William R. Newman: Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature

摘要

Referring to the Whig Party, the former political opponents of the Tories in Great Britain, British historian Herbert Butterfield once coined the term 'Whig-gish' historiography for any account that looks at the past from the perspec-tive of the present, as if the goal of the past were the achievement of the pre-sent. Thus, a 'Whiggish' history of sci-ence carefully ignores everything of the past that does not suit the idea of a steady growth of science towards the current state. Strangely enough, that ap-proach has been prominent in philoso-phy too, from Hegel to recent philoso-phy science, so that we could equally speak of 'Hegelian historiography'. Because alchemy was driven by the belief in the transmutation of our ele-ments, it does not go well with the Whiggish historiography (and philoso-phy) of science. In this view, the labora-tory work of the alchemists was neither experimental, because they did not measure anything unlike their contem-porary astronomers, nor scientific, be-cause they were not seeking for mathe-matical theories unlike math teachers such as Galilei, nor technological, be-cause they were unsuccessful quacks and impostors. So, you better forget about this wrong track in the otherwise glori-ous history of science, even if the track lasted for almost two thousand years. At best, their unscientific, cryptic, and contradictory attitudes might qualify al-chemists as bedfellows of the fine arts, as an inspirational source for mystic, an-ti-scientific movements. Modern sci-ence, on the other hand, as epitomized, for instance, by the latest nanotechnol-ogy, is now on the brink of making the illusionary dreams of the alchemists be-come real: wealth, longevity, and even the laboratory creation of life. While such a view flatters and satisfies the modern ego, it does everything to mis-understand science and its role in socie-ty and lets the propagators of science and technology run again and again into the same old societal troubles