Art Piece, Draft Two, Part One

Art Piece, Draft Two, Part One

Until about the mid-fifteenth century in the West the presently distinct disciplines of philosophy, art and science were united.(1) They had the same goal, a complete "accounting for" of the physical world as perceived by humans with their eyes(2)and philosophers too, from Socrates to Descartes to the early Wittgenstein had the same goal and used the same methodology as did scientists and artists. That methodology was viewed as rational, empirical, incremental and cumulative.

This Western Way was driven by just one of the human senses, sight, not sound or taste, etc. It was also the physical world as physically--not emotionally or spiritually--experienced by just this one of the five physical senses that was the goal, that was to be accounted for completely and precisely by the three disciplines. In art this "accounting for" was often termed "describing;" in science "explaining;" in philosophy "proving."

The methodology of the West was not just rational and intellectual, or non-emotional and spiritual but in fact explicitly anti-emotional/spiritual. Even thus circumscribed the West considered achievement of this accounting for to be the "Truth." There was no other.

Thus conceived and pursued, Truth could be approached closer and closer in a linear manner. "Progress" could be made. Derivatively, and with more far-reaching consequences , the Western Way was method driven and outcome neutral. Whatever outcome resulted from the method was the Truth, or a closer and closer approximation of it. Thus the methodological became the metaphysical. Descriptive "truth" was the same as meaning.

Because of the above, the West's dominant art form was painting. In Thomas Kuhn's view painting was the cumulative discipline of the Renaissance and before.(3) Western painting's goal was to describe or "mirror" the (sight limited) physical world. Music, experienced with a different sense, and emotional, was comparatively devalued.

By contrast, in China, the most continuously great of the world's civilizations, a painting's greatness was evaluated according to its achievement of six goals in descending order of importance. Ch'I-yun or "spirit consonance," was first. Verisimilitude was last. Music was a more important art form in China than in the West because of its emotional content.

Plato put poetry at the bottom of his list of worthwhile endeavors. The Shih Ching, "The Book of Documents," an early Chinese text on art, lauded poetry precisely for its mimicking of music's ability to put sentiments to song.

As the West's way proceeded it changed humankind's physical, intellectual and spiritual relationship with what it was seeking to completely account for. In cyclical manner the observer was affecting the observed which was affecting the observer.

Nature in the West was demystified, described, understood and conquered. The Way removed humans from nature. This was viewed as "liberating" humankind.

By force of logic and empirical proof western methodology forced western spiritual institutions to accommodate, or acquiesce, to it.

By force of understanding, nature was made to give up more of its bounty.

By conquest large parts of nature were destroyed and replaced by human creations for habitation and other desiderata.

At least in historical perspective to some, perhaps most, contemporary art historians, a complete accounting for, the truth, was obtained in painting by the mid-fifteenth century. Portraits were painted with uncanny verisimilitude, physical objects were captured in exacting detail, more detail in fact than the human eye could see.

Ernst Gombrich for example wrote that for an aspiring art student in the Renaissance it must have felt as if there was nothing left to do. Other scholars in different fields arrived at similar conclusions. Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that after van der Weyden art became nothing more than a game of technical refinement.

According to Richard Rorty philosophy broke with science in the late 18th century when Kant succeeded in transforming philosophy from a hand maiden of science to a discipline that was held out to be the "foundation" of all others. In language similar to that of Gombrich, Rorty describes philosophy student's dilemma in the shadow of the collossus science, "...it is hard to imagine what philosophy could have been in the age of modern science. Metaphysics--considered as the description of how the heavens and the earth are put together--had been displaced by physics."(4)

In the view of Thomas Kuhn, art "diverged" from science in the mid-fifteenth century when it "completely renounced" verisimilitude and turned to learn from "primitive" cultures instead. The days when a Leonardo could move seamlessly between art and science and philosophy were, in the West, in Kuhn's view, over.

It was not the same in China where the aim of art was "spirit consonance." The sciences in China, though advanced, did not explode in descriptive power and practical effect on Chinese life in the way that they did in the West and the spiritual Way was different also. By even commonplace understanding a Zen approach to the world is a non-linear, no-incremental Way.

Importantly, in the West method drove outcome. Even today the scientific community prides itself on its detachment, this outcome neutrality. Do the experiment rigorously, follow the evidence and the result will be the truth. The method was considered validated, thus so were its results. The Zen way by contrast was explicitly to take a non-methodological Way.

The West the Standard Model is that the great flowering in art and culture occurred in the Renaissance, the literal rebirth, when the West turned back to its Greek and Socratic methodology. But if this Standard Model is correct then the apex of--the final truth in--painting was achieved in he early Renaissance and the rest of even that great time was only an extension or "refinement."

If this Standard Model of Western art history is true then there is a dissonant ring of inertia and comparative non-creativity to the rest of the Renaissance and to the next 300 years until at least the Impressionists.

During that same time however it would not have appeared to a Western prospective scientist that there was nothing left to do. During those years western science physically changed the western landmass, western man's relationship to nature and his spiritual relationship with whatever was left.

The Western artist had achieved complete descriptive power at and slightly beyond the human ocular level by the early Renaissance. The Western scientist now pursued the truth to the sub and super ocular levels. There was indeed more there than met the eye. During this period western philosophy worked in tandem with science and according to the scientific method and its most influential figure was Rene Descartes.

In the Standard Model's view, post-Renaissance/pre-Impressionist art is creatively stale, aesthetically mediocre, almost embarrassingly so, and, as in the views of even those outside the field like Levi-Strauss and Kuhn, disconnected. Disconnected from science certainly, but also from society, for it was during this interregnum that the Industrial Revolution took place.

Art, and the scientific methodology that so effected it, had supposedly achieved a perfect description, the truth, by the early 1500s but that art did not describe the truth, the reality, what the human eye saw and the rest of the human being experienced, beginning in 1700.

As "high" science first challenged and then forced Western spiritual institutions to adapt to it, technological science, going beyond high science's descriptive truth, now changed the truth. It changed the physical world and Western man's relationship to it. The observer had changed the observed.

For the first time in all of humankind's existence, man's relationship to time itself changed. That relationship was no longer cyclical and measured by the changes of the earth's rotation and available sunlight or by the seasons of the year. Western man in the Industrial Revolution began to--was forced to--experience time in much smaller increments and now as measured by clocks.

The Industrial Revolution also changed Western humankind's relationship with motion. Previously, the human speed limit was set by the pace of his walk, his run, then the pace of nature's animals that he learned to domesticate. With the invention of locomotive power, initially exclusively rail power, man was able to shatter the old speed limit.

Rebecca Solnit has marvelously described man's difficulty in adjusting to the new speed. An English M.P. standing on railroad tracks had his leg cut off by a train whose speed he miscalculated because he had no referent for it.




(1) See e.g. Gombrich, The Story of Art, p. 361. Danto, The End of Art, and Belting, Vision and Presence argue that art as currently understood did not begin in the West until around 1400.
(2)The world as perceived by, e.g. eagles, or dolphins or even other human societies like the Chinese was not considered.
(3) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p.161"
(4) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.132.
(4) River of Shadows.

-Benjamin Harris