From Copernicus to Freud: Five books that changed the world

In the span of a thousand years, there have been many great men who have shaped the history of mankind with their monumental works. T.G.VAIDYANATHAN, referring to five of them, explains, how each one , in his respective field - be it science, literature or politics - became the torchbearer of human destiny.

1. Nicolaus Copernicus, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" (On the Revolution of Celestial Bodies) (1543)

THE Cambridge don, Sir Hebert Butterfield, in his influential The Origins of Modern Science (1949) observes in his 'Introduction' that the "scientific revolution, popularly associated with the 16th and 17th Centuries, ...overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world - since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastism but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics - it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom" (Ibid, p.vii). The name that springs to mind at once is that of the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus 'Koppernigk' (latinised to 'Copernicus' when he came to Cracow University at the age of 18 sometime in the winter of 1491-92) who spent 40 years of his life in building a new theory of the world. And, yet, his great book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, was published only a few months before his death in 1543 in Nuremberg - although it was completed in 1530 - for fear of reprisals from the Church for he was himself a canon of Frauenberg cathedral! As a monument of scientific genius, it ranks with Almagest of Ptolemy, with Newton's Principia and with Darwin's The Origin of Species. Copernicus was on his deathbed the day - May 24, 1543 - the first printed copy of his book was brought to him by Bishop Tiedemann Giese. Giese has described the last sad scene to Rheticus who had done so much in persuading Copernicus to publish his book: "He had lost his memory and mental vigour many days before," observes Giese, "and he saw his completed work only at his last breath upon the day that he died" observes the noted Copernican scholar, Angus Armitage, in his The World of Copernicus (Mentor, 1951), p.102.

Copernicus offered arguments in the book for heliocentrism viz., that the Earth and other planets travel around the sun.

However, the assumption of circular motion meant that he had to complicate the paths by retaining 34 in place of the 80 epicycles of the Ptolemaic system to accord with observation. Still, the atmosphere of Copernicus's work is not entirely modern. Bertrand Russell in his A History of Western Philosophy(Allen & Unwin, 1948) describes it as 'Pythagorian.' There are, as we have noted, still epicycles in his system. And, gravest of all, there is the absence of stellar parallax which was - with improved measurement techniques - observed only in the 19th Century.

What was important in his work was "the dethronement of the earth from its geometrical pre-eminence" which made it difficult to give man the cosmic importance given to him in the Christian theology..." (Ibid, p.548). In his epoch-making book, De Revolutionibus, Copernicus revised Ptolemy's mathematical models by eliminating equant points and by taking the sun to be (roughly) the centre of the universe. The sun-centred system explains magnitudes and frequencies of the retrograde motions of the planets which the Earth-centred system of Ptolemy does not.

Copernicus had set forth as clearly as possible all the coordinates of the new system which ruined the traditional geocentrism sanctioned by scriptural authority and by that of Aristotle and of St. Thomas Aquinas. Still the Copernican revolution remained a silent revolution, so to speak, until the work of his successors Tycho Brahe in Denmark, Kepler in Prague and Galileo in Italy in the first decades of the 17th century.

The actual publication of Copernicus's book was overseen by a Lutheran minister, Andreas Osiander, who, because Luther had condemned the book even before publication, had added a preface to the effect that the Earth did not move but calculations would be easier if one assumes it did! Even so, the metaphysical and doctrinal implications were not grasped immediately by the dignitaries of Rome - till the arrival of Galileo. Alexander Koyre, in his magisterial La Revolution Astronomique (The Astronomical Revolution), (Paris:Hermann, 1961) does not rule out this possibility. The book is dedicated to the Pope and hence escaped official condemnation at least until the time of Galileo. Copernicus stands at the gateway of the modern world.

2. Shakespeare, Hamlet

The 17th Century begins, appropriately enough, with Shakespeare's Hamlet (1600-01), the most famous play of the last millennium and, arguably, the greatest play 'ever' written.

Significantly, reversing the Copernican verdict, it once again put Man at the centre of the universe. Consider Hamlet's famous apostrophe to Man in Act II. Sc ii.:

"What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals..."

If this eulogy to Man sounds a bit too abstract, consider Ophelia's eulogy to 'a' particular man - Hamlet - towards the end of Act III. Sc i:

"O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

The courtier's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword,

Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion, and the mold of form,

Th' observed of all observers, quite, quite down!"

An index of Hamlet's 'universality 'and popularity can be gleaned from this possibly apocrypal story. The story goes that an old lady went to see the play and found it full of famous quotations! But what she didn't realise was that all the quotations were all from the play itself! In a list of 'quotations' from the complete Shakespeare canon in Oxford English (Delhi, 1986), I found that as many as 47 out of a grand total of 176 quotations are all from Hamlet! Macbeth is way behind with 15. This quotability surely is one sign of its universal popularity. General Sir John Hackett, who fought and was wounded in the Battle of Arnhem towards the end of World War II (he is listed as "Brig. J.W. Hackett of the 4th Parachute Brigade, wounded and evader" in Appendix I of Martin Middlebrook's Arnhem 1944: The Airborne Battle, 17-26 September (Penguin, 1995) spent four months as a fugitive in occupied Holland ('after' his brigade's grim ordeal in the Oosterbeek perimeter) rediscovered Hamlet: "If I must single out one play, it would be Hamlet, as penetrating a comment on the human condition (mine, yours)...."

"Penetrating comment on the human condition" is probably the most apt description of the greatness of Hamlet. Still, its place today in the Western literary canon is heavily under fire from the anti-canon brigade of Foucault, Barthes and their many clones.

But 'resentment' (or envy?) of Shakespeare began way back in Tolstoy's Shakespeare and the Drama (1898) and what we see today is a revival of the resentment under a new management.

Tolstoy hated Shakespeare - particularly the aristocratic Lear - and set the tone early on for the anti-canonists. Marx, however, loved Shakespeare - notably Timon of Athens (1605-08) - and so did Freud who, in addition to Hamlet, found much to admire, especially the celebrated casket scene in The Merchant of Venice. And nobody has had a greater influence on our intellectual life than Marx and Freud. Let me conclude my all too summary remarks on Hamlet by quoting two recent parodies of the opening lines of the play's most famous soliloquy (reproduced in The Faber Book of Parodies Ed. Simon Brett (1984):

"To 'print', or not to 'print' - that is the question.

Whether 'tis better in a trunk to bury

The quirks and crotchets of outrageous fancy,

Or send a well-wrote copy to the press,

And by disclosing, end them?"

- Richard Jago

"To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis better in this life to suffer

The petty trials of unmarried life

Or add one more unto a list of troubles,

And thus by marriage end them?"

- William H. Edmunds

Hamlet earned Shakespeare, in contemporary value of currency, a mere five pounds! Need I say more about the continuing relevance of the play?

3. Sir Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) published in 3 volumes (1686-87).

The most important scientific work in the second half of the 17th Century was Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica but the beginnings of Newton's momentous discovery of the universal laws of gravitation are now the stuff of schoolboy legend. Newton, the son of a farmer in the sleepy Lincolnshire hamlet of Woolsthorpe, was studying in Cambridge when plague broke out in London in 1665 and rapidly spread to the suburbs causing the University to close down. The students had to return home and among the evacuees was young Isaac Newton, a newly fledged B.A. who had just turned 22. Marooned in Lincolnshire for months on end, Newton's thoughts turned to old perplexing problems. One autumn day, playing in the orchard at Woolsthorpe, watching the fall of an apple from a tree brought vividly before Newton's mind the mystery of gravity. After about 18 months of concentrated mental effort, Newton produced his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy - probably the greatest scientific book ever written for it is the foundation of all modern textbooks of mechanics. It also formed the basis of scientific method that govern the study of natural phenomena.

His remark 'Hypotheses non fingo' ('I frame no hypotheses') was a watchcry for the ideologues of the 'experimental philosophy,' among them John Stuart Mill. Newton refused to frame hypotheses that were not verifiable, unlike Rene Descartes who hypothesised the existence of vortices to explain gravitation. Newton's universal law of gravitation holds: "Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force whose direction is that of the line joining the two, and whose magnitude is directly as the product of the masses and inversely as a square of their distance from each other." Newton's discovery, which gives an accurate description of phenomena on earth as well as in celestial space, breaks down the long held belief that heavenly bodies were of special and divine nature.

And yet Newton was no athiest! John Maynard Keynes writing on the occasion of Newton's centenary felt that Newton was "the last of the Magi." His latest biographer, Frank E. Manuel, in his The Religion of Isaac Newton(1974) - based on an analysis of Newton's manuscripts of the 1670s and 1680s when Newton was in his prime, mind you - has pointed out that "Newton held it... our duty to study scripture as objective historic record."

Still, it is amazing that Newton's God appears explicitly only once in the first edition of the Principia. This single reference occurs casually in Book 3 - when Newton argues that God must have placed the planets at different distances from the sun for some purpose - but even this Newton regretted and removed the passage from his interleaved and annotated copy of the first edition as I.B. Cohen has recently pointed out.

Henceforth, anyone was free to believe that "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork" (The Holy Bible, Psalm 19) but "no one could let this belief intervene in an astronomical calculation", as Bertrand Russell has pointed out in his A History of Western Philosophy.

Astronomy soon became an extension of Newton's mechanics and the return of the great comet of 1682 in 1758 - at the time predicted by Edmund Halley who, incidently, payed for the printing of the Principia - was viewed as a confirmation of the validity of Newton's theory of gravitation. Newton's theory of gravitation provided a theoretical basis for the Copernicun system and Kepler's laws. Newton's work was the starting point of a new field, celestial mechanics, that was to dominate astronomy for the next 200 years. Pope's great epitaph - intended for Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey -

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night

God said "Let Newton be," and all was light

is fully deserved.

4. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

No single book has altered the life of mankind as comprehensively as The Communist Manifesto (1848), prompting the well-known British historian, A.J.P. Taylor - who wrote the introduction to the 1967 Pelican edition - to describe it as "a holy book in the same class as the Bible or the Quran" (Ibid, p.7). A mere 12,000 words, occupying a modest 33 pages, The Communist Manifesto often carried much lengthier introductions in its frequent reprintings in various European languages. 515 editions appeared between 1848-1918 and a further 218 editions between 1919-1959. Lenin's The State and Revolution- written before the Bolshevik revolution - is clearly an adaptation of the Marxist Manifesto.

No on who has read it - perhaps even those who haven't! - can ever forget its grim opening sentence:"A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism" nor its stirring call to action at the very end: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" In between, The Communist Manifesto is "an amalgamation of German philosophy, French politics and English econimics" (Taylor, p.12). Although the Manifesto appeared under the joint authorship of Marx and Engels, Engels himself, in his Preface to the English edition of 1888, admitted that "although The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition, which forms its nucleus, belongs to Marx" (Ibid, p.62). That proposition was that "the whole history of mankind... has been a history of class struggles...." The Manifesto begins by outlining the history of society. It contains a fine recognition of the achievements of the bourgeosie: "It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades."

But this panegyric serves only as a prelude to a wholesale denunciation of bourgeois society: "Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." (Ibid, p.85-86). There follows a crushing tirade against bourgeois hegemony for "not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons - the modern working class - the proletarians."

After this the Manifesto proceeds to define the position of the Communist Party. Marx and Engels had indeed been summoned by the Communist League to produce the Manifesto as their programme. The Communist League was a German working-class group which later became international. It was at its congress in London in November1847 that Marx and Engels were entrusted with this task. On January 26, 1848, the London committee sent an ultimatum to Brussels. Citizen Marx was warned that unless he produced his Manifesto by February1, "further measures will have to be taken against him." Marx just made his deadline! And yet the Manifesto passed unnoticed during the turmoil of both the French and German revolutions of 1848.

Ironically, the Manifesto does not contain Marx's famous phrase - "the dictatorship of the proletariat." But the idea is there though the phrase is not. Now, nearly 150 years after Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto "the dictatorship of the proletariat" has not come about although there have been periodic crises in the capitalist systenm: the Wall Street crash of '29 and the more recent crash of '87. The mighty USSR is no more and of the new Russia, Boris Yeltsin is President. In his autobiography, Against the Grain (New York, 1992), Yeltsin recounts with a very Russian brand of irony the preposterous oral exam he took at the local Party Committee for membership:

"[The examiner] asked me on what page of which volume of Das Kapital Marx refers to commodity-money relationships.

Assuming that he had never read Marx closely and had, of course, no idea of either the volume or page number in question, and that he didn't even know what commodity-money relationships were, I immediately answered, half-jokingly, 'Volume Two, page 387.' What's more I said it quickly, without pausing for thought. To which he replied, with a sage expression, 'Well done, you know your Marx well." After it all, I was accepted as a Party member." (David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York 1993), p.195).

This incident shows more clearly than anything I have read so far why Communism failed in Eastern Europe as well. After all, Richard Crossman's notorious 1949 collection of essays "The God that Failed" - only explained why Communism failed in Western Europe. If religion is the opium of the people - as Marx wrote in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right - then it looks as if Marxism itself ended up, unwittingly, as the opium of the intellectuals.

5. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

In an unusual departure from his customary modesty, Freud once referred to himself as a Copernicus of the mind and on another occasion compared himself to Darwin. Perhaps he is closer to Copernicus than he himself realised. Hunting in the luxuriant jungles of childhood experience, Freud came up with some fascinating trophies, none so spectacular or as controversial as the Oedipus complex - which is to the human mind what Newton's universal law of gravitation is to the whole universe. The Oedipus complex is encoded in all human myths, fairy tales and dreams. It is a nuclear complex of all neuroses. Let me illustrate using some of the most well-known texts both from Western literature and from Indian classics.

Freud himself devoted a long footnote in the original 1900 edition to a discussion of Hamlet (in the 1934 edition he elevated it into the main text) by declaring that "Shakespeare's Hamlet has its roots in the same soil as "Oedipus Rex"... in the Oedipus the child's wishful phantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realised as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed and just as in the case of a neurosis - we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences. Strangely enough, the overwhelming effect produced by the more modern tragedy has turned out to be compatible with the fact that people have remained conpletely in the dark as to the hero's character."

Freud's most famous disciple and earliest biographer, Ernest Jones, published an entire book to the similarity between Western culture's most archetypal heroes in his 1947 book Hamlet and Oedipu. Lest we think that the complex is a purely Western phenomenon, let me draw attention to the late A.K. Ramanujam's 1972 essay, The Indian Oedipus (included in The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujam, ed., Vinay Dharwadker (Oxford: Delhi, 1999). A Chicago Professor of Religion, Wendy Doniger, has gone a step further. She has argued in a recent essay (1993) that the story of Pradyumna (son of Krishna) in the "Vishnu Purana"(5.27.1-31) is a "clearer window into the unconscious than the most obvious Western parallel, Sophocles' "Oedipus the King." Robert Goldman, who is the general editor of the Princeton edition of the Ramayana and Professor of Sanskrit at Berkeley, has argued in his influential essay, Fathers, Sons, and Gurus: Oedipal Conflict in the Sankrit Epics(1978) that there are three basic versions of the oedipal conflict including the 'positive' version where the son kills the father as in the Greek myth. Only the third and most common version found in India is where the son submits to the father and virtually castrates himself - as in the Ganesa myth found in the "Siva Purana" (2.5.13.33). The Oedipus complex, first introduced in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams is indeed the most universal of human myths. It is to man's inner life what gravity is to nature. Even so while Freud may have really thought his work merited comparison to that of Copernicus and Darwin, already voices of dissent are being heard. The chief prosecutors have been Adolf Grunbaum - The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1984) - and Ernest Gellner - The Psychoanalytic Movement (London, 1985). Using a famous Popperian criterian, Grunbaum - a philosopher of science - argues that psychoanalysts entrench themselves in a 'proof against disproof' and so render themselves irrelevant to the explanation of observable human behaviour. Gellner - a Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University - characterises psychoanalysis as "a theory, a technique, an organisation, a language, an ethos, an ethic, a climate" leaving it unclear whether it is a good thing to be all these things in the first place! Gellner's unstated implication - much like Grunbaum's - is that whatever psychoanalysis is it is not a strict science. A recent TLS review of a 1999 collection of essays - "Freud 2000" edited by Anthony Elliott - carried the funereal title 'The End of Freud?.' Perhaps a poet who also knew his Freud should be allowed to have the last word. In his In Memory of Sigmund Freud, W.H. Auden wrote:

To us he is no more a person

Now but a whole climate of opinion

Under whom we conduct our different lives.

For Freud, to continue with Auden, has indeed become his admirers.

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