7. The Renaissance¶
Core Argument¶
The Renaissance marks the rupture from a millennium of scholastic dogma and the birth of modern science, a revolution inseparable from the upheavals of the Reformation, the Peasants’ War, and the discovery of new worlds. The development of science was driven by technology and productive forces; astronomy, for instance, remained shackled until Galileo’s telescope shattered the geocentric model. The Church, defending a closed universe and a Creator, suppressed materialist thought. Copernicus published his heliocentric theory only on his deathbed; Kepler corrected it with empirical laws that refuted idealist notions of perfect circular motion. Galileo, discovering Jupiter’s moons and lunar mountains, was twice tried by the Inquisition and forced to recant. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his pantheist, materialist vision of an infinite universe. Even Protestantism persecuted scientists, with Calvin having Servetus burnt.
Francis Bacon championed empirical, inductive methods against Scholastic idealism. Marx noted that Bacon’s materialism contained the germs of many-sided development but was limited by its strict empiricism, which later fostered a narrow Anglo-Saxon aversion to theory. Dialectical materialism sees induction and deduction as inseparable. The Baconian school gave a contradictory impulse: it stimulated investigation but also produced a narrow empiricism that, as Engels noted, ended up accepting mystical ideas. The emancipation of science from theology was won, but the new world outlook remained shallow and mechanical, observing things in isolation and at rest. This method, transferred by Bacon and Locke to philosophy, produced a metaphysical mode of thought.
The period’s static, mechanical worldview denied change and development in nature. Empiricism degenerated into subjective idealism with Berkeley, who denied matter’s existence, arguing “esse is percipi.” His ideas persist in logical positivism, where some physicists treat theory as mathematical convenience rather than truth. Empiricism reaches a dead end with Hume, who denied causation, arguing that one event merely follows another. This leads to the denial of rational thought, since all natural laws are based on causality. Hume’s philosophy represents the bankruptcy of eighteenth-century reasonableness, a move toward subjective idealism.
English empiricism then gave impulse to French materialism. Condillac held that all mental processes are modified sensations. Helvétius gave materialism a French character. Holbach attacked religion and idealism, arguing that ignorance of natural causes creates Gods. La Mettrie considered thought a property of matter. The French materialists prepared the ground for the bourgeois revolution of 1789-93. Materialism’s tenets—the original goodness of man, the omnipotence of experience, and environment’s influence—necessarily connect it to communism and socialism. If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human; if man is shaped by nature, he develops his true nature only in society.