The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  Although it is not possible, in this brief discussion, to elaborate in any greater detail on Galileo's intellectual antecedents, some comments on Tartaglia are in order because his works and style provide a major clue to Galileo's methodology. New Science was the earliest attempt to apply mathematics to projectiles, and it dealt extensively with the trajectories of cannonballs. Tartaglia was first to break with the Aristotelian notion of discontinuous trajectories, to state that the projectile path was curvilinear, and to demonstrate that the maximum range of a projectile occurred at a gun elevation of 45 degrees. Contradicting Aristotle, he claimed that the air resisted motion, rather than assisting it. Between the covers of a book on ballistics, then, Tartaglia advanced a theoretical analysis of motion. This same combination occurred in a book he wrote in 1551 on the raising of sunken vessels, a topic of obvious interest to a republic like Venice. To this study he appended his Italian translation of Archimedes' essay "On Bodies in Water." Again, the text emerged not merely as a technical treatise, but as the first open challenge to Aristotle's law of falling bodies, for it used Archimedes' theory of buoyancy and surrounding media to argue against Aristotle's rigid distinction between up and down. Galileo was to follow in Tartaglia's footsteps, arguing that there was no natural upward motion; using Archimedes to overturn Aristotle; refining the mathematics of projectile motion; and intimately connecting, as Tartaglia had done in all his work, technical fieldwork with theoretical conclusions.

  Galileo's involvement in technical problems was most intense during the so-called Paduan period (1592-1610) when he was engaged in his studies of motion. His own laboratory was like a workshop, where he manufactured mathematical apparatus. Galileo tutored privately on mechanics and engineering; did research on pumps, the regulation of rivers, and fortress construction; and brought out his first printed work, on the military compass, or "sector," as it was called. He also invented the "thermobaroscope," and took a strong interest in the field of engineering (now called materials science) which deals with the resistance of materials. Although Galileo made a distinction in his own mind between craft and theory, he broke with the prevailing view that saw them as totally unrelated. He was not just a scientist who also happened to be interested in technology, but rather used technology -- both in spirit and method -- as the source of theory. His last work, the "Two New Sciences," opens with the following conversation between two imaginary interlocutors:

  Salviati: The constant activity which you Venetians display in your famous arsenal suggests to the studious mind a large field for investigation, especially that part of the work which involves mechanics; for in this department all types of instruments and machines are constantly being constructed by many artisans, among whom there must be some who, partly by inherited experience and partly by their own observations, have become highly expert and clever in explanation.

  Sagredo: You are quite right. Indeed, I myself, being curious by nature, frequently visit this place for the mere pleasure of observing the work of those who, on account of their superiority over other artisans, we call "first rank men." Conference with them has often helped me in the investigation of certain effects including not only those which are striking, but also those which are recondite and almost incredible.16

  The book not only contains a discussion of projectile motion, but also includes a table of ranges for firing. Galileo makes much of the value of his theory to gunners, but as it turns out, they did much more for his science than he did for theirs.

  How exactly did the technological tradition surface in Galileo's studies of motion? He not only agreed with the literature of this tradition, that construction is a mode of cognition, that manipulating nature is a key to knowing it, but he also showed precisely how this type of investigation should be carried out.

  The analysis of projectile motion, of course, was derived from a practical military problem, and was, at the same time, a crucial blow to Aristotelian physics. Since Aristotle divided motion into two types, forced and natural, he concluded that projectile motion (see Figure 9) had to be discontinuous, that is, it had to consist of a forced motion (throwing the object into the air) and a natural one (the descent to earth):

  When people first hear about this theory, they often ask how intelligent men and women could have believed it, since all one has to do is look at a projectile to see that the above "curve" does not correspond to reality. In fact, the acceptance of Aristotle's theory is a good example of the gestalt principle of finding what you seek. Most readers probably have not watched a projectile very closely, and certainly few have plotted on a graph exactly where its apogee occurs and what then takes place. Furthermore, from the point of view of the thrower, a stone does seem to rise and then vertically drop. Finally, not until the end of the sixteenth century were cannon fired at long range, so such motion was not typically a part of the environment. As late as 1561 graphs in some textbooks were superimposed over a cannon, with the motion of the ball being shown as discontinuous (see Plate 1). In a world of qualitative science, the Aristotelian picture is roughly "true" in that it is one apparent aspect of projectile motion. Only with the rise of standing armies and the military concentration on ballistics was there any interest at all in a precise mathematical description of cannonball flight, which in any case is never really parabolic (see below) due to the effects of air resistance. We thus see how blurry, or complex, a simple "fact" can be: it seems to be shaped by what is being asked.

  In any event, closer and closer scrutiny of projectiles made it more difficult to maintain the Aristotelian distinction between forced and natural motion. Since it is virtually impossible to map the points on a graph for an object actually thrown into the air, Galileo once again abstracted the essentials of the situation and adapted them to laboratory conditions. Projectile motion, he reasoned, is a free-fall situation with a horizontal component. At the apogee of the curve, the object starts its downward descent due to the force of gravity, but it still retains some of the horizontal impetus originally imparted to it. The path would thus be smooth, not discontinuous, as Aristotle had maintained; and rather than abruptly falling to earth in a sheer vertical drop, the object would describe a curve, a combination ("resultant") of the vertical and horizontal components of motion. Galileo's experiments to ascertain this curve mathematically involved rolling a ball down an inclined plane that had a horizontal deflector at the bottom, and which was sitting on the edge of a table. The ball was released from different points along the plane, and thus in each trial struck the floor at a correspondingly different point. This generated a mass of data -- really a collection of curves-- which enabled Galileo, using his law of free-fall, to derive a mathematical description of these curves as parabolic. In a nonresistant medium, he finally concluded, the trajectory of a projectile would be a perfect parabola. '

  Plate 1. The Aristotelian theory of projectile motion, from Daniele

  Santbech, "Problematum Astronomicorum" (1561). Courtesy Ann Ronan

  Picture Library.

  The significance of this was not merely the mathematical description of a curve, but the challenge to Aristotelian physics. Not only did this weaken the distinction between forced and natural motion; it also called into question Aristotle's assertion that vacua could not exist (since projectile motion was supposedly maintained by displacing air rushing in to prevent a vacuum from forming), as well as the whole concept of immanent purpose contained in the Aristotelian doctrines of natural motion and natural place. Galileo's discovery of the independence of the horizontal and vertical components of motion, which is another aspect of the above investigation, led to his formulation of the composition and resolution of forces -- what we now call vector mechanics. Here again, measurement, rather than any sort of purpose, is seen to lie at the heart of scientific explanation (if so it can be called). We see, then, that a military problem, which had been investigated by an engineer like Tartaglia, was converted into a controlled laboratory experiment to produce a mathematical expression, and
then used to smash several fundamental tenets of the Aristotelian world view. Galileo's studies of ballistics not only refuted Aristotelian concepts; they were also beginning to delineate a new method for exploring reality.

  All of Galileo's investigations served as vivid demonstrations of the relationship between theory and experiment which was slowly forming in the minds of a few European thinkers. They also vindicated the unproven assumption made by the technological literature of the sixteenth century: there can be a fundamental link between cognition and manipulation, between scientific explanation and mastery of the environment. The economic history sketched in the early pages of this chapter is thus much more than an interesting backdrop to these developments in the seemingly abstract realm of scientific thought. Cognition, reality, and the whole Western scientific method are integrally related to the rise of capitalism in early modern Europe.

  We have talked in terms of a gestalt principle, of facts being plastic, "created" by theoretical constructs that are in turn linked to a socioeconomic context; and of the Scientific Revolution and its methodology as being part of a larger historical process. We are then brought face to face with an unsettling question: Is reality nothing more than a cultural artifact? Are Galileo's discoveries not the hard data of science, but simply the products of a world view that is a more or less localized phenomenon? If, as the foregoing analysis suggests, the answer is yes, we are cast adrift on a sea of radical relativism. There is then no Truth, but merely your truth, my truth, the truth of this time or that place. This is the implication of what is commonly called the sociology of knowledge. The distinction between knowledge and opinion, between science and ideology, crumbles, and what is right becomes a matter of majority rule, or "mob psychology."17 Modern science, astrology, witchcraft, Aristotelianism, Marxism, whatever -- all become equally true in the absence of objective knowledge and the concept of a fixed, underlying reality. Is there no way to protect ourselves from such a conclusion?

  My answer is that radical relativism arises out of the peculiar attitude that modern science has adopted toward participating consciousness, which I discussed very briefly in the Introduction. It will be necessary, in the first place, then, to analyze the nature of participating consciousness in some detail. To do so, we must pursue the sociology of knowledge into a neglected chapter in the story of the Scientific Revolution: the world of the occult.

  3 The Disenchantment of the World (1)

  What appears a wonder is not a wonder. -- Simon Stevin

  The phrase is Weber's: 'die Entzauberung der Welt.' Schiller, a century earlier, had an equally telling expression for it: 'die Entgötterung der Natur,' the 'disgodding' of nature. The history of the West, according to both the sociologist and the poet, is the progressive removal of mind, or spirit, from phenomenal appearances.

  The hallmark of modern consciousness is that it recognizes no element of mind in the so-called inert objects that surround us. The whole materialist position, in fact, assumes the existence of a world "out there" independent of human thought, which is "in here." And it also assumes that the earth, excepting certain slow evolutionary changes, has been roughly the same for millennia, while the people on that earth have regarded the unchanging phenomena around them in different ways at different times. According to modern science, the further back in time we go, the more erroneous are men's conceptions of the world. Our own knowledge, on this schema, is of course not perfect, but we are rapidly eliminating the few remaining errors that do exist, and shall gradually arrive at a fully accurate understanding of nature, free of animistic or metaphysical presuppositions. Modern consciousness thus regards the thinking of previous ages not simply as other legitimate forms of consciousness, but as misguided world views that we have happily outgrown. It holds that the men and women of those times thought they understood nature, but without our scientific sophistication their beliefs could not help but be childish and animistic. The "maturation" of the human intellect over the ages, particularly in this century, has (so the argument goes) almost completely corrected this accretion of superstition and muddled thinking.1

  One of the goals of this chapter is to demonstrate that it is this attitude, rather than animism, which is misguided; and that this attitude stems, in part, from our inability to enter into the world view of premodern man. We have already established that modern science and capitalism were, historically, inextricably intertwined, and can appreciate that the perceptions and ideology of modern science are a part of large-scale social and economic developments. But because this scientific attitude is our consciousness, it is nearly impossible to abandon, even momentarily. Indeed, doing so is usually regarded as prima facie evidence for insanity. Nor does the recognition of the relativity of our own consciousness serve, by itself, to place us at the center of a different consciousness. In short, it is very difficult to form a reliable impression of the consciousness of pre-modern society.

  One thing that is certain about the history of Western consciousness, however, is that the world has, since roughly 2000 B.C., been progressively disenchanted, or "disgodded." Whether animism has any validity or not, there is no doubting its gradual elimination from Western thought. For reasons that remain obscure, two cultures in particular, the Jewish and the Greek, were responsible for the beginnings of this development. Although Judaism did possess a strong gnostic heritage (the cabala being its only survivor), the official rabbinical (later, talmudic) tradition was based precisely on the rooting out of animistic beliefs.2 Yahweh is a jealous God: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"; and throughout Jewish history, the injunction against totemism -- worshipping "graven images" -- has been central. The Old Testament is the story of the triumph of monotheism over Astarte, Baal, the golden calf, and the nature gods of neighboring "pagan" peoples. Here we see the first glimmerings of what I have called nonparticipating consciousness: knowledge is acquired by recognizing the distance between ourselves and nature. Ecstatic merger with nature is judged not merely as ignorance, but as idolatry. The Divinity is to be experienced within the human heart; He is definitely not immanent in nature. The rejection of participating consciousness, or what Owen Barfield calls "original participation," was the crux of the covenant between the Jews and Yahweh. It was precisely this contract that made the Jews "chosen" and gave them their unique historical mission.3

  The Greek case is less easily summarized. At some point between the lifetime of Homer and that of Plato, a sharp break occurred in Greek epistemology so as to turn it away from original participation and contribute, out of very different motives, to the gradual disappearance of animism. It is difficult to conceive of a mentality that made virtually no distinction between subjective thought processes and what we call external phenomena, but it is likely that down to the time of the "Iliad" (ca. 900-850 B.C.) such was the case. The "Iliad" contains no words for internal states of mind. Given its contextual usage in this work, the Greek word psyche, for example, would have to be translated as "blood." In the "Odyssey," however (a century or more later), psyche clearly means "soul." The separation of mind and body, subject and object, is discernible as a historical trend by the sixth century before Christ; and the poetic, or Homeric mentality, in which the individual is immersed in a sea of contradictory experiences and learns about the world through emotional identification with it (original participation), is precisely what Socrates and Plato intended to destroy. In the "Apology," Socrates is aghast that artisans learn and pursue their craft by "sheer instinct," that is, by social osmosis and personal intuition. As Nietzsche pointed out, the phrase "sheer instinct," which in Socrates' mouth could only be an expression of contempt, epitomized the attitude of Greek rationalism toward any other mode of cognition. For this reason, he found Socrates (and indeed all of Western civilization) tragically inverted. The creative person, wrote Nietzsche, works by instinct and checks himself by reason; Socrates did just the reverse. And, Nietzsche continued, it was the Socratic form of rational knowledge which (despite Socrates' trial a
nd sententing) spread itself across the public face of Hellenism after his death.4

  According to Eric Havelock, Plato regarded participating consciousness, as exemplified by the Greek poetic tradition, as pathological.5 Yet this tradition had been the principal mode of consciousness in Greece down to the fifth or sixth century before Christ, and during that period it served as the sole vehicle for learning and education. Poetry was an oral medium. It was recited before a large audience that memorized the verses in a state of autohypnosis. Plato used the term mimesis, or active emotional identification, to describe this submission to the spell of the performer, a process with physiological effects that were both relaxing and erotic, and that involved a total submergence of oneself into the other. Pre-Homeric Greek life, concludes Havelock, "was a life without self-examination, but as a manipulation of the resources of the unconscious in harmony with the conscious, it was unsurpassed."