Focus: Natural Philosophy and Instrumentality

The mismatch between common representations of “science” and the miscellany of materials typically studied by the historian of science is traced to a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced to early modern Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy came to be rearticulated (most famously by Francis Bacon) as involving both contemplative and practical knowledge. The resulting tension and ambiguity are illustrated by the eighteenth-century views of Buffon. In the nineteenth century, a new enterprise called “science” represents the establishment of an unstable ideology of natural knowledge that was heavily indebted to those early modern developments. The two complementary and competing elements of the ideology of modern science are accordingly described as “natural philosophy” (a discourse of contemplative knowledge) and “instrumentality” (a discourse of practical or useful knowledge; know-how). The history of science in large part concerns the story of their shifting, often mutually denying, interrelations. THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF “SCIENCE” T HE QUESTION IN MY TITLE ARISES from an anxiety that the history of science as a scholarly specialty is less obviously self-defining than it once was. This essay * Department of History, McGraw Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853. This essay is an elaborated version of the 2004 History of Science Society Distinguished Lecture, presented at the annual meeting in Austin, Texas. FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 3 (2005) 391 F O C U S therefore concerns itself with various aspects of the field in order to clarify what does or does not qualify the history of science as a legitimate area of scholarly specialty. The overriding reason for asking such a question is that, especially for those who work on the premodern period, it has become increasingly apparent over the last couple of decades that identifying some theme or topic as a part of the history of science is less straightforward than might once have seemed the case. For example, Isaac Newton’s activities included work in various mathematical sciences, in theology and biblical chronology, in alchemy, in parliamentary politics, and in running the Royal Mint. As arguments for the imperviousness of the boundaries between those areas of activity have become increasingly less convincing to many historians, a corresponding tendency has arisen to incorporate them into broader and more complete accounts of Newton and the meaning of what he did. That tendency, and similar ones in other topical areas, has made the history of science, especially for early modern Europe, resemble other kinds of sociocultural history. As our history has in many respects become better, it has also become less identifiable as being specifically the “history of science.” The problem has been compounded by other areas of work in science studies that call into question the whole idea of there even being something—a natural kind in the world— that corresponds to the label “science” at all. Historians have responded to these doubts by embracing the notion, together with its research agenda, of studying “naturalistically” ideas, practices, and institutions that have, through contingent historical processes, come to be established as what people usually mean when they speak of “science” and “scientific knowledge.”1 Rather than studying the history of something that we always knew in advance how to identify, historians of science have turned more and more to studying how that “something” itself has been formed as a historical object, with no permanent, transcendental identity. Everything thus becomes historicized and contingent, and the days of the history of science as an apologetic or celebratory enterprise serving present-day science have become, so to speak, a thing of the past. So the very category “science” has become historicized—and hence very slippery. The argument for having an academic specialty called “the history of science” becomes increasingly a pragmatic, locally situated one, rather than the expression of a particular scholarly enterprise that takes its special character from the peculiar properties of its subject matter. Long gone are the days when George Sarton could say that “scientific activity is the only one which is obviously and undoubtedly cumulative and progressive,” and his characterization of science as being marked by a series of discrete “discoveries” is liable to sound quaint to our ears.2 What, then, has happened to the scholarly specialty that Sarton attempted so tirelessly to promote, a history of science that stood at the center of what he called “the new humanism”? Should we, in fact, throw in the towel and admit that there is no specifiable kind of activity called science for which a continuous and identifiable history can be investigated? There seem to be several resources that can be used to defend the integrity of what historians of science, broadly speaking, are engaged in. First of all, the history of science is not at all unique in facing the kinds of conceptual problems I have noted. The field of 1 The term “naturalistic” has been used by philosophers of science for the past quarter-century or more to describe a concern with studying science as it is actually practiced rather than as an epistemological ideal. For a survey of such approaches see, e.g., Werner Callebaut, Taking the Naturalistic Turn; or, How Real Philosophy of Science Is Done (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1993). 2 George Sarton, The History of Science and the New Humanism (New York: Braziller, 1956), p. 10. 392 FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 3 (2005) comparative religion has to deal with the embarrassing fact that its specialists have come increasingly to recognize that there is no helpful demarcation criterion to indicate what should count as a religion and what should not, any more than there is one to distinguish clearly between science and nonscience.3 Art historians have long since ceased trying to define what “art” is; they simply do what they do—although they also turn more and more into social and cultural historians as they do it.4 One historical specialty that seems to be immune to such problems is political history. Political historians, no matter what part of the world or what period they study, seldom have relativistic nightmares about their subject matter. All they really seem to need is some kind of central control of a region’s people, and then they can look at how that control is realized, mediated, or offset by other competing or subsidiary structures. Perhaps their lack of worry about the nature of “politics” stems from a conviction that they know a state when they see one.5 Be that as it may, we historians of science are by contrast very selfconscious about our analogous conceptual difficulties. The former close alliance between the history and the philosophy of science may help to account for this, but to the extent that the history of science has always engaged in creating knowledge about knowledge creation, it probably would have invited self-reflection anyway. This is a particularly acute issue for historians of early modern science—as well as of non-Western science. Early modernists have learned to be very careful about the terms they use to describe the early modern enterprises they talk about. The first step, which seems to have been widely adopted, was to start speaking about “natural philosophy” instead of “science.” That was a useful stopgap, but it most often amounted to people saying “natural philosophy” but thinking “science” and then proceeding exactly as before. Several of the enterprises that we now call “science” were not in fact seen in early modern Europe as “natural philosophy” at all: some were “mathematics,” some were “natural history,” and so on.6 In practice, early modernists in the history of science do, chiefly, one of two things (or else a mixture of the two). The first is the study of the history of early modern cultural enterprises that have their own integrity, independent of the modern category called “science”; this involves engaging in a form of historical anthropology, of the kind practiced by many cultural historians of early modern Europe. The second enterprise pursues the history of possible antecedents of modern science—a much trickier approach and one that historians of science often try to avoid acknowledging, since we were all brought up to regard with horror something rather imprecisely called “whig history.”7 3 Most studies of religion in the history of science have focused on Christianity alone. For an attempt at a slightly broader canvas see John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler, and Jitse M. van de Meer, eds., Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions (Osiris, N.S., 2001, 16). 4 Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, trailblazers in this area, have both been notably important for historians of science. 5 A recent collection of essays that attempts to develop new approaches to political theory with the aid of ideas from science studies is Sheila Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (London: Routledge, 2004). Important precedents include Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990); and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1998). 6 For a discussion of such issues see Margaret J. Osler, “The Canonical Imperative: Rethinking the Scientific Revolution,” in Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 3–22. 7 The term owes its origin to Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931). One of the most thoughtful discussions of the themes that it spawned is Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant, FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 3 (2005) 393 F O C U S Nonetheless, the integrity of the history of science as a distinct field of scholarship might indeed lie in this enterprise of understanding the antecedents to, as well as the ongoing development of, modern science. In order to do that without falling into anachronism or teleological explanation, however, we must be mindful of some necessary tasks. There must be an unambiguous idea of what precisely it is about modern science that we wish to understand historically—especially for periods before the nineteenth century, when there really was no such thing as modern science according to the usual accepted historicist criteria. There must also be a recognition of the nature of those antecedents themselves, so as to ensure that superficial similarities to later developments are not taken as necessarily genetically related to them when they easily might not be. A particular set of themes that lends itself quite well to such an enterprise develops out of my own interest in early modern materials. These themes, in part, concern natural philosophy as a presumed antecedent to modern science. THEORY AND PRACTICE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE A notable feature of early modern taxonomies of knowledge is the pairing, both medieval and early modern, of the terms theorica and practica. This pairing, as a unit, applied to various areas of knowledge, but especially to medicine, astronomy, and music together with the other designated mathematical sciences (including fencing); it was also sometimes used for alchemy and for various other areas falling under the heading of “natural magic.” But the pairing seems not to have been applied to natural philosophy, even though philosophy as a whole contained a so-called practical part that encompassed ethics and politics. According to the standard usage, theorica concerned the technical apparatus of the science or art in question, such as how to compute planetary orbits in astronomy, or compound ratios in music theory, or talk about the humors in medicine; whereas practica was the part of the discipline that used that technical apparatus to achieve certain purposeful goals, such as casting horoscopes or calculating calendrical questions in astronomy, composing polyphony in music, or applying a cure in medicine.8 The fact that the pairing usually found no application in natural philosophy thus underlines a crucial point: traditionally, up to the early seventeenth century, the early modern category of “natural philosophy,” inherited from the medieval university legacy of predominantly Aristotelian philosophy, had referred to a specifically contemplative endeavor. “Whig History and Present-Centred History,” Historical Journal, 1988, 31:1–16; paired with Ashplant and Wilson, “Present-Centred History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge,” ibid., pp. 253–274. 8 The clearest way to get a sense of this overall point is to look at the use of the two words theorica and practica in medieval and Renaissance book titles. Robert S. Westman’s ongoing work considers this theme in astronomy, where the use of theorica is much better known by scholars than that of practica: see Westman, “The Literature of the Heavens and the Science of the Stars: Roots of an Early Modern Classification,” paper presented at the conference “Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science,” Madison, Wisconsin, Apr. 2001, esp. sect. 10, which discusses the dual categories as a feature of numerous disciplines. For an overview of the theme in music see Thomas Christensen, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 1–23. In alchemy, the notable example of Paul of Taranto’s work Theorica et practica is discussed in William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 69–72; and Newman, “Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages,” Isis, 1989, 80:423–445. In medicine, the theorica/practica division lasted well into the eighteenth century, and Thomas H. Broman argues that its echoes played an important role in shaping the emergence of a modern medical profession: see Broman, “Rethinking Professionalization: Theory, Practice, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century German Medicine,” Journal of Modern History, 1995, 67:835–872; and Broman, “Conclusion,” in The Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 1750–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 193–202. 394 FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 3 (2005) The natural philosophy that Francis Bacon and others complained about in the seventeenth century had been effectively defined as a discipline aimed only at understanding the natural world. It was not supposed to be about craft production or the deliberate creation of physical effects—the kinds of practices that counted for an Aristotelian as art, Aristotle’s technē. Natural philosophy was not, then, generally seen as having a practical part at all; by the same token, neither did it have, strictly speaking, a technical, “theorical” part, since the two categories were complementary. The content of natural philosophy was essentially and solely speculative because it was about understanding things, not doing things. On the basis of usage, it appears that just about any other branch of knowledge that related to the natural world could in principle be described in the terms of theorica and practica. Natural philosophy stood out as different simply because it was not conceived as knowledge to be used for practical purposes: as Rudolph Goclenius, the German author of a 1613 philosophical lexicon, puts it, for the Peripatetics philosophy is concerned with the behaviors and properties (disciplinis et habitibus) of things, excluding tools (instrumenta).9 Thus Goclenius explicitly excludes practical techniques and their uses; those are not what (natural) philosophy is about, and to think otherwise would be a category mistake. An associated feature of natural philosophy during the period of the Scientific Revolution is that it carried a certain intellectual prestige that tended to set it above most other areas concerned with natural knowledge. As is nowadays well known from the work of Robert Westman and others, formal disciplinary hierarchies in the universities and colleges put natural philosophy above mathematical sciences such as astronomy.10 However, it is also the case that medicine stood apart from both natural philosophy and mathematics, since it ranked as one of the lofty higher faculties in the university, even though, like the mathematical disciplines, it was a subject routinely conceptualized in the terms of theorica/ practica. Clearly, then, a discipline with avowedly practical dimensions did not necessarily hold lower, artisanal status—although academic physicians, as Vesalius famously claimed, still often disliked getting their hands dirty. The office of the physician evidently had enough prestige in its own right to offset the allure of the pure, intellectual, speculative character of natural philosophy.11 These observations set in relief one of the most notable developments of the Scientific Revolution: a restructuring of natural philosophy that turned it, in the learned European world, into a very different kind of enterprise—one where works, as Bacon put it, could act as testimony to philosophical truth and where the production of works was advertised as a major moral justification for natural philosophy. This change came to be expressed in the form of so-called experimental philosophy, and that notion of experimentalism, over time, did some very strange things to natural philosophy. Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) was the earliest published expression of his programmatic ideas, and it displays a particularly interesting strategy for handling the issue of natural philosophy’s relationship to questions of utility. In defining natural philosophy as a formal branch of learning, Bacon wrote: “These be the two parts of natural philosophy, the inquisition of causes, and the production of effects; speculative, and operative; natural 9 Rodolfus Goclenius, Lexicon philosophicum (Frankfurt, 1613), p. 828, col. 1. 10 The classic study is Robert S. Westman, “The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study,” History of Science, 1980, 18:105–147. 11 See the useful reading of Vesalius’s preface to De fabrica in Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Project of the Ancients (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), pp. 121–124. FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 3 (2005) 395 F O C U S science, and natural prudence. For as in civil matters there is a wisdom of discourse, and a wisdom of direction; so is it in natural.”12 Bacon thus attempted to represent natural philosophy, quite against its usual academic Aristotelian grain, as necessarily having a practical or utilitarian dimension. As he tried to justify this picture, he proceeded, artfully, to conflate two different things. He began by taking the scholastic notion of analysis and synthesis (also known as resolution and composition, or demonstration a posteriori and a priori) and explicated it in relation to natural philosophy in a fashion perfectly consistent with the standard late sixteenth-century treatment by Jacopo Zabarella. However, he did so in such a way as to imply that “effects” or phenomena were tantamount to practical uses of natural philosophy’s explanatory principles. Thus, shortly after the passage just quoted, he continued: Now although it be true, and I know it well, that there is an intercourse between causes and effects, so as both these knowledges, speculative and operative, have a great connexion between themselves; yet because all true and fruitful natural philosophy hath a double scale or ladder, ascendent and descendent, ascending from experiments to the invention of causes, and descending from causes to the invention of new experiments; therefore I judge it most requisite that these two parts be severally considered and handled.13 The standard view on which Bacon drew was solely concerned with the inferential motion back and forth between causes and effects. It had nothing whatever to do with putting natural phenomena to work; it was concerned only with developing causal explanations for phenomena. Bacon’s attempt at subtly shifting the apparent implications of this regressus theory was evidently a part of his general strategy to make his new program for natural knowledge appear to conform as closely as possible to received ideas and ways of doing things: “wheresoever my conception and notion may differ from the ancient, yet I am studious to keep the ancient terms.”14 Bacon’s artful conflation of phenomena with uses served potentially to open up new, different ways of promoting and developing a particular kind of natural philosophy—one that would be judged not on whether it successfully explained aspects of the world but on whether it could produce desired effects on command. Bacon provided labels and categories to create room for such an innovation a little later in the Advancement of Learning: “For as we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes.”15 12 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and The New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), pp. 3–212, on p. 88. On differences between Advancement and the later Latin version, De augmentis scientiarum (1623), see Sachiko Kusukawa, “Bacon’s Classification of Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 47–74. 13 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, p. 88. On this passage see also Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 99–100. A good overview is Nicholas Jardine, “Epistemology of the Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Quentin Skinner, Charles Schmitt, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 685– 711. 14 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, p. 88. 15 Ibid., p. 90. 396 FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 3 (2005) Bacon went on to reject the appropriateness of final causes for this kind of “metaphysic,” now understood as a subdivision of natural philosophy. Furthermore, formal causes were to be understood solely in terms of Bacon’s own definition and understanding of “forms,” which are, just as in his later work, inverted operational rules for producing those forms.16 Thus, taking formal causes together with the material and efficient, Bacon’s reformulation of natural philosophy aimed at providing detailed recipes suited for operational use, all without appearing to rock the boat of established understandings of natural philosophy. Bacon’s attempt to provide a respectable intellectual pedigree for operative knowledge required a passage through novel conceptualizations of the field of knowledge called natural philosophy. His convolutions in trying to invest practical, operational knowledge with the status and legitimacy of natural philosophy, however, indicate how far his was from natural philosophy’s usual profile. Bacon envisaged the superinducing of desired properties onto matter by mechanical means—“mechanical” describing here the sort of operations performed by a “mechanic,” or manual laborer; such superinduced properties were in effect driving out purely natural-philosophical entities—Aristotelian substantial forms were, after all, posited as ways of explaining things, not as ways of doing anything related to mechanical operation.17 Nonetheless, the subsequent growth of experimentalism in seventeenth-century natural philosophy demonstrated a reluctance, similar to Bacon’s, wholly to abandon the Aristotelian project. That the term “natural philosophy” itself continued to be used indicates that the goal of providing contemplative understanding of the natural world remained a crucial concern. The period’s “mechanical philosophy” was not, after all, actually very useful, despite its being couched in terms of particles of matter being moved around; it was chiefly a means of explaining phenomena. Another wellknown theme, physicotheology, provided from the seventeenth century onward a particular sort of understanding rather than a means of manipulating nature. Utility, instrumentality, had become attached to natural philosophy but had not usurped it. A typical example from the second half of the seventeenth century may be had from Robert Hooke. In the famous “Preface” to Micrographia Hooke extols the virtues of instrumental aids to the senses, detailing inventions and various other sorts of practical utility. There are also, however, moments at which he explicitly makes room for philosophical, contemplative knowledge, not least in the description of his very Baconian program as “experimental philosophy”: by eschewing other labels, such as “natural magic” or even (conceivably) “natural mechanics,” Hooke retains the speculative, contemplative, and above all intellectual trappings of a high-status branch of liberal learning, philosophy. At the same time, he describes the program that he lays out as “the Design which the ROYAL SOCIETY has propos’d to it self.” Hooke explains how the society’s great stress on the importance of the senses in the study of nature amounts to a melding of practical purposes with the contemplative goals of natural philosophy: By this means they find some reason to suspect that those effects of Bodies, which have been commonly attributed to Qualities, and those confess’d to be occult, are perform’d by the small 16 Ibid., pp. 91–94; cf. Francis Bacon, New Organon (1620), Bk. 2, aphs. 2–4. 17 On these aspects of Bacon’s thought see Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1968); and Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), esp. App. 2. See also Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), esp. Ch. 1. FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 3 (2005) 397 F O C U S Machines of Nature, which are not to be discern’d without these helps, seeming the meer products of Motion, Figure, and Magnitude. . . . And the ends of all these Inquiries they intend to be the Pleasure of Contemplative Minds, but above all, the ease and dispatch of the labours of men’s hands.18 The logical incommensurability between natural philosophy and utility is short-circuited by having natural philosophy speak only in the terms of mechanical tools: the invisible causes of various qualities and effects are taken to be tiny machines, scaled-down versions of those artifacts that facilitate operational, or mechanical, effects on the everyday human scale. The passage elaborates further on this theme: “They [the Royal Society] do not wholly reject Experiments of meer light and theory; but they principally aim at such, whose Applications will improve and facilitate the present way of Manual Arts.”19 Hooke, like Bacon, is trying to construct a way of having natural philosophy and utility as parts of the same enterprise. THE TROUBLE WITH MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES: BUFFON AND THE “SCIENTIFIC ARTS” European sciences of nature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries experienced the development of two mutually supportive, but analytically distinct, enterprises or “discourses.” One of them was “natural philosophical,” in the sense of its being contemplative and aimed at understanding the natural world; the other was instrumental and was geared toward the production of practical effects, whether to do with moving weights or improving agriculture. In effect, this period saw the establishment of a new enterprise, one that took the old “natural philosophy” and rearticulated it in the new terms of instrumentality: the engagement with the world that, in the nineteenth century, produced modern science was thus born of a discursive hybrid of these analytically unrelated endeavors.20 One prominent aspect of the dichotomy in early modern Europe, when it was still visible as such, took the form of the conventional scholarly distinction between mathematics and natural philosophy. The difference between the two was usually expressed in terms of causation: natural philosophy identified the causes of some occurrence or property, prototypically in terms of the four Aristotelian causes; while mathematics—meaning the mathematical sciences in general, including astronomy, optics, mechanics, and many others—referred strictly to quantities, regardless of the kinds of things whose quantities were at issue. Thus, if an object six feet high were called for, whether the object was a six-foot man or a six-foot sunflower was irrelevant; dealing with behaviors or characteristics that were determined by quantities and their interrelations ignored the natures of things and was not, therefore, natural philosophy. People such as Johannes Kepler took a different view, of course, and even the dominant conceptualization became confused by the advent in the seventeenth century of such hybrids as “physicomathematics” and by the appearance, late in the century, of Newton’s “mathematical principles of natural philoso18 Robert Hooke, Micrographia; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London, 1665), “Preface,” sig. g1r. 19 Ibid. 20 An earlier attempt at sketching this argument is Peter Dear, “The Ideology of Modern Science” [essay review of Pamela Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship], Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2003, 34A:821–828; the argument also plays a significant role in Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, in press). 398 FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 3 (2005) phy.”21 Nonetheless, the idea that there was a dichotomy, a basic difference in kind, between mathematical sciences and true natural philosophy—where the latter, unlike the former, provided real physical understanding of the world—remained for many people a basic presumption about how natural knowledge should be addressed. For a well-known example, consider Christiaan Huygens’s complaints concerning Newton’s 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: Huygens regarded the book as containing mathematics rather than natural philosophy, insofar as it described mathematically the motion of bodies in the solar system on the basis of gravitational behavior but failed to consider, let alone explain, the causes of gravity.22 This famous response by Huygens, who was certainly no Aristotelian natural philosopher, was founded on a categorical distinction between mathematics and natural philosophy that was still a vital legacy of Aristotelianism