Nature and Modern Subjectivity

Nature and Modern Subjectivity

To set the stage and to create a critical context for our study this semester, I would like to start with a very brief and rough sketch of "Western Culture" at the beginning of the modern period in Europe. My concern here is with the ways in which scientific, artistic and philosophical discussions of nature -- the "external world" -- and the role of the human subject in nature reveal both a break with the classical and medieval past and, at the same time, a haunting of modern theory by various methods and ways of thinking typically associated with Greek philosophy and Christian theological traditions.

We can begin by noting that an emerging emphasis on the value of observation and description of the natural world in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe constitutes a break away from the scientific methods of dominant medieval scholasticism. But it was also a move away from the techniques of medieval scholarship which emphasized deductive analysis apart from observation and mathematical description of nature and human experience.[1] Since it was assumed by the scholastics that church dogma provided all the fundamental assumptions one needed, all that was left for them to do was examine the logical implications of their assumptions. Thus, the controversy between the supporters of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and those of René Descartes (1596-1650) in the Seventeenth Century would often turn on a polarization of extreme empiricist and rationalist positions. Descartes' position was interesting. While he wholeheartedly rejected medieval scholasticism, he retained the deductive approach to knowledge. However, when deduction led to more than one possible conclusion, he would be forced to resort to experimentation.[2]

The basic idea in the epistemologies of both Descartes and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is to find a foundation of absolutely certain facts. These would function as the axioms of a new philosophical system. Thus, what they rejected was not the deductive logic of medieval scholasticism as such, but the assumptions from which scholastic reasoning began.

But the break was more than metaphysical and scientific. It was a shift in a cultural model among progressive writers, artists, philosophers, and scientists which amounted to a new appreciation both for the world of nature and for increasing human autonomy within that world. Evidence for this nascent sensibility can be found in painting and sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for example in Giotto, Alberti, and Dürer, as well as is in the scientific and philosophical texts of Montaigne, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and others.

Charles Taylor characterizes this cultural shift in terms of a new conception of the self as a self-defining being.[3] Thus, an anthropological shift in the concept of the subject (or "self") accompanied a new epistemology which, as we have seen, emphasized the role of observation, description, experimentation, and mathematical reasoning. Aristotle's notion of a "final cause" (the inherent goal to which a thing is directed) was replaced out of concern for how things worked rather than for justifying their ultimate purpose in God's universe.

So, for example, in 1638 Galileo wrote that

The present does not seem to be the proper time to investigate the cause of the acceleration of natural motion, concerning which various opinions have been expressed by various philosophers, some explaining it by attraction to the center, others to repulsion between the very small parts of the body, while still others attribute it to a certain stress in the surrounding medium which closes in behind the falling body and drives it from one of its positions to another. Now all these fantasies, and others too, ought to be examined; but it is not really worth while. At present it is the purpose of our Author merely to investigate and to demonstrate some of the properties of accelerated motion (whatever the cause of this acceleration may be)...[4]

Thus, it was not the purpose (final cause) of uniform acceleration that concerned Galileo, but an adequate mathematical description of it. Galileo's approach was competing with the medieval Aristotelian conception of nature as a fixed, stable and symbolic order to be interpreted and understood according to Church doctrine by positing a world of contingent correlations among observable and measurable material objects to be mapped, measured and described by the patient and objective observer.

But what we find in this conflict is not so much a rejection of universal order as a contest of competing views about the nature of universal order and how best to approach it. Thus, Charles Taylor suggests that the medieval view which is challenged by Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and others put all of its faith in the assumption that the world of nature is but an expression of certain cosmological Ideas originating from the mind of God. The purpose of nature was to embody and express these Ideas and the will of God. The experience of the medieval individual was in relation to this cosmic order. To put things right with oneself entailed achieving and maintaining the right alignment or connection to the higher order of things outside or prior to nature.

The ancient Greeks also had a notion of being in harmony with a higher order of Ideas and rationality.

On this view the notion of a subject coming to self-presence and clarity in the absence of any cosmic order, or in ignorance of and unrelated to the cosmic order, is utterly senseless: to rise out of dream, confusion, illusion is just to see the order of things. We might say that on this view, there is no notion of the self in the modern sense, that is, of an identity which I can define for myself without reference to what surrounds me and the world in which I am set. Rather, I am essentially vision of...either order or illusion.[5]

The modern European experience of the self, in contrast to the medieval and ancient forms, can be understood as part of an attempt to free oneself from the interpretive and symbolic model of medieval scholasticism. By withdrawing to a position of objective observation within -- to an interior realm of thought to which all else is exterior -- a self is posited in contrast to the (exterior) world of nature. "Man" the neutral observer with the capacity to measure, predict, and control the forces of nature replaces the individual who merely contemplates the higher order latent in all things -- who passes through this world ever mindful of our relation to the "real" world beyond. This new (modern) subject is dedicated to freeing itself from the prejudices and falsehoods of the past in order to fully develop in the modern scientific world.

Thus, we find Descartes opening his Meditations on First Philosophy with a personal reflection on the past and how poorly he has been served by it.

Several years have now passed since I first realized how many were the false opinions that in my youth I took to be true, and thus how doubtful were all the things that I subsequently built upon these opinions. From the time I became aware of this, I realized that for once I had to raze everything in my life, down to the very bottom, so as to begin again from the first foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences. But the task seemed so enormous that I waited for a point in my life that was so ripe that no more suitable a time for laying hold of these disciplines would come to pass. For this reason, I have delayed so long that I would be at fault were I to waste on deliberation the time that is left for action. Therefore, now that I have freed my mind from all cares, and I have secured for myself some leisurely and carefree time, I withdraw in solitude. I will, in short, apply myself earnestly and openly to the general destruction of my former opinions.[6]

Notes

1. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholatic, and Humanist Strains, New York:Harper & Row, 1961, 45. [return]

2. Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, 107. [return]

3. Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, 4-10. [return]

4. From Mathematical Discourses and Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences, quoted in Allen G. Debus, op. cit. 109. [return]

5. Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, 6. [return]

6. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Donald A. Cress (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980, 57. [return]