[FRA:] William Fleiss, The Domination of Nature (1)

[Ralph Dumain]

In Nov-Dec 2008 I wrote 8 posts on William 
Fleiss, whose first big splash was in the 
beginning of the '70s when Marcuse and the New 
Left were on the scene. After reading several 
pieces by Fleiss online, I tackled his book:

Leiss, William. The Domination of Nature. Boston: 
Beacon Press, 1974. (Originally published 1972. See also 1994 ed.)

I think this is the richest treatment on the 
subject I've ever read; I can't think of anything else to compare.

In the preface to the paperback edition, Leiss 
cites Jerome Ravetz’s Scientific Knowledge and 
Its Social Problems (1971). Ravetz identifies 
three components of the ideology of science and 
their interaction­-the idea of science (xi) as . . .

(1)   technique important to industry;
(2)   a form of knowledge valuable in itself;
(3)   a vehicle of liberation from dogmatic attitudes.

Leiss finds that the notion of the domination of 
nature conceals internal contradictions. There is 
an “inextricable bond between the domination of 
nature and the domination of man.” (xiv)

How the latter emerged as an unintended 
consequence of the former is one of the most 
difficult riddles which we have been called upon 
to resolve. One of the primary functions of the 
idea of the human domination over nature­-in its 
role as a significant social ideology-­was to 
inhibit the consciousness of newly developing 
forms of domination in human relationships.

The former notion develops in tandem with the 
notion of the social contract, presuming an 
equality of social actors, but such equality is 
illusory. And now we are faced with the prospect of ecological disaster.

Chapter 1: The Cunning of Reason

4-7: The myth of Daedelus and Icarus interpreted 
differently. Bacon was unimpressed by the fate of 
Icarus, but was impressed by the riddle of the 
Sphinx. Following World War I, Haldane wrote an 
optimistic book called Daedalus, countered by a 
pessimistic book by Russell called Icarus, on the 
question of whether scientific progress 
automatically engenders social progress.

The 20th century was the site of utopian and 
dystopian prognostications. The idea of the 
domination of nature is not transparent at all. 
It carries a dual role of clarifying and 
concealing the reality it purports to describe. 
(13) The terminology of conquest saturates 
behaviorist B.F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden 
Two. The distortions of the utopian dream are 
addressed not only by romantics like Aldous 
Huxley, but from a variety of perspectives. (14) 
Commentators as diverse as conservative political 
theorist Yves Simon analyst of computer 
technology Robert Bugoslaw have recognized that 
mastery of man over nature morphs into extending 
control over man. (14ff) The frustration of the 
dream of reason­which could be called the cunning 
of unreason­has never been explained adequately. (21-3)

Chapter 2: Mythical, Religious, and Philosophical Roots

There are myths of various peoples associating 
metallurgy with demonic forces. (Cf. Mircea 
Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible.) The archaic 
fears embedded in the myths of “primitives” may 
be the same suppressed fears that resurface in 
advanced technological societies, and which tend 
to trigger fascist impulses. (27-8) Modern man 
has not forsaken magic; it lives on in technological civilization.

Does modern science have Christian roots, as Lynn 
White claims? (29) While the (idealist) causality 
claimed by White is up for questioning, the fact 
that early modern scientists were occupied by 
theological issues and conscious of their 
Christian upbringing could mean that they were 
conscious of the Biblical conception of man’s 
relation to nature and its difference from pagan 
animism. (30)  Leiss reviews several Christian theologians on this question.

Leiss then moves on to the role of natural magic 
and what we today call pseudosciences in the 
Renaissance. The figure of the Magus embodied 
these preoccupations. (38) Alchemy loomed large. (See Jung, Yates, Eliade.)

Chapter 3: Francis Bacon

Pro-Bacon sentiments shifted to anti-Bacon ones 
as epistemology evolved in the 19th century. The 
20th century, beginning with Cassirer, saw more 
probing scholarship.  Bacon’s advocacy of the 
mastery over nature has had a more lasting impact 
than his epistemology. (46-7) Feuerbach (1833), 
for example, praised Bacon on this account. (48) 
Note Bacon’s Christian ideology in justifying his 
enterprise. (49 ff) Bacon separates natural 
knowledge from moral knowledge, establishing a 
precedent for the modern fact-value dichotomy! 
(52) Bacon links the mastery of nature with the 
restoration of innocence. In the process of 
secularization, the religious compass associated 
with the mastery of nature disappeared. (54) 
Legal metaphors are also associated with 
scientific research. (55) It is less frequently 
noted, however, that mastery of nature is also 
linked with control of human behavior, the 
pacification of unruly passions. (56-7) Note 
Bacon’s pragmatic arguments. (57) Improved 
science yields the triumph of hope over despair. 
(58) Political metaphor is used to characterize scientific procedure. (59)

Bacon’s New Atlantis is contrasted with More’s 
Utopia. More’s utopia is not romantic 
primitivism. An advanced society is presumed. 
Bacon’s utopia reveals something new, a society 
organized along the lines of scientific research. 
The scientist embodies a superior ethical 
standard and disinterestedness, above the norm of 
his society, maintaining some distance and 
autonomy in his profession. (66) Leiss considers 
interpretations and implications of this 
embryonic portrayal of the scientist as social 
actor. The utopias of Tomasso Campanella and 
Johann Andrae also are different from More’s 
utopia. Still, these ideal scientists remain 
subordinate to the social authority in a 
religious society. In Bacon, there is a 
hint­apparently not followed up by Bacon’s 
readers­of the complete autonomy of the 
scientific research establishment. (68) Bacon 
assumes the sense of responsibility of those who 
would wield the power to command nature, whereas 
More emphasizes moral progress, an element not 
manifest in Bacon’s portrayal of technical 
progress. (69-70) The exalted status of the 
scientific administrator heralds a new era. No 
one has equaled Bacon in setting the stage for the modern technological epoch.

Chapter 4: the 17th century and after

Leiss prefaces this chapter with an abbreviated 
quote from Marx. Here I cite the full paragraph 
(in a different translation) from whence it comes:

Thus, just as production founded on capital 
creates universal industriousness on one side -- 
i.e. surplus labour, value-creating labour -- so 
does it create on the other side a system of 
general exploitation of the natural and human 
qualities, a system of general utility, utilizing 
science itself just as much as all the physical 
and mental qualities, while there appears nothing 
higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, 
outside this circle of social production and 
exchange. Thus capital creates the bourgeois 
society, and the universal appropriation of 
nature as well as of the social bond itself by 
the members of society. Hence the great 
civilizing influence of capital; its production 
of a stage of society in comparison to which all 
earlier ones appear as mere local developments of 
humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first 
time, nature becomes purely an object for 
humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to 
be recognized as a power for itself; and the 
theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws 
appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it 
under human needs, whether as an object of 
consumption or as a means of production. In 
accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond 
national barriers and prejudices as much as 
beyond nature worship, as well as all 
traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted 
satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions 
of old ways of life. It is destructive towards 
all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, 
tearing down all the barriers which hem in the 
development of the forces of production, the 
expansion of needs, the all-sided development of 
production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.

--Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook IV
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.htm>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.htm 


The glorification of nature was fueled by a 
growing sense of what the new sciences could 
offer in the way of unearthing its hidden powers. 
This feeling of one’s way into the modern world 
was torturous, however.  Descartes seemed like a 
magician to many of his contemporaries, as 
evidenced by praises from astrologers and sources 
we would not take seriously today. Descartes’ own 
writing practices helped to foster this aura of 
the magus. Gassendi and Mersenne labored to 
distinguish “true science” from the occult 
sciences, while establishing its theological 
legitimacy. (75) There was a shift from nature to 
craft and the logic of invention. (76-7) Note 
Fontanelle’s propaganda for science. (77-8) As 
the Enlightenment reached its high point, the 
notion that a single method in all the sciences 
and the conduct of social life could be raised as 
a standard coincident with the securing of human 
happiness. (78) Science was conceived as the 
royal road to progress. (79) Descartes sees the 
new science as inherently linked with practical 
philosophy and the common good. The passage from 
Discourse on Method quoted is unique in 
Descartes’ writing.  (81) Descartes does not elaborate, however.

Marxist and non-Marxist writers alike have made a 
big deal out of this quote, as Marxist writers 
have made a big deal out of this remark by Marx 
(82)-­I now quote from another translation:

This portion of value which is added by the 
machinery, decreases both absolutely and 
relatively, when the machinery does away with 
horses and other animals that are employed as 
mere moving forces, and not as machines for 
changing the form of matter. It may here be 
incidentally observed, that Descartes, in 
defining animals as mere machines, .saw with eyes 
of the manufacturing period, while to eyes of the 
middle ages, animals were assistants to man, as 
they were later to Von Haller in his 
“Restauration der Staatswissenschaften.” That 
Descartes, like Bacon, anticipated an alteration 
in the form of production, and the practical 
subjugation of Nature by Man, as a result of the 
altered methods of thought, is plain from his 
“Discours de la Méthode.” He there says: “If est 
possible (by the methods he introduced in 
philosophy) de parvenir à des connaissances fort 
utiles à la vie, et qu’au lieu de cette 
philosophie spéculative qu’on enseigne dans les 
écoles, on en peut trouver une pratique, par 
laquelle, connaissant la force et les actions du 
feu, de l’eau, de l’air, des astres, et de tous 
les autres corps qui nous environnent, aussi 
distinctement que nous connaissons les divers 
métiers de nos artisans, nous les pourrions 
employer en même façon à tous les usages auxquels 
ils sont propres, et ainsi nous rendre comme 
maîtres et possesseurs de la nature” and thus 
“contribuer au perfectionnement de la vie 
humaine.” [It is possible to attain knowledge 
very useful in life and, in place of the 
speculative philosophy taught in the schools, one 
can find a practical philosophy by which, given 
that we know the powers and the effectiveness of 
fire, water, air, the stars, and all the other 
bodies that surround us, as well and as 
accurately as we know the various trades of our 
craftsmen, we shall be able to employ them in the 
same manner as the latter to all uses to which 
they are adapted, and thus as it were make 
ourselves the masters and possessors of nature, 
and thus contributing to the perfection of human 
life.] In the preface to Sir Dudley North’s 
“Discourses upon Trade” (1691) it is stated, that 
Descartes’ method had begun to free Political 
Economy from the old fables and superstitious 
notions of gold, trade, &c. On the whole, 
however, the early English economists sided with 
Bacon and Hobbes as their philosophers; while, at 
a later period, the philosopher [...] of 
Political Economy in England, France, and Italy, was Locke.

-- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One; Chapter 
Fifteen: Machinery and Modern Industry, footnote 27
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm 


The Saint-Simonians of the 1830s took up Bacon’s 
optimistic perspective, foreseeing the 
exploitation of nature and the end to the 
exploitation of man. (82) Marx recognized the 
dialectic of man and nature­“He opposes himself 
to nature as one of her own forces . . .” 
(Capital, I) (83) The development of the new 
social individual is attendant upon the mastery 
of nature, resulting in an individual who stands 
outside the process of production (Grundrisse). 
(84) In the meantime, relation to nature is no 
longer direct but mediated through class 
struggle. Marx was thus able to link a theory of 
social change with the notion of the mastery of 
nature, which he saw as an integrated progressive 
development, not foreseeing the development of 
technology as a source of false consciousness. (86)

Contemporary scientists often reference the unity 
of knowledge and power. Heisenberg notes the 
change in attitude toward nature from a contemplative to a pragmatic one. (87)

What difference between modern and pre-modern 
science made this possible? Max Scheler is the 
only one to think this through the connection 
between scientific knowledge and power seriously. 
(88) Natural philosophy separated into natural 
science proper and the philosophy of nature. 
According to Cassirer, German Naturphilosophie 
attempted the integration of the natural sciences 
with ethics and aesthetics (89). When that fell 
away, so did an alternative conception of the relation to nature.

The only complete study of the issue, according 
to Leiss, is Franz Borkenau’s  Der Übergang vom 
feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild; Studien zur 
Geschichte der Philosophie der Manufakturperiode 
(Paris: F. Alcan, 1934). Borkenau took off from 
the Marx’s footnoted remark about Descartes. 
Borkenau sees mechanics as the scientific 
foundation of the new manufacturing system. 
Abstract labor is linked to abstract matter. 
(90-92).  Henryk Grossman disputed the 
identification of quantification with 
manufacturing. Instead, he linked the quantifying 
tendency with the machine itself, independent of 
the future labor process. Industrial labor 
follows later from this basis. (92) Paolo Rossi, 
after carefully inspecting Leonardo’s work, sees 
what separates it from the 17th century: Leonardo 
was more interested in diversion than in the 
mastery of nature. Leiss concludes that one 
should be wary of seeing the development of 
mechanics and machines as ineluctably fused with 
the notion of the mastery of nature or capitalist 
industry. (93) Alexandre Koyré examines the 
generally accepted notion that sees activity 
supplanting contemplation as the highest value as 
a general trend that also governed the 
development of modern science. Mathematics and 
astronomy, however, were motivated by purely 
theoretical considerations, and the scientific 
revolution was guided by a metaphysics that 
overthrew the ancient idea of cosmos. Bacon 
promoted the new science, but did not participate 
in it. (93-4) This is, I would say, grounds for 
drawing a distinction between the theoretical and 
the ideological dimension of science.

In Part II Fleiss examines the ideas of figures 
not generally recognized by sociology of science: 
Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl, and Max Horkheimer & co.