5
1
9780472112883
By Duncan F. Kennedy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0472112880
Essay 1 - Rethinking Reality
The Epicurean physical system expounded by Lucretius in his poem De Rerum Natura, in pursuit of its aim to exclude divine causation, claims to offer an explanation of every phenomenon observable in the universe, and with it the prospect of complete peace of mind and freedom from fear. Epicurean atomic theory appeals continually to the evidence of our senses, yet asks us to give our intellectual and emotional allegiance to--are we to call it a "reality"?--of atoms and void that operates way below the threshold of our senses. In seeking explanations for the phenomena of the visible world, we are told repeatedly that our senses must be our guide, but the most familiar aspects of our sensory experience--colors, sounds, tastes, smells--turn out not to be properties of atoms, which, we are told, have four basic properties only: size, shape, weight, and movement. Atomism, it has been asserted, is a theory with the potential to pose a disorientating challenge to our sense of "reality." Robert Wardy has put it thus: "From antiquity to the present day atomic theory has demanded that people confront a very startling idea: that the world, on scales both very small and very large, is notfaithfully represented by the experience of human subjects." Wardy offers a striking characterization of the extreme reductionist image that results: "Theory reveals to the mind's eye a stark, pure vista of colorless, odorless, tasteless, soundless atoms traveling through the never-ending void. It opens a gap between basic reality, and at least the most familiar or basic appearances, threatening to make strangers of us in our own world." The theory has the potential also to disrupt our sense of scale, both of space and of time. Below the world whose scale and activity we are familiar with, we are asked to imagine a furious microscopic activity, but at the same time to envisage it as taking place throughout a universe that has no boundaries, a universe that has always existed and will always exist. Life itself becomes a problematic idea. Atoms, the constituent matter of the universe, are lifeless, so we are asked to accept that everything we consider makes us what we are--our consciousness, our senses--is purely an epiphenomenon, the chance combination of particular atoms moving in particular ways.
If atomism poses a challenge to our sense of "reality" in physical terms, it can do so no less in historical terms. Lucretius's poem purports to offer a final and definitive theory of the "nature of things." But, whatever Lucretius's beliefs or claims in this matter, his was not the final word, was it? What, then, do we "do" with Lucretius? Michel Serres has observed that in his major work on atomic theory of 1913, Les Atomes, Jean Perrin cites Lucretius from the very beginning and even performs anew experiments and observations inspired by the Latin text. "In his study," Serres remarks, "you'll find an annotated copy of Lucretius." For Perrin, Lucretius remained in an important sense contemporary, not some historical relic, heuristically inert. But in rereading the text of Lucretius these days, Serres suggests, it is generally assumed that the philosophical state of mechanistic materialism as discussed from antiquity up until the nineteenth century is over, that experimental science has moved on from these abstract speculations, uprooting itself from this discussion and rendering it definitively pointless. As a result, it is assumed, Perrin's atoms have no longer anything to do with Lucretius's, making Lucretius no longer "contemporary," and readable only, in accordance with their different preconceptions and interests, by Latin scholars on the one hand and by historians of materialism on the other: "In this way he is twice lost--so why study him in philosophy? Besides, 'it 's poetry.' " What Serres is pointing to is a sense of historical and epistemological discontinuity and rupture, according to which we, our ideas, and the authorities and traditions we appeal to are "modern" (and, by implication, "correct"), and which consigns everything else to a past now definitively superseded, so making Lucretius irredeemably "ancient," a "classical" text of antiquarian interest only. Our status as "moderns" makes us fully comfortable with the discontinuity by which certain terms like ether and phlogiston have long since fallen by the wayside. Indeed, we feel it to be a sign of our progress that we have left such notions well and truly behind us. And yet, other terms, such as atom, show a remarkable historical tenacity, but we stress their continuity only by negotiating or suppressing some potentially discomfiting discontinuities. In a book on Lucretius published in 1909, John Masson devoted an appendix to the "Relation of Lucretius' Atom to the Daltonian Atom and to the Electron." In his preface, he pronounces: "No doubt the 'atom' in the strict sense of the word is now the Electron.. . . In the essential quality of indivisibility, on which Lucretius bases the fact of law in Nature and the persistence of all things in the world, his atom corresponds to the Electron." Contemporary particle physics inherits from the chemistry of the nineteenth century the assumption that matter is made up of some ultimate, indivisible units. The century and a half since has seen the reduction of matter from molecules to atoms, from atoms to nuclei, from nuclei to nuclear particles, and from particles to quarks, but has not produced the elusive ultimate unit, although one way that each historical stage has sought to mark its achievement is by claiming to have found it. But in what sense, "strict" or otherwise, is the atom of Lucretius "really" the atom of Dalton? Or, for that matter, the atom of Dalton the atom of Rutherford? The atom of Rutherford the atom of Bohr?
For Serres, however, Lucretius is "truly contemporary, not only in his scientific content but in his philosophic reflection," on questions of violence and the relations between religion and science, for instance. But that reference to "scientific content" is a bit disconcerting, for surely we have progressed beyond the picture of things Lucretius gives us? Serres demurs:
So, when one frees oneself of a particular mind-set, not only about the mechanics of solids, but also about time, Lucretius, he says, must be seen as contemporary, indeed much more so than many of those more recent books that claim to be the last word on these issues:
However, Serres's assertion in relation to his own reading of Lucretius, that Lucretius "in reality" and "really" was already talking about fluid mechanics, turbulence, and chaos, is undermined, we may feel, by what he goes on to say about time and progress. He compares the modern model of time to those old diagrams that place the Earth at the center of everything:
A scene in Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Gate of Angels can serve to dramatize a number of issues about "reality" I want to discuss. The novel, which was published in 1990, is set in Cambridge, England, between 1907 and 1912, in the early years of what has often been described as the "revolution" in physics that dominated the twentieth century, and which, it is said, was set in train by the publication of three papers by Einstein in 1905. A central character in the story is a Junior Fellow named Fred Fairly, and in an account of how he came by his Fellowship, we find this conversation between Fred and one of his teachers, Professor Flowerdew:
The effects created by the narrative format of this passage deserve close scrutiny. The setting of this extract, its narrative "present," is 1907, but two temporal perspectives are being subtly intertwined. A prospective account of twentieth-century physics--constructed, however, retrospectively by the narrator with the benefit of hindsight--is put into the mouth of Professor Flowerdew. History is being written in the future tense, and this invites us to view the chosen sequence of events in a less familiar direction, from the beginning toward the end: we are being asked to consider not "what was" but "what was-to-be." The effect is to present what might otherwise be deemed the contingencies of history as the inevitable working out of a sequence in some sense already determined. These notions are important for understanding configurations of the discourse of science, and I shall be returning to them in due course. But for the moment, let us merely observe that irony infuses such narratives, arising out of the discrepancy between the "knowledge" a character like Flowerdew has of the "significance" of the "future" events he predicts and that of the narrator or the reader of the text. When for example Flowerdew mentions "elementary particles which are too strange to have anything but curious names," we can relish the irony that is produced by our familiarity with words such as quark or boson; or reflect upon the more somber ironies of some "spectacular" and some indubitably "unpleasant" results of atomic research. There is irony too in the "end" of Flowerdew's narrative, for what to many modern physicists is the intriguing vocabulary of "chaos," heuristically useful for conceptualizing extremely complex information and for understanding behavior so complex that it evades the usual methods of formalizing a system through mathematics, is for Flowerdew an expression of horror at an absence of "order."
The irony created by superimposing two perspectives we might term "1907-forward" and "1990-backward" on to the word chaos can serve to emphasize the way in which terms can accrue to themselves a multiplicity of connotations that can be orchestrated and mobilized to different ends in different contexts. To take another example, in 1871, Charles Darwin published the second of his major expositions of evolutionary theory, which he entitled The Descent of Man. Almost exactly one hundred years later, Jacob Bronowski, appealing explicitly to a Darwinian framework of assumptions about evolution, wrote a book and a television series that he called The Ascent of Man. It is worth pondering on the distinction between these two titles. Descent in Darwinian terms suggests the emergence of the human species over time; but descent can also suggest motion downward, and within our culture, downward motion is often associated with degeneration and decline. The notion of the extinction of species is central to Darwin's argument, and the title of the book raises the possibility of human extinction, implying that humankind is not a privileged species. Descent with modification, rather than evolution (the term made popular by Herbert Spencer), was Darwin's preferred description of this mechanism since he wanted to uncouple his theory from associations of progress. This will have dovetailed with the strong determinism of Victorian science, particularly the anxieties associated with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and notions of the "heat death" of the universe. Furthermore, the title The Descent of Man for many could have prompted associations with the biblical story of the Fall, the very sort of theological worldview Darwin's theory was implicitly denying. The word descent was one with many negative associations, but that should not necessarily be taken to be rhetorically disadvantageous. By thus engaging with antagonistic models deeply embedded within the culture it addressed, the word may have helped to disseminate Darwin's ideas by the controversy it fueled. By contrast, Bronowski's title is upbeat, optimistic; metaphorically, motion upward often signifies progress and happiness. Humankind is seen as the culmination of a process and is placed at the pinnacle of things.
In a semiotic system in which a polarization of "order" and "chaos" is regularly mapped onto a distinction between civilized values and barbarism, the complex rhetorical impact of the designation chaos on an explanatory theory is similarly not to be under-estimated. However, Professor Flowerdew, for whom research into the physical world is construed in terms of the "discovery" of "laws," sees "chaos" as the absolute antithesis of "order," and his use of the word encapsulates his sense of disorientation in the face of the enormous challenges that are being posed by the new physics not simply to his notion of his discipline, but to his ideological worldview more generally. The world for him is "what can be known through the senses," and this is what he wishes to identify with the word reality. Citing Ernst Mach, he asserts that "an atom is not a reality, it is just a provisional idea," and he continues: "We ought to feel suspicious of it when we find that it has been given characteristics which absolutely contradict those which have been observed in any other body." From the perspective of the present, the reader might think here of the somewhat disconcerting notion of the electron, of which physicists assure us that we can tell its position or its direction, but we can't tell both at once: it depends on which question you ask, which will also determine whether you conceive of it as a "wave" or a "particle." Flowerdew is reluctant to grant the atom the status of a "reality" because, he says, we ought to feel suspicious of it when we find that it has been given characteristics that absolutely contradict those that have been observed in any other body. However, the use of the term body to describe any kind of elementary particle becomes increasingly problematic within a discourse that is involved in dissolving the distinction between "mass" and "energy"; indeed, the word particle, with its associations of a "piece of matter," does not escape this difficulty either. At one level, Flowerdew's problem can be seen as one of language. The overwhelming associations the word body has for him with the "tangible," with "matter," is likely to prove a major obstacle to him in coming to terms with the directions physics is taking in the twentieth century.
"There is a continuity of scientific thought, you know," protests Professor Flowerdew, and indeed, histories of science traditionally locate its beginnings in the attempt of Thales to find rational if unseen causes for what are then described as the "phenomena" that occur in the natural world. Philosophers of science sometimes speak of a distinction between the manifest image (the world as it appears to our senses) and the scientific image (the world as it is "in itself "). If Professor Flowerdew resists the application of the word reality to anything that may lie below the threshold of the senses, for proponents of the scientific image, the world of the senses, however familiar, is that of "appearances"--the "phenomenal world"--while "reality" lies firmly below. The "manifest image" and the "scientific image" seem to present us with a disconcerting choice. Ian Hacking's book on the philosophy of science, Representing and Intervening, has drawn attention to the way in which reality is a term intimately linked to the notion of representation: awareness of a multiplicity of competing images or representations drives, he argues, the distinction between "appearance" and "reality" and also both generates and disturbs our sense of a fixed or stable reality. Ironically indulging in a fantasy of origins that he himself freely disowns as "preposterous," Hacking suggests that it is not language, as is so often thought, but the making of representations that is the defining notion of the human: "The first peculiarly human invention is representation. Once there is a practice of representing, a second-order concept follows in train. This is the concept of reality, a concept which has content only when there are first-order representations." In response to the objection that reality, or the world, was there before any representation or human language, he says: "Of course. But conceptualizing it as reality is secondary. First there is this human thing, the making of representations. Then there was the judging of representations as real or unreal, true or false, faithful or unfaithful. Finally comes the world, not first but second, third or fourth. . . . The world has an excellent place, if not a first one. It was found by conceptualizing the real as an attribute of representation." Hacking's fantasy characterizes the issue as one stretching back into the mists of time, and Greek thought in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. could be seen as offering a number of divergent "solutions" to the "problem" of representation. Thus for Plato we could say that "reality" is identified with the world of the Forms, abstract essences or ideas, while the world of sensory experience is equated with (consequentially, illusory) "appearance." For the atomists at the same time, we could say that the language of "appearance" likewise depicts the world of our sensory experience, but the language of "reality" is reserved for the world of atoms and void; recall the way I spoke of Lucretius "seeking explanations for the phenomena of the visible world" or of life, our consciousness, and our senses from this perspective (the language of representation at this point becomes explicit) being epiphenomena, "appearances" (phenomena) that exist "over" (epi) a "reality" that is therefore depicted as "underlying," the "inner essence" of the phenomenal world. If "reality" is equated with the "material," then "life becomes a problematical idea." "Reality" and "appearance," and their associated terms, are projected as opposites, but such distinctions are taken here to operate within, and articulate, a hierarchy of value, their meaning generated by the ways in which, and the ends to which, they are kept distinct in different discourses. Thus for Plato, the world of the senses is opposed to the world of the Forms so as to elevate abstract essences and ideas as ultimate reality. On the other hand, when Professor Flowerdew proclaims that an atom "is not a reality, it is just a provisional idea," "reality" is opposed to "idea" (dismissively "just an idea" within this materialist discourse) in such a way as to present the world of the senses as ultimate reality.
The difference in outlook between Professor Flowerdew and his opponents is usually expressed by philosophers of science in terms of a distinction between realism and antirealism. Hacking characterizes the distinction in this way:
On this description, Flowerdew's views (and his appeal to the authority of Ernst Mach) put him firmly in the antirealist camp. As Hacking's account and his lists of entities, states, and processes adumbrate, there are many varieties of realism and of antirealism, and realism in respect of one "thing" does not necessarily entail realism in respect of another. Indeed, we might say that it is realism-in-respect-of that constitutes something as a "thing." Thus Nancy Cartwright emerges as a realist in respect of some entities, but, as the title of her book How the Laws of Physics Lie implies, an antirealist in respect of physical laws and theories. She explores what it means to call something a cause, and from a causalist perspective, causal entities could, theoretically at least, be not only, say, material, but economic (e.g. market forces), sociological (e.g. society, ideology, or power), psychological (e.g. the unconscious), rhetorical (text or discourse) or whatever within any discourse is deemed to create effects. Nicholas Jardine, while conceding what he terms the "local reality" of certain questions in certain scientific discourses at certain times (the so-called scenes of inquiry that give his book its title), addresses doubts about the claims of the sciences to have accumulated not only absolutely real answers but also absolutely real questions. Hacking himself says that he never thought twice about scientific realism until a friend told him about an experiment to detect the existence of fractional electrical charges called quarks. It was not the quarks that made him a realist, he reports, but electrons. The experiment involved changing the initial charge placed on a ball of a substance called niobium:
Hacking's formulation of realism (at least realism in respect of certain entities--thus constituted as "entities" rather than, say, "provisional ideas," "fictions," or "tools for thinking") leads to the following conclusion: "Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are regularly manipulated to produce a new phenomena [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature. They are tools, instruments not for thinking but for doing." Consider the title of Hacking's book, Representing and Intervening, in this light. The "and" in the title may be read as a copula, but it may also be taken to conceal a hierarchy that is complicit with the teleology of the argument: representation is marginalized so as to bring "intervening" center stage. Similarly, Rom Harre's defense of scientific realism sees science not as a logically coherent body of knowledge in what he terms "the strict and unforgiving philosophical sense," but "a cluster of material and cognitive practices. . . . Science is an activity; it is something people do. Some, but not all of that doing is thinking, and a yet more minor part of it is producing discourses in which the results of making those material manipulations and doing that thinking are recorded." He counsels against mistaking "the discourse and its properties for the practice of which it is a partial and rhetorically distorted representation."
As we can see from Hacking and Harre, downplaying representation is a crucial strategy for the defenders of scientific realism. For Hacking, we may recall, language was less important, and so even more marginalized, than representation. For the realist, language should be a transparent window to the entity beyond, and when it isn't, the accusation is made that it offers "a partial and rhetorically distorted representation" of what is really going on. This emphasis on experiments and the laboratory seeks to distance science from language and associate it with a world of activity; the truth is not so much "out there" as "down there"--on the laboratory bench. Conversely, in the words of George Levine, if one "accepts the inevitability of an equation between language and knowledge, one's likely stance is antirealism." Thus Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar argue that the researchers on neuroendocrinology they observed in their "ethnographic" study of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, far from investigating things per se, were manipulating recording devices and instruments that "can transform a material substance into a figure or diagram which is directly usable by one of the members of the office space . . . once the end product, an inscription, is available, all the intervening steps which made its production possible are forgotten. The diagram or sheet of figures becomes the focus of discussion between participants, and the material processes which give rise to it are either forgotten or taken for granted as being merely technical matters." Latour and Woolgar set themselves the task of plotting how the statement "TRF (Thyrotropin Releasing Factor) is Pyro-Glu-His-Pro-NH2" moves from being unsayable to possible to a fact, and they see the laboratory not so much in terms of the practices of experimentation as of a site for technologies of representation and a locus of negotiation, in which apparatus subserves statement:
Continues...
Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature available in Hardcover
Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature
by Duncan F. Kennedy
Duncan F. Kennedy
- ISBN-10:
- 0472112880
- ISBN-13:
- 9780472112883
- Pub. Date:
- 09/23/2002
- Publisher:
- University of Michigan Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0472112880
- ISBN-13:
- 9780472112883
- Pub. Date:
- 09/23/2002
- Publisher:
- University of Michigan Press
Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature
by Duncan F. Kennedy
Duncan F. Kennedy
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Overview
How deeply into the structure of physical reality do the effects of our way of representing it reach? To what extent do constructivist accounts of scientific theorizing involve realist assumptions, and vice versa? This book provides a lucid and concise introduction to contemporary debates, taking as its theme the question of the relationship of representation and reality. It treats in an attractive and accessible way the historical, philosophical, and literary aspects of this question. In particular, it explores how the present relates to and configures claims to scientific knowledge from the past, taking as its main case study On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), the poem on physics written by the Roman poet Lucretius in the 50s B.C.E.
The book engages in a sustained argument about realist assumptions in scientific and other discourses through detailed analysis and discussion of some of the most important recent contributions to this debate. Engaging sympathetically but not uncritically with constructivist accounts of scientific knowledge, the book takes up a sustained critique of recent contributions to that debate, including those of Ian Hacking, Evelyn Fox Keller, Bruno Latour, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. What are the implications of regarding such knowledge as "discovered" or "invented"? How is the rhetoric of such claims to be identified and the pretentions of those claims assessed? In what ways can realist and constructivist approaches be reconciled? How do these considerations affect the way we read scientific texts from the past and regard them historically?
What emerges is a fresh and challenging assessment of the role of time and temporal perspective in assessing claims to knowledge in scientific thought and of the importance of textuality to the history of knowledge. A wide variety of readers, from classicists and intellectual historians to epistemologists of science, will enjoy and learn from Rethinking Reality.
Duncan Kennedy is Reader in Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism, University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy.
The book engages in a sustained argument about realist assumptions in scientific and other discourses through detailed analysis and discussion of some of the most important recent contributions to this debate. Engaging sympathetically but not uncritically with constructivist accounts of scientific knowledge, the book takes up a sustained critique of recent contributions to that debate, including those of Ian Hacking, Evelyn Fox Keller, Bruno Latour, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. What are the implications of regarding such knowledge as "discovered" or "invented"? How is the rhetoric of such claims to be identified and the pretentions of those claims assessed? In what ways can realist and constructivist approaches be reconciled? How do these considerations affect the way we read scientific texts from the past and regard them historically?
What emerges is a fresh and challenging assessment of the role of time and temporal perspective in assessing claims to knowledge in scientific thought and of the importance of textuality to the history of knowledge. A wide variety of readers, from classicists and intellectual historians to epistemologists of science, will enjoy and learn from Rethinking Reality.
Duncan Kennedy is Reader in Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism, University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472112883 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 09/23/2002 |
| Series: | Studies In Literature And Science |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Duncan Kennedy is Reader in Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism, University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy.
Read an Excerpt
Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature
By Duncan F. Kennedy
University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2002 Duncan F. KennedyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0472112880
Essay 1 - Rethinking Reality
The Epicurean physical system expounded by Lucretius in his poem De Rerum Natura, in pursuit of its aim to exclude divine causation, claims to offer an explanation of every phenomenon observable in the universe, and with it the prospect of complete peace of mind and freedom from fear. Epicurean atomic theory appeals continually to the evidence of our senses, yet asks us to give our intellectual and emotional allegiance to--are we to call it a "reality"?--of atoms and void that operates way below the threshold of our senses. In seeking explanations for the phenomena of the visible world, we are told repeatedly that our senses must be our guide, but the most familiar aspects of our sensory experience--colors, sounds, tastes, smells--turn out not to be properties of atoms, which, we are told, have four basic properties only: size, shape, weight, and movement. Atomism, it has been asserted, is a theory with the potential to pose a disorientating challenge to our sense of "reality." Robert Wardy has put it thus: "From antiquity to the present day atomic theory has demanded that people confront a very startling idea: that the world, on scales both very small and very large, is notfaithfully represented by the experience of human subjects." Wardy offers a striking characterization of the extreme reductionist image that results: "Theory reveals to the mind's eye a stark, pure vista of colorless, odorless, tasteless, soundless atoms traveling through the never-ending void. It opens a gap between basic reality, and at least the most familiar or basic appearances, threatening to make strangers of us in our own world." The theory has the potential also to disrupt our sense of scale, both of space and of time. Below the world whose scale and activity we are familiar with, we are asked to imagine a furious microscopic activity, but at the same time to envisage it as taking place throughout a universe that has no boundaries, a universe that has always existed and will always exist. Life itself becomes a problematic idea. Atoms, the constituent matter of the universe, are lifeless, so we are asked to accept that everything we consider makes us what we are--our consciousness, our senses--is purely an epiphenomenon, the chance combination of particular atoms moving in particular ways.
If atomism poses a challenge to our sense of "reality" in physical terms, it can do so no less in historical terms. Lucretius's poem purports to offer a final and definitive theory of the "nature of things." But, whatever Lucretius's beliefs or claims in this matter, his was not the final word, was it? What, then, do we "do" with Lucretius? Michel Serres has observed that in his major work on atomic theory of 1913, Les Atomes, Jean Perrin cites Lucretius from the very beginning and even performs anew experiments and observations inspired by the Latin text. "In his study," Serres remarks, "you'll find an annotated copy of Lucretius." For Perrin, Lucretius remained in an important sense contemporary, not some historical relic, heuristically inert. But in rereading the text of Lucretius these days, Serres suggests, it is generally assumed that the philosophical state of mechanistic materialism as discussed from antiquity up until the nineteenth century is over, that experimental science has moved on from these abstract speculations, uprooting itself from this discussion and rendering it definitively pointless. As a result, it is assumed, Perrin's atoms have no longer anything to do with Lucretius's, making Lucretius no longer "contemporary," and readable only, in accordance with their different preconceptions and interests, by Latin scholars on the one hand and by historians of materialism on the other: "In this way he is twice lost--so why study him in philosophy? Besides, 'it 's poetry.' " What Serres is pointing to is a sense of historical and epistemological discontinuity and rupture, according to which we, our ideas, and the authorities and traditions we appeal to are "modern" (and, by implication, "correct"), and which consigns everything else to a past now definitively superseded, so making Lucretius irredeemably "ancient," a "classical" text of antiquarian interest only. Our status as "moderns" makes us fully comfortable with the discontinuity by which certain terms like ether and phlogiston have long since fallen by the wayside. Indeed, we feel it to be a sign of our progress that we have left such notions well and truly behind us. And yet, other terms, such as atom, show a remarkable historical tenacity, but we stress their continuity only by negotiating or suppressing some potentially discomfiting discontinuities. In a book on Lucretius published in 1909, John Masson devoted an appendix to the "Relation of Lucretius' Atom to the Daltonian Atom and to the Electron." In his preface, he pronounces: "No doubt the 'atom' in the strict sense of the word is now the Electron.. . . In the essential quality of indivisibility, on which Lucretius bases the fact of law in Nature and the persistence of all things in the world, his atom corresponds to the Electron." Contemporary particle physics inherits from the chemistry of the nineteenth century the assumption that matter is made up of some ultimate, indivisible units. The century and a half since has seen the reduction of matter from molecules to atoms, from atoms to nuclei, from nuclei to nuclear particles, and from particles to quarks, but has not produced the elusive ultimate unit, although one way that each historical stage has sought to mark its achievement is by claiming to have found it. But in what sense, "strict" or otherwise, is the atom of Lucretius "really" the atom of Dalton? Or, for that matter, the atom of Dalton the atom of Rutherford? The atom of Rutherford the atom of Bohr?
For Serres, however, Lucretius is "truly contemporary, not only in his scientific content but in his philosophic reflection," on questions of violence and the relations between religion and science, for instance. But that reference to "scientific content" is a bit disconcerting, for surely we have progressed beyond the picture of things Lucretius gives us? Serres demurs:
But in carefully rereading the De rerum natura, I see that in reality he 's talking about fluid mechanics, about turbulence and chaos, that he 's asking--and asking well-- questions about chance and determinism. . . . I see that one could not read these things as long as the science of the day obliged one to think exclusively in terms of the mechanics of solids.
So, when one frees oneself of a particular mind-set, not only about the mechanics of solids, but also about time, Lucretius, he says, must be seen as contemporary, indeed much more so than many of those more recent books that claim to be the last word on these issues:
The word contemporary automatically takes two contradictory meanings. It means that Lucretius, in his own time, really was already thinking in terms of flux, turbulence and chaos, and second that through this, he is part of our era, which is rethinking similar problems.
However, Serres's assertion in relation to his own reading of Lucretius, that Lucretius "in reality" and "really" was already talking about fluid mechanics, turbulence, and chaos, is undermined, we may feel, by what he goes on to say about time and progress. He compares the modern model of time to those old diagrams that place the Earth at the center of everything:
Just as in space we situate ourselves at the center, at the navel of things in the universe, so for time, through progress, we never cease to be at the summit, on the cutting edge, at the state-of-the-art of development. It follows that we are always right, for the simple, banal, and naive reason that we are living in the present moment. . . . This diagram allows us permanently (yes, permanently, since the present is always the last word on time and truth . . .) to be not only right but to be righter than was ever possible before. Now I believe that one should always be wary of any person or theory that is always right: he's not plausible; it's not probable.Surely then, Serres is not claiming to be "always right" about Lucretius; he would not be plausible, and that would not be probable. In which case, our focus should return to his rhetoric of "reality." If we thought there was no ground more solid on which to take our stand, perhaps we should go with the "flow" and rethink the "mechanics" of this term--in history, rhetoric, and philosophy no less than in physics.
A scene in Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Gate of Angels can serve to dramatize a number of issues about "reality" I want to discuss. The novel, which was published in 1990, is set in Cambridge, England, between 1907 and 1912, in the early years of what has often been described as the "revolution" in physics that dominated the twentieth century, and which, it is said, was set in train by the publication of three papers by Einstein in 1905. A central character in the story is a Junior Fellow named Fred Fairly, and in an account of how he came by his Fellowship, we find this conversation between Fred and one of his teachers, Professor Flowerdew:
"You are attracted towards atomic research?"
"I've seen Ernest Rutherford walking into the Cavendish," Fred cried. "I heard his lectures. It all hangs together. If it works, it must be true."
"Well, well," said Professor Flowerdew, "I expect it will hang together for a considerable time, perhaps sixty or seventy years. The belief that Nature, or an invisible god, created the world and assigned everything for a purpose, lasted very much longer than that and worked reasonably well. But we 've given all that up, because we 've no evidence that God or Nature exists."
"None at all," said Fred. "That has to be left to faith. After all, you can only reason from what you can observe."
"Quite so," said Professor Flowerdew. "But atoms are unobservables." He pointed to one of the photographs on the wall.
"Who is that?" he asked.
Fred floundered, looking at the bearded, enigmatic faces, one of which had been circled in red ink. There were distant men in frock coats and top-hats, standing outside a building he did not recognise.
"That is Ernst Mach, a photograph taken in Vienna on the occasion of his retirement from the University Chair of physics. I used to be in correspondence with him, now I no longer am. It was from his lectures and his Science of Mathematics that I came to understand the folly of basing any kind of scientific research on unobservables. Mach, don't forget, is a very deeply respected physicist. He has established among many other things, the relationship between the speed of objects and the local speed of sound. But in respect of the atom, Mach said to the world, don't commit yourself to it! An atom is not a reality, it is just a provisional idea, so how can we say it is situated in space? We ought to feel suspicious of it when we find it has been given characteristics which absolutely contradict those which have been observed in any other body. There is a continuity of scientific thought, you know. The continuity is now being thrown out of the window. Let us hope we shall remember where it is when, at long last, we find that we can't do without it."
He looked compassionately at Fred. "You're hungry. But it 's no use going down now, the Science Faculty will have eaten everything. The organic chemists will have cleared the sandwiches. Let me tell you what is going to happen, over the coming centuries, to atomic research.
"There will be many apparent results, some useful, some spectacular, some, very possibly, unpleasant. But since the whole basis of the present research is unsound, cracks will appear in the structure one by one. The physicists will begin by constructing models of the atom, in fact there are some very nice ones in the Cavendish at the moment. Then they'll find that the models won't do, because they would only work if atoms really existed, so they'll replace them by mathematical terms which can be stretched to fit. As a result, they'll find that since they're dealing with what they can't observe, they can't measure it, and so we shall hear that all that can be said is that the position is probably this and the energy is probably that. The energy will be beyond their comprehension, so they'll be driven to the theory that it comes and goes more or less at random. Now their hypotheses will be at the beginning of collapse and they will have to pull out more and more bright notions to paper over the cracks and to cram into unsightly corners. There will be elementary particles which are too strange to have anything but curious names, and anti-matter which ought to be there, but isn't. By the end of the century they will have to admit that the laws they are supposed to have discovered seem to act in a profoundly disorderly way. What is a disorderly law, Fairly?"
"It sounds like chaos," said Fred.
"The chaos will be in their minds only. It, too, will not be observable."
"What do you think is to be done?"
"Admit the wrong direction, and go back to what can be known through the senses. If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips."
The effects created by the narrative format of this passage deserve close scrutiny. The setting of this extract, its narrative "present," is 1907, but two temporal perspectives are being subtly intertwined. A prospective account of twentieth-century physics--constructed, however, retrospectively by the narrator with the benefit of hindsight--is put into the mouth of Professor Flowerdew. History is being written in the future tense, and this invites us to view the chosen sequence of events in a less familiar direction, from the beginning toward the end: we are being asked to consider not "what was" but "what was-to-be." The effect is to present what might otherwise be deemed the contingencies of history as the inevitable working out of a sequence in some sense already determined. These notions are important for understanding configurations of the discourse of science, and I shall be returning to them in due course. But for the moment, let us merely observe that irony infuses such narratives, arising out of the discrepancy between the "knowledge" a character like Flowerdew has of the "significance" of the "future" events he predicts and that of the narrator or the reader of the text. When for example Flowerdew mentions "elementary particles which are too strange to have anything but curious names," we can relish the irony that is produced by our familiarity with words such as quark or boson; or reflect upon the more somber ironies of some "spectacular" and some indubitably "unpleasant" results of atomic research. There is irony too in the "end" of Flowerdew's narrative, for what to many modern physicists is the intriguing vocabulary of "chaos," heuristically useful for conceptualizing extremely complex information and for understanding behavior so complex that it evades the usual methods of formalizing a system through mathematics, is for Flowerdew an expression of horror at an absence of "order."
The irony created by superimposing two perspectives we might term "1907-forward" and "1990-backward" on to the word chaos can serve to emphasize the way in which terms can accrue to themselves a multiplicity of connotations that can be orchestrated and mobilized to different ends in different contexts. To take another example, in 1871, Charles Darwin published the second of his major expositions of evolutionary theory, which he entitled The Descent of Man. Almost exactly one hundred years later, Jacob Bronowski, appealing explicitly to a Darwinian framework of assumptions about evolution, wrote a book and a television series that he called The Ascent of Man. It is worth pondering on the distinction between these two titles. Descent in Darwinian terms suggests the emergence of the human species over time; but descent can also suggest motion downward, and within our culture, downward motion is often associated with degeneration and decline. The notion of the extinction of species is central to Darwin's argument, and the title of the book raises the possibility of human extinction, implying that humankind is not a privileged species. Descent with modification, rather than evolution (the term made popular by Herbert Spencer), was Darwin's preferred description of this mechanism since he wanted to uncouple his theory from associations of progress. This will have dovetailed with the strong determinism of Victorian science, particularly the anxieties associated with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and notions of the "heat death" of the universe. Furthermore, the title The Descent of Man for many could have prompted associations with the biblical story of the Fall, the very sort of theological worldview Darwin's theory was implicitly denying. The word descent was one with many negative associations, but that should not necessarily be taken to be rhetorically disadvantageous. By thus engaging with antagonistic models deeply embedded within the culture it addressed, the word may have helped to disseminate Darwin's ideas by the controversy it fueled. By contrast, Bronowski's title is upbeat, optimistic; metaphorically, motion upward often signifies progress and happiness. Humankind is seen as the culmination of a process and is placed at the pinnacle of things.
In a semiotic system in which a polarization of "order" and "chaos" is regularly mapped onto a distinction between civilized values and barbarism, the complex rhetorical impact of the designation chaos on an explanatory theory is similarly not to be under-estimated. However, Professor Flowerdew, for whom research into the physical world is construed in terms of the "discovery" of "laws," sees "chaos" as the absolute antithesis of "order," and his use of the word encapsulates his sense of disorientation in the face of the enormous challenges that are being posed by the new physics not simply to his notion of his discipline, but to his ideological worldview more generally. The world for him is "what can be known through the senses," and this is what he wishes to identify with the word reality. Citing Ernst Mach, he asserts that "an atom is not a reality, it is just a provisional idea," and he continues: "We ought to feel suspicious of it when we find that it has been given characteristics which absolutely contradict those which have been observed in any other body." From the perspective of the present, the reader might think here of the somewhat disconcerting notion of the electron, of which physicists assure us that we can tell its position or its direction, but we can't tell both at once: it depends on which question you ask, which will also determine whether you conceive of it as a "wave" or a "particle." Flowerdew is reluctant to grant the atom the status of a "reality" because, he says, we ought to feel suspicious of it when we find that it has been given characteristics that absolutely contradict those that have been observed in any other body. However, the use of the term body to describe any kind of elementary particle becomes increasingly problematic within a discourse that is involved in dissolving the distinction between "mass" and "energy"; indeed, the word particle, with its associations of a "piece of matter," does not escape this difficulty either. At one level, Flowerdew's problem can be seen as one of language. The overwhelming associations the word body has for him with the "tangible," with "matter," is likely to prove a major obstacle to him in coming to terms with the directions physics is taking in the twentieth century.
"There is a continuity of scientific thought, you know," protests Professor Flowerdew, and indeed, histories of science traditionally locate its beginnings in the attempt of Thales to find rational if unseen causes for what are then described as the "phenomena" that occur in the natural world. Philosophers of science sometimes speak of a distinction between the manifest image (the world as it appears to our senses) and the scientific image (the world as it is "in itself "). If Professor Flowerdew resists the application of the word reality to anything that may lie below the threshold of the senses, for proponents of the scientific image, the world of the senses, however familiar, is that of "appearances"--the "phenomenal world"--while "reality" lies firmly below. The "manifest image" and the "scientific image" seem to present us with a disconcerting choice. Ian Hacking's book on the philosophy of science, Representing and Intervening, has drawn attention to the way in which reality is a term intimately linked to the notion of representation: awareness of a multiplicity of competing images or representations drives, he argues, the distinction between "appearance" and "reality" and also both generates and disturbs our sense of a fixed or stable reality. Ironically indulging in a fantasy of origins that he himself freely disowns as "preposterous," Hacking suggests that it is not language, as is so often thought, but the making of representations that is the defining notion of the human: "The first peculiarly human invention is representation. Once there is a practice of representing, a second-order concept follows in train. This is the concept of reality, a concept which has content only when there are first-order representations." In response to the objection that reality, or the world, was there before any representation or human language, he says: "Of course. But conceptualizing it as reality is secondary. First there is this human thing, the making of representations. Then there was the judging of representations as real or unreal, true or false, faithful or unfaithful. Finally comes the world, not first but second, third or fourth. . . . The world has an excellent place, if not a first one. It was found by conceptualizing the real as an attribute of representation." Hacking's fantasy characterizes the issue as one stretching back into the mists of time, and Greek thought in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. could be seen as offering a number of divergent "solutions" to the "problem" of representation. Thus for Plato we could say that "reality" is identified with the world of the Forms, abstract essences or ideas, while the world of sensory experience is equated with (consequentially, illusory) "appearance." For the atomists at the same time, we could say that the language of "appearance" likewise depicts the world of our sensory experience, but the language of "reality" is reserved for the world of atoms and void; recall the way I spoke of Lucretius "seeking explanations for the phenomena of the visible world" or of life, our consciousness, and our senses from this perspective (the language of representation at this point becomes explicit) being epiphenomena, "appearances" (phenomena) that exist "over" (epi) a "reality" that is therefore depicted as "underlying," the "inner essence" of the phenomenal world. If "reality" is equated with the "material," then "life becomes a problematical idea." "Reality" and "appearance," and their associated terms, are projected as opposites, but such distinctions are taken here to operate within, and articulate, a hierarchy of value, their meaning generated by the ways in which, and the ends to which, they are kept distinct in different discourses. Thus for Plato, the world of the senses is opposed to the world of the Forms so as to elevate abstract essences and ideas as ultimate reality. On the other hand, when Professor Flowerdew proclaims that an atom "is not a reality, it is just a provisional idea," "reality" is opposed to "idea" (dismissively "just an idea" within this materialist discourse) in such a way as to present the world of the senses as ultimate reality.
The difference in outlook between Professor Flowerdew and his opponents is usually expressed by philosophers of science in terms of a distinction between realism and antirealism. Hacking characterizes the distinction in this way:
Scientific realism says that entities, states and processes described by correct theories really do exist. Protons, photons, fields of force, and black holes are as real as toenails, turbines, eddies in a stream, and volcanoes. The weak interactions of small particle physics are as real as falling in love. . . . Anti-realism says the opposite: there are no such things as electrons. Certainly there are phenomena of electricity and of inheritance, but we construct theories about tiny states, processes and entities only in order to predict and produce events that interest us. The electrons are fictions. Theories about them are tools for thinking.
On this description, Flowerdew's views (and his appeal to the authority of Ernst Mach) put him firmly in the antirealist camp. As Hacking's account and his lists of entities, states, and processes adumbrate, there are many varieties of realism and of antirealism, and realism in respect of one "thing" does not necessarily entail realism in respect of another. Indeed, we might say that it is realism-in-respect-of that constitutes something as a "thing." Thus Nancy Cartwright emerges as a realist in respect of some entities, but, as the title of her book How the Laws of Physics Lie implies, an antirealist in respect of physical laws and theories. She explores what it means to call something a cause, and from a causalist perspective, causal entities could, theoretically at least, be not only, say, material, but economic (e.g. market forces), sociological (e.g. society, ideology, or power), psychological (e.g. the unconscious), rhetorical (text or discourse) or whatever within any discourse is deemed to create effects. Nicholas Jardine, while conceding what he terms the "local reality" of certain questions in certain scientific discourses at certain times (the so-called scenes of inquiry that give his book its title), addresses doubts about the claims of the sciences to have accumulated not only absolutely real answers but also absolutely real questions. Hacking himself says that he never thought twice about scientific realism until a friend told him about an experiment to detect the existence of fractional electrical charges called quarks. It was not the quarks that made him a realist, he reports, but electrons. The experiment involved changing the initial charge placed on a ball of a substance called niobium:
Now how does one alter the charge on the niobium ball? "Well, at that stage," said my friend, "we spray it with positrons to increase the charge or with electrons to decrease the charge." From that day forth I've been a scientific realist. So far as I'm concerned, if you can spray them then they are real.. . . What convinced me had nothing to do with quarks. It was the fact that by now there are standard emitters with which we can spray positrons and electrons--and that is precisely what we do with them. We understand the effects, we understand the causes, and we use these to find out something else.
Hacking's formulation of realism (at least realism in respect of certain entities--thus constituted as "entities" rather than, say, "provisional ideas," "fictions," or "tools for thinking") leads to the following conclusion: "Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are regularly manipulated to produce a new phenomena [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature. They are tools, instruments not for thinking but for doing." Consider the title of Hacking's book, Representing and Intervening, in this light. The "and" in the title may be read as a copula, but it may also be taken to conceal a hierarchy that is complicit with the teleology of the argument: representation is marginalized so as to bring "intervening" center stage. Similarly, Rom Harre's defense of scientific realism sees science not as a logically coherent body of knowledge in what he terms "the strict and unforgiving philosophical sense," but "a cluster of material and cognitive practices. . . . Science is an activity; it is something people do. Some, but not all of that doing is thinking, and a yet more minor part of it is producing discourses in which the results of making those material manipulations and doing that thinking are recorded." He counsels against mistaking "the discourse and its properties for the practice of which it is a partial and rhetorically distorted representation."
As we can see from Hacking and Harre, downplaying representation is a crucial strategy for the defenders of scientific realism. For Hacking, we may recall, language was less important, and so even more marginalized, than representation. For the realist, language should be a transparent window to the entity beyond, and when it isn't, the accusation is made that it offers "a partial and rhetorically distorted representation" of what is really going on. This emphasis on experiments and the laboratory seeks to distance science from language and associate it with a world of activity; the truth is not so much "out there" as "down there"--on the laboratory bench. Conversely, in the words of George Levine, if one "accepts the inevitability of an equation between language and knowledge, one's likely stance is antirealism." Thus Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar argue that the researchers on neuroendocrinology they observed in their "ethnographic" study of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, far from investigating things per se, were manipulating recording devices and instruments that "can transform a material substance into a figure or diagram which is directly usable by one of the members of the office space . . . once the end product, an inscription, is available, all the intervening steps which made its production possible are forgotten. The diagram or sheet of figures becomes the focus of discussion between participants, and the material processes which give rise to it are either forgotten or taken for granted as being merely technical matters." Latour and Woolgar set themselves the task of plotting how the statement "TRF (Thyrotropin Releasing Factor) is Pyro-Glu-His-Pro-NH2" moves from being unsayable to possible to a fact, and they see the laboratory not so much in terms of the practices of experimentation as of a site for technologies of representation and a locus of negotiation, in which apparatus subserves statement:
The central importance of this material arrangement is that none of the phenomena "about which" participants talk could exist without it. Without a bioassay, for example, a substance could not be said to exist. The bioassay is not merely a means of obtaining some independently given entity; the bioassay constitutes the construction of the substance. . . . It is not simply that phenomena depend on certain material instrumentation; rather the phenomena are thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the laboratory. The artificial reality, which participants describe in terms of an objective entity, has in fact been constructed by the use of inscription devices.
Continues...
Excerpted from Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature by Duncan F. Kennedy Copyright © 2002 by Duncan F. Kennedy. Excerpted by permission.
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