Emil du Bois-Reymond and the tradition of German physiological science

Abstract

In 1872, Emil du Bois-Reymond delivered an astonishing lecture entitled ‘‘The Limits of Science’’ at a Congress of German Scientists and Physicians in Leipzig. No stranger to polemic and bellicose oratory, and possessing among his generation of physiologists unmatched rhetorical abilities, du Bois-Reymond had already attracted much public recognition and acclaim for his denigration of French culture at a time when belligerence and competition between Prussia and France had peaked. Yet, the topic of his 1872 lecture had a signal significance which not only would inform du Bois-Reymond’s subsequent public lectures on literature, art, civilization and science, and the place of Darwin in the modern world, but would also elaborate a mechanistic and fatalistic view of consciousness, one that denied scientific understanding of the phenomenon as even obtainable. Controversy exploded—and from all quarters. Renowned scientists accused him of pessimism and of failing to apprehend the progress of instrumentation. Darwinists accused him of denying the theory of evolution. Catholics saw du Bois-Reymond as calling ‘the Divine’ into question. Philosophers thought his mechanism jejune. The public was shocked—both by the fatalism and materialism and also by the very notion of limitations. Reading Gabriel Finkelstein’s biography of Emil du Bois-Reymond well over a century after these debates, it is striking that du Bois-Reymond’s objections, and the controversies they engendered, remain salient even into the present. That we appear to be living in a ‘neuro’ epoch filled with similar debates seems sufficient reason to start turning the pages. Finkelstein’s Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany is an exquisite and sensitive study of the private and public life of a man that Finkelstein regards as: ‘‘the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century’’ (xv). Filled with rich empirical details