Reclaiming the History of the Epigenesis of Scientific Knowledge: From Aristotle’s Theory to Kant’s Abstract Epigenesis of Pure Reason and Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology

Scholarly debate persists over whether Aristotle explicitly used the term epigenesis (ἐπιγένεσις). What is beyond doubt, however, is that he originated the concept itself, already implicit in his distinction between potency (dynamis, δύναμις) and act (energeia, ἐνέργεια). Aristotle conceives the generation of an organism as a staged process emerging from an embryo that contains the possibilities of a future being, but not a preformed one. This generation from something that already exists is epigenesis: “upon” (epi) what is given, a new form arises. The concept became increasingly important in the history of thought, especially after the English biologist Conrad Hal Waddington coined the term epigenetics, now a discipline of immense scientific relevance. In this article, we emphasize the fact that Immanuel Kant, in a brief but remarkable moment of his work, took Aristotle’s notion of epigenesis and transformed it into an abstract model for the generation of knowledge, one capable of reconciling the opposed presuppositions of Rationalism and Empiricism in the history of ideas. As he writes in the Critique of Pure Reason: There are only two ways in which a necessary agreement between experience and the concepts of its objects can be conceived: either experience makes these concepts possible, or these concepts make experience possible. The former cannot apply to the categories; consequently, only the latter remains (which presents us with a system, as it were, of the epigenesis of pure reason. This expression has received remarkably little attention in the nearly 400 years since its appearance and, when discussed, is usually interpreted as a mere analogy to organic epigenesis, a biological concept formally established only in the seventeenth century by William Harvey. Against that prevailing tendency, we do not interpret Kant’s phrase assertion as an allusion to the biological development of the human organism, as he himself does in the Critique of Judgment (§81), in discussing Blumenbach. Rather, we understand the “epigenesis of Pure Reason” as a genuine epigenesis: singular, abstract. Kant does not describe the process in detail; he merely indicates it for posterity. This abstract epigenesis cannot imply physical development or transformation. Rather, it signifies an expansion in the field of application of the a priori structures of Reason. For Kant, what is given a priori to human nature, namely the categories and forms of judgment, does not change, evolve, or alter. Here, the prefix epi should be understood in its etymological sense: that which grows out of an immutable origin. The set of possibilities for predication and for the construction of judgments, always identical and always given a priori in Pure Reason, never modifies; it only expands its domain insofar as the Verstand (german word that does not equates to English “Understanding”) deepens its structuring engagement with the world of phenomena. What is given a priori to the human being encounters in experience, in the world of phenomena, that which can be assimilated in light of its own a priori possibilities. Much later, Niels Bohr would demonstrate that Pure Reason can construct models of physical reality even in the absence of phenomena accessible to immediate observation, thereby extending Kant’s concept of the a priori at its core. The great physicist preserves, above all, Kant’s interpretation of the construction of knowledge as a “Copernican inversion”: it is not phenomena that determine the origin of scientific knowledge; rather, our capacity and possibility of knowing determine what we can know—just as it is not the Sun that revolves around the Earth, but the Earth that revolves around the Sun, as Copernicus demonstrated. In this sense, Kant’s theory of scientific knowledge reaches into the realm of quantum physics, a fact acknowledged by distinguished physicists in the twenty-first century. Thus, the dynamis (δύναμις) conceptualized by Aristotle around 400 BCE attains its Energeia (ἐνέργεια) in the twenty-first century, accompanied by his master Plato, who created the concept of dialektikē (διαλεκτική), which explains how a thought can depart from ancient Greece and arrive, unbroken, in our own time. It is in the twentieth century, finally, that Jean Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology emerges: as a theory that shows how the epigenesis of scientific though recapitulates phylogeny, synthesizing Aristotle’s organic epigenesis with Kant’s abstract epigenesis. Keywords: Organic Epigenesis; Epigenesis of Pure Reason; Genetic Epistemology; Theory of Knowledge