Textbook-style history of science takes the achievements of modern science as its standard, and describes the course of science as a great chronology in which people one by one attained those achievements. But history of science in this sense is in a certain way not history at all; what it confronts is not the process by which science succeeded one another, but is always simply the task of praising modern science. Such history of science assigns to each component of modern science a discoverer and a date of discovery, and thus introduces modern science according to the order of discovery rather than the logical order. Yet this kind of narrative remains completely static and does not really tell a story of development.
If we acknowledge that the results of the present are products of historical development, if what we set out to narrate is history rather than the present state of affairs, then we must attend to those ideas of the ancients that differ from modern ones. We should not treat these differences as mere stupidity or superficiality, but seriously understand them as the quest for truth in different eras, as the unfolding succession of different scientific paradigms, only then can we narrate a history of movement.
According to one traditional distinction in Western historiography, annals are not history. A “history of science” in the true sense must first transcend a chronological account of modern science and strive to notice, with a historical and sympathetic eye, the scientific world of the ancients, especially those places where it differs from and runs counter to the modern. If those seemingly paradoxical claims and conclusions do not stem from mere negligence or backwardness, then what is embodied in these differences is precisely “history” as development and succession.
What can be depicted is always what is fixed; “change” itself cannot be grasped. So to tell history, one can only begin by revealing differences. But differences, after all, are always made possible by certain more basic commonalities. There must first be some comparable relation between two things, or they must be placed against one and the same background, before one can speak of difference. In this sense, historical retrospection always requires a relatively definite point of support, or, one may say, a basic thread. If there is a lack of a sufficiently firm foothold and a clear thread, and one only single-mindedly tries to describe differences, the result can only be a looser chronological register.
Of course, this orientation that values difference alone and does not pursue continuity is also a historiographical orientation; one might call it a “non-his-tory.” But the establishment of such historiography does not mean that historical scholarship, which reveals history as temporal succession, is no longer valid.
What should serve as the foothold or main thread for retracing history? There is, without a doubt, no ready-made, unique thread. The Whigs stood on their party’s standpoint to look at British history, telling British history as a process gradually unfolding toward the ideals of their party; is this wrong? Likewise, Tories also tell British history according to their own ideals—who, after all, is right? We find that history does not have one unique, absolutely correct way of being told. But this does not mean that any way of telling it is incorrect. The belief that because no particular telling is the uniquely correct one, history therefore cannot be told by any particular method, is the mindset of foundationalism or dogmatism.
Of course, although there is no unique way of telling, history cannot be made up at random; different tellings are not wholly devoid of distinctions between better and worse. But it must be noted that what historical retrospection truly cares about is “difference,” and the ultimate meaning of choosing a standpoint or thread also lies in how one reveals historical change. A great historian need not necessarily be innovative in the thread used to narrate history; rather, under the guidance of a certain thread, how to collect and sift historical materials, how to understand them deeply and meticulously, how to expound them rigorously and clearly, and finally how to present the historical transformation to readers in a lucid, intuitive, and thought-provoking way—all these links also test the historian’s skill.
After the above preliminaries, let us look at the Dutch historian of science Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis’s classic work, The Mechanization of the World Picture. This book was published in 1950, and an English translation appeared in 1961; from that point on, the author acquired an international reputation, and in 1962 he was awarded the Sarton Medal, being regarded as one of the most important historians of science of the twentieth century.
First, of course, this is a history book rather than a chronicle. Dijksterhuis always tries to return to the historical context and to interpret the text itself in a sympathetic way. What he cares about is not the chronology of the birth of modern technological and scientific achievements, but the historical process by which ancient and modern thought transformed one into another. Therefore, under similar themes, the details that subtly differ from modern understanding become the key points requiring scrutiny. Thus, although The Mechanization of the World Picture is a general history spanning an enormous stretch of time and a broad range of fields, it carries out careful and penetrating investigation into various theoretical details.
Second, this book has a clear historiographical thread—“the mechanization of the world picture.” This is not the final conclusion of the history, but the perspective from which it proceeds. This may be where it differs from the so-called general “Whig history”: by means of narration, Whigs tell the eventual triumph of Whig ideals as the final outcome of British history’s development, whereas Dijksterhuis places the “result” of the mechanization of the world picture at the beginning, as a starting point, and through historical retracing reconsiders what exactly this “result” means. Yet insofar as he cares only about the contributions ancient people made to mechanistic science and does not trace the historical development of ancient thought itself, his basic program can still be called Whiggish, and also traditional in method. Traditionally, an account of the course of science has likewise been nothing more than an exposition centered on mathematics, physics, and astronomy, using today’s mechanistic (mechanical) science as the benchmark. Dijksterhuis does not care about other threads outside this main line, nor does he care about elements of so-called “external history” such as social history or economic history.
But the above characteristics are not defects of the book; rather, they precisely confirm its classic status. Whether it is the social-history program, the chemical-history program, the feminist program, or various postmodern methods of narration, none is truly comprehensive or correct. Any historiographical method filters and arranges historical materials from a particular point of view, and each “point of view” is bound to be partial. To stubbornly cling to one particular historical perspective, to remain confined to a Whiggish internal history centered on the mathematical sciences, is of course partial. But that does not mean we can completely abandon this classic thread of historical narration. In fact, only after first affirming the classical status of such an orthodox historiographical mode do those more fashionable methods reveal their distinctive value. Without understanding modernity, how can one speak of postmodernity?
Dijksterhuis first makes clear that, given that the mechanistic worldview is the core thread that ultimately leads into contemporary history of science and cultural history, people, although they dispute whether the consequences of “mechanization” are good or bad, accidental or necessary, often lack an understanding of the content and origins of this concept. Thus he wants to retrace history to investigate the gestation and development of mechanistic ideas—not in order to praise the modern condition or prove it necessary, but neither to be blindly anti-modern or postmodern without first clarifying what modernity actually is. He tries to suspend value judgments for the time being, and instead look from the standpoint of modernity in order to place himself within history.
The theme of this book is still very meaningful for Chinese scholarship today—whether in serious academic discussion or in general public courses, expressions such as “mechanism” and “mechanistic view of nature” have long been commonplace. But historical investigation into the origins and development of this concept has remained thin and weak. We criticize the mechanistic view of nature that modern science brought to modern people, but how exactly this view of nature was brought into modern science is something we have not pursued.
The Mechanization of the World Picture starts with Pythagoras in ancient Greece and goes all the way to Newton. Following the thread of how mechanistic ideas arose, developed, and finally became embedded at the center of modern science, the book selects materials and organizes its structure, while not caring about historical content unrelated to this thread. Of course, it does not only care about scientific content in the modern sense; it also cares more about things that are not scientific content but nonetheless exerted a lasting influence on the development of mechanism, including various philosophical and theological ideas, as well as sections on technology, astrology, magic, and so on. In terms of focusing on a clear thread, Dijksterhuis’s field of vision is narrow; in terms of the range of historical materials he surveys and commands, it is extremely broad. Clearly, the reason this book is classic does not lie in the choice of its narrative thread, but in his broad and deep mastery of historical materials, and in his rigorous and incisive analysis and organization. In these respects, Dijksterhuis’s brilliance can be appreciated only through careful reading.
Reading this book is not a pleasant task. Although the book aims to provide the general “reader” with a “broad outline,” rather than being intended only for historians of science, readers will certainly not find it as relaxed and enjoyable as they would an ordinary popular general history. Why is this so? It is not because the expression is difficult or because too many technical details are inserted, thereby creating obstacles to reading. The key lies in the fact that the content of this book is extremely condensed. It does not, like ordinary general histories, contain much “water.” For example, when introducing a scientist, one usually first has to tell a bit of biography, either praising his diligence and love of learning, or gossiping about anecdotes and oddities; such material is irrelevant to understanding the development of scientific thought, but it is the necessary “lubricant” for our usual reading of general histories. Dijksterhuis includes almost no empty talk; every word is a pearl indeed. As the Chinese translator put it: “Not a single sentence can be passed over casually; the reader needs enough patience to slowly dilute the thick, almost undissolvable content and carefully savor its meaning.”
Of course, even if one cannot chew through the entire book in one go, but instead treats it as a reference work to consult from time to time, it is still beneficial. On the one hand, many of the topics covered in this book remain unfamiliar to Chinese scholarship, and many concepts do not even have established translations. On the other hand, for things that seem familiar to us, this book can also correct many misunderstandings.
Let me give just two examples at random: we usually know that Galileo derived the law of inertia from a thought experiment about a ball moving endlessly on a horizontal plane, but is that really so? “We cannot see any trace of such reasoning in the text of his works, … Galileo could not possibly have reasoned in this way” (p. 378). In fact, Galileo understood inertia as a tendency to maintain circular motion, and his “horizontal plane” referred to a sphere centered on the earth. And even Newton “did not yet possess the concept of inertia prevalent in later mechanics … Newton still held the Aristotelian view that any motion requires a mover, only in the modified form of the Parisian nominalists” (p. 512).
In addition, we all know that Newton’s second law is “F=ma,” but is it really? In fact, Newton’s second axiom says that the “change of motion” is proportional to the motive force, but change in Newton does not equal rate of change. “F=ma is a sufficient but not necessary condition for making Definition 8 and Axiom 2 valid. Therefore, Definition 8 and Axiom 2 together are not equivalent to F=ma” (p. 517), and the force mentioned in the second law is probably not a continuous force either, but rather refers to some kind of “impulsive force that causes an instantaneous change in momentum” (p. 518).
Many more such examples could be given. In fact, these misunderstandings are by no means accidental. When we read the texts of the ancients, we are always inevitably influenced by the deeply rooted concepts and modes of thinking of modernity; without the kind of deep and serious investigation carried out by Dijksterhuis, it is difficult to discover the differences involved. And these subtle differences in the understanding of concepts are by no means trivial; they precisely embody the changes in ancient and modern modes of thought or worldviews. Is it not precisely the origins and development of the modern mechanistic worldview that we want to investigate? Out of this aim of investigating worldviews, Dijksterhuis leads us deep into the fine-grained aspects of the history of scientific thought.
Finally, Dijksterhuis gives his answer to what, after all, the mechanization of the world picture is—“The mechanization of the world picture means the introduction of a description of nature by means of the mathematical concepts of classical mechanics.” But as far as the value of this book is concerned, this conclusion itself is of no real importance. What is more meaningful for us is his profound and incisive explanation of the development history of tangled and difficult conceptual ideas. Even if we have a different understanding of the mechanization of the world picture, reading this book will surely be highly rewarding. On the other hand, it is likewise meaningful that, through these profound and incisive explanations, this book displays a method of writing history of science that can truly be called classic, sufficient to be ranked as an outstanding representative among works of the same generation and as a standard model for later works to imitate and improve upon. The introduction of this book to Chinese readers should be of great significance for the study of history of science in China and of historiography thereof.
November 19, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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