2. Dissecting the Subject: Brain Localization in The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

August Klingemann, Nachtwachen von Bonaventura, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012). August Klingemann, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, trans. Gerald Gillespie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Hereafter cited in the text. Friedrich Schlegel defined the novel as the distinctively modern genre that epitomized a “progressive, universal poetry” (progressive Universalpoesie) reuniting all the separate species of poetry. Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel. Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöning, 1958–), Vol. 2: “Charakteristiken und Kritiken I [1796–1801],” 182.

Commentators have established August Klingemann, director of the court theatre in Braunschweig, as the author of the Nightwatches. Jost Schillemeit, “Bonaventura: der Verfasser der ‘Nachtwachen’” Studien zur Goethezeit 2006, 309–437. Ruth Haag, “Noch einmal: Der Verfasser der ‘Nachtwachen von Bonaventura,’” Euphorion 81 (1987): 286–297.

See Oliver Breidbach, “The Origin and Development of the Neurosciences,” 9.

Gall did not publish an authorized version of his findungs until his 1806 Untersuchungen ueber die Anatomie des Nervensystems ueberhaupt, und des Gehirns insbesondere. Ein dem französischen Institut ueberreichtes Mémoire von Gall und Spurzheim; nebst dem Berichte der H. H. Commissaire des Institutes und den Bemerkungen der Verfasser über diesen Bericht (Paris und Strasburg: Treuttel und Würtz, 1809). He subsequently published (albeit in limited circulation) a massive four-volume work in French, entitled Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux (Paris: E. Scholl, 1810–1819). The first two volumes of the work were coauthored by Johann Spurzheim. A subsequent revised version of the same work, which was aimed at a general public, omitted the name of Spurzheim. F. J. Gall, Sur les fonctions du cerveau et sur celles de chacune de ses parties (Paris: Ballière, 1822–1825). Translated as Franz Joseph Gall, On the Functions of the Brain and each of its Parts: with Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head, 6 vols., trans. Winslow Lewis (Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1835). By that time, Spurzheim’s phrenology had superseded Gall’s craniology in general popularity. For a general introduction to Gall’s work, and the legacy of craniology in the Anglo-Saxon world in particular, see John van Wyhe, “The Authority of Human Nature: the Schädellehre of Franz Joseph Gall,” The British Journal for the History of Science 35.1 (2002): 17–42. See also Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), 32–38.

Claus Heeschen goes even further, arguing that localizationism “is as old as Plato who divided the mind into three distinct components and assigned them to three different parts of the body.” Claus Heeschen, “Franz Joseph Gall,” Reader on the History of Aphasia, ed. Paul Eling (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1994), 9.

Furthermore, as Heeschen points out, the French philosopher “anticipated the possible counter-argument that such a huge thing as the human mind should not be located in such a tiny organ as the pineal body and suggested that the mind as a ‘res nonextensa’ is not dependent on the physical dimensions of its seat.” Heeschen, “Franz Josef Gall,” 8.

Heeschen, “Franz Joseph Gall,” 9.

The term sensorium commune derives from Aristotle who in De Anima defines the koinê aesthesis (sensus communis in Latin) as a higher-order perceptual capacity that cooperates with both basic sensory perception and human rational thinking. See Pavel Gregoric, Aristotle on the Common Sense (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See on this also Helmut Müller-Sievers, The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference (Boston: DeGruyter, 2015), 75.

See Breidbach, “The Origin and Development of the Neurosciences,” 10. Also Paolo Pecere, “Kant’s Über das Organ der Seele and the Limits of Physiology: Arguments and Legacy,” Kant’s Shorter Writings: Critical Paths Outside the Critiques, ed. Robert Hanna et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 214–230.

Terence, The Eunuch, II. 61–63. Terence, ed. and trans. John Barsby, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1: 321.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Wissenschaftslehre 11. Vortrag im Jahre 1804, J. G. Fichte Gesamtausgabe der Bayrischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth and H. Gliwitzky (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt: Friedrich Frommann, 1985). Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1970).

“This transcendental unity of apperception forms out of all possible appearances, which can stand alongside one another in one experience, a connection of all these representations according to laws.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Second Edition, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Howard Caygill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 136. [A108]

Ellis Finger, “Bonaventura through Kreuzgang: Nachtwachen as Autobiography,” The German Quarterly 53, 3 (1980), 283.

Gillespie, “Introduction,” xiv.

Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), II. 2: 438–464. Translated as Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Selected Writings: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 143–166.

Franz Josef Gall, “Das Programm,” Der Neue Teutsche Merkur 3 (1798): 311–382. Reprinted in Franz Joseph Gall. Naturforscher und Anthropologe, trans. and ed. Erna Lesky (Bern: Huber, 1979). Note that Gall’s letter was first presented to the public in a literary journal, the December 1798 edition of Der Neue Teutsche Merkur. This may explain why the journal’s editor, Christoph Martin Wieland, found it necessary to include a note in which he assured his readers that they would find Gall’s system of importance and that its author was a uniquely qualified authority. See Christoph Martin Wieland, “Des Herrn D. F. J. Schreiben über seinen bereits geendigten Prodromus über die Verichtungen des Gehirns des Menschen und der Thiere an Herrn Jos. Fr. Von Retzer” (Ibid.).

After enjoying a wave of initial popularity, Gall was dismissed as fraudulent by some. His ideas nevertheless spread throughout and beyond Europe in the 1820s and 1830s.

Franz Joseph Gall, On the Functions of the Brain and of Each of its Parts, Vol. 1: “On the Origin of the Moral Qualities and Intellectual Faculties of Man, and the Conditions of their Manifestation,” 14. Hereafter cited in the text. It is important to note that Gall objected to the notion of craniology: “The object of my researches is the brain. The cranium is only a faithful cast of the external surface of the brain, and is consequently but a minor part of its principal object. The title then is as inapplicable as would be that of maker of rhymes of a poet.” (18) See Andrew P. Wickens, A History of the Brain: From Stone Age Surgery to Modern Neuroscience (London: Psychology Press, 2015), 135.

For a close analysis of the patterns of commedia elements within the Nightwatches, see Gerald Gillespie, “Kreuzgang in the Role of Crispin: Commedia dell’arte Transformations in Die Nachtwachen,” in Herkommen und Erneuerung: Essays für Oskar Seidlin, 1911–1984, ed. Edgar Lohner (Tübingen: Niemeyer; 1976), 185–200. On the influence of the theatrical tradition of commedia dell’arte in an eighteenth-century German cultural context, see Jocelyn Holland, “The School of Shipwrecks: Improvisation in Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung and the Lehrjahre,” Goethe Yearbook 15 (2008): 19–33.

Franz Josef Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Anatomie et Physiologie du Systême nerveaux et général, et du Cerveau en particulier, avec des Observations sur la Possibilité de reconnoitre plusieurs Dispositions intellectuelles et morales de l’Homme et des Animaux, par la Configuration de leur Têtes (Paris: F. Schoell, 1812), Vol. 2: 254. English translation cited after Tadeusz Zawidski and William Bechtel, “Gall’s Legacy Revisited: Decomposition and Localization in Cognitive Neuroscience,” The Mind as a Scientific Object: Between Brain and Culture, 296.

Heeschen, “Franz Josef Gall,” 12.

Connectionism views thinking as an activity within a massive interactive network that involves multiple neural connections between parallel nodes taking place simultaneously.