Crisis and Hegemony

Abstract

From about the middle of the eighteenth century, especially in Francophone Europe, the three cardinal points of the traditional Aristotelian framework were repeatedly subjected to discussion, particularly in the fields of philosophy and medicine. Despite pursuing often heterogeneous general theoretical ends, authors such as Maupertuis, de Maillet and La Mettrie revisited the ancient ‘materialistic’ and ‘mechanistic’ tradition represented by authors such as Empedocles, Democritus and Lucretius, repeatedly attacking the fixist thesis, the correlated essentialist anti-random concept, and the basic teleological assumptions upon which the classic static and harmonious equilibrium between inextinguishable species rested. In his System of Nature (1751), for example, while combining multiple perspectives and requirements (from a rejection of Cartesianism to a defence of epigenism, and so on), Maupertuis mounted an attack on traditional fixism, and made decisive use of randomness, as is evident in paragraphs XLIV and XLV, in which he discusses the formation of species:

XLIV. It is possible, on the contrary, that there may be structures so resistant that they prevail from the first generation over all the preceding structures, and eliminate their previous habits.

XLV. How is it possible to explain that from only two individuals the multiplication of many diverse species was derived? Their origin could be attributed to certain fortuitous developments, among them that the elementary parts did not preserve the order of their animal father and mother: every degree of error will have given life to a new species and because of repeated deviations the infinite diversity of the animals that we see today will have been determined. This diversity is perhaps destined to increase over time, even if in the course of centuries imperceptible increments may occur.¹