Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ ─ German Romanticism Between Leibniz and Marx

The German term das Organ comes ultimately from the Greek organon("tool"), but did not emerge in German-speaking Europe--to mean the functional part of a living being--until the1780s. The term remained caught between its ancient instrumental and modern biological senses well into the 19th century. Early German Romanticism (1796-1800) thus occurred in a small window of semantic confusion just before the naming of the discipline "biology" after 1800. Organs were not merely parts of animals, but also faculties of spirit and instruments of literary and literal production.Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is the first book-length study to examine this terminological history and its literary and philosophical consequences.

Friedrich Holderlin, Friedrich Schelling, and Novalis shared the project of determining what sort of knowledge can count as metaphysical in a world filled with antinomies created by political and technological upheavals over the course of the eighteenth century. A new metaphysics, they reasoned, would need a determinate tool. Aristotelian scholasticism had long described logic a set of tools for philosophy, an organon. The organon's etymological sibling, the organ, had a primarily physiological heritage (sense-organ, internal organ). Combining the medical sense of the term (from Albrecht von Haller and Johann Wilhelm Ritter) with the logical senses (from Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Johann Heinrich Lambert, and Immanuel Kant) of these related terms, the Romantics imagined their literary-philosophical efforts as the construction an "organ of metaphysics."

This terminological history is missing from the intellectual historiography of the period, especially in the important works of Hans Blumenberg and Michel Foucault. Building on the work of Frederick Beiser and Manfred Frank,Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ shows how the Romantic synthesis of science and philosophy led to the invention of a modern metaphysics.

Leif Weatherby is Assistant Professor of German at New York University. His research interests include Romanticism and Idealism, the history of science and technology, and Marx and Marxism.