THE ORIGIN AS RHETORICAL ARGUMENTATION

In 1828, the Oxford don Richard Whately, having in his Elements of Logic (1826) defined argument as the connection between a claim and its support, proposed in its newly published counterpart, Elements of Rhetoric, to

The idea that rhetoric is situated argumentation - argumentation giving reasons why a specific audience should come to the speaker’s side of a disputed issue or controversial topic - is old. Aristotle took this line when he defined rhetoric as the “ability to discover the available means of persuasion in each particular case” (Rhetoric I.2.1355b27-8). The idea still has champions (Toulmin 2003). This argument-centered conception of rhetoric contrasts sharply with the equally ancient view that the specific task of a rhetor is not to find or set out an argument but skillfully to deck one out with whatever ornaments of speech might induce a presumably less-than-rational audience to be affected, even infected, by it. Scientists and philosophers assume just such a conception when they hold that logically valid, context-free, undecorated arguments are the only sort that count. Whately’s view also contrasts, however, albeit less severely, with a third conception of rhetoric.

Thomas Henry Huxley recalled that after he had read Darwin’s Origin of Species, he had exclaimed to himself: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” (Huxley 1900, 1: 183). It is a famous but puzzling remark. In his contribution to Francis Darwin’s Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Huxley rehearsed the history of his engagement with the idea of transmutation of species. He mentioned the views of Robert Grant, an advocate of Lamarck, and Robert Chambers, the anonymous author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which advanced a crude idea of transmutation. He also recounted his rejection of Agassiz’s belief that species were progressively replaced by the divine hand. He neglected altogether his friend Herbert Spencer’s early Lamarckian ideas about species development, which were also part of the long history of his encounters with the theory of descent. None of these sources moved him to adopt any version of the transmutation hypothesis.

Huxley was clear about what finally led him to abandon his longstanding belief in species stability:

A PUZZLE

Textbook histories tell us that Charles Darwin sparked a scientific revolution with the publication of his Origin of Species in 1859. While this revolution is obvious in many biological disciplines, it is less so in biological taxonomy or systematics - the grouping and classification of organisms. After all, the approach most of us learn in school today was first developed by Linnaeus in 1735 - 124 years before the Origin. That being the case, where is the revolution? Systematist Ernst Mayr expresses this doubt: “As far as the methodology of classification is concerned, the Darwinian revolution had only minor impact” (Mayr 1982, 213). Mayr is right in that the Linnaean hierarchy predated but also survived the Darwinian revolution, and has remained in use today. But it would be wrong to conclude that the Darwinian revolution was irrelevant to classification.

My intention here is to sketch out Darwin’s influence on classification and the role classification played in his larger project. We shall see that despite the superficial similarity between pre- and post-Darwinian classification, Darwin’s influence has nonetheless been profound. He gave systematics a theoretical foundation and an operational method. Moreover, classification was important to Darwin’s project. His discussion of it in the Origin comes at the end, unifying and drawing together threads from important topics in earlier chapters – natural selection and divergence, comparative anatomy and morphology, and embryology and development.

DARWIN AND DARWINISM

Darwinism is all the rage in philosophy these days. Evolutionary thinking of one kind or another is frequently used to illuminate such areas as ethics (e.g., Joyce 2006), epistemology (e.g., Hull 1988), and the philosophy of mind (e.g., Sterelny 2003). But it is one thing to examine how evolutionary work in a broadly Darwinian style has influenced philosophy, another to ask what form of philosophical insight is present in Darwin’s own oeuvre. And it is something else yet again to ask what the specific relationship might be between philosophy and the Origin of Species. This last question can be broken down into an analysis of the work’s philosophical legacy and an analysis of its philosophical content.

Since the Origin has so often been taken by later thinkers as the canonical statement of a Darwinian worldview, any project of assessing that book’s philosophical legacy risks sliding toward a hopelessly ambitious attempt to embrace all those subsequent forms of philosophical Darwinism that the Origin has inspired. This essay consequently focuses on the Origin’s own philosophical content. In the next section I will catalogue some of the philosophical themes that arise in it.

Chapters 6 and 7, on “Difficulties on Theory” and “Instinct,” are the fulcrum of Darwin’s Origin of Species. They come at the center of the work, after the first five chapters that explicate the theory of natural selection and outline the causes and effects of the mysterious laws of variation on which Darwin’s argument for natural selection depends. These two chapters sustain the narrative drive that Darwin had been building through the first five chapters and introduce new scientific and emotional dimensions, particularly in his treatment of the theory’s larger implications for the religious context in which he was writing.

“Difficulties on Theory” and “Instinct” take on two classes of what Darwin describes as “a crowd of difficulties [that] will have occurred to the reader … [l]ong before having arrived at this part of my work” (Origin, 171). The first class of problems, covered largely in Chapter Six, deals with the apparent lack of transitional forms, wide variation within taxa, organs of apparently small importance, and, most importantly, the difficulty of giving a wholly materialist explanation for the evolution of structures and organs of extreme perfection, such as the vertebrate eye. The second class, covered in Chapter Seven, deals with the evolution of behavior and instinct, phenomena for which the physical basis was quite unknown (as with the laws of variation), and which thus presented particular problems for a materialist explanation.

CHARLES DARWIN AS GEOLOGIST

In November 1859, Darwin’s masterpiece, the Origin of Species, was published. Earlier that year, in February, he had been awarded the Wollaston Medal, the highest honour of the Geological Society of London, “for his numerous contributions to Geological Science, more especially his observations on the Geology of South America, on the Phaenomena of Volcanic Islands, on the structure and distribution of Coral-reefs, and his Monographs on recent and fossil Cirripedia” (Correspondence 7: 237; Darwin 1842, 1844, 1846, 1851a, 1851b, 1854a, 1854b). Also contributing to Darwin’s high reputation as a geologist was his Fossil Mammalia, a publication from the voyage of HMS Beagle (Darwin, ed. 1840). This work was done jointly with the anatomist Richard Owen (1804-1892). Given Darwin’s prodigious efforts as a geologist, it was natural for the subject to play an important role in the Origin.

Darwin learned his geology in stages. As a teenage boy, he was exposed to 'experimentation' as an enthusiastic 'assistant' to elder brother Erasmus (1804-1881) through chemistry and mineralogy in the garden tool shed at home. From 1825 to 1827, as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, he attended lectures given by the geologist Robert Jameson (1774-1854) and the chemist Thomas Charles Hope (1794-1871) (Secord 1991). He also gained knowledge of the invertebrate animals and worked with the Lamarkian zoologist Robert Edmond Grant (1793-1874).

Varieties and variation were the keys to Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection - barnacles and pigeons - and varieties and variations are the keys to our understanding of the Origin of Species as a book.

The three largest collections of editions of the Origin are the Kohler Collection held by the Natural History Museum in London; a collection assembled by R. B. Freeman at the Thomas Fisher Library of the University of Toronto; and the books collected by Warren Mohr, Jr., now in the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino. Anyone wanting to study the Origin as a book needs to have close by a copy of R. B. Freeman’s The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist in its second edition. With all its faults and quirks, it is indispensable.

On November 24, 1859,On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published by John Murray on heavy cream-coloured stock from Spalding, printed by W. Clowes and Sons and bound by Edmonds & Remnant, London, in green cloth with gilt blocking on the spine. John Murray had held a trade sale on November 22 when orders were taken for copies from booksellers, wholesalers, and circulating libraries. Twelve hundred and fifty copies had been printed and bound. Of those, 5 were sent to Stationers' Hall; 12 were “allowed Author”; and 41 were “Presented Reviews” leaving 1,192 for sale (National Library of Scotland (NLS) Acc 12604/570/158).

Darwin signaled the preeminent importance of natural selection in both the title and subtitle of his book the Origin of Species. But without variation as the raw material upon which selection can act and inheritance as the means for preserving favorable variations in the future, natural selection would not lead to the genesis of new species. How, then, did Darwin present these two topics in the Origin? Answering this question will require textual analysis of the first edition of the Origin, including some reference to changes in later editions, and a little indulgence in somemore speculative discussion of the subject. The chapter will address the following questions:

1. Why did Darwin privilege variation in 1859?

2. Why did he hold that changes in the conditions of life provide the chief raw material for evolution?

3. Had Darwin known of Mendel’s critique of his work, how might the sixth edition of the Origin have differed from what was published?

INTRODUCTION

To the contemporary reader with some knowledge of modern biology, the crucial importance of heritable variation to the theory of species transmutation has no need of justification. It is obvious. Yet Darwin’s manner of presenting it and the theoretical stance he adopted must seem strange, even extraordinary.

The publication of the Origin of Species propelled Darwin to the status of a public figure, and although he himself preferred to remain secluded in his country house at Downe and pursue specialised research, his theory was at the centre of a heated debate on the social and political implications of evolution. The key principles of Darwin’s biology - the struggle for existence and natural selection - became subject to a wide spectrum of interpretations ranging from laissez-faire liberalism to Marxism. This state of affairs raises some interesting questions concerning the claims and arguments advanced by proponents of such opposing views in defence of their positions. Simultaneously, one may inquire after Darwin’s own political opinions. This chapter proposes to examine these questions through a close study of reactions to the publication of the Origin from three different sources: first, the somewhat misleading enthusiasm of Herbert Spencer, the great philosopher of evolution and an advocate of an extreme type of individualism; second, the progressive attitude of Clémence Auguste Royer, the first translator of Darwin’s Origin into French; and finally, the comments made by the authors of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. All three offer particularly interesting case studies, since Darwin expressed his own opinions of their claims regarding his theory, mostly in private correspondence.

Hegel's achievements as a philosopher of art have been both widely recognized and endlessly disputed. His position as the “father of art history” (Gombrich) has been confirmed Oedipally, by a succession of figures in that profession who have criticized Hegel's alleged tendencies to (among other things) progressivism, essentialism and historical determinism. While he is regarded by many (Henrich, Danto, T. J. Clark) as a philosophical forerunner of theoretical discourse on modernism in art, his own (in)famous remarks about the “end of art” are often cited against him as evidence of an inability to imagine the development of just such later movements. He is rightly regarded as having pushed forward the independent status of art in its own right, yet this independence is frequently held to be vitiated by the demands of his own philosophical system.

The difficulty of assessing Hegel's achievements in aesthetics has led to a number of attempts to rescue some version of an Hegelian aesthetics by going beyond what the presumably “official” account itself offers. In what follows, I want to examine what resources might lie within Hegel's aesthetics for a view of the practice of art, something I hope will shed light not only on some of the famous systematic difficulties in Hegel's aesthetics but also on questions such as the endlessly interpreted “end of art” thesis.

Hegel's social philosophy, as articulated in his Philosophy of Right (1821), presents a vision of the rational social order that, despite certain obvious archaisms, is still of relevance to anyone interested in reconciling the best aspects of liberal social thought, including its concern for the rights and dignity of individuals, with the human need for deep and enduring communal attachments. Hegel's fundamental claim is that a single idea, properly understood - the idea of freedom - provides the philosophical resources needed to ground a comprehensive account of the good society: what makes social institutions good, on Hegel's view, is that they play an indispensable role in “realizing” freedom (PR, 4). The aim of this paper is to explain this basic thought by examining how Hegel understands and employs the ideal of freedom in justifying the three institutions he regards as essential to a rational social order: the nuclear family, civil society (the market-governed realm of production and exchange), and the modern constitutional state.

Yet articulating Hegel’s conception of freedom is considerably more complicated than this characterization of his position suggests. This is because there is not just one conception of freedom at work in his social philosophy but three: personal freedom, the freedom of moral subjectivity, and “substantial” freedom (PR, §§149, 257) or, as I will call it, “social” freedom. Each of these conceptions of freedom grounds one of the Philosophy of Right’s three major divisions: (i) personal freedom is the basis of “Abstract Right” (PR, §§34–104); (ii) moral freedom is the topic of “Morality” (PR, §§105–41); and (iii) social freedom is the concern of “Ethical Life” (Sittlichkeit) (PR, §§142–360).

In an influential article on this topic, Karl Ameriks posed the question: “But can an interesting form of Hegelian idealism be found that is true to the text, that is not clearly extravagant, and that is not subject to the [charge] of triviality . . . ?”, and concluded by answering the question in the negative: “In sum, we have yet to find a simultaneously accurate, substantive, and appealing sense in which Hegel should be regarded as an idealist”. Other commentators on this issue have tended to be more positive; but then the fact that these commentators have differed sharply between themselves may suggest that another concern is over the coherence of Hegel's position, and whether a consistent account is possible of it at all.

In this article, I will consider the charges of inaccuracy, triviality, and extravagance that Ameriks and others have raised. Of these charges, the first two are obviously damaging; but it might reasonably be felt that that last is less clearly so (why shouldn't a philosophical theory be extravagant?), and also that it is open to different readings (for example, does it mean “not consistent with 'common sense'”, or “not consistent with the findings of the sciences” - but what do these include?). The context for a concern of this sort, however, might well be whether Hegel's position can be made consistent with Kantian objections against the pretensions of metaphysics, either by respecting those objections, or at least by satisfactorily addressing them.

Hegel's Science of Logic does not enjoy the best of reputations. It is invariably criticized for being obscure and impenetrable, or it is simply ignored altogether, as if it had never been written in the first place. Allen Wood speaks for many who have read some of Hegel's dense and difficult text when he maintains that the philosophical paradoxes explored in it are frequently based on “shallow sophistries” and that the resolution to such paradoxes supplied by Hegel's system is often “artificial and unilluminating”. With even friends of Hegel, such as Wood, dismissing the Logic in this way, it is hardly surprising that (as Wood notes) “Hegel's system of dialectical logic has never won acceptance outside an isolated and dwindling tradition of incorrigible enthusiasts”.

In the eyes of such enthusiasts, however - who include, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dieter Henrich, Jean Hyppolite, and John Burbidge - Hegel's Logic is by no means shallow or sophistical, but is one of the most subtle and profound works of philosophy ever produced. My aim in this chapter is to shed light on the distinctive purpose and method of Hegelian logic in the hope of enabling many more readers than hitherto to discover that subtlety and profundity for themselves.

This sentence commences, and anticipates the key lesson from, what is perhaps the most-read section of any of Hegel's texts: the eight or nine pages titled, “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” which is embedded within chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The chapter itself, which is titled “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” is the only chapter of a section that is labeled “B: Self- Consciousness” and that follows the three-chaptered “A: Consciousness” and precedes “C: Reason.”

The general idea summarily introduced here - that we are the sorts of beings we are with our characteristic “self-consciousness” only on account of the fact that we exist “for” each other or, more specifically, are recognized or acknowledged (anerkannt) by each other, an idea we might refer to as the “acknowledgment condition” for self-consciousness - constitutes one of Hegel's central claims in the Phenomenology. This is a substantial claim indeed, and is at the heart of the thesis of “the sociality of reason”. It is, however, introduced in a seemingly arbitrarily way in the paragraph prior to the “Independence and Dependence” section, and at the conclusion of a discussion examining “desire” as a model for self-consciousness.

Hegel's birthplace, Stuttgart, lay in the Duchy of Württemberg, the Swabian speaking area of south Germany. In one sense, Württemberg looked like so many other Länder in Germany at the time. The use of the German term, Land and its plural, Länder, is here intentional; it was not a state, not a province, not a department, not even a political unity of elements that would be immediately recognizable today; instead, it was sui generis, a Land. At the time of Hegel's birth in Württemberg, people did not speak of general “rights” (the common discourse of our contemporary politics); there were only particular rights, particular liberties, and the like, which were restricted to particular groups and almost none of which applied to the populace at large. (This or that guild had the right to use metal nails in its carpentry, this or that group had the right to be exempt from a certain tax that other groups had to pay, and so on.) All in all, Württemberg had virtually all the features of what the historian Mack Walker called the German “hometowns,” the odd early modern entities kept alive by the singular oddness of the existence of the Holy Roman Empire: As a set of “hometowns,” the Empire was governed by a mostly unwritten set of customs and mores that included a sense of various communities both having an obligation to take care of their own members and the right to police the mores of their members in fine grained ways (including the prohibition of marriage by a “hometowner” to an unseemly “foreign” spouse). It was, above all, structured by a strong sense of who did and did not belong to the local communities and by the nearly absolute right of the community to decide whom to admit and not to admit.

Few scientists, or philosophers, have patience for a priori science. It is widely supposed that modern science owes its progress to subjecting hypotheses to experimental tests, and that nature is simply too intricate and surprising to determine without empirical investigation. Philosophers who have tried to study issues of substantial scientific doctrine or theory are regarded as embarrassments, and recent philosophers of science have narrowed their vision to scientific method. Probably no philosopher is more embarrassing than Hegel because he couples a priori science with a dialectical method that purports to derive concepts from each other in ways that bear no connection with either experience or material processes. Some contemporary scholars emphasize the empirical elements in his text, hoping, perhaps, to make his philosophy of nature more palatable against the long tide of philosophers who quickly dismiss his philosophy of nature. In my view, the current antipathy toward a priori science is misplaced: many great scientific achievements came from thinking through the implications of concepts through so-called thought experiments and other modes of nonempirical or, at least, not wholly empirical inference. Be that as it may, my concern here is Hegel's account of mechanics and, in particular, his criticism of Newtonian mechanics. I argue that Hegel not only discovered a contradiction in Newton or, rather, in Newton plausibly interpreted, but proposed a solution that carried the day in its tenor if not in its substance. Whether the solution was accepted because of Hegel is an historical question that I cannot address here.

The inherent problem with any philosophy which claims to be systematic is as easy to pose as it is troublesome to solve; namely, how do the parts of the system hang together? Of all the great systems in the history of philosophy, perhaps none has been subject to as much criticism as Hegel's. One author baldly claims that it makes sense to dismiss Hegel entirely “if one emphasizes the Logic and Hegel's rhetoric about 'system' and 'Wissenschaft.'” Likewise, as John Dewey, a great admirer of Hegel, writes, “The form, the schematism, of his [sc. Hegel's] system now seems to me artificial to the last degree.” The tendency to shy away from Hegel's own statements about the systematic nature of his philosophy is doubtless due to the complexity and opacity of the Hegelian system which have baffled scholars since Hegel's own time. A common reaction to these problems has been simply to abandon any attempt to understand Hegel's philosophy as a systematic whole.

Due to these problems and despite Hegel's own statements to the contrary, the Phenomenology of Spirit has often been criticized as an unsystematic text. In the words of one scholar:

INTRODUCTION

That there is something “mystical” about Hegel's philosophy is a familiar claim. In the years following Hegel's death it was a commonplace. In an 1840 essay on Meister Eckhart, the Danish philosopher Hans Martensen remarked that Hegel (as well as Schelling) had “demanded that philosophical thought rejuvenate itself in the immediate knowledge of God and divine things found in mysticism.” Friedrich Theodor Vischer remarked that the Hegelian philosophy had come forth “from the school of the old mystics, especially Jakob Boehme.” In his 1835 work Die christliche Gnosis, Ferdinand Christian Bauer claimed that Hegel was a modern Gnostic, and argued for his philosophical kinship with Boehme. Wilhelm Dilthey later noted the same affinity between Hegel and the mystics. More recently, authors as different as Bertrand Russell and J. N. Findlay have claimed a “mystical element” in Hegel's thought - Russell in order to disparage Hegel, Findlay in order to elevate him.

In this chapter, I shall survey the evidence for the influence of mysticism on Hegel's writings. I shall argue that the evidence is abundant and the influence decisive. However, even if it can be established that there was such an influence, and that it was of importance, this does not mean that the Hegelian philosophy can itself be accurately described as mystical. Therefore, this issue must be addressed as well, and I shall approach it, primarily in section three, through an examination of what Hegel himself had to say about the relationship of his philosophy to mysticism.

A central topic of modern aesthetics after Kant is the problem of aesthetic judgment. The question concerns the proper understanding of logical form of such judgments (such as “this is beautiful”) and their possible objectivity. But Hegel does not offer, anywhere in his discussions of fine art, a recognizable theory of aesthetic judgment. He does not even work out a well defined account of aesthetic experience. This divergence from much modern aesthetic theory is largely due to the complexity of the concept of art itself as Hegel invokes it. For Hegel's treatment is famously historical; the account of the nature of art is narrative rather than analytic. And he arrives at a most paradoxical conclusion as a result of this narrative: much of what we consider postclassical art (what Hegel calls “romantic” art) is treated as art in the process of “transcending itself as art,” somehow “against itself as art,” and as much a manifestation of the “limitations” and increasingly dissatisfied “life” of the practice of the production and appreciation of art as it is a part of a continuous tradition. (The even deeper paradox is that romantic art is all of this “as art. ”) In less dramatic terms, Hegel denies the autonomy of the aesthetic, or at least its complete autonomy, and this denial is the basis of the claim that art must be considered as a social institution linked to the development of the norms and values of a society as a whole, and that it is best understood in terms of its similarities with religion and philosophy and not as autonomous.