Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx by Leif Weatherby (review)

Be it food, lifestyle, or education, “organic” is the buzzword of our time and the concept’s popularity can be explained with its promise of wholeness and transcendence for a world that is perceived as lacking in both. In the history of organic thinking, Romanticism is often considered as that time in which Western thought turned away from destructive Enlightenment rationality to a way of perceiving the world that is more “natural.” Leif Weatherby’s Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx invites us to reconsider this genealogy and interpretation of Romanticism by looking more closely at the concept of the organ. In a book that is both erudite and provocative, the author demonstrates not only that Romanticism was more technological than acknowledged, but also that human nature is intrinsically linked to and defined by technology.

The monograph is divided into three parts that follow a chronological pattern. The first part is devoted to thinkers such as Leibniz, Blumenbach, Kant, and Herder and considers the pre-history of Romantic notions of the organ. Romantic “organology” proper is discussed in the second part, focusing on Hölderlin, Schelling, and Novalis. In the concluding third part, Weatherby discusses the afterlife of Romantic notions of the organ in the 19^th century with particular attention to Goethe, Hegel, and Marx. At the core of Weatherby’s study is the question of how to account for the simultaneity of concrete scientific and technological (including political) projects and the metaphysical approach to life that shapes the thought of German Romanticism around 1800. Traditionally, scholars such as Hans Eichner have argued that Romanticism is a counter-movement to modern science and that the results of Romantic science can only be explained by the fact that Romantic researchers were still trained in the empirically driven context of the Enlightenment, but that empirical-scientific research ultimately cannot be explained within a Romantic framework (“The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism”). Insisting on the search for final causes, Eichner states, Romanticism turned away from the empirical sciences and towards a metaphysical Universalpoesie. Approaches such as Eichner’s have pitted an organic-metaphysical Romanticism against a mechanical-empirical Enlightenment. This line of thought and its focus on antagonism has remained powerful and we can see repercussions not only in debates of a wider public, but to a certain extent also in the philosophical readings of scholars such as Pierre Hadot (The Veil of Isis).

Weatherby’s own approach is informed by established figures in international Romanticism Studies of the last decades such as Manfred Frank, Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe, and Frederick Beiser. However, in one of the crucial innovations of the book, Weatherby also draws on theoretical frameworks usually not considered in this context; most importantly, technology studies as developed by thinkers such as Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler. By doing so, Weatherby confirms Beiser’s thesis that the new metaphysics around 1800 was simultaneously rational and organicist. However, Weatherby further develops this thesis by adding that Romantic metaphysics was also “meant to be interventionary, to make possible rational alteration of the world in a nonarbitrary manner” (282). Weatherby sees in Romanticism an attempt to account for the world that oscillates between mimesis and intervention, an attempt that he labels technologia transcendentalis (282). By making visible Romanticism’s technological heritage, Weatherby offers a much-needed alternative to recent readings—justified in their own right—that stress Romanticism’s interest in vitalism and which interpret the organic in terms of a self-organizing life force (see for example Denise Gigante’s Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, 2009). In this field of inquiry, he joins a still small but highly promising set of studies spearheaded by scholars such as Jocelyn Holland, Alice Kuzniar, and Joan Steigerwald.

Weatherby suggests that Romanticism found in the organ a concept that was conceived as simultaneously mechanical and organic, transcendental and real, universal and particular...