The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman Page A

question was, is white light simple

or complex? Descartes, for one, had regarded it as simple, and saw colors

as the result of some sort of modification of the light. Newton believed

white light was in fact composed of colors that somehow cancelled each

other out in combination to produce the effect of white. How to decide

between these two claims?
     
     
In the experiment illustrated in Figure 6, Newton took white light,

broke it into parts with a prism, selected one of the parts, and showed

that it could not be further broken down. He did this with each color,

demonstrating that monochromatic light could not be subdivided. Next,

Newton ran the experiment in the opposite direction: he broke the ray

of white light into its parts, and then recombined them by passing them

through a convex lens (see Figure 7). The result was white light. This

atomistic approach, which follows Descartes' four-step method exactly,

establishes the thesis beyond doubt. But as in the case of gravity, the

Cartesians took issue with Newton. Where, they asked, is your theory of light and color, where is your explanation of this behavior? And

as in the previous case, Newton retreated behind the smokescreen of

positivism. I am looking for laws, or optical facts, he replied, not

hypotheses. If you ask me what "red" is, I can only tell you that it is

a number, a certain degree of refrangibility, and the same is true for

each of the other colors. I have measured it: that is enough.
     
     
     

 
     
In this case too, of course, Newton struggled with possible explanations

for the behavior of light, but the combination of (philosophical) atomism,

positivism, and experimental method -- in short, the definition of reality

-- is still very much with us today. To know something is to subdivide it,

quantify it, and recombine it; is to ask "how," and never get entangled

in the complicated underbrush of "why." It is, above all, to distance

yourself from it, as Galileo pointed out; to make it an abstraction. The

poet may get uncritically effusive about a red streak across the sky

as the sun is going down, but the scientist is not so easily deluded:

he knows that his emotions can teach him nothing substantial. The red

streak is a number, and that is the essence of the matter.
     
     
To summarize our discussion of the Scientific Revolution, it is necessary

to note that in the course of the seventeenth century, Western Europe

hammered out a new way of perceiving reality. The most important

change was the shift from quality to quantity, from "why" to how." The

universe, once seen as alive, possessing its own goals and purposes,

is now a collection of inert matter, hurrying around endlessly and

meaninglessly, as Alfred North, Whitehead put it.23 What constitutes an

acceptable explanation has thus been radically altered. The acid test of

existence is quantifiability, and there are no more basic realities in

any object than the parts into which it can be broken down. Finally,

atomism, quantifiability, and the deliberate act of viewing nature

as an abstraction from which one can distance oneself -- all open

the possibility that Bacon proclaimed as the true goal of science:

control. The Cartesian or technological paradigm is, as stated above,

the equation of truth with utility, with the purposive manipulation

of the environment. The holistic view of man as a part of nature, as

being at home in the cosmos, is so much romantic claptrap. Not holism,

but domination of nature; not the ageless rhythm of ecology, but the

conscious management of the world; not (to take the process to its

logical end point) "the magic of personality, [but] the fetishism of

commodities."24 In the mind of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

medieval man (or woman) had been a passive spectator of the physical

world. The new mental tools of the seventeenth century made it possible

to change all that. It was now within our power to have heaven on