What the what?

Galileo and the Book Of Nature

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:09:09 -0400

By Galileo Galilei
Commentary by Scott Horton
From “Galileo - Reading the Book of Nature”
Harpers.org, July 11, 2009

The only people who oppose this point of view are a few rigid defenders of philosophical minutiae. These people, as far as I can see, have been brought up and nourished from the very start of their education in this opinion, namely that philosophy is and can be nothing other than continuous study of such texts of Aristotle as can be immediately collected in great numbers from different sources and stuck together to resolve whatever problem is posed. They never want to raise their eyes from these pages as though this great book of the world was not written by nature to be read by others apart from Aristotle, and as though his eyes could see for the whole of posterity after him. Those who impose such strict laws on themselves remind me of those whimsical painters who as a game set themselves constraints such as that of deciding to depict a human face or some other figure by simply juxtaposing some agricultural implements or fruits or flowers of different seasons. All of this bizarre art is fine and gives pleasure as long as it is done for amusement, and it proves that one artist is more perceptive than another, depending on whether he has been able to choose more suitably and use a particular fruit for the part of the body to be depicted. But if someone who had spent all his training in this kind of painting should then decide that in general any other form of painting is inferior and defective, certainly Cigoli and all other illustrious painters would laugh him to scorn.
–Galileo Galilei, Istoria e demostrazioni itorno alle macchie solari, terza lettera (1613) in Opere de Galileo Galilei, vol. v, p. 190.

Suddenly, in the midst of Galileo’s third letter on the nature and significance of sun spots, he turns to a discussion of the work of the Mannerist painter Giuseppi Arcimboldo, whose highly stylized portrait of the Emperor Rudolph II is placed above the text. In other works on celestial mechanics, Galileo takes swipes at Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and defends Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. In still others, he takes up the ancient theme of music as a language of mathematics and deliberates the notion of the “music of the spheres.” Is all of this a wild digression? Or is it not perhaps more essential to understanding Galileo’s approach to science? The key to understanding this passage and its broader import lies in the concept of the “book of nature” that appears near the end of the long and rambling first sentence. Galileo’s fascination with painting, poetry and music—which for him form an essential trinity of artistic expression—is not so much art for art’s sake, but rather art as a grammar of the mind.

He is following in a specific tradition of the Neoplatonic Renaissance that had its seat in his hometown, Florence. Raymond Sebond, the Catalan scholar who was immortalized as the subject of Montaigne’s greatest essay, used the same expression that Galileo uses here—the “book of nature.” And so did Nicholas of Cusa, the German cardinal-theologian who was perhaps the greatest philosopher of the Renaissance. All of them are concerned with the grammar of nature, its alphabet, its words. How does one “read” nature, plumb its depths, come to mastery of the rules that govern it? As Galileo writes in Il saggiatore, “Philosophy is written in this enormous book which is continuously open before our eyes (I mean the universe), but it cannot be understood unless one first understands the language and recognizes the characters with which it is written.” It was Galileo’s life’s work to understand that language. And to that end, he has earned a principal position in the history of science for his development and articulation of scientific methodology.
But it would be wrong to conclude that Galileo’s path was found entirely in scientific method as that is understood today. Rather, for Galileo human perception is sharpened and advanced when it draws not on one but rather on a multitude of paths of understanding. The artistic vision was thus an alternative, equally valid and important path to understanding truth, to unfolding the book of nature. This point is found in his discussion of the curious painter Arcimboldo, whose various portraits of men composed of vegetables, fruits, stacks of books and piles of twigs have assumed an iconic quality even as his name has never been put among the pantheon of painters of the era. Still, Arcimboldo’s knack for the double meaning has exercised a strange hold on the modern world. The Surrealists loved him, and in Roberto Bolaño’s last work, 2666, Arcimboldo surfaces as a character. For Galileo, however, Arcimboldo belonged to the “enemy camp,” since he served the emperor, like Johannes Kepler, the man Galileo seems consistently (in a display of his human shortcomings) to have viewed as a rival and never to have properly appreciated. And Galileo prefers, in his tastes and vision, a classical approach like that of his friend Lodovico Cigoli, whom he mentions. But his criticism of Arcimboldo is not entirely dismissive. The Arcimboldo style and technique is fine as far as it goes, he tells us—the use of objects of nature to portray a human face even shows a flash of genius—but its repetitiveness is a problem. Galileo agrees with Arcimboldo that the artist must not be obsessed with superficial verisimilitude—with an approach that moves inevitably towards the modern photorealism. The real focus of graphic art must be to reveal an internal truth that cannot be captured on the surface. That truth can flow from the selection of the subject, the use of light, line and color, the composition or from other factors. But Arcimboldo falls short on this point, at least in Galileo’s judgment. He does not reach for the internal truths, he is “cute” and superficial.

The artist’s search is a quest for the grammar of nature, the artist’s tools are another language, an alphabet by which nature can be approached and understood. If “nature” takes a human subject, then it is the psychological or internal dimension which must be portrayed; if it is a landscape, then it must be the unseen hand or animating force of nature. This grammar is pursued in the interests of unlocking nature and understanding its secrets. But it also is essential to create a means of broader communication among humans over time and space–a topic of enduring concern for Galileo.
And in his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue on the Two World Systems, but usually referred to in English as the Dialogue on Tides), the book that provoked Galileo’s final and tragic confrontation with the Holy Office, Galileo is focused on the same issues. He talks about the newly discovered Indies and the wondrous and alien civilization there. But his major concern is communication: how do we communicate our learning to them, and absorb also their attainments? He talks about the exploration of the “alphabet,” by which he means understanding the grammar of the mind. “What eminence of mind was his who first devised the way of communicating his innermost thoughts to any other person however distant in time or space? The way of communing with those in the Indies, with those who have not yet been born, with those who will come into being a thousand or ten thousand years hence?” Galileo’s book is a sort of dialogue between adherents of the Copernican and the Ptolemaic systems, but at a more fundamental level it is a book about dialogue—how do we assemble, order and transmit our thoughts? What discipline do we impose to make them more readily understood?

The drive for an increasingly universal medium of communication leads Galileo to consider and value the graphic arts, poetry and music, in particular, as the other most promising paths. Galileo does not view them as rivals or alternatives to the scientific method which is his chief focus. Rather he sees them, well pursued, as essential adjuncts which will aid understanding, and—in the case of music and graphic arts—move it beyond the limitations inherent in words.

The Urge of The Letter

Tue, 7 Jul 2009 22:07:55 -0400

From What’s “The Urge of the Letter”?
by Matthew Battles
May 21, 2009

Though the ways of writing have proliferated through time, they’re connected like some existential cursive stretching from clay tablets to computers. The letterforms with which we’re most intimate—those of the Roman alphabet—have traveled a long way since their birth as sketchy renderings of oxheads and houses. But they still carry those shapes, along with marks left by Greek scribes and Roman stonecutters, medieval monks and Renaissance goldsmiths, designers and sign painters and artists and engineers.

And all this stuff we’re doing with pixels and silicon, with networks and nodes, tweets and tumblelogs? It’s not the negation of all that came before—it’s not the end of the world as we know it. It’s just the next loop, part of the cursive line.

A species like ours can do perfectly well without writing for millennia upon millennia—but once we take the plunge and blunder into writing, we had better be all in.

From “Writing is Radical”
May 26, 2009

What are the roots of writing? What makes it look like it does? Despite vast differences in their appearance and in the systems that govern them, most forms of written characters share profoundly similar traits: they’re made of lines that cross, connect, and loop, and they arrange themselves into linear sets. Why is this the case? Why don’t we have writing systems that convey meaning by, say, color or hue, or size, or relative location? ...

All this speculation about the roots of perception glosses over the basic history of graphic signs: whether alphabetic or ideographic, they start out as pictures of things. The fundamentals of perception provide a basis for understanding why writing works for us, and why it has conserved these signs so well over these three millennia. It’s remarkably conservative, the alphabet, at a root/radical/topological level. And this, too: characters don’t evolve only to be seen and read, but made. Written. And line is a handy tool for this kind of making...

I want to say that we’re wired for writing—although it’s likely more accurate to say that writing employs our wiring, as it must do. Were we wired like dragonflies, or even dogs, our writing would take remarkably different forms.

And yet this is our world, not that of dragonflies—there are no natural scenes, no standard configurations, without our particular perceptions. We are fibered together out of the world that our fibers weave.

How Does Language Shape The Way We Think?

Wed, 1 Jul 2009 16:14:14 -0400

by Lera Boroditsky
from Edge.org, June 12, 2009

Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts? ...

Read more at www.edge.org.

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.