The Rise of the Small: Meaning, Metaphysics, and the Microscope A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Keith Michael Mikos IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Jani Scandura, advisor February 2014 © Keith Michael Mikos 2014 i Acknowledgements My thanks must begin with my committee members, whose intelligence, creativity, and experience have been crucial to the formulation and completion of this dissertation. I thank my advisor Jani Scandura for teaching me to trust my instincts and develop my thinking; she is a model for how a researcher asks questions, draws connections, and maps ideas. I am, without a doubt, a better scholar because of her. Tony Brown, my faculty mentor, has been at my side since my first day in graduate school; as a teacher, committee member, and friend, he has helped me make critical choices while refusing to accept lazy claims, unqualified terms, and unclear exposition. I greatly appreciate his support. John Mowitt’s comprehensive understanding of philosophy, his willingness to hear my thoughts on Plato, Aristotle, Pierce, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and his exceptional professionalism has made him an ideal reader and an important influence on my work, and Thomas Pepper’s timely and profound ideas brought my thinking to another level. Finally, John Shanahan, who I first met as an undergraduate, gave me the confidence to both enter graduate school, and to finish. His intelligence is exceeded only by his kindness, and I am forever grateful for his generosity. I thank both the English Department and the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota for financial support in the forms of travel grants, teaching assistantships, and research fellowships. I also wish to thank the English and Philosophy Departments at DePaul University, where my scholarly aspirations took shape and where I continue to receive intellectual and financial support. The American Philosophical Society deserves recognition for supporting my archival research through their Library Resident Research Fellowship. Without their funding, holdings, and knowledgeable staff, the very backbone of my project would be disjointed and incomplete. My most rewarding moments as an academic have occurred in the classroom, and so thanks must also go to my students at both DePaul and the University of Minnesota, for their enlightening questions and imaginative responses to literature and philosophy. I have met too many brilliant people in Minnesota to name, but would be remiss if I failed to tell Annemarie Lawless, Dan Mrozowski, Maurits van Bever Donker, Ryo Yamaguchi, Nick Walsh, and Chris Kamerbeek how thankful I am for their friendship. I owe a special debt to John Pistelli and Elizabeth Criswell, who have opened their home to me countless times, and who remain a source of great intellectual, illuminating, productive, and pleasing conversation. I thank my family, who have always provided for me and given me support— emotionally and materially. My father and mother, Michael and Patricia Mikos, are my heroes, and Dirk and Grace Connor offered me much more than I can ever repay. Of course my greatest debt is to my wife Jennifer Connor, to whom I dedicate this dissertation. She is the kindest, most thoughtful, and most generous woman I know. She has given me a family of my own. She is my best friend. Thank you. ii Dedication To Jenni and Lily For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. iii Abstract From public reminders to sanitize drinking water to philosophical speculation on the sublime, this study documents how microscopical science appears in a wide range of cultural and intellectual concerns. Interweaving a genealogy of microscopy with readings of literary texts, I show how the microscope embodies certain epistemological formulations that, when discerned and mapped, disclose original literary and philosophical networks. Through readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sanders Peirce, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, along with diverse intertexts from philosophy, science, and literature, I expose the influence that microscopy had on nineteenth century American metaphysics, spirituality, fiction, and figuration. It explores, for example, questions of invisibility and faith in early American writers such as John Winthrop, Jr. and Cotton Mather, who believed that the microscope presented a divinely mandated opportunity to fully comprehend God’s universe, and follows through with Emerson’s later arguments that the instrument endorses a dangerous mechanistic ideology at odds with his spiritual sensibilities. It explains how Peirce viewed the microscope as a means through which to rescue philosophy from crude and untenable metaphysics, how Melville embraced the microscopical to enact a theory of symbolism, how Dickinson meditated on the spiritual dangers of “looking too closely,” and how writers from numerous disciplines have all struggled to make sense of extended human vision. The study closes by discussing the model of “deep time” literary history, and questioning the status of the aesthetic detail when placed on the vast scale of a universe expanded by optical instruments. This cosmic vastness threatens to annihilate the significance of human intellectual pursuits, leading to a “scaling-up” that I argue is best addressed in existentialist terms. The microscope made available a novel means of imagining the infinite while revealing the limits of natural perception, expanding assumed scales of understanding, and challenging inherently prejudiced biological categories and social stratifications. This work demonstrates how the microscope came to be, the polemics it provoked, the ideas it preserves, and the role it played in the formations of nineteenth century philosophy, science, fiction, and poetry. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments i Dedication ii Abstract iii Preface vi INTRODUCTION “The eye struggled in vain”: On a Genealogy of Microscopy 1 Magnification 1 Little Things, Big Problems 13 Transatlantic Microscopy: Winthrop, Mather, and American Alchemy 24 The Microscope, after Mather 35 Overview of Chapters 39 CHAPTER ONE “The sublime was in a grain of dust”: Emerson and Macroscopical Metaphysics 56 The New Microscopy: Emerson and Science 57 Etymology, Entomology, Dissection 68 “The eye too near …” 71 Emerson’s Symbolism after the Microscope 86 CHAPTER TWO “Myopic minds, seeing microscopically”: Peirce and the Microscopical Mind 93 The Popular Rise of Microscopy 93 Observation 101 The Microscopical Mind 114 Errare est humanum; or, On Making Mistakes 123 The Spirit of Dissection 132 Microscopical Science vs. Macroscopical Metaphysics 150 Peirce’s Metonymy after the Microscope 162 CHAPTER THREE “Upon a still nigher approach”: Melville’s Microscopical Vision 177 Emerson and Melville 177 “Benito Cereno” and Microscopical Movement 184 The Deposition 189 On a Melvillean Theory of Symbolism; Moby-Dick and White-Jacket 192 Padlock and Key 200 The Gordian Knot 208 The Place of the Literal 215 Babo and the Literal; or, Suppressing the Mut(e)ineers 218 “… since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words” 226 v CHAPTER FOUR “Things overlooked before”: Dickinson’s Disruptive Details 229 Details Matter 229 Details and Matter 234 Dissection and the De-tail 237 “What triple Lenses burn upon”: Dickinson and Optics 239 Emergen(-see!) and Surgery 257 EPILOGUE “All I may, if small”: Dickinson and Deep Time; or, Existentialism Expanded 265 Deep Time and the Question of Scale 265 The Limits of Scale, the Ends of the Earth 277 The Pressure of the Vast; or, Cosmic Nihilism 279 Being-towards-(sun)-death; or, Existentialism Expanded 283 Bibliography 292 vi Preface. Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from intense nearsightedness. Twenty minutes of reading or writing triggered acute and unbearable eye pain, throbbing migraine headaches, nausea, and exhaustion. Naturally, he sought relief for his debilitating symptoms, undertaking week long medicinal treatments at facilities like the Bad Ragaz spas in Switzerland and the mineral springs of Recoaro Terma in northern Italy.1 Because writing for any extended length of time proved too taxing, Nietzsche purchased a typewriter, hoping that the speed afforded by the device would combat the onset of pain. Sometime in 1881 he attained a Hansen “Writing Ball,” an early Danish typewriter that resembled a kind of over-sized mechanical pin cushion.2 In February of 1882, in reference to the Writing Ball, Nietzsche wrote to his friend and confidant Peter Gast, “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts” (qtd in Kittler 204). Friedrich Kittler aligns this statement with a stylistic shift he observes between Nietzsche’s early and late works, a shift from “arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style” (203), that is, from a style of writing that demands more than twenty minutes, to a style exhibiting the speed made available by Hansen’s typewriter. Nietzsche’s statement, and Kittler’s assessment of it, speaks to the profound influence that technology has on modes of being and expression. There exists an entanglement of instruments and the very thought of their users; they are co-operative, and as we use the tools that extend our mental capacities, we “inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies” (Carr 60), consequently making it more difficult to separate social change from technological change.3 It is not merely that novel 1 See David Farrell Krell, The Good European: Nietzsche’s