CONTENTS - ouroboros ponderosa

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10 all the arts (not to menlion slich earlier and atypical Ii.H"l'rllllllt'l"S ;IS
Roger Bacon's 13th century contribution toward a strictly matilcmatic,li
optics) was a mild prelude to the magnitude of number's triumph in the
seventeenth century.
Though thcy wcre soon eclipsed by other advances of the 1600s,
Johannes Kepler and Francis Bacon revealed its two most important and
closely related aspcts early in the century. Kepler, who completed the
Copermcan tranSitIon to the heliocentric model, saw the real world as
composed of quantitative differences only; its differences are strictly
thos of number." Bacon, in The Ne w Atlantis (c. 1620), depicted an
Ideahzed sCientific commumty, whose main object was domination of
nature; as Jaspers put it, "Mastery of nature .. . 'knowledge is power ' has
been the watchword since Bacon.""
The century of Galilco and Descartes-pre-eminent among those who
deepened all the previous forms of quantitative alienation and thus
sketched a technological future-began with a qualitative leap in the
diVISIOn of labor. Franz Borkenau provided the key as to why a profound
change m the Western world-view took place in the seventeenth century,
a movement to a fundamentally mathematical-mechanistic outlook.
According to Borkenau, a great extension of division of labor, occurring
from about 1600, mtroduced the novel notion of abstract work." This
reification of human activity proved pivotal.
Along with degradation of work, the clock is the basis of modern life
eq ally "scientific" in its reduction of life to a measurability, vi
obJective, commodified units of time. The increasingly accurate and
ubiqUItous clock reached a real domination in the seventeenth century
as, correspondingly, "the champions of the new sciences manifested ad
avid interest in horological matters.""
. Thus it seems fitting to introduce Galileo in terms of just this strong
mtcrest m the measurement of time; his invention of the first mechanical
clock based on the principle of the pendulum was likewise a fitting
capstone to hiS long career. As increasingly Objectified or reified time
reflects, at perhaps the deepest level, an increasingly alienated social
world, Gahleo's principal aim was the reduction of the world to an object
of mathematical dissection.
Writing a few years before World War Jl and Auschwitz, Husser!
located the . roots of the co temporary crisis in this objectitying reduction
and IdentJhed Gahleo as Its main progenitor. The life-world has been
"devalued" by science precisely insofar as the "mathematization of
nature" initiated hy Galileo has proceeded7°--clearlyno small indictment.
For Galileo as with Kepler, mathematics was the "root grammar of the
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II\" W I Iii i It \S( )pl! ical d isCt HI I'St' I Ii:! t Ct )llS\ i t utcd Ill< )(ern scie n tine me tholl. ". .'1
I It' ('Illilirialni tlH: principle, "tu measure what IS measurahle and try to
"·,,dn what is "ot so yet. "" Thus he resurrected the Pythagorean­
I 'lal< ,lIie substitution of a world of ahstract mathematical relations or ,.he
" .al worltl, and its methods of ahsolute renunciation of the senses claJ
10 1l0W reality. Ohscrving this turning away from quality to quantity, thiS
t,llInge into a shadow-world of abstractions, Husser! concluded that
"I< "lcrn. math;;matical science prevents us from knowmg lit;; as It IS. And
t Ill" rise of science has fueled ever more specialized knowledge, that
stunting and imprisoning progression s well known hy now. ,, '
Collingwood called Galileo "the true father 2t modern SCIence for the
SlIeccss of his dictum that the book of nature IS wntten m mathematical
language" and its corollary that thcrefore "mathematics is the language
I· ·c·cnce ,,73 Due to this separation from nature, GJlhsple evaluated,
I) S 1 . 74
·'After Galileo, science could no longer be humane."
[t seems very fitting that the mathematician who synthcSIZed geometry
and algehra to form analytic geometry (1637) and who, With Pascal, IS
credited with inventing calculus," should have shaped GalIllean
mathematicism into a new system of thinking. The thesis that the world
is organized in such a way that thcre is a total hreak between people an
the natural world contrived as a total and tnumphant WOrld-VICW, IS the
basis for Descarts' renown as the founder of modern philosophy. The
foundation of his new system, the famous "cog ito, ergo sm," is the
assigning of scientific certainty to the separation between mmd and the
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rest 0 rea l!y.
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This dualism provided an alienated means tor seemg only a completely
ohjectified nature. In the Discourse on Method Descartes dcclared t;
the aim of sciencc is "to make us mastcrs and possessors of naturc :
Though he was a devout Christian, Descartes renewed the dlstanemg
from life that an already fading God could no longer cffcclively
legitimize. As Christianity weakened, a new central ideology of estrange­
ment came forth, this one guarantecing order and dommalion based on
mathcmatical precision.
To Descartes the material universe was a machmc and noth,ng more,
just as animals "indeede arc nothing else hut engines, or matter sell mto
a continual and orderly motion."" He saw the cosmos Itsdf as a giant
clockwork just when the illusion that time is a separate, autonomous
process was taking hold. Also as li : ing, . animate nature dle, dea,
inanimate money became endowed With hie, as capital and the marke
assumed the attrihutes of organic process and c')'clcs -'" Lastly, Descartes
mathematical vision eliminated any messy, chaotic or live clements and
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