SS. 490 Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud: the Sciences of Life & Society more

Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies Pratt Institute Fall 2010 B. Ricardo Brown, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Cultural Studies Darwin Marx Nietzsche Freud Why these works? I. Not because they are canonical “great works” but because they mark how works become canonical. II. Not because we are concerned with “Great Men” or “Great Figures In Thought”. III. Archeology and genealogy: because they mark the limits to our knowledge and of our truth because scientific truth changes over time. IV. Because they raised fundamental problems that the sciences of life and society address. Some common associations Darwin and the Social Darwinians/Eugenicists Marx, the 20th Century Communist Parties, the Inevitable Revolution and utopian future State Nietzsche and German National Socialism Freud and certain vulgar therapies and a worse misogyny. Why these works? I. Not because they are canonical “great works” but because they mark how works become canonical. II. Not because we are concerned with “Great Men” or “Great Figures In Thought”. III. Archeology and genealogy: because they mark the limits to our knowledge and of our truth because scientific truth changes over time. IV. Because they raised fundamental problems that the sciences of life and society address. Reading the texts in this course I. Continuities and Discontinuities II. Concerns and events that connect the authors, e.g., education, illness, exile or voyage, etc. III. Concerns and events that connect the works. There are social structures and structures of knowledge that these works, taken together, opposed as ruthless critiques. These include: Slavery, race, and the slave trade Society and the social relations of capital Nature and “the environment” Bourgeois morality Sexuality Nationalism Degeneration, criminality and madness Reading the texts in this course II I. Materialism II. Chance and contingency III. Interpretation is open and can change. IV. Rejection of idealism in favor of scientific rationality and experience. Enlightenment rationality. V. Emphasis on both individual experience and history. VI. Rejection of a narrow or specialized intellectualism. Works cut across the established disciplines of their time. VII. How they transformed knowledge and created the basis for the disciplines, specialties, and social policies of the present, i.e., their transvaluations of the values of their time and their concern for “Life” and “Society”. Darwin in Context See the Timeline of the life of Charles Robert Darwin at http://darwin-online.org.uk/timeline.html The “Brief Historical Sketch...” did not appear until the 3rd (1861) edition of On the Origin of Species. A corrected version appears in the 5th edition (1869). Important as much for those authorities not mentioned, or only mentioned in passing, as it is for those cited. Voyage of the HMS Beagle December 1831-October 1836 Fitz-Roy Darwin about 1840 Darwin in Context Next Week: First readings from On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray. [1st ed.], 1859 Pay attention to: I. How Darwin argues and how he constructs his argument. II. How he describes and defends key elements of his theory, such as selection, extinction, descent with modification, etc. III. How you might characterize his style of argument and writing? 

Darwin in Context Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies Pratt Institute Fall 2010 B. Ricardo Brown, Ph. D. Associate Professor of Cultural Studies Reading the texts in this course I. Continuities and Discontinuities II. Concerns and events that connect the works. III. The social structures and the structures of knowledge that these works, taken together, opposed as critiques, such as the social relations of capital, slavery and the slave trade, bourgeois morality, nationalism, degeneration, criminality, and madness. Reading the texts in this course II I. Materialism. II. Chance and contingency. III. Rejection of idealism in favor of scientific rationality and experience. IV. Emphasis on both individual experience and history. V. Rejection of a narrow or specialized intellectualism. Works cut across the established disciplines of their time. VI. How they transformed knowledge and created the basis for the disciplines, specialties, and social policies of the present, i.e., their transvaluations of the values of their time. Admiral Robert Fitz-Roy, Captain of the HMS Beagle and founder of the Met Office, the UK meteorological service http://metoffice.gov.uk/ Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these are of so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Feugians on board the "Beagle," with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate (Darwin, Descent of Man, 1882, p.178). Fullarton’s Map, 1872 Evolution before Darwin: the Homunculus Antonii Leeuwenhoek, (1719) Epistolae ad Societatem Regiam Anglicam, et alios illuistres viros seu Continuatio mirandorum Arcanorum Naturae detectorum, quadraginta Epistolis contentorum. From one of the first investigators of what would become microbiology. ● Linne’s Classification of Human Varieties as given in the second edition of Systema Naturae (1740) . Classis I QUADRUPEDIA Ordo 1. Anthropomorpha. teeth four fore-teeth, or none. 1. Homo. Know thyself. Homo varieites: Eurpaeus albus Americanus rubescens Asiaticus fuscus Africanus niger Mammalia 1. Primates foreteeth, upper 4, parallel Petoral mammae, binary 1. Homo know thyself Sapiens Ferus Americanus 1. H. Diurnus; varying by culture and place on all fours, mute, hairy. a. reddish, choleric, erect. Hair black, straight, thick; Nostrils wide; Face harsh, Beard scanty. Obstinate, merry, free. Paints himself with fine red lines. Regulated by customs. b. white, sanguine, muscular Hair flowing, long, Eyes blue. Gentle, acute, inventive. Covered with close vestments. Governed by laws. g. sallow, melancholy, stiff. Hair black. Eyes dark Severe, haughty, avaricious. Covered with loose garments. Ruled by opinions. d. black, phlegmatic, relaxed. Hair black, frizzled. Skin silky. Nose flat. Lips tumid. Women without shame. Mammae lactate profusely. Crafty, indolent, negligent. Anoints himself with grease. Governed by caprice. Linne’s Classification of human varieties, adopted from the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758-59). Europaeus Asiactus Afer Monsterous a. Alpini small, child-like, agile, fearful Patagonici large, sluggish b. Monorchides little beasts: Huttentotti Juncea girls with large belly: European c. Macrocephali coneheads. China Plagipcephali flatheads. Canada _________ Linne's fifth category from the 10th edition. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Blumenbach’s Classification, from De generis humani varietate nativa, 1781 Name Caucasian Geographical Location Europe, including Lapps, Northern Africa, America, Eskimo and Greenlanders derived from Lapps, Western Asia White Color Characteristics Beautiful in form Mongolian Rest of Asia Ethiopian Africa excluding Northern Africa Brownish/Olive Black Straight face, narrow eyelids, scanty hair Muscular, prominent upper jaws, swelling lips, Upturned nose, very curly black hair Broad nose, scanty hair, thin habit of body Broad nose, thick hair American Malayan Non-European Americans Southern Pacific Copper Very deep brown Blumenbach Georges Cuvier Geological and Paleontological Successions as established by Cuvier (1825) Period Modern Deposit Alluvia Sandstones, freshwater deposits, loose transported terrain Gypsum Rough limestone Fossils Contemporary species only Mastodons, mammoths, rhinoceros and hippopotamus-like animals, marine and fresh-water shells and fish Paleotherium, Anoplotherium, marine shells and fish First mammals, marine shells and fish Maastricht animal, marine shells and fish Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosarus (Jurassic animals) No quadrupeds; only fish and shells No fossils Tertiary [Secondary ?] Primary? Ancient Limestone Below the limestone Deeper deposits Transition rocks, Primitive Rocks Adopted from Coleman (1965:128). Cuvier's Ibis and the Negro A Biblical Account “It was the year 2348 B.C. that Noah spent in floating upon the waste of waters while every living thing was perishing around him, and afterwards in seeing the floods return to their beds in oceans, lakes, and rivers which they shall never again overpass.... In 2247 B.C. The sons of men banded themselves together to build the tower of Babel on the plain of Shinar, just below the hills of Armenia, where the two great rivers Euphrates and Tigris make the flats rich and fertile. For their presumption, God confounded their speech, and the nations first were divided. Ham's children got all the best regions; Nimrod, the child of his son Cush, kept Babel, built the first city, and became the first king. Canaan's sons settled themselves in that goodliest of all lands which bore his name; and Mizraim's children obtained the rich and beautiful valley of the Nile, called Egypt. All these were keen clever people, builders of cities, cultivators of the land, weavers and embroiderers, earnest after comfort and riches, and utterly forgetting, or grievously corrupting, the worship of God. Others of the race seem to have wandered further south, where the heat of the sun blackened their skins; and their strong constitution, and dull meek temperament, marked them out to all future generations as a prey to be treated like animals of burden, so as to bear to the utmost the curse of Canaan.”Charlotte Mary Younge, 1859. The Chosen People: A Compendium of Sacred and Church History for School Children, 1859. Project Gutenberg text 7chsm10.txt PHRENOLOGY: Reading the Skull George Combe (1788-1858) George Combe’s Constitution of Man (1827) offers a rationalist philosophy of progressive natural laws capable of serving as a guide to life and conduct. It was one of the most controversial and influential works of the nineteenth century, selling an astonishing 350,000 copies and remaining in print from 1828 until 1899. (In comparison, Darwin's Origin of Species sold only 50,000 copies.) Countless books, pamphlets and articles were written to oppose, condemn, praise and especially to imitate it. Ralph Waldo Emerson on phrenology “I know the mental proclivity of the physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness.... I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the form of the head of the man he talks with! I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities.... I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1890 [1856]. “Experience” in Essays by R.W. Emerson: Second Series. David McKay, Publisher, Philadelphia. ● Moved away from Phrenology to develop craniology as the methodology for establishing the meaning of human diversity. Largest collection of skulls in the world. Reluctance to extend the Polygenic critique as far as Nott and Gliddon would. ● – Dr. Samuel G. Morton ● Josiah Nott Josiah Nott: an expert on Yellow Fever, Nott became one of the most noted exponents of Morton's work. Nott was the principle editor of Types of Mankind, as well as the author of important polygenic essays. He then published the first American translation of Gobineau's Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Nott and Gliddon Types of Mankind Louis Agassiz contributed an introductory essay to the volume on the geographical distribution of species. Note that the portrait of Cuvier is use to represent the human characteristic of the “European Realm” of the earth. Nott and Gliddon Types of Mankind From Nott and Gliddon Types of Mankind (1856) Nott and Gliddon Types of Mankind John Bachman ● Pastor in Charleston, S.C. Friend and collaborator with Audobon (Bachman's wife Maria Martin painted backgrounds for Audobon's Birds of North America). Founder of Newberry College. John James Audubon BACHMAN'S WARBLER (Vermivora bachmani) Bachman's warbler is the rarest native songbird in the United States. This four inch long (10.2 cm) bird is on the verge of extinction and perhaps already gone. Critical wintering habitat in Cuba has been severely reduced. It inhabits dense wooded swamps with thick undergrowth and is most likely to be found in low wet headwater swamps and Coastal Plain river swamps with deciduous trees including cypress, gum, and hickory. One of the last ones seen in the Southeast was in Long County, Georgia, in 1975. Reasons for decline include habitat loss as bottomland hardwood forests are converted to pine plantations. Scan from Audubon's Birds of America Plate 185 http://www.songbird.org/birds/extinct/bachwarb.htm Right: Charleston, S.C. At the end of the Civil War. Bachman's Church is on the far left side of the picture. Below: Display of Maria Martin Bachman's notebooks. Much of her work and John Bachman's was destroyed in the burning of Charleston and along with it, St. John's Church and its school. ● Agassiz, about 1861, and a page from his copy of Darwin's Origins of Species, at the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Louis Agassiz & Separate Creations Frontispiece from Louis Agassiz's Outlines of Comparative Physiology (London: Bell & Daldy, 1867), depicting the crust of the earth as related to paleo- and contemporary zoology. Whether primeval man, when he possessed but a few arts, and those of the rudest kind, and when his power of language was extremely imperfect, would have deserved to be called man, must depend on the definition which we employ. In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term ‘man’ ought to be used. But this is a matter of very little importance. So again, it is almost a matter of indifference whether the so-called races of man are thus designated, or are ranked as species or subspecies; but the latter term appears the more appropriate. Finally, we may conclude that when the principle of evolution is generally accepted, as it surely will be before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death. ---Charles Darwin, Descent of Man. While Nott saw in the Origin of Species the repudiation of the polygenic theory--- and he gracefully accepted defeat--- he nonetheless appreciated it as a "capital dig at the parsons" Stanton, Leopard's Spot's,175.