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Carnal Spirit. Matthew W. Maguire
Читать онлайн.Название Carnal Spirit
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isbn 9780812296105
Автор произведения Matthew W. Maguire
Издательство Ingram
In his ambitions for a comprehensively scientific account of the human in history and beyond, Simiand did not speak only for sociology. By the early years of the twentieth century, a scientific turn had left few disciplines untouched, from political economy to the humanities to psychology.
Léon Walras—who would later be lauded or condemned as one of the founders of efficient market economics—wrote a book attempting to reconcile his sympathies with liberalism and socialism68—his Studies of Social Economy—in 1896. Among his goals was to abandon the moral and qualitative arguments of traditional political economy in favor of a rigorously demonstrable “scientific truth”69 of economics.
Others would make even more expansive claims, as a “scientific” ethos spread to the humanities themselves. Gustave Lanson wrote that for reasons of intellectual honesty and national security alike, the scientific “esprit” should “predominate everywhere, even in literary education,” since “science alone imparts the taste and the sense of the truth.” Following a similar logic, historians like Charles Langlois and Seignobos rejected any role for aesthetics in history: a kind of denuded knowledge was the only purpose of their work.70 Lanson went further: “The true modern humanities are the sciences.”71 In fact, Lanson said he had “no difficulty” in acknowledging that in contrast to those who work upon “the construction of laws and generalizations” above, those who “do literary history” properly “work in the basement of science.”72
The natural sciences themselves—if one inexplicably persists in the puerile hope that the true humanities are the humanities—flourished in the New Sorbonne and the research institutes of Paris. In particular, they promised imminent breakthroughs in the study of human beings as scientific objects. For example, a breathless article by the biologist Alfred Dastre of the Sorbonne, entitled simply “The Nervous System,” was published in April 1900 in the widely circulated and intellectually prestigious journal Revue des deux mondes. Dastre declared, “One day, we can hope to know the laws that regulate the material states of the brain, the relations that exist among them, their sequences and their reciprocal influences. They will be the same laws, the same relations, the same sequences that will allow us to go to the other side of the ditch, into the psychological domain, to illuminate the functioning of the soul.”73
According to Dastre, a host of findings from scholars around the world would take modern science to this seemingly ultimate materialism, in which the soul would be understood above all as matter in motion. Some excitedly reported results could seem rather modest: an uncharitable observer might conclude that the notion that frogs whose brains are removed have a sort of consciousness in their spinal fluid74 and that degrees of consciousness ascend to voluntary movement, stands at some considerable remove from a materialist eschaton. But Dastre assures his readers that “no other scientific field is more investigated,” with “so many publications and papers.” One “could fill libraries with the ones that appear each year.”75
Yet Dastre not only declared his confidence that materialism would only grow in explanatory power. He also, somewhat more discreetly, acknowledged his assumption that questions of volition and consciousness must be bracketed out of the field altogether (though the field was itself fascinated by consciousness). Dastre acknowledged this undemonstrable commitment. He wanted “to avoid entering into philosophical controversies” by limiting the discipline to physical motions and objects.76
Similar projects that aspired to collapse mind into brain enjoyed considerable prominence in the early decades of the Third Republic. In 1881, Théodule Ribot published The Diseases of Memory,77 in which memory was assumed to be an entirely physiological phenomenon: by 1906, it had gone through eighteen editions,78 and by that time Ribot had long been a professor at the Collège de France. Other research in Paris—following some of the work done in Germany by Wilhelm Wundt (whose own positions were relatively nuanced)—became fascinated by the possibilities of physiology as a way to investigate the brain, itself the focus of an international community of researchers.79 Consciousness was not a reliable or especially interesting witness to experience; rather, the trained scientist could disclose what personal, qualitative experience had long hidden.
Throughout higher education and educated commentary, the prestige of natural and social science, and their imitative forms in the humanities, had undergone a meteoric ascent between 1870 and 1900. Altering Péguy’s term slightly, one could speak of an intellectual coalition—less unified than Péguy’s own term “party,” more cohesive than a tendency—that had achieved great prominence at the start of the new century.
For all their differences, the members of this coalition conceived time in unwaveringly linear terms, and history as material, moral, social, and above all scientific progress along that temporal line. It inclined strongly to reject both religious revelation and “high” metaphysics as incredible artifacts of a more primitive past (“really” belonging to earlier points along that temporal line), and believed that accompanied by a scholarly affect of meticulous bourgeois sobriety—adopted by trained specialists engaged in the Cartesian crowd-sourcing of knowledge—a generally positivist notion of science would lead humanity forward. Freedom was not to be found in an affirmation of free will (now understood to be not only inflected or constrained but severely restrained or even determined entirely by either material or social laws); rather, it was to be found through a cumulative critique and repudiation of the past and its “illusions” in favor of brain studies and neurology, social fact, mathematically driven economics, history, and literature as scientific disciplines, and so on.
By pursuing these ends, both national and global society would embark upon a course of perpetual reformation, more just, more rational, and faithful to fact. New laws of nature and society—variously of history, technology, and money—would be the fundaments of novel and uncompromisingly modern orders of things. In particular, with rare exceptions, the thought and culture of all ages prior to the late eighteenth century now serve primarily as raw materials for academic industries of scholarship and science, rather than seeking out the work of a more distant history as a dialogical partner in understanding. In Renan’s radical forms of a “future science,” if human beings must eventually become raw materials in turn—for a science that conquers human nature as the last frontier in the conquest of nature—so be it.
Beyond their stated intellectual ambitions, the members of this broad intellectual coalition held very considerable influence over academic appointments, as well as ambitious reforms of French education, from primary school through university. This was especially true for Durkheim and his students.
The social sciences in particular began to institutionalize themselves in French education in the thirty years before the Great War. The theology faculty in French universities was abolished in 1885.80 The next year, the École Pratique des Hautes Études founded a “fifth section” dedicated to the study of “religious sciences,” in which sociologists associated with Durkheim were soon appointed in significant numbers.81 The fifth section assumed the unique legitimacy of modern research methods and applied them to explain a past in modern social-scientific terms; in this sense, it was altogether different from a theology faculty, which tries to interpret an exemplary or revelatory past, through which the present can better understand itself.
Sociology positions had been almost nonexistent in French universities, and students trained by Durkheim and his circle began to occupy posts in “law, education, linguistics, religion,” and other disciplines, as well as teaching philosophy in lycées.82 This led many advocates of other disciplines to conclude that Durkheim and his circle were academic conquistadores, building their movement at the expense of their own.83 The fact that there was a formal requirement for the president of the French Republic to approve academic appointments84 gave the rapid ascent of Durkheimian sociology a political cast.
The ascent of Durkheim and his allies was particularly