tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-168608072024-03-05T07:58:30.866+01:00Representing Individuality in BiomedicineThomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-42905276385473785532009-02-27T08:30:00.003+01:002009-02-27T08:34:55.063+01:001st European Auto/Biography Association meeting in Amsterdam 29-31 OctoberThe International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) which was founded ten year ago has so far held six biennial conferences in Asia, North America, Australia and Europe. Now a European branch of IABA has been established. The founding conference will take place at VU University in Amsterdam, 29-31 October 2009. Panels (three papers) on a single topic and submitted together are welcome. As the conference aims to stimulate discussion between conference participants, papers should not exceed 15 minutes in length. Send 300 words abstracts with a short cv to Alfred Hornung (<a href="mailto:hornung@uni-mainz.de">hornung@uni-mainz.de</a>) AND Monica Soeting (<a href="mailto:m.soeting@xs4all.nl">m.soeting@xs4all.nl</a>). Deadline is 1 May, 2009.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-79239662960077309122009-02-25T10:38:00.004+01:002009-02-25T10:44:53.630+01:00'Science as Autobiography' lost in translation -- 免疫学の巨人イェルネ<p>A couple of months ago I received a package which, to my great joy and surprise, contained five copies of my biography of Niels K. Jerne (<a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300094411"><em>Science as Autobiograhy, </em>Yale UP, 2003)</a> in a <a href="http://www.igaku-shoin.co.jp/bookDetail.do?book=5666">Japanese translation</a>. <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3023/2486847108_bf36694bd9_o.jpg" align="right" /></p><p>The rights were sold to the big Tokyo publisher <a href="http://www.igaku-shoin.co.jp/top.do">Igaku Shoin</a> already in 2004. But I never heard anything from them, and occasional inquiries never yielded anything but polite avoidance replies. So it is very pleasing to see it in print at last.</p><p>My knowledge of Japanese is less than rudimentary so I churned the title (免疫学の巨人イェルネ) through <a href="http://translate.google.com/">Google Translate</a> and got another---but less joyful---surprise: 'giants immunology jerne'! Could be a Google blunder, of course, but it doesn't even remotely looks like anything like 'autobiography'.</p><p>The Japanese title is a pretty far shot from (well, even the opposite of) the idea behind the original title. The thrust of the book is that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Kaj_Jerne">Jerne's theoretical work in immunology</a> was a metaphorical projection of his understanding of himself. His science was literally his autobiography. Accordingly <em>Science as Autobiography</em> is a case-study of an auto/biographical approach to understanding the construction of scientific knowledge. My claim is that the inner life of the scientist constitutes an emotional and existential context for the production of scientific knowledge which is as important as the cultural or social contexts.</p><p>Most reviewers got this message right (like <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/v078/78.3tauber.html">Fred Tauber in Bull. Hist. Med.</a>). But, alas, it gets completely lost in the translation. The new title erroneously classifies the biography into one of these hagiographical works that I very consciously tried to stay away from. Maybe some immunologists believe Jerne was a 'giant', but I certainly didn't portray him as such. It simply wasn't the intention of the book. <a href="http://www.igaku-shoin.co.jp/bookDetail.do?book=5666">The summary on their website</a> (in Google translation) isn't better.</p><p>That said, it's great that the book is now available for a wider Japanese readership. To Igaku Shoin's credit, they have kept the whole note apparatus and the full bibliography, and all the illustrations are intact too. And it's very nicely set and bound, and (as far as I can see :-) there are no typos.</p><p>(also <a href="http://www.corporeality.net/museion/2008/05/15/science-as-autobiography-lost-in-translation-%e5%85%8d%e7%96%ab%e5%ad%a6%e3%81%ae%e5%b7%a8%e4%ba%ba%e3%82%a4%e3%82%a7%e3%83%ab%e3%83%8d/">published on Biomedicine on Display</a>)</p>Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-67799088108911329382008-03-01T17:51:00.003+01:002008-03-01T17:58:25.138+01:00Obituary writing journalists get togetherThere already exists an <a href="http://www.obitpage.com/">International Association of Obituarists (IAO)</a> which hosts an Obituary Writers Conference. Now a US-based Society of Professional Obituary Writers (SPOW)---mainly for newspaper obituarists---has been created. <a href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003717311">More here</a>.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-15113662857402775272008-03-01T17:42:00.004+01:002008-03-01T17:45:22.930+01:00A too long sabbatical ...I've had a too long sabbatical from this blog. Spent most of my time adding posts to <a href="http://www.corporeality.net/museion">Biomedicine on Display</a>. But will try to update this one more often. Promise, promise, promise ... Not for you sake, but for my own.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-43138600797470246432007-08-03T18:31:00.000+02:002007-08-03T18:36:58.630+02:00Friendship in science<p>Plato and Aristotle did it, Cicero did it, and many other classical authors too. Montaigne wrote a long essay on it, and Henry David Thoreau a whole book. <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friendship/">Friendship</a> is one of the perennial topics in the history of philosophical thought.</p><p><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8311.html">Some sociologists</a> say that friendship relations have perhaps never been as strong as they are today, when individualism flourishes and traditional social institutions and solidarities have broken down, at least in Western societies.</p><p>Now, Western societies are also science-based societies -- and science is an extremely individualist enterprise -- ergo, one could expect friendship to be quite a pervasive kind of social relationship in science, technology and medicine, including biomedicine. In his autobiography (<em>What Mad Pursuit</em>, 1988) Francis Crick said that friendship was crucial for scientific collaboration: "certainly you have to be personal friends" (on p. 93).</p><p>Crick's point is underlined by the ubiquitous references to friendship in book prefaces. In almost every book, in the humanities as well in the sciences, authors thank their colleagues and/or friends. And even if they may exaggerate, or include people they would never dream of having a really friendly relationship with, the ubiquity of the term 'friend' seem to reflect at least an widespread expectation that friendship in crucial for scholarship.</p><p>What has been written in history of science and science studies? The other day I searched through some of the standard book and article data bases (<a href="http://scientific.thomson.com/products/ahci/">Arts & Humanities Citation Index</a> and <a href="http://scholar.google.dk/">Google Scholar</a>; and <a href="http://eureka.rlg.org/">RLG's Eureka</a> for history of science) -- and found almost nothing.</p><p>True, historians of science, technology and medicine have written quite a lot about concrete friendships, but I didn't really find anything about friendship as a social or cultural category in the HoSTM- and STS-literature.</p><p>The only interesting item I did in fact find was one made in passing by veteran STS-scholar <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Fox_Keller">Evelyn Fox Keller</a> who wrote in a memorial article to one of her old friends, mathematician Lee Segel, that in their case friendship came first: "work grew out of friendship, and gradually became the very medium of friendship" (E. F. Keller, "Science as a medium for friendship: How the Keller–Segel models came about", <em>Bulletin of Mathematical Biology</em>, vol. 68, 1033–1037, 2006; on p. 1034).</p><p>Maybe there is a rich literature on friendship in science that I have missed in this preliminary literature search? But it may also be the case that friendship has been overlooked among historians of STM and STS scholars.</p><p>Maybe the general opinion corresponds to the naïve idea expressed by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_J._Ayala">F.J. Ayala</a> that "scientists are inclined to transcend ideology, nationality, friendship, monetary interest and other prejudices when the mettle of scientific knowledge is at stake" ("On the scientific method, its practice and pitfalls", <em>History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences</em>, vol. 16, 205-240 1994).</p><p>That kind of naïvité has been surpassed when it comes to ideology, nationality and monetary interest, but may still be valid with respect to friendship. I don't know. Does anyone have any good ideas?</p><p>(is also published here: <a href="http://www.corporeality.net/museion/2007/08/03/friendship-in-science/">http://www.corporeality.net/museion/2007/08/03/friendship-in-science/</a></p>Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-62557972408607425112007-07-26T18:07:00.000+02:002007-07-29T16:51:54.741+02:00GoshIt's two months since I last write a post on this blog. Seems like I'm spending too much time on <a href="http://www.museion.ku.dk/">my full-time museum director work</a> and on <a href="http://www.corporeality.net/museion/">Biomedicine on Display</a>, and much too little time on my intellectual love-child.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-32240752736463609122007-05-18T21:33:00.000+02:002007-05-18T21:54:20.463+02:00Beyond Contextualism: The Concrete Individual as a Focus PointI just received a mail from the Program Co-Chairs of the <a href="http://www.hssonline.org/07_VA_meeting_info/VA_meeting.htm">History of Science Society's meeting in the Washington metro area, 1-4 November, 2007</a> saying that my paper "Beyond Contextualism: The Concrete Individual as a Focus Point" has been accepted. Here's the abstract:<br /><br /><blockquote>This presentation investigates the role of the genre of writing about individual scientists (biography) in relation to the writing of historical accounts of science (historiography). From the professional vantage point of history of science, scientific biography is normatively considered an auxilliary genre to science historiography (an <em>ancilla historiae</em>) and as a tool for contextualizing science in history. Such a normative perspective makes it difficult to appreciate the full richness of the genre, however. In practice, biographies of scientists have also been written as contributions to understanding singular lives, e.g., for commemorative and eulogistic purposes, as moral investigations, or as tools for understanding oneself. These generic roles - which have been prominent throughout the history of the genre and are also operative in biographical writing today - may be more or less overlapping in the same biographical work, but their analytical separation may help improve the critical evaluation of the genre, e.g., in biographical book reviewing practice. Most importantly, these generic roles point to a reversal of the function of the <em>ancilla historiae</em>-role of the genre, viz., that the historiography of science can as well be seen as an <em>ancilla biographiae</em>, a mere context for understanding individual scientists, their ambitions and expectations.</blockquote>The paper is part of a panel session organised by Noretta Koertge titled "Scientific Biography: Constructing the Human Element in the Production of Science". The participants are (in addition to myself): James Capshew (Indiana University), "Portraits of the Sex Researcher: The Cultural Production of Kinsey"; Michael Sokal (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), "Psychology as a Biographer's Tool: Developing Insights into Scientific Careers"; and Noretta Koertge (Indiana University), "Reflections on the <em>New DSB</em>" (Noretta is Editor-in-Chief of the <em>New Dictionary of Scientific Biography</em>, an eight volume extension of the original DSB that will appear late in 2007. Here's the session abstract:<br /><blockquote><a href="http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/Isis/journal/issues/v97n2/970207/970207.html?erFrom=-7909482421718295500Guest">Nye's recent article in <em>Isis</em></a> documents the wide spread interest in the life stories of scientists. From the sidebars in school science books to biographical dictionaries and prize-winning scholarly monographs, scientific biography is an increasingly important genre. The purpose of this panel is to reflect on issues that arise when historians of science write biographies. There are the perennial puzzles about selection, emphasis, the goals of the author, and the interests of the audience that always arise when doing history. We want to focus on current problems and possibilities. (Examples range from the difficulty of describing the technical achievements of recent scientists to concerns about how the unsavory details of a scientist's life may be misused.) Each panelist will make a short presentation and then we hope to involve them and the audience in an open discussion. The participants on this panel are all currently engaged in producing and reflecting on scientific biography.</blockquote>Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-6590320374628947802007-04-16T09:45:00.000+02:002007-04-16T10:05:24.920+02:00Obiturial prosopography of contemporary biomedicineAs contemporary biomedicine -- the use of molecular and digital biological and medical technologies -- is coming of age, its pioneer practitioners are passing away, and as a consequence biography becomes increasingly important as a genre for understanding its development and workings.<br /><br />Biographies come in many varieties. One of the least conspicuous, but also most read, is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obituary" mce_href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obituary">obituary</a> -- a public notice of a recently deceased person, usually in the form of a short life description, often in a newspaper or a popular magazine. Many more people get obituaries than short biographical articles, not to mention full-scale scholarly biographies; in fact, most people of some public importance get at least a minor notice in the form of an obituary.<br /><br />Obituaries are a potentially very interesting material for representing the contemporary history of biomedicine. Between the lines about the portrayed person the obituary presents pieces (like single pixels on a screen) for a picture of a more complex history, and by accumulating large numbers of obituaries the pixels coalesce and form historical patterns. This way of combining of singular live-descriptions into a larger pattern is what historians call <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopography" mce_href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopography">prosopography</a>.<br /><br />The number of obituaries about biomedical practitioners is growing rapidly. Many who were active in the heroic period of molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s have already passed away, and now the great names in biovisualisation technologies are following them in turn. For example, in the last couple of weeks many newspapers and magazines have carried obituaries of the 'father of magnetic resonance imaging', Paul Lauterbur (see e.g., <a href="http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8954439" mce_href="http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8954439">this one</a> in <em>The Economist</em> of April 7).<br /><br />What's interesting about this kind of 'obituarial' contemporary popular history is the variability between the accounts. With few notable exceptions, most scientists and medical people only get one book-size scholarly biography or biographical article (if they ever get one at all). But popular obituaries, like that of Lauterbur, are not only much more frequent -- they also come in many versions written by several obituarists for many different newspapers, journals and magazines, and therefore give a much more composite picture of the history of MRI. Together with obituaries of other pioneers in biovisualisation they add up to what might be called an <em>obiturial prosopography</em> of the field.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-28898890597711375202007-03-06T04:36:00.000+01:002007-03-06T04:39:39.774+01:00The archive is growing ...I've begun to file a few papers and unpublished talks in the archive -- you can either search for key terms ('biography', 'care of self', etc) or look in monthly folders (see further down in the column to the right).Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-22987742741530450972007-01-11T07:16:00.000+01:002007-01-11T09:10:11.166+01:00Using the blog as an archiveThe time-stamp feature makes it possible to antedate a post and thus create an on-line searchable text archive. I will begin putting my old texts on representations of individuality in biomedicine in antedated posts. For example, I've just posted the manuscript for a seminar paper that I wrote in September 1991 (gosh, that's along time ago!) and antedated it as if it was written then -- although blogs didn't exist at that time.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-17953916718433111732007-01-03T18:01:00.000+01:002007-05-18T18:12:37.153+02:00Plutarchian versus Socratic scientific biographyI was working on a draft to the first chapter of my biography of Niels Jerne (note 1) when his elder son called me on a Friday morning in October 1994 to tell me that Jerne had died during the night. The funeral would take place on the following Monday. I hastened to say that I was on my way to a History of Science Society meeting in New Orleans and that biographers oughtn’t attend their subjects’ funerals anyway (except perhaps discreetly observing the event from a distance). My excuses were accepted without further ado.<br /><br />Two days later, while waiting for my connecting flight at the JFK, I bought a copy of the Sunday <em>New York Times</em> which to my pleasant surprise carried a half-page obituary of Jerne, a nice piece of top-notch science journalism. And when arriving at the conference hotel a few hours later, I realized that many other historians of science too had read the obituary, because friends and colleagues who knew about my project came up and gave me their condolences. “I’m so sorry”, said one. “Bad news about Jerne”, said another. “You must be devastated”, said a third. I felt somewhat uneasy, didn’t know what to think, even less what to say.<br /><br />I got my keys and was just about to go up to my room and get a night’s well-deserved sleep when a tall, white-haired, handsome man in his sixties wearing a worn tweed jacket came out of the restaurant. He caught my eyes, strolled up to me, somewhat hesitantly, and greeted me with a shy smile on his bearded face: “Thomas, you must be relieved!”<br /><br />In my jet-lagged state I didn’t quite hear if he was serious or in a joking mode. Whatever, his words hit a chord inside me. I stretched out as if to embrace him, then realized that this was perhaps not quite proper procedure, and cried out so that everyone around could hear: “At last, someone who understands how I feel!” That someone was Sam.<br /><br />Silvan S. Schweber, of all people at the HSS meeting, understood. Not only because he is one of those rare members of American academia who listens to, contemplates and understands what you tell him (another member of this rare breed of academics was the late Larry Holmes). But also because Sam too was living with a problem that had bothered me for years, viz., how to research and write the biography of a living scientist.<br /><br />A few months before the HSS meeting, we had both attended a meeting at Stanford on oral history of science. Sam and I were the only participants who were writing biographies. I talked about my ongoing study of Jerne, Sam about his work with Hans Bethe. We discovered that not only had we both devoured our subjects’ scientific publications and delved into their personal document files, but also interviewed them at length. And more importantly, we were both interested in the moral lives of our subjects.<br /><br />To me ethical questions were something new. Sam on the other hand had already spent the better part of a lifetime reflecting on the moral landscape of science, in his case bomb physics (note 2). He was, of course, never involved in any bomb work himself, but the moral aspects of physics have nevertheless loomed large in his intellectual development. Already when arriving in Princeton in the fall of 1949 to do graduate studies in theoretical physics, he was confronted with the debate on whether to develop a hydrogen bomb; he continued as a postdoc with Bethe at Cornell and later became actively involved in the creation of the physics department at Brandeis.<br /><br />The student unrest that followed in the wake of the escalating Vietnam war in the late 1960s got him even more deeply involved in the moral issues of academia. In the course of this journey Sam has also made a significant detour to the moral grove of biography. <em>In the Shadow of the Bomb</em> (2000) summarizes many years of close insights into the development of theoretical and nuclear physics. In the form of a parallell biography — or rather a sort of modernized, i.e., strongly contextualized, version of the classical Plutarchian format — Sam analyzes the shaping of Bethe’s and Robert Oppenheimer’s moral outlooks and their ensuing struggle with the ethical and political aspects of the new knowledge and technology of atomic fission and its consequences for humankind. Was the Enlightenment ideal still valid? Was knowledge always a good in itself? Should some knowledge be forbidden?<br /><br />The gist of a Plutarchian biography is the ethical evaluation of two political actors who handle similar kinds of problems in different ways. Oppenheimer and Bethe had much in common, including a strong faith in reason, a conviction that science is always good, and that shared knowledge will sooner or later lead to progress. But they also differed in important respects, and in Sam’s interpretation this was most evident in the way they positioned themselves in the spectrum between individuality and communality.<br /><br />Whereas Oppenheimer tended to seek individualistic solutions to moral problems and became “a lonely and somewhat solitary personage” (p. 184), Bethe sought solutions at the level of community. Whereas Oppenheimer could so eloquently voice (“and perhaps only voice”) love and the care of mankind, almost as if he were a poet, Bethe created a strong community around him that gave him “sustenance, fortitude, and caritas” ( p. 27).<br /><br />If Sam would have to choose between the two, he would undoubtedly turn up on Bethe’s side. He does indeed respect Oppenheimer, but his former mentor at Cornell — the subject of the full biography yet to come — is closer to his heart. Even for those of us who do not know Sam well personally, it is evident that Bethe’s ideals are also his. In this sense In the Shadow of the Bomb is a labor of love and a practical demonstration of a central aspect of the Plutarchian biographical tradition, viz., to be edifying. Sam has been edified and wants us to be too.<br /><br />Much as I sympathize with Sam’s biographical position, however, I am not sure that the future of biography’s edifying capacities lies here. Not because <em>In the Shadow of the Bomb</em> focuses on great men as such and their theories that shook the world; after all, this seems to be a valid account of the situation at the time. But rather because this great men/big theories/dire consequences-kind of biographical poetics may be difficult to apply outside the atomic age, which is unique in that the chain of events could have resulted in the eradication of all of humankind in one singular political act (as it perhaps almost did during the Cuban crisis).<br /><br />The ethical problems involved in, say, the present development of the biomedical sciences, seem to be of a quite different kind. Unlike classical big physics, biomedicine is a network-like pattern of interaction between the demands of millions of consumers of biomedical products and hundreds of thousands of more or less proletarianized laboratory scientists (with few theoreticians or classical intellectuals among their ranks) in both public and private laboratories; the two sides are mediated by a large number of private biotech companies operating against the backdrop of a volatile stock market. In this scenario there is hardly any place for noble theoreticians who feel responsible for the catastrophic consequences of scientific discoveries.<br /><br />In other words, even though Sam’s biographical project is commendable for giving us an understanding of the moral dilemmas and responsibilites of scientists in the state-driven atomic era, I believe that today’s fragmented, individualistic, narcissistic and market-driven global technoscientific culture calls for a different sort of ethically-oriented life writing. In short, I suggest that the future for biography as an ethical genre — in contrast to the standard function of the genre as an ancilla historiae, i.e., a way of writing the history of science by other means, or<br />as sophisticated entertainment á la Dava Sobel — relies on its ability to resonate with the technoscientific culture of the twenty-first century. This resonance lies, I believe, in its capacity for being a Socratic exercise, i.e., for being a genre devoted to the project of “knowing oneself”.<br /><br />Whereas Plutarchian moral biography has raised monuments to model scientists for us lesser mortals to gaze upon with awe, a renewed Socratic genre of scientific biography (single or double) would rather consist in portraits of how members of the new global technoscientific network (it is rather difficult to see it as a community in the old Mertonian sense), create their scientific and life projects. Such portraits do not have to be restricted to books — in the last decade the film format has proved an increasingly interesting medium for biographical portraits (note 3).<br /><br />A theoretical and methodological grounding for such a Socratic approach to a renewed ethical biographical genre might be developed with reference to works such as Martha Nussbaum’s, which involves reading fiction as a continuation of the Hellenistic practice of “therapy of desire”, and Pierre Hadot’s — who inspired Michael Foucault to the concept of “souci de soi” (“care of self ”) — proposal that the ancient role of philosophy as a genre for the cultivation of “spiritual exercises” has interesting late modern repercussions (note 4).<br /><br />By viewing/reading about the cognitive yearnings, professional passions, and life choices of other actors on the technoscientific stage, twenty-first century scientists may thus learn to be more reflexive in their daily life-practices and more willing to engage in practical virtue ethical training. In that way scientific biography might help undo some of the a-morality that permeats today’s global technoscience, not least its biomedical sector (note 5).<br /><br /><strong>Notes</strong>:<br />1. Thomas Söderqvist, <em>Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne</em> (New Haven: Yale University Press 2003).<br /><br />2. I have borrowed the phrase “moral landscape of bomb physics” from Gregg Herken’s review of Silvan S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2000) in <em>American Scientist</em>, vol. 88, nr 4 (July–August), 2000 (quoted from on-line version: <a href="http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/25926">http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/25926</a>).<br /><br />3. Like Richard Eyre’s <em>A Memoir of Iris Murdoch</em> (2001). I must confess, however, that I rather prefer Helen Mirren’s portrait of the daily life and work and moral quanderies of fictional detective chief inspector Jane Tennison in <em>Prime Suspect</em> (1991–1996) to Russell Crowe’s quasi-realistic and sentimental rendering of mathematician John Nash in <em>A Beautiful Mind</em> (2001).<br /><br />4. Martha Nussbaum, <em>The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics</em> (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1994); Pierre Hadot, <em>What is Ancient Philosophy</em> (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press 2002); Michel Foucault, <em>Histoire de la sexualité</em>. 3: <em>Le souci de soi</em> (Paris: Gallimard 1984).<br /><br />5. For a more extensive discussion of scientific biography as a genre of virtue theoretically based research ethics, see, e.g., Thomas Söderqvist, “Immunology á la Plutarch: biographies of immunologists as an ethical genre,” pp. 287–301 in: Anne-Marie Moulin and Alberto Cambrosio, eds., <em>Historical Issues and Contemporary Debates in Immunology</em> (Paris: Elsevier 2001), Thomas Söderqvist, “Wissenschaftsgeschichte à la Plutarch: Biographie über Wissenschaftler als tugendetishe Gattung,” pp. 287–325 in: Hans Erich Bödeker, ed., <em>Biographie Schreiben</em> (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2003), and Thomas Söderqvist, “What is the use of writing lives of recent scientists,” pp. 99–127 in: Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Söderqvist, eds., <em>The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine</em> (London: Routledge 2006).<br /><br />(manuscript to be published in J. Renn and K. Gavroglu (eds.), <em>Positioning the History of Science</em>, Springer (2007). Thanks to Finn Aaserud, Adam Bencard, Janet Browne and Ron Doel for constructive remarks. [Added in May 2007: The volume has now been published!]Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-84746309450121486402007-01-03T17:53:00.001+01:002007-01-03T17:55:43.153+01:00Combining wikis and blogs for joint document editing<p>When thinking about possible ways of working out an on-line writing project of this kind, I was inspired by Laura Cohen's post <a href="http://liblogs.albany.edu/library20/2006/12/why_cant_a_wiki_be_more_like_a.html">"Why Can't a Wiki Be More Like a Blog?"</a> on her blog <a href="http://liblogs.albany.edu/library20/">Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective</a>. Wikis are great for collective editing, but discourages people who "just" want to add comments. Blogs on the other hand don't have the collective editing feature. Why not create a mix, a sort of Wikiblog? An example of a half-way solution that Laura Cohen mentions is the annotated edition of <a href="http://www.futureofthebook.org/iraqreport/II-the-way-forward-a-new-approach">The Iraq Study Group Report</a> which shows a very nice comment system where you can open windows and comment on each paragraph in the document. Says Laura: "Wikis and blogs could benefit from incorporating each others' features. This could move us toward a truly full-featured integrated publishing platform in which the best of both systems are available".</p>Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-46611196851749260132007-01-01T16:03:00.000+01:002007-01-01T20:08:22.235+01:00MetabiographyAs the number of biographies has grown over the centuries, so has the number of famous people whose lives have been subjected to several or many renditions; some popular historical figures have in fact occasioned more than a hundred biographies (an anonymous <a href="http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:mzj7gKgC2LsJ:mediakit.bolt.com/profile/index.jsp%3FmemberName%3DCourtneyLoves+%22and+I+never+get+bored+reading+them%22+monroe&hl=sv&gl=se&ct=clnk&cd=1">blogger</a> recently proclaimed that she had nearly one hundred Marilyn Monroe biographies on her shelves “and I never get bored reading them”). Thus the emergence of a supergenre, the “metabiography,” which does not restrict itself to writing yet another and infinitesimally “truer” version of a life (perhaps based on a newly discovered letter or diary) but primarily analyzes earlier versions to make a critical appraisal of the tradition of life-writing about a particular subject. An excellent recent example is Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2004) which is not so much a biography of the Brontës as a book about biography where the author demonstrates how generations of literary historians and life-writers have remolded the Brontë sisters to fit their own agendas.<br /><br />Scientists have had their metabiographers too. More than fifty years ago, Henry Guerlac (1954) set the example with an essay on Lavoisier and his biographers. He was followed by Dorinda Outram (1976) on the tradition for Cuvier-éloges; David Cassidy (1979) on biographies of Einstein; Marilyn Marshall (1980) on Fechner-studies; Steven Jacyna (1983) on the succession of nineteenth-century images of John Hunter; Frederick Churchill (1982) and Marjorie Greene (1993) on the Darwin-biographical tradtion; and L. Pearce Williams (1991) on Faraday-biographies. The first scientific metabiography in monograph form was probably A. Rupert Hall’s study on eighteenth-century biographies of Newton (1999). The entries on individual scientists in the Reader’s Guide to the History of Science (ed., Arne Hessenbruch, 2000) follows the same pattern — it is not primarily the details of the life and work of the scientist but the changing interpretations by different biographers that is in focus.<br /><br />Although Nicolaas Rupke was apparently not aware of this emerging metabiographical literature when completing his study of the Humboldt phenomenon in Germany (<a href="http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vSiteName=SearchBooksResult.cfm&vLang=E&iValue=Autor&iQuickSearch=Rupke&iAutor=Rupke&vSearchBooks=Yes&vRecordPhrase=True&CFID=16819979&CFTOKEN=35646558">Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography. Frankfurt: Peter Lang AG, 2005</a>) his book fits nicely into the tradition. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is a good choice for a metabiographer. A celebrated naturalist, scientific traveller-explorer, physical geographer, and intellectual, indeed one the best known figures in the history of German science and learning, he has been the subject of a huge publication industry. Fellow scientists, science popularizers, journalists, and to some extent historians, have contributed to the facets of the many Humboldt portraits.<br /><br />“Who did the many writers about Humboldt think he really was?” (p. 17), asks Rupke and answers the question by identifying a number of political camps in modern German history that have appropriated Humboldt over more than 150 years and “aggressively recreated” his life and work “to suit contemporary needs” (p. 208). There is Humboldt the national hero of the revolutionaries of 1848; the subversive democrat at the Prussian court; the culture chauvinist of the Weimar republic; and the Aryan supremacist of the Nazi period. Postwar Humboldts include the antislavery marxist of the East Germans; the cosmopolitan friend of the Jews; and today’s pioneer of globalization (there is, of course, even a “green” and a gay Humboldt). Each of these get a separate chapter in Rupke’s well-researched (the list of printed sources is 75 pages long), densely written and fact-heavy study. The only significant political institutions in Germany that have not been involved in the cultural construction of their own Humboldt are the Lutheran and Catholic churches.<br /><br />Rupke concludes that a study of the Humboldt phenomenon is attractive as a means for understanding changing modern German identities. Humboldt’s life and work was an “agora” that shaped a discourse not only about the natural world, but as much about his own nation, enabling Germans to deal with “national ambitions, shortcomings, guilt complexes and the like” (p. 206). He also concludes that all the Humboldts — whether good or bad, scholarly or popular — are the product of institutional cultures. The task of metabiography, in Rupke’s view, thus is primarily to explore the ideological embeddedness of biographies, not to settles issues of their authenticity.<br /><br />Despite a concluding section on metabiographical reflections and “an inevitable moment of self-reflection” (p. 217), Rupke never really becomes self-reflexive, however. He reprimands biographers who thought they were only describing the facts of Humboldt’s life; yet he basically treats the political and ideological circumstances around the successive Humboldt constructions in an similar down-to-earth factual manner. And he does not seem to realize that the phrase “In historiography there does not exist an Archimedean point” (p. 217) is as strongly ideologically embedded in contemporary Western culture as the Humboldt-authors whose writings he has so skilfully analyzed. This is a minor point, however. In general, Rupke’s study is a clear improvement of the earlier scientific metabiographical tradition from Henry Guerlac to A. Rupert Hall. It is well-written, (albeit not elegantly) and will doubtlessly become a standard reference for the Humboldt industry and for writers of scientific metabiographies to come.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-24712634291530648112007-01-01T15:33:00.000+01:002007-01-06T17:11:10.689+01:00Dictionary of Medical BiographyI <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhImET33eiNlJAaGyqO9wfhRt0EXJB4MQ2Hj27iJ5omgvufQl2PdlduY9PaxY_qo1dtXNCRRlCO4OeSKEP9a0w9FL7Mg1Inh_gr7cAzsy_NiUuEL4VnhvHSwcbovpBOnsrclbu3/s1600-h/DMB.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5015071469442953218" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhImET33eiNlJAaGyqO9wfhRt0EXJB4MQ2Hj27iJ5omgvufQl2PdlduY9PaxY_qo1dtXNCRRlCO4OeSKEP9a0w9FL7Mg1Inh_gr7cAzsy_NiUuEL4VnhvHSwcbovpBOnsrclbu3/s320/DMB.jpg" border="0" /></a>just want to announce the publication of the five volumes of <em><a href="http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/GR2877.aspx">Dictionary of Medical Biography</a></em>, edited by Bill and Helen Bynum for Greenwood Press. It came out the day before New Year's Eve (30 Dec. 2006), so I haven't seen it in print yet.<br /><br />Several of my present and former colleagues here at <a href="http://www.museion.ku.dk">Medical Museion</a> (and myself) have written articles for it (in addition I was area editor for the Nordic countries, i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden; unfortunately no Icelandic medical doctors are included). The Bynums allowed for 38 entries from the Nordic countries out of a total of approx. 1100, so we had to make some pretty tough decisions -- in fact, not even all medical Nobel prize winners have been incorporated.<br /><br />I'm curious to read the Bynums' editorial introduction. Judging from the original author instructions back in 2004, this is a fairly conventional biographical dictionary. But I will postpone all critical remarks until I have received my area editor's copy (wouldn't dream of buying it myself; it costs 750 USD! -- hopefully major libraries will buy it, though)Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-1314805426720757522006-12-30T20:32:00.000+01:002007-01-01T15:59:41.608+01:00A research and writing experimentBesides posting news and occasional thoughts, this blog is also conceived as an experiment in on-line writing.<br /><br />A couple of months ago I decided to write a small book on "Individuality in biomedicine" -- and now I've found out that I want to do it in the public sphere. In other words, I will try to develop the manuscript on-line by posting new ideas, readings, successive changes in the argument and chunks of text here.<br /><br />I'm not intending to be too honest: I will probably spare you too many unfinished fragments and stupidities. This is not going to be warts and all. On the other hand I will really do my best to post text, ideas, questions etc. regularly as the book develops.<br /><br />Some of my colleagues have told me they would never want to do anything like this, because they are afraid of being scooped if they share before 'real' publication. I see the point -- in some areas competition is indeed high, which means that you risk seeing your ideas ending up in someone else's book or paper before you get them out in print.<br /><br />But this field (I will try to explain what I mean by "Representation of individuality" in later posts) is almost empty, as far as I know. As things stands now, the hope of finding someone out there to share ideas with trumps my anxiety of having my (probably not very original) ideas stolen.<br /><br />I don't know if this is going to work or not, but I'm ready to give it a try. You are very welcome to comment, both on the substantive content of individual posts and on the experiment as such.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-1127047432601078392006-12-30T16:23:00.000+01:002007-01-01T15:59:15.795+01:00WelcomeThis is the start of my research blog on representations of individuality in biomedicine. I'm already posting on <a href="http://www.corporeality.net/museion">www.corporeality.net/museion</a>. But that's for our joint project. This blog is about my own subproject.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-61222355618206250582004-03-06T04:25:00.000+01:002007-03-06T04:34:56.480+01:00Why are there so few scholarly biographies in the history of medicine and public health?<em>This paper was given as a keynote plenary lecture to the 7th Congress of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (“Health between the private and the public: shifting approaches”) in Oslo, September 3, 2003. It was later published in</em> Michael: Publication Series of the Norwegian Medical Society<em>, vol. 2 (2004). For web version, see </em><a href="http://www.dnms.no/index.php?kat_id=5&art_id=5"><em>here</em></a><em>.</em><br /><br />A meeting like this is a welcome opportunity to raise historiographical questions, i.e., questions about the many assumptions (ontological, epistemological, cultural, or ideological) that guide professional practice in the field of history of medicine and public health.<br /><br />One such set of historiographical questions has to do with the place and role of the individual in interpretations of the past. Is the individual subject just a social, cultural or linguistic construct? Are “agents” and “actors” primarily defined by webs of discourse? Or do individuals have a role as free and independent creators of society and culture, i.e., as sources of culture rather than its results? And if so, to what extent? Further (to raise the “utility”-question), is the ultimate purpose of interpretations of the records of the past to teach lessons for future collective action? Or is it also to emancipate the individual and to turn him or her into a morally competent global citizen? And finally (to raise the “reflexivity”-question), to what extent do such different opinions about the individual’s place in history, ­express different cultural and ideological assumptions, or even different personal life-experiences, among historians of medicine and public health?<br /><br />In the wake of such questions and meta-questions about the place of individuals and their experiences in history, there is a whole set of issues concerning the role of biography in relation to other forms of writing about the past. The individual subject and its place in history is one of those historiographical topics we tend to repress, and biography is one of those genres of writing we tend to avoid. Why is this so?<br /><br />Ten years ago, Ludmilla Jordanova pointed out in an essay review aptly titled “Has the social history of medicine come to age?” that she was struck by “the restricted range of genres and topics tackled” in the history of medicine and public health. She added that “one of the most dramatic examples of this is the almost total absence of scholarly biographies”, and continued: “Even for the really big names celebrated by Whig history, few have been the recipients of sustained biographical treatment” (Jordanova, 1993, p. 438). In fact, not even Edward Jenner has received any substantial modern treatment.<br /><br />I think Jordanova was right in 1993. And even though we have seen some rather impressive examples of scholarly biographical writing since then – consider, for example, works such as Patricia Spain Ward’s Simon Baruch: Rebel in the ranks of medicine (1994), Jacalyn Duffin’s To see with a better eye: A life of Laennec (1998) and Michael Bliss’s magisterial William Osler: A life in medicine (1999) – I am afraid that Jordanova’s ­observation is still valid. The absence of scholarly medical biographies, i.e., biographies about people who have been engaged in medical and public health activities in one way or the other, is indeed dramatic if you compare it with the interest in biographical writing in almost all other fields. ­General scholarly journals like the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books abound with reviews of biographies of all kinds: historical bio­graphies, literary biographies, art biographies, biographies of philosophers, and so on. But rarely medical biographies.<br /><br />The absence of medical biographies becomes even more dramatic if one takes a look at one of the neighbouring fields: scientific biography. During the last two decades there has been a swell of biographies about naturalists, microbiologists, biochemists, physicists, mathematicians, and geologists; whatever one desires. Books that have made their publishers happy and at the same time have received applause in the scholarly journals. In the last two decades, historians of biology, for example, have produced at least four major Darwin portraits based on meticulous archival research, one even in two volumes (Browne, 1996-2002). Historians of physics have produced several acclaimed studies of Newton and Faraday, and there have been marvellously written treatises of Lord Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Henry Huxley, Fritz Haber, Lise Meitner and Rosalind Franklin, just to mention some random fine examples. In my view good biographies not only show how scientists were integrated into the thinking of their time, and how the life and work can shed light on the cultural, political and social context of science, but also investigate the mind and practice of the individual scientist, and even delve into their private lives and existential dilemmas.<br /><br />Of course, there are many bad biographies as well; some would say too many. But this is what could be expected in global book market that absorbs around one hundred titles of scientific lives every year. Generally speaking, I think there is a general agreement among historians of science today that biography has become a quite respectable scholarly genre over the last two decades. The genre has blown new vitality into our understanding of science past.<br /><br />If Academia in general and our disciplinary neighbours in particular, have taken biography to their hearts for some twenty years now, why is this not yet the case in the history of medicine and public health? Why are there still so few scholarly medical biographies?<br /><br />The question becomes even more topical if one contemplates the fact that the medical-biographical genre has a much longer record than most other biographical genres, including scientific biography. Hippokrates, the celebrated, but elusive phantom figure of ancient medicine, had bioi written of him already in the Hellenistic period, none of which, unfortunately, is extant. A thousand years later, the miraculous healing powers of some of the medieval saints and their relics found the way into their vitae, a genre which later came to be known, somewhat condescendingly, as hagiography (literally saint-writing). And yet another half millennium later, Renaissance and early modern period medical doctors had their given place in the emerging secular biographical tradition, for example in funeral speeches of deceased university professors and in the collections of what was called, ­obviously by inspiration from Petrarch, “the lives of illustrious men”. ­Medical biography is thus a very old genre, obviously reflecting the fact that medicine and healing is an old practice, whether pursued by hippocratic doctors, medieval saints or professors in the early modern medical faculties and it continues to be published in great numbers (Morton and Moore, 1994).<br /><br />In spite of being old and venerable, however, the genre has lagged ­behind its sister genre, scientific biography, for the last three hundred years (the history of the genres of scientific and medical biography remains to be written; see, for example, Söderqvist, 2002a). The first vitae of the pioneers of the so called scientific revolution, including Copernicus and Kepler, came in the first part of the seventeenth century. As natural philosophy, ­astronomy and physics, and later chemistry and the biological sciences, ­advanced toward the top of the academic pecking order, so did biographical portraits of what gradually became known as scientists, whereas the lives of medical men (and later a few women) were gradually assigned a more humble place in the genre spectrum, compared to the lives of the new ­revolutionary scientists. Consequently, one of the few medical doctors who repeatedly received biographical notice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was Hermann Boerhaave. Of the approximately 1200 medical-biographical essays and monographs published in the three hundred years between 1550 and 1850, almost all were singletons (Oettinger, 1854); Boerhaave, however, received a top score of seven, the most famous of which was that of his admiring English student William Burton, whose ­Account of the life and writings of Hermann Boerhaave (1743) came only a few years after the great master’s death. The fact that Boerhaave towers higher than any other in the Enlightenment medical biographical tradition confirms the impression that he was, in the eyes of his successors, the man who brought the scientific revolution into medicine (Cook, 2000).<br /><br />The triumphs of scientific medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, reflected in medical lives, too. But they still lagged behind their more illustrious scientific colleagues. Scientists were conspicuously present in the Lives and Letters-tradition; these spectacular and detailed compilations about the great luminaries of the Age of Imperialism, tomes packed with excerpts from letters, often in two, sometimes three volumes. Darwin, Pasteur, Kelvin, Wallace and the other great stars of nineteenth century science all got their tributes. The mathema­tician William Rowan Hamilton was the subject of 2100 pages in three thick volumes (Graves, 1882-89); the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz was memorised by three volumes in German (Koenigsberger, 1902-03). But there were not many great medical doctors among them. And when authors of medical lives eventually adopted this grand format, the era of Lives and Letters had already ebbed out, not least thanks to Lytton Strachey’s and André Maurois’s attacks on what they regarded as ­biographical dinosaurs. Harvey Cushing’s two-volume Life of Sir William Osler in 1925 was one of the most celebrated medical biographies of the ­interwar period and was indeed a great tribute to the man. In form and outlook, however, it came almost a quarter of a century too late. It was out of fashion before it was even conceived.<br /><br />I will not try the reader’s patience by going into the medical biographical tradition of the rest of the twentieth century, but will hasten to my conclusion of this look-back on the record of the genre, viz., that one reason why there are so few scholarly medical biographies today, compared to, for example, scientific biographies, is that even if medical biography is a very old genre, it never really has had a strong presence as a scholarly genre. True enough, tucked away on the shelves here and there are some extremely well-written and thoughtful studies. But, with the risk of sounding contentious, there have indeed been a lot of bad medical biographies. The Biography Room of the Welcome Library in London contains every possible variety of eulogistic, panegyric, hagiographic, badly written, badly organised, badly contextualised biography, in all major languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Danish, Swedish, etc. Biographies written by admiring colleagues, devoted students, faithful wives and proud daughters and sons; biographies written out of duty, or as labours of love; bio­graphies that wanted to set the record straight, and so forth, but very few good scholarly biographies.<br /><br />This lack of a strong scholarly medical biographical tradition may partly explain the absence that struck Ludmilla Jordanova in 1993. But there is also another, and probably more important, reason which has to do with the strong impact that social history has made on the field of history of medicine and health in the last three decades.<br /><br />If one goes back to the programmatic manifestos of the social historians of medicine in the 1970s and 1980s, one will note the extent to which they were fighting against the biographical genre. They probably did not do so because they were trying to defend a scholarly space of their own against the dominance of scholarly medical biography (because, as we have seen, there was hardly any such tradition), and their fight against biography was probably not driven by a virtuous wish to combat the many bad medical biographies (because there were bad biographies in all possible areas, including lousy art biographies, literary biographies and scientific biographies, now filling dusty shelves in remote library stacks). Neither did the social historians of medicine fight so fiercely against biography because they were influenced by the vague anti-biographical sentiments fuelled by positivism, Marxism, structuralism, new criticism etc., that hovered all over Academia during most of the post-war period (because art historians, literary historians, historians of science etc., continued to produce scholarly biographies apparently without being affected either by the marxist denouncement of individualism, by Roland Barthes’s call for the “death of the author”, or by the young Michel Foucault’s attempt to eradicate the subject (Burke, 1998)).<br /><br />So why then did historians of medicine in general and social historians of medicine in particular, try to root biography out? Susan Reverby and David Rosner’s influential anthology Health care in America: Essays in social history from 1979 gives a clue. In their introductory chapter, the editors questioned medical doctors’ definitions of health and disease and hegemony over history; they wanted historians to take over professional ownership of the medical past. But there was more at stake. Reverby and Rosner had a much more far-reaching political goal than control of the past: they evidently wanted to have a say about who should control the contemporary medical system. The new social history of medicine was thought to be a weapon that would unmask “the pervasive societal faith in the potential and efficacy of medical science” (Reverby and Rosner, 1979, p. 4). Historians were thought to help break doctors’ control over the health system. Reverby and Rosner took the side of patients against powerful doctors, and in doing so; they particularly questioned biographies of “great men”, because they believed that biographies were an expression of false consciousness. In their view, medical biographies made the presumed real forces in history – social and economic forces, political discourses, ideologies, patients, nurses, etc. – invisible. In short, biographies upheld the power relations in the medical system.<br /><br />Confirmed social historians of medicine were not alone in attacking biography as an expression of a deplorable “great doctor”-perspective in history of medicine. With very few exceptions, most professional historians of medicine in the 1980s and 1990s have been hostile, or at best indifferent, to biographical writing (Linker, 2002; Söderqvist, 2002a). This is remarkable, because it was in the same period that Academia in general began to shake the ban on biography imposed by Marxism and structuralism off their shoulders. (Indeed, literary and art historians never found it necessary to fight the art establishment and have therefore apparently not felt any strong need to attack biographies of artists. In fact, it seems as if art historians still feel rather cosy with the idea of the “great artist”; more critical approaches to art biography, like Christie and Orton (1988), have not had much impact).<br /><br />Likewise historians of science have not felt any strong urge to combat the “great men” of science for political reasons; the idea of “great scientists” has just been considered a trifle unfashionable, so it has rather been a question of moving biography out of the “great man” perspective instead of attacking and denying the genre of biography altogether. As Thomas Hankins wrote in an influential article titled “In defence of biography” published in 1979 (the same year as Reverby and Rosner made their attack), the genre could in fact be used productively to show how the political, social, cognitive, philosophical, etc. aspects of science were working together. Hankins did not see biography as the expression of a suppressive professional ideology, but as a useful methodological tool for exploring science in its wider context.<br /><br />Hankins’s 1979-article announced the come-back of biography as a scholarly genre in the history of science. For the next two decades there has been a surge of scholarly scientific biographies, many of them written with the Hankinsinian purpose in mind. Adrian Desmond’s two volumes about Thomas Henry Huxley (1994-97) is a telling example. “This is a story of Class, Power and Propaganda”, Desmond announced in the preface: this is “a contribution to the new contextual history of science”. And he continued: “Isn’t it the modern function of biography to carve a path through brambly contexts? To become a part of history?... And isn’t that our ultimate aim, to understand the making of our world?” And again:<br /><br />“Huxley is part of the new contextual history of science. This itself is a reaction to the old history of ideas, which displaced the person, made him or her a disembodied ghost, a flash of transcendent genius. Only by embedding Huxley can we appreciate his role in the vast transformation that staggered our great-grandfathers” (Desmond, 1997, p. 235).<br /><br />Desmond and other historians of science have thus given good arguments for not setting social history up against biography and the individual. So it may be time for historians of medicine and public health to begin to reconsider the genre of biography. The omnipotent doctor is not the major culprit any more; today the medical system is in the hands of politicians, health administrators, insurance companies and pharmaceutical multinationals as well. Patients’ lobby groups and nursing organisations are beginning to have a say as well. The “great doctor” of the past is largely gone. There is no need to flog dead horses and therefore there is no need to combat biography, because it supposedly obscures power relations, social forces and cultural influences in the medical system.<br /><br />To use the individual as a lens, as it were, into the larger social and cultural context of philosophy, or science, or art, or literature, or, in this case, medicine and health – i.e., to use biography as a microcosm of history at large, or as an ancilla historiae (a servant of history), as I have called it elsewhere (Söderqvist, 2003) – is probably the most common argument among historians today for the use of biography. It is an important role indeed, which, as I have just tried to argue for, makes it more profitable for historians to work with biography rather than against it. Recent developments in historiographical thinking, such as microhistory and the loose intellectual movement of “new historicism” and its interest in literary tropes, add to the impression that biography and some its salient features, for example the focus on narrativity, are important contributions to medical historiography.<br /><br />Yet biography is not just history by other means. Even when one speaks of biography as an ancilla historiae, one should remember that servants are never entirely in the hands of their masters. Maybe the notion of biography as a adjunct to history should be dropped altogether? As an alternative I suggest to let the ontological assumption which Plutarch made in the introduction to his life of Alexander two millennia ago – viz., that biography (bios) and history (histoira) are two distinct ways of writing about the past – gloss the present debate about the relation between history and bio­graphy.<br /><br />Remember that historia literally means “an inquiry”. But in the course of time such inquiries of the past have by tradition come to mean studies of phenomena like nations, classes, economic institutions, political movements, social interactions, cultural constructs, etc.. Bios means “an individual life course”, and even if some historians today pretend they are writing biographies of cities or countries or even diseases, most historians nevertheless prefer to think about biography as the art of writing the lives of individual human beings. So whereas historia by tradition deals with the collective phenomena of the past, bioi (vitae, biographies) deal with its individuals. One past, two genres.<br /><br />In other words, even though most historians today think of biography as a genre that takes a secondary role in assisting its more influential master, history, this is not the only role there is for it. Biography has other, more independent, roles as well; for example, at least in the last two centuries is has also been written and read as an aesthetic genre in its own right; literary scholars would probably say that biography has in fact always been emancipated from being a servant to history, that it has always blossomed in its own right.<br /><br />Medical biography as literature is an interesting topic, which I will not pursue further here. Instead I will use my remaining few minutes to sketch out yet another possible role for medical biography (and in doing so, I will switch from a descriptive-analytical to a somewhat more normative stance). I am thinking of biographical writing as an example of the ancient practice of “spiritual exercises”, a tradition which has been high-lighted in Pierre Hadot’s (1987, 1995) recent reinterpretation of Hellenistic philosophy (1984) which has also had a seminal influence on Michel Foucalt’s idea of “souci de soi” (care of self) in the third and last volume of Histoire de la sexualité (1984).<br /><br />Hadot’s point is that already in classical times there was a pronounced difference between “philosophy” in the sense of systems, concepts and theoretical discourses, and “philosophy” as a mode of life. He traces the distinction through the history of philosophy, from Plato, via Petrarch, Montaigne and Descartes, to Kant, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. One thing is to philosophise about what the world is like, or to find out what justice and goodness may be, or what characterises true knowledge, etc. Another thing is to live and practice justice, goodness, truth, etc.<br /><br />Hadot uses the term “spiritual exercises” for the kind of practical thinking that informs philosophy in this second sense, as a mode of life (the term itself is not crucial; for some readers it may smack of cheap therapeutical practices, which is not the intention). The point is that there is a tradition in philosophy for “spiritual exercises” as a practice of intensive focus on the intellectual matter at hand, not primarily in order to contribute to the theoretical discourse of philosophy or to understand the world (even if this is a nice side-effect), but to change one’s own self in relation to the world.<br /><br />Hadot restricts his analysis to philosophy. But one can easily extend his distinction to other scholarly activities, in science and medicine as well as in the humanities. Following Hadot, one could then say that it is, of course, a good and admirable thing to do science or medicine to understand the physical world and the human body, or to pursue humanistic scholarship in order to understand language or culture. But it is another, and equally good and venerable thing, to be a scientist or a scholar as a mode of life. Similarly with biography. The purpose of the genre is thus not only to help understand a larger historical context, or to be an aesthetic genre, but also to function as a “spiritual exercise”, i.e., to inform the practice of “souci de soi” (care of self), to use Foucault’s wording. In other words, biographical writing enhances both the understanding of individual action in the past and the writer’s and the readers’ understanding of themselves in the world today, thus making them better fit to cope with the present world (cf. Söderqvist, 2002b; Söderqvist, 2003).<br /><br />Summing up: I believe medical biography has at least two major roles to play in scholarship today. One is to penetrate the intricacies of the medical system of the past by using individuals as lenses, or microcosms, to show how the political, social, economic, military, cultural, and cognitive aspects of medicine and public health have interacted in complex ways. The other is to write and read medical biography as a “spiritual exercise”, i.e., as a contemplation of one’s place in the contemporary medical and health system and in the world at large. In other words, biographies of scientists, doctors and nurses can help medical and health professionals understand the place of their work in the course of life as a whole; similarly biographical stories of patients may help us all, as potential sufferers, to cope with the situation of being ill. (Maybe even biographies of historians of medicine and public health could be of some use?)<br /><br />I started by asking: Why are there so few medical biographies? I hope my answer has not scared you from inviting me to the next congress to give the concluding address, but now to answer another question: How can we stem the tide of all these many new and good medical and public health biographies?<br /><br /><strong>References<br /></strong><br />Bliss, M. (1999). William Osler: a life in medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<br /><br />Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo academicus. Paris: Editions de minuit.<br /><br />Browne, J. (1995). Charles Darwin: Voyaging. London: Jonathan Cape.<br /><br />Browne, J. (2002). Charles Darwin: The power of place. London: Jonathan Cape.<br /><br />Burke, S. (1998). The death and return of the author: criticism and subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.<br /><br />Burton, W. (1746 [1743]). An account of the life and writings of Hermann Boerhaave doctor of philosophy and medicine professor of the theory and practice of physics and also of botany and chemistry in the University of Leyden, president of the Chirurgical College in that city, Fellow of the Royal Society in London and of the Royal Academy at Paris. 2nd. ed., London: Henry Lintot.<br /><br />Christie, J. R. R. & Orton. F. (1988). Writing on a text of the life. Art History, 11, 545-564.<br /><br />Cook, H. (2000). Boerhaave and the flight from reason in medicine. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74: 221-40.<br /><br />Cushing, H. (1925). The life of Sir William Osler. Oxford: Clarendon Press.<br /><br />Desmond, A. (1994). Huxley: The devil’s disciple. London: Michael Joseph<br /><br />Desmond, A. (1997). Huxley: Evolution’s high priest. London: Michael Joseph.<br /><br />Duffin, J. (1998). To see with a better eye. A life of R. T. H. Laennec. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.<br /><br />Foucault, M. (1984). Histoire de la sexualité. 3: Le souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard.<br /><br />Graves, R. P. (1882-1889). Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, including selections from his poems, correspondence, and miscellaneous writings. 3. vols., Dublin: Hodges, Figgis.<br /><br />Hadot, P. (1987). Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. 2nd. ed., Paris: Etudes augustiniennes.<br /><br />Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell.<br /><br />Hankins, T. L. (1979). In defence of biography: the use of biography in the history of science. History of Science, 17: 1-16.<br /><br />Jordanova, L. (1993). Has the social history of medicine come of age? The Historical Journal, 36: 437-49.<br /><br />Koenigsberger, L. (1902-03). Hermann von Helmholtz. 2 vols., Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn.<br /><br />Linker, B. O. (2002). Great doctors, great scientists: the career of biography in the history of medicine and science. Unpublished paper at the conference “The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology, and Medicine”, Copenhagen, May 22-25, 2002.<br /><br />Morton, L. T. & Moore, R. J. (1994). A Bibliography of medical and biomedical biography, 2nd ed., Aldershot: Scholar Press.<br /><br />Oettinger, E.-M. (1854). Bibliographie biographique universelle, Bruxelles: J. J. Stienon.<br /><br />Reverby, S. & Rosner, D., eds. (1979). Health care in America: Essays in social history. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.<br /><br />Söderqvist, T. (2002a). The poetics of biography and the history of science. Unpublished paper at the conference “The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology, and Medicine”, Copenhagen, May 22-25, 2002.<br /><br />Söderqvist, T. (2002b). The life and work of Niels Kaj Jerne as a source of ethical reflection. Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, 55: 539-545.<br /><br />Söderqvist, T. (2003). Wissenschaftsgeschichte à la Plutarch: Biographie über Wissenschaftler als tugendetische Gattung. In H. E. Bödeker (ed.), Biographie schreiben (pp. 285-325). Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.<br /><br />Ward, P. S. (1994). Simon Baruch: rebel in the ranks of medicine, 1840-1921. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.<br /><br /><br /><em>Thanks to Beth Linker, Section of the History of Medicine, Yale University, for drawing my attention to Jordanova’s article, and to Hanne Jessen, Signe Lindskov, Søren Bak-Jensen og Adam Bencard, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, for constructive comments.</em>Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-33956341750273090182002-10-31T17:54:00.000+01:002007-05-18T18:02:50.157+02:00Report from Meeting on Scientific Biography Held in Copenhagen<em>(originally posted in the History of Science Society Newsletter, October 2002, pp. 9-10)</em><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology and Medicine </strong><br /><br />In May [2002], thirty historians from nine different nations gathered in Copenhagen to reflect on current problems in scientific biography. The three-day residential meeting was organized by Janet Browne (London), Geoffrey Cantor (Leeds), Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen), and Richard Yeo (Brisbane) at the Magleas Conference Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark, 22-25 May 2002, under the heading "The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology, and Medicine". Precirculated papers generated intense round-table discussion with a genuinely international and cross-disciplinary flavor, helped along by the wonderful pastoral setting. The aim was to probe the genre in the light of new perspectives and reexamine its history, foundational problems, and metahistorical implications. The meeting included a visit to the Danish National Portrait Gallery (where artworks based on Niels Bohr’s death mask generated much comment) and ended with a convivial boat excursion to the site of Tycho Brahe’s observatory on the island of Venn, conducted by Helge Kragh. Many—if not all—of the participants are actively working in the field.<br /><br />The problems of self, persona and identity were central. Stephen Gaukroger (Sydney) opened the proceedings with a paper about how the genre of biography was related to the construction of the persona of the early modern natural philosopher. Charlotte Bigg and David Aubin (MPI-Berlin) continued with parallel biography as a tool for analyzing categories central to the public representation of scientists. Ray Monk (Southampton), author of acclaimed biographies of Wittgenstein and Russell, discussed the likelihood of getting into another person’s mind and concluded that a scientist’s inner life is not intrinsically hidden from the biographer. Thomas L. Hankins (U Washington, Seattle), one of the first to defend the use of biography in the history of science in a seminal article in History of Science 1979, drew an analogy between modern biography and the modern patent system, both being part of the reward system of science.<br /><br />Memory was also a central category for debate. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Paris-Nanterre) talked about biographies as mediators of memory and history in science and stressed the importance of the genre as an instrument for expressing the cultural meanings of scientific activites and the construction of national memories. Paolo Palladino (Lancaster) eloquently claimed that "biography is the salve for our longing to feel how it feels to be unique and memorable" and added as comparison between biography and drug addiction: "one dose of this salve can never be enough and soon leads to destruction ... We want more biographies still, to feel how it feels".<br /><br />Others papers, too, investigated conceptual issues so far not much treated in the literature. Christopher Chilvers (Oxford) brought Aristotle’s notion of tragedy into play in an analysis of the Sovjet historian of science Boris Hessen’s life in terms of hamartia, peripeteia and katharsis. Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge) considered the case of the Rev. John Williams and the rhetorical power of the story of his life and especially his volatile death (he was eaten by cannibals) in the creation of his reputation as a godly naturalist and an icon against the trope of the savage cannibal, thereby attempting to deconstruct the fascination with scientific genius. Patricia Fara (Cambridge) approached scientific biography through scientific portraiture, claiming with Edmund Lodge (Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain, 1821) that it is "from the combination of portraits and biography that we reap the utmost degree of utility and pleasure which can be derived from them" – a useful prescription for biographers even today.<br /><br />In the last decade, historians of medicine seem to have been much more sceptical about biography than historians of science. Nonetheless, in a revisionist paper, Jackie Duffin (Toronto) gave a convincing autobiographical argument, based on her experiences of writing about Langstaff and Laennec, for biography as a central resource for the historian of medicine. Beth Linker (Yale) suggested that American historians of medicine will only come to accept biography once they reasses their own disciplinary founding story and Henry Sigerist’s role in it. Two speakers also addressed biography’s role in the writing of recent science. Rena Selya (Harvard), who has just finished her thesis on Salvador Luria, reflected on the relation between autobiography and biography in writing recent historiography of science. Betty Smocovitis (U Florida, Gainesville) drew on her own experiences in writing about a recent scientist (G. Ledyard Stebbins), claiming that working with living subjects alters the life of the biographer too, who may ultimately incorporate elements of the other’s life in his or her own autobiography.<br /><br />The history of biography further emerged as a bundle of traditions for writing about individuals. Three papers dealt with such traditions. Helge Kragh (Aarhus) surveyed the lineage of lives of Tycho Brahe, starting with Gassendi’s vita in 1654 which set the framework for the following 300 years, and ending, so far, with John Christianson’s social history of the Tycho clan: On Tycho’s Island (2000). Signe Lindskov Hansen (Copenhagen) talked about the Danish tradition for writing biographies of Niels Stensen (Steno) with a focus on different rhetorical strategies that had served different political aims over time; it was particularly interesting to hear that Marinus Borup’s biography of Steno from 1938 was written as a 300 page prose poem (probably the only major modern biography ever written in poetic form). Rebekah Higgitt (Imperial College, London) also addressed the question of particular agendas for biographies; taking three major contributions to the 19th century picture of Newton – Brewster’s and de Morgan’s Newton portraits and Baily’s account of Flamsteed – as her point of departure, she discussed their modes of presentation and the techniques which made them persuasive.<br /><br />Finally, the genre as an historical phenomenon was examined. Geoffrey Cantor (Leeds) presented his current work on the British periodical press in the 19th century and raised the question to what extent biographical articles were responsible for shaping the public understanding of both science and the scientist in the period. Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen), ended the meeting with an overview of the history of the genre, suggesting that the different valuations over time have been fuelled by vested professional interests, and that a true defense of the genre would be to study it without being prejudiced by present standards for what constitutes good history of science, technology, and medicine. Publication of a volume including the conference articles is currently being investigated.<br /><br />Janet Browne<br />Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London<br /><br />Thomas Söderqvist<br />Medical Museion, University of CopenhagenThomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-31255122821034784341998-11-08T20:23:00.000+01:002007-01-11T20:39:59.222+01:00Hagiografi og forskerbiografi<em>This unpublished paper (written in Danish) was presented at Forum for Theology and Science (Forum Teologi-Naturvidenskab) at the University of Aarhus, November 9, 1998 (file is dated 8 November 1998).</em><br /><br /><strong>Hagiografi og forskerbiografi</strong><br /><br />Tak for indbydelsen - glad for at være med i det her forum - har aldrig været her før - meget spændt på diskussionen.<br /><br />Udgangspunktet for mit oplæg her idag om "Hagiografien og forskerbiografien", er jo at jeg for nylig har forsvaret en forskerbiografi som doktordisputats -- om den danske immunolog og Nobelpristager Niels Kaj Jerne. Det er første gang en forskerbiografi er blevet antaget til forsvar for den filosofiske doktorgrad i Danmark, og derfor knyttede der sig en del interesse til forsvarshandlingen i begyndelsen af september. Bogen blev anmeldt i alle større dagblade -- nogle mere seriøst end andre -- og den gav ophav til seks timers opposition.<br /><br />Det har været et interessant mønster i kritiken. De, der var positive (og det var da heldigtvis de fleste), har fremhævet bogens komposition, stil, sprog, det historiske håndværk, fodnoteapparatet etc., dvs at jeg har levt op til de akademiske dyder.<br /><br />De, som har været negative derimod, har næsten udelukkende haft indvendinger imod, at jeg gik så tæt ind på min hovedperson, at jeg så at sige klædte ham af, at jeg viste hvordan hans private funderinger, livserfaringer og verdensanskuele øvede indflydelse på hans videnskabelige virke. Marie Tetzlaff mente i Politiken at denne nærgående behandling af en, i hendes øjne så ubehaglig, person som Jerne var onødvændig og udtryk for manglende kærlighed -- hvis man ikke har mere kærlighed til sin person skal man ikke skrive om ham, sagde hun. Og videnskabsjournalisten Tor Nørretranders skrev (også i Politiken), at det private var helt ligegyldigt i den her sag, for når store videnskabsmænd får sine store ideer så findes der ikke noget at forklare -- sande ideer behøver slet ikke forklares. Så at skrive om Jernes private liv blir det rene dyneløfteri, mente han.<br /><br />De her meget forskelligartede reaktioner har gjort et stort indtryk på mig, og de er vigtige indput i det arbejde jeg er gået igang med, og som jeg regner med at bruge en stor del af mit 5-årige forskningsrådsstipendium. Det projekt jeg er igang med, handler om at sætte forskerbiografien i perspektiv, både historisk og tematisk -- og formålet med det her oplæg, ihvertfald fra min side, er at få respons på projektet.<br /><br />At sætte forskerbiografien i historisk perspektiv betyder at jeg vil gøre nogle nedslag i genrens lange træk, fra den antikke filosofbiografi og op til den nutidige forskerbiografi. Og tematisk ved tage fat i nogle af de interesser der knytter sig til genren. Biografien har mange interessenter:<br />F.eks. den historievidenskabelige interesse der ligger i at se forskerbiografien som et stykke historieskrivning, enten om en person alene eller om personen i en større historisk sammenhæng.<br /><br />- En litterær interesse der handler om at se biografien som et slags roman.<br />- En panegyrisk interesse som handler om at biografien skal bidrage til hyldesten af en person og den institution eller nation han/hun virket i.<br />- En psykologisk interesse -- at se biografien som et stykke psykologisk case-study.<br />- En moralisk interesse, hvor man ser biografien som et stykke eksemplarisk etik, et forebillede til etisk handling.<br />- Og måske også en soteriologisk interesse -- det vil jeg lige vende tilbage til tilsidst i oplægget.<br /><br />Jeg tror at de reaktioner, der er kommet, kan fortolkes udfra ihvertfald nogle af disse interesser. En måde at fortolke de positive reaktioner på bogen, er nemmelig at se dem som udtryk for, at man mener at bogen lever op til de krav til biografien som har været de forherskende indenfor genren i dets helhed under moderniteten -- nemlig at biografien er en kombination af roman og videnskabelig historieskrivning.<br /><br />Det er biografiens opgave at vise hvordan værket egentlig er blevet til, at male et "sandt" billede af personen, uafhængigt af hvilket eftermæle han selv eller hans elever vil at han skal have, og en historisk fagligt korrekt vurdering af personens historiske forankring og virke -- og alt dette med særlige litterære krav til sprig og stil. Det er et modernistisk syn på biografien som en genre der i litterær form skal give os det sande billede af livet og værket.<br /><br />Og det er dette syn på biografien som (som jeg ser det) ligger som u-udtalte udgangspunkt for den positive kritik.<br /><br />Den negative kritik, derimod, er (mener jeg) udtryk for et ganske anderledes syn på biografien, nemlig at genren grundlæggende skal bidrage til at give et hyldest til et betydningsfuldt menneskes betydningsfulde indsats i samfundet og i kulturen. Biografiens opgave er at installere politisk, kulturelt og videnskabeligt betydningsfulde personer i deres plads i historien.<br /><br />Biografien skal kort sagt være panegyrisk (af he panægyris, festlig fællesforsamling og deraf afledte adjektiv panægyrikos = passende for den offentlige fest, og substantiv ho panægyrikos, dvs. en lovtale). En opfattelse som måske bedst er kommet til udtrykt netop hos Nørretranders som meget apropos har været en de de mest aktive til at skabe offentlige fester omkring naturvidenskaben, og som selv har skrevet en lovtale til Niels Bohr. Ud fra dette udgangspunkt er bogen en stor fejltagelse.<br /><br />Som i kan høre har jeg formuleret alternativerne her -- kombinationen af roman og videnskabelig historieskrivning hhv. panegyrik -- så at der ikke er nogen tvivl om hvilket af dem jeg går ind for. Og det er ikke kun fordi jeg personlig foretrækker positiv fremfor negativ kritik. Det er også fordi jeg lever i en tid hvor romanen og den videnskabelige historieskrivning er normen og hvor panegyriken er latterlig.<br /><br />Sådan har det ikke altid været. Under det meste af historien er det panegyriken der har været normen. Biografigenren har jo sine rødder i den arkaiske græske tradition for at skrive lovsange (egkomia) til gode og magtfulde mænd, en sekulær variant af traditionen for lovsange (humnoi) til guderne. Blandt tidlige bevarede enkomier findes f.eks. Isocrates' Euagoras, som førfatteren selv hævdede var den første lovsang i prosaform. En flittig enkomie-forfatter var Xenophon som bl.a. skrev en kombination af øjenvidneskildring og forsvarstale over Sokrates, Apomnemoneumata (også kendt som Memorabilia), og et omfattende, om end delvist fiktivt, biografisk portræt af den persiske konge Kyros (den såkaldte Cyropaedia). Biografier over konger og kendte krigere udviklede sig til en veletableret genre under hellenistisk tid og op igennem senantikken.<br /><br />På tilsvarende måde er jo den middelalderlige helgenbiografi (hagiografien) i nogle henseender en form for panegyrik. Eller snarare, det er det panegyriske islæt som man senere har lagt mest mærke til. Hagiografien er blevet lagt for had fordi panegyriken til den grad kom at lade den ukritiske hyldest af helgengerningen erstatte den kritiske holdning, fakticiteten og omsorgen om den litterære fremstilling. "This was a period of biographical darkness", slår forfatteren til Encyclopedia Britannicas biografiartikel lakonisk fast når han når frem till middelalderen.<br /><br />Nu er middelaldermørket i og for sig ikke så kompakt som man man kan tro -- der findes en del sekulære biografier, f.eks. Einhard's Vita Caroli Magni fra 800-tallet, som godtnok har et klart panegyrisk sigte, men hvor forfatteren pointerer, at han har været omhyggelig med ikke at udelade nogle facts. Og indenfor helgenbiografien kan man pege på f.eks. Edmer's Vita Anselmi fra begyndelsen af 1100-tallet (den er jeg ved at læse lige nu) som bær præg af at Edmer var en usedvanligt god iagttager af Anselm's personlighedstræk og havde svært at få øje på nogle af de under han ifølge den hagiografiske tradition burde spække sin bog med.<br /><br />Men disse er alligevel sjældne eksempler. I det hele taget er panegyriken helt dominerende i hagiografien. Det gælder sådan set også i renæssancen, f.eks. i Vasaris' kunstnerbiografier, selv om det panegyriske element blandes op med et mere historisk-videnskabeligt element. Det er først i 1700- og 1800-tallene at panegyriken for alvor dæmpes ned. I indledningen til den mest kendte og mest toneangivende af alle biografier, Life of Johnson, der udkom i to bind i 1791, skrev James Boswell at han ville skrive om Samuel Johnson som denne "really was", fordi, skriver han, "I profess to write, not his panegyrick, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect".<br /><br />Den biografiske genres historie i de tohundrede år der fulgte Life of Johnson er en eneste lang indløsning af dette kritiske-realistiske tema -- desværre har jeg ikke tid til at gå i detaljer her. Lad mig bare sige, at sejrsgangen for den kritiske, historisk-videnskabelige biografi ikke er total. Panegyriken har overlevt hist og pist. Og tit finder man i mange biografier en pudsig blanding af kritisk realisme og lovtale. Det gælder John Lennon-biografier, Pelé-biografier og Kennedy-biografier -- hvor modernismens tendens at forklare og afsløre balanceres af at mange af de personer som biograferes er vor tids helte -- en Elvis Presley-biografi kan næsten ikke undgå at blive et enkomion over "The King", en Martin Luther King-biografi en hyldest til medborgerretskæmperen.<br /><br />Forskerbiografier er ingen undtagelse fra denne blanding af lovtale og kritisk realisme. Den forskerbiografiske tradition har ligesom al anden biografi sine rødder i panegyriken. Hvis vi ser bort fra filosof-biografier, som jo findes helt tilbage til antikken, så kom de første egentlige forskerbiografier med Academie des Sciences' tradition fra slutningen af 1600-tallet om fremover, for at skrive såkaldte éloges, lovprisninger, over sine afdøde medlemmer, en tradition som sidenhen spred sig til andre videnskabelige akademier. Selv om de med tiden blev et mere og mere kritisk-realistisk træk i det franske videnskabsakademies éloges, så er det panegyriske element stærkt, i en udstrækning at i hvertfald en idéhistoriker, Charles B. Paul, betegner akademitalerne som moderne hagiografier.<br /><br />Og ser man til forskerbiografierne i dette århundrede er det svært at frigøre sig fra en følelse af, at godtnok er biografiforfatterne klare over at man bør leve op til den historievidenskabelige og kildekritiske metode, men at der allerede i valget af hovedperson ligger en mere eller mindre skjult panegyrisk interesse -- at man skriver om Bohr fordi man vil hylde en af nationens store og kendte sønner, at man vil hylde fysikken, at man vil hylde en af vort århundredes store tænkere. Om ikke andet af den grund, tror jeg det ville være gavnligt at mere systematisk diskutere ligheder og uligheder mellem forskerbiografien og helgenbiografien som to former for panegyriker.<br /><br />For at vende tilbage til listen over interesser bag biografien, så er panegyriken kun ét (omend vigtig) aspekt af helgenbiografien. Et anden nærbeslægtet, og måske lige så vigtigt aspekt, er det moralsk opdragende. Nærbeslægtet, fordi det som i antikken og middelalderen tit blev opfattet som værd at hylde, var ikke bare de store dåd, men også de store dyder som lå bagved dådene.<br /><br />Det moralsk opdragende aspekt i den antikke biografi kommer bedst til udtryk hos Plutarch, som ekplicit skriver i indledningen til sin Timoleon-biografi, at formålet er (i Loeb-udgavens oversætning) "to adorn my own life in conformity with the virtues therein depicted" -- og når han siger virtues/arætai/dyder henviser Plutarch jo selvfølgelig til hele den antikke dydsetiske tradition, ikke kun til Aristoteles men til hele den hellenistiske dydsfilosofi.<br /><br />Det moralsk opdragende aspekt er også gennemgående i hagiografien. Helgenbiografier bliver læst højt i klostrene som ren og skær opbyggelseslitteratur. Selv det franske akademis hyldningstaler var præget af et opdragende element, så også her går panegyrik og moralsk dannelse hånd i hånd. Langt ind i sidste århundrede er den moraliske et væsentligt motiv hos biografiforfattere. Et godt eksempel er den skotske forfatter Samuel Smiles, måske bedst kendt for sit didaktiske arbejde Self-Help og for sine mange biografiske essæer over ingenjører og andre heltefigurer under den industrielle revolution, som konkluderede, att "the chief use of biography consists in the noble models of character in which it abounds".<br /><br />Det er vel egentlig kun i den moderne forskerbiografi, at det moralske islæt forsvinder ud af billedet. I den moderne forskerbiografi møder vi en forholdsvist videnskabelig-kritisk biografi med (som jeg tidligere påpegede) panegyriske islæt, men stort set uden moralske elementer.<br /><br />Eller hvad? Måske ligger der alligevel et (ubevidst) moralsk element i mange moderne forskerbiografier -- altså at man fremhæver forskerens flid, mod, samarbejdsevne, nysgerrighed, kreativitet m.m. som forebilledlige dyder for unge videnskabsmænd og kvinder, så at de, ved at læse biografier om nysgerrige forskere, selv skal følge i nysgerrighedens spor. Men hvis der er et moralsk element, så er det ikke udtalt. Ingen nutidig forskerbiograf vil eksplicit vove sige at formålet med hans arbejde er at tjæne som moralsk forbillede for unge mennesker.<br /><br />Jeg prøvede faktisk lidt i skjul i Jerne-biografien, og selv om det var nogle få linier det handlede om, så vækkede det umiddelbart forargelse hos nogle af mine ekstraopponenter, at jeg "dømte ham", som de sagde.<br /><br />At se biografien som et stykke eksemplarisk etik (narrativ etik, ville Svend Bjerg nok kalde det) er således endnu ikke noget man vil tale højt om blandt videnskabshistorikere og forskerbiografer. Jeg ved ikke om kirkehistorikere og teolog-biografer er anderledes i det henseende (i det hele taget kunne jeg tænke mig at vide mere om forholdet mellem kirkehistorie og teolog-biografi, altså ikke helgenbiografi men teolog-biografi, for det er jo i princippet er form for forskerbiografi).<br /><br />Men nok om det -- det sidste aspekt af helgenbiografien som jeg tror det er værd at kikke lidt nærmere på, hvis man vil tematisere forskerbiografien, det er hvad jeg vil kalde det soteriologiske (af såtær, redning, frelse), dvs en biografi som opfylder en frelsesinteresse. Og jeg skal skynde mig at sige, at jeg er ude på tynd is når jeg kommer in på den soteriologiske interesse.<br /><br />Jeg har lånt udtrykket "soteriologisk biografi" af en australsk teolog og biografiforsker der hedder Richard Hutch, men kun selve udtrykket, for jeg synes at hans diskussion af det (i en bog som hedder The Meaning of Lives) er ret uklar.<br /><br />Når det gælder helgenbiografien er det selvfølgeligt klart hvad den soteriologiske interesse går ud på. Slår vi op på artikeln "Heiligenverehrung-hagiographie" i Realleksikon für Antike und Christentum skriver, så får vi at vide at "sittliche u. geistliche Erbauung der Leser u./oder Zuhører" er en af de vigtigste funktioner af hvad forfatteren (Marc van Uytfanghe) kalder "der hagiographische diskurs".<br /><br />"Sittliche Erbauung", det ligger allerede implicit i det jeg lige sagde om det moralske aspekt af biografien. Soteriologi handler om "geistliche Erbauung". At den kristne hagiografi, foruden at være et stykke panegyrik og et stykke moralsk vejledning, også handlede om åndelig opbyggelse og veje til frelse, om at indlejre den enkeltes liv i frelseshistorien -- det er der vel ingen tvivl om.<br /><br />Men vil det være meningsfuldt at også forstå forskerbiografien i termer af åndelig opbyggelse og frelse? Ja, det mener jeg faktisk, og jeg er begyndt på at argumentere for det i en artikel om forskerbiografien som opbyggelig genre, som kom i en antologi over forskerbiografier der udkom på Cambridge University Press sidste år.<br /><br />Vi er så vandt til at tænke naturvidenskab som en upersonlig aktivitet, hvor den enkelte forsker er et mer eller mindre anonymt redskap, en omvendt forlængelse af det eksperimentelle udstyr, for udforskningen af naturlovene, ofte med teknologiske anvendelser i sigte -- at vi ofte ikke ser denne udforskning som et hiin enkeltes livsprojekt.<br /><br />Men forskning er jo i høj grad et livsprojekt, vi kunne måske endda sige et eksistentielt projekt. Vi investerer håb og længsler i arbejdet, håb om at se ting ingen anden har set, nogen gange (som jeg prøver at vise i Jerne-biografien) båret af en længsel efter det sublime, efter en dimension af tilværelsen hinsides det daglige trummerum med kollegerne og spektrofotometret der ikke virker. Heri ligger kimet til en religiøs impuls -- ja, hos nogle er forskning endda et religiøst projekt forklædt i mere eller mindre sekulær-sproglig drægt (som hos f.eks. biologen Jesper Hoffmeyer).<br /><br />Et andet kim til en religiøs impuls kommer af, at den videnskabelige verden er fuld af store bedrifter, af verdslig succéer, af konkurrence, af elitisme og stræben efter den fuldendte prestation, af karriere og statusprivilegier -- kort sagt at verdslig triumf. Men den er jo også fyldt af fejltagelser, af tab, af følelsen af at være mislykket, af stor ensomhed. I disse øjeblikke af sociale og menneskelige nederlag mindes også medlemmer af den videnskabelige verden om sine begrænsninger og sin længsel efter at blive set og at blive elsket. Så heri ligger også kimet til en religiøs impuls.<br /><br />Når jeg nu siger at man kan se et soteriologisk aspekt i forskerbiografien, så mener jeg vel egentlig bare at den kan hjælpe sine læsere at udvikle disse impulser -- at artikulere de håb om at finde en livsmening i det intellektuelle arbejde og den åndelige længsel som, trods alle Trøjborgske foranstaltninger, stadigvæk findes hos mange enkelte forskere. Tor Johan Grevbo, som er én af redaktørerne for det norske Halvårsskrift for praktisk teologi, taler om biografin som en form for sjælesorg. Men mindre kan også gøre det -- når Grevbo taler om sjælesorg så lægger han selvfølgelig ind en kerygmatisk dimension i biografien (den sjæl som læser om en anden sjæl skal frelses).<br /><br />Jeg hævder ikke at sjælesorg og frelse nødvændigtvis skal forstås evangelisk. Men der findes utvivelagtigt elementer af noget vi kunde kalde længsel efter frelse hos alle mennesker, og læsning af biografier indholder, vil jeg hævde, altid elementer af noget der ligner sjælesorg.<br /><br />Så er der tid til at opsummere: der er tre træk af den middelalderlige helgenbiografi (og nogle af disse træk kan genfindes også i den antikke biografi og i den tidlig-moderne biografi), som ville kunne inspirere tematiske studier af den nutidige forskerbiografi -- og det er: det panegyriske træk, det moralske træk, og det soteriologiske træk.<br /><br />Afslutningsvist vil jeg sige at jeg for nylig er blevet bevidst om yderligere et hagiografisk islæt i Jerne-biografien. Næsten alle de tidlige middelaldersbiografer lagde stor vægt på at udmejsle en slutscene, i hvilken man gør rede for de sidste ord som det døende helgen udtaler. Hagiograferne var specielt interesserede i disse de sidste øjeblikke i den hellige mands eller kvindes liv, fordi disse øjeblikke, mente man, forbandt det jordiske med det himmelske liv.<br /><br />I epilogen til Jerne-biografien redeviser jag til sidst en telefonsamtalte som Jerne og jeg havde et par måneder inden hans død i efteråret 1994, vores sidste samtale sammen. Jerne havde en terminal cancer. Nogle af jer har måske læst anekdoten eller hørt mig fortælle den før, men jeg vil lige gentage den igen, fordi den så klart illustrerer et træk i min biografi, der går helt tilbage til den hagiografiske tradition (jeg fortæller den på englsk):<br /><br />At the beginning of August 1994, Alexandra suddenly called me up.<br />- "Niels doesn't like that title of the book, What struggle to escape," she proclaimed in her usual direct way.<br />I asked to speak with Jerne, and a few minutes later he came to the telephone, apparently somewhat woozy from pain-killing medicine.<br />- "What do you mean," I asked. "Why don't you like the title of the book?"<br />There was a silence.<br />- "You want to call it 'What struggle to escape', right?" he replied at last, and went on: "Isn't that from a poem by Keats?"<br />- "Yes," I answered.<br />- "And the line before it is 'What mad pursuit?'<br />- "Yes," I answered again.<br />- "Which is also the title of Francis Crick's autobiography?" he added.<br />- "That's right," I answered, still not sure just what his drift was.<br />Then it came, loud and clear, without the least uncertainty in his voice: "I don't want to be second to Francis Crick."<br />That was our last conversation. Just over two months later, on 7 October, 1994, Niels Kaj Jerne died in his home in Castillon-du-Gard.<br /><br />Jeg tror ikke at dette islæt af hagiografi i min biografi er så enestående. Jeg tror der er mange sådane træk i mange forskerbiografier og jeg ser frem imod at diskutere det med jer.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-8989642796983886541996-07-18T20:00:00.000+02:002007-01-11T20:18:47.161+01:00Biography and the good life in science<p><em>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 <a href="http://unrulymeditations.blogspot.com/1996/06/good-life-in-science-biography-as.html">here</a>; for an earlier version, see <a href="http://unrulymeditations.blogspot.com/1996/05/biography-and-good-life-in-science.html">here</a>).<br /></em><br /><strong>Biography and the good life in science</strong></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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]. </p><p>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.</p><p>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'.</p><p>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].</p><p>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).</p><p>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].</p><p>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.</p><p>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].</p><p>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).</p><p>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].</p><p>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<br />"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".</p><p>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].</p><p>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 :-)].</p><p><strong>Notes</strong><br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1"></a>[1]It is probably no coincidence that the renaissance of virtue-ethics paralleles that of biography.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2"></a>[2]Cf. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p.11.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3"></a>[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.*).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4"></a>[4]Johan Huzinga, Homo ludens*<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5"></a>[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:<br />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"<br />(Quoted in Dash, A Life of One's Own (New York: Harper & Row, 1973, p.318).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6"></a>[6]The quote is an example of the combination of beauty and pain which Burke and Kant called the `sublime'.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7"></a>[7]2nd. ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8"></a>[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.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9"></a>[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').<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10"></a>[10]Lorraine Daston, "The Moral Economy of Science", Osiris, vol.10 (1995), 3-24 (quotes on p.8-9).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11"></a>[11]MacIntyre, op.cit., p.205.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12"></a>[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).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13"></a>[13]Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), p.96.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14"></a>[14]Murdoch, op.cit., p.96-97.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=16860807#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15"></a>[15]In Plato's dialogues Apology and Crito Socrates is said to have equated moral wisdom, virtue, the `good life' and happiness.</p>Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-60217720412305777581996-06-24T19:38:00.000+02:002007-01-11T19:47:31.004+01:00The Good Life in Science: Biography as Therapy of Scientific Desire<em>This abstract was written for the session "Biography at the Crossroads" at the 3rd British-North American History of Science Meeting in Edinburgh, July 23-26, 1996 (file is dated 24 June 1996; but this is probably wrong, I must have sent in the abstract long before)</em><br /><br /><strong>The Good Life in Science: Biography as Therapy of Scientific Desire</strong><br /><br />Irrespective of their epistemological positions, historians of science almost invariably focus on accounts of how scientists relate to the objective world. Even when the moral world is considered, factual knowledge (true or `true') of the objective world constitutes the rationale for doing historical scholarship ((cf. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 1994). Instead of viewing science as a moral system for the production of factual knowledge, I wish to open up for a discussion of how scientists have pursued a good life in science.<br /><br />One classical moral philosophical view of the good life is the Platonic/Augustinian search for the highest good in God. The secular, scientific version of this classical ideal is to know and love the truth; the best secular life style in search of the good is that of a life in the Republic of Science. This secularized conception of a good life in science is not very popular today. Instead, hedonism has crept into the heart of Academia. The idea of a good life in science today is rather articulated in terms of pleasure-ethics.<br /><br />A better foundation of a discourse about the good scientific life is found in the virtue-ethical tradition. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics has inspired a recent renaissance in moral philosophy (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981). Based on MacIntyre's argument about the relation between virtues and the good life one can distinguish between different kinds of goods in science: goods external to scientific practices, goods internal to practicies, and the narrative quest in search of the good. MacIntyre's notion of the unity of virtues is important because it opens up for a discussion of virtues in science different from that of recent studies of the moral economy of science (e.g., Lorraine Daston, Osiris, vol.10, 1995).<br /><br />The renaissance for a virtue-ethical approach to the good life has consequences for our understanding of the role of biography in the historiography of science. Biography is usually seen as a genre for the reconstruction of individual scientific production (scientific biography) or for understanding the social conditions of science (social biography). However, from a virtue-ethical point of view, biography is primarily a genre that provides exemplars of what it means to lead a good life in science. Biographies force us to ponder the differences between our own life accounts and those of others. Trying to understand how other people's lives fit together, how they are narratable, and how they have tried to attain a good life, we may begin to understand our own quest for the good life. This, I suggest, is an aim of biography so far neglected in the historiography of science.<br /><br />Finally, I will shortly discuss the implications for biography in history of science raised by Martha Nussbaum in her reconsideration of Hellenistic moral philosophy (The Therapy of Desire, 1994).Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-46667287272420539551996-06-12T08:58:00.000+02:002007-01-11T09:09:33.396+01:00Det goda livet i vetenskapen [The good life in science]<em>This is a welcome address on the good life in science that I gave at the Nordic postgraduate meeting in Copenhagen, June 1996 (file dated 12 June 1996).</em><br /><br /><strong>Det goda livet i vetenskapen</strong><br /><br />Ja, välkomna till Köpenhamn, staden som om sommaren är fylld av svenska och norska turister och en del kvarvarande danskdjävlar. Vi befinner oss i en av danska vetenskapliga kulturens kärninstitutioner, det gamla Botaniska muséet -- botaniken var som bekant under flera århundraden en av de viktigaste och mest prestigefyllda vetenskaperna vid universitetet.<br /><br />Nu ska jag inte förfalla till disciplinär inskränkthet -- och heller inte till nationell. Låt mig inledningvis förklara varför jag har bytt ämne för den här föreläsningen. För ett halvår sedan blev jag inviterad av Gustav Holmberg för att komma och prata om "idéhistoriens nationella inskränkthet". Och det berodde nog på att vid en konferens vi hade på Kungl. Vetenskapsakakemien i Stockholm för ett drygt år sedan, så hade jag yttrat något ofördelaktigt om svensk idéhistoria med epitet som just "nationell" och "inskränkt".<br /><br />Gustav hade väl tänkt sig att jag skulle provocera en diskussion som inledning till lunchen och eftermiddagens presentationer. Men det har jag alltså inte tänkt mig att göra. Och orsaken till det är att jag (allteftersom dagens dato närmade sig) blev alltmer övertygad om att jag inte är särskilt intresserad i det nationella perspektivet på idé- och lärdomshistorien. Det nationella intresserar mig faktiskt inte ett dyft. Jag tror jag dras mot beskrivningens extremnivåer istället mot det globala perspektivet och mot den enskilda individen å ena sidan det globala kunskapssamhällets historia, på den aandra sidan den enskilde tänkarens unika livsöde.<br /><br />Låt mig lämna världshistorien åt sidan för den här gången (den kan vi vända tillbaka till) och prata om den tänkande individen istället. Det finns ju en hel idéhistorisk genre som behandlar individen, nämligen biografin. Den har inte varit särskilt populär de senaste tjugo åren -- idéhistoriker har hellre sysslat med institutioner och organisationer, med kollektiva idéer och mentalitetshistoria. Biografin har uppfattas som litet passé, som om man abonnerade på uppfattningen att historien handlar om stora män.<br /><br />Men som ni väl har lagt märke till har biografin kommit tillbaka på de idéhistoriska bokhyllorna. Den ena forskarbiografin efter den andra spottas ut genom förlaagspressarna. Biografier över Lord Kelvin och Einstein, Schrödinger och Heisenberg har satt dagordningen för de senaste tio årens fysikhistoria. Biologihistorikerna kan glädja sig åt att den tredje stora Darwinbiografin är på väg: efter John Bowlbys psykobiografiska porträtt och Adrian Desmond och Jim Moore's politiserade Darwin har vi nu fått första bandet av Janet Brownes tvåbandsopus, "the definitive Darwin". Och filosoferna har de senaste åren kunnat glädja sig åt tre helt olikartade skildringar av Michel Foucaults liv och verk: Didier Eribons, James Millers och David Maceys.<br /><br />Jag ska inte gå in på frågan varför den idé- och lärdomshistoriska biografin fötts på nytt. Samma trend gäller ju den litterära biografin och den politiska biografin utan istället ställa frågan: vad är meningen? vad vill vi med biograafin? vilken roll kan den spela?<br /><br />Biografin kan spela många roller i idé- och lärdomshistorien. Man kan förfalla till närmast psykologiska undersökningar: skriva utvecklingspsykologiska eller psykodynamiska fallstudier, eller användaa biografin som ett medel för att rekonstruktuera kreativa arbetsprocesser. Man kan (och det är kanske det vanligaste när det gäller intellektuella biografier) använda personbeskrivningen som en röd tråd för att få grepp om en politisk eller filosofisk eller vetenskaplig idé som blir allt för snårig om man ska försöka rekonstruera den ur en taankekollektiv. Man kan också vara litet mer kontextuell och undersöka hur en människas intellektuella liv är inbäddat i sociala institutioner och i en nationell kultur, för att därigenom använda personen som ett titthål in i lärdomens institutionella eller kulturella omvärld. Omvänt kan man undersöka hur en människas liv gestaltas i politiska, ideologiska och sociala spänningsfält, hur en tänkare socialiserats in i en tradition, en kultur och ett saamhälle.<br /><br />Möjligheterna är legio och jag ska inte tråka ut er med att gå igenom dem. Istället vill jag använda resten av min tid här idag för att diskutera ytterligare en möjlighet (en som sällan eller aldrig nämns, varken i diskussionen om vad den intellektuella biografin kan användas till eller i diskussionen om idé- och lärdomshistoriens mål och mening), och det är att man kan skriva biografi i uppbyggligt syfte. Biografin kan, med andra ord, användas för aatt förstå "det goda livet": det goda lärdomslivet, det goda filosofiska livet, det goda vetenskapliga livet. Biografin kan hjälpa oss att förstå hur andra människor har levt ett gott liv och därmed hjälpa oss själva att leva goda liv.<br /><br />Vad vill det så säga att leva ett gott lärdomsliv? Någon vill kanske invända att det kan man inte svara på, att frågan om det goda livet är en av de frågor som man, som Wittgenstein hävdade, bör hålla käften om. Jag är snarare på våglängd med Charles Taylor, en av de nutida filosofer som har vågat närma sig ämnet, och som menar att man åtminstone kan försöka artikulera den här typen av frågor.<br /><br />Det mest närliggande är naturligtvis att gå tillbaka till den antika filosofin. Jag säger detta med bävande hjärta ty bland svenska idéhistoriker är grekisk filosofi primärt detsamma som naturfilosofi och kunskapsteori. I Idéhistoriens huvudlinjer som länge varit introduktionsbok för svenska idéhistoriska studerande står det sida upp och sida ned om Hippokrates, om elementläran och himlakropparnas rörelser och nämner bara i yttersta förbigående att Aristoteles (citat) "skrev om etiken och statsläran" (slut på citat, det är allt). Inte ett ord om Den Nikomakeiska Etiken. Det är, som danskarna säger, en "tilsnigelse", för grekerna var ju inte primärt naturfilosofer, utan moralfilosofer. De var först och främst intresserade i det goda livet. Det var inte så, som svenska studenter läser, att det "vid sidan av fackvetenskapernas utveckling uppstod filosofiska riktningar som intreesserade sig för praktisk levnadsvisdom". Studiet av naturen var nästan alltid ett medel till att uppnå det goda livet.<br /><br />Vad är så det goda livet? Frågar vi Platon, i Staten, så är svaret enkelt. Den goda människan är den som disciplinerar sitt intellekt och sina känslor och vänder hela sin uppmärksamhet mot idén om det rena goda. Denna platonska tradition fördes vidare i den tidigaa kristendomen, t.ex. hos Augustinus: att leva ett gott liv innebar att känna Gud, att vara filosof innebar att älska Gud. I Gudsstaten utvecklade Augustinus ju idén om valet mellan det politiska livet och det himmelska livet, ett liv i sökan efter sanningen. Ett sådant kontemplativt liv skulle naturligtvis föras i avskildhet, och i århundraden uppfattades livet i klostret som den bäst livsstilen för dem som ville söka efter det högsta goda.<br /><br />Sådan är också den moderna, sekulära versionen av det goda livet i vetenskapen -- att känna sanningen och älska sanningen. Den bästa sekulära livsstilen i sökaandet efter det goda är ett liv på biblioteket eller på laboratoriet ett liv i vetenskapens republik, den moderna, sekulära versionen av den himmelska staden. Det är en syn på det goda livet i vetenskapen som vi finner i högtidstalen, i nekrologerna, i den hagiografiska biografierna och stundom också i självbiografier, och som det vore mycket intressant att följa upp igenom lärdomshistorien. Min gissning är att den i stort sett upphör under efterkrigstiden. Den här sekulariserade platonsk-augustinska syn på det goda tillvaron i vetenskapen som ett intellektuellt och emotionellt disciplinerat sökande efter sanningen är inte särskilt populär idag. Dels därför att vetenskapshistoriker (och de som sysslar med vetenskapsstudier, s.k. `science studies') inte längre tror på Sanningen, och dels därför att hedonismen i allt högre grad har krupit in i de akademiska salarna som ett alternativ till det goda livet i vetenskapen.<br /><br />Fråga er bordsgranne ikväll varför han eller hon har valt att syssla med forskning istället för politik, eller administration eller att bli lärare eller skriva skönlitteratur eller göra en karriär i näringslivet. För att få syssla med något intressant svarar de kanske. För att möta intressanta människor. Det svar jag oftast har mött är en eller annan variant på "att ha det bra", "göra något spännande", "ha kul". Det goda livet på kemiska institutionen är att sitta framför dataskärmen och använda avaancerade program som använder kvantkemiska beräkningar för att flytta runt på atomerna i molekyler och skapa nya virtuella kemiska föreningar. Att ha kul är också temat för flera nutidiga vetenskapiga självbiografier, t.ex. Richard Feymans Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman eller Jim Watsons The Double Helix som är smockfylld mer anspelningar på hur kul Jim och Francis hade det i Cambridge när de byggde DNA-modellen. Dagens forskare är en utgåva av Johan Huizingas Homo ludens. Hur länge har det lärda samhället sökt det goda livet i hedonistisk mening? Jag vet det inte också det vore intressant att följa upp i idéhistorien.<br /><br />Så sökandet efter sanningen i platonsk efterföljd eller en eller annan form för hedonism kunde vara två sätt att artikulera det goda livet i vetenskapen. Kan man tänka sig fler? Ja, det mest rimliga alternativet är väl att söka sig till medelproportionalen mellan sökandet efter idén om det goda och det lustfyllda lekandet vid skärmen. Jag tänker på ett verk jag redan har nämnt, nämligen Den Nikomacheiska Etiken. Aristoteles uttalade sig emellanåt föraktfullt om hedonismen (ett liv i nöje passade bäst för boskap) och han satte det kontemplativa livet (som teoretiker och naturfilosof) högst av alla mänskliga sysselsättningar. Men han lyckades ändå balansera mellan ytterligheterna: det goda livet innebar för honom ett aktivt liv i överensstämmelse med dygderna, eller snarare skickligheterna (det grekiska areté översätts bäst med "skicklighet" eller "förträffliga egenskaper"). Och dessa skickligheter är av både etisk art (mod, generositet, rättrådighet, m.m.) och av intellektuell art episteme, sophia och techne inrangeras bland skickligheterna.<br /><br />Att leva i överensstämmelse med skickligheterna skulle alltså, enligt Aristoteles, känneteckna det goda livet. Det skulle maan kunna säga mycket om -- inte minst i anslutning till Alasdair MacIntyres tolkning i After Virtue av Aristoteles etik och dess betydelse idag. Till exempel tror jag att det vore nyttigt att använda MacIntyres distinktion mellan yttre håvor (`external goods') och inre håvor (`internal goods') för att karaktärisera vetenskapliga och lärda praktiker. De yttre håvorna är sådana som ära, berömmelse, ekonomisk vinning m.m., saker som vi alla vet är värdefulla och som vi alla strävar efter. Problemet, från det aristoteliska perspektivet sett, är att de inte nödvändigtvis involverar skickligheterna, allra minst de skickligheter som vi idag skulle kalla dygder'. Så om vi ska försöka artikulera det goda livet i aristotelisk mening, så ska vi nog koncentrera oss om de inre håvorna -- de som vi uppnår genom att uttrycka de skickligheter och dygder som är specifika för de lärda och vetenskapliga praktiker vi är involverade i. T.ex. att vara en ärlig, modig och skicklig experimentator, eller att vara en duktig, rättvis och ärlig lärare.<br /><br />Tiden tillåter mig inte att gå närmare in på MacIntyres läsning av Den Nikomacheiska Etiken. Bortsett från en viktig punkt, nämligen idén om dygdernas eller skickligheternas enhet. Det är viktig därför att den ger möjligheten för att utveckla en diskussion om dygderna i lärdomshistorien som på en väsentlig punkt skiljer sig från den syn på dygderna i vetenskapen som Lorraine Daston har fört fram i sina studier av 17- och 1800-talsvetenskapens moraliska ekonomi.<br /><br />De av er som läser tidskriften Osiris såg för ett år sedan en artikel av Daston där hon identificerade ett antal kvaliteter som hon kallar "quantifying virtues" -- precision, noggrannhet, opersonlighet, opartiskhet m.m. -- som hon menar har "an almost unbroken history in the sciences as well as in public life" helt upp till idag. Hon kallar de här kvaliteterna dygder (virtues). Men det är knappast någon aristotelisk förståelse av dygderna. För det första är Daston bara intresserad i hur utvecklingen av de här s.k. dygderna påverkar kunskapsutvecklingen, inte hur utvecklingen av dygderna påverkar den enskilde forskaren och hans eller hennes livsprojekt, det goda livet i vetenskapen. För det andra, om man ska leva upp till det aristoteliska kravet så kan man inte göra en bodelning mellan å ena sidan ett antal skickligheter i lärda praktiker, och å andra sidan ett antal dygder i livet utanför laboratoriet eller biblioteket. Som MacIntyre påpekar, den som verkligen besitter en dygd kan förväntas att uttrycka den i en en rad olika livssituationer.<br /><br />Om man uppvisar mod eller ärlighet i sitt arbete som molekylärbiolog eller historiker, men inte på krogen på kvällen, är inte någon ärlig eller modig person. Och därigenom blockeras möjligheten att, i aristotelisk mening, uppnå den tillfredsställelse, eudaimonia (att vara fylld av goda demoner), som kännetecknar det goda livet.<br /><br />Jag ska inte tugga mer på Aristoteles, MacIntyre eller Daston utan bara kort vända tillbaka till vad denna typ av resonemang får för konsekvens för den biografiska genren. Som jag nämnde skriver man biografier med en rad olika syften och ett av dessaa är, menar jag att fungera som uppbygglig läsning. Och mer specifikt, uppbyggligt i den meningen att biografin, och dess tvillinggenre självbiografin, kan ger oss unika möjligheter att studera hur andra människor har lyckats eller misslyckats med att leva sina liv i överensstämmelse med dygderna, hur de har lyckats eller misslyckats med att leva det goda lärda livet. Jag ser alltså biografin som en sond in i lärdomshistorien inte som en deskriptiv sond som kan hjälpa oss att rekonstruera de lärda idéernas logiska utveckling, eller avslöja tankeformationernas sociala, institutionella, eller kulturella ursprung. Utan som en normativ sond en sond genom vilken vi kan jämföra våra egna livsförlopp, som verksamma i en eller annan form för intellektuell verksamhet, med andras, andra som vi kan lära av och som vi kan använda som förebilder, på gott och ont. Eller som Richard Rorty säger någonstans i Contingency, Irony and Solidarity: "att ta oss ut ur våra gamla själv .. att hjälpa oss att bli nya varelser".Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-64388363460742943951996-05-16T07:46:00.000+02:002007-01-11T19:50:03.920+01:00Biography and the good life in science<em>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).</em><br /><br /><strong>Biography and the good life in science</strong><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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]<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"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]<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />[*The final paper will contain an exposition of Aristotle's view of the relation between the virtues and the `good life']<br /><br />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]<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"[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."<br /><br />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').<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"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]<br /><br />[*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'].<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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]<br /><br />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".<br /><br />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".<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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".<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br /><strong>Notes<br /></strong><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1"></a>[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).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2"></a>[2]Jan Golinski, Isis*<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3"></a>[3]Cf., e.g., Lorraine Daston, "The moral economy of science" 1995.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4"></a>[4]For a discussion of `emotional longing', see Feuer (1978.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5"></a>[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.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6"></a>[6]Cf. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p.11.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7"></a>[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.*).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8"></a>[8]Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p.19.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9"></a>[9]Johan Huzinga, Homo ludens*<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10"></a>[10]Quoted in Dash (1973), 318.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11"></a>[11]The quote is an example of the combination of beauty and pain which Burke and Kant called the `sublime'.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12"></a>[12]Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London 1968), p.160 [*check]<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13"></a>[13]2nd. ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14"></a>[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.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15"></a>[15]MacIntyre, op.cit., p.205.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16"></a>[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).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17"></a>[17]Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), p.96.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18"></a>[18]Murdoch, op.cit., p.96-97.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19"></a>[19]In Plato's dialogues Apology and Crito Socrates is said to have equated moral wisdom, virtue, the `good life' and happiness.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20"></a>[20]Lorraine Daston, "The Moral Economy of Science", Osiris, vol.10 (1995), 3-24 (quotes on p.8-9).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21"></a>[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).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22" href="http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=16860807&postID=6438836346074294395#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22"></a>[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).<br /><br /><br /><p></p>Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16860807.post-9056548314617822551991-09-07T07:22:00.000+02:002007-01-11T19:51:08.599+01:00Vad kan forskarbiografin lära av författarbiografin? [What can scientific biography learn from literary biography?]<em>This is the manuscript (in Swedish) for a short talk with the title "Vad kan forskarbiografin lära av författarbiografin?" [What can scientific biography learn from literary biography?] that I gave in September 1991 in a seminar group on biography that the Danish historian Birgitte Possing and I organised in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1991 (just as the first Iraq war had started) -- file is dated 7 September 1991</em><br /><br /><strong>Vad kan forskarbiografin lära av författarbiografin?</strong><br /><br />Ursprungligen hade jag tänkt mig att prata om det biografiska samtalet -- eftersom jag skriver en biografi över en person som fortfarande lever, och eftersom det ger upphov till helt speciella metodproblem. Men jag nog är den ende här som sysslar med en nulevande person, och därför tyckte jag att det var bättre att inleda med något som vi har gemensamt.<br /><br />Men allra först en kort självbiografisk skiss, så att ni får en bild hur jag har kommit dit jag står nu med hänsyn till synpunkter på biografin. Jag kan väl gå tillbaka ända till gymnasietiden -- jag hade mina talanger och intressen inom humaniora -- historia, litteratur och svenska -- men jag stammade förfärligt och då är det svårt att göra sig gällande i talämnena. Så både i gymnasiet och vidare på universitet i Stockholm läste jag naturvetenskap, kemi och biologi, istället (där kan man stort sett klara sig tigande igenom studiet), men fortsatte ändå att hålla fast vid mina gamla intressen -- bl.a. genom att lägga ett historiskt perspektiv på naturen -- jag specialiserade mig på fylogenetiska studier, evolutionsbiologi och skrev en licentiatavhandling i paleontologi.<br /><br />Det fulla steget tillbaka till humaniora tog jag när jag blev lektor i biologi på Roskilde 1975. Då fick jag forskningsfrihet och så svängde jag helt om och började läsa idéhistoria och vetenskapsteori i Göteborg. Och så använde jag drygt tio år på att omskola mig till vetenskapshistoriker och vetenskapssociolog, bl.a. genom att skriva en doktorsavhandling om ekologins historia i Sverige. I stora stycken är den en disciplinhistoria -- och ett försök att tillämpa en bestämd sociologisk tolkning av Foucault's diskursbegrepp. Men den hade starka biografiska inslag, så starka att flera anmälare, särskilt dem som inte begriper diskurstanken i den, har rubricerat den som personhistorisk (den elakaste och mest marxistiske av dem kallade den en slags ekologins Hänt i veckan, dvs ekologins Se og Hør).<br /><br />Det var de här biografiska inslagen i avhandlingen som väckte lusten att skriva en riktig biografi. Och den lusten fick jag utlopp för snabbare än jag hade trott. Det var hösten 1986 det här. Jag fick plötsligt fatt i ett enormt spännande material -- tillfälligheterna styrde mig rakt i famnen på en av nutidens mest ryktbara naturvetenskapliga forskare -- han heter Niels Jerne och är dirigenten bakom den moderna immunologin: ni vet vetenskapen om immunsystemet, det som producerar antikroppar mot virus och ormgift, reagerar med allergi på gräspollen och som gör att kroppen spontant stöter från sig främmande vävnader, m.m. Det var en vetenskap, som var helt kaotisk på 1950-talet, men som under 1960- och 1970-talen fick ett solitt teoretiskt fundament, och det är mer än någon annan Niels Jerne som står bakom detta. Det renderade honom ett Nobelpris i medicin 1984.<br /><br />Det tog två år innan jag kunde komma igång med biografin -- några av er har hört anekdoter om diverse fängelsevistelser och långa förhandlingar innan jag fick tillträde till hans privata arkiv. Men det gjorde jag till sist, det var hösten 1988, och sedan dess har jag arbetat på heltid i snart två och ett halvt år med arkivet -- allt med generöst stöd från ett forskningsråd.<br /><br />Nu skulle jag kunna sitta och prata i timmar här om allt det spännande som dykt upp i arkivet och under hans och mina långa samtal framför bandspelaren. Så låt mig begränsa mig till att säga att det har visat sig att Jerne inte bara är en ovanligt kreativ naturvetenskaplig forskare, utan att han också är en mycket allsidig intellektuell och en sammansatt personlighet. Bland annat visar det sig att hans filosofiska, konstnärliga och litterära intressen ofta spelat en avgörande roll i det vetenskapliga arbetet. Redan som ung läste han Kierkegaard och Kierkegaard's filosofi är otvivelaktigt av betydelse för det sätt Jerne formulerar sina teoretiska problem på. När han sedan läste medicin i Köpenhamn på 1930- och 1940-talet umgicks han i de konstnärskretsar som senare skulle bli Cobra-gruppen och också här kan man spåra påverkningar. Hans intresse för litteratur (han är bl.a. en stor Shakespeare-kännare) och framför allt det litterära språket har också satt sina spår -- bl.a. i den senaste teorin, den s.k. nätverksteorin för immunsystemet, som han i sin Nobelföreläsning jämförde med den strukturalistiska lingvistiken. På det rent personliga planet ger arkivet och samtalen också belägg för att hans intellektuella verksamhet inte kan isoleras från det privata livet -- hans vetenskapliga upptäckter går så at säga i fas med avgörande händelser i hans privatliv -- ibland mycket traumatiska sådana.<br /><br />Mina erfarenheter från dessa intensiva 2 1/2 år i arkivet har övertygat mig om att Leon Edel i stor utsträckning har rätt när han skriver att "The nature of a biography is most often predetermined by the existence of documents and archives". Men det är bara halva sanningen. Det är riktigt att arkivet spelar en mycket väsentlig roll för att bestämma biografins väsen och utforming. Men ofta, och inte minst i mitt eget fall, har de teoretiska och metodiska övervägandena spelat en minst lika viktig roll. Det finns så många intressanta teoretiska strömningar som skulle kunna skärpa biografin. Jag vill använda mina återstående 20 minuter till att säga litet om hur jag ser på några av dessa teoretiska och metodiska överväganden.<br /><br />*<br /><br />Den biografiska genre som jag själv har specialiserat mig i, forskarbiografin, är osedvanligt ointresserad i teoretiska och metodiska diskussioner. Det verkar som om många forskarbiografer tror att arkivet kan tala för sig självt, efter en viss förklaring och förenkling av de vetenskapliga tankegångarna. Kanske är det så, därför att forskarbiografier ofta skrivs av f.d. forskare som skolats i ett empiristiskt vetenskapsideal. Men kanske också därför att materialet är så tekniskt komplicerat. Efter att ha brottats med att förstå teorierna, försöksuppställningarna och de experimentella resultaten och dessutom försökt tolka betydelsen av den enskilde forskarens insatser för vetenskapssamhällets utveckling -- ja, så har man förbrukat sin intellektuella energi på det -- och så har man inte mycket kraft över till att också fundera över biografins egen teori och metodik.<br /><br />Jag använde t.ex. nästan tre månader förra våren till att sätta mig in i Jerne's laboratorieanteckningar och manuskriptutkast skrivna under några veckor 1954 -- experiment som låg till grund för formuleringen av den s.k. naturliga selektionsteorin för antikroppsbildningen. Jag kunde inte tänka en enda förnuftig tanke om biografins mål och medel under de tre månaderna. Jag var helt inne i immunologins mål och medel. Forskarbiografier tar alltså oproportionerligt mycket tid med något som inte har med biografin som genre att göra. Richard Westfall arbetade i nästan 20 år med sin Newton-biografi Never at Rest, inte minst med att tränga in i Newton's matematiska formuleringar.<br /><br />Nu får ni inte uppfatta det här sagda som en nedvärdering av andra biografiska genrer. Tvärtom -- vissa andra biografiska genrer har genom tiderna uppvisat en betydligt högre grad av teoretisk och metodisk sofistikation än forskarbiografin. Dock inte (för att komma med ett påstående för att skapa litet debatt efteråt) dock inte allmänhistorikernas biografiska genre: politiker-, organisations- och kungabiografin. Många års strukturalistisk hegemoni (bl.a. inspirerad av marxismen och Annales-skolan), förskjutningar mot socialhistoria m.m. har gjort att de historiker som vågat sig in på den biografiska genren mest varit upptagna av att legitimera sin verksamhet. Förorden till allmänhistorikernas biografier fylls av ursäkter för att man skriver om individer istället för klasser eller andra kollektiva fenomen ("den riktiga historien"), och man skyndar sig att förvandla biografin till en fall-studie, att låta individen framstå som det prisma i vilket "den verkliga" historien bryts och speglas.<br /><br />Men jag ser inget skäl att legitimera biografin via historien. Förlagsstatistiken visar att biografin lever sitt eget liv i högsta välmåga, och vi som vill reflektera över biografin bör därför se till att ta genrens särskilda egenskaper på allvar. Och de som bäst lyckats med att reflektera över biografin på dess egna betingelser är förespråkare för författarbiografin. Det är från den sidan, och i takt med biografins renässans, som de flesta intressanta försöken, enligt min mening, har gjorts att utveckla en biografins teori och metodik. Jag tänker t.e.x på meta-biografer som James Clifford med sin Biography as an Art från 1962, Leon Edel med Literary Biography från 1957 och 1959 och med Writing Lives; Principia Biographica från 1984. Jag tänker på Ira Bruce Nadel's Biography; Fiction, Fact and Form från 1984, David Novarr's The Lines of Life; Theories of Biography, 1880-1970 från 1986, och William Epstein's Recognizing Biography från 1987.<br /><br />Det här med att söka sig till reflektioner över författarbiografier för att få idéer och uppslag till forskarbiografin är ju i och för sig inte särskilt originellt. Ändå är det påfallande i hur liten utsträckning olika biografiska genrer faktiskt utbyter erfarenheter. Helge Kragh skickade mig som julklapp en artikel av en viss Susan Sheets-Pyenson som pläderar för att forskarbiograferna kunde lära av författarbiograferna. Detta fick lov att framstå som en nyhet, som "New Directions for Scientific Biography" i en av de ledande vetenskapshistoriska tidskrifterna (History of Science) årgång 1990.<br /><br />*<br /><br />Nå, men vad är det då jag som forskarbiograf har blivit inspirerad till -- eller styrkt i mina synpunkter på -- av de reflekterande författarbiografernas överväganden? Jag vill framhäva sex sådana lärdomar som sex teser i mitt manifest för forskarbiografier: 1) att inte reducera biografin till historia, 2) att betrakta livet och verket som en enhet, 3) att se jaget (eller självet) som en konstruktion, 4) att se biografin som en litterär genre, 5) att bejaka den nödvändiga subjektiviteten och 6) att vara medveten om biografin som maktdiskurs. De är allesamman rätt närbesläktade, men jag ska försöka hålla isär dem för diskussionens skull.<br /><br />Det där med att förhålla sig till individen på hans/henne egna betingelser och inte reducera personen till historia har jag redan harcellerat litet grann över, så det tar jag inte upp mer här.<br /><br />Min andra poäng är att forskarbiografer i allmänhet inte vet vad de ska göra med förhållandet mellan livet och verket. Den forskarbiografiska genren tar vanligtvis utgångspunkt i verket, det är verket -- teorierna, experimenten, problemlösningarna -- som är huvudsaken, och livet uppfattas som ett privat appendix till det offentligt tillgängliga verket. Alltsomoftast kryddar man med litet livsanekdoter här och var eller samlar en snabb genomgång av privatlivet i något inledande kapitel innan man övergår till att kritiskt och i detalj genomgå personens vetenskapliga bidrag. Därför är forskarbiografin i verkligheten snarare en vetenskapshistoria begränsad och skuren efter en enskild forskares bidrag än en egentlig forskarbiografi. Författarbiografer har i betydligt större utsträckning valt att betrakta författaren som en enhet av liv och verk. Om vi bortser från nykritikens avvisning av möjligheten att överhuvudtaget skriva biografi, så är författarbiografins mål, som Johnny Kondrup skrev i sin bok för några år sedan, "at forstå den humane helhed; den existens, hvoraf digterværket er fremgået som en del" (1986:29). Biografin blir ett försök att komma i dialog med personens försök att lösa sin egen livsgåta. Varför valde han forskningens väg? Vad ville han därmed uppnå med sitt liv? Jerne's liv är på många sätt en parallell till den bild Leo Tandrup tecknar över Erslev (Tandrups Ravn, Kbh 1979) -- historien om hur en människa som var lika känslomässigt som förnuftsmässigt begåvad ensidigt satsade på sin rationella förmåga -- och samtidigt med bitterhet måtte inse att den rationella förmågan i det långa loppet ödelade hans inre liv.<br /><br />Min tredje käpphäst är nära förbunden med de två föregående. Om nu biografin har personen som objekt på dess egna betingelser, och om det är enheten mellan liv och verk som står i fokus -- ja, då kommer osökt frågan: kan biografin vara realistisk till sin karaktär, är den en återspegling av en faktuell person, eller är den en social konstruktion? Forskarbiografier är, närmast utan undantag, naivt realistiska. Man utgår från att det finns ett verkligt själv därute som biografen kan gräva sig in till. Personens utsagor i brev, manuskript och intervjuer används som faktuella utsagor. Men om man istället uppfattar självet som konstruerat -- i interaktionen mellan den man skriver om och hans/hennes omgivning -- så flyttar man biografins fokus till de processer varigenom detta själv konstitueras. I Jerne-biografin vill jag framför allt förstå hur Jerne i samspel med andra skapade sitt eget liv, hur han skapade sig en identitet som man, som äkta make, som far, som läkare, som biostatistiker på Statens Seruminstitut, som immunolog och slutligen som en stor kanon, och inte minst hur andra bidrog till att skapa denna hans biografiska identitet. Biografihn blir därför lika mycket vad jag kallar en "meta-biogesfi" -- historien om hur olika (skriftliga eller muntiga) texter samverkar till att skapa det William Epstein kallar en "livstext".<br /><br />Min fjärde tes är en direkt följd av den tredje -- nödvändigheten av att i högre grad skriva och värdera biografin som en litterär genre, istället för att endast värdera den efter dess förmenta exakthet, återgivande av relevanta data, eller relevans för en rekonstruktion av vetenskapens historia. Recensioner av forskarbiografier består (liksom de flesta biografirecensioner) i stor utsträckning av referat, och i de kritiska avsnitten diskuterar man i stor utsträckning textens fakticitet, felaktigheter, slarv med källor, etc. Det finns inom min genre, den forskarbiografiska, nästan ingen medvetenhet om det vi kunde kalla "biografins poetik" -- t.ex. bruket av de litterära troperna: metaforen eller ironin som distansmedel -- eller att skapelsen av biografin i stor utsträckning är ett kompositionsproblem. Livsförloppets uppdelning på kapitel, kapitlens indelning i avsnitt, stycken, och meningar ("sætninger") -- allt detta är komposition och har mycket stor betydelse för organiseringen av livsförloppet.<br /><br />Min femte poäng, nära besläktad med den föregående, är att betona biografens subjektivitet. Många författarbiografer har insett att biografens känslor och personliga upplevelser under arbetet är en integrerad del av forskningsprocessen och inte ett störande inslag som kan negligeras eller vaskas ut ur den färdiga texten. Forskarbiografer är sällan medvetna om detta -- ett positivt undantag är den nämnde Newton-biografen Richard Westfall, som efter att ha samarbetet med en psykoanalytiker skrev: "Jag upptäckte subjektiva facetter i mitt eget arbete där jag inte hade trott att jag skule finna dem. Biografi är sannerligen självbiografi. Den kan inte undgå att bli en personlig redogörelse. Det är omöjligt att porträttera en annan människa utan att framvisa sig själv".<br /><br />Den sjätte, och sista punkten som jag tycker att författarbiografer har utvecklat en högre grad av reflektion omkring gäller biografin som maktdiskurs. Det är den enda av de här nämnda sex reflektionspunkterna som jag själv har bidragit till, men eftersom flera av er har fått manuskriptet till en artikel om det, så vill jag inte gå in mer på det här nu -- utan säga tack för att ni lyssnat tålmodigt på mig i den här dryga halvtimmen -- medan bomberna fallar över Irak.Thomas Söderqvisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04066022796534125366noreply@blogger.com0