Life sciences: discontents and consolations.

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Life Sciences: Discontents and Consolations
Paul Rabinow
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, USA
In 1930, Sigmund Freud, already in a somber,
pessimistic mood about the state of the world, one
reinforced shortly thereafter by the victories of the
national socialists, published Civilization and its
Discontents. Perhaps defiantly, Freud conspicu-
ously continued the scientifically detached stance
he had fashioned in The Future of an Illusion. This
stance, with its resigned distance, and its self-
control, was both the price to be paid and the
constraint required, or so it seemed to Freud, to
pursue successfully the project of demystifying
humankind’s deepest illusions. By means of this
ascetic exercise, Freud believed he could, or had
already, achieved essential insights that others,
mired in illusion, lacked. That lack, Freud was
lucid about this point, provided its own benefits
in the world. Benefits that those pursuing science
would have to forgo as the price of insight.
Basically, for Freud, what had to be abandoned
was hope, or at least, child-like or naı ¨ve hope.
It would seem to follow that abandoning this
type of hope was a necessary if not definitive step
toward maturity, or perhaps wisdom. But is there
such a thing as scientific maturity or wisdom?
Much turns on the term Wissenschaft, science. And
what it offered. And to whom. In this paper, I take
Freud’s claims and the position he claimed them
from as a starting point to explore these issues.
The hope is that such an effort might help us to
better understand—and
complexities of Wissenschaft as well as the commit-
ment to making it a central component of a life.
One of Freud’s central claims was that mankind
for most of its history had unknowingly projected
its ideals onto its gods. Recent advances in civili-
zation, however, had complicated this millennial
process; not only were some of these delusionary
processes now understood (thanks to the scientific
advances Freud himself was spearheading) but
additionally, and this was more complicated yet,
mankind was close to making its ideals—realities.
“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic
God.” This double turning of increased self-aware-
ness and increased power constituted the diacritic
of the present. What Freud held to be certain was:
first, that the process would continue indefinitely
into the future; second, that “present-day man
does not feel happy in his Godlike character.”1
renew—thehistorical
And humans, according to Freud, desire to be
happy. Consequently discontent was another dia-
critic of humans’ plight, especially as science
advanced and its achievements yielded instrumen-
tal capacities.
Consequently, Freud’s diagnosis of the present,
in 1930, was gloomy. While scientific and technical
advances were unquestionably accumulating; the
contemporary mix of scientifically achieved self-
understanding (of the self and of civilization) and
technical advance was, however, not yet coordi-
nated. Mankind was pursuing its illusions with
more power than ever before. Freud’s effort was
to question the project of coordination or at least
to temper the expectations it engendered. Of
course, Freud himself was deeply committed to a
scientific project of his own.
Wounded pride
In 1916, a younger Sigmund Freud had written
a small article for a Hungarian journal entitled
A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-analysis. The piece,
which appeared early in 1917, was intended for an
“educated but uninstructed audience” (an interest-
ing distinction when you think about it). Freud
remained content with the article’s basic points
and repeated them (albeit phrased a little dif-
ferently) in his subsequent Introductory Lectures in
Psychoanalysis2The difficulty alluded to in the title
of Freud’s essay was not humanity itself but
rather its pride. The question of who exactly this
humanity or mankind is, it is worth remarking, is
not explored in the essay (Europe’s educated
classes perhaps). Freud’s core argument is that
throughout history scientific advance had ran
counter to humanity’s megalomania, its’ self-
importance. Consequently it was consistent to
assume that any truly significant scientific advance
concerning man’s relation to the cosmos, to nature,
to other humans, or to itself, would be resisted, for
longer or shorter periods of time.3Freud’s core
position is that as science discovered and demon-
strated what was true, mankind ultimately had no
rational alternative but to adapt its own self-under-
standing to scientific discoveries. In these articles
as elsewhere, Sigmund Freud presents himself as
a scientist, even a great scientist; by so doing his
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self-presentation
challenge to his readers to accept his theories and
no doubt offers some comfort to himself. After all
the article was written to explain why Freud’s
theories were not being generally accepted.
Furthermore, in his defiant faith in the inevitable
triumph of science against the blind forces of
irrational resistance to its discoveries, Freud can
be understood to be not merely a scientist but an
Aufklarer, a man of the Enlightenment. The distinc-
tion rests on the observation that there is nothing
within the disciplinary confines of this or that
science to direct the historical fate of its dis-
coveries. An Aufklarer is someone who undertakes
to pursue increased understanding of a rational
sort where ever it leads believing that it will lead
somewhere beneficial. Enlightenment affect (belief,
hope, desire) is a surplus, a supplement, to scien-
tific achievement. An Aufklarer follows Kant’s
dictum—Sapere Audere!—“dare to know!”4
Kant argued, enlightenment is simultaneously a
scientific, moral and political undertaking. Such
a project constitutes a commitment to a kind of
truth and to a way of life linked to an understand-
ing of the good. Enlightenment, one might say, is
a culture, an ethos, or a form of life. It is a form of
life that can never be complete. It is a form of life
that is both arrogant and humble. It is arrogant in
so far as it acts for humanity with a confidence
that it is right, it is humble in that enlightenment
is an infinite project whose achievement lies in the
future.
Consequently, an ethos of Enlightenment is a
way of life that requires a certain understanding
of maturity. That is to say a view of the past, the
future and the present that links them together in
a hopeful manner but one whose proof can only
lie in the future of humanity not in any individual
life. The question is whether there is a correspond-
ing ethos within a scientific attitude. We will raise
the issue of maturity and its relation to science,
enlightenment and history recurrently in this
paper. The reason for this repetition is that there
are different and contrastive understandings of
each of the terms. Those differences depend in
part on an evaluation of the history of science and
Enlightenment—and of the present moment.
To return to Freud, he proposes “to describe how
the universal narcissism of men, their self-love, has
up to the present suffered three severe blows from
the researches of science.”
constitutesanaudacious
As
(a)The
COSMOLOGICAL
blow. Man
believed that his abode, the earth, was the
stationary center of the universe. This perception
fit well with man’s “inclination to regard himself
as lord of the world.” The first blow to man-
kind’s lordly status was dealt when it learned
that the earth was not the center of the universe
but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of
scarcely imaginable vastness. The destruction
of this narcissistic illusion came to general
acceptance in the XVIth century with Copernicus
although Freud is at pains to underscore that the
discovery had been made millennia before.
(b) The BIOLOGICAL blow. In the course of
the development of civilization man acquired a
dominating position over his fellow-creatures
in the animal kingdom. Not content with this
supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf
between his nature and theirs. He denied the
possession of reason to them and to himself he
attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to
a divine descent that permitted him to break the
bonds of community between himself and the
animal kingdom. Darwin put an end to this
presumption. “Man is not a being different from
animals or superior to them; he himself is of
animal descent, being more closely related to
some species and more distantly to others”
Although this point has been hard for civilized
adults to accept, Freud insists that children
and primitives readily accept, even assume, a
closeness with animals.
(c) The PSYCHOLOGICAL blow is, in Freud’s
self-serving opinion, probably the most wound-
ing. Man has been humbled externally but now
must accept that he is not sovereign within his
own mind. Philosophers had previously under-
stood this point but its scientific demonstration
has been fiercely resisted. Man, it seems, must
also accept that he is thinking about sex all the
time and only Sigmund Freud has explained
why.
Regardless of how one evaluates Freud’s overall
thesis, the main thing that he does not explain, or
even address, is under what historical conditions
scientific truth becomes socially acceptable. Greek
scientists knew the earth traveled around the sun,
children feel a kinship with animals, and philoso-
phers knew we know not what we think. Yet,
somehow, eventually, even grown up Europeans
saw, and would see, the light of day. In this faith,
despite all his pessimism about civilization and its
discontents,Freud remains
thinker. Not only does he dare to know—the high-
est commandment—but he assumes that ulti-
mately the truth will, as it were, come to light.
That light, sooner or later, will shine forth and
humanity will awaken. The question certainly
remains open as to whether Freud’s faith is not
his ultimate defense mechanism or a sign of
his maturity, a maturity running ahead of and
presaging where the rest of mankind is heading.
anEnlightenment
Science as a vocation: truth versus meaning
In 1917, perhaps on the very day of the Bolshevik
seizure of power in Russia, Max Weber delivered a
lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Wissenschaft als
Beruf, to a crowded hall of German university
studentsinMunich.5
the great—unsurpassed in my view—twentieth
Itstands, asone of
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century statements of the ethics and ethos of
science and scientists. It may well be considered
one of the first twentieth century statements,
especially if one agrees with my old humanist
German professors at the University of Chicago
who felt that Western Civilization had come to an
end by 1917. The lecture fits within the general
framework Weber had elsewhere set for himself
of characterizing the “life orders” (lebensfuhrung)
under modern capitalism. Although Weber does
not phrase it this way, the central theme of the
lecture might well be “What is maturity?,” within
modernity?, for those who dedicate their life to
seeking knowledge and understanding. In the
triad of science, Enlightenment and history, Weber
privileges history and science. He presents a
challenging diagnosis of the historical moment
and the ethical demands it poses for those who
desire to remain loyal to science. Loyal, that is,
without illusions. Weber,
the Enlightenment as, “the laughing heir” of
Capitalism, an heir, that by 1917, had long lost its
“rosy blush.”6For Weber, we lived enmeshed in
processes of Modernity rather than Enlightenment.
Weber divided his lecture, in classical didactic
fashion, into three parts: (a) the material conditions
of science, (b) the inner ethic of science and (c) the
cultural—or value—significance
modernity. Although this set of distinctions is
totally out of fashion today, I believe it remains a
powerful mode of orientation for those who study
science and practice Wissenschaft.
(a) Material conditions. Weber cast his discussion
of the material conditions of science as a compari-
son between the work conditions and career trajec-
tory of graduate students in Germany and the
United States. German students, after a lengthy
apprenticeship and the publication of a book,
received permission to begin offering lectures for
which they were compensated only by the fees of
those students who attended their lectures. While
providing limited monetary resources, this system
left the student a good deal of freedom of thought
and time to conduct research. In the United States,
an academic career began with a regular faculty
position hence the young person joined a bureau-
cratic system and was assured of being paid,
often, Weber observes dryly, the equivalent of
wages of a semi-skilled laborer. Only football
coaches were well paid in American universities,
Weber observed. In return for this money and
position, the young scientist was required to do a
great deal of teaching although ultimately his
career would be judged on his research. Whatever
else it might be, for Weber, Wissenschaft, required
labor and institutional resources.
With a certain regret he sought to contain, Weber
observed that the old humanist university in
Germany was on its last legs. “In very important
respects German university life is being American-
ized, as is German life in general. The large
institutes of medicine or natural science are ‘state
capitalist’ enterprises, which cannot be managed
chillingly refers to
ofsciencein
without considerable funds. As in all such enter-
prises, there is a separation of the worker from his
means of production. The worker, that is, the
assistant, is dependent upon the implements the
state puts at his disposal; hence he is just as
dependent as is the employee in a factory upon
the management.” As with all capitalist, and at
the same time bureaucratized enterprises, there
are indubitable advantages
disadvantages.
Not only was science operating under capitalist
and bureaucratic constraints, it further labored,
like the Vatican, under conditions of consensus for-
mation that rarely rewarded exceptional people.
Weber paints a stern, stinging, and remarkably
contemporary, portrait of the role played by
chance, arbitrariness and consensus-formation in
academic life. “It would be unfair to hold the per-
sonal inferiority of faculty members or educational
ministries responsible for the fact that so many
mediocrities play an eminent role at the uni-
versities. The predominance of mediocrity is rather
due to the laws of human co-operation.” Conse-
quently, he admonished his audience a young
person contemplating a scientific or scholarly
future must ask himself “Do you in all conscience
believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after
mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you,
without becoming embittered and without coming
to grief?“ Although, Weber remarked, enthusiastic
young people always answer that their “calling”
for science will see them through, Weber cautions
that few actually make it, without succumbing to
ressentiment or resignation.
Finally, not all were allowed to play the game of
science. Although Weber does not mention gender,
even though his wife was an ardent socialist–
feminist, he does add that if the would be scientist
was “a Jew, of course one says lasciate ogni
speranza” (“adandon all hope”). This equation of
the gates of Wissenschaft with the gates of hell is,
upon reflection, a rather bizarre one. It should
serve as a reminder to those who pine for the
good old days when science was pure. By this I
do notmeanthat the
science and industry are unproblematic, only
that historically their separation contributed to a
certain caste like recruitment within Germany and
beyond.
(b) Internal situation: inward calling for science.
Weber opens the section on the “inward calling
for science” by continuing to specify the conditions
under which science operates. The essential feature
of contemporary science is that it has entered an
irreversible “phase of specialization previously
unknown, and that this will forever remain the
case.” Science is not wisdom, science is—special-
ized knowledge. A number of important conse-
quences follow from this situation. First, “scientific
work is chained to the course of progress.” Any
scientist knows that, by definition and in part
due to their own efforts, their work is fated to be
outdated. Every scientific achievement opens new
in allthis. And
recent couplings of
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questions. One might say that a successful scientist
can only hope that one’s work will be productively
and fruitfully outmoded rather than merely forgot-
ten. Second, the knowledge worker must live with
the realization that not only are specialized
advances the only ones possible but that even
small accretions require massive dedication to
produce. Dedication or enthusiasm alone, however,
are not sufficient to produce good science. Nor
does hard work guarantee success. “Ideas occur to
us when they please, not when it pleases us.” The
calling for science thus must include a sense of
passionate commitment combined with methodical
labor and a kind of almost mystical passivity or
openness. The scientific self must be resolutely
willful, patient, yet permeable. Androgynous, if
you will.
Here Weber opens a parenthesis that is one of
the most celebrated in his entire work. What
exactly, he asks, does scientific progress provide to
the individual, to society, and to civilization?
Weber’s answer amounts to the stark conclusion
that not only does science alone not produce either
enlightenment or meaning, but furthermore under
conditions of modernity science stands in a
fraught, perhapsmortal,
enlightenment and meaning.
For Weber, scientific work forms part of a larger
“process of intellectualization” that has been
developing for thousands of years. What does this
mean?
Does it mean that we, today, for instance,
have a greater knowledge of life under
which we exist than an American Indian or a
Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist,
one who rides on the streetcar has no idea
how the car happened to get into motion.
And he does not need to know. [He can
depend on others.] The savage knows incom-
parably more about his tools. The savage
knows what he does in order to get his daily
food and which institutions serve him in this
pursuit. Theincreasing
and rationalization do NOT, therefore, indi-
cate an increased and general knowledge of
the conditions under which one lives. It
means something else, namely, the know-
ledge or belief that if one but wished on
could learn it at any time. Hence, it means
that principally there are no mysterious
incalculable forces that come into play, but
rather that one can in principle, master all
things by calculation. This means that the
world is disenchanted. One need no longer
have recourse to magical means in order to
master or implore the spirits technical means
and calculations perform the service.
tensionwithboth
intellectualization
Now, this process of disenchantment, which
has continued to exist in Occidental culture for
millennia, do they have any meanings that go
beyond the purely practical and technical? Weber’s
answer is a resounding “no.” Strictly speaking
within the constraints of the question of the
“inward calling for science” there can be no answer
to this question because it is not a question that
science can answer scientifically. If we recall that
when Weber refers to Wissenschaft he means all
forms of disciplined knowledge, we are unlikely
to be let off the hook by bringing Shakespeare to
the physicians nor ethics committees to the molec-
ular biologists. For that move risks instrumentali-
zing the cultural sciences (geisteswissenschaften)
rather than humanizing the life sciences.
(c) What is the value of science? “To raise this
question is to ask for the vocation of science within
the total life of humanity.” The value of science is
quite specific. To invent concepts and conduct
rational experiments. These concepts, however, no
longer provide a window onto eternal verities and
the experiments no longer reveal God’s truth.
Furthermore, they tell us nothing about the mean-
ing of the cosmos, nature or the psyche. Weber
heaps scorn upon those who think otherwise.7
“And today?,” he scoffs, “Who—aside from certain
big children who are indeed found in the natural
sciences—stillbelieves
astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could
teach us anything about the meaning of the
world?” Or, “After Nietzsche’s devastating criti-
cism of the ‘last men’ who invented happiness, I
leave aside altogether the naı ¨ve optimism in
which science—that is, the technique of mastering
life which rests upon science—has been celebrated
as the way to happiness. Who believes in this?—
aside from a few big children in university chairs
or editorial offices.” Or, “Natural science gives us
an answer to the question of what we must do if
we wish to master life technically. It leaves quite
aside, or assumes for its purposes, whether we
should or do wish to master life technically and
whether it makes ultimate sense to do so.” Weber
shares with Freud the view that science and its
associated growth of instrumental capacities was
not the path to happiness. He differs from Freud
in refusing to believe that scientific truths yielded
meaning. For Weber, science alone could not yield
meaning, the only possible path toward that goal
was experience yielding phronesis. Weber deeply
desires to follow this path but despairs that he is
making any progress in doing so.
For Weber, science contributes methods of
thinking, the tools and the training for disciplined
thought. It contributes to gaining clarity. That is
all. Hence for Weber, science contributes to an
ethics; a critical ethos of “self-clarification and a
sense of responsibility.” This sense of responsibility
turns on a specific conception of truth. Such an
ethics is a form of critique. It is a form of critique
in the Kantian sense of establishing where the
limits of thought lie. It is also critical in the sense
that it displays a suitable scorn for those who
cannot accept what Wissenschaft can and cannot
provide. That science, “does not give an answer to
questions [of meaning] is indubitable.” On that
claim Weber broached no gainsaying. However,
that thefindingsof
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that insight constituted not the end but only rather
the beginning of the problem of science, ethics and
modernity. “The only question that remains,”
Weber continued, “is the sense in which science
gives ‘no’ answer, and whether or not science
might yet be of some use to one who puts the
question correctly.”8In the conclusion, we will
return to Weber’s far-reaching, still unanswered,
and entirely contemporary, query.
However, today it seems clear that Weber’s view
of history and of science (Wissenschaft) require
modification. Specifically, they are too monotone
and too substantialist. At times Weber remains a
neo-Kantian seemingly forcing science into a priori
categories. At other times, there are grounds for
reading him as holding a view of ‘rationalization’
as the master term of Western history (although in
other places he resists this hypostatization). Both
tendencies go against the grain of other parts of
Weber’s thought where one could argue that
categories such as science are ideal types and
hence stem from value orientations. And hence
are historical and contingent. Where ever one
comes down in these debates, Weber’s question
and concern about the status and challenge of the
life orders within modernity, it seems to me,
remains a compelling one, even if his answers
seem dated.
1917–1989 Enlightenment betrayed
The twentieth century, amply endowed with
megalomaniac projects, has been the scene of
further wounds to mankind’s naı ¨vete ´ and its
narcissism.Theever-reasonable,
cautiously hopeful, Jurgen Habermas observes
“historical skepticism about reason belongs more
to the nineteenth century, and it was not until the
twentieth century that intellectuals engaged in the
gravest betrayals.”9Although Habermas is pre-
sumably referring to intellectuals such as Martin
Heidegger (and his obscene allegiance to the
Nazis) andGeorg Lukacs
indentureship to Stalin), his point refers to natural
scientists as well. The twentieth century has been
a time of the establishment of the most intimate
and systematic connections between knowledge
and the military (or forces of destruction more
generally): From the horrific effects of poison gas
(and other gifts of the chemical industries) through
the atomic bomb (and other gifts of physics and
engineering), through the Nazi nightmare of racial
purification (and other gifts of anthropology and
the biosciences), through the indigestible fact that
close to three quarters of the spending on scientific
research during the Cold War was devoted to mili-
tary ends. The industries and sciences of thanatos
have had a glorious century. We should never
forget that what is nostalgically seen today as the
Golden Age of Science—the one before Capitalism
supposedly despoiled the Life Sciences—was the
Age of the Cold War.
prudentand
(andhis horrific
Today it seems implausible to maintain any
longer that accumulating knowledge per se auto-
matically leads to beneficial results, or given its
fragmentation that it furthers our general self-
understanding. Nor—and this is where Weber
helps us avoid the fatuous denunciatory cant so
widespread today—can we unambiguously main-
tain that the opposite is the case.10
It is striking that in 1958 when Hannah Arendt
published The Human Condition the science she
chose as exemplary was physics. In the same year,
C.P. Snow in The Two Cultures had done the same
thing. However, four years later in the book’s
second edition,Snow
molecular biology. He was prescient. The immense
achievementsofmolecular
chemistry during the 1960s and 1970s—the dis-
coveryof the fundamental
mechanisms of the genetic code and its opera-
tion—will surely stand as a monumental threshold
in the history of science. However, with the inven-
tion of recombinant DNA technology and the
ascendancy of a new type of industry—the biotech-
nology industry—another blow was dealt to those
who wanted to believe that the production of
truth about life must remain pure of worldly taint.
Over the last two decades it has been shown that
there can be no life science without substantial
amounts of money. During the Cold War this
money came from nation states. Although there is
still a substantial contribution to the life sciences
from the State, there is an even greater flow of
funds from the huge multi-national pharmaceuti-
cal industries and from the fleet-footed and highly
mobile purveyors of venture capital. Please note
that I am not claiming that this situation is intrin-
sically either horrific or terrific, I have no regrets
for the passing of the Cold War, or for much of
what nationalistic science produced in the twen-
tieth century. I have no doubt that the goals and
means of capitalist enterprise and character will
inflect, perhaps radically, what used to be known
as the scientific ethic. My goal is to note a water-
shed change and to urge us to reflect on it.
Although hype and cant have dominated the
coverage of the emergence of genome mapping,
what we have learned from the first decade or so
is neither the secrets of the Holy Grail of Life nor
the meaning of the Code of Codes nor that genetics
inevitable brings with it a new eugenics. Rather we
have learned that all living beings—at the level of
the genetic code—are materially the same and that
the very techniques that were developed to make
this profound discovery enable, even oblige,
further intervention into that materiality. Francois
Jacob, the French Nobel Prize winner, frames
these two points in simple, elegant prose: First,
“All living beings, from the most humble to the
most complex, are related. The relationship is
closer than we ever thought.”11Second, “Genetic
engineering brought about a total change in the
biological landscape as well as in the means of
investigating it. Where it had been possible only
replaced physicswith
biologyandbio-
principles and
Life Sciences: Discontents and Consolations
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