Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution”
IX
What has neither will nor wisdom and is indifferent to itself solicits no respect. Awe before nature’s mystery gives way to the disenchanted knowingness which grows with the success of the analysis of all things into their primitive conditions and factors. The powers that produce those things are powerless to impart a sanction to them: thus their knowledge imparts no regard for them. On the contrary, it removes whatever protection they may have enjoyed in a pre-scientific view. The implication this has for man’s active commerce with the equalized manifold is obvious. If nature sanctions nothing, then it permits everything. Whatever man does to it, he does not violate an immanent integrity, to which it and all its works have lost title. In a nature that is its own perpetual accident, each thing can as well be other than it is without being any the less natural. Nature is not a norm (which to Aristotle it was), and a monstrosity is as natural as any “normal” growth. There is only the extrinsic necessity of causal determination, no intrinsic validity of its results.
Furthermore, if nature is mere object and in no sense subject, if it is devoid of “will,” then man remains as the sole subject and the sole will. The world, after first having become the object of man’s knowledge, becomes the object of his will, and his knowledge is put in the service of his will. And the will, of course, is a will for power over things. The heavens no longer declare the glory of God; but the materials of nature are ready for the use of man.
This is one train of reasoning that shows how the scientific revolution was intrinsically ready for the technological turn given to it later. Other, less spiritual and more technical aspects of the new science pointed the same way. I mention two, the role of analysis and that of experiment. The analysis of any complex phenomenon into its simplest geometrical, material, and dynamical factors is tantamount to finding out how even the most sophisticated natural entity comes about — is brought about — from the collocation of primitive components. But knowing how a thing is made up of its primitive elements leads of itself to knowing how one can make it up oneself out of those elements. The passage from analytical knowledge to making, i.e., to providing the requisite components and manipulating them so as to secure the desired results — the passage, in short, from analysis to synthesis is open on principle whenever the former is completed in a given case. And so is the passage from experiment as a means of knowledge to applied science as a means of use. Practice in the service of theory, which is what experiments are, is readily converted into theory, in the service of practice, which by now most of “science” almost automatically becomes.
Nevertheless, logical consequence that it was from the new scientific conception of the universe, foretold and urged by such philosophical exponents of it as Bacon and Descartes — in the actual course of history it took technology rather long to seize upon this momentous potential. Not for almost two centuries did the two streams join and effectively interpenetrate.