JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
A Serious Man
by Steven Shapin
Three facts about Bruno Latour. He was from a wine-growing family; he was from Burgundy; and he was Catholic. These facts are related, and they are pertinent to understanding what his philosophical project was about. Bruno was born with silver in his mouth and that silver was a tastevin. I don’t believe that Bruno ever needed the money that came from an academic career... and I occasionally teased him about his poor career choice, for which my reward was several bottles of Corton when he came over to dinner at my house in San Diego.…
At the funeral service at the Chapelle Saint-Louis in the Salpêtrière, there it was.
Bruno left detailed instructions…for the production and display of a digitalized representation of Rogier van der Weyden’s mid-fifteenth-century Last Judgement polyptych altarpiece in the Hospices de Beaune, an art work that Bruno made much of in his discussions of salvation and of “the end of days.”
The service was… I believe, the first Mass—and plausibly the last—that contained readings from texts in Science and Technology Studies.
Sections of Bruno’s writings—from An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Facing Gaia,and the Irréductions appended to The Pasteurization of France—were read out by colleagues and friends...
most people in our part of the academic world knew of Bruno’s Catholicism… there were some who were embarrassed by it—including... I suppose, the great majority of the atheists and the religiously indifferent attending the funeral mass.
When, five years ago, the New York Times ran a sprawling panegyric introducing Bruno to the American public, the wine connection was mentioned, Catholicism and theological concerns not at all... his religion, like his philosophy, was idiosyncratic.
His conception of God was, it’s been said, “immanentist.” Schaffer once tagged him as a “hylozoist,” and “pantheist” might serve as well—God was everywhere, present in all things... in Bruno’s metaphysics the sorting of the categories of Nature and Us is ultimately in need of linguistic repair.
You’ve had the language for centuries, he once told me, give me a few years. Bruno’s religious focus was, as he often said, on eschatology and soteriology—the Last Days, apocalypse, salvation—the matters portrayed on the Beaune altarpiece.
