Fact and Fiction

Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain

Edited by Christine Lehleiter

FACT AND FICTION
EDITED BY CHRISTINE LEHLEITER

Fact and Fiction

Literary and Scientific Cultures
in Germany and Britain

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2016
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Fact and fiction : literary and scientific cultures in

Germany and Britain / edited by Christine Lehleiter.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4426-4598-1 (cloth)

1. German literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 2. English literature – 18th
century – History and criticism. 3. Literature and science – Germany – History – 18th
century. 4. Literature and science – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 5. Science in
literature. 6. Knowledge, Theory of, in literature. I. Lehleiter, Christine, editor
II. Title.

PT148.S3F32 2016 830.9'36 C2015-905663-2

CC-BY-NC-ND
This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution
Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish
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Contents

Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction. Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in

Germany and Britain – Thoughts on a Contentious Relationship  1
christine lehleiter

Part I – Reading: Electricity, Medicine

  1  Facts Are What One Makes of Them: Constructing the Faktum in

the Enlightenment and Early German Romanticism  33
j o c e ly n h o l l a n d

  2  The Competing Structures of Signification in Samuel Hahnemann’s

Homeopathy: Between 18th-Century Semiosis and Romantic
Hermeneutics  50
alice kuzniar

Part II – Imagining: Botany, Chemistry, Thermodynamics

  3  “She comes! – the GODDESS!”: Narrating Nature in Erasmus

Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  73
ann shteir
vi  Contents

  4  Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften: The Career of a

Metaphor  97
c h r i s t i a n p .  w e b e r

  5  Physics Disarmed: Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of James

Clerk Maxwell and George Eliot  130
tina young choi

Part III – Sensing: Anthropology, Psychology, Aesthetics

  6  Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and

Fiction  155
john k. noyes

  7  Fictional Feedback: Empirical Souls and Self-Deception in the

Magazine for Empirical Psychology and Beyond  175
michael house

  8  Fictional Feelings: Psychological Aesthetics and the Paradox of Tragic

Pleasure  199
tobias wilke

Part IV – Relating: Biology

  9  Coining a Discipline: Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of

Religion  221
s t e fa n i e n g e l s t e i n

10  Kin Selection, Mendel’s “Salutary Principle,” and the Fate of

Characters in Forster’s The Longest Journey  247
daniel aureliano newman

Part V – Displaying: Scientific Collections

11  Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind: Science, the Body,

and Language in the Writings of Durs Grünbein and Thomas
Hettche  275
peter m. mcisaac
 Contents  vii

12  Vivifying the Uncanny: Ethnographic Mannequins and Exotic

Performers in Nineteenth-century German Exhibition Culture  298
a. dana weber

Contributors  333
Index  337
Illustrations

  3.1  Henry Fuseli, “FLORA attired by the ELEMENTS”  90

12.1  Piegan woman  301
12.2  Aboriginal from the Tiwi Islands, Australia  302
12.3  Édouard Joseph Dantan, A Casting from Life  308
12.4  Adolph Menzel, Atelierwand  310
Acknowledgments

This volume emerged from a symposium, “Fact and Fiction: Literature

and Science in the German and European Context,” which took place at
the University of Toronto in spring 2011. The workshop was generously
sponsored and supported by the Department of Germanic Languages
and Literatures and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of
Toronto, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC),
the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Munk School of
Global Affairs, Joint Initiative in German and European Studies (JIGES),
and the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES).
We gratefully acknowledge the support of these institutions. A thank you
to those who helped mount the symposium and guaranteed its smooth
running, especially Yasmin Aly, Dale Gebhardt, Gayle Grisdale, Monika
Lang, Nicole Perry, Markus Stock, and John Zilcosky. Financial sup-
port for the publication of this volume was provided by a SSHRC Aid to
Research Workshops Grant.
Thanks go also to the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) at the Uni-
versity of Toronto for its support of a working group on the relationship
between “Science and Culture,” initiated by Cannon Schmitt in 2008 and
co-organized by Marga Vicedo and Christine Lehleiter in 2010–11. The
discussions in this working group inspired the preparations for the sym-
posium and it has been gratifying to see that several of its members have
become contributors.
I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to all contributors for their out-
standing engagement with this project and for their patience during the
editorial process. We owe special thanks to the two anonymous peer-
reviewers for their extremely insightful suggestions and comments. For
her copy-editing work in the early stages of the volume’s production
xii  Acknowledgments

I thank Marlo Burks, for the professional copy-editing John St James,

and for help with finishing the indexing Teresa Sudenis. Finally, a deeply
felt “thank you” goes to Richard Ratzlaff, our editor at the University of
Toronto Press, who supported this project from the moment of its incep-
tion and was there with help and advice at every step of the process.
Introduction
Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific
Cultures in Germany and Britain – Thoughts
on a Contentious Relationship

christine lehleiter

The title of this volume alludes to the paradigm of “The Two Cultures,”
which became popular through Charles Percy Snow’s Rede lectures
delivered in 1959. In these lectures, Snow lamented the divide of the
two knowledge-producing systems of the humanities and the sciences.1
Despite the reference to Snow, however, it is not the volume’s aim to
represent and solidify an antagonistic formulation of the relationship
between scientific and literary cultures. Rather, the articles assembled
here investigate Snow’s division between science and the humanities as a
historically conditioned and complex phenomenon. When the title refers
to literary and scientific cultures, it is with the acknowledgment of this
historical complexity and, at the same time, with the recognition that the
terminological pair of “literature and science” has become a practical ref-
erence for an area of study that is still in its development.2

Towards a Field?

Since Snow’s lamentation about the split between scientific and literary
worlds and – even more – about the unwillingness of the participants of
these cultures to engage with each other’s fields of knowledge, much work
has been undertaken in disciplines such as the history of science and liter-
ary studies with the goal to develop a clearer picture of the relationship
between science and literature and of its historical development. Indeed,
there was much excitement two decades ago about the establishment of a
new field under the heading of Literature and Science. In their 1989 publi-
cation, Christie and Shuttleworth expressed the hope that this field would
become comparable to research areas such as Gender Studies or Postcolo-
nial Theory.3 Similarly, Bruce and Purdy, in their volume Literature and
2  Christine Lehleiter

Science (1994), announced the emergence of an “exciting new field” under

the name “Literary and Science Studies.”4 However, despite initial excite-
ment and optimism, little has materialized in the last decades in terms of an
institutional anchoring of such a field. There are few programs in North
America that have found promising ways to bring together under one roof
scholars trained in distinct disciplines (York University is an example) or
to unite them in the context of a scholarly association (the Society for Lit-
erature, Science, and the Arts, SLSA, is an exception). These attempts at
institutionalizing have remained far and few between.
The hesitations and delays in establishing and institutionalizing the
field are connected to the realization that it is difficult to formulate a
stringent set of questions which this area of study might address. Even
before formulating such questions, we would need to ask: how are the
terms defined within the field’s name? When we say “literature” and
“science,” do we mean a specific historical and disciplinary constellation
which became possible once scientific and literary methodologies were
defined as separate from each other? Or do we assume a much more gen-
erous definition of the terms – running the risk that the title’s distinction,
if not the opposition that it claims, becomes void? These questions are
difficult to answer.
Notwithstanding the difficulties, there is a rich body of work that has
tried to address questions such as these. Gillian Beer in particular has been
instrumental in establishing and conceptualizing a field of research that
focuses on the relationship between literature and science. In “Translation
or Transformation,” Beer considers the question of whether the distinc-
tion between the disciplines is justified at all. To discuss the relationship
between the disciplines, Beer employs the terms “translation” and “trans-
formation.” She dismisses what she calls “translation” as inadequate,
because it assumes a primacy of one field which is then translated into
another. Instead of delineating clearly defined boundaries between dis-
ciplines, Beer highlights the unstable nature of the relationship between
literature and science. She stresses “interchange rather than origins and
transformation rather than translation” and notes that “neither literature
nor science is an entity, and what constitutes literature or science is a mat-
ter for agreement in a particular historical period or place.”5 Instead of
assuming a hierarchy or split between disciplines, Beer turns her attention
to the shared language of literary and scientific texts. Using the Victo-
rian period as a case study, she examines how in texts of scientists such as
Charles Darwin (1809–82) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875) narrative mod-
els and myths are reused in order to tell the story of evolution.6
 Introduction  3

Following the lead of literary scholars such as Beer and theoreticians

such as Michel Foucault, significant work has been done in recent years in
the history of science to shift the attention from individual discoveries and
experiments to the discursive, textual production of these moments. This
“linguistic turn”7 is perhaps most clearly marked in James Secord’s Halifax
keynote address, in which he proposes that historians of science should
approach “science as a form of communication.”8 Suggestions such as Sec-
ord’s have helped to raise the status of textual expertise within the his-
tory of science, where this new attention to language has proved extremely
productive. One recent exploration of this work is the excellent Focus sec-
tion of the leading history of science journal ISIS on the topic “History
of Science and Literature and Science” (September 2010). Colin Milburn
observes there that historians have become more aware of what he calls
“literary technologies” in the sciences, but he notes that the contribution
of science fiction “and even literature as such” to the sciences has not been
adequately studied yet.9 In the same ISIS issue, Henry S. Turner encour-
ages readers to learn from literary scholarship and to consider “form” as
a category for the study of the history of science. Laura Dassow Walls’s
contribution stresses the “rootedness of all texts in lived experience” and
suggests that “both literary and scientific texts may be approached as per-
formances that weave together discursive and material elements.”10 Two
observations regarding the ISIS issue stand out in connection to the sub-
ject of our volume: first, the focus on the interrelatedness of literature and
science and, second, the conviction that literary tools help historians of
science to understand better their objects of study. Consequently, James
Bono states in the issue’s introduction that the essays assembled in this
ISIS edition demonstrate “that history of science and literature and sci-
ence are, in fact, interdependent fields” and that the field of “literature
and science shares with the history of science a concern to understand the
making of science.”11
The focus on language and on shared discourses has proved to be a
fruitful path towards an understanding of how scientific innovation takes
place and how scientific paradigms emerge. However, it has also made it
difficult to pay attention to specific disciplinary questions and to the spe-
cific contribution of literary cultures to knowledge.12 Although numerous
studies have shown by now that the emergence of knowledge cannot be
confined within disciplinary boundaries, it is also a fact that disciplines
remain a shaping structure of knowledge production and academic life. As
Katherine Hayles has noted, disciplinary formation is so strong that we
often don’t even notice any longer the disciplinary “lenses” that we wear.
4  Christine Lehleiter

“They are crafted through long years of apprenticeship as we absorb,

often unconsciously, attitudes and ways of speaking that determine not
only the answers we accept, but the questions we ask and the rhetoric
we use to ask them.”13 It seems likely that the challenges in establishing
an interdisciplinary field of Literature and Science Studies have not only
to do with a yet to be formulated set of questions, but also with the fact
that institutionalized disciplines remain today the place whence inter-
disciplinary inquiries are launched. Even more, disciplinary training, as
Donald T. Campbell argues, is a necessary precondition for research as we
understand it today.14 Accepting disciplinary division, Campbell suggests
a “Fish-Scale Model of Omniscience” that promises access to truth by
means of partially intersecting expert knowledge.
This volume is rooted in disciplinary traditions, but it is also indebted to
the historical sensibility that scholars such as Beer bring to the disciplines’
definition and development. The aim here is less a search for omniscience
than an exploration of the historical condition and relation of disciplines
and methods whose continued existence (and necessity) the volume
acknowledges. By examining individual cases of disciplinary relations,
Fact and Fiction does not promise to formulate a binding and abstract def-
inition of Literature and Science Studies. It pursues a more confined but
hopefully no less productive agenda. Starting from the premise that the
eighteenth century is shaped by a differentiation of disciplines, this vol-
ume asks how authors from the eighteenth century onwards have assessed
the relationship between literary and scientific cultures. In engaging with
this question, the scholars that contribute to this volume are indebted to
specific disciplinary traditions and tools. However, by using these tools
they aim to look beyond their disciplines.
In undertaking interdisciplinary work, the papers in this volume remind
us that interdisciplinarity is in no way “more natural” than the discipli-
narity that we have exercised for so many years. Interdisciplinarity is
understood here as an effect of disciplinary divisions, not as their aboli-
tion. Mindful of its own historical condition, the volume testifies that if
there will be a place for Literary and Science Studies, it will be as much an
expression of an interest in interdisciplinarity as it will be an expression of
a historical and political moment in which literature feels under pressure
from the sciences. What Tim Lenoir has stated regarding disciplines – “It
is at best an interested abstraction formed in the service of a disciplinary
program”15  – could also be said about interdisciplinarity. Despite these
difficulties and hesitations regarding an institutionalization of Literature
 Introduction  5

and Science Studies, the papers in this volume are witnesses to how pro-
ductive it can be to think beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Science and Poetry

And yet, the distinction of the two areas of knowledge production is

justified and their study legitimated not only by the current disciplin-
ary wars, but by the fact that authors have referred to the division from
the eighteenth century onwards. In an often quoted passage, the Ger-
man polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) acknowledges and
regrets the existence of the division: “Nowhere would anyone grant that
science and poetry can be united. People forgot that science had devel-
oped from poetry and they failed to take into consideration that a swing
of the pendulum might beneficently reunite the two, at a higher level and
to mutual advantage.”16 The German term “Wissenschaft” (science) that
Goethe uses in this quote encompasses a broader spectrum of meaning
than its English translation into “science” would suggest. While science is
often understood as “natural sciences,” the German “Wissenschaft” refers
more broadly to scholarly inquiry, which includes not only “Naturwis-
senschaft” (natural sciences), but also “Geisteswissenschaft” (humanities)
and disciplines such as “Literaturwissenschaft” (literary studies). The term
“Wissenschaft” refers to a methodology rather than to a specific object
of study.17 Thinking about Snow’s suggestion regarding the two cultures,
David Knight has highlighted the new significance of scientific inquiry
that emerges in Goethe’s times. He observes that in Romanticism “the real
division was between the realm of science, governed by reason, and that
of practice, or rule of thumb.”18 Knight’s observation brings to our atten-
tion the growing awareness for scientific methods which informs Goethe’s
statement, but it also overlooks how closely scientific inquiry was shaped
in Goethe’s times by the practical and the quotidian. Botany – the field of
study to which Goethe refers – is a particularly relevant example. Its study
around 1800 relied heavily on the contribution of individuals with no spe-
cific training or schooling.19 Goethe’s statement suggests that it was not
only the opposition to the practical but even more the opposition to the
imaginary and poetic which was crucial for the development of a modern
understanding of the sciences.
While noting the split between scientific and poetic methodologies,
Goethe assumes that they are genealogically linked. He is not alone in this
assumption, nor is he the first to formulate it. His statement that science
6  Christine Lehleiter

has developed from poetry resonates with the work of philosopher and
theologian Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) from the mid-1760s  –
published only a few years before Goethe got in close contact with Herder
and his thinking when befriending him in Strasbourg during his study
years. Herder had argued that conceptual language developed from poetry
and, as John Noyes formulates in this volume, that “there is something
about the poetic that resides at the heart of factuality.”20 Much as Herder
observed a historical development from poetic to conceptual language,
Goethe understood the split between science and poetry not as an onto-
logical condition, but attributed it to historical circumstances which, when
changed, could reconfigure  this relationship (“nach einem Umschwung
von Zeiten” [after a change of times]).
Despite Goethe’s hope for a potential reconciliation of the two ways
of creating knowledge, it is important to note that Goethe does not
regret so much the existence of the differentiation of the methodologies
as the assumption that they could not talk to each other in a meaningful
way. In his contribution to this volume (“Elective Affinities / Wahlver-
wandtschaften: The Career of a Metaphor”), Christian Weber examines the
ways in which poetic language and scientific inquiry relate to each other
in Goethe’s work. He demonstrates that in Goethe’s texts the imaginative
potential of poetic language can both surpass the empirical exploration of
the world and fall short in grasping its reality. In order to be successful
it is necessary according to Weber’s reading of Goethe that imagination
constantly “renegotiates the abstract symbolic meaning of words with the
more concrete images of natural things.”21
Goethe discusses the relationship between science and poetry in the
context of his poem on plant morphology and the hesitation of his pub-
lisher as well as his audience to accept it as a valid contribution to bot-
any. He attributes this hesitation to his readers’ expectation that a writer
known to them as an author of literary pieces will, and should, stay within
the limits of his expertise. For expertise, Goethe uses the German terms
“Feld” (field) and “Fach” (subject).22 Both terms refer to a defined space,
a field of research (Feld) or a subject area (Fach).23 Parallel to the meth-
odological split between scientific and poetic approaches, there is then
also a disciplinary context in which Goethe’s statement has to be read.
His lamentation regarding the unwillingness of his audiences to see the
complementarity of poetic and scientific approaches can be read as witness
to the increasing disciplinary differentiation, in which the natural sciences
become defined as fundamentally different from, or even the opposite of,
literature.
 Introduction  7

While it is certainly true that Snow’s paradigm of the two cultures needs
to be understood as an expression of his own historical moment,24 Goethe’s
engagement with his readers’ reaction to his scientific work demonstrates
that it is no less true that the long eighteenth century knew already of
potential tensions between scientific and literary accounts of the world.
The unity that Goethe envisions does not negate the existence of disci-
plinary differentiation; rather, it considers disciplines as complementary
forces which need to cooperate in the attempt to understand the world in
which we live. David Knight’s statement that “around 1800 ‘science’ was
not opposed to ‘arts’; there was nothing like the ‘Two Cultures’ of C.P.
Snow’s famous essay”25 seems, therefore, overstated. Goethe’s plea for an
overcoming of the gap is not an expression of his ignorance of the differ-
ences, but a proof of the experience of their existence.

Certain and Probable

There have been a number of attempts to understand the prehistory of

the split between the arts and the sciences. In one of these accounts the
Enlightenment provided decisive foundations for later disciplinary divi-
sions.26 Enlightenment physicists who believed in the potential of their
mathematical tools to access reality are pitted against philosophers who
continued to search for epistemological clarity.27 Margaret Osler observes
that “whereas the physicists believed themselves to be approaching the
position of Laplace’s omniscient intelligence, the philosophers came to
abandon the hope that scientific methods can lead to certainty or even
penetrate the veil of appearances.”28 Osler concludes: “Where the physi-
cists sought a science known with certainty, the philosophers saw at best
the possibility of probable knowledge.”29
The appeal of probabilistic thinking went across whatever divide might
have existed between philosophical and mathematical approaches to real-
ity. While Laplace (1749–1827) formulated the belief in the obtainability
of omniscience, he was at the same time deeply involved in contributing to
the mathematical theory of probability.30 Laplace’s example is significant
because it illustrates that even if we can observe disciplinary splits, indi-
viduals engage simultaneously with a number of different methodologies.
We have to be careful not to confuse the divide between approaches to
knowledge with the divide between individuals. These individuals often
lived “in a variety of conflicted epistemologies.”31
The split between those approaches to knowledge that were based
on the assumption of certainty and those approaches that continued to
8  Christine Lehleiter

explore epistemological questions anticipates later formulations of disci-

plinary divisions. It is important to note, however, that in this Enlighten-
ment articulation of the division the uniting principle is rationality: both
approaches assume that truth finding needs to be conducted by rational
means. In contrast to later thinkers, these philosophers neither rely on faith
nor do they want to employ Poesie – as Goethe would later suggest – in
order to come closer to the truth or in order to sketch probable scenarios.
Probabilistic thinking became a powerful tool that was used well
beyond its Enlightenment origins to elaborate on the likeliness of events
of which the particular occurrence could not be known with certainty.
Tina Young Choi’s contribution to this volume (“Probabilistic Knowl-
edge in the Works of James Clerk Maxwell and George Eliot”) attests to
the fact that nineteenth-century scientists such as Maxwell (1831–79) and
writers such as Eliot (1819–80) took recourse to probabilistic thinking in
order to elaborate where certainty was missing. By the late nineteenth cen-
tury, however, how certainty about reality was defined had changed sig-
nificantly compared to the Enlightenment understanding. As Choi shows,
by the time Maxwell published his thoughts on molecules and thermody-
namic laws in his1873 Nature article, such certainty had become defined as
that which can be accessed by the senses.32 While the physicists’ optimistic
belief in “Laplace’s omniscient intelligence”33 relied unapologetically on
mathematical approaches to reality, Maxwell felt it necessary to admit to
his readers that “no one has ever seen or handled a single molecule” and
that they “cannot be subjected to direct experiment.”34
A second decisive change had occurred around 1800: once certainty
had become defined by the empirical and experimental, the imaginary
became its opposite. Maxwell found it justified and necessary to “extrapo-
late from limited data by engaging the ‘constructive imagination.’”35 In a
way that might have pleased Goethe, Maxwell connected to Lord Tenny-
son’s (1809–92) poetic imagination of the atom in his 1868 poem “Lucre-
tius” in order to overcome factual limitations. Maxwell’s text witnesses
two important phenomena. First, it highlights the options that probabi-
listic thinking offered in moments of missing certainty, now defined as
empirical truth. And, second, it witnesses the closeness that Maxwell saw
between probabilistic and poetic-imaginative thinking when certainty
became defined via the empirical. Once philosophers had highlighted the
epistemological limits of knowledge, probabilistic thinking became one
way to deal with them. However, once the criteria for scientific certainty
had become defined by the empirical and experimental, there was also a
second alternative opened, the imaginary.
 Introduction  9

Factual and Imaginable

Many scholars have noted that the study of Romanticism played a crucial
role in the understanding of how disciplines emerged and became insti-
tutionalized. In Romanticism and the Sciences (1990), Cunningham and
Jardin suggest reading Romanticism as a counter-movement to the Enlight-
enment and its mechanical and dividing tendency.36 With this assessment
they confirm the core of Hans Eichner’s argument in “The Rise of Mod-
ern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism” (1982). Building on work
by René Wellek and Morse Peckham, Eichner, in an essay that is impres-
sive in both its comprehensiveness and clarity, argues that Romanticism
can be understood as “a desperate rearguard action against the spirit and
the implications of modern science.”37 Eichner ultimately reads the split
between humanities and natural sciences as a split between physics and eth-
ics and locates its beginning at that point when the sciences, starting with
Galileo, did not engage any longer with the question of final causes.38 In the
new mathematical and mechanical world the space for God, transcendental
hope, and the possibility of free will had shrunk if not altogether vanished.39
According to Eichner, Romanticism tried to overcome the shortcomings
of mechanical philosophy by rejecting the material existence of the world
and by positing instead a cosmos that is a product of the mind.40 In order
to attain truth Romantic thinkers “relied on the irrational faculties of the
mind  – unmediated insight, ‘enthusiasm,’ ‘intellectual intuition,’ and the
imagination.”41 Eichner goes one step further yet by assigning a specific
genre to this approach to truth finding: poetry becomes the place where
imagination reigns and it is considered “the supreme tool of cognition.”42
Assuming a split between imagination and empirical science, it seems
difficult in this approach to account for the decisive contributions that
Romantic scientists have made in fields indebted to empiricism such as
medicine and physics. Eichner concedes such advances, but he reads them
as the result of a compromise. Romantic scientists obtained their scientific
discoveries not as a result of their speculative methodologies, but because
they had interiorized the empirical paradigm long before they encoun-
tered the thought of Romantic philosophers such as Schelling.43 Eichner’s
insights are decisive, but his strict division between the empirical and the
imaginary makes it difficult to acknowledge the genuine contributions of
Romanticism to modern sciences except as a compromise between differ-
ent methodologies.44
The relationship of Romantic thinkers to the heritage of Enlightenment
might be more complex. In connecting to what Eichner calls “empirical
10  Christine Lehleiter

paradigms” of the Enlightenment, Romantic thinkers fundamentally

transformed them. In her contribution here (“Constructing the Faktum
in the Enlightenment and Early German Romanticism”), Jocelyn Holland
zeroes in on the status of the “fact” in Romantic thought. Holland traces the
term through a rich etymological and conceptual history which exposes its
temporal quality. She demonstrates how Romantic writers such as Nova-
lis and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) became interested in exploring this
temporal quality of the fact “by connecting it to an open-ended process
which, ideally, would facilitate the emergence of new facts.” For these
Romantic thinkers the fact is not defined as a verifiable observation but
as “potential conveyer of intellectual activity.”45 For Schlegel, as Holland
observes, even aesthetic statements can become a fact. Such close readings
of how Romantic thinkers engaged with the heritage of the Enlightenment
shed new light on the Romantic contribution to the sciences. Contrary to
the assumption that Romantic scientists retained empiricist methodolo-
gies because they were trained in them and compromised when they used
them, Holland’s article demonstrates that Romantic authors embraced
facts by fundamentally redefining them. This redefinition made it possible
to think beyond the split between natural sciences and aesthetics because
both were understood as products and origins of intellectual activity. If
Romanticism has been read as a poetic reaction against mechanical philos-
ophy, Holland’s paper challenges the division between the mechanic and
poetic, since the mechanical itself becomes a productive tool which can-
not be distinguished in its epistemological status from aesthetics. Roman-
tic thinkers dissolved disciplinary boundaries not because they could not
accept that they rely on different objects and methodologies of studies,
but because they saw similar epistemological questions at work in both
areas.
If the beginning of the nineteenth century experienced an unprece-
dented interest in the accumulation of empirical data obtained by means
of experiment, the “facts” collected also gained a new status as both epis-
temologically uncertain and rich. In this context, aesthetics was not pro-
viding the meaning that the mechanical data collection could not provide:
rather, both fact and aesthetic object rely on the subject who reads and
posits the data. In her chapter on the invention of homeopathy, Alice Kuz-
niar shows the extent to which the work of the physician Samuel Hahn-
emann (1755–1843) was shaped by an uncertainty regarding the status of
the fact. While his research efforts are devoted to the collection of huge
data sets, there is no attempt to find general rules or approach the large
numbers statistically. This lack of interest in generalization is not the
 Introduction  11

result of a capitulation, but expression of the conviction that facts cannot

be distinguished from the act of reading. The data that Hahnemann col-
lects becomes intrinsically tied to individual engagements with it. Draw-
ing connections between Hahnemann’s and Novalis’s (1772–1801) work,
Kuzniar observes that both experimental research and literature of the
time searched for affinity and analogy between unique and disparate facts.
Despite the reliance on the fact, this search was, as Kuzniar demonstrates,
“conducted intuitively and idiosyncratically” and, therefore, relied heav-
ily on an act of reading.46 While Goethe strove for an objectivity which
was still guaranteed by the object itself, thinkers such as Hahnemann and
Novalis put a greater stress on the perceiving entity of the subject which
can only guarantee the sense-making process.

Subjective and Objective

For a short time, then, in Romanticism, the subject-object distinction was

virtually dissolved. However, in the history of disciplinary differentiation
a new definition of the opposition between “objective” and “subjective,”
which also emerges around 1800, marks a crucial point. As Lorraine Das-
ton and Peter Galison show, from the fourteenth century, when this oppo-
sition was introduced by scholastic philosophers such as Duns Scotus (c.
1266–1308) and William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), until the nineteenth
century, objective denoted objects “as they are presented to conscious-
ness,” while subjective denoted the objects themselves.47 Daston and Gali-
son credit Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) with redefining the terms. But, as
they point out, even Kant’s “objective validity” was not directly linked to
external objects. Instead, it referred to the “forms of sensibility” – time,
space, causality – which for Kant make experience possible. Kant’s intro-
duction of subjective as an approximate equivalent for “merely empirical
sensations” shares with the later usage a pejorative connotation.48 Das-
ton and Galison observe further that in the first third of the nineteenth
century, dictionaries in Germany, Britain, and France started to explain
the terms “objective” and “subjective” similarly to today’s usage: as fact
and fiction.49 Objective is from now on defined as referring to external
objects, while subjective is connected to feelings and thoughts inside a
person. It is this new definition of subjective and objective that starts to
be associated with certain disciplines. While natural scientists increasingly
strove to exclude subjectivity from their work, subject-based approaches
to the world gained value in literary cultures. Daston and Galison observe:
“In notable contrast to earlier views held from the Renaissance through
12  Christine Lehleiter

the Enlightenment about the close analogies between artistic and scien-
tific work, the public personas of artist and scientist polarized during this
period. Artists were exhorted to express, even flaunt, their subjectivity, at
the same time that scientists were admonished to restrain theirs.”50
While one can witness some resistance to this differentiation, particu-
larly in those countries in which Romantic epistemology had a signifi-
cant influence, such as Germany,51 the subject-object division increasingly
became equated with the division between science and the humanities.
At the same time, one can also observe decisive attempts to dissolve the
distinction within a positivistic paradigm, namely, by reinterpreting a
number of disciplines, like history, as natural sciences.52 Tobias Wilke’s
contribution in this volume examines how empirical approaches in the late
nineteenth century kindled a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of
aesthetics, which started to engage in empirical methodologies to establish
the psychological phenomena behind aesthetic experiences.
Under the pressure of the dominating natural sciences, new attempts
were made to define what the unique contribution of the humanities could
possibly be. Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) texts from the late nineteenth
century can be interpreted as an expression of this “crisis” of the humani-
ties. Dilthey’s immensely influential work moves along a similar axis as
that of Daston and Galison. Dilthey defines the kind of research under-
taken in the natural sciences as geared towards finding universal laws,
while the research undertaken in the humanities is shaped by a historicist
perspective and is interested in individual approaches to the world. In his
work, the sciences are defined as explaining the factual world, while the
humanities are given the task of understanding the world from the centre
of the hermeneutic circle, the subject.53
In light of empirical methodologies emerging in the sciences, litera-
ture more than any other discipline became the space for subjectivity and
imagination. Faced with disciplinary fragmentation, it also became that
discipline in which meta-disciplinary discussion could be held. This is an
interesting development, because it somehow defines literature both as the
place where the non-factual resides and as that place where a higher factu-
ality is searched for. While imagination remains epistemologically suspect,
it is at the same time privileged as the place where a truth might be found.

Disciplines and Institutions

Although Daston and Galison can locate the differentiation of the terms
“subjective” and “objective” along disciplinary lines in the first third of
 Introduction  13

the nineteenth century, disciplinary differentiation was far from being

completed. Even when disciplines have been institutionalized, they are,
as Hayles has pointed out, “far from being monolithic,”54 and we can
observe intricate links between disciplines well into the twentieth century
and beyond. How complex the picture of the emergence of disciplines
remains even, or, rather precisely when paying close attention to histori-
cal conditions is pointed out by Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman.
Focusing on the developments in Great Britain, they observe that for the
British Royal Literary Fund in the early nineteenth century science was
considered one of literature’s branches. At the same time, the term litera-
ture “was also being used, by members of the very same charitable organi-
zation, in a newer, much narrower sense to signify merely imaginative or
fictional writing.”55 Dawson and Lightman highlight that different notions
of literature existed simultaneously in the early nineteenth century. Much
as Daston and Galison, they note that the understanding of literature as
“imaginative fictional writing” was the one that became defining for the
later nineteenth century.56 Parallel to a new understanding of literature as
fiction, science came to be defined in Britain as natural science. Dawson
and Lightman locate the emergence of this more restrictive understand-
ing of the word “science,” which focuses on “experimental method and
the investigation of the natural world,” with the formation of the Brit-
ish Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831.57 Fulford, Lee,
and Kitson assume a slower solidification, but they also place disciplin-
ary differentiation in nineteenth-century institutional history. They locate
the professionalization of disciplines in the later nineteenth century and
observe: “There were institutional parameters, and bodies concerned with
enforcing them, ensuring that intellectuals could, in practice, define what
was, and was not, acceptable as a proper scientific discourse. The sanction
of the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians was important,
and both these bodies preferred work that followed inductive method and
used an empiricist and realistic style.”58
In their introduction to Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature,
1700–1900 (1989), Christie and Shuttleworth observe that the split between
science and literature is often based not on different underlying methodol-
ogies but on the tendency to understand disciplines as products of differ-
ent human faculties. They state that while we tend to align rationality with
the natural sciences, we align literature with emotional faculties.59 Depart-
ing from this quasi-anthropological paradigm, Christie and Shuttleworth
suggest tracing the split between scientific and literary cultures neither
to epistemologies nor to human faculties but to institutional decisions in
14  Christine Lehleiter

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.60 By doing so, they open the
inquiry into the relationship between the two areas of knowledge produc-
tion to questions regarding specific local and national cultures. Instead of
a uniform historical – or even natural – development towards ever greater
disciplinary stratification, they describe the dependency of disciplinary
differentiation on specific geographical, political, and national condi-
tions. For example, they note the great difference between the institution-
alization of disciplines in France and Britain, thereby offering readers a
new framework to understand the division between French and British
scientific cultures. To follow Christie and Shuttleworth’s approach, the
greater openness of British scientific cultures to popular occupations and
representations in fields such as botany and physics can be traced back to
the less pronounced institutional divisions between disciplines in Britain
compared to France.61

Germany and Britain

Christie and Shuttleworth’s work points to the necessity of looking at

national developments in order to understand the relationship between
literature and science and its historical origins. The authors have formu-
lated first insights into the French and the British contexts and conditions
of the emergence of disciplines. Without being able to provide a compre-
hensive picture – nor having the ambition to do so – Fact and Fiction offers
an opportunity to compare and contrast German and British disciplinary
developments.
Germany and Britain offer a rich field for such studies because of the
significance of their scientific cultures for furthering disciplinary develop-
ments and their crucial role in shaping modern sciences. In the history of
the sciences, as David Knight has pointed out, precisely those countries
in which Romantic natural science was strongest turn out to have had
decisive impact on the development of modern science culture. Knight
observes: “The theory of the conservation of energy and evolutionary
theory in the mid-nineteenth century developed in Germany and Britain,
where romantic natural science had been strongest, and not in France.”
Knight goes so far as to claim that “this was a factor in the relative decline
of French science in the course of the nineteenth century.”62
Regarding the comparison of German and British traditions of scientific
inquiry, two statements have been made traditionally. Knight mentions
the first one, namely, the indebtedness of British scientists to empirical
methodologies compared to the continued devotion of German scientists
 Introduction  15

to metaphysics.63 The second one is – as Christie and Shuttleworth note –

the greater openness of British scientific cultures to popular occupations
and representations.64 Ann Shteir’s contribution to this volume, “‘She
comes!  – the GODDESS!’ Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The
Botanic Garden,” bears witness to the willingness of British authors to
engage with a wider public. As Shteir shows, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802)
uses literary imagination and mythology to make scientific knowledge
accessible to the layperson. In discussing Darwin’s The Botanic Garden,
Shteir not only pays attention to Darwin’s use of poetic language for the
purpose of making scientific context accessible to larger audiences, she
also examines the role of poetic language in making sense of the scien-
tific data. Shteir argues that by drawing on mythology, Darwin is able to
project a holistic understanding of nature, which would not be possible
by the presentation of botanical nomenclature alone. Here, we observe a
thinker who is indebted to an Enlightenment epistemology of empirical
observation, while at the same time acknowledging that the data alone can
provide neither meaning nor the ability to communicate knowledge. For
both activities, Erasmus Darwin relies on literary cultures.
It might seem that Darwin’s attempts to popularization confirm the
long-standing conviction that attributes greater openness regarding larger
audiences to British scientists. However, singling out British scientists as
more open to popularizing their science risks overlooking the extent to
which communication and cross-fertilization between British and Con-
tinental scientific communities were vivid and ongoing. Erasmus Darwin
drew significantly on the work of Swiss polymath Albrecht von Haller
(1708–77) and Darwin’s own poem Loves of the Plants was highly influ-
ential in Germany in general and for Goethe in particular. As Shteir points
out, while Goethe might have dismissed Darwin’s “pile-up of textual fea-
tures,”65 he nevertheless acknowledged Darwin’s influence. Goethe’s own
botanical poem Metamorphose der Pflanzen (Metamorphosis of Plants) is
driven by a very similar pedagogic-didactic impetus.
While German intellectuals around 1800 might have made attempts to
distinguish their work from any form of trivialization  – as Goethe did
when he rejected Darwin’s poem as a “fashionable” piece of writing in a
letter to his friend Friedrich Schiller66 – their texts nevertheless took shape
in similar paradigms as those of their British counterparts. It is indeed
interesting that Goethe and Schiller sketched pieces such as Über den Dil-
ettantismus (On Dilettantism) in which they erected barriers against the
work of women and other less educated groups, while Goethe himself was
deeply involved in dilettantish attempts at painting and, as some would
16  Christine Lehleiter

argue to his dismay, botany and optics. In fact, Goethe and Schiller might
have been aware of the discrepancy between their theoretical attempts and
their writing practice: the Dilettantismus sketch was never published dur-
ing their lifetimes.67 Goethe’s remark on Darwin’s poem and the sketch on
dilettantism suggest that there is an attempt in German intellectual circles
around 1800 to distinguish “high” from “low” forms of literary and sci-
entific engagement which has no equivalent in British circles. However, as
Shteir’s article makes visible, ultimately German and British writers, scien-
tists, and “dilettantes” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
engaged in surprisingly similar forms of scientific and poetic explorations.
In light of the close interaction between empirical and imaginary, scien-
tific and popular cultures that we can observe in both German and British
science communities, this volume encourages us to reconsider the convic-
tion that British cultures were more indebted to empirical work and to
popularization than their German counterparts. As in the case of the open-
ness of British culture to popular forms of learning which were rejected by
Goethe and Schiller, the attention to the work of authors such as Erasmus
Darwin, Hahnemann, and Novalis highlights the fact that such prefer-
ences might have been more declaration and rhetoric than actual practice.
Knight suggests as much, when he adds that the British were indebted
to empirical work “at least in public.”68 Why these public declarations
were felt to be necessary needs further examination from the perspective
of fields such as the sociology of science and the history of science.
Attention to the relationship between literature and science also sheds
new light on one of the most influential theories of modernity that emerged
in the twentieth century, Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. In Luhmann’s
model, modernity is marked by a differentiation of value spheres, such as
art, religion, or love.69 Each of these spheres is ultimately a self-referential
system with no access to (and interest in) the questions asked or the knowl-
edge produced in other systems. Daniel Fulda and Thomas Prüfer have
noted that Luhmann’s model seems too schematic in light of the permeabil-
ity of forms of knowledge and the fundamental significance of convergence
for autonomous disciplines.70 The contributors to this volume observe
both interdependence between knowledge fields and the conviction of the
authors of the time that such distinct knowledge fields exist.

The Volume’s Organization

Fact and Fiction is organized into five parts, with each of the parts devoted
to one activity that relates literary and scientific cultures in Germany and
 Introduction  17

Britain. In the first, “Reading: Electricity, Medicine,” Holland and Kuz-

niar investigate the fragility of the “fact” in literary and scientific texts
from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. Discussing examples and lan-
guage taken from the fields of electricity and medicine, both authors point
out that in the cases they study the fact is not considered something empir-
ically given, but rather produced in an act of reading. Holland opens the
section with the fundamental question of how the fact is defined in texts
around 1800. She traces the eighteenth-century history of the term “fact”
and observes that at the end of the century the term did not yet encompass
notions like “objectively known” or “scientifically proven,” with which
we associate it today. Instead, for Romantic authors the “‘primal’ factum
is in essence the one which we are ourselves, posited in the original activity
of the subject.” Focusing on this temporal and processual quality, authors
like Novalis and Schlegel begin to see the fact as a conveyor of intellectual
productivity. Drawing on vocabulary and concepts used in contemporary
research on electricity, Romantic authors redefine the fact as “conductor”
(Leiter), an instrument for the facilitation and creation of new facts. If
the difficulty to establish facts haunts scientific endeavours around 1800,
Romantic authors explore the epistemological potential of such uncer-
tainty in their literary and philosophical texts. Perhaps ironically, these
explorations become possible precisely because of new conceptual frame-
works which the sciences provide.
Kuzniar, in the second chapter of this part, starts her investigation with
a focus on Hahnemann’s medical writings, to discover that these writings
share important features with literary theories which emerge simultane-
ously in early Romanticism. Kuzniar demonstrates that the discovery of
similarities between symptoms which forms the basis of Hahnemann’s
homeopathic theory of healing (the Law of Similars: “like cures like”) is
only possible in a moment of nonsensical intuition. While Hahnemann’s
infinite listing and cataloguing of symptoms follows an eighteenth-
century methodology of taxonomical observation, his law of similars fol-
lows the principle of the absurd, which aligns it closely with Romantic
notions of the chaotic and fragmentary. Rejecting any attempt of system-
atization or generalization, Hahnemann’s theory of medicine does not
allow for the establishment of a stable set of symptom–remedy relations.
Instead, it relies on individual and idiosyncratic acts of reading symptoms
and establishing similarities between them, thereby connecting it strongly
to the productive acts of reading propagated in Romantic literature and
philosophy, which Holland negotiates in the first chapter of this section.
What both chapters witness in the late eighteenth century is a heightened
18  Christine Lehleiter

awareness of the instability, or even absence, of “reality” and a growing

acknowledgment that our perception of the world is a process which pro-
duces the fact that it studies. Here fiction does not differ from fact: the
distinction has become obsolete.
While Holland and Kuzniar discover the instability of the fact in
Romantic thought, in the next part, “Imagining: Botany, Chemistry,
Thermodynamics,” Shteir, Christian Weber, and Choi explore the place
of imagination vis-à-vis empirical studies in the production of knowledge.
Shteir investigates the many ways in which physician and poet Erasmus
Darwin employs imagination in order to both arrive at a more compre-
hensive understanding of nature and to mediate this understanding to new
audiences, in particular women. Shteir points to the tensions in Darwin’s
expository poem The Botanic Garden between, on one side, taxonomy
built on empirical observation and differentiation and, on the other, Dar-
win’s multiple use of analogies, which establish “the vastness of relations
within nature.”71 In his poem, Darwin goes beyond mimetic presentation
of the Linnaean nomenclatura and empirical classification and by com-
bining prose and poetry, Shteir argues, leaves Enlightenment taxonomy
behind to propagate what Pierre Hadot in The Veil of Isis has called an
“Orphic” idea of nature.
By discussing The Botanic Garden as a generic hybrid, which mixes
poetry and prose, scientific information and mythology in the tradition
of Albrecht von Haller’s “Die Alpen” (The Alps), Shteir joins Kuzniar
and Michael House (see part 3) in highlighting the extent to which episte-
mological questions have an impact on genre. The epistemological aporia
finds its generic expression in Ernst Platner’s (1744–1818) aphoristic writ-
ing style and in Hahnemann’s practice of simply jotting down symptoms
which do not add up to a given set of sicknesses, but require – much like
Romantic fragments  – individual acts of reading to become meaningful.
Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden is shaped by a similar tension between
an (Enlightenment) taxonomic understanding of nature and a (Roman-
tic) search for analogies, which Kuzniar observes also in Hahnemann’s
homeopathy.
Shteir observes that for Erasmus Darwin “imagination underlies science
as much as poetry, and is as important for him as information.” In the
opening lines of the poem, Darwin declares the goal “to inlist Imagination
under the banner of Science.” The quote suggests that imagination is for
Darwin both resource and tool in the production of knowledge. How-
ever, it also alludes, it seems, to the fact that imagination has a dangerous
potential which threatens to get out of control and thereby endanger the
 Introduction  19

scientific inquiry. It is this last aspect which is taken up by the second

chapter in this part, in which Christian Weber discusses the relationship
between empiricism and imagination in Goethe’s work.
Weber opens his chapter  with the observation that although we have
come to understand literature and science as two mutually exclusive
fields – one thriving on subjectivity and imagination, the other shunning
them  – they ultimately depend on each other. While literature receives
inspiration from the sciences, each scientific inquiry will experience at
some point the limits of factual analysis and will, at this point, be forced
to leave the area which can be approached by the senses and use imagina-
tion and figurative language to newly conceptualize the problem at hand.
Weber takes the term Elective Affinities as a case study for this figurative
use of language. He traces it from its origin in eighteenth-century chemis-
try to its use in Goethe’s novel of the same title. Weber demonstrates not
only how poetics supplies the sciences with metaphors for their inquiries,
but how the novel itself becomes a virtual experiment. It has the potential
to take on a meta-discursive function, stimulating and assessing the forma-
tive potential of metaphors and scientific models.
Much as in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which
is the focus of Choi’s contribution, science is less the novel’s topic than its
informing model. Choi explores how Eliot draws on probability theory
used in nineteenth-century thermodynamics to articulate the characters’
speculations on what lies beyond empirical observation. When the char-
acters in Daniel Deronda speculate about the feelings and actions of other
people, they can articulate general observations and probable outcomes,
but they fail to predict actions and decisions of the individual. Where Eliot
shows how much the scientific model that she employs fails to predict the
individual case, she closely follows probability theory, which, as Eliot’s
contemporary Maxwell laments in the context of thermodynamics, can
predict behaviour of all, but not the behaviour of individual, particles. Both
Goethe and Eliot describe the necessity of imagination in the moment of
the failure of empirical observation and both transfer scientific models
into literature. However, while Goethe considers this transfer from sci-
ence to literature, and ultimately life, problematic because the model can-
not grasp the far more complex reality for which it is taken, Eliot embraces
the scientific model at hand precisely because it does not offer a conclusive
reading of reality, but expresses an epistemological aporia.
Eliot and Goethe grapple with the question of what happens, as Max-
well had put it, when the scientific inquiry turns to “things invisible and
imperceptible by our senses.” The urgency of this question was never
20  Christine Lehleiter

clearer than at the point in history when the sciences started to define
themselves as a field of inquiry based on the method of empirical study
and experiment, and in opposition to subjective imagination. The third
part in this volume, entitled “Sensing: Anthropology, Psychology, Aes-
thetics,” connects to the previous in that it asks how to account for some-
thing which is not easily graspable by logical deduction: feelings, in both
their sensory and psychological interpretation. At the centre of this part,
which presents papers by Noyes, House, and Wilke, stands the question
of how to account for feelings in a science of the human and how to dis-
tinguish “true” from “false” or merely “simulated” (fictitious) feelings
within a field of inquiry which, methodologically, is increasingly commit-
ted to the factual. Opening this part, Noyes traces Herder’s philosophi-
cal project from Kant’s lectures on metaphysics via Alexander Gottlieb
Baumgarten’s (1714–62) and Johann Georg Hamann’s (1730–88) aesthetics
to the advent of anthropology as a science. Noyes describes the extent to
which Herder’s anthropological turn is indebted to Kant, with whom he
shares the conviction that “Being is a concept that cannot be further ana-
lyzed.” Against the backdrop of the crisis of rationalism and in the wake
of the empiricism which Locke and Hume had promoted, Herder’s aim
is to establish a philosophy that accounts for both rational and sensory
capacities of the human being.
Noyes’s chapter on Herder marks an important point in the narrative to
which this volume contributes, since it illustrates the enormous changes
that happened in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
in the assessment of sensual experience for a scientific understanding of
the world. While for philosophers like Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant sensory
information was suspicious because it was considered blurred and there-
fore provided only imprecise information, Herder rehabilitates sensory
experience as a necessary correlation to a rational approach to the world;
but only the nineteenth century turns to observation and experience as the
major tool of a scientific methodology, thereby redefining the empirically
obtained information as the more factual and precise one, undistorted by
subjective and fictitious accounts of the world.72 It is precisely at this point
that House’s chapter continues the discussion.
Much as in Noyes’s contribution, one of the main concerns that House
discerns in the authors that he discusses – in particular Salomon Maimon
(1754–1800) and Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93) – is how to conceptual-
ize the relationship between universal and particular. However, while for
Herder this terminological pair was analogue to, and defined by, the terms
rational and sensory, House demonstrates that it could also be interpreted
 Introduction  21

as empirical versus fictitious. For Enlightenment thinkers, it was the ratio-

nal mind that reflected and abstracted the information transmitted by the
senses. Maimon, however, doubts the conviction that such a step is pos-
sible and, as a result of this hesitation, embraces fiction as a necessary part
in giving meaning to the overwhelming number of facts which the human
encounters constantly.
While in Platner, one of the founding fathers of anthropology as a dis-
cipline, epistemological uncertainty finds its expression in the focus on
observing and expressing thoughts in an aphoristic writing style which
refuses any meaningful narrative (very similar to what Kuzniar observes
in Hahnemann’s work), eighteenth-century anthropologists turn to auto-
biographical writing and to what became known as empirical psychology.
The question of fiction, however, continued to haunt the scientific ambi-
tions behind this project. Focusing on the narrative of life-experience,
which they collect in their Magazin der Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Journal
of Experimental Psychology) authors like Moritz and Maimon are con-
fronted with the question of how to distinguish between fact and imagina-
tive reconstruction. Discussing Maimon’s contribution to the Magazin,
House proposes that the production of fiction comes to be understood as
a fundamental condition of human existence. Around 1800, House argues,
the science of the human ultimately is a science of fiction.
Wilke takes this line of inquiry further by reconstructing the con-
cept of “fictional feelings” that was developed in the framework of late-
nineteenth-century psychological aesthetics. The article analyses the way
in which the idea of fictional feelings, which assumes that emotions expe-
rienced as a result of aesthetic stimuli are merely “simulated states of con-
sciousness,” is the signal of a fundamental shift in the understanding of
aesthetics: namely, an understanding of aesthetics which does not rely on
theoretical statements (e.g., specific rules or media according to which
specific art forms function), but on the study of psychological “facts”
which follows an empirical methodology. Like House, Wilke observes a
pronounced wish to distinguish real and “fictional” emotional responses.
While there are intrinsic reasons for such a distinction, Wilke shows that
the insistence on separation is also driven by strategic interests: by exclud-
ing so-called quasi-emotions from the field of psychology, psychological
aesthetics hopes to establish itself as a discrete discipline. While anthropol-
ogy around 1800 strives – as House demonstrates – to include a number
of disciplines in order to arrive at a science of the human, psychological
aesthetics insists on the limitation of the field for the sake of disciplinary
clarity and survival.
22  Christine Lehleiter

The essays in the fourth part, “Relating: Biology,” delve into how
genealogy is negotiated in light of an increasing biologization of kinship
relations. While Stefani Engelstein observes that in Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing’s (1729–81) Nathan the Wise cultural ways of establishing kin-
ship trump biological factors, Daniel Newman explores the ways in which
new and as of yet unacknowledged scientific theories inform narrative and
character in E.M. Forster’s (1879–1970) novel The Longest Journey. Lit-
erature serves here as an experimental space in which authors ask what
consequences scientific theories might have for our self-understanding.
Engelstein revisits Lessing’s Nathan the Wise in order to study its
contribution to the eighteenth-century debate on human diversity. Less-
ing’s Nathan played a significant role in redefining religious studies as
an anthropological discipline by removing religion “from the Enlight-
enment quest for grounded truths.”73 However, it is important to note
that eighteenth-century interpretations of anthropology – much like the
one that House describes  – include both biological and cultural inqui-
ries which are considered intrinsically intertwined. If Lessing opens up
a space for accepting the importance of kinship and blood relation for
human self-understanding, he points out at the same time that “inher-
ited traits must enter a history of activity and relationships to shape their
expression as deeds and to acquire meaning.”74
Newman’s contribution is similarly devoted to questions of heredity
and biological genealogy. However, while in Lessing’s Nathan biologi-
cal inheritance acquires meaning only through a process of culturization,
Newman argues that in Forster’s The Longest Journey new models of
hereditary transmission provide the main character with a new narrative to
his life. Here atomistic heredity, first described by Gregor Mendel (1822–
84) and then rediscovered by the Dutch botanist and geneticist Hugo de
Vries (1848–1935) and the German botanist Carel Correns (1864–1933),
allows the novelist Forster to use and, at the same time, to question the
narrative logic of genetic determinism. Forster’s novel is informed by most
recent scientific models. However, it does not only illustrate these models,
but also helps to propel a scientific theory at a time when this theory is not
yet fully acknowledged in the scholarly community. Like Goethe’s Elec-
tive Affinities, Forster’s novel becomes a virtual experiment in which the
author anticipates and asks for the significance of specific scientific models
for individual lives and human interaction.
In the fifth and last part of this volume, “Displaying: Scientific Collec-
tions,” Peter McIsaac and Dana Weber examine the relationship between
fact and fiction in collections of medical specimens and of ethnographic
 Introduction  23

mannequins. McIsaac opens this part by studying the function of collec-

tions of medical specimens in recent literary productions by Durs Grün-
bein (1962–) and Thomas Hettche (1964–). In McIsaac’s chapter, fictional
medical museums are shown to “represent indispensable ways of probing
the place of science and science knowledge in our existence as biological
beings at the turn of the third millennium.”75 McIsaac’s article witnesses
both a new awareness for the interconnectedness of fact and fiction and an
awareness that the conceptualization of their relationship is not indepen-
dent of specific historical moments and particular media.
The volume is closed by Dana Weber with an chapter on ethnographic
mannequins and exotic performers in early-twentieth- and twenty-first-
century exhibition culture. In her article, Weber demonstrates that the
boundaries between scientific display and popular spectacle, between
events in which exotic performers were featured and the presentation of
ethnographic mannequins in ethnological and anthropological museums
which followed scientific and pedagogical goals, were not always clearly
defined. She argues that the mannequin’s problematic epistemological
status and its uncanny effect are determined by its paradoxical position
between the scientific, factual information for which it is conceptual-
ized and the imaginative flights that it invites. Drawing on theories of
the uncanny by Jentsch and Freud, Weber investigates “the relationship
between scientific facts and the fictions emerging in their contemplation.”
Paradoxically, the effect that the ethnographic mannequin exerts on the
viewer is uncannier when the mannequin is rendered in more realistic a
manner. Weber reads the mannequin against the backdrop of the “uncanny
valley,” a concept introduced by Masahiro Mori in the context of robotics
and later employed in studies of three-dimensional computer-generated
digital animation (3D CGI) in order to articulate the insight that excessive
realism leads to disturbed reactions in the viewers and users of life-like
animations. Discussing the ethnographic mannequin and its relationship
to contemporary adventure literature, Weber comes to the surprising and
strong conclusion that “by giving some leeway to imagination, an inac-
curate human representation in fact allows for a quicker and more exact
ontological ascription.”76
Dana Weber’s contribution makes visible once again what renders
the papers in this volume particularly fascinating, namely, the fact that
they combine detailed analysis of one particular point in time with larger
issues surrounding the question of the relationship between fact and fic-
tion, thereby informing our current debate on the relationship between
humanities and the sciences. The book aims to gain scholarly knowledge
24  Christine Lehleiter

of disciplinary constellations in particular historical moments, but also

intends to open new views and debates on questions which have far-reaching
consequences for the academic landscape and society in general.

NOTES

1 Snow, Two Cultures.

2 In their introduction to Victorian Science and Literature (2011), Dawson and
Lightman concede that although terminological clarity is missing, the term
literature and science has become a useful reference. Referring to nineteenth-
century Britain, they state: “While there is certainly nothing inevitable or
timeless about the distinction between science and literature, and it is essen-
tial to resist postulating general patterns that are in fact contingent cultural
formations particular only to certain historical moments or specific interest
groups, it needs to be acknowledged that the disputed critical shorthand
‘science and literature’ remains no less useful than the newer ‘science as lit-
erature’ in recapturing the intricate situation of nineteenth-century Britain”
(“General Introduction” x).
3 Christie and Shuttleworth, “Introduction,” in Nature Transfigured 6.
4 Bruce and Purdy, eds, Literature and Science, front-matter.
5 Beer, “Translation or Transformation?” in Beer, Open Fields 173.
6 Beer, Darwin’s Plots.
7 For a sketch of the debate in the history of science and bibliographic refer-
ences see Turner, “Lessons from Literature” 578–89, esp. 579–80.
8 Secord, “Knowledge in Transit” 655. Another strong current has been the
turn to the metaphorical language of sciences. See Bono, “Why Metaphor?”
215–34.
9 Milburn, “Modifiable Futures” 560.
10 Walls, “Of Atoms, Oaks and Cannibals” 590.
11 Bono, “Making Knowledge” 555.
12 In his contribution to the ISIS Focus section, Turner concentrates on how
attention to form could be productive for the history of science. However,
he also provides a sketch of some ways in which scientific understandings of
form shaped the work of early modern playwrights, an inquiry that he has
developed in greater detail in The English Renaissance Stage (2006). Turner,
“Lessons from Literature” 581.
13 Hayles, “Deciphering the Rules of Unruly Disciplines” 25.
14 Campbell, “Ethnocentrism of Disciplines” 328–48.
15 Lenoir, “The Discipline of Nature” 94.
 Introduction  25

16 “[N]irgends wollte man zugeben, daß Wissenschaft und Poesie vereinbar

seien. Man vergaß, daß Wissenschaft sich aus Poesie entwickelt habe, man
bedachte nicht, daß, nach einem Umschwung von Zeiten, beide sich wieder
freundlich zu beiderseitigem Vorteil, auf höherer Stelle, gar wohl wieder
begegnen könnten.” Goethe, “Schicksal der Druckschrift” 107. Goethe, “His-
tory of the Printed Brochure” 171–2.
17 Regarding the development of knowledge fields into scientific disciplines see
Stefani Engelstein’s contribution on the science of religion in this volume,
chapter 9. See also Fulda and Prüfer, “Das Wissen der Moderne.”
18 Knight, “Romanticism and the Sciences” 14.
19 Ann Shteir has demonstrated that women particularly contributed signifi-
cantly to the study of plants around 1800. See Shteir, Cultivating Women,
Cultivating Science. See also the recent project under the leadership of Sally
Shuttleworth on citizen involvement in nineteenth-century science in Britain
(“Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st
Centuries,” http://conscicom.org/).
20 See chapter 6, p. 155.
21 See chapter 4, p. 102.
22 Goethe, “Schicksal der Handschrift” 104. Goethe, “The History of the Man-
uscript” 169.
23 See the entry “fach” in the Deutsches Wörterbuch of the brothers Grimm,
where it is defined as a spatial term and – deduced from there – as a subject
area. The Wörterbuch connects this subject area closely with professional
occupation: “fach … das einem überwiesene, von ihm betriebene geschäft”
(fach … the profession that one has been assigned to, that one engages in).
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch 1221.
24 Cf. Beer, “Translation or Transformation” 174.
25 Knight, “Romanticism” 14.
26 In another account, this prehistory is located already in alchemic thought.
William R. Newman argues that “alchemy provided a uniquely powerful
focus for discussing the boundary between art and nature,” and thereby
anticipated today’s split between arts and sciences. Newman, Promethean
Ambitions 8.
27 Osler, “Certainty, Scepticism, and Scientific Optimism” 3–28.
28 Ibid. 3.
29 Ibid. 10.
30 Ibid. 21–2.
31 Beer, “Translation and Transformation” 176.
32 See Daston and Galison, Objectivity.
33 Osler, “Certainty” 3.
26  Christine Lehleiter

3 4 Quoted in Choi, chapter 5, p. 130.

35 Quoted ibid., 144.
36 Fulford, Lee, and Kitson come to a slightly different result. While they also
understand Romanticism as a counter-movement to the sciences, they see
this movement less as an engagement with mechanical tendencies than with
the colonial enterprise. Their “study shows how literary Romanticism arose
partly in response to science’s appropriation of explorers’ encounters with
foreign people and places” (Fulford, Lee, and J. Kitson, eds, Literature, Sci-
ence and Exploration in the Romantic Era, front-matter).
37 Eichner, “The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism” 8.
38 Ibid. 11.
39 Ibid. 12.
40 Ibid. 14.
41 Ibid. 17.
42 Ibid. 18.
43 Ibid. 24.
44 Ibid.
45 See chapter 2, 39 and 43.
46 Chapter 2, p. 61.
47 Daston and Galison, Objectivity 29.
48 Ibid. 30.
49 Ibid. 31.
50 Ibid. 37.
51 According to Daston, such resistance to differentiation can be observed in
Germany. Cf. Daston, “Die Kultur der wissenschaftlichen Objektivität” 15–16.
52 Cf. Oexle, ed., Naturwissenschaft.
53 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences.
54 Hayles, “Deciperhing” 31.
55 Dawson and Lightman, Victorian Science viii.
56 Fulford, Lee, and Kitson locate the differentiation of fictional from factual
writing in the middle of the nineteenth century and associate it with De
Quincey. They write: “It was not customary formally to divide fictional from
factual writing until De Quincey in 1848 made fiction a defining characteristic
of the ‘literature of power’ and claimed it was distinct from the ‘literature of
knowledge’” (Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, Bodies of Knowledge 4).
57 Dawson and Lightman, Victorian Science ix.
58 Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, Bodies of Knowledge 2.
59 Christie and Shuttleworth, Nature Transfigured 1.
60 Ibid. 2.
61 Ibid. 2 and 9.
 Introduction  27

6 2 Knight, “Romanticism” 22.

63 Knight observes that “men of science in Germany were aware of their use of
and need for metaphysics, while in Britain empiricism prevailed.” Ibid. 19.
64 Christie and Shuttleworth, Nature Transfigured 2 and 9.
65 Chapter 3, p. 79.
66 Ibid.
67 Schiller and Goethe, “Über den Dilettantismus” 1121–3. More than twenty
years later, when contemplating his own attempts in botanical studies, Goethe
conceded that dilettantti could make decisive contributions to the sciences: “und
was sind nicht überhaupt schon die Wissenschaften teilnehmenden Liebhabern,
und unbefangenen Gastfreunden schuldig geworden!” (“And to how many
other interested amateurs and uninhibited dilettantes is science indebted!”).
Goethe, “Schicksal der Handschrift” 104 (“History of the Manuscript” 169).
68 Knight, “Romanticism” 19.
69 Cf. Luhmann, Art as a Social System; Luhmann, A Systems Theory of Reli-
gion; Luhmann, Love as Passion.
70 Fulda and Prüfer, “Das Wissen der Moderne” 5.
71 Chapter 3, p. 77.
72 Cf. Daston and Galison, Objectivity.
73 Chapter 9, p. 224.
74 Ibid., p. 232.
75 Chapter 11, p. 276.
76 Chapter 12, p. 305.

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–  “The History of the Manuscript.” In Goethe’s Botanical Writings. Translated
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–  “Schicksal der Handschrift” (1817). Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in vierzehn
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 Introduction  29

–  “Schicksal der Druckschrift” (1817). In Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in vier-

zehn Bänden. Edited by Erich Trunz. Vol. 13. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch
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est Proposal for Literature and Science.” In Literature and Science. Edited by
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–  Love as Passion. The Codification of Intimacy. Translated by Jeremy Gaines
and Doris L. Jones. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998.
–  A Systems Theory of Religion. Edited by André Kieserling. Translated by
David A. Brenner with Adrian Hermann. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2013.
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Nature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014.
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Cambridge UP, 1959.
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30  Christine Lehleiter

–  “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflec-
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Walls, Laura Dassow. “Of Atoms, Oaks and Cannibals, or, More Things That
Talk.” ISIS (Focus section: History of Science and Literature and Science,
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Wellek, René. “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History.” Comparative
Literature 1 (1949): 1–23, 147–72.
PART I

Reading: Electricity, Medicine

1 Facts Are What One Makes of Them:
Constructing the Faktum in the
Enlightenment and Early German
Romanticism

j o c e ly n h o l l a n d

There is a scene in Christoph Wieland’s novel The History of the Philoso-

pher Danischmende (1775) where Danischmende invites the Kalender to
express his views on mankind. The Kalender is a religious mendicant who
has spent his life begging in the metropolises of world, and he takes the
opportunity to make a few unflattering observations about human behav-
iour, views which Danischmende finds unacceptable. When the Kalender
points out that it is not a matter of what “we wish, hope, and dream …
Facts must be the deciding factor,” Danischmende retorts that “facts are
what one makes of them … from every new point of view they appear dif-
ferently; and in ten cases to one the purported fact, on which one has sup-
ported his opinion with great confidence, is at heart a mere hypothesis.”
“This may be,” replies the Kalender in turn, “But the facts of which I am
speaking are of the kind which, observed from all possible perspectives,
always show the same form and always give the same results” (9: 60).1
Danischmende and the Kalender are speaking at cross-purposes,
describing two different (though not mutually exclusive) aspects of the
fact: the data underlying it and its instrumentalization within a broader
argument. The Kalender chooses to emphasize what he considers to be
verifiable observations that constitute a fact in the first place. For him,
these observations have all the neutrality of empirical data; if the evidence
he has gathered in his travels yields an unflattering picture of humankind,
so be it. Danischmende, without disputing what the Kalender has seen
with his own eyes, nonetheless complains that facts are not stable enti-
ties and can easily succumb to subjective manipulation. His comment that
facts can be crafted for individual purposes and in some cases even exposed
as mere opinion underscores their instrumental value. That Wieland
allowed a character like the Kalender to deliver lengthy discourses and
34  Jocelyn Holland

give testimony to the innate stupidity and immaturity of the human race
as irrefutable facts was also a source of irritation to some of his readers.
Goethe essentially takes Danischmend’s side with his complaint that, for
all Wieland’s eloquence, “this brilliant man liked to play with his opinions,
but – as his contemporaries will testify – never with his convictions” (9:
959).2 Such a criticism of Wieland’s work, however justifiable in terms of
aesthetic taste or philosophical theory, is nonetheless insufficient when it
comes to a historical understanding of the fact, because what exactly it
could or should be was part of an ongoing discussion which extends from
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the present day. Mary
Poovey has observed that there are many competing histories of the fact to
be told (the one she focuses on in A History of the Modern Fact deals with
the use of statistical tables in early-nineteenth-century Britain).3 Nor has
this situation become simpler in recent times. With regard to the fact, there
is a broad spectrum between the certainty of positivism and the relativism
of postmodernism. One need only consider the diverse attempts at both
the definition and appropriation of facts as evinced in the fields of episte-
mology, critical theory, politics, and economics as well as arenas of public
debate (such as the Pulitzer prize–winning website politifact.com). To the
multiple disciplinary appropriations of the fact, one could also add the
nuances of its colloquial usage, exemplified in the abundance of sometimes
contradictory idiomatic expressions we have at our disposal today. Even
a cursory glance at the expressions after the fact and in fact demonstrates
how facts can be considered as events (and therefore situated in histori-
cal chronologies) as much as they can be used to invoke the categories of
truth and reality. Any discussion of facts, including Danischmende and the
Kalender’s initial dispute concerning what facts are and what one can do
with them, will, by necessity, confront a certain degree of terminological
confusion.
Although it is no easy task to follow the manifold branches of the fact’s
genealogy, or to narrate even one of its many histories, this chapter par-
ticipates in such a large-scale project with a focus on the fact as it was
understood in the German context leading up to the Romantic era. When
we speak of the fact in German thought around 1800, this problem is com-
pounded by the situation of having more than one word that correlates
to the English “fact.” These include the Factum, a Latin import product,
which had been around since the sixteenth century, as well as the Tatsache
and, to some degree, the Tathandlung, both of which were understood
as more or less faithful translations of the Factum. In order to contextu-
alize Early German Romanticism’s contribution to the discussion of the
 Facts Are What One Makes of Them  35

fact, this chapter begins by briefly describing the relationship between the

Factum, Tatsache, and Tathandlung at the end of the eighteenth century
before considering two aspects of the Romantic understanding of the fact.
The first of these has to do with how the Romantics both draw upon pre-
established usage and propose new kinds of facts with the effect of compli-
cating the understanding of the fact at that time (this occurs above all with
reference to the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his reception by
Novalis); the second concerns Romantic ideas about what one can do with
facts, and even what facts can do for themselves, which I  will elaborate
with reference to the aphoristic work of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel.
In particular, it is Friedrich Schlegel who raises the question of to what
degree facts may be considered productive or epistemological dead ends,
and who taps into the operative quality of the fact to serve as both a con-
duit and a generator for new facts.

1.  Factum / Tatsache / Tathandlung

When we look at the different trajectories that the words Factum, Tat-
sache, and Tathandlung follow in the German language, it is striking that
they are each indebted in some way to legal discourse. The Factum first
emerges in juridical contexts, as early as Georg Lauterbeck’s Regenten-
buch of 1559. Within a large section devoted to the governance of cities
and a chapter on the importance of enforcing good hospitality, one finds
the case of a poor soldier on his way home from war, who is accused of
stealing money from an innkeeper. Once the trial begins, the soldier, being
as honest as the innkeeper is devious, denies the Factum of the theft: that
is, what was supposedly observed by the mendacious innkeeper, but not
yet proved in the court of law. In the context of the trial, both the status
of the Factum as event and its truth-value are disputed. The soldier, in
accordance with protocol, has chosen an advocate to represent his case: it
is the devil (an admittedly unusual choice for such an honest man), who
has either taken on a rare case of pro bono work or, what is more likely,
satisfies himself with the pleasure of escorting the evil innkeeper to Hell
after the completion of the trial.4 During the trial, the purported Factum
is disproved and both the soldier and his lawyer are satisfied with the out-
come. Other cases where the Factum appears in German writing during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries preserve the legal context: it is
usually defined as a deed evaluated by trial (Streitsache), or the circum-
stances described in the testimony given before a court of law. By the time
Zedler publishes his universal lexicon at the beginning of the eighteenth
36  Jocelyn Holland

century, however, the definition of the Factum has expanded: it can now
be understood more generally as deeds, occurrences, and works, including
the course [Verlauff (sic)] of a concluded transaction.5 Zedler’s definition
of the Factum is therefore broad enough to encompass the double mean-
ing of doing and making (as both the “deed” and the “work”), in keeping
with its derivation from the Latin verb facere, but the temporal aspects of
this definition merit particular emphasis. They show that the Factum is
not only able to be assigned a place in a historical chronology, but also has
its own duration. Even though one usually relegates the factum to the past
around 1800 (in keeping with its grammatical status as past participle of
facere) as opposed to the hypothetical future, a Factum is nonetheless able
to be extended in time, as either a momentary occurrence or the course of
an event. It is precisely this quality of the Factum that will take on new
meaning in the aphorisms of Schlegel and Novalis.
Unlike the Factum, the Tatsache arrives on the scene via a translation
from an English text: Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and
Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, first published in
1736.6 In the German translation of Butler’s text, Johann Joachim Spald-
ing renders the expression “matter of fact” as Thatsache.7 Yet as was the
case with the Factum, the Thatsache as translation of “matter of fact” owes
its origins to a juridical rather than theological context and already occurs
as an English legal expression in the sixteenth century.8 Butler’s text trans-
poses the “matter of fact” from the juridical context into a theological
one: it is a “Matter of Fact,” for example, that “[God] governs the World
by the Method of Rewards and Punishments” (Analogy of Religion 167).
Butler also makes it quite clear that these divinely performed “matters of
fact” are also “things of experience,” in keeping with his overall plan to
construct a parallel history between the divine and the natural.9 Nor is
he the only one. To the extent that “fact” correlates to an action, matters
of fact as Thatsachen come to be understood as divine deeds, and it is in
this sense that Johann Hamann and Johann Herder also equate the That-
sache with the revelation of God in natural phenomena.10 Not everyone
was pleased with this neologism, however, which was rendered both as a
translation for the “matter of fact” and as a German equivalent of the Fac-
tum itself. Adelung’s 1811 dictionary condemns both the Thatsache and
the Thathandlung for being “indecorous,” composed “contrary to anal-
ogy,” and “subject to misunderstanding, in that an upper German [that is,
someone from the Bavarian or Allemanian linguistic groups] would at first
most likely think of nothing other than an act of violence, an assault” (in
other words, would understand the That as a Delikt).11 And even though
 Facts Are What One Makes of Them  37

one can read in the English edition of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre that Tha-
thandlung is “a term of Fichte’s own coinage,”12 there are examples to be
found as early as the Reichs-Fama of 1727, which makes reference to a
“murderous” That-Handlung (3). It would be useful to know to what
degree Fichte was cognizant of the word’s more violent connotations,
although one should probably keep in mind that his family was deeply
rooted in Saxony. In any event, part of the terminological proliferation of
the fact was that by the mid-eighteenth century, the Thatsache and Tha-
thandlung were just as likely to call to mind a criminal deed as they were
a religious manifestation or a simple fact – with the range of possibilities,
the intended meaning could only be determined by context.

2.  Fichte’s Fact / Romantic Facts

The proliferation of the fact and its potential confusion does not abate
by the late eighteenth century, when Schlegel and Novalis become inter-
ested in the Factum as well as the disputed Thatsache. At the same time,
however, the fact in its multiple forms becomes a key term in philosophy,
also as the result of being imported from legal discourse:13 yet the degree
to which Kant, Fichte, and their followers ultimately subjugate the Fac-
tum (as well as the Tatsache and the Tathandlung) to their philosophical
projects for their own purposes varies greatly. To keep things simple, the
following discussion will first focus on the Romantic fact as Factum in the
context of a reception of Fichte, in order to explore what the fact can be
and do, before incorporating the other terms.
In Novalis’s Fichte Studies, the product of a reading of Fichte’s Wis-
senschaftslehre and other texts in 1795–6 (which actually extends well
beyond an engagement with Fichte), one finds a compilation of excerpts
which include original meditations on the fact. At one point, Novalis even
characterizes Fichte’s entire philosophy as a fact: “Fichte’s philosophy is a
process of thought production or process of organization – a phenomenon
itself, or a factum” (3: 447). Structured as a chain of associations linked
through repetition and accumulation, this aphorism reveals as much about
Early Romantic techniques of creating definitions as it does about Fich-
te’s philosophy, and both aspects are relevant here. Fichte’s philosophy
is defined as a process of thinking or as a process of organization, a pair
immediately substituted by a phenomenon or a fact, suggesting a logic of
accumulation rather than exclusion: all of these terms share a relationship
both to Fichte’s thinking and to each other. In the context of the present
discussion, there are at least two things of note about the Factum. The first
38  Jocelyn Holland

is, by connecting the Factum to a process, we can observe a reluctance to

impose temporal constraints upon it as something made or done and then
relegated to the past (which would be more in keeping with one of the
definitions found in Zedler, the Factum as “Verlauff einer Handlung”).
The second is, by linking the Factum with the phenomenon, as something
which exists and is perceivable, Novalis allows the process-character of the
Factum (or Fichte’s philosophy) to be unified under a single sign. It also
bears remembering that we are not dealing with a colloquially informed
definition of “facts” in general here but rather “the fact” which, in Fichte’s
work (as in Kant’s), has a philosophical status as a technical term.
When Novalis first refers to the Factum in the Fichte Studies, it is to assert
the validity of a philosophy of the subject: “A generally valid philosophy
would presuppose the fixation of the so-called subjectivity, thus a free Fac-
tum or the assumption of a hypothetical, free proposition [Satz].”14 The
“primal” factum is in essence the one which we are ourselves, posited in the
original activity of the subject. This claim is given nuance in both the Wis-
senschaftslehre and the Fichte Studies, where we see the subject emerge as
the synthesis of a real and ideal “fact” through the joint labour of the I and
the Not-I. One of the excerpted passages from Fichte found in Novalis’s
notes expresses this sentiment more clearly and also explains the degree to
which we are able to access the original Factum: “The factum should allow
itself to be observed as well as, according to its determination, plainly pos-
ited through the I – and also, according to its being, as posited through the
Not-I. It can be observed as product of the I and the Not-I, each indepen-
dently of the other. It is an intuition.”15 Even though Novalis’s reception
of the Factum has not received much attention, this is well-travelled terrain
as far as Fichte scholarship is concerned. In the process of self-reflection,
according to Fichte, one has immediate access to the produced intuition
or “fact” but not to the original activity of self-positing. Novalis noticed
that only belatedly does the realization come that the intuition is the prod-
uct of a process which originated in an undifferentiated state preceding
consciousness (identified on various occasions as “Grund” or “Gefühl”);
it is a state which, somewhat counter-intuitively, we can only at a later
stage construct or approximate for ourselves. This aspect of Novalis’s
reading of Fichte has been extensively documented by Manfred Frank in
his work on time and German Romanticism (Das Problem “Zeit” in der
deutschen Romantik). For now, it suffices to remember that the Factum is
created and, as an intuition, can be observed; this latter point aligns with
the earlier connection made between the phenomenon and the process-
quality of the fact.16 In the second introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,
 Facts Are What One Makes of Them  39

Fichte connects the Factum, Thatsache, and Thathandlung in the follow-

ing way: a philosopher understands that the intuition is a “fact [Factum]
of the consciousness,” with the caveat that for him it appears as Thatsache
(i.e., Factum as Datum), whereas for the “original I” it is Thathandlung (an
activity).17 Robert Richards comments that “Fichte’s genius was to see that a
fact of consciousness might better be conceived as an act of consciousness –
unification would be achieved not by a logical supposition but by an
underlying action” (Romantic Conception of Life 75).
Just one more example from the Fichte Studies is necessary to lay the
groundwork of facts for German Romanticism:

Every object posits – every opposition sets up – if we attribute the particu-
lar nature of the Factum to the ladder [dem Leiter]18 – object and opposite
are ladders  – neither active nor passive. Activity is, however, attributed to
them  – because, pressured by the natural laws of reflection, this [activity]
must be posited somewhere; and so one resorts more easily to the ladder and
attributes [activity] to this – all activity belongs to the Factum.19

The translator of the Fichte Studies has chosen to render Leiter as “lad-
der,” but the choice of words is misleading, particularly since the Ger-
man text clearly indicates that Leiter is not a feminine noun. Whereas die
Leiter (fem.) indicates a climbing ladder, der Leiter (masc.) refers to a con-
ducting medium. The image invoked in the aphorism is therefore one of a
conductor of electrical current. This allows us to align Novalis’s thinking
about the Factum with his scientific studies of electricity as well as to read
the Factum as conduit of reflection and potential conveyer of intellectual
activity. As was the case with the other aphorisms, this one is also deeply
indebted to the laws of reflection. When we reflect upon an object – when
we posit it in our consciousness – then, according to Fichte, it enters into a
complex chain of reactions leading to our ability to compose an adequate
intuition of it. And as was touched upon above, what we eventually have
access to is not the object itself, but rather a mere Schein – an image of it.20
Within this network of activity, the Factum is intimately bound to reflec-
tion, but through the reference to the Leiter, its processual quality comes
more prominently to the foreground.
In the context of the Fichte Studies, Novalis focuses his attention on
“the” Factum, but his later aphoristic work allows for modifications. The
Teplitzer Fragments, for example, refer to a “specific fact” which is the
source of a particular science,21 and there is an analogous fragment in Das
allgemeine Brouillon which makes a parallel claim for the Thatsache.22
40  Jocelyn Holland

These two cases demonstrate an attempt by Novalis to expand his reason-

ing about the fact beyond the immediate context of Fichtean philosophy
while remaining within a theory of science. At the same time, the Romantic
discussion of the fact has not yet arrived at a modern understanding of the
fact in terms of what Husserl will eventually define as the “objective cor-
relate of a true proposition.”23 What does capture the attention of Schlegel
and Novalis, however, is the possibility of generalizing from “the fact” to
facts by tapping into their potentially instrumental quality  – the notion
that one can do things with facts. To some degree, there is a precedent for
this way of thinking: the idea that it is possible to experiment with facts
is already a topic of the Fichte Studies, such as when Novalis comments
that Fichte teaches us “the secret of experimentation” when he instructs us
how to “transform Thatsachen and Thathandlungen … into experiments
and concepts.”24 Friedrich Schlegel’s thinking about facts will, however,
go much further in terms of connecting them to the experiment, without
remaining indebted to the constraints imposed by Fichte’s philosophy.
In Athenäum Fragment 427, Schlegel invokes the fact in the context of
historical investigation when he writes that “a so-called investigation is a
historical experiment. Its object and result is a fact [Factum]. What a fact
should be has to have strict individuality, being at once a secret and an
experiment, namely, an experiment of formative nature.”25 Within an anal-
ogous framework of Romantic practices of interpretation and open-ended
experimentation, the essay by Alice Kuzniar in this volume on structures
of signification in the homeopathy of Samuel Hahnemann offers an illu-
minating parallel narrative, by focusing on Hahnemann’s Romantically
informed “reading” of individual symptoms. As far as Athenäum Frag-
ment 427 is concerned, although we are no longer in the realm of Fichte’s
fact, bound within a process of reflection, we have also still not quite
arrived at the pedestrian facts of everyday life. Schlegel’s understanding
of the fact as the beginning and endpoint of research suggests that a fact is
both something rendered to us, differentiated from the noise of sense per-
ceptions, and something made, which preserves its individuality even in
the process of transformation. If there is any new tendency to be discerned
in Schlegel’s comments on the fact scattered throughout his aphorisms –
comments diverse enough to identify beauty and Christianity as facts in
their own right26 – then it is perhaps an inclination to let them calibrate a
scale of phenomena. At one end we would have according to Schlegel a
simple Erscheinung or phenomenon which is a “still rough and not com-
pletely historicized fact,”27 and at the other we would have an experiment
which, in the process of isolating the phenomenon as fact, eventually goes
 Facts Are What One Makes of Them  41

beyond it such that “the true phenomenon is representative of the infinite,

thus allegory, hieroglyph  – thus far more than a fact.”28 We need facts,
but, as Schlegel suggests, we also need to get beyond them. As “individu-
als of sense,” he writes, facts are constrained by being a “limited histori-
cal whole.”29 For Schlegel, the fact would seem to serve as a transit point
for the work of philosophy, for history, and, one could even say, for any
critical thinking. The character Marcus in Schlegel’s fictional conversation
“Gespräch über die Poesie” [conversation about poesy] makes precisely
this point: “A true aesthetic judgment, you will agree, a fully formed, thor-
oughly complete view of a work is always a critical fact [Factum], if I may
say so. But also only a fact, and that is exactly why it is empty work to
want to motivate it, the motive itself would have to contain a new fact or
a more precise determination of the first one.”30 The context of the quote
is a discussion about the relativity of aesthetic judgments, as well as their
epistemological status. An aesthetic judgment of a work of art has just as
much claim to exist as any other thing that taken place, in keeping with
Zedler’s broad understanding of a Faktum as something that has occurred
(ein geschehenes Ding). In the broader scope of Schlegel’s text, however,
the “critical fact” is also introduced as an argument against the limited
value of aesthetic statements, claiming that despite their subjective origin
they can contribute to general knowledge. Marcus’s statement about the
critical fact is also notable for another reason: it describes both its limit and
its potential. It is certainly possible for a critical fact to be “only a fact” – to
be a dead end, so to speak. But Marcus also suggests that facts and the way
we work with them have the ability to generate new facts or more precise
versions of the old ones. This second take on the fact recalls both Nova-
lis’s claims that facts can form the point of departure of a new science and
that there is a connection between the fact and “conductor” of intellectual
activity, as was discussed above with reference to Fichte. It is also impor-
tant to note that we have a somewhat more cautious understanding here of
the potential instrumentality of the fact. On the one hand, its mobilization
could result in “empty work” – such that the instrumental value of the fact
is effectively null. On the other hand, if one mobilizes it in the name of a
motive which already contains a new fact (or, as Schlegel writes, a more
precise formulation of the present one), then the process of critical aes-
thetic labour continues, albeit in a somewhat circular fashion, given that it
is the motive and not the instrument which has produced something new.
The Romantic discussion of the fact can be thrown into even sharper
relief with an example (one of numerous possible ones) from the scientific
discussions around 1800. For the purpose of objectivity, I have chosen the
42  Jocelyn Holland

scientist Paul Ludwig Simon, a professor of physics at the Bauakademie of

Berlin, someone with no known ties to the Romantic circle (unless, in the
interest of full disclosure, we count his financial bailout by the minister
Karl August von Hardenberg, a distant relative of Novalis). Simon made
contributions to one of the most hotly debated scientific ideas of his time,
the composition of water. On one side of the debate were those for whom
water remained a pure element in the Aristotelian sense, and on the other
side were those who claimed they could experimentally prove that water
was composed of hydrogen and oxygen. The latter group took advantage
of the Voltaic pile, a primitive battery which generated an electric charge
and allowed the process of electrolysis to take place. At the beginning of an
article he published in the Annals of Physics (1802), Simon shows himself
determined to remain impartial: “Everything which one has said so far
about [the phenomena produced by water in the closed circuit of the pile]
merely rests on supposition, and the theories built upon it are up until
now neither evidently proven nor supported with established facts [That-
sachen]” (Simon 283). Of the two opinions/hypotheses  – the first, that
water is a composed substance, and the second, that water is “simple” – each
accepts as “facts” (Facta) that hydrogen and oxygen result from the elec-
trolysis of water, but neither group can adequately account for its theory.
In the first case (the argument for the composition of water), there remains
the question “Why do both ends of the wire of the pile only produce one
component of water” (Simon 283)? According to Simon, “Everything said
about this are only words, is mere hypothesis, and does not allow itself
to be led back empirically [auf sinnlich] to justifiable facts [Thatsachen]”
(ibid.). For its part, the other group has yet to provide a cogent explana-
tion as to where the oxygen and hydrogen come from, if not from the
water. In the context of the present discussion, it is perhaps more inter-
esting to observe several familiar “elements” of the fact at play in a text
devoted to scientific method. Not only does the passage from the Annals
of Physics recall aspects of the Factum on trial (the fact as Streitsache) in
the Regentenbuch and other juridical contexts, it can also remind us of the
discussion between the Kalender and Danischmende as to whether or not
facts (such as the fact that hydrogen and oxygen are the products of water
electrolysis) are what we make of them. And in the question as to which
version of the facts is most conducive to the generation of an adequate
theory, there is also an echo of both Novalis’s metaphor of the conductor
(which is quite at home in the context of the Voltaic pile) and Schlegel’s
question of motives which result in the continued production of viable
facts rather than a dead end.
 Facts Are What One Makes of Them  43

A common thread in many of the examples discussed above is the dura-

tion of the fact, whether as Factum or Tatsache. The cases we have seen
include Zedler’s definition of the Factum as a process, Novalis’s metaphor
of a galvanic conductor and understanding of Fichte’s Tatsache as a pro-
cess; and Schlegel’s notion of facts begetting other facts, if in a somewhat
inverted way. These philosophical/theoretical interpretations of the fact,
when considered in a broader context which accepts facts as actions and
events, suggest that by the end of the eighteenth century there were mul-
tiple ways in which the temporality of the fact could be understood. Just
as facts occurred in time and could be used to indicate a bygone occur-
rence, situated in a historical chronology, they are also events with their
own mechanisms of extension and duration. The kind of facts Schlegel
and Novalis have in mind may seem to be entities which bear little resem-
blance to the kind whose appropriation is up for grabs in contemporary
political and cultural arenas. It is nevertheless worth keeping in mind that
time is one of the key factors in contemporary definitions of the fact; in
particular, those definitions that claim that although facts may denote
temporal events, they are themselves atemporal in nature: “that every ref-
erence to facts [Tatsachen] is certainly a reference to temporal events …
that facts themselves can however not be characterized as temporal events:
they do not occur and are never past.”31 The Romantic discussion of facts
challenges such constraints. Romantic facts are constructed entities with
theoretical value.
Facts are what one makes of them … in the dispute over the nature of
water we have heard an echo of Danischmende’s words, and we can also
see the connectivity of facts: each established one should lead to further
precisions or altogether new facts. Otherwise it is “empty work,” the dead
end of a bad hypothesis. Where does that leave us? For one, with the sense
that the Romantic fact is as indebted to a philosophical system as it is to
linguistic context. We can also observe in the Romantic thinking about the
fact an interest in exploring its temporality by connecting it to an open-
ended process which, ideally, would facilitate the emergence of new facts.
That means that facts, understood in this theoretical sense, have a concep-
tual historicity as if they were events (Schlegel’s claim that Christianity is
an initiated but still not concluded “Fact” would be just one additional
example).
Certainly, the Romantic discussion of the fact anticipates discussions
the field of science studies over a hundred years later that facts emerge
through intricate processes of construction, even if science studies does
not necessarily acknowledge this kinship. At the same time, it cannot be
44  Jocelyn Holland

said to fit comfortably into the categories which the discussions of the
past decades have circumscribed. The Romantic fact conforms neither to
positivistic views nor towards the radical contingencies of postmodern-
ism. It does not exist within a conceptual framework in which notions of
“objective validity” or “reality” also play a role. Instead, the Romantic fact
seems most comfortable poised on a threshold between theoretical system
and event, among processes of reading and creation, and it is precisely this
ambivalence which lends it its distinctive character.

NOTES

1 The entire passage reads as follows: “Die Frage, wenn ich nicht irre, war, wie
die Sache sey; nicht, wie wir wünschen, hoffen, träumen, daß sie seyn sollte
und möchte. Facta müssen hier den Ausschlag machen!”
“Facta sind Alles, was man daraus machen will, sagte Danischmend: aus
jedem neuen Augenpunkte scheinen sie etwas Anderes; und in zehn Fällen
gegen einen ist das vermeinte Factum, worauf man mit großer Zuversicht
seine Meinung gestützt hatte, im Grund eine bloße Hypothese.”
“Dieß mag seyn, erwiederte der Kalender. Aber die Facta, von welchen ich
rede, sind von der Art derjenigen, die, aus allen möglichen Gesichtspunkten
betrachtet, immer die nämliche Gestalt zeigen und immer einerlei Resultate
geben” (9: 60).
2 “Der geistreiche Mann spielte gern mit seinen Meinungen, aber, ich kann alle
Mitlebenden als Zeugen auffordern, niemals mit seinen Gesinnungen” (9: 959).
3 See Poovey, History of the Modern Fact xiii.
4 “Since the traveller denies the Factum, he is called upon according to custom
to choose someone present” [i.e., to speak on his behalf]. “Da der Trabant das
Factum leugnet, wird er dem gebrauch nach geheissen / einen aus den umb-
stendern zu erwehlen” (141).
5 “Eine That, das geschehene Ding, oder eine Geschichte, das Werck, die Ver-
richtung, der Verlauff eines ergangenen Handels” (def. “Factum,” col. 65).
6 For the historical overview, see the entry “Tatsache” in Joachim Ritter and
Karlfried Gründer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (10: col. 910–16).
7 “For though [unbelievers] may say … the historical Evidence of Miracles
wrought in Attestation of Christianity, is not sufficient to convince them,
that such Miracles were really wrought: they cannot deny, that there is such
historical Evidence, it being a known matter of Fact, that there is” (Butler,
Analogy of Religion 398). “Denn wenn sie gleich sagen mögen, der historische
Beweis von den Wundern, die zur Bestätigung des Christenthums geschehen
 Facts Are What One Makes of Them  45

seyn sollen, sey nicht zureichend, sie zu überzeugen, daß diese Wunder
wirklich geschehen wären, so können sie doch nicht läugnen, daß es einen
solchen historischen Beweis giebt, da es eine bekannte Thatsache ist, daß es
dergleichen giebt” (Bestätigung der natürlichen und geoffenbarten Religion
378). See also the definition for “Tatsache” (10: col. 910) in the Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie.
8 See for example the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “matter of fact”:
“1583: A. Nowell & W. Day True Rep. Disput. with E. Campion sig. M1v, ‘He
speaketh of a matter of fact’; 1605: Bacon Of Aduancem. Learning i. sig. F2v,
‘It is either a beleefe of Historie, (as the Lawyers speake, matter of fact:) or
else of matter of art and opinion.’”
9 See also the definition of “Tatsache” (10: col. 910) in the Historisches Wörter-
buch der Philosophie.
10 “These events [i.e., miracles such as the resurrection of Christ, etc.] thus
belong to the course of history; their effect, partly through the impression
that they make upon our minds, partly through that which follows from
them as fact [Thatsache], lies in religion before the eyes of all the world as
fact [Factum].” “Diese Ereignisse gehören also in den Gang der Geschichte;
ihre Wirkung Theils durch den Eindruck, den sie auf die Gemüther machten,
Theils durch das, was als Thatsache aus ihnen folgte, liegt in der gestifteten
Religion als Factum aller Welt vor Augen” (Herder, “Von der Auferstehung
als Glaube” 264).
11 See the definition for “Thatsache” in Adelung.
12 “Thathandlung (which is here always translated as ‘Act’ and capitalized) is a
term of Fichte’s own coinage, constructed by combining the word for ‘fact’
(=Thatsache) with the word for ‘action’ (=Handlung). It is a term employed
to designate the type of originally productive act that is, at the same time,
its own product and/or object) … In other words, it designates the original,
productive activity of the I itself and thus provides the starting point for a
transcendental deduction of experience. Fichte first introduced this term in
1794 in his ‘Review of Aensidemus’… and employed it extensively in GWL”
(see note 12, Fichte 48–9).
13 See, for example, Pauline Kleingeld, who discusses the Factum as “a technical
term that designates a particular moment in Kant’s proof structure” (“Moral
Consciousness” 61), drawing upon an argument by Dieter Henrich which has
a direct bearing on the German tradition of legal disputes through the proof
or disproof of a factum.
14 “Allgemeingültige Filosofie würde die Fixirumg der sogennanten Subjectivi-
taet, also ein freyes Factum, oder die Annahme eines hypothetischen, freyen
Satzes voraussetzen.” (Novalis, Schriften 2: 177).
46  Jocelyn Holland

15 “Das Factum soll sich betrachten lassen, als auch seiner Bestimmung nach
schlechthin gesezt durch das Ich – und auch seinem Seyn nach, als gesezt
durch das N[icht]I[ch]. Es läßt sich, als Produkt des Ich und des N[icht]I[ch]
betrachten, beydes unabhängig vom andern. Es ist ein Anschauen” (Fichte,
Sämmtliche Werke 1: 342; Novalis, Schriften 2: 345).
16 That the factum we observe is the product of two activities of positing and
negation is also compatible with another eighteenth-century definition of the
Factum as mathematical product. See the definition of “Product” in Adelung:
“In arithmetic the product is the number that arises when one number is
multiplied with another, and which is also called the Factum.” “In der Rech-
enkunst ist das Product, diejenige Zahl, welche entstehet, wenn eine Zahl mit
der andern multiplicirt wird, und welche auch das Factum heißt.”
17 There are further specifications to be made, in that the intuition as fac-
tum is not immediately given but needs to be differentiated/discerned:
“Thus the philosopher finds this intellectual intuition as fact [Factum] of
consciousness (for him it is fact [or “matter of fact” = Thatsache]; for the
original I action [Thathandlung]), not immediately, as isolated fact of his
consciousness, but rather, in that he distinguishes what appears united in
the common consciousness, and dissolves the whole into its constituent
parts.” “Sonach findet der Philosoph diese intellectuelle Anschauung als
Factum des Bewusstseyns (für ihn ist es Thatsache ; für das ursprüngliche
Ich Thathandlung), nicht unmittelbar, als isolirtes Factum seines Bewusst-
seyns, sondern, indem er unterscheidet, was in dem gemeinen Bewusstseyn
vereinigt vorkommt, und das Ganze in seine Bestandtheile auflöst” (Fichte,
Sämmtliche Werke 1: 465).
18 die Leiter = ladder; der Leiter = leader, conductor, etc.; See the “Leiter der
Elektricität” in J.S.T. Gehler: “Ein vollkommner Leiter würde derjenige seyn,
der der Elektricität beym Durchgange durch seine Substanz gar keinen Wid-
erstand entgegensetzte.” A complete conductor would be the one that does
not offer any resistance to electricity passing through its substance. Accessed
from http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/home.
19 “Jeder Gegenstand sezt – jeder Gegensatz stellt – wenn wir die besondre
Art des Factums dem Leiter zuschreiben – Gegenstand und Gegensatz sind
Leiter – weder activ noch passiv. Man schreibt ihnen aber Activität zu – weil
man doch dieselbe, gedrungen vom Naturgesetze der Reflexion, wohin setzen
muß; und da nimmt man am bequemsten mit dem Leiter vorlieb und schreibt
sie diesem zu – Alle Activitaet gehört dem Factum” (Novalis, Das philosophisch-
theoretische Werk 105).
20 Novalis proposes a creative approach to a problem already formulated by
Fichte: that the product of self-reflection is a falsification that impedes access
 Facts Are What One Makes of Them  47

to the original subject. Whereas Fichte negotiates this problem through a

law of reflection that posits the determination of knowledge through the
simultaneous recognition of its opposite, Novalis proposes a second negation
of reflection. Through a double inversion that first acknowledges the falsity
or Schein of reflection and then turns it on its head, Manfred Frank shows
how Novalis believed the original, pre-reflexive state could be more closely
approximated. Novalis calls for continuous philosophical activity, which,
though it may never fully attain the pre-reflexive state, at least permits move-
ment towards this goal.
21 “Jedes specifische Factum ist Quell einer bes[onderen] Wissenschaft” (Nova-
lis, Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk 386, no. 330).
22 “All sciences that take their start from facts etc., belong to the mixed sci-
ences – the individual sciences. Every fact is synthetic – substantial.” (Nova-
lis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia 106). “Alle W[issenschaften] die von
Thatsachen etc. ausgehn, gehören zu den Gemischten Wissenschaften – den
individuellen W[issenschaften]. Jede Thatsache ist synthetisch – Substantiell”
(Novalis, Das philosophisch-theoretiche Werk 609, no. 600).
23 Husserl, quoted in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie under the defini-
tion of “Tatsache” (10: col. 912).
24 “Fichte lehrt das Geheimniß des Experimentirens, er lehrt Thatsachen und
Thathandlungen, oder wirkliche Sachen und Handlungen in Experimente und
Begriffe verwandeln” (Novalis, Schriften 3: 391, no. 657).
25 “Eine sogenannte Recherche ist ein historisches Experiment. Der Gegenstand
und das Resultat desselben ist ein Faktum. Was ein Faktum seyn soll, muss
strenge Individualität haben, zugleich ein Geheimniss und ein Experiment
seyn, nämlich ein Experiment der bildenden Natur.” Friedrich and A.W.
Schlegel’s Athenaeum (1: 135).
26 Part 2 of the second volume of the Athenaeum journal published by August
Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel in 1798 contains several aphorisms on the
Faktum written by Friedrich Schlegel (later published elsewhere in his oeu-
vre), including the two referred to here: “Christianity seems to me to be a
fact. But a fact that has only just begun, that therefore can not be historically
represented in a system, but can rather only be characterized through divina-
tory criticism.” “Der Christianismus scheint mir ein Faktum zu seyn. Aber
ein erst angefangenes Faktum, das also nicht in einem System historisch dar-
gestellt, sondern nur durch divinatorische Kritik charakterisirt werden kann”
(2: 59–60); and Schlegel’s claim that beauty is “not merely a necessary fiction,
but rather also a fact, namely an eternally transcendental [fact] “nicht bloss
eine nothwendige Fikzion, sondern auch ein Faktum, nämlich ein ewiges
transcendentales” (2: 71).
48  Jocelyn Holland

27 “Erscheinung ein noch rohes nicht vollständig historisirtes Factum, gehört in

die Hist[orische] φ[Philosophie] nicht in die Tr[anszendental] φ[philosophie]”
(Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 18: 55, no. 452).
28 “Das Experiment geht darauf aus, d[as] Phänomen zu isoliren d.h. es
in seiner classischen Reinheit zu bekommen. Das wahre Phänomen ist
Repräsentant d[es] Unendlichen, also Allegorie, Hieroglyphe – also weit
mehr als ein Factum” (Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 18: 155,
no. 380).
29 “Facta sind Individuen des Sinns … Ein Individuum ist ein bedingtes histo-
risches Ganzes” (Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 18: 88, no. 704).
30 “Ein wahres Kunsturtheil, werden Sie mir eingestehen, eine ausgebildete, dur-
chaus fertige Ansicht eines Werks ist immer ein kritisches Factum, wenn ich
so sagen darf. Aber auch nur ein Factum, und eben darum ists leere Arbeit, es
motiviren zu wollen, es müsste denn das Motiv selbst ein neues Factum oder
eine nähere Bestimmung des ersten enthalten” (Athenaeum 3: 183–84). Schle-
gel’s “Gespräch über die Poesie” was originally published in the two parts of
Athenaeum, vol. 3.
31 “… daß jeder Bezug auf Tatsachen zwar ein Bezug auf zeitliche Begeben-
heiten ist … daß Tatsachen selbst gleichwohl nicht als zeitliche Begeben-
heiten charakterisiert werden können: Sie ereignen sich nicht und sind nie
vergangen.” See the definition for “Tatsache” (col. 912) in the Historisches
Wörterbuch.

WORKS CITED

Adelung, Johann Christoph. Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hoch-

deutschen Mundart. Vienna: Bauer, 1811.
–  “Product.” Bestätigung der natürlichen und geoffenbarten Religion. Trans.
Johann Joachim Spalding. Leipzig: in der Weidmannischen Handlung, 1756.
–  “Thatsache.” Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart.
Vienna: Bauer, 1811.
Butler, Joseph. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed. London: John
and Paul Knapton, 1740.
“Factum.” In Grosses vollständiges Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und
Künste, vol. 9, col. 65. Ed. Johann Heinrich Zedler. Halle/Leipzig: Johann
Heinrich Zedler, 1735.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writ-
ings, 1797–1800. Ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale. Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett, 1994.
 Facts Are What One Makes of Them  49

–  Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Berlin: Verlag von Veit
und Comp., 1845–6.
Frank, Manfred. Das Problem “Zeit” in der deutschen Romantik. 2nd ed. Pader-
born: F. Schoningh, 1990.
Goethe, Johann Wolfang. “Zu brüderlichem Andenken Wielands.” In Sämtliche
Werke, vol. 9. Ed. Christoph Siegrist, Hans J. Becker, Dorothea Hölscher-
Lohmeyer, et al. Munich/Vienna: Carl Hanser, 2006.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Von der Auferstehung als Glaube, Geschichte und
Lehre.” In Christliche Schriften, Erste Sammlung. Riga: Johann Friedrich Hart-
knoch, 1794.
Kleingeld, Pauline. “Moral Consciousness and the ‘Fact of Reason.’” In Kant’s
Critique of Practical Reason: A Critical Guide. Ed. Andrews Reath and Jens
Timmermann. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 55–72.
Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Ed. Ernst Behler, Jean Jacques Anstett, and
Hans Eichner. Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1963.
Lauterbeck, George. Regentenbuch. Wittemberg: Hans Kraffts Erben, 1581.
“Leiter der Elektricität.” In Physikalisches Wörterbuch, vol. 2. Ed. J.S.T. Gehler.
Leipzig: im Schwickertschen Verlag, 1798.
“Matter of Fact.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Novalis. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia: Das allgemeine Brouillon. Trans.
David W. Wood. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007.
–  Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk. Ed. Hans Joachim Mähl and Richard H.
Samuel. Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1978.
–  Schriften. Ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard H. Samuel. 4 vols. Stuttgart: W.
Kohlhammer, 1981.
Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sci-
ences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.
Reichs-Fama. Frankfurt/Leipzig, January 1727.
Richards, Robert. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in
the Age of Goethe. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.
Schlegel, Friedrich, and A.W. Schlegel. Athenaeum. 3 vols. Berlin: Friedrich
Vieweg the elder, 1798–1800.
Simon, Paul Ludwig. “Beschreibung einiger Versuche über das quantitative Ver-
hältniss, worin Volta’s Säule das Oxygen- und Hydrogen-Gas aus dem Wasser
darstellt.” In Annalen der Physik, vol. 10. Ed. Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert. Halle:
Rengersche Buchhandlung, 1802. 282–300.
“Tatsache.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 10, col. 910–16. Ed.
Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1998.
Wieland, C.M. Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. 9. Leipzig: G.J. Göschen’sche Verlags-
handlung, 1854.
2 The Competing Structures of Signification
in Samuel Hahnemann’s Homeopathy:
Between 18th-Century Semiosis
and Romantic Hermeneutics

alice kuzniar

In his essay “Lehre vom Ähnlichen” (Doctrine of the Similar) Walter Ben-
jamin speaks of the “moment of birth” in the perception of similitude:
correspondences appear to one in an instant – “im Nu” – and arise at an
ingenious spark of inspiration that is “in every case bound to an instanta-
neous flash” (206; 66).1 He compares this occurrence to the flash of insight
that comes to the astrologist who, upon seeing the conjunction of two
stars, perceives a third term or special meaning in their constellation. This
magical, unanticipated instant leads Benjamin to work out a concept of a
nonsensical similarity (“Begriff einer unsinnlichen Ähnlichkeit” [207; 66]).
In other words, in counterpoint to the establishing of similarities stands
the pivotal but paradoxical idea that what actually grounds comparison is
something absurd, unexpected, arbitrary, and merely coincidental. Benja-
min offers the examples of onomatopoeia and graphology as beliefs in an
innate but nonsensical correspondence between a sign and that to which
it refers.
This concept of a third, absurd element unexpectedly relating two sepa-
rate entities is one that invites investigation in reference to one of the most
renowned applications of a theory of similarity: Samuel Hahnemann’s
medical practice of homeopathy.2 Hahnemann, the founder of home-
opathy, came up with the idea that “like could cure like,” namely, that
something producing symptoms similar to an illness could in fact cure
this very illness. Homeopathy indeed seems to be an absurd, nonsensical
proposition; and no less a poet than Goethe made fun of it in Faust, Part
Two when Mephisto, in response to an old woman’s complaint about a
sore foot, cruelly says he’ll step on it, which she initially misinterprets
as a sexual advance or playing footsie. But the devil’s stomping on her
foot is a joke, not only on her but on Hahnemann’s Law of Similars: “Zu
 Competing Structures of Signification in Hahnemann’s Homeopathy  51

Gleichem Gleiches, was auch einer litt; / Fuß heilet Fuß, so ist’s mit allen
Gliedern” (Hair of the dog, whatever ill you pick. / Foot for a foot, all
parts are cured like that) (195; 181).3 Goethe’s parody aside, as a holistic
medical practice, homeopathy is suspiciously seen to be effective based on
the placebo effect rather than on scientific testing. But the semiotic system
or tabling of symptoms that Hahnemann set up actually endeavoured to
be thoroughly systematic, based on close observation and the recording
of data, as well as a contribution to the compiling of facts. If we return to
Walter Benjamin, though, we see undergirding Hahnemann’s system of
comparisons a third, nonsensical element: the moment that clinches the
diagnosis for Hahnemann in determining which remedy to offer a patient
is both what enables the comparison and, at the same time, threatens to
disrupt the symmetrical order.
To state it differently, what I  hope to pursue in this chapter  are two
divergent tendencies in ways of making meaning in Hahnemann’s medical
poesis. The one strives to list and catalogue symptoms based on their simi-
larity; it is indebted to an eighteenth-century belief in taxonomical organi-
zation. The second tendency, running counter to the first, is a principle of
the absurd, chaotic, and exceptional, in other words, Benjamin’s nonsensi-
cal moment that grounds the comparison. The problem is that this pivotal
moment also threatens to unhinge and unravel the system. This second
tendency resembles less eighteenth-century collecting than a Romantic
theorization of chaotic, fragmentary, and individualistic reading. It can
be traced in Hahnemann’s concepts of the unusual symptom, disease as
unique to each patient, even in the piecemeal note taking of his case stud-
ies. The first requires a semiotic comparison of signs based on evident par-
allels, while the second depends on the ingenuity of the individual reader
to single out the pertinent sign. That both “ways of knowing” – to use the
phrase coined by John Pickstone – existed simultaneously is not surpris-
ing. Samuel Hahnemann straddles the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries. Extremely learned and fluent in several languages, he embodies the
eighteenth-century savant. And yet he also reflects beliefs in organicism
and vitalism that we have come to associate with Romanticism. In sum, he
borrowed from contradictory paradigms to construct his own salient and
unique philosophy of medical treatment.
The word homeopathy stems from the Greek homoios (similar) and
pathos (sickness or feeling). Although the term gained currency only with
the publication of Hahnemann’s major work, the Organon der Heilkunst
(Organon of the Art of Healing) in 1810 (a work that underwent vari-
ous revisions up to 1842), as early as 1796 in his “Versuch über ein neues
52  Alice Kuzniar

Prinzip zur Auffindung der Heilkräfte der Arzneisubstanzen” (Essay on

a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Powers of Drugs), Hahne-
mann laid down his Law of Similars, which was to guide all his subsequent
findings: “We should imitate nature, which sometimes cures a chronic dis-
ease by superadding another, and employs in the (especially chronic) dis-
ease we wish to cure that medicine that is able to produce another very
similar artificial disease, and the former will be cured; similia similibus”
(Lesser Writings 265). Giving vivid examples from everyday life of similia
similibus curentur, Hahnemann colourfully writes: “Why does the bril-
liant planet Jupiter disappear in the twilight from the eyes of him who
gazes at it? Because a similar but more potent power, the light of breaking
day, then acts upon these organs. With what are we in the habit of flattering
the olfactory nerves when offended by disagreeable odours? With snuff,
which affects the nose in a similar manner, but more powerfully … In the
same manner, mourning and sadness are extinguished in the soul when the
news reach us (even though they were false) of a still greater misfortune
occurring to another” (Organon 106). For Hahnemann, the homeopathic
remedy exercises a “more potent power” that allows the body to regain
equilibrium and overcome the initial corporeal affliction.
Hahnemann arrived at the principle of similia similibus via his conten-
tion that the conventional medicine of his day operated via the principle
contraria contrariis. For example, constipation is treated by purgatives,
pains by opium, or acidity in the stomach by alkalis (Lesser Writings 261).
To comprehend the significant difference that Hahnemann offered with
his concept of the minimal dose and its appeal to patients who were oth-
erwise at the mercy of radical treatments, it is important to understand
medical practice around 1800. The notion of counteracting the cause or
source of an illness was prevalent because of widespread belief that one
needed to “expel from the body that imaginary and supposed material
cause of disease” (Organon 29). This expelling took the form not only of
diuretics, emetics, and purgative medicines but also of bloodletting that
was commonly prescribed for various manifestations of inflammation.
Hahnemann writes: “They recommend diaphoretics, diuretics, venesec-
tion, setons, and cauteries, and above all, excite irritation of the alimentary
canal, so as to produce evacuations from above, and more especially from
below, all of which were irritatives” (Organon 41). He refers to “the old
school of medicine … [that] still imagined they could arrest disease by a
removal of the supposed morbid material cause” (Organon 29). He even
mentions the incidence of a “young girl, of Glasgow, eight years of age,
having been bitten by a mad dog, the surgeon immediately cut out the part,
 Competing Structures of Signification in Hahnemann’s Homeopathy  53

which, nevertheless, did not save the child from an attack of hydrophobia”
(Organon 36). Citing new experiments with the voltaic column in curing
nervous afflictions that were the rage at the time,4 Hahnemann rhetori-
cally asks: “Have electric and galvanic shocks ever produced, in such cases,
any other results than those of gradually increasing the paralysis of the
muscular irritability and the nervous susceptibility and finally rendering
the paralysis complete?” (Organon 53).
Hahnemann was deeply opposed to such drastic, heroic treatments.
Medication that aims at producing the opposite condition, he claimed, was
not only merely temporary but, in fact, injurious and destructive precisely
because of its temporary nature, which could result in the aggravation of
the original condition when the latter returned. After a brief period of
apparent relief, the original illness would break forth again. The reason
the disease returned more grievous than before, Hahnemann argued, was
that “the ill-advised evacuations have lessened the energy of the vital pow-
ers” (Organon 45). He offered as a clear example of the rebound effect the
case of opium: at first it induces a “fearless elevation of spirit, a sensation
of strength and high courage, an imaginative gaiety,” only to be followed
by “dejection, diffidence, peevishness, loss of memory, discomfort, fear”
(Lesser Writings 266).
It was this secondary, indirect action, following upon the antagonis-
tic, direct action that led Hahnemann in his 1796 essay to conceive of the
notion of similia similibus. If a drug could be administered in small doses, it
could produce the counter-effect of the strong dose: for example, “valerian
(valeriana officinalis) in moderate doses cures chronic diseases with excess
of irritability, since in large doses … it can exalt so remarkably the irritabil-
ity of the whole system” (Lesser Writings 269). Another example he gives,
among many, is coffee, which can produce headaches in large doses but can
cure them in smaller doses (Lesser Writings 271–2). He adds that “other
abnormal effects it occasions might be employed against similar affections
of the human body, were we not in the habit of misusing it” (Lesser Writ-
ings 272). He was to later write in the Organon: “Strong coffee in the first
instance stimulates the faculties (primitive effect), but it leaves behind a
sensation of heaviness and drowsiness (secondary effect), which continues
a long time if we do not again have recourse to the same liquid (palliative)”
(Organon 131). Indeed, coffea cruda circulates today among the many
homeopathic remedies that were invented by Hahnemann and is used to
counteract insomnia based on this after-effect of “lassitude and sleepiness.”
In his 1805 essay “Heilkunst der Erfahrung” (The Medicine of Expe-
rience), Hahnemann refines the notion of there being two incompatible
54  Alice Kuzniar

responses residing simultaneously in one body, the primary effect and the
after-effect. Harris Coulter explains Hahnemann’s complicated line of rea-
soning as follows: “Discovery of the biphasic action of drugs immediately
raised the question: does the ‘similarity’ necessary for cure lie between the
primary or the secondary drug symptoms and those of the patient? For
Hahnemann … experience showed similarity to lie between the patient’s
symptoms and the primary symptoms of the drug; then the second-
ary symptoms of the drug (i.e., the symptoms of the patient’s reaction)
remove the disease” (Progress and Regress 364–5). Unlike with the effects
of drugs working according to the principle of contraria contrariis, which
can aggravate the original disease, the cure according to similia similibus
would produce a slight aggravation only resembling the original disease.
This slight aggravation would cause the body’s own vital force to over-
come the original illness, resulting in a permanent cure. Hahnemann writes
in “The Medicine of Experience”: “In order therefore to be able to cure,
we shall only require to oppose to the existing abnormal irritation of the
disease an appropriate medicine, that is to say, another morbific power
whose effect is very similar to that the disease displays,” and “it is only
by this property of producing in the healthy body a series of specific mor-
bid symptoms, that medicines can cure diseases, that is to say, remove and
extinguish the morbid irritation by a suitable counter-irritation” (Lesser
Writings 451). In the Organon Hahnemann rephrased this curative action
by noting that “a remedy  … closely resembling the natural one against
which it is employed … excites … the artificial disease … [and], by reason
of its similitude and greater intensity, now substitutes itself for the natural
disease” (171). In the Organon the term “secondary effect” comes to also
mean the reaction and reassertion of the vital life force in the living organ-
ism: “Our vital powers tend always to oppose their energy to this influence
or impression [of the medicine or primary effect]. The effect that results
from this, and which belongs to our conservative vital powers and their
automatic force, bears the name of secondary effect, or re-action” (130).
Hahnemann then set about reading the reactions that substances pro-
duced in a healthy person, reasoning that, when this reaction mimicked
a true disease, the homeopathic remedy was found. The task he under-
took over the course of his life was to determine via close observation of
healthy individuals, most often himself, what symptoms drugs produced.
The reason he offers in the Organon for self-experimentation is that “a
thing is never more certain than when it has been tried on ourselves” (168);
moreover, the self-testing helped to “exercise our powers of observation,
an indispensable talent in a physician” (168). Hahnemann then recorded
 Competing Structures of Signification in Hahnemann’s Homeopathy  55

and catalogued these reactions, so as to determine subsequently how they

could be used to cancel and exterminate symptoms in the sick. Hahne-
mann’s procedure was one of extremely close observing and comparing
of indicators – in both the healthy and the ill as well as provoked by the
primary and secondary action of drugs – and matching them so as to come
up with the appropriate homeopathic remedy. His idea was that one could
not truly know what occurred in the human body, but that it presented
external signs to be read: “The internal essential nature of every malady,
of every individual case of disease, so far as it is necessary for us to know
it, for the purpose of curing it, expresses itself via the symptoms” (Lesser
Writings 443). For him, it was not that a drug would overpower a dis-
ease, but that one symptom would overcome the other. As he writes in the
Organon: “The particular medicine whose action upon persons in health
produces the greatest number of symptoms resembling those of the dis-
ease which it is intended to cure, possesses, also, in reality (when adminis-
tered in convenient doses) the power of suppressing, in a radical, prompt,
and permanent manner, the totality of these morbid symptoms – that is to
say – the whole of the existing disease” (105).
To restate the issue, it was not that at the root of symptoms was a dis-
ease that needed to be fought off via drugs: homeopathy operated instead
according to a translation and comparison of symptoms. The underlying
principle of homeopathy was thus a semiotic one, based on an association
and compilation of signs. Hahnemann’s process was to first distinguish
indications of illness in recording what he observed and subsequently
constitute them as signs by comparing them to other signs. He then for-
mulated a law that governed how they operated. One can compare his
method to what Michel Foucault categorized as typical of the scientific
method in the classical age: Foucault argues that, for instance, natural his-
tory as it arises in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is “established
within the apparent simplicity of a description of the visible” (Order of
Things 137). The object is constituted or “provided by surfaces and lines,
not by functions or invisible tissues. The plant and the animal are seen not
so much in their organic unity as by … visible patterning” (ibid.). To be
sure, Hahnemann did regard the human body as an organic unity whose
equilibrium, once disturbed, would result in malady. But it was not the
internal circulatory, muscular-skeletal, digestive, or nervous systems that,
according to homeopathy, could break down under disease so that the
physician could analyse its etiology and development and then treat it;
rather the external symptoms, or what Foucault calls “visible patterning,”
were the solution to the cure. Key here is that the somatic and psychic
56  Alice Kuzniar

manifestations of disequilibrium do not reference the body – conceived as

a unity of organs, tissues, and organic systems – and hence do not refer-
ence a disease that can be named. As a new science, in its self-generating
productivity, homeopathy creates its own encyclopedia of symptoms and
its own pharmacopeia that its practitioner consults. To be precise, Hahn-
emann is not involved in charting pathologies, in other words, tracking
the origin, nature, and course of an illness. He does not classify diseases,
as in nosology; nor for that matter does he even organize symptoms: he
compiles symptoms.5 Homeopathy, much like natural history, thus “tra-
verses an area of visible, simultaneous, concomitant variables, without any
internal relation of subordination or organization” (Order of Things 137).
Hahnemann would therefore see the role of his Materia medica pura, inas-
much as it is a compilation, “as [a] contribution to the collective store of
observations” (Pickstone, Ways of Knowing 68).
In order to better situate Hahnemann’s discovery in terms of scientific
and medical practice before the rise of hospitals and institutionalized med-
icine in the nineteenth century, a mode that is still dominant today, one
can compare and contrast his semiotic system to that of Paracelsus (1493–
1541). In referring to Paracelsian thought, Foucault notes that “the world
of similarity can only be a world of signs” (Order of Things 26); this world
view would also be true of Hahnemann. But whereas Paracelsus ascribed
to the signature of things, according to which “even though he has hid-
den certain things, [God] has allowed nothing to remain without exterior
and visible signs in the form of special marks” (cited ibid.),6 Hahnemann
does not refer to a magical analogy that reveals the workings of God. His
system of analogy is without reference to the sympathy between micro-
cosm and macrocosm. Hahnemann did not read the medicinal purpose of
a plant by virtue of how it looked. In other terms, it is no longer the plant
itself via its appearance that suggested an affinity with the cure it could
bring about; it was solely the effect of the plant on the human body that
Hahnemann examined and recorded. Thus, one does not find in Hahn-
emann, as in Paracelsus, a belief in a vast system of signatures that revealed
the invisible workings of a divinely inspired and created universe. And
certainly planetary movement was not aligned, as it was in Theophras-
tus von Hohenheim, with processes of healing.7 Hahnemann believed that
he was documenting observable empirical positivities; thus, he was thor-
oughly Kantian in his conviction that you could know phenomena but not
substances. To repeat, he created a closed system, typical of eighteenth-
century thought, whereby signs referred to other signs, not to the macro-
cosm and its divine order.
 Competing Structures of Signification in Hahnemann’s Homeopathy  57

Most of the homeopathic remedies sold today stem from Hahnemann’s

experimentations. Harris Coulter summarizes the results of his findings as
follows: “Fragmenta de Viribus Medicamentorum Positivis (1805) … have
the symptoms of 27 medicines … The Reine Arzneimittellehre (1811–21)
enlarged on the Fragmenta, presenting the symptomatology of 62 sub-
stances. By the end of his life Hahnemann had conducted or supervised
the provings of 99 substances” (363). These substances are enumerated and
discussed in great length in the compendium Materia Medica Pura. For
each remedy Hahnemann lists a vast number of symptoms of the body,
mind, and disposition which it can treat and often the time of day in which
these symptoms appear. The patient portrait for each remedy is based on
an accumulation of symptoms, which is to say that Hahnemann neglects
either to exclude or to prioritize them. His method is synchronic in the
sense that the duration, succession, frequency, and cessation of symp-
toms – their diachronic aspect – is not noted. For instance, more than forty
pages are devoted to the remedy nux vomica and its various indicators such
as vertigo, headache, smarting in the eyes, swelling of the gums, ringing
in the ears, toothache, looseness of the teeth, heartburn, nausea, pricking
pain in the hepatic region, flatulence, burning or itching while urinating,
erection of the penis after the midday sleep, nocturnal cough, bloody nasal
mucus, asthma, sudden powerless of the arms, frightful visions in dreams,
and yawning accompanied by weepy eyes. Quite understandably if suffer-
ing from all these symptoms, the nux vomica patient also exhibits extraor-
dinary anxiety, crossness, sadness, reproach of others, even mistakes in
speaking and writing. This exhaustive coverage as well as listing, in which
no detail is omitted of Hahnemann’s investigations into nux vomica over
several years, gives the impression of an intentional lack of hierarchy of
symptoms as well as an asystematic presentation. Conceivably, there is no
limit to the potential listing of symptoms, because it is not the goal of the
physician to arrive at a diagnosis, pathology, or nosology. In other words,
there never arrives the instant at which the doctor determines that enough
symptoms have been recorded to ascertain the reason for an illness, its
chronological progression, or its prognosis; these objectives or targets are
not his intent.
Such a structure of asystematicity is derived in large part from the prac-
tice of “biographical” medicine current in Hahnemann’s day. John Pick-
stone describes biographical medicine as “a continuing tradition of seeing
illnesses as disturbances of individual lives” (10). Before the time of medical
care conducted in hospitals,8 the physician was devoted to hearing out the
patient’s maladies.9 To be sure, Hahnemann was not so much a “bedside”
58  Alice Kuzniar

physician as a practitioner who, given his renown, saw patients in his own
consultation room or received long letters from them minutely detailing
an illness. (In fact, he was opposed to doctors making house calls for he
thought it lessened the respect that patients would have for their healers.)
Nonetheless, like the bedside doctor he heard out his patients thoroughly.
His philosophy, in fact, required a precise procedure for the physician to
follow in sessions with his patients in order to diagnose their maladies: the
physician writes down accurately all that the patient and his friends have
told him in the very expressions used by them. The examination is “for
the most part, to be confined to listening to his narrative” (Organon 167).
Keeping quiet, the physician allows the patient to say all he has to say, and
refrains from interrupting, even to ask questions. He should not indulge
in making conjectures or suppositions (ibid.).
The result of this prescribed procedure, as amply evidenced in the vast
compilation of the Materia Medica Pura, is a concept of the body as frag-
mented. In Hahnemann’s patient notebooks, the Krankenjournale, which
document the patient interviews, one clearly sees how he jots down symp-
toms, starting with the head and descending to the rest of the body, with
notations about the disposition of the patient at the close. The only thread
that joins the symptoms is this sequence, not any interpretation of the
symptoms or their relation to one another. Put succinctly, this accumula-
tion of several disjointed moments of a body in disequilibrium threatens
to collapse the Law of Similars. This law attempted to create order by
drawing parallels between signs in two separate human bodies, rather than
between warning signs in one body. The single body thus houses chaotic,
isolated, non-stratified symptoms that in fact tyrannize it as incomprehen-
sible illness. Whether one consults the Krankenjournale or the Materia
Medica Pura, each individual body presents a bewildering, cacophonous
encyclopedia of symptoms. The bodily and psychic indicators of illness
that are catalogued and recommended for each remedy seem infinite and
unrelated, as if we were truly speaking here of a Deleuzian “body with-
out organs,” that is to say, of a body without any unifying systems, be
they digestive, nervous, circulatory, etc. Such a body not only expresses
its uniqueness through a plethora and mingling of affects or what Deleuze
and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus call “intensities,” it is also exquisitely
sensitive to response from the minuscule homeopathic dosage, which sets
off a flow or wave of resonances. Operative in Hahnemann’s system, in
his note taking, and in his own patient’s letters is thus less a regulatory,
disciplinary monitoring of the body than a dissolving of self in the pro-
liferation of discrete symptoms and the resonances of the remedies.10 The
 Competing Structures of Signification in Hahnemann’s Homeopathy  59

coordinates are incalculable, and the results are unverifiable. Important

instead are the responses of the physiological and psychological bodies,
infinitely diverse from each other.
Hahnemann’s schizoid practice necessarily entails revision of a belief
in organic, natural wholeness that is all too quickly ascribed to home-
opathy to the exclusion of this other corporeal model. In conclusion to
his book Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe,
Michael Stolberg uses the rise in homeopathy as an example of how the
body was conceived differently starting around 1800. In the early mod-
ern era, the unhindered stream of bodily fluids was considered integral to
health, which meant that the body was seen as permeable and open and,
when ill, required such treatments as leeching, bloodletting, drastic emet-
ics, and laxatives in order to abet such flow. According to such a model,
for instance, menopause with its cessation of menses gave rise to great
concern. This medical tradition, Stolberg argues, was “superceded and
replaced by a compact, internally firm body mass that was largely sealed
off from the outside. The vital basis for maintaining good health was no
longer the unobstructed flow of humors but the integrity and orderly
performance of the solid parts and the strength of the ‘life force’ of the
organism as a whole” (214). Bodily excretions were then seen as danger-
ous rather than beneficial, as the nineteenth-century anti-masturbation
discourse illustrates. Stolberg continues:

Life force became the pivotal concept in medical guidebooks, of which Hufe-
land’s Makrobiotik is the most famous example. The strong response that
early homeopathy earned at the beginning of the 19th century, particularly in
genteel circles, is a good illustration of the positive lay response to this new
view. Homeopathy’s great attractiveness, according to its followers, was the
fact that it “was based on the principle of temperance” … With homeopathic
treatment, human nature was not so easily deprived of the force it needed to
fight the disease. (214)

Although Stolberg’s insight helps explain both why homeopathy arose at

the time it did and why it garnered popularity, he overlooks how Hahn-
emann failed to participate in the new model of science that saw “fibers
and organs … as the principal material substrate of human physiology and
pathology” (214) that was instrumental in conceptualizing the body as a
unified, integral whole.11 At the very least, it is important to recognize in
homeopathy two competing hypotheses about the body: Hahnemann’s
symptomology, that is to say, his vast compiling of symptoms, unrelated
60  Alice Kuzniar

to each other within the body and to bodily organ systems, runs counter
to his notion of the body as a whole, governed by a vital life force.
But if the homeopath merely jots down the symptoms that a patient
relates to him and is even encouraged to refrain from interpreting them,
how then is the cure to the maladjustment in the body to be found? What
results in the selection of a cure is, I would like to argue, comparable to
Benjamin’s concept of the nonsensical similarity. What enables the deci-
sion about what remedy to select is the bizarre, unanticipated moment.
The lynchpin in deciding upon a treatment was based on Hahnemann’s
notion that each individual patient was unique, hence, that, despite simi-
larities with other patients, what singled out for the physician the choice
of a cure is what made the patient stand out from all other cases. In short,
paradoxically only the dissimilar could enable the workings of the Law of
Similars.
Hahnemann criticized allopathic medicine for attempting to reduce all
individual cases to one disease, whereas he saw each individual case as
unique. Diseases are infinite in number, he wrote, “as diverse as the clouds
in the sky” (Lesser Writings 504). In striking contrast to medicine as prac-
tised today, he insisted that it was always the person with the disease who
was treated, not the disease itself. “Each case of the disease that presents
itself must be regarded (and treated) as an individual malady that never
before occurred in the same manner and under the same circumstance as
in the case before us, and will never happen precisely in the same way”
(Lesser Writings 442). On the one hand, this unique view of the patient
was indebted to the “bedside” and “biographical” medical practice men-
tioned earlier. On the other hand, Hahnemann here parts ways with
prevalent medical theories of his day, notably those of the Scottish doctor
John Brown. According to the medical theory of Brown widely adopted
in Germany around 1800, especially by Schelling, there were two types
of illness into which a variety of maladies could fit, what he termed the
asthenic and sthenic, if you will, hypo-stimulated and hyper-stimulated
states.12 The medicinal treatment also corresponds to either one of these
groupings, and the physician was encouraged to test on his patient several
of the drugs that belonged to either of the two categories. Hahnemann
considered Brownian medicine a simplistic reduction of illness, one that
also unfortunately required the use of strong medication, such as opium,
in order to reverse or palliate the condition.13 Novalis, too, criticized
Brownian medicine for not attending to the individualization of illness
in each patient, noting that Brown treated the body as a pure abstraction
(Werke 2: 796). The poet wrote, for instance, that every person has their
 Competing Structures of Signification in Hahnemann’s Homeopathy  61

own sicknesses (2: 500), indeed, that most sicknesses seem to be very indi-
vidual, like a human, or a flower or an animal (2: 797, no. 268). He goes on
to observe: “Therefore interesting is their natural history, their relations
(out of which complications arise), their comparison.”14 Noteworthy in
this passage are two salient points. First, despite the individualization
of illness, in fact paradoxically because of it, Novalis, like Hahnemann,
recognizes the importance of searching out affinity and analogy between
disparate entities. For both poet and physician this search was conducted
intuitively and idiosyncratically – if you will, poetically. Second, it is not
merely that disease and its course are uniquely manifested in each indi-
vidual but that disease is specific to each individual. Moreover – and here
he goes beyond Hahnemann  – because of this specificity, Novalis also
conjectured that illness must lead to the development of individuality; it
furthered Bildung. Indeed, because of this potential to heighten character,
he idealized illness over health: “The ideal of perfect health is only scien-
tifically interesting. Sickness belongs to individualization.”15
It now becomes clear why, as mentioned above, Hahnemann recom-
mended the intent listening to the patient, the seemingly disorganized
note taking in the Krankenjournale, as well as the copious accumulation of
symptoms compiled in the Materia Medica Pura: if the manifestations of
a malady are in each case different, the diseases infinite in number, and the
arrival at a diagnosis of a disease impossible, the oddest symptoms need to
be recorded. They, in actuality, became the key to ascertaining what made
the patient unique and distinct; in Novalis’s words, “sickness belongs to
individualization.” In determining “what kind of symptoms ought chiefly
to be regarded in selecting the remedy,” Hahnemann thus prescribes that

we ought to be particularly and almost exclusively attentive to the symp-

toms that are striking, singular, extraordinary, and peculiar (characteristic),
for it is to these latter that similar symptoms, from among those created by the
medicine, ought to correspond … On the other hand, the more vague and gen-
eral symptoms, such as loss of appetite, headache, weakness, disturbed sleep,
uncomfortableness, &c., merit little attention, because almost all diseases and
medicines produce something as general. (Organon 173–4)

To restate, for Hahnemann the notion that illness was unique to each
patient meant that the physician needed to read for what Benjamin termed
the exceptional, bizarre, or dissimilar moment. Only then could the pre-
cise remedy that would exactly fit that patient be found. It was not that,
as in allopathic medicine either in its Brownian variety or as practised in
62  Alice Kuzniar

the nineteenth century until today, a disease would express itself in symp-
toms common to a host of patients, but that precisely the aberrant symp-
toms proper to the patient required closer attention. In terms of its new,
Romantic definition that Jocelyn Holland investigates in her contribution
to this volume, the “fact” (or what I have called here the symptom) gains
individual, unique significance. To this effect, Holland cites Friedrich
Schlegel’s Athenäum fragment: “What a fact should be has to have strict
individuality, being at once a secret and an experiment, namely, an experi-
ment of formative nature.”16
The reason for Hahnemann’s counterintuitive procedure was, as men-
tioned above, that, without believing in an underlying disease, the homeo-
path only had symptoms to analyse. Specifically, in the search for finding
the right homeopathic remedy, in other words, the Gegenbild (antitype)
that would illicit the same overt symptoms but not be the original dis-
ease, the physician needed to read between the lines. For example, these
indicators had to appear intermittently in the course of an infirmity. Har-
ris Coulter offers this illustration: “In the treatment of malaria (intermit-
tent fever) Hahnemann notes that the paroxysms of fever (communia) are
of little use in the selection of the remedy, since they are experienced by
everyone. Instead, the physician should look to the patient’s symptoms
between the seizures of fever (propria), since these differ greatly from one
patient to the next” (381). Determining the aberrant, random symptoms
meant individualizing the patient and establishing a patient profile that
was attentive to such things as on which side of the body a pain came,
what the general disposition of the patient was, or what other signs on
other parts of the body were present that seemed to be unrelated to the
malady.
To give an example of how Hahnemann desired to pay attention to the
peculiarity of each symptom, one can turn to how he recommended tes-
ters record their medicinal trials. He prescribes that the experimenter

place himself successively in various postures, and observe the changes that
ensue. Thus he will be enabled to examine whether the motion communi-
cated to the suffering parts by walking up and down the chamber, or in the
open air, seated, lying down, or standing, has the effect of augmenting, dimin-
ishing, or dissipating the symptom, and if it returns or not upon resuming the
original position. He will also perceive whether it changes when he eats or
drinks, or by any other condition, when he speaks, coughs, or sneezes, or in
any other action of the body whatsoever. He must also observe at what hour
of the day or night the symptom more particularly manifests itself. All these
 Competing Structures of Signification in Hahnemann’s Homeopathy  63

details are requisite, in order to discover what is peculiar and characteristic in

each symptom. (Organon 164, italics mine)

That Hahnemann was attentive to the defining, bizarre symptom does

not mean that all the diverse markers did not need to be recorded and
taken into account. Indeed, the above passage suggests as much. He speci-
fies that the totality of all the indicators also needed to be addressed, for
they too would help select the proper remedy, for each remedy would
elicit several, diverse symptoms in the healthy test case; these could not be
ignored. In particular, Hahnemann recognized that the affects of “contin-
ued grief, anger, injured feelings, or great and repeated occasions of fear
and alarm [i]n the course of time … have an influence over the health of
the body, and often compromise it in a high degree” (Organon 196). He
thus exhorts the homeopathic practitioner to pay special attention to the
state of mind of the patient: “The moral state of the patient is often that
which is most decisive in the choice of the homeopathic remedy; for this is
a symptom of the most precise character, and one that, among the mass of
symptoms, by no means can escape the notice of a physician accustomed
to make precise observations” (Organon 192).
Finally, one needs to stress the conclusion to which Hahnemann came –
that is to say, the law he devised – on the basis of each patient’s peculiar-
ity. In his “Law of the Single Remedy” Hahnemann, unlike subsequent
homeopaths, stipulated that only one remedy was to be tried at a time:
he matched the single remedy to the singular patient. “In no instance is it
requisite to employ more than one simple medicinal substance at a time”
(Organon 218).17 In short, the Benjaminian paradox is that the “Law of
the Single Remedy,” based as it is on the dissimilarity between patients,
enables the workings of the “Law of Similars.”
If the law of similia similibus curentur and the extensive listing evident
in the Materia Medica Pura resembled a Foucauldian eighteenth-century
semiosis, then this genial interpretation of the singular, unexpected, yet
portent sign was thoroughly Romantic. Around 1800 there is a shift from
a regulatory, normative poetics to the belief in individual, idiosyncratic
interpretation.18 Romantic reading is, if anything, non-predictable. “There
is no universally true kind of reading, in the ordinary sense. Reading is a
free operation. No one can prescribe for me how I am to read something
or what,”19 writes Novalis. The genres that come to the fore in Roman-
ticism are non-prescriptive. Strangely enough, one could even call them
non-genres  – the fragment, the essay, and the mixed genre of the novel
with its embedded fairy tales and digressions. Friedrich Schlegel in the
64  Alice Kuzniar

most famous of the Athenäum fragments (nos. 116 and 238) states that
modern, Romantic literary production is dynamic and reflects upon itself
in ever greater exponentiation.20 Although Hahnemann, too, used this
Romantic notion of Potenzieren (see discussion below), what it means for
Schlegel is that Romantic writing is always an after-effect, involved in the
constant production of marginalia on itself or on another text. Novalis
exhorted that the true reader must be an extended author (2: 282, no. 125),
and Friedrich Schlegel similarly wrote that the true critic is an author to
the second power (18: 106, no. 927). If the reader is an extended author,
then there is no regularization of reading: Witz, with its attention to the
unexpected, plays the more important role.21 As we have seen, the same is
the case for homeopathy. In this medical practice there is no point in run-
ning experiments, as in contemporary pharmaceutical trials, for one can’t
predict outcomes. The homeopath is as inventive, imaginative, and idio-
syncratic as the Romantic reader: both hone in on the odd, dissimilar sign.
What is further important about the Romantic fragment is that it remains
a Bruchstück, that is, it resists closure. It alludes (hindeuten) without offer-
ing up definitive interpretation (Deutung). It revels in surface, extraneous,
or marginal observations; and it hides more than it reveals. The oracular
quality of Jena Romantic writing seems to gloss the pre-Socratic fragment
by Heraclitus: “The master to whom the oracle of Delphi belongs, does not
speak, does not hide, he makes signs” (Fragment 93). When nature speaks,
it does so via infinite signs, the key to which cannot be ascertained. In the
renowned passage at the start of Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Apprentices of
Sais), Novalis writes that one can see marvellous figures everywhere that
seem to belong to the great script of ciphers – in the designs of bird wings,
egg shells, clouds, snow, crystals, in the filings around a magnet, and in
strange, chance conjunctures. This magical script would seem to resemble
Paracelsus’s belief in the signature of things, except that for Novalis the
key to the mystery is not to be found: “Intuition alone does not allow
itself to conform to particular patterns and does not seem to provide the
ultimate answer.”22 The signifying abundance in nature cannot be authori-
tatively deciphered. This search for the perplexing signification in nature,23
however, is just as ambivalent in Hahnemann as it is in Novalis. That is
to say, the Romantic theory of fragmentary, incomplete signification sub-
tends Hahnemann’s own fragmentary, voluminous writing. Although the
Organon der Heilkunst in its various versions is a concise treatise on the
principles of homeopathy, the Materia Medica Pura, where Hahnemann
assembles the homeopathic remedies and gives the patient profile for each,
is a bewildering, cacophonous encyclopedia of symptoms.
 Competing Structures of Signification in Hahnemann’s Homeopathy  65

Novalis then establishes parallels between Romantic writing and the

writing in nature: when Hardenberg compares the fairy tale to nature, it
is because of the chaotic ensemble they share, their unendingly accidental
conjunctures, and their infinite possibilities: “A fairy tale is really a dream
picture – devoid of all coherence – An ensemble of wondrous things and
happenings  – a musical fantasy for instance  – the harmonious effects of
an Aeolian harp – Nature herself.”24 Again, Novalis compares nature to
associative but lawless Romantic literary production: “Anecdotes, with-
out coherence, though with association, like dreams. Poems  – purely
melodious and full of beautiful words  – but also without any meaning
or coherence – are at the most comprehensible as single stanzas … At the
most true poetry can  … have an indirect impact like music  – nature is
thus purely poetic – and so is the parlour of a magician – of a physicist – a
child’s room – a jangle and repository.”25 The reason why nature herself
is poetic is that she is not only beautiful, but, as the passage above from
Die Lehrlinge zu Sais similarly indicates, ultimately without coherence
and meaning. This lack of apparent cohesion does not exclude the work-
ings of association and analogy. On the contrary, the powers of associa-
tion play a significant role for Novalis, but, as in Benjamin’s “Lehre vom
Ähnlichen,” the similarities established are sheerly coincidental, free, and
unforeseeable.26
In sum, what links Hahnemann to Romantic theories on language,
nature, and interpretation and what allows one to speak of a homeopathic
poesis are their shared beliefs in (1) the geniality of the gifted interpreter
attentive to the marginal and surprising, (2) the chaotic, unpredictable
ensemble of impressions, as well as (3) the wave of resonances or har-
monies that unite life and subtend the chaos. It is this last concept of
vibrational dynamism that I  want, in conclusion, to touch upon briefly
in respect to the second law of homeopathy about which I  have said
very little up to this point – the Law of Minimum. Developing his 1796
notion of the peculiar effect of the small dose, Hahnemann announced in
1799 his principle of the infinitesimal dose: then, after 1800, respecting
what was to be termed homeopathy’s “Law of Minimum,” he gradually
reduced dose sizes (Coulter 400). The impact of the catalyst was pres-
ent even though the toxicity of the substance had disappeared. Hahne-
mann postulated that a substance would be not just still present but in
fact activated after exponential dilution, as well as by trituration (grinding
an insoluble ingredient with milk sugar) and succussion (vigorous shak-
ing). This belief that the elemental, essential action of a substance could
be extracted and transmitted places Hahnemann squarely in the realm of
66  Alice Kuzniar

Romantic, divinatory science, especially since Hahnemann claimed that

the mysterious vital force in the remedy was somehow present in purer
form once it had been so diluted that the original substance was undetect-
able. Homeopathy resembles the medical practice of mesmerism at the
time, as well as the investigations into animal magnetism and galvanism:27
like homeopathy, these experiments sought to provide evidence of an oth-
erwise unseen, ubiquitous current of energy in both organic and inorganic
life. Paradoxically, the more imperceptible it was, the more omnipresent,
energetic, and effective the vital life force in a homeopathic remedy would
be. Like the third, nonsensical term of the unique symptom, the notion
that the active ingredient of a substance is not just present after several
dilutions, but even more dynamically functional, demonstrates what is
typical for Romanticism – an embracing of what Novalis termed “magic
idealism” (2: 550, no. 399).
The law of similia similibus curentur operates on the eighteenth-
century classification of phenomena based on a system of correspon-
dences, whereas Hahnemann’s later notion of the infinitesimal dosage
capable of inversely powerful and exponential effect on the body resem-
bles a dynamic, developmental model of life that is characteristic of the
nineteenth century. As we have seen, Hahnemann thus straddles both
eighteenth-century semiosis, based on the accumulation of analogies
between signs, and the early-nineteenth-century Romantic hermeneutics,
with its models of unpredictability, individuality, and organic dynamism.
As Jocelyn Holland points out, the “fact” for the Romantics becomes
involved in an open-ended process. But regardless of whether it is seen as
an Enlightenment or Romantic science, the medical practice of homeopa-
thy arises from theories of signs and how they are interpreted. In short,
the therapeutic discipline cannot be separated from the fictional, poetic
structures of signification that give rise to it.

NOTES

1 Here and in the rest of my article when citing a German original, the first
page reference is to the German, the second, following the semi-colon, to its
English translation. If no second reference is given, the translation is my own.
2 In his short study, Der Akt der Ähnlichkeit, art historian and homeopath
Claus Just mentions Benjamin’s study in the larger context of homeopathy.
3 It is amusing to see websites extolling homeopathy quoting this passage out
of context so as to make it seem Goethe advocated homeopathy.
4 See Stolberg’s subchapter “The Rise of the Nerves” (Experiencing Illness 170–3).
 Competing Structures of Signification in Hahnemann’s Homeopathy  67

5 Pickstone writes: “For 18th-century philosophers, such a method [hierarchies

based on maximal numbers of ‘characteristics’ – all treated as equally impor-
tant] approximated the mental processes of ‘association’ which were funda-
mental to learning” (Ways of Knowing 70).
6 See also Bergengruen’s subchapter “Natürliche Signaturen” where he dis-
cusses Paracelsus alongside Ficino, Croll, and other Renaissance thinkers
on the signature of things. For instance, he writes that “Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola [hegte] den Astrologie-unabhängigen Gedanken, dass die Philoso-
phen die ‘invisibilia [mysteria] dei’ durch die ‘visibilibus naturae signis’ (‘die
unsichtbaren Geheimnisse Gottes durch die sichtbaren Zeichen der Natur’)
erkennen könnten” (Nachfolge Christi 167).
7 Gantenbein focuses on several parallels rather than fundamental differences
between Hahnemann and Paracelsus in order to suggest that Paracelsus func-
tions as a dark Jungian shadow to the founder of homeopathy, who resisted
acknowledging direct influences.
8 Foucault refers to this post-1800 system as the anatomical-clinical method
based on the study of cases in institutionalized settings: “a new structure in
which the individual in question was not so much a sick person as the end-
lessly reproducible pathological fact to be found in all patients suffering in a
similar way” (Birth of the Clinic 119). “The patient has to be enveloped in a
collective, homogenous space” (242).
9 See Stolberg’s subchapter “The Doctor–Patient Relationship” (64–76).
10 For an account of how the body is monitored and the self constituted by the
homeopathic patient, see Brockmeyer, Selbstverständnisse.
11 Foucault also documents in the Birth of the Clinic how the early nineteenth
century saw the rise of the anatomical study of tissues and organs that
allowed physicians to localize and find the seat of disease.
12 On Brownian medicine, see Coulter, Progress and Regress; Schwanitz,
Homöopathie und Brownianismus; and Neubauer, Bifocal Vision.
13 Hahnemann’s observations on Brown are recorded in his essays “Fragmen-
tarische Bemerkungen zu Browns Elements of medicine” (Fragmentary
Observations on Brown’s Elements of Medicine [1801]) and “Monita über
die drey gangbaren Heilarten” (Observations on Three Current Methods of
Treatment [1809]).
14 “Daher ist ihre Naturgeschichte, ihre Verwandtschaften (woraus die Compli-
cationen entstehn) ihre Vergleichung so interessant” (2: 797, no. 268).
15 “Das Ideal einer vollkommnen Gesundheit ist blos wissenschaftlich interes-
sant. Krankheit gehört zur Individualisirung” (2: 835, no. 400).
16 “Was ein Faktum seyn soll, muss strenge Individualität haben, zugleich ein
Geheimniss und ein Experiment seyn, nämlich ein Experiment der bildenden
Natur” (2: 249, no. 427).
68  Alice Kuzniar

17 As early as 1797 in the essay “Sind die Hindernisse der Gewißheit und Ein-
fachheit der practischen Arzneykunde unübersteiglich?” (Are the Obstacles
to Certainty and Simplicity in Practical Medicine Insurmountable?), Hahn-
emann recommended against mixing compounds into a single prescription.
18 I am adapting somewhat the terms that Peter Szondi used: he uses the cat-
egory of the normative Poetik, but refers in the second instance to a “specula-
tive poetics.”
19 “Es giebt kein allgemeingeltendes Lesen, im gewöhnlichen Sinn. Lesen ist
eine freye Operation. Wie ich und was ich lesen soll, kann mir keiner vor-
schreiben” (2: 399, no. 398).
20 See Neubauer, “Zwischen Natur und mathematischer Abstraktion.”
21 See the section “Witz” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (The Literary Absolute
52–8) and its entry in their topical index to Friedrich Schlegel’s fragments
(164).
22 “Allein die Ahnung will sich selbst in keine feste Formen fügen, und scheint
kein höherer Schlüssel werden zu wollen” (1: 201).
23 Novalis writes of “das seltsame Verhältnißspiel der Dinge” (the peculiar rela-
tional play of things) (2: 438; Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice 146).
24 “Ein Mährchen ist eigentlich wie ein Traumbild – ohne Zusammenhang – Ein
Ensemble wunderbarer Dinge und Begebenheiten – z. B. eine musicalische
Fantasie – die harmonischen Folgen einer Aeolsharfe – die Natur selbst”
(2: 696, no. 986; translation by Wood, 171).
25 “Erzählungen, ohne Zusammenhang, jedoch mit Association, wie Träume.
Gedichte – blos wohlklingend und voll schöner Worte – aber auch ohne allen
Sinn und Zusammenhang – höchstens einzelne Strofen verständlich … Höch-
stens kann wahre Poësie … eine indirecte Wirckung wie Musik etc. thun –
Die Natur ist daher rein poëtisch – und so die Stube eines Zauberers – eines
Physikers – eine Kinderstube – eine Polter und Vorrathskammer” (2: 769,
no. 113).
26 See also the fragment from Das Allgemeine Brouillon, in which Novalis
speaks of poetic association of ideas based on intentional production of
chance relations (2: 692, no. 953; translation by Wood, 168).
27 See the works by Aesch, Barkhoff, Eppenich, Holland, Steigerwald, Tatar, and
Wetzels.

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and ed. David Wood. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
–  Novalis: Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Ed. Hans-
Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel. 3 vols. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978.
Pickstone, John V. Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and
Medicine. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, et. al. Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early
German Romantic Writings. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
Schwanitz, Hans Joachim. Homöopathie und Brownianismus 1795–1844: Zwei
wissenschaftstheoretische Fallstudien aus der praktischen Medizin. Stuttgart:
Gustav Fischer, 1983.
Steigerwald, Joan. “Figuring Nature: Ritter’s Galvanic Inscriptions.” European
Romantic Review 18.2 (2007): 255–63.
Stolberg, Michael. Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern
Europe. Trans. Leonhard Unglaub and Logan Kennedy. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.
Szondi, Peter. Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie II. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974.
Tatar, Maria. Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1978.
Wetzels, Walter. Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Physik im Wirkungsfeld der deutschen
Romantik. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973.
PART II

Imagining: Botany, Chemistry,

Thermodynamics
3 “She comes! – the GODDESS!”:
Narrating Nature in Erasmus
Darwin’s The Botanic Garden

ann shteir

Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conver-

sations on the Plurality of Worlds) (1686) is an exuberant popularizing
French exposition of Cartesian physics in the form of a witty and imag-
ined night-time dialogue between an intelligent noblewoman and her male
counterpart and tutor on the grounds of her estate. The tutor’s eyes are on
seduction more than on the heavens, but the woman takes him to task for
his gendered gambits – “Do you think I’m incapable of enjoying intellec-
tual pleasures? … Tell me about your stars!” (10–11). Fontenelle’s female
interlocutor may lack knowledge, but, representing not only women but
also others not yet introduced to the New Science, she is an avid learner,
not to be trifled with. In England one century later, Erasmus Darwin
joined Fontenelle’s company in seeking to communicate new ideas and
findings about the workings of nature to women and other audiences.
Darwin’s compendious poem The Botanic Garden (1791) brings together
poetry and prose, personifications and scientific information, and mythol-
ogy and reports about empirical practices. The Botanic Garden is studded
with substantive footnotes about eighteenth-century science and technol-
ogy, yet at the same time it uses mythologies old and new to promote
ideas about nature that resonated with beliefs of Romantic-era writers and
philosophers. A hybrid and often paradoxical piece of writing, the formal
literary features and expository scientific material in The Botanic Garden
speak in different and seemingly contradictory registers. One figure, how-
ever, links the fictive and factual aspirations of the poem. Darwin gives
the role of narrator in the poem to the “Botanic Goddess,” his own new-
style mythological figure of inspiration and imagination. Not an abstrac-
tion, she is nature animated for botanical culture, she is the bridge in the
poem between empirical botanical features of the material world and the
74  Ann Shteir

expansive and vitalist analogies that Darwin promulgates in his verses.

Like Fontenelle’s seventeenth-century female aristocrat, the Botanic God-
dess stands in for women whose interest in the sciences Darwin seeks to
inspire. She also carries Darwin’s banner for a dynamic vision of nature
that expands beyond the systems and conventions of late-eighteenth-
century Europe.
A two-part poem with over four thousand lines of heroic couplets, The
Botanic Garden abounds in generic variety and fecund substance that still
capture attention from literary scholars and historians of science. The first
part, The Economy of Vegetation, is an ambitious overview of the creation
of the universe that echoes Lucretius in De rerum natura. Darwin’s verses
trace the origin of stars, and the emergence of earth and moon, miner-
als and plants; topics include light, heat, volcanoes, tides, sensation, and
stimuli. Darwin also celebrates such contemporary technological achieve-
ments associated with the Industrial Revolution as porcelain manufacture,
air pumps, and electricity. The second part of the work, The Loves of the
Plants, is filled with poetic pictures of more than eighty species of flowers.
Darwin shares ideas of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus about the cen-
trality of sexuality in nature. He personifies plants and creates narratives
around them that feature sexual and eroticized aspects of the vegetable
kingdom.
Erasmus Darwin came of intellectual age during what David Elliston
Allen has termed “the Linnaean Spring,” a time in both the history of nat-
ural history and book history when the writings of Linnaeus opened new
directions in plant systematics and nomenclature. Early in the eighteenth
century, Linnaeus had formulated an influential system of taxonomy by
dividing the plant kingdom into a hierarchy of classes and orders based
in the reproductive parts of flowers. In this approach to classification,
the number and placement of the “male” parts of flowers (the stamens)
determine the class to which a plant is assigned, and characteristics of the
“female” parts of flowers (the pistils) determine the order. Fundamental
to Linnaeus’s system are sharp sexual differentiation between male and
female and also analogy between plant reproduction and human sexual
reproduction. Metaphors abound about “virgins,” “marriage,” “brides”
and “bridegrooms” in the vegetable kingdom, along with various other
forms of sexual coupling. In part because the Linnaean system was sim-
ple enough to learn and apply, botanical writings cultivated curiosity and
brought practices of collecting, identifying, naming, and classifying plants
to audiences in eighteenth-century England and elsewhere. These activi-
ties were encouraged for people of all ages for their physical and mental
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  75

benefits, part of fashion, and part of cultures of improvement. Erasmus

Darwin’s poem emerged in that climate and sought to promote it. But
while the playful underpinnings of Linnaean ideas made the schema
attractive for some, the erotic codings were suspect for others.
The Loves of the Plants, the better known part of Darwin’s compos-
ite poem, illustrates Linnaean ideas about plant reproduction through
verse narratives that personify individual flowers. In the preface, Dar-
win explains Linnaeus’s division of the plant kingdom into 24 classes
and then into about 120 orders, with further subdivisions into “families”
(genera) and species. Linnaean Class I, for example, is named Monandria,
and all plants within that grouping have one stamen on each flower. Class
XXIII, Polygamia, consists of plants in which the male and female flow-
ers are together; Linnaeus described Class Polygamia as “Twenty males
or more in the same bed with the female” (Stearn, “Linnaean Classifica-
tion” 244). Consider Darwin’s entry for the Mimosa, or Sensitive Plant,
from Linnaean Class Polygamia as an example of Darwin’s poetic and
expository practice in The Loves of the Plants. The verse account reads
as follows:

Weak with nice sense, the chaste MIMOSA stands,

From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands;
Oft as light clouds o’erpass the Summer-glade,
Alarm’d she trembles at the moving shade;
And feels, alive through all her tender form,
The whisper’d murmurs of the gathering storm;
Shuts her sweet eye-lids to approaching night;
And hails with freshen’d charms the rising light.
Veil’d, with gay decency and modest pride,
Slow to the mosque she moves, an eastern bride;
There her soft vows unceasing love record,
Queen of the bright seraglio of her Lord. (1: 247–58)1

The Mimosa, still nicknamed the Sensitive Plant, does indeed close up
when its leaflets are touched, whether by a hand, a breath, or a breeze.
Going back to seventeenth-century writings by herbalists, the Mimosa has
been treated as an object of curiosity and wonder, portrayed often as a sen-
sitive and bashful female, but also figured as male in eighteenth-century
pornographic writing (Shteir, “Sensitive, Bashful, and Chaste?”). Here, in
1791, Erasmus Darwin creates through his personification an anticipatory
and sexualized Mimosa as one kind of gendered female for the male gaze.
76  Ann Shteir

Figured as in an oriental tale, she is timid, tender, and chaste, yet “alive
through all her form” as an “eastern bride” on the brink of marriage and
her first sexual encounter.
Darwin’s verse account does not stand alone on the page in the Botanic
Garden. A footnote to the poetic picture of the Mimosa contains lines of
botanical discussion in prose, and in smaller font, that easily take up more
than half the page. Darwin begins with the Latin name of the plant and
then cites its common English name, followed by reference to its Lin-
naean class. Thereafter he steps away from classification and the sexual
system and addresses plant physiology. He hypothesizes possible expla-
nations for the “sleep” and “collapse” in the “sensitive” and “irritable”
parts of the plant, and reports on his own observations and experiments
with the Mimosa. Darwin writes: “I kept a sensitive plant in a dark room
till some hours after day break, its leaves and leaf-stalks were collapsed as
in its most profound sleep, and on exposing it to the light, above twenty
minutes passed before the plant was thoroughly awake and had quite
expanded itself. During the night the upper or smoother surfaces of the
leaves are appressed together, this would seem to shew that the office of
this surface of the leaf was to expose the fluids of the plant to the light as
well as to the air” (LP 25). Within this one long annotation in Loves of
the Plants, Darwin makes cross-reference to botanical notes in other parts
of his poem as well. A reader who follows each such cross-reference will
realize quickly that the length of The Botanic Garden as a poetic text is
more than matched by what Darwin terms “Philosophical Notes,” along
with other paratextual parts of the work. Following upon the four cantos
of The Economy of Vegetation, for example, are more than one hundred
pages of notes on scientific topics in geology, chemistry, and atmospheric
science that include comets, heat, phosphorus, “modern production of
iron,” coal, and circulation and respiration in plants. Further filling out the
composite shape of The Botanic Garden are mythological frontispieces,
intratextual prose “Interludes,” illustrations of plants and of Linnaean
reproductive parts of flowers, and a “Catalogue of the Poetic Exhibition”
followed by an index to the “Contents of the Notes.”
How are we to read such an assemblage? How are we to understand and
interpret the different registers of knowledge visualized on each page of
Darwin’s popular and influential late-eighteenth-century poem? Numer-
ous analyses suggest themselves. We could read the verse and the footnotes
in The Botanic Garden as parallel forms of knowledge, separate and dis-
tinct, with the literary and scientific approaches to nature equal in value and
purpose. Or, we could understand the verse and the informational notes
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  77

as contradictory modes of knowledge that call upon the reader to choose

one or the other. Another way of reading the generic divergence between
verse and footnotes is to construe them in Darwin’s text as two modes
that are in tension, and perhaps in fruitful tension. A still further reading
could consider the two modes as interacting in some kind of composite
that embodies an approach to nature larger than each part on its own. An
additional approach could explain the formats of verse and footnotes in
relation to different audiences for the work, with degrees of knowledge
that call for different forms of explanation. In such a case, one register of
knowledge could serve pedagogically to guide readers to another.
Numerous recent scholars of Romanticism have animated discussion
of Darwin’s work with fresh attention to literary, scientific, and cultural
aspects of The Botanic Garden. Alan Bewell, for one, reads The Botanic
Garden within a nexus of British commerce and imperialism. His Dar-
win is the Lunar Society of Birmingham member with eyes on consum-
erism and expanding British national interests at home and abroad. He
relates The Botanic Garden to eighteenth-century enthusiasms for plants
and gardening, and highlights actual botanical gardens, notably the Royal
Botanic Gardens at Kew. Kew carried symbolic meanings as an ecological
metropole of Britain’s global reach, yet also, he suggests, is a material site
filled with specific plants and flowers that were collected as commodities
for use, beauty, and accumulation of wealth. Seen from this vantage, he
writes, Darwin’s Botanic Garden can be considered “a very expensive gar-
dening book, perfectly suited to appeal to a well-heeled middle-class audi-
ence interested in developing a knowledge and taste for plants” (“Erasmus
Darwin” 28). Dahlia Porter, bringing a more formal literary orientation
to Darwin’s poem, examines how and why Darwin structures The Loves
of the Plants around analogy in the verse and Linnaean taxonomy in the
footnotes. Whereas the taxonomic aspect differentiates empirical features
of nature, Darwin’s analogies represent his view of connections and the
vastness of relations within nature. Porter’s argument is that the struc-
tural boundary between verse and footnotes in Loves of the Plants was a
deliberate strategy by Darwin to separate out science and imagination. It
is taxonomy, she concludes, that “stems the tide of unbounded analogy”
in The Loves of the Plants (“Scientific Analogy” 219). Theresa Kelley, in
a richly detailed study of botany and Romantic-era culture, looks beyond
a bifurcation of verse and prose notes in Loves of the Plants and in The
Botanic Garden as a whole. Although Darwin explicates and illustrates
Linnaeus’s sexual system as a system of order, Kelley identifies an orienta-
tion in the poem critical of Linnaeus’s sexual system and of systematics as
78  Ann Shteir

a whole. Darwin’s poem is an example for her of resistances and challenges

to categories and clear distinctions as “plants challenge the authority of the
Linnaean system with repeated and dramatic imperiousness” (Clandestine
Marriage 79). Furthermore, “The unruliness of … Darwin’s figures gives
him the space he needs to write simultaneously about and away from the
Linnaean system in the same work” (81). His trajectory is towards counter-
narratives of fluidity in theories of nature and practices of normative
relationships.
In the proem to The Loves of the Plants, Darwin writes about the poet
Ovid’s vision of metamorphoses in nature, in which human beings are
transformed into flowers and trees. Darwin declares that his own mission
is to do the reverse: to restore flowers and trees to “their original animality,
after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable man-
sions” (LP vi). Analogy between plants and animals was a building block
of the European cultural imaginary for centuries, and Darwin humanizes
plants for both aesthetic and philosophical reasons in his own grand nar-
rative of growth. Personification was his technical tool for illustrating not
only reproduction in the plant kingdom but also agency and self-generating
relations among plants. Darwin reflects upon his working methods in three
prose interludes in Loves of the Plants about relations between literature
and other modes of knowledge for understanding nature. Discussing the
“sister-arts” of poetry and painting, he asserts an “essential similitude in
the language of the poetic pen and pencil” (LP 119), and traces the process:
“When by the Part of the Painter or Poet a train of ideas is suggested to
our imaginations, which interests us so much by the pain or the pleasure
it affords, that we cease to attend to the irritations of common external
objects, and cease also to use any voluntary efforts to compare these inter-
esting trains of ideas with our previous knowledge of things, a compleat
reverie is produced: during which time however short, if it be but for a
moment, the objects themselves appear to exist before us” (LP 47–8). In
her analysis of Darwin’s poetics, Catherine Packham argues that he gave
human-style passions and behaviours to parts of nature that are already
living beings, and that the personifications in Loves of the Plants are far
from the empty mechanisms that critics attacked. She locates Darwin’s
botanical figures of animation within a wide spectrum of vitalist theories
of nature found in eighteenth-century philosophy, natural philosophy,
and literature. Darwin’s transformation of plants into animals in Loves of
the Plants can be seen, therefore, “to fulfil a scientific as much as a poetic
agenda” (Eighteenth-Century Vitalism 156). In this regard, Darwin’s
way of representing plants in The Botanic Garden anticipates vitalistic
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  79

ideas that he went on to develop further in his Zoonomia; or, the Laws of
Organic Life (1794) and subsequent publications.
Darwin was writing at a time when “serious” science and science writ-
ing were being taken along separate paths from poetry, art, mythology,
and popularizing accounts of new developments in natural history and
natural philosophy. The Botanic Garden was issued in London in 1791
under the imprint of Joseph Johnson, who published milestone works of
children’s literature as well as writings by Mary Wollstonecraft and oth-
ers associated with radical ferment in European politics and ideas. Eras-
mus Darwin, grandfather to Charles Darwin, was a busy physician in the
British Midlands, an enthusiast of progressive Enlightenment thinking, a
celebrated poet, author of scientific treatises and papers, and an avid com-
municator of ideas. He was, along with other like-minded and prosperous
members, part of the Lunar Society of Birmingham that, as Jenny Uglow
has documented, met from the mid-1770s into the 1790s to discuss new
developments in science and technology. Absorbed by new developments
in botany, Darwin translated two Linnaean botanical treatises from Latin
into English at the same time that he was writing The Loves of the Plants.2
The Loves of the Plants was a bestseller when it appeared first in 1789 as a
free-standing publication that won many admirers (and garnered Darwin
considerable profit), so much so that Darwin corresponded with Parlia-
ment about the possibility of a poet laureateship. Critics, however, were
vocal. Poet Henry Crabb Robinson, for one, wrote of Darwin’s “tinsel
gawdy lines” (cited in Bewell, 34). Poet Anna Seward, who was Darwin’s
friend and botanical colleague, wrote in her Memoirs that “Dr. Darwin’s
excellence consists in delighting the eye, the taste, and the fancy,  … but
the passions are generally asleep, and seldom are the nerves thrilled by his
imagery … or by its landscapes” (Seward 177). Goethe acknowledged that
a German translation of Loves of the Plants had inspired his own poem
“Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,” but in a letter to Schiller in 1798 he had
little positive to say about Darwin’s “fashionable” piece of writing [“diese
englische Modeschrift”] with its pile-up of textual features and allegorical
figurations, and no trace of poetic feeling to hold it all together. Odder still,
Goethe adds, is that he finds no actual plants in this botanical work.3
Darwin had a large agenda for his poem. The prefatory advertisement
to each part distinguishes between the “general design” and the “par-
ticular design” of the work. Whereas the “general design” is “to inlist
Imagination under the banner of Science,” the “particular design” is “to
induce the ingenious to cultivate the knowledge of Botany, by introduc-
ing them to the vestibule of that delightful science, and recommending
80  Ann Shteir

to their attention the immortal works of the celebrated Swedish Natural-

ist, LINNEUS” (EV v). Darwin intervenes through his poem in disputes
about the validity of Linnaean ideas about sexual reproduction in plants;
his descriptions often included botanical details that added to Linnaeus’s
system, and historian of science Janet Browne has made the point that
Darwin likely intended his poem, above all, “to be a reaffirmation of Lin-
naeus’s insistence on plant sexuality in the face of increasingly numerous
anti-Linnaean publications” (“Botany for Gentlemen” 602). Seen from
this perspective, there are ample grounds for arguing that the notes in The
Botanic Garden were more important to Darwin than the verse.

Form and Footnotes in The Botanic Garden and “Die Alpen”

Darwin’s Botanic Garden is not the first eighteenth-century poem to

blend verbal modes. A  notable German-language example is Albrecht
von Haller’s poem “Die Alpen” (1732), which brings together descriptive
verse and scientific observations in an idealized vision of nature in the
mountain world of the Swiss Alps. Haller (1708–77) was a Swiss poly-
math known throughout Europe as a poet and scholarly editor, and as
author of many learned publications about anatomy, botany, and medi-
cine. “Die Alpen” appeared first in Haller’s collection of poetry Versuch
schweizerischer Gedichte, and was reprinted and widely translated during
the eighteenth century. Haller wrote with deep admiration about the lives
and values of Alpine dwellers, and describes Alpine folk festivals, routines
of cheesemaking, and other instances of hard work. The moral trajectory
of the poem is pastoral, for Haller reflects on the simplicity and happi-
ness that result from being in congruence with nature, by contrast to the
corrupt and vapid lives of city dwellers. “Die Alpen” consists of forty-
nine stanzas of tightly organized alexandrines, and Caroline Schaumann
makes the point in a new study of this poem that Haller’s poetic form itself
manifests his overall didacticism insofar as “Haller relies on the meter in
order to emphasize tradition, convention, and conscientious labor” (61).
The pastoral quality in Haller’s account of the bucolic world of mountain
people leads him also to paint verbal pictures of Alpine topography and
features of waterfalls, rock formations, minerals, and plants. Two stan-
zas pertinent to discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden
detail Alpine meadows, and wildflowers observed there. In the first of
these stanzas Haller describes features of two species of gentian, one yel-
low and the other blue, and characterizes their stature among other native
plants. This stanza reads as follows in a prose translation of Haller’s poem
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  81

into English, dating from 1794: “The noble Gentian lifts his proud head
above the crowd of vulgar plants; a whole blossomed cohort ranges under
his banner; and even his brother, distinguished by his clothing of celestial
blue, bows down to yield him homage: his golden flowers encircle the grey
stalk, and form a splendid crown: upon the satined leaves streaked with
dark green, liquid diamonds shoot their keen sparkles.”4 While Haller’s
adjectives of nobility, hierarchy, and authority speak to moral dimensions
of the poem, details about the colour, size, and shape of the two gentians
are meant to convey the poet’s careful observation of features distinguish-
ing one plant from another. Haller strengthens the empirical linkage to
the Alpine plants by inserting footnotes with Latin notations that identify
them botanically. Thus, the footnote to lines 381–4 of the verse names the
two gentians in the following manner: “Gentiana floribus rotates verticil-
latus. Enum. Helv. p. 478, one of the largest Alpine plants, and whose
healing powers are widely known, and the blue foliis amplexicaulibus floris
fauce barbata. Enum. Helv. p. 473, which is smaller and less attractive.”5
He goes on similarly in the next stanza to describe the size, leaf shape and
configuration, colour, and habitat of other Alpine plants. The prose trans-
lation of Haller’s text reads:

Here the narrow leaves of a modest vegetable spread their net-work of ash-
colour: the flower resembles a bird of amethyst, with its beak of shining gold:
there a lovely plant bends its indented and glittering foliage over the surface
of the river: the stream reflects its beauties; the calyx tinted with delicate pur-
ple, the velvet petals sprinkled with snow. The rose and the emerald spread
all their beauties upon the meadows; and the very rocks shine in a vestment
of purple.6

Footnotes to these lines continue to identify the plants botanically. For

example, the opening four lines of the stanza refer to alpine toadflax, a
low spreading plant with grey-green foliage and purple flowers that now
is called Linaria alpina. By contrast, Haller designates the alpine toadflax
botanically as “Antirrhinum caule procumbente, foliis verticillatis, floribus
congestis.” Haller did not agree with the nomenclatural system devised by
Linnaeus that used a two-word shortcut practice of genus and species as
the way to name plants. Instead, he used long Latin descriptive phrases to
identify plants. His practice, continuing throughout his career as a writer
on medical and botanical topics, placed him outside the eighteenth-century
nomenclatural mainstream. The page references that follow upon the
descriptive phrases in the footnotes to the stanzas shown above all refer to
82  Ann Shteir

Haller’s own scholarly botanical compilation of Swiss plants, Enumeratio

methodica stirpium Helvetiae indigenarum (1742). This influential work
appeared after several editions of his poem “Die Alpen” had been pub-
lished, and Haller integrated citations from it into the fourth edition of the
poem (Shteir, “Albrecht von Haller’s Botany”).
In 1794, readers in England had access for the first time to a translation
of Haller’s poem into English, and the story around this builds a cultural
bridge that connects Haller’s early and mid-eighteenth-century botani-
cal work to the content and context of Erasmus Darwin’s writing in later
decades. Alison Martin has studied the prose rendering of “Die Alpen”
undertaken by “Mrs J. Howorth” that brought Haller’s ideas to a British
audience familiar by then with Rousseauistic ideas about nature and also
interested in the scientific aims of Haller’s poem. Mrs Howorth herself
(about whom little is known) had clear botanical interests and pursued the
study of plants during the decades of the 1780s and 1790s when botani-
cal culture was burgeoning. She corresponded with Sir James E. Smith,
the first president of the Linnaean Society and himself a translator of key
Linnaean publications, and dedicated her Poems of Baron Haller to him
as a fervent botanist and institution builder (“Natural Effusions” 23–4).
Her translation dates from a period in the cultural history of science in
Britain, America, and elsewhere when women participated in studying,
collecting, drawing, translating, writing about plants, and teaching others
(Shteir, Cultivating Women; George, Botany, Sexuality; Teute, “The Loves
of the Plants”).
Readers of Mrs Howorth’s translation of Haller’s mix of nature descrip-
tion and botanical detail, in all likelihood familiar with Erasmus Darwin’s
Botanic Garden from just a few years earlier, may well have noted similar-
ities between the two works. Writing more than fifty years after publica-
tion of “Die Alpen,” Darwin shares Haller’s interest in using verse to extol
nature and its workings, and both poets write out of deep involvement in
technical botany and other sciences of their day. But Darwin’s account
goes way beyond the empirical rendering of the ideal world that Haller
portrays in his praise of Alpine orderliness. Where Haller aimed for clarity
and simplicity in language, Darwin’s poetry and prose are exuberant and
on the move, piling up images and information. The imaginative writing
in Darwin’s verse leads to extensive footnotes that in turn guide the reader
into Linnaean systematics, as well as towards practices in plant physiol-
ogy, and other new directions in scientific study of the vegetable king-
dom that Darwin himself will contribute to through subsequent works.7
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  83

Yet those same footnotes are for Darwin part of an elaborate apparatus
that surrounds his poem with explanations that are both scientific and
aesthetic. His vision of nature is vitalistic as he brings forces of nature
alive. Darwin also brings mythologies into the mix as part of his vision
of nature, and thereby moves, in my view, past literary figuration into
something else.

Mythology and the Goddess

In Darwin’s day, botany was a component of fashionable activity having

to do with sociability and pleasure across the broad middle range of Brit-
ish society. Writing in this regard in the proem to The Loves of the Plants,
Darwin positions the verse botanical material for his intended “Gentle
Reader” as “diverse little pictures suspended over the chimney of a Lady’s
dressing-room” (LP v–vi). Darwin clearly nods to gendered ideas about a
feminized reader who will be attracted by ornament and aesthetics. How-
ever, Darwin had other audiences in mind, including women who looked
to botany as a sphere for their own intellectual activity.
Across both parts of the poem, Darwin constructs an elaborate mytho-
logical apparatus to embody and express a vision of nature as elemental
and dynamic. Classical mythology appears in references to Venus and
Vulcan, Hercules, Jupiter and Juno, and to terrestrial goddesses such as
Flora, Pomona, and Ceres. The overarching cast of mythological char-
acters extends, however, outside traditional Greek and Roman gods and
goddesses and the stories they have embodied across European cultures.
In this regard, the dominant figure in The Botanic Garden is the “Botanic
Goddess.” Darwin’s own creation, she is invoked at the start of the poem
by the Genius of the Place, and her trajectory through domains of nature
gives textual shape to the poem as a whole. It is her voice that guides the
reader across the text. She arrives in the opening canto of The Economy of
Vegetation and departs at the end of the fourth and closing canto of The
Loves of the Plants:

She comes! – the GODDESS! – through the whispering air,

Bright as the morn, descends her blushing car;
Each circling wheel a wreath of flowers intwines,
And gem’d with flowers the silken harness shines;
… Light from her airy seat the Goddess bounds,
And steps celestial press the pansied grounds. (EV 1: 59–68)
84  Ann Shteir

Also termed “Fair Spring,” the Goddess of Botany then calls upon elemen-
tal creatures that have command of specific areas in nature and that will
accompany her on a journey through her domain. Her retinue will depend
upon nymphs of fire and of water, gnomes of the earth, and sylphs of the
air who will keep the economy of nature on track. The myth system being
called upon here is Rosicrucian, that is, European esoteric beliefs, symbols,
and practices going back many centuries, and going back farther still to
ancient Egyptian emblems, hieroglyphs, and allegories. Earlier in the eigh-
teenth century, Alexander Pope had marshalled Rosicrucian sylphs and
others for his witty heroicomical poem “The Rape of the Lock” (1712–14).
There the coquette Belinda is assisted in her daily toilette by legions of
spirits charged with preparing her for daily routines of beauty, akin to
readiness for the battle that then ensues: “The busy Sylphs surround their
darling care, / These set the head, and those divide the hair, / Some fold
the sleeve, whilst others plait the gown” (1: 145–7). The gap in Pope’s
telling between the weighty machinery of multiple gnomes, mythological
figures, and extravagant references, on the one hand, and the slightness
of the action, on the other, is the satiric heart of Pope’s wonderful poem.
By contrast, the sylphs, gnomes, and nymphs of The Botanic Garden
personify Darwin’s vision of elemental and active nature, and are not
meant to be only clever machinery. Darwin’s use of such figures in fact
offers a productive way to think about cultural dimensions of nature and
science at a time when artists, writers, scholars, sceptics and critics, trans-
lators and teachers told and retold, adapted and reshaped, stories from
Greek and Roman mythology. Mythologists across the earlier and later
eighteenth century used their retellings to connect to old stories in widely
disparate ways. Some linked the present to the past so as to justify con-
temporary social codes and practices, shore up hierarchies, or confirm
gender systems. Others sought to undercut earlier versions of stories,
as when Enlightenment sceptics read myths from Greece and Rome as
historical record rather than as divinely ordained truths; their accounts
put gods and goddesses into mortal forms as historical individuals who
were deified to suit politics or nation building (Feldman and Richard-
son). Some repudiated mythology altogether. Others, however, sought
alternatives. Darwin, for one, was interested in new or less-known older
accounts of origin stories. He was fascinated by a treatise on mythology
by Jacob Bryant that had appeared in the 1770s, entitled A New System,
or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology, and refers to it in footnote refer-
ences in The Botanic Garden. Bryant was an antiquarian and Christian
who believed in the scriptural Mosaic account of the Flood. Wanting to
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  85

correct ancient history, he asserted that the Greeks had claimed for their
own origin stories that trace way back before their time. “The Greeks,”
he wrote, “were so prepossessed with a notion of their own excellence
and antiquity, that they supposed every ancient tradition to have pro-
ceeded from themselves” (1: 130). Instead, Bryant uses etymology and
other tools as “historical evidence” that may help to win over “infidels”
(3: vii). He writes about cognate rites and idols that are found in mytholo-
gies cross-culturally, and argues that these developed out of earlier Egyp-
tian hieroglyphs and allegories and in “universal” stories that circulated
among Babylonians and other early peoples. Like Bryant, Darwin seems
to have found Greek and Roman mythologies limiting as well. Instead,
Darwin evokes in The Botanic Garden typologies that are older, but that
in his day were both a new style and a critical alternative style. He inte-
grated Bryant’s thinking about hieroglyphs and elemental themes and fig-
ures into his own writing as a way to get at continuities between past and
present and to be both philosophical and visionary in his approaches to
nature.
In the opening lines of The Economy of Vegetation the Goddess of Bot-
any descends from the heavens as an embodiment of Nature but specifi-
cally in relation to plants. She gives instructions to her minions, the four
elements. Nymphs of fire are instructed in canto 1 to use their heat, for
example, for plant germination and growth. Gnomes of the earth are to
enrich the soil:

Go, gentle Gnomes! resume your vernal toil.

Seek my chill tribes, which sleep beneath the soil;
On grey-moss banks, green meads, or furrow’d lands,
Spread the dark mould, white lime, and crumbling sands;
Each bursting bud with healthier juices feed. (EV 2: 542–6)

Water nymphs, addressed in canto 3, sustain plants and breathe “sweet

enchantment o’er BRITTANIA’s isle” (EV 3: 262). The power of the
Botanic Goddess and her elements is reinforced across both The Economy
of Vegetation and Loves of the Plants. Darwin’s Botanic Goddess might be
read principally as a rhetorical creation for his intended audience, a strate-
gic choice to help entice female readers into kinship with “her” kingdom,
but she is larger than that. That she is figured in relation to the plant king-
dom illustrates well later eighteenth-century orientations towards organic
domains. The Botanic Goddess is apt for Darwin himself and for his time.
The significance of his choice becomes clear when Darwin’s creation of
86  Ann Shteir

the Botanic Goddess is juxtaposed with the figure  of Flora, the Roman
goddess of flowers. Writers and pedagogues contemporary to Darwin had
named Flora as their literary guide in narratives that, similarly to Dar-
win’s, concern new directions in natural history. Darwin has a Flora too,
but only as one of the handmaids that attends on the Botanic Goddess in
the company of other nature divinities:

Hither, emerging from yon orient skies,

BOTANIC GODDESS! Bend thy radiant eyes;
O’er these soft scenes assume thy gentle reign,
Pomona, Ceres, Flora in thy train. (EV 1: 43–6)

Flora assigns dominance in the vegetable kingdom not to Flora and other
terrestrial goddesses, but to the Botanic Goddess instead. She is an over-
arching figure that is at once explicitly scientific and, I suggest, even more
powerfully mythological. The figure  of the Botanic Goddess takes The
Botanic Garden into a different kind of reading, beyond personification,
and into a larger vision of nature, in which empirical features are compo-
nents in a still larger whole.
With his reference to Flora, Erasmus Darwin joined himself to a rich
cultural legacy. Mythologies throughout the world have some version
of a Flora figure, a personified aspect of nature associated with spring-
time that represents fertility and the coming into flower of plants. Flora
made her way into Roman popular culture and religious ritual and out
into mythology textbooks, literature, science, and the visual arts. Within
western European culture, into the Renaissance and Early Modern era and
beyond, she was depicted in many guises. One is as the Mother of Flowers
who generates growth through her body’s milk. Another is as the Queen
of Flowers, a figure of power who presides over seasonal and agricultural
cycles of rebirth and fruition. She can be young and part of a narrative of
blooming into marriage and motherhood  – as in Botticelli’s Primavera.
Often Flora was depicted as sexually alluring. She has been gendered and
embodied in ways that sometimes represent power, pleasure, agency, and
knowledge, but often convey negative versions of womankind. Always
anchored in the body, sexed female and gendered feminine, she carries
traffic across the centuries, an all-too-ready vocabulary for naturalizations
of difference (Shteir, “Flora primavera or Flora meretrix?”). In the eigh-
teenth century, in particular, Flora is figured in song, on stage, in portrai-
ture and historical painting, in garden statuary and architecture, in verse
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  87

and fiction. Ubiquitous in many cultural forms, a mythological Flora cer-

tainly serves Erasmus Darwin’s purposes well.
However, Darwin’s figurehead in The Botanic Garden is the Botanic
Goddess and not Flora. Because of Darwin’s interest in both botany and
expansive mythologies, the narrator of his poem carries a name that is less
about flowers and more about systematic study of plants, that is, the sci-
ence of botany. For Darwin, and for his time, the term “botany” registered
as more strictly scientific than would references to “Flora.” An apostrophe
to the Botanic Goddess early in Loves of the Plants addresses her as the
“Botanic Muse” who inspired Linnaeus in his work: “who in this latter age
/ Led by your airy hand the Swedish sage, / Bad his keen eye your secret
haunts explore” (LP 1: 31–3). By linking Linnaeus to the Botanic Goddess
and her “secrets of nature,” Darwin gives tremendous power to mythol-
ogy as a guide in formulating scientific ideas. In this poem, as indeed in his
writings more generally, Darwin elucidates his own mythologies so as to
move back and forth among types of knowledge.
Darwin’s view of nature is not a binary between literary and scientific
approaches to knowledge. Instead, The Botanic Garden is an amalgam in
which literary and scientific features join to express a vision of nature that
is larger than the components. The crossover point for Darwin is imagina-
tion as a resource and a tool, a force integral to both literary and scientific
modes of knowing. Darwin addresses the importance of imagination in the
“Advertisement” that opens his publication. He writes: “The general design
of the following sheets is to inlist [sic] Imagination under the banner of
Science; and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out
the imagery of poetry, to the stricter, ones which form the ratiocination of
philosophy” (v). Imagination is Darwin’s path from poetry to philosophy.
It underlies science as much as poetry, and is as important for him as infor-
mation. Darwin’s poem abounds in references to empirical practices, yet
the overarching vision is holistic and seeks to understand a unity of nature
in the forces and patterns that underlie all life. For these reasons, Darwin’s
analogies between plants and animals and his personifications and creative
mythologies make botany more philosophical than taxonomic. For these
reasons, his writing includes both the fable and the footnote.
Mythology proves to be a good resource for analysing traffic across
the domains of literature and science at the time when Erasmus Darwin
was contributing to it as an expanding area of natural knowledge and
encouraging others to join him. While the Botanic Goddess suits Darwin’s
late-eighteenth-century orientation as a specialized goddess that speaks to
88  Ann Shteir

emerging disciplinary-specific directions of that time, she also embodies

the larger philosophy of Darwin’s poem when read as a whole. Her place-
ment as the lead figure from the beginning of The Economy of Vegetation
through to the conclusion of The Loves of the Plants gives a cosmic frame
to Darwin’s ideas about growth and change. The Botanic Goddess is the
source of plants in their materiality and an energizing force that propels
plant processes. She animates the place and ground that are the Botanic
Garden, whose space is the poem. She also is the force that shapes relations
among the plants and within nature. She does not impose adherence of
the plants to system. Indeed, the plants in her vegetable kingdom are not
reverent Linnaeans. Instead of fitting tidily within Linnaean taxonomies,
they transgress boundaries and are far from walled in. Furthermore, as a
female narrator, the Botanic Goddess mediates Darwin’s poem to audi-
ences, particularly to the female readers whose botanical study Darwin
seeks to promote. She can serve as a narrative hook and literary way to
reach them, and thus can be construed as a strategic feature in the compo-
sition and publication of the poem in that time of burgeoning populariza-
tions of knowledge.
As much as The Botanic Garden can be read for literary and structural
features discussed in this chapter, Darwin’s embodied female Botanic
Goddess also has specificity and materiality in relation to his own time
and place. During the 1790s, women in England wrote about botany with
the same pedagogical and popularizing purposes found in The Botanic
Gardens, especially in Loves of the Plants. Didactic and expository texts
such as Priscilla Wakefield’s Introduction to Botany, in a Series of Famil-
iar Letters (1796), and Botanical Dialogues, between Hortensia and Her
Four Children (1797), written by Maria Elizabeth Jacson from within
Darwin’s own circle in the Midlands, were part of a literary marketplace
of expository books about botany and other areas of natural history
for women, children, and general readers that began around 1760 and
extended into the mid-nineteenth century (Shteir, Cultivating Women;
George; Kelley 103–10). Darwin was widely familiar with the interests
of contemporary women in plants as objects of botanical, horticultural,
and aesthetic attention, and his writing was a springboard for other
women botanical writers, who themselves continued bringing botanical
knowledge to female audiences. His own Plan for the Conduct of Female
Education in Boarding Schools (1797) sets out a curriculum that includes
botany as well as natural history, mythology, technology, and a range
of other Arts and Sciences. There, after listing several introductory and
illustrated texts that supplied instruction about botany, Darwin put in a
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  89

plug for his own work: “And lastly I shall not forbear to mention, that
the philosophical part of botany may be agreeably learnt from the notes
to the second volume of the Botanic garden, whether the poetry be read
or not” (41).
The Botanic Goddess links Darwin’s creation of a new-style mythol-
ogy in The Botanic Garden to actual “modern” Botanic goddesses, and
would-be goddesses, of his time. Mythological frontispieces to the two
parts of the poem illustrate this well, while also raising questions about
ideas of femininity and womanhood that The Botanic Garden may be
promoting. Indeed, despite the powerful agency of the Botanic Goddess,
The Botanic Garden positions women within normative gendered ideas of
womanhood that historically shaped women’s relationship to knowledge
of nature and science.
The visual aspect of Darwin’s work is beyond the immediate purview
of this essay, but a few remarks are relevant to the Botanic Goddess in the
poem as imaginative vision, normative practices, and possible experiential
realities. The Loves of the Plants, the chronologically earlier part of The
Botanic Garden, carries a frontispiece captioned “FLORA at Play with
CUPID” that was drawn by Emma Crewe, a socially well-placed artist.
It portrays Flora languidly posed, with flowers massed in her hair and
Cupid’s arrow in her lap. Her face is conventionally appealing, though
with a demure and flirty edge that mirrors Darwin’s Linnaean verses. This
image would easily find a place among other decorative representations
in visual culture that would appeal to female audiences interested in the
“looser” analogies of botanical poetry. The frontispiece for the overarch-
ing composite publication The Botanic Garden is another story. Painter
and illustrator Henry Fuseli was commissioned to do this piece in line
with Darwin’s request for an image that would be “an allegory of the
whole work” (cited in Bewell, 24), and “Flora attir’d by the Elements”
captures Darwin’s Romantic energy well. Fuseli’s Flora ( figure 3.1) is a
force of nature being dressed by Earth, Air, Fire and Water for her work
as a goddess in the plant kingdom. The image is a visual counterpart to a
passage from The Economy of Vegetation:

Pleased GNOMES, ascending from their earthy beds,

Play round her graceful footsteps, as she treads;
Gay SYLPHS attendant beat the fragrant air
On winnowing wings, and waft her golden hair;
Blue NYMPHS emerging leave their sparkling streams,
And FIERY FORMS alight from orient beams. (1: 73–8)
Figure 3.1  “FLORA attired by the ELEMENTS” by Henry Fuseli is the
frontispiece to Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts
(London, 1791). Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University
of Toronto.
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  91

Henry Fuseli gives this passage a contemporary twist. Fuseli’s gnome

ascends from its “earthy bed” with budding floral growths in hand, his
sylph of the air wears a butterfly hat, a figure  of fire in a flaming hel-
met holds a mirror, and a graceful nymph points to water as an elemental
source. Darwin’s text does not characterize the appearance of Flora/the
Botanic Goddess herself. It is Fuseli who represents her as an attractive
and rather haughty and self-possessed young woman, dressed in a manner
that would have looked distinctly elegant and fashionable in 1791. The
position of her lower body seems modest, but the full pose is sinuous and
alluring, aligned well with Linnaean ideas about sexuality and Darwin’s
own ideas about fecundity.
Fuseli’s frontispiece to The Botanic Garden depicts Flora as a modern
and sexualized young woman, a possible icon for her time. But how and
in what ways might “Flora attir’d by the Elements” bring women over
the threshold into study of botany, especially in its “stricter” analogies of
philosophic and scientific thought? Several readings suggest themselves.
In one kind of reading, the Fuseli/Darwin image of Flora naturalizes
Woman as elementally female and the object of a sexualized gaze, preoc-
cupied with her body rather than with intellectual directions in the study
of nature. In another, Flora is the Botanic Goddess who controls the ele-
ments, and thus orchestrates both the economy of vegetation and the
loves of the plants. As an exemplar for a modern botanizing goddess, she
may be read as self-possessed and self-aware, modelling clever resource-
fulness, inhabiting the part as a route to power. Further readings build
upon or challenge traditional associations between women and flowers.
Ideas about emancipatory sexualities were associated with radical politics
at that time, and perhaps Fuseli and Darwin were showing in this regard a
new template for women beyond the binaries of feminine/masculine and
body/mind. Theresa Kelley remarks that Loves of the Plants is “more
evidently about the role of females than males in classificatory argu-
ment,” and further that “Darwin’s goddess of botany supervises a system
of figuration that pushes at and away from the epistemological grip of
a systematic founded on figurative males as taxonomic as well as social
governors” (89). Attention to the Botanic Goddess in Darwin’s Botanic
Garden, in other words, takes us out past literary features of narrative
and metaphor and into considering this iconic figure as both represen-
tation and potential reality. For, as she goes, so late-eighteenth-century
female and male readers, writers, and teachers may follow in her train.
Attention to the Botanic Goddess may also orient readers of the poem
beyond empirical details of plants and their landscapes into spheres of
92  Ann Shteir

elemental forces and micro and macro cosmic processes. Some older inter-
preters of Darwin’s thought and writing, instead of analysing his poetic
diction or foregrounding his progressive and evolutionary views, accentu-
ated his “Orphic” ideas, including his preoccupation with Eleusinian mys-
teries and “secrets” of nature. Irwin Primer, for one, read Darwin’s late
poem The Temple of Nature as “a marriage of poetry and science” at the
very time that “the humanistic and the scientific cultures … were moving
steadily away from one another” (“Erasmus Darwin’s Temple” 76). More
recently, historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot has provided an
impetus of an ecological and philosophical kind to this interpretive direc-
tion in his erudite study The Veil of Isis: An Essay in the History of the
Idea of Nature. Hadot is fervently interested in mythology and mytho-
logical figures that have been used to write about nature and science in the
Western cultural imagination. Prometheus the fire-bringer and Orpheus
the singer serve his purposes well. Hadot explains that mythology was
“poetic physics” for medieval and Renaissance thinkers and writers (79),
and he himself is drawn to metaphors, iconographies, and aesthetics as
ways to understand “secrets” of nature and to admire and venerate the
enigmas of life and the world. These form the Orphic attitude towards
nature. The Promethean attitude shares in admiration of nature, but seeks
to understand nature’s secrets so as to use nature through observation and
technique. While the contrast is familiar enough in analyses about organic
and mechanical ideas about nature, Hadot’s broad-brush study stretches
across nearly twenty-five centuries from ancient thought into beliefs of
more recent philosophers and scientists. Hadot wisely points out that the
Promethean and Orphic orientations towards nature “do not necessarily
exclude each other, and are often found united in the same person … The
two attitudes … correspond to our ambiguous relation to nature, and they
cannot be separated in too definitive a way” (97). Hadot has heroes in his
study, Goethe notably among them as poet and scholar. Although Eras-
mus Darwin’s Botanic Garden does not figure  in his account, Darwin’s
work nicely embodies, in content and form, Hadot’s thinking about con-
trasting but coexisting ideas in our relation to nature. The Botanic Garden
also is congruent with Hadot’s overall orientation towards the poetically
Orphic rather than the scientifically Promethean.
Erasmus Darwin’s expository The Botanic Garden blends science, poetry,
and mythologies into an amalgam of information and visionary ideas.
Like Haller’s poem “Die Alpen,” Darwin’s poem showcases burgeoning
eighteenth-century interest in scientific approaches to nature. Empirical
features of observation, classification, and nomenclature are important to
 Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden  93

both writers, each of whom contributed directly and substantially to the

elaboration and dissemination of botany. However, Darwin’s integration
of scientific focus and an extended literary apparatus came from a different
time and place as well as from a different person and mindset within the
history of European culture. Darwin embodies the intellectual, cultural,
and political turmoil of the 1780s and 1790s, when analogical and organi-
cist approaches to nature and writing were challenging earlier modes. In a
recent study of German Romanticism and science, Jocelyn Holland exam-
ines procreation as both an explicit theme and a process of thought in lit-
erary writings about science at that time. She tracks Romantic discourse
that includes matters of reproduction as well as metaphors and analogies
of organic change on a broad scale across the arts and sciences. Holland
makes a powerful case for “a productive coupling” of literature and science
by studying Goethe’s poem “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen” (1798), for
example, in which Goethe “embeds the scientific activities of observation
and experimentation within a procreative context” (14). The same notion
of a “productive coupling” applies to The Botanic Garden. Published in
the same decade as Goethe’s writings about botany, The Botanic Garden
is an intriguing generic hybrid that takes account of new philosophies of
nature and new audiences for developments in science. Although its for-
mal features, piling up metaphor, verse, and prose, are not to most current
literary tastes, Darwin’s multidimensional text from 1791 still has much to
teach. His poem carries ecological and cosmological provocations across
the centuries to writers and readers who seek new types of relationships
with animate worlds, and who are in search of effective and imaginative
forms for communicating their ideas about nature and science.

NOTES

1 The original 1791 edition of The Botanic Garden carried separate pagination
for each of the two parts of the poem. Page references, and line references
within individual cantos of the poems will be shown in this way, preceded by
EV for The Economy of Vegetation and LP for The Loves of the Plants.
2 Darwin’s translation of Linnaeus’s Species plantarum (1753) was published
as A System of Vegetables (1783) and Genera Plantarum (1737) as Families of
Plants (1787).
3 Goethe, Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, ed. Dorothea Kuhn (Weimar:
Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1986), 2: 9B, 130–1. I thank Christian Weber
for bringing this letter to my attention.
94  Ann Shteir

4 Mrs J. Howorth, trans., The Poems of Baron Haller 31. Haller’s text is:

“Dort ragt das hohe Haupt am edlen Enziane

Weit übern niedern Chor der Pöbel-Kräuter hin;
Ein ganzes Blumen-Volk dient unter seiner Fahne,
Sein blauer Bruder selbst bückt sich und ehret ihn.
Der Blumen helles Gold, in Strahlen umgebogen,
Türmt sich am Stengel auf und krönt sein grau Gewand;
Der Blätter glattes Weiss, mit tiefem Grün durchzogen,
Bestrahlt der bunte Blitz von feuchtem Diamant[.]”
(In Die Alpen, ll. 381–8)
5 Trans. Shteir. Haller’s footnote is this: “Gentiana floribus rotates verticillatus.
Enum. Helv. p. 478, eines der grössten Alpen-Kräuter, und dessen Heil-
Kräfte überall bekannt sind, und der blaue foliis amplexicaulibus floris fauce
barbata. Enum. Helv. p. 473, der viel kleiner und unansehnlicher ist.” In Mrs
Howorth’s translation, the footnote is reduced to read only Gentiana lutea
and Gentiana bavarica, with no further nomenclatural or botanical details.
6 The Poems of Baron Haller 31–2. Haller’s text is:
Hier kriecht ein niedrig Kraut, gleich einem grauen Nebel,
Dem die Natur sein Blatt in Kreutze hingelegt;
Die holde Blume zeigt die zwey vergüldten Schnäbel,
Die ein von Amethyst gebildter Vogel trägt.
Dort wirft ein glänzend Blatt, in Finger ausgekerbet,
Auf eine helle Bach den grünen Wiederschein;
Der Blumen zarten Schnee, den matter Purpur färbet,
Schliesst ein gestreifter Stern in weisse Strahlen ein:
Smaragt und Rosen blühn, auch auf zertretner Heiden
Und Felsen decken sich mit einem Purpur-Kleide. (391–400)
7 The titles Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life (1794), Phytologia; or the
Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800), and Temple of Nature; or,
the Origin of Society (published posthumously in 1803) illustrate Erasmus
Darwin’s philosophic reach and orientation towards the life sciences and their
applications.

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Teute, Frederika J. “The Loves of the Plants: or, the Cross-Fertilization of Sci-
ence and Desire at the End of the Eighteenth Century.” Huntington Library
Quarterly 63.3 (2000): 319–45.
Uglow, Jenny. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the
World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
4 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften:
The Career of a Metaphor

christian p. weber

The relationship between poetry and science seems intuitively clear. They
appear to be distinct from each other through mutual exclusion. Whereas
poetic fiction expresses subjective ideas by imaginatively combining
images and words and realizing them through the creation of mythical
or literary worlds, scientific investigation – at least according to its com-
mon modern understanding  – aims for the objective representation of
knowledge by rigorously excluding anything that can be associated with
fiction.1 Whereas poets virtually transcend in imaginary flights the “real”
world and thus the material basis of science, scientists arrive at facts as the
result of strictly controlling their imagination, reducing nature to a spe-
cifically defined subject matter, and comparing the data of measurements.
Yet, the presumption of this mutual exclusion is challenged by problems
of distinction within each domain: How can scientists set aside subjective
impulses? What determines the subject matter of a scientific investigation?
What counts essentially as “matter” and what should be labelled just as
evidence or inference? On what “objective” basis can these decisions and
distinctions be made? And vice versa: poetic fiction requires and relies on
commonly shared factual knowledge about the world in order to be able
to articulate meaning and facilitate understanding. How else could a poeti-
cal, genuinely imaginary world come into existence if not by drawing its
material from the “real,” which is, to a certain degree, a scientifically struc-
tured world? Eventually, poetry needs to manifest its alternative ideas by
leaving a material trace and having a “real” impact on peoples’ lives. These
probing questions defy the clear-cut distinction between “facts” and “fic-
tion” so that, ultimately, the heuristic status of these concepts themselves
oscillates between fact and fiction. Once this distinction has been blurred,
fiction turns into fact and fact (re)turns into(as) fiction.
98  Christian P. Weber

In light of this problem of definition, the following essay argues that

the transmutability or translatability between scientific fact and poetic
fiction is actually not only possible or unavoidable, but even desired for
the progress of both (seemingly mutually exclusive) human activities.
On the one hand, poetry can find inspiration in new scientific discov-
eries for the invention of innovative metaphors and visions of alterna-
tive (utopian) worlds. On the other hand, the strict focus of science on
factual analysis encounters at some point limits of insight and overview
over all facts and relations. At this point, science often reverts to poetic
ideas and figurative language in order to breach new avenues of research
and eventually to reach a more comprehensive, higher theoretical level
of understanding. In fact, as Evelyn Fox Keller has recently argued,
language, and more specifically figurative language, is the common
denominator and mediator through which the opposite trajectories of
science and poetry are interconnected and interact:

Scientific research is typically directed at the elucidation of entities and

processes about which no clear understanding exists, and to proceed, sci-
entists must find ways of talking about what they do not know – about that
which they as yet have only glimpses, guesses, speculations. To make sense
of their day-to-day efforts, they need to invent words, expressions, forms
of speech that can indicate or point to phenomena for which they have no
literal descriptors … Making sense of what is not yet known is thus neces-
sarily an ongoing and provisional activity, a groping in the dark; and for this,
the imprecision and flexibility of figurative language is indispensable. (Fox
Keller, Making Sense of Life 118)

Fox Keller’s statement responds to the mysterious processes of genetic

evolution as well as the phenomenal and thus conceptual instability of the
term “gene.” Yet her astute observation is hardly new, and neither are the
described methodic problems that challenge modern biogenetic research.
In fact, the situation is very reminiscent of the beginnings of modern chem-
istry, when Lavoisier redefined the term “element” to bring order into the
otherwise confusing mixes and matches of chemical substances. Yet even
this great French chemist, the embodiment of a rational and rationalist
modern scientist, continued to operate with the anthropomorphic and
alchemistic metaphor “elective affinities” to characterize – rather than just
describe – the mysterious “motivation” of chemical reactions.
As this chapter will show, “elective affinity” has been an attractive met-
aphor for many other scientific discourses as well, especially at the turn
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  99

from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and it continues to be so

even today. The following case study traces the career of this metaphor
as it transgresses the divide between matter and idea (spirit), fact and fic-
tion, science and poetry. For each discourse that resorts to this metaphor,
it aims to describe the gains (in insight) or losses (of sight) by using it.
Or, to approach this matter from the opposite direction in recognition
of the intrinsic power that Hans Blumenberg ascribed to metaphors, the
chapter aims to figure out what sort of lifestyle – understood as the will
and desire to (trans)form life in a certain fundamental manner – this par-
ticular metaphor has empowered and how it has changed the world.2 The
metaphor of “elective affinities” is particularly interesting for the study of
these questions because it circulated in almost every discourse around the
time of the French Revolution and because there is a pre-eminent literary
work that emerged as a critical response to the pressing task of reflect-
ing the aforementioned issues in light of the great transformations that
this world-historic event has brought about. As I argue in the following,
Goethe created his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften,3 published in 1809,
(literally) as a poetical experiment to systematically explore the funda-
mental relations that its title metaphor has entertained by shaping various
scientific discourses and even inspiring new socio-political programs and
cultural life forms. However, I pursue here a different strategy than deliv-
ering a plain interpretation of the (supposedly) scientific content of this
literary work, bearing in mind Helmut Müller-Sievers’s warning:

Literary texts do not contain scientific theorems as their subject matter, and
science is not in need of the support of literary ornamentation … Unless the
analysis can show how science informs the literary text, unless it raises sci-
ence from the unfathomable depth of the content to the surface of writing,
unless the writing of science crosses over into the science of writing, the rela-
tionship between literature and science will always remain anecdotal at best.
(Self-Generation 9–10)

This statement serves as a methodological guideline of my undertaking.

My first and primary concern of analysis regards scientific, supposedly
non-fictional texts that employ the metaphor of “elective affinities.” Only
after the specific meaning or significance of “elective affinities” has been
established for each particular discourse, such as geology, chemistry, biol-
ogy, and the social sciences, will I turn to Goethe’s novel in order to see
how – if at all – these uses or abuses of the metaphor to produce scientific
“facts” influence the world view and belief of the fictive characters that
100  Christian P. Weber

then transform the poetic, pseudo-real world they inhabit. By separat-

ing as much as possible the utilization of the metaphor in the scientific
discourses – or more specifically the associations and relations that were
established as a result of that – from the poetic renegotiation of them by
the novel, the essentially critical (and in that sense also “scientific”) capac-
ity of literature comes to light. Die Wahlverwandtschaften appears then
as a meta-discourse that translates the “scientific” workings of its title
metaphor into literary action. In the virtual reality of the novel, the char-
acters embody and literarily “act out” the effects and consequences that
the utilization of “elective affinities” has shown in various discourses.
Ultimately, I argue, the poetic imagination not only invigorates scientific
investigation by creating metaphors when the senses or instruments of
observation have reached their limits, but also provides the means by con-
structing a literary simulacrum to test and critically assess the transforma-
tive power the same metaphors potentially can or actually do exercise in
the real lifeworld.4

“Just one nature”: Goethe’s Poetics of the Simile

Before inquiring into the poetics of the various scientific discourses that
employ the metaphor of “elective affinities,” a short excursion into what
may be called the metaphysics of Goethe’s poetics helps one to under-
stand the issue in a wider context. The author addressed the complex of
metaphoric transference and substitution when he announced the publica-
tion of his new novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften, apparently as part of a
strategy to not only explain but also reinforce the overall strategy of this
literary project:

It seems that the author has been inspired to choose this strange title by his
continued scientific studies. He may have realized that in natural sciences one
very often employs ethical analogies/similes [ethische Gleichnisse] to bring
closer phenomena that are quite remote from the circle of human knowledge;
and so, presumably, he also wanted, in a moral case, to trace back a chemical
figure of speech [chemische Gleichnisrede] to its spiritual origin, all the more
so since there is just one nature, and also since the realm of serene reason and
freedom is unavoidably marked by the traces of opaque, passionate necessity.
These may only be completely erased by a higher hand, and then probably
not in this life. (Goethe, “Notiz” in Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände,
FA 1.8: 974)5
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  101

Goethe plays here a self-ironic game with the author role, and further
plays a trick on the reader. If this piece had ever been intended as adver-
tisement, it must have strangely missed its purpose. Its pretentious specu-
lation creates the illusion of a meta-author who reads the author’s mind,
which is rather off-putting to a reader who is left clueless about the plot of
this much-anticipated novel. The position assumed here mimics the ironic
position of the narrator in the novel, so that the announcement can be
understood as an ironically read statement of an altogether ironic novel,
thus highlighting the irony and virtual reality of the whole project. Inter-
estingly, Goethe associates this narrative strategy with the novel’s “strange
title,” which he is most concerned to justify and clarify. Yet, he does not
simply explain the origin, meaning, or significance of the crucial metaphor;
he rather enacts its effects. In most condensed and stylized form, the text is
composed as an intricate play of subtle figurative correlations and attrac-
tions that virtually connect concepts that are semantically far apart so that
opposite meanings almost seem to belong to one and the same phenome-
nal complex – although their relation remains, of course, only a virtual one
due to the effect of rhetorical “elective affinities.” The whole text is held
together by a dialectics of expanding versus retracting and displacing ver-
sus longing (“fortgesetzt,” “weit Entferntes näher heranzubringen,” “zu
ihrem geistigen Ursprung zurückführen mögen”); the distance between
‘the close” and “the far” is bridged by analogical structures such as paral-
lelism (e.g., “nur eine Natur”  – “nur durch eine höhere Hand”), oppo-
sition (e.g., “heiter[e] Vernunft-Freiheit“ versus “trübe, leidenschaftliche
Notwendigkeit“), and chiasm (“Naturlehre” – “ethische Gleichnisse” vis-
à-vis “sittliche[r] Fall” – “chemische Gleichnisrede“). The rhetorical rela-
tions among the textual components thus simulate the immanent workings
of elective affinities and yet their exposed artistry also reveals and hints at
their making by a hidden, transcendent author. (To that effect, Goethe did
not identify himself as the drafter of this announcement.)
Ultimately, however, all of this play serves just the purpose of illustrating
the main idea of this text as well as of the novel and Goethe’s holistic Welt-
anschauung, namely, that there is “just one nature” which springs from a
“spiritual origin.” For Goethe, the origins of nature and ingenious culture
are essentially identical.6 Since the “spiritual origin” of the physical world –
of which the light of the sun is seen as the purest emanation – remains sci-
entifically inaccessible, humans resort to their own minds and explore the
origin of their spirituality and creativity. In two consecutive letters to his
friend Knebel, who was working on a translation of Lucretius’s De rerum
102  Christian P. Weber

natura at the time, Goethe characterizes the imagination as a faculty that

even trumps natural light in its capability to illuminate the physical world:
Lucretius’s high rank as one of the most distinguished poets of all times is
the result of his highly productive skill of sensory perception, which makes
him capable of vigorous representations, and further of his lively imagina-
tion, which allows him to track the perceived objects even beyond the reach
of the senses down to the imperceptible depths of nature and most secretive
recesses. (14 February 1821, HA Briefe 3: 499)

In the following letter, Goethe distinguishes three types of imagination:

the first he names “reproductive” (nachbildend), which coordinates the
various sensory faculties in the effort of mimetic representation. Provided
that this happens without the involvement of the mind, one may also call
it the intuitive imagination. It produces pure images that are “true” in the
sense of verisimilitude. This ideal of “objective” representation of natural
things also serves as a fundamental criterion to determine scientific truth.
The other essential quality that Goethe assigns to the great poet of nature
is associated with the second type of imagination that he calls “produc-
tive” (productiv). Reaching beyond the senses, the productive imagina-
tion also engages the mind and creates concepts. (A concept is whole yet
abstract, whereas an image is concrete yet only represents an aspect of the
thing.) Only in the sphere of symbolic signification and conceptual under-
standing does the imagination surpass the level of purely “objective” per-
ception and reach an “idea” of truth beyond verisimilitude that is either
informed by the categorical logic of the mind as well as the fundamental
maxims of reason (philosophical truth) or by the analogical procedure of
the imagination (poetical truth).7 However, when the productive imagina-
tion seeks analogies just within the symbolic sphere of language or with
relation to cultural phenomena, it acts outside of its genuine field of com-
petence where it is at the risk of establishing artificial relations and forging
metaphors without “real” substance. (Such kind of “truth” is not poetic,
but merely rhetorical, especially when it fulfils an ideological purpose.)
Hence, to “really” create poetic truth and true poetry, a mediating third
type of imagination must come into play that reconnects and constantly
renegotiates the abstract symbolic meaning of words with the more con-
crete images of natural things:

Moreover we can assume the existence of a circumspective [umsichtige] imag-

ination, which surveys and takes hold of the same and the like during speech
in order to test the validity of what has been said.
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  103

Here now appears the desirability of analogy [Analogie], which places

[versetzt] the spirit [Geist] onto many related points of interest so that it can
reunite everything that belongs and harmonizes together [alles das Zusam-
mengehörige, das Zusammenstimmende wieder vereinige].
This immediately generates similes/allegories [Gleichnisse], which are
more valuable the closer they come to match the object that they were sup-
posed to illuminate. The most valuable, however, are those that cover the
object completely and seem to become identical with it. (21 February 1821,
HA Briefe 3: 501)

In the simile a long series of substitutions and displacements culminates

that, to a certain degree, are unavoidable in the human effort to form knowl-
edge and cultivate the world: images substitute things,8 concepts substitute
and displace images, and tropes substitute and displace concepts by a figu-
rative recombination of the relationships between images and concepts.
The simile must be considered – as it has been since ancient time9 – a special
type of metaphor. For Goethe, it retains special cultural importance as the
product of the circumspective imagination, which he regards highest, since
it combines both reproductive (the observance of images) and produc-
tive (the making of concepts) faculties in the act of forming a valid speech
or rapport (“Vortrag”). Different from the rather spontaneous fusion of
image and concept in the metaphor, the simile is more reflective. In creat-
ing it, the poetic “spirit” reverts to sense perception (and the making of
images) in an effort to review linguistic concepts and metaphoric tropes.
By determining their relationship to natural things, the analogical poetics
of the simile reassesses the imagination’s substitutions and displacements
and performs a critique of the human language. As such, the simile also
fulfils a scientific (empirical, analytic) and philosophical (critical, yet syn-
thetic) purpose.10 At the same time, the imagination has accomplished its
genuine poetic task by establishing a symbolic harmony between concepts
and images that mirrors the “original” intuitive harmony between images
and things. With the creation of a truly “objective” simile, the imagination
has returned to the exploratory spirit of its reproductive origin. By accom-
plishing an analogical identity of all its cognitive modes of representation
(image, concept, and trope) in the simile, it collapses the differences and
distinctions among them into one poetic totality and thereby completes
one cycle of its formation.11 The simile thus brings a (temporary) end and
relief to the “daemonic” process of fragmenting and dividing the world
in images, concepts, and metaphors. By creating one “apocalyptic” poetic
vision, it reveals in a momentous epiphany that “there is just one nature.”
104  Christian P. Weber

In the sense described above, the famous “Gleichnisrede” (figurative

speech) of the Wahlverwandten (elective relatives) certainly is no Gleich-
nis, or simile, whereas the novel as a whole is. Exemplary for their funda-
mental misunderstanding of the true character of the simile is Eduard’s
conclusion of the playful conversation, which revolved around various
possibilities of how the metaphor of “elective affinities” may be applied
to their situation: “Eduard interjected [fiel ein]: Now then! Until we will
see all this before our eyes, we shall regard this formula as a parable [Glei-
chnisrede], which shall serve us as a teaching to our immediate benefit”
(1.4; 118).12 Everything that matters in the creation process of a true poetic
simile is here turned inside out: the reflexivity of speech is perverted by
the suddenness of Eduard’s idea to declare a simile; sensory perception is
replaced by speculative anticipation; the natural object of analogical com-
parison is here merely an abstract formula; finally, Eduard remains blind
for the intrinsic poetic “value” of the simile, its esoteric vision of oneness;
instead, he simply wants to utilize this “teaching” as a sort of legitima-
tion to promote his immediate interests and practical human affairs, which
bring about only further substitutions, displacements, and divisions.
Eduard’s confused character disqualifies him from ever gaining an
understanding of the simile, not to mention an appreciation for its poetic
vision. His “daemonic” imagination is only productive, constantly creat-
ing hollow metaphors without a foundation in the “real.” (To the contrary,
his wife Charlotte’s imagination is primarily reproductive and driven by
the compulsion to make up for lost opportunities in the past.) The only
character in the novel that appears to be capable of creating true simi-
les is the old gardener, who is introduced already in the first chapter  as
the positive antagonist to Eduard. Whereas we first encounter the “rich
baron” preoccupied with the “business” of inoculating grafts onto “young
rootstocks” (1.1; 93), which serves as a symbol for his appropriating and
greedy character, the gardener contains himself as a sympathetic observer
of this scene.13 Other than his selfish master, who perceives things only
with pleasure as long as he has invested an interest in them, he appears
to be capable of just enjoying the uninterested panning of his view “in a
serene distance” (ibid.).14 Such an attitude is the precondition for the cre-
ation of a poetic simile (an extraordinary example of which is represented
in the next section). The gardener also serves as a mirroring figure of the
narrator, whose omnipresence is immediately felt. He introduces him-
self as a tertiary meta-observer, as one who observes how the gardener
observes Eduard observing. The overall task of his circumspective imagi-
nation is to fully comprehend and observe the consequences of some
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  105

dubious actions and transactions by the novel’s protagonists. Ultimately,

the narrator describes the eventually tragic logic of displacements that has
been set in motion by the misunderstanding and dubious application of
the metaphor of “elective affinities,” as was demonstrated by the “figura-
tive speech” in paragraph 1.4. Later on in the novel (in paragraph 2.9), it is
revealed that the conservative gardener judges Eduard’s excessive grafting
and the production of entirely ornamental plants as highly dubious.
Grafting means in this context not simply a horticultural practice, but
represents a specific biological type of “elective affinities.” The next sections
discuss how this metaphor is used by various, predominantly scientific,
discourses. At the same time, it symbolizes the very structure (or “nature”)
of the metaphor as such. If the narrator of Die Wahlverwandtschaften –
respectively the author, whose insightful comments constitute another
level of (self-)critical observation that I consider an essential part of this
whole poetic enterprise – intended, as I argue, the creation of a modern
meta-simile about this metaphor, his vision must comprehend and con-
tain its wide range of uses, consequences, meanings, and overall cultural
significance. The task of interpretation is then to trace back the analogical
(metaphoric) relations between scientific discourses and poetry that bridge
nature and human culture and to reconstruct how Goethe reconciles the
tensions of this uneasy relationship in the simile, that is, the novel.

First Discourse: Geology

Goethe renders a superb poetic example of his theory of the simile in his
equally scientific fragments on granite.15 Although this group of texts does
not employ the metaphor “elective affinity” directly, it provides a spec-
ulative, geological explanation for the origin of affinities in the material
world, or rather, to be more precise, for the attraction of geological and
especially chemical discourses to the genealogical concept of “affinity”
(translated as Verwandtschaft).
The first fragment (subtitled Granit I) describes granite as a rock that
exhibits the widest range of both spatial/vertical and temporal dimensions.
Goethe imagines that, in primordial times, it was the “deepest” layer hid-
den in the earth, whereas it appears to be now the highest and most exposed
layer of all geological formations. Goethe’s curiosity is further sparked by
the observation that granite is a composite of at least two different particles.
Intriguingly, they seem to be “not joined together by something third, but
to coexist side by side and to adhere just to themselves” (FA 1.25; 311).
Although this natural phenomenon certainly invites speculation, Goethe
106  Christian P. Weber

adheres in the closing remark of this piece to his rock-solid and steadfast
scientific principle of objective reasoning:16 “My spirit has no wings to
uplift itself to those primordial beginnings. I  stand firmly on the granite
and inquire the rock whether it would give us any reason to reflect about
the consistency of the mass that made it” (FA 1.25: 312). The subsequent
fragment (Granit II), however, contradicts this judgment by rendering one
of the most ecstatic moments of poetic-scientific inspirations. Goethe first
recalls that granite was considered even in the “most ancient times” to be
a very “mysterious [merkwürdige] type of rock” and that its “monstrous
[ungeheuren] masses were an inspiration for the Egyptians with their ideas
of monstrous [ungeheuren] buildings” (FA 1.25: 312). After this historical
reflection, he recollects the scientific knowledge of his time, which amounts
to the “fact” that granite is both “the highest and lowest” layer of rock and
therefore the “foundation of our earth” (FA 1.25: 313).17 Feeling the insuf-
ficiency of this knowledge and the “passion” to explore the deeply hid-
den secrets of the earth, he introduces a metaphysical premise that opens a
new avenue to poetic-scientific exploration. Similarly to his announcement
of the Wahlverwandtschaften above, Goethe states that “all natural things
entertain an exact relationship with each other,” which implies that even the
“human heart” as the most recent, fickle, and sensitive product and granite
as “the oldest, hardest, deepest, and firmest son of nature” are intercon-
nected and that one may be accessed by means of the other (FA 1.25: 313–
14). Next, Goethe performs (and renders) a poetic soliloquy of his heart
that turns into an act of “telepathic” communication, a pseudo-scientific,
investigative dialogue with the earth. While sitting on a rock of granite on
top of a mountain, he simultaneously summons the feelings in the depth of
his soul as well as the whole world below and the sky above him. (He thus
inhabits and displays a daemonic position.) Goethe takes great care in his
description to emphasize the constant interplay of the introspective voice
(“I say to myself”) with the circumspective vision (“I survey the world”).
At the climax of this experience, the inner and outer spheres coalesce and
generate a complex simile at the moment of greatest enthusiasm:

In this moment, when the inner powers of the Earth seem to affect me directly
with all their forces of attraction and movement, and when the influences
of heaven hover closer around me, I am uplifted in spirit to a more exalted
view of nature. The human spirit brings life to everything and here, too, there
springs to life within me an image irresistible in its sublimity. “This mood of
solitude,” I say to myself as I gaze down from the barren peak and glimpse
a faint patch of low-growing moss far below, “this mood of solitude will
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  107

overcome all who desire to bring before their souls only the deepest, oldest,
most elemental feeling for the truth … I feel the first and most abiding origin
of our existence; I survey the world with its undulating valleys and its distant
fruitful meadows, my soul is exalted beyond itself and above all of the world,
and it yearns for the heavens which are so near.” (FA 1.25: 314–15)18

Goethe feels to have almost (gleichsam) an intimate relation with the rock,
which inspires him to elaborate a complex “simile” (Gleichnis): First, he
comes to see the likeness between the vivifying “human spirit” with the
earth’s “forces of attraction and movement.” Second, he associates his
daemonic mood – oscillating between a “highly tuned” (hochgestimmte)
ecstasy and a most sober determination to explore “the deepest feelings of
truth” – with the sublime moment of the “being of all beings” immediately
after the act of Creation. The resulting sublime simile is simultaneously a
product of all his senses, of his emotion and imagination. It thereby defies
the surface of the rock and the presence of time; it accesses, conveys, and
symbolically embodies the deepest and oldest secret of nature, which is
the act of creating as such (see again the letter to Jacobi quoted above),
especially the creating of similes. The final verses of Faust sum up Goethe’s
sublime experience in the act of creating the simile, which represent per-
haps his deepest insight: “Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis” (All
that is transient / Is but a simile/parable.)
This highly subjective and yet, at the same time, most objective vision
informed Goethe’s ideas about geological formation as well as about
chemical composition. In the subsequent fragment (Form und Bildung des
Granits), Goethe proposes the hypothesis that all matter was originally
“united” in the “intimate solution” of “first chaos” (FA 1.25: 317–18).
Natural history means to him a still ongoing decomposition and crystalli-
zation process that was set in motion once the primordial union of matter
had been disturbed. Ever since, everything has been in flux, and Goethe
seems to suggest that the constant decomposition and (re-)composition of
bodies entertain “elective affinities” because all matter and all material life
forms on earth are intrinsically driven by the quest to restore this previous
harmony.19 Granite is a remnant of earth’s prehistory, and its indestruc-
tible composition strikes Goethe as a visible reminder of this original and
intimate belonging that has been lost for all the rest. “Elective affinity”
means for him essentially the expression of an essential (or even existen-
tial) longing and yearning in all material “elements” (FA 1.25: 318) that
were once violently disassociated and forced to recombine in less harmo-
nious compounds during the natural history of the earth.
108  Christian P. Weber

I would suggest that this reasoning constitutes the foundation of the

“radical idea” which Goethe reported to have followed in the composition
of his Wahlverwandtschaften.20 Goethe mentioned in another letter that
he conceived the novel in the “Bohemian mountains” during the poeti-
cally chaotic period of the Napoleonic Wars, in which he devoted a lot
of time to geological studies (Goethe to Zelter, 1 June 1809, FA 1.8: 979).
This coincidence is certainly no accident. One central theme of the novel
is marriage, and the primordial association of two different “elements”
in granite could be considered the perfect symbol for this most intimate
union between two human beings. The same analogy is actually alluded to
by the most militant defender of marriage in the novel, the ominous Mit-
tler, when he says: “Marriage is both the base [Anfang] and the pinnacle
[Gipfel] of culture” (1.9: 137). Marriage thus occupies in human culture
the same place as granite in nature. However, Eduard’s and Charlotte’s
marriage proves to be anything but granite-solid. They are, as also the
novella within this novel insinuates, not quite a natural match for each
other; the intrinsic forces of “elective affinities” have a pull on them and
continue to impact their association as well as their relationships to others.
Mittler’s desperate attempts to keep the couple together must remain futile
since he acts, in fact, counter to the marriage symbol of granite, according
to which the two elements would stick together no matter what without
the need of a third, mediating person. What the couple needs are not the
orthodox moral principles of a retired priest like Mittler, who does not
even understand the basics of geology, but the recognition that the funda-
mental natural laws of creation, the interplay of attraction and repulsion,
continue to have an effect even in human affairs. For that, some knowl-
edge of chemistry may be a good start.

Second Discourse: Chemistry

The revolutionary age of chemistry, coinciding with the political revolu-

tion of France, can be easily integrated as a particularly radical episode in
Goethe’s idea of natural history as an ongoing process of de- and recom-
position and de- and regeneration. In the historical part of the Farben-
lehre, Goethe characterizes the emerging new discipline of chemistry
accordingly:

More recently, chemistry brought about a major transformation; it dis-

sected natural bodies in order to artificially reassemble them in manifold
ways; it destroyed a real world to construct in its stead a so far unknown,
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  109

unimaginable new world. As a consequence, we were forced to reflect harder

and harder about the likely origin of all things and everything that followed
from it so that we have found ourselves confronted again and again with new
and increasingly higher types of ideas [Vorstellungsarten]. This is even more
the case since the chemist and the natural scientist have made an inseparable
pact to establish among things, which previously appeared to be units, at
least manifold relations – if not to decompose them completely otherwise –
and thus to gain from them an admirable versatility [bewundernswürdige
Vielseitigkeit]. (FA 1.23/1: 660–1)

The new age of chemistry does not only immensely increase the decom-
position process, but, more crucially, radically alters the constitution of
nature by forcefully breaking apart the natural substances of the “real
world” and by recombining the fragments into artificial and fantastic
composites. As Goethe points out, the unheard of possibilities of chemical
syntheses are followed up by the invention of equally creative ideas and
theories which also destroy the integrity of the spirit and intellect. Though
he personally does not favour this modern development, Goethe accepts it
as a historical fact and embraces its “admirable versatility.” But he remains
aware that this new scientific discipline also increases the potential of fur-
ther displacements and forced associations, which consequently produce
new sufferings in an ever more complicated world.
Under these circumstances, “elective affinities”  – originally an alche-
mist term  – becomes an attractive metaphor for the chemical discourse
as a regulative idea. As Goethe points out, it provides the idea (and ideal)
of primordial unity and thus constrains the imagination of chemists who
may otherwise have fancied hypothetically unlimited new combinations.
Accordingly, Torbern Bergman, whom Goethe21 praises for the introduc-
tion of this metaphor into the chemical discourse, stresses in his Disserta-
tion on Elective Attractions “the tendency to union which is observed in
all neighboring bodies on the surface of the earth” (2).22 Arguably, Berg-
man’s great use of this metaphor assigns to chemistry its specific scientific
domain by distinguishing between the chemical forces of “affinity” and
the astrophysical forces of “attraction.” Affinity, he writes, “only affects
small particles, and scarce[ly] reaches beyond contact, whereas remote
attraction extends to the great masses of matter in the immensity of space,
[which] seems to be regulated by very different laws” (2). Even though
Bergman is aware that the laws of affinity “may perhaps depend on cir-
cumstances,” he maintains that a “fixed order” must exist and that the
knowledge of the laws of “elective affinity” would provide the “key to
110  Christian P. Weber

unlock the innermost sanctuaries of nature” upon which “the whole of

chemistry rests” (9). Hence, the metaphor of “elective affinity” encapsu-
lates a metaphysical program of unity.
Bergman’s scientific optimism regarding the possibility of taming and
containing the versatile and transitory nature of chemical reactions, trans-
formations, and circumstances is displayed in his famous affinity tables,
which compile the results of his repeated observations and experiments in
a very orderly manner. However, the ever-increasing dimensions of affin-
ity tables and their failure to account for every condition and countless
exceptions reintroduce the problem of how to deal with this sheer com-
plexity. In response to these concerns, Claude Louis Berthollet has argu-
ably reached the highest level of scientific accuracy and methodological
reflection in his Recherches sur les lois de l’affinité,23 published in 1801,
by introducing many refinements to the guiding metaphorical principle.
Among the many innovations proposed, the most relevant one is a redefi-
nition of the term “elective affinity,” which Berthollet strictly limits to
displacement reactions with three agents. For him, displacement reactions
of the “elective” type are not about a choice of alternatives, but rather
a matter of affinity in proportion to quantity: “The very term, elective
affinity must lead into error, as it supposes the union of the whole of one
substance with another, in preference to a third; whereas there is only a
partition of action, which is itself subordinate to other chemical circum-
stances” (146). In other words, many examples of elective affinity cannot
be considered as completed and uniform displacements of absolute bodies.
Instead, they often showcase partitions of bodies and actions that are not
only determined by the quality of substances but also by the quantity of
their “respective [chemical] masses” (6).24 If, qua analogy, this scientific
disintegration of bodies and actions is carried over to humans and their
behaviour – which transfer the Wahlverwandtschaften seem to perform by
respective actions of the “wahlverwandten” protagonists, as I will discuss
later – then it is an assault on modern anthropological concepts such as
free will and individuality.
Overall, Berthollet’s contributions to chemistry and to epistemology
are significant because they highlight the complexity and intricacy of
nature. In agreement with Goethe, Berthollet recognizes the invalidity
of Newton’s ideal of an experimentum crucis as well as the insufficiency
of conducting research within the confines of scientific disciplines. Only
the totality of sciences constitutes for him “la physique,” which brings
back to mind Goethe’s statement about the Wahlverwandtschaften,
according to which there is only one nature (“nur eine Natur”).
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  111

Third Discourse: Biology and Physiology

The red thread that interconnects the manifestations of both inorganic

and organic nature is the metaphor of “elective affinity.” By the 1790s,
after it had been employed by Lavoisier in his groundbreaking Traité
élémentaire de chimie, this metaphor was commonly accepted as a sci-
entific concept and so well established that it spread to other discourses,
including the simultaneously emerging discipline of biology. Alexander
von Humboldt, for example, uses elective affinity to distinguish the prin-
ciple of organic formation from the laws of inorganic association: “We
call those bodies animated and organic that, though they tend constantly
to change into new forms, are contained by some internal force, so that
they do not relinquish that form originally introduced … That internal
force (vim internam) which dissolves the bonds of chemical affinity and
prevents the elements of bodies from freely uniting, we call vital” (Hum-
boldt, Florae Fribergensis specimen 133–5; qtd. in Richards, Romantic
Conception of Life 257). By contrast, the physician and physiologist
Johann Christian Reil25 considers Humboldt’s idea of an internal force,
which he prefers to call “life force” (Lebenskraft), not an objective qual-
ity but a subjective concept, a hypothetical metaphor that helps conceive
and represent otherwise inconceivable relations and reactions. Inspired
by French modern chemistry, he aims to substitute this rather mysti-
cally sounding concept with a full-fledged theory of elective affinity.26
Reil traces back the origin of organic life to elementary matter, which
he defines in accordance with Lavoisier’s famous conceptualization of
“elements” as substances “which we are not able to reduce further by
decomposition” (Reil, Von der Lebenskraft 6).27 However, he empha-
sizes more than Lavoisier that all “elements have one unique and essential
quality in common, which is elective affinity [Wahlanziehung]” (6). And
he believes that elective affinities also determine organic matter, since it
consists to the greatest extent of inorganic matter. Living matter then
only differs from dead matter in an additional, distinctly organic “basic
material” (Grundstoff) that has certain features of “composition [Misch-
ung] and form [Form],” which themselves are the resulting manifesta-
tions of particular laws of elective affinity between inorganic substances
and the specific basic material:

Per se, organic matter is peculiar to the organic realm and not to be found
anywhere in dead nature. And yet, the origin of organic material is securely
stored in the womb of dead nature. One must only find the core or stock of
112  Christian P. Weber

an organic being [Wesen] to which raw materials can attach themselves and
they will be organized in a purposeful order. Plants are begotten out of the
materials of dead nature and constitute, so to speak, the first level of enno-
bling matter [Veredelung der Materie] into organic beings. (11)

This passage serves as a great example for the desire of natural philosophers
and scientists of the eighteenth century to imagine and construct a meta-
phoric bridge to cross the divisions between species and different forms of
organized matter, perhaps even to find an access to the primordial union
of all nature that also Goethe envisioned. For Reil, everything that consists
of matter is basically identical, except that organic matter displays an orga-
nizing skill. He assumes that the organic core material or “stock” consists of
very “fine, perhaps entirely unknown matter” which transforms and refines
the crude matter by intermingling with it (13–14).28 Curiously, he character-
izes the general form of this relationship metaphorically in terms of grafting,
which he applies to growth – the inoculation of “foreign matter” (nutrients)
onto the organic life-stock – and to plant cultivation: “We are able to engraft
a tree with scions of different kind; each scion is its own stock that attracts
the common matter, which it draws from the tree according to the laws of
its own affinity [Verwandtschaft] and by which it increases in mass from its
own kind” (42–3). Hence, grafting is the basic modus operandi, the elective
affinities of organic life forms, which is also why it is so prominently fea-
tured in the opening sentence of the Wahlverwandtschaften. (The symbolic
meaning of “grafting” is discussed in the next section.)
According to Reil, variants of elective affinity also occur on the level of
the human organism, which he subsumes under the heading of “sympa-
thy (consensus).” He mentions that “similarities of the constitution and
composition of organs can cause the generation of sympathetic phenom-
ena” that even affect remote organs: “Similar organs like nerves or blood
vessels have similar affections and similar affinities [Verwandtschaften] to
the fine matter” (62–3). Moreover, sympathetic effects can result “from
the habit and association of our motions [Bewegungen] and representa-
tions [Vorstellungen]” (63). More refined human organs like the eyes and
the brain are especially palpable; they develop their faculties (e.g., vision,
understanding) by adapting to the widest range of “matter,” which they
process as information: “Almost every new idea, every new concept
changes the system of their faculties [Kräfte], intermingles with [mischt
sich] their operations and increases the potential [Kraft] of new products
in the future” (69). Thus, Reil even conceives the formation of cognition
and cultural forms essentially as manifestations of elective affinities.
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  113

At the same time, this metaphor loses its original elementary pull the
more it is associated with intellectual and spiritual (moral) faculties. Even-
tually, these higher faculties transgress and challenge the predetermined
order of the physical world by creating a symbolic order of signs that pro-
duces desires beyond immediate necessity and stimulates ideas of free will
and autonomy. Human behaviour very often runs counter to the (hypo-
thetical) pre-established harmony of elective affinities. In Goethe’s novel,
the actions of the Wahlverwandten Eduard and Charlotte, the Haupt-
mann and Ottilie represent this basic conflict between the laws of nature
and the (more or less) rational decisions and actions of human beings.
Especially the egotistic decisions and actions of the first two institute a
series of displacements which range from grafting exotic plants onto the
native trees and soil of their grounds to the transplanting of the “delicate
plant” Ottilie, who was in Charlotte’s custodial care but is sent away to
an institution of education against her own inclination. Altogether, the
enforced actions of displacement29 result in modern biographies of suffer-
ing (Werther’s theme) and in a romantic longing for love, friendship, and
community that mirrors nature’s yearning for a return to its primal state of
unity. Human history is thus a part of the general decomposition process
of natural history.

Fourth Discourse: National Ideology

To return once more to the discourse of physiology, Reil further suggests

that organs, which once cooperated in a “community” (Gemeinschaft),
have the inclination to form lasting associations (81). He explicitly lik-
ens the organic body to the body politic of a republican state, since both
“consist of many parts that stand in a determinate relationship with one
another and contribute to the maintenance of the whole; but each part
does so through its own faculties and its own perfections, deficiencies, and
afflictions independently from the other parts of the body” (59). The body
metaphor has been often employed to illustrate the abstract idea or ideal
of the republican state, for example, to name prominent examples of the
eighteenth century, in Rousseau’s Social Contract and Schiller’s Aesthetic
Letters. As part of a rhetorical strategy, it makes “visible that which could
not be seen otherwise” (Koschorke et al., Der fiktive Staat 58), namely, the
apparatus of the state as a whole. Still invisible, however, remain the prin-
ciples and fundamental program that unite and coordinate all the people
of one state by providing them with a distinct cultural and thus national
identity.
114  Christian P. Weber

I suggest that, complementary to the effect of the body metaphor of the

state, biopolitical metaphors, such as “grafting” and “elective affinities,”
promote within diverse discourses an implicit programmatic idea of how
life is organized in nature and how, in turn, society should be organized
as a nation. They thereby define the national ideology that assigns only
specific cultural content to fill the abstract political form of state govern-
ment.30 Concerning “grafting,” I can present here only one example for
how this metaphor has informed other discourses of national relevance,
especially in England. In his Reflections on the Revolution of France,
Edmund Burke reminds his British readers of the unique constitutional
principle of their nation and warns them against the potential attraction
they may feel towards the newly “fabricated” one across the Channel in
France: “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough
to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revo-
lution [in 1688], and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheri-
tance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we
have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the origi-
nal plant” (27). For Burke, the natural “law of inheritance” must remain
the sacrosanct basis of the state, and “grafting” its national principle. He
believes that the British nation will not fall prey to the ills of modernity
and another revolution as long as it sticks to its foundational principle of
inheritance and the cultivation of blood-conscious grafting. At the same
time, his insistence on grafting indicates that he acknowledges some need
for continued national reform, but only within this clearly defined limit.
What Burke so vehemently opposes is not so much the “new government”
of France, but rather the new national idea that justifies its “fabrication,”
which is derived from another, at this time most popular, scientific meta-
phor: “elective affinities.”31
It is hardly just a curious coincidence of history that the most promi-
nent scientific work that made use of “elective affinities” was published
right in the centre and at the climax of the Revolution: Antoine Lavoisier’s
Traité élémentaire de chimie appeared in Paris in 1789. This major accom-
plishment did not only revolutionize sciences by introducing a system of
elements and thereby articulating the clearest and most radical version of
the chemical life form. It also proposes a new scientific ethos that strives to
exclude imagination, tradition, and prejudice from the laboratory and that
accepts nothing but facts. As a consequence, Lavoisier breaks down the
appearances of organic bodies and reduces their essences until they cannot
possibly be decomposed further, which results in his famous definition of
chemical elements (as mentioned earlier). That this scientific revolution
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  115

is related to the political revolution has been noted by Friedrich Schlegel,

who called the French in one of his famous Athenaeum fragments a “chem-
ical nation,” since in them “the chemical sense is excited more universally
than in others. Even in moral chemistry they conduct their experiments
always at a grand scale. Likewise, the age is a chemical age. Revolutions are
universal movements, not organic but chemical” (87, no. 426).
But the analogy between chemistry and the French nation alludes not
only to the melting and composition of masses during the revolutionary
events, it also and perhaps even more convincingly informs about the more
critical stage of instituting and constituting a new political order. After
the most radical break from past traditions, values, and institutions, which
destroyed the “organic” self-understanding and communities of many
French people, the revolutionaries were pressured to restore order quickly.
To justify the destruction of the old aristocratic “nation,” the Revolution
demanded in its stead the implementation of a radical, anti-organic con-
ception of nature as an alternative ideal life form that unites the renewed
French nation. Lavoisier’s chemical model of life and his experimental, yet
strictly rational, method provided much inspiration for the revolutionar-
ies’ desire to redefine humanity in terms of their slogan “Liberty, Equal-
ity, and Fraternity.” The new chemistry’s pursuit of decomposing organic
units down to elements, which are from the standpoint of objective scien-
tific observation equal, correlates with the attacks of the political revolu-
tion on venerable organicist traditions and socio-political hierarchies that
were grounded in the notion of natural law. As a result of events of collec-
tive uprooting during the ancient regime, theoretically everybody is equal
and free to form new associations. This coincides with another important
claim of Lavoisier’s theory. He acknowledges agency in chemical elements
and recognizes their innate capability of forming associations freely, that
is, without the interference of the experimenter: “They act with regard to
us as simple substances, and we ought never to suppose them compounded
until experiment and observation has proved them to be so” (4). In other
words, the analytically truthful chemist must strictly observe the principal
rights of chemical elements, namely, to regard them as equals that can asso-
ciate freely and, as such, form “elective affinities.” Since these are elemen-
tary rights, they should be considered universally. From here it is only a
relatively small step  – although it remains an enormous jump from ele-
ments to human beings, of course – to the declaration of universal human
rights and to Rousseau’s republican ideas that inspired the Revolution.
The advantages of the chemical model for the (re-)formation of the
French nation are obvious: it promotes the principle of equality, which
116  Christian P. Weber

theoretically grants every human being the right to become a citizen and
to have equal opportunities, and allows for very progressive and flexible
political structures that can justify even radical transformations. However,
there are certainly also risks and dangers attached to it: First, the transfer
of materialist scientific principles to the socio-political sphere contradicts
the genuinely intersubjective and often idealist nature of human interac-
tions. Social and political decisions cannot be based exclusively on mere
facts and rational factors, but are also driven by compassion and directed
by distinctly humanistic ideals. A nation that considers its citizens merely
as human “elements,” without respect for individual biographies, familial
ties, or cultural traditions, tends to approve the confiscation of private
property and the displacement of people more readily than a nation that is
governed by more organicist ideas. Second, chemical as well as social and
political experiments have often unpredictable outcomes that may result
in catastrophic explosions. To counterbalance these dangers, a “chemical”
nation is susceptible to individuals who may usurp – as the embodiment
of reason – the supervising position of the master chemist and thus inca-
pacitate other people. The history of the French Revolution shows how
easily Robespierre and Napoleon Bonaparte could turn the new Republic
of France into a “laboratory” and determine the parameters for their social
and political experiments.
Goethe wrote the Wahlverwandtschaften during the chaotic period of
the Napoleonic Wars, which affected his own life and caused unease to his
family and community.32 The political and social ideas that the revolution-
aries and Napoleon, their culminating master chemist, experimented with
in the laboratory of the French nation are repeated and mirrored en min-
iature by Eduard’s and Charlotte’s efforts to live together in the seclusion
of their estate. In their conversation about the arrival of the Hauptmann
in the first chapter, they explicitly emphasize the experimental character
of their chosen lifestyle. Charlotte remarks that “inviting the Captain does
not quite fit in with our original intentions, plans, and arrangements” (1.1;
95), and she insists that they “try [versuchen] for a time at least to see how
we can get along in this way with each other’s company” (1.1; 96). This
whole setting, which includes Eduard’s efforts of grafting and Charlotte’s
endeavour to transform the natural landscape into a “new creation” (1.1;
93), displays a willingness to experiment with nature, with their own lives
as well as with the lives of others, especially of the misplaced Hauptmann
and displaced Ottilie. Their experimental lifestyles indicate the shifts and
rifts that the Revolution has caused in the attitudes of common people.
Essentially, the Wahlverwandtschaften simulate the chemical, social, and
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  117

political experiments of this time in one literary meta-experiment to envi-

sion what good or bad results from these tendencies. Hence, the novel aims
not only to represent but actually to (re)enact the conditions that brought
about the Revolution and the consequences that it brought about.33

Elective Affinities, “Elective Affinities,” and Elective Affinities

The novel is, of course, not just about the Revolution; more fundamentally
it is about the consequences and effects – positive and negative, imaginary
and real – of the title metaphor’s inherent potential. Goethe was generally
very sensitive about the application of metaphors in scientific discourses34
and warned scientists to not confuse its artificial and to a certain degree
arbitrary status with the real natural phenomenon. Yet the phenomenal
scientific career of “elective affinities” must have awoken in Goethe a
sense of urgency to excavate the intrinsic structure and psychological logic
that make this particular metaphor so attractive and to reveal this danger-
ous mechanism to a wider audience in the more popular form of the novel.
For Goethe, the crux of all culture and the sciences in particular rests
in the problematic, that is, metaphoric origin of the human language in
general, as he expressed with great clarity and verve in a letter to Wilhelm
von Humboldt from 22 August 1806. This letter arguably can be consid-
ered the founding document of the Wahlverwandtschaften.35 The follow-
ing crucial passage stands in the context of Goethe’s review of Steffen’s
idealistic and speculative natural philosophy, which he mainly criticizes
for its “strange language” (seltsame Sprache):

It was certainly due to the nature of the problem that one had to penetrate the
depth of nature with words which were based on signs from in-depth inqui-
ries of other scientific and human endeavors. That way a symbolism came
about, which I  don’t want to criticize, but which entails, however, some-
thing highly miraculous [höchst Wunderliches] and dangerous at the same
time. The formulas of pure and applied mathematics, astronomy, cosmology,
geology, physics, chemistry, natural history, ethics, religion and mysticism
are all confused and mixed into the mass of a metaphysical [or metaphoric?]36
language which, though often used with good and great sense, will always
appear barbaric … In this very complex and highly artificial language [as in
any language in general], very dire consequences result from the fact that
one substitutes the symbolic proxy for the thing itself and that one internal-
izes the implied external relation, which loses by this replacement with fig-
ures of speech [Gleichnisreden] its representative quality [Darstellung]. For
118  Christian P. Weber

example, North and South, East and West, oxygen and hydrogen are already
such phantoms of strange figures of speech [wunderliche Topik] that they
exorcize the best of our intentions. (HA Briefe 4: 484–5)

In contrast to the constructive scientific-poetic simile that the circum-

spective imagination has created in the Granit fragment, Goethe warns in
this passage against the potential catachrestic and eclectic use of metaphors
and allegories in the sciences, since the confusion of any symbolic repre-
sentation for the “real” thing may create “whimsical figures of speech”
and consequently produce whimsical scientific results.37 (As mentioned
before, Goethe’s poetics of the simile is meant to counteract this com-
mon phenomenon that we observed in the discussed scientific discourses.)
An illustrative example for such misunderstanding and misappropria-
tion is presented by the famous “figure of speech” (Gleichnisrede) in the
Wahlverwandtschaften. Eduard, Charlotte, and the Hauptmann literally
enact the negative dialectic of metaphorization and further promote it by
naively transferring the metaphor of “elective affinities” to their human
affairs in the hope of making sense of them that way.38 Their conversation
ends in the fatal decision to add Ottilie to the mix simply because she fits
in the equation. It reinforces the dubious motivation of their decisions and
actions, of which the protagonists themselves seem to be subconsciously
aware: “What strange [wunderliche] people we are” (1.2; 100), Eduard
exclaims at the beginning. And Charlotte wraps up the whole story in
an equally curious statement close to the end: “If true things are said in
strange [wunderlich] ways …, in the end strange things [das Wunderliche]
appear as true” (2.7; 208). These remarks show the protagonists’ quest for
orientation and certainty due to the crumbling of the aristocratic culture
that experiences the decline of its political and economic status and the
depreciation of its values and norms. How the nobility responds to this
transformation is nicely reflected by one particular change of Eduard’s
habits. As the narrator reports, the baron had an inclination to entertain his
evening societies with “his lively and expressive recitation of poetry and
rhetorical pieces,” but now “he read from other texts, and for some time
had chosen by preference works on physics, chemistry and technology”
(1.4; 111). In other words, Eduard searches and yearns for a new stable
foundation on which he can rebuild his life. He seems to have found a new
life form in the metaphor of “elective affinities,” yet he does not realize
that this is just a pseudo-scientific metaphor which itself rests on instable
ground. To build a new life upon this idea just perpetuates and increases
the contingency and insecurity of his existence, as the Wahlverwandten
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  119

painfully experience. Their decision to complete the formula by sending

for Ottilie releases the “natural” forces of elective affinities in the human
imagination, which result in an erosion of common-sense reason and a
general detachment from reality. This has fatal consequences especially for
Eduard and Charlotte’s “fantastically” conceived “Wunderkind” Otto,
whose facial appearance shows a striking resemblance to both Ottilie and
the Hauptmann and who dies due to the collective neglect of all four “elec-
tive relatives.” Through his death he becomes the “living allegory”39 of the
negative dialectic of “elective affinities,” both of the “real” imaginary play
of the protagonists’ fantasies and the just imagined power that has been
attributed to it in terms of pseudo-scientific metaphor.
With regard to the latter, the uses of it in scientific and socio-political
discourses reduce the physical complexity of the respective phenomena by
providing a supposedly simple and quick explanation where actually there
may be none. At the same time, its use also unnecessarily complicates
research by inventing associations between in fact unrelated phenomena.
Hence, metaphors may not just open up innovative avenues for future sci-
entific inquiry, as was argued here in the opening paragraph, but also have
the opposite effect of obscuring and mystifying issues that would require
further empirical investigation. Berthollet’s contributions to chemistry
were so important – not least to Goethe – because his Recherches high-
lighted this concern. He argued, as we have seen, that chemical reactions
are caused or altered by many contingent factors, which reveal the limit of
elective affinity as a formal measure, based on the general assumption that
certain elements have specific qualities and thus entertain certain relations
with other elements accordingly. But that even Berthollet was not yet
ready to disregard this basic assumption and completely dismiss this meta-
phor, which instead continued to enjoy popularity in almost every newly
emerging scientific discipline, is a symptomatic reaction to the enormous
increase of complexity and contingency around 1800. Biopolitical meta-
phors are attractive because they provide or rather pretend pseudo-
scientific guidance; as such, they introduce a kind of new mythology with
increasingly national and nationalistic implications.
But how shall one deal with the emergence of ever more complex subject
matters when even the sciences fail and when one remains sceptical against
national ideologies? How is a representation of dynamic processes and
transformative developments – both in society at large and in the psyche
of individuals – at all possible? I argue that Goethe’s poetics of the simile,
as it manifests in the novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften, responds to this
very issue by employing poetic strategies that reflect the three modes of
120  Christian P. Weber

the imagination discussed earlier. First, like the reproductive imagination,

it is the author’s ambition to render a realistic representation of the situa-
tion, attitudes, and actions of the aristocratic society around 1800, which
is essentially characterized by its desperate attempt to integrate itself into
the emerging civil society. This notion has been noted by many contem-
porary readers.40 Second, the action of the novel equals the actions of the
main protagonists Eduard and Charlotte, whose productive imagination
is informed by the title metaphor – though at first negatively. To salvage
their marriage  – basically to escape from the pull of the “real” elective
affinities as they manifest themselves, for example, in sexual attraction –
they decide to live secluded from society and to unite their otherwise
drifting apart personalities by creating for themselves a perfect environ-
ment. For the realization of this common project, they radically alter their
lifestyle and the landscape of their property by compulsively displacing
rocks, plants, and people (most notably Charlotte’s daughter Luciane and
her foster child Ottilie). Their efforts to gain control over the uncontrol-
lable only increase in intensity once the Hauptmann and Ottilie come into
play. Ironically, they now try to regain composure and restrain the (real,
natural) elective affinities of their imaginative powers by implementing the
pseudo-scientific metaphor of “elective affinities” as a general principle of
orientation. (The “Gleichnisrede” of chapter 1.4 marks this turning point.)
Fighting elective affinities with “elective affinities,” they are fighting the
blindness caused by their consuming passions with the blindness of (false)
reasoning that is (mis-)informed by an unfounded, pseudo-scientific met-
aphor. (Even though, it should be mentioned in parentheses, it is often the
narrator who alludes to this metaphor when reporting or rather comment-
ing on their behaviour, for example, in chapter 1.7. He probably does so
to remind his audience about the importance that this metaphor plays for
their idea of shaping their lives, but also for the poetic sake of instituting
the simile.) This negative dialectic triggers a series of tragic events and
basically seals their doomed fate.
At the same time, equally detrimental to their state of affairs is the fact
that the Wahlverwandten are not only losing sight of their core values and
touch with the conditions and consequences of their behaviour for their
immediate environment, but that they also take every slightest issue of
their petit community far too seriously. What Eduard and Ottilie, but also
Charlotte and the Hauptmann, are lacking most is circumspective vision.
To accomplish that, certain qualities are required like dispassionateness,
calmness, and serenity, which they do certainly not possess. The notable
exceptions in the novels are the old gardener and, of course, the above all
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  121

(between plot and author) hovering narrator. His display of circumspective

vision satisfies the third requirement for the accomplishment of a poetic
simile, which Goethe himself associated with the Wahlverwandtschaften
in another of his many insightful statements about his novel:

Man encounters problems everywhere, yet he is incapable of ignoring a single

one, which is fair enough, since otherwise research would stop. However,
we should not take the positive too seriously, but transcend it with irony in
order to recognize the characteristics of the problem. After exhausting years
of dealing with Berthollet in the Wahlverwandtschaften, the public is now as
unwilling to accept his science as my novel.41

Irony functions for Goethe as a poetic strategy to represent serious and

complex problems without direct engagement and entanglement. The abil-
ity to transcend the pressing problems, to hover above them and to compre-
hend them in one big picture is a quality that distinguishes the true poet42 as
much as the true scientist43 from the mere actors and spectators of the world.
Peter Schwartz aptly noticed the affinity of Goethe’s “ideal of morally neu-
tral contemplation (Schauen)” with Spinoza’s ultimate philosophical goal to
strive for an “adequate knowledge of the formal essence of things” (After
Jena 214). This perspective is reflected also in the narrator of the novel,
who presents us, without compromising the complexity of the issue, only
traits of characters that are essential for the demonstration of the unfolding
effects and consequences of “elective affinities” in human relations.
To facilitate such a critical perspective is a very important function and
accomplishment of modern poetry. The novel is a favourable genre to con-
tain and represent the complexities of modern life, because it possesses the
poetic capacity to associate a wide range of discourses and to condense
them in graphic manner. Goethe also associated his novel with a container
or barrel (“faßlich”)44 through which he expresses his desire to counteract
the fragmenting tendencies of modernity and the emerging dissociation of
nature into scientific disciplines by resynthesizing nature in one text. Die
Wahlverwandtschaften thus exercises a critical meta-discourse about the
uses of its title metaphor in scientific discourses and human life as much
as it executes a poetic simile, a super-realistic Gleichnis that does not rep-
resent reality, but rather recreates a virtual model of reality based on some
essential parameters.
Astonishingly, Goethe’s poetic ambition is matched or even trumped
today by some vanguard scientists, who write computer programs to
simulate and study complex environments and evolutionary processes in
122  Christian P. Weber

virtual realities. According to Christopher Langston, “the ultimate goal of

the study of artificial life would be to create ‘life’ in some other medium,
ideally a virtual medium where the essence of life has been abstracted from
the details of its implementation in any particular model. We would like
to build models that are so life-like that they cease to become models of
life and become examples of life themselves.”45 At this vanishing point of
(future) science, the boundary to poetry in its highest form – the vision-
ary yet reflected use of the reproductive, productive, and circumspective
imagination in the creation of a living simile – collapses. The sciences’ as
much as poetry’s ultimate goal is to withdraw the distinction between fact
and fiction, that is, as Langton states, to create another “example” of life
in a different medium, which eventually asserts its right to live just as any
life that unfolds in the material and historical world. The latter part of this
sentence actually paraphrases a letter from Goethe to his friend K.F. von
Reinhard that accompanied the sending of a copy of his newest brainchild,
which presents a wonderful opportunity to close also this investigation of
the wunderliche similarities among elective affinities (as elementary/imag-
inary forces), “elective affinities” (as metaphor) and The Elective Affinities
(as a poetic simile in the form of the novel):

When despite all criticism the content of this small book stands before the
imagination as an immutable factum [unveränderliches Factum], when the
readers realize that all their willpower and aversion will not alter it; then they
will eventually accept an apprehensive Wunderkind in fiction [in der Fabel]
just as they have come to accept in history, after a few years, the execution
of an old king and the crowning of a new emperor. Poetic events assert their
rights just as historical events do. [Das Gedichtete behauptet sein Recht, wie
das Geschehene.] (31 December 1809, FA 1.8: 982)

NOTES

1 About the vicissitudes of the ethos of “objectivity” in the sciences, see Daston
and Galison, Objectivity.
2 Cf. Blumenberg, Paradigms 15.
3 Another literary text that reflects the potential consequences of the metaphor
of “elective affinities” by enacting an equally rigorous discourse analysis is
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella Die Bergwerke zu Falun.
4 I should emphasize that my ambition in this essay is not to deliver a full-
fledged interpretation of Goethe’s perhaps most interpreted work. (For
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  123

a lucid review of the novel’s scholarly reception until 2001 see Tantillo,
Goethe’s “Elective Affinities.”) I only relate to the Wahlverwandtschaften as
the most important literary document to reflect on the metaphoric relation
between the scientific and the poetic imagination, which, I argue, the novel
itself does in poetic terms.
5 Since the original wording of this short “note” matters, I add the German
text: “Es scheint, daß den Verfasser seine fortgesetzten physikalischen Arbe-
iten zu diesem seltsamen Titel veranlaßten. Er mochte bemerkt haben, daß
man in der Naturlehre sich sehr oft ethischer Gleichnisse bedient, um etwas
von dem Kreise menschlichen Wissens weit Entferntes näher heranzubrin-
gen; und so hat er auch wohl in einem sittlichen Falle, eine chemische Glei-
chnisrede zu ihrem geistigen Ursprunge zurückführen mögen, um so mehr,
als doch überall nur eine Natur ist und auch durch das Reich der heitern
Vernunft-Freiheit die Spuren trüber, leidenschaftlicher Notwendigkeit sich
unaufhaltsam hindurchziehen, die nur durch eine höhere Hand, und vielleicht
auch nicht in diesem Leben, völlig auszulöschen sind.” Unless indicated oth-
erwise, all translations of German sources are my own.
6 Goethe expressed this belief most prominently in the famous verses which
he adapted from Plotinus and which form, appropriately, a simile: “Wär’
nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, / Wie könnten wir das Licht erblicken? /
Lebt’ nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft, / Wie könnt’ uns Göttliches
entzücken?” (FA 1.23/1:24) – “Something like the sun the eye must be, /
Else it no glint of sun could ever see; / Surely God’s own powers with us
unite, / Else godly things would not compel delight” (trans. Christopher
Middleton, GCW 1: 179).
7 I am elaborating on Goethe’s typology with reference to Kantian terminology
given that Goethe himself employed it here and at other occasions. Cf. esp.
the essays “Glückliches Ereignis,” “Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie,”
and “Anschauende Urteilskraft” in the first volume of his Hefte zur Mor-
phologie (FA 1.24: 434–8, 442–8).
8 Fritz Breithaupt (Jenseits der Bilder, 131–88) describes the substitutive struc-
ture of the image/picture and its working in the Wahlverwandtschaften in
his interpretation of the novel. Relevant for the poetics of the simile is his
observation that “no comparison” exists that could make visible the destruc-
tions caused by the image, “since according to the program of substitution
reality does only appear as a substitute” (134–5), that is, reality can be only
conceived in the mode of representation. The simile, however, juxtaposes and
compares two different modes and layers of representations so that one may
serve as the critique of the other.
9 Cf. Robert Stockhammer’s entry “Gleichnis” in the Goethe-Handbuch 4.1: 388.
124  Christian P. Weber

10 In a letter to Jacobi (23 November 1801, HA Briefe 2: 423), Goethe expresses

this expectation from philosophy, which he only considers beneficent “when
she unifies, that is to say, when she increases, secures and transforms our gen-
uine sense as if we were one with nature into a deep and quiet contemplation
[Anschauen] of the eternal unifying [συγχρισις] and separating [δίαχρισις], in
which we feel divine life.”
11 Goethe appreciates oriental poets especially for their similes, which he regards
as felicitous expressions of their cultural identity. He describes the ideal, i.e.,
quasi “natural,” creation process of some exemplary similes in his notes to the
“West-östlichen Divan,” cf. FA 1.3/1: 196–200.
12 All direct quotes from the Wahlverwandtschaften are cited by providing first
the chapter number of the novel (here: 1.4) followed by the page number of
the English edition of Elective Affinities in Judith Ryan’s translation (GCW
11, 89–262, here: 118). I have also used the German edition edited by Wal-
traud Wiethölter (FA 1.8: 269–529).
13 Actually, the narrator reverses the relationship between master Eduard and
his serving gardener in this very first paragraph, since it is indeed the gardener
who feels “enjoyed” (the German ergetzte is reminiscent of God’s satisfied
contemplation of His Creation) about the “participating diligence of the lord.”
14 My analysis has been informed by Breithaupt’s precise close reading of the
first chapter, cf. 131–3.
15 I refer here to five texts that the Frankfurter edition compiled under the head-
ing “Granit, Gebirgsbau und Epochen der Gesteinsbildung 1784–1785”
(FA 1.25: 311–21). For a thorough survey of Goethe’s interest in geology, see
von Engelhardt, Goethe im Gespräch mit der Erde.
16 Goethe translates his ethos of “obstinate realism” into a scientific method
of observation and experimentation in the essay Der Versuch als Vermittler
zwischen Objekt und Subjekt (FA 1.25: 26–36).
17 What Goethe considered fundamental and imperturbable knowledge at his
time is, as matter of fact, no longer accepted in most of the present geological
theories and models of earth formation.
18 My translation follows Douglas Miller’s (GCW 12: 132). I add here the first
part of the original German text to emphasize (by putting in italics) the char-
acter of the simile that is lost in the translation: “In diesem Augenblicke da
die innern anziehenden und bewegenden Kräfte der Erde gleichsam unmittel-
bar auf mich wirken, da die Einflüsse des Himmels mich näher umschweben,
werde ich zu höheren Betrachtungen der Natur hinauf gestimmt, und wie der
Menschengeist alles belebt so wird auch ein Gleichnis in mir rege dessen Erha-
benheit ich nicht widerstehen kann. So einsam sage ich zu mir selber indem
ich diesen ganz nackten Gipfel hinab sehe und kaum in der Ferne am Fuße ein
geringwachsendes Moos erblicke, so einsam sage ich wird es dem Menschen
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  125

zu Mute der nur den ältsten ersten tiefsten Gefühlen der Wahrheit seine Seele
eröffnen will.”
19 I cannot go in detail here, but Goethe’s basic idea of world history was
influenced by Plato’s and Spinoza’s philosophy and, more specifically, by
Hamann’s ideas about the loss of unity in God’s Creation and the origi-
nal poetic language through human reason, as expressed in his writings
Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten and Aesthetica in nuce.
20 See his correspondence with Eckermann, 6 May 1827 (FA 1.8: 984).
21 See Goethe to Riemer, 24 July 1809: “The ethical symbols in the natural sci-
ences (for example, that of elective affinities which was invented and used
by the great Bergman) are wittier and more readily connectable with poetry
and even society [Sozietät] than all others, though the latter, too, are merely
anthropomorphic, even the mathematical ones” (FA 1.8: 979–80).
22 First published in Latin in 1775 and quoted here after its English transla-
tion by Thomas Beddoes as rendered by Mi Gyung Kim, 264–6. Cf. also
the recapitulations of Bergman’s Dissertatio in Jeremy Adler, “Eine fast
magische Anziehungskraft” 63–73 and Nils Reschke, “Zeit der Umwend-
ung” 121–45.
23 Here quoted after the English translation Researches into the Laws of Chemi-
cal Affinity from 1809 with page numbers in brackets, cf. Kim 411–33.
24 On how the introduction of quantities changed the conception of “elective
affinities” in the chemical discourse and on how this translates into Goethe’s
novel, cf. Hoffmann, “‘Zeitalter der Revolutionen.’”
25 Richards (Romantic Conception 252–88) provides an instructive recapitula-
tion of Reil’s theories of life and mind.
26 The irony here is, of course, that he simply replaces one metaphor with
another, because the other was scientifically more established. Nowadays,
“elective affinity” sounds as mystical as “life force,” but so will probably a
metaphor like “genetic engineering” in a couple hundred years.
27 Cf. the definition in Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry 3.
28 Today, we identify this “fine basic matter” as DNA.
29 The narrator reveals the psychology of displacements, which Eduard and
Charlotte are entangled in, as a systematic problem of modernity by using
the multivalent term “versetzen” (which means, among many other possible
things, “to displace,” but is here primarily used in the sense of “to counter
an argument”) in the novel’s first chapter no less than seventeen times, thus
setting the thematic leitmotif. According to Martina Schwanke, it is the most
frequently used word in the whole novel.
30 The content of this section is discussed in greater detail in my article “Particu-
lar Universals – Universal Particulars: Biopolitical Metaphors and the Emer-
gence of Nationalism in Europe (1650–1815).”
126  Christian P. Weber

31 In his recent interpretation of Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften, Nils Reschke

argues that Goethe’s novel reflects the events of the French Revolution by
assuming the same critical position that Burke expressed in the Reflections (cf.
esp. chap. 3, “Wahlverwandtschaften: Goethe – Burke,” 85–119). This atti-
tude is prominently articulated by the ironic opening sentence of the novel,
in which Eduard is introduced while “grafting freshly cut shoots onto young
rootstocks” (1.1; 93). He is thus completely inverting the practice of graft-
ing as recommended by Burke – we learn later that Eduard, in doing so, acts
against the horticultural practice of his father – and is thus characterized as a
revolutionary.
32 See Schwartz for a thorough “historical contextualization” (After Jena 39) of
the novel.
33 Cf. Reschke 124–5.
34 Cf. Pörksen, “Goethes Kritik.”
35 Besides its criticism of “metaphoric symbolism,” there are two more aspects
of this letter that make me think that it contains the nucleus of the plan for
the future novel. First, Goethe articulates his shock about the suicide of Karo-
line von Günderode, whose life and fate show some striking parallels with
the tragic figure of Ottilie. Second, he speaks about the “fate of the German
fatherland” during the Napoleonic occupation and how this political event is
reflected in the writings of certain nationalist authors, namely, Müller, Gentz
(Burke’s translator), and Arndt.
36 This passage is also discussed by Pörksen, 297–8, who reads “metaphorischen”
instead of “metaphysischen,” which is probably the correct rendering.
37 “Wunderlich,” like “Gleichnis,” is a favourite term of Goethe during these
years of the Napoleonic Wars and frequently appears in his letters between
1805 and 1810. It is difficult to translate and can mean all of the following:
wondrous, strange, curious, fantastic, and whimsical. Moreover, it is related
to marvellous (sich wundern = to marvel) and miraculous (das Wunder =
miracle) and even evokes an association with wounded (die Wunde = wound);
all of these meanings resonate in Goethe’s use of the word in the novel.
38 Cf. the detailed analysis of the “Gleichnisrede” and how it can be translated
into chemical formulas in Adler 84–139. Attempts to read the poetics of the
Wahlverwandtschaften exclusively in terms of these chemical formulas, how-
ever, must fail in light of Goethe’s criticism and warning of unsubstantiated/
unmotivated transferences in the letter to Humboldt.
39 Cf. Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation 162.
40 For example Achim von Arnim, who saw in it “a segment of vanishing his-
tory portrayed for the future in exact and exhaustive detail.” Letter to Bettina
Brentano, 5 November 1809, as cited in Schwartz, 15).
 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften  127

41 Goethe to Kaspar von Sternberg, 19 September 1826, quoted from

Reschke, 136.
42 See Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit: “True poetry announces itself [to us],
as a secular Gospel, by freeing us through inner cheerfulness and external
comfort from the earthly burdens that press on us. Like a balloon, it lifts us
and all the ballast attached to us to higher regions and lets us see, from a
bird’s perspective, the confused paths of the world spread before us”
(FA 1.15: 631).
43 See his essay Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt: “The true
botanist shall be neither touched by the beauty nor by the usability of plants.
He shall just study their forms and relations among each other. As they are all
raised and shined on by the sun, the botanist shall look at them all and survey
them in the same calm manner” (FA 1.25: 26).
44 See Goethe to Johann F. Cotta, 26 July 1808: “The novel is a generally com-
prehensible [faßliches] and, also for the writer, a comfortably entertaining
genre; I feel a great urge to put more of what I have to say into this form than
previously” (FA 1.8: 978). Cf. his statement to Eckermann, 5 May 1827, FA
1.8: 984.
45 Quoted in Fox Keller, 267.

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wandtschaften und die Chemie seiner Zeit. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1987.
Baecque, Antoine de. The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary
France, 1770–1800. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
Bell, David A. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–
1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003.
Bergman, Torbern. Dissertation on Elective Attractions. Trans. Thomas Beddoes.
London: J. Murray, 1970.
Berthollet, Claude Louis. Researches into the Laws of Chemical Affinity. Trans.
M. Farrell. Baltimore: P.H. Nicklin & Co., 1809.
Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Trans. Robert L. Savage.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010.
Breithaupt, Fritz. Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Poetik der Wahrnehmung. Freiburg
im Breisgau: Rombach, 2000.
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. New Haven: Yale UP,
2003.
Daston, Lorraine J., and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Brooklyn: Zone, 2007.
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Engelhardt, Wolf von. Goethe im Gespräch mit der Erde: Landschaften, Gesteine,
Mineralien und Erdgeschichte in seinem Leben und Werk. Weimar: Böhlau,
2003.
Fox Keller, Evelyn. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development
with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002.
Goethe, Johann W. Goethes Briefe und Briefe von Goethe. Hamburger Ausgabe
in 6 vols. Ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Ver-
lag, 1988. [= HA Briefe]
Goethe, Johann W. Goethe’s Collected Works. 12 vols. Ed. Victor Lange et al.
New York: Suhrkamp, 1983–9. [= GCW]
Goethe, Johann W. Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Ed.
Dieter Borchmeyer et al. 40 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Ver-
lag, 1985–99. [= FA]
Goethe-Handbuch. Ed. Bernd Witte et al. 4 vols. in 5. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996–9.
Hoffmann, Christoph. “‘Zeitalter der Revolutionen’: Goethes Wahlver-
wandtschaften im Fokus des chemischen Paradigmenwechsels.” Deutsche Vier-
teljahrsschrift 67 (1993): 417–50.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Florae Fribergensis specimen, plantas cryptogamicas
praesertim subterraneas exhibens, Berolini: Rottman, 1793.
Kim, Mi Gyung. Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical
Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT UP, 2003.
Koschorke, Albrecht, Susanne Lüdemann, Thomas Frank, and Ethel Matala
de Mazza. Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der
Geschichte Europas. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007.
Lavoisier, Antoine. Elements of Chemistry. Trans. Robert Kerr. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1952.
Müller-Sievers, Helmut. Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature
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Pörksen, Uwe. “Goethes Kritik naturwissenschaftlicher Metaphorik.” Jahrbuch
der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 25 (1981): 285–313.
Reil, Johann Christian. Von der Lebenskraft (1795). Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius
Barth, 1910.
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Roman Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Freiburg: Rombach, 2006.
Richards, Robert J. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in
the Age of Goethe. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.
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U of Minnesota P, 1991.
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wandtschaften.” Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994.
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Schwartz, Peter J. After Jena: Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the End of the Old
Regime. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2010.
Tantillo, Astrida O. Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” and the Critics. Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2001.
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Metaphors and the Emergence of Nationalism in Europe (1650–1815).” His-
tory of European Ideas 39.3 (2013): 426–48.
5 Physics Disarmed: Probabilistic
Knowledge in the Works of James Clerk
Maxwell and George Eliot

tina young choi

In his 1873 Nature article, British physicist James Clerk Maxwell intro-
duced readers to the molecule, a particle about which little had heretofore
been known. “Every substance … has its own molecule,” the renowned
scientist methodically explained in his opening remarks, and every mol-
ecule a characteristic mass and composition (“Molecules” 437). Yet there
were significant limitations to the investigator’s knowledge, he admitted,
in spite of Britain’s many advances in the physical and thermodynamic sci-
ences. Even in the article’s first paragraph, he conceded that “no one has
ever seen or handled a single molecule,” and characterized his own work
as “deal[ing] with things invisible and imperceptible by our senses, and
which cannot be subjected to direct experiment” (437). After devoting sev-
eral pages to an explanation of the principles of molecular velocity and dif-
fusion, he returned in his concluding paragraphs to the more fundamental
methodological problem with which the article began, the problem of see-
ing and knowing, and noted that in spite of these obstacles to traditional
scientific methods, molecular research had compensated by “develop[ing]
a method of its own, and it has also opened up new views of nature” (440).
Rather than naming this revolutionary new “method” at once, however,
Maxwell left readers in suspense while he embarked on an unusual digres-
sion for the space of a few paragraphs. He first turned to ancient Roman
philosopher-poet Lucretius’s assertion that the invisible movements of
atoms might be understood through their indirect effects, the movement
of dust particles rendered visible in shafts of light, and then quoted Lord
Tennyson’s 1868 poem “Lucretius,” with its vivid description of “flaring
atom-streams” (440). Only after these two examples of ways in which the
invisible might imaginatively be rendered visible did Maxwell identify the
new “method” he had mentioned earlier: statistics.
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  131

The juxtaposition of Lucretius’s and Tennyson’s accounts of the mol-

ecule with nineteenth-century statistical models feels unexpected, even
strange. Maxwell may have wished to highlight the contrast between older
forms of understanding and recent research methods; but rather than dis-
missing the attempts of his predecessors, he seems instead to draw attention
to the continuities between poetic and scientific modes of representation.
Like Lucretius and Tennyson, his article suggests, the nineteenth-century
molecular scientist can only speculate about the subject of his inquiry. The
scientist cannot know “the actual motion of any one of these molecules,”
Maxwell explains, and his “experiments can never give … anything more
than statistical information” – averages, likelihoods, a range of chances and
possibilities – impressionistic data beyond which finer examination yields
imprecision and uncertainty (440). In place of empirical knowledge that
would come from direct observation and measurement, statistics offers a
speculative, indirect vision of its object. The molecule itself, imperceptible
and unfixable, is a “mental representation” in Maxwell’s words, something
generated by and resident in the imagination (438). Like poetry’s visions
of illuminated dust, statistics – with its probabilities and indeterminacies –
provides what can only be, as he puts it, a “probable conjecture” about the
molecule (439).
For physical scientists of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, these
seemingly abstruse questions about epistemology and imagination were
concerns to be grappled with on a regular basis, both in the laboratory and
in the pages of professional journals. As the thermodynamic sciences, in
particular, turned their attention to the realm of unseen atoms and mol-
ecules, new epistemological questions arose about the very nature of sci-
entific inquiry: What kind of knowledge could be considered legitimate,
or even possible, about this invisible and largely imperceptible world of
molecules? What constituted knowledge in the absence of direct empirical
evidence about one’s subject?
As historians of science have observed, the proffered answers to these
questions were correlated, in large part, with the respondent’s national
affiliation (Smith, Science of Energy 233–5; Dear, Intelligibility of Nature
115–19). Leading German physicists, men like Carl Friedrich Gauss and
Wilhelm Weber, contended that molecules and the unseen magnetic and
electrical forces governing the interactions between them could best be
described mathematically. In the 1850s, as British scientists like Maxwell
were studying the mechanics of electromagnetism, Weber directed his
efforts to the calculation of distance and potential energy between par-
ticles, to the mathematical description of forces. Yet these Continental
132  Tina Young Choi

accounts met with resistance from British scientists like chemist Michael
Faraday, the director of the Royal Institution and the first to describe elec-
tromagnetic induction, as well as prominent mathematician and energy
physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), among others. Like
them, Maxwell argued that Weber’s mathematical solution, what he called
“action at a distance,” reduced molecular phenomena to little more than
“a system of points” and overlooked “the perseverance of matter” (qtd.
in Smith, 221). For Maxwell and his colleagues, particles and the spaces
between them were not mathematical abstractions, but material bodies
whose actions needed to be explained in terms of mechanics and physical
causalities. Understanding molecules thus meant examining not only these
invisible particles themselves but also and especially the intervening spaces
between particles, the fields within which one particle might collide with
or affect another.
The larger epistemological question posed by the molecule, however,
reached beyond the limits of the laboratory, as Maxwell’s Nature article
suggested – and touched as well upon concerns both theological and aes-
thetic. Indeed, Christian Weber’s essay in this volume demonstrates that
this interest in what could not be apprehended through the senses had its
origins in eighteenth-century philosophy and science; Romantic thinkers
across Europe, but especially German intellectuals like Goethe and Kant,
sought a language for describing the immaterial relationship between the
self and the world. As Christian Weber reveals, Goethe’s chosen metaphor,
drawn from the language of experimental chemistry, was “elective affin-
ity,” a word that not only reflected the relational quality of perception but
also suggested the act of imagination at its core. Yet the leading German
physicists of the nineteenth century, Gauss and Wilhelm Weber, ultimately
turned away from the language of philosophy and literature – the language
of affinity, inclination, faith, and desire – and towards mathematical pre-
cision and certainty. By contrast, as this chapter will reveal, their British
counterparts embraced the spirit of imaginative speculation. Indeed, by
the 1870s, both Maxwell and one of his most prominent contemporaries
in the literary world, George Eliot, were engaged in their own representa-
tional experiments, using the language of probability.
The first section of this chapter focuses on efforts by British scientists,
especially by Maxwell and his contemporary, physicist John Tyndall, to
investigate the realm of sub-microscopic particles in the 1860s and 1870s,
and to accustom readers not to expect direct empirical knowledge about
the subject, but to accept the kinds of speculative activity and indeter-
minacy that such research entailed. The second section considers Eliot’s
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  133

novel Daniel Deronda as an exploration of forms of understanding about

the unverifiable and the unknown in human motivation and feeling. Both
Maxwell and Eliot formulated new models for understanding that did not
avoid but rather acknowledged and even embraced uncertainty. Literary
historian Christopher Herbert asserts that a wide range of intellectuals
began to question forms of absolute knowledge during this period (Vic-
torian Relativity xiv), and Maxwell and Eliot are, without doubt, to be
counted among them. But their work also proposed that not knowing
could become the basis for a different way of knowing, a knowing that
was statistical rather than empirical.
According to historians of science Lorraine Daston, Ian Hacking, and
Theodore Porter, the emergence of the statistical sciences in the 1830s
and 1840s had a significant impact on professional and popular discourse.
With the founding of a statistical section of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science in 1833, the contemporaneous creation of statis-
tical societies in London and Manchester, and the open support of political
economists like Thomas Malthus and social reformers like James Phillips
Kay, statistical methods gained legitimacy not only in scientific circles but
in political ones as well (Porter, Rise of Statistical Thinking 31–3). The
creation in 1837 of the General Register Office, which was tasked with
collecting comprehensive population statistics for all of Britain, and the
establishment of the Journal of the Statistical Society the following year
gave these professional concerns a more public voice. By the middle of
the century, proportions and  percentages were referred to as matters of
common parlance.
It soon became clear from this widespread application of the statistical
sciences in insurance policies, social reform, public health planning, and
political economy that there were two seemingly contradictory phenom-
ena that emerged from the collection of numerical data. On the one hand,
statistics illustrated the mathematical regularity with which events (e.g.,
death, crime, sickness, fire) occurred when measured in large populations
and over long stretches of time. This law of large numbers lent such inci-
dents the effect of determinacy and certainty. Although one might not
be able to predict their time or location, the fact of their occurrence gave
statisticians and laypersons the impression of a world governed, if no lon-
ger by providence, then by a secular principle at once consistent and tran-
scendent in its application. But on the other hand, statistics spoke through
the language of uncertainty. Its percentages and proportions might have
calculated the chances and risks of an event’s occurrence, but particulars –
where, when, who – were left to the imagination and the future. Recent
134  Tina Young Choi

scholarship has tended to focus on the former, on the containment and

control represented by statistical regularities (Poovey, Rosenthal), and
particularly on the role of numbers and averages in reinforcing the middle
class’s normalizing disciplinary agendas. But the uncertainties conjured by
statistics, while not exactly liberatory, nonetheless moved beyond predict-
ability and determinism, and instead encouraged readers to think in terms
of probabilities and possibilities, to contemplate what theorist Niklas
Luhmann has described as the fertile space between the “necessary” and
the “impossible” (Observations on Modernity 45). But where this realm
of the possible is, for Luhmann, most characteristic of twentieth-century
thought, my work traces its origins to the nineteenth century and sug-
gests, more specifically, that it was contemplated and cultivated by science
and literature alike.
By the 1850s and 1860s, as the language of statistics extended beyond
the specialized report and became all but commonplace, lay writers began
to contemplate the disjunction between large-scale certainties, the law of
large numbers that might describe populations, and the vagaries and inde-
terminacies associated with the individual. One anonymous essayist, for
instance, complained that public health statistics, rather than providing
certainty or assurance, left the individual ever in doubt: for “the one death
that must come  … the time is to him personally  – in spite of libraries
full of statistics – utterly unknown and uncertain” (“Registration” 228).
More typical was Charles Dickens’s treatment of statistics in his 1854
novel Hard Times, which criticized the period’s proliferation of numbers
and tables for their overdetermined, dehumanizing qualities, for how little
they concerned themselves with the individuals they claimed to repre-
sent. The character Sissy Jupe, for example, learns that in a population of
“a million of inhabitants … only five-and-twenty are starved to death in
the streets, in the course of a year” (97). Statistics, for the novel’s charac-
ters, are not only unsympathetic but also wrong-headed in their narrow
focus on populations and their failure to account for the experiences of the
individual. For many Victorians, the incontrovertibility of such “facts”
represented the limitations of statistical methods and the impersonal qual-
ity of the political or social efforts that employed them.
But later writers like Maxwell and Eliot, turning their focus away
from statistical certainty, saw value in the uncertainties that statistics
also allowed one to represent. Rather than dismissing statistical modes
of understanding as irrelevant, they considered how the uncertainties
that emerged at the level of the particular might in fact be generative of
alternative forms of knowledge about what could be neither seen nor
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  135

measured: the precise qualities of any one of Maxwell’s molecules, the

emotions of Eliot’s characters. In place of the verifiable constants that
described populations, both Maxwell and Eliot suggested that probabili-
ties – imprecise and indeterminate though they might be in application –
could provide a way of approaching the particular, not of knowing it
directly through empirical observation or measurement, but of generat-
ing a fertile field of possibilities around it.

Molecular Realms of Speculation

British scientists discredited “action at a distance,” the theory favoured by

Gauss and Weber to explain magnetic and electrical phenomena between
discrete particles, and sought instead causal explanations to describe the
relationship between one body and another.1 They promoted the idea of
“aether” as a material – and possibly even mechanical – substrate that could
mediate and transmit such effects across space. But knowledge about the
ether, which was understood to be omnipresent but imperceptible, as well
as about the individual molecules within it, lay outside the scope of scien-
tific certainty. Faraday posited the existence of “lines of force,” and Max-
well, citing the plausibility of Faraday’s explanation for the “intervening
medium” between particles, also speculated that something like intricate
cogwheels could be thought of as the responsible intermediaries (Max-
well, Treatise x, 36; Dear 132–5; Smith 220, 225–7).2 Scientific evidence
about these or other hypotheses was, however, inconclusive. Describing
the realm of the molecular – the motions and interactions of molecules,
and the ether surrounding them  – to other scientists and to laypersons
thus presented a significant challenge.
Indeed, what these scientists emphasized was that the molecule and the
ether surrounding it were indescribable by traditional modes of scientific
investigation and representation. Tyndall, an experimental physicist who
had succeeded Faraday to the directorship of the Royal Institution in
1867, considered this aspect of scientific research in his 1870 address to the
British Association for the Advancement of Science. He focused primar-
ily on the microscopic, but, he asserted, once scientists moved beyond the
microscope’s limits and towards the molecular, “the speculative faculty”
necessarily compensated in “regions where the hope of certainty would
seem to be entirely shut out  … Beyond the present outposts of micro-
scopic inquiry lies an immense field for the exercise of the imagination”
(“Scientific Use,” 63).3 As an example of imagination supplementing more
traditional forms of scientific investigation, Tyndall referred to the work
136  Tina Young Choi

of his contemporary, Lord Kelvin, observing, “When William Thomson

tries to place the ultimate particles of matter [molecules] between his com-
pass points, and to apply to them a scale of millimeters, it is an exercise
of the imagination” (36). Beyond the limits of the visible, more specula-
tive forms of knowledge took the place of epistemological certainty and
empirical knowledge. Maxwell might elsewhere have disagreed vehe-
mently with Tyndall, but in his own address to the British Association the
same year, he offered an account of molecular research that accorded with
that of his fellow scientist.4 Knowledge about the molecule, according to
Maxwell, lay in “the still more hidden and dimmer region where Thought
weds Fact,” a region in which “molecules … in their true relation” might
be apprehended only through a combination of empirical and theoretical
study (“Address” 216).5 As he concluded, “the way to [the molecule]”
passes not through the scientific laboratory or the mathematician’s note-
book, but rather “through the very den of the metaphysician” (ibid.).
The difficulty in obtaining information about the individual molecule
was due, in part, to the technical limitations of available instruments; the
resolution of microscopes did not allow scientists to visualize the particles
they studied. But as Maxwell’s dynamical theory of molecules asserted,
the very nature of the particle and its motions also rendered imaging or
measurement impossible. Never a “single hard body” whose contours
and motions could be determined with mathematical accuracy, the mol-
ecule was a site of “vibration” internally as well as externally, engaged in
what he evocatively described as a “dance” with other molecular bodies
(“Address” 224, 228). Thus, he could state with assurance that particles in
air travel at an average velocity of “1505 feet per second” and experience
an average of “8,077,200,000 collisions  per second” (Scientific Letters 2:
615). Such figures might well strike the uninitiated reader as providing
access to empirical knowledge – but these data were, as Maxwell empha-
sized elsewhere, “of an essentially statistical nature, because no one has yet
discovered any practical method of tracing the path of a molecule, or of
identifying it at different times” (Theory of Heat 329). Moreover, this shift
from empirical to statistical knowing was, he declared, of both scientific
and epistemological significance: “This is a step the philosophical impor-
tance of which cannot be overestimated. It is the equivalent to the change
from absolute certainty to high probability” (Scientific Letters 2: 930).6
In explicating this distinction for lay readers, Maxwell resorted to an
analogy with the population statistics with which most of them would
already have been familiar. What one could know about individual
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  137

molecules, like what one could know about individual persons, was dif-
ferent from what one could know about a group, he explained. Indeed, he
made this comparison between molecules and populations explicit in his
1873 Nature article, explaining that just as surveys by “registrars and tabu-
lators” differed in fundamental ways from “the study of human nature by
parents and schoolmasters,” so by analogy “the smallest portion of matter
which we can subject to experiment consists of millions of molecules, not
one of which ever becomes individually sensible to us. We cannot, there-
fore, ascertain the actual motion of any one of these molecules, so that we
are obliged … to adopt the statistical method” (“Molecules” 440).7 Offer-
ing a similar comparison in his letter to social scientist Herbert Spencer
that same year, he declared that our knowledge of the molecule  – of its
rotations, which “var[y] at every encounter with another molecule,” and
of its differential velocity – can be “statistical only – there is nothing defi-
nite in any other sense than the death-rate of a city is definite” (2: 959–60).8
Just as the law of large numbers might provide information about popula-
tions but not individuals – a distinction which most readers of the 1870s
would have comprehended – scientific investigation yielded certainty and
accuracy for the mass but not for the single molecule. Specific knowl-
edge in both cases, Maxwell suggests, would necessarily be probabilistic
in nature.9
But this epistemological uncertainty applied not just to the molecule,
but also and especially to the intervening spaces between molecules, the
ether of molecular influences, movement, and potential. As twentieth-
century physicist and philosopher Freeman Dyson puts it, the focus
of Maxwell’s research was not only “things,” but also the fields within
which these “things” move and exert their influence on others (“Why Is
Maxwell’s Theory” 3–4). Moreover, while molecules might have some
known properties, such as chemical composition and mass, the chemical
essence and mechanism of the ether (Faraday’s proposed lines and Max-
well’s hypothetical cogs notwithstanding) remained undefined. Indeed,
the ether’s most consistent characteristic lay not in any physical feature
assigned to it, but in the indeterminacy associated with scientific inves-
tigations into its nature. Just as the ether’s very existence was a matter of
scientific hypothesis without empirical proof, so the intervening spaces
between molecules were rendered thick, not by any discernible matter, but
by the multiple probabilities understood to reside there – the velocities,
vibrations, influences, and impulses that were at once imaginable and yet
incalculable.
138  Tina Young Choi

Probabilistic Intersubjectivity

Maxwell was keenly aware of how this probabilistic approach might

extend beyond the sciences. After all, he asserted, there was little differ-
ence between a metaphysician who contemplated human motives and
behaviours and “a physicist disarmed of all his weapons” (Scientific Letters
2: 815), and as he admitted in his Nature article, the physicist who studied
the molecule was himself “disarmed” of empirical methods and data. For
novelist George Eliot, the world was filled with observers who, like Max-
well’s scientist, were “disarmed,” denied omniscience or assurances of per-
fect understanding. Indeed, sympathy and scientific observation function
in analogous ways, she suggests in her final novel, Daniel Deronda, as they
are ever moving towards but never achieving epistemological resolution.
Eliot’s interest in the period’s science, including nineteenth-century
naturalism and the medical sciences, spanned the length of her career as
a novelist (Beer, Darwin’s Plots; Levine, Darwin; Rothfield, Vital Signs).
Moreover, while a number of other Victorian novelists demonstrated an
interest in contemporaneous scientific discoveries and theories – notably
Charles Dickens, who was fascinated by the period’s physical chemistry,
and Charles Kingsley, who actively promoted sanitary principles in his
fiction – Eliot was perhaps unique among them in the depth of her engage-
ment with and understanding of contemporaneous scientific research. Her
lifelong companion, editor George Henry Lewes, was Tyndall’s personal
friend and correspondent; she herself had read Tyndall’s and Maxwell’s
published essays, and had assiduously transcribed excerpts from their two
1870 British Association lectures into her working notebooks in prepa-
ration for writing Daniel Deronda (George Eliot’s Notebooks 16–23).
A consideration of Eliot’s literary oeuvre as a whole, however, belies any
suggestion that science’s epistemological grapplings served as the prereq-
uisite and foundation for her fictional equivalents. Her earlier writings,
too, had explored versions of these same questions both from a theological
perspective, through translations of key Christian philosophical texts that
were among her first publications in the 1840s and 1850s, and from a secu-
lar stance, through novels that asked readers to consider the difficulties
inherent in the process of seeing and knowing. The narrator of Middle-
march, for example, famously made appeals to the novel’s readers, inviting
them to turn a critical eye to the limitations of vision and perspective; she
shed light on the difficult process by which characters might know each
other or, as in the case of her well-meaning but often fatally myopic hero,
Dr Tertius Lydgate, might know themselves. These questions permeate
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  139

Daniel Deronda as well, and the notebooks she kept in preparing this 1876
novel seem to suggest the common ground she observed between recent
scientific developments – as they questioned the possibility of empirical
knowledge and considered the meaning of incalculability – and the direc-
tion of her own literary endeavour. For Eliot, scientific investigation and
understanding, and specifically, their handling of the broader epistemo-
logical challenges of knowing something about the invisible world, pro-
vided one way of thinking through and describing the limits of knowing,
a useful model  – and sometimes a useful metaphor  – for describing her
own experiments in narrative, where omniscience gave way to speculation,
certitude to productive doubt.
Scholars investigating the intersections between science and literature in
Eliot’s work have typically looked to Middlemarch as a critical case study.
Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, which traces the intertwined histories of
two young English persons confronting unsettling circumstances – Dan-
iel Deronda, a wealthy gentleman who discovers and ultimately embraces
his Jewish ancestry, and Gwendolen Harleth, a woman who attempts to
resolve her social and financial difficulties through marriage to the aris-
tocratic Charles Grandcourt  – has tended to attract critical attention to
its social thematics, namely, the place of Jews and of women in Victo-
rian London. But given that the notes Eliot made in preparing to write
this novel included material drawn from Maxwell’s and Tyndall’s writ-
ing, I  suggest that we might read Daniel Deronda, too, as a “scientific”
novel. Unlike Middlemarch, with its doctor protagonist and its focus on
the rise of the medical profession, science plays no thematic role in Daniel
Deronda. Yet as critics such as George Levine (Dying to Know 172–85;
“George Eliot’s Hypothesis”) and Jesse Rosenthal have noted, the lat-
ter investigates epistemological questions about the relationship between
scientific and sympathetic, objective and subjective ways of knowing.
Indeed, like Middlemarch, with its recurrent turns to the language of
light and microscopy as figures for perception and epistemology, Daniel
Deronda features science – and as these pages will demonstrate, probabil-
ity theory in particular – as central to its narrative strategy. It provides one
way of responding to the question, How can one know something about
the unknowable? For Eliot’s characters, religious faith – in this case, Juda-
ism – offers one viable response to the problem of arriving at knowledge
about the unknowable. But the narrative also invites us to contemplate
the power of probabilistic thinking as another mode of approaching the
unknowable. While their objects of investigation necessarily differed – for
Maxwell it was the molecule, while for Eliot it was human emotion – both
140  Tina Young Choi

explored ways of knowing that extended beyond the empirical, beyond

what observers could see and measure. In this sense, the novel offers its
own meditation on an issue that Maxwell had raised some years before, in
a provocative letter to friend and classics scholar Lewis Campbell: “What
is believing? When the probability … in a man’s mind of a certain propo-
sition being true is greater than that of its being false, he believes it with
a proportion of faith corresponding to the probability … This is faith in
general” (Scientific Letters 1: 198). In other words, rather than opposing
religious and scientific explanation, Maxwell places them on a single con-
tinuum of belief. Just as probability, for the scientist, was the likelihood
of a hypothesis holding true, so too was faith a matter of ever-increasing
probabilities, of an asymptotic, not identical, relation to truth.
As if elaborating two decades later on Maxwell’s privately expressed
idea, Eliot contemplates the relationship between religious and scientific
belief in chapter 41 of Daniel Deronda, the first chapter of the novel’s sixth
book, “Revelations,” a title that aptly suggests the convergence of secular
and religious truths that occurs within. The narrator explores the continu-
ities between religious faith and scientific research from Daniel’s perspec-
tive, as he reflects on the surprising insistence of his Jewish friend, Ezra
Cohen, that the hitherto Christian Daniel is destined to serve as Ezra’s
own “executive self,” to fulfil his spiritual desires (510). For Daniel, who
has not yet discovered his Jewish parentage, his friend’s zeal verges on
fanaticism; at the same time, he acknowledges, many secular men, includ-
ing the “social reformer … [the] enthusiast in sewage,” and even great sci-
entists such as Copernicus, Galileo, and James Watt, might well have been
described as possessing an enthusiasm more akin to prophetic fervour than
to scientific detachment (510). Indeed, he speculates that Ezra’s passion
might be likened to “even strictly-measuring science,” whose “forecasting
ardour … feels the agitations of discovery beforehand, and has a faith in
its preconception that surmounts many failures of experiment” (513). The
operations of science, like the inclinations of religion, are driven forward
by belief. Filling the space of the unknown with guesses, premonitions,
and desires, scientific speculation operates like another version of spiritual
faith. Moreover, Ezra, in believing that Daniel is Jewish, is not alone in his
speculative fanaticism; Daniel acknowledges that he, too, has transformed
probabilistic belief (what he, borrowing the language of science, terms a
“hypothesis”) into faith when he assumes, as he has for many years, that
he is Hugo Mallinger’s biological son (512). But rather than seeking “valid
evidence” that would support or refute any of these speculations, Daniel
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  141

accepts these forms of irresolution at chapter’s end, “regard[ing] his uncer-

tainty as a condition to be cherished” (515).
This language of scientific speculation recurs throughout the novel, as
a figure for other modes of speculative thought: religious faith in a time
of secular rationalism, emotional attachment to a certain vision of one’s
future, sensitivity to what others feel but cannot express. What Eliot’s last
novel suggests is that these forms of knowing are, in large measure, nec-
essarily probabilistic; in the absence of empirical evidence to confirm or
deny, it is the observer who helps to generate around his or her object a
field of possibility, actively filling the unknown spaces between the neces-
sary and the impossible with hypothetical narratives of what might be.
The difficulty of knowing, particularly when knowing necessitates the
overcoming of distance between oneself and another – whether between
one character and another, or between reader and character  – is central
to Eliot’s oeuvre as a whole, and a number of recent critics, including
Thomas Albrecht, Elizabeth Ermarth, Catherine Gallagher, Rae Greiner,
George Levine (“Daniel Deronda”), and Forest Pyle, have ably explored
the attendant problematics of sympathetic feeling in Eliot’s work. As with
Maxwell’s molecule, however, sympathy’s epistemological difficulty arises
not merely from limitations of perception, but also from the nature of the
perceived object itself. Maxwell had referred to a “dance” to describe the
unfixed condition of the molecule at the centre of his study, and so too
Eliot was interested, not in securing her subject under a microscope, but
in portraying its ever-shifting condition. In an essay presented to a private
club, Maxwell, ruminating on the extension of physical principles into the
domain of metaphysics, suggested that “our free will at the best is like that
of Lucretius’s atoms – which at quite uncertain times and places deviate in
an uncertain manner from their course” (Scientific Letters 2: 820). Percep-
tion might be one part of our difficulty in knowing, that is, but another,
significant part lies in the undetermined path of our object, whether
molecular or human. Eliot’s Daniel Deronda explores this indeterminacy
with characteristic psychological depth and complexity, focusing atten-
tion on the “iridescence of character – the play of various, nay, contrary
tendencies,” the often imperceptibly shifting emotions of the individuals
at the novel’s centre (42).
The narrator of Deronda introduces us to a range of characters, and
while she occasionally dwells on appearances and generalizations, she also
reveals that such forms of knowledge are not to be trusted. For example, in
introducing Grandcourt, the narrator lingers for a moment on the surface
142  Tina Young Choi

of this “correct Englishman,” on his “faded fairness” and “long grey eyes”
(111). But she cautions us about coming to any conclusions about the
individual based on certitudes about “correct Englishmen” as a popula-
tion – and then, pressing further still, she exclaims, “Attempts at descrip-
tion are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being? even when he
is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which
must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circum-
stances” (111). The supposedly legible surfaces of the body tell us little;
they represent only the beginning of epistemological difficulty, revealing
primarily the limits to our understanding. Even when “complete,” our
empirical knowledge consists only of an assemblage of fleeting observa-
tions, “impressions,” rather than facts or certainties. The narrator’s stance
here constitutes a striking difference from the nineteenth century’s typi-
cal literary omniscience, in which the authoritative third-person narrator
of a Dickens or Flaubert novel implicitly knows  – even if he does not
reveal – all. Here, such knowing is a delusion, based on generalizations or
assumptions; as the chapter’s epigraph admonishes us, “The beginning of
an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline
for our ignorance” (111).
What kind of knowledge might we as readers hope to gain about these
characters, then? To resign ourselves to the impossibility of understand-
ing is hardly a reassuring beginning for someone embarking upon a
nine-hundred-page novel. Eliot revisits this question throughout, when
she invites us into those spaces of encounter between one character and
another, or even between reader and character. For instance, she offers us
the perspective of Mr Lush, Grandcourt’s assistant, who contemplates the
possibility of a union between his employer and Gwendolen:

What was the probable effect that the news of [Gwendolen’s] family misfor-
tunes would have on Grandcourt’s fitful obstinacy he felt to be quite incalcu-
lable. So far as the girl’s poverty might be an argument that she would accept
an offer from him now in spite of any previous coyness, it might remove that
bitter objection to risk a repulse which Lush divined to be one of Grand-
court’s determining motives; on the other hand, the certainty of acceptance
was just “the sort of thing” to make him lapse hither and thither with no
more apparent will than a moth. Lush had had his patron under close obser-
vation for many years, and knew him perhaps better than he knew any other
subject; but to know Grandcourt was to doubt what he would do in any
particular case … Lush had some general certainties about Grandcourt … Of
what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  143

head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus
that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths? (281–2)

More than the content of Lush’s thought processes, this passage reveals
their limitations  – the first half of the passage inhabits Lush’s limited
perspective through indirect discourse, then turns away to the narrator’s
point of view, a third-person commentary on Lush’s reflections. Yet if we
expected narratorial omniscience in the passage’s second half (beginning
with “Lush had had his patron”), the novel disappoints us. We receive
no further insight, rather an exposition on the necessarily imperfect state
of Lush’s knowledge as well as, by extension, our own. Moreover, that
imperfection is hardly particular to Lush; indeed, as the narrator suggests,
it is as fundamental to observation of a creature like Grandcourt, as to any
act of scientific observation of a moth or other insect. Like the scientist,
Lush is familiar with generalities, average behaviours deduced from “close
observation for many years,” but he cannot know particulars for any one
case, including the case that interests him most.
Significantly, as the narrator pauses over the divide between Lush and
Grandcourt, her subject is not Grandcourt himself, but rather the diffi-
culty that characters like Lush or Gwendolen (or even we as readers) face
in ascertaining Grandcourt’s feelings and motivations. Drawing our atten-
tion to the felt space between individuals  – to what narratologists have
termed intersubjectivity, one character’s conscious appraisal of another’s
interiority,10 and what we might call a version of human ether, filled with
emotions, inclinations, and influences – Daniel Deronda reveals that it is
not readily accessed by empirical knowledge and useful data, but rather by
speculative and imaginative effort. Thus, the condition of uncertainty that
Lush experiences applies generally, not just to the inscrutable Grandcourt.
For example, Gwendolen, contemplating Grandcourt’s offer of marriage,
speculates on the relationship between husband and wife: “For what could
not a woman do when she was married, if she knew how to assert herself?
Here all was constructive imagination. Gwendolen had about as accurate a
conception of marriage – that is to say, of the mutual influences, demands,
duties of man and woman in the state of matrimony – as she had of mag-
netic currents and the law of storms” (298). What seems at first a dep-
recatory comment about Gwendolen’s ignorance of married life (not to
mention science) might also be read, in light of the narrator’s description
of Lush some pages earlier, as a commentary on the epistemological dif-
ficulties that such invisible influences and effects present to any observer,
who can perceive little more than their outer manifestations. Just as the
144  Tina Young Choi

mundane interactions and expectations that constitute the intersubjective

experience of married life are unknowable to someone like Gwendolen,
so too are the physical interactions of particles or of masses of air invis-
ible even to the physicist or the meteorologist, whose objects of study are
resistant to more traditional, empirical modes of study. She might indeed
be ignorant, but so too the trained observer, as Maxwell himself had admit-
ted, needed to extrapolate from limited data by engaging the “constructive
imagination.” Indeed, these parallels between scientific and lay observa-
tion are the mirror image of those in Maxwell’s 1873 Nature article; just
as, for Maxwell, probability theory might be explained through analogy to
Tennyson’s poetic visions of the atom, so for Eliot might the layperson’s
imaginative interpersonal speculations be understood by comparison to
the scientist’s necessarily probabilistic hypotheses.
The epistemological challenge presented by intersubjective space is a
central feature in many of Eliot’s writings, but what distinguishes this
last novel from her earlier work is the degree of certainty characterizing
moments of intersubjective feeling. Much is left unarticulated by char-
acters and narrator in Middlemarch, for example, but this earlier novel
nonetheless leaves us with the sense that the characters have reached a
deep understanding with each other, and we as readers with them; thus,
in its final chapters, the novel’s primary characters find themselves joined
in moments of mutual insight. Describing the sympathetic touch of hands
and meeting of eyes, the narrator reassures us that such secular communion
of feelings between persons can exist. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot invites us
to explore the indeterminacy of interpersonal spaces, but she denies us the
certainties she offered in her earlier novel. While she resolves the lingering
question of Daniel’s parentage with a perhaps uncharacteristic certainty,11
the realm of the unseen – questions of faith, emotion, attachment, moti-
vation – remains one of uncertainty. Deronda’s characters approach each
other, but the sympathetic resolutions that take place in Middlemarch are
elusive in this last novel. Its final pages, in which the widowed Gwendolen
sends one last letter to Daniel, and Daniel, inspired by the dying Ezra’s
religious fervour, sails off to Palestine, leave both her characters and us as
readers in a state of emotional irresolution: What effect does Gwendolen’s
last letter have on Daniel? Will Gwendolen carry out Daniel’s encourage-
ment to become “one of the best of women”? Will Daniel fulfil the dying
Ezra’s final, prophetic wish?
For a novel characterized by such indeterminacy, the opening scene
begins, appropriately, with Gwendolen being viewed through a haze, both
literal and epistemological, by Daniel, who can only guess at her feelings
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  145

as she plays at roulette. The roulette game, like the accidents that occur
throughout  – the Harleth family’s financial losses, Daniel’s encounters
with Ezra and with Mirah Lapidow, Grandcourt’s drowning – reflects the
fact that these characters inhabit a secular rather than a providential world,
filled with indeterminate causes and outcomes. The traditional certainties
of knowledge, whether those of empiricism, religious faith, or even nar-
ratorial omniscience, have little hold here. Perhaps for this reason, when
faith does emerge in the novel Eliot represents it in a form that would have
been unfamiliar to most of her Victorian readers (including the devoutly
Christian Maxwell); rather than a turn towards nostalgic assurances, Dan-
iel’s Judaism represents, both for him and for readers, a step towards the
unknown.
But for Eliot, a modern world unguided by providence or traditional
certitudes need not be an unfeeling or unsympathetic one. Deep feeling
and sympathy are possible, she suggests in this last novel, but require a
new mode for their generation and sustenance, guided by probabilistic
thinking and approximation rather than absolute knowledge.12 Acknowl-
edging the limitations of one’s vision, the hindrances to seeing or know-
ing with certainty, as the narrator herself does when she admits how little
Grandcourt’s “faded fairness” tells us, is the prerequisite for a new form
of knowledge. By this criterion, Grandcourt himself fails miserably; com-
pared to a “terrier” by the narrator, he understands his wife’s feelings
“in dog fashion … with the narrow correctness which leaves a world of
unknown feeling behind” (678). To insist on an exact account of others’
emotional life, as Grandcourt does, is necessarily to fall short in human
sympathy. Like Maxwell, Eliot directs us rather to an epistemological
stance defined by uncertainty, where precise empirical information about
the objects that interest us is unavailable. We might know the molecule’s
characteristics in terms of likelihoods and averages, just as Lush might
know Grandcourt’s general characteristics, but we cannot ascertain the
behaviour of our object for any one moment in space and time. Moreover,
this acceptance of ignorance, about molecules or persons, is generative of
new modes of knowledge; indeed, as Eliot’s narrator declares, “ignorance
gives one a large range of probabilities” (137). The acknowledgment of
ignorance, the novel suggests, is thus a productive starting point for prob-
abilistic understanding.
Further, such imperfect knowledge is not only a result of the funda-
mental opacity of the individual, the lack of correspondence between
appearance and emotion, between averages and particulars, but also, as
the narrator reminds us, an effect of the many circumscribing social codes,
146  Tina Young Choi

rituals, and circumstances of Victorian London. The ether of social inter-

action, as it were, surrounds and fills the spaces between persons, at once
invisible and congested with unexpressed, unknowable desires, impulses,
temptations, and constraints. Eliot’s novel explores what it means to act
ethically and sympathetically in this world, where the possibilities for
feeling, speech, and action that might exist, play a much larger role and
occupy many more pages than those which can find utterance or actual-
ization. Such intersubjective ignorance is, for characters like Daniel, Lush,
and Gwendolen, as well as for us as readers, a rich landscape of possibil-
ity, and Eliot encourages us to envision those intervening spaces between
observer and observed, where exactitude and empirical measurement are
unattainable, as available to probabilistic modes of understanding.
When, for example, Daniel contemplates Gwendolen’s marriage, the
narrative tells us that “his mind had perhaps never been so active in weav-
ing probabilities,” and indeed, as the narrator reveals, his feeling for her is
conveyed here not through any one insight, but through a series of pos-
sibilities: What “caused her to shrink from [marriage] – a shrinking finally
overcome by the urgence of poverty? … Was [she,] under all her deter-
mined show of satisfaction, gnawed by a double, a treble-headed grief –
self-reproach, disappointment, jealousy?” (433). Similarly, his attachment
to Mirah begins when he sees her by the river, and “fell again and again to
speculating on the probable romance that lay behind that loneliness and
look of desolation” (188). This condition of not knowing, far from being
futile, is instead what enables the development of a sympathetic imagina-
tion, the capacity to generate multiple hypotheses about the feelings and
experiences of others. Two chapters later, the act of speculating consumes
Daniel’s attention again, as thinking back on his discovery of Mirah, he
“saw and heard everything as clearly as before – saw not only the actual
events of two hours, but possibilities of what had been and what might be
which those events were enough to feed with the warm blood of passion-
ate hope and fear” (205), followed by several paragraphs of speculation:
about Mirah’s past and about her future, about the true character of her
lost relatives. In similar fashion, Gwendolen’s connections to other char-
acters can never achieve the resolution she longs for; her emotional isola-
tion, a result of her marriage to the domineering Grandcourt, “caused her
to live through [conversations with others] many times beforehand, imag-
ining how they would take place and what she would say” (607). Much
of the pleasure and satisfaction she takes in such social interaction comes,
then, not from actualized conversations, which are too often kept in check
by the presence of others, but from the time spent generating hypotheses
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  147

about the many directions these conversations might take – conjuring that
intersubjective space for herself in the imagination. Speculation acts as a
positive, generative force here, filling the unknowable space that divides
observer from observed, empirically available “actual events” from the
unavailable emotions of lived experience, with a multiplicity of narratives,
which reach out towards their object like so many benevolent tentacles
of potential understanding. Indeed, Eliot’s novel proposes, a sensitivity
to qualities “which can never be written or even spoken – only divined
by each of us” in “our neighbours’ lives” constitutes a kind of “genius”
of sympathetic feeling (179). Daniel’s speculative ability thus serves as a
model for intersubjective experience, not only for other characters but
also for us as readers. Sympathy, even the exceptional sympathy of some-
one like Daniel, is only ever an approximation, an epistemological asymp-
tote to its object.
In this sense, Eliot’s last novel seems to pick up where Middlemarch
leaves off in its final paragraph, with its contemplation of a single person’s
“incalculably diffusive” influence on others, of his or her “unvisited” grave
as a marker of unrecognized effects (896). Where the preceding chapters
of this earlier novel had assured us of the possibility of true mutual under-
standing  – between Lydgate and Dorothea Brooke, between Dorothea
and Rosamond Vincy, even between Will Ladislaw and James Chettam,
characters divided by temperament and social class  – its last lines dwell
on the ethics of unreciprocated feeling, on the value of what cannot be
calculated or identified. Daniel Deronda elaborates on the significance of
unconfirmed influence and emotion, where Ezra’s feeling for Daniel, Dan-
iel’s feeling for Gwendolen, even Daniel’s feeling for God, elude definition
or calculation.
The unlived, unrealized, hypothesized landscape of speculative knowl-
edge is the primary dwelling place for the novel’s characters throughout.
The narrator shows us characters again and again weighing probabilities,
and for this reason, these moments are more present, and possibly even
more potent, than the novel’s realized moments. As with Daniel, she leads
us into the speculative reflections of other characters; we witness, too, the
young artist Hans Meyrick thinking about the romantic inclinations of
Mirah, Daniel, and Gwendolen (“Mrs Grandcourt”):

Suppose Mirah’s heart were entirely preoccupied with Deronda in another

character than that of her own and her brother’s benefactor: the supposition
was attended in Hans’s mind with anxieties which, to do him justice, were
not altogether selfish. He had a strong persuasion, which only direct evidence
148  Tina Young Choi

to the contrary could have dissipated, that there was a serious attachment
between Deronda and Mrs Grandcourt; he had pieced together many frag-
ments of observation … which convinced him not only that Mrs Grandcourt
had a passion for Deronda, but also, notwithstanding his friend’s austere self-
repression, that Deronda’s susceptibility about her was the sign of concealed
love. Some men, having such a conviction, would have avoided allusions
that could have roused that susceptibility; but Hans’s talk naturally fluttered
towards mischief, and he was given to a form of experiment on live animals
which consisted in irritating his friends playfully. His experiments had ended
in satisfying him that what he thought likely was true. (729–30)

The intersubjective, emotional spaces between characters  – what Hans

knows about Mirah’s emotional state, what Mirah might feel for Daniel,
what Daniel and Gwendolen feel for each other  – occupy the centre of
this long passage. As with her account of Lush’s reflections, Eliot’s nar-
rator begins with indirect discourse, in which she lightly mediates Hans’s
thoughts, only to intercede without warning, shifting from Hans’s limited
perspective on his fellow characters to her own commentary on Hans’s
behaviour towards them. Like Lush, Hans is figured as a scientist, and yet
in both cases, science represents not the power of comprehensive knowl-
edge, but rather its limitations. Hans as the scientific observer draws the
only conclusions he can about what he can neither see nor measure, and
these limited data lead him, as we learn, to incorrect judgments. As the
narrator’s analogy reveals, in place of the empirical conclusiveness Hans
seeks, he accumulates only “fragments of observation” and “sign[s]”;
his answers come from a probabilistic interpretation of his observations
(“what he thought likely”).
What is more, the novel shows us that this probabilistic stance is not
limited to its characters; indeed, even the reader is invited to generate his
or her own speculations around the narrative. For instance, in describ-
ing Daniel’s thought processes, the narrator makes her now characteristic
move, first inhabiting Daniel’s speculations about Gwendolen through
free indirect discourse, then turning her third-person gaze onto Dan-
iel himself: “Was she seeing the whole event  – her own acts included  –
through an exaggerating medium of excitement and horror? Was she in
a state of delirium into which there entered a sense of concealment and
necessity for self-repression? Such thoughts glanced through Deronda as a
sort of hope. But imagine the conflict of feeling that kept him silent” (689).
But here the narrator departs from the pattern she follows in the examples
discussed earlier; rather than offering a generalizing commentary about
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  149

speculative knowledge, she moves our attention from the intersubjec-

tive space between Daniel and Gwendolen, to the intersubjective space
between Daniel and ourselves as readers. Moreover, rather than filling that
space with the certainties of her own omniscient knowledge, she encour-
ages us to speculate (“imagine the conflict of feeling”), to generate our
own narratives to describe Daniel’s emotional state at that moment.
Daniel Deronda depicts a world in which characters are necessarily lim-
ited in what they can know about others; however, in contrast to Middle-
march, where the characters’ epistemological constraints were offset by
the narrator’s own transcendent wisdom, the narrator of Daniel Deronda
points to a more general condition, where we and she share in the experi-
ence of not knowing, of generating fields of possibility through specula-
tive activity. This aspect of Eliot’s fiction marks an important difference,
then, from Maxwell’s vision. Maxwell might have turned to the probabilis-
tic to compensate for the lack of empirical evidence, but he also envisioned
a being, whether idealized automaton or God, possessed of perfect per-
ception, who could, for example, look at the movements of molecules in a
box and determine the velocities and paths of individual molecules.13 Yet
Eliot seems to disavow even that possibility in Daniel Deronda. The goal
for both characters and for us is not to aspire to that perfect insight, but
to acknowledge the value of uncertainty as an ideal form of knowledge.
Eliot’s narrator, then, provides a vision of this invisible world – a world
of seemingly empty spaces between persons, between separate conscious-
nesses – and reveals that it is thick with feeling, intention, sympathy, and
desire. But she also reveals that our knowledge can only ever be an approx-
imation, a good guess about the object of our attention. The very nature of
that space is, like the ether, probabilistic, a space of potential rather than
of resolution, of all those things that might be rather than the one thing
that has been. As Maxwell wrote to Campbell, “They say that Under-
standing ought to work by the rules of … Logic; but the actual science of
Logic is conversant at present only with things either certain, impossible,
or entirely doubtful, none of which (fortunately) we have to reason on.
Therefore the true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities”
(Scientific Letters 1: 197). Maxwell’s assertion is that an understanding of
“this world” (and by this he seems to mean, not simply the world of mole-
cules, but the “world” more generally) is constituted not so much by what
is “certain” or what is “impossible,” but by what lies between the two,
by possibilities. To understand that world of the probable, of potential
rather than of resolution, requires, as both Eliot and Maxwell understood,
a redefinition of knowledge itself.
150  Tina Young Choi

NOTES

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the Proceedings of the Membranes,

Surfaces, Boundaries Workshop, ed. Mathias Grote, Laura Otis, and Max Stadler,
Max-Planck-Institut for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany (2011): 105–12.

1 As Maxwell summarized it, “According to a theory of electricity which is

making great progress in Germany, two electrical particles act on one another
directly at a distance … Another theory of electricity, which I prefer, denies
action at a distance and attributes electric action to tensions and pressures in an
all-pervading medium” (“Address” 228). See also Dear 13, 116; Smith 211, 219.
2 Both Dear and Smith note that Maxwell offered this model as a hypothetical
explanation for electromagnetic phenomena, rather than as an illustration of a
physical reality.
3 This was originally delivered as an address to the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, 16 September 1870.
4 As Smith recounts, Maxwell and Tyndall were involved in a bitter dispute
over the direction of the energy sciences and their relationship to theol-
ogy (Smith 170–2, 249), but little, if any, of that rivalry is evident in these
addresses. Indeed, they seem in remarkably cordial agreement here in their
characterization of the scientific imagination.
5 This was originally delivered as an address to the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, 15 September 1870.
6 Porter’s account traces Maxwell’s gradual turn to probability through his
interactions with other scientists, starting from the late 1850s (Porter 194–208).
7 Quoting La Rochefoucauld, Eliot offers a similar statement in one of her epi-
graphs for Daniel Deronda: “Il est plus aisé de connoître l’homme en général
que de connoître un homme en particulier” (309); i.e., “It is easier to know
mankind in general than to know one man in particular.”
8 Spencer seems to have struggled with Maxwell’s argument, a result perhaps of
his own belief in a perfect epistemological clarity; in an ideal society, Spencer
wrote, “emotions … will visibly exhibit themselves” and a “simultaneous
increase in the power of interpreting … signs of feeling” will take place (Data
of Ethics 286, 287). I am grateful to Kathy Psomiades for clarifying and help-
ing me to locate this element in Spencer’s work.
9 Indeed, according to Dyson, Maxwell’s work anticipated twentieth-century
quantum mechanics by describing a probabilistically rather than empirically
known world of energies, movements, and collisions (5).
10 For an extensive discussion of intersubjectivity in the British literary tradi-
tion, see Butte, I Know.
 Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of Maxwell and Eliot  151

1 1 Levine makes this observation as well (“George Eliot’s Hypothesis” 18–19).

12 Levine likewise identifies the world of Daniel Deronda as characterized by
epistemological uncertainty, but he is primarily interested in the relationship
between knowledge and feeling in achieving sympathy (“Daniel Deronda” 69).
13 As Smith and Porter observe, Maxwell’s thought experiment pointed to the
statistical nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; see Smith 249–52,
Porter 200–1.

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Eliot’s The Lifted Veil.” ELH 73 (2006): 437–63.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot
and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Butte, George. I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from
Moll Flanders to Marnie. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.
Daston, Lorraine. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1988.
Dear, Peter. The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.
Dyson, Freeman. “Why Is Maxwell’s Theory So Hard to Understand?” Deliv-
ered at and published in the Proceedings of the Second European Conference
on Antennas and Propagation, 11–16 November 2007. London: Institution of
Engineering and Technology, 2007.
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1876. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
–  Middlemarch. 1871–2. London: Penguin Books, 1965.
Ermarth, Elizabeth. “George Eliot’s Conception of Sympathy.” Nineteenth-
Century Fiction 40.1 (1985): 23–45.
Gallagher, Catherine. “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian.” Representations 90
(2005): 61–74.
George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks. Ed. Jane Irwin. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 1996.
Greiner, Rae. “Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathy v. Empathy in the
Realist Novel.” Victorian Studies 53 (2011): 417–26.
Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Herbert, Christopher. Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Dis-
covery. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
Levine, George. “Daniel Deronda: A New Epistemology.” In Knowing the Past: Vic-
torian Literature and Culture. Ed. Suzy Anger. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. 52–73.
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–  Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago:

U of Chicago P, 1991.
–  Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England.
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(1980): 1–28.
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ford: Stanford UP, 1998.
Maxwell, James Clerk. “Address to the Mathematical and Physical Sections of the
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–  “Molecules.” Nature 8 (1873): 437–41.
–  The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell. Ed. P.M. Harman.
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–  A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1873.
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Porter, Theodore. The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900. Princeton:
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Pyle, Forest. “A Novel Sympathy: The Imagination of Community in George
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“Registration of Sickness.” All the Year Round 4 (1860): 227–8.
Rosenthal, Jesse. “The Large Novel and the Law of Large Numbers; Or, Why
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Smith, Crosbie. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in
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Tyndall, John. “On the Scientific Use of the Imagination.” In Scientific Addresses.
New Haven: Charles Chatfield & Co., 1870. 33–74.
PART III

Sensing: Anthropology,
Psychology, Aesthetics
6 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction
between Fact and Fiction

john k. noyes

In this chapter  I  show how, in his earliest writings, Johann Gottfried

Herder sets in place a program of research that calls into question the dis-
tinction between fact and fiction. In a number of early papers, he develops
two fundamental principles that render the fact/fiction distinction prob-
lematic: the first is the unknowability of Being; the second is the discur-
sive nature of knowledge. Taken together, these principles ensure that any
attempt to formulate statements of fact has to be measured on the same
scale that is applied when reading poetic language. This is not to say that
the notion of factuality is clouded by its rhetorical strategies, but that
there is something about the poetic that resides at the heart of factuality.
In 1764 Herder wrote a short paper, Versuch über das Sein (Essay on
Being), on the impulse of Kant’s lectures on metaphysics, and on some of
Kant’s pre-critical writings. Herder refers again and again, both directly
and indirectly, to Kant’s publications of the years 1762 and 1763, such
as Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren (The False
Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, 1762), Versuch, den Begriff der
negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen (Attempt to Introduce
the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy, 1763), and, above
all, Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins
Gottes (The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of
the Existence of God, 1763). Herder also references the works of Crusius,
and Baumgarten’s metaphysics and aesthetics, which formed the backbone
of Kant’s lectures on philosophy in the 1760s.1
The general philosophical problem Herder addresses is what Pross calls
the “crisis in causality and the problem of evidence” (MA 1: 844), which,
in the wake of Locke and Hume, had split the philosophical debates of the
Enlightenment, forcing writers to think about how best to use the rules of
156  John K. Noyes

logic and/or observation and experimentation to explain the phenomena

of the natural world. Like Kant, Herder examines Being as a concept that
cannot be further analysed, and he follows his teacher in denying the status
of a predicate to Being: nothing is explained by stating that an object has
existence. Herder also rejects any attempts to explain either Ideal Being
(Idealsein) or Existential Being (Existentialsein) on the basis of the other,
as Descartes had done by declaring cogito ergo sum, or Crusius in assert-
ing the existence of the self on the basis of self-consciousness.2 The point
of departure, and the guiding principle of the essay, is stated clearly in the
Prolegomena, where Herder declares his adherence to a philosophy that
follows the “human paths of attention, abstraction and reflection” (“Ver-
such über das Sein” 576). Kant, too, in his writings of the 1760s repeatedly
emphasized the need to consider the human dimension of thought.3 The
human dimension of thought is characterized by the specificity of sensory
experience on the one hand and the universality of logical thought on the
other. Herder links the two through innate cognitive processes. Attention
is the capacity of the mind to focus on the information imparted by the
senses, and the processes of abstraction and reflection are the cornerstones
of the analytic method, which Herder recognized as the cognitive distinc-
tion that sets humans apart from the rest of creation.
With this declaration, Herder is announcing his philosophical lineage.
But as the essay progresses, he will begin to push these ideas in a remark-
able direction. It is not simply that he attempts to revise Baumgarten’s
views on aesthetics, following what Gaier calls a characteristic move in
eighteenth-century philosophy  – the shift in focus from “the aporia of
philosophy to aesthetics as a metatheory” (FA 1: 857). He also wants to
dwell on the intersection of philosophy and aesthetics by studying the
conditions under which the information given to the senses is converted
to thought processes. Philosophy, he felt, is not in a position to add to the
store of existing knowledge. It can only provide a better understanding of
knowledge through relating concepts to experience.4 As Herder puts it,
“One has to really exist if one is to think” (MA 2: 11). And to really exist
is to exist in time and space. Philosophical inquiry has to confront the
fact that the concepts it uses have a history, a genesis within the thought
processes of the perceiving subject, in the same way that they have a geog-
raphy, a location in the natural world.
When he demonstrated in the Essay on Being that experience becomes
increasingly inaccessible to the operations of logic as it comes closer to
the saturated fullness of unmediated sensory perception, Herder felt that
he had also shown the error in the founding premise of Baumgarten’s
 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction  157

aesthetics. Baumgarten followed Wolff and Leibniz in regarding sensory

cognition as taking place on a lower order than rational cognition, but he
applied their concept of rational analogy – which they had used in order to
compare the cognitive faculty of animals to that of humans5 – in order to
argue that there is a science of sensory cognition, just as there is a science
of rational thought, and that this science can serve as a guiding principle in
making true judgments about sensory experience, and in the production
of objects of beauty. The problem with this approach to aesthetics is that it
applies the same formalism that undermines the effectiveness of logic,6 and
it consequently prescribes artificial rules to artistic production, thereby
inscribing them with the limitations of rational thought. Rational thought
needs to confine itself to the sphere of cognition where it remains effec-
tive. Aesthetic experience, as it comes closer to the experience of Being –
the “most sensory of concepts” – recedes from the grasp of logic, and no
attempt to bring it back will succeed. What remains for the philosopher
is to investigate the genesis of concepts and the factors influencing aes-
thetic experience. This is what Marion Heinz and Heinrich Clairmont call
the “anthropocentric turn” in Herder’s epistemology, whereby “pointless
attempts to solve the problem of truth as the central task of classical epis-
temology are to be renounced in favor of meta-reflection on which kind
of certainty is possible for which kind of subject” (“Herder’s Epistemol-
ogy” 46–7). In turning the philosophical pursuit of truth to an aesthetics
of human life, Herder is pushing the philosophical project in the direction
of an anthropology of cognition, which will ask questions about the mate-
rial factors influencing the subjective processes that lead from experience
to a world view.
At the same time that he was working on the Essay on Being, Herder
was attending Kant’s lectures on geography. The topics of Kant’s lectures
were wide-ranging and included physical geography, which he was later to
declare as the cornerstone for an understanding of humanity’s place in the
world. Around the time Herder arrived in Königsberg, Kant’s announce-
ments of his forthcoming classes almost always included physical geogra-
phy.7 In fact, looking back on his career shortly before his death in 1800,
Kant observes that over the course of thirty years he had been careful
to include courses on both anthropology and physical geography in his
duties as a teacher of philosophy. He is explicit in stating that these two
disciplines complement one another in imparting “Weltkenntniß” (knowl-
edge of the world) (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, note to
page 6). One of the reasons why geography assumed foundational impor-
tance in Kant’s thinking was that it provided him with the grounds for
158  John K. Noyes

discussing various other aspects of human life and thought.8 It formed the
basis for what he called a general pragmatic anthropology, the study of
the self-apprehension of human beings, in their relationship to the natural
world and their own human nature.
The view of physical geography Kant imparted to his students placed
it on the cusp between nature and human life. In the report on the plan
of his lectures for the winter semester 1765–6, the year after Herder left
Königsberg, Kant suggests a threefold conception of the discipline that
would include “physical, moral and political geography.” The basis of this
threefold geography is “the natural relationship which holds between all
the countries and seas of the world,” as well as the basis of their inter-
connection. Kant calls this basis “the real foundation of all history,”
without which “history is scarcely distinguishable from fairy tales.” The
second step is to investigate “humanity according to the variety of its
natural properties,” with the aim of acquiring “a comprehensive map of
the human species.” Finally, the interaction of these two aspects allows a
study of “the condition of the states and nations throughout the world”
(Kant, “Announcement” 229).9
If geographical knowledge points to the diversity of the human condi-
tion, it presented Herder with a set of problems that are closely related
to the problem of Being. The grounding of history in geography suggests
that the story of humanity’s development through the ages derives in some
as yet unexplained manner from experiences of geographical diversity. The
priority of geography as the “real foundation” of historical narratives indi-
cates a collective experience of geographical Being that has, through time,
been translated into various collective narratives of historical becoming.
What this means is that there must be something in the stories history tells
that harks back to sensory cognition and the experience of Being. Geog-
raphy does not secure the truth of history in contradistinction to fairy
tales by giving it a location, as Kant had hoped. Instead, history is itself
grounded in and merges with a more fundamental discourse of Being  –
that of poetry. In Herder’s opinion, Baumgarten was right in identifying
poetry as a pure discourse of the experience of Being, but he was mistaken
in his attempts to explain poetry in terms of Wolffian logic. Poetry, like the
other art forms, is an aesthetic expression of aesthetic experience: aisthetic
perception is subject to aesthetic reflection (Greif, “Herder’s Aesthetics”
143).10 Artistic products testify in different ways to what it is like to be
located in time and space, and to what kind of models of nature’s hidden
forces can be used to link the spatial and temporal aspects of embodied
being. To draw up a catalogue of the different genres that does justice to
 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction  159

the complex poetic reflections on time, space, and force would be to draft
what Herder calls a “map of the human soul” (MA 2: 11). This map would
show how the different sense perceptions of time, space, and force give
rise to different forms of artistic reflection.11 Here, literary criticism is
forced to engage with the fundamental problems of philosophy.
The challenge facing literary criticism is to write of poetry in a language
that does not supplant the immediacy of originary experience with the
“totally univocal language” towards which philosophy strives (Zammito,
Kant, Herder 160). Instead, the descriptive language of criticism needs
to trace the self-understanding that arises from the apprehension of the
world. History works together with philosophy and poetry in provid-
ing the theoretical framework for this project. Herder called this project
anthropology, and “he pronounced it philosophy’s legitimate successor”
(ibid.), since any philosophy which was to be for humanity will have to
re-centre scientific inquiry on its real object – humanity, in all its manifes-
tations. The focus on humanity sent Herder on a quest for a model capable
of explaining the force determining the unitary development of humanity
in its diverse manifestations – just as Copernicus and Kepler had sought
the force at the centre of the universe that determines the motion of all
heavenly bodies. As Palti notes, in the 1770s, Herder came to see history
as analogous to cosmology.12
Herder’s move from philosophy to anthropology or, as he put it in 1765,
the “withdrawal of philosophy into anthropology” (FA 1: 103), seemed to
provide an appropriate shift in perspective, since it drew on empirically
verifiable data in order to reconstruct a perspective on that which could
not be verified. But it also brought with it a problem that becomes appar-
ent as Herder begins to turn his attention to the historical development
of the different art forms that express diverse experiences of social life.
Herder was so convinced of the fundamental correctness of his departure
from Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant that he began to think of the indi-
vidual genesis of concepts out of sensory cognition not only in terms of
the individual but also in terms of the social collective, and of the species
as a whole. The philosophical formulation of this coincidence of the indi-
vidual with the species will lead Herder to take the position that Marion
Heinz calls (in the title of her 1994 book) “sensual idealism.”13 According
to Heinz and Clairmont, this position is first taken in the sketch Plato
sagte (Plato Said, 1767). Here Herder describes the soul as a finite force
that enters into dialogue with the body via “a specifically organized body-
soul constitution produced by itself” (Heinz and Clairmont 49).14 What is
being described here is not only the psychological genesis of concepts in a
160  John K. Noyes

particular individual or a particular apperceptive event, but a fundamental

quality and a central process of human nature. It is part of the objective
constitution of human beings that cognitive faculties of the soul point to
a being which they cannot grasp, while our physiology organizes sensory
concepts according to the concepts of time, space, and force. Starting in
1767, with Plato Said, Herder begins to address the paradoxical position
of the mind or soul (Seele) with respect to Being. Here, “representations
mediated through external sensory perception are considered as conse-
quences of inner thought occasioned by the perception of objects” (Heinz
and Clairmont 49–50). This appears to invite Descartes in through the
back door by assigning primacy to the mind in grasping Being, while time,
space, and nature’s force are concepts relating to bodily experience. What
Herder is in fact trying to do – and what he will continue to attempt in
his subsequent writings – is to find a way to describe the conceptual unity
that resides within the infinite variety of phenomena and experiences. The
assumption that there is such a conceptual unity grounding creation is
central to Herder’s theology and cosmology. It contains the idea, as Pross
shows, that the infinite diversity of creation only makes sense if we think
of it as preceded by the “purely intellectual anticipation of their unity”
(MA 3.2: 348). Furthermore, this is built into the diversity of nature as a
structural potential for unity, and natural as well as historical development
is motivated by a drive to realize this potential. In the realm of thought,
the progression from the physiological apprehension of time and space
through to thinking about Being follows this structural potential, and it
leads to the realization that thinking about Being is “purely symbolic” and
that it is “the opposite of sensory representation” (MA 3.2: 347–8). Sym-
bolization is what Heinz and Clairmont call a “spiritualization of nature”
and a “naturalization of spirit” (Heinz and Clairmont 52).
Because Herder understands himself to be speaking not only of unique
individual psychological processes but of human nature, the objectivity
of knowledge can be thought of not only in epistemological or psycho-
logical terms, but also in terms that would later provide the field for social
anthropology. Representations of the world are not only individual; they
are shared, and they have a shared history. In approaching the concept of
Being through the concepts of time, space, and natural force, the body
represents its environment to the mind – and here Herder was thinking
of Spinoza. But in the shared genesis of these representations – and in the
shared medium of their communication (language and art) – the individual
appropriates the world and the culture in which he or she lives.15 This is
why the philosopher in pursuit of the essence of human life cannot begin
 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction  161

by tracing human expression back to an act of divine intervention (this

conviction forms the backbone of Herder’s later essay on the origin of lan-
guage). Instead, he has to take account of the fact that, in acts of linguistic
creation, human expression works in analogy with and according to the
same laws as the divine force at work in nature. The essence of divine force
causes it to manifest itself as a diversity of cultural expressions, which
themselves retain structural traces of the idea of their unity. For Herder,
language could not be traced back to a single, ideal purpose that might be
named divine. Language is a social arrangement that expresses the diversity
of human life. Writing in 1766, Herder asked what would remain for him
the fundamental question of linguistic diversity: “Are there not a thousand
indications in one language, and in the diversity of languages millions of
vestiges, of how it was precisely through language that the nations gradu-
ally learned to think, and through thinking that they gradually learned to
speak?” (Herder, “Über die Bildung einer Sprache” 154).
In Herder’s analysis, nature’s force reveals itself in the relationship
between various unifying and diversifying impulses, each of which requires
a corresponding conceptualization on the part of the philosopher – to the
point where philosophy needs to take on board the various other dis-
courses aimed at understanding human life: psychology, biology, physiol-
ogy, cultural anthropology, and so on. These discourses cast human life
into a set of disciplines that establish the terms of their own factuality, and
in the process they run the risk of posing as transparent windows onto the
objective world. Herder saw scientific model-formation in the disciplines
within the context of his aesthetic theory – as rhetorical systems for articu-
lating well-defined aspects of experience.
Herder began early on to think of aesthetics as an inquiry into the com-
mon foundations of this process, but at the same time he saw the endless
possibilities for studying the historical development of shared representa-
tions in specific cultures. Any such study would have to remain grounded
in the essential insight into human nature: that “all human beings have
aestheticam connatam, since they are all born as sensory animals, and
since they are more animal than spirit, the aesthetica connata is necessarily
greater than innate logic … Here lies the origin of the sensory sensibility
for beauty, which all humanity has in common” (“Plan zu einer Aesthe-
tik” 660). Because of this, there is something about the poetic that remains
essential to discourses of fact. The test case would be history.
In 1764, at the same time that he was working on the Essay on Being,
Herder drafted a study of poetry as evidence of this single human drive to
expression, but a drive whose forms of expression are infinite in variety.
162  John K. Noyes

In his posthumously published Versuch einer Geschichte der lyrischen

Dichtkunst (Outline of a History of Lyric Poetry), he ties this problem of
formal multiplicity and unity of purpose to the question of the origin of
things, and the genesis of the world. “One of the most pleasant fields in
which human curiosity can stray,” he tells us in the opening sentence, is the
recognition of “the origin of that which exists” (Geschichte der lyrischen
Dichtkunst 85). This study of origins is even more appealing when it is
concerned with the products of human artifice.
In the opening paragraph of this essay, it becomes clear that Herder is
already thinking of epistemology as parallel to history. The pursuit of the
origin of knowledge in sensory concepts follows the historical pursuit of
human knowledge in the depths of prehistory. He speaks of the drive to
knowledge (Wißbegierde), which “pushes forward, unsatisfied,” follow-
ing a path “into the darkest times, in order to experience historically the
beginning of things, or else to explain them philosophically, or to speculate
on their possibility” (Geschichte der lyrischen Dichtkunst 85). The frame-
work here is anthropological in the sense Zammito claims, in that it brings
philosophy, poetry, and history into dialogue with one another in the name
of holistic human knowledge. In speaking of the darkest times in which
knowledge seeks its own origins, he is evoking the Leibnizian obscurity
of the sensory (Norton 40). In the Essay on Being he declared that “all my
representations are sensory – they are obscure; sensory and obscure have
been synonymous expressions for a long time” (“Versuch über das Sein”
11). But he is also evoking the problem of historical origins, where histori-
cal knowledge merges with oral tradition, myth, and the unknown, and
where truth slips from the field of philosophical discourse, or at least from
the discourses of rationalism, and enters the domain of poetic language,
the form of expression that is both epistemologically and historically prior
to the language of philosophy.16 “Philosophers came forth quite late in
time; they themselves hailed from poets; they spoke in the language of
poets; they derived their wisdom from poets and from common life” (EW
81); and so the natural drive to seek origins leads directly to a history of
humanity. This, he continues, is the reason why “we take such pleasure in
reading the poetic or philosophical hypotheses on the origins of familiar
objects”; and here he cites the opening chapters of the Bible as present-
ing “the oldest reports on the childhood of the world” (Geschichte der
lyrischen Dichtkunst 85).
In formulating the challenge facing the study of origins in poetry or
philosophy, Herder emphasizes how all nations have responded to this
historicizing explanatory drive in a similar manner, with the development
 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction  163

of “cosmogonies that contain the grounds of their wisdom.” The diverse

forms of these cosmogonies cannot themselves be traced back to a sin-
gle origin, although their form of expression may point in that direction.
Herder rejects from the outset the possibility that “all nations appropriated
these treasures from a single people; that everything has to be traced back
to the lands of the East, that all streams arise from a single spring.” Instead,
he insists that it is more helpful “to seek within each people itself the seeds
that were capable of giving rise to the arts and sciences” (Geschichte der
lyrischen Dichtkunst 94–5). This is not to deny the common ground of
poetic expression, but to shift it away from facile models of geographical
origins in favour of the common anthropological condition. Monogenesis
is a biological fact, but culture is polygenetic.
The project of a history of the forms of expression of humanity in all
its diverse manifestations is itself like the cosmogonies of the nations. In
taking cognizance of the single drive to expression that unites all peoples,
such a history must at the same time recognize that the more we study
the origin of this drive, the more it fades away into the far distant past,
becoming ever more fictional as its recedes. In its place, we are left with the
certainty that all people share an intense desire for knowledge, an episte-
mological drive, as well as a form-giving drive, an aesthetic drive, and that
the forms of expression of these drives are infinite in variety. The historian
of humanity is like the poet – he responds to a desire for knowledge by
creating aesthetic products that mark the limits of this knowledge. And if
there is such a thing as a single origin of human expression, its traces lie
in the multiplicity of poetic form throughout the world. The diversity of
expression is like a mosaic, a composite picture of that which each nation
can only dream in its cosmogonies.
By outlining the historiographical challenges of poetic expression in
this way, Herder is setting the markers for his future aesthetic project.
Wolfgang Pross speaks of a “program of research” that sets itself the goal
of grasping the universal nature of the human being in its anthropologi-
cal constitution while “taking account of the legitimacy of the divergent
historical forms of this constitution” (MA 1: 694). One of the earliest
attempts to do justice to this program of research was the essay Über
den Fleiß in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen (On Diligence in the Study of
Several Learned Languages, 1764), and it marks the point where Herder’s
epistemology first leads him to confront some of the contemporary effects
of European imperialism.
On Diligence was one of the last essays Herder wrote before leaving
Königsberg for Riga. It was published in the Gelehrte Beiträge zu den
164  John K. Noyes

Rigaischen Anzeigen in October 1764, but was composed in the form of

a speech earlier in the year.17 On the surface, it addresses the question of
priority in the teaching of the mother tongue and foreign languages in
schools, a matter that was much debated in Herder’s day, and that contin-
ued to occupy him in the years he spent in Riga (Gaier, FA 1: 870).18 As
Michael Morton has shown, there has been a recurrent tendency in Herder
criticism to read the essay on this surface level, and to derive the interest-
ing but not particularly surprising position Herder takes: that the mother
tongue will always have priority over acquired languages, since “nature
imposes upon us an obligation only to our mother tongue,” but that, in
the developmental history of humanity, the learning of foreign languages
plays a key role (On Diligence 30). However, reading this essay within the
epistemological framework Herder developed in On Being, it becomes
clear that much more is at stake.19
The opening paragraphs of the essay are built upon a number of assump­
tions that relate directly to On Being. The first of these concerns the
central task of Herder’s anthropology: bringing philosophy into dia-
logue with history and poetry in order to gain insight into the genesis
of humanity. In order to clarify what exactly the terms of this dialogue
should be, he begins the essay by setting himself apart from the com-
monly held view that poetry can serve to revitalize the originary language
of nature. The most important proponent of this view for Herder was
Johann Georg Hamann, whom Herder had met in church in Königsberg
earlier that year. Like Herder, Hamann was intent upon demonstrating
the importance of sensory experience and, above all, of feelings and emo-
tions in the life of the mind, since “nature works by way of the senses and
passions” (Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce 131). Language for him was the
key to unity in human life. This grants poetry and the poetic arts a special
place, since they provide a form of expression that allows experience to
move beyond the shackles of the rational mind. Furthermore, they allow
specific cultural experiences to be expressed in accordance with the unique
qualities of a specific language. In his Aesthetica in nuce of 1760, he wrote
that poetry is “the mother-tongue of the human race; even as the garden is
older than the ploughed field, painting than script; as song is more ancient
than declamation; parables older than reasoning; barter than trade” (Aes-
thetica in nuce 121). This historical priority of poetic language has an epis-
temological correlate, since poetic language focuses on and reproduces the
imagery of the senses and the passions. Nature is to be read as a compen-
dium of signs, and the key to human happiness lies in the correct deci-
phering of nature’s signs. “The senses and passions speak and comprehend
 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction  165

nothing but images. In images lie the entire treasure of human knowledge
and happiness” (ibid. 121–2). The imagery of poetic language is thus one
step closer to originary experience than the concepts of logic.
Hamann’s ideas on the history of expression connected well with Herd-
er’s conviction that the poetic expression of individual cultures cannot
be evaluated in absolute terms, nor measured on a scale given by Euro-
pean culture. In fact, there is something about the lives of more innocent
cultures (Hamann speaks of “the heathens”) that allows them, in their
“blindness” to “recognize the invisibility which humans have in common
with GOD” (Aesthetica in nuce 122). The underlying assumption of this
recognition of linguistic diversity, together with the belief in a common
human communion with God and Nature, is that there is a single uni-
directional movement of human development, which issues from some
primary divine or natural force, or some primal creative event. “Speak, so
that I may see you! – This wish was granted in the act of Creation, which
is speech through created beings to created beings. For one day speaks to
the next, and one night heralds the next. Their watchword runs through all
climates up to the end of the world, and their voice can be heard in every
language” (ibid. 123). Not only did Hamann believe that poetic language
could transport humanity back to its childhood, where the communion
with divine creativity had not been tarnished by the rational mind, but he
felt there must be other cultures that were closer to this process than his
own. When he wrote Aesthetica in nuce, he was beginning to tentatively
explore the idea that other cultures held the potential for reinvigorating
what had ossified or decayed in the European context. He asked himself
how it would be possible to “raise the defunct language of Nature from
the dead,” suggesting immediately that the answer was by “making pil-
grimages to the fortunate lands of Arabia, and by going on crusades to
the East, and by restoring their magic art. To steal it, we must employ old
women’s cunning, for that is the best sort” (ibid. 16). The terms in which
he imagines this process are still rudimentary, to say the least, still rife with
imagery borrowed from popular tales of crusade, conquest, and plunder,
but his ideas on poetic language and on cultural cross-fertilization pose a
pressing question to Herder: if poetry is the mother tongue of humanity,
how well do we speak it?
The answer to this question can be sought on a number of levels. It is
true, the golden age has past, but this did not stop Hamann from attempt-
ing to revitalize the language, if not the age, and to harness it against the
“murderously deceitful philosophy” of his day (Aesthetica in nuce 131).
Hamann’s writing was intended to evoke the muse that would “dare to
166  John K. Noyes

purify the natural use of the senses and cleanse it from the unnatural uses
of abstraction, through which our concept of things is deformed to the
same extent that the Creator is suppressed and blasphemed” (ibid. 13).
Herder was to take a plain stance on this in his essay on Hamann, Dithy-
rambische Rhapsodie über die Rhapsodie kabbalistischer Prose (Dithyram-
bic Rhapsody on the Rhapsody of Cabalistic Prose), written in early 1765,
where he stated: “If poetry is the mother tongue, then ours is prose” (31).
Similarly, the earlier, unpublished version of On Diligence begins with
the words “It has vanished, that flourishing age …” (FA 1: 22). In stating the
passing of the golden age, Herder draws a line between himself and the
age of humanity’s earliest communion with nature, which Hamann had
characterized in Aesthetica in nuce. And Herder casts this age irrevocably
into the past even while retaining Hamann’s understanding of what the
poetic age looked like: it was a “golden age,” when “our earliest ances-
tors dwelt round the patriarchs like children round their parents,” and
when “all the world was of one tongue and language” (On Diligence 29).
Like Hamann’s “mother tongue of the human race” (Aesthetica in nuce
2), the language of Herder’s golden age is poetic in the sense that it pres-
ents the imagery in which “the senses and the passions speak and com-
prehend” (ibid. 12). And it is the language of nature, since “nature acts
(würkt) via the senses and the passions” (ibid., translation modified). And
like Hamann, Herder registers the chasm that separates this language from
our own, which is marked with “the burden of our learning and the masks
of our virtues” (On Diligence 29). But unlike his friend, Herder sees no
point in sustaining the rhapsodic evocation of the lost language of a lost
age: “But why do I sketch a lost portrait of irreplaceable charms? It is no
more, this golden age” (On Diligence 29). In a prosodic age, critical dis-
course can attain the goals Hamann sets himself only by drawing the full
methodological and topical consequences of the impossibility of analysing
Being.20 But the problem with the prosodic age is that it speaks in a rheto-
ric of factuality, while intending to mediate the insights of poetry.
In beginning On Diligence with a concealed criticism of Hamann,
Herder is once again raising the problem of philosophical method. Herd-
er’s rejection of the rationalist school’s attempt to apply mathematical
method in philosophy and transfer this to aesthetics was in agreement
with Hamann.21 But the methodological consequences he drew were quite
different. In On Being, Herder stated that idealism cannot be refuted on
the basis of that which is logically possible.22 Logical possibility is embed-
ded in philosophical language, where it serves to link concepts to one
another through the use of grammar. Since logical possibility and grammar
 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction  167

mutually guarantee the validity of propositions of being, the Being of

which they speak cannot be proved or disproved using logical possibility.
Similarly, common sense shows that no experiential concept can be proven
a priori (“Versuch über das Sein” 584).23 What this means from a meth-
odological point of view is that the idealist position must be unmasked
by demonstrating, using the method of analysis, that idealist claims to
make meaningful statements about Being are all based on the unspoken
assumption of Being’s unanalysability. Once analysis has pointed to the
moments where idealism is built upon the knowledge of Being as its own
unanalysable foundation, it can be shown how grammar hides its found-
ing premises. This is the point at which Herder solicits poetic language. As
a formalization of Being’s unanalysability, it speaks within, not outside of,
philosophical language.24
This is how Herder is asking to be read when he begins On Diligence
with an imaginary foray into mythological time. The opening images of
a golden age, followed by the whirlwind tour from the Tower of Babel
through the Greeks and Romans to present-day Germans, Spaniards, and
Africans is intended to present the process whereby knowledge of history
becomes possible. When it confronts the origin of things, historical dis-
course devises stories about the Being that has enabled it, and that will for-
ever escape its grasp. Only after Herder has uncovered this process does
he begin to speak of the mother tongue as the material perpetuation of one
particular way of moving from prehistory to history, and from Being and
sensation to consciousness. Once we see it in these terms, another meth-
odological question presents itself, and this one will prove to be much
more problematic for Herder. This is the principle of the analogous devel-
opment of individual language speakers, of individual linguistic commu-
nities, and of humanity as a collective language-speaking organism. This
is, as Morton observes, “a key element of Herder’s thought” (Herder and
Poetics 30). With his image of “our earliest ancestors” placed in juxtaposi-
tion with the image of children in the presence of their parents, Herder
is establishing the link between species and individual as one of the most
important assumptions of his essay. He uses it not only to describe the ini-
tial poetic communion with nature, but also the growth out of this condi-
tion and into maturity. In doing this, he sets himself the task of explaining
how the processes that shape individual life are different from, and how
they are similar to, the processes at work in the development of the spe-
cies. In On Diligence Herder begins to sketch one of the most important
aspects in the coincidence of individual development and the development
of the species: the role of language. Language mediates the individual’s
168  John K. Noyes

experience of the world and the collective thought processes that make
sense of the world. And it also provides the building blocks for repeating
this mediation on a collective level – the level of a linguistic community, or
a culture, but perhaps even a species level.
Herder embeds the question of language learning in the context of the
historical development of humanity out of mythical origins into its cur-
rent state. Herder’s age is characterized by a multiplicity of languages and
cultures scattered across the earth, each with its own set of traditions, each
with a distinct relationship to its specific environment. Each of these has
its own national characteristics, interpretations of the world, and charac-
teristic sets of skills. After the failed Tower of Babel, humanity began to
split into “families and dialects” that were “transplanted to various points
of the compass; and a thousand languages were created in tune with the
climes and mores of a thousand nations” (On Diligence 29). It is only
natural that languages and cultures drift apart in the course of history,
since they are acted upon from without by the different environments in
which they take root (Clima, climes), and from within by the perpetuation
of tradition and shared memory (Sitten, mores). This becomes increas-
ingly pronounced throughout history. But it raises another problem that
will occupy Herder for years to come. As the languages and cultures drift
apart, where is the cultural location from which its unity can be imagined?
In what language can its unity be described? And how do we imagine the
many cultures of the world developing into an organic whole, without
imposing our world view and value system on them?
Within the life of an individual, there are various forces at work to
ensure a tight bond among psychological development, the development
of the mind, and the cultural context in which development takes place.
This tight bond ensures that the individual experiences culture as possess-
ing a natural dimension, since culture mediates the effects of climes; and
a historical one, since culture appears as a collection of historically trans-
mitted mores. Within this cultural context, the most important force at
work in the psychological and cognitive development of the individual
is the mother tongue, since “it is perhaps better attuned to our character
and coextensive with our way of thinking” (EW 30). In describing the
primacy of the mother tongue in human development, Herder is careful
to emphasize the blurry line between historical and environmental factors.
The language of the fatherland forms a cultural bond that ties its members
together, while at the same time creating an inner drive that presents one’s
own language as the most attractive one of all. In using the word Reiz
(attraction, allure, stimulus, charm) to describe this attraction, Herder is
 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction  169

also blurring the line between emotional forces and physiological ones.
It is the experience of attraction that bonds the individual to his language
and gives preference to the mother tongue as part of the developmental
psychology of the human being. The early experiences of pleasure in the
mother tongue “impressed themselves upon us first and somehow shaped
themselves together with the finest fissures of our sensibility” (On Dili-
gence 32). But they are also part of the individual’s physiological constitu-
tion, since, as he argues in On Being, the mental life of the individual is
grounded in the senses. It follows that not only the organs of sense them-
selves, but also the regime of concepts built upon them have a particular
affinity with the language into which an individual is born. In Herder’s
words, “Our mother tongue really harmonizes most perfectly with our
most sensitive organs and our most delicate turns of mind” (On Diligence
30). What this means is that the mother tongue is “the instrument with
which the child collects a world of images and concepts into his or her
soul by means of words; the specific ways and methods of thinking char-
acteristic of a people are as it were planted in its language, and the learning
child forms soul, ear, and organs of speech synchronically” (Gaier, “Core
Cognition” 303).
In acquiring a mother tongue, a person is shaped, developmentally and
physiologically, into an individual who is also a member of a group, who
exists in time and space, and is subject to the forces, both environmental
and social, that make up that person’s culture. The experience of becom-
ing human means confronting one’s own Being as it is moulded by the
forces associated with the Crusian ubi and quando, which amounts to
confronting the forces of history and geography. But it also means striv-
ing to live in the consciousness of one’s historical and geographical deter-
mination, and to understand how the organism one has become is a result
of these forces. This is why the limits of cognition Herder described in
On Being also mark the limits at which one is able to confront one’s own
cultural, historical, and geographical determination as something factual,
objective. It is in the nature of cognition that the ability to make state-
ments about the world external to oneself is always compromised by the
speaker’s own organic condition, its organic life as a material extension of
the “external” world. Confronting factuality means confronting the lim-
its of cognition, and the medium of this confrontation resides at the very
core of the discourses of truth and factuality. Wherever poetic language
can be shown to inhere in statements of factuality, the mind comes a little
closer to understanding its strange relationship with a truth it can never
quite grasp.
170  John K. Noyes

NOTES

1 Rudolf Haym’s appraisal that Herder is steering a course remarkably close

to Kant’s pre-critical writing has been the subject of much critical revision,
and more recent readings are much more conscious of the independent moves
in the essay. Herder is using his teacher’s ideas to position himself critically
within the labyrinth of mid-century metaphysics, and while his points of
reference focus on Kant and the philosophers Kant lectured on, they extend
beyond this in complicated ways. In Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthro-
pology (410n78), John Zammito repeats the opinion of Marion Heinz that
Herder is attempting to establish his own philosophical status by engaging
critically with the core ideas of his teacher. More recent readings suggest a
more striking originality in the essay. For example, Heinz herself, writing
with Heinrich Clairmont, speaks of Herder’s stance against Kant’s claim that
philosophy could be a demonstrative science (Heinz and Clairmont, “Herd-
er’s Epistemology” 46). Ulrich Gaier (Herders Sprachphilosophie 35) describes
the project in the essay as a “transcendental philosophy of sensory, existential
experience,” and places this in direct opposition to Kant; and in his notes to
the critical edition, Gaier claims that Herder is anticipating Kant’s own posi-
tion on the proof of the existence of God which he later takes in the critical
writings (FA 1: 845). Pross emphasizes the importance of Moses Mendelssohn
and Johann Heinrich Lambert for this essay (MA 1: 844–5).
2 “For this reason, Descartes also reached the wrong conclusion with ‘I think,
therefore I am.’ Crusius too with: ‘I am conscious of myself, therefore I am.’
Both deduce existential being on the basis of ideal being” (“Versuch über das
Sein” 587).
3 In Träume eines Geistersehers (Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, 1766), he puts it like
this: “The other advantage is more adapted to human reason, and consists in
recognizing whether the task be within the limits of our knowledge and in
stating its relation to the conceptions derived from experience, for these must
always be the foundation of all our judgments. In so far metaphysics is the
science of the boundaries of human reason. And as a small country always
has many boundaries, and is generally more careful to intimately know and
defend its possessions than blindly to set out upon conquests, it is this use of
metaphysics, as setting boundaries, which is at the same time the least known
and the most important, and which further is obtained only late and by long
experience” (113).
4 See Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics 33.
5 Leibniz and Wolff ascribed to animals lower orders of cognition, which they
share with humans, such as memory, anticipation, association, etc. These
 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction  171

orders function as analogon rationis, in that they are able to link separate facts
of cognition without understanding the causes. See Leibniz, Monadology,
para. 26, 28; Theodicy, Preliminary Dissertation, para. 65; Wolff, Psychologia
empirica, para. 506, Philosophia rationalis, para. 766, and Vernünfige Gedan-
ken, I, para. 872.
6 See Heinz and Clairmont 49–50.
7 Some of Herder’s handwritten notes on Kant’s geography lectures are to
be found in the Berlin Akademie Archiv under AA-Kant: 29 0069–0071
NL.-Kant Nr. 15 and NL.-Adickes U 4; also in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek
Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Haus II: NL.-Herder: XXV, 44 and XXV, 44a.
8 This is explained by May (Kant’s Concept of Geography 113).
9 By the mid-1770s he is referring to geography as “the preliminary exercise in
the knowledge of the world,” lending a pragmatic aspect to all other forms of
knowledge and skills (“Of the different races of human beings” 97).
10 See also Menges, “Particular Universals” 193.
11 See the tabular representation of this in Norton, 201.
12 Here too, Herder was reading Kant. In 1755 Kant had published his Allge-
meine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (Universal Natural History
and Theory of the Heavens), in which he argues the unity of diverse phe-
nomena on a cosmic scale. In his reading of this idea, Herder emphasized the
notion of a Kette der Wesen (chain of beings) (SW 4: 381), which would later
form the basis for his inquiries into the geographical distribution of diversity
across a planet characterized by human unity.
13 Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus.
14 Heinz and Clairmont 49.
15 See Heinz and Clairmont 52. Gaier speaks of Herder’s “brand-new systems
theory of cognition” (“Core Cognition in Herder” 295). See also Gaier,
“Herders Systemtheorie.”
16 In 1765, Herder will draw on Blackwell’s studies of Homer as evidence of the
fact that “in everyday life, poetry is older than prose. This is also the reason
why the first writers were poets, the first νόμοι were songs, and the oldest
religions were mythologies, all of which spoke the sensory language of the
people” (FA 1: 133).
17 See Morton, Herder and Poetics 8. I follow Morton in using the Suphan
edition of Herder’s essay, which is the version he published in the Gelehrte
Beiträge (SW 1: 1–7), and I cite Menze’s translation in EW, which also follows
the Suphan edition.
18 See also Herder’s comments in Journal meiner Reise (SW 4: 388ff.).
19 In his book on On Diligence, Morton doesn’t mention On Being, but he
uncovers a wealth of themes that relate directly to that study, themes which
172  John K. Noyes

Herder will continue to develop in the following decades. Morton is evasive

on the question of the centrality of On Diligence for Herder’s corpus (6),
though the tenor of his book is to argue for the germinal nature of this essay.
But in failing to link On Diligence to On Being, he misses its position in the
development of Herder’s studies in history out of his epistemology. Pross
makes a similar move when, in volume 1 of MA, he decides to place On Being
directly before This Too a Philosophy. The latter work is, he claims, the most
immediate realization of the principle of evidence postulated in On Being
(MA 1: 845). This is probably correct, but On Diligence needs to be read as an
important intermediate statement between these two essays.
20 See Norton 67.
21 “We contemporaries of the templates for letters concerning recent literature
are all the happy ones privileged to be schooled by taste, which becomes a
mathematical teacher of the aesthetic average, building in the playful caprice
of its declamations and of the most recent literature on foundations which no
eye has seen and no ear heard” (Hamann, Hamburgische Nachricht 492–3).
My translation.
22 Gaier notes that Diderot made the same observation in Lettre sur les aveugles,
à l’usage de ceux qui voient (Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those Who
Can See, 1749). FA 1: 854–5.
23 This is the famous problem of synthetic judgment a priori which Kant will
tackle in Critique of Pure Reason, and which Herder will address in his Meta-
critique. See Kaupert, “Verstand und Erfahrung.”
24 This is the “actual relationship between poetic and discursive language” of
which Morton (12) speaks.

WORKS CITED

Adler, Hans, and Wolf Koepke, eds. A Companion to the Works of Johann Gott-
fried Herder. Rochester: Camden House, 2009.
Blackwell, Thomas. An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer. London,
1735.
Fox, Russell Arben. “J. G. Herder on Language and the Metaphysics of National
Community.” Review of Politics 65.2 (2003): 237–62.
Gaier, Ulrich. Herders Sprachphilosophie und Erkenntniskritik. Stuttgart-
Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1988.
–  “Herders Systemtheorie.” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 23.1
(1998): 3–17.
–  “The Problem of Core Cognition in Herder.” Monatshefte 95.2 (2003): 294–309.
 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction  173

Greif, Stefan. “Herder’s Aesthetics and Poetics.” In Adler and Koepke, Compan-
ion 141–64.
Hamann, Johann Georg. Aesthetica in nuce. In Classic and Romantic German
Aesthetics. Ed. J.M. Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
–  Hamburgische Nachricht aus dem Reiche der Gelehrsamkeit. Nach dem ein
und sechzigsten Stücke des Jahres 1762. Hamanns Schriften, vol. 2. Ed. Fried-
rich von Roth. Berlin: Reimer, 1820.
Haym, Rudolf. Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken. Berlin: Rudolph
Gaertner, 1870.
Heinz, Marion. Sensualistischer Idealismus: Untersuchungen zur Erkenntnistheo-
rie des jungen Herder. Hamburg: Meiner, 1994.
Heinz, Marion, and Heinrich Clairmont. “Herder’s Epistemology.” In Adler and
Koepke, Companion 43–64.
Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Dithyrambische Rhapsodie über die Rhapsodie
kabbalistischer Prose. FA 1: 30–9.
–  “Plan zu einer Aesthetik.” FA 1: 659–69.
–  Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Bernhard Suphan. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1967–8.
Cited as SW (Suphan Werke).
–  Selected Early Works 1764–1767. Addresses, Essays, and Drafts; Fragments
on Recent German Literature. Ed. Ernest A. Menze and Karl Menges. Trans.
Ernest A. Menze with Michael Palma. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP,
1992. Cited as EW.
–  Selected Writings on Aesthetics. Trans. and ed. Gregory Moore. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2006.
–  “Über die Bildung einer Sprache.” MA 1: 143–210.
–  “Versuch einer Geschichte der lyrischen Dichtkunst.” SW 32: 85–140.
–  “Versuch über das Sein.” MA 1: 571–87. Citations of this essay are my
translation.
–  Werke. Ed. Wolfgang Pross. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1984–. Cited as MA
(Münchener Ausgabe).
–  Werke in zehn Bänden. Ed. Martin Bollacher et al. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klas-
siker Verlag, 1985–. Cited as FA (Frankfurter Ausgabe).
Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. and ed.
Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
–  Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics. Trans. Url F.
Goerwitz. Ed. Frank Sewall. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900.
–  “M. Immanuel Kant’s Announcement of the Programme of His Lectures for
the Winter Semester 1765–1766.” In Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy
1755– 1770. Trans. and ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1992.
174  John K. Noyes

–  “Of the Different Races of Human Beings.” In Anthropology, History, and

Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert M. Louden. Cambridge UP, 2007.
82–97.
–  Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, or An Essay on the
Constitution and Mechanical Origins of the Entire World Edifice treated
according to Newtonian Principles. Trans. Stanley L. Jaki. Edinburgh: Scottish
Academic Press, 1981.
Kaupert, Christa. “Verstand und Erfahrung in Kants Vernunftkritik und Herd-
ers Metakritik”. Diss. Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, 2006.
http://www.johann-gottfried-herder.net/Christa_Kaupert_Metakritik.pdf.
Leibniz, G.W. Discourse on Metaphysics, and The Monadology. Trans. George R.
Montgomery. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005.
–  Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin
of Evil. Trans. E.M. Huggard. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951.
May, J.A. Kant’s Concept of Geography and Its Relation to Recent Geographical
Thought. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970.
Menges, Karl. “Particular Universals: Herder on National Literature, Popular
Literature, and World Literature.” In Adler and Koepke, Companion 189–213.
Morton, Michael. Herder and the Poetics of Thought. University Park and Lon-
don: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989.
Norton, Robert. Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1991.
Palti, Elias. “The ‘Metaphor of Life’: Herder’s Philosophy of History and
Uneven Developments.” Eighteenth-Century Natural Sciences 38.3 (1999):
322–47.
Pénisson, Pierre. “Kant et Herder.” Revue germanique internationale 6 (1996):
63–74.
Rudolph, Enno. “Kultur als höhere Natur: Herder als Kritiker der Geschicht-
sphilosophie Kants.” In Nationen und Kulturen: zum 250. Geburtstag Johann
Gottfried Herders. Ed. Regine Otto. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
1996.
Terzakis, Katie. The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philoso-
phy. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.
Wolff, Christian. Philosophia rationalis. Francofurti and Lipsiae: Prostat in offi-
cina libraria Rengeriana, 1732.
–  Psychologia empirica. Hildesheim: Olms, 1968.
–  Vernünfftige Gedancken von dem gesellschafftlichen Leben der Menschen:
Und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen. Hildesheim, New York: Olms, 1975.
Zammito, John H. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2002.
7 Fictional Feedback: Empirical Souls
and Self-Deception in the Magazine for
Empirical Psychology and Beyond

michael house

The Problem of Psychology: Science of the Human

as Science of Fiction

In his famous unpublished essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral

Sense” (1873), Nietzsche confronts the hubris of the philosophic tradition
with the cold realization that the intellect may serve a biological and not
spiritual function:

The intellect as a means of preserving the individual unfolds its main powers
(Hauptkräfte) in dissimulation (Verstellung); for this is the means by which
the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, having been denied
the ability to fight for their existence with horns or the sharp teeth of a preda-
tor. In the human this art of dissimulation reaches its peak: here deception
(Täuschung), flattery, lying and deceit, speaking behind someone’s back, pos-
ing, living in borrowed splendor, masking oneself, hiding behind convention,
acting in front of others and one’s self (das Bühnenspiel vor anderen und vor
sich selbst), in short, the continuous fluttering around the one flame of vanity
has become so much the rule and law, that nothing is more inconceivable than
how the human could have come to a noble and pure drive to truth. (“Über
Wahrheit und Lüge” 1: 876; “On Truth and Lie” 254, translation modified)

Nietzsche presents our claim to a “drive to truth” as incomprehensible

in the face of what more accurately defines the “rule and law” of human
activity, namely, “the art of dissimulation.” The logic, in its most distilled
form, reveals that if there is anything true about us, it is that we have a
strong natural proclivity to falsify, lie, deceive, and generate fiction. As
a result of this observation, our sanctimonious account of our perpetual
176  Michael House

desire to come closer to the truth can only be understood as a subordinate

manifestation of a biological imperative. With this passage and the text
as a whole Nietzsche initiates a second project that undermines the dual-
ism between mind and body that quarantines and purifies the intellectual
realm from its bodily contamination. Now this art of deception is our
survival mechanism; it maintains our existence where our pathetic physi-
cal constitution – our lack of predatory attributes – would fail. Remark-
ably, Nietzsche’s conflation of the traditional dualism and reduction of all
intellectual activity to its materialist basis in no way eliminates the spon-
taneous, aesthetic component of human activity in favour of causal laws.
Instead, it amplifies the constitutive role of fiction in human experience.
We cannot eliminate the acts of cloaking, masking, and playing a role in
order to reveal what is truly human; rather, the human is found in these
very acts. To know the human is to know the human deceiving.
It is possible to view Nietzsche’s essay as the culmination of a project
that has its start in the previous century. In particular, it is in the inter-
disciplinary drive to create a hybrid science of the “whole man” – a sci-
ence that combines disciplines traditionally limited to knowledge of the
“body” or the “mind”  – that we find not only a similar melding of the
traditional dualism, but also a sustained reflection on the same question of
the human’s “deceptive” nature.1 Empirical psychology and anthropology
stand at the forefront of this pursuit and their anticipation of Nietzsche’s
proclamation emerges from a reflection on both methodological problems
as well as the very characteristics of human nature that makes it resistant
to scientific pursuit. They both attempt to provide an account of human
subjectivity from the basis of its concrete embodiment, while still under-
standing their pursuit as a synthesis of two distinct realms of human activ-
ity. The result, however, is that the enterprise – and this is especially the
case with empirical psychology – becomes obsessed with fiction not only
as a potential threat to the scientific status of the emerging discipline, but
also as a potential condition for human experience.
Overcoming the dualist account of the human in order to form a total
science of the whole man faced two main problems: the first pertained
to the potential for disciplinary interference and the breakdown of disci-
plinary unity; and the second pertained to the impossibility of studying a
human subject. With respect to the first problem, Ernst Platner’s influen-
tial Anthropology for Physicians and Philosophers (1772) serves as an illus-
trative example. For Platner the aim of anthropology is nothing more than
an adequate representation of what a human being truly is: “The human
is neither body nor soul alone; he is rather the harmony of both and the
 Fictional Feedback  177

physician (Arzt) should not be permitted to reduce his focus to the former
as much as the moralist on the latter” (iv). From this recognition, anthro-
pology as the science of “the whole man” upholds the dualism while at the
same time attempting to demonstrate pathways between souls and bod-
ies. Platner’s division of the knowledge of man (Erkenntnis des Menschen)
into three separate fields of inquiry demonstrates the drive to both main-
tain physiology and psychology as independent sciences and, at the same
time, reconcile them under the umbrella of anthropology:

The first considers the parts and operations (Geschäffte) of the machine alone
without thereby taking into consideration which of these movements (Bewe-
gungen) are received from the soul and which are experienced by the soul;
these are known as anatomy and physiology. Secondly one can in the very
same way examine the powers and qualities of the soul without at the same
time considering the concurrence (Mitwirkung) of the body and the conse-
quent changes in the soul on account of the machine. And this I call psychol-
ogy  … Finally, one can consider body and soul together in their reciprocal
relationships, restrictions and affiliations, and that is what I call anthropology.
(xvi–xvii; emphasis added)

What anthropology, as an examination of the exchange relations in the

psychosomatic complex, gains in its claim to a total account of the human,
it loses in disciplinary specificity and unity.2 Each domain represents a
closed system adequate to itself, but (at least previously understood as)
incommensurate with the other: one treated the body as a mechanistic
entity; the other, in complete opposition, treated the spontaneous free-
dom of the soul. Anthropology unites the two only insofar as it applies the
operative assumption of “the immanent interrelation of two intrinsically
connected substances” (Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic 134). Still,
insofar as it does not present a monist account, it remains in the interstices
between mind and body, where “reciprocal relationships, restrictions and
affiliations occur,” a site which for Nietzsche remains connected only
through the non-logical structure of metaphorical exchange.3
For Platner, however, the speculative quality of all metaphoric assertion
seems to have no place in a science that concerns itself with that which is
“more historical than speculative” (xxvi). Platner’s corrective occurs in the
mode of presentation that he deems most adequate to avoiding the fictional
narratives produced by philosophical systems and adopts what he calls an
“aphoristic writing style” (xvii). As Adler notes, he conceives of his anthro-
pology more as “observing and collecting than systematizing” (“Aisthesis”
178  Michael House

100), and thus the aphoristic style allows for the presentation of raw, unme-
diated facts. However, in reducing all action to its historical-empirical
ground without eliminating the existence of the soul, his project becomes
a mechanistic fiction in which each action is metaphorically translated into
a discrete physiological function. Even more damaging, the physiological
register can only account for the mechanistic dimensions of human action,
reducing it all to the “unfree” movement of nature’s machine.4 Thus, what
is observed empirically is at best a paradoxical expression of an unobserv-
able state (i.e., the mechanistic expression of spontaneity) and as such can
do nothing to explain, except in an inadequate register.
The second problem concerns the very tight definition of what consti-
tutes a science at the time. In the Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Sci-
ence (1786), Kant determines that we have to have the ability to construct
laws about objects on the basis of a priori knowledge (i.e., on the basis of
their mere possibility) for the study to attain this status. Chemistry, for
instance, as it exists before Kant’s eyes, fails this test, as it is impossible to
construct laws of chemical interaction strictly within our minds, and as a
result, it can, at best, attain the status of a “systematic art of analysis (sys-
tematische Zergliederungskunst)” or “experimental doctrine (Experimen-
tallehre)” (AA 4: 471).5 For a science of our mind, things are far worse.
Imagine if the chemicals were non-quantifiable, endowed with free will,
and demonstrated a strong proclivity towards dissimulation. For Kant,
the “empirical study of the soul” has (slightly less than) no chance what-
soever of attaining the status of a science. If the ambitions were, however,
downgraded, what then? Could we still talk about empirical psychology
as a “systematic art of analysis” or “experimental doctrine”? Not simply,
and Kant identifies three problems: (1) while I can think of the manifold
of internal observation separately, I cannot separate them and reconnect
them at will; (2) I cannot possibly see the contents or internal observations
of the mind of another subject; and finally, and most importantly for the
problem at hand, (3) if the other is aware of observation, the observed
subject alters itself and dissembles (alterirt und verstellt). However, while
Kant excludes empirical psychology from the status of science, this does
not preclude some sort of study of the human mind. It would, no doubt,
neither be a “science of the soul” (Seelenwissenschaft) nor a “psychologi-
cal experimental doctrine” (psychologische Experimentallehre), but would
have to go by another name: “a natural description of the soul” (Naturbe-
schreibung der Seele) (AA 4: 471).
While Kant’s reclassification of empirical psychology as less-than-
scientific does not decommission it, the set of problems he raises are certainly
 Fictional Feedback  179

pressing for its self-definition and realization. For Kant, the shift from a
transcendental to an empirical account of man must reconcile the decep-
tively simple problem that the observed subject is capable of distortion.
“Dissembling” and “alteration” produce fictional surrogates, potential red
herrings in the search for “true selves.” As a subject narrates its past, con-
veys its “state of mind” to itself or others, it is impossible to overlook the
imaginative reconstruction that occurs. For this reason, the methodologi-
cal question of how to treat “fiction” not only haunts this program as a
tangential problem, but also at times becomes its central focus. Nowhere
else does this occur with greater consistency and frequency than in the
journal Gnothi Seauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Know
Thyself or the Magazine for Empirical Psychology). In its ten-year run
(1783–93), its editors – most notably Karl Philipp Moritz and the Kantian
Salomon Maimon6  – offer a continual reflection on the methodological
problems faced by an empirical psychology, while its other contributors
provide narrative accounts of their own lives, and reflect on various psy-
chological dispositions and disorders they encounter in themselves and
others.7 Kant’s concerns with the possibility of such a pursuit certainly do
not go unaddressed in the context of this journal, and at numerous junc-
tures we find a sustained engagement with the question of “fiction” and
“deception.” Recent scholarship has pointed to some of the key articles
on deception in the Magazine – most notably Moritz’s contribution “On
Self-Deception”; what is left unaddressed is how the theory of fiction in
fact defines the science of the human.8 The human’s production of fiction
is no longer addressed as a problem that needs to be overcome, but as con-
stitutive element of human experience, and thus as a self-understanding
of the human, the production of fiction is fundamental. For the history of
the Magazine, this emerges as a trajectory in which the reformulations of
empirical psychology continually move.

Performing Subjectivity: The Subjects of Real Fictions

For all its concrete, historical, and empirical presence, the “subject” of
empirical psychology seems to have always lacked all stability, consistency,
and permanence. It is not “given,” but is instead created, and as much as
this subject creates itself, it is likewise capable of self-annihilation. Mori-
tz’s concurrent project, the novel Anton Reiser, which he first publishes in
fragments in the Magazine, attests to the problematic subject position in a
number of ways. First, Moritz’s psychological novel – which is in fact an
autobiography – foregrounds the construction and alteration of identity
180  Michael House

through the construction of a surrogate identity, the titular character

“Anton Reiser.”9 Second, Moritz further emphasizes the alterability of the
subject position by beginning the novel with his father’s engagement with
the “Quietist or Separatist” sect led by Mad. Guion. Here, the teachings
lead subjects to “exterminate,” “deny,” and “depart” from themselves:
“The entire household, down to the lowliest servant consisted only of
such people whose efforts were directed at or appeared to be directed at
returning to their Nothingness (as Mad. Guion calls it), the annihilation of
all passion, and the extermination of all individuality (Eigenheit)” (1: 37;
author’s emphasis). He further emphasizes this possibility moments later:
“One believed to read annihilation and disavowal in every expression,
and departure from oneself and entry into nothingness in every act” (1: 37;
author’s emphasis). While these acts serve a religious function – namely,
preparation for a truly “disinterested love of God” unmarred by even a
minute “flicker of self-love” (1: 38) – in a text that carries the subtitle A
Psychological Novel, beginning with a cult that promotes the negation of
the self certainly points not to the historical permanence and empirical
immutability of the subject, but to a void that can be filled or emptied at
will. The subject is anchored only by its mobility, its potential for creation,
recreation, and annihilation. What lies beneath these acts is, for an empiri-
cal account of the human subject, irrelevant.
Moritz further entrenches human experience in an inescapable fictional-
ity in his preparatory work for the Magazine, in particular in the article
“Prospects for an Experimental-Psychology” (1782).10 Amid his account
of the modes of observation available to the practitioner of this science, he
cannot depart from an obsession with the mediality of the human subject
as a condition of familial and social existence. And at this time Moritz is
still concerned with the potential to escape from a totally illusory existence.
However, as much progress as he makes, dissemblance becomes more and
more an inescapable condition of human existence. In fact, for Moritz,
acts of dissemblance predate their own understanding: “The child learns to
dissemble (sich verstellen), before it knows that there is dissemblance and
that dissemblance is a vice” (3: 87). Later in the text, he addresses another
more contemporary and culturally specific issue that impedes access to
some “authentic” self lurking behind its medial counterpart: namely,
reading-addiction. Reading becomes pathological the moment a subject’s
actions are dominated by imitation: “The addiction to imitation (Nachah-
mungssucht) extends so far, that one carries over ideals from books into
one’s life. Indeed nothing makes the human more untrue (unwahr), than
too many books. How difficult it has become for the observer, with
 Fictional Feedback  181

everything that has come to the character through the reading of novels
and plays, to retrieve the authentic and original (das Eigne und Origi-
nelle). Instead of humans, o wonder! one now hears books speaking, and
sees books acting” (3: 96).11 Moritz’s lamentation of the mimetic inauthen-
ticity that plagues Europe appears as a reflection on its potential inescap-
ability.12 While he holds this possibility out there, these questions become
a running concern that threatens to disrupt the very model of inquiry that
would define the Magazine. The impositions of customs (courtesy, polite-
ness, etc.) and culture (literature and theatre) on the subject erect such
veneers of mere appearance that the deeper reality of empirical subjectiv-
ity appears at this juncture unattainable. Still, Moritz holds out hope that
there is something beyond the veneer, and that it can be attained.

The Theory of Fiction: Imagining Kantians in the

Erfahrungsseelenkunde

Theatricality, deception, self-deception, and fiction all have their place

in the scholarship that deals with the Magazine and historically affili-
ated projects. However, the subtle theoretical framework that Moritz and
Maimon develop to address the fictionality of empirical existence still
requires attention. In particular, Salomon Maimon’s contribution to the
question of fiction gives the project a form, in which Moritz’s perpetual
insistence on “antitheatricality,” and statements against “idealism” (see
Wild, “Theorizing Theater Antitheatrically”) make sense in relationship
to the real subject’s inevitable slide into the “unreal.” That is, although
the ideality of experience is inescapable, this does not preclude the pos-
sibility of a rigorous science of fiction, one that distinguishes, for instance,
between kinds of ideality (e.g., good and bad). For Maimon, the claim goes
so far as to suggest that the foundation of empirical experience can only be
worked out in terms of a solid theory of fiction. The heightened rhetoric
of fictionality occupies a central place in Maimon’s thought, as we find in
the shift in emphasis from the Kantian language of “representation (Vor-
stellung)” to that of “fiction (Fiktion)” and “fabrication (Erdichtung).”13
Thus, Maimon, the self-proclaimed “empirical skeptic,”14 occupies a
unique position to orchestrate a project on empirical psychology: through
a reflection on the mechanisms through which we generate fictions, he can
differentiate between the production of fiction and deception. Bracketed
by the terms “superstition (Aberglaube)” and “doubt (Zweifel),” even his
1791 Philosophical Dictionary (Philosophisches Wörterbuch) is dispropor-
tionately dedicated to an exploration of the unreal.15
182  Michael House

So what is fiction for Maimon, and why does it seem to describe an

unavoidable condition of empirical existence? In the Philosophical Dic-
tionary, under the entry “Fiction,” he provides the following definition:
“Fiction (Fabrication) is in its most general meaning an operation of the
imagination in which a not objectively necessary unity in the manifold of
an object is brought forth.”16 For Maimon, this means that the meaningful
experience of a world of discrete objects occurs at the hand of imagination
(Einbildungskraft). He begins with the manifold itself (das Mannigfaltige
an sich), which alone does not yet constitute an object of experience. Only
when the subject modifies the manifold through the reflexive concepts
(Reflexionsbegriffe) of “unity (Einerleiheit), difference (Verschiedenheit)
and the like” does it become an object of thought (Gegenstand des Den-
kens) (3: 61). Maimon then draws the following conclusion: “The mere
sensible gathering together (Zusammennehmung) of the manifold to a
unity in the object, is on the other hand, much like the object that emerges
from this activity, an object of the faculty of fabrication or productive
imagination (Erdichtungsvermögen)” (3: 61). The external world is a sub-
jective and fictitious rendering produced by the faculty of fabrication.
For Maimon, the study of empirical subjects, in part, must begin with an
understanding of how the “productive imagination” produces a world for
the subject; and how this co-constitutes the production of the empirical
subject. As a key founder of German Idealism, Maimon maintains that
there is no escape from the “circle of consciousness”; we have no access to
an object outside of consciousness.
As Maimon’s extreme subjective idealism serves as the theoretical back-
drop for his own contributions to the Magazine, it is clear that Kant’s
potential issues for an empirical science of the soul have not disappeared,
but have rather doubled. The fictional status of the experience of the exter-
nal world – a point arrived at through the definition of the a priori con-
ditions of knowledge  – emerges as an issue for both the observing and
observed subject. And the self-proclaimed quest of the project, “knowl-
edge of the human (Menschenkenntnis),” now experiences the full brunt
of its grammatical ambiguity. Knowledge of the human is all-too-human.
To speak now of a theoretical framework in advance of the empirical col-
lection of data, however, betrays the method the Magazine itself employs.
It desires only to be a repository that collects the various “appearances or
episodes” (Erscheinungen) from its “learned and unlearned”17 contributors
and readers. This is outlined by Moritz in his proposal for the Magazine
that he published a year before its first issue, in 1782: “All these observa-
tions will first be collected in a magazine under certain rubrics, without
 Fictional Feedback  183

engaging any reflection, until a sufficient number of facts are there, and
then, at the end all of this, it will be ordered into a purposeful whole. And
what an important work for mankind this could become!” (Moritz 3: 90;
emphasis added). Thus, on one level, we encounter the project as a truly
enlightened “public scientific project,” to use Gailus’s phrase, in which
“cultural and scientific progress are intertwined” (75). On another, how-
ever, activities of accumulation and ordering remain distinct; and there is
no myth of an organic order that crystallizes at the culmination of the
project. Instead, the project parallels Maimon’s distinction between the
sensation and the production of an objective reality: as the data streams
in, it accumulates as an unruly manifold until it attains the critical mass
that would allow its editors to transform the repository into a “systematic
understanding” of the human: a mirror image that forever remains just
that, an image.18 Episodic, contingent, arbitrary events will later be retold
as a meaningful narrative. On an individual level this occurs as a restruc-
turing of one’s life as a temporally continuous and meaningful narrative,
and on a disciplinary level, that is, for empirical psychology, this occurs as
the unification of the data into a systematic whole.
The generic qualities of accumulated parts themselves are also reveal-
ing in terms of the question of fiction. The genre-blurring and -blending
contributions from philosophers, lawyers, clergymen, and anonymous
self-observers produce a truly unsystematic manifold ready for order-
ing.19 The Magazine contains a mixture of contributions that range from
clinical accounts of “sicknesses of the soul,” disturbances in language and
consciousness (aphasia, deafness), evaluations of spiritual power such
as divination and clairvoyance, anonymous autobiographical accounts
(for instance, a multipart sequence entitled “From the Journal of a Self-
Observer”), reflections on proclivities towards various forms of crimi-
nality, as well as selections that would later be republished as their own
literary texts (Maimon’s Autobiography and Moritz’s Anton Reiser). Thus,
from a perusal of the table of contents, it seems that the editors main-
tain the diverse manifold of a public repository for accounts of empirical
subjectivity. At the same time, the journal erodes the division between
“fabricated” and “true” accounts of human behaviour. A  great example
occurs as Maimon seems to slip in and out of the fabricated world of one
suffering from “reading addiction” and freely cites a long passage (the
Heinrich encounter) from Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, in a recur-
ring article, “Plan for the Magazine of Empirical Psychology,” and then
remarks: “And although this is also not a true anecdote, but a mere fab-
rication (Erdichtung) from the author, this remark is no less true, which
184  Michael House

can be verified through thousands of examples” (9: 1.13). Certainly, the

need to provide non-literary evidence for a fabricated claim demonstrates
a continued commitment to the empirical dimension, but the line between
the two grows ever more thin.
Maimon, whose work primarily engages with transcendental philoso-
phy, provides an epistemological account of why an account of empirical
existence and the work of the Magazine must have as its focus the human
capacity for fabrication. In the first instalment of his 1791 “Plan” article,
Maimon intervenes to begin the work of systematizing the “science of the
soul.” He first acknowledges the division between “pure and applied psy-
chology”; the former constitutes a “doctrine of the main powers (Haupt-
kräften) of the soul” (8: 3.1). As an empirical science, Maimon argues that
“the only correct method is the following: to connect all appearances so
much as possible through the reduction to common principles; not to
fabricate unknown principles” (2). Immediately following this statement,
however, he turns to a more abstract metaphysical enumeration of the pow-
ers of the soul and their division into higher powers (understanding and
reason) and lower powers (sensation, imagination, memory, etc.) (4). For
Maimon, the higher powers have no place in empirical psychology, as they
are the same in all “rational entities” (5). Individuality is not a question for
the “higher powers” of reason and understanding; instead, it works itself
out in terms of the “lower powers” used to process the empirical world.
Individuals would be indistinguishable if you were to control the vari-
able element (empirical experience): “If you were to give Duns Scotus the
same sensible representations and series of associations that Newton had,
he would discover the exact same world system” (5).20 What remains for
Maimon as the variable element that gives each individual its own discrete
world and allows for discrepancies between their worlds relates to the
“Imagination (Einbildungskraft)” (6). The imagination processes the same
objects in “different successions of association,” and according to differ-
ent degrees of “strength and speed (Stärke und Geschwindigkeit),” and in
different relations of “freedom and necessity” (6). For Maimon this not
only accounts for the differences in human perception but also for a sys-
tematic understanding of the “diseases of the soul” to which the division
of applied psychology can turn; they could only ever be “diseases of the
productive imagination,” as reason and understanding are universal and
do not vary among individuals. The whole project turns on understand-
ing the “different modes of activity of the imagination” (6), a science that
he boasts is a priori and not a posteriori. More importantly, the general
conclusion that Maimon draws from this is that whether or not we speak
 Fictional Feedback  185

of the differentiation as a matter of health and sickness of the soul, the pos-
sibility of individuality (distinctions between humans) relies on the dis-
crepancy in the worlds they produce with their imagination. The only fact
about distinct individuals is that they live according to different fictions.

Are They Deceiving Themselves? Self-Deception

and Self-Observation

The use of fabrications to establish facts about conditions of human exis-

tence proceeds also in the reverse direction, in which the contributing
subjects express their inability to escape the fictionality of their existence.
Perhaps the most sustained discussion of this issue occurs at a moment
in the third volume, which appeared in 1791, and in which Moritz and
Maimon feel compelled to interject, in the middle of the aforementioned
anonymous self-observer’s journal entry, two independent pieces, each
titled “On Self-Deception (Über Selbsttäuchung).” Occurring first as a
harsh insertion of the Magazine’s editorial voice, Moritz contradicts his
promise to remain “hands-off” and feels compelled to respond to a state-
ment made by the self-observer,21 who complains of the impossibility of
presenting to himself or anyone else who he truly is: “In these morning
hours, in this garden under the open sky, I only want to make the follow-
ing resolution: in the future only to be true, and not to appear, neither
to myself nor to others; that is precisely what has until now robbed me
of so much happiness” (7: 3.44; emphasis added). The psychological pre-
dicament is one in which there is a rift between the moments of action
and observation. In the loud interruption, before allowing the reported
journal to continue, Moritz not only chastises the author for his desire
to transcend his “mere appearance” and “be real” as a fundamental self-
deception, but also argues that we can no longer conceive of authentic
individuality as anterior to the production of a fiction. For Moritz, at the
moment one expresses “the desire to be true” an inversion occurs and “the
desire of truth, becomes a lie, the hate of dissemblance itself dissemblance,
and the fear of self-deception itself deception” (7: 3.47). Wild identifies
in this the “will to truthful self-observation and its programmatic enact-
ment” as representing “the highest degree of self-deception” (537). This is
true, and the problem pertains not only to the act of self-observation and
the feedback generated from the self observing itself observing itself, but
also to the mediated condition of experience in general. Moritz does not
propose to overcome this problem, but presents the drive to overcome
it as misplaced; what is, however, uncovered in this self-deception is the
186  Michael House

hidden outline of what the subject truly “is.” The very moment of decep-
tion becomes the moment that warrants our attention, “because there,
where our being deceives itself, certainly resides the undiscovered traces
of its hidden limits and delineations” (7: 3.47). Here, in the act of self-
deception we find the anonymous self-observer, who has made himself
present in writing; he does not reveal himself, but is the act of presentation.
The self is nothing more than the ever-changing self-generation of its own
image. Thus, the object of the science of man seems to move far from a
static empirical object to the ever-evolving mechanisms of deception, dis-
simulation, or, to put it less negatively, representation.
In fact, within philosophical discourse at the same time and the scepti-
cism debate in which Maimon is a central voice, we find the emergence of
a similar line of argument. Gottlob Ernst Schulze’s sceptical attack on the
edifice of Kantian philosophy (or at least the form it takes with Reinhold)
leads Maimon and Fichte to some of the most original statements on the
self in which it would be absurd to draw the conclusion that there is a
static “subject” (self-in-itself) that exists behind the stream of represen-
tation, or independently of its activity. Fichte’s famous conclusion that
emerges from this debate reduces the subject to its own activity, thereby
ending the metaphysical search for a “soul” or “self-in-itself” that under-
writes existence.22 The subject is reduced to a pure production. However,
this does not mollify the paranoia that persists and drives the question
of self-deception forward: the paranoia grounded in the conviction that
there exists an internal split in the self. For Moritz in the 1791 article “On
Self-Deception,” the phenomenon of self-deception must be greeted first
as enigmatic: “In human nature, there is certainly no more unexplainable
phenomenon than the possibility of deceiving oneself, as if one is at the
same time a being that is distinct from itself that has two separate interests”
(8: 3.32). Moritz’s response to this possibility is less than satisfactory, as he
merely subjects “deception” to a cost-benefit analysis, and argues that no
man would deceive another without there being some sort of advantage,
and the same must hold for self-deception. In the case of self-deception
the benefit, for Moritz, is lost.
Maimon’s response to this paradox promises a solution – and gives rise
to his own article “On Self-Deception” – one that first must give specificity
to the terms of the debate, and argues that what is required is a distinction
between “Deception (Täuschung)” and “Deceit (Betrug).” Maimon begins
by setting the former in an aesthetic context: here it can obtain a posi-
tive valance, even though it contains the possibility of deception. In fact,
Maimon, who follows Sulzer’s aesthetics and a mimetic understanding of
 Fictional Feedback  187

the work of art, perceives its effectiveness in its capacity to deceive, argu-
ing in the end that “the good effect of the fine arts (in so far as they are
an imitation of nature) depend on deception” (8: 2.38). Maimon’s account
of deception takes its cues from his belief that Kant does not overcome
Hume’s scepticism, in which he argues that what “deception” holds in
common with historical and empirical truths is the fact that they both
rest on the “Association of Imagination (Association der Einbildungsk-
raft)” (8: 3.39). What is associated or connected are different appearances,
such as the colour, weight, and density of gold, that are constantly con-
nected in space and time, and through this habitual connection we come
up with “gold” as that in which we combine all these appearances as its
“qualities.” It is on this basis as well that historic or empirical truths attain
their contingent structure; they depend on a unity that is manifested by
the imagination. Thus, Maimon, through a Kantian logic, has negated the
question: “Should it mean, for example, that sugar, which tastes sweet,
can also, independent of my own capacity for sensation (Empfindungs-
vermögen), be sweet in itself (an sich)? This contains a contradiction, that
something independent of my faculty of sensibility indeed still can be
called a sensation” (8: 3.40). Maimon’s point is that the deception and the
question of deception lie not in the relationship to the external thing, but
rather in its association with other appearances. Nonetheless, Maimon can
maintain a distinction between deception (Täuschung) and deceit (Betrug).
He writes: “They are different from one another, insofar as a deceit is
destroyed through its discovery; on the other hand, deception, even in the
conviction that it is a deception, is not destroyed” (41). Deceit only dif-
fers insofar as the conditions for the production of the “image” reveal that
the assumptions drawn by the subject in its encounter with the illusion
were wrong.23 For Maimon, thus, that we deceive ourselves is certainly
the case, a fact of empirical existence, in which we constantly construct out
of a manifold another reality; that we would will to deceive ourselves and
know that we carry out an act of deceit with respect to ourselves, on the
other hand, is an impossibility.

The Truth of Fiction: The Narrated Unity of Subjectivity

Empirical truth, no longer beholden to the narrow definition of the cor-

respondence between a subjective image and an external object, can now
be sought in the internal unity and consistency of the associated episodes
drawn together by the imagination. This proposal is, even for Moritz, ten-
uous, leaving a great deal of discomfort; but it marks the transition from a
188  Michael House

soul understood as fixed and hidden, needing to be recovered from the veil
of language, to the temporalized entity that is its expression in language.
I say tenuous, because it remains a tension that permeates even his own
Anton Reiser: he sees his being, his self and soul, as “a mere deception, an
abstract idea  – a consolidation of similarities, which in every following
moment in life disappears” (227).24 This revelation, however, marks the
moment that the pursuit of empirical psychology changes from one of
uncovering truth to one of reconstructing meaning.
For this reason, Moritz, in his “radically empirical” psychological novel
Anton Reiser focuses on the possibility of bringing the life of a single,
ordinary, everyday human subject to writing; it is at once a scientific and
literary pursuit that entails a recalibration of the observer’s (or author’s)
representational faculties in such a way that it becomes coldly attuned to
all events. Moritz describes this process as follows: “It is intended not to
disperse the representational power, but to concentrate it, and to give the
soul a sharper insight into itself” (136). This concentrated focus of the rep-
resentational faculty produces a kind of microscopic vision that does not
allow the initial perception of events to determine whether they will be
included in the narrative of the character, leading to the obvious problem
that much of what he writes appears, in his own words, too “small and
meaningless” (136). However, as we read on, we discover that the process
is far from complete, and that he is only asking for the readers’ patience.
The temporal structure of the plot simply displaces the question of mean-
ing, and it is only through the totality of a life, only “in the process of life”
(136) that the hermeneutic context for reading life is revealed.
In the Magazine a similar determinative structure emerges, but here
it is clear that the displacement defines the limitation of possibility,
and childhood impressions gain their importance insofar as they make
“indeed the foundation for all that follows” (Moritz 3: 104). Both Anton
Reiser and the Magazine carry the problematic structure, however, that
the material  – the original impressions, or the small and unimportant
events of childhood – attain their determinative force not through empir-
ical observation, but rather through a secondary act. This is necessarily
the case, as these events and impressions are generally available only as
“memories of memories” (ibid.). Thus, the significance and meaning do
not emerge solely out of themselves; instead, the power of reconstruction
takes on the form of an imaginative return to a natural origin. Method-
ologically, this underlines the very tension between a literary enterprise
that attempts to eradicate the literary imagination and a scientific one
that seems to depend on the imaginative reconstruction of the individual.
 Fictional Feedback  189

In this way, we can read Moritz’s generic obsession – which primarily

takes the form of the self-reflexive, extradiegetic question: am I  writing
a psychological novel that is still a novel or a biography that is a faithful
reproduction of life?25 – as exemplary of a larger concern as to whether or
not life writing (biography) can ever achieve the status of a “life science.”
Moritz is nonetheless committed to the possibility of his human science as
a “Seelennaturkunde” produced through “dispassionate self-observation”
(Krupp, “Observing Children” 34). What emerges, however, is the sugges-
tion that the literary reconstruction of the small and meaningless as signifi-
cant and meaningful is not merely a phenomenon restricted to observation,
but is also a process integral to the human condition. The status of these
determinations (of meaning and significance) becomes the tension that per-
meates the entire early history of anthropological disciplines (the so-called
sciences of man). Are they fictions generated only in the moment of (self-)
observation? If so, do they nonetheless have an ontological status, express-
ing a condition of existence by which empirical subjects live?26

Postscript: The Playful Art of Anthropology

Kant’s Anthropology in a Pragmatic Sense responds to this question from

another point of view. Kant starts with a critique of the deterministic
implications of a reductive physiological account of man present in the
materialist vein of the sciences of man. The model of strictly spatial causal-
ity allows all capacities of the soul to find their origin in the constitution
of the body. Moritz’s model for human science already establishes its com-
plexity through the introduction of a temporality, and it becomes clear
that his subject attains an arbitrary freedom in the open-ended possible
interpretations of particular events. For Kant, any determinist account of
man as a fixed mechanical or material subject is abhorrent to his fundamen-
tal understanding of man as a “free acting being (freihandelndes Wesen),”
who is likewise a free citizen of the world (the human as Weltbürger).
Kant’s rejection of a physiological basis for anthropology immediately
sets up the poles between internal freedom and external determination.
Under this model, we are merely passive observers of the necessary, but
indecipherable, processes that occur in our body, but are inaccessible to
our mind. That is, we become enslaved to the play of representations of
unknown origins:

He who ponders natural phenomena, for example, what the causes of the
faculty of memory may rest on, can speculate back and forth (like Descartes)
190  Michael House

over the traces of impressions remaining in the brain, but in doing so he must
admit that in this play of his representations (Spiel seiner Vorstellungen) he
is a mere observer and must let nature run its course, for he does not know
the cranial nerves and fibers, nor does he understand how to put them to use
for his purposes. Therefore all theoretical speculation about this is a waste of
time. (Kant, Anthropology 3; AA 7: 119)

Regaining access to these representations, and more specifically to the play

of representations, becomes both the basis for his anthropology and the
chief impediment to its execution. It would be far easier to study sedate,
passive objects that present themselves in the tangible clarity of a physical
structure. However, for Kant this would do injustice to the fundamental
self-determining freedom man experiences with respect to the “play of
representations.” And because it is a free self-directed play – we play with
our representations – a ludic element creeps in the backdoor.
For Kant, in his Anthropology, the problems expressed at the beginning
are reformulated as they pertain to pragmatic anthropology. In addition to
the problem of dissembling, Kant adds the fact that cultural entrenchment
makes certain habits second nature (Kant, Anthropology 5; AA 7: 121).
These concerns all point to the question of access to what is authentically
human. Expressed as a problem for the very possibility of an anthropology
or empirical psychology, Kant directs us to what might be called a pro-
ductive negation, a failure that reveals that the self-generated or socially
generated construction does not merely obfuscate man, but might define
what man, in fact, is. No doubt, the concluding paragraphs of this preface
take this wager seriously when he argues: “While not exactly sources for
anthropology, these are nevertheless aids: world history, biographies, even
plays and novels” (ibid.). As we move closer to understanding what Kant
in this context means by man, as an I-object constituting a Weltbürger, it
becomes increasingly clear that we are dealing with a hybrid entity, one
that not only is known through its literary aids, but also constitutes itself
through these aids.
Foucault  – in his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology  – makes the
point that “we see a field proper to anthropology being sketched out,
where the concrete unity of the syntheses and of passivity, of the affected
and the constituting, are given as phenomena in the form of time” (39).
In this sense, Kant comes closer to what in Moritz appears as the play
between the determinative contingency of external conditions (Umstände)
and the continuous reattribution of meaning that the subject gives these
former conditions. On this basis, Foucault aligns this back and forth with
 Fictional Feedback  191

the notion of play at the heart of Kant’s reclaiming of the Spiel der Vorstel-
lungen (i.e., man as the constant, free-acting moderator of the play):

This notion of Spielen is singularly important: man is nature’s play; it is the

game that he plays, and [he] is played by it; if he is sometimes played with –
as when his senses are deceived – it is because he is playing the victim of the
game, despite it being within his power to be in control, to take back control
by feigning his intention. In this way, the game becomes a “künstlicher Spiel”
[sic] and the show he puts on receives its moral justification. Anthropology
thus develops on the basis of this dimension of human exercise that goes
from the ambiguity of the Spiel (game-toy) to the indecision of the Kunst
(art-artifice). (53)

Even for Kant, what originally constitutes the chief impediment for the
possibility of anthropology becomes its very subject matter.
The means of the playing, and what it means to be a human for anthro-
pology, for Foucault, for his Kant, and even for Moritz, has its answer in
the question of language: “Anthropology’s man is indeed a Weltbürger,
but not in the sense that he belongs to a given social group or such and
such institution. He is Weltbürger purely and simply because he speaks.
It is in the exchange of language that he manages on his own account both
to attain and to realize the concrete universal. His living in the world is,
originarily, residence in language” (Foucault 102). Language thus emerges
immediately for Moritz and Kant as the science’s problem preventing
anthropology from penetrating the dissimulations and façades erected
by an I-object’s literary nature. The truth of man is no longer something
“anterior to language” (ibid.)  – a physiological structure or originary,
small, meaningless moments  – but rather is to be found in the negotia-
tion between observer and observed, and their linguistic exchange. Thus,
Moritz, when returning to the same methodological concern at the begin-
ning of the second book, focuses on the synthetic process, the linguistic
re-rendering of the minuscule: “For anyone who gives value to a faithful
representation (Darstellung) will not be irked by what appears initially to
be trivial and unimportant; but will take into consideration that the artis-
tically interwoven web of a human life consists of an infinite number of
details (Kleinigkeiten), all of which assume the greatest importance upon
being interwoven” (Moritz 3: 120). It is only with this notion of the web
that is “artistically interwoven” that the human subject as an object of lit-
erary science emerges. In this way – so long as we are reading an autobiog-
raphy – the temporally determined interconnections and causal networks
192  Michael House

do not have their origin in an externally determinative source, but rather

in the subject’s own artistic and linguistic capacity. It is in this free act of
self-production and in this act alone that the empirical soul exists.

NOTES

1 For the most comprehensive anthology on this period in German history,

which accounts for the diversity of sciences that propose to provide an
account of the “whole man,” see Schings, ed., Der ganze Mensch. The anthol-
ogy is based on the 1992 DFG-Symposium, and the authors take into account
the complete spectrum of scientific perspectives, methods, and theories that
contribute to the attempted account of “the whole man.” Everything from
physiognomy, crainioscopy, neuroanatomy, to (animal) magnetism, as well
as those sciences that define the focus of this chapter: empirical psychology
(Erfahrungsseelenkunde) and anthropology.
2 Jonathan Hess provides a good overview of the impact of Platner’s project
in his book Reconstituting the Body Politic. There he argues that there is an
ideal of the interdisciplinary, which he characterizes as follows: “Platner’s
Anthropologie addresses and hopes to bring together both physicians and
philosophers, the anatomists and physiologists who specialize in the body,
and the philosophers who traditionally limit themselves to studying the mind
and soul” (134). At the same time, the discourse privileges the “empirical
observations of the medical doctor over the philosopher’s quest for systematic
knowledge” (135).
3 Nietzsche famously refers to the series of metaphors that separate “things in
themselves” from our experience of them: “The ‘thing in itself’ (for that is
what pure truth, without consequences, would be) is also completely incom-
prehensible to the creator of language and not at all worth striving after. He
designates only the relationship between things and men, and to express them
one employs the boldest metaphors. A nerve stimulus, first transposed into
an image – first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound – second
metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right
into the middle of an entirely new and different one” (“On Truth and Lie”
256; “Über Wahrheit und Lüge” 1: 879; translation modified).
4 In the preface to Kant’s Anthropology in a Pragmatic Sense, it is precisely this
dimension of “physiological anthropology” that he views as deficient. I will
return to this in the concluding section.
5 All references to Kant’s work are to the Akademische Ausgabe (AA).
6 Friedrich Pockels was the second editor of the Magazine. The focus of this
chapter is on Moritz and Maimon’s stewardship.
 Fictional Feedback  193

7 For those interested in the specifics of the publication, its popularity, and
the history of its editorial changes, see Bennholdt-Thomsen and Guzzoni,
“Nachwort” and Gailus, “A Case of Individuality” 70–1.
8 Schreiber, following the path of Wild, points to the theatrical metaphor that
Moritz employs in his article: “In his theatrical Vorstellung, then, the risk
of Verstellung is not overcome, but rather remains immanent. In attempting
to peer through the curtain of courteous convention by distancing oneself
from oneself, yet another curtain falls” (“Pressing Matters” 145). Thus, the
moment the subject observes itself, or becomes observed, he suffers the prob-
lem foretold by Kant: a projected identity created for the observer (even if the
observed and observer are one and the same). Schreiber points to the inevi-
table doubling of the self into observing subject and observed object as well,
and demonstrates the common psychological configuration in both “self-
deception and self-observation”: “The role-playing of self-deception would
then only be a logical extension of the theatrical model of (self-)observation”
(537). Schreiber, building upon Bezold’s comprehensive work on the subject,
demonstrates that the “self-observer” doubles himself and becomes performer
and audience at once (161). Gailus comes closest to the understanding that
the problem of self-deception does not need to be solved for there to be a
“true” representation of the self. “Language is not a transparent window
onto the soul but a narcissistic mirror that enables the self to imagine its own
wholeness” (97). What I would contend is that, in all cases, what Moritz (and
Maimon) encounter is that the science of the self can only reveal the self as
non-stop representational activity, and not as some thing or entity that resides
beyond or outside of the activity. And this represents a complete transfor-
mation of the nature of empirical psychology itself. It should also be noted
that what remains especially underappreciated in the scholarship on Moritz’s
article “On Self-Deception” is Maimon’s contribution. This paper attempts to
demonstrate that through Maimon the fictionality of the subject attains a sci-
entific understanding that allows for a far more subtle account of what “self-
deception” could possibly mean.
9 In a much more “real” way, this is the case for Salomon “Maimon,” whose
own name is a construction that stands in for his given name, Salomon Ben
Joshua. For an account of the question of name and identity see Weissberg
(“Erfahrungsseelenkunde” 303–39). Maimon likewise published his autobiog-
raphy in fragments in the Magazine.
10 A good overview of the road to the Magazine can be found in Davies’s article
“Karl Philipp Moritz’s Erfahrungsseelenkunde” (15–21) and Bell’s The Ger-
man Tradition of Psychology (esp. 85–103).
11 This concern with an oversaturated book market is repeated in the inaugural
remarks, in which he speaks of the journal itself contributing to “the
194  Michael House

Flood of books.” His retort is that he is offering neither “moral prattle, nor a
novel, nor a comedy” but “facts” (3: 103).
12 Wild makes a similar point, while retaining the fundamental aim of the
Magazine to undermine the “idealism” and “theatricality” of a mediated life:
“While Moritz never tires of warning against ‘sich in eine idealische Welt
hinüber zu träumen’ and promotes Erfahrungsseenlenkunde as a method ‘in
seine eigne wirkliche Welt immer tiefer einzudringen,’ this bookish variant of
‘Nachahmungssucht’ poses the danger that there is no real world left to which
one can return from one’s foray into the ideal” (535).
13 Maimon is perhaps more famous for his role in the skeptical reception of
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. His skepticism serves to widen the Kantian
rift between subjective knowledge and a mind independent external reality,
leaving the subject to reside solely within the ideality of his own mind.
14 He makes this statement, which is the point of departure for most interpreta-
tions, in his most famous work, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (232),
which is an extended exegesis on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
15 To get a sense of this tendency, consider the following entry titles dedicated
to the exploration of issues surrounding fictional dimensions of human exis-
tence: “Superstition” (Aberglauben),” “Idolatry (Abgötterei),” “Imagination
(Einbildungskraft),” “Fiction (Fiktion),” “Belief (Glauben),” “Imitation
(Nachahmung),” “Play (Spiel),” “Deception and Appearance (Täuschung und
Schein),” “Probability (Wahrscheinlichkeit),” “Reality [in us] (Wirklichkeit [in
uns]),” and “Doubt (Zweifel).”
16 “Fiktion (Erdichtung) ist in der allgemeinsten Bedeutung eine Operation der
Einbildungskraft, wodurch eine nicht objektiv notwendige Einheit im Manig-
faltigen eines Objekts hervorgebracht wird” (3: 60).
17 The subtitle for the journal reads: “As a Primer for Scholars and Nonscholars
(als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte).”
18 From his preparatory texts, Moritz claims that the empirical psychology
would constitute “a universal mirror, in which the human species could see
itself” (3: 90). Gailus cleverly and accurately acknowledges that it is not a
mirror, but “a multi-perspectival montage of a population in its psychosocial
diversity” (81).
19 This overstates the case a tad, as there is a slight tension in Moritz’s empiri-
cal method. Moritz does include in the introduction to the Magazine rubrics
that would define the basic subdivisions of the discipline (as proposed by his
friend Moses Mendelssohn) and they are, “without any structural mecha-
nisms: natural psychology (Seelennaturkunde), psychopathology (Seelen-
krankheitskunde), psychosemiotics (Seelenzeichenkunde), psychodietetics
(Seelenediätetik) and psychotherapy (Seelenheilkunde), etc.” (see Moritz
 Fictional Feedback  195

3: 104; and Magazine 1: part 1. 3). All future references will be made to the
original Gnothi Seauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (volume
number followed by part number and page number), and the author’s name
will be mentioned if known.
20 His point is that these higher powers give the “thinking being” the capacity
to think an object this way or that way at all: “Understanding thinks concepts
of objects and makes judgments about the relationships of these objects a
priori”(4). These relationships are necessary and universally valid, as in the
case of a triangle: “The concept of a triangle is only possible, because the
three sides (as the determinations) without space (as that which is through
this determined) cannot be thought” (4). The elements of a triangle must be
thought together for there to be a triangle at all. Thus, the differences and dis-
crepancies between individuals must reside in another capacity.
21 For a sense of the hard-handedness of this intervention, here is the sequence
as it appears in the table of contents:
“Anonymous. From the Journal of a Self-Observer
Moritz. On Self-Deception. A Parentheses to the Journal of the Self-Observer
Anonymous. Continuation of the Journal”

22 As Fichte writes: “The I posits itself, and it is, by virtue of this mere positing
by itself and conversely: The self is, and it posits its being, in virtue of its mere
being. It is at once the agent and the product of action; the active, and that
which is brought about by the activity; action and deed are one and the same;
and hence: ‘I am’ expresses a Tathandlung” (97).
23 He gives the example of a stick partially submerged in water (41–2). From
the angle of the stick you could believe it to be broken, but with knowl-
edge of optics and an understanding of why the angle of the stick changes
in the medium of water, the deceit (that the stick is broken) is destroyed.
However, it is always the case that the stick, as it appears, is just that, an
appearance.
24 Minter presents this as the radical empiricism and an expression of a
“Humean sentiment” (“Psychology of Association” 70). Historically, there
is no doubt that this is the case, and it is in part due to the rise of Hume in
German intellectual circles at this very time. Maimon himself, certainly in
his engagement with Kant, does not believe the problems raised by Hume
to be solved by the first Kritik. And his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy
explores the way in which Kant fails to answer the questions quid juris and
quid facti. The radical Humean scepticism that would lead Anton to doubt
the existence of the soul comes with the liberating realization that the self has
a form-giving function, and cannot be estranged from the world it produces.
196  Michael House

In a different venue, linking this to the role of association psychology in

Anton Reiser, Minter makes a similar point: “Against the backdrop of Anton
Reiser’s radical empiricism and its implications for the nature of the central
character’s experience of self, the principle of association offers itself as a
potential psychological form-giving element: Anton’s fragmentary percep-
tions are capable of becoming connected according to the laws of
association” (70).
25 The famous introductory lines in the preface (certainly not promising as a
page turner) read: “This psychological novel could also be called a biography,
because the observations are for the most part taken from real life”
(Moritz 3: 36).
26 The fact that fiction can constitute a real ontological category in psychology
becomes a perennial topic for the discipline, especially as it attains disciplin-
ary specificity around 1900, as is evident in Wilke’s contribution to this very
anthology. And in this context, in particular in the formation of psychologi-
cal aesthetics as a field of knowledge, the epistemological and ontological
relationships between fact and fiction are not merely a problem that the
nascent discipline must overcome; instead, it is again a constitutive, formative
negotiation.

WORKS CITED

Adler, Hans. “Aisthesis, steinernes Herz und geschmeidige Sinne. Zur Bedeutung
der Ästhetik-Diskussion in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Der
ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. Hans-
Jürgen Schings. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1992.
Bell, Mathew. The German Tradition of Psychology in Literature and Thought,
1770–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.
Bennholdt-Thomsen, Anke, and Alfredo Guzzoni. “Nachwort.” In Gnothi
Sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Vol. 10. Lindau: Antiqua-
Verlag, 1978.
Bezold, Raimund. Popularphilosophie und Erfahrungsseelenkunde im Werk von
Karl Philipp Moritz. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1984.
Boulby, Mark. Karl Philipp Moritz: At the Fringe of Genius. Toronto: U of
Toronto P, 1979.
Brantigan, Martha Jane. Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde: Editors, Text and
Context. Diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1981.
Davies, Martin L. “Karl Philipp Moritz’s Erfahrungsseelenkunde: Its Social and
Intellectual Origins.” Oxford German Studies 26 (1985): 13–35.
 Fictional Feedback  197

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. The Science of Knowledge. Ed. and trans. Peter Heath
and John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982.
Foucault, Michel. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Ed. Roberto Nigro.
Trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008.
Gailus, Anreas. “A Case of Individuality: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Magazine
for Empirical Psychology.” New German Critique 79. Special issue on
Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought (Winter 2000): 67–105.
Gnothi Seauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Ed. K.P. Moritz, K.F.
Pockels, and S. Maimon. 10 vols. Berlin, 1783–93. http://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.
de/diglib/aufkl/magerfahrgsseelenkd/index.htm.
Hess, Jonathan. Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture
and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999.
Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. and ed.
Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
–  Kants gesammelte Schriften. Edition Königlich Preussische Akademie. 29 vols.
Berlin: Georg Reimer Verlag, 1910–. (= AA)
Krupp, Anthony. “Observing Children in an Early Journal of Psychology.” In
Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Anja Müller. Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2006.
Maimon, Salomon. Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Valerio Verra. 6 vols. Hildesheim:
Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1965–71.
–  Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie. Ed. Florian Ehrensperger. Ham-
burg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2004.
Minter, Catherin. “The Psychology of Association in Karl Philipp Mortiz’s
Anton Reiser.” Forum Modern Language Studies 44.1 (2008): 67–75.
Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungs-Seelenkunde.”
Deutsches Museum, 1776–88, vol. 1 (1782): 485–503.
–  Werke. Ed. Horst Günther. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1981.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In Writings
from the Early Notebooks. Ed. Raymond Guess and Alexander Nehamas.
Trans. Ladislaus Löb. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
–  “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne.” In Kritische Studien-
ausgabe. Ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari. 2nd ed. Munich, Berlin, New York:
dtv and de Gruyter, 1988.
Platner, Ernst. Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweise. Leipzig: Dyckische
Buchhandlung, 1772.
Schings, Hans-Jürgen, ed. Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18.
Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1992.
Schreiber, Elliott. “Pressing Matters: Karl Philipp Mortz’s Models of the Self in
the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde.” Goethe Yearbook 11 (2002): 133–58.
198  Michael House

Weissberg, Liliane. “Erfahrungsseelenkunde als Akkulturation: Philosophie, Wis-

senschaft und Lebensgeschichte bei Salomon Maimon.” In Der ganze Mensch:
Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Schings.
Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1992.
Wild, Christopher J. “Theorizing Theater Antitheatrically: Karl Philipp Moritz’s
Theatromania.” MLN 120.3 (April 2005): 507–38.
8 Fictional Feelings: Psychological
Aesthetics and the Paradox
of Tragic Pleasure

tobias wilke

“Do aesthetic quasi-emotions [Scheingefühle] exist?” (191),1 the German

philosopher Moritz Geiger asks in the opening part of a lecture delivered at
the first Kongreß für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, a large-
scale gathering of aestheticians, psychologists, and art historians held in Ber-
lin in 1913.2 The question he poses in this manner is, to be sure, a rhetorical
one, for Geiger himself has no doubt that the object of his inquiry – con-
ceived as a particular class of psychological responses to aesthetic stimuli – is,
in fact, empirically “real.” And he proceeds to dispel any potential uncer-
tainty on the part of his audience by citing various examples of experiential
evidence, all of which attest, according to him, that “there are” emotions
of the kind he is going to talk about. In particular, he invokes the familiar
experience of feelings aroused by dramatic representations – those feelings,
that is, with which the viewer in the theatre either personally reacts to the
characters on stage or re-enacts their condition through a mechanism of
empathetic identification. As Geiger points out, the two kinds of response
are categorically different: In the first case, the spectator’s own emotion is
directed at the fictional characters and their actions – Geiger writes in this
context: “I detest Franz Moor, I pity Maria Stuart” (192)3 – while in the sec-
ond case it is directed at the object of the feelings experienced (fictionally)
by the characters themselves: “One fears with Wallenstein, or with Agnes
Bernauer and so forth” (192). Yet both kinds of emotional response fall
equally – so Geiger goes on to claim – into the larger category of “aesthetic
quasi-emotions.” For they both display the characteristics that he takes to
be symptomatic of quasi-emotions in general. He writes:

So-called quasi-emotions are shorter in duration and alternate more rapidly

than real emotions … Moreover, quasi-emotions are significantly less effective
200  Tobias Wilke

in psycho-motoric respects than real emotions. In the theatre, fear does not
prompt us to jump up and run away, pity does not compel us to help the
hero of a play. And finally, there exists the strange fact that the most intensely
unpleasant feelings, such as fear and fright, do not interfere with the experi-
ence of aesthetic enjoyment but even increase it. (Problem of Dubos.) (192)4

The central aspect named here to distinguish “quasi-emotions” – phenom-

enologically – from “actual” ones is the different behavioural pattern they
involve. Experienced in a fictional context like the dramatic representation
on stage, neither pity nor fear trigger the psycho-physical repertoire of
standardized actions that would (likely) be activated under “normal” or
“real” circumstances; and they do not trigger those actions because they
are not defined by the same emotional “valence”5 as their non-aesthetic
counterparts – because they are, in fact, not the same emotions at all.
Within the course of but a few paragraphs, Geiger has arrived in his
deliberations at the issue of tragedy’s peculiar emotional economy, and
the fact that he has done so is no coincidence, for the so-called paradox of
tragic pleasure – “the strange fact,” as he puts it, “that the most intensely
unpleasant feelings, such as fear and fright, do not interfere with the expe-
rience of aesthetic enjoyment but even increase it”  – forms the primary
context within which the late-nineteenth-century concept of “quasi-
emotions” initially emerged.6 The issue of the tragic paradox in itself, to be
sure, long pre-existed this conceptual development. Perhaps most canoni-
cally stated in the opening sentence of David Hume’s treatise “Of Trag-
edy” (1757) – “It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of
a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other pas-
sions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” (258) – it had been
addressed repeatedly from the early eighteenth century onwards. (Geiger
briefly gestures towards this history in his parenthetical remark “Duboss-
ches Problem.”)7 And indeed, Aristotle’s even earlier, if more implicit,
treatment of the paradox in his theory of tragic pathos famously marks the
very beginning of (Western) poetics in general. What uniquely character-
izes the late-nineteenth-century debates, however, to which Geiger’s 1913
lecture offers a kind of belated postscript, is a significant transformation
within – and of – this theoretical genealogy. For starting in the 1870s, the
tragic paradox becomes the object of, and testing ground for, new explana-
tory strategies that are inextricably tied to a fundamental methodological
shift in the field of aesthetics: namely, the shift towards the rigorous study
of psychological “facts” and a discipline governed by the laws, on a par
with the standards, of (modern) empirical science.8
 Fictional Feelings  201

The beginning of this transformational process is typically identified

with Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s anti-formalist declaration in 1866 that
“the beautiful” be conceived and investigated as (the result of) a dynamic
psychological “act” (“Kritik meiner Ästhetik” 224).9 Throughout the fol-
lowing decades, this pronounced reorientation unfolds, with ever increas-
ing discursive intensity, in various descriptive models designed to explicate
the essentially emotional “nature” of aesthetic experience. In the works of
authors like Robert Vischer, Johannes Volkelt, Theodor Lipps, and Karl
Groos (figures who are relatively little known today but were of decisive
influence at the time), “psychological aesthetics” takes shape as a field of
knowledge constituted by newly developed conceptual instruments and
argumentative patterns; and it involves, though often only in nominal
form, the incipient deployment of “experimental” research methods.10
What unifies the evolving discipline (which enters into a phase of meth-
odological and institutional consolidation in the 1890s)11 is the avowed
conviction that aesthetics, “like any other science [Wissenschaft], must
proceed anti-metaphysically [unmetaphysisch] by deriving its point of
departure and its objectives from the world of experience” (Volkelt, Sys-
tem 31). Rejecting any kind of speculative reasoning – which they take to
be characteristic of traditional, “merely” philosophical aesthetics (Volkelt,
Ästhetik des Tragischen, 1st ed., 2; Groos, Einleitung 310)  – the propo-
nents of this paradigmatic “turn” claim that aesthetic experience can be
adequately studied only by means of systematic empirical observation.
Aesthetics is to be transformed from a body of theoretical “principles”
into a body of demonstrable “facts” – from a Prinzipienwissenschaft into a
Tatsachenwissenschaft – in which the notion of “functional law” takes the
place of central concept (Nachtsheim, Kunstphilosophie 35). And while the
various ways in which this shift is actually implemented may not always
live up to the standards of a strictly empiricist endeavour, the underlying
aspiration nevertheless remains, discursively speaking, effective. For it is
precisely this aspiration  – the objective of re-conceiving aesthetics as a
science of observable facts – that produces the need to maintain, or rather
re-establish, a specific area of competence from within the methodological
framework of empirical psychology.12 And it is, in turn, due to this very
need that the categorical notion of “aesthetic emotions,”13 and the notion
of “aesthetic quasi-emotions” more specifically, begins to acquire its cen-
tral conceptual status. The notion of inherently fictional feelings, in other
words, first arises within, and consequently testifies to, a discursive process
in which the new formation of psychological aesthetics begins to stake out
a territory of its own. And in the context of this process, the concept of
202  Tobias Wilke

quasi-emotions serves to articulate a qualitative difference between certain

specifically aesthetic processes of consciousness and other, more general
psychological functions – a difference, that is, from which a correspond-
ing (partial) difference at the level of disciplinary formations can then be
derived by means of analogy.
The question to be pursued here is not whether this kind of discursive
strategy actually succeeded from a systematic point of view, but rather
how the emerging notion of quasi-emotions relates  – epistemologically
and rhetorically  – to the self-demarcation and self-legitimization of a
nascent disciplinary field situated at the crossroads between an aesthetic
tradition and contemporary scientific paradigms. The particular signifi-
cance of this dynamic interaction between methodological claims and
conceptual developments, when viewed from a genealogical perspective,
lies in the way in which the reorientation towards a decidedly scientific
standard of factuality – a factuality anchored at the methodological level of
empirical analysis and description – ultimately leads the newly conceived
branch of psychological aesthetics to fictionalize emotional processes by
claiming that “fictional” emotions like “quasi-fear” and “quasi-pity” are
psychological facts. Viewed in this light, Geiger’s initial question “Do
aesthetic quasi-emotions exist?” turns out to revolve around the central
issue of how, and in what sense exactly, those fictional feelings can be said
to be actually “the case.” And any solution to this problem requires, as
he asserts right after the passage quoted above, “a psychological theory
as to whether mere illusion [Schein] is at all possible within the psycho-
logical realm” (192). The way in which this very possibility gets addressed
and maintained throughout the late nineteenth century is therefore to be
understood as the negotiation of a two-levelled relationship – the epistemic-
ontological relationship between fact and fiction on the one hand, and the
methodological-discursive relationship between “scientific” analysis and
(the experience of) aesthetic objects on the other hand – at a crucial junc-
ture in the history of aesthetics as a field of knowledge. To reconstruct this
negotiation, conversely, is to trace the process through which the theoreti-
cians of “aesthetic quasi-emotions” arrived at this peculiar notion of real
yet fictional feelings in the first place.
Not coincidentally, it is in the very text usually credited with initiating
the psychological turn in late-nineteenth-century aesthetics  – Friedrich
Theodor Vischer’s treatise “Kritik meiner Ästhetik” (1866)  – where the
first traces of the conceptual development towards quasi-emotions can
be discerned. Contending at one point that it would be virtually impos-
sible to follow the stage presentation of a play like Schiller’s Wallenstein
 Fictional Feelings  203

without experiencing any emotional involvement whatsoever – and that,

consequently, the peculiar nature of this emotional involvement must be
analysed – Vischer provides the following preliminary characterization:

None of this, to be sure, happens in reality; it is not “earnest” in the usual

sense of the word. Just as the object is mere illusion, so also is the impres-
sion. In both cases, however, it is no empty, frivolous kind of un-earnestness;
after all, it is with earnest intentions that the illusion is presented to us, and
as viewers we likewise take our feelings very earnestly – without any earnest-
ness in the everyday sense of the word. Interest has been divested of the sting
of interest, stimulus is stimulus without stimulus, fright is fright without
fright, hatred is hatred without hatred and so on for every emotion. (327–8)14

The passage is significant for the way in which it relocates the kernel of
aesthetic experience  – while transforming the classic Kantian notion of
“disinterested interest”  – to a generalized economy of feeling (Müller-
Tamm). In doing so, it extends the notion of illusion from the level of
aesthetic object – the stimulus – to the level of emotional response (“just
as the object is mere illusion, so also is the impression”). More specifi-
cally it transfers, by means of analogy, the fictional logic inherent to the
poetic object of aesthetic experience (“None of this, to be sure, happens in
reality”) on to the psychological object of (future) scientific observation.
According to this model, then, the spectator of Wallenstein reproduces the
fictional representation that occurs on stage in the form of an emotional
experience in which every feeling corresponds to  – but is not identical
to – a “real” counterpart. This, however, does not mean that these aestheti-
cally induced emotions are merely unreal (“no empty … un-earnestness”).
As Vischer goes on to emphasize, they rather possess their very own and
distinctly empirical factuality – after all, something happens on stage that
can be seen and heard – and they are thus to be conceived, paradoxically,
in rhetorical forms like “fright is fright without fright, hatred is hatred
without hatred,” and the like.
This focus on the paradox of tragic pleasure  – already inscribed into
Vischer’s Wallenstein-inspired reflection – begins to unfold more fully at
the point where psychological aesthetics, over the course of the 1890s,
develops comprehensive typologies designed to capture the entire spec-
trum of dramatically aroused feelings. As a central means of laying claim
to the practice of rigorous empirical analysis – to an exhaustive categori-
zation of what can be “observed” – these typologies serve to differentiate
more precisely among the various kinds of aesthetically relevant emotions;
204  Tobias Wilke

and they do so, in particular, by establishing under the umbrella category

of quasi-emotions the two different subclasses of fictional feelings as
distinguished in Geiger’s lecture. The first subcategory, and most basic
form, of tragic “quasi-emotions” identified in this context comprises the
“empathetic feelings [Einfühlungsgefühle],”15 that is, those feelings that
the spectators, while following the dramatic representation, “project
into” the figures on stage – as is the case, for example, when they experience
the wrath of King Lear or Gretchen’s despair as the emotional states lived
through by the fictional characters themselves. As Johannes Volkelt puts
it in the third edition of his Ästhetik des Tragischen: “In reality, this pain
is being projected out of our own soul and into the tragic character, with
whom it then ‘fuses,’ so that it appears to us  – in a manner completely
detached from its origin in our own consciousness – as though it pervaded
the tragic characters themselves” (297).16 The second subcategory of tragic
“quasi-emotions,” by contrast, is not subject to any such psychological
mechanism of projection (“feeling into”). Instead of being ascribed to
the fictional characters, the “sympathetic feelings” (Witasek, Grundzüge
148)17 or “reactive feelings” (Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen, 1st ed., 358)
are experienced by the spectator as a kind of meta-response to the dra-
matic action on stage (Witasek, “Zur psychologischen Analyse” 2); and
they therefore imply, as Theodor Meyer concludes, an awareness of lasting
emotional difference: “We are well aware that these sympathetic feelings
differ from empathetic feelings; we know very well that the fear we begin
to feel for Gretchen when she – full of love and confidence – makes the
fatal pledge to her loved one is entirely our own feeling, a feeling that we
must not project into her” (534).18 Likewise, the pain experienced by the
spectator at the moment of the tragic catastrophe must precisely not be
identified with the suffering of the tragic characters themselves; rather, it
is to be described – as Volkelt underscores once again with his own kind of
pathos – in the structurally different mode of compassion: “When we see
how the mighty Lear, every inch of whom had once been king, has been
broken, overwhelmed by his pain, and has fallen prey to the misery of mad-
ness, we are softened and shaken by compassion. Another example for this
almost passionate excitation of pity is Goethe’s Gretchen in the dungeon
scene” (Ästhetik des Tragischen, 2nd ed., 282).19 Despite this crucial differ-
ence, however, both “empathetic” and “sympathetic/reactive” feelings are
considered to be “merely imagined and not truly real feelings” (Witasek,
“Zur psychologischen Analyse” 7), manifestations of an “emotional illu-
sion” (Lange, Das Wesen der Kunst 97) in which the fictional plot of trag-
edy translates, as it were, into the psychological form of a similarly fictional
 Fictional Feelings  205

“affect script.”20 Neither kind of emotion – so the consensus among the

most important proponents of psychological aesthetics21 – is “real” in
the sense that it would originate from an actual affection or activation of
the spectator’s personal selfhood – his “ego-state [Ichzustand],”22 as Moritz
Geiger puts it in his lecture (193). Since their dramatic generation occurs
within an established aesthetic frame, both “empathetic” and “reactive”
feelings lack any notable connection to pragmatically relevant contexts,
and this fundamental disconnect has, in the words of Stephan Witasek,
the effect that “the aesthetically relevant sympathetic feelings, just like the
empathetic ones, are usually not real feelings but merely quasi-emotions.
After all, the events on stage that we observe from the auditorium are not
real but merely illusory; consequently, there is no actual reason for fear
and pity, since nobody is being truly harmed” (Grundzüge 150).23 This
passage unmistakably recalls – and reiterates – the causal nexus drawn by
Vischer in his originary characterization of “quasi-emotions.” Yet it also
indicates  – by placing its focus explicitly on the two most classic tragic
affects – that the notion of fictional feelings now figures plainly as a coun-
ter model to the oldest and most prominent explanation of tragic pleasure,
namely: to the idea of “catharsis” which had traditionally revolved around
the dramatic arousal of real pity and real fear.
Specifically in its dominant nineteenth-century conception, tragic
catharsis had been construed as a mechanism in which harmful emotional
conditions on the part of the spectator are stimulated, intensified, and ulti-
mately released from the psycho-physical apparatus. As the philologist
Jacob Bernays in his seminal treatise Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhan-
dlung des Aristoteles über Wirkung der Tragödie (1857) claims, catharsis
in its original, Aristotelian definition derives from an analogy between
the fields of medicine and poetics; it is to be understood as a “medical
metaphor” (21) that serves to semantically transfer the principle of thera-
peutic purgation from the context of metabolic processes to the sphere
of psychological phenomena. In a move directed against Lessing and his
“moralizing” take on the Aristotelian notion of tragedy,24 Bernays states
that “catharsis is: a designation transferred from the somatic to the mental
for the type of treatment given to an oppressed person, which does not
seek to transform or suppress the element oppressing him, but rather to
arouse and drive it into the open, and thereby to bring about the relief of
the oppressed person” (“On Catharsis” 329).25 What Aristotle describes as
the effect (and objective) of tragedy must therefore be seen – so Bernays
argues – from a “pathological point of view” (325); and the famous pas-
sage from the Poetics, also known as the Tragödiensatz, is to be translated,
206  Tobias Wilke

according to Bernays, like this: “Tragedy brings about through (excita-

tion of) pity and fear, the alleviating discharge of such (pitiful and fearful)
affections of the mind” (325).26 According to this model, then, the final
purpose of tragic fiction is to address emotional tensions in the spectator
in order to temporarily liquidate these affective energies; and the pleasure
associated with this aesthetically induced process lies in the experience
of retroactive relief. Not least owing to its suggestive imagery, Bernays’s
interpretation of catharsis as energetic “discharge” (“Entladung”) became
tremendously influential throughout the late nineteenth century and was
widely accepted in both philological and literary circles.27 For the pro-
ponents of a psychological aesthetics, however, it serves as a decidedly
negative foil against which they begin to situate, in the 1890s, their very
own explanation of tragic pleasure. The basic thrust of their critique turns
on the argument that Bernays – though he pursues, as a matter of fact, an
essentially psychological line of reasoning – does not adequately account
for the specifically aesthetic nature of the emotional response to tragic fic-
tion. What the psychological aestheticists seek to contest, in other words,
is the idea that the pleasure of tragic pity and tragic fear can be derived
from a merely quantitative intensification of pre-existing feeling states.
In his treatise, Bernays does indeed ascribe to the tragic affects of pity
and fear the status of general emotional “dispositions.” According to him,
the state of arousal induced in the spectator by the fictional plot of trag-
edy serves to release potentials of affective energies that do not themselves
belong specifically to the realm of aesthetic experience. What is “dis-
charged” from the viewer’s psycho-physical apparatus, in other words,
does not qualitatively originate from (or with) the dramatic representation.
Rather, it precedes the latter in the form of habitual and chronic condi-
tions – conditions that have been acquired biographically by the spectator
and that are merely acted upon by the tragic plot.28 This understanding
of pity and fear as affects whose actual sources lie in pragmatic contexts
of life – in “real” events, that is, that have led to the formation of lasting
character traits – effectively renders tragedy a means of psycho-hygienic
therapy, designed in particular for the treatment of pathologically fearful
or compassionate “patients.”29 And it is precisely this functional linkage
between general emotional “affections” and their tragically elicited dis-
charge against which the proponents of late-nineteenth-century psycho-
logical aesthetics raise their objections.30 In an essay entitled “Die tragische
Entladung der Affekte” (1898), Johannes Volkelt, for example, declares
that any “legitimate” explanation of tragic joy must rigorously distinguish
between “pathological” and “aesthetic” effects (2–3). While he concedes
 Fictional Feelings  207

that cathartic processes as envisioned by Aristotle/Bernays may occur as

part of the tragic impression, he seeks to systematically play down their
prominence and scope, with the aim of constraining the explanatory value
attached to them. In this regard, his position is typical of the way in which
Bernays’s theory is negotiated throughout the field of late-nineteenth-
century psychological aesthetics more generally: Whereas the semantic
equation between catharsis and energetic “discharge” remains uncon-
tested from a conceptual point of view  – indeed, is regularly taken for
“fact”31 – the mechanism of emotional purgation is simultaneously recast
as an “extra-aesthetic” (Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen, 1st ed., 391) fac-
tor of tragic pleasure – as a factor, moreover, that informs “some cases”
(Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen, 2nd ed., 318) of subjective experience at
best. Two arguments, accordingly, come into play here: On the one hand,
the effect of cathartic discharge is conceived as exception rather than rule
precisely because it presupposes, on the part of the spectator, a particular
disposition to pity and fear. On the other hand, this limited scope is ren-
dered not only an empirical given but also a theoretical necessity. Where
the conceptual focus lies primarily or exclusively on the mechanism of
cathartic discharge – so the critical argument goes – it becomes impossible
to draw a categorical line between aesthetic and (other) therapeutic forms
of psychological stimulation.
Whereas Bernays ties the Aristotelian purpose of tragedy to the meta-
phorical function of catharsis – understood as “a making visible [of] the
processes in the mind by alluding to analogous bodily manifestations”
(“On Catharsis” 328)32 – the proponents of psychological aesthetics coun-
ter this notion with the claim that “aesthetic feelings, inasmuch as they
remain aesthetic, do not reach the stage of sensory discharge” (Groos,
Einleitung 344).33 In line with the metaphorical field at stake here, this
counter-strategy can be characterized as a way of defusing the explosive
power of the cathartic model on two interrelated levels: By neutralizing
the suggestive force of the physiological-medical metaphor, psychological
aesthetics  – at its object-level  – seeks to shift the focus from a psycho-
hygienic “side-effect” to the central characteristic of genuinely aesthetic
pleasure.34 And this very shift serves, in turn – at the level of description –
to combat a form of psychologization that threatens to “contaminate”
(Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen, 2nd ed., 310) and even undermine the
specific area of competence to which psychological aesthetics lays disci-
plinary claim. Seen from this point of view, the critical references to Ber-
nays primarily bear witness to a process of systematic self-articulation in
which a newly defined field of “scientific” investigation attempts to secure
208  Tobias Wilke

its particular authority, by sealing itself off from the potentially volatile
consequences of its own psychological (re)constitution. In this context,
the typologies of emotions sketched out above become discernible as a
strategic means of implementing this self-definitional process with partic-
ular regard to the two (most) classic tragic affects. The conception of tragic
pity and tragic fear as aesthetic “quasi-emotions” serves to withdraw them
from the subject area of a general psychology of affect, and in doing so,
ultimately serves to negotiate the discursive identity of psychological aes-
thetics as a discrete field of knowledge.
Against the negative backdrop of this anti-Bernaysian critique, the posi-
tive model of tragic pleasure prevalent in late-nineteenth-century psycho-
logical aesthetics begins to take shape: Whereas both “empathetic” and
“sympathetic” emotions figure, in the words of Karl Groos, as “feelings
within aesthetic contemplation [Anschauung]” (Einleitung 150) – that is,
as discrete affects that change and alternate over the course of the tragic
plot – the “pleasure of [an] aesthetic contemplation” (150) gains the status
of a separate “dimension” of emotional experience which in itself remains
independent of the specific “valences” of those changing and alternating
affects.35 According to this two-tiered model, the effect of what Groos
terms “pleasure in the image of pain [Lust am Bilde des Schmerzes]” (168)
becomes possible insofar as the decidedly negative quality of affects like
pity and fear remains confined to a first plane of psychological processes
within which it is then neutralized so that the positive valence of pleasure
can unfold on a second functional level for which the first level serves
as a kind of contrastive “foil” (Utitz, Funktionsfreuden 64; Döring, “Die
ästhetischen Gefühle” 165). The phrase “pleasure in the image of pain” is
thus to be read in a dual sense: It locates the source of tragedy’s pleasur-
able effects not only in the dramatic representation of painful affects in
the “images” created on stage, but also, and primarily, in the fact that the
spectator experiences his own emotional affection in the theatre as a mere
“image” of pain. This is, then, where the decisive contrast to the model
of cathartic discharge ultimately turns out to lie: The pleasure-inducing
mechanism of tragedy does not depend here on a solicitation of certain
real “affections of the mind” but  – on the contrary  – on a de-realization
of these (displeasurable) emotions by means of their psychological
simulation.
It would be a task in its own right to pursue in detail the various ways in
which the very act of psychological simulation – an act labelled “conscious
self-deception [bewußte Selbsttäuschung]” (Lange, Die bewußte Selbst-
täuschung 28) or “playful inner imitation [spielende innere Nachahmung]”
 Fictional Feelings  209

(Groos, Einleitung 347) – is rendered the actual source of a truly aesthetic

pleasure derived from tragedy.36 Instead, it must suffice here to sketch out
the crucial dynamic in a few lines: When the proponents of psychological
aesthetics ascribe to the two classic tragic affects of pity and fear the status
of merely simulated forms of emotional excitation – the status of feelings,
that is, that are “strictly speaking neither pleasant nor painful” (Witasek,
Grundzüge 115)37  – they do so to ensure that at a “higher” functional
level the dimensional phenomenon of aesthetic pleasure can emerge as a
real emotional effect. Aesthetic pleasure is conceived in this context as
the positive experience of a state of affective arousal as such – as an expe-
rience that can only be realized where the psychological process of the
tragic impression is not fully imbued with, and absorbed by, the specific
qualities of certain “empathetic” or “sympathetic” feelings like pity and
fear. According to this logic, then, the purpose of the particular stimula-
tion as accomplished through tragedy would be to neutralize the negative
valence of these otherwise “disagreeable and uneasy” (Hume 258) affects,
thereby facilitating their conversion into the feeling of dynamic emotional
activity for its own sake. Contrary to the teleological notion of cathartic
discharge, this model seeks the source of tragic pleasure in the very fact of
being aroused – in a kind of autotelic “self-feeling” [“Selbstgefühl”] that
originates not from the qualitative “what” and “how” but from the “that”
of an inner movement and its successive unfolding (Volkelt, Ästhetik des
Tragischen, 3rd ed., 299). The aesthetic enjoyment derived from tragedy,
in short, emerges in this perspective as a form of second-order “functional
pleasure” (Döring 164) in which the dynamic of affective processes is
experienced in its own energetic structure constituted by rhythmic “vibra-
tions” (Utitz 11). And the prerequisite for the empirical facticity of this
experience – its condition of possibility – comes to be identified with the
very fictionality of the tragic plot which serves to separate between simu-
lated emotional qualities (quasi-pity, quasi-fear) and the actuality of their
simulation.
It is precisely this argumentative pattern that can be seen to recur, about
a century later, where the notion of quasi-emotions re-enters academic
discourse in its most recent (and English-language) form. In his study
Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), the analytic philosopher Kendell Wal-
ton writes: “Must we declare Aristotle wrong in decreeing that tragedies
should evoke fear and pity? Not unless we naively insist on a literal-minded
reading of his words” (249). And he goes on to provide the necessarily
figurative understanding of what tragic affect in a fictional context really
is: “Realizing it to be fictional that Anna Karenina suffers misfortune, it is
210  Tobias Wilke

fictional that we are aware of her suffering, and we experience quasi pity
as a result” (251).38 When confronted with the fictional representation of a
fear- or pity-inducing object – so Walton argues to support his claim – the
spectator/reader engages in a process of mental simulation which is quali-
tatively set apart from his “actual” mental life (255) and in which he “actu-
ally experiences his ‘fictional fear’” (247).39 This discursive recurrence of
a distinction first developed in the late nineteenth century may indicate
that the question addressed in and by the term of aesthetic quasi-emotions
did not disappear entirely with the historical formation of fin-de-siècle
psychological aesthetics  – a formation whose prominence began to dis-
sipate rapidly in the years leading up to the First World War. The term
did, however, first come into being with that formation, emerging from a
constellation in which poetic fiction not only figures as the object of, but
also functions as the model for the emotional processes it generates – emo-
tional processes which, in turn, not only form the object of, but also serve
as foundational “facts” for a nascent field of psychological investigation.

NOTES

1 A note on terminology: The term “quasi-emotions,” which was coined by the

analytic philosopher Kendell Walton in his study Mimesis as Make-Believe
(1990), will be used here to translate the German word Scheingefühle, as it has
come to be – in the context of recent debates on the subject matter – the most
commonly used corresponding expression in English. It is important to keep
in mind, however, that the term does not capture the double meaning inherent
to its German counterpart. As the compound structure of the word Scheinge-
fühle implies, the noun Schein (which means fiction or illusion) can be taken
to designate both the (fictional) object/cause and the (fictional) status of the
attached Gefühl – a linguistic effect to which the concept of quasi-emotions
does not offer a full semantic equivalent. For Walton’s discussion of emo-
tional phenomena like “quasi-fear” and “quasi-pity,” see Mimesis 244–9.
2 For a discussion of this conference and its historical background, see Bern-
hardt, “Dialog und Konkurrenz.”
3 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German sources are my own.
In the case of longer quotations, the German original will be given in the
footnotes.
4 “Die sogenannten Scheingefühle sind von kürzerer Dauer und wechseln
miteinander schneller ab als die wirklichen Gefühle … Fernerhin haben die
Scheingefühle eine weit geringere psychomotorische Wirksamkeit als die
 Fictional Feelings  211

wirklichen Gefühle: die Furcht im Theater veranlaßt uns keineswegs, aufzus-

pringen und davonzulaufen, das Mitleid treibt uns nicht, dem Helden eines
Dramas zu helfen. Und endlich existiert die merkwürdige Tatsache, daß die
heftigsten Unlustgefühle, wie Furcht und Angst, den ästhetischen Genuß
nicht stören – ja sogar ihn noch erhöhen. (Dubossches Problem).” See note 7
regarding Dubos.
5 The notion of emotional “valence” – which refers to the basic qualitative
distinction between pleasure (Lust) and displeasure (Unlust) – was intro-
duced into empirical psychology by Wilhelm Wundt in the 1870s and quickly
adopted by many scholars throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. See, for instance, Wundt, Grundriss 99.
6 The aim of the following deliberations, therefore, is not to examine the late-
nineteenth-century category of aesthetic quasi-emotions as such, but to
explore the particular way in which it relates to the psychological discussion
of the paradox of tragic pleasure, and more specifically even to the notion of
cathartic “discharge” that had dominated earlier nineteenth-century concep-
tions of tragic affect. A more general and more comprehensive investigation
into the historical debates on quasi-emotions has been conducted in the con-
text of the research project “Aesthetic Thresholds: Emotion and Fiction,”
directed by Jutta Müller-Tamm at the Freie Universität Berlin, to which this
paper offers a complementary focus and perspective. I thank Jutta Müller-
Tamm for her suggestions and for comments on an earlier version of this text.
7 This refers to French writer Jean-Baptiste Dubos, whose Réflexions critiques
sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719) had already been credited by David
Hume with having initiated serious philosophical discussion of the subject
matter (“Of Tragedy” 259).
8 As Michael House’s paper in this volume demonstrates, these late-nineteenth-
century developments by no means constitute the first historical occurrence
of “empirical” approaches in the study of psychological phenomena and
their fictional character. What distinguishes these developments from the
understanding of Erfahrungsseelenkunde prevalent in the eighteenth century,
however, is the way in which they respond both to the rise of new experi-
mental paradigms since the 1860s and to the challenges that result from the
(methodological and institutional) rise of psychology as a scientific discipline
in its own right – a process set in motion primarily by the pioneering works
of Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt.
9 See also, paradigmatically, the appropriation of this definition in Lipps,
“Ästhetik” 349, and the corresponding characterization in Groos, Der aes-
thetische Genuss 2. For a more detailed discussion of Vischer’s claim and its
methodological implications, see Perpeet.
212  Tobias Wilke

10 In this particular context, “experiments” are not conceived in the form of

psycho-physiological testing methods – methods that would involve the
measuring of changes in respiration, heartbeat, or pulse – but as systemati-
cally executed processes of introspective self-observation. In his Einleitung in
die Aesthetik (1892), for instance, Karl Groos paradigmatically states that the
origin of the beautiful must be sought “in purely psychological processes that
can only be approached by means of introspection and not by means of levers
and screws” (283). Johannes Volkelt, in his System der Ästhetik, remarks
accordingly that the apparatus-based gathering of physiological data could
serve to address “only preliminary aesthetic questions of the most basic kind”
(38–9). Nonetheless, it is precisely in response to the scientific boom of
psycho-physiological testing practices à la Wilhelm Wundt – and to the
competitive pressure exerted by these practices – that the “method” of
introspection is now frequently recast as “a kind of experiment” (Groos,
“Ästhetik” 508). See also, in this context, the critical distance to Wundt’s
psycho-physiological research as staked out in Lipps, “Zur Lehre von den
Gefühlen” 329–30 and 361, and the following passage in Lipps, “Ästhetik”:
“In the realm of aesthetics, the facts of history and everyday life will always
prevail, due to the nature of things, over the experiment conducted in the
laboratory. No such experiment, at any rate, can replace the experiment to
which the aesthetician subjects himself, that is: an introspective self-analysis
under varying conditions” (386).
11 For a discussion of this development within the institutional context of
nineteenth-century Germany’s university system and its disciplinary organi-
zation, see Drüe.
12 When Johannes Volkelt, in the foreword to the first edition of his Ästhetik des
Tragischen (1897) declares, “Aesthetics can only be pursued on psychologi-
cal grounds” (2), his statement paradigmatically embodies the twofold aim of
relating and differentiating the two fields. For a more general discussion of
this interdisciplinary dynamic, see Allesch.
13 The earliest text in which the category of “aesthetic emotions” appears is
Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will, published in 1859. In German,
the corresponding term “ästhetische Gefühle” is first employed in August
Döring’s essay “Die ästhetischen Gefühle,” which appeared in 1890.
14 “Nun aber geschieht ja dies Alles nicht wirklich, es ist im gewöhnlichen Sinne
des Wortes nicht ernst. Wie der Gegenstand bloßer Schein, so der Eindruck.
Auf beiden Seiten ist es jedoch kein leerer, leichtfertiger Nicht-Ernst; es ist ja
doch sehr ernst gemeint, daß man uns den Schein vormacht, ebenso ist es uns
mit unserem Fühlen beim Anblick sehr ernst – ohne allen Ernst im alltägli-
chen Sinne des Worts. Dem Interesse ist der Stachel des Interesses genommen,
 Fictional Feelings  213

Reiz ist Reiz ohne Reiz, Angst ist Angst ohne Angst, Haß ist Haß ohne Haß
und so jedes Gefühl.”
15 See Witasek, Grundzüge 148; Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen, 2nd ed., 273;
Meyer 530.
16 “Dieses Leid wird in Wahrheit aus unserer eigenen Seele in die tragische Per-
son hinaus- und hineinverlegt, mit ihr ‘verschmolzen‘, so daß es uns, unter
völligem Zurücktreten seines Ursprungs aus unserem eigenen Bewußtsein, als
die tragischen Personen selbst erfüllend erscheint.”
17 For a concise discussion of the semantic difference between empathy and
sympathy, see Keen, “Theory of Narrative Empathy” 208–9.
18 “Diese Anteilsgefühle sind uns in ihrer Verschiedenheit von den Einfühlungs-
gefühlen wohl bewußt, wir wissen ganz genau, daß die Furcht, die uns für
Gretchen befällt, da sie liebe- und vertrauensselig dem Geliebten die verhän-
gnisvolle Zusage gibt, nicht ein Gefühl Gretchens ist, sondern ganz nur unser
eigenes Gefühl, das wir in diesem Augenblick nicht in sie einfühlen dürfen.”
19 “Sehen wir den gewaltigen Lear, an dem jeder Zoll ein König war, zerbro-
chen, von Qualen überwältigt, dem Jammer des Wahnsinns verfallen, so
werden wir von Mitleid durchweicht und durchschüttelt. Ein anderes Beispiel
für diese, fast leidenschaftliche Mitleidserregung bietet Goethes Gretchen in
der Kerkerszene.”
20 In the first edition of his Ästhetik des Tragischen, for example, Johannes
Volkelt characterizes empathetic feelings as “images [Abbilder] of emotions”
(357). In the same vein, Witasek states that “in the process of empathy …
quasi-emotions [Phantasiegefühle] are generated in the appreciating subject
and projected by the latter into the expressive object” (Grundzüge 148).
21 There are merely two exceptions to this rule: Volkelt stresses at one point that
“reactive feelings” experienced in response to the tragic characters on stage do
not fall under the umbrella category of “quasi-emotions,” as they are part of
the spectator’s actual personal condition (Ästhetik des Tragischen 1st ed. 358),
and Theodor Lipps goes so far as to reject the notion of quasi-emotions alto-
gether (“Weiteres zur Einfühlung” 479–80).
22 “In the theatre,” Geiger adds to underscore this point, “horror, fear for, and
fear with Wallenstein are present as experiences [Erlebnisse], without, how-
ever, turning into states of the I” (193).
23 “Daß die ästhetisch in Betracht kommenden Anteilsgefühle, geradeso wie die
Einfühlungsgefühle in der Regel nicht Ernst-, sondern bloß Phantasiegefühle
sind. Die Vorgänge auf der Bühne, die wir vom Zuschauerraum aus verfolgen,
sind ja nicht Wirklichkeit, sondern nur Schein, es liegt also ein tatsächlicher
Grund zu Furcht und Mitleid gar nicht vor, weil ernstlich niemandem etwas
zuleide geschieht.” Cf. also, in this context, the characterization in Hermann
214  Tobias Wilke

Siebeck’s Grundfragen zur Psychologie und Aesthetik der Tonkunst, where

tragedy’s emotional economy is conceived as follows: “The dramatic poet,
for instance, creates images of conditions in ourselves that we would have
brought forth for real, had their causes – as represented in the play – truly
occurred” (15).
24 Bernays critically remarks that Lessing, in his (mis)translation and (mis)inter-
pretation of Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, conceives of tragedy as a “moral
house of correction” (“moralisches Correctionshaus”) that serves to purify
rather than purge the tragic affects of pity and fear (3).
25 “dass Katharsis sei: eine von Körperlichem auf Gemüthliches übertragene
Bezeichnung für solche Behandlung eines Beklommenen, welche das beklem-
mende Element nicht zu verwandlen oder zurückzudrängen sucht, sondern
es aufregen, hervortreiben und dadurch Erleichterung des Beklommenen
bewirken will” (“Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung” 16). Translation
modified.
26 “Die Tragödie bewirkt durch (Erregung von) Mitleid und Furcht die erleich-
ternde Entladung solcher (mitleidigen und furchtsamen) Gemüthsaffec-
tionen.” (Bernays, “Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung” 21).
27 The degree to which Bernays’s interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of cathar-
sis – initially the cause of a controversial and heated debate among contem-
porary philologists (see Gründer) – eventually acquired canonical status
can be inferred from various late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
sources. See, for example, the obituary of Bernays published by Viennese
classicist Theodor Gomperz in 1881, a text in which the semantic equation
between catharsis and discharge is authorized in no uncertain terms: Bernays’s
“pathological” viewpoint – so Gomperz claims – has “solved the riddle of the
sphinx and put an end to the catharsis controversy” (“Jacob Bernays” 122).
In his own translation of the Aristotelian Poetics, published in 1897, Gom-
perz accordingly chooses to render catharsis as “discharge,” thereby endors-
ing – and further disseminating – Bernays’s account. Another protagonist of
Vienna’s literary circles, Hermann Bahr, likewise remarks in his “Dialog vom
Tragischen” (1903) that Aristotle’s notion of catharsis permits “no other inter-
pretation than the one provided by Bernays,” and that, therefore, the iden-
tification of the term’s “pathological” meaning is to be considered the final
word on the subject matter (719). On the catharsis-related debates in turn-of
the-century Vienna, see also Worbs.
28 Bernays states that it is the viewer’s “permanent affection [dauernde Affec-
tion] … that Aristotle must be concerned with if the process he calls catharsis
is to take place” (“Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung” 30).
 Fictional Feelings  215

29 At the end of the nineteenth century, the Viennese philosopher Alfred von
Berger generalizes – and radicalizes – this therapeutic model even further.
Whereas for Bernays/Aristotle, tragic catharsis remains confined to the (tem-
porary) liquidation of pity and fear, Berger claims that these two affects can
serve as (metaphorical) vehicles to discharge any kind of unhealthy “affective
tensions” [“Affect-Spannungen”] from the viewer’s psyche. Berger’s reflec-
tions on this mechanism – inspired by Breuer and Freud’s Studien über Hys-
terie (1895) – were published in 1897 as an appendix to Gomperz’s translation
of the Poetics. For a detailed discussion of this therapeutic model in relation
to Breuer/Freud’s “cathartic” method of the “talking cure,” see Gödde.
30 See Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen, 2nd ed., 304; Groos, Einleitung 345–6;
Utitz, Funktionsfreuden 29.
31 See Stumpf, “Die Lust am Trauerspiel” 54–5; Siebeck, Grundfragen 90;
Groos, “Das Spiel als Katharsis” 356.
32 “Eine Versinnlichung des Vorgangs im Gemüth durch Hindeutung auf analoge
körperliche Erscheinungen” (“Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung” 14).
33 Emphasis mine.
34 See Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen, 3rd ed., 347; Witasek, Grundzüge 151;
Groos, Einleitung 344–8.
35 The conceptual distinction between “discrete” affects like anger, fear, pity, etc.
and general affective “dimensions” like pleasure and displeasure is Wilhelm
Wundt’s. See Wundt, Grundriss 99.
36 In his discussion of tragic affects, Groos introduces the notion of “inner imi-
tation” – the core element of his own aesthetic theory – explicitly as a counter-
concept to the concept of cathartic “discharge.” As he claims, tragic pleasure
“originates exclusively from the play of inner imitation, and discharge is but a
special side-effect of very limited significance” (Einleitung 357).
37 For Witasek, the distinction between “real” emotions and “quasi-emotions”
explicitly results from the different non-emotional premises under which
they arise: The former are based on judgments about reality, whereas “quasi-
emotions” are based on assumptions about fictitious objects (Grundzüge
116). For a detailed discussion of this particular aspect, see Vendrell Ferran,
“Ästhetische Erfahrung.”
38 The reference point for Walton in this context is Colin Radford’s seminal
paper “How Can We Be Moved By the Fate of Anna Karenina?” (1975),
which had initiated in the field of analytic philosophy an extensive debate
devoted to the so-called paradox of fiction (Yanal, Paradoxes 1–18).
39 For a more detailed examination of Walton’s theory and its premises, see
Yanal 49–66.
216  Tobias Wilke

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zur historischen Entwicklung eines psychologischen Verständnisses ästhetischer
Phänomene. Göttingen: Hogrefe, 1987.
Bahr, Hermann. “Dialog vom Tragischen.” Neue Deutsche Rundschau 14 (1903):
716–36.
Bain, Alexander. The Emotions and the Will. London: Parker & Son, 1859.
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Döring, August. “Die ästhetischen Gefühle.” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und
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Geiger, Moritz. “Das Problem der ästhetischen Scheingefühle.” In Kongreß für
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Gödde, Günter. “Therapeutik und Ästhetik: Verbindungen zwischen Breuers
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Groos, Karl. “Ästhetik.” In “Das Spiel als Katharsis.” Zeitschrift für pädago-
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–  Der aesthetische Genuss. Gießen: Rieker’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1902.
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–  Die Philosophie im Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Festschrift für Kuno Fischer.
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–  Einleitung in die Aesthetik. Gießen: Rieker’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1892.
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–  Die bewußte Selbsttäuschung als Kern des künstlerischen Genusses. Leipzig:
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321–61.
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der ästhetischen Erfahrung um 1900.” In Bewegte Erfahrungen: Zwischen
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Radford, Colin. “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Pro-
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Tübingen: Mohr, 1909.
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Leipzig: Barth, 1910. 1–64.
Utitz, Emil. Die Funktionsfreuden im aesthetischen Verhalten. Halle/Saale: Nie-
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Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid. “Ästhetische Erfahrung und Quasi-Gefühle.” In The

Aesthetics of the Graz School. Ed. Venanzio Raspa. Heusenstamm: Ontos,
2010. 129–68.
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Robert Vischer. 6 vols. Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1914–22. 4: 222–419.
Volkelt, Johannes. Ästhetik des Tragischen. 1st ed. Munich: Beck, 1897.
–  Ästhetik des Tragischen. 2nd ed. Munich: Beck, 1906.
–  Ästhetik des Tragischen. 3rd ed. Munich: Beck, 1917.
–  “Die tragische Entladung der Affekte.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philoso-
phische Kritik 112 (1898): 1–16.
–  System der Ästhetik. 2 vols. Munich: Beck, 1905–10. Vol. 1.
Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Repre-
sentational Arts. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1990.
Witasek, Stefan. Grundzüge der allgemeinen Ästhetik. Leipzig: Barth, 1904.
Witasek, Stefan. “Zur psychologischen Analyse der ästhetischen Einfühlung.”
Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 25 (1901): 1–49.
Worbs, Michael. “Katharsis in Wien um 1900.” In Grenzen der Katharsis in den
modernen Künsten: Transformationen des aristotelischen Modells seit Bernays,
Nietzsche und Freud. Ed. Martin Vöhler and Dirck Linck. Berlin and New
York: de Gruyter, 2009. 93–113.
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Yanal, Robert J. Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction. University Park: Pennsylva-
nia State UP, 1999.
PART IV

Relating: Biology
9 Coining a Discipline: Lessing, Reimarus,
and a Science of Religion

s t e fa n i e n g e l s t e i n

In 1782, Johann Christoph Adelung coined the name cultural history for
a phenomenon recently put into practice by Johann Gottfried Herder. In
the Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) and again two years later in
This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity, Herder
embeds “culture” in a list of characteristics that define a particular peo-
ple in a particular age and that vary over time: “arts, science, culture and
language” (italics in the original).1 Culture as a concept, in other words,
was largely concomitant with its historicization. It would be anachronis-
tic, however, either to think of cultural history as a discrete discipline or
to categorize it within a two-cultures divide of sciences and humanities
that still lay in the future. Instead, cultural history was one of a pano-
ply of allied new approaches to understanding both Europe as a whole
and particular European cultures in the context of other cultures around
the world. Indeed, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, a growing
obsession with human diversity in all of its cultural and physical forms
had led to a variety of attempts to trace and classify relationships between
groups genealogically, that is, through inheritance either biological or cul-
tural. This pattern held true from biology and its subfield of race theory to
comparative linguistics and comparative religion, and to the related fields
of ethnology, anthropology, and cultural history. These proto-disciplines
followed a pattern of repeated anastomoses and generally failed to remain
distinct. As each of these fields traced genealogical developments over time,
they created complex patterns of relatedness among peoples, languages,
and cultures. Sigrid Weigel has recently noted the rise of family trees at this
time, and the way that the logic of genealogy applies to histories of both
natural and cultural transmission, which were segregated into the natural
sciences and the humanities over the course of the nineteenth century (9).2
222  Stefani Engelstein

Among the fields investigating human diversity, the one we are today
least likely to refer to as a science is religious studies, and yet comparative
religion shared a methodology with other investigations of human diver-
sity and claimed for itself a scientific basis through the nineteenth century.
Eric Sharpe’s classic history of comparative religion locates Darwin’s 1859
publication of On the Origin of Species as the decisive moment in the for-
mation of the discipline, when “an attempt was beginning to be made to
view religion on the criteria provided by science, to judge its history and
growth and evolution as one would judge the history, growth, and evolu-
tion of any organism – and to dissect it as one would dissect any organ-
ism” (Comparative Religion 32).3 Darwinian evolution provided, in other
words, “the principle of comparison” (ibid.). The directionality and chro-
nology of methodological influence is far more complicated, however. Dar-
win was heavily indebted to linguists from Friedrich Schlegel to August
Schleicher in his establishment of the theory of descent with modification
as the principle for determining the relationship between population groups
over time.4 Schlegel, in turn, had acknowledged comparative anatomy as the
foundation of his methodology (Über die Sprache 137). By the time Schlegel
wrote “On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians,” moreover, compara-
tive anatomy had already branched out into anthropology in the 1770s and
1780s, at precisely the same time that Herder and Adelung ventured into the
arena of cultural history. Adelung, who explicitly included the study of the
history of religion within cultural history (Preface, Versuch einer Geschichte
ii), positioned culture in an inverse relationship to the physical needs of the
human animal. Far from excluding physical anthropology from the study
of culture, this paradigm correlated cultural advances with increased physi-
cal delicacy and decreased sensuality. Bodies mattered in culture. The reli-
gious studies that emerged at this time participated in the same concerns
as other anthropological pursuits; in fact, comparative religion modelled
in exemplary fashion basic tensions in physical and cultural anthropology:
between value-laden and value-neutral analysis, and between progressive
models of history and contingent models. Indeed, the nascent paradigm for
each of these approaches can be found within the work of a single early
practitioner, namely, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
In Germany, the emergence of comparative religion out of theology
crystallized in a very public manner in 1777, when Lessing anonymously
and posthumously published several fragments from a manuscript writ-
ten by the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a professor of oriental lan-
guages at an academic preparatory school (Gymnasium).5 The infamous
Fragmentenstreit, or fragment-controversy, that ensued engulfed Lessing
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  223

in a series of polemical disputes with theologians, in particular Johann

Melchior Goeze, the senior pastor of Hamburg. At the centre of the con-
troversy was not only the acceptability of the idea of a rational or natural
religion, but also implicitly the application of ethnographic methodologies
to religion, including historical investigations of the events in the Gospels.
As a result of the exchange, Lessing was officially censored from any fur-
ther publications on religion by the duke of Braunschweig. Lessing’s most
famous literary work, Nathan the Wise, has regularly been read as a barely
covert continuation of this dispute in a literary form likely to circumvent
the censors. Most Lessing critics interested in the fragments have focused
on the advocacy of a religion of reason in the play, but Nathan the Wise
also picks up Reimarus’s comparative approach to understanding the rela-
tionship between the monotheistic religions and his cultural-geographical
approach to belief systems around the world. Moreover, the famous ring
parable at the literal centre of the drama, which recasts the relationship
between the monotheistic religions as a sibling relationship, was also part
of the new investigation of the historical connections between religions
that the Reimarus fragments heralded. The ring parable and the play as
a whole can together be read as a particular variant of the eighteenth-
century transition from patriarchy to fratriarchy, a shifting of focus from
vertical lineage to genealogically informed horizontal relations, here
framed within the global-cultural field. The narrative structure of Nathan
the Wise did more than help the piece elude censorship, however – it also
facilitated a new kind of object and a new methodology for comparative
religion and even for anthropology itself.
Lessing’s Nathan the Wise thus becomes a paradigmatic moment for
reading classifications of human population groups through the structure
of the family, and interrogating the role of innate and cultural traits in
both cases. Willi Goetschel has noted Lessing’s departure from norms rep-
resented by Johann David Michaelis, among others, who erected essen-
tialist ethnic categories (“Lessing’s ‘Jewish’ Questions,” esp. 63). Helmut
Schneider similarly depicts Lessing’s valorization of the autogenesis of
reason above the material morass of body, sex, race, and national iden-
tity (Genealogie, esp. 176).6 I  would argue, however, that Lessing gives
both more credence and more respect to inherited physical difference than
Goetschel and Schneider allow for. This material component of identity
serves as a structural enabler of human worth. Within a milieu that serves
as a perfect setting for a study of human population diversity, Nathan the
Wise reframes the combined effects of physical and cultural determinants
of group identity.
224  Stefani Engelstein

The play is not Lessing’s only reflection on these issues. In his theo-
retical responses to the fragment controversy, including the piece “The
Education of the Human Race,” Lessing’s historiography takes a far dif-
ferent shape. This treatise can be read as a bridge from the older genre of
History of Humanity [Menschheitsgeschichte] to the equally progressive
Philosophy of History [Geschichtsphilosophie] of the nineteenth century.
While “The Education of the Human Race” complicates the notion of
universal human progress by connecting the nature of belief to histori-
cal circumstance, it does ultimately represent the Christian religion as a
cultural advance. In Nathan the Wise, however, Lessing shifts the object
of inquiry away from the content of belief and onto the contingencies
of custom themselves. He thereby removes religion from the Enlighten-
ment quest for grounded truths, on the one hand, while on the other, mak-
ing religions available to anthropology. In this shift, Lessing provided a
foundation for a “science of religion” equally removed both from deist
debunking of positive religion and from theological attempts to find proof
for Christianity in the assembled mythologies of the world.

1.  Letter and Spirit

The text by Reimarus participates in the deist project of discrediting posi-

tive religion. The passages Lessing chose to publish from Reimarus’s man-
uscript, against the advice of friends and fellow enlightenment thinkers
Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai,7 not only employ a compara-
tive and cultural-geographical approach to religions, but also question the
plausibility of a single revealed religion as a divine strategy for salvation,
problematize the relationship of belief to justification, and cast doubt upon
both the authorship of the gospels and the veracity of what is reported in
them – most controversially, the resurrection. Lessing accepted the con-
cerns raised about the Bible as the word of God, but, unlike Reimarus, did
not see these doubts as fatal for the idea of a revealed Christian religion.
Lessing simply increased the distance between letter and spirit, asserting
in the first section of his response to Reimarus, “In short, the letter is not
the spirit, and the bible is not religion.”8 He explicitly claims that salvation
does not depend on “this particular revelation” (78; emphasis in original,
trans. modified), but rather that God “might very well wish to save the
good people of all religions out of this particular consideration and for
these particular reasons” (78, trans. mod.). What is particular here is not
the content of revelation, but rather the reasons for salvation, namely, ethi-
cal goodness, so that the core of religion is not an essence but a function,
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  225

that of providing “motives for virtue” (69). Not only does this shift allow
Lessing to open the doors of heaven to the myriad peoples with no expo-
sure to Christianity, but it also enables him to avoid making of religion a
business in which one counts converted souls as profit, a perspective he
finds distasteful and whose origin he locates as Jewish.9 If the content of
revelation is not the salient feature of its salvific power, then conversion is
merely a superficial change sanctioned by a dubious authority, very much
like the stamping of new coins Lessing will later have Nathan complain of,
and to which I will return below.
For Reimarus, this notion of religion as an arbitrary stamp reaches
beyond the issue of conversion. Reimarus claims that ‘each person has
his religion and sect impressed upon [eingeprägt] him as a child, merely
as a prejudice, through memorized formulas that are not understood and
a drilled-in fear of damnation” (8:176).10 Each individual’s “inherited reli-
gion” (“angeerbte Religion,” 8:175) is a consequence of indoctrination
during a time when children are not yet able to exercise reason. This prac-
tice leaves them permanently stunted, unable ever to attain the impartial
power of judgment. The teaching of religion to children comes across as a
kind of child abuse, an impression strengthened by the emphasis on fear of
damnation presumed to structure the religious upbringing. In Reimarus’s
schema then, Erziehung11 itself becomes suspicious, a view we find echoed
unexpectedly in the self-serving rhetoric of Lessing’s blood-thirsty church
patriarch in Nathan the Wise: “For isn’t everything that one does to chil-
dren violence?” he declares, with the crucial caveat, however, “except what
the Church does to children” (85, trans. modified).12 If we leave aside the
hypocritical addendum, however, what remains is Reimarus’s vision of the
parent–child relationship as irredeemably tainted. Childhood becomes a
dangerous waiting period. It is only from one’s equals and as an equal,
after the age of majority, that one can properly judge truth. The only
acceptable transmission of religion implied by Reimarus would thus be
a horizontal one. And yet, any thorough and mature investigation of the
specific claims of a religion are bound to reveal inconsistencies and inac-
curacies. In a historical investigation of the truth value of religious beliefs,
all religions fail equally. As Robert Leventhal points out, deists such as
Remairus actually shared with their rival orthodox adherents a need to
find a fixed foundation for religious beliefs. The deists chose reason as
their foundation, and hence jettisoned all narratives of divine involvement
with history, and all positive religions along with them. The orthodox, by
contrast, insisted on the Bible as a source of revealed truth about history,
as well as about God (“Parable as Performance” 509). Lessing introduces
226  Stefani Engelstein

a third option: a valorization of the transmission of belief and hence of the

cultural practice of religion.
While, like Reimarus, Lessing also envisioned horizontal community as
crucial to proper religious activity, he departed from Reimarus’s view of
childhood. For Lessing, childhood education in religion was the necessary
foundation of an ethical habit that was its salient feature. “Education is rev-
elation imparted to the individual,” he declares in “The Education of the
Human Race.” Nathan the Wise spells out still more explicitly what Rei-
marus has overlooked in the parent–child relationship that Lessing finds
redemptive, namely, love. It is love that keeps the inherited religion from
representing violence. Love provides a counter-model to the objectionable
business of trading in souls. Nonetheless, Lessing’s ring story illustrates
how love can recreate the effect of fear as long as truth in religion is viewed
as attached to a single doctrine. The three siblings in Nathan’s story are
equally loved by their father, but are unable to accept this equality. Their
love leaves them equally blind to the truth and unable to judge the equal
legitimacy of their siblings’ claims to it. Nathan’s ring parable can thus be
read as a rebuke to the author’s own philosophical treatise, because the
treatise retains the notion of a progressive approach to religious truth.
The universalizing tendency that seems in Lessing’s treatise an argu-
ment for respectful coexistence has another side, therefore. Lessing’s own
metaphor of soul-usury implies that Christianity has a moral imperative
to leave behind a materialism envisioned as imparted by its Jewish roots.
Indeed, even the notion of shared roots is too disturbing for Lessing,
for whom “The Christian peoples  … were grafted onto the trunk/tribe
of Judaism”13 rather than growing organically out of it. If tolerance and
progress require a divorce of spirit from letter, and a move away from
particularism, then it becomes merely an acclamation of an understand-
ing of Protestant Christianity that was coming to stand for the universal.
“The Education of the Human Race” restricted the usefulness of Judaism
to a certain stage of human development later superseded by the purport-
edly more spiritual and abstract Christianity. Islam, meanwhile, because
it is subsequent to Christianity, but deemed less advanced, fails to appear
at all. Willi Goetschel is not wrong, however, when in his exploration of
Nathan the Wise he emphasizes Lessing’s recognition of the debt owed
by Christianity to the Judaism from which it sprang, a debt that amounts
to an obligation for respect and acknowledgment and, more, an accep-
tance of national and civic equality without reference to religious identity
(“Lessing’s ‘Jewish’ Questions” 62–4). Lessing’s depiction of religion and
coexistence in the drama is predicated on characters with individual rather
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  227

than universal histories and therefore constructs a more nuanced vision

of community than does his philosophical treatise. Indeed, it is this nar-
rative form that gestures towards an ethnographic alternative to universal
histories.
The debate over the degree of tolerance and respect for religious differ-
ence in Nathan the Wise has raged for decades, focusing on the question
of how Jewish Nathan is. Is Nathan a proponent of a denuded rational
religion that bears little resemblance to the practice of Judaism? And why
is he alone excluded from the “universal” family relations revealed to exist
between all the other main characters at the end of the play?14 Like the
grafting of Christianity onto Judaism quoted above, the relationship of
Recha to Nathan remains one of adoption, not blood. The question of
whether the conclusion truly allows for Jewish particularity, or whether
the universal family merely points to the imposition of a universal reli-
gion, thus hinges on the relationship between blood and upbringing in
establishing identity, character, and human value. If upbringing supersedes
blood, then Judaism gains a status of respect, love, and belonging in the
play; if blood remains a tainting essence that undermines the practice of
reason, then, as Helmut Schneider puts it, Judaism “is in the end the blem-
ish, the stain of irreducible bodiliness per se, that cannot dissolve into any
universality” (Genealogie, 179, my trans.). The reason the controversy
continues unabated is because the text undermines this dichotomy, pro-
posing a far more complex interaction of the terms of the debate. As in his
aesthetics and his ethics, Lessing here shifts from essence to process, from
substance to history, from being to acting. In order to integrate a view
of human identity as material with a view of identity as cultural, Lessing
must similarly transform the terms of this dilemma. Thus, any heritable
trait in the play, material or immaterial, requires experience to mould, to
interpret, and to weave it into a history without which it is meaningless.

2.  Matter and Meaning

While Nathan the Wise is often read as a coda for universal brotherhood,
Lessing’s focus on the three monotheistic religions had long since become
anachronistic as an indicator of universality. The European medieval and
early modern division of the world into four religions, namely, Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, and polytheism or heathenism had given way over
the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to an increasingly
vast panoply of known religions, ancient and modern.15 Guy Stroumsa
has recently argued that this proliferation of acknowledged belief systems
228  Stefani Engelstein

along with secularization in Europe increasingly reframed religion as an

element of culture parallel to habits, customs, and language. The notion of
civil religion advocated by Rousseau meanwhile reinforced the status of
religion as a national characteristic (A New Science 171–3). Alain Schnapp
has outlined the result for the British and French context: “What emerges
unmistakably … is the appeal to a new form of knowledge, uniting natural
science with human history, theological inquiry with the study of antiq-
uity” (“Antiquarian Studies” 162). This new approach soon expanded in
scope, adopting the same methods in the study of more recent and indeed
contemporary religious practice and belief. Religion thus came to represent
private devotion while serving simultaneously as a sign of group identity
within a historical, cultural framework. Comparative religion correspond-
ingly reflected ethnographic practices. It is not a coincidence that Saladin,
when countering Nathan’s figuration of the three monotheistic religions
as three identical rings, insists on their variety in “clothing, … food and
drink” (72), while Nathan himself refers to differences between religious
groups “in color [that is, skin color] and clothing, in form” (56). If these
external features generally characterize the religious groups, they none-
theless prove throughout the course of the play to be inadequate to their
signifying task. Not only does Nathan mistake his Parsi friend al-Hafi for
a Muslim once he has changed into the uniform of Saladin’s court,16 but
the terms “Jud’” and “Christ” used as forms of address based on visual
judgments of exteriors, are shown to be indicative of a category mistake
which equates individuals with their “Volk” (9: 533; 56–7).17 Skin colour
and build can be similarly misleading. The adopted Recha, for example,
passes as Jewish without problem although her inherited physical traits
come from a European Christian mother and a Muslim-born, Middle
Eastern father. Meanwhile, Daja sees nothing odd about Curd’s claim to
be a simple Swabian (43) in spite of the resemblance to his Muslim-born,
Middle Eastern father noticed by both Saladin and Nathan.
One way in which Lessing approaches this relationship between culture
and body is through the metaphor of the coin. Economic transactions,
monetary gifts, and depicted financial prejudice against Jews recur perva-
sively and play multiple roles in this text.18 My interest in coins and rings
in this essay moves in another direction, however. In its configuration as
a material symbol for an immaterial value, coin, I argue, is used by Less-
ing to comment on signification and on the connection between letter and
spirit in religion, and also to interrogate the valence of human bodies.
When Lessing’s wise Nathan appears before the sultan Saladin he is pre-
pared for trouble  – money trouble to be precise. And he is not wrong.
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  229

The sultan has called him in to borrow money. Saladin’s request for truth,
for an accounting of the true religion, is a trick, meant to loosen Nathan’s
purse strings by backing him into a corner. And yet, there is something in
the request itself that reminds Nathan of money. He muses: “He wants …
truth. Truth! And he wants it like that, so bare, so shiny, as though the
truth were a coin!” (70). But what then is truth, to speak with Nietzsche?
Struggling with this question, Nathan resorts again to coin: “Now if it
were an age-old coin that was weighed, that might work. But such a new
coin, that only a stamp can make, that you can just count on a counter,
that’s not what the truth is” (70, trans. modified). By insisting on weighed
money as a figure more appropriate for truth than new coin dependent on
an arbitrary stamp, Nathan simultaneously fits into and modifies the role
known as Münzjude, the Jewish mint-master and financier to the nobil-
ity. Münzjuden, employed by Prussian kings for generations by the time
Lessing wrote, were regularly publically abused for devaluing currency
by changing the stamps, and thus causing inflation.19 Nathan’s preference
for weighed metal coin counters this image of the false-dealing Jew, but
does not uphold the possibility of uniting sign and referent in any simple
way. The metal coin serves after all as a complicated figure of speech. The
phrase “that might work” (“Das ginge noch!” 9: 554) cannot be read as
a simple declaration of inherent truth value; it suggests instead an activ-
ity in the context of a social interaction, a kind of weighing on Nathan’s
part of the ability of human-crafted metaphors to affix value. The coin
figure  serves several purposes here, then. First, it reveals Nathan in the
process of considering metaphor as a strategy for responding to the sul-
tan; second, it tests the coin as a rough draft of the valuable ring he will
eventually choose for his story; and finally, in the reflection on age-old
and new coin, Nathan develops an approach that establishes the value of
transmission as dependent on material, while side-stepping an evaluation
of the material itself, an approach in other words that allows him to assign
worth to all three religions and escape the “tyranny” of a singular truth.
The shifting of value from matter to transmission is a shrewd political
move that illuminates Nathan’s strategic intelligence, but we need not
therefore dismiss his claims. The peaceful coexistence of different faiths
that Nathan’s reading facilitates would have made this formula quite as
compelling for Lessing as for Nathan, and just as desirable for each to
deliver to his respective audience.
In order to fulfil these functions, the coin passage engages with the
conventional value of even weighed money, which was recognized and
debated throughout the eighteenth century, as well as with the referential
230  Stefani Engelstein

status of stories and metaphors such as Lessing’s own.20 As Richard Gray

has discussed, mining operations in the New World at this time had dem-
onstrated the volatility of the value of gold and silver, and greater acquain-
tance with other cultures had revealed their status as valuable objects to be
a relative cultural phenomenon (26–7). Unlike paper bank notes that wear
their conventional status on their sleeves, however, metal money partici-
pates in an illusion of security.21 Nathan’s age-old coin could be idealized
as an example of transparent unity between stamp and intrinsic worth,
and yet the value of a weighed coin as Nathan describes it lies more in its
age than its weight, that is, it accrues significance through transmission
over time.22 Indeed, the passage, particularly read in conjunction with the
ring story and the play as a whole, reveals that, in spite of its own age-old
association with the word, coin is never bar or bare, never nakedly self-
valuing. Not only its arbitrary, authorized stamp, but also its function as
substance is unsuited to serve as a symbol of truth. To resemble truth, the
coin must be entered into circulation within a society that accepts and
upholds its value. It is worth comparing this genealogical view of truth
to Nietzsche’s extraordinarily similar and oft-quoted one a century later:

What then is truth? A  mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropo-

morphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which … after lengthy use,
seem firm, canonical and binding to a people: truths are illusions that are no
longer remembered to be illusions, metaphors that have become worn and
stripped of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their design and are now
considered only as metal and no longer as coins. (“On Truth and Lie” 357)

For Nietzsche, as for Reimarus before him, the genealogical reading dis-
credits truth. For Lessing, however, the same procedure reveals and vali-
dates the source of truth as transmission rather than substance.23 While in
“The Education of the Human Race,” Lessing was content to separate let-
ter from spirit, in Nathan the Wise he finds a new way to combine them.24
In his coin musings, Nathan presents us with a view of worth he will
consistently espouse throughout the play. The sultan, however, only treats
truth like new coin as part of a temporary strategy for borrowing money
of the less metaphorical variety. Saladin has already expressed his philo-
sophical preference for a naive view in which true value both inheres in a
thing and can be reliably discerned through its outer form. In accordance
with Muslim prohibitions on figurative art, Saladin and his sister Sittah
play chess with “smooth stones, which are reminiscent of nothing, don’t
depict anything” (45, trans. modified). Saladin’s exasperation with them
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  231

expresses his yearning for a revelatory correspondence between matter

and meaning in things both human and divine. Saladin’s wish would seem
to be upheld by at least one incident in the course of the play: the Templar
Curd, whom Saladin anomalously pardons because the Christian crusader
resembles Saladin’s brother, will turn out to be the son of that brother.25
Not only Nathan’s ring story, however, but also the play itself, ultimately
includes human bodies in its challenge to the idea of natural signs.
Nathan’s ring story is thus particularly well chosen because it directly
addresses Saladin’s qualms about arbitrary signs. In Nathan’s famous story,
the original ring was passed down from father to best-loved son for gen-
erations until it was eventually replicated by a father who loved his three
sons equally and who gave a ring to each of them. As the judge in Nathan’s
story notes, not only the knowledge of which ring is the original, but the
true ring itself, may very well have been lost in transmission. All three rings
are likely copies and, like the once-weighed coin, now depend upon faith
in transmission for their value. Significantly, the value of even the original
ring lay in its role as a marker of a loving relationship between two people,
rather than in its material. After the proliferation of rings, one could still
imagine authenticating the true ring or the true religion through its osten-
sible power to make its wearer beloved, if it is worn with that intention.
While vertical transmission motivates the adoption of a particular religious
truth claim, therefore, it is horizontal affirmation of regard from siblings
or contemporaries that distinguishes the bearer of the true ring. This
qualification suggests the replacement of a competition over truth, which
is singular, by a competition in goodness, which can be shared without
diminishing. As truth content devolves into process, and substance dis-
solves into a history of relationships, the replication of a single father in
each generation proliferates into a complex set of affective kinship rela-
tions. This pattern complicates Friedrich Kittler’s now commonly accepted
claims about the rise of a new bourgeois nuclear family at this time, cen-
tring in Lessing on paternal Bildung rather than biological inheritance, and
in the later Romantic period on maternal love, but in both cases positioning
the child in a linear relationship to parents while overlooking siblings.

3.  Family Matters

Between “The Education of the Human Race” and Nathan the Wise,
Lessing subtly but significantly altered his portrayal of the common ele-
ments of religions. In both cases Lessing refers to common Gründe, but
in the drama he no longer means the intellectual justification for religion,
232  Stefani Engelstein

namely, the “motives [Bewegungsgründen (8: 321)] for virtue” (69) from
his response to Reimarus.26 Instead, he now focuses on the historical and
narrative foundations of religions. With this move, he replaces an empha-
sis on individual rational analysis with an emphasis on the affective quality
of familial relationships embedded in transmission. In both cases, how-
ever, the foundations are a set of behaviours and motivations rather than
solid substances. “After all, aren’t they [religions] all grounded in history?
Written or passed down [überliefert (9: 557)]! And history can only be
accepted on faith and belief, right? Well, whose faith and belief is one least
likely to call into question? Isn’t it that of his own people? Of those of our
own blood? Of the people who from childhood on have given us proof of
their love?” (73, trans. modified). Belief, in other words, is not a rational
judgment about truth, but a question of identity. The passage raises the
same question inherent in the coin, the rings, and Saladin’s chess pieces,
but now levied more directly at human population groups. This question
needs to be addressed to the entire late eighteenth century and the sciences
that emerged from this period: religious studies, linguistics, race theory,
ethnography, and anthropology. What does it mean to belong? Who are
“his own people” (“die Seinen”) – those of whose blood we are (to follow
Nathan’s sudden shift from third to first person here), or those who raise
us with love? How do the material and the cultural inform each other?
The parable, like the play as a whole, dismisses neither birth nor emo-
tional ties as legitimate foundations for the transmission of belief and cul-
ture, but intertwines them. The eventual discovery that the Templar and
Recha are brother and sister, and are Saladin’s nephew and niece, is not
disregarded as irrelevant to their behaviour, their emotions towards one
another, or what one could call their cultural identity. Blood, however, is
not a defining substance here, any more than metal defines the coin. Sala-
din unexpectedly gets this right when he reassures Recha, “Truly blood,
blood alone does not make the father! It hardly makes the father of an ani-
mal! At the most it confers the right to earn that name!” (113). True to this
notion of earning value, the play dramatizes the way that inherited traits
must enter a history of activity and relationships to shape their expression
as deeds and to acquire meaning. Moreover, blood alone does not commu-
nicate itself without a history of shared experience. Not only does Saladin
recognize Curd because of his memory of his brother, but the drama also
suggests that Curd recognizes Recha, although less distinctly, because of
his vaguer memories of his parents. Significantly, Recha, orphaned as an
infant, cannot reciprocally recognize him, and therefore does not react to
him with the same passion that he immediately feels for her.
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  233

While on a first acquaintance Saladin and Curd are each attracted to

these new objects of affection, more interaction is required to solidify the
bond. Lessing’s commitment to moving beyond physical traits and first
impressions is programmatic rather than accidental. The relationships
must both develop a history and be recognized as historical by the partici-
pants. This process entails establishing a complex interaction of inherited
and learned traits, through an integration of temporal and spatial experi-
ences. While Curd’s appearance, for example, highlights the persistence
of inherited characteristics, these inherited characteristics are not limited
to the physical, and cannot be isolated from their lived contexts. While
Recha’s behaviour, on the other hand, emphasizes the significance of
learned characteristics, the effect of these learned characteristics is influ-
enced by her innate traits.
The plot of Nathan the Wise turns on Curd’s resemblance to Nathan’s
friend and to Saladin’s brother, who are, of course, revealed to be both
one and the same and Curd’s father. The traits Curd shares with his father
range from the most concretely material to the intangible. While Saladin
pardons the Templar at first glance because of a visual resemblance, he
later notes that the tone of their voices also coincides (9: 582). Saladin also
regularly compares the Templar’s behaviour, rash as well as brave, to that
of his long-lost brother, while Nathan reasons without hesitation from
appearance to character. After just one look at the Templar and before
their first conversation, Nathan concludes, “The shell might be bitter; the
core certainly isn’t” (54).27
Recha, unlike her brother, seems to be first and foremost the product of
her education, and to resemble Nathan more than her biological parents.
Her features are never described and it would seem that her physical traits
exist in no relationship, in no history. Mild and soft, as both her Jewish
and Christian names suggest, she would seem the ideal imprintable blank
slate.28 And yet, as with Curd and Saladin, Recha awakens memories in
the Templar through both her appearance and her voice. In an early draft
of the play, Curd asks himself: “I  have seen just such a heavenly form
somewhere before – heard just such a heavenly voice. – But where? In a
dream? Images from dreams do not impress themselves so deep” (9: 649;
my trans.). The two most prominent rescues in the play are thus analogous
in motivation: Saladin acts on a visual cue of recognition when he pardons
Curd from execution, Curd on an aural one when he hears Recha cry out
for help from the burning building.29 Curd’s own bemusement over this
action, which makes him a “mystery” to himself (43), can only be unrav-
elled once he has discovered his own identity in relationship to Recha.
234  Stefani Engelstein

Lessing removed such explicit allusions to Recha’s resemblances from the

final version, however, creating an initial tension between appearance and
voice in Curd’s perception of Recha that he must overcome.
Curd’s initial attachment to Recha therefore seems to play out in the
field of the visual. His defensive insistence after the rescue that “the girl’s
image disappeared long ago from my mind, if it was ever there in the first
place” (43), argues against its own import. A second meeting reinforces a
bond created specifically through appearance: “Seeing her, and the deci-
sion never to let her out of my sight … Seeing her, and the feeling of being
bound up with her, of being interwoven with her, were one and the same …
If that’s love, then the Templar truly loves, the Christian truly loves the
Jewish girl” (75–6).30 After conversing with Recha, he feels a sense of
disjunction, crying out, “How my soul is divided between eye and ear”
(65). Educated exclusively orally by her foster father, who discouraged
her from reading, her speech echoes his empirical bent. We must therefore
surmise a glimmer of awareness on Curd’s part of the contrasting pull of
her appearance towards her birth family, towards his own parents.31
We soon realize, however, that the perceived division between eye and
ear in Curd’s reaction to Recha is another of his groping misinterpreta-
tions. Recha’s voice combines Nathan’s instruction with the timbre of her
ancestry, while visual traits such as her smile are integrated into a history
of action and behaviour. Curd himself determines that Recha’s smile alone
would not appeal to him, were it not for the thoughts that motivate its
appearance, thoughts attributable to her upbringing. Helmut Schneider
reads the emphasis on paternal instruction in the evaluation of Recha’s
smile as a male appropriation of female generative abilities (196). While
Schneider is right to critique the absence or inadequacies of maternal edu-
cation here and throughout Lessing’s work, it is noteworthy here that the
paternal inhabits both body and mind. The already mercurial image of
the smile or the material timbre of voice,32 which might be inherited, are
thus replaced by the actions of smiling and speaking which represent the
unique combinatorics of nature and nurture, and complicate the discrep-
ancy between time and space.33
The split between eye and ear was at the centre of Lessing’s great aes-
thetic treatise Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.
Lessing’s preference there for the thoughts and empathy awakened by the
arbitrary signs of language above the beauty achieved by the natural signs
of visual art reappears here, when Curd turns his head aside to hear Recha
without distraction from his eyes. And yet, Curd is unable to keep his eyes
averted. While drama always combines visual and verbal material, Curd’s
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  235

and Saladin’s reflections are more than cues for how the audience should
interpret the play. Rather, they model how the audience should read bod-
ies in action as signs in general. Lessing here expands his semiotics, merg-
ing aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology. David Wellbery has argued that
visual and audible signs ultimately fail to remain distinct in Lessing’s Lao-
coön because language, however arbitrary, performs a mimesis of thought,
which occurs through the same arbitrary medium (Lessing’s Laocoon 198–
200). Wellbery is too quick to collapse Lessing’s nuanced semiotics, how-
ever. Verbal discourse, precisely because it is non-mimetic, creates a space
necessary for the material to achieve meaning. Claudia Brodsky Lacour
notes this chiasmus “by which signs attain natural status and the things
they signify are denaturalized” (“‘Is that Helen?’” 245). This “revers[al
of] the order of semiosis” (246) allows a material thing – whether tone or
smile – to be freed from the pure mimesis of inheritance and refer to the
historical experience of a person in time.
It is no accident that Lessing’s text, like many others of the period,
depends prominently on investigations of the relations between siblings
to explore this interaction between bodies and identity. One could specu-
late that it was the disturbingly proximate relationship of the monotheistic
religions that accounts for the prevalence of Muslims in European tales of
sibling incest, particularly in British literature, but also in German.34 At
the same time, as in so much later social and genetic science, siblings fore-
ground questions of how shared or divergent upbringing interacts with
shared biological origins. If with a coin, it is not only the stamp, but also
the metal itself whose value depends on convention, the matter/meaning
constellation is still more complicated in humans. It is significant in this
vein that the story’s familial denouement departs from traditions in which
an orphan discovers a father who provides a name, a title, and often a for-
tune, enabling a happy ending based on marriage. Here, the reunited fam-
ily conspicuously excludes vertical lineage, extending the dismantling of
reproductive relationships that has structured the story throughout. Even
in the symbolic terms of church titles, the sympathetic and open minded
lay brother is clearly to be preferred to the fanatical patriarch.35 Discov-
ering that the beloved Recha is his sister creates a moment of dismay for
Curd, but only a moment, after which he declares to Nathan that in pro-
viding him with a sister rather than a wife, “You’ve given me more than
you’ve taken from me! Infinitely more!” (117).36
What are we to make of this preference for siblinghood over spousal
and parent–child relations? The answer lies in the disparity between two
versions of history, exemplified also in the discrepancy between Lessing’s
236  Stefani Engelstein

treatise “The Education of the Human Race” and his drama Nathan the
Wise. Any universal, progressive history requires abstracting ideas and
cultural affiliations from individuals and positing a story of linear descent
as supersession. Such descent, in order to be progressive and teleological,
necessarily implies the preference of new over old, necessarily distorts by
ignoring developments that do not fit the desired vision of advance. Hence
Lessing’s denigration of Judaism in comparison to Christianity, and his
avoidance of Islam altogether, in his philosophical treatise. A narrative fic-
tion works differently, however. In the play, history is always personal,
and the abstract becomes concrete and particular. Religious succession
becomes religious coexistence; the genealogy of the monotheistic religions
metamorphisizes from one of generational descent to one of common
ancestry; and parental relationships melt away in favour of complex lateral
and step-relationships. While the universal histories of idealism construct
a vision of advance viewed from a distance that renders them indifferent to
individual lives, focusing on cultural history in the moment reveals stark
ethical choices that do not end with the close of the Crusades: respectful
coexistence and recognition of the bonds of individual histories, or fanati-
cism in the service of a vision of progress. In the play, Lessing constructed
a defence of both the ethics and the anthropological value of weighing par-
ticular histories and relationships above universal progress. Meanwhile,
both forms of history left lasting and conflicting legacies.37

4.  Revelation

Writing nearly a century after Lessing, Friedrich Max Müller announced

the birth of a “Science of Religion,” and attributed it to the accumulation
of new material from around the world over the preceding fifty years, and
to the new ability to read this material as a result of advances in linguistic
knowledge in Europe. At least as important in the establishment of this
field, however, was the wider shift in the methodologies of knowledge
work in which Reimarus and Lessing participated. While it is true that
more Europeans were travelling more widely and reporting their experi-
ences for large and rapt audiences, comparative religious studies would
not have developed without the internal application of ethnological tools
to the roots of European culture: in particular, biblical philology and the
historical study of early Christianity.
The stakes of early comparative religion were very high. As Jonathan
Z. Smith indicated in the 1980s, “Religion is solely the creation of the
scholar’s study” (Imagining Religion xi). Tomoko Masuzawa traces the
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  237

way that Europeans who travelled the world looking for religion always
managed to find it. Having interpreted beliefs and customs of the most
diverse kind as religion, they were able to declare religion a universal
human trait. But such universality merely increased the pressure to dis-
tinguish, to discriminate, and ultimately to legitimate European Christian
superiority in this area, as in the case of race and language. Max Müller
exemplified this trend by combining the teleological historiography also
seen in Lessing’s own “Education of the Human Race” with the essential-
ism Lessing had even there evaded. In his 1870 lecture series “The Science
of Religion,” Müller confidently refurbishes the worn-out coin of truth as
divine revelation:

Like an old precious medal, the ancient religion, after the rust of ages has been
removed, will come out in all its purity and brightness; and the image which
it discloses will be the image of the Father, the Father of all the nations upon
earth; and the superscription, when we can read it again, will be, not only in
Judaea, but in the languages of all the races of the world, the Word of God,
revealed, where alone it can be revealed – revealed in the heart of man. (121)

Turning away from Lessing’s vision of many religions open to many

truths, Müller believed comparative religion would establish the valid-
ity of a particular theological doctrine, and herald a to return to a single,
revealed Father, a practice that would not only enshrine Christianity, but
also participate in the larger project of constructing science as the legitima-
tor of a hierarchy of culture.

NOTES

1 Herder, Philosophical Writings 160. In the later work, “culture” has moved up
to the front of the list (288). See Michael Carhart and John Garber for discus-
sions of the late-eighteenth-century development of a science of culture in
Germany in the context of anthropology and ethnography. Peter Burke places
this late-eighteenth-century development in a longer historical context.
2 See also Theodore Pietsch’s fascinating book on the development of the tree
image to represent the relationship between species. Pietsch, however, does
not connect the trees to similar structures in use for other purposes, from
family trees tracing lineage to linguistic trees.
3 This date is generally accepted as the beginning of the discipline. See also
Molendijk, Emergence of the Science of Religion and Hjelde, “Science of
238  Stefani Engelstein

Religion.” For accounts that move the origin back into the eighteenth and
sixteenth centuries, respectively, see Baird, “How Religion Became Scientific”
and Stroumsa, A New Science. In an excellent article, Peter Byrne delineates
three ways to conceive the neutral, “scientific” approach to religion: natu-
ralistically, phenomenologically, and through a cultural-symbolic approach.
He traces the naturalistic approach back to David Hume. See also Hume,
“Natural History of Religion” 33–87. Byrne attributes the phenomenologi-
cal method – in which Christian doctrine is justified through comparison –
to Rudolf Otto, and finds the origin of the cultural-symbolic approach in
Herder and Hegel. I claim here, however, that in Nathan the Wise, Lessing
applies Herder’s cultural methodology more directly to religion, and that he
provides a less hierarchical cultural approach than Hegel. I will end with a
glance at the phenomenological method, which Max Müller exemplified far
earlier than Otto.
4 See Alter, Darwinism for the influence of linguistics on Darwin’s theory.
5 Lessing first published a less controversial segment of Reimarus’s manuscript
in 1774 without much public reaction, and then issued the five fragments
which instigated the controversy in 1777 and a seventh fragment in 1778. For
more, see Yasukata, Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion 1–43 and Talbert, Intro-
duction to Fragments.
6 For Schneider, however, the play also illustrates the inescapable material con-
straints that obstruct this self-creation.
7 Lessing, Werke 8: 888.
8 “Commentary on the Fragments of Reimarus” 63. It is precisely on these
lines that Goeze focused his attack on Lessing.
9 While defending the Jews on the one hand as “dieses unendlich mehr ver-
achtete als verächtliche Volk” (8: 321), “that infinitely more despised than
despicable people” (69), Lessing here still conforms to a pervasive anti-Semitic
prejudice that associates Jews with usury (8: 321; 69). All quotes from Lessing
in the original are from the Deutscher Klassiker edition and will be cited by
volume and page number parenthetically in the text.
10 Quotes from the Reimarus fragments are taken from Lessing, Werke. Transla-
tions of Reimarus are mine.
11 Erziehung is education or upbringing as in the title of Lessing’s treatise “The
Education of the Human Race.”
12 English quotations of the play are taken from Ronald Schechter’s translation.
I will note when I have modified his translation or provided my own.
13 “Commentary on the Fragments,” 70, trans. modified.
14 For a variety of perspectives, see Goetschel’s “Lessing’s ‘Jewish’ Question”
and Adamo (“One True Ring or Many?”), who argue that Lessing presents a
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  239

respectful, multicultural perspective; and Oesmann (“Nathan der Weise”) and

Robertson (“‘Dies hohe Lied der Duldung’?”), both of whom find Lessing’s
view of tolerance limited and limiting.
15 Karl Guthke notes that both Reimarus and Lessing focus on the monothe-
istic religions while acknowledging the much greater diversity around the
world (“Die Geburt des Nathan” 17–18). As Guthke mentions, in Lessing’s
Jerusalem one encounters “‘Franken,’ Inder, ‘Mohren,’ Agypter, Araber,
Parsen (‘Gheber’), Juden und Mohammedaner, selbstverständlich, aber auch
ein ‘Wilder’” (24). The “savage” is, with Lessing’s typical irony, a European
Christian.
16 Al-Hafi is variously described as a Parsi, a Gheber, and a Dervish. The last
of these designations conflicts with the first two, however. The Parsis are a
Zoroastrian sect in India, which al-Hafi also mentions as his homeland (61).
Gheber is a European word for a Zoroastrian, and there is evidence in the
text that al-Hafi considers his religion to be other than the three monotheistic
religions (51). On the other hand, Dervishes constitute a Muslim Sufi sect.
Farquharson provides a convincing reading of Lessing’s sources on Dervishes
and Zoroastrians to suggest that he likely intended the character to be Zoro-
astrian rather than Muslim (“Lessing’s Dervish” 47–67).
17 The fact that Nathan rejects the identification of individual and group does
not constitute a rejection of each group. Nathan wears identifiably Jewish
clothing or other outward indicators, as evidenced by the Templar’s identifi-
cation of him as Jewish as he approaches (54), and during his interview with
the sultan he is determined not to convert. Moreover, while he points out that
evidence of goodness that inspires the Christian lay brother to call a person
a Christian simultaneously inspires Nathan himself to call that person a Jew
(98), he does not reject either label in favour of a more universal designation.
Nathan is committed to elucidating what religions share, and also to main-
taining their distinctness. See Bennett for a related argument that Nathan the
Wise promotes belonging to a tradition – which Bennett, however, equates
with blood-relatedness – as “rationally arbitrary but realistically necessary”
(“Reason, Error and the Shape of History” 70).
18 Since Peter Demetz’s 1966 commentary on Nathan the Wise, which called
the money metaphors the key to the ring story, the play, and Lessing’s philo-
sophical thought (“Lessing’s ‘Nathan der Weise’” 147), numerous reflections
on money in the play have appeared, including examinations of generosity
and gift-giving by Weidmann (“Ökonomie der ‘Großmuth.’”) and Librett
(“How Does One Orient Oneself”) and explorations of the ambiguous status
of the power of the market economy by Lehrer (“Lessing’s Economic Com-
edy”) and Schönert (“Der Kaufmann von Jerusalem”). Demetz, Shell (Money,
240  Stefani Engelstein

Language, and Thought), Goetschel (“Negotiating Truth”), and Gray (Money

Matters) have written on coin, representation, and truth. I will return to sev-
eral of these readings.
19 Daniel Itzig was appointed Münzjude by Friedrich the Great and remained
both Mintjew and court banker under Friedrich Wilhelm II (Breuer and
Graetz, Tradition and Enlightenment 109–10, 148). Itzig’s son Isaac Daniel
Itzig and his son-in-law David Friedländer were leading figures in the Jewish
Enlightenment, or Haskalah, along with Moses Mendelssohn. Lessing almost
certainly knew several members of the family – one of Itzig’s daughters who
ran a Berlin salon, Sara Levy, recounted the acquaintance (Malino and Sorkin,
Profiles in Diversity 193–4).
20 Coin was a common rhetorical player in debates about hermeneutics. See
Gray and Shell.
21 While Nathan’s “new currency” is therefore a step towards the logic of paper
money, the two cannot be conflated, as Shell tends to do (159, 171).
22 As Goetschel notes, the worth of the old coin “is determined on the grounds
of the custom and habit that present the framework of historical continuity”;
“Negotiating Truth” 113.
23 Eva Knodt also reads Lessing as “proto-Nietzschean” in his views of truth.
Lessing’s intervention into the understanding of truth has been long noted by
critics. In addition to Knodt (“Herder and Lessing on Truth”), see Schmitt,
“‘Die Wahrheit’”; Schneider, Genealogie 157–60; Goetschel, “Negotiating,”
115; Leventhal and Fulda, Schau-Spiele des Geldes 4; and Schilson, “Dichtung
und (religiöse) Wahrheit.”
24 Robert Leventhal similarly points out the shift from the disregard for the
“letter” or means of religious tradition in “Education” to the respect for
historical specificity of traditions in Nathan (“Parable as Performance” 515,
emphasis in original). Schneider attempts to reunite the two views by claiming
the gulf between object and meaning sets both free by allowing the universal
core to shine through the diverse particulars (169–70). I would add, however,
that the particulars are not merely conduits to higher abstract universals, but
instead that the sought-after meaning continues to integrate the bodily and
particular with universal foundations.
25 Sara Eigen Figal complicates the picture still further by emphasizing the
uncertainty surrounding the circumstances of Assad’s relationships with
women, and hence of the birth of the two children claimed to be his at the
end of the play. The play’s insistence on the allegiance associated with family
bonds, while also recasting allegiance in the form of family bonds, unmasks
the blood relation as a structuring idea rather than a material fact.
 Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion  241

26 For a reading of Lessing’s use of the word Grund as a critique of Enlighten-

ment epistemology and hermeneutics, see Leventhal, “Parable as Perfor-
mance” 506–7. Schneider comments on the double function of Grund as both
the particular space we occupy and the universal foundation of our reason
(170).
27 The convoluted nature of the interrelation between inside and out is revealed
by the fact that Nathan makes this positive judgment based on observation of
the Templar’s external, i.e., bitter, features.
28 See Birus (“Das Rätsel der Namen”) for the etymology of Recha’s names.
29 The two rescues are also parallel in risk. While the jeopardy of rushing into
a burning building is obvious, the patriarch renders the threat to Saladin
explicit when he attempts to recruit Curd to assassinate his benefactor. It is
Curd’s special protected status that would make him the ideal choice for the
job.
30 The formulation implies that the novel emotion caused by a visual impression
could be something other than erotic love. Curd’s life is after all intertwined
with Recha’s biologically and historically. We see here how even natural signs
such as resemblance require the intervention of education before they can be
properly understood.
31 As Katja Garloff has argued, “The integration of visual, aural, and tactile
impressions” (“Sublimation and Its Discontents” 56) in the play distinguishes
successful moments of cognitive intuition from less mature infatuations
dependent on vision alone.
32 Saladin’s explicit reference to tone of voice makes clear that Lessing here rec-
ognizes the material element even of verbal signs.
33 Elsewhere in this volume, Daniel Aureliano Newman describes a similar
moment in a much later work by E.M. Foster, in which a character makes a
significant life decision because the voice of his brother resonates with that of
a lost parent. In that case, the siblings are half-brothers, and the voice explic-
itly connects the brothers to their common mother. While the timbre of the
voice is materially inherited, the persuasive force of the voice comes from the
experiential emotional attachment of the character to his mother.
34 British sibling incest narratives that involve Islam include Southey’s Thalaba
the Destroyer, Byron’s Bride of Abydos, Coleridge’s Osorio, Percy Shelley’s
Revolt of Islam, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while Byron’s Manfred
appeals to Zoroastrian myths originating in a geographical area that had
become Muslim. In German, Lessing’s 1779 Nathan the Wise was joined by
Schiller’s Braut von Messina in 1803 and Günderode’s Udohla in 1805. Until
Thomas Mann’s twentieth-century “Wälsungenblut,” only Lessing’s Nathan
242  Stefani Engelstein

also includes Jews, as far as I am aware. It is fascinating that critical responses
to Lessing have overwhelmingly focused on Jewish–Christian relations to the
exclusion of Islam. Exceptions are work by W. Daniel Wilson (Humanität
und Kreuzzugsideologie), Karl-Joseph Kuschel (“Jud, Christ und Musel-
mann”), and David G. John (“Lessing, Islam and Nathan”). Performances
of the play have initiated an engagement with Islam since the 2001 terrorist
attacks in the United States and subsequent attacks in Europe, although an
unfortunately biased one. See Kuschel, 9–32. For more on sibling incest nar-
ratives and cultural encounter, see Engelstein, “Sibling Incest and Cultural
Voyeurism.”
35 So that the point not be lost, the lay brother corrects the Templar’s mistaken
appellation of “father” to “brother” in their first encounter (37).
36 In one of few attempts to account for this oddity, Schneider sees the affirma-
tion of the sibling over the lover as an attempt to sublimate erotic interest
into a vision of universal brotherhood (197–9). Such a reading tells only half
the story, however, overlooking the function served in an economy of group
identity, rather than universal identity, by the structure of affective sibling
relations. For more on the sibling in relation to both desire and civic affection
see my “Sibling Logic; or, Antigone Again” and “Civic Attachments & Sib-
ling Attractions: The Shadows of Fraternity.”
37 See Foreman, “Lessing and the Quest” for Lessing’s role in current theologi-
cal debate.

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10 Kin Selection, Mendel’s “Salutary
Principle,” and the Fate of Characters
in Forster’s The Longest Journey

daniel aureliano newman

At the end of E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907), Rickie Elliot is
killed by a train as he saves his half-brother Stephen by pushing him off
the rails. It is, John Colmer exclaims, an “extraordinary” ending (“The
Longest Journey” 63), and it has been criticized for too neatly resolving
a convoluted plot and for cavalierly disposing of its protagonist. Even
queer theorists, who have so radically reread and contextualized the plot’s
apparent incoherencies, see Rickie’s sacrifice as a betrayal of the text’s
queerness. Accepting these concerns, this chapter takes a new look at the
novel, attending to its hitherto neglected engagement with genetics. The
Longest Journey is obsessed, to quote one of its characters, with “heredi-
tary business” (Longest 9). Examining Forster’s thematic and structural
use of heredity, I suggest a new, enlarged outlook on the novel’s ethics, its
treatment of character and its “overdetermined heroic ending” (Miracky,
“Pursuing (a) Fantasy” 141).
To begin, a simple thought experiment. What can we learn about Rick-
ie’s death from J.B.S. Haldane’s famous quip – that he would not risk his
life to save his drowning brother, but would plunge in for two broth-
ers or eight cousins (Marshall, “Ultimate Causes” 504)? In terms of evo-
lutionary fitness, Haldane realized, the more closely related the rescuer
and the drowner, the less it matters if the rescuer survives. Relatedness
is, so to speak, overlap between individuals: identical twins overlap com-
pletely, being one genetic individual in two bodies; siblings overlap less
(50%, on average), first cousins even less (12.5%, on average). Therefore,
as Richard Dawkins updates Haldane, “the minimum requirement for a
suicidal altruistic gene to be successful is that it should save more than
two siblings …, or more than four half-siblings …, or more than eight first
cousins, etc. Such a gene, on average, tends to live on in bodies of enough
248  Daniel Aureliano Newman

individuals saved by the altruist to compensate for the death of the altruist
itself” (100). There is strangeness indeed in this view of life. According to
Haldane’s calculations, Rickie throws good genes after bad when he dies
saving Stephen. It would take not one but “more than four half-siblings”
to justify his sacrifice. Thus, Rickie’s cynical aunt Emily Failing appears
to be right to eulogize him “as ‘one who has failed in everything he under-
took’” (282). But then I have withheld some relevant details about Rickie
and Stephen, details which complicate and reward a reading attuned to
The Longest Journey’s particular genetic vision.
What follows is not, despite superficial resemblances, Literary Dar-
winism. I doubt this school of criticism can serve well outside its natural
environment of social realism. A rigorous sociobiological reading would,
I think, fail to register the modernist oddities that make The Longest Jour-
ney such a delightful read. My goal is neither to solve its “contradictions,
gaps, and inconsistencies” (Miracky 130), nor to take these as indicators
of aesthetic failure (see Carroll, Literary Darwinism 145). My reading is,
in fact, continuous with the ongoing revisionist approach to Forster, here
summarized by Alan Wilde: “In forgoing some of our assumptions about
the novels’ and stories’ aesthetic coherence we will discover heretofore
unrecognized levels of complexity, which make of the books, if less perfect
and autonomous creations, at any rate a more authentic record of Forster’s
(and modernism’s) struggles” (69).
Seeking “unrecognized levels of complexity,” I  pursue the analogy
between Rickie and Haldane’s drowning siblings and discover in The
Longest Journey a relatively coherent hereditary logic, one sufficiently
informed by contemporary genetics to bring into play some strange impli-
cations of post-Darwinian biology. Upholding a vision of identity Forster
found – or would find – congenial with Mendelism, The Longest Journey
lives up to its reputation as a modernist Bildungsroman, demanding that
we see beyond human characters to the tiny particles, now called genes,
that “swarm in huge colonies … in you and in me” (Dawkins, Selfish Gene
21).1 Thus, “the fate of characters” in my title plays on two planes of nar-
rative action in The Longest Journey: on one, Rickie the developing human
character; on the other, his inherited traits, or characters.
Such an estranging take on character confirms Forster’s status as a mod-
ernist, as does, more broadly, the cosmopolitanism of his biological engage-
ments. Throughout his novels, Forster enacts cultural encounters to reveal
the poverty of nationalistic or ethnocentric views of human nature. Eng-
lish prejudices and national myths are challenged by Italy in Where Angels
Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with a View (1908) and by India in A
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  249

Passage to India (1924). While The Longest Journey, by contrast, seems

wholly English, its apparent insularity is deceptive. A pervasive but subtle
German influence emerges, especially when we read it alongside Howards
End (1910), which, despite many differences, rewrites the earlier novel (I
will return shortly to their affinities). That is, Howards End exposes an
indebtedness to German culture that is only latent in its predecessor. It
challenges an English nationalism Forster abhorred by naming its hero-
ine Margaret Schlegel and making her neither “English to the backbone”
nor “German to the backbone” (26) but, rather, a composite of “the two
supreme nations, streams of whose life warmed her blood, but, mingling,
had cooled her brain” (198). Less overt in The Longest Journey, German
thought occasionally surfaces: Hegel looms large both thematically and
structurally, and the novel’s ethical centre, Ansell, is repeatedly associated
with German aesthetics and philosophy.
For contemporary readers, moreover, the novel’s focus on genetics
would have evoked a science that was still dominated by German names
like August Weismann, Carl Correns, and Richard Goldschmidt. By the
1890s, Haeckel was more popular in England than in Germany (Holland,
“Walter Garstang” 248). Such figures were, if not household names, famil-
iar enough in England to give public lectures (Hans Driesch delivered the
1913 Gifford Lectures) and to publish in high-brow English periodicals
like Fortnightly Review (where, in the 1890s, Weismann and Spencer aired
their differences). If The Longest Journey was engaging with estranging
scientific ideas, these would have struck its audience as strangely foreign
to boot.
My focus on genes does not deny traditional views on character or
human interest. Certainly, Rickie’s sacrifice is just that: an act of will and
an expression of love, rather than a compulsion from his genes. And any-
way, opposing human agency and genetic fitness is a bit of a straw man.
Even Daniel Dennett, a most zealous neo-Darwinist, insists it is a mistake
to think selfish genes survive because they cause us to act selfishly (Dar-
win’s Dangerous Idea 422–7); it is more accurate to say that the genes that
survive appear to be selfish (by virtue of their having survived), which
says very little about the nature of our own human choices. My point is
not that Rickie is thinking with his genes when he sacrifices himself. The
selection in kin selection does not indicate agency but, rather, the retro-
spective appearance of agency. Rickie’s choice in the moment makes sense
to me only as a manifestation of agency, be it fully reasoned or partly
instinctive.2 Insofar as he can be said to act on behalf of his genes, he does
so only in the future perfect: at the moment of his sacrifice, he is not acting
250  Daniel Aureliano Newman

selfishly, but, rather, will have acted selfishly when his action is analysed
in hindsight. In any case, I am simply proposing that attending to a genetic
logic that Forster was evidently interested in allows us to uncover an addi-
tional dimension to the twin narratological problems of character and plot
development. This doubling of plot trajectories sheds new light on queer
Forster criticism and suggests a crucial role for contemporary biology,
particularly Mendelism and neo-Darwinism, in Forster’s modernist ethics
and aesthetics.

The great geneticist W.D. Hamilton, who formalized kin selection theory,
believed an evolutionist must be endowed with “a fourth intellectual pig-
ment of the retina capable of raising into clear sight patterns of nature and
of the human future that are denied the majority of his fellows” (qtd. in
Dugatkin, “Inclusive Fitness Theory” 1378). His theory certainly chal-
lenges received ideas, troubling conventional understandings of identity,
family, altruism, heroism, and success – primary concerns of real life and
fiction alike. Undoubtedly, any major scientific theory can, as Gillian Beer
argues, “disturb assumed relationships and shift what has been substan-
tial into metaphor” (Darwin’s Plots 1). Quantum mechanics explodes our
most fundamental ideas about reality – but then it hardly demands a revi-
sion of daily life, or of the narratives we spin to comprehend it. By con-
trast, a new genetic theory is always a new vision of human nature, of our
individual and collective potential for improvement, of our past and des-
tiny, of our very make-up and identity. Formalizing Haldane’s anecdote of
drowning kin (Dugatkin 1378), Hamilton opened up vistas as strange as
Einstein’s or Planck’s. But his hit closer to home.
Hamilton’s kin selection model inaugurated the now orthodox frame-
work in evolutionary biology, Inclusive Fitness Theory. In this view, selec-
tion acts not on groups or individuals but on genes; individuals are mere
vessels for selfish genes. This is certainly unsettling. A theory that reduces
bodies into “survival machines” for genes (Dawkins 21) and behaviours
into “apparent strategies” for optimizing fitness (Buss, “Mate Preference
Mechanisms” 263) cannot but deliver an ontological shock. Even a cham-
pion of post-humanism like Donna Haraway shrinks from it, though she
recognizes its potentially productive challenge to the myths of identity:
“the pov [point of view] of the gene gives me a curious vertigo that I blame
on the god-like perspective of my autotelic entity” (Modest 133).3
This “curious vertigo” distorts the stories we live by and those we pro-
duce as art. It has been exploited thematically in Ian McEwan’s Enduring
Love (1997) and David Lodge’s Thinks … (2001). More pertinent here, it
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  251

can shape narratives. Both Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985) and Zadie
Smith’s White Teeth (2001), for example, are structured by the random-
ness of survival and the discrepancies between individual merit and repro-
ductive fitness (Vonnegut’s Captain von Kleist is a total failure who, as a
new Noah, fathers all future humans). That these two novels feature mul-
tiple generations and emphasize reproduction is not incidental: we should
expect to find Inclusive Fitness Theory associated with certain literary
genres (the family saga, the Bildungsroman, cyberpunk, Naturalism). The
features that make these genres amenable to the logic of inclusive fitness
predate by decades or centuries its formalization in the 1960s; the genres
were, so to speak, pre-adapted to intersect with selfish genetics. For this
reason, we can speak of inclusive fitness at work in novels as old as The
Longest Journey.
Anachronistic as it may seem, my claim is supported by historical prec-
edents. Indeed, the basic insights of inclusive fitness inhere in the work of
Francis Galton (1822–1911) and Weismann (1834–1914), who both distin-
guished mortal bodies from potentially immortal genetic lines (Olby, Ori-
gins of Mendelism 57). Kin selection originates even earlier. In The Origin
of Species, Darwin explains the puzzling existence of sterile worker-bees
by proposing that “selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the
individual, and may thus gain the desired end” (237). Aspects of inclusive
fitness are therefore latent in Darwinism itself. If its precise articulation
demands statistical and genetic knowledge unavailable before the 1920s,
its implications could nevertheless emerge from earlier fictional treat-
ments of heredity.
In the context of fiction, this emergence requires that the narratives
meet specific conditions: a plot structured by genealogy; character rela-
tions stressing reproduction and kinship; and, crucially, a model of hered-
ity sufficiently consistent with the modern notion of genes. The first two
conditions are easily met; the limiting factor is the hereditary model, partly
because most novels have concerns other than generating coherent genetic
theories. Clearly, inclusive fitness would not obtain in a plot dictated by
Lamarckian, or soft, inheritance. In soft inheritance, the genetic material
changes as the body reacts to experience and environment; genetic iden-
tity is too closely aligned with personal identity for genes to act selfishly.
The Lamarckian vision so intertwines the individual with the hereditary
that Samuel Butler uses the word “personality” to speak of both (Life and
Habit 78 ff.).
What is needed, then, is hard inheritance, “the essential constancy of
the genetic material” (Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought 755). Hard
252  Daniel Aureliano Newman

inheritance decouples genetic from personal identity: the mother’s blue-

eyed gene continues in her son – even if his eyes are brown – and it could
be traced back along her family tree for countless generations. Hard
inheritance is exactly what we find in The Longest Journey, whose implicit
genetic theory, stressing inherited traits, genetic determinism, and shared
descent, demands readings that discriminate between the fate of characters
and the fate of their genes.
A brief précis of The Longest Journey reveals a plot dictated by genea-
logical events  – births, deaths, marriages, fertile couplings. Rickie has a
hereditary clubfoot; marries Agnes Pembroke; and fathers a severely crip-
pled daughter whose death convinces him “no child should ever be born
to him again” (184). He learns that Stephen Wonham, a rustic drunk raised
by Rickie’s aunt Emily, is his illegitimate half-brother. More conventional
than he would like to think, Rickie blames his hated father for the bastard
and accordingly rejects Stephen; in reality, Stephen is the son of Rickie’s
beloved mother and Robert, a farmer. The revelation should surprise no
one, for the kinship had to be maternal: all Elliots have a clubfoot, and
Stephen has not. In any case, Rickie has a change of heart, leaves Agnes,
moves to the country and dies under the train as inevitably as Anna Kar-
enina. The novel closes idyllically with Stephen, now married and living
off the royalties of Rickie’s posthumously successful book, camping in the
woods with a daughter named after his and Rickie’s mother.
My crude summary strips the novel of its charm, but it suffices for
demonstrating the narrative’s structural reliance on genealogy. “We are
expected always to bear the circumstances of [Rickie’s] parentage in
mind,” as an early reviewer complained (qtd. in Gardner, E.M. Forster,
66). Like Howards End, The Longest Journey is shaped by genealogical
events. Like Howards End, it enacts its drama and generates its values by
having biological bloodlines overlap with and diverge from material or
spiritual legacies. Like Howards End, it features the tortuously indirect
inheritance of a country house and exploits the contrasts between legiti-
macy and bastardy, and between being “normal” and being cursed with
“something congenital or hereditary” (Howards 285). Both novels resolve
their notoriously complicated plots and give coherence to their unwieldy
narrative structures by dividing the labour of inheritance between siblings.
Unlike his use of siblings, Forster’s engagements with heredity enjoy
little attention. Yet the two issues are inextricable. In Howards End, for
example, Margaret Schlegel inherits Howards End but, choosing child-
lessness, bequeaths the house to her sister’s illegitimate son. In “Tony
and Ralph,” the titular males find a way to live together through Ralph’s
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  253

marriage of convenience to Tony’s sister. In The Longest Journey, the sib-

ling relation is so important that the whole narrative hangs on the precise
nature of Rickie and Stephen’s kinship and on the actions their kinship
inspires.
The Longest Journey heralds its genetic concerns early. We soon learn
that Rickie is “rather lame” and that his lameness is “hereditary” (6, 9).
His difficulties are then summarized as a predicament reminiscent of Har-
dy’s Jude: “‘He says he can’t ever marry, owing to his foot. It wouldn’t be
fair to posterity. His grandfather was crocked, his father too, and he’s as
bad. He thinks that it’s hereditary, and may get worse next generation …
He daren’t risk having any children’” (50). Consistent with such genetic
determinism, Rickie frequently appears as a replica of his father. Even to
his mother he is, unflatteringly, “the little boy who looked exactly like”
her husband. At first glance, then, the novel seems to posit an inexo-
rable hereditary curse, whereby ‘“the sins of the parents are visited on
the children”’ (Longest 261). Nowhere is Forster more clearly indebted
to Naturalism and its assumption of “absolute determinism in all human
phenomena” (Zola, “Roman” 324). The Elliot curse recalls the “thrust of
[the] hereditary lesion” in Zola’s Germinal (1885), which drives Étienne,
“despite his communist theories” and “his moral education,” to drink and
“end up an assassin” (566, 423). Determinism hangs as inexorably, if less
heavily, over Rickie. So he is understandably annoyed when Aunt Emily
tells him, ‘“you are so like your father … It is curious – almost terrible – to
see history repeating itself”’ (Longest 92).
The Longest Journey’s hereditary vision is, however, more nuanced, and
its complexity rests partly on Forster’s ability to use up-to-date theories
of heredity. For historical if for no other reasons, Zola’s novels are vague
about the hereditary operations that shape his Rougon-Macquart cycle.
In the preface to La fortune des Rougon (1871), the families he “studies”
are victims of hereditary energies and inclinations, of “the slow succes-
sion of neurological and blood symptoms that arise in a race following an
original organic lesion and determine in individuals of that race, accord-
ing to the environment, the emotions, desires, passions, all those human
manifestations whose products are called virtues or vices” (“Préface”
302). This view, typical of mid-nineteenth-century science, assigns family
resemblances to contending ancestral forces, habits, or tendencies. In the
decades leading up to Forster’s novel, however, such models were being
discredited by evidence for inheritance by material particles (Olby 63;
Mayr 735). Galton’s particles, Weismann’s biophores, and Hugo de Vries’s
pangens all require, in various ways, “a transportation of material particles
254  Daniel Aureliano Newman

which are bearers of the individual hereditary characteristics” (Vries,

Intracellular Pangenesis 7).
The genetic theory implicit in The Longest Journey is of the particulate
variety. This may be unexpected: Forster is typically considered a disciple
of Samuel Butler’s theory of unconscious memory and progressive evolu-
tion (Heath, Creator as Critic 328). All the same, The Longest Journey
contains a single explicit reference to genetics, and it foregrounds particu-
late inheritance, which is almost necessarily incompatible with Lamarck-
ism. Thus, Emily mocks the pamphlets Stephen reads to support his
evolutionism: ‘“One of those sixpenny books tells [him] that he’s made of
hard little black things, another that he’s made of brown things, larger and
squashy. There seems a discrepancy, but anything is better for a thought-
ful youth than to be made in the Garden of Eden”’ (103). Emily references
contemporary debates about heredity, but both sides assume physical
units – “little black” or “brown things.” Her sarcasm could be read as a
reliable indicator of the novel’s genetic vision, but this reading is unsup-
ported by the text: The Longest Journey always sides with Stephen against
Emily. Moreover, she knows enough about how Stephen was “made” – in
a real-life imitation of ‘“French comedy”’ (236), complete with cuckoldry,
elopement, and farcical hypocrisy – to raise the reader’s suspicions about
the sincerity of her appeal to the “Garden of Eden.”
This passage must suffice, given the absence of Lamarckian or other
such alternatives, to align the novel’s genetic theory with particulate inher-
itance. Particles, unlike forces, are highly conserved across generations,
retaining their molecular identity despite the vicissitudes of their carri-
ers’ lives. This conservatism has a weird corollary. Heredity is not about
the person, or personal essence or identity, but about the particles housed
within that person. Galton vividly illustrates this odd logic by likening
the body to “a post office” and genetic particles to “heaps of letters” (qtd.
in Olby, 63): the post office is just temporary storage space, and it is the
letters and their movements that matter. If hereditary units are particles
whose integrity and identity are conserved despite their carrier’s environ-
ment and actions, their fate is at least partly distinct from that of the car-
rier. As Galton and later Weismann argued, the hereditary line (Galton’s
stirp, Weismann’s germ-plasm) is fundamentally distinct from the body
(Galton’s person, Weismann’s soma). In Weismann’s words, “The cells of
the organism are differentiated into two essentially different groups, the
reproductive cells – ova or spermatozoa, and the somatic cells, or cells of
the body … The immortality of the unicellular organism has only passed
over to the former; the others must die, and since the body of the individual
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  255

is chiefly composed of them, it must die also” (Essays 111). This model, as
retrospect reveals, approximates the gene-centred view of evolution.
The germ-soma division allows us to reassess Rickie and Stephen’s rela-
tion. They are, in this light, two somatic bodies whose germ lines over-
lap and whose genetic fates are therefore partially co-implicated. Rickie’s
change of heart about Stephen thus appears to be justified by the novel’s
genetic theory. When Rickie thinks Stephen is his paternal half-brother, he
imagines they are competing for posterity. When his daughter dies, then,
the outcome of the competition seems fixed: “There isn’t any future,” he
tells Agnes, believing that “he, because his child had died, was dead” (190,
192). So he is rather upset by the prospect of healthy Stephen propagating
the Elliot line. “As a final insult,” Rickie muses, his father

had brought into the world a man unlike all the rest of them, a man dowered
with coarse kindliness and rustic strength, a kind of cynical ploughboy, against
whom their own misery and weakness might stand more vividly relieved …
For that Stephen was bad inherently he never doubted for a moment and
he would have children: he, not Rickie, would contribute to the stream; he,
through his remote posterity, might be mingled with the unknown sea. (192,
my emphasis)

The metaphorical equation of stream and lineage remains after Rickie dis-
covers his maternal relation to Stephen. But its connotations change for
the better:

Something had changed … On the banks of the gray torrent of life, love is
the only flower. A little way up the stream and a little way down had Rickie
glanced, and he knew that she whom he loved had risen from the dead, and
might rise again. “Come away – let them die out – let them die out … Let me
die out. She will continue,” he murmured, and in making plans for Stephen’s
happiness, fell asleep. (250–1)

Moments earlier, Rickie had saved his drunken half-brother from tipping
over a banister, signalling his change of heart and foreshadowing his death.
Knowing his true relation to Stephen, he finds his world transformed. Yet
nothing structural has changed in the relation between them; according to
the branches of a family tree they are still as closely related, half-brothers.
The source of kinship matters more than its degree.
Significantly, Rickie, who resembles his father more than his mother,
had already sensed fellow-feeling for Stephen ‘“down in what they call
256  Daniel Aureliano Newman

the subconscious self”’ (191) – in, it could be said, the maternal elements
lying latent in him. In any case, with the revelation of their maternal rela-
tion, what began as competition becomes what behavioural ecologists call
reciprocal altruism. By facilitating Stephen’s survival he ensures the sur-
vival of part of his own genetic makeup. Rickie believes himself “unfitted
in body” and “in soul” (81), as he must remember every time he sings his
school anthem, which begins, ‘“Perish each laggard!”’ (158). This line, as
implausible as it may seem, is lifted unchanged from Forster’s own child-
hood school anthem, and Rickie probably sings it, as did Forster, think-
ing he will “be a prisoner throughout life’s battle.” The way out, writes
Forster, is having “the courage to become a laggard” (“Literature” 89). In
Stephen, Rickie finds the courage and a reason to let himself perish.
It is not pure selflessness that moves him to “gaz[e] at the pure stream
to which he would never contribute” and sacrifice himself so that Ste-
phen might contribute instead. It is, rather, an “apparent strateg[y]” (Buss
263) for transmitting the maternal traits he considers the best of him, hap-
pily divorced from any Elliot element. Rickie has found a way to sur-
vive genetically, to live on in the next generation without contributing
directly to it. The situation recalls Darwin’s early version of kin selec-
tion, designed to explain how traits in sterile individuals might neverthe-
less survive genealogically: “I have such faith in the powers of selection,”
writes Darwin, “that I do not doubt that a breed of cattle, always yielding
oxen with extraordinarily long horns, could be slowly formed by carefully
watching which individual bulls and cows, when matched, produced oxen
with the longest horns; and yet no one ox could ever have propagated
its kind” (238). Voluntarily sterile as an ox, Rickie may be “a stream that
never reaches the ocean” (246). But “streams do divide” (272): a channel
of his mother’s stream is in him, combined with the Elliot line, but another
channel, untouched by Elliot blood, has been diverted into Stephen. For
Rickie, this makes his brother “the future of our race” (289).
The dividing streams offer Rickie a chance to correct a past mistake: his
mother’s naive ‘“marrying into the Elliot family”’ (235) – a choice aptly
described, given the novel’s fluvial conceit, as “a plunge taken  … from
the opposite bank” (22). By sacrificing himself for Stephen, he aborts the
future of his paternal line without imperilling the maternal. This goal he
cannot achieve as an individual; though he does symbolically manage to
divorce his maternal and paternal selves when the train severs his (it is
implied) crippled leg, the severance costs him his somatic life.
Instead, the effective division of streams occurs at the genetic level,
in the future children that Rickie had previously begrudged his brother.
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  257

Helping Stephen now appears an interested act: Rickie saves Stephen

so that Stephen can perpetuate the genetic particles they share. Reading
Rickie’s sacrifice as reciprocal altruism is supported by a draft of the previ-
ously quoted passage beginning “Something had changed” (250). Having
discovered his true relation to Stephen, Rickie kisses his brother as “the
portrait of their mother look[s] down upon them both” and prophesies:

“She has risen from the dead … Living in houses, as I must, we forget Nature.
But at times … she enters and makes her comment. She has commented on
me. I daresay you have heard about my child … I can bear to die out now …
I have seen just a little way up and down the generations, and I know there is
a purpose in the tiny corner of the world that I have touched … I stand with
my face to the night[, but] it is not really darkness, for [those] I  loved are
handing the torches on … Nothing greater could happen to me – not even a
child of my own.” (376, my emphasis)

Rickie’s survey of both past and future reveals the role he must play in
order to extend, despite his refusal to have “a child of [his] own,” his
genetic existence. He must purge the Elliot from the extension of his
mother’s line. In Rickie the two lineages coexist, but Stephen is not so
burdened (he inherits, however, his father Robert’s alcoholism).
The determinism in The Longest Journey is less devastating than Zola’s,
but not because Forster’s genetic theory is gentler. It is, instead, determin-
istic in ways that are neither simple nor linear. The Elliot curse is an irrevo-
cable fact for Rickie, but it tells only half of his hereditary story; the other
half is told by his mother. The genetic shuffling that accompanies repro-
duction belies any vulgar form of genetic determinism, by which we are
copies of one of our parents. As we have seen, Rickie seems at first a copy
of his father, who “resembled his son, being weakly and lame, with hollow
little cheeks, a broad white band of forehead, and stiff impoverished hair”
(22). His mother finds him to be “exactly like [his father] in disposition”
(239). Yet the narrator insists they are not identical: Mr.  Elliot’s “voice,
which he did not transmit, was very suave … Nor did he transmit his eyes”
(22, my emphases).
Rickie does not, in fact, exactly resemble his father in every trait; some
traits, those the narrative deems desirable, descend from his mother. As
in Weismann’s theory, Rickie’s inheritance involves recombination, the
shuffling of genetic particles so necessary for introducing variation into
procreation. Recombination on its own, however, does not allow Rick-
ie’s genetic survival in Stephen’s daughter. As in most nineteenth-century
258  Daniel Aureliano Newman

genetic theories, including Darwin’s and Galton’s (as well as Butler’s),

Weismann’s model assumes the fusion of parental characters, producing
in the offspring an indivisible blend (see, e.g., Germ-Plasm 239). If inheri-
tance is blending, Rickie and Stephen still share maternal genetic material;
but the material is altered by the paternal elements with which it is mixed,
and there is therefore no real genetic identity between the half-brothers.
To put it schematically,

Mr Elliot + Mrs Elliot → Rickie

   +    →  
Robert + Mrs Elliot → Stephen
 × +    →   

The maternal element shared by Rickie and Stephen exists (), to be

sure, but its molecular identity has been modified. This blending model
precludes the type of genetic survival I  have outlined for Rickie, for in
no sense would any part of him literally be preserved in Stephen and his
daughter.
This outcome, which the novel appears to endorse, requires that mater-
nal and paternal elements unite without fusing, retaining their integrity
and independence:

Mr Elliot + Mrs Elliot → Rickie

  ◊ +   § →   
Robert + Mrs Elliot → Stephen
  Θ× +   § →   ×

If inheritance is non-blending, odds are good Rickie and Stephen share

, an atomistic genetic element unchanged by its combination with the
complementary elements from different fathers.
The genetic theory in question must be Mendelism. Though formulated
in the 1860s, Mendel’s discoveries failed to reach a substantial audience
before 1900, when they were rediscovered by de Vries, Carl Correns, and
Erich von Tschermak and then, in England, championed by William Bate-
son and popularized by Reginald Punnett in Mendelism (1905). Mendel
would also find a champion in Forster.
Mendelian inheritance involves genetic particles (now called genes),
each coding for a specific trait. Each gene is transmitted independently
from the genes coding for other traits. This is the Mendelian Law of Inde-
pendent Assortment (the other is the Law of Segregation, which states
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  259

that somatic cells contain two copies of each gene-variant, or allele, e.g.,
Rickie’s , but that each sex cell contains only one of the other, i.e.,
either  or ) (Morgan, Physical Basis 15–16). The independence of each
allele from the others allows offspring to inherit idiosyncratic mixes of
their parents’ genetic constitution.
Paternal inheritance is, in Rickie, the primary source of traits mentioned
in the text, and it largely determines his development and life story. But
the narrative clearly favours the maternal source, and from this valuation
emerges a crucial system of narrative values. Knowing to consider what
traits Rickie inherited from which parent, we find ourselves more attuned
to the novel’s norms. Because we know Rickie inherited his eyes from his
mother and his club foot from his father, for example, we can deduce a lot
from metaphors like Rickie “shut[ting] his eyes” to the failure of his mar-
riage or dying from the amputation of his crippled foot.
Rickie’s voice is especially significant. It is the special property and
gift of his mother, “a girl whose voice was beautiful. There was no caress
in it yet all who heard it were soothed, as though the world held some
unexpected blessing” (22). Rickie even owes his existence to it, for it is
what brought his parents together. We are never told explicitly that Rickie
inherited his mother’s voice, but this is strongly implied by the negation of
paternal inheritance: Mr Elliot’s “voice … he did not transmit” (22). The
maternal inheritance of voice is further supported in the metonymy that
reduces Rickie to one of “the voices of boys who should call her mother”
(240). The other boy, Stephen, does have her voice; when he asks Rickie
to leave Agnes, Rickie has no real reason to accept, but he is persuaded by
one crucial, hereditary reminder of his mother. Stephen’s

words were kind; yet it was not for their sake that Rickie plunged into the
impalpable cloud. In the voice he had found a surer guarantee. Habits and
sex may change with the new generation, features may alter with the play of
a private passion, but a voice is apart from these. It lies nearer to the racial
essence and perhaps to the divine; it can, at all events, overleap one grave.
(257–8)

In Stephen’s voice Rickie hears his mother and therefore, for the first time,
can see Stephen as one of the “real brothers” he pined for when he was a
boy (24).
Rickie’s lameness and voice have different sources, and they therefore
exert separate influences on our understanding of Rickie as a character.
Each of his traits must be considered independently. Reading Rickie’s fate
260  Daniel Aureliano Newman

and relation to Stephen, we must follow Bateson’s Mendelian warning

against seeing heredity at the individual level: instead, “the heredity of
each character [trait] must be separately investigated” (Mendel’s 8). This
allows us to disentangle and decouple the genetic material combined in his
soma and to look beyond the individual and “a little way up and down
the generations” (Longest 376). Decoupling the inheritance of paternal
lameness from maternal voice, Forster allows the genetic overlap between
Rickie and Stephen to perform a material, as well as symbolic, role in Rick-
ie’s fate: genes identical to his, genes sharing a common history, literally
survive in Stephen’s daughter, a possibility inconceivable under blending
inheritance. Thus, Forster proposes a genetic escape from genetic deter-
minism. Realizing he embodies not one but two lineages, Rickie finds an
escape from the genetic curse that, he thought, led only to his extinction.
“The son of his mother had come back,” the narrator says (Longest 249),
referring to Stephen but using free indirect discourse and deictic shifters
(“the son,” “his mother”) to include also Rickie. Agnes is right, though
not in the way she imagines, to believe ‘“he’ll come back in the end”’ (261).

This Mendelian solution, easily accommodated into the Inclusive Fitness

framework, is rather neat. Too neat – for it cannot quiet a lingering doubt,
which I must detail before venturing on to suggest how Forster uses genet-
ics strategically to further his ethical and political beliefs and construct his
queer and modernist poetics.
The narrative solution of making Stephen a maternal brother may sat-
isfy a gene-centred reading, but it lends a troubling triumphalism to Rick-
ie’s death. Some readers are, of course, untroubled and applaud Rickie’s
self-sacrifice. To Frieda Lawrence, for example, “Rickie of course isn’t a
bit dead, it’s only one of those many healthsome deaths one dies” (qtd. in
Gardner, 97). My own reading is not innocent of such abstraction. Also
troubling, Forster’s solution perhaps too starkly reduces the desire for
one’s own children to the genetic rewards of procreation, and thus risks
endorsing Rickie’s willingness to forgo the children he wanted. Unsettling
is his realization of “the cruelty of Nature, to whom our refinement and
piety are but as bubbles, hurrying downwards on the turbid waters. They
break, and the stream continues” (192). At the human scale, the cost to
him is too high and paid perhaps too readily. Is Rickie’s death not a little
too convenient, an easy way to eliminate an “unfitted” character (Lon-
gest 81)? Is not Stephen’s inheritance of Rickie’s posthumous royalties the
novel’s way of saying it ‘“can’t stand unhealthiness”’ (49)? Does it not
endorse Rickie’s self-loathing attempt to restore the status quo by offering
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  261

his (monetary) inheritance to Agnes and her fiancé Gerald, thus harmo-
nizing good income with good heredity?
Let us register these important concerns, but without repudiating the
genetic reading above. Abandoning the genetic perspective would be to
throw the baby out with the bathwater. Indeed, a biologically informed
reading of The Longest Journey proves not at all inconsistent with For-
ster’s career-long assault on prejudice or, for that matter, with recent
queer interpretations of his work. In fact, by resolving Forster’s seem-
ingly paradoxical investment in both non-reproductive homoeroticism
and procreation, the model by which Rickie survives genetically in Ste-
phen’s daughter grants the homosexual soma freedom from the genealogi-
cal imperative, without entirely closing off the genealogical future. It is
telling that Edward Carpenter, whom Forster admired, would point to the
“evolution of the worker-bee” from “two ordinary bee sexes” (Intermedi-
ate 11) – the very phenomenon that inspired Darwin to hypothesize kin
selection  – as a model of how homosexuals might contribute to a more
harmonious future society.
Carpenter deplored the increasing differences between heterosexual
men and women, a polarization he considered a symptom of unchecked
progress. If individuals or societies are too forward-driven, he argues,
their energies are dissipated and they become “woody” and “ossified”
(Angels 244). The best hope for the future is, he suggests elsewhere, the
mediating influence of “the intermediate sex or sexes” (Intermediate 12).
Homosexuality thus contributes to Carpenter’s notion of “the Return to
Nature,” “a reversionary process” or “counter-current” whereby “one …
feels back within oneself for another point of departure farther down”
(Angels 219, 246–7). Carpenter defines the return to nature both as indi-
vidual and society tonic and as evolutionary reversion, illuminating how
Rickie, who tends to settle for a bad lot, is awoken by his true relation
with the child of nature Stephen.
The boost Rickie feels from glancing “a little way up the stream and
a little way down” (Longest 250) signals how his kinship with Stephen
might serve his own interests. In a maternal half-brother, he finds a genetic
alternative to having “a child of [his] own” without sacrificing what he
inherited from his mother (Longest 376). He recognizes a way to unmarry
her from the Elliot family. Rickie’s reversionary return to nature is not
only the theme of his stories (all “harping on this ridiculous idea of getting
into touch with Nature” [71]): it is the fate of his genes. At a moral and
genealogical impasse, Rickie is saved by a sort of strategic atavism  – an
artistic return to myth, a literal move to the Wiltshire countryside, and a
262  Daniel Aureliano Newman

genetic step back that allows him to revive his mother’s line and simultane-
ously shed his paternal inheritance. It is a boost because he can fulfil this
goal without yielding to the reproductive imperative.
Forster’s homosexual Maurice Hall finds happiness by accepting,
despite his desire for children, ‘“the way of all sterility”’ (Maurice 78).
But in the formally if not substantively queerer Longest Journey, Rickie
need not make such a choice, though he, too, resigns himself to childless-
ness. Nor must he follow Clive Durham and ‘“become normal”’ in order
to fulfil ‘“the need of an heir’” (Maurice 97). For Clive, procreation is the
key to status and a conventionally good life, so he chooses to perpetuate
the “visible work” of his forebears, who “handed on the torch their sons
would tread out” (Maurice 78). Rickie, thanks to his partial genetic iden-
tity with Stephen, finds another means of “handing the torches on” (Lon-
gest 376), which demands not a pragmatic switch to heterosexuality and
conventionality but a principled and deeply felt switch away from them.
He must reject his loveless marriage and bleak suburban job and follow
Stephen into the countryside. Clive compromises himself by accepting to
let “Nature ca[tch] up this dropped stitch in order to continue her pat-
tern” (Maurice 114), but Rickie, through Stephen, can remain a “dropped
stitch” and yet still contribute materially to the genealogical “pattern.”
My brief excursion into Carpenter’s ideas suggests that Rickie’s sacri-
fice might avail itself of queer interpretations not yet envisaged by queer
theorists. Forster studies have been profoundly reinvigorated by queer
theory, thanks largely to Judith Herz’s identification of the “double nature
of Forster’s fiction” (“Double Nature” 254). In this model, Forster’s fic-
tions underlay the heterosexual surface-plot (darling of Merchant-Ivory
productions) with a homosexual under-plot. This duality is often pre-
sented competitively, following Herz’s argument that “one [plot] is true,
the other a lie. Finally one or the other is displaced” (257). Of The Longest
Journey, for instance, Scott Nelson bemoans Rickie and Stephen’s kinship
as a betrayal of the under-plot: “Forster displaces the homoerotic elements
of the ‘friendship’ by making them half-brothers” (qtd. in Miracky, 141).
Herz’s model has helped uncover in Forster’s fiction a veritable wealth
of ethical, ideological and aesthetic complexity. Yet such a powerful model
inevitably brings its own blinders. An unfortunate consequence of focus-
ing on the under-plot has therefore been the neglect of elements too eas-
ily attributed to the surface, heterosexual “lie.” Illustrating this neglect,
John Beer argues that “homosexuality gave [Forster] an ‘outsider’s’ view
of things, making him look at the world from a point of view which did
not regard marriage or the procreation of children as central” (qtd. in
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  263

Martland, E.M. Forster, 20). Beer is not wrong, but his argument signifi-
cantly underrates the importance, also noted by Elizabeth Heine (“Edi-
tor’s Introduction” xxi), of reproduction throughout Forster’s fiction. In
Where Angels Fear to Tread, Gino and Lilia’s baby is part of the hetero-
sexual surface-plot, but he also energizes, by his parentage and death, the
homoerotic under-plot linking Gino and Philip (Herz 255). Forster often
thus distances reproduction from a simple heteronormative ideal: parents
are of mixed race or rank (Lilia and Gino; Helen and Leonard; Mrs Elliot
and Robert), and their offspring tend to catalyse same-sex dynamics (Gino
and Philip; Helen and Margaret; Rickie and Stephen).
A reading sensitive to genetics disputes the view that Rickie’s death is
an aesthetic and political failure, on Forster’s part, to let his plot endorse
the homoerotic bond between Rickie and Stephen. Contemporary sexol-
ogy had established that homosexuality was at least sometimes congenital,
as Forster knew (Heine xxi–iv). It is therefore important to examine how
The Longest Journey coordinates its queer poetics with its complex treat-
ment of heredity. A key dynamic here is, I think, the favouring of horizon-
tal over vertical genetic transmission, which Stefani Engelstein discusses
in her contribution to this volume. A  pertinent example here would be
how kin selection has been invoked to explain the otherwise perplexing
evolutionary survival of the “gay gene” (Ridley 279–80), and in Forster’s
novel it similarly bridges, tentatively, the apparently unbridgeable surface
and under-plots. It allows different fates for the men and for their genes.
On one level Rickie can follow Stephen “as a man” and “not as a brother”
(257), thus preserving the homoeroticism some critics find incompat-
ible with kinship (Miracky 141); on the other, genetic level the narrative
exploits the precise nature of their kinship in order to further a seemingly
contradictory set of interests.
This is not to say biology resolves everything. Indeed, The Longest
Journey, like all Forster’s novels, features an absolutely central system of
non-genetic connections, which space prevents me from examining (these
include, most notably, the affinities between Mr Failing and his “spiritual
heir” Rickie (195) and between Rickie and Ansell). Even so, a genetic read-
ing challenges the facile equation of the hetero/homosexual, reproductive/
non-reproductive, and biological/cultural dichotomies.
A genetic perspective transcends these categories largely because it
complicates and revises what it means to be an individual. Critics who
deplore The Longest Journey’s incoherence as “a confused and inadequate
vision of life” (Colmer 64) are, one might say, too narrowly focused
on the human level in a narrative that defamiliarizes what it is to be a
264  Daniel Aureliano Newman

human. If, by contrast, we read Rickie as a bundle of independent traits

with underlying genetic particles, a surprising parallel emerges between
his self-inconsistency and those of the narrative itself. John Harvey might
be writing about the character instead of the novel when he complains
that “the disparate elements of which it is composed are never brought
together into any kind of unity; at best they lie uneasily side by side” (qtd.
in Colmer, 64). Sure, even the most post-humanist among us probably
fails to be consoled by the view that our persons are evolutionarily dispos-
able, and it is neither possible nor really desirable to be totally comfortable
with Rickie’s death. But the discomfort is instructive, because it not only
highlights the undeniable aesthetic and political compromises in Forster’s
narrative solution, but also signals his attempt to reimagine character, and
by extension humanness, in politically and ethically productive ways.
As a character, Rickie hardly coheres. He is, as Agnes tactfully ven-
tures, ‘“a little – complicated”’ (104). At least one contemporary reviewer
agreed: “Rickie is drawn with too much care, his broader tendencies
obscured by too many minor touches” (qtd. in Gardner, 66). The minor
touches are so prominent that Rickie never becomes a character in the
sense of “a repeatable integrity of form” (Abbott, “Character and Mod-
ernism” 393) or “a compendium of traits … which gradually concatenate
into a represented whole” (Levenson, Modernism 109). He has, as another
early reviewer notes, “capacities for re-organizing himself” (Gardner 89)
and even his name indicates his being “rickety” (“Mr. Elliot had dubbed
him Rickie because he was rickety”; 23). To the end, he remains a more
or less jumbled collection of physical features, ideas, attitudes, phrases,
many of which survive, through genetic or other modes of transmission,
his somatic death.
It is in this character incoherence that Forster carves out a future for
Rickie  – or rather for particles of Rickie. Recast as an archive of inde-
pendent genes, Rickie avails himself of partial resurrection through what
I have called strategic atavism, a biologically inflected development that is
politically potent because atavism “punctures the modern idea of the self
as individual and autonomous,” and, as such, “open[s] up liberal notions
of the privatized subject to the genealogical record” (Seitler, Atavistic
Tendencies 2). Excluded by his disability and sexuality from so much of
his world, Rickie is given some form of hope in the failure to cohere,
a failure allowing Forster to reclaim, as did Carpenter, the “reversion-
ary process” (Carpenter, Angels’ 246) that was written off as pathology
or perversion by contemporary racist, misogynistic, and homophobic
pseudoscience.
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  265

Forster valued Mendel because his theory explained scientifically why

humans, like peas, “keep throwing up recessive characteristics,” ata-
visms (“Racial” 19). Mendelism, in Forster’s view, confronts the human
“desire to feel a hundred per cent” – the dangerous longing behind class-
consciousness, nationalism and racism. From being “all of a piece” (ibid.),
the self is reconstituted by Mendelism as a mosaic, each piece indepen-
dent, some pieces lying latent until their reversion generations later.
Such atavisms participate rather subtly in The Longest Journey, in the
genealogical structure of the narrative and under the cloak of symbolism
worn by phrases like “risen from the dead” (Longest 251). But there is
one intriguing hint of specifically Mendelian heredity: Robert, Stephen’s
father, woos Mrs Elliot with “an armful of sweet-peas” (235), his plant
leitmotif. Sweet peas were also, of course, a favourite of early Mendelians,
yielding some of the first major discoveries of twentieth-century experi-
mental genetics. As Punnett writes in the preface to the 1907 edition of
Mendelism, “the sweet pea and the stock have yielded up their secret, and
we are at last able to form a clear conception of the meaning of ‘reversion’”
(vi). Later in the book, he notes that “the case of the sweet pea throws a
flood of light upon a widespread phenomenon which has long puzzled
the naturalist: the phenomenon of reversion on crossing,” whereby white-
flowered plants give plants with “red, or purple” flowers (Punnett 53).
When Mrs Elliot elopes with Robert, her husband finds the drawing room
“littered with sweet-peas. Their colour got on his nerves – magenta, crim-
son; magenta, crimson. He tried to pick them up, and they escaped. He
trod them underfoot, and they multiplied and danced in the triumph of
summer like a thousand butterflies” (236–7). It seems that in the union
that will produce Stephen, reversion has bested Mr Elliot, ‘“a country man
on the road to sterility”’ (246).
The genetic vision behind such biological references is elucidated by
more explicitly biological moments in Forster’s other works. In Arctic
Summer, Venetia Whitby, who understands heredity as “Mendelism”
(148), outlines how the “desire to feel a hundred per cent” induces snobs
to overlook the “recessive characteristics” that inconveniently pop up as
atavistic reminders of their true, mixed pedigree (“Racial” 19). ‘“A gene-
alogical tree that is genealogical would be valuable,”’ she admits; “but …
people are so apt to make a fuss about their eminent ancestors … and to
hush up those who aren’t. I know by my father. When he talks of ‘fam-
ily’ he means only his grandmother’s family. On the other sides he was
nothing, and this gives a false view … There’s no such thing as ‘family’
in England” (Arctic 151). A similar point appears in Where Angels Fear
266  Daniel Aureliano Newman

to Tread. Accused by Philip Herriton of misrepresenting her fiancé as

“a member of the Italian nobility,” Lilia strikes back: “‘Well, we put it
like that in the telegram so as not to shock dear Mrs. Herriton. But it is
true. He is a younger branch. Of course families ramify – just as in yours
there is your cousin Joseph.’ She adroitly picked out the only undesir-
able member of the Herriton clan” (25). Forster probably did not have
Mendel on the mind when he wrote Lilia’s reply, though such an inten-
tion is plausible: his theories were much talked about in the early 1900s.
But it hardly matters either way. More importantly, Forster would later
find in Mendel a kindred spirit, a scientist whose theories shored up his
own principles.
Over thirty years after The Longest Journey, Forster would reiterate
and develop Lilia’s and Venetia’s genealogical arguments. A  remarkable
appeal to Mendel appears in a 1939 BBC broadcast aimed at “the ridicu-
lous doctrine of Race Purity” (“Racial” 18). His target, given the imminent
war, is obvious; but behind his urgent anti-Nazism lies a broader attack
on snobbery and its links to genealogy – an attack familiar to readers of
his novels. Scientific racism and family snobbery differ, he implies, only
in degree; both draw on age-old myths of origins and blood purity. For-
ster challenges his audience: “Can you give the names of your eight great-
grandparents?” Family pride, he implies, stems from the same stock ideas
as Nazi race policy, and both are wrong – ethically and empirically – for
they always conceal something “mortifying” (“Racial” 17):

We can often get six or seven [great-grandparents], seldom the whole eight.
And the human mind is so dishonest and so snobby, that we instinctively
reject the eighth as not mattering, and as playing no part in our biological
make-up. As each of us looks back into his or her past, doors open upon
darkness … On such a shady past as this – our common past – do we erect
the ridiculous doctrine of Racial Purity. (“Racial” 18)

The doctrine is ridiculous because, “whether there ever was such an entity
as a ‘pure race,’” historical migrations and imperialism have ensured “there
never can be a pure race in the future. Europe is mongrel for ever, and so
is America” (“Racial” 18).
The doctrine is also ridiculous because it rests on “pseudo-science”
(“Racial” 19), so Forster is canny to conclude his attack with an appeal to
science. Freud and Einstein are mentioned – an oblique dig at the German
state that demonized two of its own world-class scientists. But Forster’s
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  267

real praise is for yet another German-speaking scientist whose theories

inconvenience Nazi “pseudo-science.”

Behind our problem of the eight great-grandparents stands the civilizing fig-
ure of Mendel … He embodies a salutary principle, and even when we are
superficial about him he helps to impress it in our minds. He suggests that
no stock is pure, and that it may at any moment throw up forms which are
unexpected, and which it inherits from the past … He has unwittingly put a
valuable weapon into the hands of civilized people. We don’t know what our
ancestors were like or what our descendants will be like. We only know that
we are all of us mongrels, dark haired and light haired, who must learn not to
bite one another. (“Racial” 19–20)

Forster may be simplifying Mendel’s contribution to science and ethics

in concluding that peas, like humans, “keep throwing up recessive char-
acteristics, and cause us to question the creed of racial purity” (“Racial”
19), but he is hardly superficial. His views on Mendel and Nazism are
directly informed by Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon’s We Europeans
(Forster, Commonplace 301), and he clearly understands the Mendelian
fact that “pure individuals may be bred from impure ones” (Bateson, Nat-
uralist 183). In this remarkable phenomenon, Forster foresees the end of
purity in any traditional sense of the word, and with it an end to scientific
and genealogical apologies for prejudice. Insofar as purity survives after
Mendelism, its applications have been evicted from blood or individual
essence to single traits, where it bears the less catchy name of homozygos-
ity. What looks like purity, moreover, often is not: seventy-five individu-
als that are pure for a given trait, writes Bateson, “are not all alike, but
consist of twenty-five which are pure dominants and fifty which are really
cross-breds” (Naturalist 176–7). As Forster would have read in We Euro-
peans, “the picture of the hereditary constitution of human groups … [is]
very different from any which could be framed in the pre-Mendelian era”:
“Practically all human groups are of decidedly mixed origin” (103–4).
“The sense of purity is a puzzling, and at times a fearful thing,” says the
narrator of The Longest Journey. “It seems so noble, and it starts at one
with morality. But it is a dangerous guide” (139). But if purity is displaced
from human characters to “unit-characters” (Punnett 22ff.), Rickie’s sac-
rifice appears not more justified but certainly more nuanced than previ-
ously recognized. Now, though combined with Mr Elliot’s lineage in the
person of Rickie, his mother’s lineage is literally recoverable by future
268  Daniel Aureliano Newman

generations, in the granddaughter who aptly bears her name (289). As

Walter Sutton explains Mendelism, “while in the organism, maternal and
paternal potentialities are present in the field of each character, the germ-
cells in respect to each character are pure” (231–2, original emphasis). Still,
purity at the genetic level says nothing about the organism. As Forster
observes, “too many factors are involved” in human heredity (“Racial” 19)
to say anything quite conclusively.
I am under no illusion of having solved the difficulties that disappoint
and delight readers of The Longest Journey. But I hope that, by investigat-
ing its treatment of genetics, my reading has opened a window among the
“million … possible windows” that Henry James imagined for “the house
of fiction” (46). Other novels might offer similar views; but The Longest
Journey is perhaps uniquely disposed to reveal that particularly strange
implication of Mendelism, still relevant today in the age of selfish genes:

The individual is an aggregate of unit-characters, and individuality is the

expression of a particular aggregation of such characters. Though often react-
ing upon one another, the factors on which these characters are based behave
as independent entities during the hereditary process, and heredity in con-
sequence we may regard as a method of analysis, enabling us to judge of the
number and condition of the unit-characters which go to make up the individ-
ual. The facts of heredity provide us with a series of reactions, which, if read
aright, reveal to us the constitution of the living thing. And in the constitution
of the living thing we have the key to its behaviour, to its potentialities and
limitations, to what it can become, and what it can produce. (Punnett 74–5)

Mendelism offers no skeleton “key” to Rickie’s “behaviour …, potenti-

alities and limitations.” The Longest Journey permits no way to “connect
up,” to borrow from Forster’s defence of homosexuality, “all the frag-
ments [Rickie] was born with” (qtd. in Heine, xxiv). But the perspective
of the gene reveals a different novel, shining new light on well-recognized
patterns and opening the window on entirely new interpretations.

NOTES

I thank Stefani Engelstein for helpful comments on this essay, as well as Cannon
Schmitt and Melba Cuddy-Keane for invaluable criticism of an earlier draft. For
funding, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada and the
University of Toronto.
 Kin Selection, Mendel, and Forster’s Longest Journey  269

1 Throughout this essay, I favour general and anachronistic terms like “heredi-
tary particle,” “genetic line,” and “genes” (in the colloquial sense) over, say,
“biophores” and “alleles.” Contemporary biologists used a dizzying array of
terms, most since abandoned, some misleading. My reading would gain little
from terminological fastidiousness, for its resolving power is limited by the
novel’s implicit genetic theory, which is, unsurprisingly, crude relative to its
scientific counterparts.
2 As Haldane himself wryly notes, “On the two occasions when I have pulled
possibly drowning people out of the water … I had no time to make such cal-
culations” as the model would require (qtd. in Dawkins 103).
3 The genetic challenge to traditional notions of selfhood helps explain why
I distance myself from Literary Darwinism, which assumes that readers
share evolved “psychological dispositions” that “provide a common basis for
understanding what is intelligible in … novels”; among these is “the idea of
the self” (Carroll, Literary Darwinism xiv, 145, 126). But the very idea of the
self is undermined by the genetic logic I find in Forster’s novel – incidentally,
a great example of an “unsatisfactory and confusing” novel about a “sociobio-
logically atypical” character (ibid. 145, 132).

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PART V

Displaying: Scientific Collections

11 Anatomy Collections in and of the
Mind: Science, the Body, and Language
in the Writings of Durs Grünbein
and Thomas Hettche

peter m. mcisaac

This chapter is part of a larger set of episodic investigations I have been

undertaking into the ways that anatomy exhibitions and medical col-
lections have been deployed in German literary texts over the past 125
years. Insofar as these texts were penned by writers as diverse as Gustav
Meyrinck and Gottfried Benn around 1900 to Durs Grünbein, Thomas
Hettche, and Thor Kunkel in recent years, it is perhaps not surprising that
they are not united by a single topos or references to a single institution or
mode of display. It is all the more striking, then, that following the fall of
the Berlin Wall, several prominent German literary texts sought to articu-
late concerns arising in the wake of German unification using the surviv-
ing anatomy specimens collected and displayed in institutions such as the
Humboldt University and Berlin’s Charité. As scholars have been quick
to recognize, the long history and pre-eminent place of these institutions
of Berlin’s scientific and cultural landscape make them rich vehicles for
probing how the contours and fault lines of today’s thought, art, and cul-
ture are shaped by the complex legacies of the German past. The fact that
the Charité itself underwent a thorough institutional reorganization in the
1990s – part of which saw its pathological collections reopened to the pub-
lic with a good deal of sensation in 1998 – helped to make it a revealing
(excavation) site in a city whose post-Wende transformations became a
shorthand for so many effects of German unification. Perhaps not surpris-
ingly, texts that deploy Berlin-based medical collections have been read
by scholars such as Katharina Gerstenberger, Doerte Bischoff, and Birgit
Dahlke primarily in terms of Berlin and its real and imagined contribu-
tions to a changing gendered German national identity.
Yet as crucial and productive as these readings are, framing texts nar-
rowly in terms of Berlin’s history and institutions threatens to obscure the
276  Peter M. McIsaac

nuanced engagement some of them make with a number of key issues con-
nected to the creation and display of medical and science collections, on
the one hand, and what their deployment in literary texts accomplishes, on
the other. Where these issues become particularly acute is in the work of
Durs Grünbein and Thomas Hettche. At a time when a turn to the medi-
calized and often dissected body manifested itself in a surprising num-
ber of high-profile texts by writers such as Reto Hänny, Ulrike Draesner,
Ulrike Kolb, and Marcel Beyer (Magenau, “Der Körper” 12–20), Grün-
bein and Hettche stand out for their respective and highly revealing uses
of historical medical collections and (in Hettche) the anatomical theatre in
the Charité as privileged points of entry into the core aesthetic and medial
parameters of their work and thought. As I  will show, profound reso-
nances exist between Grünbein’s and Hettche’s literary engagements with
scientific display practices and their respective underlying conceptions of
the body, language/thought, and science.
Exploring these resonances, as I will do in this essay first with Grün-
bein and then with Hettche, provides not merely deeper insight into what
scholars such as Andrea Bachner have described as the development of a
highly medicalized “wound aesthetic” specific to the past twenty years
(“Hettche’s Wound Ethics” 212–14). Rather, the resonances also help to
recognize that material collections of medical specimens present unri-
valled means of studying how past scientific conceptions and practices
have impacted the body and the human sensory apparatus as a function
of particular media, including literature and technological media such as
film. If I may put it another way, with this approach I aim to show that
the scientific and physiological discourses linked to the body represent
not a mere borrowing of scientific and medical words and metaphors,
but rather operate as an integral discursive and conceptual framework
in which scientific (“fact”) and linguistic-literary (“fiction”) categories
mutually contribute to an illumination of human thought and existence.
What is perhaps most critical about the explication of this framework is
not the generation of new literary interpretations in and of themselves,
important though they may be. Rather, it is the realization that Grünbein’s
and Hettche’s approaches to writing and conceptions of discourse allow
them to create fictional medical museums whose operations transcend the
capabilities of physical collections on their own. In other words, these
fictional modes will be shown to represent indispensible ways of probing
the place of science and scientific knowledge in our existence as biological
beings at the turn of the third millennium.
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  277

Museums, Science, and Literature

Because my project introduces considerations of museums in addition

to those of (scientific) fact and (literary) fiction, I  will begin with some
general remarks about how I  am conceiving of literature, science, and
museums. Museums, as I conceive of them, emerge as an integral product
and driver of modernity in Western society. As such, museum operations
involved in the preservation, categorization, and display of past objects
are inseparable from modernity’s generation of innovation, novelty, and
obsolescence. At the same time, public museums’ rise in political, social,
and cultural importance from the nineteenth century on takes place at the
same time as many modern disciplines such as the natural sciences, history,
national literatures, and art history begin to the take the forms they will
have for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than exist
side by side with each other temporally, museums, the sciences, and vari-
ous forms of writing and image making are held to develop in dialectical
relationship to each other.
As the modern arts and sciences differentiated over the nineteenth cen-
tury, distinctions were increasingly made between the material repositories
and material practices deemed relevant to a particular field and the par-
ticular imaginative aspects of those fields, be they narrative, historical, or
theoretical. As they have become naturalized, these divisions have tended
to obscure our sense of the contiguities that exist in thought and practices
as they span the museum and the laboratory on the one side and the areas
in which writing and imaginative processes take place on the other. This
is particularly true for museums, which prior to 1800 tended to be under-
stood, as Wolfgang Ernst argues, as a “cognitive field of ideas, words, and
artifacts whose semiotic inventorying operations made the world read-
able” (“Archi(ve)textures” 18). In conceiving of the museum in this way,
I  therefore wish to construct a new optic through which I  can examine
complex exchanges of ideas and practices between fields and institutions
that change dynamically over time, not only in relation to each other but
also in response to the development of new media based on photographic,
cinematic, or digital technologies.

Anatomical Collections in the Writing of Durs Grünbein

I want to argue that precisely these considerations permeate Durs Grün-

bein’s analysis of scientific collections and displays. Indeed, awareness of
278  Peter M. McIsaac

Berlin’s anatomical collections entered public discussion in no small part

due to an essay Grünbein wrote for the 1992 volume Periphere Museen
in Berlin (Marginal Museums in Berlin), later republished under the title
“In the Museum of Malformations.” As Katharina Gerstenberger has
shown, Periphere Museen was explicitly designed to draw attention to
exhibitory institutions in Berlin with non-mainstream offerings, both as
a means of increasing knowledge of Berlin’s dizzyingly diverse cultural
landscape and out of concern that the transformations affecting the city
might cause these out-of-the-way museums to “fall victim to the unifica-
tion process” (“‘Only the Wall’” 130). Gerstenberger’s global observation,
that the essays in this volume sought “to preserve in writing the legacy of
institutions that might not survive otherwise despite the fact that their pri-
mary mission is to protect their content against oblivion,” is especially apt
with respect to Grünbein’s contribution, even if Gerstenberger portrays
Grünbein’s essay as effectively announcing the ultimate demise of the col-
lections (130). As I will show, this perspective only partially unlocks the
ways museums, science, and literature relate in his work.
In his essay “In the Museum of Malformations,” Grünbein discusses
two of the historically significant collections in Berlin’s history: a collec-
tion founded by Friedrich the Great that was later known as the Gurlt Col-
lection of Anatomical Malformations, and a separate collection founded at
the Humboldt University. What is crucial is that Grünbein prefaces his
discussion of Berlin’s surviving anatomical displays with a framework that
explicitly situates literature with respect to the uncertainties that collec-
tions of physical objects can face in modernity. To accomplish this, Grün-
bein sets the essay’s key considerations with its first three sentences:

How do you write about a museum that no longer exists? What kind of lan-
guage is appropriate for something like this here, something so obviously
wretched, damaged, deplorably neglected, a tiny pile of grotesque junk? Of
a collection that was once unique in Europe, that burned in an air raid in the
Second World War and whose better surviving pieces were then scattered to
the winds, what remains is only a chimera. (221)1

Faced with a collection largely in ruins and a need to work in largely imag-
inary registers, Grünbein frames his project as an act of literary recovery,
reconstruction, and preservation. Key to this project, I want to suggest, is a
choice of discourse capable of achieving at least two things at once: it must
be able to evoke the material specimens themselves in all their complexity
at the same time as it enables a precise historicizing of the collection in
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  279

its socio-political disciplinary contexts from its moments of creation, its

transformations, and its ultimate demise, as Grünbein already begins to
sketch out here. Though the notion of a “chimera” clearly has resonances
reaching back to Greek mythology, the kind of chimera Grünbein has
in mind is in fact a specifically scientific one. As Grünbein immediately
explains about his discourse in a crucial aside, “(biology imposes itself on
the discussion of its own accord. Aren’t chimeras living beings whose bod-
ies possess cells with divergent chromosomal structures; organisms built
out of genetically separate cells?)” (221; original emphasis). As a writer
with extensive training in medicine and biology (Ryan, “Das Motiv”
301–15), Grünbein’s invocation of a biological idiom as the best way to
recover and preserve this anatomy collection is highly meditated and a key
to unlocking his writing and thought.
What deserves immediate attention are the registers this deliberate
choice of discourse makes available for thinking about science, literature,
and museums in the destructive flow of modernity. Grünbein’s turn to
biological discourse serves as a way of plotting the functions of the ana-
tomical and zoological collections with respect to the categories and meth-
odologies variously prevailing in the modern life sciences. With a thick
history-of-science perspective, Grünbein demonstrates that the collecting
of biological specimens formed the living backbone of the nineteenth-
century life sciences. “It is no wonder,” he writes, that the collection
grows rapidly around 1800. It is at this time that Europeans “are starting
to amass great osteological archives, obeying a mania that sees the skulls
of primitive man placed next to those of Greek statuettes, cat skeletons
placed next to torsos in the display vitrines. The age of the taxonomies and
bloodlines has begun” (221–2). As science moves from Goethe, Lavater,
Gall, and various late-eighteenth-century projects of morphology, com-
parative anatomy, and teratology to phylogenetic, Darwinian, and anthro-
pological perspectives many decades later, the collections expand, shift,
and recombine in what Grünbein portrays as a living part of life science
research. “Soon,” he writes, “the collections will massively branch out,
indent like joints (Gelenkteile) or fuse organically to support phyloge-
nies, Darwinism, anthropology” (222). As Grünbein explains, life-science
research programs depend on collections so deeply at this time because
collecting’s core operations work to make biological phenomena visible
and thus comprehensible:2 “But before all this can happen, people collect,
prepare specimens, make inventories, a provisional sense of order comes
into being” (222). Insofar as the processes of collecting and exhibiting feed
knowledge production, the collection’s ability to create order relative to
280  Peter M. McIsaac

prevailing research programs lends the collections their scientific vitality

and viability.
Worth emphasizing about the museum qua life form that Grünbein
sketches out is that he connects the collections and their disciplinary
formations to a substrate of select but revealing political and cultural
impulses. Thus, it is not some abstract quest for knowledge in the life sci-
ences that propels the founding of the veterinary institute and its collec-
tion, but rather a specific recommendation of Friedrich the Great. Though
Friedrich saw fit to clad the school and museum in grand architecture cre-
ated by the designer of the Brandenburg Gate, Carl Gotthard Langhans
(“Im Museum” 222), Friedrich’s motivation for pushing veterinary and
biological research was openly instrumental, if not militaristic: namely, to
improve breeding and treatment of the animals used by the Prussian cav-
alry (224). But if this legacy is still brought to mind by the fact that the
skeleton of Friedrich the Great’s horse Condé has managed to survive the
tribulations that have befallen so much of the other objects in the Gurlt
collection, most of the political impacts in Grünbein’s account relate to
moments of complete loss and destruction. Of the two main branches of
the life science collections Grünbein discusses, one was decimated by an
air raid in the Second World War (223), while the other fell victim to the
“Marxist-Leninist” priorities of the GDR regime (225). In the long view,
then, the upheavals wrought by German unification would appear to pres-
ent only the latest round of disciplinary and professional processes whose
end effect would seem to be the inevitability of the specimens’ ultimate
destruction.
Paradoxically, it is the palpable and highly specific obsolescence of these
anatomical collections that directly bears on their contemporary value.
One thing the Berlin collections can hardly avoid is a kind of historical
reflexivity that demands to be noticed.3 So scarred and miserable are the
collections today that they obtain a kind of meta-significance and self-
referentiality, as Grünbein indicates when he says today’s “collection of
malformations is simultaneously a malformation of what such a collection
could be. And what it once was, at its high point in the age of inventory-
ing and classifying! That this age has passed is something one grasps at one
stroke, perhaps only now and in this space” (224; my emphasis). As the last
sentence makes clear, the apprehension of historical rupture available in
this exhibition space involves much more than a realization that this par-
ticular collection has seen better days or even that the life sciences have in
many ways abandoned collections-based research inquiry. At stake in the
experience of this exhibition space is, rather, the awareness that an entire
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  281

age has passed, precisely due to the disruption of the historically appropri-
ate mode of display. It is precisely what Grünbein calls the “diorama” that
is violated through the East German remaking of the display space. As a
result of the destruction, “theological disputation took the place of the
direct examination of nature and illustrated research. It is as if they wanted
to replace the diorama with official regulations and the display vitrines
with a wall newspaper of unfocused Heimatfotos” (225). The offence
caused by Marxist-Leninist ideological interference is not merely that it
destroyed accumulations of evidence and impeded research based on sci-
entific principles, but that its sense of “progress” entailed the destruction
of the antiquated modes of exhibition Grünbein regards as so characteris-
tic of natural history collections, display vitrines and the diorama, terms
with particular valence in Grünbein’s writing.
The preservation of these antiquated modes of display is crucial to
Grünbein for the way they structure personal and collective memory in
the larger crush of modern media and historical processes. As he writes
in the essay “Childhood in the Diorama,” his ecstatic experiences gazing
at the animal dioramas in Dresden’s Natural History Museum represent
core moments in how he learned to view and organize his knowledge of
the world. Looking back at the museum epiphanies he had as a child, he
writes,

Today it seems to me that in such moments, my entire childhood entered

the diorama. Like the Chinese painter of whom legend has it that he was
absorbed into his finished landscapes, the child’s imago slipped into those
fantastic middle realms of near and far, its ideal place to be. As if a magic
word had been uttered, everything that was there, the exotic and strange
and the familiar objects from home, was intermingled with the fragments
of lived experience (Erlebnisfragmente) from my early years … Here in the
museum they were inventoried as archetypal dream images, and it had to be
possible to call them back up when their time came. The diorama was the
“open sesame” [realm] in which my memories lie stored as primal geographi-
cal motifs. (122–3)

Elsewhere I  have worked with the Benjaminian resonances in this pas-

sage in order to reveal that for Grünbein, the diorama operates as a key
site for the intermingling of personal and collective memory as Benjamin
describes them in his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Benjamin
159; McIsaac, Museums of the Mind 37–8). Important about this argument
for this discussion are two related sets of considerations. The first, which
282  Peter M. McIsaac

I will return to as I turn to Thomas Hettche’s uses of anatomy collections,

involves showing how the diorama becomes a shorthand for the way that
memory, language, science, and museums relate in Grünbein’s thought
and what they might suggest about the relationship of science and litera-
ture, fact and fiction. The second set involves the recognition that Grün-
bein’s Benjaminian conception of the diorama can help to articulate the
stakes of maintaining and encountering antiquated modes of knowledge
production such as natural history displays. From this perspective, and in
accordance with my analysis of Grünbein’s writing above, natural history
displays represent an occasion, to use Benjamin words, to “awaken … the
world from the dream about itself” (Arcades Project 456). That is, the con-
tinuing existence of the diorama presents the opportunity to recognize
that many of the worn-out forms of the nineteenth century – in this case,
antiquated forms of natural history display  – continue to structure our
thinking without our full awareness and without their corresponding in a
productive way to the dynamics of modernity as they exist today.4
Seen this way, the highly damaged form of natural history display as
it exists at the Humboldt University’s veterinary faculty is valuable for
the way it resituates the past in relation to the present. Thus, while the
displays manifest once prevailing organizing principles and modernity’s
destructive effects, their mode of presentation puts them at a remove from
the dynamics of the present day. As a result, a distanced perspective is
enabled on forces whose workings otherwise remain imminent and thus
difficult to apprehend.
Just such a perspective is what Grünbein is looking to develop when he
situates the collection’s “historical examples” of biological malformation
relative to their “modern variants” (“Im Museum” 227). If, as Grünbein
writes, today’s malformations “for good reasons are never shown” in muse-
ums like their historical counterparts, this is not because the malformations
themselves have ceased appearing. Indeed, when Grünbein writes that
what separates the historical examples from today’s variants is “the statisti-
cal magnitude of mutations today,” he sees malformation as an increasing
tendency (227). But in explaining the differences between past and pres-
ent using notions of statistics and mutation, Grünbein also points to shifts
that have taken place in biology and medicine, as morphological typology
has given way to population biology and genetics. In the context of the
Humboldt museum, the absence of modern specimens in museums would
seem to be justified scientifically speaking, with the collections’ obsoles-
cence figuring them as a kind of dead-end in the evolution of those disci-
plinary practices. Yet what is easily overlooked, and what Grünbein’s rich
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  283

discourse strives to recover, is the sense that the earlier specimens fulfilled
functions in the realms of “myth, religion and science” (226). Unwilling to
grant that advances in science mean the end of myth and religion, Grünbein
tracks their movement into institutions and media such as film whose aes-
thetic functions work to assuage the anxiety presented by “the evolution-
ary horror vacui” (226, 227). Without collapsing categories of evolution
and culture, Grünbein’s biological-Benjaminian discourse likewise pushes
the conclusion that whatever progress science and medicine may make
in preventing the malformations that once ended up in the Humboldt’s
collections, natural means of generating evolutionary variation and thus
malformation will be massively accelerated in modern human culture. In
Grünbein’s polemical horror vision, these trends will outpace contempo-
rary habitual norms of life and ethics to such an extent that genetic manipu-
lation will soon permit people to follow the dictates of fashion, spinning
out ghastly visions that will become consumable in ways that make today’s
collections of “ever new phenotypes” resemble “Paris’ semi-annual fashion
shows,” and making contemporary horror film look quaint in the process
(228). A key point about this logic is the notion that unlike old-fashioned
collections, prevailing mainstream media such as film and digital special
effects offer less and less distance from the phenomena they are depicting,
leaving precious little in the way of media that enable deep reflection on
what makes us human. Seen this way, film and other technological media
exert pressure on collections, but not in a straightforward way.
In my reading, Grünbein’s concern is therefore not so much that film
will simply displace collections, as Katharina Gerstenberger has argued,
but that emerging media configurations promise fewer and fewer oppor-
tunities to gain perspective on modernity’s flow (133). The seeming obso-
lescence of physical life-science collections such as the Humboldt’s – and
here it is worth mentioning that Grünbein makes similar arguments about
obsolescence in zoos and natural history museums generally (for instance,
in the essay “Before Mankind Is Alone with Itself”) – is thus something
to be highly prized, particularly when they are probed and engaged by
literary means. At stake in this notion is more than just a validation of
Grünbein’s practice of writing about collections; there is also a recognition
of the physiological bases of what links and valorizes material collections
and literary and other modes of writing. A brief discussion of this point
will help to explicate the place of the diorama in Grünbein’s conception of
fact, fiction, and human thought.
One of the fascinating things about Grünbein’s notion of the diorama
is that it manages to place personal and collective recollections into a kind
284  Peter M. McIsaac

of mental inventory. In Grünbein’s thinking, the capacity of museum dis-

plays to organize thought stands in direct relationship to the neurological
underpinnings of all human cognition. As critics as diverse as Wolfgang
Riedel, Amir Eshel, and Andrea Bachner have respectively argued, human
thought works in a kind of post-post-structuralist way for Grünbein.5 In
contrast to notions such as the Derridian “hors-texte,” which recognize
no ontological reality outside language, Grünbein’s theorization insists
that the only reality that exists for us is generated by the brain situated in
the body. The result is an ascription of a biological reality to all cognitive
activity – what Grünbein calls imagination – that precedes the generation
of images and language. The implications of this “neurological realism”
are not merely that “the body determines what the method is. Behind
the semantic order stands the anatomical,” as Grünbein once put it in the
essay “My Babylonian Brain” (33). Rather, human mental activity, and
especially image production and memory, tend to work in terms of spa-
tial images that are then transformed into forms appropriate to specific
media and discourse such as painting, film, or poetry. Thus, while each
medium retains particularities in Grünbein’s thought, each shares a funda-
mental basis in psychic acts whose neuro-physiological bases allow them
to intersect and draw on each other’s techniques. Crucial is that spatial-
representational layouts such as museum displays figure again and again
as key paradigms for Grünbein’s exploration of the organization of the
human psyche and how it makes sense of the world with all the tools at its
disposal. For this reason, Grünbein states in interviews, “In museums you
can see without interference how the battles of memory have been fought
(Schlachten der Erinnerungsarbeit). Where else could I, in the briefest
amount of time, learn more about the way my brain works?” (68).
It follows from Grünbein’s conceptions that language and literature are
capable of intervening profoundly in the neurological responses related
both to the experience of museum space and to its imagining. This,
I  would argue, is precisely what makes his project of “writing about a
museum that does not exist” more than a documentary or nostalgic exer-
cise. Indeed, it is only when literary techniques invest museum remnants
with knowledge that that which is old, forgotten, damaged, and destroyed
can best be explored in the mind’s eye. But more than this: Grünbein’s
selection of biologized discourse for his discussion of the Humboldt’s life
science collections deserves particular attention if neuro-physiological
acts are posited as the basis of all human thought. For in addition to the
functions I  have tried to illuminate, this discourse also works to signal
that scientific modes of thought can be thought of as integral to every
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  285

human psychic act – including those that are artistic – without collapsing
differences between individual media and discourses. Grünbein’s ability
to deploy this biologized discourse to multiple ends points not only to his
skill as a writer and thinker, but to the key role science and literature, fact
and fiction can play together in order to illuminate deep questions about
ourselves and our place in the world.

Medicalized Bodies and Anatomy in Thomas Hettche’s Prose

Though anatomical media and related commentary surface at many points

in Thomas Hettche’s texts, his 1995 Wenderoman Nox is probably the one
best known for the prominence of its anatomical collections. Yet perhaps
because the malformed bodies and organs in the pathological museum and
the eerie trappings of the adjoining anatomical theatre seem to provide
an almost too perfect backdrop for a novel that stages a graphic murder,
violent sado-masochistic sex acts, and a casting of recent German history
in terms of wounds, pain, and scars, key features of Hettche’s literary
museum have escaped critical notice.6 When read with an understanding
of how literary techniques can intervene in and exploit museum practices,
these features can be shown to illuminate many of Hettche’s core aesthetic
and ethical concerns. These, as I will review in a moment, include the way
the interaction of science, language, and visual media in modernity struc-
ture and maintain a problematic mind-body split. If these have been pro-
ductively analysed in terms of what Andrea Bachner has called a “wound
aesthetic,” some of the functions of the museum in Nox are to depict, in
performative terms, chief conflicts that accompany humanity’s attempts to
grasp itself and where it is ultimately going as a species in terms of science,
language, and culture.
As Nox is a novel whose investment in anatomy cannot be separated
from its basic narrative premises, it will be helpful to say a few words
about that relationship before analysing the anatomical collection’s func-
tions in the text. Taking place on 9 November 1989, Nox’s peculiar anato-
mizing of the text turns on the brutal killing of the narrator. Following
the murder, the narrating mind is radically separated from the body,
which, the text is careful to stress, becomes solely a disembodied object.
This conceit allows the narrator not only to describe his decaying body
using biochemically and medically precise terminology (79), but also to
move omnisciently through the city and relate four interlocking narra-
tive strands: the actions of his murderess, an escaped guard dog from the
East German border, the director of the Charité medical collections, and
286  Peter M. McIsaac

several other protagonists whose stories intertwine via the fall of the Ber-
lin Wall. At the same time, the separation of narrativizing mind and body
qua object breaks the bonds of post-Cartesian subjectivity. As the narra-
tor remarks once death has set in,

The body in which we exist only acts as if it obeys our minds. It alone, how-
ever, actually decides at what we gaze, and we do not notice that the things
we glimpse are what the body wants to see, through eyes indifferent [to our
will]. Only when one is dead does one hear how everything eats away at the
stone in a city. [With my body] now a thing among things, the city opened
itself into my head, and my body reflected its noise. (31)

No longer (mis)perceived as an object to be controlled, the body’s domi-

nance becomes a force to be reckoned with and reimagined in relation to
subsequent acts of seeing, naming, and narrating in the text.
With the body posited as a key determinant in this narrative logic, ana-
tomical “facts” can be shown to be a, if not the, key register in which
the text attempts to depict the consequences of disrupting the traditional
mind-body split. A  major consequence of death opening the narrator’s
body to the movements of the city is that, as several critics have noted,
the city becomes assimilable in bodily terms. Accordingly, areas around
the Berlin Wall, for instance, develop as skin adapts to a wound, pro-
ducing “new layers of skin” and “scar tissue” (89–90) in response to the
Wall’s erection, and then pain when the breach of the Wall reopens the
wound (96–7). That the female protagonist wanders the city without a
name, coherent memories, and the ability to close herself off to the bodies
and experiences and also the anatomized city, signals a peculiar kind of
crisis in identity. Yet as Andrea Bachner and Doerte Bischoff have both
noted, this crisis can be read in terms of narrative perspective that is in the
process of being renegotiated (Bachner 214–20; Bischoff 134). Conceived
with an awareness that it is impossible to simply erase the long history of
the medialized and medicalized body, the renegotiation also moves to the
anatomized body in an underappreciated form: the novel’s harnessing of
the Charité’s medical collections.
Key to grasping the “work” the medical collections perform with respect
to this renegotiation is the registering of the parameters with which the
collections are subtly deployed in the text. Though critics focusing on bot-
tled, stillborn fetuses and malformed organs have tended to overlook it,
the collection first appears in the text through interaction with its fictional
director, Professor Matern of the Berlin Charité. When the reader first
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  287

meets him, Matern is immersed in the active augmentation of the collec-

tion, interestingly enough not through human specimens, but rather medi-
cal technology. Having just received an advanced Japanese pacemaker,
Matern’s immediate response is to position it within the medical collec-
tions: “In the morning, Matern had had the pacemakers brought from the
display cases, where they were normally exhibited next to the internal
prostheses and the artificial organ implants. For today, after extended cor-
respondence and great difficulties with bureaucratic approvals, the little
package Matern had been awaiting for over a year had come in the mail”
(17). As this passage reveals, Hettche’s text takes great pains to situate the
Charité’s collections with respect to prevailing cultural and technological
developments. Confirming the text’s preceding identification of him as the
“Director of the Institute for Pathological Anatomy of the Berlin Charité,
Capital of the GDR” (17), the text places Matern in the privileged position
of being able to have historical artefacts taken off display for his own per-
sonal use. Matern has managed to obtain his prized, foreign-manufactured
display piece after pushing his request through channels that, as a post-
Wende reader might suspect, would have required compelling rationales
for the use of precious hard currency. This marker of his perseverance
testifies to his embeddedness in GDR power structures as they are linked
to a manifest relationship to the objects on display.
A notable aspect of this situation is that a presumably fully operational,
cutting-edge pacemaker goes not into medical use (where it could save or
prolong a life), but straight into a museum collection.7 A strong driver of
this logic is a particular mode of display that, when rendered in textual
form, helps to delineate what museum dynamics contribute to the aes-
thetic argument Hettche mounts in the novel. To see this, it is helpful to
start with the literary strategies. “Professor Matern,” the text reads as it
registers the unfolding museum scene, “pushed the small cardboard boxes
laid out with surgical cotton on his imitation walnut desktop. Pacemakers
from twenty years of medical engineering (Medizintechnik), its progress
legible in the diminishing size of the apparatus. Tiny stickers noted the
years of their introduction into the marketplace” (17). Only after estab-
lishing the presence of the display context in the mind’s eye does the text
shift attention to the set of pacemakers, with their sense of existence as a
grouping of undistinguished elements reinforced by descriptive equiva-
lency (they all hail from the past twenty years) and the lack of a verb that
imparts a sense of synchronous stasis. What the pacemakers represent –
the progress of medical technology  – emerges only upon the introduc-
tion of ordering criteria that, in spite of appearing to inhere in the objects
288  Peter M. McIsaac

themselves, rely on both a particular sequential sweep (big to small) and

the temporal vector (1969–89) established by the tiny labels to valorize
and ascribe meaning to the arrayed objects. Through its use of grammar
and sequence, the text translates display techniques into linguistic equiva-
lents that invite one to notice the operations that work to generate object-
based narratives not as pre-existing entities, but in the performative
moment of reading. One result of this literary strategy is to reveal the idea
of technologically driven medical progress to be a powerful museum effect
simultaneously reflected and illuminated by the text.
The development of the strategy reveals that the desire to make an even
more compelling display of technological progress underwrites Matern’s
acquisition of the foreign pacemaker. After arraying the museum’s extant
collection, Matern

carefully took the device made by the MATSUSHITA ELECTRIC INDUS-

TRIAL CO LTD OSAKA JAPAN from the tiny, polyethylene-lined box no
larger than a box of matches. According to what he had read, the device used
the patient’s body warmth [as an energy source] and so for the first time no
longer required the batteries that had prevented further miniaturization of
pacemakers up until that point. (17–18)

The latest in pacemaker technology in terms of size and performance,

Matern’s new model dramatically expands the argument made by the
“front room” display: medical technology continues to beat back limits
of man and nature. An instantiation of a general Enlightenment trope, this
narrative of progress resonates in particular with prevailing GDR valori-
zations of science, technology, and medicine, insofar as they, in the hands
of socialism, were purported to deliver mankind from myth and the fickle-
ness of nature (Assheuer).8
But if one point of relating the arrival of Matern’s acquisition is to mark
it as being capable of substantiating a particular GDR narrative, a cru-
cial aspect of this scene is how it works to show that Matern’s museum
manifests the contours of contemporary medicine, economy, and culture
in ways potentially at odds with the prevailing ideological dictates of the
day. By introducing the collections via Matern’s “behind the scenes” per-
spective, the text constructs a display in which the identity of the most
advanced model figures prominently (“the MATSUSHITA ELECTRIC
INDUSTRIAL CO LTD OSAKA JAPAN”). If placed on an exhibit label,
this information might well shift the pacemakers’ narrative about “human-
ity’s inexorable march towards progress” to one in which capitalist entities
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  289

play an important, if not the leading, role. Yet in the “front room” version
of this narrative as it is depicted on display labels, the centrality of capital-
ism as a driver of late-twentieth-century modernity is literally made small,
appearing on tiny labels showing devices’ “year of introduction into the
marketplace” (17; my emphasis). It is in the margins, Hettche’s text guides
the reader to see, and not in the main display, that this GDR museum
has its finger on the pulse of modernity, a modernity whose ubiquitous,
market-driven realities cannot be denied, only pushed into the back-
ground. But only for so long: for, in a kind of dramatic irony the post-
Wende reader can readily grasp, that very modernity is about to render
the “front room” version of things prevailing on 9 November 1989 itself a
kind of museum piece.9 With dynamics captured in textually unique ways,
Nox’s museum is made to show itself as an assemblage of specimens and
artefacts dialectically indexing the conditions that have promoted its mak-
ing and use, as well as its destruction and abuse, throughout its existence.
Yet what enables Hettche’s narrative to harness the revelatory capacities
of the museum (and later also the anatomical theatre) for its own intellec-
tual and aesthetic purposes is its sustained attention to Matern’s interac-
tions with those environments. Taking a variety of forms, these interactions
repeatedly showcase the ability of exhibitory environments to generate
narratives shaped by the minds and knowledge of those who engage them.
In the case of the pacemaker display, the information that clinches the
new device’s seamless fit into the extant array originates in Matern’s head
(“according to what he had read”).10 Once revealed as an essential element
in the textual display’s construction of sequence and meaning, cognitive
acts become possible and in fact highly flexible sources of components and
information, creating a form of composite discourse capable of referencing
subjective and objective registers at the same time.11 This double-voiced
quality is precisely what is manifested when, for instance, Matern leads
students through the Charité’s historical collection. By keeping signals
that Matern is moving and speaking with an audience to a minimum (an
exception is the “you can see” reported on p. 25), long passages become
indistinguishable from interior monologues (23–4; also 83–8). While not
strictly necessary in terms of plot – the routine and nature of guided tours
means readers would otherwise probably grasp them as containing a
subjective dimension  – this strategy of inscribing an interior dimension
accomplishes three interrelated things. First, in showing Matern in a posi-
tion of recognized authority, it demonstrates his extensive knowledge of
the collections and their functions in a textually economic way. Second,
this dimension foregrounds Matern’s thorough personal identification
290  Peter M. McIsaac

with the collections (including his obsession with anatomy and museum
icon Rudolf Virchow). Together, these help to naturalize several passages
in which Matern is in effect interpreting and activating the collection for
the reader when no audience is involved. In important ways, Matern is
thus the conduit through which the collection is activated and passed into
the present in the text, with the text also working to make the pathological
collection and anatomical theatre museums of his mind.
Such a condition is important in no small part because it is through
Matern that the novel spells out many of the historical features that help
connect the plotlines of 1989 to the fault lines of (malformed) body and
(wounded) city reaching back to the early nineteenth century. But if these
emphases make the Charité, as Katharina Gerstenberger aptly puts it,
into “a center of monstrous exchanges” that describes the ways in which
humanity’s darker tendencies will anything but disappear in the present
day (138), it is crucial to recognize that Matern’s comments often refer,
in self-reflexive fashion, to important functions the museum has in the
text. When, for instance, Matern explains the museum’s value as “a piece
of cultural history of humanity” (25), he articulates the premise that
I  have shown underwrites the museum’s operation from the moment it
appears in the novel. Along similar lines, after showing Matern in the act
of expanding the collection, the text explains that his pet project consisted
of “the reconstruction of Rudolf Virchow’s collection, which had been
nearly completely destroyed in the war” (23). But more than confirm
these aspects of the museum’s function in the text, Nox has Matern per-
form and also comment on acts related to dissection and reanimation of
organic tissue that, when understood in terms of the performative process,
yield fresh insight into the place of anatomy in Hettche’s approach to sci-
ence, narrative, and media.
Crucial scenes involve a dog skeleton that Matern keeps next to the desk
in his office. Symbolically rich, the skeleton carries particular significance
because it connects to the core topoi in the text. The remains of a German
shepherd that had once guarded the Wall, the skeleton references both the
topic of German-German division as well as the living animal that follows
the murderess through the city of Berlin. More crucial still is that the skel-
eton became a specimen as part of Matern’s only partially successful plan
to reconstitute the museum as it was maintained by its founding patholo-
gist, Rudolf Virchow. As the text recalls,

There was too little room for the human skeleton that can be seen in the old
photos of Rudolf Virchow’s offices … and that stood next to the high win-
dow as if it were looking out into the summer light. But Matern had a new
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  291

dog specimen prepared like the one that had sat on Virchow’s desk for some
thirty years. He had thought of a small dog, a terrier perhaps, that would not
be too large for the desk. When a dead German shepherd was brought to him,
he had to put it on the floor. (18)

Bowing to what the space and situation will allow, Matern’s attempt to
emulate Virchow is significant for how, in museal terms, it works as a
metaphor for the impossibility of achieving anything like seamless res-
toration of a lost condition. For what Matern (or anyone familiar with
these canonical photos) must see in entering his office are the gaps left by
the missing skeleton and the almost farcical reincarnation of Virchow’s
dog. A synecdoche for the near total loss of Virchow’s legacy, these gaps
function as a kind of museal scar that testifies to the forever altered state
of tissue marked by a cut or wound. Though no doubt also meant to rep-
resent Matern’s outsized and malformed ego, the distorted reinstallation
of Virchow’s office works to capture the contours of his larger museal
ambition in ways that perfectly align with what Andrea Bachner has called
Hettche’s “wound aesthetic” (212–14). For no matter what Matern does,
his restorative project cannot but express that he is working on terrain –
both literally the Charité collections, buildings, and grounds the text
depicts as ruins (124–6) and the state of German culture, figuratively  –
that will carry the marks of what has come before even as it is reworked
as an embodiment of the present. A metaphor that captures the thrust of
the wound aesthetic in the physical and spatial registers of the museum
as a dialectical index of its day, the dead guard dog shows its difference
vis-à-vis Virchow’s day not only in size and location, but also in being the
deadly by-product of the Berlin Wall.
Especially striking in this context is Hettche’s focus on Matern’s cogni-
tive responses to the dog:

Matern did not know that when it came to the cadaver, it was that of a dead
guard dog from the border that one had taken to the rendering facility near
the sewage fields in the north-eastern part of the city. When Matern looked
down at the dog skeleton, he always involuntarily completed its form with
muscles, fat, coat, ears, eyes and flews. And there was always a moment of
uncertainty in the process, when it also seemed possible that he was consti-
tuting a completely different animal in his head. (18–19)

Highly significant as a general comment on how meaning is made in muse-

ums, Matern’s mental restoration of the dog to full form inflects several of
Hettche’s core concerns. The covering over of an object whose origins are
292  Peter M. McIsaac

imperfectly known can be read in one register as an allegory of the fate of

the past transmitted in museum contexts.12 Crucial, too, is the seemingly
irresistible propensity to seek wholeness out of parts. In this sense, this
museum scene resonates with a variety of related subtexts, most promi-
nently the Platonian “one out of two” myth of sexual origins retold by
none other than the living counterpart of Matern’s specimen, the escaped
guard dog that follows the murderess as she wanders the city (158–9).13
Yet in being unable to avoid feeling like he might come up with the
wrong animal altogether, Matern, in his mental animation of the dead
canine, does more than urge caution with respect to the “fictionality” of
cognitively produced wholeness in historical or sexual registers. Anima-
tion and its discontents, rather, tie directly into Hettche’s larger diagnoses
of what ails modern society and culture in terms of media, thought, and
knowledge. As explored in Hettche’s correspondingly titled 1999 book
Animationen (Animations), the idea of “animation” serves as a way of ref-
erencing the socio-scientific problems posed by embodiment in represen-
tation and media, particularly in the aftermath of the Cartesian mind-body
and subject-object splits (94–5). Whereas in Nox these splits are explored
in the topography of a divided Berlin as I began to describe above, in Ani-
mationen they are excavated in the context of Venice, a terrain marked by
not only divides such as between land and sea (43–51) but also by a long,
intertwining history of publishing and medicine (82–101). Read in terms
of how gaze, word, and image work to disentangle the problem posed by a
body whose inner workings cannot be grasped without destructive dissec-
tion (88–9), Hettche’s Venetian-centred genealogy seizes on the innova-
tions of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica and early-modern
anatomy theatres as the first instances when the dissecting, scientific gaze
seemed to evade the aporias of the dead body (98). Marking not just what
Hettche considers to be “the beginning of modern science” (83; original
emphasis to show quote from O’Malley and Saunders, Illustrations 19),
in this account the schooling of the gaze offered by scientific anatomy
decisively set the coordinates of modern word, image, and media. Insofar
as media “following the anatomical theatre” are tasked with “supplant-
ing the opened dead body” (98),14 the history of media involves not ways
of producing “fictions,” as Hettche goes on to write, but rather “feats of
engineering” that align representations (Abbilder) so as to defeat aware-
ness of the dead or dissected body (98).
Seen this way, acts of animation as Matern performs them on the dead
guard dog need to be regarded not as departures into falsehood, as common-
sense understandings of fiction might have it. Rather, such acts stand in
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  293

relation to techniques of medial representation whose practice will be his-

torically conditioned. As a repository of specimens preserved according to
prevailing conventions and practices, the medical museum thus emerges as
a paradigmatic site for plumbing the past and present techniques of “ani-
mation.” As was the case with Grünbein, however, museum techniques’
ability to generate insights of this kind get significant boosts when trans-
lated into literary registers, revealing the processes of exposing and hiding
(Hettche’s “feats of engineering”) that enable objects and bodies to signify
in comfortable or scientifically appropriate fashion. It is in literary dis-
course, that is, as fiction, that Hettche mobilizes the museum as dialectical
index of modernity.
At the same time, it might be too simple just to ignore literature’s com-
plicity in the violence and suffering it clearly works to explore. As if to drive
home the point that the production of image and narrative in the present
day and age remains tethered to the ongoing cutting and fragmenting of
bodies, Nox stages a second animation scene. Set in the middle of a long
interior monologue in which Matern reconstructs in his mind the forces that
brought Virchow and countless bodies from the east to Berlin until being
stopped by the Wall (86–7), Matern again turns to the dog on the floor:

Standing at the door, he looked as always once more at the dog skeleton
on the floor and tried to stretch skin over the bones. And in fact saw for a
moment coat and ears and snout and how the animal panted and moved and
looked up at him. It has yellow eyes Matern thought as they gazed at him.
He hastened over to the anatomical theatre, as the dissection lecture rooms
used to be called. (87)

Though similar to the act of animation in the opening pages, this instance
works to introduce the anatomical theatre not only as physically proxi-
mate to the medical collection, but also as conceptually part of the same
scientific-medial complex. Though standing in the tradition of the old the-
atres in “Bologna, Amsterdam or Cracow” (87), Nox’s anatomical theatre
functions in medial terms the text likens to those of cinema. Outfitted
with penetrating lights and a finely wrought stainless steel table so as to
become the equivalent of a giant, mechanical eye (87–8), the theatre also
works such that Matern believes that “the soundtrack (Synchronisation)
in the theatre of anatomy is the scream” (88). One reason for this associa-
tion might be that, as an institution always in dialogue with the dominant
media of the day, Nox’s theatre might be expected to generate images in
line with today’s dominant media, film, television, and digital imaging.
294  Peter M. McIsaac

That these media are no less implicated in the production of pain than
earlier media is perhaps one point of making the anatomical theatre the
site not just of a cinematic sado-masochistic orgy, but also of the transfer
of Charité footage of decaying bodies that most critics take to be of Nazi
human experimentation (87, 102–3, 128; Gerstenberger 138).
What literature might achieve through this kind of gesture is a reversal of
what Hettche calls the “feats of engineering,” the medial adjustments that
render the suffering intrinsically wrought by representation impercep-
tible. Seen that way, the deployment of museum and anatomical theatres
as self-reflexive indices of modern science and media might be regarded
as showing that the inclusion of cuts and wounds and pain represents the
only ethical way to produce images and narratives. That critics until now
have yet to fully grasp the self-reflexive and media-critical work done by
medical collections in Nox perhaps reveals the limits of such a strategy, if
the key question is whether a text can be made less complicit in the images
it produces by its demand that readers notice its self-reflexivity. However
that question of complicity is answered, what cannot be overlooked is that
Hettche’s writing, like that of Grünbein, shows that literary techniques
remain uniquely capable of showing why fiction matters, precisely in the
context of biology and medicine.

NOTES

1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

2 Precisely these developments inform the phenomena Dana Weber, in her
chapter in this volume, explores with respect to the ethnographic uses of
mannequins in the nineteenth century.
3 Dana Weber’s reading of nineteenth-century mannequins picks up on this
dynamic, in which death, absence, and memory are involved in a complex
interplay that becomes more apparent with changing historical conditions
(see Weber, chapter 12, below).
4 On the mimetic conventions and mechanisms that accompany this kind of
display using human figures, see Dana Weber’s chapter in this volume.
5 The argument in this paragraph rehearses points I have made on p. 31 in
Museums of the Mind.
6 Most treatments of the museum and anatomical theatre in Nox, while
thoughtful, nonetheless focus on thematic and plot-related resonances. See
Magenau 18; Dahlke, “Sexing Berlin” 89–90; Gerstenberger 137–8; Bischoff,
“Berlin Cuts” 134; Bachner 226–7.
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  295

7 Though often theorized as institutions that obtain objects whose usefulness

has expired, the Pathological Museum defies this expectation.
8 This subtext resonates with Matern’s belief that the Charité collection had
been swept into the city by two centuries of superstition.
9 The text’s rendering of small but telling details in the construction of the dis-
plays also contributes to this irony. Though appropriate on some level to the
idea of surgical intervention, a notable contrast nonetheless exists between
the use of cheap surgical gauze to present the pacemakers and the device’s
increasing technological sophistication (17). Similarly, the text draws atten-
tion to the use of tiny nails and fishing line to construct a display of historical
surgical instruments in the space behind Matern (17). However functional,
these approaches belie a museum left to scrap and scrimp as it struggles to do
justice to the historical and monetary value of the artefacts and possessions in
its collections.
10 The original German (“Das Gerät, wie er gelesen hatte, nutze …”) implies
Matern had read this information before his unpacking of the device, but
a cognitive dimension would still be in operation, even if the scene were
taken to refer to an act of reading commensurate with the opening of
the box.
11 It is worth observing that cognitive registers are not limited by material con-
straints in the way that exhibit labels are (which often cannot exceed more
than a few hundred words), even as they are capable of supplying context in
comparable ways. In other ways, cognitive registers can be used to represent
information the museum visitor takes in or associates with a display but
whose multivalence is not fully grasped, creating contexts that suggest uncon-
scious and other complex cognitive operations.
12 These processes are nicely unpacked in the context of past and present dis-
plays of human mannequins in Dana Weber’s chapter in this volume.
13 Through this doubling, Hettche also seems to shows an awareness of the
enlivening dimension involved in his own act of storytelling.
14 In the original, “ersetzen” carries a range of meanings including “displace,”
“restore,” “replace,” and “compensate for,” all of which shade Hettche’s point
in different ways. “Und alle Medien in der Nachfolge des anatomischen The-
aters suchen wesentlich, diesen geöffneten Leib zu ersetzen.”

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Assheuer, Thomas. “Die Olympiade der Leichen. Der Tabubruch erreicht

eine neue Qualität: Gunther von Hagens’ Körperwelten ziehen in ein
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Hamburger Erotik-Museum. ” Die Zeit 35 (21 August 2003). http://www.zeit.

de/2003/35/K_9arperwelten.
Bachner, Andrea. “Thomas Hettche’s Wound Ethics.” German Quarterly 82.2
(2009): 212–30.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999).
–  “Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus.” In
Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1974.
–  “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New
York: Schocken, 1968.
Bischoff, Doerte. “Berlin Cuts: Stadt und Körper in Romanen von Nooteboom,
Parei und Hettche.” GegenwartsLiteratur: A German Studies Yearbook 4
(2005): 111–42.
Dahlke, Birgit. “Sexing Berlin.” German Life and Letters 64.1 (2011): 83–94.
Ernst, Wolfgang. “Archi(ve)textures of Museology.” In Museums and Memory.
Ed. Susan A. Crane. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. 18–34.
Eshel, Amir. “Diverging Memories? Durs Grünbein’s Mnemonic Topographies
and the Future of the German Past.” German Quarterly 74.4 (2001): 407–16.
Gerstenberger, Katharina. “‘Only the Wall Put a Stop to the Inflow of Monsters’:
Bodies and Borders in Post-Wall Berlin.” Studies in 20th and 21st Century Lit-
erature 28.1 (2004): 126–51.
Grünbein, Durs. “Im Museum der Mißbildungen.” In Galilei vermißt Dantes
Hölle und bleibt an den Massen hängen: Aufsätze 1989–1995. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. 221–8.
–  “Kindheit im Diorama.” In Galilei vermißt Dantes Hölle und bleibt an den
Massen hängen: Aufsätze 1989–1995. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996.
117–28.
–  “Mein babylonisches Gehirn.” In Galilei vermißt Dantes Hölle und bleibt an
den Massen hängen. 18–33.
Grünbein, Durs, and Heinz-Norbert Jocks. Durs Grünbein im Gespräch mit
Heinz-Norbert Jocks. Cologne: Dumont, 2001.
Hettche, Thomas. Animationen. Cologne: Dumont, 1999.
–  Nox. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1995.
Magenau, Jörg. “Der Körper als Schnittfläche.” In Wespennest. Zeitschrift für
brauchbare texte und bilder 102 (1996): 12–20.
McIsaac, Peter. Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of
Collecting. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2007.
O’Malley, Charles, and J.B. Dec. M. Saunders. The Illustrations from the Works
of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels. New York: World Publishing Co., 1950.
 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind  297

Riedel, Wolfgang. “Poetik der Präsenz: Idee der Dichtung bei Durs Grünbein.”
Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 24.1 (1999):
82–105.
Ryan, Judith. “Das Motiv der Schädelnähte bei Durs Grünbein.” In Schreiben
nach der Wende. Ein Jahrzehnt deutscher Literatur: 1989–1999. Ed. Gerhard
Fischer and David Roberts. Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 2001. 305–15.
12 Vivifying the Uncanny: Ethnographic
Mannequins and Exotic Performers
in Nineteenth-century German
Exhibition Culture

a. dana weber

The use of mannequins in ethnographic displays is common in German

museums and exhibitions of all kinds. Although regarded as a problem-
atic, even obsolete, display form,1 mannequins continue a lively existence
as media of ethnic and cultural representation. Such objects pose a major
paradox: their three-dimensional human appearance occasionally over-
shadows their designated function as display aid for original ethnographic
objects, so that audiences might only too easily mistake them for the dis-
play goals instead. In other words, the human likeness and tangibility of
the mannequin inadvertently complicates its exhibition purpose, calling
for an accurate circumscription of its ontological condition with signifi-
cant consequences for the interplay between fact and fiction in the pro-
duction and reception of these museum displays.
This chapter  theorizes the ethnographic mannequin’s medial condi-
tion as situated between the lifeless, albeit life-like, and therefore uncanny
object used in the service of cultural representation, and the cultural per-
former who often served as its model.2 The claim is that, in terms of audi-
ence reception, the mannequin’s potential uncanniness emerges as the
imaginary reverse of the delight caused by its inspiration and flip side, the
living human performer.
I read these contradictory yet related reactions through the lenses of Sig-
mund Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” and Eric Ames’s “vivification,”
which conceptualize receptive imagination with the help of literary fic-
tion as paradigm for interpreting the facts of external reality. The theoreti-
cal focus on these two “domain[s], emotional movement[s], concept[s]”3
helps account for the reasons why the mannequin has survived to this day
as a means of mediating cultural information. Beyond their literary foun-
dation, both concepts coincide in their performative spin: just as scientific
 Vivifying the Uncanny  299

and aesthetic interpretations of external facts (at least in these two theories)
follow an analytical dynamic that deconstructs the scrutinized object, one
can conceptualize theatrical roles as the fragmentation of human behav-
iour and its subsequent reconstruction on stage.
By following this line of argument, the chapter  complements Peter
McIsaac’s incisive analysis of the effect of museum techniques on the cre-
ation of literary fictions which are guided by equally transgressive and
fragmenting strategies. While McIsaac explores how display ideologies
and methods have informed the German literary imagination in the last
decades, this analysis is interested in how, a century earlier, audience per-
ceptions of tangible museal and entertainment displays of human-shaped
objects and human beings were influenced by the literary fiction as guiding
principle for engaging with the culturally unfamiliar. At this time, when
numerous new media technologies appeared and the market for print
products increased dramatically, fiction texts offered accessible and ubiq-
uitous models for imagining ontological and cultural Others. Although in
time this mode of conceptualizing imagination changed under the impact
of audiovisual media,4 it still (and famously) came into play in numerous
of Freud’s writings – not least in his seminal essay “The Uncanny” (1919).
In theorizing “vivification,” Ames also acknowledges literary fictions as
crucial element for the reception of turn-of-the-century exotic shows.
Read together, McIsaac’s and the current essay reveal that, at least in the
last two centuries, the processes of imagination that shape aesthetic cre-
ation and reception have relied on the indissoluble bind between literary
fictions and scientific and performed facts.

1.  Turn-of-the-Century Technologies of Human Representation

One finds mannequins in exhibitions worldwide. This article focuses on

such exhibits in German locations because the theories used to describe
them were designed in or in reference to German-speaking cultures. Cer-
tainly, this correspondence is not obligatory and one could just as easily
select other examples to discuss naturalistic museum figures. Nonetheless,
drawing from German contexts ensures not only the cultural cohesiveness
of the argument, but also integrates the article into the cultural framework
of this collection.
Ethnographic mannequins range from hyper-realistic and lifelike to
abstract and stylized ones. They were and continue to be used to display
ethnographic items and artefacts and to illustrate scenes from the lives
of distant cultures. I  am interested particularly in those that represent
300  A. Dana Weber

individual human beings with a high degree of realism. Not coinciden-

tally, the heyday of these objects was in the last decades of the nineteenth
and the first of the twentieth centuries, that is, in a period of rapid tech-
nological innovation that brought forth audiovisual recording media such
as photography, film, and the phonograph. These technologies made pos-
sible the precise recording of human bodies and significantly affected their
hyper-exact reproduction with various materials. During the same era, the
emergence of modern scientific disciplines such as anthropology, ethnol-
ogy, and ethnomusicology (which, in their turn, profited from this media
development) impacted the foundation and design of Germany’s imperial
museums and exhibitions.5 Not least, as this was also a time of innovations
in entertainment technologies and genres, the boundaries between fact and
fiction, scientific display and spectacle were not always drawn clearly.
Unlike other media and exhibition modes of this era that soon became
obsolete, the ethnographic mannequin has not disappeared for reasons
that this argument hopes to illuminate with the help of two examples:
the figure of a Piegan Blackfoot woman exhibited in the Native Ameri-
can exhibition at the Karl-May-Museum in Radebeul near Dresden6 ( fig-
ure 12.1) and the figure of an Australian Aboriginal dancer from the Tiwi
islands displayed at the Grassi Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig (Grassi
Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig) ( figure 12.2). While controversial,
the Karl-May-Museum’s Native American exhibition7 is one of the sig-
nificant German collections of Indian arts and artefacts.8 Modelled by
artists Vittorio Güttner (1869–1937) and Ernst Grämer (1899–1966), its
mannequins, busts, and sculptures depict major indigenous groups from
the North American continent (Hoffmann, “Zur Geschichte” 109–10).9
Nevertheless, their main function is that of display structures for the
museum’s original ethnographic objects. Most of the figures look static,
according to the taste of the time when they were created, the first decades
of the twentieth century. Only their flexed legs or bent elbows suggest
some movement. Among them, the “costume figure” of a young Piegan
woman10 stands out. Portrayed in an upright position, “she” serves to
present a spectacular dress of mountain sheep leather richly decorated
with the teeth of a Wapity stag (Dräger and Krusche, “Ausstellung” 78).
The figure holds a bag and wears exquisite beaded accessories as well as
indigenous jewellery of silver and bone. Its relaxed appearance invites
immediate fantasizing: one can easily imagine that “she” has stopped dur-
ing a leisurely stroll, perhaps because “she” encountered a friend or the
viewer. The Piegan mannequin’s almost impishly smiling lifelike coun-
tenance attracts the attention of less adept visitors (such as the author)
Figure 12.1  Piegan woman, Karl-May-Museum Radebeul, near Dresden (1928).
Copyright by Karl-May-Museum Radebeul. Photos courtesy of Karl-May-
Museum.
302  A. Dana Weber

Figure 12.2  Aboriginal from the Tiwi Islands, Australia. Grassi Museum für
Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen
(2009). (Photograph by Birgit Scheps-Bretschneider.)

immediately, just a moment before they become aware of its superb origi-
nal attire.
Nearly one hundred kilometres away, at the Grassi Museum of Ethnol-
ogy in Leipzig, a diorama features the figure of a middle-aged Aboriginal
dancer whose process of creation and exhibition is far better documented
than that of the Piegan woman.11 This figure’s composite portrait of a
father and a son was created on the basis of photographs. By collaborating
with the figure’s two Aboriginal models, their families, and cultural com-
munity, the makers of the exhibit took pains to ensure that the manne-
quin offers both an accurate and a dignified depiction of an imaginary yet
lifelike figure and a specific culture. The mannequin shows the dancer in
the final moment of a Pukumani burial ritual. On such occasions, dances
can last for days to honour and please the souls of the deceased so that
 Vivifying the Uncanny  303

they return to reincarnate. Visibly exhausted, the dancer steps forward.

Far from having a static appearance, the figure lifts arms and hands that
hold two ornamented spear-tips called tungaliti and tungatini. These pres-
tige objects reveal their owner’s respected position in the community. The
dancer’s gesture indicates that the satisfied soul has finally departed, and
the community is allowed to restart its everyday life. The figure’s facial
expression is calm and kindly but, to a sensitive and empathetic observer,
“his” eyes may appear moist from effort and rapture.
Oftentimes, visitors who encounter objects such as the Piegan and the
Aboriginal mannequins experience the “peculiar emotional effect of the
thing” (Freud, “Uncanny” 227) as a “disquieting strangeness” (Cixous 525)
or even disgust. Others are fascinated by them and wish to learn more
about the cultures they represent.12 Thus, although they are meant to ren-
der cultural information in the most accessible and  – in the absence of
living individuals – in the most realistic three-dimensional manner, man-
nequins usually elicit reactions that are difficult to pinpoint and describe.
They are caused by the viewer’s imaginative engagement with the object
that subtly complements, even overrides, the pragmatic and scientific
facts these figures are called upon to convey. In other words, such exhib-
its may inadvertently evoke spontaneous fantasizing although they are
designed to render facts. As facts and fictions intermingle in them, man-
nequins have the potential to puzzle us with their tangible and life-sized
human form and to confront us with an ontological and hermeneutic
conundrum.
Theorizing the ontological status of three-dimensional objects made to
portray human beings – from statues, dolls, and robots to waxworks fig-
ures and ethnographic mannequins – cannot dispense with the Freudian
concept of the uncanny that approaches them via their fundamental onto-
logical ambiguity: although they are inanimate things, they often appear
eerily alive to their viewers. Theories of the uncanny such as Freud’s and
Ernst Jentsch’s (to whom Freud was responding) tend to focus on the
lifelessness of the human-like object and its effect on the viewer’s psyche
without paying much attention to the living person who may have served
as its model. The role of imagination in such perceptions can be extended
if mannequins used for cultural representation are theorized in conjunc-
tion with their models, some of whom performed in turn-of-the-century
exotic shows (Völkerschauen in germanophone countries).13
This association makes sense especially in the case of hyper-exact ethno-
graphic mannequins like the two described earlier. The stress here is on the
304  A. Dana Weber

hyper-exactness of the depiction, although the identity of the represented

person may be uncertain as in the case of the Piegan woman or factually
inexistent as in the case of the Tiwi dancer. The high degree of accuracy of
such human portraits, produced industrially since the last decades of the
nineteenth century, resulted from the fact that they were created either
from three-dimensional plaster imprints or from model sittings and pho-
tographs of living individuals. As performances of “commercial ethnog-
raphy” (Bruckner 233), exotic shows corresponded to museum exhibits
insofar as they too presented foreign artefacts and cultural aliens, albeit in
a live theatrical context. Such performances animated what stood frozen in
ethnographic mannequins and dioramas, making possible

what museum exhibitions could not: they presented the foreign humans in
the original  – living, moving, speaking bodies  … The Völkerschau repre-
sented what was [regarded as] typical for a specific ethnicity. Its performers
presented traditional clothing, instruments, and objects, and they performed
mundane activities that were considered as characteristic [for the represented
groups, as well as] profane, and religious ceremonies. (Lange 57–9)14

In short, the Völkerschau breathed life into the exhibits of ethnographic

and anthropological museums. The doubling of the living person by his
or her objectification in display allows the discussion of these two forms
of ethnic and ethnographic display as opposite poles of a spectrum of rep-
resentation and medialization that depends on modes of spectating and
problematizes the relationship between scientific facts and the fictions
emerging in their contemplation.
One might claim that, in principle, any medium is at once an effigy and
a replica: Technological media purport to convey information about a
segment or aspect of transient life, yet can potentially replicate it indefi-
nitely. The recorded information is, however, not the life it purports to
present and therefore always calls attention to something that is missing
ontologically. In this sense, all media constitute effigies because – even in
live broadcasting  – they always mark the absence of tangible presences.
The tension between external reality and medial effigy is particularly
pronounced when the medium’s external form does not reveal its onto-
logical condition immediately, for example, when it adopts the shape of a
human being. (In contrast, neither the writing on the page or the screen
nor audiovisually recorded information can be touched as self-standing
physical entity or even remotely resemble the outer appearance of any
 Vivifying the Uncanny  305

living being, so that the difference between medium and the existential
status of the human receiver always remains clear.) Mark B. Sandberg’s
concept of the effigy includes the mannequin as only one “tangible mani-
festation of a wider array of circulating corporeal traces and effects” that,
in the last decades of the nineteenth century, aimed to fill in the places of
absent persons while offering “new possibilities for imagining space and
time” (Living Pictures 5). Wax figures, Sandberg’s object of investigation,
and ethnographic mannequins are such replacements. Like photography
or film, they implicitly convey to their viewers that the represented indi-
viduals and their cultural contexts are absent temporally, spatially, or both.
By one and the same gesture, ethnographic dioramas and exhibits serve as
records of geographic, cultural, and personal information as well as evi-
dence of its physical absence. Britta Lange therefore identifies such objects
as symptoms of the fundamental paradox of ethnology: the attempt to
depict absent cultures while claiming their immediacy (140–1). This para-
doxical relationship between presence and the lack thereof has the poten-
tial to confuse viewers’ perceptions of the objects that imply it, triggering
the reaction of imagining them as uncanny. And yet, as will become appar-
ent later, imagination also has the power to rescue the mannequin if the
latter contains a certain amount of representational inexactitude: precisely
by giving some leeway to imagination, an inaccurate human representa-
tion in fact makes possible a quicker and more exact ontological ascription
and therefore opens space for delight.
Like the naturalistic life-size statues, late-nineteenth-century ethno-
graphic figures also occupy “the same volume as the real body” they
portray (Flynn, Body in Three Dimensions 21). Although the wax figures
of panopticons or cabinets of curiosities are identical with them in this
regard, they were usually designed to be unique and perishable and to
represent celebrities and well-known historical, spectacular, or fictional
scenes. Instead, museum mannequins were created to be reproducible and
durable, and to represent anonymous individuals in mundane or extraor-
dinary scenes from the lives of “exotic” cultures (Lange 69). The actual
information they conveyed through original objects and accurate cultural
contexts was (ideally) obtained by direct scientific, cultural, and personal
interactions of Europeans with the represented groups. Since this specific
information was ultimately presented by means of generic, homogenized
human types, however, an abundance of scientific facts was transmitted on
the basis of their shortage on an individual level. Precisely the lack of per-
sonal information in the mannequin constitutes a major point of critique
306  A. Dana Weber

for this medium because such a depersonalized mode of representation is

not only guided by but also invites an objectifying, oftentimes colonial,
and levelling perspective in contemplation.
The anonymity of mannequins also stands in contrast to their high
degree of aesthetic realism. Long before the advent of the museum fig-
ure, the tendency towards an idealized naturalism in European sculp-
ture already manifested itself in “objects which directly mimic the
body – dolls, waxworks, automata, robots – [that] have been present as
sculpture’s doppelgänger, or double, since time immemorial” (Flynn 7).
Whereas naturalistic sculpture and body mimicry share the same quest
for accurate representation, however, waxworks models, death masks,
or plaster effigies – many of them produced as direct imprints of human
body parts – do not serve primarily as means of aesthetic expression but
oftentimes as memento mori of deceased individuals (16–17). Such objects
fulfil a recording function comparable to that of photography, yet they
conserve human features also for tangible memory. As three-dimensional,
exact-scale records of past persons that broadcast from the ever-absent
netherworld, such objects potentially become “uncanny presence[s] for
the spectator” (21), and therefore fully deserve the designation of “media”
in its entire ambivalence.
A person’s absence owing to death complicates the effect of ethno-
graphic mannequins further. Although the individuals who serve as mod-
els for such figures are usually alive at the moment when their likeness
is taken, their personal historicity inevitably associates them with death
sooner or later. For example, if the model for the Piegan woman was still
alive in the 1920s,15 she cannot possibly be alive anymore today. Simi-
larly, the Aboriginal’s portrait conflates the likenesses of a father and a
son because the initial model, the father, passed away during the lengthy
production process of the figure.16 Even if they were modelled from living
humans, the ontological condition of such objects gradually and inevi-
tably shifts to that of memorabilia of the deceased as they outlive their
models and makers. The ethnographic mannequin accrues its function as
a memento mori only inadvertently, given that it is designed specifically
to transmit scientifically ratified, not personal information. And yet, this
function resonates permanently beyond its purportedly objective, natu-
ralistic surface.
Both the mannequin and the body souvenir were created by technologi-
cal methods that served to replace earlier and even eerier forms of human
representation, such as taxidermied human bodies. In them, the human
epidermis generated another type of memento mori of individuals who
 Vivifying the Uncanny  307

were paradoxically present and absent at once thanks to the tangible pres-
ence of their skins. This proved to be also the most problematic aspect
of such specimens. Not only did human skin cause problems for mount-
ing and preservation, but it also had an eerie effect on viewers because it
highlighted the person’s genuine dead-ness and thus the object’s artificial-
ity (Lange 111). A classical example for such an exhibit is that of Angelo
Soliman’s body, the “Moor of Vienna” (Mohr von Wien), an African-
born Freemason, valet, and tutor at the court of Liechtenstein. In 1796,
his mortal remains were preserved and displayed without his or his fam-
ily’s consent in a private imperial Viennese collection. Although, during
his lifetime, Soliman had been an educated, cosmopolitan, and politically
engaged man, his remains were used to portray him as a clichéd noble
savage wearing a feather headdress and belt, porcelain beads, and a shell
necklace (“Angelo Soliman”). The racial stereotyping that Soliman may
have evaded in life became literally affixed to his skin after death, raising
questions about the limits of personal agency and the respectful treatment
of human remains. Regrettably, this mode of human representation was
accepted until the end of the twentieth century.17
Although techniques for producing death masks were not new when
they were adopted by the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, they
now offered a welcome alternative to human taxidermy. As they were
put in the service of novel scientific goals such as the precise registra-
tion and cataloguing of human physical features, mask- and body-casting
techniques benefited from the development of accurate anthropological
measurement techniques and innovations in visual recording (photography
and, later, film). Scientists took natural casts of living humans (“Naturab-
güsse”) while on expeditions, or from the performers of the exotic shows
that toured Europe in this period (Lange 78). In effect, this was a print
method: not only were the created moulds called clichés or stereotypes
according to terms from print vocabulary, but the objects created with
their help were often made of papier-mâché (a mix of paper pieces, glue,
and water) and thus, technically, paper prints. Paradoxically, paper gave a
better impression of human skin than preserved skin itself, so that figures
created in this manner were described as “naturgetreu” (true to nature),
“natürlich” (natural), “streng nach Natur” (strictly from nature), and
“lebensecht” or “lebenswahr” (true to life), indicating that the manne-
quins were considered adequate plastic representations of human bodies,
but not identical to them (72).
However, neither were all ethnographic figures produced in this man-
ner nor were the body casts restricted to the natural sciences: sculptors
308  A. Dana Weber

Figure 12.3  Édouard Joseph Dantan, A Casting from Life [Un moulage sur la
nature] (1887). Photo courtesy of the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Hossein
Sehatlou.
 Vivifying the Uncanny  309

and plastic artists used them too. Édouard Joseph Dantan’s naturalistic
painting A Casting from Life (1887), for example, depicts the moment
when a painter and his assistant remove the plaster negative from the leg
of a female nude ( figure 12.3). Adolph Menzel’s oil study Atelierwand
(1872)18 represents a wall, to which casts of human body parts (the front
of a female and a male torso, death masks including those of children)
have been attached next to measuring tools ( figure 12.4). Significantly
for the current argument, Dantan’s and Menzel’s artworks illustrate the
contradictory hermeneutic potential of three-dimensional body prints.
Dantan’s painting thematizes the technological creation of a perfect
human representation according to a classical aesthetic of elegance and
beauty.19 Not without blatant gender implications, it narrates the posi-
tive story of a media negative, the plaster cast. However, this snapshot
from an artist’s studio ultimately withholds the final aesthetic product
for which the cast was made (if it is not the female nude or the paint-
ing itself), so that the story that the painting tells offers viewers the
hope but not the certainty that the technological process glorified by
the image will eventually generate an exceptionally beautiful naturalis-
tic artwork.
Contrary to Dantan’s affirmative interpretation of the sculptural nega-
tive, Menzel’s study offers a dissenting vision of the casting technology
as a process of fragmentation. It agrees with aesthetic practice, however,
in that a complete body imprint cannot be taken in one sitting but only
through partial castings. Accordingly, in Menzel’s grim still life, positives
created from the moulds of body parts hang desolately from walls, testify-
ing to disintegration and lifelessness in the service of art. Like Dantan’s, his
image also denies viewers insights into a finalized artistic product. How-
ever, unlike Dantan’s well-lit, wholesome, and hopeful scene that repre-
sents (male) artists evidently working at something remarkable, Menzel’s
pessimistic and literally dark vision focuses on how technological replicas
of the human body in fact dismantle life in the service of portraying it
accurately. Only dimly illuminated here and there by a flickering glow,
Menzel’s suspended copies of human parts hover in an expressionistic twilight
between life and death, between organic being and its life-less objectifica-
tion, withholding rather than promising aesthetic wholeness. And yet, as
viewers might well imagine while contemplating these images, artworks
will be created with the help of the methods and means depicted by both
painters, artworks whose graceful appearances will obfuscate their frag-
mented origins. Although it might exist, so far I have not found evidence
310  A. Dana Weber

Figure 12.4  Adolph Menzel, Atelierwand (1872). Copyright by Hamburger

Kunsthalle/bpk. (Photography by Elke Walford.)
 Vivifying the Uncanny  311

of an aesthetic or ethic meditation about the production of ethnographic

mannequins by their makers, so that Dantan’s and Menzel’s painterly
comments on methods of accurate human representation must serve here
as contiguous reflections. The two painters’ diverging engagement with
techniques of body copying do not only illuminate how technical facts
come into play in the creation of visual fictions, but also illustrate the
major concepts at stake in this argument, the uncanny and fragmentation,
as precursors and preconditions to the ideal aesthetic reconstitution of
the human body into an imaginary, even living and breathing artwork (in
performance).
A conjoint discussion of the visual arts, physical anthropology, and eth-
nology as fields of the mannequin is not so far-fetched as it might seem,
considering that modern European aesthetic and scientific explorations of
the human body have employed biometrics at least since the second half of
the eighteenth century to uncover what were considered typical features
of ethnic and cultural groups and individuals.20 At this time, anthropo-
logical theories were often influenced by aesthetic thought such as Johann
Joachim Winckelmann’s reconstructivist idea that the ideal human body
did not exist in reality but could only be assembled from the most beauti-
ful parts of multiple bodies (Kaufmann 108–10). Further developed in the
following decades, the purportedly scientific assessment of the mental
and psychological capacities of individuals and groups through biomet-
ric measurements eventually contributed to the virulent American and
European racisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and peaked
in Arthur de Gobineau’s Aryan theory and its appropriation by the Nazis
(Burke 270–1). The interplay between the European aesthetic and scien-
tific interests in the human body ultimately imagined race as purportedly
empirical, measurable, but also aesthetic fact, and one that was literally
printed in 3D in the ethnographic mannequin.
While this history renders this medium as extremely problematic from
a contemporary viewpoint, at their heyday in the late nineteenth century,
the greatest problem that such objects posed to their makers and audi-
ences was their representational authenticity, that is, their medial capacity
to broadcast measurable ethnic and cultural information as accurately as
possible. The highest degree of natural faithfulness or realism was ascribed
to mannequins made from body casts because they contained indexes of
original human bodies that Dantan’s and Menzel’s paintings of figures 12.3
and 12.4 scrutinize with such contrasting results. Another category of eth-
nographic mannequins consisted of those created in portrait sittings or
from photographs. Their value was considered merely iconic, however.
312  A. Dana Weber

Interposed media, such as brochures with explanatory texts and images,

had to vouch for the scientific and informational accuracy of these objects
(Lange 80).21 Ironically, in spite of the considerable artistic skill required to
create an ethnographic figure by modelling rather than casting, the tech-
nically produced imprint of a person’s external appearance was ascribed
more scientific and economic value, indicating (at least in the case of
museum mannequins) that factual information was assessed higher than
creative imagination and artistic ingenuity.
And yet, regardless of the methods by which they were produced, all
mannequins inherited some of the problems reaching back to taxidermied
human bodies, first and foremost their unsettling effect on viewers. Thus,
in 1902, ethnographic figures representing a group of Australian Aborigi-
nals at the Grassi Museum were touched by visitors, who also pilfered
some of the objects they were supporting (Lange 153). This audience
response does not only reflect the questionable morals of some visitors,
but also suggests that, in the new media-scapes at the turn to the twenti-
eth century, visual and acoustic criteria no longer sufficed for the onto-
logical classification of naturalistic three-dimensional human-like figures.
Unlike the three-dimensional digital technologies of our time that usually
cannot be touched, however, the mannequin’s condition as a 3D medium
was not a visually created illusion, and palpation proved to be the only
certain method of establishing its identity or non-identity with a human
body.

2. The “Uncanny” and “Vivification” in Human Exhibits

and Performances

The reactions to ontological uncertainty that the Leipzig case illustrates

also account for the uncanny feelings theorized by psychoanalysts. In his
article “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen” (1906), Jentsch asserts that
uncanny feelings are caused by uncertainties regarding the familiar, for
example, when the aliveness of a supposedly living being is doubted or,
vice versa, when supposedly inanimate beings appear to show signs of
organic life (197). He observes this phenomenon particularly in relation
to the life-like figures of wax museums, panopticons, and dioramas, which
elicit “half-conscious secondary doubts that are caused automatically by
renewed contemplation and the perception of fine details” (198). In other
words, what is most uncanny about such objects is not what they repre-
sent, but the precision of their execution. Indexical body prints can be
subsumed under this definition too, considering that their hyper-exact
 Vivifying the Uncanny  313

rendering of a person’s physique might easily elicit doubts, as it did in the

Leipzig case.
Freud’s response to Jentsch’s argument in “The Uncanny” adapts this con-
cept to his own psychoanalytical thought. For Freud, the familiar sub-
sumes the home and with it the intimate and the sexual, which have to be
concealed. It is not the exactness of representation that causes the uncanny
feeling, but the resurfacing of an all-too-familiar which “ought to have
remained secret and hidden but has come to life” (225) to confront the
viewer.22 According to Freud’s logic, the uncanny effect of an object thus
has to do with virtually dead, that is, repressed sexuality. This means that
automatons, mannequins, dolls, or waxwork figures frighten us because
their absence of life and thus of the capacity to reproduce themselves
organically signifies an evolutionary danger to the human species. For
Freud, life – and with it successful procreation – is indicated by the eyes
(240), whose removal elicits the fear of castration in his reading of E.T.A.
Hoffmann’s novella Der Sandmann (1816), the centrepiece of his reflec-
tions on the uncanny.23 Indeed, the most conspicuous and emotionally
most troubling part of the replicated human body is the face, whose eyes
are the first checking points for life. Both in death masks and in the face
casts taken from living individuals they are shut, suggesting death. By
the same token, the colourful and shining glass or painted eyes of eth-
nographic mannequins have the potential to unsettle us in line with Jen-
tsch’s argument, because they are lifeless objects that nevertheless suggest
life. Indeed, a look at the faces of the Piegan woman or the Australian
dancer might constitute a viewer’s first reality check for these figures. If
the response is positive, we are tempted to give back the jovial smile of
the Piegan woman and be moved by the raptness that we sympathetically
believe to detect but, in fact, imagine, in the glossy eyes of the Aboriginal
dancer. By causing either uncanny fear or eager fascination,24 however,
both reactions confuse the museal reality of the object with that of an
imagined person.
One can infer from here that the hyper-realistic ethnographic manne-
quin is a faulty medium because its physical form interferes with its sci-
entific message so that an unintended and individually fantasized meaning
overrides what it has been designed to transmit. Thus, be they indexical or
iconic, such objects broadcast first and foremost that they are both copies
and proxies of human beings. The fact that ethnographic mannequins do
not represent persons with readily recognizable personal identities adds
to this effect because viewers might easily believe that they are encounter-
ing unfamiliar individuals, which is a mundane and realistic situation for
314  A. Dana Weber

anyone. (In contrast, when wax figures portray celebrities, their purported
identities themselves account for the viewers’ disbelief in the possibility
of personal presence, allowing observers to delight in the objects’ false
or effigial one.)25 The anonymous individuals depicted by ethnographic
mannequins thus have more potential to cause disturbances in reception
precisely because of their familiar unfamiliarity.
Both wax figures and ethnographic mannequins enthral or disconcert
and disgust us not least because they mimic human figures so well that
they double, that is, repeat them. Not coincidentally, repetition is a cru-
cial element in both Freud’s and Jentsch’s theories of the uncanny. Jentsch
remarks that eerie feelings re-emerge in the repeated contemplation of an
object even after its actual nature has been identified (198). For Freud,
the “constant recurrence of the same thing” causes uncertainty not least
because it alludes to the “doubling, dividing and interchanging of the
self” (“Uncanny” 234),26 in other words to a threat to the self’s integrity
that might end with its undoing. Fragmentation begins with the separa-
tion between the concepts of the soul and the body of a human being that
generates not only the idea of the body’s first abstract double but also that
of denying death (235). When the “evolutionary universalist” Freud (Zil-
cosky, “Uncanny Encounters” 149) moreover equalizes the early mental
states of childhood with those of primitivism that have supposedly been
surmounted by adulthood and European civilization (“Uncanny” 249,
251), he adds another layer to this double: the “savage” (242) who, like
the ghost, uncannily returns to confront and haunt contemporary humans
with their repressed cultural past (Zilcosky 139, 149). Precisely these “sav-
ages” that Freud had in mind may have served as models for ethnographic
mannequins and also appeared in Völkerschauen. Yet, they did not always
frighten their viewers.
Instead, the same selves and psyches that were subject to fragmentation
in Freud’s and Jentsch’s views of the uncanny, often “persuaded ordinary
observers [of non-Europeans] to blur the line between the self and the
other, the familiar and the exotic” (Zilcosky 151–2) in Völkerschauen. The
fact that spectators bridged the divide postulated by psychoanalysts when
they searched for affinities and commonalities in the encounters with per-
formers of exotic shows suggests the possibility of a positive approach
to the double. Hillel Schwartz notes, for example, that “our skill at the
creation of likenesses of ourselves, our world, our times” (Culture of the
Copy 11) generates the “impostors, ‘evil’ twins, puppets, ‘apes,’ tricksters,
fakes, and plagiarists” of our pervasive “culture of the copy” (17). Instead
of fearing them, however, we can use them to restore a more coherent
 Vivifying the Uncanny  315

sense of ourselves through compassion by reaching out and thus learning

intellectually and emotionally. Schwartz’s optimistic take on the copy is
theatrical rather than technical in that it assumes a person’s doubling not
in an art or science object but in a role whose performance provokes posi-
tive changes in the self. An industrially reproduced inanimate medium,
the ethnographic mannequin had foils and counterparts in living humans,
who often performed themselves culturally, theatrically, or both. The
future mannequin and the potential performer became connected indi-
rectly, for example, in the awkward situations wherein anthropologists
created face casts of indigenous people. As their body parts were copied,
the living models also acted (in the sense of taking independent action).
One such instance was reported by Otto Schellong (1858–1945), a doctor
from Leipzig, who travelled on an expedition to the German colonial ter-
ritories in Papua New Guinea in 1885 (Friederici, “Lebensmasken” D2 5).
There, he took the face negatives of thirty-nine individuals (D2 6).27 Schel-
long, who spent extended periods of time among the indigenous people
and learned their language, reports that the Papuans were suspicious about
the casting process.28 This comes as no surprise if one considers what it
consisted of: The model’s face was covered with grease so that the plaster
could easily be removed, and two rolls of paper were inserted into the per-
son’s nostrils to allow him or her breathe. A sturdy ribbon wound around
the model’s face prevented the cast’s still fluid plaster from flowing off.
“Of course,” Schellong declares, “sometimes funny scenes happen, when
the Papuan does not hold still, for example when he squints so that plaster
gets into his eyes or when he suddenly becomes afraid under the pressure
of the mask; then he is up and gone at once and if he [turns around and]
looks back, he looks like chocolate with whipped cream” (qtd. ibid. D2 7).
While the reasons for the model’s fear become more than understand-
able from the way Schellong describes the casting process, his report is
formulated like a slapstick scene featuring the notorious pie-in-the-face
gag from vaudeville and early film. Not only are racial innuendos eas-
ily detectable behind the visually and ideologically telling “chocolate and
whipped cream” remark, but those involved in the situation are portrayed
according to clichéd roles. Schellong, the omniscient first-person narrator
and a German doctor, obviously plays the part of the well-informed, ratio-
nal, and composed protagonist. In contrast, the indigenous character is
staged as an innocent fool whose lack of familiarity with scientific proce-
dures causes his irrational fear and his making a spectacle of himself – “he”
standing generically for all Papuans. Beyond testifying to a condescending
colonial attitude, Schellong’s scene illustrates an anthropological method
316  A. Dana Weber

in the terms of a theatrical performance. Other than in the doctor’s inter-

pretation, role-play in fact translates here into emancipatory action on the
side of the Papuan, who disrupts the casting process.
Casting connects theatre and anthropology. Not unlike creating a collec-
tion of anthropological masks through plaster casting, performance casting
also constitutes a preliminary procedure for assembling acting ensembles.
Here the process refers to the choice of physical markers (faces, bodies)
and theatrical skills, whose interplay will render the most substantial part
of the show. Like plaster casting, role casting also assembles a group (a
collection) of individuals intended to be displayed before an audience.
One can easily imagine how, in the last decades of the nineteenth century,
indigenous individuals such as Schellong’s Papuan (whose face cast became
part of a German museum collection) may have been cast for participation
in the exotic shows of commercial ethnography. Here, the selection also
focused on the individuals’ physical markers (ethnic and physical features)
and on their displayable skills (cultural expertise and the ability to pres-
ent it appealingly to a foreign audience). For example, Native American
performers who appeared in Wild West shows not only had to match the
visual clichés of American “Indians,” but also to possess skills such as rid-
ing or sharp shooting alongside sufficient histrionic talent to fit typified
ethnic roles that were already well established in European theatre (e.g.,
the noble “Indian” chief or prince, the villain, or the maiden or princess).29
Paradoxically, individuals with such capabilities earned a living in pop-
ular spectacles that claimed to meet the newest ethnographic standards
although they were enhanced by fictional and theatrical elements.30 Sci-
entists like Schellong often collected the physical and cultural informa-
tion of such performers through technological methods ranging from
voice recording to body measurements and plaster casting. For example,
a show presented by twenty Omaha at Castan’s Panopticon in Berlin
in 1884 included dancing, singing, and shooting tricks. After the group
left, Castan’s catalogue of masks featuring diverse “ethnic types” (Völk-
ertypen) contained thirteen made from members of this group31 (Fried-
erici, “Völker der Welt” D3 6–7). Their example underscores the overlaps
between anthropological plaster and artistic performance casting and
reveals the ontological and medial relation between ethnographic masks
and figures and Völkerschau performers, all of which were regarded as
vehicles for presenting ethnic features and cultural information.
Beyond their entanglements with anthropological and ethnographic
research, ethnographic shows were always also entertainments that res­
ponded to the centuries-old European curiosity about exotic aliens. In
 Vivifying the Uncanny  317

Wilhelminian Germany, the degree of this curiosity was remarkable.

Scholars’ estimates about the numbers of exotic shows that toured the
country until the first decades of the twentieth century range from 120
between 1874 and 1931 (Thode-Arora, Für fünfzig Pfennig 168–78)32
to 400 between 1875 and 1930 (Dreesbach, Gezähmte Wilde 79). While
these numbers are likely not complete, they nevertheless suggest how
strong the presence of non-European individuals was in Germany at
this time and how heavily it was not only researched, but also marketed.
A  remarkable example of such a touring troupe is that of nine male
Bella Coolas who performed in numerous cities, enthused the scientific
community in 1885, and also presented a significant collection of eth-
nographic artefacts. They inspired the work of German anthropologists
and ethnomusicologists (Ames, Hagenbeck’s Empire 107–8; Lange 60–1;
Penny, Kindred by Choice).33 The Ethnology Museum in Leipzig alone
bought five hundred of the group’s ethnographic objects, thus acquir-
ing the largest individual sub-collection of its North America inventory
(Friederici, D3 12). However, the Bella Coolas failed to attract the atten-
tion of a wider public that favoured competing groups from the Plains
such as Frank Harvey’s “Sitting Bull Sioux Indians” (Ames, Hagenbeck’s
Empire 108) or Chief Spotted Tail’s Sioux troupe from the Rosebud res-
ervation,34 because they fitted their publics’ stereotyped expectations
about “Indians” better (109).
The Bella Coolas’ example illustrates once again how scientific activities,
exotic entertainments, and the production of ethnographic figures over-
lapped. Scientific facts and performed fictions intersected not least because
the individuals involved in them acted in several cultural fields at once. For
instance, the Bella Coolas’ impresario, Adrian Jacobsen, worked for Carl
Hagenbeck’s company of animal trade that also managed ethnographic
shows (Ames, Hagenbeck’s Empire 103). Hagenbeck, as it happens, was
Johann Friedrich Gustav Umlauff’s brother-in-law (Lange 59), and thus
privately connected to the leading producer of ethnographic mannequins
in turn-of-the-century Germany. In turn, Umlauff’s company hosted and
managed ethnographic shows on its own premises or in collaboration with
museums.
The cultural and theatrical self-performances of individuals who appeared
in the arenas of exotic shows constitute effigies in their own right. The
protagonists of these entertainments were persons with their own biogra-
phies and cultural identities who were understood to act out generic scenes
from their indigenous lifeworlds – and even did so, to a degree. However,
what they also suggested was the spatial and even temporal absence35 of
318  A. Dana Weber

precisely the cultures that they aimed to represent. The effigial status of
such performers serves, in other words, as the flip side of the uncanny
mannequin on one and the same ontological and imaginary coin.
While the ethnographic objects selected according to the scientific stan-
dards of the time and exhibited on mannequins may have compensated,
to a degree, for the cultural knowledge and self-representation of Völker-
schau entertainers, they were arranged in inanimate exhibits. Such displays
could be easily interpreted negatively as uncanny (in the sense discussed
earlier) and associated with the (lifeless) information of science rather than
with lived cultures. And yet, they were often staged according to theatri-
cal parameters.36 Exotic shows also purported to present replicas of scenes
from alien cultures, but they did so live. Thus, these popular performances
had no overt negative connotations for their audiences because their first
condition (even when representing allegedly doomed Native Americans)
was incarnate life, not the dead soullessness of the inorganic mannequin.
Precisely this liveliness opened Völkerschauen up to an imaginary process
that Ames calls “vivification” and theorizes in the example of exotic shows
featuring American indigenous performers.
Shows representing indigenous groups from the American Plains – first
and foremost William Cody’s “Wild West”  – enjoyed an immense suc-
cess in Germany.37 To account for their popularity, Ames explains that,
unlike the scientists who treated ethnographic performers as literal bodies
of data, spectators perceived them as embodiments of the fictional figures
they already knew from adventure literature (Hagenbeck’s Empire 105).
Far from being an “ontological error,” this “dramatic reinterpretation of
ethnographic performances as fantasy” constituted the principle of “vivi-
fication” that governed the reception of exotic shows by Wilhelminian
audiences (105–6). Spectators thus appropriated the performances not as
means of education and self-cultivation, like the mannequins of anthropo-
logical museums, but as incarnations of their fantasy dreams of the Wild
West: “Rather than preserve the traces of people who were supposedly
either dead or on the verge of dying, as ethnographic museums and folk
museums would claim to do, the shows were seen as giving ‘life’ to [fic-
tional, literary] figures that never existed” (114).
A comparison of the angst of the “uncanny” and the enjoyment of “viv-
ification” reveals that both are caused by the interplay between sensory
perception and imagination in contemplation and spectating. However,
whereas uncanny reactions relate ontological uncertainty to the fear of
death, “vivification” ties factual and ontological certainty to life, so that
“the very idea of vivification … at once surprised and delighted viewers,
 Vivifying the Uncanny  319

almost as if the practice of spectatorship had become a form of magical

thinking” (ibid. 113) that could bring to life cherished fictions. It is in its
recourse to magical thinking that “vivification” coincides with Freud’s
“uncanny.” According to Freud, magic is a technique of animism that
establishes imaginary relations in external reality where there are none in
order to ward off the fear of death. As it thus at least assumes the possibil-
ity of immortality (“Totem and Taboo” 865–7), such thinking in fact relies
on a “narcissistic overvaluation of [the subject’s] own mental processes”
(“Uncanny” 240) and generates erroneous perceptions about one’s “omnip-
otence of thought” (“Totem and Taboo” 873). Animist magical thinking
turns against itself in the uncanny quality of ethnographic figures because,
out of a fear of their suspected dead-ness and all it entails in Freud’s vision
(as noted earlier), it imagines anxiously that it could bring to life the inani-
mate human depiction. By a similar token, in Völkerschauen flesh-and-
blood human beings with personal and cultural identities are magically
animated into fictional, now tangible figures that had hitherto populated
only the imagination of fiction writers and their readers. Assessing such
individuals by the parameters of literary fiction does not rule out the
awareness of their non-fictional personal and ethnic identities, however,
and so maintains the ambivalent thought needed for the enjoyment of
“vivification.”
Eugenio Barba’s theory of theatrical roles helps cement the analogies
between the uncanny and vivifying performance that this argument has
carved out so far. As Barba describes it, acting consists of comporting
oneself according to elaborate behaviour systems, which are not those
of everyday conduct, yet are still determined culturally and acquired by
conditioning and training. They are based on body techniques created
through the dismantling of functional and unconscious mundane behav-
iours and gestures and their performative reconstruction in ways that are
entirely non-habitual and practically inefficient (Paper Canoe 15–16), yet
theatrically effective. The physical body that is recreated in this process
only shows actions, but does not necessarily relive them (32). In short,
the presence created in theatrical acting “means to remove what is obvi-
ously the body’s daily aspect in order to avoid it being only a human body
condemned to resemble itself” (32, Barba’s italics). Such a concept of play
acting transforms a mundane into an extraordinary body through frag-
mentation and reconstitution. Likewise, it entails a double effigy as it ges-
tures at both the absence of the fictional persona in mundane reality and
that of the private person on stage. And yet, unlike the factual absences
hinted at by the ethnographic mannequin, those evoked by human
320  A. Dana Weber

performers remain simultaneously present in the performance as mutual

doppelgängers (of the person or the persona), demanding from specta-
tors to decide on only one as the focus of their contemplation. (Ideally, of
course, the goal of conventional European acting styles is the suspension
of disbelief, i.e., voluntarily ignoring the mundane parameters of the event,
for example, the private identities of the cast or the artificiality of the sets.
The audience must imagine the ever-present everyday backdrop of the
performance as absent in order to immerse itself in the theatrical illusion.)
Conceptualizing performance in this manner complicates this argu-
ment’s reading of Ames’s “vivification” by identifying it too as a kind of
effigy. Considering that Völkerschau performers were seen as enacting
their private selves and habitual cultural roles (which may or may not have
been the case), the fictional identities with which at least their German
audiences endowed them compensated for their lack of conventional the-
atrical acting and fictional identities. As Ames’s concept of “vivification”
reveals, audiences collectively drew from the era’s leading provider of fan-
tasy, literature, to fictionalize these real individuals (Seeing the Imaginary
214; Hagenbeck’s Empire 105–6, 133). Moreover, in Barba’s definition,
acting techniques are primarily physical activities that deconstruct the
body in uncomfortable ways before reconstituting it counter-intuitively
in performance. This means that, similarly to the ethnographic figures
that are created by way of physical fragmentation, as noted earlier, and
therefore always imply its organic consequence, death, the enacted human
body is also generated from behavioural fragments, that is, the death of
mundane behaviours in the service of suggesting life. In “vivification,” not
the actors but the spectators joyfully performed this reconstitution as a
result of their cultural habituation as theatre viewers and fiction readers,
when they complemented the supposedly authentic exotic performances
with their own fantasies that overrode the initial anthropological and eth-
nographic intentions of the exotic spectacles.
Just as literary or theatrical fantasy hinges on life in “vivification,” the
narcissistic fantasies of magic thinking described by Freud fancy them-
selves powerful enough to maintain life without death, however with the
caveat that they might generate potentially threatening ghostly or savage
revenants. In both cases, the amount of leeway that is left to the spec-
tator’s imagination ultimately dictates his or her visceral response to the
representation. Both Freud’s and Ames’s concepts utilize literary fictions
as reference points for conceptualizing these workings of the (European)
imagination. Commenting on Freud’s psychoanalysis, Hélène Cixous and
Lionel Trilling agree that it is “a science standing upon the shoulders of
 Vivifying the Uncanny  321

a literature” (Trilling, “Freud and Literature” 35), with fiction authors

serving as its “precursors and coadjustors” (42).38 Given that specifically
Freud’s “uncanny” aims to bring forth a definition of uncertainty and
hesitation, it becomes a metaphor for the undefinable it aims to define
as it itself oscillates between “figures of science” and “some type of fic-
tion” (Cixous 526). Moreover, as Cixous reveals, Freud does not hesitate
to adapt Hoffmann’s Sandmann to his psycho-sexual analysis by deliber-
ately obfuscating the significance of the doll Olympia (532–3).39 Not only
does Freud thus fictionalize fiction in the service of his scientific analysis,
but he does so in a theatrical manner: “What unfolds without fail before
the reader’s eyes is a kind of puppet theater in which real dolls or fake
dolls, real and simulated life, are manipulated by a sovereign but capri-
cious stage-setter” (525): the psychoanalyst himself. As the text thus stages
its own argument in a dramatic manner, it posits fragmentation at the cen-
tre stage of a theory of the uncanny, in which the original triggers of this
reaction, objects that might somehow appear as lifelike, are suppressed in
the service of a psychoanalytical fiction of castration. This intra-textual
performance highlights the dynamic relationship between scientific truth
and the mechanics of fiction in Freud’s prose (531), which aims to design a
scientific theory about the human perception of external facts.
With less intra-textual artifice, Ames uncovers the model for the col-
lective fictionalization of performers meant to convey ethnographic and
anthropological information in adventure writing which, in the era of Dar-
winism and colonialism, was dominated by a plethora of exoticist writ-
ings, from pulp fiction and serial novels to the works of popular authors.40
Although Barba does not specifically refer to textual fictions, for him too,
the success of the fictional presence that the actor creates from fragments
depends to a large degree on the viewer’s investment of imagination.
Taken together, Freud’s (alongside Jentsch’s), Ames’s, and Barba’s theo-
ries reveal that, if the form is human, it indeed affects the message. The
cases discussed in this chapter  suggest that representations of human
beings must maintain sufficient non-identity with a person for their audi-
ences to remain certain about what they are invited not to believe: namely,
that museum mannequins are living individuals and that Völkerschau per-
formers are ethnographic exhibits. Owing to the fact that these theories
conceptualize both human bodies and human-looking objects in theat-
rical performances or exhibitions through fragmentation, reconstitution,
and technological or histrionic reproduction, they posit the “uncanny”
and “vivification” as polar opposites on the continuum of our imaginary
engagement with external facts, especially when these facts have to do
322  A. Dana Weber

with the human form. One can infer from here that a successful reception
of such individuals and objects requires space for contemplative imagina-
tion: the signals that the body and its copies broadcast have to be cali-
brated in such a manner, that they unambiguously convey their intended
message: ethnographic information or a performed role. If this message is
not perfectly adjusted, perturbations such as the uncanny emerge or the
performance is perceived as wanting in some way. If the respective rep-
resentations allow for enough engagement of the imagination in percep-
tion, however, then facts and fictions collude in a successful media message
about human beings, the life form with which we are most familiar.

3. Postscript: Successful or Unsuccessful Human

Simulations Today

In recent years, a related dilemma has been particularly felt in another

domain that aims to create replicas of the world and its humans: three-
dimensional computer-generated digital animation (3D CGI). As design-
ers strove to represent human life ever more accurately, they soon came to
learn that excessive mimetic photorealism elicits disturbed, morbid reac-
tions in the viewers of digital animations. Echoing Jentsch, digital designer
Saint John Walker explains this effect by noting that “our brains seemingly
magnify the slightest imperfections. We note the soul-less eyes, the rigid
lips. Our empathy with the character is curtailed, and in some cases we
feel a form of revulsion” (“A  Quick Walk” 32). Already in 1978, Japa-
nese roboticist Masahiro Mori had coined the term “uncanny valley” to
describe this reaction (ibid. 31–2). To avoid triggering it, Walker suggests
that, instead of “cloning [the] world” (34), digital designers ought to strive
for emotional – not representational – plausibility, even if “the temptation
to describe the human form and physical objects with oppressive levels
of detail will always be there” (38). Currently, 3D digital representations
mature aesthetically when they fuse human acting with digitally designed
fantasy settings and when they limit themselves to stylized or cartoon
portrayals of human beings.
The predecessors of the “uncanny valley” were certainly at work in
late-nineteenth-century media, in ethnographic mannequins, and  – to a
degree  – even in the obsolete Völkerschauen. As museums and exhibi-
tions aimed for an ever-higher accuracy of representation by charging
their displays with too much factual information, their exhibits curtailed
the viewer’s imagination and lost their attention. The Bella Coolas are a
case in point, not only because they were culturally too different from the
 Vivifying the Uncanny  323

glorified Plains Nations, but perhaps also because their enactment of their
own lives was not staged enough for European tastes. Before becoming
unacceptable owing to their racial and colonial implications, those exotic
shows that catered to their audiences’ imaginary reinterpretations of cul-
tural difference prevailed at least for some time.41 Less ostentatiously,
museum mannequins created by artistic means, not as imprints of human
bodies, such as the Australian Aboriginal and the Piegan woman, remain
successful as museum exhibits to this day.
The Tiwi man’s devotion and exhaustion, for example, move us because
they suggest the emotional depth of the ceremony that this exhibit rep-
resents in the first place. As Birgit Scheps-Bretschneider, the curator of
the Aboriginal figure, explained to me, the choice to create and exhibit
a museum mannequin in 2009 was not easy, given the medium’s colonial
history. Nevertheless, the museum decided to continue its exhibition tra-
dition (comparable to that governing the Native American displays of the
Karl-May-Museum), while actualizing it in line with contemporary sen-
sibilities. Thus, what distinguishes the new figure  both in its process of
creation and its display, according to Scheps-Bretschneider, is the respect
for the portrayed culture. No body measuring or cast taking affronted an
individual’s physique for the creation of this exhibit. The same care was
devoted to creating an appropriate arrangement of the diorama. Such fac-
tors were rarely taken into consideration in the past, when exhibits were
considered accumulations of data and arranged in purely pragmatic and
culturally insensitive ways, to often inappropriate effects.
Today, a critical yet optimistic perspective on ethnographic manne-
quins at least suggests that they are understood not as mere objects, but
as both informative and expressive artistic creations. In the case of the
Leipzig exhibit, the adequate depiction of an event of great significance for
Aboriginal cultures is achieved by presenting a composite portrait during
a ceremony that speaks of emotional and cultural legacies. Coincidentally,
the represented event informs about a specific cultural view on an exis-
tential issue that also lingers at the core of the uncanny and, why not,
of performance: the immortal soul. The goal of the Tiwi islanders’ ritual,
however, is not the Western medial one of summoning an absent spirit,
but rather the ontological one of inviting reincarnation. This cultural logic
excludes the uncanny, because it conceptualizes the life of the soul through
organic, not technical reproduction. The museum exhibit depicting this
belief permits sufficient distance between these ethnographic, religious,
and ontological facts and us observers to allow us to perceive this message
in an empathetic and imaginative way through the ethnographic figure.
324  A. Dana Weber

The Piegan figure also looks real and appeals to us because “she” smiles,
but we will ultimately not mistake “her” for a human being. The bright
eyes and beaming face suggest an origin in artistic sculpture rather than
anthropological face casting and the mannequin appears as charming to us
not least because its facial expression opens a window in time, allowing us
to imagine how mischievously and yet warmly the model may have smiled
at the artist while posing. Just as a Piegan woman might have done, too.

NOTES

1 Britta Lange calls the mannequins used in German colonial exhibitions from
the 1920s already “anachronistic” (Echt 265).
2 I am grateful to the independent researcher Hartmut Rietschel (Dresden) and
Dr Birgit Scheps-Bretschneider, curator of the Australian exhibition at the
Grassi Museum of Ethnology (Leipzig), for generously sharing their materials
and expertise with me while I was researching this article.
3 In these words, Cixous circumscribes Freud’s concept of the uncanny as
realm of uncertainty and strangeness (“Fiction and Its Phantoms” 525). As
I discuss in the course of this argument, “vivification” has affinities with
Freud’s concept, so that these terms can be applied to it as well.
4 Today one might even argue that the relationship is inverted, with literature
borrowing many of its themes and aesthetic methods from media (e.g., film).
5 For discussions of new modes of scientific and entertainment displays in Wil-
helminian Germany see, for example, Ames (Seeing the Imaginary, Hagen-
beck’s Empire), Bruckner (“Tingle-Tangle of Modernity”), Lange (Echt.
Unecht. Lebensecht), Penny (Objects of Culture), and Zimmerman (Anthro-
pology and Antihumanism).
6 Karl May (1842–1912) was one of the most significant German authors of
adventure fiction. Located in his former residence, the Karl-May-Museum is
dedicated mainly to his biography and works.
7 For example, in 2014, the exhibition of supposedly Ojibway scalps caused a
widely publicized public debate and an agreement between the Karl-May-
Museum and representatives of the Ojibway nation. See, for example, media
reporting by Liebschner (“Die Kopfhaut”), Oltermann (“German Museum”).
For belated accounts, see Eddy (“Lost in Translation”) and Pitzke (“Der
Streit”). Leipold (“Über die Rückforderung”) complements them with a cura-
torial approach.
8 The Karl-May-Museum’s Native American exhibition is located in a sepa-
rate building called “Villa Bärenfett” (Villa Bear Fat, a name evoking May’s
 Vivifying the Uncanny  325

Wild West fictions). This log cabin was erected in 1926 for Patty Frank
(1876–1959), a circus performer, ethnographic collector, and the museum’s
later administrator, as an exhibition space and private residence. The quality
of today’s collection owes much to Frank’s expertise and connections as a col-
lector. Still, as his memoir reflects, Frank’s attitude towards Native Americans
was replete with racism and clichés (Ein Leben im Banne Karl May’s).
9 To this author, Güttner’s portraits appear more artfully executed than
Grämer’s. His most prominent mannequin exhibit is a diorama depicting the
family of a Plains Chief that welcomes home victorious warriors. The painted
backdrop representing these warriors was created by controversial artist Elk
Eber (1892–1941), who is best known for his depictions of German soldiers
during the Third Reich. On Eber’s relationship to the Karl-May-Museum and
Native Americans, see Penny, Kindred by Choice, chap. 4, “Modern Germans
and Indians.” I am grateful to Hartmut Rietschel for the historical details
about the mannequins of the Karl-May-Museum.
10 While its actual production year is unknown, the figure was first mentioned in
1928, the year of the museum’s opening (Hoffmann, “Zur Geschichte” 102).
11 All information about this exhibit is courtesy of Birgit Scheps-Bretschneider.
Personal communication, 18 June 2012.
12 Observation by Scheps-Bretschneider.
13 Other models were selected from indigenous groups visited by anthropologists.
14 Unless stated otherwise, all translations from German are mine.
15 I did not find detailed information about the sources and production pro-
cess of the mannequins created by Güttner. However, Rietschel’s private
­document collection of the historical Wild West scene in Saxony contains
a photograph depicting the artist and his wife, as an inscription on the
­photograph explains. Both were members of the renowned and still ­existing
Munich cowboy club (Cowboy-Club-München 1913 e.V.). In the image,
Güttner is dressed as a cowboy and his spouse as a Native American
Plains woman. A close comparison between her face and the Radebeul
mannequin’s suggested at least to this viewer that the figure might be an
idealized and younger depiction of Güttner’s wife whose ethnicity remains
to be identified. (Undated photograph by Franz Xaver Lehner, presumably
from the 1920s; reference and information courtesy of Hartmut
Rietschel.)
16 Personal communication with Scheps-Bretschneider.
17 In 1916, a natural history collection donated to the Spanish village Banyoles
still contained the taxidermied body of a Bushman, who was removed from
the exhibition only in 1992 and returned to Botswana another eight years
later (Moyano, “‘Nègre de Banyoles’” 145).
326  A. Dana Weber

18 Under the same title, Menzel painted a predecessor to this study in 1852.
This image depicts the casts of two arms hung from a wall between a shelf
and a window. One arm is bent, the other holds an elongated object (possibly
a carving or drawing tool). Both are suspended above a mummified human
hand and a skull. The mood of this painting is similar to that of its 1872 com-
plement: dark and foreboding, it is created by sparse light that illuminates the
depicted objects from below. The 1852 painting also suggests morbidity and
an ominous sense that technological and organic replication and preservation
may (literally) go hand in hand with physical and aesthetic de-composition.
19 Although the subject is clear, this image lends itself to an even more posi-
tive reading if the negative’s function is inverted. Thus, the depicted moment
could be interpreted not as the taking of a cast but as that when male makers
free their flawless creation from its mould, the last trace of its technological
origin. Dantan’s painting may suggest that the two artists have created such a
naturalistic representation of a lovely woman – “sur la nature,” i.e., from life –
and that “she,” the visual focus of the canvas, has come to life just as in the
Pygmalion myth.
20 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s and Samuel Thomas Soemmering’s proto-
racial theories, for example, aimed to establish morphological classifications
of “nationalities” or to derive the psychological features of human groups
on the basis of biometric and cranial measurements. (Burke, “Wild Man’s
Pedigree” 268–70, Kaufmann, “Vom Zeichen” 108–12). See also Zimmerman’s
excellent discussion of German methods of anthropological measurement at
the heyday of Wilhelminian imperialism (Zimmerman 86–171).
21 Authenticity was defined not least economically. One of Umlauff’s product
catalogues from 1909 not only lists the various nationalities depicted by man-
nequins, but also indicates the price distinction between the more expensive
full-body figures made of durable papier-mâché and the cheaper ones with
doll bodies and wax or papier-mâché heads, hands, and feet. All figures,
however, came with “original and authentic” clothes, jewellery, and weapons
(Lange 267–9).
22 As he notes himself, Freud borrows this idea from Schelling (“Uncanny” 225).
23 Freud also observes that our organs of sight are often connoted negatively, for
example, as the ominous and potentially deadly evil eyes of popular beliefs.
24 Freud notes that uncanny reactions vary from person to person. Scheps-
Bretschneider also reported that many visitors encountering the Tiwi man’s
portrait feel enthralled, not repelled by it.
25 Or would anyone be easily convinced that the actual Angela Merkel, John F.
Kennedy, or Barack Obama gather in the same building of Madame Tussaud’s
Berlin branch? (“Wen möchten Sie treffen?”)
 Vivifying the Uncanny  327

26 Freud notes that he draws from Otto Rank’s theory of the double (“Uncanny”
235).
27 The casts were meant to complement Otto Finsch’s collection in Berlin that
consisted of 164 life masks.
28 The fact that they were suspicious because they did not comprehend the
procedure calls into question Schellong’s degree of transparency towards his
collaborators.
29 Warren’s Buffalo Bill’s America (2005) and Sagala’s Buffalo Bill on Stage (2008)
offer insightful examples and analyses of such staple-fare ethnic characters in
the context of the theatrical performances of William Cody (a.k.a. Buffalo Bill).
30 For example, at the time when it toured Germany, Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West”
was regarded as the latest trend in ethnographic exhibits (Ames, Seeing the
Imaginary 213).
31 They were incorrectly listed as “Sioux.” Coloured reproductions of the face
masks were commercially available at the price of 15 marks (Friederici, D3 7).
32 Of these, Carl Hagenbeck’s animal trade company alone managed 69.
33 For a detailed and current transnational analysis of the Bella Coolas’ tours
and impact on their German audiences, see particularly the subsections “The
Showmen and the Sioux” (chap. 1), “German Audiences” (chap. 3), and “Dif-
fusion and Cultural Traits” (chap. 8) in Penny, Kindred by Choice.
34 Like the Omaha, this troupe performed at Castan’s Panopticon in Berlin in
1898–9. It was the last one of five Native American troupes that had appeared
in this location since 1882 (Friederici, D3 16).
35 Usually, performers presented scenes from the lives of contemporary colo-
nized and European cultures. However, because Native Americans were con-
sidered a vanishing race in line with the ideology of Manifest Destiny, their
performances portrayed – at least in the understanding of their turn-of-the-
century audiences – cultures on the verge of extinction.
36 Presenting mannequins in so-called life groups was one of the most popular
modes to exhibit them. Such arrangements were governed by principles of
staging borrowed from theatre and spectacle. For example, in his instructions
regarding such a display, anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) wrote: “In
order to set off such a group to advantage it must be seen from one side only,
the view must be through a kind of frame which shuts out the line where the
scene ends, the visitor must be in a comparatively dark place while there must
be a certain light on the objects and on the background” (qtd. in Lange 163).
Not only through its vocabulary (“view,” “frame,” “scene,” “background”),
but also its practical suggestions about how the figures should be positioned
and illuminated for best effect, this remark reflects the anthropologist’s famil-
iarity with the aesthetics of conventional theatre and the fact that he aimed to
328  A. Dana Weber

transpose this aesthetics into the museum. Boas, one of the most significant
figures of modern American anthropology, had been a curator of the Royal
Museum of Ethnology in Berlin before he moved to New York. He too had
seen the Bella Coolas. He also made gypsum casts of Kwakiutls and used
photographs of Umlauff mannequins in his work in New York (ibid.).
37 Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West” toured Germany in 1890 and 1906, where it per-
formed in over sixty cities and towns (Kort and Hollein, I Like America 230).
This and other Wild West shows were so successful that, after the North
American groups left, German show producers such as Hagenbeck and Hans-
Stosch Sarrasani hired Native American performers for their own Wild West
shows in the first decades of the twentieth century. For a recent analysis of
these entertainments see Penny, Kindred by Choice.
38 A similar point is made by Josef Rattner and Gerhard Danzer (Literatur und
Psychoanalyse 27–43).
39 Olympia’s function in the text as lifelike albeit lifeless figure would have kept
the definition of the uncanny too close to Jentsch’s. Cixous further observes
that Freud sets up a confrontation between the sandman and the neurotic
Nathaniel that is more sustained and obsessive than Hoffmann narrates it. He
thus literally reinvents his source text by pruning it of any elements that did
not serve his reading (533), i.e., by fragmenting and reconstructing it to serve
his own goals.
40 Ames refers specifically to James Fenimore Cooper, Friedrich Gerstäcker, and
Karl May (Seeing the Imaginary 214; Hagenbeck’s Empire 109, 131).
41 As it offered its spectators ethnically marked human bodies in acting, on
which they could project their German literary fantasies of America, a spec-
tacle such as William Cody’s “Wild West,” for example, left an indelible mark
on popular culture whose reverberations are felt to this day in German west-
ern films and events, Native American and other American re-enactments,
and Karl May festivals.

WORKS CITED

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Contributors

Tina Young Choi is associate professor of English and a member of the

Graduate Faculty in Science and Technology Studies at York University in
Toronto. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century
literary and scientific writing, and the histories of the city and of the body.
She is the author of Anonymous Connections (U Michigan P, 2015) and
the editor of Medicine and Sanitary Science (Pickering and Chatto, 2012).

Stefani Engelstein is associate research professor of German at Duke

University and associate professor of German at the University of Mis-
souri. She is author of Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human
Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY, 2008) and co-editor
of Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture
(Rodopi, 2011).  Her work has also appeared in such journals as the PMLA
and Critical Inquiry.  She is currently completing a manuscript entitled
Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity.

Jocelyn Holland received her PhD from Johns Hopkins in 2003 and is
currently associate professor of German at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Her publications include German Romanticism and Sci-
ence: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (Routledge,
2009), Key Texts by Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810) on the Science and
Art of Nature (Brill, 2010) as well as special editions of Configurations
on The Aesthetics of the Tool (co-edited with Susanne Strätling) and Sub-
Stance on The Archimedean Point: From Fixed Positions to the Limits of
Theory (co-edited with Edgar Landgraf). Her current project is on the
mechanical lever as a figure of thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
334  Contributors

Michael House (PhD, Princeton, 2009) is an assistant professor of Ger-

man in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the Uni-
versity of South Carolina. Before joining the faculty, he was an assistant
professor at Dalhousie University and an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral
fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute (2009–10) at the University of
Toronto. His research explores the intersections of literature, epistemol-
ogy, and human sciences around 1800. He has recently published articles
on this theme, including “Beyond the Brain: Skeptical and Satirical Reac-
tions to Gall’s Organologie,” in Neurology and Modernity (2010), and
“Kant’s Uncertain Mariner,” in Schiffbrüche und Idyllen (2014). He is
currently completing a manuscript, tentatively titled Grounding Fictions:
Skepticism, Idealism and the Modern Individual.

Alice Kuzniar has been professor of German and English at the University
of Waterloo since 2008, after teaching 25 years at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, with guest professorships at Princeton, Rutgers,
and the University of Minnesota. Her books include The Queer German
Cinema (Stanford University Press, 2000) and Melancholia’s Dog: Reflec-
tions On Our Animal Kinship (University of Chicago Press, 2006). She has
just completed a book entitled The Romantic Art of Homeopathy.

Christine Lehleiter is an associate professor of German at the Univer-

sity of Toronto. Her research focuses on the intersection between litera-
ture and the life sciences. Among her publications are the monograph
Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity (Bucknell University
Press, 2014) and articles on eighteenth-century notions of generation and
gender.

Peter McIsaac is associate professor of German Studies and Museum

Studies at the University of Michigan. He works at the intersections of
German literary culture and museums; on popular anatomy exhibitions
(Body Worlds and its predecessors); uses of digital devices in museum gal-
leries; and with digital humanities approaches to mainstream nineteenth-
century German periodicals. His publications include the book Museums
of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting and arti-
cles that have appeared in The German Quarterly; Seminar, Monatshefte,
Literatur für Leser, German Life and Letters, and The International Jour-
nal of Cultural Policy. With Gabriele Mueller, he co-edited Exhibiting the
German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization (University of Toronto
Press, 2015).
 Contributors  335

John K. Noyes is professor of German at the University of Toronto since

2001. He has written on the cultural history of colonialism, postcolonial
theory, and the history of sexuality. His books include Colonial Space
(1992), The Mastery of Submission (1997), and most recently Goethe’s
Faust: Theatre of Modernity, edited with Hans Schulte and Pia Kleber
(2010). His book Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism will appear with
University of Toronto Press in September 2015.

Daniel Aureliano Newman is an associate at the Institute for the History

and Philosophy of Science and Technology (University of Toronto). His
research focuses on the two-way traffic of narrative structures between
innovative fiction and scientific theories and models. He has essays pub-
lished or forthcoming in Style and James Joyce Quarterly, as well as in
the American Journal of Botany and Oikos. His other research interests
include the Bildungsroman, unnatural narratology, strange narrators in
Irish fiction, and selfish-gene theory.

Ann Shteir is professor emerita at York University in humanities and the

graduate program in gender, feminist, and women’s studies. She is author
of Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany
in England 1760 to 1860 (1996), which won the Joan G. Kelly Prize in
Women’s History. She co-edited Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe
Science (1997) with Barbara T. Gates, and Figuring It Out: Science, Gen-
der, and Visual Culture (2006) with Bernard Lightman. Current projects
are women and botany in early-nineteenth-century British North Amer-
ica, and mythography and science.

Christian P. Weber is associate professor of German studies at Florida

State University, Tallahassee. His research aims for a comprehensive phe-
nomenological and critical investigation of the human imagination by
examining its various manifestations in literature (especially Goethe and
the Romantics), the sciences, and the history of nationalism. He is the
author of Die Logik der Lyrik: Goethes Phänomenologie des Geistes in
Gedichten (Rombach, 2013).

A. Dana Weber is an assistant professor of German in the Department

of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. She is
currently completing a monograph on the intersections of literature, folk-
lore, and performance in German Wild West festivals. Dana’s published
articles explore legends in media, cultural transfers in German festivals
336  Contributors

and performances, Native American theatrical representations, and the

transcultural dynamics of fraternity bonds in Quentin Tarantino’s Django
Unchained (2012).

Tobias Wilke, PhD and Dr.  phil., is assistant professor in the Depart-
ment of Germanic Languages at Columbia University, New York. His
work focuses primarily on the history of German literature and culture
from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, with a particular emphasis
on the broader contexts of European modernism, the history of media
and media theory, and the interrelations between aesthetics and empirical
psychology. He is the author of two books: Medien der Unmittelbarkeit:
Dingkonzepte und Wahrnehmungstechniken 1918–1939 (Fink, 2010),
and Einführung in die Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Wissenschaftli-
che Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed., 2011), co-authored with Dorothee Kim-
mich. He is also the co-editor of a special issue of Grey Room, “Walter
Benjamin’s Media Tactics” (Spring 2010), and the co-editor of the volume
Gefühl und Genauigkeit: Empirische Ästhetik um 1900 (Fink, 2014). His
articles have appeared in such journals as DVjs, MLN, Scientia Poetica,
Monatshefte, Grey Room, and Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie.
Index

aboriginal, 300, 302–3, 306, 312 – 13, 323 animism, 319

absurd, 17, 50 – 1 Anna Karenina, 209, 252
Adamo, Christopher, 238 – 9n14 anthropology, 20 – 2, 110, 157 – 64,
Adelung, Johann Christoph, 36, 46n16, 176 – 7, 189 – 91, 221 – 4, 228, 232, 236,
221 – 2 237n1, 279, 300, 311, 316, 328n36.
Adler, Jeremy, 125n22, 126n38 See also science
aesthetics, 10, 12, 20, 21, 83, 92, 155 – 7, anti-Semitism, 225, 226, 229, 238n9
161, 166, 186, 196, 200 – 3, 205 – 10, Aristotle, 200, 205, 207, 209, 214nn24,
212nn10, 12, 227, 235, 249 – 50, 26, 27, 215n29
327 – 8n36 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 126n35
aether. See ether Arnim, Achim von, 126n40
Albrecht, Thomas, 141 art(s), 7, 16, 21, 41, 78 – 9, 86, 88, 93,
alchemy, 25n26 158 – 60, 163 – 5, 175 – 6, 178, 187, 191,
allegory, 41, 89, 103, 118, 119, 292 221, 230, 234, 250, 251, 275, 277,
Alter, Stephen, 238n4 300, 309, 311, 315
altruism, 247 – 8, 250, 256 – 7 artist, 12, 84, 89, 147, 300, 309, 324,
Ames, Eric, 298 – 9, 318, 320 – 1, 324n5, 325nn9, 15, 326n19
328n40 Athenaeum, 47nn25, 26, 48n30, 115
analogy (analogue), 11, 12, 18, 20, 36, astrology, 50, 67n6
56, 61, 65 – 6, 74, 77 – 8, 87, 89, 91, 93, atavism, 261, 264 – 5
100 – 5, 108, 110, 115, 136 – 8, 144, atom, 8, 130, 131, 141, 144
148, 157, 159, 161, 167, 171, 202 – 3, Australia, 300, 302, 312 – 13, 323, 324n2
205, 207, 233, 248 autobiographical writing, 21
anatomical theatre, 276, 285, 289 – 90,
292 – 4 Bachner, Andrea, 276, 284 – 6, 291
anatomy, 80, 177, 222, 275, 279, 282, Bahr, Hermann, 214n27; “Dialog vom
285, 290, 292 – 3 Tragischen” 214n27
338 Index

Bain, Alexander, 212n13; The Birus, Hendrik, 241n28

­Emotions and the Will, 212n13 Bischoff, Doerte, 275, 286
Baird, Robert, 237 – 8n3 Blackfoot Piegan, 300
Barba, Eugenio, 319 – 21 Blackwell, Thomas, 171n16
Bateson, William, 258, 260, 267 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 326n20
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 20, Blumenberg, Hans, 99, 122n2
155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Boas, Franz, 327n36
bee, 251, 261 body, 52 – 60, 62 – 3, 66, 67n10, 86,
Beer, Gillian, 2 – 3, 4, 138, 250 91, 113 – 14, 159 – 60, 176 – 7, 189,
Beer, John, 262 – 3 192n2, 221 – 3, 228, 231, 234 – 5,
Being, 20, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 247, 250 – 1, 254, 256, 276, 284 – 6,
162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 171 – 2n19 288, 290, 292, 294, 300, 305 – 7, 309,
Bella Coola, 317, 322, 327nn33, 36 311 – 16, 319 – 22, 325n17, 326n21,
Benjamin, Walter, 50 – 1, 60 – 1, 63, 65, 328n41; soma, 254 – 5, 260 – 1. See
66n2, 281 – 3; “Doctrine of the Similar” also wound
(“Lehre vom Ähnlichen”), 50 Bono, James, 3
Benn, Gottfried, 275 botany, 5, 6, 14, 16, 77, 79, 80, 82 – 3,
Bennett, Benjamin, 239n17 87 – 91, 93; “Botanic Goddess,”
Bergengruen, Maximilian, 67n6 73, 83 – 92; “Linnaean Spring,” 74;
Berger, Alfred von, 215n29 women and botany, 83, 88, 91
Bergman, Torbern, 109 – 10, Botswana, 325n17
125nn21 – 2; Dissertation on Elective Breithaupt, Fritz, 123n8, 124n14
Attractions, 109, 125n22 Breuer, Josef, 215n29
Berlin Wall, 275, 286, 291 British Association for the
Bernays, Jacob, 205 – 8, 214nn24, ­Advancement of Science, 13, 133,
26, 27, 28, 215n29; Grundzüge 135, 136, 138, 150nn3, 5
der ­verlorenen Abhandlung des British Broadcasting Corporation, 266
­Aristoteles über Wirkung der British Royal Literary Fund, 13
Tragödie, 205 Brockmeyer, Bettina, 67n10
Berthollet, Claude Louis, 110, 119, brotherhood, 227, 242n36, 247 – 8, 255,
121; Researches into the Laws of 262
Chemical Affinity, 110, 119, 125n23 Brown, John, 60 – 1, 67nn12, 13
Bewell, Alan, 77, 79, 89 Browne, Janet, 80
Beyer, Marcel, 276 Bruce, Donald, and Anthony Purdy, 1
Bildungsroman, 248, 251 Buffalo Bill (William Cody), 318,
biography (autobiography), 179, 183, 327nn29, 30, 328n41
189, 191, 193n9, 196n25 Burke, Edmund, 114, 126nn31, 35;
biology, 22, 99, 111, 161, 221, 248, 250, Reflections on the Revolution of
263, 279, 282, 294 France, 114
biometrics, 311, 326n20 Bushman, 325n17
 Index  339

Butler, Samuel, 251, 254, 258 cinema (film), 276, 283 – 4, 293 – 4, 300,
Byrne, Peter, 237 – 8n3 305, 307, 315, 328n41
Byron, George Gordon Lord, 241 – 2n34 citizen involvement, 25n19
Clairmont, Heinrich, 157, 159, 160,
Campbell, Donald T., 4 170, 171nn6, 14, 15
Carhart, Michael, 237n1 Cody, William (Buffalo Bill). See
Carpenter, Edward, 261, 262, 264 ­Buffalo Bill
cast: plaster, 307 – 9, 311 – 13, 315 – 16, cognition, 9, 112, 157, 158, 159, 169,
323, 324, 326nn18, 19, 327n27, 170nn5, 15, 284
328n36; role, 316, 320 coin, 225, 228 – 31, 232, 235, 237,
Castan’s Panopticon in Berlin, 316, 239 – 40n18, 240nn19, 20, 22
327n34 Coleridge, Samuel, 241 – 2n34
castration, 313, 321 colonialism, 26n36, 321
catharsis, 205 – 7, 211, 214nn24, 27, 28, comparative religion, 221 – 3, 224 – 5,
215n29 227 – 8, 236 – 7, 237 – 8n3. See also
causality, 11, 155, 189 religion
cause, final, 9 conductor (electronic), 17, 39, 46n18
certainty, 7 – 8, 34, 118, 132 – 7, 144 – 5, Cooper, James Fenimore, 328n40
157, 309, 318 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 140, 159
chaotic, 17, 51, 108, 116 Correns, Carl, 22, 249, 258
character, 61, 63, 168; genetic, 248, Coulter, Harris, 54, 57, 62, 65, 67n12
260, 264, 267 – 8; literary, 19, 22, 33, Cowboy Club Munich (Cowboy-
41, 99, 100, 104, 121, 134 – 5, 138 – 9, Club-München 1913 e.V.), 325n15
141 – 9, 180 – 1, 188, 195 – 6n24, 199, Crusius, Christian August, 155, 156, 170
213n21, 226 – 7, 241n33, 248 – 52, 259, cultural history, 82, 221 – 2, 225 – 8,
264, 268, 315, 322 231 – 2, 236, 290. See also
Charité, 275 – 6, 285 – 7, 289 – 1, 294, ­comparative religion
295n8 culture, 1, 3 – 5, 7, 11, 13 – 16, 23, 75, 77,
chemistry, 19, 76, 98, 99, 108 – 11, 115, 83, 86, 89, 92 – 3, 101, 105, 108, 117 – 18,
117 – 19, 132, 138, 178 160 – 1, 163, 165, 168 – 9, 181, 221, 228,
childhood, 162, 165, 188, 225 – 6, 230, 232, 236 – 7, 237n1, 249, 275, 283,
232. See also family relations, 285, 288, 291 – 2, 299, 302, 303, 305,
parent-child 314, 318, 323, 327n35, 328n41
Choi, Tina Young, 8, 18, 19 Cunningham, Andrew, and Nicholas
Christianity, 40, 43, 44n7, 47n26, Jardin, 9
224 – 7, 236 – 7, 238n3, 239n15; cyberpunk, 251
­relationship to Judaism, 225, 226 – 7,
236, 239n17, 241 – 2n34 Dahlke, Birgit, 275
Christie, John, and Sally Shuttleworth, Dantan, Édouard Joseph, 308 – 9, 311,
1, 13 – 15 326n19
340 Index

Darwin, Charles, 2, 222, 238n4, 251, Dilthey, Wilhelm, 12

256, 258, 261 diorama, 281 – 3, 302, 304 – 5, 312, 323,
Darwin, Erasmus, 15 – 16, 18; 325n9
­audiences, 83; The Botanic ­Garden, discharge, 206 – 9, 211n6, 214n27,
15, 18, 73 – 93, 93n2, 94n7; The 215nn29, 36
Economy of Vegetation, 74, 76, 83, disciplines, 1 – 9, 11 – 14, 16, 21, 23n25,
85, 89; footnotes, use of, 77, 82; 25n17, 110, 121, 157, 161, 176, 189,
frontispieces, 89 – 91; imagination, 277, 300; institutionalization of, 13
79, 87; The Loves of the Plants, 15, dissemblance, 180, 185
74 – 9, 89 – 91; mythologies 83 – 9, 92; doppelgänger, 306, 320
personification, 78, 86 – 7; Plan for Draesner, Ulrike, 276
the Conduct of Female Education in Driesch, Hans, 249
Boarding Schools, 88 – 9 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 200, 211n7;
Darwinism, 251, 279, 321; literary, 248, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et
269n3 sur la peinture, 211n7
Daston, Lorraine, 26n51, 133; and Duns Scotus, John, 11, 184
Peter Galison, 11 – 13, 122n1 Dyson, Freeman, 137, 150n9
Dawkins, Richard, 247, 250
Dawson, Gowan, and Bernard Eber, Elk, 325n9
­Lightman, 13, 24n1 education (Erziehung), 113, 226, 227,
deception (self-deception), 175 – 6, 179, 233 – 4, 238n11, 241n30, 253
181, 185 – 8, 193n8, 208; and deceit, effigy, 304 – 5, 319 – 20
186 – 7 Eichner, Hans, 9
De Gobineau, Arthur, 311 eighteenth century, 4, 5, 7, 17, 19, 21,
deism, 222, 224 – 5. See also religion 22, 35, 37, 43, 46n16, 51, 63, 66,
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari: A 73 – 8, 80 – 2, 84 – 7, 91 – 2, 112 – 13, 132,
Thousand Plateaus, 58 156, 200, 211n8, 229, 232, 237n1,
Demetz, Peter, 239 – 40n18 279, 311
Dennett, Daniel, 249 Einstein, Albert, 250, 266
De Quincey, Thomas, 26n56 elective affinities (metaphor), 19,
Descartes, René, 156, 160, 170n2, 189 98 – 122, 122n3, 122 – 3n4, 125nn21, 24
determinism, 22, 134, 252 – 3, 257, 260 electricity, 17, 39, 46n18, 74, 150n1
De Vries, Hugo, 22, 253, 258 electrolysis, 42
Dickens, Charles, 134, 138, 142 element, 98, 111, 114 – 16, 119
Diderot, Denis, 172n22; Lettre sur Eliot, George (née Marian Evans),
les aveugles, à l’usage de ceux qui 8, 19; Daniel Deronda, 19, 132 – 5,
voient, 172n22 138 – 49, 150n7; indirect discourse,
differentiation: disciplinary, 4, 12, 143, 148; interest in contemporaneous
6 – 7, 11, 13 – 14, 26nn51, 56; of value science, 138 – 9; intersubjectivity,
spheres, 16 143 – 9; Middlemarch, 138 – 9, 144,
 Index  341

147, 149; narratorial omniscience, evidence, absence of, 131, 135, 136,
139, 142 – 3, 149; notes on Maxwell 140, 141, 147, 149, 309
and Tyndall, 138 – 9; probability, 132, evolution, 2, 14, 98, 121, 222, 254 – 5,
139, 141, 144, 145 – 9; secularism, 262, 282
141, 145; sympathy, 138, 139, 141, exhibition, 275, 280, 298 – 300, 302, 304,
144 – 6, 149; uncertainty, 133, 141, 321 – 3, 324nn1, 2, 7, 8, 325n17
143, 145, 149 exhibition culture, 23
empathy, 199, 204 – 5, 208 – 9, 213nn17, exotic, 113, 281, 299, 303 – 5, 307, 314,
20, 234, 322 316 – 18, 320 – 1, 323; performers, 23
empirical, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 – 21, 33, experiment, 3, 8, 10, 11, 19, 20, 22, 40,
56, 73, 77, 81 – 2, 86 – 7, 91 – 2, 103, 47nn24, 25, 48n28, 53, 62, 64, 66,
119, 131 – 3, 135 – 49, 176, 178 – 92, 67n16, 76, 99, 110, 115 – 17, 130 – 2, 137,
192nn1, 2, 193n8, 194nn18, 19, 139 – 40, 148, 151n13, 212n10, 247
200 – 3, 207, 209, 211nn5, 8, 234, 311 experimental, 8, 11, 13, 22, 132, 135,
empiricism, 9, 19, 20, 27n63, 145n24, 178, 201, 211n8, 265
195 – 6n24 experimentum crucis, 110
Engelhard, Wolf von, 124n15
Engelstein, Stefani, 22, 241 – 2n34, fact (factum), 10, 11, 17 – 18, 21, 22 – 3,
242n36, 263 33 – 44, 44nn1, 4, 44 – 5n7, 45nn8,
England, 73, 74, 82, 88, 114, 249, 258, 10, 13, 14, 46nn15–19, 47nn21,
265 22, 26, 48nn27 – 30, 51, 59, 62, 66,
Enlightenment, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 67nn8, 16, 97, 98, 106, 109, 114,
17, 18, 21, 22, 66, 79, 84, 155, 224, 116 – 17, 122, 134, 136, 155, 161, 163,
240n19, 241n26, 288 171, 170 – 1n5, 178, 183, 185, 187,
epistemology, 12, 15, 34, 110, 131, 139, 193 – 4n11, 195n24, 200 – 2, 207, 210,
157, 162, 163, 171 – 2n19, 235, 241n26 212n10, 240n25, 267, 268, 286, 299,
Ermarth, Elizabeth, 141 303; and fiction, 11, 22, 23, 26n56,
Ernst, Wolfgang, 277 99, 122, 155, 179, 185, 196n26, 202,
Eshel, Amir, 284 276 – 7, 282 – 3, 285, 298, 299, 300,
ether, 135, 137, 143, 146, 149 304, 317, 322
ethics, 9, 117, 147, 235 – 6, 247, 250, factuality, 6, 12, 155, 161, 169, 202 – 3
267, 283 fairy tale, 63, 65, 68n24, 158
ethnicity, 298, 304, 311, 316, 319, family relations: adoption, 227, 231,
325n15 228, 232; nephew, 232; niece, 232;
ethnographic mannequins, 22 – 3, 299, parent-child, 225 – 6, 228, 231, 232 – 3,
303 – 6, 311, 313 – 14, 317, 322 – 3 234 – 6, 240n25, 241n33; saga, 251;
ethnography, 232, 237n1, 304, 316 siblings, 223, 226, 231, 235, 241n33,
ethnology, 221, 300, 302, 305, 311 – 12, 241 – 2n34, 234n36. See also
317, 324n2, 327 – 8n36 genealogy; heredity
ethnomusicology, 300 Faraday, Michael, 132, 135, 137
342 Index

Farquharson, R.H., 239n16 Foucault, Michel, 3, 55, 190 – 1; Birth

Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 211n8 of the Clinic, 67nn8, 11; Order of
feelings, 11, 19 – 20, 63, 106 – 7, 143 – 6, Things, 55 – 6
164, 200, 312, 314; fictional, 20 – 1, fourteenth century, 11
199 – 205, 207, 209, 213nn20, 21 Fox Keller, Evelyn, 98, 127n45
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 35, 37 – 41, 43, fragment, 17 – 18, 39, 51, 57, 62 – 4,
45n12, 46nn15, 17, 46 – 7nn20, 24, 68n26, 105 – 7, 109, 115, 118, 148,
186, 195n22 179, 222 – 4, 238nn5, 10, 268, 281,
fiction (fictionality), 3, 11, 13, 18, 21, 320 – 1
22 – 3, 26n56, 47n20, 87, 97 – 9, 122, Fragment Controversy, 222 – 4, 238n5
155, 175 – 83, 185, 187, 189, 193, France, 11, 14, 108, 114, 116
194n15, 196n26, 199 – 206, 209 – 10, Frank, Patty, 324 – 5n8
210n1, 215 – 38, 250 – 1, 262 – 3, 268, Freud, Sigmund, 23, 215n29, 266,
276 – 7, 282 – 3, 285, 292 – 4, 298 – 300, 298 – 9, 303, 313 – 14, 319 – 20, 321,
303 – 5, 311, 317, 319 – 22 324n3, 326nn22 – 4, 327n26, 328n39;
Figal, Sara Eigen, 240n25 Der Sandmann, 313, 321; Studien
figure of speech, 100 – 1, 104, 117 – 18, über Hysterie, 215n29; “Totem and
120, 123n5, 126n38, 229 Taboo,” 319, “The Uncanny,” 299,
fitness, evolutionary, 247 – 9, 250, 260; 303, 312, 313, 319
inclusive, 250 – 1 Friedländer, David, 240n19
Flora, 83, 86 – 7, 89 – 91; “Flora attir’d Friedrich the Great, 240n19, 278, 280
by the Elements” (Fuseli), 89 – 91 Fulda, Daniel, 240n23; and Thomas
Fontenelle, Bernard de, 73, 74 Prüfer, 16
Foreman, Terry, 242n37 Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee, and Peter J.
form, 3, 16, 21, 24n12, 33, 76 – 7, Kitson, 13, 26nn36, 56
80 – 1, 92 – 3, 98 – 9, 101, 107, 111 – 14,
117 – 18, 122, 127nn43, 44, 134 – 6, Gaier, Ulrich, 156, 164, 169, 170n1,
141, 145, 158 – 9, 161 – 4, 203, 223, 171n15, 172n22
227 – 8, 230, 264, 267, 277, 282, 287, Galileo, 9, 140
289, 291, 298, 304, 306, 313, 321 – 2 Galison, Peter. See Daston, Lorraine
Forster, Edward Morgan, 22, 247 – 69, Gall, Franz Joseph, 279
269n3; Arctic Summer, 265; Gallagher, Catherine, 141
­homosexuality, 262 – 3, 268; ­Howards Galton, Francis, 251, 253 – 4, 258
End, 249, 252; The ­Longest ­Journey, galvanism, 66
22, 247 – 69; Maurice, 262; ­modernism, Gantenbein, Urs Leo, 67n7
248; A Passage to India, 249; politics, Garber, John, 237n1
260, 266–7; A Room with a View, Garloff, Katja, 241n31
248; “Tony and Ralph,” 252 – 3; Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 131 – 2, 135
Where Angels Fear to Tread, 248, 263, Geiger, Moritz, 199 – 202, 204 – 5,
265 – 6 213n22
 Index  343

gender studies, 1 Form und Bildung des Granits, 107;

gene, 98, 125n26, 247 – 52, 255, 258 – 61, Granit, 105 – 7, 118; ­Metamorphose
263 – 4, 268, 269n1; “gay,” 263; der Pflanzen, 15; Über den
­particulate, 253 – 4, 257, 258, 264; ­Dilettantismus (On Dilettantism),
selfish, 249, 250, 251, 268 with Friedrich Schiller, 15 – 16, 27n67;
genealogy, 22, 34, 200, 221, 236, 237n2, Der Versuch als Vermittler zwischen
251 – 2, 266, 292; lineage vs. lateral, Subjekt und Objekt, 124n16,
223, 231, 235 – 6; and truth, 230. See 127n43; Die Wahlverwandtschaften
also family relations; heredity (Elective Affinities), 19, 22, 99 – 100,
generalization, 10, 17, 141 – 2 116 – 22; West-Östlicher Divan,
genre, 9, 18, 63, 121, 127n44, 158, 183, 124n11
224, 251, 300 Goetschel, Willi, 223, 226, 238 – 9n14,
Gentz, Friedrich von, 126n35 239 – 40n18, 240nn22, 23
geography, 156 – 8, 169, 171nn7, 9 Goeze, Johann Melchior, 223, 238n8
geology, 76, 99, 105 – 8, 117, 124n15 golden age, 165, 166, 167
German Democratic Republic (GDR), Goldschmidt, Richard, 249
280 – 1, 285, 287 – 9 Gomperz, Thedor, 214n27, 215n29
Germany, 11, 12, 14 – 16, 26n51, 27n63, grafting, 105, 112 – 14, 116, 126n31, 227
60, 150n1, 212n11, 222, 237n1, 249, Grämer, Ernst, 300, 325n9
266, 300, 317 – 18, 324n5, 327n30, granite, 105 – 8
328n37 Grassi Museum of Ethnology in
germ-plasm, 254 – 5 Leipzig, 300, 302, 312, 324n2
Gerstäcker, Friedrich, 328n40 Gray, Richard, 230, 239 – 40n18,
Gerstenberger, Katharina, 275, 278, 240n20
283, 290, 294, 294n6 Great Britain, 11, 13 – 16, 24n2, 25n19,
Gleichnis. See simile 27n63, 34, 77, 82, 130, 133
Gleichnisrede. See figure of speech Greif, Stefan, 158
God, 9, 36, 56, 123n6, 124n13, 125n19, Greiner, Rae, 141
147, 149, 155, 165, 170n1, 180, Groos, Karl, 201, 207 – 9, 211n9,
224 – 5, 237 212n10, 215nn30, 31, 34, 36
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, group identity, 223, 228, 232, 239n17,
5 – 8, 11, 15, 16, 19, 22, 25nn16, 242n36
22, 27n67, 34, 50 – 1, 66n3, 79, Grünbein, Durs, 23, 275 – 85, 293 – 4
92, 93, 93n3, 99, 100 – 3, 105 – 10, Guattari, Félix. See Deleuze, Gilles
112 – 13, 116 – 19, 121 – 2, 122 – 3n4, Günderode, Karoline von, 126n35,
123nn6, 7, 124nn10, 11, 15 – 17, 241n34
125nn19 – 21, 126nn31, 35, 37, 38, Gurlt Collection of Anatomical
127nn41 – 4, 132, 183, 204, 213n19, ­Malformations, 278, 280
279; ­Dichtung und ­Wahrheit, 114; Guthke, Karl, 239n15
Zur ­Farbenlehre, 108 – 9; Faust, 50 – 1; Güttner, Vittorio, 300, 325nn9, 15
344 Index

Hacking, Ian, 133 161; Plato sagte, 159; This Too a

Haddon, A.C., 267 ­Philosophy of History, 171 – 2n19, 221;
Hadot, Pierre, 18; The Veil of Isis, 92 Über die Bildung einer Sprache, 161,
Haeckel, Ernst, 249 173; Über den Fleiß, 163; ­Versuch
Hagenbeck, Carl, 317 – 18, 327n32, einer Geschichte der lyrischen
328n37 ­Dichtkunst, 162; ­Versuch über das
Hahnemann, Samuel, 10, 11, 16 – 18, 21, Sein, 155 – 6, 162, 167, 170n2
40, 50 – 66, 67nn7, 13, 68n17; Lesser heredity, 22, 221, 227, 247, 251 – 4, 260,
Writings, 52 – 5, 60; Materia Medica 261, 263, 265, 268; cultural, 221, 223,
Pura, 56 – 8, 61, 63 – 4; Organon, 225 – 6, 232 – 4, 241nn27, 33; physical,
51 – 5, 58, 61, 63 – 4 221, 223, 228, 231, 232 – 5, 241n33,
Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson, 247 – 69. See also family relations;
247 – 8, 250, 269n2 genealogy
Haller, Albrecht von, 15, 18, 80 – 3; hermeneutics, 12, 66, 240n20, 241n26
“Die Alpen,” 80 – 2, 92; Mrs J. heroism, 247, 250
Howorth translation, 81, 94nn4, 5; Herz, Judith, 262 – 3
use of footnotes, 81, 94n5 Hess, Jonathan, 177, 192n2
Hamann, Johann Georg, 20, 36, Hettche, Thomas, 23, 275 – 6, 282,
125n19, 164, 165, 166, 172n21, 173; 285 – 7, 289 – 94, 295nn13, 14
Aesthetica in nuce, 125n19, 164, historiography, universalist vs.
165, 166; Hamburgische Nachricht, ­ethnographic, 221 – 2, 224, 226 – 7,
172n21 228, 231 – 2, 235 – 7, 240n24. See also
Hamilton, William, 250 narrative
Hänny, Reto, 276 history, 10 – 14, 20, 22, 36, 41, 45n10,
Haraway, Donna, 250 55 – 6, 67, 74, 79, 82, 85 – 6, 88, 93,
Hayles, Katherine, 3, 13 107 – 8, 113 – 14, 116 – 17, 122, 125n19,
Haym, Rudolf, 170n1 126n40, 156, 158, 159 – 65, 167 – 9,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 171 – 2n19, 179, 189, 190, 192n1,
237 – 8n3, 249 193n7, 200, 202, 212n10, 221 – 2,
Heinz, Marion, 157, 159, 160, 170, 224 – 5, 227 – 8, 231 – 6, 237 – 8n3, 253,
171nn6, 15, 173 260, 275, 277 – 9, 281 – 3, 285 – 6, 290,
Heraclitus, 64 292, 311, 323, 325n17
Herbert, Christopher, 133 history of science, 1, 3, 16, 24n7
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 6, 20, 36, Hjelde, Sigurd, 237 – 8n3
155 – 69, 170n1, 171nn7, 12, 15 – 18, Hoffmann, E.T.A., 122n3, 313, 321,
171 – 2n19, 172n23, 221, 222, 237n1, 328n39
237 – 8n3; Dithyrambische Rhapsodie Holland, Jocelyn, 10, 17, 18, 62, 66,
über die Rhapsodie kabbalistischer 93, 249
Prose, 166; Journal meiner Reise, homeopathy, 10, 18, 40, 50 – 1, 55 – 6,
171n18; Plan zu einer Aesthetik, 59, 64 – 6, 66nn2, 3, 67n7; definition
 Index  345

of, 51; Law of Minimum, 65; Law of 175, 184, 195n20, 225 – 6, 228, 236,
Similars (similia similibus curentur), 239n17, 247 – 8, 250, 256, 261, 263,
17, 50, 52, 58, 60, 63, 66; Law of the 267 – 8, 303 – 6, 311, 313 – 17, 319 – 23
Single Remedy, 63 inductive method, 13
Homer, 171n16 inheritance: 22, 114, 221, 231, 235,
homosexuality, 261, 262 – 3, 268 253; of alcoholism, 257; blending
House, Michael, 18, 20 – 2, 211n8 versus non-blending, 257 – 8, 260; of
Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm: ­clubfoot, 252, 253, 259 – 60; cultural,
­Makrobiotik, 59 252, 263, 264; of eyes, 257, 259; hard
human diversity, 22, 221 – 2 versus soft, 251 – 2, 254; maternal
human faculties, 13 versus paternal, 259 – 60, 262; of
humanities, 1, 5, 9, 12; humanities and property, 252, 260; of voice, 257,
the sciences, 1, 12, 23, 221. See also 259 – 60
Wissenschaft institutional history, 13 – 14
humanity, 115, 157 – 9, 161 – 8, 285, 288, insurance, 133
290 interdisciplinary, 4, 176, 192n2, 212n12
Humboldt, Alexander von, 111, intuition, 9, 17, 38 – 9, 46n17, 64,
117, 126n38; Florae Fribergensis 241n31
­Specimen, 111 irrational, 9, 315
Humboldt University, 275, 278, 282 – 4 Islam, 226, 227, 228, 230, 235, 236,
Hume, David, 20, 155, 187, 195n24, 239n16, 241 – 2n34. See also religion
200, 209, 211n7, 237 – 8n3; “Of Italy, 248
­Tragedy,” 200 Itzig, Isaac Daniel, 240n19
Huxley, Julian, 267
James, Henry, 268
idealism, 159, 166, 167, 181 – 2, 194n12, Jardin, Nicholas. See Cunningham,
236 Andrew
imaginary, 5, 8, 9, 16, 52, 78, 97, 117, Jentsch, Ernst, 23, 303, 312 – 14, 321 – 2,
119, 122, 167, 278, 298, 302, 311, 328n39; “Zur Psychologie des
318 – 21, 323 Unheimlichen,” 312
imagination, 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 18, 19, 20, John, David G., 241 – 2n34
23, 73, 77 – 9, 87, 92, 97, 100, 102 – 4, Judaism, 226 – 9, 236, 238n9, 239n17,
107, 109, 114, 118 – 20, 122, 122 – 3n4, 240n19, 241 – 2n34. See also religion
131 – 3, 135 – 6, 143 – 4, 146 – 7, 150n4, judgment, aesthetic, 41
182, 184 – 5, 187 – 8, 284, 298 – 9, 303, Just, Claus, 66n2
305, 312, 318 – 22
imperialism, 77, 163, 266, 326n20 Kant, Immanuel, 11, 20, 132, 155 – 9,
India, 239n16, 248 170n1, 171nn7, 12, 172n23, 178 – 9,
individual, 5, 7, 19, 54, 61, 67n8, 84, 181 – 2, 186 – 7, 189 – 91, 192n4,
116, 119, 134, 137, 141 – 3, 168 – 9, 193n8, 194nn13, 14, 195n24,
346 Index

203; Allgemeine Naturgeschichte Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe: The

und Theorie des Himmels, 171; ­Literary Absolute, 68n21
­Anthropologie in pragmatischer Lacour, Claudia Brodsky, 235
­Hinsicht, 157, 173, 189 – 92; Critique Lamarckism, 251, 254
of Pure Reason, 172; Der einzig Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 170n1
mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Langhans, Carl Gotthard, 280
Demonstration des Daseins Gottes, Langston, Christopher, 122
155; Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit language, 2, 3, 6, 17, 24n8, 78, 102 – 3,
der vier syllogistischen Figuren, 117, 132 – 4, 139, 141, 159 – 62, 164 – 9,
155; Träume eines ­Geistersehers, 171n16, 172n24, 183, 188, 191,
170; Versuch den Begriff der 192n3, 193n8, 234 – 5, 276, 278, 282,
­negativen Größe in die Weltweisheit 284 – 5; poetic, 15, 125n19, 155, 162,
­einzuführen, 155 164 – 5, 167, 169; figurative, 19, 98;
Karl May: festivals, 328n41; museum metaphorical, 24n7, 117
300 – 1, 323, 324nn6–7, 324–5n8, 325n9 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 7, 8
Kaupert, Christa, 172n23 Lavoisier, Antoine, 98 – 9, 111, 114 – 15,
Kay, James Phillips, 133 125n27; Elements of Chemistry
Kelley, Theresa, 77, 88, 91 (Traité élémentaire de chimie), 111,
Kepler, Johannes, 159 114
Kim, Mi Gyung, 125nn22 – 3 law, 35, 39, 46 – 7n20, 65, 108, 109,
King Lear, 204 111 – 15, 133 – 4, 137, 143, 161, 175 – 6,
Kingsley, Charles, 138 178, 195 – 6n24, 201, 258; of similars,
kin selection, 249, 250, 256, 261, 263 17, 50, 52, 58, 60, 63, 66; universal, 12
kinship, 22, 43, 85, 231, 251 – 3, 255, 261 – 3 Lawrence, Frieda, 260
Kitson, Peter J. See Fulford, Tim Lee, Debbie. See Fulford, Tim
Knight, David, 5, 14, 16, 27n63 Lehrer, Mark, 239 – 40n18
Knodt, Eva, 240n23 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 20, 157,
knowledge, 1, 3 – 8, 14 – 16, 18, 23, 170 – 1n5; Monadology, 170 – 1n5;
25n17, 26n56, 41, 46 – 7n20, 76 – 9, Theodicy, 171
86 – 9, 97, 100, 103, 106, 109, 121, Lenoir, Tim, 4
124n17, 130 – 7, 139, 141 – 3, 145, Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 22, 205,
147 – 9, 151n12, 155 – 67, 170n3, 214n24, 222 – 42; “Education of the
171n9, 176 – 8, 182, 192n2, 194n3, Human Race,” 224 – 7, 230, 231 – 2,
196n26, 201 – 2, 208, 228, 231, 236, 236 – 7, 238n11; Laocoön, 234 – 5;
251, 276, 278 – 82, 284, 289, 292, 318 Nathan the Wise, 22, 223 – 4, 225 – 7,
Kolb, Ulrike, 276 230 – 1, 233, 236, 237 – 8n3, 239nn17, 18,
Koschorke, Albrecht, 113 241n34; origins of, 223 – 7; ring ­parable
Kunkel, Thor, 275 in, 223, 226, 228 – 31, 232, 239n18
Kuschel, Karl-Joseph, 241 – 2n34 Leventhal, Robert, 225, 240nn23, 24,
Kuzniar, Alice, 10, 11, 17, 18, 21, 40 241n26
 Index  347

Levine, George, 139, 141, 151nn11, 12 Masuzawa, Tomoko, 236 – 7

Levy, Sara, 240n19 mathematics, 7, 8, 9, 46n16, 117,
Lewes, George Henry, 138 125n21, 131 – 3, 166, 172n21
Librett, Jeffrey, 239 – 40n18 Maxwell, James Clerk, 8, 19; “action at
Lightman, Bernard. See Dawson, a distance” and, 132, 135, 150n1; on
Gowan Alfred Lord Tennyson, 130 – 1, 144;
linguistic turn, 3 on ether, 135; Lewis Campbell and,
Linnaeus, Carl, 74 – 7, 80, 81, 87; 140, 149; on Lucretius, 130 – 1, 141;
nomenclatura, 18 on molecules, 130 – 2, 135 – 7, 138 – 9,
literature, 13, 22 – 3, 26n56, 78 – 9, 86, 141, 149; religion, 140, 145, 149; on
100, 132, 172n21, 181, 235, 276 – 9, statistics, 130 – 1, 136 – 7, 149, 150nn6,
282, 276 – 9, 282, 284 – 5, 293 – 4, 318, 9, 13; John Tyndall and, 150n2
320 – 1, 324n4; and science, 1, 2, 3, May, J.A., 171
4, 6, 13, 14, 16, 19, 24n2, 87, 93, 99, May, Karl, 324n6, 328n40
134, 139, 285 McEwan, Ian, 250
Locke, John, 20, 155 McIsaac, Peter M., 22, 23, 299
Lodge, David, 250 meaning, 5, 6, 10, 15, 21, 22, 36 – 7,
logic, 22, 37, 102, 105, 117, 149, 156 – 8, 50 – 1, 65, 97, 99, 101 – 2, 112, 139,
161, 165, 175, 187, 203, 209, 221, 182, 188 – 90, 210n1, 214n27, 231 – 2,
240n21, 248, 250 – 1, 254, 269n3, 283, 235, 240n24, 268, 288 – 9, 291, 313
286 – 7, 313, 323 mechanical philosophy, 9, 10
love, 16, 75, 113, 148, 180, 204, 226, media, 21, 23, 276 – 7, 281, 283 – 5,
227, 231, 232, 234, 235, 241n30, 249, 290, 292 – 4, 298 – 300, 304, 306, 309,
255 311 – 12, 316, 322 – 3, 324nn4, 7;
Lucretius, 74, 101 – 2, 130 – 1, 141 ­digital, 277, 283, 287, 293
Luhmann, Niklas, 16, 134 medical specimens, 22, 23, 276
Lyell, Charles, 2 medicine, 9, 17, 52 – 5, 56 – 7, 60 – 1,
67n12, 68n17, 80, 205, 279, 282 – 3,
Madame Tussaud’s, 326n25 288, 292, 294
magic: idealism, 66; thought, 319 – 20 Mendel, Gregor, 22, 258, 260, 265 – 7
Maimon, Salomon, 20, 21, 56, 179, Mendelism, 248, 250, 258, 265, 267 – 8;
181 – 7, 193nn8, 9, 194n13, 195n24 laws, 258 – 9; “salutary principle,” 267
Malthus, Thomas, 133 Mendelssohn, Moses, 170n1, 194n19,
Manifest Destiny, 327n35 224, 240n19
Mann, Thomas, 241 – 2n34 Menges, Karl, 171
mannequin, 23, 294nn2, 3, 295n12, Menze, Ernest A., 171n17
298 – 300, 302 – 7, 311 – 15, 317 – 19, Menzel, Adolph, 309 – 11, 326n18
321 – 4, 324n1, 325nn9, 13, 15, mesmerism, 66, 68n27
326n21, 327 – 8n36 meta-disciplinary (meta-discursive)
Martin, Alison, 82 discussions, 12, 19
348 Index

metaphor, 2, 3, 19, 74, 91 – 3, 98 – 105, Müller, Adam, 126n35

109 – 14, 117 – 22, 122n3, 125n26, 132, Müller, Friedrich Max, 236 – 7, 238n3
139, 192n3, 193n8, 205, 207, 226, Müller-Sievers, Helmut, 99; Self-­
228 – 30, 239n18, 250, 259, 276, 291, Generation, 99
321. See also language museum, 23, 287 – 94, 294n6, 295nn9,
methodologies, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9 – 10, 12 – 14, 11, 298 – 302, 304 – 6, 308, 312,
223, 236, 279 316 – 18, 321 – 3, 324 – 5n8, 325n10,
Meyer, Theodor, 204 327 – 8n36; medical and ­anatomical
Meyrinck, Gustav, 275 collections, 275 – 80, 282, 284 – 7,
Michaelis, Johann David, 223 293 – 4
Milburn, Colin, 3 mythology, 15, 18, 73, 79, 83 – 4, 86 – 8,
mind, 9, 21, 57, 91, 102, 125n25, 140, 92, 119, 279
146, 156, 160, 164 – 5, 168 – 9, 176 – 9,
189, 192n2, 194n13, 206 – 8, 210n1, Nancy, Jean-Luc: The Literary
234, 266, 285 – 6, 292 ­Absolute, 68n21
Minter, Catherine 195 – 6n24 Napoleon Bonaparte, 116
model, 16, 19, 22, 59, 66, 115, 121 – 2, Napoleonic Wars, 108, 116, 126nn35, 37
124n17, 131, 133, 139, 147, 150n2, narrative, 2, 20 – 2, 40, 58, 74 – 5, 78,
158 – 9, 161, 163, 181, 189, 193n8, 86, 88, 91, 101, 139, 141, 146 – 9,
201, 203, 205 – 10, 215n29, 222, 226, 158, 177, 179, 183, 188, 223, 225,
250 – 1, 253, 255, 258, 261 – 2, 269n2, 227, 232, 235 – 6, 248, 250 – 3, 257 – 9,
288, 298 – 300, 302 – 4, 306, 314 – 15, 263 – 5, 277, 285 – 90, 293 – 4. See also
321, 324, 325n13 historiography
Modernism, 248 nation, nationalism, national identity, 84,
modernity, 16, 114, 121, 125n29, 113 – 17, 119, 163, 223, 249, 265, 275
277 – 8, 279, 282 – 3, 285, 289, 293 National Socialism, 266, 267, 294
molecules, 8, 131 – 2, 135 – 7, 145, 149 Natural History Museum (Dresden),
Molendijk, Arie, 237 – 8n3 281
money, 35, 228 – 30, 239n18, 240n21. Naturalism, 251, 253
See also coin natural sciences, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13,
Moor of Vienna (Mohr von Wien), 307 100, 125n21, 221, 227, 277, 307;
Mori, Masahiro, 23, 322 ­Romantic, 14. See also Wissenschaft
Moritz, Karl Philipp, 20 – 1, 179 – 81, nature, 15, 18, 25n26, 52, 56, 64, 65,
189 – 91, 193n8, 194nn18, 19; Anton 73 – 4, 76 – 8, 80, 82 – 9, 91 – 3, 97,
Reiser, 179 – 81, 183, 188, 196n25; 100 – 3, 105 – 17, 121, 124n10, 130,
Magazin der ­Erfahrungsseelenkunde 155, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166,
(Journal of Experimental 167, 169, 171 – 2n19, 176, 186 – 7, 190,
­Psychology), 21, 179 – 89, 194n12 195 – 6n24, 203, 206, 248, 250, 260 – 2,
Morton, Michael, 164, 167, 171n17, 281, 288, 289, 307, 326n19; holistic
171 – 2n19, 172n24 understanding of, 15
 Index  349

Nazi, 266, 267, 311; human 124n16, 131, 135, 138, 142 – 4, 148,
­experimentation, 294 156, 178, 180, 182 – 3,185, 188 – 9,
Neubauer, John, 67n12, 68n20 192n2, 193n8, 196n25, 201, 203,
Newman, Daniel Aureliano, 22, 212n10, 241n27, 325n12
241n33 Ockham, William of, 11
Newman, William R., 25n26 Oesmann, Astrid, 238 – 9n14
Newton, Isaac, 110, 184 Ojibway, 324n7
Nicolai, Friedrich, 224 Omaha (Native Americans), 316,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 175 – 7, 192n3, 327n34
229 – 30, 240n23 omniscience, 4, 7, 138 – 9, 142 – 3, 145
nineteenth century, 8, 10 – 14, 16, 19, optics, 15, 195n23
20 – 1, 24n2, 25n19, 26n56, 34, 56, Osler, Margaret, 7
59, 62, 66, 67n11, 88, 99, 131 – 2, 134, Otto, Rudolf, 237 – 8n3
138, 142, 200, 202, 205, 206, 208,
210, 211nn6, 11, 215n29, 221 – 2, 224, Packham, Catherine, 78
253, 257, 277, 282, 290, 294nn2, 3, Palti, Elias, 159
304 – 5, 307, 311, 316, 322 panopticon, 305, 312, 316, 327n34
Norton, Robert, 162, 170n4, 171n11, Papua New Guinea, 315; Papuan,
172n20 315 – 16
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Paracelsus, 56, 64, 67nn6, 7
10, 11, 16, 17, 35 – 43, 45n14, 46nn15, paradox of fiction, 215n38
19, 46 – 7n20, 47nn21, 22, 60 – 1, 63 – 6, pathos, 51, 200, 204
68nn23, 26; The Apprentices of Sais Peckham, Morse, 9
(Die Lehrlinge zu Sais), 64 – 5; Das performance (performer), 3, 59, 123,
Allgemeine Brouillon (Notes for a 193n8, 241 – 2n34, 288, 298 – 9, 303 – 4,
Romantic Encyclopaedia), 68n26 307, 311 – 12, 314 – 23, 331, 325n8,
novel, 19, 22, 33, 63, 99 – 101, 104, 105, 327nn29, 34 – 5, 328n37
108, 113, 117, 119 – 22, 122 – 3n4, philosophers, 7 – 9, 11, 20, 67n5, 73, 92,
123n8, 124n12, 125nn24, 29, 112, 162, 170n1, 183, 192n2
126nn31, 32, 35, 126n37, 127n44, philosophy, 9 – 10, 17, 20, 37 – 8, 40 – 1,
133 – 4, 138 – 48, 179 – 81, 188 – 90, 51, 58, 78 – 9, 87 – 8, 92, 117, 124n10,
193 – 4n11, 196n25, 241n30, 247 – 9, 125n19, 132, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161,
250 – 6, 258 – 60, 263 – 4, 266, 162, 164, 165, 166, 170n1, 171 – 2n19,
26 9nn1, 3, 285 – 7, 290, 307, 321 184, 186, 215n38, 224, 249
Noyes, John K., 6, 20 photography, 277, 300, 305 – 7
physicists, 7, 8, 65, 130 – 2, 135, 137 – 8,
objectivity, 11, 41, 122n1, 160 144
observation (self-observation), 10, 15, physics, 9, 14, 42, 73, 92, 117 – 18
17 – 20, 33, 51, 54, 56, 63 – 4, 76, 80 – 1, Pickstone, John V.: Ways of Knowing,
92 – 3, 100, 105, 110, 115, 123n8, 51, 56, 57, 67n5
350 Index

Piegan (Blackfoot), 300 – 4, 306, 313, prose, 18, 73, 76 – 8, 80, 82, 93, 166,
323, 324 171n16, 321
Pietsch, Theodore, 237n2 Pross, Wolfgang, 155, 160, 163, 170n1,
pity and fear, 200, 202, 206 – 9, 214n24, 171 – 2n19
215n29, 35 Prüfer, Thomas. See Fulda, Daniel
Plains (Nations), 317 – 18, 323, 325nn9, pseudoscience, 264, 266 – 7
15, 325 psyche, 119, 284, 215n29, 303, 314
Planck, Max, 250 psychology, 21, 125n29, 161, 169, 177,
Plato, 125n19 180, 195 – 6n24, 196n26, 208, 211n8;
Platner, Ernst, 18, 21, 176 – 7, 192n2 empirical, 176, 178 – 9, 181, 183 – 4,
poetic language, 6, 15, 125n19, 155, 188, 190, 192n1, 193n8, 194nn18, 19,
162, 164, 165, 167, 169 201, 211n5
poetry, 5, 6, 8, 9, 18, 65, 73, 78 – 80, public health, 133, 134
82, 87, 89, 92, 97 – 9, 102, 105, 118, Pukumani, 302
121 – 2, 125n21, 127n42, 131, 158 – 9, Punnett, Reginald, 258, 265, 267 – 8
161 – 2, 164 – 6, 171n16, 284 Purdy, Anthony. See Bruce, Donald
Poovey, Mary, 34, 44n3, 134 Pygmalion, 326n19
Pope, Alexander, “The Rape of the Pyle, Forest, 141
Lock,” 84
popularization, 15 – 16, 88 quantum mechanics, 150n9, 250
Pörksen, Uwe, 126nn34, 36 quasi-emotions, 21, 199 – 202, 204 – 5,
Porter, Dahlia, 77 208 – 11, 213nn20, 21, 215n37
Porter, Theodore, 133, 150n6, 151n13 queer theory, 250, 262 – 3
positivism, 1
possibility, 7, 9, 40, 110, 139, 141 – 2, race, 34, 164, 166, 221, 223, 232, 237 – 8,
146, 147, 149, 162, 163, 166, 167, 253, 256, 263, 266 – 8, 311, 327n35
176, 178 – 81, 185 – 6, 188 – 91, 202, racism, 265 – 6, 311, 325n8
209, 299, 260, 314, 319 Radford, Colin, 215n38
postcolonial theory, 1 rational, 8, 13, 20 – 1, 98, 113, 115 – 16,
post-humanism, 250, 264 141, 157, 164 – 5, 184, 223, 227, 232,
potenzieren, 64 315
practice, 5, 40, 73 – 5, 78, 81 – 2, 84, 87, reading, 11, 17, 40, 44, 51, 63 – 4, 86,
89, 105, 126n31, 203, 212n10, 225 – 8, 91, 155, 162, 164, 170n1, 171n12,
237, 276 – 7, 282 – 3, 285, 293, 309, 180 – 1, 183, 188, 191, 209, 223, 229,
319; medical, 50 – 2, 56 – 7, 59 – 60, 230, 234, 239n16, 240 – 1n18, 241n26,
64, 66 242n36, 248, 252, 254, 257, 259 – 61,
Primer, Irwin, 92 263, 268, 269n1, 275, 288, 295n10,
probability, 7, 8, 19, 132, 136, 139 – 41, 313, 320, 326n19, 328n39
144, 146, 149, 150nn6, 9. See also realism, 23, 124n16, 248, 284, 300, 306,
statistics 311
 Index  351

reality, 6 – 8, 17, 19, 34, 44, 91, 100 – 1, robotics, 23

119, 121, 123n8, 150n2, 181, 183, Romanticism, 5, 9, 10, 11, 17, 26n36,
187, 194n13, 203 – 4, 215n37, 250, 77; German, 34 – 5, 38 – 9, 43 – 4, 51,
252, 284, 298, 304, 311, 313, 319 63, 66, 93
reason, 5, 100, 102, 116, 119, 125n19, Rosenthal, Jesse, 134, 139
170n3, 184, 223, 225, 227, 241n26 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 113, 115, 228
recombination, 103, 257 – 8 Royal College of Physicians, 13
Reil, Johann Christian, 111 – 13, Royal Society, 13
125n25; Von der Lebenskraft, 111
Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 222 – 3, Sarrasani, Hans-Stosch, 328n37
224 – 6, 230, 232, 236, 238nn5, 10, scalp, 324n7
239n15 scepticism, 186 – 7, 194n13, 195n24
religion, 16, 22, 140, 171n16, 283; Schaumann, Caroline, 80
as cultural phenomenon, 223 – 4, Scheingefühle, 199, 210nn1, 4
226 – 8, 231 – 2, 236 – 7, 239nn15, Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, 9, 60,
17, 240n24; as ethical foundation, 326n22
224 – 6, 231 – 2; and faith, 8, 139 – 41; Schellong, Otto, 315 – 16, 327n28
natural, 223; rational, 223, 225, 227, Schiller, Friedrich, 15 – 16, 113, 202;
232; ­relationship between religions, Wallenstein, 199, 202 – 3, 213n22. See
223, 225, 226 – 7, 235 – 7, 238 – 9n14, also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,
241 – 2n34; revealed, 224 – 6, 236 – 8; Über den Dilettantismus
transmission of, 225 – 7, 231 – 2; truth Schilson, Arno, 240n23
of, 224, 225 – 6, 229 – 32, 237. See Schlegel, Friedrich, 10, 17, 35 – 7, 40 – 3,
also anti-Semitism; ­Christianity; 47nn25, 26, 48nn27 – 30, 115, 222;
­comparative religion; deism; Athenäum, 62 – 4, 68n21
Islam; Judaism; science of religion; Schleicher, August, 222
Zoroastrianism Schmitt, Axel, 240n23
religious studies, 22, 222, 232, 236 Schnapp, Alain, 228
Renaissance, 11, 67n6, 86, 92 Schneider, Helmut, 223, 227, 234,
representation 181, 184, 186, 188 – 91 238n6, 240nn23, 24, 241n26, 242n36
reproduction, 74 – 5, 78, 80, 93, 251, Schönert, Jörg, 239 – 40n18
257, 260, 261 – 3 Schulze, Gottlob Ernst, 186
Reschke, Nils, 125n22, 126n31 Schwanitz, Hans Joachim, 67n12
reversion. See atavism Schwartz, Peter, 121, 126n32
revolution: chemical, 108, 114 – 16; science, 1 – 7, 9 – 10, 12 – 21, 23, 24nn2,
English, 114; French, 99, 108, 25nn17, 19, 26n36, 27n67, 39 – 41,
114 – 17, 126n31 43, 47n22, 56, 59, 65, 66, 73 – 4, 76 – 7,
Richards, Robert J., 39, 111, 125n25 79 – 80, 82, 84, 86 – 9, 92 – 3, 94n7,
Riedel, Wolfgang, 284 97 – 100, 110, 114, 117 – 19, 121 – 2,
Robespierre, Maximilien, 116 125n21, 130 – 5, 138 – 40, 143, 148 – 9,
352 Index

157, 163, 170nn1, 3, 176 – 82, 184, Simon, Paul Ludwig, 42

186, 189, 191, 192n1, 193n8, 200 – 1, simulation, 101, 116, 121, 208 – 10
221, 223 – 4, 228, 232, 235 – 7, 237n1, Sioux, 317, 327nn31, 33
249, 253, 266 – 7, 276 – 80, 282 – 5, 288, Sitting Bull, 317
292, 294, 307, 315, 318, 320 – 1. See Smith, Jonathan Z., 236
also Wissenschaft Smith, Zadie, 251
science fiction, 3 Snow, Charles Percy, 1, 5, 7; “The Two
science and literature. See literature Cultures,” 1, 7
and science sociology of science, 16
sciences: genetic, 235; human, 221, Soemmering, Samuel Thomas,
228, 232, 236 – 7, 237n1; and humani- 326n20
ties, 221, 228; of religion, 222, 224, Soliman, Angelo, 307
236 – 7 soul, 107, 159, 176 – 8, 182 – 6, 188 – 9,
science studies, 4 – 5, 43 192, 192n2, 193n8, 195n24, 204,
scientist, 8 – 12, 14 – 16, 92, 97 – 8, 100, 225 – 6, 234, 256, 302 – 3, 314, 323;
112, 117, 121, 131 – 2, 135 – 8, 140, and body, 176 – 7
143 – 4, 148, 266 – 7, 307, 316, 318 Southey, Robert, 241 – 2n34
Second World War, 278, 280 Spencer, Herbert, 137, 150n8,
Secord, James, 3 249
self-experimentation, 54 Spinoza, Baruch, 121, 125n19, 160
semiotics, 51, 55 – 6, 235 Spotted Tail (Chief), 317
senses, 8, 19, 20, 21, 100, 102, 107, 130, statistics: 130 – 1, 133–5, 136 – 7, 282;
132, 156, 164, 166, 169, 191 General Register Office and, 133;
seventeenth century, 14, 74 – 5 law of large numbers, 133 – 4; ­Journal
sexology, 263 of the Statistical Society and, 133;
Sharpe, Eric, 222 probability theory and, 136 – 7;
Shell, Marc, 239 – 40n18, 240nn20, 21 uncertainty and, 133 – 4, 137, 141. See
Shelley, Mary, 241 – 2n34 also Maxwell, James Clerk
Shelley, Percy, 241 – 2n34 Steigerwald, Joan, 68n27
Shteir, Ann, 15 – 16, 18, 25n19 sterility, 251, 256, 262, 265
Shuttleworth, Sally, 25n19. See also Stockhammer, Robert, 123n9
Christie, John Stolberg, Michael, 59, 66n4,
siblings. See family relations 67n9
Siebeck, Hermann, 213 – 14n23; Stroumsa, Guy, 227, 237 – 8n3
Grundfragen zur Psychologie und subject (individual), 10, 11, 17, 176,
Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 213 – 14n23 178 – 82, 186 – 91, 193n8, 194n13
signature of things, 56, 64, 67n6 subjectivity, 11, 12, 19, 20, 38, 176, 181,
signification, 40, 64, 66, 102, 228 183, 286
simile, 100 – 1, 103 – 7, 118 – 22, subject-object distinction, 11, 12
123nn5 – 9, 124nn11, 18, 126n37 sweet pea, 265
 Index  353

sympathy, 56, 112, 138, 141, 145, 147, twentieth century, 13, 16, 134, 150n9,
149, 151n13, 213n17 214n27, 241n34, 265, 289, 300, 307,
symptoms, 17, 18, 40, 50 – 1, 54 – 64, 312, 317, 328n37
253 Tyndall, John, 132, 135 – 6, 138, 139, 150n2
systematization, 17
systems theory, 16, 171n15 Umlauff, Johann Friedrich Gustav,
Szondi, Peter: Poetik und 317, 326n21, 327 – 8n36
­Geschichtsphilosophie, 68n18 uncanny, 23, 298, 303, 305 – 6, 311 – 14,
318 – 19, 321 – 2, 323, 324n3, 326n24,
Talbert, Charles, 238n5 328n39; valley, 23, 322
Tantillo, Astrida, 122 – 3n4 universal, 85, 115, 163, 184, 191, 224,
Tatar, Maria, 68n27 226, 227, 236 – 7, 239n17, 240n24,
taxidermy, 307 241n26; brotherhood, 227, 242n36;
taxonomy, 17, 18, 74, 77, 88, 91, 279 and particular, 20; progress, 224,
technique, 284 – 5, 288, 293 – 4, 299, 307, 227, 236. See also family relations;
311, 319 – 20 historiography; truth
technology: 79, 88, 118, 299, 300, 309,
312; medical, 276, 286 – 8 Vesalius, Andreas, 292
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 8, 130 – 1, 144 Virchow, Rudolf, 290 – 1, 293
theatre, 181, 199 – 200, 208, 213n22, virtual reality, 100 – 1, 121 – 2
276, 285, 289 – 90, 292 – 4, 294n6, 316, Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 201 – 3,
320, 327n36 205; “Kritik meiner Ästhetik,” 202
thermodynamics, 8, 19, 130 – 1 Vischer, Robert, 201
Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin), 132, vital life force, 54, 60, 66
136 vitalism, 51
3D, 23, 311 – 12, 322 vivification, 298 – 9, 312, 318 – 21, 324n3
Tiwi (islands), 300, 302, 304, 323, Volkelt, Johannes, 201, 204, 206,
326n24 212nn10, 12, 213nn20, 21; ­Ästhetik
tool, 3, 4, 7 – 10, 18, 20, 78, 85, 87, 236, des Tragischen, 204, 212n12,
284, 309, 326n18 213nn20, 21; “Die tragische
tragedy, 200, 204 – 9, 213 – 14n23, ­Entladung der Affekte,” 206
214n24 Völkerschau, 303 – 4, 314 – 16, 318 – 22
tragic pleasure, 200, 203, 205 – 9, 211n6, Vonnegut, Kurt, 251
215n36 Vries, Hugo de, 22, 253, 258
truth, 8, 9, 12, 22, 34 – 5, 102, 107, 140,
157, 169, 175 – 6, 185, 187 – 8, 192n3, Walker, Saint John, 322
224 – 6, 229 – 31, 232, 237, 239 – 40n18, Walls, Laura Dassow, 3
240nn22, 23, 321 Walton, Kendell, 209 – 10, 215n38;
Tschermak, Erich von, 258 Mimesis as Make-Believe, 209 – 10,
Turner, Henry S., 3, 24n7 210n1
354 Index

wax, 326n21; wax figure, 305 – 6, 314; Wissenschaft (science), 5;

wax museum, 312; wax works, 303, ­Geisteswissenschaft (humanities),
306, 313 5; Literaturwissenschaft (­literary
Weber, Christian P., 6, 18, 19, 132 ­studies), 9; Naturwissenschaft
Weber, A. Dana, 22, 23, 294nn2 – 4, (­natural sciences), 5
295n12 Witasek, Stephan, 205, 213nn15, 20,
Weber, Wilhelm, 131 – 2, 135 215n37
Weidmann, Heiner, 239 – 40n18 Witz, 64, 68n21
Weigel, Sigrid, 221 Wolff, Christian, 20, 157, 159,
Weismann, August, 249, 251, 254, 257, 170 – 1n5; Philosophia rationalis, 171,
258 174; Psychologia empirica, 170 – 1n5
Wellbery, David, 235 women, 15, 18, 25n19, 73 – 4, 82 – 3,
Wellek, René, 9 88 – 9, 91, 139, 240n25, 261
Wetzels, Walter, 68n27 wound, 126n37, 276, 285 – 6, 290 – 1,
Wieland, Christoph, 33 – 4 294
“The Wild West” (Buffalo Bill’s), 318, Wundt, Wilhelm, 211nn5, 8, 212n10,
327n30, 328nn37, 41 215n35
Wild West (frontier), 316, 318, 324 – 5n8,
325n15, 328n37 Yasukata, Toshimasa, 238n5
Wild, Christopher, 181, 185, 194n12
will, free, 9, 110, 113, 141, 178 Zammito, John, 159, 162, 170n1
Wilke, Tobias, 12, 20, 21, 196n26 Zola, Émile, 253, 257
Wilson, W. Daniel, 241 – 2n34 Zoroastrianism, 239n16, 241n34. See
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 311 also religion