This essay looks at the roles in the history of the sciences of empathetic approaches to past authors. It focuses on the ways in which Arthur Koestler and other historians have engaged with Kepler and his works, and in particular with his Astronomia nova. I argue that here, as with many other historical sources, close attention to the process of composition and conventions of genre is crucial for adequate interpretation.
As reported by Cynthia KoestlerA.KoestlerC., Stranger on the square, ed. with intro. and epilogue by HarrisH. (London, 1984), 189.
2.
KoestlerA., The sleepwalkers: A history of man’s changing vision of the universe (London, 1959).
3.
On these polarities, see, for example, KoestlerA., The Yogi and the Commissar, and other essays (London, 1945); Insight and outlook: An enquiry into the common foundations of science, art and social ethics (London, 1949); The act of creation (London, 1964).
4.
See especially Insight and outlook, pt. 3, “The neutral arts – invention and discovery”, 239–73.
5.
Koestler’s Hungarian associates George Pólya and Michael Polanyi shared his passionate commitment to the power of genius and free creative thinking as opposed to rigorous application of rules in the sciences: see, for example, HidegkutiB., “Arthur Koestler and Michael Polanyi: Two Hungarian minds in partnership”, Polanyiana, iv (1995), 8–31; FrankT., “George Pólya and the heuristic tradition: Fascination with genius in Central Europe”, Polanyiana, vi (1997), 22–37.
6.
Sleepwalkers, 21.
7.
Sleepwalkers, 26–41.
8.
Sleepwalkers, 33, and 225–422.
9.
Sleepwalkers, 425–509.
10.
Sleepwalkers, 530–42.
11.
Sleepwalkers, 519–21; cf. Act of creation [1964], cited here and hereafter from the Danube edition (London, 1969), 225.
12.
Insight and outlook, 23–4.
13.
Act of creation, 188.
14.
Act of creation, p. iv, where satire and caricature are presented as forms of “impersonation”, and 69ff, where impersonation figures as the self-assertive form of empathy.
15.
Preface to the 1968 Danube edition of Sleepwalkers, 11.
16.
ScammellM., Koestler: The indispensable intellectual (London, 2009), 461.
17.
Koestler himself characterized the “Commissar” mentality as one of “repressed puberty”: The Yogi and the Commissar [1945], here and hereafter cited from the Danube edition (London, 1965), 20.
18.
Sleepwalkers, 438 ff., 522.
19.
Sleepwalkers, 119–219.
20.
Arrow in the blue (London, 1952), 96–7.
21.
Sleepwalkers, 165–72. Koestler quotes from a letter from the distinguished Copernicus scholar Ernst Zinner strongly supporting his view. (His correspondence with Zinner is in the Koestler archive, Centre for Research Collections, Edinburgh University Library, GB0237 MS2417.) The implausibility of this claim is shown in Giorgio de Santillana and Stillman Drake’s acerbic review of The sleepwalkers, “Arthur Koestler and his sleepwalkers”, Isis, l (1955), 255–60.
22.
Sleepwalkers, 237–8.
23.
ToynbeeP., “The psychology of discovery”, Observer, 25Jan.1959.
24.
Sleepwalkers, 308.
25.
On Kepler’s humour, see GerlachW., “Humor und Witz in Schriften von Johannes Kepler”, Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Klasse, Jahrgang 1968 (Munich, 1969), 13–30; JardineN., “God’s ‘ideal reader’: Kepler and his serious jokes”, in KremerR. L.WłodarczykJ. (eds), Johannes Kepler: From Tübingen to Zagan (Studia Copernicana, xlii; Warsaw, 2009), 41–51.
26.
Sleepwalkers, 314–15.
27.
Parts of Koestler’s correspondence with Caspar and Hammer are in the Koestler archive, CRC, Edinburgh University Library, GB0237 MS2417.
28.
Koestler, “In memory of Franz Hammer”, in BeerA.BeerP. (eds), Kepler: Four hundred years: Proceedings of conferences held in honour of Johannes Kepler (Vistas in astronomy, xviii; Oxford, 1975), 947–9, p. 947. My thanks to Owen Gingerich for alerting me to this.
29.
Sleepwalkers, 223–38. Koestler saw Kepler’s auto-horoscopes in vols v and viii of Kepler, Opera omnia, ed. FrischC. (8 vols, Frankfurt and Erlangen, 1858–71).
30.
Sleepwalkers, 396–7.
31.
KoyréA., “L’oeuvre astronomique de Kepler”, Bulletin de la Société d’Étude du XVIIe Siècle, xxx (1956), 69–109, p. 70; La révolution astronomique (Paris, 1961), The astronomical revolution, freely transl. by MaddisonR. E. W. (London, 1973). On Koyré’s account of Kepler’s cosmology and its place in the history of Keplerian studies, see JardineN., “Koyré’s Kepler / Kepler’s Koyré”, History of science, xxxviii (2000), 363–76.
32.
Koyré, Révolution astronomique, 377.
33.
SimonG., Kepler astronome astrologue (Paris, 1979); the animism of Kepler’s cosmos is further explored by BonerPatrick, Kepler’s cosmological synthesis: Astrology, mechanism and the soul (Leiden, 2013).
34.
Koestler’s theory of bisociation is spelled out in Insight and outlook and The act of creation. In The sleepwalkers, in line with his general avoidance of technical terminology, Koestler does not use the term, but when writing about Kepler’s placement of the problem of planetary motion in new contexts he refers to the former work: Sleepwalkers, 336.
35.
On Kepler’s various accounts of his quest for knowledge of the cosmos, see VoelkelJ. R., The composition of Kepler’s Astronomia nova (Princeton, 2001); MartensR., Kepler’s philosophy and the new astronomy (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
36.
On these debates see, for example, HarrisM., “History and significance of the EMIC/ETIC distinction”, Annual review of anthropology, v (1976), 329–50; HeadlandT. L.PikeK. L.HarrisM., (eds), Emics and etics: The insider/outsider debate (Newbury Park, CA, 1990); JardineN., “Etics and emics (not to mention anemics and emetics) in the history of the sciences”, History of science, xlii (2004), 261–78.
37.
DrayW. H., History as re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s idea of history (Oxford, 1995).
38.
For a cogent presentation and defence of Simulation Theory, see Jane Heal’s articles collected in her Mind, reason and imagination: Selected essays in philosophy of mind and language (Cambridge, 2003).
39.
StueberK. R., Rediscovering empathy: Agency, folk psychology and the human sciences (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 21.
40.
See Jardine, op. cit. (ref. 25), 43–4.
41.
Koestler’s translation, Sleepwalkers, 330, of von DyckW.CasparM.. (eds), Johannes Kepler: Gesammelte Werke (Munich, 1938– ; hereafter cited as KGW), xv, no. 308:82–5.
42.
See, for example, “Focus: The emotional economy of science”, Isis, c (2009), 792–851; and EvansR. J. W.MarrA. (eds), Curiosity and wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Aldershot, 2006).
43.
GeisonG., The private science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, NJ, 1995). Thanks to James Secord, who witnessed the dartboard.
44.
Rosen prefaces his tirade with a listing of hostile reviews and with three specimen errors, one relating the course of the Vistula river and two to Rheticus’s career: RosenE., Three Copernican treatises (New York, 1971), 290–1.
45.
BenjaminW., “Theory of knowledge, theory of progress”, The arcades project, transl. by ElandH.McLaughlinK. (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 456–88; EliotT. S., “Burnt Norton”.
46.
See, for example, KoestlerA., The roots of coincidence (London, 1972), chap. 3, where Pauli’s views on “acausal synchronicity” are endorsed.
47.
“The influence of archetypal ideas on Kepler’s theories”, transl. by SilzP., in PauliW.JungC. G., The interpretation of nature and the psyche [1952] (London, 1955).
48.
For a detailed appreciation of Pauli’s reading of Kepler, see WestmanR. S., “Nature, art, and psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler–Fludd polemic”, in VickersB. (ed.), Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984), 177–229.
49.
Heal, op. cit. (ref. 38).
50.
On early-modern wonder, curiosity and the collection of naturalia, see, for example: CéardJ., La nature et les prodiges: L’insolite au XVIe siècle (Geneva, 1977); DastonL.ParkK., Wonders and the order of nature (New York, 1998); KennyN., The uses of curiosity in early modern France and Germany (Oxford, 2004).
51.
DiltheyW., Die Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Berlin, 1910); EliasN., Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen (Basel, 1939); WinchP., The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy (London, 1958).
52.
On genres as shared systems of expectations, see HirschE., Validity in interpretation (New Haven, 1967); as tacit covenants, see DamroschD., The narrative covenant (San Francisco, 1987).
53.
For useful reflections on this, see the essays in LaveryJ.GroarkeL., Literary form, philosophical content: Historical studies of philosophical genres (Madison, WI, 2010).
54.
On Lutheranism and early-modern astronomy, see BarkerP., “The role of religion in the Lutheran response to Copernicus”, in OslerM. J. (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 2000), 59–88; AlmasiG., “Rethinking sixteenth-century ‘Lutheran astronomy’”, Intellectual history review, xxiv (2014), 5–20.
55.
On the Mannerism of Kepler’s cosmology, see HallynF., La structure poétique du monde: Copernic, Kepler (Paris, 1987); on Kepler’s Mannerist jokes, see Jardine, op. cit. (ref. 25).
56.
KGW, iii, 36:14–15.
57.
SmallR., An account of the astronomical discoveries of Kepler (London, 1804), 2. Small touches only briefly on Kepler’s physical “speculations” on the causes of planetary motion (214–16, 360–2).
58.
ApeltE. F., Johann Kepler’s astronomische Weltansicht (Leipzig, 1849), 51.
59.
FrischC. (ed.), Joannis Kepleri astronomi Opera omnia, iii (Frankfurt, 1860), 3–133.
60.
CasparM., Johannes Kepler. Neue Astronomie (Munich, 1929), 5*.
61.
Sleepwalkers, 314.
62.
Koyré, Révolution astronomique, 165.
63.
For Kepler as “hero”, see Sleepwalkers, 326; Koyré, Révolution astronomique, 167.
GingerichO., “Kepler’s treatment of redundant observations: Or, the computer versus Kepler revisited”, in KrafftF.MeyerK.StickerB., (eds), Internationals Kepler-Symposium, Weil der Stadt 1971 (Hildesheim, 1973), 307–14; reprinted in his The eye of heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler (New York, 1993), 367–78.
66.
KGW, iii, 156:4–7.
67.
Gingerich, op. cit. (ref. 65), 309.
68.
StephensonB., Kepler’s physical astronomy (Princeton, NJ, 1987); DonahueW. H., “Kepler’s fabricated figures: Covering up the mess in the New astronomy”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xix (1988), 217–37.
69.
Stephenson, op. cit. (ref. 68), 106.
70.
WilsonC., “Kepler’s derivation of the elliptical path”, Isis, lix (1968), 4–25.
KGW, iii, 36:1–26. Here, and in my other translations of passages from Astronomia nova, I have been helped by Max Caspar’s exemplary German translation (ref. 60) and (while diverging from it at several points) by William Donahue’s English translation: Johannes Kepler. New astronomy (Cambridge, 1992).
74.
Voelkel, op. cit. (ref. 35), 214.
75.
See JardineN.SegondsA.-P., “Stratégies argumentatives du Contra Ursum”, in La guerre des astronomes, ii/1, Le Contra Ursum de Jean Kepler: Introduction et textes préparatoires (Paris, 2008), 169–82; JardineN., “Kepler’s ‘lightly woven cosmography’: On the sources, identity and significance of Kepler-Ms 18, 283v–241r, Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg”, in NoirotC.OrdineN. (eds), Omnia in uno: Hommage à Alain-Philippe Segonds (Paris, 2012), 453–65.
76.
Voelkel, op. cit. (ref. 35), 215, citing Aristotle, On rhetoric, i, 2; cf., also, iii, 16.
77.
For example, Cicero, De oratore, transl. by SuttonE. W.RackhamH., revised edn (Cambridge, MA, 1948), ii, 211–16. On oratorical ethos and pathos, see WisseJ., Ethos and pathos from Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam, 1989).
78.
Cicero, De inventione, transl. by HubbellH. M. (Cambridge, MA, 1949), i, 19, 27.
79.
On this, see BrownP., “‘That full-sail voyage’: Travel narratives and astronomical discovery in Kepler and Galileo”, in FlemingJ. D. (ed.), The invention of discovery, 1500–1700 (Farnham, 2011), 15–28.
80.
Parts of Pigafetta’s Il primo viaggio intorno al mondo were first published in French (Paris, 1525) and subsequently in Italian, Latin and English; Benzoni’s La historia del mondo nuovo (Venice, 1565) likewise went through many editions and translations. For a good selection of lively early-modern travel narratives, with an informative introduction, see MancallP. C. (ed.), Travel narratives from the age of discovery: An anthology (Oxford, 2006).
81.
A useful guide to the terminology of such rhetorical figures is SonninoL. A., A handbook to sixteenth-century rhetoric (London, 1968). Note that ekphrasis is often taken in recent writings to refer more specifically to vivid description of an image: see WebbR., “”Ekphrasis ancient and modern: The invention of a genre”, Word and image, xv (1999), 7–18.
82.
On vivid description and “virtual witnessing” in historical narratives, see GinzburgC., “Ekphrasis and quotation”, Tidschrift voor Filosofie, i/1 (1988), 3–19, elaborated in “Description and citation”, in his Threads and traces: True false fictive (Berkeley, 2012), 7–24; and on their use in early-modern travel writing, see CampbellM. B., The witness and the other world: Exotic travel writing 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY, 1988).
83.
Kepler’s facetious thought is that since he forgives himself for his past credulity, so too will his like-minded readers.
84.
The military imagery here echoes that of the jocular dedicatory letter, addressed to Rudolph II, in which Kepler announces his campaign against the enemy, Mars: KGW, iii, 1–10.
85.
KGW, iii, 47:18–25.
86.
Aristotle, On rhetoric, i, 2; Cicero, Topics, iii, 11, and iv, 1; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, v, 1, 1, and v, 2, 2. Cf. the textbook in use at Tübingen in Kepler’s time there, Melanchthon, Elementorum rhetorices libri duo, Martini Crusii quaestionibus et scholiis explicati in academia Tybingensi (Basel, 1570), 45–6. On “technical” and “non-technical” means of persuasion, see Wisse, op. cit. (ref. 77), 128–33.
Voelkel, op. cit. (ref. 35), 214, citing Donahue’s translation (ref. 73), 187, of KGW, iii, 111:5–7.
90.
On the roles of genre in guiding selection of appropriate material, see Gian Biagio Conte’s insightful “Genre between empiricism and theory”, in his Genres and readers: Lucretius, love elegy, Pliny’s Encyclopedia [1991], transl. by MostG. W. (Baltimore, MA, 1994), 105–28.
91.
On the geometrical demonstrations of Ptolemy’s Almagest, see PedersenO., “Ptolemy as a mathematician”, A survey of the Almagest (Odense, 1974), chap. 3. On didactic treatises de sphaera, see ThorndikeL., The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its commentators (Cicago, 1949), and LattisJ. M., “Textual traditions in medieval astronomy”, in his Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the collapse of Ptolemaic cosmology (Chicago, 1994), 38–45. On the theorica planetarum tradition, see PedersenO., “Origins of the ‘theorica planetarum’”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xii (1981), 113–23.
92.
See, for example, his remarks on the genre of cosmographia in the second edition of Mysterium cosmographicum (KGW, viii, 15:27–35) and on the form and intended readership of Epitome astronomiae copernicanae (KGW, 251).
93.
See Marion Kintzinger’s splendid Chronos und Historia: Studien zur Titelblattikonographie historiographischer Werke vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1995).
94.
Theories of adjudication of historical testimony are discussed in my “Explanatory genealogies and historical testimony”, Episteme, v (2008), 160–79. Carlo Ginzburg looks at the links between genre and reliability of testimony in several of his essays in Threads and traces (ref. 82).
95.
On conflict of testimony concerning the Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, see FrankT., “Caesar at the Rubicon”, The classical quarterly, i (1907), 223–5.
96.
GavorseJ., “Introduction” to Suetonius, The lives of the twelve Caesars (New York, 1931), pp. i–xvi, treats the work as an accurate record; by contrast, Tamsyn Barton’s “Introduction” to H. M. Bird’s translation of the work (Ware, 1997), pp. i–xii, is much more sceptical, taking due account of Suetonius’s rhetorical ploys.
97.
RudwickM. J. S., “Charles Darwin in London: The integration of public and private science”, Isis, lxxiii (1982), 186–206.
98.
Ginzburg, “Proofs and possibilities” and other essays in his Threads and traces (ref. 82). For generic constraints on historical sources for the early-modern period see, for example, on letters, PapyJ.. (eds), Self-presentation and social identification: The rhetoric and pragmatics of letter writing in early-modern times (Leuven, 2002); on notebooks, BlairA. M., Too much to know: Managing scholarly information before the modern age (New Haven, CT, 2010).
