The Baroque
The Protestant Revolt, which began in 1517 within
the Christian religion, had its counterpart in the revolt of the New Science
against the old. Similarly, Luther's privacy of conscience in religion
became Descartes's privacy of thinking (thought reflecting on itself)
in philosophy. The geocentric (or Ptolemaic) astronomy was replaced by
a heliocentric (or Copernican) astronomy (which was already known in the
ancient world by the Pythagoreans). Neither the humanism of Erasmus nor
his defense of freedom was enough to blunt Luther's determinism. Equally
important is the revolt against Aristotle's account of a teleological
world (i.e., a world in which nature is purposive and things act for an
end) by means of formal and final causes in addition to material and efficient
causes. The upshot is a mechanistic account of nature wherein only material
and efficient causes exist. Galileo in his Dialogues
Concerning Two Chief Systems of the World (1632), Descartes in
Le Monde (1633) and Hobbes in Leviathan
(1651) all eschew formal and final causes as they affirm the heliocentric
astronomy. John Kepler had already replaced the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic
concept of the circular motion of astral bodies around the earth with
the notion of orbital motions in his Harmonies
of the World (1619), a title strongly reminiscent of Pythagoreanism.
In 1543 Copernicus' On the Revolutions of
the Heavenly Spheres and Vesalius' study of anatomy On
the Fabric of the Human Body were published. Near the end of the
seventeenth century (1687) Isaac Newton, who thought of the universe as
"a cryptogram set by the Almighty," synthesized the New Science
with his formulation of the laws of motion in his Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy. While Newton's title indicates
that science had not yet become separated from philosophy, the rebellion
against Aristotle in the universities became ever more pronounced in such
thinkers as Francis Bacon. Bacon's major work, The
New Organon (1620), enunciates the scientific method in the form
of inductive reasoning (i.e., reasoning from particulars in experience
to general principles, a posteriori reasoning), in contrast to Aristotle's
"old" Organon, which employed deductive reasoning (i.e., reasoning
from universal principles to particulars, a priori reasoning). From Bacon's
and Hobbes's rejection of Aristotle we derive the caricature of Aristotle
as an armchair scientist. In politics, the philosopher with the decisive
influence on modern democratic thinking in the eighteenth century, certainly
on American founders such as Jefferson, was John Locke. Regarded as the
founder of modern empiricism, Locke presents the labor theory of value,
important both for economics and for art.
The philosophy of the period displayed a tendency toward dualisms, e.g.,
mind-body, matter-spirit, faith-reason, sense perception-thinking, science-religion,
emotion-intellect. Epistemology was understood in terms of a disjunction
between rationalism and empiricism.
The beautiful was refigured during this period from baroque to the prettiness
of the Rococo. What managed to remain stable among artists and philosophers
through the diversity of styles and forms was the concept of beauty in
terms of light, color, harmony, proportion and splendor of form.
