We have seen how the success of Newtonian physics came to influence and motivate numerous epistemological theories. Locke, the first of the major British Empiricists, put forth a theory which was an attempt to blaze a trail to necessary, certain and universal knowledge, but Berkeley and Hume put a full stop to such an attempt. Kant’s Copernican Revolution of the mind, a theory clearly and explicitly motivated by the Newtonian successes, was a different approach to the same goal as Locke, but ended, at best, in our complete ignorance of the world as it is. Nevertheless, the influence of Newtonian science was by no means limited to philosophical circles. In this post we will discuss the influence which science came to have upon society at large by the turn of the 19th century.
In the 17th century, the search for knowledge took a dramatic turn in the works of Descartes and Bacon. Both men recognized that the western tradition had had 2,000 years in which no significant advances in human knowledge had been achieved. This is what indirectly motivated Descartes’ attempt to reestablish human knowledge upon a firm foundation and is what directly motivated Bacon’s Novum Organum. The movement which these two men epitomized was the move from tradition and authority as a reliable source of knowledge, particularly religious authority in the case of the common man, to reason and science as an even more reliable source of knowledge.
By the 18th century, the concepts of science, reason and technology came to be conflated with the idea of progress, in a way very much in line with what Bacon believed. Of course progress was an originally Renaissance idea and a rather controversial one at that. It is not difficult to see how the reliance upon tradition and authority as sources of knowledge and guidance would tend toward a very conservative approach to public policy. It was only with the groundbreaking success of Newtonian science that progress by way of reason and science came to be less controversial as it came to supplant conserving the past by way of tradition and authority.
Given that Newtonian mechanics had come to be the paradigm of progressive knowledge, it is not surprising that it was promptly used by numerous thinkers as a model to how reason and science could be applied to other fields as well. Montesquieu put forth a natural theory of social relationships, essentially founding sociology. The America founding fathers took reason, rather than religious tradition and/or authority as an approach to the establishment and maintenance of political organizations. Hume attempted to establish a scientific approach to the mind in his theories of mental association. Hume’s good friend, Adam Smith founded a scientific theory of economics. The relative success of science within each of these fields only served to strengthen the general confidence in reason as a source of knowledge and guidance. This confidence waxed so strong that the Bible began to be studied “scientifically,” creating as much of a tension between reason and religious tradition as can be imagined.
As science, reason and progress came to be conflated the interesting question arises as to why the Western world of the 18th century was so incredibly receptive to such ideas? Indeed, was the success of science, Newtonian mechanics in particular, the cause of the ideological response of the public, or was the ideology of the public the cause of the success in science? I am inclined to think that in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was a combination of the two, one feeding off of the other. However, I suspect that the original push came from the need to find some way of distinguishing two traditional and authoritative claims to truth, i.e. Catholic and Protestant. The inevitable consequence of the religious wars was the decline of religious authority, and something had to take its place as a source for guidance and knowledge. Science and other forms of human reason were simply the most obvious and available sources to fill that gap.
Another consequence of the decline of religious authority accompanied by the rise of Newtonian explanations for all phenomena was that which motivated Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, namely a mechanistic, materialistic determinism. This tendency was usually embodied in the form of Deism, although it sometimes embraced a full atheism in the likes of Diderot, La Mettrie and Voltaire. Most illustrative of this change would be Laplace’s assertion to Napoleon that he had no need for the “God hypothesis” in his physical theory. This sentiment which equates the scientific worldview with deterministic and materialistic atheism still lives with us today.
Science and reason in the 18th century also came to be used as an effective tool to institute social reform. This can be seen most prominently in the publication of the Encyclopedie by the French Philosophes. Whereas the Encyclopedia Britannica, which would later be published, was but a collection of facts, the French Encyclopedie consisted primarily in know-how. It is for this reason that the publication of work was a clear attempt at giving power to the general people by way of know-how; an attempt to subvert the political and economic status quo. This was but one of the many attempts by the French Philosophes at popularizing what was called the “New Philosophy.”
In was in this context of a science, technology and reason coming to supplant tradition and religion as the pillars of society, progressive values replacing conservative ones, that Rousseau offered his criticisms of the Enlightenment project. Science and technology made life worse, according to Rousseau, not better as Bacon had hoped. Science distanced man from his natural states of happiness and an over-reliance upon reason simply drowned out what good there was to be had in passion and feeling. In other words, Rousseau saw man’s instinctual creativity being stifled by a universal and mechanistic sense of reason and rationality, a feeling which would soon after be given emphasis by the Romantics.
Notice, however, that while Rousseau rejects reason and science as the primary sources for guidance and knowledge, he too has abandoned tradition and authority as legitimate sources as well. While the Romantic movement was not progressive in the same way as the Enlightenment was, it certainly was not a return to Scholastic conservatism by any stretch of the imagination. The Romantics saw science as being vastly incomplete rather than being wrong in any particular way. If anything, the Romantic tradition can be seen as removing the seeming contradiction in the Enlightenment tradition of utilizing a fully deterministic theory to institute social reform.
