Romantic biology

 

Some scientific hypotheses which were discarded make me more nostalgic than others. Just discovered the one below. From Wikipedia this time.   

>>>Haeckel claimed the origin of humanity was to be found in Asia: he believed that Hindustan (Indian subcontinent) was the actual location where the first humans had evolved. Haeckel argued that humans were closely related to the primates of Southeast Asia and rejected Darwin's hypothesis of Africa.

>>>Haeckel later claimed that the missing link was to be found on the lost continent of Lemuria located in the Indian Ocean. He believed that Lemuria was the home of the first humans and that Asia was the home of many of the earliest primates; he thus supported that Asia was the cradle of hominid evolution. Haeckel also claimed that Lemuria connected Asia and Africa, which allowed the migration of humans to the rest of the world.

>>>In Haeckel's book The History of Creation (1884) he included migration routes which he thought the first humans had used outside of Lemuria.

The riddle of Monism

 

“Monism as Connecting Religion and Science” is an 1892 article by Ernst Haeckel, the controversial German evolutionist and scientist. I admit that it didn´t clarify as much as I hoped! Is Monism really just materialism under a fancier designation, complete with quasi-religious terminology? To make its mass appeal easier, perhaps? Or is it actually a covert form of panpsychism and pantheism?

The religious terminology is immediately obvious. Haeckel talks about “scientific articles of faith”, he says that the human soul is part of a “world-soul” (albeit in quotation marks), that the one fundamental law that makes the universe move and evolve could be called “God”, and denies being a “materialist” (apparently a frequent theological reproach against his Systeme). In a footnote, he refers to the ether as “God the Creator”. While admitting that there is no individual immortality in his worldview, he points out that some religions don´t believe in that either, specifically early Buddhism and ditto Judaism. Besides, matter and energy are immortal and will always take new forms. But is all this just exotic rhetoric from a materialist too drunk on Goethe? Or does it mean something? At one point, Haeckel does call his worldview “pantheistic”, but it´s possible that the term had a different connotation in 19^th century Germany than it has today. Mabe “pantheism” was just another fancy term for (de facto) materialism (and another theological reproach), while today, I would rather suspect a self-professed pantheist to be into something like Theosophy! Madame Blavatsky, as is well known, constantly dunked on Haeckel…

Most of the speech sounds materialist enough. Everything evolves from simple, non-conscious, and material beginnings. Human consciousness is a product of the brain and its ganglia. No immortal soul exists, nor do ghost, spirits or gods. Humans and non-human animals are only quantitatively different, indeed, Haeckel explicitly rejects anthropocentrism and regards Darwin as the Copernicus of biology. He criticizes teleological reasoning and final causes. The only “dualism” permissible is the dualism between the luminous ether and mass-atoms, and even this dualism will probably be resolved one day by science in favor of strict monism, with the ether being the primordial substance everything is ultimately made of. The ether has something to do with light and electricity. Indeed, Haeckel likes the ether precisely because it would do away with all spooky action at a distance (in contrast to, say, empty space being somehow fundamental).

And yet, at the very end of the article – when rejecting the label “materialism” – Haeckel actually says the following: “Our conception of Monism, or the unity-philosophy, on the contrary, is clear and unambiguous; for it an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable as a dead, spiritless material; the two are inseparably combined in every atom. The opposed conception of dualism (or even pluralism in other anti-monistic systems) regards spirit and material,  energy and matter, as two essentially different substances; but not a single empirical proof can be adduced to show that either of these can exist or become perceptible to us by itself alone”.

But what is this if not actual pantheism or panpsychism? The key words being that an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable as dead spiritless matter, the two being inseparable “in every atom”. This sounds more like Whitehead´s later process philosophy. Or indeed some forms of occultism.

What is the solution to the riddle of Ernst Haeckel?

A philosophy of sponges

 

So I´ve continued to read articles by Andrew Reynolds, who must have an interesting academic position, since his research seems to combine the philosophy of science with marine zoology. One of his articles on 19^th century German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel (no stranger to marine zoology himself) has the entertaining title “Ernst Haeckel and the philosophy of sponges”, first published on the web in 2019. 

Sponges (Porifera) are classified as animals, but are extremely primitive compared to more regular Animalia. Once it became clear to the scientific community that sponges are *some* kind of animals (they react to outer stimuli, they feed, they have sperm and ovum), studies of said creatures became important to understand the early evolution of life. 

The curious expression “The Philosophy of Sponges” actually comes from Haeckel himself and is taken from his three-volume work on calcareous sponges. Apparently it was in this magnum opus the giant of evolutionary biology first proposed his controversial thesis that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. He also attempted to prove evolution empirically and specifically, not just lay out an argument in general terms (as Darwin had already done). And yes, Haeckel also wanted to demonstrate the truth of his “philosophy of monism” and pin down the exact place of humans in the cosmos. Quite the agenda for a work on primordial invertebrates, but there you go. In case you think the whole thing sounds very…I don´t know…*German*, Romantic, Goethean, something, well yes, that´s probably it! Reynolds quotes William Blake´s saying about seeing the universe in a grain of sand…

Since Reynolds knows his poriferan biology by heart, the article is frankly hard to read, but it´s clear that “philosophy” for Haeckel encompassed both scientific methodology and an entire worldview. But then, that was probably how the word was often used at the time (compare Romantic Naturphilosophie of earlier German generations). Haeckel emphasized that scientists must do both rigorous empirical observations and theory-building, which sounds obvious today, but probably was a relatively new idea at the time. Thus, Haeckel and other scientists had to delineate themselves from both the overly-speculative Naturphilosophen and equally over-empirical scientists who only catalogued long lists of facts but never draw any theoretical conclusions from them (yes, this was a thing – see “American Science in the Age of Jackson” by George H Daniels).

Haeckel further wanted to provide what he called an “analytical” proof for evolution as opposed to Darwin´s “synthetic” ditto (Haeckel used the terms differently from Kant) by actually demonstrating an evolutionary lineage, rather than just holding out the mere possibility of evolution being true. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and attempts to prove that sponges were analogous to a specific stage in the development of animal embryos were all part of this program. Haeckel was fascinated by sponges since some of them looked heavily transitional between different groups. And if both human development in the womb and animal evolution were subject to the same laws, Haeckel´s monist-materialist worldview was also proven, since there was no need to postulate anything spiritual or supernatural above these natural processes.

If Haeckel really succeeded is another matter entirely. It could be argued that he was the last of the Naturphilosophen. His notorious illustrations of embryos were “idealized” rather than strictly empirical, leading later generations to accuse him of science fraud. A fact not mentioned by Reynolds is that Haeckel´s monism has been interpreted as pantheist rather than materialist. Reynolds does point out Haeckel´s lifelong fascination with Goethe, and suspects that the German naturalist at bottom saw himself as an artist rather than a scientist sensu stricto. Haeckel´s scientific theories were his artistic masterpieces, and like all artists, he didn´t suffer criticism of his work lightly. Reynolds ends with discussing the reception of the “philosophy of sponges”. Many contemporary scientists were sharply critical of Haeckel, and it´s clear that he did make major mistakes, such as assuming that colonies of several sponge species were really one “transitional species”. 

However, Reynolds also quotes modern scientists who believe that some of Haeckel´s speculations about sponge or animal evolution might not have been so wrong, after all. It´s also obvious that he had supporters in his own day, as when the “Challenger” expedition hired him to analyze their samples of – surprise – sponges.

With that, I end this little expedition. 

Applied metaphysics?

 

So I just tried to read a 48-page paper titled “Ernst Haeckel´s Discovery of Magosphaera planula: A Vestige of Metazoan Origins?”, published in 2008 in “History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences”, apparently a journal. One of the authors, Andrew Reynolds, is a scholar of religion and philosophy. The other, Norbert Hülsmann, is a zoologist. And yes, their paper was quite hard to read! 

It deals with German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel´s discovery of a curious micro-organism off the Norwegian coast in 1869, a creature Haeckel named Magosphaera planula, the generic name meaning “magician´s ball”. The organism was only observed and studied by the German naturalist himself, and only at this one occasion! Despite this, it played an important part in the evolutionary speculations of both Haeckel and others during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It´s still occasionally mentioned in scientific works (and even on Wikipedia), but only with a huge question mark as to its placement on the tree of life.

In Haeckel´s theories, Magosphaera was first given the rank of a protist (Haeckel apparently regarded protists as a somewhat nebulous group transitional between plants and animals), but was later upgraded to a protozoan (a unicellular animal) of the “blastaea” stage in the German naturalist´s “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” scheme. The fact that Magosphaera had only ever been seen by Haeckel himself could easily be misinterpreted as science fraud, especially since Haeckel have posthumously come under fire for his supposedly fake illustrations of embryos. The two authors are therefore at pains to point out that they are *not* accusing Haeckel of hoaxing. However, they do believe that he made an honest mistake.

The magician´s ball doesn´t really exist. With one exception, no other scientist has claimed to observe anything even remotely similar (the equally dubious species Magosphaera maggii). The authors have actually looked for Magosphaera-like organisms in the North Sea on several occasions, but always without success. They also believe that Haeckel´s illustrations and descriptions of Magosphaera are inconsistent. Haeckel had made other mistaken identifications, something he also admitted. The purported missing link in animal evolution was probably two or three different species of marine organisms temporarily hanging together, perhaps even one kind of organism parasitizing another kind. I haven´t kept up to speed on Haeckel-bashing lately, but I wouldn´t be too surprised if both creationists and Woke evolutionists (who regard the German fellow as a proto-fascist) will nevertheless use this unfortunate little episode to further their respective agendas.

The article initially promises to discuss the social construction and “applied metaphysics” of scientific objects, but there is very little of this in the actual text, suggesting it´s just a nod to popular trends in academic research. Obviously, a marine zoologist can´t be a postmodernist!

With that, I end this little conversation. 

Elective affinities

"Three Essays on Haeckel and Karma" is a book 
originally published in 1914 by the London Theosophical Publishing Society. This is one of several reprint editions. The volume contains three essays by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy.

The essays are very different in content, and frankly bewildering. But then, nothing about Steiner seems to be easy! The only thing tying the three pieces together are references to Ernst Haeckel, the leading German evolutionist and "Monist", whom Steiner had met on several occasions. The most curious essay is titled "Haeckel and his opponents" and sounds like a defence of materialist, non-teleological evolution against a whole range of dualist and sometimes frankly creationist critics. But why would Steiner defend Haeckel in this manner? And why would he want the piece to be translated and republished at a time when Steiner's opinions were explicitly anti-materialist and spiritual? No idea.

The two other articles are titled "The Working of Karma" and "Haeckel, `The Riddle of the Universe', and Theosophy". Here, Steiner sounds more logical. While rejecting Haeckel's materialism, Steiner nevertheless attempts to use the evolutionary perspective to bolster Anthroposophy, which was based on notions of spiritual evolution. Karma and reincarnation can easily be reconciled with evolution. While Theosophy's founder Madame Blavatsky constantly attacked Haeckel, Steiner wanted to appropriate him - perhaps a smarter tactic in Germany, where Haeckel was something of a culture icon. Still, it looks weird when Steiner is affirming precisely the teleological, spiritual and "archetypal" ideas he has just criticized in "Haeckel and his opponents"! Was the good doctor playing some kind of esoteric shell-game with Haeckel's legacy?

I'm not an expert on Haeckel, but I noticed that his "progressive" view of evolution and his "Monism" is sometimes seen as Romantic and panpsychist rather than strictly materialist. Steiner must have felt that some kind of elective affinity between Haeckelianism and evolutionary spirituality existed. Perhaps this explains Steiner's somewhat "elective" relationship with the great German scientist...

Between planetary spheres

Since there are several Steiner books with similar titles, the following presentation seems to be in order. This book was originally published in 1968. Its translated by R. M. Querido from the German original “Okkulte Untersuchungen über das Leben swischen Tod und neuer Geburt”. It contains sixteen lectures given by Steiner in several European cities between October 1912 and May 1913. The first lecture was given in Milan, and the last one in Strasbourg. My edition of the book, published by Anthroposophic Press, has a different cover than the one on this product page, but it seems to be exactly the same work inbetween the covers.

Rudolf Steiner was the founder of Anthroposophy, sometimes referred to as “spiritual science”, a spiritual path that blends ideas similar to Theosophy with a Christianized version of classical Western esotericism. Steiner was originally the chair of the German section of Annie Besant's Theosophical Society, but left it when Besant and C W Leadbeater launched their crusade on behalf of “The World Teacher” Jiddu Krishnamurti. The split was probably inevitable anyway, since Steiner had always laid more emphasis on Christ, Goethe and the Western occult tradition, while Besant preferred Hinduism, Buddhism and the “Mahatmas” of Madame Blavatsky.

I recently reviewed an earlier work by Steiner, “Rosicrucian Wisdom”, which contains some information on the fate of the soul after death, between two incarnations. However, it says relatively little about the Mystery of Golgotha, perhaps because the book was published when Steiner was nominally still a Theosophist. “Life Between Death and Rebirth”, by contrast, consists of lectures given after Steiner had founded his own Anthroposophical Society. It contains additional information on the soul's journey after death, to some extent based on “new spiritual research” made by the author. Here, the Mystery of Golgotha and the so-called Christ impulse play a more central role. Unfortunately, many of the lectures are extremely repetitive and belabour pretty much the same points!

A few things stand out. In Steiner's scenario, Christ isn't a redeemer in the traditional Christian sense, but rather a kind of “evolver”. Christ is a Sun-spirit who sacrificed himself to rejuvenate Earth and give humans additional spiritual powers to evolve during the soul's journey between two incarnations. Only humans who enter into a right relationship with the Christ impulse while on Earth will be able to consciously journey through all the planetary spheres after death, thereby gaining new energies necessary to further evolve the etheric and astral bodies. Somewhat naively, Steiner calls on all religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, to accept the objective fact of the Mystery of Golgotha, revealed by “spiritual science”. He considers Christianity to be the only truly universal religion, since the West adopted it despite its alien origins in the Middle East. (It's not clear how he sees Islam or Buddhism, who also spread far outside their respective lands of origin.) Followers of all religions will reach “the Venus sphere” after death, where they will form their distinct communities, but those who lack a proper Anthroposophical understanding of the Christ impulse will get in trouble when reaching the Sun, and presumably can't reach beyond it. The fate of materialists is to become “hermits” after death, not being able to communicate with any other souls, and hence missing out on all evolutionary possibilities. Somewhat sarcastically, Steiner says that there will be no Monistic League in Heaven, since the dead Monists won't be able to find each other! (The Monistic or Monist League, with Ernst Haeckel as its most well-known member, was a strong organization in pre-war Germany. Steiner regarded it as atheist and materialist.)

A more stunning revelation is the claim that Lucifer plays a central role in human spiritual evolution! In other Steiner texts, Lucifer is depicted as a negative being alongside Ahriman (the closest thing to a traditional devil figure in Anthroposophy), but in “Life between death and rebirth”, Lucifer is a more ambivalent character – something I always suspected was Steiner's real position. He calls Lucifer “Christ's brother”, says that both Christ and Lucifer have thrones on the Sun, and that Lucifer's existence is justified. Humans with the right relation to Christ will be served by Lucifer, whose powers are necessary for the human soul when it travels beyond the Sun, to the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. At the same time, Lucifer is nevertheless also a kind of deciever, who mimics Christ's words but with a different content (compare Jesus' words “Ye are gods” in John with the snake's words “Ye shall be like gods” in Genesis). People who completely lack spirituality will be “aided” by Lucifer in the afterlife, who will bestow manipulative intelligence and cunning on their souls, giving them negative karma and making it more difficult for them to evolve. It's almost as if Lucifer serves the spiritually advanced, but sinks the dull and dim-witted. (I suppose David Spangler's notorious “Luciferic initiation” could be inspired by Steiner.)

Steiner's lectures contain another very strange speculation: the claim that the Buddha went to Mars (or perhaps the “Mars sphere”, but Steiner does seem to mean the literal planet Mars) in order to carry out a Martian version of the Mystery of Golgotha (!). However, Buddha was never literally crucified (since the Martians seem to be ethereal beings, an actual crucifixion might have been impossible to arrange anyway), but rather sacrificed himself by sending out love and kindness to a planet the inhabitants of which were extremely aggressive. Apparently, this kind-hearted act has soothed the conflicts among the Martians, making it easier for human souls to pass through the planetary sphere of Mars during our cosmic sojourn between two earthly existences... I admit that this mutant Buddha legend is somewhat difficult to take seriously!

Those interested in Anthroposophy's view of the afterlife (or rather the “life between lives”, since Steiner believed in the reality of reincarnation) should perhaps read both “Rosicrucian Wisdom” and “Life between death and rebirth”. The first book also contain several chapters on planetary evolution and the future destiny of man, and hence gives the lectures in this book much needed context.

On its own, this is probably just two stars, but with additional background information, I might as well give it three.

In defense of Ernst Haeckel

Robert J. Richards is a professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of Chicago. His special interest seem to be Darwin's theory of evolution and its relationship to the Romantic movement. I haven't read Richard's others books yet, but he seems to have a "progressive" interpretation of Darwinian evolution, which marks him out from Neo-Darwinism and (arguably) from Darwin himself. It does align him with the subject of the present book, however.

"The tragic sense of life" is a biography of the German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel. Richard has a relatively positive view of Haeckel, both as a man and as a scientist, and he defends him from the usual accusations. Personally, I have a more negative view of the man, but it's still interesting to read a book with a different perspective.

The political landscape of 19th century Germany was very different from that of the Weimar Republic or the modern West, explaining why Haeckel often took positions that seems contradictory or even absurd to modern ears. Thus, German nationalism was often a *liberal* position during the 19th century. And while Haeckel's support to Bismarck could be seen as a betrayal of liberal ideals, it should be noted that Bismarck initially took a fiercely secularist position in the Kulturkampf with the Catholic Church, something that would have endeared him to an atheist such as Haeckel. As for Haeckel's racism and eugenics, those were standard positions all across the political spectrum during the 19th century and the early 20th century.

Unsurprisingly, Haeckel classified humans in a racial hierarchy with Africans at the bottom and Europeans at the top. Ironically, however, he was neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Arab. He classified the Semites immediately below the White Europeans, wrote positively about the Arabs after a visit to Morocco, and admired precisely those Jews which the Nazis later would hate most of all: well-assimilated and successful German Jews. For a while, Haeckel also classified American Indians as a relatively advanced human race or "species". Haeckel opposed war with the somewhat awkward argument, inspired by eugenics, that modern wars tend to kill off the best individuals of the race, while the bad-bred elements survive. During World War One, however, Haeckel eventually lost his nerve and began supporting the German war effort.

Of course, this is *not* a defence of Haeckel - at least not to the present reviewer. Being a child of your time isn't always positive (perhaps it never is). However, it does show that the equation "Haeckel = Hitler" isn't as simple as some people imagine. The entire Zeitgeist of the period was imbued with racism, "progressive" evolutionism and fear of degeneracy. Haeckel never managed to transcend it, but compared to the later Nazis, he was almost a liberal!

Apart from the "Nazi" connection, Haeckel has become notorious for supposedly forging pictures of embryos to prove that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Richards believe that the charges against Haeckel are unfounded, and that other biologists (including some who criticized Haeckel) simplified pictures of embryos in exactly the same manner in their printed works.

Finally, a more humorous observation. Richards constantly implies that Haeckel was bisexual or even homosexual, but never says so explicitly. I wonder why not? Come on, Richie, say it! Instead, we are treated to a whole string of euphemism such as "They took a bath together", "the boy became totally devoted to him", "the boy looked like a Greek god", etc.

Indeed.

Once again, I'm much more negative to Ernst Haeckel and his political entanglements than the author, but as a balanced pro-Haeckel book, "The tragic sense of life" is nevertheless quite interesting.

Pannekoek as philosopher

"Lenin as Philosopher" is a classic criticism of Lenin, written by the Dutch Marxist and council communist Anton Pannekoek. The author left the Communist International in 1921 together with Herman Gorter and the German KAPD, but their alternative Communist movement never really got off the ground. Council communism was semi-anarchist and hence less authoritarian than Marxism-Leninism, but also heavily sectarian and ineffectual. Today, Pannekoek's writings are probably of interest only to very intellectual anarchists who would never throw Molotovs, preferring to hibernate at some obscure institution of higher learning... (And no, I'm not referring to myself.)

Pannekoek's little book was published under a pseudonym in 1938. Interestingly, it was first offered to a journal of the Frankfurt School, but was rejected. Occasionally, "Lenin as Philosopher" has been misattributed to another anti-Leninist Marxist, Paul Mattick. Some editions of the work contain an afterword by Karl Korsch.

"Lenin as Philosopher" is a critical examination of Lenin's only major foray into philosophy, "Materialism and Empirio-criticism". Lenin's work is a blistering attack on the supposedly idealist, solipsist and reactionary philosophies of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. Pannekoek was not impressed, and comes close to actually defending Mach and Avenarius, whom he regards as materialists. Pannekoek accuses Lenin of "middle class materialism", sharply rebuking him for drawing the main battle line in philosophy between materialism in general and idealism, when the real fault line is between Historical Materialism and middle class materialism. Ironically, Pannekoek uses standard Marxist analysis to attack Lenin and the Russian revolution, charging that it was "state capitalist" and represented the interests of a new bureaucracy, rather than those of the workers and peasants.

But what is Pannekoek's alternative? While the author claims to be a materialist, I rather get the impression that he was closer to panpsychism, neutral monism or certain kinds of phenomenology. Pannekoek explicitly attacks Lenin for regarding dead matter as the ultimate ground of existence, instead suggesting that existence is a holistic system in which mind and matter are somehow intertwined, and where the same phenomenon can be both physical and psychical dependent on perspective. He seems to suggest that creativity, political ideas and the social actions which flow from them are decisive in shaping society. True, society and nature are in some ultimate sense material, but since the whole of existence is a network of "relations", including relations between mind and matter, Pannekoek has moved away from a strictly reductive materialism even in his view of the universe itself. Also, Pannekoek seems to suggest that socialist propaganda, including philosophical and scientific expositions, play an important part in the class struggle. This suggests that *ideas* are central. Curiously, Pannekoek doesn't believe that the fight against religion is important in the Western nations, since the development of the socialist and labour movements will somehow render it obsolete almost automatically. This stands in sharp contrast to the battle of ideas he seems to be calling for overall.

In contrast to strict panpsychists, Pannekoek doesn't believe that all material objects are in some sense conscious. He holds that such a viewpoint, which he identifies with Haeckel, is really dualist. Instead, the author suggests that only some forms of matter are conscious. However, since mind and matter both seem to be parts of a larger holistic system, this isn't a consistently materialist position either. It's easy to understand why Pannekoek could read Mach and Avenarius with some benefit, while Lenin (with his "naïve realism" towards space, time and natural laws) regarded their talk about reality being a sensation-complex to be a dangerous concession to idealism.

In one chapter, Pannekoek expresses strong support for Joseph Dietzgen, a German or German-American socialist who developed his own version of dialectical materialism independently of Marx and Engels. I never read Dietzgen, who is a very obscure thinker, but judging by Pannekoek's description, he wasn't a strict materialist either. Dietzgen seems to have been a quasi-idealist, crypto-panpsychist early phenomenologist! Hats off, Joe.

Lenin never got the opportunity to respond to "Lenin as a Philosopher" (he was already a mummy on Red Square by the time his Dutch adversary penned his pamphlet), but I don't think he would have been impressed. The Soviet Russian leader had attacked the politics of the so-called ultralefts, including Pannekoek's supporters, in his book "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder". But then, Lenin wasn't the philosophical type. At bottom, "Materialism and Empiro-Criticism" was a factionalist document, something Pannekoek also acknowledges. Apparently, Lunacharsky and Bogdanov - two of Lenin's factional opponents within the Bolshevik ranks - had developed ideas similar to those of Mach and Avenarius. Or so Lenin believed. That was the real reason why the Bolshevik leader wrote an extensive, talkative and extremely tedious book on the differences between Marxism and Empirio-criticism.

"Lenin as Philosopher" is also available free online on several Marxist and anarchist sites.

Next week: Ashtar Command takes on Amadeo Bordiga, Otto Rühle and the Tooth Fairy.