Page - 31 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

31Introduction that while contextual reconstruction does not necessarily deny the possibility of more lasting truth value, the point of properly historical inquiry into past intellectual performances is not finding something familiar (or to dismiss it as unfamiliar in order to confirm our position), but being challenged by its his- torical alterity.100 As part of the overall recovery of historical biography—of which only a par- tial and impressionistic sketch could be provided here, in the hope that it nev- ertheless suffices for the present purposes—historians of science have turned to biography as a theoretically and empirically rewarding form of exploration and expression. Naturally, this turn is also indebted to the general opening up of the history of science toward a more expansive cultural history of knowl- edge. Especially striking is the emphasis on each scientist’s struggle for “exis- tential authenticity” in the face of social, political, and other constraints: the “ability to handle the enabling conditions of self-assertion lies at the heart of the life and work of every scientist.”101 With this in mind, it is also possible to avoid the schematism of earlier contextualist endeavors, in which the individ- ual is reduced to a “sampling device” that helps us understand the culture and the time:102 otherwise excellent “social biographies” of scientific practitioners like Charles Darwin (1809–82), in which the parallel currents of history are tied together “at the level where the events and ideas occur.”103 Imbued with the recently conceived premises, but still close to the ideal of pure “existential” biography, we find those of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Descartes. These have shown that the philosophical and scientific achieve- ment of Bacon and Descartes is indissolubly wedded to their reflection of what it means, among the significantly altered circumstances of their day, to be a natural philosopher: no longer an individual seeker after arcane mysteries of the natural world, employing an esoteric language and protecting the discover- ies from others, but a public figure in the service of the public good in the one case, and an honnéte homme using his natural faculty of clarity and distinctness 100 La Vopa, “Doing Fichte,” 153–57. 101 Thomas Söderqvist, “Existential Projects and Existential Choice in Science: Science Biog- raphy as an Edifying Genre,” in Telling Lives in Science: Essays in Scientific Biography, ed. Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45–84, here 66. Cf. Söderqvist, “Introduction,” in The History and Poetics of Scientific Biog- raphy, ed. Thomas Söderqvist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1–16. 102 Charles Rosenberg, “Woods or Trees? Ideas and Actors in the History of Science,” Isis 79 (1988): 565–70. 103 Söderqvist, “Existential Projects,” 51. Cf. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1992); Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery, and the Quest for Human Origins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).