Emil du Bois-Reymond & Ignorance in Science: Interview with Gabriel Finkelstein

“we are ignorant and we will remain ignorant”

Readers of Psychiatry at the Margins will remember Joshua Richardson from his reviews of the ‘Too Mad to be True’ conferences. Several years ago, Josh introduced me to Emil du Bois-Reymond and the Latin maxim “ignoramus et ignorabimus,” (“we are ignorant and we will remain ignorant”), and Josh treats us now to an interview with the historian Gabriel Finkelstein.

Awais Aftab

Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896). Wikipedia.

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Gabriel Finkelstein is an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver who works on modern science and historiography. His book Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth Century Germany is an engaging and erudite biography of an important but largely forgotten intellectual.

Joshua Richardson is a registered psychotherapist living and working in Ontario, Canada.

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To give readers a taste of Du Bois-Reymond, there are some quotes at the end of this interview from his 1872 address on the limits of knowledge, published in Popular Science Monthly (1874) and translated from German by J. Fitzgerald.

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Joshua Richardson: What do you think we can learn from Emil du Bois-Reymond?

Gabriel Finkelstein: Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–96) is often thought of as a spokesman for biological reduction and Prussian chauvinism, in other words, as a pretty bad guy, especially by those who blame his mechanistic outlook for the evils of the twentieth century. This assessment is wrong. Far from being reactionary or malign, du Bois-Reymond was a leading exponent of progressive German culture. His achievements were astounding:

A) In terms of his science, he pioneered the use of instruments in neurophysiology, discovered the electrical transmission of nerve signals, linked structure to function in neural tissue, and posited the improvement of neural connections with use.

B) In terms of his career, he served as professor, dean, and rector at the University of Berlin, was secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, directed the first institute of physiology in Prussia, established the first society of physics in Germany, helped found the Berlin Society of Anthropology, oversaw the Berlin Physiological Society, edited the leading German journal of physiology, supervised dozens of researchers, and trained an army of physicians.

C) In terms of his popular addresses, he introduced Darwin’s theory to German students, rejected the inheritance of acquired characters, fought the specter of vitalist biology, analyzed nationalism, denounced antisemitism, predicted wars of genocide, furthered the growth of historicism, popularized the Enlightenment, recovered the teachings of Lucretius, formulated the tenets of history of science, championed realism in literature, described the earliest history of cinema, criticized the Americanization of culture, and provoked Bismarck, Nietzsche, Mach, James, Hilbert, and Wittgenstein.

Most important of all, he delineated the limits of science in two lectures that aroused enormous controversy.

Joshua Richardson: Can you say a little more about these two lectures and Emil du Bois-Reymond’s significance in the history and philosophy of science?

Gabriel Finkelstein: Du Bois-Reymond was the founder of modern neuroscience. Anyone who believes that physiology has some bearing on psychology might be interested in learning more about the history of that connection. Moreover, the two lectures that I mentioned, “The Limits of Science” (1872) and “The Seven Enigmas” (1880), deemed consciousness to lie beyond the ken of scientific understanding.

To demonstrate his claim, du Bois-Reymond reasoned that even a superbeing with perfect knowledge of every atom in our bodies could tell us nothing about consciousness. It might be able to match the states of our minds to the states of our brains, but that was only a correlation of awareness with information—no facts about reality could account for the experience of thinking and feeling. An “unbridgeable chasm,” he concluded, divided the world from our perception of it.

Du Bois-Reymond wasn’t the only thinker to identify this impasse. Pascal, Locke, Leibniz, and Voltaire had all drawn attention to the limits of our understanding, and Virchow, Tyndall, Helmholtz, and Huxley had expressed similar reservations about science. Where du Bois-Reymond stood out was in the power of his exposition. Contemporaries reported that his addresses hit them “like the unexpected explosion of a mine.” Since his arguments have yet to be refuted, his counsel of humility is one that we would do well to consider.

Joshua Richardson: That strikes me as a claim that could be interpreted quite broadly, which maybe flows nicely into the next question. Could you say something about the phrase Ignoramus et Ignorabimus from these lectures?

Gabriel Finkelstein: Ignoramus et Ignorabimus (“we are ignorant and we will remain ignorant”) refers to the closing of the first address in which du Bois-Reymond proposed limits to scientific understanding. Critics misinterpreted his position as an attack on rationality in general, something that enraged colleagues like Ernst Haeckel, who accused him of being in league with the Vatican, and David Hilbert, who countered that there was no ignorabimus in mathematics. As it turned out, Hilbert was wrong—Kurt Gödel and Alfred Tarski proved that there are indeed questions in mathematics and computer science that cannot be decided. Whether their finding extends to science remains unknown. I suspect that it does, since none of the efforts to resolve the issue have been probative.

Joshua Richardson: This is fascinating. So, these ideas provoke a series of thinkers to respond (including Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others). Your book also shows how widely publicized du Bois-Reymond was, with these two lectures appearing in translation in France, the United States, and several other countries. We’ve communicated elsewhere about how the figure of du Bois-Reymond appears in the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy as well. In reading your book and speaking to you, I’m probably struck hardest by du Bois-Reymond’s impact as you explain how all these more familiar thinkers responded to him. What do you think we can take away from this?

Gabriel Finkelstein: Du Bois-Reymond was not the first to suggest that we could never fathom the ultimate nature of mind and matter, but his was the clearest voice of caution towards our modern faith in experiment. Unfortunately, many of his contemporaries rejected his warning. He was pilloried by the press, the academy, and the Church, and new schools of philosophy, like Pragmatism, Neo-Idealism, and Logical Positivism, arose in response to his claims. This history is not particularly well known. William James came to Berlin in 1867 to study with du Bois-Reymond. Not long thereafter he dropped out of school and suffered a famous crisis of confidence. It’s hard to tell which had horrified James more: his failure at neurophysiology or his anguish at du Bois-Reymond’s Pyrrhonism. Either way, the experience haunted him all his life. What this example teaches us is that James’s psychology owes more to religious conviction than it does to scientific skepticism.

I think James is mistaken. There’s no reason to equate doubt with despair. If anything, the need for certainty has, as Jacob Bronowski pointed out in The Ascent of Man, fueled the worst regimes in history. Bronowski offers a persuasive argument for limitation being the essence of humanity.

Joshua Richardson: What do you think this can tell us about science today?

Gabriel Finkelstein: It tells us that du Bois-Reymond was almost certainly right. Matthew Cobb and John Horgan have made the case that scientists are far from understanding the brain. Anne Harrington and Andrew Scull have made a similar case with psychiatrists and the mind. These contemporary writers have been criticized for their pessimism, but that doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, any more than du Bois-Reymond’s critics meant that he was wrong 150 years ago.

Joshua Richardson: Why do you think more people don’t know about du Bois-Reymond?

Gabriel Finkelstein: I’ve thought about this question for over a decade. Here’s what I wrote at the end of an essay that compared du Bois-Reymond’s legacy with that of his rival Claude Bernard:

“I’ve tried to account for du Bois-Reymond’s oblivion in various ways: his elegance in German fell on deaf ears, the next generation ignored him, polymaths are hard to label, and his skepticism towards progress seems at odds with his age. Let me add a final reflection. French biology evokes nature, agriculture, medicine, and innovation—all areas of justifiable national pride. German biology also brings those images to mind, but it conjures up darker associations to race, eugenics, and genocide—in short, to all the horrors of Nazism. This shadow casts a pall over the memory of German science. It’s an irony that despite his many liberal tendencies—his defiance of Bismarck, his opposition to the Church, his criticism of nationalism, his defense of women, Jews, and Socialists, and even, by the end of his life, his support of France—Emil du Bois-Reymond struggles to be remembered in his own right.”

Joshua Richardson: What you’re saying makes me think about where we can see traces of du Bois-Reymond’s work today. Some of the debates surrounding Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, and Large Language Models seem to have some echoes of du Bois-Reymond. I don’t know if you saw any of the press coverage of the recent settling of a 25-year-old bet between the neuroscientist Christof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers about whether science could explain consciousness. It certainly resonates. What do you think these stories miss by not addressing the history of science more directly?

Gabriel Finkelstein: They’re disguising the fact that many contemporary philosophers of mind were anticipated by Victorian scientists. Neil Tennant and Galen Strawson have surveyed the extent of the debt, and their assessments are sobering. Academic philosophy seems to be riddled with people who discover old ideas and reissue them as their own. The best that can be said of this practice is that the culprits aren’t aware of their thefts. If that’s the case, perhaps they should learn the history of their discipline.

Joshua Richardson: This is very interesting. Chalmers writes in 2020:

“For really definitive statements [...] we have to wait until the 1860s with the classic statements of Thomas Huxley’s “Djin” (1866), John Tyndall’s “chasm” between physical processes and consciousness (1868), and Emil du Bois-Reymond’s “ignorabimus” about the brain-consciousness relation (1872).”

This was revelatory to me reading your book. Having read Chalmers and others debating scientific explanations of consciousness, I was amazed to read du Bois-Reymond so lucidly illustrating some of the arguments 150 years earlier. Perhaps this is just testimony to my own ignorance. This history seems crucial to communicating our current understanding of the mind.

I’m always excited to hear about your new publications and am curious what you’re working on next?

Gabriel Finkelstein: I’m working on a book that compares du Bois-Reymond’s historical essays with those of Henry Thomas Buckle and Hippolyte Taine. All three scholars challenged the assumptions of their colleagues in grand narratives. With so much attention now devoted to the longue durée, I am interested in linking contemporary expositions of “Big History” to these nineteenth-century outsiders.

How this research connects to what we’ve been discussing is this: each of these writers had a deterministic theory of history, and each made compelling arguments in support of their vision. Nevertheless, none of them agreed on the course of civilization—Buckle saw progress in the growth of knowledge, Taine saw decline in the rise of the masses, and du Bois-Reymond saw stasis in the appalling record of politics. To me this indicates that we will never arrive at a final theory of history, just as we will never arrive at a final theory of science.

Joshua Richardson: Wow—this sounds very relevant, especially considering current discussion about supposed Western cultural decline. I’m excited to read it when it comes out. Thanks very much for doing this. I hope we can do something like this again.

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Quotes from Emil du Bois-Reymond’s The Limits of Our Knowledge of Nature:

““A mind,” says Laplace, “which at a given instant should know all the forces acting in Nature, as also the respective situation of the beings of which it consists, provided its powers were sufficiently vast to analyze all these data, could embrace in one formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe, and those of the smallest atom; nothing would be uncertain for such a mind, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. The human intellect offers, in the perfection to which it has brought astronomy, a faint idea of what such a mind would be.””

“Thus the knowledge of Nature possessed by the mind imagined by Laplace, represents the highest thinkable grade of our own natural science. Hence we may lay this down as the basis of our inquiry as to the limits of this science. Whatever would remain unknown to such a mind, must be perfectly hidden away from our minds, which are confined within much narrower bounds.

There are two positions where even the mind imagined by Laplace would strive in vain to press on farther, and where we have to stand stock-still.”

“In our endeavor to analyze the physical world, we start out from the divisibility of matter, the parts being to our eyes something simpler and more primitive than the whole. When in thought we carry on this division of matter ad infinitum, we act in perfect accordance with our sense-perceptions, and we meet with no obstacle in the process. But we make no advance whatever toward an understanding of things, since we, in fact, carry over into the region of the minute and the invisible the concepts we obtained in the region of the gross and the visible.”

“No one, that has bestowed any thought on this subject, can fail to acknowledge the transcendental nature of the obstacles that face us here. However we try to evade them, we ever meet them in one form or another. From whatever side we approach them, or under whatsoever cover, they are ever found invincible. The ancient Ionian physical philosophers were no more helpless than we in presence of this difficulty. The natural sciences, with all the progress they have made, have availed naught against it, nor will their future progress be of any greater effect. We shall never know any better than we now do (to use the words of Paul Erman), “was hier im Raume spukt,” the spectre that haunts the world of matter. For even the mind imagined by Laplace, exalted as it would be high above our own, would in this matter be possessed of no keener insight than ourselves, and hence we despairingly recognize here one of the limitations of our understanding.”

“This other incomprehensible is consciousness. I will now, conclusively as I believe, prove that not only is consciousness unexplainable by its material conditions in the present status of science, which every one will readily admit, but that, even in the nature of things, it never can be explained by these conditions. The contrary opinion, that we must not give up all hope of getting at consciousness from its material conditions, and that in the course of hundreds or thousands of years the mind of man, having invaded now unthought-of realms of knowledge, might succeed where we fail—this is the other error which I propose to combat here.”

“With regard to the enigma of the physical world the investigator of Nature has long been wont to utter his Ignoramus with manly resignation. As he looks back on the victorious career over which he has passed, he is upheld by the quiet consciousness that wherein he now is ignorant, he may at least under certain conditions be enlightened, and that he yet will know. But as regards the enigma what matter and force are, and how they are to be conceived, he must resign himself once for all to the far more difficult confession—Ignorabimus!”

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See also: interviews by Awais Aftab fostering a re-examination of philosophical and scientific debates in the psy-sciences.