Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature

by William R. Newman

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 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.

Genres: History, Alchemy, History Of Science, Nonfiction, Science, Philosophy

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

William R. Newman is the Ruth Halls Professor in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University and the author of Gehennical Fire and Promethean Ambitions, as well as the coauthor of Alchemy Tried in the Fire (which was awarded the 2005 Pfizer Prize for the best book in the History of Science), all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

[William Bies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it possible to formulate in rigorous philosophical terms the distinction between nature and artifice? This deep question will occupy our reflections in the review to follow, for, as William R. Newman recognizes in his engaging book-length essay, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2004), the age-old pagan figure of Prometheus has been seized upon by modern men as expressive of a compelling ideal of what is core to humanity’s being, viz., an artistic creativity that endows man with the dignity of existing on a divine plane, as it were, capable of rivaling and indeed perfecting nature. Newman’s original angle on the problem is to view alchemy as the vehicle through which such Promethean ambitions have most characteristically been pursued and to investigate its historical fate. In reviewing Newman’s well-researched narrative, we shall avail ourselves of the opportunity to subject modern man’s Promethean ambitions to critique and to propose a criterion by which to answer our lead question, as to how to differentiate artifice from nature.

To frame our discussion, it will be well to start by reproducing the passage from Ovid that Newman quotes in his frontispiece:

Then man was made, perhaps from seed divine
Formed by the great Creator, so to found
A better world, perhaps the new-made earth,
So lately parted from the ethereal heavens,
Kept till some essence of the kindred sky –
Earth that Prometheus molded, mixed with water,
In likeness of the gods that govern the world –
And while the other creatures on all fours
Look downwards, man was made to hold his head
Erect in majesty and see the sky,
And raise his eyes to the bright stars above.
Thus earth, once crude and featureless, now changed
Put on the unknown form of humankind.
………………………………………………………............................
[Metamorphoses, Book I, trans. A.D. Melville]

The tale begins in antiquity. We moderns are accustomed to view our civilization as uniquely technological, but of course the theme of art versus nature goes back to the very beginnings of civilized life, for the men of those times preserved a memory of having but recently emerged from the primitive state and attributed the origins of culture to the institution of their great sages or heroes. Hence, the importance of mythical figures like Daedalus. The ancient theory of art as mimēsis biases the question, for sure. Here, in a typical move, the early alchemists represent their technē as not entirely artificial, but rather as availing itself of natural potencies and helping them along, so to speak:

Despite the close relationship between the proto-alchemy of the Leiden and Stockholm papyri and the visual mimēsis of ancient illusionist art, the alchemy of Zosimos and his descendants entered an area that was more akin to ancient medicine than to the other technai. Physicians, like alchemists, spoke of ‘perfecting’ the form within natural things. But the Galenic tradition put strict limits on what man could accomplish in this area, claiming the humans were incapable of following nature in the making of homogeneous mixtures. This would certainly have made the replication of metals an impossibility, since they, along with many other natural products, were ranked among the homogeneous substances by Aristotle and his countless followers. Already in late antiquity, then, alchemy occupied a privileged rank among its believers in its claim to alter the deep structure of matter in a way that was purely natural. It was this claim that would form the focus of debate in subsequent centuries as a disputational literature gradually grew up with the aurific art at its center. Here was a discipline that claimed not only to imitate nature by deceiving the senses, but to replicate it in every detail. To opponents of alchemy, this claim seemed to make the alchemist a second deity, since he was creating new gold, precious stones or minerals where none had been before. The charge of ‘playing God’, commonly leveled against pioneers of genetic engineering today, was already raised against those medievals who would change the order of the natural world. [p. 33]

Newman goes on the trace the art-nature debate down to his focal period, from 1200 to 1700. The stages on the way from Aristotle to Robert Boyle run through Avicenna and the Latin West (principally Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas). Thus, there are sections in chapter two devoted to ‘Art versus nature in Islam: The problem of transmutation of species and the substantial form’ and to ‘Alchemy and thirteenth-century theology’. Newman’s scholarly reconstruction of the arguments for and against alchemy makes for fascinating reading, as one encounters what are to us in the post-modern era familiar issues in an alien context, rooted in Arabic resp. Latin medieval scholasticism.

The turn to Francis Bacon’s eventual elimination of the distinction between art and nature begins during the Renaissance, as described in chapter three on the visual arts and alchemy. Here is what was at stake:

Always aware of the potential charge that they too were engaged in a sort of trompe l’oeil trickery, the medieval and early modern alchemists explicitly claimed that their discipline perfected nature rather than merely imitating it….To alchemical writers, this meant that most other fields relating to physical production, such as shipbuilding, fabric making and the visual arts, merely mimicked natural products….The supporters of alchemy, on the other hand, claimed that the aurific art actually duplicated natural products in ways that improved on nature’s own methods. [p. 116]

The artists could hardly let such an allegation go unchallenged. Although techniques for the preparation of materials related to alchemy were an indispensable basis of art as well, Leonardo da Vinci and Giorgio Vasari held an unfavorable opinion of alchemy due to its conceit that it could transmute the substantial species of natural things, which they took to usurp a prerogative that belongs to God alone. Yet other Renaissance writers are prepared to defend alchemy, by distinguishing between its false and true pursuit – Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480-1537), Benedetto Varchi (1503-1565) and Bernard Palissy (1510-1590). Thus, one has the makings of a real intellectual debate, which Newman takes pains to review and adjudicate in the remainder of chapter three.

We intend to keep our running commentary on the contents of the text short so as to conclude by engaging the philosophical issue it raises for us. Chapter four on artificial life and the homunculus turns to another theme with eerie associations for us, who approach it in the wake of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (originally published in 1818). At the center of debate stand the occult views of Paracelcus (1493-1541). Newman, with his accustomed thoroughness, covers all aspects surrounding the history of the question as to the possibility of artificial life, from the early writers such as Aristotle and Zosimos of Panopolis to Salāmān, Absal, Jābir ibn Hayyān, the Jewish golem, pseudo-Thomas, William of Auvergne and Alonso Tostado (c. 1400-1455).

Lastly, chapter five investigates another topic related to the art-nature debate, namely, the issue of experiment (that is, whether experimental interventions can yield knowledge of nature). Newman wants to reproduce in detail the stages by which Aristotelianism gave way, in the seventeenth century, to the attitudes of Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, which are determinative for us today, and to this end examines some obscure medieval and early modern figures (Themo Judaei and Daniel Sennert) before analyzing Bacon and Boyle. What is interesting is the extent to which these two latter figures whom we perceive as prototypically modern draw upon and appropriate alchemical sources.

How to respond to Newman’s erudite, though not at all pedantic, work? We would like to suggest a few themes for reflection by which the reader may orient himself, who otherwise might be threatened to drown in the profusion of minutiae:

1) What of the Renaissance idea of art improving upon nature? The great art historian Erwin Panofsky in his essay in Eidos und Eidolon (our review here) describes how, under the influence of a Neoplatonizing tendency, leading theorists of the Renaissance turned the ancient doctrine of mimēsis upside down and began to credit the artist with a superior mind that communes with the pure ideas in the intelligible realm and can bring them down into the realm of our worldly experience through his creative artistry. Thus, the artists have not merely a negative judgment to render (the charge of infringing on God’s prerogative) but also a positive claim of their own to lodge against the alchemists, viz., that their artistry goes beyond the alchemical perfection of nature to something more imaginative and reflective of a personal dignity to which the alchemists themselves do not pretend. Newman has nothing to say in the present work about Panofsky’s thesis, but we can profitably ponder it in the context of alchemy.

2) What does Goethe really say about his homunculus and Galatea in Faust II? The homunculus destroys himself striving after a perfection that is not connatural to him because, as created by something less than God he cannot be endowed with Henri de Lubac’s innate drive to that which surpasses nature itself (the mystery of the surnaturel)?

3) How are we who live in the era of the all but uncontested reign of a mechanical view of nature to think about any continuing role for alchemy? The following passage sets the context:

Already in the 1960’s, Riejer Hooykaas argued in a seminal article that the increasing sophistication of early modern machines may have helped diminish the perceived divide between artificial and natural products, thus contributing to Cartesian mechanism….First let us briefly recapitulate the story told by Hookyaas. The mechanical approach, already in antiquity, had been that of working para physin – against nature. The same attitude appears quite clearly in some early modern writers on machines, such as Guidobaldo del Monte and Henri de Monantheuil in the late sixteenth century. As we saw in chapter 1, this idea of working ‘against nature’ meant principally that contravening of the ‘natural’ tendencies of the elements by subjecting material things to the mathematical laws of mechanics. When Descartes reduced matter to spatial extension and eliminated the Aristotelian elementary qualities from his physics, he was left with a mechanics that no longer had a ‘nature’ against which to work. The art-nature divide could no longer be based on a metaphysical distinction with an essential difference between natural and artificial products. [p. 299]

Thus, what survives of the alchemical impulse in an era of mechanization would be a sheer technological hubris. Think of all the hype surrounding AI and the Singularity that supposedly looms before us! Anyone conversant in the older tradition of a liberal arts education, now deprecated in the name of critical thinking skills as preparation for a business career or of STEM disciplines as a means of induction into the technology industry, will register his doubts as to the plausibility of the future that our star technologists so brilliantly project for us. Let us adduce a few instances of things that, one can be confident, will ever elude technological manipulation and control:

First of all, we must criticize AI for lack of creativity. In theory, all a large language model can do is to range among modulations of an already established corpus of knowledge. Thus, after one overcomes his initial shock at the apparent fluency of ChatGPT and the like, one is prompted to an ever greater awareness of the critical difference between workmanlike scholarship – which, for the sake of argument, we may grant that AI may eventually master – and genuinely original work in the artistic or intellectual spheres.

Second, now that CGI has become sophisticated enough to be convincingly realistic most of the time, contemporary Hollywood movies wind up being more and more driven by special effects and, correspondingly, less and less imaginative in their story-lines, compared to old movies (a case in point would be the movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ring cycle) – quite apart from the related problem that children growing up accustomed to viewing special effects in which nothing is left to the visual imagination can scarcely be expected to derive as much pleasure from reading classic fiction, where one has, so to speak, to supply the special effects from the resources of one’s own mind.

Another illustration would be how, in every romantic affair of any consequence, there is an element of a genuine interchange between two developed personalities, in which the man and the woman have to be alike in some respects and yet different in others. Any genial combination that would possess a spark of the magic of romance is unforeseeable and, indeed, surpasses the capacity of human ingenuity to devise whole-cloth, it can only be experienced in reality. That is why playwrights ordinarily exercise a prudent reserve and depict their loving couple only after the lovers have fallen in love, for the attempt to portray the inexpressible moment of falling in love itself almost always falls distinctly flat (as notably in, for instance, the Hollywood movie Titanic).

We may enlarge on observations such as these and conclude to a general postulate, that the natural world seems to be imbued with an inventiveness so rich in potential as always to exceed our ability to emulate, try as we might – and to be a great artist, one must hone one’s skill on the persistent study of nature herself and strive to equal her, while recognizing the impossibility of ever succeeding fully. For nature has at her disposal untold eons of deep geological and evolutionary time in which to set to work through ever so gradual and incremental steps, which, when amassed, accrue into the wonderful and strange products of phylogenesis. Therefore, any finite axiomatic scheme contrived by human cunning will be bound ultimately to fail to embrace the fullness of reality itself (πλήρωμα, cf. Ephesians 1:23).

Thus, the contrast between art versus nature could be characterized as coming down to that between finitely many versus infinitely many generative principles entering into combination, among the products of which one selects by a fine-tuning, as it were, to reach the optimum possible under the circumstances. In the extreme, the former leads to ideology (a system of thought that can be sketched in terms of a small number of basic ideas), which is why we find ideologies so dissatisfying. Whatever element of truth they may embody, there will always be, in any actual setting involving real existing human actors, countervailing considerations and the reductive account of the ideologist finds itself inadequate to recapitulate any but the grossest features of the historical phenomenon, and may miss altogether the crucial juxtaposition that determines the outcome. This reason is why we have still to learn from protracted contemplation on God’s creative wisdom, as expressed through nature as we experience it.

Hence, with respect to the Promethean ambitions upon which our author, William R. Newman, touches in the present work, we may suggest that the pursuit of alchemy reflects a fundamental misapprehension, common as it may be to an intermediate stage of civilization that Europe went through during the early modern period. In a burst of youthful enthusiasm, the alchemists presumed that they could isolate the primary mechanisms behind nature and reproduce them in an artificial setting, outdoing nature at her own game and perfecting her. Here, one may recall the crazy idea entertained by rationalist philosophers of the era to the effect that the intelligible world could likewise be reduced to so many combinations and permutations of Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas or Leibniz’ characteristica universalis (wherein all possible ideas are subjected to a logical resolution into something like unique prime factors in arithmetic). A while ago, this recensionist reviewed Anthony Grafton’s Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Princeton University Press, 2023, our review here). There, Grafton depicts the career of magic during the same period and concludes that, at least in its high-brow form, it transformed itself into engineering, thereby opening up a field of endeavor in which its age-old ambitions could be finally realized in practice. Thus, modern technology seems to represent a confluence of alchemy and magic. It would be a great benefit to us if, in forthcoming work, Newman were to train his erudition on an analysis of the respective roles of the two in giving rise to the predominance of the technological understanding of being that remains our civilization’s fate, until some incalculable factor intervene, if ever. Any such scholarly undertaking would have to contend with Martin Heidegger’s imposing reflections on technology (which we hope to review someday). Heidegger’s grave point, in this context – to simplify drastically – would be that modern technology indeed realizes the alchemist’s dream and thereby fastens modern man into an iron cage of his own making, in which, to our loss, we become so fixated on technological control of our environment that we all but entirely forget any more meditative or contemplative mode of relating to being.

Indeed, our current quality of life does owe a lot to the spectacular successes of these enterprising men of early modernity, as we see not least in modern medicine and pharmacology. Yet Newman is surely right in concluding that the distinction between the artificial and the natural remains ever with us, and must ever so remain – what is in his case, unfortunately, merely a factual observation lacking in any theoretical grounding. Hence, four stars for being a stimulating historical study of the quest to perfect nature that stops short of a systematic analysis of the problem – the preserve, one might suppose, proper to the philosopher more so than to the historian of culture.

[John David · Rating 3 out of 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.

[Sienna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting stuff.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm probably a homunculus