Weaving a Web of Light: Final Thoughts about Science’s Poetics

From Margaret Cavendish to Martin Heidegger, from Bishop Sprat to Pierre Duhem, and from Jonathan Swift to Virginia Woolf, Scientia and Poesia were always at odds. Early modern apologists of the New Science and their modern disciples found in the suppression of sophisticated language a crucial achievement that enabled science’s brilliant advancements. For doubters, this was laughable: science could not transcend everyday language, no more than humans can transcend their world or their body. But for Heidegger, the most severe of the detractors, it was not science’s failure to distance itself from poetry that was to be condemned, but its success in suppressing it. And it was not just the use of language that he had in mind: for him, the relations between humans and the natural world were fundamentally poetic—creative and productive. In its reduction of nature to what can be measured, gathered, and utilized, modern science has deprived us of nature’s poetry. The papers collected here suggest that Heidegger’s nostalgic lament was ill-directed. In the rise of early modern science they find true cultural poiēsis: the “bringing forth” of new approaches, attitudes, and engagements with nature from the cross-fertilization of theology and poetry, gambling and religiosity, and alchemy and rhetoric.