The decision to try and crush Christianity’s spiritual tyranny was made well before the Enlightenment etc. All those things, very much including the Industrial Revolution, were launched as means to that end. But it’s true that the Industrial Revolution may by its very nature be set on this course, as you say. It is, then, like a domino whose very nature it is to fall when hit by another domino. The first domino, however, was pushed over by Machiavelli et al., who themselves were not dominoes (except in the sense of determinism, of course).
But Baconian science was from the very beginning under the yoke of a power that wanted to use it to advance its (good) purposes: that power being Machiavelli et al., to whom Bacon very much belonged. Their chief purpose was to make the world free for philosophy again or to keep it free for philosophy.
Indeed. And I’ve been thinking about that recently. I’ve been reminded of this passage:
“In passages deeply influenced by Nietzsche, he [Max Weber] analyzes the state as a relation of domination of man by man, founded on legitimate violence—that is, violence that is considered to be legitimate. Men inwardly accept being dominated if they have certain beliefs. There is no more foundation to legitimacy than the inner justification the dominated make to themselves in order to accept the violence of those who dominate them. These justifications are, according to Weber, of three kinds: traditional, rational, and charismatic. Some men submit because that is the way it has always been; others consent to obey competent civil servants who follow rationally established rules; and others are enchanted by the extraordinary grace of an individual. Of the three, charismatic legitimacy is the most important. No matter what conservatives may think, traditions had a beginning that was not traditional. They had a founder who was not a conservative or a traditionalist. The fundamental values informing that tradition were his creation. The tradition is the continuing half-life of the charmed moment when a happy few could live on the heights of inspiration with the creator. Tradition adjusts that inspiration to the ordinary, universal motives of man, such as greed and vanity; it routinizes the charisma. It is what it is because of that original impulse. So charisma is the condition of both the charismatic and the traditional legitimacies. It is also the splendid form of legitimacy. The rational is not informed by charisma, and the civil servants—bureaucrats—are therefore unable to make real decisions or take responsibility. They cannot, as we would say, determine the broad outlines of policy or, put more classically, establish ends. Mere competence can only serve already established goals and decide according to the established rules. It must be at least supplemented by charismatic leadership in order to be pointed in the right, or any, direction. So again charisma comes out on top. Value creation, the activity that writes the table of laws by which a people is constituted and lives, is, as Nietzsche tells, the nut in the shell of existence.” (Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, “Values”.)
Bloom draws Weber’s conclusion:
“The prophet becomes the pure model of the statesman—with very radical consequences.” (ibid.)
But Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is, as Heinrich Meier has shown, basically one long attempt at answering the question whether “Zarathustra” be a prophet or a philosopher. And the final answer is that he’s a philosopher. But what Meier has not grasped is the way in which “Zarathustra” overcomes the need for charisma—which, “as Weber knew perfectly well, is God-given grace” (ibid.)—i.e., revelation… How can reason overcome the need for revelation? How can it create values, how can it establish ends?
“Natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe. All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them. In the case of man, reason is required for discerning these operations: reason determines what is by nature right with ultimate regard to man’s natural end. The teleological view of the universe, of which the teleological view of man forms a part, would seem to have been destroyed by modern natural science.” (Strauss, Natural Right and History, Introduction.)
If we have a goal, reason can tell us what brings us closer to it and what doesn’t. But man’s natural end in its classic form is reason itself!:
“Islamic philosophy shared the ancient view that man is a special kind of being; that his ability to reason—his power to know himself and the whole—is the activity that marks him as different from other animals; and that reasoning is therefore the ultimate purpose of his existence.” (Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, page 16.)
Note that this latter reason is not the mere capacity for using logic—not mere ratio. The Latin translation ratio lacks the key meaning of “speech, word, statement” in the original Greek word, lógos, and this meaning is literally “gathering” (of words or, perhaps, thoughts). As I put it in my open letter to Leonardo DiCaprio almost seven years ago,
‘Reason has been misunderstood as being opposed to revelation. To be sure, the principle that constitutes it is that A is different from not-A, but that’s only half of it. The other half is to then see the unity of the two, the whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Not a divine but a natural revelation’.
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/t/open-letter-to-leonardo-dicaprio/45177?u=zeroeth_nature
Ratio is only the former half. Lógos is both halves taken together. And man himself as well as the whole, the universe, is such a ‘halves taken together’:
“[T]he mind of man belongs together with his build. They are together as much as the [black] root and [white] flower of the moly. There cannot be a change in one without a corresponding change in the other. […]
It has often been remarked that, while the prephilosophic term for the whole is ‘heaven and earth’, the philosophers call it kosmos, an ordered composite whose structure is intelligible only to the mind but is not apparent to the eye, which cannot go beyond its two most conspicuous parts.” (Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey, page 86.)