Had anybody told me at the beginning of my university studies that I would end up as a historian of science, I would not only have shaken my head in disbelief, I would in all probability not even have understood the prophecy. When I left high school, my interests ranged from literary writing to the life sciences. After an initial attempt to study biochemistry, which I aborted after a year, my early university education was in philosophy, with an emphasis on continental philosophy, from Descartes to Spinoza, from Kant to Hegel, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, pretty much the curriculum that would dominate the vast majority of the philosophical institutes in German universities in the mid-1960s. Having moved from Tübingen to Berlin, in addition I absorbed early on, as part of a group of students around Jacob Taubes, what came to be subsumed under the label of structuralism and post-structuralism: linguistics and semiotics from the Prague School through Noam Chomsky to Julien Greimas, grammatology from Ignace Gelb to Jacques Derrida, historical epistemology in its latest, Canguilhemian and Foucauldian versions, literary theory as practiced by Roland Barthes, to mention just a few names that formed the horizon of our student reading circles.
What loomed large in those heydays of the student movement was, as one could put it, a particular form of the question of demarcation, not at all, however, in its traditional form as handed down by analytical philosophy of science. For us students, it took the form of the question of science versus ideology. We used the term “theory,” “critical theory” more precisely – the term “theory” had won preference at the time over the traditional notion of “philosophy” – to help us make that distinction, to help us escape ideology and adopt an, as we saw it, unbiased view of the social reality in which we lived. What fell under the category of critical theory were not only the works of the major proponents of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Herbert Marcuse as its overseas representative –, but also psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan –, structural anthropology – Claude Lévi-Strauss – and, not to forget Karl Marx himself as the taken-for-granted founder of a critical theory of capitalist society.
It is easy to see that, first, history did not figure prominently in this amalgam, and history of science even less so. Second, the natural sciences were conspicuously absent from the picture. They largely fell under the Habermasian verdict of an instrumental rationality that, with its technically determinist connotations, we perceived as being unhelpful to see through and behind the “existing relations” (die bestehenden Verhältnisse), but rather apt to cement them. To adopt a “scientific” position thus largely meant to adhere to a methodically rigorous form of the human and the social sciences, and the structuralist paradigm held a particularly privileged position in this context. A central field for structuralism was linguistics, and it was thus only consequent that, besides my main study in philosophy, I minored in linguistics. It was all, one could summarize, about forms of science trying to identify concealed structures that, in the end, would be responsible for appearances, which depended on these structures and at the same time held them hidden from the gaze and thus disguised them altogether. And it was a structure shared by so widely differing fields of knowledge as Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and anthropology.
There was only one lasting encounter with the history of science I had in these early years of my university life. It must have been in the winter of 1969 or 1970 that, through the mediation of Taubes and his student circle, I made acquaintance with the views on science of Paul Feyerabend. Taubes was then trying to win Feyerabend to the Free University, and in the context of these negotiations, Feyerabend lectured, for a semester, on history of science in Berlin, shuttling back and forth between Dahlem and the London School of Economics where he was lecturing in parallel. It was the time when he was working on his Against Method (Feyerabend Reference Feyerabend1970)Footnote 2 and he was using the history of science basically as a quarry for mining bits and pieces, mainly from the history of physics around the time of Galileo, to demonstrate that practicing science was a basically opportunistic undertaking in which, after all, “anything goes.” My first encounter with the history of the sciences was, thus, mediated through philosophy of science, an epistemology that was rather unheard of at the time. It was a lasting experience for a young student; however, the historical part left me rather untouched. What was much more attractive was Feyerabend's tongue-in-cheek attitude toward any kind of normatively laden scientific positivism that, at least to a certain extent, was in resonance with the critical attitude toward the natural sciences we knew from critical theory, although it came in a much more radical and politically agnostic guise.
Early French Teachers
Among the advanced students in the circle around Taubes was Rodolphe Gasché, and through him, we became acquainted with the work of Jacques Derrida, himself a student of, among others, Georges Canguilhem and Louis Althusser at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris. It was a time of heightened attention to French “theory.” Many of the soon-to-be classics published in the second half of the 1960s were translated into German within less than five years of their appearance.Footnote 3 Gasché himself engaged in a translation of Jacques Derrida's collection of papers, Ecriture et différence.Footnote 4 My fellow student Hanns Zischler and I ventured to translate Derrida's other great book of that year, De la grammatologie.Footnote 5 We were lucky to find, with Metzler in Stuttgart, a press willing to sponsor the translation. From working on the translation of this book, the reading of many of the quoted sources and references in the philosophy of language included, I learned at least as much as from all the rest of the courses in philosophy that made up the spectrum of our curriculum. The take-home lesson, however, had again only marginally, if at all, to do with history of science. It was a philosophical lesson, and it read: In order to be able to position oneself beyond the whole of occidental metaphysics, and that was, for Derrida, clearly the order of the day, there was no way but to deconstruct it, slowly but tenaciously, from within its own fundamental dichotomies. That was the work and labor of différance. There was no simple “beyond” thus. The dichotomy, with which Derrida struggled throughout De la grammatologie, was that between spoken language and writing. Detached from the supremacy of the spoken word, writing could and would be shown to have always already deployed its own forces of iteration. The belated appearance of the book was due to the fact that after a change in publication policy of Metzler, the manuscript lay around for quite a while until it was sold to, and finally published by, Suhrkamp in 1974.
Louis Althusser's epistemology, as exposed in his Pour Marx and Lire le Capital (cf. Althusser Reference Althusser1965, Althusser et al. Reference Althusser1965, and Althusser Reference Althusser1968), was the subject of my master's thesis soon thereafter. In it, I tried to extract, from Althusser's writings of the 1960s, his “materialist” conception of the process of knowledge production, as he saw it prefigured in the writings of Marx. His central idea consisted in conceiving of science as a process of “theoretical practice” that, in the course of its establishment and development, created its own specific procedures of corroboration and evaluation, oscillating between socio-historical and objectal determinations, with the potential of escaping from and breaking with the ideology that belonged, as its respective superstructure, to any particular economic formation. It was this position that earned Althusser and the group with which he was working, at the time, rather fierce accusations of being “scientistic” from their leftist fellows.
In a rather abstract and rudimentary form – despite the “materialist” aspiration of these authors – I was confronted here with, first, the question of what it meant to do science from the perspective of its practice, and second, the question of the historical development of the sciences as a process sui generis. But to neither question, it seemed to me, was there a satisfactory answer to be found, be it in the writings of Althusser or in those of his nineteenth-century mentor Marx. The positions of Karl Popper or Thomas Kuhn, much debated and confronted with each other in those days, did not convince me either. From the rather different perspectives both of Althusser and of Feyerabend, what was distressing about the whole debate was its rationalist, or “theorist,” bias.
Through my involvement with Althusser, the question of science had become of existential importance for me. The solution to the dilemma could not be to go on and quietly pursue a career as a philosopher-theoretician. After some hesitation, I decided to immerse myself in a science and to begin to study all over again, this time biology and chemistry. Here, in the course of these study years during the 1970s, I became confronted with and aware of a way of engaging in the pursuit of science that gave things the priority over what was written about them in textbooks. It was a hard lesson to be learned for someone trained in and acculturated to a philosophical universe. Along with that, first, the question of the relation between science and philosophy acquired a new urgency. Was philosophy to be seen as a prolongation of the sciences in the realm of the abstract and the general? Was it to be seen as a distinct mode of thinking and inquiry? And, first and foremost, what should a philosophy of science look like? Since these were exactly the questions that had come to haunt Althusser since his course of philosophy delivered to science students in 1967 – but only published in 1974 (Althusser Reference Althusser1974) – Althusser continued to accompany my path into the sciences for quite a while. And second, I established, together with my philosopher/historian colleague Peter McLaughlin, a seminar in the history of the life sciences for biology students in the Department of Biology at the Free University of Berlin, in which we made ourselves and the students acquainted with major sources in the history of biology from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. As far as the history of the sciences as an academic discipline is concerned, it was, with the notable exception of a chair in the history of mathematics at the Technical University and a chair in the history of medicine at the Free University, academically virtually nonexistent in Berlin in the early 1970s.
Laboratory Experience
For my diploma thesis, I was lucky to find a place in the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics on the campus of the Free University of Berlin, in a group working on the mechanism of bacterial protein biosynthesis, that is, the function of the the cell organelle by which it was accomplished, the ribosome. I was familiar with the epistemological and the historical challenges of molecular biology through the books of Jacques Monod (Reference Monod1970) and the late François Jacob (Reference Jacob1970). Both books had formed the subject of our student seminars.Footnote 6 It was inconceivable in those days to get a diploma in biology without doing experimental work. But except for a course where we learned to extract DNA from bacterial cells, I had had no contact so far with the laboratory life of molecular biology. It was a thorough change of perspective. I had entered the lab with the idea in mind that I would go on, when and wherever an opportunity would arise, with philosophy of science after I had finished my studies in biology. Within a year, that idea had vanished. The fascination with laboratory work had taken over, and it would last for the next decade.
I became completely immersed in doing experiments and put aside my preconceptions over how the sciences actually might work and how they changed over time. These questions became replaced by the experience of what it meant to be in a situation where knowledge had still to be gained and nobody could tell exactly in which direction one would have to look for it. Proceeding from one test tube experiment to the next became an ongoing adventure. You set up an experiment in the morning, carry it out during the day, process the radioactive samples, put them in the scintillation counter to be counted overnight, and look at the results when you return to the lab next morning. The outcome determines where you go next. Moreover, one even was confronted with situations in which phenomena showed up that one would not have been able to anticipate. As all of us in the group, I proceeded from the standard picture of the so-called peptide elongation process – how, aminoacid after aminoacid, new building blocks are added to a growing protein chain according to the genetic information provided by a particular messenger RNA – and was intrigued when the results did not conform to the expectation. As time went on, it even became an obsession to create an experimental setup that would not only solve your actual question, but also allow for unprecedented effects that would lead you to the characterization of phenomena beyond what you possibly could anticipate. A feeling for the epistemic object, as esoteric an object as the mechanism of peptide bond formation – that is, the way in which proteins are fabricated in the cell – replaced apriori reasoning. It changed into reasoning with test tubes. Reading and writing gave way to experimental groping and to handling, arranging, combining, and rearranging the traces that the daily experiments left behind them and that one had to make sense of. The game of knowledge production took over. Basically, it took the form of arranging the available bits and pieces of research technology – ultracentrifugation, radioactive tracing, electrophoresis, ion exchange chromatography – in the form of a “system” that would, at one and the same time, technically channel your questions and epistemically create a space of exploration. Experimental practice became the ground from which theoretical reasoning emerged and into which it would have to tie if it was to be effective. Theoretical reasoning was as good as it allowed one to conduct clever experiments. It was not granted by an overarching system; its justification was its maieutic function in the experimental engagement. Theoretical pluralism and historical situatedness became lived experiences, conceptual underdetermination not a flaw, but a challenge and a chance to go further. To my disappointment as well as enlightenment, none of the competing visions on science that had occupied my spirits as a philosopher helped me in any way to improve my experimental system. The only one who seemed to have been in touch with the realities of a life in research was Paul Feyerabend with his stress on the opportunistic face of research processes in science. Be that as it may, ideas as well as experiments remained precarious elements in a process that only existed as a chain of replacements. Research papers – the written products of one's work and the communication units of one's “findings” – were more or less ephemeral stages and historically transient marks in this ongoing and virtually unending process.
In parallel to and as a result of this sobering – and equally enchanting – experience of a life in the laboratory, my philosophical ambitions properly speaking faded more and more into the background. They gave way to an increasing interest in a theoretically demanding, reflective history of science. Georges Canguilhem's Idéologie et rationalité dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie (Reference Canguilhem1977) became a hallmark and a point of orientation at this turn for me. In fact, Canguilhem, who had not until that point caught my greater attention in my forays into French theory, appeared to offer the perspective, as he himself once put it, in taking up a word of Eduard Dijksterhuis, of seeing the history of the sciences not only as their memory, but as a veritable laboratory for epistemology. This was, then, a truly acceptable, though perhaps only partial, parallel universe to the actual workings of a biological laboratory. And the re-publication in 1980 of Ludwik Fleck's Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache added the historically minded gaze of the experimenter to Canguilhem's more conceptually oriented historical epistemology.Footnote 7 Against this background, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life (Reference Latour and Woolgar1986), which must have fallen into my hands after its second edition in the middle of the 1980s, made rather the impression of an irritation on somebody who was not ethnographing but actually living in the midst of and working with all those purported “inscriptions.” Woolgar and Latour had clearly a point to make about the structure of experimental practice, and their ethnomethodical forays into a laboratory culture of a cutting-edge Californian biomedical lab added a new way of assessing science in the making, but it appeared that they were simply not interested in the science that went on in Roger Guillemin's laboratory.
On the whole, however, it is fair to say that in the decade between 1980 and 1990, experimentation had moved center stage for me, and history of science was playing the role of something like a weekend writing desk activity that served as little more than a compensation, a counterbalance to my laboratory activity.
Synthesis
A more detached view on scientific practice became possible for me only when I left the laboratory at the beginning of the 1990s. Time had come to do what I originally had imagined to do right after the completion of my studies in biology. But after this “detour” of a long experimental decade my philosophical ambitions had changed. Questions such as what an “organism” really is – core questions of a philosophy of biology – had never really interested me. What had haunted me was to find an answer to the question of what the essence of “science” was. Now, this was no longer my concern. The question had shifted from what science really and in essence was to what scientists do when they practice their trade that comes in so many different shades and grades. Epistemology had taken over on ontology, and in addition, the conviction had hardened that a fruitful, rich enough epistemology could only be historical in nature.
During a sabbatical in the Program in History of Science at Stanford in 1989/1990 with Tim Lenoir, I engaged in a case study on the history of test tube protein synthesis research. The subject allowed me to have recourse to my own laboratory experience while screening all the available literature and laboratory notebook records of a number of the actors who were still around as well as having conversations with them. Actually, one could even say that what I was doing was to engage in the archaeology of my own laboratory work. This circumstance proved to be an invaluable background for writing Toward a History of Epistemic Things.
Another background came to be reactivated in the course of this study. The experience of translating Derrida's Grammatology and the lessons it contained had almost faded in the lapse of twenty years of time. But now, in reflecting about how to characterize the process of experimentation and find the right vocabulary to convey not only the gist of its structure, but also the temporal dynamics it displayed, it occurred to me that Derrida, although he, in his own work, appeared far away from historical science studies, had more to offer, with his account of the writing process in terms of “trace” and “différance,” according to its spatial and temporal dimensions, respectively, than all the philosophers and historians of science that had crossed my path until then.
Two concepts stood central in this historical-epistemological approach to twentieth-century experimentation. One of them was the concept of “experimental system,” the other one that of “epistemic thing.”Footnote 8 It was an approach to experimental practice that tried to account for two of its essential features. The first was to take seriously the experiment as a generator of novelty, and thus to try to bring back the practical, material context of discovery into the realm of epistemology from which philosophy of science had worked long and hard to exclude it. The notion of epistemic thing was to help to capture the moment of indecision and indeterminacy that is so characteristic for the research process, or of “unconceptuality,” to say it in the words of the philosopher Hans Blumenberg (Reference Blumenberg2007). The notion came to stand for a gesture that pointed to the future without pretending to anticipate it. At the same time, it should make clear that at the core of the research process, one had to do with a kind of indeterminate materiality that was malleable enough to allow for unprecedented outlooks and resistant enough to hold in check the process of conceptualization.
The second feature was taken up and displayed by the concept of experimental system. It was to stress and take seriously that modern empirical research in the natural sciences is unthinkable without the mediation of a plethora of research instruments and devices of sorts that in one combination or other, are responsible for shaping the epistemic objects under enquiry. As technical conditions, they convey a certain stability to the experimental systems circling around the more elusive epistemic things. Although essentially local in their nature, related experimental systems can form more or less translocal experimental cultures over more or less extended periods of time.
It appeared thus that from such a vantage point the traditional history of disciplines could be bypassed. A history of the sciences, to be more precise, a history of scientific research – other than in the traditional categories of “theories” and “institutions” – became envisageable, with a thorough entrenchment in detail and, at the same time, the potential to cover broader historical grounds. Accordingly, this work inserted itself in, was a particular expression of, and gave a special slant to a broader movement that became covered under the label of the “practical turn” in the history and philosophy of science of the late twentieth century.
For me, this turn had taken the form of a history and epistemology of experimentation. In the center of that history and epistemology stand, not values, not symbols, but things. Orienting the history of science toward a history of epistemic things and their relations, on the one hand, among each other, and on the other, with things in art and other areas of cultural creativity, has been the stake of that move. Culture has always been, and still is material in its essence, and the sciences, in their making as well as in their technical products, are materially transforming our world. To give an account of this transformation means, first and foremost, to shape the conceptual tools with which such an account becomes possible.
Eclipse: Why Is History of Science Important, and Is It?
With that, I come to the present, and with that, things become necessarily messier. The challenge remains that scientific-practice studies tend to be micro studies and thus fail to deal with longer duration phenomena in the development of the sciences. This is a historiographical challenge for the present and it will remain one for the future. I have myself no patent solution to the problem. With A Cultural History of Heredity (cf. Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2012), my colleague Staffan Müller-Wille and I recently tried to meet the challenge by having recourse to a culturally embedded history of a concept in its material manifestations, that of heredity, taking up and developing a step further the legacy of Georges Canguilhem (cf. Canguilhem Reference Canguilhem1966).
History of science, as well as the sciences it studies, is itself a historically changing enterprise. For the larger part of the twentieth century, it sought to derive its coherence from organizing itself into a “discipline” with more or less rigorous boundaries, be it with respect to the sciences themselves, be it with respect to philosophy of science, be it with respect to other fields of study that deal with the sciences as a cultural phenomenon, such as sociology of science, anthropology of science, and science and technology studies more broadly. As long as the historiography of the sciences saw itself as a history of scientific theories, or at least a history of ideas, there could be some justification for this boundary work. But it has driven the larger part of the history of the sciences into an “antiquarian” edge, to take up a notion of Friedrich Nietzsche (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche and Grey1995). From a practice point of view, this drive has become altogether problematic, and it is in urgent need of renegotiation. In which direction such renegotiation should go, is open for debate. Historical epistemology following the French tradition can be seen as a model for the successful integration of history with philosophy of science. But this, as I see it, is just the beginning of a more integrated way of studying the sciences and of relating them to other areas of cultural activity. Other efforts will have to follow, but what they will look like cannot be a matter of prescription.
There is one thing in this context I would like to insist on, and one that even a large part of the protagonists of the practical turn have neglected. It is the critical engagement with the actual sciences. From the vantage point of a positivistic historiography, however sophisticated, where taking position is equated with partiality, this request is of course counter-indicated. I see it, however, as a necessary condition for even the further existence of history of science and its ability to participate in shaping a field of reflection in which the sciences in all their aspects as a cultural activity that increasingly pervades our lives can be critically dealt with. Aristocratic abstinence from this task will in the end undermine the history of science's conditions of existence, indeed its raison d'être. History alone, that is, is not enough. Such a space of reflection with, of course, its own rules of action and procedures of advancement, will not only be the proper home for the history of the sciences of the future, it will also be, in the long run, a necessary ingredient of the further development of the sciences themselves. The existence of such a discourse has been taken for granted for centuries, in our societies, as far as other areas of cultural activity are concerned, such as literature, music, and art. For the sciences, so it seems, an equivalent discourse appears harder to achieve. There is work to be done. One of the lessons I learned from and one of the chances I experienced during my directorship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science was that it takes more than a solitary individual to accomplish this task, and that it must, in the end, not only be seen as the collective work of groups, but that of generations. To do so, however, to come back to my earlier remarks, means to work on an open chain of objects that one deems to be worthy of such a collective effort. Without this chain of things, neither continuity in time nor the breaks in this continuity could be experienced.
