This paper examines the concept of objectivity traceable in Francis Bacon's natural philosophy. After some historical background on this concept, it considers the question of whether it is not an anachronism to attribute such a concept to Bacon, since the word ‘objectivity’ is a later coinage and does not appear anywhere in his writings. The essay gives reasons for answering this question in the negative, and then criticizes the accounts given of Bacon's understanding of objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Julie Robin Solomon. It argues that this understanding is most directly and fully expressed in his discussion of the idols of the mind. In this connection, the paper notes Bacon's critical attitude to sixteenth-century scepticism and its relevance to the idea of objectivity implicit in his comments on the idols. In conclusion, the paper argues that Bacon was not a pure empiricist and describes the place assigned to theories and hypotheses in his natural philosophy.

The introduction into the laboratory of the magic lantern and the arts of projection marked a change from putatively individual and mechanical to obviously collective and skillful perception in nineteenth-century German sciences. In 1860 Karl Friedrich Zöllner introduced an astro-photometer to astronomers who, by practising with it, became aware of their own tacit and ubiquitous skills. Zöllner was a showman who was aware of the personal skills involved in magic-lantern projection. Like showmen, nineteenth-century astronomers could also control and calibrate their vision with this instrument. Photometrists such as Zöllner were not only aware of subjectivity, but developed techniques to manipulate, control and to employ it in scientific judgements. This view stands in contrast to that of the scientists described by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, for whom ‘machines offered freedom from will – from the willful interventions that had come to be seen as the most dangerous aspects of subjectivity’. But with Zöllner's successful programme of instrumental subjectivity, acts of willful intervention were at the very centre of astronomical judgement.

Argument

The cerebral localization of mental functions is one of the centerpieces of modern brain research. Though the localization paradigm in its cultural and social interwovenness has been characterized as successful in the last third of the nineteenth century by a variety of historians of the neurosciences, there is also general agreement that localization came under threat around 1900. Besides the so-called holistic protest against the localization of mental functions, the neuroanatomical approach itself was challenged by experimental psychology, psychiatric nosology, and psychoanalysis. This story underestimates the fact that anatomically-based localization remained powerful in response to these multiple challenges. This meant a neuroanatomical revision of tools, concepts, and practices. But this meant also a shift in the cultivation of the cortex from a more philosophical agenda to rather concrete political claims. More specifically, the idea of the cortex as the noblest part of man was supplemented by suggestions concerning its “Höherzüchtung.” I will analyze this re-orientation and radicalization in two steps. First, I briefly discuss the anatomical and philosophical account of Theodor Meynert and then turn to Paul Flechsig who in the late nineteenth century inscribed the ability to create culture and civilization into the cortex. Second, I focus on the neuroanatomists Oskar and Cécile Vogt, who began their careers around 1900 and expanded the cultivation of the cortex. Even before World War I, they proclaimed a “cerebral hygiene.” Consequently, the Vogts linked their innovative neuroanatomical researches with the rising field of genetics, racial hygiene, and eugenics. In the early Weimar Republic, the Vogts openly supported socialist ideas and were engaged in establishing an Institute for Brain Research in Soviet Moscow, where Lenin’s brain was analyzed. By the end of the Weimar Republic, the rhetoric of the Vogts was bluntly authoritarian. Based on a few anatomical examinations of so-called elite brains and the brains of criminals, they made concrete suggestions for eugenics and the breeding of “one-sidedly gifted leaders.” Given the remarkable popularity of the Vogts around 1930, their program is an important example of the hubris of predicting and guiding future developments on the basis of scientific authority. It can be regarded as an ironic nemesis that the Vogts – never sympathizing with the political aims of the National Socialists – were forced to finish their careers as influential Kaiser Wilhelm scientists in Nazi-Germany.

Der Mensch wird immer mehr ein Hirntier werden. (Vogt 1912, 309)

Argument

This essay studies the convergence of brain research with the physiology of emotions during the early twentieth century. It argues that the brain entered the laboratory of emotions not as an object of knowledge, but as a technique for producing emotions, in spite of the laboratory. The new brain-generated emotion signaled an epistemic break in the nature of studied emotion. It restructured the relationships between physiological and psychological forms of knowledge. It embodied the historical and political concerns of physiologists with pain. And it excluded the affectively experiencing subject from the study of “emotion.” The essay also suggests that the brain-generated emotion was an object suspended in time and abstracted from history. Its unique a-temporal and de-contextualized characteristic transformed emotion into a product of a laboratory whose mode of production mimicked the modern factory. The constitutive elements that were assembled in creating the brain as emotion-generator were instrumental for the important studies of James Papez, Paul MacLean, and for the modern concept of Limbic System.

The time has come [to]…begin the vivisection of the human heart according to scientific methods.

Angelo Mosso, 1896

While the study of Newton's religious views has been continuously expanding, it has not been brought to bear directly on Newton's career as an ‘experimental philosopher’. Historical perspectives on his optical experiments in particular affirm the historiographic separation between the religious and scientific aspects of his work. In this paper I examine the practical implication of Newton's theology of dominion on his early experiments on light and colours. While his predecessors had made experiments to collect evidence, I show that Newton conceived experimental research as a discipline of the practical understanding of the structure of light and the origins of colours. His conception of experimental reasoning followed his practical reflections on human beings as agents who belonged to God's dominion and who were created to serve its divine ends. These reflections suggested, more specifically, that the aim of natural philosophy was the discovery of divine rules that instrumentally constrained and facilitated human conduct in general, and perceptual judgement in particular. I show, moreover, that Newton's endeavour to subordinate experiment to divine worship had been foreshadowed by Boyle's writing on the theory and practice of the experimental philosophy.

Throughout his life, Newton searched for the machinery through which God creates, designs and sustains the world. He believed that the Creator is a God of Dominion who continuously preserves His creation through secondary mechanical causes or through direct, voluntary actions. God periodically intervenes in order to restore the pure and divine state of creation, deteriorated due to material interactions in a natural process of decay. The restoration, whether through matter or through chosen souls, is pure and simple, flowing equably along God's eternal duration. As time passes, a process of decay and corruption causes these pure states to deviate from the original divine path and they gradually begin to flow along distorted and distracted ways. Newton's youthful method of fluxions, though dealing with abstract mathematics, has a crucial role in revealing true knowledge about the God of creation and sustenance. The mathematical method captures and reveals the most fundamental truth about the mechanism of perception and the natural decline of all processes in Nature. This simple method is analogous to the simple creed, which God reinstills throughout history in religious founders and prophets assisting humans to worship God properly.

Argument

The life of the pioneer electroencephalographer, William Grey Walter, initially appears to be a paradigmatic example of the process of network building and delegation identified by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. In his professional career, Walter continually repositioned himself, moving from an unhappy beginning as an expert in the apparently useless and suspect technology of the EEG, to become a self-styled crucial mediator in subjects as diverse as medical diagnosis, forensic detection, marriage counseling, and international diplomacy. This position was achieved moreover through the construction and co-option of human and mechanical accomplices – laboratory assistants, electrical tortoises, and mechanical analyzers – which sustained his research and propagated his arguments. However in contrast to Callon and Latour’s atomistic account of scientific power and agency, this paper will extend their analysis to explore the impact of network building and delegation on domestic life, human desire, and personal identity. Walter’s engagement with the complexities of love and the human brain demonstrates how the transformative power of scientific rhetoric extends simultaneously into both the organization of the world and the subjectivity of the individual.

What would be the use of a neuroscience which cannot tell us anything about love?

Programs of the Brain (Young 1978, 143)

In the early 1950s the neurophysiologist and electroencephalographer, William Grey Walter, began to speculate on the future evolution of the human brain. Rejecting the vision of disembodied nervous systems and dome-headed descendants proposed by the populist authors of pulp science fiction, Walter instead imagined a series of linked transformations that would encompass our neural organization, technology, and society. He argued that our future evolution would be an indirect process, in which the development of new mechanisms of information storage and communication would allow the brain to shake off its mundane operations and embark instead on a process of mental growth through play and speculation. As Walter wrote:

The exteriorization of tedious or controversial reasoning will no doubt have as profound an effect upon the brain and society as the introduction of skilled and respectful servants has on a humble household. … But the future of the brain is more intriguing than a mere holiday from drudgery, for it is only when the servants of thought have done their work and retired unobtrusively to their quarters that the master brain can discover its own place and settle down to its proper work. (Walter 1953, 194; 1961, 234)