Lorenz Oken - Een tijdsbeeld

Abstract

SUMMARY: An attempt has been made to analyze Oken’s contributions to biology in the light of his own time, and against the background of the specific character of social and scientific development of Germany since the Middle Ages. As to the opinion of the present author, this situation puts its stamp on the development of German biology in its totality, up to recent times. It has been elucidated how Oken’s nationalism lead him to two very important initiatives, viz., the publication of the famous journal « Isis », and the foundation of the « Jahresversammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte ». Oken tried to construct one objective natural system embracing all the fast growing number of facts. This system, in which the deductive method was predominant, was to a large extent based on intuition, and it was closed in itself. These factors gave it a too definite character, and too little room remained to include new features. We therefore characterized his system as the terminating point of a development, evoking ,a reaction which came, indeed, from the side of Oken’s most famous pupils. Oken was one of the first biologists who had a sense for history, and had an idea that the world was liable to changes. Oken stated that these changes should not be due to an outer force, but they should be caused by a mechanism inherent to the things themselves. In doing so, he was opposed both to vitalism and to the static world view, two points of view which dominated scientific reasoning in those days. Therefore, much attention was paid to Oken’s meaning about the rôle played by history on the formation of organisms, whereby particularly the (time-bound) limitations wore stressed. Thus, Oken did not start his system with the lowest and most primitive organisms, just as phylogenetic systems do, but, on the contrary, Oken started his deductions with the most complicated organism, i.c. Man, and accordingly he states that the animal world should show Man disintegrated into his parts. In this connection, Oken arrived at an idealistic formulation of that law which was called the law of biogenesis by Haeckel. Related problems wore discussed, such as the relative autonomy of the separate parts within an organism, and to which extent Okens train of thoughts was linked up with one of the famous principles of that time, viz., that of the Great Chain of Beings. Much attention was paid to the way in which Oken looked for parallelisms between as many natural phenomena as possible : within any plant or animal individually, but also within groups of plants and/or animals; the plant- (or animal) system in its turn should correspond with the inorganic elements (water, air, fire and earth), but also a correlation should exist with psychical phenomena or even with colours, and, at last, all earthly phenomena should be parallelized by cosmic phenomena. This analogizing was used even as a scientific method which should lead to further knowledge. In evaluating Oken’s work it appeared necessary to stress that Oken has to be considered within the framework of his own time, and should not be measured by contemporary criteria.