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AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CONCRETE
Twentieth-Century Histories of Life
By Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4575-6
Chapter One
Ludwik Fleck, Edmund Husserl
On the Historicity of Scientific Knowledge
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the "crisis of historicism" was much debated, particularly in Germany. Interestingly, the crisis of historicism soon came to be seen as a "crisis of reality." This twofold crisis-of historiographical thinking and ways of experiencing reality-had repercussions on the internal and external perception of the history of science. Between 1880 and 1930, the history of science ceased to be an ancillary endeavor of mainly pedagogical interest, becoming a field of research with genuine historical and epistemological pretensions. As such, the emerging discipline of the history of science began to contest the dominion of the philosophy of science over the space of epistemology. In what follows, I would like to show that this deep-reaching change was bound up closely with the crisis affecting the sciences early in the twentieth century.
In 1872, the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond delivered a lecture entitled "On the History of Science" at the Leibniz Session of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Speaking entirely in the spirit of a history of science conceived as a pedagogical auxiliary to the established disciplines, he emphatically affirmed that "whether what is involved is an organism, state, language, or scientific doctrine, it is always developmental history that best reveals the significance and internal connections of things." "In contrast to the not infrequently dogmatic presentation of the textbooks," Du Bois-Reymond went on, "I hold an inductive approach to be the right way to teach physiology, be it in textbooks or the lecture hall." "When we adopt such an approach," he concluded, "we teach a science and its history at the same time." Du Bois-Reymond's reasoning exemplifies the unproblematic and, as it were, "natural" assessment of the history of the sciences prevailing before the critical turn. This kind of historical perspective pervaded both the humanities and the life sciences of the late nineteenth century. But how was history in general conceived at the time?
Even physicists such as Ludwig Boltzmann unhesitatingly proclaimed the nineteenth century to be the "century of the mechanical conception of nature, Darwin's century," not, as might be expected, that of the steam engine or electricity. This association of mechanics with natural history shows that for Boltzmann, Darwin's theory of evolution by no means amounted to a comprehensive historicizing of nature. It was just the opposite: the theory of evolution was, in his eyes, living proof of the possibility of mechanizing history-or, at any rate, natural history. The German philosopher of science Gregor Schiemann is thus quite right to affirm that "the temporalization of explanations of nature [implies] a deteleologization of the knowledge of nature that goes even further than the early modern causal conception of science. Therefore it considerably sharpens the contrast between the knowledge of nature, on the one hand, and, on the other, historical knowledge based on understanding [Verstehen]." Max Hartmann, a protozoologist with an interest in philosophy who had in 1914 become a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem, took a similar view. In Allgemeine Biologie (1927), he observes about "the question of the logical and methodological foundations of historicism in biology" that
the vexed philosophical question as to whether history, insofar as it is intellectual or cultural history, rests, from the standpoint of the theory of knowledge, on different epistemological bases than the natural sciences-whether it can be grounded only through an appeal to notions of value, in Windelband's and Rickert's sense-need not be discussed here, because the history of biology is assuredly not a historical science in that sense.... It can hardly be doubted that, although historical knowledge is unquestionably more closely geared to the individual and to that which occurs only once, scientific biology does not and cannot content itself with ascertaining a historical state of affairs, but aspires above all to arrive at knowledge of the laws that condition such a state of affairs, seeking explanations for historical developments like the one that Darwin provided with his magnificent essay on the origin of species.
In Hartmann's estimation, biology had not yet gone very far down this path. It was, "notwithstanding Darwin's grand, fruitful attempt, still miles away from rational, nomothetic comprehension of the history of the biological system."
It is plain that in the closing decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, an encompassing historicizing of nature that simultaneously put forward mechanistic claims stood in curious contrast to the "waning interest natural scientists took in the historicity of their own knowledge." The positive sciences of the late nineteenth century defined themselves, including their evolutionary-biology sub-disciplines, analytically and mechanistically.
This situation was bound to change with the subsequent development of the sciences themselves. Basically, two phenomena would lead, between 1900 and 1930, to a growing resistance to mechanistic thinking: the revolutionary developments in physics, and the debate about the unity of the sciences. Both contributed decisively in the 1920s to an intellectual mood that I shall describe in greater detail below with reference to the early work of Ludwik Fleck and the late work of Edmund Husserl. It should be noted that the radical changes in the theoretical edifice of physics gave rise to two insights that have proved relevant to thinking about the history of science. Hartmann formulated them with exemplary clarity. The first of his conclusions was that one must "keep one's eyes and mind open for the discovery of new conceptual systems, when called for by experience." According to the second, we have to take seriously the admonition "that it is dangerous for thought and science to transpose, with dogmatic overconfidence, the results of a period such as that of the nineteenth-century heyday of classical physics to other fields in the natural sciences and humanities or even the intellectual realm as a whole. For to do so is to exceed the competency and limits of one's own scientific discipline."
A new awareness of the historicity of all scientific knowledge, his own included, makes itself felt in Hartmann's remarks, if only in the form of a presentiment. And it does so with reference to the very field that has been emblematic of scientific knowledge since the beginning of the early modern period: physics. Recent developments had not made classical physics either obsolete or superfluous. Yet it had to be qualified in light of its own time-bound character, situated as one historical stage in the age-old development of knowledge about the physical world, and seen as limited by its reference to particular phenomena. Scientific knowledge could no longer be perceived as something inherently destined for closure and perfection; it was now apprehended as "endless progress," its horizon no more predetermined than its direction. Hartmann's categorical summary of the matter is quite radical: "Every statement about the way the world really is [die Beschaffenheit der Weltwirklichkeit] is a time-bound statement."
At the same time, in France, Gaston Bachelard emphatically declared, in his Essai sur la connaissance approchée (1928): "As we see it, the nature of ... reality, given the inexhaustibility of the unknown, is eminently such as to invite us to pursue research without end. Its very being resides in its resistance to knowledge. We shall therefore take it as an epistemological axiom that our knowledge is inherently open-ended." Pursuing this idea, Bachelard emphasized the moment of surprise and unpredictability in the process of knowledge acquisition: "As the history of the sciences teaches us, every big step towards an ultimate reality has shown that it was discovered in an altogether unexpected quarter."
Science's unpredictability led to the second phenomenon, the debate over the problem of the unity of the sciences. Even biologists as committed to the principle of causality as Hartmann recognized a qualitative difference between physics and the life sciences, without having recourse to neovitalistic premises for that marker. "The task of causal research in biology," Hartmann maintained, "is not to trace biological events back to physical and chemical reactions, but, rather, to elucidate the specific laws of complexification that determine the essence of particular, individualized natural bodies." This fundamental claim to a terrain in which other things were investigated and explained than in physics went hand in hand with a de facto fragmentation of that very terrain itself. The life sciences had broken down into different disciplines with extremely variegated knowledge horizons, from physiology through developmental mechanics to genetics and morphological phylogenetics. Such fragmentation provided good reason to suspect that it was not just biology that was irreducibly many- sided and multiform, but the sciences in general. At the very moment when a movement in the philosophy of science, the Vienna Circle, was engaged in yet another bid to save the unity of the sciences, the actual developmental dynamics of the sciences themselves pointed in a different direction. In a paper entitled "Die Krise der Wirklichkeit" that appeared in 1928 in a journal published by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Die Naturwissenschaften (a competitor, at the time, of the British Nature and the American Science), the Frankfurt philosopher and cultural politician Kurt Riezler summed the situation up: "To begin with, some of what we had thought of as the laws of nature were revealed to be mere statistical regularities. ... To this moment, the divergent paths of development taken by the individual sciences added another.... [The individual sciences] were not converging, but diverging; they were developing their conceptual systems in different directions."
Both these moments, the demarcation of biology from physics and the internal differentiation of the life sciences into disciplines that could be neither reduced to each other nor derived from each other, preoccupied philosophically minded biologists from the end of the nineteenth century. As a rule, these biologists presented their reflections on the fundamental relationship between physics and biology under the rubric "theoretical biology," whereas the internal differentiation of biology itself generated diverse attempts at drafting a comprehensive "general biology." Accounts that lump these efforts together as so many subordinate expressions of a holistic Zeitgeist have a point, but the situation is more complex. Manfred Laubichler remarks, "While it is certainly true that there are connections between particular trends in German culture and history on the one hand and certain features of holism on the other, holistic science can by no means be traced back to this cultural context alone." Indeed, the "grand historiographic challenge" is precisely to understand, Laublicher goes on, "the many different intellectual and scientific developments in their own right, rather than constantly seeking the explanation for them in the shadow following them," that is, in the political developments in their wake. The various attempts to formulate a theoretical and general biology in Germany in the 1920s certainly involved wholeness and synthesis; yet as a rule they proceeded exclusively on the basis of experiences and experiments specific to a particular field. The Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler thought, for example, that it was impossible to lay claim to the holistic or synthetic as something specifically biological. Köhler's school held that holistic phenomena occurred in all natural domains, which-as attributes of material systems-could be investigated experimentally; they were by no means entities that could be conceived only in transcendental, let alone vitalistic, terms, as Anne Harrington has shown in Reenchanted Science. Again let us attend to what Hartmann had to say on the subject: "Vitalism basically puts the frontier of knowledge in the wrong place, namely, between the organic and the inorganic, when it really runs between the rational and the irrational."
Ludwik Fleck
A year after Riezler's essay in Naturwissenschaften (1928), there appeared a reply by a young, unknown, philosophically minded microbiologist from Lemberg with ten years of laboratory experience as an immunologist. His name was Ludwik Fleck. Naturwissenschaften had also made room for his contribution, which bore the evocative title "Zur Krise der 'Wirklichkeit.'" Riezler in his essay had distinguished between the historically produced common sense of three realities: the reality of the continuous stream of our external and internal perceptions; the reality of our objectivizing knowledge of the world; and the absolute reality underlying our historically changing knowledge of the world. For Riezler, the development of the sciences in the opening decades of the twentieth century, beginning with the progress made by physics, had profoundly shaken the belief that our second reality was steadily approximating the third, absolute reality and would ultimately coincide with it. With that he effectively identified the crisis he had diagnosed as an epistemological one. Fleck makes reference to Riezler's paper only in passing, but with a surprising shift. In one passage, he notes, in lapidary fashion, that "no progress is to be expected from ... trying to solve the problem of the origin of knowledge, in traditional fashion, as the individual concern of a symbolic 'man.'" "Hence I do not know," he went on, "why and to what end I should distinguish between a first and a second reality as depicted by, among others, Riezler."
This remark announces a reorientation that was to have fundamental consequences. In a first step, Fleck redefines the epistemological "crisis" affecting the relation between the second and third reality as a crisis affecting the conception of realities one and two. The passage just cited goes on, "one should precisely not neglect the social moment in the emergence of knowledge." Scientific knowledge becomes, in consequence, something that is in principle relational: "As a member of some society, every thinking individual has his own reality, in which and according to which he lives. Indeed, every human being possesses many, partially conflicting realities: the reality of everyday life, a professional, religious, and political reality, and even a small scientific reality. Hidden from others' eyes, he also has a superstitious reality that is governed by fate, a personal reality that makes an exception of his own ego." Yet Fleck does not leave matters at what might at first glance appear to be a general knowledge relativism. In a second step, the problem of reality, initially redefined in sociological terms, is transformed into a historical problem: "Every epistemology must be brought into relation with the social," he says, "and, further, with the history of culture, if it is not ... to come into sharp contradiction with the history of knowledge and everyday experience." Thus Fleck no longer conceives of knowledge, in the Cartesian tradition, as the relationship of a knowing ego or "symbolic 'man'" to his object; nor does he simply reformulate this relation as a multiple social relationship with the environment, in which the individual belongs to different social groups and consequently moves in different "worlds." Rather, Fleck historicizes the problem of knowledge. Knowledge acquisition-situated between everyday experience on the one hand and a cultural history of knowing on the other-is an inherently supra-individual process: "For knowing is neither passive contemplation nor acquisition of the only possible insight into something that is already finished and given in advance. It is an active, living entering-into-relation with, a transformation and being transformed, in short, creation [ein Schaffen]." Referring explicitly to Niels Bohr's quantum postulate and the non-negligible interference between atomic phenomena and the devices for measuring them, Fleck affirms that "observation, knowing [Erkennen], is always a feeling-out-of, and therefore, literally, a transformation of the object of knowledge." There is a striking similarity here to Bachelard, who, like Fleck, was a self-taught epistemologist assignable to no school or tradition; one cannot miss the reference to Bohr in Bachelard either. Bachelard, however, goes even further in the direction of an irreducibly historical epistemology: "Since the phenomenon is absolutely inseparable from the conditions of its detection, we must also characterize it in terms of those conditions." We are accordingly "justified in thinking knowledge in its unfolding, not its sensory origin." In question here is, as Bachelard puts it, a new "realism without substance," a realism of knowledge as process-and, let us add, the transition from the classical theory of knowledge to historical epistemology: that is, from the contemplating subject's relation to the world it contemplates to a conception of knowledge as an always technically and culturally implemented process.
(Continues...)
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