1 - Life’s Story

Summary

When Stein looks back on her nineteenth-century background in her memoirs she repeatedly points to the importance of Darwin and the evolutionary paradigm. When she began “knowing everything,” she reflects in Everybody's Autobiography, Darwin's influence was pervasive. In Wars I Have Seen, she confides that the natural scientists Huxley, Agassiz and Darwin “made the difference of before and after.” In attributing to Darwin a key role in the marking of a new era, Stein echoes many of her contemporaries. John Dewey, for example, held Darwin responsible for the “intellectual revolt” and “new intellectual temper” of the second half of the nineteenth century in the title essay of The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910). Darwin, Dewey claimed, had brought change to the “conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, [and that] rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final.” Dewey's point is something we do not often think through today. The framework we tend to credit for pulling the rug from under our feet and installing difference where before we had truths and certainties is post-structuralism. Yet it is Darwin, Elizabeth Grosz has shown, who “uncannily anticipates Derridean différance” when he inquired into the origin of species.

Darwin famously never really answered the question of the origin of species. Yet his broaching the issue, Grosz points out, opened up fundamental questions about the object of scientific inquiry. With Darwin, the scientific object of study, life, became an epistemological and methodological problem. What is its unit? How to integrate the study of the individual, the group and the species and a concern for life in its totality? In providing the prompt for such questions, Darwin compromised his own plan to transpose the largely Newtonian framework from physics into the field of natural history. Darwin's methodological legacy is not so much a system of laws as the insight that precise prediction or calculation is impossible, that we have to work with tendencies and broad principles rather than universal laws. For Grosz, Darwin “introduced a new understanding of what science must be to be adequate to the reality of life itself, which has no real units, no agreed upon boundaries or clear-cut objects, and to the reality of time and change that it entails.