Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) i jego koncepcje biologiczne. W dwusetną rocznicę śmierci. Część I

• Autorzy: Bednarczyk A.

Warianty tytułu

EN

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and his biological ideas. On the bicentenary of herder’s death. Part one.

• Języki publikacji: PL

Abstrakty

EN

The textual analysis of J.G. Herder’s main work, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, which is conducted in the present article focuses on historicism as a method of Herder’s natural research, and on historicism and naturalism as a method of his research on man as a social being and on the regularities of the historical process. In his historicism, Herder followed the ever more frequent historical approach in natural research (Descartes, Buffon, Kant). In more general terms, Herder derived his concepts of man and society from the extensive natural knowledge of the times that he had acquired. Both the natural process and the historical process were subject to laws of a causal nature, the most general of which, according to Herder, was the law of emergence of order out of chaos. The thesis on the causal unity of the history of nature and humankind was accompanied in Herder’s approach by the thesis on the unity of the animate world, the view that animals and man were linked through a significant similarity in their morphological-anatomic structure, which was expressed in the concept of morphological type. The concept, which Herder developed in close collaboration with the poet-naturalist J.W. Goethe, has been reconstructed in detail in the current article. The article emphasizes some of the characteristic solutions adopted by Herder, such as the modification, through the introduction of discrete transitions, of Leibniz’s law of continuity (lex continui), which rules the great chain of being. The unity of morphological type was masked by a remarkable diversity of animate forms. Just as Goethe, Herder accounted for the rise of this diversity, accompanied by the preservation of stable type, by the operation of a compensatory mechanism, described as a principle of compensation. The principle related to both nature as a whole (macrocosm), as well as to man, to whom Herder referred as microcosm. The notion of type found in Herder’s concept is correlated with the notion of analogy. The link between the two notions is that what is expressed by the type, i.e. the stability of morphological structure of animate bodies and the unity that is manifest through this stability, arises from the similarity discovered between the particular forms compared, that is from the analogy that links them. The very process in which organic forms emerge was subjected to the necessity of preserving the analogy between them. The analogy held not only between the way in which spatial forms were shaped, but also between the ways of sensing and cognising, which were a function of the former. In the animal world, man became a form in which stability, conceived as morphological type, manifested itself in a pure manner, vis-a-vis other organic forms, man performs the function of tertium comparationis. This was confirmed by Goethe’s discovery of os intermaxillare in man; however, this was a discovery that Herder was reluctant to recognize. Herder tried to put order into the diversity of living beings in two ways: firstly, by resorting to a typological operation and reducing such diversity to one type, which he held man to be; secondly, by creating a sequence of living beings according to their increasing degree of perfection, that is according to their degree of proximity to the fullest and most balanced realization of the type - man. In this way, a scala naturae, or the already mentioned great chain of being appeared. The uniqueness of Herder’s great chain of being (as contrasted to the concepts of other naturalists) consisted in the fact in its successive steps - in an ascending motion and at a relatively constant pace -, the realization of the same type was taking place. The motion involved was marked for progress, in the sense that it brought closer the appearance of man, in whom the type came forth to the fullest; man was thus the goal towards which nature was oriented. However, the forms through which nature finally achieved its goal, were not phases of an actual, constant process occurring in the world, but they constituted isolated elements of the sequence. This picture of linear ordering of living beings that Herder outlined has tempted some historians of biology to join the independently emerging elements of the sequence together, turning the sequence into a process, and forcing such elements to transform from one into another and to acquire a greater degree of perfection along with time. Thus Herder was, quite falsely, found to be an eighteenth century precursor of Darwin. Meanwhile the original organic form, representing a successive element in a chain, emerged in a separate, independent, precisely successive creative act of nature, which thus was oriented towards to the final and most important act - the creation of man. Herder excluded the possibility that the structural type of a living being could change, and thus he excluded the possibility a process of transformation of one organic form into another over time. The stability of the structural type was conceived by Herder as the precondition of life. Within the type, however, Herder did allow for the variability of forms, with the causative factor behind such changes being climate, which in those times was a factor that was most frequently regarded as a source of variability. The most interesting thing was that the mechanism of change that Herder described made him a Lamarckist at a time when the original views of J. B. Lamarck (1744-1829), presented in his Philosophie zoologique (1809), were not yet known. The antitransformationism that characterized the naturalist views of Herder is testified to at many points in the text of his Ideen. Herder expressed his theoretical attitude in a variety of ways, one of which consisted in his categorical and unequivocal view that there is a fundamental difference between ape and man, the origin of which was to be found in the nature of individuals of the two species. By producing successive organic forms, nature has been preparing to create man by means of repeated trial and experiment, so that the ultimate result - man - could turn out as well as possible and could become a perfect creation. Thus the species of plants and animals that exist on the Earth are traces of those trials and experiments left by nature to their own devices, whenever it turned out that the products did not meet the expectations of the ceaselessly creative nature. Thus, it is not only (higher) animals that are according to Herder the older brethren of man. One could say that the whole animate world of the Earth, all living beings are the numerous siblings of man, whose shared mother is nature. Among those siblings man came last, and turned out to be the youngest of the siblings: man thus shares similarities with the whole of the animate world. Both Herder and Goethe described this significant affinity with the help of the notion of morphological type. As for the diversity of organic forms, they described it by means of the compensation principle, and accounted for it by reference to the particular conditions of the environment in which type was realized. Herder was not satisfied to limit himself to a description of the creative nature. He made an attempt to explain the basis on which the process of creation was taking, to explain its mechanism. Here Herder resorted to his theory of forces, making use of a notion which was in common currency in 18th century science, both in science concerned with animate and inanimate nature. He believed that he did a good job of the task he posed before himself. However, the theory is far inferior to other scientific achievements of Herder’s: its theoretical and methodological aspects were not very carefully developed, it was superficial and of dubious cognitive value, it was very reminiscent of the speculative naturalist concepts of German romanticist philosophy, to which in fact it had given rise. This theory will be the subject matter of the second part of the present article.

Słowa kluczowe

PL

filozofia; historia kultury; biologia

EN

philosophy; cultural history; biology

• Wydawca: Instytut Historii Nauki im. L. i A. Birkenmajerów Polskiej Akademii Nauk
• Czasopismo: Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki
• Rocznik: 2003
• Tom: R. 48, nr 1/2
• Strony: 33--56
• Opis fizyczny: Bibliogr. 13 poz.

Twórcy

autor

Bednarczyk A.

• Instytut Filozofii UW Warszawa

Bibliografia

• 1. J.G. Herder: Myśli o filozofii dziejów. T. 1-2. Warszawa 1962.
• 2. R. Haym: Herder [1877]. Bd. 1-2. Berlin 1954;
• 3. R.Th. Clark: Herder. His life and thought. Berkeley 1955;
• 4. E. Adler: J.G. Herder i Oświecenie niemieckie. Warszawa 1965.
• 5. R. Haym: Herder. Bd. 2. Berlin 1954, s. 283.
• 6. A. von Humboldt: Ansichten der Natur. Bd. 2. Stuttgart-Tübingen 1826, s. 19.
• 7. J.W. Goethe: Zmyślenie i prawda. T. 1. Warszawa 1957
• 8. J.D. Falk: Goethe aus näherm persönlichen Umgange dargestellt. Ein nachgelassenes Werk. Leipzig 1832, s. 36.
• 9. Goethes Werke herausgegeben im Aufträge der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. Abt. IV: Briefe. Bd. 6. Weimar 1890, s. 224; nr 1835.
• 10. J.W. Goethe: Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft. Abt I. Bd. 9. Weimar 1954, s. 13.
• 11. F. von Bärenbach: Herder als Vorgänger Darwins und der modernen Naturphilosophie. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Entwicklungslehre im 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin 1877.
• 12. A von Haller: Versuch Schweizerischer Gedichte. Bern 1777, s. 214.
• 13. A. Bednarczyk: Filozofia biologii europejskiego Oświecenia. Albrecht von Haller i jego współcześni. Warszawa 1984, s. 313-314.