Abstract
Once, many years ago, while driving my Harley up a rough mountain road in the wilderness of a Western state, I came to a bend in the road. As I turned up the bend I came upon a large, crudely lettered sign that said, “If you have come this far, you have gone too far.” Sure enough; a few hundred yards on, in the middle of the old road, I confronted a large, raunchily dressed man—no leathered-up, bechained biker, either—with a large rifle, pointed directly at me and a look on his face like a mangy red-bone hound. With a very dry mouth and my life passing before me, I explained that I had taken the wrong road and was just looking for a place to turn around. I found it, did it, and set a new record for downhill driving. I mention this story because I was put in mind of it while reflecting on where Alberti had taken me in the last chapter: if I had come that far, perhaps I had gone too far. Moreover, the new formulation of consciousness it entailed in the face of the Classical one made me feel once again the rude and potentially violent meeting of civilization and wilderness at the bend of an old logging road. However, rather than give in to the instinct to turn around and get back on the royal road of the Classical formulation of consciousness it is worth the risk of seeing how far we have come, and whether we may have come too far.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
See Alberti, On Painting, p. 81ff. At issue too are colors, light, shadows.
Kepler, cited by H. F. Cohen, Quantifying Music, p. 17.
Kepler, cited by Wihelm Dilthey, Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, p. 258. The translation is mine.
The arithmetical “now” of daily life is no longer the privileged datum of ordinary experience from which the “real,” “eternity,” the nunc stans, is extrapolated.
Alberti, p. 83; the emphasis is mine. See above, pp. 60f.; and Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, p. 163.
Ihe changes in the signification of “mimesis” are many and subtle; “imitation” and “analogy” undergo broad changes in meaning; see, e.g., Cohen, pp. 58f., and p. 269, note 7, who charts the changes in “analogy” when by the sixteenth century analogia comes to mean ratio; see also D. P. Walker, Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance, p. 121; and Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art, pp. 47ff., and 75ff. We shall return shortly to these changes. Eventually, to speak of “mimesis” it will only be possible by specifying which formulation of consciousness is at issue.
Cited by Cohen, p. 17.
See above, pp. 58f.
Cohen, p. 8. This is what we may call the “Kusmitch” view of the history of Western science so favored among politically correct academics in the humanities. For an “interdisciplinary” eulogy of this view, see Ruth Katz, Divining the Power of Music. Aesthetic Theory and the Origins of Opera, pp. 2ff., 15ff.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, pp. 284ff. (English translation, pp. 245ff)
See below, pp. 84f.
See Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, pp. 161ff., 172ff., 297ff. (English translation, pp. 143ff., 153ff., 282ff.) Later (below, pp. 111ff.) we shall return to the idea of the room as a “milieu” in Scheler’s meaning of the term, and as a silent premise of the Baroque formulation of consciousness. Although the concept is adapted from Scheler, no attempt has been made here to provide a Schelerian analysis with its correlative concept of “person.” Our approach here follows more closely that of Helmut Plessner and Alfred Schutz.
The Dyer’s Hand, p. 477. The example I always have in mind is Jussi Björling’s accurately struck, ringing High C’s in Di quella pira in his debut performance at Covent Garden in 1939 inIl Trovatore (as heard on Legato Classics LCD 173). It may be added that precisely those top C’s (the do di petto) of the tenor were described by Rossini as the “screeching of a slaughtered chicken” (cited by Celletti, A History of Bel Canto, p. 150). Rossini, to be sure, had other devices for demolishing the theory that we are irresponsible puppets of fate or chance; see below, pp. 230ff.
See Cohen, p. 40 (with a charming example drawn from Huygens).
Ibid , p. 44. See also Walker, op. cit.., p. 36: “For music which is monodic, or in which the interest is concentrated on melody, Pythagorean intonation is more suitable than just, since all the fifths and fourths can be untempered, and the very narrow semitones give greater sharpness to the melody. For polyphonic music such as that of the late sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in which the major triad occupies a dominating and central position, just intonation has the advantage of making this chord as sweet as possible and in general of making all chords, both major and minor, more consonant, though it has the disadvantages of much greater instability of pitch, of unequal tones, and of much wider semitones...” Cf. also Maria Rika Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530–1630, pp. 136, 138.
Whatever “right” (or “real” or “true” of “sweet”) may be; see Cohen, pp. 41ff., 79ff., who traces the elaborate, vituperative controversy through the writings of Stevin (who surely must have been tone-deaf), Zarlino, Benedetti (who follows Galileo Galilei), Salinas, and, the most facile of them all, Vicentino.
See Cohen, pp. 41ff.; Maniates, pp. 139, 142f., 146 It is worth noting in this connection Maniates’ discussion of the private and public functions of temperament, the social and political implications of which deserve a careful analysis in relation to correlative functions of perspective; see Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens. Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy, p. 280, who examines similar functions of rhetoric in Galileo’s Dialogo; for the historiography of the problem, see Cohen, The Scientific Revolution. A Historiographical Inquiry, pp. 204ff.
Of course the assumption begins to lose its taken-for-grantedness the moment that we are struck by the fact, as was Galileo, that when we look at the stars through a telescope the stars are magnified less than the distance between them; see Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Fabric of the Heavens. The Development of Astronomy and Dynamics, pp. 192f. We will return to the stars and the telescope later in this chapter, below, pp.149ff.
Cohen, p. 44.
See Cohen, pp. 80ff.; Walker, Chapter II, especially pp. 19ff. for detailed discussion of this issue in Renaissance and Baroque music.
See above, pp. 6f., and note 8, p. 6; and below, pp. 227ff.
For the interaction, see the chapters in Cohen, especially Chapter 7; and Katz, especially Chapter III, pp. 55ff.; see also Walker, Chapter VII. For the dangers of considering that new stock of knowledge at hand as comprising, in part, only metaphors which need not be taken very seriously anymore, see Gary Tomlinson. Music in Renaissance Magic. Toward a Historiography of Others, pp. 98f For a different view, see Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, pp.162f, where the idea of the common ground consists in the “apriori” of empirical reality and artistic beauty (which Cassirer contrasts with Panofsky’s notion of the common ground as a sort of “aposteriori” of art and beauty).
Below, pp. 101ff.
See above, p. 58.
See Katz, pp. 179ff. for discussion of these issues in the light of contemporary theories (which she eventually boils down to “referentialist” and “absolutist” views, neither of which excludes the other). The problem consists of “how meaning (whether intrinsic or extrinsic) comes to be attributed to music at all. How, in other words, do specific emotions or cognitive reactions come to attach themselves either to an ‘abstract, nonreferential succession of tones’ or to ‘the musical symbolisms depicting concepts, emotions and more qualities’?” (p. 181) Katz’s solution, which ignores the phenomenology of consciousness at issue for us, perhaps rightfully, is that music takes meaning from a text, but that in turn the text is “enhanced by the music.” But, then, one might say the same of any art—painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture—and even empirical science itself!
See Barbara Russano Hanning, Of Poetry and Music ’s Power. Humanism and the Creation of Opera, Chapter II; Maniates, Chapter XIII; Walker, Chapter V; Manfred F. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era, pp. 389f.; and Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, Chapter Three, especially pp. 78ff.
Thus my approach drawing on the phenomenology of the social is distinct from (although not irrelevant to) the Foucault-grounded “historiography and archeology of others” of Tomlinson; see Tomlinson, pp. 20ff, and 32ff ; and above, pp. 49f., 52f.; below, pp. 176f.
My point of reference is chiefly to Kepler’s Harmonia Mundi of 1619; I rely primarily on Cohen, Chapter 2; Walker, Chapter IV; Panofsky, Galileo as Critic of the Arts; and Hall, The Revolution in Science 1500–1750, Chapter V.
See Cohen, p. 17; Walker, pp. 53, 61.
How it is a criterion is lucidly shown by Cohen, pp. 18ff.
In particular, see Cohen, p. 21: “It is not possible to find a flaw in the entire axiomatic system that Kepler had elaborated.”
Kepler, cited by Cohen, p. 24.
Cohen draws especially on E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture (1961).
Cohen, p. 25.
Cited ibid. We shall return to Kepler’s account when we come, in Chapter Seven, to Leibniz and the idea of the ellipse (of which the circle is then the limiting case); see below, pp. 192ff.
Walker, pp. 59f. See below, p. 90.
Walker provides examples, p. 60.
Ibid. , p. 61.
Ibid., pp. 38f.
Ibid. , p. 61. That is, a pedal-note in the sense of a note constantly sustained over which celestial harmonies play and into which they are finally resolved. Even though I cannot substantiate it on musicological grounds, my own candidate for what Kepler’s heavenly music would sound like is Satie’s “Description Automatiques.”
Ibid. pp. 61f.
See Walker, pp. 44f. for some of the reasons for Kepler’s “geometrizing” of the “real.” Geometry is clearly superior to the arithmetic of the ancients; see the texts of 1619 of Kepler in The History of Mathematics. A Reader, p. 328
Walker, p. 61.
Ibid.,, pp. 38, 41f.
Ibid., pjp. 39f.
Cf. ibid., p. 37. To speak of “perfect” or “impure” dissonance seems absurd; for the moment I find it the only way to describe the situation.
Cited by Walker, p. 34.
See The History of Mathematics. A Reader, pp. 323f.; Panofsky, Galileo as Critic of the Arts, pp. 24f.; Cohen, Quantifying Music, p. 27; Hall, The Revolution in Science 1500–1750, pp. 139ff. See below, p. 193.
Cited by Panofsky, pp. 26f.
Panofsky, ibid., and Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo in Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, pp. 283f. (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, p. 259.)
Alberti, On Painting, p. 74; see Spencer’s comments, note 41, p. 125.
It is only when Kepler has answered the question by affirming the second alternative that we can agree with Cassirer’s statement that “The ‘innate’ idea of number and the `innate’ idea of beauty led Kepler, as he himself always emphasized, to establish the three basic laws of planetary movements,” Cassirer, op. cit., p. 164, note 62.
It remains an open question whether, on the Classical formulation of consciousness, the “real” is ever strictly presented, rather than appresented. As a basic mode of representation, however, mimesis and analogy are always only appresentational, never presentational. On the Baroque formulation of consciousness, however, there is no question: the “real” is always only appresented, the medium of access to the “real” is always indirect, never direct.
See Maniates, pp. 201ff., 210f., and Chapters I–III; Katz, pp. 63ff.; Hanning, pp. 44ff., 56ff., 77, note 120, p. 226, and the new “harmonic graticula” or grid, we might say, that regulates harmonic movement in accord with affections expressed in speech, pp. 58f., 74ff.; Bukofzer, Chapter 11, especially pp. 375ff.
See Maniates, p. 258.
The vituperative, often vitriolic, polemics of this period deserve a separate study along the new developments in rhetoric; see above, p. 45; and Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens. Rhetoric and Science in the Coperican Controversy, Chapter 1 for the use of rhetoric in science in the 16th and 17th centuries, and especially pp. 78ff. This important book does for science in the Baroque what Maniâtes’ does for music in roughly the same period, and what Hanning’s does for libretti in a somewhat earlier period. See also Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic, pp. 33ff., 179ff. Polemos replaces the ancient Peithein as a political means in the late Renaissance and Baroque.
See above, pp. 75. This does not mean, however, changes and shifts in paradigms, alterations in “styles,” even seeking the ways in which cognitive and affective experiences are transformed, are not important, or even of fundamental importance. It is that phenomenologically no foundations have yet been established by which to develop them, examine them in a critical-conceptual way as concerns the phenomena we are trying to describe.
See Arnold Hauser, Mannerism, Vol. I, pp. 11–22; Katz, Divining the Powers of Music, pp. 63ff.; and Maniates, Mannerism, pp. 208f., 228f. The distinctions cut across time and place as much as subject matter—e.g., painting in Flanders, the theatre in France, music in Florence or Venice, the novel in Spain.
See Fred Kersten, “The Line in the Middle,” pp. 90ff. for the idea of “use” at issue here.
Although “beauty” now has many different meanings; see Panofsky, “Theory of human Proportions,” loc. cit., pp. 89ff., note 63; Cassirer, op. cit., pp. 163f.
Recall the distinction of Hannah Arendt that, on the Classical formulation of consciousness it is the form that is retained and which defines the thingness of things; we may say that on the Baroque formulation, in contrast, rather than the form it is the geometrized grid or veil that defines the thingness of things—in general, the appresenting element of “what seems right.”
Hanning, Of Poetry and Music’s Power, p. 29 and pp. 29ff. Hanning’s chief purpose here is to develop the “emergence of a musical aesthetics from the humanistic assumptions of the late Renaissance—an aesthetics aimed at stirring the passions of the soul.” For a brief overview of the development of Italian tragedy, see Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art, pp. 128ff
Ibid., p. 31.
Cited and translated by Hanning, p. 23 (see note 21, p. 198: “imitazione con parlare favoloso ridotto in versi di azione umana.”) We shall return to the meaning of “parlare favoloso” below, pp.140f. See Doran, op. cit., pp. 70f., who makes a point of emphasizing the fact that it is the Aristotelian, rather than the Platonic, notion of mimesis which influenced the Renaissance thinkers, and this would seem to be borne out especially in the English theatre of the Renaissance as she traces its development, i.e., the idea of poetry as the “imitation of life” and hence its significant features of “universality,” “verisimiltude,” “decorum” and the “marvelous.” She also emphasizes the fact that the very idea of “imitation” is subjected to changes in meaning depending on the individual writer, and which often depart from a strict reading of what Aristotle had in mind; see pp. 74ff. Certainly there are similarities between the authors Hanning cites and those that Doran cites, as well as common sources among them (especially Cicero). While it would be worth pursuing the similarities and differences between the Italian and English authors, still such a task is outside the present one. For a beginning, see Vivian Foss, “Massinger’s Tragicomedies: The Politics of Courtship,” Chapter IV, which provides a good example of the use of tragicomedy as a vehicle of verisimilitude (see also pp. 291ff. for its limitations). A few of the similarities will, however, be noted as we proceed.
Hanning, p. 35, and pp. 36ff.; see Maniates, pp. 199f, and 196f., for the important distinction in music between fuga and imitazione. For Girolamo Mei’s aesthetics, see Edward Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics. pp. 32ff.
See Hanning, pp. 44, 54, 57, 77, 89f.
See Maniates, p. 201: “The theoretical conception and practical use of musical conceits is a complex phenomenon. Purely pictorial word painting consists of eye music whose visual effect depends on esoteric puns grasped only by performers. This tradition is a very old one going back to the Middle Ages; but even then it was viewed as a witty rhetorical trope. Aural figures are more ambiguous in as much as they depict conceits and affect the listener. They have a double purpose: to imitate concetti by their graphic shape and to dramatize the effective meaning of the conceits by drawing the listener’s attention to them.”
Ibid., p 201; see Doran, Endeavors of Art, pp. 72–79, where the equivalents in literature are discussed under the headings of “universal truth” and “decorum,” the doctrine of which “brings universal truth down from these speculative heights to a practical level. It gives directions for the embodiment of universal truth in poetic symbols. For it is a doctrine of the fitness of the means to an end” (the emphasis is mine). As in music and painting, the doctrine of decorum is grounded in action at the center.
Maniates, p. 201; cf. Doran, 74f. For the philosophical and aesthetic problems of notation, which cannot be considered here, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, pp. 21ff.; Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance. Reflections on Musical Representation, Chapter VI. Both take their point of departure from Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1969).
Hanning, p. 87; the example is from Caccini’s La Dafne, and is reprinted by permission of the publisher. See also Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought , pp. 429ff.
Ibid. To be sure, in this case, we are no longer operating with Giulio Cesare Monteverdi’s dictum, “L’oratione si padrona dell’armonia e non serva” (cited by Maniates, p. 200).
Although certainly the attempt is made to “geometrize” music along with everything else that crawls out from the woodwork; see Cohen, Quantifying Music, Chapter 3, and pp. 209ff. (on Huygens).
The question remains open whether we can even make such distinctions apply to the Renaissance and Baroque; see the discussion by Katz, Chapter 3, especially pp. 54ff., pp. 108ff., 177ff.; Maniates, Part I, is devoted to the attempt to make these distinctions in Mannerist painting, architecture, scuplture and literature. The whole issue is practically and theoretically difficult and not easily stated in a few words, but is nicely sketched by Moss, p. 268 and p. 268, note 23, by taking two opposite views. The one view is that of Finocchiaro (e.g. in Galileo and the Art of Reasoning) who insists that rhetoric is a nonlogical, non-intellectual and non-literary/aesthetic, and who, despite his ahistorical pretensions, reveals the emotional along with the logical elements at work in Galileo’s Dialogo; the other extreme is represented by Brian Vickers (in e.g. “Epideictic Rhetoric in Galileo’s Dialogo,” pp. 69–102), who deals with the use of a “literary rhetoric” of praise and blame. These two different treatments are grounded in different ideas of rhetoric and those different ideas are grounded, in turn, in their different disciplines. Neither sees rhetoric allied with dialectical argumentation, that is, neither considers how concepts that are framed for one set of problems (rhetoric) are compatible with those framed for another set of problems (dialectical proofs). In contrast to Finocchiaro and Vickers, this is just what Moss does, I believe, pp. 269ff., and is one of the great merits of his book.
In this connection, see Kurt Blaukopf, Musical Life in a Changing Society, pp. 132ff. Blaukopf sees these phenomena of music, painting, science as sharing a “common social basis” rather than being compossibles, and the common social basis lies in the rise of the idea of artistic genius, the creation of a work as a totality and the integrity of the concept of a “work”—all of interest to a sociologist for whom genius, creativity and production of a work are “learned,” and the learning sociologized; cf. Lippman, op. cit., pp. 506ff. In contrast, I am suggesting that instead of common social basis there is a founding formulation of consciousness, that painting, music, science are “related” by compossibility rather than analogy.
See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. III, Introduction; and The Logic of the Humanities, Chapter III. Of course, the idea of a transformation formula is as old as the Classical formulation of consciousness, and is implicit in every attempt since then to classify and arrange the arts and science; see Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II, Chapter IX. In “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (1947, pp. 101ff.) Panofsky seeks to formulate a similar principle, although much narrower in application, which he calls the “principle of expressibility.”
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 75. (This translation is the only one I am aware of which can be cited in lieu of the original. It is indeed a Renaissance masterpiece.)
For a discussion of “eidetic laws” as employed here, see Kersten, Phenomenological Method: Theory and Practice, pp. 88ff. It should be noted that the concept of “compossibility” used here is a Husserlian, and not Husserl’s, concept; moreover, it is— in strictly phenomenological terms—applied to the transcendental community of experiences (transcendental intersubjectivity constituted in the natural attitude) and is not the “egology” of Husserl; for the basis for a Husserlian concept of compossibility, see Fred Kersten, “Private Faces,” pp. 174f. For Husserl’s, and not the Husserlian concept used here, see Paul Ricoeur, Husserl. An Analysis of His Phenomenology, pp.108–114. (Alfred Schutz frequently employed the idea of compossibility to deal with the differing domains e.g. of economics, political theory and sociology, and in some manuscripts treats of possibility as “meaning adequacy,” compossibility as “causal” or “motivational” adequacy.) See also Aron Gurwitsch, “Compossibility and Incompossibility in Leibniz,” pp. 10ff.
Husserl, op. cit., p. 141.
For the important, too often neglected, idea of the “contingent apriori,”, see Fred Kersten, Phenomenological Method: Theory and Practice, pp. 155f., 167, 215.
It is worth emphasizing here that the same situation prevails in the case of p painting; for example, the light in the paintings of Caravaggio such as the Conversion of St. Paul or, better, the painting attributed to Caravaggio, David and Goliath, where the light is self-interpretatively self-generative from the knee of David kneeling over the decapitated Goliath; see Howard Hibbart, Caravaggio, pp 332f
Above, p. 92.
See Aron Gurwitsch, Leibniz. Philosophie des Panlogismus, pp. 451ff.
E.g., above, pp. 73f.
Descartes, Philosophical Essays, p. 96; Oeuvres de Descartes, Meditations (1641), Vol. IX-1, p. 31. In passing we may note that at the very least “reason” here signifies dialectical argument as much in Descartes as in Galileo.
Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 244; cf. p. 153.
Ibid., pp. 252ff. (Galileo’s term is “mente concipio.”) See also Clavelin, The Natural Philosophy of Galileo, pp. 404ff., for further examples.
See Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era, pp. 56f. Like the harmonic rhythms, the pedal basses of Peri serve as the grid or veil: “The bass of the recitative is written predominantly in the slow pedal-point style, the dramatic purpose of which is attested by Peri <in his Preface to his operaEuridice>. He stated in the preface that he sustained the bass even against the dissonances of the singer, and moved it ‘according to the affections’ whenever they made a change in harmony necessary.” See also Nikolaus Harnoncourt, The Musical Dialogue, pp. 29ff., and below, pp. 179f.
Descartes, op. cit.., p. 89; Meditations, loc. cit., p. 25.
Ibid.
Galileo Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957).
Ibid. , p. 92. See Koyré, Études Galiléennes, pp. 161ff., 277ff.
Ibid., pp. 100, 123ff.
Ibid., pp. 113ff.
Ibid.,p. 115
ibid., p. 118. For discussions of Galileo’s idea of “sensory evidence,” see Clavelin, op. cit., pp. 389ff., 394f., 400f. (the combining of geometric construction and observation of sunspots). Despite the thorough and perceptive account of Galileo’s views, valuable by itself, Clavelin still does not examine either the presentational or the appresentational nature of the “sensory evidence” by which Galileo replaces the “occult qualities” and final causes of the Aristotelians in colleges and universities all over the country. The “sensory,” after all, is a construction of the “imagination” (or “reason”); see ibid., pp. 397f. for Clavelin’s own assessment; Clavelin notes that “Tycho and his predecessors used instruments exclusively to support and refine the evidence of the senses, so that their science could never transcend the limits of sense perception;” in contrast Galileo’s use of the telescope did precisely that: transcended the limits of sense perception and was therefore “quite unlike its traditional counterpart,” introducing a “sharp break between observation as it had been understood and practiced before Galileo and observation as it would be understood and practiced after him,” with the help of the telescope “endowing man with a `superior and better sense than natural and common sense’,” in Galileo’s words. The result is that the content of sensory evidence was renewed and vastly extended by Galileo. See Ibid., pp. 398f. for a discussion of the differences between Aristotle and Galileo; and pp. 399f. tells how the new idea of sensory evidence operates: first, a telescope is stuck out the window, casting images on a piece of paper; “daily drawings then showed that the two spots kept moving across the solar disk until they had reached the other side in a little less than two weeks...” (emphasis mine); then measuring the spots drawn their apparent distances were determined. Once the drawing is constructed, then the whole is represented by a further geometrical construction (illustrated p. 400). “Sensory evidence,” then, consists of the combining of the painter’s (compossible) perspective construction with a further and geometrical one. For the current historiography of experiment and experimentation in the Baroque, see Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, pp. 186ff. Finally, it should be noted that, as Clavelin says, on the basis of his new idea of sensory evidence Galileo ends up “converting celestial bodies into true physical objects” or, as we would say, reads the far off the near just as does the painter. With his story in The Assayer of the monkey and the mirror (Discoveries and Opinions, p. 255; Clavelin, p. 399; see also Moss, op. cit., Chapter 4, for details about the “sunspot quarrel,” espc. pp. 112ff.; also Finocchiaro, op. cit., pp. 247f. for a critique of Clavelin’s discussion), Galileo rejects the Classical formulation of consciousness and especially the idea of sensory evidence according to which the near is read off the far reflected in the mirror; see above, pp. 62ff. Too, we also have to note in this now over-long footnote that once “celestial bodies” are converted into “true physical objects,” divested of their garments on Descartes’ testimony, we are no longer talking of the same thing when we read the far off the near: Galileo is not talking about forms, as did Aristotle, for instance, or Plato, but of things whose thingness is quite distinct. See above, pp. 26ff.
Above, pp. 92f. That the “perspective” is “artificial” does not mean that it is not “natural” or drawn from Nature. Rather it is a “creation” made either with the understanding or the imagination as Leonardo da Vinci expressed it (“la scienza è una seconda creazione fatta col discorso; la pittura è seconda creazione fatta colla fantasia,” cited by Cassirer, op. cit., p. 161).
Plato, Phaedo, 990. The translation is by Harold North Fowler, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, p. 343.
Ernst Cassirer, “Galileo’s Platonism,”, p. 280, and Cassirer’s discussion of the passage from Phaedo, pp. 282ff. Also see Clavelin, op. cit., pp. 424ff. for a strong case for the opposing view and criticism of Koyré and others. It seems to me that both sides of the controversy of whether and in what sense Galileo is a “Platonist” miss the non-mimetic nature of Galileo’s thought. To be sure, the use of the terms experientia and experimentum, and the conceptual differences they express, is important; in this connection see Charles B. Schmitt, “Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Zabarella’s View with Galileo’s in de Motu,” pp. 80–138; in addition see Moss, op. cit., pp. 82f. for the distinction between “dialectical arguments (rationes) and physical proof (experimenta)” in Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius that “Galileo, as the father of the rhetorical revolution in science, led the way in demonstrating that rhetoric could indeed invade the scientific domain and spearhead the cause of science and of a reformed theology,” ibid, p. 332. See also Cohen, op. cit., Chapter 2.
“Galileo’s Platonism,” loc. cit., p. 297; see also The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 160f.
Panofsky, Galileo as Critic of the Arts. p. 20.
Ibid. , pp. 19f., and p. 20, note 1.
Ibid.., pp. 25ff. and above, pp. 90f.
What follows is based on Scheler, Formalism, pp. 139ff., 150, note 1; 157, 188f., 274f., and 287; and Aron Gurwitsch, Human Encounters in the Social World, pp. 58ff.
Plessner, Laughing and Crying, p. 140. To Plessner we may add that, on our view, both laughing and crying, in the literal sense and as names for representation from the boundary-periphery of daily life, are, strictly speaking, “hors de milieu.”
Ibid.
See above, pp. 46ff.
According to Scheler, it is only when we carry out a process of disenchantment, of decomposition of the milieu, much like the Cartesian divestiture of clothing as well as flesh and muscle (above, pp. 105f.), that we outfit the things of the milieu with exclusively material properties. He grounds the decomposition of the milieu in a drivestructure that itself is characterized as a drive toward domination of Nature by the “rational spirit” and, more particularly, if we add into this brew Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies, the “rational spirit” of capitalism. We cannot pursue this idea further in our discussion.
The reproduction is taken from The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, No. 338.
See Albert William Levi, Philosophy as Social Expression, pp. 219f
See Carl J. Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque, pp. 86f.; Frederick Hammond, Music & Spectacle in Baroque Rome, pp. 1 1ff.
See Hélène Leclerc, Venise Baroque et l’Opéra, Chapters I, VIII, XV. See also her magnificent, Les Origines italiennes de l’Architecture théâtrale Moderne (1946); Hammond, pp. 186ff., 212ff.
See Hauser, Mannerism, pp. 53f. In the next chapter we shall note the scepticism, neuroses, above all, melancholy and madness that mark the room-milieu as human habitation.
Above, pp. 101f.
See Hall, op. cit., pp. 54ff.
See above, pp. 73f.
See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, §37.
Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, pp. 204 and 206.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kersten, F. (1997). Room 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_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8931-4_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4847-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8931-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive