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134 In the middle ages, there was a well-known theological argument that man will never be able to understand nature, because nature was created by God, and man cannot fathom God’s purposes. But in the domain of technology , Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus) wrote in 1450, man is a “second god.”1 In other words, what man makes himself, he can understand completely. Cusanus’s argument shed a different light on Aristotle’s view that there was a sharp distinction between nature and technology, providing a conceptual basis for using “unnatural” technology to understand unforced nature. Yet there was a price to pay: this understanding was analogical, and the deductive framework sketched by Aristotle left no room for analogy, at least not in science. Artistotle had envisioned a hierarchical universe with causal chains extending from the Unmoved Mover at one end to the observable world at the other, while the explanatory link made by analogy is utterly independent of hierarchical structure. From the early Middle Ages onward, philosophers saw the clock as a scale model of the cosmos and as a model for animal locomotion. These analogies were hinted at by Thomas Aquinas, and Jean Buridan and Nicholas Oresme fleshed them out in greater detail a century later.2 What intrigued these thinkers most was that once a clock is set in motion, it goes´ 7 The Hypothetical Style Analogies between Nature and Technology The true and the made are interchangeable. —Giambattista Vico What, then, is truth? A movable army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in a word: a totality of human relations. —Friedrich Nietzsche The Hypothetical Style ´ 135 on moving of its own accord. God, they reasoned, could have set the celestial spheres in motion in the same manner. In 1370, during Oresme’s life, King Charles V had a clock installed in his palace in Paris. This clock was intended to serve as a standard for all the other clocks in the city. Its novel feature was that every hour of the day was equally long. Before that time, there had been fixed numbers of hours between sunrise and sunset in summer and winter; accordingly, the hours had varied in length.3 In 1348, Giovanni de’ Dondi, a physician and professor of medicine in Padua, developed an astrarium based on the Ptolemaic system, which was driven by clockwork.4 (Long before, Archimedes had built a planetarium, which was plundered by the Romans when they conquered Archimedes’s home city of Syracuse. It remained in Rome for a couple of centuries before it disappeared.5 ) An astronomical clock built in Strasbourg in 1352 inspired scientists for centuries afterward. It was a monumental clock whose attractions included moving automata, one of which (a rooster) is still on display in a local museum . Between 1571 and 1574, the clock was replaced by a new and larger one.6 This only reinforced the clockwork image of the universe. Several scientists made repeated reference to the Strasbourg mechanism: Rheticus mentioned it in his defense of Copernicus, and Kepler and Boyle discussed it as well.7 Those who saw the clock, Boyle wrote, felt reassured that God was the maker and protector of the world.8 Scientists saw the clock metaphor as an invitation to learn more about nature by recreating it. A mechanical model, it seemed, was a hypothesis about how nature works. Nevertheless, we should not assume that this line of thought foreshadowed the hypothetical-analogical method of modern science, especially when we look back on the Middle Ages. Medieval thinkers would not have seen analogies as a viable philosophical method for gaining new insights about nature. Scholastic philosophers and theologians made a sharp distinction between literal truth (the domain of science, or natural philosophy) and allegory, in which analogical thinking could take place freely and served a spiritual and theological purpose, especially in the area of salvation history. Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, which draws quite a number of analogical connections, was read in this way. Medieval literature was full of analogies and allegories that drew readers’ attention to the unity of creation and God’s plans for the world. One example is the link between the red rose and the blood of Christ, a link made even stronger by Christ’s crown of thorns and the thorns of the rose bush.9 The controlled movement of a clock (or an hourglass) was associated with the allegorical figure of Temperance.10 Undoubtedly, the aforementioned similarities between the cosmos and clockwork were also...

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