Body text

Body text: Typography and the corporeality of literature In one of his fragments, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg explains that German books printed with roman type, instead of the then default gothic type, always give him a feeling that he needs to translate them – evidence, he says, of “the degree to which our concepts are dependent on these signs”. The article elaborates on this thought. It explores the relation between literature, text (abstract and material), and typography, and argues – by means of bibliographical theory, Goethe’s mother, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roman Ingarden, and a diagnostic comparison between hand writing and digital fonts – that the longstanding, idealistic view, within literary criticism and history, of texts’ ‘content’ as independent of books’ and texts’ materiality and form, obstructs scholars’ striving for understand-ing. Text is not only representation; it is also presentation. Text has form, and the form produces meaning.

Zwischen Naturlehre und Rhetorik

In Lichtenbergs Sudelbüchern erfolgt die Beobachtung des Kleinen in der Natur und beim Menschen durch Wissensformen, die an der Schnittstelle von Rhetorik und Naturlehre entstehen. In seinen Sudelbüchern notierte Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 35 Jahre lang allerlei Einfälle, Ideenassoziationen, Gedankenexperimente und Versuchsanordnungen. Diese legendären Notizhefte bilden jedoch kein literarisches bzw. epistemisches Ganzes. Sie sind vielmehr ein Sammelsurium von Texten, in dem die »zwei Kulturen« aufeinandertreffen: die rhetorisch-poetische und die naturwissenschaftliche. Das Aufzeichnen besitzt dabei eine doppelte zeitliche Signatur, denn diese kleinen Textformen haben nicht nur eine mnemonisch-aufbewahrende Funktion; sie erweisen sich auch als Winke für künftiges Wissen. In ihrer Monographie geht Elisabetta Mengaldo dem für die Sudelbücher zentralen Zusammenhang von Rhetorik als traditioneller Kulturtechnik und Formen der Wissensanordnung an der Schwelle zwischen taxonomischen Modellen und modernen Beobachtungs- und Experimentalpraktiken nach. Dabei kommt dem »Kleinen« sowohl als Forschungsobjekt als auch als hybrider kurzer Prosaform eine geradezu emblematische wissensgenerierende Funktion zu.

¿Qué es una ocurrencia? Sobre humanidades y ciencias

En primer término, se aborda la relación asimétrica de humanidades y ciencias en las instituciones contemporáneas de conocimiento sugiriendo la inconveniencia de acentuar la diferencia entre unas y otras, en la medida en que ambos órdenes epistémicos están sometidos hoy a los mismos condicionamientos estructurales. El efecto que estos tienen sobre las humanidades es analizado a través de dos aspectos críticos. En segundo término, se discute la significación epistémica de la ocurrencia como principio común de ciencias y humanidades apelando a la obra de Georg Christoph Lichtenberg a manera de caso ejemplar. En esta, experimentalismo y ensayo, singularidades, ficción y variación dan cuenta de un mismo brote epistémico en humanidades (y literatura) y ciencias.

Notebooks

The eighteenth-century German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg developed a utopian style of note-taking that anticipated the fantasy of democratically organized information promulgated by social media in the twenty-first century. In his “waste-books” (a term drawn from accounting) Lichtenberg made a virtue of the unfinished, promoting the use of the notebook as a tool directed to purposes other than publication: first, as an accumulation of informational wealth (“pennyworths); second, as an incubator for future possibilities over which he exercised no control (“seeds”); and, third, as a space where the micro trades places with the macro (“keyholes”). Lichtenberg elected to live in manuscript, relinquishing his witty retorts, aphoristic reflections, or ideas for whole books entirely to posterity. He kept marginal notations as a way of honing an individual style that was simultaneously divorced from social exchange with the living.

Einstieg in das Forschende Lernen

Inquiring learning offers the opportunity for students to acquire action-oriented skills by solving research questions independently. Regina Gente examines initial difficulties in inquiring learning at a student research center and discusses how these can be countered through coaching. For this purpose, teams of students were accompanied during their introduction to inquiring learning and employees of the Schülerforschungszentrum Nordhessen were interviewed. In addition, the application of this method in regular lessons is highlighted as an example. Dr. Regina Gente teaches math and physics at the Georg Christoph Lichtenberg School in Kassel and has been working as a consultant at the Schülerforschungszentrum Nordhessen since 2013.

How “Facts” Shaped Modern Disciplines

This history of the concept of fact reveals that the fact-oriented practices of German physicists and historians derived from common origins. The concept of fact became part of the German language remarkably late. It gained momentum only toward the end of the eighteenth century. I show that the concept of fact emerged as part of a historical knowledge tradition, which comprised both human and natural empirical study. Around 1800, parts of this tradition, including the concept of fact, were integrated into the epistemological basis of several emerging disciplines, including physics and historiography. During this process of discipline formation, the concept of fact remained fluid. I reveal this fluidity by unearthing different interpretations and roles of facts in different German contexts around 1800. I demonstrate how a fact-based epistemology emerged at the University of Göttingen in the late eighteenth century, by focusing on universal historian August Ludwig Schlözer and the experimentalist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. In a time of scientific and political revolutions, they regarded facts as eternal knowledge, contrasting them with short-lived theories and speculations. Remarkably, Schlözer and Lichtenberg construed facts as the basis of Wissenschaft, but not as Wissenschaft itself. Only after 1800, empirically minded German physicists and historians granted facts self-contained value. As physics and historiography became institutionalized at German universities, the concept of fact acquired different interpretations in different disciplinary settings. These related to fact-oriented research practices, such as precision measurement in physics and source criticism in historiography.