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The Gap Represented

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Galileo and the ‘Invention’ of Opera

Part of the book series: Contributions to Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 29))

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Abstract

We are interested in developing a formulation of consciousness which belongs to the Renaissance and Baroque, i.e., to the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, our interest is not just “historical” and occupied with discovering the origin and genesis of that formulation. Our interest lies ultimately in discovering whether that formulation is still a possible formulation of consciousness and, if so, whether it can claim precedence over yet other and, as Leibniz would say, competing formulations. But how do we arrive at a formulation of consciousness? And how do we arrive at not just any formulation of consciousness but one specific to the Renaissance and Baroque? Even more, how do we arrive at a formulation of consciousness that both preserves the gap between science (and opera) and ordinary life but which also takes precedence over ordinary life in its existential and truth claims? The answer to these questions lies in the “eccentricity” of ordinary life and its common-sensical, ungrounded ontic conviction. But in what way?

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References

  1. In this connection, see Hans Jonas, “Plotin über Ewigkeit und Zeit,” pp. 296f.

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  2. For detailed studies of this influence, see William Wallace, Prelude to Galileo, Chapter One; Stillman Drake, Cause, Experiment & Science, pp. 193, 205f.; A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science 1500–1750 , pp. 97ff., 106f, 125f.; Maurice Clavelin, The Natural Philosophy of Galileo, Chapters 1, 2, and 4. It is not our purpose in this chapter to review and rehearse these and numerous other studies; we are interested instead in making thematic that datum of ordinary experience to which the “real” and “real motion” are acessible and eventually in the change in the privileged status of that datum in the Renaissance and Baroque.

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  3. Aristotle, De Caelo II, 12; cf. II, 3.

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  4. Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII, 7.

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  5. Aristotle, De Caelo, I, 5; II, 4.

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  6. Ibid.,II,6, 8.

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  7. Ibid. , II, 1; I, 9. See below, p. 206.

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  8. Ibid., I, 1; II, 7.

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  9. Ibid., I, 2, 3; II, 6, 8.

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  10. By virtue of “epicycles” and “eccentrics” the planets too demonstrate the geometrical properties of circularity of path and uniformity of motion; see Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII, 8.

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  11. See Hall, op. cit., pp. 103f.; Marshall Clagett, “Some Novel Trends in the Science of the Fourteenth Century,” pp. 278, 279; see also Aron Gurwitsch, Leibniz. Philosophie des Panlogismus, Chapter VII, §§3–6.

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  13. See above, pp. 16f.

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  14. Ihe boundary-periphery is akin to laughter and, bizarre as it may seem, the idea seems quite consistent with Aristotle, De Anima, III, 10.

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  15. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, VI, 2 (1026a f.).

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  16. So Buridan, for instance; see Clagett, loc. cit., pp. 278f.

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  18. For Oresme, see Clagett, loc. cit..,pp. 277f.; and below, pp.42f.

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  19. For important documentation of this problem, see Clagett, loc. cit., pp. 280ff. ; Hall, op. cit. pp. 285, 292, 294f.

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  22. See above, pp. 10f. and the statement of Erwin Strauss.

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  23. See Fred Kersten, “Phenomenology, History and Myth,” pp. 258ff.

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  25. Ibid., p.223.

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  26. Ibid. p. 210.

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  27. See above, pp16f.

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  29. See Kersten, op. cit., loc. cit., pp. 257f., and the references there to Plato, Republic, X.

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  30. See Giovanni Comotti, Music in Greek and Roman Culture, pp. 77ff.; H.F. Cohen, Quantifying Music, pp. 1–6; the references to Aristotle are to the Poetics, 6

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  31. Thus the Classical ideal of the life of Skolé on the Isle of the Blessed; see Werner Jaeger, Aristotle. Fundamentals of the History of His Development, pp. 280ff., and Appendix II, pp. 426ff. In our lingo, life on the Isle of the Blessed is life at the boundaryperiphery—a life which is, after all, a “death.” Perhaps a better way of expressing it (in Nicomachean Ethics, 1177b, 25–1178a, 5), is by saying that “One should not think as do those who recommend human things for those who are mortals, but immortalize as far as possible.” (The translation is by Hannah Arendt, Between Present and Future, p. 231, note 26, where athantizein is intransitive. In strict Classical terms, the Latin equivalent should be aeternare rather than immortalem facere.) See above, pp. 21f., and note 1, p. 22.

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  32. See Fred Kersten, “Heidegger and the History of Platonism,” pp. 276ff.; see also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition , p. 20; Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness, p. 390.

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  33. In this connection, see Alfred Schutz, “Symbol, Reality and Society,” pp. 294ff.

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  34. For what follows, I draw on Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 59ff.; The Human Condition, Chapters 4 and 5; Hans Jonas, “Homo Pictor and the Differentia of Man,” pp. 201ff.; Dorion Cairns, “Perceiving, Remembering, Image-Awareness, Feigning Awareness,” pp. 251ff.; Aron Gurwitsch, Human Encounters in the Social World, §§ 17–20. For a general, systemtic view, see also Edward S. Casey, Imagining. A Phenomenological Study, Chapter One. Two other works are central to this discussion, but will be considered later in connection with the Baroque formulation of consciousness: Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of form in Elizabethan drama, pp. 46ff., 54ff., 342ff.; and Maria Rika Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530–1630, Chapter XIII. For the late Renaissance, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Chapter Two.

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  35. Later, below, pp. 97f., 133f., 250f., we shall reformulate these properties in the light of the (non-mimetic) Baroque formulation of consciousness.

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  36. Were that not the case, we would find ourselves in the “nauseous” situation of Roquetin in the portrait gallery; see Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, pp. 82ff.

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  37. For what is still the best phenomenological account of image-deception and its correlative undeception, see Herbert Leyendecker, Zur Phänomenologie der Täuschungen, § § 8f.

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  38. And has, accordingly, its own moral dimension as well; see Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 156.

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  39. For an account of the notions of use and no-use, see Fred Kersten, “The Line in the Middle (The Middle of the Line),” pp. 89ff.

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  40. See above, p. 29f.

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  41. Of course, the selection of relevant features may be based, in turn, on the usefulness of things to achieve certain ends at the center of action.

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  42. See Fred Kersten, “Heidegger and Transcendental Philosophy,” pp. 212ff. for the development of the idea of the “acquisition of empirical meaning.”

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  44. See below, pp. 61f. Leaving aside the emphasis on the ontological dimension of mimetic resemblance, this discussion draws on Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 122ff.

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  45. Were it a case of representation from a periphery preindicated at the center there would be no release from life’s necessities and cares or at the most only their temporary interruption and respite.

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  46. Plato, Republic, X; see Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 224f. Arendt quotes with approval Cicero’s statement: “Errare mehercule malo cum Platone... quam cum istis (sc Pythagoraeis) vera sentire” (“I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than hold true views with his opponents”), and which Arendt construes as being “a matter of taste to prefer Plato’s company and the company of his thoughts even if this should lead us astray from the truth.” Or: “In what concerns my association with men and things, I refuse to be coerced even by truth, even by beauty” (p. 225). In this respect, Arendt may be said to work with the most extreme case of the Classical formulation of consciousness.

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  47. Above, pp. 22f

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  48. See above, p. 25.

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  49. In Chapter Three, below, pp.61f., we shall consider yet another example drawn from Euclid.

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  51. Oresme, Livre du ciel et du monde, cited and translated by Clagett, pp. 279f.

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  52. Ibid.., p. 280.

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  53. See Hall, op. cit., pp. 68f.; Lindberg, op. cit., pp. 258f.

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  54. Hall, p. 68; see also pp. 69f. for the striking similarities between the arguments of Oresme and Copernicus in this connection; see Clagett, pp. 284ff. for the similarities with Kepler.

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  55. See Clagett, pp. 283f.; Clavelin, op..cit., pp. 468–471.

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  56. Clagett, pp. 284f.

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  57. With disappearance of the gap, we may add, there is disappearance of the “distance.” We shall return to this question in the next chapter.

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  1. University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, USA

    Fred Kersten (Emeritus Professor)

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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Kersten, F. (1997). The Gap Represented. In: Galileo and the ‘Invention’ of Opera. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8931-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8931-4_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4847-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8931-4

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