Peter Hanns Reill. Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005. x + 388 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-24135-0.
Reviewed by Charles Withers (Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh)
Published on H-HistGeog (January, 2006)
Re-vitalizing (the) Enlightenment
Peter Hanns Reill is a leading historian of the Enlightenment, with books including a study of the German Enlightenment and historicism, and (in edited collections) the nature of nature and of Enlightenment exploration and the nature of the Enlightenment as a whole.[1] This background is important, for in several respects the book in question here has elements of each of these earlier concerns. Reill's account is in large part a discussion of the nature of Enlightenment vitalism and its motivating forces as understood by numerous Enlightenment contemporaries. And because Reill's mission in thus addressing vitalism is to recover that discourse from the condescension of mechanist readings and to question the Enlightenment as the birthplace of rationalising modernity--the eponymous "Enlightenment Project"--it is in part an appeal to a more complex view of what the Enlightenment was and so is a contribution to current revisionist historiography. Reill succeeds in both these endeavors. The book is closely argued, but it is generally well written and is the result of very thorough-going research in the primary sources. His case convinces but raises different questions in doing so.
In order to structure his concerns, Reill has an opening Prologue in which the words and views of the von Humboldt brothers, Alexander the natural historian and "global physicist" and Wilhelm, philologist and cosmopolitan statesman, are used to read the language of nature. Both men figure also in the Epilogue, Alexander especially, where Reill uses these distinguished German thinkers to reconsider interpretations of the Enlightenment. In between, the discussion of Enlightenment vitalism takes up five chapters: from its mid-century origins in Buffon's work, to vitalism and chemistry, its connections with physiology, medical thought and "generation"--how life began and what it was--and the shift from vitalism to Romantic Naturphilosophie. For the sake of convenience, let me take the vitalist "heart" of the book and the concerns about the Enlightenment as separate matters.
In the introduction, Reill takes the view of Steven Shapin (expressed in 1980) that 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" (p. 4) as a prompt to his own endeavors, not least because he considers the promise of this earlier claim to have been unfulfilled in the interim. In particular, the place of vitalism in Enlightenment studies has been consistently overshadowed by the proponents of mechanist philosophy, by the appeal to rationality: the anatomists and physiologists (in and of the Enlightenment) have been, as it were, neglected in favor of the philosophical mathematicians and political accountants. Vitalism is taken to be that set of theories that attribute the circumstances of life neither to the soul, nor to matter--that is, then, neither to theistic or to mechanistic "causes"--but to an intermediary principle with properties of its own. Attention to the idea of a "vital principle" to explain the sensitive and motive forces that sustain the unity of an organism allowed vitalist thinkers to employ a rhetoric of "sympathy" and "sensibility" often shared with mechanist natural philosophers and political economists, as, in turn, different proponents of vitalism placed different emphasis on the questions of force and the nature of function in living organisms. Nevertheless, for Reill, "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" (p. 15). Not just the simple matter of a revitalized physiology as the precursor to the "modern" biological sciences, vitalism raised questions about process more than form, energy more than effect alone, about historical explanation more than mathematical relationship. The great French thinker Buffon thus emerges as himself a vital force in this vitalist reading, given his attention to the primacy of living over inanimate matter, his preoccupation with historical change over time, and, with others, his creation of a new dynamic language for reading and explaining nature. And from Buffon, Reill turns his attention to those who we might think of as "chemical vitalists"--whose interpretations cast further critical light upon any simply paradigmatic reading of the "Chemical Revolution"--and, thus, to questions of "heat," "generation" and materialism underlying the dynamics of human life. Reill's treatment of vitalism is sensitive to the nature of the ideas themselves, depends upon his sketching a biographical background to the protagonists (which he does well) and, in part also, is aware of the geographical context to these ideas and personnel. Vitalism was more apparent in Montpellier, Göttingen and in Scotland's medical schools, notably in Edinburgh, than it was in other Enlightenment centers.
Reill thus succeeds in documenting the ways Enlightenment vitalists forged new languages and new explanations to account for the nature and the end of life, the history of species and the characteristics of individual life forms. These concerns are with us still, of course, and in that regard, Reill effectively shows how vitalist perspectives are just as much a part of the uneasy birth of the "modern" as the oft-cited but still too-little examined claims of the rationalists. Relatively, this aspect of Reill's account is underexamined, since his concern is more with the complex nature of what the Enlightenment was than with its diversity as an antecedent to something else. I am persuaded nevertheless by his appeal that we "decompose" the Enlightenment as he puts it (p. 252), to move away from the proposition that there was a single Enlightenment deploying a uniform language of nature and society. But, to return in closing to the brothers von Humboldt (as does Reill), I am less persuaded of his treatment of them--of Alexander in particular--as figures on the "cusp" between Enlightenment generalism and an essentialising Romanticism. In other works, one at least of which might have been known to Reill, the leading Dutch historian of science Nicolaas Rupke has shown that there were different Alexander von Humboldts at work: British audiences interpreted his book differently from Spanish reviewers, the French still differently. In death, Humboldt was seen less as a natural historian, more as a political "revolutionary."[2] This is not a major flaw, of course. Quite the contrary for it serves as further illustration of Reill's argument that, in several ways, we should continue to keep the Enlightenment's complexities of thought and personnel under review.
Notes
[1]. Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1975); Encyclopedia of Enlightenment (New York: Facts on File, 1996); (co-edited with David Philip Miller), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); (co-edited with Keith Michael Baker), What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
[2]. Nicolaas Rupke, "A Geography of Enlightenment: The Critical Reception of Alexander von Humboldt’s Mexico Work," in Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 319-343; Nicolaas Rupke, "Alexander von Humboldt and Revolution: A Geography of Reception of the Varnhagen von Ense Correspondence," inGeography and Revolution, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 336-350.
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Citation:
Charles Withers. Review of Reill, Peter Hanns, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment.
H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11323
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