Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  (8) Finally, in contrast with the medieval Christian world view, modern man’s independence—intellectual, psychological, spiritual—was radically affirmed, with increasing depreciation of any religious belief or institutional structure that would inhibit man’s natural right and potential for existential autonomy and individual self-expression. While the purpose of knowledge for the medieval Christian was to better obey God’s will, its purpose for modern man was to better align nature to man’s will. The Christian doctrine of spiritual redemption as based on the historical manifestation of Christ and his future apocalyptic Second Coming was first reconceived as coinciding with the progressive advance of human civilization under divine providence, conquering evil through man’s God-given reason, and then was gradually extinguished altogether in light of the belief that man’s natural reason and scientific achievements would progressively realize a secular Utopian era marked by peace, rational wisdom, material prosperity, and human dominion over nature. The Christian sense of Original Sin, the Fall, and collective human guilt now receded in favor of an optimistic affirmation of human self-development and the eventual triumph of rationality and science over human ignorance, suffering, and social evils.

  While the classical Greek world view had emphasized the goal of human intellectual and spiritual activity as the essential unification (or reunification) of man with the cosmos and its divine intelligence, and while the Christian goal was to reunite man and the world with God, the modern goal was to create the greatest possible freedom for man—from nature; from oppressive political, social, or economic structures; from restrictive metaphysical or religious beliefs; from the Church; from the Judaeo-Christian God; from the static and finite Aristotelian-Christian cosmos; from medieval Scholasticism; from the ancient Greek authorities; from all primitive conceptions of the world. Leaving behind tradition generally for the power of the autonomous human intellect, modern man set out on his own, determined to discover the working principles of his new universe, to explore and further expand its new dimensions, and to realize his secular fulfillment.

  The above description is necessarily only a useful simplification, for other important intellectual tendencies existed alongside of, and often ran counter to, the dominant character of the modern mind that was forged during the Enlightenment. It will be the task of later chapters to draw a fuller, more complex, and more paradoxical portrait of the modern sensibility. But first we must examine more precisely the extraordinary dialectic that took place as the dominant modern world view just described formed itself out of its major predecessors, the classical and the Christian.

  Ancients and Moderns

  Classical Greek thought had provided Renaissance Europe with most of the theoretical equipment it required to produce the Scientific Revolution: the Greeks’ initial intuition of a rational order in the cosmos, Pythagorean mathematics, the Platonically defined problem of the planets, Euclidean geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy, alternative ancient cosmological theories with a moving Earth, the Neoplatonic exaltation of the Sun, the atomists’ mechanistic materialism, Hermetic esotericism, and the underlying foundation of Aristotelian and Presocratic empiricism, naturalism, and rationalism. Yet the character and direction of the modern mind were such that the latter increasingly disavowed the ancients as scientific or philosophical authorities and depreciated their world view as primitive and unworthy of serious consideration. The intellectual dynamics provoking this discontinuity were complex and often contradictory.

  One of the most productive motives impelling sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European scientists to engage in detailed observation and measurement of natural phenomena derived from the heated controversies between orthodox Scholastic Aristotelian physics and the heterodox revival of Pythagorean-Platonic mathematical mysticism. It is no small irony that Aristotle, the greatest naturalist and empirical scientist of antiquity, whose work had served as the sustaining impulse of Western science for two millennia, was jettisoned by the new science under the impetus of a romantic Renaissance Platonism—from Plato, the speculative idealist who most systematically wished to leave the world of the senses. But with Aristotle’s transformation by the contemporary universities into a stultified dogmatist, the Platonism of the Humanists had succeeded in opening the scientific imagination to a fresh sense of intellectual adventure. At a deeper level, however, Aristotle’s empiricist this-worldly direction was extended and fulfilled by the Scientific Revolution ad extremum; and although Aristotle himself was overthrown in that revolution, it could be said that this was no more than the Oedipal rebellion by the modern science of which he was the ancient father.

  Yet just as decisively was Plato overthrown. Indeed, if Aristotle was deposed in effigy while maintained in spirit, Plato was vindicated in theory but altogether negated in spirit. The Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton had depended upon and been inspired by a series of strategies and assumptions derived directly from Plato, his Pythagorean predecessors, and his Neoplatonic successors: the search for perfect timeless mathematical forms that underlay the phenomenal world, the a priori belief that planetary movements conformed to continuous and regular geometrical figures, the instruction to avoid being misled by the apparent chaos of the empirical heavens, a confidence in the beauty and simple elegance of the true solution to the problem of the planets, the exaltation of the Sun as image of the creative Godhead, the proposals of nongeocentric cosmologies, the belief that the universe was permeated with divine reason and that God’s glory was especially revealed in the heavens. Euclid, whose geometry formed a basis both for Descartes’s rationalist philosophy and the entire Copernican-Newtonian paradigm, had been a Platonist whose work was fully constructed on Platonic principles. Modern scientific method itself, as developed by Kepler and Galileo, was founded on the Pythagorean faith that the language of the physical world was one of number, which provided a rationale for the conviction that the empirical observation of nature and the testing of hypotheses should be systematically focused through quantitative measurement. Moreover, all modern science implicitly based itself upon Plato’s fundamental hierarchy of reality, in which a diverse and ever-changing material nature was viewed as being ultimately obedient to certain unifying laws and principles that transcend the phenomena they govern. Above all, modern science was the inheritor of the basic Platonic belief in the rational intelligibility of the world order, and in the essential nobility of the human quest to discover that order. But those Platonic assumptions and strategies eventually led to the creation of a paradigm whose thoroughgoing naturalism left little room for the mystical tenor of Platonic metaphysics. The numinosity of the mathematical patterns celebrated by the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition now disappeared, regarded in retrospect as an empirically unverifiable and superfluous appendage to the straightforward scientific understanding of the natural world.

  It is true that the Pythagorean-Platonic claim for the explanatory power of mathematics was being constantly vindicated by natural science, and that this apparent anomaly—why should mathematics work so consistently and elegantly in the realm of brute material phenomena?—caused some puzzlement among thoughtful philosophers of science. But for most practicing scientists after Newton, such mathematical consistencies in nature were considered to represent a certain mechanical tendency toward regular patterning, with no deeper meaning per se. They were seldom seen as revelatory Forms by which the mind of man was comprehending the mind of God. Mathematical patterning was simply “in the nature of things,” or in the nature of the human mind, and was not interpreted in a Platonic light as giving evidence of an eternal changeless world of pure spirit. The laws of nature, although perhaps timeless, now stood on their own on a material foundation, dissociated from any divine cause.

  Thus with the somewhat perplexing exception of mathematics, the Platonic stream of philosophy generally ceased to be viewed as a viable form of thought in the modern context, and science’s quantitative character was left with an entirely secular meaning.
In the face of the indisputable success of mechanistic natural science and the ascendance of positivistic empiricism and nominalism in philosophy, the idealist claims of Platonic metaphysics—the eternal Ideas, the transcendent reality wherein resided true being and meaning, the divine nature of the heavens, the spiritual government of the world, the religious meaning of science—were now dismissed as elaborately sophisticated products of the primitive imagination. Paradoxically, the Platonic philosophy had served as the sine qua non for a world view that seemed directly to controvert the Platonic assumptions. Thus “the irony of fate built the mechanical philosophy of the eighteenth century and the materialistic philosophy of the nineteenth out of the mystical mathematical theory of the seventeenth.”6

  A further irony lay in the modern defeat of the classical giants—Aristotle and Plato—at the hands of the ancient minority traditions. In the course of the later classical and medieval periods, the mechanistic and materialistic atomism of Leucippus and Democritus; the heterodox (nongeocentric or nongeostatic) cosmologies of Philolaus, Heraclides, and Aristarchus; the radical Skepticism of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus—all these had been overshadowed, almost trampled underfoot and extinguished, by the culturally more powerful philosophical triumvirate of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and by the dominant Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology.7 But the minority views’ retrieval by the Humanists during the Renaissance eventually served to reverse that hierarchy in the world of science, with many of their tenets enjoying an unexpected validation in the theoretical conclusions and philosophical tenor of the Scientific Revolution and its aftermath. A similar restoration would come to the Sophists, whose secular humanism and relativistic skepticism found renewed favor in the philosophical climate of the Enlightenment and subsequent modern thought.

  But the isolated and seemingly fortuitous insights of a few speculative theorists were not sufficient to offset modern science’s critical evaluation of the ancient mind. Nor was the utility of various premises from the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions enough to counterbalance what were seen as their misguided and insufficiently empirical foundations. The retrospective awe felt by medieval and Renaissance thinkers toward the genius and achievements of the classical golden age luminaries no longer seemed appropriate when on every side modern man was proving his practical and intellectual superiority. Thus, having extracted whatever was useful for its present needs, the modern mind reconceived classical culture in terms respectful of its literary and humanistic accomplishments, while generally dismissing the ancients’ cosmology, epistemology, and metaphysics as naive and scientifically erroneous.

  A more sweeping dismissal was given to the esoteric elements of the ancient tradition—astrology, alchemy, Hermeticism—that had also been instrumental in the genesis of the Scientific Revolution. The ancient birth of astronomy, and of science itself, had been inextricably tied to the primitive astrological understanding of the heavens as a superior realm of divine significance, with the planetary movements carefully observed because of their symbolic import for human affairs. In the ensuing centuries, astrology’s ties to astronomy had been essential for the latter’s technical progress, for it was the astrological presuppositions that gave astronomy its social and psychological relevance, as well as its political and military utility in matters of state. Astrological predictions required the most accurate possible astronomical data, so that astrology supplied the astronomical profession with its most compelling motive for attempting to solve the problem of the planets. It was no accident that prior to the Scientific Revolution the science of astronomy enjoyed its most rapid development precisely during those periods—the Hellenistic era, the high Middle Ages, and the Renaissance—when astrology was most widely accepted.

  Nor did the major protagonists of the Scientific Revolution move to sever that ancient bond. Copernicus made no distinction in the De Revolutionibus between astronomy and astrology, referring to them conjointly as “the head of all the liberal arts.” Kepler confessed that his astronomical research was inspired by his search for the celestial “music of the spheres.” Although outspokenly critical of the lack of rigor in contemporary astrology, Kepler was his era’s foremost astrological theoretician, and both he and Brahe served as royal astrologers to the Holy Roman Emperor. Even Galileo, like most Renaissance astronomers, routinely calculated astrological birth charts, including one for his patron the Duke of Tuscany in 1609, the year of his telescopic discoveries. Newton reported that it was his own early interest in astrology that stimulated his epochal researches in mathematics, and he later studied alchemy at considerable length. It is sometimes difficult now to determine the actual extent of these pioneers’ commitment to astrology or alchemy, but the modern historian of science looks in vain for a clear demarcation in their vision between the scientific and the esoteric.

  For a peculiar collaboration between science and esoteric tradition was in fact the norm of the Renaissance, and played an indispensable role in the birth of modern science: Besides the Neoplatonic and Pythagorean mathematical mysticism and Sun exaltation that ran through all the major Copernican astronomers, one finds Roger Bacon, the pioneer of experimental science whose work was saturated with alchemical and astrological principles; Giordano Bruno, the polymath esotericist who championed an infinite Copernican cosmos; Paracelsus, the alchemist who laid early foundations of modern chemistry and medicine; William Gilbert, whose theory of the Earth’s magnetism rested on his proof that the world-soul was embodied in that magnet; William Harvey, who believed his discovery of the circulation of the blood revealed the human body to be a microcosmic reflection of the Earth’s circulatory systems and the cosmos’s planetary motions; Descartes’s affiliation with mystical Rosicrucianism; Newton’s affiliation with the Cambridge Platonists, and his belief that he worked within an ancient tradition of secret wisdom dating back to Pythagoras and beyond; and, indeed, the law of universal gravitation itself, modeled on the sympathies of Hermetic philosophy. The modernity of the Scientific Revolution was in many ways ambiguous.

  But the new universe that emerged from the Scientific Revolution was not so ambiguous, and appeared to leave little room for the reality of astrological or other explicitly esoteric principles. While the original revolutionaries themselves called no attention to the problems the new paradigm posed for astrology, those contradictions soon became apparent for others. For a planetary Earth seemed to undermine the very foundation of astrological thinking, since the latter assumed the Earth was the absolute central focus of planetary influences. It was difficult to see how without the privileged position of being the fixed universal center, the Earth could continue to deserve such distinctive cosmic attention. The entire traditional cosmography delineated from Aristotle through Dante was shattered as the moving Earth now trespassed into celestial realms previously defined as the exclusive domain of specific planetary powers. After Galileo and Newton, the celestial-terrestrial division could no longer be maintained, and without that primordial dichotomy, the metaphysical and psychological premises that had helped support the astrological belief system began to collapse. The planets were now known to be prosaically material objects moved by inertia and gravity, not archetypal symbols moved by a cosmic intelligence. There had been relatively few thinkers in the Renaissance who were not convinced of astrology’s essential validity, but a generation after Newton there were few who considered it worth examining. Increasingly marginalized, astrology went underground, surviving only among small groups of esotericists and the uncritical masses.8 After being the classical “queen of sciences” and the guide of emperors and kings for the better part of two millennia, astrology was no longer credible.

  With the exception of the Romantics, the modern mind also gradually outgrew the Renaissance’s fascination with ancient myth as an autonomous dimension of existence. That the gods were nothing more than colorful figments of pagan fantasy needed little argument from the Enlightenment on. Just as the Platonic Forms died out in philosophy, their place taken b
y objective empirical qualities, subjective concepts, cognitive categories, or linguistic “family resemblances,” so did the ancient gods assume the role of literary characters, artistic images, useful metaphors without any claim to ontological reality.

  For modern science had cleansed the universe of all those human and spiritual properties previously projected upon it. The world was now neutral, opaque, and material, and therefore no dialogue with nature was possible—whether through magic, mysticism, or divinely certified authority. Only the impersonal employment of man’s critical and empirically based rational intellect could attain an objective understanding of nature. Although in fact an astonishing variety of epistemological sources had converged to make possible the Scientific Revolution—the immense imaginative (and antiempirical) leap to the conception of a planetary Earth,9 Pythagorean and Neoplatonic aesthetic and mystical beliefs, Descartes’s revelatory dream and vision of a new universal science and his own mission to forge it, Newton’s Hermetically inspired concept of gravitational attraction, all the serendipitous recoveries of the ancient manuscripts (Lucretius, Archimedes, Sextus Empiricus, the Neoplatonists), the fundamentally metaphorical character of the various scientific theories and explanations—these were all later viewed as significant only in the context of scientific discovery. In the context of scientific justification, of ascertaining the truth value of any hypothesis, only empirical evidence and rational analysis could be considered legitimate epistemological bases, and in the wake of the Scientific Revolution these modes dominated the scientific enterprise. The too flexible, syncretistic, and mystical epistemologies of the classical period, and their elaborate metaphysical consequences, were now repudiated.