Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy by Jennifer Mensch (review)

The guiding claim of Jennifer Mensch’s Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy is that organic, epigenesist models of generation played a pivotal role in the development of Kant’s philosophy of mind. While a substantial body of scholarship exists on Kant’s theory of cognition and his complex relationship to theories of generation (preformation and epigenesis), Mensch’s methodology departs from that of her predecessors, such as John Zammito and Alix Cohen, by showing that these two problematics were deeply enmeshed and mutually informing. This well-argued text yields important new insights into the familiar terrain of critical philosophy and enriches our view of a Romantic Kant.

Mensch locates Kant within the fertile framework of mid- to late eighteenth-century organicism, which is a “view of nature as something that cannot be reduced to a set of mechanical operations” (1). Importantly, Mensch examines more than the Kant of the third Critique; following her own organic logic, she judiciously analyzes the complete Kant, from the precritical to the late writings, as a way of comprehensively scrutinizing what Kant would have found attractive in the model of epigenesis for thinking about questions pertaining to origin and generative processes. Epigenesis, the theory of generation or production of something new, is opposed to theories of preformation, which are based in the idea of preformed matter simply unfolding. Mensch’s key argument—and the real significance of her contribution to Kant studies—is that biological epigenesis played a significant role in shaping Kant’s metaphysical theory of cognition. What Kant would come to see is that the mind, like the organism itself, operates “according to a kind of reflexive or organic logic according to which its unity must be viewed as both cause and effect of itself” (9). It is through an epigenesist understanding of the human mind that Mensch suggests we can both understand the transcendental deduction and meaningfully integrate Kant’s work in natural history with his critical philosophy.

In her introduction and first two chapters, Mensch recounts the state of the life sciences beginning in the mid–eighteenth century, when a shift against preexistence theories emerged in the 1740s with Abraham Trembley’s discovery of the freshwater hydra. Figures such as Pierre Louis Maupertuis and Georges Buffon play an eminent role in this history of generation, as thinkers who laid the groundwork for epigenesist or organicist thinking. “Epigenesis,” Mensch argues, “met a need to grasp the power and vitality of nature, but without recourse to the soul or devices such as Buffon’s interior molds, it faced an impossible task with respect to the problem of form” (5). Thus, epigenesis as “the common denominator of organicism” would become the model for a variety of Romantic discourses, including science, literature, and politics (5).

Mensch’s starting point with Kant is the 1757 outline for his new university course titled “Physical Geography,” one that followed Buffon’s outline in the first volume of his natural history. By the early 1760s Kant had weighed in on the debates over preformation and epigenesis and proposed a middle ground. Kant’s solution avoided recourse to the supernatural and at the same time was mindful of the need to provide form. Also during this decade Kant developed his interest in the origin of ideas and by 1771 let go of what Mensch calls his “mitigated skepticism” (51) and finally identified “the real principle of reason” as resting “on the basis of epigenesis from the use of the natural laws of reason” (17:492). Chapter 3—a highlight of the book—presents an early Kant “not only open to but drawn by questions of origin” (52), a protean philosopher pursuing parallel investigations into the problem of origin (cosmological, biological, and metaphysical). Here, Mensch examines often-overlooked texts from the pre-critical period and convincingly demonstrates Buffon’s enormous influence on Kant.

Chapter 4 treats Kant’s efforts to reformat metaphysics as a science of...