Jeffrey Tucker and Professor Paul E. Kerry, History
Perhaps the most difficult thing about doing scholastic research is coming up with a good question. The philosopher Imre Lakatos has suggested that the modern research programme works by establishing positive and negative heuristics which dictate the questions that are and are not profitable to ask. As Thomas Kuhn has claimed, there are moments when scientists (and, I would argue, scholars) choose to break from tradition, but for the more part scholarship tends to follow the pattern of that which comes before it. When I submitted my ORCA proposal in the Fall of 2008 I thought I had found something new; developed a question which was novel, answerable, and provocative. In all my reading I had found clear connections between eighteenth century medical philosophy and the theory of Isaac Newton, and it seemed only natural to ask how Isaac Newton might have influenced a philosopher/physician as prominent as Friedrich Schiller. After a year of research and writing, however, I am convinced that this is exactly the wrong type of question to ask.
At first glance this may seem to be a bold statement; perhaps even one that suggests I consider my research to be a failure and am seeking to minimize my disappointment. I would be dishonest if I denied that this is a possibility, but I genuinely believe that my academic instincts have vastly matured over the last year. Lest it be thought I shirked in my efforts, however, I shall relate the story of my metamorphosis.
The question, as initially proposed, was a question of influence. It was my explicit intent to discover how Isaac Newton might have influenced the thinking of Schiller, particularly with regard to Schiller’s perceptions of the body. Though I would not have admitted it at the time, I now believe that my intent was more than a little blind. I had it in mind that influence was something to be found by association; if I could prove that Schiller had read Newton, or that he had been taught his theory, I believed that I could assume a connection between their ideas. In my naiveté, I held that if I read Schiller so informed then Newton would veritably jump out of the pages and declare himself, fully formed in all his ideological grandeur. In other words, I sought to validate my own high esteem for Isaac Newton by necessitating that he have an obvious presence in every aspect of eighteenth-century science. This simply cannot be the case, and as I researched the connection between Newton and Schiller I increasingly began to believe that such a connection did not exist. Intellectually, my first reservations developed after reading the work of the historian Quentin Skinner. Skinner, now one of the world’s pre-eminent historians, clearly demonstrates that historical influence is almost impossible to prove; according to Skinner, even if textual evidence shows that two persons have been in direct contact with one another, the historian has no basis to claim that the ideas of one have affected the ideas the other. All that is certain in this situation is that one person has claimed to be influenced by another. As I approached the relationship between Newton and Schiller from a more critical perspective I began to question if the mere citation of Newton by Schiller was sufficient to prove that Newton had changed the substance of Schiller’s thought.
The procedure of my study heavily emphasized a literary review of Schiller’s writings, with particular emphasis on the content of Schiller’s early medical dissertations. As expected, at no point in Schiller’s two extant dissertations does he mention Isaac Newton. Initially, this discovery was disappointing, as I believed it incontrovertibly invalidated my thesis. Having ascertained the non-presence on Newton in these sources I next turned to the writings of Schiller’s teacher Jakob Friedrich Abel, whom Schiller frequently cited as his favorite instructor. Compared to Schiller, far fewer of Abel’s writings have been translated into English, and this severely limited the depth my analysis; but, of those sources which I examined, none explicitly cite or discuss Newton in any way. At this juncture I was faced with a decision. Either I could continue to pursue a connection between Schiller and Newton by forcibly interpreting Schiller’s writings according to Newtonian principles, or I could re-evaluate the worth of imposing intellectual correlations were they did not exist.
The most critical phase of my research was conducted in England, while attending the University of Cambridge. As the alma mater of Isaac Newton, the University of Cambridge contains the largest collection of Newtonian manuscripts and Newtonian secondary literature in the world. It would be humanly impossible to browse the totality of Cambridge’s collection in two months, but the hundreds of sources that I did examine fundamentally altered my perceptions of historical processes. Newtonianism, I determined, does not have a single uniform interpretation over time. Isaac Newton and the Newtonian legacy have, at different times, been appropriated by dozens of different intellectual traditions, and to label any one of them as the ‘true’ form Newtonianism would be untenable. It is two very different things, therefore, to claim that Isaac Newton influenced Schiller and that Newtonianism influenced Schiller. Indeed it would almost impossible to claim that Newtonianism did not influence Schiller, but this does not mean that Schiller’s interpretation of Newtonian philosophy was anything more than a fourth-hand re-interpretation of what Newton actually said.
Having problematized my proposal I determined to take a closer look at Schiller’s dissertations and then formulate a new thesis based of a closer reading of the text. I was anxious to maintain the basic structure of my original question, and as such determined to focus on cultural issues which had an influence on Schiller’s philosophy. In this I was facilitated by my readings at Cambridge. Whilst studying the history of anatomy and medical education I began to read heavily into the history of the brain and role that medical philosophy has played in shaping cultural ideas of gender. I realized as I read deeper into Schiller’s writings that his conceptions of the duality of soul and body correlated strongly with these eighteenth-century concepts; furthermore, the justifications which Schiller used to construct his vision of mediated soul/body mechanisms were highly reminiscent of pietistic mysticism. Based on these observations I drafted a paper entitled, ‘Psychic Physiology: Hermetic and Spiritual Mysticism in the Medical Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller,’ in which I argue for strong connections between Schiller’s medical philosophy and the various mystical traditions which were prevalent in late eighteenth-century Germany. I then used these cultural concepts to examine how medical theories, such as Schiller’s, helped to produce a radically different concept of femininity. This paper was submitted to the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and was approved by them to be presented at their annual conference, held on October 8-11, 2009 at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. As a professional academic conference (only two other undergraduates were accepted to present at the event) this was an unprecedented opportunity for me to demonstrate the quality of my research, writing, and knowledge.
In the end, even though the subject of my final paper/presentation differed from my initial proposal, I feel extremely satisfied with the work that I have done. The research which I have produced far surpasses my initial expectation, and I believe that my understanding of historical theory is greatly enhanced for having gone through this learning process. Unquestionably, without support of ORCA I never would have had the resources to achieve these results.