Let us begin by considering a series of letters written in 1863 by Max Vigne, a humble imperial surveyor in India, to his wife at home in England. In the course of his affectionate and finely observed correspondence, Vigne comes to think of himself for the first time as a naturalist. He recounts his growing fascination with botany, particularly the new field of plant geography, and he expresses a keen desire to share this new knowledge—and his newfound identity—with his faraway wife, Clara.
Everything I am seeing and doing is so new . . . When I lie down to sleep everything spins in my brain. I can only make sense of my life the way I have made sense of everything, since we first met: by describing it to you. That great gift you have always had of listening, asking such excellent questions—when I tell you enough to let you imagine me clearly, then I can imagine myself.
In these lines Vigne is proposing what might strike us at first as a surprising connection between scientific observation and private life. He seems to derive his standard of clear description—the backbone of his scientific work as a naturalist—not from professional norms or philosophical reflections, but rather from an ideal of intimacy. In subsequent letters Vigne makes clear that his study of the geographical relations among plants is part of a more personal quest for knowledge: an attempt to make sense of the persistence of his own identity during his transformative experiences of travel. “Only now do I begin to grasp the principles of growth and change in the plants I learned to name in the woods, those we have grown at home—there is a science to this. Something that transcends mere identification.” He likens the plant's essential and enduring form to the bond he shares with Clara:
The point, dear heart, is that through all these transformations one can still discern the original morphology; the original character is altered yet not lost. In our separation our lives are changing, our bond to each other is changing. Yet still we are essentially the same.
These letters never reached Vigne's wife, because neither he, nor Clara, nor the letters themselves ever really existed. They are fictions, penned not by a nineteenth-century naturalist but by the twenty-first-century novelist, Andrea Barrett.Footnote 1 Why begin a historiographical essay with fiction? In part because in very few cases have historians yet gone to the trouble of reconstructing such profound resonances between familial and scientific experiences. As historians, we are not yet sure how to read domestic documents as sources for the history of knowledge production. “Flimsy lists of things to do, large parchment mortgages, ‘private letters of no consequence’”—these are among the historical documents that we need to learn to read for their clues to intellectual history.Footnote 2
At the intersection of the history of science with the history of the family lies the question how science grasps relations of similarity and difference—connections between objects across time and space, whether plants, atoms, or humans. Science is used here in the broad sense of systematic knowledge, both natural and social. I view the household as the space where the emotional practices of cognition are learned; that is, as the training ground for the affective habits of perceiving resemblances and oppositions.Footnote 3 If, as has often been claimed, science is an “epistemology of common experience,” then it behooves us as historians to understand how scientists come to hold one or another conception of “the common.”
In this vein, Carlo Ginzburg has drawn our attention to the historical emergence of two organizing metaphors in the sciences: “family resemblances” and “family trees.” As Ginzburg notes, “Cognitive metaphors do not work in a void; they interact with empirical evidence, with social and biographical circumstances, with all kinds of aims and constraints—aesthetic, moral, and political.”Footnote 4 And yet, when Ginzburg explores the intellectual contexts in which Wittgenstein and Galton developed their notions of resemblances and trees, he leaves aside the biographical circumstances to which the metaphors most obviously point. Here are two thinkers from unusually prominent families, each of whom carved his own identity in part by embracing or rejecting that family legacy.Footnote 5 Are their family lives not part of their intellectual context? Conversely, in Alexander Waugh's House of Wittgenstein (2008), as in Paul Reitter's otherwise thoughtful review of it, we find intellectual historians taking up Wittgenstein's family life without any mention of his concept of family resemblance. Reitter laments that “our conversation about family biography has not gotten off the ground,” and I am largely inclined to agree.Footnote 6 And yet there are a number of recent efforts that point the way forward.
SCIENTIFIC FAMILIES IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
Intellectual historians tell us that the separation between intellectual work and domestic life has extraordinarily deep roots in Western history. They trace this division back at least to the celibacy of the professoriate in the Middle Ages. As Gadi Algazi has argued, the elimination of celibacy as a prerequisite of academic teaching in the fifteenth century led to the construction of a new professorial persona. Married professors found ways to build invisible walls between their domestic and intellectual lives, to learn what Algazi calls the “habit” of “emotional detachment.”Footnote 7 According to conventional historical narratives, the walls between family life and scholarly work were reinforced by the rise of the doctrine of separate spheres in the eighteenth century. As Rousseau famously insisted, intellectual work should not be conducted at home, because “reason takes on more weight” outside the womanly sphere of the family.Footnote 8
Yet in the course of the French Revolution, Rousseau's faith in the rationality of the public sphere came to seem somewhat misplaced. In post-Revolutionary Europe, the home once again beckoned to scholars, now as a retreat from the madness of the “crowd,” and as a space for moral purification. This was the era that saw the crystallization of a modern ideology of the home as a space for the cultivation of the self. In this way, the post-Revolutionary home came to be seen as an ideal site for study and contemplation. The nineteenth-century reformer Samuel Smiles extolled the home as a “place of enlightenment and civility, ‘suitable for the growth of the manliest natures.’”Footnote 9
Even the professionalization of the sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not necessitate a separation of work from family. Indeed, historians of the European family have recently observed that family partnerships became a model of organization not only for capitalist enterprises but also for newly emerging intellectual professions.Footnote 10 From this perspective, the processes of academic professionalization and the strengthening of domestic ties reinforced each other. Indeed, academic dynasties were ubiquitous and powerful in nineteenth-century Europe, and we now have intellectual biographies of some of the most influential of these families (e.g. the Herschels, the Webers, the Darwins, the Exners).Footnote 11 Nineteenth-century scholars themselves were well aware of this phenomenon. When the eugenicist Francis Galton first catalogued these dynasties in his Hereditary Genius, he was merely codifying familiar facts.
Recent work in the history of science indicates further that homes remained key sites of scientific research during and after what has slightly misleadingly been termed the nineteenth-century laboratory “revolution.”Footnote 12 Laboratories were often makeshift arrangements in a spare room of a scientist's home. Indeed, even those scientists strenuously promoting the forms of discipline associated with the new laboratories—and the values of professionalization more broadly—often viewed the domestic sphere as the proper space for exercising reason. There they were shielded from the nefarious influences of public life: the drive toward narrow specialization, competition, and profit. These men often looked to their families to imbue their science with spiritual value. Paul White has vividly demonstrated these attitudes in the case of Thomas Henry Huxley. White explains that Huxley
presented himself as someone injured by the strife and self-interest that governed public life and whose manhood depended on securing a place of work that was removed—like the Victorian sanctuary of “home”—from the sordid intrigue of politics and the grinding routine of professional pursuits.Footnote 13
It was on this tradition that the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard drew in 1958 when he defined the home in cerebral terms: it was the space that “protects the dreamer; the house allows one to dream in peace.”Footnote 14 In many respects, then, the home appeared to be a natural space for intellectual work well into the twentieth century.Footnote 15 Yet it remained virtually invisible to historians of science until quite recently.
THE ABSOLUTE AND THE RELATIVE: THE DE MORGANS
In 1995 the historian of mathematics Joan Richards traveled to Berlin with her two sons for a sabbatical year at the Wissenschaftskolleg. She planned to spend the year writing a book about the Victorian mathematician Augustus De Morgan and his theory of probability. Angles of Reflection is not the book she set out to write—but it is a brilliant and important book. It charts the accident that soon befell her younger son, and her travails as she tried to make her way through the German health care system in search of proper care for him. Viewed through the lens of her concern for her son, her Victorian documents take on entirely new meanings. Angles of Reflection is the story of how the boundary between a scholar's personal and professional lives crumbled as a result of a playground mishap. Or rather, it is the story of how that boundary came to look like a willful and historically contingent delusion. In short, we should credit Richards with the insight that the records of domestic and scholarly life should be allowed to illuminate each other; the life of the mind and the life of the family can and should be reconstructed together.
What Richards comes to understand in the course of her year in Berlin is that De Morgan's stern commitment to the absolutes of mathematics was made possible not simply by logic or father but by his marriage. By assigning much of the emotional work of the family to his wife, Sophia, De Morgan was able to protect his ideal of absolute truth from the subtleties of a more personal perspective. Richards shows how the non-absolute was relegated to the female sphere and shorn of value: knowledge that was merely “relative;” certainties that were merely “moral;” “beliefs” that could not stand up to “truths”—all these became the province of women. With further research, Richards manages to recover the alternative epistemology that governed Sophia's experiments with spiritualism. In contrast to De Morgan's conception of absolute logical truth, Sophia
emphasized the importance of working with people who were constructively committed to the experience . . . Sophia's openness required a completely different view of words and their relations to meaning than that I had found in Augustus's logic . . . for Sophia, listening was an active process, and understanding was as much a function of a listener's internal state as it was of the words that he or she was trying to decipher.Footnote 16
Richards is inclined to be wary of Sophia's spiritualism, and she can hardly ignore the shortcomings of what she calls Sophia's “two-way epistemology.” Yet she feels that her eyes have been opened, and she can no longer view De Morgan's logic uncritically. Finding a drawing by his daughter on the back of one of his mathematical manuscripts, she remarks,
De Morgan was so intent on his search for logical certainty that his own daughter's sparkling arctic world of flying birds and kissing Eskimos was frozen into cold and rigid absolutes. I understood the justification for his efforts, the reasons for his attempt to find a rational world in which people could communicate across religious differences. It was a noble vision, one that had always overcome my doubts and struggles in the past. But in Berlin I saw that the price was just too high. Even if he were to succeed in his logical program, I could not rejoice in the world that he was constructing.Footnote 17
As confident as Richards is in this new outlook, she also struggles with the sense that her interpretation does violence to the life that the De Morgans tried to build for themselves:
The wall between the public and the private, the personal and the professional, the wall that had failed me so spectacularly, was essential to both of them. Neither would have been sympathetic to my attempts to incorporate both of their roles into a single life, a single reality. The issue went beyond sympathy. Augustus and Sophia and the world they had inhabited had defined the very words that I might use to construct a new approach. It was their careful parceling of the world that had left me so frustrated in my attempts to understand and explain.Footnote 18
Richards thus leaves us as historians wondering about the prospects for our own projects of understanding and explanation. Can we succeed in grasping the resonances between our actors’ personal and intellectual worlds if they themselves were so intent on denying them?
Richards was not entirely alone in posing such questions in the 1990s. At the time, feminist historians of science were beginning to uncover the unacknowledged contributions often made by women to their husbands’ scientific work.Footnote 19 This literature was largely concerned with restoring credit to overlooked women and assessing the success or failure of their collaborative strategies. More recent studies of “collaborative couples” have gone further toward historicizing these strategies in the contexts of earlier social norms.Footnote 20 Such studies have generally pursued questions of social rather than intellectual history, with little to say about the evolution of scientific ideas. Yet they can be quite revealing about the cultural imperative to deny the influence of the domestic sphere on those ideas. Notable in this respect is Emily Levine's recent study of the twentieth-century art historians Dora and Erwin Panofsky.Footnote 21 Levine not only recounts Dora Panofsky's systematic disenfranchisement from the academic community, which insisted on attributing conceptual work to men and assumed women to be capable merely of “indexing.” Levine also shows how this division of labor was thrown into question by the couple's only explicitly co-authored publication, a history of the figure of Pandora (a pun that greatly amused the authors). Pandora's Box argued that the humanist tradition had suppressed the Pandora myth, with its association between curiosity and sensuality, in order to protect an impersonal, disembodied ideal of knowledge. Levine reads the Panofskys’ recovery of this history as a resurgence of the repressed knowledge that even the most lofty intellectual creation is rooted in a context of personal relations. She closes with an appeal to historians to take seriously the “epistemological consequences” of domestic relationships.
THE OBJECTIVE AND THE FATHERLY: THE DARWINS
Paul White takes up that challenge in a recent essay on what he helpfully calls the “emotional economy” of Charles Darwin's life and work. White observes that the scientific questions addressed by Darwin were often inspired by the household in which he carried out his research from 1842 to his death forty years later. “It was partly the domestic setting of his scientific work, the proximity of his scientific ‘objects’ to his own familial affections, that prompted his methodological innovations.”Footnote 22 White shows, however, that Darwin carefully adopted different points of view, depending on whether he was observing in the persona of the naturalist or that of the family man. Thus, for instance, the scientific notes he took on his infant son William bear no trace of emotional involvement with the object of study. “The father and the scientific observer are not fused; they are split. When William cried, we must imagine that either Darwin's paternal feelings or his scientific notebook were laid aside.” White goes on to show how the son's role in his father's research shifted as he grew. For the adolescent William, mimicking his father's scholarly persona was one way to express his devotion to him. White rightly emphasizes this familial dimension of objectivity: “Father love, which had been suppressed in order to convert the son into an object of study, can now join with fatherly pride and together sustain patient observation. Filial devotion, in turn, can be expressed through a regimen of scientific restraint, enthusiasm for discovery, and the promise of authorship.”
White concludes that we should understand objectivity in this context as a practice that was neither solitary nor unemotional. On the contrary, he explains:
Such performances were never isolated, even in the study, the private journal with lock and key, the solitary walk (again the dog was there). They had to share the stage with other practices of the self, as husband, father, friend, colleague, gentleman of means, respectable author. Objectivity, as we have seen, might run in the family—that is, it might become a channel through which parental and filial sentiments could flow. Might other forms of collaborative objectivity, the sharing and imparting of disciplined detachment, in laboratories or teaching hospitals, for example, mobilize similar trains of emotion, those normally associated with familial affections or friendship?Footnote 23
At this point, we might recall Joan Richards's observation about the De Morgans: “It was their careful parceling of the world that had left me so frustrated in my attempts to understand and explain.” Paul White helps us move beyond that sense of frustration. He brings us closer to understanding and explaining how the familial can imprint the scholarly, even across a strenuously defended divide. He encourages us to think of science in terms of a set of emotional practices of cognition, and to explore how those practices are learned within the sphere of the family. To this end, it will be helpful for us to look for models beyond the history of science, toward histories of knowledge production more broadly.
THE RATIONAL AND THE IDEAL: THE BAKUNINS
Turning from Victorian Britain to late imperial Russia, we find quite different circumstances for writing the history of intellectual families. As John Randolph observes in The House in the Garden (2007), there is a long tradition of reconstructing Russia's revolutionary intellectual tradition on the basis of family archives. This can be attributed in part to the scarcity in Russia of the kind of documentation that intellectual historians of Western Europe take for granted, the records of the public sphere. Russian intellectual historians long argued that they turned to personal documents out of necessity, as a result of the stunted development of Russian civic life. Thus the effort to recover what Randolph calls “the intimate theater” of Russian intellectual life was not originally a subversive move, as it has been recently among historians of Victorian science. As Randolph explains, Russian historians “turned to intimacy hoping to supplement public lives—rather than with the intention of historicizing intimacy itself as a forum for Russian social thought.”Footnote 24 Hence an irony that Randolph is quick to point out: historians with revolutionary sympathies adopted the line between public and private just as it had been drawn either by liberal norms or by the censors of the police state. What these historians produced, then, was a history of intimate ideas abstracted from their intimate context. The contributions of women, for instance, were largely ignored. Randolph boldly sets out to correct these mistakes. He opens a fresh new window onto the scene of some of the great turning points in Russian intellectual history. In the process, he shows us how to write a history of ideas as a process of “reasoning through the home.”
Priamukhino was the country estate of the Bakunin family, birthplace of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and sanctuary for key members of his intellectual circle. Randolph rejects the assumption that the “ornate domesticity” with which the late eighteenth-century Russian nobility surrounded itself in the countryside represented a “withdrawal from imperial life.” On the contrary, he argues, country homes like Priamukhino indicated a “new politics of private life,” in which the ideals prescribed by Catherine the Great—an ideology of enlightenment and civilization suited to the needs of Russia's expanding empire—would find their first instantiation. As Randolph makes clear, the Russian aristocracy thus set out quite consciously to configure the relationship between ideas and domesticity in contrast to the “separate spheres” that they saw taking shape in Western Europe. The aristocratic home was reinvented as a milieu that would make enlightenment safe for Russia. “To those who argued that critical thinking was too abstract, they could reply that home life stabilized reason by bringing the whole of human rationality (including its imaginative and even erotic components) into play.”Footnote 25
From the first, then, the Russian intelligentsia cultivated a close fit between new ideas and new forms of family life. Randolph's metaphor of the home as a “theater of intellectual activity” emphasizes the performative aspects of both domestic intimacy and intellectual creativity. He describes Priamukhino as a self-conscious “experiment,” a “laboratory for the creation—and not merely the representation—of virtuous social norms.”Footnote 26
Yet there was never full agreement about the nature and goals of the experiment. As the men of the family grew increasingly secular, the women embraced an ever more mystical religious devotion. We might be reminded of the conflict that Richards depicts between the absolutism of Augustus De Morgan's mathematics and the relativism of his wife's spiritualism. Analogously, the perspective of Mikhail Bakunin's sisters exposed the shortcomings of German Idealist philosophy: “However logical, the Hegelian world of rational reality seemed cold and galling.”Footnote 27 In the case of the Bakunins, the result was not the unification of the family around a common notion of reason, as Mikhail Bakunin had hoped; nor was it the “splitting” of intellectual life into irreconcilable spheres, as in Victorian Britain. Instead, the result was a fruitful dialectic. Through a religious mysticism borrowed from their female forebears, the Bakunin women
sought to build a better and more autonomous “inner life” for themselves, freed from the subjective delusions that they believed surrounded them. It was precisely the Bakunin sisters’ desire to be the makers of their own moral lives that created the social and intellectual space at Priamukhino for the practice of Idealist philosophy in the 1830s.Footnote 28
By viewing the women of the household as autonomous thinkers and actors, Randolph offers a feminist alternative to the usual view of Russian intellectual history. Russian Idealism appears as the culmination of an unpredictable experiment in fusing family life and the life of ideas.
Randolph's attention to the Bakunin women also results in a better understanding of the evidence on which this history rests. Much of what the family left behind was the product of the Bakunin women's self-conscious efforts to document their new modes of existence. In what was perhaps not an uncommon division of labor in the nineteenth century, the women of the family became its archivists. “Keeping the family's papers would become one means of projecting their spiritual aspirations into the public realm.” In other words, private thoughts were never strictly private. They were generated and preserved with a view to the public eye, and they bear the mark of specifically feminine strategies of self-presentation.Footnote 29
Narrative is essential to Randolph's argumentation. This is not just a book about the life of ideas, but about the making of ideas—hence its relevance to historians of science. These ideas emerge in part from the stories that the family tells about itself. It is the author's task both to relate and to deconstruct these stories. Accordingly, the book's first part narrates the fashioning of the Bakunins’ new home at Priamukhino. In the second part, the home becomes the stage for a drama of domestic oppression and liberation, which was carefully scripted by the family to enact their new conceptions of reason and virtue. By a strategic alternation of viewpoints, Randolph manages to show us how members of the family competed to narrate this chapter of their story. Reading their accounts against each other, Randolph shows how Mikhail's sister Varvara cast doubt on the meaning of “liberation” according to her brother's new philosophy. She raised the question whether it was possible for a woman to “imagine her own intellectual development according to a scheme designed for a man.”Footnote 30 In this sense, Randolph's Varvara not only plants the seeds for the flourishing of Russian Romanticism; she also anticipates the feminist critiques of Idealism that have emerged in recent decades.Footnote 31
In sum, The House in the Garden demonstrates how the Russian intelligentsia fashioned the home as “reason's proper forum,” in an explicit attempt to circumvent the pitfalls of the Western European Enlightenment. Randolph's revisionist history illustrates a process that he helpfully terms “reasoning through the home.”Footnote 32 In the Bakunins’ case, this meant articulating a version of enlightenment in harmony with their mode of domestic life and with the moral values they believed it to embody.
THE NEAR AND THE DISTANT: THE JOHNSTONES
All of the cases considered so far have involved actors who were either participants in the Romantic movement or indebted to it. The story that Emma Rothschild tells of the Johnstone family in The Inner Life of Empires unfolds in an earlier era, before the crystallization of the boundaries that these other historians have been at pains to deconstruct. As Rothschild remarks in her introduction,
The distinction between the inner and the outer life, or between an interior, private existence of the mind and an exterior universe of events and circumstances, is very difficult to identify in the lives of the Johnstones (as it is in our own lives). So too is the distinction between the intimate and the official, the universe of sentiment and the universe of reason.Footnote 33
Admittedly, the meaning of that parenthetical aside is somewhat enigmatic. Was there an intervening era in which those public/private distinctions were, in fact, self-evident? Or is her point that these boundaries have always been contested? What historical relationship does the indeterminacy of these categories in the eighteenth century bear to our own experiences with them in the twenty-first? Might such histories allow for a rethinking of the current configurations of intellectual work and family life? Rothschild leaves it to her reader to connect the dots.
The Inner Life of Empires is many things: economic, intellectual, political, and legal history simultaneously. But it is, first and foremost, an original model for bringing family history to bear on the history of ideas. Rothschild uses the members of this unusually well-connected Scottish family to track the circulation of eighteenth-century ideas. Her actors traffic in ideas much as they would traffic in tobacco or sugar. Concepts of enlightenment pass through the Johnstones’ lives like the tea or books that arrive in packages from afar. At one level, then, this is an exercise in mapping the long, entangled trajectories of eighteenth-century people, commodities, and concepts. In this respect, her story is so tightly woven that one could quickly go mad trying to trace any single thread. Enlightenment becomes inextricably entwined with schemes for material gain, political oppression, and slavery. The effect is to deflate the Johnstones’ lofty ideals (“humanity, benevolence, candor, delicacy &c.”Footnote 34), and to show how they depend on the exclusion of certain people from full membership in the category of the human.
Yet Rothschild's narrative also has other, less predictable implications for intellectual history. The Johnstones—whose social circle included Hume, Smith, Ferguson, and the chemist William Cullen—bring to light an unsuspected genealogy for the Scottish idea of enlightenment as a society of perfect information. Rothschild reminds us that “enlightenment, in Adam Ferguson's sense of knowledge that was communicable to others by information, or in Hume's sense of a ‘conversible World,” in which everyone ‘mutually gives and receives information.’”Footnote 35 She suggests, paradoxically, that enlightenment in this sense was associated less with the cosmopolitanism of the Republic of Letters than with intimate ties to distant relatives and friends. Enlightenment in this sense arrived in the valises of the various itinerant clerics, tutors, writers and other educated individuals who came and went from the Johnstones’ lives, as well as in their letters from abroad. Enlightenment, from this perspective, was not a public, collective awakening. It was more like an exchange of gifts or intimacies—though its tempo and geography were structured by the pathways of empire. Familial communication, in other words, paved the way for the imagination of a society of perfect information. One might conclude that our modern ideas of enlightened universality emerged in part through the process that Randolph terms “reasoning through the home.” Rothschild reminds us that we should be all the more wary of these ideals, knowing that they reflect the limitations and exclusions of a patriarchal, slave-holding family.
Like the other authors considered here, Rothschild does not underestimate the ability of her subjects to manipulate the historical evidence. She views the Johnstones as “modern or postmodern characters: at least as cunning and as self-conscious as historians.”Footnote 36 Yet Rothschild follows this insight in a new direction, emphasizing not merely the performative aspects of intimate documents, but also the information that has gone missing. “At the center” of her narrative, as she puts it, is a secret: a slave, “Belinda or Bell,” who was put on trial for infanticide. This woman's story remains—and will probably always remain—uncertain and incomplete. But those gaps are crucial elements of the historical record. As Rothschild puts it, in the Johnstones’ letters “it is the silences . . . that have been eloquent.”Footnote 37 Rothschild thus shows us the family as a site for the suppression, as well as the production, of knowledge. Rothschild keeps the shortcomings of the archives constantly before our eyes, reminding us of the naivety of Smith's enlightened dream of an unimpeded, universal flow of information.
It is worth noting that this method—reading a family's silences—has been used to great effect by Deborah Cohen (no relation!) in her recent study of the evolution of modern British norms of privacy. Like the other authors considered here, she is interested in tracking historical shifts in the line between public and private. Like Rothschild, Cohen studies the ways in which families have transmitted or suppressed information. Cohen shows, first, that Victorian family bonds were often cemented by shared secrets—secrets such as adoptions, illicit affairs, illegitimate children, and mentally impaired siblings. Twentieth-century families had fewer secrets, and Cohen argues that this shift was due to a new understanding of privacy that made secret-keeping largely irrelevant. The concept of privacy was reimagined as the means by which families could protect sensitive information about their members. Privacy, in short, came to be defined in terms of the protection of human difference. In this way, the customs of family life conditioned a series of shifts in the ways that difference itself was perceived and discussed. Cohen's argument is more than a challenge to the received view of the family as, invariably, a repressive social institution; she makes us consider the possibility that families have played active roles in expanding common definitions of the “normal.” “In some cases,” Cohen argues, “as in the history of adoption, family secrets helped to create the intellectual and social bedrock upon which new legal distinctions would be built.”Footnote 38
In this respect, Cohen's book complements the studies discussed here, bringing into relief another episode of “reasoning through the home.” Taken as a whole, this new body of work reveals households to have been important historical sites for the negotiation of the organizing concepts of modern science—concepts such as the “common,” the “rational,” the “enlightened,” and the “normal.”
SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE: GOETHE'S GUIDING THREAD
As a coda, I propose that we consider once again what we might learn from fiction about the nexus of science and family life. In 1806, in the midst of Napoleon's invasion of Prussia, the poet and naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe married his mistress of eighteen years, with whom he had already fathered five children. The following year, he found himself falling in love with a much younger woman. It was in the midst of this predicament that he composed the novel Elective Affinities, published in 1809. It tells the story of Eduard and Charlotte, a couple who waited decades for the chance to marry, and of their house guests, the Captain and Ottilie, who lead the couple's desires astray. The title invokes a technical term of the new chemical science, and the novel is governed by chemical symbolism, suggesting that the formation and dissolution of the bonds of human passion mirror the principles of chemistry. In Goethe's day, the novel was condemned for implying that romantic love is based on no more than chemical attraction. This crude reading long distracted critics from the novel's far more subtle implications for natural science.Footnote 39 For our purposes, the novel is most compelling as a commentary on the power of intimate experiences in the domestic sphere to structure perceptions of the natural world.
For much of the two hundred years since the novel's publication, critics have argued about the relevance of Goethe's personal life to its interpretation. The biographical mode dominated in the late nineteenth century, with some commentators going so far as to attempt to absolve Goethe of accusations of immoral behavior by casting the novel as a morality tale intended to defend the sanctity of marriage. The pendulum swung the other way in the twentieth century, after Walter Benjamin famously declared that neither Goethe's life nor his authorial intentions could have any bearing on the meaning of the novel. Yet the fact remains that Goethe had explicitly invited readers to interpret the novel in relation to his private affairs. He wrote,
No one can fail to recognize in it a deep passionate wound which shrinks from being closed by healing, a heart which dreads to be cured . . . In it, as in a burial-urn, I have deposited with deep emotion many a sad experience. The 3rd of October 1809 (when the publication was completed) set me free from the work; but the feelings it embodies can never quite depart from me.Footnote 40
While it would be naive to treat the novel as autobiography, we should not be surprised to find that the relationship between love and intellectual work is one of its core themes.
At the same time, Elective Affinities reflects the anxious sense among Goethe and his contemporaries of a contradiction between the nature of domestic life and the demands of the new civic order. The French Revolution had thrown into question the ancient model of the polity as a family writ large. Now that the patriarchal state had been discredited, new rationalizations were required to shore up the patriarchal home. Across Napoleonic Europe, the institution of the family was being scrutinized for its political implications, and the German Romantics were active in this debate. It was in this context that Fichte, Schiller, and Hegel, among others, took up the problem of reconciling the particularity of the bonds of domestic love with the necessary ethical universality of the public sphere. They sought a theory of domestic love compatible with their visions of a political order based on the freedom of male citizens and the exclusion of women.Footnote 41
Elective Affinities expresses this concern in part by contrasting the upper-class household shared by the four main characters with the neighboring village. The villagers are passive participants in this story, willing subjects for the elaborate experiments in “improvement” dreamed up by the main characters, including feats of landscaping, architecture, and gardening. At one point, Eduard and the Captain discuss the difficulty of dealing with the lower classes. Eduard remarks that he can only tolerate such interactions if he is in a position to give orders. The Captain agrees, adding that the common people have no ability to look out for their own long-term interests. “Anything which really promotes the common good can be attained only through unlimited sovereignty.”Footnote 42 This simple, static model of political harmony stands in opposition to the dynamic complexity of the characters’ domestic relationships. Unlimited sovereignty is not possible within the household, where the very boundaries between self and other are destabilized. In contrast to the bourgeois public self, the domestic self is marked by experiences of “splitting,” as well as by moments of fusion with others. Consider, for instance, how Eduard explains why he cannot bear to have anyone reading over his shoulder: it is as if
a window were constructed in my forehead or in my chest, so that he to whom I want to expound my thoughts one by one, or convey my feelings one by one, could always know long in advance what I was getting at . . . Whenever anyone reads over my shoulder [wenn mir jemand ins Buch sieht] it is as if I were being torn in two.Footnote 43
In this case, intimacy is experienced as a splitting of the self; in other cases, as in the following entry in Ottilie's diary, intimacy is described as simultaneously fusion and separation:
There is something exciting about being with a much-loved portrait, even if it is not a good likeness, just as there is sometimes something exciting about arguing with a friend. You have the pleasant feeling that you are divided, and yet can never be separated.Footnote 44
The novel thus suggests that individuality, the foundation of the new political order, is a misleading category for thinking about the nature of experience in the domestic sphere. In a new twist, however, the breakdown of autonomy in the domestic sphere is not presented as a threat to reason, as Rousseau would lead us to expect.
What matters within the household, Goethe suggests, is not individuality but typicality; not the individual but its type, its natural kind. The novel's plot, in effect, challenges the newlyweds, Eduard and Charlotte, to move from their particularistic attachments to each other as individuals, to an abstract love for each other as lawful spouses. Charlotte succeeds in this, while Eduard fails, and therein lies an important claim about sexual politics. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807, Hegel argued that this kind of abstract familial love fell to women. To men it was granted to love in a more particular vein within the family, precisely because men achieved a universal ethical perspective beyond its walls: “In the ethical household, it is not a matter of this husband, this child, but rather of husbands and children in general—the woman's relationships are based on universality, not sensibility” (“Im Hause der Sittlichkeit ist es nicht dieser Mann, nicht dieses Kind, sondern ein Mann, Kinder überhaupt—nicht die Empfindung, sondern das Allgemeine, worauf sich diese Verhältnisse des Weibes gründen”).Footnote 45 Once married, women were thus expected to love their husbands not as individuals—as the erotic partners of their choosing—but as instantiations of the general category of husband. In Elective Affinities, a woman's love is shown to differ from a man's in just this way. Charlotte remains loyal to Eduard, as the husband to whom she is duty-bound, but who has forsaken her for Ottilie; Ottilie, meanwhile, briefly succeeds in sublimating her illicit love for Eduard into a kind of generalized, humanistic warmth.
However, in the hands of a naturalist like Goethe, this sexual division has ramifications that Hegel did not foresee. Ottilie emerges as the figure closest to the novelist himself: a writer and a keen observer of human nature. Consider the instructions with which the narrator introduces the first in a series of excerpts from Ottilie's diary:
We understand that the English navy has a certain arrangement by which every rope in the royal fleet, from the stoutest to the finest, is spun in such a fashion that a red thread runs through it which cannot be extracted without unravelling the whole rope, so that even the smallest piece of this rope can be recognized as belonging to the Crown. Similarly, there runs through Ottilie's journal a thread of affection and inclination [Neigung und Anhänglichkeit] that binds everything together and characterizes the whole. It is this thread which turns into the peculiar property of the writer these observations, thoughts, aphorisms copied down, and whatever else is there, and makes them significant for her. Every single passage we have selected bears indisputable testimony to the truth of this [Selbst jede einzelne von uns ausgewählte und mitgeteilte Stelle gibt davon das entschiedenste Zeugnis].Footnote 46
In this passage, Goethe invites the reader to trace the themes of “affection and inclination” through the fragments that constitute Ottilie's diary. He explicitly links the novel to his contemporaneous reflections on scientific method by the device of the connecting thread, the Leitfaden. The thread is both Goethe's metaphor for a mode of morphological observation and an approach to reading fiction. As he puts it in his “Essay on the Form of Animals,” the concept of the Urtyp provides the organizing principle of anatomical investigations, “the universal guiding thread through the labyrinth of forms” (der allgemeine Leitfaden durch das Labyrinth der Gestalten”).Footnote 47 Likewise, one might say that the reader of Elective Affinities must learn to identify the Urtyp of love, the emotion in the abstract, in each of Ottilie's entries. In his morphological writings, Goethe describes the process of morphological classification as being guided by the naturalist's “scientific desire” or “urge.”Footnote 48 As he points out, this method is, ultimately, aesthetic. Sympathetic desire guides the eye of the naturalist through the universe of natural forms, just as it leads the reader through the kaleidoscopic thoughts of a young girl in love. In this way, Ottilie comes close to what Goethe himself hoped to achieve in the novel: the sublimation of love into intellectual creation.
The deeper connection between Elective Affinities and Goethe's scientific methodology becomes apparent in the central scene of Part One, in which the novel's title is explained. Eduard is reading aloud from a treatise on chemistry, and he, the Captain, and Charlotte fall into a discussion of the new theory of chemical affinity. The dangers of anthropomorphism are introduced early on: “Man is a true Narcissus,” remarks Eduard; “he makes the whole world his mirror.” The Captain agrees, observing that man “treats everything he discovers outside himself; his wisdom and his folly, his will and his caprices, he lends to the beasts, the plants, the elements and the gods.” Yet the discussion that follows heavily qualifies this critique. Charlotte asks the Captain to describe a certain type of chemical reaction, in which four entities recombine into new pairs. The Captain replies that, in this case, no description will be adequate:
One has to have these entities before one's eyes, and see how, although they appear to be lifeless, they are in fact perpetually ready to spring into activity; one has to watch sympathetically [mit Teilnahme] how they seek one another out, attract, seize, destroy, devour, consume one another, and then emerge again from this most intimate union in renewed, novel and unexpected shape: it is only then that one credits them with an eternal life, yes, with possessing mind and reason, because our own minds seem scarcely adequate to observing them properly and our understanding scarcely sufficient to comprehend them [weil wir unsere Sinne kaum genügend fühlen, sie recht zu beobachten, und unsre Vernunft kaum hinlänglich, sie zu fassen].Footnote 49
At one level, this is a prelude to the experience awaiting the reader as a witness to the story to come: the death of old passions and the birth of new ones. Yet the passage also serves to gloss Goethe's unusual theory of natural knowledge. It implies that an understanding of nature depends not merely on reason and the senses, but also on a sympathetic emotional response. This is a point that Goethe was then in the midst of developing in “The Enterprise Justified,” which would eventually be published as an introductory essay to On Morphology (1817). Compare the Captain's account of chemical observation to Goethe's description of the morphological method, particularly the emphasis on the recognition of reciprocal influences:
When in the exercise of his powers of observation man undertakes to confront the world of nature, he will at first experience a tremendous compulsion to bring what he finds there under his control. Before long, however, these objects will thrust themselves upon him with such force that he, in turn, must feel the obligation to acknowledge their power and pay homage to their effects. When this mutual interaction becomes evident he will make a discovery which, in a double sense, is limitless; among the objects he will find many different forms of existence and modes of change, a variety of relationships livingly interwoven; in himself, on the other hand, a potential for infinite growth through constant adaptation of his sensibilities and judgment to new ways of acquiring knowledge and responding with action.Footnote 50
Here Goethe describes how the naturalist overcomes his instinct to master nature and comes to respect the independence of the non-human world (much as the lover might overcome the fantasy of possessing the beloved). He traces a path to what we might call an ecological vision, an appreciation of nature's dynamic web of “mutual interactions.”
In all these ways, Elective Affinities is a “morphological” novel, as Stefani Engelstein has compellingly argued. Engelstein has illuminated many resonances between the novel and Goethe's morphological studies. Yet she argues that the novel expresses far more pessimism about the limits of human knowledge. Its characters fail “to come to terms with their world,” misled by the endless patterns, reflections, and analogies with which the novel confronts them. “While Goethe's methodological writings rest on the assumption that the passage between the urge to systematize and the urge to isolate can be negotiated, the novel reveals a much darker face.”Footnote 51 Engelstein wants us to read the novel's disastrous dénouement as illustrating a fundamental shortcoming of the human interpretive faculties. She wants us to see Ottilie as the embodiment of a flawed epistemology—mentally inflexible, passive, and stubborn. My reading is more optimistic. Far from undercutting Goethe's methodological treatises, the novel is a necessary complement to them. In it I see Goethe pointing the way to a form of natural knowledge that is profoundly indebted to emotional experience, and yet no less valid for that reason.
For instance, Engelstein rightly calls our attention to Ottilie's distaste for the study of natural history. Ottilie remarks in her journal that she “could never take kindly to worms and beetles,” and expresses gratitude that her schoolmaster never forced the study of nature on her. Knowledge of “lower forms” of life is irrelevant in light of “what we know anyway, namely that the human form bears uniquely the image of the divine . . . [T]he proper study of mankind is man.” Yet this conviction is not quite as solid as it might appear. In the same passage, Ottilie also expresses admiration for Alexander von Humboldt and his ability to “depict the strange and exotic together with its own locality, with all its environs, in its own proper element.”Footnote 52 Clearly, Goethe is suggesting that Ottilie's education has failed her. The schoolmaster withheld from her a deeper understanding of humanity's imbrication in the natural world. It is, in fact, this omission that prepares her downfall. For it is Ottilie's inability to tolerate the animal quality of her own passion that spells her doom. She cannot accept her love for Eduard, and she can root it out only by killing herself.
It would, therefore, be a mistake to read the novel as expressing cynicism about the character of human knowledge. Together, Goethe's morphological essay and his “chemical” novel serve to modify Eduard's rather crude critique of anthropomorphism. Goethe argues that we cannot help but project human categories onto nature.Footnote 53 The observation of nature entails learning to recognize in the non-human world the kinds of interaction that we first come to know in our interpersonal life: attraction and repulsion, mutual completion and destruction. The observer comes to recognize these interactions only by analogy to his consciousness of his own dynamic relationships with other (human) objects. As idiosyncratic as Goethe's theory of natural knowledge may be, his broader point is easily generalizable. Without a sense of our own entanglement in human webs, we would likely overlook our entanglement in natural ones. While Goethe's theoretical writings argue this point, Elective Affinities makes it vivid. Novels are particularly well suited to revealing the connections between the emotional and the intellectual life, because narrative can lay bare the patterns by which an individual's interactions with the world reflect earlier, formative relationships. Family life throws its “shadow” over all other elective affinities.Footnote 54
CONCLUSION
Even as historians of science have recently taken up the emotional side of knowledge making, they have not fully assimilated the idea that cognition itself is an emotional act. Emotions like love, fear, or wonder are not merely our motivations to know or the consequences of knowing; emotions are themselves knowledge of the state of the world. In Martha Nussbaum's lovely phrase, “the world enters into the self in emotion . . . in a cognitive way.”Footnote 55 To the extent that the household is the space where the emotional practices of cognition are learned, it deserves the attention of historians of science. To be clear, I am not calling for a psycho-history of past scientists. I am suggesting, rather, that we attend to the epistemic frameworks generated by the norms of family life in different times and places. In this way, we might write histories of science and domestic intimacy that shed light on the emergence of some of the organizing concepts of modern science—such as family trees, family resemblances, mutual interactions, elective affinities, networks, webs, individual differences, and normal observers. We might thus be in a better position to explain why the modern sciences have often reproduced traditional assumptions about gender relations, even while proposing what would seem to be radical and liberatory ideas.Footnote 56
In the 1950s, a certain strain of antitotalitarian philosophy, associated with thinkers like Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt, held science up as the antithesis of the “tribalism” of families and friends. In defining “the meaning of public life” in 1958, Arendt wrote,
even the richest and most satisfying family life can offer only the prolongation or multiplication of one's own position with its attending aspects and perspectives . . . Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear.Footnote 57
However well this might work as political theory, it gets the nature of earlier science wrong. Arendt traced a direct line from the Royal Society of the seventeenth century to the nuclear physicists of the 1950s. She assumed that science had always been “performed,” in her terms, “in the unseen quiet of labs.” She thus obscured forms of scientific work, past and present, that did not square with postwar definitions of the public. Yet Arendt also offers us an important clue to the nexus of intellectual history and family history, for she asserts that the most fundamentally political of all concepts is that of “the common,” as in the “common world” or “common sense.” By “the common,” I mean, as I think Arendt did, both an idea of universal human faculties and a concrete set of practices of association or ways of establishing commonality. Thanks to the works discussed above, we are increasingly in a position to recognize that ideas of “the common” have taken shape, in part, within the family sphere. If science is an “epistemology of common experience,” then it falls to the historian of science to reconstruct how scientists acquire their intuitions about what constitutes the shared world and how it can be accessed. To this end, we cannot ignore the realm of the family. It is there that the child, learning to recognize its caregivers as independent beings, first comes to see the world through someone else's eyes.
