Fredrik Engelstad is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oslo and Director of the Institute for Social Research.Fredrik Engelstad, "Knowledge and society : Holberg, Ibsen and Bjørneboe." Translated by Ann Clay Zwick. Norwegian Literature 1995, special issue of The Norseman, vol 35, No. 4/5 (1995), 17-25. Used with permission. The original Norwegian article appeared in De nasjonale forskningsetiske komiteers Skriftserie No 5 (1996), "Litteratur, forskning og etikk." ©1995 by Fredrik Engelstad. English translation ©1995 by Ann Clay Zwick.
Many summarize Holberg's Erasmus Montanus as an attack on an undergraduate who, while attempting to flaunt his scholastic brilliance, cannot avoid making the most elementary errors in logic. This idea is often documented by quoting the syllogism about Mother Nille and the stone. In fact, the comedy presents the main character, Erasmus Montanus, as a brilliant intellectual, an accomplished master of scientific debate, and an authority on recent discoveries in the empirical sciences.
Erasmus, son of Nille and Jeppe Berg, returns to his birthplace after his university studies in the capital. He becomes entangled in arguments with the village sexton, Per Degn, who, despite his total lack of basic knowledge, is considered the area's most learned person.
Erasmus is not satisfied by simply demonstrating the noble art of intellectual debate to his fellow villagers, he also sets out to instruct them in contemporary natural science. But when he states that the earth is round not flat, he has gone too far. His future father-in-law demands that Erasmus renounce such heresy. If Erasmus refuses to do so, he will not be allowed to marry Lisbeth.
After a difficult spiritual struggle, Erasmus concludes that faithfulness to the intellect must precede love, and he breaks his engagement. After this, a conspiracy against Erasmus results in his enlistment in the army. His life now in danger, Erasmus relents in the spirit of his predecessor, the great Galileo. His last lines are: "My dear father-in-law. The earth is as flat as a pancake. Is father-in-law satisfied?" Indeed, he is.
Holberg believed in the ideals of the Enlightenment, and in his Erasmus Montanus he attacked academics as well as laymen. He criticized academics for the arrogance that so often follows scholarly erudition. Vanity leads Rasmus Berg to change his name to Erasmus Montanus in the hope of being treated as a person of rank, and he uses his knowledge to flaunt his superiority over other people. The point of the syllogism "proving" that Mother Nille is a stone is not that Erasmus' reasoning is fundamentally wrong, but that he manages to convince Mother Nille that the conclusion is correct even though Erasmus is well aware of the syllogism's fallacy. This turns scientific knowledge into a source of power for the educated.
Holberg, a man of the Enlightenment, is also concerned about the deep-seated prejudices held by most people. Even though Erasmus admits and apologizes for his arrogance, the people staunchly refuse to accept the truth. This is why the people must be educated.
Holberg also draws attention to science itself. As a character, Erasmus Montanus personifies the deep tension between scholastic reasoning and empirical truth in the world of research. When he enters into a discussion, Erasmus holds himself exclusively to hypothetical possibilities or argumentation for its own sake. Using subtle techniques, he "proves" that Per Degn is a rooster, and after "establishing" that Mother Nille is a stone, he can just as easily prove that she is not a stone.
There is a great divide between suppositions and the empirical truth that Erasmus defends so emotionally when he is required to renounce that the earth is round. He could have proven that the earth is flat with the same logical elegance he used to present the argument that Per Degn is a rooster. However, his recognition of the actual facts is too strong to allow for compromise.
It is impossible to come to the conclusion that the earth is round without setting up complicated chains of argumentation, and numerous hypotheses and suppositions. The problem is that hypothetical thought disintegrates into empty scholastics when it is not used as a means to find the truth. This maybe professor Holberg's most important concern in his comedy.
In the first three acts of An Enemy of the People, the plot is much the same as that of Erasmus Montanus. Stockmann is also a scientist returning to his home town and disclosing a truth that the unsuspecting community knows nothing about. Like Erasmus, Stockmann is marked by the arrogance and vanity that often follow academic superiority. Further, both men are faced with massive demands to deny their newly discovered truths.
The similarity of these two plays also emphasizes the importance of their differences. While the general public in Holberg's play is subject to prejudices rooted in basic common sense, the characters in Ibsen's play accept, as rational beings, that the waters are polluted. Nevertheless, the situation itself is strongly denied. How is this possible? One answer might be that financial concerns are at stake. Quite simply, the problem is too expensive to rectify.
However, this is not the whole story. Financial interests gain the upper hand because the people in the society portrayed by Ibsen live under a fundamental lack of freedom. Their lives are controlled by disagreeable forms of mutual interdependence. They are all caught in the "grip" of others: The rebels of society, writing for the newspaper Folkebundet, and wanting to take Stockmann's side in order to undermine the Establishment, are forced to keep their silence because of their financial dependence on the printer of the paper, Aslaksen. Aslaksen has no desire to attack the men in power because he depends on them for his own political power. The town leaders, members of the board of the new municipal baths, are dependent upon keeping Stockmann from spreading information about the polluted waters. And the general public cannot possibly call the elite to task, because then they themselves, rather than the wealthy, will be forced to carry the enormous expense of correcting the situation. Therefore, despite the many conflicting interests among the different factions, each group arrives at the same conclusion: The truth must be suppressed.
There is also a psychological reason for resisting the truth. As the tanner Morten Kiil says to Stockmann:
You said yesterday that the worst pollution came from my tannery. But now if that is true, then my grandfather and my father before me and I, myself, over numbers of hears have been poisoning the town right along, like three angels of death. You think I can rest with that disgrace on my head?This honorable member of society cannot endure the idea that his work, which he had thought was valuable, was not valuable at all. His self-respect demands being cleared of these charges, even though this requires ignoring the truth. A second important difference between Ibsen and Holberg can be seen in their conceptions of truth. Unlike Holberg, Ibsen reveals two form of truth—empirical truth and visionary truth. When Stockmann experiences society's denial that the waters are polluted, his objective changes. No longer is he fighting for the truth about the waters of the health spa, but rather, for what he calls the truth about society. "Our entire community rests on a muckheap of lies," cries Stockmann. The reason lies in the relationship between the social development of the masters and the masses. The elite lead the way, creating new ideas, and the truths the masses are capable of accepting today are always those proclaimed by the avant-garde of the previous generation. This "aristocratic radicalism" is the basis for Stockmann's familiar statement: "Truth lives as a rule, some seventeen, eighteen, at most twenty years; rarely more."
Thus, Ibsen's play ends in deep pessimism. According to Stockmann, Holberg's suggestion of a responsibility to educate the masses is useless, because by definition, the masses cannot develop the social self-awareness necessary for true thought.
Like An Enemy of the People, Semmelweis is about a doctor who discovers an important source of infection, and then strives for general acceptance of this fact. However, neither Holberg's idea of educating the masses nor Ibsen's aristocratic radicalism can be found in Bjørneboe's drama. Semmelweis is an unreserved tribute to clear thinking human insight, and revolutionary action. The doctor opposes the authorities, both when he presents his medical theory and when he takes part in the revolutionary uprising in 1848. The authorities are obtuse and recalcitrant, while the ordinary people are the carriers of common sense.
To summarize the drama, young Doctor Semmelweis is alarmed by the extremely high death rate in a maternity ward in a hospital in Vienna. He concludes that the mortality rate is cause by infections carried by doctors who visit their patients directly after performing post-mortem examinations. Through his acquaintance with Vienna's whores and privy cleaners, Semmelweis realizes that washing in solutions of chlorinated lime prevents infection. Therefore, he demands that all those working in h is department wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before visiting patients. Protests from doctors and students are overwhelming. Semmelweis is removed from his post. After the defeat of the revolution in 1848, he returns to his birthplace, Budapest. He finds a position at a hospital, but for the rest of his life, his theories are ridiculed by the medical establishment.
Although doctors are authorities, we must believe that the well-being of their patients is one of their chief concerns. What is it then that causes opposition to Semmelweis' theory, which we now accept as doctrine? The play illustrates science historian Thomas Kuhn's idea about competing paradigms. The convincing arguments presented by Semmelweis are rejected because there is no meaningful place for them within the medical field's established way of thinking at that time. Bacteriological theories had not yet appeared, and it was assumed that the disease was caused by atmospheric conditions. The fact that Semmelweis disproves this is not considered important since he has not y et documented his new theory well enough to warrant its replacing the old one.
Social conventions also work against Semmelweis. The requirement that doctors and medical students wash their hands many times in the course of a day was an offense to their dignity. A deeper humiliation lay behind this feeling of social disgrace, the same on that Morten Kiil, the tannery owner, expressed: If the theory held by Semmelweis was correct, it would mean that rather than preventing disease, a doctor was the major cause for spreading disease. The medical world would be held responsible for the deaths of thousands of women. A truth of this kind could not be tolerated. And it was not tolerated. Semmelweis' theory was not accepted until his opponents passed away.
The first source is conventional thought, which can apply to lay people as well as scholars. The conventional thinking of lay people is uncomplicated: We will not overstep the limits of common sense, i.e., what we can quickly observe and understand. The learned also run into obstacles in their thinking. Although they are more discriminating, they are also caught up in their deeply established patterns of thought. Scientific authority, without an understanding of new lines of thought, will hamper the development of science.
The second source for resistance to truth is social interests. Knowledge can come into conflict with financial interests so that it can become something to conceal. The need for concealment can increase when the interests being threatened involve highly dependent relationships, as in Ibsen's description of society. The motives are not necessarily financial ones. They can also be associated with our civic honor and esteem. Many people reject knowledge that is humiliating or socially degrading to avoid possible unpleasantness.
The third and possibly most important source for resistance to truth is that we all want to protect our personal integrity. The thought that at some point, with the best of intentions, our actions may have been based on errors resulting in serious unavoidable consequences, may be the most dangerous threat to our self-image.
In this century, serious doubt has been raised as to whether science can ever lead to truth. But if science renounces its search for truth, it will be difficult to treat science as anything other than an intellectual game. By reflecting on our resistance to accepting truth, we can improve on our understanding of the problem. A consideration of the social responsibility of science makes it even more important. Bathing guests who have contracted typhoid fever, or women who die in a maternity clinic, are not hypothetical constructions but suffering human beings who can be helped by knowledge.
Ibsen presents an additional problem in terms of the relationship between empirical and visionary truth. It becomes confusing when visionary and empirical methods are both used in the search for truth. Stockmann's example illustrates this clearly. On the one hand he claims, "our community rests on a muckheap of lies," and on the other hand, he also states that "the waters are polluted." However, it would still be erroneous to maintain that if the first claim is reasonable then it is impossible to have any confidence in the second claim.
In the opposite case, empirical truth could not be given any consideration, simply be declared irrelevant. In recent years we have constantly come across the idea that reality involves so much fantasy that there is virtually no difference between fantasy and reality. To present a few examples: The truth of a claim is bound to its cultural context. Or: Knowledge is no more than social conventions. Or: Life and pictures from the media are one and the same. Or: Society can be interpreted like a text.
It is 250 years since Ludvig Holberg penned his impassioned play, but every once in a while we find ourselves confronted by a disputing Erasmus Montanus in our modern society.