Faculty PresentationPsychology Lunch

Inner Sense and Experience

The Discovery of Perspective

and the “Making of the Modern Mind”

Professor Peter Burmeister

Wednesday, September 21, 2011, 12 Noon

Webb 006

The Making of the Modern Mind

• By the end of the Middle Ages, with the demise of the Roman Empire, much of Europe was peopled by descendants of the former “barbarian” tribes from northern and central Europe

• The last “Roman” emperor, Romulus Augustus, was deposed (476 A.D.)

• Thereafter, “Germanic” tribes dominated much of Europe, including Italy, Spain, Southern France

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• The “barbarians” from Northern and Western Europe colonized much of what had been the Roman Empire and its outposts

• Germanic tribes were the intellectual and psychological ancestors of modern western civilization

• Our psychology textbooks almost entirely reflect this heritage in the contributions of the vast majority of the “great men” that we study

• This is particularly true of the “outward-looking” point of view that developed into Empiricism

04/13/2023 4

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• “In a list of 538 individuals important to the field of psychology (between 1600 and 1967) one-third were workers in the German language, one-third Americans and one-third British and French together. Only 11 Italians figured in this list.” (Robert I. Watson and Marilyn Merrifield, “Characteristics of Individuals Eminent in Psychology in Temporal Perspective,”1973)

• “Psychology has been mainly a creation of the German language out of the German soul.” (James Hillman, 1975)

Modern Mind, Cont’d.• “For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away

from England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, the one country which bore the name of England was what we now call Sleswick (Schleswig), a district in the heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic from the Northern seas.

• The dwellers in this district were one out of three tribes, all belonging to the same Low German branch of the Teutonic family, who at the moment when history discovers them were bound together in some loose fashion by the ties of a common blood and a common speech.” (J.R. Green. A Short History of the English People. 1915.”)

Sleswick

Conquest of England

Modern Mind, Cont’d.• Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374): his writings are often

considered to mark the beginning of the Renaissance• Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux (central France): one of

the first recorded instances of a recreational climb, simply to enjoy the awesome landscape.

• It represents a turning away from the soul, the inner life, to the outer, the realm of experience

• Petrarch urged a return to religion based on personal faith and personal feelings

• The Renaissance is primarily a period of experience, observation and perspective; of anthropocentrism rather than theocentrism

Mount Ventoux

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• Perspective, a Renaissance invention, separates the observer from the observed; the land becomes landscape

• Petrarch influenced Renaissance art and thinking by placing man at the center of the Universe

• Renaissance art becomes secular and architecture no longer encloses sacred space but looks outward through vaults and windows to the world

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• Ordinarily, we think of perspective as optical or ‘vanishing point’ perspective, an arrangement of objects within cubical space so that each object is clearly ‘located’ in relation to the enclosing space and to other objects by a system of co-ordinated lines (‘orthoganals’) converging in a ‘visual pyramid’ toward an exact focal point situated upon an implied or defined horizon. This sort of mathematical perspective – as artificial as any system of vision ever invented – became an orthodox mode of representing space in renaissance painting.” (Wylie Sypher – 1955)

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• “The emergence of spatial perspective for the first time gave consciousness the ability to fully accommodate a three-dimensional of perspectival worldview. This new awareness of perspective is seen clearly in the paintings of the Renaissance, but also appears in its literature, philosophy, and mathematics.” (Allan Combs. The Radiance of Being. 1996.)

• Objectivity began to take on a new meaning as the ego identified its location as a point separated and distanced from the rest of the world. (Ibid.)

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• “Uccello, for example, who gave his life and his art to exploring perspective, is one of those humanists who used his painting for research.

• “Berenson complains that Uccello merely illustrates scientific problems, that his zeal for converging lines causes him to forget local color, so he presents us with green and pink horses.” (Wylie Syhper, 1955)

• “Uccello's wife told people that Paolo used to stay up all night in his study, trying to work out the vanishing points of his perspective, and that when she called him to come to bed he would say: ‘Oh what a lovely thing this perspective is!’” (Vasari, “Lives of the Artists. 1568.)

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• “For his time his (Petrarch’s) is an epochal event and signifies no less than the discovery of landscape: the first dawning of an awareness of space that resulted in a fundamental alteration of European’s man’s attitude in and toward the world.” (Jean Gebser 1949)

• Perspective is man’s effort to concretize or to objectify space

• It detaches the observer from the observed

Modern Mind, Cont’d.• In spite of his experience on Mt. Ventoux, Petrarch suffered great

remorse at his desire to look outward• Turning from the view of the landscape, he opens “The Confessions

of St. Augustine” at random, and finds this passage:• “And men went forth to behold the high mountains and the mighty

surge of the sea and the broad stretches of the rivers and the inexhaustible ocean, and the paths of the stars, and in so doing, lose themselves in wonderment.”

• Then Petrarch writes: “I was irritated for having turned my thoughts to mundane matters at such a moment, for even the pagan philosophers should have long since taught me that there is nothing more wondrous than the soul, and that compared to its greatness nothing is great.”

Francesco Petrarca

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• James Hillman in “Re-Visioning Psychology,” uses the story of Petrarch's ascent to illustrate his argument that the outer world of nature is mirrored by an equally vast inner world of images.

• Both worlds exist apart from the human being. The outer world may have motivated Petrarch to climb Mont Ventoux, but the inner world is what he discovered when he reached the top and read the passage from Augustine's “Confessions.”

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• Hillman’s theory suggests that the use of perspective “adds depth” to visual art and therefore reflects the desire of the Renaissance man for greater psychological depth

• This elegant theory directly contrasts with Gebser’s sense of Petrarch’s pre-occupation with the outer world as seen from the mountain

• Which hypothesis appeals most to you?• Where is the evidence?

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• “So this is the natural order, that among mortals the care of things mortal should come first; to the transitory will then succeed the eternal; from the first to the second is the natural progression.” (Petrarch, “Letter to Posterity)

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• The older mindset (Roman/Christian Empire) emphasized looking within for spiritual guidance and truth

• The Gothic mindset (Northern/Western Europe) was dualistic: a tension between inward and outward experience

• That tension remains current in the history of modern psychology

• Much of the modern mind has its roots in the zeitgeist of the European Gothic period

Modern Mind, Cont’d.• Petrarch’s life coincided with the “Babylonian Captivity” of the

Papacy• 1305 – 1378, Popes resided in Avignon, rather than in Rome• Petrarch (and many others) condemned the seven Avignon

Popes during this period for their “worldly” lifestyle, emulating princes and nobles

• This schism in the church is a further indication of the conflict between the inner and the worldly or outer mental and spiritual life

• The Popes returned to Rome in 1378, but the schism continued for another 40 years, during which the Protestant Reformation had its beginnings

Papal Palace, Avignon

Uccello (1397-1475) : The Battle of San Romano

Uccello: Bernardino della Ciarda Thrown Off His Horse

Uccello: St. George and the Dragon

Sant’Andrea del Valle, Roma

San Carlo al Corso Roma

Chiesa del Gesu, Roma

San Francesco, Rimini

Church of Gesu, Rome, Interior

Structure of a Gothic Cathedral

Beauvais Cathedral

Beauvais Cathedral

Lincoln Cathedral Chapter House

Lincoln Cathedral Chapter House

Florence Cathedral

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• “The moment when man stepped out of the Middle Ages and into the modern era, long celebrated as a sublime act of self emancipation, was in reality a neurotic flight from a sense of narcissistic impotence into the illusion of narcissistic omnipotence.” (Horst-Eberhard Richter, 1984)

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• Roger Bacon (1214 – 1292 A.D.): “Experience is double: one is by means of the exterior senses; . . . but this experience does not suffice man; . . . it touches on nothing at all of spiritual things. Therefore it is necessary that the understanding of man be aided otherwise, and therefore the holy patriarchs and prophets, who first gave the sciences to the world, received interior illuminations and were not dependent only on sense . . .”

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• William of Occam or Ockham (1285-1349 A.D.): emphasized the role of sense experience over reason

• Not concerned with transcendent reality• “Occam’s Razor”: no unnecessary assumptions should be

made; all such extraneous inferences should be “shaved” from explanations or arguments. Less is more!

• Argued that universal principals were no more than verbal labels

• Occam was only concerned with how the mind classifies experience

• Sensory experience defines the world

Modern Mind, Cont’d.• Council of Trent (1545-1563 A.D.): Catholic Church

reaction to Luther• Sanctioned the veneration of images and relics• Also, set forth the doctrine that during the Mass, the bread

and the wine actually (not symbolically) become the body and blood of Christ

• “During this ceremony, therefore, the spiritual experience can be represented and consummated at the level of the flesh.” (Wylie Sypher, 1955)

• Christ is "really, truly, substantially present" in the consecrated forms

• The “Word” becomes “Flesh!”

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• The emergence of perspective led to a three-dimensional or perspectival orientation to the world

• The ego became a point separated from the rest of the world

• The result was objectivity: essential to science and analytic thought, but it has its downsides

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• The perspectival consciousness that developed during the Gothic period is evidenced in “nothing but” statements

• For example, the statement: “Matter is nothing but atoms.”

• Nothing but statements lead to nihilism; the death of inquiry, calcification of creativity

• Contemporary psychologists such as: Alan Combs, Ervin Laszlo, Rupert Sheldrake, Ken Wilber, Michael Conforti and others are leading the way to an aperspectival, Integral Consciousness

Modern Mind, Cont’d.• “For as far back as I can remember, my own consciousness has seemed

to me to be absolutely real and unwavering. I was fascinated by it, and that fascination eventually led to a study and career in the sciences of the mind and the brain. As a student, I learned to my amazement that there were others who did not find it interesting or who denied its existence entirely. Much has changed since those days, both in my own life and in science as well. The study of consciousness has become not only legitimate but even fashionable. Nevertheless, conferences, professional meetings, and even popular books on consciousness seem to entirely miss my original idea. They speak of behavior, they speak of cognitive networks, they frequently speak or neurons and the brain, but they all too rarely speak of the simple crystalline reality that undergirds all experience – consciousness. (Allan Combs, “The Radiance of Being”. 1996)

Modern Mind, Cont’d.

• “Compelled to emphasize his ego every more strongly because of (its) isolating fixity, man faces the world in hostile confrontation.” (Jean Gebser, 1956)

• The conscious mind has evolved and adapted to deny our hostile reactions to threatening stimuli in the outer world

• Our greatest mental resources lie outside conscious awareness and thinking

• The future of psychology may be within the deep unconscious psyche to decode the wisdom that resides outside of conscious awareness

Jean Gebser