The Ideological Import of Newton

Abstract

Considering Newton and the Enlightenment, the standard topic as I understand it is the contribution of Newton’s specific achievement to the culture of his times and the following generations, known as the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment. It is not clear what characterizes that age, nor even how the avant garde thinkers of that age saw themselves. But, to begin with at least, we can take the central thesis of Immanuel Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung? Kant says Enlightenment is two things: the autonomy of the individual and rational thinking. The recognition that each individual is responsible for himself and that thinking is the major factor in human affairs leads to the immediate corollary that every individual person must be his own light. Hence, science as a specialism is impossible since the specialist, however, clever and intelligent and learned, cannot have authority over anyone but himself. Thus, rather than having the universal man as the image of the age, as Leonardo and Michelangelo still are the images of the Age of Humanism, the Age of Reason has as its models or symbols of the age, people like Franklin, Priestley, Lavoisier, Boscovich and even Voltaire. In a later age a joke was invented about Euler’s poking fun at Diderot’s ignorance of mathematics. This joke has provoked historians of ideas to show that Diderot was a mathematician; and everyone who knows D’Alembert’s preface to the Encyclopedia knows that he was a rounded man too.