Organic Vitality: Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life by Joan Steigerwald (review)

Upon the completion of an experiment on a dreary November night, a young doctor Frankenstein wrote in his diary,"I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet … by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs." Today, Frankenstein reads as a bizarre tale, albeit one with crucial implications about the monstrosity of humanity and the humanity of the supposedly monstrous. At the time when Mary Shelley wrote the novel, though, the sciences were animated by discussions about what precisely separated the living from the nonliving. This movement was known as vitalism: the belief that living matter was endowed with some "spark of being" and the attendant search for what that thing, that vital principle, might be.

Joan Steigerwald's monograph, Organic Vitality: Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life, is an interdisciplinary study of vitalism that investigates the intertwining of scientific and empirical inquiry, critical philosophy, and Romantic theory around the turn of the nineteenth century. Her entry into this topic is via the blooming periodical culture of Germany at this time: in a multitude of publications, there was a lively and critical debate concerning whether the vital principle or force in question might best be understood as irritability, sensibility, a reproductive force, or a more general Lebenskraft. These arguments were, in turn, situated within a longer history that called especially upon the authority of the Swiss polymath Albrecht von Haller and his experiments in the 1750s on irritability and sensibility (roughly, the innate capacity of the body to respond to external stimuli) and the equally multitalented Friedrich Blumenbach and his inquiries during the 1780s into generative processes, i.e., the capacity of organized bodies to grow or cultivate their own kind and the simultaneous ability to generate, maintain, and repair their own complex structures. Practicing a close reading of contemporary journal articles, critiques and countercritiques, treatises by scientists and philosophers, scientific and physiological textbooks, and literary texts, Steigerwald offers a counterhistory to straightforward, teleological histories of vital powers and organicist theories, arguing instead that the ambiguities and tensions within these texts and the debates surrounding them led to still further thinking on the subject, ultimately opening a space of change that reaches past the history accounted for in this book.

Organic Vitality consists of six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. These are divided largely by theme—scientific inquiry, critical philosophy, and Romantic theory—but some key figures and concepts span more than one of these endeavors and are thus included in several chapters. Steigerwald's major theses and arguments encompass a range of concerns. German notions of organic vitality were informed more concretely and specifically through experimental inquiries than through theoretical systems, she contends. At the same time, reflections on epistemology developed in a reciprocal relationship with critical philosophy and Romantic theory during the years under discussion. This led, on the one hand, to new ideas about the processes of cognition as well as the study of nature. While these initiatives informed developments in experimentation, they also created questions pertaining to the artificiality of such experiments and their instruments: in other words, the entire experimental apparatus, whether it be due to the subject under investigation, something the experimenter does or does not do, the tools being used, or some other unknown variable, lends a synthetic quality to the results. Steigerwald picks up on Schelling's notion of "boundary" or "intermediate" concepts (Grenzbegriffe): concepts that can be employed to permit an epistemic unity of distinct observed phenomena as elements of the natural order. Steigerwald maintains that, for Schelling, such boundary concepts provide a means for discerning how organisms interact with their environments, and that a space of mediation (as implied by the term itself, i.e., boundary or intermediate concepts, as well as Kant's mediating...