In his interesting book on the history of the idea of progress, Nisbet writes:
No single idea has been more important than, perhaps as important as, the idea of progress in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years. •
There has been no stronger support for the idea of progress than the accumulation of knowledge. The grandiose spectacle
of this gradual increase of knowledge is indeed a magnificent example of a successful collective human endeavor.
Let us recall the remarkable discoveries achieved at the end
of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century: the theories of heat, electricity, magnetism, and op
tics. It is not surprising that the idea of scientific progress, already clearly formulated in the eighteenth century, domi
nated the nineteenth. Still, as we have pointed out, the posi
tion of science in Western culture remained unstable. This lends a dramatic aspect to the history of ideas from the high point of the Enlightenment.
We have already stated the alternative: to accept science with what appears to be its alienating conclusions or to turn to an antiscientific metaphysics. We have also emphasized the solitude felt by modern men, the loneliness described by Pas
cal, Kierkegaard, or Monod. We have mentioned the anti
scientific implications of Heidegger's metaphysics. Now we wish to discuss more fully some aspects of the intellectual his
tory of the West, from Diderot, Kant, and Hegel to Whitehead and Bergson; all of them attempted to analyze and limit the scope of modern science as well as to open new perspectives
79
seen as radically alien to that science. Today it is usually agreed that those attempts have for the most part failed. Few would accept, for example, Kant's division of the world into phenomenal and noumenal spheres, or Bergson's "intuition"
as an alternative path to a knowledge whose significance would parallel that of science. Still these attempts are part of our heritage. The history of ideas cannot be understood with
out reference to them.
We shall also briefly discuss scientific positivism, which is based on the separation of what is true from what is scientifi
cally useful. At the outset this positivistic view may seem to op
pose clearly the metaphysical views we have mentioned, views that I . Berlin described as the " Counter-Enlightenment. "
However, their fundamental conclusion is the same: we must reject science as a basis for true knowledge even if at the same time we recognize its practical importance or we deny, as posi
tivists do, the possibility of any other cognitive enterprise.
We must remember all these developments to understand what is at stake� To what extent is science a basis for the intel
ligibility of nature, including man? What is the meaning of the idea of progress today?
Diderot, one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment, is certainly no representative of antiscientific thought. On the contrary, his confidence in science, in the possibilities of knowledge, was total. Yet this is the very reason why science had, following Diderot, to understand life before it could hope to achieve any coherent vision of nature.
We have already mentioned that the birth of modern science was marked by the abandonment of vitalist inspiration and, in particular, of Aristotelian final causes. However, the issue of the organization of living matter remained and became a chal
lenge for classical science. Diderot, at the height of the Newto
nian triumph, emphasizes that this problem was repressed by physics. He imagines it as haunting the dreams of physicists who cannot conceive of it while they are awake. The physicist d /\lembert is dreaming:
·� living point . . . No, that's wrong. Nothing at all to begin with, and then a living point. This living point is
joined by another, and then another, and from these suc
cessive joinings there results a unified being, for I am a
81 THE TWO CULTURES
unity, of that I am certain. . . . (As he said this he felt himself all over.) But how did this unity come about?"
"Now listen, Mr. Philosopher, I can understand an aggre
gate, a tissue of tiny sensitive bodies, but an animal! . . . A whole, a system that is a unit, an individual conscious of its own unity! I can't see it, no, I can't see it. "2
In an imaginary conversation with dj\lembert, Oiderot speaks in the first person, demonstrating the inadequacy of mechanis
tic explanation:
Look at this egg: with it you can overthrow all the schools of theology and all the churches in the world. What is this egg? An insensitive mass before the germ is put into it . . . How does this mass evolve into a new organiza
tion, into sensitivity, into life? Through heat. What will generate heat in it? Motion. What will the successive effects of motion be? Instead of answering me, sit down and let us follow out these effects with our eyes from one moment to the next. First there is a speck which moves about, a thread growing and taking colour, flesh being formed, a beak, wing-tips, eyes, feet coming into view, a yellowish substance which unwinds and turns into intes
tines-and you have a living creature . . . . Now the wall is breached and the bird emerges, walks, flies, feels pain, runs away, comes back again, complains, suffers, loves, desires, enjoys, it experiences all your affections and does all the things you do. And will you maintain, with Descartes, that it is an imitating machine pure and sim
ple? Why, even little children will laugh at you, and phi
losophers will answer that if it is a machine you are one too! If, however, you admit that the only difference be
tween you and an animal is one of organization, you will be showing sense and reason and be acting in good faith;
but then it will be concluded, contrary to what you had said, that from an inert substance arranged in a certain way and impregnated by another inert substance, sub
jected to heat and motion, you will get sensitivity, life, memory, consciousness, passions, thought . . . Just lis
ten to your own arguments and you will feel how pitiful
they are. You will come to feel that by refusing to enter
tain a simple hypothesis that explains everything-sen
sitivity as a property common to all matter or as a result of the organization of matter-you are flying in the face of common sense and plunging into a chasm of mysteries, contradictions and absurdities.3
In opposition to rational mechanics, to the claim that mate
rial nature is nothing but inert mass and motion, Diderot ap
peals to one of physics' most ancient sources of inspiration, namely, the growth, differentiation, and organization of the embryo. Flesh forms, and so does the beak, the eyes, and the intestines; a gradual organization occurs in biological "space,"
out of an apparently homogeneous environment differentiated forms appear at exactly the right time and place through the effects of complex and coordinated processes.
How can an inert mass, even a Newtonian mass animated by the forces of gravitational interaction, be the starting point for organized active local structures? We have seen that the Newtonian system is a world system: no local configuration of
·bodies can claim a particular identity; none is more than a contingent proximity between bodies connected by general re
lations.
But Diderot does not despair. Science is only beginning; ra
tional mechanics is merely a first, overly abstract attempt. The spectacle of the embryo is enough to refute its claims to uni
versality. This is why Diderot compares the work of great
"mathematicians" such as Euler, Bernoulli, and di\lembert to the pyramids of the Egyptians, awe-inspiring witnesses to the genius of their builders, now lifeless ruins, alone and forlorn.
True science, alive and fruitful, will be carried on elsewhere."
Moreover, it seems to him that this new science of organized living matter has already begun. His friend d'Holbach is busy studying chemistry, Diderot himself has chosen medicine. The problem in chemistry as well as in medicine is to replace inert matter with active matter capable of organizing itself and pro
ducing living beings. Diderot claims that matter has to be sen
sitive. Even a stone has sensation in the sense that the molecules of which it is composed actively seek certain com
binations rather than others and thus are governed their likes and dislikes. The sensitivity of the whole organism is then
83 THE TWO CULTURES
simply the sum of that of its parts, just as a swarm of bees with its globally coherent behavior is the result of interactions be
tween one bee and another; and, Diderot thereby concludes, the human soul does not exist any more than the soul of the beehive does. s
Diderot's vitalist protest against physics and the universal laws of motion thus stems from his rejection of any form of spiritualist dualism. Nature must be described in such a way that man's very existence becomes understandable. Other
wise, and this is what happens in the mechanistic world view, the scientific description of nature will have its counterpart in man as an automaton endowed with a soul and thereby alien to nature.
The twofold basis of materialistic naturalism, at once chemi
cal and medical, that Diderot employed to counter the physics of his time is recurrent in the eighteenth century. While biolo
gists speculated about the animal-machine, the preexistence of germs, and the chain of living creatures-all problems close to theology6-chemists and physicians had to face directly the complexity of real processes in both chemistry and life. Chem
istry and medicine were, in the late eighteenth century, priv
ileged sciences for those who fought against the physicists' esprit de systeme in favor of a science that would take into account the diversity of natural processes. A physicist could be pure esprit, a precocious child, but a physician or a chemist must be a man of experience: he must be able to decipher the signs, to spot the clues. In this sense, chemistry and medicine are arts. They demand judgment, application, and tenacious observation. Chemistry is a madman's passion, Venel con
cluded in the article he wrote for Diderot's Encyclopedie, an eloquent defense of chemistry against the abstract imperialism of the Newtonians.7 To emphasize the fact that protests raised by chemists and physicians against the way physicists reduced living processes to peaceful mechanisms and the quiet unfold
ing of universal laws were common in Diderot's day, we invoke the eminent figure of Stahl, the father of vitalism and inventor of the first consistent chemical systematics.
According to Stahl, universal laws apply to the living only in the sense that these laws condemn them to death and corrup
tion; the matter of which living beings are composed is so frail, so easily decomposed, that if it were governed solely by the
common laws of matter, it would not withstand decay or dis
solution for a moment. If a living creature is to survive in spite of the general laws of physics, however short its life when it is compared to that of a stone or another inanimate object, it has to possess in itself a "principle of conservation" that main
tains the harmonious equilibrium of the texture and structure of its body. The astonishing longevity of a living body in view of the extreme corruptibility of its constitutive matter is thus indicative of the action of a "natural, permanent, immanent principle," of a particular cause that is alien to the laws of inanimate matter and that constantly struggles against the con
stantly active corruption whose inevitability these laws imply. s To us this analysis of life sounds both near and remote. It is close to us in its acute awareness of the singularity and the pre
cariousness of life. It is remote because, like Aristotle, Stahl defined life in static terms, in terms of conservation, not of becoming or evolution. Still, the terminology used by Stahl can be found in recent biological literature, for example, where we read that enzymes "combat" decay and allow the body to ward off the death to which it is inexorably doomed by physics. Here also, biological organization defies the laws of nature, and the only "normal" trend is that which leads to death (see Chapter V).
Indeed, Stahl's vitalism is relevant as long as the laws of physics are identified with evolution toward decay and disor
ganization. Today the "vitalist principle" has been superseded by the succession of improbable mutations preserved in the genetic message "governing" the living structure. Nonethe
less, some extrapolations starting from molecular biology rele
gate life to the confines of nature-that is, conclude life is compatible with the basic laws of physics but purely contin
gent. This was explicitly stated by Monod: life does not "fol
low from the laws of physics, it is compatible with them. Life is an event whose singularity we have to recognize."
But the transition from matter to life can also be viewed in a different way. As we shall see, far from equilibrium, new self
organizational processes arise. (These questions will be stud
ied in detail in Chapters V and VI.) In this way biological organization begins to appear as a natural process.
However, long before these recent developments, the prob
lematics of life had been transformed. In a politically
trans-85 THE TWO CULTURES
formed Europe the intellectual landscape was remodeled as the Romantic movement, closely linked with the Counter
Enlightenment, shows.
Stahl criticized the metaphor of the automaton because, un
like a living being, the purpose of an automaton does not lie within itself; its organization is imposed upon it by its maker.
Diderot, far from situating the study of life outside the reach of science, saw it as representing the future of a science he con
sidered to be still in its infancy. A few years later, such points of view were to be challenged.9 Mechanical change, activity as described by the laws of motion, had now become syn
onymous with the artificial and with death. Opposed to it, united in a complex with which we are now quite familiar, were the concepts of life, spontaneity, freedom, and spirit. This op
position was paralleled by the opposition between calculation and manipulation on the one hand, and the free speculative activity of the mind on the other. Through speculation the phi
losopher would reach the spiritual activity at the core of na
ture. As for the scientist, his concern with nature would be reduced to taking it as a set of manipulable and measurable objects; he would thus be able to take possession of nature, to dominate and control it but not understand it. Thus the intel
ligibility of nature would lie beyond the grasp of science.
We are not concerned here with the history of philosophy but merely with emphasizing the extent to which the philo
sophical criticism of science had at this time become harsher, resembling certain modern forms of antiscience. It was no longer a question of refuting rather naive and shortsighted generalizations that only have to be repeated aloud-to use Diderot's language-to make even children laugh, but of refut
ing the type of approach that produced experimental and mathematical knowledge of nature. Scientific knowledge is not being criticized for its limitations but for its nature, and a rival knowledge, based on another approach, is being announced.
Knowledge is fragmented into two opposed modes of inquiry.
From a philosophical point of view, the transition from Di
derot to the Romantics and, more precisely, from one of these two types of critical attitudes toward science to the other, can be found in Kant's transcendental philosophy, the essential point being that the Kantian critique identified science in gen
eral with its Newtonian realization. It thereby branded as
im-possible any opposition to classical science that was not an opposition to science itself. Any criticism against Newtonian physics must then be seen as aimed at downgrading the ra
tional understanding of nature in favor of a different form of knowledge. Kant's approach had immense repercussions, which continue down to our day. Let us therefore summarize his point of view as presented in Critique of Pure Reason, which, in opposition to the progressist views of the Enlighten
ment, presents the closed and limiting conception of science we have just defined.