Sometimes when you are deep in reading, you get a jolt, a few lines or a paragraph which pulls you up a little and gets you thinking.  When a couple of hundred pages into Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, believe me, a jolt is a good thing.  Hans Castorp is staying in a Swiss sanatorium visiting his cousin undergoing treatment for tuberculosis, and then finds (you could see this coming) that he too is diagnosed with the disease, and starts a treatment.  There is much discussion through the book about organic disease as a secondary phenomenon, or even some form of depravity. This is contrasted with the physical analysis presented by the regular body temperature taking and the x-rays that so absorb the patients. In the course of ongoing discussion on this, suddenly, here is Herr Settembrini, the resident philosopher, an Italian undergoing treatment:

“Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilisation is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetising affair, as much so as death, with which it may well belong – allied to the grave and its unsavory anatomy.”

If you are a research scientist with a career based in analysis, then this is a challenge. Mann’s novel is riddled with analogies, of the state of Europe just before WWI, of decadence, and of personal and public morality. Settembrini is the character who pits the world of the diseased cousins against the new sciences and the stirrings of freedoms of the age. But does reason and analysis result in stasis? Was use of the word ‘enlightenment’ yet another broadside at the Enlightenment legacy of science, reason, analysis and rational and humanistic thinking. It is the old dialogue between classics and romantics, objectivism and subjectivism, deduction and induction, Dionysus and Apollo, and if you are of a certain age, you might recall Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which caught up a generation in the argument.

The most famous, poetic instance of this is that of Keats, bemoaning the negative effects of Newtonian physics on the poetic imagination; ‘unweaving the rainbow’. Here is the excerpt from his Lamia:

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade

They are wonderful lines, but while they do reflect a contemporary feeling about Newton and his dissecting of light, and the whole growth of science, we shouldn’t think that this was a seminal science versus romantics clash. Keats’ contemporaries, such as Wordsworth and Turner were equally intrigued by what science could offer their artistic vision. And even the eminent scientist of the day, Humphrey Davy, was also a poet and comfortable member of the romantic movement in the early years of the 19^th C.[1] However, was Mann’s Settembrini saying just this? Science and analysis, ‘the dull catalogue of common things’ , ‘conquering all mysteries by rule and line’, science destroying the poetic vision of the world.

The Enlightenment is getting roughed up a bit these days, sometimes seen as the force behind colonialism, the spread of Empires, slavery, racism, and industrial grind. The Enlightenment seems to be regarded as a thing, an object, but it wasn’t. It was the gradual change from the 17^th C through to the 19^th of the realisation that reason, observation, experimentation and analysis, might better drive the progress of society than myth, magic and religion. It brings humanism into its natural place.  Civilisation didn’t need this rationalisation to institute slavery and racial segregation. We managed that for at least a few thousand years. But the skewing of those arguments by reference to reason didn’t help; we could have done without Hume’s and Kant’s views on race and the superiority of  the European male, for instance. Hadn’t they read their Montaigne from a 100 years or more before, in his essay on Cannibalism, viewing New World people brought to France. In speaking of such men he had met at Rouen, ‘..there is nothing more barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told,  except that each man call barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have not other test of truth and reason than the example an patter of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.’ And later: ‘Three of these men, ignorant of the price they will pay some day, in loss of repose and happiness, for gaining knowledge of the corruptions of this side of the ocean; ignorant also of the fact that this intercourse will come their ruin (which I suppose is already well advanced: poor wretches, to let themselves be tricked by the desire for new things, and to have left the serenity of their sky to come and see ours!…’ His final, simple words in the essay are: ‘They don’t wear breeches.’ This seems to say it all, we are all the same when the appurtenances of society are stripped away.

But back to the new science. One of the leaders of  the scientific revolution occurring in the 18^th C was Carl Linneaus, the Swedish naturalist who established a new binomial taxonomic system for the precise naming and description of fauna and flora, a system still in place today. It was more than just a process for naming things, something civilisations and societies had been doing for millennia. The thinking incorporated the need for close, patient observation, description and recording. As the great industry of exploration, European discovery of other lands and societies and the inevitable appropriation and colonisation that followed is being re-evaluated, Linnaeus gets his criticism, for imposing European description and nomenclature over that of indigenous societies. Of course that is true, though every society has named and described what is around it whether as new or replacement.

Linnaeus had a network of students, colleagues, disciples, particularly a group called the 17 Apostles. These were mostly trained by him at Uppsala. Through his contacts with the Swedish East India Company, he facilitated their travel round the world, where they collected and brought back specimens for him. One of these was Pehr Osbeck, who published in 1757 an account of his voyage to China (https://ianferg.nz/the-greatest-rivers-often-come-from-the-least-springs/). In that book, he includes an address he made to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the occasion of his appointment as a Fellow, in 1758.  Beside it is a reply from Johann Kruger, the Society’s President.

Osbeck’s opening lines are an eloquent declaration of what the Enlightenment scientist should be and do in this age of discovery: ‘The greatest rivers often come from the least springs; and so the least causes may produce the most considerable effects. The ablest men in all sciences therefore pay great attention even to the minutest information, which is despised by persons of inferior abilities: they expect no fruit without a preceding flower, no scientific knowledge without simple but fundamental principles, and no experiments without previous introductions.’

Its clear from the reply by Kruger that there has been a sea change in Sweden (and elsewhere in Europe) with the combination of exploration and science: ‘A nation which does no honour to science, arts, and trade, can expect nothing but foreign fopperies from their travellers: for how can they be inquisitive in other countries about those things which are despised in their own? or, why should they with a great deal of trouble acquire such notions abroad, as will not be regarded or adopted at their return? And this is the principal reason of the little benefit which Sweden has formerly reaped from its travellers. But, since science has been equally esteemed both by high and low, we can boast of those travellers, whose sole view has been to improve their knowledge by fresh experience.’

Well these are just thoughts that pop up when reading, and seem to coalesce. The whole argument of the Enlightenment, however, the rise and development of modern science, and the predations of societies on other societies is bedevilled by that modern phenomenon of things having to be one or the other, black or white, mutually exclusive. But its not the case. As a research scientist, I quickly found that poetry and science are not as separate as some believe. In my own way, I found that whenever you unweaved a rainbow (and believe me, my rainbows were pretty threadbare and missing the pot of gold), there was always another to mystify and inspire.

[1] Penelope Hughes Hallett  provides a wide-ranging commentary on this in her book on Haydon, Keats, Lamb, Wordsworth and others of the romantic movement in her book The Immortal Dinner (200).