Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
this way, seismology could serve as a test of the capacity of Mach's psycho-
physical program to produce practical knowledge in real environments, be-
yond the laboratory, as his evolutionary epistemology demanded.
In other
respects, however, Mach's choice of example is confounding. Having spent
most of his life in Bohemia, he was unlikely to have experienced a major
earthquake firsthand. Moreover, how could he expect anyone, in the midst
of catastrophe, to record all these details—and
manage to survive?
Mach's choice of example seems to have reflected the ambitions of
earthquake research in imperial Austria. As early as 1869, Mach likely heard
Rudolf Falb discuss earthquake prediction at the Lotos natural-historical
society in Prague.
72
As Mach would have known—whether from the Lo-
tos society, Austrian scientific journals, or even the popular press—the
monographic method of earthquake study was being held up as a model of
empiricism and an antidote to popular unreason. Moreover, this method
embodied Mach's principle of analyzing experience into its most basic ele-
ments. Only by combining the limited perspectives of individual observers
could a total picture of the phenomenon emerge. Tellingly, the subject of
Mach's passage on the earthquake is not the generic
Man
(“one”) but the
first-person plural
Wir.
such a panoramic view of a seismic event could not
be the property of a single psyche. seismology was therefore a perfect in-
stantiation of Mach's principle that physics would do well to abandon the
fiction of the ego. For Mach, “The primary fact is not the I, the ego, but the
elements (sensations).”
73
Mach's denunciation of “self-centered views” in
Analysis of Sensations
was
as much a political critique as an epistemological objection. He likened the
metaphysical notion of the bounded self to the social phenomena of “class
bias” and “national pride,” and called on the “broad-minded inquirer” to
renounce them. Behind this appeal lay bitter personal experience. Just as
suess resigned a university rectorship in 1889, so had Mach in 1883, both
apparently worn down by the politics of nationalism. Both longed to escape
the “egoism” of modern politics for a collaborative, supranational science.
74
To Mach's Austrian colleagues, his seismic example of complete knowledge
in the
Analysis
would have evoked a thriving culture of earthquake observa-
tion—a culture that managed to fuse the provincial practices of
Landeskunde
with the transnational organization of a continental empire.
Both Mach's epistemology and the practices of macroseismic survey
reflected a peculiarity of Habsburg science: the function of translation.
Implicit in the work of the earthquake Commission was a philosophical
resistance to reduction. no single perspective on the event was privileged.
Instead, the full array of impressions—visual, aural, tactile, instrumental—
