Science and Nature

pirišti ilani rabûti "secret knowledge of the great gods"

Modern universalism flows directly from naturalist ontology, based as it is on the principle that beyond the muddle of particularisms endlessly churned out by humans, there exists a field of truths reassuringly regular, knowable via tried and trusted methods, and reducible to immanent laws the exactness of which is beyond blight from their discovery process. In short, cultural relativism is only tolerable, indeed interesting to study, in that it stands against the overwhelming background of a natural universalism where truth seekers can seek refuge and solace. Mores, customs, ethos vary but the mechanisms of carbon chemistry, gravitation and DNA are identical for all.

PHILIPPE DESCOLA, "Who Owns Nature?"

Where the social world of another culture is at issue, we have learned, against our own deep-seated ethnocentric resistance, to take shock for granted. We can, and in my view must, learn to do the same for their natural worlds.

THOMAS KUHN, "The Natural and the Human Sciences," in The Road since Structure: Thomas S. Kuhn

THE CUNEIFORM WORLD AND THE NATURALWORLD

There is nothing self-evident about nature. Neither the phenomena of nature nor the environment as such have always been understood in the way we now understand them, and yet we tend to assume that what we call the natural world with its myriad forms, regularities, and irregularities confronts us all and always has. Haven't we always stood and still stand "before nature," observing, inquiring, and seeking to understand it as a whole, or in its parts? There is a serious question of reference that fails to justify such an assumption. Neither the sense nor the reference of the word is absolute across cultures and history. What we make of "the natural world" is a direct function of our particular moment in history, our particular cultural idiom and imagination. R. G. Collingwood concluded his extended historical essay on the idea of nature with the observation that

nature, though it is a thing that really exists, is not a thing that exists in itself or in its own right, but a thing which depends for its existence upon something else ... that natural science is not a tissue of fancies or fabrications, mythology or tautology, but is a search for truth ... but that natural science is not, as the positivists imagined, the only department or form of human thought about which this can be said, and is not even a self-contained and self-sufficient form of thought, but depends for its very existence upon some other form of thought which is different from it and cannot be reduced to it.

At issue in the following chapters is not the ontological problem of whether there is a mind-independent universal state of physical reality that we call nature, a realm apart from human interaction with it, operating in accordance with its own immutable and universal laws. Nor is it the historical problem of the development of the conception of that universal nature. Neither are the various naturalisms relevant to the study of cuneiform knowledge and the world to which it refers — methodological naturalism, where the supernatural has no place in scientific explanation; metaphysical naturalism, where the supernatural does not exist and all supervenes on nature; epistemological naturalism, where knowledge is attached to things such as natural kinds; or ontological naturalism, where only science ascertains what exists (sometimes but not always equated with physicalism). None of these positions will help us gain purchase on the cuneiform world of inquiry about phenomena.

The effort to understand the world of our perception and experience of phenomena might be a basic way to define the impetus for science, even though quite different ways of construing objects of inquiry and different methods of knowing have been historically encompassed by what we call science. There have been any number of claims as to when and where science emerged, from the beginnings of European modernity, to the European Middle Ages, to the classical Greek period, and even in ancient Babylonia. A claim that parts of the ancient cuneiform corpus contain evidence of the thinking and doing of science may well be an affirmation that Theseus's ship retained at least something of its identity after having had all its planks replaced. At the same time, and whether one agrees or not that the "ship of science" was launched from ancient Mesopotamia to be utterly changed by the modern period, it seems plain that the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian scribes of the cuneiform world had no stakes in knowing nature as such.

From a modern Western scientific perspective such a world is difficult to imagine. But as Philippe Descola stated the matter: "Seen from the point of view of a hypothetical Jivaro or Chinese historian of science, Aristotle, Descartes, and Newton would not appear so much as the revealers of the distinctive objectivity of nonhumans and the laws that govern them, rather, they would seem the architects of a naturalistic cosmology altogether exotic in comparison with the choices made by the rest of humanity in order to classify the entities of the world and establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them." So too did Assyrian and Babylonian scribes engage with the entities of the world from a perspective different from that which lies at the basis of science in its later Western forms. The scribes' engagement with the world, as preserved in learned cuneiform texts, was not presumptive of nature, consequently not open to the possibilities for methodological, epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical naturalisms. In that sense, "before nature" is meant to represent the perspective before the conception of nature was formulated, a perspective wholly open to reconstruction and interpretation. What is offered here is but one such reconstruction and interpretation.

In the cuneiform world, ominous phenomena in general, and astral phenomena in particular, were observed, analyzed, calculated, and predicted by learned and specialized scribes. Entities of the external world were of interest, for example, to diviners, and to medical practitioners, who knew about the efficacy of plants used in administering the sick by mouth, aromatic woods for his or her fumigation, and stones used in making amulets to aid in conjuring evil spirits viewed as responsible for disease. As well, lists and descriptions of objects in...