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Revolutionizing Science Although Peter Dear
does not completely embrace the idea that the scientific advancements of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should be called a revolution, he does
argue in the following passage that a fundamental change took place in the
way in which Europeans understood their world. From Copernicus to Newton, as
Dear writes, European scientists successfully revolutionized their field, and
in turn originated modern science. 700. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 1-2, 168-170.
The idea that something
particularly important to the emergence of European science occurred in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one that Europeans themselves first
claimed in the eighteenth century. The period from the work of Copernicus in
the early sixteenth century, which put the earth in motion around the sun, up
to the establishment of the Newtonian world-system at the start of the
eighteenth--which included universal gravitation as part of an indefinitely
large universe--came to be regarded as a marvellous
"revolution" in knowledge unparalleled in history. Naturally, this
perspective included an appropriate evaluation of what had gone before. The
European learning of the Middle Ages, on this view, had been backward and
empty. Philosophers had been slaves to the ancient writings of Aristotle;
they had been more concerned with words and arguments than with things and
applications. . . . For all that it was exaggerated and self-congratulatory, the idea that there was a fundamental
difference between medieval learning and the new learning brought about by
the recent "revolution" contains an important insight. Medieval
learning, on this account, had stressed the ability to speak about matters of
truth; whereas now, instead, there was a stress on knowledge of what was in
the world and what it could do. ... By the time of Newton’s death, the
educated European outlook on the natural world had changed beyond all
recognition from what it had been in 1500. The new ideology of natural
knowledge was now one firmly, though not exclusively, associated with
practical, operational capabilities. The greatest physico-mathematicians
of the later seventeenth century, Huygens and Newton, both took an active
interest in practical, non-contemplative matters. . . . The major development of the two
centuries . . . was, therefore, the rise to a position of prominence of a
"natural philosophy" that was directed towards control of the
world. European knowledge in 1500, as it existed in formal, official settings
such as universities, placed a premium on abstract, contemplative understanding.
This is not to say that there were no social implications of such a focus,
but it is to say that those implications were mediated through such
institutions (especially the Church) whose power did not noticeably involve
ambitions to increase the means of control over the natural world itself.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, European nations
began to spread their power to other parts of the world to an extent
unprecedented in history. Consequently, valuations of knowledge began very gradually
to shift towards those kinds of knowledge that could bring the world beyond
Europe back home (as with geography and natural history), or that would
enable a more effective reaching out to other parts of the world with the
intention of material and cultural domination (as with such sciences as
navigation or mechanics--or even with Matteo
Ricci’s use of mathematics to impress the Chinese court). The rise of a Baconian rhetoric of utility during the seventeenth
century, associated with the welfare of the state, mirrored closely these
large-scale changes in European life. . . . Concomitantly, while the sixteenth
century had witnessed a form of intellectual endeavor that was dominated by
humanism, and by the explicit aim of recovering the civilization of classical
antiquity, the seventeenth century saw the appearance of a new ambition,
exemplified by Descartes and Bacon, to forge ahead with professedly novel
intellectual programmes. The sanction of antiquity
remained an important rhetorical resource for many, but it now competed with
claims of novelty that often justified approaches to nature by talk of
"method" instead of talk about classical precedent. The evidence
that such methods were efficacious was argued to reside in the practical
achievements that the method supposedly enabled, whether it was Bacon’s
inductive method leading to "works," or Descartes’s method leading
to improved optical lenses (as in his essay "Dioptrics")
or, as Descartes also hoped, to lengthen human lives. All the same, the category of endeavour known as "natural philosophy"
retained certain fundamental features right through all the changes that
occurred during this period. From beginning to end, natural philosophy
involved God, whether Thomas Aquinas’s medieval God of an Aristotelian
universe or the God of the Newtonians, free to do whatever He wanted and
continually, providentially aware of everything in the universe due to His
omnipresence throughout all of (absolute) space--what Newton called God’s
"universal sensorium." Natural philosophy bred very few genuine
atheists in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, although matters changed
in the eighteenth. It would be foolish to see the
so-called Scientific Revolution as nothing but a straightforward product of
European expansion. The emergence in the seventeenth century of the infinite
universe of Descartes and of Newton, with the earth a planet orbiting a star
called the sun, can stand for enormous intellectual shifts in the kind of
universe that educated Europeans saw themselves as inhabiting. . . . European
learned culture, in regard at least to an understanding of the natural world,
had undergone a shift from a stress on the vita contemplativa,
the "contemplative life," to stress on the vita activa, the "active life," to use a Latin
terminology familiar to the humanist scholars of the period. "Knowing how"
was starting to become as important as "knowing why." In the
course of time, those two things would become ever more similar, as Europe
learned more about the world in order to command it. The modern world is much
like the world envisaged by Francis Bacon. |
