Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution”
X
It is a common misconception that the evolutions of modern science and modern technology went hand in hand. The truth is that the great, theoretical breakthrough to modern science occurred in the seventeenth century, while the breakthrough of mature science into technology, and thereby the rise of modern, science-infused technology itself, happened in the nineteenth century. What happened in between?
The question involves the impact which science may have had on technology or vice versa. Let us begin with mechanics, the oldest branch of modern science. As a theory, it meant preeminently celestial mechanics, with such very general terrestrial applications as the understanding of free fall, ballistic trajectories, and the like — in short, phenomena exemplifying the general laws of motion. As to man-made machines, their example was used in theoretical discourse to illustrate cosmic (and sometimes biological) mechanics: but the theory of cosmic mechanics was not used for the designing of machines. Descartes, for the purpose of illustrating matters of theory, showed particular interest in automata. Such as existed in his time were not for work but for the amusement of court society, the one exception being clocks, the favorite example in certain deterministic speculations and later in the description of the whole universe. The clock also was the first case where findings of the new theory of mechanics were applied to the improvement of an existing, practically important mechanism (in the introduction of the pendulum by Huyghens). This was technologically applied theory, but the mechanism in question itself is for a cognitive purpose, viz., measuring time, and not for performing work. The same goes for most of the inventions closely related to the progress of knowledge, notably the optical instruments, which were for rather than from the progress of scientific theory. All instruments of this class — chronometers, telescopes, microscopes, to which may be added the compass — whether used in the furtherance of theory or for practical ends, were in themselves “theoretical” rather than “practical” implements in that their function was cognitive, and not that of effecting physical change.1 Only gunpowder, among the crucial technical innovations of the modern beginnings, falls into the latter class, and its “invention,” like that of the compass, was entirely “unscientific”; both found their theories only centuries later. For the long first phase of the growth and perfection of classical mechanics, it generally holds that the artificial that happened to be there served to further the understanding of the natural, and not the scientifically understood natural to promote the inventive expansion of the artificial.2
What is true for mechanics holds even more for the younger and more slowly evolving branches of natural science. The investigation of magnetism and electricity, with all its theoretical progress, remained entirely non-practical until the second half of the nineteenth century. (The only practical application before that was Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod.) Thermodynamics, far from influencing the initial evolution of thermal machines, had to wait for their arrival to come into being — vide the persistence of the search for a perpetuum mobile into the nineteenth century. And the steadily growing sciences of zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, had in nobody’s mind any conceivable technological application: they were descriptive, classificatory, and historical. Only when the first two were by geneticism transformed from morphological into causal systems and subsumed under the norms of classical mechanics (in a bold extension of its terms), could the idea of a science-informed biological technology arise. This is happening just now, in the latter half of our twentieth century. Any field of natural knowledge, so it seems, has to be assimilated to physics before it becomes amenable to a scientific technology. Thus for chemistry too, its nineteenth century transformation into a branch of physics was required to set a systematic chemical technology afoot. Medicine alone, and naturally, was always an intimate fusion of theory and practice, and the increasingly scientific inquiries into the human body were never undertaken without regard to their use in the art of healing (and indeed never by other than medical men). To the extent, then, that medicine can be called a “technology” (a moot point), evolving modern medicine would be the first case of a scientific technology.3
The last, somewhat special case apart, we may sum up that science did not significantly inspire technology before the nineteenth century, while receiving some help from it in the form of investigative instruments. Technology itself moved forward in those centuries on its own. It had been making strides since the Middle Ages and continued to do so without the aid of science. Wind- and watermills, improved sailing vessels and sailing techniques, compass, loom, gunpowder, canon, metal alloys, deep mining, porcelain — inventions were made in many fields before and after the advent of the new physics, with little if any impact of this event on the rate and kind of inventions. Engineering regained and then surpassed the level it had reached in later Roman times, and a general machine-consciousness developed (wonderfully and precociously displayed by Leonardo da Vinci) unknown to the ancient counterpart. But not before the industrial revolution did the alliance of science and technology — of the knowledge of nature and the art of invention — come about which Leonardo and Bacon had anticipated.
Bacon’s is a classical case of the combination of prescience and blissful ignorance which seems to be necessary for mortal man to entertain a grand vision. His vision was that the new knowledge of nature will make man master over his environment. Bacon’s grasp of the nature of this knowledge itself, untouched by the spirit of Galilean analysis, was strangely imperfect, and his own prescriptions would never have led to the results he expected from them. Yet, in a kind of prophetic anticipation of what was to come much later, he proclaimed that knowledge is power, and that it is the aim of knowledge to advance man’s earthly estate, to conquer human “necessity and misery” by subjecting nature to his more complete use. With this vision went the belief that man’s power over nature would end men’s power over men, as this would become redundant through the wealth which conquered nature would yield for all. Bacon is thus the first of a new breed of philosophers (the, philosophes) whose optimistic creed — the creed of progress — challenged the pessimistic wisdom of all previous philosophy and religion. Some pessimism had always tinged the assessment of man and of the prospects of his enterprises by the thinkers of the past. Optimism, as confidence in man, in his powers and his natural goodness, is the signature of modernity. No pleader of a revolution can afford to suspect the revenges which nature — human and environmental — may hold in store, in the immense complexity of things and the unfathomable abyss of the heart, for the planner of radical change. We act blindly, and such is our condition that even the light of knowledge becomes a means of our blindness. We late-comers, tasters of the bitterness of the Baconian fruit, smitten with the wisdom that comes after the fact, may just be moving, with the burden of science on our shoulders, into a humbler, postmodern age. The science we take with us will still be that which Bacon, unsuspecting of the darker consequences, was the first to conceive of as a utilitarian tool of civilization, a collective enterprise of society, institutionalized, organized, split up into subcontracted tasks, its results fit for the production of wealth and the destruction thereof, for the furtherance of life and the annihilation thereof. Bacon, and the still naiver innocents after him, failed to remember the simple Aristotelian insight (with which the “pessimistic” Leonardo was still deeply imbued) that any science is of contraries — of the object and its opposite: if of good, then also of evil, if of building, then also of destroying, if of health, then also of disease, if of life, then also of death: from which alone it would seem to follow that only in the hands of angels would the power of science be sure to be for the good only. Even there, Lucifer comes to mind.
They were in fact called “philosophical instruments,” also “metaphysical instruments.” James Watt in his youth was apprenticed to the trade of philosophical-instrument maker (he later worked as a mathematical-instrument maker). There is a nice symbolism in the fact that the philosophical-instrument maker became the first maker of the new, non-philosophical, power-generating and work-producing machine. ↩
“There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. The barometer, e.g., (again a “cognitive” instrument) was wholly a product of scientific theory. Suction pumps anteceded and stimulated the science that explained them, but then the new mechanics, doing away with the honor vacui, benefited their further development; and it is similar with the whole field of hydraulics. This does not materially alter the main point that classical mechanics arose, as a purely theoretical enterprise, independently of a machine technology and in turn did not lead to one in straight course. ↩
Descartes, in his curious concern with health, had wished for this and indeed regarded the conquest of disease and the lengthening of life as the principal fruit to be expected of the new science of nature. ↩