Creatures, Technology, and Scientific Psychology
2.4 The Unexpected Debt and Experimentation
Every possible object of knowledge, just as knowledge itself, is therefore subject to a double determination: by intuition and by the concept. Whereas intuition deter- mines the (sensory) content of knowledge, the concept is what lends intuition stabil- ity and universality (causal law).20 Thus far the indebtedness to Kant is clear and has long been recognized by scholars. It is an epistemological debt, insofar as the a priori elements of intuition and the intellect are identified as the conditions for the determination of any object of knowledge. However, there is also an unexpected, ontological debt toward Kant, which has gone completely unnoticed.
Kant drew upon ancient ontology and its distinctive view of production to clarify the “question of the thing”: he argued that since an entity can only really be per- ceived by its producer, finite beings such as us have no way of accessing things in themselves. In doing so, Kant provided a remarkable epistemological indication for the subsequent generations nourished by the Enlightenment—an indication that to this day remains dominant, unchallenged, and unchallengeable.
The essence of Kant’s indication is enclosed in a sentence which Emil du Bois- Reymond wrote to his friend Helmholtz in 1852, in order to convey his excitement about the latter’s latest invention, an apparatus for measuring electric current during the contraction of muscles in a frog: “It is a spectacle for gods, to see the muscles working like the cylinders of a steam engine” (ip. 123, quoted Brain et al. 1999).
The new course which du Bois-Reymond enthusiastically endorses in this message to his friend is that of technological reproducibility. The productive approach
20 It is important to bear in mind that, according to Kant, it is the pure intellect which provides the foundations—the principles—for the objectivity of objects and that the objects he has in mind are those of physics and mathematics. What this means is that things, as physical-mathematical objects, are understood starting from the fundamental principle according to which each body left to itself will move with uniform rectilinear motion. In this respect, what determines each thing is understood in advance (a priori), and, at the same time, the (invariably uniform) setting in which things manifest themselves is defined. Things thus become physico-mathematical objects, insofar as they are set and arranged within the framework of the uniform spatiotemporal connection between movements. The fact that things are all mobile in terms of space, time, and relations of motion is what makes numerical measuring possible. Kant’s research is intended to establish the pure intellect as the foundation of the objectivity of phenomena. Principles are precisely what provide the basis for this. Kant divides principles into four groups: (1) axioms of intuition (quan- tity), (2) anticipations of perception (quality), (3) analogies of experience (relation), and (4) postu- lates of experience in general. Along much the same lines, when medicine later established itself as a natural science, it came to understand the functions of the living body in the light of the fun- damental principle of the logic of the dead body and hence of the mechanization of the living body (see par. ch. 3).
37
becomes the key for understanding natural phenomena and the very heart of scien- tific research.
This notion is emphatically confirmed in a course of lectures which Helmholtz delivered after the completion of his volumes on Physiological Optics and which were brought together as a paper, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision.” In the first section of this paper, significantly entitled “The eye as an optical instru- ment,” Helmholtz infers certain imperfections of the human eye by comparison with the perfection of a series of optical instruments. He writes:
Now it is not too much to say that if an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which had all these defects, I should think myself quite justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest terms, and giving him back his instrument. Of course, I shall not do this with my eyes, and shall be only too glad to keep them as long as I can—defects and all. Still, the fact that, however bad they may be, I can get not others, does not at all diminish their defects, so long as I maintain the narrow but indisputable position of a critic on purely optical grounds.
(p. 142)
In order to understand natural phenomena, the scientist reproduces them with an even higher degree of perfection. This is the spectacle fit for gods! The key point is that this ontology stands at the origins of the epistemic connections between tech- nology and the body—the dead body which Bichat placed (as a model) at the very center of physiology—that were destined to characterize, on the one hand, the mod- els and metaphors in brain research (Brock 2011), down to the contemporary cogni- tive sciences, and, on the other hand, the development of a technology mirroring neural functions by means of mechanical or electronic devices.
The remarkable context that favored the development of this new path emerged, partly as a consequence of considerable socioeconomic pressure (Lenoir 1988), through the establishment of the Berlin Physical Society in May 1845. Certainly, the most interesting fact from today’s perspective is that, for the first time, an interdis- ciplinary effort was undertaken of the sort that was destined to characterize the cybernetic revolution—roughly 100 years later, within the same tradition and in another moment of major crisis. In addition to Helmholtz, the Society included a small group of doctors who had trained in physiology in Muller’s laboratory. Twelve of the 154 members were engineers: 6 of them bore the title of “Mechanikus,” while the other 6 were lieutenants—probably in the artillery and engineering corps.
Among these was Werner Siemens, the future founder of the Siemens corporation.
The Society further included Privatdozenten seeking to reform the university and to redefine its disciplinary boundaries, the Emeritus Professor in Physics Gustav Magnus, and members of various scientific, technological, and industrial institu- tions: the School of Industry, the United Artillery and Engineering School, the War College, and the Academy of Architecture (Brain et al. 1999).
The most distinctive aspect of the new epistemological position that found its sharpest representative in Helmholtz was the centrality assigned to experiments.
Experimental knowledge had also been cultivated in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as the basis of craftsmanship, but had then been redefined by modern science. From Galileo onward, experimentation had come to be understood as a verification
2.4 The Unexpected Debt and Experimentation
conducted within the framework of a fundamental model of nature that predetermined the essential conditions according to which nature could answer to the questions posed to it.
As noted by Heidelberger (1993), however, for Helmholtz “the function of test- ing hypotheses is only secondary. For him experiment is far more an art of invention (ars inveniendi) than an art of demonstration (ars demostrandi)” (p. 483). According to Helmholtz, the function of an experiment is to find the causal conditions for an event; and to do so, it is necessary to intervene in the world by changing its circumstances. Therefore, in order to determine the causes of phenomena, science intervenes in the course of natural events, by isolating objects and exposing them to selected influencing factors: “in the experiment the causal chain runs throughout our self-consciousness. We know one member of these causes—our will’s impulse—
from inner intuition, and know the motive by which it has occurred. The chain of physical causes which transpires in the course of the experiment has its initial effect from it, as from one initial member known to us and to one point in time known to us” (p. 358 The Facts in Perception). An experiment, in other words, enables us to grasp the initial conditions of a causal chain of events that are produced starting from the experimenter’s voluntary, intervening activity. Only bringing our bodies
“in various relations to the objects” can we be “sure as to our judgments of the causes of our sensations.”
In the light of this perspective, it is easier to understand the strange combina- tion of elements which Helmholtz brings into play in his research on sensory physiology: on the one hand, introspection, employed as a mode of access to the realm of pure sensations; on the other, the remarkable use of a variety of new media technologies, electric, photographic, and telegraphic inscription devices.
In all likelihood, Helmholtz developed this approach to introspection—which acquires a systematic character in his Optics—through an engagement with the teachings of his master Johannes Muller.21 What lies behind this unique combi- nation is actually a specific mode of operating: introspection enables the distinc- tion of the phenomenon to be studied. Indeed, in volume 3 of his Optics, Helmholtz explicitly states: “the first thing we have to learn is to pay heed to our individual sensations” (p. 7, vol. 3).22 Helmholtz displayed his mastery not just through his ability to discern a set of fundamental or primary tones in physiologi- cal acoustics but also through his studies on the perception of color, which con- firmed Young’s hypotheses; his investigations into afterimages, simultaneous contrasts, irradiation, and retinal rivalry; and his observations on the perception of space relations.
21 In a study of visual hallucinations, Ueber die phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen (“On Fantasy Images”), Muller had shown that the visual system is an active rather than passive recorder of exter- nal events. In a series of rigorous self-experiments, having noticed that just before falling asleep he could sometimes see imaginary people and scenes, he tried to manipulate these figures (Otis 2007).
22 These opening pages of volume 3 show a striking affinity with the notion of phenomenological reduction that is realized by putting natural aptitudes aside—what enables the constitution of objects according to Husserl’s phenomenology.
39
On the other hand, in order to explain each distinct phenomenon, a mechanism was put forward, “materialized” by a device capable not just of reproducing the phenomenon itself through its functioning but also of enabling the manipulation, rearrangement, and comparing of the data thus obtained. As Lenoir insightfully emphasizes: “the new technologies were a resource for representing the scientific object, and ... in their material form they were not just ‘representatives’ of an object described by theory; rather they created the space within which the scientific objects,
‘eye and ear’, existed in a material form” (p. 205, 1994). From this perspective it is possible to understand why Helmholtz conceived of the nervous system as a tele- graph and of its appendages—sensory organs—as a media apparatus: the eye as a photometer and the ear as a tuning-fork interrupter with attached resonators (Lenoir 1994).