Kant, Goethe, and the mechanization of the world-picture

pp. 9-40

in: Paul H. Lauxtermann, Schopenhauer's broken world-view, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

"Modern man lacks a unified conception of the world. He lives in a dual world: in his environment, which is naturally given to him, and, at the same time, in the world which since the beginning of the modern era has been created for him by sciences founded upon the principle that the laws of nature are, in essence, mathematical. The non-unity which has thus come to penetrate our entire life is the true source of the spiritual crisis we are going through today," says the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka.^*15 Patočka refers here to that loss of a pristine unity in man's experience of the world which has been lamented so often. He appears to link it closely to the 17th-century Scientific Revolution an event that has also been described as the "mechanization of the world-picture",¹⁶ and interpreted as the point of no return in the process of European civilization's "deviation from the general human pattern".¹⁷ What was this Scientific Revolution all about?