Humphry Davy’s Last Days: The Chemist as a Philosopher and a "Dreamer of Dreams"

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org

The last printed work of Humphry Davy, entitled Consolations in Travel or the Last Days of a Philosopher (London: John Murray, 1830), was written not long before its author’s death. In the book the famous British chemist sets a series of dialogues, asking questions about the history of civilization, the history of creation, the possibility of science itself, and the very possibility of things. It is evidently a philosophical discourse, but not of an arbitrarily speculative kind, since it incorporates detailed scientific descriptions and is based on then-current theories, covering a broad range of disciplines.

Daydreaming plays a significant role in the deployment of the narrative. The book begins with a vision, a reverie of Philalethes, a persona that functions as one guise for Davy himself. Then another persona comes into play, named “The Unknown,” who stands, as we can plausibly assume, for the ideal Ego of Davy: the chemical philosopher who far from being confined in the apothecary shop or the “kitchen,” where useful applications are to be prepared, contemplates nature, reckons nature in terms of becoming, indulges in astonishment, and feels pleasure “in contemplating the order and harmony of the arrangements belonging to the terrestrial system of things” (p. 243). Some decades after Lavoisier had chased the metaphysicians out of the domain of chemistry, the ideal Ego of Davy keeps claiming the subjective position of a philosopher, keeps endorsing via contemplativa, revealing thus an unexpected—from our standpoint—affinity with the theosophist-chymists of the Renaissance. Instead of being just a token of Romantic literary inclinations or an outcome indicative of Davy’s retirement from the strenuous daily round of an active chemist, his Consolations illustrate a kind of consciousness, pertaining to reveries and also essential in scientific inquiry (lest this inquiry be negated), that Ernst Bloch has designated as “anticipatory”: the chemist, studying “those operations by which the intimate nature of bodies is changed” (p. 247), advances, as is the case with all waking dreams, into a world to come, a field of real possibilities for a better life. Davy’s last book is not the farewell of a specialist, of an experienced puzzle-solver, but the testimony of a traveler, of a Homo Viator, remaining in a state of hope, striving to keep his nearness to “that evening star of light in the horizon of life, which, we are sure, is to become in another season a morning star, and it throws its radiance through the gloom and shadow of death” (p. 222).

Vangelis Koutalis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Ioannina (Greece). His research work centers on the question of how in different historical periods chemical experimentation has been developed in conjunction with philosophical conceptualization. Subjects under study include the emergence of Renaissance alchemy or chymistry under the horizon provided by occultism, the dissemination of chymistry in Greek-speaking communities of the Ottoman Empire from the 17th to the 18th century, and, turning to a later period, the persistence of some eminent experimenters, such as Joseph Priestley and Humphry Davy, in the philosophical dimension of chemistry. Koutalis is a CHF 2010-2011 Allington Fellow.