Generating modernity

Procreation, Aristotle said, is like building a house. The carpenter’s role in house-building helps us understand “how the male makes its contribution to generation.” The semen males emit in sexual generation “is not part of the fetation as it develops,” just as a carpenter does not mix anything of himself with the timber when he builds a house.” Form passes from the carpenter to the material, a form that is located in the carpenter’s soul. Just so, “Nature acting in the male of semen-emitting animals uses the semen as a tool” ( On the Generation of Animals ).

As Wolfram Schmidgen ( Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England , 126) explains, “the semen is not actually mixed up with the female parts, and male form acts without interference by the female.”

One is amazed to realize how durable Aristotle’s theory was.

Still in the mid-seventeenth century no less a luminary of modern science than William Harvey claimed that “The Species or Forme of the Chicken is in the Uterus, or Egge, without any matter at all: as the reason of the Work is in the Artificer and the Reason of the House, in the Brain of the Builder” (quoted by Schmidgen, 128).

The dismantling of this theory of generation was an important aspect of the early modern dismantling of Aristotle (and, with Aristotle, of fixed notions of substance, hierarchical political systems, etc). Filmer’s theory of patriarchy rested initially on an Aristotelian account of generation: Children were conceived in an already-hierarchical system in which the male is “the Nobler and Principal Agent in Generation.” Thus, “there is, and always shall be continued to the end of the world, a natural right of a supreme father over every multitude” (quoted by Schmidgen, 108).

Responding to Filmer, Locke understood that the response had to be not only political but biopolitical: The mother, he insisted “cannot be denied an equal share in begetting of the Child, and so the Absolute Authority of the Father will not arise from hence.” For Locke, children were generated by a “mixture of Male and Female” (quoted by Schmidgen, 109).

Maintaining the boundaries between things is an important rule of thumb for Aristotle. Growth and change happen because of the inbuilt power of form. Generation is a type of change in which “something as a whole changes from ‘this’ to ‘that,’” but such change involves the “patient” (passive principle) changing into the “agent” (active principle) – the timber changes into the form of a house, the active principle which initially exists only in the soul of the carpenter.

This substantial form of change, though, does not involve mixtures; boundaries remained in place, or could be restored. Mixed things retain the properties of each ingredient, potentially at least. Aristotle understood that mixtures of various kinds existed, but as Schmidgen explains, “while a different body may be produced by a perfect mixture, such a body can never claim a clear identity. Its ingredients glance backward, to their existence before mixture, and can always be reduced to their original state. Such a body is excluded from the noble striving for perfection that Aristotle reserved for all truly generated bodies . . . . Nothing is generated by mixture. The superiority of form, which generates by bringing spiritual action to bear on passive, inchoate matter, is secured” (28). Aristotle clearly expressed the ontological ambiguity of mixed substances: “It is possible for things which combine in a mixture to ‘be’ in one sense and ‘not-be’ in another.” (Not all Aristotelians followed this line; Averroes argued that “elemental mixture could be generative and thus constitutive of form” [28-9]).

Why did Aristotle’s theory of generation have such staying power? I suspect the politics drive the biology: Generation takes place without any breach in the boundary between male and female, without any equalization or interdependence of male and female. Generation confirms the sexual hierarchy. But I suspect that behind this is something closer to a religious impulse: Generation takes place without any mixing of the immaterial principle of “form” with the matter that receives the form. The bright line between intellectual and sensible remains undisturbed. And it’s hard not to hear an echo of archaic boundaries of sacred (spiritual) and profane (material), and to suspect that Aristotle’s theory of generation reflects a principle of graded holiness, albeit in a biological idiom.