"What is *Truth*; said jesting *Pilate*; and would not stay for an Answer." -- quoted from *Essayes* by Francis Bacon
by Francine R Hall, UIC
(Who says English majors and Science don't mix? One of my happiest moments as an undergraduate at UIC was to help create a course where top-notch teachers in their specialized fields of Music, English literature, Art History and Physics gave wonderful lectures that remain memorable to me today. The following paper is dedicated to them.)
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The quest for order may be thought of as not only a basic but also a universal characteristic underlying man's desire for understanding the world. In a sense, this faith in an inherent order of the universe provides the link tying art, science and religion together--for harmony, balance and symmetry constitute man's notion of beauty; they allow for predicting and understanding the natural world; and, finally, they satisfy man's spiritual needs. The Baroque period is no different from the Middle Ages in this respect. However, the uniqueness of the 17th and 18th centuries lies in their endorsement of a new scientific approach and methodology previously lacking or ridiculed. Thus, the scientific impulse of the Baroque era is revolutionary not in the light of a greater desire to know the Truth of the world, which, it must be understood, had always constituted man's basic intellectual force, but, rather, the desire to separate moral purposes from natural phenomena. Mr. Bell writes:
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"...the only explanations men had in a pre-scientific age referred to reasons, which were moral reasons, why things are as they are. In the last resort these moral reasons pointed to God's purposes, or in Greek thought to purpose inherent in the nature of the universe. The great intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century lay in the realization that in the subject of mechanics it is possible to work out a system of explanations that is not only teleological but thoroughly deterministic, which refers not vaguely to God's purposes or preferences but brings out the quantitative relationships that a mathematical account of phenomena requires."(1)
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However, such new methodologies did not mean that scientific truth lost its essentially religious and artistic spirit. In fact, a new trend towards naturalism and mysticism projected out of the older, more rigid confines of Christian doctrine. Thus, as Carl Friedrich succintly writes, "the passionate concern of the age with nature and its secrets, the persistent doubting of all human authority, was fed by what seems to us now a faith of extraordinary depth and intensity--a faith in the power of God to order the universe, and a corresponding faith in the power of man to understand this order, and in the light of it to achieve the mastery of nature and to order anew man's life on earth."(2)
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The adherence to the classical past was strong throughout the Medieval and Renaissance ages, and the 17th and 18th century, with all its radical innovations in intellectual thought, could not yet shake itself entirely free from Aristotelean and Platonic dogma. Reason still held a stubborn even if tenuous position over scientific empiricism--such abstract approaches to understanding the natural world were advocated by men of no less stature than Descartes and Leibnitz: "For these two writers truth was...a matter of acute thinking such as is required in mathematics. They attributed little importance to innumerable facts which can be discovered only by experiment, or else ignored them altogether."(3)
Closely tied in with the rationalist approach, was the belief that one's expectations concerning natural phenomena coincided with actual fact. Kepler, for example, could not easily shake off the strong faith in assumption so characteristic of Greek thought; consequently, it took him near to two decades to account for the strange discrepency of Mercury's orbit with Tycho Brahe's data. He was finally compelled to elucidate a planetary theory in terms of elliptical orbits--the Corpernican scheme (circular orbits) could no longer hold.
In a more general sense, the 17th and 18th centuries were also slowed down in their scientific advancements by their strict dogmatic attitude. Of course, such a fallacy is not unique to the Baroque era, and it extended itself well into the 19th century. However, the Baroque period provided extensive battleground for the sometimes forceful intellectual interplay of ideas. On one side stood the "school of empiricism" as begun by Francis Bacon in which all explanations are founded chiefly by observations. Galileo was the famous voice of this world view, i.e., experiment and calculation.. The anti-empiricism of Leibnitz expounded a strong faith in mathematical speculation--Kepler's approach can be traced largely to such a rationalist school.
The result of adhering too strongly to one philosophy, be it materialism (Hobbes) or mechanism (DesCartes) undoubtedly delayed any true insight into the nature of light, for example. Newton's insistence on the materiality of light extended to his theory of aether as the medium for light also.(4) Huygen's wave theory modified Newton's Corpuscular theory and was able to account for the phenomena of interference; however, "his indulation theory failed to explain the effect at a great distance of a ray of light having a short wave length"(5) (i.e., energy as independent of the light's intensity which decreases as the distance squared). It remains for the 20th century to discard a dogmatic or rational approach (such as the corpusular or wave theory dogma); consequently, quantum mechanics came into vogue and a greater understanding of the nature of light resulted.
However, we cannot deny that great advances were made in the 17th and 18th centuries despite some of their errors. In fact, one could state that their weakness was their strength. Galileo's staunch empiricism caused strong antagonism towards Kepler's discoveries and "thereby [weakened] his own work in astronomy."(6) However, the importance of his work on the law of acceleration cannot be denied. Similarly, Kepler's mystical nature blinded him to the nature of gravitation as discovered by Galileo and he remained an advocate of the Prime Mover concept. Nevertheless, his very mystical nature (i.e., faith in the underlying simplicity of the universe), helped him in discovering the elliptical orbits of planetary bodies. Thus, Truth, for Kepler, and for 20th-century scientists as well, carried elegance and simplicity as its basic thrust--indeed, such a concept of Truth is the very foundation of the modern scientific theory.
It remained, however, for Newton's law of universal gravitation to synthesize the experimentalists and their strong desire to measure with mathematicians and their equally strong impulse for abstract principles. Importantly, this synthesis carried witih it the most encompassing notions of Truth and order. Max Planck, in his *Philosophy of Physics*, writes: "The idea becomes fruitful and hence attains value for science if the interconnection thus established can be applied more generally to a series of cognate facts: for the establishment of an interconnection creates order, and order simplifies and perfects the scientific view of the universe." (7)
Thus, the "untidiness" of 17th-century astronomy and mechanics was largely cleaned up by the work of Isaac Newton who was able to discover the simplicity and connectedness of the acceleration of the moon and that of the earth. It was found that "all the effects of nature were almost certainly due to only a few grand universal laws."(8) Thus, faith in the 18th-century of a *natural* order remained paramount. Truth at that time therefore carried with it the notion of order, simplicity and prediction. However, the dogmas of materialism, mechanism, empiricism, and abstraction remained behind the facade of the Baroque period and, thus, somewhat distorted their grand notion of "Truth" (remember Newton's erroneous materalist notion of the nature of light). We realize today (in the the face of quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) that, as Mr. Bell writes, "we have to live without dogma."(9) It cannot be denied, though, that the final stages of the scientific method, as exemplified by Newton's *Principia*, nearly parallels the modern notion of a sound (and "true") scientific theory for explaining, understanding and predicting natural phenomena.
The 17th and 18th century scientific mind traveled somewhat tortuous routes--Galileo's empiricism and Kepler's abstraction, for example, although necessary in understandiing nature, blinded each from the merits of the other. With the discovery of universal gravitation, however, Newton was able to achieve a synthesis which allowed for a greater comprehension of what made a scientific theory "true" (i.e., simplicity and prediction). Of course, the desire for order and Truth is universal and remained potent throughout the Baroque period; however, as we have seen, greater scientific advances were made when dogmas were weakened--Kepler's break with the Copernican scheme; Newton's synthesizing approach; Harvey's combined inductive and deductive methods helping him discover the circulation of the blood, are good examples. Indeed, the Baroque era made its great advances when it discarded the one dogma, i.e., moral purposes as residing in nature (Christian doctrine) or natural purposes as inherent in nature (Greek doctrine), which had made scientific progress move relatively slow before. Thus, the revolutionary character of the 17th and 18th centuries found its source by asking the vital question, as Mr. Bell points out: "If events did not take place because of the purposes behind them then how are they caused?"(10)
NOTE: PLEASE SEE THE APPENDIX
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Perhaps in the process of clarifying certain points one may feel a certain sense of defensiveness pervading these last hanging thoughts. At any rate, as an English major, I may be erroneously charged with unconsciously endeavoring to make simplified generalizations concerning 17th and 18th century conceptions of Truth in order that an aesthetic pattern may be seen to emerge. I do not pretend to compromise Truth for artistic ends--instead, it must be understood that my resources contain not only historical documents but interpretive materials as well--and everyone knows that interpretations are ultimately a simplified if not a subjective handling of factual material. Unfortunately, however, my paper goes a step further in this distortion process by researching and simpliflying these self-same sources. Hopefully, this has all been understood and taken for granted upon reading my paper.
In short, all that is wished to be established in studying aspects of the Baroque mind is merely to create a sense of the flavor of the times--as the Lookalofts (from *Barchester Towers* by Anthony Trollope) we are not invited to the feast.
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