Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land - Eighteen
The Shattering of Conventional Wisdom
JAMES
RAYMOND FISHER, JR.
Originally
© August 12, 2016/© August 22, 2021
“In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites that attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.
“Tradition is living and active, but the convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. The convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But the convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. The convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.”
Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968), American Trappist monk, No Man Is an Island (1955)
AMERIGO VESPUCCI
On July 22, 1502, the Italian manager of a Spanish branch of a Florentine shipping agency landed in Lisbon at the end of his third voyage to the New World. He was already famous for these transatlantic crossings. His name was Amerigo Vespucci.
In 1507, the word “America” was inserted on a small map drawn by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller (1470 – 1521) to show the New Word America where Amerigo Vespucci (1454 – 1512) had gone, and to honor him and his name.
Amerigo Vespucci was born and raised in Florence on the Italian Peninsula. He was the third son of Ser Nastagio (Anastasio), a Florentine notary, and Lisabetta Mini. He was educated by his uncle, Fra Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, a Dominican friar of the monastery of San Marco in Florence.
While his elder brothers were sent to the University of Pisa to pursue scholarly careers, Amerigo Vespucci embraced a mercantile life and was hired as a clerk by the Florentine commercial House of Medici, headed by Lorenzo de Medici. He acquired the favor and protection of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici, who became the head of the business after the elder Lorenzo’s death in 1492.
In March 1492, the Medici dispatched the thirty-eight-year-old Vespucci and Donato Niccolini as confidential agents to look into the Medici branch office in Cadiz (Spain), whose managers and dealings were under suspicion.
In April 1495, by the intrigues of Bishop Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, the Crown of Castile broke their monopoly deal with Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of America, and began handing out licenses to other navigators for the West Indies. Around this time (1495–96), Vespucci was engaged as the executor of Giannotto Berardi, an Italian merchant who had recently died in Seville.
Vespucci organized the fulfillment of Berardi's outstanding contract with the Castilian crown to provide twelve vessels for the Indies. After these were delivered, Vespucci continued as a provision contractor for Indies expeditions and is known to have secured beef supplies for at least one (if not two) of Columbus' voyages.
At the invitation of King Manuel I of Portugal, Vespucci participated as an observer in several voyages that explored the east coast of South America between 1499 and 1502. On the first of these voyages, he was aboard the ship that discovered that South America extended much further south than previously thought.
The expeditions became widely known in Europe after two accounts attributed to Vespucci was published between 1502 and 1504. In 1507, Martin Waldseemuller produced a world map on which he named the new continent “America” after the feminine Latin version of Vespucci's first name, which is Americus.
In an accompanying book, Waldseemuller published one of the Vespucci accounts, which led to criticism that Vespucci was trying to upset Christopher Columbus’ glory. However, the rediscovery in the 18th century of other letters by Vespucci has led to the view that the early published accounts, notably the Soderini Letters, could be fabrications, not by Vespucci, but by others.
Amerigo Vespucci
Two letters attributed to Vespucci were published during his lifetime. Mundus Novus (New World) was a Latin translation of a lost Italian letter sent from Lisbon to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici. It describes a voyage to South America in 1501–1502. Mundus Novus was published in late 1502 or early 1503 and was soon reprinted and distributed in numerous European countries.
A letter of Amerigo Vespucci’s, concerning his four voyages, is known as Lettera al Soderini or just Lettera. It was a letter in Italian addressed to Piero Soderini and reprinted in 1504 or 1505. This letter claimed to be an account of the four voyages to the Americas made by Vespucci between 1497 and 1504. A Latin translation was published by the German Martin Waldseemuller in 1507 in Cosmographiae Introduction, a book on cosmography and geography, as “The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci.”
A MAP SEES EUROPE GO “NATIVE!”
This map of the globe took Europe by storm as it showed the world as Vespucci had seen it with an extra continent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and another ocean beyond separating this continent from Asia.
Christopher Columbus (1451 – 1506), the Genoese explorer, who had discovered the New World in 1492, had never expressed this view. In fact, little or nothing was heard from him since his great voyage (1502 – 1504) along the southwestern coast of Mexico.
Vespucci’s account of the New World destabilized European society at its roots as it began the agonizing process to fathom what had occurred. This called into question the validity of its premises which were the basis of its social, political, and economic identity.
The core ideological belief was that the earth was the center of the universe, that everything had its proper place, that there were only three continents, and above all, that according to the bible all matters were fixed by God at creation, and therefore were incapable of being changed.
It was as if the discovery of America, which the bible had not predicted, would sweep away all their sacred anchors, and with that disappearance would vanish the entire social structure of some 2,000 years of theological and philosophical certainty.
The medieval method of arguing the way to the truth had failed. It had not prepared people for the possibility of an extra continent. Nor did it help those primitive people inhabited America in a state of natural existence and harmony without the benefit of any knowledge of progressive education, politics, history, or indeed, Christianity. It was clear to observers that these primitive people were surviving without all this knowledge or culture, even happily thriving as organized and functional societies without outside direction.
If you desire precedence for cultural absurdity in a time of surreal challenge, look no further than the utopian fervor with which 16th century Europe conducted affairs. Once word spread of the immaculate harmony of these primitives a world away, shock and awe led to mocking self-righteousness as cover for ubiquitous European anxiety. This led, paradoxically, to conscious and obsessive mimicry of what was presumed to be the key to these primitives setting off the rapid spread of “free association.”
This social principle, many Europeans were coming to entertain, might prove better than the old social forms of uniform dependence and submission to imposed legislative protocol. Indeed, advocates of “free association” proposed that communities could come together “of their own free will,” voluntarily agreeing to laws, as they believed these American primitives had. This concept of “free association” was shocking in the 16th century.
To give you a sense of the impact, one hundred years later, it would influence the thinking of the English philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704). He would become a formative influence on British empiricism with the idea of liberal democracy.
John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, written earlier, but published anonymously in 1690, directly challenged the patriarchal “Divine Right of Kings,” proposed by Sir Robert Fuller (1590 – 1653) in Patriarcha (1680) and then by Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) who argued in Elements of Law Natural and Politics (1650) that monarchical government was superior to any other. Locke, against this prevalent thinking defended the natural rights of people, and justified the idea with constitutional law, the liberty of the individual, and the rule of the majority.
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician and one of the most influential “Age of Enlightenment” thinkers, and is commonly known as the “Father of Liberalism.” One of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, he is an important contributor to social contract theory, influencing the development of empiricism and liberal political philosophy. His ideas are apparent in the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as American revolutionaries. His philosophy is also obvious in the words of the United States Declaration of Independence.
Locke’s theory of mind is often cited as the origin for the modern conception of personal identity and the sense of the individual self, figuring prominently in the works of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant.
Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He proposed that at birth the mind was a blank tabula rasa. This is contrary to the Cartesian philosophy, which is based on preexisting concepts. Arguing further, Locke maintained that we are born without innate ideas and that knowledge is determined only through experience and derived from sense perception. Emerson would use this premise to create his “self-reliance” thesis.
If the ruling body offends against Natural Law, Locke argued, it must be overthrown. He claimed that all men are originally in a state of nature. A man in this original state is bound by the Laws of Nature but is otherwise able to live, act, and dispose of his possessions as he sees fit. The ruling body also has an obligation to punish anyone who goes against God’s Will and attempts to harm another by compromising his life, liberty, or possessions. This sanctioning of rebellion had a powerful influence on the American Revolution (1776) and French Revolution (1789).
Also, in 1690, Locke published the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a work developed over a 20 year period. The essay is a systematic inquiry into the nature and scope of human reason, very much reflecting the scientific temper of the times, which was in the process of establishing that “all knowledge is founded on and ultimately derived from sense or sensation.” It is regarded as the first statement of an empiricist theory of knowledge in the British tradition.
John Locke's by Godfrey Kneller, National Portrait Gallery, London
As people returned from the New World, they brought with them questions that undermined the authority and credulity of European tradition:
· How could these naked, wild savages be descendants of Adam and Eve?
· If Ptolemy (90 - 168 B.C.E.) was the unquestioned Egyptian astronomer and geographer, and on whose maps the world was based, had not known of America, how accurate and trustworthy was the rest of his data?
· If the revered Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.E.) had been wrong about the number of continents (he said there were “three”), was his entire method of classifying nature, the bedrock of Western intellectual life, to be trusted?
Similar doubt was posed about the nature of the cosmos for in 1512 Copernicus (1473 – 1543), a Polish astronomer, came up with mathematical proof that put the sun at the center of the solar system in which the earth was but one of a myriad of planets.
A TIME FOR RESET
GALILEO GALILEI
The implications of this new awareness were philosophically mindboggling. It denied time-honored centuries of hubristic comfort that all there was to know was known, and that humankind held a central position in the universe that befitted a creature made in the image and likeness of God. More directly, this undermined the authority and wisdom of the Catholic Church, which rested on the assertion that it was all-knowing.
It was soon realized that Aristotelian premises were flawed and required a new more reliable method of study and measurement. Attempts to do this would bring about an entirely new technique in deriving and processing data, encouraging a “value-free” observance of the natural world, and a departure from dependence on religious explanations for natural phenomena.
One of the first users of this new technique was the Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo (1564 – 1642). In 1603 in Padua, Italy, he tried a totally different approach to the study of nature. Like Copernicus, he worked out the answer to the problem mathematically. Then he looked to develop a method of testing his hypothesis and proving (or disproving) it through experimentation. His first experiment was on the acceleration of falling bodies.
Before the 1600s, various kinds of knowledge were treated as aspects of philosophy. People used general principles of reasoning (as did Aristotle) to explain nature, society, and religion. Then Galileo, Kepler, and others came on the scene who developed new methods for examining the world of nature. Through the use of experiments, new measuring techniques, and using mathematical calculations as a complement to reasoning, they took the study of nature out of philosophy and turned it into science.
As Roger Bacon had been tabbed the “first scientist” in the 13th century for his systematic exploratory work, Galileo in the 17th century was known as the “first physicist.”
Galileo saw mathematics as the alphabet of science. Using this alphabet, he proved the theory of Copernicus that the sun was the center of the universe. Among his other discoveries were a species of the thermometer and proportional compass, while perfecting the refracting telescope, the invention in 1608 attributed to Hans Lippershey (1570 – 1619), a German-Dutch spectacle maker.
Using the first telescope to study the heavens, he observed Jupiter and its four moons. In 1610, he noticed spots on the Sun, from whose movement he inferred its rotation, and two years later published his dissertation on the solar spots, and boldly advocated the Copernican system.
This provoked censure of his work from the ecclesiastical authority of the church with him, in 1616, promising to abstain from all future advocacy of this condemned doctrine. His troubles, however, were not over as he felt compelled to publish a somewhat satirical picture of his times in Dialogue on the Chief Systems of the World (1632).
Pope Urban VIII had previously been supportive of Galileo before the Dialogue but felt he had been betrayed when this work portrayed him as a simpleton and buffoon. Galileo was summoned before The Inquisition and after a wearisome trial, condemned to indefinite imprisonment which was eventually commuted by Pope Urban.
Under home arrest near Florence, Galileo continued his research even after his hearing and sight failed. Some of his less publicized and yet remarkable discoveries included:
· The law of uniform accelerated motion towards the earth,
· The parabolic path of projectiles and virtual velocity, and
· The law that all bodies have weight.
These discoveries would influence Einstein in the 20th century. During his declining years, his daughter, a nun, Sister Maria Celeste, kept his spirits alive with her many letters which have been published in a heartwarming book (Letters to Father: 1623 -1633, Dava Sobel, 2001). These letters span the last decade of Sister Celeste’s life, dying at the age of thirty-three in 1633.
It was also a dramatic period for Pope Urban VIII (1568 – 1644) who reigned as Pope from August 1623 to his death in 1644. He expanded the papal territory by force of arms and advantageous politicking and was also a prominent patron of the arts and a reformer of Church missions.
At the same time, Pope Urban battled the Protestant Reformation and the fallout of the “Thirty Year War” that embroiled Europe. If this was not enough, the Bubonic Plague (1348 – 1590) erupted across Italy and eventually reduced Europe to a standstill. Then this new “philosophy of science” was forcing the church to take notice, led by such men as Galileo.
Given these circumstances, Pope Urban accumulated massive debts during his pontificate, which greatly weakened his successors, pontiffs who were unable to maintain the papacy's longstanding political and military influence in Europe. Despite these eroding issues to church authority, Pope Urban is better known for his contretemps with Galileo, The Inquisition, and his effete opposition to the theory of heliocentrism during his reign.
Aristotle said each object fell to the earth because it sought its natural position on the ground. Galileo proposed that all bodies fell in the same way and at the same rate because they were obeying a common law of nature. This, he cited, could be derived mathematically and proved experimentally.
THE INQUISITION
GIORDANO BRUNO
The Inquisition represents a stain on Roman Catholicism, although a group of institutions within the judicial system of the church claimed to be organized simply to combat heresy. The Inquisition started in 12th century France to ostensibly combat religious sectarianism which was soaring.
It was originally established as an ecclesiastical tribunal by Pope Gregory IX (1145 – 1241) in 1232 for the suppression of heresy. It was active chiefly in the beginning in northern Italy and southern France, becoming notorious for the use of torture. In 1542 the Papal Inquisition was re-established to primarily combat Protestantism, eventually becoming an Organ of the Papal Government.
By the 1250s, The Inquisition was well organized with prosecutors generally chosen from members of the Dominican Order. This replaced the much less effective practice of using local clergy as judges. The Medieval Inquisition covered these courts up to the mid-15th century.
In the Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance period, the concept and scope of The Inquisition were significantly expanded in response to the challenge of the Protestant Reformation. Moreover, its geographic scope expanded to most European countries, but by far its harshest form of prosecution was with The Spanish Inquisition and The Portuguese Inquisition. These two kingdoms in particular operated Inquisitorial Courts throughout their respective empires (Spanish and Portuguese) in the Americas, resulting in the Peruvian Inquisition and Mexican Inquisition.
One particular focus of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions was the issue of Jewish anusim, which is Hebrew for “singular male” with anus that for “singular female.”
It was originally established as an ecclesiastical tribunal by Pope Gregory IX (1145 – 1241) in 1232 for the suppression of heresy. It was active chiefly in the beginning in northern Italy and southern France, becoming notorious for the use of torture. In 1542 the Papal Inquisition was re-established to primarily combat Protestantism, eventually becoming an Organ of the Papal Government.
By the 1250s, The Inquisition was well organized with prosecutors generally chosen from members of the Dominican Order. This replaced the much less effective practice of using local clergy as judges. The Medieval Inquisition covered these courts up to the mid-15th century.
In the Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance period, the concept and scope of The Inquisition were significantly expanded in response to the challenge of the Protestant Reformation. Moreover, its geographic scope expanded to most European countries, but by far its harshest form of prosecution was with The Spanish Inquisition and The Portuguese Inquisition. These two kingdoms in particular operated Inquisitorial Courts throughout their respective empires (Spanish and Portuguese) in the Americas, resulting in the Peruvian Inquisition and Mexican Inquisition.
One particular focus of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions was the issue of Jewish anusim, which is Hebrew for “singular male” with anus that for “singular female.”
The Inquisition maintained a policy of converting (coercing) Jews to abandon Judaism against their will and to become Roman Catholic. Muslims were submitted to the same policy. One of the justifications for this policy was that Jews and Muslims were minorities far more numerous in Spain and Portugal than elsewhere in Europe, as it was considered a threat to the assimilation of the Christian culture.
The practice was abolished (except in the Papal States) early in the 19th century after the Napoleonic Wars (1803 – 1815) and after the Spanish American War of Independence (1808) in the Americas.
Today, the Inquisition Institution survives as part of the Roman Curia, a body of mainly Roman Catholic Cardinals who act as the administrative apparatus of the Holy See and function as the central power grid of the church through which the Roman Pontiff conducts the affairs of the Roman Catholic Church.
Against rank criticism, The Inquisition was euphemistically renamed by Pope Pius X in 1908 “The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.” In 1965, it was renamed the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”
It was an agonizing time for scientists and an exasperating time for the Roman Catholic Church. Science was in the process of resetting the narrative of man and nature while The Inquisition was giving the church a bad name. Its cold and resolute sanctions and sometimes brutal executions only embolden its opposition.
Take the case of Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600). He was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and astrologer, and is remembered for his cosmological theories which conceptually extended the novel Copernican model.
Bruno proposed that the stars were just distant suns surrounded by their own exoplanets, and raised the possibility that these planets could even foster life of their own (a philosophical position is known as cosmic pluralism). He also insisted that the universe is in fact infinite and could have no celestial body at its "center.”
Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges including denial of core Catholic doctrines (including Eternal Damnation, the Blessed Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, the Virginity of Mary, and the Transubstantiation). Transubstantiation is a core belief in Catholic doctrine: that is, the changing of the substance of bread and the substance of wine in the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Jesus Christ by the priest celebrating the Catholic Mass.
Giordano Bruno by Christopher Bartholmess
Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern. The Inquisition found him guilty, and he was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori in 1600. After his death, he gained considerable fame, being particularly celebrated by 19th and early 20th-century religious chroniclers as a “martyr for science.” It is still opened to question whether his heresy trial was a response to his cosmological views or to aspects of his pantheistic philosophy and theology. His case is still a landmark in the history of free thinkers in the embryonic days of science.
In addition to cosmology, Bruno also wrote extensively on the art of memory developing mnemonic techniques and principles. There is considerable evidence that Bruno was well-read in Islamic culture and science, and that he was deeply influenced by Arab astrology, particularly the philosophy of Averroes, as well as Neoplatonism, Renaissance Hermeticism, and legends surrounding the Egyptian god Thoth, the god of knowledge.
Bruno also had a qualitative approach to mathematics and his applications of the spatial concepts of geometry to language (see The Pope & The Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition, Michael White, 2002).
To Bruno’s pantheistic philosophy the whole of creation was a “world soul” seeing it natural to embrace diverse disciplines. His erudite intellect accepted nothing and challenged everything. It was this open-mindedness that brought him to the attention and patronage of Henry II of France, and Elizabeth I of England. This put him in direct conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. It first defrocked him as a priest then excommunicated him from the church.
Unwisely, and this is where the story gets incredible, after spending many years enjoying intellectual freedom in France and England, he chose to return to Italy, and was arrested by The Inquisition in 1592 in Venice, and tried as a heretic.
He endured almost eight years of imprisonment and brutal torture before being burned alive at the stake in Rome in 1600.
The Inquisition attempted to obliterate his reputation with this humiliating demise, but it failed as Bruno, and the myth of his martyrdom spread, as did his philosophy. In science, he would come to have a notable influence on Galileo, Isaac Newton, Christian Huygens, and Gottfried Leibniz. They would build on his ideas and speculations. Indeed, his thought experiments predate much of the work of the 20th century by such luminaries as Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper (1902 – 1994), while his religious thinking inspired the ethical philosophy of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632 -1677). Moreover, Bruno’s “art of memory” can be detected in the works of William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616).
Although the Vatican today says that it “regrets” burning Bruno at the stake, the church has refused to clear him of the charge of heresy.
JOHANNES KEPLER
One of Galileo’s contemporaries largely overlooked was Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), a German astronomer who is often referred to as “the Protestant Galileo.” He endured the witchcraft trial of his elderly mother, an eccentric woman who, like Kepler, was too smart for the world in which she found herself living.
He suffered from his half-mad mother through this trial of crooked judges, sadistic bailiffs, nasty neighbors, and a public bent on destroying her resolve, which never wavered. After a five-year trial, the old woman still unbowed, said, “Do what you want to me. Even if you were to pull one vein after another out of my body, I would have nothing to admit.” Kepler demonstrated the same resolve in his scientific work in the climate of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation (see Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer’s Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother, James A. Connor, 2004).
Johannes Kepler by an Unknown Artist
Kepler remembered most for his venerable “Three Laws of Planetary Motion,” for which he earned the title of “the Father of Celestial Mechanics.” His accomplishments were wide-ranging. He is considered the founder of “Modern Optics,” and was the first to investigate the formation of pictures with a pinhole camera, the first to explain the process of vision by refraction within the eye, the first to formulate eyeglass design for nearsightedness and farsightedness and the first to explain the use of both eyes for depth perception.
This was described in his book, Astonomiae Pars Optica (1604). In his book Dioptrice (1611), he describes real, virtual, upright, and inverted images and magnification. He also created the ray diagrams commonly used today in optic textbooks. As for the telescope, he was the first to explain how it actually works and the first to discover and describe the properties of internal reflection.
Galileo may have used the telescope effectively with the Dutch optician Lippershey’s invention, which allowed him to discover the moons of Jupiter and to see the first hints of Saturn, but it was Kepler who explained the telescope’s physics. This is mentioned because he got inside the mechanics of his tools to chart the physical laws involved so that future improvements could be made with this knowledge.
Moreover, Kepler was perhaps the first real astrophysicist using physics to explain the astronomical phenomena. He was the first to explain that the moon causes the tides. His book, Astronomia Nova (1609), was the first to suggest that the sun rotates about its own axis.
In Stereometria Doliorum Vinariorum (1615), Kepler developed methods for calculating the volume of irregular solids that became the basis of integral calculus. And he was the first to derive the birth of Christ now universally accepted.
[David Koch, Deputy Principal Investigator for the Kepler Mission for NASA, wonders how much research today will hold up as well as Kepler’s has after more than 400 years. Kepler’s laws, he points out, as areas as exact today as they were then, and he had meager resources and rudimentary experimental tools, but a most exacting mind.]
FRANCIS BACON
An English lawyer turned philosopher and scientist, Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), was approaching the certainty of knowledge from a complementary angle. In 1620, he sought nothing less than an entirely new approach to generating information, abandoning the deductive logic of Aristotle (that is, reasoning from the general to the particular), and stressing the importance of running experiments in interpreting the laws of nature. This, he argued, would nullify the possibility of being influenced by the previously held thesis that ran counter to the findings.
New principles were needed, he insisted, and new forms to manage and channel the flood of discoveries that seemed about to overwhelm the social and intellectual order of his time. A very active man, he would add statesman, jurist, and author to the many hats that he wore. As a consequence, after his death, he remained influential through his works, especially for his design of the scientific method that was prominent during the early days of the “Scientific Revolution” (1543 – 1600).
Bacon by Frans Pourbus (1617),
As you might expect, his methodology would lead to more sophisticated approaches, but they would depend on the methods he first established Strangely, in this 21st century of virtual reality and the Internet “cloud,” where millions, even billions of data can be stored and sorted, where computers can classify, assimilate and evaluate enormous quantities of facts, some scientists today move outside the Bacon tradition to speculate beyond the limits of data or even experiments. Those devoted to “string theory” come to mind. It is as if they are retrogressing to Aristotle’s approach of thought experiments or speculation those many millenniums ago. Science and methodology are always open to discussion.
That said Bacon’s methodology provided a new tool grounded in observation and experiment, not in how well a problem could be argued. Only through exhaustive testing, gathering, and evaluation of information, could a thesis (hypothesis) be proven or disproven. The basis of proof would be the ability to replicate the experiment with the same results, and therefore verify the thesis.
Bacon’s greatest gift to posterity was his insistence that the facts speak for themselves, and facts are based on truth and not derived from authority, and that knowledge is the fruit of experiment.
The impetus Francis Bacon gave to future scientific investigation is indisputable. By being the practical creator of the scientific induction method, or reasoning from the particular to the general, a posteriori, he unshackled man from the intrinsic nature of bias.
Bacon’s data management process had four components that would bring into prominence our modern view of knowledge:
· Finding,
· Judging,
· Recording,
· Communicating.
Should things turn out to be truly new, it was important to view them in the cool light of objectivity, a new term that would dominate society's mind. Regulation of thought by approved methods would come to reach the status of a truism in that such methods were believed to take control of nature easier. We have seen this not always to be the case.
[Albert Einstein always regretted writing the letter in August 1939 to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the possibility of constructing an atomic bomb. This was written but a month before Nazi Germany would invade Poland to start WWII. The bomb was built and the U.S. Army Air Force dropped one atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki, Japan in August 1945, killing more than 100,000 residence and turning the two areas into wastelands to speed up the end of the war. We have had nuclear arms races ever since or more than three-quarters of a century. Nuclear power plants were built with the same technology, and we have had already two major nuclear disasters: the nuclear power station meltdown at Chernobyl, Russia in 1987, turning the area into a wasteland; and the nuclear power station at Fukushima, Japan in 2012 with nuclear containers being compromised following an earthquake that set off a tsunami, turning that area into a wasteland as well. Science in the 21st century, in addition to continuing to unlock the mysteries of nature, has the added responsibility of measuring the possible impact such new discoveries might have on vulnerable society. If science fails in this task, “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land” will no longer be the narrative of a concerned writer, but a reality.]
Incidentally, it is alleged that Francis Bacon died of pneumonia while studying the effects of freezing conditions on the preservation of meat. If this is true, he died practicing his belief in the science of his methodology.
With Galileo’s experimentation and Bacon’s system of managing data, a new definition of knowledge was emerging. The theories of these men had a role in the process along with the objectifying capacity of mathematics to quantify and verify their findings. All that appeared left to consider was a technique for evaluating data without fear of error. Descartes believed he had the answer.
In 1619, Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650), a young French engineer was in Germany with the army of the Duke of Bavaria. One winter’s day in that year, he had an intellectual vision in a stove heated room of what amounted to a reconstruction of the whole of philosophy and, indeed, the whole of knowledge into a unified system based on certain truth, modeled on mathematics and supported by rigorous rationalism.
Obviously, a man of deep reflection would work on a theory to support his epiphany that would eventually be published as Discourse on Method (1637). In it, he set out the rules for seeking certainty in an uncertain world. The secret, he claimed, lay in “systematic doubt.” By that, he meant that everything except self-evident truths were to be questioned until they proved themselves to be true.
The Cartesian Philosophy, as it came to be known, revolved around the principle of “I think, therefore I am.” It was further based on the idea of God as the absolutely perfect being, and the dualism between the mind (immaterial world) and the body (material world).
· Judging,
· Recording,
· Communicating.
Should things turn out to be truly new, it was important to view them in the cool light of objectivity, a new term that would dominate society's mind. Regulation of thought by approved methods would come to reach the status of a truism in that such methods were believed to take control of nature easier. We have seen this not always to be the case.
[Albert Einstein always regretted writing the letter in August 1939 to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the possibility of constructing an atomic bomb. This was written but a month before Nazi Germany would invade Poland to start WWII. The bomb was built and the U.S. Army Air Force dropped one atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki, Japan in August 1945, killing more than 100,000 residence and turning the two areas into wastelands to speed up the end of the war. We have had nuclear arms races ever since or more than three-quarters of a century. Nuclear power plants were built with the same technology, and we have had already two major nuclear disasters: the nuclear power station meltdown at Chernobyl, Russia in 1987, turning the area into a wasteland; and the nuclear power station at Fukushima, Japan in 2012 with nuclear containers being compromised following an earthquake that set off a tsunami, turning that area into a wasteland as well. Science in the 21st century, in addition to continuing to unlock the mysteries of nature, has the added responsibility of measuring the possible impact such new discoveries might have on vulnerable society. If science fails in this task, “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land” will no longer be the narrative of a concerned writer, but a reality.]
Incidentally, it is alleged that Francis Bacon died of pneumonia while studying the effects of freezing conditions on the preservation of meat. If this is true, he died practicing his belief in the science of his methodology.
With Galileo’s experimentation and Bacon’s system of managing data, a new definition of knowledge was emerging. The theories of these men had a role in the process along with the objectifying capacity of mathematics to quantify and verify their findings. All that appeared left to consider was a technique for evaluating data without fear of error. Descartes believed he had the answer.
RENE DESCARTES
Obviously, a man of deep reflection would work on a theory to support his epiphany that would eventually be published as Discourse on Method (1637). In it, he set out the rules for seeking certainty in an uncertain world. The secret, he claimed, lay in “systematic doubt.” By that, he meant that everything except self-evident truths were to be questioned until they proved themselves to be true.
The Cartesian Philosophy, as it came to be known, revolved around the principle of “I think, therefore I am.” It was further based on the idea of God as the absolutely perfect being, and the dualism between the mind (immaterial world) and the body (material world).
Western philosophy would henceforth be a response to his writing and closely studied to this day. For example, Antonio Damasio (born 1944), Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California writes in “Descartes’ Error” (1994): I think, therefore I am overlooking emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Damasio insists that emotion is in the loop of reason and that emotion can assist the reasoning process rather than necessarily be a disturbance to it. Emotions are not a luxury, he insists, but essential to rational thinking and normal social behavior.
Although Damasio has support from the neuroscience community for his criticism of Cartesian logic, Descartes’ “Meditations on First Philosophy” (1641) is referenced to this day in college classes on philosophy.
As a mathematician, Descartes is credited with forming coordinate system as a bridge between algebra and geometry to form analytical geometry to reference points in space as a set of numbers in algebraic equations to be expressed in geometric shapes in two and three dimensional systems; or conversely, for shapes to be described in equations.
Cartesian Coordinate System with a circle of radius 2 centered at the origin marked in red. The equation of a circle is (x − a)2 + (y − b)2 = r2 where a and b are the coordinates of the center (a, b) and r is the radius.
A three-dimensional Cartesian Coordinate System, with origin O and axis lines X, Y, and Z, oriented as shown by the arrows. The tick marks on the axes are one length unit apart. The black dot shows the point with coordinates x = 2, y = 3, and z = 4, or (2, 3, 4).
This CARTESIAN COORDINATE GRAPH shows how a substance such as water could experience a “triple point,” that is, a point at which it is simultaneously a liquid, a solid, and a vapor. This is an example of the application of the Cartesian Coordinate System.
Choosing a Cartesian Coordinate System for a three-dimensional space means choosing an ordered triplet of lines (axes). For this work, he has been tabbed the “Father of Analytical Geometry,” as well as one of the keys to the “The Scientific Revolution.”
Descartes refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers and declined to trust his own senses. He frequently set his views apart from those of his predecessors.
In “Passion of the Soul” (1649), the last of his published works, clearly, an area of which he was not comfortable, Descartes attempts to advance the rational-based scientific method by seeing passions as a parallel universe. That is to say, he makes the same distinction between the body and the soul:
· The soul thinks but is incorporeal;
· The body is corporeal or physical and does not think.
In this book, he explores Cartesian Dualism or the dichotomy of mind and body. Thus he laid the foundation for 17th-century rational dualism, which would be later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, but opposed by empiricists such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
Interestingly enough, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes were all mathematicians, while the others were not. Likewise, Antonio Damasio is not a mathematician but sees the critical influence of emotions on behavior and therefore chooses not to see body and soul as separate but integral to each other (see Descartes’ Error).
Descartes, Copernicus, and Galileo had dislodged the image of man from the center of the universe, but it was only Descartes who had persuasively separated the image of the mind from the image of the body, the subject from the object, the knower from the known. British management philosopher Charles Hampden-Turner (born 1934) sees this as a lethal split in “Maps of the Mind” (1981), writing, “The broken (image) of the mind must now be healed.”
Descartes, a deeply religious man with a reverence for the immortality of the soul didn’t appear to see his dichotomy between body and soul either painful or a split, but an inevitable and crucial separation between God and man. The consequences of this mindset would reverberate down to the present age.
GOD AND THE MACHINE
The vision of nature conceived by Descartes and perfected by Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) was that of a vast perpetual motion machine, objective in the sense that no human act qualified its behavior. God was the clockmaker, who had wound His creation up then left him to tick on his own. It followed the Divine Plan and was compatible with Protestant theology.
Astronomy was the leading science of the time, and its vision was bleak, indeed. American philosopher of religion E. A. Burtt (1892 – 1989):
“Saw man reduced to a puny, irrelevant spectator, imprisoned in a dark room. The world that people had thought themselves in, a world rich in color and sound, redolent with fragrance, speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals, was crowded now into minute corners in the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world hard, cold, colorless, and dead.”
After Newton, no image of man or nature could be too pessimistic. The tough-mindedness of dispassionate reason and skepticism became the prevailing orthodoxy. The des ex machine, or the “god from the machine,” was now the norm. This concept was taken from Greek drama whereby the resolution of a plot impossible by natural means had a god or goddess lowered by machine on stage to exercise supernatural powers in the midst of implacable tragedy to end the drama in contrived but inspirational fashion. In literature, it is used by novelists to suspend belief with characters exhibiting unexpected powers to save the principals in the story seemingly from hopeless situations.
[Over the past 500 years, or since the shocking discovery of America, man has been at times on a rollercoaster climbing slowly, then rapidly descending taking tortuous turns at breathtaking speeds to end up pretty much where he started, only to believe because of his “cut & control” progress to be in a different place and space. He sees what he has gained but not what he has lost. Some might say this has been a five hundred year retreat from a God-centered to a man-centered universe, and with all that man has and has accomplished, that man finds himself in a place and space, not all that reassuring. Another metaphor might be that of a locomotive that must first overcome enormous inertia to establish some momentum, but once that is accomplished the momentum builds to acceleration that keeps quickening which becomes impossible to control, but nobody minds as they race past landmarks and sacred markings that they once cherished not realizing they are running from themselves as “Nowhere Man” to place just over the horizon called “Nowhere Land.”]
The mechanisms of science would culminate in the “First Industrial Revolution” (1760 – 1840). Manufacturing transitioned from manual to machine power with the introduction of new chemical and iron production processes. This was followed by improved efficiency of water power and the increasing use of steam power. New machine tools and machines would replace the pre-industrial guilds. The workplace lost its intimacy and with it came growing concern about what sociologists would call “self-estrangement.”
Guilds were associations of artisans and merchants who controlled the practice of their craft in confraternities of tradesmen. Guilds were something between a professional association and a trade union.
The dominant industry of the “First Industrial Revolution” in terms of employment was the textiles industry. Negro slaves in the American South planted and harvested cotton. This was shipped to the textile mills of Great Britain to be weaved into cloth. The most important technological innovations during this period were made by the British.
James Watt transformed the steam engine from reciprocating motion to rotating motion.
“The Second Industrial Revolution” was a period of rapid industrial development, primarily in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, but also France, Italy, and Japan. Railroads became critical to the transporting of goods. This led to large-scale iron and steel production. It also led to the widespread use of machinery and increased steam power fueled by petroleum and coal for cheap energy. It was the inaugural period of rapid communications with the widespread use of the telegraph. Blueprints were created for large windowless factories and giant public utilities for electrical power. Workers were seen as interchangeable parts in a giant machine and controllable brawn with modern industrial-organizational methods.
American mechanical engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) became prominent with his industrial efficiency expertise (see The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911). The concept of “consultants” entered the language.
Sociologist Patrick Geddes (1854 – 1932) puts these developments in perspective with “Cities in Evolution” (1915), while decades later Harvard economist David Landes updates the trend in “The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present” (1969).
Landes focuses on the “Second Industrial Revolution,” which spread from Great Britain to the rest of Europe to eventually spread to other advanced societies. Included in this focus are the innovations and inventions that brought about the rapid rise of Western technological development from the 18th to the 20th century.
Many other voices are at the ready to define “The Third Revolution,” which is as challenging and disruptive as the first two, if not more chaotic. The world population has exploded to more than seven billion souls, and thanks to the “Information Age” and electronic technology, the earth is now a global community, a community in these early days of the 21st century that has not yet reconciled itself to the fact that cooperation, not conflict is the elixir to man’s survival.
One of the most respected voices is that of the American economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin (born 1945) with his book, “The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World” (2011). He sees a society powered by oil and other fossil fuels spiraling into a dangerous endgame.
The price of gas and food is climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt is soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a sustainable economic game plan to take us into the future.
Rifkin explores how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create a powerful "Third Industrial Revolution." He asks us to imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories and sharing it with each other in an "energy internet," as we now create and share information online. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
He sees a reordering of human relationships from hierarchical to lateral power, something that the Maltese physician and psychologist Edward de Bono (Lateral Thinking, 1970) has been advocating for decades. Lateral thinking has been the campaign of his life. My wonder is how many readers are familiar with his work.
Rifkin sees lateral thinking as a way to impact the conduct of commerce, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life. This is a macro approach whereas the Maltese psychologist’s approach is fundamentally individualistic.
De Bono believes Western man has to radically change the way he thinks. Since cell phones, apps, and the Internet only continue to reinforce the way we have always thought, it is unlikely that technology will correct this fault line. There has been a maddening drift away from ourselves for the past 500 years, the product of our “cut & control” philosophy of progress. Perhaps it is time to drop our self-centered narcissism, take a “time out,” and reconnect with our spiritual side. What do you think?
NEXT: Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land – PART NINETEEN – The Ghost in the Machine: Pragmatic Science & Self-Indulgent Man
American mechanical engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) became prominent with his industrial efficiency expertise (see The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911). The concept of “consultants” entered the language.
Sociologist Patrick Geddes (1854 – 1932) puts these developments in perspective with “Cities in Evolution” (1915), while decades later Harvard economist David Landes updates the trend in “The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present” (1969).
Landes focuses on the “Second Industrial Revolution,” which spread from Great Britain to the rest of Europe to eventually spread to other advanced societies. Included in this focus are the innovations and inventions that brought about the rapid rise of Western technological development from the 18th to the 20th century.
Many other voices are at the ready to define “The Third Revolution,” which is as challenging and disruptive as the first two, if not more chaotic. The world population has exploded to more than seven billion souls, and thanks to the “Information Age” and electronic technology, the earth is now a global community, a community in these early days of the 21st century that has not yet reconciled itself to the fact that cooperation, not conflict is the elixir to man’s survival.
One of the most respected voices is that of the American economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin (born 1945) with his book, “The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World” (2011). He sees a society powered by oil and other fossil fuels spiraling into a dangerous endgame.
The price of gas and food is climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt is soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a sustainable economic game plan to take us into the future.
Rifkin explores how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create a powerful "Third Industrial Revolution." He asks us to imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories and sharing it with each other in an "energy internet," as we now create and share information online. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
He sees a reordering of human relationships from hierarchical to lateral power, something that the Maltese physician and psychologist Edward de Bono (Lateral Thinking, 1970) has been advocating for decades. Lateral thinking has been the campaign of his life. My wonder is how many readers are familiar with his work.
Rifkin sees lateral thinking as a way to impact the conduct of commerce, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life. This is a macro approach whereas the Maltese psychologist’s approach is fundamentally individualistic.
De Bono believes Western man has to radically change the way he thinks. Since cell phones, apps, and the Internet only continue to reinforce the way we have always thought, it is unlikely that technology will correct this fault line. There has been a maddening drift away from ourselves for the past 500 years, the product of our “cut & control” philosophy of progress. Perhaps it is time to drop our self-centered narcissism, take a “time out,” and reconnect with our spiritual side. What do you think?
NEXT: Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land – PART NINETEEN – The Ghost in the Machine: Pragmatic Science & Self-Indulgent Man
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