The Reenchantment of the World

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The Reenchantment of the World Page 5

by Morris Berman


  Newton deliberately titled his major work, popularly called the "Principia," the "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (1686),19 the two adjectives serving to emphasize his rejection of Descartes, whose "Principles of Philosophy" he regarded as a collection of unproven hypotheses. Step by step he analyzed Descartes' propostitions about the natural world and demonstrated their falsity. For example, Descartes envisaged the matter of the universe circulating in whirlpools, or vortices. Newton was able to show that this theory contradicted the work of Kepler, which seemed quite reliable; and that if one experimented with models of vortices by spinning buckets of fluid (water, oil, pitch), the contents would eventually slow down and stop, indicating that on Descartes' hypothesis the universe would have come to a standstill long ago. Despite his attacks on Descartes' views, it is clear from recent research that Newton was a Cartesian right up to the publication of the "Principia"; and when one reads the work, one is struck by an awesome fact: Newton made the Cartesian world view tenable by falsifying all of its details. In other words, although Descartes' facts were wrong and his theories insupportable, the central Cartesian outlook -- that the world is a vast machine of matter and motion obeying mathematical laws -- was thoroughly validated by Newton's work. For all of Newton's brilliance, the real hero (some would say ghost) of the Scientific Revolution was René Descartes.

  But Newton did not have his triumph so easily. His entire view of the cosmos hinged on the law of universal gravitation, or gravity, and even after it had been given an exact mathematical formulation, no one knew just what this attraction was. Cartesian thinkers pointed out that their own mentor had wisely restricted himself to motion by direct impact, and ruled out what scientists would later call action-at-a-distance. Newton, they argued, has not explained gravity, but merely stated its effects, and thus it really is, in his system, an occult property. Where is this "gravity" that he makes so much of? It can be neither seen, nor heard, nor felt, nor smelled. It is, in short, as much a fiction as the vortices of Descartes.

  Privately, Newton agonized over this judgment. He felt that his critics were correct. Early in 1692 or 1693 he wrote his friend the Reverend Richard Bentley the following admission:

  That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.20

  Publicly, however, Newton adopted a stance that established, once and for all, the philosophical relationship between appearance and reality, hypothesis and experiment. In a section of the Principia entitled "God and Natural Philosophy," he wrote:

  Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power. This is certain, that it must proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centers of the sun and planets. . . . But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.21

  Newton was echoing the major theme of the scientific Revolution: our goal is how, not why. That I cannot explain gravity is irrelevant. I can measure it, observe it, make predictions based on it, and this is all the scientist has to do. If a phenomenon is not measurable, it can "have no place in experimental philosophy." This philosophical position, in its various forms called "positivism," has been the public face of modern science down to the present day.22

  The second major aspect of Newton's work was best delineated in the "Opticks" (1704), in which he was able to wed philosophical atomism to the definition of experiment which had been crystallizing in the minds of scientists throughout the previous century. As a result, Newton's researches on light and color became the model for the correct analysis of natural phenomena. The question was, is white light simple or complex? Descartes, for one, had regarded it as simple, and saw colors as the result of some sort of modification of the light. Newton believed white light was in fact composed of colors that somehow cancelled each other out in combination to produce the effect of white. How to decide between these two claims?

  In the experiment illustrated in Figure 6, Newton took white light, broke it into parts with a prism, selected one of the parts, and showed that it could not be further broken down. He did this with each color, demonstrating that monochromatic light could not be subdivided. Next, Newton ran the experiment in the opposite direction: he broke the ray of white light into its parts, and then recombined them by passing them through a convex lens (see Figure 7). The result was white light. This atomistic approach, which follows Descartes' four-step method exactly, establishes the thesis beyond doubt. But as in the case of gravity, the Cartesians took issue with Newton. Where, they asked, is your theory of light and color, where is your explanation of this behavior? And as in the previous case, Newton retreated behind the smokescreen of positivism. I am looking for laws, or optical facts, he replied, not hypotheses. If you ask me what "red" is, I can only tell you that it is a number, a certain degree of refrangibility, and the same is true for each of the other colors. I have measured it: that is enough.

  In this case too, of course, Newton struggled with possible explanations for the behavior of light, but the combination of (philosophical) atomism, positivism, and experimental method -- in short, the definition of reality -- is still very much with us today. To know something is to subdivide it, quantify it, and recombine it; is to ask "how," and never get entangled in the complicated underbrush of "why." It is, above all, to distance yourself from it, as Galileo pointed out; to make it an abstraction. The poet may get uncritically effusive about a red streak across the sky as the sun is going down, but the scientist is not so easily deluded: he knows that his emotions can teach him nothing substantial. The red streak is a number, and that is the essence of the matter.

  To summarize our discussion of the Scientific Revolution, it is necessary to note that in the course of the seventeenth century, Western Europe hammered out a new way of perceiving reality. The most important change was the shift from quality to quantity, from "why" to how." The universe, once seen as alive, possessing its own goals and purposes, is now a collection of inert matter, hurrying around endlessly and meaninglessly, as Alfred North, Whitehead put it.23 What constitutes an acceptable explanation has thus been radically altered. The acid test of existence is quantifiability, and there are no more basic realities in any object than the parts into which it can be broken down. Finally, atomism, quantifiability, and the deliberate act of viewing nature as an abstraction from which one can distance oneself -- all open the possibility that Bacon proclaimed as the true goal of science: control. The Cartesian or technological paradigm is, as stated above, the equation of truth with utility, with the purposive manipulation of the environment. The holistic view of man as a part of nature, as being at home in the cosmos, is so much romantic claptrap. Not holism, but domination of nature; not the ageless rhythm of ecology, but the conscious management of the world; not (to take the process to its logical end point) "the magic of personality, [but] the fetishism of commodities."24 In the mind of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medieval man (or woman) had been a passive spectator of the physical world. The new mental tools of the seventeenth century made it possible to change all that. It was now within our power to have heaven on earth; and the fact that it was a material heaven hardly made it less valuable.

  Nevertheless, it was the Industrial Revolution that put the Scientific Revolution on t
he map. Bacon's dream of a technological society was not realized in the seventeenth century or even in the eighteenth, although things were beginning to change by 1760. Ideas, as we have said, do not exist in a vacuum. People could regard the mechanical world view as the true philosophy without feeling compelled to transform the world according to its dictates. The relationship between science and technology is very complicated, and it is in fact in the twentieth century that the full impact of the Cartesian paradigm has been most keenly felt. To grasp the meaning of the scientific Revolution in Western history we must consider the social and economic milieu that served to sustain this new way of thinking. The sociologist Peter Berger was correct when he said that ideas "do not succeed in history by virtue of their truth but by virtue of their relationships to specific social processes."25 Scientific ideas are no exception.

  2 Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

  From whence there may arise many admirable advantages, towards the increase of the Operative, and the Mechanick Knowledge, to which this Age seems so much inclined, because we may perhaps be inabled to discern all the secret workings of Nature, almost in the same manner as we do those that are the productions of Art, and are manag'd by Wheels, and Engines, and Springs, that were devised by humane Wit.

  -- Robert Hooke, "Micrographia" (1665)

  The collapse of a feudal economy, the emergence of capitalism on a broad scale, and the profound alteration in social relations that accompanied these changes provided the context of the Scientific Revolution in Western Europe. The equating of truth with utility, or cognition with technology, was an important part of this general process. Experiment, quantification, prediction and control formed the parameters of a world view that made no sense within the framework of the medieval social and economic order. The individuals discussed in Chapter 1 would not have been possible in an earlier age; or, perhaps more to the point, would have been ignored, as were Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste, who pioneered the experimental method in the thirteenth century. Modern science, in short, is the mental framework of a world defined by capital accumulation, and ultimately, to quote Ernest Gellner, it became the "mode of cognition" of industrial society.1

  It is not my intention to argue that capitalism "caused" modern science. The relationship between consciousness and society has always been problematic because all social activities are permeated by ideas and attitudes and there is no way to analyze society in a strictly functional way.2 We are confronted, then, with a structural totality, or historical gestalt, and my point in this chapter will be that science. and capitalism form such a unit. Science acquired its factual and explanatory power only within a context that was "congruent" to those facts and explanations. It will be necessary, therefore, to look at science as a system of thought adequate to a certain historical epoch; to try to separate ourselves from the common impression that it is an absolute, transcultural truth.3

  Let us begin our examination of this theme by comparing the Aristotelian and seventeenth-century world views, and then consider the changes wrought by the Commercial Revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the social and economic world of feudalism (see Chart 1).

  The most striking aspect of the medieval world view is its sense of closure, its completeness. Man is at the center of a universe that is bounded at its outermost sphere by God, the Unmoved Mover. God is the one entity that, in Aristotle's terminology, is pure actuality. All other entities are endowed with purpose, being partly actual and partly potential. Thus it is the goal of fire to move up, of earth (matter) to move down, and of species to reproduce themselves. Everything moves and exists in accordance with divine purpose. All of nature, rocks as well as trees, is organic and repeats itself in eternal cycles of generation and corruption. As a result, this world is ultimately changeless, but being riddled with purpose, is an exceptionally meaningful one. Fact and value, epistemology and ethics, are identical. "What do I know?" and "How should I live?" are in fact the same question.

  Turning to the world view of the seventeenth century, we are apt to note first of all the absence of any immanent meaning. As E.A. Burtt describes it, the seventeenth century, which began with the search for God in the universe, ended by squeezing Him out of it altogether.4 Things do not possess purpose, which is an anthropocentric notion, but only behavior, which can (and must) be described in an atomistic, mechanical, and quantitative way. As a result, our relationship to nature is fundamentally altered. Unlike medieval man, whose relationship with nature was seen as being reciprocal, modern man (existential man) sees himself as having the ability to control and dominate nature, to use it for his own purposes. Medieval man was given a purposeful position in the universe; it did not require an act of will on his part. Modern man, on the other hand, is enjoined to find his own purposes. But what those purposes are or should be cannot, for the first time in history, be logically derived. In short, modern science is grounded in a sharp distinction between fact and value; it can only tell us how to do something, not what to do or whether we should do it.

  Chart 1. Comparison of world views

  World view of the Middle Ages World view of the seventeenth century

  Universe: geocentric, earth in the Universe: heliocentric; earth has center of a series of no special status, planets held concentric, crystalline in orbit by gravity of the sun. spheres. Universe closed, Universe infinite. with God, the Unmoved Mover, as the outermost sphere.

  Explanation: in terms of formal Explanation: strictly in terms of and final causes, teleological. matter and motion, which Everything but God in process have no higher purposes. of Becoming; natural place, Atomistic in both the material natural motion. and philosophical sense.

  Motion: forced or natural, Motion: to be described, not requires a mover. explained; law of inertia.

  Matter: continuous, no vacua. Matter: atomic, implying existence of vacua.

  Time: cyclical, static. Time: linear, progressive.

  Nature: understood via the Nature: understood via the concrete and the qualitative. abstract and quantitative. Nature is alive, organic; we Nature is dead, mechanistic, observe it and make and is known via deductions from general manipulation (experiment) principles. and mathematical abstraction,

  The openness that we see as characteristic of seventeenth-century consciousness is also antithetical to the medieval cosmos. The universe has become infinite, motion (change) is a given, and time is linear. The notion of progress and the sense that activity is cumulative characterize the world view of early modern Europe.

  Finally, what is "really" real for the seventeenth century is what is abstract. Atoms are real, but invisible; gravity is real, but, like momentum and inertial mass, can only be measured. In general, abstract quantification serves as explanation. It was this loss of the tangible and meaningful that drove the more sensitive minds of the age -- Blaise Pascal and John Donne, for example -- to the edge of despair. The "new Philosophy calls all in doubt," wrote the latter in 1611; "Tis all in peeces, all cohaerance gone." Or in Pascal's phrase, "the silences of the infinite spaces terrify me."5

  The culture that was permeated by the Aristotelian world view was, as we know, characterized by a feudal economy and a religious way of life. By and large, food and handicrafts were produced not for market and profit, but for immediate consumption and use. Excepting luxury items, trade existed only within local areas, and more closely resembled the tribute structure of the ancient Roman Empire (out of whose disintegration feudalism arose) than our modern notion of commercial exchange. Until the late fifteenth century almost all shipping was coastal: boats stayed within sight of land for fear of getting lost. The guilds, which produced for personal commission, emphasized quality rather than quantity, and closely guarded the secrets of craftsmanship. There was no notion of mass production, and very little division of labor. The economy was, essentially, a self-contained reward system. It could not be described as "going" anywhere, and, in general, our notions of growth and expansion would
have made little sense in this static and self-sufficient world. In the Middle Ages, meaning was assured, both politically and religiously. The church was the ultimate reference when one sought to explain a phenomenon, whether it occurred in nature or in human life. Furthermore, the social order made sense in a direct and personal way. Justice and political power were administered in terms of loyalty and attachment -- vassal to lord, serf to land, apprentice to master -- and the system, as a result, possessed few abstractions. If the Middle Ages seem, from our vantage point, to be hermetically sealed, they had the advantage (despite the extreme instability afforded by plague and natural disaster) of being psychologically reassuring to their inhabitants.6

 

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