depiction of the invention of spectacles, the tradespeople and
scholars at the right side of the print make use of the spectacles
and magnifying glasses that the glass grinder sells at the left.
In the background, a blind man is guided by a dog. An emphasis on
visual observation and demonstration was only one component of new
attitudes to experience that emerged in the early modern period.
Like so much else about human experience, vision is shaped and understood
not only by unchanging human senses and cognitive abilities but
also by historically specific cultural understandings about that
perception and cognition.
A particularly wide
variety of understandings about human experience gained currency
beginning in the fifteenth century in Europe. The classic source
for understanding human cognition and perception was Aristotle's
De Anima (On the Soul) in which the powers of
the soul are described, including the place of the senses and thinking
and the relationships between them. Aristotle, however, was only
one of the authorities whose writings shaped experience and sensory
perception. Renaissance humanists undermined the authority of Aristotle
by claiming to recover even older sources of wisdom, such as Pythagoreanism,
Platonism, and Hermeticism.
Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) drew on astrological
and Neoplatonic theories to link the balance among the humors of
the human body and its spirits to the cosmic forces emanating from
the World Soul. Ficino developed his enormously influential views
as he studied, translated, and commented upon the Neoplatonic corpus
of texts from late antiquity by philosophers such as Plotinus and
the Hermetic corpus. The latter was actually a group of Neoplatonic
texts written around the third century CE, but thought to be the
writings of one Hermes Trismegistus, who lived before Moses and
transmitted divine wisdom. Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) and
Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615) exemplified a tradition known
as natural magic that sought to decode the secrets of nature and
recover knowledge that was older than the original revelation. Another
influential ancient source was Pliny the Elder's (ca. 23-79) Natural
History, an encyclopedic collection of all kinds of observations
about nature. It may partially explain the fascination with particulars
(especially wonders and marvels) in early modern Europe and the
many attempts to compile and catalogue them.
Early modern experiences
were not just informed by the legacy of the past but also by the
present structures of nature and society. The rhetoric of novelty
was often employed to privilege the new over the old. Paracelsus
(1493/4-1541) opposed the longstanding tradition of Galenic medicine
by locating the source of disease outside the human body and emphasizing
firsthand observation and manipulation of natural things in the
development of remedies for disease. Artisanal experience and the
everyday experience of ordinary people also gained status during
these centuries. The exploration of previously unknown continents
and increased commercialism imparted greater value to artisanal
practices and their products. Social practices, such as patronage,
enabled the legitimation and diffusion of new forms of experience
and knowing. Intellectual practices began to demonstrate a new notion
of intelligibility, which applied mathematics to physics and emphasized
knowing how to produce effects over understanding the purpose for
which they occurred.
The term "texture"
was used by Robert Boyle (1627-1691) to designate the different
configurations of material particles which account for our experience
of a world of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, pains, and pleasures.
In the new mechanistic philosophy of the seventeenth century, textures
came to replace the forms and real qualities that Aristotelian philosophers
attributed to physical things. The mechanists sought to explain
all physical phenomena in terms of the motions and interactions
of particles of a uniform matter. An example may illustrate the
difference: For Aristotle (384-322 BC) and his medieval followers,
sugar is sweet because sweetness belongs to the form that makes
sugar what it is, and we taste that sweetness when the form of the
sugar makes an imprint on our bodily fluids, as when one presses
a seal on molten wax. For the mechanists, sugar tastes sweet to
us because the sizes, shapes, and motions of the sugar particles
set off a chain of motions in our bodies causing us to experience
The early mechanist,
René Descartes (1596-1650), made this distinction between
the quantifiable features of physical objects and the qualitative
features of our experiences of objects the basis for a dualist metaphysics.
Descartes reduced material substance to geometrical properties and
relegated those aspects of our experience that resisted such a reduction
to a separable and distinct substance called the mind. Descartes
incorporated the nutritive soul into extended matter and attributed
perception and thought to mind or soul, thus making the individual
soul fully separable from the body.
is often blamed for various ills of the modern world, most notably,
the alienation of mind from body, individual from world, and thought
from action. Clearly Descartes divides the world up very differently
than Aristotle, and this affects the way we, as post-Cartesians,
situate ourselves in and experience the world. Nevertheless, as
John Sutton illustrates in his book Philosophy and Memory Traces,
if one ventures beyond the canonical texts of the history of philosophy,
it is also apparent that there was a great deal of continuity from
the Ancients to Descartes.