Sun, 14 Mar 2010 10:23:59 +0000



4. Leibniz’s preformation theory has at least one feature in common with earlier, non-empirical theories of generation, such as that of Aristotle, that take the father to be the source of the future individual.  As Françoise Heritier has argued from an anthropological point of view, the attribution of primary, active responsibility for generation to the father is a widely recurring view in folk cultures, and indeed has had such a strong hold on the Western imagination as to find itself smuggled into recent scientific accounts of generation with alarming explicitness.  She cites for example the article on ‘Fécondation’ from the Encyclopaedia universalis of 1984: “The distinctive feature of female gametes is a particular metabolic regime.  Once they are differentiated, these cells display an extraordinary inability to develop on their own.  They enter into a state of physiological inertia, so that they are bound to die unless they are activated.  It is in this way that the necessity of fecundation arises: the male gamete fulfills the natural activating function” (Heritier, Masculin/Féminin I: La pensée de la différence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), 204).

5. The correlation between theories of cause and theories of generation remains fresh in Kant’s mind over a century later when writing the Critique of Pure Reason, which perhaps shows how close to the hearts of metaphysicians the science of generation remained even in the later modern period.  In analyzing the relation of the concepts of the understanding to experience, Kant suggests that “[t]here are only two ways in which we can account for a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible.  The former supposition does not hold in respect of the categories (nor of pure sensible intuition); for since they are a priori concepts, and therefore independent of experience, the ascription to them of an empirical origin would be a sort of generatio aequivoca. There remains, therefore only the second supposition –a system, as it were, of the epigenesis of pure reason- namely, that the categories contain, on the side of the understanding, the grounds of the possibility of all experience in general” (See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), § 27).  Here Kant is using the term generatio aequivoca as synonymous with generatio spontanea.  Either, then, experience is generated “spontaneously” by sensation alone, without any genetic material taken from the faculties of intuition or understanding, or it is generated epigenetically through the fertilization by the a priori faculties of intuition and understanding of the sense data.  Kant goes on to consider a third possibility, namely “[t]hat the categories are neither self-thought first principles a priori of our knowledge nor derived from experience, but subjective dispositions of thought, implanted in us from the first moment of our existence, and so ordered by our creator that their employment is in complete harmony with the laws of nature in accordance with which experience proceeds- a kind of preformation system of pure reason” (ibid.). What Kant wishes to claim is that the three basic ways of explaining the way in which mind and world conspire to produce in the mind judgments of experience correspond in an instructive way to the three basic accounts of how organisms are generated.  If we accept that Kant’s analysis of experience may be seen as a continuation of the broader early modern problematic of body-mind causation, it may be shown that Kant's comparison has clear roots in what one hundred and some years before he wrote the first critique could have been a well known connection between the science of generation and the metaphysics of substance and cause.