Paradigm for a Romantic Metaphorology

Dorin Smith (bio)
Brown

A review of Weatherby, Leif. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. Fordham UP, 2016.

The place of critique has, perhaps, been in question for too long; not that it was wrong to critique critique but that the activity has exhausted itself. While publications on the topic mount and ever-new modes of “reading” are figuratively proposed (close, too-close, critical, post-critical, surface, new formalist, and distant—non-reading is clearly on the horizon), what is beneath our readerly theorizing is almost certainly less about “reading” and more about the metaphors which have displaced theory as our form of critical interlocution. At one level, metaphors seem indispensable for articulating the kind of unsettled knowledge the humanities traffic in; at another, they seem routine tools for normalizing thinking and eliding complex differences. In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski acknowledges the necessity of metaphor as “the basis for any kind of comparative or analogical thinking,” even as she challenges how the metaphors we read with, like “digging down” and “standing back,” ossify the figurative potential of the mediating distance across which we encounter our texts (52). It is not simply that we deal in metaphors, we read in metaphors—a second-order investment that takes the positionality of metaphor as its problematic. It should then be no surprise that our critical moment coincides with renewed interest in the arch theorist of metaphor, Hans Blumenberg.

Blumenberg’s work, which has been available in German for decades, is finally being translated into English, with Paradigms for a Metaphorology and The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory among the more recent notable publications. For an earlier generation of scholars, Blumenberg’s work on metaphor has only been accessible in English through his Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Though metaphor then and now is often treated as a cognitive tool that culminates in a new concept, Blumenberg understands metaphors as meaningful in themselves, as historical entities reducible neither to lived experience nor to the theoretical necessity of conceptualization. Developing an inter-animating account of theory and metaphor, Blumenberg frames the possibilities of theoretical knowledge as a problem of positionality, as something emerging out of the distance between a shipwreck and its spectator or between a stumbling astronomer and a passing Thracian woman. As touchstones that elide final conceptualization, these metaphorical events (the witnessed shipwreck and the laughing woman) become the place from which theory marks its conceptualizing capacities and from which it organizes its capacity to influence the very form of the lifeworld. The method of metaphorology, as Blumenberg develops it and as Leif Weatherby utilizes it in his new book, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx, is a tool for striking against positivistic conceptuality and becomes a way to effect change in an increasingly technological world that, in contrast, is increasingly moving toward metaphysics.

One would be right to presume on picking-up Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ that it is a dense study of the “organ” in early German Romanticism with a wide array of ancillary interventions into the history of ideas, the history of science, critical theory, and the intersections of literature and philosophy. But at its core Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is a work of the recent Blumensance. Theoretically, it extends the problematic of metaphorology to the moment of German Romanticism in which the organ became not only the primary metaphor of the understanding, but also the tool with which the distantiating power of metaphor was internalized as the organs of sense, understanding, and reason. Where Blumenberg reads Romanticism as an awkward age of metaphysics (“the semantic grasping after a lost stability”) between the classical moment of Aristotelian Being and the modernist moment of metaphorical free-play in the creative constitution of new ontologies, Weatherby digs deeply into German Romanticism to demonstrate that this period sought a ground for metaphysics in the manipulable (albeit fragile) world of “organs” (42). As Weatherby notes in his introduction, “it has become a historiographical refrain that the Romantics aestheticized metaphysics on the basis of an organic model of the universe” (23), yet this reduction of Romanticism’s “organs” to the biological hinges on our presentist sense of organs as the functional locations of an organism (23). The simplicity of Weatherby’s question (“what, then, is the organ?”) and response (“the answer is not simple, and never has been”) is refreshing for the way it privileges the task of conceptualizing over the recovery of some then-contemporary concept as the motive for re-engaging pre-Romantic philosophers (Leibniz and Kant), the German Romantics (Hölderlin, Schelling, and Novalis), and the post-Romantics (Goethe, Hegel, and Marx) (7). One is left, like Weatherby’s dramatis personae, with the task of metaphorizing the “organ.” In this respect, Weatherby’s book marshals its metaphorological project and its commitment to the possibilities of conceptuality against organicist readings of Romanticism like Denise Gigante’s Life: Organic Form and Romanticism and Robert J. Richard’s The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, and against attempts to identify the pre-Critical Kant with organicism as in Jennifer Mensch’s Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy and Catherine Malabou’s Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality.

Structurally, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is organized into three historical sections: “Toward Organology,” “Romantic Organology,” and “After Organology,” each of which contains chapters organized chronologically. Revolving around the metaphysical and metaphorical richness of the 1790s as the moment in which the “organ” moved from metaphorical to metaphysical technology, Weatherby’s analysis begins from a contextualization of the problematic of the “organ” in post-Aristotelian metaphysics. Asking the reader to suspend the intuition that “organ” is “bodily, ‘organic,’ or part of the order of the living,” he fixates on the absence of “organ” as a term in the German-speaking world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, lasting until the mid-1790s when, suddenly, it “was now on everyone’s lips” (33, 111). Alongside the emerging sense of the biological organ, “organ” signified metaphorically between functional, instrumental, and cosmological semantic fields. From Aristotle, organon was “that which is potential with respect to a field of actuality on which it is concentrated” (17). This functional, and for Weatherby primary, sense is the tool: wherein the actuality of something (e.g., a fire) is immanent in the possibility of something else (i.e., a flint). When the flint makes the fire real, it is an organon, bridging nature and artifice, making the possible actual. Another sense of the word, also used by Aristotle but perhaps more resonant to those familiar with early modern philosophical discourse, is the organ as instrument, exemplified in early-modern references to “instruments of perception” which included both the eye and the microscope. The other important sense was cosmological. Weatherby argues that for philosophers in the eighteenth century like Leibniz and the pre-Critical Kant, the desire to reconcile logic with cosmic understanding is a potent undercurrent beneath the desire to produce a metaphysical organ (a tool for metaphysics) that can bridge the understanding of truth and the order of the cosmos. But though the “organ” was vested with bridging mind and cosmos, it also created conceptual problems over whether or not the mind is an organ, and, if not, how its actuality is to be understood. The larger argument in Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is that throughout the eighteenth century, German metaphysics was concerned with the metaphysical potential of the “organ” even as German lacked a clear term to circumscribe the work of the word. By the 1790s the early German Romantics deployed the metaphorics of the “organ” as crossing speculatively between the functional, instrumental, and cosmological semantic fields “to reinvigorate speculation after Kant and provide theoretical justification for human intervention in natural and historical processes” (23).

The three chapters in “Toward Organology” historicize the operant metaphorics of the “organ” in the German-language from Leibniz to the 1790s with Kant. And more than other chapters in this book, these reveal the distinctly German condition for the Romantic metaphysics of organology, which relies on the complex conceptual inheritance of das Organ rather than to the simpler, functionalist definition of the term in English and French. Chapter one details the “beginnings of the metaphorization of the ‘organ’ for Metaphysics” to Leibniz, who “never uses the term in its biological sense” (53). Though Leibniz’s search for a “tool of tools” that could connect necessary truths of the understanding to the cosmos courted contemporary language of embryology and pre-formation, it was ultimately in the service of producing metaphorical senses of das Organ that would leverage the functional and instrumental senses of “organ.” By contrast, prominent German-speaking scientists, like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Albrecht von Haller, who were engaged in the development of physiology and embryology in the eighteenth century, never used the German word and wrote hesitatingly, despite the immanent necessity of it for their respective projects, to conceptualize the “organ”; in fact, they “wrote in part to avoid that term” (66).

At the edges of conceptuality, the “organ” became a metaphorically invested term for articulating and then satisfying the desideratum of yoking necessary truths to the pre-formation of the understanding. In the second chapter, Weatherby traces the influence of the metaphorics of the “organ” on Kant’s and Herder’s respective philosophical projects. Through an insightful and occasionally brilliant comparative analysis of Kant’s pre-Critical search in the 1760s for an organon of metaphysics and his post-Critique metaphysical restriction to a canon of the understanding, Weatherby argues that what Kant introduced to the metaphorology of the organ was a concern with methodology: how does judgment unify whole and part? Ultimately, this metaphysical question, dropped by Kant, is said to be taken up subsequently by Hölderlin, Schelling, and Novalis in the mid-1790s. Herder, by contrast, is taken as the source for the metaphorical content of the “organ,” as he came to speak of “organs analogically in metaphysical, epistemological, and cultural spheres indifferently” and so popularized the metaphorical capacity of the concept, such that the “organ” registered cosmological order and biological processes alongside its functional and instrumental senses (97). All of this comes to a head in one of the book’s best chapters, “The Organ of the Soul: Vitalist Metaphysics and the Literalization of the Organ,” in which Weatherby’s careful attention to the metaphorics of the “organ” demonstrates how the renewal of metaphysical speculation in the 1790s was less a turn to organicism than a return to the close imbrication of judgment and metaphysics which Kant ultimately rejected. Balancing Alexander von Humboldt, Ernst Platner, Johann Reil, Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, and Samuel Thomas Sömmerring’s On the Organ of the Soul, Weatherby reads the 1790s as the decade in which the metaphorical range of the “organ” broadened to name several conceptual pressure points simultaneously (111). In this way, the “organ” galvanized the conceptual ground of the “tool of metaphysics” and suggested an interface for metaphysics that would be developed by the early German Romantics.

The second section (“Romantic Organology”) divides its attention across four chapters covering Hölderlin and the dialectical organ of tragedy (chapter four), Schelling and the transcendental organ (chapter five), Novalis and the metapolitical ends of Romantic organology (chapter six), and then the opposition of Naturphilosophie to Romantic organology (chapter seven). Though these chapters are ordered as a philosophical history of the development of organology, chapters three through five are more hermetic and author-centric in their scope than are the previous chapters. Consequently, though these chapters do the most to articulate “organology,” they are recruited to challenge received critical accounts of the early German Romantics. The chapter on Hölderlin, for example, negotiates the space between critical interest in his “reaction to Kant and Fichte on the one hand, and the emergence of his poetic theology” on the other by introducing Hölderlin’s theorization of literary genre (tragedy) as an organological interface between judgment and being (132). Similarly, the chapter on Novalis falls into an analogous critical closeness of argument as Weatherby is most preoccupied with positioning Novalis beyond the organicist reading of Romanticism. Though Novalis is the thinker whom Weatherby identifies as developing the most “robust form of Romantic organology” and is thus central to the project of carving out a space for Romantic metaphysics, the chapter feels confined to the technical significance of the Romantic Encyclopedia as “the genre of Romantic organology” (234, 240). The overarching claim here, as in the chapter on Hölderlin, remains that the concerns of form and aesthetics among the early German Romantics are not in opposition to metaphysics but rather the means of manipulating the interface of metaphysics. While these chapters are occasionally too hermetic, the chapter on Shelling excels in part because he was so wide-ranging and capacious a figure in German intellectual life that tarrying with his uses of “organ” between drafts of Naturphilosophie and System of Transcendental Idealism can speak to the broader conceptual sea changes in the period. For Schelling in the late-1790s, organ and organon are necessarily linked, and their relationship subtends the value of art and “intellectual intuition” in his thinking. Bridging the difference between organ and organon, the “organ” “becomes an analytical tool capable of synthetic intervention in its field of potential” (173).

The last chapter of section two narrates the cultural end of Romantic organology, if not organology more broadly, with the rise of Naturphilosophie and the loss of the metaphysical potential of the “organ” following the extensive mapping of the concept of the biological organ onto the order of being. In this chapter, Weatherby offers a compelling account of Naturphilosophie as “directly inspired by Schelling” even as its “resulting cosmology is Herderian in quality” (258). Philosophers identified with Naturphilosophie, like Lorenz Oken, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, and Joseph Görres, were concerned with transposing the biological organ onto metaphysics rather than deploying the metaphysical and metapolitical possibility of organology towards realizing a fundamentally open-ended world. According to Weatherby, the revolutionary ambition of Romantic metaphysics was lost by Naturphilosophie. Consequently, Hegel’s critique of the “organ” in The Phenomenology of Spirit as an overt concern with “observing reason” marks the moment where the “organ” loses its conceptual capacity to facilitate the philosophical crossings of organ, organon, and the biological organ. Though Naturphilosophie is the end of Romantic organology as a program, Weatherby argues that there remain a few lingering strands in Goethe’s late-career work on morphology (chapter eight) and Marx’s balance of naturalism and revolutionary politics in his technological metaphysics (chapter nine)—both discussed in the final section of the book, “After Organology.” This section’s title is somewhat misleading, as Weatherby is concerned with demonstrating the longevity of Romantic metaphysics even after the loss of the metaphorics of the “organ.” He attempts to save the late-career Goethe from the charge of political retreat and “intellectual senility” by contextualizing his attempt to navigate the Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier debates as a means of returning the organon of Romantic organology to metaphysics (281). In this light, Goethe’s concern with developing a practice of observation is not only a means of attending “to phenomena in their generality and concreteness,” it is also an attempt “to found a system of experience capable of altering the world, a technological metaphysics” (281). The final chapter, “Instead of an Epilogue,” reprises Marx’s relationship to Darwin in order to tease out the significance of technology for Capital and redresses the extent to which Marx’s twentieth-century interlocutors elide his metaphysical roots in a Romantic organology. Though no chapter of this book is easily extricated from the whole, “Instead of an Epilogue” is the most exportable and the most likely to find an audience outside of Romanticist studies.

Though there are many reasons to recommend Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ, the intensely interconnected yet sprawling nature of the book will likely confine its theoretical intervention into technological metaphysics to a smaller readership than it deserves. After all, the appeal of re-engaging German Romanticism neither in terms of the philosophical prominence of Fichte in 1794/1795 nor in terms of the discursive impulses of the Athenaeum between 1798 and 1800 but rather through the early Romantic return to Kant in 1796/1797 will attract a very self-selecting reader, despite the value of Weatherby’s attempted fusion of method and politics. The challenge of the book, to follow the articulations of organology at the level of metaphorics, remains an obstacle for its method, because the possibilities of metaphorology (or organology) depend upon clear metaphorical points of contact. Making metaphorics manipulable is a key desideratum of metaphorology. When Weatherby praises Blumenberg for being “a practitioner of this metaphorization,” he highlights how the latter makes metaphorology a tool for illuminating metaphor’s capacity to challenge conceptuality and actualize change in the lifeworld (40). Weatherby pursues a practical metaphorology by making room for German Romanticism’s alternative to Aristotelian metaphysics and the metaphorical free-play of modernism. In his account, what emerges out of the Romantic metaphorics of the “organ” is “a new metaphysics—that of the organ, a ‘technological’ metaphysics paradigmatic of modern concerns with the point at which speculation and politics, theory and praxis, can communicate” (43). This reveals an interesting direction for literary theory, as Weatherby navigates past the disappearing landmarks of our post-theory landscape to discover “an unexpected Romanticism” in our technological present which makes a return to Schelling more explanatorily powerful than a turn to Stiegler (352).

As a metaphorological work concerned with carving out space for Romantic metaphysics beyond Romantic metaphorics, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ tasks itself with maintaining two competing impulses: one diachronic and comparative, the other hyper-critical and devotional. The more comparative chapters juggle multiple thinkers as they attempt to conceptualize the “organ” metaphysically or cosmologically, whereas more focused chapters, like chapter five, burrow deeply into the nonconceptuality underlying an author’s shifting distinctions between organ and organon across the drafts of a single work. Both impulses are usually well-executed, but the general effect for the reader is one of cognitive whiplash. Similarly, the use of metaphorology requires balancing the metaphor’s leaning towards conceptuality and lingering with its logical perplexity, which in Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ leads to practical confusions about the exact semantics of “organ.” Any reader coming to this book will likely struggle with the array of distinctions Weatherby deploys. The expressions that distinguish between the three basic senses of “organ” are generally vague throughout and border on inconsistency in a few instances. Moreover, I feel obliged to note that this book has more typographical and copy-editing errors than any work from a major publisher that I can recall in recent history. Mistakes happen in every published work, of course, but these errors are regrettable. In respect to more substantive issues with Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ, the chapters dedicated to Hölderlin, Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe are rich but not equal in their ability to balance the competing impulses of historical breadth and critical depth. For this reason, the book’s scope feels inflated by its dogged devotion to the most canonical early German Romantics and its need to provide a distinct position for each thinker in the development of organology. Similarly, the weakest argumentative strand of the book is the identification of Romantic metaphysics’ concern with producing open-ended systems to positive political philosophy. It is only in the book’s final chapter and its turn to a Romantic Marx that the confluence of metaphysics and politics is ultimately compelling. Generally, however, concrete political commitments are underrepresented in favor of meta-political reflections, a fact which is strikingly clear in the omission of any discussion of slaves in this very large book. Aristotle’s definition of slaves as “living tools” in the Nicomachean Ethics and the historical presence of the slave trade around 1800 make the discursive absence of slavery a significant oversight.

These points aside, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is a deeply impressive work of scholarship. It will serve some readers as a renewed introduction to and impetus to engage with Romantic metaphysics, while others might find in it a means of returning to the metaphorics of technology and its conceptual history. In this respect, it will likely come to resemble Edward S. Casey’s 1997 book The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, written early in the ecocritical movement as a phenomenologically inflected history of the concept of “place” that had been neglected since Descartes’s reflections on “space.” Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ turns to the metaphorics of the “organ” with such strength and intellectual vigor because in the brief window of the 1790s the “organ” became a metaphor for the realizable metaphor, for something both literal and instrumental. As such, this book will act as a foundation, if not a theoretical position, for future analyses of the “organ” and the possibilities of conceptuality.

Works Cited

Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.