Abstract
It is intriguing to observe that the massive rise of a contemporary set of so-called life sciences at the turn of the twenty-first century has not only spurred philosophers of vastly different backgrounds worldwide to rethink the very concepts of “life,” “the living” or of “lived experience,” to name but a handful. What is more, the literal revival of this terminology has allowed historians of modern philosophy to shed new and unwont light on one genealogical compound in particular: that of the quite often charged and complex relations between French and German positions in twentieth-century philosophical thought. My paper aims at a specification of this new map of Franco-German philosophy that has secretly and insistently been centered upon the concept of life. On one level, it discusses an antagonism: whereas the paradigmatic tradition of modern German philosophical anthropology (Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen) has coined the notion of a philosophical biology (philosophische Biologie), French thought, in reverse, witnessed the project of a biological philosophy (philosophie biologique), most pronouncedly in the historical epistemology of Georges Canguilhem. The paper will reflect on the diametrical antagonism between these two formulae. In its extended first part, however, it also tries to unearth the shared roots and sources of these two genealogies, that is of the French and the German constellation respectively. Attention will be drawn to the empirical biologies that resonated stronly both with thinkers such as Scheler, Plessner and Gehlen in Germany, and with figures such as Jacques Lacan or Raymond Ruyer, if it comes to the “French connection.” Thus, the overall discursive refraction between the conceptions of philosophical biology and biological philosophy does not rule out, but rather imply a corporate genealogy that traverses the works of Hermann Klaatsch, Paul Alsberg and Louis Bolk, and the history of the radical divergence between modern French and German philosophy on the subject of the philosophy and the science of life is finally attenuated by a space of unsuspected encounters.
This text is a strongly revised and abdridged variation on Ebke (2017).
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Notes
- 1.
See the definition and the polemical implications of this term in the editors’ introduction to this volume.
- 2.
Derrida (2016), for that matter, reconstructed the linguistic idea of the text (or écriture) as the common paradigm of the biological and the human sciences at a point when “structuralism” prevailed on both fields from the 1950s on and way into the 1960s.
- 3.
Claire Colebrook’s monograph on Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Colebrook, 2010) is a fine example of the prolific focus of recent contemporary research projects geared to the dimension of a “biological rationality” in the works of the above-mentioned authors (whom I have evoked here with a view to their international aura, and as the phalanx of a broader current in modern French thought). Colebrook succeeds in arguing that certain major figures of thought deployed by Deleuze entail a vitalist implicature: to the extent that, in modern French thought, “life” has generally not been appreciated as a relevant category for the discouse of philosophy, it is all the more important to unearth the implicit repercussions of this concept for the sake of a better understanding of the philosophical approaches pursued by Deleuze and others.
- 4.
- 5.
“Ought we then to dismiss entirely the notion that there are preconscious a priori forms, categories of existence, vital categories belonging to to the deeper layers of existence of the bearers of life – that is, organisms (understood not as existing objects but as living subjects), upon which the togetherness and cooperation of the organism and its environment rest? They would in any case have the value of categorical functions, as they, while neither being taken from the counterworld [Gegenwelt] nor applied to the counterworld by the living subject, determine the structure of this counterworld along with the structure of the living subject that fits into it“(Plessner, 2019, 61).
- 6.
Limoges (2015), 25 f. Limoges paraphrases Canguilhems “biological philosophy” as a the position that “tout vivant se voit reconnu comme centre d’activités polarisées, acteur de valorisations, sujet de sa propre normativité” (ibid., 30).
- 7.
In making this point, Limoges draws on an unpublished lecture under the title “La Biologie” from 1942–43 that finds itself in the Canguilhem archives, located at the CAPHÉS in Paris. See (Limoges, 2015, 35).
- 8.
In English: Max Scheler, “On the idea of man” (1915), translated by Clyde Nabe, in: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 9/3, October, 1978, pp. 184–198.
- 9.
While Darwin had supposed this territory to be located in Africa, Haeckel, in his History of Creation (1868, English translation 1880), placed his bet on Southeast Asia as the more likely spot – a supposition that was proven true by means of the findings of fossils at the banks of the Solo River in the East of the island of Java in 1891.
- 10.
Due to health issues, Schoetensack himself had to resign from the expedition, which had been explicitly initiated by him. Klaatsch, as his friend and colleague, stepped in for Schoetensack on the journey. See (Erckenbrecht, 2010).
- 11.
There is, by the way, a remarkable reference to Klaatsch in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005, 172) in the context of the authors’ attempt to conceptualize the morphology of the human organism as an effect of “deterritorialization“of animal forms. Apparently, Deleuze and Guattari came across excerpts of Klaatsch’s book on the basis of the French translation of Hans Kraemer’s edition of canonical texts from the tradition of natural history “Weltall und Menschheit” (1900).
- 12.
Arnold Gehlen, „Philosophische Anthropologie“, in: Id., Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 4 (Philosophische Anthropologie und Handlungslehre), p. 238.
- 13.
In the absence of an official English translation, I am working with my own translation here as well as in all the other cases where no official English translation is available.
- 14.
For an account of the impact of Bolk’s biological theories on modern philosophy cf. Verhulst, 1993.
- 15.
Again, I am employing my own translations from the German original in this context, in the absence of an official English version.
- 16.
At this point, it needs to be emphasized that, in the terminological framework of this essay, the concept of “need“should precisely be substituted with the concept of “desire“. It is my claim that Gehlen’s anthropology, which turns out to be closely and implictly affiliated with the field of modern French philosophy that we are goind to investigate, is a philosophy of “desire,” whereas the more plausible term to portray the approaches of Scheler and Plessner is the concept of “need.”
- 17.
“The concept of action also avoids the fateful cleavage of human being into a bodily and a nonbodily region. Whether it is merely evaded and banished from view, as it were, is another question. If, like Gehlen, one wants to be an empiricist, one has the right to do just that. His theories are wellknown and can all be grouped around the notion of compensation, for which Herder provided the label “deficient being.” Gehlen’s skillful combination of Hermann Klaatsch’s notions of the characteristic ancientness and relative lack of specialization of the build of the human body with [xvi] Bolk’s ideas about retardation and fetalization, Portmann’s about the extrauterine spring, and Scheler’s about weak instincts, surplus drives, and world- openness add up to a creature to whom Herder’s ‘invalid of its higher powers’ seems less fitting than my characterization of a combatant of his lower ones. Gehlen conceives of the homo species exclusively in terms of its potential to act” (Plessner, 2019, XXVII).
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Ebke, T. (2023). “Dilettantes of Life.” Franco-German Refractions of Anthropogenesis in Twentieth Century Philosophy. In: Bianco, G., Wolfe, C.T., Van de Vijver, G. (eds) Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20529-3_4
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