Infinity and Perspective. (Reviews).

Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective

Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001. xii + 380 pp. $37.95. ISBN: 0-262-08292-6.

This ambitious and venturesome book -- dedicated to and drawing on but also deviating from the work of Hans Blumenberg -- is an inter- (or super-) disciplinary study of the transformation of Western scientific thought from a pre- to a post-modern orientation, focusing on our modern interlude. Not strictly speaking history, it is a series of reflections on an eccentrically constructed tradition of philosophical and theological interpretations of God's Creation and man's post-Copernican re-creation. I say not history because its form is not explanatory narrative but rather an extended and critical commentary on a series of thinkers and artists admitted to the cosmological conversation, including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Petrarch, Nicolas of Cusa, Alberti, Ficino, Pico, Bruno, Galileo, Glanvill, Lambert, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and of course Blumenberg, who have all speculated about the nature and human perception of the world and transcendental questions beyond the horizons of na ture and humanity.

Although Harries treats the history of science, he does not touch at all on contemporary issues of social and cultural construction raised by Shapin, Schaffer, and others, but rather returns to the old and (some would think) outdated opposition between Pierre Duhem, who pushed the origins of modern science back through the scholastic tradition to the fourteenth century, and Alexandre Koyre, who argued for a "deep revolution" and rupture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the wake of the Copernican theory. Harries rejects Koyrd's radical position (and deviates a bit from Duhem's neo-scholasticism) and turns rather to the theological and mystical speculations of Cusanus as the key and "conceptual link" between ancient ideas and modern science. Harries' argument draws not only on Cusanus' endorsement of the principle of the relativity of motion, an infinite uriverse (on the analogy of an infinite God), and the rejection of geocentrism but also, and more originally and problematically, on his concept o f "learned ignorance." These concepts Harries joins to the Renaissance discovery of perspective and emphasis on human point of view, all of which is reinforced, he thinks, by the likelihood (suggested long ago by Joan Kelly) of a personal connection between Cusanus, Alberti, and Toscanelli. In this putative fortunate conjunction art and mathematics seem to give substance to theological speculation and associated mystical and skeptical inferences.

But philosophical affinities, and not humdrum historical connections, underlie Harries' ingenious, allusive, and sometimes pretentious line of argument and exhortation, which ranges in its conceptual invocations from Protagoras (man the measure) to Pico (dignity of man) to Nietzsche (God-deprived man left to his own interpretations) to Heidegger (representing a "third Copernican revolution") and other visionaries. I cannot begin to do justice to, or even adequately to criticize, Harries Imaginative and finally poetic (or post-poetic) creation; but it is useful to note, I think, his style, which is first-personal (quite in keeping with his concern for perspective), and his procedure, which is in effect to construct an intellectual -- a philosophical-literary-artistic-prophetic -- continuum, in which sanctioned authors are called upon sustain an argument about the expansion (or reduction?) of human consciousness from a providential to a human-perspectivist world view -- and indeed from there to a new and Blumen berg-inspired "astronoetic" transcendence, which replaces vision-bound astronautic exploration. From this perspective, Cremonini was perhaps not so wrong in refusing to look through Galileo's magic tube.

In any case Harries' story ends with a cryptic moral, which seems to be that through another Copernican revolution (or counter-Revolution?) we, at last those of us with postmodernist inclinations, can return to an earthly perspective in which poetic wisdom is reborn and in which -- although we have had to leave behind Kant's specious "island of truth" for "a new postmodern geocentrism" -- both science and history are again subordinated to philosophical, or rather theological, imagination. So then what next for "mothership earth" (as Blumenberg called it) and her inhabitants?