The Cylinder. Helmut Müller-Sievers

were an effect of an external cause [e.g., God’s twisting motion], then Mars would have to have a more rapid axial rotation than Jupiter, for the very same power of movement affects a smaller body more than a larger one. We would quite correctly be surprised at this, since all the orbital movements diminish with distance from the mid-point, but the speeds of the rotations increase with the distance.”³⁹ What needs to be explained, this theory implies, is not rotational motion (for it is a natural effect of the self-creation of the material universe) but its cessation. Why, then, do some planets rotate around their axes and others, like the moon, not? In the Universal Natural History Kant promises to solve this problem in his answer to one of the Academy prizes, and indeed he does so in a small essay of 1754 with a very long title.⁴⁰ There he shows that the orbit of the moon around the earth is the result of the earth’s greater mass having dragged the satellite by its (now evaporated) aqueous surface and finally locked it into its present synchronous rotation. The same will happen, Kant knows, to the earth once the moon’s drag on its oceans overcomes its rotational momentum.

      The great conceptual problem of Kant’s history of the heavens, immediately seized upon by the next generation of natural philosophers, lies in the assumption of two original forces.⁴¹ A system based on two principles is unable to close itself off; it remains susceptible to the charge of contingency, to that which cannot be anticipated or grounded. This uncertainty is expressed in Kant’s cosmogony by the curious temporal assignations of the “immediate edge of creation” and the “instant” of equilibrium—Kant cannot further account for their occurrence, nor can he explain why attractive forces operate first and repulsion follows later. According to the Romantic philosophers of nature, who succeeded Kant and who acknowledged their debt to his writings on natural science while eagerly moving away from his mechanistic thought, the principal motions cannot interact in such a desultory fashion, and, what is more, they must follow from principles that are valid for both natural and intellectual phenomena. Otherwise, the relation of nature to our understanding would remain inexplicable, and the system would again suffer from contingency. Rotation, this implies, cannot be the result of two supervening forces but has to originate together with the system itself, and it has to have a subjective manifestation.

      This, at least, was the way the most scientifically inclined idealist philosopher, F. W. J. Schelling, argued. He neither accepted the contingent relation between attraction and repulsion at the origin of rotation nor countenanced the separation of mechanical causes from organic (and ultimately intellectual) ones. In his own rewriting of Plato’s Timaios, Von der Weltseele (1798), he advanced the notion that the world was a “universal organism” and that its motions and interactions were governed by two forces that formed a polarity: one was the other of the other, neither existed by itself. Nature would not coalesce into solid phenomena if the tendency to expand were not checked by a “returning motion.” These two polar forces—whose avatars, among others, were positive and negative magnetism and electricity, chemical affinity and repulsion, physiological irritability and sensibility—animated the universal organism and kept its soul in constant motion. Since Plato and Aristotle had already argued that motion originating from the soul was superior to all others, and above all that it could initiate rotation, Schelling could spend comparatively little energy on explaining the origin of rotation. If everything potentially rotated, it was rectilinear motion that required explanation.⁴²

      Schelling’s Naturphilosophie underwent a few metamorphoses before he expanded his perspective even further and considered—in his Philosophy of Revelation—creation and the becoming of God as a process of rotational gestation. His followers and successors kept their focus on the primacy of rotation in the explanation of the natural world. Lorenz Oken, one of the most influential teachers of Romantic natural philosophy, declared confidently: “God is a rotating globe. The world is God rotating. All motion is rotational, and there is everywhere no straight motion any more than there is a single line of straight surface. Everything is comprehended in ceaseless rotation. . . . Straight motion is only the mechanical; such, however, exists not through itself. The more a body moves in a straight direction, the more mechanical and ignoble it is.”⁴³ Hegel interpreted the solar system as a kind of cosmic mind, where the sun represented subjectivity in its most abstract form as self-relation (because rotation was motion that related only to itself); the moons, which circled their center of gravitation without rotating, were entirely other-related; and the planets, including the earth, combined both motions by rotating and orbiting at the same time. This figure of an initial rotation that exteriorizes itself in its component motions recurs at various junctures in Hegel, whose philosophical system in its totality has been described as depicting a multiplicity of spheres rotating around a common center.⁴⁴

      Similar thoughts animated Goethe, who, as we will see later, sought to identify spiral motion as the motion of organic growth: “The supreme thing we have received from God and from nature is life, the rotating movement of the monad about itself, knowing neither rest nor repose; the instinct to foster and nurture life is indestructibly innate in everyone; its idiosyncrasy, however, remains a mystery to ourselves and to others.”⁴⁵ Goethe’s metaphysical and poetic notion of free rotation already reached into the epoch in which rotation was broken down by the formula for torque. His contempt for rotating machines and for the pernicious acceleration brought about by them animated his last, resigned musings on historical progress in his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Travels.⁴⁶

      The full intricacy of rotation’s transition from divine attribute to mechanical necessity cannot be recounted here. All this fragmentary overview of theories of translation and rotation has attempted to show is that motions have their history. Properly speaking, of course, only their valuation undergoes historical change, but since these motions do not “exist” unless they are forced, their metaphysical value dominates their mechanical properties until the widespread use of engines reverses this situation.⁴⁷ The ubiquitous availability of convertible motion from the steam engine and the emergence of suitable transmission replace metaphysical speculation with the forced geometry of motion—with kinematics.

      Still, looking back at the roles played by translation and rotation respectively, we can appreciate the irony that steam engines met a deep desire on the part of Romantic natural philosophers who had kept the cosmic dignity of rotation alive against what they perceived as the cold rationalism of straight-line mathematical physics. It is true that the intrusion of large machines into the life of the nineteenth century pushed most poets and thinkers to the side of the protesters and even Luddites, but this had to do with the steam engine as a motor—and hence as a thermodynamic polluter, in the widest sense—or with the machine as a tool that dispossessed human workers of meaningful and remunerative work. When the Romantics articulated their opposition to the motion of machines, it was to mechanisms as metaphors (or as translations, in the Latin and kinematic version): against the state as a machine, against mechanical thinking and art making, against automata insofar as they tried to imitate or supplant natural bodies and their motions and emotions.

      As far as the purely kinematic impact of the new machines was concerned, there was agreement between engineers, philosophers, and artists that bringing rotation to earth and accomplishing its conversion into other forms of motion was in fact an epochal achievement. A continuous line of thinkers from Kant to Babbage to Reuleaux, and on to Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari, and an equally continuous line of poets from Kleist to Dickinson to Beckett and Wallace Stevens testify to this view. Baudelaire went so far as to see in the visualization of kinematic conversion an essential sign of modernity. His painter of modern life, like Kleist’s Herr C., delights in depicting carriages in motion because “a carriage, like a ship, derives from its movement a mysterious and complex grace which is very difficult to note down in shorthand. The pleasure which it affords the artist’s eye would seem to spring from the series of geometrical shapes which this object, already so intricate, whether it be ship or carriage, cuts swiftly and successively into space.”⁴⁸

      Hopefully, this metaphysical background helps to mitigate the technicality of the following parade of cylindrical objects. For their early designers, these objects retained an aura in which the drama and the conflict between the motions—even when they were frozen in the architecture of early iron bridges and glass roofs—were still palpable. Kinematics seems an abstract science