Aetiologies in the Reality Narratives of the Natural Sciences: On the Epistemic Function of Origin (Re)Constructions
This project is part of the DFG Research Unit “Aetiologies: Founding Narratives in Literary, Scholarly, and Scientific Discourses” that explores productive interdisciplinary uses of the concept of aetiology. It analyzes narratives of creation, literary and scientific primal scenes, as well as political foundation narratives, with a specific focus on their respective rhetorics.
The two subprojects based at the ZfL examine the aetiological procedures employed by the “historical natural sciences.” These procedures describe and explain natural developments that extend far back in time, such as the succession of geological formations and the development of life forms throughout Earth’s history. The project focuses on the significance of aetiological explanations for the natural sciences themselves and on their reception in critical social theory. The project’s guiding question is how the present is understood, explained, and criticized from the vantage point of aetiological argumentations, especially through the construction and reconstruction of significant points of departure, “origins,” from which developments and their narratives can be derived.
Fig. above: Einstämmiger oder monophyletischer Stammbaum der Organismen (detail), Source: Ernst Haeckel: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, Berlin: Gg. Reimer 1868, Taf. 1, 569
Website of the project: www.aitiologie.de
Subproject(s)
Concepts, Images, and Procedures of Aetiological Narratives in the Historical Natural Sciences
This subproject analyzes evolutionary narratives with explanatory purchase in the life sciences. It does so by examining the concepts, images, procedures, and instrumentalizations of such narratives, as well as the epistemic functions and the fictional status of their constructions of origins. The aim is to examine the empirical accessibility of the postulated origins, their constitution as both fictional-hypothetical and explanatory constructs, and their narrative integration and explanatory scope. The project seeks to determine the specific nature of scientific aetiologies and their differences from cultural myths and ideologies. Thus, it aims to explore the interplay of fictionality and facticity, construction and reconstruction, as well as narration and explanation in the historical natural sciences through the example of aetiologies. The main hypothesis is that the construction of an origin is central to the reasoning of the historical natural sciences. Indeed, it occupies a similar function to that of laws in the nomological natural sciences, namely, to organize the manifold array of phenomena and lend them a unifying structure.
Critical Recapitulations: Repeated Origins Between Evolutionary Biology and Marxist Theory
The assumption that an individual’s development repeats (“recapitulates”) the evolution of species has influenced many Marxist perspectives, from Friedrich Engels’ classical Marxism to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Herbert Marcuse and beyond. Such recapitulative theories’ problematic entanglements with colonial conceptions of time, racist psychology, and eugenics have been widely criticized in the history of science, however, their impact on critical social theories has thus far scarcely been examined. Applying methods from philosophy, literary studies, and the history of knowledge, this dissertation project studies the fluctuating exchanges between evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In pursuit of a self-reflexive examination of these ambivalent theoretical legacies, it explores the following key questions:
How does the reception of these recapitulation theories shape sociocritical analyses and agendas? How do the narrative and rhetorical operations of recapitulation (such as repetition, condensation, acceleration, parallelization, and synecdoche) dynamize the aetiologies of social and psychological forms in capitalist systems? What significance does the recapitulative relationalization of different developmental levels have for post-Marxist diagnoses of the present, especially during the so-called Capitalocene?