Burgerhartlezing 2008. Rethinking the Enlightenment. Nature and Culture in the High and Late Enlightenment

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Rethinking the Enlightenment
Nature and Culture in the High and Late Enlightenment

Since its self-proclaimed inception in the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment has served as a major field of intense ideological confrontation, making its interpretation always open to debate. Even today the Enlightenment stands in the center of a number of searing political and ideological issues, either lending support for certain ideas such as individual liberty, religious freedom, and human equality, or serving as a screen upon which present-day discontent can be projected. For the radical Christian right - especially in the United States - it forms the source from which the ‘degeneration’ and irreligion of modern ‘liberal’ society has flowed. Strangely, for the intellectually sophisticated left it serves a similar function, namely as the origin for all of the ills of the modern age. This interpretation, which seems dominant amongst contemporary intellectuals, was first posed by post-World-War II thinkers such as Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

In 1946 Max Horkheimer claimed in an essay that ‘the collapse of a large part of the intellectual foundation of our civilization is to a certain extent the result of technical and scientific progress’.¹ Horkheimer located the origins of this demise - whose process he characterized as ‘the self-destructive tendency of Reason’ - in the Enlightenment. This line of analysis, further elaborated by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, was later expanded and amplified by many commentators: post-modernists who rebel against the so-called ‘hegemony of enlightenment rationality’; some feminists who decry the Enlightenment's supposed elevation of universality over distinctness; and a cohort of philosophers of science, such as Stephen Toulmin, who seek to uncover Modernity's dangerous and outmoded hidden agenda by searching out the political and social forces that led to its inception. Despite the vast differences separating these critics and the multiple tones of major and minor they sound, the indictment is clear. The Enlightenment in its fascination with science and universalizing reason sired such movements as gender and racial discrimination, colonialism, and totalitarianism.

Recently a new take on the Enlightenment has been formulated by thinkers in Europe and the United States fearful of the cultural and economie effects of large-scale immigration, especially of peoples from Muslim areas. For these critics, the Enlightenment is again evaluated in a positive light, as the movement that shaped the West and differentiates it from other areas, especially Islam. Thus, for these thinkers areas that have never experienced Enlightenment cannot be integrated into the Western world. Here the Enlightenment serves as a firewall protecting the West from the perceived corrupting influences of non-western peoples.

Two assumptions join all of these evaluations, whether negative or newly positive, whether from the left or the right, together into a whole. The first is that the Enlightenment can be considered a unitary movement, called by post-modernists ‘the Enlightenment project’, which contained a specific set of objectives and programs, often concealing a hidden agenda not transparently proclaimed. As a corollary to this first assumption, many writers have assumed that certain figures such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Beccaria, or Kant, were its true embodiments. Hence a study of their writings, intentions and/or actions would reveal the Enlightenment's essence. The second assumption is that the Enlightenment was the origin of modernity. For this reason, the ills or the achievements of the modern age could immediately be related back to the age of Voltaire, Rousseau and/or Kant, providing modernity with its own paternity against which it was easy to rebel or its founding fathers that one could extol.

In my work, I propose an alternative to these views, arguing for a more varied and complex definition of the Enlightenment and for using care in identifying the Enlightenment with modernity and thus with immediately associating it with contemporary social and political movements, though I too see its understanding as helpful for us to comprehend the regnant issues of the day. Clearly, the major focus in the contemporary evaluation of the Enlightenment is its supposed worship of science, reason, and universality, of a form of power/knowledge based on control of

1 Max Horkheimer, ‘Reason Against Itself’, in: What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), page 359.

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both the physical and social realm. And we all know what that term suggests: the triumph in and by the Enlightenment of a mathematically based science, founded upon certain essential presuppositions concerning matter, method and explanation whose reign has lasted until today. Stephen Toulmin described this macro-historical movement as follows: ‘In choosing the goals of modernity, an intellectual and practical agenda that [...] focused on the seventeenth-century pursuit of mathematical exactitude and logical rigor, intellectual certainty and moral purity, Europe set itself on a cultural and political road that has led both to its most striking technical successes and to its deepest human failures’.² These failures are often ascribed to the rise of instrumental rationality and to a new regime of strict discipline, scrutiny and control.

Yet when one begins to query what was really implied beneath this all-powerful engine of cultural and social change, the picture becomes much more hazy, complicating and confusing the new master narratives that are now being forged and opening, I believe, fascinating alternatives to evaluate the so-called Enlightenment project. This is especially true for the study of how nature was interpreted in the Enlightenment and how those interpretations were deployed in discourses dealing with human activities. For it has become increasingly clear that in the Enlightenment, as Lorraine Daston argues, ‘nature was the principle that unified all narratives - the history of human society, as much as the history of the earth and stars, was a narrative about nature’.³ Hence it is essential to understand how nature was viewed, understood, spoken and written about if one wishes to understand ‘What is Enlightenment?’

In my work, I have attempted to investigate one way in which nature was apprehended in the High and Late Enlightenment. In so doing, I question the assumptions about a unified Enlightenment project and the obvious modernity of the Enlightenment. I deny the existence of a unified Enlightenment project informed and driven by a language of nature founded upon mechanist natural philosophy, which reduced nature to a mechanism and humans to machines or automata. My attempt to disentangle some of the strands making up the Enlightenment is not in itself new. Already in the nineteen seventies and eighties some leading historians of science such as Roy Porter, Jacques Roger, Simon Schaffer, Robert Scofield, Steven Shapin and Philip Sloan, to name but a few, called for a rethinking of how eighteenth-century science should be conceived. In nineteen eighty, Steven Shapin characterized these new insights as follows: ‘We now have a developing perspective which points out the existence of a number of species of natural knowledge, and a number of opposed Enlightenments’.⁴ Yet Shapin's anticipatory agenda has not been fully realized. Today, when different ‘Enlightenments’ are analyzed, they are more often done by reference to specific social and cultural conditioners generally producing concrete national, regional, local or even disciplinary varieties, such as the Swedish Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment or the religious Enlightenment. In a recent study designed to show new approaches in the history of science, the editors of the collection of essays, The Sciences in Enlightened Europe diagram the changes that have occurred over the past twenty years. They describe their approach as one that avoids the ‘thrall’ of ‘positivism’ and ‘mere anatomical dissection and microhistory’. The volume's announced goal was to combine local, national and disciplinary studies within a larger unified framework. However, this ‘recuperation’ as proposed contradicts Shapin's original statement concerning opposing species of Enlightenment. The larger categories advanced in this new volume appear to be forged by instruments taken directly from Foucault's toolbox, often resulting in generalizations closely allied to those originally proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno in which discipline, control, dehumanization and colonial exploitation emerge as dominant themes characterizing the Enlightenment as a whole.⁵ There are exceptions to this interpretive stance in the volume, of course.⁶ But, if its introduction represents the direction in which the study of Enlightenment science is going, then tracing the existence of conflicting Enlightenment languages of nature that crossed national and regional barriers and represented a different take on essential questions seems to have disappeared from the research agenda of historians of eighteenth-century science.

Not all historians of eighteenth century natural philosophy, and I number myself amongst them, accept the proposition advanced by the editors of The Sciences in Enlightened Europe that the Enlightenment can be reduced to ‘uniform reason [...] defined by processes of classification and exclusion’, to ‘a system of measure and disciplines’.⁷ This is especially so for those of us who do not view the age as an integral totality, who are willing to acknowledge major intellectual, social and cultural shifts occurring within the period.⁸

2 Stephen Edelson Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990), page x.

3 Lorraine Daston, ‘Afterword: The Ethos of Enlightenment’, in: The Sciences in Enlightened Europe: pages 495-504 and 503.

4 The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, edited by G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pages 111-112.

5 Lorraine Daston makes a similar point in her closing essay in this volume, ‘Afterword’, page 496. ‘Distrust of the enlightened - of their tendency to conflate their own narrow interests with the dictates of universal nature, and to substitute rationalization for rationality - is as least as old as the Romantics, and was famously elaborated by Marx. It is still alive and kicking in this volume. With only a few exceptions, the authors of these essays regard the material claims of the enlightened to serve the commonweal with a skepticism that ranges from mild to vehement’.

6 As in the majority of multi-authored volumes the research and explanatory agendas of individual contributors sometimes vary from the program announced in the introduction or just partly converge and overlap with it. In this volume, composed of uniformly outstanding essays, the degree to which they agree with the general interpretations offered in the introduction runs from very strong to weak, if not in some cases to critical. In my opinion the essay that most clearly and consequently explores the theses set forth in the introduction, demonstrating in its elaboration interpretive imagination and rhetorical flair, is Simon Schaffer's ‘Enlightened Automata’. Needless to say, I don't always agree with his interpretations.

7 Sciences in Enlightened Europe, page 22.

8 See, for example, the work of Ludmilla Jordanova, especially her excellent introduction to Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (London: Free Association Books, 1986), 10-47; her analysis of the eighteenth century in Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989); and her essay, ‘Sex and Gender’, in: Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, edited by Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pages 152-183.

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Today, it is usually conceded that during the first half of the Enlightenment, roughly from the late 1680's to the 1740's mechanical natural philosophy became dominant, cemented by the increasingly widespread acceptance of Newtonian science, though that dominance was never complete. During that period, the central project of leading natural philosophers had been to incorporate the methods and assumptions of formal mathematical reasoning into explanations for natural phenomena. The overriding impulse was to transform contingent knowledge into certain truth, to reduce the manifold appearances of nature to simple principles. In this process leading proponents of the mechanical philosophy of nature proposed a new definition of matter, established methodological and explanatory procedures to incorporate this definition into a viable vision of science, and evolved an epistemology that authorized these procedures. Matter's essence was streamlined and simplified: it was defined as homogeneous, extended, hard, impenetrabie, movable, and inert. The result, in Horkheimer's words was that: ‘Nature lost every vestige of vital independent existence, all value of its own. It became dead matter - a heap of things’.⁹

Georges-Louis le Cler, Comte de Buffon (1740-1804)

By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, some of the core assumptions of this language of nature were contested. For many younger intellectuals mechanism's very success made it suspect. To them, the brave new world of seventeenth century mechanism was very easily adapted during the early eighteenth century to serve as a support for the status quo - for political absolutism, religious orthodoxy and established social hierarchies. Joined to that was an increasing crisis of assent, expressed in a wave of mid-century skepticism directed against the spirit of systems, against a one sided reliance upon abstract reasoning in constructing a coherent picture of reality. These thinkers of the high and late Enlightenment,¹⁰ deemed deductive philosophy incapable of accounting for nature's vast variety. A strong skeptical critique, formulated most forcibly by David Hume but reflected in various degrees by thinkers as diverse as Buffon, d'Alembert, Condorcet, Diderot, and Maupertuis opened the way for a new approach to constructing nature.¹¹

The mid-eighteenth-century skeptical critique of hypothetical thinking elevated the contingent over the coherent. It became a commonplace that all human knowledge was extremely constricted, both because of its reliance upon sense impressions and its limited scope. If humans were endowed with reason, its power to pierce the veil of the unknown was circumscribed. At the same time, many late Enlightenment thinkers surrendered the idea that nature's operations could be comprehended under the rubric of a few simple, all encompassing laws. Variety and similarity replaced uniformity and identity as the terms most associated with nature's products. Nature not only was seen as complex, it also was considered to be in continuous movement in which old forms of existence are replaced by new ones.¹² In short, nature had a history. This triple movement - the limiting of reason's competence: the expansion of nature's complexity: and the historization of nature - set a new agenda for Enlightenment natural philosophers. To paraphrase Hume, they were required to rethink the meaning of the terms ‘power, force, energy and connexion’.¹³

Generally, one can discern two broad mid to late eighteenth-century strategies designed to satisfy the objections raised by the skeptical critique of reductive rationalism and uniformity. The first, and best known, was formulated by neo-mechanists such as D'Alembert, Condorcet, Lagrange,

9 ‘Reason Against Itself’, page 361.

10 Ever since the unity of the Enlightenment has been contested, its internal periodization has emerged as a problem. Terms like early, high and late have been used to differentiate moments within the Enlightenment. I have just accepted the normal conventions here and use high and late to designate the period from circa 1750 to circa 1800. Some interpreters have taken a more radical stance, foremost amongst them being the practitioners of ‘Begriffsgeschichte’ in Germany. In their scheme, the major changes that led Europe to ‘modernity’, occurred in what they call the ‘Sattelzeit’ [saddle time], from ca. 1750 to 1850. The increasing tendency to speak of a ‘long eighteenth-century’ is leading in a similar direction, though at its most radical it doesn't go much past 1832.

11 For the importance of skepticism in the late eighteenth century see; Johan van der Zande, and Richard Popkin, eds., The Skeptical Tradition around 1800 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998).

12 ‘The world is a theater of continual revolutions’, in: Anon. Traité des extrêmes ou éléments de la science de la réalité (Amsterdam, 1767), page 232. The same position was proclaimed by August Ludwig Schlözer. ‘Der Erboden hat Revolutionen erlitten. Er ist nicht mehr, wie er aus der Hand des Schöpfers kam. Er andert, verschönert, verschlimmert sich, wie das Menschengeschlecht, das ihn bewohnt’. Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie (Göttingen, 1772), page 8.

13 David Hume, The Philosophical Works, edited by Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose, 4 vols. (Aaien: Scientia Verlag, 1992), 4: page 51. This is a reprint edition of the new edition (London, 1882-86).

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and Laplace. Though retaining the mechanists' definition of matter as inert, they limited mathematics' role in describing nature to an instrument of discovery instead of considering it a model of reality. In so doing, they put aside those debates concerning the ultimate composition of matter (was it made up of atoms, monads, or immaterial points) or the mathematical definition of force (the vis viva controversy) that had animated early eighteenth century thinkers. Rather, they developed the mathematics of probability as the surest guide to direct observational reason, while maintaining an epistemological modesty concerning the truth claims of these activities.¹⁴

The second response to the skeptical critique was proposed by a loose group of thinkers, less frequently studied, though extremely numerous, whom I call, for want of a better term, Enlightenment vitalists. Their interests usually centered on the fields of natural history, chemistry, the life sciences, medicine, and on their interconnections. Unlike the neo-mechanists, they sought to reformulate the concept of matter, along with those of force, power and connection in their construction of a natural philosophy that respected natural variety, dynamic change, and the epistemological consequences of skepticism.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)

Who were these vitalists? A simple answer would be that they were composed of natural philosophers and of fellow travelers, who applied their ideas to specific issues in the moral and political realms, though given the lack of strict disciplinary distinctions in the eighteenth-century, many fellow travelers also contributed greatly to the elaboration of vitalism's critique of mechanism. Amongst the formulators were Buffon, Maupertuis, Paul Barthez, Friedrich Blumenbach, Charles Bonnet, Peter Camper, Benjamin Franklin, Georg Foster, Alexander von Humboldt, John and William Hunter, Georg Lichtenberg, Jean Baptiste Robinet, Horace-Benedict Saussure, and the great Swedish chemists, Toberg Olaf Bergman and Carl Wilhelm Scheele, to name but a few. In the academic world, the major centers of vitalist thought were Edinburgh, Montpellier, Göttingen, Paris, Geneva, and Bologna. Amongst the better known fellow travelers, those who sought to incorporate vitalist ideas into their works, were Diderot, La Mettrie, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Benjamin Constant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Gottfried Herder. In fact, all of those thinkers who actively sought to incorporate ideas of sympathy and ‘organization’ into their social theories invariably had to confront vitalism's challenge. Since vitalists were a loosely formed group they often disagreed greatly with each other, but all shared a disdain for applying mechanistic principles to describing complex situations, especially those touching vital matters. As Ludmilla Jordanova claimed, their ‘reaction against the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century’ served as a ‘powerful stimulus to the search for fresh vocabularies and methods with which to approach entities self-evidently more complex than automata’.¹⁵ The general outlines of this language of nature can be summed up as follows.

For the vitalists, the basic failure of mechanism was its inability to account for the existence of living matter. Mechanists had posited a radical separation between mind and matter that only God's intervention could heal, either as the universal occasion for all phenomena or as the creator of a pre-established harmony between mind and matter. This mind/body dichotomy was, according to Stephen Toulmin, the ‘chief girder in the framework of Modernity, to which all the other parts were connected’.¹⁶ Enlightenment vitalists sought to bridge or dissolve this dichotomy by positing the existence in living matter of active or self-activating forces, which had a teleological character. Living matter was seen as containing an immanent principle of self-movement or self-organization whose sources lay in active powers, which resided in matter itself. Thus, these natural philosophers vitalized the world with living forces such as elective affinities, vital principles, sympathies and formative drives, reminiscent of the living world of the Renaissance. Rather than considering nature to be a ‘heap of things’, Enlightenment vitalists envisioned it as a teeming interaction of active forces, revolving around each other in a developmental dance.

14 For the rise of probability theory in the eighteenth century see: Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

15 Ludmilla Jordanova, Languages of Nature, page 41.

16 Cosmopolis, page 108.

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The re-introduction into nature of goal-directed living forces led Enlightenment vitalists to reassess the basic methodological and analytic categories of natural philosophic investigation and explanation. The new conception of matter dissolved the strict distinction between observer and observed, since both were related within a much larger conjunction of living matter. Relation, rapport, Verwandschaft, cooperation of forces, and reciprocal interaction replaced aggregation and strict causal relations as defining principles of matter. Identity and non-contradiction were substituted by degrees of relation and similarity, a shift made evident in the development of late eighteenth-century chemistry.

The world of living matter consisted of a circle of relations, which looking at it from the human vantage-point, radiated out to touch all forms of living matter, uniting them in sympathetic interactions. Living matter's constituent parts formed a ‘synergy’ in which each conjoined partiele was influenced by the other and the habitus in which it existed.¹⁷ By emphasizing the centrality of interconnection, Enlightenment vitalists modified the concept of cause and effect. In the world of living nature, each constituent part of an organized body was both cause and effect of the other parts, all symbiotically linked through the universal power of sympathy.

Mutual interconnection constituted a basic pillar of Enlightenment Vitalism. It accounted for self-organization and complex interaction, and employed the metaphors of affinity, synergy, sympathy and consensus, which were proposed at the mid-century but worked out extensively after the 1760's.¹⁸ However, if left standing alone, this vision of nature's economy could easily have been reduced to one espousing the static, mechanistic images of balance and equilibrium and mobilized to legitimate the status quo in religious, political or social terms. To counter these dangers, Enlightenment vitalists evolved a theory of change over time to complement and modify their discussion of these interactions. It emphasized new creation, sharp breaks, and directional change. From the mid eighteenth century to the end of the Enlightenment, natural historians, physiologists, comparative anatomists, and physicians forged new explanations to account for the creation and cessation of life, the development of individual life forms and the history of species, processes governed by the universal principle of qualitative transformation. Thus, Enlightenment vitalists explained change using the concept of goal, making it the efficient cause of development. An explanation for something's existence took the form of a narrative modeled upon the concept of stage-like development or epigenesis, in which a body evolves through steps from a point of creation. Unique creation and true qualitative transformation formed part of the vitalists' vision of living nature.

These shifts in natural philosophic assumptions challenged Enlightenment vitalists to construct an epistemology capable of justifying and validating them. True to the skeptical critique of strict causation and ‘dead’ mechanical forces, vitalists agreed that active life forces could not be seen directly. They were ‘occult powers’ in the traditional sense of the term. At best they were announced by outward signs, whose meaning could only be grasped indirectly. In this language of nature the topos of locating true reality as something that lurked within a body played a crucial role. That which was immediately observable was considered superficial. Understanding entailed a progressive descent into the shadowy depths of observed reality, using signs as markers to chart the way. Thus, Enlightenment vitalists reintroduced the idea of semiotics as one of the methods to decipher the secrets of nature.

The basic epistemological problem was to understand the meaning of these signs and how to perceive the interaction of the individual yet linked active forces, powers and energies without collapsing one into the other. To resolve this problem Enlightenment vitalists called for a form of understanding that combined the individualized elements of nature's variety into a harmonic conjunction that recognized both nature's unity and diversity. The methods adopted to implement this program were analogical reasoning and comparative analysis. Analogical reasoning became the functional replacement for mathematical analysis. With it one could discover similar properties or tendencies between dissimilar things that approximated natural laws without dissolving the particular in the general. The fascination for analogies was strengthened by a general preference for functional analysis, subordinating actual outward form to inner activity. Comparative analysis reinforced the concentration upon analogical reasoning. It allowed one to consider nature as composed of systems having their own character and dynamics, yet demonstrating similarities not revealed by the consideration of form. Comparison's major task was to

17 The term synergy was coined by Georg Stahl and then used extensively by Paul Barthez in his theory of vital physiology.

18 This is one of the major themes of John E. Larson's study Interpreting Nature, where he draws a distinction between the founding generation of life scientists who wrote their works at mid-century and the second generation of life scientists who ‘made a concerted attempt to make qualitative observations far more exact’, page 23.

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chart similarities and differences and mediate between them, finding analogies that were not immediately apparent.¹⁹

In pursuing this program founded upon analogical reasoning and comparative analysis, a further epistemological problem arose. If nature was unity in diversity, how could one choose which element to emphasize? When should one concentrate upon the concrete singularity and when should one cultivate generalizing approaches? The proposed answer was to do both at once, allowing the interaction between them to produce a higher form of understanding than provided either by simple observation or by discursive, formal logic. This type of understanding was called divination, intuition or Anschauung. Its operation was based on the image of mediation or harmony, of continually moving back and forth from one to the other, letting each nourish and modify the other. Buffon described this practice in the introduction to his Histoire naturelle: ‘the love of the study of nature supposes two seemingly opposite qualities of mind: the wide-ranging views of an ardent mind that embraces everything with one glance, and the detail-oriented laboring instinct that concentrates only on one element’.²⁰

In this movement, however, understanding passed through a third, hidden and informing agent that was, in effect, the ground upon which all reality rested. In eighteenth-century vitalist language, this hidden middle element, opaque, un-seeable, yet essential was called by such terms as the internal mold (Buffon), prototype (Robinet), Urtyp (Goethe) or Haupttypus (Herder). These Enlightenment thinkers seemed to seek a ternary system of signs, which introduced something between sign and signified through which everything was refracted but which could never be seen, grasped or directly identified. In short, they argued for a harmonic view of nature that organized reality around the figures of ambiguity and paradox, a position reluctant to reduce one thing to another but allowed them to be allied.

This harmonic view of reality formed the core and essence of the late Enlightenment vitalists' vision of nature and humanity, differentiating it from early eighteenth century mechanism and later Romanticism and also from our modernist perspectives on nature and truth. It accounted for the vitalists fascination with extremes and their hoped for mediations, what Ludmilla Jordanova called ‘bridging concepts’.²¹ It was not a dualistic nor a dialectical vision, for essential reality always lay between the two existing extremes. Harmony, the joining of opposites within an expanded middle generated by reciprocal interaction, served as the norm and desired end of each natural process, though that dynamic was continually in motion, leading to ever changing harmonic combinations. Living nature became the place where freedom and determinism mer ged.

By labeling this language of nature Enlightenment Vitalism, I am aware that I am creating a synthetic type not usually recognized in Enlightenment historiography. At best, the term vitalism has been reserved for physicians, usually associated with the medical schools of Montpellier and Edinburgh. My claims are much stronger. I argue that the language of nature summarized above far transcended disciplinary boundaries, that its appeal was great and that its terms, metaphors, and explanatory strategies easily translated into many spheres of human thought and activity. Further that these translations reciprocally interacted, leading to continual exchange and reformulation. Thus certain central Enlightenment vitalist categories such as sympathy, sensibility, or habit could wander in and take root in other spheres of human thought and culture and then move back in an enhanced form.

In my view, Enlightenment Vitalism was a relatively coherent movement distinguished by a set of basic assumptions, often later considered contradictory, held together by a unique epistemological position based on the imperative to mediate between extremes. It constituted one of the basic languages of nature and humanity available to Enlightenment thinkers. In this sense, Enlightenment Vitalism had its own linguistic and intellectual form, shaped by crucial questions that confronted thinkers of the last half of the eighteenth century.

My claim that Enlightenment vitalism constituted one of the basic vocabularies of the Enlightenment raises once again the question of defining the Enlightenment. Let me pose a few possible solutions to the question whose answers have been bounded on the one hand by strict constructionists - e.g. people such as Robert Darnton and Tore Frängsmyr who define it as the radical

19 See Jordanova, ‘Sex and Gender’, page 163, for an excellent discussion of the centrality of comparison in the late eighteenth century.

20 Buffon, Histoire naturelle, volume 1, page 4.

21 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Introduction’, Languages of Nature, page 35.

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French Enlightenment and nothing more - and those who see many Enlightenments, defined by local characteristics, e.g. Enlightenment in national, or regional or confessional contexts. In answering the question, I would like to emphasize the usefulness of Shapin's idea of species of Enlightenment. By thinking of a limited number of Enlightenment species, it allows us to draw larger unifying categories that transcend local conditions, while allowing for variations within each species due to these conditions.

But even then another question emerges. What unites these species into the genera Enlightenment? I would list the three I have already mentioned, a definite form of epistemological modesty, the concern with variety within unity and the historization of nature and add to them the idea of human perfectibility and the emphasis upon humankind as the measure of all things. But most important was the assumption that all texts were open to critical analysis and progressive reformulation. In the larger sense, I believe one should follow Ernst Cassirer's lead in seeing Enlightenment as a process of critical inquiry rather than a set of fixed positions.

With this in mind, let me quickly return to Enlightenment vitalism. What is fascinating about these questions is that they again speak to issues we are now facing: how does one define life and death, what is matter, to what extent is morality natural or artificial? Its assertion of the intimate link between humans and nature and its celebration of nature's creativity and sublimity speak directly to our need to rethink the issue of humankind's role within the environment and relationship to it. Its elevation of reciprocal interrelationship and cooperation, validated by the free play of nature's forces, coincides with our attempts to rethink causal explanations in nature and global interaction amongst humans. Its view of gender and discussions of race still resonate with today's discussion of these topics. Finally its attempt to formulate a new logic of complementarity linked to its epistemological modesty and supported by a concern with semiotics and language provides a model of knowledge that speaks to contemporary endeavors to escape from absolute solutions and maintain the search for knowledge without surrendering to skepticism. In all of these, Enlightenment Vitalism shares many elements usually seen as characteristic of Postmodernity. In fact, once the image of the ‘Enlightenment project’ is abandoned and replaced by a true appreciation of the high and late Enlightenment, of which Enlightenment Vitalism formed a part, the Enlightenment may well emerge as an age much more in tune with our concerns than is usually conceived. The questions the vitalists posed are still relevant, though their answers may not be. Yet their basic epistemological temper still serves as a challenge, relevant today as it was then, asking us to seek liberation in the face of uncertainty, recognizing skepticism but holding it at bay, and, while acknowledging humans' capacity for debasement, hoping that understanding nature and human nature will help us realize the best in ourselves.