6. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Pelican ed., 1926), p. 12.
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The Human Condition
verse through an instrument, at once adjusted to human senses and
destined to uncover what definitely and forever must lie beyond
them, set the stage for an entirely new world and determined the
course of other events, which with much greater stir were to usher
in the modern age. Except for the numerically small, politically in-
consequential milieu of learned men—astronomers, philosophers,
and theologians—the telescope created no great excitement; public
attention was drawn, rather, to Galileo's dramatic demonstration
of the laws of falling bodies, taken to be the beginning of modern
natural science (although it may be doubted that by themselves,
without being transformed later by Newton into the universal law
of gravitation—still one of the most grandiose examples of the
modern amalgamation of astronomy and physics—they would ever
have led the new science on the path of astrophysics). For what
most drastically distinguished the new world view not only from
that of antiquity or the Middle Ages, but from the great thirst for
direct experience in the Renaissance as well, was the assumption
that the same kind of exterior force should be manifest in the fall of
terrestrial and the movements of heavenly bodies.
Moreover, the novelty of Galileo's discovery was clouded by
its close relationship to antecedents and predecessors. Not the
philosophical speculations of Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno
alone, but the mathematically trained imagination of the astrono-
mers, Copernicus and Kepler, had challenged the finite, geocentric
world view which men had held since time immemorial. Not
Galileo but the philosophers were the first to abolish the dichotomy
between one earth and one sky above it, promoting, as they
thought, the earth "to the rank of the noble stars" and finding her a
home in an eternal and infinite universe.7 And it seems the as-
tronomers needed no telescope to assert that, contrary to all sense
experience, it is not the sun that moves around the earth but the
earth that circles the sun. If the historian looks back upon these
beginnings with all the wisdom and prejudices of hindsight, he is
tempted to conclude that no empirical confirmation was needed to
abolish the Ptolemaic system. What was wanted was, rather, the
7. I follow the excellent recent exposition of the interrelated history of philo-
sophic and scientific thought in "the seventeenth century revolution" by Alexan-dra Koyxe (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe [1957], pp. 43 ff.).
[ 258 ]
The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
speculative courage to follow the ancient and medieval principle of
simplicity in nature—even if it led to the denial of all sense experi-
ence—and the great boldness of Copernicus' imagination, which
lifted him from the earth and enabled him to look down upon her as
though he actually were an inhabitant of the sun. And the historian
feels justified in his conclusions when he considers that Galileo's
discoveries were preceded by a "veritable retour a Archimede"
which had been effective since the Renaissance. It certainly is sug-
gestive that Leonardo studied him with passionate interest and
that Galileo can be called his disciple.8
However, neither the speculations of philosophers nor the im-
aginings of astronomers has ever constituted an event. Prior to
the telescopic discoveries of Galileo, Giordano Bruno's philosophy
attracted little attention even among learned men, and without the
factual confirmation they bestowed upon the Copernican revolu-
tion, not only the theologians but all "sensible men . . . would
have pronounced it a wild appeal . . . of an uncontrolled imagina-
tion."9 In the realm of ideas there are only originality and depth,
both personal qualities, but no absolute, objective novelty; ideas
come and go, they have a permanence, even an immortality of their
own, depending upon their inherent power of illumination, which
is and endures independently of time and history. Ideas, moreover,
as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented, and em-
pirically unconfirmed speculations about the earth's movement
around the sun were no more unprecedented than contemporary
theories about atoms would be if they had no basis in experiments
and no consequences in the factual world.10 What Galileo did and
what nobody had done before was to use the telescope in such a
8. See P.-M. Schuhl, Machinisme etphilosophie (1947), pp. 28-29.
9. E. A. Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations of Modem Science (Anchor ed.),
p. 38 (cf. Koyre, op. cit., p. 55, who states that Bruno's influence made itself felt
"only after the great telescopic discoveries of Galileo").
10. The first "to save the phenomena by the assumption that the heaven is at
rest, but that the earth revolves in an oblique orbit, while also rotating about its own axis" was Aristarchus of Samos in the third century B.C., and the first to
conceive of an atomic structure of matter was Democritus of Abdera in the fifth
century B.C. A very instructive account of the Greek physical world from the
viewpoint of modern science is given by S. Sambursky, The Physical World of the
Greeks (1956).
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The Human Condition
way that the secrets of the universe were delivered to human cogni-
tion "with the certainty of sense-perception";11 that is, he put
within the grasp of an earth-bound creature and its body-bound
senses what had seemed forever beyond his reach, at best open to
the uncertainties of speculation and imagination.
This difference in relevance between the Copernican system and
Galileo's discoveries was quite clearly understood by the Catholic
Church, which raised no objections to the pre-Galilean theory of
an immobile sun and a moving earth as long as the astronomers
used it as a convenient hypothesis for mathematical purposes; but,
as Cardinal Bellarmine pointed out to Galileo, "to prove that the
hypothesis . . . saves the appearances is not at all the same thing as
to demonstrate the reality of the movement of the earth."12 How
pertinent this remark was could be seen immediately by the sudden
change of mood which overtook the learned world after the con-
firmation of Galileo's discovery. From then on, the enthusiasm
with which Giordano Bruno had conceived of an infinite universe,
and the pious exultation with which Kepler had contemplated the
sun, "the most excellent of all the bodies in the universe whose
whole essence is nothing but pure light" and which therefore was
to him the most fitting dwelling place of "God and the blessed
angels,"13 or the more sober satisfaction of Nicholas of Cusa of see-
ing the earth finally at home in the starred sky, were conspicuous
by their absence. By "confirming" his predecessors, Galileo estab-
lished a demonstrable fact where before him there were inspired
speculations. The immediate philosophic reaction to this reality
was not exultation but the Cartesian doubt by which modern
philosophy—that "school of suspicion," as Nietzsche once called
11. Galileo {op. cit.) himself stressed this point: "Any one can know with the certainty of sense-perception that the moon is by no means endowed with a
smooth and polished surface, etc." (quoted from Koyre, op. cit., p. 89).
12. A similar stand was taken by the Lutheran theologian Osiander of Nurem-
berg, who wrote in an introduction to Copernicus' posthumous work, On the
Revolutions of Celestial Bodies (1546): "The hypotheses of this book are not necessarily true or even probable. Only one thing matters. They must lead by com-
putation to results that are in agreement with the observed phenomena." Both
quotations are from Philipp Frank, "Philosophical Uses of Science," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. XIII, No. 4 (April, 1957).
13. Burtt, op. cit., p. 58.
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The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
it—was founded, and which ended in the conviction that "only on
the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation
henceforth be safely built."14
For many centuries the consequences of this event, again not
unlike the consequences of the Nativity, remained contradictory
and inconclusive, and even today the conflict between the event
itself and its almost immediate consequences is far from resolved.
The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable,
ever-quickening increase inhuman knowledge and power; shortly
before the modern age European mankind knew less than Archi-
medes in the third century B.C., while the first fifty years of our
century have witnessed more important discoveries than all the
centuries of recorded history together. Yet the same phenomenon
is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable in-
crease in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which
has spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most sig-
nificant aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scien-
tists themselves, whose well-founded optimism could still, in the
nineteenth century, stand up against the equally justifiable pessi-
mism of thinkers and poets. The modern astrophysical world view,
which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the
senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities
we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instru-
ments, and—in the words of Eddington—"the former have as much
resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a sub-
scriber."15 Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find
instruments, and instead of nature or the universe—in the words of
Heisenberg—man encounters only himself.16
14. Bertrand Russell, "A Free Man's Worship," in Mysticism and Logic
(1918), p. 46.
15. As quoted by J. W. N. Sullivan, Limitations of Science (Mentor ed.), p. 141.
16. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg has expressed this thought in a
number of recent publications. For instance: "Wenn man versucht, von der Situa-
tion in der modernen Naturwissenschaft ausgehend, sich zu den in Bewegung
geratenen Fundamenten vorzutasten, so hat man den Eindruck, ... dass zum
erstenmal im Laufe der Geschichte der Mensch auf dieser Erde nur noch sich
selbst gegeniibersteht . . . , dass wir gewissermassen immer nur uns selbst be-
gegnen" (Das Naturbild der heutigen Pkysik [1955], pp. 17-18). Heisenberg's point is that the observed object has no existence independent of the observing
[ 261 ]
The Human Condition
The point, in our context, is that both despair and triumph are
inherent in the same event. If we wish to put this into historical
perspective, it is as if Galileo's discovery proved in demonstrable
fact that both the worst fear and the most presumptuous hope of
human speculation, the ancient fear that our senses, our very or-
gans for the reception of reality, might betray us, and the Archi-
medean wish for a point outside the earth from which to unhinge
the world, could only come true together, as though the wish
would be granted only provided that we lost reality and the fear
was to be consummated only if compensated by the acquisition of
supramundane powers. For whatever we do today in physics—
whether we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in
the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic
evolution, or penetrate with the help of telescopes the cosmic
space to a limit of two and even six billion light years, or build
machines for the production and control of energies unknown in
the household of earthly nature, or attain speeds in atomic accelera-
tors which approach the speed of light, or produce elements not to
be found in nature, or disperse radioactive particles, created by us
through the use of cosmic radiation, on the earth—we always
handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth. With-
out actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand (dos rnoi
pou sto), still bound to the earth through the human condition, we
have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature
as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean
point. And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process
we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature's
household.
While these achievements were anticipated by no one, and while
most present-day theories flatly contradict those formulated during
the first centuries of the modern age, this development itself was
possible only because at the beginning the old dichotomy between
earth and sky was abolished and a unification of the universe ef-
fected, so that from then on nothing occurring in earthly nature
subject: "Durch die Art der Beobachtung wird entschieden, welche Zfige der
Natur bestimmt werden und welche wir durch unsere Beobachtungen ver-
wischen" (Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der Naturwissenschaft [1949], p. 67).
[ 262 }
The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
was viewed as a mere earthly happening. AH events were consid-
ered to be subject to a universally valid law in the fullest sense of
the word, which means, among other things, valid beyond the
reach of human sense experience (even of the sense experiences
made with the help of the finest instruments), valid beyond the
reach of human memory and the appearance of mankind on earth,
valid even beyond the coming into existence of organic life and the
earth herself. All laws of the new astrophysical science are formu-
lated from the Archimedean point, and this point probably lies
much farther away from the earth and exerts much more power
over her than Archimedes or Galileo ever dared to think.
If scientists today point out that we may assume with equal
validity that the earth turns around the sun or the sun turns around
the earth, that both assumptions are in agreement with observed
phenomena and the difference is only a difference of the chosen
point of reference, it by no means indicates a return to Cardinal
Bellarmine's or Copernicus' position, where the astronomers dealt
with mere hypotheses. It rather signifies that we have moved the
Archimedean point one step farther away from the earth to a point
in the universe where neither earth nor sun are centers of a uni-
versal system. It means that we no longer feel bound even to the
sun, that we move freely in the universe, choosing our point of
reference wherever it may be convenient for a specific purpose.
For the actual accomplishments of modern science this change
from the earlier heliocentric system to a system without a fixed
center is, no doubt, as important as the original shift from the geo-
centric to the heliocentric world view. Only now have we estab-
lished ourselves as "universal" beings, as creatures who are ter-
restrial not by nature and essence but only by the condition of
being alive, and who therefore by virtue of reasoning can overcome
this condition not in mere speculation but in actual fact. Yet the
general relativism that results automatically from the shift from a
heliocentric to a centerless world view—conceptualized in Ein-
stein's theory of relativity with its denial that "at a definite present
instant all matter is simultaneously real"17 and the concomitant,
implied denial that Being which appears in time and space pos-
sesses an absolute reality—was already contained in, or at least
17. Whitehead, op. tit., p. 120.
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The Human Condition
preceded by, those seventeenth-century theories according to
which blue is nothing but a "relation to a seeing eye" and heaviness
nothing but a "relation of reciprocal acceleration."18 The parentage
of modern relativism is not in Einstein but in Galileo and Newton.
What ushered in the modern age was not the age-old desire of
astronomers for simplicity, harmony, and beauty, which made
Copernicus look upon the orbits of the planets from the sun instead
of the earth, nor the Renaissance's new-awakened love for the
earth and the world, with its rebellion against the rationalism of
medieval scholasticism; this love of the world, on the contrary,
was the first to fall victim to the modern age's triumphal world
alienation. It was rather the discovery, due to the new instrument,
that Copernicus' image of "the virile man standing in the sun . . .
overlooking the planets"19 was much more than an image or a ges-
ture, was in fact an indication of the astounding human capacity to
think in terms of the universe while remaining on the earth, and the
perhaps even more astounding human ability to use cosmic laws as
guiding principles for terrestrial action. Compared with the earth
alienation underlying the whole development of natural science in
the modern age, the withdrawal from terrestrial proximity con-
tained in the discovery of the globe as a whole and the world aliena-
tion produced in the twofold process of expropriation and wealth
accumulation are of minor significance.
At any event, while world alienation determined the course and
the development of modern society, earth alienation became and
has remained the hallmark of modern science. Under the sign of
earth alienation, every science, not only physical and natural sci-
ence, so radically changed its innermost content that one may
doubt whether prior to the modern age anything like science ex-
isted at all. This is perhaps clearest in the development of the new
science's most important mental instrument, the devices of modern
algebra, by which mathematics "succeeded in freeing itself from
18. Ernst Cassirer's early essay, Einstein's Theory of Relativity (Dover Publications, 1953), strongly emphasizes this continuity between twentieth-century
and seventeenth-century science.
19. J. Bronowski, in an article "Science and Human Values," points out the great role the metaphor played in the mind of important scientists (see Nation,
December 29, 1956).
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The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
the shackles of spatiality,"20 that is, from geometry, which, as the
name indicates, depends on terrestrial measures and measurements.
Modern mathematics freed man from the shackles of earth-bound
experience and his power of cognition from the shackles of fmitude.
The decisive point here is not that men at the beginning of the
modern age still believed with Plato in the mathematical structure
of the universe nor that, one generation later, they believed with
Descartes that certain knowledge is possible only where the mind
plays with its own forms and formulas. What is decisive is the
entirely un-Platonic subjection of geometry to algebraic treat-
ment, which discloses the modern ideal of reducing terrestrial
sense data and movements to mathematical symbols. Without this
non-spatial symbolic language Newton would not have been able
to unite astronomy and physics into a single science or, to put it
another way, to formulate a law of gravitation where the same
equation will cover the movements of heavenly bodies in the sky
and the motion of terrestrial bodies on earth. Even then it was clear
that modern mathematics, in an already breathtaking development,
had discovered the amazing human faculty to grasp in symbols
those dimensions and concepts which at most had been thought of
as negations and hence limitations of the mind, because their im-
mensity seemed to transcend the minds of mere mortals, whose
existence lasts an insignificant time and remains bound to a not too
important corner of the universe. Yet even more significant than
this possibility—to reckon with entities which could not be "seen"
by the eye of the mind—was the fact that the new mental instru-
ment, in this respect even newer and more significant than all the
scientific tools it helped to devise, opened the way for an alto-
gether novel mode of meeting and approaching nature in the ex-
periment. In the experiment man realized his newly won freedom
from the shackles of earth-bound experience; instead of observing
natural phenomena as they were given to him, he placed nature
under the conditions of his own mind, that is, under conditions won
from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint
outside nature itself.
It is for this reason that mathematics became the leading science
of the modern age, and this elevation has nothing to do with Plato,
20. Bunt, op. cit., p. 44.
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The Human Condition
who deemed mathematics to be the noblest of all sciences, second
only to philosophy, which he thought nobody should be permitted
to approach without having become familiar first with the mathe-
matical world of ideal forms. For mathematics (that is, geometry)
was the proper introduction to that sky of ideas where no mere im-
ages (eidola) and shadows, no perishable matter, could any longer
interfere with the appearing of eternal being, where these appear-
ances are saved (sozein ta phainomena) and safe, as purified of hu-
man sensuality and mortality as of material perishability. Yet
mathematical and ideal forms were not the products of the intel-
lect, but given to the eyes of the mind as sense data were given to
the organs of the senses; and those who were trained to perceive
what was hidden from the eyes of bodily vision and the untrained
mind of the many perceived true being, or rather being in its true
appearance. With the rise of modernity, mathematics does not
simply enlarge its content or reach out into the infinite to become
applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing,
expanding universe, but ceases to be concerned with appearances at
all. It is no longer the beginning of philosophy, of the "science" of
Being in its true appearance, but becomes instead the science of the
structure of the human mind.
When Descartes' analytical geometry treated space and exten-
sion, the res extensa of nature and the world, so "that its relations, however complicated, must always be expressible in algebraic
formulae," mathematics succeeded in reducing and translating all
that man is not into patterns which are identical with human,
mental structures. When, moreover, the same analytical geometry
proved "conversely that numerical truths . . . can be fully repre-
sented spatially," a physical science had been evolved which re-
quired no principles for its completion beyond those of pure mathe-
matics, and in this science man could move, risk himself into space
and be certain that he would not encounter anything but himself,
nothing that could not be reduced to patterns present in him.21 Now
the phenomena could be saved only in so far as they could be re-
duced to a mathematical order, and this mathematical operation
does not serve to prepare man's mind for the revelation of true
being by directing it to the ideal measures that appear in the