In this chapter, I look into an intellectual and political debate that was fought during the first decades of the twentieth century under the banner of a “crisis of reality”—a battle equally perceived as a “crisis of historicism.” This double crisis also had consequences for conceiving the history of science, which experienced a fundamental change in the period between 1880 and 1930. The history of science abandoned its roles as the chronicler, the eulogist, and moralist of the sciences and emerged as a field in which the primacy of positivism (for the sciences) and historicism (for the humanities) began to be questioned. In what follows, I will argue that the development of a history of science with a genuinely historicalepistemological agenda is intimately connected with the crisis experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In 1872, the distinguished Berlin physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond lectured On the History of Science at the Leibniz Session of the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin. In this lecture, the idea of a history of science as a means of teaching and understanding the present state of a discipline is preeminent. Consider the following quote from Du Bois-Reymond’s paper: “No matter whether we deal with an organism, a state, a language, or a scientific doctrine, it is always its developmental history that best captures the meaning of and the relation between things.” And Du Bois continues: “In contrast to the dogmatic representation that is often used in textbooks, I prefer an inductive approach. In the textbook as well as in the lecture hall, this is the right way to teach physiology. In this manner, one teaches the science and its history at the same time” (1912, 432–33, 436). This is a good example of the rather unproblematic and quasinatural uses of history of science before the critical turn. For Du Bois-Reymond, it appears evident that besides “the contingencies of the business of discovery,” “the historical path of the inductive sciences is mostly the same as the path of induction itself ” (1912, 435). Indeed, here we may even talk of a “natural history” of science, a history following the unfolding of an inductive logic. At the same time, this attitude is part of a pervasive historical perspective not only in the humanities but particularly also in the life sciences of the late nineteenth century. There is a peculiar reciprocity to be observed here: An extensive historicization of nature runs side by side with a naturalization of history.
Physicists such as Ludwig Boltzmann did not hesitate to proclaim the nineteenth century, not as might be expected, as the century of steam power or of electricity, but rather as the “century of the mechanical conception of nature, the century of Darwin” (Boltzmann, 1905, 28). This connection between mechanics and natural history reveals that scientists such as Boltzmann did not take Darwin’s theory of evolution at all as an indication of a genuine and extensive historicization of nature, including life. On the contrary, Boltzmann took Darwin’s achievement as living proof and evidence of the possibility of a mechanization of history, a mechanical—and may we add, statistical—understanding of nature, including the genesis of living beings.
With this couple of quotations, I wish to draw attention to the fact that at the turn of the twentieth century, an extensive historicization of nature—including life—fits in very well with an overall mechanistic explanatory drive, including a naturalization of history, even resulting in a “decreased interest of the scientists concerning the historicity of their own knowledge,” as Gregor Schiemann has observed (Schiemann, 1997, 157).
Change came, however, from within the development of the sciences themselves. Two phenomena can be discerned that, during the first decades of the twentieth century, begin to resist the drive of mechanical thinking. They are not alone responsible for, but contribute decisively to, an intellectual mood and new meaning of historicity that I will describe in more detail in the second part of the chapter, in which I discuss the works of the young physician Ludwik Fleck and those of the aged philosopher Edmund Husserl—with a few interspersed remarks on Gaston Bachelard. These two phenomena are, first, the revolutionary developments in physics, and second, the problem of the unity of the sciences.
The first is well and widely known. I will not enter into a discussion of relativity theory or quantum physics. It shall suffice, as a brief remark, to note that two insights resulted from the revolutionary changes in physical theory. Both of them had consequences for thought and selfperception in the history of science. I will report on both of them—pars pro toto—as articulated by the contemporary protozoologist Max Hartmann. As to the first point, Hartmann contends that one must “keep one’s eyes and one’s brain open for the discovery of new conceptual systems, if experience demands them.” One has to take to heart the admonition “that it is dangerous for thinking and for science, if one generalizes the results of an epoch such as those of the high noon of classical physics with too great a dogmatic security to other domains of the sciences and the humanities and even to the whole intellectual world. For that means transcending the competences and the boundaries of one’s own scientific discipline” (Hartmann, 1956, 155).
In these remarks, a new consciousness regarding the historicity of scientific knowledge appears. Classical mechanics had not become obsolete through the new developments. First, however, it became realigned with respect to its own boundedness in time; second, it became located as a historical step in the epochal development of physical knowledge; and, third, it became recognized in its own phenomenal restriction. Here scientific knowledge is no longer experienced as being directed toward closure and perfection, but rather as an “infinite progress” in the words of Hartmann, a progress whose horizon is no longer given once and forever, any more than the direction it will eventually take. Hartmann resumes rather categorically: “Every statement about the nature of world reality—Beschaffenheit der Weltwirklichkeit—is a historically conditioned one” (1956, 150). Similarly and around the same time, in his Essai sur la connaissance approchée of 1928, Gaston Bachelard in France states the point in the following words: “In our view, this reality, in its inexhaustible unknown, exhibits a character that lends itself eminently to a research without end. Its very essence resides in its resistance to being known. We take it thus as a postulate of epistemology that knowledge is unfinished in a fundamental fashion” (Bachelard, 1987, 13). Furthermore, Bachelard also stresses the moment of the unprecedented and the unanticipated in the course of knowledge acquisition: “The history of the sciences teaches us that every great progress toward an ultimate reality has shown that this reality found itself in a direction that had by no means been expected” (284).
With that, I come to the second of the above-mentioned points, namely the problem of the unity of the sciences. Even biologists such as Hartmann, who definitely stuck to the causality principle in his biological work, unambiguously postulated a qualitative difference at least between the realm of physics and that of the biological sciences. He did so within the confines of the natural sciences themselves and without having recourse to neovitalist resources. Hartmann stated: “The task of causal research in biology is not to reduce biological events and processes (Geschehen) to physical-chemical reactions. The task is rather the elucidation of the specific laws of complication which determine the essence of these particular, individualized natural bodies” (1956, 152). He thus claimed a terrain of scientific research (other than physics) on which other things were sought for and explained. In addition to this principal claim came the division of this other terrain—biology—itself: namely, the factual splitting up of the life sciences into different disciplines that had very different knowledge horizons—from physiology through developmental mechanics to phylogenetics and evolution. That split conveyed the feeling that it was not only biology that displayed an irreducible plurality but the large remainder of the sciences as well. In the very moment when a philosophy of science movement such as the Vienna Circle once again set itself the task of spelling out the unity of the sciences, the genuine developmental dynamics of these sciences themselves appeared to doom these unification efforts to failure.
The demarcation of biology from physics and the internal differentiation of the life sciences into apparently irreducible disciplines have occupied philosophically minded biologists since the beginning of the twentieth century. The relation between physics and biology was usually discussed under the title of “theoretical biology,” whereas the internal differentiation of the life sciences resulted in multiple attempts at producing more or less extensive “general biologies,” such as Hartmann’s Allgemeine Biologie (1927). As we have seen in the example of Hartmann, this movement cannot be reduced to a resurgence of vitalism. Of course, issues of wholeness and synthesis featured prominently in these attempts to deal with theoretical as well as general questions of the life sciences during that time; yet, with few exceptions, they remained thoroughly on the grounds of specific domains of experience and corresponding regimes of experimentation, as has been neatly illustrated by Anne Harrington in her Reenchanted Science (1996).
In a paper for the journal jointly issued by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the Society of German Scientists and Physicians, Die Naturwissenschaften , the philosopher and cultural politician Kurt Riezler from Frankfurt summarized the situation in 1928 as follows: “At first, a part of natural lawfulness [Gesetzmäßigkeit] that was known to us became unmasked and revealed itself as a mere statistical regularity ... To this turn, the diverging development of the particular sciences added a second.... The individual disciplines did not converge but they diverged; they developed their conceptual systems in different directions” (706).
One year after Riezler’s paper titled The Crisis of “Reality,” the same journal published a follow-up. It was written by a young, unknown microbiologist and immunologist from Lemberg with ten years’ laboratory experience but not yet any credit in philosophy of science. His name was Ludwik Fleck. The article had a title almost identical to that of Riezler. But instead of a definite the, we read A Propos a Crisis of “Reality.” Riezler had distinguished three different “realities”: First, the reality of the continuous stream of our exterior and interior perceptions; second, the reality of our objectivizing knowledge of the world; and third, the absolute reality underlying our historically changing knowledge of the world. For Riezler, the development of the sciences of the past decades had eclipsed the belief that our second realities continually approximated the third, absolute one and finally dissolved themselves in it. With that, he stated the crisis he had diagnosed as being an epistemological one, that is, a crisis involving the relation between the second and the third reality. In his essay, Fleck mentioned Riezler’s paper only in passing, but with a significant shift in perspective: “If one wishes to solve the problem of the origin of knowledge in a traditional manner as an individual matter of a symbolic ‘man,’ then ... there will be no progress and advance. Therefore I do not know why and to what end I should distinguish between a first and a second reality, as described among others by Riezler” (1929, 426).
This remark indicates a displacement entailing fundamental consequences. Fleck, in a first step, reformulates the philosophical crisis in the relation between the second and third realities as a social and psychological one by dissolving the distinction between the first and second ones. Following the above sentence, he explains: “Indeed one must not neglect the social moment in the origination of knowledge.” And he adds: “Every thinking individual, as a member of some society, has its own reality, in which and according to which it lives. Indeed, everybody disposes of many, partially even conflicting realities: the reality of everyday life, a professional one, a religious one, a political and a little scientific reality” (Fleck, 1929, 426).
Yet Fleck does not leave it at what might at first glance appear as simple knowledge relativism. In a second step, the socially and psychologically reformulated reality problem is now transformed into a historical one: “Every epistemology must be brought into relation with social matters,” he says, “and then, further, with the matters of cultural history, if it does not want to come into severe conflict with the history of knowledge and everyday experience” (Fleck, 1929, 425). Knowledge is therefore no longer conceptualized as the relation of a knowing ego, of a “symbolic ‘man’ ” with his object; neither is it simply reformulated as a multiply structured social relation to the world around us, in which the individual is concurrently a member of various, very different social groups and thus moves in different “worlds.” Fleck relocates the knowledge problem between the coordinates of everyday experience on the one hand and a cultural history of knowledge production on the other: “For knowing is neither mere passive contemplation, nor acquisition of the only one possible insight into something ready-made and once forever given. It is an active, living engagement in relations, a transformation and a being transformed, in short, a creation [ein Schaffen]” (426).
With explicit reference to Niels Bohr’s quantum postulate and the non-negligible interference between atomic phenomena and their measuring devices, Fleck states: “Observation, knowing [Erkennen] is always ... literally a transformation of the object of knowledge” (1929, 428). At this point, let us once again briefly switch to Fleck’s contemporary, Bachelard. The vicinity to his French colleague, who at the same time, at the end of the 1920s, finds his own way of detaching himself from the positivist epistemological tradition, is striking. Bachelard also recurs to Bohr. However, he steps even further toward an irreducibly historical epistemology. The following is a quote from his La connaissance approchée: “Since the phenomenon is absolutely inseparable from the conditions of its detection, it has to be characterized by its detection” (1987, 297). And he elucidates by observing that the source of the scientific river is to be seen as a geographical point only, one that does not contain all its energy: “We are [thus] justified to take knowledge in its plain course, far apart from its sensible origin” (15). Like Fleck, he aims at overcoming what he judges to be “a kind of negative procedure by which one opposes the non-I to the subject.” This attitude, at the same time, amounts to a new kind of realism for Bachelard, “a realism without substance,” (298) a realism of knowledge as an infinite process and, we can add, a definite transition from a philosophy of knowledge to an epistemology: away from contemplating the relation of the knowing subject to the world it contemplates toward a conception of knowledge as a process that is always, by its means, technically and culturally mediated and invested.
Fleck repeatedly characterized this process in his paper of 1929 as a “democratic” one, that is, as a communitarian enterprise. He saw it shaped by the community of “experts” (Fachleute), and the experts in turn were shaped by this same process: “For natural science is the art to shape a democratic reality and to orient oneself accordingly—therefore to become transformed by it. It is a permanent, much more synthetic than analytic, never ending work, like the work of a river which forms its own bed. This is true, living natural science. We never must forget its creative-synthetic and social-historical aspects” (1929, 429). Fleck uses the image of a river here in a manner akin to the phrase of Bachelard mentioned above.
Fleck insisted that the natural sciences should be stripped of what he called their “paper form” and their philosophical transcendence. He contended that “one falsely equates the natural sciences as they are with the natural sciences ... as one would like to have them” (1929, 427). Once their idealized and ideologized philosophical clothes have been taken away, once they have been brought back to the ground of a real phenomenon (a Realphänomen) that can be investigated empirically, they can become the object of historical research, a richly structured cultural phenomenon that by its very constitution embodies a democratic attitude. For it is collective work, and it lives and flourishes from being predicated on preliminarity in the double sense of this word: ready to anticipate, and at the same time, ready to deviate from cherished meanings and to surpass them. It is in this spirit that Fleck assumes the task of showing that the sciences—which were so heavily criticized, especially in the aftermath of World War I, as being mechanistic, devoid of life, if not deadly and disenchanted—that these sciences in their practical, and so to speak, everyday existence, neither function mechanistically, nor are they disenchanted. This is yet another context of the crisis of the mechanical worldview in which the development of Fleck’s ideas are embedded. We have to see them as an effort not to discard but to save the sciences from their own cultural image of rigidity. I will come back to this point in the section on Husserl.
Neither Fleck’s paper of 1929 nor his later book on the Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, which was published in Switzerland in 1935, was an immediate success. Fleck’s suggestions only became historically effective about forty years after their first publication, namely in the context of the discussion on Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm and his view on the structure of scientific revolutions. There are obvious reasons for this belatedness. Fleck’s writings were given no time for resonance. His book was ignored in national socialist Germany, and Fleck himself, as a Jewish physician, was deported to the ghetto of his hometown Lwów and later to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He survived, and after the war, resumed his work on immunobiology at the Polish Academy of Science before emigrating to Israel in the late 1950s, where he died in 1961. A thorough and ongoing discussion of his revolutionary ideas on thought styles and thought collectives, his “knowledge view” (Wissensanschauung) as he called it (1929, 430), only began at the end of the 1970s with the English translation of his book and its republication in Germany (1979; 1980). Fleck’s long laboratory experience as an immunologist was the starting point for his deliberations on how communities of scientists in local working settings fabricate, develop, modify, and discard their scientific objects in their daily practice, how they gradually harden them into facts, which themselves are continually reshaped in an ongoing process. It is not single experiments, says Fleck, that are typical of the laboratory sciences. What is typical, rather, are extended series of experiments that communicate among each other in differing degrees and that constitute an experimental texture in which unforeseeable local reinforcements as well as unexpected eradications may occur. Where Fleck repeatedly compared scientific occurrences with a meandering river which, through its own movement in the interaction with the contingencies of the terrain, produces the very form and direction of its course, he was by no means of the opinion, to extend the analogy, that it would not obey the laws of gravity. He did not advocate a relativism of “anything goes.” The resistance of the phenomena, and thus also their realness, remained constitutive for him. However, he did indeed think that gravity neither determines the particular form of the river of knowledge nor the precise point where it will join the sea—if indeed science has anything at all comparable to such a sea. He contended that its form and its actual end points were conditioned by what he called the “succession of the discoveries” themselves (Fleck, 1929, 429).
With Fleck’s work, the perspective of an intrinsic historicity of knowledge is brought into play that has nothing to do with either the classical, if only asymptotic approximation of Riezler’s second reality of scientific knowledge to the third one, the absolute and perennial outer world, or with a mere succession of contingent events, a merely accidental stream of discoveries, or a series of constructions directed by specific interests. On the contrary, history is now at work in the inner core of epistemology itself, in the episteme itself, which is conceived as a cultural configuration with its own temporality. The acquisition of knowledge, especially of scientific knowledge, becomes an iterative procedure, out of which the possibilities for the next round emerge only gradually and depend on the actual state of epistemic affairs. In this sense, Bachelard, whom we can regard in some sense as a French parallel to Fleck and who gives us the impression of a remarkable European dimension of this historicization of epistemology, also talks of a “rectifying pace,” of a “thought in action” that is to be seen as the “veritable epistemological reality” (Bachelard, 1987, 300).
Again and again, Bachelard emphasized that the modern sciences are to be understood as “phenomenotechnologies,” that is, as enterprises addressing and shaping their objects of investigation in the laboratory in a technical horizon (Rheinberger, 2005). As a rule, these objects are no longer accessible by means of everyday experience. In an inversion of the Cartesian philosophy of knowledge with its emphasis on the evidence of clear and distinct ideas, Bachelard regarded what were traditionally recognized as the most simple and basic scientific phenomena as being the most derived ones, because they were most subject to the phenomenotechnical work of purification. He urged his fellow philosophers and historians of science to pay close attention to this work of purification, to study it in great historical detail and to develop an epistemology of the detail accordingly. It is characteristic of Bachelard’s epistemology of the detail that, under the concept of “epistemological obstacle,” it regards a certain inertia and inevitable blurredness as being inherent in the very act of knowledge acquisition. Gaining knowledge means, in a certain sense, to outwit one’s own current thinking in a phenomenotechnical act of surpassing. It finally allows one to arrive at facts that by definition are not accessible to the anticipating imagination, simply because they are beyond the reach of our everyday experience and our ordinary senses (Bachelard, 1969).
In his 1922 book on Historicism and its Problems, the well-known German theologian, philosopher, and politician Ernst Troeltsch diagnosed, as did so many others at the time, a crisis of the general philosophical foundations of historical thinking and of the cornerstones upon which and between which the nexus of history was to be “contemplated and to be construed.” In the years after World War I, Troeltsch perceived, as he expressed himself, an “incredible longing for a concentration of historical life.” He experienced nothing less than a foundational crisis of historicism, and he saw it as part of a general crisis concerning the sciences at large (Troeltsch, 1922a, 4–5). In his late years, Edmund Husserl argued structurally in a very similar manner. Between 1934 and 1937, that is until shortly before his death, Husserl worked on his book on The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. In this book, he complained that the triumph of the positive sciences with their undeniable theoretical and practical successes and their orientation toward “prosperity” (he used that word in English) had paved the way for a pervasive “philosophical and weltanschaulichen positivism” that had become firmly entrenched and generally disseminated throughout society (Crisis, § 2–3). For a long time, the sciences had, according to Husserl, already become detached from the living world. They no longer had anything to say to people, certainly not to the young generation that opposed them with hostility. This development had led not only to a crisis of philosophy and the modern sciences in their philosophical universality, but also to a “crisis,” as Husserl claimed, “of European humanity itself in respect to the total meaningfulness of its cultural life, its total ‘Existenz’ ” (Crisis, § 5).
Husserl had drafted his Crisis when he was invited by the Viennese Kulturbund to present a lecture in Vienna, which he delivered in May 1935 (The Vienna Lecture). In this paper, Husserl outlined the program he then developed more systematically in his last grand opus. I wish to point out here that astonishing parallels emerge in that work to the program of Ludwik Fleck, despite the fact that the physician and microbiologist Fleck and the mathematically and logically trained philosopher Husserl could not be further apart as far as their academic socialization and their disciplinary backgrounds of experience are concerned.
Just as for Fleck, it was clear to Husserl that what was at stake was ultimately a new understanding and self-understanding of the natural sciences . And just as Fleck, Husserl realized that this new self-understanding could not be gained or recovered by treading the paths of traditional rationalistic philosophy of science. Instead, Husserl was determined to hold out against the usurpation of all understanding of science—and culture for that matter—by objectivism, naturalism, and positivism, by means of a countermovement; namely, one of bringing the academic disciplines back into the cultural historical horizon of living experience. Let us recall that Fleck had also questioned Riezler’s distinction between a first reality of living experience and the second reality of scientific knowledge and even pleaded for a conflation of both.1 At the very beginning of his exposition, Husserl asks: “Is it not absurd and circular to want to explain the historical event ‘natural science’ in a natural-scientific way, to explain it by bringing in natural science and its natural laws which, as spiritual accomplishment, themselves belong to the problem” (The Vienna Lecture, p. 273)? According to Husserl, such a “fatal naturalism” could only be counteracted by an extensive historical gesture seeking to understand the knowledge of nature as a cultural “spiritual accomplishment,” as the historical product of the joint efforts of “collaborating scientists,” Husserl’s philosophical equivalent to Fleck’s “thought collectives.” With that, the knowledge of nature was to be brought from its positivistic residual existence and “residual concept,” as Husserl put it, back into the horizon of a historically grown knowledge of the world (Crisis, § 3).
For Husserl, this in no way means relativizing the validity of scientific knowledge in the sense of a social or even merely epistemological constructivism. He wants to see it in flux. For him, just as for Fleck and Bachelard, science embodies “the idea of an infinity of tasks, of which at any time a finite number have been disposed of and are retained as persisting validities” (The Vienna Lecture, p. 278). Scientific questioning is a principally endless process without closure. One must see it as “mobile goings-on from acquisition to acquisition”—Fleck’s “succession of discoveries,” Bachelard’s “knowledge in its course”—a process carried out by an “open chain of the generations of those who work for and with one another” (Origin of Geometry, p. 356). What is important for Husserl is that those working together and for each other are permanently aware of the fact that their questioning, in the last instance, is nourished by their living world and that even the oldest sedimentations of a scientific tradition, across all their transformations, remain ultimately bound by this living world. With a thoroughly programmatic gesture, Husserl asks and insists at the same time: “Where is that huge piece of method subjected to critique and clarification (–that method) that leads from the intuitively given surrounding world to the idealization of mathematics and to the interpretation of these idealizations as objective being?” (The Vienna Lecture, p. 295). In the eyes of Husserl, given that this critique and clarification remained undone, and that the self-critique and self-enlightenment of scientific workers, including the philosophers, remained undone, it was this deficit that was responsible for the crisis he diagnosed at a time when the national socialists in Germany celebrated their early triumphs and excesses, and against whom Husserl called upon the philosophers as the true “functionaries of humanity” (Crisis, § 7).
Husserl left us that “huge piece of method” for historical critique and clarification. In his short, untitled fragment on the Origin of Geometry posthumously published by Eugen Fink, Husserl sketched the contours of a historical epistemology that would devote itself to this critical task.2 Here, Husserl rejected the supposition of a fundamental separation between theoretical explanation and historical explication. He pleaded for a combination of theoretical explanation and historical explication in an originary foundational effort and accomplishment. In this paper, Husserl stated with great emphasis: “Certainly theory of knowledge has never been seen as a peculiarly historical task. But this is precisely what we object to in the past.... What is fundamentally mistaken is the limitation through which precisely the deepest and most genuine problems of history are concealed” (Origin of Geometry, p. 370). Husserl struggled with these “deepest and essential problems of history.” A “real, genuine history of the separate sciences,” as he put it, could not simply be written as a recounting of their development in the contingency of past events. On the contrary, a true history of the scientific disciplines was for Husserl “nothing other than the tracing of the historical meaning structures given in the present, or their self-evidences, along the documented chain of historical back-references into the hidden dimension of the primal self-evidences which underlie them” (Origin of Geometry, pp. 372–73). Put simply, as Husserl paradoxically summarized elsewhere in the same paper, “what is historically primary in itself is our present” (Origin of Geometry , p. 373). In Husserl’s view, borrowing the words of the French historian of science Georges Canguilhem, “the past of a science of today is not to be confounded with that science in its history” (Canguilhem, 1977, 15).
Husserl did not or could not follow the path he sketched to its very conclusion. His version of a historical epistemology essentially remained an attempt to catch up with foundational knowledge gestures. In the end, it remained an exercise of looking out for originary evidences he called the “historical a prioris” of a “teleological reason running throughout all historicity” (Origin of Geometry, p. 378). Husserl remained bound by such a teleological perspective, and in this point he certainly distinguished himself from Fleck as well as from the French tradition he inspired. 3 At the same time, however, he paved the way for later efforts to approach the peculiar historicity and materiality of the ideal objects of science from the ateleological perspective of a typology of forms of iteration. In The Origin of Geometry, we once again read with regard to the historical invention and intervention of the art of writing: “The important function of written, documenting linguistic expression is that it makes communication possible without immediate or mediated personal address; it is, so to speak, communication become virtual” (Origin of Geometry, p. 361). Husserl was inclined to see writing as a precondition for the peculiar historicity of science and the forms of sedimentation and iteration it made possible. It is the merit of Jacques Derrida to have insisted on this message of Husserl,4 and thus to have made the late writings of Husserl available to a much more exoterically oriented historical epistemology (Derrida, 1999).