Foundations of the Modern World View
And so between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the West saw the emergence of a newly self-conscious and autonomous human being—curious about the world, confident in his own judgments, skeptical of orthodoxies, rebellious against authority, responsible for his own beliefs and actions, enamored of the classical past but even more committed to a greater future, proud of his humanity, conscious of his distinctness from nature, aware of his artistic powers as individual creator, assured of his intellectual capacity to comprehend and control nature, and altogether less dependent on an omnipotent God. This emergence of the modern mind, rooted in the rebellion against the medieval Church and the ancient authorities, and yet dependent upon and developing from both these matrices, took the three distinct and dialectically related forms of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. These collectively ended the cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church in Europe and established the more individualistic, skeptical, and secular spirit of the modern age. Out of that profound cultural transformation, science emerged as the West’s new faith.
For when the titanic battle of the religions failed to resolve itself, with no monolithic structure of belief any longer holding sway over civilization, science suddenly stood forth as mankind’s liberation—empirical, rational, appealing to common sense and to a concrete reality that every person could touch and weigh for himself. Verifiable facts and theories tested and discussed among equals replaced dogmatic revelation hierarchically imposed by an institutional Church. The search for truth was now conducted on a basis of international cooperation, in a spirit of disciplined curiosity, with a willingness, even eagerness, to transcend previous limits of knowledge. Offering a new possibility of epistemological certainty and objective agreement, new powers of experimental prediction, technical invention, and control of nature, science presented itself as the saving grace of the modern mind. Science ennobled that mind, showing it to be capable of directly comprehending the rational order of nature first declared by the Greeks, but on a level far transcending the achievements of the ancients and the medieval Scholastics. No traditional authority now dogmatically defined the cultural outlook, nor was such authority needed, for every individual possessed within himself the means for attaining certain knowledge—his own reason and his observation of the empirical world.
Thus science seemed to bring the Western mind to independent maturity, out of the encompassing structure of the medieval Church, beyond the classical glories of the Greeks and Romans. From the Renaissance onward, modern culture evolved and left behind the ancient and medieval world views as primitive, superstitious, childish, unscientific, and oppressive. By the end of the Scientific Revolution, the Western mind had acquired a new way of discovering knowledge and a new cosmology. Because of man’s own intellectual and physical efforts, the world itself had expanded—immensely, unprecedentedly. And the most astonishing global shift of all had now dawned on the cultural psyche: the Earth moves. The straightforward evidence of the naive senses, the theological and scientific certitude of the naive centuries, that the Sun rises and sets and that the Earth beneath one’s feet is utterly stationary at the center of the universe, was now overcome through critical reasoning, mathematical calculation, and technologically enhanced observation. Indeed, not only the Earth but man himself now moved, as never before, out of the finite, static, hierarchical Aristotelian-Christian universe and into new, unknown territories. The nature of reality had fundamentally shifted for Western man, who now perceived and inhabited a cosmos of entirely new proportions, structure, and existential meaning.
The way was now open to envision and establish a new form of society, based on self-evident principles of individual liberty and rationality. For the strategies and principles that science had shown to be so useful for discovering truth in nature were clearly relevant to the social realm as well. Just as the antiquated Ptolemaic structure of the heavens, with its complicated, cumbersome, and finally unsustainable system of epicyclic fabrications, had been replaced by the rational simplicity of the Newtonian universe, so too could the antiquated structures of society—absolute monarchical power, aristocratic privilege, clerical censorship, oppressive and arbitrary laws, inefficient economies—be replaced by new forms of government based not on supposed divine sanction and inherited traditional assumptions, but on rationally ascertainable individual rights and mutually beneficial social contracts. The application of systematic critical thought to society could not but suggest the need for reform of that society, and as modern reason brought to nature a scientific revolution, so would it bring to society a political revolution. Thus did John Locke, and the French philosophes of the Enlightenment after him, take the lessons of Newton and extend them to the human realm.
At this point the foundation and direction of the modern mind had been largely established. It is time, then, to summarize some of the major tenets of the modern world view, as we did earlier with the classical Greek and medieval Christian outlooks. Yet to do this, we must define our focus more precisely and extend our analysis forward. For the modern world view was, like its predecessors, not a stable entity but a continually evolving way of experiencing existence, and, what is especially relevant to us here, the views of Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, and the rest were essentially a Renaissance synthesis of modern and medieval: i.e., a compromise between a medieval Christian Creator God and a modern mechanistic cosmos, between the human mind as a spiritual principle and the world as objective materiality, and so forth. During the two centuries following the Cartesian-Newtonian formulation, the modern mind continued to disengage itself from its medieval matrix. The writers and scholars of the Enlightenment—Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, d’Alembert, Holbach, La Mettrie, Pope, Berkeley, Hume, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Wolff, Kant—philosophically elaborated, broadly disseminated, and culturally established the new world view. By its end, the autonomous human reason had fully displaced traditional sources of knowledge about the universe, and in turn had defined its own limits as those constituted by the boundaries and methods of empirical science. The industrial and democratic revolutions, and the rise of the West to global hegemony, brought forth the concrete technological, economic, social, and political concomitants of that world view, which was thus further affirmed and elevated in its cultural sovereignty. And in modern science’s culminating triumph over traditional religion, Darwin’s theory of evolution brought the origin of nature’s species and man himself within the compass of natural science and the modern outlook. At this juncture, science’s capacity to comprehend the world had apparently achieved insuperable dimensions, and the modern world view could assert its mature character.
The following synopsis of the modern outlook thus reflects not only its earlier Cartesian-Newtonian formulation, but also its later form as the modern mind more fully realized itself in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For as the Cartesian-Newtonian framework was drawn out to its logical conclusion, the implications of the new sensibility and the new conceptions that had been initiated in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution were gradually made explicit. We may describe as the specifically “modern” world view that which was most sharply distinguished from its antecedents, mindful that in reality the latter (e.g., the Judaeo-Christian perspective) continued to play a major role in the culture’s understanding, if often in a latent manner, and that a particular individual’s outlook in the modern era could occupy any position in a wide spectrum ranging from a minimally affected childlike religious faith to an uncompromisingly tough-minded secular skepticism.
(1) In contrast to the medieval Christian cosmos, which was not only created but continuously and directly governed by a personal and actively omnipotent God, the modern universe was an impersonal phenomenon, governed by regular natural laws, and understandable in exclusively physical and mathematical terms. God was now distantly removed from the physical universe, as creator
and architect, and was now less a God of love, miracle, redemption, or historical intervention than a supreme intelligence and first cause, who established the material universe and its immutable laws and then withdrew from further direct activity. While the medieval cosmos was continuously contingent upon God, the modern cosmos stood more on its own, with its own greater ontological reality, and with a diminution of any divine reality either transcendent or immanent. Eventually that residual divine reality, unsupported by scientific investigation of the visible world, disappeared altogether. The order found in the natural world, initially ascribed to and guaranteed by the will of God, was eventually understood to be the result of innate mechanical regularities generated by nature without higher purpose. And while in the medieval Christian view, the human mind could not comprehend the universe’s order, which was ultimately supernatural, without the aid of divine revelation, in the modern view, the human mind was capable by its own rational faculties of comprehending the order of the universe, and that order was entirely natural.
(2) The Christian dualistic stress on the supremacy of the spiritual and transcendent over the material and concrete was now largely inverted, with the physical world becoming the predominant focus for human activity. An enthusiastic embrace of this world and this life as the stage for a full human drama now replaced the traditional religious dismissal of mundane existence as an unfortunate and temporary trial in preparation for eternal life. Human aspiration was now increasingly centered on secular fulfillment. The Christian dualism between spirit and matter, God and world, was gradually transformed into the modern dualism of mind and matter, man and cosmos: a subjective and personal human consciousness versus an objective and impersonal material world.
(3) Science replaced religion as preeminent intellectual authority, as definer, judge, and guardian of the cultural world view. Human reason and empirical observation replaced theological doctrine and scriptural revelation as the principal means for comprehending the universe. The domains of religion and metaphysics became gradually compartmentalized, regarded as personal, subjective, speculative, and fundamentally distinct from public objective knowledge of the empirical world. Faith and reason were now definitively severed. Conceptions involving a transcendent reality were increasingly regarded as beyond the competence of human knowledge; as useful palliatives for man’s emotional nature; as aesthetically satisfying imaginative creations; as potentially valuable heuristic assumptions; as necessary bulwarks for morality or social cohesion; as political-economic propaganda; as psychologically motivated projections; as life-impoverishing illusions; as superstitious, irrelevant, or meaningless. In lieu of religious or metaphysical overviews, the two bases of modern epistemology, rationalism and empiricism, eventually produced their apparent metaphysical entailments: While modern rationalism suggested and eventually affirmed and based itself upon the conception of man as the highest or ultimate intelligence, modern empiricism did the same for the conception of the material world as the essential or only reality—i.e., secular humanism and scientific materialism, respectively.
(4) In comparison with the classical Greek outlook, the modern universe possessed an intrinsic order, yet not one emanating from a cosmic intelligence in which the human mind could directly participate, but rather an order empirically derived from nature’s material patterning by means of the human mind’s own resources. Nor was this an order simultaneously and inherently shared by both nature and the human mind, as the Greeks had understood. The modern world order was not a transcendent and pervasive unitary order informing both inner mind and outer world, in which recognition of the one necessarily signified knowledge of the other. Rather, the two realms, subjective mind and objective world, were now fundamentally distinct and operated on different principles. Whatever order was perceived was now simply the objective recognition of nature’s innate regularities (or, after Kant, a phenomenal order constituted by the mind’s own categories). The human mind was conceived of as separate from and superior to the rest of nature.4 Nature’s order was exclusively unconscious and mechanical. The universe itself was not endowed with conscious intelligence or purpose; only man possessed such qualities. The rationally empowered capacity to manipulate impersonal forces and material objects in nature became the paradigm of the human relationship to the world.
(5) In contrast to the Greeks’ implicit emphasis on an integrated multiplicity of cognitive modes, the order of the modern cosmos was now comprehensible in principle by man’s rational and empirical faculties alone, while other aspects of human nature—emotional, aesthetic, ethical, volitional, relational, imaginative, epiphanic—were generally regarded as irrelevant or distortional for an objective understanding of the world. Knowledge of the universe was now primarily a matter for sober impersonal scientific investigation, and when successful resulted not so much in an experience of spiritual liberation (as in Pythagoreanism and Platonism) but in intellectual mastery and material improvement.
(6) While the cosmology of the classical era was geocentric, finite, and hierarchical, with the surrounding heavens the locus of transcendent archetypal forces that defined and influenced human existence according to the celestial movements, and while the medieval cosmology maintained this same general structure, reinterpreted according to Christian symbolism, the modern cosmology posited a planetary Earth in a neutral infinite space, with a complete elimination of the traditional celestial-terrestrial dichotomy. The heavenly bodies were now moved by the same natural and mechanical forces and composed of the same material substances as those found on the Earth. With the fall of the geocentric cosmos and the rise of the mechanistic paradigm, astronomy was finally severed from astrology. In contrast to both the ancient and the medieval world views, the celestial bodies of the modern universe possessed no numinous or symbolic significance; they did not exist for man, to light his way or give meaning to his life. They were straightforwardly material entities whose character and motions were entirely the product of mechanistic principles having no special relation either to human existence per se or to any divine reality. All specifically human or personal qualities formerly attributed to the outer physical world were now recognized as naive anthropomorphic projections and deleted from the objective scientific perception. All divine attributes were similarly recognized as the effect of primitive superstition and wishful thinking, and were removed from serious scientific discourse. The universe was impersonal, not personal; nature’s laws were natural, not supernatural. The physical world possessed no intrinsic deeper meaning. It was opaquely material, not the visible expression of spiritual realities.
(7) With the integration of the theory of evolution and its multitude of consequences in other fields, the nature and origin of man and the dynamics of nature’s transformations were now understood to be exclusively attributable to natural causes and empirically observable processes. What Newton had accomplished for the physical cosmos, Darwin, building on intervening advances in geology and biology (and later aided by Mendel’s work in genetics), accomplished for organic nature.5 While the Newtonian theory had established the new structure and extent of the universe’s spatial dimension, the Darwinian theory established the new structure and extent of nature’s temporal dimension—both its great duration and its being the stage for qualitative transformations in nature. While with Newton planetary motion was understood to be sustained by inertia and defined by gravity, with Darwin biological evolution was seen as sustained by random variation and defined by natural selection. As the Earth had been removed from the center of creation to become another planet, so now was man removed from the center of creation to become another animal.
Darwinian evolution presented a continuation, a seemingly final vindication, of the intellectual impulse established in the Scientific Revolution, yet it also entailed a significant break from that revolution’s classical paradigm. For evolutionary theory provoked a fundamental shift away from the regular, orderly, predictable harmony of the Cartesian-Newtonian world in recogni
tion of nature’s ceaseless and indeterminate change, struggle, and development. In doing so, Darwinism both furthered the Scientific Revolution’s secularizing consequences and vitiated that revolution’s compromise with the traditional Judaeo-Christian perspective. For the scientific discovery of the mutability of species controverted the biblical account of a static creation in which man had been deliberately placed at its sacred culmination and center. It was now less certain that man came from God than that he came from lower forms of primates. The human mind was not a divine endowment but a biological tool. The structure and movement of nature was the result not of God’s benevolent design and purpose, but of an amoral, random, and brutal struggle for survival in which success went not to the virtuous but to the fit. Nature itself, not God or a transcendent Intellect, was now the origin of nature’s permutations. Natural selection and chance, not Aristotle’s teleological forms or the Bible’s purposeful Creation, governed the processes of life. The early modern concept of an impersonal deistic Creator who had initiated and then left to itself a fully formed and eternally ordered world—the last cosmological compromise between Judaeo-Christian revelation and modern science—now receded in the face of an evolutionary theory that provided a dynamic naturalistic explanation for the origin of species and all other natural phenomena. Humans, animals, plants, organisms, rocks and mountains, planets and stars, galaxies, the entire universe could now be understood as the evolutionary outcome of entirely natural processes.
In these circumstances, the belief that the universe was purposefully designed and regulated by divine intelligence, a belief foundational to both the classical Greek and the Christian world views, appeared increasingly questionable. The Christian doctrine of Christ’s divine intervention in human history—the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Second Adam, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Second Coming—seemed implausible in the context of an otherwise straightforward survival-oriented Darwinian evolution in a vast mechanistic Newtonian cosmos. Equally implausible was the existence of a timeless metaphysical realm of transcendent Platonic Ideas. Virtually everything in the empirical world appeared explicable without resort to a divine reality. The modern universe was now an entirely secular phenomenon. Moreover, it was a secular phenomenon that was still changing and creating itself—not a divinely constructed finality with eternal and static structure, but an unfolding process with no absolute goal, and with no absolute foundation other than matter and its permutations. With nature the sole source of evolutionary direction, and with man the only rational conscious being in nature, the human future lay emphatically in man’s hands.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 37