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Some historians of science today reject the notion inherited from the philosophy of science that “objectivity” is an achievement of pure rationality and instead argue that it is an achievement of virtue. They trace the meaning of “objectivity” back to various moral, ethical, and aesthetic discourses, all of which belong to practices of subjectivities. Peter Dear points out that seventeenth -century “objectivity” rested entirely on personal “disinterestedness.” By drawing on both David Bloor’s claim that “objectivity” can be understood only in terms of social history and Theodore Porter’s observation that the collapse of scholastic hierarchies gave birth to “disinterestedness,” Dear concludes that “objectivity” conceals a history of intricate relations between power and subjectivity.1 Similarly, Lorraine Daston claims that the history of “objectivity” is a moral history, since aesthetics and moral philosophy, rather than natural science, constitute its native soil. To press this point further, she goes back to the eighteenth-century aesthetics and moral philosophy of Hume, Smith, and Shaftesbury in order to show that what is variously called “contemplative joy,” “catholic and universal beauty,” and the “virtue of disinterestedness ,” all, in one way or another, express the conditions of subjectivity , rather than some Kantian apersonal and transcendental rules of reasoning . Beginning with Descartes and particularly with Kant, Daston argues, objectivity’s multiplicities of ontological, epistemological, and socially consensual meanings converged, by the second half of the nineteenth century, into a single meaning: “ontological objectivity.”2 Similarly, in her book Cognition and Eros, Robin May Schott tethers “objectivity” to asceticism: ”the emphasis on distancing thought from sensualism grew out of an ascetic practice by which men thought to transcend the vicissitudes of the phenomenal world, to escape the mortal fate implicit in the natural life cycle of human beings.”3 Steve Shapin’s case study of Boyle also treats the subject of the scientist ’s practices of the self as a gentleman. Shapin demonstrates that Boyle’s 33 T W O T h e Pe r v e r s i o n o f O b j e c t i v i t y a n d t h e O b j e c t i v i t y o f Pe r v e r s i o n “life of solitary disengagement,” his “solitary retirements,” involved not only special mental conditions but, above all, specific conditions of bodily discipline that resembled those of stoic apatheia. Boyle, Shapin claims, gains trust for his experiments by virtue of his negative attitude towards his body and pleasures. Boyle’s physical frailty, his delicate appearance—he was often described as resembling transparent “Venetian glass”—proved, for his contemporaries , that he was in fact detached from life and was committed to the rational discipline of the civic order. It is this mastery over the body and pleasures that makes him a disinterested observer, but at the same time distinguishes him from the “mere fine gentleman” who, Boyle claims, “was identified as the servant of his animal nature, as unfree in the ostensible taking of his ‘pleasure’ as any servant acting at the behest of a human master.”4 As Shapin shows, with Boyle, “objectivity” had a distinct bodily appearance and an inscribed asceticism. The relation between “objectivity” and morality is even more pronounced in James Bono’s history of scientific language. He argues that the seventeenth-century language of scientific objectivity emerged as a reaction to the overall moral decline of that time, which brought about an effort among the male-educated elite to reconstruct postlapsarian languages as a way of achieving a moral redemption from fallen nature, nature that was implicated in the fall from grace and the loss of an Adamic knowledge of God. The first step towards this reconstruction was to objectify nature as a woman, stressing the Christian view that woman’s sensuality caused the fall and the loss of Adamic knowledge, and to reclaim the lost knowledge by imposing masculine rationality onto nature, thereby re-establishing control over it. As the extension of human decay, languages suffered from reflecting erroneous reality; therefore the role of science was fundamentally moral and redemptive, seeking truth through the moral reconstruction of the self. As Bono writes: “This new Pentecostal narrative of man’s fall and redemption hence pointed toward emphasis upon human industry and the observation of nature in all its diversity—and away from a symbolic ordering of nature— that was to become a hallmark of the new science of Bacon, Galileo, Mersenne...

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