Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution”
XI
Modern technology, in the sense which makes it different from all previous technology, was touched off by the industrial revolution, which itself was touched off by social and economic developments entirely outside the theoretical development we have been considering. We need not deal with them here, except for saying that they determined the first distinctive feature of modern technology, namely the use of artificially generated and processed natural forces for the powering of work-producing machines. In this respect, the steam engine signified a radical departure from all former methods of saving human labor through animal traction, wind, and water. Other objects were added to this initial one as the new technology progressed, and the sequence of its stages reflects to some extent the development of the physical sciences on which technology increasingly drew.
1. As mechanics was the first form in which natural science had emerged, so the first stage of technology ushering in the industrial revolution was what we may call the mechanical stage. Its products were machines made of rigid parts and powered by the mechanics of volume expansion under heat — thus operating with the familiar solids and forces and on the familiar dynamical principles of classical mechanics. Their predominant use was in the manufacturing of goods and their transportation. The goods were the same as those hitherto produced manually. Changed was the mode of their production and therewith the whole condition of human labor; unchanged at first were the products themselves, which were the conventional ones of pre-industrial society, cloth in particular. Yet, a new class of goods was added to the conventional ones: the machines themselves, which had to be produced, thus giving rise to a new, specifically “mechanical” and predominantly metallurgical industry.
One cannot say that this initial stage of modern industrial technology depended in any decisive manner on the contemporary condition of physics. Much of its apparatus was designed by craftsmen with little succour from science. James Watt, it is true, was a keenly scientific mind, and the inventions that went into his steam engine were the result of much theoretical knowledge and reasoning. But nothing like the advanced mathematical techniques by which Newtonian celestial mechanics had been refined at the hands of such eighteenth century thinkers as Euler, Lagrange, and Laplace, was required for the calculations he had to carry out. Generally, in the first stages of modern technology, the engineer was an empiricist with a knowledge of materials and of the broad rules of statics and dynamics, with no need for the degree of sophistication which pure theory had attained by that time.1
This changed radically with the coming-of-age of the two younger sciences of chemistry and electromagnetics, which all by themselves originated their own, novel arts of large-scale utilization. The respective technologies, springing as it were from Jupiter’s head, without the intermediary of any of Vulcan’s pre-theoretical crafts, were thus the first wholly science-generated (and henceforward science-guided) technologies in the history of mankind. They led, moreover, into entirely new direction of technological advance, with objects unanticipated in kind by the human crafts of the past. Opening up hitherto unknown domains for manipulation and possible artifacts, these new technologies became goal-setting rather than merely goal-serving: they made the very possibility of such goals known before even their desirability could be conceived, whereas all previous technology, whether stationary or progressing, had been in the service of familiar goals, and even the inventor used to work toward objectives always thought of and desired. Now for the first time, discovery and invention preceded not only the power but the very will for what they made possible — and imposed the unanticipated possibilities on the future will. Compared with this, even the steam engine had been conventional.
2. There is little to choose in point of chronological precedence between chemical and electrical technology as they arose side by side in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and we take chemistry first for mere reasons of theoretical convenience. Chemical industry, then, is in our survey the first case of an industry really originating from scientific discoveries; and in it, scientific and industrial-technological progress, hitherto apart, came together definitively and inseparably. Here for the first time the scientific laboratory and the manufacturing plant, that is, small-scale investigation and large-scale application, became parts of one intertwined venture — and by no means with unilateral dependence of the practical on the theoretical side. Increasingly the tasks of research were set by the interests of industry, and even when not directly undertaken in their service, the idea of applicability was never far from the researcher’s mind. In other words, scientific experiment here ceased to be a purely theoretical activity, and the hidden practical implication which its manipulative aspect always had beyond the cognitive one came to the fore.
This is not the only novelty of chemical technology. There is a significant difference between mechanical and chemical technology in the depth of man’s intervention in the working of nature. In the chemical stage, man does more than construct machinery from natural materials and use natural forces as sources of power. In chemistry he changes the substances of nature and even comes to synthesize substances which nature never knew. At first — e.g., in the dye, fertilizer, and pharmaceutical industries — the older idea that art imitates nature, reinforces nature, or provides substitutes for it, seemed still to hold. But with the advent of molecular engineering man assumed a more sovereign role, involving a deeper meddling with the patterns of nature — indeed a redesigning of such patterns. We now are in an age where by imposed dispositions of molecules, substances can be made to specification — substances nature might produce but in fact does not produce. Man steps into nature’s shoes, and from utilizing and exploiting he advances to creating. This is more than merely shaping things. Artificiality enters the heart of matter.
Also, technology here changes not merely the mode of production but the nature of the products themselves. With its new, synthetic substances, it introduces things unknown before into daily use and thoroughly refashions the habits of consumption. This is the general course of technology, which can be observed in its “mechanical” branch as well: starting as a labor-saving method with the multiplication of conventional goods, it later added machines themselves to the consumer goods with which men lead their lives.
3. The growth of artificiality is even more pronounced in electrical technology. Here the dependence on science in the very conception of the “object” to be dealt with is complete. The “matter” of chemistry is still the concrete, corporeal stuff of our natural experience; and chemical practice has at least a pre-scientific forerunner in all the combining, refining, and other processing of natural substances which had been practiced as far back as pottery, metallurgy, and wine-making go in the history of mankind. Also, scientific chemistry evolved in an intimate, reciprocal relationship of theoretical and practical progress. By contrast, there just was no experience of such a thing as electricity, let alone any dealing with it, before science discovered and investigated it; and even then utilization had to wait until theory was to all intents and purposes complete. The mere technique of the generation, distribution, and kinetic transformation of electrical power calls for the full armor of sophisticated theory. Electrical technology is thus the first that was wholly and unilaterally science-generated. Its industrial purpose, to be sure, was originally no different from that of the first, “mechanical” stage of modern technology represented by the steam engine: to supply motive power for the propulsion of machines.2 But whereas heat and steam are familiar objects of sensuous experience, and their force is bodily displayed in nature, electricity is an abstract entity, disembodied, immaterial, unseen;3 and to all practical intents, viz., as a manipulable force, it is entirely an artificial creation of man.
4. The height of abstraction is reached in the passage from electric to electronic technology, where purpose changes as well. In terms of technique, it is the difference between high and low tension engineering; in terms of purpose, the difference between power and communication engineering. In its theoretical as well as its practical aspects electronics marks a genuinely new phase of the scientific-technological revolution. Compared with its subtlety, as also the delicacy of its apparatus, everything which came before seems crude — and almost “natural.” To “imitate nature” had been one of the watchwords of the early pioneers. When Leonardo grappled with the problem of human flight, when Bacon envisaged nature “commanded by being obeyed,” when Descartes spoke of machines yet to be invented — they liked to think of this as a systematic imitation of nature by man (of her methods, to be sure, not her products). As the technological revolution progresses with an ever increasing artificiality of its means as well as its ends, the image becomes more and more obsolete. To appreciate the point, take a look at the man-made satellites now in orbit. In one sense, they are indeed an imitation of celestial mechanics — Newton’s laws finally verified by cosmic experiment: astronomy, for millenia the most purely contemplative of the physical sciences, turned into a practical art! Yet, astonishing as it is, the astronomic “imitation,” with all the power and finesse of techniques that went into it, is the least interesting aspect of those entities. Their true interest lies in the instruments they carry through the voids of space — and there is nothing in all nature which even remotely foreshadows the kind of things that now ride the heavenly spheres. Man’s imitative “practical astronomy” merely provides the vehicle for something else with which he sovereignty passes beyond all the models and usages of known nature. Electronics indeed creates a range of objects imitating nothing and progressively added to by pure invention. And no less invented are the ends which they serve. Power engineering and chemistry for the most part still answered to the natural needs of man: for food, clothing, shelter, locomotion, and so forth.
Communication engineering answers to needs of information and control solely created by the civilization itself which made this technology possible and, once started, imperative. The novelty of the means continues to engender no less novel ends — both becoming as necessary to the functioning of the civilization that spawned them as they would have been redundant for any former one. Computers or radars would have been condemned to idleness had they somehow been dropped into the world of only one hundred years ago. Today’s world can no longer do without them.
Compared with the extreme artificiality of our technologically constituted, electronically integrated environment and corresponding habits, the Greek polis — this supreme work of collective “art” wrested from nature in the first flowering of Western man — has almost the naturalness and intimacy of an organic fact. For this reason, alas, its wisdom is lost to us and its paradigm no longer valid. Technology is stronger than politics. It has become what Napoleon said politics was: destiny.
Anyone who has admired Thomas Telford’s (1757-1834) magnificent suspension bridge across the Menai Straits in Wales (begun in 1820), and then learns how little theory and scientific calculation went into its construction, must be struck by the relative independence, at this stage, of bold technological achievement from scientific underpinning. ↩
Electricity is itself generated by motive power, whose original source again is either heat, conventionally produced by the burning of fossil fuels, or the gravity of water, whose level differential in turn stems from solar heat: from these primitive forms of physical activity, heat and motion, electricity is derived, and into them it is reconverted when doing work. It is thus an artificially interposed link in the chain of energy transformations and not yet an aboriginal source of power (which it may yet become). Since also the fossil fuels are stored-up solar energy, this is still today the ultimate source of all the power that runs our tellurian technology. Atomic energy is just beginning to make a dent in this monopoly. Up to now, in its non-explosive use, it reaches the desired electrical stage still via the primitive, intermediate stage of heat and the mechanical power generated by it; but this need not be the last word in power technology. ↩
This created amusing legal problems at first, and special legislation had to be enacted to bring the tapping of power lines, where no corporeal object is carried away, under the concept of “theft.” ↩