Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution”
II
My contention here is, to repeat it once more, that the theoretical beginnings – what we may call the ontological breakthrough occurring at the onset of the modern age and laying the foundations on which the edifice of modern science was reared – was the all important event. To understand this event historically, we do well to turn our minds back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was a time not only pregnant with change but also conscious of it, with a will for it, and with the polemical animus that turns against the old in the name of the new and hails the break with the past. A sign of this spreading mood is the currency of the word “new,” which from the sixteenth century on we encounter all over Europe (and much earlier in Italy) as a commendatory epithet. That “novelty” is a recommendation is by no means the rule in the history of cultures; in fact, it was itself a signal and perhaps unique novelty. In the Graeco-Roman world, for instance, which of all former ages is most akin to modernity in so many respects, the highest recommendation for a view, a maxim, a truth was its reputed antiquity. The poets and seers of old, the sages of Egypt and Babylon, the myths of one’s own past or of the still remoter past of the East, were called to witness for the truth of contemporary teaching. This hardly cramped the style of intellectual innovation, as the allegorical method could extract almost any desired meaning from the veiled evidence of the past. [About the mainly “conservative” intent of allegory, see H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 91.] But novelty was no recommendation, rather the opposite, and its appearance was generally shunned. It certainly was almost never openly professed. This, and the corresponding appeal to antiquity, are found in many epochs. Even advanced civilizations, which owed their height to a history of bold innovations from their archaic beginnings, tended to hide this aspect of their genesis. Antiquity served as the stamp of confirmation on the value and truth of beliefs about the nature of things. The source of truth lies with the ancestors who were nearer to the gods and more attuned to the undimmed voice of the world. Their truth has stood the test of time; it has to be recaptured because they spoke in riddles; but truth itself is old and well weathered. Rarely before the onset of the modern age is novelty invoked in favor of a venture or a vision.
This changed profoundly at the time when the Middle Ages drew to a close. An increasing use of the commending label “new” for an increasing variety of human enterprises – in art, action, and thought – marks the great turn. This verbal fashion, serious or frivolous as the case may be, tells us a number of things. A weariness, even impatience, with the long-dominant ways of thought and life, an irreverent and revisionist spirit, betray themselves in the elevation of the word to an adjective of praise. Respect for the wisdom of the past is replaced by the suspicion of hardened error and by distrust of inert authority. Together with this goes a new mood of self-confidence, the heady conviction that we moderns are better equipped than the ancients – certainly better than our immediate predecessors – to discover the truth and improve many things.
The confidence that the new is more likely than not to represent an improvement over the old goes with a new appraisal of the ages of man. Up to that time it was natural to believe that in looking back into the past we look into a perspective of greater age and maturity. We latecomers are the heirs of more inspired times, the recipients of a wisdom so much “older” than ourselves. A strangely persuasive, perspectival illusion was at work in this belief: What comes to us from the remote past has acquired the superiority of great age by the fact that it has been transmitted for so long, and the age of the thing transmitted is somehow transferred to the source that produced it. It was a curiously startling discovery of the obvious when the sixteenth and seventeenth century moderns contended that we moderns are the older ones; that mankind in times past was younger, thus more prone to the errors of childhood; that greater maturity was on our side, and that we, taught and disenchanted by the errors of the past, are better fitted to tackle the questions of nature and man.
Thus emerges the novel evaluation of modernity as an asset. Instead of being depreciated as the lot of epigones, it is extolled as the chance for us to break the ancient idols and start mankind on its true road. A rising tide of distrust of historical authority, and indeed of all authority in matters of truth, joins itself with a confidence of contemporary man in his power to go it alone, and to discover truth and value by his own lights. This twin combination of distrust and self-confidence puts the revolutionary stamp on the movement of thought that started in its sign. The break with the past as such was partly overlaid by the enlistment of the remoter past of classical Antiquity, then eagerly rediscovered, as an ally in the break with the immediate past of the Middle Ages. But important as was the lesson of pre-Christian, secular Antiquity in the early stages (and much that was forgotten had simply to be relearned), in the end its heritage too was included in the general verdict on the past, and the great masters of the revolution, once it had become fully conscious of itself, could discard the crutches of the Ancients with sovereign disdain. “That wisdom which we have derived principally from the Greeks is but the boyhood of knowledge,” Francis Bacon said at the opening of his New Organon.
What is truly unique, however, is that the break was not a one-time event where innovation occurs only at the beginning. In all the other great breaks in history, among them the greatest of all, the irruption of Christianity into the ancient world, the authority of the revolutionary founders soon hardened into a new orthodoxy. The break at the beginning of the modern age embodied a principle of innovation in itself which made its constant further occurrence mandatory. As a consequence, the relation of each phase to its own preceding past – itself a phase of the revolution – remained that of critique and overcoming for the sake of further advance. In the sign of permanent progress, all history becomes what Nietzsche later called “critical history.” This, as we have suggested, may be a kind of “orthodoxy” itself, that is, a settled routine, but it surely is a very dialectical kind. It made the revolution permanent, irrespective of whether its agents were still revolutionaries.