Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  What would it mean to suffer a clockwork world? In 2013, I paid a visit to the world’s oldest, largest still-functioning astrological clock in Prague, Czech Republic. Developed more than six hundred years earlier by clockmaker Mikuláš of Kada and Professor Jan Šindel, a teacher of mathematics and astronomy, the clock represents the universe in all its perfection.42 A calendar dial and automata appear in the design, including a skeleton with an hourglass and a bell. Enormous and imposing, the Gothic structure comes to life at the hours. While each figure has only a single action, the result of so many pieces moving at once—in addition to the astronomical dial itself—gives the impression that the entire clock may itself be one giant automaton. Whitechapel Gods’ grim streets glow beneath the constant watching faces of clocks, each one a kind of messenger and reminder of Grandfather Clock, joyless automaton of logic. The Prague clock’s imposing sense of scale hovers over the court, an unsmiling reminder of man’s place in the world and his duty to the unseen but all-seeing Creator.¶ It leaves you with a feeling of your own smallness, but also of something brilliant, mechanical, and comprehensible: God made the earth, and the earth is the center of a beautiful machine. Except the clock also suggests that this perfect order continues along without intervention, that the motion—so ordered and perfect—needs no one to set it to rights. Newton never meant to promote a self-ordered world, but the seeds were always there, and Leibniz plucked them out in all their heretical potential. Originally in a letter to Princess Caroline of Ansbach in 1715, Leibniz claimed that Newton’s work went against Christian doctrine. The whole matter came to public attention through the “Leibniz-Clarke” papers, an extended, long-distance debate between him and Samuel Clarke, friend and supporter of Newton. They’ve been called the most influential philosophical correspondence of all time, and while it never brought Leibniz the recognition he craved and deserved for his own part in the discovery, it brought to sudden wide attention the full potential of Newton’s oversight—the first wrench in the gears.

  Leibniz begins by describing Newton’s “odd opinion.” According to his doctrine, he claims, the Almighty “needs to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God’s making is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen, that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; who must consequently be so much the more unskillful a workman, as he is oftener obliged to mend his work and set it to right.”43 Newton never meant a clockmaker God, but his work left room for precisely that construction—and it was, Leibniz quickly pointed out, “a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God.” If Newton’s math allowed us to see how the machine worked, its constant need to be “righted” also suggested a world imperfect, constantly in need of attention. Newton’s own assertion that the world would collapse without its God, ironically, left open a gap for speculating about its inverse, the self-winding machine. He had “inadvertently” given aid to skepticism, to doubt, and to a secular science that would not raise its head until the mechanistic philosophy of the eighteenth century. As Dolnick explains, in “bolstering” the cause of science, Newton “demoted” the agency and ability of God . . . and by extension, of man. If the universe were a machine, Judith Drake (a writer of educational polemics) complains in 1721, then humans themselves might be little more than clockwork.44 In such a world, meaning had no meaning, morality no purpose. For all the good engineers of science might do in the future, the idea of a Godless clockwork world left no room for man’s immortality. It meant chaos on earth would not be rewarded with the order of heaven. Newton fought back, accusing Leibniz of heresy instead, and the conflict continued in bitterness for the rest of their lives. Here again, fortune favored Newton, who, in his capacity as president of the Royal Society, ruined Leibniz’s chances of ever claiming calculus for his own. Newton outlived his rival, and claimed valiantly that he “broke [Leibniz’s] heart.” Leibniz did his own irreparable damage to Newton, however, though Newton would not live to see it.

  From the chaos, order. From order, chaos. When Peters depicts the final destruction of the Whitechapel Gods, he relies on metaphors that mix organic and mechanical processes in visceral and eviscerating poetry. The sense is symbolic; we know only that Oliver carries a device inside him and that he must plug into the machine itself: Oliver’s thoughts “ended” and his “mental space became home to the calculations of the machine.” To begin with, all is order and harmony. Then, “a black shape appeared to mar the infinite perfection. The ticks and tolls beat against it, but it refused to be made compliant. The shape rushed out, slipping into the empty spaces between Grandfather Clock’s thoughts, and began to devour everything it touched.”45 Grandfather Clock falls out of rhythm. “His million sounds phased away from one another, changing pitch and timbre,” writes Peters, and “the Great Machine collapsed from within.”46 Newton’s God doesn’t perish in quite so surreal or so speedy a fashion, but his sense that only the Almighty held the world together, that comets and other cosmic messengers were sent to reenergize the clockwork, that numbers—like the alchemy of his youth—must be protected from the unworthy, a magical language only he and his God could understand. But something surprising comes of this, a substitution that even steampunk fiction and sci-fi dreams could not have predicted.

  In 1735, Alexander Pope penned an epitaph in honor of the man, in which he lifted him to the stature of a god: “Nature and Nature’s Law lay hid in Night:/GOD said, Let Newton be! And all was Light.” Newton had become, by 1691, the champion of religious skeptics and secularists, his views offering an alternative to faith in the creator that would become the hallmark of Deists (and, notably, “founding fathers” like Benjamin Franklin, who believed that God had wound up the universe and then walked off stage). Wootton marks the end of the seventeenth and the dawn of the eighteenth century as “the disenchantment of the world”; David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of 1748 and other works picked up the theme, offering the clockwork universe as a possibility that sounded the death knell of witches and goblins, but also of belief in miracles and then, at last, even in God him- (or her-) self. Unlike Leibniz, buried in an unmarked grave without friends, Newton’s remains lie at Westminster Abbey, where men still pay him homage. But though Newton sought to prove God a mathematician, in the end, Newton himself became the God of Mathematics. Man would replace God in the ensuing scientific age. And that meant grappling with entirely new questions about our place in the world, in life, and after death.

  Frederick Nietzsche warned that those who seek to destroy monsters should be careful to avoid becoming monsters themselves. He warned, too, that if you look too long into the void, it may very well look back. In the latter half of his life, after publishing his Principia Mathematica, Newton turned his back on chemistry in order to dwell in the dark mysteries of alchemy, claiming that “All things were created from One Chaos by the design of One God [. . .] so our work brings forth the beginning out of black chaos.”47 And yet, he also authored the great proofs on which our modern science has been built, not just calculus but the laws of motion, gravity, and measurement. Not before and possibly not since has a single human being achieved so much, with so little, in so short a time. In seeking to discover divine order, however, Newton and his contemporaries introduced the age of skepticism. If God is dead, are we left with only dread tech? And what happens if the machine of the world breaks down in the end, leaving nothing permanent? No wonder the inventors who come after Newton find themselves deeply committed to powering the future. Every invention, Elting Morison reminds us, is a dislocation. Every new thing replaces an old thing. The message of our past creeps into our fictions as well as our facts, our stories as well as our histories. From the backlash and backbiting of Leibniz and Newton to the cautionary tales of latter-day thinkers and writers as disparate as Matthew Arnold and Mary Shelley and J
ules Verne, the message is the same: “what is supposed to be humane about humanity gets ground up into smaller pieces” as the machinery clanks ahead.48 In the next chapter, the sacred order doesn’t concern heavenly bodies, but human ones, and controlling the chaos will require more than math; it wants a brand new kind of machine.

  *Letter to Robert Hooke (February 15, 1676). However, considering their strained relationship and exactly what Newton was claiming, it would be a misinterpretation to consider this humility at its best.

  †Somnium has an elaborate frame narrative where a “wise woman” sells her son Duracotus to Tycho Brahe in a fit of anger, only to recover him sometime later, when he has conveniently been taught all about astronomy under Brahe’s tutelage (like Kepler himself). Upon discussion with his mother, however, the hero discovered that it is possible, with the assistant of a Daemon, to go on a Lunar voyage and test the theories he has mastered.

  ‡On January 4, the “11th day of Christmas” in the Gregorian calendar.

  §It’s the more surprising because the two had been conversing by letter since 1677, and apparently recognized that they were on the same trail though by different methods. One explanation comes from Tasaday’s examination of “lost” letters (2007). Supporters of both men engaged in public dispute, and before long, the titans were forced to bring their claims to the public. Newton, better connected and already a practiced bullfighter for his reputation, necessarily had the advantage.

  ¶Other early automatons were less imposing, but no less fascinating—Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks contained the ideas for numerous mechanical structures, including a self-propelled cart, and the British Museum contains the mechanical ship built by Hans Schlottheim for the Kunstkammer of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden in about 1585. Its job was to announce dinner, rather than the hours; the galleon and other pieces like it were developed by clockmakers for wealthy or imperial patrons.

  TWO

  Clockwork Boy and the Mother Machine

  I [. . .] took a voyage to visit my mother Nature, by whose advice, together with the help of Dr. Diligence, I at last obtained my desire; and, being warned by Mr. Honesty, a stranger in our days, to publish it to the world, I have done it.” So begins the preface of a most curious work, the 1652 The English Physitian, by Nicholas Culpeper, an astronomer-botanist who promises to reveal the heavens in the human.1 To Culpeper, the body and all its wondrous anatomy were not divorced from nature, nor from the cosmos, but rather, the body was a “Microcosm,” a mirror of the cosmos in miniature, a flesh-wrapped star-map with which the heavens had intimate dealings. Diseases, he claimed, varied with the planets. Likewise, every plant in nature corresponded with a planet or planetary alignment. The diseases of Jupiter could be cured by the herbs of Mercury, ailments of the moon by the plants of Saturn, and those of Mars with vegetable Venuses. Culpeper finds himself in company with Kepler and Newton (rough contemporaries); “Because out of thy thoughts God should not pass, His image stamped on every grass.”2 God built the world, and so the body, and a good physician could “read” these hidden signs in flesh and blood as an astronomer reads stars. “No man ought to commit his life into the hands of that Physician, who is ignorant of Astrologic,” Culpeper claims, because such “is a Physician of no value.”3 Kepler and Newton and Leibniz looked into the heavens and saw a glorious mechanism, the orderly machine of an Almighty mathematician. Culpeper’s little book, bound in leather, block printed, and comfortable in the hand of the traveling apothecary, suggests a cosmic order to the body—cosmic but still organic. Culpeper’s work (and others like it) got all the facts wrong, but offered succor in its ardent belief about God’s plan for his creation. You are a world unto yourself, they claimed, specialized and cosmic and made of star dust, a child of Mother Nature, your every limb as moistened by her dew as the grass of the field. But times, they were a-changing.

  In 1664, the same year that Henry Power pronounced the dawn of “new philosophy” and just before Newton launched his magical thinking, France’s most renowned philosopher turned the focus from the celestial and natural bodies to mechanical ones. René Descartes’s Treatise on Man (L’Homme), published posthumously, represents the culmination of his work on physiology and mechanistic psychology. In the years after its publication, scientific and medical thinkers alike would begin to see the messy, complicated, mysterious chaos of our ephemeral “heavenly” body reduced and refined as “a fine-tuned machine.”4 Like the stars above, or like the planets on their revolutions around the sun, the body might be atomized, rendered accessible, controlled, and contained. And like the complicated brass wheels of a revolving planetarium, the body might also be modeled . . . and even replicated. “If life was material, then matter was alive,” argues historian Jessica Riskin, “to see living creatures as machines was also to vivify [or bring to life] machinery.”5 By comparing the body to clockwork and hydraulics, did Descartes begin an unintentional revolution, not only challenging what it means to be human, but what it means to be a machine?

  The Human Machinery

  I was four years old when I saw my first automatons. The “Swiss Chalet” (Sugarcreek, Ohio) boasted a carved roofline of snow-capped pines, strange in the gritty heat of July, plus wooden lattice and a working waterwheel. It’s the sort of roadside attraction that summer drives are made for: the world’s largest cuckoo clock. A peaked gable housed a single window, under which a clock told the hours. I spent an eternity of minutes, my eyes fastened on the shutters, waiting for the gong to sound. Strike, strike, strike, and the panes sprang open for the cuckoo to sing. I remember fascination: a clockwork bird, open beaked, ducking in and out of its hole in the machine. That was but the beginning. Following the herald, five mechanical players bumped and banged their way onto the stage. With painted faces stuck at smiles, a fully automated polka band stuttered out. Each stood nearly as tall as me, and each turned a wooden head in my direction, unseeing and unreadable. For reasons I couldn’t articulate then, the clock haunted me. Its bright colors and the too-loud music, the bird, the band: they danced on in my nightmares with their eerie not-alive life. I’d just experienced something important, feelings of linked fascination and dread that accompany our long history with technological innovation.

  The lever, the pulley, and the screw: in many respects, these were humanity’s first “machines,” tools that could ease the labor of the body when moving a load.6 Galileo published Mechanics in 1600, the most advanced of his day—but even he considered machinery in narrow ways, as weights and measures and forces. Galileo believed in “atomism,” or the breaking down of something larger into smaller and smaller parts that dodge around in empty space (it’s where we get our word for atoms). This theory, based on the work of ancient Greek scholars like Democritus and Epicurus, makes up one part of mechanistic philosophy. The other half comes from Descartes’s peculiar idea about “corpuscular” theory. At its most basic, corpuscular mechanics just means that instead of empty space, you have a sort of fluid, meaning that invisible forces touched and interacted with each other in a continuous substance. (Newton had yet to discovery gravity, remember.) But in following his ideas, Descartes faced a series of seeming anomalies—one thing must interact with another thing. The interaction must be a force. But the force couldn’t be seen. Was it right to believe in what you could not see? Was it right to reason from the invisible? In his questioning, we glimpse the still-flickering image of a brand new idea Descartes would begin to explore in Le Monde (The World) and make more concrete when he wrote L’Homme (Man). Culpeper began by mapping human bodies with heavenly ones, and he never once doubted that he read the signs correctly. Descartes begins by doubting not only the heavens above, but the earth below, all he can see, and all he can know. In the process, he gets from the God to man, and from man to machine. And he invents one of the most important aspects of scientific method in the process.

  In 1619, René Descartes was a young soldier, overwintering in Ulm, a Bavarian town on the banks of the Dan
ube. Frigid, bitter wind howled around the housetops and down chimneys, and Descartes huddled next to a wall stove for warmth. With little else to occupy him, he read philosophical treatises by candlelight, only to discover that most all of them contradicted each other. So continued the long dark days, and the longer, darker, nights—and all the while, Descartes read and thought, thought and read. What was to be believed if the greatest minds could not even agree? In that troubled state, alone and without friends, he began to doubt, and not a particular aspect of science. All the ragged bits and pieces stuck on or struck off over time, all the theories and ideas, every experiment of thought and every innovation seemed equally untrustworthy, equally flawed, both unproven and unprovable. Chaos, in other words. A near hopeless idea struck him: could a single person start over from scratch, working only from his own observations? Drowsing and low-spirited, he fell asleep—and had three dreams. The first was a whirlwind of phantoms and far-off lands, the second all sparks and thunderclaps, and in the third, strange beings bid him read from a book: “what path shall I take in life?” Descartes awoke with a new direction for his life: he would be the one to start over, and build knowledge from the ground up. “It often happens,” Descartes explains in Discourse on Method,* “that a private individual takes down his own [house] with the view of erecting it anew [. . .] when the foundations are insecure.”7 We should recognize again the sense that something must be destroyed before anything can be built, but Descartes doesn’t want to begin even with foundations. Begin, he suggests, with nothing. We cannot accept what we have not come to know for ourselves, but even “our senses sometimes deceive us.” If even the eye cannot be trusted, Descartes concluded, then “all the objects that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.”8