Biography and the good life in science

This unpublished paper was given as an introduction to the workshop "The good life in science", Stanford University, 31 May 1996, organised by Tim Lenoir (then at the Program in History of Science, Stanford University, now at Duke University). The other two papers at the workshop were given by Paul Rabinow and Steven Shapin -- I haven't kept the detailed notes from the meeting, so I don't remember what they were talking about (file dated 16 May 1996).

Biography and the good life in science

This paper has grown out of my experiences in writing a biography of a post-war life scientist, the leading theoretician in contemporary immunology and Nobel laureate Niels K. Jerne. Jerne had a very rich archive, including thousands of letters and personal notes, and I also had the opportunity to interview him at length -- some 200 hours -- before he died in 1994. In working on this close personal portrait I have gradually changed my views on the role of biography in history of science and in a recent paper I have summarized my views on biography as an `edifying genre'.[1]In this paper I want take the analysis a step further and discuss the role of biography in history of science from the perspective of some new trends in contemporary moral philosophy.

Historians of science have -- directly or indirectly -- always focussed on accounts, explanations and stories about the relation between scientists and the objective world, accounts about how scientists have managed to find out what is `true' out there. To be sure, realists and constructivists have employed different interpretations of the epistemological status of scientific facts in science. But both camps have nevertheless centered on how scientists relate to the objective world -- either as a representation of the world (as truth) or as a social construct of it (as `truth'). So, the privileged role of the alleged objective world and of the allegeded facticity of knowledge has cut across epistemological and ontological positions.

Classical sociology of science introduced the study of the social, the moral, world into the history of science, and during the last twenty years or so, the moral world has also found its way into the history of science. This `marriage' between sociology and history, as Jan Golinski puts it,[2] has not, however, changed the traditional focus on the relation between science and the objective world. The `new' contextual and social history of science emphasizes the importance of gender and class, of cultural embedding and political forces, and of social, moral, and institutional conditions for the production of factual and scientific knowledge -- but the cognitive constructs (true or `true', false or `false') of the objective world still constitute the rationale for doing historical scholarship.

So, however contextualized or historicized our narratives are, they are still centered around the emergence, production, utilization, popularization, etc. of factual knowledge. Steven Shapin's latest book, A Social History of Truth from 1994, bears witness to this focus on factual knowledge. Shapin deals at length with the importance of the moral order, of Christian virtues and gentlemanly culture, and particularly the central role of trust -- but the reason he deals with these, so far not much investigated, aspects of the moral economy is that he wants to show how they condition our belief in factual knowledge claims.

It is not my intention here to criticize Shapin's work; I find it a most erudite study of the relation between the moral and cognitive orders and a landmark in `the new history of science'. I have a rather different agenda in mind. I want to open up a space of discourse which has, so far, been largely neglected, both by classical historians of science and by the new joint sociology and history of science tradition. Instead of discussing science as a cognitive system related to the outer world and centering on the notion of `truth', and instead of studying the moral economy of science and centering on notions such as `norm', `rule', and `order',[3] I want to direct your attention to the inner and subjective world of scientists, their dreams, visions, and desires, their hopes and fears, their existential and emotional longings,[4] and their ideas of a fruitful and meaningful life. In short, I want to open up the space of what I have elsewhere called the existential dimension of science.[5]

In this paper I wish to discuss one particular aspect of this inner life of scientists, namely, their (and our) understanding of the `good life'. Instead of asking how scientists came up with, or sustained, a certain knowledge claim, and instead of asking how natural things became inscribed in, or even defined by, a particular historically given moral economy, I insist on the necessity to direct our attention to `the good life' in science, including the problem how scientists have pursued `happiness' in their scientific work. In other words, not what constitutes `good science' in terms of useful, true, and socailly valuable knowledge, but `good science' in terms of what constitutes a `good life' in science.

How is a discourse about the `good life' in science to be grounded? The obvious thing to do is to consult the Greek philosophical tradition -- beware, not the epistemological or ontological tradition, because Greek philosophy was not primarily engaged in problems of epistemology or ontology, as historians of science tend to believe -- but the tradition for moral philosophy. The Greeks were primarily interested in the problem of attaining the `good life'.

The modern conception of a `good life' in science is the search for `truth', a conception which goes back to Plato. In The Republic Plato set forth the notion of the `good' man as someone who, through a disciplined purification of intellect and passion, turns his attention to the idea of pure Goodness (the idea of Goodness) in his soul.[6] The Platonic tradition of the `good' was continued in early Christianity; you find it, for example, in Augustin's view that the highest good is in God. To live the `good life' is, according to Augustin, to know God and be like him; and to be a philosopher means to love God. In The State of God Augustin, inspired by Socratic/Platonian philosophy, developed the idea of a choice between a political life and a life in the heavenly city, "spent in considering or enquiring into truth".[7] Such a contemplative religious life was to be searched for in seclusion, and for many centuries a life in the monastery was considered the best life style for those who wanted to search for the highest `good'.

Substitute God with Truth and you obtain the secular, modern scientific, version of highest `good', namely, to know the `Truth' and to love the `Truth'. And the best secular life style in search of the `good' is that of a life in the research library or the Department of Physics at one of the leading research universities -- or, speaking in universal terms, in the Republic of Science, the modern, secular version of the State of God.

This particular Platonic search for the `good' implies, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, "a radical independence of true good from human need and desire".[8] In other words, as long as we follow the Platonic-Augustinian-modern scientific tradition for understanding the `good life' in science, we have to distinguish between a `good life' in science which equals the search for `truth', and a more hedonistic `good life', such as the one we can read about in the Good Life at Stanford, the catalog of funny and pleasurable things to do on the Peninsula, like going to restaurants or shopping.

The Platonic-Christian conception of a `good life' in science as the intellectually and emotionally disciplined attention to `Truth' is not a very popular idea today. An unholy mixture of neo-Nietzschean and post-modernist thought, utilitarianism and emotivist moral thinking has done away with it. Instead, hedonism (that is, pleasure-ethics) has crept into the heart of Academia. I have asked a number of graduate students and colleagues (in a somewhat unsystematic way) about why they have chosen to do science instead of going into politics, or religion, or law, or administration, or teaching, or art, or business. "To do some interesting" or "to meet interesting people" are fairly common answers, but the most common answer, particularly among chemists and life scientists, is "to have fun". For example, a `good life' in chemistry is thought to consist in using advanced programs to play around with hydrogen and co-valent bonds and create new and complex organic molecules on the screen. So today's organic chemist is somewhat like Johan Huizinga's `Homo ludens'.[9] Similarly, several autobiographies of contemporary scientists, such as Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman or Jim Watson's The Double Helix, abound with references to the playful aspects of science.

According to this unsystematic collection of interviews and autobiographical accounts, the `good life' in science is often grounded in some variety of pleasure-ethics. But pleasure is not all there is in science. Science is reportedly also painful. Autobiographical accounts tell not only about the pleasure and joy of solving a problem, but also about the intense feelings of pain before the solution comes, the feeling of fear, anxiety, even terror during the process. Pain colors and runs through the life of the scientist, irrespective of his or her scholarly standing. As one scientist says in an interview book:

"You go through this long, hard period of filling yourself up with as much information as you can. You just sort of feel it all rumbling around inside of you ... Then ... you begin to feel a solution, a resolution, bubbling up to your consciousness. At the same time you begin to get very excited, tremendously elated -- pervaded by a fantastic sense of joy ... But there's an aspect of terror too in these moments of creativity.... Being shaken out from your normal experience enhances your awareness of mortality.... It's like throwing up when you're sick."[10]

So pain seems to be an integral part of science.[11] And if this is the case, it is not in accordance with the popular contemporary idea of the `good life' in science as sheer pleasure -- remember that in the most influential hellenistic hedonist school, i.e., epicurean philosophy, pleasure is defined negatively as the absence of pain. So, from an epicurean point of view, if pain has such a central place in the scientific enterprise, hedonism is problematic as the sole candidate for grounding a normative discourse about the `good life' in science. We will have to consider other candidates than pleasure-ethics.

For another, and better, foundation of a normative discourse about the `good scientific life' I suggest that we return to the core of the Greek aretological tradition, namely Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. According to Aristotle the aim of human life is the attainment of eudaimonia, which literally means `good daemons' and is usually translated as `happiness', but which actually means something like `human flourishing', `doing well' or `a life in excellence'. Aristotle doesn't think much of a life in pleasure, which he considers suitable to cattle. The `good life' is an active life in conformity with the virtues. The Greek word for virtue (areté, hence the word aretology for virtue-ethics), should not be understood in the Medieval or modern moralistic meaning, but as a combination of virtues in the modern sense and `excellent characters'.

[*The final paper will contain an exposition of Aristotle's view of the relation between the virtues and the `good life']

I will not go further into Aristotle's view of the relation between the virtues and the `good life' here, but just remind you about the fact that the discourse about the `good life', either in Platonic-Augustinian terms or Aristotelian terms, was the basis for moral philosophy until the 18th century. (The 17th century obsession with virtues -- the most important one probably being the virtue of prudence -- is well described in Shapin's A Social History of Truth.) Then, during the late 18th and 19th centuries, discourse on the `good life' gradually faded from the agenda of moral philosophy. I Leviathan Thomas Hobbes writes that "there is no such Finis ultimus, (utmust ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Morall Philosophers".[12]

These "Morall Philosophers" were, of course, Aristotle and Plato. The utilitarian thinking which Hobbes and generations of 18th and 19th century philosophers, including Bentham, introduced, substituted `good' with pleasure and happiness in more hedonistic terms, that is to fulfil one's preferences and one's desire. Kant, with his emphasis on moral duties (`the right thing to do') and the following deontic tradition, hardly effected this devalorisation of `good'.

Today, however, the notion of `good' has been revived. A number of moral philosophers, among them Elisabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, Julia Annas and Martha Nussbaum, have contributed to a renaissance of aretology, in opposition both to utilitarianism and deontic ethics. We are now in a position from where we can begin to develop a normative discourse about the `good life' in science which transcends the contemporary hedonistic conception of science as `fun'.

The most well-developed modern version of an aretological understanding of the `good life' is given by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue.[13] To ask `What is the good for me?', says MacIntyre, is to ask how one can bring out a unity in life. Not any kind of unity, but a `narrative unity' which consists in giving accounts of our actions in terms of our past and our future aims. "In what does the unity of an individual life consist?", asks MacIntyre, and answers:

"[I]ts unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask `what is the good for me?' is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion [...] It is important to emphasise that it is the systematic asking of these two questions and the attempt to answer them in deed as well as in word which provide the moral life with its unity. The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest."

Thus, instead of a biological telos, which Aristotle meant was the aim of a human life (the `finis ultimus' which Hobbes rejected),MacIntyre introduces a cultural telos, a socially contextual telos, "a conception of the good which will enable us to understand the place of integrity and constancy in life" and "which will enable us to order other goods"; a quest which is never given, butthe result of education and self-knowledge (the late Foucault would probably say `self-construction').

So, `good life' is the life spent in seeking for the good life in a specific culture, and the virtues are to be understood as those dispositions which are necessary to sustain the kind of communities in which we can seek for the good. I guess that this search for the `good life' is what some scientists and graduate students refers to when they answer that they want "to do something professional", "to develop myself", and "to express myself", all varieties of wishes to live a full and satisfying existence. French molecular biologist Francois Jacob says in his autobiography The Statue Within:

"Science meant for me the most elevating form of revolt against the incoherence of nature [...] taking part in the new developments that were shaping up in biology [...] I felt, deeply rooted in myself, the sense of being where someting was happening [...] The opportunity to prove what I could do".[14]

[*For scientists this search for the `good life' is not unrelated to the telos of `truth'. In the full paper comes a large section about 1) MacIntyre's view on practices, tradition, and communities, 2) how scientific communities can be formed around a telos (such as `truth'), and 3) how the `good life' through practices relates to the telos of `truth'].

I will skip an important discussion of MacIntyre's view of practicies, tradition and the social contextual character of the `good life' and turn to a central idea in his neo-aristotelian virtue-ethics of particular importance for a normative discourse about the `good life' in science, namely the idea of `the unity of virtues'. This idea is important, I think, because it opens up for an alternative way of discussing virtues in science than that offered by, for example, Lorraine Daston in her recent discussion of `the moral economy of science'.

The implication of MacIntyre's idea of `the unity of virtues' is that it prohibits us to differentiate between one set of virtues operating in science and another set of virtues operating in daily life. A virtue is not a disposition that makes for success only in one particular type of situation. Someone who "genuinely" possesses a virtue, says MacIntyre, "can be expected to manifest it in very different types of situation".[15] If you are displaying courage or honesty in your work as a molecular biologist but not in your daily life, you are not a courageous or honest person.[16]

As another exponent of the renaissance for virtue-ethics, Iris Murdoch, puts it, not only seems honesty to be "much the same virtue in a chemist as in a historian" but there is a close similarity between "the honesty required to tear up one's theory and the honesty required to percieve the real state of one's marriage, though doubtless the latter is much more difficult".[17] And, Murdoch continues, "A serious scholar has great merits. But a serious scholar who is also a good man knows not only his subject but the proper place of his subject in the whole of his life".

This widened sphere of knowledge, which the Greek called phronesis (moral wisdom) is not only superior to scientific knowledge.[18] A scholar who possesses phronesis is, according to Socrates, also a happy person who lives a `good life'.[19] Thus the idea of `the unity of virtues' implies that there can not be a separate set of scientific virtues, such as those identified by Lorraine Daston in her work on 17th and 18th century mathematics and quantitative physics. In a recent paper on "The Moral Economy of Science", Daston identifies a number of qualities which she calls "quantifying virtues", such as precision, accuracy, impersonality, impartiality and communicability; these qualities are said to have "an almost unbroken history in the sciences as well as in public life" up to the present.[20] Following the idea of `the unity of virtues', however, those qualities are rather what MacIntyre calls "professional skills".

The conception of the `good life' and the idea of `the unity of virtues' bear upon the problem I raised in the beginning of my talk, namely the role of biography in the history of science. As I said, when I was about to finish the biography of Niels Jerne I realized that virtue-ethics could be the foundation for the genre of science biography. This possibility should be seen against the background of the development of the genre. For most of its existence science biography used to be a kind of secular hagiography, a genre that gave a place in the Pantheon of science to an individual contributor to `truth'. During the last decades the genre has changed, from dealing with individual lives in science to what I call `social biography'.

By `social biography' I mean a genre that either provides a lens (or peeping hole) into the workings of science as a social and collective phenomenon, or demonstrates the socially mediated formation of personal identity, in other words biography has been co-opted in the so called `new history of science'.[21] And to widen the perspective I also suggest that `social biography' and the `new history of science' is part of a broad anti-Enlightenment, neo-Nietzschean, post-Modernist trend in Western culture -- a trend which I call (borrowing a word from Paul Ricoeur) the `hermeneutics of suspicion'. I maintain that this `hermeneutics of suspicion' dominates most of the research front of history of science today, at least in the United Kingdom and North America.

I sympathize with the critique of Enlightenment modernism. But this neo-Nietzschean `hermeneutics of suspicion' is not the only alternative. The road from modernism divides. Whereas one branch leads forward to postmodernity (this is the road Paul Forman, among others, walks), the other road "doubles back" towards premodern ideas, specifically Aristotelian virtue-ethics.[22] This is the road taken by MacIntyre and others.

The idea of `a narrative unity of life' involves not only giving accounts of ourselves in terms of the past and the future, but also pondering the differences between our own accounts and those of others. It is by trying to understand how other people's lives fit together, how they are `narratable', and how they tried to attain the `good life', that we begin to understand our own quest. This is the use of biography in a virtue-ethically oriented history of science. I have used the term `hermeneutics of edification' for this normative discourse.

Robert Skidelsky has recently suggested that the biographer's main purpose indeed is "to hold up lives as examples". He advocates biography as "ancestor worship", as a genre that can recover the lessons older members of our community have made for us: "[T]he only way biography as an undertaking can recover its main function of good story-telling is to go back to [...] ancestor worship".

I would even stretch the argument a bit and say that biographies that (altough implicitly) approach this aim -- such as Maila Walter's about Percy Bridgman, James Miller's about Foucault or Ray Monk's about Wittgenstein -- provide examples of a revitalized `hagiography'. Of course, I mean hagiography in the functional, not the pejorative, sense of the word. Today we think of hagiography as blind worshipping of the scientist in his search for `truth', but that was not the function of hagiography -- it was rather `a mode of communal self-scrutiny'.

To be sure -- I am certainly not advocating a return to the uncritical hagiographic tradition, with its unqualified praise and glorification of the achievements of scientific `giants'. After all, Skidelsky uses the term `ancestor worship' tongue-in-cheek. And as Kenneth Manning's portrait of the black biologist Ernest Everett Just reminds us, ancestor does not necessarily refer to a white, anglosaxon, protestant male. The problem with traditional science biography was not that it provided personal models as such, but that these models were too bright and too unrealistic -- they were stories of scientific heroes with whom it was difficult to empathize. What distinguishes my idea for biography as an edifying biography from traditional ancestor worship are two things:

First, the much greater range of lives to learn from, so that `whereas in the past the exemplary principle worked in favour of tradition, today it works in favour of pluralism'. Examplars do not have to be positive models. They can be negative, even Raskolnikovian, figures as well, models that teach us moral dilemmas, like John Heilbron's study of Max Planck as a lesson of `heroic tragedy', and they do not have to have a great reputation but can be ordinary members of the profession.

Second -- and most important -- the shift of focus from the achievements (the contributions to factual knowledge and `truth') to the `good life' of the scientist. On this view, the aim of biographies of scientists is to provide us with stories through which we can identify ourselves with other human beings who have choosen to spend their lives in scholarly or scientific work. The stories to tell are, of course, in my opinion, stories about how a person has attained the `good life'. Such stories can make us understand and change ourselves -- scientists, historians of science, and laymen alike -- the improve our own search for the `good life'. In other words, biographies of scientists should provide us with opportunities for reorienting our familiar ways of thinking about our lives in unfamiliar terms, or, as Richard Rorty says, `to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings'.

Notes
[1] Thomas Söderqvist, "Existential projects and existential choice in science: science biography as an edifying genre" 1996, in R. Yeo and M. Shortland, Telling Lives (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[2]Jan Golinski, Isis*
[3]Cf., e.g., Lorraine Daston, "The moral economy of science" 1995.
[4]For a discussion of `emotional longing', see Feuer (1978.
[5]"The Passions of the Scientist: An Existential Approach to Science Biography", ss.67-78 i John Hultberg (red.), New Genres in Science Studies (Proceedings from the 4S/EASST conference, Gothenburg, 12-15 August, 1992, vol.II, Gothenburg, 1993). This approach has recently been used by Vidal in Piaget Before Piaget (Harvard University Press, 1994). I use the word `existential' rather common-sensical.
[6]Cf. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p.11.
[7]Quoted in Cary J. Nederman and Kate Langdon Forhan, "Introduction", pp.1-17 in idem (eds), Medieval Political Theory - A Reader: The Quest for the Body Politic, 1100-1400 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) (quote on p.*).
[8]Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p.19.
[9]Johan Huzinga, Homo ludens*
[10]Quoted in Dash (1973), 318.
[11]The quote is an example of the combination of beauty and pain which Burke and Kant called the `sublime'.
[12]Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London 1968), p.160 [*check]
[13]2nd. ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
[14]Francois Jacob, The Statue Within: An Autobiography (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p.274. Autobiographical accounts such as this one have frequently been viewed with suspicion, usually with the argument that they express an ideology of individuality and free will which is blind to the collective and power-and statusimpregnated nature of science (cf. Abir-Am; Löwy etc.), but I see no reason to discount such expressions of the `good life' in science.
[15]MacIntyre, op.cit., p.205.
[16]This is in contradiction to Merton's standpoint that objectivity and disinterestedness does not at all presuppose any special degree of "moral integrity" or "personal qualities" of scientists (Robert K. Merton, "The normative structure of science", p.*; quoted in Shapin, A Social History of Truth, p.413).
[17]Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), p.96.
[18]Murdoch, op.cit., p.96-97.
[19]In Plato's dialogues Apology and Crito Socrates is said to have equated moral wisdom, virtue, the `good life' and happiness.
[20]Lorraine Daston, "The Moral Economy of Science", Osiris, vol.10 (1995), 3-24 (quotes on p.8-9).
[21]Söderqvist, "Existential Projects", op.cit. The internalization of social values into a personal identity can be seen as laid down once and for all, or (in Shapin's more sophisticated version) as a continuous process, "a form of bricolage, respecifying and revaluing existing [cultural] repertoires into new roles and new types of social identity" (A Social History of Truth, p.130).
[22]John Haldane, "MacIntyre's Thomist Revival: What Next?", in John Horton and Susan Mendus (eds.), After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).