Tea at Trianon: The Mystery of Visual Perception

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 27, 2020

The Mystery of Visual Perception

From Philos-Sophia Initiative:

Lord Kelvin made a crucially important point when he declared physics to be “the science of measurement”: it is this basis in measurement that proves definitive not only of physics and the physical sciences at large, but of the resultant Weltanschauung. Obviously measurement quantifies: reduces things in principle to “centimeters, grams, and seconds” according to the cgs system. The fact, however, is not that all is thus reducible, but that whatsoever happens not to be is “filtered out” by the modus operandi of the scientific process and eventually demoted to the status of a res cogitans, a mere “thing of the mind.” And it is this scientistic denial of the non-measurable that in a way defines our culture and moreover engenders that “chronic schizophrenia” to which I have often enough referred.

It can hardly be doubted that the physical sciences have proved successful beyond the wildest dreams of the founders themselves: even Francis Bacon, I surmise, would be amazed to see what his celebrated “machine for the mind” has been able to accomplish! What as a rule we fail to grasp is what a physics-based science does not accomplish, what in fact its very modus operandi excludes. A physics-based science, first of all, cannot disabuse us of the belief that the world reduces to quantities: to the things brought into play, namely, by that Baconian “machine.” What is lost in the bargain are primarily the sensible qualities: the five kinds, that is, which render the corporeal world perceptible. These sensibly apprehensible constituents are now said to be “subjective,” not because some experimentum crucis has shown them to be, but simply because a science based upon measurement does not register such a thing as red or green. It thus came about that color per se has been officially declared to be a wavelength, notwithstanding the self-evident fact that what we actually perceive is not a wavelength at all, but red or green. (Read more.)