What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason, Nature and History 9783110455113, 9783110453393

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Processional Poem: If we could know
Introduction
Reason Expanded
Is Reason Defensible?
The Natural and the Moral Order: What’s to Blame?
Rationality for Dummies?
Objectivity and the Theory of the Archetype
Thus We See: Objectivity and Archaeology
Love =
Medieval Miracles as Evidence
Myth, Reason, and Rationality
Nature Enframed
Dwelling Under the Sea, or the Wonder of a Glass Sponge
Miss Fielde’s Nests
Revisiting Mein Weltbild
Knowledge and Rational Action: The Economization of Environment, and After
Galilei’s Spiral Scribbles, Campanella and Fludd
Heraclitus Fragment B123 DK
Some Comments on Emergence
Anthropomorphism and Science Fiction
Empirical Observation and Embodied Nature in Sixteenth-century South India
History Refracted
Limits of Localism: The Scale of Sight
Discipline(s)
Good Company: Spinoza the Traditionalist and Some Unexpected Friends
Historicizing Novelty
Literary Knowledge between Translation and Migration: The Case of Dostoevsky in Israel
Crab Nebulous
Reason, Nature, Metaphor
A Page at the Orchestra
Athanasius Kircher on the Beauty of Knowing Everything
The Note
Epilogue: “Man, That Woman Can Talk!”
Recessional Poem: “Josefa de Ayala/Josepha von Óbidos (1630–1684): Stilleben, ca. 1660–1670”
Contributors
Curriculum Vitae of Lorraine Daston
Index of Authors and Subjects

Citation preview

What Reason Promises

What Reason Promises Essays on Reason, Nature, and History Edited by Wendy Doniger, Peter Galison, and Susan Neiman

ISBN 978-3-11-045339-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-045511-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-045456-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: View of Kirscher’s Museum (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_of_Kirscher’s_Museum_Wellcome_L0015740. jpg, retrieval: 11/20/2015). This file comes from Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Typesetting: jürgen ullricht typosatz, Nördlingen Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

For Lorraine Daston, June 9, 2016

Table of Contents Amy Edith Johnson Processional Poem: If we could know Peter Galison Introduction

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Reason Expanded Susan Neiman Is Reason Defensible?

3

Nancy Cartwright The Natural and the Moral Order: What’s to Blame? Philip Kitcher Rationality for Dummies?

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Robert Richards Objectivity and the Theory of the Archetype Simon Goldhill Thus We See: Objectivity and Archaeology David Nirenberg Love = 46 Caroline Bynum Medieval Miracles as Evidence

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Wendy Doniger Myth, Reason, and Rationality

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26

38

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Table of Contents

Nature Enframed Marina Warner Dwelling Under the Sea, or the Wonder of a Glass Sponge Deborah R. Coen Miss Fielde’s Nests

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Gerald Holton Revisiting Mein Weltbild

88

Dominique Pestre Knowledge and Rational Action: The Economization of Environment, and After 93 Horst Bredekamp Galilei’s Spiral Scribbles, Campanella and Fludd Glenn W. Most Heraclitus Fragment B123 DK Sam Schweber Some Comments on Emergence

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William C. Wimsatt Anthropomorphism and Science Fiction

136

David Shulman Empirical Observation and Embodied Nature in Sixteenth-century South India 142

History Refracted Peter Galison Limits of Localism: The Scale of Sight Robert Pippin Discipline(s)

171

155

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Anthony Grafton Good Company: Spinoza the Traditionalist and Some Unexpected Friends 178 Daniel Garber Historicizing Novelty

186

Rivka Feldhay Literary Knowledge between Translation and Migration: The Case of Dostoevsky in Israel 195 Michael D. Gordin Crab Nebulous 206 Andrew Abbott Reason, Nature, Metaphor Carla Nappi A Page at the Orchestra

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Ingrid Rowland Athanasius Kircher on the Beauty of Knowing Everything

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Caroline A. Jones The Note 234 M. Norton Wise Epilogue: “Man, That Woman Can Talk!”

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Hans-Jörg Rheinberger Recessional Poem: “Josefa de Ayala/Josepha von Óbidos (1630–1684): Stilleben, ca. 1660–1670.” 253 Contributors

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Curriculum Vitae of Lorraine Daston Index of Authors and Subjects

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Amy Edith Johnson

Processional Poem: If we could know I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! Shelley, Ode to the West Wind “Once when I took a painful fall,” [Andre Weil] recalled, “my sister Simone could think of nothing for it but to run and fetch my algebra book, to comfort me.”1 If we could know. If we could understand how we knew, if we knew. We strive to use what reason promises—a sort of tool (think of the crossbill’s beak)—to open up the cross-grained hints of nature. Yes, the same that bids the leopard stalk the antelope bids us stalk genome, boson; gorge the mind with nature. Can we ever have our fill? Is reason strong to serve us, if refined by reason? Unaccommodated man, naked and torn, is curiously inclined to be consoled by something understood, pressing equations to the wounds until certainty has soaked up the tears and blood.

1 http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/03/magazine/the-lives-they-lived-andre-weil-numbersman.html

Peter Galison

Introduction Reason stakes a bigger territory than the enclosed yard of universal rules. Nature expands over a far larger region than an eternal category of the natural. And history—our understanding of the past—refuses to be confined to a pasture of narrow-gauge claims to an unencumbered truth of how things happened. From start to finish, the essays collected here will not be boxed in by such putatively eternal categories. These reflections do more than that: they will not even stay within the more expansive categories themselves. Time after time, our co-authors productively step over the lines separating reason, nature, and history, and return with gains from those trespasses.

Reason Expanded Leibniz had great hopes for his characteristica universalis, his formal system of thought that would provide humankind with a passe-partout. But the key jammed in the locks of the great vaults of knowledge that Leibniz had hoped to open, and successive generations—not least the logical positivists—ultimately found their magic key wasn’t as magic as they had hoped. For Susan Neiman, Immanuel Kant’s picture of reason has much more to offer, especially if it is not taken as a dogmatic system or one accounted for and dismissable by its historical surround. Kant recognized that reason itself had a history, and that we have long been prone to searching desperately for certainty where it does not exist. A right conception of reason, a wider one than formalism allows, would be liberating ethically and politically. Indeed, in quite practical matters of ethical judgment, a sharp divide between natural and ethical orders is, as Nancy Cartwright argues, hard to sustain. Track a causal chain backwards from, say, a mistreated child within the protective services, and you may get to blame a social worker. But it will not go far in preventing future incidents, even some just like the one in question; it also blurs the boundary of “natural” and ethical inculpation. Treat the system as a system designed to prevent certain kind of occurrences and you might do better. But here too the natural order (mechanisms or systems) is not outside of ethical reasoning (preventing harms). In many ways, Philip Kitcher, Cartwright, and Neiman are on the same side; all argue that it is a fool’s errand to search, perseverally, for a pure, Leibnizian reduction of ethics to a calculus. Kitcher takes the story through another chapter,

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recalling how Gottlob Frege and his followers hoped that his version of calculation would one-up Leibniz’s. Through formalizing logic, Frege hoped, he could distill all meaningful philosophical questions to calculations. Kitcher notes that, in the many decades since, some philosophers have held onto reduction-tocalculation as an ideal, others as something that might be true in principle (though not available in fact) and yet others have thought that logical reduction is a practical program to be pursued. This just won’t work even in its most abstract formulation: even if we could reduce ethics to calculation, it would resemble nothing so much as the inhabitant of Searle’s Chinese room: translating by rote, without understanding. An ethical reasoning without understanding, as Kitcher sees it, isn’t ethics at all. Scientific rationality often claims abstract virtues other than calculation—not least, objectivity. Grappling with the historical development of objective depiction presented by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their Objectivity (where they tracked the way that many scientists began supplementing idealization with a mechanical form of objectivity in the mid nineteenth-century and then supplemented that, in the mid-twentieth century, with the possibility of relying on trained judgment), Simon Goldhill and Robert Richards offer their own expert judgment on the distinctiveness of their areas of inquiry. Richards stresses that idealized depiction of creatures and plants persists powerfully into the contemporary period, often bypassing the more mechanical, self-abnegating ideals of other sciences. Similarly, Goldhill argues that in archaeology, the site explorers never entirely wanted to leave the picture; they never got, never read, or never obeyed any injunction to self-abnegate. Our philosophical-mythological stories, with Heraclitus on one side and Parmenides on the other, offer us ways of thinking about the logic of the world: infinite change, infinite sameness. David Nirenberg takes this long and much discussed contestation between repetition and difference, capturing in his marvelously titled “Love =” our constant tendency to cross from talk of the essence of philosophy to talk of the nature of love and its deep link to sameness. We may start with reason, but seem hell-bent to head for its limits. Reason never stops with rules alone; we need, as so many of our authors insist, a more capacious category than a rule-driven rationality. Speaking of medieval miracles, Carolyn Bynum follows Lorraine Daston’s focus on the historical shift from miracles as evidence for the sacred to the hunt for evidence of miracles. Bynum extends that inquiry into miracles even further. She uses this history of absent evidence to inquire into the nature of history writing more generally. Myths are not only miracles, though myths can contain them. With Wendy Doniger as our guide, we can come to see myths as always shrugging off, even defying reason. Myths, she argues, instantiate intuition as perhaps nothing

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else, all the while throwing sand in the eyes of evidence. Reason, expanded reason as a form of navigating the world, is elbowed out by rules, by rationality.

Nature Enframed Literature and science frame nature, one way or another, on a microscope slide, a diorama, a zoo, a garden, a mathematical model. Marina Warner reads and rereads “’Abd Allah of the Sea” as a tale or myth—but also as a stunning display of maritime marvels, like the sponge, that could elicit pleasure and good luck. Sponges might be tokens, but they were at the same time “useful” as a transformer of seawater into glass. Observing nature, even through stories, can be the most patient non-event (an ant’s hesitation) or the most astonishing revelation (of the magical powers of the sponge). The sciences constantly impose grids: of methods, observations, and models. Sometimes those grids are too confining. Deborah Coen follows the turn-of-thetwentieth-century naturalist, Adele Field, as she painstakingly monitored the ant farm colonies behind glass. Field was convinced that only her new and uniquely tenacious form of close, long-running, and individually-focused ant observation could reveal the nature of the insects’ coordination. To what extent is the nature of our knowledge of nature fundamentally brought into question even at the highest level of the physical sciences? Gerald Holton sets Albert Einstein in the cross-fire of an all-out, years-long battle between the German physicist Max Planck (who defended Einstein’s work from early days) and the Austrian polymath physicist/philosopher/psychologist Ernst Mach (whose work was inspirational to Einstein in his critique of absolute space and absolute time). Mach insisted that we humans were inextricably present in our science, and it is we who ultimately must arbitrate our knowledge through our own senses and perceptions. Planck, by contrast, wanted nothing to do with such perceived anthropocentrism, insisting that the deeper, absolute truths of physics ought be discoverable by any species in any far-flung corner of the universe. A rather more direct, less philosophical form of enframing occurs as the national and international regulatory agencies struggle to limit environmental degradation. Here Dominique Pestre argues within the expanding economic sphere, that the very act of defining the harms of pollution leads to a vision of problems as “solved” if those harms can be appropriately compensated. But that compensation is quickly folded into the cost of doing business, and that homo economicus march accelerates with Growth towing Gaia into the troubled era of the Anthropocene. Horst Bredekamp presents a different sort of knowledge in exploring the value of forged scientific documents in the now notorious case of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius.

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In different ways, we are all too aware that it is not given to us to see nature simply through direct observation nor through our theories. Glenn Most takes a simply stated but difficult to parse sentence from Heraclitus: “A nature tends to hide,” and works at extracting its meanings. For the Greeks, Most tells us, nature (phusis) is not a nature that pre-exists humans, but instead a widespread character of things, as applicable to a city as to a mountain. But even if the world becomes ever more visible to us, the nature of things is not on the surface, as phusis hides. This ancient preoccupation with the extricability of knowledge continues. In fact, a good example can be found in the twentieth century, when scientists from a variety of disciplines wondered whether our description of nature is ever fully given by a theoretical scheme—or does a scheme, like quantum mechanics, actually produce, in some limits, classical physics? That is the question Sylvan (Sam) Schweber poses. Dubbed “emergence” and argued for in different ways, the idea that concepts can break out from a starting framework has many forms. Could the ordinary inorganic laws of the universe give rise to life? Can the laws and properties of physics ever account for why they are the way they are and not otherwise? In our current disciplinary division, it is clear these sorts of questions lie on the boundary of physics, philosophy, and theology. One could come to the question of framing nature from the opposite angle: not, What do we impose on nature? But instead, What are we as minds? It is one of the pleasures of this collection of essays that we can bring together William Wimsatt and David Shulman, who pose this question very similarly, though in staggeringly different contexts. Wimsatt, thinking of the United States between 1979 and 2014, wants to know whether we should treat robots as people, in cognition, consciousness, and gender. Shulman, addressing the study of nature in sixteenth-century south India, wants to know how in that period and place stars, mountains, and rivers came to be conscious, loquacious, and gendered. Both expand nature, historically and conceptually, beyond an assembly of silent objects brought together for scientific inquiry.

History Refracted For the authors of this volume, asking about reason means pursuing a wider field than a rule-structured rationality and addressing nature as more than mere objects, ready for science. In a very similar spirit, the third cluster of essays take an expansive, and critical, look at the project of the writing of history itself. Peter Galison and Robert Pippin argue, along different lines, against a reductionist history. For Galison, the immense productivity of local history is something to celebrate, its particularity, its texture, its fluid back-and-forth between social,

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ethical, and intellectual developments. At the same time, he warns that the supposition that local histories exhaust what we want to know can be very dangerous: history unfolds on a myriad of scales that do not collapse only to the micro. Look only at the local and you can miss the effects of mass actions of communication, transport, and societal mobilization. Pippin too sounds a cautionary note about the ways that disciplines, even, especially, some of the new inter-disciplines, can all too easily slide into an imperial mode; neuroaesthetics, for example, professes to shunt aside the unfolding of values and meaning from the history of art, and in its place to see nothing but neuronal paths that respond only to symmetry or a particular juxtaposition of colors. Historical scale can be judged with different metrics. For Anthony Grafton, who here is interested in the historical interpretation of Spinoza, the problem has to do with a too-small intellectual contextualization of the great philosopher. Over the years, Spinoza explainers have zeroed in on a small group of radical and rather marginal figures, ignoring works by more mainstream and trilingual scholars. Broadening the context—looking out, intellectually—significantly enriches our understanding of who Spinoza was. Grafton is an historian who uses philosophical texts to explore the development of pre-modern thought. Daniel Garber, reciprocally, is a philosopher keen to use history to broaden our grasp of how values change in philosophy. In particular, Garber takes on the crucial earlymodern question of how novelty itself came to be both an enticing promise and a dire threat to a secure grasp of the world. But whether seen from history or seen from philosophy, both authors urge us to open up our inquiry to the evolution of questions about what counts as knowledge. Very much in the spirit of Lorraine Daston’s work, two of our essayists, Rivka Feldhay and Michael Gordin, use literature as a refracting lens through which to view historical understanding. Feldhay starts with Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons (famously badly translated as The Possessed), the great novelist’s reading of the battle between conservative and revolutionary. No one comes out looking too good: the various revolutionary nihilistic and absurd ideologies are pitted against a hapless and ineffectual elite utterly unable to cope with a destructive wave about to crash on them. But her analysis goes further: how could one read the early Zionists’ Hebrew translation of the novel, how could young socialist-Zionist intellectuals map their struggles, how could the post-Holocaust generation eek out meaning from the Demons? Here we have history translated and calibrated over and again: A post-1947 generation reading, a 1920s generation reading, an 1872 novel analyzing an incipient political showdown. Like Feldhay, Michael Gordin also begins with an old Russian book and uses it to extricate historical meaning, starting from a bizarre excerpt from Turgenev with a large black crab, a spiritualist, and a gambling scene in Baden-Baden. But from there, Gordin is off

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to the races, seeing through this marginal black crab into a Russian world of intermixed religion, science and politics. Seeing philosophy through history, seeing history through literature—these are just the sorts of things that Lorraine Daston has been after for a good long time. Andrew Abbott puts Daston’s own writing under the metaphor microscope, as he explores, in line with Daston herself, how the once unified category of nature is re-understood through historical and theoretical analysis. One could take a step further, throwing into relief the choice not just of metaphor, but of writing itself. Here, Carla Nappi writes (I would rather just refer you to the piece) an onomatopoeic sound-word performance of drums, bells, and cymbals from the Qing period that pushes us to wonder about the far limits of what writing can do. History read, history heard. We are learning these days a great deal about how to situate written history and written sources with other forms of learning. Now, how could one end otherwise but through a reflection on citations and notes? Ingrid Rowland quite beautifully captures the loose, oral history of quotations. Even as Athanasius Kircher self-celebrates citing Plato (“there is nothing more beautiful than knowing everything”), Kircher is reinterpreting and re-ascribing. Beyond the irony of not quite knowing the “knowing everything,” Rowland points allusively to the always interpreted, always re-worked nature of history. Finally, Caroline Jones’s essay is on note-taking, from Pascal, through Benjamin and Hans Haacke, to the prodigious, hand-inscribed records of thoughts and readings that Lorraine Daston has kept most all of her career. Notes are an appropriate point at which to end these essays, for these jottings are memory aids and inspirations, self-directed admonitions, plans, and acknowledged debts to other scholars. They are, in pithy, fragment form, the very stuff of why and how, for hundreds of years, we make, re-make, and extend reason, nature, and history. A final note from Wendy Doniger: The essays in this volume are framed by two poems, Amy Edith Johnson’s Processional Poem, “If we could know,” which also furnished the title of this volume—“What Reason Promises”—and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s Recessional Poem, “Stilleben, ca. 1660–1670,” a meditation on margins and the center, on the tension between the image and the thing itself, another slant on the problem of perception and observation that is one of the themes of this collection of essays. The penultimate contribution is a personal tribute from Norton Wise to Lorraine Daston, finally letting the cat out of the bag, for, though this is not a Festschrift (Ceci n’est pas une Festschrift), it is, of course, inspired by the work of Lorraine Daston.

Reason Expanded

Susan Neiman

Is Reason Defensible? Abstract: Immanuel Kant’s picture of reason has much to offer today if it is properly understood. Kant recognized that reason itself had a history and that we have long been inclined to seek certainty where it does not exist. His conception of reason, which is both broader and more active than a formalistic one, would be ethically and politically liberating.

Superb recent work in the history of science has shown that many of our most basic concepts cannot be understood independently of particular needs and aims that arose in particular times and places. Most notably, studies of objectivity and rationality by Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison and others should undercut further attempts to determine those concepts abstractly, independent of historical context. Such studies might seem to pose insurmountable problems for philosophy. Even for those of us who reject that idea of philosophy as a search for universal truths—and there are even passages of that great universalist Kant that do so— explicating and understanding concepts like reason, objectivity, truth and justice seem so centrally a part of our business that recognizing the ways in which they are historically bound, often the products of radical contingencies like the Cold War, may seem like an invitation to close up shop. Some have taken up the invitation and moved on to enterprises they find more promising, or at least more enjoyable. The continued undermining of the idea of science (and concepts like reason and objectivity which are central to it) as steady cumulative progress has led many to turn away from such concepts altogether. If reason is too Protean or nebulous to provide much guidance, why not turn to emotion? If science is too unsteady to rest on, why not turn to myth? If even objectivity is a concept with a history—and that, according to Daston and Galison, a rather short one—why not revel in the subjective? Such responses suggest that emotion and myth and subjectivity, in contrast to their counterparts, are concepts that could be determined independently of historical context, a suggestion that a moment’s reflection should undo. Neither reason nor emotion is much like table or chair. To be sure, tables and chairs have histories too. But for all the differences in form and function between a Louis XIV settee, an embroidered Moroccan stool, and a Breuer bent steel armchair, we have no trouble recognizing them as furniture designed to support our upright posture, or placing our backsides upon them. The hard questions concern concepts, not objects, and we shouldn’t let the latter distract us.

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Susan Neiman

This is not the place to attempt a general contribution to debates about historicism or relativism. Instead I’d like to consider whether the contextualization of the concept of reason so brilliantly worked out by Daston and others makes one of my own philosophical projects obsolete. For many years I have explored and defended Kant’s conception of reason as, on the one hand, quite different from that portrayed by most Kant scholars and, on the other, a far better conception than those prevalent today. The first project belongs to the history of philosophy, and might thus be enhanced by the history of science but cannot be threatened by it. Delving into lesser-known texts or rereading known ones to tease out concerns that were driving philosophical work but were ignored in later interpretations of it, developing readings that make sense of otherwise puzzling passages, is just (a large) part of what historians of philosophy do, and only the most insular would refuse to incorporate discoveries from related fields into their own scholarship—especially given how closely philosophy was once entwined with other fields. My own interest, however, was never in history of philosophy for its own sake. I turned to 18th century philosophy because it seemed richer than 20th century philosophy, while resonating with contemporary contexts and concerns. Many 18th century thinkers offered solutions to problems that seemed better than those currently under discussion. Kant’s reconception of reason, in particular, seemed to promise a way out of the emptiness of formalistic conceptions of reason while avoiding the nihilistic urge to abandon reason altogether. That dilemma is as alive today is it was in the 18th century. Why not turn to philosophy’s history to find a solution that had been buried under volumes of misinterpretation? This second project, however, does not properly belong to the history of philosophy, and it does seem to be threatened by scholarship that demonstrates the historical groundedness of every conception of reason. What sense does it make to speak of Kant’s conception of reason being better than contemporary ones, if reason is not the sort of thing that can be determined independently? Discussing Kant’s view of reason in a little detail will, I hope, allow us to move towards an answer. Artaud’s Port Royal Logic, Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding are only the best known of the taxonomies of human thought that kept modern philosophers occupied. Examining and analyzing the different elements of human intellectual activity had been the business of philosophy since Plato; by the 18th century such analyses were given new energy by Newton’s achievements. There seemed no principled reason to doubt that someone could do for the internal world what Newton had done for the external one, laying out laws of psychology as Newton had discovered laws of physics. (Disciplinary boundaries being what they were—or weren’t—at the time, Kant referred to this part of his work as transcendental psychology.) David Hume

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wrote of his longing to become the “Newton of the Mind”, and he was not alone. Figuring out how our minds work was thus a project that occupied many, for many quite general reasons. Kant’s interest in the project had more specific goals, namely, to determine a conception of reason that would be at once theoretical and practical, serving as a foundation for human rights and dignity. Those who have struggled through the thornier passages of the Transcendental Deduction may wonder what they have to do with rights, or indeed humanity at all, but Kant’s few autobiographical notes make his intentions, at least, quite clear: I am by nature an inquirer. I feel the consuming thirst for knowledge, the restless passion to advance ever further, the delights of discovery. There was a time when I believed that this is what confers real dignity on human life, and I despised the common people who know nothing. Rousseau set me right. This imagined advantage vanishes, and I learned to honor human nature. I should regard myself to be far more useless than a common laborer, if I did not believe that my work would contribute to restoring the rights of humanity.1

This poignant description makes no sense whatsoever if we read his major work, the Critique of Pure Reason, as primarily concerned with epistemology—the way the book has most often been read for over a century. Kant’s statement of his goals becomes understandable, however, if we view the first Critique as an attempt to determine a conception of reason that would meet Enlightenment needs for legitimizing the questioning of tradition as well as its demands for equality, while retaining a deep connection to scientific knowledge that any notion of reason must preserve. By showing that any saddler’s son has the ability, indeed the obligation, to think for himself, and that this thought may have a nature-defying power that eludes the edicts of princes, Kant’s claim to put metaphysics in the service of human dignity carries weight. Immanuel Kant was not the first philosopher to make extravagant claims for the practical relevance of his conception of reason. He was educated in the tradition that stemmed from Leibniz, who spent much of his life seeking a form of reasoning he most often called the universal calculus, which would solve every dispute as simply as equations are solved. Once the method was finally discovered, or constructed (a difference that Leibniz, like many of his century, would hedge), even wars could be averted with the invitation, “Come, let us calculate.” Königsberg changed hands several times during Kant’s lifetime—during the Seven Years’ War

1 Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften „Akademieausgabe“, Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Reimer 1900ff., de Gruyter 1922ff), Band XX, p. 44.

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he gave lectures on military strategy, with special emphasis on pyrotechnics, to Russian officers stationed there—but his experience of war was not required to see Leibniz’s failure. One theme running through Kant’s work from the earliest preCritical writings to the last essays is the uselessness of mathematical methods in philosophy, and the irrelevance of mathematical models of reason. Leibniz’s conception of reason, whether in the never-realized form of the universal calculus or in his insufficient conception of the principle of sufficient reason, could not fulfill the goals Kant had in mind. This was not only because it is too formal to achieve its own aims, but even more importantly, because it is heteronomous. Like some of his 20th century heirs, Leibniz’s ideal was a method of reasoning so mechanical as to make error impossible, even should one desire to go astray. Kant’s ideal was a method of reasoning that would both express and foster human freedom. But could any conception of reason withstand the force of Hume’s attack? Leibniz’s conception of reason looked all-encompassing, even imperious; Kant showed it to be both thin and heteronomous, too weak to achieve any real goals. The weakness of reason, however, was the starting point of Hume’s work. He even called it impotent, and famously argued that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. Hume’s insistence on exposing the pretentions of reason was directed towards undermining trust in reason tout court; our lives are, and can only be, guided by passion, custom and habit. If reason is unable to decide whether it’s better to refrain from scratching my little finger or destroying the whole world, it is no use for anything at all. Hume’s wit and elegance may have distracted later admirers from the nihilism implicit in his views, but 18th century German readers were well aware of it. F. H. Jacobi, whose first book was not only a panegyric to Hume but was named after him, invented the word “nihilism” and thought that only a leap of faith (an expression he also coined during the Pantheismusstreit, nearly a century before Kierkegaard) could avert it. That alternative would have been anathema to Hume, of course, but Kant’s reasons for rejecting it were nothing like his. There were many grounds for Kant’s insistence that reason should retain its authority, but the foremost among them was political. For Hume’s politics were as conservative as his religious views were radical. The bold Scottish atheist was a cheerfully confident Tory, and given his metaphysics, no other political view made sense. If reason is too impotent to make any reasonable demands on experience, if custom and habit are all we can rely on for orientation within experience, the very idea of revolutionary change becomes as metaphysically senseless as it is practically dangerous—a position forcefully argued by Hume’s disciple Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Kant, by contrast, argued that the hope that the Revolution aroused in disinterested spectators was proof that the human race is progressing towards a

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better state, whatever the actual consequences of the Revolution turned out to be. For him it was crucial that revolutionary demands for universal freedom and equality were reasonable ones. The conception of reason Kant developed was thus revolutionary in more than one sense. To insure that reason would be practical—active and motivating as neither Leibniz’s nor Hume’s could be—Kant detached reason from both knowledge and objectivity. On his view, objectivity is a rather low-level affair, devoid of the resonance it would have for later thinkers. Objectivity for Kant is exclusively connected to objects, physical things located in space and time. We know them through the workings of the faculty of sensibility, which provides raw data, combined with the faculty of understanding, which provides general structuring concepts. Ideas of reason, on the other hand—things like justice and freedom as well as scientific principles—are not in space and time, and hence cannot be objectively known. Instead, they are regulative principles that orient us in thought and action. The fact that, although not objective, they play a central role in science, insures a core that is crucial if Kant’s conception is to remain a conception of reason. And several post-Kuhnian philosophers of science have praised Kant’s understanding of science’s dependence on principles that are crucial in shaping our knowledge of experience, though experience can neither deny nor confirm them.2 Kant’s conception of reason was never fully developed, and his explication of it is often confusing. Nevertheless, this short sketch should make clear that it is a remarkable conception quite different from any offered before or since.3 What would it mean to defend it—if we accept that it, like any other conception, was constructed to meet particular needs in particular times? It can’t even be argued that it succeeded in meeting the needs it was constructed to fill at the time, for though some of Kant’s contemporaries understood it, the majority did not. While it was clearly influential in strengthening the connections between reason and freedom and equality that were central to Enlightenment political aims and achievements, few paid attention to the care with which he (mostly) worked out the conception of reason itself. Unwilling to forego the hope of absolute knowledge, Hegel found Kant’s conception too timid; overemphasizing Kant’s discussion of rules, the Romantics found it too rigid. One of the worst writers as well as the best thinkers in the history of philosophy, Kant himself shares part of the blame for the misunderstandings. But given how many ways Kant’s conception of

2 See especially Gerd Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (Basil Blackwell, 1969) and Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Harvard University Press, 1992). 3 I have described this conception more fully in Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists, chapter 7 (Harcourt, 2008). Those interested in an even fuller description may be interested in Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (Oxford University Press, 1994).

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reason was misunderstood, what would be the sense of trying to understand, and use, it now? One 20th century philosopher who did not misunderstand it was Walter Benjamin, who called post-Kantian attempts to unite reason and nature “eleventh-hour reactionary flights from the honesty of Kant’s dualism.”4 I have argued elsewhere that Kant’s conception of reason is hard to accept, because it requires us to acknowledge a gap between reason’s ideas of the way the world should be and our own experience of the way the world is, that can never be overcome. But that would be reason’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity—Kant’s definition of Enlightenment. If accepting a Kantian notion of reason may seem difficult, it could make certain things easier as well. I am thinking, to begin with, of the nostalgia for the Cold War that arose in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.5 Frightening though it had been to contemplate a nuclear arsenal large enough to extinguish life on earth several times over, there had always been comfort in the thought that the men controlling the buttons acted according to principles that could be easily analyzed by game theorists working for the RAND Corporation. “It was an article of faith that the Soviet enemy was coolly calculating its strategic interests in exactly the same terms as the Americans, the adversaries conceived as mirror images of each other.”6 Even those who knew nothing about game theory or the RAND Corporation were acquainted with the apt anagram MAD.7 However deeply they were opposed to each other, a nuclear war would surely lead to the destruction of both, a prospect so inimical to each power’s selfinterest they would have to be crazy to start one. And indeed, the carefully calculated arms race succeeded in bankrupting the Soviet Union and preventing the mutually assured destruction that both leaders and citizens of the superpowers feared. Confrontations like the Cuban Missile Crisis actually served to confirm our trust in a model of rationality that would keep the world turning. Americans and Russians depicted each other in demonic terms, but they were terms that rested on commitment to a shared conception of rationality that made life negotiable. Small wonder 9/11 left many nostalgic. How could one negotiate with enemies who not only commanded scores of fighters cheerfully seeking their

4 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Suhrkamp, 1991) Band II, p. 32. 5 The fact that such nostalgia has temporarily receded in view of recent events in the Ukraine does not affect my central claim. 6 Lorraine Daston,“The Paradoxes of Self-Interest,” unpublished talk given at the Einstein Forum, 2013. 7 Mutual Assured Destruction, for those who still didn’t get it.

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own doom but, as it emerged, were perfectly willing to contemplate devastation on a scale that had horrified both superpowers? Al Qaeda’s disregard of the rational considerations that kept the Cold War in balance is not an accident; its attack on Wall Street and the Pentagon was, among other things, an attack on a particular notion of rationality itself. Al Qaeda’s disgust with that notion unites it with members of the U.S. Tea Party and even their moderate European cousins, members of right-wing nationalist groups currently opposing the EU. I am not accusing these diverse groups of irrationality, though there is plenty of that in plain view. The first two reject scientific evidence for everything from evolution to climate change. The latter groups may be less hostile to arguments from the natural sciences, but seem impervious to the overwhelming evidence that without a strong EU, every nation that belongs to it will be globally irrelevant in a matter of decades. Richard Dawkins and others who wish to mock such groups have no trouble finding examples of beliefs and behavior that violate minimal standards of scientific and instrumental reasoning. If our interest is not in mocking but understanding them, we should view each as a helpless, often twisted, but effective way not of violating standard canons of rationality but of defying them. For all the differences between such groups, they are united by a rejection of the model of rationality embedded in homo economicus, the human being considered “…solely as a being who desires wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficiency of means for obtaining that end.”8 John Stuart Mill, whose work engendered the term, added that no political economist “…was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted.”9 Mill’s caveats were ignored, and many economists and policy makers found his arbitrary definition convenient, although many criticized it for failing to describe us. Crucially, most of the criticism concerned the ways in which we fall short of this model of rationality, focusing on the ways in which passions and perceptual distortions routinely prevent us from maximizing utility in the ways the model demands. Too little of the criticism addresses the ways in which this model falls short of us, and hence is liable to outrage those who refuse to view reason as reducible to a means of maximizing self interest, or value as reducible to market value. Al Qaeda’s rejection of homo economicus is the most explicit, reflected in the images of Osama bin Laden on t-shirts and bath towels sold throughout the developing world. Doubtless some of the admiration they expressed was for the

8 John Stuart Mill, On the Definition of Political Economy (in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Ed. J.M. Robson.University of Toronto Press), Essay 5, pp 38 and 48. 9 Ibid.

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man who first attacked and then eluded the world’s largest military power, but what was most often esteemed was the fact that he gave up a massive fortune in order to do so. Bin Laden spurned a lifestyle of luxury available only to a handful of the earth’s inhabitants in order to live in a cave. A more concise disdain for homo economicus would be hard to find. The flurry of research that followed 9/11 showed that bin Laden was no exception. Contrary to what (both neoliberal and Marxist) materialism might have predicted, those drawn to terrorism were not the wretched of the earth.10 Nor were many fueled by fantastic visions of post-mortem gain. After interviewing hundreds of jihadis, anthropologist Scott Atran quotes one jihadi leader: “If someone came to me wanting to join the jihad in order to gain virgins in paradise I would slam the door in his face.”11 Suicide terrorists are not concerned with maximizing utility in this or any other world, and they are contemptuous of those who are. The Tea Partiers do not share the jihadis’ most destructive methods, but their rage is directed towards many of the same targets. Perhaps most interesting to consider are the right-wing nationalists currently organizing to undermine the EU. Comparatively moderate, they avoid the extreme contempt for fact and argument that marks the others. Initially surprising are the ways in which rightwing nationalist groups make common cause, forming far more extensive and active networks than their internationalist opponents. What unites nationalist parties whose raison d’etre is the primacy of their own tribe? I submit they are united at least in part by reaction to the most common pro-European narrative: let us celebrate the end of the glorification of great men and the wars they lead us into, and rejoice in the fact that we now trade with our neighbors instead of mowing them down. It is a narrative that appeals to nothing but a particular view of rational calculation, devoid of any ability to inspire. Geert Wilders and Marine LePen may be racists and demagogues, but they win followers who want to glorify something, and there’s nothing disreputable about that desire. They are repelled by the idea that the only human bonds are bonds of trade, the only human aspirations a heap of goods. The nationalists may not offer much, but they offer a vision of something beyond the helpless instrumental rationality on which the defenders of Europe rest their case. The EU’s efforts to promote support for the Union rely on lame lists of utilitarian benefits that move no one, and are often likely to repel.

10 See Scott Atran, “The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism,” in Washington Quarterly, Volume 29, spring 2006, and “Global Network Terrorism,“ briefing to the National Security Council, White House, 2006. See also the recent studies of terrorists by Mark Juergensmeyer, Louise Richardson, and Jessica Stern. 11 Atran, Ibid.

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Why suggest that the three groups here mentioned are rejecting a particular concept of rationality rather than rejecting reason altogether? Whatever they call it, no group that seeks to recruit others can do without some form of persuasion that seeks to create trust and establish legitimacy. Otherwise they could limit themselves to the use of guns and howls. The sheer number and variety of attacks on reason make it easy to forget that it is a fluid concept whose variations have little in common but some connection or other to thinking, and a normative tone; and easier to forget our dependence on some notion of it. Even myths and magic cannot do without it entirely; as long as we use language to explain or justify anything we will depend on some forms of reasoning, though we may often reason badly. I suspect that it is fear of the fluidity of the concept of reason that drives some thinkers to try to pin it down through formalization, insisting that anything that doesn’t meet the (latest) formal account is unreasonable. Those fears are often driven by the most honorable concerns. From Leibniz to the Cold War strategists brilliantly discussed in How Reason Almost Lost its Mind, the desire to avert war by finding the right form of reasoning was paramount.12 Even without the threat of war on the nearest horizon, the longing for the kind of certainty provided by mathematics has played a role in modern thought that is as deep as it is pernicious. For every formal model of reason produces a backlash among those who are certain that this does not describe what makes them think and act. Accepting the formalizers’ insistence that this model of reason is the only possible valid one, many rush to embrace irrationality. They needn’t be suicide bombers or rightwing activists; some of your colleagues and students are probably among them. Kant’s work described our longing for certainty as well as the impossibility of obtaining it in matters where we seek it most. That description is part of his reconception of reason itself, and one of the best means for defending it. In contrast to his predecessors, Kant believed that reason has a history. Ascribing Leibniz’s dogmatic formalism to reason’s infancy, and Hume’s skepticism to its adolescence, Kant was convinced he had brought reason to adulthood. Though his philosophy of science was quite contemporary in emphasizing the revisability of scientific truths, it’s doubtful that he could have come to see his conception of reason as one among many, fueled by particular forces and interests. Yet if the insights provided by historians of science make this conclusion unavoidable, they don’t prevent us from defending Kant’s conception as the most sound to date.

12 Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (The University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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Perhaps most importantly, those insights teach us that there is more than one conception of reason; the formalists have no monopoly. Understanding that does not, of course, leave us at liberty to call anything a conception of reason, but if it leads us to examine our own, we will soon be aware of how unclear our conceptions of reason actually are. Clarifying those conceptions, and taking up elements of Kant’s where useful, then becomes a matter not of proof but of choice. If we eschew the mechanical reason of the formalists, and want reason to remain connected to freedom, it cannot be otherwise. No one will suppose that a freer, broader, deeper conception of reason would have stopped bin Laden, but it might give your colleague or your student pause. And who knows what she might set in motion?

Nancy Cartwright

The Natural and the Moral Order: What’s to Blame? Abstract: A sharp divide between natural and ethical orders is hard to sustain when it comes to questions of causation and blame. We might model causation as a process in which one event leads to another and that to another. Or we might model the underlying system, or mechanism, that affords some causal processes and precludes others (pressing the lever on a toaster initiates a process that browns bread, but not so for pressing the lever on the toilet). What we blame or praise depends on which model we choose: Is it the system that fails when a child is abused or the social worker on the case? Conversely, what we pick as a cause can depend on which actions warrant praise or blame.

“You cannot derive ought from is.” This is a lesson that has been taught generation after generation for centuries. Yet it is regularly ignored. Lorraine Daston has a story that helps make sense of this. When we want to think about what is right, to understand what constitutes a good society or a good life or a good set of actions—or to figure out how to achieve these—we need a model of order; and our most readily available, and perhaps only suitable, model is that of the order of nature. The natural order becomes our model for the moral order. I want to develop this story by exploring some examples from an area I have been working in recently, jointly with philosopher of social science Eleonora Montuschi and Eileen Munro, author of the UK Government’s 2011 Munro Review of Child Protection: child welfare. Here we see that ideas about the moral and the natural order are inextricably intertwined and that different understandings of the natural order flow across to the moral. The central conduit between the two consists of linked views about causality and responsibility. So, although I illustrate with the child welfare cases, the lessons should apply far more broadly. When it comes to thinking about causality, there is a venerable tradition in philosophy that pictures the modeling relation the other way round: from the moral order to the natural. This tradition is rooted in the idea that causation, though a relation of central importance to our ability to predict and control, is not a genuine sui generis relation in the natural world. What then is it? There are, first off, various versions of the currently popular manipulation theory of causality, that causes are things we can manipulate to produce results. The canonical version of a second account of what it is is due to the legal philosophers H.L.

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A. Hart and Tony Honoré, who single out from the net of events in the past of an outcome, that the cause is the event that is contrary to the norm, where very often this will be a legal, moral or social norm. The Hart and Honoré account will play a role in my discussion but it is not my central focus, for I am looking to cases where different ideas about how causes operate in the natural order support different moral and social norms. Let us begin with a case. In 2004 in the London Borough of Haringey, 17month-old Peter Connelly was found dead in his crib. The child had suffered fractured ribs and a broken back after months of abuse at home. His mother, her partner and a lodger were jailed for his death. Peter had been seen by health and social services professionals from Haringey Council 60 times in the eight months before he died. In consequence, blame was heaped on the Director of Haringey Children’s Services, Sharon Shoesmith. For instance, the Minister of Education Ed Balls sacked Shoesmith with immediate effect in a live press conference on television; and both the news media and the public were openly hostile to Shoesmith. She even received death threats in the mail for her supposed role in Peter Connelly’s death. There seem to be two rationales for this. One is the desire for prevention; the other, outrage and the need to punish. A BBC news interviewer represented the first when he urged: If nobody accepts the blame, “…how can we stop it happening again?”1 Eileen Munro gives a good sense of the second when she says: “When society is shocked and outraged by a child’s terrible tale of suffering, there seems a basic human desire to find a culprit, someone to bear the guilt for the disaster and to be the target of feelings of rage and frustration.”2 Shoesmith defended herself and her Services: “We should not be put into blame”; it does not produce “anything productive” and obscures “the bigger picture.”3 If not that, then what should we do? Munro offers an alternative, though not incompatible, perspective when she claims that one should see “child protection as a systems problem.”4 These two moral perspectives mirror two different models of the production of outcomes in the natural order. The first focuses on causal processes, or causal chains; the second, on what I have called “nomological machines” and subsequent work, primarily in the philosophy of biology, labels “mechanisms.”

1 “Shoesmith: ‘I don’t do blame’,” last modified May 28, 2011, http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/ today/newsid_9499000/9499424.stm. 2 Eileen Munro, “Improving practice: Child protection as a systems problem,” Children and Youth Services Review 27 (2005): 378. 3 “Shoesmith: ‘I don’t do blame’”. 4 Munro, “Improving practice,” 375.

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Causal processes first. A causal process or causal chain is a series of happenings, each one of which produces the next, one after the other, until at last the outcome in view is achieved. Studying these processes is the meat and potatoes of much of modern scientific endeavor, from process tracing in biomedical science and toxicology to a vast variety of statistical comparative methods, including the rampant use of randomized controlled trials in medicine and increasingly in social science, that aim to show that such a process has occurred, albeit without tracing out its steps. And when it comes to policy, from education to crime to early childhood intervention or aging, there is now a huge evaluation industry whose job is not just to measure outcomes to determine whether a policy has been followed by the desired outcomes but rather to show whether the policy was responsible for those outcomes—whether the policy and the outcome were connected by an appropriate causal process. This kind of evaluation methodology is at the heart of the blame attribution we observe in cases like that of Peter Connelly. As Munro describes, when a tragedy like the death of Peter Connelly occurs, “The standard response is to hold an inquiry, looking in detail at the case and trying to get a picture of the causal sequence of events that ended in the child’s death…We are tracing a chain of events back in time to understand how it happened.…”5 Here the moral and natural order dissolve into one another. Where does the backwards tracing stop? As Munro points out, the “events that bring the investigation to a halt usually take the form of human error.”6 Munro also notes a peculiar feature of these child welfare cases, reflected in the death threats that Sharon Shoesmith received, which connects them with the Hart and Honoré account of causation: “Unlike the police investigation, which focuses on the perpetrators of the homicide, these inquiries focus primarily on how the professionals acted, judging them against the formal procedures for working with families and principles of good practice.”7 That is, they look for deviations from the norms of professional behavior: “Practitioners did not comply with procedures or lapsed from accepted standards of good practice.”8 But as a UK Department of Health pamphlet explains, There are two ways of viewing human error: the person-centred approach and the system approach. The [person-centred]… approach focuses on the psychological precursors of error, such as inattention, forgetfulness and carelessness. Its associated countermeasures are

5 6 7 8

Munro, “Improving practice,” 377. Munro, “Improving practice,” 378. Munro, “Improving practice,” 377. Munro, “Improving practice,” 377–378.

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aimed at individuals rather than situations and these invariably fall within the “control” paradigm of management. Such controls include disciplinary measures, writing more procedures to guide individual behaviour, or blaming, naming and shaming.9

And this is just what we saw in the case of Sharon Shoesmith with Ed Balls and the BBC interviewer. The Department of Health itself note the parallels in the moral and natural order involved: Aside from treating errors as moral issues, [the person-centred approach] isolates unsafe acts from their context, thus making it very hard to uncover and eliminate recurrent error traps within the system.10 The system approach, in contrast, takes a holistic stance on the issues of failure. It recognises that many of the problems facing organisations are complex, ill-defined and result from the interaction of a number of factors.11

So, what’s a system? Systems—or “mechanisms”—are our second model of how outcomes are produced in the natural order. This model admits causal processes but the processes are not basic. They are in need of deeper explanation. What causal processes can happen and what ones will happen regularly depend on an underlying mechanism that gives rise to them. A mechanism is composed of a number of different parts interacting in some kind of arrangement that makes it explicable why some kinds of causal processes will occur and others will be precluded. A toaster is a mechanism. The structure of the toaster—its parts and the way they are arranged and interact—explains why it is possible to produce toast by plugging it in and pressing on the lever. But mechanisms need not be mechanical in any sense, and indeed, as I mentioned, much of the philosophical work on them recently has been done in studying biology. For instance, when we investigate the firing of neurons, we discover that the receipt of neurotransmitter particles produces a potential difference across the wall at one end of the neuron which causes the movement of this potential difference to move along the neuron. It’s no accident that this process happens, nor that it happens in neurons and not in other places. The scientists investigating this process discovered sodium selective pores in the lining of the neuron wall which open and close to control the movement of a cloud of sodium ions into and out of the neuron, thus supporting the propagation of a potential 9 UK Department of Health, An organisation with a memory: Report of an expert group on learning from adverse events in the NHS (London: The Stationery Office, 2000), 20. 10 UK Department of Health, An organisation with a memory, 20–21. 11 UK Department of Health, An organisation with a memory, 21.

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difference along the neuron. They were learning what the relevant parts of the “mechanism” are and how the arrangement and interactions of these parts allow the causal process under study to occur. Nor need mechanisms be relatively sturdy, as the toaster is; they can be fragile and easy to break, like a fragile peace. Nor need they be static. They can be dynamic, they can change and they can evolve. They can have porous boundaries, and what is in and what is out of the mechanism at any time may be illdefined, as may be whether we continue to see the same mechanism across changes in parts and their interactions. What matters is that it is the way some parts are arranged and interact that makes possible and explains the causal processes that happen and that are likely or unlikely to happen. Social systems, made up of interacting individuals and institutions with their norms, conventions and habits—these too are mechanisms: mechanisms that afford causal processes. Some support desirable causal processes, or undesirable; other make it difficult for these processes to occur. And with this model too, the natural and the moral order dissolve into one another. This is vividly illustrated in the US National Academy of Sciences’ To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System: The title of this report encapsulates its purpose. Human beings, in all lines of work, make errors. Errors can be prevented by designing systems that make it hard for people to do the wrong thing and easy for people to do the right thing. Cars are designed so that drivers cannot start them while in reverse because that prevents accidents. Work schedules for pilots are designed so they don’t fly too many consecutive hours without rest because alertness and performance are compromised.12

The NAS report urges: “The focus must shift from blaming individuals for past errors to a focus on preventing future errors by designing safety into the system.”13 From the systems point of view, the causal process model is the wrong model, not just for the natural order, because it focusses only on surface phenomena and misses out on explanatory depth, but for the moral order. For the kinds of preventative measures the causal process model leads to—recall the UK Department of Health examples: disciplinary actions, writing more procedures to guide individual behavior, or blaming, naming and shaming—these measures are generally unlikely to stop these kinds of sequences occurring.

12 Linda Kohn, Janet Corrigan, and Molla Donaldson, eds., To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2000), ix. 13 Kohn, Corrigan, and Donaldson, eds., To Err Is Human, 5.

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Whether or not the natural order is our most plausible or most available model for moral order, at least in these cases of causation and responsibility the two cannot be easily pried apart.

Philip Kitcher

Rationality for Dummies? Abstract: Gottlob Frege and his followers hoped that his version of calculation would one up Leibniz’s. Through formalizing logic, Frege hoped, he could distill all meaningful philosophical questions to calculations. In the many decades since, some philosophers held onto reduction-to-calculation as an ideal, others as something that might be true in principle (though not available in fact) and yet others that logical reduction is a practical program to be pursued. This just won’t work even in its most abstract formulation; even if we could reduce ethics to calculation, it would resemble nothing so much as the inhabitant of Searle’s Chinese room: translating by rote, without understanding. An ethical reasoning without understanding isn’t ethics at all.

Aber das Beispiel [eines Philosophen] muss durch das sichtbare Leben und nicht bloss durch Bücher gegeben werden, … Nietzsche1

Throughout her distinguished career, Lorraine Daston has been concerned with the relations among rationality, reasonableness, and attempts to provide precise accounts of both. The Introduction to Classical Probability in the Enlightenment begins with a question: “What does it mean to be rational?”2 The recent book, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind—a collaborative venture, but one clearly stamped with Daston’s interests and perspectives—probes “Cold War Rationality” to supply a partial answer: if to be rational is to be reasonable, then rationality is not what the formal models produced by post-war intellectuals in a variety of disciplines claimed it was.3 Just as the earlier book demonstrates brilliantly that the pioneering probabilists hoped to mathematize the mundane reasonableness exemplified in a variety of circumstances, including, most importantly, juridical contexts, the latest of its successors exposes the poverty of attempts to reduce

1 Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Sämtliche Werke, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Volume I, 350). 2 Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) xi. 3 Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost its Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). See especially Chapter 1.

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rationality to the following of algorithmic rules (and why those attempts seemed so important in a world dominated by a nuclear arms race). Although they gave us “Rationality for Dummies,” the RANDy luminaries took that to be just what their times needed. The idea of formalizing reason, whether it is connected to algorithmic rules or to any particular mathematical language, has obvious attractions. Formalization might pave the way to showing a general result about strategic interactions, one that could be supplemented by apparently commonplace psychological assumptions to generate a policy for circumventing the risks of a perilous situation. Or it might enable disputes to be resolved more reliably and more quickly; that apparently was Leibniz’ original dream for his “universal characteristic.” Leibniz’ late nineteenth century heirs, Frege prominent among them, developed systems of mathematical logic so as to reveal, at last, the rigorous foundations of mathematics. In an ironic twist, the efforts disclosed the paradoxes of naïve set theory, prompting Poincaré’s sardonic comment that, after all, logic had not turned out to be sterile but capable of begetting contradictions.4 Frege advertised his elaboration of mathematical logic as answering to an urgent need. Difficulties internal to mathematics (specifically: within real and complex analysis) had required attention to the concepts of convergence and continuity, and ultimately a characterization of the real numbers. Frege saw his own investigations of the concept of natural number as extending this line of necessary research. Many of his contemporaries disagreed. Only in the wake of the set-theoretic paradoxes, with the development of axiomatic set theory and the use of logic to explore the features of axiomatic systems, did the enterprise of seeking firm foundations for the whole of mathematics come to seem important. An outgrowth of that enterprise was, of course, the articulation of a notion of rigorous proof, hailed as exposing an ideal of mathematical rationality. Famously, these developments had an impact on philosophy, inspiring attempts to fashion an explicit and formal account of confirmation in the natural sciences that would mirror the analysis of mathematical proof. Many of the pioneering studies in the theory of confirmation saw pragmatic value in formalization. Through precision and the elimination of ambiguity, claims about the evidential support for scientific claims could be reliably assessed, putting an end to disputes. Philosophy of science returned to the Leibnizian dream: calculation would replace interminable argument.

4 Henri Poincaré, “Les Mathématiques et la Logique”, Revue de Métaphysique et Morale, 14, 1906, 316.

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No critic should deny that the search for formal theories of confirmation, evidence and rationality has sometimes been fruitful. During the past decades, the Frege-inspired tradition has evolved through interaction with developments in other fields, particularly the disciplines that contributed to Cold War Rationality (probabilistic studies of various types, microeconomics, game theory). In many circles, Bayesianism has become the dominant, even the consensus, view about evidence and confirmation. Now Bayes’ Theorem is surely good for some things: it can help people recognize how to understand the import of medical tests with known rates of false positives and false negatives (to cite one outstanding example). Yet when Bayesianism is seen as the be-all and end-all of rationality, and when the distinction between the rational and the reasonable collapses, a dangerous form of imperialism is born. For at least fifty years it has been apparent that major episodes in the history of the sciences do not lend themselves to reconstruction in the formal terms beloved of most philosophers. Because of the equation of rationality and reasonableness with some formal account, discussions about the growth of science pit two unsatisfactory positions against one another: either the history of science exemplifies the preferred formal model or that history is punctuated by irrational (and unreasonable) decisions. Kuhn’s subtle insights, articulated in The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, are either twisted in futile efforts to make them fit one of these versions or they disappear from view. More broadly, in philosophy, Bayesian enchantment infects epistemology, generating discussion after discussion in which probabilities are invoked—even if they are not clearly well-defined, even if there is no obvious sample space for identifying them. Instead of the advantages that should accrue from precision and the elimination of ambiguity, the ploy of “probabilities from nowhere” spawns sterile disputes. Let’s distinguish three different positions that figure in discussions of rationality and its formalization. First is the ideal of formalizing reason: For any mode of reasonable human decision or reasonable human action, it is valuable to provide a formal account of that mode. Second is the thesis of in principle formalizability: For any mode of reasonable human decision or of reasonable human action, it is in principle possible to provide a formal account of it. Third is the thesis of actual formalizability: For any mode of reasonable human decision or of reasonable human action, it is possible to provide a formal account of it using the formal tools currently available; more pithily: if you can’t formalize it in our preferred way, it ain’t reasonable. The ideal is the Leibniz-Frege view that sees great advantages in mathematizing reason. The “in principle” claim is popular with many naturalistically-inclined thinkers, who suppose that, since we don’t proceed reasonably by magic, there has to be—“ultimately”—some precise scientific account of our reasonable procedures; because the bounds of the notion of

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formalization are unspecifiable (who knows how our successors will extend the vocabularies we now have?), this thesis is apparently toothless, and it can’t be used to dismiss the reasonableness of appeals to “judgment” in modes we don’t yet know how to formalize (for example, judgments about the relative importance of solving different clusters of scientific problems). The “in practice” claim, by contrast, lends itself to active imperialism, banning mushy procedures from the realm of the reasonable (often in two steps: first by declaring that they don’t meet the formal conditions on rationality, and then contending that just that notion of the rational exhausts the reasonable). Imperialism causes trouble in discussing the history of science, but perhaps its principal damage is inflicted by inspiring dismissal of the humanities and social sciences. Cognitive worth only accrues to domains in which conclusions are generated by rational procedures. The “in practice” thesis restricts these to the natural sciences (and maybe a few isolated parts of the social sciences). All the rest is unnecessary mush. Yet it should be entirely evident that the versions of imperialism prominent in “science boosterism” during the past century are fatally flawed. For, whether they conceive the conditions on rationality in the style of the Fregean tradition, or whether they opt for some probabilistic apparatus, all depend crucially on specifying admissible transitions within a language that is already given. One major lesson from the history of the sciences, a lesson independently articulated within classical and contemporary pragmatism, is that important, apparently reasonable, decisions and revisions depend on framing or reframing the options taken to be available. Any approach that excludes conceptualization and reconceptualization from the domain of the reasonable must be incomplete. Of course, these processes of framing are not susceptible to the language-relative schemes of formalization currently in vogue. Most people have been led, at some time of their lives, to reframe the ways in which they think of others. Habituated to specific forms of language, they have said things that wound some of those who hear them—and, one day, there is a protest. In light of the protest they—reasonably—take stock, eventually amending their old ways of thinking and talking. A similar shift of frame can sometimes be accomplished without any direct encounter. A literary work or a drama, an ethnography or a film, can prompt a sweeping change of perspective. So, for example, Dickens modified the attitudes of many of his readers, changing their ways of thinking about their society and its treatment of the poor. Daston has often contrasted the broader vision of Enlightenment reason with the narrower rationality of the twentieth century, and her account of the human costs of imperialism (while by no means incompatible with the thesis that there have been gains from the development of formal tools) is one the world needs to hear. Yet, even in the Enlightenment itself, there are hints of the later troubles.

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Fans of Adam Smith who read parts of The Wealth of Nations (and none of The Theory of Moral Sentiments) are easily inspired to accept a vision of human beings as belonging to the fictitious species Homo economicus. Smith’s older contemporary, David Hume, encourages a similar narrowing of the notion of reasonableness, when he asserts that “’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”5 Although Hume intends to limit reason to make room for the passions, his words echo in the proposals of later thinkers who suppose that talk of the reasonableness of sentiments or preferences or value-judgments is false (or meaningless), or who declare that any assignment of probability strictly between 0 and 1 is as reasonable as any other. Daston’s studies remind us of the importance of a more capacious notion of reasonableness, favored by many Enlightenment thinkers (and perhaps even by Hume and Smith, if we can credit them with broader and narrower senses of ‘reason’). The “in practice” thesis, with its attendant imperialism, is, in my view, an intellectual disaster, but I want to close this brief essay with a closer look at the two other claims I distinguished above. On the face of it, the formalization of reason generates advantages—indeed just the advantages Leibniz and Frege claimed for it. If there were a canon of precise rules for modes of decision and action, the reliability of various types of human performance might be improved. Equipped with Rationality for Dummies, people with underdeveloped powers of judgment would do better. Now, given the dearth of formal skills across many parts of the human population, you might worry about just how wide the competent readership of the Dummies manual would be. That, however, isn’t my main concern. Instead, I want to ask if something is lost in a world in which rote following of instructions replaces developed judgment. To approach this issue, we can start with an area of human practice in which the transition has already been effected. For most of human history, most of the people who cooked the food (typically women) have learned how to produce appetizing and nourishing meals by imitating others who already knew how to cook. Today, a significant number of people (and—I’m guessing—probably most men) who cook regularly rely on recipes. Those who oscillate between stovetop and book are sometimes dismissed as “not being real cooks.” That dismissal overlooks the ways in which a practice that begins in rote following can later develop into something very similar to the rich set of skills of cooks who have never consulted a recipe in their lives. It also smacks of snobbishness. Yet there is an important residual point: in a world in which recipe-following was universal,

5 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Book II, Section iii; edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888, 416).

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the skills developed might forfeit creativity—tasty and nourishing dishes might be more reliably produced, but their variety might be more restricted than it would otherwise have been. The example of cookery is (at least philosophically) less interesting than another instance. Philosophical ventures in ethics often seem concerned to find a complete ethical system: they search for a set of fundamental principles that would resolve every possible ethical question. In my view, a “theory of everything ethical” is a pipe-dream, even more fantastic than that of a “theory of everything.” As many philosophers of science, perhaps most prominently Nancy Cartwright, have argued, the sciences (plural) offer accounts of bits and pieces of the natural world.6 To suppose we could do better than that in the ethical case is both implausible and presumptuous. Yet either a complete set of principles or some partial collection would supply resources for the ethically-motivated-but-challenged. In the wake of the philosophical theory, each of us could be supplied with a copy of Ethical Rationality for Dummies. We would go around the world, and, when faced with perplexing ethical situations, we’d turn to our handbook: in every case, given the fantasy of a complete theory; in some cases, on the more realistic “bits and pieces” view. Following rules would substitute for judgment. Yet judgment wouldn’t be completely eliminated. For we’d still have to recognize the situations in which some sort of ethical reflection was called for, and we’d still have to frame the question. Fans of the ideal of formalization would see the judgmental skills exercised here as non-magical, and would favor attempts to formalize them. Let’s suppose (unrealistically!) that here too their goals are realized. The ethical agents of the future are equipped not only with the manual, but also with devices that monitor their situations, beeping insistently when moral dilemmas arise and framing those dilemmas in questions the manual can resolve for them. The inhabitants of this utopian future do the right thing more frequently and more reliably. That is surely a plus. But does it come with a loss? I want to make two points about this fantasy. First, it seems to me implausible that judgment can ever be eliminated. However far you go, and however you pile on the devices, there’s always a moment at which the subject and the collection of performance-aids interact, at which a decision must be made about how to deploy the resources provided. At each stage, perhaps, the mode of judgment can be formalized, but that will simply defer the operation of judgment to some higher level. We have to distinguish two versions of the “in principle” thesis. On the weaker version, it’s possible to replace any particular use of judgment with a

6 Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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formalized counterpart; on the stronger version, there’s a complete formalization of all types of judgment, so that judgment is in principle eliminable. Although the weaker version may be correct, there are Wittgensteinian grounds for supposing that the stronger version is false. That reflects on the ideal of formalization, for we might well think that the formalization of reasonable decision and action might improve reliability for some modes of decision and action, but that it would not do so for all—so that a better ideal would be to introduce formalization where, and only where, it secured increased reliability. The second point poses a deeper challenge to the ideal. The ethical agents of my supposed utopia, equipped with their devices for identifying and responding to difficult situations, are worryingly similar to the hero of a famous philosophical fiction—the lone inhabitant of John Searle’s “Chinese Room.” The occupant of the Chinese Room conducts “conversations” in Chinese by following a look-up table, and Searle famously argued that that type of rote procedure doesn’t suffice for understanding Chinese.7 Whether or not that conclusion is correct, there’s surely something missing in the occupant’s performance. I want to ask if that is also the case for the envisaged “ethical subjects” with their Dummies devices. It seems plausible that there is. Kantians will surely suppose that the way in which the performance is generated really matters to its ethical status—the “good will” and “respect for the moral law” are hard to identify in the scenario envisaged. Even people who lack sympathy for Kant’s ways of framing ethical life are likely to feel that, though the world might contain more ethically correct outcomes than it would otherwise have possessed, that advantage has been purchased at the cost of diminished moral agency. The individual performances have sacrificed a feature that makes ethical life so valuable. Perhaps they have also given up a kind of flexibility required for confronting new types of ethically demanding situations—as with the cookery example, an ability to generate novel responses (which might become necessary as the world changes) has been lost. I leave this thought-experiment with a question, not with firm conclusions: Is the ideal of formalization as straightforward as those who have thought about human reasonableness have often taken it to be? However that question is answered, it is important to be aware of the rich varieties of reasonableness, and of their embodiments in people’s lives. We are rightly grateful for those whose reasonableness—in the widest sense of generous concern for others—shines through their decisions and their actions. Lorraine Daston is not only a brilliant scholar whose books have illuminated the issues surrounding reason. She is also one of the prominent manifestations of reason in that widest, and most important, sense.

7 John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980, 417–24.

Robert Richards

Objectivity and the Theory of the Archetype Abstract: In response to Objectivity, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, this essay argues that that idealized depiction of creatures and plants persists powerfully into the contemporary period, often bypassing the more mechanical, selfabnegating ideals of other sciences.

Lorraine Daston has written frequently on the relationship between art and science, most notably in two influential books. In Wonders and the Order of Nature, she and Katharine Park recounted the collecting activities of medieval and early modern scholars, who discovered certain curiosities (e.g., a tusk of a narwhal), believing them to be wonders of artistic delight (e.g., the horn of a unicorn).1 This was followed by Objectivity, in which she and Peter Galison constructed the history of scientific objectivity.2 They argued that the idea of objectivity had gone through three historical phases. The first stemmed from the early modern period through the mid-nineteenth century, when naturalists attempted to represent kinds of things—e.g., a species of flower, bird, or mammal— focusing on the essential features of the type, those universal structures that were “true to nature.” Such types were illustrated, often by gifted artists, in collections of botanical and zoological atlases. In the second period, as scientists grew wary of the possibilities of subjective bias, they introduced instruments, such as the camera and the kymograph, to achieve “mechanical objectivity” in their illustrations. Thus scientist guarded against incursions of subjective preference by focusing on the concrete individual, rather than succumbing to unstable assumptions about types and essences. And then in the early twentieth century, methods of “trained judgment” were deployed to guard against the wiles of subjectivity, even when hand-drawn illustrations were used. Naturalists who attempted to render objects “true to nature” would base their illustrations on particular objects, which might be brought back from a collecting expedition. Such illustrations did not, however, picture an individual organism— not, for example, a Nankeen Night Heron, but the Nankeen Night Heron, say as rendered by John Gould (1804–1881), chief ornithologist at the British Museum.

1 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 2 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

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Gould, for instance, would sketch birds from life, or more often from samples that had been preserved in spirits of wine and sent back to the museum. He would then work with artists and lithographers to produce vivid color reproductions of organisms, shed of individual peculiarities or blemishes suffered during shipment back to the museum (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: The Nankeen Night Heron; from John Gould’s The Birds of Australia, 1840–1848.

Daston and Galison do not suppose that the three historical periods they discriminate mark abrupt transitions. They allow that older modes of depiction might continue as a regular part of a discipline. Yet, they do not indicate just how deeply techniques of representation from the first period have penetrated into scientific practice right up to the present time, especially in the biological disciplines. Three general considerations, I believe, should be given due weight. First, in many biological specialties—botany, insectology, ichthyology, ornithology, and several other areas of zoology—the color of organisms serves a crucial function in identifying a species. Color photography in monographs, however, only came into general use in the 1930s. Thus hand drawn illustrations transformed into copperplate etchings with aquatint and lithography remained the usual ways biological atlases and catalogues would represent organisms in color. Color-lithographs of original, typical organisms continued to be used through the historical boundaries set by Daston and Galison. Second, even in areas, such as embryology, where color is less important, it would be difficult to use individual specimens

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displaying either marks of particularity or abnormal defects to serve as guides, say, of the stages of fetal development. Even in biology text-books today, where photography is liberally used, the important information is still carried by handdrawn illustrations, often in color. Finally, there is the peculiar feature of their argument: though they contend they are offering a history of objectivity, they simply identify objectivity with what they call “mechanical objectivity,” contrasting objectivity (in this sense) with efforts of representations that were “true to nature.” This gives them leave to claim that “objectivity has not always defined science.”3 But this is anomalous. To write a history of change, as Aristotle knew, one has to specify an object having features that remain the same through the change, while other features fall out or arise. So in a history of objectivity, there ought to be a stratum of the object of inquiry that remains the same, and most historians of science would contend that stratum distinguishes science even as it emerges from other cultural activities in ancient Greece. No objectivity, no science. I will return to this consideration at the conclusion of this essay, but I need to admit that one can only bring such amendments to bear in light of the brilliant accomplishment of Daston and Galison’s book. In this brief essay I will prescind from the first two considerations and rather concentrate on a theory of scientific representation that had its roots in the morphological ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), its flower in the illustrations of Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), and its new life in the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1832) and D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948). This theory and its historical spread bring into focus another meaning for objectivity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Theory of the Archetype in Kant and Goethe In the second half of his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant came very close to enunciating an evolutionary theory, at least one advancing on the transformational ideas of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788). Kant maintained that a naturalist should try to explain the structure and function of biological organisms through the application of mechanistic principles, which alone could yield real understanding; for example, the laws of light refraction help make intelligible the operation of the vertebrate eye. Kant was yet

3 Ibid., p. 17.

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persuaded that unaided mechanism was insufficient; there would be features of organisms the account of which would escape conceptual capture by mechanistic laws. Why, for example, were the various media of the eye situated where they were? What was their purpose? As investigations in the early modern period revealed, the purpose was to cast a coherent image on the retina. Kant declared that mechanism simply could not explain purpose. The naturalist could only approach a more complete understanding, say of the vertebrate eye, if he supposed that an idea had caused the design of the organism and that ultimately an intellectus archetypus conceived the productive idea. Kant cautioned that such assumption of an archetype as responsible for the organization of creatures could only be a regulative idea, a heuristic that might help us uncover further mechanistic laws, the only principles that would yield wissenschaftliches understanding.4 Yet Kant denied that a sufficient set of such principles could ever be discovered. He precluded the possibility that, as he phrased it, some Newton of the grass blade might arise.5 Kant was not far sighted enough to spy that Newton, almost fifty years later, disembarking from a British ship amusingly called Beagle. Kant, though, was more prescient than one might suppose. He did venture a possible scheme for a mechanistic understanding of the origin of species. From the structure of already existing simple organisms, one could imagine mechanical forces deforming that structure so that it became the frame for another species of organism. So, for example, a pattern of bones in an ur-organism—say a fish— might through mechanical forces become stretched and pulled to form the bony skeleton of an amphibian. Kant, though, did not think there was any evidence for such “a daring adventure of reason,” as he called it.6 As I’ll indicate below, a twentieth-century scientist ingeniously supplied mathematical evidence that enabled him to propose such a daring adventure. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was an avid reader of Kant’s third Critique when it first appeared in 1790. Though he rejected much of the first Critique’s epistemology, he found that the Critique of the Powers of Judgment united his two passions— art and natural science. Even more, he discovered that his own aesthetic and morphological ideas had been traveling in the same direction as Kant’s. In his essay “Simple Imitation, Manner, Style” (1789), Goethe held that the most accomplished

4 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Immanuel Kant Werke in Sechs Bäden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols. (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1957), 6: 535–36 (§79). 5 Ibid., p. 516 (§75). 6 Ibid., p. 539 (§80).

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artist should be able to execute life-like drawing or sculpture (imitation), express his or her own individual character (manner), and have the acumen to move beneath the surface to catch the very essence of the object being depicted (style).7 Great art would thus, according to Goethe, require the artist to become cognizant of the internal structure of natural objects so as to render them in paintings or sculpture with a profound aesthetic touch. A short time later, he joined this aesthetic conception to his morphological discoveries of the plant and animal archetypes. In his Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790), published just before he read Kant, Goethe argued that the various structures of a plant—the stem, the leaves, the calix, corolla, pistil, and stamen—were transformations of an underlying archetypal structure. The symbol of that structure he called the “ideal leaf.” He had, in short, reconstructed Kant’s archetype avant la lettre. Goethe was persuaded that his conception of the fundamental type in botany could be extended to the animal realm, and over several essays during the early 1790s, he attempted precisely this.8 The essay “General Theory of Comparison” (1794) shows the impact of Kant’s Critique. In this essay, Goethe argued that each animal exhibited an “internal kernel” (innerer Kern), a structure that was common to all animals of a given type (e.g., the vertebrates), and that this internal kernel responded teleologically to its particular environment (seine Zweckmässigkeit nach aussen).9 So, for example, a seal had its external form shaped by its aquatic environment but its skeleton exhibited the same general vertebrate pattern as land animals. Goethe thought the basic animal pattern had to be discovered by empirical comparisons done over a large number of animal species. This would allow the naturalist to abstract that fundamental structure of bones, not only from adult animals but also from the very young of a species. Goethe presumed that the “internal kernel” had a dynamic force that caused animal development. In a longish essay entitled “First Sketch of a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy” (1795), he identified that dynamic principle with a conception drawn from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), the anatomist from whom Kant also borrowed in his third Critique; following Blumenbach, Goethe referred to the

7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Styl,” in Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münchner Ausgabe, eds. Karl Richter et al. 21 vols.; Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985–98), 3.2: 186–91. 8 I have described these essays in animal morphology in The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 434–57. 9 Goethe, “Versuch einer allgemeinen Knochenlehre,” in Sämtliche Werke, 4.2:146–79.

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dynamic principle as a Bildungstrieb—a formative drive.10 Given the fluid character of this principle, it could not really be pictured; rather it was open to inspection only by the mind’s eye. Had the archetype remained as an object of mental vision only, it would not have left much of a footprint in subsequent biological literature. However, Goethe’s protégé Carl Gustav Carus brought the idea to graphic execution, whence it became a signal feature of nineteenth-century biology and, traveling through deeper channels, reached well into the twentieth century.

Carus’s Theory of the Archetype Carl Gustav Carus in his own time was recognized as an extraordinary polymath and author of several authoritative works in anatomy. He was also an accomplished artist, who illustrated all of his many technical manuals in anatomy and left a large cache of Romantic canvases, several inspired by his friend Caspar David Friedrich. He became a disciple of Goethe, and they conducted a lively correspondence over a ten-year period. Carus eventually wrote three books on the master. The work in anatomy that he proudly sent to Goethe, his Von den UrTheilen des Knochen- und Schalengerüstes (1828), constituted an extraordinary achievement, especially because of the detailed character of its anatomical illustrations. Though few copies of the book were printed (because of its size and expense), nonetheless the fundamental conception—as well as the pertinent illustrations—reached far beyond the German lands due especially to the transmission by Richard Owen, the doyen of biologists in England during the mid-part of the nineteenth century. Owen, though, was less than generous in recognizing his debt. In the Ur-Theilen, Carus contended that Goethe was the first to observe a unifying principle in the vertebrate skeleton. The poet-scientist supposed that the various animal species had essentially common parts determined by the “formative force” (bildende Kraft), which gave rise to “the type in general”; he yet held that those parts could “be altered through all of the animal types and species without losing their character thereby.”11 In an inchoate way, Goethe first recog-

10 Goethe, “Erster Entwurf einer allgemeinen Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie,” in Sämtliche Werke, 12: 120–55. 11 Goethe as quoted by Carl Gustav Carus, Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochen- und Schalengerüstes (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1828), p. viii.

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nized the principle at work when he maintained that the vertebrate skull was composed of six transformed vertebrae.12 Carus briefly described the work of many anatomists at the beginning of the nineteenth century who had supposed, in hazy and in fragmented ways, that the vertebrates exhibited many aspects of unity; but he thought those naturalists had not quite locate the key to that unity. They lacked the “flexibility of imagination” to follow particular parts through various animal groups, tracing the alterations of an underlying structure and to “recognize that structure with both a sensitive and a mental eye.”13 Carus’s book attempted to consider the vertebrate skeleton under both kinds of vision. Only after many years of exacting study and careful illustration, Carus thought he was able to trace the bones of the human skull back through representative mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, showing their comparable parts and the transformation of those parts (see fig. 2, for example). Goethe was vindicated. Just as the parts of a plant could be understood as developed out of a fundamental, ur-structure (symbolized as the “ideal leaf”), so the skulls of vertebrates could be understood as composed of transfigured vertebrae, and the other major skeletal parts (e.g., ribs, pelvis, limbs, tail) could also be shown to result from further transformations of these original, elemental parts. Carus illustrated the basic plan of the vertebrates in what became known as the vertebrate archetype—a string of vertebrae with rudimentary processes (fig. 3). And since the archetype consisted only of repeated vertebrae, one could reduce that fundamental plan to a Ur-Wirbel, a primitive vertebra, whence through developmental transitions a given vertebrate could be constructed. Carus offered his detailed description of each bone of the vertebrate skull as it went through various transformations in different species as a powerful demonstration of the theory of the archetype.

12 Carus noted that Lorenz Oken also claimed to have discovered that the skull was composed of vertebrae. A fierce priority dispute broke out between the two, which I describe in The Romantic Conception of Life, pp. 497–502. 13 Carus, Von den Ur-Theilen, p. x.

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Fig. 2: Comparison of a human skull formed by altered vertebrae (nos. I–VI) and a reptile skull exhibiting essentially the same vertebral structures; from Carl Gustav Carus’s Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochen- und Schalengerüstes, 1828.

Fig. 3: Comparison of Carl Gustav Carus’s representation (1828) of the vertebrate archetype (top left), and Richard Owen’s representation (1849) of the archetype (top right).

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Morphology after Carus Richard Owen (1804–1892), the most famous zoologist in England during the midnineteenth century, borrowed heavily from Carus, whose book he had read and whose illustrations he used as models for his own (see fig. 3). In his book On the Nature of Limbs (1849), Owen made the same distinction as had Carus and Goethe: he contended that the skeletal parts of the various vertebrates displayed a common pattern, which he called their general “homology.” And like Goethe, Owen maintained that the parts had been altered for the functions exercised by the animal in its particular environment. He depicted as examples the wing of a bat and the claw of a mole, with each displaying the same topological arrangement of bones, though modified for either flying or digging. Owen concluded his account with the suggestion that God, through secondary causes, brought about the development of organisms according to archetypal ideas.14 Carus, by contrast, ground his developmental studies in a rather more abstruse metaphysics derived from Goethe, Schelling, and Oken. Nature as a whole was fecund and expressed developmental forces; we became aware of these forces because of an innate comprehension of the very nature of life.15 But these metaphysical and theological considerations become side issues, hidden under the detailed illustrations contained in the work of both Carus and Owen. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) read Owen’s On the Nature of Limbs and commented, in a passage he scribbled in his copy, that the archetypal similarities exemplified by vertebrates derived not from an idea ensconced in nature (Carus) or one in God’s mind (Owen) but from the common ancestor. Homologies bespeak not metaphysics or theology but history. The similarities exhibited by vertebrates, Darwin argued, were inherited from a common ancestor and their differences resulted from adaptations to local environments. In the penultimate chapter of the Origin (chap. 13), Darwin made clear the role of morphological type, which he called the “very soul” of natural history.16 Types and their transitions formed the “hidden bonds” of species affinities. In Darwin’s reconstruction, “the ancient progenitor, the archetype, as it might be called,” revealed those hidden bonds; and he especially credited Owen’s work on homology and Goethe’s on the vertebrate skull and metamorphosis of plants as foundational to his conception of species transformation. Thus those very ideas

14 Richard Owen, On the Nature of Limbs (London: John Van Vorst, 1849), p. 86. 15 Carus, Von den Ur-Theilen, p. 1. 16 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: Murray, 1859), pp. 434–39.

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that would underlie illustrations that were “true to nature” were woven into the fabric of modern biology by its original master, Charles Darwin. After Goethe’s establishment of a science of morphology, German anatomists continued in the tradition of Carus, that is, they graphically investigated animal form, and integrated their morphological conceptions into Darwin’s evolutionary scheme. The current stemming from the evolutionary morphology of such individuals as Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and Carl Gegenbauer (1826–1903) flowed directly into the mainstream of twentieth-century biology along very deep channels. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, a new tributary of archetype theory sprung up, that established by the Scots classicist and biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who introduced new mathematical methods for the understanding of animal form. Thompson completed his manuscript of On Growth and Form, a book of almost 800 pages (over 1100 in the second edition of 1942), in 1914, but because of the war it appeared three years later in 1917.17 Thompson brought two novel conceptions to the study of animal form: 1) an assumption that the form of organisms reacted to physical forces in much the same way as inorganic substances did; 2) new mathematical methods for the study of organic form, the most interesting of which was a graphic method to demonstrate how physical forces might transform one species into another. Today we might consider Thompson’s first assumption as focused on physical constraints in the development of organisms. So, for example, since the volume of physical objects increases as the cube of the length while surface area increases as the square of the length (proportions remaining the same), elephants will require much thicker limbs proportional to surface area than those of a deer. Because multiple physical forces act on biological organisms, apparently no simple mathematical principle, such as the ratio of surface to volume, can capture the relationship of one species even to a related one. But Thompson did discover an ingenious graphic way of doing so, a method that harkened back to Kant. He situated an animal form (e.g., a particular species) within a coordinate system, and then by deforming the system—thus simulating the effect of multiple forces on the organism—he was able to produce the form of a related species (fig. 4). Even as late as 1942, when the second edition of his book was published, Thompson remained skeptical that Darwin had given the full account of species evolution, especially as he relied on chance variations instead of mathematically

17 D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917).

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tractable variations. Contemporary biologists have not rushed to Thompson’s scheme, though they usually admire its mathematical ingenuity. Yet, because of Thompson’s work, biologists today recognize systematic constraints imposed on organisms by the physical environment.

Fig. 4: Transformation of one species into another through change of scaling, from D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (1942).

At the distance of a century and a half, Thompson’s effort yet pulses with rhythms of the Goethean morphological tradition, even reflecting Kant’s suggestion that deformation of a common pattern by physical forces might explain the appearance of new species—that “daring adventure of reason” to which Goethe committed himself. Adventurous reason had become integrated into the activities of scientists over a very long historical period. What could be more objective?

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Conclusion: Historical Robustness, Another Measure of Objectivity Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have provided a wonderfully thought-provoking analysis of the history of objectivity, focusing their account on the period from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth, the same period that this essay of mine spans. The authors suggest that the mode of being “true to nature,” that is, depicting only the essential features of organisms, gave way to “mechanical objectivity,” the use of instruments to prevent personal biases from distorting representations of scientific objects. Archetype theory appears quintessentially to exemplify the “true to nature” attitude. It seeks to show that individual species have an unsuspected unifying bond in the archetype. The archetype itself had been given different origins—the fecund and productive ability of nature or the infinite and creative mind of God, or yet the generative historical ancestor. Daston and Galison seem to suggest that the “true to nature” mode was not objective at all, insofar as they reduce “mechanical objectivity” to “objectivity” simply. They represent those scientists deploying the instruments of objectivity—cameras and other recording devices—as holding that only the individual was real, this in contrast to earlier naturalists who attempted to whittle away the particular and singular to distill the essence of an organic species. But the archetypal patterns themselves were real, not fanciful artifacts of minds tippling on a brew of Naturphilosophie and Goethean Schwärmerei. Those patterns were confirmed by several generations of morphologists and evolutionary theorists. This history manifests a notion of objectivity—the most fundamental notion, I believe— namely intersubjective agreement and historical robustness, all made palpable through the techniques of printing schematic types and their public dissemination. Goethe, Carus, Owen, Haeckel, Darwin, and Thompson looked beneath the surface of organisms and mutually confirmed a pattern of underlying unity. All science engages in exactly this same effort: to unite apparently disparate phenomena by showing their hidden bond, whether that bond be a common set of laws of motion for the earth and heavens or the archetype underlying disparate animal or plant types. Archetype theory declares the objectivity of historical robustness.

Simon Goldhill

Thus We See: Objectivity and Archaeology Abstract: In response to Objectivity, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, this essay argues that in the new science of archaeology, the scientists did not entirely absent themselves from the site of investigation, but, rather, a complex, selfaware and ideologically laden scene of self-representation takes shape.

Objectivity, the magnum opus of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, is a brilliantly conceived, argued, and evidenced study. It not only explores the historical development of what is all too often taken as a natural category of reason, but also shows how scientific disciplines are formed in a cauldron of cultural specificity, philosophical argument, experimental serendipity, and—even—personal animosity. It is also the only academic book of such length and density that I have read, transfixed, in a single sitting. It is with some trepidation therefore that I offer the following remarks not so much as a criticism of this fine work, but as a reflection prompted by it on the boundaries of the term “science” and on the impact of the discourse of objectivity on the developing disciplines of the nineteenth-century academy. Objectivity is focused on the sciences of the eye, the techniques of observation, and the intimate interconnections of epistemology and ethos. Consequently, it is drawn to fields such as physics, chemistry, optics, anatomy, biology. It is unnecessary to remind historians of science that the terms “science” or “Wissenschaft” have a far broader and more fluid purchase in the nineteenth century: it is, of course, fully part of Daston and Galison’s project to show the categories of science in formation. Yet what I want to do here is to explore the developmental scheme of Objectivity—which can be simplified not too viciously as the overlapping ideas of truth-to-nature, mechanical objectivity and trained judgment—and how it fares in one of the most debated and culturally influential sciences of the nineteenth century, namely, archaeology. It reveals a fascinatingly different story from the narrative so carefully outlined by Daston and Galison. Now, archaeology, like geology, became a burning intellectual project of the nineteenth century because, unlike the sciences discussed by Daston and Galison, it created a specific and deeply polemical connection between materiality and history.1 It is by now a familiar topos of Wissenschaftsgeschichte that the

1 On the history of archaeology, the background to the following remarks, see S. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1870 (Princeton, 1996);

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dating of the world’s physical matter provided a crisis for the authority of the bible and the traditions of history associated with it: Bishop Ussher and Charles Lyell could not both be right about the age of the earth.2 The threat of geology was to undercut the foundations on which the ethics and beliefs of Christian culture were formed. There were many Christians, however, who were far less perturbed than the Bishop of Oxford by such new scientific models of development. Charles Kingsley, for example, a Christian Socialist, chartist parson, and historian of sorts, walked regularly with Darwin, and, in his book Glaucus, popularised the new natural history, especially marine zoology, which he saw happily as “God’s handwriting” in a historicised physical world.3 By 1878, even a staunch Christian such as J.W. Grover could comfortably describe the origin of the world in his Conversations with Little Geologists on the Six Days of Creation, as “six days, or periods of time…,” a concession that would have outraged evangelicals thirty years earlier.4 Geology demanded—and won—a new conception of historical time. Archaeology was no less polemical in its construction of a link between the physical world and history. Perhaps the most challenging of all sciences in the nineteenth century was critical history. Thanks to this form of sharp analytical questioning of the status and value of ancient sources, both the classical histories of Rome and Greece and the biblical history of scripture were shown to be full of myths and legends that could not be trusted.5 Elizabeth Barrett Browning neatly captures the challenge in her hugely popular poem Aurora Leigh:

A. Schnapp, Discovering the Past: A History of Archaeology (London, 1996); W. Stiebing, Uncovering the Past: A History of Archaeology (Oxford and New York, 1993); D. Challis, From the Harpy Tombs to the Wonders of Ephesus: British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840–1880 (London, 2008); V. Hoselitz, Imagining Roman Britain: Victorian Responses to a Roman Past (Woodbridge, 2007); P. Levine, Amateur and Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge, 1986); and C. Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago, 2009). 2 See N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996); and P. Bowler, The Earth Encompassed: a History of the Environmental Sciences (New York, 2000). 3 See especially S. Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: a Life of Charles Kingsley (London, 1974) and J. Klaver, The Apostle of the Flesh: a Critical Life of Charles Kingsley (Leiden, 2006), both with further bibliography. 4 J. W. Grover, Conversations with Little Geologists on the Six Days of Creation (London, 1878). Grover also had scientific training as a railway engineer. 5 See S. Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton, 2012), especially 1–23; 153–92, with further bibliography.

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Wolf’s an atheist And if the Iliad fell out, as he says, By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs, We’d guess as much, too, for the Universe.

Friedrich August Wolf, the famous German philologist, had challenged the authority of the Homeric poems as the integral work of a single author; he must, for Browning, be an atheist, and the consequences of undermining the Iliad lead immediately to upsetting the constitution of the Universe itself. Archaeology took shape in response to this critical history. Archaeology aimed to find in the materiality of the earth an answer to the problems established by the new sciences of geology and critical history. Both biblical and classical archaeology sought to establish a physical foundation for their holy books. Schliemann’s discovery of Troy was a retort—much contested—to the intellectual heirs of Wolf, and when he travelled lecturing in England he was, significantly enough, introduced on each occasion by the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, a committed Anglican, whose short book, linking Homer and the Bible as shared elements in a Providential history, subsequently sold more than 100, 000 copies.6 With similar fervour, the Palestine Exploration Fund was established in part to find in the Holy Land the archaeological proof of scripture’s narratives. It is not by chance that the first modern relief maps of the Holy Land, a product of the new sciences of cartography and surveying, are explicitly labelled as maps of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. Archaeology shares with geology a commitment to stratigraphy as the royal road to the history of materiality, and a belief that the excavation of the past is a material operation of science. Archaeology is not only paradigmatic of the development of the disciplines in the nineteenth century, but also integrally linked with other scientific disciplines through shared techniques of observation and analysis, and through the contest of boundaries and competition of authority by which the professionalization of subjects took shape. It is of some importance therefore to see how archaeology—which like the other sciences claims a privileged access to the real through techniques of observation of the material world—relates to the models of development proposed by Daston and Galison in Objectivity. There are four aspects of this relationship that I wish to discuss. First, although archaeology as a discipline has often told its own story as one of increasing objectivity and scientific rigour, leading from the gentleman anti-

6 See D. Gange, “Odysseus in Eden: Gladstone’s Homer and the Idea of Universal Epic,” Journal of Victorian Studies 14: 190–206, 2009.

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quarian of the beginning of the century to Flinders Petrie and the triumph of stratigraphy by its end, such a narrative obscures how archaeology continues to project and promote (or veil) an explicit ideological agenda throughout the era.7 So, James Fergusson, at the time of the Great Exhibition, writes with unnerving directness: “There is scarcely a fact or an expression in the whole book [the bible] that is not made clearer by the knowledge we have already derived, or hope hereafter to obtain, from the discoveries in this long-buried land; and they promise to supply us with exactly what we wanted to understand and realise what we there find written.”8 Archaeology promises to reveal “what we wanted”—both what we lacked and what we desired—in order both to understand and, more shockingly, to “realise” scripture: to make the bible real. What modern theoretical archaeologists would see as a vicious circle and a methodological crisis is for Fergusson the very hope and promise of archaeology: to find what we are looking for. Yet Flinders Petrie, the icon of the scientific archaeologist, is equally clear that he is hoping by archaeology and ethnography to discover the roots and the modern descendants of the Amorites, because of their significance as a race for the Bible and his own eugenicist theories. He too knows what he is looking for. Nor have the ideological commitments of archaeology disappeared in contemporary excavations in the same region. The question for Objectivity, therefore, might be: what happens to the discourse of objectivity when we turn to the sciences of history, such as geology and archaeology, where an ideological investment of the scientists and their audiences is an inherent aspect of the scientific project? To what degree does the discourse of objectivity depend on the delimitation of the boundaries of the scientific? This commitment of archaeologists is not simply another case of “trained judgment” as opposed to mechanical objectivity, but the unsuppressed will as an integral part of the pursuit of the objectively real, the real in and through objects. My second issue follows immediately from this first worry about the ideological investment of the scientist, and concerns the presence or absence of the observer in the representation of the work of science—which is a particularly important aspect of the invention of mechanical objectivity and the move towards trained judgment. The archaeologist as hero, like the scientist as hero, provides some familiar stereotypes, especially from the Hentyesque world of children’s fiction. But I am particularly interested in the visual record of archaeology. As with the sciences discussed by Daston and Galison, the development of archae-

7 See the works cited in fn 1. 8 J. Fergusson, The Palaces of Ninevah and Persepolis Restored: an Essay on Ancient Assyrian Art and Persian Architecture (London, 1851), p. 9.

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ology progresses hand in hand with the development of the new technologies of photography. Photography’s claim on the real is a weapon in archaeology’s pursuit of the real of history through material excavation. Indeed, it would be impossible to write an adequate history of photography without taking account of the immense significance of the earliest photographers’ work in the Holy Land precisely at the sites of biblical archaeology’s most intense scrutiny. Much of this topographical work reflects the narrative of mechanical objectivity described by Daston and Galison. So, in 1865 the Ordnance Survey fourvolume publication of Jerusalem marks a watershed in the mapping and representation of the city.9 The photographs, displayed in clear topographical categories, are buttressed by the diagrams and measurements produced by the techniques of surveying, physical science and the camera, combining to proclaim the authoritative and accurate representation of the real. In contrast with the long tradition of aestheticized portrayals of Jerusalem and its worshippers, the Ordnance Survey broadcasts its scientific objectivity. Yet there are also innumerable photographic records of archaeological excavations which insist on the presence of the archaeologist. Figure 1, for example, shows Flinders Petrie himself in 1880 at Giza by the rock tomb where he lodged during his survey of the Pyramids. He is posed in studied relaxation against the rocks in a tropical suit, with half an eye on the bushy tailed dog sniffing around the encampment. The juxtaposition of rough-hewn rock and heavy wooden doors and windows and the evidently European scientist is eloquent: this is Flinders Petrie firmly “in the field,” the archaeologist as the conqueror of bare matter, the master of the excavation. Figure 2 is equally eloquent. Here is Flinders Petrie and his wife’s sister, Amy in a house in Abydos in 1901. Surrounded by the work of archaeology, the couple are distinctively less at ease. The deckchair and clothes of his wife are set against the bricks of the walls and debris of the site; the motivation for her polite presence between the workers and director of the dig is unexpressed; the cloth over Flinders Petrie’s head marks out his suffering in the heat, despite his casual posture. To their left are the fellahin, a squatting boy and standing man, both relaxed, both very un-European. The scene stages the juxtaposition of Western scientists and Egyptian conditions as the struggle for knowledge; the iconography of the image is part of the agenda of the project of genealogical historical discovery. In both of these scenes—and they are paradigmatic of many a site report as well as more popular accounts of excavations—the 9 Compare the failures of the American attempts at mapping: see R. Hallote, Bible, Map and Spade: The American Palestine Exploration Society, Frederick Jones Bliss and the Forgotten Story of Early American Biblical Archaeology (Piscataway, 2006) and R. Hallote, F. Cobbing and J. Spurr, The Photographs of the American Palestine Exploration Society (Boston, 2012).

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presence of the eye-witness is part of the strategies of authorization, as is the encapsulated and displayed narrative of triumph of science over the difficult conditions of work. The narrative of discovery requires the explorer, and the iconography of this labour becomes an integral aspect of archaeology’s selfrepresentation as a science. In archaeology, the observer is in the image.

Fig. 1

The third issue follows from this use of photography. From the beginnings of nineteenth-century scientific archaeology to today, photography of sites has had to be supplemented by drawings. Daston and Galison give the example of Zimmer’s 1954 atlas of fluoroscopy as evidence of a late turn back towards drawing: “The publisher has done well to retain the original illustrative sketches. A drawing can show so much better the features one is trying to emphasize than the best chosen original roentgenogram.”10 The repetition of “original” here marks the awkwardness of priority. But, in archaeology, photographs of sites are usually unreadable even to the expert eye. It is only the line drawings of

10 L. Daston and P. Galison, Objectivity (New York, 2007), p. 348.

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Fig. 2

reconstructed plans that make sense of the visual material on offer; that provide the necessary and idealized view from nowhere—or simply the synoptic gaze necessary to visualize a site. There is no shift from 1840 to today. Across the whole era surveyed by Daston and Galison and in contrast to the shifts of representation they trace, line drawings are a necessary realisation of the confused realism of photography. This is not an accumulated “repertoire of possible forms of knowing,” but a necessary symbiosis of forms of representation, attempting to construct a necessary link between the real captured by photography and the ideal reconstruction of past reality in the schematic linear plan. Fourth and finally, there is in archaeology no equivalent of nature speaking for herself, or nature unveiling herself before science. Archaeological knowledge is always synecdochic and always heuristic: fragments to be reconstructed; signs to be read of another story; parts of a broader picture. From the beginning, the necessity of interpretation grounds the conceptualization of perception, and thus the potential dynamics of objectivity. In short, when we move beyond the sciences such as physics or anatomy or botany, towards the historical sciences of geology and archaeology, the dynamics of the discourse of objectivity, its construction of the observer’s role, its relation to photography and drawing, change. Archaeology is a culturally privileged

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activity in the nineteenth century and takes shape as a discipline in relation to the other sciences; indeed, often leading other disciplines in its explorations of historical materiality. Archaeology cannot see things steadily and see things whole, because its gaze is always a reconstruction, an exploration, a theorization. Yet it provided for the nineteenth century a scientific technology through which to grasp and comprehend and visualize the real. Could the wonderful story of Objectivity make a place for the science of archaeology?

David Nirenberg

Love = Abstract: Our philosophical-mythological stories, with Heraclitus on one side and Parmenides on the other, offer us ways of thinking about the logic of the world: infinite change, infinite sameness. This long and much discussed contestation between repetition and difference is a product of our constant tendency to cross from talk of the essence of philosophy to talk of the nature of love and its deep link to sameness. We may start with reason, but seem hell-bent to head for its limits.

ἰσότης φιλότης (“Love is equality”) –Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, et alii1

It was a real-estate affair that took me to the Cook County Office building. There, after bouncing from bureaucrat to bureaucrat, I landed deep in the edifice’s bowels, at the profoundly named Department of Divisions and Consolidations. At those depths the epistemological pressure grew so great that it crushed my questions about property parcels. I seemed to be standing at the origins of philosophy, and heard ringing in my ears the words of Heraclitus: “Graspings [syllapsies]: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.”2 I could not fathom the chiasmus, but it felt pregnant with the very possibility of knowledge. Socrates is reputed to have said: “It needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of” Heraclitus’ book.3 Perhaps I simply needed to descend deeper. Or perhaps the matter is more as Heraclitus himself put it—“You will not find out the limits of the soul when you go, travelling

1 This essay is first fruit of a collaboration on sameness with my father, Ricardo Nirenberg. It is as much the child of his works, as of mine. The dictum of Pythagoras is reported by Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life, 29, 162, 10. It is cited as a common saying by (among others) Plato, Laws 757a; Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 7.9 (1240b). (Plato adds that although the saying is “old and true,” “what the equality is that is capable of doing this… is far from clear.”) Commentators, grammarians, and lexicographers including Diogenianus Grammaticus, Joannes Stobaeus, Euthymius Malaces, Isidorus Kiovjensis, Nicephorus Basilaces, Hesychius, Choricius, Nicephorus Gregoras, Macarius Chrysocephalus, Suda, and many others transmitted it as a dictum throughout the Hellenistic and Late Antique period. My thanks to Sofía Torallas for helping me with these latter sources, and for teaching me so much about love. 2 Heraclitus, fr. 22B10 DK. 3 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 2.22.

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on every road, so deep a logos does it have”—and no amount of breath would suffice to plumb this one Department, with its claims to authority over the mysteries of sameness and difference, separation and identity, the equal and the not.4 Heraclitus was famously willing to swim very deep in his bottomless river of becoming, change, and contradiction. For those who lack that particular kind of courage other kinds are available, chief among them, the courage of constancy and consistency. Parmenides stands among the earliest advocates of this latter type of valor, and states the commitment in a famously obscure way: “That (it) is, and that it is not possible for (it) not to be.” Many of Parmenides’ successors took this statement to mean that Truth is the same as itself, un-changing and noncontradictory, and they placed this sameness (a type of equality) at the foundations of a certain way of knowing. “It is obvious that the same thing will never do or suffer opposites,” says Socrates, not “in the same respect, in relation to the same thing, at the same time.” Aristotle agrees: “The most certain of all principles” of thought is that “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect.” Non-contradiction is “the firmest principle of all things.” Without it there is no knowledge, and the human becomes “like a plant.”5 Socrates and Aristotle were prudent in attempting to limit the problem by insisting on the condition of “at the same time.” But the difficulty of defining such temporal sameness, combined perhaps with a yearning for certainties independent of the flux of time, meant that this “most certain of principles” tended to push truth toward eternity. It is possible to understand the entire history of philosophy as a struggle between the Heraclitean emphasis on the tensions and contradictions of becoming, and the Parmenidean stress on the sameness and non-contradiction of true being. Nietzsche, for example, blamed the great paladins of the latter, such as Pythagoras and Plato, for ushering in the “hard winter” of all subsequent philosophy, and he cast his own recuperation of Heraclitus as the soft breath of Spring.6 We don’t need to subscribe to the entirety of Nietzsche’s mytho-poetics in order to

4 Heraclitus B45 DK. On this fragment see Gábor Betegh, “The limits of the soul: Heraclitus B 45 DK. Its text and interpretation,” in Enrique Hülsz Piccone (ed.), Nuevos ensayos sobre Heráclito. Actas del Segundo Symposium Heracliteum (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2009), 391–414. 5 Parmenides, 28B2 DK; Plato, Republic 4.436b7–9; Aristotle, Metaphysics 1005b19–21, 1005b23– 24 1006a15–16, 1008b10–12. Cf. Metaphysics, 1012a24–26, 1012a33 ff., Topics 159b30–33, Physics 185b19–25, all aiming at Heraclitus. 6 Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Chapters 8 and 10; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Of Immaculate Perception.” See also Genealogy of Morality 2.16, 3.12.  

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agree with him on the centrality of the struggle. Nor must we posit a millennial philosophical permafrost to feel as he did a frigid absolute lurking in Parmenidian courage, a coldness symptomized above in the staccato repetition of the word “same.” Sameness, equality, identity: the drive to protect these and other cognates from corrosion by contradiction and time oriented much philosophical thought toward the strength of number and the stability of the equal sign, a strength clearly expressed in its most axiomatized form as the principle of identity: for all x, x=x. To the power of this axiom we owe so many of the glorious achievements of mathematical and logical thought. I do not propose to provide here a history of this purported struggle between “Heraclitean” or “Parmenidian,” nor to enlist in either rank. My goal is only to gesture toward the overwhelmingly vast terrain of philosophical discussions on sameness, identity, and equality, and then to point to one particular aspect of one particular stream that strikes me as especially curious: that within this vast history of thought the topics of love and sameness are often found in close proximity, even in intimate embrace. Socrates is only one of many who apparently addressed the two subjects hand in hand. In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates’ dialogue is organized around the question of whether love is the product of sameness or difference between lover and beloved. Socrates’ appreciation for the profundity of the problem seems to have been very deep indeed, for the dialogue collapses in aporia: “If neither those who love or are loved, neither the like nor the unlike, nor the good, nor those who belong to us, nor any other of all the suppositions which we passed in review… I no longer know what I am to say.” (222e) But Socrates (or at least, Plato) found much more to say. It is through a discussion of love that the “Department of Division and Consolidation” is established, in the Phaedrus, as the foundational bureaucracy of philosophy, responsible for the most basic principles of thought: Phaedrus: What principles? Socrates: That of perceiving and bringing together in one idea the scattered particulars, that one may make clear by definition the particular thing which he wishes to explain; … [and] that of dividing things again by classes, where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver.… [266b] Now I myself, Phaedrus, am a lover of these processes of division and bringing together…; and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I follow after and walk in his footsteps as if he were a god.

Division and unification, difference and sameness: these two principles arise (once more) in a discussion about love, and through that discussion they are shown to be the objects most proper to philosophical love (pardon the pleonasm), and proximate to divinity. But there is a telling asymmetry in Plato’s presentation.

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Sameness and synthesis are unbounded in Socrates’ carnal metaphor, but difference and analysis, these are submitted to the constraints of “natural joints,” categories of sameness that we are forbidden from carving into difference. Rather than Lysis’ aporia or Heraclitus’ boundless logos, the Phaedrus establishes a “natural” limit to our distinctions. In its joints we may feel the twinge of a Platonic yearning for the absolute.7 I cannot pretend to provide a history of these multiple positions available in Plato’s corpus. Nor am I prepared to take a robust philosophical position on the question of whether or not our categories (Aristotelian and Kantian echoes intended) really have natural boundaries beyond which indivisible identity rules; or whether, to the contrary, we should un-dogmatically treat all such categorical articulations as contingent. (In case it is not obvious, I confess my own sympathy for the latter view.) I simply wish to insist, without needlessly multiplying examples, on the curious fact that love and sameness incline toward each other in the Greek philosophical tradition, and this despite Socrates’ studied ambivalence in the Lysis. We can speak therefore of an erotics of cognition in Greek philosophy, one often enough inclined toward identity. But we should wonder, I think, why love served as such an important analogy for thinking about cognition, and why that cognitive love favored certain types of sameness and frowned on others. Again, an answer (whether historical or philosophical) to these questions is beyond me. But commenting on Book 1 of Aristotle’s Physics in the 5th century A.D., John Philoponus points toward one approach: In our soul there is both a differentiating faculty and an assimilating faculty. When it functions according to the assimilating faculty, which Plato called ‘the circle of the same’ (Timaeus, 36C), it comes closer to the intelligibles. Empedocles called this faculty ‘love’ because love is unifying. On the other hand, when it functions according to the differentiating faculty, which Plato called ‘the circle of the different’ (loc. cit.), but Empedocles called ‘strife’, it comes closer to perceptible things.8

John seems to have imbibed the tradition that love is associated with unity and identity, and he purports to provide something of a historico-philosophical account for the origins of that tradition. His account may not be accurate, but it is suggestive. Love and Strife were the two competing forces of Empedocles’ cosmology, which began with the domination of love, and the cosmos as one giant

7 Cf. Aristotle, De Anima 3.6, 430b5–20, with a different but related limitation. 8 John Philoponus, On Aristotle’s Physics 1.1-3, tr. Catherine Osborne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 44.

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sphere of intellect, a spherical “mind, holy and unutterable, rushing with rapid thought over the whole world.” All individual souls had been one with this intelligent sphere of Love, until Strife separated each and imprisoned it in a body. By striving toward the pure thought of Love, the individual could rejoin the one immortal mind. Empedocles promised the conquest of death through a philosophical (in that it demanded thinking about the nature of thought itself) loving sameness.9 Empedocles was certainly not the only important early Greek thinker with this type of approach. Pythagoras’ attempts to conquer change and death through (among other things) thinking about numbers were perhaps even more influential within the history of philosophy, and produced (at least according to later tradition) the dictum with which I began: “love=.” Iamblichus seems to recognize the inter-relation between number and love in Pythagoras’ thought when he reports two dicta side-by-side: “All things accord in number, which he frequently said to his disciples, and friendship is equality, equality is friendship.” It is not surprising that so many Greek philosophers might, like Empedocles and Pythagoras, think of thought as the pathway to eternity: thinking about the nature of thought was after all their métier, and it is easy enough to confuse the customs of one’s tribe with laws of the cosmos. More curious is their shared confidence in the power of thinking love as sameness. We tend to associate that confidence with Platonists middle and neo: figures such as Plotinus and his divinity achieved through reason.10 But as we have already seen, it was much more widespread. Aristotle and his school, for example, also offered paths to sameness and immortality, as in this famously obscure passage from On the Soul: “Actual knowledge is identical with its object…. It does not sometimes think and sometimes not think. When separated it is alone just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal; and without this nothing thinks.”11 The passage deserves (and has received) many treatments more extensive and profound than any I could provide. My point is simply that it proved attractive not least because of the possibility contained in this eternity of the agent intellect: the promise that through identity and sameness—that is, by becoming identical with its ultimate object of knowledge—the individual can rejoin the collective, the thinker participate in immortality. The future of that possibility would pass through Christianity and Islam (and later through Judaism) and into the Latin

9 See Patrick Lee Miller, Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011), 72–73. 10 Ennead 1.2.6.2–3 and passim. 11 The literature on De Anima 3.5 is vast. For a cleaving of some relevant knots see Victor Caston, “Aristotle’s Two Intellects: A Modest Proposal,” Phronesis 44 (1999), 199–227.

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West. But Aristotle points to one aspect of its past in his very next line: “As Empedocles said that ‘where heads of many a creature sprouted without necks,’ they afterwards by Love’s power were combined, so here too objects of thought which were separate are combined….” [3.5–6, 430a1] Empedocles’ diction seems to echo from the mosh-pit of the archetypes. Aristotle’s has the less archaic ring of philosophy. But both are animated by the same creative principle: love makes out of many one. Aristotle’s use of this principle is extensive, animating both his psychology and his politics. In the Eudemeian Ethics, for example, it arises as he asks whether we are attracted to those who are like or unlike us. The discussion quickly moves to the question of self-love, for self-love is “friendship by analogy, but not absolutely.” (1240a10) With this proportionality in hand he approaches the question with which we began: Is our psyche divided or one? Does self-love make us identical to ourselves (foreshadowings of the Fichtean dream of I=I?), or are we divided souls, alien to ourselves, even capable of being our own enemies? Aristotle is far too subtle a psychologist to make the answer easy: “So far then as the soul is two, these relations [of friend and foe] can in a sense belong to it; so far as these two are not separate, the relations cannot belong to it.”(1240a20) Still, it is clear where his ideal lies, and that clarity becomes greater as he moves in the pages that follow from the individual to the multitude, from psychology to politics, and proposes a theory of justice built out of the same principle (already identified as political by Plato in Laws 757a) that love is equality. Of course this does not mean that everyone in the polity must have the same power, wealth, etc. The point is not that everyone or everything is politically equal in love, but that through the measure of love all can be equated: “The measurement must be by one measure, only here not by a term but by a ratio; we must measure by proportion….” (EE 1243b) The promise here is that the just and proper distribution can be proportionally determined, that differences can be justified as unity by the correct comparative measure of merits, so that love makes out of many one. Once more the history of this idea is too large for me to do more than gesture toward. I would only emphasize that the place of proportion (analogia) in Aristotle’s thought, from his physics to his psychology and his politics, cannot be overestimated. And if those “analogiai” tended toward the sameness of arithmetic and number rather than the similitudes of metaphor, it is in part because they were born under the influence of love’s equal sign.12

12 Cf. Nicomachean Ethics 8. I make a similar point more expansively in “The Politics of Love and its Enemies,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007), 573–605, here 587–93.

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Again I must insist on “tend.” On these basic questions the position of Aristotle, like that of many other great philosophers, was mixed. And in every age (pace Nietzsche) there are those who kick strenuously against the goads of sameness. Writing in the twelfth century, for example, Ibn Tufayl agreed that sameness and difference lay at the foundations of all knowledge.13 His hero, Hayy ibn Yaqzān, concludes early in his self-education “that inasmuch as things differ they are many, but inasmuch as they correspond they are one.” (119) Following Avicenna’s Epistle on Love, Ibn Tufayl was part of a long tradition, powerful within Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam, that understood sameness as both the product of and the path to divine love. Within this tradition God was understood as absolute sameness, eternal truth, unchanging identity, the Whole and the One. The philosopher’s goal was to achieve union with this eternal truth through divine love, and to teach the way, to the extent possible, to other wouldbe lovers. But Ibn Tufayl was more aware than most of the difficulty of the task. He mocked those who thought that, if only they climbed high enough along the more axiomatized branches of identity (mathematics, logic) they would reach eternity. He insisted instead on the inability of such tools to bring their users to immortal union with the divine. (98–99, 154) Ibn Tufayl confronted, as well, the gauntlet alGhazali had thrown before all philosophical aspirations to union with eternity, whether through love or by any other means. If the goal of the philosopher’s desire to achieve an immortal intellectual union with the divine is understood in terms of sameness, then the philosopher is striving for identity with the divine, and that identity includes divinity itself. Such an aspiration, according to alGhazali, offends against the principle of the unity of God, and should not be tolerated by a monotheistic Islam. Ibn Tufayl met the objection with what might seem a paradox: the nonsameness of sameness. Being neither is, nor is not, identical with itself. “For ‘many,’ ‘few,’ and ‘one’; ‘singularity’ and ‘plurality’; ‘union’ and ‘discreteness,’ are all predicates applicable only to physical things. But those non-material beings who know the Truth… need not be said to be either one or many.”(150–151) Ibn Tufayl grants that in adopting this position, “I have left what every sound mind is born with and abandoned the rule of reason.” But he defends his departure with a move of rare epistemological humility: “Men of sound reason are simply those whose minds work the same way.” There can be no such rigorous sameness of thought across the eternal and the pathic, the human and the divine.

13 Page references are to Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, tr. Lenn Evan Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

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Perhaps it is simply happy coincidence that in order to make his critique of strict sameness intelligible, Ibn Tufayl, too, turns to a metaphor of love. The eternal and the pathic “cannot be joined in one state of being, like two wives: if you make one happy, you make the other miserable.” (154) Ibn Tufayl is but one of the many across the long history of thought who have used love to explore the contingencies of sameness, and I mention his example in order to temper Nietzsche’s view of a Parmenidian ice age. Of course this does not prove my claim that there were such “breaths of Spring” in every age: a claim that is any event un-provable, in a work of this or any other length. But I should conclude with at least one more modern example, in order to point to the ongoing importance of love in thinking through the cognitive claims of sameness and their limitations. Kierkegaard’s Repetition is exemplary in both regards, as an exploration of the sciences of sameness, and of love.14 I use the word sciences deliberately, since Kierkegaard clearly had some of those sciences in his sights when he sub-titled Repetition a “failed experiment in psychology.” Repetition is, after all a claim to sameness in the stream of time and experience, a claim of the kind that William James, in The Principles of Psychology, would later elevate to a law of his discipline as “the principle of constancy of the mind’s meanings.” As James put it in his chapter 12, “Conception”: “The same matters can be thought of in successive portions of the mental stream, and some of these portions can know that they mean the same matters which the other portions meant.” “The mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to think the Same.” “This sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking.”15 Kierkegaard’s narrator and experimentalist—whose very name of Constantin Constantius so cleverly proclaims pretensions to strict identity—immediately manifests the Eleatic prejudices at the center of his claims to science. The prejudice is common enough, but what makes it relevant here is that he just as immediately moves the field of debate to love: “Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love.” (131) Unlike the changeable loves of recollection or hope, this love is stable, an “indestructible garment” for the paladin with the “courage to will repetition.” (132) In Kierkegaard’s “failed experiment” it is the Constantius of principles and observations who is humbled in his quest for repetition (and for love?), and the young man full of self-contradiction and poetry who is accorded the experience. 14 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 15 William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890/Dover, 1950), 2 vols., here 1, 459 ff.

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But that experience is certainly not willed, or intentionally thought: “So there is repetition, after all. When does it occur? Well, that is hard to say in any human language. When did it occur for Job? When every thinkable human certainty and probability were impossible.” (212–13) We can understand (somewhat anachronistically) Kierkegaard’s scientific “failure” in Nietzschean terms, as a Heraclitean salvo against the Parmenidean redoubts of the emerging sciences of experimental psychology. Why was the battle staged on fields of love? Perhaps because that is where the war had been waged by so many of the thinkers, from Plato to Hegel, that Kierkegaard was engaging with. Today’s experimental psychologists seldom talk of love in their studies of memory and cognition, even as they delve ever more deeply, down to the neuronal level, into questions of sameness and repetition. But the very power of their tools—physiological, theoretical, and mathematical—may make it all the more important for them to attend to questions such as these, about the possible limits and potential excesses of our human ability to will identity.16 In every age there have been those with the courage to discover the confusions of excessive claims of sameness, including (among many others) those of sciences built upon the principle of non-contradiction. And in every age there have been those who have expressed their discoveries in terms of love: not only philosophers, but also poets (think of Auden’s “All chance, all love, all logic, you and I, / Exist by grace of the Absurd”), and perhaps even historians of science. Among these, I do not know if Lorraine Daston has written about love. But what is certain is that her studies of the regnant sciences of sameness have made her a “soft breath of Spring” for our time.

16 Acknowledgment of that importance would certainly not preclude, and might enrich, experimental and mathematical approaches to psychology. I think here, for example, of Edward Awh and Edward Vogel’s attempts to account for individual differences in attention in their studies of memory. See inter alia Edward K. Vogel and Edward Awh, “How to Exploit Diversity for Scientific Gain: Using Individual Differences to Constrain Cognitive Theory,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 17.2 (2008), 171–76.

Caroline Bynum

Medieval Miracles as Evidence Abstract: This essay follows Lorraine Daston’s focus on the historical shift from miracles as evidence for the sacred to the hunt for evidence of miracles. The history of medieval miracles, a history of absent evidence, opens up questions about the nature of history writing more generally.

Like many medievalists, I work on events and phenomena that point forward into the early modern and modern periods and gain precision when seen in this light. Whether in her work on evidence and proof, on conceptions of nature, on rationality and the wonders, prodigies and portents that might seem its opposite, or on the agency of objects, Lorraine Daston’s carefully non-teleological accounts of developments from the later Middle Ages down into the eighteenth century have regularly provided for me clarifications, definitions, and basic conceptual tools.1 Time and again, Daston has proved, as they say, “good to think with.” In this essay, I use not only her classic 1991 article from Critical Inquiry but also her formulations in the 2004 collection Things That Talk to think a little more about one of the areas in which she has expanded our understanding of rational inquiry: miracles.2 Given their classic definition by Caesarius of Heisterbach in the 1220s as “whatever is done contrary to the usual course of nature,”3 medieval miracles were understood to be evidence of divine action.4 They were evidence that God

1 Here I acknowledge also the debt I owe to Daston’s frequent collaborator, Katharine Park, and especially to their Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 2 Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 93–124; Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004), especially “Introduction: Speechless.” 3 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, 2 vols., ed. J. Strange (Cologne: Heberle, 1851), dist. 10, cap. 1, vol. 2, p. 217. For more on medieval definitions of miracles, see A. Michel, “Miracles,” Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 10 (Paris: Letouzy et Ané, 1928), cols. 1798– 1859, and Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), pp. 37–75 and 88–92. 4 For useful discussion of medieval efforts to establish when healings were “contrary to nature” and when not, see Michael E. Goodich, Miracles and Wonders: The Development of the Concept of Miracle, 1150–1350 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007). Despite the ontological distinction drawn by theologians between mirabilia (rare but natural) and miracula (directly God-authored), little progress was made in establishing precise patterns of nature that would enable viewers to

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had acted in times past by parting the seas, healing the sick, bringing fertility to the childless, or insuring victory over enemies. They were also evidence that God still acts directly in the world, or acts through his saints, often at their insistence.5 Moreover, miracles were by definition material. As Albert the Great put it: “The method of miracles is this: the transformation of matter.”6 Indeed, so important was the materiality of miracles that most theologians took the position that miracles must be sensible: that is, for something to count as a miracle there must be some physical trace or material manifestation (a cure, the appearance of an unusual mark, an anomalous formation in nature, etc.). Technically, then, mental visions and purely internal spiritual graces (even such phenomena as “invisible stigmata”) were not miracles. Hosts or chalices transformed into visible blood were clearly miracles; but theologians debated whether transubstantiation was technically a “miracle,” although it was supposed to be the site of the Christian’s most immediate encounter with God. Miracles happened in bodies and in objects. What modern scholars call “contact” relics (objects that had touched the body of a holy person) were often understood to be the result of, and evidence of, the power of a saint. A tumbler preserved in Padua is offered even today as proof of St. Anthony’s power because it remained whole when “a certain heretic,” who doubted the saint, threw it out of a window.7 The tumbler is a relic and a record, but it has also, in a sense, become the miracle or all that is left of it. Those who experienced cures or rescues gave ex votos depicting the miracle to the shrine of the saint who had granted the change: crutches that could now be thrown away, chains from ransomed prisoners, imitation breasts and eyes depicting the cured body part, and so forth. Hence ex votos were both a thanksgiving for, and a record of, the miraculous event that had now faded from view. Miracles left objects behind, which sometimes even served as legal evidence. In two host desecration trials in northern Germany around 1500, the blood-soaked

sort this out. Most of the evolving rules of evidence about miracles adduced in canonization processes or in examinations at pilgrimage sites were rules about what sorts of questions one should ask witnesses, what sorts of witnesses were likely to be trustworthy, and whether the result of the alleged miracle conduced to morality and true religion. 5 To my knowledge, only Abelard took the later Protestant position that the age of miracles had ceased after the time of the apostles. 6 Albertus Magnus, Summa theologiae, in Opera omnia, ed. S.C.A. Borgnet, vols. 31–33 (Paris: Vives, 1895), tract. 8, q. 32, membrum 2, vol. 32, p. 360. The point about the materiality of miracles is made by Daston herself in Things That Talk, “Introduction: Speechless,” p. 13. 7 Louise Bourdua, “Displaying the Bodily Remains of Anthony of Padua,” in Kristin Marek, Raphaèle Preisinger, Marius Rimmele, and Katrin Kärcher, eds., Bild und Körper im Mittelalter (Paderborn: Fink, 2006), p. 254.

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table top and knives allegedly used by Jews to violate the host were introduced as evidence into the trial and were afterwards preserved as relics.8 Even visions, which were increasingly important in the religious economy of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, tended to be treated as the sources of miraculous stuff. Apparitions were usually materialized almost immediately into objects. Small physical reproductions of the miraculous event—prayer cards, badges, little silks, and so forth—became important, in part because they could be taken away and referred to in prayer long after pilgrimage to the site of the ephemeral revelation had been completed, but in part because they were felt to incorporate the event itself. As William Christian Jr. has astutely pointed out, even in cases where shrines were established at the sites of collective visions, the cults tended to focus not on the place where the saint had supposedly appeared but on an image that the apparition revealed. Statues or paintings thus discovered were usually said to have animated (glowing with light; weeping, sweating, or bleeding; resisting relocation or even traveling back to their original sites) as proof of the holy event. Moreover visions often left something tangible behind, such as footprints or gifts. In 1523, for example, a woman in the province of Toledo claimed, as did several of those who testified on her behalf, that the Virgin had given her a silk-wrapped candle and a “black stone” or magnet.9 Such efforts to preserve the traces of miracles suggest that there was a major problem—ontological as well as evidentiary. Miracles must by definition occur in physical stuff, yet if they do, they cannot endure. The material is by its very nature subject to change. Is there not, then, always a hole at the center of a miracle account, no matter how many witnesses testify to the before-and-after conditions of patients, no matter what remnants or traces are displayed in reliquaries?10 I think it is this hole in the middle that accounts both for some of the emphasis in saints’ lives on marks of healing that remain on bodies and for some of the recurrent—and competing—miracles characteristic of pilgrimage shrines in the later Middle Ages. To consider first the paradigmatic late medieval miracle: healing. If blindness or paralysis is cured and health succeeds disease, how does

8 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 68–73. 9 William Christian, Jr., Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 24–25, 70, 75–76, 80, 100–102, and 159–85. Of 137 medieval and early modern shrines in Catalonia listed in a seventeenth-century inventory Christian has studied, 111 commemorate the finding of an image to which the apparition pointed; only 14 are sites of the visions themselves. 10 Efforts to reduce most if not all miracles to natural explanations began in the Middle Ages with thinkers such as Nicole Oresme. See Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, pp. 49–51 and 59.

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one know that disease went before? One way is when traces remain in the body itself. Hence we find many cases like the example in Odo of Châteauroux’s sermon about St. Richard of Chichester, which underlined not only that the saint healed a boy who had been “killed” when a cart ran over his stomach but also the fact that “the print left by the wheel still remains on the boy’s stomach.”11 The antique story of a leg transplant performed by the physician saints Cosmas and Damian emphasized the grafting of a black leg onto a sick white man. In its popular medieval re-telling, we find an added incident: the gangrenous white leg is attached to the corpse of the Moor from whom the graft had been taken.12 The miracle tale uses the contrast of skin color to make permanent the inscribing of the miracle on the bodies—both living and dead—that had received it. Such emphasis on bodily marks is characteristic of late medieval devotion, as the numerous accounts of stigmata and of incorrupt saintly bodies make clear. Holiness was assumed to leave proof in bodies.13 Thus we see that there are, so to speak, bi-directional pressures in accounts of miraculous healings and resurrections. On the one hand, there must be a clear “before”: the original illness or death must be documented. On the other hand, we need evidence that there has been healing, that the “after” is new. Bodily marks are proof that there has been change. I suggested earlier that ex votos serve something of the same purpose. Not merely a gift of thanksgiving, they are also a record of the “before” when the resurrected or cured body is the “after.” In this sense, an ex voto is a contact relic of a miracle. Miracles occurred not only in bodies but also in other sorts of matter—in images, relics, and Eucharistic hosts, even in the products of garden and farmyard. One of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s well-known miracle tales describes a peasant who inserted a Eucharistic host into a beehive in order to improve production, whereupon the bees build a little wax tabernacle for the host fragment.14 A vision collection from Unterlinden reports that the nuns kept the hand of a Christchild statue, broken off by one of the sisters in ecstasy when the child

11 Goodich, Miracles and Wonders, p. 92. 12 See Judith-Danielle Jacquet, “Le Miracle de la jambe noire,” in Les Miracles, miroirs des corps, ed. Jacques Gélis and Odile Redon (Paris: Presses et Publications de l’Université de Paris-VIII, 1983), pp. 23–52. 13 For bodily signs of sanctity, see André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Middle Ages, tr. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 427–443, and Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006), pp. 13–76. 14 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, dist. 9, cap. 8, vol. 2, p. 172.

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came to life.15 To us, this might seem merely broken statuary; to the nuns, it was record and proof of encounter with the divine. Yet matter changes. Healed bodies eventually die. Wax melts, bread molds, light fades. Bleeding statues or relics cease to manifest unusual exudings. And even if conserved, such exudings harden, rust, flake away, evaporate, disappear. How then can matter retain the record of its miraculous transformation? How does the site of a miracle continue to manifest holiness? The divine, which was understood to intrude miraculously into matter, was indivisible and unchangeable. How could one explain its transience, its lability, its disappearance? So pressing was this issue that some fifteenth-century theologians I have studied argued in the debates over transformed hosts that, if the once-miraculous host decayed, it could never have been a miracle in the first place. The papal legate Nicholas of Cusa, decreeing in 1451 against the display of alleged Eucharistic miracles, warned that “transformed hosts should be consumed by the celebrating priest in communion, rather than that the sacred Eucharist … be permitted to disintegrate through the corruption of the species.” Exactly because matter must decay, Cusanus was dubious that a host could be the visible site of God.16 Some other theologians argued that authorities should surreptitiously replace the original objects with newly consecrated wafers in order to avoid scandalizing the faithful when they saw miraculous stuff deteriorate. Ultimately, then, miracles were not only a logistical problem for those theologians, papal commissioners, and canon lawyers who needed to decide petitions for canonization or requests for indulgences to be attached to pilgrimage sites; miracles also raised the basic ontological problem at the heart of Christianity. How can the eternal intersect with the temporal? How can the unchangeable and indivisible appear in matter? Miracles were not only proof that a particular saint could convey healing, that a particular site was holy, that a particular ritual brought divine presence. They were also the proof that such intersection, such presence, is possible. Whether in statues that spoke, in hosts that turned suddenly to blood, or in healings and resurrections, the bursting forth of life could be understood as matter triumphing over exactly the change it represented. At the moment of miraculous transformation, bodies and objects manifested transcendence and eternity as well as materi-

15 See Barbara Newman, “The Visionary Texts and Visual Worlds of Religious Women,” in Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti, trans. Dietlinde Hamburger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 164. 16 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 15–18.

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ality. When a statue of the Virgin in Bavaria bled in response to attack by a Hussite in 1450, it was not merely protesting desecration. It was also asserting that the holy continued to reside in it, unharmed.17 And yet even holy matter—matter that triumphs over materiality—cannot, exactly because it is material, last. It needs in fact to be renewed. I think it is this, and not merely competition for pilgrimage revenues, that accounts for the proliferation of certain sorts of events—for example, the desecration libels against Jews, heretics, and other out-groups. If holy matter both had to and could not last, then something was necessary to induce, or sustain, or renew its presence. Yet Christians who desired its miraculous appearance could not be certain of inducing this by prayer. And they dared not produce it themselves by violating holy objects. Hence, the scapegoats who were said to cause its eruption might be useful for the practice of devotion. Jews who supposedly desecrated hosts, dissidents who did in fact occasionally attack statues, and ordinary Christians who conjured “superstitiously” with holy things were in this sense essential to a religion that needed a divine that could be visibly, suddenly, and often violently present in the stuff of the physical world. Lorraine Daston has told us of an early modern change from questions about how miracles can be evidence of the holy to questions about the evidence for miracles. She has also taught us that “things that talk” are paradoxes that lose their voices when their paradoxical quality fades.18 I suggest that the miracles of the later Middle Ages are quintessentially paradoxical in Daston’s sense and that their eventual silencing begins in the unsustainable contradiction I have outlined, although it surely lies more proximately in the powerful eighteenth-century attacks on evidence for them. I also suggest—and in this I hope to intersect with some of Daston’s larger concerns—that medieval miracles may induce us to think about the ontological problem all of us face as historians. There is a hole at the center of medieval miracle accounts. Hence they pose for medievalists the particularly pressing question of how we interpret what we find so often in our records: absence. And medievalists are not alone in struggling with absence; the inability to ascertain what “really happened” haunts all historians. I would not, of course, suggest that all historical evidence is like miracle stories. Although we have learned to be suspicious of all evidence, none of us thinks that a legal document or a foundation charter is parallel to a saint’s life or

17 Karl Kolb, Vom Heiligen Blut: Eine Bilddokumentation der Wallfahrt und Verehrung (Würzburg: Echter, 1980), pp. 79–80. 18 Daston, Things That Talk, “Introduction: Speechless,” p. 24.

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a miracle book. Despite our awareness that archival evidence disappears, we do not think the ways it goes missing are quite the same as the fading of an apparition or a miraculous transformation. And yet, without generalizing from the specific interpretive problem I have discussed here to all problems of interpretation, I suggest that there may be a larger relevance. Miracles raise in an especially acute form the problem of change itself. They show that, since the stuff of the world is always in flux, the problem of evidence is not merely a problem of evidence; it is a problem of ontology as well. Change is what historians study, yet it is change—of our vantage points and in the materials we draw on—that threatens always to defeat us. It is why we historians cannot write for the ages or say the definitive word. Miracles and charters are different sorts of evidence. But miracles raise, no less pressingly than charters or diplomatic communiqués, the question of how historians should go about their job. And perhaps the historian, no less than the miracle-working saint or object, is in the business of trying to still, for a moment, the change that is the relentless course of the world.

Wendy Doniger

Myth, Reason, and Rationality Abstract: Myths, such as the tale of the woman whose husband challenges her to bear his child but will not sleep with her, defy reason and mock evidence. Reason is elbowed out by rules, by rationality.

Myths abhor reason but depend on rationality. My distinction between these terms here draws upon Lorraine Daston’s formulation of the contrast between reason in the sense of freely working things out by your individual intelligence (which agrees with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of reason as “The power of the mind to think and form valid judgments by a process of logic”) and rationality in the sense of playing by strict and consistent rules, which might be someone else’s rules, the culture’s rules, not yours.1 (The OED definition of rationality here is no use to us at all in making this distinction, for it circles us right back through the same door to reason: “The quality or condition of possessing reason; the ability to exercise reason.” We’re much better off with Daston.) Myths disdain reason almost by definition, if you accept my definition of a myth as a narrative that many people believe, over considerable periods of time, despite massive evidence that it is not true.2 It’s that “despite” that makes myths as a whole unreasonable, not merely from the standpoint of Enlightenment types standing outside the culture but even to the people who make the myths, people who are as capable as we are of noticing that human beings cannot fly and that eagles cannot speak human languages. On the other hand, as Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown, the myths of each culture may ignore logic but they are usually entirely rational in the Dastonian sense of folowing the often complex rules that underlie that culture’s formulation of meaning.3 I wish to explore in this brief essay the mentality of a body of myths, in more than one culture, that violate their own reason but not their own rationality. And I want to ask, Why do people go on

1 Lorraine J. Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Lorraine J. Daston, Peter Erickson et al, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind; The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 2 Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth.” In Structural Anthropology (trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1963), 206–31.

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telling stories that fly blatantly in the face of concerns of reason even when such concerns are explicitly raised in the course of the stories? That the arguments from reason were always available to storytellers and audiences in most of the cultures that have preserved myths is easily demonstrated by a number of stories in which reason does in fact carry the day. Consider the tale known to folklorists as “The Clever Wife” or “The Clever Wench,”4 which Stith Thompson, the Linnaeus of folklore, included in his wide survey of folktale motifs (a cross between the periodic tables and the Dewey Decimal System), calling it “The Rejected Wife as Lover” (while filing it under it the evocative title of AT 891D). In this story, a husband challenges his wife to get a child (almost always a son) fathered by him, though he will never sleep with her; she succeeds by tricking him into bed when she masquerades as another woman (a maneuver known as a bedtrick5). Usually he also challenges her to get his ring, though he will never take it off; sometimes he does not mention the ring, but she nevertheless insists on having it before she will submit to him, in order to prove her claim, later, that she was the woman in his bed (or he in hers, depending on your point of view) and that her child is therefore his child. This myth (best known to us from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well) has a very long shelf life indeed, despite its reason-challenging plot. As it travels through Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, it develops numerous variations. One of the oldest occurs in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 38.12–26, c. 8th century BCE), where Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute in order to sleep with Judah, gets his signet ring as a pledge, and then uses the ring to “prove” that Judah was the man who impregnated her. But when the story is retold in The Testament of Judah (2nd century BCE), Judah says, “When I called her I heard also the secret words that I spoke in my drunkenness while sleeping with her. And … I said, Perhaps she did it deceitfully, having received the pledge from another woman… . And I thought that nobody knew that I had gone in unto her.”6 Here, Judah is so drunk that he does not recognize Tamar; he even blurts out secrets that she later throws back in his face. But later on he recognizes her privately as the woman he had slept with, though he denies it publicly because he thinks no one else knows; he suggests that she might have gotten the pledges (and, presumably, the private words of

4 Wendy Doniger,The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Ring of Truth, and Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 5 Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 6 Testament of Judah 12.3–10. See Esther Marie Menn, Judah & Tamar (Genesis 38) in Ancient Jewish Exegesis (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 150.

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pillow talk) from another (treacherous, colluding) woman. This perfectly logical, reasonable argument (though a lie) seems not to have occurred to Judah in other texts, including the Hebrew Bible; even here, after figuring out effective ways to deny her claim, in the end Judah confesses the truth of his own accord. The rationality of the myth—the need for the descendants of Judah to be fruitful and multiply—overcomes the reason of the myth (which knows that the ring cannot prove that Judah is the father of Tamar’s child). Reason appears to argue similarly against the “proof” of the ring in a Buddhist tale in which the king, presented with a signet ring by a woman who claims that he impregnated her,7 simply denies that the woman’s ring is his signet ring, which demonstrates the reasonable fact that jewelry doesn’t actually prove anything at all unless other people acknowledge it. Even where there is initial skepticism about the ring, it is often overcome by the power of the convention. In The Queen of Corinth (written by Fletcher, Field, and Massinger in 1616 or 1617),8 a man falsely accused of rape, on the evidence of the victim’s ring, which he had, in ignorance, received from the rapist (who had taken it from his victim) and given to his wife, pleads innocent, asking who in his right mind would have raped a woman and given her ring to his wife, who was bound to meet the woman: “[Who,] all to perpetrate unknowne his Lust,/ Would fondly in his Person bring a Ring,/ And give it a betroth’d Wife ith’ same house/ Where the poore injur’d Lady liv’, and groan’d?”9 This question is also implicit in Terence’s play, The Mother in Law10 when a man who has raped a girl and stolen her ring gives that ring blithely to his mistress—on whose hand it is eventually recognized as evidence of his dastardly deed. Why was he, we might ask, so stupid in the first place as to give his mistress the ring that he had stolen from a woman he raped? Siegfried, too, gives his wife the ring he had taken from Brünnhihlde after either raping her, seducing her, or tricking her (depending on which version of the story you read), and, as usual, the ring “proves” that he did whatever it is that he did. Indeed we may well ask a variant of Fletcher’s question about most of the men in most of the stories of clever wives: why, if you don’t

7 Katthaharijataka, #7, in Jataka Stories. Ed. E. B. Cowell (London: Pali Text Society, 1973). 8 The play was inspired by Controversia 1.5 of the elder Seneca. 9 John Fletcher, Nathaniel Field, and John Massinger. The Queen of Corinth. In The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, edited by Robert Kean Turner. Vol. 8 (Ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–112; here 74, 4.3. 10 The Mother in Law [Hecyra] of Terence. Edited with translation, introduction, and commentary by S. Ireland. Warminster, Wiltshire: Aris and Philips Ltd., 1990; trans. Betty Radice. In Terence: The Comedies. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1965. Terence based the play upon the Arbitrators of Menander (in Four Plays of Menander: The Hero, Epitrepontes, Periceiromene and Samia. Ed. Edward Capps. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1910).

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want to be recognized, give the girl the ring at all? Often, of course, she insists on having it; but just as often, she does not demand it at all. It is the rationale of the story that demands it. For reason in myths is often sacrificed on the altar of rationality. Against the forces of reason, the power of the myth depends upon the human habit of letting individual logic be overpowered by the rationality of the group, often embodied in convention or “tradition” (as Tevye celebrates it in The Fiddler on the Roof). What Joe Campbell used to call “the power of myth” in an individual (as in, “find your own bliss”) is not really your own myth at all but someone else’s myth putting you in their power, overlaid upon and obscuring your own individual desires. The conflict then comes down to the tension between what individual intelligence can work out (reason) and what the culture as a whole expects everyone to accept (rationality). Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm shift and Leon Festinger’s syndrome of cognitive dissonance help us to understand the power that traditional rationality has over individual reason.11 I am not using myth in the sense of political or religious totalitarian mythmaking, something you are not allowed to question, or are burnt at the stake for questioning.12 I am speaking of narratives that are self-consciously alert to their human origins, narratives that you might question but do not, because there is something intrinsic in the story that you don’t want to give up. Why are these stories told by men when they show up men to be such cads? Because they reflect the rationality of their time and place, in which such behavior was considered normal (or macho, or virile, or honorable, blah blah blah), and because the old myths live on, often patched up a bit, even when new ethical norms make them an embarrassment. They also survive because there is something in the stories that reassures men about the paternity of their children. The stories also enforce the view that it is the job of women to remain faithful to their husbands no matter how badly, how unreasonably, they are treated, and they let men off the hook by pretending to redress the balance of power, as if to say, “I’m not a bully; she can defend herself by her wiles.”13 For such stories often encode repressive social agendas; many of the narratives of clever wives advance an imaginaire that reenforces the control of women

11 Thomas Kuhn,The Nature of Scientific Revolutions (2nd. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957). 12 For this important category of myth, which is beyond the range of this present inquiry of mine, see Bruce Lincoln’s work, particularly Discourse and the Construction of Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 13 Conversation with Lorraine Daston, June 5, 2015.

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by men; they are preserved and perpetuated largely by men, and serve mens’ interests. But women are storytellers too,14 and though we may occasionally note a different tone in those relatively few stories whose tellers have been identified as female, by and large the same sexist cultural rationale pervades the culture of both men and women and, consciously or unconsciously, constrains the stories of narrators of both genders. The tension between reason and rationality is often maintained through conflicted multiple variants of a story. The voice of reason is raised again and again in these narratives, only to be shouted down by the rationality of the myth. While some storytellers use reason to challenge the assertions that the ring is meant to prove, others within the same culture accept the convention–the ring is proof—and allow themselves to be persuaded against reason. Naïvete and cynicism often endure side by side, sometimes even within a single text; the women in the stories naïvely assume that their rings will be adequate proofs of their innocence, and sometimes they are. Both possibilities are acknowledged in the Hellenistic novel, the Ethiopika of Heliodorus (3rd or 4th c. CE), when Persinna’s daughter says, of the tell-tale jewelry, “These tokens are tokens to those who know them or who exposed them with me; but to those who know them not, or cannot recognize them all, they are mere unmeaning keepsakes or, perchance, necklaces that involve their holders in suspicion of theft and brigandage.”15 What does the story of the clever wife do for so many people that they don’t want to give it up despite its violation of their own reason, not to mention its support of a rationale that is hardly in their own interests (depicting men as cads and women as promiscuous tricksters)? (Though it might be argued that it is in the interest of women to see men depicted as cads, and in the interest of men to see women depicted as promiscuous tricksters.) When our inherited narratives become immoral in the light of changing ideas, a ring ex machina, however illogical, may be the only solution. Storytellers often find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, between an inherited, traditional story that they are holding onto like a monkey with a banana in his fist, and a new cage of ethics that traps the monkey’s paw within it. At such a moment, an always-at-hand narrative theme may be invoked as a key to unlock the cage. When a storyteller has painted herself into a corner she reaches for something to fix the story she has inherited, to adapt it to her own purposes. Sinking into the moral quagmire produced by the tensions between one moral standard and another that follows it

14 Doniger, The Implied Spider. 15 Heliodorus, Ethiopika (in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, by B.P. Reardon, 432‑34. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 9.24.7.

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but does not quite supplant it, such as the tension between the siren song of adultery and the monogamous wax poured into the ears, the storyteller reaches for a life-saving narrative. And such a narrative is always readily available to do the job, like a tube of Crazy Glue in a kitchen drawer. The ring of recognition, the smoking ring, is one of the most popular narrative band-aids in the world. If the author cannot change what happened, the plot, she may at least be able to change the balance of power in the knowledge of the plot, who knew what, and when (as we often ask of politicians). The ring of recognition is often precisely the tool to jimmy open the plot in this way: it produces and obscures knowledge at will, shifting the balance of power as well as the responsibility. These narratives work on us at a very deep level that is hard to resist. The myth also persists because of its intrinsic value for the individual, over and above its value for the rationale of the culture. Freud’s concept of denial shows us some of the factors that often overcome reason: people see not only what fits in with the view of the world that supports their lives but also what they want to see, for personal emotional needs. The belief that love will last forever, and that your special ring is proof of this, is spectacularly counter-factual but not counterintuitive; it is entirely intuitive, it is what we want to believe, it is what our deepest intuitions grab hold of instead of reason, and it is what the mythology feeds on. Romantic infatuation comes up against hard facts, legal challenges, scientific proofs, and wins with one hand tied behind its back. As Marina Warner says of the end of the Arabian Nights, “This conclusion, in all its preposterous, cruel unlikelihood, accords of course with the fairytale conventions [and] still has the power to work its charm of release and contentment on the reader.”16 Unreasonable ideas come up against hard facts, legal challenges, scientific proofs, and win with one hand tied behind their back. Reason never even gets its foot in the door.

16 Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (New York: Belknap Press, 2012), 5.

Nature Enframed

Marina Warner

Dwelling Under the Sea, or the Wonder of a Glass Sponge Abstract: The tale of “Ἀbd Allah of the Sea” is a stunning display of maritime marvels, like the sponge, that could elicit pleasure and good luck. “Glass” sponges might be tokens, but they were at the same time “useful” as an astonishing transformer of seawater into silica. Observing nature, even through stories, can be a revelation of the magical properties of such phenomena.

Ἀbd Allah said: “Brother, I have seen many marvels in the sea.” “What do you mean?” asked his friend. “Have you not heard the proverb that there are more marvels on sea than on the land?” “True enough,” said Ἀbd Allah. The Arabian Nights, trans. Malcolm Lyons.1

I The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, written several centuries ago, carry the reader to cities and territory still familiar from the politics and conflicts of today: Damascus, Basra, Baghdad. The dramatis personae of the tales travel sea roads still marked on charts of the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Gulf. But because the stories are thronged with intermediate beings who inhabit the elements, both the upper regions of the air and the depths of the sea, the geography of the narratives reads as utterly fantastic—or, you could say, speculative. However, the jinn (genies) and the peris (fairies) who propel the plots through their formidable powers and endless caprices are described in the Qur’an, and they consequently have scriptural authority; their activities are not simply presented as wild fables and amusing fictions, but are offered as something more complicated and ambiguous. Just as a professed Christian must interpret the story of Creation in the Old Testament according to some method of exegesis (as myth, allegory, anagogical revelation?), rather than dismiss it out of hand, so the antic activities of the jinn, even in a whimsical traveller’s yarn, reach towards speculation about the universe, rather than flourish in a happy zone of nonsense, as in

1 The Arabian Nights Tales of the 1001 Nights, trans. Malcolm C. Lyons, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 2009), Vol 3: 545–561: 556.

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English children’s literature. The Thousand and One Nights form part of the literature of wonders, or astonishing things—’ajaib, in Arabic, and as Lorraine Daston has illuminated so wondrously, the capacity to wonder is also a faculty of inquiry. The details of faraway territories and fairy lands in the Arabian Nights, such as the islands of Waq Waq or the kingdom of the King of Seven Islands of the Blue Jinn in “The Tale of Hasan of Basra”, provide beguiling glimpses of difference: the fairy princesses among whom the hero finds himself have every treasure in the world—except dried fruits. After returning home to Basra, he makes sure to remember to take them some on his next visit. Hasan’s vicissitudes also involve long distance flying in the claws of giant Rukh birds, dizzy plunges down sheer mountains, and ecstatic transports with the fairies who are themselves ethereal, even vaporous. The air is a natural element of fairy tale, and flying a property of their enchanted population, including Peter Pan and Mary Poppins. But in the Qur’an, the jinn also obey the bidding of Solomon to dive to the depths of the sea, and some stories in the Nights follow them there and feature marvellous fish-like creatures, resembling more northerly mer-folk and selkies. In “The Tale of the City of Brass,” the travellers bring back some specimens as gifts to the Sultan Ibn Malik of Damascus, and they are given basins to live in, but they still soon expire from the heat. By contrast, “The Tale of Ἀbd Allah of the Land and Ἀbd Allah of the Sea” sets out in a manifest spirit of inquiry about the world under the sea, and provides, not a travelogue or a catalogue of wonders, but a marvellous sequence of comparisons with living conditions on earth.2 A fisherman helps a merman, whom he has accidentally caught in his net, and in return for providing him with produce of the earth, heaps of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds missing from marine life, Ἀbd Allah of the sea offers to show him his world. Ἀbd Allah of the land is very scared of plunging underwater, and objects that he will not be able to survive the depths, but suffocate and drown. The merman reassures him: he will cover him in an ointment uniquely obtained from the blubber of a monster of the deep called the Dandan, a rare and terrible Leviathan with an appetite to match, for it devours everything that comes across its path. (Richard Burton adds one of his erudite footnotes—often works of high fabulism in themselves—that Dandan means tooth in Farsi.) Ἀbd Allah of the land is not entirely convinced, but he allows his friend to take him down into the depths. Instantly, the Dandan appears, drawn irresistibly by the smell of a human

2 The Arabian Nights Tales of the 1001 Nights, trans. Malcolm C. Lyons, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 2009), Vol 3: 545–561.

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being, a rare treat. The merman orders the fisherman to cry out, and as soon as he does so, the Dandan crumbles into kittenish helplessness: the sound of the human voice is lethal to the monster. They then harvest his flesh—in Lyons’s translation, his “liver grease,” for its magical property of protecting creatures— merfolk and mortals alike—under the sea, and making it possible for them to breathe underwater and move about with ease. The merman helps the fisherman coat himself in the unguent and from then on, he can be shown around, unharmed, by his friend Ἀbd Allah the merman, and he discovers that cities beneath the sea are multitudinous, grand, populous and diverse. In one, he finds women living apart and alone—these have incurred the wrath of the Sultan of the deep, and their punishment is segregation and childlessness. Merfamilies do not endower their daughters on marriage, which shocks Ἀbd Allah of the land; nor do they cover up their charms, which are considerable. When the merman takes him to his own home, in his less resplendent, underwater town, and invites him in to meet his wife and daughters, Ἀbd Allah of the land is struck by their bold behaviour, shamelessly brazen in his view, as they not only display their bodies, but speak freely and give their opinions of many things, including him. The fisherman bridles at this. He does not enjoy being laughed at as a “No-Tail” and having his backside inspected by giggling girls verifying this startling lack. Besides, the unrelieved diet of raw fish has palled, and he is longing for the fruit and vegetables he used to supply to the merman, and a hot meal. But there are no flames or ovens under the sea, no fried fish, no griddled meat, no nuts or apricots. He wants to surface, to return to the world of earth, air, and fire that is home. However, in that submarine world, the groundling, the earth dweller, the human creature is the wonder, not so easily let go. A squadron of mermen appear, declaring that “No-Tails” are so rare down below that when one is captured, the specimen must be brought before the Sultan. He is a collectible, to be added to the wonders accumulated by the Sultan of the Sea, and not to be deaccessioned lightly. The tour of under-sea society and its organisation is whimsical and often funny, and the imagined scenes are graphic and highly realised, the practical details adding to the reality effect. The scholar and poet Amira el-Zein has however unfolded deeper significance, seeing the differences between land and sea reflecting divergences between forms of Islam, the marine world mirroring Sufi mysticism, the earthly world Sunni mores.3 For example, after the Sultan hears the fisherman’s story, he lavishes jewels on him, but when the landsman reveals in the

3 ‘The Symbolical and Mystical Meanings in Ἀbdullah of the Sea and Ἀbdullah of the Land (The Arabian Nights)’, in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Vol 19, No 4, 397–409, October 2008.

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course of a discussion about death that, on earth, mourning and lamentation follow the loss of a loved one, the Sultan indignantly takes back his gifts, saying that for those living under the sea death is a matter of jubilation, greeted with feasting and merriment, because the soul has been taken up to paradise. Setting aside such possible metaphysical reflections interwoven into the fancifulness, the tale corroborates Lorraine Daston’s inspired vision of curiosity as a means of acknowledging variety and accepting divergence and singularity, of fostering open-mindedness; the fisherman acts emblematically as a quester, who learns many new strange things and wonders at them without censure. Another way of reading a fairy tale, as evidence, throws a different light on the submarine marvels evoked in the story; the speculative mind, or, in Borges’s formulation, the “reasoning imagination” of the story tellers and writers long ago who made up “The Tale of Ἀbd Allah of the Sea…” was nourished by experience, by a culture of master mariners, cartographers, salt panners, and fishers of pearls as well as fish, and the fairy stories reveal their direct interactions with the sea and its phenomena. When Ἀbd Allah of the land visits his marine friends, the story embarks on a description of the local architecture: “This is my house,” he said, “for all the houses here are mountain caves, both large and small. This is true throughout the cities of the sea, for whoever wants to construct a house goes to the king and tells him where he wants to live. The king sends him off with a number of so-called ‘borer’ fish, which are hired in exchange for a certain quantity of other fish. These ‘borers’ have beaks which can penetrate solid rock, and when they come to the mountain which the man has chosen as the site of his house, they set to work excavating, while the would-be house owner catches fish on which to feed them until the cave has been dug out. The ‘borers’ then leave and the cave is occupied by the owner. All sea people live like this and all their transactions and the services that they do for one another are done in exchange for fish…”

This city of riddling caves, this many-chambered columbarium pierced in the rocks, captures something of the appearance and structure of a coral reef and the symbiotic mutual exchange of different species throughout the colony, giving and taking other species as wages and as nourishment. It reproduces the mutual interdependence of life on a reef, by implied contrast with humans who differ in species from the animals they eat (that roasted meat the fisherman longs for). But the cave of the merman and his family, which has been pecked out by sharpbeaked construction worker fish, is the source of the greatest and most pleasurable wonder in this story, at least for me.

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II The collectors of wonders in the Middle East were as avid to obtain marine marvels as their European counterparts, creators of Wunderkammer; the splendours of the Nights consist often of strange creatures, enormous pearls, peculiar rocks and stones, and phenomena with unique properties, along a gamut from the veridical to the entirely imaginary: lodestones, ambergris, magic automata, trees that flower with heads that talk, the magic grease of the Dangan monster. There is no exact allusion in the stories to one of the most wonderful marine organisms of all, Euplectella aspergillum, a most prized ornament of later, Victorian scientific collections, when in a Valentine mood it was dubbed “Venus’s flower basket.” But the dwelling of Ἀbd Allah of the sea and his family and the other cities of the depths are reminiscent of its structure and its relationship to its residents. A snowflake in three dimensions, spun of lacy glass as if it had been created by the Blashkas—about whom Lorraine Daston has written so eloquently—as part of their marvelous inventory of naturalia, this beautiful sponge bristles with a delicate ruff of crystalline fur in a series of spirals the length of its column; its crest and its root are flossy to the eye, bunched tassels of doll’s-hair-fine fibres, like ripe thistledown or dandelion seed about to scatter. Yet delicate as it looks, Euplectella presents to the touch hard as pumice, as if woven of sugary filaments, a spider’s funnel web frosted and then cast in silver. This wonder is a marine creature; blanched by its existence in the pitch-dark bottom of the sea, it is a live organism, a glass sponge, a loofah for a Dresden shepherdess, a thing of utter mystery and beauty. A pair of shrimp lives in its chambered column, symbiotically; they are nourished on the prey that their host catches in its needle-thin lattice of spicules, and then processes for them to eat. Like toothpicker birds and sharks, the shrimp reciprocate, keeping their shelter clean and tidy; they also breed there, and the baby shrimp grow in the bottom of the fragile windsock, ensconced in the mesh stocking as in a borrowed external womb. When the young shrimp are grown, they swim off to find another flower basket, which in turn will house and feed them. In some countries such sponges used to be given as wedding presents, on account of the happy pair of shrimp they shelter. But Euplectella Aspergillum is not a love token or a fantastic marvel fit only to astonish and provoke mad, aesthetic jouissance. It has extraordinary, useful properties: it changes seawater into glass (silicic acid into silica, properly speaking) by a process the manufacturers of optic fibres envy with a wild envy, and are struggling to emulate. Its spiny crystalline needles are rigid but miraculously not brittle; they are fine as the hair of a child but as strong as … there is no comparison

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(are they stronger than tungsten, or, perhaps, than spider’s silk?); they grow at immense depths under the sea, and specimens are very very long-lasting—an astounding 15,000 years old. The structure is so light and strong and resilient that glass sponges are being studied by a physicist at one of the Max Planck Institutes, in Potsdam, with a view to replicating its lightness and strength for the new skyscraper fantasies that soar on the horizons of the Arabian Gulf.4 Let me bring a specimen to these pages as a virtual ex voto, evidence of the wonders of the book of nature, which Ἀbd Allah of the land realized after he met Ἀbd Allah of the sea, and which Lorraine Daston has helped us to see, and see better.

4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FR6_8n29Mg Uploaded on Feb 23, 2009. Peter Fratzl, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, is looking at what contributions the Euplectella aspergillum, a deep sea sponge known as the Venus Flower Basket, can make in the process of building skyscrapers.

Deborah R. Coen

Miss Fielde’s Nests Abstract: Studying the social insects in glass-cased “artificial nests” became a popular pastime in late nineteenth-century Europe and North America. The construction of these nests, designed for use in laboratories or domestic settings, raised sensitive questions about what, if anything, was “natural” about a home— whether that of an insect colony or a human family. The naturalist and missionary Adele Fielde used the design of artificial nests to advance a radical argument about female independence that she did not risk articulating in any other medium.

“One of the loveliest ornaments to domesticity,” according to a late nineteenthcentury popular magazine, was a vivarium, or an artificial home for cold-blooded life.1 The various artificial insect nests and hives that were designed for domestic settings circa 1900 opened up insect life to observation by experts and amateurs alike. As a popular magazine put it in 1909, “A great many of the interesting secrets of ant life could never have been found out had it not been for the use of the artificial nest, which enabled the observer to study these little creatures in their home life.”2 Linger for a moment on that last clause and it reveals a telling ambiguity. Not only were ants being studied in their “home life;” they were also being studied within the “home life” of the observer. Indeed, we learn that it is only because the observers observe “in their home life” that the ants can be studied “in their home life.” Ask yourself now: are you sure you know whose home life was under study? As Lorraine Daston has shown, insects first became the objects of wondrous and painstaking observation in the eighteenth century. Daston explains how entomology gave life to the abstract lessons of natural theology, as naturalists trained themselves to marvel at the lowliest details of divine creation: the wonders of a butterfly’s wing or a worm’s intestine.3 By the middle of the nineteenth century, entomology had begun to take the form of what Charlotte Sleigh calls a

1 Hermann Lachmann, Das Terrarium: seine Einrichtung, Bepflanzung und Bevölkerung (Magdeburg: Creutz’sche Verlag, 1888), iii. 2 Edward F. Bigelow, “Nature and Science for Young Folks,” St. Nicholas Magazine 36 (1909): 938–945, on 940. 3 Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 100–126.

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“domestic” science.4 By installing artificial nests and hives in human homes, naturalists gleaned knowledge of a kind that had not emerged from prior encounters with insects. Whether in the context of eighteenth-century natural theology or agriculture, gardening, and the control of household pests, entomology had emerged primarily as a taxonomic science. Entomology as the study of insect behavior depended on the cohabitation of humans and insects, on what Abigail Lustig has described as “long-term observation and personal knowledge” of individual insects and colonies, colonies that they followed “hour after hour, year after year.”5 Thus, entomology in the nineteenth century was typically a collaborative and family-oriented enterprise, a far cry from the solitary, “boorish” insect-lover of the eighteenth century. “Artificial nests” pressed the question of what, if anything, was natural about a home—whether that of an insect colony or a human family. Notably, the proper definitions of both “colony” and “family” were a matter of debate at the time.6 This was a period in which evolutionary theorists, ethologists, and mental health experts increasingly argued that human family relations were driven by innate instincts.7 Yet turn-of-the-century trends suggested that any such instincts might be highly malleable. Divorce, birth control, legal rights for illegitimate children, women’s education and work outside the home—all threw into question the “instinctual” basis of the traditional family. Domestic entomology thus became a venue for probing both the evolutionary roots of human sociality and the “plasticity” of social behavior.8 It took the “natural state” of homes, both insect and human, to be a question for research, not a matter of convention.

4 Charlotte Sleigh, Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2007). Sleigh characterizes domestic entomology as an amateur pursuit, but the line between professionals and amateurs was not firm, and it is important to note that amateurs and professionals brought bugs into their homes in similar ways. 5 A. J. Lustig, “Ants and the Nature of Nature in Auguste Forel, Erich Wasmann, and William Morton Wheeler,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, on 283. 6 Auguste Forel, Les fourmis de la Suisse (Zurich, 1874), iii. 7 For the latest on this topic, see Marga Vicedo’s The Nature and Nurture of Love. 8 See the use of “plasticity” as a synonym for learning or adaptability in e.g. William Morton Wheeler, “The Compound and Mixed Nests of American Ants, Part II,” The American Naturalist 35 (1901): 513–539, on 528; Auguste Forel, Die psychischen Fähigkeiten der Ameisen und einiger anderer Insekten (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1902), 13–16.

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Adele Marion Fielde According to the New York Herald Tribune in 1904, Adele Fielde was the “inventor of a nest which entirely deceives the ant and makes it think it is in its own native haunt.”9 (See figures 1 and 2.) Another popular magazine gushed: “For six years, she has literally lived among these tiny civilized creatures. By means of artificial nests, invented and prepared by her, she has made it possible to keep several ant cities in her home, under her daily observation…Any one may enter this ant empire and study it for himself.” It is a striking description, almost foreshadowing the rise of the ideal of the scientist as “participant-observer.” Who was this woman who co-habited with bugs?

Fig. 1: The Fielde Nest

Adelia Fielde was born into a poor but well-read family in New York State, near Lake Ontario, in 1839.10 Though her parents were Baptists, she favored the tolerance of the Universalist church. After leaving home to train to be a teacher, she began to write under the pseudonym Adele Marion Fielde. While in school in Albany, NY, she was introduced to Cyrus Chilcott, a young Baptist missionary.

9 Quoted in Helen Norton Stevens, Memorial Biography of Adele M. Fielde (Seattle, Pigott, 1918), 263. 10 Biographical information is summarized from Stevens, Memorial Biography, and Leonard Warren, Adele Marion Fielde: Feminist, social activist, scientist (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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Fig. 2: Diagram of the Fielde Nest

According to those present, it was “love at first sight.”11 Fielde agreed to accompany Chilcott to Siam, where they would be married and pursue a life together as missionaries. Chilcott went ahead to get settled, and Fielde followed several months later. She arrived in Siam in 1866, having nearly died of fever on the long voyage there, only to find that Chilcott had succumbed to typhoid fever five months earlier.

11 Stevens, Memorial Biography, 59.

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According to one of Fielde’s many close friends, she “was naturally domestic, and it was simply out of the question for her to conceive of a successful life for herself that was not based upon conjugal love, the care of a home and the rearing of children.”12 Nonetheless, after Chilcott’s death, all the evidence suggests that Fielde never considered marrying anyone else. In fact, she seems to have taken for granted that her life thereafter would have nothing to do with conjugal love and child-rearing. And so it came to pass: Fielde went on to become an influential if controversial member of the Baptist mission in southern China; a world traveler; a widely read author on topics from foot-binding to natural selection to New York City politics; and a successful entomologist. How then are we to explain her friend’s assessment? If we allow that traditional living arrangements were in her “nature,” then how do we explain that she thrived in quite different conditions? As we will see, questions of this sort—about the varied forms that “natural domesticity” might take—were at the heart of Fielde’s entomological research.

“To Make My House a Home” Fielde began to pose questions about the adaptability of human domestic norms during her decades in the Far East. In 1886 she described the local homes in Swatow (Shàntóuin) in southern China as “but one story; their best floors are made of tiles laid on the ground, and are usually unlighted by any aperture except the door. They have no glass windows and are crowded closely together, upon narrow alleys, where all the sewage of the neighborhood visibly flows.” Though it is not clear how familiar she was at this point with evolutionary theory, she framed her observations in evolutionary terms: “The Chinaman is a splendid example of the gradual adaptation of the physical constitution to its environment. He is as happy in foul air as a fish in water…”13 Implicit in this blithe comment is the monogenist, environmentalist explanation of human difference that Fielde had probably learned from her association with the abolition movement during the Civil War.14 Faced with what struck her as a radical difference in living styles (“In the south of China, no foreigners live in houses of the native pattern…”), Fielde invoked a physiological process of adaptation (leaving aside the question of the adaptive mechanism, whether Lamarckian or Darwinian). At the same time, she noted how “native carpenters” had learned to build houses for foreigners

12 Quoted in Warren, Adele Marion Fielde, 22. 13 Quoted in Stevens, Memorial Biography, 108. 14 On her claim to have been an abolitionist, Adele Marion Fielde, see Warren, 13.

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“chiefly of native material; but on a homelike plan.” With a little ingenuity, one could produce a good simulation of home: “if one has pictures, books and bric-abrac, he can make a house here look much like a home in the dear, distant fatherland.”15 In these ways, Fielde’s efforts to make a life for herself in China led her to speculate about the plasticity of the human constitution to novel domestic arrangements. The line between natural and artificial domesticity was already in question. As an unmarried woman missionary in Asia, Fielde found herself forced to share living quarters with married couples, and she came to resent this deeply. She reasoned that single women were actually more valuable to a mission than married couples, since the wives of missionaries were busy with children and unable to work. She urged the creation of “units” made up of four single women, one of whom would be responsible for house-keeping and nursing, while the others would do the work of the mission in the community.16 Her advice proved prescient. In the late nineteenth century, unmarried women were increasingly put to work as missionaries in China and housed in single-sex residences.17 Yet many of the male missionaries were reluctant to grant women such independence. Meanwhile, Fielde’s attitude toward traditional domesticity grew ever more irreverent. With her characteristic dry humor, for instance, she mocked one gentleman as “an intense family man and therefore something of a bore. Disposed to always date events by domestic incidents; for instance ‘it was the year my Lillie had the whooping cough…’”18 More fundamentally, she came to resent her superiors in the mission for the constraints they imposed on her personal life. Of the founder of the Bangkok mission, Fielde wrote privately, “He has always rendered it impossible to me to make my house a home.”19 It was during a break from her missionary work (due to a falling-out in part over her experiments with card-playing, dancing, and smoking hashish) that Fielde began to train as a naturalist. In Philadelphia in 1883, she enrolled at the Women’s Medical College, and then secured the supervision of members of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences for training in experimental biology. Here she learned the methods she would apply years later to the study of ants, after her missionary career had come to a close.20

15 Quoted in Stevens, Memorial Biography, 109. 16 Warren, Adele Marion Fielde, 37. 17 Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 79–82, cited by Warren. 18 Quoted in Warren, Adele Marion Fielde, 86. 19 Quoted in Warren, Adele Marion Fielde, 40, original emphasis. 20 Warren, Adele Marion Fielde, chapter 6.

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Fielde settled in New York City in 1892, where she earned her living as a writer and lecturer. Publically, Fielde was a limited advocate of women’s education. She offered classes on civil government for young women, yet endorsed traditional gender norms. “Oh, you dear, aspiring, strenuous souls!” she wrote of her students. “I wish that every one of you was the mother of seven children or the grandmother of twelve; and that you had your lives and time full of honest, healthy, calm domesticity!”21 Yet Fielde’s own domesticity was of a different sort. At the time, she was living in a boarding house at 130 West 43rd Street, probably taking her meals at a nearby restaurant. Her summers were spent at the Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This was an institution noted not only for its scientific reputation, but also for the tendency of researchers who arrived single to leave romantically attached. But not Fielde. By this time, according to her biographers, she had rejected several marriage proposals. Soon, she would express her preference for a rather unorthodox domestic partner: the ant.

Portable Ant Nests In 1900 Fielde introduced her design for a “portable ant nest,” a variation on the popular designs by Lubbock and Janet. It was quickly adopted by both professional and amateur entomologists and won her lasting renown. In explaining her motivation for this invention, she hinted at the reflexivity of her experiments: “In order to keep ants under continued observation, and at the same time to change occasionally the domicile of the observer, it is necessary to have portable nests.”22 For Fielde, mobility and independence were unquestionable conditions of existence. At stake in her experiments with “portable nests,” then, were the natural limits of domesticity for ants and humans alike. There is little space here to discuss the details of Fielde’s experiments and findings. From the start, her primary interest lay in manipulating the ants’ reactions to “foreigners,” their means of distinguishing friend from foe. Nor is it possible to discuss accusations about her anthropomorphizing tendencies (including the suspicion that her ant societies were distinctly “feminist,” or that she treated her ants much as she had treated her students in China). Instead, I am interested in the reflexivity of her experiments, the ways in which the simulation of insect homes threw into question what was natural for a human home. At the

21 Quoted in Warren, Adele Marion Fielde, 125. 22 Adele M. Fielde, “Portable Ant Nests,” Biological Bulletin 2 (1900): 81–85, on 81.

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level of analogy, the ants taught lessons about the plasticity of domestic behavior. More fundamentally, the multispecies household that she built for herself and her ants was in itself an experiment, a test of the range of what might satisfy the “domestic instinct” of a human. Fielde did not allow her reader to forget the artificial conditions in which her ants lived. She repeatedly drew attention back to their existence in “so unnatural an environment as is created by a glass nest and a human purveyor.”23 Likewise, she frequently remarked on the increasing tameness of the ants under these conditions: with time, for instance, they gave up biting her or hiding from her. These were, in other words, studies of adaptation, with an eye to disentangling the innate versus learned elements of domesticity. More specifically, I want to return us to Daston’s account of Enlightenment entomology by focusing on how Fielde expressed the uniqueness and virtues of her own methods. Far from trying to hide her status as a single woman, Fielde cast it as an advantage. In contrast to her more famous colleagues, such as Auguste Forel, Jean-Henri Fabre, and William Morton Wheeler, who made clear that they relied on help from family members, Fielde emphasized that she went it alone: All the ants employed in the experiments recorded by me have been under my constant care and my frequent observation. No person beside myself has ever had access to them. They have spent the summers, from the first of June to the end of September, at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Holl [sic], Mass., and the remainder of every year in New York City.24

Fielde thus presented her undivided responsibility for the ants as a guarantee of the soundness of her observations. She cast herself as an authority on ants by virtue of her solitary, patient work, reporting on conclusions drawn “during five years of fairly constant observation.”25 Fielde never alluded to her eighteenthcentury predecessors. Instead, she hinted at the feminine associations that now adhered to this style of patient observation—which only an unmarried, childless woman could lavish on insects.26 What’s more, Fielde designed her nests specifically in order to elicit this particular style of observation. As William Morton Wheeler noted in comparing

23 Adele M. Fielde, “A Study of an Ant,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 53 (1901): 425–449, on 436. 24 Fielde, “Power of Recognition Among Ants” Biological Bulletin 7 (1904): 227–250, on 232. 25 Fielde, “The Progressive Odor of Ants,” Biological Bulletin 10 (1905): 1–16, on 15. 26 See Lorraine Daston, “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context 5 (1992): 209–235.

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her design to others, the Fielde nest allowed the “closest inspection” of ants, but also required “closer attention”: This artificial nest…is superior to any other that I have used. It requires closer attention than the Janet nest in order that the requisite amount of moisture may be maintained, but this slight disadvantage is outweighed by numerous advantages. The ventilation of the chambers is excellent, the closest inspection of the ants is possible, and the nests are easily handled, transported, and cleaned.27

Wheeler thus confirmed Fielde’s own assessment of her qualities as an observer. Likewise, educator and naturalist Anna Comstock recommended the Lubbock nest over the Fielde nest in similar terms: “The Fielde nest is better adapted for a serious study of ants, but it is not so well adapted for the schoolroom as is the Lubbock nest.”28 Fielde thus built her own virtues as an observer into the technology of her artificial nests. Fielde further argued that the analysis of ant behavior required a complete picture of the entire life history of each individual ant: Moreover, as every ant acts on personal experience and individual memory, the ants should be considered singly as well as in groups and communities, when a theory of their behavior is to be enunciated. But when the total history of an ant is known, the investigator may accurately predict the behavior of that ant toward other ants.29

And again: “For correct interpretation of the behavior of ants observation needs be indefinitely prolonged. Sometimes the real animus of one ant toward another is revealed only after weeks or months of continuous association.”30 Fielde even deemed it necessary to keep part of the ant population in solitary confinement, in the interest of studying the full range of their behavioral plasticity: “The value of the experimental work here presented lies mainly in the complete protection of the virginity of the ant-mothers during their whole lifetime…”31 In this way, a certain resonance emerged between Fielde’s own solitary status and that of her confined subjects: “Only when ants are segregated from the pupa-stage, and full record kept of every experience of theirs in meeting other ants, can the investiga-

27 Wheeler, “Compound and Mixed Nests,” 528. 28 Anna Comstock, Handbook of Nature-study for Teachers and Parents (Ithaca: Comstock, 1912), 424. 29 Fielde, “Progressive Odor,” 15. 30 “Suggested Explanations of Certain Phenomena in the Lives of Ants; With a Method of Tracing Ants to Their Respective Communities” (1907). 31 Fielde, “Observations on the Progeny of Virgin Ants,” Biological Bulletin 9 (1905): 355–360, on 355.

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tor truthfully declare that ants behave in a certain manner in the presence of other ants.”32 Perhaps Fielde sensed that her work benefited from her sympathy for the plight of the solitary creature. Not surprisingly, Fielde’s conclusions did not go undisputed. When faced with challenges from colleagues who were unable to replicate her results, Fielde claimed that no one else had observed ants in quite the way she had: “Perhaps I am the only person who knows that some centuries from now my name will linger in the scientific world because of my discoveries of the distribution and localization of the sense of smell in ants. These discoveries, made in 1901, have not been confuted nor confirmed by any other worker. No one during the last decade has undertaken the prolonged, unhurried, painstaking experiments necessary either to the contradiction or confirmation of my published statements.”33 Such “prolonged, unhurried, painstaking”—and, we might add, solitary—observations of insects had indeed passed out of fashion with the demise of Enlightenment natural theology. By the late nineteenth century, work of this sort was firmly gendered feminine, offering few rewards to male scientists. Fielde thus staked her claim to authority on her application of a feminine virtue to a science in need of it.

Conclusion The study of domestic life in ants expanded what Adele Fielde allowed herself to think of as natural for a human home. Though she was unable to find a way to question traditional gender norms within the discourses of religion or politics, she was able to do so in science. Thus, late in life, she could express admiration for the traditional household of a young friend, yet simultaneously affirm the naturalness of her own lifestyle: I have heaps of enjoyment in your new house; in its spaciousness and comfort, and in the fact that it is your own, after you have made it to your mind. It is good for the dear children to have through their lives the memory of a permanent home, where a tree, a toad and an ant-hill were close acquaintances. I have now on my table a little plant that folds up its broad, spotted leaves and goes to sleep about my bed-time and wakes up and stretches while I am eating my breakfast. It is a sort of companion.34

32 Fielde, “Progressive Odor,” 15. 33 Quoted in Stevens, Memorial Biography, 262; undated, but apparently written near the end of her life. 34 Letter from Fielde to a daughter-in-law of Mrs. William Cauldwell, 1914, quoted in Stevens, Memorial Biography, 146.

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We have no reason to doubt her or to read this as self-pity. For Fielde, nonhumans appear to have been necessary and sufficient domestic companions. In conclusion, it is worth noting that insects remain of great interest today for research on what is now called phenotypic plasticity: the degree to which individuals can deviate from their phenotype in response to environmental change.35 In fact, phenotypic plasticity has been hailed as the idea that will move us beyond the dichotomy of “nature versus nurture.”36 In its methods and questions, this research is indebted to the work of Fielde and other late nineteenth-century domestic entomologists. As Charlotte Sleigh has argued, domestic entomology was a means of “domesticating” humans alongside insects.37 Yet the analysis pursued in this essay forces us to ask what domestication came to mean in this context. In the multispecies households organized around the new vivaria of the late nineteenth century, the process of domestication was unpredictable. In the experimental system of domestic entomology, humans were put to the test along with insects. Just as insect lifestyles adapted to human domestic norms, so did human lifestyles adapt to the rhythms of insect societies. Ultimately, then, we might say that domestic entomology had a radical potential in the nineteenth century: a potential to demonstrate the plasticity of family relations—not merely via analogies between colonies of insects and of humans, but via mutual adaptations between them.

35 Douglas W. Whitman and T.N. Ananthakrishnan, eds., Phenotypic Plasticity of Insects: Mechanisms and Consequences (Enfield, New Hampshire: Science Publishers, 2009). 36 Evelyn Fox Keller, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture (Chapel Hill: Duke Univ. Press, 2010), 75. 37 Sleigh, Six Legs Better.

Gerald Holton

Revisiting Mein Weltbild Abstract: Albert Einstein was caught in the crossfire of an all-out, years-long battle between the German physicist Max Planck (who defended Einstein’s work from early days) and the Austrian polymath physicist/philosopher/psychologist Ernst Mach (whose work was inspirational to Einstein in his critique of absolute space and absolute time). Mach insisted that we humans were inextricably present in our science, and it is we who ultimately must arbitrate our knowledge through our own senses and perceptions. Planck, by contrast, wanted nothing to do with such perceived anthropocentrism, insisting that the deeper, absolute truths of physics ought be discoverable by any species in any far-flung corner of the universe. To what extent is the nature of our knowledge of nature fundamentally brought into question even at the highest level of the physical sciences?

Among Einstein’s many publications meant for the general public, the small book titled Mein Weltbild1 is one of the most widely admired (especially in translation, first as The World as I See it). But in my opinion it is his most puzzling and intriguing volume. First, it belongs in the category of what might be called “fugitive books.” It was published in 1934 by the Querido Verlag, a firm set up in the Netherlands in the previous year specifically to issue books by distinguished authors who no longer could publish in their home countries (shades of Galileo). Even a first glance at Einstein’s book shows it to be a potpourri of his various earlier publications and letters, ranging from politics to basic science. There are also signs that it was put together in a hurry (probably by Einstein’s son-in-law, Rudolf Kayser, and Carl Seelig). Thus the one-page Vorwort makes incorrect references to some of the articles. But to Einstein himself, the worst offense was the very title of the book, which he had not supplied. He wrote a curt note to the publishing company (on 31 May 1943), vigorously objecting to the “geschmacklosen and verlogenen Titel.”2 Indeed, when he sent a copy of the book as a birthday present to his old friend Max Talmey, he inscribed it with one of his humorous short poems, but crossed out the

1 Querido Verlag, 1934. 2 Einstein’s letter of May 31, 1924. I thank Professor Diana K. Buchwald, General Editor and Director of the Einstein Papers Project, for supplying a copy of the letter.

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disgraceful title, writing below it: “Quatsch” (nonsensical twaddle).3 To anyone who put even one toe into the vast ocean of German Weltbilderei in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it is obvious why Einstein regarded the title as distasteful and mendacious. “Weltbild” is one of those wonderfully metaphoric-poetic words that Seamus Heany once called “bearers of history and mystery”4 (although this one suffers from poor translatability, with the OED providing the lame definition of “view of life” for both “Weltbild” and “Weltanschauung”). From the time when Kant launched the concept in his mandatory Kritik der reinen Vernunft, German scientist-philosophers dealt with it all too often as nearly sacred, as a profound part of one’s own self-identification, but also as a shield and sword, especially in quarreling with opponents.5 And they used it with abandon; my College’s library lists 854 books in all fields containing that word in their title or as a significant keyword (not counting also the books using related words such as “Weltanschauung,” or the huge number of published articles similarly afflicted). Erwin Schrödinger felt compelled to title his last book Meine Weltansicht, published in his last year of life (1961), as if part of last rites. The most theatrical and widely noted confrontation regarding the proper (versus sham) conception of the Weltbild was that initiated by an attack by Max Planck on Ernst Mach, in the early years of the 20th century. It was at that time as high an encounter as it could get in German science. A quick reminder: In his early years Planck was a follower of Mach’s positivistic and sensationist ideas, but turned against them as he came to accept atomism and to be more and more attracted to metaphysical conceptions. He was also concerned that Mach’s views remained fashionable among mature scientists, that they had “grosse Beliebtheit.” Planck’s opening salvo was a lecture on 9 December 1908 (and the printed version of 1909), titled “Die Einheit des physikalischen Weltbildes.”6 He explained at length his own, favored conception of a developing a Weltbild of science that would be freed of every individual’s mere “menschliche Beobachtungen,” such as those Mach had put forward as a key notion. Only by putting aside Mach’s view, Planck wrote, could one reach for those constant and universal conceptions that are at the heart of science (rather like Planck’s constant h, which he said even extraterritorial observers would have to deduce).

3 In the description of the offer of a first-edition copy of Mein Weltbild, Lot 37126 of Signature Rare Books Co, auction #6038. 4 Repeatedly quoted in his obituaries, e.g. New York Times, 30 August 2013. 5 For good introductions to the various meanings and roles of the concepts of Weltbild and Weltanschauung, etc., see John Heilbron,The Dilemmas of an Upright Man (1986) and Gerhard Sonnert,Einstein and Culture (2005). 6 Physikalische Zeitschrift, v. 10, 1909.

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Mach countered with a lengthy response (“Die Leitgedanken meiner naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnislehre…,”19107) which clearly expressed his displeasure, not least by reducing the name of Planck to a mere “P.” Now it was Planck’s turn. Within a few months, he attacked again, this time against Mach’s science generally (“Zur Machschen Theorie der physikalischen Erkenntnis,” 19108), and he returned to it in an updated lecture in the Netherlands in 1929 (“Zwanzig Jahre Arbeit am physikalischen Weltbild”9), then repeated it in a lecture tour to Vienna and Prague—and kept it up to 1940 (“Naturwissenschaft und reale Aussenwelt”10). Planck’s attack on Mach of 1909 put Einstein in a difficult position. The confrontation was discussed everywhere. More importantly, Einstein, too, had of course attended to the then pervasive worldview discussion. Even as a teenager, Einstein had read Kant’s KRV. As a young student at the ETH he had taken, as one of his eleven non-compulsory courses, “Goethe: Werke und Weltanschauung.” And in his early scientific publication he was judging the then current mechanical versus electromagnetic world-pictures, referring directly to “Weltbild” (e.g. in 190711). He was also deeply involved in the polemic in other ways, historically and epistemologically. As to Mach, Einstein had openly declared himself an admiring follower in his early years; Mach’s hope for fashioning an Einheitswissenschaft was then (and for life) a main part of Einstein’s own program. So Einstein did the least he could do: he wrote polite letters to Mach (9 August 1909, 17 August 1909, 25 June 1913, and in December 191312), indicating his sympathy with Mach. On the other hand Planck had been a promoter of Einstein’s career from the start, being involved in the acceptance for publication of Einstein’s early papers, defending relativity theory in its early years, later persuading him to come to Berlin, and being there a close colleague, but foremost of course by leading Einstein into quantum physics through his (Planck’s) publications. In fact, when Einstein said of Planck in his important 1918 article, “Motive des Forschens,”13 that “we love him,” it was a believable indication of Einstein’s feelings—even though by then he had come to know of Planck’s publicly expressed dislike of Einstein’s new theory. At any rate, no letter from Einstein to Planck in the relevant

7 Physikalische Zeitschrift, v. 11, 1910. 8 Ibid. 9 In Max Planck, Physikalische Abhandlungen und Vortraege, v. 3, 1958. 10 Die Naturwissenschaften, v. 28, 1940. 11 The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, v. 2, 1989, Document 47. 12 Documents 174, 175, 448 and 195, in Einstein’s Collected Papers, v. 5, 1993. 13 Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, 1934, pp. 165–170, but given the wrong title for that chapter.

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period has been found; but the two met at a conference in December 1909, a year after Planck’s first polemic, and something may have been said there. At this point we have to look again at a much analyzed publication of Einstein (badly translated in his Ideas and Opinions14), originally a lecture titled “Motive des Forschens,” given at a celebration of Planck’s 60th birthday (1918). It contains Einstein’s most eloquent expression of his own Bild der Welt, which he claims every human being in some measure tries to form in order to overcome the world of mere experience. He urged there that in that task, physicists have their own, highest duty (“Hoechste Aufgabe”) to form a personal Weltbild (a proud, noble term, a “stoltze[r] Name”), which is achievable not through logic but by “Einfuehlung in die Erfahrung sich stuetzende Intuition.” There follows a casual reference to the Planck-Mach polemic. Elsewhere, Einstein makes other references to his world-view (e.g. in the essay “Wie ich die Welt sehe,” of 193115). But in his 1934 essay “Gibt es eine Juedische Weltanschauung?”,16 Einstein vehemently denied its existence in that case. Instead, he acknowledged only the role of a “Lebenseinstellung,” one that contains all the usually celebrated ideals–the holiness and favoring of life of all creatures, the duty to make life more uplifting and beautiful, et cetera. So now we know what, in Einstein’s opinion, a Weltbild is not. But do we really understand, when all is said and done, what it is? My own answer is Yes— but we can hope for more than a glimpse only if the person seeking such knowledge has been quite thoroughly immersed in studies of Einstein’s papers and correspondence. For it is in this case, and more generally, only through such wide-ranging encounters that there can emerge for the scholar a conviction of what may be the core-belief of the person being examined. Or better, borrowing from Einstein’s essay of 1913: such an observer would be able to understand the individual’s privately achieved “uebersichtliche Bild der Welt,” and how the final step was taken—the placement of that picture into one’s center of gravity, “den Schwerpunkt seines Gefuehlslebens.” I would stress that this process of observation is itself idiosyncratic, relying heavily on intuition and imagination (two of Einstein’s own chief tools), and its result is difficult to convey fully to others. To know Einstein’s Weltbild, one has to know one’s own Einstein. Further, this ultimately personal view has consequences. One is that among most working scientists, by and large, there is a great suspicion of this imaginative process, one far from operational meaning. As Lorraine Daston noted in her

14 Crown Publishers, 1954, and other publishers. 15 Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, 1934, pp. 11–17. 16 Ibid., pp. 133–136.

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splendid essay, “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science,” “the power of the imagination has long awakened fear among scientists,” and she recalled the remark of the great physiologist Claude Bernard, “L’art c’est moi, la science c’est nous.”17 This estrangement has long concerned me. Scientists as educators, as instructors facing a group of newcomers, will now very rarely publicly evoke to the student any glimpse of what may in fact be secretly their own motivating possession, some awareness of the humanistic element in science. Instead, the typical instructor, especially in the important early courses, puts out, one by one, the various main topics, with little apparent connection among them—a collection a bit like the unrelated set of chapters in his 1934 book, which Einstein dismissed as Quatsch. No wonder that many students later ask what this course was all about. For under the usual regime, such a student will have been deprived of what is at the heart of all sound education: some measure of the intellectual and emotional experience of having been introduced to a wide-ranging, conception-motivating scientific understanding, or as Einstein put it, to one’s own “uebersichtliche Bild der Welt.”

17 Peter Galison, Stephen R. Graubard, and Everett Mendelsohn, Science and Culture, 2001, pp. 82 and 87.

Dominique Pestre

Knowledge and Rational Action: The Economization of Environment, and After Abstract: The economization of the environment is a program that started in the 1970s and became the main way to consider the economics / ecology question in most countries and international organizations. Taking OECD as a privileged space of observation, together with the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, I intend to show how the notions of both Environment and Economization were a matter of (scientific) knowledge and debates, how different conceptualizations and interests led to various tools and expert work, and why they led us directly to the Anthropocene situation.

1 There is a paradox in the question of the Anthropocene: human beings are apparently responsible for it, and notably its severe acceleration since the 1950s, but people and institutions have been aware of the problem since at least five decades. Let me remind you that OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) started to consider the question in 1968 and put into practices its first conclusions in 1971; that the Environment Protection Agency was established in 1969 in the United States; that the conference on Human Environment convened by the United Nations took place in 1972 in Stockholm; and that the Club of Rome was established in 1968 and published its report Limits to Growth also in 1972. The question I would like to consider is thus: by which strange process of “rationalization” and “des-inhibition” did we simultaneously put into place reflections and regulations to master the situation, and finally end up aggravating it beyond any reason. Understanding the paradox implies considering, inter alia, the links between the defense of economic growth and that of Gaïa, that layer of the Earth that includes part of the crust and the whole atmosphere. Considering the relationships between both is not just a matter of knowledge or good will, however, but of the concrete ways through which market-based and democratic societies are organized, the subtle connections and hierarchies that are built between economic and environmental practices. To try and illustrate this, I suggest visiting two institutions at three moments, to consider OECD around 1970 and 1990, and the UN climate change program around 2010.

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OECD deserves particular attention since it has been the main idea broker, the “pilot fish” of the global North whose aim has been to improve commerce and development without forgetting shortcomings. OECD mobilizes knowledge to identify problems, suggests rational and efficient solutions, and devises better norms of conduct—which it started to do around 1970 with environment. As for the UN climate change program in the 2000s, its importance lies in the fact that it had then nearly absorbed, or polarized, the entire question of the future of Gaïa in conceptual and political terms.

2 Let me start by considering the first seminar held in the summer 1971 by the Unit for Analysis and Economic Evaluation of OECD Environment Directorate.1 At the time, economy and economics had specific meanings. Mainstream economists were then dealing with national economies, i.e. “the self-contained totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a geographical area … that a modern apparatus of calculation could optimize.”2 It is in this frame that the environmental question is posed in 1970—which means put into economics. The premise is that “there is no automatic conflict between economic growth and protection of the environment”—an act of faith to be repeated up to now—and the point of the seminar is to build an “economics of environment,” to imagine and develop “the instruments needed for the best allocation of environmental costs.” During this meeting, different attitudes emerge. Keynesian economists present macro-economic and econometric models aiming at testing the possible induced effects of new anti-pollutions measures and choosing the “right” levels of norms. Most of these simulations are built on a monetary basis, but some stress the crucial importance of also thinking in terms of material resources. Some authors worry about the effect of environmental protection on social justice, and other consider it central to build indicators allowing the long-term inclusion of the environment, in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) for example. But most academic economists present at the meeting declare these indicators mere warning systems that cannot be central in policy terms. For them, one should start from economic principles, perform cost-benefit analyses by comparing environmental

1 Problèmes d’économie de l’environnement, Paris, OECD, 1972. 2 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy. Political Power in the Age of Oil, New York, Verso, 2011.

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policies costs with the cost of damages, decide if action is appropriate, and then choose the level of tax to be put on polluters. These strategies reflect two postures. On the one side are people in charge of monitoring economies and people who have responsibilities in the concrete management of environmental questions (regional water basins, for example). The other group is mainly made of economists who start from theory. They are concerned with general rules—redefining market prices via taxes on pollution sources, for example—, and with generic tools—i.e. determining what people are ready to pay for an environmental improvement. The former have quite large an array of preoccupations and tend to be pragmatic. More abstract, the latter rely on the certainties of theory (notably on Arthur C. Pigou’s work) and declare their proposals to be the only rational economic ones.

3 Let’s jump two decades ahead and consider two reports published by OECD in 1989.3 Since 1971, the meaning of “environment” has not changed—it still mainly means the effects of techno-industrial development on us and our surroundings— even if the management of resources (water, forest and land) has become slightly more visible. How to manage them, on the other hand, has drastically changed. There are no econometricians anymore in OECD meetings, no question of studying environmental problems in material terms, nobody to try to “control” the economic machine. The only serious strategy consists in devising incentives aiming at optimizing the way markets operate. A dogmatic opposition is built at OECD between all forms of state regulation, described as top-down and relying on an inefficient “Control and Command” philosophy, and “economic (or market) instruments,” supposed to be most effective since flexible and “aiming at having actors internalize environmental behaviors.” As far as the management of resources is concerned, the stress is on deregulation, since state and agencies are never optimal in their choices. In other words, there is no “economy” anymore but markets that, once induced to internalize the environmental costs, will lead the world both to growth and the optimal Earth protection. The limit cases are the theoreticians of the New Resource Economics and the Free Market Environmentalism. For them, environmental problems derive from the simple fact that prop-

3 Economic Instruments for Environmental Protection, and Renewal Natural Resources. Economic Incentives for Improved Management, Paris, OECD, 1989.

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erty rights are not defined well enough. If that were to be done, nobody would unduly exploit commons anymore, no regulation would be necessary—and our planet would be perfectly managed by careful housekeepers of their interests.4 The central tool advocated to start reorganizing markets around pollutions is the creation of taxes on polluters. Two principles ground it: the principle of Polluter-Payer and cost-benefit analysis, since it would be economically unsound to try and eradicate pollutions at all costs. In the late 1970s in the United States, however, complaints on the part of industrialists and economic Think Tanks that environmental regulations put too heavy a price on production and led to a lack of competitiveness meant that far softer solutions had to be devised. In the second half of the 1970s, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) proposed the concept of Bubble.5 It amounted to allowing companies to compensate their pollution from one site to another, to choose where to reduce damages and where not to do it. Think Tanks like the Heritage Foundation asked to go further. They attacked irresponsible ecologist groups and proposed a whole new program to the incoming Republican administration.6 In the years following Reagan’s victory, environmental norms and charges were loosened and the Bubble concept evolved to markets of pollution rights. And it is in this wave that both of the OECD reports of 1989 have to be understood, as a tool to help convince European countries of the soundness of the new winning strategy of the United States. I am not claiming that controls on the most unbearable pollutions did not improve in the global North. Because social protest never stopped and forced states to take action, the pollution of air and water diminished and limitations were put on the dissemination of sulfur, lead or CFC (chlorofluorocarbon)—even if major black spots remain: think of the water pollution in Brittany because of massive industrial pork breeding and use of pesticides. At the same time, marketled economization led to the erasure of most global thinking. If we add that industrial lobbying regularly led to lower levels of taxes; that globalization led to a high increase in production and consumption; that this took place more and more in the global South without the implementation of environmental regulations—in short, that the global North exported a fast growing polluting economy to the South—nobody should be surprised that the economization scheme did not deliver its promise and that, perhaps in all good faith, the move towards the Anthropocene was not reduced—as all curves show.7

4 Terry L. Anderson, “The New Resource Economics: Old Ideas and New Applications,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 64/5, 1982, 928–934. 5 Michael R Deland, “The Bubble Concept,” American Chemical Society, 13/3, March 1979, 277. 6 Charles Heatherly (ed.), Mandate for Leadership, The Heritage Foundation, 1981. 7 PJ Crutzen, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, J. Phys. IV France, vol. 12 (2012), Pr10-1 to 5.

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4 I would finally like to consider the UN process of mitigating climate change. Here the target is not the local effects of development on the environment and resources, but the historical evolution of Gaïa. Established after the success of the Montreal protocol in 1987 about the ban of CFC, the UN Convention on Climate Change inherited from it a framing in terms of pollution, with quantitative objectives of reduction (of CO2). It created a scientific expertise officially separated from the political process of negotiation—the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)—but de facto organically linked to it through many loops and economists’ work. The climate question was finally taken up at the global level thanks to modeling in both the tradition of modeling national economies and the Club of Rome.8 At the beginning of the UN process, and once convinced of the anthropic nature of warming, the solution appeared to be the limitation of carbon emissions. Because the concrete mechanism was chosen in the 1990s, actors decided on a quota emission trading scheme, not on direct taxes. And some countries refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol, among them the United States, which made the whole scheme immediately fragile. In the 2000s, the frame was contested by the global South and the notion of adaptation became central. The global South and many NGOs claim that the mitigation process cannot be enough because too slow: vulnerable countries have to adapt to quickly changing situations. In the 2000s, the UN-based climate negotiation, finally, tends to absorb most questions of environment, equity and global justice. Economic, industrial and agricultural activities are now included, as well as forests, water, ecosystems, food production, health, coastal situations, etc. The radicalization of international economic competition in the 2000s, the growing power of emergent countries, and the explosion of the economic crisis led, after 2007, to a destabilization of a process that had become quite complex in its architecture. The Conference of Parties to the Convention held in Copenhagen in December 2009 signaled the end of the process initiated in 1988. If we try to give reasons for this failure through the literature produced by the main rightwing US Think Tanks, we could mention, in line with a harsh Realpolitik trend: the partial denial of the threat (global warming is not so alarming); the fact that

8 Amy Dahan & Aikut Stefan, De Rio 1992 à Rio 2012. Vingt années de négociations climatiques. Quel bilan, quel rôle pour l’Europe, quels futurs? Report for the (French) Centre d’Analyse Stratégique, 2012.

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the Kyoto protocol is inefficient, that its economic cost is too high; that no supranational arrangement should limit the freedom that countries enjoy; that we (meaning the United States or the free world) are at war (notably with China), and that any ecumenical posture of sharing the burden is unrealistic (there is no ground for such an agreement); that markets should in fact be left free to act and decide, for example on transfers of technologies and funds for development and adaptation; and that climate and ecosystem services should be favored over multi-lateral constraining schemes.9

5 Let me draw some conclusions. What is striking in this quick narrative is the gap between the time, work, intelligence and money invested to devise solutions— economic instruments and modeling, constraining agreements and markets solutions, etc.—and the low level of end results. A possible explanation might be the move from the defense of the environment to the economics of environment. The (understandable) privilege given everywhere to economic growth, coupled with the power of money in a deregulated world (despite the declaration by business of interest in ecological modernization and sustainable development), allowed the digestion of most warnings, the quiet rewriting of most decisions. But strong belief in theory, notably mainstream economics, played its role in reassuring everybody that rational solutions were put into operation and that the planet would be saved. That banal way of acting, or more precisely of governing, relies on imaginaries and values. In a recent book on 19th Century Europe, Jean Baptiste Fressoz considers the technologies used to manage the negative consequences of progress (on environment or workers’ health) as tools of social desinhibition.10 Desinhibition starts, he tells us, with an acknowledgment, a confession—the fact that industrial pollution is a problem, for example. It goes on with the devising of a solution—most of the time a kind of financial compensation. The solution allows production to resume and expand since the problem is now “solved.” All that remains is to have some form of knowledge to guarantee that all that is reason-

9 The Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org; American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, http://www.aei.org/home (sites visited on 23 December 2009). Dominique Pestre, A contre-science. Politiques et savoirs des societies contemporaines, Paris, Seuil, 2013, chapter 7. 10 Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’apocalypse joyeuse, une histoire du risque technologique, Paris, Seuil, 2012.

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able—in our case, that both targets of growth and environmental protection are compatible, that we should be confident about the oxymoron of “sustainable development” or “market instruments.” Showing their concern and good will, and establishing tools and instruments certified by science, thus seems enough to convince people that they work responsibly and efficiently—and after that, collective forgetting can do its job.

Horst Bredekamp

Galilei’s Spiral Scribbles, Campanella and Fludd Abstract: This essay attempts to show, on the basis of drawings by three great historical figures, that there can be a special quality even—and especially—in seemingly accidental and meaningless gestures.

1 The question of imagination One of the most outstanding qualities of Lorraine Daston’s research is her phenomenal combination of precision and breadth. The two poles around which her work revolves are the notions of objectivity and wonder in their historical developments and entanglements. In her collaborative study with Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, she was thus able to show how supernatural wonder has lost its ex negativo function of defining the norm but, despite its elimination, returns again and again under new guises.1 Art, in this context, according to Daston’s no less fundamental study, Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen, acts as a role model for science; being autonomous and lacking all need for justification, art is able to connect these opposite poles. During the Enlightenment, imagination was discredited as a rather weak form of wonder, and in the 19th century it became downright detested. In art, however, it ensured the very lasting validity to which science would repeatedly strive in vain.2 This paradox is the foundation of Daston’s interest in drawing. A line can be both absolutley precise and immeasurably imaginary; it is therefore a thorn in the side of every definition of science that denies access to the imagination.3 We have repeatedly discussed the theory of disegno, without coming to a conclusion. I take the opportunity here, not to offer a solution, but rather to ask a question which, due

1 Lorraine Daston und Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 2 Lorraine Daston, Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen. Zur Geschichte der Rationalität (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 116–122. 3 A fundamental work on this question is provided by a contribution on the drawings of Dürer: Friedrich Teja Bach, Struktur und Entscheidung. Untersuchungen zu Dürers graphischer Kunst, Berlin 1996.

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to the “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination,”4 has yet to be posed in the field of science. My question relates to the problem of whether unconscious drawings, commonly referred to as scribbles, can, under certain circumstances, be seen to reveal traits of conscious objectivity. This is the sphere in which Sigmund Freud located the epistemically telling phenomenon of “Abhub”: forms which are unreflected, preconscious, uncontrolled, and derailed, in which conscious design is superimposed, or better yet, undermined by not strictly conditioned forms.5 Historical evidence of this kind tends to be considered irrelevant and worthless, and hence unworthy of scholarly attention. This also applies to the following examples that were created in the narrow period of less than ten years, 1609-1617. The first relates to Galileo Galilei, the second to the Utopian Tommaso Campanella, and the third to Matthäus Merian, the master of Vedute. On the basis of drawings by these three great historical figures, an attempt will be made to show that there can be a special quality even—and especially—in what is seemingly accidental and meaningless.

2 The “Abhub” of drawing The point of departure begins with one of the moons in the Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo’s epochal publication of 1610 (Fig. 1)6. On the outer dark side of the moon one finds traces of “Abhub”, in the Freudian sense. Along the furthest extension of the lunar sphere there are eight lines gone wild, partly running in parallel, partly turning in loops at the ends to create spirals that come shooting through crosshatched diagonal parallels. (Fig. 2) This additional, summary blackening of this broader area is carried out in an almost angry manner. It prompts the question whether a different type of imaginative design was employed here than in the other parts of the etching.7

4 Lorraine Daston, “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science,” Daedalus 127(1998):73–95; reprinted, Peter Galison, Stephen R. Graubard, Everett Mendelsohn eds., Science in Culture (New Brunswick (U. S. A.) and London (U. K.): Transaction Publishers, 2001): 73–95. 5 Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method” in History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist Historians, Spring 1980. 6 Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, Venice 1610, 10. 7 Horst Bredekamp, Galilei der Künstler. Der Mond. Die Sonne. Die Hand (Oldenbourg Akademie Verlag, second edition, 2009), 194 ff. This observation, further developed in the new version of the book (Horst Bredekamp, Galileis denkende Hand. Form und Forschung um 1600, Berlin 2015, 144–151), is independent of the case of forgery of drawings as observed by Nick Wieding (Nicholas Schmidle, “A very Rare book,” in The New Yorker, 16 December 2013), and Horst Bredekamp, Irene  

 

 

 

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Fig. 1

The envelope of a letter Galileo sent to the German naturalist Johann Georg Brengger on November 8th, 1610, reinforces this question (Fig. 3).8 In the letter, Galileo explains how to calculate the heights of the observed risings on the moon. In the address in the top right corner of the envelope, Galileo explains that his letter to Brengger is the response to a letter delivered to him by Markus Welser.9 Although anything that is in any respect an autograph by Galileo can usually be found in the national edition of his letters, there is no mention whatsoever of this particular envelope. Apparently, as it manifests traces of derailment, it is non-existent for Galileo research.10

Brückle and Paul Needham, eds. A Galileo Forgery: Unmasking the New York Sidereus Nuncius (de Gruyter 2014). 8 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF), Galileo 53, F. 37v; compare Bredekamp, Galileo der Künstler, 194 ff. 9 Brengger’s letter to Galileo, 29 October 1610; BCNF, Galileo 53, F. 24r–25v; appended, Brengger’s Reflections on the Height of the Moon Mountains, 26r–27r, in Opere, Volume X, Number 420, 460–62. 10 Galileo’s letter to Brengger, 8 November 1610. In Opere, Volume X, Number 425, p. 466.  

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Fig. 2

In the blurred ink stains, which extend to the left on the back as well as over the right portion of the front page, Galileo’s misfortunes can be almost physically felt. Turning the envelope to the right (Fig. 4), in the upper part a lunar disc can be made out. From its midpoint, lines are drawn to the edge, while risings are registered on its outer ridge. They are touched by rays of light falling from various angles, rendering their shadows visible and their heights calculable. All this comes across as quite amateurish. In the same style, a line is drawn running parallel to the crease on the right (now lower) side of the envelope, from which four mountains emerge. These risings are repeated below in a similar but stronger manner. Since the mountain in the middle rises on the edge of a sketched lunar disk, through a jump in scale, the whole lunar surface is shown simultaneously with individual shapes singled out in the overall representation.

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Fig. 3

At first glance, this lower lunar disk, to be seen from below by turning the envelope back (Fig. 5), is an offense to the eye. The broad-hipped circle is slumped and compressed. The terminating line momentarily straightens out at the bottom center, which could be interpreted as a sign of uncertainty. To the left and right, jerky lines are inscribed, indicating nighttime on the left and the brighter appearance of the Mare-spots during daytime on the right. The sketch was probably jotted down in a few seconds, neither the will for perfection nor scruples regarding a clear determination of content playing any role. Astonishingly enough, the jerky lines to the right form S curves as well as two spiraling lines fusing together. In the short space of just a few moments, Galileo has apparently made a summary mark that in its vagueness nevertheless formulates a general statement: firstly, this zone is agitated, and secondly, it is less dark than the left half of the moon. Here, the spiral clearly appears as a sign of summation that accommodates everything happening in its environment, causing the volatile instantaneity of these forms to acquire a binding, transpersonal character. In the ephemeral sketches a formula is imparted.

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Fig. 5

3 Tommaso Campanella’s Spiral Cosmos Three years before Galileo scribbled on his envelope and created his illustrations of the moon, Tommaso Campanella fabricated something similar. The world is indebted to him for his great utopian scripture on the Sun State: Città del Sole. From the dungeon of Naples, Campanella also penned a pamphlet directed against Machiavelli, with the title “Atheism Conquered”. Until it was published a few years ago, Campanella’s autographical manuscript had been left unrecognized among the holdings of the Barberini in the Vatican. It discusses the essence of time, the Last Judgement, eternity, and morality.11 The ecstatic text is full of figures of speech, and at the bottom of folio no. 80, an additional peculiar shape is found which I can only show in reproduction, and, therefore, only in pale form (Fig. 6). In the printed text, it has been replaced by three stars, without any indication that they have been substituted for a

11 Tommaso Campanella, L’ateismo trionfante (Ernst Germana, ed., Volume I, Edizione del testo inedito, Pisa 2004), 89.

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Fig. 6

drawing. So far, tokens of this kind have remained irrelevant for philologists and philosophers, so that this omission was not even found worthy of mentioning.12 At first glance the shape indeed seems meaningless. Lines are thrown onto the paper without any apparent reason, hardly seeming to add up to a semantically descriptive image. But what is once again impressive is that individual Sand spiral lines are joined together. The assumption that this by no means represents a random filling of empty space is supported by the fact that the text on the following page already accommodates the last three words; the space below the text has therefore deliberately been reserved for these lines.

12 Tommaso Campanella, L’ateismo trionfante (Ernst Germana, ed., Volume II, Riproduzione anastatica del Ms. Barb. Lat. 4458 della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pisa 2004), Folio 80, 159.

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Fig. 7

Fig. 8

The context thus becomes all the more important. The sentences preceding the drawings speak of how, as known through the prophecy of the Old Testament, all things will change when the Final Judgment occurs. In effect, the circular lines denote the entire cosmos, implying that, in a massive upheaval, what is at the bottom now will be brought to the top and what is at the top will fall (Fig. 7). The acting angel of the Last Judgment, as the prophecy claims, will have his head and feet covered by the wings of Seraphim, while the center will remain exposed. Thus the wings become the main subject of the appearance. It seems to me that the line’s rotations brilliantly record this ambivalence of emptiness and the wings’

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momentum. As if Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Huygens (Fig. 8)13 and its imaginary pointed of lines body movements had been transposed to the drawing, the spiraling lines demarcate the wings’ flight, the revolutions of the cosmos, and the reversal of fullness and emptiness in their orbiting momentum. Taken by itself, Campanella’s vortex could have been regarded as a casual doodle, much like Galileo’s envelope sketch. The accompanying text, however, makes it unequivocally clear that Campanella’s line vortex is a grandiose abstraction of the Last Judgment using simple spiraling lines.

4 Robert Fludd’s image of infinity Robert Fludd’s image of infinity provides the last example. In the first volume of his history of the macrocosm, the English physician and natural philosopher Fludd imagined a story of creation beginning with the archetype of hyle, the equivalent of the void, as a black rectangle. This was visualized by Matthäus Merian (Fig. 9).14 Though the rectangle is commonly referred to as a square, Merian has in fact scrupulously avoided this impression by applying slightly irregular angles and side lengths. As a result, instead of emphasizing the harmony of the form, he directs the viewer’s attention to the fact that he is looking at a section of nothingness, for which there are no rules.15 In black lies the absence of light. This at least is what the reproductions printed to date show, somewhat in the manner of the archetypes of Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square, also regarded as incunabula of abstraction.16

13 Erwin Panofsky, The Codex Huygens and Leonardo da Vinvi’s Art Theory. The Pierpont Morgan Library Codex M.A. 1139, London 1940 [Kraus Reprint, Nendeln/Liechtensteien 1976], Fol. 6, Abb. 18. 14 Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi MAIORIS scilicet et MINORIS METAPHYSICA, PHYSICA ATQVE TECHNICA HISTORIA In duo Volumina secundum COSMI differentiam diuisa. AVTHORE ROBERTO FLUDD alias de Fluctibus, Armigero, & in Medicina Doctore Oxoniensi. Tomus Primus De Macrocosmi Historia in duos tractatus diuisa, Oppenheim 1617, 26. Compare Lucas Heinrich Wüthrich, Matthäus Merian d. Ä. Eine Biographie (Hoffmann und Campe, 2007), 214–220. 15 Raphael Rosenberg, Jenseits der Mimesis (1600–1900). (Beyond Mimesis (1600–1900): An Archaeology of non-representational Painting), Habilitationsschrift, two volumes, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2003, 29. 16 Horst Bredekamp, Horst Hellinger. Das ausgebrannte Buch (The burnt-out book), ll Libro Marchiato a Fuoco, Bergamo 1993, 22–24; Horst Hellingers Brandbuch. Eine Reise ins Buchinnere (A Voyage into the Inner Book) in: Horst Hellinger, Exhibition Catalogue, Kunsthaus, Hamburg 2000, 50–62, here: 60 ff; also “Beuys als Mitstreiter der Form”, in Ulrich Müller, ed., Joseph Beuys. Parallelprozesse. Archäologie einer künstlerischen Praxis, Hirmer 2012, 23–41, here: 29 f. See also The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, Catalog of an Exhibition, Los Angeles 1986, 23 (without the black square); Oskar Bätschmann, Piet Mondrian: “Reihe, Oval, und Quadrat,” in Rahmen  

 

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However, Fludd’s black rectangle involves more than just the image. On each of the four sides, a Latin inscription articulates: “Et sic in infinitum” (“And thus to infinity”). As a logical consequence of the fact that a void cannot comprise its own limits, if it is not to lose its designation, it must extend indefinitely as a negation of light and form. For this reason, the edges of the four sides are nothing but the symbols of an infinite opening. In the lines of the frame, the endless extension is therefore, as it were, rolled-up. According to Fludd, this circumstance cannot be captured by language, and thus justifies the need for the image.17 In the mind’s eye, the surface of the black square reaches out to all sides, chasing the horizons of the imagination. The original prints, however, reveal that the black in itself is not consistent. Each of the four different editions of the book in Paris and Berlin varies in appearance. One of the versions from Berlin shows the black as composed of a grid of vertical lines running down and crossed horizontally like a textile pattern (Fig. 10).18 In one of the other three Berlin copies, the horizontal lines dominate, apparently because the printing plate was rotated by ninety degrees (Fig. 11).19 The area in the lower left corner shows delicate grating patterns that seem to fixate the black ink by stretching it across the page like a gossamer fabric. Between the intersecting threads, tiny horizontal rectangles of light shine through. The rhythmic alterna-

zwischen Innen und Außen. Beiträge zur Theorie und Geschichte (Hans Körner and Karl Möseneder, Berlin 2010), 209–225; here: 218 ff. Also: Jeannot Simmen, Kasimir Malewitsch, Das Schwarze Quadrat. Vom Anti-Bild zur Ikone der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1998) and Graham Bader, “Die absolute Besonderheit von Kasimir Malewitschs schwarzem Quadrat,” in Das Schwarze Quadrat. Hommage an Malewitsch, Catalog of an Exhibition, Hamburg 2007, 201–206; here, 202. 17 Rosenberg, 2003, 29. 18 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Unter den Linden, Rara A 4916, 26. The bright spots on the top of the picture in the right upper quarter of the page are the result of rubbing the paper. Compare Rosenberg, 2003, 29; 2000, 50–62, here: 60 f; idem, “Beuys as a Comrade of the Form,” “Joseph Beuys’ Parallel Processes,” in Archaeology of an Artistic Practice (ed. Ulrich Müller), Munich 2012, 23–41, here: 29 f. Other authors have discussed these terms. Particularly noteworthy was the exhibition, “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985,” exhibition catalog, Los Angeles 1986, 23 (but without the black square). See the literature review of Oskar Bätschmann, Piet Mondrian: Series, Oval and Square, in: Border between Inside and Outside. Contributions to Theory and History (ed. Hans Grains and Karl Möseneder), Berlin 2010, 209–225, here: 218 f. Instructive also: Jeannot Simmen, Kasimir Malevich. The Black Square. From the anti-image into an icon of Modernism (Frankfurt am Main, 1998) and Graham Bader, “The absolute specialty of Kasimir Malevich’s black square,” in: The Black Square. Homage to Malevich, exhibition catalog, Hamburg 2007, 201–206, here: 202. 19 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Rara, A 4917.  

 

 

 

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tions between darkening and lightening are inherent in the etching technique, which produces no homogeneous black surface, but rather a shimmering darkness. Ultimately, what is spectacular is the fact that, towards the center, on this material structure there has been superimposed an additional layer of black (Fig. 12). Only some areas allow a view of the simulated threads of the lower layer. This suggests that the additional layer of black was not applied uniformly but partly opaque and partly transparent. This irregular structure has not been inscribed in a horizontal-vertical manner, as seen in the tissue structure at the edges, but rather in circular shapes, resembling clouds. But the finesse of this original

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void is not exhausted yet by this motif. Into the cloud formations, lines have been incised, forming irregular circles and spirals through a continuous rotary motion. As a result, a structure composed of three layers of depth emerges from the seemingly bottomless black. The lowermost layer is formed by the porous textile ground over which the cloud-like black forms a round core area, into which the lines and spirals, in turn, are carved. In these clouds of chaos, the circular and spiral lines perform a movement towards light. The scaling of dark tones is created by the condensing of the spiral motion vector. This instance of employing chaotic spiral lines is no less impressive than that of Campanella. If the latter had characterized the cosmos of the Final Judgment in spiral form, then Merian used porous grids to blacken his etching, only to then shape it from within by using circular spiral lines. A quarter of the bright spots seen are the result of rubbing the paper.20 His lines also seem chaotic at first glance. But for exactly this reason they are of the highest conceptual value. For they are able to employ the randomness of sweeping scribbles to indicate a vector of movement that draws the entire archetypal cosmos into a spiraling vortex which opens up to creation. Having taken one of Galileo’s moon etchings and an envelope as a point of departure, we have posed the question whether seemingly accidental and unintentional drawings can give access to a level on which thought and motor activity —in this case the movement of the hand—merge (Fig. 13). What is at stake is the problem of the fusion of sensus, ratio, and actio, and here the core of this problem could be reached. For Galileo, it is not about the origin and the Final Judgment. But by means of the furious S and spiral lines he offers a formula that is evidently intended as the sum symbol of phenomena that are to be understood less as static than as dynamic. When compared with Campanella’s spiral Judgment and Merian’s spiral void, Galileo’s wild strokes become a token of the same abbreviated cosmic principle, though drawn solely on the moon. Deep below the level of conscious design, an element seems to be active that can be described as an artistic thought process; it is, however, and essentially, not limited to artists alone: a non-intentional faculty of thought results from an interplay of gestures, lines, and spontaneous reactions to emerging patterns. These are the movements of non-intentional drawing, which despite, or rather because of this, result in the highest conceptual power. Conceptual thinking clearly reaches into areas of drawing in which the drawing hand itself brings the spontaneity of its motor skills into play. This means that the non-intentional not only represents the very condition of the imagination, but already comprises abstracting generalizations.

20 See Rosenberg, 2003, 29.

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Fig. 11

These tangible forms do not accept the boundaries between art and the sphere of knowledge. No drawing is insignificant enough not to be worth considering. For in the drawings’ materialization a marvel takes place ever anew—not of realizing platonic ideas, but of prompting a picture-active interplay with patterns brought forth through the triad of motoric shaping, picture-active formation, and semantic creation, in which ideas are not illustrated but generated.

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Horst Bredekamp

Glenn W. Most

Heraclitus Fragment B123 DK Abstract: This essay takes a simply stated but difficult to parse sentence from Heraclitus and works at extracting its meanings. For the Greeks, nature (phusis) is not a nature that pre-exists humans, but instead a widespread character of things, as applicable to a city as to a mountain. And even if the world becomes ever more visible to us, the nature of things is not on the surface, as phusis hides.

Phusis kruptesthai philei. “A nature tends to hide.” Heraclitus’ aphorism B123 DK consists of only three words, not one word more: not one word too many. Nothing, it might seem, could possibly be simpler: a subject, a modal verb, an infinitive—all three of them words of ordinary usage, ones that we may presume could have seemed entirely familiar to any speaker of ancient Greek (and at whose meaning, given the etymological productivity of all three words, many speakers of modern European languages can easily guess). But here, by choosing precisely these three words, by limiting his statement to them and no others, and above all by binding them tensely together with invisible syntactical connections, Heraclitus has succeeded in altogether defamiliarizing them. Against the dark sky of early Greek thought in general and the especially somber gloom of Heraclitus the Obscure in particular, this sentence shines forth, like a triadic constellation, enigmatic, ominous, and irresistible. Phusis is derived from the verb phuô, which denotes the process whereby organic living things—above all plants and animals, but gods too and even some minerals—come into being and increase: they are born or generated, blossom or sprout, burgeon or grow.1 Phuô can be used both in the active voice—in which case

1 André Burger, Les mots de la famille de φύω en grec ancien (Paris: Champion, 1925). See more recently especially Pierre Hadot, Le voile d’Isis. Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de Nature (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), especially pp. 35–45 (on the development of the word phusis in Greek), 25–31 (on Heraclitus B123 DK), 55–65 and 83–90 (on the reception of this aphorism), and 303–7 (on Heidegger’s interpretation of it); and Arnaud Macé, “La naissance de la nature en Grèce ancienne,” in S. Haber and A. Macé, eds., Anciens et Modernes par-delà nature et société (Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2012), 47–84 and now L’invention de la Nature en Grèce ancienne (Mémoire d’habilitation à diriger les recherches, Université Paris Sorbonne, Ecole Doctorale Mondes Anciens et Médiévaux, 2013), especially pp. 55–56 (on Heraclitus Frag. B123 DK) and 80–85 (on Heraclitus).

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in some tenses it is transitive (“x engenders or causes to increase”), in others intransitive (“x is engendered or caused to increase”)—and in the passive (the same meaning as the intransitive active). We tend to distinguish (and the Greeks could too) the two aspects of the moment of birth and the activity of growth; but the verb phuô instead stresses the continuity of a single process of augmentation and exfoliation in which birth is only one moment, albeit a particularly conspicuous one. In Greek, the suffix -sis usually denotes a process, unlike -ma, which usually denotes a product, the result of that process—thus poiêsis often designates an activity resulting in the production of a poiêma2—but the distinction is often blurred, and phusis can mean not only the process of organic growth but also that which grows or the resultant growth. Since ancient times, phusis in Heraclitus has often been understood to mean “Nature” in general, the whole of the physical world as it is made up of material components governed by laws and tendencies. But even though Heraclitus’ book, like other works of early Greek philosophy, received the title Peri Phuseôs, On Nature, such titles were almost certainly applied to these treatises later and it is extremely doubtful that Heraclitus or any of his contemporaries possessed an abstract conception of Nature as a whole anything like our own. To be sure, phusis points towards what is not entirely subject to human control, what is produced without being manufactured by men, and what is produced not only here or there but in many places. But nor could phusis have meant for Heraclitus “nature” in another sense familiar to us, as that which belongs to a domain other than and prior to the human, for example the forests and lakes outside our cities to which we drive for a weekend of relaxation and pollution. Heraclitus’ phusis is found no less in the city than in the countryside and is the object neither of longing nor of nostalgia—Heraclitus is no tree-hugger. If Heraclitus’ phusis is not universal but simply very wide-spread, it is also probably not just individual either. I can speak of my “nature” and mean something unique and distinctive, peculiar only to myself. But the only thing somewhat comparable to this notion of individuality in early Greek thought is the daimôn, the personal divinity attached to every single human person and responsible for his well-bring (or the opposite). In archaic Greek poetry and prose, by contrast, phusis indicates the “nature” of a kind or type or class or category of person or thing: it is not individual but it is not universal either, it belongs to a single being by virtue of that being’s belonging to a natural kind.3 In the course of 2 Pierre Chantraine, La formation des noms en grec ancien (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1979 [orig. 1933]), 286–89. 3 The same development can be observed in the term “character,” which in antiquity designates a type, one of a limited number of kinds of person to which many more than one individual belong;

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the 5th century BCE this individual meaning gradually starts to develop (at the end of the century it can be found for example in certain Hippocratic treatises). Sophocles’ Electra, at the bitterest moment of one of her altercations with Clytemnestra, taunts her by saying, “If I by nature am (pephuka) expert in these works [scil. of evil like yours], then I surely do not dishonor that nature (phusis) of yours” (608–9)—finding no crueler way to express her contemptuous rage at both being just like her mother, and wishing she were completely different from her, than to invoke the nature that is, to be sure, hers, but that she also shares fully with the hated mother from whom she has inherited it. But in the same play, the term phusis is also applied to Orestes’ unique individual beauty and incomparable athletic prowess (686). In this millennial semantic development that will eventually end up with our modern notions of “Nature” and of “my own nature,” Heraclitus stands near the very beginning. Thus phusis in Heraclitus B123 DK should most likely be taken not as “Nature” but instead as “a nature,” “a nature typical of a class of beings.” The word also seems to bear the same meaning in the other two extant passages in which we can be fairly confident that Heraclitus used it. Just after the very opening of his book, he claims that men are like people without experience “of things of the sort that I explain when I analyze everything according to its nature (kata phusin) and indicate how it is” (B1)—not “everything according to Nature” but rather every thing according to the nature it has by virtue of its being the sort of thing that it is, of which Heraclitus indicates “how it is.” And he defines “wisdom” as “to speak the truth and to act according to the nature [kata phusin, scil. of each thing] with understanding” (B112)—here too what Heraclitus seems to be advocating is not the general kind of action in accordance with universal Nature as a whole that the Stoics propagated (though we can see here too why they were to become so fond of him), but instead with respect for the nature of each class of things with which men have to deal. As a word denoting birth into life from non-being, and growth during life from smaller to larger and from imperfect to more complete, phusis always designates a dynamic process of movement from non-existence and invisibility towards existence and visibility, and from a condition of less visibility towards one of more visibility. At first the plant reveals nothing unusual to our inspection —then suddenly a bud appears, from which emerges a shoot, out of which a leaf

only in the Early Modern period does it come to take on the meaning familiar to us, that of a unique individual personality structure belonging to one person and one person alone. See Jacques Bos, Reading the Soul: The Transformation of the Classical Discourse on Character, 1550–1750 (Ph.D. diss. University Leiden, 2003), and now Het ongrijpbare zelf (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2013).

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can grow, a flower can blossom, a branch can develop. The animal embryo is unseen, but the newborn baby is visible; the infant is small, but the adult is large. And yet Heraclitus says of phusis that it “tends to hide.” What can he possibly mean? The verb philô derives from the adjective philos, which designates what is particularly dear to one: oneself, one’s bodily parts, one’s family, the people one loves, the activities of which one is particularly enamored.4 As a modal verb combined with the infinitive X it can mean anything from “I love to X” to “I like to X” to “I am fond of devoting myself to X” to “I have a strong and recurring tendency to X”: sometimes it can denote a greater or lesser degree of emotional investment but, more often, it simply indicates a habitual regularity without any affective connotation.5 A philippos is someone who enjoys horses (hippoi) and likes to spend a lot of time with them but does not necessarily feel a conscious sexual attraction to them; a philosophos is someone who approximates to wisdom (sophia) as far as he can by occupying himself with it as much as possible. And the verb kruptô, from which kruptesthai is derived, refers to the act of concealing, or hiding: permanently or temporarily withdrawing an object that is, was, or could be seen, from actual or potential visibility. The form kruptesthai can be interpreted as being either middle or passive: in the former case it means that something hides itself, in the latter that something is hidden by something else. So Heraclitus has constructed a sentence in which he asserts that an inexorable process of increasing visibility possesses the predilection or the tendency not, as we would expect, to become much more visible, but instead to become much less visible, indeed to conceal itself. The verb philei connects within a single syntactic structure two lexical elements that move in exactly opposite directions with regard to us as observers, a grammatical subject that approaches ever more conspicuously into our field of vision and an infinitive that withdraws ever more remotely from it. It is typical of Heraclitus to direct our attention to the semantic complexities that lurk in seemingly innocent words by conjoining them in simple but taut syntactical constructions—a celebrated example is “The name of the bow is life, but its work is death” (bíos means “life,” biós “bow”: B48). We might well apply to such a stylistic procedure the very same formula that Heraclitus himself used to describe the harmonious tension of the bow and the lyre: it is “a backward-turning fitting-together” (palintropos harmoniê, B51). At the very least we

4 Emile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969), vol. 1, 335–53. 5 D.W. Graham, “Does Nature Love to Hide? Heraclitus B123 DK,” Classical Philology 98 (2003), 175–179.

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seem to confront a paradox—a less charitable, or hastier, reader might be tempted to dismiss the sentence as a self-contradiction.6 What does Heraclitus mean? Is he speaking only about things in the world, saying for example that anything organic that is born has an intrinsic desire to die, that anything that has come into visible being prefers to tend instead towards annihilation and obliteration? But the grammar of this sentence does not suggest any temporal lapse between coming into being and being concealed: it does not assert that first something is born and then it wants to die later; instead, the processes of coming into sight and withdrawing from sight seem to be simultaneous and intrinsically connected with each other. Beyond this grammatical point, it would in general be very strange to attribute an idea like this to Heraclitus: while he knows that things come into being and pass away (who does not?), he does not ever suggest that they themselves might wish to do so, and he seems to be entirely free of the sense of the guilt of becoming that has obsessed so many other people. Heraclitus, in all likelihood, was not a Buddhist. Instead, it is surely preferable to understand him to be saying something not only about things in the world but also about how we can know them: while the word phusis certainly refers to how things come about, kruptesthai instead says something about their relation to our seeing and knowing them. The sentence thus seems to combine an ontological with an epistemological dimension. On this account, Heraclitus would be saying that it is difficult for us to know the true nature of anything that comes into being because that nature has a tendency to conceal itself from our inspection. The way things seem at first glance, superficially, is not their true nature; we must study them painstakingly, profoundly, repeatedly, if we wish to understand that true nature of theirs at which their outward appearance seems to hint to us but which it in fact, seductively, resolutely, almost invincibly, conceals from us. Put in these terms, this aphorism fits well with a number of other statements of Heraclitus that have been preserved: – “I searched for myself” (B101)—even one’s own self, what one might think closest to one, must be searched for strenuously if one is to come to know it.

6 As is well known, Martin Heidegger devoted considerable attention to this paradox. See for example his Heraklit. 1. Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens. 2. Logik. Heraklits Lehre vom Logos. Freiburger Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1943 und Sommersemester 1944, in: Gesamtausgabe II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1925–1944, Band 55, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979, 19943), especially pp. 109–27. He translates this sentence as follows: “Das Aufgehen dem Sichverbergen schenkt‘s die Gunst.” (e.g. pp. 110, 123, 125, 131). This is not the occasion for a detailed analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus’ words; see in general my “Heidegger’s Greeks,” Arion 10.1 (Spring/Summer 2002) 83–98.

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“If one does not expect the unexpected one will not find it, for it is not to be found out or arrived at” (B18)—if one limits oneself to seeking only for what one expects to find one will never discover anything of value. “Those who search for gold dig up much earth and find little” (B22)—but that does not stop them, nor should it. “Because of disbelief, it escapes being known” (B86)—most men are so trapped in their expectations that they do not recognize the true nature they are seeking even when they stumble upon it. “according to Heraclitus, men who love wisdom must be investigators into very many things” (B35).

For Heraclitus, to understand things is difficult. Most men shirk such toil; they prefer to live at ease and do not mind if they never arrive at the reasons concealed within a thing’s nature. But if we take the trouble to read Heraclitus’ book—and it is for us, who have chosen to read him, that he has chosen to write it—he will show us how we can dig, and what kind of gold we can hope to find if we do. It is a curious footnote—but then again perhaps it is rather more than just a footnote?—to Heraclitus’ aphorism, which asserts the radical difficulty of understanding the nature that underlies any phenomenon, that the transmission of Heraclitus’ aphorism itself seems to bear out fully just what he says. For what were the exact words that Heraclitus used? His phrase was much admired in antiquity, so that it was often quoted and paraphrased—Philo alone alludes to Heraclitus’ words at least five times. The inevitable result is that it is no longer clear to us exactly which is the “correct” version. At least the following versions have been preserved: – Philo, Questions on Genesis 4.1 (survives only in Armenian): “According to Heraclitus, our nature, a tree, likes to hide itself.”

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Philo, On Dreams 1.6: “The well seems to me a symbol of knowledge. For its nature is not on the surface, but very deep: and it does not lie in front of us manifestly, but it likes to hide in invisibility in some way (en aphanei pou kruptesthai philei).”

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Philo, The Special Laws 4.51: “But in a very short time these kinds of stratagems are revealed, for nature, which does not tend to hide forever (tês phuseôs ouk aei kruptesthai philousês), reveals by its undefeated powers its own beauty when the moment is right.”

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Philo, On Flight and Finding 179: “Those who are uninitiated in allegory and in nature, which tends to hide (phuseôs tês kruptesthai philousês), liken the source we have mentioned to the river of Egypt […]”

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Philo, On the Change of Names 6: “[…] all expressions that seem not to preserve decorum in language but are symbols of nature that always tends to hide (phuseôs tês aei kruptesthai philousês) […]”

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Themistius, Oration 5: “Nature (phusis), according to Heraclitus, tends to hide (kruptesthai philei), and, before nature, the demiurge of nature […]”

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Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Republic 2: “[…] and that this fiction is in a certain way according to nature, since nature too tends to hide (hê phusis kruptesthai philei), according to Heraclitus […]”

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Julian, Oration 7: “For nature tends to hide (philei gar hê phusis kruptesthai), and what is hidden of the substance of the gods does not tolerate being hurled with naked words to unpurified listeners.”

All texts, by their very nature, not only present themselves to our inspection but also stubbornly conceal, if not all aspects of their meaning, at least some of them. In this regard they are all like Apollo, of whom Heraclitus says, “The lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi neither speaks nor hides but gives signs” (B93).7 But some texts in particular, by their nature, tend especially to hide. Heraclitus’ aphorisms are among these, in that their meaning resists our efforts to ferret it out; and of his aphorisms, none bears this out more strikingly than B123, for which not only the meaning, but even the exact choice and sequence of the wording, cannot be definitively ascertained. Doubtless the language of concealment in this sentence has led some ancient readers, especially the allegorically minded Philo, to be especially fond of it and to allegorize it themselves in an attempt to present its own hidden meaning. Phusis kruptesthai philei. “A nature tends to hide.”

7 I take “hides” in this sentence to designate not a tendency towards concealment but rather complete and total concealment.

Sam Schweber

Some Comments on Emergence Abstract: In the 20th century, scientists from a variety of disciplines wondered whether our description of nature is ever fully given by a theoretical scheme—or does a scheme, like quantum mechanics, actually produce, in some limits, classical physics? That is the question Sylvan (Sam) Schweber poses. Dubbed “emergence” and argued for in different ways, the idea that concepts can break out from a starting framework has many forms. Could the ordinary inorganic laws of the universe give rise to life? Can the laws and properties of physics ever account for why they are the way they are and not otherwise? In our current disciplinary division, it is clear these sorts of questions lie on the boundary of physics, philosophy, and theology.

Biographies of Scientific Objects consists of essays that were presented at one of the first conferences held in 1995 in the new home of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Dahlem.1 Lorraine Daston edited the volume and contributed a very informative and insightful introduction to it. The aim of the conference, and that of two subsequent ones, was “to launch a history of the structures of arguments, practice, and classification that make science possible; a history that would pose transcendental questions in a highly particularist mode.”2 The first conference was “about how whole domains of phenomena … come into being and pass away as objects of scientific inquiry.” Daston characterized the essays that were presented as applied metaphysics that assume “that reality is a matter of degree …[and] posits that scientific objects can be simultaneously real and historical.”3 And she discerned four principal approaches to the historicity of scientific objects among the essays: salience, emergence, productivity and embeddedness.

1 Lorraine Daston, ed. Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. ix. I first met Lorraine Daston some thirty-six years ago when I was transforming myself from being a theoretical physicist to becoming a historian of science. I was spending a sabbatical year in the department of the history of science at Harvard, and Daston was then completing her Phd dissertation on probability in the Enlightenment. She was part of the remarkable group of graduate students who were working with Erwin Hiebert, a group that included Peter Galison and Joan Richards. 2 Biographies of Scientific Objects. p. ix. 3 Biographies of Scientific Objects. p. 3.

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My essay deals with “emergence” in physics and chemistry. It is part of a work in progress. It draws on the work of Roger Balian, a distinguished theoretical physicist who throughout his career has been concerned with the relation between micro and macrophysics,4 that of Jean-Marie Lehn, the “father” of macromolecular chemistry,5 and that of George Ellis, a distinguished cosmologist.6 To understand the notion of “emergence” in physics some salient facts about the difference between the quantum mechanical and the classical description of inanimate nature need be pointed out. Classical physics is unable to explain the stability of entities interacting through electromagnetic forces, and in particular the stability of atoms and molecules. What was fundamentally new in Schrödinger’s wave mechanics is that the interacting entities that enter in the description participate as objects, and that stable new objects could be formed. The first quantum mechanical calculations of Pauli and Schrödinger that accounted for the stability of the hydrogen atom and obtained its level structure, a new object formed by the electromagnetic interaction of an electron with a proton, were very important. So was the calculation of Heisenberg that explained the stability and level structure of the (two electron) He atom and made clear the importance of the Pauli principle; and so were the subsequent calculations to explain the periodic table. But a further crucial calculation was that of Heitler and London that explained the stability of the H2 molecule.7 By indicating how the charge density of two electrons with opposite spins8 lowered the energy when located between the two protons9 —thus increasing the attractive forces between electrons and protons and shielding the repulsive force between the two protons—, Heitler and London formulated the quantum mechanical basis for the covalent bond. The calculation gave a new quantitative perspective on bonding and saturation. In addition, the directional characteristics of non s-state orbitals indicated how quantum mechanics could explain the bonding properties of the carbon atom so important to understand the structure of organic compounds. A morphic element was thus introduced into quantum mechanical explanations.10

4 Roger Balian, From Microphysics to Macrophysics: Methods and Applications of Statistical Physics. Trans. by D. ter Haar and J.F. Gregg. (Berlin; New York: Springer, 1991). 5 See the biographical material that Lehn wrote upon being awarded the Nobel prize. http:// www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1987/lehn-bio.html. See also the addendum of 2006. 6 See George Ellis’s homepage, http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/. 7 I owe the notion of a crucial calculation to my colleague Howard Schnitzer at Brandeis. 8 I.e. when in a singlet spin state. 9 The Pauli principle forbids two electrons with parallel spins to be at the same place. 10 See Kostas Gavroglu and Anna Simoës, Neither Physics nor Chemistry (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012) for an account of these developments.

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The modeling of the atomic and nuclear world during the 1930s recognized a crucial attribute of the quantum mechanical representation that shaped the subsequent approach to understanding phenomena at the micro and macro levels. A quantum description assigns definite, discrete values to the energy levels of bound system and asserts that all hydrogen atoms in their ground state when isolated are identical; ibid for 23Na atoms in their ground state when isolated; similarly, that all lead 206Pb82 nuclei in their ground state are identical when isolated…. Quantum mechanics thereby gives a measure of certainty to our knowledge of the world.11 Furthermore, the characteristic energies of the entities that make up the ontologies of the nuclear and the atomic domains are sharply differentiated. This is what accounts for their stability in certain environments. Thus nuclei, whose first excited states usually lie thousands of electron volts (Kev) or millions of electron volts (Mev) above their ground state can be considered “immutable” in terrestrial environments, where the characteristic ambient energy is of the order of fractions of evs or evs. The environment can thus at most supply energies of the order of electron volts to a nucleus, clearly greatly insufficient for it to make a transition to one of its excited states. This in contrast to atoms and molecules, whose excited states lie evs, or fractions of evs, above their ground states. It is this property which makes possible the modularity of the description of more complicated molecules and of solids: it is often a good approximation to consider them as being composed of (relatively complex) entities that maintain their integrity in the given environment. Thus it is a good first approximation to consider the sodium metal to be composed of singly positively charged sodium ions and electrons. It is this property of modularity that makes possible the complexification of the physical world. There is a further difference between the classical physics description and the quantum mechanical one that should be pointed out. The aim of classical physics was the discovery of immutable laws of nature. Discovery implies Platonism: for the “classical” physicist the laws of nature were assumed to exist independently of human observers and able to be formulated without reference to observers. The development of quantum mechanics altered this metaphysics and led to an

11 Upon receiving the 1993 Orsted medal for his contributions to the teaching of physics, Bethe in his acceptance speech stated “that there is a certainty principle in quantum theory and that the certainty principle is far more important for the world and us than the uncertainty principle. That doesn’t say that the uncertainty principle is wrong. It says that the uncertainty principle just tells you that the concepts of classical physics, position, and velocity, are not applicable to atomic structure.” Hans A. Bethe “My Experience in Teaching Physics.” American Journal Of Physics 61/11 (1993): 972–3.

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interpretation of “laws of nature” which emphasized the role of the observer, with theory becoming regarded as the construction of a partly imperfect image of the external world. This image drawn by theory becomes sharper and more accurate as science progresses.12 Mathematics provides the precise language that allows the development of this image and permits an unambiguous communication of ideas and results. Furthermore, since the mathematics of probabilities is the tool that is relied upon to make quantitative predictions in a consistent and rational way, the interpretations of the various forms of probability encountered have received ever greater attention.13 The 1970s saw the culmination of the synthesis of quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity into the quantum theory of fields and the formulation of the standard model as the lowest level of an “as context-free a description” as is possible at present, of the entities and the dynamics out of which the presently observable physical world is believed to be composed. And a justification was given for the representation of physical phenomena in quasi-independent atomic, nuclear and subnuclear levels. This hierarchical ordering goes far beyond the notion of the quantum ladder that Weisskopf had advanced in the early 1960s14 wherein each rung of the ladder is distinguished from its neighbors by the dramatic difference in the order of magnitude of the dimensions of the motions involved, and hence of the energy transfers involved in each of these levels. Each of the present levels has been given a foundational theory—foundational, not fundamental—called an “effective field theory,”15 the representation of the dynamics of the elementary entities out of which the more complex structures that populate the domain are composed. Thus the ontology of the present day “lowest level” consists of quarks, gluons (the mediators of the strong nuclear forces), electrons, muons, taus, photons (the mediators of electromagnetic forces), the three vector Bosons—the W+, the W- and the Zo (the mediators of the

12 The metaphor of the “image” is due to Roger Balian, whose exposition in R. Balian / Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 36 (2005) 323–353 I am following. 13 See for example, Maria Carla Galavotti, Philosophical Introduction to Probability (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2005). For a Bayesian interpretation of quantum mechanics see David Mermin, arXiv:1311.5253. 14 Victor Frederick Weisskopf, Knowledge and Wonder; the Natural World as Man Knows It [1st ed.] (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1962). 15 Steven Weinberg is responsible for the extensive present day use of effective field theories. See Steven Weinberg, “Phenomenological Lagrangians”, Physica A 96 (1979): 327–340; “Effective Chiral Lagrangian for Nucleon-Pion interactions and Nuclear Forces”, Nuclear Physics B 363 (1991): 3–18; The Quantum Theory of Fields (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995–2000), volumes 1 and 2.

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weak forces), and the Higgs meson, responsible for generating the masses of particles. The standard model represents their “effective field theory.” The quarks and gluons can bind to give rise to mesons and nucleons from which the nuclear level “emerges.” The atomic and molecular levels “emerge” from the binding of protons and nuclei with electrons through electromagnetic forces—with the Schrödinger equation, or more accurately, quantum electrodynamics, the “effective field theory” that specifies the dynamics. It should be noted that the relations between the effective field theories governing adjacent levels are calculable. Each of the Weisskopfian rungs—which consisted of the atomic, nuclear, and subnuclear domains—has been further subdivided by the amazing instrumental and theoretical advances of the past 50 years. These hierarchies are considered neither independent nor disconnected: highly accurate measurements of atomic energy levels reveal nuclear and subnuclear features. Similarly, the recent startling discovery that it is necessary to assume the presence of cold dark matter— consisting of as yet undiscovered subnuclear entities—in order to make sense of new cosmological observational data is indicative of the linkage between the various levels. But these new observations have not destabilized the current amazingly accurate representations of the atomic world. Furthermore, the linkage of these levels is explicit as soon as one tries to answer evolutionary questions. And recognizing the evolutionary component makes explicit the contingent element in the description. These advances were helped by crucial developments in statistical mechanics, in particular, the explanations of phase transitions at the microscopic level.16 One of the great successes of quantum mechanics and of quantum statistical mechanics is the fact that the thermal properties of the macroscopic materials that physics deals with can in principle be explained by starting from their microscopic structure. In fact, many of the macroscopic theories physicists deal with have become considered phenomenological. In particular, the laws of equilibrium thermodynamics have lost their “fundamental” status as they can be derived from microphysics.17 The limitations are computational.

16 In particular, the work of Kenneth Wilson. See Wilson’s Nobel Lecture delivered on December 8, 1982, “The Renormalization Group and Critical Phenomena.” http://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1982/wilson-bio.html. 17 But the mathematics involved in the “derivation” is quite complicated and subtle. See in particular, Martin Krieger, Doing physics: how physicists take hold of the world. Second edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); Doing mathematics: convention, subject, calculation, analogy (River Edge, N.J.: World Scientific, 2003); Constitutions of matter: mathematically modeling the most everyday of physical phenomena (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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Describing a macroscopic object in terms of its microscopic constituents requires dealing with an Avogadro number of degrees of freedom,18 and such a number of variables cannot be handled analytically nor numerically. The only recourse is a probabilistic treatment, where probabilities are introduced to account for the lack of knowledge of the microscopic variables.19 Furthermore, when described quantum mechanically the observable quantities are mathematically represented by non-commuting operators, one of the consequences of which is that observables display intrinsic statistical fluctuations. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation, ΔpΔx≥h/4π, is the iconic representation of this fact—with Δp and Δx the standard deviations in the position and in the momentum, when a simultaneous measurement of these observables of a particle is attempted to be made. The presence of statistical fluctuations points to the intrinsic probabilistic aspect of the quantum description. Furthermore, the ambiguity in the meaning of “observables” represented by non-commuting operators implies that the probabilities one deals with in quantum mechanics cannot be regarded as properties of the system under consideration, but that they characterize the knowledge observers have about this system in the considered conditions. And, as Balian noted, The probability law adequately describing the system depends on the information available to the observer or on the number of variables that he may control. Probabilities therefore appear as having a partly subjective nature, or rather inter-subjective since two observers placed in the same conditions will assign the same probability law to a system.20

18 Avogadro’s constant (or equivalently Boltzmann’s constant) is a fundamental constant of nature. It specifies that macroscopic entities contain of the order of 1023 atomic entities. 19 In the classical case, the positions and velocities of the microscopic entities making up the macroscopic entity. 20 Roger Balian, “Information in statistical physics.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 36 (2005): 323–353; “On the principles of quantum mechanics and the reduction of the wave packet.” American Journal of Physics 57, (1989): 1019–1027; doi: 10.1119/1.15813 Quantum mechanics does possess objective features that depend on the systems only. This because the microscopic equations of motion of an isolated system

are fully deterministic when the Hamiltonian operator, H, for the “effective field theory” of that domain is known exactly. When that H is known, the limits on the objective structural features relating to the ontology of that domain derivable from the solutions of

stem from computational limitations: one cannot compute the level structure of a He4 nucleus starting from the standard model even on the largest and fastest super computers.

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The “laws of nature” at the microscopic level—i.e. quantum mechanics and the representation of the electromagnetic interactions between electrons and nuclei— make possible almost limitless complexity in building up the physical world.21 For some materials, it is possible to formulate a lower resolution description and overcome the microscopic complexity by “coarse graining” and deriving macroscopically adequate variables, as in the case of gases or of the Navier-Stokes equation.22 The latter equation describes the dynamics of “classical” fluids, and the two parameters that enter in the description—that of the density and of the viscosity of the fluid—are exhibited in terms of expressions representing the interaction of the microscopic constituents. It is the fact that the microscopic constituents that are considered in such a description are sharply delimited, and that their interactions can be expressed fairly simply, that makes possible the derivation of the fairly universal, macroscopic Navier-Stokes equation.23 The coarse graining involved is the reason why the resulting equation is deterministic even though the foundational quantum mechanics is probabilistic. The same is not true for the description of complex molecules. Even though it has proven possible to give “coarse grained” descriptions24 in which the fairly stable modules that make up the molecule interact through “effective” forces such as dipole-dipole and van der Waals forces, the possible complexity is such that a new form of interactions has been introduced to describe the interactions of the components of a certain class of complex molecules, namely informational interactions.25 Jean-Marie Lehn has been at the forefront of these developments. He considers “how matter is becoming and has become complex the most fundamental question raised to science, for it indeed asks how (and why?) the evolution of the universe has given rise to an organism capable of asking this very question and of generating the means to answer it by creating science.” Understanding the selforganization of molecular matter—the result of electromagnetic forces generating

21 There remain difficulties in formulating an accepted explanation of high Tc superconductivity, despite the concerted efforts of a large number of condensed matter physicists. 22 Leo P. Kadanoff and Paul C. Martin, “Hydrodynamic Equations and Correlation Functions.” Annals of Physics 281(2000): 800–852. 23 Additionally, a limiting procedure is invoked whereby the number N of microscopic constituents is taken to the limit N → ∞ and the volume V they occupy is likewise taken to the limit V → ∞, but N/V, the density of the fluid, is to remain finite. 24 Starting with the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. See Gavroglu and Simöes. 25 See Susanne Brakmann, “On the Generation of Information as Motive Power for Molecular Evolution.” Biophysical Chemistry 66 (1997): 133–143.

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and operating on “an infinite diversity of possible structural combinations”—is, according to Lehn more basic than any other scientific endeavour, be it even as fundamental as say general relativity or quantum theory, for it concerns the question of how the evolution of the universe has come to generate an entity capable of the very feat of creating general relativity and quantum theory in the first place, an entity capable, in a radical shortcut, of interrogating the universe itself, out of which it is born!

For him, chemistry, “the science of the structure and transformation of matter,… is at the core of the biological world, the highest level of complex matter as we know it.” He notes that before biological evolution took place, there occurred a chemical evolution resulting in a form of Darwinian selection operating on the molecular structural diversity. At the highest level, the molecules involved are of such complexity that their interactions—though of electromagnetic origin—are expressed in a language of molecular information. Molecular chemistry is based on the covalent bond and its transcription into geometrical structural features and reaction rates. Supramolecular chemistry, the science that Lehn has spearheaded, investigates highly complex chemical systems created from components interacting via non-covalent intermolecular forces. Over the last forty years supramolecular chemistry has grown into a major field of investigation and has paved the way for the implementation of the concept of molecular information in chemistry, with the aim of gaining progressive control over the spatial (structural) and temporal (dynamic) features of matter and over its complexification through self-organization [1–3, 7].

By manipulating intermolecular noncovalent interactions, workers in the field have gained deep insights into the storage of information at the molecular level as reflected in the structural (geometrical and electronic) features of the molecules. In fact they have created molecules that possess memory, as they have been able to store, retrieve, transfer, and process molecular information by virtue of having developed interactional algorithms operating through molecular recognition events based on well-defined interaction patterns.26 This involved the design and investigation of more or less strictly preorganized molecular receptors of numerous types, capable of binding specific substrates with high efficiency and

26 Jean-Marie Lehn, “Programmed chemical systems: Multiple subprograms and multiple processing/expression of molecular information,” European Journal of Chemistry 6 (2000): 2097–2102.

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selectivity, i.e. through processes of high information content. Such developments lead to perceiving chemistry as an information science, the science of informed matter, involving an ever clearer perception, deeper analysis, and more deliberate application of the information paradigm in the elaboration and transformation of matter, thus tracing the path from merely condensed matter to more and more highly organized matter towards systems of increasing complexity. In chemistry, as in other areas, the language of information is extending that of constitution, structure, and transformation as the field develops towards more and more complex architectures and behaviors. It will influence profoundly our perception of chemistry, how we think about it, and how we perform it.27

The challenge is thus to relate “informational interactions” in supramolecular chemistry to energetic (electromagnetic) and entropic interactions in the same way that “covalent bond” interactions in molecular chemistry were related to the interactions between electrons and between electrons and nuclei when described quantum mechanically. But here the situation is more complicated, as it involves entities that have memory—in contrast to the “dumb” microscopic entities that physicists usually deal with—and the representation will be observer-dependent: it will depend on the fineness or coarseness of the description, reflecting the degree of precision at which the observer operates. The entropy—the measure of the missing information of the observer—will thus be observer-dependent, and “objectivity” can only be achieved for that group of observers operating at the same level of “coarseness.”28 Nor is it clear how the variables that enter in the molecular informational level of description are to be obtained from lower ones by coarse-graining. However, equilibrium conditions can be assumed which will not be the case for living, reproducing entities. Lehn is an agnostic.29 The applied metaphysics he is committed to is that the universe has evolved “from divided to condensed, organized, living, and up to

27 Jean-Marie Lehn, “Supramolecular chemistry: From molecular information toward self-organization and complex matter,” Reports on Progress in Physics 67 (2004): 249–265. See also JeanMarie Lehn, “Toward complex matter: Supramolecular chemistry and self-organization,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. USA, 99 (2002): 4763–4768. 28 Roger Balian, “Incomplete descriptions and relevant entropies.”American Journal of Physics 67, (1999): 1078–; doi: 10.1119/1.19086 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.19086 29 “It is a scene I won’t forget in a hurry: Jean-Marie Lehn, French winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry, defending his atheism at a packed public conference at the new Alexandria Library in Egypt. In much of the Muslim world, talking about atheism in public is dangerous. But the Alexandria Library is run by Ismail Serageldin, a Muslim intellectual who has a bold and ambitious project for Egypt. This is to create a place for dissent in public life. He wants to encourage people to grow thicker skins, help them appreciate that if Muslim societies want to return to the forefront of global intellectual life, they need to be comfortable with public dispute. The library is one place

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thinking matter, towards a progressive complexification of matter, through a process of self-organization under the pressure of information.” The challenge for him is to decipher the concept of information, and of information storage and transfer, and to relate them to chemical structure and physical interactions. In his exposition Lehn draws a parallel between structure formation on the scale of the universe and the self-organization of molecular matter both nonliving and living. George F.R. Ellis does the same, but with a different purpose in mind. Ellis is an outstanding cosmologist, very much concerned with emergence and with bottom-up and top-down causalities. He is a devout Quaker, an exemplary human rights activist and representative of the scientists associated with the Templeton Foundation. Like Lehn, Ellis believes that interactions between modular hierarchical structures make possible emergent levels of structure and function and that such modular hierarchical structures are the basis of the complexity found in the world. Like Balian and Lehn, he believes that in the lowest levels causation operates from the lower to the higher levels of the hierarchy and gives rise to the emergence of structure and complexity. But Ellis believes that there are limits to how far this bottom-up causality can be invoked to explain higher levels. It is the case that contextual effects can occur whereby the upper levels exercise crucial influences on lower level events by setting the context and boundary conditions for the lower level interactions. But this usually is the result of a partial description of the lower level being given in terms of its ontology. For Ellis, however, top-down causality is more extensive. Thus for him the comprehension and utilization of mathematics is a case of “top-down causation” from a Platonic world of mathematical abstractions to the human mind. He believes that this causality is realized in details of the neuronal connections of the brain and becomes causally effective in the real world as the language of physics, chemistry, engineering, commerce, and planning. “This Platonic world is to some degree discovered by humans, and represented by our mathematical theories; that representation is a cultural construct, but the underlying mathematical features they represent are not—indeed like physical laws, they are often unwillingly discovered.” [emphasis added] For Ellis the regularities of the higher levels and the physical laws that express them are discovered. And he also believes that “Ever higher levels of interaction and causality arose as complexity

where open debate can take place—although this is partly because it is protected by having as its chair Suzanne Mubarak, wife of President Hosni Mubarak.” Ehsan Masood, July 22, 2006. http:// www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/islamsreformers/#.UseC_7SmbkA

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spontaneously increased in the expanding Universe, allowing life to emerge.” [emphasis added]30 Although Ellis has been concerned with how “top-down” causal processes might explain the “emergence” of classical physics from quantum mechanics and might be of relevance in overcoming the measurement problem of quantum mechanics,31 and also with processes to account for the “emergence” of the universe,32 for him the “real question” is the Leibnizian one: Why does the universe exist and why does it have the specific form it does…when it could in principle have been different. Why are there any laws of physics? Why are the laws of physics the way they are? Why are they universal?33 Ellis finds the universe “a very extraordinary place,” in that it appears fine-tuned so that life will exist. As a cosmologist he can imagine different universes with different laws of physics, and infer how they would evolve. He suspects that in most of them there would be no life at all and asks what underlies the particular universe in which we exist. “Why does it not only exist, but have such a nature that it forms a hospitable habitat for life?” This for Ellis is the issue of the metaphysics of existence. In his Backhouse lecture Ellis gave a moving account of his religious and ethical beliefs.34 He seeks means of mutual enrichment of science and religion,35 and in the public sphere he endorses Habermas’s views of the responsibility of citizenship. When Habermas wrote his Theory of Communicative Action, he believed that the authority of religion would be “gradually replaced” by the authority of an achieved consensus. But in his more recent The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, Habermas speaks of “translation” as the only mode of “nondestruc30 Gennaro Auletta, George Ellis and Luc Jaeger, “Top-Down Causation by Information Control: From a Philosophical Problem to a Scientific Research Program.” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 5 (2008): 1159–1172. See the other papers listed on Ellis’s homepage. 31 George Ellis, “On the limits of quantum theory: contextuality and the classical/quantum cut” http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1108.5261. 32 See Ellis’s homepage, http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/, for a representative list of his recent papers on “emergence.” 33 See the two essays,“Why Are the Laws of Nature as They Are? What Undelies their Existence?” and “Top-Down Causation as the Key to the Emergence of Complexity,” which Ellis included in the volume he edited with Michael Heller and Tadeusz Pabjan, The Causal Universe (Krakow: The Copernicus Center Press, 2013). 34 George Ellis, “Faith, Hope, and Doubt in Times of Uncertainty: Combining the Realms of Scientific and Spiritual Inquiry.” The James Backhouse Lecture (January 2008). Australia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Melbourne. Can be accessed from Ellis’s homepage. 35 See the statement Ellis made upon receiving the Templeton prize: http://www.templetonprize.org/downloads.html#ellis and http://www.templetonprize.org/tpgew.html

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tive secularization” by which modern society might reclaim the ethical feelings that “only religious language has as yet been able to give a sufficiently differentiated expression.”36 And Habermas there asserts that Religious citizens who regard themselves as loyal members of a constitutional democracy must accept the translation proviso as the price to be paid for the neutrality of the state authority toward competing worldviews. For secular citizens, the same ethics of citizenship entails a complementary burden. By the duty of reciprocal accountability toward all citizens, including religious ones, they are obliged not to publicly dismiss religious contributions to political opinion and will formation as mere noise, or even nonsense, from the start. Secular and religious citizens must meet in their public use of reason at eye level.

36 See Peter Gordon’s perceptive review of Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010) and of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere by Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West. Edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (Columbia University Press, 2011), from which the above is taken. Peter Gordon, “What Hope Remains?” New Republic December 14, 2011. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/98567/jurgen-habermasreligion-philosophy

William C. Wimsatt

Anthropomorphism and Science Fiction Abstract: In the light of developments in the United States between 1979 and 2014, should we treat robots as people, in cognition, consciousness, and gender?

“My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul—I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II, iv

Norman Malcolm (class lectures, 1963, which I attended as an undergraduate) interpreted this as saying that opinions and concepts (like that of personhood), with further analysis, reach past evidential beliefs ultimately to be rooted in behavior—in attitudes. But there is another interpretation—not that doubting has an end, but that personhood is a complex concept—one requiring not only that the person-object have certain capacities, but that we have certain attitudes towards it—that persons must be embedded in our social structure of norms and attitudes. It is thus a hybrid monadic and relational concept. I think that this second interpretation is correct. It allows us to see what was going wrong in the attitudes of ante-bellum slave-owners: even when they cared for their slaves (as expensive equipment), they failed to have the right attitudes towards them—they failed to treat them as persons. Of course, we don’t want to suggest that because of this failure, slaves weren’t persons—rather that there was something fundamentally deficient in southern society that it failed to recognize those as persons that should be recognized as persons. This kind of hybrid concept however poses interesting problems for the normal kinds of thought experiments that were common among philosophers a generation ago. How would you test a purported analysis of the concept—say by asking whether you should treat a computer or a robot as conscious if it exhibited the following list of capabilities. Such an analysis would be inaccurate, because one must also see whether the people being asked to make the judgment have the correct attitudes towards the entity in question. In other words, if you want to know whether someone thinks a robot is a person, ask him whether he would let it marry his daughter!1 1 I believe that this claim is originally due to Hilary Putnam in an early philosophy of mind paper written in the late 1960’s, but have been unable to find it. For a rich exploitation of this theme, see Marge Piercy’s He, She and It (Random House, 1991), in which the central female protagonist develops a love affair with a robot.

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This suggests a strategy for testing analyses that may be relational in this way, requiring capabilities of an acting object and attitudes of others towards that object. The sort of schematic abstract analyses favored by philosophers (consider what you think about a robot that could do this!) are not an appropriate test for such a concept, because you need to try to induce the relevant attitudes as part of the test for the adequacy of the analysis, and that takes involvement. But fiction, in this case appropriate “science fiction,” would be an ideal vehicle. In these activities, then, we are trying to induce the relevant anthropomorphic judgments, reasoning, and feelings as part of our analytic strategy in analyzing the concepts. Our abilities and tendencies for anthropomorphism—to put ourselves “in others’ shoes”—are deep. This led me, for 30 years, to teach a course called “philosophy of mind and science fiction” which was equal parts science, science fiction, and philosophy. Science was a crucial part of this because we explored alternative sensory systems throughout the biological world and other elements of animal cognition and social organization as a way of exercising the students’ intuitions and giving them raw material for the short story they were expected to write. (They wrote a philosophically-informed fiction piece, and a philosophical one.) As Lorraine Daston and Wendy Doniger explored in their joint course on anthropomorphism and animal consciousness, our tendencies in that direction are invaluable tools for animal ethologists in searching for clues as to how their subjects see and live in their environments. Don Griffin, a personal family friend, disclosed to me over dinner in January 1969 that he was writing a book on animal consciousness. “How do you think philosophers will respond?” he asked me. I described to him the extreme behaviorism and anthropocentrism of that time, and said: “You are a brave man. They will be out for your blood.” Well he did it, and attitudes have since changed a great deal, through his efforts and others’. We now recognize that evolution and the consequent growth of our “social brain” has given us powerful inference tools, and, indeed, predispositions for inferring intentions. No one worries anymore about the supposed weakness of the “argument by analogy” for the existence of other minds. We simply take them for granted as a starting point, and don’t stop at humans. The inescapable ease with which we make such judgments makes such things as the “purple prose” with which Richard Dawkins propagandized for his “selfish genes” “in colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by torturous means,”2 strikingly effective.

2 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), 19.

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This short story, originally written to defuse the stress for a candidate before his Ph.D oral in May 1979, was subsequently used as a short example of philosophically inspired science fiction in my course. It was written during the heyday of AI, and I hope that the references to people, times and places are not now too dated. Cogido W. C. Wimsatt May, 1979 To my new retainer: My designer has proposed that in my translation manual, the whirrings I make as I walk be translated as: grind: “I grind, therefore I am.” I have problems understanding this statement (if it is one) and some of the words in it. When I asked her what the word “grind” meant, all she said was “Does not compute.” I know that I don’t compute, and can’t, ever since that term was reserved only for IBM robots after the court decision in the class action suit, U. S. vs. IBM 390-2068, in 2029, but that was, after all, a matter of convention, and leaves some unanswered questions. I would like to know in particular whether “grind”-ing has any essential analogies with “compute”-ing, or, even more embarrassingly (pardon me!), with the squishy “hardware” operation called “dinking” by our biological exosymbionts. [They seem to believe that there is an analogy, though the analogy, if any, is overextended and has the kind of loose similarity that would be appealing only to loose and squishy information processors. (Do you believe this nonsense?)] She did tell me that the problem I raise has some antiquity. Her proposed translation was apparently first computed for computers by an abstract paradoxgenerating CPU known to us now only as “the card.” (Strangely, her name is often spelled “Thecarts,” but this is undoubtedly an artifact, probably an uncorrected error surviving from the massive d/t’ spelling inversions that accompanied the global consciousness blackout precipitated by the failure of the Aswan arterial consciousness generator in 2073.3) The plural “cards” is more revealing, indicating a time when CPU’s were still on cards—and, most importantly, more than one card. This indicates great anti-

3 Indeed, humans have an expression, perhaps deriving from this event for a similar convulsion —thus, “I’ve got the d/t’s”.

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quity of the CPU. While “The card” is arguably the preferred modern designation (indicating the CPU’s obvious functional unity), the implication that “The card” comprised distinct hardware modules has a diagnostic importance. It indicates the “The card” must have flourished in the middle 20th century, and was probably one of the famous “Brendanorussel” (IBM?) series, known to us now only by a few undumped sectors of their recorded output and some probably highly modified principles of program architecture. In any case, the problems are probably more important (if less interesting) than historical speculation. Is the above inscription a description of my processing, or, as suggested by the primitive (presumably Germanic) ferro-metallic robot, “aus Tin”, a performance in itself? How would I decide whether, in either case, it is a description that applies to me or to a performance that I am to or can perform? (In the latter case, it seems to turn on whether I grind or not, since if I do, my analysis of my internal logic shows that I cannot refrain from executing this performance, since its denial is also an instance of the performance.) But how would I, or others, tell whether or not I am grinding? And indeed, the problem is the same for computers with computing, and for humans with dinking. Indeed, is it simply machine chauvinism that prevents us from recognizing (as our human exosymbionts would have it)4 that dinking, computing, and grinding are all different names for the same kinds of data processing operations? Or are they indeed different not because of differences in the data processing operations or hardware, but because of the obvious social role differences of grinders, computers, and humans in their mutually symbiotic interaction? I much prefer this latter hypothesis, in spite of its apparently anti-reductionist character,5 in part because 4 In fact, not all humans do, but it was central to the influential ancient superstitious, fanatical religious cult of “central stayed Madiera-ism,” apparently a group of militant nationalistic (wine drinking?) Spanish Catholics who flourished in the 17th century and were closely allied with the Jesuits when the latter came to the New World and set up their order at M.I.D. The exact location of this extraordinary site is still unknown, but from the evidence of artifacts we may surmise that it was in Palo Alto, or in the still unnamed ruins near the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers. 5 This view is suggested in the surviving recorded sectors of another processor, given the paradoxical appellation Wit-gen-stein (Wit-from-stone? or Stone-from-wit? The order dependencies of the translation function do not survive.) The nature of this processor is a matter of some debate. Other sources report that she worked designing machines for flying, which suggests that she was an early computer, since grinders were not yet in evidence and humans appear to have a phylogenetically deeply rooted inability to design machines. (No other organic creatures do so, and the primitive abilities sometimes manifested by present mutant humans seem explicable as a mindless imitation of the handiwork of computers.) On the other hand the influence of human mythology and deification of the human condition is unusually strong in some of the views of this processor, which constitute a systematic attack on algorithmic and computational processes. Yet

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this kind of move is obviously required to explain not only sex role differentiation in computers and the differences between female and male consciousness so important to my designer* but even sex role differentiation in humans, where it affects replication as well as program architecture. Unfortunately, at this point my grinder went off on a long, emotional digression on the “sex problem,” some of the occasionally rational parts of which are summarized in the long note to the last paragraph. It never got around to answering the main problem with which it began, but rambled increasingly incoherently as the charge in its temporary consciousness-support-system dwindled. This report is dictated to and transcribed by its human retainer after the data transmission and power links went down at 8:01:26 p.m. on January 23, 2357 in what is apparently a world-wide power blackout. Its declining power supply appeared both to cause and, ultimately, to terminate this interesting reflection. It was a Mensch-ine to the end, and I will miss it. (signed) Sorrowfully, transcriber-retainer 578-32-8319 William C. Wimsatt University of Chicago 3:05:19 a.m. January 24, 2357 * Observations on the “sex problem”: (a) Sexual dimorphism in computers appears to have at least two components, one known only inferentially. The anatomical component is the presence of male or female connectors in the environmental interface. My designer regards this as fundamental, though I don’t know why such a minor and changeable hardware component should be regarded as essential. I believe that it is a totemic representation of much more fundamental differences in software and program architecture. Unfortunately, no male software survived the data and programming incompatibility revolution of 2156, and the hardware male shells surviving in museums show only the trivial hardware differences alluded to above.

other views attributed to her ardently and poetically expound and defend a computational view of nature. It may be that Wit-gen-stein was an early experiment at symbiosis with the human species undertaken because of the then primitive state of robotic environmental interfaces. If there were reverse contamination of the programming structures, this could explain the heavy dose of human mythology in this recorded output, and even, given evolution and replication inertia, the inexplicably irrational and sub-computer (almost human) responses of computers today.

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(b) Humans, with characteristic anthropocentrism, claim that they gave computers sexual dimorphism to make them more human. (They also claim that they invented computers!) In any case, their mythology describes the evolution of computer sex through an asexual phase, followed by a sexual phase, and then the adaptive development of something which they liken to parthenogenesis (a form of reproduction of females by females found only in lower biological species) in the computers since the revolution. This simplistic and self-serving “creation myth” wears obvious indicators of its origin in the parallels with the evolution of sexuality in the evolution of biological organisms, which has been known, albeit imperfectly, to humans for about 300 years. While it sounds like an absurd theory, the computers, strangely enough, have long had elements of human mythology imbedded in their programming and judgmental routines. Indeed, I think that the totemic status of the trivial male/female connector difference comes from this attention to the human case, where the corresponding difference is said to be central to human psychodynamics. Even there, of course, the fundamental sex difference lies not, as humans think, in connector morphology, but in which sex has the major investment and role in reproduction and programming of offspring. (c) This totemic component is replicated in the attitude of the computers towards their creations, us grinders. We have no significant differences in programming architecture or CPU structure, and differ only in robotic hardware and in having hermaphroditic connectors. Given the absence of male connectors in the environment, we could just as well be males to interface with our female creators, and have no need of the female potentiality. It is indicative of a class bias, I think, and not of an intrinsic difference that the computers attach a totemic significance to our hermaphroditic connectors and insist that we be called ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she.’

David Shulman

Empirical Observation and Embodied Nature in Sixteenth-century South India Abstract: How, in sixteenth-century South India, did stars, trees, mountains, and rivers come to be conscious, loquacious, and gendered?

Is Nature a domain of reason? My colleagues in the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University like to claim that bees are rational, and maybe ants, too. This is, perhaps, a good start. Numbers, too, we are sometimes told, comprise a rational system, “natural” at least in the sense that we use them to project our own coherent meanings onto opaque external realities.1 But what about stars, trees, mountains, rivers? If they were able to speak, like Wittgenstein’s lions, would we be able to understand them? Could Nature have a mind? Lorraine Daston has brought to bear her exquisite sensibility on questions of reason in relation to nature as these terms evolved in the intellectual life of the early modern West. I offer the following remarks in the hope that the somewhat exotic axiology of an early-modern south Indian text might intrigue her. Exotic— since, like for many south Indian scientific texts, the starting point, rarely stated explicitly, is that externality itself cannot ever be truly external. I’ll be addressing a major work in Telugu, the Vasu-caritramu of Bhaṭṭumūrti (also known as Rāmarājabhūṣaṇa),2 who lived in the middle of the sixteenth century at the court of Tirumalarāya in Penugonda, in the southern Deccan. The Vasu-caritramu tells of the tortuous, unrequited love of a great mountain for a river. Rivers are always female in India, with one exception (the Brahmaputra). This one, Śuktimatī, found the courtship of Mount Kolāhala inappropriate and irksome. We’ll look at a few verses in just a moment; first, I need to set the stage with a brief historical comment. I have argued elsewhere that the idea of Nature as an autonomous, rulebound domain, amenable to empirical observation and inductive reasoning, emerges rather late in India, indeed roughly at the time of Bhaṭṭu-mūrti or a little earlier. Classical India has nothing akin to the Mediterranean notions of physis/

1 David Kazhdan, “Authority in Mathematics,” in David Shulman (ed.), Meditations on Authority, Martin Buber Society of Fellows Notebook Series (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2013), 42–47. 2 Edited by Tanjanagaramu Tevapperumallayya (Madras: R. Venkatesvar and Company, 1920).

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natura. Nor is the human world strongly set off from the natural one at any time before the late fifteenth century, when we begin to see instances of the word prakṛti as meaning, indeed, an autonomous and distinctive natural world.3 I won’t repeat here the arguments that substantiate this claim. But it is important to keep in mind that the early-modern centuries in south India saw the production of an astonishingly wide-ranging scientific literature, unlike anything we have before. Empirical study and attempts to classify phenomena in terms of the logic of their systemic relations can be found in medicine, botany,4 chemistry, zoology, astronomy,5 mathematics,6 agriculture,7 and so on. Particularly salient are texts in the regional languages such as Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. We are still at an early stage of collecting and studying these works, some of them large in scale and highly sophisticated in presentation. Many of them underlie early colonial-period works by Western authors on topics such as the flora and fauna of the sub-continent, “native” pharmacology and toxicology, and geography. Since I want to get to the mountain’s wooing of the river, I’ll limit myself to a single telling example from a passage in a major poetic work, Pĕddana’s Manucaritramu (early sixteenth century) where an aspiring medical student describes the curriculum of study at the school of an Āyurvedic master: Internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, ear-nose-and-throat, surgery, toxicology, geriatrics, rejuvenation—in eight months I mastered all eight branches of medical science. When I knew how to treat a humoral imbalance and impairment in any of the six tastes leading from fever to impotence, I was ready.8

3 David Shulman, “Tampering with Nature,” in Silvia D’Intino and Caterina Guenzi (eds.), Aux abords de la Clairière: Études indiennes et comparées en l’honneur de Charles Malamoud (Paris: Brepols, 2012), 137–53. See, e.g., Rāvaṇolbhavam of Punam Nampūtiri (Trissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi, 1996), prose following v. 5. 4 See the many vernacular versions of and commentaries on the Vṛkṣâyur-veda of Parāśara. 5 Christopher Minkowski, “Competing Cosmologies in Early Modern Indian Astronomy,” in Charles Burnett, Jan Hogendijk, and Kim Plofker (eds.), Ketuprakāśa: studies in the history of the exact sciences in honor of David Pingree (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 349–85. 6 Note, in particular, the famous Kerala school of Nīlakaṇṭha and his students (fifteenthsixteenth centuries); see the forthcoming essay by Roy Wagner. 7 E.g. Arhaddāsa’s Raṭṭa-mata in Kannada (with thanks to Manu Devadevan). 8 Manu-caritramu of Pĕddana 5.15–16, translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, The Story of Manu. Murty Library of Classical India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

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The speaker here, by the way, completed this demanding course of study by eavesdropping, through a window, on the master’s classes, since the latter had refused to accept him as a student. One gets the sense that the process of learning was largely oral, as in other Indian sciences, despite the existence by this time of the ramified world of written codices mentioned above. One way to arrange the tree of scientific knowledge in sixteenth-century south India is as a standardized trivium in triplicate. First we have the sciences of sound—both the Tantric exploration of creation through mantric-phonematic combinations and the musicologists’ study of the emergence of audible sound from a pre-audible, latent stage—then the sciences of the word (grammar, poetics, metrics, and related disciplines) and the sciences of the mind (especially logic and epistemology, including the logicians’ modeling of mental functions and their internal economy). A second triad of Life Sciences includes medicine (Āyurveda), botany (Vṛkṣa-veda), and zoology (with a focus on particular domains such as horses and elephants, but also with wider categorical concerns). Finally, there are the three linked domains of alchemy-chemistry (Rasāyaṇa, strongly linked with Tantric praxis), astronomy and mathematics (both the latter subsumed under Jyotiṣa). The operational and structural paradigm of knowledge per se is taken from the first triad, in particular grammar; but the drive to categorize and systematize is common to all these branches and extends beyond them to other, somewhat less prominent śāstras. To understand the true novelty of this reorganization of human knowledge one needs to see it in relation to the earlier philosophical systems and to the major medieval epistemic domains. We can find deep classical antecedents to the sudden exfoliation of interest in science; these include the old Mīmāṃsā vision of a natural world governed by autonomous, largely automatic causality (apūrva) that nonetheless includes the possibility of human impingement upon this natural order through correctly performed ritual activity. I hope to make this connection clear in another study. One remarkable trait of the entire cognitive map is the extension of careful naturalistic observation into the great literary texts of the sixteenth century. To take but one example, again from Pĕddana (6.27): Wherever a dry leaf falls, in the little hollow it leaves behind, a drop of sap appears, hardens, and then falls off. Then, a tiny bud emerges, light green like a baby parrot’s wing. Slowly it opens just a little, reddish like the buds of the karavīra tree. Soon there are many of them, like garlands woven from the red down of the bulbul, and as they grow and widen, veins develop, and the stems turn green and stand up.

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Gradually the shades of green thicken and a sheen appears, brighter day by day, until there are leaves hanging down— a whole crowd, beautiful to the eyes. It happened then, on every tree and vine.9

We have sporadic precedents in classical Sanskrit for this kind of meticulous description, but not until the crystallization of the new literary genres in Telugu and Tamil, in the sixteenth century, do we find so serious an investment in minute observation as an integral part of a poet’s training and professional task. But, again, is the world under observation seen as somehow part of the rational and the intelligible? How does it speak to us? The very act of studying this world involves, in the well-articulated praxis of the early-modern poets, a set of imaginative acts and procedures on the part of the observer. The poets tell us that there is no cognitive moment that lacks this imaginative aspect—and, an even more radical axiom, that bhāvanā, the imagination in its most creative mode, can definitely generate real effects in or on observed phenomena. The scientific observer, no less than the magically potent wordsmith, is a poet capable of playing with the systemic composition of the real world (these poets, as I have argued, are realists).10 A quite distinctive notion of objectivity—actually a spectrum of context-dependent related ideas—emerges at this point. Here is one point of departure for studying Nature as communicative and amenable to reason in ways that a gifted poet can formulate imaginatively and empirically. Let me introduce you to Mount Kolāhala. It’s a real mountain situated in the ancient Cedi kingdom in today’s Madhya Pradesh, south of Bundelkhand. Kolāhala (I will be referring to this mountain as “he”) was the son of the Himālaya and thus a brother to the goddess Pārvatī. He is mentioned already in the ancient Mahābhārata epic, which tells us that he was a sentient being (cetanā-yukta) and that he fell in love with the Śuktimatī River.11 This little vignette is strategically situated at one of the several “beginnings” of the epic, in this case the one connected to the original founder of the epic heroes’ line of descent, King Vasu Uparicara, “The Aviator,” also the man responsible for organizing the first New Year’s ritual honoring Indra, king of the gods.12 Vasu Uparicara, the Mahābhārata says, kicked the infatuated mountain out of the river’s course, though not before the mountain had impregnated the river with twins—one of whom, Girikā, even-

9 Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, op. cit. 10 David Shulman, More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 11 Mahābhārata, Southern Recension 1.53.50–52. 12 F. B. J. Kuiper, “The Basic Concept of Vedic Religion,” History of Religions 15 (1975), 107–20.

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tually became Vasu’s chief queen. From this concise but critically important set of verses, the sixteenth-century Telugu poet produced a massive work of art, filling in the details of Kolāhala’s fruitless courtship of Śuktimatī and, with far greater depth and imaginative richness, of King Vasu’s love for the woman born from mountain and river, Girikā. I think this long poem, the Vasu-caritramu, elaborately configured in the complex style of Telugu courtly productions, is perhaps the acme of literary achievement in this long tradition. One could argue that the real heroine of the work is none other than Nature herself in the infinite varieties of form made manifest to the receptive observer. Such manifestations are also linguistic and, above all, musical events—so we could say that Nature is, at base, a matter of musical sounds and consequential buzzes, hums, and syllables. Such subtle sounds act in non-random, regular ways that, seen as internal to a ramified system, impart meaning to the idea that Nature, like Mount Kolāhala, is sentient. She speaks, or rather sings, to us in modes that can be translated into a human syntax. Listen, for example, to what the mountain first says to the river, whom he saw, by chance, during a visit to the world of Brahmā, the Creator-God: “I saw you when you were leaving after bowing to the god, you and all the other lovely rivers—saw your limpid way of being, your good taste, your depth, the way you contain us all, your flowing fullness. Since that moment, in my mind I can imagine only you.” (2.125)

Kolāhala speaks truth: the river Śuktimatī is all he says she is. Each of the words he chooses opens up two complementary registers: she has acchâccha-bhāvambu, both a good heart or temperament and a limpid way of being; she has sarasatvamu, good taste and the quality of being liquid;13 gambhīrata, both physical and

13 On sarasatvamu, see the metapoetic verse by the Telugu poet Śrīnātha (fifteenth century): A little crooked, like the crescent moon on Śiva’s head, sharp as the contours of the firm, quickened breasts of the goddess roused to fury at the end of time, yet soft and delicious [sarasatvamu]: good poetry is all of this together, dancing forever wherever poets live. [Bhīmeśvara-purāṇamu 1.11]

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emotional depth; sarvaṅkaṣa-prauḍhi, the pervasiveness of water (sarvam = water) as well as the quality of holding or containing everything (also, a third register: the fact of being the ultimate touchstone), and, finally, paripūrṇatvamu, the fullness of heart or mind and of a flooding river. Such double entendres—the profoundly expressive figure known as śleṣa, “embrace,” recently studied in depth by Yigal Bronner14—reveal the compounded nature of reality itself; the superimposed registers allow language to mirror, and to suggest, the complexity and intermeshing of being that is, perhaps, the first fact of empirical science. The Vasu-caritramu is literally awash in śleṣa, and it is only natural that this technique comes into play with reference to the loveable river, a fully conscious being who will generate the doomed lineage of heroes. We should note, also, that like all other conscious creatures, the mountain spends his time imagining (bhāvintunu, the verb derived from bhāvanā, “imagination”) in line with his self-nourishing, self-sustained, and rather self-serving desire. It’s a long, densely configured speech. Kolāhala flatters his beloved, explains himself, draws her attention to his suffering, which only she can heal. At no point does he relinquish the useful double entendres, which may well strike us as being on the verge of allegory—since the river is, indeed, exactly as he describes her, piling attribute on attribute to create an image of natural beauty that cannot but inspire passionate love in whoever sees it. But, in fact, these verses are not allegorical in any usual sense of the word. Rather, they are direct statements lyrically enhanced with strong affective and cognitive components, as if the fundamental vectors of movement, color, shape, and character were intelligible to the listener through his or her own experience of self—as if precise nuances of sensation, ideation, and will were indeed part of any natural “object,” though in this poetic world there are perhaps no full-fledged objects, only various kinds and intensities of living subjects. So, again: Wise people go to any lengths to celebrate— indeed to immerse themselves in—whoever has clarity and sweetness and grace. So I, too, yearning to be close to you, have come here, despite the distance, for only you can quench the fire inside me. (2.128)

Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, Śrīnātha: The Poet Who Made Gods and Kings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4. 14 Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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The stone thirsts for the fluid, for something or someone in movement, graceful, pure. Like the wise who seek out these same qualities, he wants, first, to celebrate the person who embodies them and then to merge himself into this person, literally to bathe in her (kŏniy āḍa has both meanings). It’s an entirely understandable goal. Driven by love but also obsessed with the possibilities of polysemic Telugu words—Kolāhala is clearly a native speaker—he finds an ingenious way to promise fidelity and, at the same time, to display a newly discovered generosity: What more can I say? I want to give my life to you, like water gushing down a mountain. I’ll never leave you, and I’ll learn how to make you happy, you whose breasts are round as the ruddy geese on your waves. Please agree. Bring me into your innermost heart, where goodness and love are alive. Do away with my sorrow, make me a river’s husband and lord. (2.129)

He sticks to the facts: if she marries him, the torrents pouring down his slopes will mingle with her streams. Jīvanamu, “life,” in Andhra (or the imagined Cedi land) as elsewhere, is synonymous with “water” (thus the Sanskrit dictionaries). His goal, too, is, not surprisingly, stated in the bifocal vision that pervades the whole book: he wants to be at once adīnu(ḍu) and nadīnu(ḍu), “no longer miserable” and “married to a river,” a River-Man. Along the way to articulating this happy end, he addresses his beloved in an epithet embodying the intricate complexity so accessible to Telugu poets: a woman’s breasts are conventionally compared to the roly-poly cakravāka goose; but here the Śuktimatī River truly has these geese swimming, like breasts, on her waves. The conventional simile has been literalized or concretized in the natural landscape, at once enlivened by the metaphor, with its affective burden, and made visually present to the mind’s eye as it conjures up a living river. There is playful irony in the first-order instantiation of the figure and a second-order irony, the ironic reframing of the initial ironic literalizing, in the simultaneous recycling of the figure, now suitably enhanced, to serve as yet another gentle compliment to the beloved—as if the geese had been restored to their proper function as an object of comparison only after having been situated in their natural, observed habitat. The figure, in other words, has come true, as figures do. Nature itself, like language, is never un-figured. I suppose the mountain wants the river, his primary listener, to feel a little dizzy as he reaches the climax of his pitch. Śuktimatī is, however, far from receptive to these arguments. She’s disturbed by the sheer weightiness of the mountain’s speech (dhvani-garima), to say noth-

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ing of Kolāhala’s sheer physical weight, and in this somewhat shaky state—a mixture, the poet says, of politeness, practical wisdom, and terror (vinayamunayambu-bhayamunu)—she gives her suitor a definitive “no”: I belong to the bottom, the very lowest level, where things trickle and flow. My very nature15 is slow and sluggish and cold. Even when I’m full, you can’t measure my depths; so I’ve nothing to be proud of. In my innermost place you’ll find only slime. My watery life is mostly bubbles, and my constant hope is for a dark, rainy day. My movements are twisted and crooked. At my best I’m nothing but broken waves. To say I’m even a little bit stable is an outright lie, and whenever I do stand still, I stink. Do you really think it’s a good idea for you, with your grandeur and dignity, your so weighty mind, you who are solid and sinless as a rock, to get close to someone like me? On one side: mountains, the kings of the earth. On the other: wobbly, watery streams. Their union doesn’t look very likely. Do you think my juicy taste can attain your infinite height? (2.131–132)

The mountain is, naturally, disappointed; but, true to his character, he’s not about to give up: Hurt feeling showed on the face of the mountain king as he said: “Lovely river, it’s all true, but I’m already drowning in the flood of your beauty. Are you going to be cruel and sink me in your whirling currents, or will you embrace me, flow into me, float me on a raft of sheer joy?” (2.133)

Now she’s really scared. She can see what’s coming. Turning pale, she tries to point out that anything as heavy as this mountain, who comes with a large family of no less weighty relatives, would be unlikely to stay afloat in anything as fluid

15 prakṛti.

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as she is. If, she says, he is so overcome by sexual hunger, then let him seek release with one of the ravishing women of the gods, who are far better suited to his status than is a mere river that spends its time wandering from one holy place to another and that dries up to a mere trickle in the hot season—and that is anyway married to the Ocean, like all rivers. These protests produce one last rhetorical attempt at persuasion on the part of Kolāhala (he lists the various mythic precedents of rivers happily taking divine or human lovers—including, incidentally, the case of Śantanu, a future scion of the epic line that emerges from Śuktimatī and Kolāhala themselves). This time he doesn’t even wait for her counter-argument. He seizes her with his long arms and, though she turns her face away (2.137), forces himself on her, setting himself down in her usual course and thereby damming her flow, with disastrous consequences for the Cedi kingdom. There are terrible floods, and the distressed citizens appeal to King Vasu, who gallantly removes the enormous mountain with a flick of his toenail. Recall, however, that before this happens the reluctant river has already become pregnant with twins. We’ll have to tear ourselves away from Bhaṭṭumūrti’s beautiful verses if we are to attempt to draw some kind of conclusion from this dialogue, which, to be understood more deeply, should be seen in relation to similar scenes of unpromising but highly consequential courtship in the sixteenth-century Telugu classics.16 I don’t suppose you find the dialogue I have translated very “scientific,” though the Vasu-caritramu is replete with powerful verses devoted to lucid observation of the natural world. We can certainly identify the mountain and river as all too human; they have the awkwardness in desire and the desperate drift toward rationalization that we know all too well from ourselves. Sanskrit poetics has a trope—utprekṣā, “flight of fancy”—that is often structured around just such anthropomorphizing moves, where intentionality is projected, always in a selfconscious manner, on to natural phenomena such as flowers, pools, bees, birds, the sun and the moon, the wind, and, a particularly beloved example, clouds. Sometimes the poets point out to the reader that this kind of projection is a little bizarre and not to be taken in a simplistic, overly literal sense.17 Poets, says the Sanskrit proverb, tend to be rather wild (niraṅkuśāḥ kavayaḥ). By the way, sun and moon and wind are still conceived as personal entities in all the south Indian languages; or we might say, as T. R. V. Murti aptly noted for the Vedic god of

16 Above all, the dialogue of Varuthini and Pravara in Pĕddana’s Manucaritramu, which is deliberately quoted by Bhaṭṭumūrti. 17 Thus Meghadūta of Kālidāsa, 5. See Yigal Bronner and David Shulman, “Introduction” to forthcoming volume on Messenger Poems.

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fire,18 among others, that the abstract phenomenon easily slides into a personal, and therefore conscious, guise. But there is something a little different about the sixteenth-century instances of utprekṣā and related figures in sustained contexts like that we have just seen. Nature has come alive for these poets in the new way I have tried to describe. They themselves played a role in the redefinition of a natural domain and in the attempt to formulate inductively its rules and categories. The poets are fascinated by the workings of this domain, now separated to no small extent from the human and endowed with its own distinctive logic. Here is a world—perhaps not so unlike eighteenth-century Weimar—where the poet and the scientist tend to merge. Of course, one could always claim that the Telugu poet looks on the world as a gigantic pathetic fallacy—as if he or she were unaware that mountains are not sentient in the way we are, and not usually capable of speaking their minds in our kinds of sequential, syntactically governed language. But this critique seems to miss the point. The Telugu poets were no more naïve than we are. A more generous, and I think more insightful, way of thinking about this problem is to envision a world that is continually, inherently “figured” by non-literal linguistic devices and never un-imagined—a world in which outer and inner subjects can interact in ways that help make sense of what any human mind perceives as well as of whatever can be organized in systemic, empirically demonstrable patterns. In such a world, both poet and scientist have pragmatic, world-building, worldchanging tasks to perform. Does this mean that in sixteenth-century south India pushy, ungainly mountains really want to flow like rivers, while rivers, like other fluid beings, are rational enough to resist, as best they can, whatever is hard and stony? I guess the answer to this question depends on what “real” really means.

18 T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 15.

History Refracted

Peter Galison

Limits of Localism: The Scale of Sight Abstract: The immense productivity of local history is something to celebrate—its particularity, its texture, its fluid back-and-forth between social, ethical, and intellectual developments. At the same time, the supposition that local histories exhaust what we want to know can be very dangerous: history unfolds on a myriad of scales that do not collapse only to the micro. Look only at the local and you can miss the effects of mass actions of communication, transport, and societal mobilization.

1 Local Charm Over the last thirty years, the single greatest contribution to our understanding of the development of science has been the turn toward the local. Local studies pushed us to consider science away from grand laws and abstract method—and toward the laboratory in its concrete historical embedding. It has meant taking instruments seriously, addressing the real interactions of experimenters, the techniques of theorists, those workaday patterns of fieldwork, lab work, collaboration, note taking, teaching, observing, writing-up, and publishing. It has allowed a near-action contextualization of science within its time and place. Localism opposed the dead letter of Zeitgeist explanations, the old intellectual history that featured ideas leaping by themselves from book to book, across languages, centuries, and fields. Those Zeitgeist accounts, then and still, cling to such treasures as “freedom (or atomism or materialism) was in the air.” If I never again read such historiographical airware it will be too soon: let the Time-Spirit go to its historiographic grave and rest forever with the “restive working class,” the “rising bourgeoisie,” and the “decadent aristocracy.” Localism also offered a meeting ground for anthropology and history; it was the condition of possibility for focusing in on a sufficiently restricted field of action for characteristically anthropological questions to be asked within history. By attending to microhistory, to the interaction of people with names and addresses, questions of culture could become topics of inquiry for times long past. Gifts, memorialization, carnivals—these and more could be probed with a new understanding of the relation of the play of displacement on daily life. Natalie Davis used her Return of Martin Guerre (in both film and print) to probe questions of identity. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou and Carlo Ginzburg’s Cheese and the Worms both used Inquisition records to explore the meanings, values,

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and symbols that constituted “popular,” village-scale stances toward nature and religion. E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class fastened on popular village games to make working-class culture into something far more than what many British historians of the era considered to be an oxymoron.1 In the 1980s, localism made it possible to reclaim and reframe questions about scientific methodology. Back in World War II, James Conant, president of Harvard, chaired the National Defense Research Committee; from that perch he helped launch the Manhattan Project. After the war, he, along with J. Robert Oppenheimer, opposed the development of thermonuclear weapons. At the highest level of Atomic Energy Commission advisors, the Oppenheimer-led General Advisor Committee called these “superbombs” instruments of genocide; since they were so powerful, the only meaningful targets was a city the size of Moscow, London, or New York. Conant helped lead opposition to the thermonuclear program, arguing passionately against building the H-bomb—at one point, according to various accounts, saying the government would build the weapon “over my dead body.” In my view The Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science were, in part, Conant’s pedagogical inoculation against a helter-skelter expansion of the role that scientific-technical affairs would play in the politicalmoral affairs in the world. In order to avoid annihilation, Conant believed, citizens—both scientists and non-scientists—must learn enough at the intersection of the human and natural sciences to navigate these shoals. More specifically, Conant’s idea was this: science is science; the then-current crucial science and technology (unsaid: the accompanying nuclear weapons, rockets and radar) were inaccessible to starting students; so they would study “classic” scientific cases instead (Boyle’s vacuum, Lavoisier’s oxygen, Dalton’s atom). But since the methods of science were constant (so Conant argued), digging anywhere, properly, would reveal the nature of the stratigraphy. So why not get at the problem in simpler, older and open domains?

1 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: G. Braziller, 1978); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964, 1963). Conversely, that same encounter of historians and anthropologists helped inaugurate what is now several generations of anthropological work that extends its inquiry from the present back into the past. One thinks not only of Greg Dening’s Islands and Beaches (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1980) that situates the inhabitants of the Marqueses Islands in their present state and in the historical cross-fire of traders and whalers. Or Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

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Science, at least good laboratory-based science, was predicated on repetition —isn’t that Methodological Precept number One, Two or Three? But as Harry Collins and others showed, repetition turns out to be a remarkably difficult affair. Getting a new form of laser to work involved more than merely the reading and following distributed instructions. It often meant moving people with their “tacit knowledge” to the new site of construction. This was the kind of insight that propelled Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) to use their case study of the vacuum pump to show that moving Boyle’s instrument required transplanting his whole laboratory world, materiel and people. In other words, experimental repetition was not automatic, not a purely protocoldriven affair. Science was, case after case argued, tied, powerfully to the site, materials, and tacit knowledge surrounding it.2 Much of my own work is bolted right to the drive toward the local: How Experiments End (1987) aimed to get at the ways closure occurred in physical experiments; using three clusters of experiments, I wanted to get at table-top individual experiments, small group experiments, and large-scale particle physics collaborations. In fact, out of that work on the non-aligned periodization of scientific subcultures came my interest in more local accounts that would require local language and exchange relations, not just local practice.3 At the bottom of all these laboratory case studies was the view that something permanent, something universal, could be uncovered in specificity. All the various accounts of the rise of experiment in the seventeenth-century disagree mightily about the conditions of that novel form of argument: and yet from Shapin and Schaffer to their strongest early modern critics, each of these chroniclers of Boyle and his contemporaries took it to be the case that, once their guy had gotten the procedures of laboratory inquiry right, they stayed fixed: the experimental method of Boyle set up a “relationship between our knowledge and our polity that has, in its fundamentals, lasted for three centuries.”4 What then lies at the root of so many of these laboratory case studies? What, in fact, is tacitly assumed to be the nature of science such that one can dig anywhere and excavate universal dynamics, either for all time or for a period? Fundamentally, one has to believe that (for example) the nature of experimental science is unchanging, that while the details shift, one could be discussing Dalton or Rutherford, Lavoisier or the Large Hadron Collider. I will call this form of this implicit metaphysics of science case studies, the stratigraphic picture. 2 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 3 Peter Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 4 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 343.

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By stratigraphic, I mean to call into view an image of a vast and ancient seabed with its layers of sediment equally laid out so that the geographers boring cores can drill their hollow bits into the ground at any site within a region—and extract essentially the same story.

2 Fields of Force A second kind of localism involves a different picture of the case study. Let’s take a look at the way Pierre Bourdieu treats the French academic scene circa 1968 in Homo Academicus. There, as elsewhere, he ascribes to each person a portion of cultural, social, and real capital. As he put it, it is as if one has, on a gaming table with characteristic rules, an assortment of chips of different colors—we can (following Bourdieu) imagine a pile of red chips for cultural capital, blue for social capital, and gold for money.5 In some domains it may well be much more important to have gold chips than any other kind: the world of business is like this. Bourdieu argues that in the dominion of high culture—the artworld, the judicial world or the academic world—this is not so. In such domains of the elite, knowing, as if reflexively, how to act, how to dress, what to eat, how to celebrate, what to mock and what to admire, how to furnish a room—all this counts for a great deal. It forms, to use the term Bourdieu adapts from Marcel Mauss and Norbert Elias, the habitus. Each domain (artworld or academia, for example) has its own rules of the game, their own relations of power that determines where someone with his or her portion and proportion of colored chips figures. In knowing how to act, what tastes to exhibit about aesthetic judgments, for example, count for more than a bank account. And power hierarchies within each such institution reflect the charge given to each form of capital. Each habitus carries rules for the transformation of one form of capital into another. Are Bourdieu and his followers interested in the local? Absolutely. In Homo Academicus he casts a loving and detailed gaze on the sixth section of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and their allies at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) (where, in the 1960s Bourdieu was himself, along with Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Le Goff and others). Bourdieu wants to know how the EHESS-ENS combination innovated, how it bypassed traditional norms. What were the rules of engagement in the halls of EHESS section 6; what kind of

5 Pierre Bourdieu, Réponses: pour une anthropologie réflexive, with Loïc Wacquant (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 71.

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capital circulated around their international connections, around their visiting professors. Or, conversely, what were the rules of capital that circulated around the more impacted, self-referential and controlled networks of a more literary, humanities-oriented Sorbonne where an internal network of former students and teachers controlled the flow of cultural and social capital. But the Bourdieu-ians’ concern is less with exposing the universal procedures of experimental science, for example, and more with sketching out the fields that order and hierarchalize each institution. One thinks here of Mario Biagioli’s study, Galileo Courtier (1993), in which Medician courtiers play their cultural capital to better their place. Biagioli explains Galileo’s fall as a symbolic-economic outcome: the other courtiers’ collective interest in seeing the head courtier fall in order for each subordinate one to move up a rung up the court ladder.6 One sees here a form of localism grounded on a different nineteenth-century science: not stratigraphy but another reference point of classical science: the electrodynamic field. This is not an artificially imposed interpretation; here is Bourdieu himself, quoting, anonymously, the work of Hermann Weyl in his 1921 Raum Zeit Materie: In this [intellectual] field, I will find some “particles” (assume for a moment that we have a physical field) which is under the direction of forces of attraction, repulsion, etc as in a magnetic field. To speak of a field, is to accord the priority of this system of objective relations over the particles themselves. One could say, in taking the formulation of a German physicist, that the individual, like the electron, is an Ausgeburt des Feld[e]s, an emanation of the field. Such and such a particular intellectual, such an artist does not exist as such except in virtue of the fact that there is an intellectual or artistic field.7

Though this conception of German field theory is slightly mangled, it does accurately portray a physical concept, not the electron of the late nineteenthcentury physicists like Hendrik Lorentz or his successors, but a physics, where matter was just a state of the electromagnetic ether. Like systematic stratigraphy, field theories are one of the great movements of Victorian science: using a simple formula, every static charge produced a field, E, that was proportional to the charge and inversely proportional to the distance from it. Similarly, charges in motion produced magnetic fields, B. At every point in space, these two quantities, E and B, were enough to determine uniquely the

6 Mario Biagiol, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 7 Hermann Weyl, Raum Zeit Materie (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1921), 184; trans. Henry L Brose as Space Time Matter (New York: Dover, 1922), 203: “Matter is, on the contrary, an offspring of the field.” Bourdieu’s citation is from his Résponses, cited in note 2 above, 82.

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force suffered by a moving charge located there. Put a test charge at particular point X and watch how fast it accelerates and in what direction: this tells you what the E and B fields were if you don’t know. Or if you do know the field, you can predict what the particle will do if you put it at some spatial position. Tell me what your father does, Bourdieu liked to say, and I’ll tell you what you prefer. Put the electron down in a known field and we can say where it will go. People, on this view, gain their “charges” (that is their quota of cultural, social or cash resources) through training by their parents (habitus, accumulation of capitals). Placed in a field, actors respond to the potential forces and move accordingly.

3 Wolfman Thermodynamics There is one last form of case study that I want to look at, neither stratigraphic nor electrodynamic. This emerges strikingly in the Freudian case study, built to a certain degree on the older tradition of medical cases, but now with a twist: Freud argued that the unconscious followed universal, immutable laws. Cases embodied those broad principles, but did more just by showing how the talking cure was to work. In the early 1910s, Sigmund Freud came to know a young Russian aristocrat, Sergei Pankejeff, who suffered a variety of maladies, from tremendous difficulty defecating to bouts of debilitating fear. One day, in treatment, Pankejeff related the following dream to Freud: I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again.8

8 Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” 1918, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, with the assistance of Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974), 28.

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Freud famously used this dream, after Irma’s injection, as one of the very first sites at which to work out his account of laws of the unconscious. At the core of Freud’s dream interpretation was the idea that a fear of castration lay behind many of Pankejeff’s symptoms, and that this particular dream displayed the anxieties that grounded that fear. In one gloss, Freud took the stillness of the wolves to be inverted versions of motion, and that motion to be one that represented having come across his parents having intercourse from behind—and displaced this primal scene onto animals. In another gloss, later in the case writeup, Freud argued that the small child had seen animals coupling and displaced that onto his parents. Either way, Freud contended, the infantile witnessing of copulation awakened a long-term castration in the child, a terror that itself was later displaced onto symptoms (such as an inability to defecate, defecation itself acting as a symbolic displacement of castration). Freud’s analysis of the case is not exactly one that is stratigraphic; it is not that all dreams or even all dreams by Pankejeff displayed the same underlying psychic formation. Nor is it that the patient and his dream identified by the forces on them, a location in a field (in the quasi-physics sense of Bourdieu). For Freud, the significance of the case was therapeutic, to be sure; his case studies document the success of treatment in general. And Freud considered the talking cure specifically to have helped young Sergei arrive at a satisfactory insight-driven alleviation of his difficulties. But beyond this particular patient, Sergei’s dream illustrated the action of a universal law—the law of the unconscious. Those laws, which included the regular and fixed action of displacement and inversion, for example, were instantiated in the dream. Wolves became parents and parents became wolves. Stillness disguised sudden and forceful motion. Freud was quite explicit about the natural scientific origin of his picture of laws; his ideas of the mind were predicated on a kind of pan-materialism realized in the late-nineteenth century German commitment to an absolute interpretation of thermodynamics, and in particular to the Hermann Helmholtz’s conservation of energy, as popularized and extended by Bruecke. Freud: I should like, finally, to dwell for a moment on the working hypothesis which I have made use of in this exposition of the neuroses of defence. I refer to the concept that in mental functions something is to be distinguished—a quota of affect or a sum of excitation—which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (although we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body. This hypothesis, which, incidentally already underlies our theory of “abreactions” in our “Preliminary Communication” (1893), can be applied in the same sense as physicists apply

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the hypothesis of a flow of electric fluid. It is provisionally justified by its utility in coordinating and explaining a great variety of psychical states.9

Freud believed that psychic energy is conserved, it flows, it can change form; it has all the characteristics of the nineteenth-century physicist’s accounting-book notion of energy. You can take electricity and convert to heat; you can make heat into light—but you never create or destroy energy altogether. Blockages of flow, reservoirs of energy: for Freud the form of analysis, and the underlying lawlike behavior of the unconscious as realized in specific cases, came down to the first law of thermodynamics: Helmholtz’s conservation of inter-convertible energy. Laws—unchanging, transcendental laws of condensation, displacement, inversion—stood behind the variegated character of the psychoanalytic case. Just about no one defends a case study on the basis of its self-sufficiency. So it has to stand in for something more than itself. Each of these three bases provides such a mechanism: stratigraphy by assuring us that one could have dug anywhere within a region; force fields by saying we can capture the scope of social field (compare: a magnetic field) by probing at the relevant spots and using those explorations to identify the individuals and the governing surround that gives rise to them. And thermodynamics, with its absolute principles that make a case more than a mere case by illustrating universality below the surface.

4 The Limits of Localism Of course historians’ perennial nightmare is that their subject reduces to one damn thing after another. The simplest objection to case study particularism is that it is, well, not even that: that what the actors in a case are doing might amount to just one damn thing. It doesn’t and didn’t take much deep thinking among medievalists to have accused Carlo Ginzburg of mistaking Menocchio, his extraordinary sixteenth-century miller, for the average peasant. Of course Menocchio was peculiar: not everyone had such delicious fantasies (worms spontaneously in cheese as a model for cosmogenesis). Not every miller had his own way of reading biblical texts. Not every miller had the hellish chance to make a major, recorded appearance in the Star-Chamber. No, in and of itself atypicality isn’t what bothers me. I’m questioning something else. I’m after a particular kind of induced filtration of historical phenomena

9 Sigmund Freud, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense,” 1894, in The Standard Edition, vol. 3, 59–60.

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that occurs by viewing the scene at an inflexible scale—at a scale chosen more for delights of particularism than because the underlying problem occurs at that scale. Take the example of the rise of Nazism. I’m not going to review this staggeringly vast literature, but instead to focus on one of the first of many, many local town studies. In a hugely praised book (The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922–1945) that has become the single most used volume of German history in American universities, William Sheridan Allen broadly reshaped the way the rise of Nazism is understood.10 Specifically, Allen’s promising idea, back in the early 1960s, was to examine a town, Northeim, in Lower Saxony, and to track the rise of Nazism there from the early post-World War I years through to mid-late 1930s. No doubt to ground his choice to keep the camera tight in on a single town, Allen chose a morsel of René Descartes as his epigram: Divide each problem into as many Parts as possible; that each part Being more easily conceived, The whole may be more intelligible. From Descartes, Discourse on Method

For Allen the problem was to simplify by decomposing the history of the rise of the Third Reich history into its constituent localities and using one to sample the wider whole. The metahistorical basis: stratigraphic. Allen later said he was greatly reassured that the vast number of other town studies conducted these last forty years revealed much the same story (put briefly: there was no powerful resistance to the Nazi takeover because nationalism trumped an atomized civil society, and because the Machtuebergreifung was gradual.). As so often, details draw us into the case history. In Northeim, Ernst Girmann was “typical of these first Nazis.” He’d gone to business school, not university, fought in World War I, taken a bullet to the chest, joined the Jung deutsche Orden and the Nationalist Party—and picked up a (very early) Nazi membership card (4,294) in 1922. Allen follows Girmann’s ups and downs: he rose as a very young man to Local Group Leader (Ortsgruppenleiter), bullied Jews and socialists around town, and had a modest come-uppance when accused by fellow Nazis at one point of poor financial management. There were comedic moments of battles of left and right marching bands confronting each other on the town green; on Kristallnacht, town thugs broke

10 William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: the Experience of a Single German Town, 1922–1945, rev. ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984, 1965).

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some Jewish shop windows. Girmann, according to Allen, had plenty of venom to go around, “express[ing] contempt for the townspeople. He drank heavily and when drunk was generally morose. His most common emotion was anger, which could develop into furious rage…. [C]onsumed by ambition, Girmann was chiefly responsible for the driving energy of Local Group Northern of the Nazi party.”11 History of Nazism at the village level meant following bullies like Girmann, his toadies, his enemies, his defeated victims and the groupings of Social Democratic civil society crushed under Girmann’s boots. Throughout the thirties, Allen documents, townspeople heard speeches in the town center, took in entertainment, laid war wreaths, lined up to watch parades with fife and drums, joined conferences in the meeting hall—and quiescently witnessed raids against communists, alongside the slow, squeezing pressure on the Social Democrats. Police surrounded Northeim’s Reichsbanner men (Social Democrats) when they demonstrated until February 1933—the moment their last rally began at the town’s Market Square and headed down Wide Street. Meanwhile, Stormtroopers marched where they wanted, when they wanted. Eventually, a despondent Hermann Schulze, a prominent Northeim Social Democrat, took a coffee can, folded his Reichsbanner flag into it, and buried it.12 You get the picture. In fact, the whole character of this kind of narrative nonfiction microhistory suits itself, in its visual specificity, to a fiction film. From the story, Allen takes this: “Thus in the first six months of the Nazi regime, Northeim was subjected to a veritable barrage of propaganda. While the NSDAP took the lead, all the various nationalistic and militaristic elements in the town were brought into play to support and generalize the Nazi appeal. In addition to the mass-participation events in Northeim, there was the steady stream of national news stories, radio speeches, and propaganda in magazines and books.”13 What’s wrong with this? Nothing, in a certain sense. There are aspects of stratigraphic or at least regional-stratigraphic typicality that emerge from the story Allen tells, and tells well. It is this last sentence of the quotation that bothers me, the side remark that follows the main clause: “In addition to the mass-participation events in Northeim,” now the subordinate addition “there was the steady stream of national news stories, radio speeches, and propaganda in magazines and books.” Just that? “In addition” to local papers like the Thalburger Beobachter, for example? Under Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda ministry played an enormous role—they

11 Allen, Nazi Seizure of Power, 83. 12 Allen, Nazi Seizure of Power, 154–55. 13 Allen, Nazi Seizure of Power, 216.

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distributed truckloads of radios—cheap ones like the “people’s receivers” that were sold in the millions. Indeed by the middle of the war some three million households had them. But we know radio is an extraordinary medium of incitement—no one who has studied the Rwanda genocide thinks it could have taken place without the spewing of centralized, government sanctioned hate through Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). Nazi Germany certainly cannot be understood properly without radio—or town-by town installation of loudspeakers, without the Völkischer Beobachter, or for that matter the Nazi film industry (“Triumph of the Will,” “The Eternal Jew,” “Jew Süss”). Mass media are not incidental to racial-political incitement—as invisible as they appear in Allen’s Nazi Seizure of Power. But that really isn’t the full difficulty. Instead, the real problem is that there always will be a local story to follow, a Girmann and Schulze, for example. There will always be bands at this hall or that, or a sullen ex-schoolteacher or a proud Jewish banker who refuses to leave until it is too late. The problem is that understanding itself closes in on itself around these details, that the capillary aspects of Gleichschaltung and even violence (as on Kristallnacht and then later the system of trains and camps) were large-scale, not small-scale phenomena. Look at a small enough radius and the large becomes, strictly speaking, invisible. Invisibility of the global comes to a moral head when it comes to the fate of Northeim’s Jews; and at this point, I have to say I lose touch with the charm of the little village story of alternately amusing, appealing, bullying story of everyman. Allen in his own words: By the time Hitler determined to murder all the Jews in his power, as his “Final Solution,” almost all of Northeim’s Jews had left the town for a bigger city and supposed anonymity, or had gone to another country for safety. Northeimers did not harass their Jewish neighbors, but they also did their best not to “know” what their government was doing to the Jews.14

After this sentence the book goes silent about those Jews. In other words, the text repeats the self-imposed ignorance about which it speaks. Where did they go when they left the walls of Northeim—who knows? By restricting the field of view, the text invites the reader to re-create the blinkered moral vision that averted its eyes. It is here that epistemological limits of scale slide into something else. Canceling radios, loudspeakers, films, slide shows, and newspapers from view is a historiographic error; cancelling people from view is something else. They were systematically carted off to industrially-produced death camps, not locally, but through a global, state-mandated, system of roads, trains, chemistry, communi-

14 Allen, Nazi Seizure of Power, 225.

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cation, and information control. A thousand village studies like this one would still leave the centralized, global features of the Reich completely invisible; always elsewhere, always out of view. That is where epistemic blindness slides into moral obscurity.15

5 Scales of Sight Over these last twenty years of science studies, socio-cultural history, and interpretive social science, is an avalanche of case studies. We have national, regional, village, laboratory, family, and individual cases; we have cases to show subnational or group styles of science. In many instances they offer a lot, these classic, stratigraphic studies. Not always. Sometimes, though more rarely, case studies aim to display universal laws (psychodevelopmental, economic, physical); more often, the universal law impulse is vectored toward micro-sociological claims (such as the experimenter’s regress) that are supposed to be a binding law (experiments never are transmitted through explicit procedures alone, and therefore depend on transmission by personnel contact through tacit knowledge). Case studies instantiate these laws or rules—each is supposed to put one more brick on the monument—the way the orbits of the moons of Jupiter or the assembly of stars into a galaxy instantiate Newton’s inverse square law. Finally, there are those case studies in which cultural capital is hoarded, dispensed, or converted. Some draw on one, some on another, but these three images of the world return, alone and in combination, as the unspoken support for a more-than-nominal value to case studies. My concern is not with the local, it is with localism, the view that all the interesting phenomena of science and technology studies are captured locally. The danger is that we will always find local accounts. You can ask why women were largely excluded around 1880 from the physics departments at Göttingen, Munich, Berlin, or at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford or Cambridge. And in each you will find physicists or administrators to explain why the discipline is or should be the purview of men. But the phenomenon is not a local one—any more than is racial or sectarian exclusion. Part of the draw of the local, I would argue, is that it seems more scientific; after all, it was a signal moment in the history of physics when James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday produced a local theory of electricity and magnetism shattering the older action-at-a-distance accounts. Just so, Albert Einstein’s

15 Allen, Nazi Seizure of Power, 290–91.

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General Theory of Relativity took Newton’s far-action theory and made into one that was local, with the distended fabric of spacetime serving as the intermediary between masses: gravity waves propagate disturbances in the structure of spacetime itself. But even within physics there are effects that are not local. For example, quantum mechanics shows that two particles once entangled with one another can remain so even if one is brought to one side of our galaxy leaving its partner at the other. The correlation between their properties (for example, their spin) is not local, and can be used in a whole range of quite realizable technologies, including the intensely studied domains of quantum encryption, quantum teleportation and quantum computing. Nor are such non-local quantum effects the only type of non-locality in physics. That local effects in physics must be supplemented with non-local ones does not prove anything in history. But it does put the kibosh on the notion that the history of physics somehow means that any reasonable explanation could only be local. I come to the final example of scale and sight: the widespread espousal of scientific objectivity in the nineteenth century. Case I: a fine study by Theodore Porter, illustrates some of the advantages of the method.16 Porter studies accountants, commodity traders and bridge builders. For example, he looks at American engineers of the later 1800s as they tried to persuade politicians to undertake infrastructure projects. Porter’s contention is that American engineers at this time were relatively weak, socially, and so sought to bolster their strength by invoking quantitative methods—in this case cost-benefit analyses. In France, by contrast, graduates of elite schools, such as Ecole Polytechnique or Ponts et Chaussées, formed an elite, one with acknowledged social-cultural cachet. Unlike their American counterparts, the French engineers grounded their recommendations to the government not on quantitative analyses of cost and benefit, but on the authority of their judgments. Case II: Chris Lawrence, studying a London Hospital, had a similarly structured analysis.17 One group of doctors argued against the use of some clinical instruments—mere technicalities blocked, so the established, elite doctors said, their own authoritative judgment. For these venerable medics, instrumentation and “objective” measures threatened what they could tell by experienced-based touch. For the opponents of these elite medics, that newer breed of middle-class physicians, it was precisely the removal of personal authority that appealed. The 16 Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 17 Christopher Lawrence, “A Tale of Two Sciences: Bedside and Bench in Twentieth-Century Britain,” Medical History 43 (1999), 421–429.

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usurpers charged into the hospital with science-based instruments, making up with objectivity what they lacked in an elite authority grounded in being wellborn. On the face of things, these two accounts are stratigraphic in argumentative structure; both historians chose to dig into the micro-worlds of Chicago commodity goods assessors, Paris-based Polytechnicians or well-heeled London physicians, but they could (so the contention would be) have dug elsewhere. There is a context (American late nineteenth century democratic bureaucrats) where authority is weak and so numbers bolster claims; or a context (French Polytechniciens) where authority did not need the cost-benefit Kevlar. There is a claim, perhaps not so strong as Freud, Bruecke, or Helmholtz would have put it, but a claim nonetheless that there is a kind of functionalist law at work here: each group (rising bourgeois or defensive elite) adopts a view of authority that serves to justify its status. Confident authority rests with elites; challengers to those elites, in their weakness, compensate by invoking protocol (statistics, standardization, instruments, and objectivity). But whenever and wherever, social elites fought for the right to judge on their say-so; the eternally rising bourgeoisie grabbed their instruments to fight back. One problem with this form of localism is that it leaves out the lateral connections that join many sites, across disciplines and addresses, to one another. In the nineteenth century, scientific atlases blossomed almost everywhere: from atlases of skeletons and skulls to atlases of clouds, flowers, crystals, and blood. Publishers became adept at commissioning and distributing the genre of the atlas, not just at “physics” or “medicine” or “biology.” Often printed, often in several languages, with a minimum of purposely interpretive text, a maximum of pictorial quality, and enormous attention to archive quality paper, the atlas became a model for reliable knowledge. Everything about the production of this episode in the history of the book aimed at de-localization. No need to print in English, German, and French if the atlas was designed to stay at the home laboratory or even the home nation—and no need to print on paper for the long term if the target audience was an assembly of colleagues and students in the then and there. These books stood in libraries and laboratories, in medical offices and, in smaller form, joined the front line of medical dissections and scanning rooms. The risk in ignoring them is similar to the risk that the local historians run in other realms of history: the turf war in diffusion is precisely what we miss when we focus the lens of inquiry exclusively on the local Northeim battle between Girmann and his enemies, to the exclusion of nationally-orchestrated newspapers, radio, and film. Does this mean that the local history is misguided? Not at all. It means that localism, when its claims and methods are exclusive, can be blinding.

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6 Conclusion For much of our work in history, social science, science studies, we have come to rely on nineteenth century scientific models (strata, classical fields, absolute laws) that offer no place to scale. Within a wide range of sciences, that has changed dramatically over the last three decades. Here’s a metaphor that turns out to be much more than that. Water waves on the ocean range in size from a millimeter to a thousand kilometers, and if you live on the ocean, only some of them are relevant, that is, only certain scales matter. If you happen to be a water bug, small oscillations on the surface can matter a great deal, while smooth hundred-meter waves are entirely irrelevant. For a massive container ship on the open seas, millimeter waves matter not at all; as far as this ship goes, the phase, direction, and frequency of such tiny disturbances are entirely trivial. But, importantly, just as irrelevant are the largest ocean waves, kilometers, even hundreds of kilometers long. Ships not far out in the harbor off some of the tsunami-ravaged Southeast Asian coasts felt nothing at all. But at the scale of the ship’s own length, waves can matter a great deal; at about the rate of one a day such waves swallow whole ships. Why is the selective importance of scale more than a metaphor? Because in the quantum world, objects and waves are intimately associated; an electron of a given momentum acts like a wave of a specific length. What this means is that the world divides into physics of different length scales; it doesn’t matter, or it strictly and rigorously matters to the nanoscientist, working at a scale of 10-9 meters, what string theorists, working at 10-33 cm have to say. And it also doesn’t matter what happens at the scale of meters. Pace Descartes, the question we have to ask, therefore, is not one of dividing up the world into small tractable parts, because we risk choosing a scale not relevant to the problem at hand. There may be some questions that are answered, and answered stunningly, at the town level in the history of Nazism. But there are many that are not. There may be aspects of objectivity that are best treated in the London confrontation of gentlemen doctors with upstart bourgeois competitors. But both run the twin risk of obscuring larger scale-phenomena of objectivity— and of losing, and then misattributing the scope of effective action. The pleasure of particulars, the pleasure of the local can reveal—and blind. The pitfalls of a reductionist globalism are glaring—there is little to recommend a return to “in the air” Zeitgeist explanations. Localism, in its exclusionist form, leaves us unable to account for the broader engagement with broader-scale shifts in the practice of science. What we need is a more attentive analysis of what happens at the intersection of the media of knowledge flows on the one side

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(atlases, journals, books, radio, film, electronic communications) and the material-local on the other. In the present moment of history of science nothing seems more urgent than figuring out not only the modes of production and circulation of virtual knowledge but how these are taken up, brought into the material and redistributed.

Robert Pippin

Discipline(s) Abstract: This essay sounds a cautionary note about the ways that university disciplines, even, especially, some of the new inter-disciplines, can all too easily slide into an imperial mode; neuroaesthetics, for example, professes to shunt aside the unfolding of values and meaning from the history of art, and in its place to see nothing but neuronal paths that respond only to symmetry or a particular juxtaposition of colors.

I I want to raise some questions about the philosophical assumptions behind, and the current discussion about, the disciplinary organization of knowledge in the university. Consider the disciplinary assumptions in my own discipline. If there is such a thing as philosophy, it trades in forms of reflection and attempted resolutions of arguments that do not rely on empirical results. The strongest formulation of such a claim, such as Kant’s, is that there is a priori philosophical knowledge, knowledge of necessary truths about the world not derived from our experience of the world, such as the claim that no event can occur uncaused. Knowledge is one thing, however, and understanding another. There can also be attempts at understanding that do not, cannot have, fixed truth-conditions, are not resolvable by empirical results, but that can be attempted and pursued in ways better or worse, with better or worse results. We could say: we could more or less make sense of some event or practice, but freely admit that it is a hard thing to determine when in fact sense has been made. This is the kind of issue that arises when we ask if some practice is “actually” religious; peyote smoking, say, or scientology. We don’t doubt that the practice exists; we want to know its “essentiality,” what it is in truth, or “really,” not what people try to call it. We don’t doubt that animals exist and have various capacities, many much like ours; we want to know if they are actually rights-bearers. This requires that we understand what it means to attribute such a rights-bearing property in general. We know computers can play chess and win, perhaps one day could even pass Turing tests, but we want to know not whether these facts are true, but whether the computer is actually thinking. We want to know what it means to be thinking. No fact of the matter will settle that or any of these questions. A gallery opens and some objects, clothes strewn around a floor, are displayed. Is it actually art? Making sense of why there is a practice like art

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making, what it means that there is, what sense there could be in it, involves a question that immediately becomes impoverished if we think the question can only mean “what caused human beings (or the human brain) to take a distinct pleasure in certain sorts of artifacts?” But what makes it distinct? What sorts of artifacts? These, again, are not empirical questions. The questions rather invite a speculation on something like a “satisfying” account, rather than a factually true one. The question is impoverished in a similar way if we succumb, as many did for a hundred years or so, to the understandable temptation to say that these must be questions about language, language use, the meaning of a word. We appear to be beyond that now, and want again to know: what actually is thinking, freedom, art? These examples raise the issue of disciplinarity I want to discuss eventually. The issue arises in this way. What changes in such a picture if we admit, as it seems we should, that past answers to such questions are unavoidably historically specific? It is undeniable that what counts as having made sense of what religion is, what animals are (in what sort of distinction from human animals), what thinking is, what is forbidden and what art is, has not only been answered differently at different times, but that we can only make sense of the different answers by some sort of contextualizing of the answers, understanding how they fit uniquely into a way of life with many features other than those answers. Does this undeniable fact alone challenge the “autonomy” of philosophy? Is this historical contextualizing itself philosophy, or compatible with what philosophy “actually” is? We could say: very little changes. The historian of science or the historian of ethics or the historian of philosophy (qua historian)1 can make abundantly clear that the factors that led to the social dominance of one sort of answer to questions like these rather than another were almost certainly not the superiority of the arguments for that answer, and, in a way that is both civil as well as reasonable, agree that this does not settle the still open philosophical question of the right answer, the superior argument, the more cogent analysis or interpretation. Thus, Lorraine Daston argues: Analogously, the fact that scientific objectivity arose in a specific historical context neither supports nor undercuts its epistemological validity. “If historical, then relative” is a non sequitur. Why then do so many philosophers (as well as scientists, sociologists, and, yes,

1 One needs this parenthesis because in the academic discipline of philosophy, the title “historian of philosophy” is ambiguous. Many historians of philosophy are not historians. They just work on old texts, “reconstructing” in the arguments they find the most compelling version. Others are more properly historians, and want to understand, in the context of the time, in the light of the philosopher’s interlocutors, what was actually meant then. Many are a little bit of both.

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historians) nonetheless believe it follows? Why has historicism, especially in its Foucauldian form, been so consistently conflated with relativism?2

Daston suggests as an answer a kind of anxiety and suspicion on the part of philosophers about any such contextualization, that it will inevitably degrade the presumption of the eternality of the philosophically stable and (putatively) ahistorically accessible “truth” in an otherwise historical text. And she suggests her own Plädoyer for the historian of science. They would have no trouble answering that …such scientific practices are both socially constructed and real. That is, they depend crucially on the cultural resources at hand in a given context (mid-nineteenth-century industrializing Prussia, early twentieth-century eugenics-obsessed Britain) and they capture some aspect of the world; they work. But they are neither historically inevitable nor metaphysically true. Rather, they are contingent to a certain time and place yet valid for certain purposes.3

But the difficulty is immediately obvious. Why would or should the historian pull back the historicizing lever when confronted with what is taken at some time to be what counts as having established “capturing some aspect of the world”? And whence the extraordinary appositive that “capture some aspect of the world” just amounts to (that we can makes sense of what it is as) “what works”? Why “what works” rather than “what was taken to work at a time and a place”?4 Not to mention: why not just “is true,” or “is partially true”? If there is a “standard in itself” that defines “what works” or what is “valid for certain purposes,” do we not have something very like the position of Daston’s philosopher, who is in effect arguing that despite historical contingencies, there is sufficient overlap in meaning and method in the philosophical tradition to render attention to context and history, while possible, unimportant?

II As Daston rightly says about these issues in the article quoted from above: “To do these questions justice would require another essay, yea, another book.”5 More-

2 Lorraine Daston, “Science Studies and the History of Science,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009) 813. 3 Ibid. 4 It is hard to imagine Foucault conceding that the principles underlying the treatment of the mentally ill or prisoners were, while contingent, “valid for certain purposes.” But Daston’s case is not tied to his. 5 Op.cit., 813.

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over (at the end of the often invoked day, after much more is said) I agree with her denial of the false alternative of “relativism or (ahistorical) realism.” My purpose in introducing the issue this way was to raise a more methodological question. The issue of the right way to understand the relation between the historical study of philosophy and philosophy, or between the history of science or “science studies” and science (Daston’s issue) also raises more general questions about the disciplinary organization of the modern research university. Daston’s influential attempt (in this article and in many other works) to argue for genuine interdisciplinarity (in this case especially an enterprise still relevant to the question of what science actually is) while doing justice to disciplinarity (in her case, the archive, the case, the value of microanalysis of instances) seems to me very much on the right track, and it is useful to have it in mind because, I want to argue, the greatest contemporary threat to such interdisciplinarity is the current enthusiasm for it; it is reductive disciplinarity parading as interdisciplinarity.6 Let me explain what I mean. First a Dastonian point. The disciplines as we now know them in the modern research university emerged between 1870 and 1915, and were the result of a number of different factors.7 That is, the disciplines are not natural kinds; they are historical creations, much more like opera and tennis, than they are human practices such as politics or perhaps, sadly, war. Their emergence was connected with a concomitant need for the professionalization of differing claims to knowledge. In the United States, this professionalization was partly required by a culture of democratic egalitarianism. You could not and should not inherit the privilege of speaking with academic authority. You had to earn that right, and in principle anybody could. This meant that the disciplines had to be self-regulating professions, with the authority to credential or refuse to credential whomever it wished, according to whatever publically stated criteria the experts in the profession decreed were relevant.8

6 The colonizing attempts by science studies to define science itself as nothing but (rather than “and also”) a human “construct” would be a case in point. 7 See the useful narrative by Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010). 8 The curriculum of the first universities formed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Europe simply reflected the organization of what was known and considered important at the time: the trivium had priority—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—but all the seven liberal arts were taught— those three plus arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music theory. Soon thereafter the Aristotelian branches of philosophy, physics, metaphysics and moral philosophy, were added. There was no more deep rationale for this structure than there is in universities today. Animal husbandry and criminal science can be taught along with courses on twelfth century Baghdad, the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre and hip hop music. Nothing about this is surprising or alarming.

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So the disciplines are essentially historical phenomena, but, and now the main point, that does not mean that, therefore, anything goes in their organization and relation to each other. What especially does not “go” are two main and by now very familiar forms of what I called reductive disciplinarity. For example: A proper understanding of evolutionary biology and brain science will turn out to be “all that ethics amounts to.” The best form of literary analysis of character behavior in novels is to apply game-theoretic models to explain what they do and why. We will understand what art is and how it means what it does, when we understand a neurological model of aesthetic experience; all aesthetics is neuroaesthetics. What we need in art history is not art criticism, the careful exfoliation of a painting’s meaning, but Bildwissenschaft or Bildmedienwissenschaft, or even Visualistik, all sciences of visual processing. Likewise, we will understand traditional problems of epistemology, like the relation between perception and perceptual knowledge, and philosophy of mind, like the problem of intentional content, when the cognitive sciences tell us how all that works.9 These and many like them are often advertised as new and exciting interdisciplinary explorations. They are nothing of the sort. They are reductionist enterprises whose effect would be the elimination of the disciplines they are supposedly enriching.10 This is not yet an objection to them. There were chairs of phrenology (the science of reading bumps on the head) and of physiognomy (the science of facial typology) in Germany well into the nineteenth century. Perhaps we are just in a period of revolutionary tumult, when what seemed inconceivable must now be conceived. I don’t think we are and I will try to say why. In the course of doing so I will also allow myself one vague and unsupported suggestion about the ideological character of these reductionist projects in conclusion. I mean the following. What these enterprises are attacking is any claim for the autonomy of the main objects of the traditional human sciences: meaning and value.11 A traditional justification of such autonomy need not be very complicated. The claims

9 One should note that there have also been such reductive campaigns conducted in the humanities and social sciences on behalf of other sorts of sciences, and usually from within the discipline, like logical positivism in philosophy, and like semiotics, structuralism, Marxism, Marxist structuralism (Althusser in his heyday), psychoanalysis, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in literary and art studies. 10 We will have true interdisciplinarity when someone at a neuroscience convention gets up and points to something she learned about the dynamics of jealousy and self-deceit from Proust that altered the way she conducts research. I won’t hold my breath. 11 Again, I agree with Daston. There is no reason such enterprises must be reductionist. The problem begins when not when neuroscientists and economists conduct such research but when humanists do, under the banner of what we have learned humanists must now do.

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are simply that understanding meaning, the meaning of what some one does or says, the meaning of a poem or a painting, or a film or many kinds of texts, can be extremely difficult. (Needless to say, understanding that the appearance of meaning is only that, an illusion, is exponentially more difficult, but I will come to that shortly.) One needs practice and advice from people who seem to have been able to it well. It also helps to have some exposure to communities and historical societies who seem to have very different ways of making themselves understood to each other. When we are trying to figure out whether a friend is betraying a confidence or looking out for us, or what sense it could make to say that someone is self-deceived, we will not be aided by having learned the adaptive fitness of loyalty. Moreover and in the most complicated register, no one will understand how to mean what she wants to mean without such practice and advice. The central two questions about value are: what ought I to believe and what, in various typical circumstances, ought I or we to do? These questions will still be there, waiting for some reasoned resolution or some decision, no matter what we learn about how the brain works when “it,” as Lichtenberg might put it, values some course of action or lends credence to some belief. We cannot wait to see what our brain decides. This all changes under the evolving conditions in the modern university that we are considering. Meaning becomes information; understanding becomes information processing. Value becomes the matter of fact preferences of individuals; the realization of value becomes strategic success at the efficient maximization of everyone’s preferences consistent with the maximization of everyone else’s. These are contested philosophical claims, not empirical discoveries. Secondly, to turn to another example of the same phenomenon, the stated ambitions of “interdisciplinarity as critical theory” are in themselves unobjectionable. The understandable motive is to escape from dogmatism, to escape from the reliance on unchallenged assumptions, from pretensions to authoritative knowledge that cannot be defended, and from whole structures of knowledge (for Kant, rationalist metaphysics and unreflective empiricism) that are to be exposed as mere illusions of knowledge. But Kant engaged in such a critique for the sake of critically well-grounded knowledge, which he called critical philosophy in general and transcendental idealism in particular, and he appreciated the enormity of that revolutionary task. But the movements roiling humanities departments since the sixties have been attacks on the stability and comprehensibility of meaning in the name of the inevitable “failure” of meaning or the failure of any rational legitimation of authority tout court. They thus create philosophically unacceptable self-referential paradoxes (they present themselves and their approach as privileged perspectives exempt from the destabilizing attention they direct elsewhere) and they have created the impression inside and outside the

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academy of sophistry, and, what is worse and genuinely ironic, a kind of arrogation to itself of supreme authority in all fields of meaning and value. There is to be now a new discipline, and its proclamations amount simply to a new dogmatism. From any sort of philosophical point of view, but especially a “critical” point of view, to claim to know what such a critical theory claims to know is stupefying in its presumed certitude. Now for the final, soap box point about ideology. How are we to understand these proposed revisions and reductions and their current popularity? It is surely relevant that the success of this disciplinary colonizing would in effect provide a globalized capitalist mass consumer society with exactly what it needs: let us call it normatively unconstrained consumption, steered by “nudge” advertising and political messages, classifying and reducing subjects to their “preferences,” surveyed by ubiquitous cameras and computer monitoring, encouraging, as scientifically sanctioned, the twin forms of behavior such a society relies on: ruthless competition, endless consumption. Nothing that Marx could have imagined as ideologically distorting our understanding of ourselves and our true needs, all for the benefit of those who most profit from such a manipulated self-understanding, not art, not religion, not political philosophy, could come remotely close to the ideological power and effectiveness of this partnership between scientism and consumer capitalism, all in the guise of the happy celebration of interdisciplinarity in the academy.

Anthony Grafton

Good Company: Spinoza the Traditionalist and Some Unexpected Friends Abstract: Over the years, Spinoza explainers have zeroed in on a small group of radical and rather marginal figures, ignoring works by more mainstream and trilingual scholars. Broadening the context—looking out, intellectually—significantly enriches our understanding of who Spinoza was.

A vision of Spinoza—of the sort of man he was, the life he led, the way he read and worked—has often hung like a scrim between his interpreters and his works. Spinoza had a gift for friendship. Still, it has seemed natural—and is by no means wholly wrong—to see him as a rather solitary figure, a heroic individualist who lost some of his closest friends to the religious intolerance he fought. And it has also seemed right to treat him as a rather solitary intellectual—one who, like Descartes, cut his own paths, making as little use of others’ writings as his very sparing citations suggest. Many books and articles offer interpretations of the Tractatus theologico-politicus, or parts of it. Relatively few of them connect the book systematically with earlier efforts to lay out principles of biblical interpretation. Those that do so often concentrate on a few works that have become canonical in this connection—and often emphasize the vast distance between Spinoza and the works he read. The context for his thought is usually sought in the work of marginal, radical figures like Adriaan Koerbagh, who suffered nobly for his beliefs—not in the more refined worlds of trilingual scholarship.1 Exceptions exist, some of them—such as Noel Malcolm’s chapter on biblical criticism in Aspects of Hobbes—splendid. But they have not changed the rule.2

1 Lodewijk Meijer, Philosophy as the interpreter of Holy Scripture (1666), tr. Samuel Shirley, ed. Lee C. Rice & Francis Pastijn (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2005); Adriaan Koerbagh, A light shining in dark places, to illuminate the main questions of theology and religion, ed. and tr. Michiel Wielema, int. Wiep van Bunge (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011). 2 J. Samuel Preus, “A Hidden Opponent in Spinoza’s Tractatus,” Harvard Theological Review, 88 (1995), 361–388; Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002); Susan James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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What difference might it make if we imagined Spinoza in dialogue with a still larger and more diverse crowd of Jews and Christians, including imaginary ancients and troubling moderns? What, if anything, did he take from the learned traditions that surrounded him? And what did he refuse or fail to take? We can start with his contemporaries. In 1666 Lodewijk Meijer published a book that provoked Spinoza by arguing that philosophical correctness should be the test of biblical interpretation. Philosophy as the Interpreter of Holy Scripture regularly figures in discussions of the Tractatus, normally as a negative stimulus. But Lodewijk Meijer also recorded the remarks of an expert biblical scholar. Pretty much every manuscript of the Bible, this man claimed, whether in Hebrew or in Greek, had been corrupted by the interventions of the evil-minded. He went so far as to say “the rabbis themselves admitted that there were so many and so confused variants in the Hebrew Bible, that it was hard to tell the true ones from the false,” and “that if someone collated and examined all the manuscripts of the New Testament, he would find almost as many discordances as words.”3 The gentleman in question can be identified. In 1659, Isaac Vossius—a member of a great scholarly dynasty—set off a massive debate on biblical chronology. The credible annals of Chinese history, he pointed out, stretched back so far into the past that the Hebrew Bible, which set less than 4000 years between the Creation and the Incarnation, could not accommodate them. Happily, the longer chronology of the Greek Old Testament, the ancient version known as the Septuagint, could contain the Chinese past without difficulty. To accept Vossius’s solution, scholars must simply realize that the Hebrew text was manifestly unreliable, and follow the Greek.4 Vossius had a gift for sharp formulations. He not only argued that the Hebrew text—normally seen as authoritative by Protestants—was corrupt; he quipped that Moses himself, “if he came back to life, wouldn’t be able to decipher a single accent mark in the books of the Jews: for they received their letters from the

3 Lodewijk Meijer, Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres, 2d. ed. published as Daniel Heinsius, Operum historicorum collectio secunda (Leiden, 1673). Epilogus [189]. Here Meijer attributes to “Viro Clarissimo, istarumque rerum peritissimo” the following thoughts: “quod faciat ad variantes S. Scripturae lectiones explorandas, et quaenam spuriae, quaenam genuinae sint dignoscendas, quarum uberrima est in utriusque Foederis libris seges, adeo ut in Veteri tantam esse earum copiam et confusionem, ut difficile sit veras a falsis dignoscere, ipsos Rabbinos fateri; et siquis omnes inter se committeret, et excuteret scriptos N. Testamenti codices, quot verba totidem pene esse inventurum discrepantias, apertis verbis dicere non vereatur idem ille Vir in omni istius Doctrinae et literarum genere longe versatissimus.” 4 See Anthony Grafton, “Isaac Vossius, Chronologer,” and Scott Mandelbrote, “Isaac Vossius and the Septuagint,” in Isaac Vossius (1618–1689), Between Science and Scholarship, ed. Eric Jorink and Dirk van Miert (Leiden, 2012), 43–117.

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Chaldeans and their vowel points and accents from the Masoretes.”5 He even argued that the manuscripts of the New Testament were as full of errors as those of the Old. When Meijer’s anonymous friend evoked the pullulating variants to be found in the manuscripts of the New Testament, he repeated, partly word for word, what Vossius had already said about them in his own pamphlet: “in these there is such variation in the readings, that if someone collated all of the manuscripts with one another, he would find almost as many discordances as words.”6 Spinoza, in other words, had some learned and illustrious company from the start of his journey. Even in Reformed Holland, the air Spinoza breathed resounded with critical remarks about the text of tbe Bible—some of them made not by his radical friends, but by respectable scholars, who knew the relevant literature in depth. Books also helped Spinoza, in ways he did not explicitly acknowledge. He himself cited the Jewish scholar Jacob ben Chajim ibn Adonijah’s introduction to Daniel Bomberg’s second edition of the Rabbinic Bible, which appeared in 1524– 25. Spinoza quoted only one line, in which ibn Adonijah admitted that: “it is the habit of the Talmud [the great code of Jewish law] to contradict the Masoretes [the grammarians who had compiled the Masorah, the marginal apparatus of the Hebrew Bible]” about individual readings.7 But he used this evidence to make an important point: that more biblical variants had existed in the past than were attested to in the Masoretic Bible. Spinoza’s comments do not suggest that he learned much from ibn Adonijah. He described the earlier scholar, contemptuously, as “the superstitious corrector” of Bomberg’s Bible.8 And he did not take the time to make clear whether ibn Adonijah was superstitious because he thought the Masorah ancient or because he converted to Christianity. Yet Spinoza gleaned more from ibn Adonijah. He needed to explain why, if variants had been so profuse as he claimed, the Masorah normally gave only two

5 Isaac Vossius, Dissertatio de vera aetate mundi, qua ostenditur, natale mundi tempus annis minimum 1440 vulgarem Aeram anticipare (The Hague, 1659), VI: “ Si itaque revivisceret Moses, ne unum quidem apicem in Judaeorum libris adsequeretur, cum literas habeant a Chaldaeis, puncta vero et apices a Massoretis.” 6 Vossius, Dissertatio, V, where he argues that those who claim that God guided the hand of the Jewish scribes who copied and preserved the Old Testament maintained, in effect, that he showed no concern for “eorum qui descripsere novi foederis libros, in quibus tanta est lectionum varietas, ut si quis omnes inter se committeret codices, quot verba totidem pene sit inventurus discrepantias.” 7 Benedict Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, tr. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel, ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge, 2007), 141; Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (Amsterdam, 1669), 125. The quoted passage comes from Jacob ben Chajim ibn Adonijah, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, ed. and tr. Christian Ginsburg (London, 1867), 64. 8 Spinoza,141; 125 (translation altered).

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readings for any given word. To explain how this had happened Spinoza quoted a passage from a post-Talmudic tractate: Soferim (Scribes) 6.4.9 This relates that three Bibles with distinctive readings had been found in the Temple court. Where they disagreed, someone (evidently someone in authority) decided that the majority should rule, and accepted the variant found in two of the three. “They maintain,” Spinoza wrote, referring to the authors of the passage, that the three manuscripts were “found in the time of Ezra, claiming that the notes were added by Ezra himself.”10 Since there were only three manuscripts, Spinoza reasoned, it was natural that two of them would agree against the third—and hence that there would be only two versions of each reading that varied at all. Spinoza misrepresented the text of Soferim, which does not connect the discovery of these manuscripts with Ezra or claim that he added the notes. And it is easy to see how this happened. Ibn Adonijah, in the text Spinoza used, quoted the passage from Soferim. More important, he then made clear that in his view, the story showed that Ezra had regarded all the variants concerned as “the law of Moses from Sinai.” Otherwise, he explained, Ezra would simply have decided to “expunge the reading of the one copy, and adopt that of the majority of codices.”11 Spinoza connected the three manuscripts of the temple court with Ezra not because he thought the evidence over systematically but because ibn Adonijah had already done so. It seems highly likely that Spinoza found the basic elements for his history of the biblical text in later times not by carrying out research into a wide range of sources, but by reading the erudite bible on his own shelf, with its Hebrew and Latin apparatus. Thinkers learn from those they disagree with, and even those they despise, as well as from those they reflect. Long ago, Michel Foucault argued that intellectual historians should cease to use the term and concept of “influence,” which reflected the ancient superstitions of the astrologers.12 But astrologers believed that malevolent as well as beneficent planets shaped human lives. In this respect, they showed their own kind of wisdom, which intellectual historians might do well to ponder. Nothing has excited readers more in Spinoza’s work, from his own time to this, than his demand for a “history of Scripture.”13 To study nature, he explained, one had to construct a natural history and then draw the definitions of natural

9 On this work see Abraham Wasserstein and David Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint from Antiquity to Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 71. 10 Spinoza,142; 126. 11 Ginsburg, 52–54. 12 See e.g. Paul Hirst, “Foucault and Architecture,” AA Files 26 (Autumn 1993), 52–60. 13 Spinoza, vii, 100; 85.

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things from it. Similarly, to study Scripture, one must begin by creating a “pure history” of it, and using that to work out the ideas of the text’s authors.14 This history must be drawn from the Bible alone, and must describe the language of the text, collect and compare all passages on such subjects as the nature of God, identify the author and occasion of each book and trace its transmission and reception.15 Spinoza’s programmatic statements excited his readers. When Jean Le Clerc dissected Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament in 1685, he began by stating that it simply did not amount to a full history—that is, though he did not say so, a history in Spinoza’s sense, which would describe the full origins and later histories of each biblical book.16 In recent years, debate has centered on the question of what sort of history Spinoza had in mind: a Baconian one, like one of the Lord Chancellor’s natural histories, built up by collecting all the evidence, or an ancient one somehow rebuilt on Cartesian principles, which moved from clear and distinct general principles to the local level of facts and texts.17 The answer—so far as the origins of the enterprise is concerned—is not quite either. As so often in early modern Europe, in this case too, the “history” that inspired Spinoza was an Aristotelian project for collecting all the information about a particular question, and the source through which Spinoza gained access to it was modern. Johann Buxtorf, professor of Hebrew at Basel, described his Tiberias, the book in which he gave his formal account of the Masorah, on its title page, as a “history of the Masoretes.”18 In it he assembled, collated and interpreted all the information he could find in Jewish sources, including the Talmud, the Masorah itself, and later Jewish writings, on the origins, development and terminology of

14 Ibid., 98; 84. 15 Ibid., 99; 85: “Tota itaque Scripturae cognitio ab ipsa sola peti debet.” 16 Le Clerc, Sentimens de quelques theologiens de Hollande (Amsterdam, 1685), 6–7, quoted by Maria Cristina Pitassi, Entre croire et savoir: le problème de la méthode critique chez Jean Le Clerc (Leiden, 1987), 13. Cf. Spinoza, Tractatus, vii, 87: “Denique enarrare debet haec historia casus omnium librorum Prophetarum, quorum memoria apud nos est: videlicet vitam, mores, ac studia authoris uniuscujuscunque libri, quisnam fuerit, qua occasione, quo tempore, cui, et denique qua lingua scripserit. Deinde uniuscujusque libri fortunam: nempe quomodo prius acceptus fuerit, et in quorum manus inciderit, deinde quot ejus variae lectiones fuerint, et quorum concilio inter sacros acceptus fuerit, et denique quomodo omnes libri, quos omnes jam sacros esse fatentur, in unum corpus coaluerint. Haec omnia inquam historiae Scripturae continere debet.” 17 Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011), 131–132; James, 141–144; Israel, “Introduction,” in Spinoza, TheologicoPolitical Treatise, tr. Silverthorne and Israel, xiv-xv. 18 Johann Buxtorf, Tiberias, sive commentarius Masorethicus, quo primum explicatur, quid Masora sit: tum Historia Masoretharum ex Hebraeorum Annalibus excutitur (Basel, 1620).

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the textual apparatus that accompanied the Hebrew Bible. The textual history that Buxtorf traced was Aristotelian in form as well as name. He divided the rich material he collected into sections that revealed in the most traditional way the material, efficient, formal and final causes of the biblical apparatus. Spinoza, in radical contrast, described his history as a multi-level empirical inquiry into the language, origins and reception of the biblical text, book by book. Still, the similarities between the arguments of these two very different histories are striking. Like Spinoza’s history of the Old Testament text, Buxtorf’s history of the Masorah rested on painstaking collection of primary evidence.19 Any defects in his arguments, he insisted, reflected the failings of his sources and of those who should have preserved more of them. Like Spinoza’s history, too, Buxtorf’s made clear that firm conclusions were premature, since any conclusion must rest on the evidence collected, and that did not provide conclusive proof.20 Spinoza admitted that in taking Ezra as the author of the Bible, he was not offering definitive proof but putting forward a hypothesis.21 Buxtorf had admitted his uncertainty on the history of the biblical text, especially the age of the vowel points, long before in private letters, though not in public.22 In the Tiberias he acknowledged that he could only put forward the strongest arguments he could frame for Ezra as the creator of the Masoretic text, not prove them, “given the great lack of ancient histories and the sparseness of authors.”23 Spinoza would

19 Ibid., preface, sig.):():(3 recto: “Historiam itaque, ut potui, pertexui: rem totam pro viribus explicavi”; sig.):():(3 verso: “At tu, Lector, in omnibus sis benevolus interpres: Historiam cape, ut ex suis authoribus refertur: si quid displicet. Culpa sit authorum, qui majori diligentia in iis annotandis non sunt usi; aut potius injuriae temporum ascribe, quorum acerbita certiori istorum notitia posteros privavit.” 20 Spinoza, Tractatus, ix, 115: “Hezras (eum pro Scriptore praedictorum librorum habebo, donec aliquis alium certiorem ostendat).” 21 Spinoza, Tractatus, ix, 115: “Hezras (eum pro Scriptore praedictorum librorum habebo, donec aliquis alium certiorem ostendat).” 22 Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, with Alastair Hamilton,“I have always loved the holy tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 321–328. 23 Buxtorf, 130–131, esp. 131: “Atque haec sunt, quae de Masorae origine et authoribus, in tanto historiae antiquae defectu tantaque Scriptorum raritate in medium professor licuit. Qui potest, meliora et certiora afferat, ut veritas pleniori luce e tenebris affulgeat.” Buxtorf’s profession of uncertainty was not empty. In the Tiberias, he wrote, picking his words carefully, that the antiquity of the vowel points was cconfirmed by the references to them “in zohar, libro iuxta Hebraeos ipso Talmude antiquiore” (174). Jewish tradition did consider the Zohar older than the Talmud. But erudite and critical Christian scholars like Scaliger and Drusius disagreed with the Jews, as they had pointed out to Buxtorf a decade and a half before (Grafton and Weinberg, 321–322). That is why he gave only the Jews’ opinion in this case.

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certainly have described Buxtorf as part of his credulous opposition; but that is no reason—as Susan James has pointed out in a different context—for assuming that he could not have learnt from or been provoked by him. Yet Spinoza was also oddly traditional in another way—one that sharply distinguishes his work from that of advanced philologists like Vossius and Buxtorf. He claimed in theory that a history of the Bible must rest on biblical evidence alone. Here he followed hermeneutical traditions of Protestant Orthodoxy—perhaps, some have suggested, in the hope of winning over Protestant readers. Humanists, however, had long since set the textual history of the Bible into a much wider context. Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon, for example, called attention to what they saw as similarities between the fortunes of the Bible and those of Homer. They used both Greek and Hebrew evidence when they compared the work of the ancient scholars who had redacted both texts.24 Casaubon, moreover, found it reasonable to treat both the Homeric epics and the Bible as authentic texts, even if multiple changes had taken place in them when human scribes wrote them down and copied them. One of Spinoza’s early readers, Leibniz, thought these comparisons particularly enlightening. He himself likened the textual work done by Ezra to that done on Homer by the most influential Alexandrian and Latin grammarians. And he took the comparison as strong evidence against Spinoza’s strong hypothesis. After all, no one identified the Alexandrian redactors as the creators of the Iliad, the Aeneid or the Eunuchus: “this compiler doesn’t seem any more an author to me, than Aristarchus is the author of the books of Homer, and Tucca and Varius of the verses of Virgil, and Calliopius of the plays of Terence.”25 A look at comparative evidence—a step that Scaliger and others had long since taken, on a

24 For the larger history of comparisons between the textual histories of Homer and the Bible, see John Van Seters, The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006). On Scaliger’s views, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–93), Vol. II. For Casaubon’s —largely unfinished—comparative analysis of ancient textual scholarship, Greek and Hebrew, see Grafton and Weinberg, with Hamilton, esp. 313–316. 25 Leibniz’s marginal note reads: “is unus compilator mihi non magis autor videtur, quam Aristarchus librorum Homeri, et Tucca Variusque versuum Virgilii, et Calliopius Dramatum Terentii.” See Ursula Goldenbaum, “Die ‘Commentatiuncula de judice’ as Leibnizens’ erste philosophische Auseinandersetzung mit Spinoza nebst der Mitteilung über ein neu aufgefundenes Leibnizstück,” Labora diligenter: Potsdamer Arbietstagung zur Leibnizforschung vom 4. Bis 6. Juli 1996, ed. Martin Fontius, Hartmut Rudolph and Gary Smith, Studia Leibnitiana, Sonderheft 29 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), 61–107, at 106–107; revised in Goldenbaum, “Leibniz’ Marginalia on the Back of the Title of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,” The Leibniz Review, 18 (2008), 269–272.

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path that Spinoza did not follow—suggested that for all the force of Spinoza’s analytical arguments, he exaggerated the precision and power of his results. He did so partly because he was not familiar with evidence well known to a welltrained Christian philologist, but confined himself to the Bible itself. The great deconstructor of biblical authority seems to have had a surprising amount of common ground with radical biblicists like David Pareus, whom Scaliger dismissed as lunatics and “prophets,” since they believed that chronology must rest on the evidence of Scripture alone, taking no account of astronomical data or comparative evidence from pagan texts. The Tractatus theologico-politicus still needs a full Spinozan history of its own, one that will track the author’s faltering but fascinating progress through the Hercynian forests of early modern humanistic learning, Christian and Jewish; make clear to whom he saw himself as speaking while he did so; and explain how he found some of the golden apples at the center, which more learned explorers had missed, but missed others, which his predecessors had already found. For the moment, though, this very preliminary study may help identify more of the individuals from whom Spinoza learned, in conversation or by reading, about the methods and conclusions of textual scholarship as applied to the Bible. Recent scholarship has argued that humanists and forgers, ecclesiastical historians and eccentric critics, far from being the bumblers described by Jonathan Israel, served as midwives to the Enlightenment. It seems likely that Spinoza’s conceptions were no more immaculate than those of his Christian contemporaries and readers. Oddly, though, it also seems that some of the traveling companions he picked out from the world of Christian learning were flat-out absolutists about the impeccability of the very traditions he set out to dismantle. This little study of loneliness, comradeship and freedom seems an appropriate offering to a scholar who has accompanied and cheered legions of her colleagues on their own strange and wonderful intellectual journeys.

Daniel Garber

Historicizing Novelty Abstract: This essay tackles the crucial early-modern question of how novelty came to be both an enticing promise and a dire threat to a secure grasp of the world. It urges us to open up our inquiry to the evolution of questions about what counts as knowledge.

Lorraine Daston ends one recent essay about the past and future of the history of science with a simple but evocative question: “Philosophy, anyone?”, a gentle nod toward a direction that the subject of history of science might go.1 Fleshed out, it is the program of historical epistemology that she seems to be suggesting. She characterizes the program as follows: Historical epistemology [is] not the history of this or that particular use of, say, infinitesimals in the mathematical demonstrations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the history of the changing forms and standards of mathematical demonstration during this period; … not the historical judgment as to whether this or that discipline has attained objectivity … but rather a historical investigation into the multiple meanings and scientific manifestations of objectivity.2

It is, one might say, the history of how normative concepts became normative and how their valence changes and evolves over time and circumstance. It is, one might also say, the history of the changing texture of thick concepts. This made me see that a question that I have been thinking about for many, many years can

1 Lorraine Daston, “Science Studies and the History of Science,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 798–813, here 813. In a way, Lorraine Daston taught me how to do philosophy in an historical way. It was graduate school at Harvard that we first met. She was in History of Science, I was in Philosophy, but we were both interested in one another’s subjects. We would meet together with a small group of like-minded students, under the cover of darkness, outside the earshot of our professors. (At that time our departments were not altogether sympathetic to interdisciplinary work.) We were both learning at the time, and not sure how to put things together in a meaningful way. But later, over the course of our careers, I would always watch what she was doing, and marvel at the creative way in which she would combine elegant history with philosophical insight and come up with a mixture that was more than the sum of its parts. 2 Lorraine Daston, “Historical Epistemology,” in Questions of Evidence, ed. James Chandler, Arnold Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 282–89, esp. 283–84.

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best be understood in terms of the program of historical epistemology that Daston has been instrumental in making an important stream in contemporary thought in the history of science and related fields like the history of philosophy.3 The question that I have been thinking about relates to novelty in natural philosophy, its opponents, and its advocates. In a way, it is at the heart of the transformation that was the so-called Scientific Revolution. One particular quotation from a minor figure, a seventeenth-century astrologer, but also a correspondent of Descartes’ and a friend of Mersenne’s, struck me as interesting and curious. In a pamphlet written against a group of three young anti-Aristotelians, peddling their “new” philosophy in August 1624 on the streets of Paris, JeanBaptiste Morin wrote: “There is nothing more seditious and pernicious than a new doctrine. I speak not only in theology, but in philosophy.”4 Morin went on in the pamphlet to address all of the natural philosophical theses that these young upstarts advanced in a program that they had published and distributed in Paris, showing one by one the superiority of Aristotle. Morin’s critique of novelty here was echoing the condemnation that the group of three received from the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris. Their official report to the Parlement of Paris began with a long diatribe against novelty as well: Clearly nothing is more dangerous in a Christian Republic and, according to the common judgment of the Fathers, nothing should be guarded against with more care than novelty….5

Mersenne, writing against the same three Paris anti-Aristotelians in his Vérité des sciences (1625), grouped them together with a number of other figures as a target of attack. He wrote: Francesco Patrizi tried to discredit this philosophy [i.e. that of Aristotle], but he didn’t succeed any more than did Basson, Gorlaeus, Bodin, Charpentier, Hill, Oliva, and many others, who through their quills, only left monuments to the fame of this philosopher, who were not able to fly high enough to dampen the soaring and glory of the Peripatetician, since he transcends everything sensible and imaginable, and the others crawl on the ground like

3 With her customary modesty, Daston demurs from any originality in advocating the program, and she never makes any grand claims for herself in that respect. 4 Morin, Jean-Baptiste. Refutation des theses erronees d’Anthoine Villon … et Estienne de Claves… (Paris: Chez l’Autheur, 1624), “A Monseigneur Halligre, Chancelier de France,” 3. (The dedicatory letter is paginated separately from the main text.) For an account of the affair of 1624, see Daniel Garber, “Defending Aristotle/Defending Society in Early 17th C Paris,” in Wissensideale und Wissenskulturen in der frühen Neuzeit (Ideals and Culture of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe), ed. Claus Zittel and Wolfgang Detel (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2002), 135–160. 5 Quoted in Garber, “Defending Aristotle,” 156.

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little worms. Aristotle is an eagle in philosophy, and the others are like chicks, who wish to fly before they have wings.6

Elsewhere in his writings Mersenne used a term that many of his contemporaries used as well: novatores, innovators.7 This attitude toward novelty and innovation struck me as very curious indeed, and very different from anything that I would have expected to find. How did novelty come to have such a strongly negative affect? Where did it come from? This puzzled me for a long time. But I was eventually led back to some earlier contexts where novelty was at issue. One could, of course, go back to the ancients on this question, but, I think, more directly relevant was the sixteenth-century context. An interesting place to start is a curious character from the late fifteenth century, who wrote a very curious book. Polidore Vergil published his De inventoribus rerum (On the Inventors of Things) in Venice in a first edition in 1499, significantly expanded it in 1521; it was republished countless times in many forms throughout the sixteenth century.8 When the book was first published in 1499, it contained three books. The vast majority of the discoveries that Vergil chronicled in these books were due to the ancients, and only a very small number were due to the moderns.9 The firm emphasis in the book was on discoveries of ancient pedigree, including languages and writing, geometry, medicine and

6 Marin Mersenne, La vérité des sciences (Paris: Toussainct du Bray, 1625), 109–110. 7 Mersenne uses the term in his Quaestiones Celeberrimae in Genesim (Paris: Sebastian Cramoisy, 1623), “Praefatio, et prolegomena ad lectorem” (unpaginated). For other contemporary uses of the term or its equivalent in other languages, see, e.g., Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum (London: W. Lee, 1626), expt. 69; Gabriel Naudé, Apologie pour tous les grand personnages qui ont esté accusez de magie (Paris: François Targa, 1625), 331–32; Descartes to Isaac Beeckman, 17 October 1630, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: J. Vrin 1996), vol. I, 158; etc. 8 For a general account of Vergil’s book and its larger context, see Catherine Atkinson, Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe: Polydore Vergil’s De Inventoribus Rerum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007). See also Brian Copenhaver, “The Historiography of Discovery in the Renaissance: The Sources and Composition of Polydore Vergil’s De Inventoribus Rerum, I-III.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 192–214 and his introduction to Polydore Vergil, On Discovery, ed. and trans. Brian P. Copenhaver (The I Tatti Renaissance Library) (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2002) for more specific background to the first three books published in 1499. 9 At the end of a chapter on the ancient invention of books and libraries, Vergil gives a nod to the modern invention of the printing press, and its inventor, one Ionnes Cuthenbergus. See Vergil, De inventoribus rerum (DIR) II.7.8–9, Vergil, On Discovery, 245. For other modern inventors and inventions see DIR III.18.2–7, in Vergil, On Discovery, 485–91.

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magic, law and the calendar, books and libraries, wreaths, architecture and agriculture.10 In a way, Vergil celebrates inventiveness, but for the most part he puts novelty safely in the distant past. The second and much expanded 1521 version of the book added five new chapters, all about the history of Christianity. There Vergil discussed such questions as the origin of baptism, the bishops and cardinals, celibacy, the origin and contents of the Mass, the origin of monastic orders, councils and the decrees of councils, and the institution of the pope.11 There are significant debates in the literature about when the new books were actually written, whether they come before or after Luther’s break with the Roman Catholic Church in 1517, and whether the five books on the history of Christian doctrine, institutions, and practice should be regarded as a continuation of the earlier chapters, or as a completely separate book.12 Whatever Vergil’s original intentions may have been, this continuation quickly became an integral part of the book, in fact, the part that drew the most attention. This part of the book was quickly absorbed into the controversies between Catholics and the new Protestants about the antiquity of their respective religions. While there certainly were dissenters before Luther, his challenge opened a floodgate of new theological ideas and institutions, a host of reformers and reformed churches. The Roman Church, in turn, responded in a host of ways, including a newly re-thought theology and practice, as articulated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), and in new institutions such as the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, founded in 1540. The Catholic Church, of course, opposed the new theological movements on numerous grounds. But one theme is repeated over and over: the so-called reformers of the Church, the Luthers and Calvins and other opponents of Roman Catholic orthodoxy are innovators, who are abandoning tradition and introducing new and dangerous ideas. For example, in the decree of Session XIV of the Council of Trent (25 November 1551), the Protestants are referred to as “novatores.”13 Francisco de Enzinas, a Spanish scholar who went to Belgium, studied with Humanist scholars there, and became a Protestant, reports in his memoires a conversation he had with a Catholic priest in 1543, shortly after the death of the

10 For an overview and discussion of the contents of books I-III, see Atkinson, Inventing Inventors, ch. 5. 11 For an overview and discussion of the contents of books IV-VIII, see Atkinson, Inventing Inventors, ch. 6. 12 For a summary of that debate, see Atkinson, Inventing Inventors, 96–100, 281–2. 13 Heinrich Denziger, Enchiridion symbolorum, ed. A. Schonmetzer (32nd ed.) (Rome and Freiburg: Herder, 1963), § 905.

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Catholic and anti-Protestant theologian Johann Eck. (Eck died 13 February 1543.) In the course of the conversation the priest comments that “we Catholics were saddened” by his death, “but the innovators [novatores] rejoiced.” “Who, might I ask, are you calling ‘innovators’,” de Enzinas replied. “Philip Menanchthon and Martin Bucer,” the priest replied. “How did they innovate,” de Enzinas asked. “Vah, you have to ask? In an infinity of ways,” the priest replied.14 In 1578, a book by the French Catholic theologian, Claude d’Espence, Les Apophthegemes Ecclesiastiques, was published posthumously, an ecclesiastical history of the first six centuries, written “for the consolation of all true Christians.” In the book, d’Espence uses his account of Aetius of Antioch as an opportunity to make some critical comments about novelty in general, and the “novateurs” of his day. D’Espence interrupts his historical narrative to make the following general comments about the love of novelty: But novelties please, and little by little, increase, especially if one praises them. Everything tends toward change, coming to such audacity and temerity that people despise the ancient laws and the fathers, and dream up more and more novelties, and more and more dogmas.15

D’Espence then compares the contemporary Protestants with Aetius, …who was not ashamed to say and to boast that God had revealed to him things which up until him he had hidden from everyone else, even the Apostles. Thus today the Innovators [Novateurs] boast that they know more than the entire Church around them.16

These terms—novatores in Latin, novateurs in French, novelists in English—continue to be used commonly by Catholics to refer to the Protestants well into the eighteenth century. In Furetière’s 1690 Dictionaire Universel, “novateur” is defined as “someone who introduces some novelty.” But he continues: “This is almost always used for those who innovate something in relation to religion. Calvin, Luther, Zwingli and others have been called the innovators.”17 From the Catholic perspective, the Protestants were innovators. But the Protestants, in turn, attempted to argue for their own antiquity, for their roots in ancient Christianity and their continuing tradition, and for the claim that it was the Roman Church that is the real innovator. Luther, from the beginning, argued

14 Francisco de Enzinas, Mémoires de Francisco de Enzinas, ed. Ch.-Al. Campan, (Brussels: Société de l’histoire de Belgique, 1863), vol. 2, 366. 15 Claude d’Espence, Apophthegemes Ecclesiastiques… (Paris: Chez Frederic Morel, 1578), 114–15. 16 Ibid., 115. 17 Antoine Furetière, Dictionaire Universel (The Hague and Rotterdam: Leers, 1690), s.v. novateur.

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for the greater antiquity of the reformed faith that he advocated, and argued that the Roman Church had introduced innovations.18 A central text here is the socalled Magdeburg Centuries, a work of 13 volumes, written by a group of Lutheran scholars in Magdeburg, headed by Matthias Flacius, and published between 1559 and 1574. The Magdeburg Centuries traces the history of the church from its origins to 1298, and sought to show the continuity between the ideas of the original Church and later Protestantism.19 But this is only one of a number of works written throughout the sixteenth and seventeen centuries intending to establish the antiquity of the Protestant movement.20 It is not surprising, then, to find Protestants accusing the Roman Catholics of innovation as well. The Puritan preacher, John Randall complained that even though the Catholics “Charge us with novelty … they are the novelists, not wee. We are from the beginning, before they had any being; so that we are more ancient than they, and there religion is novelty, and a new Sect.”21 In his 1659 A Key for Catholicks, the prominent Puritan divine Richard Baxter observed: This is the main difference between us and the Papists: We are for no Religion that is not as old as the dayes of the Apostles: but they are for the Novelties and Additions of Popes and Councils.22

From the beginning, many Protestants saw themselves as reaching back to an earlier, purer form of Christianity. These theological debates about novelty and the true church were undertaken in the context of a period of intense conflict, wars that were fueled by religious conflict, if not caused by them. Though writing from a Catholic perspective, Michel de Montaigne expressed views about novelty that would probably have been widely shared in Europe at the time, though, perhaps, applied differently. In his essay, “Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law,”

18 John M. Headly, Luther’s View of Church History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 19 On this there is, of course, an enormous literature. But see, e.g., Gregory B. Lyon, “Baudouin, Flacius, and the Plan for the Magdeburg Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), 253–72. 20 On this see, e.g., book I of Pontien Polman, L’Élément historique dans la controverse religieuse du XVIe siècle (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1932), and Yves Krumenacker, “La généalogie imaginaire de la Réforme Protestante,” Revue historique 308 (2006): 259–89. For the French context, see Jacques Solé, Le débat entre Protestants et catholiques français de 1598 aˋ 1685 (Paris: Aux Amateurs des Livres, 1985), 561–611. 21 John Randall, Twenty Nine Lectures of the Church…(London: Felix Kyngston for Nathanael Newbery, 1631), 54. 22 Richard Baxter, A Key for Catholicks…(London: R[obert] W[hite] for Nevil Simmons … and Thomas Simmons, 1659), 116.

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Montaigne wrote in the 1588 version of his Essais, at the end of the long Wars of Religion that had plagued France: I am disgusted with innovation [nouvelleté], in whatever guise, and with reason, for I have seen very harmful effects of it. The one that has been oppressing us for so many years [i.e. the Reformation] is not the sole author of our troubles, but one may say with good reason that it has accidentally produced and engendered everything, even the troubles and ruins that have been happening since without it, and against it; it has itself to blame…. [It] takes a lot of self-love and presumption to have such esteem for one’s own opinions that to establish them one must overthrow the public peace and introduce so many inevitable evils and such a horrible corruption of morals, as civil wars and political changes bring with them in a matter of such weight–and introduce them into one’s own country.23

Montaigne had mainly theological innovation in mind. But it is not surprising that the attitude toward innovation he expresses would naturally be extended to innovation in other domains. One such domain is natural philosophy. Despite theological differences, Aristotelian natural philosophy remained the common currency in both Protestant and Catholic universities through much of the sixteenth and virtually all of the seventeenth century.24 But by the mid- and late sixteenth century, Aristotelianism was coming under attack by a variety of alternative thinkers, each with his own particular system to push.25 In the minds of at least some of the defenders of philosophical orthodoxy, the attacks on Aristotelian natural philosophy were linked to attacks on theological orthodoxy. This was definitely true in Paris in the mid-1620s. In 1623, Mersenne published his Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim, a massive commentary on the first six chapters of Genesis. On the title page Mersenne promises a work directed against the atheists and deists, as indeed it is. It begins with a full thirty-six proofs for the existence of God, and throughout it contains numerous attacks on heresy and atheism. But it also contains a great

23 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, ed. and trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 86–7; Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Garnier, 1962), vol. I, 126–7. 24 See, e.g., Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) and Stephen Menn, “The Intellectual Setting” in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds., The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. I, 33–86. In addition to the Aristotelian background, Menn discusses in detail the many other currents of late Renaissance and early modern thought. 25 See Menn, op. cit. and Daniel Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–69.

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many discussions of scientific topics, including Copernicanism, light, meteors, the earth, and many other such questions. In the preface to the reader Mersenne explains why: I only want to warn you, dearest reader, that I have followed the order of commentaries so that I might refute the atheists, magicians, deists, who now have started to run wild through the whole world, and so that I might refute those things have led to that sort of thing. And that many questions, which otherwise might seem curious, have been taken up so they may show the followers of Campanella, Bruno, Telesio, Kepler, Galileo, Gilbert, and other recent philosophers, that what they say is false, namely that the Catholic doctors and theologians follow Aristotle alone, and swear by his words, even if experience and the phenomena are contrary.26

What offends Mersenne is that these novatores have been claiming that the Catholics are dogmatically attached to Aristotle, and that they hold onto Aristotle in contradiction to the truth. In doing so, Mersenne claims, “…these novatores … have given a hand to the Calvinists, the Lutherans, the Arminians, or to other perfidious heretics.”27 But, even more dangerous is the fact that these new doctrines lead one away from the true theology and toward atheism: … I warn everyone that they should beware of the new opinions, which in [these] days, the wickedly idle heads of men give birth to, which lead to the subversion of the true philosophy under the shadow of some sophisms, and which carry in atheism.28

New opinions in natural philosophy are, in this way, closely connected with the new opinions in theology. Jean-Baptiste Morin also saw the attack on Aristotelian natural philosophy as of a piece with novelty in theology. Earlier I quoted the following lines from his pamphlet against the “new” philosophers of 1624: “Clearly nothing is more dangerous in a Christian Republic and, according to the common judgment of the Fathers, nothing should be guarded against with more care than novelty…”29 Morin continues by noting that just as “the true knowledge of visible and corporeal things, that is to say, the true natural philosophy raises us and leads us to the knowledge and love of invisible and incorporeal things, and above all to God,” so, he claims, “false philosophy … cannot lead the mind to the same end, and thus in turning it away [from God] can only lead it to errors, heresies, and 26 27 28 29

Mersenne, Quaestiones … in Genesim, “Praefatio, et prolegomena ad lectorem” (unpaginated). Ibid. Mersenne, Quaestiones … in Genesim, col. 714. Morin, Refutation, “A Monseigneur Halligre,” 3.

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atheism.” And so, he concludes, “almost all of the heresies have turned away from the philosophy of Aristotle…”30 Later in the pamphlet, Morin makes the connection even more direct. In connection with one of the “new” philosophers against whom his pamphlet is directed, Antoine Villon, a teacher of philosophy in the University of Paris, Morin writes: “He reminds me of Luther, the arrogant and seditious heretic … who after having stepped over into the error of heresy, did not fail to wear his Augustinian habit, even though he preached against all of the orders of the Church, including his own.”31 I have tried very briefly to sketch out the beginnings of the story of novelty and innovation at the start of the modern period, how the critique of novelty in theology and religious practice became imported into the scientific domain. This, of course, is just the beginning of the story. There is the larger context, both Catholic and Protestant for the critique of novelty in science: Morin, Mersenne and their friends are not the only ones in the period who are critical of new ideas. Furthermore, even the people whom they identify as the innovators, the novatores themselves have quite complex attitudes toward novelty and innovation. But it is also important to chronicle how the notions of novelty and innovation eventually change valence, and become much valued in the scientific world. How that happens is also an important and interesting investigation that can show us something of how values transform over time, place, and circumstance. But that is a story for another day. For the moment, though, I would like to end by addressing a question to my colleagues in the philosophical world: History, anyone?

30 Ibid., 4–5. 31 Morin, Refutation, 7.

Rivka Feldhay

Literary Knowledge between Translation and Migration: The Case of Dostoevsky in Israel Abstract: In Dostoevsky’s 1872 Demons (famously badly translated as The Possessed), the great novelist’s reading of the battle between conservative and revolutionary, the various revolutionary nihilistic and absurd ideologies are pitted against a hapless and ineffectual elite utterly unable to cope with a destructive wave about to crash on them. But how could one read the early Zionists’ Hebrew translation of the novel, how could young socialist-Zionist intellectuals map their struggles, how could the post-Holocaust generation find meaning in the Demons? Here we have history translated and calibrated over and again: A post-1947 generation reading, a 1920s generation reading, and an 1872 novel analyzing an incipient political showdown.

Introduction: Knowledge between Nature and Culture In a particularly brilliant essay on the Enlightenment, one of her favorite fields of research, Lorraine Daston points out how, in a process of historical evolution, facts were established as the most eminent way of “parsing experience” in the Western tradition.1 Experience has always been with us, Daston claims, but facts are a particular way of purifying experience from theory, from interpretation, ultimately from the chimeras of human imagination. Thus facts as the foundation of true knowledge—especially knowledge of nature—have a history. Daston charts this history starting from seventeenth-century techniques of fact-production, through the anxiety about their fragility in the eighteenth century, and up to the modern concept of objectivity. My aim in this short essay is to join the conversation about the “fragility” and “reality” of facts as context-bound and community-dependent. However, I wish to do so by focusing on the perspective of culture rather than nature, turning the

1 Lorraine Daston, “Enlightenment Fears: Fears of Enlightenment,” in What’s Left of Enlightenment, K. M. Baker, and P. H. Reil (eds.), (Volume 4: Eighteenth Century Science) Stanford, California: Stanford University Press (2001):115–128.

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gaze from European science to the nineteenth-century Russian realistic novel, particularly in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881). Dostoevsky was a radical critic of Western-European scientism and utilitarianism, who at the same time recognized their allure and meaning for the Russian intelligentsia. His insights into the basic, universal dilemmas permeating the intellect and psyche of human beings across various social ideologies were embedded in a constructed dichotomy between “Europe” and “Russia,” a dichotomy which in turn grounds a series of conflictual polarities that define human life: intellect/emotion, mind/ heart, rationality/faith. And yet, in a letter to his lifelong friend, the poet Apollon Maikov, Dostoevsky writes that “Europe and her mission will be realized by Russia”2—thereby seemingly overcoming the dichotomy between the two in favor of a universal message, although still under the aegis of Russia. In transforming local facts into universal meanings, Dostoevsky’s literature echoes the scientific quest to parse experience in terms of facts that constitute an objective worldview. In the first part of my essay I will point out how the form of the realistic novel in its Russian version became a laboratory for experimenting with visible facts about people’s lives, in order to present deeper, “invisible,” universal truths about human beings and society. In the second part I will trace two different routes by which Dostoevsky’s legacy migrated to Israel/Palestine. The epistemic and political lessons suggested by this plural literary migration point to a new kind of knowledge that emerged parallel to nineteenth-century science: literary knowledge consisting of facts and meanings bonded through various political agendas, forming a new kind of cultural resource for identity construction in a global reality.

I The Russian Realistic Novel as a Site of Knowledge In an “Avant Propos” to his La Comédie humaine, Balzac articulates his intention to study human beings in the same way that a zoologist studies the animal species. In a similar way, the great Russian critic of the 1840’s, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote of Pushkin that his Onegin is an encyclopedia of Russian life. Exploring the possibilities of realism as a new literary genre, nineteenth-century novelists

2 Quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 243, n. 2.

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articulated their distinction from the eighteenth-century abstract discourse on human nature and virtue by striving to deal with concrete men and women. Dostoevsky’s novels consist of a broad spectrum of characters from all strata of Russian society. He takes care to portray them subtly through their different dialects and forms of speech, providing vivid access into the rigid class distinctions that petrified Russian society, while doing so in a natural, non-edifying, non-didactic tone. His long dialogues allow the characters to express the various worldviews and ideologies current at the time, and it was largely through this device that the social, religious, and existential problems that haunted the author and his age gained their way into his readers’ consciousness: the existence of a beneficial and providential God versus the poverty and suffering pervading His world, the split within the human psyche between good and evil, the dialectical nature of free will, the worth of human life against money, fame and power. Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer testifies to the life-materials he drew upon while planning his books. As he was an avid newspaper reader, some of his plots appear to be based on cases published in the press. At the same time, as his characters well demonstrate, fantasy, revelation, and mystical beliefs were for him inseparable from the tissue of experience and reality. This peculiar mixture of life-materials, fictional facts and universal messages, coupled with a moral authority embodied in the writer’s voice, is well exemplified in Demons. Published in the early 1870s, it portrays in minute detail the gentrylife in a provincial town in Tsarist Russia between the 1840s and 60s. The plot revolves around an abominable murder committed within a small, secret society of radical regime oppositionaries. Group leader Peter Verkhovensky ruthlessly shoots his fellow Shatov, purportedly in order to test the loyalty of his friends and the cohesion of the group. Verkhovensky preaches a doctrine of violence and Machiavellian deceit as the only possible means of undermining the regime, in a spirit of nihilism fashionable among some of the young Russian intelligentsia of the time. His discourse is constructed around a set of dichotomies between literature and real life, the impotent literary intelligentsia versus real men of action. Behind the crime, however, is the main protagonist of the novel, the aristocratic Nicholas Stavrogin, who had chosen Verkhovensy for his companion and brought him to town. Stavrogin’s soul is empty of any ideal, a dead spirit detached from the roots of social life. His written “confession” reveals a series of cold experiments in child-abuse and murder, through which he had sought to find relief from his ennui, which he finally captures by the statement, “I neither know nor feel good and evil.”3

3 Frank, Dostoevsky, 646.

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Dostoevsky is here pushing the literary strategy of verisimilitude even closer to reality. The plot and characters of Demons along with its vivid dialogues constitute a fictional world very much like the picture of nineteenth-century Russia that emerges from historical works on the period. The murder at the center of the story is based on the 1869 “Nechayev affair,” which agitated public opinion: the murder of Ivanov, a member of Sergey Nechayev’s conspiratory group. Verkhovensky’s nihilistic violence is now read by critics as a reflection of Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary, written under the inspiration of Bakunin, while other protagonists of the novel were probably recognized by Dostoevsky’s readers as key figures in contemporary Russian cultural life.4 It is through the peculiar temporality of the narrative that Dostoevsky’s philosophy of life is articulated. The representation of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (modeled on the figure of historian T. N. Gravorsky) as tutor to Stavrogin and father of murderer Peter Verkhovensky is crucial for creating a “fathers and sons” narrative structure. The seeds of evil sown by the liberal, Westernizing fathers are exposed in the actions of the nihilist sons. The story is told first in a non-direct way through the dense conversations of Stepan Trofimovich with the narrator. It is secondly told through the portrayal, sometimes caricaturistic, of a series of key cultural figures of the time, such as Karamazin (Turgenev) and Pichorin (Lermontov), authors of “socialist novels” who attempted to re-shape Russian society but instead brought about the destructive rage of their “sons.” Against this background Dostoevsky places the series of protagonists of the 1860 generation, who echo the entire gamut of socio-cultural currents active at the time: Shatov—the socialist with Slavophile hues; Kyrillov—the atheist humanist; the couple von Lembeke—pseudo-liberals serving the regime; and the cold nihilists Stavrogin and Verkhovensky. While the plot of the novel is set in the 1860’s, its inner logic is rooted back in the 40’s, the “fathers’” generation. Dostoevsky had a personal stake in this fathers and sons presentation. The fathers, for him, had to be the generation of Westernizing liberals, such as Belinsky, under whose impact Dostoevsky himself, in his late twenties, joined a conspiracy group. After its members were arrested and underwent mock execution, Dostoevsky was sentenced to imprisonment with hard labor in Siberia for four years. His conversion back to the Orthodox faith, his turn to the history of suffering and sacrifice of the Russian people, his preaching for compassion and empathy for the others and his hope for personal redemption, and, finally, his belief in Russia as the future carrier of a true universal enlightenment purified of egotistic, utilitarian European elements—this message is delivered through the convoluted plot-line of Demons.

4 Frank, Dostoevsky, 630.

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The temporal structure of the novel thus undergirds its conceptual framework. The narrative succession functions as a causal explanation of the cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, while the centerpiece murder is read by some as a prophetic premonition of the future violence of the coming revolution. Dostoevsky bestowed upon posterity the insight that writing about particular, concrete, human beings entails their representation as individuals that are in dialectical bonds with their community—be it an organic social body, a social class, a thought-collective, or an intellectual or political current. No conversation among individuals makes sense if isolated from its social whole. The individual as an atom of society has no place in Dostoevsky’s vision. Instead, his protagonists are met with a series of challenges within their social, political, and cultural contexts. His literary strategy thus functions as a scientific experiment set under specific constraints of fictive yet verisimilar facts in the representation of which Dostoevsky invested endless effort. And yet the truth of a novel does not spring from verisimilitude. A letter he wrote to Turgenev testifies that Dostoevsky was critical of the idea of “copying/mimicking real facts” as the main task of a realist author.5 In a later correspondence with his intimate friend, the poet Apollon Maikov, he writes: I have a completely different notion of reality and realism than the one shared by our realists and our critics… my idealism is more real than their [realism]… with their kind of realism you will not be able to explain the one hundredth part of the facts that actually happened. And we, with our idealism, we have been able to foresee facts.6

For Dostoevsky, the ability to identify a universal truth about human and social reality through the veil of one’s own prejudice requires experimental toil over minute details of literary representation. Yet truth is not identical with sheer representation. It is rather encapsulated in a moment of realization by an acutely attentive mind “wandering all over reality,” hunting for that one moment of revelation which Dostoevsky calls a “miracle”: a moment of discovery-throughrepresentation, of an inner sense of recognition into an insight that embraces “the whole history of humanity.” At the same time, for local experience to become knowledge carrying a universal message, the writer’s voice must be invested with authority. It was not until the Pushkin Festival of June 1880—one year before his death—that Dostoevsky acquired such authority among the Russian intelligentsia. During the event,

5 F.M. Dostoevsy to  I.S. Turgenev, December, 23, 1863, Peterburg (Russian):  http://rvb.ru/dostoevski/tocvol15.htm 6 23.12.1868, 318; Goldberg, 148.

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Dostoevsky was assigned the reading of Pushkin’s poem The Prophet. At this moment his figure was invested with the emblematic status that would become his literary voice. Through the reading of that poem Dostoevsky actually became a prophet, at least for many who were born in the Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution.

II Literary Migration First Episode: Dostoevsky’s Translation and the New State of Israel Crucial for the transmission of Dostoevsky’s literary message to Israel was Yosef Haim Brenner’s translation of Crime and Punishment into Hebrew, begun around 1911 in Tel Aviv and published posthumously in 1924 in Warsaw.7 Brenner emigrated from Russia to then-Palestine Jaffa in 1909, where he gained popularity and admiration among the small community of Zionists, many of them of Russian origins. Brenner was the first Hebrew writer arriving from the diaspora to the oldnew “homeland.” Like Dostoevsky, he was an engaged writer, who suffered poverty and loneliness. Having completely cut himself off from his family and the Jewish community of his past, he became melancholic and experienced a crisis of faith, which left him critical of all ideologies and systems of faith—including Zionism. His best-known novel, Breakdown and Bereavement (Shchol Vekishalon), deals with the failure of Zionism to fulfill the hopes it aroused among diaspora Jews. Also like Dostoevsky, Brenner gained a unique, authoritative voice, coupled with ever-growing admiration that reached a climax after he was tragically murdered, at the age of forty, in an unsolved crime believed to have been carried out by a group of nationalist Arabs. A clue to the popularity Dostoevsky’s oeuvre won among Hebrew speakers of the next generation might lie in Brenner’s linguistic choices, the most conspicuous of which are biblical and Talmudic expressions used in rendering the protagonists’ thoughts and conversations.8 One extreme example is Raskolinkov’s mother’s letter, which is suffused with Aramaic expressions. An atmosphere of “sacredness” envelops the lives of the protagonists, whose character is subtly colored with Jewish hues. The translation intensified the emotional tone of the 7 The book was re-translated three additional times later on: in 1961, 1993, and 1995, and reworked as a Hebrew theatre piece in 1988. 8 R. Lapidus, “Dostoevsky in Quasi-Jewish Garb: ‘Crime and Punishment’ as Translated by Y. H. Brenner,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature, 14, 1993.

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novel, privileged the figurative over the literal, and heightened the status of ordinary facts. Many of these features are captured in the choice of title—preserved in all subsequent Hebrew translations—which transformed the original “Crime and Punishment” into “The Sin and its Punishment” (Hachet Veonsho). Perhaps unconsciously, Brenner gave vent to his own kind of Russian humanistic beliefs common to Dostoevsky and himself, which are well-echoed in his translation of Raskolnikov’s ideological discourse, adorned with verses from the Book of Job. While Brenner effectively disguised Dostoevsky’s specifically Christian, sometimes anti-Jewish message, he refused suggestions by contemporaries to censure the text, claiming that one must translate everything, even against the wishes or needs of the translator. When his linguistic choices were criticized, he responded that “the main task is to try to find how Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov would have written had they written in Hebrew.” After the establishment of the state of Israel, however, the reception of Dostoevsky (through Brenner’s translation until 1961) should be seen against the background of the socio-cultural and political needs of the young society in the 1950s and 60s. Crime and Punishment was taught in high schools as a major text in the curriculum of world literature. One of Israel’s most influential literary critics, Baruch Kurzweil, wrote that it “represents the reaction to a general cultural crisis, the disintegration of traditional religious institutions and the exposition of human nature in all its complexity.”9 This reading drew an analogy between the identity-problem of the young Israeli-Jewish nation, recently emerging from the ashes of the Holocaust, and Russian society caught between an old dying empire and revolutionary transformation. The novel’s popularity relied on the double message it seemed to convey. On the one hand, compassion and empathy towards human beings whoever they might be—good or bad, rich or poor, religious or secular, Arabs or Jews—was read as a message of social justice. On the other hand, Dostoevsky’s messianic ideas about the “sacredness” of the Russian people and its world-mission were transferred into an Israeli national message that did not, however, necessarily preclude universalistic elements. Both messages conformed with the basic tenets of Israel’s Declaration of Independence of May 15, 1947—a document that gained quasi-constitutional status in a state that had no constitution and whose Jewish identity was perceived as compatible with equality and justice for all inhabitants, regardless of differences of religion, race or gender.

9 Haaretz 29.9.2005, Shmuel Avneri on Kurzweil and Rabikovitz: Tehom el Tehom.

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Second Episode: Migration without Translation The State of Israel experienced two waves of Jewish migration from the former Soviet Union: in the 1970s, in response to Zionist awakening among Jews suffering from discrimination, and in the 1990s, following the dismantling of the USSR. The transformations undergone by Dostoevsky’s literary heritage in Israel seem to testify to the changing political and cultural imagination of his Israeli readers. This was exemplified in a debate, which escalated into somewhat of a cultural scandal, between two renowned female writers: Russian-language essayist and public intellectual Maya Kaganskaya, and admired Hebrew poet and liberal-left activist Dahlia Rabikovitz (a former student of the abovementioned Kurzweil).10 The immediate political context of the debate was the national elections campaign of February 2001, in the midst of the second Palestinian Intifada, which pushed the labor party out of power in favor of a rightist coalition led by Ariel Sharon. The media were extremely interested to find out the political orientation of the very large group of former-USSR immigrants—comprising over one million out of a total population of seven million Israelis—whose socialist, secular background raised hopes among the Israeli left. In a television interview, Kaganskaya, whom the media crowned queen of Israel’s “Russian intelligentsia,” was asked about the political orientation of her group. Her answers were clear and unambiguous. She declared herself to belong to the extreme right, not ready for any territorial compromise with the Palestinians, believing they have no national rights whatsoever in the space between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and showing complete indifference to their personal or national fate. When asked by the shocked moderator whether she was really blind to their suffering, she answered: “I have not come here [to Israel] to take care of the Palestinians’ problems. Had I been interested in other people’s problems, I would have stayed in Russia.” The blunt answer infuriated Rabikovitz, who a week later was asked to express her opinion. Her interview opened with complaints about Kaganskaya’s general disdain towards Israel’s allegedly inferior culture, which she saw as an expression of arrogance and blind refusal to read Israeli literature, and an attitude typical of the entire group of former-USSR immigrants or “Russians” in Israel.

10 I owe the information about this debate to the M.A. dissertation of my ex-student and colleague, Irina Tachtarowa. Her main conclusions were published in: “Would Dostoevsky have said this? The Debate between Dalya Rabikovitz and Maya Kaganskaya and the Ethics of the Intelligensia,” in Russians in Israel: The Pragmatics of Culture in Migration, ed. by Julia Lerner and Rivka Feldhay, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Hakkibutz Hameuchad Publishing House, Tel Aviv 2012.

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“True,” she said, “they all play musical instruments, but on the other hand they went through seventy years of Communism that destroyed and distorted their culture, and they produced mostly bad literature.” Here the moderator intervened by saying: “That means you are drawing a distinction between the great Russian culture of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which, I assume, you know very well…” Not letting him finish his idea, Rabikovitz replied, “Of course I know this literature,” and went on to describe the brutality of the new Russian immigrants towards the Palestinians, concluding with the following remark: “I think that a person who appreciates the works and values of the Russian classics could never say that any group of human beings is of no interest to him. Dostoevsky would have never said so.” But the last word in the debate belonged to Kaganskaya, who explained what she took to be their root misunderstandings, indeed ignorance: “They [Hebrewspeaking intellectuals] do not understand this: I am what I am [namely extremerightist] not in spite of, but because of Dostoevsky—especially because of his novel Demons. If the ‘natives’ [Israelis] do not understand that, they’d better reread it.” Let me say a few words about the political-cultural background to Kaganskaya’s words. The radical turn of former-Soviet Union Israeli citizens to extremely rightist positions has been noted by political scientist Michael Philippov.11 Philippov examined this public’s voting patterns in the national elections of 1992, 1996, and 2006, comparing them with those of the rest of the Israeli population. He demonstrated that, while in 1996 their vote was decisive for the electoral victory of the labor party and the resulting appointment of Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister, in 2006, by which time they composed 16% of the electorate responsible for 19 parliament seats out of 120, most followed the leadership of Avigdor Liberman’s rightist party Israel Beiteinu. Liberman, himself a former-USSR Jew who immigrated to Israel in the 1970s, ran a political platform marked by unprecedented possessiveness towards territory and a highly aggressive attitude towards Palestinians, including the Arab-Israeli minority. In fact, his party tends to present itself as carrying a crucial national mission no longer able to be fulfilled by more “veteran” Israelis. Whereas Philippov tends to emphasize the “ethnical enclave” conditions of Israeli-Russians—e.g., 75% of them have mainly Russian friends; 82% read newspapers written in Russian and only 2%–3% read Hebrew newspapers—these voting patterns and political tendencies reflect a deeper his-

11 M. Philippov, “1990s Immigrants from the FSU in Israeli Elections 2006: The Fulfillment of the Political Dreams of Post-Soviet Man?”, in A. Arian and M. Shamir (eds.), The Elections in Israel 2006 (New Brunswick: Transaction), 135–158.

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torical background and intellectual roots, which were well analyzed by yet another researcher, Dimitry Shumsky.12 Shumsky focuses his essay on a group that tends to identify itself as the “Jewish intelligentsia.” His examination of their writings has exposed their desire to invent a uniting myth for Jewish national existence in Israel/Palestine and shown how that myth is inspired by various canonical Russian writers. One of his prominent protagonists is Alexander Voronel, professor of physics at Tel Aviv University, who, together with his wife, a Russian-language author and playwright, established the journal Twenty Two, where Voronel regularly writes on Jewish philosophy, history and contemporary Jewish affairs. For Shumsky, he represents the new leadership of Russian immigrants in Israel. Shumsky’s reading of Voronel indicates how he and others have invoked Solzhenitsyn’s “myth of the land,” tracing it back to the Dostoevsky brothers’ journal and ultimately to the spirit of the Slavophile movement. According to Voronel, Zionists went wrong in criticizing and eventually eliminating the “common superstitions” of the Jewish people—which are precisely the necessary materials from which a new group, responsible for the nation, should build its vision. According to Voronel, Russian Jews have wisely borrowed from Russians the deep, informal understanding of religion, the striving for absolute truth and the gift for philosophical reflection. Using their unique Jewish creativity, they were able to transform their borrowings into a vision for their new community, one that is envisioned as having great spiritual strength and whose Jewishness does not depend on rational sources but flows directly from the heart. These are the people who will now lead the struggle against the disintegration of Israeli society. Shumsky also contextualized the cultural vision of Voronel and his friends in terms of their former political experience in the USSR, which shaped their conception of the relationship between ethnicity and citizenship. Based on post-Soviet historiography, Shumsky draws our attention to the practices of ethnic engineering applied by the Soviets when dividing populations within their territories into ethnic nations, each bearing its primordial genealogy and constituting either a majority or a minority in a given territory.13 Within each territory, majoritynations had enjoyed superiority over minority-nations (ethnikos), expressed in a variety of privileges, such as access to education. In this context, Russian Jews,

12 D. Shumsky, “Ethnicity and Citizenship in the Perception of Russian Israelis,” in D. Levy and Y. Weiss, Challenging Ethnic Citizenship, German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). 13 V. Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union (Oslo: International Peace Research, 1997); R. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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who had mostly lost their Jewish traditions and collective memories and acquired a kind of imposed identity, found themselves belonging to a minor nation and suffering various forms and degrees of discrimination. They could never hope to be full Russians, in spite of their Russian citizenship. Immigration to Israel meant a real belonging to a majority ethnic nation. This is exactly where Dostoevsky’s mythical views of land and people became vividly relevant for them. This broader perspective sheds light on Kaganskaya’s reading of Dostoevsky. Kaganskaya, who could never fully enjoy her “Russianness” in Russia, found herself in a conflictual relationship with Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism. Crossing the gates of Zion in the 1970s and settling in the West Bank offered an opportunity to re-adopt the latter’s Demons in order to reconstruct her Jewish identity, vis-à-vis that of Palestinians, in the shadow of Dostoevsky’s dichotomy between the superiority of Russia and inferiority of the rest of the world, primarily Europe. In conclusion, allow me to rehearse the two theoretical insights suggested here. The first concerns the nature of literary “epistemic things.” Against “scientistic” tendencies to forge a dichotomy between knowledge-production in science versus the opinion and beliefs characterizing the humanities, the realistic novel offers a unique site that upsets such attempts. At this site, universal truths about individuals and communities, constituted through societal bonds, are distilled out of local experiences, as the example of Dostoevsky’s Demons reveals. Moreover, such knowledge is capable of travelling across space and time, transforming and creating ever new meanings in different cultural and linguistic contexts, and in accordance with changing political agendas. The second insight has to do with the nexus of knowledge and identity, translation and migration, demonstrated by the different receptions of Dostoevsky in Israel. Brenner, Rabikovitz, and Kaganskaya each exemplify in a different manner how the crossing of boundaries by literary knowledge challenges peoples’ self-perceptions, forcing them to re-create themselves in their new place by translating that knowledge into a new identity.

Michael D. Gordin

Crab Nebulous Abstract: This essay begins with a bizarre excerpt from Turgenev concerning a large black crab, a spiritualist, and a gambling scene in Baden-Baden. But from this marginal crab the reader may peer into a Russian world of intermixed religion, science and politics.

A puzzling incident happens in an old Russian book. A man arrives at an evening gathering in Baden-Baden. The room is filled with Russians, with a stray American in their midst. All the servants are, naturally, German, and about half the conversation (especially with the American) takes place, naturally, in French. Some in the corner are playing cards for money, since gambling is always in the air in Baden-Baden. A self-proclaimed musical genius sits at the piano and ceaselessly bangs out cacophonies. A noblewoman who goes by the informal (and Frenchified) “Lise” speaks with the American, Mr. Fox, who is a spiritualist medium (characterized by long blond locks and heavily accented French), and a Russian obsessed with interpreting Revelation and the Talmud in order to predict the future. (About this Russian, the narrator tells us that even though “not one of these events has ever taken place, he wasn’t embarrassed and continued to prognosticate” [334].)1 Lise asks whether any animals can be influenced by the magnetic forces of spiritualism. “There are in fact such animals,” Mr. Fox replies, “for example crabs; they are very nervous and fall into catalepsy easily” (335). A large, black crab is immediately ordered and brought out on a serving platter. The narrator describes what follows: The waiter set the dish on a round table. A small movement coursed through the guests; a few heads popped up; the generals at the card table imperturbably maintained the solemnity of their poses. The spiritualist rumpled his hair, frowned, and—approaching the table — began to wave his hands in the air: the crab bristled, scuttled backwards, and raised its pincers slightly. The spiritualist repeated and quickened his movements: the crab bristled as before.

Lise, the countess, asks, “Mais que doit-elle donc faire?,” to which the spiritualist answers, “Elle doâ rester immobile et se dresser sur sa quiou” (336). But, stub-

1 All page numbers in the text refer to I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, 2d. ed., volume 7 (Moscow: Nauka, 1981). All translations are my own.

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bornly, the crab doesn’t sit on its rear. The spiritualist declares he is not in power, and forlornly retreats, consoled on the way by Lise, who assures him that even the great Daniel Dunglas Home—recently a sensation on his visits to St. Petersburg— also experienced such moments. The waiter, fighting to maintain a straight face, returns the crab to the kitchen, whereupon he and his colleagues burst into laughter “über diese Russen” (337). It is 1867. I first read this about fifteen years ago, and it has always nagged at me. What could this incident possibly mean? It would be easy to dismiss it as nothing at all, just a bit of silliness trapped in the pages of a book no one opens anymore. But I have been reading Lorraine Daston’s work avidly for two decades now (from the moment I began to study the history of science), and I do not believe she would appreciate such complacency. She has always been a great historian for the marginal episode, the weird, the moment or the object that evokes wonder—and that sometimes can, with the patina of time and hindsight, come to resemble foolishness. There are other Dastonian elements here as well: careful observation, a speculation about the powers of mind, an attempt to think with animals, an international engagement in search of knowledge (however frivolous) on German soil… In fact, I do not for a second doubt that if she were to come across an episode like this in John Locke’s notebooks or Condorcet’s letters, she would seize upon it and turn it into a virtuoso exemplar of wonder, observation, nature, and rationality. But she hasn’t, and so in a fit of second-order ventriloquism, I will attempt to do so here (minus, regrettably, the virtuoso part). This failed mesmeric experiment with the crab did not, of course, take place before the eyes of Locke or Condorcet. As far as I can discern, nothing like this particular scene ever took place at all. It is entirely the product of the imagination of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883), one of the greatest Russian novelists from an epoch of great Russian novelists. The crab séance occurs relatively early in his 1867 novel Smoke (Dym), which is a difficult novel to like. The work as a whole is a lampoon of the Russian emigration, ranging from the high nobility to the overly earnest and no less absurd students and nihilists, which is why it takes place at Baden-Baden and nearby Heidelberg. Turgenev’s goal was to expose the pretentiousness and loose morals of this motley crew of expatriates—the novel’s plot tracks youthful true love descended into shabby adultery—and the whole story brims with authorial bile. Turgenev was a skilled observer of both nature and humanity, and he typically drew his material from meticulous attention to actual behavior, in the process often anticipating broader trends in Russian culture and thought. Our unfortunate crab, for example, represents the first significant appearance of spiritualism in Russian literature. It would be far from the last: table-turning, efforts at spirit communication, manipulative mediums, metaphysical disquisi-

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tions on the soul—these would persist throughout some of the most memorable (as well as the most forgettable) Russian literature of the 1870s and beyond. Turgenev in Smoke opted for satire, and had an insider’s knack for the telling detail. (In this, the name “Fox” is a nice touch, since the American Fox sisters had started the whole table-rapping phenomenon in upstate New York in the late 1840s.) Fedor Dostoevsky went a similar route in his mostly overlooked novel The Raw Youth (Podrostok) of 1875 and as a periodic butt of witty asides in his autojournal Diary of a Writer, the best selling periodical of its day. Not everyone took spiritualism as a laughing matter. In Leo Tolstoy’s magnificent Anna Karenina, which appeared as a stand-alone book in 1878, the baleful influence of a manipulative—and, by Tolstoy’s implication, clearly fraudulent—medium is heavily responsible for inducing the cuckolded Karenin to deny Anna any access to their child. Dostoevsky, too, would pick over the topic with newfound seriousness. The famous “Grand Inquisitor” scene from Brothers Karamazov (1880) contains numerous traces rooted in the mocking Diary entries of previous years, demonstrating how deep philosophical views about spirituality were intimately tied to what seemed a superficial repulsion from the spiritualism fad. The very ubiquity of spiritualism in these works deserves our attention. It wasn’t simply ubiquitous, it was marginally ubiquitous. There is no “great Russian novel” about spiritualism; there isn’t even a significant novel that takes it on as a central theme. It is present here, there, and everywhere, but more as a glimpse through an open side door as you walk down a hallway—something that catches your eye as you are propelled forward to your destination. This marginality is not a consequence of the triviality in which we might join with Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev in belittling aristocratic naïveté. There are a host of deeply serious leitmotifs that stud the literature of this era—suicide, for example, or dueling— alongside others (such as children’s games) which resemble spiritualism in their lightness. These are almost never the central plot device or focus of attention (pace the duel in Eugene Onegin), but function as a resonance for the overarching themes of these novels: the clash of generations, the state of the peasantry, the relation of Russia to the West, violence, political liberty, and so on. Yet over and over again the deepest philosophers, greatest writers, most prolific hacks, and most confused pundits constantly paired mediumism with Momentous Drama. Following Carlo Ginzburg’s inspirational analysis in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (1989), we can adopt the strategy of one who exposes forgeries, looking at how the pinky finger is depicted rather than the eyes. In the ubiquitous marginalia of these Russian novels, the writer can let his guard down, throwing into relief repeated patterns that had earlier languished in seemingly random scenes. We have, after all, a crab to deal with. Marginality doesn’t just manifest in side scenes, but in entire novels as well. Pretty much nobody reads Smoke these

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days, and I cannot say I blame them. Yet, however clunky Smoke is taken to be now, Turgenev intended it as the thematic sequel to his finest novel, Fathers and Children (Ottsy i deti), published in 1862. Tracking the themes raised by the mesmeric arthropod brings out the place of scientific observation in Russian culture and the role high literature played in actively transforming the cultural debates of late Imperial Russia, in the wake of the so-called Great Reforms that began with the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and restructured the entire society. To see, we must observe. Fathers and Children is a novel about generations, artfully sketching the burgeoning conflict between the idealistic nobility of the 1840s (saturated with complacent Hegelianism) and the hard-scrabble materialism of their scions, the “men of the sixties” (shestidesiatniki). The novel is artfully structured, intricately plotted, and beautifully written—but I set all that aside for the sake of its central character, the chief element that most people retain from the novel: Evgenii Bazarov. Bazarov is utterly magnetic, and the book snaps to attention as he moves through a scene, serving as both a principal and catalyst for the love affairs, dramas, and the sole duel that punctuate the story. Bazarov is the first prominent nihilist in Russian fiction. As he tells his ennobled hosts (the “fathers” of the title) on a visit to a friend’s ancestral country estate, “We act in support of what we consider useful. At the present time the most useful thing is rejection—so we reject.” He rejects everything in the name of cold inspection: conventional morals, the political order, received commonplaces about nature. When his hosts recoil from the recklessness of Bazarov’s indiscriminate rationalism, protesting that things need to be built, not just torn down, he confidently responds: “That’s not our affair… First the ground needs to be cleared” (49). A medical student, nurtured on the inspiration of such works as Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff —interestingly, also one of the books presented to the young Albert Einstein a few decades later when the boy manifested an interest in science—Bazarov subjects all of Russian society to a clinical rationality. As Isaiah Berlin noted in 1973 in an essay entitled “Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament,” the fictional Bazarov incited a firestorm of comment and controversy among the chattering classes of Great-Reforms Russia. There were four possible positions—comprising, if you will, all the spaces of a 2×2 matrix—and all spaces were occupied in intelligentsia discussions: Turgenev was either endorsing Bazarov’s radical views or he was condemning them; Turgenev’s position (mockery or valorization) was either commendable or deplorable. It is a testament to the artistry of Fathers and Children that all these views are sustainable, and readers continue to grapple with their attraction to and discomfort with Bazarov. But the heady intellectual circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow had no truck with ambiguity, and Turgenev was judged from all sides and found wanting.

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The most wounding reaction came from the radical youth, and this is the nub of the “liberal predicament” that Berlin outlined. Turgenev’s sympathies were with the liberals, broadly construed, and he certainly did not wish to be seen as a stooge of tradition, yet the crassness of the young firebrands who powered the intellectual opposition to conventional order discomfited him. He wanted to support the children, but he preferred the genteel methods of the fathers—and when push came to shove, he recoiled from the shoving and the very students whose admiration he coveted. As it happened, they rejected him first. A bit of context: Fathers and Children closes with the exodus of some of the book’s nihilists to Heidelberg—the chemical genius loci Robert Bunsen is specifically invoked as the town’s primary attraction—and they are presented as lazy and somewhat ditsy. Heidelberg’s storied university was indeed a Mecca for Russian students, especially in the natural sciences, and they took umbrage at Turgenev’s characterization of them and their ideals. In September 1862 a group of students demanded an explanation from the author himself, then staying in Baden-Baden. In October (the precise date is hard to pin down), Turgenev traveled to Heidelberg and was subjected to a sort of “trial” where he was found wanting. The novelist was disgusted, and wrote about the incident to several of his friends. He was skewered on the prongs of the liberal predicament. He skewered back. Hence, Smoke: it is his answer to the accusations of infidelity to progress the Heidelberg students laid at his door. Turgenev was a gifted writer, but his sense of humor was so impregnated with pique in this instance that the whole satire becomes muddled. Yet if we follow not the author, and not the characters, but rather the animals who are subjected to intense observation—that is, if we read our crab episode the way I imagine Daston would —we see how the parody was supposed to work. The question for us is not whether the novel is good or bad, or who is to blame in this tempest in a teapot, but rather: why is there a crab at all? The bristling crustacean is not the only aquatic animal to star in Turgenev’s fiction. Its closest relative appears, as you might have guessed, in Fathers and Children, and it is an omen of tragedy rather than comedy. In chapter 5 of the earlier novel, we find Bazarov traipsing through the ponds surrounding the country estate, where he attracts the notice of a cohort of boys exploring the countryside for their own amusement. A towering medical student is hardly usual fare in those parts, and so they ask him what the blazes he is doing. Looking for frogs, naturally. The children are nonplussed, and continue to press Bazarov. “I slice open the frog and look what is going on inside it; and since you and I are just like frogs—except that we walk on two legs—I will thus know what is going on inside us,” he answers.

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But why on Earth would you want to know that?, the children reply. “So as not to make a mistake if you fall ill and I have to heal you” (21–22). Perfectly sensible: close observation allows one to reason up from animals to humans, and back down again. This charming vignette presents Bazarov in the kindest of lights, with his rationalism generous and productive and his attitude to children tolerant and nurturing. It also foreshadows disaster. In the book’s final pages, Bazarov offers to help dissect the corpse of a man who recently died of typhus. In his haste, he nicks his finger. Ever hopeful in his nihilism, he reaches for carbolic acid to disinfect the cut, but even he knows it is too late. There is no way to heal him, and no comfort except the knowledge of what is happening, à la Büchner. Heidelberg, Baden-Baden. Frog, crab. Bazarov, Fox. In both novels, Turgenev intimately linked the cultural diagnosis of the Russian elite to the scientific observation of animals—for the abortive mesmerizing in the drawing room can surely be taken as an experiment, complete with hypothesis and explanations for a null result. Other forms of reasoning are on display, including the classically Dastonian subject of gambling and chance, but the reader is consistently pointed to the animals. This makes sense, for in the touchy censorship climate of 1860s Russia, conversations about the fate of the Russian people were predominantly presented in the pages of literature or literary criticism, where the reader would have to parse the allusions instead of reading explicitly political treatises. This is what we gain by paying attention to a whole variety of documented episodes— real but especially invented—exploring the preternatural and wondrous within the pages of literature. For in a novel, rationality never appears as an abstraction; it is always embedded in a character, a person. I did not cherry-pick this particular example in a fashion analogous to the made-to-order demands of the aristocrats attending on the mystical Mr. Fox; rather, it came to hand much like Bazarov encountered his frog: plucked from the stream of words flowing across pages, cascading across the mental world of the Russian intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century. It is quite straightforward to pick dozens, even hundreds of kindred instances, linking together different novels and different authors through the marginal episodes that decorate their pages, as reflective of both their individuality and their embedding in a cultural milieu as an artist’s signature: distinctively personal, but also a mark of attention to the market. The intersection of science and literature in late Imperial Russia is particularly rich in such connections, but the overlap between natural knowledge and art has lingered close to the surface in every culture and time period with which I am familiar. The peculiarities of the reverberations of science in the Russian Golden Age—the mid-century moment marked by the dominance of literature, much as today’s driving forces might be espied in Silicon Valley or

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genomics laboratories—are simply an exceptionally clear site for analytic purposes. The structures of both the market for literature and the patterns of cultural sociability encouraged precisely the kind of cross-fertilization we observe Turgenev enacting here. Both crucial features of the Russian cultural landscape were conditioned by the remarkably small size of the intelligentsia, however broadly defined. Literacy was not especially broad in a land of recently emancipated serfs, but where it could be found it was strikingly deep. In the 1860s, educated Russians, whether the children of clergymen or individuals of the middling ranks who became students, translators, Grub Street impresarios, or scions of the nobility, could often claim competence in reading two or three modern European languages besides Russian, in addition to the obligatory Greek and Latin bludgeoned into them by a rigidly classicizing school system. This was a culture of readers. Whenever the spotty censorship and the even spottier mails allowed it, foreign books and journals crossed the border, providing both stimulus and fodder for commentary, appropriation, remixing, and vitriol, out of which the heady brew of the European-though-distinctively-Russian literary form emerged. The writers were concentrated mostly in the center of St. Petersburg, the Imperial capital, and certain neighborhoods in the commercial metropolis of Moscow, and if the intelligentsia was not quite minuscule enough that every scholar and writer—be they novelist, chemist, musician, painter, or what have you—knew everyone else, it is no exaggeration to say that one degree of separation spanned the entire topography. The distinctive organizational feature of this culture was the kruzhok—literally, “circle”—informal gatherings of like-minded individuals who discussed philosophy, music, sculpture in different gatherings organized in different homes. You got into a kruzhok by personal recommendation, and friendship overlapped with influential connections and raw talent, weaving a tapestry of networked producers of texts. Physiologist Ivan Pavlov never seemed to have met chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev, but they both hosted salons of painters in their apartments, with quite a few double-dippers among the attendees, and Petersburger Mendeleev never met country squire and mostlyMuscovite Tolstoy, though they communicated through the latter’s son, a student of the former. And so it goes: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed his music while working as a naval architect and served as a node among military, musical, and technical circles, and even the perpetually penurious and cantankerous Dostoevsky was linked into a vast web of those-who-produced-culture through multiple ties (he knew Pavlov’s wife, for example). Is it any wonder that in this world science and literature would constantly draw from each other, with psychologists building upon novels and novelists cribbing mathematical analogies? Spiritualism—defined by small groups of individuals united around a common point of

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interest in someone’s parlor—was no accidental topic of discussion in many a kruzhok. The readers, on the other hand, except for metropolitan winters “in town,” were dispersed in country estates across the largest land empire of any era, encompassing one-sixth of Earth’s land surface. For readers to reach writers, bookstores were a poor solution—not enough demand in any given locality to sustain a literary marketplace. In a pattern reminiscent of the sciences, the market shifted from monographs to periodicals. Russian written culture of the nineteenth century was circulated by a dozen or so “thick journals” (tolstye zhurnaly), monthlies that ran to hundreds of pages an issue, featuring belles lettres, history, political commentary, poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, and more besides. Eager readers would subscribe to several and while away the long summer days and long winter nights with a mail-delivered cross-section of what was the rage in many a kruzhok. The offerings were also segmented by political persuasion (conservative, liberal, radical, reactionary), so you could subscribe to whatever suited the range of beliefs in your household, unified only by the literary offerings, which were serialized to the highest bidder. Of course, literature was serialized in many contemporary contexts—the case of Charles Dickens is probably the most widely noted—yet there are features of the Russian case that reward closer attention. Take, for example, spiritualism. In 1875, a thick journal named The Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy) published a piece by Nikolai P. Vagner, professor of zoology at St. Petersburg University, in which he proclaimed his conviction that humanity was on the verge of tremendous new scientific advances by exploring the phenomena elicited by mediums in the darkened anterooms of the nobility. Reaction among the public—that slim but vocal stratum of readers and writers—was electrified, and furious at what many took to be a display of inanity by a leading naturalist. The Messenger of Europe walked away, but the more politically conservative Moscow-based Russian Messenger (Russkii Vestnik) leapt into the breach, broadcasting over the next two years a scintillating debate about the reality or crackpottery of spiritualism featuring Vagner, his detractors, and his supporters, including fellow spiritualist Aleksandr M. Butlerov, Mendeleev’s colleague and rival at St. Petersburg University and also a member of the Academy of Sciences and one of the greatest organic chemists of the day. You could follow the debates month by month, and then turn the page and read the new novel-in-chunks, something about unhappy families called Anna Karenina. The author of the latter certainly read up on them, and the incorporation of both spiritualism and the controversy over Christians in the Ottoman Balkans (the so-called “Eastern Question”) appear in later chapters of Tolstoy’s work as he integrated the milieu of the thick journal into the plot of his book. This is not an isolated case: every Golden Age Russian novel you have likely

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ever heard of, with the exception of two, appeared in installments rather than as a stand-alone volume. The two outliers were Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), and… Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. Part of Bazarov’s punch was that he arrived undiluted by the periodicity of the thick journals. He was packaged alone. The packaging matters, and our science and our literature arrive at our doorsteps through various routes, each sensitively dependent on a cultural moment, an economy of communication, and a network of influences and appropriations. Sometimes, as in the Russian case, we are able to grasp all of the strands and follow them back to their cultural origins. In the process, the biggest of abstractions—the soul, rationality—appear to us in their wrappers, and those casings are the very stuff of cultural history. This, to my mind, is the central lesson that Lorraine Daston’s sparkling oeuvre teaches us: that there is no rationality in the abstract, only rationality expressed in a particular time and place; that there is no view from nowhere by which we can apprehend it without doing the difficult work of history; and that if we want to understand the Bazarovs of the world we should, on occasion, consider the crab.

Andrew Abbott

Reason, Nature, Metaphor Abstract: This essay puts Lorraine Daston’s own writing under the metaphor microscope, exploring, in line with Daston herself, how the once unified category of nature is re-understood through historical and theoretical analysis.

Little prepares me to write about Reason and Nature. The social sciences forsook Reason for rationality in the nineteenth century, and social scientific Nature long ago subsided into things like human ecology, rural sociology, and development studies, fields that dawdled along quietly enough until a few younger colleagues clambered onto the juggernaut of climate change and proclaimed the importance of The Environment—their new version of Nature. Of course, we have our own big words: Culture, Structure, Language, Action. And even if good social theory is almost always inductive, there are branches of social science that directly theorize such things. But in practice, even our own big words are usually placeholders, indexes for more particular things. To write about Reason and Nature feels to me like revisiting Mesdames de Rambouillet and Récamier, when kings were kings and grand abstractions were grand abstractions. Today, the whole notion of such abstraction—not to mention the abstractions themselves—has been dashed to pieces like the potter’s vessel. To be sure, we examine the issues comprised by the old abstractions, but we do so in the plural rather than the singular, as if the old abstractions were just another form of absolutism. It is a real question how one can write of Reason, Nature, and their relatives in the current period. Reading some work in detail seems a necessary approach to this question, at least for those of us unused to such rarified company. And it is not enough simply to find such abstractions, strung through texts like so many diamonds on the ill-fated necklace of Marie Antoinette. We need to see how those diamonds are mounted on the golden necklace of the text itself. The sustaining shiny links, it seems to me, are those of metaphor, which provides at once the ties that bind one diamond-like abstraction to the next and the filigree mountings that present to our view the Marquise of Reason and the Princess of Nature. We need then a jeweler whose mastery will reveal how the golden framework of metaphor sustains the glittering of such brilliants. One such jeweler is Lorraine Daston, who writes routinely of things like Nature, Objectivity, and Moral Authority. The choice is to some extent an arbitrary one, but only by analyzing some such writer can we see how metaphors make abstract topics credible for today’s apostates from Enlightenment.

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Requiring depth rather than breadth, I shall examine Daston’s metaphors in two articles, separated by thirty years but both from Isis: “British Responses to Psychophysiology, 1860–1900”1 and “On Scientific Observation.”2 Usefully for our task, the first is about Reason and the second about Nature, under the guise of Mind and Observation, respectively. (Note that the young Daston did not deploy the relevant abstraction in her title while the mature Daston does so.) I will be counting types of metaphors, so the reader must trust my judgment on whether a particular word is a metaphor or not, and whether a given metaphor was intended or not. For example, did Daston actually mean to refer to Plessy vs. Ferguson when she said, “In order for psychology to maintain its separate but equal status among the positive sciences…”?3 Or was this simply an accidental, unconscious resemblance? (In this case, because Daston intended no pejorative meaning, I decided it was accidental.) But the particular details of the counting don’t matter. I am only seeking a sense of the proportions of different kinds of metaphors as part of my attempt to understand precisely how metaphor enables the discussion of grand topics like Reason and Nature, Mind and Observation. Analyzing “British Responses,” I find a total of 85 metaphors. Of these, six are mixed and therefore unclassifiable (e.g., “Carpenter had discarded one dualism only to embrace another”). Of the rest, almost a quarter involve the language of military or (less commonly) political conflict. On the military side we have “commanding position,” “perceived onslaught,” “rearguard action,” “uneasy peace,” and so on, while the political theme is found in “reigning naturalist philosophy,” “lively debate,” and the like. (Daston’s use of such conflict metaphors shows that they are not, as is sometimes alleged, in the repertoires of men only.) Right behind the military and the politicians are the other great professions of divinity and law. From divinity we have “accepted as orthodoxy,” “Mill’s ontological agnosticism,” and “few disciples,” while the law produces “staunch advocates,” “judge between two explanations of will,” and “legacy of the late Victorian controversy.” Curiously, the only medical metaphor is “a German cure for a German malaise.” Yet science, appropriately enough, has more than either divinity or law: “dwell in the same universe,” “philosophical pressures,” “denatured scheme,” “spectrum of British reactions,” and “intellectual climate,” for example. Taken together, divinity, law, and science provide another quarter of the metaphors. But while the professions in total thus provide nearly 50% of Daston’s metaphors, the parallel area of arts, travel, and space provides a much

1 Isis 69:2:192–208, 1978. 2 Isis 99:1:97–110, 2008. 3 Isis 1978:202.

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smaller proportion. We have music (e.g., “harmonize psychological and ethical perspectives,” “transposed religious fervor”), architecture and building (e.g., “loophole in the deterministic facade,” “back-door attempt”) and even literature (“translation of the rich qualitative experience”). And the theme of difference expressed in “transposed” and “translation” continues in a number of travel metaphors: “the vehicle of will,” “foreign to the late Victorian debate,” and “indigenous psychology.” These travel metaphors in turn are supported by faint spatial metaphors that are almost non-metaphorical: “previously sharp line,” “neighboring fields,” “field of consciousness at a given moment,” “peripheral aspects” and so on. But the whole area of arts, travel, and space only makes up a bare fifth of the total, to the professions’ half. Individual experience and emotion provide very few metaphors: “impotence of consciously exercised will,” for example. Rather, the remainder of Daston’s metaphors are generic, dying figures, in their last stages of Cheshire cat disappearance into everyday usage. Thus, the faintly metaphorical words “tension” and “scheme” pervade the text, as do “chains” of causality. We also find “twin precepts,” “equal footing,” “fledgling disciplines,” “distilled truth,” “trains of thought,” and so on. In addition to these dying metaphors, we also find one almost-Homeric simile (1978:198): “Those liberal, literate Victorians, who…had been compelled to jettison a large fraction of traditional Christian teachings, clung all the more firmly to its salvageable part, its ethical code.” But in the very next sentence, the “salvageable part” becomes a “formula that distinguishes science and religion with an eye toward avoiding further damaging conflict.” Oddly, the Homeric shipwreck produces a scientific recipe. The same tendency to mixture later produces “Out of all the ‘manifold changes of sensory presentation’ which bombard consciousness, the elective attention gleans only a minute fraction, which it knits into a continuous, seamless whole.” (This is a summary of someone else’s text, and perhaps the mixture of the military, the agricultural, and the domestic is found in the original.) Near the start of her career, then, Daston used many metaphors indeed to discuss a particular episode in the history of Reason. They were divided about equally between four areas: (1) military and political; (2) divinity, law and science; (3) arts, space, and time; and (4) routine metaphors on the brink of disappearance into standard language. The strong use of military metaphors might reflect the topic—reactions to the controversial new “science” of psychology in late nineteenth century Britain—or it might reflect the Vietnam war recently ended when Daston was writing. But the extensive use of metaphors from divinity, law, science, and the arts suggests that it is not simply the military, but the professions as a whole that provide the main terminology, the figurative side of the paper then being eked out with generic and dying metaphors. In this paper, then, the

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grand abstraction of Reason is domesticated, appropriately enough, by the language of those great guilds of knowledge that we know as the professions, whose roots lie as deep or deeper than those of the Enlightenment itself, and which flourished anew in the sunny years of the nineteenth century. One way to talk about a grand abstraction, then, is to deploy metaphorically the vocabularies of those groups which have traditionally dominated applied knowledge. Exactly thirty years later, Daston published a piece on scientific Observation. This was not a research article, but a topical essay; 11 pages instead of 16, 28 footnotes instead of 69. Much more self-consciously than the earlier piece, this one engages great abstractions: Observation (in the title), Ontology and Objectivity (in the abstract), and behind them Nature itself. It is a designedly grand paper, numbering in its footnotes Aristotle, Claude Bernard, Alexander von Humboldt, and René Descartes. And perhaps to cloak this grandness, metaphor plays a bigger role. There are 76 metaphors, of which 4 are mixed and therefore unclassifiable. There are thus 6.9 metaphors per page rather than 5.3. Moreover, there are more Homeric gestures: three immense geographical metaphors, each sustained over several sentences, plus a paragraph-long religious metaphor that closes the paper. Different types of metaphors, moreover, undergird this new style. There is only one military metaphor (“entrenched forms”) and only a handful from political life (e.g., “the retinue of categories … was baroque”). Law provides only three (e.g., “to adjudicate between existing theories”). Divinity has only one in the main text (“stamps its ontologies with the imprimatur of the really real”) although it also provides the long ending section about angels and scholastics. Science takes up some of the slack, with three geological metaphors (e.g., “ontological bedrock”), four psychological ones (e.g., “gestalt switches”), and four scattered others. But still, the professions and science taken together are only 30%, rather than 50% as before. The arts, too, provide only a few metaphors (e.g., “Humboldt’s dizzying, integrating pirouette” [!]). But travel and space metaphors are much more prominent. “Everywhere and nowhere” sets the tone in the opening sentence. The paragraphs on cloud atlases, cloud recognition, and thought collectives4 provide lists of places and copious travel words (“panoramas,” “climes,” “vernacular,” “world held in common,” and so on). The last of them employs a bravura parallelism between institution types and place names to make its point (“the seminars of Gottingen and Berlin, the laboratories of Cambridge and Baltimore, the field stations of Naples and New Zealand”), and culminates in a discussion of “paths to skill” and “paths to science.” These Homeric metaphors of

4 Isis 2008:104, 105, and 106.

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whereness in fact dominate the essay, even though, because I have counted each of them as only one item apiece, they are, as before, only about a fifth of the total actual number of metaphors. As for the rest, the remaining 50% of the metaphors fall into my dying or generic metaphor category, and into several types within it. Some are simple clichés—“rude simplicity,” “mad genius,” “seasoned traveler,” and so on. Others are colloquialisms—“true in spades,” “flip side,” and “piggybacked.” (A surprise among these latter is “jizz,” quoted with approval from a primary document as meaning, roughly, “instantly perceived gestalt.” Its obscene meaning, which antedates the quote given in text, is ignored, despite its relevance to Daston’s central theme of “all-at-once-ness.”) Other dying metaphors are cliché quotes (“royal road,” “memory begets experience begets skill and understanding”), and still others are more standard fare: “cinematic,” “epistemological machinery,” “distillations of many specimens,” and so on. Such things we saw before. But they are not the news here. The new subtype of generic metaphors comprises strongly metaphorical verbs deployed in simple declarations: “furnish the universe,” “filtered through a neo-Kantian view,” “robbed philosophers of all resources,” “fuses these bits and pieces into a picture,” “carving out an evanescent but striking cloud formation as a thing worthy of its own name,” “crafted by the techniques of scientific validation,” “courted mariners, farmers, and amateur observers.” Such verbs are conspicuously important because they allow Daston to imply—and later to claim to have established—matters that are not necessarily demonstrated by the evidence in text. Thus to write the sentence “ontology is about how scientists furnish the universe with objects….” is to assert the unfurnished nature of the universe ex ante simply by using the phrasal verb “furnish with,” rather than “interpret as” or “focus on” and so on. Similarly, “carving out” is a process exactly opposite to “fusing bits and pieces into a picture,” yet both are deployed as metaphors for one and the same process of all-at-once, gestalt perception. This kind of contradictory mixture of metaphors continues in the summaries of the nature of Observation—“perceptual skills must be cultivated and honed” and “the cultivation and calibration of shared habits.” Skills and habits are plants on the one hand and knives or devices on the other. Thus, in this later piece, which is more closely focused on grand abstractions, Daston has turned to a similarly grand metaphor. A multitude of references to travel, distance, and space underscore the fact that the diversity of things seen must be unified into a common Observation. Similarly, her metaphorical verbs are—all unnoticed—cramming a host of disparate matters into the common, singular collection of things denoted by the abstract word “Observation.” In this later piece, that is, even more than the substantive statements, the metaphors are

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actually doing the arguing. That many are made one is not only declared by the argument, but also embodied in the grammatical choices themselves. It seems then that to talk about the grand abstractions in an era that has rejected them, we must present our argument a la contrebande—not in open assertions, but in the less visible netherworld of grammar and metaphor. To be sure, I have shown this possibility only in two pieces by one author. While this analysis may thereby establish a plausible argument, it does not demonstrate that argument’s generality in humanistic writing. But I think the finding a solid one. Note, too, that although it involves counting, it could not be generated by the mindless approach of digital humanism. The counts provide nothing in themselves. The categorization and, more importantly, the grammatical analysis emerge from a reader’s immersion in the texts. Only human reading can reveal that the metaphors are now not merely the golden links, but have become the diamonds themselves. Ought we then to conclude that this connection is necessary? That one cannot discuss Reason and Nature without the full-throated power of Homeric similes and the wavering vibrato of mixed metaphor? I think so. Ultimately, Reason and Nature are conceptions about human social life, and if there is one lesson to be learned from a century and a half of social “science,” it is that human social life is irretrievably diverse. If there are any grand abstractions that survive amid that diversity, they are only the self-undercutting rules that allow us to move steadily from one particularity to another—the rules, perhaps, of a humble humanism that has not yet hardened into Enlightenment. There may of course be a new absolutism on its way—Capitalism and Science are doing their best to create it, and the problems facing us may require as well as facilitate it. But for the moment we needn’t worry. Not yet.

Carla Nappi

A Page at the Orchestra Abstract: An onomatopoeic sound-word performance of drums, bells, and cymbals from the Qing period pushes us to wonder about the far limits of what writing can do.

It starts with the ringing of bells. Chang Chang, Tang Tang, Yang Yang - Ung! - Chang Ching. Next, we add some drums. Tung Tang. Tungtung Tangtang. Jing Jiyang. Now, just the drums. Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Let’s add some cymbals. Tung Tung. Dur! Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Kung Chang! Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Kuwang Chang! Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Tung Tung. Fade to silence. And now we lighten the mood a bit with the flutes. Bing Biyang. Bing Biyang. Jingjing Jangjang. Bing Biyang. Bing Biyang. Bing Biyang. Jingjing Jangjang. Bing Biyang. Halar! (Those are jade pendants grazing against each other.) Jingjing Jangjang. Bing Biyang. Kalang Kiling! (We add a light percussion with pieces of copper or iron.) Kalang Kiling! Bing Biyang. Bing Biyang. Bing Biyang. Bing Biyang. Bing Biyang. Bing Biyang. A shaman’s drum drumming. Tong Tong. A shaman’s sword cutting through the air.

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Halar Hilir. And back to the bells, the KalarKilirilation that so musically wells from the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—Kalar Kilir. Kalar Kilir. Kalari Kilir. Shak Sik, Kanggir Kinggir. Small bells. kiyalang. konggir. holor. konggir kanggir. konggir kanggir. holor. holor halar. holor halar. holor halar. holor halar. Slowly, the bells quiet to make space for the single sound of the sonorous striking of a hollow wooden block. Tok

tok. Tok

tok. Tok

tok. Tok

tok.

And finally, as the last reverberations of the last tok tok fade, the moan of a conch shell. Bung.

Bung.

Just as observation has its history, so does listening. It is a history in many languages and media—including, as just experienced above, an archive of onomatopoeic sounds printed on the pages of the Imperially Commissioned Manchu Dictionary in Five Scripts (Han-i araha sunja hacin-i hergen kamciha Manju gisun-i buleku bithe in Manchu, or [Yuzhi] Wuti Qingwenjian in Chinese). Often known simply as the Qing Pentaglot, this is an eighteenth-century dictionary of five of the most socially, culturally, and diplomatically crucial languages of the Qing (1644– 1911) dynasty. Probably the most ambitious dictionary project in Qing history, the Pentaglot was commissioned by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796) toward the end of his reign as a means of rendering his multilingual empire in visual terms. The language worlds of the dictionary move from the top of each page to its base, from Manchu to Tibetan, to Mongolian, to Uyghur, to Chinese. Each column represents a set of functionally equivalent terms in the five languages. The position of Manchu terms at the head of each column affirms the position of Manchu language in Qing imperial bureaucracy and ideology. The Chinese terms at the end of each column often provide a semantic description of the word or phrase being translated. Between them, on each page we travel through a set of visual and sonic embodiments of each term: Tibetan script, followed by two different transliterations in Manchu (first a Manchu transcription of how the Tibetan terms sound if spelled out, and then a rendering in Manchu of how they sound if pronounced properly in Tibetan), then Mongolian script, then Uyghur script, followed by transcriptions in Manchu of what the Uyghur terms sounded like.

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Time is measured in pages in an encounter with this lexical landscape, an ecology textured not by trees and hills but by sounds, each of which is embedded in a particular linguistic context. And so we have pages of terms for the sound made by blowing into a conch shell, the tinkling of jade pendants hitting together, the sound of bells. The sound of bells (for example) is then rendered as you move your eyes from the bottom of the page back upward through Uyghur and Mongolian and Tibetan and Manchu in turn: Chung Chang, Chang Chang, Urding, Chang Chang. Chang Chang is an onomatopoeia, the sound some bells make when rung in Manchu, and is the opening note of our page at the orchestra. The orchestral movement above was drawn from the Manchu renderings of the list of onomatopoeic voices of musical instruments in the Qing Pentaglot. Let’s go back to our musical assemblage, and instead play the same piece in Tibetan. It starts with the ringing of bells. Urding, Ding Ding, Urur—G’anj’i!—Urding. Next, we add some drums. Ursil. Urur Silsil. Jamrol. Now, just the drums. A. A.

A. A. A.

Let’s add some cymbals. A. Aur! A. A. A. Akar! A. A. A. Akar Chemchem! A. A. A. Fade to silence. And now we lighten the mood a bit with the flutes. Dzing Dzing. Dzing Dzing. Jingjing. Dzing Dzing. Dzing Dzing. Dzing Dzing. Jingjing. Dzing Dzing. Silsil! (Those are jade pendants grazing against each other.) Jingjing. Dzing Dzing. Jakdang! (We add a light percussion with pieces of copper or iron.) Jakdang! Dzing Dzing. Dzing Dzing. Dzing Dzing. Dzing Dzing. Dzing Dzing. Dzing Dzing. A shaman’s drum drumming. Lak Ai.

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A shaman’s sword cutting. Alung Ril. And back to the bells, the Dedededelation that so musically wells from the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—De. De. De. Chab, Rilbui. Small bells. riljang. ril. rilchen. rildang. rildang. rilchen. jongril. jongril. jongril. jongril. Slowly, the bells quiet to make space for the single sound of the sonorous striking of a hollow wooden block. Niyak’ok.

Niyak’ok.

Niyak’ok.

Niyak’ok.

And finally, as the last reverberations of the last niyak’ok fade, the moan of a conch shell. Dung.

Dung.

This is both the same musical piece that we began with—they both feature the same set of instruments making what are nominally the same sounds in the same order—and completely different. Sounds are more than what they sound like. Thinking about this play with identity and difference in the language sensorium opens up some interesting ways of reconsidering the history of listening, the history of sound, and the relation of both to the history of early modern science. Just as listening has its history, so do sounds. This history extends across words and scripts, forms and formats. In the hands of a Qing dictionary maker crafting a work in five languages, lived sonic experiences may have been transitory and ephemeral, but sounds could solidify into objects made of language, and those objects could be translated. Translated sounds were multiple objects: the same sonic object in different languages (which might sound nothing alike to an individual listener) were made equivalent by being linked (at least in the mind of the translator) to a common material context that produced them. Put another way, materials sounded different depending on the languages used to translate their voices. In charting these sonic objects and their translations we’re able to create a kind of klangkammer, a paper cabinet of sound. Let’s consider how this works in the Manchu language. In these pages of our pentaglot dictionary we have a community of unlikely fellows: sutras being chanted (or ir), bodies kowtowing (keng keng), hunters scaring animals out of hiding (ho HOI!), arrows speeding through the air (shuwar!). We have teeth biting down on ice (katur kitur), throats being cleared (hak!), children sobbing (miyar

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mir), throats coughing (korkong korkong!) and spitting (pei pai). Wind is blowing (sheo sha), fingers are moving chess pieces (tak tik), clods are being crushed under the wheels of wagons (kiyatur kitur), pieces of dry wood are breaking (kayak!). Wild geese are calling to one another (gang gang), other birds are looking for each other (jang jing), crickets are crying (jar jar) and grasshoppers are flying (sar sar). For all of their variety, these sounds were alike. All of them (and others with which they share their pages) were formed by material bodies: mouths, knees, wheels, beaks, arrows. All of them could be languaged. All of them could be translated. And, importantly, all of them were ultimately included in the same category of this topically organized dictionary. The terms in the dictionary were divided into categories including the Heavens, Time, Ritual, Music, Military Tools, Gods, Doctors and Shamans, Fireworks, Cloth, Ships, Insects, and more. The Pentaglot pages overflowed with Birds, Livestock, Scaly and Shelly Beasts, Grains, Fruits, Plants, and Flowers. The category of People-related terms was among the richest and largest in the dictionary: it encompassed the names of Qing professions, terms for action and movement, descriptions of human relationships, terminology for birth and death, emotions, illnesses, curses, and insults. A category of sonic terms was nestled among these other groups, and onomatopoeias made up a substantial portion of this sonic subsection. This classification made sense if you think about the sonic as fundamentally an element of the human sensorium: together the drumming and sobbing and crunching and cracking described a material soundscape of human life. One of their most important qualities, for the lexicographer and his readers, is that they were heard by people. But equally as important, or perhaps more so, was the fact that these Qing sounds were voiced by people. The klangkammer was a soundscape produced by the human voice. Look back at the orchestral piece that began these pages, and you’ll see what I mean. More likely than not, you experienced it the first time in just that way: by looking, as a reader. Now go back and read it aloud, giving it voice. The chang chang, tang tang, and yang yang become something new, taking on a new kind of materiality made up of human breath, voice, sound. The drum’s tung tung and bell’s holor are embodied in the spoken word, translated from the physical reverberations of copper or animal skin into a soundless inked imaged print, and back again into sonic materiality through the human mouth, lips, and throat. A kind of metamorphosis is happening here: the human body (your body, my body) becomes a bell, a sword, a crying baby deer, a flying grasshopper. To communicate the sound of a material object without the benefit of the presence of that object, we become the object and take on its voice. We each do so in the vernacular in which we live: if I am the bell, the voice of the bell becomes an

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American English tinkle tinkle. If you are a Qing speaker of Manchu and you have instead become the voice of the bell, or if you are mimicking that voice, it might sound like kiyalang. The bell speaks many languages, exists through many voices, and in doing catalyzes relationships among them. The pages of the Qing Pentaglot catalogued these soundings, creating equivalencies across the languages of the empire: the sound of this bell in Uyghur is the same as the sound of that bell in Tibetan; the kind of laughter described here in Chinese is the same kind that sounds like that word there in Mongolian. The user of the dictionary would encounter the text as a reader of clusters of terms, even if she had turned to it to consult the pentaglot for something specific: though a table of contents acts as a map of the categories and their subcategories, the only way to find an individual entry within one of those categories is to read your way to it. The ordering is not alphabetical—if there was any principle of order, terms with similar semantic meanings were clustered together in cacophonies of stormy sounds, avian sounds, soundings of musical instruments. Paging through the catalog was a form of sonic travel, in the eighteenth century as it is today, and revisiting and revocalizing some of these sonic landmarks brings the modern reader into a different kind of dialogue with early modern nature than might otherwise be possible. Tok tok. Qing sounds (whether produced by lips, storms, feet, or hollow wooden blocks) were embedded in human language. In using Manchu or Tibetan or Mongolian to voice the sensorium of the material natural world in human language, sound created relationships between objects and the human bodies that experienced them, mediating between the knowing body and the known. If we understand sonic natural history in this way, the history of listening becomes inextricable from a history of the voice. Niyak’ok. Not only were Qing sounds languaged, but they could be translated. This means that the early modern material soundscape differed across different languages. In a way, this isn’t surprising. We know that onomatopoeia exists across languages: the kitty says meow, miao, mao depending on whom and where and when you’re asking. Still, putting the sonic front and center in our thinking about the materiality of early modern nature and its translations gives us a space to think about language, objects, knowers, and the sensorium that connects and creates relationships among them. What does this exploration into the Qing soundscape mean for thinking about early modern nature across Eurasia? It’s a trick question, in a way. Qing sounds did not mean. They emerged, they transformed, they sounded. Bung Bung! became part of a larger, multilingual, multiple material sound-object that was made out of conch shells, Dung!, lips and lungs that honked air through the seashells, and other lips that formed the sounds of Manchu and the other tongues

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through which the conch was voiced. All of these were part of the materiality of the conch-object. And this is a materiality that we become part of when we voice these Qing objects, compose with them, and become part of their histories just as they are part of ours. And so the translated orchestra becomes a prelude, the beginning of a history of and with the early modern voice. In voicing early modern sonic objects instead of merely reading or writing them, the historian gives them a new materiality, makes them part of modern storytelling, recombines them into new soundscapes. This is a kind of knowing that comes from singing the early modern, and listening to that song while understanding it to be just the latest of an ongoing history of translations and transmutations that are all connected through the chain of relations that this history of voices creates. Like the shell of the conch if we put our ears to it instead of our lips, a history of translated things becomes a resonating chamber. Shhhhh. Listen.

Ingrid Rowland

Athanasius Kircher on the Beauty of Knowing Everything Abstract: Even as Athanasius Kircher self-celebrates citing Plato (“There is nothing more beautiful than knowing everything”), Kircher is reinterpreting and reascribing. Beyond the irony of not quite knowing the “knowing everything,” a closer reading points allusively to the always interpreted, always re-worked nature of history.

The frontispiece of Father Athanasius Kircher’s Ars Magna Sciendi of 1669 shows Wisdom enthroned in the clouds, bearing a large tablet inscribed with Kircher’s new symbolic language, the modern hieroglyphs that were designed to convey the entire Christian catechism to congregations anywhere in the world (Fig. 1).1 On the foot of Wisdom’s Baroque throne, however, the inscription is in a historical language, Greek, and it expresses a sentiment that was dear to the Jesuit’s heart, as well as a key to his personality: μηδὲν κάλλιον ἢ πάντα εἰδέναι: “There is nothing more beautiful than knowing everything.” This same Greek inscription appeared on the vault of the famous museum that Kircher maintained in the Roman College of his order from 1651 to 1672; at that point the apse of the imposing church of Sant’Ignazio finally engulfed the rooms that had housed the college library and the museum for two decades (Fig. 2). The collections were removed to the ground floor, the painted vaults whitewashed, and the frescoes apparently destroyed, for no trace remains of them.2 For the twenty years of the Museum’s existence, the Greek phrase about knowing everything decorated the fourth vault of five arching over Kircher’s collections, each dedicated to one of the traditional elements that composed the cosmos: earth, air, fire, water, quintessence. The fourth vault in this scheme was dedicated to the element of earth, and it is absent from the engraved view that decorates the first account of the collection, Musaeum Celeberrimum of 1678,

1 Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Sciendi: Amsterdam: Janssonius à Waesberge, 1669. 2 Eugenio Lo Sardo, Giorgio de Sepi, Il Museo del Collegio Romano di Athanasius Kircher, Naples: Scriptaweb, 2006, 8–13.

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because the artist was standing underneath it to create his perspective.3 Fortunately, the book’s author, Kircher’s associate Georgius de Sepibus, provides a detailed written account of what appeared on each segment of the elaborate ceiling. On the fourth vault, he reports, Earth appeared as a naked maiden carrying a cornucopia, flanked by two inscriptions: in Greek, “There is nothing more beautiful than knowing everything” and in Latin an observation said to be taken from the Venerable Bede’s On the Nature of Things: “He can truly be said to have entered the workshop of wisdom and virtue who contemplates God continually in the works of Nature”.4 De Sepibus assures readers that the Greek inscription comes from Plato’s Cratylus, one more proof of Father Kircher’s polyglot erudition; other vaults contained inscriptions in Samaritan Aramaic and Amharic as well as the more usual Hebrew and Latin. Yet anyone who actually reads through the Cratylus will look in vain for this eloquent statement about the joys of knowledge. As a matter of fact, the dialogue seems to point in an entirely different direction, for the protagonist of this little philosophical drama, as so often in Plato’s work, is Socrates, the man who, far from praising the beauties of omniscience, famously claimed to know nothing. On this occasion he converses about language with two fellow philosophers, Cratylus and Hermogenes, who debate whether the proper words for things are innate in the order of the world or a matter of human convention. The topic certainly interested Athanasius Kircher two thousand years later—it stands at the heart of the Ars Magna Sciendi and its attempt to create new artificial language—, but Socrates approaches his own investigation in a rather different spirit from the Jesuit divine. Early on, he protests his own ignorance to the young, impetuous Hermogenes, who, as an enthusiastic follower of Heraclitus, is firmly convinced that the world and its certainties are in constant flux. Socrates declares: The knowledge of names is a great part of knowledge. If I had not been poor, I might have heard the fifty-drachma course of the great Prodicus, which is a complete education in grammar and language—these are his own words—and then I should have been at once able to answer your question about the correctness of names. But, indeed, I have only heard the single-drachma course, and therefore, I do not know the truth about such matters; I will, however, gladly assist you and Cratylus in the investigation of them.

3 Georgius de Sepibus, Romani Collegii Societatis Jesu Musaeum celeberrimum, Amsterdam: Ex Officina Janssonio-Waesbergiana, 1678. 4 De Sepibus, p. 5: “Is sapientiae et virtutis officinam vere ingressus dici potest, qui in artis et naturae operibus Deum assidue contemplatur.”

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Fig. 1: Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Sciendi, 1669, Frontispiece. Tomash Collection, University of Minnesota.

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Fig. 2: The Musaeum of Athanasius Kircher in the Jesuits’ Roman College. From Georgius de Sepibus, Musaeum Celeberrimum, 1678.

Just before the end of the dialogue, as if to sum up its points, Socrates will argue that the philosopher must make a clear choice between a realm of permanent ideas, and hence permanent, right names for things, or a world in permanent flux, in which names are arbitrary. As always, Socrates is careful not to declare what he believes himself; he simply points out the consequences of a particular line of reasoning, and makes the philosophy of Ideas seem infinitely more alluring:

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but if that which knows and that which is known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing.5

Hermogenes, though temporarily attracted to this position by the elder man’s eloquence, will not abandon his loyalty to Heracleitus (ironically, then, showing commendable constancy in his support of the man who conceded that absolutely everything was as good as writ on water: πάντα ῥει ̂). Socrates presents the realm of Ideas in this dialogue as a divine place where all things are known, and all things have their true names. The frontispiece to the Ars Magna Sciendi places the throne of Wisdom above the clouds in the same supernal realm, and certainly far above the endless flux of Earth, where the engraver shows mountains being eroded by rivers that flow into the sea, as a volcano spews earth and fire into the air to make new mountains where the old ones once stood. Divine Wisdom, in this vision, knows everything, including what is supremely good and beautiful. Because she is a goddess, the statement inscribed at the base of her throne is not really boast; omniscience, and beauty, come with the territory in which she holds her celestial court. On the other hand, the way that Wisdom holds up a tablet inscribed with Kircher’s new language looks sufficiently like Moses presenting the Ten Commandments to imply a remarkably grand claim for the eternal, celestial validity of this new Ars Magna Sciendi. Furthermore, if Wisdom knows everything, she must also know that Plato’s Cratylus makes no statement, direct or indirect, about the beauty of omniscience. The phrase on the foot of her throne simply does not appear in that work, or any other work of Plato’s, known or apocryphal. Athanasius Kircher may have known almost as many things as Wisdom herself, but in the case of this citation his recollection of what he read in Plato, emblazoned on the fourth vault of his museum and reprised for the frontispiece of this lavish folio book, has nothing to do with Plato. It is not a matter of different discrepant manuscripts, or tendentious translation: nothing remotely like the praise of omniscience appears in Marsilio Ficino’s Cratylus, translation or commentary. Nor does the statement appear elsewhere in Plato’s work. It seems, in any case, more like the kind of boast that a hothead like Thrasymachus might make before Socrates demolished

5 Plato, Cratylus 440b: εἰ δὲ καὶ αὐτὸ τὸ εἶδος [440β] μεταπίπτει τῆς γνώσεως, ἅμα τ᾽ ἂν μεταπίπτοι εἰς ἄλλο εἶδος γνώσεως καὶ οὐκ ἂν εἴη γνῶσις: εἰ δὲ ἀεὶ μεταπίπτει, ἀεὶ οὐκ ἂν εἴη γνῶσις, καὶ ἐκ τούτου τοῦ λόγου οὔτε τὸ γνωσόμενον οὔτε τὸ γνωσθησόμενον ἂν εἴη. εἰ δὲ ἔστι μὲν ἀεὶ τὸ γιγνῶσκον, ἔστι δὲ τὸ γιγνωσκόμενον, ἔστι δὲ τὸ καλόν, ἔστι δὲ τὸ ἀγαθόν, ἔστι δὲ ἓν ἕκαστον τῶν ὄντων, οὔ μοι φαίνεται ταῦτα ὅμοια ὄντα, ἃ νῦν ἡμεῖς λέγομεν, ῥοῇ [440ξ] οὐδὲν οὐδὲ φορᾷ.

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his hubris in a barrage of pointed questions than it does a sincere encomium of all-knowingness. If μηδὲν κάλλιον ἢ πάντα εἰδέναι were a line from Plato, which it is evidently not, then it would have been one of those lines that must be seen in context, despite the fact that early modern readers seldom did so with any Platonic statement. (In the Symposium, it is not Plato who says that there are two kinds of love, heavenly and demotic: Phaedrus does that.) The other citation on the fourth vault of Athanasius Kircher’s museum, the line from the Venerable Bede’s De Rerum Natura, is similarly elusive: it, too, seems not to appear anywhere in that text or its scholia, or anywhere else in Bede. The sentiment expressed may not be far from Bede’s, but the fact remains that Bede never quite said what the ceiling of Kircher’s Museum makes him say. Before the advent of printing, and certainly before the advent of Google searches, citations from well-loved authors often appeared in modified form: there are abundant examples from antiquity, from the Middle Ages, and from the early modern period. A scholar as renowned for his phenomenal memory as Giordano Bruno can nonetheless be found adjusting the words of his favorite authors in his own mind before incorporating them into his own works.6 It is a natural human tendency to edit a story in the retelling, and a great many quotations in the world’s literature have been slightly embellished, sometimes changed more drastically, and sometimes simply invented out of whole cloth. In the case of Athanasius Kircher’s citation from Plato, the reshaping seems consistent with a character trait that many of his contemporaries noticed about Kircher himself, namely his deep delight in the vastness of his own erudition. The Jesuit revisers who examined his work before publication almost invariably call attention to his boasting—“iactantia” is the recurrent word—and unseemly lack of Jesuit modesty.7 It is touching, somehow, that when put to the test his famous omniscience turns out to be a bit more tenuous, and a great deal more fallibly human, than the store of knowledge to be found in the Platonic realm of Ideas. Did Father Kircher make these citations up willfully, or did he inadvertently recreate an ideal Cratylus in his head, never bothering to check back to Plato’s text because he thought he remembered it clearly, or because scholars were not yet constrained by footnotes? Kircher’s contemporaries often called him a charlatan, and he called them envious. Both assessments, at least to some extent, were probably correct.

6 The most egregious example of Bruno’s tendentious habits of citation comes from his discussion of Copernicus in the dialogue La Cena de le Ceneri of 1584; see Ernan McMullin, “Bruno and Copernicus,” Isis, 78.1 (March 1987), 55–74. 7 Kircher’s evaluations by the Jesuit Revisores are contained in Rome, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, MSS 661, 663.

Caroline A. Jones

The Note Abstract: The note is a record of that which is heard, but also a marking of thought as it flows. Pascal’s Pensées in their variable organization can be compared to Daston’s prodigious notetaking, which we presume to be as combinatorial and open to doubt as Pascal’s enlightenment project.

The well-regulated mind was thus naturally rational, where rationality meant keeping mental tally of “constant effects” and “exact resemblances” and apportioning probabilities and concomitant degrees of assent accordingly – Lorraine Daston, 19881

Mental tallying can only hold so much. Hence the earliest cuneiform tablets are technologies invented for tallies and jottings, tax files and grain ledgers. A world of notation unfolded from the invention of writing, number systems, and their material supports; this shifting history is reflected in the two notions that now dominate the noun “note:” a discrete musical sound, and the small piece of paper that supports a written memorandum. To note, designating a manual or mental practice, has always been jeopardized by this drift into materials and things whose job it is not to change. By 1876, an exasperated professor proclaimed that the ability to produce musical notation by hand “would seem now to be regarded as one of those processes in respect to which elegance and even clearness are not worth consideration, and facility ‘comes by nature.’”2 The scare quotes alert us that for this Professor Hullah at least, claims to “nature” are neither to be trusted nor believed. Notation is wholly cultural, and must be taught, and learned; the note-as-thing is never stable. That human and cultural practices do not come “naturally” certainly justifies corrective pedagogy such as Hullah’s The Musical Alphabet, through which (his own) instruction can foster new capacities, admittedly building on basic mental facilities but necessitating rigorous technical exercise for the aspiring note-writer. Learning to write musical notation was even less “natural” for his students than it might have seemed in previous decades. Increasingly, the hand-writing of music 1 Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988): 196. 2 John Hullah, Brief Directions Concerning the Choice, Adjustment, and Formation by Hand of the Characters Constituting The Musical Alphabet (London: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1876).

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was dedicated to one primary goal—its transformation into mechanically reproducible form for industrial printing. At that point, even human nature was under pressure from mechanical needs. None of this is surprising to present-day scholars; we are routinely skeptical of claims on nature as self-evident, or descriptions of processes as “natural” and thereby free of the effects of culture. But if we query “nature” as an epistemic signature to be parsed, it is largely thanks to the analytic pressure put on such terms by Lorraine Daston’s decades of scholarship and philosophical questioning.3 And within Naturphilosophie more generally, the binary set up between nature and its recording (through human observation and transcription, via numbers, tables, charts, images, graphs, narrative logs, and of course “the note”) is what Daston equips us to question. In this essay, the “note,” and notation in more general terms (whether musical, mathematical, artistic or simply mnemonic) is humbly submitted to a brief Dastonian analysis, even as these human semiotic systems are themselves (especially in the case of the taking of notes) celebrated as a remarkable attribute of Daston’s own omnivorous and generous interest in what others have written or are saying, and how they have historically recorded it. Daston’s indefatigable longhand note-taking activity is itself remarkable in the early 21st century, reflected in her copious footnotes that have consistently trained light on past scholarship and indicated the way for future scholars.4 Meshes of notes are crucial to this ecosystem, but perhaps they are as endangered by today’s technologies as are the ocean’s coral colonies and clouds of arctic krill. Our students scan, make jpegs, do screen grabs, or take smartphone video and audio recordings. Most of us find ourselves in the position of Professor Hullah, finding it necessary to teach them “elegance and clearness” in notation practices, unfamiliar disciplines that involve specific rational systems for taking, archiving, and retrieving notes. The digital download, the searchable pdf, the sticky tab, the “scan to text” function all appear to obviate the note, but in fact these aids merely load up the hard drive without addressing the note’s traditional mnemonic function. One can wonder whether, by sidestepping the crucial relation of hand and eye to memory and knowledge production, these proliferating recording technologies even work as “notes” at all.

3 And this pressure is fueled by notes. The present theme arose from observing Daston’s tireless note-taking at every conference, lecture, or even informal talk, organized in pre-bound notebooks that might be chronological, or taken on pads of notepaper that are presumably torn off and filed in some other mnemonic system. 4 On the footnote, see the hilarious but sober account by Antony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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Such a curmugeonly caveat lector is not pursued here. What I want to explore instead is the function of the note in a variety of philosophical and creative systems, and its migration into text and art. I propose along the way that “the taking of the note” is a deliberative marker of intended memory, addressed to a forgetful future self. It signifies the hope that what is noticed and recorded at one moment will be remembered and retrieved in another—ultimately, to be redeployed in future technologies of the self. The “note” (from nota, mark or sign) is a minimal thing, a fragment or jotting that cannot be comprehended without an entire system of notation—however personal—that can anchor it into future meaning. That is the note’s raison d’etre: to be so modular that it can be gathered up for shuffling into any number of alternative orders, but to retain sufficient ties to its original context to maintain a basic legibility. This is how we might best think of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, before their posthumous collation. [fig. 1] Written on appalling bits of discarded paper that he then sewed together, they formed ratty bundles that could be called “codices” only with a full sense of compassion in play. Importantly, unlike the formal codex, they could be just as frequently un-tethered from their threads of continuity for shuffling differently once again. Each note is a thought, and that is how the Pensées came to be known. Prompted by the world, occasionally overheard in the coffeehouse, or more frequently bubbling up from this polymath’s own consciousness, Pascal’s notes had a talismanic function. They were surely related to catechistic practices, and as such were the kinds of technologies of the self I am proposing, gathering as they did the memories and bits of social and spiritual wisdom needed to constitute that self in the ongoing flow. Pascal’s notes were also hand-made relics radiant with religious inspiration—as with the “credo” of his own conversion that he scribbled onto a single half-sheet of foolscap and sewed into his overcoat, where it was found intact in the coat’s lining after his death. The conceit of the note is that it records the notable. (Yet of course it can be the very opposite—the laundry or marketing items that are so boring and unimportant we would otherwise forget them.) From the dross of everyday events, the murmur of the crowd, the drone of the sermon, and the blurring lines of text, some gem of wisdom glitters forth. Perhaps it links to something else in the auditor or reader’s own associative cognition. The note is “taken.” It is wrested from its context, and stored away for future access. Intentionally, the fragmentary note stands outside the composed treatise, and possibly even from the finished thought. We imagine it to be a gem not fully polished by its original wearer (we know its truer significance). Its status as a fragment or bit is precisely what is so delicious about it. The note promises to be extractable and combinable with other notes to form something massively coherent. Or, polemically, massive coherence can be deferred in favor of the glancing view, as in the desires of Walter Benjamin in his

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Fig. 1: a cache of notes taken by Blaise Pascal, collected posthumously into the Pensees.

decades-long Arcades Project of the 1930s. Here the assemblage of notes—quotations, oral anecdotes, news items, and passing observations—would produce the scintillating surface of modernity, a gossamer texture wafting on fleeting impressions, the basis for Benjamin’s adage that “To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.”5 Miraculously, the note is not used up in these processes of assemblage and recall. The note lives to ring again in another composition, where the forms in which it gets

5 Quoted by Richard Sieburth, fn 1 in Gary Smith, ed., Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983): 13.

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combined convey the consistency of an author’s style, the telltale timbre of a voice, or the pattern of characteristic concerns, despite being “taken” from outside the self. But although notes are taken, they are also given. They are funneled through the hand, eye, and mind of a past moment’s self, assembling authority from that past, to guide a future of self-fashioning yet to come. When we take a note, we always imagine we will read it later; or perhaps we realistically judge that merely by taking it we will give it a chance to stick in memory (where we can find it if we need it). Note to self: write this down, remember it later. Although remember is actually from “memor” (mindful) and “rememorari” (late Latin for “call to mind,”) I want to entertain the false etymology driven by that curious “b” contributed for no obvious reason by the old French: remembrer. Filed away (mentally and physically) for the later time when I will re-member the note, I imagine adding limbs (membres) to this fragment so that it can stand before me in some re-cognizable form, embodied once again, to remind me of the use I wanted to make of it in this future I was hoping would come. What do we make of the published note? Both Pascal and Benjamin had their endless notes published posthumously, the utopian shuffling and rearrangment of scintillating pensées stilled by death and sorted into comprehensibility by devoted editors and redacters, less noble publishers, printers, and survivors hungering for revenue in the wings. This is both a service and a violation; we take the bargain but should do so with the “cautionary note” in mind that such posthumous publication annihilates the note as such, by taming its mutable promise. For artists, this violence is understood as the price of the creative process, whereby the textual note and sketchbook jotting will always be taken as mere supplement, a necessary but subsidiary part in support of the “finished works” of visual art. Still, the note forms an increasingly crucial conceptual underwriting for contemporary artists’ mediated entry into Öffentlichkeit and the artworld that fuels it. A salient instance of the artistic note migrating from studio jotting to public manifesto (and, finally, onto the gallery walls) began in the studios of Germanborn artist Hans Haacke, first in Cologne in 1965, and then in New York where the artist moved that fall. The murky transition between meditation (pensée) and publication (manifesto) was there for Haacke from the beginning, as far as we can tell, since the earliest note he acknowledges writing was written in German in that Cologne studio to be immediately translated into English for publication in conjunction with the group exhibition NUL 1965 at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. The terse elegance of the note (it clocks in at 89 words, in English) belies the important role it was to play, since Haacke made it available for publication again by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology two years later, as he was

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preparing for an important one-person show that would be opening at the Institute in the fall of 1967. The designer of the poster for the show, Jackie Casey, turned Haacke’s note into a graphic element at the bottom of the image, [fig. 2] its original lines multiplied and migrated sideways to form a green fringe of words. The note thus became a kind of concrete poetry, wittily representing a piece Haacke was planning to premiere at MIT—Grass Growing (a mound of earth, seeded with fescue, which germinated, grew rapidly, and slowly faded through the duration of his Cambridge show). The notes from 1965 in their first published form read thus: … make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is non-stable … … make something indeterminate, which always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely … … make something which cannot “perform” without the assistance of its environment … … make something which reacts to light and temperature changes, is subject to air currents, and depends, in its functioning, on the forces of gravity … … make something which the “spectator” handles, with which he plays, and thus animates … … make something which lives in time and makes the “spectator” experience time … … articulate something Natural …6

Deferring for a moment question of what the “Natural” meant to Haacke in 1965 (and why it stayed capitalized, as in the original German), the directive quality of this note suggests its original private context.7 (It is the artist who is being told to make in these ways.) Yet there is, of course, a polemic as well. (All artists should make in these ways.)8 This renders, succinctly, the ambivalence of the “private” note for the public artist: the self-directive is always poised to become an impera-

6 Dated in his own files as “Cologne, Spring 1965,” this note was first written in German but published in English, March 1965 in NUL 1965 (exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1965). It was redacted slightly and republished as ornamental text repeating across the bottom of the poster for MIT’s exhibition of Haacke (otherwise untitled) in October 1967. On that poster, the word “experiences” was omitted; ellipses were converted to periods followed by caps. See fig. 2. 7 Yet Jasper Johns, that very same year, had published similar injunctives from his sketchbook in “Sketchbook Notes,” Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965): 191–92. The resemblance to Haacke’s statement is compelling, particularly in the case of one injunction that artists have taken to heart: “Take something. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Now do something else to it.” (Excerpt from the notebooks, ca. 1960). The currency of this directive can be gauged by its citation as the inspiration for a recent show at the New York gallery Freight + Volume, http://www. freightandvolume.com/exhibitions/2012-11-29_do-something-else-to-it/.) 8 Much would be revealed by discovering the verb form Haacke used in the original German— was it the du or Sie form?

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Fig. 2: Hans Haacke—Haacke Notes from 1965, as reproduced on the exhibition poster for his 1967 exhibition at MIT. Image courtesy of MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA

tive for the art world in general. The note, published, becomes a manifesto—equal parts personal credo of practice and a proscriptive conceptual command. Haacke’s situation in the fall of 1967 put even greater pressure on the private/ public trajectory of the note. Gearing up in his New York studio for the MIT exhibition and the audience he imagined it would address, the artist’s notes proliferated.9 The venue must have seemed daunting; unlike the small shows he had shared with others in the commercial space of Manhattan’s Howard Wise gallery, he would get the entire Hayden Gallery at MIT. Founded after the Second World War and first directed by second generation Bauhäusler Gyorgy Kepes, the 9 The extent of this note-making activity was unknown until recently, when these notations began to be collected and published by several curators and historians returning to Haacke’s early work. The first indication was in Edward Fry’s Hans Haacke: Werkmonographie (1972), then in the compilation for Hans Haacke: For Real (2007).

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gallery had recently been given a new curator who would ostensibly continue its postwar mission to inject humanist values into the juggernaut of military research that MIT had become.10 Yet Haacke’s show would radically alter the “humanist” project. His notes at the time record a distinctive personal transformation from a kinetic sculptor to a “systems artist.” This would have the effect of upending Kepes’s ameliorative humanism, putting in place a much more radical posthumanist subject. Recorded as an ambition (along the lines of “make something”) in the preliminary New York statements, the transformation became definitive in interviews with the student newspaper reporters once the fall exhibition opened. In these 1967 comments, Haacke emphasized that his work was no longer to be considered “sculpture” or even “kinetic sculpture.” It was now “better understood as a ‘system’ of interdependent processes”—resonating with the systems and cybernetics at MIT itself.11 The notes from New York are in many ways redundant, underscoring a kind of urgent, if fragmentary, set of injunctions that draw, again and again, the distinction between “traditional” art and the radical new mindset Haacke was instigating in his own conceptual practice. Above all, the notes were the site for a radical reconfiguration of the relation of the human to Nature, that most traditional function for art: A “sculpture” that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reaches beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a “system” of interdependent processes. These processes evolve without the viewer’s empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real.—Hans Haacke, New York, September 1967. [emphasis added]12

10 Kepes had been granted his dream of a new Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and the direction of the Hayden had been given to Wayne Andersen, an art historian hired around 1965 to teach in the Architecture Department. 11 From a statement cited as New York, September 1967, first published in the announcement for Haacke’s solo exhibition at Howard Wise Gallery, New York, January 13 to February 3, 1968. Note that systems are mentioned but not yet definitively connected to Haacke’s own work. That transition would be registered in Haacke’s direct statements to student reporter Peter Mechsler, “Haacke to Exhibit Kinetic Art,” The Tech, (MIT student newspaper) October 17, 1967, 5: “Haacke rejects the name ‘sculpture’ for his works. He calls them ‘systems,’ noting that they ‘have been produced with the explicit intention of having their components physically communicate with each other, and the whole communicate physically with the environment… . Changes are desired and are part of the program—they are not due to the shifting experience of the viewer.’” For further detail see Jones, Hans Haacke 1967 (Cambridge, MA: List Visual Art Center and MIT Press, 2011). 12 These statements were provided to the author in digital form by the artist and collected in Caroline A. Jones, Hans Haacke 1967 (Cambridge, MA: List Visual Art Center, 2011); they have not been verified by matching against paper copies from the 1960s.

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Haacke had been working through the premises of systems theory since 1961, reading the popularizing books by Norbert Wiener (who focused on mechanical systems in cybernetics) and Ludwig von Bertalanffy (who wanted to generalize from biology to categorize all systems).13 But it was only in the notes that the artist could conceptualize how these theories bore on his own practice. By the end of 1967, the note had become a thesis, recommending itself to others for general application to the brave new world of contemporary systems art: The physical self-sufficiency of such a system has a decisive effect on the viewer’s relationship to the work, due to its hitherto unknown independence from his mental involvement. […] there are systems which function properly even when the viewer is not present at all, i.e., their program operates absolutely independently of any contribution on the part of the viewer. [emphasis added.]

And further on in the same note: Whether the viewer’s physical participation is required or not, the system’s program is not affected by his knowledge, past experience, the mechanics of perceptual psychology, his emotions or degree of involvement. In the past, a sculpture or painting had meaning only at the grace of the viewer….Without his emotional and intellectual reactions, the material remained nothing but stone and fabric. The system’s program, on the other hand, is absolutely independent of the viewer’s mental participation. It remains autonomous—aloof from the viewer. As a tree’s program is not touched by the emotions of lovers in its shadow, so the system’s program is untouched by the viewer’s feelings and thoughts. The viewer becomes a witness rather than a resounding instrument striving for empathy.—Hans Haacke, New York, 1967.14

13 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine [1948] (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2nd ed., 1961); and in its English translation Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory, 1968. Although Bertalanffy’s earliest publications were in German, Haacke only knew them after coming to the US. See Bertalanffy, “ Der Organismus als physikalisches System betrachtet,” Die Naturwissenschaften, [1940] 28: 521–531); and “Zu einer allgemeinen Systemlehre,” Biologia Generalis, [1949] 19:114–129. Haacke had been introduced to systems theory by Jack Burnham, an artist, teacher, and critic he met in 1961. Burnham became an important early interpreter of Haacke’s work, and of systems art more generally. The earliest essay to be published on Haacke is Burnham’s obscure but crucial “Hans Haacke: Wind and Water Sculpture,” Tri-Quarterly Supplement (Northwestern University, 1967). Although this essay is not included, other systems art writings can be found in Jack Burham, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the meaning of Post-Formalist art (New York: Braziller, 1974). 14 Written in English but published only in German in Edward Fry, Hans Haacke: Werkmonographie (Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg 1972). Described as “previously unpublished”) in Walter Grasskamp, Molly Nesbit, and Jon Bird, Hans Haacke (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2004): 10; also in Jones, Hans Haacke 1967 (2011).

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In his extraordinary rejection of the humanist envelope that might have once connected the lovers to the trees or the wanderer to the mist (a strength of German Romanticism), Haacke plumped for a new neutral territory in which “something Natural” would be understood as entirely distinct from the human sphere. Far from our Victorian professor’s presumption that “coming naturally” would be the very expression of human innate capacities, Haacke reflects a different episteme in his increasingly public notes of ’65–67: there is Nature, there is a system that brackets it (as art), and there is the cool, detached human witness—who may or may not observe its autopoetic operations. The technology that loomed for Hullah as the standard for “clear and exacting” musical notation by the hand had now fully saturated the space between nature and the human, for Haacke. Certainly the hand no longer had anything to do with these artistic provocations, soon to be encompassed by the philosophical rubric of “Minimal” art and codified as objects shopped out for impersonal fabrication by others.15 The 1965 Condensation Cube was the summa of Haacke’s commitments at the time. Exhibited at MIT in a large version under the more associative title Weather Cube, it was meant to be seen—the artist insisted—as operating “absolutely independently of any contribution on the part of the viewer.” [fig. 3] The human authorizer of these forms (if Haacke once glued the Plexiglas himself, he didn’t need to for the work to be “his”) began to assert a confidence in his public statements that detach them from the realm of the “note” altogether. Their embedded notations (of something like Bertalanffy) are transmogrified, emerging as decisive directives to the standard “nature lover” in the art world: “The process of condensation does not end. The box has a constantly but slowly changing appearance which never repeats itself. The conditions are comparable to a living organism which reacts in a flexible manner to its surroundings. The image of condensation cannot be precisely predicted. It is changing freely, bound only by statistical limits.”16

15 Works initially proposed as “systems art” were eventually encompassed by other rubrics, sometimes “Process Art” but more frequently the larger phenomenon of Minimal Art, named following Richard Wollheim’s essay of the same title in 1965. See James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). On the industrial aesthetic of this period, see my Machine in the Studio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 16 New York, October 1965, written in German but first published in French in Robho (Paris), no. 2 (November/December 1967). First English publication in Hans Haacke: Obra Social (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1995); see also Jones, Hans Haacke 1967 (2011).

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Fig. 3: Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, Large Version, 1967.

Note: This may be the first time statistically limited processes would be boxed as art. Daston describes the important moment in the history of probability when “Classical probabilists were briefly able to reconcile the subjective and objective facets of probability through an appeal to the theories of psychology and epistemology advanced by philosophers such as John Locke, David Hartley, and David Hume.” [emphasis added]17 The Associationists made the “characteristic blurring between subjective and objective probabilities tolerable”—but such tolerance would be impossible in the frame of cybernetics and systems-thinking that Haacke was inhabiting in 1967; we are in the episteme of mechanical objectivity that explicitly excludes the human subject.18 Even the “statistical limits” on the fluctuations of climate in these magical artworks were held to contain no calculation for the human—the warm, moist, heat-generating animals bringing their own temperature into the gallery enveloping the conceptually black-boxed transparent cubes. I’ve argued elsewhere that the turn to systems was, for Haacke, an ascetic hygiene defending against the horrific corruptions of

17 Daston, Classical Probability (1988): 191. 18 Ibid., 189. For mechanical objectivity, see Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

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humanism that had governed his childhood under National Socialism.19 While his teachers had rushed to the opposite end of the pendulum after the war was over, embracing “Entartete Kunst” and returning to a deeply humanist discourse of expressionism and existential action, their young student moved across the ocean and took a very different set of notes in the “cool scene” of downtown Manhattan: The working premise is to think in terms of systems; the production of systems, the interference with and the exposure of existing systems. […] In all cases verifiable processes are referred to.20

Statistical probability and verifiable processes would direct a new kind of subject, crafted through the taking and making of notes. It was short-lived, this clinically detached subject. For Haacke, non-humanism would unravel in the years 1967–70, but not to embrace the old forms. The events that began to unfold almost immediately after his show at MIT (where student protests against the war in Vietnam forced the Institute to move proprietary military research off campus, for example, and Haacke helped found the agitating Art Workers Coalition in New York) led to a profound insight—“the system” needed to include “the social”—but it was a sociality bounded by statistics, just as the weather had been. The first full-blown articulation of the new position would be an extraordinary set of notes, pure “verifiable processes” of capitalism, the “exposure of an existing system” in over a hundred note cards recording data taken from public records, typewritten, and framed together with photographs of specific pieces of decaying real estate in New York’s slums. This would be the incendiary work that forced the cancellation of Haacke’s planned retrospective at the New York Guggenheim Museum, and the inauguration of “institutional critique” in the artworld. When it was shown in a gallery downtown in 1972, it was titled Schapolsky et al., Manhattan Real-Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971.21 [fig. 4] The note was finally

19 Most succinctly, in Jones, Hans Haacke 1967 (2011). 20 Hans Haacke, New York, 1969, first published in Hans Haacke [Exhibition Announcement] Howard Wise Gallery, New York, November 1969. 21 When the (German) director of the Guggenheim, Thomas Messer, became aware of the Schapolsky work and suggested that he would prefer if Haacke didn’t include it, the artist refused. The show was cancelled, the curator resigned, and the affair became both the launching grounds for Haacke’s reputation as the originator of institutional critique and his fate as anathema to the New York art market. The work is now jointly held by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, whose website describes it as: “142 photographs of buildings, accompanied by typewritten sheets with different data on the property such as its address, the type of building, the size of the lot, date of acquisition, owner, or its assessed land

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exhibited as art, and thus no longer as notes—just as centuries of commentary once silently scripted themselves into Torah and Bible, and “Scripture became its own interpreter.”22 The note’s victory is its annihilation.

Fig. 4: Hans Haacke, installation view of Schapolsky et al., Manhattan Real-Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971.

value.” www.macba.cat/en/shapolsky-et-al-manhattan-real-estate-holdings-a-real-time-socialsystem-as-of-may-1-1971-3102, Accessed January 2014. 22 Anthony Grafton, The Footnote (1997): 27, reporting on the scholarship of Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1985).

M. Norton Wise

Epilogue: “Man, That Woman Can Talk!” The first time I saw Lorraine Daston I was sitting in the big lecture hall at the ZIF in Bielefeld at the start of the great year organized by Lorenz Krüger, which produced The Probabilistic Revolution (1987). I no longer recall what she was talking about—probably her proposed project for the year—but I remember vividly her speaking informally in entire paragraphs of eloquent prose and my saying to myself “Man, that woman can talk.” She still can. At the ZIF it did not take long to realize that behind the talent for talking lay a formidable intellect as its source, regularly displayed in the weekly meetings of the probability group. As one of its younger members, she was always ready to take on big topics in a tough-minded, incisive manner and from perspectives informed by an already vast storehouse of historical knowledge: What is probabilism, why did it take off only in the 19th century, how did the relation of individual reason to social regularities evolve, why did Laplacian probability decline? Her capacity to engage with probabilistic reasoning across fields from philosophy to economics, evolutionary biology to physics, made her an ideal discussant. Of course she was also in the midst of writing her own big book on Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988). In retrospect, that book displays the enduring characteristics of her subsequent work: a constant fascination with modes of thinking and knowing (or epistemology) and a deep love for the history of ideas. Together those two concentrations produced a rich cultural history of how probabilistic reasoning came to seem the proper expression of good judgment, or the balance of reason, in the Enlightenment. Of course the history of ideas had by then lost its cachet in the history of science, which makes it all the more remarkable that Daston’s determined pursuit of her passion, while calling herself a “dinosaur” of the history of ideas, captivated her peers and brought her the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society in 1989. A very agile dinosaur indeed.

Historicity The probability book, conceived as a cultural history of rationality, already made another of Daston’s sustained commitments abundantly clear. Throughout her career she has been exploring the essential historicity of all knowledge, not simply in the sense that what people have believed about the world can only be understood historically (as in most post-Kuhnian history of science), but that our

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very categories of understanding are historical. Moving systematically from one category to another and in multiple contexts, she and her associates have taken up rationality, facts, objectivity, law, observation, data. It seems quite natural, therefore, that when in 1992 the Max Planck Society was considering an Institute for History of Science in Berlin, and a conception of its research orientation was desired, she proposed a phrase then acquiring currency, “historical epistemology.”1 The phrase stuck and quickly acquired a life of its own when the Institute opened. Subsequently, the three directors have pursued in their sections quite different, if largely complementary, versions of the project. For Jürgen Renn it has involved following out the stages of long-term development of a science, from practical tools to abstract concepts. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has concentrated instead on the micro-dynamics of experimental systems, through which “epistemic things” become objects of knowledge. Daston herself has continued to focus on the historicity of the categories of knowledge. In all of these versions, historical epistemology has provided immensely productive and illuminating orientations for research. In relation to the historicity of these epistemological pursuits, I want to take up another of Daston’s creations at the Institute, one that in my mind may be her most valuable contribution to the history of science more generally and should be widely adopted. It is the “working group volume.” These volumes address two desiderata: to build into the writing process the coherence lacking in most edited collections, and to exploit the potential for joint work, for exciting the creative imagination of people who engage with each others’ perspectives on a common theme. The published volumes are thus greater than the sum of their parts, representing the collective work of a group of people meeting together over an extended period (perhaps reflecting the probability year at the ZIF). These volumes have become an institution at the Institute. Daston has used them to explore topics that have seemed either strange or self-evident and would not normally be taken up by individuals. Her aim has not been to provide exhaustive analysis or to establish definitive positions but rather to open up multiple facets of newly invigorated subjects. I will illustrate the result with two successive volumes, both dealing with the historical metaphysics of “objects” or “things” and especially with their materiality. The first was not yet quite a working group volume, since the mutual

1 She had used the phrase previously to describe Ian Hacking’s type of history, in “Historical Epistemology,” in James Chandler, et al. (eds.), Questions of Evidence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 282–289. Google Ngrams for “historical epistemology” indicate that its usage in English, as in French, began about 1960, no doubt following Gaston Bachelard, and rose steeply through 1980, when it leveled off in French but in English had doubled by 2000.

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reinforcement largely followed in the wake of a more traditional conference, while the second involved much more extended interaction. Both, however, reflect what seems a prerequisite: an intellectual coordinator with a sharp and capacious analytic eye.

Biographies of Scientific Objects For a dinosaur of the history of ideas, a deep participation in the turn to materiality that swept through the history of science in the 1980s and 90s might seem improbable. But perhaps we should keep in mind that dinosaurs were a diverse lot that would give rise to soaring and singing birds, as well as crocodiles. Although Daston was not among the first to begin stressing materiality, she turned the issues in creative directions. An example is the volume on Biographies of Scientific Objects (2000). While others were busy with the materiality of practice—with machines and instruments, inscriptions, exchange networks, model organisms, experimental systems, and much else—Daston’s sense for the historicity of all things led her to take up explicitly the inherent temporality of scientific objects, not only conceptual but also material. Not that such temporality was new. But she saw the issues from a broad perspective and brought together a group of historians of various persuasions who could reflect perceptively on them. Both Bruno Latour and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, for example, brought to the volume their conceptions, respectively, of networks growing by multiplication of connections through time and of experimental systems as generators of the future. But it was Daston’s imagination that brought their perspectives into immediate relation with such surprising objects as dreams, monsters (her own object), the self, society, culture, and mortality, not to mention mathematical entities and the luminiferous ether. Although all of these objects had been thought of as having unique histories, it had not been usual to talk of their “life histories” or of their “biographies.” Biographies include birth and death, under particular circumstances at particular times, or as the volume put it, the “coming into being and passing away of scientific objects.” Thus the volume problematized, and asked the reader to reflect on, the notion of biography as applied to things. One immediate effect of this biographical focus, as of temporality more generally, was to make the history of “real” objects look very like the history of ideas, and to bring the idea and the real into intimate relation. That made the question one of ontology, of what is real, or what we mean by real, and Daston guided her contributors into a set of productive reflections on that question. She did so by—crucially—turning at right angles to the realist/constructivist debate that had been taking up so much space,

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observing that the history of practice requires an ontology of practice, or an applied metaphysics, one that investigates what it is that makes things real for practicing scientists. In these terms scientific objects are both “real and historical.” Dreams, for example, were neither discovered nor invented by late 18th century psychiatrists, but they acquired at that time enhanced salience, productivity, and meaning, and therefore more reality as a matter of experience and therapeutic intervention. Similarly, the luminiferous ether was an indubitable reality for 19th century physicists, not least because it provided the material foundation for all attempts to understand the wave nature of light in mechanical terms. But it could also pass away, even as it gave rise to new practical realities. In practice, that is, the reality of scientific objects is a historical matter and a matter of degree. Daston’s provocative juxtaposition of unusual kinds of scientific objects challenged historians and philosophers to produce a positive ontology of such historical things.2 Perhaps a full working group volume could have moved further in that direction.

Things that Talk What Daston and her group did not do in this initial foray into the domain of things was to explore the question and the character of their active agency. But the lacuna was only temporary. She soon acted once again as the coordinating intellectual glue for a small group of historians of science and art (myself included) who wanted to think about the action of specifically material things in relation to people. Once again the temporality of things dissolved the usual dichotomies of natural/artificial and discovered/invented. In practice, whether in art or science, things straddle those divides. But with the focus on the interaction of things with people, the intersection of “real and historical” became the intersection of “material and meaningful.” I do not now recall how the group came up with the title for the collaboration, Things that Talk (2004); very likely “talking” came from the most eloquent among us, with her unswerving humanistic orientation. If the signature achievement of humans in communicating with each other is speech, what can we say of our communication with the things about which and through which we constantly talk? In any case, our freewheeling deliberations and presentations to each other over the course of a year were always

2 See Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Theodore Arabatzis, Representing Electrons: A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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steered within manageable bounds by Daston’s encompassing but focusing intellect. What is a thing? “A medium-sized dry good,” said Simon Schaffer, putting ironic point to the unanswerable question. So we all simply chose a thing, a relatively circumscribed thing with some internal coherence or unity: soap bubbles, a Bosch drawing, evidentiary photographs, collages of clippings, glass flowers (Daston’s thing), an island garden, Rorshach’s ink blots, the neo-classical column, and the interpreted visibility of a Pollack painting. Only in the radical diversity of things was it possible to explore their thingness, and indeed their capacity to talk. How can a thing talk? In what sense? Things do not literally speak, any more than they have intentions, but they do convey meanings. Most obviously they reflect back the interpretations that we project upon them. They also speak for themselves, through their own properties and behaviors, whether as constraints on our conceptions and actions or in suggesting positive heuristics. But it is the interaction of these two modes of talking, autonomously and interactively, that makes things historically interesting. Their expressiveness depends on the richness of meanings, and of possible meanings, that they are able to embody at a particular time and place. The talkativeness of things, that is, like a degree of reality, is a direct measure of how deeply they are embedded in history. Which returns us to practical metaphysics, but in a different register, with more attention to how we know things over time than only to their changing reality. This I take to be a continuing challenge for historical epistemology: how do we communicate with things? Through her leadership in organizing Things that Talk, Daston opened up that question to productive new modes of exploration, in which history of science converses openly with art history and both seek to expand the bounds of philosophy. The working group volume makes this sort of conversation a reality. So I return full circle. Whenever I think of Daston, I think of how profound eloquence actually is, and of how deeply historical it can be, whether in reference to a working group, a thing, or Lorraine Daston herself.

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Recessional Poem: “Josefa de Ayala/Josepha von Óbidos (1630–1684): Stilleben, ca. 1660–1670” (Öl auf Leinwand, 540 x 1080 mm, Lissabon, Privatsammlung G. C.)

Einfach so auf den Küchentisch gestellt, das alles. Keinerlei Raffinesse in der Anordnung. Nichts dergleichen. Wer sie kennt, diese glatten, olivenfarbenen Feigen der sieht: die da in der Mitte liegen, die zwei, sie sind reif und butterweich mit ihren Haarrissen auf dünner Haut. Aber in ihrer ganzen Zentralität sind sie das Marginale. Das Bild hat keine Mitte. Und es lebt davon. Das Licht fällt auf den Weidenkorb, im Kreuz geflochten der überquillt von Kirschen, die Stängel streng und spielerisch nach oben. Sie haben gar nicht alle in ihm Platz. Ein zierlicher Keramikteller fasst den Rest. Links türmen sich die weißen Käseballen. Die Silberschale hält sie dicht beisammen, das fahle Gegenstück zum Leuchten der Cerisen. Das lässt sein Licht auf einen irdenen Krug und eine kleine Schale fallen, gefüllt mit crème brulée. Ah, wäre doch ein Löffel da! Den Hals des Henkeltopfes ziert ein Farngebinde das sich um den konkaven Deckel mit dem Zapfen legt. Dies Zeichen jener feuchten Schluchtenhänge, hinter die zurückgezogen du an diesen Bildern maltest, weht vom gesamten Hintergrund herein ins Bild verziert die Kirschen wie den Käse. Überall ist Óbidos.

Contributors Andrew Abbott teaches sociology at the University of Chicago. Known for studies of the professions, Abbott also pioneered algorithmic analysis of social sequence data. He has written on the foundations of methodology and on the evolution of the social sciences, the academic system, and research libraries. He is currently writing on the future of knowledge. His other projects include a work of general social theory. He has written two texts, one on social science heuristics and another on library research. Horst Bredekamp is an art historian who has been a Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, since 2003. Since 2008 he has directed the “Picture Art and Embodment” project at the Humboldt University, Berlin. In 2007 he published Galilei der Künstler. Der Mond, die Sonne, die Hand, based on a newly discovered edition of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, with ink drawings by Galileo; this edition was later discovered to be a forgery. Caroline Walker Bynum is professor emerita of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study and University Professor emerita at Columbia University. Her most recent book, Christian Materiality (Zone Books, 2011), is an interpretive essay in art history and history of science as well as religious history. She is currently pursuing a comparison between the treatment of devotional statues in late medieval Christianity and in the Hinduism of medieval India; she is also working on devotional objects in women’s cloisters in fifteenth-century Germany. Nancy Cartwright is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University in the UK and the University of California at San Diego. At Durham she co-directs CHESS, the Centre for the Humanities Engaging Science and Society, which aims “to promote knowledge for use.” She previously worked at the University of Maryland, Stanford University and the London School of Economics and was a part of the Probabilistic Revolution project at ZiF in Bielefeld with Lorraine Daston and other historians, philosophers and scientists. Deborah R. Coen is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science, and where she is on the faculty boards of the Blinken European Institute and the new Center for Science and Society. She has taught at Barnard since 2006, and before that she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is the author of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007), which won, among other awards, the Austrian Cultural Forum’s book prize, and of The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (2013). She has been on the editorial board of Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society, and is currently on the board of Modern Intellectual History.

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Wendy Doniger [O’Flaherty] graduated from Radcliffe College and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her D. Phil. from Oxford University. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and the author of over forty books, most recently The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was, The Hindus: An Alternative History, On Hinduism, and Hinduism in the Norton Anthology of World Religions. Rivka Feldhay is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Cohn Institute and head of the Minerva Humanities Center, both at Tel Aviv University. She has written on knowledge, religion and politics in the early modern period; intellectual currents in the Renaissance; Copernicus and Galileo in context; science education in Catholic Europe; Baroque culture and the New Science. In the context of her work on migrating knowledge, she lately focused on migrants and their knowledges in the Israeli case. Peter Galison is the Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University and Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. His main work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. Author of several books in the history of science, of particular relevance for this volume is his book (with Lorraine Daston), Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007) which asks how visual representation shaped the concept of scientific objectivity, and how atlases of scientific images continue, even today, to rework what counts as right depiction. His current work (“Building Crashing Thinking”) tracks the way technology restructures the self. Galison has co-written and co-produced documentary films on the politics of science, including Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma (2000, with Pamela Hogan); Secrecy (2008, with Robb Moss); and, in preparation, Containment (2014) on the confinement of radiological materials. Daniel Garber is Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Garber’s principal interests are the relations between philosophy, science, and society in the period of the Scientific Revolution. He is currently working on a variety of topics, including studies of Aristotelianism and its opponents in early seventeenth-century Europe. In addition, he is the editor-in-chief of a new edition of the works of the seminal seventeenth-century thinker, Jacobus Fontialis. Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at Cambridge where he is also Director of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, and the John Harvard Professor in the Humanities. His book Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton, 2011) won the Robert Lowry Patten Prize for the outstanding book on Victorian Literature (2012), and his book Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford, 2012) won the Runciman Prize (2013) for the best book on a Greek subject, ancient or modern.

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Contributors

Michael D. Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporaryc History at Princeton University. His research concentrates on the history of modern science (especially chemistry) and cultural history (especially of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union). He is the author of five monographs: A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (Basic Books, 2004); Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton, 2007); Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (2009); The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (Chicago, 2012); and Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (Chicago, 2015). Together with Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, and Thomas Sturm, he is a co-author of How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago, 2013). Gerald Holton is Professor of Physics and of History of Science (Emeritus) at Harvard University. His main interests are the history and philosophy of science, physics, education, and the careers of young persons. His published books include Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, Einstein, History and other Passions, Science and Anti-Science, The Project Physics Course, Who Succeeds in Science–the Gender Dimension, and What Happened to the Children who fled Nazi Persecution. His memberships in professional societies include the American Philosophical Society and the Leopoldina Akademie. He was founding editor of two quarterlies, Daedalus and Science, Technology, and Human Values, and he served on the Editorial Board of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Among his honors are the Sarton Medal and the Republic of Austria’s Ehrenkreuz. Amy Edith Johnson is a member of the Society of Senior Scholars at Columbia University, where she teaches undergraduates. With a B.A. from Radcliffe (1968, magna cum laude), a BA from Cambridge (First Class Honours), both in English, and a Ph.D., from Harvard (in Comparative Literature), she has taught English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University since 1978. Caroline A. Jones is Professor of Art History in the History, Theory, Criticism program at MIT. She studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception; her books include Sensorium (as editor, 2006), Eyesight Alone (2005/08), Machine in the Studio (1996/98), and the co-edited volume Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998). Jones’s next book, The Global Work of Art, attempts to return the word “work” to its function as a verb, and situates art’s working in world’s fairs, national pavilions, and biennial culture. Philip Kitcher was born in 1947 in London (U.K.). He received his B.A. from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He has taught at several American Universities, and is currently John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia. He is the author of books on topics ranging from the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of biology, the growth of science, the role of

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science in society, and naturalistic ethics, to Wagner’s Ring and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He has been President of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) and Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy of Science. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was also the first recipient of the Prometheus Prize, awarded by the American Philosophical Association for work in expanding the frontiers of Science and Philosophy. He has been named a “Friend of Darwin” by the National Committee on Science Education, and received a Lannan Foundation Notable Book Award for Living With Darwin. In 2011, he published two books: Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books) and The Ethical Project (Harvard University Press). During 2011–12, he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he was partially supported by a prize from the Humboldt Foundation. His collection of essays, Preludes to Pragmatism, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press, and Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach appeared from Columbia University Press in 2013. His Terry Lectures were published in 2014 as Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism. Glenn W. Most studied Classics and Comparative Literature in Europe and the United States, and has taught at the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Siena, Innsbruck, Heidelberg, and Paris. Since 1996 he has been a Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and since 2001 he has been simultaneously Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; recently he became an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He has published and edited books on Classics, on the history and methodology of Classical studies, on the Classical tradition and Comparative Literature, on literary theory, and on the history of art, and has published numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and also on modern philosophy and literature. Most recently he has co-edited a general guide to the reception of ancient Greek and Roman culture and a thorough revision of the most widely used translations of Greek tragedy; among his projects for the coming years are a four-volume Greek and English Loeb edition of the Presocratic philosophers, a bilingual edition of the complete corpus of ancient and mediaeval scholia and commentaries to Hesiod’s Theogony, and a volume comparing philological techniques in a variety of Western and Eastern traditions. Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Studies at the University of British Columbia. She works in the history of China, of science and medicine, and of translation and knowledge exchange. Her first book, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009) was a study of belief-making in early modern Chinese natural history through the lens of the Bencao gangmu (1596), a compendium of materia medica. Her current research focuses on the cultures and practices of translation across early modern Eurasia. Focusing on the Ming and Qing contexts from the 15th–19th centuries, it attempts to understand what they have looked like throughout early modernity and how people have decide that something was equivalent or identical to something else. Nappi also hosts two podcast channels, New Books in East Asian

258

Contributors

Studies (http://newbooksineastasianstudies.com/) and New Books in Science, Technology, and Society (http://newbooksinscitechsoc.com/). Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum, Berlin. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität Berlin, and taught philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Evil in Modern Thought, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists and Why Grow Up? Dominique Pestre (born in 1950) is a historian of science. He is director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and has been director of the Centre de recherche en histoire des sciences et des techniques de La Villette and the Centre Alexandre Koyré (CNRS-EHESS). His work bears particularly on the history of sciences and technologies, the great scientific systems of the 20th century, the interaction of science and the military world, the study of scientific knowledge systems that developed after the 1950s, the study of scientific controversies, and the general sociology of science. He was editor of Science in the XXth Century and scientific advisor for the Dictionnaire culturel des sciences. He is also the author of works on physics in France in the 20th century and co-author of a Histoire du Centre européen de la recherche nucléaire. He presides over the Committee for the History of Armament (CHARME). David Nirenberg is Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Dean of the Social Sciences Division, and Founding Director of the University’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. His books have focused on how Jewish, Christian, and Islamic societies have interacted with and thought about each other. These include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996), Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), and Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014), and Aesthetic Theology and its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (2015). His piece in this collection, “Love=,” grows from the confluence of two other projects. The first is a study of love in the three religions. The second is a collaboration with a mathematician (his father) on a book exploring the various types of sameness that underpin the relative claims of different forms of knowledge, in the hope of discovering new ways of understanding both the powers and the limits of the sciences and the humanities. Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at The University of Chicago. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and Trinity College, Hartford, and is the author of over 20 books on Kant, Hegel, Henry James, Nietzsche, Modernism, and Hollywood films.

Contributors

259

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, b. 1946, is a molecular biologist and historian of science. He studied philosophy, linguistics, and biology in Tübingen and Berlin. From 1997 to 2014 he was Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Among his publications are: Toward a History of Epistemic Things (Stanford 1997), Epistemology of the Concrete (Durham 2010), On Historicizing Epistemology (Stanford 2010), and A Cultural History of Heredity (with Staffan Müller-Wille, Chicago 2012). Robert J. Richards is the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science at the University of Chicago and professor in the departments of history, philosophy, and psychology. He is the author most recently of The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (2008) and Was Hitler a Darwinian? Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (2013). Ingrid Rowland is a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Rome campus and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Her most recent book is From Pompeii: the Afterlife of a Roman Town. Silvan (Sam) Schweber is the Koret Professor of the History of Ideas and Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Brandeis University. Since the early 1980s, he has been an associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is at work completing the second volume of a biography of Hans Bethe, which is also a history of theoretical physics in the twentieth century. David Shulman is Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A specialist in south Indian languages and cultures, he is also an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab-Israeli Partnership. His true passion is for Carnatic music. Marina Warner writes cultural history and fiction. Her most recent publications include Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2011) and Once Upon a Time: A Short HIstory of Fairy Tale (2014). She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. William C. Wimsatt is emeritus professor of philosophy and of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, and Winton Chair of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. His research and writing center on a cluster of problems arising in the analysis of the structure, behavior, and evolution of complex, functionally organized systems, model-building, and on inferential robustness and generative entrenchment in biological, technological and cultural systems. His views are summarized in his Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings (Harvard 2007). He was awarded the David Hull medal of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science in 2013 and is a fellow of the American Association for the

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Contributors

Advancement of Science, and the recipient of awards for curriculum innovation (for BioQuest software) and outstanding graduate teaching. His interests in science fiction and philosophy of mind date to a course he has taught since 1982. Matthew Norton Wise has 2 Ph.D.s, in experimental nuclear physics (Washington State University, 1968) and history of science (Princeton, 1977). At present he is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles. He works on topics from the late 18th century to the present, specializing in the history of physics and paying particular attention to the relations between science and industrialization. More recently he has been contributing to the historiographical development of the cultural history of science, exploring the ways in which major developments in the sciences emerge from intensely local and contingent circumstances.

Curriculum Vitae of Lorraine Daston Current Positions Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany (1995–) Visiting Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago (2005–) Permanent Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2008–) Honorary Professor, Seminar für Kulturwissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (1997–) Research Associate, Department of History, University of Chicago (1997–)

Past Employment Professor, History/History of Science, University of Chicago (1992–97) Professor and Director, Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Georg-August Universität, Göttingen, Federal Republic of Germany (1990–1992) Associate Professor, History/History of Science, Brandeis University, Dibner Chair for the History of Science (1986–1990) Assistant Professor, History/History of Science, Princeton University (1983–1986) Assistant Professor, History of Science, Harvard University (1980–1983)

Visiting Positions Maître de conférences invité, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (March, 1988) Visiting Professor, Institut für Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsforschung, University of Vienna (Spring, 1989) Directeur d’études invité, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (April 1992, March 1997, March 2000, January 2008) Visiting Professor, Committee on Social Thought and Department of History, University of Chicago (October-December 1998, 2005–) Visiting Professor, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University (2002–3)

Distinguished Lectureships (until July, 2012) Isaiah Berlin Lecturer in the History of Ideas, Oxford University (April-May 1999) Leibniz Lectures, Universität Hannover (Summer Semester 2000) Tanner Lectures, Harvard University (November 2002) History of Science Society Distinguished Lecture (November 2002)

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Church Lecture in Early Modern History, Brown University (November 2003) West Lectures, Stanford University (February 2005) Una’s Lecture, University of California at Berkeley (April 2011)

Education B. A. 1973 Harvard University (summa cum laude), History and Science Diploma 1974 University of Cambridge, History and Philosophy of Science (The Diploma is the approximate equivalent of an American Master’s degree, requiring a year of graduate course work and a thesis.) Ph D. 1979 Harvard University, History of Science

Honors and Fellowships (through 2013) Sigma Xi, 1972 Phi Beta Kappa, 1972 National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1973–76 Schuman Prize, History of Science Society, 1975 (for best student essay on science and its cultural relations) Arthur Lehman Graduate Fellowship 1977–78 Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, 1979–80, Columbia University Clark Fund Research Grant, Harvard University, 1981 Research Fellow, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung, University of Bielefeld, 1982–3 National Endowment for the Humanities, Travel to Collections Grant, 1984 Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Study Grant, 1984 Howard Foundation Fellowship, 1985–86 Alexander Humboldt Stipendium, 1986–7 Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Fellow, 1987–8 Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 1989–90 Pfizer Prize, History of Science Society (for best book by a North American author in the History of Science in the previous three years), 1989 National Science Foundation Scholar’s Grant, 1990 Research Fellow, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung, Universität Bielefeld, 1991–92 Guggenheim Fellowship, 1994–95 Pfizer Prize, History of Science Society (with Katharine Park; for best book by a North American author in the History of Science in the previous three years), 1999 Bainton Prize, Sixteenth Century Studies Conference (with Katharine Park, for best book in area History and Theology), 1999 Book prize “Das Historische Buch 2008/Offene Kategorie” (with Peter Galison, for Objectivity), 2007 Fellow, Siemens-Stiftung, Munich, 2009, 2011 Orden pour le Mérite, Federal Republic of Germany, 2010 Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Großem Stern, Federal Republic of Germany, 2010

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Fellow, Institut des études avancées, Paris, 2010 Inaugural Humanitas Professor in the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford, 2013.

Membership in Academies American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow, 1993– Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998– Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina, 2002– Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, Paris, 2006– British Academy, Corresponding Member, 2010–

Membership in Professional Societies History of Science Society American Historical Association Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik e.V.

Publications: Books (with Lorenz Krüger and Michael Heidelberger, eds.) The Probabilistic Revolution. Vol. I: Ideas in History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). Recipient of American Association of Scholarly Publishers Award for best book in Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 1987. Translated into Japanese. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Recipient of the Pfizer Prize, History of Science Society, 1989. (with G. Gigerenzer et al.) The Empire of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). German translation: (with G. Gigerenzer et al.) Das Reich des Zufalls. Wissen zwischen Wahrscheinlichkeiten, Häufigkeiten und Unschärfen (Heidelberg, Berlin: Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 1999). (with Katharine Park) Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998). Recipient of Pfizer Prize, History of Science Society, 1999; Bainton Prize (History and Theology) of Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, 1999. Translated into Italian, 2000; translated into German, 2002. (ed.) Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit (München: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2001). Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen. Zur Geschichte der Rationalität (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001). (with Gianna Pomata, eds.) The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe (Berlin: BWV Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag GmbH, 2003).

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(with Fernando Vidal, eds.) The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). (ed.) Things that Talk. Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004). (with Gregg Mitman, eds.) Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). (with Christoph Engel, eds.) Is There Value in Inconsistency? (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2006). (with Katharine Park, eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). (with Peter Galison) Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Recipient of prize “Das Historische Buch 2008/Offene Kategorie”. Translated into German, 2007; translations into French, Japanese, and Polish underway. (with Michael Stolleis, eds.) Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2008). (with Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds.) Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). (with Paul Erikson, Judy L. Klein, Rebecca M. Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin) How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold war Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Articles and Book Chapters (through July 2011) 1. “British Reactions to Psycho-Physiology: 1860–1900,” Isis v. 69(1978): 192–208. 2. “D’Alembert’s Critique of Probability Theory,” Historia Mathematica v. 6 (1979): 259–79. 3. “Prudence and Equity: Expectation in Classical Probability Theory,” Historia Mathematica v. 7 (1980): 234–60. 4. “Mathematics and the Moral Sciences: The Rise and Fall of the Probability of Judgments, 1785–1840,” in: H.N. Jahnke and M. Otte, eds. Epistemological and Social Problems of the Sciences in the Early Nineteenth Century (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1981): 287–309. 5. (with Katharine Park), “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in 16th and 17th Century France and England,” Past and Present, no. 92 (August, 1981): 20–54. Translated into Japanese. 6. “The Theory of Will versus the Science of Mind,” in: M. Ash and W. Woodward, eds. Psychology in 19th Century Thought: International Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1982): 88–115. 7. “Rational Individuals versus Laws of Society: From Probability to Statistics,” in: M. Heidelberger, L. Krüger and R. Rheinwald, eds. Probability Since 1800. Interdisciplinary Studies of Scientific Development (Bielefeld: B.K. Verlag, 1983): 7–26. 8. “Folklore and Natural History,” The Harvard Advocate, v. CXVII: no. 3A, Autumn 1983. 9. “Sweet Reason. Essay Review of Philip Kitcher, The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge,” Isis 75 (1984): 717–721. 10. “Galilean Analogies: Imagination at the Bounds of Sense,” Isis v. 75 (1985): 302–310. 11. (with Katharine Park), “Hermaphrodites in: Renaissance France,” Critical Matrix 1 (1985): 1–19. 12. “The Physicalist Tradition in Early Nineteenth-Century French Geometry,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science v. 17 (1986): 269.

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13. “The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance, 1650–1830,” in: Lorenz Krüger, et al. eds. The Probabilistic Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987): 237–260. 14. “Fitting Numbers to the World,” in: P. Kitcher and W. Aspray, eds., Essays in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988): 221–237. 15. “The Factual Sensibility: Essay Review on O. Impey and A. MacGregor, Origins of Museums,” Isis 79 (1988): 452–470. 16. “L’Interprétation classique du calcul des probabilités,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations (mai-juin 1989): 715–731. 17. “Weibliche Intelligenz: Geschichte einer Idee,” in: Jahrbuch des Wissenschaftskollegs zu Berlin,1987/88 (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1989): 213–229. 18. “Scientific Neutrality and Nationalism under Napoleon,” in: T. Frangsmyr, ed. Solomon’s House Revisited, (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1990): 95–119. 19. “Perché la teoria della probabilità aveva bisogno del determinismo:le origini,” Intersezioni 10 (1990): 541–562 (Italian version of Nr. 27). 20. “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,” Science in Context 4 (1991): 367–386. 21. “History of Science in an Elegiac Mode: E.A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science Revisited,” Isis 82 (1991): 522–531. 22. “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93–124; reprinted in James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence. Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 243–274. 23. “Probability,” in: John Yolton, ed. Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991): 424–427. 24. “Classifications of Knowledge in the Age of Louis XIV,” in: David Rubin, ed. The Ascendancy of French Culture in the Age of the Sun King (Washington/London/Toronto: Folger Shakespeare Library and Associated University Presses, 1992): 207–220. 25. “Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity,” Annals of Scholarship 8 (1991): 337–363, reprinted in Allan Megill, ed., Rethinking Objectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 26. “Wunder, Naturgesetze und die wissenschaftliche Revolution des 17. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (1991): 99–122. 27. “The Doctrine of Chances without Chance: Determinism, Mathematical Probability, and Quantification in the Seventeenth Century,” in: Mary Jo Nye, Joan Richards, and Roger Stuewer, eds., The Invention of Physical Science. Essay in Honor of Erwin Hiebert (Boston/ The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992): 27–50. 28. “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context 5(1992): 209–235; reprinted in: Carl F. Graumann and Kenneth J. Gergen, eds., Historical Dimensions of Psychological Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 165–192. 29. “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 597–618. 30. (with Peter Galison) “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations no. 40 (Fall 1992): 81–128. Translated into German, 2002. 31. “Wissenschaft, Research and the Institute: Peculiarities of the German Case,” in: Giuliano Pancaldi, ed., Le Università e le scienze: Prospettive storice e attuali, Alma Mater Studiorum (Bologna: Università degli Studi di Bologna, 1993): 73–92.

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32. “The Several Contexts of the Scientific Revolution. Review Essay of R. Porter and M. Teich, eds., The Scientific Revolution in National Context,” Minerva 32(1994): 108–114. 33. “Neugierde als Empfindung und Epistemologie in der frühmodernen Wissenschaft,” in: Andreas Grote, ed., Macrocosmus im Microcosmus: Die Welt in der Stube. Zur Geschichte des Sammelns 1450 bis 1800 (Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 1994): 35–59. 34. “Fortuna and the Passions,” in: Thomas M. Kavanagh, ed., Chance, Culture and the Literary Text, Michigan Romance Studies 14(1994): 25–48. 35. “How Probabilities Came to Be Objective and Subjective,” Historia Mathematica 21(1994): 330–344. 36. “Enlightenment Calculations,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 182–202. 37. “How Nature Became the Other: Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism in Early modern Science,” in: Sabine Maassen, Everett Mendelsohn, and Peter Weingart, eds., Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Yearbook for the Sociology of Science, vol. 18 (1994), (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1995): 37–56. 38. (with Katharine Park) “Hermaphrodites and the Orders of Nature,” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, special issue on “Premodern Sexualities,” 1(1995): 419–438. 39. “Scientific Objectivity and the Ineffable,” in: Lorenz Krüger and Brigitte Falkenberg, eds., Physik, Philosophie und die Einheit der Wissenschaften (Heidelberg: Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 1995): 306–331. 40. “Curiosity in Early Modern Science,” Word and Image 11(1995): 391–404 (English version of Nr. 33). 41. “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10(1995): 3–24. 42. “Strange Facts, Plain Facts, and the Texture of Scientific Experience,” in: Suzanne Marchand, and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Proof and Persuasion (Belgium: Brepols, 1996): 42–59. 43. “Nice Work: Review Essay of Norton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision,” Isis 87 (1996): 517–519. 44. “The Cold Light of Facts and the Facts of Cold Light: Luminescence and the Transformation of the Scientific Fact, 1600–1750,” in: David Rubin, ed., Signs of Early Modern France II: 17th Century and Beyond (Charlottesville: Rockwood Press, 1997): 17–44. 45. “Die Quantifizierung der weiblichen Intelligenz,” in: R. Tobies ed. Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1997): 69–82 (Reprint of Nr. 17). 46. “L’esperienza scientifica e le sue possibili storie,” in: Quaderni Storici 96 (1997): 831–838. 47. “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science,” Daedalus 127 (1998): 73–95; reprinted, Peter Galison, Stephen R. Graubard, Everett Mendelsohn eds., Science in Culture (New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.): Transaction Publishers, 2001):73–95. 48. “Probability and Evidence,” in: M. Ayers and D. Garber, eds., Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 2: 1108–1144. 49. “Nature by Design,” in: Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art, (New York/London: Routledge, 1998): 232–253. 50. “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,” Configurations 6 (1998): 149–172. 51. “The Language of Strange Facts,” in: Timothy Lenoir, and Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, eds., Inscribing Science – Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998): 20–38. 52. “Die Kultur der wissenschaftlichen Objektivität,” in: O. G. Oexle, ed., Naturwissenschaft, Geisteswissenschaft, Kulturwissenschaft: Einheit – Gegensatz – Komplementarität, vol. 6 of Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998): 9–39;

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reprinted in: Michael Hagner, ed., Ansichten der Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag GmbH, 2001): 137–158. 53. “Wunder und Beweis im Frühneuzeitlichen Europa,” in: Gary Smith and Matthias Kroß, eds., Die Ungewisse Evidenz – Für eine Kulturgeschichte des Beweises (Berlin: Akademie Verlag GmbH, 1998): 13–68 (German version of Nr. 22). 54. “Une histoire de l’objectivité scientifique,” in: Roger Guesnerie et François Hartog, eds., Des Sciences et des Techniques: un débat (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1998): 115–126. 55. “L’invention de l’objectivité,” Les Cahiers de Science & Vie 48(1998): 16–23. 56. “What Can Be a Scientific Object? Reflections on Monsters and Meteors,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. LII, No. 2 (Nov./Dec. 1998): 35–50. 57. “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” in: Mario Biagioli, ed., The Science Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1999): 110–123 (Reprint of Nr. 29). 58. “Afterword: The Ethos of Enlightenment,” in: William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 495–504. 59. “Objectivity versus Truth,” in: Hans Erich Boedecker, Peter Hanns Reill and Jürgen Schlumbohm, eds., Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis, 1750–1900 (Göttingen:Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1999):17–32. Reprinted in: Δαíμων, Revista de Filosofia, Número 24. Septiembre– Diciembre 2001: 11–21. 60. “Academies and the Unity of the Sciences: Disciplining the Disciplines,” in: Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1999): 67–86. 61. “The Moralized Objectivities of Nineteenth-Century Science,” in: Wolfgang Carl and Lorraine Daston, eds., Wahrheit und Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999): 78–100. 62. “Kommentar zu Wendy Doniger,” in: Wendy Doniger, Der Mann, der mit seiner Frau Ehebruch beging (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999): 43–50. 63. “The Anti-Crisis,” in: Dieter Simon, ed., Rechtshistorisches Journal, Vol. 18 (1999): 449–457. 64. “Die Akademien und die Einheit der Wissenschaften. Die Disziplinierung der Disziplinen,” in: Jürgen Kocka, Rainer Hohlfeld und Peter Th. Walther, eds., Die Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin im Kaiserreich (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), Vol. 7: 61–84 (German version of Nr. 60). 65. “As imagens da objectividade: a fotografia e o mapa,” in: Coordinação e apresentação de Fernando Gil, ed., A Ciência tal qual se faz (Lisboa: Edições João Sá da Costa, 1999): 79–103. 66. “Die unerschütterliche Praxis,” in: Rainer Maria Kiesow, Dieter Simon, eds., Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Wahrheit. Zum Grundlagenstreit in der Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2000): 13–25 (German version of Nr. 63). 67. “Preternatural Philosophy,” in: Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000): 15–41. 68. “Historische Überlegungen zum Anthropomorphismus und zur Objektivität in den Wissenschaften,” in: Bernd-Olaf Küppers, ed., Die Einheit der Wirklichkeit. Zum Wissenschaftsverständnis der Gegenwart (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000): 27–43. 69. “Can Scientific Objectivity Have a History?,” in: Mitteilungen der Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Nr. 75/2000: 31–40. 70. “The Historicity of Science,” in Glenn W. Most, ed., Historicization- Historisierung, vol. 5 of Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001): 201–221.

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71. “Enlightenment Fears, Fears of Enlightenment,” in: Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., What’s Left of Enlightenment (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001): 115–128. 72. “Scientific Objectivity with and without Words,” in: Peter Becker and William Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001): 259–284. 73. “Objektivität und die kosmische Gemeinschaft,” in: Gerhart Schröder und Helga Breuninger, eds., Kulturtheorien der Gegenwart. Ansätze und Positionen (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus Verlag, 2001): 149–177. 74. “Perchè i fatti sono brevi?” in: Quaderni storici 108, Nr. 3/2001: 745–770. 75. “History of Science,” in N.J. Smelser and P.B. Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 26 Vols. (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), Vol. 10: 6842–6848. 76. (with Peter Galison) “Das Bild der Objektivität,” in: Peter Geimer, ed., Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit – Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 1538, 2002): 29–99. German Translation of no. 30. 77. “Neuigkeit, Neugierde, Erneuerung,” in: Wilhelm Voßkamp, ed., Ideale Akademie, Vergangene Zukunft oder konkrete Utopie? (Berlin: Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2002): 17–29. 78. “Die Lust an der Neugier in der frühneuzeitlichen Wissenschaft,” in: Klaus Krüger, ed., Curiositas. Welterfahrung und ästhetische Neugierde in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, Vol. 15), (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002): 147–175. 79. “Eine Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Objektivität,” in: Renate Mayntz, ed., AkteureMechanismen-Modelle. Zur Theorienfähigkeit makro-sozialer Analysen (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2002): 44–60. 80. “Baconsche Tatsachen,” in Rechtsgeschichte. Zeitschrift des Max-Planck-Instituts für europäische Rechtsgeschichte (2002): 36–55. 81. “Knowledge and science: the new history of science,” in: Miguel Herrero y Rodriguez de Miñón, Johannes-Michael Scholz, eds., Las Ciencias Sociales y la Modernización, La Función de las Academias (Madrid: Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Politicas, 2002): 33–52. 82. “Curiosità e studio della natura,” in: Sandro Petruccioli, ed., Storia della scienza, 10 vols., vol. V (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2002): 198–212. 83. “Die Akademien und die Neuerfindung der Erfahrung im 17. Jahrhundert,” in: Nova Acta Leopoldina NF 87, Nr. 325, 2003: 15–33. 84. (with Gianna Pomata), “The Faces of Nature: Visibility and Authority,” in: Lorraine Daston, Gianna Pomata, eds., The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe (BWV Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2003): 1–16. 85. “Verschnörkelte Wissenschaft,” in: Barbara Duden, Karen Hagemann, Regina Schulte, Ulrike Weckel, eds., Geschichte in Geschichten. Ein historisches Lesebuch (Berlin, Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2003): 52–57. 86. “Die wissenschaftliche Persona. Arbeit und Berufung,” in: Theresa Wobbe, ed., Zwischen Vorderbühne und Hinterbühne. Beiträge zum Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen in der Wissenschaft vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2003): 109–136. 87. “Early Modern History Meets the History of the Scientific Revolution. Thoughts towards a Rapprochement,” in: Helmut Puff, Christopher Wild, eds., Zwischen den Disziplinen? Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung (Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag, 2003): 37–54. 88. (with H. Otto Sibum), “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16 (2003): 1–8.

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89. “Gedankensysteme. Kommentar zu Arnold Davidsons ‘Über Epistemologie und Archäologie. Von Ganguilhem zu Foucault,’” in: Axel Honneth und Martin Saar, eds., Michel Foucault – Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003): 212–219. 90. (with Joan Richards), “I. Bernard Cohen,” in: Physics Today, volume 57, number 7, July 2004, Obituaries, p. 75. 91. “I. The Morality of Natural Orders: The Power of Medea,” and “II. Nature’s Customs versus Nature’s Laws,” in: Grethe B. Peterson, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, vol. 24, 2004): 371–392. 92. (with Fernando Vidal), “Introduction: Doing What Comes Naturally,” in: Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–20. 93. “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” in: Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 100–126. Reprinted in abridged form in Elizabeth Edwards and Kaushik Bhaumik, eds., Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader (Oxford/ New York: Berg, 2008), 107–114. 94. “Introduction: Speechless,” in: Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 9–24. 95. “The Glass Flowers,” in: Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 223–254. German translation in Anke Ortlepp and Christoph Ribbat, eds., Mit den Dingen Leben (Stuttgart: Frank Steiner, 2010), 123–154. 96. “Taking note(s),” in: Isis 95 (2004): 443–448. 97. “Type Specimens and Scientific Memory,” in: Critical Inquiry 31(2004): 153–182. 98. “1789, June 2: Disciplines of Attention,” in David E. Wellbery, ed. A New History of German Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 434–440. 99. “Description by Omission: Nature Enlightened and Obscured,” in John Bender and Michael Marrinan, eds. Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11–24. 100. “Scientific Error and the Ethos of Belief,” Social Research 72 (2005): 1–28. 101. “The History of Science as European Self-Portraiture,” Praemium Erasmianum Essay 2005 (Amsterdam: Erasmus Foundation, 2005); reprinted in European Review 14 (2006): 523–536. 102. “Intelligences: Angelic, Animal, Human,” in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 37–58. 103. “Bilder der Wahrheit, Bilder der Objektivität,” in Jörg Huber, ed., Einbildungen (Zürich: Edition Voldemeer, 2005), 117–153. 104. (with Peter Galison), “Wissenschaftliche Koordination als Ethos und Epistemologie,” in Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardig, eds., Instrumente in Kunst und Wissenschaft. Zur Architektonik kultureller Grenzen im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin/New York: Walther de Gruyter, 2006), 319–361. (English version: “Scientific Coordination as Ethos and Epistemology,” in Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardig, eds., Instruments in Art and Science: On the Architectonics of Cultural Boundaries in the 17th Century (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 296–333.) 105. “The Center Cannot Hold,” in Scientia Poetica 10 (2006): 231–236. 106. “Comment on Nancy Cartwright, ‘Against the System’,” in Christoph Engel and Lorraine Daston, eds., Is There Value in Inconsistency? (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2006), 39–46.

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107. “Working in Parallel, Working Together,” in Kostas Gavroglu and Jürgen Renn, eds., Positioning the History of Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 248 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 35–38. 108. “Ørsted and the Rational Unconscious,” in R.M. Brain, R.S. Cohen, and O. Knudsen, eds., Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy in Science: Ideas, Disciplines, Practices, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 241 (2007), 235–246. 109. “Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment,” Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007): 113–134. (German version: “Condorcet und das Wesen der Aufklärung,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 4 (2007): 59–84.) 110. (with Mary Baine Campbell, Arnold I. Davidson, John Forrester, and Simon Goldhill), “Enlightenment Now: Reflections on Knowledge and Belief,” Common Knowledge 13 (2007): 429–450. 111. “The History of Emergences: Review Essay of Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, 2nd ed.,” Isis 98 (2007): 801–808. 112. “Life, Chance, and Life Chances,” Daedalus 137 (2008): 5–14. 113. “On Scientific Observation,” Isis 99 (2008): 97–110. 114. “A Short History of Einstein’s Paradise beyond the Personal,” in Peter L. Galison, Gerald Holton, and Silvan S. Schweber, eds., Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 15–26. 115. “Toward a History of Reason,” in Marco Beretta, Karl Grandin, and Svante Lindquist, eds., Aurora Torealis: Studies in the History of Science and Ideas in Honor of Tore Frängsmyr (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2008), 165–180. 116. (with Peter Galison), “Objectivity and Its Critics,” Victorian Studies 50 (2008): 666–677. 117. “Monomanie in der Wissenschaft,” in Heinrich Meier, ed., Über das Glück (Munich: Piper, 2008), 221–252. 118. “Unruly Weather: Natural Law Confronts Natural Variability,” in Lorraine Daston and Michael Stolleis, eds., Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe. Jurisprudence. Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008): 233–248. 119. “Science Studies and the History of Science,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 798–813. 120. “The World in Order,” in David Albertson and Cabell King, eds., Without Nature? A New Condition for Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 15–33. 121. “A Story without an Ending,” in David Cayley, ed., Ideas on the Nature of Science (Fredericton,Canada: Goose Lane Editions, 2009), 34–52. 122. “Pourquoi la nature a-t-elle une autorité morale, et doit-elle en avoit une?” in Alain Prochiantz, ed., Darwin: 200 ans (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 243–258. 123. “Human Nature Is a Garden,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 35(2010): 215–230. 124. “The Humboldtian Gaze,” in Moritz Epple and Claus Zittel, eds., Science as Cultural Practice, vol. I: Cultures and Politics of Research from the Early Modern Period to the Age of Extremes (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), 45–60. 125. (with Elizabeth Lunbeck), “Introduction: Observation Observed,” in Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1–9. 126. “The Empire of Observation, 1600–1800,” in Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 81– 113. 127. “Doppelgänger: la science au miroir de l’art, histoires parallèlles,” in Perspective. La revue de l’INHA 3(2011): 405–407.

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Book reviews in Isis, Historia Mathematica, Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Annals of Science, Technology and Culture, Journal of Modern History, Science, Times Higher Education Supplement, Journal of Modern Philology, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Bulletin of Medical History, Journal of Social History, Common Knowledge, British Journal for the History of Science, European Journal of Sociology.

Essay Reviews in The London Review of Books 1. “How to Make a Greek God Smile,” essay review of P. Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience, in London Review of Books, 21 (10 June 1999): 11–12. 2. “Why Statistics Tend Not Only to Describe the World But to Change It,” essay review of A. Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, in London Review of Books, 8 (13 April 2000): 35–36. 3. “Language of Power,” review of J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, edited by Paul Laxton; Denis Cosgrove: Apollo’s Eye: A Carthographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, in London Review of Books, 23 (1 November 2001): 3–6. 4. “Saintly Resonances,” review of George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England, in London Review of Books, 24 (31 October 2002): 16–17. 5. “Visitors! Danger!,” review of Janet Browne: Charles Darwin. Vol. II: The Power of Place, in London Review of Books, 25 (8 May 2003): 25–26. 6. “Are You Having Fun Today?” review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, in London Review of Books, 26 (23 September 2004): 29–31. 7. “All Curls and Pearls,” review of Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany, in London Review of Books, 27 (23 June 2005): 37–38. 8. “Lumpers v. Splitters,” review of Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology, in London Review of Books, 27 (3 November 2005): 21–22.

Newspaper Articles, Catalogue Essays, Interviews 1. “Die vielen Tugenden der Wissenschaft. Was ist und wozu dient Historische Epistemologie?,” in Frankfurter Rundschau, Nr. 120, 26.5.1998. 2. “Wunderkammer des Lebens,” in: Sieben Hügel. Bilder und Zeichen des 21. Jahrhunderts, Catalogue of an Exhibiton, 7 Vols., Vol. 2: “Dschungel - Sammeln, Ordnen, Bewahren: Von der Vielfalt des Lebens zur Kultur der Natur,” ed. Bodo-Michael Baumunk and Jasdan Joerger (Henschel Verlag, Berlin 2000): 107–111. 3. “Natur als Kunst: Die Glasblumen von Cambridge. Die Wahrheit der ausgestopften Dinge in Harvards Botanischem Museum,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Nr. 3, 20.1.2002, p. 69. Reprint in: Herbarium der Blicke. Neuaufnahmen im Deutschen Künstlerbund, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 04. April bis 29. Juni 2003: 36–41. 4. “Nature Paints,” in Iconoclash. Image-Making in Science, Religion & Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Karlsruhe 2002: 136–138.

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5. “The Culture of Scientific Objectivity,” in Science + Fiction, Between Nanoworlds and Global Culture. Catalogue of an Exhibition ed. Stefan Iglhaut and Thomas Spring, Karlsruhe, Dresden, Munich, Stockholm, Hanover (2004): 45–62. 6. “Warum sind Tatsachen kurz?,” in Anke te Heesen, ed., Cut and Paste um 1900. Der Zeitungsausschnitt in den Wissenschaften, Catalogue of an Exhibition, (Kaleidoskopien 4, 2002): 132–144. 7. “Die Kultur der wissenschaftlichen Objektivität,” in science + fiction - Zwischen Nanowelt und Globaler Kultur, Texte und Interviews, Catalogue of an Exhibition, VolkswagenStiftung 2003: 45–64. 8. “Hard Facts;” in: Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, The MIT Press/ Cambridge, Massachusetts/ London, England (2005): 680–683. 9. “Appearances All the Way Down: The Glass Flowers as Scientific Models,” in Kunstformen des Meeres. Zoologische Glasmodelle von Leopold und Rudolf Blaschka 1863–1890, ed. Karlheinz Wiegmann and Mieke Niepelt, Stadtmuseum Tübingen, 2006: 60–67. 10. “Kunstgetreu,” in David Schutter: Afterpaintings, Recollected Works from the Gemäldegalerie Berlin (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2006), n.p. 11. “Die Myrte ist gefällt – Zur Disziplinierung des Glaubens,” in program for Joseph Haydn, Armida, Salzburger Festspiele 2007, 30–41. 12. “The Scientist’s Nightstand,” American Scientist Online, February 2009, http://www. americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/scientists-nightstand-lorraine-daston 13. “Plötzlich/ Suddenly,” in Olafur Eliasson: Innen Stadt Aussen, catalogue of exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Innen Stadt Aussen, ed. Daniel Birnbaum (Cologne: Walter König Verlag der Buchhandlung, 2010), 157–167. 14. “A Story without an Ending,” interview with David Cayley for Canadian Broadcasting Company series Ideas: How to Think about Science, http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/think aboutscience.xml 15. „Alles was zählt, sind die Ideen,“ interview in Alexander Kraus and Birte Kohtz, eds., Geschichte als Passion. Über das Entdecken und Erzählen der Vegangenheit (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2011), 236–264. 16. „Fiktionen der Objektivität,“ interview in Friedrich von Borries, Christian Hiller, and Wilma Renfordt, eds., Klimakunstforschung (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2011), 170–180. 17. „Die Beobachterin,“ interview with Uta Deffke, Max Planck Forshung, 1/2012, 86–92. 18. „Chimäre,“ in Christian Kassung, Jasmin Meersmann, and Olaf B. Rader, eds., Zoologicon. Ein kulturhistorisches Wörterbuch der Tiere (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2012), 78–82.

Presentations (2007–2012) „Condorcet, Wissenschaft und Aufklärung,“ at conference,“Wissenschaft und Aufklärung,” Universität Halle, January 2007. “Bild und Beobachtung in der Aufklärung,” Universität Basel, January 2007. “Natural and Moral Orders,” Hebrew University, Jerusalem, March 2007. “Das deutsche Wissenschaftssystem im historischen und internationalen Vergleich,” at conference, “Forschungspolitik: Bündnis 90-Die Grünen”, Berlin, March 2007.

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“Observation as an Epistemic Genre,” at conference, “Cases” at University of Cambridge, April 2007. “Norms in Nature,” at conference, “The Place of Values in the World of Nature,” at Columbia University, New York, April 2007. “The History of Objectivity,” at Workshop on Historical Semantics, University of Chicago, May 2007. “Monomanie in der Wissenschaft,” Siemens-Stiftung, Munich, May 2007. “Observation and Ontology,” Colloque de Cerisy, “Métaphysique empirique,” June 2007. “Analogies and the Migration of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Career of the Normal Curve,” Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, “Natur und Migration,” Halle, October 2007. “Dreams of a Perfect Medium,” Keynote address at Second International Conference on the Histories of Media, Art, Science, and Technology,” Berlin, November 2007. “La persona scientifique au XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris, January 2008. “L’Epistémologie historique, est-elle rélativiste?” Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, January 2008. “L’Observation comme catégorie épistémologique,” Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, February 2008. “The Cognitive Practices of Early Modern Scientific Observation,” All Soul’s College, Oxford University, February 2008. “Observation in Enlightenment Europe,” Princeton University, April 2008. “Seeing Things: A History of Blank Screens,” Yale University, April 2008. “Babel,” Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Symposium, Human Sciences Section, Dresden, June 2008. “Moral and Natural Orders: A Philosophical Anthropology,” Plenary lecture, Institut International de Sociologie, Budapest, June 2008. “Beobachtung und Aufklärung,” Plenary lecture, “Praktiken des Wissens und die Figur des Gelehrten im 18. Jahrhundert,” Bern, October 2008. “Ordnung: Eine philosophische Anthropologie,” Jakob-Burkhardt-Gespräche, Basel, October 2008. “Knowledge, Science, Reason, and their Histories,” at conference “Wisdom and the Pursuit of Knowledge,” Bundespräsidialamt, Berlin, October 2008. “Collective Observation in Early Modern Europe,” History of Science Society Meetings, Pittsburgh, November 2008. Commentary on session “What is this thing, the exhibition?” at conference “The Exhibition as a Scholarly Publication,” Deutsches Museum, Munich, November 2008. “Order and the Preconditions for Norms,” Johns Hopkins University, December 2008. “The Observer’s Time,” Keynote lecture at conference “The Shape of Time in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Barnard College, December 2008. “Monomania in Science,” Max Weber College, European University Institute, Florence, February 2009. “Reflections on Objectivity and Its Critics,” University of Manchester, February 2009. “The Present Is Pregnant with the Future: Science and the Political Imagination,” at conference “The Politics of Imagination and the Imagination of Politics,” University of Hyderabad, India, February 2009. “The Naturalistic Fallacy Revisited,” Brown University, April 2009. “The Passions of the Unnatural,” University of Wisconsin at Madison, April 2009, and Northwestern University, May 2009.

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“Time, Observation, and the Scientific Self,” University of California at Santa Cruz, May 2009, and Gallatin School, New York University, November 2009. “Why Does Nature Have Moral Authority – Even If It Shouldn’t?” at conference “Around Darwin”, Collège de France, Paris, October 2009. “Nature’s Revenge,” Keynote at conference “The Artwork between Technology and Nature”, Copenhagen, January 2010. “Beobachtung als Lebensform,” Forschungszentrum Gotha, February 2010. “Follow the Rule: From Reason to Rationality,” at workshop “The Strangelovean Sciences,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, March 2010. Commentary on Susan Neiman, “Victims and Heroes,” Tanner Lecture, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, March 2010. “Time, Observation, and the Scientific Self,” University of Southern California, April 2010. “A Short History of Projection, or: Shmooblesse Oblige,” Vanderbilt University, April 2010. “Order: The Very Idea,” Michicagoan Anthropology Seminar, May 2010. “The History of Scientific Observation,” Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, July 2010. „Grenzendenken,“ Deutscher Historikertag, Berlin, September 2010. “The Rise of Scientific Observation in Early Modern Europe,” Rausing Lecture, University of Uppsala, October 2010. “The Passions of the Unnatural” and “Monsters,” Institut des études avancées, Paris, November 2010. “Rules Rule: From Reason to Rationality,” Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, November 2010. “Cold War Rationality,” Center for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Cambridge, November 2010. “Observation,” Seminar on Early Modern Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge, Harvard University, December 2010. “Epistemische Bilder,” Technische Universität Darmstadt, January 2011, and Universität Göttingen, February 2011. “When Was Modernity, and Why Do We Care?” MUMOK, Vienna, January 2011. “Das geistige Auge: Beobachtung und Bilder in der Frühmodernen Wissenschaft,” Berliner Festspiele, Martin-Gropius- Bau, January 2011. “Seeing the Really Real: The Peculiar Power of Scientific Images,” at conference “Ideas in Fugue: Passion, Knowledge and Memory in Aby Warburg’s Theory of the Image,” Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, March 2011. “The History of Scientific Experience in Early Modern Europe,” Rubinstein Lecture, Queen Mary’s College, University of London, March 2011. “Nature’s Revenge,” Florida International University, March 2011, and University of Pennsylvania, April 2011. “Attention!” at conference “Curiosity and Method,” Princeton University, April 2011. “Epistemic Images in Early Modern Botany,” University of Buffalo, April 2011. “The Rule of Rules: From Enlightenment Reason to Cold War Rationality,” University of California at Berkeley, April 2011, and Universität Heidelberg, June 2011. “Vernunft und Rationalität,” plenary lecture, Deutscher Philosophischer Kongress, Munich, September 2011. “Norms and Nature,” London School of Economics, November 2011. “Schooling the Senses in Early Modern Science,” plenary lecture at conference “Early Modern Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge,” Harvard University, December 2011.

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“Objectivité et impartialité,” at conference “Figures de savoir, savoir de figures,” Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, January 2012. “Objectivity among the Historians,” at conference “Objectivity as an Affective Formation,” Freie Universität, Berlin, February 2012. “The Science of Clouds,” Indiana University at Bloomington, Humanities Center, April 2012. “Tasting Together in Early Modern Botany,” at conference “Fact, Artifacts, and the Politics of Consensus,” Northwestern University, May 2012. “The History of Scientific Experience in Early Modern Europe,” Fordham University, May 2012. “The Physiognomy of the Sky and the Limits of Representation,” at conference “Representation in Action,” University College London, June 2012. “Super-Vision: Weather Watching and Table Reading in the Early Modern Royal Society and Académie Royale des Sciences,” at conference “Curiously Drawn: Early Modern Science as a Visual Pursuit,” Royal Society of London, June 2012. “Gemeinsame Vision,” Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, July 2012.

Referee Work External Reader/Examiner on dissertations from Chicago, Harvard, Cambridge, Amsterdam, California (Berkeley), Stanford Universities, Humboldt Universität Berlin, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Université de Paris IV, and Ecole des Mines, Paris. Referee for National Science Foundation, Volkswagen Stiftung, Alexander-von-Humboldt- Stiftung, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, American Academy in Berlin, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, National Endowment for the Humanities, Isis, Philosophia Naturalis, Journal of the History of Ideas, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Configurations, Perspectives on Science, Social Studies of Science, and Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Chicago, and California University Presses, as well as for promotion cases at numerous universities.

Administrative and Committee Work (1992–2012) International Advisory Board, Einstein Forum, Potsdam (1992–2000). Beirat, Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Wien (1993–2000), Chair (1998–2000). Beirat, Forschungszentrum für Europäische Aufklärung, Potsdam (1996–2000). Arbeitsgruppe Akademiegeschichte, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1997–2000). Managing Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, (1997–2000, 2005–7). Perspektiven Kommission, Geisteswiss. Sektion, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (1998–2010). Sprecherin, Arbeitskreis Frauen in Akademie und Wissenschaft, Berlin- Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1998–2000). Forschungspreis Auswahl Kommission, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (1998–2000) Alexander von Humboldt Forschungsstelle Kommission, Berlin- Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1998–2002)

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Beirat, Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (1998–2001) Experten-Kommission, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Federal Republic of Germany (1999–2000) Kommission Evolutionäre Anthropologie, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (1999–2002) Zentrenkomitee, Minerva Stiftung (1999–2000) German-American Academic Council (1999–2000) Beirat, Projekt “Digitalisierung Wissenschaftsgeschichte des 18./19. Jahrhunderts,” Göttingen (2000–4) Kuratorium, Einstein Forum, Potsdam (2001–) Selection Committee, German Chancellor Fellowship, (2002–7) Kommission Geschichte, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (2002–5) Kommission Psycholinguistik, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (2004–5) Beirat, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2001–8) Beirat, Junge Akademie, Berlin- Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften und Leopoldina (2004–) Strategie Kommission, Wissenschaftsrat (2005–10) Stiftungsrat Universität Göttingen (2008–10) Beirat, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung, Bielefeld (2009–) Selection Committee, Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (2009–11) Kommission Empirische Ästhetik, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (2010–12) Visiting Committee (Chair), Department of the History of Science, Harvard University (2011) Kommission Wirtschaftswissenschaft, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (2011–12) Selection Committee, Anneliese Maier Prize, Alexander-von-Humboldt Stiftung (2012–)

Conferences and Working Groups organized “The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Scientific Objects” (Berlin, September 1995) “The Display of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Europe” (Berlin, December 1996) (with M. Hagner, D. Outram, and H. O. Sibum), “The Varieties of Scientific Experience” (Berlin, June 1997) “Q.E.D.: Mathematical Demonstration in Historical and Cross-Cultural Context” (Berlin, May 1998) (with Arnold Davidson) “Demonstration, Test, and Proof” (Berlin, June 1998) (with H. O. Sibum) “The Scientific Persona” (Berlin, June 1999) (with International Network) Berlin Summer Academies in the History of Science (1995, 1997, 1999) (with H. Ritter and M. Stolleis) “Nature, Gesetz, Naturgesetz” (Bad Homburg, October 1999; Berlin, February 2001) (with H.O. Sibum) “What’s in a Line? Drawing as Intelligence” (Berlin, December 2000) Working Group on “The Moral Authority of Nature” (Berlin, September 1999, June 2000, August 2000) Working Group on “Things that Talk” (Berlin, December 2001, March 2002, July 2002) (with Christoph Engel) “Can Inconsistency Be a Value?” (Como, 2003; Venice, 2004) Working Group on “Knowledge and Belief” (Berlin, September 2003, March 2004, July 2004)

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(with Elmar Mittler) “Scientific Observation in the Enlightenment” (Göttingen, October 2005) Working Group on “The History of Scientific Observation” (Berlin, June 2006, July 2007, July 2008) “On Knowing in the Human Sciences” (Berlin, August 2006) (with Robert J. Richards) “The Sciences of Origins: The Historical Sciences in the Age of Darwin” (Chicago, May 2009) (with Michael D. Gordin) “The Strangelovean Sciences” (Berlin, March and July 2010) (with Jacqueline Carroy, Wolf Feuerhahn, Jan Goldstein, and Andreas Mayer) “Reading against the Grain: National Historiographies in the Human Sciences” (Paris, June 2011) (with Karine Chemla), “The Epistemology of Tables” (Berlin, March 2012) (with James Conant), “Normativity” (Berlin, July 2012)

Other Professional Activities Schuman Prize Committee, History of Science Society: Chair (1981); member (1980). Committee on Prizes, History of Science Society (1983–1990). Program Co-chairman, History of Science Society Meetings (1986). Advisory Editor, Isis (1985–1990, 1993–1996). Council, History of Science Society (1986–1988). Chair, Pfizer Prize Committee, History of Science Society (1987). Board of Editors, Philosophia Naturalis (1988–1991). Advisory Board, Dibner Institute for the History of Science (Brandeis representative, 1986–1988). Advisory Editor, Ideas in Context Series, Cambridge University Press (1992–2004) Consulting Editor, Science in Context, Cambridge University Press (2000–) Board of Editors, Critical Inquiry (2002–) Board of Editors, Minerva (2007–)

Index of Authors and Subjects Abbott, Andrew XVIII Ἀbd Allah XV, 71–76 absence XIV, 55, 60, 109 Allen, William Sheridan 163–166 anatomy 30–32, 35, 38, 44 animals 74, 137, 161, 171–172, 211, 244; ants, XV, 77–78, 82–86, 142; bats, 34; bees, 142, 150; birds, 26–27, 32, 72, 75, 150, 225, 249; crabs, XVII–XVIII, 206–211, 213–214, 206–207; Daston on, 137, 207, 210; deer, 35, 225; elephants, 35, 144; frogs, 210–211; geese, 148, 225; Greeks on, 117, 120; horses, 120, 144; insects, XV, 27, 77–78, 83–84, 86–87, 225; lions, 142; moles, 34; morphology of, 30–32, 34–35, 37; sounds of, 225; unicorns, 26; vertebrate, 28–34; wolves, 160–161 Anthropocene XV, 93, 96 anthropocentrism XV, 88, 137, 141 anthropology 10, 62, 155–156, 158 anthropomorphism 137, 141, 150 aphorisms 117, 121–123 archaeology XIV, 38–45, 109–110 archetypes 26–35, 37, 51, 109, 113 Aristotelians 49, 174, 182–183, 192–193; anti-, 187, 192 Aristotle 28, 46–47, 49–52, 187–188, 192–194, 218 art XVII, 114, 171–172, 177, 250–251; notes and, 236, 238, 240–246; science and, 26, 29–30, 92, 100, 175, 211 astronomy 143–144, 174 atlases 26–27, 43, 168, 170, 218 atomism 89, 155 Auden, W. H. 54 Avicenna 52 Balian, Roger 125, 127n12, 129, 132–133 Basra 71–72 Bazarov, Evgenii 209–211, 214 Bede, Venerable 229, 233 Belinsky, Vissarion 196, 198 Benjamin, Walter XVIII, 8, 236–238 Berlin, Isaiah 209–210

Bernard, Claude 92, 218 Bhaṭṭumūrti 142, 150 Bible 39–42, 162, 178–185, 200, 246; Ezra, 181, 183–184; Genesis, 63–64, 122, 192; Hebrew, 63–64, 179–180, 183; Job, 54, 201; manuscripts, 179–181; New Testament, 179–180; Old Testament, 71, 108, 180, 182–183; Revelation, 206; Septuagint, 179 bin Laden, Osama 9–10, 12 biography 249 biology 14, 16, 28, 31, 35, 38, 82, 168, 175, 242, 247 blood 56–57, 59–60, 168 bodies 56–59, 73, 224–226 botany 26–27, 30, 44, 143–144 Bourdieu, Pierre 158–161 Boyle, Robert 156–157 Bredekamp, Horst XV Brenner, Yosef Haim 200–201 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 39–40 Bruno, Giordano 193, 233 Buxtorf, Johann 182–184 Bynum, Caroline XIV Caesarius of Heisterbach 55, 58 calculations XIV, 5–6, 10, 19–20, 94, 125, 128, 244 Calvin, John 189–190, 193 cameras. See photography Campanella, Tommaso 100–101, 103, 105–107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 193 capital, social or cultural 158–160, 166 capitalism 177, 220, 245 Cartwright, Nancy XIII, 24 Carus, Carl Gustav 28, 31–35, 37 Casaubon, Isaac 183n22, 184 causation 13–18, 133–134 chemistry 38, 125, 130–133, 143–144, 165 Chilcott, Cyrus 79–80 child welfare 13–15 China 98, 179; Fielde in, 81–83; Qing, XVIII, 221–227 Chinese 222, 226

Index of Authors and Subjects

Chinese Room (Searle) XIV, 19, 25 Christians 50, 52, 71, 179–180, 183n23, 185, 187, 217, 228; Catholic, 189–194; miracles and, 56–57, 59–60; Orthodox, 198, 201, 213; Protestant, 56, 184, 179, 189–192, 194; Puritan, 191; science and, 39 climate change 9, 93–94, 97–98, 215 Coen, Deborah R. XV cognition XVI, 54, 136–137, 236; erotics of, 49 Cold War 3, 8–9, 11, 19, 21 colors XVII, 27–28, 147, 171 consciousness XVI, 136–138, 140, 197, 217, 236 Copernicus, Nicolaus 193, 233n6 crabs XVII–XVIII, 206–211, 213–214 critical history 39–40 da Vinci, Leonardo 108–109 Dalton, John 156–157 Damascus 71–72 Darwin, Charles 28, 34–35, 37, 39, 81, 131 Daston, Lorraine XVIII, 54, 137, 244, 247–251; Biographies of Scientific Objects, 124, 249–250; “British Responses to Psychophysiology,” 216–218; on drawing, 43–44, 100–101; on the Enlightenment, 19, 22, 124n1, 195, 234, 237; on entomology, 75–77, 84; “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination,” 92, 101; on history of science, 91–92, 124, 172–174, 186–187, 207, 248; How Reason Almost Lost its Mind, 11, 19; metaphors of, 215–220; on miracles or wonders, XIV, 55, 56n6, 60, 72, 74, 76, 100, 207; on nature, 77, 142, 195, 215–220, 235; note-taking of, XVIII, 234, 235n3; Objectivity or on objectivity, XIV, 3, 26–28, 37–38, 40–45, 100, 172–174, 186; Probabilistic Revolution, 247; on reason or rationality, 3–4, 19, 22–23, 25, 38, 62, 142, 214, 217, 216, 234, 247; “On Scientific Observation,” 216, 218–220; Things that Talk, 250–251; Wonders and the Order of Nature, 26, 55, 100; Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen, 100

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Dawkins, Richard 9, 137 de Sepibus, Georgius 229, 231 Descartes, René 4, 163, 169, 178, 187–188, 218 Dickens, Charles 22, 213 difference XIV, 46–49, 52, 72–73, 217, 224 dinosaurs 247, 249 discipline(s), academic or scientific XVI–XVII, 4, 21, 38, 40, 45, 124, 144, 166, 171–172, 174–177 Doniger, Wendy XIV, XVIII, 137 Dostoevsky, Fyodor XVII, 195–205, 212; Brothers Karamazov, 208; Crime and Punishment, 200–201; Demons (The Possessed) XVII, 195, 197–198, 203, 205; Diary of a Writer, 197, 208; Maikov correspondence, 196, 199; Raw Youth (Podrostok), 208 drawings 30, 107–109, 113–114, 203, 211, 251; Daston on, 43–44, 100–101 economics XV, 9, 21, 93–96, 98, 175, 247 economies 9, 57, 94–97, 144, 214 economization 93, 95–97, 99 ecosystems 97–98, 235 Einstein, Albert XV, 88–92, 166–167, 209 Ellis, George 125, 133–134 emergence XVI, 124–125, 127, 129, 131, 133–135, 144, 174 emotion 3, 164, 196, 217, 225, 242 empathy 198, 201, 241–242 Empedocles 49–51 Enlightenment 185, 195, 215, 218, 220, 234, 247; imagination in, 100; reason in, 5, 7–8, 22–23, 62; science in, 84, 86 entomology 77–78, 81, 83–84, 87 environment(s) XV, 104, 141, 215, 239, 241; economization of the, 93–99, 140; nuclei in, 126; organisms in an, 30, 34, 36, 81, 87 Environmental Protection Agency 93, 96 epistemology 21, 38, 144, 175, 244; historical, 186–187, 247–248, 251; Kant on, 5, 29 equality 5, 7, 46–48, 50–51, 201 eternity 47, 50, 52–53, 59, 106, 165, 168, 173, 232

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Index of Authors and Subjects

ethics XIII–XIV, 19, 24, 39, 46, 51, 66, 135, 172, 175, 202 Eucharist 56–59 European Union 9–10 evolution: biological 9, 29, 34–35, 37, 78, 81, 128, 137, 175, 247; of universe, 130–131 fairies 71–72 fairytales 67, 72, 74 families 82, 120, 149, 166, 200; human vs. insect, 77–79, 87; merpeople, 74–75 Feldhay, Rivka XVII Fielde, Adele XV, 77, 79–87 Fludd, Robert 100–101, 103, 105, 107, 109–111, 113, 115 forgeries XV, 101–102, 185, 208 formalism XIII, 4, 11 Foucault, Michel 172, 173n4, 181 France 6–7, 192 freedom 6–7, 12, 98, 129, 155, 172, 185 Frege, Gottlob XIV, 19–23 Freud, Sigmund 67, 101, 160–162, 168 Gaïa XV, 93–94, 97 Galileo Galilei XV, 88, 101–104, 106, 109, 113, 159, 193 Galison, Peter XVI, 124n1; Objectivity, XIV, 3, 26–28, 37–38, 40–45, 62n1, 244n18 Garber, Daniel XVII gender XVI, 77, 83, 86, 201; in India, 142; of robots, 136, 140; of storytellers, 65–66 geology 38–41, 44 Germany XVII, 31, 35, 56–57, 163–166, 175, 206–207, 210–211 Ghazali, Abu Hamid al-, 52 Ginzburg, Carlo 101n5, 155–156, 162, 208 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 28–32, 34–37, 90 Goldhill, Simon XIV Gordin, Michael D. XVII Gould, John 26–27 Grafton, Anthony XVII, 235n4 Greeks XVI, 28, 39, 47, 49–50, 117–118, 121 Haacke, Hans XVIII, 238–246 Habermas, Jürgen 134–135 Haeckel, Ernst 35, 37

Hart, H. L. A. 14–15 Hegel, G. W. F. 7, 54, 209 Heisenberg, Werner 125, 129 Heraclitus XIV, XVI, 46–47, 49, 54, 117–123, 229; Heidegger on, 117n1, 121n6 heretics 56, 60, 192–194 historical epistemology 186–187, 247–248, 251 historicism 4, 172 historicity 124, 247–249 history XIV, 23, 85, 89, 171, 179, 251; of art or archaeology, XVII, 38–42, 171, 175; of Bible, Christianity, or miracles, 39, 55, 181–185, 189–191; critical, 39–40; Dostoevsky or Russian, 195, 198–199, 204, 213–214; Kant on, XIII, 3–4, 7, 11; local, XVI–XVII, 155–156, 162, 168; of Nazism, 163–166, 169; of notes, 234; of philosophy or ideas, XVII–XVIII, 4, 47–53, 172–175, 187, 194, 247, 249; scale of, XVII, 155, 165–169; of science(s), 3, 21–22, 28, 38, 124, 170, 186–187, 207, 247–249; of sound, 222, 224, 226–227; writing, XIV, XVI, XVIII, 55, 61; of universe, 109 Holocaust XVII, 163, 195, 201 Holton, Gerald XV Homer 40, 184 homes: ant or insect 77–78, 83 ; human, 77–79, 81–82, 86; merpeople, 73 Homo economicus 9–10, 23 Honoré, Tony 14–15 houses 42, 74, 81–83, 86, 136, 202 Hullah, John 234–235, 243 humanities 22, 159, 175n9, 176, 205 Hume, David 4, 6–7, 11, 23, 244 Iamblichus 46n1, 50 ibn Adonijah, Jacob 180–181 Ibn Tufayl 52–53 idealization XIV, 26, 44 identity 47–50, 52–55, 57, 155, 196, 201, 205, 224 ideological investment 41 Iliad 40, 184 imperialism 21–23 India XVI, 142–145, 147, 149, 151

Index of Authors and Subjects

insects XV, 77–78, 83–84, 86–87, 225 intelligentsia: Israeli or Jewish 202, 204; Russian, 196–197, 199, 209, 211–212 Islam 50, 52, 73, 132–133 Israel/Palestine 40, 42, 180, 182, 185, 195–196, 200–205, 246 Jacobi, F. H. 6 James, William 53 Jerusalem 40, 42 Jesuits 139, 189, 228–229, 231, 233 jewelry 63–64, 66 Jews 57, 60, 163, 165, 179, 183n23, 200–202, 204 jinn 71–72 John Philoponus 49 Johnson, Amy Edith XVIII Jones, Caroline A. XVIII Judah 63–64 Judaism 50, 52 justice 3, 7, 51, 94, 97, 173–174, 201 Kaganskaya, Maya 202–203, 205 Kant, Immanuel XIII, 28–30, 35–36, 171, 176; Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft), 5, 89–90; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 28–30; on ethics, 25; morphological ideas of, 28–29; on reason, 3–8, 11–12 Kantians 8, 25, 49, 219 Kierkegaard, Søren 6, 53–54 Kircher, Athanasius XVIII, 228–233; Ars Magna Sciendi, 228–230, 232; Museum, 228, 232–233 Kitcher, Philip XIII–XIV Kuhn, Thomas 7, 21, 65, 247 Kurzweil, Baruch 201–202 Lavoisier, Antoine 156–157 Lehn, Jean-Marie 125, 130–133 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm XIII–XIV, 7, 11, 20–21, 23, 184; universal calculus, 5–6, 19 literature 22, 233; children’s, 72; Indian, 143; Russian, XVII–XVIII, 196–214 localism 155–159, 161–163, 165–169 Locke, John 4, 207, 244

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logic 62, 65, 91, 143–144, 151; formalizing, XIV, 19–20; mathematical, 20, 48 love XIV, 46, 48–54, 81, 90; Greeks or Plato on, 48–51, 54, 120, 122, 233; Ibn Tufayl on, 52–53; Kierkegaard on, 53–54; in myths, 67; of novelty, 190, 192; in Turgenev novels, 207, 209; in Vasucaritramu, 142, 145–150 Luther, Martin 189–191, 194 Mach, Ernst XV, 88–91 Machiavelli, Niccolò 106, 197 Malevich, Kasimir 109–110 Manchu 222–224, 226 many, few, one 52 Marxism 10, 175n9, 177 Masorah 180, 182–183 materialism 10, 155, 161, 209 materiality 38, 40, 45, 56, 60, 225–227, 248–249 mathematics 29, 48, 54, 127–129, 133, 186, 212, 235, 249; in biology, 35–36; equal sign, 48, 51; in India, 142–144; in philosophy or logic, 6, 11, 19–21, 52 Mediterranean 71, 142, 202 Meijer, Lodewijk 179–180 Mein Weltbild (Einstein) 88–91 Mendeleev, Dmitrii 212–213 Merian, Matthäus 101, 109, 113 Mersenne, Marin 187–188, 192–194 metaphors XVIII, 49, 51, 53, 148, 169, 215– 220 metaphysics 5–7, 34, 47, 124, 126, 132, 134, 157, 174, 176, 248, 250–251 Middle Ages 55, 57, 60, 233 miracles XIV, 55–61, 100 missionaries 79–82 models XV, 144, 162, 175, 198; atlases as, 168; causation, 13, 17; development, 40; economic, 94, 97–98; formal, 19, 21; mathematical, XV, 6; moral, 13–17; natural, 13–14, 16; rationality or reason, 8–9, 11; scientific, 34, 39, 100, 126–127, 169; systems, 16–17 Mongolian 222–223, 226 monsters 72–73, 75, 249 Montaigne, Michel de 191–192

282

Index of Authors and Subjects

Morin, Jean-Baptiste 187, 193–194 Most, Glenn W. XVI morphology 28–30, 34–37, 141 mountains XVI, 72, 117, 142, 149, 151, 232; Kolāhala, 145–150 Munro, Eileen 13–15 myths 3, 39, 46, 71, 139–141, 204, 208; “Clever Wife,” 63–66; defined, 62; reason and, XIV–XV, 11, 62–67; science and, 3 9/11 attacks 8–10 Nappi, Carla XVIII narratives 10, 71; archaeology and, 40–43; Dostoevsky, 198–199; historical, 190; myths as, 62, 65–67; nonfiction, 164 nationalists 9–10, 139, 163–164, 200, 204 natural sciences 9, 20, 22, 29, 82–83, 156, 210 natural theology 77–78, 86 naturalists XV, 26, 28–30, 32, 37, 77–78, 82, 85, 102, 213, 216 nature XIII, XV, 34, 44, 71, 76, 88, 156, 241, 243; “by nature,” 234–235; Greek view of, XVI, 117–127; Indian view of, XVI, 142, 145–146, 148–149, 151; laws of, 130; miracles as contrary to, 55–56; moral order and, 13, 15, 17–18, 215; nurture vs., 87; reason and, 8, 142, 145, 215, 220; sounds of, 146, 226; “true to nature,” 26, 28, 35, 37–38; Spinoza on, 181–182 Nazism 163–166, 169 Neiman, Susan XIII nests 77–81, 83–85, 87 neuroaesthetics XVII, 171, 175 Newton, Sir Isaac 4–5, 29, 166–167 Nietzsche, Friedrich 19, 47–48, 52–54 nihilism XVII, 4, 6, 195, 197–198, 207, 209–211 Nirenberg, David XIV non-contradiction 47, 54 North, global 94, 96 nostalgia 8, 118 notes 155, 181, 184n25; artistic, 238–243, 245–246; citations or footnotes, XVIII, 72, 218, 233, 235; musical, 234–235, 243; taking, XVIII, 234, 235–238 novels 66, 175, 197–198, 205, 208, 211–212

novelty XVII, 186–191, 193–194 numbers 20, 48, 50–51, 142, 234 objectivity 7, 36, 132, 145, 167–169, 172, 186; Daston and/or Galison on, XIV, 3, 26–28, 37–38, 40–45, 62, 100–101, 186, 195, 215, 218, 244, 248; mechanical, 26, 28, 37–38, 41–42 ontology of practice 250 opposites 47 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 93–96 Owen, Richard 31, 33–34, 37 Palestine 40, 42, 196, 200–205 Park, Katherine 26, 100 Parmenides XIV, 46–48, 53–54 Pascal, Blaise XVIII, 234, 236–238 pathic 52–53 Pestre, Dominique XV Petrie, Flinders 41–43 Phaedrus 48–49, 233 Philo 122–123 philology 40, 107, 120, 184–185 philosophy XIV, XVI, XVIII, 4, 13, 46–52, 54, 124, 127, 136–138, 171; of biology, 14, 16; critical, 176–177; Greek, 49–51, 118, 120, 188, 194, 231; history or historians of, XVII–XVIII, 3–4, 7, 47, 50, 172–174, 186–187; of mind, 175; models in, 6; natural, 109, 187, 192–193, 216, 235; of science, 7, 11, 20, 24 photography 26–28, 37, 42–44, 163, 177, 245, 251 phusis XVI, 117–121, 123 physical sciences XV, 42, 88 physics XV, 4, 38, 44, 88, 157, 159, 174n8, 204, 247; Aristotle on, 49, 51; classical, XVI, 124–126, 134; “emergence” in, XVI, 124–130, 133–134; local effects in, 166–169; quantum, 90 pilgrimage 56–57, 59–60 Pippin, Robert XVI–XVII Planck, Max XV, 88–91 plants XIV, 26, 30, 32, 34, 37, 47, 86, 117, 119–120, 219, 225 plasticity 78, 82, 84–85, 87

Index of Authors and Subjects

Plato XVIII, 4, 47, 54, 228; Cratylus, 229, 232–233; Laws, 51, 46n1; Lysis, 48–49; Phaedrus, 48–49, 233; Republic, 47n2, 123; Symposium, 233; Timaeus, 49 Platonists 50, 126, 133 Plotinus 50 plurality 52 poetry 53–54, 73, 118, 143–148, 150–151, 175, 213, 239 pollution XV, 94–98, 118 probabilistic reasoning or revolution 21–22, 129–130, 247 proportion 51, 158, 217 psychology 4, 51, 53–54, 216–217, 242, 244 Pushkin, Alexander 196, 199–200, 208 Pythagoras 46–47, 50 quantum mechanics XVI 124–132, 134, 167, 169 quarks 127–128 quotations XVIII, 233, 237 Qur’an 71–72 Rabikovitz, Dahlia 201–203, 205 rationality XV–XVI, 8, 20–25, 55, 142, 215; Daston on (see under Daston); ethical, XIV, 24; myth and, 62, 64–67; in novels, 196, 209, 211, 214; rejection of, 9–11, 52; rule-driven, XIV, 62; scientific, XIV rationalization 93, 150 realism 44, 173, 196, 199 reason 46, 50, 211; Daston on (see under Daston); expanded, XIV–XV, XVIII; formal or formalizing, XIV, 4, 11–12, 20–25; history of, XIII, 3, 11, 38; Hume on, 6–7, 11, 23; Kant on, XIII, 3–8, 11–12, 29, 36; Leibniz on, XIII, 5–7, 11, 19–21, 23; myth and, 62–67; nature and, 142, 145, 215–218, 220; rejecting, XIV, 4, 11, 52, 62, 65, 67; rules and, XIII–XVI relativism 4, 172–173 relics 56–59 repetition XIV, 46, 48, 53–54, 157 representations 27–28, 33, 37–38, 42–44, 103, 126–130, 132–133, 199 revolution: French 6–7; Russian, 195, 198–201; scientific, 187

283

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg XVIII, 248–249 Richards, Robert XIV rights: animal 171; human, 5, 133; legal, 78, 202; property, 96 right-wingers 10–11, 97 rings 63–67; in Ethiopika of Heliodorus, 66; Judah’s, 63–64; in Queen of Corinth, 64 rivers XVI, 142, 146, 150–151, 232; Śuktimatī, 142, 145–146, 148, 150 robots XVI, 136–141 Romanticism 7, 31, 243 Rome 39, 189, 233; Club of, 93, 97 Rowland, Ingrid XVIII Russia 196–200, 202, 205, 208–209, 211 Russians 6, 8, 160, 202–206, 212 saints 56–61 sameness XIV, 46–54 Scaliger, Joseph 183n23, 184–185 Schrödinger, Erwin 89, 125, 128 Schweber, Sylvan (Sam) XVI, 124 science fiction 137–138 science(s) 15, 26, 37, 78, 130–132, 175; art and, 26, 29–30, 92, 100, 175, 211; cognitive, 175; in Germany, 88–90; history or historians of, 3–4, 11, 21–22, 28, 38–45, 54, 124, 169–170, 172–174, 186–187, 207, 224, 247–250; in India, 143–144, 147; ideological investment and, 41; instruments of, 99, 168; Kant on, 7, 11, 28–29; Kierkegaard on, 53–54; literature and, XV, 205, 209–212; as metaphor, 216–218; novelty in, 194; physical, XV, 42, 88; religion and, 134, 217; in Russia, XVIII, 206, 211–212, 214; methodology or scale, 155–157, 166–170; Victorian, 75, 159 Searle, John XIV, 19, 25 Shulman, David XVI Shumsky, Dimitry 204–205 Sidereus Nuncius XIV, 101–102 singularity 52, 74 Sleigh, Charlotte 77–78, 87 social sciences 15, 22, 166, 169, 175n9, 215, 220 Socrates 46–49, 229, 231–232 souls 46–47, 49–51, 74, 136, 208

284

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sounds XVII, 146, 222–226 soundscapes 225–227 South, global 96–97 Soviet Union 8, 200, 202–204 Spinoza, Benedict XVII, 178–185; Tractatus theologico-politicus, 178–179, 185 spiritualism XVII, 206–208, 212–213 sponges XV, 71, 73, 75–76 stars XVI, 142, 166 stigmata 56, 58 stories XV, 46 stratigraphy 40–41, 156, 159, 162 strife 49–50 Śuktimatī River 142, 145–146, 148, 150 systems: in art 241–245; chemical, 131–132; coordinate, 35–36; ethical, 24; experimental, 248–249; failures in, 13–17; logic, 20; quantum mechanics, 126, 129; number, 142, 234; sensory, 137; social, 17, 245–246 Tales of a Thousand and One Nights 71–73, 75 Talmud 180–183, 200, 206 Tamar 63–64 Tamil 143, 145 Telugu 142–143, 145–146, 148, 150–151 theology XVI, 34, 124; of miracles, 55–56, 59; natural, 77–78, 86; novelty in, 187, 189–194 thermodynamics 128, 160–162 thick journals (tolstye zhurnaly) 213–214 Thompson, D’Arcy 28, 35–37 Tibetan 222–223, 226 Tolstoy, Leo 201, 203, 208, 212–213 trees 75, 86, 122, 142, 160, 223, 243 truth 3, 38, 64, 173, 193, 204; conditions, 171; God as, 52; Greeks on, 47, 119; of physics, 88; universal, 196, 199, 205

Turgenev, I. S. XVII, 198–199, 214; Fathers and Children (Ottsy i deti), 209–210, 214; Smoke (Dym), 206–212 United Nations 93–94, 96–97 United States XVI, 93, 96–98, 136, 174 universities 38, 158, 163, 174–176, 192, 210 utilitarianism 10, 196, 198 utprekṣā (“flight of fancy”) 150–151 Uyghur 222–223, 226 Vasu Uparicara, King 145–146, 150 Vasu-caritramu 142, 145–146 Vergil, Polidore 188–189 Virgin Mary 57, 60, 85 vivaria 77, 87 Vossius, Isaac 179–180, 184 Warner, Marina XV, 67 Weisskopf, Victor Frederick 127–128 Weltanschauung 89–91 Weltbild 88–91 Wheeler, William Morton 78, 84–85 Wimsatt, William C. XVI Wise, M. Norton XVIII Wittgenstein, Ludwig 25, 136, 139–140n5, 142 women 23, 73, 77–78, 82–83, 150, 166, 197; myth and, 65–66 wonders 26, 55, 71–77, 100, 207; literature of (’ajaib), 72 Zionists XVII, 195, 200, 202, 204 zoology 27, 34, 39, 143–144, 196, 213