An essay about individualism through art
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The Renaissance was a revival in Europe of
the cyclical view of history in which mainly
Greeks and Romans had been popular. This
cyclical interpretation of history was important
because it rose and then fell behind the idea
of great civilization. It is pessimism which had
nothing continued improvement. Post
modernism which challenged the accepted
structures of historiographical research has
targeted the nature of historical truth and
objectivity. The historical basis of objectivity
as a criteria can be brought back to the
Renaissance, where there was the
development of perspective and naturalism.
Prior to the nineteenth century, history writing
basically took on grand scales. It was written
from a human progress perspective or
civilization emergence. A variety of thinkers,
writers and commentators had an authority of
history. From this period, the theories of Karl
Marx, and Marx Weber and Emile Durkheim for
later, brought influence on the reassessment
of history, its forming into a social science,
and not humanities. Early history writing
through any age reflects the mores, beliefs
and purposes of particular societies. In the
period up to the Enlightenment, it is important
to understand that religion ruled in people’s
ordering world-view, as well as influencing
their beliefs and judgement. Actually,
Enlightenment didn’t manage the
secularization of history. This notion is known
as providence which could be divided in the
actions of Man by God’s hand, and have
influence on historical writing in the past.
Marx’s first contribution to the understanding
of historical processes was the development
of "dialectical materialism (dialectic meaning
contradiction), which emerged in part from
Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s ideas." (Studying
History; J.Black and D.M.MacRaild, pg.135).
Marx’s dialectical materialism which is also
known as historical materialism was the
notion that "humans are social animals,
forming societies and maintaining relations
with other men." (pg.136). Marx argued the
material requirement that changed is the
factor in the relationship between men. In this
point, history also seemed to change through
different stages, and material life is
distinguished. The Ancient, the Feudal, and
the Bourgeois were the essential epochs
which Marx defined. Marx showed a great
understanding, which has the connection
between objective force, "the vast, impersonal
social and economic changes, and subjective
factors, such as the actions of men and
groups of people, and the implications of
social change for people." (pg.138).
Positivism was brought in the nineteenth
century in Europe as well as empiricism.
Positivism rests on the confident assertions
made by social science. The formation of
perfect laws of human development and
social change could be lead by the application
of scientific methods. "if Man could
understand the laws which governed social
change in the past, he could understand
where the future would bring change." (J.Black
and D.M.MacRaild, Studying History, pg.43).
"The Victorian age might have been
characterized by Great Men and administrative
political subject matter, but it was also the
time when many other practitioners began to
ply their alternative trade." (J.Black and
D.M.MacRaild, Studying History, pg.52)
The Whig interpretation of history along with a
tendencies of nationalistic and myth-making
was essential in the nineteenth-century
phenomenon. Whig history linked with a
political form of history. It embodied the
national myth and Victorians promoted such
vigor. Actually, history in this period was
designed to attend a political or polemical
purpose. Many uses of historical examples
were made by a writer of parliament,
pamphlet, and newspaper. History at this
time also got a major role in the education of
the influential political nation.
The necessity of art to become accountable in
the planetary all is incompatible with aesthetic
attitudes and it rested on the late-modernist
assumption that its said art isn’t useful to play
in larger scales. However, the individualistic
focus which was away from the sense of
wholeness narrowed down an aesthetic
perspectives as well. Interaction made art
move beyond the aesthetic mode. It was due
to non-interaction and non-relationism. This
view which ensured individual freedom and
expression meant freedom from community
and obligation to the society in the world under
modernism. "Reenchantment, as I
understand it, means stepping beyond the
modern traditions of mechanism, positivism,
empiricism, rationalism, materialism,
secularism – the whole objectifying
consciousness of the Enlightenment – in a
way that allows for a return of soul.
Reenhancement implies a release from the
affliction of nihilism, which David Micheal
Levin has called our culture’s cancer of the
spirit." (The Reenchanment of Art; Suzi Gablik,
Thames and Hudson, 1991, pg.11).
We see the art of the past in a way in which
nobody saw it before. Here, we perceive it in
different way. "The convention of perspective,
which is unique to European art and which
was first established in the early
Renaissance, centers everything on the eye of
the beholder." (Ways of Seeing; J, Berger,
BBC and Penguin, 1972, pg.16). Perspective
was in itself not a new development. The
evidence of foreshortening and diminishing
scale in relation to the distance from viewer
was shown by classical works. The beholder
led to the stages and stations of a journey and
the picture of reality reveals a panoramic
survey, not a one sided unified representation
dominated by a single point of view. There are
both conceptually and pictorially subordinate
to the successive unraveling of the work on
the viewpoint of single subject. Every single
eye is perspective into the center of the visible
world. Everything is concentrated on to the
single eye as to the vanishing point of infinity.
It reflected the growing view of mans central
position as observer of a purely relative
pictorial world of which he is the measure.
(see figure 1).
The dominant modes of art condition which is
specialized objects, created to be
contemplated and enjoyed for formal
pleasure, not for moral or practical reasons.
The concept of aesthetics becomes
emasculated while it is more emphasized on
ideological manipulation and repackaging
whereas a work of art is not autonomous,
self-contained, and pure. "Our present idea of
freedom, Wendell Berry writes in The Hidden
Wound, is only the freedom to do as we
please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a
home in the suburbs, and idle weekends."
(Gablik, pg. 168). The cultural ideas in terms
of individual freedom and uniqueness were
embodied in the motifs of Romanticism. The
most striking features of the art during thirteen
century is the extraordinary freedom and
effortlessness. "The freedoms won by
revolution had been immediately lost either by
counter-revolution or by the revolutionary
government falling into the hands of military
dictators. (Civilisation; Kenneth Clarke,
Penguin Books, 1969, pg. 216).
An indivisible unity is the Renaissance
conception of art, in which content relies on a
radical shift in the respective relationships
between artists, a shift symptomatic of a
transformation from the world of the symbolic
to that of the natural. "Naturalism is a
dominant mode in much of the media and
there is the related emphasis on objectivity,
e.g. in news and documentary. So it is
important to understand origins of their ideas,
their strengthen and their limitation."
(handout). It too has come to be seen as
nature. "It is only a theory, cultural product
which has history like individualism".
(handout). I prefer to look at TV which
naturalism emphasized on because it
showed each individuals and their relation
very well, specifically at an emotional level
although it is not good at showing the
background surrounded and general context.
The study of Greek and Latin influenced the
thinking, style, and moral judgement of the
Florentines and their art who’s influences
consisted of isolated quotation and wasn’t
very far-reaching. In the early fifteenth-century,
the discovery of the individual was made.
Alberti who is an early Renaissance man
described how he conquered every
weakness, for "a man can do all things if he
will". (Clark, pg.84) which could be the motto
of the early Renaissance. Alberti’s statement
seems naïve when one thinks of much of
fears and memories which every individual
carries around with him. According to the
Renaissance conception of art, it should
embrace an indivisible unity. "The lively and
intelligent individuals who created
Renaissance, bursting with vitality and
confidence, were in a mood to be crushed by
antiquity. They meant to absorb it, to equal it,
to master it." (Clark, pg.94). Here, no longer a
world of free and active men, but a world of
giants and heros.
In the republican zeal moment, Michelangelo
who is one of the great western man in the
history gave Florentine soldiers a surprise by
depicting the nude which is rather
discreditable, conventionalized and first
authoritative statement of human body. (see
figure 2) It meant an expression of noble
sentiments, life-giving energy and God-like
perfection. On the ceiling, he chose to
illustrate themes which were not simply
concentrated on single figures and were free
to depict his thoughts about human
relationships and human destiny. The Sistine
Ceiling passionately asserts the unity of
man’s body, mind and spirit. (see figure 3)
Thus, his power of prophetic insight gives the
impression and feeling that he pertains every
epoch of the great Romantics.
In the sixteenth century, one more giant man
who is a typical Renaissance man is
Leonardo da Vinci. He belonged to no epoch
although he had certain Renaissance
characteristics which are beauty and graceful
movement. The question he asked most
insistently is about man who is not the man
Alberti invocated. Although that man was
remarkable as a mechanism, he was not at
all like an immortal god. (see figure 4) The
humanist virtues of intelligence were added
the one of the quality of heroic will. He was
cruel and superstitious, and at the same time,
feeble compared to the forces of nature.
Bourgeois capitalism directed a defensive
smugness and sentimental modernity. The
philosophy of observation involved a demand
for realism in the most literal sense. Trying to
keep balance between individual genius and
the moral in the society is important in the
history of civilization. The development of
individualism began with Renaissance. The
cult of individualism was connected with the
rise of capitalism during the beginnings of the
industrial revolution. Individualism which
emphasized human progress may be a valid
analysis of the ideology on a particular
historical epoch. In the early stages of
capitalism, single individuals came into the
units of production and distribution. Economic
order which emphasized on planning,
expediency, and calculability is reinterpreted
into a visual order of logic, order and harmony.
The movement of naturalism was reflected on
the development of a capitalist economy
behind an efficient calculated rationalism.
The economic rationalism dominated the
whole intellectual and material life of the time
and was expressed artistically as the
unification and standardization of space.
Noam Chomsky continues to re-iterate that
however true an individual working within the
media’s intensions may be, the vested
interests, the political and economic forces of
the media at large hardly objective."
(http://media.wmin.ac.uk/htm99/goyder) Media
production is intimately implicated in relations
of power and serves to reproduce the
interests of powerful social forces. It is
promoting individuals for resistance and
struggle. However, a cultural materialism
also focuses on the material effects of media
culture, insisting images, spectacles,
discourses and sign, which has material
effects on audience.
Descartes was the person who wanted to cut
away all preconceptions and get back to the
facts of direct experience, unaffected by
custom and convention. His mechanical
conception of nature constituted the most
profound attack on the cosmological
assumptions of Renaissance. He conceived
his physics as a rational system which is
matter in motion, a system of science. His
transformation of basis was that physical
explanations were constructed using the
model of mechanics although Newton
rejected his mechanisms by stating lack of
mathematical basis. Newton stated the
classic laws of motion as a cosmology by the
concept of a gravitational force of attraction.
The universe was no longer a web of hidden
affinities with man at the centred. Man’s
conception of his place in nature was
changed by the scientific revolution. Towards
the art, Descartes preferred cities built by a
single architect, as he put it. "Without fully
realizing the implications of the message
about individualism, commerce, and applied
science, he helped tie the success of science
to a commercial and eventually industrial
capitalist order. The linkage was reinforced
throughout the economically expansive
eighteen century when new manufacturing
technologies seemed only to confirm the
wisdom of seeing the universe as an
interlocking series of pushing and pulling
mechanisms." (Telling the Truth About History;
Appleby, J., L. Hunt, M. Jacob, W.W. Norton
Company, 1994, pg.21).
Galileo fortified of sun centred cosmology and
contradicting church dogma and predicated
the integrity and authority of the methods of
science, which is based on observation and
mathematics could uncover the secrets of
nature. (see figure 5) This can be related to
the development of the printing press and the
compass. The ability to produce high quality
maps and the navigational system reinforced
the mercantile economy booming in
Renaissance.
In the society, practices of self take for granted
that economic self-interest is a basic one of
human nature. If a new kind of self, which is
ecological emerges in the culture, it will have
a challenge of assumption that human beings
are motivated by economics, which involves a
conscious revolution as far getting as the
emergence of individualism itself was in the
Renaissance. Objectivity takes away emotion
such as feeling and wants just facts. It serves
as a distancing device and offering strengthen
illusion, certainty and control. Objectivism of
aestheticism doesn’t involve care and
compassion. While they are the tools of the
soul, they don’t belong to the art which is
value-free with practical goals and aims
either.
"For Elton, the historian pursues nothing short
of the truth. He refused critics’ claims that
history is subjective by arguing that, because
the past cannot be altered from the present,
the truth of that past must be recoverable in a
more perfect from that is the case with natural
science." (Studying History; J.Black and
D.M.MacRaid. pg.164). He was convinced
about fixed and singular nature of historical
facts, which he believed history as being only
objective interpretation of the past. E. H. Carr
defined objective historianism into two ways
which are "a person who rose above the
limited vision of his or her own day, and one
who projects forward to discover the discrete
relations and interconnectedness of the facts."
(J.Black and D.M.MacRaid, pg.164).
However, post-modern critics denied the
statement that history is objective and
scientific, don’t have a universal law, and they
assaulted the structure of scientific
legitimation that devoted from the
Renaissance, through the Enlightenment to
Modernism. "Postmodernist history, as one
might expect, has rejected the faith in reason
and progress which was so central to
modernist historiography." (In Defence of
History; Evans, pg.244). Historical knowledge
has been argued because each historian gets
a different interpretation from the past
although Elton rejects this perception by
asserting historical knowledge as cumulative.
Post-modernists assert that true lessons of
history are in that of moral lessons, which is
similar to Whig’s interpretation of history as I
mentioned above. "And by noticing uniformity
in historians’ writing, post-modernists might
be accused of colligating the historians’ world
and emplotting their academic lives and
works in a way that does not reflect, but in fact
implies reality." (Black J and MacRaid. D.M,
pg.165).
Postmodernism has stated new subjects and
ways of research by debating the great
objectivity. "Postmodernism in its more
constructive modes has encouraged
historians to look more closely at documents,
to take their surface patina more seriously,
and to think about texts and narratives in new
ways. It has forced historians to interrogate
their own methods and procedures as never
before, and in the process has made them
more self-critical, which is all to the good. It
has led to a greater emphasis on open
acknowledgement of the historian’s own
subjectivity, which can only help the reader
engaged in a critical assessment of historical
work." (Evans, pg.248). In post-modern critic
of history, narrative, which is a constructive
device is important because it provide the
main lever. It delivered historians to contrive a
sense of order and coherence in the past.
Evans said in the book, In Defence of History,
the key term of cultural materialism as "the
analysis of all forms of signification within the
actual means and conditions of production."
(Evans, pg.42). We have to situate the objects
of analysis within the system of production. A
cultural materialist approach did put stress on
importance of the political economy of culture
and system, which constrains what can and
what cannot be produced, which has
limitations and possibilities for cultural
production.
"Post-modern critics reject claims that history
is objective and scientific, and the application
of general or universal theories is also
undermined. History has always had
advocates who argue that it is a science."
(J.Black and D.M.MacRaild, pg.164). The
postmodern critique of science knowledge
has resulted in system for understanding and
equating the past in particular by objectivity.
The notion of objectivity inherited from the
scientific revolution. "We have redefined
historical objectivity as an interactive
relationship between an inquiring subject and
an external object. Validation in this definition
comes from persuasion more than proof, but
without proof there is no historical writing of
any worth." (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob; Telling
the Truth, pg.261).
Bibliography
Appleby, Hunt & Jacob; Telling the Truth about
History, Norton Press, USA, 1995
J.Berker; Ways of Seeing, BBC and Penguin
Books, 1972
J.Black., Donald M. MacRaild; Studying
History, Macmillan, 1997, 2000
K. Clarke; Civilisation, London
R.J.Evans; In defence of history, Granta books,
London, 1996
Suzi Gablik; The Reenchanment of Arts,
Thames and Hudson, 1991
Web page
(http://media.wmin.ac.uk/htm99/goyder)
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