The Sciences in Enlightened Europe
This volume consists of fifteen essays by different authors, an introduction by the editors, several illustrations, extensive bibliographical material, and an index. It is praised by the publisher's blurb as a book that would radically change our understanding of the Enlightenment. This is an exaggeration, especially for the reader familiar with previous publications by some of the contributors. But if you happen to be one of the dinosaurs who would still characterize the Enlightenment as, to speak with Roger Chartier, "a corpus of self-contained, transparent ideas or as a set of clear and distinct propositions" (351), or even worse, "as a process of liberation, learning, and utility that was democratically available to all" (E.C. Spary, 274), this volume may prove to be the fatal meteorite.
Yet this is not to say that the book holds nothing in store for the reader who has tried to keep pace with recent changes in the historiographic perspectives on science. The essays collectively cover a wide range of intellectual, thematic, and geographic ground; indeed, so much so that the volume's pursuit of the essence of enlightened science seems to become ever more vexed, despite the extensive introductory material to the volume itself and to each of the three sections into which the essays are (arbitrarily in some cases) grouped. What holds them together is not so much the subject matter, except in the most general sense, but the signature of social studies of science, which is writ large over all the contributions.
Andrea Rusnock, for example, shows how political and medical arithmetic (early forms of statistics) contributed to public debates in England, sometimes as tools of persuasion in the struggle against superstition, and sometimes in the service of the establishment by confirming contemporary ideological assumptions. From Ken Alder we learn that French artillery engineers were promoted on the bases of their mathematical accomplishments and skills-even though mathematical ballistics was irrelevant on the battle-field. Jan Golinski takes a close look at the barometer, not in the context of the seventeenth-century vacuum debate, but later when the "barograph," as it was sometimes called, had become an enormously popular meteorological device, even though it was notoriously unreliable and poorly understood. Golinski sees an ambiguity here symptomatic of enlightened science: "On the one hand, the devices became tokens of virtuosity and philosophical prowess, of refinement and politeness; on the other hand, they continued to be associated with gullibility, vulgar superstition, and feminine susceptibility to the lure of fashion" (72). Simon Schaffer scrutinizes another enormously popular symbol of modernity, the automaton that looked and performed like a human being. Did people in the eighteenth century really think that human beings were nothing but machines, and that machines could perform like human beings? Yes and no. Schaffer reveals a grim view held by the enlightened elite: they distinguished between subjects that could be automated because they performed only mechanical labor, and those who had the right to think and be enlightened.
Two contributions approach the matter from a more literary angle, although these also focus on the social functions of science. E.C. Spary points out that the keenness with which young members of the nobility acquired and wrote about natural historical knowledge in pre-revolution France should not be interpreted as a developing professionalism. Such knowledge, she argues, was pursued because it was considered a valuable means of self-improvement. Marina Frasca-Spada makes a similar point with respect to the sentimental readers of eighteenth-century England, for whom reading was an exercise in self-knowledge. Why did they love Richardson's Clarissa, but hate Hume's Treatises so much? Because, she suggests, in presenting humanity in an abstract and estranged way, Hume flouted the authorial demeanor on which the sociability of polite, sentimental reading and conversation groups depended.
One thing that certainly recommends this volume is that it takes us to places that so far have attracted little scholarly attention. Paula Findlen, for example, tells the story of Christina Roccati, an ingenious Italian scholar destined to lecture on Newtonianism to a provincial audience unable to follow her mathematics. Lissa Roberts takes the reader to several sites of Dutch enlightened science, such as anatomy theatres, where bodies of criminals were publicly dissected to a fee-paying audience of all ranks. Lisbet Koerner's contribution provides a revealing glimpse into how notions of enlightened science were enacted in the Baltic by a nobility that resisted the abolition of serfdom for all of the eighteenth century.
Two essays, finally, deal with the question of metaphysics. But here, too, intellectual heterogeneity rather than unity reveals itself. William Clark gives a moving account of how the provincial Prussian Aufklärer, notably Kant, attempted to rescue and reform metaphysics in a time when the intellectuals in the centers of enlightened Europe had declared war on it. Mary Terrall examines how this war was carried out in France, where metaphysics was, by putting it on a par with superstition, gendered feminine and gradually edged out from the study of nature by analysis.
In view of these many disparate activities all labeled "enlightened," what then was the Enlightenment? The essays in this volume do not always point in the same direction. In the "Afterword," itself a book review of sorts, Lorraine Daston takes the contributors to task for not having pursued this question with enough rigor, a reproach certainly not in all cases justified. However, Daston offers an answer that is to the point and that captures a thrust contained, implicitly at least, in all the essays: the light of the Enlightenment was foremost a "sociable light," unlike Enthusiasm, which claimed inner, private light. The key term that creeps up time and again is "sociability," which is not to be confused with unanimity or amicability. Enlightenment depended on a new sociability; it was kindled by dispute, "argument, explanation, demonstration, and discussion within a network of interlocutors" (497).
Michael Hagner's work on the eighteenth century's obsession with "monsters," (i.e., deformed children and animals), deserves special recommendation because it pertains most directly to the theoretical and historiographical questions addressed by Nicholas Jardine and Dorina Outram. Embryonic deformation was an insoluble problem in natural philosophy because it could not in any meaningful way be accommodated in the purposeful universe of physico-theology (the world view that held sway all through the eighteenth century, as we are repeatedly told). For instance, was God responsible for a hydrocephalic child? If no, how then could he be almighty? If yes, why would he allow things like that to happen? According to Hagner, it was the relentless quest to explain the existence of monsters by scientists such as Caspar Friedrich Wolff that ultimately spelled the end of physico-theology, since this search led to ever more detailed studies of embryonic development and eventually to the discovery of a process which Wolff himself was to term "mutationis." Nature, in other words, was ascribed "incalculable and dangerous properties" of its own (212). From now on, penetrating into the unknown would no longer guarantee the discovery of a divinely ordained hidden order. It was in the wake of this recognition, Hagner concludes, that predetermination "was replaced by chance and risk, and life was provided with its own history" (214).
But how is the historian to write about events that are truly emergent in time? As Outram observes, our sustained interest in the Enlightenment bears the risk of "sacrificing its specificity to the need to find projections of ourselves in the past" (40). The historiographic pit-falls do indeed loom large, as Nicholas Jardine shows by pointing to a striking discrepancy between sophisticated historiographic theorizing and the fact that vitalistic metaphors (growth, death, decay, etc.) still abound in historical writing: "It is one thing to acknowledge that disciplinary history is shot through with novelty, contingency, and locality, quite another to write in accordance with that recognition" (493). Despite the recognition of such difficulties in its more theoretical moments, however, the volume under discussion cannot be said to have resolved them.
