Monti, Martino Rossi, et al. Review of OBJECTIVITY by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. IRIS 1 (April 2009): 277-288.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2008. “These were little plates of ice, very flat, very polished, very transparent, about the thickness of a sheet of rather thick paper [...] but so perfectly formed in hexagons, and of which the six sides were so straight, and the six angles so equal, that it is impossible for men to make anything so exact.” With these words René Descartes describes, in his treatise Les Météores (1635), some snowflakes observed with the naked eye. Not long before, Johann Kepler had celebrated the beauty and perfect symmetry of snowflakes in a short treatise entitled Strena Seu de Nive Sexangula (1611 – A New Year’s Gift of Hexagonal Snow). Since then, those who have described and drawn snowflakes, from Robert Hooke to the nineteenth-century English meteorologist James Glaisher, have seen them as absolutely perfect forms, marvelous expressions of invariable mathematical relations. Everything that appeared asymmetrical or irregular, whenever noted, was labeled as an “exception” or declared inessential. There was a sort of blindness or annoyance towards the irregularities of nature. The human eye, as St. Augustine had remarked, is “irritated” by asymmetry (De vera religione, XXX, 54). Around Christmas 1892, in Berlin, the photomicrographer Richard Neuhauss, under the direction of the meteorologist Gustav Hellmann, took a series of photographs of snow crystals. Accustomed to the “absolute regularity” and “perfect symmetry” of the snowflakes drawn by earlier scientists, Hellmann and Neuhauss were met with a disappointing sight: the crystals appeared irregular, imperfect. Only the cold and ruthless precision of the photographic camera had been able to give them a faithful image of how nature really was. As Hellmann wrote: “despite the icy hardening of the surroundings, these are natural pictures, warm with life” (151 – my italics). The snowflakes reproduced by Hellmann and Neuhauss were not ideal forms or “types,” produced by abstracting from all the particularities and imperfections of single flakes observed in nature. They were not the ideal snowflake, but this or that snowflake. This is just one example – enriched by a few details – of the history of the birth of what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison call “scientific objectivity” or “mechanical objectivity.” In Objectivity the authors provide us with many others, no less interesting and stimulating, always anchored to the world of scientific images (the scientific atlases published from the eighteenth century to the present time). The idea of scientific objectivity – this is the main thing this book shows – has a history. But there is more: the book also shows that science has not always been defined in terms of objectivity. In fact, for Daston and Galison, only around the mid-nineteenth century – with positivism the rage – did the idea begin to emerge that in order to represent a scientific object faithfully one had to eliminate all subjective interferences: “to be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower – knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving. Objectivity is blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence” (17 – my italics). Up to that moment, quite another kind of “epistemic virtue” had prevailed: that which, let us say, an eighteenth-century botanic atlas sought to represent was not an array of specimens – unique in their singularity – but, on the contrary, the ideal form, the type of each species. In order to grasp such a primary form, the naturalist had to perform a sort of platonic purification: through tenacious and tireless observation, he had to discard everything he judged inessential and accidental, in order to extract the universal from the particular. Far from being passive, the naturalist had to exercise his intelligence actively in order to abstract the perfect form from the chaos of multiplicity. Daston and Galison call this epistemic virtue “truth-to-nature.” According to the authors, both these virtues – truth-to-nature and objectivity – were strongly connected to the philosophies and theories of knowledge of their time. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/docs/objectivity_iris_09.pdf.