After the
Renaissance, the spirit of open inquiry mainly flourished outside of the
Church. The book De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium by Polish
astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was published just a few days before his death
in 1543 and is often praised as the forerunner of the spirit of free inquiry.
Copernicus advocated a heliocentric view of the cosmos (i.e., a stationary sun
with other planets, including the earth, revolving around it) in this book, as
opposed to Ptolemy’s geocentric theory (i.e., stationary earth at the center
with other heavenly bodies, including the Sun, circling around it), which was
believed as Church’s ‘official’ theory. This view was a serious attack and a
challenge to Christian Philosophy. So, Copernicus's theory was pronounced
“false and altogether opposed to Holy Scriptures”. A
similar case was with Galileo when he was imprisoned in 1633. It was a period
when a lot of confrontations took place between the Church and the protagonists
of free inquiry (the scientists). Over time, the Church was finally proven to
be incorrect, and it was forced to make an unseemly retreat from its position.
The Church ultimately adopted the heliocentric perspective in 1982 and
Darwin’s theory of evolution in the late twentieth century. As a result, the
intellectual authority of the religious thinkers was utterly shattered within a
few centuries, thereby putting the Christian worldview to rest.
During the 16th – 17th century, scientific development gave birth to a new
worldview where that of the world replaced the notion of interconnectedness,
underlying unity, purposefulness, interconnectedness, etc., as a mechanical
system, i.e., an only machine with no purposefulness. Copernicus, Kepler,
Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton actively contributed to spreading this
worldview. Bacon can be credited to the advent of this worldview mentioned in
his classical book Novum Organum in 1620. Unlike Aristotle
and Plato’s philosophy, Bacon’s approach was based on experimentation, data
gathering, and analysis to unravel Nature’s truth systematically and organized.
He believed science is a tool for only the betterment of human beings at any
cost paid by Nature. Therefore, he stressed that rather than asking the
metaphysical ‘why’ of things, the science of learning should be committed to
the ‘how’ of things.
Renes Descartes (1596 – 1650), another analytic philosopher, a great scientist and mathematician, systematically initiated the task of explaining the ‘how’ of numerous phenomena already known by the seventeenth century. He believed in breaking up problems and thoughts into smaller parts and then rearranging them systematically in a logical order. This theory became an essential characteristic of science and prevailed in the scientific community. However, the theory spread a ‘reductionist’ and ‘fragmentary’ approach, unlike an integrated and wholeness approach that prevailed during the earlier Greek philosophers. The process originated a completely new mode of thinking that has come to be known as Mechanical Philosophy. Basic to this mechanical philosophy is Cartesian Dualism. “All of reality, he argued, is composed of two substances. What we may call spirit is a substance characterized by the act of thinking; the material realm is a substance the essence of which is an extension. Res-cogitans and re-sextensa – Descartes defined them in a way to distinguish and separate them absolutely. To think of substance one cannot attribute any property characteristic of matter – not extension, not a place, not motion. Thinking, which includes the various modes which mental activity assumes, and thinking alone, is its property. From the point of view of natural science, the more important result of the dichotomy lay in the rigid exclusion of any and all psychic characteristics from material nature (Westfall, 1971). ” To Descartes, the matter was thus really dead and possessed no activity except motion derived from God in the beginning. He visualized the whole Universe from the same perspective. He concluded that Nature is made of various disconnected parts and can be completely described in terms of the movements and arrangements of its parts. This mechanistic visualization of Nature became a widespread dominant paradigm in the then scientific community in every emerging field, for example, living organisms: the seventeenth-century’s physiologists tried to explain bodily functions such as digestion, blood flow etc. from the same perspective; Cell Theory: the biologist recognized that all animals and plants are made of cells and compared body as a factory where cells are produced, assembled and distributed in body; Genes: the biologists of twentieth-century found that all the biological structures could be understood in terms so molecular structures unlike cells during nineteenth-century; Mechanistic Medicine: by concentration on the smallest part of any organism, the healing of human body shifted to cell and then finally to molecules which lost the vision of human being as a whole. Descartes visualized even organic phenomena from the same perspective. He described men as a machine that performs all physiological functions of a man – circulation, digestion, nourishment, growth and perception. Newton intensely participated in the same direction by introducing the concept of force to already existing notions of matter and motion. Newton saw particle forces as ontological realities, and he was modest enough to concede that he had no idea what caused them; in fact, he linked them directly to God’s intervention. But his French followers believed that the Newtonian system only validated the Cartesian vision of reality as a great machine. The references to God made by Newton and Descartes were quickly dismissed as superfluous and overshadowed by the successes of their mathematical mechanics. Newton had called God’s mercy to restore order to the solar system after it had become drenched, either due to external factors (comets etc.) or due to its inherent character. When Laplace demonstrated that disturbances caused by mutual forces or external bodies like comets were only transient and that the Solar System was intrinsically stable, it was considered as another ‘evidence’ of God’s redundancy. All of this resulted in a resurgence of materialism – a belief that hard stuff in unyielding lumps is the Universe’s solitary ultimate reality.
Impact of the mechanical
philosophy on Social thought
The application of mechanical
philosophy to sciences dealing primarily with human and social institutions
resulted in the materialistic worldview.
One of the first
systematic attempts of this kind was made by John Locke in the late seventeenth
century. He was so much influenced by the ‘reductionist’ or ‘fragmentary’
approach that he visualized society from an atomistic perspective. He
considered an individual the smallest unit (basic building block) and tried to
understand the ‘natural laws’ governing individual behaviour. He found the
natural laws, including personal interest, to protect and allow for the
increase of the property of its members, freedom, etc., denying any connection
between people and God. In this way, he successfully separated religion from
people’s activity as well as integrated concerns related to society. The
consequences of this monumental is best put in the worlds of Rifkin and Howard:
“Having removed God from the affairs of
people - as Bacon had removed him from nature – Locke was left with human
beings all alone in the Universe… Now, men and women became just what Bacon,
Descartes and Newton had made of nature: mere physical phenomena interacting
with other bits of matter in the cold, mechanical Universe. This being the
case, on what basis could a social order be formed?... Once we cut through
useless custom and superstition, argued Locke, we see that society, made up
solely of individuals creating their own meaning, has one purpose: to protect
and allow for the increase of the property of its members. Pure self-interest
thus becomes the sole basis for the establishment of the state, … for reason
leads us to conclude that this is the natural order of things…”
In this way, the personal goal of
salvation during the medieval ages shifted to achieving things and ensuring
personal interests. This ensued the idea of progress.
Adam Smith, a
Scottish economist of the eighteenth century, also recognized selfishness as
something ‘natural’ and did not like the idea of erecting social and moral
barriers to its pursuit. Smith, based on Locke’s idea, formulated a theory of
economics and concluded laissez-faire- the general principle
of non-interference with the free action of the individual, is the most
efficient method of economic organization and instead believed that there was
an ‘invisible hand’ of ‘Providence’ which governed the economic processes so as
to “make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would
have been made had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its
inhabitants”. Unfortunately, the “invisible hand” of ‘Providence’ did not act
as Smith had predicted, and his laissez-faire philosophy simply served to
promote the pursuit of material abundance to meet physical demands, with little
regard for ethics. This ethical evasion became the trademark of all subsequent
mainstream economists, resulting in the assumption that what is ‘pleasant’ is
‘good’ and what is ‘unpleasant’ is evil. By this way, under the influence of
Newtonian physics, the human movement was considered merely a physical movement
under the various forces of attraction or repulsion. The overall philosophy of
utilitarianism, which was first articulated by an Englishman named Jeremy
Bentham, is based on these ideas, and is summed up in Bentham’s famous phrase:
“Nature has placed mankind under the
governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to
point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we should do ”
The message of Bentham’s phase is very
clear that men should act in a manner that maximizes their ‘pleasure’ and
minimizes the ‘pain.’ It implies a theoretical framework justifying a
materialistic worldview. When social philosophers like Herbert Spencer
interpreted Darwin’s theory of evolution to sanctify the philosophy of
‘survival of the fittest ’ as a law of Nature, the journey of modern
civilization to the pinnacle of a materialistic worldview was nearly complete.
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