The Romantic Machine by John Tresch;

Author:John Tresch;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIG. 8.3. George Sand, Compagnon de la Tour de France, promotional poster. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Sand presented Geoffroy’s science as a solution to her generation’s crisis of faith, a means of reconciling religious aspiration with the discoveries of the sciences, and a tool of “regeneration.” She extended his doctrine of the unity of animal types to the notion of a divine plan guiding an emerging order through the action of an underlying creative principle. The notion expressed in Geoffroy’s later philosophy of a universal motor, in “the attraction of soi pour soi,” of like for like, was the cosmic generalization of the Golden Rule.

Leroux likewise granted Geoffroy the status of prophet. Two aspects of his thought in particular were appealing for Leroux: his metaphysics and the notion (developed by E. R. A. Serres) of the animal series. Geoffroy’s materialist monism—which at times veered into a pantheism—tended to efface the line between the animate and the inanimate.39 At the same time, it made the concept of a radically distinct, incommensurable domain of “ideas” or “archetypes” unnecessary. Borrowing from Leibniz, Geoffroy’s writings of the 1830s frequently used the language of “virtuality.” For Leibniz and the mathematicians he inspired, the “virtual” was a way of analyzing a given point as the intersection of infinite series of mathematical functions, which themselves extended into infinity. It was also applied to describe the dynamic processes that were at work in apparently stable situations. In the physics of D’Alembert and Lagrange, for example, “virtual velocities” was a way of describing the balance of forces in a dynamic system in equilibrium; later authors have seen this as a precursor to the nineteenth century’s concept of potential energy.40 Geoffroy—inspired perhaps by Charles Bonnet, who explicitly announced a Leibnizian natural history in his Palingénésie Philosophique—applied the notion in his philosophical anatomy, using it to refer to the latent conditions and organizing patterns that shaped the emergence of living things. In a letter to George Sand, he wrote: “God created matters predisposed to organization, by attributing the virtual conditions required to pass through all possible transformations according to the prescriptions of the incessantly variable atmospheres that surround them (milieux ambians).”41 We may hear in the quote an echo of Lamarck’s Deism, according to which God created a material world that was independently capable of producing novel forms over time, along with the emphasis on nature’s dynamism and diversity (“incessantly variable atmospheres”) that we saw, for example, in Humboldt’s Cosmos. Yet Geoffroy’s use of the Leibnizian language of “virtual conditions” took him further into metaphysics. His conception of the virtual made it possible to conceive of creatures’ development as guided by an underlying form—a set of quasi-mathematical potentials—without recourse to a Platonic otherworld of unchanging, disembodied ideas. It also left an organism’s process of becoming open to modifications according to the molecules, forces, and other entities in the milieu in which it unfolded, thus preserving the possibility that new species, monsters, and other unforeseen evolutions might emerge—notions that led Deleuze to claim Geoffroy as an ally.

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