2020 Essays

Everything Depends Upon the Trial (Le tout gist à l’essay): Four Manuscripts Between the Recipe and the Experimental Essay

Keller, Vera

A comparison between four manuscripts demonstrates an evolution from the genre of the recipe to the experimental essay. As a notion of general experience slowly transformed into the practice of experimentation at a particular time and place, how-to accounts became increasingly historicized and personalized. In contrast to widespread narratives depicting modern science as a thinning of previously thick, embodied knowledge, this evolution demonstrates knowledge thickening, becoming more personalized and explicit both about material experience and symbolic interpretation. This is apparent in the case of Ms. Fr. 640, in the frequent use of the first-person voice, especially at points in which the author-practitioner was most actively engaged in speculating about and experimenting with new techniques.This long-term evolution of the experimental essay situates the epistemology of making and knowing in relation to previous long-term accounts concerning the scientific method. Previously, the experimental essay has been associated with Restoration experimental philosophy, as it developed out of the works of Sir Francis Bacon. In such accounts, the experimental essay serves as the ideal expression of a particular epistemology. This essay backdates the experimental essay and demonstrates its slow emergence from the genre of the recipe. Showing the experimental essay’s connection with prior genres also suggests experimental philosophy’s connection with previous epistemologies. Neither the experimental essay nor experimental philosophy emerged fully formed in the works of Bacon and his followers. On the slow course of development that produced them, we can situate Ms. Fr. 640 at an important stage of the personalization and historicization of experiment.