Art & Physics 6: The Age Of Reason Or The

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment

Art & Physics

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Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Although all knowledge begins with experience, it does not necessarily all spring from experience. Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant (1781)

Art degraded, imagination denied. Laocoön William Blake (1820)

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Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment By the early 18th century, science had replaced religion as the dominant social force in Western culture. “The term “soul” is therefore an empty one, to which nobody attaches any conception, and which an enlightened man should employ solely to refer to those parts of our bodies which do the thinking. Given only a source of motion, animated bodies will possess all they require in order to move, feel, think, repent - in brief, in order to behave, alike in the physical realm and in the moral realm which depends on it. Let us then conclude boldly that man is a machine, and that the whole universe consists only of a single substance subjected to different modifications.” L’homme machine (Julien de La Mettrie, 1709-1751) Not only is the universe a machine, so too is Man!

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Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Painting during this era became extremely realistic. art

intuition

geometry & perspective

measurement and theorems

neo-classsicism (rectilinear space, precise logic)

(Jean Auguste Ingres, 1780-1867)

painters presented social realism allegorically in the belief that art (like science) can change society

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Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment

Socrates (Jacques Louis David, 1748-1825)

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“Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.” John Constable (1776-1837)

The Haywain (1821)

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment The obsession for geometrical perspective spread to other areas, e.g. the Gardens of Versailles (built by Louis XIV, 1638-1715 - the Sun King). The gardens were laid out in strict accordance with Euclid’s postulates.

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Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Science

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1 space +

2 time +

3 motion +

4 matter +

“I frame no hypotheses.” Isaac Newton i.e. science deals only with matters that can be reasoned and evaluated by experimental evidence.

5 light +

Philosophy

6 mind

the question was how was the mind related to the world revealed by science?

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What is the major difference between rational discourse and religious dogma? Rational discourse allows one to doubt. “In order to reach the truth, it is necessary, once in one’s life, to put everything in doubt.” If you are doubting, you are thinking, and if you are thinking you must exist. “Cogito ergo sum.” (“I think, therefore I am.”)

René Descartes (1596-1650)

analytic geometry algebra + geometry

mind

matter dualism

pure thought + visual space (res cogitans) (res extensa)

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Other figures of the Enlightenment

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) French philosopher Editor of Encyclopédie

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 1694-1778 French writer Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764

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Other figures of the Enlightenment John Locke (1632-1704) English post-Renaissance philosopher Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690 “all our knowledge comes from experience and through our senses…there is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses. The mind is at birth a clean sheet, a tabula rasa; and sense experience writes upon it in a thousand ways, until sensation begets memory and memory begets ideas.” Sensations were the basis of thought Sensations are excited by matter Therefore, mind arises from matter

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Other figures of the Enlightenment Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) Irish philosopher and cleric “Esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived) Nothing exists apart from perception If a tree falls in a forest and there is no-one there to hear it, then it cannot make a sound. Since trees (the external world) cannot exist anywhere but in the mind, sensations can only occur in the mind. “All those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world have no substance without a mind.”

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Other figures of the Enlightenment

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Berkeley used the perception argument to prove the existence of God. He argued that because the mind of God was omniscient, He must be able to perceive everything all of the time. It was God’s perception, therefore, that enabled the world to exist without the need of man’s perception.

Samuel Johnson argued against Berkeley’s claims. How? By kicking a large stone with his foot and saying “I refute it thus!

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Other figures of the Enlightenment

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David Hume (1711-1776) decided both were wrong. Mind = abstraction that combines perceptions, memories, emotions into experiences that depend on both sensation (mind) and matter. “I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” A Treatise on Human nature He also concluded that the laws of nature, that were supposedly revealed by scientific enquiry, were not an inherent part of the world but were artifacts of the human mind. Furthermore, a sequence of events does not necessarily imply causality - the one exception being mathematics (where, by necessity, 2+2 will always lead to 4)

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment David Hume (1711-1776) The fact that event B follows event A does not mean that A caused B. This idea has echoes in 20th century philosophy...

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) The “law of universal causation” is an attempt to bolster up our belief that what has happened will happen again, which is no better founded than the horse’s belief that you will take the turning you usually take.

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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Our knowledge is not completely derived from our experiences - we inherit innate (a priori) knowledge the moment we are conceived and this knowledge is independent of sensory experience. Hence, for Kant, absolute truth and absolute science should be possible. We do not need to rely on experience every time we meet examples of a priori knowledge, e.g. that 2+2=4 or the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, etc... To explain this phenomena, Kant proposed that space and time are organs of perception. i.e. he extended Newton’s idea of absolute space and time in the external world to the inner world of the mind.

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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) For Kant, space could only have three dimensions and Euclid’s axioms were a priori truths which we are born with. space time

intuitive concepts inherent to the human mind

causality Hume

every man is an island, isolated from everyone else

Kant

we share common a priori knowledge of the world

Kant’s philosophy was known as Transcendental Idealism. It was an era in which science began to triumph over religion. But not everyone approved of this trend towards deterministic science...

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment John Donne (1572-1631) And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to looke for it. And freely men confesse that this world’s spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many anew; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his Atomies. ‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a Phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he. Anatomy of the World (1611)

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Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

In vain, in vain, - the all-composing Hour Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow'r. She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold Of Night Primeval, and of Chaos old! Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying Rain-bows die away. Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, The sick'ning stars fade off th' ethereal plain; As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand oppress'd, Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest; Thus at her felt approach, and secret might, Art after Art goes out, and all is Night. Dunciad Book IV (1728)

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“I realized that our existence is nothing but a succession of moments perceived through the senses.” “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes)

“I feel, therefore I am” (Rousseau) Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French philosopher, poet, 1712-1778)

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) “It would be very singular that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased.” Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) “All theory is against the freedom of will; all experience for it.”

John Milton (1694-1778) “But God left free the Will; for what obeys Reason is free.” Paradise Lost

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William Blake (1757-1827) Blake accused Renaissance perspective and Newton’s mechanics of destroying the human spirit. “I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what Ought to be Told. That I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly.” Letter to Thomas Butts, January 10, 1802 “Art is the Tree of life; Science is the Tree of Death.” The Laocoön, 1818 “What is the Life of Man but Art & Science? Jerusalem Plate 77: To the Christians, 1818

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Newton (William Blake, 1795)

Now eye of fourfold vision see And of fourfold vision is given to me 'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft beulah’s night; And twofold always may God us keep From single vision and Newton’s sleep.

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Newton is lost in concentration, reducing the world to a set of calculations, imposing rational order on an irrational world. Newton’s body is like a part of the stone on which he sits; he is almost reduced to the flat dimensions of the paper on which he draws - a victim to the tyranny of measurement over man.

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Newton (William Blake, 1795)

Now eye of fourfold vision see And of fourfold vision is given to me 'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft beulah’s night; And twofold always may God us keep From single vision and Newton’s sleep.

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Newton is lost in concentration, reducing the world to a set of calculations, imposing rational order on an irrational world. Newton’s body is like a part of the stone on which he sits; he is almost reduced to the flat dimensions of the paper on which he draws - a victim to the tyranny of measurement over man.

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One of twelve illustrations to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve are shown sleeping peacefully in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. They are watched over by the angels Ithuriel and Zephan, who have just discovered Satan (in the form of a toad) tempting Eve by whispering into her ear.

Adam and Eve Sleeping (William Blake, 1808)

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Dante Running from the Wild Beasts An illustration for Dante’s Divine Comedy: Dante is being saved by Virgil from the earthly (William Blake, 1824-6)

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Newton and Kant saw space as Euclidean (uniform and continuous) and time as Aristotelian (sequential). Blake saw them rather differently.... “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is…infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through chinks of his cavern.” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793 “Poetry fetter’d Fetters the Human Race. Nations are Destroy’d or Flourish in Proportion as Their Poetry, Painting and Music are Destroy’d or Flourish: The primeval state of Man was Wisdom, Art and Science.” Introduction to Jerusalem, 1804-1820

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Blake saw Art as the only path to truth. He declared that every man who is not an artist is a traitor to his own nature.

The Laocoön William Blake, c.1822

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Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Blake saw Art as the only path to truth. He declared that every man who is not an artist is a traitor to his own nature.

You Must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art. Prayer is the Study of Art. Praise is the Practice of Art. Fasting &c., all relate to Art. The outward ceremony is Antichrist… The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination. The Laocoön (1820)

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For Newton, space and time were totally separate and fixed absolutes containers providing a stage for matter to appear and motion to occur. For Blake, time and space were one. He was a four-dimensional man. His vision of the universe was anticipatory of the vision of relativistic physics with its space-time continuum. How can space and time be one thing instead of two? We perceive them as two things because of the vantage point from which we observe them (in a three-dimensional world). “I see the Past, Present & Future existing all at once / Before me.” William Blake, Jerusalem (15, lines 8-9)

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment 31 If a doughnut encounters flatland, flatlanders will see the doughnut as two circles. An observer in three dimensions will see only one doughnut.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour Auguries of Innocence

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment

Creation (Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475 - 1564)

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