Kant’s writings on evolution mirror the anthropological writings in both expanding the possibilities for man and being tentative about them. Where the first two Critiqueslimit
rather than open up the possibilities for man, and by delimiting him also ground certain certitudes about him, these other writings – which are really a subset within his general anthropology, I argue – open up these limits and in the process expose man to what is beyond or outside him. As a subset within what I am calling his “general anthropology,” Kant’s evolutionary work falls in line with what we might think of as physiological anthropology, understood in the Romantic sense of physiology as the study of forces (and not simply limited to the human body).29 Hence, another way of understanding Kant’s “general anthropology” is to see how the full valence of the term “physiology” operates within his thinking about human nature. Kant is interested in the forces within but also beyond the human body that affect man, forces that, taken together, bear on what man is able to make of himself in the world.
Kant, like many other German philosophers of the eighteenth century, participated in the lively evolutionary discourse of the day. Theories of preformation understood the individual to be merely capable of unfolding from a pre-given form. Epigenesis, which harks back to Aristotle, is the theory of continual developmental change over time in increasing complexity within an individual organism via some guiding force or élan vital.
Whereas epigenesis postulates that the future individual comes into being during ontogenesis (the developmental process), palingenesis finds the future individual as
29 For an extended treatment of Romanticism’s interest in physiology, see Richard C. Sha’s essay
“Romantic Physiology and the Work of Romantic Imagination: Hypothesis and Speculation in Science and Coleridge.”
already encased within the zygote, ovum or sperm. Palingenesis is the theory of rebirth and regeneration first introduced by Charles Bonnet (1720-1793) in Palingénésie
philosophique, ou idées sur l’etat future des etres vivants (1770). Growing out of
preformationism, palingenesis denotes the successive unfolding of a preformed structure within an individual organism, the continuous return of a “germ of restitution” that survives the body and physical catastrophes. Palingenesis is a unique model of biological development that stands as a constitutive midpoint between the dominant forms of preformation and epigenesis, and between Enlightenment and Romantic epistemes. Palingenesis – Greek for “return” or “rebirth” – is a theory grounded in the indivisibility and indestructibility of “germs of restitution” [germes de restitution] akin to Leibnizian monads (qtd. in Duchesneau 296).30 Building on Tilottama Rajan’s interpretation of Bonnet’s palingenesis not as a theory of emboitement but as a theory of “life” – that is, as a theory concerned with potentiality rather than progress – I offer that such a form of palingenesis occupies an underprivileged place in Kant’s thought.31 Indeed, as a theory that is closer to epigenesis than to preformation, palingenesis offers a way of explaining the significant ambivalences and discontinuities in Kant’s use of epigenesis. However, the real pertinence here is what Kant’s engagement with preformation, palingenesis, and epigenesis exemplifies: namely, a speculative wavering on a bio-physiological debate in which are embedded fundamental questions about the origins and ends of man, questions
30 For François Duchesneau, Bonnet’s theory grows out of Leibniz in three ways: “the analogical resort to
infinitesimals, the appeal to a priori intellection beyond mere imagination, and the conception of a world of organized beings in serial emboitement or envelopment in the least germs” (292). Tilottama Rajan
compares Bonnet’s germ to the Deleuzian concept (“Spirit’s Psychoanalysis” 191).
31 I suggest that Kant is not as dismissive of palingenesis as is traditionally understood (cf. Williams).
that are finally unanswerable, but that breach the security and complacency of making the human and the anthropos the culmination of history.
While I will not microscopically examine epigenesis and palingenesis on a scientific level, I will suggest that one consequence of this hybridity, the overlap or grafting between these theories, is the formation of a particularly sublime political imaginary. As such, it is my interest here to examine how palingenesis differs from epigenesis in terms of representing a different bio-political imaginary.32 As a theory of evolution, predicated on a transcendentally imbued regulative function that continually brings back all developmental force within itself, palingenesis offers the idea that there is some governing germ bringing about order to what without it would appear like
potentially limitless growth or vitality, a monstrous surplus of life. Palingenesis’ defining feature is its emphasis on potentiality; it is a theory of the potentiality of something to
come or to return on both an individual and collective level. Palingenesis operates in the
long Romantic period’s imaginary as a sublime model of socio-political change, a developmental model whose prophetic movement carries a force that cannot be seen and promises the potentiality of the coming of a future from behind, beyond our vision and our control.
Recasting Kant in light of his palingenetic features affects how we read his complicated understanding of human progress. While Kant wants to see a continuous,
32 The political imaginary is different from biopolitics. In referring to the bio-political imaginary, I am
drawing on the Lacanian sense of “Imaginary” as one of the central ways in which humans structure their experience (the others are the Real and the Symbolic). The Imaginary implies the illusion of a body as coherent or whole; the political imaginary implies the illusory image of the political body – in this case, the body of the anthropos – as ever-progressing (epigenesis) or as having the potential to be disrupted
gradual transition in terms of political reform and human progress, such a progressive model is nevertheless troubled from within: betrayed via a rhetoric of return, references to past revolutions and the potential for future catastrophes and the possibility of the coming of a species which will inherit the earth. As such, we can see that within Kant’s talk of human progress there remains a dark germ of doubt. As a result, Kant’s epigenesis is haunted by and host to the germ of palingenesis – a discourse marked more by
potentiality than by progress. I suggest that palingenesis partially garners its sublime
affectivity from the role that force plays in this model of development. Building on the Leibnizian theory of force (monads as centres of force), palingenesis, as a theory conceptually arriving from the past, from behind – as one germ tracing back to another, and so on – appears as a strong force from the past, strong enough to unfold the germs throughout all time. Palingenesis, as a kind of unfolding or “taking from behind” – to borrow Deleuze’s description of the history of philosophy – disrupts the teleology of human progress, of the forward-oriented movement of man and the anthropos.