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Summary CHAPTER 11 SAYRE DISCOVERING THE HUMANITIES
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Summary of Chapter 11, Sayre Discovering the Humanities. Arts Culture & Media, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
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Chapter 11 Enlightenment and RococoWhat was the English Enlightenment?
Who were the philosophes and what was their relation to Rococo art and culture?
What was the result of cross-cultural contact between Europeans and peoples of the South Pacific
and China?
The Great Fire in London in 1666 burned lots of houses so 100,000 people were left homeless. Such
devastation was both a curse and a blessing. While the task of rebuilding London was almost
overwhelming, the fire gave the city the opportunity to modernize its center in a way that no other
city in the world could even imagine. This chapter surveys developments in London and Paris, the
literary centers of what would come to be known as the Age of Enlightenment. Across Europe,
intellectuals began to advocate rational thinking as the means to achieving a comprehensive system
of ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge. The rationalist approach owed much to scientist Isaac Newton
(1642–1727), who in 1687 demonstrated to the satisfaction of just about everyone that the universe
was an intelligible system, well-ordered in its operations and guiding principles. The intellectuals of
Enlightenment England and France thought of themselves as the guiding lights of a new era of
progress that would leave behind, once and for all, the irrationality, superstition, and tyranny that
had defined Western culture, particularly before the Renaissance. At the same time, an expanding
publishing industry and an increasingly literate public offered Enlightenment writers the opportunity
to instruct their readers in moral behavior, even as they described vice in often prurient detail. And in
music, the intricate and sometimes confusing compositions of the
Baroque gave way to a more rational, and classical, form and
structure.
Christopher Wren redesigned the Saint Paul’s Cathedral. In its
design, architect Christopher Wren drew on classical, Gothic,
Renaissance, and Baroque elements. Its imposing two-story facade
is crowned by symmetrical twin clock towers and a massive dome.
The floor plan—an elongated, cruciform (crosslike) design—is
Gothic. The dome is Renaissance, purposefully echoing Bramante’s
Tempietto but maintaining the monumental presence of
Michelangelo’s dome for Saint Peter’s. The facade, with its two
tiers of paired Corinthian columns, recalls the French Baroque
Louvre in Paris. And the two towers are inspired by a Baroque
church in Rome. Wren manages to bring all these elements
together into a coherent whole.
The new London was, in part, the result of the rational empirical
thinking that dominated the Western imagination in the late
seventeenth century. Newly invented instruments allowed
scientists to observe and measure natural phenomena with
increasing accuracy, and, perhaps more significantly, new methods
of scientific and philosophical investigation provided scientists
with the theoretical means to exploit the capabilities of these instruments. Knowledge was to be
found in the world. One of the most fundamental principles guiding the new science was the
proposition that, through the direct and careful observation of natural phenomena, one could draw
general conclusions from particular examples. This process is known as inductive reasoning, and with
it, scientists believed they could predict the workings of nature as a whole. When inductive reasoning
was combined with scientific experimentation, it produced a manner of inquiry that we call the
empirical method. Francis Bacon’s New Method of Science, published in 1620, is the most passionate
plea for its use. He believed superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion, was the
, greatest obstacle to human understanding. He felt that reliance on the senses frequently led to
fundamental errors. A proper understanding of the world could only be achieved, Bacon believed, if
we eliminate the errors in reasoning developed through our unwitting adherence to the false notions
that every age has worshipped. He identified four major categories of false notion, which he termed
Idols. The first of these, the Idols of the Tribe, are the common fallacies of all human nature, derived
from the fact that we trust, wrongly, in our senses. The second, the Idols of the Cave, derive from our
particular education, upbringing, and environment—an individual’s religious faith or sense of his or
her ethnic or gender superiority or inferiority would be examples. The third, the Idols of the Market
Place, are errors that occur as a result of miscommunication, words that cause confusion by
containing, as it were, hidden assumptions. Finally, there are the Idols of the Theater, the false
dogmas of philosophy— not only those of the ancients but those that “may yet be composed.” The
object of the empirical method is the destruction of these four Idols through intellectual objectivity.
This scientific observation of natural phenomena led, in the mid-1640s, to the formation in England
called “The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge,” an organization that
continues to the present day as the Royal Society. It is one of the leading forces in international
science, dedicated to the recognition of excellence in science and the support of leading-edge
scientific research and its applications.
Equally influential were the writings of the French-born René Descartes. In Holland he wrote and
published his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the
Sciences (1637). As opposed to Bacon’s inductive reasoning, Descartes proceeded to his conclusions
by the opposite method of deductive reasoning. He began with clearly established general principles
and moved from those to the establishment of particular truths. Like Bacon, Descartes distrusted
almost everything, believing that both our thought and our observational senses can and do deceive
us. He had the inevitable conclusion that he must actually exist in order to generate thoughts about
his own existence as a thinking individual. (“I think, therefore I am”). At the heart of Descartes’s
thinking—we refer to Descartes’s method as Cartesian—is an absolute distinction between mind and
matter, and hence between the metaphysical soul and the physical body, a system of oppositions
that has come to be known as Cartesian dualism. This line of thinking established Descartes as one of
the most important founders of deism, the brand of faith that argues that the basis of belief in God is
reason and logic rather than revelation or tradition. God was, in Descartes’s words, “the
mathematical order of nature”. Johannes Kepler had made detailed records of the movements of the
planets, substantiating Copernicus’s theory that the planets orbited the sun, not the Earth. The
longstanding tradition of a geocentric (Earth-centered) cosmos was definitively replaced with a
heliocentric (sun-centered) theory. Kepler also challenged the traditional belief that the orbits of the
planets were spherical, showing that the five known planets moved around the sun in elliptical paths
determined by the magnetic force of the sun and their relative distance from it. Galileo Galilei had
improved the design and magnification of the telescope. Galileo also theorized that light takes a
certain amount of time to travel from one place to the next, and that either as a particle or as a
wave, it travels at a measurable uniform speed. He proposed, too, that all objects, regardless of
shape, size, or density, fall at the same rate of acceleration—the law of falling bodies, or gravity.
Kepler’s and Galileo’s work did not meet with universal approval. The Church still officially believed
that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the sun revolved around it. Protestant
churches were equally skeptical. The theories of Kepler and Galileo contradicted certain passages in
the Bible. Two Dutch eyeglass-makers, Hans Lippershey and Zaccharias Janssen, discovered the
compound microscope (a microscope that uses more than one lens). Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
(1632–1723), was able to grind a lens that magnified over 200 times. In 1680, Leeuwenhoek was
elected a full member of the Royal Society in London. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) had demonstrated
to the satisfaction of almost everyone that the universe was an intelligible system, well-ordered in its
operations and guiding principles. First and foremost, Newton computed the law of universal
gravitation in a precise mathematical equation, demonstrating that each and every object exerts an
attraction to a greater or lesser degree on all other objects. . Newton’s conception of the universe as
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