The Metamorphosis of the Scientist

FREDERICK AMRINE The Metamorphosis of the Scientist In memory of Karl Ernst Schaefer. The object of research is no longer nature itself but man's investigation of nature. — Werner Heisenberg1 Since every thing in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is because the corresponding faculty is notyet active. — Emerson, "The Poet" How quick to know, and how slow to practice we are! - Goethe, Italian Journey2 Startling as the claim might sound to those who would prefer to cast him as a Romantic reactionary or even a kind of scientific Luddite, Goethe can be shown to have anticipated many of the most important tenets of contemporary philosophy of science. In an early attack on conventional scientific historiography, Paul Feyerabend even held Goethe up as a model, arguing that he had anticipated contemporary objections to the "dogmatic" treatment of Newton's theory, and praising Goethe's "critical sense" as a historian of science.3 Goethe's warning that "[t]he most destructive prejudice is that which would put any branch of scientific research under the ban" ["Das schädlichste Vorurteil ist, daß irgendeine Art Naturuntersuchung mit dem Bann belegt werden könne"],4 that as it were a hundred different methods should be allowed to blossom, sounds in fact rather like Feyerabend himself (although there are of course other more fundamental differences). Goethe also doubted the possibility of "rational reconstruction" in science, arguing in a strikingly contemporary idiom that "the history of science is science itself ["so läßt sich hier auch wohl behaupten, daß die Geschichte der Wissenschaft die Wissenschaft selbst sei"].5 Most important, 188 Frederick Amrine Goethe was well aware that there is not, and cannot be, any neutral observation language: An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never met, even by those who make it: i.e., that empirical data should be presented without any theoretical context, leaving the reader, the student, to his own devices in judging it. This demand seems odd because it is useless simply to look at something. Every act of looking turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act of reflection into the making of associations; thus it is evident that we theorize every time we look carefully at the world. ("Preface," Theory of Color, Miller 159) [Ist es doch eine höchst wunderliche Forderung, die wohl manchmal gemacht, aber selbst von denen, die sie machen, nicht erfüllt wird: Erfahrungen solle man ohne irgendein theoretisches Band vortragen und dem Leser, dem Schüler überlassen, sich selbst nach Belieben irgendeine Überzeugung zu bilden. Denn das bloße Anblicken einer Sache kann uns nicht fördern. Jedes Ansehen geht über in ein Betrachten, jedes Betrachten in ein Sinnen, jedes Sinnen in ein Verknüpfen, und so kann man sagen, daß wir schon bei jedem aufmerksamen Blick in die Welt theoretisieren. (HA 13:317)] Indeed, Goethe was even present when the "opening shot" of the revolution in theory was fired,6 for at the head of his epoch-making chapter on the "theory-ladenness" of perception, N.R. Hanson placed as an epigraph Goethe's distich "War nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, / Die Sonne könnt' es nie erblicken."7 If it was Hanson who fired the opening shot of this revolution, it was of course Thomas Kuhn who won the decisive battle. The paradigm shift in the philosophy of science inaugurated by his book has been so profound, in fact, that one might even want to divide the history of that discipline into B.K. and A.K. — "before Kuhn" and "after Kuhn" — with suitable typological allowances for earlier "prophets" such as Koyré,8 Hanson, and Toulmin.9 The main argument of Kuhn's book is too well known to require extensive recapitulation; suffice it to say that while others had argued that reductionism was not borne out by the historical evidence in this or that individual case, Kuhn applied the argument to the history of science as a whole and, more important, was able to tell us why it does not work. Yet The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to which has been attributed "a wider academic influence than any other single...