The Reenchantment of the World Read online

  It was, however, in the economic sphere that the feudal system became increasingly nonviable. In terms of economic payoff, the limits of feudalism had been reached as early as the thirteenth century. Since significant capital investment in agriculture was not forthcoming, there existed an upper limit to productivity. This limit in turn caused a strain that was starting to transform peasant rebellions that had begun in the thirteenth century into a class war. In response to this threat, there emerged an enormous pressure to expand the geographical base of economic operations. New areas for the cultivation of sugar and wheat, direct access to the spices that could disguise bad meat, new sources of wood, and more extensive fishing grounds were all seen as necessary to the survival of European civilization. In addition, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 gave the Ottoman Turks hegemony over Eastern trade, creating the need for a non-Mediterranean passage to the East. All these factors contributed to the rapid ascendancy of the imperial program of expansion, and with this interest came a host of inventions that made such a program possible. The full-rigged ship appeared, better able to harness the wind. In the sixteenth century the English set cannon in portholes for easier maneuverability. Gunpowder, which the ancient Chinese had invented and used for fireworks displays, became the basis for the firearm industry. It was no accident that Francis Bacon identified the compass and gunpowder as the twin keys to naval hegemony. The first maps designed with compass knowledge -- the beautiful "portolani" still preserved in the libraries of major European cities -- began to appear, as did new models of the globe. The image of boats hugging the coast, almost a perfect metaphor for the tight mental horizon of the Middle Ages, was crumbling. It was now the age of Magellan and Columbus and Vasco da Gama. The expansion of consciousness, and territory, made the closed medieval cosmos seem increasingly quaint.

  Concomitant to, and directly following on, the Commercial Revolution was a series of developments which smashed the feudal system and established the capitalist mode of production in Western Europe. Commerce naturally began to influence industry. The Commercial Revolution, with its sharply increased volume of long-distance trading, broke down the personal relationship between guild master and customer. If the former were to sell to distant markets, he needed merchant help and credit. The merchant first obtained exclusive disposal of the manufacturer's output, and later began to advance the artisan money on raw materials. Eventually, the artisan fell into such debt that he had to turn his shop over to the merchant, who became a merchant-manufacturer, or entrepreneur. The same process that destroyed guild-master and journeyman turned the peasant into a wage earner. In fifteenth-century England, the rise of the rural "putting-out" system (domestic industry), especially in textile manufacture, marked the beginning of a shift of capital investment away from the cities. Peasants began to devote their energies to various aspects of cloth production, and the cloth guilds began to fail as a result.

  The Commercial Revolution also generated profits from trade which could be invested in agriculture and manufacturing. Some industries, such as mining, book printing, shipbuilding (which now employed thousands), and the manufacture of cannon, required great capital outlay from the start, and thus could not be contained within the narrow world of craft production.~ In some cases, especially when the product had a military use, the state itself became the leading customer. State arsenals, such as the great arsenal at Venice, the scene of much of Galileo's research, became major manufacturing centers in themselves. Military manufacture also had close ties to mining and metallurgy, which expanded dramatically in the early modern period. The application of water power to mining, and the creation of a new type of forge, made possible the casting of guns. A host of technical improvements for pumping, ventilating, and driving mechanisms was developed -- and illustrated in lavish detail in such books as Biringuccio's "Pirotechnia" (1540) and Agricola's "De Re Metallica" (1556). England in particular experienced both industrial growth and commercial expansion after 1550. She began casting cannon in iron (since she lacked bronze); introducing such industries as paper, gunpowder, alum, brass, and saltpeter; substituting coal for wood; introducing new techniques in mining and metallurgy; and squeezing the Hanseatic merchants out of the textile market.

  There was no way that the medieval Christian-Aristotelian synthesis could withstand such revolutionary changes, and if we consult the characteristics of the seventeenth-century world view listed earlier in this chapter, we find the counterpart to the economic transformation just described. Heliocentricity reflects not only the awareness that the universe is infinite, but also the European discovery of other worlds and the consequent loss of the sense of European uniqueness. In his "On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs" (1543), Copernicus cites the widening of geographical horizons as a major influence on his thinking. Turning to the category of explanation, we see that explanations of events are now couched in terms of the mechanical, and mathematically describable, motion of inert matter. Nature (including human beings) is seen as so much stuff to be grasped and shaped. Nothing can have purpose in itself, and values -- as Machiavelli was among the first to argue -- are just so much sentiment. Reason is now completely (at least in theory) instrumental, 'zweckrational.' One can no longer ask,, "Is this good?," but only, "Does this work?," a question that reflects the mentality of the Commercial Revolution and the growing emphasm on production, prediction, and control.

  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 b
e 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.