The answer to this question was the main focus of Daniel Todes’ open seminar held on September 24, 2015 at the European University at St. Petersburg.
A professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University (USA), author of the first biography of Ivan Pavlov and a visiting professor in the EUSP’s Department of History, Daniel Todes spoke about his experience studying the life and work of Ivan Pavlov and the examination of the last of Pavlov’s manuscripts, written (but never finished and never published) by the scientist in the last winter of his life in the Leningrad suburb of Koltushi.
In the first manuscript, which summarizes the results of his endeavors, Pavlov revised his views. Being an adherent of established theories at the beginning of his career, Pavlov later acknowledged that pursue of truth has no end and that increasing the number of experiments leads only to infinite perspectives on the possible systemization of observations. The same idea of the search is also present in a second manuscript, which collects Pavlov’s reflections on science, Christianity and Bolshevism. Here the key concept was “chance,” which Pavlov tried unsuccessfully to avoid during the whole life in favor of “rightness” — the domain of laws and science. But a series of tragic events (his own illness, the death of his younger brother and son, the Revolution) as well as an innate inclination toward excitability (Pavlov subsequently diagnosed himself with hysteria) did not prevent him from reaching scientific heights. Pavlov resolved this contradiction only at the end of his life by observing dogs that were, like him, unbalanced.
Faith was one more “unstable” plotline in Pavlov’s biography. Despite his religious upbringing at home, in seminary school and in his marriage to the devout Seraphima Karchevskaia, Pavlov came to atheism in his youth, and until the end of his life believed only in science as the primary engine of progress, glorified the humanism of scientific thought and at certain times was an intellectual persecutor of religion. At other times, however, he celebrated Easter, collected money for the church, and, with academic skepticism, spoke about the necessary role of religion in meeting humanity’s psychological need for release from randomness. Consequently throughout his life Pavlov’s views on the most fundamental values and patterns of existence changed in accordance with the winds of his mood.
Pavlov’s relationship with the antagonists of religion—the Bolsheviks—was also ambiguous. Having explained the revolution through a lack of balance in the Russian nervous type that was incapable of correct perceiving reality, Pavlov seriously considered emigration, led reactionary activities and predicted the demise of Russian science under the Bolshevik control. But by the mid 1930s he acknowledged the positive social achievements of the Soviet policy, and in 1935 at the International Congress of Physiologists where western scholars expressed warm admiration for the state of Russian science, Pavlov proudly proclaimed his first public praise of the Bolsheviks as great experimenters.
Metaphors were an important element of Pavlov’s language in his scholarly works. Following in the footsteps of Newton and Darwin, he described the subject of his research with subjective, vivid associations. Thus his dogs “groaned, complained and enjoyed,” and were “courageous, sociable, greedy, and cheerful.” Their ranks even included those who worked “with proletarian constancy” and “the academic type.” For Pavlov, the attraction and collision of nerve endings in his experimental animals was similar to political processes in society.
Nearly a century after Pavlov’s death it seems unproductive to use his metaphors, but the problem of transferring physiological processes to the psychological is still no less mysterious now than it was in his time. In the 21st century it’s difficult to believe that science will solve the problems of mankind. But still we continue to fight desperately with chance and the torments of consciousness. New prospects for scientific thought opened up by Ivan Pavlov remain relevant today and inspire new scientific search.
Daniel Todes’ report covered only a small part of his work, which began in 1990 when the Soviet archives were opened. “Only when I started to hate this work a little could I finally finish it,” said Todes.
More information on this subject and Pavlov’s final unpublished manuscripts can be found in the biography by Todes, which was published in the United States last year.
Todes D. P. Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science. — New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. — P. 855. Todes, D. P. (1997). "Pavlov's Physiological Factory". Isis (The History of Science Society) 88 (2): 205–246. doi:10.1086/383690. JSTOR 236572.
Kristina Emelyanenko
