Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or The

Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment 1
Art & Physics

Although all knowledge begins with

experience, it does not necessarily all
spring from experience.
Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant (1781)
Art degraded, imagination denied.

Laocoön
William Blake (1820)
By the early 18th century, science had replaced religion as the

dominant social force in Western culture.
“The term “soul” is therefore an empty one, to which nobody attaches

any conception, and which an enlightened man should employ solely
to refer to those parts of our bodies which do the thinking. Given only
a source of motion, animated bodies will possess all they require in
order to move, feel, think, repent - in brief, in order to behave, alike in
the physical realm and in the moral realm which depends on it. Let us
then conclude boldly that man is a machine, and that the whole
universe consists only of a single substance subjected to different
modifications.”
L’homme machine (Julien de La Mettrie, 1709-1751)
Not only is the universe a machine, so too is Man!

Painting during this era became
extremely realistic.
art intuition
geometry & measurement

perspective and theorems
neo-classsicism
(rectilinear space, precise logic) (Jean Auguste Ingres, 1780-1867)
painters presented social realism allegorically in

the belief that art (like science) can change society
Socrates (Jacques Louis David, 1748-1825)

“Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of
nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of
natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.”
John Constable (1776-1837)
The Haywain
(1821)
The obsession for geometrical perspective spread to other areas, e.g. the Gardens
of Versailles (built by Louis XIV, 1638-1715 - the Sun King). The gardens were
laid out in strict accordance with Euclid’s postulates.
1
Science space
+
2
time “I frame no hypotheses.”
+
Isaac Newton
3
motion
+ i.e. science deals only with
4 matters that can be
matter reasoned and evaluated by
+ experimental evidence.
5
light
+ the question was how was
Philosophy 6 the mind related to the
mind world revealed by science?
What is the major difference between
rational discourse and religious dogma?
Rational discourse allows one to doubt.

“In order to reach the truth, it is necessary,
once in one’s life, to put everything in doubt.”
If you are doubting, you are thinking,
and if you are thinking you must exist. René Descartes (1596-1650)
“Cogito ergo sum.” analytic geometry

(“I think, therefore I am.”)
algebra + geometry
mind matter pure thought

+ visual space
(res cogitans) (res extensa)
dualism
Other figures of the Enlightenment
Denis Diderot Voltaire

(1713-1784) (François-Marie Arouet)
1694-1778
French philosopher French writer
Editor of Encyclopédie Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764
John Locke (1632-1704)
English post-Renaissance philosopher
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690
“all our knowledge comes from experience and
through our senses…there is nothing in the mind
except what was first in the senses. The mind is
at birth a clean sheet, a tabula rasa; and sense
experience writes upon it in a thousand ways,
until sensation begets memory and memory
begets ideas.”
Sensations were the basis of thought

Sensations are excited by matter
Therefore, mind arises from matter
Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753)
Irish philosopher and cleric
“Esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived)
Nothing exists apart from perception
If a tree falls in a forest and there is no-one there

to hear it, then it cannot make a sound.
Since trees (the external world) cannot exist
anywhere but in the mind, sensations can only
occur in the mind.
“All those bodies which compose the mighty

frame of the world have no substance without a
mind.”
Berkeley used the perception argument to prove the existence of God.

He argued that because the mind of God was omniscient, He must be
able to perceive everything all of the time. It was God’s perception,
therefore, that enabled the world to exist without the need of man’s
perception.
Samuel Johnson argued against Berkeley’s claims.

How?
By kicking a large stone with his foot and saying

“I refute it thus!
David Hume (1711-1776) decided both were wrong.
Mind = abstraction that combines perceptions,
memories, emotions into experiences that depend
on both sensation (mind) and matter.
“I can never catch myself at any time without a
perception, and never can observe anything but the
perception.”
A Treatise on Human nature
He also concluded that the laws of nature, that were supposedly
revealed by scientific enquiry, were not an inherent part of the world -
but were artifacts of the human mind.
Furthermore, a sequence of events does not necessarily imply causality
- the one exception being mathematics (where, by necessity, 2+2 will
always lead to 4)
David Hume (1711-1776)
The fact that event B follows event A does not

mean that A caused B.
This idea has echoes in 20th century philosophy...
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The “law of universal causation” is an attempt to

bolster up our belief that what has happened will
happen again, which is no better founded than
the horse’s belief that you will take the turning
you usually take.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Our knowledge is not completely derived from
our experiences - we inherit innate (a priori)
knowledge the moment we are conceived and this
knowledge is independent of sensory experience.
Hence, for Kant, absolute truth and absolute science

should be possible.
We do not need to rely on experience every time we meet examples of
a priori knowledge, e.g. that 2+2=4 or the shortest distance between
two points is a straight line, etc...
To explain this phenomena, Kant proposed that space and time are
organs of perception.
i.e. he extended Newton’s idea of absolute space and time in the
external world to the inner world of the mind.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
For Kant, space could only have three dimensions
and Euclid’s axioms were a priori truths which
we are born with.
space
intuitive concepts inherent
time to the human mind
causality
Hume every man is an island, isolated from everyone else

Kant we share common a priori knowledge of the world
Kant’s philosophy was known as Transcendental Idealism.
It was an era in which science began to triumph over religion.
But not everyone approved of this trend towards deterministic science...
John Donne (1572-1631)
And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to looke for it.
And freely men confesse that this world’s spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many anew; then see that this
Is crumbled out again to his Atomies.
‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
Anatomy of the World (1611)
In vain, in vain, - the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow'r.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
Alexander Pope The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
(1688-1744) As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sick'ning stars fade off th' ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand oppress'd,
Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
Dunciad Book IV (1728)
“I realized that our existence is nothing but

a succession of moments perceived
through the senses.”
“I think, therefore I am” (Descartes)
“I feel, therefore I am” (Rousseau)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(French philosopher,
poet, 1712-1778)
Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet, 1694-1778)
“It would be very singular that all nature, all the
planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there
should be a little animal five feet high, who, in
contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased.”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

“All theory is against the freedom of will;
all experience for it.”
John Milton (1694-1778)

“But God left free the Will; for what obeys
Reason is free.”
Paradise Lost
William Blake (1757-1827)
Blake accused Renaissance perspective

and Newton’s mechanics of destroying
the human spirit.
“I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell

you what Ought to be Told. That I am
under the direction of Messengers from
Heaven, Daily & Nightly.”
Letter to Thomas Butts, January 10, 1802
“Art is the Tree of life; Science is the Tree of Death.”
The Laocoön, 1818
“What is the Life of Man but Art & Science?
Jerusalem Plate 77: To the Christians, 1818
Newton (William Blake, 1795)
Newton is lost in
concentration, reducing
the world to a set of
calculations, imposing
rational order on an
irrational world.
Newton’s body is like a
part of the stone on which
he sits; he is almost
reduced to the flat
Now eye of fourfold vision see dimensions of the paper
And of fourfold vision is given to me on which he draws - a
'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight victim to the tyranny of
And threefold in soft beulah’s night; measurement over man.
And twofold always may God us keep
From single vision and Newton’s sleep.
Newton (William Blake, 1795)
Newton is lost in
concentration, reducing
the world to a set of
calculations, imposing
rational order on an
irrational world.
Newton’s body is like a
part of the stone on which
he sits; he is almost
reduced to the flat
Now eye of fourfold vision see dimensions of the paper
And of fourfold vision is given to me on which he draws - a
'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight victim to the tyranny of
And threefold in soft beulah’s night; measurement over man.
And twofold always may God us keep
From single vision and Newton’s sleep.
One of twelve illustrations to
Milton’s Paradise Lost. Adam
and Eve are shown sleeping
peacefully in the Garden of
Eden before the Fall. They are
watched over by the angels
Ithuriel and Zephan, who have
just discovered Satan (in the
form of a toad) tempting Eve
by whispering into her ear.
Adam and Eve Sleeping

(William Blake, 1808)
Dante Running from the Wild Beasts An illustration for Dante’s Divine Comedy:
(William Blake, 1824-6) Dante is being saved by Virgil from the earthly
Newton and Kant saw space as Euclidean
(uniform and continuous) and time as
Aristotelian (sequential).
Blake saw them rather differently....
“If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear as it is…infinite. For
man has closed himself up, till he sees all
things through chinks of his cavern.”
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793
“Poetry fetter’d Fetters the Human Race.

Nations are Destroy’d or Flourish in Proportion
as Their Poetry, Painting and Music are
Destroy’d or Flourish: The primeval state of
Man was Wisdom, Art and Science.”
Introduction to Jerusalem, 1804-1820
Blake saw Art as the only
path to truth. He declared
that every man who is not
an artist is a traitor to his
own nature.
The Laocoön
William Blake, c.1822
Blake saw Art as the only path to truth. He declared that every
man who is not an artist is a traitor to his own nature.
You Must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses

& Lands if they stand in the way of Art.
Prayer is the Study of Art.
Praise is the Practice of Art.
Fasting &c., all relate to Art.
The outward ceremony is Antichrist…
The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination.
The Laocoön (1820)
For Newton, space and time were totally separate and fixed absolutes -
containers providing a stage for matter to appear and motion to occur.
For Blake, time and space were one.
He was a four-dimensional man.
His vision of the universe was anticipatory
of the vision of relativistic physics with its
space-time continuum.
How can space and time be one thing
instead of two?
We perceive them as two things because of
the vantage point from which we observe
them (in a three-dimensional world).
“I see the Past, Present & Future existing
all at once / Before me.”
William Blake, Jerusalem (15, lines 8-9)
If a doughnut encounters flatland, flatlanders will see the doughnut as
two circles. An observer in three dimensions will see only one
doughnut.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Auguries of Innocence
Creation (Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475 - 1564)

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Art & Physics 6: The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment 1

Art & Physics

Although all knowledge begins with

Art degraded, imagination denied.

By the early 18th century, science had replaced religion as the

“The term “soul” is therefore an empty one, to which nobody attaches

Not only is the universe a machine, so too is Man!

geometry & measurement

painters presented social realism allegorically in

Socrates (Jacques Louis David, 1748-1825)

Rational discourse allows one to doubt.

“Cogito ergo sum.” analytic geometry

mind matter pure thought

Denis Diderot Voltaire

Sensations were the basis of thought

If a tree falls in a forest and there is no-one there

“All those bodies which compose the mighty

Berkeley used the perception argument to prove the existence of God.

Samuel Johnson argued against Berkeley’s claims.

By kicking a large stone with his foot and saying

David Hume (1711-1776)

The fact that event B follows event A does not

This idea has echoes in 20th century philosophy...

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

The “law of universal causation” is an attempt to

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Hence, for Kant, absolute truth and absolute science

Hume every man is an island, isolated from everyone else

“I realized that our existence is nothing but

“I think, therefore I am” (Descartes)

“I feel, therefore I am” (Rousseau)

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

John Milton (1694-1778)

Blake accused Renaissance perspective

“I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell

Adam and Eve Sleeping

“Poetry fetter’d Fetters the Human Race.

You Must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

Creation (Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475 - 1564)

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