Metabolism of Science

Metabolism of Science January 31, 2007

Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay “The Metabolism of Science” shows him at his deconstructive best. He doesn’t analyze postcards, but he does something similar, finding significance in the most marginal of glosses, in the repetitions of a book title, in the handwriting style of a lab worksheet. It’s all very playful, but produces a deadly serious analysis of modern science.


Modern science is, Rosenstock-Huessy argues, positivistic. By this he means that science operates without any attention to the social conditions that make it possible: “Scientific positivism expects that everybody in the community will contributed taxes and donations for the sake of science but that this naïve faith of the people in science otherwise may be taken for granted.” This is partly due to shifts in the notion of “nature,” which at one time served to encompass God, man, and the world under a single category. But “Nature of man today must be dismissed as inept a term. Society is man’s secret. He has no NATURE.” As a result, we have lost the notion of a reality that enclosed both creation and man. Positivist science arises when scientists become capable of studying the world while forgetting they are men.

Socially, science is a halfway house between folklore and slogans. “Evolution” destroyed folklore, but the term soon became “a derelict, a slogan of the educated mob.” A halfway house may seem safe; until the towns on either side begin to fight. Scientists seem capable of pursuing their science without regard to social concerns, but when there is a threat (he mentions the atomic bomb), scientists wake up to find themselves part of a community, of which science is only one dimension. As one would expect from Rosenstock-Huessy, the problem comes down to language. Positivist science pays no attention to speech.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay, “The Metabolism of Science,” is organized in four steps. First, he examines the title of Eddington’s Gifford Lectures; then he analyzes a work sheet from a lab report; third, he takes a look at Faraday’s notes; and finally, he compares the “linguistic pattern of the last four hundred years” regarding science with the “religious pattern of antiquity.” The goal of all of this is to understand the religion of science, but at the same time to combat the idolization of science. As “an orthodox thinker of the Christian dogma,” Rosenstock-Huessy aims to “defend the religion of science today as a vital part of my religion, against its abuse.”

The published title of Eddington’s lectures is “The Nature of the Physical World,” and Rosenstock-Huessy first spends some time defending his extensive meditation on the book’s title. Titles are like children’s names, revealing the faith of the author and the faith of the society that produces them. He finds the title exciting, absurd, and mysterious. The mystery comes from the fact that the title repeats the same term three times – “Nature” is simply the Latin name for the Greek “Physis” and the Anglo-Saxon “world.” Why would Eddington repeat the same idea three times in his title? Rosenstock-Huessy finds here a hint of magic – the title is like a spell repeated three times, and this leads him to the claim that “science is verified magic, magic come true.” The title is also absurd. What, he asks, is this “physical world”? As a Christian, he doesn’t believe God created a “physical world,” as if the physical could be skimmed off from a world that is both body and soul. God created a world full of mind and matter, and isolating only one is an absurdity. Eddington’s title reveals an implicit faith in the reality of other worlds; “physical” modifies “world,” and thus suggests that there are world which are not “physical.” But it also reveals an implicit Cartesian division of physical and mental, a fiction that, Rosenstock-Huessy claims, “has blinded many as tough the mind were more divine than our kidneys.”

Turning to the lab work sheet, Rosenstock-Huessy finds in it evidence of an implicit “dichotomy of a physical world which has become the object of a non-physical world, and of a mental world which has become the subject of the objectified physical world.” He describes this as evidence of the necessary self-immolation of the scientist, his need to split himself between mind and body in order to pursue a unified understanding of the world. How does he get here? The lab sheet he examines has two pages. On the right are observations from an experiment repeated several times. He notes the difference here between science and magic: Magic repeats the incantation or spell; beginning from a distrust of our senses, science repeats the experiment in order to check our senses. Impressions only become data through this repetition; only a series of impressions counts as data. There’s a triple move away from the “primitive” experience of the world: An impression, a sequence of impressions, an averaging of those impressions (recognizing the margin of error in each individual impression).

On the left page is a very different thing. The right page is charted, well-organized, regimented. On the right side of the page, the scientist stands at attention. The left side is full of computations, which meander here and there all over the page. Computation is a “purely mental activity,” and thus loses the bodily posture of observation; computing, the scientist is “relaxed, indifferent to appearances, introvert in slippers.” But to perform these computations, the scientist also has to sacrifice much. He seeks a “common denominator” for his computations, and this means sacrificing particular names and expressions to merge it all into a single language, the language of mathematics. He might measure his carpet in inches and feet, but in the lab he sacrifices his “historical vocabulary and nomenclature” by using the metric system that everyone else uses. He purifies himself of his local vocabulary, detaches himself from local place and time, and emerges as a “transcendental Ego” whose “owes allegiance only to the republic of physicists.” Computation, in short, requires “amputation,” as the scientist decapitates the names that he would normally use in favor of the labels given by the “international republic of science.” Whoever is trained as a scientist is trained to divide their own being into body and mind, observation and computation. The goal is unification: “For the sake of unity, I split.” In the lab, the man sheds his “naïve organship” and establishes “two specific fellowships: one for his senses, one for his mental powers.” In the pursuit of unified knowledge, he stretches out on the cross, “suspended like Prometheus on the rock” (an apt allusion, that!). The division of mind and body is temporary and for a specific purpose: “objects and subjects do not exist, but are polarities produced in the action by which we split inside temporarily for the purpose of uniting afterward more consistently.” The division of mind and body is not a “natural fact,” but a product of sacrifice. It’s not a sacrifice that’s demanded of everyone: “A bridegroom, a soldier, a daughter, must ignore this division, lest mankind perish.” But the scientist immolates himself, yields to the sword, for all of us.

Rosenstock-Huessy then turns to the notebooks of Michael Faraday to examine what he calls the “secret of the scientist.” It is largely a grammatical analysis of Faraday’s notebooks. He notes

initially that Faraday recorded 16,041 observations of data, and ended by saying that there is one “great and governing law” over all the phenomena of nature. His life work is stretched between that 16,041 and the One Law. Rosenstock-Huessy finds in Faraday’s notebooks some support for his own association of grammatical moods with aspects of time. Future is not made by an indicative “It will” but by an imperative that crosses the repetitions of the past and sends things in a new direction. The present is also not indicative, but exclamatory and emotional; experience of the present is always in suspense. Past events are recorded in Faraday’s notebooks by narrations. Through making a distinction between these moods and their temporalities, Faraday “could rise above this dog mentality of the ordinary human mind.”

Along the way, Rosenstock-Huessy makes the wonderful observation that science exists through its “right to systematic error.” Shepherds, airline pilots in a thundercloud, politicians, soldiers, teachers at the front of the classroom don’t have the luxury of suspending judgment, or of getting things wrong over and over again. Scientists do: “The admissible margin of error in the life of ordinary working people is – to speak quite arbitrarily – perhaps 5%. In Faraday’s 16,041 experiments, about one percent were successful and the rest was error.”

Rosenstock-Huessy ends the essay with a complex discussion of the “progress of prayer and of science.” He begins by showing that the division of mind and body that appears to be evident in the lab worksheet is in fact simply a reflection of different “styles of being.” A whole man becomes wholly mind in computing, wholly body when leaning toward the world to observe it. Mind and body are “different styles of being. We may be a mind or a body, in alternation.” Scientists, he says, are designated within modern society, like priests in ancient societies, to cross regularly between inner and outer, to alternate between these two styles of being. Physics is thus “a historical mandate given to a group of people by Christianity at a certain moment and for a certain future.” He also examines the differences between the three terms of Eddington’s title: World confronts us before we know it; physis is the world understood; nature is the world accompanying us and with us. He concludes with an analysis of an ancient prayer to Mars, in which the people plead with the powerful opponent of Rome to turn around and take up the cause of Rome. It is by “turning to,” not by following trends, that “we create a change in the world.” As physics becomes threatening, its future depends “not on the frantic talk about the atomic bomb but on the progress of rational prayer.”


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