Infinity and Perspective by Karsten Harries

Much postmodern rhetoric, suggests Karsten Harries, can be understood as a symptom of our civilization''s discontent, born of regret that we are no longer able to experience our world as a cosmos that assigns us our place. But dissatisfaction with the modern world may also spring from a conviction that modernism has failed to confront the challenge of an inevitably open future. Such conviction has frequently led to a critique of modernity''s founding heroes. Challenging that critique, Harries insists that modernity is supported by nothing other than human freedom.But more important to Harries is to show how modernist self-assertion is shadowed by nihilism and what it might mean to step out of that shadow. Looking at a small number of medieval and Renaissance texts, as well as some paintings, he uncovers the threshold that separates the modern from the premodern world. At the same time, he illuminates that other, more questionable threshold, between the modern and the postmodern.Two spirits preside over the book: Alberti, the Renaissance author on art and architecture, whose passionate interest in perspective and point of view offers a key to modernity; and Nicolaus Cusanus, the fifteenth-century cardinal, whose work shows that such interest cannot be divorced from speculations on the infinity of God. The title Infinity and Perspective connects the two to each other and to the shape of modernity.

Karsten Harries INFINITY AND PERSPECTIVE INFINITY AND PERSPECTIVE The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Karsten Harries INFINITY AND PERSPECTIVE © 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was typeset in Janson by Graphic Composition, Inc. and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harries, Karsten. Infinity and perspective / Karsten Harries. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-08292-6 (HC : alk. paper) 1. Perspective (Philosophy)—History. 2. Infinite—History. 3. Nicholas, of Cusa, Cardinal, 1401–1464. 4. Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404–1472. I. Title. BD348 .H37 2001 190—dc21 00-048034 W. H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” from W. H. Auden Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. In Memoriam Hans Blumenberg July 13, 1920 March 28, 1996 List of Illustrations viii Preface x 1 Introduction: The Problem of the Modern 2 Part One: Power and Poverty of Perspective 20 2 Perspective and the Infinity of the Universe 22 3 Learned Ignorance 42 4 Alberti and Perspective Construction 64 5 Curious Perspectives 78 6 The Thread of Ariadne 104 Part Two: Infinity and Truth 126 7 Truth as the Property of God 128 8 The Infinity of Space and the Infinity of Man 148 9 The Infinity of Man and the Infinity of God 160 10 Homo Faber: The Rediscovery of Protagoras 184 11 The Dignity of Man 200 Contents Part Three: The Loss of the Earth 224 12 Copernican Anthropocentrism 226 13 The Crime of Bruno 242 14 Insight and Blindness of Galileo 264 15 The Reef of the Infinite 282 16 Copernican Revolutions 300 17 Epilogue: Astronautics and Astronoetics 318 Notes 332 Index 370 CONTENTS Front Cover: Earth seen from 1 ⁄4 million miles away 1. Giambattista Piranesi, prison 4 2. Cover of Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille 6 3. Camille Flammarion, Where the Sky Touches the Earth 48 4. Perspective construction 72 5. Perspective construction 73 6. Jan Vredemann de Vries, perspective construction 75 7. Albrecht Dürer, Artist Drawing a Nude in Perspective 76 8. Andrea Pozzo, The Transmission of the Divine Spirit, S. Ignazio, Rome 84 9. Holy Women at the Sepulchre Confronted by the Angel of the Resurrection, from King Henry II’s Book of Pericopes 86 10. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation 87 11. Workshop of the Master of the Life of the Virgin, Conversion of St. Hubert 88 12. Rogier van der Weyden, St. Luke Sketching the Virgin 89 13. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors 94 14. Emmanuel Maignan, design for a fresco, Perspectiva horaria 95 15. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus 97 16. Andreas Alciatus, Icarus 100 Illustrations 17. Salomon de Caus, grotto of Neptune, Les raisons des forces mouvantes 114 18. Salomon de Caus, machine for raising water, Les raisons des forces mouvantes 115 Back Cover: Andreas Alciatus, Icarus ILLUSTRATIONS [...]... remain illinformed and blind THE PROBLEM OF THE MODERN Part One POWER AND POVERTY OF PERSPECTIVE 2 Perspective and the Infinity of the Universe 1 Koyré calls modern science both root and fruit of the revolution that, so we are told, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave birth to the modern world But that “revolution,” if “revolution” is indeed the right word, has a long prehistory and presupposes... world-understanding To understand this change we must look beyond the history of the cosmological doctrines that Duhem chronicled in CHAPTER 1 15 such illuminating detail, for every cosmology presupposes a certain worldand self-understanding The world- and self-understanding of the sixteenth century has a long prehistory Here the history of art, especially the history of the theory of perspective, ... understanding the limits of that legitimacy, on understanding how modernist selfassertion is necessarily shadowed by nihilism and pointing to what it might mean to step out of that shadow And also different, more Hegelian in some ways, is my understanding of the genesis of the modern world, whose general shape, I shall show, has its deepest foundation in nothing other than our everyday understanding... very different issues, Infinity and Perspective and my earlier book, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), yet belong together I began the latter with the observation that “For some time now architecture has been uncertain of its way” and cited Alberto Pérez-Gómez, who linked such uncertainty to the worldview ushered in by Galilean science and Newton’s philosophy, which... seventeenth century underwent, and accomplished, a very radical spiritual revolution of which modern science is at the same time the root and the fruit.”18 In his preface THE PROBLEM OF THE MODERN 14 he speaks similarly of a “deep revolution,” which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “changed the very framework and patterns of our thinking and of which modern science and modern philosophy are,... arrived and its contours are impossible to read But given what postmodern art and theorizing have produced, such an understanding may still seem much too hopeful, too close to Enlightenment optimism Postmodernism and optimism do not rhyme very well The horrors of the twentieth century have taught us to be suspicious of revolutionary fervor and of the conviction that drives it Religious fundamentalism and. .. “replacement of the teleological and organismic pattern of thinking and explanation by the mechanical and causal pattern.” Once again Descartes offers an obvious example But his insistence on explaining the workings of nature by mechanical models comes at the end of a long process, demonstrating how deep-rooted is the hold of teleological explanation Consider the following argument by Copernicus: “the universe... atheistic ‘libertin’”28 and to the gloom with which John Donne greeted the “new philosophy” in his Anatomy of the World (1611): THE PROBLEM OF THE MODERN 18 And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no mans 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... finally Koyré calls attention to those who contrast modern subjectivism and the objectivism of the ancients and the medievals To do justice to this point we shall have to look more closely at what is meant by “objectivism” and “subjectivism”: there is a sense in which we moderns have become at one and the same time both more subjective and more objective than the medievals Koyré concludes with the suggestion... world of the medievals and of the geometrization of space characteristic of modern science The two are indeed closely related But more important to me is showing that the destruction of the medieval cosmos follows from a changed selfunderstanding, bound up with a new sense of freedom A passionate interest in perspective and point of view helps to characterize that self-understanding and offers a key to . Harries INFINITY AND PERSPECTIVE INFINITY AND PERSPECTIVE The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Karsten Harries INFINITY AND PERSPECTIVE ©. Modern 2 Part One: Power and Poverty of Perspective 20 2 Perspective and the Infinity of the Universe 22 3 Learned Ignorance 42 4 Alberti and Perspective