While today scientists no longer cling to the theories of epigenesis or preformation as they originally existed, instead choosing an amalgamation of both, during the long Romantic period divisions existed between these developmental models.33 While
epigenesis can be traced back to the biological thought of Aristotle in On the Generation
of Animals, the term and theory of “epigenesis” was introduced by William Harvey in his
33 Helmut Müller-Sievers notes that “preformation and epigenesis, are nowadays dominant in different
fields of investigation. Molecular biology seeks to decipher the preformed text of heredity, whereas embryology allows for epigenetic freedom in morphogenesis” (24).
Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals (1651) where he describes the
epigenetic development of a chick:
an animal which is procreated by epigenesis draws in the material and at the same time prepares and concocts and uses it; at the same time that the material is formed, it grows [...] The formative power of the chick takes the material to itself and prepares it, rather than finds it ready prepared, and the chick seems less to be made or given increase by another then by its own self. (204)
The epigenesist view maintains the development of new biological material within the individual organism. According to Helmut Müller-Sievers, under the banner of epigenesis “organisms generate themselves successively under the guidance of a formative drive” (3). Karen Detlefsen similarly notes that epigenesis creates form out of formlessness:
matter that seemed previously to be homogenous, undifferentiated, noncomplex, unorganized, and nonunified becomes heterogeneous, differentiated, complex, organized, and unified into a living, functional individual. The form not only develops anew but is actually brought into existence as this process continues, and the process is often considered one of self-development, even self-creation. (235-
6)
The rise in popularity of the epigenetic model of development during the long Romantic period was due to the notion of self-creation inherent within epigenesis, a notion
especially valued in German Idealism. As Müller-Sievers observes, “The concept of epigenesis has been, since its inception, polemic; it allows philosophical and literary discourses to account for their own origin without recourse to extraneous causes” (4). For Thomas Pfau, the “most decisive product of evolutionary, especially variational
processes is an understanding of their own, implicit auto-telic quality – that is, their quest
for progressively more sophisticated states of self-awareness and self-description” (“Of Ends and Endings” 235). Upon first glance, it appears that Kant maps easily onto this epigenetic schematic. However, if Kant is indeed employing a Romantic, organicist perspective that favours the open-endedness and perpetual change within development, then his speculative thoughts about a mysterious species to come, and his attraction to darker thoughts about the repetition of cataclysmic geophysical upheaval – an affinity he shares with Bonnet – become problematic.
Kant’s relationship to epigenesis is tenuous, and scholars widely disagree over its importance in his thinking, and in Romantic thought more generally. As Zammito rightly suggests, “more work must be done to clarify the idea of epigenesis in that epoch” of the long Romantic period (Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 307). 34 For Müller-
Sievers, Kant’s use of epigenesis is solely rhetorical, “nothing more, but also nothing less, than an analogy” (13).35 Indeed, Kant himself, in The One Possible Basis for a
Demonstration of the Existence of God (1762), remarks on the incomprehensibility of
Buffon and Maupertuis’s epigenesis:
The internal forms of Buffon and the elements of organic matter which conjoin themselves in a succession according to their recollections of the laws of desire and aversion, according to Maupertuis, are either as totally incomprehensible as
34 Kant’s relationship to epigenesis is the focus of many essays by Zammito. See also “Kant's Persistent
Ambivalence toward Epigenesis, 1764-1790”; “Kant's Early Views on Epigenesis: The Role of
Maupertuis”; and “‘This Inscrutable Principle of an Original Organization’: Epigenesis and ‘Looseness of Fit’ in Kant's Philosophy of Science’.”
35 This claim oversimplifies the conceptual slippage within the model of epigenesis and within Kant’s own
the things themselves or else they are entirely arbitrarily conceived. […] Has the ability of a yeast to reproduce its own kind yet been made understandable
mechanically? Nevertheless one does not, for this reason, resort to a supernatural cause. (143/Ak2:115)
For Zammito, who teases out the nuances and changes in Kant’s long and intricate engagement with epigenesis, Kant’s variety is a well-tempered epigenesis compared to the more radical version of it ushered in by Caspar Friedrich Wolff and enthusiastically adopted by Herder (“Kant’s Early Views” 345-7). We find such a restricted form of epigenesis in the ways that Kant clings to the fixity of species but allows for species variation due to environmental effects. The act of having one foot in preformation and the other in epigenesis reveals not only Kant’s attentiveness to physiology, but is also
symptomatic of his inability to answer the driving question of his anthropology: what is the human. Kant’s motivation for straddling these theories is, in Zammito’s reading, to reinforce limits:
[Kant] held to these doctrines because the alternative would be to allow that environmental factors could cause the strictly genetic nature of the species to alter […] External factors could be occasions, but not direct causes of changes which could be inherited through generation. […] Therefore, it had to be possible to establish an account of their variation, a “natural history,” that would indicate the original natural endowment of the species and explain its actualization in variety over time in different environments. (Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology
In 1775, the same year that Kant published Of the Different Races of Human Beings – his
first effort at defining the variations within the human species36 – German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) published On the Natural Varieties of
Mankind [De generis humani varietate nativa], strongly influenced by Haller and
Leibniz.37 Both Kant and Blumenbach, Zammito notes, “subscribed to the notion of ‘preformation,’ even as they sought to modulate it in the direction of epigenesis. Their shared objectives were to uphold the differentiation between man and animals and to explain the different races of man from the basis of the unity of the species […] This was a moral-political, as much as a physical-anthropological, stance” (Kant, Herder, and the
Birth of Anthropology 304).38 Thus, in the mid-1770s – the foundational years of the
anthropology lectures – Kant’s theory of organismic development is profoundly
36 While race is not an aspect of the anthropology that I treat at any length, Kant’s discussions of race are
generally offensive. For a discussion of this, see Mark Larrimore’s essay “Sublime Waste: Kant on the Destiny of the Races.”
37 Zammito writes: “Haller and Bonnet insisted that the germs – Keime in German – for all organisms were
preformed but that they had within them the capacity for growth and even, within starkly circumscribed limits, for adaptation. This was a far hardier form of preformation, and, at the level of the species, it persisted even into the early forms of epigenetic theory in Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Immanuel Kant” (Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology 304-5).
38 By 1781, Blumenbach has definitively given up preformation for epigenesis. As Robert Richards notes,
in the preface to Blumenbach’s tract Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte (‘On the Formative Force and the Operations of Reproduction,’ 1781) we find the confession of “his earlier mistaken endorsement of evolution, made while still green; and with a detailed counterproposal, he sought to shrive himself of that youthful error. He now argued for epigenesis and against evolution” (17-8). In this small tract Blumenbach introduces his idea of the Bildungstrieb (formative drive), an inherent impulse embedded within an organism that drives it towards self-development. Bildungstrieb was a concept that Kant greatly admired, important for his concept of organic purpose, and in August of 1790, shortly after the publication of the Critique of Judgment, he wrote to Blumenbach to praise his “excellent work” that “unite[s] two principles – the physical-mechanical and the sheerly teleological mode of explanation of organized nature” (qtd. in Richards 11). While Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb was one theory of force or drive swirling about in the late eighteenth century (along with Lebenskraft), it differed from the other forces, as Richards notes, in “its comprehensive architectonic character: it directed the formation of anatomical structures and the operations of physiological processes of the organism so that various parts would come into existence and function interactively to achieve the ends of the species” (“Kant and Blumenbach” 19).
unsettled. Indeed, there is a parallel between his modulating theory of development – stuck midway between preformation and epigenesis – and his unique strain of
anthropology that was developing at the same time, which similarly straddles disciplinary boundaries (between the pragmatic and the physiological).