Rationalism and mechanism Julian Thomas in Archaeology and Modernity

I am much occupied with the investigation of the physical causes.

My aim in this is to show that the machine of the universe is not
similar to a divine animated being, but similar to a clock.
Johannes Kepler (quoted in Shapin 1996: 33)
Baconian empiricism was one of the two great pillars of seventeenth-century
science and philosophy, which sometimes stood apart from one another, and
were sometimes combined in various ways. The other was the rationalism of
René Descartes. Both were foundationalist, in attempting to find a new and
fundamental ground for knowledge and action, but the means in which they
went about this were radically different. While Bacon demanded a closer
attentiveness to physical things, harnessed and strengthened by the discipline
of experiment, Descartes was more thoroughly sceptical. Doubting
everything, Descartes came to focus on pure, abstract reason as a means of
overcoming the potential chaos threatened by competing cosmologies
(Toulmin 1990: 71). Descartes followed Plato in presenting mathematics
and geometry as the most fundamental forms of knowledge, and considered
a range of abstract ideas to be innate in the human soul, having been placed
there by God. The apex of Descartes’ argument is the knowing subject: the
only thing that I can be certain of is that I am aware. The metaphysical
sanction for the mind’s awareness of innate concepts that it can use to
understand the world is then found in religious faith: God is not a deceiver,
thus our mental apparatus must be accurate. The most important of the
innate capacities of the mind is the ability to reason, and from this it follows
that reason is to be trusted more than the information about the world
that the senses provide us with. For this reason, Descartes was thoroughly
opposed to the Renaissance view of the world as structured through resemblance.
We cannot trust the outward appearance of things, so resemblances
can be deceptive. Similarly, language may be an imperfect tool for describing
things, or may be untrue (Foucault 1970: 43).
In place of similarity and connection, Descartes sought to differentiate
and order things by measurement and comparison. In the Discourse on Method
he suggested that problems could be resolved by dividing them into
their constitutive elements, which should then be ordered from simple to
complex (Descartes [1637] 1912). Here, rather than beginning with experiment
and observation, reason is the principle that organises worldly things (Foucault 1970: 53). One can
begin with the study of pure geometry, and
move from there to the particularities of matter. What Descartes was hoping
to achieve by this means was the identification of the fundamental principles
of nature. These in turn could be expected to be concerned with geometry and
motion, since all worldly bodies essentially consisted of a substance with a
geometrical extension (Cassirer 1951: 50). So like Bacon, Descartes wanted to
create a total system of knowledge; the difference was that he wanted to work
outward from a set of grounding principles, rather than building upwards
from observations. In contrast with Bacon’s ‘experimental philosophy’,
Cartesian rationalism came to be known as the ‘mechanical philosophy’
because it relied on the notion that the universe was like a great machine,
operating according to a series of relatively simple laws (Coley 1991a: 179).
It had been noted by Kepler and others that clocks and automata could give
the outward impression of being animate entities, but that an acquaintance
with their inner motions demonstrated that they were entirely mechanical.
Descartes argued that the same was true of nature: the notion that the world
and its creatures might possess some form of intentionality was based on
an illusion. Machines, having been engineered to fulfil a particular task,
were entirely intelligible (Shapin 1996: 36). Accordingly, Robert Hooke
held that increasingly powerful microscopes would eventually undermine all
theories of influence and sympathy between material bodies by revealing the
‘small machines of nature’ (ibid.: 50). This conviction that the world was
entirely comprehensible, but that some aspects of its workings were beyond
the capability of the unaided senses to apprehend, contributed to the
popularity of the so-called ‘corpuscular theory’. This held that all matter was
composed of tiny atoms in continual motion. Accordingly, all problems of
matter were problems of mechanics. Any complex circumstance could be
reduced by a ‘calculus’ to a set of ordered principles.
The structure of Descartes’ argument in the Discourse on Method was to
have decisive implications for modern Western culture. We have seen
that for Descartes the absolute certainty of innate first principles can be
attributed to the truthfulness of God. But it was equally important to him
in overcoming his own scepticism to place human consciousness at the
centre of his analysis. This single move had the effect of at once defining
conscious reason as the essence of humanity, and constructing a pre-eminent
position for epistemology as prior to any other kind of knowing (Carroll
1993: 119; Heidegger 1993a: 297). At the same time it rendered humanity
as a kind of fixed point in the cosmos: that which was knowable became that
which was known by a human subject (Derrida 1978: 278). Rather than
being one kind of phenomenon created by God alongside other phenomena,
humans were now in the privileged position of being the interpreters of
reality. As we have mentioned already, the emergence of Christianity began
a process by which the world slowly changed from being an aspect of eternal
divinity to a facility at the disposal of humankind. Christianity had imagined a God who operated as
an agency, a creator and first cause, and this might be
identified with the origins of instrumental reason (Zimmerman 1990: 171).
With Descartes, the position of God was further marginalised, for the
certainty of the existence of material things was now to be vested in human
consciousness. All things could be assayed and measured, and humanity was
to be the measure (and creator) of all things (Gray 1995: 153).
Just as Descartes mistrusted the appearances of things, so he rejected the
attempt to uncover the multiple connections and contexts in which things
are embedded. In place of such a relational hermeneutics, he advocated the
imposition of an order on the world (Foucault 1970: 74). Human reason is
able to stretch a grid over creation and divide it up in a comprehensible way
because, being God-given, it is infallible. Provided that we attend to the
voice of reason we cannot commit any error. Error arises from hastiness, and
the imperfect application of reason, or from submitting to the demands of
authority, which compromises reason (Gadamer 1975: 246). Yet because
reason was a capacity of the mind, and was applied freely by human subjects
who had autonomy of will, while the material world was a mechanism that
obeyed invariant laws, Descartes was obliged to separate mind from body
and subject from object. The relationship between the observing subject and
the observed object became critical to human understanding, and it was this
that led to the privilege afforded to epistemology. Indeed, it is as soon as one
imagines that a problematic relationship exists between a subject and an
object that one has brought epistemology into being (Critchley 1999: 56).
Moreover, splitting the mind from the body, and hypothesising that mental
activity takes place in a realm that is separate from the material world, has
the additional effect of constituting perception as a problem. How information
is gathered from the world and internalised becomes an issue.
In their different ways, Baconian empiricism and Cartesian rationalism
attempted to refound human knowledge by clearing away the impediments
that had been scattered about by unsound thinking. Both attempted to cleanse
and purify the operations of thought, and both advocated the construction
of holistic systems of knowledge. While the divisions between the two were
profound, they shared a desire to introduce universally acknowledged criteria
to govern what was and what was not to stand as truth. Effectively, they
together embody an imperative to banish ambiguity and multiplicity, and
to impose a single authoritative system of knowledge on the world.
The New Philosophy
During the seventeenth century the works of Bacon, Descartes, Locke and
Hobbes, amongst others, began to define a distinctively modern conception
of society and nature. One of the most characteristic elements of this new
thinking was the claim that knowledge could be framed in ways that were
context-free, and were consequentially universal in their applicability. While
these arguments were prominently articulated in relation to physics, they
were applied equally to political and ethical issues. As Toulmin argues,
seventeenth-century philosophy replaced a consideration of the context and
language of arguments with an insistence on abstract logic, and a concern
with the particular, local and timely with an emphasis on permanent, universal
generalisations (1990: 21). Descartes’ influence was greatest in promoting
the kinds of rational certainty that could be promised by mathematics, while
Bacon’s concern with empirical verification eclipsed an interest in the
rhetorical structure of arguments. As we will see, the ultimate effect of the
transfer of these imperatives into the ethical sphere was to be the creation of
an abstract moral philosophy (ibid.: 76). These approaches advocated the
construction of a system that would integrate all possible forms of knowledge,
and this further encouraged the belief that the same kinds of regularities
that were being identified in physical processes might also be found in
the human world (Cassirer 1951: 6). Yet until the later seventeenth century
this notion of a total system of knowledge was largely presented as an
achievement to be aspired to in the longer term.
To begin with, then, the new philosophies had their impact at the level of
procedure: they suggested ways in which headway could be made towards
the establishment of a coherent new science. In this respect, Descartes’
methodological arguments were of critical importance. Descartes had
suggested that reason should proceed by dissolving a complex reality into its
component parts, and then reassembling these parts in order to understand
the totality (ibid.: 14). Consciousness therefore achieves command over things
by reconstructing the process of creation. Arguably, this implies that
humanity is conceived as following in the path of the creator, rethinking the
thoughts of God. Furthermore, this process of dissolution and reconstruction
is one that involves agency: again, humanity was usurping the position of
the creator, and Being was becoming predicated upon acting. Finally, the
idea that the world can be made comprehensible by reducing it to fragments
is an utterly modern conception (Bauman 1991: 12). Rather than attempting
to understand things in the context of a broader set of relations, they are
abstracted and presented as being in the first instance free-standing entities.
Any totality is to be understood as being composed of a collection of objects
that logically precede the whole. Descartes himself believed that any substance
could be divided an infinite number of times, and that there are
consequentially no fundamental particles, but his methodology nonetheless
lies behind a broader tradition of ‘atomism’ in science and social theory. This
manifests itself both in systems theory, which dissolves complex phenomena
into multiple ‘sub-systems’, and in liberal social thought, which privileges
the rights of the individual over community, tradition and obligation (Taylor
1985: 187). We might choose to connect this specific conceptual isolation of
entities to the more general processes of alienation that characterise modernity,
through which economic and social relationships are dissolved, and
people and things are made to appear to exist in a state of reciprocal independence.
Associated with this development was the removal of meaning
from the world. If in Renaissance thought phenomena had been networked
to each other by their symbolic significance, associations, mythological
connotations and etymology, meaning was now increasingly identified as the
content or product of the human mind, as we shall see below.
In Britain, rationalism and empiricism provided the intellectual milieu
in which the Royal Society was formed, following the restoration of the
monarchy, after the civil wars. That Charles II was favourable towards
science was highly fortunate for the founders of the Society, for experimental
science had been promoted by Puritan elements during the period of the
Commonwealth. Empiricism was believed to show industriousness, in
contrast with the slothful ways of the scholastics. The Royal Society followed
this precedent, with a programme that was vigorous, optimistic, and at
times grandiose. Robert Hooke, for instance, set the tone by arguing that
there was nothing in nature that lay beyond analysis (Coley 1991b: 211).
Similarly, Robert Boyle proposed in 1666 that a complete natural history
of Britain should be undertaken by the Society. Interestingly, one of the
elements of this project that he advocated was a questionnaire survey on the
antiquities of the regions of the nation (Piggott 1985: 21).
This is an indication of the extent to which antiquarianism was embedded
in the scientific revolution, the New Philosophy, and the Royal Society in
particular. Many of the more prominent antiquaries of the period, like Robert
Plot and Edward Lhwyd (the first two curators of the Ashmolean Museum)
presented their own studies as a facet of natural history (Schnapp 1996:
198). More importantly, the seventeenth-century antiquarians were often
part of the same social networks as the philosophers and experimentalists.
John Aubrey, for instance, was a friend of Hobbes and was very familiar
with the works of Bacon and Descartes (ibid.: 190). It is barely conceivable
that Aubrey’s recognition that artefacts could be classified, and that their
character changed through time, was not informed by what he had learned
through these professional connections. Moreover, when the Society of
Antiquaries was established in 1717 with William Stukeley as its secretary
(Piggott 1985: 15), its structure was explicitly based upon the Royal Society
and the other learned societies that had recently been founded. All of these
were sustained by Bacon’s advice that science must be a collective activity
involving the accumulation of observations and experiments.