The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  Although Bacon's identification of knowledge with industrial utility and his grappling with the concept of experiment based on technology certainly underlie much of our current scientific thought, the implications drawn from the Cartesian corpus exercised a staggering impact on the subsequent history of Western consciousness and (despite the differences with Bacon) served to confirm the technological paradigm -- indeed, even helped to launch it on its way. Man's activity as a thinking being -- and that is his essence, according to Descartes -- is purely mechanical. The mind is in possession of a certain method. It confronts the world as a separate object. It applies this method to the object, again and again and again, and eventually it will know all there is to know. The method, furthermore, is also mechanical. The problem is broken down into its components, and the simple act of cognition (the direct perception) has the same relationship to the knowledge of the whole problem that, let us say, an inch has to a foot: one measures (perceives) a number of times, and then sums the results. Subdivide, measure, combine; subdivide, measure, combine.

  This method may properly be called "atomistic," in the sense that knowing consists of subdividing a thing into its smallest components. The essence of atomism, whether material or philosophical, is that a thing consists of the sum of its parts, no more and no less. And Descartes' greatest legacy was surely the mechanical philosophy, which followed directly from this method. In the "Principles of Philosophy" (1644) he showed that the logical linking of clear and distinct ideas led to the notion that the universe was a vast machine, wound up by God to tick forever, and consisting of two basic entities: matter and motion. Spirit, in the form of God, hovers on the outside of this billlard-ball universe, but plays no direct part in it. All nonmaterial phenomena ultimately have a material basis. The action of magnets, attracting each other over a distance, may seem to be nonmaterial, says Descartes, but the application of the method can and will ultimately uncover a particulate basis for their behavior. What Descartes does, really, is provide Bacon's technological paradigm with strong philosophical teeth. The mechanical philosophy, the use of mathematics, and the formal application of his four-step method enable the manipulation of the environment to take place with some sort of logical regularity.

  The identification of human existence with pure ratiocination, the idea that man can know all there is to know by way of his reason, included for Descartes the assumption that mind and body, subject and object, were radically disparate entities. Thinking, it would seem, separates me from the world I confront. I perceive my body and its functions, but "I" am not my body. I can learn about the (mechanical) behavior of my body by applying the Cartesian method -- and Descartes does this in his treatise "On Man" (1662) -- but it always remains the object of my perception. Thus Descartes depicted the operation of the human body by means of analogy to a water fountain, with mechanical reflex action being the model of most, if not all, human behavior. The mind, res cogitans ("thinking substance"), is in a totally different category from the body, res extensa ("extended substance"), but they do have a mechanical interaction that we can diagram as in Figure 3, below. If the hand touches a flame, the fire particles attack the finger, pulling a thread in the tubular nerve which releases the "animal spirits" (conceived as mechanical corpuscles) in the brain. These then run down the tube and jerk the muscles in the hand.11

  There is, it seems to me, an uncanny similarity between this diagram and that of Laing's "false-self system" depicted in the Introduction (see Figure 2). Schizophrenics typically regard their bodies as "other," "not-me." In Descartes' diagram, too, brain (inner self) is the detached observer of the parts of the body; the interaction is mechanical, as though one saw oneself behaving as a robot -- a perception that is easily extended to the rest of the world. To Descartes, this mind-body split was true of all perception and behavior, such that in the act of thinking one perceived oneself as a separate entity "in here" confronting things "out-there." This schizoid duality lies at the heart of the Cartesian paradigm.

  Descartes' emphasis on clear and distinct ideas, and his basing of knowledge on geometry, also served to reaffirm, if not actually canonize, the Aristotelian principle of noncontradiction. According to this principle, a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. When I strike the letter "A" on my typewriter, I get an "A" on the paper (assuming the machine is working properly), not a "B." The cup of coffee sitting to the right of me could be put on a scale and found to have a weight of, say, 5.24 ounces, and this fact means that the object does not weigh ten pounds or two grams. Since the Cartesian paradigm recognizes no self-contradictions in logic, and since logic (or geometry), according to Descartes, is the way nature behaves and is known to us, the paradigm allows for no self-contradictions in nature.

  The problems with Descartes' view are perhaps obvious, but for now, it will suffice to note that real life operates dialectically, not critically.12 We love and hate the same thing simultaneously, we fear what we most need, we recognize ambivalence as a norm rather than an aberration. Descartes' devotion to critical reason led him to identify dreams, which are profoundly dialectical statements, as the model of unreliable knowledge. Dreams, he tells us in the "Meditations on First Philosophy," are not clear and distinct, but invariably obscure and confused. They are filled with frequent self-contradictions, and possess (from the viewpoint of critical reason) neither internal nor external coherence. For example, I might dream that a certain person I know is my father, or even that I am my father, and that I am arguing with him. But this dream is (from a Cartesian point of view) internally incoherent, because I am simply not my father, nor can he be himself and someone else as well; and it is externally incoherent, because upon waking, no matter how real it all seems for a moment, I soon realize that my father is three thousand miles away, and that the supposed confrontation never took place. For Descartes, dreams are not material in nature, cannot be measured, and are not clear, and distinct. Given Descartes' criteria, then, they contain no reliable information.

  In summation, rationalism and empiricism, the twin poles of knowledge so strongly represented in Descartes and Bacon respectively, can be regarded as complementary rather than irrevocably conflicting. Descartes, for example, was hardly opposed to experiment when it served to adjudicate between rival hypotheses -- a role it retains to this day. And as I have argued, his atomistic approach, and his emphasis on material reality and its measurement easily lent themselves to the sort of knowledge and economic power that Bacon endsaged as possible for England and Western Europe. Still, this synthesis of reason and empiricism lacked a concrete embodiment, a clear demonstration of how the new methodology might work in practice; the scientific work of Galileo and Newton provided precisely such a demonstration. These men were concerned not merely with the question of methodological exposition (though each certainly made his own contribution to that subject), but sought to illustrate exactly how the new methodology could analyze the simplest events: the stone falling to earth, the ray of light passing through a prism. Through such specific examples the dreams of Bacon and Descartes were translated into a working reality.

  Galileo, in his painstaking studies of motion carried out in the twenty years preceding the publication of the "New Organon, had already made explicit what Bacon only implied as an artificial construct in his generalizations about the experimental method.13 Frictionless planes, massless pulleys, free-fall with zero air resistance -- all of these "ideal types" that form the basic problem sets in freshman physics are the legacy of that Italian genius, Galileo Galilei. Galileo is popularly remembered for an experiment he never performed -- dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- but in fact he conducted a far more ingenious experiment on falling objects -- an experiment that exemplifies many of the major themes of modern scientific inquiry. The belief that large or dense objects should strike the ground faster than light ones follows as a direct consequence of Aristotle's teleological physics, and was widely held throughout the Middle Ages. If things fall to t
he ground because they seek their "natural place," the earth's center, we can see why they would accelerate as they approach it. They are excited, they are coming home, and like all of us they speed up as they approach the last leg of the journey. Heavy objects drop a given distance in a shorter time than light ones because there is more matter to become excited, and thus they attain a higher speed and strike the ground first. Galileo's argument, that a very large object and a very small one would make the drop in the same time interval, was based on an assumption that could neither be proven nor falsified: that falling objects are inanimate and thus have neither goals nor purposes. In Galileo's scheme of things, there is no "natural place" anywhere in the universe. There is but matter and motion, and we can but observe and measure it. The proper subject for the investigation of nature, in other words, is not why an object falls -- there is no why -- but how; in this case, how much distance in how much time.

  Although Galileo's assumptions may seem obvious enough to us, we must remember how radically they violated not only the common-sense assumptions of the sixteenth century, but common-sense observations in general. If I look around, and see that I am rooted to the ground, and that objects released in midair fall to the floor, isn't it perfectly reasonable to regard "down" as their natural, that is to say inherent, motion? In his studies of childhood cognition, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget discovered that until about age seven at the latest, children are Aristotelians.14 When asked why objects fell to the floor, Piaget's subjects replied, "because that is where they belong" (or some variation of this idea). Perhaps most adults are emotional Aristotelians as well. Aristotle's proposition that there is no motion without a mover, for example, seems instinctively correct; and most adults, when asked to react immediately to the notion, will affirm it. Galileo refuted the proposition by rolling a ball down two inclined planes, juxtaposed as in Figure 4:

  The ball rolls down B and up A, but not to quite the same height from which it began. Then it rolls back down A and up B, again losing height; back and forth, back and forth, until the ball finally settles in the "valley" and comes to rest. If we polish the planes, making them smoother and smoother, the ball stays in motion for a longer and longer period of time. In the limiting case, where friction = 0, the motion would go on forever: hence, motion without a mover. But there is one problem with Galileo's argument: there is no limiting case. There are no frictionless planes. The law of inertia may state that a body continues in motion or in a state of rest unless acted upon by an outside force, but in fact, in the case of motion, there is always an outside force, if nothing more than the friction between the object and the surface over which it moves.15

  The experiment Galileo designed to measure distance against time was a masterpiece of scientific abstraction. To drop weights from the Leaning Tower, Galileo realized, was absolutely useless. Simon Stevin, the Dutch physicist, had tried a free-fall experiment in 1586 only to learn that the speed was too fast for measurement. Thus, said Galileo, I shall "dilute" gravity by rolling a ball down an inclined plane, made as smooth as possible to reduce friction. If we were to make the slope steeper by increasing the angle Alpha, as in Figure 5, we would reach the free-fall situation that we seek to explore at the limiting case, in which Alpha = 90 degrees. Hence let us take a smaller angle, say Alpha = 10 degrees, and let it serve as an approximation. Galileo first used his pulse as a timer, and later a bucket of water with a hole in it which permitted the water to drip at regular intervals. By running a series of trials, he finally came up with a numerical relationship, that distance is proportional to the square of the time. In other words, if an object -- any object, light or heavy -- falls a unit distance in one second, then it falls a distance of four times that in two seconds, nine times that in three seconds, and so on. In modern terminology, s = kt^2, where s is distance, t time, and k a constant.

  Both of these inclined plane experiments illustrate the highly ingenious combination of rationalism and empiricism which was Galileo's trademark. Consult the data, but do not allow them to confuse you. Separate yourself from nature so you can, as Descartes would later urge, break it into the simplest parts and extract the essence -- matter, motion, measurement. In general terms, Galileo's was not an altogether new contribution to human history, as we shall see in Chapter 3; but it did represent the final stage in the development of nonparticipating consciousness, that state of mind in which one knows phenomena precisely in the act of distancing oneself from them. The notion that nature is alive is clearly a stumbling block to this mode of understanding. For when we regard material objects as extensions of ourselves (alive, endowed with purpose) and allow ourselves to be distracted by the sensuous details of nature, we are powerless to control nature, and thus, from Galileo's point of view, can never really know it. The new science enjoins us to step outside of nature, to reify it, reduce it to measurable Cartesian units; only then can we have definitive knowledge of it. As a result -- and Galileo was not interested in ballistics and materials science for nothing -- we shall supposedly be able to manipulate it to our advantage.

  Clearly, the identification of truth with utility was closely allied to the Galilean program of nonparticipating consciousness and the shift from "why" to "how." Unlike Bacon, Galileo did not make this identification explicit, but once natural processes are stripped of immanent purpose, there is really nothing left in objects but their value for something, or someone, else. Max Weber called this attitude of mind 'zweckrational,' that is, purposively rational, or instrumentally rational. Embedded within the scientific program is the concept of manipulation as the very touchstone of truth. To know something is to control it, a mode of cognition that led Oskar Kokoschka to observe that by the twentieth century, reason had been reduced to mere function.16 This identification, in effect, renders all things meaningless, except insofar as they are profitable or expedient; and it lies at the heart of the "fact-value distinction," briefly discussed in the Introduction. The medieval Thomistic (Christian-Aristotelian) synthesis, that saw the good and the true as identical, was, in the first few decades of the seventeenth century, irrevocably dismantled.

  Of course, Galileo did not regard his method as merely useful, or heuristically valuable, but uniquely true, and it was this epistemological stance that created havoc with the church. For Galileo, science was not a tool, but the one path to truth. He tried to keep its claims separate from those of religion, but failed: the church's historical commitment to Aristotelianism proved to be too great. In this conflict Galileo, as a good Catholic, was understandably worried that the Church, by insisting on its infallibility, would inevitably deal itself a serious blow. Galileo's life, in fact, is the story of the prolonged struggle, and failure, to win the church over to the cause of science; and in his play "Galileo," Bertolt Brecht makes this theme of the irresistibility of the scientific method central to the story. He has Galileo wander through the drama carrying a pebble, which he occasionally drops to illustrate the power of sensory evidence. "If anybody were to drop a stone," he asks his friend Sagredo, "and tell [people] that it didn't fall, do you think they would keep quiet? The evidence of your own eyes is a very seductive thing. Sooner or later everybody must succumb to it." And Sagredo's reply? "Galileo, I am helpless when you talk."17 The logic of science had a historical logic as well. In time all alternative methodologies -- animism, Aristotelianism, or argument by papal fiat -- crumbled before the seductiveness of free rational inquiry.

  The lives of Newton and Galileo stretch across the whole of the seventeenth century, for the former was born in the same year that the latter died, 1642, and together they embrace a revolution in human consciousness. By the time of Newton's death in 1727, the educated European had a conception of the cosmos, and of the nature of "right thinking," which was entirely different from that of his counterpart of a century before. He now regarded the earth as revolving around the sun, not the reverse;18 believed that all phenomena were constituted of atoms, or corpuscles, in motion and susceptible to mathematica
l description; and saw the solar system as a vast machine, held together by the forces of gravity. He had a precise notion of experiment (or at least paid lip service to it), and a new notion of what constituted acceptable evidence and proper explanation. He lived in a predictable, comprehensible, yet (in his own mind) very exciting sort of world. For in terms of material control, the world was beginning to exhibit an infinite horizon and endless opportunities.

  More than any other individual, Sir Isaac Newton is associated with the scientific world view of modern Europe. Like Galileo, Newton combined rationalism and empiricism into a new method; but unlike Galileo, he was hailed by Europe as a hero rather than having to recant his views and spend his mature years under house arrest. Most important, the methodological combination of reason and empiricism became, in Newton's hands, a whole philosophy of nature which he (unlike Galileo) was successful in stamping upon Western consciousness at large. What made the eighteenth century the Newtonian century was the solution to the problem of planetary motion, a problem that, it was commonly believed, not even the Greeks had been able to solve (the Greeks, it should be noted, took a more positive view of their own achievement). Bacon had derided the ancient learning, but he did not speak for the majority of Europeans. The strong revival of classical learning in the sixteenth century, for example, reflected the belief that despite the enormous problems with the Greek cosmologicaI model, their epoch was and would remain the true Golden Age of mankind. Newton's precise mathematical description of a heliocentric solar system changed all that; he not only summed up the universe in four simple algebraic formulas, but he also accounted for hitherto unexplained phenomena, made accurate predictions, clarified the relation between theory and experiment, and even sorted out the role of God in the whole system. Above all, Newton's system was atomistic: the earth and sun, being composed of atoms themselves, behaved in the same way that any two atoms did, and vice versa. Thus both the smallest and the largest objects in the universe were seen to obey identical laws. The moon's relationship to the earth was the same as that of a falling apple. The mystery of nearly two millennia was over: one could be reassured that the heavens that confront us on a starry night held no more secrets than a few grains of sand running through our fingers.