Abstract
This is the third of a projected five-volume intellectual history of the West. It seeks to account for the consolidation of the scientific project in post-medieval Europe by comparison with other world-historical contexts where it appears that science may have flourished for a while, before eventually going into eclipse (think, for example, of the ‘Needham Question’). In the West, by contrast, it is claimed that science was able to interpose itself as the cognitive norm for all forms of purposive knowledge, from law to politics, from metaphysics to psychology. Another way of putting this is that the West accepted the ‘gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones’ (Vol. 1, p. 11). Gaukroger’s objective is to offer an explanation of this peculiar genealogy.
Having provided a huge amount of preliminary material in the two previous volumes, Gaukroger now brackets the period 1739 (the publication of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature) to 1841 (the publication of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity). His underlying thesis is subtle. He seeks to avoid both ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’: the former accounting for the triumph of science as a function of its sui generis explanatory power; the latter seeking to rematerialize science as a purely human practice, thus attributing its triumph to cultural and societal factors only. Instead, Gaukroger offers a synthesis: this period saw an abrupt but fundamental shift in the way in which scientific enquiry was conceived, such that science came to be understood as the essential means of explanation of the human condition. The key formula thus becomes ‘the naturalization of the human’ (Vol. 3, p. 2), by which Gaukroger means the constitution in empirical terms of questions about the human realm that had up to that point taken a non-empirical form.
The main part of the book offers a magisterial survey of four such naturalizing projects: ‘anthropological medicine’ (the account of the relations between the physical, the mental/intellectual and the emotional life of man offered by the médecins philosophes), ‘philosophical anthropology’ (the replacement of Wolffian–Leibnizian metaphysics with forms of empirical psychology, as developed by Rousseau, Herder and Schiller), ‘the natural history of man’ (attempts to understand human behaviour by means of environmental, racial and phrenological factors) and ‘social arithmetic’ (the proto-utilitarian calculation of human value in terms of its collective or aggregate properties).
Of particular interest to theologians is the final chapter, in which Gaukroger addresses the confrontation of this naturalizing project with religion. His proposal is that this took place via the tool of ‘historicization’ (Vol. 3, p. 308). This allows him to reframe the long march of higher biblical criticism from Reimarus to Strauss (including a fascinating section on Gibbon) as a function of his broader narrative of modernity. The terminus of this process is, ineluctably, Feuerbach. But with Feuerbach things complicate, for as correlative to the ‘naturalization of the human’ we now have the ‘humanization of the natural’. It will be fascinating to see how Gaukroger will account for this counter-movement in forthcoming volumes, especially as he will be forced to consider the legitimacy of his synthesis in the light of two ‘future’ events: (1) the collapse of belief in scientific progress after the horrors of the technologically managed warfare of the First World War; (2) the challenge posed to Western scientific self-understanding in our current historical moment by the advent of global climate change and our entry into the curiously hybrid geological age of the ‘Anthropocene’.