333
EarlyParadigm
Science and Medicine 22 (2017) 333-360
The ‘do It Yourself’
www.brill.com/esm
The ‘Do It Yourself’ Paradigm: An Inquiry into the
Historical Roots of the Neglect of Testimony
Emmanuel Alloa
University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
emmanuel.alloa@unisg.ch
Abstract
In contemporary social epistemology, the claim has been made that there is a traditional “neglect of testimonial knowledge,” and that in the history of epistemology, firsthand self-knowledge was invariably prioritised over secondary knowledge. While this
paper acknowledges some truth in these statements, it challenges the given explanations: the mentioned neglect of testimonial knowledge is based not so much on a primacy of self-knowledge, but that of self-agency. This article retraces some crucial
chapters of this ‘do-it-yourself’ paradigm: it considers the imperative of autopsia in
early Greek epistemology, history and medicine, and the early modern refashioning of
the privilege of self-generated and self-taught (autodidactic) knowledge. A new picture
emerges of how the emphasis on (self-)agency progressively shifted towards a focus on
the self as the source of ultimate knowledge.
Keywords
testimony – self-knowledge – autopsy – autodidactic – Archaic Greek epistemology –
Renaissance – René Descartes – history – medicine
* University of Sankt Gallen, SHSS, Philosophy, Unterer Graben 21, CH-9000 St. Gallen,
Switzerland.
Early
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and nv,
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koninklijke
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| doi333-360
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Alloa
The Neglect of Testimony: How Truly Pragmatic Is the ‘Pragmatic
Turn’ in Epistemology?
The following quote is sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill: “Never trust
a statistic you haven’t forged yourself.” This anecdote is interesting in two respects, which ultimately make the same point. Firstly, Churchill apparently
never dispensed this advice (he actually regarded statistics highly), but the
quote was devised by the Nazi regime to discredit the British enemy.1 One
might, then, say, ‘never trust a quote you haven’t forged yourself.’ But secondly,
if this sentence is still quoted so often, even though its forged nature has long
been revealed, it may arguably point to a deep-rooted belief – the belief that
there is nothing we are better acquainted with than that which we have done
ourselves, with our own hands, or, more generally, by our own means. Trust is
fine, but first-hand knowledge is better. In whatever way we consider the story
of the alleged Churchill quote, it seems to confirm a human tendency to favour
self-agency over second-hand knowledge: knowing by ourselves could stands
in opposition to knowing through others, i.e. by hearsay, based on opinion and
belief. While the latter is ultimately unverifiable, the former mode of knowledge alone guarantees that the acquisition of knowledge can be traced back to
its source.
Yet such a deep-rooted persuasion is at odds with some of the recent developments in the humanities and social sciences. It is certainly not too bold a
statement to say that a consensus has recently formed that bridges the usual
divide between the history of science and philosophical epistemology. This
consensus tends to question the long-standing privilege granted to first-person
inquiry, and stresses the inherently social dimension of cognition instead. In
opposition to a reductionist understanding of knowledge, which exclusively
ties ‘self-evidence’ to the individual self, and to what might be called the idea
of ‘autopsy’ (‘seeing with one’s one eyes’), many authors advocate intersubjective, pragmatic and mediated aspects of knowledge.
Indeed, we might accept that we know most things that we hold to be true
not by ourselves, but through others. Whether gathered through personal oral
testimony or through the media, through the questioning of witnesses or often-repeated pieces of information, some of our sturdiest beliefs – about our
ancestors, the geography of the earth, or our position in the universe – have
never been the object of any personal inquiry, since we take them for granted.
As a matter of fact, some of our most personal facts and features will never be
1 Werner Barke, Ich glaube nur der Statistik... . Was Winston Churchill über Zahlen und Statistik
gesagt haben soll – und was er wirklich sagte (Stuttgart, 2011).
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directly accessible to us: when a customs officer asks us to fill out a form with
our personal details, such as our date of birth, we simply repeat what has been
handed down to us by others. Social epistemology has clearly shown to what
extent our existence is determined by relations of trust which, by nature, are
based on assumptions that we have not verified ourselves. If we were to strip
the world bare of all facts that we have not checked first hand, we would be left
with a heavily disfigured and scarcely recognizable environment.
This new consensus in social epistemology presents not only a discrepancy
with the commonsensical reaction to the abovementioned Winston Churchill
anecdote, it moreover conflicts with large parts of traditional epistemology.
Social epistemologists are certainly right when they observe, in the history of
knowledge, a traditional “neglect of testimony” (this trope was formulated by
Jonathan Coady in his seminal study, and has since been repeated often).2 Undoubtedly, the “autoptic imagination” looks back upon a long history:3 according to one established opinion, true evidence is necessarily evidence one has
verified for oneself; and advocates of social epistemology hold that this restrictive understanding of truth gave rise to a “solipsistic bias,” which we still have
not fully discarded.4 Truth is not something that ‘lies around, out there’ – it
needs to be constructed, through intersubjectively shared practices. The current consensus could then be summarized as follows:
a.
b.
rather than just being recorded, knowledge needs to be produced.
(by and large) knowledge is to be socially produced.
In the wake of what could perhaps roughly be termed the ‘pragmatic turn’ of
epistemology, and the shift towards socially shared practices of knowledge
(the title of, for example, Steven Shapin’s influential A Social History of Truth in
itself is telling), the issue of testimony has come to play a crucial role in contemporary philosophical epistemology.5 In certain ways, testimony represents
a litmus test for distinguishing individualistic epistemologies and social epistemologies, as Frederick Schmitt has noted:
2 C.A.J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford, 1992), 13.
3 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism
(New Haven, CT, 1992), 51.
4 Peter Lipton, “The Epistemology of Testimony,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science,
29 (1998), 1-31.
5 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago, IL, 1994).
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If individualism concerning testimony is defensible, then epistemology
will remain in an important sense individualistic. And if it is not defensible, epistemology will have to be profoundly social, whatever may happen on other topics.6
The vast field of scholarship on testimony generally confirms that the second
alternative has gained the upper hand. The broad evidence for our constant
and inevitable reliance on others – verifying every premise would make practical living virtually impossible – has been considered a successful rebuttal of
epistemic individualism, which holds that “social phenomena can be fully explained in terms of the motivations and actions of individual agents.”7 Today,
as Jennifer Lackey states, “the importance of testimony, both epistemological
and practical, is nearly universally accepted,” as it shows that the domain of
cognition reaches far beyond the evidence a subject can purport to have seen
‘with her own eyes.’8 If the testimony of others is, indeed, a valid source of
knowledge, the way in which the epistemic process is understood needs to be
reconsidered. Beyond the dichotomy of cognition and action, cognition itself
is now largely considered an enactive, generative process, and not just the passive registration of a state of affairs. Communitarian epistemologists highlight
that a testimonial utterance is not ‘constative’ but ‘performative:’ rather than
stating that something is the case somewhere in the world, testimonies ‘set up’
facts in the world, thereby effectively generating them.9 Most scholarship on
testimony thus confirms that epistemology must be seen not only in a pragmatic way, but also more specifically in its generative and intersubjective aspects, and that the new social epistemology contributes to put to ending the
“dominance of an individualist ideology” which, according to Coady, dominated the Western, especially post-Renaissance world.10
Interestingly, current debates within philosophical epistemology are mirrored in the history of science. A large consensus has formed to see scientific
discoveries not as the achievement of individual geniuses, but rather that of
6
7
8
9
10
Frederick F. Schmitt, “Socializing Epistemology: An Introduction through Two Sample
Issues,” in Frederick F. Schmitt, ed., Socializing Epistemology: The Social Dimension of
Knowledge (Lanham, MD, 1994), 1-28, 4.
Axel Gelfert, A Critical Introduction to Testimony (London, 2014), 175.
Jennifer Lackey, “Testimony: Acquiring Knowledge from Others,” in Alvin Goldman and
Dennis Whitcomb, eds., Social Epistemology: An Anthology (Oxford, 2011), 71-91, at 71.
Martin Kusch, “Testimony in Communitarian Epistemology,” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science, 33 (2002), 335-354, at 349. Peter J. Graham, “Can Testimony Generate
Knowledge?” Philosophica, 78 (2006), 105-127.
Coady, Testimony, 13.
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“thought collectives” (Ludwik Fleck), communities of scholars, convergent
practices, technological parameters, and changes in mentality.11 Consequently,
in Shapin’s and Schaffer’s seminal work Leviathan and the Air Pump, which discusses the experimental science of the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes
appears as a helplessly obsolete epistemic individualist who still believes that
only personal inquiry leads to knowledge; whereas Robert Boyle represents
epistemology following the ‘pragmatic turn,’ after which advancement in
knowledge is accepted to be a necessarily transindividual, collective process.12
A pragmatic turn has, then, unquestionably taken place, both in systematic
and in historical epistemology. The aim of this paper is not to question the fact
that this turn was a necessary development; to the contrary, it welcomes it. Its
aim is, rather, to analyze whether one of the central assumptions that validated
this ‘turn’ was not, in fact, flawed from the start. With regard to historical epistemology, as has been noted elsewhere, investigations of specialist groups of
scholars – like those active in the context of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century – intended to demonstrate the necessarily collective nature of
knowledge production risk entering a circular argument.13 Moreover, the fact
that (as Shapin and Schaffer repeatedly stress) the Royal Society is formed by a
community of experts whose authority as witnesses is grounded in the authority of the individual might raise some questions of whether expert collectives
really provide the best argument against the putative individualism in epistemology.14 Similar criticisms might be voiced against the systematic-oriented
approaches in philosophy. One cannot help but notice that the philosophical
debate about testimony somewhat resembles that of the question of ‘other
minds,’ e.g.: What are the conditions that give us access to what others know?
Is it possible to find out on what grounds other minds know what they know?
Under what circumstances might it be justified to rely on another individual’s
information? Merely transferring the task of securing knowledge to others is
hardly sufficient for overturning the individualistic bias of traditional epistemology: however dependent on others reliabilistic positions may be, they of11
12
13
14
See e.g. Ludwik Fleck, “Scientific Observation and Perception in General,” (1935), in
Robert S. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle, eds. Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck
(Dordrecht, 1986), 47-58; Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social
Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA, 1979); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of
Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, IL, 1995); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,
Objectivity (Chicago, IL, 2007).
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the
Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ, 1985).
Lipton, “The Epistemology of Testimony,” 23.
See esp. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, chap. 2.
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Alloa
ten remain highly individualistic in their orientation, as Sanford C. Goldberg
has convincingly argued.15 It may, therefore, not be sufficient to move towards
a social epistemology while dismissing individualist ideology entirely: the involvement of more than one individual does not in itself prompt a move beyond individualism.
But another skeptical question should be considered here. In the wake of
the pragmatic turn, the emphasis is not only on what is socially made; is it not
also placed on the fact that knowledge is made, i.e., that it is the result of an
action, and thus different from a putative traditional concept of knowledge.
Hence traditional epistemology is not only an individualistic construct, but
also static – two aspects which concurred in the image of a spectating subject
impassibly registering the facts of the external world. But what if the pre-modern conception of knowledge was not this static in the first place? What if the
common dichotomy between ‘self’ and ‘other’ was beside the point?
In what follows I shall suggest that, rather than focusing on actors, epistemological analysis should start with procedures. While much evidence points
to the fact that the Western philosophical tradition has either “ignored testimony altogether or it has been cursory and dismissive,” there are good reasons
to believe that this did not primarily result from an individualistic bias, but
rather from a tendency to define the valid generation of knowledge purely as
self-generated knowledge.16 Instead of tracing back self-agency to the individual self and its allegedly unquestionable authority, it is worth investigating the
specific parameters underlying this procedure. In retracing the historical vicissitudes of the ‘ex propria industria’ imperative, this article proposes a shift in
perspective: first-hand knowledge was privileged because of its derivation
from self-agency. Like theories of practice, epistemology had long been governed by the ‘do it yourself’ principle.
Knowing about Oneself and Knowing Through One’s Own Means
Immanuel Kant was often asked by his students or hosts to write a few dedicatory words into their guest books or albums. As the years passed, he adopted
the habit of finishing his notes with the following aphorism: ‘Quod petis in te
est. Ne te quaesiveris extra’ – roughly, “That which you seek is within you; do not
15
16
Sandy Goldberg, Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology (Oxford, 2010), chap. 2.
Coady, Testimony, 6.
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The ‘do It Yourself’ Paradigm
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search for it elsewhere.”17 Unlike the Latin poets of his sources, Kant used this
aphorism in reference not to a particular object of knowledge, but rather to a
faculty of knowledge: here, the subject is not only that which needs to be investigated, and thus the object of knowledge in a manner of speaking; it is simultaneously the only means to achieving an insight. In contrast to the Delphic
principle of gnōthi seauton (“know thyself”), the self is not the primary goal
here, but first and foremost a ‘medium’ of knowledge acquisition. Thinking for
oneself is not necessarily always thinking about oneself, but conversely, every
true instance of thinking about oneself always requires thinking for oneself. In
other words, a shift occurs, from knowing about oneself to knowing through
one’s own means. True knowledge, in this theory, is knowledge that one has
acquired oneself; true knowledge is knowledge obtained through one’s own
effort.
Kant’s emphasis on the use of one’s own faculties, in turn, indicates a liberating possibility: since immaturity (Unmündigkeit) is ‘self-incurred’ (selbstverschuldet), it can be overcome through practice of one’s own personal abilities.18
The primacy of autonomy – and of associated concepts like self-control, selfdetermination, or self-regulation – can only be understood fully if the self is
considered a faculty, not an object. The liberated use of one’s own abilities,
such as thinking and acting for oneself, which is inherent to every single subject, nevertheless wavers between individuality and universality. Thinking for
oneself, according to the first maxim of common sense, “means seeking the
supreme touchstone of truth in oneself (i.e., in one’s own reason).”19 In contrast, sapere aude refers to the courage “to use one’s own understanding” without “the guidance of another.”20 Yet are the phrases ‘one’s own reason,’ and
‘one’s own understanding,’ not, in fact, oxymoronic? This oscillation between
individuality and universality can be observed once more in Kant’s elaboration
on the topic of thinking for oneself, essentially “[t]hinking in everyone else’s
17
18
19
20
The aphorism is, in fact, a textual portmanteau combining a verse fragment by Horace
(“Quod petis, hic est”) with a fragment from the Satires of another poet, Persius (“nec te
quaesiveris extra”); Kant inscribed it in guest and autograph books, nine times altogether,
from 1777 onwards. See Hans Vaihinger, “Erklärung der vier Beilagen,” Kant-Studien, 9
(1904), 342-343.
Immanuel Kant, “Was ist Aufklärung?” in Horst D. Brandt, ed., and Ernst Cassirer, introd.,
Was ist Aufklärung: Ausgewählte kleine Schriften (Hamburg, 1999), 20; Hans Siegbert Reiss,
ed., What Is Enlightenment? Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1991), 54.
Immanuel Kant, “Was heißt sich im Denken orientieren?” (1786), in Brandt and Cassirer,
Was ist Aufklärung, 60; “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” in Allen W.
Wood, ed., Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge, 2001), 18.
Kant “Was ist Aufklärung?” 20; What Is Enlightenment, 54.
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Alloa
stead” (An der Stelle jedes andern zu denken).21 Self-induced submission to another’s authority, where only the words and thoughts of others are adopted, is
to be replaced with a form of emancipated reason that no longer adopts another’s thoughts uncritically, while retaining the ability to speak on everyone’s
behalf.
This criticism of heteronomous representation, and thus alien authority, is
juxtaposed with the overall representativeness of one’s own reasoned thoughts.
Consequently, autonomy and representativeness cannot be placed into opposition a priori. The question of enactment alone is sufficient to distinguish selfdetermination from the submission to alien authority. While it is possible to
generalize from the principle of any action carried out on one’s own grounds
and thus to make it valid for virtually everybody, anything adopted from others
will always be marred by the fact that its origin cannot be verified – one is reminded of the motto of the Royal Society of Great Britain “Nullius in verba,”
“Take nobody’s word for it.” Moreover, every adoption of exterior knowledge
holds the risk of outside encroachment. Those who accept as a fact things they
cannot verify for themselves necessarily surrender, in exchange, some of their
autonomy to an alien entity.
In agreement with Kant, Diderot defines true knowledge as knowledge acquired through one’s own faculties. An autonomous person is defined as someone who “dares to think for himself […] and admits nothing that is not based
on the testimony of his experience and his reason.”22 According to Jakob
Thomasius’s seventeenth-century theory of ‘eclecticism,’ upon which Diderot
bases his own, there are two further possible sources of knowledge acquisition
in addition to penser de soi-même (thinking for oneself): firstly, sense experience, and secondly, derived knowledge, or deductive reasoning based on one’s
own faculty of understanding. These passages demonstrate the lasting effects
of a fundamental epistemological decision. If one must be able to provide an
account of every acquired piece of knowledge, and if any epistemological content must have a traceable basis, then there are precisely two possible sources
of true knowledge acquisition: direct perception and deductive reasoning. As
such, true knowledge is always acquired first hand, since second-hand knowledge precludes authenticity. This view, predominant in epistemology and explicitly formulated during the Enlightenment, underlines the ‘neglect of
testimony’ repeatedly affirmed in the philosophical testimony debate. Beliefs
21
22
Immanuel Kant, Handschriftlicher Nachlass, Ref1. 2564; Akademie-Ausgabe [=AA] (Berlin,
1900 sqq.), vol. 16 (1924): 419, l. 1.
René Diderot, “Eclecticisme,” in Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des
arts et des métiers (Paris, 1755), vol. 5, 270.
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The ‘do It Yourself’ Paradigm
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that are merely passed down from others but cannot be personally confirmed
are relegated to the realm of transmission, and are not investigated further.
Since they derive from an outside source, they cannot claim a status of knowledge, and should therefore be considered, at the very most, opinions.
Plato’s Theaetetus illustrates the distinction between true episteme and
mere doxa using the example of court witnesses. In order to establish the facts
of the case, judges are obliged to refer to other people’s testimony. Yet the
court’s ability to reach a verdict and arrive at facts that make a sentence legally
enforceable is one thing; true knowledge is another.23 According to Jonathan
Barnes, who provided an insightful comment for these passages, facts witnessed by others are certainly the most abundant form of knowledge. However, in his view, philosophical knowledge must be acquired in a more rigorous
manner:
No doubt we all do pick up beliefs in that second hand fashion, and I fear
that we often suppose that such scavenging yields knowledge. But that is
only a sign of our colossal credulity: the method […] is a rotten way of
acquiring beliefs, and is no way at all of acquiring knowledge.24
A focus on procedure, rather than on the actor, allows a potentially interesting
shift in perspectives. While agreeing with the diagnosis of a historical ‘forgetfulness of testimony’ in large portions of Western epistemology, this paper argues that the traditional rationale put forward to explain it – the supposed
individualistic bias – does not sufficiently address the problem. The common
obsession with individualism has concealed the fact that most epistemological
debates (not just in philosophy, but also in many other fields of knowledge) do
not so much revolve around the actors than around the procedures of knowledge acquisition. The article aims to explore an alternative hypothesis: what if
the forgetfulness of testimony maintained in the testimony debate of Western
epistemology were not caused by a primacy of the individual, but rather by a
primacy of self-agency?
Primacy of self-agency is best expressed by Descartes’s adage according to
which true knowledge is necessarily knowledge acquired ex propria industria
(‘through one’s own effort’). In what follows I will reconstruct some (exemplary and yet rather sporadic) moments from the timeline along which the ‘do it
23
24
Plato, Theaetetus, 210b; in Plato, Theaetetus and Sophist, trans. H.W. Fowler (Cambridge,
MA, 1980).
Jonathan Barnes, “Socrates and the Jury: Paradoxes in Plato’s distinction between Knowledge and True Belief II,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 54 (1980), 193-206, at 200.
Early Science and Medicine 22 (2017) 333-360
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Alloa
yourself’ principle was progressively consolidated. Starting with a central topos of early Greek epistemology, the imperative of autopsia, this investigation
shall then be extended to the different fields of history and medicine, before
moving on to the early modern reshaping of this privilege of self-generated
knowledge, and finally the topic of self-taught (autodidactic) knowledge. I will
then argue, within the theme of the propria industria, the fact that the self
(‘proprium’) has been given more attention was to the detriment of the industria. However, as the conclusion shall show, there is no need to tie or subordinate the generation (industria) to the private self. From a source of knowledge,
the self turns into a means for knowledge – a medium of knowledge which, as
it turns out, competes with many others. Via the phenomenon of testimonial
knowledge, a ‘de-centering’ of individual subjectivity indeed takes place, but
in a different way from those to which social epistemologies had accustomed
us.
Autos oida: With One’s Own Eyes
True knowledge is unmediated knowledge: this familiar trope can be traced
back to some of the earliest extant sources of Greek culture. The connection
between visual perception and mental understanding pervades Greek thought,
even as early as in the pre-classical period.25 Homer’s topical appeal to the
Muses showcases the discrepancy between the omniscience of the gods and
the ultimate contingency of the poet, who was not personally present at the
time at which the events he narrates happened, and therefore relies on alien
information:
Tell me now, Muses, dwelling on Olympos,
as you are heavenly, and are [present, pareste] everywhere,
and everything is known to you [iste te panta] – while we
can only hear the tales [kleos] and never know [oude ti ismen]26
25
26
Bruno Snell, Die Ausdrücke für den Begriff des Wissens in der vorplatonischen Philosophie
(Berlin, 1924); Kurt von Fritz, “Noeô, Noein and Their Derivatives in Pre-Socratic Philosophy (Excluding Anaxagoras),” Classical Philology, 40 (1945), 223-242; Herman Fränkel,
Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums (Munich, 1962); Bruno Snell, “Wie die
Griechen lernten was geistige Tätigkeit ist,” Der Weg zum Denken und zur Wahrheit: Studien zur frühgriechischen Sprache (Göttingen, 1978), 26-32.
Homer, The Iliad, II, 484-6; in Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Garden City, NY,
1974).
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The ‘do It Yourself’ Paradigm
343
This passage is illuminating in several respects. What the muses know (iste) is,
literally, what they have seen (iste is a form of eido/oida, ‘to behold,’ in the perfect tense); moreover, the act of beholding requires personal presence (parousia). The mortal poet on the other hand is doomed to gather the information
for his narrative from an alien, and therefore uncertain, source. His knowledge
is a derived knowledge from hearsay (as the text states, he believes the kleos,
the ‘tales,’ a term etymologically derived from the word for hearing, according
to the proto-Indo-European root *kleu). As a rumor, then, this is without origin,
like a rustling in the forest. Belying Derrida’s general claim about logocentrism
according to which voice is always tied to presence (which then Derrida later
extended to ‘phono-photo-logocentrism,’ which would include both the verbal
and the visual), the Homeric passage rather suggests a metaphysical gap between the auditory and the visual. The auditory lacks a clear location and an
unambiguous author, it floats indefinitely without clear spatial anchoring nor
accountable authorship, since it can be echoed by many intermediary voices;
the visual, however, does not accommodate temporal distance and requires
physical testimony, the actual presence of visual parousia.
This dichotomy between the gods’ knowledge on one hand, which is comprehensive due to its presentist nature, and humans’ mediated, unsupported
opinion on the other, was later reiterated by Xenophanes, who stated that a
god remains “ever in the same place moving not at all,” and that nevertheless
– or therefore – “all of him sees, all thinks, all hears.”27 Through their own effort, humans may not be able to acquire all knowledge – an emphasis on the
finitude of man that also permeates the blind rhapsode’s trope; but the invocation of a divine source lends human words their legitimacy. As such, alien testimony was entirely permissible for humans in ancient times (and was, in fact,
even necessary), provided that the witness’s authority remained unchallenged,
and that it was possible to trace a definitive chain of transmission. At the same
time, the word of truth must be traced back to a genuine and particular moment, to a witness who had “shared it” himself (autos pareōn).28 This emphasis
on the oral tradition, however, places total priority on the sense of vision, as
exemplified by the genealogy episode in the Iliad. After an extended presentation of family trees, which could be considered a veiled allegory for the epic’s
unbroken destiny of transmission, Aeneas addresses Achilles:
27
28
Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz [=DK], eds., Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1903),
26, respectively fragment B 26 and B 24.
Homer, Odyssey, 8, 510; in Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Garden City, NY,
1963).
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Alloa
Each knows about the other’s birth and parents
from the old tales of mortals that we’ve heard;
you’ll never see my parents nor I yours.29
Despite the necessity of hearsay, the privileged place of seeing for oneself remains fully intact. Heraclitus simply reasserts this with an aphorism: “The eyes
are more accurate witnesses than the ears.”30 Nevertheless – and this cannot
be emphasized enough – the distinction in question is not really a contest between the senses but rather a discrepancy between direct and mediated faculties. Those who repeat what they have heard inevitably speak with borrowed
voices, whereas one cannot transmit what one has seen to others without rendering it in an auditory form. Thus, to see at all is to see for oneself. For Rémi
Brague, the prioritization of sight is “not an unwarranted preference for a particular sense [...]. The reason the Greek world indisputably favored vision is
because it better satisfied the requirements of the ideal of direct knowledge.”31
It is this ideal of directness that justifies the dominance of that autos oida, that
“self-seeing,” which was referenced by Homer, and subsequently fixed into a
concept.32
As Hermann Fränkel first demonstrated, what began with Homer as an expression acquired conceptual valence with Xenophanes of Colophon in the
latter half of the sixth century BC.33 In a passage that might remind modern
readers of Descartes, Xenophanes wrote that all knowledge consists of “clear
insight,” and therefore only things that one has seen oneself (autos oida) can
be considered insight.34 Inherent in this passage is a rejection of all forms of
religious or occult revelation, or soothsaying (‘manticism’).35 The term “presence,” as Robert Flacelière has shown, was affected by this. Previously, divine
manticism had served to compensate for a lack of personal presence; the word
mantikē, which derives from manía (madness), restores a type of presence that
the seeker is missing. The soothsayer is possessed by a god that essentially resides within his or her body, and provides direct access to divine revelation.36
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
Homer, Iliad, 20, 203-205.
DK, 22, fragment B 101.
Rémi Brague, Introduction au monde grec: Etudes d’histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 2008),
88.
Homer, Odyssey, XIII, 273 and Iliad, XVII, 687.
Fränkel, Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums, 381.
DK, 21, fragment B 34.
For the testimony in Aetius and Cicero, see James H. Lesher, “Xenophanes’ Scepticism,”
Phronesis, 23 (1978), 1-21, at 7.
Robert Flacelière, Devins et oracles grecs (Paris, 1961), 33.
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345
According to Fränkel, by rejecting manticism, Xenophanes “made the chasm
between here and yonder unbridgeable.”37
Xenophanes’ Fragment 34, with its critique of knowledge, was one of the
most frequently cited texts in antiquity. Both Plato and Aristotle made reference to it, while Sextus Empiricus even calls Xenophanes the founding father
of scepticism. Whether Xenophanes should, indeed, be regarded as a sceptic is
contested among scholars today.38 Indisputably, though, it was thanks to Xenophanes that first-hand experience was valued higher than experience derived
from alien authorities, and his view had both a momentous and lasting impact.
The development of the concept of autos oida can be traced through the dichotomies developed in various schools of thought, foremost in medicine, to
which we shall attend in a moment, and in historiography, with which I will
start.
Historiography: The Histor as Eyewitness
Xenophanes was well known for his criticism of Homer, which by extension
questioned the oral tradition, which he contrasted with first-hand experience.
Centuries later, Porphyry wrote the following in his commentary on Homer:
To see with one’s eyes [idein ophthalmoisin] is dictinct from seeing something through one’s imagination, just as in dreams too we think we see
something and we refashion the narratives of others who have told
them.39
While somewhat redundant with regard to the sensory experience described,
the text makes instrumental use of the dative in ophthalmoisin (‘with one’s
own eyes’), which might indicate that, here, self-action is once more highly
regarded. This expression was originally reserved almost entirely for extraordinary events. Porphyry’s later testimony shows the semantic shift of the expression ophthalmoisin hōran in the course of the classical period: originally used
for events in which someone, quite literally, would not believe his or her eyes,
37
38
39
Hermann Fränkel, “Xenophanesstudien,” Hermes, 60 (1925), 174-192.
Ernst Heitsch produced some valid arguments for an anti-sceptic reading in Ernst
Heitsch, “Das Wissen des Xenophanes,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 109 (1966), 193235.
Porphyry, Questionum Homericarum ad Iliadem pertinentium reliquias, ed. Hermann
Schrader (Leipzig, 1880), 75,28-76,1.
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by the end of the fifth century BC the phrase had become a maxim applied to
ordinary factual knowledge.40 A historian, moreover, is literally a person who
has seen with his own eyes: the moniker derives from the verb historein, “to
see.” Hegel later pointed out that early historians only described matters “of
living and immediate interest in the personal experiences and external environment of men.”41
Herodotus, whom Cicero posthumously declared the founding father of history, describes his understanding of the term historein. Whereas for Heraclitus,
somewhat surprisingly, the defining feature of historein was Pythagorean philosophy, Herodotus’s understanding of the same imposes two conditions:42
that of on-site investigation, and that of first-hand experience. In his Histories,
Herodotus reports that on his journey down the Nile, he had traveled and ‘seen
for himself’ (autoptēs) the country as far as Elephantine, but had learned everything about territories beyond that point by asking locals, i.e. orally (akoei
historeōn). He supplements his narrative with tales from older Egyptian sources, notably offset by the admission that “[h]itherto my own observation and
judgment and inquiry are the vouchers for that which I have said; but from this
point onwards I am about to tell the history of Egypt according to that which
I have heard.”43
Thucydides phrases the ideal of autopsia in a similar manner. A historian
must distinguish between ‘remote antiquity’ (pany palaia), the description of
which necessarily relies on hearsay (akoai logōn), and more recent events, for
which contemporaries who have seen (opsis) things for themselves and can
consult their own ‘experience’ (autoi xyniste) are available.44 This controls the
general tendency by some to “deal with traditions, even traditions of their own
country, [by] receiv[ing] them all alike as they are delivered, without applying
any critical test whatever.”45
40
41
42
43
44
45
Guido Nenci, “Il motivo dell’autopsia nella storiografia greca,” Studi Classici e Orientali, 3
(1953), 14-46; Guido Schepens, L’autopsie dans la méthode des historiens grecs du Ve siècle
av. JC (Brussels, 1980); François Hartog, “The Witness and the Historian,” in Sølvi Sogner,
ed., Making Sense of Global History (Oslo, 2001), 320-337.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen zur Philosophie der Geschichte, in Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, eds., Werke (Frankfurt/Main, 1971), vol. 12, 4; Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 1975), 13.
Heraclitus, DK, 22, fragment B 129.
Herodotus, Histories, 2, 99, 1; in The Histories, trans. A.D. Godley, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA
and London, 1946).
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2, 73, 2; in History of the Peloponnesian War,
ed. and trans. C.F. Smith (Cambridge, MA, 1921).
Ibid., 1, 20, 1.
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Polybius was the last to voice the imperative of first-hand experience so explicitly.46 Castigating armchair historians, he asserted that any true writing of
history must be based on the historian’s own witnessing. However, as Polybius
concedes, the topic of autopsia is complicated by one further factor: witnessing a maritime battle is not alike to comprehending its military tactics and
maneuvers. In this case, even if an uninvolved onlooker were “present, he
would simultaneously be absent.”47 Thus, autopsia must be matched with autopatheia (self-experience) in order to be complete. In his account of wartime
developments of 220 BC Polybius wrote that he “was not only an eyewitness
[autoptēs], but a participant [sunergos] in some of these events and responsible for others.”48 This remarkable passage demonstrates the aporia between
the dual roles of the eye witness: on the one hand, they are a detached, but
blind observer, and on the other, they are someone involved in the observed
events, and therefore someone whose comprehension will always be biased.
The empeiria (experience) called for by Polybius reflects this aporia in its very
etymology. The pe(i)r in empeiria refers to transit, yet someone who has personally undergone the events he describes can rarely assert an objective standpoint. Polybius’s claim to a universal history and a concomitant tota simul field
of vision pushes against the inherent boundaries of this aporia, since it would
ultimately require the ‘Olympian standpoint’ that Lucian of Samosata would
later theorize in his historiography. According to Lucian, the historian’s position should be precisely that of Zeus, king of the gods, “surveying now the
Mysians’, now the Thracian horsemen’s land.”49
The methodological considerations of these Roman historians reveal why
the insistence on first-hand acquaintance quickly devolved into an empty
trope. According to Verrius Flaccus, a Roman grammarian and scholar in the
reign of Augustus, historiography should never involve accounts of events in
which one was personally involved (“quibus rebus gerendis interfuerit is qui
narret”).50 Before this background, his judgment of Greek historians is ambiva46
47
48
49
50
Marie Laffranque, “L’œil et l’oreille: Polybe et les problèmes de l’information en Histoire à
l’époque hellénistique,” Revue philosophique, 93 (1968), 263-272.
Polybius, Histories, 12, 28; in The Histories, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford and New York,
NY, 2010).
Ibid., 3, 4.
Lucian of Samosata, How to Write History, in A.M. Harmon, K. Kilburn and M.D. Macleod,
eds., Works (Cambridge, MA and London, 1913), vol. 6, 49. Parallels can be found in Lucian’s
description of the katáskopos who looks from high above, in the dialogue Charon, also
known as The Observers.
Verrius Flaccus, De significatu verborum, 4. Quoted after Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae,
[Attic Nights, trans. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA, 1946)] 5,18,1.
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lent, since their concept of historia had comprised ‘knowledge of present-day
affairs’ (“rerum cognitio praesentium”).51 A history of the present is a problematic concept, and Verrius Flaccus is not the only one to believe so. Even
Polybius had acknowledged the limitations of simultaneity for the historian,
insisting on the fact that the status of the eye witness was subject to both spatial and temporal limitations:
Events take place simultaneously all over the world, but it is impossible
for one person to be in more than one place at the same time, and it is
equally impossible for him personally to visit every part of the world and
see what is special about them.52
Polybius continues with the questions of how to relate to informants, how to
interrogate witnesses, and how to critically evaluate sources. He makes visible
the paradox which all historians face invariably: in asserting to have verified all
events narrated from a first-hand perspective, historians claim that their statements are facts independent from their individual perspectives.
Medicine: The Concept of Autopsia
According to Polybius, philosophers and students of nature were regularly accused by their contemporaries of explaining only the ‘what’ (hoti) but not the
‘why’ (dioti) in their arguments – in other words, of assembling observed facts
without uncovering their causes. Polybius adapts this accusation to his own
field, historiography. For a historian to give up first-hand experience, he wrote,
was as if a doctor proceeded without first-hand acquaintance of a case. While
historians distinguished between experience (empeiria) and testimony (hypomnemata), medicine distinguished between testing (peira) and justification
(logos).53 According to Polybius’s argument, armchair historians carried as little credibility as doctors who were familiar with all the logoi, but had never
personally acted as ‘surgeons,’ that is, had never touched a body with their
own hands (from the Greek *cheir-ourgos, which literally translates as ‘hand
worker’).
51
52
53
Verrius Flaccus, De significatu verborum, 4. Quoted after Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae,
5,18,2.
Polybius, Histories, 12, 4.
Polybius, Histories, 12, 25.
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Indeed medicine, like historiography, is a discipline in which first-hand
knowledge has always played a special role. In the medicine of the ancient
world, the concept of autopsia went far beyond the mere execution of autopsies. The term denoted personal empirical experience, as evident in certain
passages from Aristotle’s writings on biology:54 a physician cannot simply rely
on what patients tell him, but he has to see for himself, studying all the symptoms evident in the body, from the most obvious to the seemingly insignificant
ones. Regardless of Polybius’s desire to contrast physicians’ first-hand acquaintance with second-hand knowledge, such a dichotomy was rarely discussed in
the classical discourse on the art of healing. According to Galen, a doctor’s
knowledge should embrace the correct blend of autopsia, historia, and metabasis, where historia is simply the sum of others’ empirical experiences, and
metabasis a comparison of information accumulated by means of autopsia
and historia. Hence first-hand acquaintance with a case and transmitted
knowledge are perpetually intertwined.55
Dissections were prohibited by Christian authorities in late Antiquity and
the Middle Ages, and therefore Hippocratic and Galenic texts corpuses remained to be the main authorities for medical knowledge. Their authoritative
nature, in turn, removed the necessity of new discoveries based on one’s own
experience. As Ludwik Fleck explains: “In the first place they believed in Galen
not because no observations were carried out, but because no observations in
the present-day meaning of this word had been done, for there was no need to
do it.”56
Autopsia and book learning would not stand in opposition to each other
until the early modern period. The earliest attacks on academic anatomy, even
before Andreas Vesalius’ day, were launched by doctors such as Niccolò Massa
who, in his Liber introductorius anatomiae (Venice, 1536), denounced those
who dared “to write about matters that their eyes and their hands have never
touched.”57 He continued that “with the clouds of stale hand-written manuscripts, they obscure the brightest sunlight, as they are indifferent towards
54
55
56
57
Aristotle, History of Animals, 618a18, 620b23, 628b8; in Aristotle, History of Animals, ed.
and trans. D’Arcy Thompson (Oxford, 1910).
Galen, Subfiguratio empirica, 9; quoted in Karl Deichgräber, Die griechische Empirikerschule: Sammlung der Fragmente und Darstellung der Lehre (Berlin, 1930, repr. 1965),
44-46.
Fleck, “Scientific Observation and Perception in General,” 73.
Niccolò Massa, Liber introductorius anatomiae, sive dissectionis corporis humani (Venice,
1536), f. 3v: “neque oculis viderint neque manibus tetigerint.”
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printed books.”58 Yet it was some time before the primacy of autopsia prevailed. As late as in 1599, André Du Laurens wrote in his Historia Anatomica
that two equally valid paths towards truth existed in anatomy: autopsia and
doctrina.59 While autopsia was based upon the dissection of human cadavers
and the vivisection of animals, doctrina referred back to opinions officially endorsed by authorities, which made personal verification, according to Du Laurens, generally superfluous. But in seventeenth century, these positions were
no longer part of a general consensus. By 1627 William Harvey’s De motu cordis
clearly affirmed the superiority of eye-witness observations over theoretical
teachings.60 The appearance of new anatomical theaters was evidence of the
emerging urge to experience things for oneself. At the first ‘free’ university of
Padua (that is, free from any papal or secular authority), autopsies were conducted within the purpose-built teatro anatomico. Paradoxically, the ideal of
first-hand observation, while in opposition to the written tradition, made extensive use of textual metaphors. For instance, in Caspar Bauhin’s Theatrum
anatomicum (Basel, 1592) the author describes dissections as a tool for rendering the “Book of Nature” (liber naturae) legible at last.61 Blumenberg comments
on this:
It is therefore ironic in its own way that the language of early science
once again makes metaphorical reference to books [...]. The question
of how one could read this Book of Nature, in what language it could
be read, in what language it would be written, and how one should
go about discovering its grammar, was initially subsumed by the basic
metaphorical layer of competition among books in which books are primarily placed alongside one another but secondarily pitted against one
another.62
58
59
60
61
62
Massa, Liber introductorius anatomiae, f. 4r: “sed ab aliis acceptis codicibus vetustate et in
curia scriptorium impressorumque vitiates, lucidissimum solis lumen offuscarunt.”
André du Laurens, Historia anatomica humani corporis, et singularum eius partium multis
controversis et observationibus novis illustrata (Frankfurt, 1599), 10 and 15.
Gabriele Baroncini, “Harvey e l’esperienza autoptica,” Forme di esperienza e rivoluzione
scientifica (Florence, 1992), 145-173.
Caspar Bauhin, Theatrum anatomicum infinitis locis auctum (Basel, 1592).
Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt/Main, 1981), 18-19: “Es hat deshalb
seine eigene Ironie, daß sich die Sprache der frühen Naturwissenschaft metaphorisch
wieder auf das Buch bezieht. Es ist die Konkurrenz nicht nur zur Autorität der Bibel,
sondern auch zu Aristoteles, die in der Metaphorik der beiden Bücher und ihrer Gleichrangigkeit angesagt wird. Die Frage, wie denn in diesem Buch der Natur gelesen werden
könne, in welcher Sprache es geschrieben sei und wie man ihre Grammatik herauszufin-
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The ‘do It Yourself’ Paradigm
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As Blumenberg has shown, the metaphor of the ‘Book of Nature’ was complemented by the metaphor of an intellectual ‘Book of History.’63 Nature recedes
behind the things generated by its creatures. Clearly, the reference to the ‘Book’
in no way excludes autopsia, on the contrary, clear insight and the understanding of a text come to mean one and the same thing. In this context, seeing for
oneself – whether nature or the world’s past – is synonymous with reading for
oneself. This does, however, bear implications for the question of what knowledge acquired through one’s own effort actually means.
Autopsia as used in both medical history and historiography may, indeed,
constitute, first and foremost, the acquisition of knowledge about the facts at
hand by oneself. But it is necessary to distinguish between the acquisition of
this knowledge by oneself, and its acquisition through one’s own effort: in the
former case, the subject is just an actor of knowledge, in the latter the subject
is the author of knowledge. While in the former case, facts predate the epistemological process and are independent of it, in the latter, they result from it;
hence the paradigm shift that is to be observed: it is not sufficient to acquire
knowledge oneself, knowledge has to be self-generated. Rather than being decipherable from some Book of Nature or History, truths may be gathered from
within the individual subject. As such, they can only be truths of reason. With
time, the principle and the range of its validity has been extended, far beyond
mere truths of reason. What is true needs to be grounded in oneself; what is
true needs to be set up by the subject itself.
Ex propria industria: Shaping the Modern Notion of Agency
René Descartes is known to have attended postmortem examinations and vivisections in person, and these experiences left traces in his philosophical work.
Beyond his famous experiment on an ox’s eye ball, the wider importance of
medicine in his philosophical method has also been discussed in recent scholarship.64 Although the role played by medicine and its empirical methods in
Descartes’ thought must, therefore, be acknowledged, the principle of autopsy
as relevant to Descartes also requires analysis in a new, philosophical direc-
63
64
den hätte, schiebt sich erst über die metaphorische Grundschicht der Bücherkonkurrenz,
in der primär Buch neben Buch, sekundär Buch gegen Buch steht” (emphasis original,
translation mine).
Blumenberg, Lesbarkeit der Welt, 91.
For an overview see Vincent Aucante, La philosophie médicale de Descartes, preface by
Jean-Luc Marion (Paris, 2006).
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tion. Significantly, his aim to find a system of medicine which, as he writes in a
letter to Mersenne, would be “founded on infallible demonstrations” entailed a
shift from sensory to mental vision.65 As Descartes perceived it, inner insight
– the transparency of one’s own mental activities – is the sole reason why no
threat was posed by some malin génie. In his Discours de la méthode, Descartes
also announced his goal of “the reformation of my own opinions, and basing
them on a foundation wholly my own.”66 Although Descartes defines science
as a form of finding through one’s own effort (invenire propria industria) and
leading to “self-sufficiency” elsewhere self-sufficiency is the result, not a precondition of science, just as thought can only be held to function as a ground
of certainty when it is transparent to subjects that have thought about a subject themselves.67
Descartes, therefore, whom Kant considered a “paragon of self-thought,”
presented a theory of thinking in which thoughts (according to the Regulae)
are entirely “intellectual activities.”68 According to Christoph Menke, this refers to “the intellectual capacity of the I, which, by scrutinizing itself, has made
itself its own foundation and can now methodically guide itself.”69 Insofar as a
person’s knowledge is received from the external world, the risk of deception
can never be fully ruled out. Only thought that is utterly “through one’s own
effort” (ex propria industria) stands on solid ground.70
This theory notably implies a reframing of the scholastic phrase propria industria or propria virtute. A concept discussed largely in the context of Christian theology, i.e. the extent to which Christ had undergone the Passion
voluntarily and been resurrected through his own effort, had evolved into an
65
66
67
68
69
70
René Descartes, Letter to Mersenne of January 1630, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery,
Œuvres complètes [=AT] (Paris, 1897-1913), vol. 1, 106: “une médecine qui soit fondée en
démonstrations infaillibles.”
René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, II, 3. AT, vol. 6, 15: “réformer mes propres pensées,
et de bâtir dans un fonds qui est tout à moi” (translation mine).
René Descartes, Letter to Hogelande, 8 February 1640. AT, vol. 3, 722.
According to Herder, who has transcribed Kant’s early lectures on logic, the original wording is “Muster im selbst denken,” Kant, Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. 24 (1966), 4, ll. 26-27. Further on the notion of Selbstdenken in Kant, and its context, see Lothar von Kreimendahl,
“Kants vorkritisches Programm der Aufklärung,” in Reiner Klemme, ed., Kant und die
Zukunft der europäischen Aufklärung (Berlin, 2009), 124-142, at 133. Fort the Descartes
quote, see Regulae ad directionem ingenii, 3,4. AT, vol 10, 368: “actiones intellectus nostri.”
Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology, trans. Gerrit
Jackson (New York, NY, 2013), 10.
Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, 10,1. AT, vol. 10, 403.
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essential feature of subjectivity theory.71 It could now be used to justify the
other precepts of the modern self: self-determination, autonomy, self-control,
and self-regulation. In contrast to Petrarch’s view that freedom comprises “being with oneself” (secum esse), the modern self comes into its own only through
self-action. In the school of thought established by Pico della Mirandola, humans must become sculptors of themselves, shaping and molding their being
(sui ipsius [...] plastes et fictor).72 Man needs to be a sculptor who chisels out his
form from the very material nature has given him. Through such self-design,
the subject fashions itself through an act of self-creation. Ernst Cassirer
summed up this thinking thus: “As soon as we proceed to the order of value, we
find a reversal of the temporal succession of the man of ‘nature’ and the man
of ‘art’ – a reversal, that is, of the primus homo and the secundus homo: the
second in time becomes the first in value.”73
In the wake of Pico’s image of the subject fashioning itself, seventeenthcentury philosophy developed either the conception of self-generating, spontaneous substances (Spinoza), or that of monads acting out of their own
depths (Leibniz). The fortune of the Leibnizian concept of the “notion of an
individual substance, which contains all its phenomena in such a way that
nothing can happen to a substance that does not come from its own depths”
explains in part why derived, external knowledge, such as knowledge from testimony, was, by and large, marginalized.74 The requirement to speak on one’s
own behalf even increased, and became a battle cry for the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century philosophy of subjectivity. This is particularly true of the
thinkers associated with existentialism and its forerunners.
During the Enlightenment Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, for instance, rejected
‘second-hand knowledge,’ which yet relied on proofs while asserting that one’s
own, immediate knowledge required no witnesses.75 A careful reader of Jacobi,
Søren Kierkegaard criticized what he deemed to be a pathology of the anonymity and “ventriloquism” of his time, and characterized it as “a world which
71
72
73
74
75
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [Opera omnia, Leonine edition, Rome 1888-1906],
IIIa, 53,4 sc. “quod Christus propria virtute resurrexit.”
Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, eds. Michael Papio Borghesi and Massimo Riva (Cambridge, 2012), 116.
Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario
Domandi (New York, NY, 1963), 97.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Letter to Arnauld, 28 November (8 December) 1686; in Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, eds. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, IN
and Cambridge, 1989), 80: “qui ne lui naisse de son propre fonds.”
Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Die Grenzen der Vernunft: Eine Untersuchung zu Zielen und Motiven
des Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt/Main, 2004), 38.
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is quite unaccustomed to hearing an I.”76 Then again, Kierkegaard considered
his own role to be that of a “forerunner until he comes who in the strictest
sense says: I.”77 The ‘I’ to which he was referring was not an autobiographical
one, given his literary style of writing in a diversity of voices. “It became my
task to create author-personalities and let them enter in the actuality of life in
order to get men a bit accustomed to hearing discourse in the first person,” he
wrote, finding that “‘truth’ cannot possibly be served by ventriloquism.”78
One could easily write a history of this intellectual thread, which extends all
the way from Jacobi, via Kierkegaard, through to twentieth-century existentialism, with figures such as Sartre and Heidegger: self-agency, doing things out of
one’s own capacities, will be found to be one of its most central motives. In Being and Time Heidegger stresses the “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) which
testifies to an inner “ability to be oneself” (Selbstseinkönnen), and which thus
pushes back the realm of anonymity (das Man). According to Günther Anders,
one of Heidegger’s earliest readers and critics, Heidegger’s call for existential
resoluteness reminds of the legendary Baron Munchhausen, who believed he
could pull himself out of a swamp by pulling on his own ponytail: “The others,
doxa, prejudice, customs, are nothing but the loam sticking to the self’s foot
and hindering his being himself. It is out of this loam of ‘Man,’ that ‘Dasein’ has
to drag itself, like Munchhausen seizing himself by his own hair.”79
The Philosopher as Autodidact
Yet another important line of intersection between self-knowledge and selfagency is that of self-education. In his dialogue On the Teacher, Augustine rhetorically asks: “Who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn
what the teacher thinks?”80 Autodidacticism, in the sense of the rejection of
others’ authorities, is, indeed, one of the forms adopted by the propria industria imperative. Leibniz, for one, insists he was “nearly self-taught,” and that
rather than “filling my mind with trifles [...][,] things that are accepted on the
76
77
78
79
80
Søren Kierkegaard, Papirer, 16 vols. in 22, ed. Niels Thulstrup (Copenhagen, 1968-1978),
vol. 8, B 88, 183. Idem, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, eds. and trans. Howard V.
and Edna H. Hong, 7 vols. (Bloomington, 1999), vol. 6, 178.
Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol. 6, 178.
Ibid.
Günther Anders (Stern), “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 8 (1948), 337-371, at 354.
Augustine, De magistro, 14, 45; in Augustine, On the Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis, IN, 1995).
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authority of teachers rather than because of arguments,” he had “probed all the
way to the depths of each subject and arrived at its very principles, from which
everything I extracted could be discovered by my own efforts.”81
No doubt the figure of the autodidact has much more ancient origins. One
early – and illuminating – example is the singing contest between Domodocus
and Phemius in Homer’s Odyssey. Phemius boasts that, unlike Domodocus
(whom he accuses of having copied his songs from others), he has taught his
own songs to himself as an autodidaktos, that is, composed them on his own.82
Nevertheless – and this might surprise modern readers – he hastens to add
that, while he has discovered this aptitude within himself, it remains to be a
gift from the Muses. The assertion that the act of writing literature is different
from an act of rewriting does not rule out the agency of divine inspiration, for
the singer has truly been implanted with the knowledge, or been bestowed it
drop by drop (emphuō).83
The term autodidaktos was still employed in late antiquity in the philosophy
of religion, by thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria, for whom it solely signified
knowledge that had not been borrowed from others. His treatise On Flight and
Finding describes four types of seekers. The fourth type, the ‘self-learnt and
self-taught sage’ (automathēs kai autodidaktos) does not, according to Philo,
by searchings and practicings and toilings gain improvement, but as soon
as he comes into existence he finds wisdom placed ready to his hand,
shed from heaven above and of this he drinks undiluted draughts, and
sits feasting, and ceases not to be drunken with the sober drunkenness
which right reason brings.84
Philo’s remarks venture to explain why there is no contradiction between an
autodidaktos and a theodidaktos, the divinely instructed sage of St. Paul’s First
Epistle to the Thessalonians.85
Abraham Malherbe has argued that, regardless of this, the allusion to autodidaktos and theodidaktos in the theology of revelation, even during St. Paul’s
81
82
83
84
85
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Preface to a Universal Characteristics,” (1678), in Leibniz,
Philosophical Essays, 5-10, at 6.
Homer, Odyssey, 22, 347.
See Jacqueline Assael, “Phémios autodidaktos,” Revue de philologie, 75 (2001), 7-21.
Philo of Alexandria, De fuga et inventione, ed. Paul Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera
quae supersunt (Berlin, 1896-1915), vol. 3 (1898, repr. 1962), 166 (translation mine).
1 Thessalonians 4,9; see Calvin J. Roetzel, “Theodidaktoi and Handwork in Philo and 1
Thessalonians,” in Albert Vanhoye, ed., L’apôtre Paul: Personnalité, style et conception du
ministère (Leuven, 1991), 324-331.
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lifetime, certainly deserves a polemic interpretation, viz. as a reframing and
appropriation of another dominant reading of the epistemological paradigm.
In the first centuries AD, the concept of autodidaktos was predominantly associated with the Epicurean tenet of first-hand experience.86 It agrees with
Epicurus’s claim that he had never had a teacher, and that he was his own student in all respects. This claim, attested by Cicero and Diogenes Laertius,
among others, has been called into question many times afterwards, including
by Hegel. And yet Epicurus’s programmatic autodidacticism has also been held
up as exemplary by many, including Marx, who lauded it in an early treatise in
a comparison of Democritus’ and Epicurus’ philosophies of nature:
While Democritus seeks to learn from Egyptian priests, Persian Chaldeans
and Indian gymnosophists, Epicurus prides himself on having had no
teacher, on being an autodidact. There are some people, he says, according to Seneca, who struggle after truth without assistance. Among these
people he has himself traced out his path. And it is they, the autodidactic,
whom he praises most. The others, to his mind, are of the second rank.87
To Marx, the episode of St. Paul subsuming the autodidaktos under the concept
of the theodidaktos, and thereby considering self-teaching just a superficial understanding of what is, in fact, a godly instruction, is nothing but a form of religious subjugation, whereby ecclesiastic institutions make sure to keep the
flock away from autonomous thinking.
Ernst Bloch has identified similar autodidactic philosophers, whom he describes as examples of successfully intellectually emancipated figures. In his
book Avicenna und die aristotelische Linke (‘Avicenna and the Aristotelian
Left’), Bloch endeavors to rehabilitate Arabic culture as one of the “headwaters
of our Enlightenment.”88 In his lectures and writings, he refers to the fictional
character of the philosophus autodidactus who appears in Ibn Tufayl’s novel
Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and, according to Bloch, reinforces “the core belief of the Enlightenment: that humanity needs no beliefs besides reason itself.”89 In this
philosophical robinsonade, Ibn Tufayl (1110–1185) describes the life of a boy
86
87
88
89
Abraham J. Malherbe, Paul and the Thessalonians: The Philosophical Tradition of Pastoral
Care (Philadelphia, 1987), 104-105.
Karl Marx, Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie (1841), in
MEGA [=Marx-Engels-Gesamt-Ausgabe] vol. I 1/1 (Berlin, 1975), 28 (emphasis original,
translation mine).
Ernst Bloch, Avicenna und die aristotelische Linke (Berlin, 1952), 11 (translation mine).
Ibid., 26 (translation mine).
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named Hayy ibn Yaqzan, who is raised by animals on a desert island in the Indian Ocean and discovers the principles of nature and reason on his own.90
Irrespective of whether he was abandoned and left to his fate on the island
(like, later, Kasper Hauser) or has simply sprung to life by spontaneous generation, the autodidact gradually achieves insight in the principles of the world
through his own intuition and use of intellect. As has been emphasised elsewhere, Ibn Tufayl’s island novel must be interpreted as a response to Avicenna’s ‘Floating Man’ thought experiment:91 even if nothing alerts us to our own
existence, whether by bodily proprioception or through the testimony of others, we still have access to our inner states.
The story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan was very popular not only in the Arabic-speaking world, but also in the West.92 According to Otto Luschnat, the novel’s Latin
translation (Philosophus autodidactus) is the earliest example of the Latin
adoption of the Greek word autodidaktos.93 The English translation of Ibn Tufayl’s thought experiment was prepared by Edward Pococke in 1671; and even
Leibniz is praising Pococke’s translation in a letter to the naturalist Albrecht
von Holten, in which he also states his familiarity with the works of Ibn Tufayl
and his contemporary Averroes. Leibniz considers Hayy ibn Yaqzan an example of the autodidact that he also defends fervently in other contexts. As he
points out in a letter sketch to Malebranche: “More frequently will he who does
not understand an art find something new than he who does, he who is selftaught sooner than those who are not; for he enters by a road and gate unknown to others, and gains a different view of things. He admires that which is
new, while others pass it by as something well known.”94 When commenting
on his reading of the Philosophus autodidactus, Leibniz links it with Augustine,
90
91
92
93
94
For an English translation see Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān: A Philosophical Tale (New York, NY, 1972).
Ibid., 195.
G.A. Russell, “The Impact of the Philosophus autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke, and the
Society of Friends,” in G.A. Russell, ed., The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in
Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden, 1994), 224-265.
Edward Pococke, Philosophus autodidactus sive epistola Abi Jafaar Ebn Tophail de Hai Ebn
Yodkhan in qua ostenditur quomodo ex inferiorum contemplatione ad superiorum notitiam
ratio humana ascendere possit (Oxford, 1671). See Otto Luschnat, “Autodidaktos: Eine Begriffsgeschichte,” Theologia viatorum, 8 (Berlin and New York, NY, 1962), 157-172.
Sketch of a Letter to Malebranche from 22 June (2 July) 1679. “Saepius aliquid novi invenit,
qui artem non intelligit, quam qui intelligit. Item autodidaktos quam alius, Irrumpit enim
per portam viamque aliis non tritam, aliamque rerum faciem invenit. Omnia nova miratur, in ea inquirit, quae alii quasi comperta praetervolant.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
Politische Schriften. Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. 4.7: Writings 1697-1699 (Berlin, 2011), 751.
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whom he sees as another defender of self-acquired evidence: it is not other
people who can convince us, but only the truth which dwells in our intelligence.95
The reception of the Philosophus autodidactus is also interesting in other
respects. Notably, Pococke’s translation had been commissioned by the AngloIrish naturalist Robert Boyle. Thanks to Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s
Leviathan and the Air Pump, Boyle is now regarded as the embodiment of a
collective practice of science which replaces Hobbes’s epistemological individualism. However, such a broad-brush picture would be similarly misleading.
Boyle actually also retained some basic elements of solipsistic epistemology,
as demonstrated by a fragment from the island novel (clearly inspired by Ibn
Tufayl) that he published under the title The Aspiring Naturalist.96 This narrative features its own autodidactic philosopher (Authades, the ‘self-willed’) and
describes to a European visitor (named Philaretes) the philosophical knowledge that the islanders have acquired on their own.97
In short, during the Age of Enlightenment, the autodidact became a figure
of “intellectual emancipation,” to quote Jacques Rancière.98 Thinkers through
their own effort liberated themselves from the superior power and prevailing
violence of alien authorities. Whereas the adoption of second-hand knowledge always bears the risk of an alien mancipatio (from manus, ‘hand,’ and capere, ‘to capture, seize’), ex propria industria thought holds the key to mental
‘e-mancipation.’ Only ‘under one’s own steam’ can true freedom be attained.
This includes the assurance, which Jean Améry pursued to its radical conclusion, that in extreme cases, one may choose to “lay hands on oneself” (i.e., commit suicide) in order to prove one’s own independence until the very last
possible moment.99
95
96
97
98
99
Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften. Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. 6.4: Writings 1677-1690, Part B
(Berlin, 1999), 1681: “non homines nos persuadent, sed veritas quae intus est in domicilio
cogitationis nostrae.” The passage Leibniz refers to is from Augustine, Confessiones, book
11, chap. 3.
Robert Boyle, “A Fragment of the Aspiring Naturalist: A Philosophicall Romance,” (1686)
The Boyle Papers, vol 9, fols. 42v-43r (<http://www.bbk.ac.uk/boyle/boyle_papers/bp09_
docs/bp9_042v-043r.htm>, accessed 8 March 2017).
Gerald J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford, 1996), 222.
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation,
trans. Kristin Ros (Palo Alto, CA, 1991).
Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death, trans. John D. Barlow (Bloomington, IN, 1999).
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Instead of a Conclusion: The Spider and the Bee
The preceding archaeological forays into fields of knowledge as diverse as history, medicine, subjectivity theory, and education corroborate the preeminence of the trope of propria industria, the acquisition of knowledge under
one’s own steam, from Antiquity to the early modern period. This preeminence
in itself may explain why, in the history of knowledge, second-hand knowledge
has often been viewed with suspicion. It seems that the marginalization of
testimony cannot simply be explained to be a function of modern-day subjectivism. Rather, the theme of knowledge by self-action draws on multifarious
sources.
Our brief archaeological probings into propria industria have covered a
wide territory: we first investigated the preference for the sense of vision over
hearsay in archaic epic poetry and philosophy, then examined the birth of historiography out of the concept of the eye witness, and then went on to explore
the trope of autopsia in the emerging medical discourse of the medieval and
early modern periods. Progressing through history, we then considered the
maxim of propria industria in the works of Descartes and other early modern
philosophers, and finally explored the emancipatory pledge of autodidactics.
First, these intellectual excavations illuminate the question why knowledge
from testimony has often been marginalized or even condemned; secondly,
they cast the diagnosis of forgetfulness of testimony in a rather different light.
As shown, a near-consensus in the contemporary testimony debate holds
that second-hand knowledge has been rejected because it is merely taken
over and not generated anew. Knowledge from testimony shall remain an
epistemological phantom for as long as epistemology remains dominated by
an “individualistic bias” and a fundamentally solipsistic model of knowledge
acquisition constructed around the conception of an underlying and preexisting self. Hence it is the express aim of an interdisciplinary epistemology to
demonstrate the possibility of self-sufficient, independent knowledge acquisition existing side by side with the generation of knowledge by others.
Such a picture is painted with too broad a brush stroke, however, and it reduces a complex development to a narrow modern perspective. This picture
also establishes the very line of demarcation it was originally intended to
subvert. While evidence is provided to demonstrate that a witness not only
mediates knowledge, but also generates it, knowledge acquisition through
one’s own effort is, by contrast, still largely explained in terms of a rather static
understanding of the self. In other words, the philosophical lens of subjectivity
restricts propria industria to the propria and loses sight of the industria.
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Above and beyond the complementarity thesis – according to which we
not only acquire knowledge by ourselves, but owe most of what we know to
others – the problem of testimony reverts directly to the peculiar generativity
of knowledge. Too often this generativity is misappropriated when, in the selfagency of propria industria, the self is taken to be both the starting and finishing point. While knowledge through oneself is mistaken with knowledge about
oneself, the self remains indebted to the philosophical ideal of egocentrism,
suppressing the causative element in favor of a reflexive entity. Reapplying this
to the diagnosis of the forgetfulness of testimony, we find that forgetfulness of
testimony would then be rooted not in a solipsistic bias, but instead in a primacy of self-agency. Such a shift in focus prompts a revision of the dichotomy
of mediated versus unmediated knowledge in favor of a diversity of media of
knowledge acquisition.
I shall conclude with an image. Francis Bacon devised a famous allegory to
illustrate the distinction between autopoietic and heteropoietic media of
knowledge acquisition. Here, the rationalist is typified by a spider, which spins
its web out of its own material, whereas a naturalist resembles a bee, whose
honey relies on pollen from alien flowers while essentially the result of a process of inner elaboration. Moving beyond an overly simplistic dichotomy of
knowledge through oneself vs. knowledge through others, of a generative creation vs. a merely reproductive appropriation – and this is perhaps what Bacon’s allegory is getting at – the problem of testimony invites us to identify the
particular type of ‘through’ in question, the essential operative mediality behind knowledge acquisition.
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Emmanuel Alloa