In feudal Europe, people belonged to the land and not vice versa. One was born into a station in life and was expected to fulfill a litany of communal obligations that went hand in hand with one’s inherited status. The Christian life was caught up in a larger drama. Space was perceived as a great ladder, a chain of being stretching from the lowliest creatures on Earth to God on high. Each creature was assigned a rung on the ladder of life and expected to serve those higher up as well as to provide for those below. It was a community where rank and membership were determined by heredity.
Examine some of the beautiful paintings and tapestries that line the church walls in Europe, and you notice that all of the living forms—animals and humans—ascend on a flat plane reaching upward like the great ladder of life that they are depicting. Absent is any sense of perspective. It’s not that the artists of the time were incapable of showing perspective. Rather, perspective was simply not part of the consciousness of the period. In a world where security is found in a tightly bound vertical plane, perspective is rarely considered.
The introduction of perspective in art during the early Renaissance was a revolution in the human conception of space. For the first time, “man’s” gaze turned from the heavens above to the “landscape” beyond. Perspective places the individual, for the first time, at the center of his world. We see the picture through the eyes of the beholder. It is through man’s eyes, and not God’s grace, that we view the world beyond. And everything in the field of view becomes the object of man’s attention. Perspective brings human beings into a new spatial realm of subject-object relationships. It is the beginning point for what the sociologist Max Weber would later describe as the “disenchantment of the world.”
The point is, the great cathedrals of Europe were not built with the idea of being seen from a distance. The very act of “placing them in perspective” would be to diminish them and relegate them to a lower status, making them the object of human interpretation. Rather, the great cathedrals were designed with the idea of fixing everyone’s gaze upward from the moment they walks inside, which is exactly what every visitor still does when they enter one of these grand temples.
Just imagine the change in consciousness that perspective brought. For early Christians, the world was thought of as just a temporary stage, a place to prepare for one’s eternal and everlasting salvation in the world to come. What counted was the community of believers, huddled together—as they are depicted in most medieval paintings—and awaiting the triumphant return of Christ the Lord. Perspective reconfigured human consciousness toward the horizontal world of the here and now and repositioned each human being to eventually become lord over his or her own earthly domain.
Perspective migrated from the canvasses of the Renaissance artists to the writing tables of pre-Enlightenment philosophers, where it became the main conceptual tool for remaking the natural world in “man’s image.” Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, wrote his two most important works,
The Novum Organum
and
The New Atlantis,
in the early seventeenth century. The idea of perspective figured prominently in his rethinking of spatial relations and man’s role on Earth.
Bacon was particularly hard on ancient Greek science, with its emphasis on pondering the why of things. The Greeks, he wrote, had not “adduced a single experiment which tends to relieve and benefit the condition of man.”
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Bacon was far less interested in contemplating nature and far more interested in harnessing it. He preferred the how of things to the why of things. In his master work,
The Novum Organum
, he outlines a radical new schema for organizing the natural world, which he called the scientific method. This new tool borrows critical insights from the artist’s conception of perspective. His method was based on the notion of separating the observer from the observed, creating, in effect, a neutral forum for the development of what he called “objective knowledge.” The scientific method, like perspective in art, put man at the center of the universe and transformed everything within his field of vision into an object for human expropriation. If the artist appropriated a likeness of nature onto the canvas, the scientist did roughly the same on the laboratory bench. Nature ceased to be a realm of awe and was reduced instead to resources waiting to be remade in man’s image. Armed with objective knowledge, Bacon claimed it would be possible to “enlarge the bounds of human empire to the affecting of all things possible.”
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Whereas the ancients viewed knowledge as a window to the divine, Bacon saw it as a way to exercise power over all of nature. By relying on the scientific method, nature could be “forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded.”
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Throughout his writings, Bacon emphasized the need to mount an all-out assault against nature. With the scientific method, he boasted that we have “the power to conquer and subdue” nature and “to shake her to her foundations.” The goal of the new science, said Bacon, was to “establish and extend the power of dominion of the human race itself over the universe.”
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While Bacon provided a methodology for organizing nature, it was the great seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes who provided the conceptual format for transforming nature into a resource. He found what he regarded as the Rosetta stone for deciphering and manipulating nature’s secrets in the universal laws of mathematics. He wrote,
As I considered the matter carefully, it gradually came to light that all those matters only are referred to mathematics in which order and measurement are investigated, and that it makes no difference whether it be in numbers, figures, stars, sounds, or any other object that the question of measurement arises. I saw, consequently, that there must be some general science to explain that element as a whole, which gives rise to problems about order and measurement. This, I perceived, was called universal mathematics. Such a science should contain the primary rudiments of human reason, and its province ought to extend to the eliciting of true results in every subject.
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Descartes stripped nature of its subjectivity and aliveness and replaced it with a rational and calculable domain. “To speak freely, I am convinced that it [mathematics] is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency, as being the source of all things.”
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The rationalization of nature, in the form of mathematical measurement, brought it a step closer to becoming thought of as a resource. John Locke, the English political philosopher, turned the final screw with his view on the worth of nature. For Locke, any question of the intrinsic value of nature was, to be blunt, bunkum. Locke argued that “land that is left wholly to nature, is called, as indeed it is, waste.”
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Locke contended that pristine nature had no other purpose but to be used by human beings to better their lot. He wrote,
Let anyone consider what the difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco or sugar, sown with wheat or barley, and an acre of the same land lying in common without any husbandry upon it, and he will find that the improvement of labor makes the far greater part of the value.
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Locke, ever the pragmatist, believed that “the negation of nature is the way to happiness.”
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He reasoned that as long as human beings remain vulnerable to the forces of nature, then security could never be assured. True security for Locke, and other Enlightenment thinkers, could be achieved only if “man effectively emancipated [himself] from the bounds of nature.”
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The key to human liberation was the ever greater expropriation, accumulation, and consumption of nature’s bounty.
The mathematical rationalization of nature and its conversion to a storehouse of resources marked a turning point of great import in the passage from medieval to modern life. It doesn’t mean that medieval man and woman were unmindful of the need to expropriate nature for their survival. In Genesis, God instructs Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and gives them dominion over everything that lives on Earth. As we’ve already learned, in the late medieval era, Europeans increasingly turned their attention to all sorts of new technologies to secure an ever greater portion of nature’s largesse. Nonetheless, their spatial and temporal reference was still, for the most part, focused vertically on the passage to salvation in the next world. There was little thought of remaking God’s kingdom into an earthly cornucopia.
The rethinking of all of nature in mathematical terms had another, more subtle effect on European society. From the very beginning of human settlement, space had been synonymous with place. To be somewhere was to be in a unique place with its own history and story. Spaces were about places. By reducing everything in the world—and the universe—to abstract mathematical measurement, Enlightenment philosophers succeeded in effectively eliminating any sense of lived experience. In the new scheme of things, all that really mattered was location and movement. “Give me extension and motion,” Descartes exclaimed, and “I will reconstruct the Universe.”
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Henceforth, the very idea of place slowly diminished and eventually virtually disappeared from intellectual discussions, replaced by the notion of “location,” “site,” and, later, “point.” A place was merely a location or site, or a point of reference between other locations, sites, and points—all measurable. Successive generations were being prepared to rationalize nature, even human nature, as well as the institutions that govern human behavior and activity. The twentieth-century mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell once remarked that mathematics has “a beauty cold and austere.”
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Although Descartes was convinced that mathematics was the key to unlocking the inner workings of the universe, it was the Enlightenment philosopher, Sir Isaac Newton, who provided the mathematical formula for reorganizing the natural world.
Newton discovered the mathematical method for describing mechanical motion. He argued that one law could explain why the planets move the way they do and why an apple falls from the tree in the manner it does.
Newton argued that “all the phenomena of nature may depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled toward each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other.”
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According to Newton’s three laws: a body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion remains in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force; the acceleration of a body is directly proportional to the applied force and in the direction of the straight line in which the force acts; and for every force, there is an equal and opposite force in reaction.
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Newton’s three laws of matter and motion were greeted with enthusiasm by scholars almost immediately after they were published, and his mathematical model was soon being taught to students across Europe.
In the new world constituted by Newton and his contemporaries, all of the messy, spontaneous, unpredictable things of life are pushed aside to make room for the neat, orderly, and calculable new world of “matter and motion.” In the mathematical universe of the Enlightenment, there was no room for joy, passion, exuberance, empathy, faith, or sorrow. None of these qualities can be reduced to quantities and explained by mathematical formulas. The Enlightenment worldview of empty space and matter in motion was, in the words of the scientist-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless, merely the bumping of material endlessly, meaninglessly.”
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The Enlightenment philosophers’ concept of nature, with its abstract, rational, mathematical construction, seemed better suited for a world of machines than of human beings. Not surprising. The scholars of the Enlightenment fetishized machine metaphors in their explanations of the workings of nature. Indeed, Enlightenment philosophers were so caught up with the new Promethean power unleashed by machines that they began to construct a cosmology that, in its every detail, bears a striking resemblance to the workings of early modern technology. Descartes, and later Newton, had envisioned all of nature as a giant machine, run by well-ordered mechanical principles. God the benevolent and caring shepherd of Christendom was replaced with God the remote technician who created and set in motion a self-regulating machinelike universe that was orderly, predictable, and autonomous.
Enlightenment thinkers soon extended Descartes’s mechanistic worldview to the economy, providing a philosophical rationale for the commercial exploitation of man himself. Borrowing from the Cartesian metaphor,
Adam Smith argued that an invisible hand ruled over the marketplace, assuring the proper functioning of economic life. This invisible hand was likened to the mechanical pendulum of a clock, meticulously regulating supply and demand, labor, energy, and capital, automatically assuring the proper balance between production and consumption of the Earth’s resources. If left unencumbered by outside interference or regulation, the invisible hand of capitalism would run like a perpetual-motion machine, securing each individual’s autonomy within an autonomous, self-regulating economy. Even today, economists continue to view the economic process in Cartesian terms when they speak of the “market mechanism.”
In the new scheme of things, then, the invisible hand becomes the overseer and the marketplace the battleground in man’s war against nature and his fellow human beings. Detached, impartial, automatic, and autonomous, the new god governing the marketplace understands only the language of numbers. In its domain, all phenomena are reduced to commodity values: cost per unit, price per pound, dollar per hour, wages per week, rents per month, profits per quarter, and interest compounded semiannually.