by admin » Tue Jul 30, 2019 4:28 am
[117]
V. Deduction of the Dynamic Series of Stages
Problem. To deduce a dynamic graded series of stages in Nature a priori.
Solution.
We have deduced in the preceding why it is necessary that the absolute product be inhibited at individual stages of development; we have also deduced how this inhibition itself occurs (III., IV.). However, it has not been shown how this inhibition could be permanent—how these individual natures which have torn themselves away from universal Nature, as it were, can maintain an individual existence, since all of Nature’s activity is directed toward an absolute organism.
Now, the problem, to deduce a dynamic graduated series of stages in Nature, presupposes the permanence of individual natures. We cannot succeed in the solution to this problem before another problem is solved, namely: how the individual is preserved in Nature at all.
Solution. Assume that the whole of Nature one organism, then within Nature nothing can come into existence which would not be joined to or subordinated to this universal organism, in short, nothing individual can remain in Nature.
Determined more precisely, our problem is this: How can any individual nature hold its own against the universal organism?
The universal organism operates absolutely by assimilation, i.e., it admits no production within its sphere that does not fit into it; it only allows that which joins itself to the absolute product to exist. [i]
[118] No individuality in Nature can, as such, maintain itself, unless it begins, just like the absolute organism, to assimilate everything for itself, to encompass everything within its sphere of activity. In order that it not be assimilated, it must assimilate; in order that it not be organized, it must organize.
In this act (of opposition) inner and outer are divided for it. It [ii] is an activity that works from the inner toward the outer. But how could this direction be distinguished otherwise than in opposition to another activity that operates on it as on an external factor? And moreover, how could the latter operate on it as on an external factor, if it did not oppose itself to the inclusion into that activity (strive against the indentification with the universal activity of Nature)?
By the same action through which it excludes the whole of external nature from its sphere, it also makes itself into an external thing in relation to the whole of Nature.
External nature (for it) will struggle against it, but only insofar as it once more struggles against external nature. Its RECEPTIVITY to external nature is conditioned by its ACTIVITY against it. Only insofar as it strives against external nature can external nature act upon it as upon an inner factor. [iii]
The external world can hardly be taken up into it except to the extent that Nature takes it in. The external world is as good as not even there for it— it has no reality for it, except to the degree that Nature directs its activity against it.
Its receptivity for the outer world is not only generally conditioned through its activity toward the outside, but the way in which the outer world acts upon it is conditioned through the mode of activity that it exercises toward the outside.
The external world does not act upon the inner factor as the external acts upon the external (dead thing upon dead thing). An external thing acts on an inner one only insofar as it engages negatively in its positive activity, or (what is the same) in the negative activity positively. But also conversely, the inner takes the outer into itself only because its activity in relation to it becomes positive or negative.
[119] Let us suppose that an external activity X acts upon the inner factor. One abstracts from all mechanical efficacy, for such a thing has not yet been deduced here, and an inner factor as such cannot be mechanically acted upon at all. We are talking about a dynamic activity.
In general, let it be noted that we expressly hold that there is to be an influence upon the inner factor AS SUCH. The effect which that external activity exercises according to its nature is = A. But with A it cannot act upon the inner factor as such, unless the latter opposes to it an activity = - A. In this - A lies the receptivity of the absolutely inner factor for the external activity = A.
(For example, let X be the activity of heat-matter. Its effect = A. In relation to this principle (the heat-matter) nothing is an inner factor other than what this principle produces in itself. The heat-matter also cannot exercise the effect A on an inner factor as such, except insofar as the proper activity of the inner factor in relation to the heat-matter as an external factor is = - A. Both effects (A and - A) are positive. They are only positive and negative in relation to one another insofar as they reciprocally hold the equilibrium. Conversely also, the activity = - A is extinguished without an external activity that is in relation to it = A, which keeps it in equilibrium and which is, as it were, its object. [iv])
The immediate effect which follows upon the effect = A in the inner factor, is the negative (i.e., not the negating, but the exact opposite of this effect = - A). (The heat-activity of its own body is A in relation to the external influence of heat-matter.)
Indirectly, through this activity = - A new transformations will be produced. If these transformations = Z, then Z will be the effect of both A and - A. [v] —That is, X cannot act on the inner factor as such with the effect A, except to the extent that the proper activity of the latter is in relation to the former = - A. Thus Z will also be determined in mode as well as in degree through the mode and degree of activity = - A.
[120] (To elucidate.—A poison acts upon the animal body. To what extent is it a poison, and why is it a poison? Is it a poison in itself? Hardly. For example, smallpox is a poison only once for each person; snake venom is not poisonous for the snake. Poison is not poison at all except to the extent that the body makes it so. For poison as poison the body has no receptivity, except to the degree that it is active against it. Poison does not attack the body, but the body attacks the poison. [vi] The ultimate effect of the poison = Z is determined in both mode and degree through the mode and degree of activity which the organism opposes to it. Therefore, it is really not an effect of the poison, but an effect of the activity - A.)
Conversely, however, the inner factor also exercises no activity = - A except to the degree that it has a receptivity for an activity = A. The activity of the inner factor = - A is thus itself again an effect of the activity of the external factor = A. Z will be indirectly determined in both mode and degree through the mode and degree of activity = A.
(The body will not be active against poison except to the extent that the poison is active against it. The form and the degree of its activity is determined through the form and degree of activity of the poison.)
Therefore A and A are reciprocally cause and effect of one another. [vii]
In the activity that the absolutely inner opposes to the external activity lies its receptivity for the outer, and conversely, its receptivity for the outer factor depends upon its activity. Neither the activity of the organism nor its receptivity can be purely known in themselves. The former is extinguished without an object against which it struggles, and conversely, nothing is an object for it except to the extent that it is active against it.
Note.
In the synthetical principles just proposed two antithetical propositions are united.
a) First principle. The activity of the organism is determined through its receptivity. [viii] The organic activity is, therefore, through and through [121] dependent upon the [ix] influence of external (material) causes. But matter can only act on matter, and only according to inexorable laws. Therefore, both the action of external causes on the organism and the functions maintained through it occur completely and entirely according to laws of matter. Matter acts on matter either through repulsive force (thrust) or through attractive force (gravity). The influence of external causes on the organism is explicable neither by the latter nor by the former type of effect alone, and neither is the activity of the organism animated by it—thus, it is explicable only from both taken together, or from the reciprocal action of both of those forces. This reciprocity produces what are called chemical phenomena. [x] The influence of external causes on the organism, as well as on the organic activity, is itself consequently of a chemical sort. All functions of the organism follow from chemical laws of matter, and life itself is a chemical process.
Remark.
(This theory appears to agree with experience, as made evident by the following. [xi])10
“Organization and life are entirely dependent upon chemical conditions. Already long ago,Nature made the first chemical sketches in the so-called inorganic world for the formations which it produces in the organic. The universal natural operations and those processes which are constantly underway must be seen as the first rudiments of all organization. Everything is swallowed up in a single chemical process. The preservation of the air circulation, e.g., in a uniform proportion of mixture, is of the utmost importance for organic nature as a whole. Even the atmosphere, daily organized anew, already contains the first impulse to universal organization. The [122] meteorological phenomena are all without a doubt manifestations of processes through which they are always rejuvenated and replenished anew. That we do not know how to explain, for the time being, e.g., the aeration of water, and the disaeration, which seems to precede the rain, from our chemical knowledge, proves nothing against the assumption that both do not happen in a chemical way. Nature does not combine as the chemist combines. Nature and chemistry are related to one another like language and grammar.— Since the same substances in the atmosphere whose combination and decomposition also sustains animal and vegetable life are constantly combined and decomposed, the processes which always maintain the same chemical composition in the universal medium of life must be the first stirrings of universal organization. Even the perpetual maintenance of that proportion of factors in the whole through which the chemical bonding of both atmospheric substances never happens and is not permitted to happen, is not to be explained otherwise than from the perpetuity of constantly sustained chemical separation.
“Most of the indecomposable substances that are major components of organic matter also betray the strongest tendency toward combination in anorganic nature. None of these substances can be exhibited individually; one knows them either only in their combination with the absolutely fluid (as kinds of air), or in connection with solid substances. They thus stand in the middle between absolutely decomposable and indecomposable substances, and belong, like organic nature itself, to no one of the two types alone.
“The substances that are particularly active in organic nature are already conspicuous in anorganic nature, and conversely, the substances that in anorganic nature are the most efficacious are also the most active in organic nature. The heat-matter produced through a continually sustained phlogistical process in the animal body, extended everywhere, doubtless even in plants, flows through everything living. The electrical matter [123] gives the muscular system and the excitable plant fibers their elasticity. As a consequence of more recent observations, it is not impossible that a free development of light takes place in the eye. Plants draw the largest part of their substances from the ubiquitous water, the major components of animal matter are spread out in the atmospheric air. In the bones of animals the soils are hardened, and their veins conduct metallic content.11
The ground of all phenomena of organized bodies is, therefore, to be sought in organic matter, in the original diversity of its basic substances, in the peculiar proportion of their mixture—in the chemical alterations that are produced through external influences, also chemical, in them. The composition of organic matter proceeds to infinity because every organ organizes again into infinity, is again mixed and formed in a peculiar way, each distinguishing itself from the other by means of particular qualities.—But what is quality itself? If it were, according to the common notion, dead stuff, then the most complete composition of manifold substances would again require a new activity which sets everything in reciprocity and puts its dead forces into a free play. However, what appears to us as quality is itself already activity, and each particular quality is a particular degree of activity. Is it to be wondered at that a connection of such manifold qualities that is still, moreover, continually altered through the influence of alien actions (light, heat, etc.) brings forth such manifold and peculiar activities as we perceive in organic nature?
The explanation of organic shape only demands the unification of manifold activities which all lead toward production of an original figure. [xii] Since the tendency to equilibrium dwells originally in each material, and this tendency in matter is unconditioned, it will take up every form in which it achieves equilibrium. Every individual organic material will commit itself to this [124] peculiar form freely, as it were, because this is the sole condition of a possible equilibrium of forces.
Accordingly, all difference of organisms will also be reduced solely to the diversity of substances that are united or separated in them, and the diversity of their functions solely to the diverse chemical influences to which they are receptive. The debated question about the difference between plants and animals is easily answered, naturally from a chemical point of view.
The two major opposing processes of Nature have prospered to the point of permanence in plants and animals. All manifoldness of material in the world is reducible to its relation to that substance which in our atmosphere enchains the element of light, and whose general possession seems to be the world system’s luminous body. All materials are either burnt up, [xiii] or burning, or such as become combustible again. The major processes of Nature are combustion and decombustion processes, in the great—(therefore, the opposition between sun and planets)—as in the small. Organic nature is divided into both.
The animal destroys the atmosphere about itself, and preserves, increases and moves itself like the mobile, growing flame. The plant returns the power of combustion to the burnt, ubiquitous substance, and returns to the atmosphere that substance which makes combustion possible.—This difference between plant and animal is the original one, grounded in Nature itself, from which stem all other differences between them. This difference itself, however, again derives solely from the different chemical composition of animal and vegetable matter. This is why the plant, therefore, at least for the most part, lacks the substance that makes the animal capable of retaining that principle in itself.
[125] Thus animals as well as plants are permanent chemical processes which are sustained through external chemical influence. The external condition of life for plants is light, for the animal phlogistical material. All of their functions engage in that chemical process and proceed from it.”
The proposition: organic activity is determined through its receptivity, is consequently the principle of a physiological materialism.
b) Second principle. The receptivity of the organism is conditioned through its activity. If the receptivity of the organism is conditioned through its activity, then so is the action of matter upon it. No one can in any way experience the pure effect of any material as such, in—and on—the organism, for the effect is determined both in mode and degree through the activity of the organism. Matter cannot operate according to its forces freely and uninhibitedly in the organism. The connections of universal chemical affinity are dissolved by the organism, and new affinities are instituted.Whatever steps into the sphere of the organism adopts, from this moment forward, a new mode of action, alien to it, which it does not abandon until it is given back to anorganic nature. [xiv]
Remark.
(This system too appeals to experience.
“The organic preserves itself in a wholly peculiar mixture, without example in the rest of Nature. Chemistry indeed names the major constituents of this mixture. But if these substances only, and only these substances in such a way, are active in organic nature (as chemistry can demonstrate), how could the great multiplicity of organic products proceed from the different proportions of mixture of these simple substances? The organic body retains its proper degree of heat in every temperature. Out of mere air and water the plant kingdom [126] produces— and indirectly through the plant kingdom the animal too—the most disparate materials, the likes of which can be brought forth through no chemical art. The chemical forces of external nature have, instead of making organic matter like dead matter, exactly the opposite power as long as life endures. As soon as life declines, the organic matter returns into the universal circulation from which it was previously withdrawn—it returns the more quickly, the less its elements were mixed according to the laws of affinity prevailing in dead nature, etc.”)12
Now, the cause that in part cancels and in part alters the chemical forces and laws of matter in the organism cannot once again be a material one, since each material is itself subjected to the chemical process—therefore, it must be an immaterial principle, which is rightly called vital force. [xv]
The proposition: The receptivity of the organism is determined by its activity is, therefore, the principle of a physiological immaterialism.
c) Neither one of these systems is true, for they reciprocally refute each other. Nevertheless there is in both something necessary; they are both true at once, or rather the true system is a third derived from both.
alpha) Where it expresses itself the principle of life is shown to be an activity that resists every infiltration of matter from outside, every impact of external force; but [xvi] this activity does not express itself unless it is excited by external impact. The negative condition of life is excitation through external influences. [xvii] Life, where it comes into existence, comes against the will of external nature (invita natura externa), [xviii] as it were, by a tearing-away from it. External nature will struggle against life; most external influences which one takes as life-promoting, are really destructive for life; for example, the influence of air, which is really a process of consumption—it is a continual attempt to subject living matter to chemical forces.
[127] beta) But this struggle of external nature preserves life, because it always excites the organic activity anew, rekindles the flagging contest. In this way, every external influence on the living which threatens to subject it to chemical forces becomes an irritant, i.e., it actually brings forth exactly the opposite effect which, according to its nature, it should produce. That reciprocal determination of receptivity and activity is really that which must be expressed through the concept of susceptibility, a concept that is exactly the synthesis which unifies those opposed systems [xix] (in its greatest generality—one should completely forget the “susceptibility” of Haller13).
The activity of life is extinguished [xx] without an object, it can only be excited through external influence. But this external influence [xxi] is again determined through the organic activity. [xxii] Therefore, no external activity acts in the organic body chemically, according to its peculiar nature, which is why chemical forces seem canceled with respect to it. [xxiii] But no activity can be canceled otherwise than through an opposed activity. This opposite activity lies in the organic body as in a closed system. At each moment the organic system establishes an antagonism against every external effect that holds the former in equilibrium. (For example, the living body retains its proper degree of temperature in the highest temperatures, not because the universal law of the communication of heat is canceled with respect to it (this is impossible), but because it maintains equilibrium with the forces impinging from outside through opposed operations—(e.g., by increasing the capacity of the fluids circulating in it, by accelerating processes that absorb much heat).)14 It is true that an external influence sustains organic activity, and that every such influence brings forth a determinate effect in the organic; but this effect is itself again a product of organic activity; e.g., of course opium acts as a narcotic, [128] but it has this effect not as opium; one would look in vain for the reason of this effect in its chemical constitution. The effect that it brings forth, it brings forth only indirectly, i.e., this effect is itself again an effect of organic activity. [xxiv] Generally expressed: Every external effect on the organism is an indirect effect.
(Therefore, no substance truly acts on the body chemically, but one does not at all need the fiction of a vital force on behalf of this idea; for either one understands by this a simple—original—force, like, e.g., attractive force: then it would have to operate just as universally as the latter. Or, if it is a composite force, then one must attempt a construction of it (e.g., if it proceeds from the antagonism that occurs in organic matter, then one would have to find a principle that continually sustains this antagonism and that keeps it from a chemical bonding of the elements, or that gives the chemical tendencies the peculiar direction which they take, e.g., in the animal body.) This could only be the function of a principle that does not enter into the chemical process itself, like, e.g., absolute matter, whose existence has been demonstrated in the foregoing, because this is absolutely incomposable, and because its conditions are present everywhere; where it is decomposed it must be composed anew in every moment. [xxv]
However, these presuppositions are not needed. The whole mystery rests on the opposition between inner and outer, which must be admitted if one admits anything individual in Nature at all.
[129] External nature will now struggle against every inner activity, i.e., against every activity which establishes itself at the central-point. The inner activity will itself be constrained to produce through this antagonism that which it would not have produced without it. The organic shape and structure is the single form in which the inner activity can assert itself against the outer, e.g., the form to which also belongs the manifoldness of individual organs, each of which adopts its particular function. Therefore, its formation is already itself an effect of that universal organic property of susceptibility (excitability through external influences) which is also found to be in agreement with experience. Conversely, the outer is, as it were, intensified to a higher kind of action through organic reaction, and precisely in this way the organic elevates itself over the dead.
Conclusions.
The activity of the organism is determined through its receptivity, and vice versa. Neither its activity nor its receptivity is in itself something real; both obtain reality only in this reciprocal determination. [xxvi]
In addition, activity and receptivity are related to one another as opposed terms (+ and -). Thus, as the one factor increases, the other falls, and vice versa.
1) The beginning of life is activity; it is a tearing loose from universal Nature. But that activity is itself again receptivity, for receptivity is only the minus of activity.
Activity and receptivity arise simultaneously in one and the same indivisible moment, and precisely this simultaneity of activity and receptivity constitutes life.
Organic activity is not activity without external pressure. The external pressure against inner activity has precisely the opposite effect, however, in that it enhances activity, it decreases receptivity. [xxvii] The maximum of receptivity (which one [130] can assume at life’s beginning) passes over first into a minus, and finally into a minimum of receptivity (by virtue of the law of reciprocal determination). [xxviii] In the degree that activity rises, receptivity must fall, until both enter into the most complete reciprocal determination, where they maintain equilibrium with one another—which is then the noon of life, as it were.
However, that complete reciprocal determination is only momentary, the organic activity is on the increase, receptivity on the decrease, and then the wheel of life rolls over toward the other side. The organic activity will increase more and more toward the minimum of receptivity, but since receptivity, as long as it has a degree, is itself only activity, it passes over by virtue of the inviolable law of reciprocal determination from the minimum immediately into the maximum (absolute receptivity), as soon as it sinks below all degree; the highest activity is to the negation of all activity, the maximum of activity to the maximum of capacity. [xxix]
Life thus has two highest points between which it pulses, as it were, and from the one it passes over immediately into the other. The maximum of activity = the minimum of receptivity, but the minimum of receptivity = also the minimum of activity, that is, the maximum of receptivity, and so it is conceivable how each maximum in organic nature passes immediately into its opposite, the minimum, and the converse.
(Two observations can readily be made here.—First, concerning the transcendental significance of this natural law of the immediate transition from the minimum into the maximum, and conversely. For this is precisely the law of all activity, namely: that an activity which no longer has an object never reverts into itself, and likewise, that there is no longer an object for an activity that has ceased to revert into itself; that in this way the highest moment of all activity borders immediately on the dissolution of it. [xxx] Organic life begins in this way, with the reflection of an activity through an object, just as [131] the higher activity, and the object itself, falls within the point of reflection [xxxi] for the organic as for the higher activity. If this point lies infinitely far away [xxxii] then the activity is no longer reflected, it has no more intensity and dissipates into the infinite. If it lies infinitely near [xxxiii] then it has no more extension and disappears into itself. [xxxiv], [xxxv]
Secondly, this perspective offers analogies for use of a higher perspective on many other natural processes, e.g., through it the similarity of life with the process of combustion is first revealed. The effect of heat on the combustible body is the excitation of its activity, which one can think as repulsive force against heat—(heating)—and which, as soon as it has achieved the maximum, passes over immediately into the minimum. Therefore, the maximum of excitation or of activity in every phlogistical body is = to the maximum of capacity. This abrupt, sequential transition from the maximum of repulsive force (of activity) into the maximum of capacity (of receptivity) is really the phenomenon of combustion.)
2) From this follow a few fundamental laws of organic life.
a) it becomes evident that every stimulant only is a stimulant as far as it minimizes receptivity or enhances activity. It only is a stimulant because it produces its (real) opposite (activity).
b) however, since the function of the stimulant generally consists in the production of its opposite, it becomes evident that the stimulant can itself be of an antithetical kind, i.e., positive or negative, accordingly as it enhances or decreases the activity. A stimulant can only act positively at a certain degree of receptivity, [xxxvi] negatively only at a certain degree of activity, [xxxvii] because in the former case it ought to decrease the receptivity, in the latter decrease the activity. With a high degree of capacity for a negative stimulant the activity cannot be decreased by the stimulant, just as with a high degree of activity it cannot be increased through a positive stimulant. (Therefore, the phenomenon of desensitization to the stimulus through habit.)
[132] c) Let there be two individuals, the susceptibility of the one related to the other in a ratio of 1:2, and if both should be raised to the same height of activity, then the stimulus that acts upon both of them will have to have a ratio of 2:1 in terms of intensity; that is, the single susceptibility with double intensity of stimulus maintains equilibrium with the single intensity of stimulus with double susceptibility.
d) Finally, it becomes evident from this concept of stimulus (that it produces its opposite) why all stimulus [xxxviii] finally ends with the absolute exhaustion of susceptibility, and how Nature achieves its aim with respect to every organism.
Nature achieves its aim in precisely the opposite way than the way in which it attempted to achieve it; the activity of life is the cause of its own dissolution. It is extinguished as soon as it begins to become independent of external nature, i.e., unreceptive to external stimulus, and so life itself is only the bridge to death. [xxxix]
3) The task was to explain how the individual holds its own in Nature against the universal. [xl] We struck upon the solution that the individual only exists through the pressure of an external nature. Inner and outer, however, are only differentiated in an act of opposition; therefore, there must be a mutual opposition between the individual and its outer nature; i.e., if the former is, in relation to the latter, organic, the latter must be anorganic in relation to the former. Therefore: no organic nature, no anorganic. No anorganic, no organic.
But if organic and anorganic necessarily coexist, then the functions of the organism cannot be deduced otherwise than precisely in opposition to that anorganic realm.
Conversely too, if the functions of the organism are possible only under the condition of a determinate external world, the organism and its external world must again be of a common origin, i.e., they must be just one product. (That is, popularly expressed, there must be between both a “relative purposiveness.” Now, to explain this relative purposiveness [133] through a divine understanding [xli] that has fit the one to the other is the demise of all sound philosophy. For example, “how wise it is that oxygen is not present in pure form in the atmosphere, because otherwise the vital air would consume the animals as quickly as a flame.” However, if the atmosphere were pure oxygen, then the organisms of the Earth would have to be correlatively otherwise constituted (i.e., receptive to a purer air) quite necessarily and from the same cause which made the atmosphere pure oxygen. The reciprocal coming together of organic and anorganic nature can only be explained, therefore, from the common physical origin of both, that both are originally only one product.)
Nevertheless, they are opposed to one another. However, as opposed, they cannot unify themselves in any other way than by being in opposition to a third higher term common to both. In the act of opposition inner differentiates itself from outer. The organism and its outer world together have to be, in relation to an outer, once again an inner, i.e., again an organic being. This is thinkable only in the following way.—The organic presupposes an external world, and indeed an external world that exercises a determinate, permanent activity upon the organic. Now, this activity of the external world could indeed be an incited one, and the fact that it is permanent is not even explicable otherwise than by a continual excitation.[xlii]—Thus, the anorganic external world again presupposes another external world in relation to which it would be an inner. Now, since the activity of the original organic being is aroused only by the antithetic activity of its external world, this is again itself sustained through an external activity (in relation to it). Together with the external world that it immediately opposes to itself the original organic being would then be again jointly opposed to a third, i.e., again mutually an inner in relation to a third outer.
[134] The original organic being is immediately conditioned through its anorganic outer world; this does not bring us any closer to a third. It would have to be shown that the anorganic as such, according to its nature, cannot exist without an outer that has influence upon it, and the mode of this influence itself would also have to be determined. This is the object of the following investigation.
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Notes:
i. Nevertheless, one could think that the individual had torn itself loose, as it were, from the universal organism. Each organism a unique, singular world—status in statu—.
ii. activity of the product
iii. Dead matter has no external world—it is absolutely identical with its world.—The condition of an activity toward the outside is an influence from the outside. But conversely, the condition of an influence from outside is the activity of the product toward the outside. This reciprocal determination is of the highest importance for the construction of all living phenomena.
iv. At any rate, the organic body generates heat in itself, but its own heat-activity is extinguished without an outer factor which it excites and which is its opposite, its object, as it were. If the inner factor brings forth activity in the outer, this means just as well that it produces its opposite.
v. It is the effect 1) of A, for through the activity of A the activity (minus)A has first been excited; but 2) also of A, for only by means of this could A produce transformations in the interior.
vi. The concept of poison only has a meaning for the organic product, like so many others, e.g., the concept of contagion, disease, medicine, etc.—Every body can become a poison, for it is so only through the activity of the organism.—Boundary between medicine and poison. Kant: what absolutely cannot be assimilated. But even every excretion is a poison. However, this much is true: poison is only poison by virtue of the fact that the organism directs its activity against it, strives to assimilate it.
vii. conditioned through one another
viii. But not the reverse.
ix. direct
x. The merely chemical phenomena of matter already lie outside the merely mechanical, and are a dynamic source of movement in Nature.
xi. One will readily note that in the presentation the chemical system is idealized, but I found this necessary. (Up to this point original note.—Trans.) It would be quite natural to view the phenomena of life entirely chemically. With the great and important discoveries of chemistry which the chemical muse has spread through every brain, in particular the discoveries which have been made by means of chemistry in animal and vegetable nature, it is as if one would have come across them oneself without needing to come to this point of view in a scientific way. Least of all Reil, the chief defender of this chemical perspective, which he has presented in all of his writings, but without lending them the support of which this doctrine is capable.
xii. The explanation of organic shape only demands that peculiar chemical mixture that we presuppose in organic nature. A certain form is always inseparable from a certain mixture.—Proof in anorganic nature.—But even a priori. Matter cannot be compelled to take a determinate form, as in a determinate mixture, because that form is then the single condition under which an equilibrium of forces in that mixture is possible.
xiii. e.g., the soils
xiv. In another respect, however, the problem is possible and solved, because the expression for the construction of the inorganic product is also the expression for the construction of the organic product, for we are permitted to take the categories of the inorganic, but in a higher potency, in order to transfer them to the organic. There is only one expression for the construction of a product; there are only products of different potency.
xv. That which is a law of nature is, just for that reason, an inviolable law. That it also appears as if Nature can again cancel its own laws might stem from the fact that, when soberly viewed, that which you call laws of nature are not actual laws of nature at all, but rather imaginary projections of your own. One only needs to take a look at most of the previous textbooks on medicine to hear (on almost every page in manifold forms, sometimes openly, sometimes concealed) that laws of nature suffer exceptions. However, this derives merely from the fact that the objects are regularly obstinate enough not to want to submit themselves to the received theory. For example, if a disease is found which is unable to be explained in terms of the received systems—no sooner is this disease an ens sui generis which follows completely singular and idiosyncratic laws.—One has that principle (that laws of nature have exceptions) to thank for the fact that the organic being has lain there for so long like a sealed book and has been whisked away from the region of natural explanation as if by a magic wand. It is this principle which until now has made all theory in medicine impossible and has reduced this science to the shallowest empiricism. This principle is at the same time so opposed to the first laws of the understanding that one has to give it another twist. This twist is: the laws of nature cannot, certainly, be canceled—this is conceded—except through forces of nature itself. Then, for example, the law of gravity cannot be canceled (e.g. the Moon cannot fall to the Earth); but now if there were in nature a force which acted counter to it (something like a negative gravity) then it would not be gravity itself but only its effect that is canceled—here no law of nature would be infringed, for the natural law of gravity only holds where no opposed force offers resistance to it.—Such is the case with the phenomenon of life. Nature cannot cancel the chemical and physical laws, to be sure, other than by the counteraction of another force, and just this force we call vital force, because it was completely unknown to us until now.
Already in this deduction of the vital force lies the admission:
1) that it is contrived solely as an expedient of ignorance and a genuine product of lazy reason;
2) that through this vital force we take no steps forward, neither in theory nor in praxi:
a) not in theory. For either ) one assumes that it is simple, like, e.g. repulsive force—or in accord with the usual idea of gravity; in other words, this means: it has no empirical condition: then one does not realize why it does not act just as universally as those forces. Or one assumes ) it is composite, i.e., dependent upon empirical conditions: then one must be able to provide these empirical conditions—until these are provided it is a mere word.—What the reference to gravity means here is, first, that it is not so constituted that it would have no empirical condition; secondly, gravity acts according to very simple laws.We would like to believe in vital force as soon as those simple laws are set out to us, and the existence and all appearances of organic nature are explained by means of them, just as the existence and the appearances of the universe are explained from the law of gravity. The concept of vital force helps just as little
b) in praxis, as in theory. The entire medical art is reducible to action upon this completely unknown force—naturally, to acting upon it not according to determinate laws which would be created for us from its nature, but according to a blind empiricism.
xvi. in this lies the receptivity for external effect
xvii. Here the organism submits itself to the laws of every other natural thing; no natural object is set in motion or activity other than through an external cause.
xviii. in contradiction to Nature
xix. It indeed sounds paradoxical, but is no less true, that through the influences which are contrary to life, life is sustained.—Life is nothing other than a productivity held back from the absolute transition into a product. The absolute transition into product is death. That which interrupts productivity, therefore, sustains life.
That proposition can be generally expressed in this way: the external influences on the organism bring forth in it precisely the opposite effects from those which it should produce according to its nature. The external influences tend toward the destruction of the product, but precisely in this, tend toward fanning the flames of productivity. Through those external influences, the activity through which the organ reproduces itself is fanned ever anew, such that the same influences which are directly destructive for the organism are, indirectly through productivity, preservative for the product.—By this means and by this means only does the outer become irritant, and stimulant, for the organism. By irritant we understand, for the time being, nothing other than an effect which sustains life as productivity, by never permitting the transition into a product.
xx. would be extinguished
xxi. on the organism
xxii. Because it acts directly only on the productivity—and only mediately and indirectly on the product. If the organic body were a product, without being productivity, then the outer would act on it exactly as it works on the dead. That it acts upon it entirely differently derives from the fact that it does not act directly on the product, but only on the productivity.
xxiii. Excitability indirect affectability of the organism. It is immediately explained from this principle of indirect affectability why no external cause can act on the organism chemically unless one invokes a particular force that cancels the chemical force.
xxiv. That opium acts as a stimulant is explained by its chemical, or what is the same, its electrical constitution (which is why it also acts in galvanism)—but its mediate effect, i.e. the effect mediated through the activity of the organism, is narcotic, and this effect is, to be sure, chemically inexplicable, since it is indirect. Thus it is shown on the whole, that just the same materials which cause the most intense excitability (which must be explained from their chemical and electrical constitution), indirectly exhaust excitability (which is now certainly no longer explicable in terms of its chemical constitution). It is no wonder that chemical explanations want to go no further than this. The ultimate effect of external causes on the organism cannot be chemically explained any longer. One does not require for the explanation of this appearance a fantasy like the vital force; it is not needed because it is a completely false assumption that the sublimity of life-processes over the chemical can only be explained in terms of an immaterial force.
xxv. It was thus an overly hasty assumption which had been much too hastily interjected that there can be no matter that is inalterable through chemical life-processes, and that could not give to the chemical forces the particular direction that they take, e.g. in the animal body. For this reason I have proposed, in the treatise On the World-Soul, the hypothesis of an absolute matter (whose necessary existence in Nature is now proven) in opposition to the assumption that in order to explain that particular direction an immaterial principle is required. The hypothesis has been taken for an assumption— the possibility of such a substance has even been denied—for what reasons we will soon see. (Original note. See AA I,6 186–91.—Trans.)
xxvi. The activity of the organism = 0 without receptivity (for the organism should be neither pure productivity— activity through itself—nor pure product, but both at once)—but then receptivity is also only a minus of activity, thus not thinkable without activity.
xxvii. It does not act on an organism as it does on a dead thing, it acts as an irritant.
xxviii. This happens, however, with retarded velocity.
xxix. (In place of the last passage, the manuscript has the following.—Trans.) The organic activity increases, the receptivity sinks gradually always more toward the minimum. But receptivity is indeed itself the mediator of organic activity. Without receptivity no activity. So the law that the increase of activity the sinking of receptivity holds only to a certain limit. When this line is crossed, it is turned completely around. The minimum of receptivity passes over immediately into the maximum, by virtue of the inviolable law of reciprocal determination. This paradox is to be explained by reciprocal determination. A degree of receptivity is itself a condition of activity. Absolute negation of every degree of receptivity = absolute negation of activity, and so the highest activity is immediately the limit of activity.—Maximum of activity = Maximum of receptivity.
xxx. The intensity of the activity is in inverse relation to its extension. Expansion of activity without any resistance negation of all intensity.
xxxi. Only that which struggles against organic activity can be turned into an object—only unruly material can be formed.
xxxii. absolute activity
xxxiii. absolute receptivity
xxxiv. is a dead object
xxxv. Brown did not deduce the concept of excitability, but neither did he construct or explain it. He openly concedes: What excitability is, we do not know, and we also do not know how it is affected. However, if we do not know the latter, then our knowledge is empiricism through and through. When we do not know the laws of physics according to which excitability is affected, knowledge which is certainly impossible unless excitability is itself deduced from natural forces (i.e. to have constructed it physically), then our knowledge is—like all medical arts—only empiricism.—The fact that Brown knew nothing of how to set his theory in connection with physics (which is certainly excusable, since at that time the greater part of those physical discoveries were not yet made that have now been made)—was without doubt responsible for very many false conclusions of his system. That more, and very significant, false notions exist in his system will be proven in the following pages. I am not concerned here at all with the Brownian system: I speak here always only of the principles of this system, which Brown himself for the most part did not ground thoroughly and from which he did not always rightly reason.
xxxvi. e.g. a lesser degree of heat only in a northerner.
xxxvii. e.g. cold negative stimulant only on a southerner.
xxxviii. also even the one that sustains life.
xxxix. Nature seeks to transform the receptivity of the organism to the external world, which is a determinate one, into an absolute one—but in doing so its receptivity is instead increasingly lessened, and in the same relation by which activity increases. In this way the organism achieves always greater independence from the influences of external nature—but the more it is independent of them, the less it is excited by them. Now, however, this excitability is, through external influences and the receptivity to them, a condition of life and organic activity: thus organic activity is extinguished along with organic receptivity. In this manner Nature achieves its aim, but in a completely roundabout way—and indirectly through organic activity itself.
Life comes into existence in opposition to Nature, but it would dissipate of itself if Nature did not struggle against it. Life, to be sure, ultimately subtends Nature, but it does not support the external pressure, only the lack of receptivity for the external. If, from the outside, the influence contrary to life serves precisely to sustain life, then in the same way, that which seems most favorable to life (absolute insusceptibility to this influence) becomes the cause of its demise. The phenomenon of life is paradoxical even in its cessation.
As long as it is organic the product can never sink into indifference. If it is to support the universal striving toward indifference, then it must first sink to a product of a lower potency. As an organic product it cannot die, and when it does die it is really already no longer organic. Death is the return into universal indifference. Just for that reason the organic product is absolute, immortal. For it is an organic product at all, because indifference can never be reached by it. Only at the moment when it has ceased to be organic does the product resolve itself into the universal indifference. The constituents that were drawn from the universal organism revert into it once again, and since life is nothing other than an intensified condition of common natural forces, as soon as this condition has passed, the product falls back into the dominion of these forces. The same forces which have for a time maintained life finally destroy it too, and so life is not anything in itself, it is only the phenomenon of a transition of certain forces from that intensified condition into the usual condition of the universal.
The system whose standpoint I have now just developed takes a stand between two opposed systems: the chemical system knows the organism merely as an object or product, and allows everything to act upon it as object upon object, i.e., chemically; the system of vital force knows the organism only as subject, as absolute activity, and allows everything to act upon it only as activity. The third system posits the organism as subject and object, activity and receptivity at once, and this reciprocal determination of receptivity and activity, grasped in one concept, is nothing other than what Brown called “excitability.”
I have not only deduced the necessity of that reciprocal determination from the concept of the product (organic product), but I have also proven that the phenomena of life can only be completely constructed from this reciprocal determination. Thus I have to say that Brown was the first to understand the only true and genuine principles of all theories of organic nature, insofar as he posited the ground of life in excitability. Brown was the first who had had enough sense or fortitude to propound that paradox of living phenomena, at all times understood, but never articulated. He was the first who understood that life consists neither in an absolute passivity nor in an absolute activity, that life is a product of a potency higher than the merely chemical, but without being supernatural, i.e. a phenomenon submitted to no natural laws or natural forces.
It is a personal duty for everyone who realizes it to say this publicly, although, on the other hand, one must openly concede that the principle that Brown placed at the apex of his system was discovered more through a lucky groping than deduced in a scientific way, not to mention actually constructed.
a) Brown did not deduce the concept of excitability (as has already been said). It is at any rate to be deduced a priori, i.e. without any mediation by experience, in the most rigorous way from the concept of an organic product, and so it must be. Every science an a priori principle.
b) By far the fewest of Brown’s disciples have understood the scientific seeds which lie in his principles. There is one exception, Mr. Röschlaub, whose writings no one can leave unread if they have any sense at all for medicine as a science, principally his investigations in pathology, and particularly a few essays in his journal of medicine (where he explains himself far more clearly and precisely about many things).—I hear that it has been said here and there concerning these writings that they are too philosophical, too scientific. For me just the reverse is true. I would like to say rather that they are not scientific enough, and also that Mr. Röschlaub has not yet thoroughly recognized the genuine depth and force of the principles which he defends—at least in his investigations on pathology.
I cannot enter into how well these principles agree with the dynamic mode of explanation— certainly not with the chemical or even mechanical modes of explanation, with which Mr. Röschlaub still seeks to reconcile these principles (if he has not long since left those modes of explanation behind). This will be further developed below.
xl. or: to deduce the graded series in productivity
xli. as a third thing
xlii. By the fact that it is itself (the external world) held together by some force, it would be in a compelled condition. In the external world, which the organic presupposes, nothing can be accidental. This necessity in all alterations of the external world, this restriction to a determinate sphere of alterations, alone makes the the existence of the organic possible. Every activity that is not restricted loses itself in the infinite. The activity of the external world is also, therefore, restricted.