. . . May God us keep
From single Vision and Newtons sleep!
-William Blake,
in a letter to Thomas Butts dated November 22, 1 802
There is no better illustration of the instability of the cultural position of Newtonian science than the introduction to a UNESCO colloquium on the relationship between science and culture:
For more than a century the sector of scientific activity has been growing to such an extent within the surround
ing cultural space that it seems to be replacing the totality of the culture itself. Some believe that this is merely an illusion due to its high growth rate and that the lines of force of this culture will soon reassert themselves and bring science back into the service of man. Others con
sider that the recent triumph of science entitles it at last to rule over the whole of culture which, moreover, would deserve to go on being known as such only because it was transmitted through the scientific apparatus . Others again, appalled by the danger of man and society being manipulated if they come under the sway of science, per
ceive the spectre of cultural disaster looming in the dis
tance.4
In this statement science appears as a cancer in the body of culture, a cancer whose proliferation threatens to destroy the whole of cultural life. The question is whether we can domi
nate science and control its development, or whether we shall
be enslaved. In only one hundred fifty years, science has been
31 THE TRIUMPH OF REASON
downgraded from a source of inspiration for Western culture to a threat. Not only does it threaten man's material existence, but also, more subtly, it threatens to destroy the traditions and experiences that are most deeply rooted in our cultural life. It is not just the technological fallout of one or another scientific breakthrough that is being accused, but "the spirit of science"
itself.
Whether the accusation refers to a global skepticism exuded by scientific culture or to specific conclusions reached through scientific theories, it is often asserted today that sci
ence is debasing our world. What for generations had been a source of joy and amazement withers at its touch. Everything it touches is dehumanized.
Oddly enough, the idea of a fatal disenchantment brought about by scientific progress is an idea held not only by the critics of science but often also by those who defend or glorify it. Thus, in his book The Edge of Objectivity, historian C . C.
Gillispie expresses sympathy for those who criticize science and constantly endeavor to blunt the "cutting edge of objec
tivity":
Indeed, the renewals of the subjective approach to nature make a pathetic theme. Its ruins lie strewn like good in
tentions aU along the ground traversed by science, until it survives only in strange corners like Lysenkoism and an
throposophy, where nature is socialized or moralized.
Such survivals are relics of the perpetual attempt to es
cape the consequences of western man's most charac
teristic and successful campaign, which must doom to conquer. So like any thrust in the face of the inevitable, romantic natural philosophy has induced every nuance of mood from desperation to heroism. At the ugliest, it is sentimental or vulgar hostility to intellect. At the noblest, it inspired Diderot's naturalistic and moralizing science, Goethe's personification of nature, the poetry of Words
worth, and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, or of any other who would find a place in science for our qualitative and aesthetic appreciation of nature. It is the science of those who would make botany of blossoms and meteorology of sunsets. 5
Thus science leads to a tragic, metaphysical choice. Man has to choose between the reassuring but irrational temptation to seek in nature a guarantee of human values, or a sign pointing to a fundamental corelatedness, and fidelity to a rationality that isolates him in a silent world.
The echoes of another leitmotiv-domination-mingle with that of disenchantment. A disenchanted world is, at the same time, a world liable to control and manipulation. Any science that conceives of the world as being governed according to a universal theoretical plan that reduces its various riches to the drab applications of general laws thereby becomes an instru
ment of domination. And man, a stranger to the world, sets himself up as its master.
This disenchantment has taken various forms in recent de
cades. It is outside the aim of this book to study systematically the various forms of antiscience. In Chapter III we shall pre
sent a fuller reaction of Western thought to the surprising tri
umph of Newtonian rationality. Here let us only note that at present there is a shift of popular attitudes to nature associated with a widespread but in our opinion erroneous belief that there exists a fundamental antagonism between science and
" naturalism. " To illustrate at least some of the forms anti
scientific criticism has taken in recent years, we have chosen three examples. First, Heidegger, whose philosophy holds a deep fascination for contemporary thought. We shall also refer to the criticisms stated by Arthur Koestler and by the great historian of science, Alexander Koyre.
Martin Heidegger directs his criticism against the very core of the scientific endeavor, which he sees as fundamentally re
lated to a permanent aim, the domination of nature. Therefore Heidegger claims that scientific rationality is the final accom
plishment of something that has been implicitly present since ancient Greece, namely, the will to dominate, which is at work in any rational discussion or enterprise, the violence lurking in all positive and communicable knowledge. Heidegger empha
sizes what he·calls the technological and scientific "framing"
(Geste/1), 6 which leads to the general setting to work of the world and of men.
Thus Heidegger does not present a detailed analysis of any
particular technological or scientific product or process. What
he challenges is the essence of technology, the way each thing
33 THE TRIUMPH OF REASON
is taken into account. Each theory is part of the implementa
tion of the master plan that makes up Western history. What we call a scientific "theory" implies, following Heidegger, a way of questioning things by which they are reduced to en
slavement. The scientist, like the technologist, is a toy in the hands of the will to power disguised as thirst for knowledge;
his very approach to things subjects them to systematic vio
lence.
Modern physics is not experimental physics because it uses experimental devices in its questioning of nature.
Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, already as pure theory, requests nature to manifest itself in terms of predictable forces, it sets up the experiments precisely for the sole purpose of asking whether and how nature follows the scheme preconceived by science. 7
Similarly, Heidegger is not concerned about the fact that in
dustrial pollution, for example, has destroyed all animal life in the Rhine. What does concern him is that the river has been put to man's service.
The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pres
sure, which then sets the turbines turning . . . . The hy
droelectric plant is not built into the Rhine river as was the old bridge that joined bank wi'th bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station.s The old bridge over the Rhine is valued not as a proof of soundly tested ability, of painstaking and accurate observa
tion, but because it does not "use" the river.
Heidegger's criticisms, taking the very ideal of a positive, communicable knowledge as a threat, echo some themes of the antiscience movement to which we referred in the Intro
duction. But the idea of an indissociable link between science and the will to dominate also permeates some apparently very different assessments of our present-day situation. For in
stance, under the very suggestive title "The Coming of the
Golden Age, "9 Gunther Stent states that science is now reach
ing its limits. We are close to a point of diminishing returns, where the questions we direct to things in order to master them become more and more complicated and devoid of inter
est. This marks the end of progress, but it is the opportunity for humanity to stop its frantic efforts, to end the age-old struggle against nature, and to accept a static and comfortable peace. We wish to show that the relative dissociation between the scientific knowledge of an object and the possibility of mastering it, far from marking the end of science, signals a
host of new perspectives and problems. Scientific understand
ing of the world around us is just beginning. There is yet another idea of science that we feel is potentially just as detri
mental, namely, the fascination with a mysterious science that, by paths of reasoning inaccessible to common mortals, will lead to results that can, in one fell swoop, challenge the meaning of basic concepts such as time, space, causality, mind, or matter. This kind of "mystery science," the results of which are imagined to be capable of shattering the framework of any traditional conception, has actually been encouraged by the successive "revelations" of relativity and quantum me
chanics. It is certainly true that some of the most imaginative steps in the past, Einstein's interpretation of gravitation as a
space curvature or Dirac's antiparticles, for example, have shaken some seemingly well-established conceptions. Thus there is a very delicate balance between the readiness to imag
ine that science can produce anything and a kind of down-to
earth realism. Today the balance is strongly shifting toward a revival of mysticism, be it in the press media or even in science itself, especially among cosmologists. IO It has even been sug
gested by certain physicists and popularizers of science that mysterious relationships exist between parapsychology and quantum physics. Let us cite Koestler:
We have heard a whole chorus of Nobel Laureates in physics informing us that matter is dead, causality is dead, determinism is dead. If that is so, let us give them a decent burial, with a requiem of electronic music. It is time for us to draw the lesson from twentieth-century
post-mechanistic science , and to get out of the
strait-36 THE TRIUMPH OF REASON
jacket which nineteenth-century materialism imposed on our philosophical outlook. Paradoxically, had that out
look kept abreast with modern science itself, instead of lagging a century behind it, we would have been liberated from that strait-jacket long ago . . . . But once this is rec
ognized, we might become more receptive to phenomena around us which one-sided emphasis on physical science has made us ignore; might feel the draught that is blowing through the chinks of the causal edifice; pay more atten
tion to confluential events; include the paranormal phe
nomena in our concept of normality; and realise that we have been living in the "Country of the Blind." I I
We do not wish to judge or condemn a priori. There may be in some of the apparently fantastic propositions we hear today some seed of new knowledge. Nevertheless, we believe that leaps into the unimaginable are far too simple escapes from the concrete complexity of our world. We do not believe we shall leave the "Country of the Blind" in a day, since con
ceptual blindness is not the main reason for the problems and contradictions our society has failed to solve.
Our disagreement with certain criticisms or distortions of science does not mean, however, that we wish to reject aJJ crit
icisms. Let us take, for instance, the position of Alexander Koyre, who has made outstanding contributions to the under
standing of the development of modern science. In his study of the significance and implications of the Newtonian synthesis, Koyre wrote:
Yet there is something for which Newton-or better to say not Newton alone, but modern science in general
can still be made responsible: it is the splitting of our world in two. I have been saying that modern science broke down the barriers that separated the heavens and the earth, and that it united and unified the universe. And that is true. But, as I have said, too, it did this by sub
stituting for our world of quality and sense perception, the world in which we live, and love, and die, another world-the world of quantity, of reified geometry, a world in which, though there is a place for everything, there is
no place for man. Thus the world of science-the real world-became estranged and utterly divorced from the world of life, which science has been unable to explain
not even to explain away by calling it "subjective. "
True, these worlds are everyday-and even more and more-connected by the praxis. Yet for theory they are divided by an abyss.
1\vo worlds: this means two truths. Or no truth at all.
This is the tragedy of the modern mind which "solved the riddle of the universe," but only to replace it by an
other riddle: the riddle of itself. I2
However, we hear in the conclusions of Koyre the same theme expressed by Pascal and Monod-this tragic feeling of estrangement. Koyre 's criticism does not challenge scientific thinking but rather classical science based on the Newtonian perspective. We no longer have to settle for the previous di
lemma of choosing between a science that reduces man to being a stranger in a disenchanted world and antiscientific , irrational protests. Koyre's criticism does not invoke the limits of a "strait-jacket" rationality but only the incapacity of classi
cal science to deal with some fundamental aspects of the world in which we live.
Our position in this book is that the science described by Koyre is no longer our science. Not because we are concerned today with new, unimaginable objects, closer to magic than to logic, but because as scientists we are now beginning to find our way toward the complex processes forming the world with which we are most familiar, the natural world in which living creatures and their societies develop. Indeed, today we are be
ginning to go beyond what Koyre called "the world of quan
tity" into the world of "qualities" and thus of "becoming."
This will be the main subject of Books One and 1\vo. We be
lieve it is precisely this transition to a new description that makes this moment in the history of science so exciting. Per
haps it is not an exaggeration to say that it is a period like the time of the Greek atomists or the Renaissance, periods in which a new view of nature was being born. But let us first return to Newtonian science, certainly one of the great mo
ments of human history.
37 THE TRIUMPH OF REASON