3
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y : 
r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s 
r e P r e s e N t a t i o N 
i N  t h e  t W e N t i e t h 
C e N t u r y  M u s e u M
D a v i d  K l e i n b e r g - l e v i n *
“Nature is the first, or old, testament, since things are still outside the cen-
ter and therefore under the law. Man is the beginning of the new covenant 
through whom, as mediator, since he himself is connected with God, God ac-
cepts nature [. . .]. Man is thus the redeemer of nature towards whom all its 
archetypes strive. [But] the Word that is fulfilled in man exists in nature as a 
dark, prophetic (still incompletely spoken) Word. [...] [For] Man never gains 
control over the condition [that organizes the world], even though in evil he 
strives to do so. [The words that Man brings to the naming of nature have, 
however, only a weak redemptive potency.] hence the veil of sadness which 
is spread over the whole of nature, the deep, unappeasable melancholy of all 
life.” Friedrich schelling, Treatise of Human Freedom.1
“The life of Man in pure language-mind was blissful. Nature, however, was 
mute. true, it can be clearly felt in the second chapter of Genesis how this 
muteness, named by Man, itself became bliss, only of lower degree. [after he 
has named the animals, adam sees them leap away from him with joy.] But 
after the Fall, when God’s word curses the ground, the appearance of nature 
is deeply changed. Now begins its other muteness, which we mean the deep 
sadness of nature. it is a metaphysical truth that all of nature would begin to 
lament if it were endowed with language. [. . .] This proposition has a double 
meaning. it means, first: she would lament language itself. speechlessness: that 
is the great sorrow of nature (and for the sake of her redemption the life and 
language of Man—not only, as is supposed, of the poet—are in nature). This 
proposition means, secondly: she would lament. lament, however, is the most 
undifferentiated, impotent expression of language; [. . .] and even where there 
* Professor emeritus, Northwestern university
1 schelling, F. W. J. (1936), Treatise on Human Freedom. Chicago: open Court, pp. 92, 79. 
translation modified.
4
P o l i G r a F i
is only a rustling of plants, in it there is always a lament. Because she is mute, 
nature mourns. yet the inversion of this proposition leads even further into the 
essence of nature: the sadness of nature makes her mute.” Walter Benjamin, 
“on language as such and on the language of Man”2
“history is written across the countenance of nature in the sign language 
of transience. [. . .] in nature, the allegorical poets [of the German Baroque] 
saw eternal transience, and here alone the saturnine vision of these generations 
recognized history.” Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama3
“Whereas in the symbol, with the glorification of death and destruction, 
the transfigured face of nature reveals itself fleetingly in the light of redemp-
tion, in allegory, the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of his-
tory, a petrified, primordial landscape.” ibid.4
“[But ‘second nature’, the artificial world of convention taking up what 
‘first’ nature has provided, is also, and in fact even more than ‘first’ nature,] 
a petrified, estranged complex of meaning that is no longer able to awaken 
inwardness; it is a charnel house of rotted interiorities.” Georg lukács, The 
Theory of the Novel5
§1
i would like to offer some modest reflections on the american Mu-
seum of Natural history in New york City, founded in 1869 as an in-
stitution that shows us and tells us not only about ourselves as “ratio-
nal animals” and about our relationship to the natural world, but also, 
through that relationship to nature, something important about our 
moral relationship to one another. This museum has played a signifi-
cant role in my life—especially during the formative years of my child-
2 Benjamin, W. (1986), “on language as such and on the language of Man.” in: Reflections: 
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New york: schocken Books, pp. 328–29.
3 Benjamin, W. (1998), The Origin of German Tragic Drama. london: Verso, New left Books, 
pp. 177, 179. The title in english is egregiously misleading, because the whole point of that work 
is to distinguish between tragedy and Trauerspiel; thus, its claim to originality consists in a re-
fined analysis of the Trauerspiel as a distinct theatrical genre during the German Baroque.
4 ibid., p. 166.
5 lukács, G. (1978), The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: Mit Press, p. 54.
5
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
hood, when i lived near enough to the Museum to visit it almost every 
weekend, passing many exhilarating hours in its awesome halls of ex-
hibition. in the earliest years of my visits, what never ceased to enthrall 
me were the gigantic dinosaur skeletons, mounted in life-like poses, and 
the no less gigantic whale, floating in the air high above me. in some-
what later years, i found enjoyment in learning from the exhibitions 
that showed the smaller animals—fearsome animals, such as bears and 
snakes, strange animals, such as anteaters and armadillos, lovable ani-
mals, such as otters, chipmunks, deer, wolves and beavers, impressive 
animals of the skies, such as eagles and hawks—placed with a marvelous 
approximation to realism, as if living happily, despite their uncanny im-
mobility, in their “natural” habitats. still later, developing a passionate 
research interest in geology, paleontology, and archaeology, the preemi-
nent sciences of natural history, i concentrated on the halls that con-
tained dazzling displays of minerals and the petrified traces and remains 
of prehistoric life. and of course i became a knowledgeable collector of 
fossils and minerals, searching for additions wherever discoveries seemed 
promising. i also developed, around the same time, a serious interest in 
the lepidoptera, attracted to their glorious beauty, and, for a while, i 
hunted and collected them, capturing some of the butterflies that fre-
quented the family’s gardens, not slighting the furry moths that i found 
near the lights where they ended their fatefully brief lives. among oth-
ers in my collection, around which i invented a network of fables and 
allegories, i had, neatly pinned, the Monarch, the yellow swallowtail, 
the Black swallowtail, the Common Buckeye, the Brown Frittilary, and 
the ephemeral and exquisitely beautiful luna Moth, once a spectral 
presence haunting the moonlit nights of summer, but now hovering 
near extinction in the New england states. But i ceased to collect these 
magnificent creatures when i could no longer bear watching their ago-
nizing deaths and realized that they had lost as corpses the mesmerizing, 
spectral beauty i saw in their energetic lives, dancing and fluttering in 
the currents of summer air.6
6 see my discussion of the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language for 
the question of our responsibility to care for nature, in: Kleinberg-levin, D. (2008), Before the 
Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s Ecology and Levinas’s Ethics. albany: 
state university of New york Press. also see my four chapters on hölderlin, Marx, Benja-
6
P o l i G r a F i
returning to the Museum after a half century away from its proxim-
ity, i was profoundly shocked by the momentous changes that had taken 
place there: really startling changes, not only in regard to what had been 
selected for “permanent” exhibition and what was no longer to be seen, 
but also in regard to the “character” of the exhibitions, the ways in which 
all our contemporary political and cultural sensitivities had been ever so 
carefully and cautiously—and, i suspect, with some anxiety—taken into 
account. so as i began to contemplate these changes, i realized that they 
reflected a half-century of changes in the very concept of natural his-
tory, changes culminating in the way in which we of today conceptualize 
and relate to natural history, hence also how we understand ourselves 
as a distinct species of life and as a species in relation to the rest of the 
natural world. although my first reaction was, not surprisingly, nostal-
gia—a wistful sense that something precious had been abandoned to 
oblivion,—as the enlightened voice of reason began to make itself heard, 
i gradually welcomed the changes. But at the same time, i believe that 
those among us who remember the old Museum with its painstakingly 
ordered exhibits of “rational” taxonomy have a responsibility to rescue 
its history from the oblivion that is an all too common fate these days.
ernst haeckel’s book, Kunstformen der Natur (1900), with its mar-
velous coloured illustrations, still evokes for me an enchanted realm of 
nature: that book exemplifies an historically significant way of experi-
encing nature that we should not exclude and forget in our embrace of 
the new techniques and forms of knowledge which a “more enlight-
ened” science can deliver. We still need to know—to experience—that 
enchantment. The natural history museum is one of those singularly 
favoured places where enchantment and disenchantment could in prin-
ciple exist in a lively dialectic of reciprocal enrichment.
so what i would like, accordingly, to reflect on in this essay are some 
of the differences that constitute this conceptual shift—a shift signifi-
min and heidegger in: Kleinberg-levin, D. (2005), Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Hölderlin’s 
Question of Measure After Heidegger. stanford: stanford university Press, 2005; and see my two 
chapter discussions of Descartes and heidegger in: Kleinberg-levin, D. (1999), The Philosopher’s 
Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment. university of California Press; revised paper-
back edition: (2003), Duquesne university Press.
7
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
cant enough, i should suggest, to warrant being called a “paradigm 
shift”.
§2
The most striking change, i would say, is in the representation of 
human life as a matter of natural history in its relation to the realm 
of nature. For the truth is that, despite all the stuffed animals, fossils, 
minerals, and skeletons, despite all the exhibitions of animal and plant 
life, in the final analysis, the Museum exists as an historical monument 
to a seemingly persistent, forever unsettled problematic, a forever con-
troversial answer to the forever renewed anthropological question that 
defines the modern world: “What is Man?” and, consequently, also, 
the question “What is Man in relation to nature?” or, in other words: 
“What is Man as a being that inhabits, and belongs to, the realm of 
animal nature?”7 Thus, i think we must recognize that, insofar as it is 
conscious of its mission, the Museum is an institution that registers our 
anthropological self-understanding at a specific historico-cultural mo-
ment. in fact, what it presents reveals far more about us than it does 
about the minerals, plants and bestiary that clamour for our attention 
and entertain, if not also inspire, our young children. My childhood 
consciousness of this anthropological intention was however obscured 
by my fascination with a realm of nature supposed to be separate and 
apart, not autonomous like the realm in which i and the other recog-
nizably human beings dwelled. But who are we? What kind of natural 
being are we? and how should we inherit and bequeath the realm of 
nature in which we live and on which we depend?
in the second of Kant’s three critiques, the Critique of Practical Rea-
son, the philosopher poses three questions he wants to address: “What 
can i know?” “What ought i to do?” and “What would it be reasonable 
for me to hope for?” in his Logic, however, he asks a fourth question: 
“What is Man?” if, though, ones reads his Anthropology with that ques-
7 see edmund husserl’s exploratory reflections on nature, animality, human nature, and the 
human embodiment, in: husserl, e. (1952), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänom-
enologischen Philosophie (ed. Marly Biemel). Den haag: Martinus Nijhoff, Book ii.
8
P o l i G r a F i
tion in mind, one will be disappointed to find what today must be rec-
ognized as culturally bound, culturally prejudiced reflections failing his 
own moral test of universalizability, failing the great eighteenth century 
project of enlightenment. But, as aristotle’s definition of the human as a 
rational animal, or an animal endowed with the gift of language, implic-
itly reveals, the enigmatic intersection of human nature and nature has 
always been the subject, since time immemorial, of heated controversy. 
Besides scholarly debates about geological dates, classificatory systems, 
taxonomies, origins, genealogies, and evolutionary patterns, New york’s 
Museum of Natural history, like the natural history museums of West-
ern europe, has been at the very centre of politically charged debates 
over the definitions and representations of races and ethnicities, along 
with debates over the theory of evolution and its representation of our 
relationship to the species to which we have given the name “animals”.
in the New york Museum i visited recently, once again living near 
it—indeed now virtually in its shadow, i find that the scientific evidence 
for the story of evolution is more meticulously, more intricately, more 
compellingly documented than it was in the past, whilst also being ex-
plained and exhibited with much more caution and delicacy, and much 
more attention to the counter-arguments. The theory of evolution is 
still confronting us with questions for which we have no satisfying an-
swers. We still do not know how planetary life could have arisen from 
the chance conjunction of nature’s elements, inanimate matter. and 
whereas, in my childhood, the Museum was not sufficiently careful to 
avoid giving the impression that the indigenous tribes scattered around 
the globe could be thought of as in some ways primitive or savage, un-
able or unwilling to rise above the condition of animal nature, the Mu-
seum of the present not only avoids this blindness, this morally offensive 
arrogance, but makes a great effort to present these peoples in a way that 
encourages, beyond mere sympathy, genuine admiration for their skills 
and intelligence, and no small measure of understanding in regard to 
their ways of life. above all, the Museum of the present is much more 
careful in its representations of the different “races” and “ethnicities”, ex-
posing the untruths concealed within old myths and prejudices, calling 
attention to the numerous difficulties that research encounters trying to 
define in strictly genetic and evolutionary terms the very concept of race, 
9
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
documenting scenes from the history of wars, crusades, and massacres 
motivated by racial and ethnic hatreds, and representing the brutal re-
alities of the trade in slaves without diminishing any of the terror. Thus, 
even when visitors are confronted with the undeniable “otherness” of 
other races, ethnicities, tribes and cultures, what they have been given 
to see in the museum is their irrefutable sharing and participation in a 
universal humanity. a new stage in the dialectic of enlightenment seems 
to have been thereby attained.
My argument for a paradigm shift will be, here, essentially anec-
dotal, although, as will become apparent, i have drawn extensively on 
Michel Foucault’s thought, in particular, his historical analysis in The 
Order of Things (1966), and have benefited more than i can acknowl-
edge here from Friedrich schelling’s Treatise on Human Freedom (1809),8 
Walter Benjamin’s schellingian account of natural history in Origin of 
the German Mourning Play (1928),9 Theodor adorno’s essay on “Natu-
ral history” (1932),10 the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) that adorno 
worked on with Max horkheimer,11 and the writings of Martin hei-
degger, especially his 1929–1930 seminar, published under the title, The 
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,12 in which, among other things, 
he struggled with the question of animality, a question that, insepa-
rable as it is from the peculiarly obscure question of human nature, he 
found it necessary to leave in many ways unresolved. But perhaps the 
intractable character of the problem, its resistance to resolution, stems 
from heidegger’s metaphysical assumption, which he will never seri-
ously challenge, that, between human beings and the [other] animals, 
there is an absolute abyss of difference. every time heidegger’s thinking 
drew him inexorably near the topic of our embodiment, the philosopher 
8 schelling, F. W. J. (1936), Treatise on Human Freedom. Chicago: open Court.
9 Benjamin, W. (1998), The Origin of German Tragic Drama. london: Verso, New left Books.
10 adorno, t. W. (1984), ”The idea of Natural history,” Telos (summer 1984), nr. 60, pp. 97–
124. also see his discussions of natural history in the 1944 adorno, t.W. (2002), Dialectic of En-
lightenment. stanford university Press; a work written in collaboration with Max horkheimer, 
and his 1966 work, adorno, t.W. (1973), Negative Dialectics. New york: Continuum.
11 adorno, t.W. and horkheimer, M. (2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment. stanford: stanford 
university Press.
12 heidegger, M. (1995), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, and Soli-
tude. Bloomington: indiana university Press.
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P o l i G r a F i
deferred the questions, unwilling to give them the rigorous thought they 
demand. Whilst taking aristotle’s ontological definition of the human 
being—mankind understood as the “rational animal”—as his starting 
point and arguing forcefully against biological reductionism and the rac-
ism it can be treacherously used to legitimate, heidegger was never able 
to illuminate the nature of human embodiment. and this meant that 
he was never able to approach a compelling ontological representation 
of the being of “Dasein” as human nature.
This ontological difference between human being and animal be-
ing—the difference that heidegger and many of his predecessors turned 
into a metaphysical difference—is called into question in Franz Kafka’s 
short story, “a report to an academy,” in which a creature living like 
human beings reports to an assembly of scholars and scientists about 
his former life as an ape. Captured in the wild forests of africa, he was 
brought back to the “civilized world” as an object for research. longing 
to escape the cage into which, for most of his time, he was kept locked, 
he found entertainment and distraction undertaking his own research, 
carefully observing and studying the comportment, the manners and 
gestures, of the human species, represented, of course, by his captors. 
Gradually, he succeeded in imitating, or aping them so cleverly that he 
was released from his cage and mingled with this strange, other spe-
cies. But the more he took part in the life of human beings, the more 
he questioned the “freedom” he once imagined to await him outside 
that terrible cage. Did he merely exchange one cage for another? Kafka 
leaves us to brood on this question. What is culture, he wonders, if not 
a sophisticated form of aping—the transmission and inheritance of re-
petitive cultural patterns, embodied in gestures, bearing, and speech?
years later, Vladimir Nabokov, asked about the inspiration for one 
of his novels, related this story, perhaps with Kafka’s story in mind. his 
account, supposedly drawn from memory, was subsequently determined 
to be one more of his impish masks, a fictional subterfuge:
as far as i can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompt-
ed by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after 
11
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled 
by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.13
What are we, we human beings? What is our nature? What is our 
place in nature? What should that place be? What wisdom, in regard to 
these questions, can a museum of natural history impart? as Kant argues 
in his third Critique, there are limits to what we can learn about nature 
by way of “determinate reflection”. This mode of cognition was deemed 
appropriate for the acquisition of empirical knowledge about the world; 
but Kant appreciated that it could not adjust to recognize the aesthetic 
and ethical dimensions of our experience of the world. in particular, it 
failed to take account of our experience of purposiveness in nature and 
in ethical life. A fortiori, it could not illuminate adequately and appro-
priately the intricate dialectic, the intertwining, of nature and human 
beings that is represented by the concept of “natural history”.
§3
For many years, it has been accepted as fact that myth was not only 
a precursor of science, but itself an archaic type of science: myths form, 
after all, coherent systems for describing, explaining, predicting, and 
understanding the natural world. however, whereas modern thought ar-
rogantly assumed that it had left the mythic completely behind, as noth-
ing more than a fascinating relic of our benighted past, adorno argued, 
i think compellingly, that myth and science are, and have always been, 
inextricably intertwined, and that, accordingly, even our latest scientific 
knowledge, abundantly confirmed though it may be, retains traces and 
vestiges of mythic configurations. These mythic residues are representa-
tives, he claims, of the prejudices, the unexamined, unchallenged ideo-
logical formations, secretly operating in our culture.
in this context, according to adorno, a certain dialectic is at work: 
the dialectic, namely, between nature and history. in defining the con-
cept of natural history in his 1932 essay, adorno makes it clear that what 
concerns him is something distinctly philosophical: it is not a question 
13 Nabokov, V. (1991), The Annotated Lolita. (edited with preface, introduction and notes by 
alfred appell, Jr.). New york: Vintage, p. 311.
12
P o l i G r a F i
of the history of nature as an object of natural science; nor is it a ques-
tion of the history of nature as an object of myth. although he does not 
dispute the validity of these approaches to natural history, his concept is 
intended to recognize the dialectical intertwining of nature and history 
and, in keeping with this understanding, to set in motion an appropri-
ate project for critical thought—critical social theory—to pursue. spe-
cifically, the dialectical character of the concept is supposed to indicate 
the possibility that the diremption in which nature and history confront 
one another in seemingly irreconcilable conflict might be overcome or 
transcended. But how? We cannot avoid the catastrophic eventualities 
due to climate changes without fundamental changes in the way we live 
our lives: not only how we live in and with nature, but how we are to 
live with one another in order to protect and preserve the natural envi-
ronment on which we will always depend.
Now, what i want to argue in this light is that the museum of natu-
ral history—i mean any such museum, not only the one in New york 
City—is an institution that, existing in the conceptual space formed by 
this dialectic, must somehow come to terms with, must somehow ne-
gotiate, the question of its legitimacy as an authoritative mediation of 
this constantly evolving, constantly shifting dialectic, not only showing 
history as taking place within nature, but also showing nature as histori-
cal, hence as a normatively constituted narrative—think of the Book of 
Nature metaphor here—always subject to conflicts of interpretation and 
rational debate. and perhaps, in this way, the museum of natural his-
tory could even contribute to overcoming or transcending the history 
of the metaphysical abyss separating the sympathies of human beings 
from the suffering of the animals that live without the gift of language.
For Georg lukács, natural history calls our positivistic conception 
of an absolutely autonomous objective science into question: if reality 
is inherently dialectical, such that the enquiring subject and its object 
of enquiry are inextricably intertwined, how would it ever be possible 
for us to know and interpret the world that the positivist conception 
of natural science is logically committed to assuming, namely: a thor-
oughly reified, essential mortified object, a world from which we, as 
living subjects, must necessarily find ourselves estranged? in the intro-
duction to their Dialectic of Enlightenment, the authors, presumably at-
13
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
tempting to address this very problematic, call for a “remembrance of 
nature within the subject”: “eingedenken der Natur im subjekt”.14 a 
beautiful thought! But exactly what kind of remembrance is at stake? We 
must not hasten to the more obvious answers. For it is surely not what 
is involved when i remember to carry my umbrella; nor is it what is in-
volved when geology and biology record for future reference the facts 
established by their research. as Walter Benjamin argued in writing to 
Max horkheimer: “history is not simply a science, but also and not least 
the objects of a form of cultural remembrance [Eingedenken].”15 hence 
the historical role of myths as resources of cultural memory. adorno’s 
phrase “within the subject” provokes other no less importunate ques-
tions. Thus: What is the character of this “subject”? how would this 
remembrance affect it? how would it be carried, borne and sustained, 
by the subject? how would it “live”, as it were, within the subject? and 
finally, we must consider this: are the existing museums, the existing 
institutions for keeping natural history in our memory keeping it in the 
right way? What would be the “right way”—if there is one? how might 
a museum of natural history be rigorously guided by, and appropriately 
reflect, its commitment as an institution to this kind of remembrance? 
Could the museum somehow contribute to the reconciliation of nature 
and history? Could the museum in any way facilitate the redemption 
of nature, a “fallen” nature that has since the emergence of human life 
suffered from our exploitation? For the time being, all that i can sug-
gest as an answer is that this remembrance is ultimately a question of re-
sponsibility, a question that has the potential to transform the so-called 
“subject” in the most profound, most radical ways: raising consciousness 
of our historical responsibility for nature, raising consciousness of our 
responsibility for the history and destiny of nature, raising conscious-
ness of our human history as a history that, since time immemorial, has 
14 adorno, t.W. and horkheimer, M. (2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 32; adorno, t.W. 
and horkheimer, M. (1971), Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 
pp. 38–39.
15 Benjamin, W. “erkenntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts,” in: Gesammelte Schrift-
en, vol. V, N8, 1, p. 589; Benjamin, W. (1999) “on the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Prog-
ress,” in: The Arcades Project, (trans. howard eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin). Cambridge: The 
Belknap Press of harvard university Press, Convolute N8, 1, p. 471.
14
P o l i G r a F i
taken place not merely within nature but in reciprocally consequential 
interaction with it. if, as i believe, the museum of natural history is an 
institutional guardian of cultural memory, then its remembrance of na-
ture must be the source of a moral obligation for our protection and 
preservation of nature—an obligation corresponding to our indebted-
ness for nature’s blessings. however, the “museum conception” of nat-
ural history that determined the exhibits in the museums of natural 
history from their earliest times until recent years was limited by its 
unexamined commitment to a paradigm of scientific knowledge that 
neglected this stewardship, this obligation. The mission of the museum 
must not be merely a question of accumulating, organizing, interpret-
ing and presenting empirical knowledge; it must also be a place where 
we learn how to take care of nature, a place where we learn what that 
means for our form of life—and indeed for our sense of ourselves as be-
ings both natural and human. This understanding of the mission is one 
that has, around the middle of the twentieth century, finally taken hold, 
reforming the natural history museum into a place where not only the 
rationality of determinate empirical judgement, but also the rationality 
of what Kant calls “reflective judgement” is encouraged and included in 
the processes of learning. Beginning with empirical data, with singulari-
ties, reflective judgement is a search for a fitting universality, a unifying, 
coherent meaning. By encouraging this form of judgement, the museum 
is supporting the search: the importance of questions, and not only an-
swers; thinking, not only knowing; and perplexity, instead of certainty. 
a dialectical methodology.
§4
The story about natural history that Foucault wants to tell in The 
Order of Things commences with the humanism of the renaissance, 
passes through what he terms the Classical period, the age of rational-
ism, roughly defined as beginning in the late sixteenth century and end-
ing in the eighteenth, and culminates in the so-called Modern age of 
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when rationalism and idealism 
are challenged and the spirit of a new empiricism and skepticism pre-
vails. Different “epistemes”, that is, configurations of epistemology and 
15
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
ontology, orders of representation, are characteristic of these different 
historical periods. in each of these epistemes, there prevails a distinc-
tive methodology prescribing the normative conditions for truth and 
knowledge, and, correspondingly, a distinctive conception of reality, the 
possible realm of objects about which there can be appropriate claims to 
knowledge. Foucault’s “archaeology” excavates these fundamental deter-
minants of the different historical periods.
in the renaissance, natural history was an ordering of resemblanc-
es, correspondences based on visible similarities, affinities, sympathies, 
analogies. Natural history was a hermeneutic science, the interpretation 
of signs and designs. What mattered were structures, not organic func-
tions. sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici exemplifies the episteme of 
this time. The “fundamental task” of natural history consisted therefore 
in determining the essentially constant “arrangements” and “designa-
tions”. as such, it was a science that remained for the most part at the 
level of description: description strongly influenced by myths, legends, 
anecdotes, and superstitions.
What Foucault names the Classical age repudiated these influences 
in the name of reason. it was an age of supposedly rational classifica-
tions, orders manifest in the very nature of things. it was an age that be-
lieved in “a homogeneous space of orderable identities and differences”, 
identities and differences lucidly visible to the natural, but nevertheless 
rational eye. [ot 268] it recognized that, in the course of their history, 
natural species have undergone structural alterations, amendments of 
adaptation; but it did not yet have the concepts to think about evolu-
tionary transformations and took the mutations they perceived to be 
totally preordained according to taxonomic tables the transparent clas-
sificatory ordering of which is eternally fixed and eternally true. hence 
it refused to take into account both the historicality of nature—the “na-
ture” it presented, and the historicality of its own methods of enquiry.
in the Classical age, renaissance and Baroque descriptions of resem-
blances, correspondences and affinities and classifications by structure 
were replaced by rationally organized empirical procedures and explana-
tory schemes. it was now the investigation of more objectively deter-
minable identities and differences that fascinated. however, despite its 
declared commitment to empiricism and its recognition that taxono-
16
P o l i G r a F i
mies are always in part conventional and that consequently the order 
of things in themselves cannot guarantee the connection between signi-
fier and signified, this age remained under the spell of rationalism; and 
it continued to have faith in a universal science of nature grounded in 
eternally true rational laws precluding chance and merely probabilistic 
events.
The theory of evolution, together with major discoveries in many of 
the other natural sciences, ended the Classical age and created an epis-
temic and ontological revolution in science that brought about histori-
cally earthshaking repercussions the significance of which passed into 
a cultural life far beyond the predictive powers of the sciences. The sci-
ences of nature gained immeasurable power and prestige in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. in what Foucault terms the Modern 
age, a radically new episteme took over: evolutionary models made their 
appearance; genealogical discontinuities and instabilities were now rec-
ognized; chance and relativity were no longer outlawed; visible organic 
events gave way to deeper, more invisible processes; probabilities and 
contingencies were acknowledged, and science itself became historical 
and interpretive.
Foucault’s story, his archaeology, ends with the Modern age, mostly 
represented by events in the nineteenth century. should we therefore 
contemplate a Post-Modern age, beginning, say, around the late 1960’s 
and continuing to evolve? in the context of his story, such an age would, 
i think, be defined by virtue of its radical recognition of difference. it 
would be the time of the other. it would be the harbinger of a time 
when it is no longer morally permissible to make “Man” the measure, 
the anthropological point of reference for natural history. as we leave 
the episteme of the twentieth century behind us, essentialism, the as-
sumption of universal sameness, has finally revealed its secret truth, and 
that truth is violence. This, i take it, is what Foucault means when, in his 
“Preface”, he says, cryptically and coyly, that “Man” is merely a recent 
invention—an invention, that is, of the Modern period, and is destined 
soon to vanish, replaced by a new episteme, a new form:
strangely enough, man—the study of whom is supposed by the naïve to 
be the oldest investigation since socrates—is probably no more than a kind 
of rift in the order of things, or, in any case, a configuration whose outlines 
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N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
are determined by the new position he has so recently taken up in the field 
of knowledge. Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile 
solutions of an “anthropology” understood as a universal reflection on man, 
half-empirical, half-philosophical. it is comforting, however, and a source of 
profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet 
two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear 
again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. [xxiii]
Writing in 1932 about the history of morality and religion, henri 
Bergson gives unequivocal expression to the impossibility of getting, as 
it were, to the very “bottom” of the enigma that is “Man”, uncovering 
in the so-called “primitive” peoples of the earth that pure essence of hu-
manity in which the animal nature of the human as such would appear:
are the “primitive” peoples we observe to-day the image of that humanity? 
it is hardly probable, since nature is overlaid, in their case as well, by a layer 
of habits that the social surroundings have preserved in order to deposit them 
in each individual.
“But,” he goes on to say,
there is reason to believe that this layer is not so thick as in civilized man, 
and that it allows nature to show more clearly through it.16
he puts scare-quotes around “primitive”, but none around “nature”: 
he still assumes the discernability of distinct layers. By the end of the 
twentieth century, this assumption will no longer be made without 
evoking vigorous scholarly ridicule.
Contemplating, in his “Conclusion” to The Order of Things, the in-
dications already apparent of a paradigm shift in the “fundamental ar-
rangements of knowledge”, Foucault speculates that,
if the existing arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some 
event of which we at the moment can do no more than sense the possibility—
without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to 
cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of 
the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, 
like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. [387]
16 Bergson, h. (1935, 1949), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. New york: henry holt 
& Company, p. 117.
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P o l i G r a F i
however, if my recent experience in the New york Museum of Natu-
ral history can be trusted, the epistemic shift that Foucault, writing in 
the middle of the last century, rather grandly and extravagantly proph-
esizes, as if he were announcing some new conception of eschatology, 
has already come to pass. and this is why i find myself tempted to think 
that, in terms of Foucault’s historiographic model, we are living—al-
ready now—in a Post-Modern world, despite so many reasons to resist 
that all-too-voguish terminology.
§5
returning to the Museum after so many years absence, i was com-
pletely disoriented. i had expected—quite unreasonably, as of course i 
realize in retrospect—to find my way around without difficulty, taking 
pride in my familiarity with such an awesome institution. Gone, how-
ever, were the huge, solemn halls with their grand windows and over-
whelming spaciousness, welcoming the natural light of day to fall gen-
tly on the rows of rectangular glass cases, each one carefully presenting 
its specimens, its objects, exactingly labeled, neatly displayed, in some 
perfect geometric order. The halls themselves, slightly stuffy, dusty and 
musty, where not a breath of air stirred, subtly conveyed to the senses, 
almost at a subliminal level, the impression of a mausoleum or a sep-
ulcher—in any case, a solemn and sober place, quite intimidating for 
a child, where one must honour the possessions and the claims of ab-
solute knowledge. entering these halls, where a heavy, hushed silence 
prevailed, felt like entering a strange temple: a temple, however, without 
any gods, where one will have come to worship in wonder and awe the 
irrefutable triumphs of science.
and on display in the glass cases, all the known entities that appear 
in our world. in the halls with smaller cases, moths and butterflies, me-
ticulously mounted, delicate wings delicately spread; insects of all sizes, 
shapes, and colours; fossilized trilobites, primitive fish and arachnids; 
and dazzling formations of crystal and iridescent stones. and in the halls 
with the much larger display cases, either aligned in rows, with one se-
ries running the central length of the hall and two other series placed 
along the walls, or else occupying the walls floor to ceiling: petrified 
19
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
skeletons of reptiles and mammals, simulacra of prehistoric animals and 
the carefully embalmed bodies of mountain lions, wolverines, foxes, and 
other slowly vanishing denizens of our increasingly denaturalized world, 
placed in artificial reproductions of their habitats.
The Museum of Natural history was intended to exhibit the history 
of nature, including the history of “Man” and the “nature” of ‘Man”. 
But there was nothing at all “natural” about the history it reported. The 
artificiality, the fundamentally interpretive or hermeneutical character 
of the Museum was artfully concealed—as much as possible. in the en-
chantment of my childhood years, though, i was not aware of this arti-
ficiality, this cultural constructedness. Nor did i grasp the significance 
of the fact, so obvious and so significant for me now, that everything in 
that Museum was either inanimate or dead. No wonder that the halls 
vaguely felt more than a little like funerary monuments! every living 
thing there had succumbed to its ultimate fate and returned to the im-
mobility of the inanimate, the stone-like, forever petrified. Dead nature. 
The grizzly bear is standing up, as if to give warnings of his wrath; but 
he is dead and will never move, never gesture, never chase and threaten. 
The red-tailed hawk spreads its glorious wings; but it will never fly, never 
move from its perch. Butterflies, like magical apparitions when flutter-
ing over a garden of flowers, would now evoke nothing but death were 
i to see them exhibited today as they were exhibited when i was a child. 
The Museum of Natural history was all about death—but that is a part 
of the story that the museum never told—never wanted to tell, or per-
haps never even thought of telling. Dead nature. until now!
Now, all the cabinets of curiosities with their painstakingly researched 
displays of dead nature, were removed from sight, consigned, in a kind 
of second burial, to their sepulchral vaults in the basement deep under-
ground.
Not only, though, is there nothing “natural” about the exhibitions 
of nature in the museum of natural history; but in the older Museum 
of my childhood, the history of nature was told as if that history were 
without its own historicality. artifacts were of course dutifully, exactly 
dated, bones and fossils were dated; earth and rock samples were dated, 
registering the periods of geological time. and yet, the history of natu-
ral history was itself left without any acknowledgement of its role in the 
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P o l i G r a F i
production and institutionalization of the scientific knowledge that the 
museum presented.
to the deadness of nature, there corresponded a certain conception 
of knowledge—a conception that, until the consciousness-raising, con-
sciousness-rescuing revolutions of the 1960’s, retained and perpetuated 
some of the epistemological convictions and ontological commitments 
of enlightenment rationalism, the spirit of which inaugurated the Mod-
ern period. The glass that enframed the exhibits bespoke the rationalist 
ideal of transparency; the lawful orderliness of the exhibits proclaimed 
an unquestioned faith in the laws—and indeed, the lawfulness and sys-
tematicity—of nature; the labels implied a knowledge of absolute cer-
tainty. The displays in their entirety suggested totality, completeness, 
even finality. in fact, despite all its specimens, all its exhibits, the Muse-
um of my childhood was still, by Foucault’s criteria, not fundamentally 
challenging old rationalist-idealist assumptions.
herakleitos, the pre-socratic philosopher from ephesus, is supposed 
to have declared that nature loves to hide. This assertion is not repre-
senting nature as if it took part in a game for children of hide-and-seek; 
rather, it was an attempt to express his recognition of the finitude of our 
knowledge—and to warn, accordingly, against efforts to force nature to 
surrender all its treasures, all its mysteries. science, he thought, must 
respect, must indeed protect and preserve, the hiddenness of nature, the 
withdrawing of nature into the mystery of its self-concealment. in “The 
age of the World Picture” and “The Question of technology”, Martin 
heidegger reiterated this warning, arguing that, in attempting to turn 
nature into an object of total control, total availability, total knowabil-
ity, our civilization is risking a grave danger—the danger that, after 
Nietzsche, he called nihilism.17 in the Modern age, the natural history 
museum exposed nature—at least implicitly—to the vision of total vis-
ibility. and the glass cases and carefully constructed stagings of nature 
conveyed, even if not with intention, the impression that nature could 
17 see: heidegger, M. (1977), “The Question Concerning technology” and “The age of the 
World Picture”, in: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New york: harper & 
row.
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N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
always be made to stand still for us—in other words, it could always be 
made into what heidegger termed an available “standing reserve”.
since the early years of modern natural science, when the possibility 
of achieving a rigorously unified, systematic knowledge of nature in its 
totality seemed to be an eminently rational and empirical assumption, 
we have learned a certain degree of humility. But there are still many, 
today, who will defend the idea of a program of research that aspires to 
unify all domains of knowledge, all universes of discourse, not just the 
natural sciences and the human sciences, but indeed even the humani-
ties, according to an evolutionary paradigm ultimately reducible to bio-
chemistry, physics, and mathematics. (Consider in this regard e.o. Wil-
son’s argument for “consilience”.) as an ideal, the unity of the natural 
sciences is not necessarily something to be repudiated. But reductionism 
for the sake of such unity is problematic. such unifying reductionism 
has, no doubt, a certain aesthetic appeal; but the understanding of life 
that it must sacrifice is of incalculable value, much too important to 
lose. in the final analysis, such a program, such an ideal, could succeed 
only by constructing a unity in which knowledge would become, once 
again, knowledge only of the dead. We need a science that serves the 
flourishing of animal, plant, and human life—we need, as the Jena ro-
mantics of the early nineteenth century proclaimed, a rigorous science 
that is also, as it were, a form of poetry—what Friedrich schlegel would 
call a “sympathetic” science.
The natural history museums of the renaissance, the Classical age, 
and the Modern age were made for viewing; they were constructed for 
only one of the five senses. What do we see when we look into exhibi-
tions framed in glass cases? reified nature, a nature to be conquered, 
mastered, and possessed, totally accessible to the grasp of knowledge. in 
the post-1960’s, Post-Modern Museum, everything has changed. Where-
as, the museum of the Modern age privileged the all-knowing, totaliz-
ing, sovereign gaze, encouraging systematic contemplation as mastery 
and domination, the Post-Modern promotes interactions, engagements, 
questions. Whereas the exhibitions in the museum of the earlier period 
often could give the impression that there are certainties, totalities, es-
sentialities, and universals, the exhibitions in the museum of the present 
encourage more questions and more skepticism with regard to these as-
22
P o l i G r a F i
sumptions, urging attention to significant differences more than to obvi-
ous but superficial similarities, identities, and unities. Whereas the ear-
lier museums did not sufficiently challenge absolutes, the Post-Modern 
is comfortable with relativisms, probabilities, even randomness and co-
incidence. and whereas the older museum was unhappy with fragments 
of knowledge, the contemporary museum is willing to admit them.
But there can be no doubt, i think, that the most obvious, and also 
most important difference between the older Museum and the one with 
which i have recently become acquainted is that, because of our extraor-
dinary advances in technologies, the exhibits are no longer silent, pet-
rified, and dead: at long last, they have come to life, have become sites 
of dialectical interaction with a living nature, where visitors can not 
only question, explore, and experiment, but also learn how this nature 
is affected by different types of interaction. The significance of this dif-
ference is that it raises the hope that the younger generations visiting 
the museum of today will have a deeper understanding of their place 
in natural history and, in consequence, a greater sense of responsibility 
for the future well-being of nature. Nature is a sacred bequest from one 
generation to the next. so too is our quest to understand it.
§6
“Natural history” is a concept that is, i suggest, peculiarly appropri-
ate for the conceptual interpretation of our time. if, on the one side, it 
would remind us of the truth that what we call “nature” exists only, in 
fact, in relation to a world that we human beings have constructed and 
that the only “nature” accessible to us is a “nature” constituted in terms 
of our history, on the other side it would remind us that our histori-
cal being takes place within the realm of nature and that, therefore, all 
our institutions, in fact, the entire world that since time immemorial 
we have struggled to build, will, as they must, succumb to the fate of 
all things natural: decay, corruption, ruination—in a word, finitude. in 
times past, the museums of natural history evaded this truth, despite 
the warnings from an earlier century, represented in the Baroque “still 
life” paintings, where, next to the abundance of nature, the artists would 
place a sobering human skull. true, the Classical museums showed skel-
23
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
etons, mummification, funerary artifacts, and burial sites; but the im-
pression they ultimately sought to convey was one of defiance: enlight-
enment, science, will eventually triumph over death, the final power 
of nature. today we no longer evade the truth: finitude, mortality, the 
precariousness—despite the progress in our sciences, our technologies, 
our cultural enlightenment—of all natural forms of life. and yet, this 
wisdom is endangered by the very interactions that i have welcomed. 
For if the interactive technologies that today’s museums provide can not 
only show their visitors more knowledge than they can possibly absorb, 
can adumbrate realms of ignorance and limitations to our knowledge, 
and even reveal in very immediate ways the consequences for nature of 
our different possible interactions with it, they can also, unfortunately, 
encourage, instead of humility and a recognition of our responsibility, 
a false and dangerous feeling of empowerment—as if, with the pressing 
of a button or the turning of a handle, we could manipulate a passive, 
compliant nature to satisfy all our desires.
to its credit, the Museum in New york, conscious, like other recon-
structed museums of natural history, of this challenging dialectical apo-
ria, is constantly endeavouring to create exhibits that can encourage a 
“remembrance of nature in the subject” and secure an abiding sense of 
our responsibility as guardians of a nature that our knowledge, despite 
its impressive vastness, will never completely master. Moreover, the mu-
seum of natural history must also reflect, and reflect on, the fact that 
the museum is itself a fragment of natural history: an institution with 
a responsibility to show its own role in the history of interpretations of 
nature and its own interventions, as an institution of research, in the his-
torical fate of nature. in other words, what, in distinction to the Modern 
museum of natural history, the Post-Modern museum embodies above 
all is, i think, a stronger and sharper recognition of the other—hence, 
the indeclinable responsibility to raise and sustain provocative questions 
regarding the objectives and the consequences of our interactions with 
nature and no less provocative questions about the variables and invari-
ables of human nature.
This is, in the broadest sense, a matter that concerns the political vo-
cation of the museum, because the natural history museum has become 
what it always already was, a point of reference, a center, around which 
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P o l i G r a F i
a community can examine not only its diverse belief-formations—its 
superstitions, prejudices and presuppositions, its hopes and articles of 
faith, especially with regard to its conception of human nature and its 
recognition of the other, whether that be other human beings, other 
animals, the other forms of nature, or the realm of the transcendent; 
it can also examine its rituals and other social-cultural practices, all the 
amazingly diverse and complex systematicities through which creaturely 
life is formed into meaningful experience, a coherent design, as natural 
history.18
§7
The natural history museum has from the very beginning been an 
institution organized for research—a function that the visiting public 
tends to forget. Now, as the natural history museum transforms itself 
into a research institution of the twenty-first century, it is beginning to 
look into the past with a complex of new materials, new instruments, 
new techniques, and new concepts. unquestionably, one of the most 
powerful and most promising involves the analysis of DNa samples 
extracted from all the dead life in its keeping.19 There is an immeasur-
ably vast wealth of biological information kept in the skins and skel-
etons and other organic matter that the museums have been preserving. 
Within the next five years, it is anticipated that museums will be able to 
sequence the entire genomes contained in many of their specimens; and 
they will be able to contribute to our understanding of evolutionary pat-
terns in ways that today are nothing but the fantasies of science fiction. 
This information can serve not only to reveal a prehistoric past; it can, 
and will, also benefit the future of the planet, for, among other things, 
it makes possible much better maintenance and stewardship of presently 
18 some of the reflections formulated in this essay are explored further in “Damals: The Mel-
ancholy science of Memory in W. G. sebald’s stories,” one of the chapters in Redeeming Words: 
Language, Literature, and the Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning, the book project, near-
ing completion, on which i am currently working.
19 For an overview of the possibilities and pitfalls of extracting DNa from museum specimens, 
as well as a review of studies that have applied the technique, see: Wandeler, P., hoeck, P. e. a., 
and Keller, l. F. (2007), “Back to the Future: Museum specimens in Population Genetics,” in: 
Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol. 22 (2007), pp. 634–642.
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N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y :  r e F l e C t i o N s  o N  i t s  r e P r e s e N t a t i o N  i N  t h e . . .
living species, especially those threatened with extinction. and beyond 
this, who knows what other benefits for planetary life lie hidden in the 
collections of dead life that the museums have preserved?
in any event, the natural history museums of today have transformed 
themselves: in every way, it is influencing the future and not memorial-
izing the past that is their ultimate concern. even the way their visitor 
exhibits are designed serves this end, for they manifest, as never before, 
a lucid awareness that the children of today, which the exhibits enchant 
and teach, will one day be responsible for all the life on this glorious 
planet.
as what we call “nature” and what we call “history”—and their dia-
lectical intersection in the force field of “natural history”—have become, 
as never before, matters of cultural contestation, the museum of natural 
history has correspondingly undertaken to transform itself into an insti-
tution where this contestation, and the freedom of thought it requires, 
can flourish. The museum of natural history that fits the Post-Modern 
episteme will make us, its visitors, endlessly question our assumptions 
about the natural and challenge our inheritance of history—and, above 
all, it will not only make us familiar with ourselves; it will also make 
us into strangers to ourselves, even revealing that in ourselves which 
is other than the “human” we have believed in. For in the museum of 
natural history, nature comes to appearance in all its beauty and sublime 
mystery, all its wildness and monstrosity, as a ceaseless challenge that not 
only demands knowledge, the continuing formation and refinement of 
our concepts and technologies; it also makes demands on our culturally 
instituted self-knowledge, our ethical capacity to respond to the needs, 
solicitations, and claims of the natural world. indeed, if it is true that, 
as Kant declared in his third critique, The Critique of Judgment, in our 
experience of the awesome beauty and sublimity of nature a symbolic 
connection to morality is constituted, then it is manifest that nature has 
always already engaged our proto-moral sensibilities long before we were 
capable of moral judgment and the pursuit of natural science—indeed, i 
believe, even before the emergence of memory. i think that, more keenly 
than did the museums of earlier centuries, the contemporary Post-Mod-
ern museum recognizes the significance of this moral connection, this 
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P o l i G r a F i
“bonding” for the future of the planet and the civilization that depends 
upon its blessings.
The future will take the measure of whom we of today are, as indi-
viduals and as societies, by judging how we lived up to the moral respon-
sibility towards which nature’s bounty and beauty have been directing 
us. Natural history will thus be the record of a fateful test of our moral 
resolve: how we respond to nature’s condition in learning how to live in 
nature and with nature as its appointed guardians. Natural history will 
be the record that reveals who we are and what we want to become. The 
fate of nature and the fate of our ethical life are forever bound up in a 
remembrance of nature in the subject.20
20 an earlier version of this essay was presented in February, 2010 as the year’s aquinas lecture 
at Manhattan College, riverdale, New york. i am grateful to Professor seamus Carey and the 
College for the opportunity to try out the thoughts presented here.