Part One

Part One

In the West from ancient times until about the mid-fifteenth century (1) art, philosophyand science were essentially the same thing with the same goal, pursuing a complete depiction and understanding of the physical world as humans perceive it with their eyes.

In their studies of the physical world, art, philosophy and science shared knowledge, in optics (2) in anatomy, etc.

After that time art and science diverged. At the most macro level, art did not change its emphasis from ocular verisimilitude until much later. The turning point could be taken to be with the Impressionists, with Cezanne and the other Post-Impressionists, or still later.

Science however can be viewed at this macro level as still pursuing verisimilitude, not at the ocular level but at the sub and super-ocular levels. Science, in this view, still is in search of a complete paradigm, a Grand Unified Theory, to explain the physical universe.

With string theory and loop theory science is now at a point where it may not be possible to come up with a theory of everything, most fundamentally because the universe itself may be a misnomer. Respected theoretical physicists for some time have considered whether there are not many, or at least many possible, "universes," some with physics different from ours and unknown to us.

In loop theory, the "everything" that scientists are pursuing a theory of may be as many as a ten dimensional phantasmagoria that our three dimensional universe is only a section of.

Not only were scientists and artists at one time working together, often in the same person as in, among others, Leonardo's case, but they also were necessarily philosophers and often serious ones.

The Western philosophical canon began with the Greeks. Nietzsche believed that the West made a wrong turn away from Homer and chose Socrates instead.

The progressive--or cumulative, or incremental--view of Western scientific history owes itself to those Greeks and to the philosophy of Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century.

Philosophy broke from science in the late 18th c with Immanuel Kant's claim that philosophy was the foundation of all other disciplines (Rorty, Mirror. p.132)

The exploration, change, and conquest of nature began with unprecedented speed with the technological science of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. For the first time humankind's experience of time changed. It was no longer cyclical and measured by the changes of the earth's rotation and available sunlight or by the seasons of the year. Humankind in the Industrial Revolution began to experience and be governed by time as measured by clocks.(3)

The Industrial Revolution was officially over when Einstein published his papers on special relativity in 1905 and on general relativity in 1912. They represented the end of that era from the perspective of the theoretical science of the physical world and the beginning of the current era.

Einstein's work was revolutioniary becaue it revealed the limitations of Newtonian physics at the quantum and cosmological levels of physical reality and explained light, gravity and mass in conceptually new ways.

Einstein's theory of relativity changed humankind's experience with time at the theoretical and intellectual level as profoundly as technological science changed people's practical everyday experiences with time. Under relativity, time slows down as a necessary consequence of motion as it approaches the speed of light.

The Industrial Revolution changed our perception of mass, also as a consequence of speed. In train travel at speeds of 35 mph the landscape, mass, became blurred to our sight, made to appear less substantial.(4) Similarly Einstein changed humankind's intellectual understanding of mass by demonstrating that multiplied by the speed of light squared it was the equal of energy.

Technological science gave humankind the still camera in 1839. By the 1870s artists began their own revolution by painting in their blurred, impressionistic style.


(1) See e.g. Gombrich, "The Story of Art," p.361; Levi-Strauss, "The Savage Mind," p. 28, Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," p.161
(2) See e.g. Hockney, "Secret Knowledge."
(3) See e.g. Solnit, "River of Shadows."
(4) Solnit.

-Benjamin Harris