Friday, November 04, 2005
(2:10 PM) | Anonymous:
The Open: Big Overture, Little Show; or, On the Relative Importance of Animal Captivation in The Open
"Red in tooth and claw" inaccurately describes Darwinian theory but ably characterizes the Nineteenth Century debates swirling about it. Any appropriation of the theory itself or the examples on which Darwin founded it for unscientific, or worse, political ends and Thomas Huxley would pounce:I am greatly indebted to your correspondents, the President and Secretary of the Anthropological Society, for the pains they have taken to justify, so full and completely, my public condemnation of the extracts from the pamphlet entitled "The Negro's Place in Nature."Naturalists like Huxley defended the material evidence of evolution for the simple reason that the theoretical foundation of evolutionary theory is inductive. If the particular examples on which it is founded become fodder for racist science, as above, then the general principles drawn from them are also implicated. Also, I should stress that the division between philosophy proper and the hard sciences had yet to materialize. It would surprise no scientist of the time to find in Huxley's essay on "Yeast" the following sentences:
But let me hasten to reassure the President of the Anthropological Society on one point: I make no attacks on his scientific honesty. I am quite ready to believe that he had never read that essay of M. Gubler's which he cited; and that, had he possessed a sufficient acquaintance with Physics or with "Anthropology," to be aware that Dr. Van Evric was writing nonsense, he would have abstained from quoting him.
Kant defined the special peculiarity of the living body to be that the parts exist for the sake of the whole and the whole for the sake of the parts.This easy commerce between those who fancied themselves philosophers and those who fancied themselves biologists created some problems, foremost among them, wild philosophical speculation based on insufficient biological evidence. The result? A passage plucked from my dissertation about Herbert Spencer's Principles of Ethics provides evidence enough:
Dr. Stirling, for example, made my essay the subject of a special critical lecture which I have read with much interest, though, I confess, the meaning of much of it remains as dark to me as does the "Secret of Hegel" after Dr. Stirling's elaborate revelation of it.
[Spencer] divides Mollusca into the “cephalopods,” the higher mollusks, and what Lamarck had called “acephala,” the “head-less” or lower mollusks. I have chosen to focus on the subkingdom Mollusca because the division between its orders is so stark: some have heads and are non-adaptive, others have heads and are adaptive. To be a headless mollusk is to remain beholden to the whims of the force of progress. For Lamarck, Chambers, and Spencer, the headless mollusks will acquire heads at a moment preordained by force of progress. To be a headed mollusk, on the other hand, is to possess the ability to form habits, and as I discussed above, the formation of habits is the first link in the causal chain of Lamarckian evolution—altered environment to changed habits to modified forms. But the headed-headless distinction indicates why his adamant belief in a progressive, evolutionary, and absolute force would be tempered by the adaptive prong of Lamarckian evolution: heads mattered. So did what was in them.In Spencerian thought, philosophical speculation collides with biological observation to frequent ill effect. The evidence--here, the headed- or headless-ness of mollusks--simply cannot bear the weight of the system Spencer wants to build upon it. To say this another way, it is unwise to generate ethical principles on the basis of mollusk behavior. A category error has occured, and although it doesn't invalidate Spencer's conclusions, it should cause us to question why he wanted to provide his philosophical point through evolutionary biology instead of on its own merits. With that, I turn to Agamben.
If I understand the stakes of The Open properly, Agamben wants to counter Foucault's notion that biopolitics are contemporary phenomena by yoking the biopolitical to the division of human from animal and thus of humanity from its own animality. With this as "the decisive political conflict . . . in its origin Western politics is biopolitics" (80). To establish this instability of this division, he reads Heidegger on animal captivation against Heidegger on profound boredom. Given the lengthy preface, you can see the question I want to ask:
Why counter a suspect Heideggerian appropriation of biological theory with a decidedly philosophical moment of Heideggerian thought in order to make a Foucauldian point? One possible answer is that Heidegger's work on the thought foundational to the establishment of "the anthropological machine"--in particular, that of Aristotle, but also his work on the pre-Socratics--forced him to think in its terms. To think through the work in the Western philosophical tradition is to necessarily think in its terms. But then why rely on Heidegger's reading of Uexkull's scientific experiments when, if Agamben's correct, the bedpan of Heidegger's corpus brims with the discarded oil of the anthropological machine? Or does Agamben's larger argument rely on the account of animal captivation more than he would likely or like to admit? I obviously don't have the answers to any of these questions. But I'd like to.
One final note: this post was supposed to've been about Haeckel, but as it lengthened I found no room to squeeze him in until now. (Or the extended discussion of Linnaeus, taxonomy and theories of speciation.) So . . . Once upon a time, a nice man named Ernst Haeckel wrote a book called The Riddle of the Universe and I read it and it was good. The End.
