PAP0808 - Between reason and and literary imagination: travel literature and the rise of modern science in Brazil

The history of science in occidental world shows us a singular path. The rise of modern science – an empirical and experimental way of produce formal knowledge about the nature and culture – has specifics features according to the structure of society. We are talking about the existence of connections between science and society. Robert K. Merton and Joseph Ben-David, using a comprehensive approach, argue that the rise of modern science in the main European societies has special connections with the protestant ethics. In other words, the rise of modern science in Europe was directed linked with the “spirit of capitalism” and, consequently, associated with the process of “disenchantment of the world”. Thus, the legitimacy of science in society as an integral discourse resulted from its capacity to glorify the God’s faith, and this was possible because science was comprehended through the protestant ethic. The sociological elucidation of the pre-institutional moment of science, therefore, can reveal the process of transmission of a new kind of knowledge. In this paper we try to show the connections between science, literature and pictorial arts (landscape paintings) as a way to comprehend the rise science in Brazil in the late 18th and in the first half of 19th. Without the protestant ethic element, the natural science in Brazil was disseminated through a special kind of literary genre: the scientific travel literature. The connection between modern science and literature substituted in Brazil the connection between science and religious. But, this type of social process reveals the rise of a specific kind of science. The narrative of scientific expeditions in 18th and 19th centuries was ordered by a singular methodological approach based on a descriptive procedure that mixed formal perceptions with subjective feelings. That type of science is called “romantic science” because it have a large personal substance – Alexander Humboldt, for instance, can be understood as a central reference of that kind of science. Romantic science was assimilated in Brazil through literary groups. These social groups diffused a literary type of science as a result of the structural organization of society in Brazil (colonial state with no class structure and no social competition). Finally, our goal in this paper is i) to show the main characteristics of the scientific travel literature; and ii) to describe the main characteristics of the Brazilian society between 18th and 19th century; and, finally, iii) we pretend to understand the connections between “fruition” and “reason” in the literary and science domains, that allowed the assimilation and the diffusion of a special type of a scientific thought in the pre-institutional science in Brazil.

Marcelo Fetz
Cientista Social, PhD em Sociologia pela Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brasil) com estágio de doutoramento na The University of Mississippi (USA). Atualmente realiza pesquisas na área de Sociologia da Ciência, Sociologia do Conhecimento e Sociologia da Cultura, com especial interesse no envolvimento entre ciência, literatura e pintura de paisagem no pensamento científico presente na passagem do século XVIII para o XIX, naquilo que convencionou-se denominar por Segunda Revolução Científica. Desenvolve trabalhos na área de Teoria Social e Epistemologia da Ciência, com ênfase no processo de formação do pensamento científico e da Instituição Científica brasileira.