The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude: Life, Literature and the Physical Sciences in Post-Enlightenment Paris (1780-1840) (2015)
Travis Benjamin Wilds (Author)
Michael Lucey (Advisor)
University of California, Berkeley
Michael Lucey
The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude investigates the conditions of intellectual production about life, living things and Nature in general prior to the emergence of literature as an autonomous cultural form. Through readings of texts by late Enlightenment and Romantic-era writers and savants, the dissertation tells the story of how literature and science became distinct entities, with distinct objects and distinct ends, by the latter half of the nineteenth century. Literary writers with natural philosophic ambitions react, I show, to the rise of Newtonian mathematical physics as an epistemic ideal among the élite mathematical physicists of the Académie des sciences, answering the growing prestige of precise quantification in the sciences with anti-mathematical rhetoric and alternative modes of quantification. The rhetoric of “exactitude” generated by the Parisian mathematical physicists and the savants who depended on their patronage corresponded, I show, to a push for cultural autonomy in scientific production, and ultimately to the emergence of a distinct scientific “field.” In Chapter One, “Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the Virtues of Admiration: Sentiment, Spectacle and the “Science to Come” in the Études de la nature (1784),” I show how Bernardin forged Rousseauvian sentimentality, early eighteenth-century natural theology, Buffonian natural history and his own expertise as a naval engineer into a new form of natural philosophy. The emphasis on the value of marveling that we find in Bernardin’s “science à venir” occurs as an attempt to update, I contend, notions about the study of Nature formerly prevalent among early eighteenth-century savants and generalists. In Chapter Two, “The Virtues of Exactitude: Alessandro Volta and the Emergence of Scientific Autonomy in Napoleonic Paris,” I examine the construction of a rhetoric of “exactitude” among the élite mathematical physicists of the Paris Académie des sciences. Like the imperative to admire espoused by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, “exactitude,” I show, can be construed as an epistemic virtue that maximizes knowledge about some aspects of Nature while minimizing others. The chapter examines the construction of “exactitude” as an epistemic ideal through an account of the strategies pursued by the Italian natural philosopher Alessandro Volta as he introduced his work on animal electricity to his Parisian counterparts in1801. In Chapter Three, “Balzac, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the Virtues of Synthesis,” I show how Balzac’s innovations in novel form were shaped by the impulse to reverse the increasing autonomy of the sciences in the interest of creating a total intellectual space. Along with other writers, philosophers and savants of the mid-nineteenth century, I maintain, Balzac articulated a rhetoric of “synthesis” predicated on the poetic and scientific possibilities of vital materialism. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)
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