Part I - Beginning with Evolution

Summary

When the French philosopher Jean Wahl wrote a piece on Gertrude Stein for the New Republic in 1945, he concluded his article by calling her “a Heraclitan in the nineteenth century.” To picture Stein as a pre-Socratic in the nineteenth century, at the end of her career, is a bit of an unfair move. Like most modernists, Stein had spent her life trying to break with the nineteenth century, pronouncing it “dead dead dead” in her memoir Wars I Have Seen. Whenever she explained her poetics, she highlighted that it was to be considered a twentieth-century project, that her “idea of a whole thing” corresponded to “the Twentieth Century conception of a whole.” Yet Wahl has a point. The key problem that Stein explored in her writing is one that we tend to trace back to Heraclitus and that, because of ground-breaking work across intellectual domains and epitomized by Darwin, became a key issue in the nineteenth century: panta rhei, or everything moves.

Evolution is, by Stein's own account, where she “began.” The following chapters argue that Stein's response to the evolutionary framework and the paradigm of neo-Darwinism that dominated late nineteenth-century science intersects with the tradition of the life philosophy that peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critical of the nineteenth century's mechanist scientific climate, life philosophers, in different ways, tried to think about life in a way that went beyond typologies of different species. Philosophically, they reacted against the tradition of idealism. In both a scientific and an idealist framework, they objected, life was severed from lived experience. Taking from the sciences a concern for the empirical and from idealism an interest in structures surpassing the individual mind, they tried in different ways to conceptualize life as a collective experience. William James, for example, suggested the concept of pure experience, Wilhelm Dilthey proposed the idea of an objective mind, and Henri Bergson coined several concepts that gesture towards a dynamic, felt life unity, going from élan vital to the notion of the virtual as real yet not actual substratum. In spotlighting the lived experience of the thinker, life philosophers also objected to the methods of the natural sciences and the pristine schemes of idealist philosophy, which eclipsed experience and left little room for the context in which the research was taking place.