The Mechanization of the World: A Few Revisionary Theses

 

Having waiting for over a decade, I finished David Bentley Hart's latest book, All Things Are Full of Gods. As always, it was rather dazzling, though I am not convinced by all of it (Hart always impresses, but his purple prose can sometimes feel like the magician's legerdemain).

There is so much I want to talk about, but I will leave that for the coming weeks as I have time to continue to reflect (and re-read). One piece in particular stood out, and upon which I thought I would enjoy doing a quick commentary as it happens to align with my Ph.D. work, namely in the history and historiography of science and religion. Hart, through the figure of Psyche, constantly reminds us that one of the main contrasts to be drawn here is designated by the use of the umbrella label "mechanistic philosophy." Take for example p.33: 

Psyche: But electrochemical events are not simply the same thing as, say, ideas, beliefs, reasoning, awareness, and so forth. And only modern habits of thought make anyone imagine that this is a distinction that one should in principle be able to conjure away. According to the mechanical view of reality, which has reigned over the modern imagination for roughly four centuries, matter is mindless, mass and causality is mindless force, and physical reality is entirely determined by mindless impulses and momentums rather than by rationales or purposes.

I have no problem with this per se, especially because it is being employed in a specific way to anchor the reader into a specific set of problems to which Hart is providing solutions. Nonetheless, because Hart does not go in to detail work regarding "mechanism" there is a chance that readers will import misinformation about such things given that there are so many myths about mechanism that still float around whether in atheist or theological intro textbooks. This is hardly meant as anything resembling an essay, and certainly is not exhaustive. It is rather more of a few points to keep in mind as the references to "mechanization" in Hart's latest book crop up.

1.) The theurgic and the mechanic were not always seen as opposites. In theology one often hears about the "mechanization" of nature and how it created a picture of a dead world where God was no longer needed. In some sense this theory gained its widest acceptance in 1961, when Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis published his magnum opus The Mechanization of the World Picture, building upon the herculean discoveries of Pierre Durham and others. But in terms of the history of ideas (and one of the emphases of my book) there are several important caveats that have been noted as of late in recent historiography that have extremely important ramifications for theology. The theurgic and the mechanic were not initially opposites. Nor did understanding the world as a machine eliminate God. Those most in favor of the image did so for theological purposes; those who most opposed it did so for the same reasons. The story of the mechanization of the world picture is not one where science conquered theology or metaphysics. It is a more complex story of the the interweaving of theology together with different sciences and in different combinations across multiple possibilities for a world still enchanted with a mysticism of movement, interconnection, and function.:

2.) Almost no work has been done on the implicit ambiguity of the term and concept, "mechanization." What does it mean? Dijksterhuis noted that, with Newton, "the mechanization of the world picture," that had been initiated earlier, "had, in principle, been accomplished." Yet not only does Newton not ever use the metaphor of a mechanical or clockwork universe in his corpus (see "The Myth of the Clockwork Universe," in The Persistence of the Sacred for more), Newton's own work both in physics and metaphysics was an explicit attempt to counter the perceived excesses of Cartesian mechanism. Ironically, the most commonly used pedagogical example of a universe filled with billiard-balls playing one off the other is exactly the sort of image Newton was railing against. Much of our misperceptions come by way of the French Catholic Pierre Simon de Laplace and others, who altered the reception of Newton with a great deal of concerted effort and strategy (see for example Roger Hahn, "Laplace and the Vanishing Role of God in the Physical Universe," 85-95).

3.) A "mechanical" world was an ancient picture rather than some startling new invention of modernity. The machina mundi was a favorite picture of God and world even in the early middle ages (see: Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages, 35-70) as robots and automatons like a hydraulic Christ gasping on his cross spoke not of a dead world but of a world full of mystery and strange powers. As mentioned, the theurgic and the mechanic are not, as they very often thought of today, opposites. It would take another set of transitions before "machine" took on the connotations of lifeless, automatic, dead (See: E.R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (U. of Pennsylvania, 2015)).

3.) The "machine" world was not anti-theological but was thoroughly theological and originally positioned and maintained in explicitly theological terms as God was seen in terms analogous, e.g., to the great clockmaker of Strasbourg but also as the power the upholds the clock and the nature of time itself, the power that made living things "tick" (See: Jessica RIskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick (U. of Chicago, 2016)). Far from removing God from the world, mechanization was seen as a way to precisely reveal the working of God. Matter, now described as passive, displayed God's agency precisely in the way it combined and had goal oriented behavior, which was a direct produce of providence.

4.) The notion of the machine-world was not originally anti-spiritualist, but became so as machines were themselves "secularized" and de-spiritualized. The irony? This was itself justified theologically. For in the banishment of agencies from the world what was needed to do this was the invocation of God as machine-maker, rational orderer, demiurge. This was, though not exclusively Protestant, a very typical Protestant argument against Catholic "superstition." Thus, to note the world was a machine that could organize itself was itself nonetheless a directly theological insight. When the world was seen to be reproducible through mathematics, the whole complex order nothing but a string of 0's and 1's, it is said as he discovered this Leibniz wept and was dumbstruck by what he took to be a breathtakingly sublime version of divine creation. (See: Jonathan Sheehan & Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization in the Eighteenth Century (U. of Chicago, 2015)).

5.) "Mechanization" of the world was also often a deep source not just of disenchantment (as the typical story goes) but also of a surprising consistent "counter-enchantment." We do well to remember that no less than John Locke and Thomas Hobbes saw in the new sciences the means whereby one could probably and thoroughly not only identify but taxonomize witches and other creatures of the dark. Mechanization and atomic theory (in its early form of corpuscular theory) was how Robert Boyle proposed one could find the working of "subtle spirits" roaming in the world. It also again and again impressed upon the minds of these men the not often thought of but deeply mystical idea that the world and the mind of men are somehow meant for one another: like the machine our minds roam the lattices and nooks of creation. The world machine was hardly a dead and inert thing but rather one that called for humanity, the microcosm that stands as a mobile horizon combining spiritual and physical, to find such fusions also in the world. Where machines arose, so did enchantment, so did sublime awe. To be sure theories like Descartes could "disenchant" the world; but the machine could just as easily (and ironically in the same movements) re-enchant. (See: Jason Ananda Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (U. of Chicago, 2017)).

6.) One of the most important changes was that involving the concept of "form." It was not the mechanization of the world that secularized and disenchanted it, but the change in the "form." Once an eagle swooping, a fire burning, a world worlding were, in their very particularities, indications of the permeation and preservation of God. In this schema (whether it was envisioned by way of the so-called "Great Chain" or whether it was pictured along the lines of Thomistic subalternation, or Platonic participation in the Forms) there was a non zero sum relation between God and world: the more a thing is itself, the more it is of God. As the "scientific reinterpretation of form" (not itself one thing) occurred, individuality became a source of isolation and containment--more and more focused upon the notion of efficient causes and extrinsic relations between increasingly atomized components. Instead of a complex interrelation that ramified a divine relation at every repeated level, the machine more and more became a symbol invoking the pure exteriority of a thing; that exteriority could exhaust essence; that everything was but a surface, that movements from love to rocks falling and everything in between was merely the mediations of exteriorities of a world constructed only out of replicable superficialities (see: Norma E. Emerton, The Scientific Reinterpretation of Form; Adrian Pabst, Metaphysics: The Invention of Hierarchy)