soul as the distinguishing mark became, by

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virtue of this reflection, [the] name of the sheep, even if no tongue had ever tried to stammer it. He recognized the sheep by its bleating: this was a conceived [gifa}Jtes] sign, through which the soul reflected distinctly upon an idea-and what is that other than a word? And what is the entire human language other than a collection of such words? (pp. II7-18/723-24)

This passage is central: whenever interpreters grant Herder's treatise systematic structure and philosphical coherence, this Urszene comes to occupy the position that in Kant's Critique cif Pure Reason will be claimed by the transcendental deduction, and in particular by the demonstration of transcendental apperception as the necessary condition for every act of cognition. 15 To make such precursorship plausible, however, the distinction between word, characteristic mark [Merkmal], and concept has to be erased in much the same way that Herder effectuates its erasure in such programmatic statements as: "We are here concerned with the inner, the necessary generation of a word as the characteristic mark of a distinct reflection" (pp. 126/73 1). The logical problems of Herder's example and the argument he draws from it-inherent in any reconstruction of a scene of unprecedented recognition-can be overcome only with the help of such an erasure. Only thus is the seamless translation from inner characteristic mark [Merkmal] to inner characteristic word or concept [Merkwort] to external communicative word [Mitteilungswort]1 6 -the transition, that is, that the earlier stage of the argument had prepared by equating force with reason and freedom-at all possible. This is not an accidental change in vocabulary, but an active step toward the elimination of a rhetorical and logical tradition with which Herder was intimately familiar. 17 But contrary to the standard criticism of the essay on the origin oflanguage, tinted by the later dispute about Herder's abominable Metacritique cif the Critique cif Pure Reason, it is not only the lack of adherence to determinable discursive rulessuch as the distinction between transcendental and empirical levels of investigation-that is reprehensible in Herder's text; much more irritating is the inconsistency of his own rules and semantics, most notably the deliberate confusion of the distinction between sound and tone. 18

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Sound and Tone Herder's interpretation of the sheep example was that the sound of the bleating, mediated through the sense of hearing and reproduced in the soul as a characteristic mark, would turn out to be the name of the lamb, the word by which it could be recognized. Naturally, this type of argument raises all sorts of questions about the onomatopoetic origins of words, and indeed much of Herder's reconstruction rests on the assurance that "all of nature produces tones" (pp. 133/737), to be picked up by the middle sense ofhearing. Herder understands perfectly well that the derivation oflanguage from the tones of nature would not do much to prove the freedom of the human being. To escape such deterministic consequences, he elevates the sense of hearing, itself straddling the very confines of interiority and exteriority, to the status of generative rather than receptive sense, thus dethroning the "cold," receptive visual sense that had furnished most of the information to Condillac's and Buffon's proto-humans. Just as the Merkmal is the third mediating term between two sensations, hearing, because it shares attributes with all the other senses, becomes an actively synthesizing mediator between all of the other senses. The logocentric consequences of this reconfiguration of the senses-installing the sensory network of "hearing oneself speak"are quite obvious in Herder's text. 19 Yet nothing reveals the abruptness of this move more than the fact that, according to Herder's own thought, the human soul could not even have heard, let alone recognized, the sound of the bleating. The "sound [Schall] of the bleating, apprehended by the human soul as a distinguishing mark," is in fact, in the language essay and in the writing that accompanies it, fundamentally different from the tones [Tone] of nature that make up the first vocabulary of the human soul. Just shortly before writing the essay Herder had expended considerable argumentative energy in the fourth ofhis Critical Forests [Kritische Waldchen] to demonstrate just this point: "Sound and tone are not one and the same." 20 In Waldchen, Herder argues not only for the interiority of music, but also-closer to Rousseau than the language essay leads one to

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believe-for the original musicality of poetry, oflanguage in its most originary state. Sound [Schall] here is defined as being exclusively exterior; signs of such exteriority are the fact that it exhibits geometrical proportions and that it can be physically measured. As such, sound lacks any quality; it cannot be felt [empfunden] by the ear, which, as it does in the essay, functions as the medium, logogenetic sensor. The ear, imagined by Herder as a "string instrument [Saitenspiel] composed of auditive fibers that in number and position stand in a certain ratio, and are different in length," 21 can only conceive tones, which are qualitatively differentiated. Tones, as Herder puts it, are the "simple monads" of sound (Waldchen, p. I45), which in their intensive quality alone are the source of the pleasure we take in music, and they alone are perceived by the preformed apparatus of the ear. Sound, on the other hand, is "nothing but noise, mere undulations of air" (ibid.) and as such does not possess any characteristic marks that would allow for its recognition. Yet that was precisely Herder's central proposition, the "unique place" (pp. n8f724) of linguistic origination in the essay: "The sound [Schall] ofbleating perceived by a human soul as the distinguishing mark of the sheep became, by virtue of this reflection, the name of the sheep, even if his tongue had never tried to stammer it" (pp. I I 7 /724). Under the conditions set in Waldchen, the bleating would have been a recurring noise as undifferentiated and unrecognizable as the sound of the wind or the sea, or it was already a tone and the lamb would have done nothing less than reverse the constellation in Eden and announce to Adam its own name. In either case, Herder's goal, to demonstrate the human origin oflanguage, is missed, for nowhere in the essay does Herder show how and that the transition from sound to tone is effectuated. The force of reason and the means of reflection, or Besonnenheit, do not produce their own linguistic material and are therefore always passively confronted with the "natural" dichotomy between sound and tone. It is for this reason that the essay, and the ensuing anthropology of Ideen, cannot be taken as a valid answer to the question raised in the Critique of Pure Reason, or in post-Kantian systems. The pamphlet refuses to acknowledge the problems involved in the replace-

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ment of philosophical with linguistic structures of arguments (in light ofHerder's contemporary writing this is indeed a refusal). The claim of transcendental validity-that is, the identity of reason and language-cannot be supported by identifying concept and word, or tone and sound. With its attempt to demonstrate the equiprimordiality of reason and language, the essay effuses, as it were, an epigenetic desire that, however, is constantly thwarted by preformationist assumptions of the unquestioned parallelism of sound and tone. Further expression of the fragility of Herder's argument is the suffocating rhetorical (even by Sturm-und-Drang standards) bombast of the essay and the attempt to anchor the propagation of language in the hierarchy of the nuclear family. The infant child assimilates language "from the breast of the mother, on the knees of the father." 22 The naturalness of family successions and, above all, of paternalistic hierarchies amounts to one of the natural laws by means of which Herder seeks to secure his thesis. "Is it not law and perpetuation enough, this familial propagation of language? Woman, by nature so much the weaker part, does she not have to accept the law from the experienced, providing, language-forming man?" (p. 787). The essential difference between man and woman, so much part and result of the epigenetic construction of natural and moral philosophy, announces itself in Herder's failed epigenetic account of the origin of language; it will recur in Fichte and, massively so, in Humboldt. Yet in its failure the essay lays open the problem any thoroughly epigenetic theory oflanguage would have to confront. It is the question of articulation in its double-sided form: first as the subjective labor of articulating sound to tone; second as the objective suppression of noise in the signifying material. 23 Fichte's Language As its central proposition, A = A, demonstrates ad oculos, for Fichte the origin and status of language is of only secondary interest: the pure generativity of his philosophy, or rather of the science of knowledge, comes before language. The structure of reason is uni-

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versal, the terms chosen to represent it arbitrary. Precisely the epigenetic nature of The Science if Knowledge as the investigation into the prelinguistic generation of knowledge opens up the possibility of imposing a philosophically deduced terminology on the discourse ofknowledge. The chauvinism ofFichte's later Reden an die deutsche Nation is by no means a patriotic faux pas, but intrinsic already to the early deliberations in Uber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre: since the science of the conditions of science in its present state of potentiality (in which Fichte will keep it) is still nameless, and since, like every originary act, naming appears to be arbitrary, the unscientific name of philosophy-"the name of connsoisseurship, of amateurism, of dilettantism" -can be exchanged in favor of a national name: "The nation that will invent it [this science] would be well justified to give it a name from its own language." And a footnote continues: "It [the nation] would also be justified in giving it the remaining artificial concepts from its language; and this language, as well as the nation that speaks it, would thereby gain a decisive predominance [entschiedenes Ubergewicht] over all other languages and nations." 24 Based upon the same assumptions about the arbitrariness oflinguistic signs, Fichte's treatise Von der Sprachfahigkeit und dem Ursprung der Sprache brings together and separates in its title faculty and origin and is thus philosophically located between Herder and Humboldt. The attempt to demonstrate "that and how language had to be invented" is Herderian in its range (Siimmtliche Werke, val. 3, p. 97), and it is in obvious accordance with the general claims of the Wissenschaftslehre. Yet unlike Humboldt, Fichte clearly assumes the primacy of nonlinguistic thought. His question "How did the idea arise in human beings to communicate their thoughts by means of signs?" (ibid., p. 99) leads into a protohistory in which language emerges as the overcoming of the I's aggressive stance toward its environment. Its immediate reaction to objective nature, "subjugate or flee" (ibid.), is inhibited with regard to other l's. Language thus is an instrument in Fichte's combative dialectics between the I and the not-I, and it is grounded in sociality, not vice versa. The origin of language, therefore, is dependent upon the originality of the I and

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allows for a linear reconstruction of language development from primitive to ever more complex forms of expression. One's impression of Fichte's rather pedestrian treatise on the origin of language can be elevated by a look at his lecture notes. Here, motion, which Fichte had deduced from the confounding of substance and accidens, is posited in nature as the "self-determined drive for motion," 25 and as such it finds its expression in "articulation." The original freedom of the I can realize itself only if endowed with an articulate body: "The rational being distinguishes itself in the sensible world through nothing other than its shape [Gestalt], which is articulated for the employment offreedom.... I am I purely and simply to the degree in which I act in the sensible world; but I can only act in it to the degree in which I have an articulated body" ( Vorlesungen iiber Platners Aphorismen, in Siimmtliche Werke, vol. 4, pp. 79, 82). The I can only realize itself as free insofar as it opposes itself to other free individuals. But bodily contact with these others would deprive them of their freedom; for free reciprocity "a medium must be given through which the shape would be propagated, and this would necessarily be a more subtle matter by means of which one ought to act upon a free being" (ibid., p. 79). In their reciprocal communication rational individuals must therefore appear to one another in the shape of their freedom-that is, in their articulation: "But that to which their identity, the expression of their persevering personality, is tied in the sensible world is their shape. Hence this [shape] must appear also during their communication, it must appear to both reciprocally as persevering for the purpose of the possibility of[communication]. Accordingly, the medium which reciprocally expresses their shape to one another, not" (ibid.). The text breaks off here; but it is evident from the context that the only medium fit to both attenuate and transmit the substantiality of human Gestalt is language, and that these notes attempt to give a transcendental deduction oflanguage from the activity of the I. Fichte's Reden an die deutsche Nation of r8o8, in particular the infamous fourth speech, shows that the argument for a linguistically shaped worldview, for which Humboldt will be credited, rather

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than inducing a relativist attitude, can also unleash fearsomely nationalist arguments (see Siimmtliche Werke, vol. 7, pp. 257-300). Fichte's call to purge German of alien, in particular French, linguistic influence, is not only a further testimony to the deeply xenophobic nature of his philosophy (and to the provincialism in his upbringing); it shows that constitutively epigenetic thought has a particular need to keep its sources and the tributaries to its organic development unpolluted. If, as the worldview argument states and Fichte, somewhat at odds with the supralinguistic claims of the Wissenschaftslehre, maintains in the fourth speech, language is necessary for the constitution of the self-if, that is, the reflection upon the self is always deflected by the interference of improper (e.g., French) linguistic material, the outcome might indeed be a split Ich (e.g., into je and moi), rather than the realization and recuperation of the I. Preformationist linguistics had quite different interests: as Batteux's "Lettres sur la phrase frans:oise comparee avec la phrase latine" show (Cours de belles lettres, T. [val.] II, Paris 1747-48), here the goal is to demonstrate that one language-in this case, surprisingly, French-mirrors the preformed procedures oflogic better than any other: at stake is not the purity of self-relation but the transparency of representation. Since Batteux has in Aristotelian logic a parameter with which to measure the justness of his claim, he is, unlike Fichte in his aggressive defensiveness, supremely unconcerned with other languages. The problem for Batteux is to account for the occasional inversion of the preformed logical schema. In Lettre sur les sourds et muets a ['usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent (1751), Diderot claims that the problem of inversion can be solved only by taking into consideration the origin oflanguage (CEuvres, pp. 34992). The generatio aequivoca of language and sensory perception shows, Diderot argues, that even French is fraught with irreducible inversions, and that the harmony between French and Aristotelianism only testifies to the latter's dominance in French culture over the previous two centuries. Furthermore, poetic-and, by inference, all-language, in its attempt to convey complex sensory impressions, constitutively relies on multiple inversions. Diderot calls these poetic hieroglyphs and suggests that a dictionary of such hieroglyphs

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would do more for international understanding than the reduction oflanguage to Aristotelian logic. 26 Political chauvinism is as intrinsic to Fichte's reason as its male descendant. Embedded in his philosophy of human freedom, language soon loses the appearance of free, reciprocal exchange between members of the same community of communicators and turns into an instrument of domination: "The human being has an irrepressible drive to assume rational beings outside ofhimself, and to modify, to form their reason through his own; the human being wants to dominate" (Vorlesungen, p. 165). As the investigation of Fichte's natural and moral philosophy has shown, at a necessary point of the analysis this human being assumes gender specifications. Just as for Herder, language for Fichte is gender specific insofar as the passive, receptive, "natural" female is less articulate than the male "because the male is considered, according to a very natural opinion, as the human being Kat' E~oxitv. He is the instrument, the articulation of mankind, whereas the female is its organization" (Vorlesungen, p. 162). As Herder's and Humboldt's thought also testify, the emergence of gender difference at the heart oflinguistic origination is constitutive for epigenetic thought even in the philosophy oflanguage. Humboldt's New Origin Despite his persistent silence about Herder and Fichte, Humboldt proves to be the rightful heir to their central questions. An admirer of Kant and a disciple of Fichte, Humboldt signals his departure from Herder's Ursprungsschrift by removing all empirical connotations from the question of origin. Even a hypothetical scene of origin such as Herder's story of the lamb, designed to match the scenarios of Condillac, Rousseau, and SiiBmilch, cannot but produce a distorted perspective on the question. Confined to its insurmountable "historical milieu," 27 any investigation that assumes an "original" transition from, say, scream to word, or a decision to use language, remains bound to the contradictory concepts of origin embodied in generatio aequivoca and preformationism. To avoid this

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quandary, the origin of language has to be stripped of all temporal markers: "The application of temporal concepts to the development of a human characteristic that lies, as language does, so wholly in the region of incalculable original faculties of the soul, is always misfitting" (OL, p. 133; GS, vol. 7, p. 149). Any illusion that language originated "slowly and gradually, almost by taking turns;' 28 would not only lead to logically unacceptable stories, such as Herder's, but would also have to rely on the preformationist concept of evolution: "If, as is after all most natural, we conceive of the formation of language as successive, we must base it, like all origination in nature, upon a system of evolution" (OL, p. 133; GS, vol. 7, p. 149). The most natural point of view is thus also the most fallaciousat least as long as nature is understood as the system of causally, hence temporally, linked finite phenomena. 29 But Fichte's confoundings, in which he deduced rather than accepted Kant's definitions of organic phenomena, had already shown that the infinity of natural organisms was in fact a product of the activity of the I. Seizing upon this argument, Humboldt both defines language in its given, natural form as organism and attempts to describe its generation as a self-sufficient, or epigenetic, process. 30 Preformation or generatio aequivoca, the alternative that had both kindled and stifled the debate about the origin oflanguage during the eighteenth century and that Herder's precocious treatise had only aimed at avoiding, must be transformed, Humboldt argues, into the transcendental epigenesis oflanguage. Already Kant's Critique ofJudgment had shown that satisfactory definitions of natural products must not only integrate their complexity but also stress their nonlinear form of origination. Humboldt, in his attempt to secure the status of organism for language, follows this precept. Surely, he argued, there is the infinite interconnectedness of all linguistic phenomena; there is their seemingly vegetative growth, as, for example, in the formation of words, but the incontrovertible sign of the organic nature oflanguage is the inexplicability of its origin by causal meansY Language is not even the necessary supplement to the-ultimately contingent-lack in in-

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stinctual equipment ofhuman beings (as Herder had argued), and it does not satisfY a desire for communicative action: "It is surely one of the most erroneous assumptions to ascribe the origin [Entstehung] of languages primarily to the desire for reciprocal support. The human being in its natural state is not that needy and, as we can see in animals, for that purpose inarticulate sounds would have sufficed."32 Even where Humboldt concedes that "society is the necessary condition oflanguage that does not otherwise form itself," 33 it is apparent that such observations do not advance the goal he shares with other epigenetic thinkers-that is, to demonstrate the sufficient conditions for the emergence of language. The apparent advantage of epigenetic accounts of origination consisted precisely in the combination of necessary factors, such as the regularity of forms, with "uncaused" or free beginnings, manifested in the iterability of generation; and this combination of argumentative strategies was further bolstered by a professed Newtonian docta ignorantia concerning the ontological status of physical forces. Exacdy these epigenetic criteria (regularity, iterability, denied explication), enriched by the context of Aristotelian ontology to which they refer, are satisfied with Humboldt's famous definition of language as energeia rather than as ergon (OL, p. 49; GS, vol. 7, p. 46). For language cannot indeed be regarded as inert material, surveyable in its totality, or communicable little by little, but must be seen as something that eternally generates itself, where the laws of generation are determined, but the scope, and even to some extent the nature of the product remain totally unspecified. (OL, p. 58; GS, vol. 7, pp. 57-58)

This self-generating quality or, to put it into Fichtean terms: this attribution of selfhood and reflexivity to language, already invalidates the physei-thesei-alternative that still divided the supporters of a human origin of language in the Enlightenment. Against the conventionalists-proto-Habermasians, in that they suppose an original agreement over signification-Humboldt can argue that as an organism language is at no point of its growth not organic, and that consequendy it can only have emerged "all at once"; 34 against the representationalist who stresses the natural link between signifier

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and signified, however tenuous it might be, he insists that the organic self-sufficiency oflanguage does not allow for its degradation to a mere instrument. In rejecting both arguments Humboldt is as determined as he is overly optimistic: That a language be but a multitude of arbitrary or accidentally customary signs of concepts [Begriffizeichen], that a word have no other destination and force than to recall an object that is either at hand in reality or thought in the mind, and that, by consequence, it might be insignificant which language a nation uses-these are opinions that one must not presuppose with anyone who has given at least some thought to the nature oflanguages. 35

The Transcendental Epigenesis ofLanguage Humboldt knew that in order to argue for a revaluation of the philosophical status oflanguages he could not remain in such defensive neither-nor positions. Relying on the developments in natural philosophy and transcendental philosophy, he proceeded to define the organism oflanguage positively according to the parameters of transcendental epigenesis. Opposing the image of a linguistic organism to that of a lifeless inventory of semantic elements and grammatical rules and thus moving the discussion away from the endless academic debates about genesis and function had been the first step; the next, again in conformity with the procedure of natural philosophy, was to endow the organism oflanguage with generative force. As early as C. F. Wolff, modern epigenetists had realized that without the assumption of an underlying productive force the argument against the preformationist could not hold up. Already Herder had argued that a human origin oflanguage is plausible only if reason is understood as a productive force rather than as a passively activated faculty. But only what Fichte, in a moment of reflection, had called his "monstrous procedure" 36 supplied Humboldt with the justification for such an assumption. Humboldt, not only in order to lay to rest the fruitless debate about the origin oflanguage, but also, prompted perhaps by his own empirical work, to sketch out the guidelines for a future scientific study of language using the parameters of epigenetic philosophy,

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proposes to divide this task into two distinct parts. The general part, serving as philosophical foundation and guideline for empirical research, would have to describe the transcendental schematism of language; temporal or linear origin would here be sublated into the "eternally repeating" originality of each speech actY The investigation of historical transformations and grammatical structures of a language, on the other hand, had to treat languages, whether spoken or not, as organisms such as natural philosophy after Blumenbach and Kant had defined them. The former description, for which Humboldt chooses the difficult term Veifahren-schematism, trial, procedure-has to ground the enumeration and classification of language's elements [Bestandtheile]. 38 Only this combination would establish the study oflanguages [Sprachstudium] that Humboldt advocated in his lectures to the Berlin academy and in his later works. But the same division in objective organicity and generative subjectivity recurs in the schematism oflanguage: it "possesses an autonomy [Selbstthiitigkeit] that visibly reveals itself, even if in its essence it remains inexplicable; it is, in this regard, not a product of [subjective] activity, but a spontaneous emanation of spirit, not a product of nations, but a gift fallen upon them by their inner destiny." 39 Such affirmations of the irreducible opacity oflanguage, which in Humboldt's work oppose the claims of pure logo-epigenesis, culminate in the worldview hypothesis, which is often seen as Humboldt's most important contribution to the history of linguistic thought: there "resides in every language a characteristic worldview. Just as the single sound intervenes between object and man, so language as a whole steps in between man and his inner and outer nature" (OL, p. 6o; GS, vol. 7, p. 6o). Although this is one of Humboldt's most famous pronouncements, he is neither the first nor the only one to make it. 40 But it is a testimony to his unusual good judgment that for him this insight leads to a peculiar mixture of resigned relativism-with clearly detectable preferences for Sanskrit and Greek-and of veritable, and ultimately anti-classical, enthusiasm for marginal languages (American Indian, Mexican, Basque, etc.). Even the cherished idea of a natural hermeneutics, which Hum-

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boldt in his Schiller-influenced youth had tried to ground anthropologically and sexually, 41 is threatened by the organismic force of language. All communication is always also impossible-not just an infinite task-because language in its ultimate determination in the individual is, properly speaking, incomprehensible: Only in the individual does language receive its final determinacy. Nobody thinks in a given word precisely and exactly what the other thinks, and this difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, through the entire language. Thus all understanding is always at the same time a notunderstanding, all harmony in thoughts and feelings also at the same time a divergence. (OL, p. 63; GS, vol. 7, pp. 64-65) Taken in isolation, such speculations on the endowment oflanguage with autoactivity [Selbstthiitigkeit], designed to remove language further from the instrumentalizing grip of the enlightened subject, could turn out to be dangerous for a disciple of Fichte. In the extreme, they would lead to a sort oflinguistic Schellingianism in which all forms of subjective expression become only so many constellations within the linguistic absolute. Understandably, it was this aspect of Humboldt's thought that, for different reasons, proved most appealing to Heidegger and Benjamin. But in the end such moments are rare in Humboldt's work, and they reveal much more the probity of the empirical linguist than the speculative rigor of the idealist philosopher. Race, History, and Language In the massive introduction to his study of the Kawi language, his philosophical legacy and the single most impressive document of language philosophy between idealism and positivism, 42 Humboldt attempts to halt the potentially disseminative consequences of this force in his account of the diversity of languages. The title's first part, Ober die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbques, unmistakably indicates that Humboldt wanted his work to be inserted in the development of epigenetic thought in natural philosophy. His teacher Blumenbach (De humani generis varietate), Soernmerring

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(Uber die Verschiedenheit des Negers vom Europder), and many of their followers, also had had to justify the diversity of species anew once the hand of the creator no longer afforded a sufficient reason. 43 As the debates between the most important practitioners and theorists of early natural philosophy had shown, the least costly way to account for the diversity and fixity of natural phenomena was to extend the epigenetic model to an all-encompassing scale. What could be assumed in the epigenetic origin of the individual-the working of a fundamental force, and its split into inert and active poles to ensure the regularity of their product-should also be assumed in the origin and development of mankind as such. Monogenetic theories about the origin of man-both a scientific and a moral desideratum-would account for the diversity and relative fixity of the races in the form of progressive degenerations from an original stock, caused by external factors such as climate and geographical surroundings. 44 The same process of freedom and necessity that forms the individual also applies to the totality of mankind, only in the latter case the part of the resistant and passive pole is played by nature as natura naturata. This is the narrative frame in which Humboldt's account of the diversity oflanguages unfolds, although with none of the dreadful consequences that the collusion of linguistic and racial theories will produce in the nineteenth century. Diversity of languages and hence diversity of linguistically national worldviews is, as Humboldt's grand opening chapters narrate, the result of a progressive history of the foundational force. But from this viewpoint we can regard that which lives in spiritual and physical nature as the effect of an underlying force, developing according to conditions unknown to us. If we are not to forgo all discovery of continuity in the phenomena of mankind, we have to come back to some independent and original cause, not itself in turn conditioned and transitory. But we are thereby most naturally led to an inner life-principle, freely developing in its fullness whose particular manifestations are not intrinsically unlinked because their outer appearances are presented in isolation. (OL, p. 26; GS, vol. 7, pp. 18-19) The almost imploring tone of this methodological postulate lays bare a basic need structure in the epigenetic argument: after the

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banishment of final causes, and with the relocation of all efficient causes into nature, the only way to preserve a coherent interpretative schema in natural philosophy, and in metaphysics in general, is to narrate the history of a foundational force, the source of which is by definition exempted from empirical research. In historical accounts, or as the condition for historical accounts, the absence of the source allows for the discontinuities and catastrophes that syncopate natural history. Only a similar catastrophical progress of world history can explain the emergence and dispersal of different organisms. All intellectual progress can only proceed from the expression of an inner force, and to that extent has always a hidden, and because it is autonomous [selbstthiitig], an inexplicable reason [Grund]. But if this inner force suddenly creates so mightily ofits own accord that it could not in any way have been led there by what went before, then by that very fact, all possibility of explanation automatically ceases. (OL, p. 3 I; GS, vol. 7, p. 26)

The absence of the source, as an interpretative heirloom of eighteenth-century Newtonianism, has its counterpart in the groundless freedom of the understanding, of the absolute I, or of reason. For Humboldt, this isomorphy prevents the organic growth oflanguages from suffocating the possibility of expression. On a worldhistorical scale, the catastrophes and irregularities that result in the diversity of languages recur in every act of speech as the disruptive force of the speaker. In opposition to the organic power oflanguage is, therefore, the restless attempt of speech to leave the mark of its freedom; and for Humboldt, true to his philosophical upbringing, the subjective activity of speech has to outweigh the objective organicity oflanguage. In itself [language] is no product (Ergon), but an activity (Energeia). Its true definition can therefore only be a genetic one. For it is the eternally repeating mental labor of making the articulated sound capable of expressing thought. Immediately and in a strict sense, this is the definition of every act of speech; but in its true and essential meaning only the totality of this speech can be called language. (OL, p. 49; GS, vol. 7, p. 46) The eternal presence of the activity (the Fichtean absolute

Thiitigkeit) of speech thus is to take precedence over the insur-

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mountable historicity, or "givenness," of language; language is, to use a metaphor Humboldt is fond of, in a state of constant labor to give birth to meaningful expression. 45 Humboldt's previous discussion of the power oflanguage over the individual tried to show that there is no intellectual activity untainted by linguistic elements; the organicity oflanguage, as opposed to its conception as a lifeless body of words and rules, had pointed to traces of reason in its structure. As a result, both poles, intellectual force and organic power, presuppose each other as they engage in the generation of meaningful-that is, both regular and individual-expression, and this form of reciprocity is, of course, a typical epigenetic relation. The question of the origin oflanguage is thus sublated: Herder had been right in correlating language and reason; but since he was unable to conceive of this relationship as epigenetic, reason remained thoroughly dependent upon the suggestions of nature. Humboldt could afford to be so supremely unconcerned with Herder's, and the Academy's, quest for the origin because from his epigenetic perspective there is no origin of language: every act of speech presupposes and performs an original articulation of thought and sound [Laut]. Articulation is the "essence oflanguage," 46 and the analysis of articulation is the beginning and true domain of any philosophy oflanguage. The Pain of Articulation But the difficulties Humboldt encountered in his repeated attempts to secure for articulation a foundational position in the philosophy oflanguage proved to be daunting. Torn between the desire to claim for the philosophy of language the place of prima philosophia it deserves if indeed language is a necessary condition for the differentiation in intellectual activity, and the insight, gained from the analysis of vast amounts oflinguistic material, that the reduction of articulate sound to intellectual activity is impossible, Humboldt's discourse wavers interminably between transcendental aspirations and empirical resignation. Just as the dissection ofliving, organic languages was impossible yet necessary for practical linguistics, the distinction

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between intellectual activity and linguistic material is, given their epigenetic embrace, improper yet foundational for the philosophy of language: "Intellectual activity and language are therefore One and inseparable from one another; one cannot even regard the former exclusively as generating, the latter as generated." 47 Yet under such circumstances the replacement of Fichte's philosophy (present in all of Humboldt's pronouncements with the terms Thiitigkeit and Selbstthiitigkeit) with a transcendental philosophy oflanguage would be impossible; linguistics would turn out to be nothing but an empirical science. In order to lay claim to philosophical rights, the generation of language and thought had to be demonstrated on the same level of universality on which the facticity of the not-I had to be demonstrated in Fichte's Wissenschqftslehre; and for that purpose the undifferentiated identity oflanguage and thought had to be severed. Subjective activity fashions an object in thought. For no class of representations can be regarded as purely receptive intuition of an object already present. The activity of the senses must combine with the inner activity of the mind, and from this synthesis the representation tears itself away, becomes an object vis-a-vis the subjective force, and, perceived anew as such, returns ... to the former. For this language is indispensable. (OL, p. 56; GS, vol. 7, p. 55) This is, in contrast to Herder's Urszene, a fully developed epigenetic account: no exterior cause, be it the tones of nature or the sheer presence of an object, brings the formation of thought and language about, and no element is purely passive or lies outside the arch of reflection; as such, Humboldt's construction bears an unmistakable resemblance to that ofFichte's intellectual intuition. The birth of the representation from the conjunction of sensibility and "the mind" and its return as a sensible object allows for both poles to constitute themselves as subjective and objective in the very process. But while in Fichte's account subjective activity posits together with itself also its opposite, and thus encompasses in one initial operation the totality of all possible representations, for Humboldt language is necessary for the production of representations, or distinct portions

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of thought; language articulates subjective force from sheer activity into a chain of conceptual units. This "return" of the representation as a distinct unit is possible only after its passage through sound, so that language also articulates the inner activity of the mind with the exteriority of sound. The double articulation oflanguage is generally acknowledged as Humboldt's contribution to theoretical linguistics. 48 But just as Fichte could not conceive of the progress and unfolding of the activity of the I except as a successive overpowering of seemingly passive resistance-exemplified in his proposed legislation of marital relations-Humboldt's reconstruction of the epigenesis of language becomes a progressively violent and desperate affair. To put it into Hegelian language, Humboldt failed to understand articulation as a relation rather than an activity. Why is language necessary for the articulation of thought? For in that intellectual striving breaks out through the lips in language, its product returns to [the speaker's] ear. Representation is [thus] translated [hinuberversetzt] into real objectivity without being withdrawn from subjectivity. Only language can achieve this; and without this transposition, occurring constandy with the help of language even in silence, into an objectivity that returns to the subject, the formation of the concept, and, by consequence, all true thought is impossible. So quite regardless of communication between human beings, speech is a necessary condition of the individual's thought even in solitary seclusion. (OL, p. 56; GS, vol. 7, p. 55) Although Humboldt repeatedly shows that the return in this paradigmatically phonocentric economy never quite equals the initial investment, his trust in the main construction and its ability to carry the philosophy of language remains unshakeable. Intellectual activity, "entirely internal and, so to speak, passing without a trace" nonetheless leaves its mark on the formless matter oflanguage ( OL, p. 54; GS, vol. 7, p. 53); the articulated sound "finds a medium miraculously suited to it in the air, the most refined and mobile of all elements, whose seeming incorporality corresponds to the mind even on the level of sensibility" (OL, p. 55; GS, vol. 7, p. 54). Yet the spiritual suitability of air does not keep an unmistakable desperation and urgency from creeping into the labor of articula-

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tion. The phonetic material, in the process of generation, also offers resistance to the intellectual force-the resistance maternal hyle offered to the forming activity of semen in Aristotle's invention of epigenesis: "The formation of language [Sprachbildung] in general must be seen as generation, in which the inner idea, to make itself manifest, has a difficulty to conquer. This difficulty is the sound [Laut], and the conquest does not always succeed to the same degree" (OL, p. 77; GS, vol. 7, p. 82). The degree to which this resistance of the Laut is broken furnishes the parameter with which to measure languages once the relativism of the worldview hypothesis has rendered traditional forms of ranking obsolete. The "best" language is that in which the phonetic material has been bent and split most thoroughly by the intellectual force, in which everi the smallest units still carry meaning so that they can be arranged in the most variegated, or most individual, way. The smaller the significant units, the less meaningless debris, the better a language is able to accommodate the inexhaustible meaningfulness of the mind. This is the reason why for Humboldt, Chinese, with its large, solid blocks of significance, is not as "good" as Sanskrit, the most supple of all languages: That a given family of languages, or even a single one of them, should coincide throughout and on all points with the perfect form oflanguage, is not to be expected, at least not in the range of our experience. But the Sanscritic languages come closest to this form ... and are at the same time those in which the intellectual formation of mankind has evolved most happily [and) felicitously in the longest sequence ofprogress. 49 The ideal language, therefore, is no language at all; in all empiricallanguages intellectual activity is endlessly compelled to break the resistance of sound. In his attempts to deduce transcendentally the generation of speech acts, Humboldt strives for credibility by portraying articulation as an epigenetic act resulting from a successful sexual union between male intellectual activity and feminine receptivity of the linguistic material. But in the transition to the empirical demonstration of linguistic generation-which is the pride of Humboldtian linguistics-Humboldt seems to become aware that

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the sexual relation after which his idea of articulation is modeled does not exist. As in the exemplary encounter of Fichte's male activity with the possibility of an indelible female passivity, the resistance of sound consists not so much in active opposition as in its impenetrable remainder. In speech this remainder appears, as it did for Herder, as meaningless "white" noise: "That which thought requires in language is not so much what can actually be perceived by the ear, or, to put it differently, if one separates sound [Laut] into articulation and noise [Geriiusch], it is not the latter but only the former." 5° The disconcerting presence of noise disturbs the harmonious union of interior and exterior and unleashes the characteristic violence with which the Humboldtian subject tries to force the linguistic material, and his organs of speech, into signifYing submission: "Articulation rests upon the violence of the mind over the organs of speech, to force them into a treatment of sound corresponding to the form of its activity" (OL, p. 66; GS, vol. 7, p. 66). Noise is not necessarily audible. While the wondrous aptness of air seems to provide a preformed medium for the ineffability of the spirit, which always, at least virtually, assumes the form of the understanding other, written signs reveal the complete meaninglessness, the stupidity of the letter with which articulation has to wrestle. In his writings on writing, slightly earlier than his grand summary of the introduction to his work on the Kawi language, Humboldt confronts the schism between the need of the spirit to articulate itself and the resistance of the sign. Alphabetic writing, Humboldt argues, is superior to other forms, for it "presents to the soul the articulations of tones, insofar as it isolates and designates [bezeichnet] the articulate tones" (Buchstabenschrift, GS, vol. 5, p. II5). Alphabetic writing reproduces and represents the labor of division and articulation, and its univocal relationship of tone and letter promises to stop the leakage of subjectivity that afflicted speech. But even in the realm of writing, according to the Aristoteleian account one step further removed from the source of the speaking subject, the appropriateness of alphabetic writing is based upon the ultimate meaninglessness of the letter. "It [alphabetic writing] does not dis-

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turb the nature of pure intellectuality of language, but enhances it through the sober use of per se meaningless signs" (Buchstabenschrijt, GS, vol. 5, p. 1 14). Again, the underscoring of language's intellectuality points to the impossibility of forging a lasting link between articulate sound and meaning. Again, the structure of the problem is inherited from Fichte. Just as Fichte's activist subject can, within the realm of a given language, posit itself only in the mode of a tautology (I =I)since it cannot, in other words, signify in one and the same act the analytic and synthetic version of its self-positing statement-articulate sound, too, cannot be defined other than tautologically: Exhaustively and exclusively the essence of [articulate sounds] is described always by attributing to them the property to produce concepts immediately in their sounding [durch ihr Ertonen], partly inasmuch as every single one is formed to this purpose, partly because the formation of a single one makes possible, and demands, a certain number in a certain class but from a different species, which are apt to form necessary or arbitrary connections with one another. But with this, nothing more is said than that articulate sounds are sounds oflanguage, and vice versa. (Buchstabenschrift, GS, vol. 5, p. 116)

Language is thus threatened by annihilation from both ends: the labor of articulation threatens and diminishes the pure motility of the mind by finitizing it in material sound-alllanguages are imperfect materializations of the ideal language; on the other end, every language, however articulate, is always stupefied by the opacity of the letter. 51 Mter the grand attempts at a transcendental deduction of language, Humboldt's sober resume sounds very much like a return to Kantian skepticism: "That a connection exists between the sound and its meaning seems certain; but the nature of this connection can rarely be demonstrated exhaustively, can often be divined only, and far more often still is wholly beyond conjecture" (OL, p. 72; GS, vol. 7, p. 76). Even under the auspices of epigenesis, and in his conscious attempt to avoid the shortcomings of Herder's original scenario, Humboldt fails to render intelligible the generation of linguistic

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meaning. As the survey of his repeated attempts at formulating the history and structure of this generation shows, Humboldt, like his scientist counterparts, habitually resorts to the presupposition of a fundamental intellectual, or linguistic, force that somehow covers the abyss between sound and meaning. While the insufficiency of languages to the purposes of fully expressing the wealth of subjectivity depends on Humboldt's (Fichtean) concept of the subject as sheer activity, the empirical opacity of language finds its parallel in the specific limitations of contemporary natural philosophy.

The Limit ofWords The early debates between preformationists and epigenetists, like that between Haller and Wolff, demonstrated that the question whether organisms grow successively until they form a whole (the epigenetic position), or whether they are already fully formed, albeit invisible, and only need to be aggrandized in the process of generation (the preformationist. credo), was meaningful only as long as both agreed on a common limitation-that is, on the smallest observable entity, in this case the single organ. Although Wolff clearly saw cells through his microscope, he never argued. that individual organs were actually formed of smaller, self-contained units. This implicit agreement on the organ as the smallest unit set the stage upon which the debate could be acted out: after the success of the cell theory in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the controversy over preformation and epigenesis lost much, if not all, of its momentum. But in the absence of such a deeper level of structuration, the explanation of organic composition invariably took on the tautological form encountered so often in this period: muscles are composed of muscle fibers, nerves work through nerve fluid, bones are made ofbone mass, etc. Humboldt expressed the same dilemma regarding articulate sound: "With this nothing else is said than that the articulate sound is a sound oflanguage, and vice versa" (Buchstabenschrift, GS, vol. 5, p. II6-I7). Like the natural scientists from whom he learned, and like the language philosophies he sought to replace, Humboldt takes

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the word as the most basic observable, or meaningful, unit in language. Although the essence oflanguage lies in the endless labor of articulation to produce an articulate sound, this sound itself cannot be assigned any meaning. Talking about the "system of sounds" in the introduction to the Kawi language, Humboldt summarizes his position in a peculiarly old-fashioned way: By words we understand the signs of particular concepts. The syllable forms a unit of sound; but it becomes a word only if it acquires meaning on its own, which often requires a combination of several.... Words thereby become the true elements of speech, since syllables, with their lack of meaning, cannot properly be so called. 5 2

Paradoxically, then, the human origin and essence oflanguage is ineluctably bound to the production of meaningless elements, and the human origin of the word, upon which Humboldt's subterranean anti-Christological polemics places such weight, reveals nothing but the inhumanity of its constituent parts. Rather than boosting a humanist perspective in the debate about the origin and function of language, Humboldt the epigenetist, in his rare but decisively lucid moments, ends up representing a philosophy that seems very much like an atheistic version of Hamann's claim for a nonhuman origin oflanguage. Toward the end of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, both the ungraspable activity of the I and the opacity of the letter found various "solutions." The emergence of phonology, bolstered by increasingly efficient forms of anthropometry, led to the replacement of the question of meaning in sound with the assignation of mere value. In a parallel development, the spirit became a bone, and philosophical considerations of the brain as the organ of the soul turned into physiological investigations and experiments supposing a quantifiable flux and reflux of nerve impulses. Both of these strands of investigation are integrated in the concept of information that dominates contemporary debates about the origin and function oflanguage. Information is, like the cell, a term Humboldt and his contemporaries could not think-although it might well be asked what "to think information" could possibly mean. But while the

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emergence of meaning from noise cannot be thought, it can nonetheless be simulated, under the condition that the position of subjectivity, infinitely full and active for Humboldt, is vacated to the point of sheer referentiality. 53 Articulation in this context refers to the link between the various layers of noise and the operations that introduce distinction, or informational value, into noise. In Humboldt's activist perspective, articulation, although the necessary condition of liveliness and mobility-in short, of freedom -of an organism, had turned into a source and site of desperate violence on the part of the speaking subject. In this configuration, the wealth of signification is always proportionate to the strength of the subjective force and the receptivity of the linguistic material. The linguistic expression of subjectivity is thus bound to its antagonist principle in much the same way that the male is bound to the female principle in Fichte's dialectics of nature and law. Indeed, Humboldt's philosophy of language, indebted to the concepts of philosophical epigenesis, derives much of its imagery and rhetorical energy from a thorough sexuation of its spheres. Much as the phantasm of voluntary female masochism provoked the frenzied moral and legal prohibitions in Fichte's philosophy, Humboldt, in the darker moments of his immense corpus of poetry, conjures up the image of mute female passivity. The threatening disseminative effect of this resistance to dialogue is halted quite literally by the insemination in the many scenes of rape and forced pregnancy. But unlike for Fichte, for Humboldt the main scandal of female passivity is the refusal to speak, and the orgies of violence that the male protagonists unleash upon their victims and that, wrongly, have earned Humboldt the attribute sadistic, are part of the desperate intent to overcome the woman's becoming silent [ Verstummen] by mutilation ( Verstiimmelung). 54 The connection between, and the interdependence of, epigenetic natural philosophy, Fichtean idealism, philosophy, the politics of gender, Humboldt's philosophy of language, violence, and silence that the previous chapters have tried to establish might read like a paranoid narrative. But Goethe's "best book," the novel Elective Affinities [Die Wahlverwandtschciften], not only repeats in its very title

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the dilemma facing epigenetic models of explanation, it also arranges the same phenomena around the epigenetic origin and death of the child who, like all protagonists in the novel, is called Otto. Against the sparkling background of Beaumarchais's Mariage de Figaro, the specifically literary forms of epigenesis become readable.

CHAPTER 5

Marriage and Self-Generation: Goethe with Beaumarchais

Impossibility Marriage is impossible. Two literary texts, central to their respective epochs of generation, are devoted to the demonstration of this proposition. This does not mean, of course, that marriage does not happen: both Beaumarchais's Mariage de Figaro and Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften are ostensibly written about it. But in both cases, in the comedy of preformation and the novel of epigenesis, marriage fails to become explicable in the terms of the underlying discourse of generation. In Figaro's case, marriage happens (it is to be assumed) despite its arrangement. Its comic potential lies in the collision between the arranging machinations-the intrigue-and sheer accidentality. Love does not mediate between these two spheres. In Die Wahlverwandtschciften, this very feeling, supposedly the expression of self-generating subjectivity, is led astray; the radicality of the novel lies in the fact that this errance of feeling is not attributed to any exterior force but is located in the very presumptions of its expressions. In both texts, the failure of grounding, rather than simply legitimizing, marriage, results in the failure, or breakdown, of language: in the play the unity of the word is disrupted by stutter and echo; in the novel the poetic symbol is disfigured by allegorical relationality. The determining influence of any theory of generation, scien-

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tific or philosophical, on the concept of marriage has become apparent in the previous chapters. Kant's indifference to the generative principles underlying marriage reflects his skepticism about the moral implications of natural philosophy. Fichte's fierce philosophy of marriage is explicitly based on the constitutive employment of epigenesis in the interpretation of nature. Herder's origin of language, beginning with the repressed marital sexuality in his original scene, is sustained by the nuclear family's linguistic education; and Humboldt's reflections on the epigenesis of language are saturated with images celebrating the wedding [ Vermiihlung] of thought and sound, to say nothing of the many published letters with which the Humboldts built the fa!i=ade of their own marriage. Articulation

Figaro has acquired fame not as a piece of daring originality but as a perfect exemplar of its genre and as a piece of daring on the part of its author. The perseverance with which Beaumarchais pursued the production of the play, escaped the (perfectly formal) restrictions of censorship, and managed to launch the comedy straight into the center of court society is matched only by the recklessness with which Figaro pursues his intrigue against the Count, which in turn is imitated and intensified by the plan ofSuzanne and the Countess, and by all the counterintrigues (Marceline's, Fanchette's) weaving the bewildering texture of the play. Beaumarchais, a well-known public figure, aired his widely publicized juridical grievances in the form of a play whose hero (himself a failed playwright) works to check his master's desire by exposing him to the public; these two are upstaged by the intrigues of the women who in their turn are always countervailed by the irruptions of the page and by other "accidents." This mise en ablme allows at the same time for the articulation of the various levels-political, biographical, sexual, dramatic-and divests each statement, which is always embedded in another, of its univocal and potentially dangerous meaning. The intrigue, of which Figaro boasts to be a master, is the attempt to take advantage of this endless embeddedness of the action; it is theater in the real where mastery itself is at stake. 1

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This articulation of public and private is not only the work of one courageous playwright-although Beaumarchais himself and his legion ofbiographers certainly like to give this impression-but, as will become clearer, is intrinsic to the biological, social, and philosophical force-field of preformationism. Outside that field Figaro indeed seems to be uncompromisingly rebellious. But nowhere in the play is there a wholesale indictment of the ancien regime, nowhere a criticism that is not justified by the delight derived from its formulation, and the tirades into which Figaro launches from time to time, as well as the protofeminist harangues of Marceline, are really only so many instances of the comic potential of monologues rather than devastating critiques of aristocratic power. 2 In Figaro's eyes, the injustice setting off the plot consists not in an excess of privilege (as revolutionary critique would later charge), but in the fact that the Count cannot live up to the aristocratic promise, that he cannot keep his word. But in that he is not alone, for the difficulties arising from keeping one's word under the parameters of preformationism trouble all of the protagonists, and precisely that is the stuff that the public in the eighteenth century found funny. Such articulation with the outside is cut off in Goethe's epoch. Again, this is not only a function of the genre. Elective Affinities was released to an expectant host ofliterary interpreters to whom Goethe would feed snippets of an interpretatio authentica, thus promising "real" content under the cover of symbolic presentation. This promise would keep the institutions of interpretation busy for centuries to come. In Goethe's time, a time that he actively shaped, the chance of a theatrical scandal, complete with the intervention of the king and counterintervention of the Queen, was forever gone, and with it, despite Goethe's claim that early in his career he had developed a sense of humor quite like that ofBeaumarchais, the tone and appreciation of comedy. 3

Ius Primae Noctis Preformationists had attempted to salvage the autonomy of the physical world by proclaiming everything in it already created;

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the prevailing interpretation for the generation of human beingsless intuitively appealing than Tristram's homunculus, but also less philosophically (and narratively) daunting-stated that human beings were lodged in the mother's ovaries until awakened by a rousing action on the part of the genitor. As Kant had so dryly remarked, this situation rendered the father irrelevant: no matter who he is, the children will always have been the same. Fueled by the intensifYing polemics against feudal privileges in the late eighteenth century, this matriarchal hypothesis gave birth to the phantasm of the ius primae noctis, the "ancient right" of the landlord to sleep with all the brides on his lands. The logic behind this phantasm is simple and effective: under the auspices of ovism, as long as the husband comes in immediately afterward, the execution of the right represents the very peak of social oppression without having any biological-that is, "material" -consequences. The traceless brutality of the ius primae noctis would thus express the pure and brutal formality offeudallaw. Yet no such right has ever existed. It began to appear in literature at a time when ovism had carried the day in the debates about generation. 4 In polemical and comic literary expression these texts could expose the same concerns that epigenetists would later address by holding both parents liable for their offspring: that preformation uses biological indifference as an excuse for social irresponsibility, that it aligns sexuality with power and thus negates privacy and intimacy, that it is philosophically untenable, and that it defies the idea oflinguistic responsibility. To change this predicament would indeed require a revolution. Figaro, meanwhile, tries to exploit the internal contradictions of ce ancien droit. To the lord of the land, the ancient right has become law. Such transformation of right into law-in biological terms, the transformation from generatio aequivoca into preformationism-had long been the secret of aristocratic power. It would be wrong, therefore, to assume that the ius primae noctis is just the empirical abstraction of Count Almaviva's desires-too often are its ancient origins mentioned in the play. The ius is instead a law to which the count himself submits, and if he is doing so with apparent enthusiasm, it is because rebellion against a law would strike him as a base, bourgeois sentiment. But then the count discovers that there is one pleasure

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greater than being and obeying the law: suspending it. Figaro has tricked him into giving up the ancient right, and, once the urge to obey the law arises again after his marriage with Rosine has gone fiat, Almaviva finds himself opposed to Figaro, who wants to interdict the count's deriving satisfaction from the abrogation of the law. The play surprises Count Almaviva at the transitional moment when he tries to salvage the content of the law after having renounced its form. Divested of the law's power, he is caught in the exhausting process of convincing one of its former subjects that she really wants it-that it is not the law, but rather nature that will make her do it. But this endeavor is hopeless. Had his gardener ever been sober, he could have told him that no amount of empirical evidence would ever ensure the exhaustiveness of classification (every bride) or the regularity of natural laws (in the first nights). Reliable order in the variety ofbeings is guaranteed either by preformed laws under which every single instance falls (but those days are evidently over for the count) or by some inherent drive that would ensure the continuance of the law in a new guise (these days, the days Beaumarchais so disappointingly celebrates in his Mere coupable, have not yet begun). To hope for a coincidence of the two-a law that would oblige each individual as though it were natural-does not even enter the count's mind, perhaps because he knows that such a law could never compel a multitude of individuals (all brides) but only each individual. Such a law could only be categorical, not specific, and it is the totality of the species, not the individual (not Rosine, not Suzanne, not Fanchette ... ) that Almaviva has to convince. As he finds out, the law of preformation and its chimera, the ius primae noctis, can only be enforced from the exterior; it cannot be wanted by its subjects. For wanting to be the subject of a law is but another name for love. And no one in the play would know what that is. Exteriority It is indeed remarkable that the opposition between the count and Figaro is not based on the opposition between seduction and romantic love, the opposition Mozart would exploit in the figures of

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Don Giovanni and Don Ottavio, much to the disadvantage of the latter. The opening scene shows palpably that Figaro intends for him and Suzanne to occupy the space between the count and the countess, not a higher or lower level, and that he sees accessibility, not privacy, as its main advantage. It is the breach of the count's promise to traverse this space for business purposes only that enrages Figaro against his master-that is, once Suzanne has pointed it out to him. His anger manifests itself as an instinct for and pleasure in competition, very much the same pleasure the count reveals unwittingly to the countess as the secret ofhis desire (p. 206). Figaro, too, remains bound to the law, not to nature, and his countermeasure, the intrigue, is not only the staging of a conflict, but also implies an acknowledgment of the validity of the very laws it attempts to circumvent. With all his spite for the count and his reliance on the rights of birth and purse, Figaro neither breaks out in wholesale moral condemnations of the system as such (as, for example, Rigoletto does in his terrifying "Corteggiani, vil razza damnata"), nor is he tormented by a jealousy that supposes that, somewhere in their inscrutable hearts, those it suspects do consent with the aggressor (Swann's and Marcel's predicament). All action and reaction remains within the boundaries of the law which, despite and because of its being suspended, continues to exercise its power over the players. The superficiality of all characters and events, their submission to the preformation of the law, is reflected in the groundlessness of their present or desired marital relations. The count, as we know from the Barbier, conquered Rosine to "bring her under the law" and lost interest once she acquiesced; 5 Suzanne and Figaro are intent on getting their marriage under way more to defy the count than for any burning desire for each other; and Marceline's claims on Figaro (and her relation to Bartholo) are openly contractual. Marriage is indeed, to take up Benjamin's contrary claim concerning Die Wahlverwandtschaften, the "Gegenstand" of Figaro insofar as, unrelated to an unutterable emotional ground within the subject, it is but a subspecies of the law and therefore a "thing" subject to jurisdiction. The count, as his jealousy and his presiding over Marceline's trial show, is not at all against marriage, unlike so many of his libertine

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compatriots in eighteenth-century literature; on the contrary, he is so much for it that he wants to be the husband of all women. Such exteriority of marriage was one of the principal targets of epigenetic ire. If marriage, as an instance of nature's infinite productivity, were not defined simply as the unrestricted access to each other's genitalia, as Kant had so unforgettably put it, if there was to be an epiphany ofsubjective activity [Selbstthiitigkeit] in the offspring (and a natural function for the mother to nurture it), then it had to be preceded by mutual consent, and that consent had to be anchored in an inalienable ground (love) that could be spoken of only in such prearticulative notions as fate, predestination, destiny, and the like. For the epigenetic philosophers and aspiring legislators, the unbearable groundlessness of marriage and its restriction to a public, political, juridical "thing," found its expression in the feudal practice of arranged marriages, which, under the auspices of preformationism, suspiciously resemble the barter of genetic goods. Seen from this perspective, the ius primae noctis, rather than representing the libertine breach of the law, is its perverse enlargement, because it aims at nothing but one gigantic arranged marriage. The noted duplicity of epigenetic claims in which liberation coincides with oppression becomes nowhere more apparent than in the polemics against arranged marriages. Pleading for laws that are only natural while insisting on the consent ofboth genitors seems an altogether noble goal. Fichte, for one, goes so far as to rank arranged marriages above rape in cruelty, setting a successful paradigm for future legislation: "This form of constraint is the most despicable, and far more offensive than the physical violence discussed above, even if not in form, but in consequence" (the consequence, of course, being the generation of offspring) (Fichte, Naturrecht, in Gesamtausgabe, pt. I, vol. 4, p. I o8). This, to be sure, is part of the same chain of deductions that had proven the sexual monstrosity, and resulting legal infancy, of women. Herder, who was equally concerned with securing the place of mute caregiver to women and whose philosophical manifesto, Ideen, is a grandiose vision of cosmological epigenesis, accuses those who practice arranged marriage of things worse than bestiality:

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Nothing is more revolting to the formative Genius of Nature than this cold hatred, or this contrary convenience [widrige Konvenienz], which is even worse than hatred. It forces together people who are not meant for each other and perpetuates miserable creatures in disharmony with themselves. No animal has sunk as low as in this degeneration the human being sinks. 6 The duplicity in these and other statements should not necessarily induce nostalgia for the exteriority of the laws regulating marriage and generation as they are put into play in Figaro and countless other plays of the time. But their visibility, the fact that their prescriptions are not yet lodged and concealed in the interior of the natural body but imposed by a patently paternalistic order, makes them controvertible. They can become objects of dispute and intrigue, and in these contests intelligence and wit alone count. As Beaumarchais shows, those who align themselves, positively or negatively, with the law-men, all of them, with the exception of Marceline before she becomes a mother-are constantly stupefied by their inability to judge the effect of their actions. This is not blindness of passion but lack of judgment (Kant's definition of stupidity), wholly unaware of the transparency of its schemes. One of the functions of Cherubin in the play is to make transparent to the count what everybody else sees, and Figaro, too, as opposed as he might otherwise be to the count, shares in the same remarkable hatred of the page. 7 The visibility of the laws and the stupidity of the men release the intelligence and the courage of the women, whose dominance throughout the play is nothing short of astonishing. Not only are Suzanne and the countess the only ones with a strong enough grasp on things to lead the intrigue to the designed end, but each instance in which a woman confronts a man results in her victory and his humiliation: this is true, of course, for the countess and the count, but also for Suzanne and the jealous Figaro, for Marceline and Bartholo, even for Fanchette and the count. As Suzanne's and the countess's attraction to Cherubin shows, the superiority of the women is not a moral one, as the epigenetists, in order to displace the dispute from the legal to the philosophical realm, regularly claim; it is simply

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the expression of a higher state of lucidity, unencumbered by the pomposity ofbeing or representing the law.

Offspring In an epigenetic framework, marriage ought to be based not on a contract but on the continuance of subjectivity-male subjectivity, if this is not a pleonasm-into the next generation; it thus requires the gathering of all family resources around the effort of for~ation and education. The idea of education as an epigenetic (successive and self-governed) process is simply ridiculous to the Beaumarchais of Figaro; only after the Revolution will he stage virtuous children who are able to absolve their culpable parents. Children, the preformationists insisted, are little adults, and bringing them up did not mean bonding them to their individual parents but exposing them to the most instructive environment. Both Fanchette ("a young girl about twelve years old," p. 221) and Cherubin; a page, although from different social classes, are very good children. The count is quite right in sending Cherubin to the next level of apprenticeship, the military; in each of their encounters the page has demonstrated that he has learned to copy and finally to anticipate the master's desire. The casualness in the preformationist relation of parents and children, apparent in the endless exteriority of emboftment (encapsulation), becomes topical in the court scene. Figaro and his natural parents recognize each other only by means of a tattooed sign, a spatula with which the doctor Bartholo had prescribed his profession for his son-a hieroglyph indecipherable to its bearer until the moment it becomes visible to its writer. Figaro, having fantasized about a noble birth, is at first a bit disappointed to discover who his mother is, but, as a good ovist, he is downright disgusted that Bartholo is his father. 8 In one of the play's more savage lines, Bartholo asserts that, if it were only for the fact offathering children, "there's no saying who one would have to marry" (p. 175). The name Figaro receives in this literal anagnorisis, Emmanuel, quite appropriately invokes that paroxysm of ovist preformationism, the immaculate

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conception. 9 And it is from the moment he is baptized and inducted into a family that he begins to base his actions on love alone and immediately loses track of the intrigue. The lack of concern for the characterological relation to one's ancestry and progeny translates into the equally superficial and "flat" depiction of the protagonists. Figaro in particular, who flaunts his resources as a master of intrigue, cannot draw from any inner source that would sustain him in times of adversity. The famous monologue at the end of the play shows how little his philosophic is able to secure identity over even the shortest stretches of time. 10 Whereas a Fichtean hero would gather strength from self-reflection, it is precisely the monologic structure of reflection that leaves Figaro completely headless. Imitating the count's generic desire in his rage against "woman," Figaro, after recounting his failed Bildungsroman, decries the abysmal structure of events that precipitated the dissolution of"this 'me' that I'm worrying about: a formless aggregation of unidentified parts" (p. 202). 11 The impossibility of securing any ground to stand on-indicated by the mocking evocation of the principle of reason: "Why should they happen to me? Why these things and not others?" (ibid.)-results for Figaro in submission to the bizarreness ofhis destiny, and to the smacks ofSuzanne. There is also no self-conscious interiority produced from the dialectics of master and slave between the count and Figaro. Because the median term is "woman" rather than "thing" (and its attributes "resilient" rather than "malleable"), no work can intervene between the two males, and as the stanza attributed to each of the characters in the final scene shows, nothing has been learned by anyone during the course of the crazy day.

Erotic Nominalism and Realism In none of the protagonists is there an unfathomable core that would attract the other or would require a special hermeneutics or a special code (like a diary) to reveal itself. 12 All movement of desire is lateral only and would continue interminably were it not for the time limit Figaro (and Aristotle) imposes on the action. This lateral movement

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is directed by a particular susceptibility to the power of language. Almaviva and his double, Cherubin, admit how, each in his own way, they are motivated by words. The count derives his satisfaction from that ''je ne sais quoi" of refusal and acquiescence characterizing the status of the bride (act 5, scene 7). Once this ambiguity is turned into an affirmation, or brought under the law, the monotony of linguistic repetition, not the withering ofbeauty or any other "real" reason, suffocates the count's desire. As he explains, unwittingly, to his wife (and here the English translation is not sufficient): "Nos femmes croient tout accomplir en nous aimant: cela dit une fois, elles nous aiment, nous aiment (quand elles nous aiment)" (act 5, scene 7; trans!. p. 206). Wedded to the law, the count thrives on the elusive moment when obeisance and refusal blend into each other: the ius primae noctis, together with the marital laws it presupposes, had provided him with a situation in which the collision ofjuridical provisionshis and those of his subjects-created a moment (a night) of suspense. But now, if Suzanne were to yield even when the ius primae noctis is abrogated, the promise of fidelity and infidelity would indeed coincide and thus create a situation of superlative excitement. This moment seems to have come when Suzanne hands the count a billet doux during the wedding ceremony. Almaviva would be able to break his promise to abrogate the ius without really breaking it, while Suzanne would break her marital vows without really breaking them, since the count's money freed Figaro from the contract with Marceline and made the marriage possible in the first place. But as the count painfully discovers, absolute duplicity not only cannot be contained by a ceremony, but it also eludes the letter. His humiliation at the end of the play is a direct result of his linguistic naivete, which, although it enjoys duplicity (or because of it), still relies on the univocity of the "real" event. While the predicament of the count's desire makes him desperately selective-this woman at that time-Cherubin's pursuits are allinclusive. His extraordinary activity is also based on an explicit linguistic philosophy. If the count is an erotic nominalist, Cherubin believes in the reality of"love." His indiscrimination is motivated by

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the insight that no word is causally connected with the individuality of what it signifies. His love is aroused by "love"; it does not arise from the depth of subjectivity or from the intrinsic qualities of the object: Cherubin: ... The word love makes my heart go pit-a-pat. In fact, I feel such a need to say "I love you" to someone that I catch myself saying it to myself walking in the park, to your mistress, to you, to the trees, to the clouds, to the wind which wafts them away with my fleeting words. Yesterday I met Marceline.... Suzanne [laughing]: Ha ha ha! Cherubin: Why not? She's a woman. Woman-girl-maiden! How thrilling the words areP 3 With their resolutely superficial relation to language, the count and Cherubin are Humboldt's worst nightmare, each in his own way. The epigenetic interpenetration of subjectivity and language, the drama of articulation, seems to completely pass them by. The count's nominalistic opposition of design and sign and Cherubin's delirious realism both keep their actions away from any depth of responsibility, which is why they are so easily forgiven. The intrigue is set up to make the count trip over his own linguistic presumptions rather than teach him a moral lesson; as for Cherubin, irresponsibility is his chief attraction. St-utter If all signs are, like Figaro's tattoo, hieroglyphic and entirely on the surface, their interpretation becomes, in a very literal sense, intriguing. If their meaning does not reside in any transcendental endowment with subjectivity, no appeal for a decision can be made to a third instance. Therefore, no hermeneutics help Bartholo and Marceline justify the claims of the marital contract, or help Figaro disprove them. Figaro might contend that there was "malice, error, or deliberate misrepresentation in the reading of the document" (p. 170); but such an ascription of hermeneutic intent is erased by the blot of ink covering the spot where a decision between "the

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coordinating conjunction 'and' linking the coordinate clauses" and "the alternating conjunction 'or' which separates the two clauses" (p. 170) could be read. The vertiginous movement of interpretation performed in court continues well beyond Humboldt's sacred boundaries of the word and begins to involve phonemes and accents, ending in the question: ou or ou?, or: ou ou ou? The attempted interpretation of the contract thus contracts to the same density of tautology that is so brilliantly embodied in the speech impediment of the judge. Brid' oison's stutter is indeed a diformation prcifessionelle: it performs the interpretive mode oflegal hermeneutics (the law is the law), and shows that no individual claim can ever hope to get an individual interpretation by the law. Only the sentence delivered by the count brings the conflict to an end-an end that, given Almaviva's interest in the case, was so predictable that it can be controverted only by the accidental discovery of Figaro's ancestry. Needles Superficiality, nonrelation between form and content, or, as Benjamin puts it, irreducibility of Sache (subject matter) and Gehalt (substance): 14 this is why the sign of choice in Figaro is the seal. While it is true that such signs cannot properly be understood, they can be divined. 15 In the dizzyingly complicated second act (scene 21), Antonio, although he is of evident anthropological erudition, 16 fails to demonstrate the relation between wax and seal (in this case, between the footprint in the flowerbed and the foot), whereas Figaro, led by the women, guesses that the seal does not appear on the page's commission and thus succeeds in thwarting the count's aggression. Only after Figaro himself has become a family man does he forget that one must not infer from the seal what has been sealed, or from the content of the sealed letter the intention of the writer. 17 Figaro is pricked by the needle sealing the presumed billet doux just as painfully as the count because, as he later admits, he temporarily loses his faculty of divination. 18 The needle is the ultimate sign and seal in Figaro for this reason: rather than imprinting a coat of arms on receptive wax-a relation

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that evokes social, philosophical, and linguistic distinctions to which only the count would subscribe, while everybody else is out to undercut them-the needle turns, if not divined, into a weapon itself, a stylus threatening to scratch the surface of the skin and to produce its own ink, "that special juice" (Faust) that the author of Die Wahlverwandtschaften will later stage as the ink of authenticity. 19 The impossibility of authenticating signs and establishing the provenance of things precipitates the action in Figaro, but it also, underneath the folly of the day, opens the play to a stratum of seriousness that goes far beyond the scope of the stage as a moral institution. With the proximity of needles and other pointed devices to the surface of vulnerable, in two cases paper-white, skin-the body of the countess, the lips ofSuzann:e, the arm ofCherubin20 -the play underscores the constant danger associated with all production and exchange of signs: they might return and hurt. While the lack of a third dimension-in Lacanian terms, the lack of the imaginaryallows for the unlimited manipulation of signs, it also makes them literally consequential. If not born from the imaginary or absorbed by it in interpretation, signs-words, promises, commissions, contracts, letters, needles-might follow those who send them away, might stray or ricochet. Echoes This danger calls for a responsibility for and to the signs that goes beyond the mere assumption or denial of auctoritas. The last scenes of the play pivot around echoes, words in random, authorless repetition. In the first instance, the repetition of the negative "nor I" (p. 206) still sounds to those involved like a natural echo, accidental to the place, a further obstacle in the arduous paths of desire and intrigue; but in the very last scene this negative is turned around: The Countess [laughing]: You'd say, "No, No!" if you were in my place. Whereas I for the third time today accord it [forgiveness] unconditionally. [She rises] Suzanne: And I too. [Gets up] Marceline: And I too. [Gets up]

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Figaro: And I too. There's an echo somewhere about. [They all get up] The Count: An echo! I thought I was being clever and they've treated me like an infant. (p. 215) All protagonists-or more precisely, those who had based their claims and actions on signs-acknowledge the possibility of a return of the sign. For the intrigue and its last climactic scene in the dark have revealed that no one controls absolutely the circulation of signs (least of all the men). This acknowledgment, and thus the possibility of forgiveness and laughter, comes as an echo, as the very form that had already announced itself throughout the play-in the stutter of the judge, in the phonetic indifference of the contract-as the straying oflanguage from its subject. The acknowledgment comes as an echo, or, in the count's case, as the echo of the echo. 21 To echo the echo is the inversion of the idealist claim of self-reflexivity through language, which Humboldt had so laboriously tried to establish. As the count has learned (and only this-no moral lesson is taught in the play), such presumptions are to be treated like those of an infant, who does not yet understand the seriousness oflanguage. With all the revolutionary pathos surrounding it-Danton's "Figaro a tue la noblesse" might be its most succinct expression22 nowhere does Figaro threaten the framework of aristocratic discourse and practice. But it is the neglect of the frame and the concentration on the accidental that provide him and Suzanne with the space that the generation after him will have lost-Beaumarchais's own Mere coupable, and most of the dramatic and operatic productions after 1 8oo can serve as evidence. The preformed law of the ancien regime cannot be questioned as such, but it can be shortcircuited and its commands drowned out by its own echo. The commands of epigenesis, on the other hand, issue from a depth identified with the very essence of nature, and they therefore never quite reach the surface of inscription. The strategy in Fichte's and Humboldt's pronouncements on love and marriage, to name only these examples, consists in erasing any trace of their unnatural juridical origin, or telos, and in presenting themselves as the distillation and systematization of nature's own ideal components. Positive laws are no longer decipherable as the imposition of a social class,

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and scientific theories, even those that collude with the interests of a social system, are immunized against radical doubt. While a critique of, and a stance against, preformationism was possible when it took the form of multiplication and cross-wiring of its commands, the inequities of epigenesis, no longer attributable to any exterior force, have to be suffered in silence. Le Mariage de Figaro is the loquacious comedy of preformation in the same sense that Goethe's Wahlverwandtschqften will turn out to be the silent Trauerspiel of epigenesis. 23 Similarities Like Le Mariage de Figaro, Die Wahlverwandtschqften has four protagonists, two of which form a (noble and rich) couple whose marriage seems to have lost some of its initial drive. The other two are servants. But what was visible social dependency in the case of Figaro and Suzanne has mutated in Goethe's work, true to the precepts of romantic interiorization, into character traits. The servility of Ottilie and the captain is mentioned incessantly, hers from the very first moment when she kneels in front of Charlotte, his in the relentless usefulness with which he helps Eduard run his estate. 24 Both plots are driven by the fact that the noble husband develops a passion for the female servant, while the other half of the foursome, under the pressure of mimetic desire, tries halfheartedly to work up the same enthusiasm for each other. In both stories, sons of some sort divide and link the four protagonists. The unity of time in Figaro, announced in the subtitle of the play and used throughout as a means to force the action, is replaced by the unity of space in Die Wahlverwandtschqften, which positions the characters in a closed yet structured environment. This is not to say that Goethe has consciously modeled Die Wahlverwandtschaften after Figaro; but the difference between the two scenarios is determinate and revealing. As Ottilie remarks in her diary: "Life without love, without the presence of the one we love is just a 'comedie atiroir,' a cheap, ill-made play [Schubladenstack]. We pull out one drawer after another, put it back again and hasten on to the next. Everything there that is good or meaningful seems only

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tenuously connected" (p. 219). 25 Such motivation through accidents and interruptions rather than through interpretable design was a hallmark of eighteenth-century drama, of high drama, such as the opera seria, no less than of comedies; and for Goethe, the author, organizer, and theoretician of classicist drama, the discontinuity in these pieces was a practical as well as a theoretical nuisance. But this is not only a formal concern: as the analysis of Figaro has shown, the irruption of accidents is symptomatic of the breakdown of the intrigue, of the failure of the planning and projecting subject to hold on to all the threads of the action. Whatever reconciliation there is at the end of Figaro, it is based-apart from the respect for trying-on the shared insight into the impossibility of a successful intrigue.

Zufall There seems to be no intrigue in Die Wahlvenvandtschajten; indeed, all attempts at prompting people to take certain actions by means other than genteel persuasion-Charlotte to accept the divorce, Ottilie to leave for the school, etc. -fail miserably. And yet, the elimination of all intriguing behavior does not bring about the elimination of chance; to the contrary, the seemingly controlled environment obscures the possibility of distinguishing between meaningful and chance events. What turns out to be extraordinarily meaningful to the protagonists is explicitly, even literally, presented as an accident [Zufall] in the novel: the engraved glass that falls toward its catcher and ultimately to Eduard (pp. I 35, I 72); the slip ofpaper that falls out ofEduard's waistcoat (p. I 54); the door that falls shut while Eduard tries to remove the signet (p. 2 5I; the very instrument that in Figaro, and later in Benjamin, is associated with the possibility and impossibility of controlled signification); the fall of little Otto into the water (p. 239). Objects, and therefore the initiative, slip in and out of the hands of the protagonists. The association of falling with subjectivity-jumping-is so unusual to the people in the novel (not, however, in the novella) that the captain's jump into the lake draws a "shout of surprise" from the bystanders (p. I 58). The dichotomy of intrigue and accident, which had character-

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ized the plot of Figaro, is replaced in Die Wahlvenvandtschaften by the ominous undecidability of events as they move across the chiasm holding the four protagonists together. What appears meaningfulbedeutend is the word Goethe uses incessantly in the novel-to one person (the engraved glass to Eduard) or one couple (the death of Otto to Ottilie and Charlotte) is comparatively insignificant to another. In particular, linguistic events-conversations, remarks, engravings, speeches, letters, gestures, etc.-have drastically different meaning for those who participate in them, the most obvious case being the utterly insignificant chatter of Mittler, which kills both the priest and Ottilie. The intrinsic instability of meaning, rather than the exteriority of accidents in Figaro (where the count surprises Cherubin by always coming from the outside into a room) sustains the "ineluctable horror" the novel presents in its chillingly serene language. 26 Accidents take on such an ominous aura in the lapsarian world of Die Wahlvenvandtschciften because none of the characters seems to have found a mode [Gelassenheit ?] in which to let them happen. In a revealing scene of pedagogy, soon after Ottilie enters the castle (p. 122) she is taught that falling objects here always land on a ground already marked by sexual difference. Every Zufall, one could (but does not have to) say, is already zu phall. 27 Under these circumstances, Ottilie's penchant for bending down and picking up what has fallen is not simply another instance of her enthusiastic servility, but, by virtue of Charlotte's explicit prohibition, fraught with such unspeakable sexual implications (comparable to those in the beggar's song that kills Emma Bovary) that no reason [Grund] for such a suspension of politeness is given. Forced to accept this rule of decency, Ottilie, although apparently lifted up from her supine position, nevertheless has to submit to the severance of rule and reason and, therefore, to the impossibility of not distinguishing between chance and omen. The unspeakable and anonymous decision about what is decent in society (was sich ziemt, a lifelong obsession of Goethe) exemplifies the schism between rule and reason, or, as Ottilie puts it in her diary with perfect clarity, between sign and ground: "There is no external sign of politeness that does not rest on

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a deep ethical ground. Proper education would ideally consist in transmitting the convention and its ground at one and the same time" (p. 199, mod.). For Ottilie, speaking for all characters in the novel, the allegorical form of politeness, in which the organic link between ground and expression is severed by an unquestionable prohibition, only imperfectly covers an original and desirable symbolic unity in "natural" action. Much of the protagonist's activity is devoted to erasing the superimposition of allegorical relation over symbolic unity-to giving life to paintings, naturalness to landscape, feeling to recited poetry, etc. Paradigmatic, of course, was the attempt to vivify the thematic chemical allegory; and the novel could have begun with showing us Eduard pruning a tree, rather than grafting, the symbol of symbolic activity. Mter all, the title of the novel reproduces the same precedence of an artificial, allegorical choice [Wahl] over natural, symbolic relation [Verwandtschqft]. The instability of meaning, which replaces the radical exteriority of accidents in Figaro, opens up the distance between allegorical surface and symbolic ground into which the characters insert themselves in their endeavor to restore meaning and temporal univocity to their world. To compensate for how things "fall," they attempt to chart their own itinerary while the novel, speaking from "another world" to which Ottilie gains access at the end (p. 243), mercilessly registers these attempts as further stations on their ineluctable decline. The attempted translation of allegorical accidentality into symbolic meaningfulness positions them in a fate that is all the more unyielding because it is of their own doing.

Goethe's Science The use of symbol and allegory, terms that came to embody the opposition between literary strategies as well as that between strategies of reading, is by no means extraneous to a novel that is so obviously concerned with issues of contemporary science. Goethe's lifelong occupation with scientific matters is accompanied by a sustained, if changing, reflection on the nature and power oflanguage. Far more subtle than in the propagandistic definitions of symbol and allegory

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quoted incessantly as his last word on the matter, Goethe, for example in his critique ofNewton and Schelling, acknowledges the convergence of scientific and linguistic procedures, and in particular the confusion arising from the misreading of allegorical descriptions of natural processes as their symbolic, or univocal, determinations. 28 Preformation and epigenesis figure early on in Goethe's writings on biology as paradigmatic "modes of representation" [ Vorstellungsarten] in scientific discourse. Like vulcanism and neptunism (the competing theories about the formation of the surface of the earth), they both contain enough truth and enough detectable motivation not to be completely worthless; it is their claim to exclusivity and rigor that disqualifies them, in Goethe's eyes, for the kind of"tender empiricism" that he attempted to substitute for the soulless Newtonianism against which he felt compelled to fight. The characterization of preformation and epigenesis as modes of representation is, of course, a gesture similar to Kant's exposition of competing cosmological theories as antinomic and, therefore, irreconcilable on purely theoretical grounds. 29 But Goethe's attempt to undercut their difference by positing a more fundamental morphogenetic process-metamorphosis-would align his science with the procedure of epigenetic natural philosophy in the wake ofFichte's and Schelling's regrounding of transcendental philosophy, in which the dialectics of the understanding is recast as a dialectics of nature. Goethe's science indeed shared with epigenetic theories of generation the empirical difficulty of recurring to an "original" phenomenon; but this was so far removed from scientific verification that even its discursive coherence seemed precarious. He could or would never quite clear away the impression of a certain poetic or philosophical inventiveness. But unlike some of the more adventurous natural philosophers-Lorenz Oken, his future nemesis, is an example30 -Goethe allowed the original position to be divided in order not to carry too much metaphysical weight: This ideal original body, however simple we might construe it in our thoughts, we have to think of as divided in its interior; without previously thought division of the one, the emergence of a third cannot be thought. This ideal original body, which is characterized by a certain determin-

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ability for duality, we leave for the time being in the lap of nature. We only note that here atomistic and dynamic modes of representing the methods of evolution and formation [Bildungsmethoden] oppose each other immediately. 31 While the dynamism of epigenesis-Goethe's use of Bildung as an equivalent for the epigenetic "method" again underscores the "scientific" connotation of this key notion in German discoursecomplies with the demand for duality and formability [Bildbarkeit] in the original material, the atomism of preformation, exemplified in the theory of encapsulation, offers a comparatively crude, even disgusting, way to account for the multiplicity of natural forms: "The theory of encapsulation does soon become disgusting to those with higher education" (Siimtliche Werke [AGA], val. 17, p. 176). In the "higher culture" that Goethe envisions as a frame for his own scientific research, both sides of the alternative would be sublated as compatible perspectives on the generation ofliving beings. How exactly such a reconciliation might be achieved and what a corresponding epistemology might look like, whether metamorphosis is indeed a concept well enough defined to answer the demands of scientific morphogenesis or just another metaphysical construct to avoid the abyss of sexual division, is a matter of much speculation in Goethe scholarship. In any case, it is obvious that the higher culture in which the opposition between preformation and epigenesis might be contained and in which an unequivocal mode of communication would bind all interlocutors is not that of Die Wahlvenvandtschqften. In its fashionably epigenetic setting-announced in the first sentence with Eduard's grafting and culminating in the epigenetic crime manifested in little Otto-both Vorstellungsarten interpenetrate and cross over constantly but are not sublated in a higher form or concept.

Tying the Not An essential part of the epigenetic proclamations of freedom had been liberation from the bonds of prearranged marriages in which the contingency of preformed generation is extended to the con-

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tingency of parental choice. Opposition to such arrangements in the comedies of preformation typically assumed the form of initial rebellion, experimental verification, and final acceptance of the parental choice. In the course of this verification-often a prolonged disguise-the apparent exteriority and willfulness of that choice is shown to actually comply with the inner orientation of the lover's desire. The perceived distance between love and chance is traversed in the process of making it evident, and the plots derive much of their comic potential from the fact that the rebellion blindly furthers its enemy's goal. The initial negation of the father's law on the grounds of its sheer contingency collapses and results instead in its smiling acceptance. Georg Buchner, whose Leonce und Lena follows this schema, characterized this tendency aptly as "flight into paradise." 32 The unheard-of event recounted in the novel's central novella is set in this world of preformed marriage. The wunderliche Nachbarskinder are destined by their parents to be married for reasons of mere convenience and contiguity; the children-the girl in particularreject this design. This rejection, however, is not directed against the parental choice per se, as in so many stories where, against the social convenience of the arrangement, the freedom of the will is shown to have an emotional base in the chosen partner; it is so visceral, so full of hatred, that the parents are forced to separate the two and let them make their own choice. But by finally falling for each other, the path of the lovers in the novella is asymmetrical both to the scenario of initial rebellion and final consent and to the free choice of epigenesis. The children's detour from and back to the law is motivated exclusively and insistently by exterior and unconscious reasons. The rivalry between them stems not from any specific character trait but from their similarity: they simply stand in each other's way and therefore need to be separated. The boy is happy about this separation "without being clearly aware of it" (p. 225), and the relation between the girl and her new groom is a result of convenience and "habit" [Gewohnheit]: "She had so often been called his future wife that she finally regarded herself as such" (p. 226). Her retroactive

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passion for her "original" groom does not arise from an articulate insight into his superior qualities, which, conspicuously, are developed only by the narrating "anyone": "If anyone had been able to share and discuss [entwickeln] these feelings ..." (p. 227). And her decision to die is not calculated to provoke anticipated reactions on the part of the insouciant soldier (it is not a sacrifice, in Benjamin's terms) but to punish him with the same inexplicable hatred and maliciousness that had already characterized their childhood relationship ("hostile [hassend], even vicious toward each other alone" [p. 225]), to punish him for his unwillingness to explore, even to recognize her inner feelings: "He would, she thought, never be able to free himself from her dead image, he would never cease to reproach himself for not having sounded out, recognized, and valued her feelings" (p. 227). Their change ofheart down the river, finally, is unconscious on both sides: she forgot her hatred during her unconsciousness, he promises his love "quite unaware of what he was saying and doing" (p. 229). That this sequence of exterior events and unconscious choices does not lead to an interiorization or naturalization of the parental law-which in fact they are breaking-but to an acceptance of its exteriority is indicated by the wedding garments with which the lovers "transvest" themselves smilingly: garments complete enough to dress a couple from head to toe and-as Goethe adds in a phrase so astonishing that it was left untranslated"from the inside out" (von innen heraus; p. 229). Of the marriage practices in preformationist societies, the novella exhibits the very features against which epigenetists-those in the framing novel, for example-would direct all their argumentative and institutional might. Besides the apparent unaccountability of the marrying subjects, which lets the coincidence of necessity and chance just happen, these include the equality of the children's upbringing and their resulting sexual formation. The tutor in the novel advocates and practices the closest possible scrutiny of his disciples and proposes a philosophy of strictly gender-specific education, culminating in the maxim: "Boys should be educated to be servants and girls to be mothers, then everything will work out quite suitably" (p. 208). Yet the children in the novella roam about

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without any supervision, engaging in games played apparently by girls and boys alike and fighting each other as equal, even if not equally strong, leaders of rival gangs. Unlike the subjects of epigenetic pedagogy, whose innate goodness only needs to be elicited by the pedagogue and protected against the detrimental influences of society, these children hate each other to begin with, and only the interference of society keeps each from destroying the other. The absence of supervision and the omission of cultivating gender differences in early childhood leads to a drastically unepigenetic sexual relationship between the two neighbors. Epigenetic philosophy, whenever it descends to the practical aspects of marriage and sexuality, is faced with a fundamental dilemma, which Fichte's Natural lAw had exposed in all its starkness: if subjectivity is thought of as infinite activity, if nature, in analogy to the relation between I and not-1, is divided into activity and passivity, and if woman is supposed to represent the material, resistant, passive pole in nature, then female sexuality, as the activity of passivity, can never be exercised without woman's losing her membership in the species of reasonable beings to which, by virtue of its universality, this very philosophy of reason has elevated her. In Fichte, the dilemma was resolved through love-that is, male compassion for the utter contradictoriness of female existence and female gratefulness for his magnanimity. For those who wonder how such a woman could react at all when the contrariety of sex befalls her, the novel contains an unusually precise characterization at the outset of what will turn out to be the epigenetic disaster of the novel, the generation of little Otto: Charlotte was one of those women who, moderate by nature, still retain in marriage, without consciously trying, the ways of a mistress [Liebhaberin]. She never sought to arouse the man, in fact she hardly even responded to his desire; but, without coldness or stern refusal, she yet resembled a loving bride who still feels some inner shyness even about what is now permitted. (P. 147, mod., my emphasis) The accumulation of negativity in this behavior serves to prevent the possibility that Fichte and Humboldt had rejected as the disgusting other of their epigenetic constructions: that women en-

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joy what passes for passivity and actively pursue its satisfaction. But exactly this possibility-later ejected from reasonable behavior under the name of primary female masochism-is taken up and pursued by the girl in the novella: She smiled at the thought of how she had taken up arms and attacked him; she thought she recalled the most pleasant of feelings when he had disarmed her; she imagined she had experienced the greatest bliss when he had tied her up; and everything she had done to hurt and annoy him now seemed to her an innocent means of attracting his attention. (Pp. 226-27) This smile is significantly more relaxed than the smile with which Ottilie accepts Charlotte's admonishments regarding the indecency and sexual depravation of her servility and defenselessness. What in the hyper-epigenetic context of the novel appears as indecent and sexually abominable because every spontaneous lowering of a woman contains the potential threat of her active submission, prompts-as part of a game and in retrospect-a smile in the preformationist utopia of the novella. The girl in the novella, as a member of the as yet unquestioned aristocracy, can afford to be supremely careless about her appearing servile precisely because this is not a plausible threat. But Charlotte and the tutor's pedagogical project with Ottilie, namely to weld together servility and femininity in the single function of the mother, must rely on their subject's ability to distinguish between physical and mental servility, as well as to be constantly aware of the abyss of sex that threatens her path. And while Charlotte's precept interrupted Ottilie's response to the "fall" of accidents, the girl's smiling memory initiates the process by which the two neighbors ratify the chance of their parents' choice with their own jumps. The novella is not, however, a preforhlationist counterworld. This is borne out by its relation to the plot of the novel: its protagonist, the captain, arrives on the scene of the novel unmarried and with a massively neurotic relationship to water. 33 His hesitation to leave the helm of the ship to save his suicidal neighbor might have been too long, causing the girl to drown, or, which seems more likely, the fathers had refused to consent to the marriage. 34 Indeed,

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so incommensurable appear the events in the novella from the epigenetic standpoint of the novel-the children's inversion of divorce and marriage, their invention of obstacles, their realization that what they desired most was chance, and their society's consent to this delayed realization-that they amount to a twist of affirmation and negation that can only be cast in violent physiological imagery: "To go from water to land, death to life, from the family to the wilderness, despair to delight, indifference to affection and passion, and all this in one moment-the mind could scarcely contain it all; it would burst or go mad" (p. 229). It is not the content of the novella that makes the head burstpretty tame stuff by the standards of the genre-but the mode of its reading: Goethe, by fore grounding the relational movement of the novella (from . . . to), describes the structure of an allegory; but rather than immersing itself in the appropriate infinite contemplation of this relation, the mind is forced to apprehend the relation of extremes under the time structure of the symbol exaiphnes, "all this in one moment." This suppression of temporal difference, and with it the suppression of allegorical relationality by the immediacy of the symbol, which will recur in the central scene before Otto's death, also characterizes Charlotte's understanding of marriage.

Wunderliche Parents For Charlotte and Eduard, marriage has taken a detour different from that of the children in the novella. They, too, had been "truly predestined for each other" (p. 141), but their desire seems to have been supported to a large extent by the desire of others. As the count reminisces: "Today, there are no longer such glorious events or such splendid figures. When the two of you danced together all eyes were on you, and how everyone vied for your attention, while [or because] you mirrored yourselves only in each other" (ibid., mod.). The narcissistic union between the two is destroyed by Charlotte's flirtatiousness and cruelty (p. 14) and not, as she likes to think, by the "insatiable desire for possessions" (p. 96) of Eduard's father. Curious [wunderlich] (p. 141) in their story are not the children but Eduard's

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parents, who did not contradict their child's will but "managed to talk him into a strange, but highly advantageous marriage" (p. 98) once his own choice had started to mistreat him. Just as they slipped into their respective first marriages because the expressions of their love had destroyed their union, both Charlotte and Eduard are finally liberated not by their own decision [Entscheidung] but by death's will: "In their case death did willingly what the courts are usually unwilling to" (p. 140). Their marriage-entered into after a delay often years not by mutual passion or conscious decision but by common memories ("We took pleasure in our recollections, we loved our memories"; [p. 96]) and by Eduard's stubbornness)is characterized by melancholia and the attempt to recuperate lost time. Life in the castle resembles a constant, sometimes frantic labor to delay death and erase all of its signs: gardening, archivization, architecture. All characters seem to share Eduard and Charlotte's attitude toward death: rather than confronting it as the ultimate accident, they see death as the will of another; when little Otto dies, everybody interprets his fall into the water as an intelligible act. The imposition of a will on death and the ensuing attempts to delay its advent orient time for the four friends irreversibly toward the future; everything needs to be done before [ehe] it is too late. Eduard's characteristic haste is fueled by this understanding of time, as is Charlotte's idea that marriage provides shelter from fate. When she hears from the baroness that a friend ofhers will soon [ehstens] be divorced, she exclaims: "It is distressing ... when you believe your absent friends are in comfortable circumstances or think a dear friend is well settled, and before you turn around [eh man sichs versieht] you hear that their fate is uncertain and they are about to take new and perhaps uncertain paths" (p. 139). Since Eduard and Charlotte have not dared to go ahead with their own choice, have endured their first marriages in full consciousness of their banality, and have entered their present union motivated by common memories, they are equally helpless in preventing its dissolution. The inauthentic repetition that constitutes their marriage condemns Eduard and Charlotte, and by association their friends, to a reading of ehe that is univocally determined by the feared advent of

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the future. Ehe has lost all absoluteness and survives in the novel as the framework within which to make best use of time before [ehe] it is too late, as the framework that has to be accepted rather than [eher] solitude or dissolution. The neighbor children who rebel against their parents' will only to oblige it have a different reading of ehe.

Ehe ehe Ehe When they ask for their parents' blessing, the children of the novella already have their death behind them. Rebelling against the parental choice for a second time and thus rebelling against themselves, they reach back into a dimension in which they were unquestionably given to each other. When the girl throws herself into the water it is to punish the "man she had once hated" [den ehemals Gehaj3ten] (p. 227); he, "her former opponent and neighbor" [ihr ehemaliger nachbarlicher Widersacher] (p. 225) was already, as the simple anagram underscores, her Ehegemahl (husband). With their retroactive validation of parental choice the neighbor children understand ehe as that which comes before: not so much as the simple passing of time in which one event comes before another (as the choice of their parents came before [ehe] they could make up their own minds), or as the awareness of the imminence of the future (before long, ehstens), but as the pure, directionless, temporal condition for the possibility of the partner's decision. Before this decision, both temporal directions, "in prospect and in retrospect, so to speak" (p. 227) are equally possible-just as ehe can be read forward and backward. While normally decisions are predicated upon the acceptance of the past and the will's free projection into the future (such as Charlotte and Eduard's decision to invite the captain and Ottilie), the palindromic undecidability of ehe leads to the girl's "strange delirium" (p. 227) in which she wants the impossible: the past as it will be, the future as it was. For it is not the past as it was that she desires (then she simply hated the boy) but the past as it would have been had they both accepted the future their parents had designed before them. Consciously, therefore, the decision to throw herself into the water appears as the design to marry the reluctant soldier to her image:

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She decided to die in order to punish for his lack of interest [Unteilnahme] the man she had once hated and now so passionately loved, and since she could not possess him, she would bind herself forever [vermiihlen] to his rueful imagination. He would, she thought, never be able to free himself from her dead image, he would never cease to reproach himself for not having sounded out, recognized, and valued her feelings. (P. 227)

Punishing the boy for one wrong letter (Unteilnahme/ Anteilnahme), driven crazy by the senses of ehe, she throws herself into the middle-the "hospitable element" (p. 228) with the (al)chemical name hydor 35 -not because of a conscious decision [Entscheidung] but as a means of Scheiden: to separate herself from him "chemically" by changing elements (becoming a "dead image" after dissolution in water), to divorce herself from him because they are not to be married, to take leave [Abschied] from him before they would be separated forcibly. As this "mad" structure and the incessant mentioning of attributes of unconsciousness show, the events leading to marriage-if they do-are not caused by consciousness, freedom of will, epigenetic subjectivity, or obedience to the laws of preformation. The unheard-of event in the novella is properly inaudible from both of these positions: it tells of the ehe before the Ehe [ "ehe" ehe Ehe], the directionless temporal intervention before [ehe] the joining of two people, the period before [ Vorzeit] their wedding [Hochzeit]; not before [nicht ehe] this intervention has been accepted does the marriage have a chance to realize itself rather than and before [eher als] the jump into the water can become deadly. The peculiar spreading of time in ehe would best be expressed in a verb (ehern), which, however, oscillates with the adjective denoting the strength of the bond forged with it: ehern (brazen). Benjamin's provocative "Der Gegenstand der Wahlverwandtschaften ist nicht die Ehe" (Wahlverwandtschaften, p. 68) could thus be supplemented with "sondern das ehe": Ehe is not the object of Die Wahlverwandtschaften but the form under which the impossibility of its objectification becomes legible. As befits a novel in which the meaning of the word is so consistently obliterated by the position of the letter, the incomprehensible palindrome Ehe, just as its equally incomprehensible product, Otto, indicates a sphere in which the

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imposition of meaning, subjectivity, and freedom is unexpectedly thwarted. Marriage, the crucial link between epigenetic nature and epigenetic subjectivity, is unintelligible even when its procedures are liberated from the strictures of preformation and prearrangement. The simple opposition of the two senses of ehe-grounding marriage in a past before [ehe] the partners could make their decision, or projecting it into a future in which the self-grounding promise has to hold true-is too facile, for it neglects the fact that between the two directions of ehe no clear decision can be made and a third dimension has to be accepted (Goethe himself had recommended that Die Wahlverwandtschciften be read at least three times). 36 The Vorzeit envisaged in the novella involves the abolition of consciousness, but it is equally unattainable by trusting a lower faculty such as desire, which is ill-disguised hatred anyway. Its head-shattering incomprehensibility rests on its incomprehensible time structure: the repetition of a state that never was. It is uchronical rather than utopian, and as such it is discredited in the novel.

The House ofReason Showing the impossibility of reading Ehe-despite the numerous deliberations and pronouncements on the topic-is but one way in which the novel discredits the idea of a self-active [selbstthiit(g] and therefore free and responsible human subject. Goethe's elimination of subjectivity goes far beyond the story of romantic victimization, according to which the attempts at liberation and synchronization of self and world are thwarted by exterior forces, be they political, familial, or simply discursive. Already in the uncovering of the Vorzeit of Hochzeit, time, as the dimension of interiority, is twisted beyond cognition. The elaborate allegory of the house on the hill, introduced by a carefully choreographed "trionfo" 37 and performed ("this stone means that") by the mason, shows that the end of time as the fundament of reason has come. Kant had structured the architectonics of pure reason in three distinct levels. The faculty of sensation occupies the "lowest" rung, for in its insurmountable passivity it always requires the ordering ac-

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tivity of the understanding. Although the understanding, the faculty of categorical order, is equally dependent upon sensibility for the constitution of experience, its ordering principles are given a priori. Reason, the ability to employ concepts without necessary experiential content, but also the faculty to totalize the categorical order, needs in turn to be anchored in the lower faculties if it is not to lose its function as "roof," or capstone, of the structure of cognition. The whole structure is based on the presupposition that there is no empirical ground strong enough to carry it, and that, consequently, only the epigenetic origin of the categories can provide sufficient stability. To account for the plan of this structure and to ground it securely, Kant, as he proudly recounted, had had to survey the field of metaphysics; the Critique of Pure Reason is this cartography of metaphysics (CR B 295). Fichte and the post-Kantians have torn down this structure while claiming to reground it: the epigenetic origins within just one faculty, which can be legitimized but not explained, were replaced by making the structure originate-not simply depend, as Reinhold had proposed-from its highest point, from the epigenetic, self-positing I in the medium of reason. The three levels ofKant's edifice and its ultimate reversal structure the first part of the novel and chart the protagonists' descent into the netherworld of the second part. In accordance with Goethe's insistence on denying his characters all ability of self-reflection and hence of synthesis and self-constitution over time, these instances are themselves cast in an entirely spatial, architectonic mode. Charlotte, in her attempt to clear a comfortable path up to the highest point in the park, works on the first level of pure sensory apprehension. Proceeding step by step and without plan or project, the infinite task ofbringing unity into sensory impression-be this their tinkering in the park, their music making, or the preparation of Eduard's papers for posterity-constitutes for her the very essence of marriage. She perceives the invitation to the captain as a threat to the infinite task of ordering and thus as an uncovering of finitude and emptiness in her marriage to Eduard. Trying to avert the disaster of the invitation to the captain, she reminds Eduard of this common essence:

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First, you planned to recount the content of your travel diaries to me in proper sequence, while at the same time organizing various of your papers on the subject, and with my help and interest piece together those valuable but disordered pages and notebooks to form a rounded picture that would give pleasure to ourselves and others. I promised to help you with the fair copy, and imagined that it would be so agreeable, so charming, so warm and cozy to journey again through a world we were not destined to see together. (P. 96)38 Charlotte's apprehensions were perfectly justified. The captain decides to waste no time in demonstrating to the impressionable Eduard the inferiority of his wife's thinking, a decision that in its maliciousness, or thoughtlessness, is surpassed in the novel only by Ottilie's decision to report to Eduard the captain's low opinion ofhis musicianship. Charlotte's tinkering, the captain implies, interferes with the freedom and rhythm of a priori thought: If the execution had exhausted the [possibilities of] thought, which is very fine, no objection could be made. She has worked her way up the rock laboriously, if you will, and now makes everyone clamber up there just as laboriously. You can't walk in freedom either beside or behind one another. The rhythm of the step [der Takt des Schrittes] is interrupted at every moment. And one could raise all kinds of similar objections. (P. 106, mod.) All work in the park henceforth is based on the topographical map the captain produces in his sleepless nights. Trigonometry, as an a priori science, is not only a tool to better represent the park in the two dimensions of the map; it also provides the ground for all further planning and, unlike Charlotte's infinite dabbling, helps find an end: the "topographical map ... -which the captain knew how to ground with trigonometric measurements-was soon finished" (p. 110, mod.). In addition, papers are put in a workable order and the community is subjected to measures of public welfare and policing. This reign of the understanding is disrupted by Ottilie. She suggests that the highest point in the land-the one to which Charlotte had attempted to build a path step by step and which the captain tried to attain with his systematic and economic ascent-be

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occupied by a house that would no longer have any relation to the rest of the environment but constitute its own world: "One would be in a new and different world" (p. 129). Her suggestion is derived not from experimentation or calculation but from intuition and intellect at the same time. When Eduard, having climbed from Charlotte's realm of sensory apprehension to the captain's plane of rational planning, suddenly follows Ottilie to the highest point and inscribes the place for the new building, the map, and the captain's soul, are disfigured: "He took a pencil and drew in rough, bold strokes a long rectangle on the rise. The captain's soul was crossed. He didn't like to have his careful, cleanly drawn map disfigured in this way" (p. 129, mod.). The consecration of the new building on the highest ground also marks the moment in the novel when Eduard and Ottilie leave the community in and of the castle and proceed toward their end in ever greater isolation. The idea that reason is not only the capstone and crowning of the edifice of cognitive faculties or, at the most, provider of the Triebjedern (incentives) for moral action, but instead ground and grounding, was implicit in the epigenetic reversal of philosophy beginning with Fichte's early Practische Philosophic. The Science cif Knowledge, and any other philosophy with the same claim to fundamentality, was infinitely concerned with its beginning, with its own ground and Begriindung, while the perfection of the edifice-still a main concern ofKant before he too began to brood over the right beginning of philosophy-was of secondary importance. Science is an edifice, its main purpose solidity: The ground is solid [fest], and as soon as it is prepared, the purpose would be achieved. But since one cannot live on the ground alone, since through it [the ground) one cannot protect oneself against the willful onslaught of the enemies, nor against the willful onslaught of the climate, one erects walls and on top of these a roof. All parts of the edifice are conjoined to the ground and among themselves, so that the whole becomes solid, but one doesn't build a solid edifice so that one can conjoin, but one conjoins so that the edifice becomes solid; and it is solid inasmuch as all parts rest upon the same solid ground. The ground is solid, and it is not grounded upon another ground, but upon the solid soil

[festen Erdboden]. 39

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Accordingly, the foundation ceremony for the house on top of the rise, for which Ottilie had found the ground, is accompanied by a long and profound discourse, while the short speech celebrating the roof and structural completion of the building "was for the most part carried away by the wind" (p. I 57). The discourse of the mason recapitulates the epigenetic reversal in the house of reason. 40 Three elements, the philosophical mason begins, are to be remembered when building a house: that it should be well placed, well grounded, and well finished. As Ottilie's choice of place from intellectual intuition had shown, the first decision-or the primacy of practical reason-can no longer be conceived as coming from outside the building. There was no other place to build it (idealism is not one of many possible philosophies), and the ultimate justification for the choice has to emerge together with the building. The perfection and ornamentation of the building, on the other hand, can be left to other trades once the unity of the foundation has been established. "But the second thing, the foundation, is the mason's task and-let us state this boldly-the chief business of the whole undertaking" (p. I 33). Founding the fundament is anything but a simple, unified enterprise. The first fundamental stone, which will determine the position of all other stones and that of all the walls and the roof, must itselfbe grounded in the ground: We could easily just lower this stone [Grundstein] ... because it would rest evenly by virtue of its own weight. But here, too, there shall be no lack of mortar, the substance that binds stone to stone; for just as people who are naturally fond of each other stay together better when they are bound by the law, so stones that have already been shaped to fit together are held together better by its cohesive powers. (P. I33)

Positioning [Setzen] the grounding stone prevents, by means of the intermittence of the law [Gesetz], the contact between the stone and its ground. And this law-the mortar-as the captain in the parabola of the elective affinities had shown, is itself not a unified substance but a mixture of various elements. If the self-grounding of the system "by virtue of its own weight" is impossible, the "union of

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stone and earth" can only be signified, but not effectuated, through the ritual triple tapping of the stone. It is not without justification that the mason asks Charlotte to perform this ritual, since with it her own tinkering on the ground is explicitly discredited. In the foundation ceremony, the activity of the mason-the grounding of the building by allegorical signification rather than by symbolic union-is bared to the eyes of the spectators whose presence shall cover up the impossibility in the act of grounding before the ground itself is covered again. Arising from this mutual testimony, self-consciousness can declare itself as the real ground of the building: "The mason's work" the speaker continued, "though now in the open air, takes place, if not in secret, then for a secret purpose. The level ground is filled in, and even in the case of the walls we build above the ground, one hardly thinks of us in the end .... Who else, then, is more justified than the mason in doing what he does right to please himself? Who has more reason to nourish his self-consciousness?" (Pp. I33-34, mod.)

As a consequence of this instauration of self-consciousness, the grounding stone becomes a stone for, or of, thought: "This is why we are going to make this foundation stone a memorial stone [Denkstein] as well" (p. 134). Suddenly, the perfectly rectangular stone communicating its regularity into the farthest corner of the housethe stone of the understanding-is marked with "different hollowed-out spaces" (p. 134) in which documents of the time are to be deposited forever: We are grounding this stone for all time, to ensure that the present and future owners will have the longest possible enjoyment of this house. But insofar as we are also burying a treasure, as it were, we reflect, during this most fundamental of tasks, on the transience of all things human; we contemplate the possibility that this firmly sealed cover may be opened again, which could not happen unless everything else that we have not yet even finished building were to be destroyed. (P. I 34)

Ottilie, the muse and inspiration of the house, contributes "with quiet hand" the golden chain from which Eduard had persuaded her to remove the image of her father-Charlotte's brother-and Ed-

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uard "rather hastily made sure that the well-fitting cover was immediately set in place and joined fast" (p. I 34). After the catastrophe of epigenesis, the death of Otto, the characters enter a world in which they are united no longer by sharing the same time-"The intervening time [Zwischenzeit] had been forgotten" (p. 255)-but by pure spatial communion, "immediate presence [reines Zusammensein ]" (p. 2 54). The desire for mundane eternity announced in the grounding of the stone "forever" has been answered by a mundane apocalypse, which Ottilie, true to her angelic vocation, had evoked early on: "But this isn't the final judgment, after all!" (p. I I9). "Erased was that unpleasant, embarrassing atmosphere of the time between [der mittleren Zeit]" (p. 255, mod.), just as Ottilie has ceased to partake in any other form of mediation, of Mitteilung or communion, be it language or food. In this state of timeless revelation, the house of epigenetic reason has also been toppled, and its fundaments, and the fundament of the fundament, the Denkstein containing the pieces of time, has again been laid open. For no other reason could Ottilie keep the key to her worldly possessions on the golden chain she had buried in the foundation stone: "She added one more thing-her father's portrait-and locked the whole chest, hanging the delicate key around her neck again on the golden chain" (p. 256, mod.). 41

Monstrum The moment of revelation is the death of Otto. It was the sight of the new house's "red tiles shining in the sun" that filled Eduard with "irrepressible longing" and drew him to the fateful meeting with Ottilie (p. 237); it is the new house in which the women live and toward which Ottilie rushes with the body of the dead child. It is here that Ottilie, as she had predicted when arguing for the best site for the new house, enters "another world," from which she observes the orbit, or tracing, ofher life (pp. 129, 243). Mterward, the friends move back down to the castle, and soon thereafter Eduard's haste ceases. If the house on top of the hill is an allegory of the system of epigenetic reason, Otto is its symbol, and when the latter perishes,

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so does the former. But the symbolic character of litde Otto is monstrous indeed. Otto's monstrosity consists in showing and living-that is, symbolizing-the chiastic relationship among the four characters. 42 This is possible only under hyper-epigenetic presuppositions. In premodern theories of epigenesis the role of the imagination in the formation of the embryo had served to explain the presence ofbirth defects and deformities. 43 Yet while in these earlier accounts the imagination is conceived as essentially passive and was referred to mainly to answer one of the most pressing concerns of general theodicy, the imagination after Kant and Fichte has become a productive force. While none of the epigenetists in the German tradition makes claims about the actual interference of the imagination with the morphogenesis of the embryo, the philosophical construction of epigenesis rests nonetheless upon the idea of an infusion of nature with subjectivity. Every epigenetically conceived organism is, by virtue of this endowment with subjectivity, a symbol, or, as Schelling puts it: "In every organization there is something symbolic, and every plant is, so to speak, the intertwined trace of the soul." 44 In this respect the stress that authors like Fichte, Herder, and Humboldt put on the harmony, or love, between the generative partners is not a recipe for matrimonial peace but a designation of the place in which freedom and necessity are to celebrate their fusion. Matrimony is only the consecration of this natural fusion of subjectivity and nature, its laws (such as Fichte's) only a description of this coincidence, and its natural purpose (offspring) an expression of its success. The dangerous strife [ Widerstreit] relating ontological freedom, as discussed in the third antinomy, and freedom of the will in Kant's philosophy, would be sublated in the child whose facial traits symbolize their union. The tendency of epigenesis to transcend the perceived shortcomings of "mechanical" preformationism, its desire to look into the face of transcendence, so troubled Kant that in his treatise On the Concept ofRace, occasioned by Herder's epigenetic effusions in Ideen, he felt compelled to state:

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It is evident that, if the magic of the imagination or the artifice of human beings on animal bodies were granted the power to change the force of generation itself, to alter the original model of nature, or to disfigure it through additions that would be kept in successive generations, one would not be able to know from what original nature had started, or how far the changes would go, and, since the imagination of human beings knows no boundaries, into what caricatures [Fratzengestalt] the genera and species would degenerate. Because of this consideration I hold as my principle not to recognize any meddling influence of the imagination on the generativity of nature, or to effectuate in the human being, through exterior artifice, changes in the old original of species and genera, to introduce them into the force of generation and make them hereditary. 45

Fratzengestalt: despite the references to his beauty this is precisely what Otto is for all those who know about the (intimate or general) circumstances of his generation. Unprecedented and shocking in Goethe's account is not so much the view offered into Charlotte's bedroom, but the precision with which all epigenetically legitimate motivations for the sexual union are discredited. The procreative desire originated not from a state of self-possession and with a view to manifesting in nature the bond uniting the partners, but was induced, on Eduard's side, by the desires of another (the count), kindled by memories, and fueled by wine; on Charlotte's side the desire was induced by her thoughts about the captain and facilitated, of course, by her epigenetically required submissiveness. Indulging in rituals of seduction and compliance reminiscent of Figaro, Eduard and Charlotte seem to be falling back into the world of preformed desire, where the imagination would be allowed, if not incited, to wander without the threat of morphological consequences. The Tapetentiir (hidden door; p. 146) through which Eduard gains access to his wife's bedroom is a clear reminder of that past: not only does it conceal itself, but also the tone of the voice with which, according to Herder and Humboldt, the self announces itself unmistakably: "'Is anyone there?' A soft voice answered: 'It's me.' 'Who?' returned Charlotte, not recognizing the tone" (p. 147, mod.). But while in Figaro the confusion between truth and concealment, between speaking and grammatical subject, was "acted out" in the constant

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play of hiding and cross-dressing, the confusion [ Verwechselung] (p. 146) that excites Eduard and Charlotte and allows both of them to substitute a different image for the body they are holding is the substantial freedom of the imagination that for Fichte signaled the I's exodus from the slavery of the understanding. Otto, then, is the total epigenetic child: in not bearing any likeness to his biological parents, he demonstrates the achieved penetration of nature by subjectivity. He not only grows to resemble the captain and Ottilie, he is his face and her eyes. Testifying [bezeugen] visibly to his generation [Zeugung], he seems to restitute the broken bond in signification that Ottilie had mourned; 46 but born from double adultery, he only manifests the double difference between the genitors ("he [the child] separates me from my wife and my wife from me"). The confounding of the night to which Otto owes his brief existence thus appears in broad daylight as a double breakage or crime [Verbrechen] (pp. 147, 238); and Otto's face becomes the emblem where the two genitors relate: not to each other, as epigenesis prescribes, but to each other's other. Upon the symbolizing relationship between the epigenerative partners to which Otto owes his life is inscribed the allegorical relationship of their desires: each embraces the other as someone else. The natural symbol of family resemblance is crossed out by the unnatural relation between desiring subjects, Otto effaced by the cross, which holds the four protagonists together.

x.

Family Resemblance One of the immediate advantages of epigenesis had been the ability to account for the resemblance of children "sometimes to their father, sometimes to their mother, and sometimes to both of them" (Encylopedie, p. 569). But family resemblance is a phenomenon impossible to classify. As Wittgenstein showed, no factual proof will ever establish the pattern in which facial traits "overlap and crisscross" in a child's face, 47 and yet its resemblance to previous generations is rarely ever in dispute. Resemblance is itself the limit of the language game "family resemblance;' whose rules work only if they

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are agreed upon linguistically. Unlike distinct hereditary traits, such as skin color, the status of which was discussed intensely in the wake of the debate about generation, family resemblance is not constituted by a set of specific signs. It escaped the parameters of anthropometry by means of which the late eighteenth century attempted to prove the fixity of the species after God's preforming mold was broken; and it contradicted the basic assumption of physiognomy, for which the face was composed of expressive, classifiable character traits. To ascertain family resemblance in the context of epigenesis, at least five people are required: the two parents, the child, and at least two witnesses, who, in the absence of factual proof and under the premise of parental bias in the matter, have to agree on the actuality of resemblance, just as in court the defendant's account of events is only believable if it is corroborated by additional, independent testimony. In both cases the witnesses' testimony guarantees the presence of something suprasensible-truth or resemblance-with the major difference that in the case of the resembling child this suprasensibility lives on. Family resemblance, therefore, is based on a linguistic act in which the relation between the parents visible in the child is certified by a parallel linguistic relation between two witnesses. The threat that the relation between the parents was only accidental-allegorical-seems relieved in the symbolic unity of the child's face; yet this unity has to be guaranteed by another accidental relation, that between the witnesses. For the Romantic poet, these linguistic underpinnings of resemblance-its ineluctably linguistic instantiation-threaten the intuitive symbolicity offamily resemblance. In a child's face the promise of the symbol seems fulfilled since a relation is visible and can be apprehended in one moment; but the immediate expression of this relation is impossible because it rests upon the allegorical agreement. Indeed, the five people necessary for the ascertainment of family resemblance are present in Die Wahlvenvandtschqften. But the symbol of hope has been effaced by the sheer positionality of allegory: the child resembles not the parents but the witnesses.

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Gleichen The terror Otto's face instills in Eduard and the captain-who have not seen him grow up but are confronted with the Fratzengestalt, or facies hippocratica, at once-comes from seeing the incomprehensible: a living allegory. "I have never seen such a likeness" [Solch ein Gleichen habe ich nie gesehen] (p. 238), Eduard cries out at the sight of his son, and indeed, the deadly crossing of natural and subjective forces in Otto's face exceeds the vision of all protagonists. To the unheard-of story of the wunderliche Nachbarskinder thus corresponds the unseen appearance of the "Wunder-Kind," the "miracle" Otto (p. 232), composed, literally, of the four elements contributing to his existence. 48 From his face, which remains uncovered after his death-"Only his little face was visible, he lay there, calm and beautiful" (p. 241, mod.)-the peculiar equalization, comparison, resemblance, resulting from the constant flux between symbolic and allegorical modes of meaning, radiates out as a structuring device over the narrative. Thus does the characters' insecurity over the meaning of events as necessary or contingent rise to the level of composition. The strictly symmetrical structure of the text, as well as its many formal interrelations, seems to invite an allegorical, or typological, reading, in which episodes are related like anticipation to fulfillment. 49 As such, it would represent a counterstructure to the encapsulating relation between events in the intrigue of Figaro. Each event would be similarly stripped of self-sufficient, or symbolic, meaning and refer to another event as its explanation. But while in the ovist scenario the relation between events is hierarchical and infinite, Goethe's symbolic allegory is based upon a likeness [Gleich en] without ground. For Christian allegorical readings, which Goethe obviously (and successfully) invited, are based upon the historical process of sublation, upon the anagogic direction toward the destruction and recollection of all differences in the pure cotemporality of revelation. Christian allegories become understandable, that is, only in the service of an ultimate symbolic unification of their elements. But as the reemergence of Ottilie's golden chain shows, the apoc-

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alypse has already taken place in the novel, occasioned, as it were, by the inverse cruficixion, the drowning of Otto's unbearable face. In the absence of any hope for revelation, the corresponding episodes in the novel are frozen into a crystalline structure in which facets and segments correspond not because of their organic development from one another, but because of their peculiar form of exterior similitude and repetition, Gleichen. Gleichen is topical for the novel even before its beginning, when Goethe announced to his dutiful interpreters that the chemical Gleichnisrede was to serve as the exegetical matrix for a correct understanding of the novel. Yet the chemical processes that Eduard describes with such enthusiasm as anthropomorphic adventures, are not, as Goethe shows in accordance with the advanced chemical theories ofhis time, motivated by qualitative impulses; 50 as quantitative, exterior, superficial reactions of mass, they deserve the title Wahlvenvandtschaften only as a catachresis and cannot be interpreted. Similarly, relations between elements in the novel, be they human beings, events, or objects, obtain mostly, if not exclusively, by virtue of their superficial resemblance or sheer repetitiveness. Emblematic for these relations of Gleichen is the protagonists' literal allegiance to the name Otto, which they share but cannot bear in its self-identical form. Even the central relation in the novel, that between Eduard and Ottilie, is both indicated and motivated by such superficial phenomena as the similarity of their handwriting, of their musical talents, of their headaches, and, finally, of their deaths. Gleichen invokes a visual relation. In its review of images and their likeness-the tableaux vivants, the frescoes, etc. -the novel conjures up a realm of pure and unmediated visibility regarding which language remains exasperatingly impotent: "And who can describe the expression of the newly created queen of heaven?" (p. 204) is only one of the many Unsagbarkeitstopoi populating the text. But in the face of his son Otto, Eduard sees a Gleichen that he has never seen: the echo of Charlotte's and his own desire. 51 This Gleichen is not only initiated discursively by the count's reminiscences; the crosswise relation between the four characters is itself endlessly mediated by language and discursive events. And the possibility of this

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particular Gleichen-the impression of the imagination upon a living form-is embedded in a history of scientific theories on generation that, as Goethe was well aware, was unskewered by experimental "visible" discoveries. As Eduard exclaims, the Gleichen that is Otto exceeds the realm of visual resemblance: there is no likeness like it. In his face the novel's preoccupation with immediate imagistic and imaginary likeness, which culminates in the two instances when Ottilie appears as a heavenly creature (pp. 127, 203-4), is subverted by the irreducibly linguistic relation of allegorical reference. In Otto's living face the mortifying power of language-the possibility, or even necessity, that it refer to what is absent-becomes visible for one brief moment. And just as it is irrelevant which arm of a cross (X) is written first, Otto's face, too, "equals" a relation to time beyond the constraints of mere successivity. The historical relation between the arms of the cross have here been recounted as the success of epigenetic, symbolic explanations ofbiological, philosophical, and linguistic generation over their preformed, allegorical predecessors. The reversibility in Otto's face (and name), in which symbolic origination is in turn obliterated by its allegorical past-these are Ottilie's eyes and the captain's traits ("Isn't this the Major's face exactly? ... It's you .... Those are your eyes" [p. 238])-does not simply turn this process around, but results in a time structure already encountered in the novella's sheer anteriority of Ehe. Things might be equal or like each other (gleich), such is the predicament of this structure, but only soon (gleich). The apparent inability of language to reach the realm of the image, upon which the symbolic interpretation of the novel feasts, is effaced in the Gleichen of Otto. His palindromic name, like everybody else's, introduces visible likeness into language. But his Gleichen also instantiates the particular likeness of language. Gleichen is like itself by being other at the same time. It is, at the same time, an epigenetic symbol, a word uttered in surprise and therefore immediately expressive, and a literal, allegorical encapsulation. It destroys the fiction of pure spatiality in visible likeness by underscoring the imminencing [Gleichen] of Otto's death. It shows the result of this

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death: Leiche (a corpse). It shows the trees under which Eduard sees his child for the only time: Eichen (oaks) (which are mentioned here for the only time in the novel). It shows the agency obliterated in Otto's face: Ich. And it shows the cross brandished over this face: X· Gleichen thus affords the reader the same aspect that Otto's face presents to Eduard. As Goethe would say at the end of Faust II, "Das Unbeschreibliche, hier ist's getan."

Andenken The disruption of identity by expectation [gleich . . . ] had been contained in the promise of Fichte's epigenetic foundation of philosophy. A = A must be read not only as A gleich A, but as A gleich gleich A: soon, after the interlude that must be bridged by practical philosophy, everything will be like the I, and the I will be, as it is "already" transcendentally, like everything. Without the promise of an end, this infinite deferral would be the peak of desperation: we would indeed be but a sign (A), bereft oflanguage (which Fichte has shown to belong to the profane tools of practical reason), and hence without the possibility of(self-)interpretation. But in Otto's face, A (or rather B, Eduard's sign in the chemical parabola) has its endtotal penetration ofl and not-I-behind it and yet is still not, unlike his name, self-identical. As the drowning of Otto immediately [gleich] after its unveiling shows, Gleichen cannot persist in a living form or in an image. Its proper domain is the linguistic sign-not the sign expressing or promising identity, but a sign in which past and future cross; not a living sign of epigenetic coherence between subjectivity and nature, but a dead sign of their always anterior disruption. Not a O"WJ.Ul, in other words, but a crflf..La which equals [gleicht] a crflf..La, a sign that is, was, and wiH also be a gravestone. The futural fundament assumed in A = A is shaken by the anteriority of crflf..La = crflf..La. Thus, the Eheleute Eduard and Charlotte have tried to supplant all signs of death. While the first part of the novel begins with Eduard's grafting-a hybridization the 1S~pt~ of which is underscored by Eduard's blasphemous "Tell her I want to see and enjoy the new creation" (p. 93, mod.) 52 -at the begin-

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ning of the second part Charlotte complements this work in the absence of her husband with the removal of the gravestones. Her preoccupation with deadly signs-"as she enjoyed life, she tried to eliminate anything potentially dangerous and fatal" (p. I I I)-had already led to the Gleichnisrede of the chemical affinities; it also motivates her gardening in the "field of God" [Gottesacker]. Charlotte's dislocation of the gravestones performs the semiotic disarticulation of sign and ground Ottilie deplored in her diary. The older woman's intervention with her niece's proclivity had intimated that the ground to which things fall is already inscribed, for example, by the rules of decency. For such inscriptions to take place, however, the ground has to be a plane and the signs upon it mobile. Therefore, all monuments on the graveyard are moved away from their position and brought into one readable line; the ground is equalized and covered with clover to give it the appearance of naturalness and utility. The continuous outbreak of new graves, Charlotte feels, must be banished to the far end of the graveyard and "each time the ground was to be leveled [verglichen] again" (p. 176). The architect declares Charlotte's decision for the planification of the ground as natural not least because it does away with the pure contingency of death: "And if we are in the end to be entrusted to the earth, I find nothing more natural and proper than that graves set up in random order [zufollig enstandenen] and now gradually sinking be leveled without delay [ungesiiumt vergleiche], so that the cover they all bear may be made lighter for each" (p. I77). Similarly, Charlotte conjoins the argument for naturalness with that of political progressiveness: the "pure idea of a final equality for all" (ibid.). Naturalness and the progressive humanitarian concern of the two reformers outweigh the position of those who, sending an advocate rather than speaking for themselves, insist on the link between sign and place, between