The world as a picture

Power, before it paid

Newton’s physics changed how people understood the heavens, but for a century it changed almost nothing about how they farmed, traded, or fought. This is worth stressing. For its first three hundred years, from the 1500s through the 1700s, modern science was of little practical use. The payoff came in the 1800s with chemistry, electricity, and engines. It blazed in the twentieth century, and today it is everywhere.

But the type of science, this course argues, was fixed from the start: a science that seeks power. Two features define it, and this course borrows a book title to name them. In 1818 the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer published The World as Will and Representation. The title captures modern science exactly. One side is the will to power, the drive to master nature. The other is the world turned into a representation, a picture that can be measured and controlled. They are two sides of one thing.

Putting nature to the question

The will to power shows itself first as the project of conquering nature, and its first prophet was the English statesman Francis Bacon.

Natura enim non nisi parendo vincitur.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Francis Bacon, New Organon, 1620

To command nature you must obey it, and to obey it you must understand it. But nature doesn’t give up its secrets easily. Bacon wrote that they come out more readily “under the vexations of art,” that is, when human skill puts nature under pressure, than when nature is left to go its own way. Later readers heard in that phrase an image of interrogation, and the image fits. An experiment takes a natural thing out of its setting, puts it into a laboratory under unnatural conditions, and forces it to reveal how it works. The laboratory, in this reading, is a place of cross-examination.

Two later thinkers put the same idea memorably. In 1787, Immanuel Kant wrote that reason must approach nature not like a pupil who lets the teacher say whatever he likes, but like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. And the naturalist Georges Cuvier drew the contrast in one sentence: the observer listens to nature; the experimenter questions it and forces it to reveal itself.

The magicians’ inheritance

Where did the experimental attitude come from? The answer offered here is surprising: the natural magic and alchemy of the Renaissance. Alchemy had survived through the Middle Ages, now openly, now in hiding, and the church was never sure what to make of it. Its core idea was that human intervention can change nature, for instance by turning base metals into gold. In the Renaissance it became fashionable, partly because it seemed to work and partly because it fit the new will to power. Everyone of importance wanted to try it.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.

John Maynard Keynes, “Newton, the Man,” 1946

That includes Newton. The economist John Maynard Keynes bought a trove of Newton’s private papers at auction in 1936 and was startled by how much alchemy they contained. Newton suffered a breakdown in 1693, and tests of his hair in 1979 found high levels of mercury; some historians link the two, though the connection is debated. Alchemy’s goals were impossible. Its spirit, though, was the spirit of experimental science: change nature by intervening in it.

The world as a picture

When can nature be cross-examined? Only when it behaves regularly: put in A, and B reliably comes out. That, in this reading, is what a modern law of nature is. It’s a repeatable response to a stimulus, something you can operate with, not something to contemplate. And for the world to behave that way, it has to be treated in a particular way. It has to become a representation: an object standing over against us.

Make this personal. Think of your parents. In one sense they are the source of your life, people you are bound to beyond any calculation. But as you grow up you also learn to treat them as a situation to manage. You work out strategies for avoiding their rules, you bargain, you negotiate as equals. Both relationships are real. The second one is what representation means here. Humans are part of nature, but we have learned to stand back and treat it as an object.

How the world looks depends on how you stand toward it. Approach it with the will to power, and it becomes an object and a picture. Approach it gently, immersed in it, and it becomes your surroundings, the place you live. In a 1938 lecture called “The Age of the World Picture,” the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that the modern age is the one in which the world is grasped as a picture. Science produces that picture in four ways. It mathematizes the world, spatializes it, puts it on a clock, and turns it into a machine.

Mathematize

A world of endless variety can’t be controlled: grab one part and the rest slips away. The surest route to control is to reduce everything to number, to turn differences of quality into differences of quantity. Galileo put the idea in a famous image. God, he suggested, wrote two books. The Bible was written for ordinary people, in language they could follow. The book of nature was written for those who could read it:

It is written in the language of mathematics, and its letters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.

Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, 1623

Galileo’s famous conflict with the church can be read in this light. The quarrel was not about whether God exists. Both sides agreed that God wrote both books. It was about who could speak for God, the churchmen who read the Bible or the scientists who read nature. In 1615 Galileo quoted a cardinal’s quip that the Bible teaches “how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.”

Galileo also changed the question science asks. He would no longer ask why a heavy body falls, only how it falls. In his Two New Sciences of 1638, his spokesman declares that this is not the time to investigate the cause of the acceleration. Try Galileo’s approach yourself.

To make nature mathematical, change itself had to be simplified. Aristotle counted many kinds of change: a thing can come into being or perish, change its qualities, grow or shrink, or move from place to place. A face turning pale is a change; so is a mood turning dark. Modern science kept only one kind, change of place, and explained all the others through it.

Descartes finished the move. The essence of the world is matter, he argued; the essence of matter is extension, taking up space; and space is what geometry describes. So the world is whatever can be treated mathematically, and anything that can’t be measured is, to borrow the pun, “not a thing.” The ancient Pythagoreans had said that all things are number. Newton called his masterpiece The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). And today “let the data speak” is the loudest voice in any meeting. If you can’t put a number on it, people assume it isn’t worth saying.

Numbers work by making things alike. To add, you need the same units. So everywhere mathematization goes, it wipes out differences of quality. How do you quantify a good teacher, or a person’s character? The point is that we often try anyway.

Spatialize

Space used to be different everywhere. Chinese sayings still carry that older sense: 一方水土养一方人, “each place’s water and soil raise their own kind of people.” Aristotle’s cosmos had places with natures too: earth belongs down, fire belongs up. Modern science made space uniform, the same in every direction and at every point, so that any location can be named by coordinates. A place became a position.

Put it on a clock

Time changed in two ways. First, it became a line. The Greeks and the Indians thought of time as cycles. Chinese tradition held both views: “every five hundred years a true king arises,” said Mencius, but people also expect things to get better. Christianity, in this reading, gave the West a single line with a beginning, a direction, and an end, and from it came the modern belief that history moves from lower to higher.

Second, time became objective. In most of human history time was felt, not measured. It ran fast in good company and slow in pain, and a farmer’s time differed from a herder’s. The mechanical clocks of Europe, from the late 1200s on, made time an objective quantity that runs on whether you notice it or not. Now we buy watches and strap them to our wrists like the Monkey King’s golden band. We eat because it’s noon, not because we’re hungry, and we sleep because it’s late, not because we’re tired. We even lie awake knowing that time, and money, are running out while we sleep.

Kant summed up the new outlook: space and time are the frames in which anything we can know must appear. The conclusion can be drawn with a grin. Whatever can’t be placed in space and time isn’t a thing. A ghost has no location, so there can be no physics of ghosts, though aliens are fine. Neither can there be a physics of love, reverence, awe, or devotion. Things that mattered enormously to earlier civilizations dropped out of the modern picture of the world.

Turn it into a machine

Last, the world became a machine. Consider a parable. Walking through a desert, you find a flower growing from the sand and marvel at its life. A few steps on, you find a wristwatch. You don’t marvel that the desert grew a watch. You know someone passed by. A flower grows; a watch is made. The English clergyman William Paley told a similar story in 1802, about a stone and a watch found on a heath.

Almost every civilization, on this view, saw nature as the flower: an organism that grows by itself. To see nature as a machine, you need the idea that it was made, and Christianity supplied it. In 1605 Johannes Kepler wrote that the heavens were not a divine animal but something like clockwork. Early modern scientists pictured God in their own image: as a mathematician, a clockmaker, or even an alchemist. There is a wry twist here: China has adopted Western science and its worldview while leaving God out. It takes the parts it likes.

The conclusion

So what drove modern science for three centuries before it paid off? The answer here is religious: the desire to understand God’s creation and to glorify its maker. Without the Christian link, this course argues, we can’t explain why the new science took the shape it did. We can’t say why it was mechanical, why it was mathematical, why it depended on experiment, or why gifted people pursued it for generations when it had no obvious use.