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

• Autorzy: Bednarczyk A.

Warianty tytułu

EN

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

• Języki publikacji: PL

Abstrakty

EN

J.G. Herder’s work, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791), features, alongside a naturalist-based historiographic conception explaining the mechanism of the historical process, also a theoretical approach - partly naturalist and partly philosophical in origin - of a more restricted scope: namely the theory of organic forces, which Herder intended as part of the naturalist research programme and expected, inter alia, to throw some light on the unity that characterizes animate and inanimate nature. One striking characteristic of the view of the world presented in the Ideen consists in the fact that this world was deterministic, in the broad sense of the word, i.e. it was subject to laws. A deterministic attitude became widely accepted in 18th-century science; in Herder’s works it found a very distinct philosophical expression. The view of the nature was by formulated by Herder in the shape of (a) a methodological postulate, which obliged scientists look for causes of the phenomena that occurred; (b) the principle of the conservation of force, or action, e.g. also the conservation of life; (c) the principle of the morphological unity of living beings. The theory of organic forces was intended as a universal conception of a significant degree of generality, which was to encompass physical and psychic phenomena, and to resolve fundamental metaphysical questions, but it turned out to be unclear, made use of notions with a fuzzy scope, and reflected a variety of doubts of different origin that its author had. It was probably as a result of these features of the conception that it has never been subjected to detailed analytical research, nor has its origin and the meaning of the concepts that constitute ever been satisfactorily explained. The scope of the textual research described in the article has been restricted to one, conceptually relatively homogenous work of Herder’s, namely his Ideen. The Ideen document a certain period in Herder’s work and the naturalist field of his interests, which he shared and on which he closely cooperated with Goethe. The first component of the notion of organic force - the organic - was frequently used in 18th-century science (eg. by Buffon, Bichat). In Herder’s text it is used in the following senses: (a) in the oldest sense, which makes a direct recourse to how it was used by Aristotle, being organic may be described as being ’’connected with the organ and dependent on it; originating and located in the organ”; (b) being organic is also acting in a spontaneous way, carrying a source of action within, and not merely reacting to a stimulus acting from without; being organic is being primarily active, and not reactive (the latter feature is shown by mechanical creations, which are opposite of the organic); this sense is in line with the whole theory of forces, as the essential features of force are also creativity and spontaneity; the seat of the organic force was thus an organ; the force acted from within that organ in a spontaneous way, giving rise to manifestations of life within that organ and the organic whole that contained it: (c) being organic is both being a whole (an organic whole), as well as forming an indispensable (organic) part of the whole, belonging to the whole; (d) being organic relates to what is animate, what is endowed with the features of life (cf. Bichat). All the aforementioned features of the organic were attributed by Herder to the force which he called organic and made the central concept of his theory. Herder made the second component of the theory of organic forces - the concept of force - much more definite, putting it in the foreground, and attempting to present it in a more comprehensive way; he thus supplied more textual material for study. A closer analysis of the text reveals that Herder’s explanation by recourse to force could be reduced in fact to a framework of causal explanation. The force-cause as such, however, remained unknown; the organic force was also unknown in its ’’pure” form, outside and independently of the organ. That such a force existed could be proved by observing the working organ and the form that this working of the organ took. The working of the organ, just as the force, was also unknown in its ’’pure” form, as such; it always occurred in the body and could be cognized through the body: it was the working of the body. Thus, category of the property (of the body) could be used in the description of the change observed within the body as the results of the working of the force. For instance, if the body was alive, this meant that present within it was the vital force postulated by Herder; and such a statement in fact exhausted the explanation of the peculiar phenomenon of life formulated by Herder. The concept of force used by Herder, as well as by 18th century biology in general, did not derive from Newton concept of force (or even less from Leibniz’s concept of monade), but rather from the concept of dynamis, which had its origins in Aristotle’s philosophy and was introduced into medicine by Galen. The interpretation of the concept of organic force as an explanatory tool is not the only possible interpretation. This explanatory function of the concept may be regarded only as Herder ”force”-related way of expressing himself, and the concept may be used only in a descriptive manner. Indeed, all of the Ideen have this kind of basically descriptive character. It could be said in fact that the theory of organic forces and some equally general conceptions constitute a metaphysical digression in the naturalistic and scientific description developed by Herder. The concept of organic force in the descriptive function would then serve to describe the function of bodies endowed with specific properties, such as life, spontaneous activity, wholeness, etc. In the description the focus moves away from what a living being is towards the mode in which it works; it reveals in particular the dynamism of vital processes so prominent in Herder’s thinking. Such an interpretation would make Herder’s work appear more strongly embedded in the naturalist tradition. The beginnings of individual life were to be sought, according to Herder, in the organization of forces, or in other words, in the way whereby processes taking place in a morphologically uniform substance were ordered in time. As the body developed, this primary organization of processes was subject to transformations and it became an increasingly mechanic organization of spatial creations, or organs. The solidified morphological structure now began to have a feedback effect on the processes that were taking place within it: it changed their direction and the effect that they produced. The former, most highly plastic, dynamic organization of processes had by now lost so much of its plasticity and was solidified in the state it had reached, that it now deserved to be called a machine; a living body had become a machine. While a change in the kind of ordering - from a dynamic ordering of processes to a static ordering of morphological processes had taken place - the structure, the emergent organ and the whole anatomical structure did not remain in an immutable state, but conversely it found itself in a state of ’’flow”; the organism remained in state of dynamic equilibrium, exchanging its building stuff with the environment. The dynamism of an animate body was also manifested in another way, once the organs had been formed: namely in the working of the organs determinated by their anatomical structure and described in terms of function. A full description of an organ should contain a description of its morphological structure, or form, and the description of the way it worked, or its function. Herder combined the principle of the unity of form and function with the principle of the primacy of function with regard to form (as opposed to the mechanistic principle, which claimed the primacy of form with regard to function). In the principle of the unity of form and function, one can see a concrete expression of another principle formulated by Herder - that of the correspondence between the internal and the external. The theory of organic forces used to explain (and to describe) the morphological unity of the animate world, i.e. to explain what it had been designed by Herder to do, is bound to lead to disappointment, which is inexorably to be expected of any explanation in terms of forces. According to Herder, information on the morphological structure of any organism is carried by that hypothetical force. Explaining the unity of animate nature in terms of organic forces can also be formulated in another way: the cause of the observed unity of the animate world is to be found in the organic forces stable mode of functioning, which is dependent only on these forces. The insignificant cognitive value of such an explanation will be more distinctly seen if the explanation is reformulated: animate nature preserves (morphological) unity, for this unity forms its essence. To sum up, it is only appropriate to add that the interpretation of the concept of force presented above is not the only interpretation possible. There are traces in the text of the Ideen that Herder hypostasized the concept of force, that he subjected force to substantialization and treated it as an a distinct being, independent of material substance. He resorted to this when he moved away from naturalism and entered what might nowadays be termed psychology. The naturalist interpretation proposed in the present paper fits in an unprompted way into the general naturalist current characteristic for the science of the European Age of Enlightenment.

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 3/4
• Strony: 57--78
• Opis fizyczny: Bibliogr. 28 poz.

Twórcy

autor

Bednarczyk A.

• Instytut Filozofii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego Warszawa

Bibliografia

• 1 J.G. Herder: Myśli o filozofii dziejów. T. 1-2. Warszawa 1962.
• 2 „Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki” R. 48 2003 nr 1-2 s. 33-55.
• 3 A. Bednarczyk: Filozofia biologii europejskiego Oświecenia. Albrecht von Haller i jego współcześni. Warszawa 1984 s. 143-154, 182-194
• 4 A. Bednarczyk : Pierwsze organizmy w dziejach Ziemi. Komentarz biologiczny do „Epok natury” G L. Buffona. „Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki” R. 46: 2001 nr 3 s. 31-54.
• 5 H.B. Nisbet : Herder and the philosophy and history of science [Dissertation series - Modem Humanities Research Association; vol. 3. Cambridge 1970. s. 132.
• 6 A. Bednarczyk: Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) i jego koncepcje biologiczne. W dwusetną rocznicą śmierci. Część I. „Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki” R. 48: 2003 nr 1-2 s. 33-55.
• 7 R.T. Clark: Herder’s conception of „Kraft”. „Publications of the Language Association of America” T. 57: 1942 s. 737-752.
• 8 B.M. Dreike : Herders Naturaujfassung in ihrer Beeinflussung durch Leibniz’ Philosophie [Studia Leibnitiana. Supplementa vol. 10]. Wiesbaden 1973.
• 9 H.B. Nisbet : Herder and the philosophy and history ofscience. Cambridge 1970.
• 10 M.C. von Herder: Erinnerungen aus dem Leben Joh. Gottfrieds von Herder. Teil 1-3. Gesammelt und beschrieben von Maria Carolina von Herder, geb. Flachsland. Herausgegeben durch Johann Georg Miiller [J.G. von Herder’s Sammtliche Werke. Herausgegeben durch Johann von Müller. [Abt. 3]. Zur Philosophie und Geschichte. Teil 20-22]. Stuttgart-Tübingen 1830.
• 11 A. Bednarczyk: Filozofia biologii europejskiego Oświecenia..., s. 155-194,431-434.
• 12 A. Bednarczyk: Pierwsze organizmy w dziejach Ziemi, s. 31—54.
• 13 J. Śniadecki: Teoria jestestw organicznych. T. 1. Poznań 1905, s. 7.
• 14 W.D. Wetzels (Herders Organismusbegriff und Newtons Allgemeine Mechanik, s. 177-185, w: Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Herausgegeben von Gerhard Sauder [Studien zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Band 9]. Hamburg 1987 s. 183-185.
• 15 A. Bednarczyk: Galen. Główne kategorie systemu filozoficzno-lekarskiego. Warszawa 1995 s. 50-62,98.
• 16 De generatione animalium 734b - Arystoteles: O rodzeniu się zwierząt. Warszawa 1979 s. 69
• 17 De partibus animalium 640b, 645b, 646b-647ab - Arytoteles:O częściach zwierząt. Warszawa 1977 s. 8, 25, 28-32.
• 18 G.W. Leibniz: Die philosophischen Schriften, herausgegeben von C.I. Gerhardt. Bd. 6. Berlin 1885 s. 599.
• 19 J. Śniadecki: Teoria..., s. 3.
• 20 X. Bichat : Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort. Quatrième edition, augmentée de notes par F. Magendie. Paris 1822 s. 8.
• 21 A. Bednarczyk: Galen. .., s. 116-139, 178-186.
• 22 E.B. Schick: Metaphorical organicism in Herder’s early works. A study of the relation of Herder’s literary idiom to his world-view [De proprietatibus litterarum. Senes practica, 20]. The Hague-Paris 1971.
• 23 Molière: Le malade imaginaire, s. 393-510, w: Oeuvres complètes de Molière. T. 4. Pans 1854 s. 506.
• 24 B.M. Dreike : Herders Naturauffassung. s. 118-128.
• 25 A. Bednarczyk: Filozofia biologii europejskiego Oświecenia. .., s. 244-283, 437-443.
• 26 Th.S. Hall: On biological analogs of Newtonian paradigms. „Philosophy of Science” T. 35: 1968 z. 1 s. 6-27.
• 27 R.Th. Clark: Herders conception of „Kraft”, s. 749.
• 28 F. W. Strothmann: Das scholastische Erbe im Herderschen „Pantheismus ”. „Dichtung und Volkstum” T. 38: 1936, s. 174-187.