The Symbolic Power of Biology

Biology, established around 1800 as the "science of life," has developed in modernity as not only a specific scientific discipline but has also continually served as a kind of social knowledge. Biological knowledge supported the modern "order of the sexes" (Claudia Honegger) and the two-sex-model that it was structured along, as well as modern racism and multiple forms of social inequality articulated in a differentiation of the normal and abnormal. Yet biological knowledge consistently transgressed the boundaries increasingly established between the natural sciences and the humanities or social sciences in the course of the nineteenth century. However, the fledgling discipline of biology alone was not capable of developing the epistemological as well as political-ethical competence necessary for these transgressions; it was possible only because philosophy and the emerging social sciences conceded biology a specific status. The proposed research project will start from and explore the thesis that the re-configuration of philosophy at the beginning of modernity is crucial for the status that knowledge about nature gained in the modern order of knowledge. The leading question is the extent to which philosophical discourses contributed to the political-ethical formation of biological knowledge at the turn of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the project will analyze philosophical articulations of biological knowledge. Going back to the period around 1800 in this context means to go back to constellations of philosophical and biological knowledge that are not yet characterized by clear boundaries between the natural sciences and the humanities as they were fixed at the end of the nineteenth century. They thus differ from the present order of knowledge which is still structured by the "two cultures" of the humanities and the sciences. The research project focuses on the writings in Naturphilosophie by Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer. In these texts, the connections of biological and philosophical knowledge are particularly close and recent research has pointed to the relevance Naturphilosophie had for the development of biology. The project inquires into different epistemic strategies. It therefore concentrates: a) on the status of the concept of life, which is constitutive for biology; b) on articulations of sexuality, reproduction, and gender differences; c) on articulations of human differences, especially in terms of "race," as well as the boundaries between humans, animals, and plants, and d) on different configurations of biological and philosophical knowledge. The aim of the proposed research project is twofold: On the one hand, it contributes to an archaeology of biologism. On the other hand, it contributes to current debates on a transdisciplinary re-configuration of the humanities.

Biological knowledge holds a specific position in the modern order of knowledge in so far as it plays a crucial role for diverse forms of naturalization and biopolitics. It has continuously transgressed the boundaries of the scientific field of biology and has functioned as a form of social knowledge. The project started from the question to what extent philosophical discourses contributed to the political-ethical formation of biological knowledge at the turn of the nineteenth century, when biology first emerged as a distinct field of knowledge. The primary focus was on the philosophies of nature formulated by Kant, Schelling and Hegel. In these writings the authors articulate results from contemporary natural research in specifically philosophical ways and engage in crucial epistemological debates on the possibility and status of scientific knowledge about life. As a result of my research I am able to show how gender and race are naturalized in Kant, Schelling and Hegel in different ways. These modes of naturalization not only differ among these authors who concede a different epistemic status to biological knowledge. They also differ within the writings of these authors with regard to race and gender. In Kant the concept of race plays a crucial role for his distinction between natural description and natural science and his understanding of the living organism, while gender hierarchies are articulated strictly in juridical and political-ethical terms. In Hegel's writings it is quite the opposite: Sexual difference is a central subject of Hegel's philosophy of nature, but he is opposed to Kant's genealogical and proto-biological concept of race. Instead he formulates a territorial concept of race which is not part of the philosophy of nature but of the philosophy of spirit. While concepts of race and gender clearly differ among authors, an analysis from the point of view of history of concepts reveals that race and gender became systematically linked to each other in the late 18th century via the concept of reproduction. This is the second main result of my research. In order to reconstruct the central status of the concept of reproduction in relation to race, gender and emerging biopolitical views and projects, I analysed the emergence of the neologism reproduction within the scientific debates on generation in the second half of the 18th century and the circulation of this concept in French and German philosophies of nature. It reveals that in the decades between 1750 and 1830, concepts of race and gender were formulated in the same epistemic and political-cultural contexts but in no way parallelized or homogenized. With regard to my research on the temporal aspects of the concept of reproduction and the shifting understandings of temporality in natural history and philosophies of nature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, I finally show that the co-emergence of concepts of gender, race, heredity and reproduction, which all played a central role in the process of the temporalization of nature and the formation of the early life sciences, has to be understood within the context of transformations of kinship relations and of genealogical thinking around 1800.