In the current issue of HHS, Isabel Gabel, from the University of Chicago, analyses the links between evolutionary thought and the philosophy of history in France – showing how, in the work of Raymond Aron in particular, a moment of epistemic crisis in evolutionary theory was crucial to the formation of his thought. Here, Isabel speaks to Chris Renwick about these unexpected links between evolutionary biology and he philosophy of history. The full article is available here.
Chris Renwick (CR):Isabel,we should start with an obvious question: Raymond Aron, the main focus for your article, is a thinker most readers of History of the Human Sciences will be familiar with. But few – and I count myself among them – will have put Aron in the context you have done. What led you to connect Aron and evolutionary biology together?
Isabel Gabel (IG): Yes, this was a real revelation for me too. I knew Aron as a sociologist, public intellectual, and Cold War liberal, but had never seen his early interest in biology mentioned anywhere. It was actually in the archives of Georges Canguilhem, at the CAPHÉS in Paris, that I stumbled upon a reference to Aron and Mendelian genetics. In 1988 there was a colloquium organized in Aron’s honor, and Canguilhem’s remarks on Aron’s earliest years, and the problem of the philosophy of history in the 1930s, had been collected and published along with several others in a small volume. At the time, Canguilhem felt that not enough importance had been given to the fact that his late friend had abandoned a research project on Mendelian biology, as he put it. This totally surprised and, needless to say, delighted me. I quickly found a copy of Introduction to the Philosophy of History, and began reading.
As someone who works in both history of science and intellectual history, I frame my research questions to address both fields. Aron’s development as a thinker is really a perfect illustration of how these two fields converge, because his encounter with biology can be so precisely localized in time and space. It wasn’t just that he made the obvious connection between theories of evolution and philosophical approaches to history. Rather, it was the very specific moment in which he happened to encounter evolutionary theory, and that this happened in a very French context, which so profoundly shaped his thought.
CR: An important part of your article involves outlining the context of French debates about evolution, which provides the backdrop for Aron’s early intellectual development. As a historian of evolutionary thought myself, I found this part fascinating and something I had only really encountered periodically in my research – Naomi Beck’s work on Herbert Spencer’s reception in France is one example of where I have read about these kinds of issues before. The French context seems strikingly different from the Anglophone one. What do you think the Francophone context brings to our discussions of both the history of evolutionary thought and the human science that’s related to it?
IG: The French context is absolutely central to this story. Everything from the specifics of the French education system, to the cultural politics of Darwinism in France, to the state of the French left in the twenties and thirties played a role in how and why Aron brought evolutionary theory and the philosophy of history together. First, because debates about evolutionary mechanisms were, if not insulated from Anglophone science, at least somewhat resistant to the incursion of external concepts, the epistemic crisis of neo-Lamarckism could only have happened in France. Also, while it’s important to note that Aron’s self-understanding was very post-Henri Bergson, there is no denying Bergson’s influence on early-twentieth-century French biology. All of which is to say that mid-century France is a fascinating case for understanding the feedback loop between biology and philosophy.
Moreover, it’s the very specificity of the French case that makes it so useful for thinking through methodological questions such as the one you raise about the shared history of evolutionary thought and the human sciences. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in bringing science and humanities/social science into dialogue with one another, an impulse that historians of science should of course welcome. Part of what the story of Aron and the philosophy of history in mid-century France can teach us is how contingent these influences can be. In other words, as evolutionary theory evolves over time, so too do the ways we interpret its meaning for the human past. In France in the twenties and thirties, it was the limits of science that were most instructive to Aron. French biologists couldn’t quite bridge between observations and experiments in the present, and the theory of evolution they believed explained past events. Objectivity became, for Aron, partly about acknowledging the limits of both positivism and philosophical idealism, i.e. a way of negotiating the relationship between the limits of observation and the limits of theory.
The French context therefore instructs us not to buy in too quickly to the idea that science offers facts and humanities subsequently layer on interpretation. This picture does a disservice to both the science and the humanities. What becomes visible in the case of Aron and French evolutionary theory is that biology and philosophy were encountering parallel epistemic crises, and therefore that neither one could singlehandedly save or authorize the other.
CR: Another issue that I thought was important in connection with Raymond Aron is liberalism. As you explain in your article, most people think of liberalism when they think of Aron. However, we don’t necessarily think of liberalism when we think about evolutionary biology. Liberalism and evolutionary biology have such a fascinating and entangled history. Why do you think we are now so surprised to find people like Aron were so interested in it?
IG: Those who know Aron by reputation as a Cold War liberal may be surprised, because the conversations he helped shape were about ideology and international order. But I don’t know that everyone will be surprised that Aron was so interested in biology, so much as they might be unsettled. We associate any contact between political beliefs and evolutionary theory with deeply illiberal commitments, with racism, eugenics, and just plain old bad history. And while it’s true that we should approach attempts to import scientific data into humanist frameworks with caution, we also shouldn’t grant science more explanatory power than it can hold. In recent history, the liberal position has been a vigorous critique of biological determinism, but as Stephen Jay Gould and others repeatedly teach us, the point is not simply that society or history is autonomous from the biological, but that biology itself is not as determinist or totalizing as we sometimes understand it to be. That’s why reading the work of scientists themselves is so important, because it brings out the provisional, ambiguous, and contentious nature of their endeavors. It shows that they aren’t stripping the world of contingency, but rather prodding at and making visible new contingencies.
CR: The history you uncover in your article is incredibly revealing in what it tells us about the intellectual origins of not just Aron’s thought but the milieu out of which many people like him emerged. Do you think there is anything in that history that is of particular relevance or importance for the present?
IG: Yes, I do think there are really instructive parallels with the present. Aron came of age in a time of enormous political upheaval and two catastrophic world wars. Political and epistemological upheaval go together, and so this generation of French thinkers can speak to our own anxieties about the eclipse of humanities and social sciences by STEM fields. One way to think about this history’s relevance would be to see Aron as a cautionary tale – the science changes quite quickly as the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis takes shape, DNA explodes as a new way to understand life over time, and antihumanism gains cultural strength in France. So it’s not clear that Aron’s study of biology really got him where he wanted to go. But I actually think this picture is a little too cynical, because it ignores what’s so interesting about Aron’s philosophy to begin with. He understood that biology and philosophy were facing some of the same questions, such as how to understand the past from the perspective of the present, and whether laws that explained the present could be known to have operated the same way in the past.
In this way, we ought to pay attention to how STEM fields and the humanities are speaking to some of the same questions. For example there’s been a lot of energy around the concept of the Anthropocene recently, and it’s a perfect opportunity for historians to contribute to a conversation about something that is both a scientific claim—that humans have become a geological agent—and a historical, political, and moral one. We can offer a longer-term understanding of how history and natural history have spoken to one another in the past, how the human has been constructed through philosophy, human sciences, and natural sciences, and how thinking about the end of civilization is saturated with political imagination. Deborah Coen’s work on history of scaling is a great example, as is Nasser Zakariya’s recent book, A Final Story.
CR: I was very interested in what you had to say in your article about bridging the gap between intellectual history and history of science, which is an important issue for an interdisciplinary journal like HHS. The material or practice turn in history of science has been important in creating this division, as you explain in your conclusion. This turn needn’t rule out the human, of course, and it hasn’t, as work on subjects like the body shows. But it’s clear, as you explain, that many historians of science see intellectual history as something that needn’t concern them. Why do you think belief is misplaced and what do you think we would all gain by putting the two together again?
IG: I hope that the story I’ve told in my article illustrates one immediate benefit of overcoming the longstanding division between intellectual history and history of science. Namely, that there is historical work that just hasn’t been done as a result. Aron’s early interest in evolutionary theory, and its effect on his philosophy of history, is not an isolated case. There is enormous potential in fields like the history of knowledge, history of the humanities, as well as in fields like environmental humanities, to bring the tools of intellectual history and history of science to bear on any number of subjects.
But also within intellectual history, the elision of science has meant flawed or at least partial understandings of figures as enormously influential as Aron. At the same time, within the history of science the material turn that you mention led to a kind of reflexive suspicion of philosophy, which John Tresch has written about. Tresch sees the potential of intellectual history in a broader scale for history of science – get beyond the case study. I think this is part of the story, but that on an even more basic level the history of science will be better told if its methodological framework can accommodate the conceptual feedback that exists between science and philosophy, in addition to the feedback between science and society, institutions, and technology. One of the most exciting things about reading the work of French biologists is discovering the degree to which philosophical questions preoccupied them not as extra-scientific or ex post facto interpretations, but as urgent problems to which their research was addressed.
Isabel Gabel is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. Her current book manuscript, Biology and the Historical Imagination: Science and Humanism in Twentieth-Century France, provides a genealogy of the relationship between developments in the fields of evolutionary theory, genetics, and embryology, and the emergence of structuralism and posthumanism in France.
Chris Renwick is Senior Lecturer n Modern History at the University of York, and an editor of History of the Human Sciences. His most recent book is Bread For all (Allen Lane).