Review of Jan Golinski’s “Humphry Davy and the Experimental Self

摘要

Humphry Davy in Jan Golinski's article is marked out as an intriguing figure in the first two decades of the nineteenth century; a fascinating lecturer to his audiences, yet a "mystery to his contemporaries" (24). According to Golinski, Davy is "charismatic and protean" (17) in his experiments, publications and lectures, where the chemist experiments with his body and deploys his charms and passion to reconfigure chemistry as a powerful discipline that can yield new knowledge and discoveries. Golinski proposes that Davy's different identities are evident of the chemist's personal exploration of the self. The article thus establishes that Davy can be a case- study from which to understand that with the wider transformation of practices, rhetoric and other techniques of structuring disciplines in this period there also came the exploration and shaping of the individual identity. A subtle link between the concerns of historians of science and literary critics comes in the beginning of the article with the explanation that Foucault's work can illuminate the period scholars call both the "second scientific revolution" (15) and the Romantic period since the changes in disciplinary institutions in modern society also transformed the sense of self and the individual. For Golinski the "implications" of Foucault's work "have not been completely explored" (16) by scholarship on the early nineteenth century and the complex relationship between personal individuality and institutions can be analysed via Davy as an experimenter of both science and the self. To this end the paper follows Davy's career as a chemical experimenter refashioning his own identity to foster resources and support for two newly established institutions, the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol and the Royal Institution in London. Golinski concludes that Davy underwent a serious and "profound inquiry" of his own identity throughout his life, shaped by "the difference structures of disciplinarity" and ultimately expressed in his final work Consolations in Travel (1830), where Davy "broke new ground" in synthesising his personal life and Enlightenment literature to suggest the adaptability of the self (25).