Staying at Home

The Tao Te Ching is my favorite book, and I am also a great admirer of Thoreau. These words of theirs favor quietness over rushing around, and thoughtfulness over the endless accumulation of data points -- and up to a point, my bias is like theirs. Nonetheless, the Voltaire citation (when put in context) shows what's wrong with this point of view.

Voltaire's dig was aimed at Maupertuis and the other French geodeticists, who traveled to Lapland and Ecuador to take measurements establishing the exact shape and size of the earth -- data necessary for the confirmation of Newton's gravitational theory. Voltaire's belief that these trips and measurements were unnecessary was the result of an anti-empirical theoreticist bias. This was the rationalist age, and Voltaire thought that measurements were unnecessary, since Newton's theory showed what the measurements would be. (Voltaire was all wrong, of course.)

The geodeticists' work was politically sensitive and involved adventures and mountaineering feats surpassing those of Indiana Jones -- one scientist was sentenced to death in Spain and had to escape via Algeria. (Geodetics eventually came to be assigned to the French military, which played a considerable role in scientific research well into the twentieth century.) Poincaré also tells us that the Histoire du Docteur Akakia, Voltaire's attack on the first French Newtonian Maupertuis (once Voltaire's mentor), was apparently motivated primarily by petty jealousies and court intrigue rather than anything more serious. Voltaire's feud with Maupertuis ultimately became entangled with a different feud between Maupertuis, Samuel König, and Leibniz,  the last of whom was also  simultaneously battling with Newton and Clarke over quite a different grievance. Science-studies-wise, early modern science confirms Steve Shapin's observation that modern science traces back to the secular aristocracy's originally-military code of honor, rather than to the otherworldliness and selflessness of Christianity.

Even during my Lao Tzu / Thoreau days I was more an egalitarian mystic than a theoretician, but by now I'm as far from theory as you can get. To me studies of concrete particulars (history, geography, philology) are infinitely more interesting than their theoretical explanations, and the fully-theorized studies (marginalist economics, analytic philosophy, "literary studies")  are abominations.

And if in the end I prove incapable of making really significant contributions to the study of concrete reality, then I'll just have to continue to gather bright shiny things and post them here.

The real Dr. Akakia

What is "akakia"? 

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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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