Biography and the good life in science

This unpublished paper was written for the session "Biography at the Crossroads" at the 3rd British-North American History of Science Meeting, Edinburgh, July 23-26, 1996 (file dated 18 July 1996). Cf. abstract here; for an earlier version, see here).

Biography and the good life in science

The point of departure for this session is that biography is back and that it constitutes a major genre in the historiography of science. One excellent biography follows the other: recent biographies of Lord Kelvin and Heisenberg have become major contributions to the history of physics; historians of biology can now enjoy the third recent new portrait based on the productions of the Darwin industry. The biographies of the 1980's and 1990's are the result of impeccable archival work, they are based on heaps of private letters and laboratory notebooks, and they display a thorough understanding of the social, political, and scientific context of the achievements of their subjects. No wonder that biography is so popular these days.

Yet the genre is not unproblematic. As we put it in the title of this session, biography is at a sort of crossroads. I say a sort of cross-roads, because the metaphor should not be taken too literally. The problem is not which road to travel, but what kinds of roads there are to choose between.

In a couple of earlier papers I have discussed the possible uses of biographies of scientists. Life stories can still be used for hagiographic reasons of course. They can give material for studies of creativity, such as Larry Holmes's two volumes of Krebs or Gerald Geisons recent revision of Pasteur. And they can also be richly textured analyses of the relation between science and its wider cultural and political context, like Adrian Desmond and James Moore's Darwin.

But in addition to these uses of biography, I have suggested (in a chapter that just came out) that we can also distinguish a kind of biography which I have called existential, the use of which is edification: the story of the life of a scientist can function as a guide for the lives of other scientists, as (positive or negative) models. Good examples of what I call existential or edifying biography are Ray Monks biographies, first of Wittgenstein, now of Bertrand Russell.

In this talk I will take the notion of edification a step further. I will suggest that the notions of existential biography and edification prompt us to open up a neglected space of discourse in the history of science. So far historians of science, including biographers, have focused on the (contextualized or not) production of knowledge claims -- in other words, historians of science, including biographers, have usually had epistemological axes to grind. But since biographies are about persons, the genre invites us to a change of focus -- from a study of the production of knowledge to a study of scientists as moral agents. A discussion of the place of biography in the history of science today therefore has to consider the opening up of roads usually travelled by moral philosophers.

There are many kinds of moral philosophy of which two are quite familiar to students of science studies, namely utilitarian consequentialism and deontology. A large variety of positions of both kinds can easily be found in recent debates about, e.g., the consequences of genetical engineering and the ethics of using animals in experimental systems. What the genre of biography almost automatically seems to suggest, however, is not one of these kinds of moral philosophy, but rather the road travelled by the Greek philosophers, namely the road of eudaimonistic ethics, the ethics dealing with the means of obtaining a good life.

This suggestion would not come as a surprise to those of you who are familiar with recent developments in ethical theory. Philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Julia Annas, and Martha Nussbaum have contributed to a renaissance for eudaimonistic moral philosophy and virtue-ethics, a renaissance for the notions of `virtue' and `the good life' in opposition both to utilitarian consequentialism and to deontology[1]. So what I will do here is simply to articulate some of the notions of an eudaimonistic ethics and apply them to the question of what it means to live a good life in science.

As a starter -- one way to articulate the good life in science would be to identify it with the Platonian idea of the search for `truth'. In The Republic Plato sets 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 in his soul [2]. This Platonic tradition 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 to know God and be like him; and to be a philosopher accordingly means to love God. In The State of God Augustin, inspired by Platonic 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"[3]. Such a contemplative religious life was to be searched for in seclusion, so 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, scientific version of highest good in modernity, namely, to know the `truth' and to love the `truth'. Accordingly the best secular life style in search of the good is that of a life in a major research library or the Department of Molecular Biology at one of the leading research universities -- or, speaking in universal terms, a life in the Republic of Science, the modern, secular version of the heavenly city.

I hardly need to say that this secularized Platonic-Augustinian 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. For example, a good life in chemistry is thought to consist in using advanced programs to play around with hydrogen and co-valent bonds, creating new and complex organic molecules on the computer screen. It's probably no coincidence that 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, Today's scientists see themselves in terms of Johan Huizinga's `Homo ludens' [4].

Such autobiographical accounts indicate that the good life in science today could be articulated in terms of 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 feelings of fear, anxiety, even terror during the process [5]. Pain seems to be an integral part of science [6]. And if this is the case, the good life in science is not sheer pleasure -- remember that in the most influential hellenistic hedonist school, i.e., epicurean philosophy, pleasure is defined negatively as the absence of pain. From an epicurean point of view, if pain has such a central place in the scientific enterprise, we should rather avoid science. So, hedonism is problematic as the sole candidate for articulating the notion of good life in science. We will have to consider other candidates than pleasure-ethics.

For another, and better, foundation of a discourse about the good scientific life I suggest that we go to the core of the virtue-ethical tradition, namely Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. For Aristotle the aim of human life is the attainment of eudaimonia, which literally means `good daemons' and usually is translated as `happiness', but which actually means something like `human flourishing', `doing well' or `a successful life'. Aristotle didn't think much of a life in pleasure, which he considered suitable to cattle. The good life was to lead 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 sense, but as a combination of virtues in the modern sense and `excellent characters'.

Time does not allow me to go further into Aristotle's view of the relation between the virtues and the good life, so I will turn to the recent virtue-ethical discussion instead. The best present-day point of departure for an understanding of the good life in science is probably that given by Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book After Virtue, which came fifteen years ago but has had virtually no impact whatsoever on historians of science or scholars in science studies interested in moral topics [7].

Following MacIntyre one can distinguish between at least three kinds of goods in science. The first kind are those goods that are external to scientific practices, such as honor, reputation, monetary rewards, etc. These goods are certainly important and there is no point in devaluating them. But from an aretological point of view, external goods are uninteresting because they do not involve the expression of virtues (on the contrary they may often collide with the development of a virtuous life in science).

The other kind of goods (which are more important for my discussion) are those that are internal to scientific practicies (intrinsic goods) and which are achieved by means of the expression of virtues specific to these practicies, such as being an honest, courageous, and skilful experimentalist, or being an able and just professor. The category of intrinsic goods also includes the good life that goes with being virtuously absorbed in these practicies. I guess that it is this aspect of the good life that some scientists and graduate students refer to when they say that they want "to develop themselves" or "to express themself". 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" [8].

From an aretological point of view, these goods associated with scientific practicies are not enough to characterize a good life in science, however. Not only can scientific excellence be utilized for altogether evil purposes (Nazi medicine is a tragic example), but it often collides with the virtues of ordinary life. Think of all scientists who have destroyed their marriages because they were devoted to the goods internal to science! So we obviously need something more to characterize a good life in science.

Here we can again rely on MacIntyre. To ask `What is the good for me?', he says, is to ask how one can bring out a unity in one's life. Not any kind of unity, but a `narrative unity', i.e., a unity which consists in giving accounts of our actions in terms of our past and our future aims. More specifically, the good life is a narratively unified life spent in seeking for the good, i.e., the good which will enable us to evaluate and order other goods in relation to each other, e.g., enable us to evaluate the good life in using PCR skilfully to obtain excellent research results, in relation to the good life in being a just and generous laboratory leader. I say the good, well aware of the fact that it cannot be absolutely defined -- on the contrary the telos of life implicit in this definition of the good life is contingent on historically given moral traditions. Yet it is precisely through this quest for the good that we, pace MacIntyre, will be able to develop the good life [9].

Finally, I want to expand a little on a central idea in neo-aristotelian virtue-ethics of particular importance for the articulation of the good life in science, namely the notion of `the unity of virtues'. This notion is important, I believe, because it opens up for discussion of virtues in science which is different from that offered by Lorraine Daston in her recent studies of `the moral economy' of 17th and 18th century mathematics and quantitative physics. (A somewhat similar approach was taken by Steven Shapin in A Social History of Truth).

In a recent paper Daston identifies a set 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 [10]. Daston calls these qualities virtues. But hers is not an aretological understanding of virtues; these and similar qualities in scientific work are rather what MacIntyre would call "professional skills". Because, according to an aretological understanding of the good life, we cannot differentiate between one set of virtues operating in scientific practices and another set of virtues operating in ordinary life. A virtue is not a disposition that makes for success only in one particular type of situation. As MacIntyre puts it, someone who "genuinely" possesses a virtue, "can be expected to manifest it in very different types of situation" [11].

So, if you are displaying courage or honesty in your work as a molecular biologist, but not in your daily life outside the lab, you are not a courageous or honest person, and consequently, your quest for the good life as the narrative unity of life is hampered [12]. 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" [13]. And, continues Murdoch, "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 that Murdoch speaks about is that which the Greeks called phronesis (moral wisdom) -- a wisdom which at least Aristotle thought superior to scientific knowledge [14]. And a scholar who possesses phronesis is, according to Socrates, the quintessence of a happy person living a good life [15].

Time does not allow me to discuss the differences between a virtue-ethical approach to biography and the kind of analysis of the moral economy of science that Steven Shapin and Lorraine Daston are pursuing, and unfortunately I will not have time to discuss Martha Nussbaum's interesting studies of stoic and epicurean moral philosophy either. I will have to stop here, hoping that my main point has gone through -- that the renaissance for virtue-ethics in contemporary moral philosophy opens up for new possibilites for the genre of biography. Biography has helped historians of science to sharpen the analysis of knowledge production. I suggest that biographers might may be able to sharpen the abilities for a good life in a technoscientific world -- even for those who are surfing around on World Wide Web like our next speaker [*which was Steve Fuller :-)].

Notes
[1]It is probably no coincidence that the renaissance of virtue-ethics paralleles that of biography.
[2]Cf. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p.11.
[3]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.*).
[4]Johan Huzinga, Homo ludens*
[5]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"
(Quoted in Dash, A Life of One's Own (New York: Harper & Row, 1973, p.318).
[6]The quote is an example of the combination of beauty and pain which Burke and Kant called the `sublime'.
[7]2nd. ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
[8]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.
[9]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, but the result of education and self-knowledge (the late Foucault would probably say `self-construction').
[10]Lorraine Daston, "The Moral Economy of Science", Osiris, vol.10 (1995), 3-24 (quotes on p.8-9).
[11]MacIntyre, op.cit., p.205.
[12]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).
[13]Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), p.96.
[14]Murdoch, op.cit., p.96-97.
[15]In Plato's dialogues Apology and Crito Socrates is said to have equated moral wisdom, virtue, the `good life' and happiness.