SOURCE: "Scientific Method and Rationality in Dürrenmatu" in German Life and Letters, Vol. 35, No. 1, October, 1981, pp. 64-72.

[In the following essay, Wright shows how Dürrenmatt explores what is real by juxtaposing scientific method and speculation in his detective novels.]

Dürrenmatt's work so often presents us with an incalcuable world thwarting man's attempts to shape it, that the world's rationality seems questioned and thus the whole scientific enterprise to understand it. Nowhere does this seem more evident than in the detective novels, where scientific procedures are apparently mocked. In lectures of recent years Dürrenmatt has dealt directly with such philosophical issues, comparing in particular the views of Spinoza and Einstein, and acknowledging the importance that the thought of Karl Popper has come to have for him. An analysis of the detective novels will show just how much of what he now makes explicit was contained in his earlier work, suggesting that underlying his work is a coherent philosophical position that has changed little. While his work constitutes a critique of the Cartesian strand of rationalism, of which Spinoza is an extreme representative, his position remains firmly rationalist.

The novels contain an exploration of scientific method, presenting competing views of it that reflect the battles in physics fought out in Germany between the wars. The contrast that we are shown in Der Richter und sein Henker is ostensibly that between the brilliant but unsystematic Bärlach, proceeding by hunch not scientific method, and his superior Lutz, the champion of modern scientific criminology, employing inductive logic and a methodical discovery procedure. It is precisely these rational procedures that the novel seems to mock and Lutz himself, bewildered by the denouement, is made to admit the inadequacy of his science: "… wenn es nach der Wissenschaft gegangen wäre, schnüffelten wir jetzt bei fremden Diplomaten herum." Bärlach accepts the role he is cast for, playing teasingly with the accusations of unscientific procedure: "… mein Verdacht ist nicht ein kriminalistisch wissenschaftlicher Verdacht. Ich habe keine Gründe, die ihn rechtfertigen." Justification will prove to be a key notion.

Lutz's view of science is the Baconian one of a procedure that starts from firmly established facts and builds on this sure foundation a structure of verified knowledge, discovery being achieved by applying a rigorous method. This view is suspicious above all of hypotheses. It finds bold expression in Newton's "Hypotheses non fingo", which Dürrenmatt put into the mouth of his own Newton in Die Physiker and which was a slogan of Philipp Lenard's "Aryan Physics". Above all it is necessary to restrain the imagination, to avoid obscuring the truth of nature with the mind's fantasies. Nature must be viewed without preconceptions and the mind firmly anchored in the "real" world. Nature is thus an open book, revealing itself to any mind unclouded by the fictions produced by the all too fertile imagination. The idea is fostered that the scientist is the man of cold reason who points to a reality we all could see, if we would open unprejudiced eyes and look. With such a method, Bacon even suggested, great intellect was no longer essential: "Not much is left to acuteness and strength of talent." With a pair of compasses, he remarks, anyone can draw a circle. Any of Dürrenmatt's dull policemen, Lutz, Tschanz or Henzi, will suffice; the undisciplined brilliance of a Bärlach is superfluous. The empiricist Bacon was at one with the rationalist Spinoza on this point at least, that truth manifests itself.

Opposed to this is the view argued above all by Popper that science can yield no more than theories that may take us ever closer to the truth but can never be verified or "justified"; they are falsified by one counter-example, but no amount of "confirmatory" evidence can establish their truth, for the very next instance may contradict. Progress is only by the negative way of subjecting theories to the severest tests, in order to reveal inadequacies and suggest better theories. A theory is only as good as the tests it has survived; a good one will not only be consistent with available data but lead to new discoveries. The scientist should not try to prove his theory but to falsify it. On this view it is not only the dramatist but the scientist too who must pursue "die schlimmst mögliche Wendung", which for him means refutation of his theory. In this process of conjectures and refutations hypotheses are essential. It matters little how fantastic the hypothesis, if it yields testable statements; the only hypothesis useless to science is one that cannot be falsified. Reality is not an open book; in Heraclitus' words, Nature loves to hide, and must be tricked into revealing her secrets. Einstein called his world "a world of some objective reality which I try to catch in a wildly speculative way." Dürrenmatt's detective novels bring these two conceptions of science into confrontation.

In Das Versprechen the hawker von Gunten, with a previous conviction for indecency involving a fourteen year old girl, is the obvious and only available suspect for the murder of the young child Gritli Moser. Henzi, in charge of the case, jumps at the plausible solution, fitting all the confirmatory evidence to the pattern: the previous conviction; the failure of von Gunten to report tripping over the body he claims he found, until confronted with the bloodstains detected on his trousers; his unwillingness to mention razors in the list of his wares etc. The pattern is impressive, but is it there in the real world or being forced onto it? All the evidence can be fitted into another coherent pattern, that of the hawker's own explanation. Some test is required to show the explanatory power of Henzi's theory. Henzi does not look for such a test; he prefers to squeeze von Gunten till he cracks and confesses. It does not trouble Henzi that not even the confession yields testable information, such as the whereabouts of the murder weapon. His hypothesis has risked nothing and survived no tests. It triumphs only because the alternative is silenced: von Gunten commits suicide.

Yet any serious attempt to refute the hypothesis would have aroused immediate doubts. Matthäi's keener mind had spotted the irrelevance of the previous conviction to a case involving no sexual assault. Dissatisfied, he seeks further evidence and finds it in Gritli's drawing of a man, made shortly before her death. The psychiatrist Locher, to whom he submits it for comment, dismisses it as worthless evidence, because children's drawings are a mixture of fantasy and reality, but coaxed into going along with Matthäi's "fiction" and informed that three girls have been murdered in the same way, he obliges with a hypothesis. When Matthäi proceeds to take it seriously, however, he reacts with horror: "Alles, was er ihm gesagt habe, sei nur eine Spekulation, ein blosses Gedankenspiel ohne wissenschaftlichen Wert." It is a mere fiction, one possibility in a thousand: "Mit der gleichen Methode könate man beweisen, dass jeder beliebige der Mörder sein könnte." The sober scientist pleads with Matthäi to leave his fantasy world: "… nun solle Matthäi auch Manns genug sein, die Realität ohne Hypothesen zu schen."

Locher has however overlooked a vital point: his "wild" speculation has the great merit of being falsifiable, because it has yielded one testable statement, the prediction that the girls will resemble each other. "Prüfen Sie es nach, die Opfer werden sich alle gleichen." The hypothesis leads to the discovery of a significant fact, for Locher is right and the fact had not previously been noticed. Unlike Henzi's plausible hypothesis, Locher's speculative one ran the risk of being refuted; it has probed the world, instead of filling known facts into a preconceived pattern. Matthäi's next step is equally conjectural. Following painstaking experimental work with children, he suggests that a horned figure in the drawing depicts the ibex motif on a Graubünden car number plate. This conjecture focuses attention on another detail that nobody had noticed: all three murder locations were on the Graubüden—Zurich road, and von Gunten had no car. Further successful predictions finally convince everyone. Matthäi's fiction exposes reality so well that the police chief Dr. H. calls the detective a genius. Locher had pleaded with Matthäi to face reality without hypotheses; Matthäi shows that only with hypotheses can reality be faced.

Locher and Dr. H. had urged Matthäi to be reasonable and accept what was probable. Too often the reasonable and probable are merely what seem plausible to an unimaginative mind. Poor Lutz in Der Richter und sein Henker never questions the plausible: at first the master criminal Gastmann is "above all suspicion" and at the end his guilt is "proven". The truth he never suspects. That reality might be surprising never enters his mind. All the scientific paraphernalia in the world is useless, when the thinking is as shoddy and unimaginative as his.

In the Bärlach novels it is Bärlach himself, not Lutz, who displays scientific method. In Der Richter und sein Henker this is obscured by the fact of Bärlach's previous knowledge of Gastmann. In Der Verdacht, however, Dürrenmatt gives us two examples of scientific reasoning made so explicit that it reads like a textbook. Bärlach characterizes the detective's art for his surgeon friend Hungertobel as follows: "Unsere Kunst setzt sich aus etwas Mathematik zusammen und aus sehr viel Phantasie." This resembles the account given by Einstein and Popper of the scientist's "art". Expounding Einstein, Dürrenmatt has written:

Damit sind wir auf das wichtigste Dogma der Einsteinschen Erkenntnistheorie gestossen, auf den Glauben, dass sich die Sinnen-Erlebnisse nur intuitiv, nicht logisch auf ein in sich logisches, aber an sich logisch willkürliches Begriffssystem beziehen lassen.

Bärlach's intuitive processes are stimulated by Hungertobel's astonishment at the close resemblance between a picture of the concentration camp doctor Nehle and a student colleague, Emmenberger, now running a prosperous local sanatorium. To Bärlach's speculative identification of the two Hungertobel reacts with the same horrified protest with which Locher greets Matthäi. He objects to the unrestrained imagination: "Deiner Phantasie sind offenbar nicht die geringsten Grenzen gesetzt." Like Locher and Lutz he prefers to draw the least disturbing conclusion, the one easiest to fit into routine modes of thinking: "Jeder von uns kann einem Mörder gleichen." Bärlach is suspicious of the obvious. He has to seek the solution that is most "wahrscheinlich", for verisimilitude is, as Popper asserts, the most that science can attain, but "Wahrscheinlichkeit", understood as plausibility, is too often the refuge of the lazy mind. With rigorous logic the detective forces the doctor to defend his common-sense theory against alternative hypotheses. Hungertobel greets the suggestion that Emmenberger was in the camp and Nehle in Chile under Emmenberger's name with cries of "Unsinn", "ein unwahrscheinlicher Schluss." This manner of dealing with reality is primitive; it is, he implies, arbitrary and thus unscientific, because it would put everything in doubt, leaving no firm ground on which to stand. Bärlach agrees about the doubt: "Wir müssen in diesem Punkt durchaus wie die Philosophen vorgehen, von denen es heisst, dass sie erst einmal alles bezweifeln."

The detective now proceeds to show that what saves his approach from arbitrariness is the testing of the hypothesis. This is where "Phantasie" gives way to "Mathematik". Close investigation shows the similarity between the two men to be remarkable: both have a scar on the forehead as a result of a far from common operation and in both cases part of the eyebrow is missing, because the operation has not been managed with the usual skill. This is a highly improbable coincidence or a contrived one. The "probable" hypothesis now rests on a highly improbable occurrence, but here "improbability" has a precise meaning: it is not mere implausibility; it can be given a numerical, if approximate, value. Dürrenmatt pursues the demonstration at length, showing the hypothesis leading, like Matthäi's, to the discovery of relevant and quite unpredictable facts. Like Matthäi Bärlach then proves his confidence in his theory by acting upon it. Here, however, we have one of Dürrenmatt's characteristic twists: by sticking his neck out a scientist usually runs the risk of being wrong, but in entering Emmenberger's sanatorium Bärlach only runs a risk if he is right.

This lesson in scientific thinking from Part I of the novel is then balanced and reinforced in Part II by its mirror image, with roles of doctor and detective neatly reversed. Emmenberger, having discovered Bärlach's identity, needs to know whether Hungertobel is involved and needs to be disposed of. The detective now finds himself desperately trying to make his denial of Hungertobel's involvement convincing. Emmenberger subjects Bärlach's arguments to the same rigorous scrutiny to which Bärlach had subjected Hungertobel's. The detective's objections echo his friend's: "Unsinn … das sei eine unberechtigte Idee, eine leere Spekulation." Emmenberger carefully tests the opposing hypotheses for their "Wahrscheinlichkeit", attempting to argue the negation of his hypothesis that Hungertobel knows all: "Gehen wir vorher zu andern möglichen Indizien über, die gegen mich vorliegen, versuchen wir ihn reinzuwaschen." The attempted refutation is not convincing: on Bärlach's "hypothesis" the facts simply cannot be made to cohere, but on his own they cohere perfectly. It is not thereby established or justified, but it is the one that has best survived criticism and to act according to the best tested theory is the rational course. It is the only rational strategy in a world without certainty. Doctor and detective show the same capacity for critical thought. With some justice Emmenberger tells Bärlach: "Wir sind beide Wissenschaftler."

Now that Einstein is one of the undisputed "greats", it is easy to forget the bitter struggle his theories provoked. His most virulent opponent was Philipp Lenard (Nobel Prizewinner for Physics, as chance would have it, in 1905, the year in which Einstein made the discovery for which he won the prize in 1921), who championed what he saw as the empiricist view of science, distinguishing between "mere hypothesis" and well founded theory derived from observation and experiment. Relativity theory, he insisted, did not deserve the name theory, because it came not from careful observation of the great judge and teacher Nature, but from the relativists' own fantastic imaginations. We meet here what, in the context of Dürrenmatt's work, is the familiar accusation of distorting reality through the unrestrained and grotesque imagination. For Lenard, Einstein's theories were procreations alien to nature and he scorned the idea that knowledge of the exterior world could come from the notions of human heads. "Makers of hypotheses" was an insult hurled at the "new" physicists. In the Aryan Physics that Lenard attempted to construct, discovery was to be firmly rooted in Nature, with which the nordic researcher was engaged in close dialogue, whereas the Jew was involved in abstractions from his own head, abstruse mathematical constructs deriving from the imagination, supported by "Gedankenexperimente".

Einstein's answer to Lenard at the Bad Nauheim conference on relativity in 1920 had been the now familiar notion that we cannot rely on the intuitively obvious, because what is intuitively obvious changes with time. It is uncomfortable to have our familiar images questioned and the questioner is resented. Einstein disturbed Lenard, as Bärlach disturbed Hungertobel, and Matthäi disturbed Locher and Dr. H. The world of Dürrenmatt's detective fiction is one in which there is no simple contrast between the imaginative artist and the "rational" or "logical" scientist. In this world writer, detective and scientist are alike dependent on imagination. More recently Dürrenmatt has made the point explicit: "Dagegen ist die Logik der Wissenschaft jene des schöpferischen Menschen." The imagination is essential for the rational exploration of reality, and not for its exploration only: its rational ordering requires the imagination just as urgently. To Lutz, in Der Verdacht, Bärlach grumbles: "Die Phantasie, das sei es eben, die Phantasie!… Die Welt sei aus Nachlässigkeit schlecht, und daran, aus Nachlässigkeit zum Teufel zu gehen." In a novel concerned with the devils of the concentration camps it is a striking suggestion that the greatest threat to a humane world is unimaginative and slipshod thinking.

Yet despite brilliant thinking, both imaginative and logical, Matthäi fails disastrously, evoking the nightmare thought that we are not in a rational world. It is tempting to ascribe the failure to "the element of unreason in the world", but it is misleading. Matthäi fails because he is ignorant of one fact that he could not possibly have known: the man he seeks is already dead. Writing of the problems of prediction in the social sciences, F.A. von Hayek, whose work has pertinent things to say on Dürrenmatt's perennial theme of "Zufall", states:

The difficulties which we encounter … are not, as one might at first suspect, difficulties about formulating theories for the explanation of the observed events … The real difficulty, to the solution of which science has little to contribute, and which is sometimes indeed insoluble, consists in the ascertainment of the particular facts.

To ascribe to a lack of reason in the world man's inability to know all, is a manifestation of human pride, which in Dürrenmatt's work is always punished. Matthäi's failure has disastrous consequences, not despite his rationality, but because he is not rational enough to realize that no theory, however fruitful, can be relied on as true. He presumes to know and acts with absolute faith in his theory.

The rationalism that Das Versprechen mocks is the Cartesian rationalism that believes that an absolutely sure foundation can be given to the structure of human knowledge. Descartes wrote: "It seems to me that I can establish as a general rule that all things which I perceive very clearly and distinctly are true." Matthäi too perceives clearly and distinctly: having calmed a lynch mob by daringly offering to hand over the hawker if they insist, he is asked by the horrified Staatsanwalt what he would have done, had the villagers insisted; he replies: "Ich wusste, dass dies nicht der Fall sein würde." The arrogant tone of absolute self-confidence is that of Spinoza's remark (which shows the gulf between him and Einstein, for all the similarities that Dürrenmatt adduces): "I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy."

The representative of a worthier and more Einsteinian rationalism is Bärlach who, having quite demolished Hungertobel's objections to his hypothesis, concludes his lesson in scientific thinking by emphasizing that it remains a hypothesis:

Ich habe dir nur die Wahrscheinlichkeit meiner Thesen bewiesen. Aber das Wahrscheinliche ist noch nicht das Wirkliche … In dieser Welt ist der Gedanke mit der Wahrheit nicht identisch … Zwischen dem Gedanken und der Wirklichkeit steht immer noch das Abenteuer des Daseins.

The scientific enterprise is "ein grandioses Abenteuer des Geistes", requiring both boldness and humility, both the recognition of ultimate ignorance and the refusal despairingly to ascribe to irrationality one's failure to make sense. In comparing Einstein's search for understanding to a chess game played between the scientist and God (or Nature), Dürrenmatt says:

… er nimmt die Partie in der Überzeugung auf, dass auch jene Spielzüge Gottes, die Sinnen-Eindrücke, die den Spielregeln zu widersprechen scheinen, sich auf dem Schachbrett nachspielen lassen; und er beginnt die Partie im Vertrauen, einer fairen Auseinandersetzung entgegenzugehen.

It is assumed that God keeps the rules and any apparent breaking of them is due to "eine fehlerhafte Interpretation des göttlichen Spiels". He quotes Einstein himself: "Die Natur verbirgt ihr Geheimnis durch die Erhabenheit ihres Wesens, nicht durch List." Many years before, in Das Versprechen, he had made Dr. H. urge his interlocutor not to draw irrationalist conclusions from the story of Matthäi:

Unser Verstand erhellt die Welt nur notdürftig. In der Zwielichtzone seiner Grenze siedelt sich alles Paradoxe an. Hüten wir uns davor, diese Gespenster "an sich" zu nehmen, als ob sie ausserhalb des menschlichen Geistes angesiedelt wären.

In Dürrenmatt's works reality mocks those who presume to know her and act arrogantly on the basis of their mistaken epistemology, either with the cruel punishment experienced by Romulus, Matthäi and Möbius, or merely with ignorance. Dürrenmatt ends Das Versprechen with a coda that subtly restates a main theme. The grotesque old lady, Frau Schrott, has an unshakable view of the world. She is obsessed by the conviction of her sister's malice towards her and she keeps secret the murders committed by her mentally sub-normal husband Albert precisely to deny her sister the opportunity to gloat. This malice, she asserts, has been lifelong, but has never shown outwardly. All the sister's actions are fitted into the pattern. She had, it is true, made no comment on the marriage with Albertchen, but:

wenn ihre Schwester auch nichts dazu bemerkt habe, ja sogar zur Hochzeit nach Chur gekommen sei, geärgert habe sie sich über diese Heirat, das wisse sie bestimmt, wenn die Schwester auch wieder, um sie eben zu ärgern, nichts habe merken lassen.

Of the flowers decorating her hospital room she says: "All diese Blumen … schicke ihre Schwester nur, um sie zu ärgern." The circle is closed. Even the absence of positive evidence is regarded as corroboration. Here is a theory like Henzi's, sealed off from any danger of refutation. (Lenard apparently countered the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment with the irrefutable theory that each bit of matter carries with it its own ether.) Such theories and such minds run no risk of being proved wrong, nor of probing the world.

Dürrenmatt has frequently shown the importance of the epistemological issue. He sums up one consequence for action of Spinoza's philosophy as follows: "gut ist der Wissende, schlecht der Unwissende, böses Handeln ist falsches, gutes Handeln ist richtiges Handeln." Many of Dürrenmatt's characters presume to know, and act accordingly, pragmatically rejecting traditional moral constraints in pursuit of their visions, Möbius murdering his nurse and Romulus sacrificing his people. Romulus at least recognizes his error, but disillusionment too can have dangerous consequences. Marlok, having discovered that the knowledge of which Spinoza speaks is impossible, draws the conclusion that good action is no longer possible, leaving her a "Mitmacher", the tool of Emmenberger's evil:

das Gute und das Böse sind zu sehr ineinander verschlungen … umje wieder voneinander getrennt zu werden, um zu sagen: Dies ist wohlgetan und jenes vom Übel, dies führt zum Guten und jenes zum Schlechten. Zu spät! Wir können nicht mehr wissen, was wir tun, welche Handlung unser Gehorsam oder unsere Auflehnung nach sich zieht.

She rejects with scorn Bärlach's desire to uphold the law, failing to see that in rejecting "Gesetze" she rejects precisely those strategies that mankind has unconsciously developed for coping with chance and our ignorance of the consequences of our actions. They are of course as unjustifiable as the scientists' hypotheses; they are just as much in need of constant revision. Bärlach's banal-sounding "das Gesetz ist das Gesetz" is not as intellectually lame as first it seems. Rules prove themselves by their fruitfulness and to reject them because they are "unjustifiable" is as irrational as rejecting a theory for the same reason. Swiss society, Bärlach admits to the iconoclast Fortschig, in Der Verdacht, is pretty shabby, but it is not rational to want to destroy it: "gleich das ganze Haus abreissen ist sinnlos und nicht gescheit; denn es ist schwer, in dieser armen lädierten Welt ein neues Haus zu bauen." Neither our systems of theory nor our systems of rules can be perfected. In a world of ignorance the rational course is to accept provisionally a well tested system and to use the imagination to construct theories that mesh better with reality, and institutions that shape it to accord more nearly with our values. Dürrenmatt's early novels suggest a view of the links between science, politics and art that he has made explicit in the following words:

Ich weiss, wir frösteln, wenn wir von Institutionen hören. Wenn aber die Wissenschaft ein grandioses Abenteuer des Geistes ist, das nicht auf die Entdeckung absolut sicherer Theorien ausgeht, sondern auf die Erfindung immer besserer Theorien, die immer strengeren Prüfungen unterworfen werden können, wie Karl Popper meint, so sollten wir dieses Abenteuer auch für unsere Institutionen entdecken und es auf sie anwenden, indem wir sie imrner gerechter und vernünftiger machen, indem wir in ihnen nicht Zwangssysteme sehen, sondern Kunstwerke, die für den Menschen da sind, nicht der Mensch für sie.