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Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment

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This is a pretty amusing book, but unfortunately it suffers from some typical flaws of post-modern historiography of science. I shall substantiate this claim by two illustrations.

For my first example, the tenet of post-modern historiography in question is its predisposition to read honest and sensible scientific treatises as bubbling with devious rhetoric and implicit schemes. Let us see how this plays out in the case of Riskin's discussion of Diderot's Letter on the Blind.

In his Letter, Diderot makes the following two points:

(1) The blind man's understanding of sight is strikingly similar to that presented in Descartes's optics. "An eye, for example, was 'an organ on which the air has the same effect as my stick has on my hand'. Diderot advised, 'Open Descartes's Dioptrique, and you will see the phenomenon of sight related to those of touch, and optical figures full of men engaged in seeing with sticks.'" (p. 56)

(2) "Diderot 'suspected' blind people of 'inhumanity'. He asked rhetorically, 'What difference is there, for a blind man, between a man who urinates and a man from whom, without complaining, blood pours forth?'" (p. 61)

Combining (1) and (2), Riskin concludes:

"Diderot's Lettre constituted an allegorical, moral condemnation of Cartesianism. ... Cartesians thought like blind men, and the blind were inhumane. The conclusion was plain to see." (pp. 61-62)

This far-fetched conclusion is not "plain to see." Diderot did not make it explicit. (1) and (2) are several pages apart in the Letter, with no apparent connection. A more common-sensical interpretation readily suggest itself.

We do not need to stipulate any ulterior motive in order to understand why Diderot made the point (1). The fact is simply so striking that no one in Diderot's position could have failed to remark on it, regardless of whether they had some urge to tacitly "condemn" Cartesianism or not. In fact, if we read the full Letter to the Blind we find that the quotation in (1) from the blind man is immediately followed by these words: "We were impressed with this reply, and ... were looking at one another with admiration." This part of the letter is not quoted by Riskin, saving her the trouble of explaining why Diderot admittedly "admires" and is "impressed" by what he secretly wants to "condemn."

Similarly for (2). This is but one in a barrage of amusing and thought-provoking observations on how the blinds' perception of the world differs from ours. These observation all fit very well with what Diderot himself explicitly identifies as the purpose of his Letter, namely "the entertainment of saying little and not being bored." It is harder to see, to say the least, how these observation are supposed to be squared with the notion that the Letter is a veiled "condemnation of Cartesianism."

My second example concerns another unfortunate aspect of post-modern historiography, namely its glorification of the absence of any evaluative element. Consider the following argument put forth by Condillac.

"Condillac imagined endowing a statue with each of the five senses separately and in various combinations, in order to settle the question of which senses conveyed the impression of an external world. He wanted to know how it was possible to 'see objects outside ourselves' given that ' our sensations are but manners of being'. ... Imagine a statue that can only smell. Waft a rose under its nose. To an observer, it will be a statue that smells a rose. But 'to itself, it will be simply the odor of this flower itself. ...' The odors that the statue smells will seem to it not as properties of an external object, but rather as its own 'manners of being'. ... A seeing statue similarly 'cannot judge that there is something outside itself'. It feels itself to be all light and color. ... When it acquired touch, however, Condillac's statue would soon discover its own boundaries and the existence of a world beyond. In touching its own body, it would recognize itself in all its parts. But when it touches 'a foreign body, the me, that it feels modified in its hands, does not feel modified in this body. ... Voilà therefore a sensation by which the soul passes from itself outside itself.' ... Condillac imagined his statue 'quite astonished not to find itself in all that it touches.'" (pp. 44-47)

I say that the argument is fundamentally flawed in that confounds the sense of touch with the phenomena of self-motion. It is self-motion, not touch, that is the deciding factor in the above experiment. The argument does not go through if the statue has touch only, without self-motion. And a statue possessing no sense of touch but which has sight and self-motion will nevertheless be led to perceive the existence of an external world by the phenomena that some changes in visual impressions are internal since they depend on (i.e., are corrigible by) self-motion whereas others are not (whence they are external changes), as we know from Poincaré.

Now I may be right or I may be wrong in my critique of Condillac's argument; that is not the point. What I am protesting against is the implicit assumption in post-modern historiography of science that the very question is illegitimate; i.e., that it is not our business to engage with these arguments as such, but only to trace how they "transformed the practice of the sciences as well as the arts and literature" (from the conclusion, p. 283). I do not believe that Condillac or any of his contemporaries would have wished historians discussing their work to be so indifferent to issues of substance and so fanciful in espousing various grandiose "transformations."

This book really helps to rethink what science was and what it was all about. By connecting science to sensibility, and even sentimentality, Riskin shows how science shaped and was shaped by ethics and morals of the time.For example, she shows how scientists like Benjamin Franklin, needed a theory of matter that one could sympathize with. The findings are rigorously demonstrated, and the entire study scrapes away many of the barnacles that have become attached to science in the eighteenth century.