The Counter-Reductionism of/against Science

The true promoters of philosophy in France and England are their great natural scientists, and it is not to the discredit of the English if philosophy for them mainly, indeed almost exclusively, means physics. German ideas seem to gain entry to France mainly in the realm of the natural sciences. Whoever, e.g., reads many recent French investigations of the anatomy of the brain will be surprised to find a new language, a new kind of expression which until very recently people in Germany thought they could insult by using the epithet “poetic”, a new, thoroughly German sort of conception; even [the French naturalist George] Cuvier shows in his latest writings on geology and the natural history of the prehistoric world that in relation to these great phenomena German ideas about the natural history of the earth and even German expressions have had a great influence on him. ¹

Perhaps unusually for histories of philosophy, Schelling ends his history of modern philosophy not merely with a summing-up of what came before but with a vision for its future. Andrew Bowie, who translated the lectures, suggests in his preface that the lectures were probably given either 1833–34 or 1836–37. Schelling's one-time friend and rival Hegel died in 1831, and Schelling's lectures on modern philosophy give the impression of having summed up the philosophical output of a particular period, which starts with Descartes and ends with Hegel, including the various outmoded systems by Schelling himself. Schelling writes at the transition from the speculative moment of German idealism to the various kinds of later neo-Kantian idealisms and more importantly, positivisms.

The nineteenth century is the century of the great repudiation of metaphysics, given that the key disputants all seem to characterize Hegel as the enemy. This is true whether we look at Nietzsche or at Kierkegaard. In this we are preceded by Schelling, who perhaps might have been the first to attempt to "put Hegel upside down," as the famous line puts it. Despite their predecessors, modern fideism and scientific rationalism seem to have been born with Hegel's death. I do not mean this literally, and rather as a statement about polarization after Hegel. It is curious that we see traces of both in the arch-speculator Schelling already. Schelling spends his last pages of his lectures identifying Hegel with rationalism and his own position with a brand of empiricism. That Schelling earlier identifies this with Jacobi might make us think that this is merely religious fideism.

It is harder to retain this understanding when Schelling himself finds as his objects of praise not the English pamphleteers or the French philosophes but rather the French and English natural scientists. Schelling specifically singles out French neurology. This is the first example of what I would perhaps like to signal as a recurring theme within Western thought: not that science itself needs to be vanquished as a carrier of mechanism, but that new science itself (especially biology) will be the Trojan Horse that will devastate mechanism, and therefore marry science and metaphysic.

A likely candidate for the French anatomist who Schelling may have had in mind is Étienne-Renaud-Augustin Serres. Serres published his Anatomie comparée du cerveau, dans les quatre classes des animaux vertébrés (Comparative anatomy of the brain, in the four classes of vertebrate animals) in 1824–27, a work of comparative neuroanatomy. Serres was influenced by the naturalists Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), but perhaps most importantly for Schelling, the German Schelling-linked Naturphilosoph Lorenz Oken (1779–1851). Oken was not Serres' chief influence, but he was an associate and follower of Schelling. From our modern vantage, it seems that he was a lesser-known but not unimportant pioneer, who made many careful and detailed descriptions of neurological syndromes. His other, less durable, claim to fame is the Meckel–Serres law, an early articulation of the recapitulation theory, which is not accepted by modern biologists.

Schelling's claim to fame, if we can put it that way, lay in his early organicist metaphysics that aimed to reconcile both realism and idealism through the construction of an ontology of powers and a broadly Romantic metaphysics and philosophy of nature. Today "philosophy of nature" has become a discredited field.

Here however we see that Schelling was, at the moment that idealism was being discredited after Hegel's death, hoping to rescue the language of such a "German" metaphysics in the form of the new science. This need not involve an actual speculator working in science, since Schelling cites the naturalist Cuvier, who was notoriously a critic of the philosophy of nature beloved by Schelling. What could not be won for metaphysics through speculation could be won through a rigorous empiricism working with the matter of life itself. Such an empiricism would not be one of Locke or Mill, but something that would be adequate to its object of Nature. We shall see how it has fared.

Has Schelling succeeded? Schelling makes a specific suggestion about brain anatomy being the source of a "new language, a new kind of expression which until very recently people in Germany thought they could insult by using the epithet “poetic”, a new, thoroughly German sort of conception." Do we see that in neuroscience, or the philosophy of neuroscience, today? The most famous exponents here are Thomas Metzinger (of Being No One) and the Churchlands, infamous for their strict eliminativist tendencies. We might call it scientism, and point out that (superficially, at least), the modern position is not so far from the view set out in Julien Offray de La Mettrie's 1747 L'homme machine (Man a Machine).

What is surprising is just how late the decline of vitalism and organicism in the biological mainstream was. The story you might hear from a science communicator might go like this: élan vital was a Mysterious Answer to the Mysterious Question of Life by people who did not want to dig too deep into the question of life, until heroic scientists decided to actually do the experiments. Sometimes you are told that vitalism was disproved when Friedrich Wöhler succeeded in the inorganic synthesis of urea in 1828, which was thought to have required some kind of "vital force."

Bergson writes L'Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution) in 1907 and coins the term élan vital, and perhaps we can put it down to the philosophers refusing to look at the science even when it should have kicked them in their teeth. We then have to contend with Hans Driesch, who by all accounts was (at least at first) a respected neo-vitalist biologist who worked into the 1920s and 1930s. Admittedly, at this time he had turned to natural philosophy after his last experiments in 1909. We can leave aside Driesch's later descent into parapsychology and spiritualism, and note that in the 1890s he was an accomplished researcher in embryology, working on the embryos of sea urchins. The other major vitalists (Johannes Reinke, Oskar Hertwig and others) all seem to have worked mainly before the war.

After the vitalists, the next hurrah is with organicism, with a more familiar list of names. Here I can mention J. S. Haldane, E. S. Russell, Joseph Henry Woodger (who incidentally became interested in logical empiricism), Joseph Needham and the most distinguished of them, C. H. Waddington. If Henri Bergson was the figurehead of the old vitalism, altogether too French, too Continental, too speculative, there is A. N. Whitehead, who stands behind the newer wave of organicism. It is true that Whitehead was influenced by Bergson, to the point that they cited each other. ² He nevertheless set out his theory in a more "empiricist" register, as a speculative hypothesis that could be of use.

I certainly knew these names because of my own interest in Whitehead. I'm a scientifically literate layperson, not a biologist, but I had been bowled over by Whitehead's Science and the Modern World. And then I had gotten myself acquainted with the successors of the old organicism and vitalism. The French genealogy of vitalism had not died, since it had been given respectable form by Georges Canguilhem and then by Raymond Ruyer, and then Gilles Deleuze finally incorporated Bergson, Ruyer, even Saint-Hilaire into his metaphysics meant for modern science. There was even a modern revival of anti-reductionism, which had been cut off from the pre-war vitalist world and had sought to reconstruct it. I can name Stuart Kauffman in this vein, but most importantly the mathematical biologist Robert Rosen, who set out a mathematical theory sketching out the non-fractionability and non-simulability of biological organisms. In a similar mathematical vein (though not wholly on the "organicist" end) I can also mention the mathematician and theoretical biologist Giuseppe Longo, whose striking papers on the philosophy and mathematics of biology are online.

I mention this not because of my triumphal belief in the victory of vitalism, or of organicism, or some other kind of anti-reductionism, over "mechanism," however one might put it. Quite the opposite: why has none of these interventions ever really accomplished their goals for a "new kind of science?" If we can put it simply, the organicists and the vitalists in general wish to revive a neo-Aristotelian notion of the organism, one that is conjugated to greater or lesser extents with a Platonic or a neo-Platonic metaphysics (this is the goal of Schelling, and to some extent of Whitehead and Bergson too, even if they did not identify strongly with "Platonism").

Given that Aristotelianism as a philosophy of nature was defeated through the growing mathematization of science, Rosen offers the most direct attempt to found an Aristotelian science (complete with the four causes!) on an explicitly mathematical foundation. We can also talk about René Thom's catastrophe theory in a similar register, as a successful mathematical theory that did not fulfil its promise in biology. I suspect that this is why the incorporation of systems-level thinking within biology is not quite what any of these would-be Achaeans hoping to sack Troy-Mechanism have in mind. What is wanted is not only the acknowledgement of "complexity" wherein mechanical systems with numerous parts can simulate holism and even include feedback loops but an actual metaphysics of the organism that is Aristotelian, which itself requires a distinct epistemology and a different consideration of the ends of science.

It is precisely these that it is unfair to demand that biologists give up. It may also be a matter of time; one gets the impression reading some of the big synthetic theoretical biologists that they would have been happier living before 1945. Before 1945, perhaps, there might have been more of a serious audience for someone like Robert Rosen or Stuart Kauffman who wants to talk Aristotle and Kant while doing biology. The fall of organicism is linked not only to the war and the professionalization of science but also to the rise of molecular chemistry, which severs the link between the almost "contemplative" empiricism of a Needham or Waddington (not a coincidence that they were embryologists!) and the later lab-work with closer ties to physics and chemistry.

The "new" organicism therefore inherits an interest in formalism and mathematics that was not as prominent in Driesch. Rosen worked on category theory, Kauffman worked on the mathematics of random Boolean networks, and Longo is literally a mathematician, so these are not cases of scientists who could not "hack it" with technical work and decided to be armchair speculators for laymen and philosophers instead. The new organicism, however, has not really impinged on the work of modern biologists to the extent of demanding metaphysical revision, and why should it? Even granting Rosen's philosophical arguments about the relative precedence of philosophy and biology, or the unique nature of biological systems, by itself does not determine a line of research or transform an existing biological line of research.

It is puzzling, especially if you (like myself) have found yourself becoming convinced by anti-reductionist arguments. It seems that mathematical biologists dispute the force of Rosen's mathematical arguments in and of themselves, suppose that, like me, you were to find the mathematics and the non-mathematical argumentation both convincing. Supposing you do accept a neo-Aristotelian account of what it means to be an organism, your work as a biologist, or for your interpretation of the work of biologists? It is not that organicism is purely a metaphysical view that floats over and above empirical work, since many of the great organicist biologists have plainly been close and obsessive empiricists. Is it that vitalism is good enough for (continental) philosophy and mostly irrelevant everywhere else? Deleuze and Guattari, in the "Geology of Morals" chapter in A Thousand Plateaus, offer a synthesis of the view of Saint-Hilaire in light of Darwinism and modern molecular biology.

I plan to set out in some detail my thoughts on epistemology sometime; one of my more unusual positions, so I'm told, which I have taken up from Feyerabend, is that I support a robust theoretical pluralism. That is, I would support a multiplicity of "traditions" in the same science (whether physics or biology) wherein researchers are affiliated with distinct research programmes each beginning from different metaphysical premises. In this imagined world, there would perhaps be reconstructionist vitalists working alongside hard-core materialists, emergentists, even dualists, idealists and Platonists on the questions of biology. The problem is that most employers do not want or need "philosophers of biology," but rather reliable "technicians" who can work on real problems like drug synthesis, identifying metabolic pathways, and so on. ³ The actual pluralism relevant to biologists happens to be methodological pluralism, not metaphysical.

What can Robert Rosen tell the cancer biologist after a long, hard Monday? This is not something that can be taken lightly, or as a provocation. Often the argument against reductionism, alongside "this is not an accurate ontology of reality" is accompanied by a regret for a particular sacramental, organic or holistic metaphysics. It is this additional aspect of science that cannot be changed by the anti-reductionist philosopher of biology. The impression one gets is that these people (or, I should say, we people) are like the "critical critics" among the Young Hegelians. Suppose we continue with this critical criticism of modern reductionistic biology: what then?

Here we come back to the original comments by Schelling that we have seen already. Schelling has had his revival, especially as a philosopher of nature, and one delightful example is Iain Hamilton Grant's Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, a systematic reconstruction of Schelling's philosophy of nature and organic metaphysics, especially in the context of the science of his time. Grant accomplishes this ably, but one notices that there is a gaping hole in this project: if we are to accept with Grant that Schelling offers a systematic philosophy of nature, should we not be able to look at contemporary physics and biology from Schelling's point of view?

This should also go for the other famous philosophies of nature, like Hegel's: even if we do not have to convince scientists to adopt such a philosophy of nature en masse, could we (even if only for the contemplation of philosophers) sketch out what such a theory could be? The same goes for the contemporary interest in cybernetics, which comes after its failure finally to found and synthesize the natural and human sciences.

The other is that the anti-reductionist opposition to modern science, whether biology or physics, cannot simply posit itself as being wholly oppositional, but has to explain the success of a reductionist materialism (or whatever this is called) on its own grounds. This is the fault of many of the leading metaphysicians like Bergson and Whitehead, who would have found it difficult to account for the astounding success of molecular biology. A philosophy of nature cannot simply predict its future success in terms of midwifing a future science, while at the same time becoming more modest; I do not mean becoming more modest about metaphysics. Thank God, speculative metaphysics will be with us always.

There has been a huge change in scientific culture, especially in biology. This makes large amounts of the history of biology essentially incomprehensible from a modern biological point of view (debates over matter, "irritability" as a characteristic, and so on). When we read books like John H. Zammito's The Gestation of German Biology, which traces the history of German biology from G. E. Stahl to Schelling, it is hard to read this in the progressive way that we might read a history of physics from Simon Stevin to J-L. Lagrange. Was there, in modern parlance, a "progressive research programme" starting from Stahl, passing through von Haller, La Mettrie, Buffon, Herder, Kielmeyer and ending in the Nature-philosophers? Or rather, is there progress (which Zammito argues for), but in a fashion totally alien to the mentality of the modern biologist? The development of physics in the equivalent period is more comprehensible to modern physicists. Modern biologists also do not tend to see their own ancestors in Schelling. We see instead the elaboration of various "metaphysical" debates over the nature of matter, vital forces and the plasticity of biological forms, alongside surprisingly detailed and careful work done in comparative anatomy, which means that these were not simply abstract armchair speculations.

While scientists like to state their lack of interest in the history of science, or the irrelevance of reading the work of their illustrious ancestors, there is nevertheless a recognizable lineage of predecessors, dating back to Newton, about whom the physicist can read. It is harder for the biologist to do so for many of the celebrated biologists in the history of biology, even up till the early twentieth century: it is easier for a physicist to look to Max Planck than it is for a biologist to look at August Weismann. ⁴ Hence, except for the history of medical techniques, the history of biology before the twentieth century is unavailable (or at least less available as a living internal disciplinary canon), with the exceptions of Mendel and Darwin. But it is impossible to turn the clock back to the earlier generation of scientific intellectuals, whether for physics or for biology. Perhaps Rosen and Kauffman would really be more comfortable sitting alongside J. F. Blumenbach or Stahl, but even so you can only work with the scientific community you were born into.

The modesty required is rather about the ability to change the course of science or to "fix" it; a more meaningful response is re-interpretation and showing how the results of a "reductionist" science can be meaningful even under a non-reductionist or a vitalist metaphysics. This, after all, is metaphysics, not biology, and so not the purview of biology. One gets the impression that many of us interested in a wide-reaching speculative science are those who would prefer to have been scientists at the turn of the previous century. If so, it is understandable why it has been impossible to drag biologists in to live in it with us. ⁵