David Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science
Before science, and the precondition of science..
David C. Lindberg wrote
Chapter 1
Section 2
PREHISTORIC ATTITUDES TOWARD NATURE
From the beginning, the survival of the human race has depended on its ability to cope with the natural environment. Prehistoric people developed impressive technologies for obtaining the necessities of life. They learned how to make tools, start fires, obtain shelter, hunt, fish, and gather fruits and vegetables. Successful hunting and food gathering (and, after about 7000 or 8000 B.C., settled agriculture) required a substantial knowledge of animal behavior and the characteristics of plants. At a more advanced level, prehistoric people learned to distinguish between poisonous and therapeutic herbs. They developed a variety of crafts, including pottery, weaving, and metalworking. By 3500 they had invented the wheel. They were aware of the seasons and perceived the connection between the seasons and various celestial phenomena. In short, they knew a great deal about their environment.
But the word “know”, seemingly so clear and simple, is almost as tricky as the term “science”; indeed, it brings us back to the distinction between technology and theoretical science. It is one thing to know how to do things, another to know why they behave as they do. One can engage in successful and sophisticated carpentry, for example, without any theoretical knowledge of stresses in the timbers one employs. An electrician with only the most rudimentary knowledge of electrical theory can successfully wire a house. It is possible to differentiate between poisonous and therapeutic herbs without possessing any biochemical knowledge that would explain poisonous or therapeutic properties. The point is simply that practical rules of thumb can be effectively employed even in the face of total ignorance of the theoretical principles that lie behind them. You can have “know-how” without theoretical knowledge.
It should be clear, then, that in practical or technological terms, the knowledge of prehistoric humans was great and growing. But what about theoretical knowledge? What did prehistoric people “know” or believe about the origins of the world in which they lived, its nature, and the causes of its numerous and diverse phenomena? Did they have any awareness of general laws or principles that governed the particular case? Did they even ask such questions? We have very little evidence on the subject. Prehistoric culture is by definition oral culture; and oral cultures, as long as they remain exclusively oral, leave no written remains. However, an examination of the findings of anthropologists studying preliterate tribes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with careful attention to remnants of prehistoric thought carried over into the earliest written records, will allow us to formulate a few tentative generalizations.
Critical to the investigation of intellectual culture in a preliterate society is an understanding of the process of communication. In the absence of writing, the only form of verbal communication is the spoken word; and the only storehouses of knowledge are the memories of individual members of the community. The transmission of ideas and beliefs in such a culture occurs only in face-to-face encounter, through a process that has been characterized as “a long chain of interlocking conversations” between its members. The portion of these conversations considered important enough to remember and pass on to succeeding generations forms the basis of an oral tradition, which serves as the principal repository for the collective experience and the general beliefs, attitudes, and values of the community.
There is an important feature of oral tradition that demands our attention—namely, its fluidity. Oral tradition is typically in a continuous state of evolution, as it absorbs new experiences and adjusts to new conditions and needs within the community. Now, this fluidity of oral tradition would be extremely frustrating if the function of oral tradition were conceived as the communication of abstract historical or scientific data—the oral equivalent of a historical archive or a scientific report. But an oral culture, lacking the ability to write, certainly cannot create archives or reports; indeed, an oral culture lacks even the idea of writing and must therefore lack even the idea of a historical archive or a scientific report. The primary function of oral tradition is the very practical one of explaining, and thereby justifying, the present state and structure of the community, supplying the community with a continuously evolving “social charter”.
For example, an account of past events may be employed to legitimate current leadership roles, property rights, or distribution of privileges and obligations. And in order to serve this function effectively, oral tradition must be capable of adjusting itself fairly rapidly to changes in social structure.
But here we are principally interested in the content of oral traditions, especially those portions of the content that deal with the nature of the universe—the portions, that is, that might be thought of as the ingredients of a worldview or a cosmology. Such ingredients exist within every oral tradition, but often beneath the surface, seldom articulated, and almost never assembled into a coherent whole. It follows that we must be extremely reluctant to articulate the worldview of preliterate people on their behalf, for this cannot be done without our supplying the elements of coherence and system, thereby distorting the very conceptions we are attempting to portray. But we may, if we are careful, formulate certain conclusions about the ingredients or elements of worldview within preliterate oral traditions.
It is clear that preliterate people, no less than those of us who live in a modern scientific culture, need explanatory principles capable of bringing order, unity, and especially meaning to the apparently random and chaotic flow of events. But we should not expect the explanatory principles accepted by preliterate people to resemble ours: lacking any conception of “laws of nature” or deterministic causal mechanisms, their ideas of causation extend well beyond the sort of mechanical or physical action acknowledged by modern science. It is natural that in the search for meaning they should proceed within the framework of their own experience, projecting human or biological traits onto objects and events that seem to us devoid not only of humanity but also of life. Thus, the beginning of the universe is typically described in terms of birth, and cosmic events may be interpreted as the outcome of struggle between opposing forces, one good and the other evil. There is an inclination in preliterate cultures not only to personalize but also to individualize causes, to suppose that things happen as they do because they have been willed to do so. This tendency has been described by H. and H. A. Frankfort:
Our view of causality … would not satisfy primitive man because of the impersonal character of its explanations. It would not satisfy him, moreover, because of its generality. We understand phenomena, not by what makes them peculiar, but by what makes them manifestations of general laws. But a general law cannot do justice to the individual character of each event. And the individual character of the event is precisely what early man experiences most strongly. We may explain that certain physiological processes cause a man’s death. Primitive man asks: Why should this man die thus at this moment? We can only say that, given these conditions, death will always occur. He wants to find a cause as specific and individual as the event which it must explain. The event … is experienced in its complexity and individuality, and these are matched by equally individual causes. [Source: Frankfort, H., Frankfort, H. A., Wilson, John A., and Jacobsen, Thorkild, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, Penguin, 1951]
Oral traditions typically portray the universe as consisting of sky and earth, and perhaps also an underworld. An African myth describes the earth as a mat that has been unrolled but remains tilted, thereby explaining upstream and downstream—an illustration of the general tendency to describe the universe in terms of familiar objects and processes. Deity is an omnipresent reality within the world of oral traditions, though in general no clear distinction is drawn between the natural, the supernatural, and the human; the gods do not transcend the universe but are rooted in it and subject to its principles. Belief in the existence of ghosts of the dead, spirits, and a variety of invisible powers, which magical ritual allows one to control, is another universal feature of oral tradition. Reincarnation (the idea that after death the soul returns in another body, either human or animal) is widely believed in. Conceptions of space and time are not (like those of modern physics) abstract and mathematical, but are invested with meaning and value drawn from the experience of the community. For example, the cardinal directions for a community whose existence is closely connected to a river might be “upstream” and “downstream”, rather than north, south, east, and west. Some oral cultures have difficulty conceiving of more than a very shallow past: an African tribe, the Tio, for example, cannot situate anybody farther back in time than two generations.
There is a strong tendency within oral traditions to identify causes with beginnings, so that to explain something is to identify its historical origins. Within such a conceptual framework, the distinction that we make between scientific and historical understanding cannot be sharply drawn and may be nonexistent. Thus, when we look for the features of oral tradition that count for worldview or cosmology, they will almost always include an account of origins—the beginning of the world, the appearance of the first humans, the origin of animals, plants, and other important objects, and finally the formation of the community. Related to the account of origins is often a genealogy of gods, kings, or other heroic figures in the community’s past, accompanied by stories about their heroic deeds. It is important to note that in such historical accounts the past is portrayed not as a chain of causes and effects that produce gradual change, but as a series of decisive, isolated events by which the present order came into existence.
These tendencies can be illustrated with examples from both ancient and contemporary oral cultures. According to the twentieth-century Kuba of equatorial Africa,
Mboom or the original water had nine children, all called Woot, who in turn created the world. They were, apparently in order of appearance: Woot the ocean; Woot the digger, who dug riverbeds and trenches and threw up hills; Woot the flowing, who made rivers flow; Woot who created woods and savannas; Woot who created leaves; Woot who created stones; Woot the sculptor, who made people out of wooden balls; Woot the inventor of prickly things such as fish, thorns, and paddles; and Woot the sharpener, who first gave an edge to pointed things. Death came to the world when a quarrel between the last two Woots led to the demise of one of them by the use of a sharpened point.
Notice how this tale not only accounts for the origin of the human race and the major topographical features of the Kuba world, but also explains the invention of what the Kuba clearly considered a critically important tool—the sharpened object.
Similar themes abound in early Egyptian and Babylonian creation myths. According to one Egyptian account, in the beginning the sun-god, Atum, spat out Shu, the god of air, and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture.
Thereafter, Shu and Tefnut, air and moisture, gave birth to earth and sky, the earth-god Geb and the sky-goddess Nut. … Then in their turn Geb and Nut, earth and sky, mated and produced two couples, the god Osiris and his consort Isis, the god Seth and his consort Nephthys. These represent the creatures of this world, whether human, divine, or cosmic.
A Babylonian myth attributes the origin of the world to the sexual activity of Enki, god of the waters. Enki impregnated the goddess of the earth or soil, Ninhursag. This union of water and earth gave rise to vegetation, represented by the birth of the goddess of plants, Ninsar. Enki subsequently mated first with his daughter, then with his granddaughter, to produce various specific plants and plant products. Ninhursag, angered when Enki devoured eight of the new plants before she had the opportunity to name them, pronounced a curse on him. Fearing the consequences of Enki’s demise (apparently a drying up of the waters), the other gods prevailed on Ninhursag to withdraw the curse and heal Enki of the various ailments induced by the curse, which she did by giving birth to eight healing deities, each associated with a part of the body—thus accounting for the origin of the healing arts.
It will be convenient to pause for a moment on the healing arts, which can serve to illustrate some important characteristics of oral cultures. There can be no doubt that healing practices were extremely important in ancient oral cultures, where primitive conditions made disease and injury everyday realities. Minor medical problems, such as wounds and lesions, were no doubt treated by family members. More dramatic ailments—major wounds, broken bones, severe and unexpected illness—might require assistance from somebody with more advanced knowledge and skill. A certain amount of medical specialization thus came into existence: some members of the tribe or the village became known for herb-gathering ability, proficiency in the setting of bones or the treatment of wounds, or experience in assisting at childbirth.
But so described, the primitive medicine practiced in preliterate societies sounds remarkably like a rudimentary version of modern medicine. A more careful look reveals the healing arts within oral cultures to be inseparable and indistinguishable from religion and magic. The “wise woman” or the “medicine man” was valued not simply for pharmaceutical or surgical skill, but also for knowledge of the divine and demonic causes of disease and the magical and religious rituals by which it could be treated. If the problem was a splinter, a wound, a familiar rash, a digestive complaint, or a broken bone, the healer responded in the obvious way—by removing the splinter, binding the wound, applying a substance (if one were known) that would counteract the rash, issuing dietary prohibitions, and setting and splinting the broken limb. But if a family member became mysteriously and gravely ill, one might suspect sorcery or invasion of the body by an alien spirit. In such cases, more dramatic remedies would be called for—exorcism, divination, purification, songs, incantations, and other ritualistic activities.
One last feature of belief in oral cultures (both ancient and contemporary) demands our attention—namely, the simultaneous acceptance of what seem to us incompatible alternatives, without any apparent awareness that such behavior could present a problem. Examples are innumerable, but it may suffice to note that the story of the nine Woots related above is one of seven (or more) myths of origin that circulate among the Kuba, while the Egyptians had a variety of alternatives to the story of Atum, Shu, Tefnut, and their offspring; and nobody seemed to notice, or else to care, that all of them could not be true.
Add to this the seemingly “fanciful” nature of many of the beliefs described above, and the question of “primitive mentality” is inevitably raised: did the members of preliterate societies possess a mentality that was prelogical or mystical or in some other way different from our own; and, if so, exactly how is this mentality to be described and explained?
This is an extremely complex and difficult problem that has been hotly debated by anthropologists and others for the better part of the past century, and I am not likely to resolve it here. But I can at least offer a word of methodological advice: namely, that it is wasted effort, contributing absolutely nothing to the cause of understanding, to spend time wishing that preliterate people had employed a conception and criteria of knowledge that they had never encountered—a conception, in the case of prehistoric people, that was not invented until centuries later. We make no progress by assuming that preliterate people were trying, but failing, to live up to our conceptions of knowledge and truth. It requires only a moment of reflection to realize that they were operating within quite a different linguistic and conceptual world, and with different purposes; and it is in the light of these that their achievements must be judged.
The stories embodied in oral traditions are intended to convey and reinforce the values and attitudes of the community, to offer satisfying explanations of the major features of the world as experienced by the community, and to legitimate the current social structure; stories enter the oral tradition (the collective memory) because of their effectiveness in achieving those ends, and as long as they continue to do so there is no reason to question them. There are no rewards for skepticism in such a social setting and few resources to facilitate challenge. Indeed, our highly developed conceptions of truth and the criteria that a claim must satisfy in order to be judged true (internal coherence, for example, or correspondence with an external reality) do not generally exist in oral cultures and, if explained to a member of an oral culture, would be greeted with incomprehension. Rather, the operative principle among preliterates is that of sanctioned belief—the sanction in question emerging from community consensus.
Finally, if we are to understand the development of science in antiquity and the Middle Ages, we must ask how the preliterate patterns of belief that we have been examining yielded to, or were supplemented by, a new conception of knowledge and truth (represented most clearly in the principles of Aristotelian logic and the philosophical tradition it spawned).
A necessary condition, if not the full explanation, was the invention of writing, which occurred in a series of steps. First there were pictographs, in which the written sign stood for the object itself. Around 3000 B.C. a system of word signs (or logograms) appeared, in which signs were created for the important words, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics. But in hieroglyphic writing, signs could also stand for sounds or syllables—the beginnings of syllabic writing. The development of fully syllabic systems about 1500 B.C. (that is, systems in which all nonsyllabic signs were discarded) made it possible and, indeed, reasonably easy for people to write down everything they could say. And finally, fully alphabetic writing, which has a sign for each sound (both consonants and vowels), made its appearance in Greece about 800 B.C. and became widely disseminated in Greek culture in the sixth and fifth centuries.
One of the critical contributions of writing, especially alphabetic writing, was to provide a means for the recording of oral traditions, thereby freezing what had hitherto been fluid, translating fleeting audible signals into enduring visible objects. Writing thus served a storage function, replacing memory as the principal repository of knowledge. This had the revolutionary effect of opening knowledge claims to the possibility of inspection, comparison, and criticism. Presented with a written account of events, we can compare it with other (including older) written accounts of the same events, to a degree unthinkable within an exclusively oral culture. Such comparison encourages skepticism and, in antiquity, helped to create the distinction between truth, on the one hand, and myth or legend, on the other; that distinction, in turn, called for the formulation of criteria by which truthfulness could be ascertained; and out of the effort to formulate suitable criteria emerged rules of reasoning, which offered a foundation for serious philosophical activity.
But giving permanent form to the spoken word does not merely encourage inspection and criticism. It also makes possible new kinds of intellectual activity that have no counterparts (or only weak ones) in an oral culture. Jack Goody has argued convincingly that early literate cultures produced large quantities of written inventories and other kinds of lists (mostly for administrative purposes), far more elaborate than anything an oral culture could conceivably produce; and, moreover, that these lists made possible new kinds of inspection and called for new thought processes or new ways of organizing thoughts. For one thing, the items in a list are removed from the context that gives them meaning in the world of oral discourse, and in that sense they have become abstractions. And in this abstract form they can be separated, sorted, and classified according to a variety of criteria, thereby giving rise to innumerable questions not likely to be raised in an oral culture. To give a single example, the lists of precise celestial observations assembled by early Babylonians could never have been collected and transmitted in oral form; their existence in writing, which allowed them to be minutely examined and compared, made possible the discovery of intricate patterns in the motions of the celestial bodies, which we associate with the beginnings of mathematical astronomy and astrology.
Two conclusions may be drawn from this argument. First, the invention of writing was a prerequisite for the development of philosophy and science in the ancient world. Second, the degree to which philosophy and science flourished in the ancient world was, to a very significant degree, a function of the efficiency of the system of writing (alphabetic writing having a great advantage over all of the alternatives) and the breadth of its diffusion among the people. We see the earliest benefits of the use of word signs or logograms in Egypt and Mesopotamia, beginning about 3000 B.C. However, the difficulty and inefficiency of logographic writing inevitably limited its diffusion and made it the property of a small scholarly elite. In sixth- and fifth-century Greece, by contrast, the wide dissemination of alphabetic writing contributed to the spectacular development of philosophy and science.
We must not imagine that literacy was sufficient of itself to produce the “Greek miracle” of the sixth and fifth centuries; other factors no doubt contributed, including prosperity, new principles of social and political organization, contact with Eastern cultures, and the introduction of a competitive style into Greek intellectual life. But surely a fundamental element in the mix was the emergence of Greece as the world’s first widely literate culture.
The Source:
David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, University Of Chicago Press (1992) revised 2nd edition 2007
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
As a subscriber you have full access to the searchable Social Science Archives.
… high speed cutting, hammering, and filing of the best social science writing …