THE AGE OF WONDER
I suppose it was the dead frog and the reminder of Luigi Galvani that prompted me to revisit my research from a few years ago about science and philosophy around the time of the Enlightenment and the writing of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Experiments with corpses, both animal and human, and the development of the knowledge of anatomy and electricity were prompting theories of a “Life Force” and raising questions about what distinguished dead from living, and vegetable from animal.
Friedrich Schelling’s theory of Naturophilosophie speculated that “all physical objects “aspired” to become something higher.”… “All nature had a tendency to move towards a higher state. So carbon for example “aspired” to become diamond; plants aspired to become animals; animals aspired to become men…”*
John Thelwall’s theory of “Animal Vitality” proposed that “no spark of life was divinely conferred, and that no soul was implanted by some external source but that neither could a “life principle be simply explained by blood passing through the lungs”.
It was in Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein that questions were clearly articulated about what it was that would make a creature “human”: “would it have language, would it have a moral conscience, would it have human feelings and sympathies, would it have a soul?”**
So I suppose, the questions beginning to form in my mind are not so far removed from those of 300 years ago but must be applied to a modern-day context where scientists can now create life. What must we think of this new life? How can we categorise it? What respect must it be given? What status should it have? When does it begin to have a soul?
Perhaps a most pertinent question for me, what sort of work can I make that will help me think about these questions?
*Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder.
