Jonathan Barnes

Science is practised amid folklore and ideology, and it is foolishly romantic to imagine that the scientist conducts his professional affairs on a high plateau of reason untainted by the miasmous exhalations of ordinary life. It is equally foolish to suppose that science is and can be nothing more than a cunning defence of the ‘dominant ideology’ of the society within whose bounds it happens to be pursued. But it is plausible – even platitudinous – to think that the scientist may be influenced, in unconscious acquiescence or conscious reaction, by the unscientific ideas prevalent in his society. That platitude generates a host of particular questions for the historian of science. How far was this astronomer influenced by the astrological beliefs of his contemporaries? How far was that botanist moved by the accumulated wisdom of country folk? How far did this biologist escape from the anthropocentric prejudices of his society? If we are interested in Kepler or in Newton, it will matter that the one was a devotee of astrology, the other of alchemy. But those dispiriting facts impinge upon the history of science only to the extent that Kepler’s astrology disoriented his star-map or Newton’s alchemy upset his calculations. The general form of the questions, in short, is this: how far did items of folklore or of ideology affect science?–

Who else would refer in the space of a hundred pages to a newly discovered papyrus of Stesichorus, a Zurich medical dissertation on the fear of being buried alive, and four 19th-century Danish followers of Hegel? George Steiner’s erudition is as exuberant as ever. The latest book, like its predecessors, teems with esoteric references, recondite allusions and jackdaw juxtapositions. It resounds with the clangour of dropping names.

Every pilgrim who ascends the Acropolis is seized by the splendour of the Parthenon, its ruined elegance, its marmoreal serenity. But the pilgrimage is secular: although we know that the Parthenon was a temple, we do not experience it as a numinous haunt of the gods. The power of its finished form is now perhaps beyond imagination: but it may be doubted whether even the vast chryselephantine statue of Athene which it housed – and which was, by all accounts, incomparable in its vulgarity – added any awfulness to the place. The museum visitor who contemplates a marble Aphrodite may likewise know that Aphrodite was a Greek goddess. But her smooth contours are unlikely to excite thoughts of religious passion.

Greek, Sir, said he, is like lace; every man gets as much of it as he can.’ So Johnson in 1780. An early editor punctiliously observed that ‘this was said twenty-five or thirty years ago, when lace was very generally worn.’ Two centuries later lace is quite out of fashion.