Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and ... Fourth Series) Joel Kaye - Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century_ Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought -Cambridge University 2004.
287 Pages
A cluster of intellectual innovations appearing within scholastic natural philosophy in the fourteenth century played a critical role in the future development of scientific thought. Beneath these innovations lay a profound reconceptualization of nature. This book attempts to analyze the components of this reconceptualization and to uncover the pressures and concerns that shaped it.
To do so, it looks both within the university and beyond it, to the monetized society that surrounded and supported it. It argues that the transformation of the conceptual model of the natural world within scholastic natural philosophy c. 1260-1380 was directly linked to the social and economic process of monetization that transformed European society over this same period. It illustrates how those perceptual shifts essential to the emergence of modern scientific thought — the shifts toward quantification, geometric representation, multiplication, relativity, probability, mechanistic order, and dynamic equilibrium — were grounded in the experience and comprehension of monetized society. The book’s earlier chapters analyze scholastic writings on economic questions (particularly those found in commentaries on Aristotle’s discussion of exchange in Nicomachean Ethics v.5), focussing on the six new categories of analysis and description devised by philosophers to make sense of their experience of monetized society.
The concluding chapters investigate the transmission of philosophical insights from the comprehension of the monetized marketplace to the comprehension and construction of nature. They reveal how intellectual developments pioneered within each of the six new categories of economic analysis lie at the base of the most forward-looking conceptual advances within scholastic natural philosophy — advances that proved to be crucial to the further development of scientific thought.
INTRODUCTION
Intellectual innovations within fourteenth-century natural philosophy occupy an important place in the history of scientific thought. Over the course of the century, philosophers subjected elements of the Aristotelian model of the natural world to critical analysis, advancing claims of logic, mathematical consistency, and empirical evidence against Aristotelian authority. The selective critique of Aristotle was informed by a wealth of new questions and innovative speculations. Beneath these speculations lay a profound reconceptualization of nature.'
In broad terms, the conceptual landscape that emerged in the fourteenth century resulted from a striking shift in the models derived to represent order and activity in the natural world: from a static world of numbered points and perfections to a dynamic world of ever-changing values conceived as continua in expansion and contraction; from a mathematics of arithmetical addition to a mathematics of geometrical multiplication, newly accepting of the approximate and the probable; from a world of fixed and absolute values to a shifting, relational world in which values were understood to be determined relative to changing perspectives and conditions; and from a philosophy focused on essences and perfections to one dominated by questions of quantification and measurement in respect to motion and change. Each of these new directions proved to be of great importance to the future of scientific thought.”
Proto-scientific speculation in the fourteenth century developed within the rigorous intellectual culture of the university, particularly at Paris and Oxford. The abstraction, logical density, and technical complexity characterizing this speculation engage and impress logicians and historians of science to this day. Given the highly refined and formal intellectualism of scholastic natural philosophy, it is understandable that with few exceptions historians of medieval science have hesitated to step outside the sphere of intellectual culture in their search for the factors influencing its development.
This book suggests a broader historical explanation for the new directions taken in fourteenth-century natural philosophy than has so far been offered. It argues that the transformation of the conceptual model of the natural world, accomplished within the technical disciplines of the universities of Oxford and Paris c. 1260-1380, was strongly influenced by the rapid monetization of European society taking place over this same period, beyond the university and outside the culture of the book. It analyzes the impact of the monetized marketplace on the most striking and characteristic concern of natural philosophy in this period: its preoccupation with measurement, gradation, and the quantification of qualities. It investigates the transference of insights from the philosophical comprehension of the monetized marketplace to the philosophical comprehension of nature. It traces how those perceptual shifts essential to the emergence of modern science — the shift toward quantification, geometric representation, multiplication, relativity, probability, mechanistic order, and dynamic equilibrium — were grounded in the experience and comprehension of monetized society.
In the early years of the fourteenth century, English natural philosophers associated with Merton College, Oxford, initiated a vital new approach to the study of motion and qualitative change.* These scholars, now known collectively as the ““Merton School’ or the “Oxford Calculators,”’ constructed a highly technical logic and mathematics of measurement.* They applied mathematical rules and quantitative schemata to awide range of philosophical questions concerning qualities and motions, including the question of motion in space.> In the process of refining their logico-mathematical analysis of qualitative change, the Calculators laid the foundations for a future mathematical physics.
By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, masters at the University of Paris began to adopt the intellectual interests and methods of the English Calculators. As they did so, the passion to measure and quantify that characterized the proto-science of calculationes quickly invaded every realm of scholastic thought, including theology. Soon not only entities that had never been measured before, but also those that have never been measured since, were subjected to a kind of quantitative analysis. Theological questions concerning the most subjective and seemingly immeasurable qualities, such as the strength of Christian charity, or the comparison of human love to Christ’s love, or the means by which the quality of grace increases in the soul, were routinely treated as problems of quantification, and subjected to analysis according to the latest developments in the logic and mathematics of measurement.°®
Struck by the application of measuring schemata to the solution of philosophical and theological problems, John Murdoch asked: “How and why did the near frenzy to measure everything imaginable come about in the fourteenth century?”’? Murdoch’s question, first posed more than two decades ago, is central to this present study. How are new conceptual possibilities created? Why are new intellectual problems and approaches suddenly brought to prominence? With characteristic forthrightness, Murdoch admitted that he could not answer with certainty how a measuring ‘“‘mania’’ came to dominate speculation in this period, but he suggested a number of possibilities. His first suggestion pointed to a creative dynamic produced solely from within the logic of the intellectual-philosophical debate.* His second suggestion broadened the range of influence to include the “‘catalyst’’ of theological concerns.’ Here he cited, above all, the many dimensions of measurement involved in the central theological question of the relation of finite humanity to an infinite God.’°
In explaining the new frenzy to measure qualities primarily as the working out of problems generated from within the philosophical tradition, Murdoch articulates a position on philosophical and scientific innovation prevalent among historians of medieval science. Murdoch goes further, however, when he suggests as a third area of influence the social and intellectual milieux of the university.'! Edith Sylla has investigated this connection between philosophical speculation and its university setting in depth. She has shown the relationship between the vibrant, sometimes fierce, “disputational context” of the university and the evolving mathematical and logical form of both the questions asked and the answers considered successful in philosophical debate.'? While acutely conscious of the impact of scholastic society on the shape and direction of philosophical inquiry, Sylla has limited her consideration of social factors to the society of scholars within the schools. With few exceptions, historians of medieval science have hesitated to step outside the university and outside the sphere of a refined intellectual culture in their analysis of fourteenth-century natural philosophy.’
As the reading of any text in natural philosophy from this period indicates, the great majority of positions taken and points made were in response not to external experiences or influences, but to questions and positions defined by the ongoing debate. In this literature, logic dominates and leads. Evidence of direct experience in the world beyond the text is rare. Historians of medieval science have, therefore, directed their attention primarily toward the internal elements of scholastic debate and of university culture.
While the internal analysis of texts and traditions provides the base on which all intellectual history must rest, at certain points its limitations in explaining intellectual innovation become apparent even to those most committed to its practice.'* These limitations are especially clear in the case of major shifts in perception and direction like those that defined fourteenth-century natural philosophy.’ It is difficult to see (to take one set of examples) how influences coming solely from within the schools can explain the strength of the intellectual movement of calculationes, or the preoccupation with measurement and relation that informed it, or the faith in the potential of quantification that underlay it, or the new perceptual models of the natural world from which it arose. Understanding intellectual innovation of this magnitude requires an approach that focuses on the interaction between the culture of the schools and new conceptual models coming from beyond the schools — in this case models that took shape as scholars directly (and sometimes painfully) experienced and sought to comprehend the dynamic of the monetized marketplace.
Without the vibrant intellectual culture of the medieval university in place — its disputational context, its characteristic attention to detail and logical rigor, its passion to synthesize — social experience and economic insights would never have been translated into new conceptual models, much less into mathematical and logical languages capable of expressing and refining these models. But at the same time, the rigid formality of scholastic discourse, and the focus of fourteenth-century natural philosophy on the technical intricacies of mathematics and logic, has disguised the rich layer of contact between philosophical speculation and social experience in this period. The biography of virtually every natural philosopher of note from the late thirteenth century reveals that the world of higher thought was not bounded by the walls of the university, whether actual or metaphorical. The new conceptual model of nature’s form and activity arose in the minds of men who were deeply involved in the life of their society and highly conscious of the transformative process of monetization taking place within it.
The students and masters at Oxford and Paris lived in urban settings where the effects of monetization and commercialization were everywhere to be seen and experienced.'* Were the student to venture into High Street in Oxford, or to cross the Grand pont in Paris, he would likely be caught up in crowded markets as he measured the price of a coveted pen or book or tankard against the coins in his purse. Ifhe were a foreigner to the city, as was most likely, he would be brought into frequent contact with moneychangers and the complex equations that converted his currency into locally accepted coin. He would be required to calculate and husband his resources in a society that provided numerous opportunities for spending. It is hardly surprising that the earliest surviving letters from university students witness their preoccupation with monetary shortages and record their pleas for financial aid.'”
The involvement of the student in the world of the market was not limited to periodic encounters, nor did it end with his inception as master. Ifanything, it seems to have increased in the case of those scholars most responsible for the new proto-scientific direction in natural philosophy. The one constant in the biographies of these scholars is that they were repeatedly given responsibilities in practical affairs drawing on thinking far removed from their philosophical and theological training. Indeed, the most innovative and influential scholars of the century seem almost to have been on an informal bureaucratic track, with their experience as administrators beginning during their university careers and ending with exalted positions in the bureaucracies of Church or civil government. '*
Within the universities, every examination taken, every grade passed and degree earned, had a price attached to it. The surviving administrative records from Oxford and Paris attest to the range of fees charged and the amount of conscious effort required of the master-scholars in the assessment and collection of these fees — for the teaching masters at the university were in almost all cases its administrators as well.'? The minute monetary regulation and gradation of university life was further complicated by the habit of varying each fee levied in proportion to the ability of each student to pay. Again it was ordinarily the teaching masters who were charged with assessing, collecting, accounting for, and recording these fees. The evidence in surviving university records for continued bureaucratic involvement has led one modern scholar to conclude that university masters of the fourteenth century spent as much of their time performing administrative duties as they did writing and lecturing.”'
The economic writings left by these masters (examined in chapters 3-5) reveal how strongly their administrative experience influenced their perceptions of money and exchange. The same scholars whose economic writings are studied in this book and whose work demonstrates the clearest insight into the structure of economic life — Godfrey of Fontaines, Henry of Ghent, Peter John Olivi, John Duns Scotus, Geraldus Odonis, Walter Burley, Richard Kilvington, Jean Buridan, Nicole Oresme — all made significant and forward-looking contributions in the area of natural philosophy. To take but one example, each of these thinkers played a vital role in refining the concept of qualitative intensity, a concept central to the intellectual movement of calculationes and to proto-scientific thought in the fourteenth century.”
Despite ample evidence for the involvement of fourteenth-century natural philosophers in the economic life of their time, not one directly acknowledges the impact of social and economic experience on his philosophical speculation. While in their economic writings they continually state that “money measures all things” (inventum est nummisma ut sit medium et mensura omnium commutabilium), and while they investigate in great depth how money performs its function of measuring, relating, and equalizing, they never directly acknowledge its influence on their philosophical preoccupation with these same questions of measurement, relation, and equalization. Although they often remark on money’s extraordinary success as an instrument of gradation and commensuration, they never acknowledge it as a model for the conceptual instruments they themselves devised to perform similar functions within philosophical discourse. At a number of points in the following pages I discuss this lack of acknowledgment (or recognition) and what I believe are its probable causes, but some general observations can be made here.”
In contrast to modern scientific attitudes, scholastic thinkers expressed strong doubts that scientific truths could be based upon personal and particular experiences of an ever-changing object world. They believed that observations drawn from personal experience lacked the necessity, universality, and truth-value required by science. There was, consequently, a concerted effort to cleanse philosophical discourse from the taint of its contact with contingent experience. Insights drawn from the experience of nature were quickly denatured — translated into propositions and logical terms deemed to be the proper subjects of scholastic debate. In a paradox that has often been remarked upon, many of the most important works in natural philosophy of this period contain not a single reference to personal observations of nature.
Experiences drawn from economic life carried with them a double weight of negative connotations since, even when scholastic thinkers recognized the importance of economic activity, they remained suspicious of it. When the influential natural philosopher, Jean Buridan, writes on economic questions, he shows conclusively that he understands the multi-faceted role of money as an instrument of measurement in exchange — particularly money’s capacity to bring the most diverse goods into a common system of measurement and relation.** Faced with a parallel question of measurement in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Buridan asks whether money as a common measure of diverse goods can serve as a “proper” model for the philosophical measurement of diverse species.
Here, however, in the context of natural philosophy, he concludes that it cannot. Speaking within a tradition of medieval economic commentary, he notes that money can measure only relative and everchanging economic values, not the essential qualities and natures that are of concern to philosophy. Even more damaging in his eyes was the association of monetary measurement with fraud. The economic value that money measures as selling price is, Buridan writes, often distorted through a bargaining process in which deception is intended by both buyer and seller. Thus, although Buridan is acutely aware of money’s function as the common measure of all goods in his society, he cannot accept its influence as a measure in philosophy.** A similar disjunction is found in the work of every philosopher considered in this book. Given the strict requirements for truth, universality, and necessity in the highly formal discourse of scholastic natural philosophy, medieval thinkers never explicitly acknowledge the influence of any model drawn from the tainted sphere of the marketplace on their philosophical speculation.
In the absence of this conscious recognition (the ‘“‘smoking gun,” so to speak), I have relied throughout on the method of isolating and comparing elements of the scholastic model of the monetized marketplace (including the model of money as measure) with the defining elements of the proto-scientific model of nature that emerged in the fourteenth century. After isolating the elements that I believe define both intellectual spheres, I detail the verbal and formal similarities existing between them and the many levels of connection joining them. To make it easier for the reader to test the strength of these connections, I use the same category headings in my chapters on scientific thought as I do in my chapters on economic thought.
In order to explore the relationship between economic insights into the monetized marketplace and philosophical insights into the workings of nature, it is necessary to link areas of historical investigation rarely considered together: economic history, the history of economic thought, and the history of science. The goal of integrating the findings in these areas determines the structure of this work. In chapter 1, I provide definitions of monetization, market development, and monetary consciousness that are followed throughout the work. I then consider the progress of monetization and the level that market organization had achieved in England and France by the middle of the fourteenth century. The chapter concludes with details from the biographies of leading fourteenth-century natural philosophers, illustrating their involvement in a range of administrative duties that brought them into close contact with the economic life of their society.
Scholastic philosophers inhabited an intellectual universe as well as a social universe. Authoritative texts and contemporary philosophical debates framed and mediated their social experience. Knowledge of the rich tradition of scholastic writing on economic subjects is essential to understanding how scholastic thinkers “experienced” the new dynamic of the monetized marketplace. In chapters 2 through 5 I investigate the scholastic literature on money and market exchange, considering both the authoritative texts inherited on these subjects and the important additions and corrections made to these texts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Chapter 2 considers Aristotle’s detailed discussion of money and economic exchange in Book v of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle’s conception of economic exchange as a dynamic process of equalization, one that could be represented both as a mathematical equation and as a geometric figure, had great influence on scholastic economic thinking. His markedly mathematical, geometrical, and relativist treatment of exchange provided an important textual ground for the later linking of scholastic economic thought with proto-scientific speculation.
In chapter 3 I consider the two earliest and most influential commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics: those of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. These commentaries reveal the understanding, acceptance, and even expansion of Aristotle’s sophisticated analysis of money and exchange by Christian thinkers of the middle of the thirteenth century. They provide as well the point against which we can measure the rapid development of money and market consciousness from the late thirteenth century.
Chapter 4 is divided into two parts, both of which are concerned with the central question of equality and equalization in exchange. The first part considers the definition of equality in writings on usury and just price theory from the earliest church councils through the thirteenth century. The second part follows the history of the changing philosophical conception of equality and equalization through the late thirteenth century: from a knowable and numerically definable point of equality to an estimated, geometrically defined range (or “‘latitude’’) of approximation. I illustrate the conflict between older arithmetical and newer geometrical conceptions of economic equality through a heated philosophical-economic debate that occurred at the end of the thirteenth century between two Parisian masters, Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines.
Chapter 5, the last of the economic chapters, investigates developments in economic thinking that occurred over the course of the fourteenth century. The focus here is on the economic writings of those scholars who at the same time made pivotal contributions to fourteenthcentury natural philosophy: Peter John Olivi, John Duns Scotus, Walter Burley, Richard Kilvington, Geraldus Odonis, Albert of Saxony, Jean Buridan, and Nicole Oresme. Although scholastic economic thinking has often been characterized as abstract, unrealistic, and bounded by authority, a close reading of fourteenth-century texts reveals the willingness of philosophers and theologians to reformulate economic conceptions in order to comprehend and accurately describe the changing realities of the monetized marketplace.
In the speculation considered in chapter 5, we come most forcefully to those economic insights that had the greatest influence on scientific speculation: the recognition of money as a common measuring continuum for all commodities in exchange; the social geometry of a world perceived to be tied together by economic exchange and the medium of money; the comprehension of the relativist determination of all values in the marketplace; the understanding of the necessity of a mathematics of the approximate in the exchange equation; and, perhaps most important, the emerging sense of the marketplace as a dynamic, supra-personal, self-ordering system of equalization.
I have come to recognize that these insights can be organized into six conceptual categories, in each of which developments in scholastic economic thought connect to proto-scientific speculation: (1) mathematics and the geometry of exchange; (2) equality, the mean, and equalization in exchange; (3) money as medium and as measure; (4) relation and the relativity of value in exchange; (5) common valuation in exchange; and (6) the social geometry of monetized society. The chapters on scholastic economic thought are divided into headings determined by these categories.
The concluding chapters, 6 and 7, are focused on new directions in the comprehension and representation of nature pursued within fourteenthcentury natural philosophy. Under each of the six category headings, defining elements of the new scholastic understanding of monetized exchange are related to specific innovations within fourteenth-century natural philosophy. It is, I believe, within this fertile area of connection between perceptions ofa dynamic, monetized society and perceptions of a dynamic nature that philosophers created the conceptual landscape within which Western science later developed.
In discussing the complex relationship between economic and protoscientific thought in the fourteenth century, a question arises concerning the direction in which the insights flowed. Were they insights originally derived to make sense of pressing new economic and social realities that were then applied to the understanding of the natural world, or were they insights developed within the philosophical and intellectual tradition of the schools that were then applied to the understanding of economic problems? This question cannot be answered unconditionally. Clearly there was influence in both directions.”° The very act of creating conceptual models rested on the existence of a sophisticated university culture, proficient in the exercise of logic and criticism, and confident in its powers of creative speculation. But, while allowing for the strength of scholastic culture, my study of particular intersections between economic and proto-scientific thought has led me to conclude that the creative impulse behind the fertile new models of measurement, relation, and equalization emerging within the schools came largely from the experience and comprehension of unsettling social and economic developments that were transforming the society beyond the schools.?’
The interchange between economic and scientific perceptions is considered at many points in the following chapters. Taken together they provide an outline of a mechanism of transference between the scholar’s conception of the social world and his conception of the natural world, between his insights into the working of a monetized society and his insights into the working of a newly quantifiable and measurable nature. To scholastic thinkers influenced by Roman and canon law and Aristotle’s analysis of exchange in Ethics v, the monetized marketplace came to be perceived as a dynamic system of equalization, governed by its own proper mathematics and logic. Take exchangers with unequal needs exchanging unequal products at crossed purposes (each wanting to buy cheap and to sell dearly); add money as a line instrument of commensuration and relation; allow a relativist price to fluctuate in relation to need and calculated benefit; expand the system of equilibrium from the individual exchange to the community of exchangers; and the result was, somehow, market order and equality. What is more, from the middle of the thirteenth century, the order established by the self-equalizing marketplace of free exchangers was coming to be recognized as resistant to, and in some ways superior to, an order imposed by decree, even when motivated by the best social intentions.”*
In the religious and philosophical universe of the thirteenth century, where the existence of order necessarily, as Aquinas said, implied the existence of an active ordering intelligence,” where in the Aristotelian universe even the movement of the celestial spheres required the constant intervention of active intelligences, there was no other system that conformed to the scholastic conception of the self-equalizing system of market exchange.*° Serious ethical and theological questions were raised by an order in which equality and justice resulted from an impersonal, almost mechanical, common process, rather than from a conscious ethical decision on the part of individuals.* And the model of market equalization was worse than merely impersonal. As the fourteenth century progressed, scholastic thinkers realized that market equality was the geometric product of willed inequalities — crossed diagonals — each exchanger seeking to benefit more than the other from the exchange.” Such production of order and equality out of willed inequality violated the essence of the traditional metaphysical and physical understanding of the ordo rerum.
As the power and weight of the marketplace within society grew over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, opposition between the economic order and traditional models of natural order led to continuing attempts (seen most clearly within scholastic usury theory) to force economic definitions to conform to traditional definitions of “natural” equality.*? The distinction between natural order and market order created great tension within an intellectual culture whose habit was to unify and synthesize. The tension grew as the power and position of the market in society grew, until, by the late thirteenth century, as a result of this continued opposition, it was the conception of the natural order that began to give way.** Scholastic natural philosophers began to create a new model of nature, one that could comprehend the order and logic of the marketplace — dynamic, self-equalizing, relativistic, probabilistic, and geometrical — a nature constructed and bound together by lines in constant expansion and contraction. It was within this new model of nature that science emerged.
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