The Reenchantment of the World (8 page)

 

 

Because we ourselves live in a society so completely dominated by a money
economy, because the cash value of things has become their only value,
it is difficult for us to imagine an age not ruled by money and almost
impossible to understand the formative influence that the introduction of
a money economy exerted on the consciousness of early modern Europe. The
sudden emphasis on money and credit was the most obvious fact of economic
life during the Renaissance. The accumulation of vast sums in the hands of
single individuals, like the Medici, gave capital a magical quality, the
more so as the increasingly popular sale of indulgences brought entry into
heaven under its sway. Salvation had literally been the goal of Christian
life; now, since it could be purchased, money was. This penetration of
finance into the very core of Christianity could not help but rupture
the Thomistic synthesis. The German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that
the money economy "created the ideal of exact numerical calculation,"
and that the "mathematically exact interpretation of the cosmos" was
the "theoretical counterpart of a money economy." In a society that was
coming to regard the world as one big arithmetical problem, the notion
that there existed a sacred relationship between the individual and the
cosmos seemed increasingly dubious.7

 

 

Money's seemingly unlimited ability to reproduce itself further
substantiated the notion of an infinite universe which was so central to
the new world view. Profit, the crux of the capitalist system, is open
ended. A "capitalist economy and modern methodical science," wrote the
historian Alfred von Martin,

 

 

are the expression of an urge towards what is on principle unlimited
and without bounds; they are the expression of a dynamic will to
progress ad infinitum. Such were the inevitable consequences of
the breakup of an economically as well as intellectually closed
community. Instead of a closed economy administered in the traditional
mode and by a privileged group by way of monopoly, we now find an
open cycle and the corresponding change in consciousness.8

 

 

The emphasis on individual will which we identify with Renaissance
thought, specifically with the merchant-entrepreneurial class, also had an
obvious affinity with the new arithmetical Weltanschauung. The same class
that came to power through the new economy, that glorified the effort of
the individual, and that began to see in financial calculation a way of
comprehending the entire cosmos, came to regard quantification as the key
to personal success because quantification alone was thought to enable
mastery over nature by a rational understanding of its laws. Both money
and scientific intellect (especially in its Cartesian identification
with mathematics) have a purely formal, and thus "neutral" aspect. They
have no tangible content, but can be bent to any purpose. Ultimately,
they became the purpose. Historically, the circle was thus complete,
as Figure 8 illustrates:

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, even the notion of time -- and few things are as basic to numan
consciousness as the way in which the passage of events is perceived --
underwent a fundamental transformation. As Mircea Eliade points out in
"The Myth of the Eternal Return," the premodern conception of time is
cyclical. For the people of the Middle Ages, the seasons and events of
life followed one another with a comforting regularity. The notion of
time as linear was experientially alien to this world, and the need to
measure it correspondingly muted. But by the thirteenth century this
situation was already changing. Time, wrote Alfred von Martin,

 

 

was felt to be slipping away continuously. . . . After the thirteenth
century the clocks in the Italian cities struck all the twenty-four
hours of the day. It was realized that time was always short and
hence valuable, that one had to husband it and use it economically
if one wanted to become the "master of all things." Such an attitude
had been unknown to the Middle Ages; to them time was plentiful and
there was no need to look upon it as something precious.9

 

 

The new concern with time running out was much in evidence by the
sixteenth century. The phrase "time is money" dates from this period,
as does the invention of the pocket 'watch, in which time, like money,
could be held in the hand or pocket. The mentality that seeks to grasp
and control time was the same mentality that produced the world view
of modern science. Western industrial nations have pushed this change
in attitude to an almost absurd conclusion. Our cities are dotted with
banks that post the time in large electronic lights that flash minute by
minute and sometimes second by second (there is one in Piccadilly Circus
which actually tells the time in tenths of a second). From the seventeenth
century on, the clock became a metaphor for the universe itself.10

 

 

Clearly, then, one can speak of a general "congruence" between science and
capitalism in early modern Europe. The rise of linear time and mechanical
thinking, the equating of time with money and the clock with the world
order, were parts of the same transformation, and each part helped to
reinforce the others. But can we make our case more strongly? Can we
illustrate the interaction in terms of problems picked, methods used,
solutions found, in the careers of individual scientists? In what follows,
I shall attempt to demonstrate how these trends crystallized within the
mind of Galileo, a figure so central to the scientific Revolution. But
our understanding of Galileo depends in part on our awareness of yet
another aspect of the changes described above: the erosion of the barrier
between the scholar and the craftsman which occurred in the sixteenth
century. For many scientists, including Galileo, it was the availability
of a new type of intellectual input which enabled their thoughts to take
such novel directions.

 

 

Much has been made of the refusal of the College of Cardinals to look
through Galileo's telescope, to see the moons of Jupiter and the craters
on the surface of the moon. In fact, this refusal cannot be ascribed to
simple obstinacy or fear of truth. In the context of the time, the use of
a device crafted by artisans to solve a scientific (let alone theological)
controversy was considered, especially in Italy, to be an incomprehensible
scrambling of categories. These two activities, the pursuit of the truth
and the manufacture of goods, were totally disparate, particularly in
terms of the social class associated with each. Bacon's argument for a
relationship between craft and cognition had as yet made little headway
even in England, a country that, compared to Italy, had undergone an
enormous acceleration in industrial production. Galileo, who studied
projectile motion in the Venice arsenal, conducted scientific studies in
what amounted to a workshop, and claimed to understand astronomy better
by means of a manufactured device, was something of an anomaly in early
seventeenth-century Italy. Where did such a person come from?

 

 

 

 

It was not until the late fifteenth century that the strong intellectual
bias against craft activity, with its lower-class associations, began
to break down. The crisis in the feudal economic system was accompanied
by a historically unprecedented increase in the social mobility of the
artisan class (including sailors and engineers).11 At the same time,
scholarly attacks on Aristotle (and they were not typical) drew ammunition
from the history of technological progress, and in doing so lavished
praise on the now exalted artisan, "who sought truth in nature not in
books."12 The result -- and the trickle which began ca. 1530 became a
torrent by 1600 -- was a host of technical works published by artisans
(very much an aberration in terms of class structure) and an increasing
number of methodological critiques of Aristotelian-Scholastic science
based on its complete passivity vis-ŕ-vis nature. This new "mechanics
literature," which was written in vernacular tongues, became popular
among merchants and businessmen and was frequently reprinted. The
breakthrough of artisans, craftsmen, engineers, and mariners into the
ranks of publishing and scholarship, notes historian Paolo Rossi, "made
possible that collaboration between scientists and technicians and that
co-penetration of technology and science which was at the root of the
great scientific revolution of the seventeenth century."13

 

 

By and large, the artisan classes were simply asking that their work
receive a hearing, not seeking a theory of knowledge based on technology;
and those writers who did claim that technical activity constituted a mode
of cognition (Bacon included) were at a loss as to what such a merger of
theory and practice would look like. Yet the period 1550-1650, says Rossi,
saw "continuous discussion, with an insistence that bordered on monotony,
about a logic of invention. . . . "14 Technology was hardly new in the
sixteenth century, of course, but the level of its diffusion and the
insistence on its being a mode of cognition were novel, and these events
inevitably began to have an impact on scientists and thinkers. No longer
restricted to such devices as catapults and water mills, technology
became an essential aspect of the mode of production, and, as such,
it began to play a corresponding role in human consciousness. Once
technology and the economy became linked in the human mind, the mind
started to think in mechanical terms, to see mechanism in nature --
as Robert Hooke recognized. Thought processes themselves were becoming
mechanico-mathematico-experimental, that is to say, "scientific." The
merger of scholar and craftsman, geometry and technology, was now
occurring within the individual human mind.

 

 

The change in attitude to artisanry on the part of some scholars also led
to the rediscovery and sixteenth-century reprinting of a large number
of classical technical works, including those of Euclid, Archimedes,
Hero, Vitruvius, Apollonius, Diophantus, Pappus, and Aristarchus. Whereas
much of previous mathematics had been conceived in terms of numerology,
Pythagorean number mysticism, or even ordinary arithmetic, it was
now increasingly possible to approach it from the point of view of an
engineer. This development was to have an enormous influence on the work
of Galileo, among others.

 

 

We have seen that the Galilean method incorporated a denial of
teleological explanations (emphasis on how, rather than why); the
formulation of physical processes in terms of "ideal types," which
reality can be tested against by experiment; and the conviction that
mathematical descriptions of motion and other physical processes are the
guarantors of precision, and thus of truth. We saw too that Galileo had a
very practical approach to such investigations (actually, an engineering
approach), and that his method explicitly involved distancing himself from
nature in order to grasp it more carefully -- an approach that I have
called nonparticipating consciousness. It is perhaps no surprise, then,
that Galileo's particular intellectual outlook stemmed from influences
originating outside of the traditional academic framework. Despite his
various professorships, he was directly involved with precisely those
facets of the technological tradition which were impinging upon certain
scholars as a result of the collapse of the dichotomy between scholar
and craftsman. Rossi correctly calls Galileo the premier representative
of the scholarly and technological traditions, but it is the latter
that should be emphasized.15 With professorships at Pisa and Padua,
and contact with popes, dukes, and the educated elite, Galileo was
destined for an academic career; but in terms of orientation he did
not fit comfortably into such a context. Galileo had direct contact
with sailors, gunners, and artisans. Two of his mentors (or heroes),
Niccolň Tartaglia and Giovanni Benedetti, had no university education
whatever; another, Guido Ubaldo, studied mathematics on his own; and
a fourth, Ostilio Ricci, was a professor at the Accademia del Disegno
(School of Design) in Florence, a place that was turning out a new breed
of artist-engineer. All four of these men stood at the forefront of the
Renaissance revival of Archimedes, who had been as much an engineer as
a mathematician. Tartaglia and Benedetti were also steeped in technical
fieldwork. The former was the founder of the science of ballistics, his
book "New Science" (1537) emerging out of problems he had encountered with
the artillery at Verona in 1531; and Benedetti, an early Copernican who
vigorously criticized Aristotle and held that bodies of unequal density
fell with equal speed, served as court engineer at Parma and Turin. In
short, Galileo was unique in the early seventeenth century. He was heir
to the new mechanics, which had developed entirely outside the university;
but significantly, he himself was located in an academic setting.