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The idea of the city and beauty

Kosiński W.

Czasopismo Techniczne. Architektura

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2015

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Y. 112, iss. 12-A

121--156

EN

The essay presents a fragment of the latest research that the Author has performed on the topic of the concept of beauty, viewed from the perspective of the cultural changes that took place throughout history, in relation to the spatial creations of cities. Urban aesthetics, so rarely taken into account in modern science, have been given due attention at the point at which theory meets practice. The territorial scope of the research extends from the Middle East and Egypt, through Europe, to the United States of America. The scope of history under analysis includes the time since the beginning of the construction of cities to the break of the XX century ‒ the time of the appearance of the first clear signs of the Modern Movement.

PL

Autor przedstawia fragment swoich najnowszych badań na temat pojęcia piękna w układzie historycznym, na tle dziejowych przemian kulturowych, w powiązaniu z kreacjami przestrzennymi miast. Rzadko uprawiana we współczesnej nauce etyka urbanistyczna została w niniejszym artykule ujęta syntetycznie, na styku teorii z empirią. Zakres terytorialny badań rozciąga się do Bliskiego Wschodu i Egiptu poprzez Europę, po USA. Zakres czasowy obejmuje okres od zarania budowy miast do przełomu XIX i XX wieku, to jest do czasu pojawienia się konkretnych zwiastunów Ruchu Nowoczesnego.

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

Bednarczyk A.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

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2003

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R. 48, nr 1/2

33--56

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.

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

Bednarczyk A.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

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2003

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R. 48, nr 3/4

57--78

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.