OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue Jul 07 2015, NEWGEN Chapter 35 Science and the Scientific Disciplines Benjamin Dawson Introduction European Romanticism coincided with a period of profound reorganization in the sci- ences, and in particular with the genesis of the modern scientific discipline. In contrast to earlier and other orders of discourse in which disciplines operated largely as archives, that is, as repositories of knowledge, by the early nineteenth century the scientific disci- pline had begun to play an internal, essential, and active role in epistemic production.1 Processes of specialization, professionalization, and role differentiation in the sciences were central to this transition, and were supported by the establishment of the earli- est research universities (in Göttingen, Leipzig, and elsewhere).2 Likewise important were changes in the form of scientific communication. Notably, as supplements to the general organs of the scientific institutions established in the seventeenth century, such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and the proceedings of the Paris Académie, the late eighteenth century saw a proliferation of specialist scientific journals which served both to accelerate the generation of empirical observations and to regu- late these communications, governing this great new wealth of fact.3 Beginning around 1 On the development of the scientific discipline as the primary unit of internal differentiation and structure formation in the social system of science, see Rudolf Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland, 1740–1890 (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1984). 2 ‘Scientific factories wissenschaftliche( Fabriken)’ was how one commentator described these new institutions. Friedrich Böll, Das Universitätswesen in Briefen (1782), cited in Andre Wakefield,The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 49. For university reforms prior to the Humboldt era, see Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany 1700–1914 (Cambridge: CUP, 1980), 37–98. 3 ‘The periodical publications of the scientific societies were specialized in the sense that they concerned themselves with the sciences, but they were not limited to any one specialty or discipline.’ 9780199696383_Hamilton_The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism.indb 684 7/7/2015 1:33:57 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue Jul 07 2015, NEWGEN Science and the Scientific Disciplines 685 1780, journals devoted exclusively to chemistry, physics, mathematics, and philology began in France, Germany, and Britain; and, rather than quickly disappearing again, they became relatively stable sites for the publication of discoveries, the consolidation of specialized vocabularies and criteria of judgement, and hence for the increasing inde- pendence of these burgeoning discursive formations. Beneath this disciplinary redifferentiation of knowledge, changes to the social and moral codes framing intellectual discourse were occurring. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the foundations of the old so-called ‘learned class’ (Gelehrtenstand) were effectively demolished by the ideological and medial forces of the European Enlightenment. The cultural and social interiorization of print played a powerful role in this process, altering the status of the scholarly professions so that, for some observ- ers, the ‘Republic of Letters’ appeared to have been commandeered by a ‘great horde of writers’.4 ‘To attain citizenship of the learned requires only a piece of writing (bedarf es nur einer Schrift); hence, it is exclusively writers who are namedthe learned.’ 5 The old European distinction literati/illiterati, which had conditioned and sustained the schol- arly class within Europe’s stratified societies up to and including the natural and ‘gen- tlemen’ philosophers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was collapsing. And in the academies and universities, late humanist ideals still centred on erudition and eloquence were rendered further obsolete by the intensifying ‘research imperative’.6 Indeed, the emergence at this time of the modern semantics of ‘research’ (Forschung, recherche, etc.) ultimately signalled the end of the tradition of European scientia, and a redetermination of the totality, and temporality, of knowledges of nature: ‘In early mod- ern times the transition from the preservation to the enlargement of knowledge could only be perceived as a continual process. In contrast, research from about 1800 refers to a fundamental, and at any time realizable, questioning of the entire body of knowledge until then considered as true.’7 As the scientific discipline became an internal, generative agent, essential to the production of knowledge in and out of the research university, the form of epistemic James McClellan III, ‘Scientific Institutions and the Organization of Science’, in Roy Porter (ed.),The Cambridge History of Science: Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), iv. 87–106 (87). That said, already by the mid-century, articles in theTransactions were becoming more determined by professional argument, a tendency supported by the introduction of referees in 1752. See Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 136. 4 ‘Gelehrtenrepublik heißt also der ganze Haufe von Schriftstellern …’ Johann Melchior Gottlieb Beseke, Vom Patriotismus in der deutschen Gelehrtenrepublik (Dessau, Leipzig: Buchhandlung der Gelehrten, 1782); quoted in Heinrich Bosse, ‘Gelehrte und Gebildete—die Kinder des 1. Standes’, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert, 32 (2008), 16. 5 Beseke, quoted in Bosse, ‘Gelehrte und Gebildete’, 16. 6 See Steven Turner, ‘The Prussian Professoriate and the Research Imperative, 1790–1840’, in H. N. Jahnke and M. Otte (eds), Epistemological and Social Problems of the Sciences in the Early Nineteenth Century (Dordrecht: Springer, 1981), 109–21. 7 Rudolf Stichweh, ‘Scientific Disciplines, History of’, in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), 13729. 9780199696383_Hamilton_The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism.indb 685 7/7/2015 1:33:57 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue Jul 07 2015, NEWGEN 686 Benjamin Dawson advance became more profoundly discontinuous. An evolutionary progress punctuated by ‘epigenetic’ breaks displaced or further replaced the contiguous unfolding of natural truth, so that, in science as in politics and art, the period is marked by an increase in power of the present over the past, the new over the established.8 The transition from continuity to discontinuity seems itself to have been experienced as abrupt rather than gradual—a redoubled or reflexive discontinuity that may lie behind the disorientation discernible in questions such as the ‘Where are we?’ (Wo stehn wir?) of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s The Eighteenth Century (written already in 1796/7). It also explains, in part, why ‘1800’ could later become the sign of an opaque or ‘archaeological’ event.9 The End of Natural History Particularly important to the possibility of a Romantic epistemology of science was the fate of the traditional field of ‘natural history’ as it strove, and failed, to contain the rap- idly developing and diversifying discourses of geology, mineralogy, botany, embryology, and zoology, which were each attracting their own communities of authors, observ- ers, and highly motivated experimenters. Mutations of both ‘nature’ and ‘history’ were under way. The category of historia—the old name for knowledge from singular cases (explicatio et notitia rerum singularium)—was under pressure from modes of investigation which, within the emerging disciplinary economy of research, tended to be both more explic- itly generative of the phenomena of observation and more methodologically reflexive. Already ‘[b] y the middle of the eighteenth century, “natural history” was no longer seen by the Republic of Letters as a part of history’, being rather, as the Encyclopédie put it, ‘an essential part of physics’.10 The new distinction, coming at the end of ‘natural his- tory’, between history (i.e. temporalized history) and physics, is important, here, because this distinction became central among those that Romantic science would strive to sub- late: ‘Not history of physics,’ Ritter will declare, ‘but rather history = physics = history.’11 The bald and redoubled equation here seems, to say the least, lacking in mediation; 8 As Wolf Lepenies remarks, ‘at the turn of the eighteenth century … the French Revolution appeared as a model for scientific as well as political upheaval’: Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. Hanser, 1976), 107. Foucault discusses the new epistemic and philosophical significance of ‘the present’ at this time in his many readings of Kant’s essay ‘What is Aufklärung?’. See e.g. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, tr. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 11. 9 Cf. Joseph Vogl, ‘Einleitung’, in Poetologien des Wissens um 1800 (Munich: Fink, 1999), 7–10. 10 Brian W. Ogilvie, ‘Natural History, Ethics, and Physico-Theology’, in Nancy G. Siraisi and Gianna Pomata (eds), Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern