NEWTON'S FLIGHT

During my visit to Great Britain in 1969, I visited London’s Westminster Abbey, the place where the great Englishman Oliver Cromwell had been buried, and he wasn’t there, except for a stone marking the place from which his body was pulled and desecrated after the 1660 Stuart Restoration. But another great Englishman was there for me, hidden inside an aesthetically perfect tomb with a no less perfect Latin inscription on it, which I loved so much that I remembered it literally by heart, and quoted it over a hundred times in the next forty-plus years: “Hic depositum est quod mortale fuit Isaaci Neutoni.” I happen to be quite partial to such personal experiences, as you may have noticed already, and from then on, Isaac Newton has been forever associated in my memory with that quiet resting place inside Westminster Abbey, and has thus transcended a normal interest I might have had in his person, through the sheer force of that encounter. On yet another, sadder occasion, in the now so distant past, I almost bought a rare early edition of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica for my book collection… Well, I procrastinated, and it did not happen, to my huge disappointment, but the above-mentioned accidental personal bond between me and the shadow of Newton was thus further strengthened, despite the fact that, as a person, he couldn’t have a particular appeal to me, while some of his actions, such as his shabby treatment of the astronomer John Flamsteed, and his anti-Leibniz campaign, were little short of reprehensible. To all of which I will only say: Let not the legend be judged by the man…

I do not intend in any way to steer toward Newton’s straightforward biography now, which, of course, can be easily obtained from any conventional reference source. For stock reference, however, his fame rests in particular on his discoveries in optics, of the composition of white light, in mechanics, of the three laws of motion, constituting the law of universal gravitation, and in mathematics, of the infinitesimal calculus. As far as his philosophical preoccupations were concerned, his early interest in Aristotle and Dèscartes later shifted toward mechanical philosophy (Gassendi) and, surprisingly, its ostensible Hermetic antithesis (Henry More), their unlikely combination shaping his own philosophical disposition. Eventually, he tried to reconcile the mechanical and the Pythagorean tradition (asserting the mathematical nature of reality) through the concept of force.

My special interest here is in Newton as a philosopher. There can be no great science without a philosophy behind it. Not surprisingly, most great scientists of the past were also philosophers, and this organic combination, although somewhat diminished, has not become extinct even in more recent times.

It can be justly argued that in most cases of the scientists-philosophers, as distinguished from philosophers who have also been scientists (the latter belong to my Philosophy sections, and thus, will be conspicuously absent from this extremely short subsection), the nature of their philosophy is mainly derivative, or applied within the limits of the science appointed to them by their genius. For this reason, it would be foolish and useless to try to extend their field of application to areas closer to our own intellectual home, but, even so, the uniqueness and great value of their scientific thought ought not to be detracted from, as in conjunction with their scientific genius, it is their very own distinctive wisdom, rather than that of a Plato, or a Kant, or a Nietzsche, that supplies the only creditable key to the phenomenon which they represent.

Not every great scientist can be readily identified in that broader philosophical sense, of course, but in such cases it is rather the paucity of our knowledge about their thinking than the lack of a proper philosophical basis for it, which is to blame. With enough time on our hands, and a certain persistence in penetrating the mental process going on in each of their scientific universes, revealing itself through their writings, I insist that an adequate understanding of a great scientist’s philosophy can be attained. In the future I will be much tempted to attempt doing precisely this, significantly expanding the present subsection, and going well into the depths, in each particular case. At the moment, however, my sole statement of intent to do it will have to suffice, further underscoring the gigantic scope of the task lying ahead for me.

The titanic figure of Newton, the extraordinary number two on the Hart List, belongs here, in this series, far more properly than as an originally intended separate entry in the Significant section, titled The Greatest Arian. (Referring to Newton’s espousal of religious Arianism, as manifested by his anti-Trinitarian treatise, which he sent to John Locke, yet withdrawn by him from publication for fear of an unwelcome exposure of his unorthodox religious views, and eventually appearing in print--alongside another such work--only after his death.) And so, in violation of decent subsectional chronology, here it is!

Newton was a brilliant, but psychologically confused man. Historians and biographers call him a rationalist, and such is the image he himself was desperately trying to project. As if he were terribly scared of the inner irrationalist in him, probably treating irrationalism as a manifestation of a mental illness. Hence, he was so anxious to convince the world, and himself above all, that his sanity was unimpeachable.

He was wrong, of course, and in denial, concerning the evident irrational element in his psyche. The story of Newton’s apple does not suggest to me a ponderous scholar who would spend years trying to figure out why an apple falls down the way it does. It rather suggests that he was supremely capable of intuitive brainstorms, which it must have been, and I daresay his greatest discoveries had to be of intuitive, rather than of rational origin.

As a result of his denial of irrationality, Newton was intellectually flawed as a philosopher-scientist. In fact, he was an anti-irrationalist extremist. Ironically, this very trait of militant rationality that presumably makes a perfect scientist, that is, his insistence on scientific law and order, has become the greatest weakness of his otherwise incredibly rich legacy. Assuming the absolute necessity of strict laws governing nature, and thus formulating the classic Newtonian law, he intimidated by his superhuman authority the scientists who came after him, and turned what he probably never quite believed in himself, his psychiatric remedy against the demons of irrationality, into an exclusive religion of many a scientist, to the detriment of science as such.

Not by reason alone does man acquire knowledge and understanding. Newton’s discoveries, although very greatly influenced by the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, could not be made without a great deal of the other essential component, intuition and inspiration, which Newton must have possessed to an extraordinary degree yet denied to the subsequent generations by his insistence on the scientific infallibility of his own transcendentally begotten child.

On the whole, though, Newton’s scientific thinking conceals, rather than reveals, a perfectly legitimate philosophy, which is the prime mover behind his great discoveries, but whose elixir of immortality can very easily turn into poison, if indiscriminately transplanted from its organic host to other potentially fertile bodies.