John C. Eccles’ Conversion and the Meaning of ‘Authority’

Abstract

Robert K. Merton’s tentative taxonomy of the ‘instructively ambiguous’ categories of ‘excellence’ and ‘recognition’ features the Nobel Prize as an example of the couple ‘excellence as performance/recognition as honorific’.1 In this connection, Merton raises the problem of what the performance to be recognised should look like. In the sciences, he concludes, the single achievement (as opposed to ‘life-work’2) seems to be the standard, although what this means is far from self-evident. Alfred Nobel’s three famous criteria for a prize-worthy achievement (‘recency’, ‘benefit to mankind’ and ‘discovery’) have equally proven difficult to handle, requiring progressive adjustments (see the Introduction to this volume). In situations of real-life complexity, Merton’s taxonomy of ‘recognition’ and ‘excellence as performance’ shows its analytical limit, as do Nobel’s criteria. Even in early, apparently simple, cases of undivided awards, the stumbling block of the ‘individual discovery’ had made itself perspicuous, as shown by the lengthy debate over Ivan Pavlov’s3 or Paul Ehrlich’s award,4 demonstrating how problematic the ‘snapshot’ conception of discovery can be. One is here reminded of Roland Barthes’ concept of ‘punctum’,5 ‘[the] element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces [us]’. The ‘punctum’ is what commands our attention and makes us notice an image. This event, however, can only be perceived as such within the less perspicuous framework of an educated and idiosyncratic approach, which he calls ‘studium’, and is the ‘application to a thing [...] a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, but without special acuity’.6 Transposed to the problem at hand, the ‘punctum’ can be abruptly translated as ‘(beneficial) discovery’, whereas ‘studium’ becomes the set of conditions that makes the achievement recognised as a great