Introduction: Dynamic Ontologies of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The epistemology of the eighteenth century is changing. The great chain of being —influentially announced in the 1930s by Arthur Lovejoy as the eighteenth century’s article of faith—is now under siege from dynamic philosophies reported by historians of the period’s scientific and literary cultures. The great chain, as Lovejoy enshrined it, posited eternal stability. A scale of perfection ran downwards from God to inanimate matter, fixing—but also linking—the variety of all creation. There were no valid prospects for transformation of this order. Following Plato’s dictum, everything that could be, already was. To contemplate novel bodies and forms was to entertain monsters. At stake was not simply a world view, in a humanist sense, but what Foucault—excavating the grounds of knowledge—called the classical episteme. In that “order,” Foucault contended, any knowledge worthy of that name would of necessity turn on taxonomy, describing and evaluating things according to their proper type, their species. In this context, Carl Linnaeus’s binomial taxonomy of the universe of animals, plants and minerals in his Systema Naturae (Leiden, 1735)—a living project through the rest of the century—like the intricate classification of musical styles and genres by Johann Mattheson—are emblematic of (at least a major component of) the period’s official ways of knowing. The stability of the great chain of being, but not its structuring role, is questioned in many recent studies of the history of science. Peter Reill (drawing on a burgeoning literature) argues that at least by mid-century, the eternal order of bodies, divinely created, preformed, and set in motion by the hand of God, was destabilized by vitalism, a broad term for emerging discourses of dynamic, selforganizing systems of life. Resisting a conventional elision of the Enlightenment with “mechanistic rationalism,” and the supposed dominance of preformationism,