" The vexations of nature " : the test of naturalisms between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment

Listen to audio

The Scientific Revolution has often been presented as the moment of invention of a Western naturalism. In the words of Francis Bacon at the dawn of the ^17th century, it was a "history of nature constrained and vexed", opposed to "nature unbound and free". The naturalism that emerged from the vast movement to refound scientific knowledge in the modern era was thus described in terms of a practice of objectification, of separating nature from artifice, of setting in order, controlling and mastering a nature deemed dangerous, through the tireless work of classification, categorization and engineering. To the theory of social orders, naturalists would have responded by putting nature in order, by defending its unity. Bachelard's 1938 thesis was entirely contained in these two formulas: "the scientific spirit must be formed against Nature" and "the scientific spirit must be formed by reforming itself". As early as 1948, however, Lucien Febvre proposed a different approach. He responded to Alexandre Koyré's criticism of his Rabelais by emphasizing the importance of these counter-cultures of science, and urged historians of science to make their narratives more complex.

Research into the history of science over the last thirty years has moved in this direction, shifting the framework of analysis by recontextualizing naturalist practices in the ^17th and ^18th centuries. They have done so by showing that it was undoubtedly necessary both to pluralize the naturalist cultures of the Moderns, by pointing out the tensions between different conceptions of nature (beyond the classic oppositions between plenism and atomism, mechanism and vitalism, etc.), and by demonstrating the effects of new instrumentation and intellectual techniques that equipped this "scientific revolution" - the microscope and automata opened up new reflections on the principles of the living. This research has led to a reassessment of empirical knowledge (observation, description, collection), as well as a better understanding of the devices used alongside measurement and quantification to produce the regularities of nature. They have also shown the insistence, if not the obsession, with the visible and visual representations to record, compare and objectify, and recall the still-vibrant importance of aesthetic issues in the classification process.

The second historiographical turning point was the question of the moral and political authority on which these naturalist practices were based in the ^17th and ^18th centuries. The history of science did not simply explore scientific theories and epistemologies, but sought to understand the link between the development of naturalisms and the establishment of absolutist cultures. Thus, behind Tournefort and the King's botanists, a network was established under the impetus of Louis XIV, making Versailles a veritable naturalist laboratory of "ecological absolutism". Around Linnaeus, in Sweden, an entire political economy centered on natural resources propelled natural history into state knowledge. Credit, authority and utility fostered a new political philosophy of nature that redistributed and prioritized other naturalistic practices. Instead of dismissing these practices as pseudo-sciences, as Bachelard did in his day, today's history of science mobilizes them to understand the survival or maintenance of analogist or animist visions at the very heart of Enlightenment Europe. Although the subject of polemical attacks by philosophers against superstition and the various forms of belief in the "supernatural", or of relegation to the side of local or indigenous knowledge, as Alix Cooper has shown, the place of these practices was kept active, including in the scientific accounts and discussions of the great academies until the middle of the ^18th century. We were perhaps too quick to consider denunciations as effective; or to confine the discussion around "obstacles" or "resistances" to the irresistible march of the "Scientific Revolution", without giving a chance to a complex and multiple naturalistic Ancien Régime that would last until the triumph of science in the ^19th century.

Finally, there's another element that disrupts Michel Foucault's successful organization: his openness to distant worlds. We'll be focusing on the way in which Western naturalism is also a product of encounters, travels and more or less lengthy stays at the ends of the earth. First, we'll measure the effects of European naturalistic projection through empires. We will emphasize that European naturalism was conceived as a tool for exchange and commensurability, notably by diplomats, with the great empires of China, Japan and Mughal. Encounters with these other imperial naturalist cultures enriched and tested European practices, overturning established taxonomies and making nature a central frontier object in discussions. Secondly, the inventory of the distant natural world undertaken by this empire of sciences was coupled with the idea of bio-prospection, both botanical and human, and an inventory of natural resources and pharmacopoeias, in accordance with a model of the cameral sciences, linked to a neo-mercantilism. The Linnaean "apostles" sent to the four corners of the world in the ^mid-18th century were thus on a quest to domesticate and acclimatize nature in Europe, and not without failure - Linnaeus never succeeded in producing tea in Upsalla. These great operations of "scientific diplomacy" make us forget the impasses and limits of contacts with Polynesians, African slaves and Amerindians. In the end, we'll be asking how these scientific dynamics were able to produce a geographical and ontological division.