Discuss the laboratory from Laputa

Laputans are the inhabitants of the flying island called Laputa. The Laputans have prostituted science by fixing on knowledge for knowledge’s sake, instead of putting intellectual theory to practical use. Where Scientists, in Swift’s send-up, would make poor rulers. Even Bacon, whose New Atlantis was the first scientific utopia, implicitly recognized this; while Bensalem’s key institution is Solomon’s House, it is not the sole governing body. One reason why Bacon thought scientists should not rule alone is that, while scientists pursue knowledge as an end in itself, politicians seek to use such knowledge as a means for other ends. The realities sought and delivered in the laboratory, in other words, are a different kind from those sought and delivered in the political arena.

The activities of the members of the Academy of Projectors, though they involve experiment, are yet related to the abstract thinking of the King. For the most part, they are based on some wrong-headed abstract conception, and are really examples of reasoning downward, taking "the High Priori Road" They are aspects, therefore, of the modern tendency to ignore "the old forms" and to rely on a spider-like spinning of thought, By blending experiment and High Priori reasoning in the Academy at Lagado, Swift is able to show scientific "projects" as yet another example of the kind of thinking which leads away from the methods of a Christian and humanist tradition. Indeed one of the projects is an exact allegorical equivalent of the process of reasoning downward to the foundations of plain experience. There is a most ingenious architect who has contrived a new method of building houses, by beginning at the roof and working downwards to the foundation, which he tries to justify by the practice of those two prudent insects-the bee and the spider. Again. the notion of ploughing the land with hogs to save the charges of ploughs. cattle. and labour results, upon experiment, in no crop and a good deal of trouble and expense.

Such projects leave an impression of uselessness, dirt, temporariness, or death. An eminent member of the Academy has been busy for thirty years converting things into their opposites. Air has been made tangible and marble has been made soft; land is sown with chaff, and woolless sheep have been reared; the hooves of a living horse are petrified. In short, the projects are conducted in an atmosphere of aimless activity, distorted values, and a perversion of things from their proper purpose. While the general effect of the  images we associate with Lilliput and Brobdingnag is of man and other animals as vigorous physical beings, the effect of Laputa and its subject Kingdom of Balnibarbi is of a deliberate giving up of the physical and the vital for the abstract, the mechanical, and the unproductive. The prevailing images in Laputa and Balnibarbi are not of real people and animals, but of ruins, mechanical constructions, men who look like allegorical figures and women who are thought of in geometrical terms. Animals are only negatively present, as in the pathetic horses and sheep of the Academy. Laputa itself is a mechanical device, because the flying island expresses not only the Laputans’ desertion of the common earth of reality but their conversion of the universe to a mechanism, and of living, to a mechanical process.

Academy of Lagado, Gulliver meets a culture completely dedicated to the sciences. Swift lampoons his era’s enlightened thinkers by directly parodying their own experiments, this time implementing a different body part. One of the academy’s most famed physicians claims to be able cure illnesses by inserting objects “eight inches up the anus.” Another hopes to “reduce human excrement to its original food.” Guided by real-life research, Swift ridicules philosophers with common sense, showing that even the world’s most brilliant minds are still capable of humbling mistakes.

 In his poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Swift moves from satirizing the sciences to poking fun at the arts. He attacks romanticized ideals of femininity by once again focusing on their bodily functions. Imitating the epic illusions used by his literary peers, Swift compares Celia’s chamber pot to Pandora’s Box and Paradise Lost. After further deconstruction of the feminine ideal, Swift’s male protagonist reaches the disturbing conclusion that his darling “Celia shits!” This crude discovery grounds both genders in reality and parodies any poem portraying women as anything other than eating, breathing, pooping characters.

 Academy of Lagado, Gulliver meets a culture completely dedicated to the sciences. Swift lampoons his era’s enlightened thinkers by directly parodying their own experiments, this time implementing a different body part. One of the academy’s most famed physicians claims to be able cure illnesses by inserting objects “eight inches up the anus.” Another hopes to “reduce human excrement to its original food.” Guided by real-life research, Swift ridicules philosophers with common sense, showing that even the world’s most brilliant minds are still capable of humbling mistakes.

While readers typically focus on Swift’s mastery of bathroom humor, his critical portrayal of accepted governmental, scientific, and artistic standards remains applicable to today’s society. Instead of using bodily fluids as a crutch, Swift strategically hides his highbrow social attack within the bladders and bowels of his characters.  From vain politicians to irrational logicians to idealized women, he humanizes the social elite and unifies the world through one of our few shared experiences – the restroom. All of the above discussion about the Laboratory from Laputa.