Analogies of the Freshwater Polyp in Eighteenth-Century Humanist Philosophy & Literature

Abstract

This dissertation examines the analogy of the freshwater polyp in late-eighteenth century reflections on the forms and formation of life across the disciplines of science, philosophy, and literature. After discovering the creature in 1740, the Swiss naturalist Abraham Trembley (1710–1784) engaged in a years-long project to observe and describe this centimeter-long cnidarian. The polyp puzzled Trembley and eventually the broader European scientific community because it possessed the remarkable ability to reproduce both sexually and asexually and to regenerate any severed part of its body. Within a matter of years, Trembley’s discovery set off energetic debate not just in the emergent field of biology, but also in metaphysics, moral philosophy, anthropology, and aesthetics. Vital materialists like Denis Diderot (1713–1784) viewed the animal’s seemingly infinite regenerative capacity as evidence that the organization of nature was not fixed—that a polyp, a goat, or an elephant could become human, or vice versa. The German response was ambivalent. Conservative theologians rejected this extreme materialism because it undermined their view that nature operated according to an internally coherent rational plan. Progressive philosophers and anthropologists, however, endorsed the idea that a capacity for change and transformation must be encoded within that plan. In the works of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), and Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765–1844), the polyp became a byword for Bildung—organismic change oriented toward the telos of nature—and the foundation of what this dissertation terms polyp-humanism: the conviction that the human being’s capacity for moral and cultural self-transformation is not a triumph over nature but an expression of it. The final part of the dissertation considers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) as a literary inheritor of this tradition, tracing the diffusion of polyp-humanist ideas into his morphological writings and his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795/96). As the project demonstrates, over the course of a few decades, a seemingly modest creature came to bear the weight of the Enlightenment dream that the human being could become the architect of a future aesthetic-moral order—not just as an aspiration, but as a law encoded in the very material of life.