{"id":107275,"date":"2013-02-28T13:00:16","date_gmt":"2013-02-28T16:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=107275"},"modified":"2017-03-06T15:15:14","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T18:15:14","slug":"the-patriarch-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-patriarch-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"The patriarch of science"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita and Jos\u00e9 Mindlin-USP<\/span>Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio, 1861 lithograph by Frenchman Jean Sisson: a learned man and scholar of many fields of knowledgeBiblioteca Brasiliana Guita and Jos\u00e9 Mindlin-USP<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

A 2011 survey by the Brazilian Congress showed that only 8% of its 652 representatives and senators hold a master\u2019s degree or doctorate. Looking at senators alone, 9.5% have never even enrolled in a college or university. Perhaps these statistics do not affect a congressman\u2019s performance, as some experts suggest, but a comparison with the r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of one politician from the past, Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio (1763-1838), gives us food for thought. Bonif\u00e1cio was a scientist admired by his peers, who had an international career \u2013 something rare in the 18th<\/sup> century. He was versed in mining and metallurgy, both theoretically and in practice, and published many articles in a number of languages in Europe\u2019s top academic journals.<\/p>\n

Bonif\u00e1cio could, after all, speak and write six languages and read 11 and was a highly learned man and an avid reader of scholars from a wide gamut of fields of thought. He was a member of the world\u2019s leading academies of science, discovered various minerals, served as professor at the University of Coimbra, and headed up some of the main industries of Portugal and Brazil. He is also the only Brazilian ever linked with the discovery of a new chemical element (lithium); further, calcium<\/em>–<\/em>iron garnet<\/em> was named \u201candradite\u201d in his honor. Well before the advent of ecology, he promoted the rational exploitation of our natural resources and reviled the destruction of forests. Bonif\u00e1cio considered the sciences essential to the development of Brazil. He called for the establishment of universities, mining schools, scientific expeditions to chart the Brazilian territory, and economic and scientific societies.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut he was reduced to the political role of Patriarch of Independence, a movement he rejected up to the last moment. First and foremost, Bonif\u00e1cio was a scientist formed by the Enlightenment, who scorned armchair knowledge. He believed in science of a propositional and practical bent. In his opinion, his position as a scientist enabled him to find rational solutions for the problems faced by the State,\u201d explains historian Miriam Dolhnikoff, of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP) and author of the recently published biography Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio <\/em>(Companhia das Letras). \u201cAs a politician \u2013 his most well-known side \u2013 he was at the forefront of the process of building a new nation, but the way he thought about this nation was defined by his training as a scientist,\u201d she says. According to this researcher, the \u201cpolitical scientist\u201d wanted to engineer the Brazilian nationality within his social laboratory, which would basically entail mixing the country\u2019s diverse cultural patterns in the test tubes of ordinary life to produce a single pattern, synthesized through miscegenation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe knowledge concentrated in Bonif\u00e1cio\u2019s accomplishments as a politician does have merit. But his political engagement in Brazil was limited to only two years in the life of a 59-year-old retired man, who boasted a long career as a mineralogist in Portugal,\u201d points out journalist and political scientist Jorge Caldeira, responsible for the digitalization of the complete works of Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio, available at the portal Bonif\u00e1cio\u2019s Works (www.obrabonifacio.com.br). \u201cHe was the most respected Brazilian scholar in the international scientific community of his day. This is why he would not accept compromise, and he was a victim of bias because he was a world-renowned scientist who also wielded great political power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bonif\u00e1cio was part of a new generation of Brazilians in Coimbra. \u201cIf the majority followed the tradition of studying law to then return to Brazil to manage their family\u2019s businesses, the new enlightened mentality drew many students from the colony who saw scientific knowledge as affording them the opportunity to develop their abilities and the Empire\u2019s potential,\u201d explains Dolhnikoff. From 1772 to 1822, 450 of the 866 Brazilian graduates of Coimbra majored in mathematics; 250 studied natural philosophy (i.e., natural sciences); and 65 took up medicine. The young 20-year-old Bonif\u00e1cio arrived in Portugal in 1780 in the midst of a modernization movement that intended to wage battle against what contemporaries interpreted as the \u201cdecline of the kingdom.\u201d \u201cAt that time, there was a strong identification between science and politics. The State recruited naturalists for important administrative posts to ensure enforcement of reformist policy,\u201d states historian Alex Varela, author of Juro-lhe pela honra de bom vassalo e bom portugu\u00eas: an\u00e1lise das mem\u00f3rias cient\u00edficas de Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio<\/em> (I swear on my honor as a good subject and a good Portuguese: an analysis of the scientific memoires of Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio) (Annablume).<\/p>\n

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Marcos Scheliga \/ Latinstock Brasil<\/span>Courtyard of the University of Coimbra in Portugal, where Bonif\u00e1cio was introduced to modern ideasMarcos Scheliga \/ Latinstock Brasil<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

As a result, the University of Coimbra, centerpiece of Portuguese knowledge, underwent major reform in 1772, importing professors to make up for the local shortage. One of the most influential of these was Domingos Vandelli, eminent naturalist and friend of Linnaeus, hired to teach natural history and chemistry. In a short time, the Italian had put together a group of disciples who defended dominion over nature as the way Portugal could catch up with the rest of enlightened Europe economically. \u201cHe believed that the nature of the colonies had to be inventoried by scientific institutions, because these natural resources would restore the kingdom,\u201d observes Varela. As Vandelli\u2019s student, Bonif\u00e1cio came to view science not as a mere form of knowledge but as an instrument capable of transforming society. \u201cIt was applied, pragmatic science that would have the social function of solving problems. Nature in the colony should be understood and exploited scientifically in order to contribute to Portuguese industrialization,\u201d affirms the researcher.<\/p>\n

\u201cBonif\u00e1cio\u2019s choice to study mineralogy fit in with this utilitarian outlook on science. He carried his vision as an enlightened scientist into politics. As a mineralogist, he wanted to amalgamate the metals available to him to forge the character of a civilized nation. Nature and history provided all the necessary elements. Reason and knowledge alone were enough, together with the power of the State, to transform these into noble metal,\u201d says Dolhnikoff. \u201cThe man of science should associate himself with the State and accept the hierarchical values of this society. In exchange, the scholar earned honor and privileges, in the hierarchical spirit of the Anci\u00e9n Regime,\u201d asserts historian Berenice Cavalcante, professor at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro (PUC\/RJ) and author of Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio: raz\u00e3o e sensibilidade <\/em>(Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio: reason and sensibility) (FGV). Bonif\u00e1cio the scientist was thus essentially an employee of the State. The government in turn invested heavily in training academic personnel who were expected to provide the Empire with what it lacked most: technical knowledge. Specialization and professionalization trips were offered for this purpose, like the one Bonif\u00e1cio took between 1790 and 1800 through central and northern Europe, where he visited the major mining schools and regions.<\/p>\n

These were not \u201cphilosophical journeys.\u201d The beneficiary was supposed to observe everything, with the mission of bringing an atmosphere of modernity back to the Empire. \u201cOnly important places like centers of mineralogical knowledge and natural philosophy and chemistry were visited,\u201d says Cavalcante. In France, Bonif\u00e1cio took Fourcroy\u2019s chemistry course; in Germany he met Humboldt, took classes with Kant, and worked at the mines; he visited the mines of Bohemia; and he did research in Sweden and Denmark. His article on the minerals he found, especially petalite and spodumene<\/em>, made a great impact, and it was after English chemist Humphry Davy read the publication that the latter was able to discover a new element, named lithium.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was also on this trip that Bonif\u00e1cio re-embraced Vandelli\u2019s critical view of the irrational destruction of nature, reformulating it in tune with his own precepts, out of sharp concern over the environmental question. Unfortunately, historians have underestimated this component of Bonif\u00e1cio\u2019s thought,\u201d states historian Jos\u00e9 Augusto P\u00e1dua, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and author of Um sopro de destrui\u00e7\u00e3o: pensamento pol\u00edtico e cr\u00edtica ambiental no Brasil escravista<\/em> (A breath of destruction: political thought and environmental criticism in slaveholding Brazil) (Zahar). \u201cBonif\u00e1cio had first-hand experience with the process of engendering a new theoretical universe concerning the dynamics of nature. Above all, his writings do not constitute a mere transposition of the European discussion to the Luso-Brazilian milieu but rather a personal interpretation derived from his experiences and reflections,\u201d observes P\u00e1dua. According to this author, Bonif\u00e1cio believed that the growth brought by development could not be based on the anti-scientific destruction of forests, as such actions posed a threat to the future. \u201cOur precious woods are disappearing, the victims of fire and the axe, of ignorance and egotism. Without plant life, our beautiful Brazil will be reduced to the arid deserts of Libya. The day will then come when our affronted nature will be avenged for so many crimes,\u201d he wrote in 1828.<\/p>\n

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Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita and Jos\u00e9 Mindlin-USP<\/span>Title page of the book on botanical gardens written by Domingos Vandelli, dedicated to Queen Maria I. Above, andradite, the stone named in honor of Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio and his pioneering work in mineralogyBiblioteca Brasiliana Guita and Jos\u00e9 Mindlin-USP<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe must be careful about seeing Bonif\u00e1cio as an \u2018ecologist\u2019, because the possibility that natural riches would be exhausted had not been posited back then, and no one had any notion that the destruction of nature would jeopardize the environment. He was a scientist concerned about using nature as efficaciously and rationally as possible to ensure better economic results,\u201d Dolhnikoff cautions. This pragmatic outlook caught the attention of the nobleman Dom Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, Minister of the Navy and Overseas. A member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Coutinho was a man of the Enlightenment who supported the revival of mining in the colony \u2013 which many felt had been \u201cdepleted\u201d \u2013 as the key to reinvigorating the Empire, so long as it was \u201cscientifically\u201d led. As soon as Bonif\u00e1cio came back from his pilgrimage through Europe, Dom Rodrigo invited him to establish a professorial chair in metallurgy at Coimbra and also appointed him superintendent of the mines of the kingdom of Portugal in 1801. This was the beginning of the organic melding of scientist and statesman, a union that remained in perfect harmony until his return to Brazil.<\/p>\n

In addition to the mines, Bonif\u00e1cio was made responsible both for the Brazilian Mint, where he sponsored studies and courses in chemistry, and also for the royal forests, where he could apply his ideals regarding harmony between nature and \u201cprogress.\u201d Working tirelessly, he surveyed the problems of mining in Portugal; he also set Portugal\u2019s first steam machine to work, rendering coal extraction more efficient; and he started up the Figueir\u00f3 iron factory, which employed a modern, rational management approach and produced substantial quantities of ore. As if this were not enough, he discovered a new vein of coal in the city of Porto, which he claimed could supply the kingdom for 1,500 years. But Bonif\u00e1cio grew tired of the sluggish imperial bureaucracy, which kept him from efficiently implementing \u201ctechnology\u201d in Portugal, and he decided to go back to Brazil in 1819. In a farewell address, he heralded the colony\u2019s potential contributions to the \u201cnew\u201d Portuguese Empire: \u201cAnd gentlemen, what a country this is for a new civilization and for a new base for the sciences! What a land for a great and vast empire!\u201d The shock of reality hit a few years later: \u201cIn Brazil, the sciences and fine letters have crumbled. All that matters is selling sugar, coffee, cotton, and tobacco.\u201d Nevertheless, his native land at first delighted the man who had become disenchanted with the \u201cvices\u201d of European modernity.<\/p>\n

In 1820, alongside his brother Martim Francisco, Bonif\u00e1cio took a \u201cmineralogical journey\u201d that commenced in Santos and covered 72 leagues of the S\u00e3o Paulo hinterlands, as he was anxious to assess its natural resources. \u201cGiven what he came across, he lamented the tremendous potential that had been lost because of the backwards, \u2018careless\u2019 way the Brazilians farmed the land. He was aggravated by the senseless destruction of nature and predicted that once people had depleted these resources, they would be forever migrating, further hampering the arrival of civilization,\u201d states Cavalcante. As a man of the Age of Reason, Bonif\u00e1cio was not discouraged by these obstacles; instead, they reanimated the retired naturalist and motivated him to take action. \u201cHe saw Brazil as a raw mass, pregnant with potential, which could be shaped in accordance with his enlightened will. Bonif\u00e1cio inaugurated a lineage of statesmen who proposed crafting an overall project of nationhood for the country from a broader and more generous perspective than that prescribed by his peers and contemporaries,\u201d Dolhnikoff observes.<\/p>\n

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Jo\u00e3o Carvalho \/ Creative Commons<\/span>Ajuda Botanical Garden in Lisbon, designed by Vandelli, who hoped to create a laboratory for the colony\u2019s natural richesJo\u00e3o Carvalho \/ Creative Commons<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

For Dolhnikoff, the label \u201cconservative,\u201d which Bonif\u00e1cio earned from his fierce defense of the monarchy, is unfair. \u201cHe was one of the biggest reformist politicians of his day. His concern with creating a homogeneous nation through miscegenation, the end of slavery, the assimilation of indigenous peoples, and guaranteeing everyone some degree of education and means of survival lay at the heart of his national project, and was a product of his training as a scientist,\u201d she says. We need only remember his pioneering defense of miscegenation as the foundation for a national identity. \u201cAt a time when the founders of the first enlightened legislation on the planet \u2013 the Americans \u2013 believed there were differences between the races, he negated them, a position that only gained ground in the mid-20th<\/sup> century,\u201d says Caldeira. Bonif\u00e1cio did not consider European production a model to be copied but a method to be redeveloped. \u201cBonif\u00e1cio used the Enlightenment as a tool to analyze Brazilians and to found a nation that took Brazilian behavior into account. In his era, no man of the Enlightenment went as far in valuing the reality of Brazilians over the direct transplant of imported models.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bonif\u00e1cio advocated a nation grounded on homogeneity attained through the mixing of the races, which he thought would erase deep racial differences. He did not want Brazil to be \u201cwhitened\u201d but felt it was the State\u2019s duty to encourage marriage between indigenes, whites, and mulattoes. \u201cIt was not a matter of humanism but of believing that integration would favor the elites, who he saw as playing the role of catalyst of civilization,\u201d states Dolhnikoff. \u201cSymptomatically, he used a chemical term \u2013 \u2018amalgamation\u2019, an alloy of homogeneous metal \u2013 to explain the need to unify society, which was divided into irreconcilable groups. If these many \u2018diverse metals\u2019 were not amalgamated, the young nation ran the risk of rupturing at the slightest sign of any political tremor,\u201d observes Varela.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis defense of abolition followed the same principle. Slavery generated an idle, violent, and therefore uncultured elite, which was an obstacle to development. It was also responsible for the pointless destruction of the forests,\u201d says Dolhnikoff. Bonif\u00e1cio was not, however, so unrealistic as to call for immediate abolition. He preferred gradual change, advocating the reform of agricultural practices, which should be modernized by providing \u201cignorant farmers\u201d with scientific instruction and through the application of the Empire\u2019s land-grant system, known as sesmaria<\/em>. He clashed directly with large landholders when he proposed that uncultivated land be confiscated and sold by the government, with the proceeds going to the poor so that they could enjoy social inclusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wanted to build a nation led by a constitutional monarchy, and for this he needed the support of the majority of the elite, and the nation he wanted to build was not the nation this elite wanted,\u201d notes Dolhnikoff. He failed to realize he was in a country with misplaced ideals. \u201cThe identification of a Brazilian citizenship based on ethnic and religious universalism is still a valid utopia for a nation. Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio was the first thinker to lend finished form to this idea,\u201d observes Caldeira. \u201cSince then, a number of reform projects have been devised, with the developed world in mind, but without any better results than Bonif\u00e1cio\u2019s,\u201d the historian says. Along with his projects, Bonif\u00e1cio bequeathed the country a large collection of minerals and a library of over 1,500 volumes, enormous for his time. Both have almost completely vanished due to Brazil\u2019s reckless disregard for knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jos\u00e9 Bonif\u00e1cio were marked by the bond between statesman and naturalist ","protected":false},"author":370,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[241],"coauthors":[684],"class_list":["post-107275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","tag-history"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/370"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107275"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=107275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}