Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ

Leif Weatherby is Assistant Professor of German at New York University.

"This is an ambitious, disciplined study that reveals new aspects of Romanticism: it is an invaluable reference for anyone interested in German Romanticism." -- John D. Caputo -Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "In Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ, Leif Weatherby gives us a fundamentally new view on Romanticism and its contribution to German Idealism. In Holderlin, Schelling, and Novalis, Weatherby unearths a surprisingly coherent discussion of the 'organ.' We see the Romantic philosophers and poets intervene in the age old Western debate on techne, physis and metaphysics, with the emphasis, however, on techne's interventions in it. A discourse emerges which neither subordinates techne to nature in the Aristotelian tradition nor hypostatizes technology in a Heideggerian reversal of the order of things. Rather, Romantic 'organology' is shown to introduce historicity and contingency into the heart of metaphysics. This is a discovery in the history of ideas, and it opens new ways of thinking technology today." -- -Rudiger Campe Yale University "Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is a truly impressive work of scholarship. The author has a breathtaking command of the German philosophical tradition, including major figures, such as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, as well as those who are less well-known outside the field of German studies. He has taken a single, somewhat innocuous concept-the 'organ'-and revealed it to be at the crux of a rapidly changing philosophical landscape whose terrain encompasses metaphysics, subject philosophy, the history of science, literature, and aesthetics. Accordingly, it should be of interest to anyone working in these fields." -- -Jocelyn Holland University of California, Santa Barbara

• 1. Introduction: Romantic Organology: Terminology and Metaphysics Part I: Towards Organology 2. Metaphysical Organs and the Emergence of Life: From Leibniz to Blumenbach 3. The Epigenesis of Reason: Force and Organ in Kant and Herder 4. The Organ of the Soul: Vitalist Metaphysics and the Literalization of the Organ Part II: Romantic Organology Romantic Organology: Towards a Technological Metaphysics of Judgment 5. The Tragic Task: Dialectical Organs and the Metaphysics of Judgment (Holderlin) 6. Electric and Ideal Organs: Schelling and the Program of Organology 7. Universal Organs: Novalis's Romantic Organology 8. Between Myth and Science: Naturphilosophie and the Ends of Organology Part III: After Organology 9. Technologies of Nature: Goethe's Hegelian Transformations 10. Instead of an Epilogue: Communist Organs, or Technology and Organology Acknowledgments Notes Index