Introduction
This article attempts to point out a certain connection among the three things named in the title—what is the relation between the invention of printing, the revival of natural history, and the birth of modern science? Is there perhaps some profound link among them, such that if we want to understand the essence of modern science and even “modernity,” we must begin by examining the influence of printing?
Among these three matters, the date of printing’s appearance in Europe is the clearest: in the 1440s, Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, invented movable-type printing. Whether or not Chinese printing indirectly influenced Gutenberg’s invention, the fact that the era of print in modern Europe begins in the mid-fifteenth century is beyond doubt. As for the birth of modern science, it is usually marked by the publication of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. Of course, any seemingly clear-cut periodization in history is full of ambiguity. After the invention of printing, the culture and customs of the handwritten-book age continued to exert influence for a long time, and the forms and reach of printed books also developed gradually. Likewise, from Copernicus to Newton, the development of modern science always remained under the influence of classical tradition. If we examine history with a microscope, it is hard to discover any absolutely definite “turning point.” But when placed in the sweep of modern history as a whole, printing and the Scientific Revolution unquestionably brought earth-shaking change.
I do not mean to establish a causal relation between printing and modern science, nor to argue that printing was a sufficient or necessary condition for the birth of modern science. In fact, what history allows us to discover are only certain latent linkages, not any precise causal chain. Historical “linkages” do not even have to conform to chronological order. For example, Eisenstein tries to identify printing as the “motor force (intermediary)”[1] behind the various transformations of Western modernity from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution, but did not the “Renaissance” arrive in Italy before the invention of printing? Then how can one still say that printing drove the Renaissance? Eisenstein believes that where the Renaissance first began and whether those pioneers were themselves the motor force of the movement are two different questions.[2] In fact, we can identify many possible “starting points.” For example, Europe also experienced a brief “Renaissance” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; earlier still there was the “Carolingian Renaissance.” The thought and style of so-called forerunners of the Renaissance, such as Petrarch, were also by no means entirely without precedent. But the question is: why did the earlier “renaissances” always remain confined to a narrow scope, never breaking beyond the schools to become a cultural current that spread across all Europe, whereas this Renaissance suddenly became unstoppable and turned into an irreversible great transformation in the history of civilization? Here the influence of printing cannot be ignored.
Of course, the power of printing is hard to overlook; yet is its influence really only a matter of multiplying the speed and range of dissemination? That is to say, is this medium of transformation merely a catalyst—it does not alter the outcome of the reaction, it only multiplies the rate at which the reaction occurs? Or did printing also participate in the shaping of the modern spirit?
In a certain sense, both statements are true. After all, historical change is not a chemical reaction. It should be said that printing, like any technology, is not completely “neutral”; it always has some directional force, reshaping human ways of thinking and habits of life in a particular manner. However, no new way of life can descend from nowhere; it is nothing more than a transformation of earlier ways of life—the new tendencies brought by new media can always find their roots in tradition, and there is nothing surprising in that. Thus we can very likely find various features of modernity in the sources of Greek and Hebrew culture, but this does not negate the crucial mediating role that printing played in all this.
In the title, only the item “natural history” is puzzling. “Natural history” here refers to “Natural History,” a technical phrase usually translated as “博物学,” but that translation is inappropriate.[3] Here we will not concern ourselves with the awkwardness and difficulty encountered when using the term “博物学” to translate Western contemporary writings, but instead focus our gaze on the period around the rise of printing. We will discover that if we do not fully grasp the fact that this so-called fixed expression is after all composed of the two parts “natural” and “history,” then we will find it difficult to understand the revival that “natural history” underwent in the early modern period and its significance. We may even mistakenly think: “博物学”—as “the study of broadly knowing all things”—obviously existed from antiquity; indeed, even in prehistoric times, in any primitive tribe, there was already “博物学,” because people had to deal with all kinds of things!
Those who carelessly translate “Natural History” as “博物学” easily forget that the concept of “nature” was in fact invented by the ancient Greeks, and only after a long process did it eventually develop into the concept of “Nature” and “the natural world,” “all things”; they also easily overlook the subtle changes in the concept of “history” around the rise of printing. They take it for granted that in a primitive tribe with no concept of Nature and no discipline called history, there already existed something called “Natural History.” This is like saying that since people always live in communities, every culture has sociology; since people must always use language, every culture has linguistics; since people must always read faces and gauge moods, every culture has psychology… In the sense that people always have to deal with all things, it is certainly true to say that every culture has “博物学,” but that is not very meaningful, and it does not help us at all to understand what kind of role a discipline like “Natural History” actually played in the history of Western culture.
The ancient, ubiquitous “博物学” has no issue of rising or reviving, but the rise of “natural history” is indeed worth mentioning. In particular, the fact that the term referring to people who specialized in this “ancient” research tradition—naturalist (usually translated as 博物学家)—only appeared in the seventeenth century is astonishing enough. Moreover, why did this term eventually replace the earlier, and more neatly corresponding, “natural historian”? If “Natural History” is an inseparable fixed phrase, why was naturalist able to be split off from natural historian? And in botanical and ornithological works, why can history itself also be split off separately?
“History” stands for the world of “text”; “since time immemorial” means the same as “since the existence of writing.” This strange combination, “natural history,” hints at a new relationship between the natural world and the textual world. This new relationship first appears as a rupture between the two, after which nature becomes the object of historiography—that is, of textual record. The shift from “Natural History” to “naturalist” suggests the rise and maturation of a new conception of nature.
By pursuing this concept of “natural history,” we will find that the modern concept of “nature” that ultimately took shape in modern “natural science” benefited from the transformation of the form of “history (text)” brought about by printing.
1. Natural History Becomes Scientific Method
From ancient “natural philosophy” to modern “natural science,” the concept of “nature” underwent a certain transformation. Originally, the word “nature” meant only “inherent character” or “essence”; what was called “natural philosophy” primarily meant the study of the “nature” of things. In a certain sense, the object of study in natural philosophy was not the “natural world,” but the world of ideas; it did not concern itself with the qualities and appearances of things, but rather with the ideal principles governing the natural world. By the time of “natural science,” however, the natural world, or natural objects, had become the objects of study. Although scientists still paid attention to the “nature” of things, concrete things had also become objective objects to be carefully examined and investigated on the laboratory table.
So what is the new element added by modern science? People often speak of the emblematic figure of modern science—Francis Bacon—and regard the inductive method or experimental method he advocated as the defining element of modern science. The development of modern science is described as three parallel traditions: the ancient tradition of natural philosophy (the mathematical tradition), the even older tradition of “博物学” (natural history), and the recently added Baconian tradition of induction and experiment. But the relationship among these three traditions remains obscure. Given the situation we are in today, it is easy for us to think that, along with the rise of modern science, the mathematical plus experimental tradition became stronger and squeezed out the so-called natural-historical tradition.
However, if we actually return to Bacon’s texts, we will definitely feel an unusual atmosphere—was the “scientific method” Bacon promoted really the famous inductive method? In particular, once we discover that the “Natural History” that was to be squeezed out in modern science is mentioned at such high frequency in The New Organon, we cannot help but wonder—wasn’t what Bacon labored so hard to promote first and foremost this “natural history”?
To say that Bacon’s so-called “history” merely follows the Greek original sense of the word, namely the general meaning of inquiry or investigation, is undoubtedly self-deception. We clearly see Bacon placing “natural history” alongside “social history, religious history, and intellectual history”[4]; and comparing the rigorous method of making (natural) history with the historians such as Livy.
The “natural history” Bacon emphatically keeps stressing is indeed a kind of historiography, and Bacon made this historiographical labor “the basis of natural philosophy.”[5] What Bacon discusses at greatest length in The New Organon is not “induction,” but how to “prepare and arrange history properly.”
Bacon’s methodology contains at least three stages: “First, we must prepare a natural and experimental history… this is the foundation of everything; … the second step must be to arrange the instances into tables and rows according to some method and order, … the third step must be to use induction.”[6] In short: record—compile—induce. The first two steps are nothing more than the procedures of historiography in the general sense, and this is precisely where Bacon concentrated most of his effort. The entire second half of The New Organon (from page 160 of the Chinese translation to the final page 291) is devoted entirely to discussing “the twenty-seven kinds of instances that should be recorded first.” In other words, it is discussing how to collect instances like an astute historian—“the collection of instances must also be done in the manner of making a history.”[7]
Besides The New Organon, Bacon’s own practical work also centered on historiography, from his early studies in intellectual history to the unfinished Ten Centuries of Natural History—in this book Bacon “left behind the mass of ‘facts’ he had collected, both from books and from direct observation. … This work, usually printed together with The New Atlantis, is the most frequently reprinted of all Bacon’s writings.”[8]
Thus, one may say that Bacon’s greatest and most influential insight was less the formulation of induction than the self-conscious recognition of “natural history.”
Of course, from Aristotle to Pliny the Elder, the ancients also achieved many things in “natural history”; so why say that only in Bacon’s time did “natural history” become the “new tool” of scientific research? On the one hand, ancient natural history stood far below natural philosophy and could not possibly be placed in the foundational position; on the other hand, and more importantly, ancient natural history was only a series of scattered achievements and had not formed a tradition capable of accumulation and development.
What enabled “natural history” to flourish in the early modern period was precisely the technical conditions brought by printing. Bacon himself was, to a certain extent, aware of the importance of record-keeping equipment: “Even if… a heap of materials from experience has already been prepared to hand, if the understanding is unequipped and has only memory to deal with them, it will still be unequal to the task, just as one cannot hope to maintain and master the calculations of astronomical tables by the power of memory alone. But hitherto work in invention has always involved more thinking than writing, and experience has not yet learned its letters. And we know that the course of invention, unless it is kept moving forward by written record, can never be brought to completion. Once written record is widely adopted and experience becomes literate and able to write, better things may be hoped for.”[9]
What made “experience learn to write” was precisely printing. Before the age of print, unless there was support from a huge and stable institution like the Mouseion at Alexandria, it was simply impossible for one person to master the entire set of astronomical tables and produce calculations that were accurate and accumulable. Eisenstein points out: “After Ptolemy’s Almagest was restored in the West and translated into Latin in the twelfth century, its preservation and circulation also took considerable effort. In the age of handwritten books, … Western astronomers rarely read the complete Almagest, and few were taught how to use the work. Brilliant astronomers spent their lives copying, correcting, and making summaries, but the manuscripts they used were flawed from the start, copies in which errors kept increasing.”[10] “For the thousand years from Ptolemy to Regiomontanus, new evidence was unlikely to accumulate ‘gradually’; rather, errors and omissions were likely… What we need to explain is not the problem of ‘stagnation,’ nor the problem of slow progress, but how the process of error and omission was restrained.”[11]
Bacon complained that the ancients did not preserve records of their experience, so that their research was difficult to inherit and advance. He mentioned: “When the ancients first began to think, they too had at hand great heaps of abundant instances and particulars; they arranged them into long treatises item by item; with these they completed their philosophical systems and various arts; and once the matter had been made clear, they published those systems and arts. —But at that point they inserted only a few examples here and there for proof and explanation; as for publishing all the notes, annotations, particulars, and materials in full, the ancients thought that would be superficial and inconvenient. This practice is just like that of builders: once the house is finished, the scaffolding and ladders are removed and disappear.”[12]
On this point, Bacon was clearly too severe on the ancients. Even if we grant that the ancients did not regard the activity of recording experience in long, cumbersome notes and particulars as superficial, even if they dutifully recorded them one by one, could such dull and repetitive records have been transmitted to later ages? Even if we grant that scribes after the ancients also tirelessly copied these dull records, would those records not very quickly have become riddled with errors? Even if occasionally there survived an accurate version carefully preserved in some archive cabinet, would other scholars have been able to access it freely and thus advance their own research?
Only printing made it possible for empirical records or experimental reports—often composed of lengthy descriptions, error-prone data, and dull tables—to enter the academic space and thereby be repeatable and revisable. In this respect, even the most developed communication networks cannot replace the effect of printing—“There is no doubt that if handwritten letters convey the news that Kepler is working on a set of formulas, that is effective. However, to transmit the Rudolphine Tables by letter will not work. When you print a monograph in several hundred copies, and it contains large amounts of numbers, tables, maps, and nautical charts, and even when you need to convey oral reports with precision and in detail, the efficacy of manuscript copies is extremely low compared with mechanically printed books.”[13]
The second step in Bacon’s scientific method likewise derived from the stimulus of printing, namely that “by means of those suitable, well-arranged, and, one might say, lively ‘tables of discovery,’ all the particulars relevant to the subject of inquiry must be laid out and brought into line.”[14]
This kind of “table of contents” orders things into sequence, but in essence it is nothing more than the indexing of texts. Writing in a segmented, itemized, architectonic way is a habit that only arose after printing. “Hand-copied books often have no title; instead, they are classified by the opening words.”[15] Not to mention chapter titles and a clear table of contents. Medieval students would occasionally make indexes in their own notes so as to review and look things up later, and preachers would compile indexes of stories that served as exempla of virtue for ease of preaching; but before these indexes were used in printing, they were clearly extremely private, created merely to facilitate individual memory, and carried no sense of objective knowledge whatsoever.
But once printed books appeared, indexes were quickly disseminated in a neutral and objective manner: “Printed indexes appeared as early as the 1480s, mainly in herbals”[16]; “the motives that initially prompted people to make indexes and compile reference materials were religious instruction and preaching; however, when printers used indexing and reference work for all texts, such work became neutralized and even morally colorless.”[17]
One can imagine that the tabular method Bacon described as “laying out in order all the particular things relevant to the topic under discussion” was cultivated along with the development of indexes and bibliography since the age of printing.
II. Nature Becomes an Object of Historiography
Thus it is not hard to understand that the pioneer of modern Europe’s “zoology” and “botany” — the Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner — also happened to be worthy of the title “father of bibliography.”
Gessner pursued the cataloguing and systematization of books with fanatic zeal; he “devoted himself to compiling the first (and last) truly comprehensive ‘universal bibliography,’ to display all works in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew published within a hundred years of printing.”[18]
To characterize Gessner as a “natural historian” may easily lead to misunderstanding. In fact, what concerned Gessner was not “things” but “history” — the cataloguing and systematization of texts. It was just that “his extraordinary taxonomic talent was used in the study of animals rather than the study of spiritual phenomena.” In that era, “natural history” was, first and foremost, natural history in the literal sense.
The historian of science George Sarton “noticed that geography tended to become a branch of philology… nevertheless, when he saw ‘curiosity about natural phenomena’ combined with the study of ‘literature’ and ‘historiography,’ he was still surprised. In fact, such a combination was not worth making a fuss about, because many early field investigations were initiated by publishers, editors, and translators, … The Pierre Belon in Sarton’s account is a good example: ‘Belon wanted to translate Dioscorides and Theophrastus into French, but his translation proceeded with difficulty; he found it hard to identify the animals and plants in the ancient books. He realized that… he needed to travel to the East to investigate… the animals and plants described by ancient Greek natural historians.’ Belon obtained royal patronage to travel to the Middle East, recorded the animals and plants he observed, and returned loaded with materials. His book became a milestone in the study of natural history, first printed in Paris in 1553 and then reissued in many editions…”[19]
Even in the seventeenth century, the records of animals brought back from the Americas by explorers were used to compile a Dictionary — intended “to organize the many explanations and commentaries on Aristotle’s original zoological text, and to correct the errors introduced in transmission.”[20]
Every age has no shortage of travelers who love nature, or adventurers fascinated by novelty; but what propelled “natural history” to grow and flourish was not explorers’ curiosity about wild animals, but historians’ urgent desire to compile and edit historical records.
As Foucault said, the naturalist whom Linnaeus still called a “natural historian” “is concerned with the structure of the visible world and with the naming of that world according to its characteristics; he is not concerned with life.”[21]
Simply put, what rose with printing was first of all an interest in historiography, that is, the need to arrange and emend ancient texts. And in order to correct the errors and omissions caused by the loss and copying of ancient books, people began to turn to nature. Field investigations, specimen collection, and the like were first undertaken not out of interest in things themselves, but out of the need to edit texts. Of course, in the end, “nature” gradually extricated itself from the concerns of historiography and, in turn, became the object of history. This process was quite long; not until Buffon did nature finally acquire its own “history” — Buffon no longer arranged things according to their place in human historical records, but according to the history of nature’s own development.
With the rise and development of the discipline of “natural history,” the relation between nature and text, nature and knowledge, underwent change. And this change was due less to a change in what people saw as “nature” than to the fact that the change in the conception of nature was first driven by changes in the status of “history” or “text.” Foucault points out: “For natural history to appear, nature did not have to become dense and dark… On the contrary, history had to become natural. In the sixteenth century, right up to the middle of the seventeenth, all that existed was history… In 1657, Jonston published his Natural History of Quadrupeds… (marking) that within the domain of history, … two orders of knowledge suddenly separated. Until Aldrovandi, history was the intricate and fully unified structure of everything visible and of the signs found or placed in things: to write the history of a plant or an animal was to describe its elements or organs, but also the similarities one could discover in it, the properties thought to belong to it, the legends and stories associated with it, its place in satirical poetry, the medicines made from its substance, the food it provided, the accounts given of it by the ancients, and everything travelers might say about it. The history of a living being was that living being itself within the semantic network that connected it to the world.”[22]
In other words, for the ancients, studying a certain organism in nature and studying that organism in historical records were one and the same activity; biology and etymology, if not identical, were at least fused together. The greatest encyclopedic work of the Latin West — Isidore’s Etymologies — is a case in point. Isidore believed that “words are something transcendent; they can themselves be related to truth, and the road to knowledge is realized through words, which should be clarified by appeal not to the things they represent but to their etymologies…. He tries to understand the structure of the whole world and to obtain knowledge by tracing Latin words back to their origins.”[23]
Early natural historians, and even natural scientists — all the way down to Isaac Newton, who devoted himself to “biblical chronology” — more or less retained Isidore’s attitude: studying nature and studying historical records were equally beneficial to the understanding of things.
In the ordinary imagination, “modern early scientists are more likely to be portrayed as people holding plants or astrolabes than as people studying texts. Natural historians may have studied early printed editions of the works of Ptolemy, Pliny, Galen, or Aristotle. In this respect, they are often accused of looking in the wrong direction. ‘One might think that the astonishing discoveries of navigators shifted attention from the tiny human book to the great book of nature.’ But one cannot help asking: if information is not exchanged with the ‘tiny human book,’ how is the ‘great book of nature’ to be studied?”[24] Eisenstein points out that people often misunderstood the methods of studying nature, naively imagining scientific activity as always having to abandon old ideas and personally conduct firsthand observation[25]. In fact, as Bacon had already made plain, so-called “empirical evidence” depends first and foremost on recording and organizing; induction is only possible on the basis of these experience-histories once they have been properly arranged.
In fact, the slogan “trust what you see with your own eyes rather than books” did not newly emerge in modern times; rather, in modern times, because of the advent of printing, it had just become outdated. Eisenstein mentions that “classical authorities warned against trusting images for very good reason, namely because images distort with the passage of time. Galen said: ‘The patient is the doctor’s medical book.’”[26] In the age of print, scientists finally could trust books and images, could trust other scholars’ descriptive records, and so could be spared the need to travel about in person and instead sit back in their studies to conduct research.
Distance from nature, rather than closeness to nature, became the revolutionary aspect of modern science. As Latour says, behind knowledge lie texts, and more texts, and “layers upon layers of tables, records, labels, operating tables, and diagrams… We do not have nature… what we have is an array”[27] “Nature” is the result of argument, not its basis — “No one can intervene in a debate by saying, ‘I know what it is, nature told me, it is an amino acid sequence.’ Such a claim would be met with uproarious laughter unless the proponent of the sequence could produce his charts, present his citations, provide his sources of support.”[28] Latour interprets the “Copernican revolution” of modern science in this way: no longer does man wander among natural things; instead, centered on the “drawing room,” things are gathered together (Drawing things together).[29]
And to gather things, one must use convenient and reliable media to inscribe them (Latour’s so-called inscription); apart from making specimens, paper and movable type are the best media.
As Foucault said, “natural history found itself in the interval now open between things and words”[30]. And this interval, this space, is precisely that “array” constituted by texts and more texts, brought into being and expanded by printing. Mumford likewise observed that “printing… promoted a mode of thought based on separation and analysis… printed matter made a deeper impression on people than what actually occurred in reality… existence came to mean existence in print, and learning came to mean learning from books, so the authority of books was vastly expanded. … The gap between reading print and personal experience had grown ever larger.”[31]
III. Nature Becomes the Original Standard
We have already said that the essence of the Scientific Revolution, in continuity with the Renaissance and the Reformation, remained “returning to the text.” And the need to edit texts drove people toward nature. Yet this process is still not fully clear — why did this need not only drive people toward nature, but also greatly stimulate their capacity to know nature? Compared with the ancients who also observed nature, why was modern knowledge able to explode at such an astonishing speed?
What is involved here is the formation of the academic world of modern science as a whole, an academic world that created a positive environment of competition and cooperation. Although this brand-new scholarly environment, compared with the agora of ancient Greece or the Mouseion of Alexandria, may have had a somewhat more utilitarian and indifferent air, it was unprecedentedly efficient. In addition to basic conditions such as freedom and democracy, the modern academic world at least added the following new elements: standardization, publicity, and copyright.
Let us first talk about standardization. Aside from a small number of exceptions such as the crossbow mechanism of Qin, the printing press can be said to be the first machine in history to achieve standardized production. Mumford exclaimed: “Printing laid the foundation for all future reproduction technologies. Printed paper was the first product to be mass-produced mechanically and to be fully standardized, even earlier than military uniforms. And movable metal type was the first fully standardized, interchangeable machine component, revolutionary from every angle.”[32] Martin likewise believed that “a printing shop in its early stage was more like a modern small factory than a medieval monastic workshop. As early as 1455, the printing enterprise of Fust and Schöffer already had the tendency toward standardized production.”[33] Although early printed books were still full of errors, the fact that printed books could issue large numbers of errata lists “in itself shows the new capacities printing conferred on people… errata lists display some of the effects of standardization.”[34]
In a certain sense, the image of the “errata list” may be even more important for the formation of the concept of standardization — although the book before me is riddled with errors, it is after all something that can be revised. Behind the various flawed versions circulating in the world, there is still a most accurate original version; the work of revision may step by step approach this original edition and ultimately restore the standard version.
Once people adopt such an attitude toward the classical works handed down from antiquity, the first thing they will think of is to set about “restoring” these classical works. And that is indeed what happened — “Galen, Aristotle… their abandonment took place only a hundred years after printing. In the hundred years from 1490 to 1598, Galen’s works had already been printed in 660 editions…. The voluminous encyclopedia of Pliny the Elder was printed before 1550, and its content, rather than its style, was valued…. As George Sarton said: ‘The printing of ancient scientific treatises in the Renaissance was by no means due to curiosity, … but for use… the discovery of new texts… was active accumulation of knowledge… searching for medical manuscripts was a form of medical research.’”[35]
It was precisely at this time that dogmatism was only just beginning to flourish. In antiquity, even texts as carefully preserved and rigorously copied as the Bible could not have their authority taken for granted; rather, that authority had to be guaranteed by the authority of the Church. Eisenstein proposes: “Biblical fundamentalism that insists on literal interpretation was a phenomenon that arose only after printing. … Witch trials that appeared after the publication of The Hammer of Witches were also a phenomenon that arose only after printing.”[36] “Clergy everywhere in the sixteenth century were subject to a much stricter discipline of ‘book-based standards.’”[37] “Preachers’ sermons should draw directly from the Bible — in Erasmus’s day, this view was far from obsolete; it had only just begun to take shape.”[38]
Once the notion of “book-based standards” arose, scientists did not first try to construct a new natural system out of thin air; rather, they tried by every means to revise the classical texts of antiquity. Early scientists believed that the works of ancient philosophers, having been copied for so long, had accumulated countless errors and losses. There was therefore an urgent need to restore them through painstaking study.
However, once the work of emendation begins, its effects go far beyond simply producing a comprehensive rewriting of some old book. The crucial point is that the original edition, the revised edition, the rewritten edition, and so on, will all circulate in the world at the same time. In this sense, it is no exaggeration to say that Ptolemy was a contemporary of Copernicus; Ptolemy only became popular shortly before Copernicus, and continued to circulate for many years after him. Quite unlike the different handwritten copies circulating simultaneously, whose versional differences were vague and indistinct, the different versions produced by printing are clear-cut and can be compared and criticized against one another.
Eisenstein puts it well: “The great historical significance of the new Prutenic Tables lay not in the fact that they ‘replaced’ the Alfonsine Tables, but in that they became another option, which prompted astronomers to observe celestial phenomena by means of two sets of tables (Tycho’s observations are proof of this).”[39] “Perhaps Copernicus’s greatest contribution was less that he found the ‘correct’ theory than that he proposed another thoroughly studied theory; thus, he posed questions for the next generation of astronomers to solve, rather than producing answers for posterity to study himself… In the frontispiece of the 1651 edition of Riccioli’s New Almagest, the figures of Copernicus and Tycho are placed on the two pans of the Muses’ balance, while the figure of Ptolemy is placed on the ground, … We should see that it is quite novel to have, in a single frame, three clearly represented planetary models. Just as contradictory biblical commentaries encouraged people to study the Bible itself, so too did the contradictory judgments in the ‘book of little man’ impel people to keep on testing them against the ‘great book of nature.’”[40]
“The reason Tycho differed from the stargazers of the past was not that he observed the night sky while neglecting ancient books.” Tycho also had no telescope, but he did have “resources that earlier people had rarely possessed, namely two different sets of computational methods for two different theories… He had a library packed with printed works, and he also had assistants skilled in printing and engraving. He personally installed printing presses, and on the island of Hven where he worked he even set up a paper mill.”[41] The resources provided by printing enabled the knowledge of early modern scientists to be refreshed and accumulated at an unprecedented speed.
IV. Nature Becomes Public Knowledge
We say that Tycho still had no telescope, and that was thanks to the help of printing. But after all, Galileo did have a telescope. So in technologies such as the telescope, was there something new that played a role more important than printing? It cannot be denied that technologies such as clocks and lenses also played crucial roles in the history of modern science. Yet the crux of the matter is that printing, in relation to the development of many other technologies, also played a kind of decisive role.
“Before the advent of printing, important events, even when reported, were reported orally from the pulpit. ‘Lenses had been widely known since the thirteenth century… but for three hundred years everything about lenses remained in a silent conspiracy… It was not until after the sixteenth century that lenses became objects of theoretical study.’ … By the beginning of the seventeenth century, technical inventions had already appeared in print; the press disclosed the invention of optical instruments, and thus many people began to compete for priority of invention, as in the case of the so-called ‘Galileo’s tube.’”[42]
On the one hand, printing itemized knowledge, and on the other hand, it made knowledge public; this promoted the intellectualization of technique. Skills and secrets that had previously been passed down only orally and by example within artisan traditions could, like scientific knowledge, become a public scholarly resource that could be accumulated and criticized. — “Printing does not lock documents away in deep storage; rather, it takes them out of boxes and chambers, reproduces them, and lets people all see these documents. The best way to preserve valuable materials is to make them public; this notion runs counter to traditional ideas.”[43]
The printing press simultaneously opened up natural history and the history of technology—Gutenberg may be counted as the first person in history to become truly famous because of a great technological invention. In the past, most inventors remembered by history came upon fame by chance, and the causes and consequences of their inventions were also obscure. But after Gutenberg, patents and copyright rose up together, and those artisans who transformed the world through technology would all have the chance to enjoy immortal renown, something ancient craftsmen could hardly have imagined.
On the other hand, in antiquity, not only did the development of technology always depend on private esoteric transmission, but the tradition of science likewise never entirely escaped the realm of secrecy. Eisenstein gives an example: “Tartaglia… this self-taught artisan-writer was the first to translate Euclid into the vernacular, but he still was unwilling to part with the latest techniques in the trade of calculators. In fact, when Cardano published his method for solving cubic equations, Tartaglia flew into a rage… ‘Modern scholars have in their heads a notion formulated by Robert Merton: before you communicate (circulate) an idea to someone else, that thought is not truly your idea. For such scholars, Tartaglia’s attitude seems inexplicable. Yet… the very idea that an individual owns ideas was itself new and strange in Tartaglia’s day.’”[44]
Another example is the transformation of alchemy. As Rutherford said,[45] the most important shift from alchemy to chemistry was less whether one’s attitude toward nature was superstition or reason than the turn from secrecy to publicity.
In modern times, the very concept of “knowledge” in our minds already bears the mark of publicity, and thus the meanings originally included within “knowledge”—bodily knowledge, skill-based knowledge, and the like—have gradually been forgotten. This is less because the metaphysical vision of modern people, with its Platonism, neglected technology than because of the publicity requirement newly imposed upon the concept of “knowledge” by printing—knowledge ought to appear as something in black and white, something that can be openly circulated, and not as any obscure thing that cannot be printed. In fact, Plato’s own concept of “knowledge” was essentially still a kind of skill—the skill of recollection, or of intuiting truth—and by no means the book knowledge in black and white as modern people imagine it. Thus in Plato’s view, only a tiny handful of people with the qualifications of philosopher-kings could grasp true knowledge; it certainly was not something a common compositor might recognize.
And by the time we reach Bacon’s “ideal commonwealth,” secret knowledge is strictly ordered to be made public: “Knowledge of nature should be set forth openly; indeed, craftsmen who strictly keep secrets should have their ‘histories’ written in the form of numerous collections.”[46]
The characteristic of this “natural history” is the publicity of knowledge, the new tradition of open debate among the public around texts, rather than the ineffable private experience of drawing near to the depths of nature that naturalists with romantic sensibilities long for.
References
[Fr.] Bruno Latour, Science in Action, trans. Liu Wenxuan and Zheng Kai, Dongfang Publishing House, 2005
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2010
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, trans. Chen Yuming, Wang Keren, and Li Huashan, China Architecture & Building Press, 2009
[U.S.] Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, trans. He Daokuan, Peking University Press, 2008
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. Xu Baokui, Commercial Press, 1984.
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, trans. Wu Changjie, Commercial Press, 2002
Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, trans. Li Hongzhi, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2006
Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Mo Weimin, Shanghai Joint Publishing Company, 2001.
Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, trans. Zhou Jiaxian et al., CITIC Press, 2011
Edited by Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, Books and the Sciences in History, trans. Su Xiangui et al., Shanghai Science and Technology Education Press, 2006
Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, History of Private Life III, trans. Yang Jiaqin et al., Northern Literature and Art Publishing House, 2008.
Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Reading, trans. Li Ruilin et al., Commercial Press, 2009
[1] The original title used by Eisenstein is “The printing press as an agent of change”; agent here means primarily an intermediary or mediator, not so much an active agent as a force, but rather a medium of “transmission.”
[2] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 100, P163.
[3] See: Natural History should be translated as “natural history”
[4] Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, p. 64.
[5] Bacon, Novum Organum, p. 78, I-98.
[6] Bacon, Novum Organum, p. 117, II-10.
[7] Bacon, Novum Organum, p. 118, II-11.
[8] Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, eds., Books and the Sciences in History, p. 86.
[9] Bacon, Novum Organum, p. 79. I-101.
[10] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 289, P463.
[11] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 290, P464.
[12] Bacon, Novum Organum, p. 99, I-125.
[13] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 287, P460.
[14] Bacon, Novum Organum, p. 80, I-102.
[15] Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 95, P123.
[16] Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, eds., Books and the Sciences in History, p. 88.
[17] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 59, P99.
[18] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 57, P96.
[19] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 302, P483.
[20] Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, eds., Books and the Sciences in History, p. 177.
[21] Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 215.
[22] Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 170.
[23] Zhang Butian: The Encyclopedia of the Latin West at Its Finest—A Review of Isidore’s Etymologies
[24] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 284, P454.
[25] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 294, P471.
[26] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 303, P485.
[27] Latour, Science in Action, 132[79], 150[89]
[28] Latour, Science in Action, 164[98]
[29] Latour, Science in Action, 364[224].
[30] Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 171.
[31] Mumford, Technics and Civilization, p. 124, P136.
[32] Mumford, Technics and Civilization, p. 123, P135.
[33] Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 123.
[34] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 48, P79.
[35] Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 118, P193.
[36] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 272, P438.
[37] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 269, P437.
[38] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 226, P364.
[39] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 387, P622.
[40] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 390, P628.
[41] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 387, P624.
[42] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 346, P552.
[43] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 68, P115.
[44] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 345, P551.
[45] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 352, P561.
[46] Eisenstein: *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, p. 352, P561.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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