Abstract
While not quite like being eaten by a wolf and thrown over a cliff, the prospect of the internal collapse of the Classical formulation of consciousness has a serious impact. It lays bare the ambiguity at the heart of ordinary experience by serving notice on the ungroundedness of its underlying ontic conviction, leaving in sore need of resilvering the tarnished prestige of the power of mimesis and analogy to represent the “real.”1 The contemplative sight of the measure of the higher and the far, beheld at night, has become blurry and increasingly myopic. At worst, mimetic and analogical resemblance will prove to be inadequate to the task of meeting the needs, cares and necessities of ordinary life under the yoke of the criterion of beauty. At best they will be reduced in rank to become the “tools” of the rhetoric and logic of scientific persuasion.2
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References
See below, pp. 73f. for the specific form and problem taken by the internal collapse of the Classical formulation of consciousness.
For the rhetoric and logic specific to scientific persuasion, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo and the Art of Reasoning. Rhetorical Foundations of Logic and Scientific Method, Chapters 1 and 3; for a more general discussion, see Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art, Chapters 2 and 12; Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism. Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance,Chapter 6; and Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier. The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism.
See above, pp. 13f.
Below, pp. 56f.
Among other writings, see Alfred Schutz, “Common-sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” Collected Papers, Vol. I, pp. 19ff., 38ff.; and “Choosing Among Projects of Action,” ibid. pp. 67ff. Schutz’s definition of social action, employed here in modified form, is quite narrow; the context in which he developed it, and the reasons for the necessity of making it as narrow as it is, may be found in Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World , pp. 15f., 57ff., 144ff. The basic modification of Schutz’s account of social action introduced here is that the structure of center/periphery is regarded as the chief principle of the internal organization of social action in ordinary life. However, no attempt is made here to systematically develop, or imply the development of a phenomenology of social action, for which see Alfred Schutz/Thomas Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, Vol. I (1979), Vol. II (1984).
See Alfred Schutz, “Common-sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” loc. cit. , pp. 7ff.; Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, Chapter 3, especially pp. 66ff.; and “Tiresias, or Our Knowledge of Future Events,” Collected Papers, Vol. II, pp. 281ff.
For the idea of “historical specification” with respect to the stock of knowledge at hand, see Fred Kersten, “Phenomenology, History, and Myth,” pp. 242ff.
Paul Griffiths, “Rattle and Sellars: Hearing Debussy,” New Yorker, 28 June, 1993, p. 86.
See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 116f.; Alfred Schutz, “Husserl and the Social Sciences,” in Edmund Husserl, 1859–1959, pp. 95f.
See above, pp. 21f. In terms of the center of action, the world out of actual and potential reach is, on the Classical formulation of consciousness, the measure of the world within actual and potential reach. In what follows we shall examine how the new measure of the “real” is what is within actual and potential reach rather than what is out of reach, with correspondingly new meanings of “objectivity” and “measure.”
The mutual transformation of periphery and center requires further analysis beyond what we have introduced. This is not the place for such an analysis. However, I do not wish to imply that there is a multiplication of Here’s nor of zero-points of the system of spatial-temporal coordinates. It is instead a question of further analysis of internal organization and reorganization of the world within actual and potential reach consistent with the systems of relevances governing ordinary life as a whole.
For the limiting cases, see Kersten, “The Life-Concept and the Life-Conviction,” pp. 121ff. Death, for instance, would be a zero-point without any system of spatial-temporal coordinates to which a world within reach would be relative; it is “being” neither here nor there. See above, p. 32 and note 31.
For the idea of indication as a form of appresentation, see Alfred Schutz, “Symbol, Reality and Society,” Collected Papers, Vol. I, pp. 294ff., 306ff. The distinction between mimetic and analogical appresentation on the one hand, and indicational appresentation on the other hand, although not Schutz’s, is not wholly inconsistent, I believe, with Schutz’s distinction between sign and symbol. As I use the terms here, the distinction between mimetic and indicational appresentation cuts across that between sign and symbol. The discussion here is then a development and transformation of Schutz’s view, rather than its application. See “Loneliness and Solitude,” pp. 306ff. where I first argued against the idea that the experience of someone else is a case of mimetic or analogical appresentation; see also my “Constancy Hypothesis in the Social Sciences,” pp. 559ff.
See Schutz, op. cit., loc. cit., pp. 312ff.; “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl,” Collected Papers, Vol. III, pp. 61 ff. ; see also Fred Kersten, Phenomenological Method: Theory and Practice, §§ 19, 80, 89, 96.
See above, pp. 28ff.
Above, p. 30.
To speak of your Here and my Here is, of course, a linguistic impossibility, just as it is to speak of your “I” and my “I.” As with most such difficulties in ordinary life, we can ignore them for the practical purposes at hand.
See Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, Chapter 4, especially pp. 304ff.; also Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, pp. 160ff. For Schutz’s account of the specious present, see especially “On Multiple Realities,” Collected Papers, Vol. I, pp. 214ff. In this connection, see below, pp. 73f.f., and also Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, pp. 70f.
For this distinction, see R. Kearny, Dialogues with Contemporsary Thinkers, pp. 115f.
See above, pp. 21f.
Cited by Panofsky, Galileo as Critic of the Arts, p. 41. We shall return to Agucchi at the end of this chapter.
Above, p. x.
Erwin Panosky, “The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles,” p. 94.
Ibid., pp. 97ff., 113ff.; see also Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Chapter VIII, especially pp. 253f., and 272f.
The received wisdom is plausible that the elevation of the artist with the scientist and philosopher only occurs with and at the time of Dürer. However, if we consider significant, for instance, the fact that the fusion of the theory of human proportion and human motion, the basic epistemic condition for “perspectivism,” already occurs in Alberti’s works on architecture, in “architectual thinking,” such as the Descriptio urbis Romae, c. 1431, or De re aedificatoria, c. 1450, then we must count the elevation rather earlier. Cf. also Stefano Ray, Lo Specchio del Cosmo. Da Brunelleschi a Palladio: Itinerario nell’architettura del Rinascimento, pp. 47f.
What follows is based chiefly on Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pjp. 244ff., and Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Chapter 3; Kenneth Clark, The Art of Humanism, pp. 79ff.; John White, “Paragone: Aspects of the Relationship Between Sculpture and Painting,” in Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, pp. 43ff.; and Clagett, op. cit., loc. cit., pp. 283ff.
Just as whoever did the plates for Vesalius’ Fabrica had to work out the anatomy distinct from the largely Galenic text of Vesalius; see Hall, op. cit., pp. 48f.; White, op. cit., loc. cit., pp. 48f.
See Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pp. 257ff., 266f.
See Panofsky, “The History of the Theory of Human Proportions,” loc. cit. , p. 106: “When, after the ‘revival of classical antiquity’ had spent its momentum, these first concessions to the subjective principle came to be exploited to the full, the role of the theory of human proportions as a branch of art theory was finished. The styles that may be grouped under the heading of ‘pictorial’ subjectivism—the styles most eloquently represented by seventeenth-century Dutch painting and nineteenth-century Impressionism—could do nothing with a theory of human proportions, because for them solid objects in general, and the human figure in particular, meant little in comparison with the light and air diffused in unlimited space. The styles that may be grouped under the heading of ‘non-pictorial’ subjectivism—pre-Baroque Mannerism and modern ‘Expressionism’—could do nothing with a theory of human proportions, because for them the solid objects in general, and the human figure in particular, meant something only in so far as they could be arbitrarily shortened and lengthened, twisted, and, finally, disintegrated.” Eventually the stock of knowledge at hand becomes codified, socially approved as, broadly conceived, a “theory of human proportions,” only eventually to collapse under the weight of the continuance of its social derivation.
This sketch is, admittedly, rough; but our purpose is neither to develop nor to refine it; see Panofsky, “The History of the Theory of Human Proportions,” loc. cit., pp. 80ff.; White, op. cit., loc. cit., pp. 48ff. The symbolic appresentation takes an unusual turn in the Platonism of the Renaissance, even, for instance, in the later views of Dürer; see Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, p. 281. For the most part we are concerned here with what chiefly consists of a non-Platonistic or even anti-Platonistic formulation that will be more consistent with the formulation of consciousness deriving from Alberti’s work. To what extent Alberti himself was influenced, in any significant way, by the revitalized Platonism of his time does not admit of any simple answer. Judging by his Della pittura, he bought into very little of it. See Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism, p. 66, and below, pp. 67ff., 121ff. for an account of the nature of just that neo-Platonism antithetical to Alberti and the Baroque formulation of consciousness.
Above, pp. 48f.
Above, pp. 33f.
The equivalent in music, for example, to “foreshortening,” as we shall suggest below, pp. 176f., is “temperament.” Even though it is not our purpose here to develop an arthistorical theory of styles, we may at least refer in this connection to the interesting point made by Panofsky, “The History of the Theory of Human Proportions,” pp. 99f.: Egyptian art, he says, is “objective” in the sense that people represented in a painting or sculpture do not move of their own volition but rather by virtue of mechanical laws eternally arrested in a given position. In other words, Egyptian art is another version of the Classical formulation of consciousness and mimetic appresentation (in our sense) where, again the near is read off the far. In the Middle Ages, bodies, for instance, turn, twist, are even “distorted,” but without depth; actual bodily movements are dictated and manipulated from on high: again, motion is read off from a Will afar (cf. the ideas of Medieval anthropometry discussed by Panofsky, pp. 77ff., especially the Byzantine canons of harmony). To be sure, in Greek antiquity we find organic movement and foreshortening as well as optical adjustment so that for a moment it would seem that the Classical formulation of consciousness must include yet other formulations for antique art. However, it is necessary to note with Panofsky that, e.g., Polyclitian anthropometry was not paralleled by an equally developed theory of movement nor by a theory of perspective, i.e., there was not explicit fusion of human proportion and movement. Morever, as I shall try to suggest now, the catoptics, as an essential chapter of Euclidean optics, does not allow of a theory of perspective such as is developed by Alberti. Thus whatever foreshortening there is does not result from the visual image as a projection that can be constructed in the same way by geometrical methods. The temptation is to say that “perspectivism” is found in antique art only in retrospect, and then only in an “inferior” way providing we forget and dismiss the theory of reflections in mirrors.
Above, pp. 22ff.
Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, p. 33. Proclus continues to explain that canonics, a branch of arithmetic rather than geometry, deals correspondingly with “the perceivable ratios between notes of the musical scales and discovers the divisions of the monochord, everywhere relying on sense-perception and, as Plato says [Republic 531 ab] ‘putting the ear ahead of the mind’,” ibid.. For a general account of music theory in antiquity, see Edward Lippman, “Aesthetics in Theoretical Treatises on Music,” pp. 217ff.
Ibid.
Cited in The History of Mathematics. A Reader, p. 200.
Ibid., pp. 200f.; see Heath, A Manual of Greek Mathematics, pp. 267ff.
See the discussion by Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, pp. 123ff.
Cited in The History of Mathematics. A Reader, p. 202; the proofs are reproduced pp. 202f.
See Plato, Republic, 595ff.; and Kersten, “Phenomenology, History, Myth,” loc. cit., pp. 256ff.
See above, pp. 30f.
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, p. 56.The emphasis is mine.
Ibid. p. 109
Cited by Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, p. 123. For the history of the meaning of the term, “perspective,” as it comes to be used by Alberti and Dürer, see Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pp. 248f.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, pp. 345ff. (English translation, pp. 299ff.)
Alberti, pp. 56f.; see Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, pp. 123ff., and especially the note on p. 125 which reconstructs the appropriate “recursive formula” for the location of the visual image.
Alberti, pp. 68ff.; see Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pp. 252f.
Alberti, p. 59; see below, pp. 161ff. for the fate of Alberti’s arrow.
See ibid. (and Spencer’s notes, pp. 110ff. for lucid diagrams representing the construction); briefly, the base line of the “quadrangulo” or window is divided into a number of equal parts, and within it assumed a central vanishing point; when the central vanishing point is connected with the terminals and dividing points of the base line a “pencil” of converging but apparently equidistant orthogonals are obtained extending into infinity. See also Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, p. 248; Renaissance and Renascences, pp. 125 ff.
For a correct statement of such a recursive formula which predetermines all other geometrical or exponential ratios in a given perspective space, see Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, p. 127, note 1; Spencer, op. cit., p. 113 (thus the difference between Brunelleschi and Alberti: Brunelleschi “ends with a point rather than beginning with one. Geometry does not enter into Brunelleschi’s construction, for it relies solely on sightings”—such as the famous painting from inside the door of Santa Maria del Fiore, where the door frame, the “quadrangulo,” provided the sightings of the points and angles he wished to draw. See also Alberti, op. cit., pp. 51ff., and 53f., where he translates the proportions into construction of the visual pyramid. In any case, once the ratio of transverals a/b is established according to the distance of the eye to the projection plane and its elevation above the horizontal ground plan, the ratios of transverals b/c, e/d automatically follow. We shall return to this from a different aspect when we come to Leibniz and the mature Baroque formulation of consciousness—it is nothing else than the same internal principle of organization of substances in the monadology; see below, pp.113f., 196ff. See also Panofsky, “The History of the Theory of Human Proportions,” note 19, p. 69, where the contrast generally with the Classical formulation of consciousness and Vitruvius is emphasized. Whereas Vitruvius would consider such ratios under the heading of symmetria, Alberti considers them under the heading of proportio. We cannot delve further into this intriguing problem of a change in the stock of knowledge at hand in painting; see Spencer, pp. 107ff., 111 ff.
Alberti, p. 55.
Alberti, pp. 57f., and p. 59; see Spencer’s comment, p. 116, on how Da Vinci combined the two constructions of Alberti into a single one.
Alberti, p. 56; see also Panofsky, “The History of the Theory of Human Proportions,” pp. 98, 105f.
See also Spencer, pp. 103, 115f.
See Spencer, pp. 103, 115, 115f., and 116.
See Fred Kersten, “Phenomenology, History, Myth,” for discussion of the constituting of “pure” and “empirical” kinds involved in the reciprocity of perspectives, pp. 262ff.
See Alberti, p. 69: “You know how impossible it is to imitate a thing which does not continue to present the same appearance… you know that as the distance and position of the centre are change, the thing you see seems greatly altered. Therefore the veil will be… always the same thing in the process of seeing.”
Ibid.., pp. 68, 69.
See Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pp. 250f.
Above, p. 59.
Spencer, Introduction, p. 13; and Lippman, “Aesthetics and Theoreical Treatises on Music,” pp. 226ff.
Alberti, p. 63. See Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pp. 268f.; and “The History of theTheory of Proportions,” pp. 89, 95 (and note 19, p. 68, for a summary of Vitruvian fractional proportions). See above, note 47, for the change that Alberti inaugurates with respect to the Vitruvian ideas of proportio and symmetria. In rather different Gestalt-phenomenological language, we may say that Vitruvian proportion means that the whole is viewed from the point of view of a part working together with other parts; whereas Vitruvian symmetry is the the case of a part working together with other parts viewed from the whole. Together, combined, they produced a “good” Gestalt.
Alberti, p. 54. The significance of this statement will be explored briefly in the discussion of Descartes, below, pp. 201f. There is, after all, Alberti’s personal hieroglyph of a winged eye from which thunderbolts radiate. There are any number of interpretations (reviewed by Ingrid D. Rowland in a letter to The New York Review of Books, 12 January, 1995); I am in no position to take issue with them, except to note that I believe that the godlike eye is that of the eye establishing the vanishing point from which the whole perspectival structure is established, i.e., the recursive formula for the internal organization of the “istoria,” indeed of the world. In this sense, Alberti is identified with God (Jove) on the obverse. There is a similar idea in Nicolas of Cusa, De Visione Dei (c. 1451) who, in the Preface, likens the omnipresence of the eye of God to that of the godlike eye in a portrait of Roger van der Weyden. For the moment it suffices to note that I place much more importance on this statement than does, e.g., Spencer, p. 108.
Alberti, p. 65. See also Leon Battista Alberti, On Architecture, in Documentary History of Art, Vol. 1, pp. 221ff. and 242f.; and Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism. Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, pp. 61ff., especially p. 65.
See Spencer, p. 24. Alberti even altered the antique themes to make them fit the window, e.g., the “Venus pudica;” see Alberti, pp. 90f., and Panofsky, Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, pp. 157ff., and note 100, p. 158.
Alberti, pp. 77f.; cf. Spencer, p. 25. See below, pp. 73f.. For the impossibility of the reflection of the soul in the mirror, and in general of the soul to seize upon itself on the Classical formulation of consciousness, see Kersten, “Heidegger and the History of Platonism,” pp. 276ff.
For the idea of “circumscription,” see Alberti , pp. 68f.
Alberti, p. 78. In Chapter Five we shall consider the idea of istoria as fabula, and in Chapter Seven istoria/fabula as ego cogito qua cogitatum and the pre-established harmony of Leibniz.
Alberti, pp. 75ff., 80.
See above, pp. 29f.
Alberti, p. 79. For a similar development in Dürer of the representation of the fusion of human proportion in action, see Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pp. 267ff.
Alberti, ibid. What Alberti describes is a “statics,” to be sure, and which we shall consider in a rather different form below, pp. 161ff. What is important for us here is that it is applied equally to animate as to inanimate things, pp. 81f. “Thus one member is taken which corresponds to all the other members in such a way that none of them is nonproportional to the others in length and width” (p. 73). And, in their just proportions, bodies in motion are understood, as it were, from the bones, then the muscles. Later we shall see (below, pp. 90f.) that this is part of the self-interpretation of the center of action as subject to the properties of the circle (Galileo) rather than the ellipse (Kepler).
See Panofsky, Galileo as Critic of the Arts, pp. 39ff. for an account of the content of Agucchi’s work and a reproduction of Agucchi’s emblem.
Ibid.,p. 39.
Agucchi’s cosmology is sketched by Panofsky, ibid.. pp. 40f.
Ibid., p. 41.
See Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, p. 118. For the difficulty under discussion here, see also the very clear statement of the problem in yet another connection by Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, pp. 58ff.
Klein, op. cit., p. 119.
Ibid..To be sure, the sharing of the basic assumption eventually will be denied afterwards—a denial which, in my view, marks the division between “modernism” and “post-modernism;” see Kersten, “The Constancy Hypothesis in the Social Sciences,” pp. 523ff.
Klein, p. 120. See above, pp. 64f. For a sketch of the complex “history” of these ideas, see Paul Otto Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II, pp. 166–189.
Klein, pp. 122ff.
See Klein, pp. 243f (note 132); Hans Jonas, “The Practical Uses of Theory,” in The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 188f.; Ruth Katz, Divining the Powers of Music. Aesthetic Theory and the Origins of Opera, pp. 15f., and, for specific socio-economic-political elements, pp. 66ff. Cf. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum, pp. 70ff.
Ihe terms are those of Aquinas, cited by Klein, op. cit., p. 243.
Eventually this will raise two questions of theoretical consequence: the first is to what extent dismissal of the corrolary assumptions effects the basic assumption, that the “real” is somehow accessible to ordinary experience. In other words, are the corrolary assumptions necessarily included in the basic assumption, implied or even entailed by it. The second question arises if we ask whether dismissal of the corrolary assumptions is therefore tantamount to dismissing the basic assumption. I think that we still have to go the whole nine innings before we can attempt an answer. See above, pp. 43f. 86Ihe next step, with Descartes and Galileo, will be to reformulate the nature of “method” for the Baroque formulation of consciousness as developed on aesthetic grounds by Alberti. See below, pp. 129 ff.
See Klein, op. cit. , p. 123.
See Panofsky’s descriptions of the various kinds of apparatus invented by Dürer and Keser which “replace” the window, but not the room within which they are utilized in The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pp. 252f. (See also figures 310 and 311). Even the needle in the wall, which “replaces” the human eye and the length of the human arm, still “presupposes” the inclusion of the room as the room of the window ; and it is interesting that in Dürer’s drawings of the apparatus for constructing perspective in painting the room itself is included, in proper perspective of course. The room itself would seem to be self-generated as an essential part of the costruzione legittima and the prospectiva artificialis. Just how the specious present of the room is related to, e.g., the past, present, and future of the view from the window remains a question for phenomenological analysis.
See above, pp. 56f.
See Garin, op. cit.., p. 65.
Republic, 531ab.
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Kersten, F. (1997). The Gap at the Center. In: Galileo and the ‘Invention’ of Opera. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8931-4_3
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