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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association
Descartes writes that 'je ne reconnois aucune difference entre les machines que font les artisans et les divers corps que la nature seule compose'. The machine, then, serves as model to explore and understand nature, 'et il est certain que toutes les regles des Mechaniques appartienent a la Physique [...], en en sorte que toutes les choses qui sont artificielles, sont avec cela naturelles'. (1)
As Paolo Rossi observes:
L'assunzione del modello macchina, la integrale spiegazione della realtC fisica e biologica in termini di material e di movimento comportavano una modificazione profondissima del concetto di natura. Essa non appare pi* contesta di forme e di essenze cui ineriscono le 'qualitC', ma di fenomeni quantitativamente misurabili [...] tutti I fenomeni, cosi come tutti I pezzi che compongono una macchina, hanno lo stesso valore. Conoscere la realtC vuol dire rendersi conto del modo in cui funziona la macchina del monde, e la macchina puo (almeno teoricamente) essere smontata nei suoi singoli elementi per essere poi, pezzo per pezzo ricomposta. (2)
The world that can be understood, then, is a world that can be reconstructed or re-assembled. The knowledge of causes and essences is reserved to God.
All'immagine platonica del Dio geometra si sovrappone l'immagine, poi tanto largamente diffusa, del Dio 'meccanico', costruttire di quel perfetto orologio che e il mondo [...] L'immagine del Dio orologiaio si intrecciava in Leibniz con quella di un Dio che governa gli spiriti e il mondo 'come un ingegnere maneggia le sue macchine'. (3)
Out of this concept an analogy is developed between God and humanity. If there is a relationship between knowing and building, both God and Man can participate in the same activity, since both God and Man can know and build. But human intellect is finite and limited and can only know what has been built by a human mind, and this means unchangeable and applicable knowledge, such as geometry or mathematics. Thus, the only possible knowledge is the knowledge of the artificial, of things that can be constructed and disassembled. As the universe was created by God, it is impossible for humanity to find the ultimate truth of physics, for instance, because humanity has not the experience of building the universe. Human knowledge is only possible about things created by humanity with their own hands or minds. As G. B. Vico says, 'come la natura da vita alle cose fisiche, cosi l'ingegno umano alla meccanica; come Dio e artifice della natura, cosi l'uomo delle cose foggiate dall'arte'. (4)
The radical change introduced by the idea that knowledge is constructed and therefore knowable by humanity; that it is a product of minds and hands will have an immense impact on the future. The concept of the universe as a machine and of God as a clockmaker, as an artificer, will create the necessary framework to contradict centuries of philosophical attitudes that tend to relegate the idea of practice and of operation to the margins of culture.
Kepler, in contrast, puts aside the model of the divine clockmaker and defines the essence of the scientific revolution:
My aim is to show that the heavenly machine is not a kind of divine, live being, but a kind of clockwork (and he who believes that a clock has a soul, attributes the maker's glory to the work), insofar as nearly all the manifold motions are caused by a most simple, magnetic and material force, just as all motions of the clock are caused by a simple weight. And I also show how these physical causes are to be given numerical and geometrical expression. (5)
But the model that emerges from the animism of the universe of God still has to explain movement, the 'moving force'. The mediaeval planet-moving angels and spirits, the souls, are replaced by the concept of 'mind', not in the sense of sensory organs, but rather like a computer with multifaceted functions. The notion of 'intelligence' is then introduced and will generate a series of models of the universe based in the analogy between human intelligence and universal patterns.
This notion, however difficult to define and apply, is nonetheless used to express yet another series of metaphors related to the last bit of the man-machine topos, which is 'artificial intelligence'. I do not intend to discuss the trope in detail here, but suffice it to note its importance to cybernetics, information theory, linguistics, as well as its undeniable popularity in science fiction.
My intention here is to show how a literary reading derived from cosmologico-theological systems became part of an important set of ideas that formed and form our intuitive notion of what is consciousness, what is 'natural', what is 'artificial', and what are the ultimate, unanswered, questions about mortality, immortality and the eternity of the universe.
Greek thinkers regarded the world of nature as permeated by a mind and they conceived this mind in all its manifestations, whether regulating the human world or the universe. The world of nature is a world of motion and is therefore alive, but it is also a world of controlled motion; thus, it is a world that has not only a soul but an intelligence as well. They called this world the cosmos. This is the world described by Cicero in Scipio's Dream, which I will come back to later.
The second great change in the view of the cosmos took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Copernicus, Telesio and Bruno, among others, followed by Descartes, Kepler and Newton. Central to their view was a denial of the Greek concept that the universe was an organism. As a consequence, the universe is not able to ordain its own movements in a rational manner; this order must be imposed from without. As Collingwood puts it: 'Instead of being an organism, the natural world is a machine: a machine in the literal and proper sense of the word, an arrangement of bodily parts designed and put together and set going for a definite purpose by an intelligent mind outside itself.' (6) This is the world of Camoes's 'machine of the world' which I will also explore below.
Two fundamental axioms are then opposed, the immanent model of the Greeks and the transcendent model of Descartes. When in the eighteenth century philosophical discussion shifted from a theory of nature to a theory of mind, the next question was to ask how the connection between nature and mind could be established if nature was essentially mechanical and non-mental. The question was settled by a consensus: that mind makes nature; that nature is, then, a by-product of the activity of the mind. This does not mean that nature in itself is mental since it is radically mechanical and cannot be reduced to a mind category. Neither does it mean that nature is an illusion, a dream of mind, and that one can say anything about it since there is no objective nature to be verified. (7)
The third fundamental modification in how nature is viewed comes with new developments in science. The theory of evolution in biology, introduced change, transformation, evolution, adaptation and extinction to a scheme that preferred to see change as circular, repetitive motion. Modern biology which defines life through evolution and genetics has also challenged the boundaries of nature between the 'artificial' and the 'natural'. The role played by chance and necessity in the establishment of life is replicated in the advancements of physics, with Einstein's radical view of the machine of the world, as well as with quanta mechanics.
But is it possible for humanity to know anything at all? And if so, under what conditions and circumstances? This is not easy to answer, in science or philosophy, and the topos of the 'quest for knowledge' in literature establishes a fundamental, sometimes parallel, relationship between these disciplines, reproducing issues and preoccupations, sometimes developing a critical dialogue where scientific and philosophical questions are satirized, criticized and qualified.
If, however, the schematic three steps outlined above serve a narrow didactic purpose in pinpointing clear changes in a long and more subtle history of science and nature, they are necessary as guide posts for those who are interested in pinpointing how and when literary sources used them, which were the articulations that were brought by literary use, which modifications may have been introduced, and what impact they had on their audience.
Why, for example, is it that the heliocentric system clearly outlined in Cicero's Scipio's Dream, a text that would become a classic from the Middle Ages onwards, was never seen to change or challenge the Ptolemaic geocentric model? To what extent were authoritative texts really authoritative and in which fields?
Augustine's condemnation of 'certain types' of knowledge followed by the sanctification of ignorance as a form of wisdom (docta ignorantia) added to the belief that to interfere with nature was a sin against God. (8) To what extent could such injunctions that hinder human curiosity be counterpoised? Was he only speaking against the excesses that exceed the terrain of ethics, or was he echoing a universal alarm over human hubris (in the manner of the Greek myth of Prometheus)? Or was this a warning to cut short any human relation with nature at all? The guilt developed out of this relationship between sinful man and nature will inform much of the literature concerning man and the 'forbidden' sciences for centuries to come.
However well informed we are about the latest developments in biology, physics and cosmology, our imagination is filled with scraps of images and 'intuitive' knowledge that belong to previous times. We say that the 'sun sets' and the 'sun rises' as if the earth were still the centre...
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