In his thought-provoking 1971 book, "The Pentagon of Power," Lewis Mumford delves into the profound impact of the mechanized world picture on our understanding of the cosmos, nature, and humanity itself. He traces the origins of this paradigm shift to the work of luminaries such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton, whose systematic descriptions of space, time, motion, mass, and gravitation paved the way for a depersonalized view of the universe, prioritizing mechanical activities and interests over more human concerns.
At the heart of this transformation lies the figure of Galileo Galilei, who embodied the two great attributes of the new science: empirical knowledge based on close observation and theoretical knowledge based on the manipulation of symbolic abstractions. Galileo's reaction to the fossilization of official Church doctrine was both inevitable and salutary, as he sought to challenge the authority of Aristotle in areas where more satisfactory interpretations were possible. However, Mumford argues that Galileo's approach also exhibited an indifference to areas of biological behavior and human experience where Aristotle's insights remained superior.
Mumford highlights several fallacies in the mechanized world picture that emerged from Galileo's work. First, the "universe" described by Galileo and his contemporaries was composed only of isolated physical bodies, devoid of life. This "dead" matter, however, is an illusion, as we now know that even the most basic elements possess the potential for life. The qualities that Galileo rejected as subjective and unreal, because they were indescribable in mathematical terms alone, are essential to the richness and complexity of the living world.
Second, Galileo's dismemberment of the human organism treated the mind as if it could function without the other members of the body, as if the eye saw by itself and the ear heard by itself, with the brain isolated and dedicated to the specialized function of mathematical thinking. Recent experiments, however, have shown that the human brain has a remarkable capacity for coping with vague, indistinct, and confused data, making sense out of incomplete information in ways that would paralyze a computer.
Mumford argues that the reduction of events solely to their quantitative elements renders the practitioner of this method unfit for dealing with any kind of organic behavior. The implicit assumption in Galileo's formulation was that to understand the physical world, and ultimately man himself, one must eliminate the living soul. The new scientist, in the interest of "objectivity," eliminated historic man and all his subjective activities, leaving only a detached intelligence and its special products, scientific theorems and machines, as having any permanent place or high degree of reality.
This conception has led to a vulgarized understanding of man, exemplified by Buckminster Fuller's description of the human being as a complex mechanism composed of various mechanical components and systems. Mumford argues that this description lacks any hint of the true nature of man, beyond his measurable physical components.
Galileo himself, as a true exemplar of baroque culture, delighted in the multi-dimensional world that his own intellectual analysis denigrated and rejected. He never suspected that the ultimate consequence of the mechanical world picture would be an environment fit only for machines to live in, devoid of the organic attributes that make life rich and meaningful.
Mumford's critique of the mechanized world picture highlights the limitations and dangers of reducing the complexity of life to a set of quantifiable, mechanical processes. By challenging the assumptions that have shaped our understanding of the universe and our place within it, he invites us to reconsider the value of subjective experience, organic behavior, and the irreducible richness of the living world.
Mumford then delves deeper into what he calls "the crime of Galileo," arguing that the renowned scientist's true transgression was not the heresy he was accused of by the Roman Catholic Church, but rather the division of experienced reality into two distinct spheres: the subjective and the objective. By dismissing the subjective realm as unsubstantial and unreal, Galileo effectively traded the totality of human experience for a narrow, mechanistic view of the universe, denying the importance of unmediated human realities from which science itself is derived.
Mumford contends that this false distinction between the objective and subjective worlds, which Galileo made with a "cheerful heart and open eyes," had far-reaching consequences. For nearly three centuries, orthodox exponents of science followed Galileo's lead, suppressing evidence of human and organic behavior that did not fit neatly into their mechanical world picture. In doing so, they committed the error of the early Christian Fathers in reverse, focusing solely on the material world while neglecting the fate of the human soul.
The dualism introduced by Galileo was even more pronounced than the separation of the heavenly and earthly realms in Christian doctrine. While the Christian's subjective Heaven remained an integral part of daily life, visible in churches, charitable acts, and communal celebrations, the subjective experience in the mechanical world picture was impoverished and deformed, lacking contact with both the past and prudent forethought for the future.
Under this new scientific dispensation, the organic world, including man himself, required redemption. Living forms had to be molded anew to conform to a perfect mechanical model, shedding their organic complexity and autonomy. Mumford argues that this view failed to do justice even to the physical properties of natural phenomena, as Kepler observed in the complex geometry of a snowflake and the apparent presence of mind in the structure of a flower.
Mumford asserts that the innermost and inaccessible aspects of existence, even in physics, cannot be considered unreal or wholly subjective. Innerness is as objective as outerness, and the external world is a necessary part of each organism's internal world. The mechanical world picture, as conceived by Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Boyle, has long ceased to be acceptable in advanced science, with the work of Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, Planck, and their successors revealing a more insubstantial, subtle, complex, and elusive reality.
Despite these advancements, the scientific world picture still bears the imprint of Galileo and Kepler, remaining under-dimensioned and lacking the most vivid reports of human experience. The ultimate effect of this methodical approach was to devalue aspects of human experience that could not be treated mechanistically, eliminating the products and by-products of the human personality. The technological world, which prided itself on reducing or extruding the human personality, progressively displaced both nature and human culture, claiming a higher status for itself as the concrete working model of scientific truth.
Mumford concludes by stating that pointing the way to this devaluation of the human personality and its eventual exile was the real crime of Galileo. By prioritizing a narrow, mechanistic view of the universe over the richness and complexity of human experience, Galileo set the stage for a scientific paradigm that would ultimately prove limiting and dehumanizing.
In the final part of the chapter, "The Mechanized World Picture", Mumford delves into the details of what he calls "the crime of Galileo," examining the far-reaching consequences of the mechanistic worldview and its impact on our understanding of reality, life, and the human experience.
Mumford acknowledges the merits of Galileo's method, which opened up a part of the visible world to systematic public observation and lifted the results above private dispute. The new scientific philosophy, by focusing on quantitative measurements and standardized parts, aligned with the increasing use of machines and coined money in society. As mechanical power increased and scientific theory became more adequate, the new method expanded its domain, shoring up the theoretical scheme upon which it was based.
However, Mumford argues that this validation by the machine came at a cost. The immediate outcome of the new system of thought was to cool off theological controversies and draw minds together through appreciation of the new world picture and machines. But by concentrating solely on quantity and piecemeal knowledge, the weakness of the original emphasis on so-called primary qualities became a handicap.
The scientific method, by deliberately ignoring the complex reality of organisms, was an immensely labor-saving device, but its pragmatic efficiency counterbalanced its conceptual superficiality. By separating primary from secondary qualities and making mathematical description the test of truth, the new science turned the most significant attributes of life into secondary phenomena, ticketed for replacement by the machine. Living organisms, in their most typical functions and purposes, became superfluous.
Mumford contrasts this mechanistic worldview with that of the Australian aborigines, who see no sharp division between man and nature, the quick and the dead, or past, present, and future. While their habits of observation and symbolic formulation may be deficient, their view is far less primitive than the mechanical world picture, as it includes the many dimensions of life that Galileo and his successors intentionally excluded.
Throughout the 19th century, major voices in science proclaimed that the laws of mechanics were the only laws needed to explain even life and mind. This led to the machine being raised to a higher status than any organism, or at best, admitting grudgingly that higher organisms were supermachines.
Mumford illustrates the absurdity of using machines to explain autonomous processes of organization, growth, and reproduction through examples such as a biologist dismissing the existence of pain because it cannot be described mechanistically, and Frank O'Connor's mother explaining conception as a mechanical process involving an engine and a starting handle.
Despite the insufficiencies of the mechanical world picture, Mumford acknowledges its beneficent results, particularly in the realm of technics. The new ideology provided a common language and opened up a field of practical endeavor in which people with different inner worlds could collaborate. However, those who utilized these symbols implicitly believed they represented a higher order of reality, when in fact they expressed only a higher order of abstraction.
Mumford concludes by absolving Galileo, recognizing that he could not have anticipated the consequences of splitting apart objective and subjective experience. Galileo, as an open-minded naturalistic humanist, likely assumed that the culture which had formed his own life and mind would continue to exist, enriched rather than devitalized by his new way of looking at the world. The pursuit of scientific truth achieved the status of an absolute, but as history teaches, man cannot be trusted with absolutes. By failing to include the observer as an essential component in its scheme, the new science presented a defective picture of both human nature and the world we live in.