Goethe Yearbook

Many notable recent scholars in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German studies have established fascinating ties between literature, philosophy, mathematics, physics, and the life sciences, as is demonstrated by the work of Dalia Nassar, John H. Smith, Frederick Amrine, Howard Pollack-Milgate, Jocelyn Holland, and Joan Steigerwald. Their work is as expository as it is interpretive. Clearly, to become knowledgeable and conversant in these diverse fields is a difficult task, that is to say, to become as familiar with these intersecting discourses as the German Idealists and Romantics themselves were. Leif Weatherby both excels and falls short in this task, depending on the field he chooses to investigate.

On the plus side, Weatherby displays an impressive command of the philosophical and physiological discourses of the era. His book ranges widely: it starts with Leibniz, travels from Haller to Herder, Kant to Kielmeyer, Hölderlin to Schelling, Fichte to Novalis, Goethe to Hegel, and ends with Marx. He renavigates and redefines the Romantic project via the words Organon and das Organ, noting that the term das Organ did not appear in German-speaking lands until the 1780s. It was used initially to indicate that a particular biological part was an instrument or tool, that it had a specific function, faculty, or capacity. Only subsequently did it brush off this semantic dimension of instrumentality and mechanism to evoke solely the isolated, physical part of the body, its prime meaning today. Weatherby argues that the Romantics played with this duality between the vital and the mechanistic in order to conjoin metaphysics and aesthetics with the life sciences. He thus searches for the use of the word in these various writers and meticulously traces out the various appropriations to varying methodological purposes, including their construction of a philosophical Organon (i.e., an aid or vehicle providing or erecting an edifice for knowledge). In so doing, he disputes the prevalent association of Romantic organicism with aesthetic wholeness or a natural unfolding. Weatherby stresses instead the functional, mechanistic, technological side of the words Organ and Organon that writers of the period brought into play.

On the negative side, this investigation would have profited from a more careful, thorough grounding in the life sciences, specifically, medical discourses at the time. Because Weatherby focuses on the German tradition and the impact of Haller, there are no references to the mid-eighteenth-century Montpellier vitalistic school of medicine, where a discourse on the organ first arose. In contrast to Boerhaave's (1668–1738) and Hoffmann's (1660–1742) pathology, vitalistic rather [End Page 324] than iatromechanical theories of the body took hold in the Montpellier school of medicine in the eighteenth century. Its founder Sauvages (1706–67) was influenced by Stahl's theory of an anima regulating the body; yet at the same time Sauvages advocated precise empirical observation in order to collect and classify illness. Bordeu (1722–66), discontent with the Stahlian metaphysical framework adopted by his predecessor, located sensibility in specific organs and physiological systems. Others, such Cabanis (1757–1808), Bichat (1771–1802), and Pinel (1775–1826), then furthered the recognition that the physician must detect the causes of disease. Theirs was a science of etiology that refined a methodicalempirical approach to understanding phenomena. Bichat investigated pathological anatomy and ascertained that diseases derived from tissue lesions. Pinel studied the brain. There is also no mention in Weatherby's book of the all-important term principe de vie, coined in 1772 by the Montpellier physician Paul-Joseph Barthez (1734–1806). To argue as Weatherby does that biology as a science does not arise until the beginning of the nineteenth century is to ignore these eighteenth-century advances made in the sciences of etiology, nosology, and pathology.

Already in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie of 1765, organe is defined first as an instrument and second as an isolated biological part capable of executing this or that action, such as in the work of veins, arteries, nerves, and muscles...