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 18/08/2016 11:57 | |
Thomas Huxley
The final development in the evolutionary drama of sight (and I must leave much out) occurred in our century. By the mid-1900s, the neurophysiology and psychology of vision had ad-vanced to an extraordinary degree. The detailed knowledge we now possess of brain structure and function, of the neural anat- omy of the eye and visual pathways, is truly staggering. In the flush of excitement that naturally accompanies a century of dis- covery, many feel that they hold now in their hands "the me- Page 35 / chanical equivalent of consciousness," as Thomas Huxley called it.
The Harvard biologist and Nobel laureate David Hubel speaks for many scientists when he states that the brain is a machine "that does tasks in a way that is consonant with the laws of physics, an object that we can ultimately understand in the same way we understand a pnntlng press."30 oreover, contrary to Descartes, we have no need to appeal "to mystical life forces- or to the mind" to account for perception, thought, or emotion. They are purely and simply states of the physical brain.
Hubel rightly recognizes the profound implications of this view for everything we do. Our image of the mind sets the agenda for everything from education to love relationships. According to Hubel, once we understand that mind is an illusion, and that brain is the sole reality, then we can restructure our systems of education and social institutions to serve the brain, not an an-tiquated notion of "spiritual man."
In traditional language, the substitution of a purely material and sensual image for a spiritual reality is idolatry. In his in- sightfullittle book Saving the Appearances, Owen Barfield sug-gests a connection between the biblical injunction against idolatry and the veneration of models so common to modem scientific practice.31 Scientific models certainly have their right-ful place. But when does a model become an idol, that is, when is it taken for something other than a model, becoming "reality"? The model of an atom as a miniature planetary system is helpful only as long as it is not taken literally. Quantum physicists discovered long ago the dangers of idolatry. Neurophysiologists have yet to learn the lesson. For many of them, the brain has become an idol; it has become quintessential man.
The dangers associated with this kind of adulation of the brain are innumerable. The image we have of ourselves is a powerful thing; it shapes our actions, and so also the world we fashion for us and for our children. It is important, therefore, patiently and carefully to distinguish between idol and fact.
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I am not suggesting a simplistic Romantic return to the past. There is no turning back. Yet are Hubel and the legions of scientists who think like him right to reduce our humanity to brain function? The answer is, quite simply, no. The brain as described by Hubel is a carefully crafted and dazzling image fashioned from the fruits of scientific research, one full of in- sights; but which is ultimately mistaken for something it is not. Is it possible to embrace the results of science without falling into such idolatry? Yes, but this, perhaps more than any other, is the challenge we confront in our times. Our success or failure in fashioning a nonidolatrous science will determine much for our future.
Rekindling the Fire of the Eye
The movements we have traced are like a contrapuntal harmony where one melody sounds against the other. As the light of the eye dims, that of the world brightens. As the beacon of the eye gradually retreats, the power of sunlight projects itself deeper and deeper into the human being until finally the ethereal em- anations of Plato, and even the Cartesian spectator, vanish from the Western scientific sense of self. Yet some data and scientific developments indicate the possibility of a "postmodern" view of self and vision that has room in it for the light of the eye. In them, the interior ray may once again find a place, even if under another guise.
We have learned that our consciousness is not immutable. Our habits of thought become perceptions, and while powerful and pervasive, these are not universal or "true." We should learn to take responsibility for them. Do they accord with our deepest intentions and the good of our society and planet? Or do we need to "reimagine" ourselves and our world? In this way Matthew's remarks make real sense: "If thine eye be evil, thy / Page 37 / whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" Our light, a light of meaning, fashions a world, forms it from the light of day. If our light be darkness-be evil-then we bring darkness and evil into our whole body, personal and social. If it be light- be good-then health flows into us, and into the world.
Plato's light of the eye was a light of interpretation, of "in-tentionality," as modem phenomenologists would say; a light that grants meaning. Cognition entails two actions: the world presents itself, but we must "re-present" it. We bring ourseJves, with all our faculties and limitations, to the world's presentation in order to give form, fig1:1re, and meaning to that content. The beautiful and productive images we craft on the basis of expe- rience are images only-fruits of the imagination. They are no less true for being so. If in our enthusiasm we forget this, then images become idols demanding propitiation at their high altars. Nor should these reflections become grounds for abandoning the path of knowledge, because it is a philosophy of growth and development. The organs of insight we bring are neither fixed nor limited, but malleable and expansive. Thus the importance of integrating the insights into light gained by artistic and spir-itual disciplines as well as scientific ones.
"Plato's light of the eye was a light of interpretation,"
Plato's light of the I was a light of interpretation,
Plato's light of the 9 was a light of interpretation,
CHAPTER 3
Light Divided: Divine Light and Optical Science
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"Our original question-what is the nature of light?-has been answered differently by different peoples. To the Egyptians it asked after man's relationship to the god Ra. They sought first a moral or spiritual answer, not a mechanistic one. By contrast, we search to explain the nature of light by tracing light rays through intricate optical systems. We seek light's mathematical and physical lawfulness. The sequence of words-what is light?-does not have a unique meaning. The Egyptian answer is utterly different from that of quantum optics, but are they necessarily at odds? Or does the Egyptian yearn to know a different part of light's expansive being?
We should be open to the possibility that the essential ques- tions posed about nature in past or future ages may be quite different from those posed by us today. As C. S. Lewis wrote in his lovely book The Discarded Image, it is not that our present- day understanding is unsubstantiated, but we should realize that "nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her.". The questions we ask, as well as the answers we are willing to accept, reflect our temper of mind. The images of one age may be discarded by another less because of new discoveries than because of new priorities and new questions, all of which reflect a changing psyche.
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By remaining open to conflicting proposals regarding the na- ture of light, we allow the wide-ranging drama of the past its place, and so read the full biography of light rather than only the fragment we have written ourselves. We can also wonder afresh at our present understandings of light and see the future as being still undeterl{lined. As we approach the ancients' un- derstanding of light, we should leave our own hard-won, con-temporary images at the threshold to see as others have seen.
The Lost Eye
I
am the one
who openeth his eyes, and there is light; When his eyes close, darkness falleth.
Ra
speaking; from the
Turin papyrus, 1300 B.C."
Two eyes looked down on the civilization of the Nile, the "two eyes of Horus," the sun and moon. No more significant symbol existed in ancient Egypt than the eye of the sun-god Ra. His eye-the sun-was creative, his vision was life itself. It was said that mankind arose from the tears of his eye. in Egyptian, the very words for tears and men sounded similar.
The nature of light was clear to the Egyptians. As the priest- scribe wrote in the above fragment 3,300 years ago, when Ra "openeth his eyes. . . there is light; When his eyes close, dark- ness falleth." The gaze of Ra was the light of day. For men and women of that civilization, to stand within daylight was to stand in the sight of their sun-god. The power of vision to illuminate the world was universalized, projected onto the grandest scale, becoming the brightness of day. The gaze of God was light. Light was God seeing."
TWO EYES YOU ARE TWO EYES YOU BE EYE SEE YOU ARE TWO EYES FOR ME
We are reminded of the Greeks, who felt the force of their vision, the "light" of their own eye, and developed a theory of / Page 40 / vision based, in part, on that experience. From the mythology of the Egyptian world with its multitude of stories about the eyes of Horus or Ra, we come to realize that prior to the individualized light of Greek visual theory, sunlight itself was felt to be an emanation of an eye, that of the sun-god Ra. In neither case was light a substance or thing, but rather was felt to be the power of seeing. To see was to illumine. For Empedocles, the human eye was like a lantern lit at the hearth of creation. When open, it rayed forth into the world and man saw. For the Egyptian priest, the sun itself was an eye, which, when open, brought the day and, when closed, the night. The kinship between the eye and the sun was felt deeply for many centuries, from ancient Egypt to the medieval mystics. In Persian and Greek mythology the identical image reappears-the sun and moon are the eyes of gods placed into the heavens.2
The earliest answer given to our question-what is the nature of light?-must be: it is the sight of God. Mankind, formed from the tears of Ra or by means of his sight alone, shares somewhat in his nature, like debased gods.3 By the time of the Greek philosophers, we, like the gods, illuminate the world with our sight. The sight of Ra lights up the cosmos; the sight of man lights up our personal world.
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The change from universal illumination and the eye of god to the human is beautifully told in the Egyptian story of the "lost eye" of Horus or Ra that appears in many variations within Egyptian mythology." It seems that the Eye of the supreme god of Egypt wandered away from its appointed course as the Sun, becoming lost in the watery depths of this world and living as a lioness in the eastern mountains of the sunrise. Ra sent Shu and Tefnut in search of it, but by the time the Eye was found and returned to the face of Ra, another eye had been fashioned to take its place. The original Eye was outraged, but the god Thoth pacified and healed it. Ra went still further and made a place for it within the enclosed serpent form of the uraeus, and placed it in the middle of his forehead "where it could rule the whole world." In the depiction of the pharaohs, this same' em-blem rested on their heads. The Eye of Ra, the Sun, was no longer free to rove unfettered, but was now forever encompassed by the asp-serpent. Delimited and individualized by the power of the serpent, it became the ruler of this world. The all-mighty pharaoh, therefore, is depicted as crowned with the uraeus. The eye of Ra becomes the eye of man; the light of god the light of man.
Light was, and has remained, an aspect of God. Imaged in countless ways as sight or angel or one of a thousand other things, it has been inseparable from man's groping to represent the spirit. From Egypt we move to ancient Persia, where light, darkness, and the divine unite to form a glorious religious uni-verse."
IF THINE I OFFEND THEE
CATCHING THE LIGHT
THE ENTWINED HISTORY OF LIGHT AND MIND
Arthur Zajonc 1993
THE GIFT OF LIGHT
Light in a Dark World
Legend has it that at the age of thirty, Zoroaster, whose life had been spent in careful attention to the path of righteousness, stood in the river Daiti in order to draw water for ritual libations. / Page 42 /
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"As the sun sets, its light passes through more and more of the atmosphere en route to the eye. Thus, in its journey from sun to us, light passes through the darkening or "turbid" medium of air, as Goethe called it. In the process, all the warm colors arise. This is the archetypal relationship between light and dark- ness that yields red, orange, and yellow-light through dark- ness. The stronger the darkening, the redder the color.
The blue vault of the daytime sky offers us the archetypal instance of the other pole of color. Here light does not pass through darkness, but just the opposite-darkness passes / Page 210 / through light. Looking up, we gaze into the dark depths of space, but once again the atmosphere intervenes. Now, however, it plays a different role. In this case, the air catches the light. We look, therefore, through the light-filled medium of the atmo-sphere into the darkness. Or, if we follow Goethe and conceive of darkness as equally, if oppositely, active to light, darkness shines through the light-filled air, and the cool colors arise.
Once you learn to see the law of color in the colors of the heavens, you will see examples of it everywhere, from the blue haze over a smoky pool table, to the use of "atmospheric per-spective" by a painter (that which is distant appears blue be-cause of the intervening turbidity of air). Prismatic colors, as in the boundary colors discussed above, are more complex but can also be understood in this way. In all cases, light and darkness meet in a turbid medium to create color.
The account of color production given by the most recent theories of physics offers a similar, if far more exact and math- ematical account. In them, colors arise through the "scattering" of light. The turbid medium provides innumerable scattering centers, be they molecules in air or a glass prism. From them light is scattered according to strictly mathematical laws, and in the process colors are produced. Even the rainbow, set be- tween Alexander's dark band and a luminous interior region, can be understood in an analogous way. Where light meets darkness, colors flash into existence. Colors are, therefore, the offspring of the greatest polarity our universe can offer. In the mythic language of Zarathustra, colors are a reflection of the mighty battle relentlessly waged between the god of light, Ahura Mazda, and the dark hosts of Ahriman. In Goethe's lan-guage, "Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light," the deeds and suffe.rings of light with darkness.24
If we follow Goethe's pathway into color, we are not led to models of light in terms of waves or particles, but to a perception of those relationships between light and darkness that give rise / Page 211 / to color. Seen aright, the phenomena of the blue sky and sunset are the theory, and true to its Greek root, theoria, theory really is a "beholding." In Goethe's words, "The highest thing would be to comprehend that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the heavens reveals to us the fundamental law of chro- matics. One should only not see anything further behind the phenomena: they themselves are the theory.25
Like the geologist reading rocks, or Newton seeing the apple fall, or Archimedes crying "Eureka!" we can grow to perceive the laws of chromatics in the blue of the heavens and the first light of dawn. Through studying the action of light in darkness, and darkness in light, we come to sense the "deeds and suf- fering" that are color. Once we have kindled an Empedoclean light within, fashioned the requisite organs of insight, the ar- chetypal phenomena appear, and in them we see an idea.
PHILOSOPHY SINCE PLATO has divided knowing into two insular realms: ideas and experience. Naively, but tenaciously, Goethe ceaselessly sought a way to experience ideas, to bridge the chasm others thought unbridgeable. The union of idea and ex- perience may seem impossible, but as Goethe says, "nothing forbids us from seeking a loving approach to that which lies beyond our reach.26
Goethe's method gradually converts facts to theory, seen real-ity to ideal reality, and is Goethe's response to philosophical dualism. One cannot take truth by force, but perhaps indirectly, through phenomena, sign, and symbol we may approach her. "The True, which is identical with the divine, does not allow itself to be recognized by us directly. Rather we discern it only in reflection, in instance, symbol, in particular and kindred appearances. We become aware of it as incomprehensible life and yet cannot renounce the wish to comprehend it."
Goethe's method requires a reciprocal enhancement of both / Page 212 / natural phenomena and the observing mind. It all begins with wonder, as Plato rightly said, but then passes on to interest and so to active inquiry. In the process, new organs of perception are fashioned that are suited to seeing the essential aspects of the phenomena before us. As we enhance our cognitive capac- ities we simultaneously enhance the world we see until, ulti-mately, we behold the ideal within the real as archetypal phenomenon. To them one rises, as Goethe described the pro-cess, and from them one can descend in order to understand specific phenomena. They are the ultimate experience, and the limit beyond which one cannot legitimately go. Most of us, however, do not recognize this and so go on, putting, for ex-ample, a model or idol in place of the archetype. "The sight of an archetypal phenomenon is generally not enough for people; they think they must go still further; and are thus like children who after peeping into a mirror turn it round directly to see what is on the other side.Page 27"
"GOETHE'S SENSE OF scientific understanding is grounded in in-sight, not model building, and so is true to the heart of both science and art.
Every scientific discovery from Galileo to Einstein can trace its origin to the eureka experience in which a phenomenon becomes transparent to the ideal, and an idea is seen. From this exhilarating moment, the scientist works to translate his or her insight into words and symbols. In the process, the eureka experience is often lost while its technical power is retained. Goethe was more interested in the former, seeking constantly for means that would permit everyone to have their own epiphany into nature's ways, to see ideas. -
GOETHE PERFORMED FOR philosophy a common piece of parlor magic. The magician stands with two disconnected solid metal / Page 213 / rings before the audience, one in his left hand, the other in his right. He taps them together to prove the impossibility of their union. Then, before their very eyes, he clangs the two and they are linked. Each ring passes through the middle of the other. In an instant the topology has changed utterly. Now all such distinctions as inside-outside simply lose their meaning. Like the two rings, Goethe considered the realms of thinking and perceiving as interpenetrating. Perceiving is at once outside and at the center of thinking, and thinking likewise passes through the heart of seeing, and surrounds it.
Two worlds, kept so long apart, are united in our perception of archetypal phenomena. To see them we must fashion new organs of cognition, for they cannot be gained by logic alone. Once known, they represent the highest we can hope to attain. To the artist, one final and all-significant aspect of this method is that in perceiving the archetypal phenomenon, one does not denude or degrade nature but exalt her. The sunset is still gloriously red, not reduced to differential absorption and scat- tering. The perception of a scientific idea does not require the death of the beautiful.
The last chapter of Goethe's Theory of Color undertakes a preliminary treatment of the "sensory-moral" effects of color. In these pages, Goethe describes his inner response to color, connecting it back to earlier sections of the book. The eye's tendency to complete the color circle is related to the principles of color harmony; the polarity of warm and cool colors takes on new me~ning in light of his prism experiments. The inner aspects are as much a part of the experience of color as the redness of red. The archetypal phenomena include the moral with the sen-sual.
Remember Goethe's motivating question framed on a hillside outside Rome regarding the use of color by artists. Remember, too, the therapeutic use of color at Sunfield Children's Home. Textbook physics cannot answer the real questions of Goethe or Wilson. Such answers come only by working with the phenomena / Page 214 / themselves, hecause then we fashion organs for a science in which the beautiful as well as the useful, the human as well as the physical, can be experienced. Thus, Goethe performed a second piece of conjuring. As Gaston Bachelard once wrote, and as Goethe amply demonstrated, "The phenomena of the world, as soon as they acquire a little consistency and unity, turn into the human truths."28
More Light!
Throughout his life Goethe was a lover of nature and especially of light. When he was young, that love was passionate; when he was old, it became quiet but intense. As a child, Goethe revered God through his works, his creation of minerals, plants, animals, and heavens. Above all these ranked the sun. To this god, the child Goethe once constructed an altar after the fashion of Old Testament prophets. On his father's ornate, red, four- sided music stand he arranged his most precious specimens: crystals, ores, shells, and plants. Yet something especially fine was needed for the summit-a flame with gently rising smoke, perhaps. In a small porcelain saucer the young priest placed a tablet of incense, completing the altar. Lighting the tablet was all that remained in order to consummate the ceremony.
The secret service occurred at dawn with only Goethe in attendance. As a brilliant sun rose above the apartments to the east, Goethe used a magnifying glass to focus the sunlight onto the incense. Like a Zoroastrian priest, the child connected the sacred fire atop his altar to the sun. The liturgy was complete. Through the power of the sun, and with a little technical assis-tance from the lens, the mystery was enacted. Johann was content.
Goethe lived long enough to see his color science ignored or rejected by scientific contemporaries in whom mechanical con- / Page 215 / ceptions of light were unalterably rooted. They preferred a math-ematical language to that of color experience, physical models to archetypal phenomena. Yet this greatest of Germany's many geniuses never swerved from his own judgment concerning the high value of what he had accomplished.
The light of the ferryman's lamp in Goethe's fairy tale The Lily and the Green Snake turned all it touched to gold. Similarly, colors are the precious ripples that sparkle in light's wake. For decades Goethe studied them, saying at his life's end, "I have known light in its purity and truth, and I consider it my duty to strive after It."29
In his final conflict with death, light was still Goethe's last request. A half hour before his passing, Goethe commanded that the window shutters be opened so that more light might stream into the room where he lay. His earthly striving at an end, how fitting that Goethe's last words are said to have been: "More light!"30 Ruskin was right, those who love color are pure. Surely to them, if to anyone, will be granted nature's open secret-light."
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"One cannot take truth by force, but perhaps indirectly, through phenomena, sign, and symbol we may approach her. "The True, which is identical with the divine, does not allow itself to be recognized by us directly. Rather we discern it only in reflection, in instance, symbol, in particular and kindred appearances."
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Least Light: A Contemporary View
The Place of Light
"Hast thou perceived the breadth of the Earth? declare if thou knowest it all. Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof?" |