The major premise of Karsten Harrries’ ambitious book is the suggestion
that much postmodernist rhetoric can be understood as a symptom
of Western civilization’s discontent, caused by a longing for
coherence and transcendent meaning. This dissatisfaction with
modernity is, Harries suggests, traceable from medieval cosmology
through the revolutionary ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton
to the rise to prominence of the Enlightenment ideals of rational
objectivity, individual liberty, and progress and the subsequent
undermining of Christian dogma. In Infinity and Perspective,
Harries traces the "prehistory" of this movement and
claims that it has led to a conception of human freedom that at
once supports modernity and threatens to destroy it. He also attempts
to show how modernism is imbued by nihilism and what it might
mean to go beyond nihilism to a new "geocentrism".

Through his somewhat tendentious elucidation of the ideas of infinity
and perspective, Harries attempts to uncover the complexities
of the threshold that separates the modern from the pre-modern
world. In particular, he argues that the notion of perspective
was integral to the writings of two contemporaneous early Renaissance
thinkers: Francesco Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and Leon Battista
Alberti (1404-1472). Brunelleschi was an architect and sculptor
and invented the system for rendering three dimensions on a flat
plane, which was later refined and extended by Alberti, a philosopher
and art theorist. The system allowed painters for the first time
perspectivally to represent objects, to create convincing representations
of objects as they appear. At the same time, the German humanist,
scientist, and Roman Catholic cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464)
was devising Gedanken Experimente that involved the reader
in adopting perspectival variations. In both instances, the implied
relativity of appearance constituted a fundamental shift in the
way human beings understood their world which gave rise to new
perceptual and intellectual possibilities.

Harries argues that Cusanus also influenced the development of
the notion of infinity. By identifying Cusanus in this way, Harries
is repudiating the common belief that the conception of the infinity
of the universe originates with the Greeks. The theological speculations
of Cusanus are, according to Harries, a direct antecedent of the
scientific ideas of Copernicus, even though they were clearly
not meant as contributions to science. Harries explains this convergence
of disciplines that are today assumed to have nothing to do with
each other by showing that the autonomy of science is itself a
relatively recent development. Modern science, he claims, has
indeed developed in such a way as to preclude the need to observe
its wider contexts; but the same is not true of its beginnings.
Harries’ main exegetical proposal is that Cusanus’s cosmological
speculations culminate in the transference to the universe of
the Judaeo-Christian characterization of God as infinite: "a
sphere of which the center is everywhere, and the circumference
nowhere". This transference of the metaphor of the infinite
sphere did not, Harries argues, as is commonly held, follow the
astronomical discoveries and theories of the sixteenth century.
Rather, the reverse was the case; the metaphor’s transference
preceded and helped prepare the way for the new astronomy. Cusanus’s
speculations thus led to a new way of looking at the world.

Throughout the book, Harries draws on the writings of many seminal
medieval and Renaissance scholars and attempts to disentangle
and examine various strands of ideas pertaining to his central
themes. In this connection, Harries explores conceptions of teleology
and objectivity, being and understanding, appearance and reality,
theocentrism and anthropocentrism, determinism and freedom, reason
and spirit. In addition, his final chapter examines post-Copernican
ideas, such as those of Darwin and Freud, which have led to further
"decentering", and in the epilogue Harries presents
his own proposals for a new post-postmodern "geocentrism".
In broad outline, he claims that, through the power of reflection,
we can transcend ourselves as finite knowers. He does not claim,
as many postmodernists do, that modern science is "just one
more worldview," but advocates using our powers of reflection
to question such modernist aims as boundless technological progress
or its assumption that reality is the only objective reality pursued
by scientists. Harries maintains that we "can be the centre
of our own interest," but that we "need an understanding
of being that expresses itself concretely in the way we concern
ourselves with persons and things," and that "an understanding
of science can help us find again our home on Earth".

© 2001 Daniel Came

Daniel Came is a graduate
student at the University of Oxford where he also teaches philosophy.
His principal research interests are the History of German Philosophy
and the Philosophy of Art.

Categories: Philosophical