Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution”
VIII
The plain picture of classical, Newtonian mechanics here drawn, whose prime data were nothing but mass and acceleration, was later, especially from the nineteenth century on, made more complex by the addition of electromagnetism, radiating energy, atomic valency, nuclear forces, molecular structure. Though a far cry from the simplification of the original “matter and motion” formula of Descartes, the more advanced scheme in all its enormously increased subtlety still adheres to the basic postulates of quantitative cause-effect equivalence assured by constancy laws, the linear transfer of given mass-energy magnitudes through the progression of time, and the consequent fitness of mathematical computation to all natural phenomena. For the foundation of the technological approach, which is predicated on these postulates, the original simplification sufficed to provide the essential condition. Its delineation therefore also suffices for our purpose. Let us further spell out some of its implications, speculative and methodological, which prepared the ground for the technological revolution.
The concept of the one, neutral, quantitative world stuff of which reality is essentially made is matched, so we found, by the concept of the sameness of the laws that govern this spread of bodies through space and determine their changes: one set of laws is sufficient for all phenomena. There are no different orders or classes of things calling for the application of different types of laws and thus for different modes of knowledge. The reduction of every type of phenomenal change to one basic set of laws means, of course, reduction to those laws which govern the basic level of reality, viz., pure matter distributed in space, bodies interacting according to their geometrical configuration. These laws are the laws of mechanics, and the idea of the world machine arises. It is to be noted that it preceded the machine age.
For the gain of calculability the cosmic mechanism paid with certain losses that are entailed by its negative aspects. Of these we mentioned the discarding of the idea of a hierarchical order and the denial of teleology. Nature is not a place where one can look for ends. Efficient cause knows no preference of outcomes: the complete absence of final causes means that nature is indifferent to distinctions of value. It cannot be thwarted because it has nothing to achieve. It only proceeds — and its process is blind. Its “necessity” is not that of compulsion but the mere absence of alternatives to the type of inter-connection by which all things operate — and by which they can be known. Thus the object of knowledge — the whole ceaseless drama of creation, be it the universe, terrestrial nature, or living things — is divested of any “will” of its own.
The regularity which makes it knowable makes it meaningless at the same time. With the last trace of anthropomorphism expunged, nature retains no analogy to what man is aware of in himself, namely, that one direction is preferred to another and that outcomes make a difference, some being fulfillments and others failures. In the working of things there are no better or worse results — indeed there is no “good” or “bad” in nature, but only that which must be and therefore is. Again Spinoza was the first to pronounce this pitiless truth.
From this follows that there is nothing terminal in nature — and thus no “results” at all, other than the stage just reached at the moment which we happen to consider. None of the formations that make their appearance in the ongoing transactions, no passing configuration more than another, has a claim to representing the appointed terminus of a natural process. Whatever comes to be has only the validity of happening to be the consequence of what likewise happened to be a consequence before. The solar system itself, which Newton still looked upon as a definitive, created order when he analyzed the mechanics of its working, was later (by Kant and Laplace) conceived to have originated by the same mechanics from some unordered primal state: according to the basic nature of the causality involved in its genesis no less than in its function, it represents not an achievement, a “realization,” but merely a dynamic equilibrium that has worked itself out in the long sequence of interactions among the elements. A different initial distribution of these would have resulted in a different solar system or none at all — and the overall system of nature as a balance of forces would be none the worse for it. There is nothing providential in the disposition of planets that in fact did evolve, and in that of the earth in particular with its suitability for life. Some configuration had to arise, and from the random concurrence of many causes it happened to be this.
Now this concept that all formations in nature are in a certain sense “accidental,” though “necessary” in terms of their causal antecedents, that there is nothing intentional or terminal in whatever arises, applies in the Darwinian extension of Newtonian physics also to the life forms, not excluding man. What holds for the structures and entities of inanimate nature: that they are the consequence of a history of aggregate mechanics that goes on beyond them to ever new configurations of matter, so that any given configuration is nothing but a point of passage to another and yet another, and none the expression of an idea at work — this pattern was extended by Darwinism to the sphere of the living world. There, too, a certain continuous mechanics operates, whose seemingly stable effects astound us by their complexity and functional subtlety; and among these unplanned products, elaborate beyond any justification of need, are we ourselves — we who harbor purpose, intention, preference, love and hate, joy and grief. But that which brought this about, us and all the other living creatures, is not affected by any of those feelings nor motivated by an inner direction toward them. No creative urge is satisfied, no aiming finds or misses its mark. It just so happened that in the protracted interplay of random mutation and natural selection there emerge forms upon forms, and the fact that man is among them is a mere oddity. Speaking cosmically and in terms of mere natural categories, there is nothing in nature, conceived as a great automatism of indifferent forces, which predisposed it toward this event, and no interest was invested in its coming to pass. Let us now turn to the bearing of all this on the fostering of the technological attitude.