in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
September
2002A. C. Keller
Zilsel, the Artisans, and the Idea of Progress in the
Renaissance
Journal of the History of
Ideas
Volume 11, Issue 2
Apr. 1950,
235-240.
The work of the late Edgar Zilsel, whose study of the sociological roots of science stressed the view that modern science owes its origin to the work and writings of artisans in the Renaissance rather than to humanists or scholars, was an important contribution to the history of the beginnings of modern culture. Unfortunately for the world of scholarship, Zilsel could not carry his work to completion, and many points of detail remain to be supplied or clarified within the framework which he built
. 1One of the characteristics of scientific thought, according to Zilsel, is the belief in progress. This complex idea involves “(1) the insight that scientific knowledge is brought about step by step through contributions of generations of explorers building upon and gradually amending the findings of their predecessors; (2) the belief that this process is never completed; (3) the conviction that contribution to this development, either for its own sake or for the public benefit, constitutes the very aim of the true scientist.”
2 But in his effort to emphasize the role of the artisans in the formation of this idea, Zilsel gave little consideration to the fact that the same idea was asserting itself in more academic pursuits. He says, for example, that “in classical, scholastic, and humanist literature no statements on the necessity of the gradual improvement of knowledge exist. Naturally only members of the most highly skilled crafts wrote treatises, and only a few of these craftsmen-authors conceived the idea of progress with any clarity.” 31. The following is a complete list of Zilsel’s writings,
as nearly as the present writer can determine: Die Geniereligion: Em
kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideat mit einer historischen
Begrundung, Wien, 1918; Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes: Em Beitrag zur
Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus, Tubingen, 1926;
“Copernicus and Mechanics,” JHI, I (1940), 113-18; “History and
Biological Evolution,” Philos. of Sci., VII (1940), 121-8; “The Origins
of W. Gilbert’s Scientific Method,” JHI, II (1941), 1-32; “Phenomenology
and Natural Science” Philos. of Sci., VIII (1941), 26-32; “Physics and
the Problem of Historico-Sociological Laws,” Philos. of Sci., VIII
(1941), 567-79; “Problems of Empiricism:
Experiment and Manual Labor,” International Encycl. of Unified
Science, II, 8 (Chicago, 1941), 53-94; “The Genesis of the Concept of
Physical Law,” Philos. Rev., LI (1942), 245-79; “The Sociological Roots
of Science,” Amer. J. of Sociol., XLVII (1942), 544-62; “The Genesis of
the Concept of Scientific Progress,” JHI, VI (1945),
325-49.
2. “Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Progress,”
JHI, VI (1945), 326.
3. Ibid., 332.
235
He cites an impressive number of such treatises, in
which the craftsmen-authors were transmitting their knowledge or discoveries to
posterity with the conscious aim of promoting the understanding of their fields
of work. In some of the treatises
one reads the statement, which was to play so important a part in the
seventeenth-century quarrel of ancients and moderns, that nature, far from being
exhausted, is still able to produce praiseworthy things now and in the future.
This dynamic view is closely
associated by Zilsel with the rising capitalist economy, the spirit of
competition, and the revolt against authority.
Modern science was born, then, in Zilsel’s view, when academic learning and the attitudes of the artisans joined forces, roughly about 1600. What stood in the way before that time was the social barrier which led scholars to look with scorn upon the mechanical arts. However, W. E. Houghton, Jr., has called attention to the importance of the mechanical arts in the learned writers as early as Rabelais and Vives, writing in the 1530’s
. 4 I should like now to point out that the general notion of progress was not as unknown to the bookish writers of the sixteenth-century as Zilsel thought, and that the notion was evident both in technological and in scholarly writings, separated though they were to a certain extent by the barrier of social prejudice. Nor should this be surprising. The revolt against authority on all fronts, visible in Ramus and Montaigne as well as in Galileo and his precursors, was (and Zilsel understood this, as few have) an expression of a changing society. It would therefore be strange that the idea of progress should have made its appearance in the pre-scientific writings alone. The technological advances, which corresponded to the needs of the age and which inspired confidence in the continuing development of technology, were paralleled by advances in scholarship and academic learning, with parallel effects. The power which the scholars, historians, and political theorists of the sixteenth century felt that they had acquired by the editing of texts and the increased accessibility of the sages of antiquity was not unlike that of the artisans in the face of the improvements in their tools and their technical knowledge. If the growth of capitalism had a more powerful and direct impact on the artisans than on the scholars and made the thought of the former the more significantly “progressive,” the bookish men nevertheless were not so isolated from the movement of history as not to share the views attributed by Zilsel to the artisans alone. The attack against tradition was carried on equally in science and philosophy, and the intellectual independence of the artisans is of a piece with that of the speculative thinkers.Specifically, the general concept of progress appears
fairly clearly, among the best-known authors, in Rabelais, Bodin, and Leroy,
from the
4. Houghton, Walter E., Jr., “The History of Trades: Its
Relation to Seventeenth-Century Thought,” JHI, II (1941),
33-60.
236
1540’s to the 1570’s
. 5 Were their statements isolated from the rest of their work and from their times, they might be regarded as exceptions, like Seneca, in antiquity. But in all three cases, the statements were supported by attitudes of intellectual independence, by vigorous departures from and criticisms of ancient authorities, and by a keen awareness of the dawning of a new age.Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel is too well known to need much comment. It is enough to quote from the last chapter of his book to see how aptly he expressed in general and philosophical terms the sentiment expressed in particular matters by the technological writers. “Your philosophers,” he says, “who complain that the ancients have left them nothing to write of or to invent, are very much mistaken. Those phenomena which you see in the sky; whatever the surface of the earth affords you, and the sea, and every river contains, it is not to be compared with what is hid within the bowels of the earth.”
6 As far as the beginnings of science are concerned, such statements are not comparable in importance with the work and writings of the artisans, which led in an unbroken chain to Gilbert and Bacon; but they merit attention in a study of the idea of the progress of knowledge. Rabelais was, in fact, one of the early writers in whom scholarship and artisanship were already joined. Not only did he advocate education in the mechanical arts, but as a doctor he did not disdain dissection, though, according to Zilsel ‘s thesis, his scholarly work on ancient medical texts might have precluded such manual work. The barrier between the intellectual and the manual was, surely, already weak in Rabelais’ case.Jean Bodin,
Some one will say that the ancients were inventors of
the arts and to them the glory ought to go. They certainly did discover many things -
especially the power of the celestial bodies, the calculated courses of many
stars - but yet not all - the wonderful trajections of fixed stars and of those
called ‘planets.’ Then they noted
carefully the obscurities of nature and explained many things accurately, and
yet
5. An excellent sketch of the idea of progress in
Renaissance thought, citing Leroy and Bodin among others, may be found in H.
Weisinger, “Ideas of History during the Renaissance,” JHI, VI (1945),
415-35. As Weisinger says, Bury’s
and Delvaile’s books (The Idea of Progress, London, 1924; L’ideé du
progrès, Paris, 1914) are both weak on the Renaissance, and much work
remains to be done.
6. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Urquart-Motteux trans.
237
they left incomplete many of these things which have been completed and handed down to posterity by men of our time. No one, looking closely into this matter, can doubt that the discoveries of our men ought to be compared with the discoveries of our elders; many ought to be placed first. Although nothing is more remarkable in the whole nature of things than the magnet, yet the ancients were not aware of its use… Nature has countless treasures of knowledge which cannot be exhausted in any age
. 7More than this, Bodin lists some of the lines along
which progress has occurred - discovery, exploration, commerce, geography,
medicine, warfare, weaving, handicrafts – “with which the life of man has been
aided in a remarkable way”; so that, making social utility an aim of learning,
Bodin shows much the same concern as the artisans cited by
Zilsel.
The third notable case is that of Loys Leroy (or Regius), whose De la vicissitude des choses en l’univers appeared in 1577. As early as 1540, exhibiting an irreverent spirit toward the writers of antiquity, Leroy held that much learning had been accumulated since the days of Aristotle. In his G. Budaei Vita (1540) he asserted that nature is not so exhausted that she cannot produce as great works now as in times gone by,
8 the very idea which Zilsel finds in a work by Peter Apian written in the same period. On the gradual building up of knowledge, Leroy spoke as follows:Arts and sciences receive their perfection, not by relying upon the sayings and opinions of men of former ages, of how great authority soever they were, but by correcting of the same, and changing in them whatsoever is found not to be good… I have collected [historical and political data] to the intent to add the same to the governments of Plato and Aristotle, as a thing most necessary for the understanding of their books, and for the knowledge of the faculty of government, which is not all so manifest in their observations, how learned and elegant soever they be, but there doth and will remain many precepts and observations behind for learned men to join thereunto, and that without losing their labour. Truth sheweth herself to all such as will seek for her, and are of capacity to receive her. She is not yet all taken up and engrossed, great things come slackly forward, and shew not themselves manifestly together at one instant, but are from time to time augmented or brought to better order and elegance. And so it may fall out in this science politics, after the help that we receive by the observations of the ancients, after so many examples wherewith we are instructed by them that have been before us, after so long experience and practice of two thousand years or thereabouts, which have passed since the time wherein our authors wrote till this present
. 9Beginning, in the Vicissitude - as the title implies - with
the idea of cycles or ups-and-downs, Leroy was carried away in the course of his
study by the gradual ascent of humanity, and his final chapter is a
veritable
7. Methodus, cli. 7. (Eng. trans. by
Beatrice Reynolds, New York, 1945.)
8. Edition of 1542, p. 4.
9. Les Politiques d’Aristote
(
238
paean to progress. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a
more complete statement of the idea of progress anywhere in the sixteenth
century. The following sentences
indicate the tenor of the whole last book:
So almost all the arts were found by use and experience,
then systematized by observation and reason, consequently reduced to better and
surer form… not by stopping at what the first men had done, said, and written:
but by later generations adding their own, so that things were discovered and
made clear as time went on - the honor usually going to the last as most
accurate and accomplished… If the ancients had proposed to write or say nothing
but what had been written or said before them, no art would have been invented
and all would have remained in their first stages without being increased… It is
therefore reasonable to apply industry and research to the truth, as they did,
and to try to augment the knowledge of those who went before… Nothing prevents
this age from producing in philosophy men as eminent as Plato and Aristotle, or
in medicine as Hippocrates and Galen, or in mathematics as Euclid, Archimedes
and Ptolemy, after the help which we get from their books, after so many
observations and inventions made since them, after such a long experience in all
things: so that, when we consider well, there was never a century more happily
placed for the advancement of letters than the present
one.
There is no substantial difference between these
statements of Rabelais, Bodin, and Leroy on the one hand, and those of the
progressive artisans quoted by Zilsel on the other - e.g., the following from
the surgeon Ambroise Paré:
The arts are not yet so perfected that one cannot make any addition: they are perfected and polished in the course of time. It is sloth deserving blame to stop with the inventions of the first discoverers, only imitating them in the manner of lazy people without adding anything and without increasing the legacy left to us… More things are left to be sought after than have been found
… 10Zilsel’s erudition undoubtedly embraced the works of
Rabelais, Bodin, and Leroy. That he
failed to give proper emphasis to their statements of progress must be
attributed partly to the fact that his studies inevitably focused more on
10. Malgaigne ed. (3 vols.,
239
a balance, and not for the purpose of criticizing an
important and original student of the Renaissance, that this note has been
written. The idea of
progress in the Renaissance, was an expression of real progress, and
scholarship had as much ground on which to base its view of cumulative advance
as had technology. Renaissance
scholars cannot seriously be thought of as unaffected by the world about them;
humanists like Rabelais, Bodin, and Leroy were not unaffected by technological
progress, which, joined with the enthusiasm for the progress of scholarship,
produced well before 1600 the general statements of the progress of knowledge
cited above.
240
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
September
2002