Abstract
“Modern man lacks a unified conception of the world. He lives in a dual world: in his environment, which is naturally given to him, and, at the same time, in the world which since the beginning of the modern era has been created for him by sciences founded upon the principle that the laws of nature are, in essence, mathematical. The non-unity which has thus come to penetrate our entire life is the true source of the spiritual crisis we are going through today,” says the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka.*15 Patočka refers here to that loss of a pristine unity in man’s experience of the world which has been lamented so often. He appears to link it closely to the 17th-century Scientific Revolution an event that has also been described as the “mechanization of the world-picture”,16 and interpreted as the point of no return in the process of European civilization’s “deviation from the general human pattern”.17 What was this Scientific Revolution all about?
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“L’homme moderne n’a pas du monde une conception unifiée. Il vit dans un monde double: dans son environnement, qui lui est naturellement donné et, en même temps, dans le monde que depuis l’ère moderne créent pour lui des sciences fondées sur ce principe que les lois de la nature sont d’essence mathématique. Le non-unité qui a pénétré ainsi toute notre vie est la source propre de la crise spirituelle par laquelle nous passons actuellement.”
We are aware that the concept of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ has in our time become a disputed one. This is so, in part, no doubt, because of the general postmodernist distrust of ‘grand narratives’, but also because the word ‘revolution’ has really become subject to a deplorable process of word-inflation over time. Nevertheless, in view of the indisputable fact that with the emergence of modern science something arrived upon the European stage which had never been there before (nor upon any non-European stage), and in view of the tremendous consequences of this arrival, the admittedly somewhat worn-out term ‘revolution’ seems in this case to us still useful and even indispensable.
The term ‘modern science’ is used here as an overall label for the whole development which starts with the Scientific Revolution. For our purpose this seems justified. Otherwise it is indeed desirable to distinguish between the science of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, and science since Einstein and Bohr, which may be called with Dijksterhuis ‘classical’ (to be distinguished from the ‘ancient’ of the Greeks) and ‘modern’, respectively; or, with Cohen, ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’, respectively.
So did Dijksterhuis, in spite of his own acknowledgement that it is almost unfeasible for a philosophy which so radically denies the reality of the empirical world ever to provide any inspiration for a science concerned precisely with this empirical world. Yet in the conservation laws and in the idea of causality, which Dijksterhuis (just like Meyerson) took to be, in the last resort, reduction to identity, he recognized the same desire to trace the unchangeable behind all change.
‡ >To the Greeks, only in the celestial sphere was absolutely and perfectly regular motion possible, so that only mathematical astronomy was possible, not mathematical physics.>
It is perhaps interesting to note that Dijksterhuis, in an earlier work of his, used almost the same wording in order to point out that the Archimedean influence did not fully reveal itself until the advent of Galileo. Indeed, the Alexandrian school of Greek science (among which Archimedes must be reckoned in the intellectual, though not of course in the strictly geographical sense) may be said to have used mathematics very well as(in Koyré’s words) a “method for the study of sublunar phenomena” and to provide therefore at least one counter-example to Koyré’s thesis that it was only in modern times that geometry became real. Yet it may be said that only in modern science has this trend become dominant.
* “Eotechnical” refers to pre-industrial technics; “paleotechnical” to what is usually called the ‘First Industrial Revolution’. The technology of the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’, which was the first to be truly science-based, is called by Mumford “neotechnical”.
>In his stressing the role of experience and experiment Pascal has more in common with the British empiricist school (which did not become fashionable in France until the 18th century under the belated influence of Newtonian science) than with continental rationalism; however, his dominant motive (namely, his religious preoccupations) of course separates him greatly from the former.>
Cartesianism, to confine ourselves for the moment to this example, was already made definitely obsolete by Newtonian physics with its reintroduction of the concept of force. But, as we shall see in Chapter VIII, p. 215, the same is true of later non-mechanicist philosophies of nature insofar as these pretend to be based upon science.
Or, to adopt the expression Patočka derived from his phenomenologist intellectual environment, with the “life-world” (Lebenswelt).
>According to this view scientific laws are accounts of the actions of man-made tools into which a part of nature has been incorporated; and since there is no reason to suppose that such tools are models of nature’s hidden mechanisms, Sorel arrives at the conclusion (surprising for naive positivists, who indeed were his bêtes noires) that there is no determinism (i.e. order) whatsoever in nature left to herself (“natural nature”). This seemed to be confirmed by the second law of thermodynamics with its announcement of a tendency towards increasing entropy. Sorel’s entire philosophy of culture sees culture as the ceaseless human endeavour to create islands of order (doomed to perish in the long run) in the arbitrariness of nature. A thoroughgoing study of this interesting figure is to be found in work of the Dutch essayist J. de Kadt, to which I am much indebted.>
‡ >This is the conclusion drawn by Heidegger in his two-volume study of Nietzsche. Elsewhere, too, Heidegger points to the central position ‘Will’ occupies in Western philosophy, e.g., in his essay ‘Wozu Dichter?’ (an allusion to Hölderlin’s elegy ‘Brot und Wein’, where the poet asks: “Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?”). Here it is stated that modern man may rightly be called “willing man”. One might surely object (we shall return to it in our final chapter) that the whole philosophical development from Descartes to Nietzsche is all too easily brought together by Heidegger under the one denominator of a voluntarist subjectivism, in which no difference is made between ‘thinking’ and ‘willing’ subject, and ‘will’ is moreover identified with ‘will-to-power’ (which, according to Heidegger, is in fact “will-to-will”, since power is the essence of will). What made Heidegger do so is evidently his general opposition to modern civilization. The dubious consequences of this generalizing attitude become clear when we remember that in the>
political sphere it induced him to lump together in the same sweeping way Western liberalism and Russian communism as having the same metaphysical background (to say nothing of his, at least temporarily, hailing of Nazism as a sound alternative; cp. Victor Farias’ well-known study).
Is an allusion to Arthur Schnitzler’s well-known distich: “Tiefsinn hat nie ein Ding erhellt / Klarsinn schaut tiefer in die Welt”.>
Heidegger insists that the Greek word τεχνη extended beyond the strictly artisanal sphere, not only because it included equally the artistic field (and was therefore part of πoιησις) but also because already since Plato it had been connected with ‘επστηµη. This could be so, because the essence of technics does not reside in making and handling, but in the “unhiding” of that which does not generate itself (“unhiding” — “Entbergen” — being Heidegger’s favourite (and in fairness, I must add, quite beautiful, for once) etymological translation of Greek a-ληθειa (a-lètheia)).
In this connection Heidegger compares an old wooden bridge built into the river, with a modern power station. Here it is rather the river which is built into the power-station, for it owes its present nature as a river (namely, its being a supplier of hydraulic pressure) only to the nature of the power-station.
It has been rightly observed that the quantitative method of modern science meant a decisive step on the road to ever greater objectivation, since in this new symbolism we are no longer concerned with words (with their always ambiguous meanings), but with numbers whose meaning is defined by the position they occupy in the full numerical system. For scientific purposes it is therefore superior to the symbolism of speech; in Ernst Cassirer’s words: “... for what we find are no longer detached words but terms that proceed according to one and the same fundamental plan and that, therefore, show us a clear and definite structural law.” Perhaps it is the most striking point of the adventure of modern science that, in it, two basic human tendencies, the will to power and the will to knowledge (indeed a too!), for the first time in history came together.
To be more precise: the Second Industrial Revolution (Mumford’s “neotechnical age”), since, in spite of the steam-engine and, with it, the beginning of the penetration of technics by science, the technics of the First Industrial Revolution (the “paleotechnical age”) cannot yet be characterized as’technology’, i.e. as science-based technics.
“Turning point”; for an inherent dynamism in European society and a resulting tendency towards expansion can certainly be traced back to the period before the 14th-century crisis, as has been demonstrated by (among others) Lynn White. He stresses the importance of the agricultural revolution of the early Middle Ages since, from the 10th century on, it permitted rapid urbanization and with it the advent of a new way of life which, in its turn, germinated important medieval progress made in the mechanical exploitation of natural forces for human purposes. Likewise, the great pioneer in the study of Chinese science, Joseph Needham pointed to the inherent instability of Europe as compared to China’s “spontaneous homeostasis”. He ascribed this in the first place to Europe’s geographical predicament, which tended from the beginning to turn it into “a culture of rovers”. Fernand Braudel rather follows Marx in underscoring the 13th-century origins of capitalism in the Italian city states, which, according to him, already by then had given rise to a kind of European-centred world economy. At all events, however much Braudel sought (against Wallerstein) to play down the point, not even he could deny that ‘capitalism’ acquired a new dimension with the unprecedented European expansion which began in the last decade of the 15th century.
The Dutch historian of science, R. Hooykaas, although of course recognizing that the Scientific Revolution took place much later than the Voyages of Discovery, was nevertheless eager to point to the importance of these sailors being confronted with a host of new phenomena considered impossible up until then, because this fostered a respect for empirical facts and a critical stance towards authorities which was to be essential for the later development.
In this sense, Francis Bacon, who contributed nothing to science in the strict sense, and who quite misunderstood its mathematical nature, may nonetheless be regarded as its prophet. We come back to the ‘Baconian’ tradition in science in Chapter V, p. 122.
*“Als Galilei seine Kugeln die schiefe Fläche mit einer von ihm selbst gewählten Schwere herabrollen, oder Torricelli die Luft ein Gewicht, was er sich zum voraus dem einer ihm bekannten Wassersäule gleich gedacht hatte, tragen ließ, oder in noch späterer Zeit Stahl Metalle in Kalk und diese wiederum in Metall verwandelte, indem er ihnen etwas entzog und wiedergab; da ging allen Naturforschern ein Licht auf. Sie begriffen, daß die Vernunft nur das einsieht, was sie selbst nach ihrem Entwurfe hervorbringt, daß sie mit Prinzipien ihrer Urteile nach beständigen Gesetzen vorangehen und die Natur nötigen müsse auf ihre Fragen zu antworten, nicht aber sich von ihr allein gleichsam am Leitband gängeln lassen müsse; denn sonst hängen zufällige, nach keinem vorher entworfenen Plane gemachte Beobachtungen gar nicht in einem notwendigen Gesetze zusammen, welches doch die Vernunft sucht und bedarf. Die Vernunft muß mit ihren Prinzipien, nach denen allein übereinkommende Erscheinungen für Gesetze gelten können, in einer Hand, und mit dem Experiment, das sie nach jenen ausdachte, in der anderen, an die Natur gehen, zwar um von ihr belehrt zu werden, aber nicht in der Qualität eines Schülers, der sich alles vorsagen läßt, was der Lehrer will, sondern eines bestallten Richters, der die Zeugen nötigt, auf die Fragen zu antworten, die er ihnen vorlegt ... Hierdurch ist die Naturwissenschaft allererst in den sichern Gang einer Wissenschaft gebracht worden, da sie so viele Jahrhunderte durch nichts weiter als ein bloßes Herumtappen gewesen war.”
One might object that the primacy of a constructivist notion of truth belongs, not to Kant, but rather to Giambattista Vico with his verum factum. But for Vico this was precisely a reason to grant true scientific status, not to natural science, but to History (the latter being indeed a creation of man, ‘nature’, however, being a creation of God). Cf. on this subject also our Chapter V, p. 130.
Kant may really be said to distinguish between three “I”s (the “intelligible I” being the third one). For, although the distinction — made in the Critique of Practical Reason — between “empirical character” and “intelligible character” runs closely parallel with that between the “empirical” and the “transcendental” subject of the Critique of Pure Reason, the “intelligible character” as the bearer of man’s deepest nature as a moral being (and as such belonging to the “noumenal” realm), cannot be identified with the purely formal “transcendental unity of apperception”, which, although (being the condition of any phenomenon) it cannot be a “phenomenon” itself, is not a “noumenon” either; in fact it ‘is’ nothing. We shall discuss the “intelligible I” at some length in chapters VII and VIII; for now it suffices to confine ourselves to the two mentioned first.
More on the distinction made by Kant between ‘limits’ (Schranken) and ‘boundaries’ (Grenzen) in our Chapter VI, p. 136.
The ‘categories’ of Understanding are thus constitutive for science (in that they may indeed be said to prescribe laws to nature), whereas the ‘ideas’ of Reason have (in the domain of ‘theoretical’ reason!) only the regulative function of inspiring the search for utmost unity and totality in the knowledge thus obtained. In our Chapter IV we shall see that one of the essential differences between Kant and Schopenhauer consists of the latter’s fundamentally different usage of the terms ‘Reason’ and ‘Understanding’.
“Allein die Natur gleicht einer standhaften und edelmüthigen Person, welche selbst unter allen Qualen bei der Wahrheit verharrt. Steht es anders im Protocoll, so hat der Inquisitor falsch gehört, der Schreiber falsch niedergeschrieben.”
“Vom Philosophen glauben wir Dank zu verdienen, daß wir gesucht die Phänomene bis ihren Urquellen zu verfolgen, bis dorthin, wo sie bloß erscheinen und sind, und wo sich nichts weiter an ihnen erklären läßt.”
“... und ließ, mit manchen charakteristischen Federstrichen, eine symbolische Pflanze vor seinen Augen entstehen.”
§“Das ist keine Erfahrung, das ist eine Idee.”
* “Das Auge hat sein Dasein dem Licht zu danken. Aus gleichgültigen thierischen Hülfsorganen ruft sich das Licht ein Organ hervor, das seines Gleichen werde; so bildet sich das Auge am Lichte fürs Licht, damit das innere Licht dem äußeren entgegentrete.”
“Daß ich erkenne was die Welt /Im Innersten zusammenhält / Schau’ alle Wirkenskraft und Samen / Und tu’ nicht mehr in Worten kramen.”
“Denke man aber nicht, daß ich seine Schriften hätte unterschreiben und mich dazu buchstäblich bekennen mögen ...”; “. .. der als Schüler von Descartes durch mathematische und rabbinische Cultur sich zu dem Gipfel des Denkens hervorgehoben”.
“Übrigens möge auch hier nicht verkannt werden, daß eigentlich die innigsten Verbindungen nur aus dem Entgegengesetzten folgen. Die alles ausgleichende Ruhe Spinozas kontrastierte mit meinem alles aufregenden Streben, seine mathematische Methode war das Widerspiel meiner poetischen Sinnes- und Darstellungsweise, und eben jene geregelte Behandlungsart, die man sittlichen Gegenständen nicht angemessen finden wollte, machte mich zu seinem leidenschaftlichsten Schüler, zu seinem entschiedensten Verehrer.”
“Es gibt eine zarte Empirie, welche sich mit dem Gegenstand innigst identisch macht und dadurch zur eigentlichen Theorie wird.” (“There is a tender empiricism which identifies itself, as intensely as can be, with the object, and which turns thereby into theory proper”).
* “Kant (sagte er) ist der vorzüglichste, ohne allen Zweifel. Er ist auch derjenige, dessen Lehre sich fortwirkend erwiesen hat, und die in unsere deutsche Cultur am tieffsten eingedrungen ist. Er hat auch auf Sie gewirkt, ohne daß Sie ihn gelesen haben.”
>Man is customarily inclined, so Goethe writes here, to look at the objects around him from a subjective point of view (‘do I like them or not?’; ‘do they profit or harm me?’). The man of science, instead, must look at them in a detached and objective way; he should therefore be cautious not to draw conclusions too quickly from one single experiment (nor, for that matter, from two or more mutually isolated experiments). More especially, he should not use them rashly as arguments for some favourite hypothesis or theory (guess at whom Goethe is aiming here ...?). The reader is likely to nod his approval, yet not to be unduly impressed with these rather trivial observations, nor to discern any particularly ‘Kantian’ flavour about them.>
“Nun aber kam die Kritik der Urteilskraft mir zuhanden, und dieser bin ich eine höchst frohe Lebensepoche schuldig. Hier sah ich meine disparatesten Beschäftigungen nebeneinander gestellt, Kunst- und Naturerzeugnisse eins behandelt wie das andere; ästhetische und teleologische Urteilskraft erleuchteten sich wechselsweise.”
“Er predigte das Evangelium der Freiheit, ich wollte die Rechte der Natur nicht verkürzt wissen.” Cf. our remarks in Chapter IX, p. 250.
This national will-to-power indeed added a decisively new element to the German concept of ‘nation’, which is not yet to be found in Herder, but was to bear fruit in the further course of German history. I cannot therefore quite agree with Finkielkraut, when, in distinguishing between two types of racism (namely, one that proclaims one scale of values for all peoples and thus establishes a hierarchy between them in accordance with the extent to which they conform to it; and another one that is based on each people’s unrepeatable singularity, thus denying any unity of mankind), he arrives at the conclusion that the former ends in colonialism, whereas the latter (which he rightly traces back to Herder) reaches its apogee in Hitlerism. It is true that Herder fits fairly well Finkielkraut’s description of his second category, but only because he was still content with cultivating his own national uniqueness without wishing to subjugate other nations to an inherently superior Deutschtum. It was quite otherwise with later, aggressive and ‘racist’ nationalism culminating in Hitler, the origins of which can be traced back to the anti-Napoleonic wars of liberation. This particular racism may rather be said to be a very explosive synthesis of both types!
“Wie hätte ich, dem nur Cultur und Barbarei Dinge von Bedeutung sind, eine Nation hassen können, die zu den cultiviertesten der Erde gehört, und der ich selbst einen so großen Teil meiner eignen Cultur verdanke? Überhaupt ist es mit dem Nationalhaß ein eigenes Ding. Auf der untersten Stufe der Cultur werden Sie ihn immer am stärksten und heftigsten finden. Es gibt aber eine Stufe wo er ganz verschwindet und wo man gewissermaßen über den Nationen steht und ein Glück oder eine Wehe seines Nachbars empfindet als wäre es der eigenen begegnet. Diese Culturstufe war meiner Natur gemäß und ich hatte mich darin befestigt, ehe ich mein sechzigstes Jahr erreicht hatte.”
“... und das Innere der Häuser so nett und zierlich wie ihre Bilder.”
>*> Th>i>s d>isapproval found its expression in the well-known verdict: “Das Klassische ist das Gesunde, das Romantische das Kranke”. At times, however, he allowed for some differentiation in his pertinent utterances. For example, in another conversation he credited Romanticism with having achieved, not only greater freedom in matters of form, but also greater diversity in content such that no subject matter whatsoever in the wide world or in the multifariousness of life is excluded any longer from poetry, going on to express his confidence that the excesses will over time disappear of themselves. Moreover, in 1814–15, through the brothers Boisseré in Heidelberg, he had made the acquaintance of early Rhenish and Flemish painting (notably that done by the Van Eycks) and had renewed his interest in medieval architecture (in particular, the cathedral of Cologne, the completion of which he advocated). Just as with the acquaintance he made with Oriental poetry (which served as a source of inspiration for his own West-östlicher Divan of 1819), this led to a certain softening of his previously strict classicism, which had made him regard Greek art as the only true art. None of this is to deny that the Greeks never ceased to serve as the ultimate model for him.>
Kant may indeed be regarded, with Heidegger, as already a philosopher of ‘Will’, but we are concerned here with an ethical will (indeed, a’will’, too, just as ‘will to knowledge’; cf. footnote on p. 15)! It is otherwise with Schopenhauer, as we shall see in Chapter VII; on the other hand Schopenhauer’s “Will” is in its turn different from Nietzsche’s, as we shall see in Chapter VIII.
“Wenn man nun sah, wie diese jungen Leute vor der römisch-katholischen Kirche gleichsam Queue machten ...”
‡ >It should certainly be kept in mind that Romanticism is a general European phenomenon; already the name Byron which was mentioned by us in passing reminds us that there was also an English Romantic movement, just as there was a French one. But in those countries Romanticism is one period among others in the history of their national culture, whereas in the latecomer Germany it has decisively contributed to shaping the profile of its national culture in the first place; and only here did it become not only a literary but also a philosophical movement, especially with Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.>
As >is well-known, Hegel had no theory of knowledge. More than that, he denied the very possibility of such a thing, using the argument that one can only learn to swim by going into the water. Indeed it is a topic among Hegelians that Kant’s attempt at a critique of our faculty of knowledge is to be compared with the famous attempt of Baron Münchhausen to draw himself out of the swamp by his own wig. In our opinion this would count as an argument only if Kant had proceeded by way of introspection, rather than by way of a comparison between the publicly available results of positive science on the one hand, and those of metaphysics on the other.>
>“Das schönste Glück des denkenden Menschen ist, das Erforschliche erforscht zu haben und das Unerforschliche ruhig zu verehren.”>
“Willst du ins Unendliche schreiten / Geh nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten.”
§ >One wonders what Goethe would have said about the esoteric speculations of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy (a movement which — quite wrongly in our opinion — claims Goethe as its patron saint), had he lived to know them ...>
In a conversation dated 1 September 1829, Eckermann tells Goethe about a visitor who had taken lectures with Hegel, and who reported that once more a proof of God’s existence had been served up. Goethe thought this outdated. Philosophers do not in any way increase our knowledge of such problems as immortality, or the nature of the divine, or the nature of our soul and its connection with the body; rather, Goethe argued, it was precisely the great merit of Kant to have drawn the boundaries of possible human knowledge and to have left insoluble problems aside. He goes on to mock the Germans who torment themselves with attempts at the solution of metaphysical problems, while meantime the English with their practical wisdom laugh at them and conquer the world. (Goethe did not fail to add that the English, in so doing, knew how to serve up ‘cant’ (an expression not literally used by him), for example, in their apparently idealist advocacy of the abolition of the slave trade, which served their own interests).
“Wir wollen hier auf Erden schon / Das Himmelreich errichten”; “Den Himmel überlassen wir / Den Engeln und den Spatzen”.
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Lauxtermann, P.F.H. (2000). Kant, Goethe, and the Mechanization of the World-Picture. In: Schopenhauer’s Broken World-View. Science and Philosophy, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9369-4_2
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