For Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, the end of the nineteenth century and its vigorous empiricism, which had been fuelled by the successes of the experimental sciences, brought about ‘a crisis of reflection on scientific knowledge’. Writing in On Historicizing Epistemology, published in English in 2010, Rheinberger was reflecting on the ways in which the shift from classical to modern physics had made the question of scientific revolutions ‘unavoidable’, while a glance back at a past littered with obsolete theories and discarded things—aether, crystalline spheres, the humours—naturally prompted questions about the historicity of scientific knowledge. Positivism, Rheinberger wrote, was ‘the first symptom’ of this crisis. As an attempt to synthesize the fragmented landscape of the sciences, Husserl deemed positivism a ‘residual concept’—a nineteenth-century hangover. Flaubert delivered a harsher judgement. ‘Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions’, he wrote, and the work of positivism’s chief French architect, Auguste Comte, thus ‘deadly stupid’: the Cours de philosophie positive, in particular, ‘contains vast mines of the comic, whole Californias of the grotesque’. Indeed, Flaubert continued in a letter to a friend in 1879, the subtitle of his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, ‘might be: “On lack of method in the sciences”’, since, he said, ‘I intend to pass in review all modern ideas.’ After they have given up on agriculture, horticulture, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, medicine, hygiene, geology, archaeology, history, the historical novel, literature, politics, love, gymnastics, spiritualism, hypnotism, philosophy, religion, the critique of religion, phrenology and pedagogy, Bouvard and Pécuchet take to copying ‘haphazardly, whatever falls into their hands, all the papers and manuscripts they come across, tobacco packets, old newspapers, lost letters, believing it all to be important and worth preserving’. While they ‘are often at pains to catalogue a fact in its correct place’—finding and classifying ‘examples of every style, agricultural, medical, theological, classical, romantic, periphrasis’; composing a ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’; even writing a ‘history of the world in howlers’—classification becomes more and more difficult as they copy.
Flaubert’s great satire of modern epistemology, his novel of agnotology, found a surprising echo in the work of Gaston Bachelard. He, too, opposed positivism—Comte’s dominance in French pedagogy, the universal-knowledge projects of the Vienna Circle, all fictions of historical cumulation; he, too, rejected his contemporaries’ desire for synthesis and sought to make ‘a close study of error, of ignorance and of thoughtlessness’. In The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938), Bachelard set out to reveal and uproot the epistemological obstacles that ‘encrust any knowledge that is not questioned’. An ‘over-familiar scientific idea’, Bachelard wrote, ‘becomes weighed down by too much psychological concreteness, amassing too many analogies, images and metaphors, and gradually losing its vector of abstraction.’ As such, ‘all scientific culture must begin with an intellectual and emotional catharsis’. Bachelard sought to purge the scientific mind of pernicious metaphors like the sponge, salt, digestion. For the philosopher of science, ‘abstraction is a duty’: philosophy must ‘turn the mind from the real to the artificial, from the natural to the human, from representation to abstraction’. Despite its insistence on a strict philosophical and historical demarcation between science and pseudoscience, and its treatment of literature as useful only as an archive of errors, the structure of Bachelard’s book resembles that of Flaubert’s novel: in presenting ‘the objects on view in our chamber of horrors’, Bachelard wrote, ‘our plan will then have to be a loose one and we shall find it pretty impossible to avoid repeating ourselves since it is the nature of epistemological obstacles to be intermixed and polymorphous. It is also very difficult to establish a hierarchy of error and to describe in an orderly way the disorders of thought.’ Out of such rebellions against positivism and vitalism (the treacle spilt on the dining table of nineteenth-century thought, to paraphrase T. E. Hulme) came a new way of thinking about science—as process and as plurality—and, eventually, the research methodology of the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin.
Founded in 1994, the Institute was initially housed in the old Czech Embassy building in the former eastern zone of central Berlin. (Its relocation to a purpose-built facility in Berlin-Dahlem in 2006 concluded the Max Planck Group’s funded participation in the unification and reconstruction of the German scientific environment.) In its own most general terms, the Institute ‘is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena. Researchers pursue an historical epistemology in their studies of how new categories of thought, proof and experience have emerged.’ In On Historicizing Epistemology—a text at once introduction, genealogy and manifesto—Rheinberger, the Institute’s Director from 1997 to 2014, traced its methodology back to the fin-de-siècle: a pivotal moment in the history of epistemology’s transformation from ‘a synonym for a theory of knowledge (Erkenntnis) that inquires into what it is that makes knowledge (Wissen) scientific’ to a concept used ‘for reflecting on the historical conditions under which, and the means with which, things are made into objects of knowledge’. In Rheinberger’s account, Émile Boutroux’s vision of philosophy as the study of the historical becoming of scientific objectivity—refined at the nineteenth-century Sorbonne, where Boutroux was professor of the history of philosophy—becomes the historical epistemology of Gaston Bachelard, who ascended to the chair of the history and philosophy of science at that same university in the mid-twentieth century. In his opening address to the 1911 International Philosophical Congress in Bologna, ‘Du rapport de la philosophie aux sciences’, Boutroux rejected Comte’s view of the philosopher’s task—that, faced with the archipelago of the modern, plural sciences, the philosopher should determine their true relations and synthesize them—and instead proposed that philosophy begin again, by studying the sciences in action. Like Bachelard, Paul Feyerabend, David Bloor and countless others after him, Boutroux picked apart the myth of a unified science: each of the sciences deploys a different principle of research (its own ‘question put to nature’, as he phrased it) as an epistemic tool. By analysing these tools, and the methods by which scientists ‘attain vigour and progress’, the philosopher could uncover ‘the very foundation of scientific objectivity’, and philosophy as a discipline could assert its legitimacy against those in the scientific community who would proclaim its ‘nonentity’. ‘Objectivity, in the last analysis, thus becomes a historical task’, Rheinberger concludes. Boutroux, he writes, was therefore ‘one of the fathers of a rapprochement between philosophy and the natural sciences in France, which later was to flow into a special form of historical epistemology’.
A Liechtensteiner born in 1946 in Grabs, Switzerland and educated in Tübingen and Berlin, Rheinberger often declares historical epistemology a specifically French tradition. This choice of inheritance likely dates back to Rheinberger’s years as a student at the Freie Universität: ‘It was a time of heightened attention to French “theory”. Many of the soon-to-be classics published in the second half of the 1960s were translated into German within less than five years of their appearance’, he recalled in a 2013 piece, ‘My Road to History of Science’. It was most probably via Althusser, on whom he wrote his master’s thesis, that Rheinberger first encountered the ideas of Gaston Bachelard. Despite Bachelard’s own lack of demonstrable political engagement, his concepts were assimilated to and disseminated by a Marxist tradition: Althusser took up the epistemological rupture, while Dominique Lecourt’s doctoral thesis, published as L’Épistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard, branded Bachelard’s work as ‘historical epistemology’—a phrase Bachelard himself never used. The preface by Lecourt’s supervisor, Georges Canguilhem, helpfully divided Bachelard’s philosophy of history in two: the rectified history of science, written from the perspective of the present, and the lapsed—our aforementioned chamber of horrors. Bachelard, along with Jacques Derrida, whose De la grammatologie Rheinberger and a fellow student translated into German, has proven to be an abiding intellectual influence on Rheinberger’s work in the history and philosophy of science. It was only after many years in the laboratory as a molecular biologist that Rheinberger turned to historical epistemology, publishing Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (in German in 1991 and English in 1997) to widespread acclaim. In 2017, finally crossing back into the tradition to which its author felt it had always belonged, that book was translated into French by Arthur Lochmann as Systèmes expérimentaux et choses épistémiques. In the same year, Lochmann’s French translation of Der Kupferstecher und der Philosoph: Albert Flocon trifft Gaston Bachelard, Rheinberger’s meditation on a little-known byway in the history of printmaking, appeared.
Le graveur et le philosophe: Albert Flocon rencontre Gaston Bachelard has been variously described as a ‘double biography’, a ‘work of intellectual history’ and in a humble, honest moment in the book’s preface, as a ‘homage to its protagonists’: Bachelard the philosopher and Flocon the engraver. Their portraits are drawn in miniature; their encounter—documented in a series of collaborative works made in Paris in the 1940s and 1950s—intended as an Auerbachian Ansatzpunkt from which new light might be cast on Bachelard’s epistemology and the chasm between the history of art and the history of science bridged. The vocabulary of engraving has permeated Rheinberger’s writing since Toward a History of Epistemic Things, where it was given philosophical ballast by Derrida:
The French notion of écriture is only inadequately grasped by its translation into writing. Écriture is the ‘writing’ and the ‘written’, and it is the ‘how to be written’ as well. It covers the graphemic space and the things from which it is built. According to Derrida, ‘to write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning.’
Graphs, graphemes, inscriptions, scriptural traces: such fragments from the etymology of engraving proliferate in Rheinberger’s archaeology of laboratories, where they have a particular fit, since techniques of transcription and translation have indeed been central to the histories of molecular biology and genomics that Rheinberger has focussed on. Rifling through Bachelard’s archives, then, Rheinberger delights to find that he, too, took philosophical inspiration from engraving: from, in particular, the intaglio prints of Albert Flocon.