L4. German Idealism & Nature’s Most Sublime Flower

Hegel, in 1807, balked at the idea that spines could seat additional souls. For him, metamerising nervous arcs and the plastic parenchyma represent ‘fluid’ moments in mind’s ‘self-contained existence’; on the contrary, supportive skull and rigid vertebral mast are mere antipodal moments in this liquid self-actualization, petrifactions and ‘self-externalizing’ exuviae of spirit’s self-realization. Brain is ‘living head’, spine merely its polarising ‘caput mortuum’.1 (‘Caput mortuum’ being the alchemical ‘nigredo’ or waste product from purification, literally ‘dead head’).2

In stark contradistinction, Schopenhauer, as we have seen, relished the notion of spinal souls. Yet in his geohistorical account of a concatenated ‘biology’ and ‘physics’ of the unconscious (and its aeon-long awakening into conscious homo sapience), Schopenhauer is preceded by F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854): first discoverer of depth psychology and of the law of recapitulation. It was the radically novel thinking of Schelling and his Naturphilosophen followers—a school of mad scientist polymaths, some of whom we have already met above, including Heinrich Steffens (1773–1845), Lorenz Oken (1779–1851|), Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780–1860), Georg August Goldfuß (1782–1848), Johann Christian Heinroth (1773–1843), Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851), and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776–1837)—who first developed such notions.3 They too, like Hegel, had a strong taste for grandest-possible-history and for sweeping teleological development. And yet, unlike Hegel (and his impatience for sinew and bone as mere skin shed on the way to absolute knowing), the Naturphilosophen—followers of Schelling’s thoroughly encompassing conception of cosmic nature—were more than willing to wade knee deep into the muck and dirt and slime, the messy empirical details, of terrestrial history.4

Naturphilosophie, developed first by Schelling following his rupture with the philosophy of Fichte, promulgated a vision of nature entirely rooted in recapitulationism.5 Schelling, in his Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie of 1799, was explicit: ‘with every organic product Nature passes through all of [the previous] stages’.6 In his System der transcendentalen Idealismus of the next year, he accordingly envisaged a ‘graduated sequence [of organisation] running parallel to the development of the universe’.7 Each stage of this sequence (which Schelling called the Stufenfolge) repeats those below.

Applied to the minutiae of physiology, we have seen that this led Oken to claim that ‘the head is none other than a vertebral column, and that it consists of four vertebrae [whilst] maxillae are nothing else but repetitions of arms and feet, the teeth being their nails’.8 Taking this line of thought to its limits, Oken’s imposing Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie is a masterwork of such developmental series and their parallelisms.9 It contains the unfolding of an entire universe, starting from the positings and unpositings of a generative zero and ascending grandiosely through nature’s various stages of evolutionary production: from ‘PNEUMATOGENY’, ‘HYLOGENY’, ‘COSMOGENY’, ‘STÖCHIOGENY’, ‘GEOLOGY’, ‘ORGANOGENY’, ‘PHYTOGENY’ and ‘ZOOGENY’, to ‘PSYCHOLOGY’.10 Providing an ominous (and perhaps even prophetic) cadence to his symphonic climax, the pinnacle of Oken’s evolutionary upsurge—the zenith from which alone the whole can be retrospectively encompassed and appreciated—is, of course, nineteenth-century Prussian culture and, in particular, an identifiably Teutonic ‘Art of War’.11

Regardless of what—in nineteenth-century Germany—was inevitably coming down the road, the rear-view past was ever-present for Oken. It is a matter of strict necessity that each of Oken’s generative levels repeats all those below. Thus, each ‘Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal’ cannot be considered in ‘isolation’ (for each class and item ‘takes its starting-point from below, and consequently [all] of them pass parallel to each other’).12 Such parallelisms, like connective ligatures, therefore web not only between organic series but criss-cross between inorganic and organic series of development. Following this, Oken noted that the ‘[e]arthly organs must correspond to animal organs’: or, the ‘mountains, rocky terrain, [and] cliffs’ must find their analogues in our own innards. If teeth are nails, then nails are just stalactites. ‘Just as the animal body is finally composed of these organs, so the composition of rocky terrain must produce a terrestrial body, which is the planet’, Oken pronounced.13 From Ritter to Kielmeyer, Schubert to Steffens, the Naturphilosophen were in agreement on this: ‘[i]norganic matters and activities pass parallel [to] the anatomical formations and functions’, as Oken put it.14 He went so far as to say that ‘[o]rganism is what individual planet is’ (because the ‘primary vesicle’ of the embryo, in its globular form, is but a repetition of the forces that ‘produce’ the planet itself).15 Steffens summed all this up adequately when he wrote that, given these principles, every animal, plant, crystal, and mineral represents a ‘stage of [terrestrial] development’: the totality of which, taken together as one goliath constellation, would thus provide the ‘true history of earth’.16 History is just the decryption of the relations of body parts; body parts are just a matter of encrypted history.

Oken and his Naturphilosophen peers took such developmental parallelisms as licensing substantive identity and indiscernibility claims (as opposed to presenting vague analogues or homologues). Following from this, the Naturphilosophen could observe orthograde posture, like Bataille after them, as the tautegory of vegetal erection. (‘Tautegory’, again, being a contemporary term for a symbol that somehow literally consubstantiates, rather than merely mediates, what it presents. Contemporaneously, the basis of this ‘literality’ and ‘consubstantiation’ was often glossed as consisting in a ‘genetic’ relation of filiation, inheritance, or recapitulation.)17 For, as Schelling wrote, just as the ‘plant bursts forth in the bloom, so the entire earth blossoms in the human brain’—nature’s ‘most sublime flower’.18 Brains are how the earth system thinks, flowers how it photosynthesizes. ‘Reason is world-understanding’, as Oken had it.19 For Schelling, ‘[j]ust as the plant coheres with the sun through its bloom (which the plant’s “thirst” for light, the movements of its stamen induced by light, prove), so the animal coheres with the sun through its brain’.20 The horizontal animal-process diverts the vertical vegetative-process, however: turning with the globe rather than escaping it. Not ‘until humankind does the organised entity again become erect’, Schelling notices—as sublunary escape velocity, or, as Alsberg would later note, jailbreak.21 The phototaxis of flowers is repeated into the aletheia of a thinking brain: both are strivings towards a stimulus. Oken wrote, therefore, that that which is ‘noblest lies at the anterior extremity of the animal, or in man in the direction upwards’.22

The animal coheres with the sun through its brain. Indeed, the Naturphilosophen invariably saw the skull as a repetition of the shape of a star or a planet. Oken impressed upon his readers that ‘[a]ngular forms are imperfect’ and the ‘more spherical a thing is’ the ‘more perfect and divine is it’.23 Friedrich Tiedemann (1781–1861) similarly stressed that all ‘organic bodies [betray] a form more or less round’.24 Ergo, the concentric pairing of inner encephalon and outer skull becomes the pinnacle of this universal stratal and spheriform striving. Accordingly, John Christian Reil (1759–1813) celebrated this ‘marble-white vault’—and its many-folded innards—as bearing an entire ‘planet’ of representations and cogitations within, whilst accordingly therefore also outwardly resembling the ‘image of this original archetype in which the head is shaped’: a planet.25 Because a brain contains a world, it is no wonder that it morphologically resembles one. Joseph Görres (1776–1848) similarly claimed that nature’s universal pursuit of spheroid morphologies culminates in the animal brain, and he wrote that, in this, the encephalon repeats the structure of the solar system itself: with a solar central fire or seat of personality, at the core—where he notes the azygous and unpaired nature of deep brain structures—with concentric depositions, of planetary orbits in the solar system or of neural functions in the brain, moving outwards towards the epigene extremity. (One, of course, recalls Jung’s ‘geology of personality’.) Görres similarly compared the brain’s layout to the stratigraphic layering of the earth and its plutonic depths.26 ‘The planet is a brain’, Oken concluded.27

Such notions were inevitable. Stephen Jay Gould dubs them an ‘inescapable consequence’ of naturphilosophisch thinking.28 Recapitulation, indeed, is nothing but Fichtean identity re-stated naturalistically: ‘A=A’ encapsulates repetition with iterative difference, tying palingenesis into caenogenesis, legitimating ontogeny’s retracing of phylogeny. Nevertheless, if ‘everything’ is contained in the Absolute Idea, then the Idea contains terrestrial geohistory. And the nascent science of geology was contemporaneously revealing the crushing majority of the planet—in both time and space—to be gigantically dead. Previously, adherence to the aforementioned Law of Continuity had prohibited such cogitation: Continuity’s infinite divisibility formats containment as interminable self-similarity; thus, all life must contain or be contained by other lives ad infinitum; leading to the optimistic Enlightenment view of existence as telescopically placental or infinitely organic.29 Accordingly, even Earth’s hypogene depths were once considered vital and populated—all of its matter essentially biogenic—and all death or inorganicity merely temporary deviation from organic baseline. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) had even subscribed to a form of ‘geozoism’ by arguing that the entire lithosphere was essentially biogenic and interminably populated. Inspired by the discovery of islands produced by coral reefs, he and others theorized a primordial and biotic ‘nucleus of the earth’ composed of minute animalcules, that, in the ‘long series of time’, sequentially excreted and deposited ‘solid strata’—thus procedurally ‘germinating’ a solid planet from compost.30 It is not a planet that generates life, but life that generates a planet.

This ‘amniotic’ sense of belonging soon changed, however. As mentioned, it was during this era that the word ‘inorganic’ gained its modern, scientific meaning. During the middle of the eighteenth century, geoscientists began discussing how ‘primeval’ or granitic strata contain no fossil traces. Jean-André Deluc (1727–1817) proposed that they must have ‘been produced antecedently to the existence of organized bodies upon our globe’.31 Goethe thereafter bore witness to ‘peaks [that] have never given birth to a living being and have never devoured [one], for they are before all life and above all life’.32 One palaeontologist lyrically encapsulated the menace of such a prospect, talking of an ‘eltritch-world uninhabitate, sunless and moonless and seared in the angry light of supernal fire’.33

Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), whose own cerebral mass infamously weighed a gargantuan 64 ounces, soon calculated that ‘[o]nly about 1/1,600 of the diameter of the earth [has] yet been penetrated’.34 Life, Schopenhauer accordingly noted, was just a ‘mouldy film’ atop a titanically dead telluric hulk.35 (Even worse, this ‘death’ is not static nor inert, but ductile and churning; Schelling accordingly wrote of how the ‘geological hypothesis of uplift’ rendered ground itself no longer ‘certain and lawful’.)36

And so, in faithful pursuit of the recapitulatory notion of containment of prior stages, the Naturphilosophen were led, by their own principles, to an incredibly troubling notion. If noesis contains all of this (all of earth’s strata upon strata of matter entirely removed from all organicity or even any organic utility), then roughly ~1,599/1,600th of noesis is unavoidably hostile and opaque towards itself (life and thought is merely a ‘mouldy film’ wrapped around its own titanic death). If the planet is a brain, only a vanishingly small amount of its trillion-cubic-kilometre volume is not lithified and dead. And, as intimated above, it was in attempting to internalize—or digest—the planet’s magmic inorganic depths that Spirit developed the ulcer we now call the Unconscious. In other words, Recapitulation’s attempt to retain Identity through Natural History’s temporal torsion ended up sacrificing idealism’s Law of Continuity (at every psychic and somatic level): the self-identical telescopic inclusions of Leibniz’s prior ‘fractal vitalism’ now became internal heterogeneity and layered self-exclusions (or, stratification: the internal trace of Grand Time). Idealist containment spectacularly intussuscepted into a layer-cake of internalised self-exclusion: this was the invention of philosophical Depth, or the evagination of telescoping self-inclusion into invaginated and stratigraphic self-exclusion. And so, this is how Schopenhauer could finally state that consciousness ‘is the mere surface of the mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior, but only the crust’.37 It is clearly for these reasons that Kant sympathized so easily with the ‘consternation’ one feels when one realises one has never stood on solid ground.

Unsurprisingly, models of organism at the time became strikingly stratal: C.A.F. Kluge talked of the ‘somaphere’, ‘zoösphere’, and ‘neurosphere’; C.W. Hufeland of a ‘vegetative sphere’ inclosed within an ‘animal sphere’; C.G. Carus of the ‘dermatoskeleton’, ‘splanchnoskeleton’ and ‘neuroskeleton’—all nested sequentially. Transliterating this psychologically, Schelling wrote of how one’s true biography would interpose all of cosmological history; he noted, however, that many ‘turn away’ from the inhospitable ‘depths’ that are, therefore, ‘concealed within themselves’.38 We ‘shy away’ from ‘glances into the abysses of the past’ which remain within us ‘as much as the present’.39 These ‘unfathomable depths’ are ‘what is oldest in nature’: its inorganic and uninhabitate past. For the first time, the body was unravelled into exploded constellation of divergent tempos and heterochronies: ‘[i]n the bones of animals the soils are hardened, and their veins conduct metallic content’.40 Comparative anatomy became chrono-locomotion. Bones are genuine transportations of the inorganic past into the organic present, each organ an epoch suspended. Recapitulation granularizes and modularises monolithic time: disarticulating embodiment’s continuities and homogeneities into radically divergent moments.