The Dynamo and Sixteen Vestal Virgins Reconsidered

[alice wellintown]

The Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered
Machina ex Deo
Lynn White

A renowned medievalist joins a humanizing grace with insight in these
studies in the history of technology and culture. The author shows
that long before the Renaissance, technology was an integral and major
activity of the West, fostered and shaped by other forms of culture
and reciprocally affecting them.

It's important to  distinguish tools from machines, technology from
technological activity, the manipulation of resources for an end in
view from
biological applied technology. For example, when humans add
grasshoppers to an environment that did not have and support them
previously, we do not get environment plus
grasshoppers, but a new environment. New technologies change what we
mean by "knowing" and "truth"; they alter those deeply imbedded habits
of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the world is
like--a sense of what is the natural order of things, of what is
reasonable, of what is necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is
real. Think of
how language is changed by new technology and how language affects
thought, action, and expression. This is why I think Pynchon insists
that humans not be put on the scale.

Humans are not to be valued for their usefulness, understood by their
purposes, but for their unique human elements and antecedents. On
this, Pynchon pulls away from Plato, Neo or Christian Platonism.
Though a dialectician, he rejects Plato's dying words in the Phaedo,
words that would, with a blending of Aristotle and others, define the
world and man's place in it for thousands of years.

Pynchon returns to the philosopher Plato rejects in favor of a
Reasoned universe in the Phaedo, Anaxagoras, not the Reasoned
universe, but
scatter-brained mother earth.

All things have existed from the beginning. But originally they
existed in infinitesimally small fragments of themselves, endless in
number and inextricably combined. All things existed in this mass, but
in a confused and indistinguishable form. There were the seeds
(spermata) or miniatures of wheat and flesh and gold in the primitive
mixture; but these parts, of like nature with their wholes (the
homoiomereiai of Aristotle), had to be eliminated from the complex
mass before they could receive a definite name and character. Mind
arranged the segregation of like from unlike; panta chremata en omou
eita nous elthon auta diekosmese. This peculiar thing, called Mind
(Nous), was no less illimitable than the chaotic mass, but, unlike the
logos of Heraclitus, it stood pure and independent (mounos ef eoutou),
a thing of finer texture, alike in all its manifestations and
everywhere the same. This subtle agent, possessed of all knowledge and
power, is especially seen ruling in all the forms of life.[citation
needed]

Mind causes motion. It rotated the primitive mixture, starting in one
corner or point, and gradually extended until it gave distinctness and
reality to the aggregates of like parts, working something like a
centrifuge, and eventually creating the known cosmos. But even after
it had done its best, the original intermixture of things was not
wholly overcome. No one thing in the world is ever abruptly separated,
as by the blow of an axe, from the rest of things.

It is noteworthy that Aristotle accuses Anaxagoras of failing to
differentiate between nous and psyche, while Socrates (Plato, Phaedo,
98 B) objects that his nous is merely a deus ex machina to which he
refuses to attribute design and knowledge.

Anaxagoras proceeded to give some account of the stages in the process
from original chaos to present arrangements. The division into cold
mist and warm ether first broke the spell of confusion. With
increasing cold, the former gave rise to water, earth and stones. The
seeds of life which continued floating in the air were carried down
with the rains and produced vegetation. Animals, including man, sprang
from the warm and moist clay. If these things be so, then the evidence
of the senses must be held in slight esteem. We seem to see things
coming into being and passing from it; but reflection tells us that
decease and growth only mean a new aggregation (synkrisis) and
disruption (diakrisis). Thus Anaxagoras distrusted the senses, and
gave the preference to the conclusions of reflection. Thus he
maintained that there must be blackness as well as whiteness in snow;
how otherwise could it be turned into dark water?

Anaxagoras marked a turning-point in the history of philosophy. With
him speculation passes from the colonies of Greece to settle at
Athens. By the theory of minute constituents of things, and his
emphasis on mechanical processes in the formation of order, he paved
the way for the atomic theory. .


The revolution in attitude seemed voluntary, but in fact was as
mechanical as the fall of a feather. Man created nothing. After 1500,
the speed of progress so rapidly surpassed man's gait as to alarm
every one, as though it were the acceleration of a falling body which
the dynamic theory takes it to be. Lord Bacon was as much astonished
by it as the Church was, and with reason. Suddenly society felt itself
dragged into situations altogether new and anarchic -- situations
which it could not affect, but which painfully affected it. Instinct
taught it that the universe in its thought must be in danger when its
reflection lost itself in space. The danger was all the greater
because men of science covered it with "larger synthesis," and poets
called the undevout astronomer mad. Society knew better. Yet the
telescope held it rigidly standing on its head; the microscope
revealed a universe that defied the senses; gunpowder killed whole
races that lagged behind; the compass coerced the most imbruted
mariner to act on the impossible idea that the earth was round; the
press drenched Europe with anarchism. Europe saw itself, violently
resisting, wrenched into false positions, drawn along new lines as a
fish that is caught on a hook; but unable to understand by what force
it was controlled. The resistance was often bloody, sometimes
humorous, always constant. Its contortions in the eighteenth century
are best studied in the wit of Voltaire, but all history and all
philosophy from Montaigne and Pascal to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
deal with nothing else; and still, throughout it all, the Baconian law
held good; thought did not evolve nature, but nature evolved thought.
Not one considerable man of science dared face the stream of thought;
and the whole number of those who acted, like Franklin, as electric
conductors of the new forces from nature to man, down to the year
1800, did not exceed a few score, confined to a few towns in western
Europe. Asia refused to be touched by the stream, and America, except
for Franklin, stood outside.

Very slowly the accretion of these new forces, chemical and
mechanical, grew in volume until they acquired sufficient mass to take
the place of the old religious science, substituting their attraction
for the attractions of the Civitas Dei, but the process remained the
same. Nature, not mind, did the work that the sun does on the planets.
Man depended more and more absolutely on forces other than his own,
and on instruments which superseded his senses. Bacon foretold it:
"Neither the naked hand nor the understanding, left to itself, can
effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done."
Once done, the mind resumed its illusion, and society forgot its
impotence; but no one better than Bacon knew its tricks, and for his
true followers science always meant self-restraint, obedience,
sensitiveness to impulse from without. "Non fingendum aut excogitandum
sed inveniendum quid Natura faciat aut ferat."


Science has proved that forces, sensible and occult, physical and
metaphysical, simple and complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate,
repel, attract, without stop; that man's senses are conscious of few,
and only in a partial degree; but that, from the beginning of organic
existence, his consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained in
the lines of his sensitiveness; and that the rise of his faculties
from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field,
may be due to the function of assimilating and storing outside force
or forces. There is nothing unscientific in the idea that, beyond the
lines of force felt by the senses, the universe may be -- as it has
always been -- either a supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which
irresistibly attracts, and is either life or death to penetrate. Thus
far, religion, philosophy, and science seem to go hand in hand. The
schools begin their vital battle only there. In the earlier stages of
progress, the forces to be assimilated were simple and easy to absorb,
but, as the mind of man enlarged its range, it enlarged the field of
complexity, and must continue to do so, even into chaos, until the
reservoirs of sensuous or supersensuous energies are exhausted, or
cease to affect him, or until he succumbs to their excess.

For past history, this way of grouping its sequences may answer for a
chart of relations, although any serious student would need to invent
another, to compare or correct its errors; but past history is only a
value of relation to the future, and this value is wholly one of
convenience, which can be tested only by experiment. Any law of
movement must include, to make it a convenience, some mechanical
formula of acceleration.