"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it" , wrote George Santayana, joining a long list of scholars disillusioned with public affairs.
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history"
Aldous Huxley
"What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it"
G. W. F. Hegel
"History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time"
Anonymous
R.W. Emerson wrote (in History) "...stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches, before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence..and reach the same height or the same degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done."
Emerson makes a reference perhaps to the many official investigations of the theories of Franz Mesmer, a famous European Doctor (and patron of Mozart) using magnetism and hypnosis in his cures. Early in his controversial career, Mesmer had confronted famous Priest and Exorcist Johann Gassner at the Munich Academy of Sciences in a notorious clash of knowledge and belief. All Gassner's achievements, Mesmer asserted, were explicable as natural forces, requiring no particular belief or other at all. While the Priest was sincere, the recently discovered natural force of Animal Magnetism produced tides in wounded bodies, allowing the life force to flow more freely through them. Additionally, Mesmer diagnosed, the Priest was a natural hypnotist.
It was vanity, said the scientists, self-delusion wrought buy religious fervour, that allowed Priests to interpret natural forces as the will of God. It was vanity, said the religious, self-delusion wrought from the deadly sin of pride, for any man to claim to understand a world made by God, and interpret the forces of nature as anything but the will of Heaven.
Hyponotism might have been just one fad amongst many in Enlightenment Europe, if it were not such a dagger at the heart of new ideas about individual will. Mesmerism arouses deep suspicion even now. Mind control threatens the core from which Cartesian sciences proceeded, that God would not give me eyes, only to allow them to be deceived.
Emmanuel Kant (in Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?) saw the Enlightenment as "Mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error." However it was also a time when attempts were made to circumscribe the limits of individual reason. “A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent” he wrote.
In A Social History of Truth, Steven Shapin argues that during Enlightenment times reason was required to be expressed according to the rules of civil society. Otherwise it could not be believed. The law may overturn reason, it was argued, but reason may never overturn the law, and the brave new society it sustained.
Years ago when I was reading Haraway's 'Modest_Witness...' she referred to Shapin and here are some of the quotes I garnered and some of my understanding of what they were proposing:
ReplyDeleteSchapin and Scaffer claim:
In the conventions of the intellectual world we now inhabit there is no item of knowledge so solid as a matter or fact. We may revise our ways of making sense of matters of fact and we may adjust their place in our overall maps of knowledge. (1985:23)
So, according to Shapin and Scaffer, matters of fact depend on the way that we understand information. They explain:
We do, to be sure, reject particular matters of fact, but the manner of our doing so adds solidity to the category of the fact, and that ‘..there are "good" theories, and "bad" theories - theories currently regarded as true by everyone and theories that no one any longer believes to be true’. So, if everyone agrees then it is a good theory, and if no one believes it to be true then it is a bad theory. (1985:23)
Further,
there is nothing so given as a matter of fact. In common speech, as in the Philosophy of science, the solidity and permanence of matters of fact reside in the absence of human agency ‘in their coming to be’, and, that ‘matters of fact are regarded as the very ‘mirror of nature’. (1983:23)
The following assumptions seem evident in this statement. Firstly, that nature is separate from culture and human activity; that the ‘technology’ of language is separate and distinct from humanity; and that truth or objective fact may be discovered. Rather like Hermeneutics and ‘Signatures’ which denoted a meaning that only needed to be decoded. (See: Foucault: The Order of Things, and Paracelsus, 1894.).
Indeed Shapin and Scaffer appear to be saying that ‘matters of fact’ were on the one hand God given, uncontestable; and on the other hand, could be redefined, reinterpreted and represented by human agents. According to their logic, if the fact was changed, it was not a matter of fact in the first place. If a theory is challenged but it remains unchanged, then it is a matter of fact. And it is here that we can start to think about the modest witness, for in the statement ‘theories currently regarded as true by everyone’ is misleading in that the ‘everyone’ that they speak about is an elite group of male subjects. It’s a matter of ‘if we say it is so, then it is’.
Power is everywhere.
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