Natural theory
A natural theory is a theory to describe and explain the external, non-man-made reality (the "uncultivated" nature in contrast to culture ). It tries to trace back statements about natural phenomena to a few basic principles in an interdisciplinary manner or to prove the validity of one or more basic principles in the various natural phenomena that have been discovered or hypothesized through research or observation.
Ancient as well as modern theories of nature are broader and at the same time more narrowly defined than laws of nature which, according to modern understanding, only describe observable regularities in the behavior of real systems : on the one hand, further insofar as a tentative scientific approach to new topics, e.g. B. When first formulating a theory about a new subject, these theories or “prototheories” were often imprecise, phenomenological or only formulated metaphorically. Empirical observation and systematization of natural phenomena were carried out for thousands of years before they were rationally analyzed, and especially before the rationality of a theory was set as a criterion for truth. As a result, the line between speculation, magic and mysticism was blurred. Only today is a theory that tries to systematize the observational data questioned by permanent criticism that reveals the shortcomings, gaps and errors of the theory and looks for the causes of its failure.
But even more recently, figuratively projective, often heuristically fertile theories of nature have been directed against the impoverishment of knowledge of nature through progressive abstraction. B. the spiritually charged Gaia hypothesis . Human artifacts such as “clockwork”, “world machine” or “particle zoo” have repeatedly served as paradigms for the interpretation of cosmic or subatomic events because of their clarity.
On the other hand, many natural theories shed light on very narrow sections of natural events, i.e. In other words, they develop special, selective and historically changing perspectives on their frequently changing objects, which are often inadmissibly generalized and transferred to other areas. At times, the question of the corpuscular structure of matter was in the foreground of theoretical efforts and ignored all phenomena that could not be explained by it; at other times it was the invisible forces and long-distance effects, the sensory impressions that external nature leaves behind in the subject or the evolutionary transitions from the inorganic to the organic, then again the search for a universal theory or for the mathematical unification of disparate theories.
To the extent that man has influenced nature (including his own) through scientific and technical interventions and has been able to create super-heavy elements or genetically modified organisms since the 20th century , the concept of natural theory as well as the increasingly plural concept of Nature itself problematic. Nonetheless, the validity of natural laws continues to define insurmountable limits to the manipulability of nature.
On the status of historical and current natural theories
As attempts to explain nature, natural theories are historical phenomena. They developed under the influence of internal and external factors. The latter include the respective historical prerequisites for knowledge, i.e. their cultural, social and economic boundary conditions. One of the most important internal factors was the progressive differentiation of the natural sciences, which since modern times has led to attempts to reintegrate the increasingly fragmented knowledge of the rapidly developing individual sciences. Often natural theories were therefore hypothetical because they were not based on directly observable principles and were permeated by basic philosophical assumptions; or they worked with analogies that later turned out to be untenable and that were at hand in the respective epoch. Nonetheless, useless analogies and models often gave rise to suggestions for positive research. B. through the generalization of Darwin's evolutionary idea in the 19th century, which found its way into many disciplines. In other cases they inhibited individual scientific research or, in spite of their fundamentally pioneering approach, remained without consequences for centuries, like the theory of atomism , which could not be verified with the state of the art at the time. For example, it was only more than 2000 years after its first formulation around 1910 that the atomic theory was so irrefutably confirmed that all serious natural scientists accepted it. Like other pre-modern natural theories, however, it already fulfilled the minimum requirements of a scientific theory or hypothesis in antiquity and kept returning in various modifications and refined forms.
Natural theories were hardly ever structured in such a way that they correspond to the modern ideal of theory, e.g. B. Quines came even close. Every change in theory also implied a change in the meaning of scientific terms and their relationships to one another. Something similar to the atomic term also applies to terms such as “matter”, “force” or “energy” to which the scientific community clung to, although they have been interpreted very differently over time and not only lost their clarity, but also with various observation and measurement methods have been operationalized - just think of the change in the definition of the meter . Even Quine's concept of theory allows such a change in meaning if he understands theory in the broader sense to be any traditional holistic system of statements that is shared by the majority of the scientific community .
In the Middle Ages - for example with Thomas Aquinas - no distinction was made between natural science and natural philosophy. It was only Roger Bacon who demanded that the conclusions of natural philosophy should be experimentally checked. Newer natural theories differ from the natural philosophy , which has been splintering into many schools of thought since the 17th century , primarily in their endeavor to establish the understanding of general principles of nature based on empirical science and not metaphysically. In contrast, natural philosophy (or today the philosophy of natural sciences) works primarily on sharpening the concepts that are presupposed in natural sciences. It reflects the usefulness of these terms with regard to the acquisition of knowledge and discusses the limits of human knowledge and explanation. She also includes aesthetic and ethical aspects in her considerations. The technical malleability and substitutability of natural processes by technoscience are in turn topics of the philosophy of technology and partly also of the sociology of science .
The anchored in the spontaneous view of the world, but also by the modern philosophy of science - z. B. from logical positivism - the required separation of observer and external nature, i.e. a detached attitude in which the scientist remains external to the examined natural objects and thereby should achieve an objectivity removed from time, has been repeatedly and ultimately mainly through quantum theory questioned.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the natural sciences not only deal with external nature, but (also) the productions of the human mind and human ingenuity.
Attempts to draw a dividing line between natural theory and philosophy where the area of empirical evidence ends and the area of philosophical speculation began , remained problematic insofar as evidence (in the sense of mere "appearance") was a question of habit, cultural Practice of perspectives and ways of thinking and the observation instruments used is. Therefore, in the course of time, the criterion of evidence as a feature of non-speculative theory took a back seat and was replaced by that of the predictability of the theory. Since Newton it became common to derive conclusions from a mathematical theory using purely deductive procedures, which only then had to be empirically verified. Whether this working method of the physicists z. B. also makes sense for biology remains the subject of controversy. Similarly, the delimitation criterion of the critical verifiability of theoretical statements also fails, since some theories proposed by natural scientists could not initially be empirically verified.
Concept history
The program of a theory of nature in the sense outlined at the beginning is first formulated by Aristotle , who claims “basic propositions or causes or basic building blocks”, i.e. principles of a “science of nature” from the “mixed up” (the whole known to us on the surface ) to work out a way from the "wholes to the details", d. H. to tread in the analytical sense.
In Latin form (as Theoria Naturae ), the term has been used since the early Enlightenment for a reason-based knowledge of nature that is not based on “speculations and opinions”. B. 1721 by the doctor Michael Alberti from Halle in his handbook of medicine, which, however, was still caught in the religious ideas of Pietism .
Rugjer Josip Bošković , whose atomistics was based on Newton's mechanics and his concept of inertia , used the term “Theoria” in his treatise Theoria philosophiae naturalis redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium (“Theory of natural philosophy, reduced to a uniform law of in the Forces existing in nature ”) to delimit his scientific endeavors from the natural philosophy of his time.
In addition to Latin, the term was first used in Anglo-Saxon literature, often in the plural (Theories of Nature) . In Italian, however, teoria della natura is often used as a generic term that also includes natural philosophy and natural history. For a long time, no distinction was made between natural philosophy and natural theory in German either; 19th century physicists did it first.
Klaus Mainzer uses the term natural theory for the attempts to establish a unified theory of nature based on mathematical procedures in the successor of Newton. Such theories tie in with the old idea of Pythagoras , according to which there is a uniform symmetry structure in mathematics and nature, which today can be grasped with the help of the instruments of mathematical group theory, both from the totality and from the elementary level. There is no contradiction between the holistic apprehension of nature and its atomistic view, but rather a complementarity, as Niels Bohr has already put it. Wolfgang Lefèvre and Falk Wunderlich from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science use the term “natural theory” in relation to Kant's writings on nature in the sense of a theory of nature that is free of metaphysics, but not only reduced to epistemology. In the 20th century, the term “unified natural theory” or original theory was also used in connection with attempts to standardize the conceptual bases of quantum theory and general relativity .
The concept of natural theory was also used for Goethe's attempts at a synthesis of a rational explanation of nature, a clear understanding of biological development models and aesthetic theory, and for Schelling's speculative idea of nature as pure productivity.
In recent times, the term has been used primarily in the context of social science (for example with Oliver Schlaudt) and ecological debates. The modern theories of nature, which are often viewed as critical, also include approaches to delimit the areas of nature from human culture and society or to investigate the mutual fusion phenomena. The "socialization" of nature and the nature-changing power of modern technology, including its ecological effects, constantly raises new questions in natural theory. Attempts to re-establish natural theory without philosophical implications are in the foreground. So today there is a whole range of theories that relate to nature or its relationship to society and thereby strive beyond individual scientific knowledge, while skeptical voices of a continuing "decline of natural theory in modern times" and the resulting "void" speak.
Myth, teleology, causality
For the Babylonians of the 1st millennium BC BC there was no creation out of nothing, but a primeval chaos in which a supreme deity created order. They traced the concrete phenomena of the world of nature and objects back to a large pantheon of gods whose names were listed in poorly sorted lists. In contrast to their predecessors, the Sumerians , they not only strived for a conceptual order of the world, but also for an "explanation of the tradition, which to a large extent no longer really understandable." However, "the appropriateness of the declaration did not make too high demands". Mythical and teleological explanations dominated the interpretation of natural phenomena such as the gait of heavenly bodies, the type, color and direction of lightning or the flight of birds. The divination was used to explore the intentions of the gods and to predict. If the gods punished people through natural phenomena, this was due to human errors in the practice of strictly regulated rituals. However, on the basis of unreal premises, the Babylonians repeatedly come up with rational practical decisions - a consequence of the competition of many scholars for the correctness of the interpretations.
The Egyptians completely subordinated the explanation of nature to ethics; Natural disasters were therefore due to human error or human guilt.
The Torah , which has been cleansed of the traces of polytheism and magic and can be interpreted from an evolutionary psychological perspective as a reliable "rule-based disaster control system", which makes the external world more predictable on the basis of protoscientific observations , went one step further than the other ancient oriental religions : only strict rule compliance, not magic protects against incomprehensible catastrophes, e.g. B. from epidemics. Also Émile Durkheim sees the Urkategorien of science in religious thinking anchored. This already requires a certain degree of detachment and reflection on the part of the observer towards reality.
The Greeks considered their gods to be particularly ill-tempered and unpredictable; the rise of Greek philosophy and science may also be due to the need to create more reliable "disaster prevention systems". Seneca contrasted the mythical-teleological thinking with the enlightened ancient thinking of his time. He sees the difference between the two ways of thinking in that the Etruscans believed that the clouds collided to create lightning, while the Romans believed that lightning came about because the clouds collided.
But not all myths function as a kind of “proto-science”, which serve to explain the world and predict phenomena that cannot be controlled by humans. In contrast to the oriental creation myths, which ascribe the origin of the world to a supreme being, the totemism widespread among many indigenous peoples testifies to man's self-understanding as part of nature, on which he is dependent without being passively subject to it. In his study of the snake cult of the Pueblo Indians, Aby Warburg speaks of totemism as a “form of Darwinism through mythical affinity”, which takes the form of an equal ritual interaction between humans and animals. This is a mythological-psychological relationship with the world and all living beings, which cannot necessarily be viewed as a preliminary stage to a rational explanation of the world, but rather describes an independent form of thinking. An example of the mixture of close observation and such mythical thinking is the figure of the thunderbird, revered by the North American natives . It is based on the constant, therefore easily observable, temporal connection between the annual bird migration and the thunderstorm season. Such “ wild thinking ” is characterized by the fact that it seeks to create a magical relationship to the whole with the means of analogy or purely temporal coincidences. It is not the individual things that are real, but the indivisible events such as e.g. B. the seasons or the thunderstorm season with bird migration.
According to Claude Lévi-Strauss , this thinking can be arranged in logical pairs of opposites that do not arise from an unlimited imagination, but, like the systematics of the modern world, were obtained through observation and the formation of hypotheses. These pairs of opposites (such as the raw and the cooked, exogamy and incest, wild and tamed animals, heaven and earth, over- and underestimation of consanguinity through incest and parricide, etc.) resolve the contradictions inherent in myths that one another the human being experiences on the one hand as part of nature and at the same time as a cultural being; or they declare one side of the contradiction to be dominant if they e.g. B. consider death necessary to prevent overpopulation and starvation. It is not the action of the myth that is relevant, but its structure that creates cognitive order.
Antiquity: non-mythizing theory formation and search for primal substances and forms
The Greek natural philosophers were confronted with a rudimentary legacy of the advanced oriental cultures, but initially did not develop it further in the direction of individual scientific theory formation, but through in-depth reflection, clarification of terms and repeated attempts at systematization. In the pre-Socratic period, therefore, natural philosophy and natural theory largely coincided, but developed a clear skepticism towards the explanatory power of myths, which they often discuss comparatively and which one after the other are excluded from the group of explanatory models of natural events. The philosophers of the Ionian coastal fringe of Asia Minor were not yet scientists in today's sense, but they were able to observe the diverse natural phenomena of ebb and flow, fog, rain, wave formation, storm or earthquake more closely than was possible for the inhabitants of the Mesopotamia in their relatively constant environment . Many Ionic scholars attributed sensory perception to physical conditions, even if they rated the knowledge through speculative thinking higher than the often deceptive perception. For example, in the earthquake zone of Miletus in the 6th century BC. The first non-mythical attempts to explain the origin of earthquakes through the fluctuation of the sea level (for example through Thales) or in air eruptions in the interior of the earth and in the wind that grazes through crevices (through Anaximander). Nowhere has the separation between speculative thinking and systematic observation of nature been carried out so radically as in Europe. An interesting side effect of this development is that the ancient thought of nature increasingly relieved the gods of suspicions of malice.
Social foundations of ancient knowledge of nature
Raaflaub attributes the progress of ancient philosophy and science, and in particular ancient knowledge of nature, to three factors: the unhindered competition between the freely evolving póleis in the midst of a power vacuum, and the Greek colonization of the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, which led to high mobility and rapid growth Geographical and nature-related knowledge led, above all, to the lack of an institutionalized religion that legitimized the respective rule. A caste of priests, which was formed by a unified religious community as in the ancient oriental states, did not exist in the political structures that were decentralized after the collapse of the Mycenaean kingdom . In the Ionian city-states there was a local syncretism of various competing myths; scriptures or theological dogmas did not exist, which was almost unique in the ancient world.
The cosmopolitan character of the trading city of Miletus with its 80 colonies contributed to the demystification of the ancient cosmologies, as did the development of measurement and comparison methods that enable the ability to abstract and form concepts (e.g. "What is gravity and how does it work?") supported; because in order to be able to trade successfully, the Ionian cities had to convert or unify measures, weights and coins. Alfred Sohn-Rethel argues that such a cognitive synthesis is tied to a certain form of socialization: important abstract categories of the Greeks' knowledge of nature such as laws, logic, atomicity, causality, etc. are based on intra-social acts - above all on exchange transactions based on the monetary economy - traced back. Edgar Zilsel particularly emphasizes the role model function of legal terms for the formation of terms in natural theory. In fact, the time of the codification of the law of the Greek polis coincides with the formulation of the first natural laws around the 6th century BC. Chr.
The idea of the structural similarity of the cosmos and human society is also evident in the sociomorphic metaphors used to explain nature . Heraclitus already uses terms such as justice, balance and retribution as well as metaphors from the areas of trade and war to explain natural occurrences.
The search for the original substance
A concept of external nature only emerges from the observation of certain regularities that can be viewed as independent of the intentions of the gods or other personalized powers, i.e. not as "artificial things". This seems to have been the case first with the Greeks, where the development of the concept of nature and the observation of nature took place in close interaction. For Heraclitus, the physis (φύσις, phýsis) was the true essence of things, their law of development, which one had to track down behind their surface.
It was the outstanding achievement of the valley to recognize that the substance of the water always remains the same in different aggregate states (water, steam or fog, ice). Many new forms of matter evidently emerged from the water. Thales did not attribute these changes to the gods, whose existence he did not negate, but to the primary material "water" itself, which obeyed its own laws. To be sure, Thales was unable to understand water as the cause of life; the gods are still responsible for its creation. Thales allegedly managed the solar eclipse of May 8, 585 BC. To predict.
A decisive difference to the oriental myth was that in Ionia, whose cities were in lively trade-political competition, other philosophers opposed the hypothesis of the valley with competing, debatable hypotheses about the original substance and to some extent supported them with arguments.
His thoughts were further developed by his student Anaximander , who separated religion and explanation of nature more strongly by looking for the source of things not in a known material, but in a hypothetical, eternal and unlimited original material , the apeiron , from which new worlds time and again would be born. By accepting a primordial material, the dualism of principles (light / darkness, cold / warmth) given in the immediate intuition should obviously be overcome. With Anaximander, the primordial matter itself receives some divine properties, so that the world no longer appears to be limited in time in any direction. For Anaximander, the stars emerged from a sphere of fire surrounding the earth through cooling and merging in circles.
Anaximenes made further attempts to find the primordial matter; he suggested air and saw the causes of the transformation of matter in compression and dilution. Heraclitus, on the other hand, placed dynamic natural processes and movement at the center of his thinking and saw fire as the source of the world - presumably he had volcanism in mind. Also Xenophanes accepted the existence of a special fire material, of phlogiston . From fossils found on a mountain, he concluded that water once covered the entire earth ( Neptunism ). Parmenides , the most important representative of the Eleatics , saw the world as a mixture of two opposing elementary principles (light, fire and warmth versus night, earth and cold). From these ideas a four-element doctrine developed , as it was supposedly first advocated by Empedocles , in order to identify the causes of natural phenomena; it was easiest to reconcile with the individual facts. Conversions of matter could be viewed as changes in the mixing ratio of the primordial elements - a kind of speculative protochemistry was required .
But if, like the Babylonians, one assumed a primordial chaos or a primordial substance, but in contrast to them excluded a divine demiurge, the problem arose of how an orderly, regular structure of the cosmos could arise from it. That could only be explained by the introduction of forces . In connection with the four-element theory, the observable state forms of matter could be explained so well: The transition between the states could be described by a kind of condensation theory that is remotely similar to today's theories of the Big Bang . According to Empedocles, there was no longer a singular primal element: fire, air, water and earth were equal "roots", their mixing ratios shaped the matter. For Empedocles, Thales' thesis of the preservation of the original material became the preservation of the four elements. This prepared another moment for later theories of the explanation of nature: the reduction of qualities to quantities. Two primal forces, metaphorically referred to as love (attraction) and hate (repulsion), provided the mixing ratio; how did the mixing and separation of the elements, e.g. B. in the formation and dissolution of fog . The state of the highest intermingling consists in the shape of a sphere; after that there is a separation until the earth has reached its present form.
According to Aristotle, Empedocles represented a kind of non-teleological theory of evolution in which chance played a major role: Empedocles also understood living beings as mixtures of the four elements. The differences between the species or individuals would result from largely random deviations in the respective mixing ratios. Thus, a theory of spontaneous generation could be reconciled with Empedocles' teaching: He postulated that from original grotesque hybrid forms, reproductive organisms could later develop. Leucippus and Democritus were later able to tie in with Empedocles' theory, but radicalized it by introducing two abstractions: the atom and nothing. But they kept the principle of chance.
Parmenides, who developed the idea that the being cannot be non-being and the non-being cannot be thought, derived from this the impossibility of becoming and passing away, which subsequently preoccupied the eleatic people who tried to establish the existence of a unified, to connect indivisible being with the appearances of change and movement.
It is true that the pre-Socratics understood the object of their thought, nature, as living, even as divine; however, even from today's perspective, these explanations seem quite rational. Such “prototheories” were largely based on intuition and individual observations - Empedocles grew up particularly rewarding in this regard in the Etna catchment area - but remained without any significant deepening, let alone practical application, not least because, due to its only oral tradition, empirical data were not systematically collected and therefore cumulative Progress in knowledge did not take place and was not even intended. Their aim was rather to explain the incomprehensible, even threatening. This is how it can be read 400 years later in the Romans Lucretius :
- "Nothing can ever arise out of nothing through divine creation. / Because fear dominates all mortals only because / because they see a lot happening in heaven and here on earth, of which they are by no means able to grasp the reason."
Pythagoras went a completely different way of explaining nature . He did not assume any material original material, but postulated - probably due to his experimental preoccupation with vibrating strings and the connection between pitch and length of the string - that the fundamentals of the cosmos were based on harmonies that could be expressed in numerical proportions . With him religious thinking and knowledge of nature remain connected; But the basic idea of the mathematization of the natural relationships and also the meaning of the ideal body, for example in the form of the spherical shape of the earth recognized by him, has not let go of the natural scientist.
But as early as the 4th century BC The pre-Socratics' views of nature corresponded only to a "painting" of nature, which Plato describes in Phaedrus .
Nonetheless, pre-Socratic philosophy contains genuine theoretical elements: The inner structure of the world is no longer a riddle to it, there are no creation myths in which personified gods play a role, and it can be recognized and formulated by humans. This formulation - even if it often remains metaphorical - should be consistent in itself and is subject to discussion and criticism. In this respect, these thought systems basically meet the minimum requirements for scientific hypotheses.
Already in Anaximander and Heraclitus we find the idea of a legality immanent in all being; for Heraclitus there is no coincidence. A doctrine of the creation of the world ( cosmogony ) or a doctrine of the order of the world and the stars ( cosmology ) is thus split off from the theory of the creation of gods ( theogony ); for the acceptance of gods, whose role in the creation of the universe appeared to be indispensable for Pherecytes of Syros in the 6th century , is actually not necessary in a world of strict necessity.
The existence of natural laws
The idea of laws to which nature as well as the ancient polis is subject, combined with the use of the concept of necessity , is formulated by Democritus , Xenophon , Plato and finally by Aristotle , who also develop an implicit concept of causality , even if this is neither in the Greek was still formulated with stringent terminology in the Latin tradition.
In Timaeus, Plato assumes that the formed matter, which differs from chaos in this way, consists of four geometric shapes of polyhedra , which are composed of isosceles triangles that cannot be further divided. All becoming and passing is based on the rearrangement of these, so to speak, geometrical atoms; the mathematical objects are very close to the world of ideas and these creative ideas are the originators of the shaping of the Platonic bodies , which find their correspondence in the four elements of Empedocles. The fire z. B. consists of tiny tetrahedra that penetrate everywhere, air atoms consist of octahedra , earth atoms consist of hexahedra (cubes) and water atoms consist of icosahedra .
Plato is the founder of a kind of "mathematical atomism". But while he does not consider the empirical study of nature to be particularly useful, Aristotle focuses on its individual changes. He sets himself apart from the pre-Socratics, who think of nature mechanistically and materially, i.e. from today's perspective “physical- reductionist ”. While for them the state forms and attributes of matter such as gravity, density or spatial movement resulted from the rearrangement of primitive elements, Aristotle shows that these mechanistic explanations of the change must lead to an infinite regress, because they say nothing about where these primordial elements and their movements ultimately originate. He also does not derive the movements of the bodies from their properties, but from their position in space and the features of the anisotropic space, which is of spherical symmetry, has an above and a below and the earth as the unmoved center. In his criticism of both the thesis of Parmenides and his pupil Melisssos of the unified, indivisible, unchangeable and immobile natural matter as well as of atomistic materialism, Aristotle tries to restore the older "concept of nature in the sense of natural becoming and changing" and with its four-usachen -Theory (material, form, impetus and goal of change) to visualize diverse phenomena and causal complexes of things, changes and movements.
He reinterprets the primordial material ( hyle prote , Latin materia prima ): It is not a being, has nothing to do with the origin and becoming of matter, but is the primordial ground of all beings and thus the basis of the transformation of matter that does not come from Nothing can arise and pass away without a trace, but only transform (such as water through evaporation into "air", i.e. water vapor). The idea of the spontaneous generation of the lower living beings also has its place in this world of ideas. The being (on) is from the beginning diverse, infinitely divisible (whereby one does not come across atoms or geometrical bodies when dividing) and moves. The cosmic movements are eternal, even and circular ( he explained the planetary loops, like Eudoxus of Knidos, by inserting auxiliary spheres); they are pushed by a first mover; the earthly movements, on the other hand, are imperfect and finite. Among them there are natural movements (a stone returns to its natural place), violent movements (a body experiences an external force) and the movements of living beings (of its own accord).
Aristotle relocates the purposeful causes that Plato sees in the ideas in the things themselves. He even attributes a soul to plants and thus inherent teleological developmental forces in the form of a purposeful striving for the realization of their essence. This immanent causa finalis has nothing in common with the modern concept of causa in the sense of the causa efficiens , the external causation. Aristotle's explanation of the movement of things is ultimately teleological, although he also encounters things that change but which are obviously lacking in purpose.
While the physics of Aristotle deals with changes in the visible, tangible world, the invisible, indivisible and independently existing nature of individual things, their "first substance" ( Ousia ) , is not subject to any changes in size or quality; only reason is realized in it. In his metaphysics , Aristotle delimits this unchangeable essence of individual things from matter ( hyle ) as a completely indefinite substratum; this is what remains when we abstract from all other determinations. The observable individual things and processes cannot be traced back to matter understood in this way. Thus the paths of physics and philosophy diverge for the first time, even if in physics Aristotle deals with questions of ontology that can definitely be assigned to metaphysics , in metaphysics, however, also questions of cosmology. However, his eye for subtle differences and differences of things and the development of the corresponding terminology was groundbreaking, even if this could not lead to the development of a research methodology in view of the social and economic conditions at the time.
Atomism versus Metaphysics
Democritus, who was trained by Babylonian science, orientated himself on a materialistic-physical world view of his teacher Leukippus , who had shown the paradoxes of the assumption of an infinite divisibility of matter. In his atomic theory, Democritus unites the contradicting teachings of Heraclitus (theory of primordial fire and constant movement - the everyday experience of stability and identity is only the surface) and Parmenides (constant change is only appearance: beings are independent of space and time, es also did not arise from the non-existent, because this cannot be thought) by explaining the constant change with the movement of the smallest particles of being in the infinite, partially empty space: The void is the space between the corpuscles, and these distinguish them through their geometric shape. The void is necessary so that the particles can move. Earth, fire, air and all qualities of matter such as color, sweetness or bitterness arise from their vertical mechanical movements. According to Democritus, the soul also consists of particularly fine round atoms.
For Leucippus and Democritus, “coincidence” is something that cannot (yet) be explained only because of the ignorance of the people. The strict validity of the causal law leads to determinism: Leukippus is ascribed the sentence: "It does not happen by itself, but everything for a reason and under the pressure of necessity." With this, any teleology is excluded, and there is no room for human freedom either - a position that most Greek thinkers did not want to share because of its radicalism.
Epicurus developed this geometrical atomism further, renouncing all metaphysical assumptions, but also the strict determinism of Democritus. The atoms, which are invisible and differ in size, shape and weight, create innumerable combinations through collision and random deviations from their preferred perpendicular direction of fall. The soul also consists of atoms just like the gods. Epicurus does not deny their existence; but they did not care about the human world and could not override mathematical and natural laws.
Although the conception of a continuous space, which consists not only of the interstices between bodies, was probably too abstract for the atomists, they were the first to express the idea that something can be real without being body at the same time. Plato, on the other hand, equates the world of physical bodies with the world of geometric shapes that contain nothing but empty space. Geometry thus becomes the principle of the design of physical things: physical coherence or - in modern terms - chemical affinity is the result of the stereometric formation of the undifferentiated matter, which leads to "selective gravity": like attracts like. Thus, according to Plato, the earth consists of cubic elements that are particularly solid and immobile; the fire elements are in the shape of a pyramid, etc.
In his didactic poem De rerum natura , in which he explained Epicurus' understanding of the world to his Roman compatriots, the Roman Lucretius established a connection between the random fluctuations (fortuna) of the invisible atoms, the movements of nature and the cosmos, which for it a "picture and likeness “Are, and the free will of living beings, between matter and psyche. Against the strict determinism of the Stoa , which replaced the atomic thought with the pneuma , and its belief in a divine control of the world, he set the assumption that one could only observe the regularities of nature, and denied that gods were able to control themselves to interfere with nature. Even if he can be seen as a forerunner of scientific progress thinking because of his idea of the continuous development of what is hidden in nature , he remained primarily a poet and philosopher integrated into the ancient horizons. In the 19th century, Karl Marx criticized Lucretius' alleged lack of interest in the positive sciences and the "nonchalance" and arbitrariness with which he had introduced the "real reasons" of natural phenomena.
The same was true for Cicero and Seneca , who in the second book of his scientific investigations concretized Lucretius' criticism of the determinism of the Stoics and at the same time turned against the superstition of the Etruscans , who wanted to predict the future from random events. Seneca assumed that one was making the gods too busy and the servant of an insignificant cause if one wanted to explain every natural phenomenon such as the flight of birds by their intervention and to regard it as a divine sign. Random events such as B. the weather did not allow predictions; but: "Cuius rei ordo est, etiam praedictio est" - where there is order, there is also the possibility of prediction.
Karl Popper attests to the speculative atomic theorists that they were the intellectual pioneers of empirical and scientific research.
Limits of ancient nature observation
In fact, precise predictions based on long-term observations were not possible in weather-dependent agriculture, but only in astronomy, which was of little practical relevance to the Greeks , and that was only possible using the mathematical aids already developed by oriental science. The Spheres of Aristotle to explain the planetary motions was not the Euclidean geometry compatible; But his view of the world was not suitable for the development of a geometry of space either. Adhering to Aristotle's premise that all cosmic movements must be circular, Apollonios von Perge developed his epicyclic theory , which was later adopted by Claudius Ptolemy and was even more complex , which at least enabled an approximation of the theoretically expected orbits of the planets observed. So the theory of planetary motion remained the best developed scientific theory of all until the early modern period.
Only Archimedes became the first physicist to a few axioms founded purely mathematical derivation of mechanical ( lever principle ) and hydrostatic laws ( buoyancy ). The work of Archytas of Taranto on mechanics and acoustics was also based on careful experiments. Only in such cases can one speak of a successful theory formation in the modern sense; the practical applications were initially limited to toys such as the compressed air-powered dove of Archytas .
In the age of the late Hellenism, theoretical knowledge of fluid mechanics was also used for military and civil purposes. However, the social and mental structures and framework conditions of late antique societies were not conducive to the practical application of scientific knowledge. A targeted research program to improve material living conditions did not result from the knowledge gained. This also applied to the reception and use of ancient natural theories in the Middle Ages.
Ernst Mach attributed the “vagueness” of the ancient theories of nature to the disdain for manual work by the intellectual elite, who did not consider an empirical examination of theories necessary. Peter Janich argues differently , who regards the observance of causally compulsory factual logics as a characteristic of knowledge-enhancing manual activity. As "mouthworkers" the ancient and later philosophers were always only spectators of these activities. Janich thus criticizes the overestimation of the historical role of the experiment in the development of scientific theories by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, as well as by Ian Hacking , who understands the practical manipulability of artifacts in controlled experiments as an indicator of reality .
Non-European natural theories
While Arabic philosophy stuck to the Aristotelian tradition and, despite remarkable individual observations in the fields of medicine, chemistry and astronomy, did not make any contribution to a general theory of nature, Chinese scholars developed a five-element theory based on Daoism ( Wu Xing ) , who named the basic concepts of cosmology with water, fire, wood, metal and earth . Initially, only the mixed primordial matter from the resting and moving principle existed in space; this moved and swirled back and forth. The impure substances gathered in the center; this is how the earth came into being - the resting principle. The purer components of the primordial matter became the sky, the sun, the moon and the stars and move forever in a circle around the earth - the moving principle. In view of the development of practical and technical skills from iron processing to irrigation technology during the Warring States' times , this teaching was expanded into a cyclical model of the development and decay of nature - also according to the seasonal rhythm: the wood feeds the fire, the fire creates ashes (Earth), the earth produces metals, these dissolve in the water and nourish the plants (wood).
This cycle is also interpreted as the cycle of the seasons; the element of water marks the beginning of the dynamic and corresponds to winter. In the form of fossils there are signs of such a growth and decay and the change in shape of the earth. However, this “protocausal” thought structure lacks the linear development component that is typical of Western thinking .
For Hinduism , matter is only a form of the original soul. There is no need to intervene in world events, practical submission and exploration of living nature is forbidden, especially because of the reverence for the equality of all souls and living beings. The same applies to Buddhism .
The classic book religions have promoted the intellectualization of broader strata, but favored dogmatism rather than the acquisition of empirical knowledge of nature. The same is probably true of the role of socially homogeneous and isolated priestly caste freed from physical labor, such as that of the Brahmins . Michel Foucault tried to show, in a controversial approach, how subject formation only took place in the West parallel to self-submission to the regime of work and to submission and knowledge of external nature.
The question of the extent to which the abolition of compulsory labor in ascetic redemptive religions such as Hinduism or in the monastic cultures of Buddhism , Quanzhen- Daoism , but also in Christian monasticism , which initially regards work as a practice of penance and asceticism, hinders empirical knowledge of nature and practical subjugation of nature has, however, cannot be clearly decided. The Chinese were brilliant engineers, observed the heavens very closely, but did not develop a theory of the movements of the sky. Apparently, Buddhist pandeism made the assumption of causal laws operating in nature unnecessary, since the ultimate cause is always God. Likewise, the concept of eternal return or rebirth is not conducive to causality thinking. Like the five-element theory of Taoism, Buddhism ultimately led to a magical concept of the universe and the human body.
Middle Ages: Between certainty of belief and belief
The idea of predictable causality was already lost in late antiquity. Christianity opened the earthly space to influences from the hereafter, but also from the underworld. The earthly world thus became a stage for battles between good and evil forces. From the assumption that the senses belong to the corporeal world and are therefore deceiving and that only the truth of the ideas is indubitable, there was a great closeness of Christianity to Platonism for Augustine : The view could not provide any definitive certainty about nature, but became through the certainty of belief dominates. However, the ancient authors had at least contrasted the low probability of divine intervention against the accuracy of our exploration of human affairs. With the adoption of Aristotelianism in Christian dogmatics since the 12th century, there was also a rejection of the experiment, which had already been rejected by Plato and Aristotle as a manipulation of nature, as an artificial separation that conceals the inner essence of nature. This ended the influence of Arab scholars such as Jabir ibn Hayyān or the Persian doctor and empiricist Rhazes , whose writings were translated into Latin as early as the 10th or 12th century at the latest.
The neglect of the body world
Another prerequisite of medieval thought, the assumption of the inner purposefulness of nature and thus its anthropomorphism , was also adopted by Aristotle. Alchemy was also shaped by the belief in the spiritual essential properties of matter , which spread in Europe in the 12th century under the influence of Arab authors and through the mediation of Spain. Hardly received, however, the heretical ideas for the Islamic orthodoxy about the eternity of matter and the impossibility of a Creatio ex nihilo des Averroes .
This did not change fundamentally because of the rediscovery of the corpuscular (atomic) theory of antiquity by Isidore of Seville in the 7th century . It is true that in the early 12th century, with the increasing understanding of the autonomy of nature, atomism was revived by Odo von Cambrai and Adelard von Bath : The physical world is given an intrinsic value in them, the divine act of creation has only given it a basic order and certain qualities. But this did not lead to their empirical research. After church attacks on atomistics, it revived in the 14th century, above all through Nicolaus von Autrecourt , who followed directly on to Democritus and rejected Aristotle's view of the infinite divisibility of space as a continuum . However, he did not succeed in developing a theory with which more complex physical phenomena from the connection of atoms could be explained even rudimentarily. So the medieval atomists mostly got stuck in logical-mathematical proof of existence. In addition, atomism competed with the chemism of Paracelsus , who traced all organic life processes back to chemical processes and combined the experimental recording of fundamental natural processes with Kabbalistic practices and belief in demons - a conflict that continued in various forms into the 19th century. Because of the weakness in explaining mechanistic-atomistic theories, Paracelsism persisted well into the 17th century. However, some of his questions, such as that of artificial new elements, have surfaced again recently.
Up until then, the influence of Aristotle, which was largely only known in Europe in the 12th century through the commentaries of Averroes , was that of Neoplatonism . Robert Grosseteste's theory of creation as the self- propagation of light was based on his theory of light as the first physical form and first form of movement, which he adopted from Jewish teaching and possibly from Pythagorean philosophy . These theories must be added to theology; however, like the theories of the Persian-Arabic researcher Alhazen , which were conveyed through Gerhard von Cremona's translation, they aroused increased interest in geometrical optics and at least stimulated experimentation in this field. For example, Nicolaus von Autrecourt understood light as a stream of particles that propagated in a vacuum at a finite speed; he also assumed that matter was immortal. The optical experiments and geometric solutions to optical problems by Alhazen, who lived at the court of Cairo in the early 11th century, influenced Blasius von Parma, through him, the perspective and pictorial thinking of the European Middle Ages to Leonardo da Vinci .
It is true that Christian theology promoted the conviction of the existence of natural laws, because it believes that the rules of nature come directly from God. But from the high medieval scholasticism to the time of Copernicus, the natural sciences remained largely stuck to metaphysics in the tradition of Aristotle or fictionalism , as Pierre Duhem and Edward Grant showed for astronomy. The joy in the related issues created a certain interest in the physical world and contributed to the development of logical argumentation skills. But Thomas Aquinas in particular resisted the separation of belief and rational knowledge postulated by the Arab scholars and continued to understand any form of movement as an element of metaphysics.
These doctrines, as well as the teachings of Aristotle, were first questioned in part by Giordano Bruno through his theses, which were based on the Epicureans, of the infinity and indestructibility of the universe. His idea of the idea of the unity of substance, of death as a moment of infinite form change in productive nature, alleviates the apocalyptic fear of the destruction of the earth that was widespread in the post-Copernicus era: for Bruno, every catastrophe also means the birth of something new. He was fought because of the vehemence of his polemics and the theological implications of his theories (e.g. the denial of the Last Judgment , which could not take place in an infinite universe.)
Nominalism as a door opener to the world of individual things
The philosophy of the Christian late Middle Ages , scholasticism , was, however, mainly shaped by the discussion of the problem of universals , the social background of which was the laboriously preserved monotheism and the unity of the church that had to be maintained. The trinity stood for a God-given unity of nature that was real, but not accessible to sensual experience. For the supporters of a growing opposition to this realism , which was called nominalism , on the other hand, the individual sensory objects were real, as Roscelin put it in a provocative way. These nominalists broke away from unifying ideas, were initially persecuted, but prevailed around 1400.
Wilhelm von Ockham represented the most differentiated nominalism: If only the individual and the single thing are real (and the latter is an expression of divine ideas), then generalizations are of a purely linguistic nature. On the one hand, the idea that the individual thing embodies a divine idea prevents its identification with a real physical object in a generalizing, but not existential, character. The general is not something given, but inaccessible like Plato's ideas , but can be researched and formulated in an ideal language, for which Leibniz later developed his mathematical-logical universal language.
However, genuine natural theories did not emerge from the discourses of that time; one tried only to adapt Aristotle's thoughts closer to reality and to combine them with intuitive insights. One such attempt was the impetus theory of Johannes Buridan , the doctrine of a force that is transferred to a body to be moved in order to bring about its movement. The installation of the first wheel clocks (Milan 1306) also made time measurable, broken it up into artificial units and freed the division of the day from the monks' rhythm of life. Pierre Duhem saw in the discourses of this time an anticipation of Galileo's mechanics: The study of nature now takes place through the disclosure of its only empirically accessible laws; she could free herself from the “meta” shackles of metaphysics. Modern natural research originated in Paris in the 14th century. This modernity thesis of late medieval physics is contradicted today: Despite innovative approaches, the distance to Galileo's mechanics remains very large.
After all, the methodological reflection on the study of nature by the Neo-Platonist Nicolaus Cusanus began shortly afterwards . In the course of his work, he came to an increasingly optimistic assessment of human knowledge. His ideas were refined almost 200 years later by Francis Bacons , whose important epistemological treatise, the Novum Organum , appeared in 1620.
Early modern times: Mechanics as a universal science
In the early modern period, private interests became important for the development of the knowledge of nature for the first time. Alchemical laboratories contributed to this, as did scientific instrument makers who constructed optical and precision mechanical devices for universities, and planetary observatories sponsored by princely patrons.
Basically, Francis Bacon was the first to question the ancient and Christian understanding of nature. For him, technology in the form of measuring instruments is an indispensable prerequisite for the production of scientific knowledge. Thus he is not only an empiricist, but also an operationalist and utilitarian , in that he not only understands nature as that which is given in the senses; for him it is also the realm of what is feasible and man-made. However, it does not stop at measuring instruments: the technical experiments with which researchers penetrate nature become increasingly aggressive over time. Bacon marks a turning point in the history of the appropriation of nature: For him, laws of nature are always also rules for the production of useful things, even the “domestication” of nature. What is understood as a causal cause when considering a “natural” fact can be used as a rule when executing it. For Bacon, the difference between nature and technology - unlike for Aristotle, for whom nature has its own laws of motion in contrast to man-made techne - is not a fundamental one.
Above all, it was astronomy that shook the assumption that the earth and man were at the center of the universe. The cosmology of the Middle Ages had taken the nine-sphere model of the structure of the universe from the commentary on Plato's Timaeus by Calcidius and the cosmology of Macrobius (both around 400) and stuck to it tenaciously, even if calculations based on it turned out to be difficult. Nicolaus Copernicus still had to develop his concept of a heliocentric view of the world with primitive observation instruments , which was initially little received and was only hard-fought over in the course of the Counter-Reformation . The ancient observations and theories of Hipparchus provided him with important stimuli . The works of the outsider Aristarchus of Samos , an early exponent of the heliocentric worldview, were probably not known to Copernicus.
Tycho Brahe was an excellent observing astronomer; a few decades after Copernicus, thanks to royal support, he was able to fall back on a sophisticated observation technique. In this way he succeeded in determining the orbit of the comet from 1577 and thus identifying it as a cosmic object. In today's terms, his Uraniborg observatory on the Öresund could be described as a major research facility ; but he was a rather mediocre mathematician, and his world model still tried to mediate between geocentrism and heliocentrism. The very short-sighted Johannes Kepler, on the other hand, was a poor observer and a Pythagorean mystic , but an excellent mathematician who calculated the planetary orbits. decisively further developed the heliocentric worldview and derived from it the possibility of a natural inertia of matter, which opposes the forces of movement. These examples show how the recourse to ancient authors, new observation techniques, but also philosophical speculations and mathematical methods in complex interaction with political-religious conflicts did not advance the knowledge of nature without steps backwards and detours.
The invention of the experiment
In the Renaissance, people had only suspected that the universe was not firmly enclosed by a fixed star sphere and that earth and humans were not in the center of the universe, but around 1600, as a result of the dynamic development of optics and precision mechanics as well as the advancement of mathematics, refined methods of measurement technology were used Observation of nature and experimental methods of nature exploration by means of which it was possible to finally break through the last “lid” of the nine celestial spheres. However, resistance to this program did not only come from church circles, as in the case of Galileo Galileo , whose astronomical observations published in Sidereus Nuncius in 1610 with the help of the telescope, which showed at least ten times more stars than were previously known, made theologians angry. His book remained on the Index librorum prohibitorum until 1835 . Resistance, especially against experiments, also came from science and - in the tradition of Aristotle's verdict - from philosophy. An example of this was the controversy between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle over his experiments with the air pump . Even the existence of the vacuum has long remained a controversial issue between corpuscular and atomic theories. Boyle, vacillating between the two positions, was interested in describing effects, not the underlying causes. Hobbes, on the other hand, demanded that new knowledge must be causally justified and derived with logical necessity. The mere experimental induction of artificial effects - according to Hobbes - does not lead to true knowledge, since an induction of the effect on the causes would always remain hypothetical. Even Boyle's argument that his experiments could be repeated at any time could not eliminate Hobbes' skepticism about scientific instruments and the falsifications of nature they caused; but Boyle's pragmatic position quickly caught on with the help of the Royal Society .
Nevertheless, the development of experimental natural science led to the fact that the natural-philosophical-ontological concept of matter separated from the physical concept of matter and a concept of natural law crystallized, which first appeared explicitly in the writings of Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke .
The machine paradigm: the world as clockwork
With the spread of machines such as mills, pumping stations, pulley blocks, gears and precision mechanical devices such as clocks, empirical thinking was considerably stimulated and the formation of analogies stimulated. In the Baroque age , under the influence of increasingly powerful mechanics, the sciences were increasingly permeated by a reductionist mechanistic-mathematical worldview, which culminated in the image of the world as precise clockwork and the predominance of the machine paradigm in almost all disciplines and led to the use of technomorphic metaphors. This is how William Harvey , who was the first to describe the blood circulation in 1628, understands the body with the help of mechanical models much better than a hundred years earlier Andreas Vesalius , who, despite his own anatomical studies, was still guided by Galen's brilliant authority, which was undisputed for over 1500 years . With the increasing orientation of humans to this world, nature is subsequently broken down to human standards and tamed, which becomes clear in the design of the baroque gardens ,
The process of displacing a largely speculative natural philosophy and organistic metaphors by supposedly “exact”, metaphysics-free mechanical theories did not lead to advances in knowledge in all areas. With the ostracism of Aristotelian natural philosophy and the transfer of the mechanistic view of the world to biological phenomena, a large part of the medical knowledge of antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Arab world was lost. The presumed scope of action of mechanical procedures was greatly expanded in that they were also used to heal the sick.
Even Montaigne had noted that human things can only perceive in the forms which are known to them already, and criticized the "ridiculous endeavor" Plato as the modern astronomers, the "physical their train pulling planet [...] with massive, pure and equipping them with material means of transport. [...] One might think that we had cart builders, carpenters and painters who went up there to assemble mechanisms of different functions ”.
So describes René Descartes physics solely on mechanical principles. He regards animals as the human body, yes, like the world as a whole, as soulless machines. The human mind generates knowledge of nature from itself, just as it constructs mathematical rules and laws. With this, Descartes finally turns away from the ancient Christian notion that nature and the cosmos have an inherent meaning. But with the strict Cartesian separation between subject and object, doubts about the existence of the outside world are sown.
It was also difficult to explain chemical reactions and even more various long-range effects with the help of mechanics. Descartes and Christiaan Huygens tried to explain gravitation from eddies of the ether ; an empty room was still inconceivable for them. Descartes' assumptions were soon challenged by Pierre Gassendi 's reception of Epicurus , who tried to combine ancient atomic theory with the mechanistic physics of his time. Even Newton showed influenced by Epicurus, which he allegedly received important theoretical impetus written accounts. But it was only Newton's concept of an absolute, infinite, immobile space that could be penetrated by all bodies, had no qualities or forms and could not be separated by any force , and which was the measure of all distances and speeds of the bodies, replaced the Cartesian theory, which provided no inertial masses, and became the basis of successful physical research. The high point of the development were Newton's formulations of theoretical mechanics and the law of gravitation , which for a long time seemed to be useful as the "Theory of Everything". The process of mathematical deduction enabled him to think through problems without regard to the limits of perception and (largely) uninhibited by conventional terminology, to uncover all the mathematically interesting consequences of a conceptual construction and to eliminate their contradictions.
However, these theories were subsequently supplemented or underpinned in many cases by Spinozist teachings about a spiritual-physical original substance without extension as in Bošković or by theological- metaphysical assumptions about a first cause. These speculations were aided by the use of ever more powerful microscopes, which unearthed new micro-worlds. Leibniz tried to build a bridge between the organic and inorganic world with his monad theory , based on the assumption of quasi-metaphysical, immortal atoms with the ability to recognize the outside world, which goes back to various ancient schools.
The hylozoism of the Platonist Ralph Cudworth was also an attempt to explain life or the ability of self-movement as a property of matter; it was directed against mechanical determinism as well as against the doctrine of predestination of the Calvinists .
With this, however, the developing natural theory was drawn back into the theological conflicts of the time: If the biblical revelation played an ever less important role in the explanation of nature, nature itself had to be the most important source of revelation - that was the position of physical theology - and the good obviously one Being a property of nature itself. The latter view was represented by the Cambridge Platonists , who opposed the materialism of the growing natural sciences and derived a theory of natural law from this.
Compared to the various theories of the original substance, Newton's concept of space ultimately prevailed as the guiding paradigm of natural theory. From the early 18th century onwards, it was practically “deified” by the exact sciences, as space was simply considered the work of God. Many scientists even hoped that Newton's concept of space could serve as the basis for a new proof of God by which it was hoped to replace the scholastic proofs.
From the “divine watchmaker” to the self-movement of matter
Until Newton's day, natural science and biblical truth were perfectly compatible if only scientists could make up their minds to view the statements of the Bible as metaphorical. For its part, the Church, which had demonstrated to Galileo and Giordano Bruno the full severity of the Inquisition , significantly softened its position on questions of science, especially astronomy. However, through Newton's assumption of a universe moving strictly deterministically according to given rules, the idea of a permanently necessary divine intervention was gradually displaced from cosmology. Newton himself adhered to a Platonic deism : in place of divine guidance from outside came the self-movement of matter, and in place of the intuitively plausible concept of impulse, the indistinguishable law of inertia . The deist currents of that time, which rejected knowledge as a source of revelation , also fitted the spontaneous generation, flood and catastrophe theories , such as the doctrine of Georges Cuvier of the origins and the change in form of life, which is repeatedly destroyed and destroyed by geological catastrophes was newly created.
However, many of these theoretical concepts prove to be insufficient to explain the experimentally newly gained knowledge about heat , magnetism , light , blood circulation or the chemical conversion of substances. If elasticity or gas pressure could still be explained mechanically, the phenomena of organic nature in particular raised numerous problems, for the solution of which a mechanistic global paradigm proved to be of little use. Instead, analogies were increasingly used, and similarities between macro and microcosm were discovered. The blood circulation became a model of the organic self-movement of a nature that was not only subject to mechanical laws and was not controlled by external intervention. This thought followed on from the Aristotelian explanation of biological dynamics through the soul; it became the basis of modern physiology, which rehabilitated the concept of organism.
Age of Enlightenment: Systematic representation of knowledge and historicity of its objects
The primacy of experiment and observation
Since the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, private interests have been the main driving force in science. They pooled themselves in learned societies such as the Royal Society or the Leopoldina , some of which were supported by the monarchs of enlightened absolutism or converted into national societies. The focus here was initially on the observation of nature and the systematization of the results, as well as the joy of discovering curiosities and the exchange, rather than the formation of theories or practical application. The curator for experiments of the Royal Society and polymath Robert Hooke initiated z. B. 1663 the first permanent weather observation. He made numerous contributions to the development of scientific instruments such as barometers, telescopes and timepieces and was a versatile experimenter and observer who inductively acquired the concept of the (plant) cell, which was groundbreaking in biology, through his work with the microscope he had improved. In addition, he was a speculative mind who generated terms such as that of ether in order to underpin the theory of light as a transverse wave, which he founded around 1670, in contrast to Newton's pond theory .
Taxonomies and Classifications
The Enlightenment scientists were faced with the task of organizing and systematically representing the rapidly growing and confusing flood of data generated by observation and experimentation, which the natural sciences, each dedicated to their own research programs, produced. An example of this is the work of Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), the creator of the binomial classification as the basis for a taxonomy of animals and plants. In place of the imprecise similarity relationships, there was a scientific endeavor to capture the knowledge in lexicons, tableaus, taxonomies and classifications as completely as possible - admittedly never to be achieved: Instead of looking for analogies, one looked for the precise determination of identities or differences based on a few central selected features; What was required was an exact representation of the external world through precise scientific language. Linnaeus certainly had an eye for ecological relationships, cycle forms and the interdependence of species. Although he recognized the signs of the further development and transformation of plant species and genera , he did not interpret them further. Its hierarchy of characteristics for classification in the taxonomic units remains arbitrary. He also described the food chain without using this lexeme ; he interpreted the overall ecological context as a hierarchically ordered, harmonious, because God-willed, best of all worlds; he still had no eye for the struggle for survival. Nevertheless, Linnaeus' understanding of ecology cannot be described as primitive: Oxygen and photosynthesis had not yet been discovered, so that the real causes of the material cycles had to remain closed to him.
Mediating links between inanimate and animate nature
Around the middle of the 18th century it became clear that the idea of a universe without a ruler but with a creator who gives it a unique impetus, as well as the creationist postulate that all living things are immutable, collided with a growing number of scientific findings. This led to the search for the intermediary links in the chain that included people somewhere between nothingness (or the infinitely small) and the infinity of the cosmos without having to accept Leibniz's theodicy , and ultimately led to the idea of self-movement and self-development of matter ( hylozoism ), which also adhered to Denis Diderot , who was enthusiastic about the idea of the development of nature.
Kant rejected hylozoism in principle, however, because the concept of living matter "contains a contradiction because lifelessness, inertia, constitutes its essential character"; he cannot even be thought of. One undertakes a circle if one “wants to derive the usefulness of nature in organized beings from the life of matter”. But in the age of sensitivity under the influence of sensualism , it made sense to give even the smallest particles a sensitivity ( sensibilité universelle , Diderot) that gives them the ability to unite with other particles to form higher organic formations, without assuming causal laws must.
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The thesis of the spontaneous emergence of higher living beings was first advocated by Maupertuis , a bitter opponent of Leibniz's monadology. Maupertuis took a mediating position between Linnaeus' assertion of a constancy of species and Cuvier's catastrophe theory. He claimed that the small "infusion animals" ( infusoria ) detectable with the microscope , which develop, divide and merge in the infusion of plant material, arise from dead matter and existing species arise in a similar way according to the principle of the smallest effect formulated by him could develop further through the smallest changes ( mutation ) and crossing. Maupertuis also pointed out the inheritance of physical malformations in humans. However, his theses and empirical findings were forgotten again in the period that followed. Contemporaries also saw the monistic-materialistic picture of the body-soul relationship that La Mettrie drew in his work L'home machine as provocative and morally unacceptable .
Only through the development of embryology in the 19th century was it possible to meaningfully combine the assumption of the constancy of species and the findings on the change in shape of organisms.
At the very beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, there were also attempts in France to justify an ethic in a naturalistic way and thus to develop an alternative explanation to Leibniz's postulate, according to which God could produce nothing less than the best of all possible worlds with the cosmos . The ideas of a “good” nature and the noble savage were nourished by reports of the explorers of the 18th century about peoples who were supposedly in a state of nature , such as the travel reports of Louis Antoine de Bougainville , which were taken up by Diderot. Although David Hume had at an early stage opposed such naturalistic fallacies , which tried to infer ethical qualities or norms from the description of nature, the proponents of natural law theories were unimpressed by this argumentation: For them, the good was what the natural Essence of things.
Many articles in Diderot's Encyclopédie were also still guided by metaphysical assumptions that were influenced by Leibniz's monad theory. In the Encyclopédie the “law of conservation” of matter is interpreted as one of the main laws of nature, since it is the basis for the validity of all other laws. It also extends to social and moral relationships: if it is hurt, you destroy yourself. Nobody can leave the world voluntarily without questioning the social pact with others and also their preservation. This gives the law of conservation of matter an almost ethical value.
The mathematician, physicist, astronomer and priest Bošković, who is relatively unknown in Germany and who both Italians and Croats claim to be a great scholar, attempted a non-metaphysical synthesis between Newton's mechanics and Leibniz's monadology by adding the monads Reinterpreted mass points. He derived the impenetrability and elasticity of solids from forces, not from their substance. This anticipation of the atomic theory inspired Faraday to his theory of the electric field .
Probability of hypotheses and historicity of knowledge
A systematic differentiation between the terms of natural philosophy and those of the experience-based natural sciences, which Bošković had avoided, was not widely accepted until the middle of the 18th century. It opened the way for attempts to generalize individual scientific findings in a natural theory and at the same time provided stimuli for further empirical research. The momentous interpretation of probability as a gradual step or a preliminary stage on the way to truth and as a characteristic of hypotheses by the philosophers Christian Wolff and Moses Mendelssohn also falls into this period .
The thereby facilitated insight into the gradual progress and the historicity of knowledge (as well as the historicity of nature) helped the natural scientists to gain their increasingly methodically secured, but still narrowly based, empirical knowledge, which is neither guaranteed by God nor by the system of logic was to oppose the traditional knowledge of Aristotle. With the grading of the probable, the strict Aristotelian distinction between the knowledge of the individual things and the knowledge of the laws, the causae , finally became obsolete.
It was characteristic of Kant's time that there was an abundance of individual, reliable findings on which there was consensus, while there was no consensus on overarching theories that linked the various bodies of knowledge. Because of the fragmentary nature of their knowledge base, the natural sciences continued to rely on highly speculative assumptions in their attempts at theoretical generalization for a long time. This applies even to a highly developed area such as mechanics . In physics and chemistry, the most diverse hypotheses were even more unrelated. This is why more and more scientists were looking for explanations of nature that managed with as few principles as possible in order not to have to assume the effectiveness of numerous heterogeneous forces. For Maupertuis and others, Ockham's razor became the criterion on which the striving for an economical and elegant theory had to be oriented , as it had previously guided Leibniz's or Spinoza's speculative search for the basic building block or the minimal entities necessary for construction the world needs.
Just as the ether served the development of physical theory, although it could not be proven, so the hypothetical substance of the phlogiston helped the chemistry of the 17th and 18th centuries. Century to understand combustion processes. Both theories turned out to be false, but were productive because they initially provided plausible generalizations that could be empirically verified. The progress of knowledge in chemistry was neither promoted by the encrusted university structures of Oxford and Cambridge and the teachings represented there, nor by the Royal Society in London, which lacked practical relevance. Rather, it was empirical practitioners like the doctor and chemist Joseph Black who refuted the phlogiston theory, or civil scientific societies in the English provinces that were founded by the Dissenters , i.e. groups outside the Anglican state church. They created their own educational institutions with a modern program and, around 1770, made outstanding contributions to experimental air and gas research. The most important of these institutions was the Lunar Society in Birmingham , with which the discoverer of oxygen Joseph Priestley had close contacts. New chemical elements have been discovered continuously since the 1770s. In this way, certain natural phenomena could be analytically resolved more and more.
The discovery of the stratigraphic principle by the Danish anatomist and geologist Nicolaus Steno and the correct interpretation of fossils by Robert Hooke did not have such rapid effects . But it prepared the knowledge of the 18th century that nature has its own history and the earth has a "deep time" ( Stephen Toulmin ).
Georges Buffon , in particular , approached the idea of evolution with his theory of nature without, of course, explicating it. He was the first to try to estimate the age of the world and put it at 70,000 years; elsewhere he also noted the number of 500,000 years. Buffon was a representative of a radical nominalism that denied the existence of universals and relegated order and uniformity of the world to the realm of the imagination, but opened the view to processes of growth. Buffon strictly rejected Linnaeus' system: nature was too diverse to be classified on the basis of fewer features. He criticized the too narrow hierarchical classification, in particular because of the arbitrary selection of these characteristics, and instead called for a careful description of every living being in all aspects. In his monumental 36-volume Histoire Naturelle , an overview of the history of the earth, he compares animals with humans. B. Newborn children with animals. All living beings are composed of the smallest immortal organic particles similar to them - these are obviously borrowings from Epicurus' atomism and Leibniz's theory of monads - which are put together to form living beings according to mechanical laws. They have a shape, a power, and behave like germs, i. that is, they can produce new particles of the same kind. Growth takes place by expanding the form outwards and absorbing new matter inside. Malesherbes , who realizes that domestic animals can go wild and then acquire predatory-like traits, certifies Buffon that, unlike Epicurus and Leibniz, he was the first to see these particles through microscopic observations (he actually believed that they were, for example, in soaked semen or spoiled Seeing flesh, and thought it was alive), but criticizes his system formation based on monadology, which contradicts his empirical approach.
The advocates of a divine anthropogony , on the other hand, tried to emphasize the great distance between the animal world and humans in order to discredit the emerging idea of a gradual transition from apes to humans and thus save the date of creation given by the Bible, contrary to the more recent geological findings.
At the end of the 18th century, however, it was clear that scientific knowledge could not be timeless, but rather one that developed historically and, according to the capabilities of human nature, tended to be incomplete or faulty. In addition, under the influence of skepticism, the view opened up to the fact that the space or causal connections of our immediate perception are not accessible as objects or openly revealed laws, but only through human consciousness or through "effects of habit" (David Hume) be constituted or constructed as laws. Hume (and shortly afterwards Kant) shifted the causal problem from the ontological to the epistemological level for the first time.
Kant's draft of a metaphysics-free celestial mechanics
A problem not solved by Newton was the explanation of the planetary motions. At the time of Kant, the dispute between the defenders of divine creation and the "naturalists" escalated on this issue. Kant's dynamic theory of matter, which was neglected by many philosophers in contrast to the “critiques”, can be regarded as the first modern theory of nature which largely freed itself from the metaphysical assumptions of Spinozism, Newtonism and Hylozoism, although he used the concept of metaphysics in his early work “ Metaphysical foundations of the natural sciences ”.
In his General Natural History and Theory of Heaven, Kant moves from Newton's consideration of the movements of the cosmos to a mechanical explanation of the origin of the cosmos from primordial matter through attraction and repulsion and thus takes the step towards cosmogony : Newton's space - meanwhile (almost) empty - was previously filled with diffuse primordial matter. In order to protect himself against the accusation of Epicureanism - and not least with regard to his dependent position and a revived religious zealotry at the Prussian court - Kant distinguished himself from the godless atomists. He solved the dilemma by tying world matter and its development to laws from the very beginning: an orderly cosmos develops from the initially unevenly distributed primordial matter. Higher density places attract more matter; Planetary systems thus combine to form galaxies. In the apparently chaotic Milky Way , too, Kant sees structures similar to those in the planetary systems.
The state of the natural sciences of his time is reflected in this work by Kant. In particular, he is based on Charles Bonnet's "step ladder theory" of a statically ordering natural history "from angels, people to cattle, from seraphim to worms", as Alexander Pope enthusiastically describes it, and accepts it as a regularistic principle, from which the periodic principle The formation and decay of solar systems can be explained.
Kant's achievement consists essentially of the elimination of unusable theories, but it can also be viewed as anticipating later developments in scientific knowledge. His theory apparently influenced André-Marie Ampère's work on electromagnetism , while Ampère presented his findings as purely inductive.
On the basis of his knowledge of the efficiency of Newtonian mechanics, Kant later came to the conclusion that all attempts to give it a purely logical-analytical foundation must in principle be doomed to failure as well as their legitimation through past-related empirical observations. He could deduce this from his reading of Hume. This had shown that from purely descriptive statements about the being no statements about the ought - that is, also not about a necessity or regularity in nature - can be derived. In doing so, he had generally questioned the use of inductive methods in natural research ( Hume's law ). Kant attempted to solve this dilemma by introducing synthetic a priori judgments as a foundation for empirical scientific research.
Like Kant, the strict determinism of celestial mechanics by Pierre-Simon Laplace , who drew a similar, essentially correct picture of the formation of the solar system, came from without metaphysical assumptions: gas nebulae from a hot prehistoric star detach from the surface of the star, condense to planets and begin to orbit the sun according to the Kantian equilibrium principle. The Kant-Laplace theory influenced various branches of research; however, Laplace's enlightened optimism of knowledge, which expressed itself in the statement of the indestructibility of the planet and the continuation of a blissful world, was only shared briefly by science and hardly by laypeople. The fear of torrential disasters and earthquakes was the place of the medieval Höllenangst entered.
Reactions to the differentiation of the sciences
Towards the end of the 18th century - starting from biology and geology - the descriptive subject natural history had developed, which was based on the registration and nomenclature of the visible environment, without trying to explain or generalize. In Goethe's time, more and more educated amateurs, so-called “naturalists”, began to observe animals, landscapes and stars, or to collect and classify plants, minerals and fossils without arriving at a consistent system of terms or a temporalized concept of development.
It is true that the systematic-industrial cultivation of nature turned out to be an increasingly relevant source of knowledge compared to the naturalists' urge to collect. In 1788 , the co-founder of modern geology, Abraham Gottlob Werner, developed an empirically based theory about the erosion of primary rocks by water and wind, and James Hutton was also able to draw on his visits to English mines, which are deeper and deeper layers of the earth's crust, when developing his chronological geology exposed. At the beginning of the 19th century, however, the task of developing viable generalizations based on the results of the increasingly differentiating natural sciences arose in an increasingly pressing form. The new knowledge of chemistry, biology, physiology and experimental psychology could not be explained with the mechanistic view of the world, i.e. in a reductionistic way. Despite the rapid accumulation of knowledge, the fundamental problem of the transition from inorganic to organic matter remained unsolved.
Romantic vitalism
If the French Revolution had already aroused doubts about the rationality of the world order as a whole, in view of the invisibility of more and more new "forces" discovered in nature, there was a romantic countermovement against the Enlightenment's view of nature, which was frayed by discipline.
Due to his conscientious experimental analyzes of material compounds , John Dalton was able to assume that, contrary to Democritus's assumption, the atoms differ in their mass and are linked in certain numerical proportions depending on the compound. However, the reception of this first modern atomic theory was limited to a narrow circle of chemists for a long time, as it was not yet able to explain any electrophysical or electrochemical phenomena. (This was only rudimentarily achieved 90 years later by Joseph John Thomson , the "inventor" of the electron .)
Even Johann Wolfgang Goethe had unsuccessfully contested the Newtonian physics because they do qualities to quantities; following Spinoza, he saw a living wholeness in nature. But also the medium of perception, highly valued by him and others, which for a time was given a higher priority than measurement and calculation, failed to explain life processes.
At the turn of the 19th century, German philosophy also turned more to nature again. While for Fichte this was completely absorbed in the scientific knowledge of nature, Schelling undertook the attempt, typical of Romanticism, to build a bridge between philosophy and science, which resorted to pre-mechanistic concepts, but which today seems quite modern. Schelling was on the trail of a theory of self-organization : for him, nature was the infinite becoming, never closed, was infinite “productivity”, dominated by the power of expansion and attraction that give it its form. Wherever matter appears, it is in motion; wherever gravity reaches is space, and wherever light goes is time. All chemical, magnetic and electrical forces are related. The concept of the growing organism , unmistakable in its individuality, almost became a universal metaphor for Schelling, with which he also explained state institutions and social phenomena; Such declarations, as they were popular among German romantics like Adam Müller , were directed against liberalism, the right of reason and the acceptance of a social contract. With this the projection of the machine model onto nature was finally overcome; conversely, the model of the natural organism was now projected onto the state and society.
In order to explain the organic processes that were ultimately not understood, one had to rely on the discovery of new factors which were added to the action of mechanical forces and which could not be derived from them, but controlled them. First of all, alchemical and physiological concepts such as B. use that of Georg Ernst Stahl , who had already questioned mechanistic natural theories on the threshold of the 18th century. Above all, however, the idea of the vital force , which was popular from the early days of organic chemistry to Jöns Jakob Berzelius , was used as a non-specific placeholder term for all physiological processes.
The vitalistic conceptions of nature were favored by Franz Anton Mesmer's discovery of “animal electricity” and Alessandro Volta's experiments with frogs' legs. Even Hans Christian Ørsted who discovered electromagnetism was marked by romantic antimechanistischen thinking. A problem particularly noted by romantic writers was the failure of the mechanistic theories of nature to explain phenomena from the “night domain of nature” such as hypnosis , somnambulism , ecstasy or delusion , which at times gave a boost to mesmerism , which Kant had dismissed as charlatanry .
Samuel Taylor Coleridge , influenced by Schelling, formulated the old question: “What is life?” Into the more radical (rhetorical) question: “What is there that is not life?” His world of ideas, which he does not primarily through speculation, but through Observation of the newly discovered phenomena and developed by analogy included concepts such as that of life as a process and function and that of evolution. The organic model has also been used by the humanities; B. by Wilhelm von Humboldt in his considerations on the development of languages. However, from Romanticism, which contrasted the transparency of the Enlightenment with the mysterious of the world, the idea of the self-creation of life was shifted into a fantastic, demonic parallel world; it found its way into English and above all into German literature, such as B. in the work of Novalis or ETA Hoffmann ( Der Magnetiseur , Der Sandmann ).
Alexander von Humboldt shared the ideas of vitalism in his early work. But as early as 1797 he revoked the thesis of the life force and listed the physiological processes in the organisms , which, given the state of knowledge at that time , could not be derived from laws because they were too complex. In contrast to inorganic nature, these cannot simply be divided without disintegrating; so their members had to be both an end and a means for one another. The research into the life force eludes empirical verifiability, the search for knowledge is blocked.
But at the beginning of the 19th century, life processes could be described, but not explained physically. In this way, a field of vital sciences emerged that methodologically differed from physics. The British surgeon John Hunter and the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach were among their pioneers . Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus and others first used the term biology around 1800. It was not until the development of electrochemistry , paradoxically stimulated by romantic thinking, that a systematic connection between chemistry, physics and mathematics was created and thus proved that chemical reactions can also be calculated. With the work of Humphry Davy - himself a romantic - and Michael Faraday , vitalism became increasingly dispensable for science.
"Humboldtian Science"
Many complex phenomena that could not be explained by the individual sciences, however, can still only be summarized by the description. Seafarers and explorers had already prepared careful descriptions of the landscape in the past, but the concept of landscape became virulent in the German-speaking world since the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a special term for structuring and penetrating phenomena of the diverse natural, but also cultural forces. Landscape thus became the subject of both scientific and aesthetic consideration; it was given an aesthetic value as a "vivid, holistic ensemble of physical-material objects, all of which were charged with social, historical and cultural meaning" and which could evoke moral feelings. Only those who admire nature can understand it, says Humphry Davy.
A complex understanding of the mechanical, volcanic, hydraulic, chemical and biological forces that shape nature, which are in a steady state, shaped the extensive work of Alexander von Humboldt, which ended in the book Kosmos: Draft of a physical description of the world . Here he attempted a synthetic-holistic explanation - not just description and naming - of the structures of the organic and inorganic world and the cosmos, which is accessible to a wider audience. Both in the inorganic and in the organic world the same basic materials were present and the same forces acted. This approach could not be squeezed into a disciplinary corset: The researcher does not work in the laboratory, but is a "science traveler"; for this he needs observation, creativity and works with high precision. Humboldt takes a mediating position between the Enlightenment and Romanticism: on the one hand, he arranges and measures natural phenomena with great precision; on the other hand, he overcomes the Linnaeus taxonomies and orientates himself on the holistic perception program of romanticism. He describes nature as a landscape. He focuses on the exotic and mainly uses narrative means of representation. He saw the purpose of his research in “discovering the interweaving and interweaving of all natural forces”, which he interpreted not as a harmonious equilibrium, but as a battle between these forces (and all living beings).
This is clear from the example of his Tableau physique des Andes . With this, Humboldt tried to summarize the entire scientific output of his journey through the Andes in a single diagram. His ascent of Chimborazo showed him that the ascent was equivalent to a journey through the vegetation and climatic zones from the equator to the pole. By recording the interactions between factors such as height above sea level, climate and vegetation, as well as between different groups of plants, he came to an understanding of the uniformity of nature beyond the species-isolating classification systems of the Enlightenment, even if no law without local exceptions applied to him. With this, Humboldt established a paradigm that the American science historian Susan Faye Cannon referred to as Humboldtian Science and that became groundbreaking for modern ecosystem research. Darwin also knew and valued Humboldt's work on Latin America, which showed that the earth's surface is constantly being transformed.
While the scholars of the late 18th century were largely content with classifications and thought, if they accepted the idea of a development of nature at all, mainly of catastrophic cuts, the geologist Charles Lyell also saw the formation of the earth's crust as the work of continuously acting forces; He gathered irrefutable arguments against the catastrophe ( cataclysms ) theory still prevalent in the 18th century and with his "law of continuity" can be seen as a pioneer of evolutionary thought. In a sense, it was justified by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, who concluded from a comparison of recent and fossil forms that species are constantly changing because they have to adapt to a changing environment. For Lamarck, today's species went back to simpler ancestors. For Lamarck, the essential element of the evolutionary process was the inheritance of acquired traits. The zoologist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire also presented weighty objections to Georges Cuvier's catastrophe theory in the Paris academy dispute from 1830–32 . For him there were no leaps in the realm of zoology; he postulated a uniform blueprint for all animals and a continuous development from fossil to modern species, which, however, has come to an end in the present.
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However, a more pessimistic view of nature had been gaining ground since the first third of the 19th century. The concept of nature was opposed to that of an autonomous culture (from Latin: cultura - agriculture, since Cicero always only supplemented by genitive attribution , like cultura animi - cattle breeding). The separation of this human-made world of symbols from the found world, which it not only "cultivates", i.e. improves and complements, but completely reshapes, reflects the process of the transformation of the world through the beginning industrialization. In this way, the “landscape” was also de-romanticized and reduced to a disciplinary field of observation in which one could only read the influence of the action of the often violent elementary forces, while the traces of human action - initially especially the construction of cities and railways - became more and more visible .
In 1840 the romantic idea of a “procreative” natural theory disappeared. The disciplinary boundaries solidified and the holistic view of nature was supplanted by Auguste Comte's positivism in the course of the boom in laboratory science . Admittedly, countercurrents against the tendencies towards appropriating nature in the course of its industrial use were loud again and again - right up to the ecological movement of the 20th century.
Natural theories in the age of the industrial exploitation of nature
From around 1840 to around 1890, the development of the natural sciences was characterized by a stronger disciplinary separation, the suppression of aesthetic aspects through the benefit perspective and the positivist movement. The philosophical idea of the "whole" of nature, as it was characteristic of Romanticism, was replaced by the positivistic concept of a single possible path of gradual and cumulative approximation to a complete system of knowledge about nature, as was the spontaneously realistic concept of matter.
It is true that Kant already considered metaphysical explanations of nature to be inadmissible transgressions of the world of experience; but positivism, for which the world of appearances is the only real thing, radicalizes the struggle against metaphysics and transcendental philosophy , based on the fact that nothing can actually be said about " things in themselves ". So was z. For example, the substantive concept of matter has been criticized as “metaphysical” and a purely operational definition for the mass phenomenon has been proposed, for example through weighing processes, through the relationship between force and acceleration, or through acceleration behavior in the event of a collision or mutual attraction of bodies.
According to Auguste Comte, the unity of the sciences cannot be found in reality; it lies in the methods. The process of professionalization of the sciences and, in particular, the theory of evolution finally made the coexistence of theology and science impossible, which had existed until the Enlightenment after the ecclesiastical pressure on the sciences had been weakened. One now had to take a clear stance, through mutual demarcation. Theology finally had to accept that it could no longer refer to statements in the Bible on cosmogony and anthropogony .
Economic Theories
Since the 18th century, natural theories have also been formulated explicitly and implicitly by classical economics . The physiocrats assumed that only nature or the earth produces a social product (theory of natural values ). However, they recognized that this can be increased through systematic management. Her theory of nature to be carefully cultivated was directed against the feudal skimming economy; Adam Smith assumed, within the framework of a comprehensive, but theologically founded presumption of order, that there must be a fundamental harmony between population growth and the food base. For Malthus, on the other hand, nature posed an insurmountable obstacle to social progress in the form of an objective resource barrier. Marx and Engels were primarily interested in the question of the processes by which a person detaches himself from his natural environment. This happens not through consciousness, but through work, in which people begin to produce their food. The fact that a theory of nature was not developed by Marx is probably due to the fact that he considered nature's ability to reproduce to be unlimited. In the Marxist theory tradition, however, the Marxian labor value theory was further developed as a link between natural and cultural theory.
Also Léon Walras regarded nature as basically inexhaustible resource that can not be completely destroyed. He coined the term natural capital (capital naturel) , distinguishing between the stock of natural capital, which annually produces new products, and annual consumption. It wasn't until about 100 years later that Ernst Friedrich Schumacher ( Small is beautiful , 1973) picked up this pioneering term again.
In the 20th century, fundamental elements and terms from natural theories were then exported to the social and economic sciences in the opposite direction, albeit often only by analogy , metaphor or projection - up to the concept of growth and evolutionary economics .
The autonomy of laboratory science and the idea of the whole of nature
Everyday perception often proved to be an important corrective to theory, but more and more often it led astray; it gradually lost its importance in relation to experiment and induction . This became the guiding principle of scientific knowledge, albeit a purely methodological one. Initially, it was particularly successful in medicine and physiology, because no extensive experiments were necessary or feasible here and groundbreaking research results (such as those by Ignaz Semmelweis on infection routes in hospitals) could be obtained solely through systematic observation of obvious connections.
The experimental way of working of many physicists, however, was shaped by the idea of the effect of immaterial forces, which was influenced by Romanticism. This idea ensured a gain in knowledge, although the laboratory sciences were mostly quite naive with the speculative, naturally romantic terminology. In the course of time, the focus of attempts to integrate individual scientific findings into an understanding of nature as a whole tended more and more to the empirical side. This was also the case with Robert Mayer's discovery of the mechanical heat equivalent . Mayer was guided by an analogy between the “force” (vis) of falling bodies due to gravity and the generation of heat when gases are compressed. With the discovery of the possibility of transferring quantitatively determinable “forces” from one state to another, he became a pioneer of thermodynamics . Joule came to the same conclusions solely through experimentation with electric motors. Finally, Helmholtz tried to derive the law of conservation of energy by drawing conclusions from Newtonian mechanics. The three researchers already shared the opportunity to study the practical industrial use of steam power.
For a while it seemed that a unified theory of all natural phenomena - including biological ones - could be justified on the basis of heat and mechanical energy and atomic theoretical assumptions could be dispensed with. Other scientists considered the electrical interaction of particles to be the explanation for most forces such as friction , viscosity or elasticity . Maxwell's kinetic theory of heat gave the proponents of atomism renewed impetus and led to intensified disputes between different paradigms, with their potential use appearing increasingly important and speculative, empirically unverifiable theories being rejected. Initially, even Maxwell hesitated to get involved in speculative atomic theory, which he finally accepted because the idea that gases consist of elastic spheres could be reconciled with many phenomena in the macro-world.
Physiology has played an important role in the progress of knowledge since the 1830s and 1840s . This not only helped overcome mechanistic explanations; it also promoted the insight that the structure of perception and knowledge was partly conditioned by the physical-anatomical structure of the body. These findings included Helmholtz's measurements of nerve conduction velocity , Gustav Fechner's discovery of the functional relationships between stimulus and sensation and, above all, Johannes Müller's theory of the specialization of the human nervous apparatus and the arbitrariness between the type of stimulus and the type of sensation. He was able to show that light sensations can be caused by impact, drugs, electricity and other stimuli. This made the distinction between external and internal perception problematic; the human nervous system was not a black box analogous to a camera obscura , which registered the stimuli passively, but an active mechanism that could structure and falsify perception. These distortions, or rather: active conversions of sensory stimuli, had to be taken into account by research in the future. It is possible that the statements of Karl Marx about the specialization of human abilities in his writings from 1844 were inspired by reading Müller. In particular, physiology, which dealt intensively with the regulatory processes inside cells and organisms, provided important impulses for overcoming materialistic-mechanistic theories.
A highly specialized experimental psychologist like Wilhelm Wundt also called for a “general science” around 1860 with the aim of “combining the knowledge imparted by the individual sciences into a consistent system”. This role was intended for a metaphysics that should summarize the results of the positivistic individual sciences. According to Wundt, the unity did not lie in the diverse nature itself, but was only established through the active and creative consciousness of man, through his will and his purposes - a reference to Kant.
The physiologist Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond also changed from a supporter to a critic of the claim to power of the mechanical worldview. His 1872 speech “Beyond the Limits of Knowledge of Nature” caused a sensation and became a kind of scientific manifesto. In view of the seemingly incoherent coexistence of nature, time required great syntheses. Experimental methods were no longer required, but the power of intellectual understanding. However, the scope of generalizing approaches such as the theories of self-regulation or the equilibrium of open dynamic systems based on the work of Claude Bernards initially remained limited until they were taken up again in the 20th century by cybernetics and systems theory.
The anti-fundamentalist turn: the beginning of conventionalism
Nikolai Dellingshausen , with his considerations on the relationship between movement and heat as "elements of natural theory", opposed the "attempts at speculative physics" with the inductive method, which replaces the deduction of natural phenomena from philosophical assumptions by the generalization of observed phenomena to general laws should. However, he himself remained stuck to the speculative ether theory , in that he considered the chemical elements as vibrational atoms, i.e. H. explained as standing waves in the vibrations of a world ether. On the other hand, Lorentz 's attempt to explain the propagation of light analogously to the behavior of water and sound waves in a medium turned out to be the end point of the ether theories. His separation between moving matter and a completely immobile, no longer mechanical, but electromagnetic ether took up the concept of absolute space from Newton, even if he was no longer convinced of the real existence of the ether, but only for one useful assumption held. Along with Henri Poincaré , Lorentz was one of the first representatives of conventionalism , according to which observational facts were brought into a rational order by arbitrary constructions, theories or paradigms, i.e. H. Can be "explained", whereby different theories can be equivalent. The conventionalists demanded that one had to part with the fruitless revision of old ideas if one wanted to gain new knowledge in an experimental way. At the same time, the question of the “true” theory was obsolete for them; When choosing a theory, it is always a question of its usefulness, simplicity or even aesthetics. Pierre Duhem radicalized this position in his instrumentalist interpretation of theories, which for him were mere tools - analogous to laboratory apparatus. Conventionalism later experienced a further radicalization through the operationalism of Percy Williams Bridgman , who reduced scientific terms to measurement rules, and the operationalism of Hugo Dingler .
The evolutionary thought
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What the physiologists like Mayer, Du Bois-Reymond and other followers of the idea of a holistic, self-creating and regenerating nature were denied, Darwin succeeded . His work was widely received faster than the first law of thermodynamics. It was based on a synthesis between a mainly theory-based, deductive approach and an inductive research process based on morphological comparisons of birds (the famous Darwin's finches ), animal skeletons, etc., and brought about a decisive change in our understanding of nature. Darwin's concept of so-called "natural" selection was based primarily on Malthus' concept of population and the economic competition model; he had gained insight into the variation through empirical observation on his voyage with the Beagle ; and the functionalist- teleological view of the individual elements of the body, shaped by the idea of adaptation and higher development, followed on from Lamarck's theory . In addition, theological ideas of an unorthodox deism flowed into Darwin's work when he speculated on the relationship between designed design and the chance of details. His views on the pace of evolution were certainly also shaped by the knowledge of the long periods of geological transformation and by the "Victorian views of the appropriate speed of innovation", which prevented him from having even the idea of an experimental test of his theories Help formulate rapidly reproducing organism.
However, the core ideas of Darwin's theory of evolution proved to be extremely fruitful and soon spread beyond the disciplinary boundaries of biology and natural sciences. With Darwin at the latest, the assumption of an inherently purpose-free (but usable!) Nature prevailed, as did the elimination of the concept of necessity through a regularist perspective that replaced neocessitarian laws and mechanical principles. But the purposeful approach lived on as an important heuristic tool, especially in the life sciences.
By Ernst Haeckel they were in his Anthropogenie on human ontogeny transfer and economic-efficiency-related themes and concepts combined ( natural household , competition for resources). However, the numerous popularizations of the theory by Haeckel and social Darwinism led to catastrophic deterministic and evaluative misinterpretations (“struggle for existence”). Their transfer to whole societies, social norms, cultural and religious phenomena gave their development the appearance of inevitability and natural law in the sense of an evolution to ever higher forms. This led to the devaluation of the “primitive” “ indigenous peoples ” and “ natural religions ”. This also allowed the “culture war” against indigenous peoples to be explicitly legitimized in a cultural and national Darwinian way, up to and including genocide .
The “old Darwinian” theory has changed its shape several times up to the present day. It became the paradigm of various disciplines from microbiology to cosmology, entered into the most varied of syntheses, for example with sociology in the form of sociobiology , and in combination with systems theory developed into a super theory .
Dematerialization of nature and the end of determinism
In the last third of the 19th century, natural philosophy was increasingly stigmatized as speculative, as it had apparently become obsolete through the progress of knowledge in the individual sciences. The call of the positivist scientists, who were at the height of their influence around 1880, for a natural science free of metaphysics became louder. But Nietzsche also turned against the conceptual “mummies” and “Egyptianism” of philosophy and their ignorance of the growth and decay of theories, concepts and of the world that can be experienced with the senses.
- Monism and vitalism
While the world of the living and the world of the material have formed two opposing categories of Western ontology since the modern era, the mechanistic-deterministic interpretation of the theory of evolution changed from the 1890s onwards under the influence of an anthropomorphising view of nature and a “tendency to liven up” matter. Erich Haeckel interpreted the crystal growth analogously to living nature and gave the crystals a soul and behavior that correspond to those of lower living beings, such as mating and eating. The biologist Theodor Jaensch even granted plants a “ protoplasmic soul ”.
This tendency towards monism and the "impressionistic" poetization of nature, to which the research on the mysterious, immaterial nature of light certainly contributed, was taken to extremes by Wilhelm Bölsche , who described Haeckel's thoughts in his work "Vom Bazillus zum Affenmenschen" ( 1899) popularized. Everything that appeared abstract in Darwinism has been translated into a poetic sequence of images. In “The Natural Science Foundations of Poetry” (1887), Bölsche went so far as to postulate an analogy between experimental science and poetry: the poet, too, mixes human passions and reactions in his works in a more or less experimental way and observes success. In biology, Hans Driesch opposed the atomism of cellular theory, which could not adequately explain the morphogenesis of organisms, with his neovitalism , which placed the entelechy of the developing organism at the center. From his discovery that whole organisms can arise from half eggs, Driesch derived teleological creative powers and postulated an "elementary entelechy" inherent in the germinal regions. Oscar Hertwig positioned himself between vitalism and physicalism , who opposed deterministic heredity theories.
- "Impressionism" and relativism in the natural sciences
When the physicist and sensory physiologist Ernst Mach was appointed to a chair in "History and Theory of Inductive Sciences" at the University of Vienna in 1895, the year the X-rays were discovered , large parts of the scientific public still believed in the possibility of standardizing theory formation under the Leadership of physics; but doubts about this plan increased. A criticism of the materialism of the natural sciences had long since started. It came mainly from a philosophical -Neo-Kantian direction and was based on the sensory-physiological studies of Helmholtz and other physiologists. The Neo-Kantian Friedrich Albert Lange tried to show that materialism was only a research principle, a pure concept of the understanding that did not reflect the essence of things. For Helmholtz, as for Kant, sensory perceptions were sensations that depend on both the exciting object and the perceptual apparatus; they are not an image of reality, but only signs. The causal law is also a hypothesis, the proof of which is not possible. Ernst Mach, a co-founder of empirical criticism and a critic of Newtonian mechanics, who avoided the use of scientific formulas, wrote in his Analysis of Sensations (1886) that “unbiased reflection” teaches that “every practical and intellectual need is satisfied” if one mentally reproduce the sensual phenomena. Laws of nature, forces and atoms are only aids in such a representation, all natural phenomena are only sequences of sensory impressions. Mathematical functions should take the place of the concept of causality. In a certain way, Mach, who criticized the concept of absolute space and assumed that Newton's theorem of inertia had only limited spatiotemporal importance, can be regarded as the pioneer of the theory of relativity.
The philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel described the insight that there are no absolute qualities and their carrier substances as a fundamental knowledge of all modern sciences of his time. Organic, psychological, social formations are never stable, but are in restless development; however, all movements (like money) dissolved into the abstract and “lack of attributes”. Quantities therefore take the place of qualities. At this point, the natural sciences and humanities, sensory physiology and impressionistic art met.
- The methodological and epistemological turn
In this situation, Mach and Moritz Schlick demanded to concentrate on the methodological and conceptual requirements of nature research, instead of making statements about nature itself or making a theoretical concept of it. In doing so, they aimed at eliminating the concept of matter. The unity of the sciences is not to be sought in the substance but in the method. This idea had already been prepared by Auguste Comte; it was confirmed by the knowledge of electrodynamics that an electromagnetic field not only cannot be explained by microscopic subsystems, but also exists in a vacuum without matter or carrier systems such as ether . It had also finally become clear that matter and space are not ontologically different entities; rather, the electromagnetic field became a new, non-material entity.
Many natural scientists turned away from positivistic materialism. The strict belief in causality has been replaced by theories that take the unpredictable into account. Even the founder of physical chemistry, Wilhelm Ostwald , pleaded in his lecture The Overcoming of Scientific Materialism (1895) to overcome the "unspiritual" atomism of mechanics and to trace all real phenomena back to different forms and quanta of energy. Although as a chemist he had to use the atomic term and was himself a member of the Atomic Weight Commission , he stated that the evidence that all the non-mechanical processes, such as those of heat, radiation, electricity, magnetism, and chemistry, are actually mechanical, ... was not provided in a single case .
The methodological-epistemological and logical-linguistic-philosophical work of the philosophers and logicians of the Vienna Circle represented a further attempt to establish scientific knowledge on a non-fundamentalist basis. They made it clear that the linguistic form is not only an aspect of the scientific presentation of research results, but a constitutive element of the object of science, both the investigation of external nature and all human products. The physicalist conception of language of Rudolf Carnap , which intersubjectively accessible physical objects are the primary referents of symbolic concept formation, was the science limits transcending turn Linguistic initiated the era of the great designs of a unified science , the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and formal sciences include should, finally ended. This attempt, to which Nietzsche's accusation of ahistoricity can also be related, drew its radical modernity from the intellectual "cleanup work" in science, which served to eliminate traditional uses of terms and other alleged traditional baggage. In this it corresponded to a zeitgeist characterized by New Objectivity , the Bauhaus and the youth movement .
- The unpredictable in nature
Instead, the 20th century saw a pioneering theoretical innovation within the natural sciences: After the late 19th century had decided to say goodbye to Newton's corpuscle theory and to recognize the wave character of light, Max Planck discovered that the transfer of energy between radiation and matter can only take place in the form of quanta. Albert Einstein proved that the explanation of photoelectric effects also requires light quanta ( photons ). A short time later he showed that the statistical fluctuations of thermal radiation presuppose a wave-particle dualism . Nevertheless, like other scientists, he maintained his resistance to a stochastic view of natural phenomena. Finally, Louis de Broglie shows in 1924 that not only photons, but also particles with mass have a wave character or that the wave accompanying them is present in a larger spatial area.
The stochastically based theories, such as Quantum statistics , for example , appeared much less elegant than Einstein's theory of relativity , for which the inner perfection of the theory reflected its proximity to the real world. Theoretical aesthetic considerations such as economy, reduction of the number of axioms and symmetry , as they were asserted above all by Henri Poincaré , did not lose their importance in the following period despite the statistical interpretation of quantum phenomena. In contrast, determinism had finally become obsolete, just as the classic idea of causality was shaken by the discovery that processes in which we distinguish cause and effect are irreversible and that time has a “direction”.
The rationality crisis of physics and the search for a physically based general theory of nature
While the shaking of the concept of time by the theory of relativity and quantum physics in the 1920s triggered a fundamental crisis in physics, u. a. Thomas S. Kuhn's theory of the paradigm shift in the natural sciences, i.e. the development and decay of theories, led to a more far- reaching crisis of rationality in the natural sciences in the 1960s . It generally shook the belief that scientific truth is the result of reasonable discourse, although it barely affected scientific practice itself. Although only one year before the publication of Kuhn's book Ernest Nagel , the representative of radical physical reductionism, had still spoken of a stable structure and continuous development of theories and knowledge, the vision of a cumulative human insight into the laws of nature and their holistic view appeared to have failed due to the constant change in research paradigms that can be observed. Kuhn does not deny that Newton's theory can explain more phenomena than Aristotelian, and Einstein's theory more than Newton's, but he does show the assumption of a linear-approximate approximation to the truth, as also postulated by Karl Popper , back: With regard to certain aspects of his theory, Einstein is closer to Aristotle than Newton.
With Kuhn's work, a variant of conventionalism prevailed that distinguishes between a core theory and a system of statements on its periphery that back it up. It was already recognized in the early 20th century that there is a “solidity scale” of theories. So put Hermann Weyl found that theories "different degrees of strength" possessed; some are "adhered to with great tenacity as principles"; they are often only saved by "excuses" or complicated additional assumptions. They are most likely to be shaken by "negative experiences", which he used to describe the falsification principle later developed by Karl Popper . The choice and structure of the core theory are ultimately a matter of agreement . A theory is rarely falsified as a whole : in the event of difficulties in explaining reality or internal theoretical contradictions, only the periphery is adjusted and the core is kept stable as long as possible. With this approach, the history of the defense of the Ptolemaic system against the heliocentric view of the world in the Middle Ages until its collapse in the early modern period is described quite precisely . This is based on the idea that incorrect assumptions can also lead to conclusions that are appropriate to reality and have great prognostic potential. Paul Feyerabend even postulates that scientific breakthroughs are mainly achieved by violating the methodological rules. However, these strands of theory lead away from a theory of nature and back to epistemology or towards a sociology of science .
The unexplained relationship between Einstein's theory of relativity and Max Planck's quantum theory repeatedly gave rise to attempts in the 20th century to formulate natural theories that should direct physical research towards a unity of nature, as Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had in his quantum theory of primeval Alternatives called for. But the search for a universal theory ultimately remained a specialty of physicists. Although the combined quantum field theory , the theory of special relativity successfully with the quantum mechanics and thus united the theories of fields and particles. Paul Dirac's hope that a universal theory could emerge on the basis of his Dirac equation , however, proved unfounded in the 1930s. While the formalism of wave mechanics developed by Erwin Schrödinger was gratefully received, its realistic physical interpretations encountered resistance. The unsuccessful attempts he initiated to formulate a unified field theory that summarizes all matter and force fields of the universe continue to this day.
Werner Heisenberg worked unsuccessfully in the 1950s on the establishment of a world formula , a theory of everything , which should summarize the four basic forces - gravitation, electromagnetism and the weak and strong interaction in the atomic nucleus. Only the quantum field theoretical formulation of symmetries since the 1960s brought some order to the particle world . John Ellis and other scientists from CERN coined the term Grand Unified Theory (GUT) in 1978 , a unification of these forces, for which there is now an ever-increasing number of theories.
Following Kant, Weizsäcker proposed a so-called abstract quantum theory as a solution , which was essentially based on the concepts of time and the logical original alternative (i.e. the binary decision), but could not be fully formulated due to its abstract nature. Binary logic and the phenomenon of quantum entanglement with opposite-reciprocal polarities or energies also form the basis for modern attempts to understand the problem of causality. Today one is mostly satisfied with weakened variants or with an "anti-realistic" interpretation of the causal principle ; d. That is, it is not understood as an ontological or even deterministic statement, but as a useful research-guiding methodological norm.
The string theory , whose representatives since the 1980s also claim to be an “all-encompassing theory of nature”, is hardly clearer . Other candidates for a unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity are the theory of loop quantum gravity and the M-theory , which also imply a quantization of spacetime . In this case, the paths that the photons take would have to run differently at great distances. This could possibly be proven with telescopes that measure Cherenkov radiation .
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The questions about the nature and validity of stochastic regularities in cosmology, biological evolution or the quantum world as well as about the origin of the natural constants remained unanswered. Since the 1990s, John Moffat , João Magueijo and Andreas Albrecht have advocated the thesis that the speed of light was a dynamic variable and was much higher in the early days of the universe than it is today. This raises the question of whether a meta-law exists that specifies the temporal development of the laws of nature and thus also of the natural constants.
Knowledge of nature and artifact production
Even more than mathematics and astrophysics, experimental elementary particle physics is ascribed a key role in the development of a comprehensive model to explain all interactions in nature. Since the first particle traces were detected with the help of the cloud chamber in 1912 , an unprecedented hunt for elementary particles began, which led to the development of an increasingly complex technical infrastructure ( technoscience ) e.g. B. in the form of particle accelerators . The first artificial element, the technetium, was produced as early as 1937, although it also occurs in nature. By 2016, another 25 artificial elements (the transuranic elements ) had been produced, which are so unstable that they do not occur in nature, even if they may have existed when the solar system was formed. With the Large Hadron Collider, with its 27-kilometer-long ring tunnel made of superconducting magnets, the development reached its highest level to date. A paradox arose at the end of the 20th century: On the one hand, the conditions that must be met for a phenomenon to be considered observable were tightened ever more; on the other hand, the area of the potentially observable has been constantly expanded through ever new theories and technologies.
The artefact character of the extremely short-lived findings obtained with these techniques became more and more apparent, and the difficulties of their interpretation increased. The confusingly numerous states of matter produced by particle accelerators are still reifyingly referred to as elementary particles in the language of Descartean substance metaphysics . However, this obscures the fact that the various meanings of all that are now called “particles” are only loosely related. It is of course more prestigious to have discovered a “particle” than to produce a short-lived excited state of matter.
Even if the standard model of elementary particle physics was confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson with the help of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and thus the union of electromagnetic and weak interactions has come closer, there has not been any great progress in knowledge regarding numerous other research questions since the 1970s ( Essence of gravity, dark matter , dark energy ). Not everything that could be formulated mathematically can already be empirically verified today. Overarching, often speculative theories also remain so abstract that they can no longer be interpreted as a system of experience-based statements about an external nature that was not made by humans. The often required, but not even in the standard model of elementary particle physics to be realized "naturalness" (naturalness) of the ratio of physical constants to each other so far did not produce. Naturalness is evidently more of an aesthetic than a physical criterion.
On the other hand, there are more and more critics of the realistic interpretation of laws who instead represent an entity realism like Ian Hacking. For him, the “particles” no longer represent hypotheses as soon as they can be used to achieve targeted effects or as a tool. More important than checking their ontological status is their successful handling in experiments. The separation of the observer from the observed nature, which has been called into question since Heisenberg's discovery of the uncertainty principle and which undergoes a change through the observation process, thus takes on a whole new dimension.
However, in view of the decreasing marginal utility of expensive experimental set-ups, it is argued that the hypotheses to be tested should be selected more carefully and not be guided by highly speculative theories. Their critics warn against the hope that simply by investing more in experimental research, one can make progress “at some point” in theory formation.
Regardless of the efforts of the theoretical and experimental physicists to integrate their findings, sometimes in a critical turn against the costly production of artefacts or against a theory of everything perceived as reductionist , in other scientific disciplines there have been repeated attempts at systematization and theorization that the traditional scientific systematics and even the Questioned the demarcation of the natural and the social sciences: for example, with cybernetics , the bottom-up theories of self-organization and emergence of living and complex systems influenced by evolutionary theory but anti-Darwinian ( Robert B. Laughlin , Ludwig von Bertalanffy , Gilbert Simondon , Francisco Varela , Per Bak ), chaos theory , ecosystem theory or the theory of the universe as a cellular automaton with the ability to self-replicate , with which the simulation of the big bang and the complex interacting patterns resulting from it m is possible. Systems theory questioned the dualism of observer and observed object, of matter and spirit, and the atomistic denomination of the world. Like Schelling, Francisco Varela emphasizes the creative power of nature. So far, however, it has been a highly abstract language of description. A holistic concept of nature could not be regained with this. Rather, metaphors from computer science to describe and explain natural phenomena gained ground towards the end of the 20th century. The notion that the universe can be understood in analogy to the functioning of a digital computer led to the development of various approaches to digital physics .
The artifacts of synthetic biology are not only natural phenomena without a purpose, but always artifacts as well, i.e. the results of human intention or “creations of the mind”. Today these determine the path of further research. Peter Janich continued the "protophysical" program of methodical constructivism in this direction in order to avoid the pitfalls of naturalism without ending in relativism: for him and for his student Michael Weingarten , the general validity of knowledge of nature is based on the repeatability of practical success with experimental setups. Theories are therefore only "condensed" experiences based on experimental set-ups and the observance of experimentation rules.
Virtualization of Reality or Return of Metaphysics
The violation of Bell's inequality demonstrated in the experiment led since the 1960s to the acceptance of the assumption that the wave function only determines the probability of the measured values, but not which measured value occurs in each individual case. This refuted Einstein's assumption of hidden variables that a deterministic solution could have saved. A measurement does not read, but first establishes what was not previously determined. As a result, experimental physics found great interest among philosophers again. The physicist and philosopher Abner Shimony speaks in this context of experimental metaphysics : There is no such thing as an objective local reality. But unpredictability does not have to imply indeterminism . The difficulties of the “orthodox” Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which regards the measuring devices as classical devices that cannot be described in terms of quantum mechanics, are an essential motive for the development of alternative interpretations that focus in particular on the measurement problem.
The relationship between “world” and “information” was also discussed. Has one assumed the primacy of the external, visible world since the early Enlightenment. For example, when information was generated through laboratory experiments, the virtualism of John A. Wheeler turns this relationship on its head: The information is not based on physical principles, but the visible external environment emerges from the uncertainty of the quantum world (It from bit) ; the problem lies in the description of the boundary and the transition between the two areas. The mass-carrying elementary particles are linked by information-carrying "messenger particles" - gluons and photons - or by fields that penetrate everything and their tensile effects . This information must be recognized and used “intelligently”, which is what creates meaningful forms and structures.
Add to this the statement by Weizsäcker and other quantum physicists that everything that happens through experiments on the subatomic level only happens through the influence of subjective consciousness and thus what is observed from the selection of the question to the interpretation of the artifacts of the goals and language of the observer, it becomes clear that quantum physics is linked to traditional metaphysical questions. For Heisenberg, elementary particle physics was most likely to be compared with Plato's philosophy: Modern “particles” were to him only as representations of symmetry groups, which in this respect resemble the bodies of Platonic theory. For him, the inclusion of consciousness in physical models, as implied by the uncertainty relation, was no longer a problem. This questioned the separation of matter and mental processes that had been established in ancient atomism and had been increasingly solidified since the 17th century, as Alfred North Whitehead did in 1925: What physicists believe to be persistent matter is actually a sequence of events. The concept of matter cannot be explained with the help of the natural sciences any more than the evolutionary property of matter to produce a consciousness can be explained by the known rules of evolution. The relationship between matter and consciousness remains a tough problem for any physical description of reality, unless one accepts Leibniz's solution, according to which physical particles can be imagined as mental beings with physical forces. According to this, everything material would always be conscious, it had a “proto-consciousness”.
Another reaction to the impasse of constructivism are the neovitalist attempts to tie in with Schelling's theory of nature, which avoid the physicalism of particle theories and again understand nature as an indeterminate generative potential of forces that cannot be explained by human models. So goes Iain Hamilton Grant believes that the emphasis on the role of human consciousness or reason for understanding the nature is completely unjustifiable. Kant's question as to what purpose the (organic) deviations from the mechanistic processes serve, is anthropocentric. This school of thought tries to save the application of the concept of reality to nature, but leads to a new metaphysics of forces.
Natural theories in social sciences and ecology
Social metaphors in natural sciences and natural metaphors in social sciences
Not only have nature metaphors such as B. the concept of the organism and growth flowed into social theory; Conversely, social metaphors such as For example, the concept of (social) order was projected into nature, or society and nature were conceptualized on the basis of man-made artifacts, as in the baroque machine or clock model. This mutual transfer of metaphors was not fundamentally questioned until the 19th century: For Aristotle, good metaphors were a sign of talent; because "to form good metaphors means that one can recognize similarities".
While Wilhelm von Humboldt stated that “any separation of faculties of genuinely scientific education is fatal,” the social and natural sciences and their terminology have drifted further and further apart since the end of the 19th century. Where common metaphors no longer helped, “supertheories” sometimes seemed to offer an opportunity for integration. Around 1900, the notorious opposition between culture and nature or sociality and nature seemed to be temporarily suspended in the life discourse.
But today the terms are converging again, e.g. B. in sociobiology . In economics, the Chicago School applied Darwinism to the market and competition. Today metaphors and topoi from the theory of evolution can also be found in philosophical discourse. Christian Illies speaks of the scarce resources such as "food, territory and probably women".
Postmodern theory and denaturalization of nature
Genetic engineering and artificial life research, socionics and other developments are currently providing an opportunity to reflect on the ongoing process of “denaturalization” in “technoculture” as well as that of the “ naturalization of society”. However, the concept of naturalization is used by the social sciences in formulas such as “naturalization of social inequality”, social differentiation or gender, mostly in a metaphorical and ideological critique and not in the context of a natural theory; he then means: “(apparently) from birth” or “not (only) thinking in terms of nature”. The topic of the "socialization of nature" is mainly addressed through individual studies on the basics of culture and technology in the biotic. In this context, social metaphors are increasingly used in technical discourses and vice versa, which leads to the question of which technical-scientific decisions are to be made with regard to which socio-cultural models.
The feminist Donna Haraway , which examined the development of metaphors in developmental biology, challenges traditional boundaries between nature and culture in question. The landscape planner Angelika Saupe , who is inclined to deconstructivism, criticizes the thesis of the technical subjection of nature; it directs attention to the vitalization of technology as well as to the technical production of a “new” nature.
The radical subjectification of knowledge by postmodern theorists also leads to the negation of the “outside” and thus the idea of an external nature. In his works, which are located at the interface between technical and social theory, Bruno Latour sets himself apart from both the concept of nature and the concept of natural law, which is always a social construction. Latour criticizes the fact that the Cartesian dualism with its opposition of acting subjects and passive, silent objects continues to be regarded as the official science doctrine, while science and society - in stark contrast to this self-image - in their laboratories and factories permanently nature and society, social and Mixing artificial things without really being aware of this practice. Humans and tools, nature and society are intertwined to form hybrid quasi-objects, which today are both greatly increased and at the same time denied (e.g. the ozone hole ). According to Cartesian view, these hybrids are always “only regarded as part of nature domesticated by humans and thus continue to be attributed to the - albeit only imagined - objective outside of society”; their existence is being suppressed.
With this criticism, Latour implicitly ties in with Friedrich Engel's attempt to build a bridge between social history and natural theory by means of abstract modeling (what Engels called the dialectic of nature ).
The neglect of questions of natural philosophy promoted by postmodern constructivist theory formation is only partially compensated by the modern social, cultural and technical sciences. Only ecological research raises the question of the inherent values or intrinsic value of nature , which has been neglected since the physiocrats , which is obviously a consequence of the increasing depth of intervention in nature. Other authors, such as the representatives of speculative realism , complain about both the increasing anthropocentrism of the view of nature at the beginning of the 21st century and the ethicalization of nature.
Critical Theory and Ecology Movement
The search for holistic theories expresses the unease about the division of labor in the natural sciences. Since the 1950s, “the physicists” had become a symbol for “a level of naïve professionalism that must be prevented by natural scientists [...] who, as researchers, slide blindly into weapon development or worse”. The conflict between the natural and social sciences was intensified by the latter towards the alternative of “narrow-mindedness” versus “critical ability”.
Above all, the critical theory in the form of its co-founder Herbert Marcuse has been concerned with the implications of power in the natural sciences since the 1950s . Marcuse postulated that the cognitive structure of the experimental sciences is not only geared towards the progressive mastery of nature, but also towards increasing the effectiveness of man's rule over man. He called for a different science and a new, non-exploitative attitude towards nature, even an "erotic" attitude towards it. The advocates of a critical theory of evolution also tried to modernize the old Darwinian evolutionary idea within the framework of a general theory of nature. For the first time, Joachim Radkau devoted himself comprehensively to environmental history , i.e. human interventions in nature and its repercussions.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, energy crises and environmental scandals such as those in Seveso, Bhopal or Chernobyl have made it clear that natural resources were limited and that the earth's ecological balance was at risk. The modern success story of the domestication of nature, which is inextricably linked with modern science and technology, turned into a fundamental crisis in the control of nature and clouded the optimism of science and progress.
The idea of an “alternative natural science” also influenced the ecological movement and even the Marxist discussion with a certain delay. Jürgen Habermas, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with the aspect of a "moralization" of human nature and, among other things. a. the right to a natural genetic inheritance that should not be artificially interfered with.
The Gaia hypothesis and similar superorganism theories are, however, often criticized attempts to formulate a new holistic natural theoretical approach to understanding the relationship between life and the inorganic world. On the other hand, attempts to develop a theory of the constitutive role of diversity in nature appear to be more empirically founded. Since evolution is a process of differentiation that generates diversity, on the basis of which further, alternative development steps are possible in the first place, the accelerated extinction of species can be regarded as an indicator of an impending evolutionary crisis.
The concept of the Anthropocene , coined by Paul J. Crutzen in 2000, is intended to express that humanity has become one of the most important geological and atmospheric shaping factors. B. contributes to the remodeling of large areas of land, to the melting of glacier and polar ice and to the rise of the oceans. The Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani had already postulated a similar thesis of a “nuova forza tellurica” in an anthropozoic era in his three-part work Corso di Geologia , published from 1871–1873 , and Vladimir Ivanovich Wernadski had already shown around 1900 that in the course of history always more and more different elements are introduced into the biosphere in ever larger quantities . He, too, can therefore be regarded as a forerunner of the Anthropocene concept. The global appearance of large amounts of artificial radioactive isotopes from atomic bomb tests since around 1950 or the beginning of climate changes due to the industrial revolution since 1800 or the appearance of large amounts of plastic remains are often used as temporal markers for delimiting the Anthropocene from the Holocene.
So nature no longer belongs - as with Descartes and well into the 20th century - to the objectifiable “outside” of society. "Environmental problems are not environmental problems, but through and through - in genesis and consequences - social problems, human problems". A theory of the Anthropocene that resolves the dualism of man and nature is still pending; However, it is evident that it always has to take into account the issues of justice, responsibility and political feasibility.
See also
literature
General
- Natural philosophy. In: Joachim Ritter, Karlfried founder (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy . Volume 6, Basel 1984.
- Klaus Mainzer : Symmetries of Nature: a manual on the philosophy of nature and science. Berlin 1988.
- Klaus Mainzer: Matter: From primordial matter to life. Munich 1996.
- Lars Weber: The natural sciences: A biography. Berlin / Heidelberg 2014.
Aspects
- Karim Akerma: The gain of the symbolic. To derive natural theory from social being in the tradition of critical theory since Marx, Lit Verlag, Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-89473-251-2 .
- Max Jammer : The problem of space. Darmstadt 1960.
- Joachim Klowski: The historical origin of the causal principle. In: Archives for the History of Philosophy. 48, 1966, pp. 225-267.
- Martin Kober: The constitution of space-time in a unified natural theory. Saarbrücken 2011.
- Wolfgang Lefèvre: Natural theory and mode of production: Problems of a materialistic history of science. A study on the genesis of modern science. Darmstadt 1978. (On the origin of the individual sciences from the 13th to the 17th century.)
- Rolf Löther: On the unity of natural theory and cultural theory. In: Journal for Science Studies. 3, 1986, pp. 59-67.
- Rolf Peter Sieferle : Population growth and natural balance. Studies on the natural theory of classical economics. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-58070-1 .
- Ursula Winter : Leibniz and the natural theories of the French Enlightenment. The reception of the concepts of Monas and body, unity and aggregate in the nature discourse of the Encyclopédie. In: Herbert Breger, Jürgen Herbst, Sven Erdner (eds.): Unity in the multiplicity. Supplement to the 8th International Leibniz Congress. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Society, Hanover 2006, ISBN 3-9808167-1-0 , pp. 235–243.
- Wen-Ran Zheng: A Unifying Theory of Nature, Agents and Causality with Applications in Quantum Computing, Cognitive Informatics and Life Sciences. New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-60960-526-1 .
Individual evidence
- ^ André Pichot : The birth of science. Darmstadt 1995, p. 10.
- ^ Percy Williams Bridgman : The Nature of Physical Theory. John Wiley, Hoboken 1964 (first 1936).
- ↑ Regine Kather: Gottesgarten, Weltenrad und Uhrwerk: Pictures from the cosmos. In: TightRope - the digital journal. Art, Science, Philosophy , 4/1995.
- ↑ Georg Schiemann : Nature: Culture and Her Other , in: F. Jäger u. a. (Ed.): Sense - Culture - Science. An interdisciplinary inventory. Munich 2004, pp. 60-75.
- ↑ Martin Neukamm (ed.): Darwin today. Darmstadt 2014.
- ^ Paul A. Roth: Theories of Nature and the Nature of Theory. In: Min. 99 (1980), pp. 431-438, here: p. 431.
- ^ John A. Schuster: What Was the Relation of Baroque Culture to the Trajectory of Early Modern Natural Philosophy? 2nd International Workshop of the Baroque Science Project, University of Sydney 2008 sydney.edu.au
- ↑ This is taken into account by the representatives of speculative realism such as Quentin Meillassoux and Iain Hamilton Grant , who no longer differentiate between material and imaginary objects.
- ↑ Hans Günter Zekl (trans. And ed.): Aristoteles' lectures on physics. Lecture on nature. Hamburg 1987, 1st half volume, book I, 184a (p. 3).
- ^ Books.google.de Therapia Medica
- ^ Paul A. Roth: Theories of Nature and the Nature of Theories. In: Min. 99 (1980), pp. 431-438.
- ↑ Mainzer 1988, pp. 141, 268, 607.
- ↑ October 2011.
- ^ Tillmann Köppe: Literature and knowledge: Theoretical-methodical approaches. Berlin, New York 2001, p. 211.
- ↑ Horst Albert Glaser, György Mihály Vajda: The turn from the Enlightenment to Romanticism 1760-1820. 2011.
- ↑ So z. B. Anthony Paul Smith: A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought. Belgrave MacMillan 2013.
- ↑ Jutta Weber: Contested meanings: Concepts of nature in the age of technoscience. Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 19.
- ↑ Wolfram von Soden : Achievement and limits of Sumerian and Babylonian science. (1936) Reprinted in: B. Landsberger / W. von Soden: The self-conceptuality of the Babylonian world. Achievement and Limits of Sumerian and Babylonian Science. Darmstadt 1974, p. 21 ff., Here: p. 49.
- ↑ Stephan Maul: The art of divination in the ancient Orient. Munich 2013, p. 216 ff.
- ^ Carel van Schaik, Kai Michel: Tas diary of humanity. Reinbek 2016, p. 251.
- ↑ Davi P. Clark: Germs, Genes, & Civilization. Upper Saddle River, NJ 2010.
- ↑ Émile Durkheim: The elementary forms of religious life. First edition 2012. Frankfurt 2007, p. 613.
- ↑ Carel van Schaik, Kai Michel: The diary of humanity. Reinbek 2016, p. 312.
- ↑ Wilfried Kuckartz: The image of man in the mirror of art. Volume 1. Berlin 2012 (Book on Demand), p. 434.
- ↑ Aby M. Warburg: Pictures from the area of the Pueblo Indians in North America [1923]. In: M. Treml, S. Weigel, P. Ladwig (eds.): Aby Warburg: Works in one volume. Berlin 2010, pp. 524–565, here: p. 550.
- ^ Claude Lévi-Strauss: The wild thinking. Frankfurt am Main 1968.
- ^ Robert A. Segal: Myth. Stuttgart 2007, p. 156 ff.
- ^ Christof Rapp: pre-Socratics . Munich 2007.
- ^ FP Hager: Episteme. In: Hist. WB. Phil. Volume 2, Basel 1972, Sp. 587.
- ↑ For example, the round shield of is Achilles , the preparation of Homer in the Iliad (18 singing, V. 468-608) describes since Heraclitus as a reflection of the sky and from the Okeanos reflowed world as a kind of early heaven and Map interpreted.
- ^ Kurt A. Raaflaub : Intellectual Achievements. In: Kurt A. Raaflaub, Hans van Wees: A Companion to Archaic Greece. Wiley-Blackwell 2013, pp. 564-584, here: pp. 561 f.
- ^ Engelbert Theurl: State and health system. Analysis of historical case studies from the perspective of the new institutional economics. Vienna 1996, p. 179 ff.
- ^ Alfred Sohn-Rethel : The money, the face of the apriori , Berlin 1990.
- ^ Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Spiritual and physical work. On the epistemology of Western history. Rev. u. exp. New edition Weinheim 1989 (first 1970). See similarly: Rudolf Wolfgang Müller: Money and Spirit. Frankfurt / New York 1977.
- ↑ Edgar Zilsel: The social origins of modern science. Frankfurt, 1976.
- ↑ Ernst Topitsch : Knowledge and Illusion: Basic Structures of Our Worldview. Tübingen 1988, p. 125.
- ^ Kurt A. Raaflaub: Intellectual Achievements. In: Kurt A. Raaflaub, Hans van Wees: A Companion to Archaic Greece. Wiley-Blackwell 2013, p. 577.
- ↑ Rapp 2007, p. 13.
- ^ Franz Schupp: History of Philosophy. Volume 1: Antiquity. Hamburg 2013, p. 50.
- ↑ Aristotle, Physics II.8.
- ^ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel : Lectures on the history of philosophy. 1st part, 1st section, 1st chapter, E.2 in www.zeno.org
- ↑ Rapp 2007, p. 14.
- ↑ Lucretius: On the Nature of Things. I. Book, 1st proposition, (online)
- ↑ Phaedrus 270c, zit. according to Wolfgang Kullmann, Jochen Althoff, Markus Asper: Genres of scientific literature in antiquity. Tübingen 1998, p. 269.
- ↑ This does not mean that later authors completely dispense with the idea of a creator or a demiurge . So Plato in his dialogue Timaeus , 28C, 29A, but also modern theorists like Newton.
- ↑ F. Scheibe: Causality. In: Hist. Wb. Philos. 4, p. 798.
- ^ Plato: Timaeus. Cape. 20, 53c4-55c6.
- ↑ Physics Δ1 208 b 7-14.
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