The Biological Individual
Article from Margin Notes 2
Translators’ IntroductionIntroduction by Anatarah Bin AlKaf and translation by James Crane
Known as the “first Marxist among the biologists, first biologist among the Marxists,”
Born in Augsburg to a middle-class family on May 24, 1887 , Schaxel was enamored with nature from a young age, a love he later attributed to his parents.
Upon graduating from high school, Schaxel, dazzled by Ernst Haeckel’s Die Welträtsel (The Riddle of the Universe), wrote to the German Darwinist. Impressed by him, Haeckel invited the young man to study zoology under him at the University of Jena.
The field Schaxel entered in 1906 faced the very lacuna he would later attempt to address: the problem of evolutionary development. Ernst Haeckel cast an enormous shadow over both academic zoology and popular culture. In his younger years, Haeckel’s program of evolutionary morphology had been genuinely productive, introducing a battery of concepts that remain fundamental to evolutionary theory today: ecology, phylogeny, ontogeny, stem cells, and so on. But by the time Schaxel arrived in Jena, this research program had transmuted into polemical philosophy; a ‘monist’ nature-religion meant to overcome Christianity’s “dualism” through mechanical materialism.
Other subfields of biology— namely physiology, the medical fields and botany— were less influenced by these disciplinary developments, and allied themselves with more robust empirical experimental work, and a burgeoning new philosophy titled neo-Kantianism, which saw itself as a self-correcting tendency away from mechanical/scientific materialism.
This philosophical crisis was inseparable from its institutional context. Key to understanding this scientific culture is grasping the social geography of German research institutions. The German university remained the privileged site where scientific knowledge was certified and careers made, yet it was increasingly stagnant.
It was into this fractured landscape that Schaxel entered. Like many of Haeckel’s students, he quickly drifted away from his advisor to be better acquainted with “modern biology.”
Schaxel began cementing himself increasingly in embryology and became reputable in the field. In 1916, he secured an “außerordentliche” professorship of zoology at the University of Jena. And in 1918, he founded the small “Institute of Experimental Biology,” where he conducted axolotl research, especially on its developmental and regenerative capabilities. It was at this point during the turbulence of WW1 where Schaxel switched more thoroughly from doing empirical work to more theoretical and conceptual work. One of his most cited and major works of this period was Grundzüge der Theoriebildung in der Biologie (“Foundations of Theory Construction in Biology”), in which Schaxel gave a synoptic and critical overview of the “crisis” state of biological theory. He argued that biology suffered from a profusion of incommensurable theories—Darwinism and phylogeny, Entwicklungsmechanik, physiology, and neo-vitalism—each generating a multitude of facts and descriptions, but lacked coherent unifying conceptions to guide empirical research.
Schaxel’s approach sought a middle ground between competing extremes. On the embryological front, for instance, he positioned himself between Wilhelm Roux’s mechanism (Entwicklungsmechanik) and Hans Driesch’s neo-vitalism. Roux’s reductionism offered impressive experimental work but lacked a consistent, philosophically informed biological theory; Driesch provided a stronger philosophical framework, but his deductions—entelechy as an immaterial force—were not sufficiently grounded in empirical work. Theoretical biology, Schaxel argued, was needed precisely in this middle ground, and the task required biologists and philosophers of biology alike. To institutionalize this vision, Schaxel launched the book series Abhandlungen zur theoretischen Biologie (Treatise on Theoretical Biology), published from 1919 to 1931, with contributions from Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Paul Weiss, Emil Ungerer, Friedrich Alverdes, and many other young biologists.
By 1923, Schaxel was known as a successful young biologist, but that would change in the next two years. While he was politically active in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) since 1918, he would take politics much more seriously during this period, becoming professionally involved. After a surprising victory of the left-wing parties in Thuringia, Schaxel was appointed as an employee responsible for educational reform at the universities. The Mandarins were under threat, and naturally the socialist experiment was crushed by the Berlin military. Schaxel was branded a “red” professor, and instead of running away, he doubled down. Science needed to be saved.
Amidst this maelstrom, between 1924 and 1926, Schaxel headed the science communication magazine, Urania. As a socialist cultural product, Urania represented a critical development for his ongoing fight for scientific culture. It was here where left-wing scientists, teachers, statisticians, physicians, and worker-functionaries aimed to mediate between science as a culture product and the labor movement.
Urania’s project was twofold: to critique “bourgeois science” and to establish a new scientific culture that could overcome the working class’s justified suspicion of it. Schaxel’s own biography became central to this project. He presented himself as a model of the dissident scientist whose expulsion from bourgeois institutions confirmed rather than undermined his credibility. While some in the social-democratic (SPD) and communist (KPD) milieus welcomed a scientific “authority” in their midst, the majority remained skeptical of bourgeois scientists. Science and the figure of the scientist were not givens.
Schaxel deployed the familiar Kautskyite argument: while science is class-determined, not all of it would be discarded by the ascending working class, for the full heritage of science still contained the building-stones from which a future proletarian society could be erected. Excluded from the reactionary educational system, Schaxel himself had been expelled from professional zoology by the racial hygienist Ludwig Plate, which only bolstered his political credibility among workers, he recast dissident university professors, schoolteachers, and their ilk as heroes. These socialist class traitors would serve the working class as “more experienced personnel” charged with “filtering and sifting” the heritage of science to produce “fighting knowledge.”
To grasp the full scope of Urania magazine, it helps to contrast it with its bourgeois rival, Kosmos—Germany’s most popular science magazine at the time.
Within Urania’s pages, advertisements for other Urania activities abounded. The magazine was only one component of a broader program of proletarian science: educational seminars, Marxist sociology classes, “social hiking,” lifestyle reform featuring vegetarianism and “natural healing,” and more. Urania’s fate was bound to the collapse of Weimar’s left-wing institutions. Urania with its whole host of activities continued until 1933 but was abruptly ended when the Nazi forces liquidated the entire operation. Julius Schaxel fled to the Soviet Union that same year. He died there under unknown circumstances in 1943.
* * *
This journal presents a translation of an article from Schaxel’s late period: “Das biologische Individuum” (The Biological Individual), published in 1931. This late period is characterized by two developments: first, a deeper engagement with Marx and Engels, both philosophically and politically, than his work of the 1920s demonstrated; and second, a return to the teachings of his original mentor, Ernst Haeckel—but now on dialectical materialist terms rather than Haeckel’s monist ones. Specifically, Schaxel articulates a left-wing naturalism that avoids three pitfalls: metaphysical speculation, neo-vitalistic or scholastic conceptions of the organism, and empiricist-mechanistic biology. To accomplish this, he introduces “dialectical biology” as his remedy. As Schaxel writes, dialectical biology “strips away all rigidified concepts, above all the concept at the center of any metaphysical biology—that of individuality.” It does so by refusing idealistic absolutes and returning them to the natural-historical development of society, underlining their “general relativity” in the course of both life and earth history. It is important to note, for him, this is not merely a scientific claim but a political one: Schaxel links biological dichotomies (individual/collective, organism/environment) to the polarity of labor and capital, making him among the first biologists to theorize this homology explicitly.
Using his legitimacy as a “red” professor, he aimed to overthrow the dominant conception of the organism-environment relationship while tracing its source, bourgeois social relations.
This intervention must be understood against the background of intense debate over biological individuality in early twentieth-century biology. What constitutes the “unit” of evolutionary mechanisms: the gene, the cell, the organism, or the community? These questions haunted researchers grappling with new embryological discoveries and extensive ecological field studies, with the organism-environment relationship at the center of concern. Schaxel’s position emerged from his controversy with Hans Spemann, the most successful experimental embryologist of his generation. Spemann had adopted Driesch’s concept of the “harmonious-equipotential system,” arguing it could be retained without neo-vitalist conclusions by understanding it as an organic whole that could be “regulated” back to harmony. Schaxel rejected this move as too theory-laden, fearing it introduced teleological conceptions of organismic development.
With hindsight, Spemann held the more contemporary and scientifically correct view on evolutionary developmental biology. Yet Schaxel possessed the more robust philosophical instincts, insofar as the justification of theory also constitutes a kind of progress. What we have in “The Biological Individual” is one of the strongest, if most brusque, statements of left-wing naturalism and theoretical biology from the period.
Similarly, Schaxel’s understanding of ontogeny and phylogeny, while trailblazing at the time, is quite outdated by today’s standards. His view of evolutionary history, despite its impressive integration without subordination of one domain to another, remained too Haeckelian. Phylogenetic relationships have proven far more complicated than the regular “tree of life” structure Schaxel assumed, particularly with discoveries like horizontal gene transfer. Moreover, both blood-relations and sexual-relations exhibit far greater environmental variability than Schaxel acknowledged. Nature proves too promiscuous to exclude the social mediation of how we understand natural history.
Why return to Schaxel today? Contemporary biology possesses theoretical sophistication Schaxel could scarcely have imagined. Sophisticated enough, indeed, that his absence from the field seems almost justified. We have molecular genetics, systems biology, epigenetics, evo-devo frameworks that have incorporated much of what he struggled toward. Yet this very sophistication obscures what Schaxel understood: that dialectical materialism is a philosophy of nature insofar as it focuses on the lived, day-to-day pragmatics of philosophy of science, which in the last analysis is political philosophy. The dialectician reaps “a rich harvest” when this fact is ignored, and it is systematically ignored in contemporary scientific culture.
Consider the political work performed by seemingly neutral biological categories today. Microbiome research, for instance, operates with ever-greater technical precision while unwittingly reifying race as a biological category; the morphological boundaries Schaxel dissolved through parabiosis return as genomic sequence mapped onto the social field.
Recovering Schaxel means recovering the possibility that scientific practice can be a site of political struggle. Not applied politics, not science communication, but the research itself as intervention. This is not nostalgia for the Weimar Republic’s proletarian science seminars but recognition that the questions Schaxel posed remain unanswered: what is the biological individual in an age of microbiomes and holobionts? How do we understand organism-environment relations when the environment is being destroyed by capital? Who does science and for whom? These are not questions that more data will answer; they require the philosophical and political work Schaxel modeled. In this sense, he didn’t miss his chance to show up—we’re still living in the crisis he tried to address, only now with less awareness that it is a crisis at all. That is precisely why his voice, awkward and brusque as it can be, needs to be heard again. The harvest awaits those willing to reap it.
* * *
Because Schaxel’s synthetic project is difficult, his language is difficult too. We have translated Schaxel’s text and found that he uses multiple synonyms for certain key concepts in developmental biology, especially for the concepts of process, form/ation, and whole/ness or structure. Sometimes, Schaxel seems to use different words interchangeably for these concepts. In some passages, however, a slight difference in connotation or denotation between two different words for form/ation, for instance, will become significant for Schaxel’s argument. Often, the difference in meaning between two terms for a given concept—such as the difference between Ganzheit, translated below as “wholeness,” and Gesamtheit, translated below as “totality”—relates to a difference, whether real or potential, in (1) levels of scientific explanation, (2) theoretical vocabulary (e.g., Schaxel occasionally uses the language of Gestalt-psychology, an influential idiom for the description of “holistic” phenomena across numerous scientific disciplines in Weimar-era Germany), or (3) scale of the phenomena in question (as in the difference between Vorgänge, more discrete processes or sub-processes, and Prozessen, understood as more comprehensive.) We have attempted to standardize our translation of quasi-synonymous terms and mark out potentially significant differences in Schaxel’s language by including the German term in brackets. Ultimately, we believe that Schaxel’s conceptual presentation on its own terms is often significant for distinguishing between the various possible meanings in the variety of terms he uses for “process,” “form,” and “whole/ness” or “structure.” The linguistic slippage in Schaxel’s writing was, in part, intentional and even unavoidable: Schaxel was attempting to develop a unified theoretical vocabulary for developmental biology, bridging multiple extant and nascent paradigms, that did not preexist his interventions. Therefore, some of the differences between respective “processes” of development suggested by Schaxel’s language would, eventually, become more distinct with advances in theoretical and experimental biology, particularly in the consolidation of more comprehensive and synthetic paradigms like “evo-devo.” Finally, we endeavored to highlight these idiosyncratic usages of biological terms by Schaxel by writing them as translator’s notes peppered throughout the essay. We hope the readers can appreciate the systematicity and inventiveness of Schaxel’s description of organic development and the generalized relativity of the ontogenetic processes.
Tranlators’ Bibliography
Amidon, Kevin S. “ ’Diesmal Fehlt Die Biologie!’ Max Horkheimer, Richard Thurnwald, and the Biological Prehistory of German Sozialforschung.” New German Critique, no. 104 (2008): 103–37.
Baedke, Jan. ”O Organism, Where Art Thou? Old and New Challenges for Organism-Centered Biology.” Journal of the History of Biology 52, no. 2 (2019): 293–324. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-018-9549-4.
Alexander Böhm, Stefan Reiners-Selbach, and Vera Straetmanns. “A Synthesis Without Darwin: Unification Attempts in Early Theoretical Biology.” In Unity and Disunity in Evolutionary Biology, edited by Richard G. Delisle, Maurizio Esposito, and David Ceccarelli. Springer International Publishing, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42629-2_12.
Beiser, Frederick C. “Encounter with Darwinism.” In The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880, edited by Frederick C. Beiser. Oxford University Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198722205.003.0012.
Clarke, Evan. “Neo-Kantianism, Darwinism, and the Limits of Historical Explanation.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, ahead of print, April 30, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2021.1912707.
Delgado, Abigail Nieves, and Jan Baedke. “How to Eliminate Race from Human Microbiome Research.” Argumenta 10, no. 2 (2025): 497–510.
Finkelstein, Gabriel. “Haeckel and Du Bois-Reymond: Rival German Darwinists.” In “Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919): The German Darwin and His Impact on Modern Biology, ed. Uwe Hoßfeld, Georgy Levit, and Ulrich Kutschera.” Special issue, Theory in Biosciences 138 (2019): 105–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-019-00282-6.
Gambarotto, Andrea. “Teleology and Mechanism: A Dialectical Approach.” Synthese 201, no. 5 (2023): 155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04137-y.
Haraway, Donna J. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203421918.
Hopwood, Nick. “Biology between University and Proletariat: The Making of a Red Professor.” History of Science 35, no. 4 (1997): 367–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/007327539703500401.
———. “Producing a Socialist Popular Science in the Weimar Republic.” Oxford University Press, no. 41 (1996): 117–53.
Hoßfeld, Uwe, and Lennart Olsson. “The Road from Haeckel: The Jena Tradition in Evolutionary Morphology and the Origins of ‘Evo-Devo.’ ” Biology and Philosophy 18, no. 2 (2003): 285–307. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023988119440.
Laubichler, Manfred Dietrich, and Jane Maienschein, eds. From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution. Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology. MIT Press, 2007.
Novick, Rose. “Structure and Function.” Elements in the Philosophy of Biology, ahead of print, February 2023. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009028745.
Peterson, Erik L. The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.
Porges, Karl, Ian G. Stewart, Uwe Hoßfeld, and Georgy S. Levit. “From Idea to Law: Theory, Concept and Terminological Formation in Ernst Haeckel’s Works.” Russian Journal of Developmental Biology 50, no. 6 (2019): 290–302. https://doi.org/10.1134/S1062360419060079.
Priest, Gregory Michael. “Charles Darwin’s Science of History.” Ph.D., thesis, Stanford University, 2025. https://purl.stanford.edu/dt096gc1088.
Reiß, Christian. “No Evolution, No Heredity, Just Development—Julius Schaxel and the End of the Evo–Devo Agenda in Jena, 1906–1933: A Case Study.” Theory in Biosciences 126, no. 4 (2007): 155–64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-007-0016-6.
———, Susan Springer, Uwe Hoßfeld, Lennart Olsson, and Georgy S. Levit. “Introduction to the Autobiography of Julius Schaxel.” Theory in Biosciences 126, no. 4 (2007): 165–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-007-0015-7.
Taylor, Peter J. “Biology as Politics: The Direct and Indirect Effects of Lewontin and Levins.” Science as Culture 19, no. 2 (2010): 241–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431003660246.
Walsh, Denis M. “Objectcy and Agency: Towards a Methodological Vitalism.” In Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, edited by Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.003.0008.
The Biological Individual (1930)Julius Schaxel, "Das biologische Individuum." *Erkenntnis (1930-1938)*, 1930/1931, Vol. 1 (1930/1931), 467--492.
Introduction
Rather than attempting to trace the concept of the individual through the history of philosophy, or even to investigate the vacillating representations of the individual that have recently circulated in biological theory, in what follows, my aim is solely to anticipate a portion of the empirical material from a forthcoming, comprehensive presentation in which modern natural science will be illuminated from the standpoint of dialectical materialism. In light of this, and because this method will assert itself under pressure of fact with greater force than has heretofore been recognized or even admitted, even outside the broad social strata through whose movement the method enters into consciousness, some indication in this direction can be given through two formulations by the initiators, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In a letter of May 30th, 1873, Engels wrote to Marx:
The subject-matter of natural science—matter in motion, bodies. Bodies cannot be separated from motion, their forms and kinds can only be known in motion; one cannot say anything about bodies without motion, without relation to other bodies. Only in motion does a body reveal what it is. Natural science therefore knows bodies by examining them in their relation to one another, and in motion. To understand the different forms of motion is equivalent to understanding bodies. The investigation of these different forms of motion is therefore the chief subject of natural science.
Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, May 30, 1873, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, *Selected Correspondence*, trans. I. Lasker, ed. S. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 281, <https://archive.org/details/selectedcorrespondencemarxengels>.
What is significant for us is the fact that the chemist Carl Schorlemmer, upon reading this epistolary sketch, left the marginal note: “Very good, my own view precisely!” Sometime later, Engels notes:
Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature.
Friedrich Engels, *Dialectics of Nature*. Translated by Clemens Dutt. *Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works, Volume 25* (Lawrence & Wishart [E-Book], 2010), 492.
In short, what follows comes down to the consideration of biological facts in a rather general context and deriving various lawful regularities from them.
For several years now, I have repeatedly addressed such matters in proletarian training courses and academic lectures alike. Recently, I have also had occasion to deliver a presentation on the object of this essay in connection with the demonstrations at the Berlin branch of the Internationalen Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie on February 25th, 1930.
Before science ever deals with the concept of the individual, the society that produces this science is already familiar with the notion. It is one of those representations that characterizes relationships among members of such a society. The community emphasizes the individual individually. It is precisely those distinct, “exceptional,” “historical” individuals who need the foundation of the mass that carries them, and of which they are supposed to be the exponent. That is, empirically, individuality—in its spatial, temporal, and causal self-sufficiency—always remains relative. The absolute individual—the indivisible, the isolated, the ἄτομον (atom)—is a concoction of metaphysical speculation.
Individual self-reflection, “inner sense,” “I-feeling,” intuition, and introspection—all of these employ the full range of means of social understanding. Not only is the “You” older than the “I,” but both presuppose the community of the “It.” Individuation is, among other things, the index of a determinate stage of socio-historical development, one accompanied by linguistic expression, form in thought, and ultimately the concept.
Individuality proper, which is supposed to—and seeks to—signify ‘personality,’ arrives on the scene even later. [Individuality] is connected with the desire for universal freedom among all those who are super- and sub-ordinate to one another in society, a demand for a state of affairs in which each is their own master, a part of the declaration of human rights in the bourgeois-liberal era. The problem of individuality is therefore by right a problem of the bourgeois society of the present—as it appears problematic to itself. Thus, the problem is ever “posed” and never “solved.” The elevation of individuality into totality, of its individual character into wholeness [Ganzheit], simultaneously displaces the individual, which therefore remains a riddle, into the imaginary realm of the in-itself. A social strata, forced into the defensive, erects an ideological dictatorship that aims to prohibit empirical access to offensive empirie. The validity of any such prohibition is a question of power.
1. The General Relativity of Bionts[Translator's note:] Haeckel coins the term 'biont' to designate the 'onta' of 'ontogenesis.' Though he used 'biont' interchangeably with 'concrete' or 'physiological individual,' Haeckel relativized the concept of the individual in his work into six levels of individuality, from the single cell (whether unicellular individual or nested within a multicellular organism) up to colonial organisms, in light of then recent developments in biological theories of individuation as a process unfolding simultaneously across different scales and at different rates. For Haeckel's development of the term 'biont,' see: ["From Idea to Law: Theory, Concept, and Terminology in Ernst Haeckel's Works,"](https://www.biodidaktik.uni-jena.de/iefbdmedia/3124/2020-rjdb-from-idea-to-law.pdf) by Karl Porges, Ian G. Stewart, Uwe Hoßfeld, and Georgy S. Levit. *Russian Journal of Developmental Biology*, 2019, Vol. 50, No. 6 (2019), 290-302.
The empirical biologist who collects experience of the living through observation and experiment never encounters anything like a closed, rigid, categorical ‘individuality.’ The facts of living nature show themselves otherwise.
The living can only be cognized in their general contexts and connections, reciprocal relations of dependency, in their development and their movement. The living phenomenon, in its substance and its form, only ever presents itself to the observer in process and sequence, never as standing still, for-itself, isolated, abstract. There is no “life-in-itself.” Although determinate living beings always concretely exemplify “life,” they do not do so in an isolated or self-contained way, but as forms in motion, through their behaviors, in their relationships, and in the manifold connections between these movements.
Living beings are phenomena in a state of perpetual reorganization, subject to metabolism, ending in their death. Life continuously changes its material composition through the same metabolic process that constitutes the course of life itself. In close relationship to metabolism, the form of living beings is not a permanently ordered manifold, but in constant transformation in the formative sequences of development. This occurs in processes which operate at different speeds, and which are distinguishable from one another according to the kind of events which fulfill them.
The closer we occupy ourselves with the contents of the biosphere—which is integrated to a circumscribed extent with the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and geosphere of the planet—with the living beings that inhabit the earth’s crust—the clearer their interconnection with the totality [Gesamtheit] becomes.
Not all living beings are the same. Nor do they all undergo the same transformations, such that what we find would simply be various stages of life existing at the same time. And yet, we cannot say that beings are completely different from one another either. What is true of the leaves of a tree—of which, it is said, no two are exactly alike, but which are nevertheless identifiable as leaves of the same kind—applies on a larger scale for the living world as a totality. There is neither complete likeness, distinctness, nor isolatedness among living beings, but rather a graduated manifold that manifests itself as historical kinship. All that is living is connected through two kinds of kinship: the blood-relationship of descent from ancestors to descendants, and the sex-relationship of pairs who sexually reproduce offspring.
Aristotle first conceived life in the concept of the organism in a natural manner, having considered all living beings his equals, and himself in natural connection with them. It was only the thousand-year interpretation of the Christian Middle Ages that refashioned ‘the organism’ into a scholastic concept, one whose essential being was neither of this world nor, therefore, knowable in such context: the organism as an instrument of the “soul,” which intervenes in physical events from the transcendent beyond of the realm of metaphysics. To this day, idealistic philosophers still discuss "ideas," entelechies, and psychoids, and, so long as any of them remain, will continue to do so indefinitely.
When the geocentric and heliocentric standpoints of the natural sciences had long been overcome, in the midst of the powerful development of mechanics in the modern natural sciences, natural researchers nevertheless continued to run up against the wall of the scholastic-metaphysical category of the organism for nearly four centuries. No qualitatively new formation [Neubildung] in time, and so no organic history, was considered to be possible. As Linnaeus formulated the dogma: tot sunt species quot in principio creatae, inflicting the violence of preformationist evolution on the history of life.
Only in 1859 did Charles Darwin demonstrate, under the most exacting demand of burden of proof, that the present stock of organic products of nature, humans included, is itself the product of a long process of development that began from a few primordial germs. For the first time in the history of life upon the earth, the natural connection of all living things, and with non-living nature, was recognized.
During his search for an explanation for the fact that plants and animals populate the earth in such a multiform and graduated manifold, Darwin decomposed the organism as the totality of characteristics used as markers of identification for the purposes of classification. Once the organism was decomposed into the aggregate of properties that came about and came together in the course of time as the result of individual effects, the individual in the true sense of the word has ceased to exist. August Weismann arrives at an explicit dissolution of the individual with his view that the givenness of the organism is, in the last instance, the result of the determination-complex of its germ-plasm: in [this complex], independent series of events, without any causal connection to one another, are accumulated and, if they prove themselves, preserved. [These determinations] are contingent in origin; in their present operation, however, they belong together—brought together by the history of life.
As Ernst Haeckel sought to furnish Darwinian Transformism with a genuine theoretical foundation, beyond mere empiricism, for the first time, he devoted several chapters of his “General Morphology” to the topic of organic individuality, concluding therein that the concept of the individual “has no absolute, but only relative, meaning.”
In the proceeding, we will continue to refer to “bionts” in order to avoid the contradiction of the “divisible individual.” After Darwin and Haeckel, the metaphysical individual and the scholastic organism have been banished from natural science; these ideologies divorced from actuality have dissipated like so many wisps of fog, opening up a view of the spatio-temporal process of life directly accessible to empirical praxis.
“Bionts” are processes of living connections, appearing solely in their movements and relationships, never as self-enclosed categories. Their having-become [Gewordensein] can be historically explained. In so doing, it is necessary not just to demonstrate the broad historical trends of their development, but also to demonstrate the descent and modes of action [of bionts] in detail. Bionts become objects of experimentation. [In the experimental process,] they repeatedly point beyond immediate conditions to connections operative on a variety of levels. Here, the points of transition between biology and sociology are of particular interest to us.
2. The Special Relativity of Bionts
Human thinking has never truly left nature behind, except in its imagination. Every such retreat from actuality has resulted in the erection of various kinds of barriers to human knowledge. The concept of the categorical individual, so inhibiting to biological insight, stems from the social being of a certain epoch. As the epoch comes to an end, facts begin to break through the artificial barrier. The general relativity of bionts is now widely acknowledged. Across individual fields of research, the confirmation [of this general relativity] is on the rise. Without claiming to be exhaustive, in what follows we present a few examples whose individual significance lies in the fact that, in their interconnection and in their connections to others still, they attest to the general dissolution of individuality.
a) The Historical Dissolution
Life on Earth presupposes conditions which only arose in the course of the Earth’s history. Life therefore began in geological time. Through abiogenesis, the tree of life is rooted in non-living nature. Over many millennia, countless living organisms have evolved from one another. The historical connection between interrelated groups is expressed in the graduated diversity of phenomena. It is reasonable to assume that the similarity of forms in a given group can be explained by descent from a common ancestral form [gemeinsamen Urform]. This approach is further strengthened in the event that the derivation obtained through the comparison of forms is corroborated by remnants of the history of forms, or in the event that the transitional form between one group and another is documented.
Already in 1863, Ernst Haeckel
Individual beings are no longer regarded in imagined isolation. There was nothing that could be said about the absolute individual or the constant species except that all things of that nature exist without context, in complete disconnection. Only the knowledge of their having-become makes arriving at an understanding of their coming-to-be and passing-away, the process of nature, possible.
Organisms are products of historical accumulation. They change through independent increases or decreases of diversity. They are constructed through the assimilation of new parts or dismantled by the removal of others. This succession of events accumulates into something that endures. We speak of ‘accumulation’ in order to express the fact that the result in each case is not completely determined by real-time spatial boundaries, because the change in diversity is brought about through addition or subtraction in time. The individual events in this sequence, in their causal connection, constitute sums or aggregates. The establishment of historical accumulation not only abolishes the abstract conception of the individual and the species, but at the same time excludes any kind of teleological evolution whatsoever.
The historical dissolution of individuality places life-processes within the nexus of natural process. Now, it is necessary to determine the bonds of this interconnection, of organic formation, behavior, and its constitutive relationships. This endeavor has been most successful in terms of the bonds between ancestors and descendants—namely, in terms of heredity.
b) The Genetic Dissolution
Science has only begun to move on from the more-or-less anecdotal presentation of heredity-relations since 1900, when, building off of the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s findings in hybridization, scientists began conducting their own investigations in the analysis of cross-breeding.
Artificial selection and cross-breeding deal only with the facts of direct kinship, both the blood-relationship of descent and the sex-relationship of fertile couplings.
Thirty years of research have generated a series of important findings in three stages.
First, artificial hybridization of observable traits reveals the regularities with which the traits under observation arise in the succession of generations. Then, the collected statistical data is recorded under formulas of heritability and, at the same time, the “laws of inheritance” are derived from statistical clusters. Thereby, what endures in the flux of phenomena is separated out from what is randomly conditioned, the effect of inheritance from the effect of external conditions under which the process occurs, from the life-situation—in other words, that is, thereby the genotype is separated from the phenotype.
Second, in the treatment of the genotype, fictions about hereditary factors, or ‘genes,’ are introduced. The similarity of genealogically related persons, among whom the compared traits coincide in qualitative and quantitative terms, as well as in the spatial and temporal order of their occurrence, is accordingly explained by inheritance when evidence of the same genes in ancestors, descendants, or siblings is taken to be sufficiently well-established. For our purposes, what is significant is the renewed disintegration of the organism into an aggregate—previously of traits or properties, now of genes—already mentioned in the historical dissolution of individuality. Furthermore, with the progressive collection of experiences, there follows the realization that what seems to be an unsurveyably large number of varietal and breed distinctions within a species are in fact always based on different combinations and re-combinations of a relatively small number of genes. A particularly distinguished researcher of heredity, the botanist E. Bauer,
If genes were to remain mere symbols, genetics would only profess a mechanism without mechanics, and inheritance as a preserving principle through the fluctuation of organic processes would only consist in a mere persistence stripped of such process. The third step in the direction of insight into actuality is therefore the uncovering of those processes [Vorgänge] which have been provisionally described through the fiction of ‘genes.’ In any case, they must be processes, for we know that life is nothing but a process of processes [Ablauf der Prozessen]. Any return to the older corpuscular theories of inheritance is simply impossible.
In 1917, R. Goldschmidt began working in this direction, starting from heredity and the determination of sex. Already by 1920,
The gene is a substance-particle to which not only a specific quality belongs, which is self-evident, but which is also already provided at the starting-point of development in a typical quantity—typical, but different for different genes or gene-groups. The chromosomal-mechanism, which ensures the right amount of the different genes at the starting-point of development, must also possess the necessary means to ensure the provision of the typical quantities of each. Each of these genes is material, which, beginning with an activation in fertilization (or parthenogenesis), participates in a reaction or chain of reactions, the specific quality of which is conditioned by the quality of the gene and its substrate (i.e., in the main, the egg-plasma), the speed of which, however, is proportional to the quantity of the gene. If one wishes to associate a more concrete representation with ‘the substance of the gene,’ it might best be classified as an ‘autocatalyst.’ With this, the preceding proposition can be expressed more concretely as well: the gene catalyzes a reaction with a speed proportional to its quantity. The development of an organism with independent differentiation can be dissolved into a series of parallel-running processes [eine Reihe nebeneinander-gehender Abläufe] which tend towards a chemical situation which at specific, but different, points in time can in general be described as the emergence of formative material, determination-substances, or, according to our more specific assumption, hormones of definitive configuration [Gestaltung] in effective quantities. The correct course of normal differentiation demands that these determination-points appear in precisely the correct sequential order, and that the determining substances arise localized, in precisely the right location. A system of precisely dosed gene quantities, and thus the reaction-process of proportionally coordinated speeds they catalyze, enables the result of the reaction, the determination-points, to appear in a typical sequential order and in the correct intervals. Each subsequent reaction-point confronts a different general physico-chemical situation on the grounds of the preceding, and so faster, processes; above all, each is met with an increasingly limited sphere of action due to the determinations that have already been completed, and which restrict and localize the scope of its effect. The assumption of parallel-running, coordinated rates of reaction for the process of determination explains the sequence and localization of differentiation; in connection with the causative role of precisely dosed gene quantities, the former representation becomes a theory of heredity, one which constitutes a decisive advance on the factor-theory.
Richard Goldschmidt, *Physiologische Theorie der Vererbung* (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1927), 40.
In the genetic process, the effect-qualities are conditioned by precisely dosed gene-quantities, and thus the processes which pass through the generations, and which constitute the mosaic of the species-image at any one point in time, are incorporated into a lawful regularity that may be derived from all spheres of living processes—namely, the dialectical law of the transformation of quantity into quality. I will return to this point to provide a more thorough elaboration in the comprehensive presentation announced in the introduction above. Here, it is sufficient for us to establish the genetic dissolution of individuality into a series of parallel-running processes, the resultant effect of which is, at any one point in time, nothing but what we call the individual, and which, accordingly, we conceive of as a state of a natural process, as a cut-out from connection and context, as a complex of relations, but by no means do we imagine this as a permanent structure, nor, for that matter, as an absolute individual that, though unrepresentable, we are still somehow supposed to address.
c) The Formal Dissolution
That living beings have forms is one of their most obvious properties. Organic forms are never fixed and unchanging, but in a state of constant change. Not only does the material change in its form, but the form itself changes with the material.
The composition of parts referred to as ‘form’ is typical-specific, i.e., each respective, determinate, ordered composition (specific) arises through multiple events in ordered coordination (typical). Despite the singular diversity in number, arrangement, relationships, and alternation of their parts, there are always simultaneously many individual beings that display the same order of composition that repeats in the same sequence. The graduated diversity of the kinship-relations of living beings, the historical coming-to-be of which we are familiar, is evident herein.
The formative process is bound to material parts, each of which occupies a spatially determinate position at any one point in time. Accordingly, experiment—which consists in the translocation, disconnection, excision, insertion, and substitution of parts—focuses on these material parts.
In the formative states [Formzuständen] of single-celled and tissue-forming living beings, form finds its simplest expression in the fact that different materials are separated from one another spatially within the cell, distributed in specific proportions, and relate to one another in specific ways. Therefore, we speak of the compositionality, the constitution of the cell. In tissue-formation, cellular structures and their reciprocal positional relations are formally operative in cell-constitutions. Material form that arises from distinguishable parts is everywhere present. There are no states or structures that are identical in every respect but in which the composition of parts cannot be recognized.
Cells and cellular structures cannot be viewed as self-contained individuals, for it is precisely in view of form that life proceeds through the continuous sublation [Aufhebung] of these individualities. Any other approach to the cell as an illusory semblance of individuality or as an imagined totality contradicts the facts and, for that reason, creates an insoluble problem.
Cells with anabolism increase their material stock and then divide themselves. Quality transforms into quantity. The preservation and proliferation of cells, the living process, is only possible through the continuous negation of cellular individuals through division.
The difficulties this presents to holding onto the concept of the individual are already evident in Ernst Haeckel (1866). The reproduction of living beings is derived from growth.
As the individual grows beyond its individual measure, the surplus growth-product becomes detached from it in the form of a new part, which is soon restored into a complete individual through its own growth. The newly generated fetal organism (partus) is therefore a detached part of the paternal organism (parens). This detachment can be complete or incomplete. In the former case, the newly generated morphological individual, through the act of detachment, acquires the self-sufficiency of the physiological individual (bion). In the latter case, the fetal morphological individual remains more or less bound to the parental and forms in conjunction with it a complex or colony; the physiological individual becomes a member of a higher morphological order than either of the two components [viz., partus and parens].
Ernst Haeckel, Generellen Morphologie, 180.
The indivisible maintains itself through division, within the framework of an indivisible measure, the boundaries of which are, however, not fixed but movable in varying degrees. This contradictory formulation only demonstrates that the processes of life cannot be comprehended by rigid, individual concepts. They spring loose from the fetters of conceptual violence. The dialectician Friedrich Engels,
Let us take a grain of barley. Billions of such grains of barley are milled, boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets with conditions which are normal for it, if it falls on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture it undergoes a specific change, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place appears the plant which has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal life-process of this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilised and finally once more produces grains of barley, and as soon as these have ripened the stalk dies, is in its turn negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have once again the original grain of barley, but not as a single unit, but ten-, twenty- or thirtyfold. Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a century ago. But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener’s art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances this process of perfection. —With most insects, this process follows the same lines as in the case of the grain of barley. Butterflies, for example, spring from the egg by a negation of the egg, pass through certain transformations until they reach sexual maturity, pair and are in turn negated, dying as soon as the pairing process has been completed and the female has laid its numerous eggs. We are not concerned at the moment with the fact that with other plants and animals the process does not take such a simple form, that before they die they produce seeds, eggs or offspring not once but many times; our purpose here is only to show that the negation of the negation really does take place in both kingdoms of the organic world.
Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring*, trans. Emile Burns, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, *Collected Works*, vol. 25 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 126.
Through the continuous negation of the individual, the stream of life flows through the generations.
Prior discoveries about the preservation and proliferation of forms need to be deepened by determination of the content of events, the determination of development, on the basis of which further evidence for the dissolution of individuality emerges.
Development occurs in states that are distinguishable through changes in speed of the process and the kind of events which fill them. For example, in tissue-forming animals, development occurs as predevelopment (maternal egg and paternal semen), unification of the germ-cells (fertilization), triggering the development of the fertilized egg, construction of the body prior to cleavage (division of the egg), the forming of basic components and the separation of tissues, the structuration [Ausgestaltung] of the organs through their activity, operational processes, including any substitute-formations, and, in the end, senescence. Development extends from cell-formation to natural death. The cell is a finite member of a comparatively infinite sequence.
The determination of formations happens in a step-by-step progression. All subsequent states are necessary, since the change of any one individual state necessarily conditions the determination of all that follow. Determination can therefore also be characterized as an increasing restriction of possibilities through the restriction of opportunities for formation [Bildungsermöglichung] to a narrower and narrower sphere. Spinoza’s axiom applies here too: omnis determinatio est negatio.
‘Determination in successive acts’ excludes two misleading assumptions: predestination, which rigidly fixes the course of development from the outset, and the finalist conception, which supposes that teleologically directed forces strive towards a stage considered to be essential. What is ‘typical’ is only the typical outcome achieved along typical paths. The redirection of development along atypical paths always results in atypical progression. Nothing stands in the way of the artificial institution of modes of development that have yet to be realized in nature, even if this has largely been unsuccessful until now because our insight into the interaction of the parts is still too poor and the technical difficulty involved is still too great. The so-called “regulation of development” must only be spoken of with extreme caution, or else teleological speculation will replace derivation from facts. Here, the danger posed by fictive individuality and totality is particularly acute.
In 1922, summarizing more than a decade of research into the formation of animal form [Formbildung], I wrote:
There is a determinable boundary of the typical-specific form, one which cannot be overstepped without consequences that endanger the persistence of what is typical. Analytic experiment is of service in the determination of this boundary, which, in turn, provides a causal demarcation of the typical-specific form—after its descriptive presentation through comparison of formative modes [Bildungsweisen]. If we overstep this boundary—that is, if that which has form [Formhabende] is changed—and so change will inevitably continue to have an effect. The atypical form-process [Formvorgang] proves itself to be just as persistent as the typical. From this, it follows that the type is not absolute, possessing neither spatial fixity nor non-spatial persistence. The material bondage of the formed [Formhaften] also restricts atypical paths of development within a determinable scope. Overstepping this boundary results in the destruction of the organic form; decay takes the place of ordered interaction.
Julius Schaxel, "Über die Natur der Formvorgänge in der tierischen Entwicklung," *Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen* 50 (1922): 523--24.
Several further examples of early embryo development, regeneration, and transplantation may be appropriate for purposes of illustration. The first developmental step in tissue-forming animals is cleavage, which consists in the division of the egg. The typically-constituted egg is gradually replaced by a typically-ordered aggregate of cells through a series of cellular divisions. This has been experimentally substantiated and replicated. The change in constitution of the egg results in a change in the modus of the cleavage and, thus, in outcome (Figs. 1 and 2). This results in—
—the constitution of each blastomere, and thus its determination for subsequent developmental events, which is conditioned, on the one hand, by the material composition inherited from the egg and its locationality and, on the other, by the preceding cleavage-process. What becomes of the blastomere that is experimentally removed from its germinal cluster (in isolation) depends on its constitution. Failure to take this circumstance into consideration has led to disastrous speculations about regulation, totality, individuality.
There are species whose modus of cleavage preserves the egg-constitution into the first blastomere-generations, e.g., the so-called radial-modus, with totally equal and then adequate cleavage, in many sea urchins and starfish, and also in species in which blastomere-constitution is still distinct from egg-constitution after the first, but always unequal, division (e.g., the spiral-modus of snails and many species of worm). Isolated blastomeres of the second group develop, if they develop at all, into one or another sort of atypia from partial-mass. They have never been seduced by “holistic representations” [“Ganzheitsvorstellungen”]. It is different for the first group.
For species whose blastomeres retain the external form and arrangement of contents after isolation from the cellular cluster they first arose in, the isolated blastomeres develop into partial-structures from partial-mass (e.g., the comb jellies or ctenophores in Fischel’s experiments). In sea urchins, however, the earliest experimenters encountered the initially baffling result: structured wholes [Ganzgebilde] obtained from isolated blastomeres, i.e., from partial-masses. Lacking requisite insight into the relevant context, these experimenters soon began to employ terms like non-spatio-temporal factors, elementary “soul,” the category of individuality—assumptions and representations whose socio-historical presuppositions have already been indicated in the above introduction. The careful reexamination of their experiments does not, in fact, result in similar constructions, but instead the derivation of much simpler lawful regularities from the facts.
Things stand as follows: the cleavage-modi of spherical eggs, whose blastomeres retain the egg-constitution and, after their isolation from the spherical-sector-form (half-, quarter-, and eighth-spherical contents), round into spheres once more—all of this enables the decomposition of the egg-whole into smaller eggs of typical constitution. The products of their cleavage are whole structures of partial-mass. In the case of the Asterias glacialis starfish (Fig. 3), I have produced detailed reports and drawn conclusions from them.
Regeneration, understood as the regeneration of lost parts, has given rise to the erroneous conception that what is regenerated is “in each case precisely that which was missing.” This then becomes a question of maintaining the whole over and against external disturbances. Standard natural-scientific procedure does not seek the cause of present events in what is absent; a glance at the facts is enough to reveal their true face. As a rule, it is not that something missing is mysteriously regenerated, not even for supposedly exceptional species; rather, in the progression of organic formation, new formations arise in accordance with what is present.
Every excision of a part in the course of ongoing development creates a discongruence in the correlations of the remaining parts and, thus, an atypical end-structure. Absence of formation, scarring, budding, regenerative new formation, reconfiguration following removal—all of these are atypical phenomena; these are not, however, final approximates, but rather vary according to the specific cause of the wound and the tissue that remains.
Finally, transplantation offers still another way by which one can go beyond the individual, who is by no means formally self-enclosed or complete. In the axolotl, astonishing multi-faceted structures have been created and cultivated over the course of many years through the grafting of body parts onto animals of the same or slightly older age as the donor, and through the creation of vascular- and tissue-connection between two nearly intact specimens. All manner of transitions have been demonstrated: from the grafting of surplus organ-parts to the insertion of foreign body-sections, and even the duplication of structures, in a manner reminiscent of conjoined twins, to the effect of creating a shared circulatory system that flows through a single heart (Figs. 5 and 6). Not infrequently, processes have arisen in which the correlations of tissue-complexes appear to break down, resulting in extensive tumor-growth.
The stream of life pulses in organic forms, flowing not through a mesh of more or less distinct tubes, but in a broad and wide-branching riverbed, whose branches separate and rejoin one another, now and then branching off in new directions and perhaps even drying up. The individual is only a state, often just an arbitrarily circumscribed cutout, of the formative process.
d) The Social Dissolution
The metabolism of life is a sub-process of the metabolism of the Earth. Under the influence of solar energy, autotrophic green plants form organic mass out of simple compounds, which are diluted in water and dispersed in air. Microbes break down the organic matter to the point of complete disintegration. Together, autotrophy and heterotrophy constitute an internal bond between all living beings. Alongside phylogeny and kinship, life-preserving relations find expression in the relativity of bionts.
The Lebensraum (“living space”) of the Earth, wherein the conditions for life (nourishment, water, salts, warmth, space)
The interlocking of the Lebensräume, the relational complex of the preservation of life, has led to the concept of biocoenoses, which, however, become living communities in the true sense of the word only through the progress of repeated success in phylogenetic history.
The interactive relationships between bionts are of two kinds. Either: coexistence is limited to the simultaneous exploitation of the chances for survival in a given locality. This ends in the competition between competitors, through which their strength is tested. Or: relations of one-sided or reciprocal dependency form. The shared way of life brings with it a more or less internal bond between cooperants. A community of the living in the true sense of the word emerges.
With his notion of the “struggle for life,” Darwin emphasized competition, the struggle for existence by all against all. This resonated with the prevailing mode of thinking in his society, its markedly individualistic features. Since then, as a consequence of the further development of human society, the significance of cooperation has received increased recognition. The struggle between competitors of the same kind for space, nourishment, and light is won by the stronger displacing, overgrowing, or crushing the weaker. This competition intensifies as it progresses. The natural filtration process of a forest shows, for example, that only one in 2,000 ten-year-old beech trees succeeds in fully developing into a hundred-year-old specimen. The competition between species is all the more violent the more their life-requirements and patterns of seasonal development coincide. The more diverse the inhabitants of a locality, the greater the sum of life that can be realized in the same spatial coordinates. The task of ecology is to empirically determine the comparative competitiveness of the species that populate it. Every none-too-minor slice of nature furnishes further examples: forest, meadow, oyster bed, coral reef, etc.
In each, the bonds of interdependent cooperation have overcome competition within their own sphere. Together, they enter into the struggle for existence as closed formations. One-sided relations of dependency are characteristic of parasites, which extract the raw living substance or draw ready-made flows of nutrients from their hosts. They have all manner of transitional forms, from those which suck their nutrients from the host to those for which the innards of the host serve as a Lebensraum all its own. In the reciprocal relations of dependency in symbiosis, the Lebensräume of the partners interpenetrate, as they reciprocally secure their chances for survival. The competitiveness obtained through this reciprocity is demonstrated by the example of lichens—the nutritive cooperative of autotrophic algae and heterotrophic fungi. Lichens are true cosmopolitans, spreading from sea coasts to high mountains.
The one-sided-parasitic and reciprocal-symbiont relations, even when they occur on a massive scale, have no true, or only the very beginnings of, social value. It is only the preservation of the members by the whole, the integration of interdependent and interreliant comrades, that guarantees mutual support, the social division of labor, and community. Whenever the masses form such a community, a new form of life emerges. Quantity has transformed into quality. In social progression, individuals are sublated into the collective. In natural history, this path has walked many times and to varying degrees. We will address this elsewhere in greater depth and detail.
The swarms and the herds of so many vertebrates, particularly fish, birds, and mammals, are assemblages of common activity of shorter or longer duration for specific periods of life, extending all the way to lifelong herd-formation. Beyond the naturally-occurring division of labor between the sexes, the organization of the social structure evolves in a domain in which humans, though still far from perfect, are already master. Among invertebrates, a number of sessile, aquatic creatures that reproduce asexually (through fission or budding) form nutritive cooperatives. Sponges, colonies of polyps, and corals display interwoven tissues and communication between gastric cavities, such that the actions of the parts affect the whole. Homomorphic colonies are the foundation on which hetero- and poly-morphic forms of society develop. In the polymorphic colonies of the siphonophores, there are no independently viable bionts to be found, because the division of labor has created a deep-rooted relation of dependency between all members of the colony alike. Even among socialized insects such as bumblebees, wasps, bees, ants, termites, bionts lose the capacity for independent survival. Procreation, brood-care, and nutrition—in short, all of the functions of reproduction—are socialized through the division of labor. Phylogenetically, ecologically, and physiologically—here, we see the dialectical intensification of mass-association and, along with it, social progression.
The earliest signs of human society are found in the horde of early humans, and they, in turn, brought this kind of association along with them from out of their animality. An animal as defenceless as the developing human being could only survive in isolation or small numbers on occasion. In order to complete the process of becoming-human, it was vital that the meager defensive capabilities of the individual were replaced by the unified strength and cooperation of the horde. Men and women of all stages of life (the elderly, adults, children) are unified in this horde and act together for the preservation of the whole. They use only naturally-occurring food sources (wild-growing plants, edible animals) and provision only for their more immediate needs. The conditions of life are the same for all members of the horde alike, which has yet to undergo any real differentiation. The subsequent social-historical structure does not lead to polymorphic reproductive communities as in the case of insects; rather, the performance of labor becomes the fundamental condition of human life. It is with labor that humanity’s domination over nature begins. Through it, humans are separated from animals and set on the path towards economy. The community of equals is pierced through by a streak of inequality, one which will leave its mark on the structure of human social development from that point on. Agriculture, animal husbandry, handicrafts, industry, and trade are all activities and achievements of a class-stratified society, as the greater part of human beings have no ownership over the means of production, which have since become the property of the rulers. Class society, constantly racked and rattled by struggles, wars, and crises, points beyond itself, towards the community of humanity [Menschheitsgemeinschaft]. In the producing collective, individuality is socially sublated.
The present-day content of the Earth’s biosphere is a historical product, and the preservation of this content binds its participants to one another. The degree of consolidation is variable. Socialization [Vergesellschaftung] always proves itself superior to isolation [Vereinzelung]. The most advanced reproductive communities of insects possess a phenomenal capacity for propagation. Human society, with its division of labor in production, proves itself incomparably more powerful, ready for further advances, and heightened organization. Already, it stands at a turning-point where the individual is no longer its goal and concept; rather, the community of the masses relegates all such boundaries into the past.
3. Individuality and Dialectic
In 1885, Friedrich Engels wrote:
It is however precisely the polar antagonisms put forward as irreconcilable and insoluble, the forcibly fixed lines of demarcation and class distinctions, which have given modern theoretical natural science its restricted, metaphysical character. The recognition that these antagonisms and distinctions, though to be found in nature, are only of relative validity, and that on the other hand their imagined rigidity and absolute validity have been introduced into nature only by our reflective minds—this recognition is the kernel of the dialectical conception of nature. It is possible to arrive at this recognition because the accumulating facts of natural science compel us to do so; but one arrives at it more easily if one approaches the dialectical character of these facts equipped with an understanding of the laws of dialectical thought. In any case natural science has now advanced so far that it can no longer escape dialectical generalisation.
Engels, *Anti-Dühring*, trans. Burns, 14.
When he wrote this forty-five years ago, Engels was under the influence of thermodynamics and organic evolutionary history. Today, the accumulation of facts in all fields of natural science compels us to adopt a dialectical conception of nature. Because researchers and thinkers, given their social being, by no means necessarily confront the facts with consciousness of dialectical laws, heterogeneous eclecticism takes the place of general agreement, a chaos in which neither empiricists nor metaphysicians, but only dialecticians, can find their way. Only those who can recognize the ripeness of the fruit before them will reap the riches of harvest.
Dialectical biology strips away all rigidified concepts, above all the concept at the center of any metaphysical biology—that of individuality. The constant species has condemned mechanics to inactivity in the face of the living. Idealistic morphology exhausted itself in the transcendent Bauplan (blueprint, or structural plan).
The natural individual has been dissolved: historically, genetically, formally, and, for the most natural-historically advanced species, even socially. Composed of its parts, the natural individual is itself only part of a larger context. We encounter it only as relative, never absolute.
In every respect, the individual is a transient state of the life-process, no more mysterious than nature as such, which we understand because we ourselves are part of it. Dialectical thinking only reflects the objective dialectic of nature.
Bibliography
Bauer, Erwin. Einführung in die experimentelle Vererbungslehre. 3rd and 4th ed. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1919.
Bluwstein, Jevgeniy, Connor Cavanagh, and Robert Fletcher. “Securing Conservation Lebensraum? The Geo-, Bio-, and Ontopolitics of Global Conservation Futures.” Geoforum 153 (2024): 103752. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103752.
Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring. Translated by Emile Burns. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010.
Engels, Friedrich. Dialectics of Nature. Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25. Lawrence & Wishart, 2010. E-book.
Engels, Friedrich, to Karl Marx. May 30, 1873. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, translated by I. Lasker, edited by S. Ryazanskaya, 281. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. https://archive.org/details/selectedcorrespondencemarxengels.
Goldschmidt, Richard. Mechanismus und Physiologie der Geschlechtsbestimmung. Berlin: Verlag von Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1920.
Goldschmidt, Richard. Physiologische Theorie der Vererbung. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1927.
Haeckel, Ernst. “Über die Entwicklungstheorie Darwins.” In Gemeinverständliche Vorträge und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Entwickelungslehre. Bonn: Emil Straus, 1902.
Jax, Kurt. “‘Organismic’ Positions in Early German-Speaking Ecology and Its (Almost) Forgotten Dissidents.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42, no. 4 (2020): 44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00328-9.
Porges, Karl, Ian G. Stewart, Uwe Hoßfeld, and Georgy S. Levit. “From Idea to Law: Theory, Concept, and Terminology in Ernst Haeckel’s Works.” Russian Journal of Developmental Biology 50, no. 6 (2019): 290–302. https://www.biodidaktik.uni-jena.de/iefbdmedia/3124/2020-rjdb-from-idea-to-law.pdf.
Ratzel, Friedrich. “Lebensraum: A Biogeographical Study” [1901]. Translated by Tul’si (Tuesday) Bhambry. Journal of Historical Geography 61 (2018): 59–80.
Schaxel, Julius. “Das biologische Individuum.” Erkenntnis 1 (1930/1931): 467–92.
———. Das Leben auf der Erde. Jena: Urania-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1928.
———. Die Leistungen der Zellen bei der Entwicklung der Metazoen. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1915.
———. Grundzüge der Theorienbildung in der Biologie. 2nd ed. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922.
———. “Regenerations- und Transplantationsstudien, I: Zum Determinationsproblem.” Zoologischer Anzeiger 78 (1928): 153–57.
———. “Über die Natur der Formvorgänge in der tierischen Entwicklung.” Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen 50 (1922): 523–24.
———. Vergesellschaftung in der Natur. Jena: Urania-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1931.
Zammito, John H. The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Enjoy Reading This Article?
Here are some more articles you might like to read next: