Art, Science and Philosophy

For every major intellectual epoch, one can find a succession of art, science and philosophy. Art is an imaginative expression, an expression which is not mediated by anything else, whose function is to express emotion, the mind’s own freedom in its immediate form. As such, it is quite logical that the first move toward an advancement or transformation of an intellectual epoch in history happens in the arts. In ancient times, the life of the mind of the new civilization of Greece was expressed by Homer’s epics. Homer’s characters, initially a fictional representation of the various gods imported from outside Greece, were the divine presentations of the deepest and most profound emotions felt by the Greek people. What it was to be a radiant woman was epitomized by Penelope and Helen, while what it was to be a radiant man was likewise epitomized in Odysseus and Achilles. Following the celestial narrative of the Homeric myths, we find Euclid and the Pythagoreans venturing forth into the realm of the abstract concept to build a pure, harmonious system of geometry, again by bringing in individual notions and propositions from the foreign sciences yet transforming them in a fundamental way by organizing them in the context of a fuller axiomatic system. Such movements in art and science paved the way to the philosophical teachings of Socrates. Plato’s dialogues distill the pure intellectual essences of the pantheon as well as geometry, further refining them into a dialectical movement. In this process, Plato the philosopher brings critical reflection and self-consciousness to his contemporaries. The transformation was so painful and earthshaking that Meletus, on behalf of the majority of the city of Athens, was compelled to sentence Socrates to death.

The pattern is repeated during the early decades of the modern era. The Dutch paintings of the 15th century exemplify a craving for grasping the world as it is, thus representing natural objects, traditionally thought as created beings and therefore worthy of a non-naturalistic representation, in a thoroughly, almost artificially, real manner. In literature, Shakespeare has again brought the sacred and the profane together, depicting the muddy human strife behind the facade of divinely ordained royalty. The enchantment with that which is supposed to be least enchanting, the mundane, has since then become the harbinger of novelty, until Odysseus becomes a middle-aged Irish-Jewish man and the hymns and symphonies melt away eventually into 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence in three acts.

On the side of the sciences, Galileo and Newton have spearheaded the idea of empiricism, the importance of being able to verify a hypothesis by experiments or observations. When we today say “science,” this is the method which we are usually referring to. Moreover, Descartes introduced the discipline of analytical geometry, and the figurative proofs of geometry has gradually been taken over by the non-figurative, purely discursive proofs of algebra. Since then, the presupposition that geometrical proof require pictorial representation has been rejected. From a theoretical standpoint, it was the consistency of the system itself which became the criterion of truth for an axiomatic system. We therefore have non-Euclidean geometry, which further provide the analytical tools for describing the curvature of spacetime in the general theory of relativity.

In the wake of the modern arts and sciences, it was Kant who truly brought to self-consciousness the philosophical fruits of this new spirit. The tensions between the idea of natural necessity and of human freedom have become the central focus in modern philosophy since, and even when Kant’s idea of natural necessity, based on a simplistic notion of causation, turned out to be more fictitious than real, the question “what is freedom” continues to be the wellspring from which philosophers have drawn new life.

Coupled with this enthusiasm for the newfound freedom of the mind, the fascination with the human world, or that which is within reach of our organs of sense and thought, also continues to this day. Yet, our art will one day no longer resonate with the emotions of a future age, and our scientific theories will, as scientists are fond of saying in jest, be completely refuted and discarded by posterity. This melancholy anticipation is another characteristic of our age, which is reflected in our calm disavowal of planetary crises such as global climate change and the risk of nuclear warfare.