La gestión del riesgo como concepto

Natural philosophy and the beginnings of scientific thought

The theological controversies that resulted in the sixteenth century as the Protestant Reform spread in Western Europe continued in the late Renaissance, amidst some developments that led to the rise of modern science. This was also the time when natural philosophy contributed to the ongoing debate in moral philosophy and theology, as various thinkers increasingly focussed on the relation between human beings, their powers of reason and volition, and how these could in turn be

conceptualised in a scheme that accommodated both ‘human nature’ in its fullness, the physical world and the belief in the nature and goodness of God, or the divine.

The most original natural philosopher of the late Renaissance was probably Giordano Bruno, and his influence was felt not only by the Cambridge Platonists, but it is also visible in Spinoza, Leibniz, Bonnet and others, as well as in the romantic idealism of Goethe, Lessing, Schelling, and Coleridge. Bruno’s most fundamental idea is that God is not only transcendent, but immanent - above Nature but also in Nature. He believed that the universe is an animated whole, permeated throughout by the infinite

power of God, and that all matter is infused with living souls, energising and

constructing all the possibilities of nature. The goal of human existence, according to Bruno, is knowledge, and he aimed to know God through an understanding of Nature, and thus to get beneath the surface of things to their physical and metaphysical core. Through intellectual understanding, he thought, we can come to experience God within ourselves, and ultimately, we can even become one with God.196

Bruno’s radical thinking challenged the doctrine of the Eucharist, and the Council of Trent dogmatically interpreted his ideas in terms of Aristotelian physics. Although he defended his views by invoking the notion of the ‘double truth’, Bruno was in the end found guilty of heresy and burnt at the stake.197

Following in Bruno’s path, the thirst for naturalistic knowledge and understanding that Renaissance humanism had brought in its wake did not diminish the aspirations of human beings to reach out beyond their immediate physical surroundings. The notions that had underpinned Aristotelian physics also led to conceive of the universe as a whole as well as many of its parts as some sort of conscious mind trying to attain some purposeful goal. A new view of the physical world that regarded natural objects as machines and sought to figure out how they worked came to replace Aristotelian notions. In this new theory, the universe is conceptualised as consisting of parts of an efficient machine, functioning like the mechanism of a clock. Henceforth, the entire natural world, eventually including humans, would be portrayed in a different way.198

This new mechanistic view of the world removed talk of ends, or final causes, from the science of nature and consigned it to theology and to theories of human

consciousness. As the relation of human consciousness to the rest of nature was seen in a new light, this also raised new questions, whose answers would impact

profoundly in our understanding of this complex aspect of ‘human nature.’

196

Raymond Martin and John Barresi., 2006, pp.118-19

197

The historian Frances Yates gives a fascinating account of Bruno’s life, from his training as a Dominican in the convent in Naples, to the publication of his first book on memory, De umbris idearum (Shadows) in Paris in 1582, with a dedication to the French king Henri III, and a promise in its opening words to reveal a Hermetic secret. The purpose of this book, as in all of Bruno’s writings, was apparently to convey his Hermetic religious message within the framework of the art of memory. His reputation had already spread in Frankfurt, but when he came back to Venice, Bruno was promptly seized by the Inquisition, imprisoned and subsequently put to death at the stake. (Yates, F., 1966/1992, The Art of Memory, pp.197-99)

Metaphysics, epistemology and religion had up until now been seen as part of one scientific mode of enquiry, but from now on they would became separate domains from science, making possible the beginning of modern scientific experimentation and discovery. No one illustrates this new empiricism better than Francis Bacon, a contemporary of both Galileo and Descartes, who inaugurated in common with these two other philosophers and scientific pioneers a new spirit of criticism and a rejection of traditional authority that lay down the intellectual foundations of what we can call modern thought.199

In his Novum Organum, Bacon’s exploration of the fundamental principles of scientific thought, he set out to show the inadequacies of Aristotle’s scientific logic that he had found in the latter’s Organum. He argued that Aristotelian logic, being purely deductive in character, provided no method for the discovery of new facts, but only a means of arriving at the logical consequences of what is already known. This classificatory system, Bacon thought, divided the known contents of the world without understanding the true causality that such a classification implied. He proposed instead his method of ‘induction’, the postulation of universal laws on the basis of observed instances. With this method, he hoped to promote the ‘true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty.’200

Bacon criticised the theory of final causes that says that the cause of an event might be found in its purpose, putting forward instead the notion of causality as ‘the

generation of one thing from another, in accordance with underlying laws of nature.’ He argued that science must always aim at greater and greater universals and

abstraction, so ascending ‘the ladder of the intellect.’ His conception of science as the formulation of quantitative laws was shortly to gain intellectual ascendancy in the wake of the discoveries of Galileo and Harvey. Bacon firmly believed that knowledge is power, and his utopian New Atlantis shows his interest in the use of knowledge to improve the material conditions of human life. The impact of his theories, however, would not be felt until philosophy had undergone a radical convulsion, and this would only happen in the wake of Cartesianism, once Descartes had declared that all of

199

Sir Francis Bacon, subsequently Viscount St. Albans and Lord Chancellor of England, was, as Scruton tells us, a polymath and scholar of the highest order, and his Essays alone make him ‘one of the great stylists of the English language.’ (Roger Scruton, 2005, pp.23-24)

philosophy’s results were without foundation until its premises could be agreed, together with a method whereby to advance from them.201

Around the time when Bacon was putting forward his own objections to Aristotle, Galileo Galilei was busy proposing his own theory of revolutionary astronomy. For this theory, following Copernicus, he ended up persecuted by the Catholic Inquisition. His account showed that the earth rotates around the sun, which was precisely the opposite of what the Church had always taught, profoundly challenging the

established conventions of Christian belief which until then had human beings at the centre of God’s universe. Galileo’s scientific spirit also led him to attempt to explain the distinctions between objectively observed primary qualities and secondary qualities, such as taste, perceived colour, and the many other subjective experiences that are not found through observation of the external world.202

As a product of the mechanistic age in which he lived, and preoccupied with the general laws of nature, Galileo did not believe that scientific enquiry should be concerned with anything that could not be expressed mathematically, stating that we cannot ‘read the Book of Nature’ unless we understand the language in which it is written. For him, the symbols of this language were ‘triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures’, without which ‘it is impossible to comprehend a word’,

wandering in vain through a dark labyrinth.203 One of his contemporaries, Descartes, a brilliant mathematician and philosopher, was around the same time equally busy trying to illuminate the dark labyrinth within his mind, where he would find plenty of room for subjectivity, as we shall see in the next chapter of this thesis.

** **

Our narrative has so far followed the many tangled and often rival perspectives concerning our ‘human nature’ that became enmeshed as Christianity came to prevail in European thought. In the poietic flow that traces human aspirations for fulfilment from classical antiquity till the dawn of the seventeenth century, one aspect remains

201

Ibid, pp.24-5

202

With this distinction, he anticipated the notion of ‘qualia’, relevant today in the study of our subjective experience.

constant: the search for goodness, the incessant looking to our ‘human nature’ to understand what it is in it that impels us, or enables us to distinguish right from wrong, and the accompanying desire to realise our humanity. As Christian thought develops a mostly Platonic understandings of human beings, the Augustinian emphasis on ‘inwardness’ and the centrality of God’s love as the source of human fulfilment and moral guidance is enfolded into this story. Through the entire Scholastic period, classical ways of thinking about our ‘human nature’ are interrogated, challenged, and redefined, in a changing stream of conceptions regarding human life and the physical world in which humans inscribe their lives.

From a belief that humans intuit the good in contemplation of the love of God, the story turns to human reason, interrogating the freedom of humans to live a good life, as some of the Aristotelian principles are revived in Thomistic ethics. This paves the way for natural law - or ‘right reason’ theory - where right reasoning and right action are seen as dictated by moral conscience. Whether humans can see themselves as being free by choice, that is, as an expression of their ‘human nature’, or because divine illumination is what enables human volition is then debated extensively through the late Scholastic and Renaissance periods. Augustinian strands are then woven into the story that begins to question the teleological vision of man’s ends, as an ethics founded on reason emerges, following Aquinas’ moral philosophy.

The Reformation contributes another important turn in the narrative, introducing the idea of ‘human nature’ as corrupted by sin and only redeemable through unquestioned faith in God’s rules, through the power of divine grace. The stern Protestant beliefs are themselves challenged, or perhaps subsumed, in a new regard for the power of Nature and an equal desire to fully understand all the secrets that the new physics promised to reveal, while human beings also seek in the same rules that governed the universe the answers to account for their own nature. All these combined aspirations, these radical turns and detours can to some extent be seen as also inscribing the unfolding poiesis that this thesis seeks to advance: an enterprise that sees human beings as continually seeking to realise their inner nature, as they strive for personal and universal goodness.

science, together with Galileo’s heliocentric account of the Earth’s place in the universe, spelled the final dismissal of a teleological view of the cosmos and of the role of humans within it. Galileo’s challenge to established ways of thinking was born of optimism and reflection, not on culture, but on the implications of the new science. Montaigne’s investigations were motivated by the quest for qualitative knowledge of self; Galileo’s, for quantified knowledge of nature. This kind of self-examination, together with a mechanistic, or materialistic, conception of the world, set the scene for the Cartesian thinking that would change an entire worldview and mark the beginnings of the modern scientific revolution. As this change began to unfold, it gave rise to different understandings of the issues that had begun to occupy human beings, where the question of the hitherto universal conception of humans and what their ‘natural’ propensities and characteristics consisted of, took centre stage. Such persistent questioning would inevitably be mirrored in the analysis that would soon focus on the personal and the public divide and its consequences for morality - a distant cry from the debates of the much tighter-knit and well defined cosmos of the classical world.

Chapter Three

Reason and morality: From the individual to the common good

Introduction

In the late Renaissance, the more individualistic, person-oriented, relation to God that allowed individual reason, conscience, and free will to emerge, gradually led to an increased desire to understand the nature of human motivation and conduct. The question of whether one could follow one’s ‘natural’ inclinations, while at the same time practising the virtues required to live a moral life, soon began to be examined in relation to matters linking, and often opposing, one’s self-interest, to the interests of others. Concern for the ‘care of the soul’, an individual good, becomes linked to the common good of society, sparking debates on whether there is an inherent sense of rights and responsibilities in the individual pursuit of our own inclinations that is also compatible with living with other individuals in community.

The new spirit of scientific inquiry that followed the humanistic flourishing of the Renaissance resulted in radically new understandings of ‘human nature’, as the prestige of the natural sciences spread in Western Europe. With subjectivity and personal morality now regarded as matters of common concern to all, the poiesis of our ‘human nature’ takes a number of major turns. Our story follows some of these new understandings in moral philosophy, and in the debates that established the principles of a nascent political science, as the seventeenth century approached. By the end of the seventeenth century, natural and moral philosophy begin to shape the art of government and public policy, as attempts are made to implement the notion of the common good in a variety of political and economic forms. In the process, human motivation and self-interest are enmeshed in a wider conception, where personal and civic virtues are redefined and reconfigured for the good of the nation as a whole. The development of civil society then becomes a major preoccupation, as is the

determination of the norms and values that would shape the rising ideal of citizenship that was by now gathering momentum, first in Anglo-Saxon countries and then elsewhere in the world.

The extraordinary character of this century reveals the difference between the Renaissance, or second Enlightenment, as Grayling has called it, and the third

Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and beyond.204 This is also the time when the accepted views about the universe in general and about humankind in particular are challenged, as observation and reason provide powerful ways of describing natural phenomena and predicting their behaviour. New understandings of the rational grounding for human morality emerge as a natural development, or perhaps as a reaction to the mechanised view of reality and existence that accompanied the new science. In the midst of such a mechanistic conception of the world, Descartes begins his well-known struggle between a scientifically-trained orientation and a genuine desire to conform to the religious ethos of the time. Out of this inner conflict emerges the rational, modern subject, signalling a radical change in our thinking about the relationship between our mind’s rationality and the natural world, and one that would have profound implications for both science and philosophy, and our own

understanding of moral agency.

As norms of individual behaviour, enhanced by natural law, are extended to the public sphere in the nascent theories of political science and economy, Locke’s ideas,

grounding individual moral responsibility in human reason, empirical observation and general consensus, become greatly influential. The manner in which he regards human beings as persons with rights and responsibilities also comes to form the basis of the legal systems of many liberal modern democracies in the West. This involves a profound anti-teleological turn in the thinking about human beings, their rationality and motivation, in which Locke finds a reason in human consciousness that enables a person to think of him or herself as a moral agent with a distinct identity, thus

enabling moral responsibility and prefiguring the modern conception of a self.

Civic virtue is by then seen as a common good, important in promoting social harmony and effective government. The Neo-Platonic influence moreover, is once again a central element in Shaftesbury, who links his moral philosophy to Platonic notions of beauty, privileging aesthetic appreciation. Love, in both Shaftesbury and

204

A.C. Grayling, 2004, characterises the whole of the humanist tradition of the Renaissance as the Second Enlightenment, and eighteenth century thought and beyond as the Third Enlightenment. For Grayling, the First Enlightenment took place in the classical period of antiquity.

Hutcheson, has a central place, and is regarded in their ethic as the highest human good, and linked to a claim to knowledge based on the image of a universal ‘human nature’ where moral facts are to be derived from a kind of observation based on divine order and harmony. The epistemological turn that was involved in Hutcheson’s scientific account of human subjectivity, and his and Shaftesbury’s idea that our natural inclination to morality is based on a natural disposition to sympathy, is soon challenged by Mandeville, who nevertheless suggests a different way of

conceptualising self-interest to promote social and economic development.

A new sense of the value of ordinary life and of the place of moral sentiments to motivate human behaviour come to add around this time to the already complex picture of the individual and of society that is emerging, the combined product of both moral and natural philosophy. This is a picture where humans are increasingly seen as self-responsible and autonomous beings, with obligations to themselves as well as to others, while remaining part of the providential order of the world. This time of profound change is also a period that saw religious wars that tore Europe apart and