Georges Cuvier: Founder of Modern Biology (Foucault), or Scientific Racist (Cultural Studies)?

About Georges Cuvier (1769–1832)—comparative anatomist, paleontologist, biologist, physiologist, geologist, educationist, and public administrator—two stories are being told.

The Stories

Cuvier, Founder of Modern Biology (History of Science, Foucault)

The first story is found in books on the history of biology and in Michel Foucault’s Order of Things. Foucault celebrates Cuvier as the founder of modern biology. He displays no small degree of admiration for Cuvier’s intellectual muscle: “One day, towards the end of the eighteenth century,” he tells us, “Cuvier was to topple the glass jars of the Museum, smash them open and dissect all the forms of animal visibility that the classical age had preserved in them.” ¹ Cuvier’s intellectual impatience pertains to the tables of natural history of the seventeenth and the better part of the eighteenth centuries, which do not yield any explanations, precisely because they cannot account for elements that partake of the manifold movements of life. ² The taxonomy of natural history was patterned by four variables—forms, number, arrangement, and magnitude—which could be scanned, as it were, in one and the same movement, by language and by the eye (p. 268). With Cuvier’s intervention, characters—the objects of classification—are being freed from their taxonomic function, and are being introduced into the various organic structural plans of living beings (p. 263). Foucault terms this system of thought an “untamed ontology”: “transferring its most secret essence from the vegetable to the animal kingdom, life has left the tabulated space of order and become wild once more”(p. 278).

No longer content to transfer the methods of botany to zoology (in the manner in which Linnaeus had done it), Cuvier points to the importance of anatomy (and a general physiology) for zoology. Life, as the new object of inquiry, is no longer seen to emerge from its visible surface, but from its hidden depth. Cuvier directed his search to the internal organic structure of living beings through methods of comparative anatomy. Everything that was hitherto rendered continuous and visible through the static grids of natural history—genera, species, individuals, structures, organs—attains a different status. Cuvier animates these categories by subjecting them to the notion of the function of an organ (e.g., respiration, digestion, circulation, locomotion). He thereby demonstrates the inadequacy of a mechanical explanation of vital processes. According to Foucault, the further the organs are from the center of the functionality of the system, the more flexible, variable, and rich they are in distinctive characters: “Animal species differ at their peripheries, and resemble each other at their centres; they are connected by the inaccessible, and separated by the apparent. Their generality lies in that which is essential to their life; their singularity in that which is most accessory to it” (p. 267).

This implies that the resemblances in function, which allow the biologist to draw links between groups, are inaccessible to view. The distinctness and individuality of the organism, in contrast, will be found at its visible surface: “Multiplicity is apparent and unity is hidden”(pp. 267–268). Functional unity and the subordination of characters were to become the most important principles in Cuvier’s new classification. In a memoir of 1812, he laid down his criterion for an optimal classification system: it had to be one that could reduce the classification to its most general propositions. ³ This criterion also pertains to Cuvier’s notion of “species,” whose individuals are highly variable yet highly stable units. A similar principle is seen to govern the status of the organs: those that are visible on the surface of the body are designated as secondary, while the primary organs are essential, central, hidden, and unreachable except by dissection (p. 268). “Thus,” says Cuvier, “we find more numerous varieties in measure as we depart from the principal organs and as we approach those of less importance; and when we arrive at the surface where the nature of things places the least essential parts—whose lesion would be the least dangerous—the number of varieties becomes so considerable that...