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    Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature
    Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature
    Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature
    Ebook343 pages9 hours

    Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature

    By William R. Newman

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    In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature more generally were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly.

    In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman ambitiously uses alchemy to investigate the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned—and often negative—responses to their efforts. By the thirteenth century, Newman argues, alchemy had become a benchmark for determining the abilities of both men and demons, representing the epitome of creative power in the natural world. Newman frames the art-nature debate by contrasting the supposed transmutational power of alchemy with the merely representational abilities of the pictorial and plastic arts—a dispute which found artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy attacking alchemy as an irreligious fraud. The later assertion by the Paracelsian school that one could make an artificial human being—the homunculus—led to further disparagement of alchemy, but as Newman shows, the immense power over nature promised by the field contributed directly to the technological apologetics of Francis Bacon and his followers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous "father of modern chemistry," Robert Boyle, was employing the arguments of medieval alchemists to support the identity of naturally occurring substances with those manufactured by "chymical" means.

    In using history to highlight the art-nature debate, Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles, with vocal supporters and even louder critics, that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that Newman charts between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today, and he ably links contemporary issues to alchemical debates on the natural versus the artificial.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2005
    ISBN9780226577135
    Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature

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    • 3/5
      Living in a time of Dolly the sheep and bioluminescent rabbits, it’s easy to lose sight of the ever-blurrier distinction between nature and “art” (understood in the sense of anything “artificial”). Most of us are familiar with an example that Newman himself mentions – that of Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-Mark,” which tells the story of a man who tries to eliminate a small mark on his otherwise remarkably beautiful wife’s face. The moral is so universal as to be predictable: his effort to perfect the already perfect is to have hubris that cannot go unpunished, it is to fail to accept in a Niebuhrian sense our own limitedness and the sin of human nature. But one of the goals of Newman’s book is to show that this conversation is much older than the nineteenth century. It goes back at least to the myth of Icarus and Arachne.I’ve had a longstanding interest in the history of science, but this was admittedly a bit of a blind purchase from the University of Chicago Press. The subtitle, “Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature,” hinted at perhaps a bit of room for the reader of general interest, but I had no such luck. The topic is fascinating in itself, and I walked away from the book feeling that I’d learned a lot about the history of the art-nature debate in its various instantiations throughout history. The preface offers a nice, general introduction to the history of alchemy. (It should be noted that Newman’s use of the word “alchemy” is extremely general. Scientists locked away in a laboratory trying to transmute lead or aluminum into gold should be banished from your mind. Instead, think about any kind of transformation produced by a human being, including the visual arts and, in much more recent history, the production of human life through means other than coitus, i.e., in vitro fertilization or other methods.) In fact, Newman’s thesis is that “alchemy provided a uniquely powerful focus for discussing the boundary between art and nature” and that this whole discussion “can only be understood if the reader is willing to engage with the presuppositions of premodern philosophers, theologians, alchemists, and artists about the structure and nature of the world around them” (p. 8). He’s not kidding, either. The heart of this book is a truly exhaustive attempt to chart the history of this idea, many of whose contributors will not be recognizable, even to readers of the history of science. Some of more popular: Ibn Khaldun, Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas play gigantic roles. But most are unfamiliar: Jean de Meun, Petrus Bonus, Thomas Erastus, Bernard Palissy, and Zosimos of Panopolis are just a few of the dozens. There are so many of these minor people, whose ideas loom large in the book, that they are often picked up, left behind, only to be picked up in another chapter, leaving the readers to flip back and forth in order to intellectually orient themselves. I’ll spare you the various transmutations and permutations of these complex arguments (they do get very complex), but Newman seems to have two important takeaways. One is that our view of alchemy as synonymous with witchcraft or other black arts is naïve and undeveloped, and that it needs to be expanded to include all of the arts in the sense described above. The second and more important one is that this intellectual conversation has a long, subtle, and storied past in the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences. This should without a doubt be read by someone with a narrow, serious interest in this subspecialty (if this is the case, you’re probably already familiar with Newman’s name, since he’s one of the better-known scholars in the field). The book doesn’t have even a bit of appeal to a slightly more popular audience that it might have had that would have made it much more enjoyable, at least for this non-specialist.

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