Civilisation; 8; The Light of Experience Filler: Interview with Loren Eiseley

The following program is a presentation of NET. The presentation of this series in its entirety is made possible by a grant from Xerox Corporation and its world-wide affiliates. The presentation of this series is made possible by a grant from Xerox Corporation and its world-wide affiliates.

Light, the light of early morning, the light of Holland. It spreads over the flat fields, it's reflected in the canals, it picks out distant towers and spires. This was the inspiration of the first grade school of landscape, one might almost say sky-scape painting. This is a painting done in the middle of the 17th century of the square in Harlem.

You can see it's an old painting because of the clothes the people are wearing, but I can walk into this picture or rather into the square. Looks very much the same, doesn't it? For the 17th century, the idea that one could walk into a picture in this way would have been almost unthinkable. It seems quite natural to us and a loadout seemed natural when it was painted, but like so many things we take for granted, it goes back to a revolutionary change in thought, the revolution in which divine authority was replaced by experience, experiment and observation. I'm in Harlem not only because Dutch painting is a visible expression of this change of mind, but because Holland, economically and intellectually, was the first country to profit from the change.

When one begins to ask the question, does it work or even does it pay instead of asking, is it God's will? One gets a new set of answers, and one of the first of them is this, that to try and suppress opinions, which one doesn't share, is much less profitable than to tolerate them. This conclusion should have been reached during the reformation, it's permeated the writings of Erasmus, who of course was a Dutchman. Alas, a belief in divine authority of our own opinions afflicted the Protestants just as much as the Catholics. Even in Holland they continued to burn and torture each other right up to the middle of the 17th century, and the Jews, who in Amsterdam were at last exempt from persecution by the Christians, the Jews began to persecute each other too. Still, when all this is said, the spirit of Holland in the early 17th century was remarkably tolerant, and one proof is that nearly all the great books which revolutionized thought were first printed in Holland.

What sort of a society was it that allowed these intellectual time bombs to be set off in its midst? Inside this charming old arms house at Harlem, which is now a picture gallery, there's plenty of evidence. We know more about what the 17th century Dutch looked like, than we do about any other society, except perhaps the first century Romans. Each individual wanted posterity to see exactly what he was like, even if he was a member of a corporate group. And the man who tells us all this most vividly, the man who painted these pictures was the Harlem painter Franz Hals.

He is the supreme extrovert. I used to find his works, or except the last, revoking the cheerful and odiously skillful. Now I love that unthinking conveyality, and I value skill more highly than I did. But I'll admit that his sitters don't look like representatives of a new philosophy. But out of these all too numerous group portraits of early 17th century Holland, something does emerge which has a bearing on civilization. These are individuals who are prepared to join in a corporate effort for the public good. Well, I can't imagine groups like this being painted in 17th century today, even in Venice. They're the first visual evidence of bourgeois democracy, dreadful words, so debased by propaganda that I hesitate to use them.

And yet, in the context of civilization, they really have a meaning. They mean that a group of individuals can come together and take corporate responsibility. That they can afford to do so because they have some leisure, and that they have some leisure because they have money in the bank. This is a society which you see in the portrait groups. They might be meetings of local government committees or hospital governors today. They represent the practical social application of the philosophy that things must be made to work. Amsterdam was the first centre of bourgeois capitalism. It had become, since the time of Antwerp, the great international port of the North and the Chief Banking Centre of Europe.

Drifting through its leafy canals lined with admirable houses, one may speculate on the economic system that produced this dignified, comfortable harmonious architecture. I don't say much about economics in this programme, chiefly because I don't understand them.

And perhaps without reason believe that their importance has been overrated by post-Marxist historians. But of course, there's no doubt that at a certain stage in social development, fluid capital is one of the chief causes of civilization. Because it ensures three essential ingredients, leisure, movement and independence. It also allows that slight superfluity of wealth that could be spent on noble proportions, a better door frame or even a more extraordinary tulip. But please allow me two minutes' digression on the subject of tulips. Because it really is rather touching that the first classic example of boom and slump in capitalist economy should have been not sugar, nor railway, nor oil, but tulips. It shows how the 17th century Dutch combined, there are two chief enthusiasm, scientific investigation and visual delight.

The first tulip would be imported from Turkey in the 16th century, but it was a professor of botany at Leiden, the first botanic garden of the North, who discovered its attribute of unpredictable variation, which made it such an exciting gamble. By 1634, the Dutch were so bitten by the new craze that for a single bulb of one tulip, the viceroy, one collector exchanged a thousand pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, twelve sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes. When the bottom fell out of the tulip market in 1637, the Dutch economy was shaken. However, it survived for over 30 years and produced superfluities of the most seductive kind. What about this little clavicle? Isn't it enchanting?

Better to look at than to listen to I'm afraid. And large spacious rooms, black and white marble pavements, carved furniture, and a gravel wave life. Along the walls is Gold's temp leather, the most sumptuous wall-covering I know. Unfortunately, this kind of visual self-indulgence very soon leads to ostentation, and this in bourgeois democracy means vulgarity. I can see this happening in Holland in the work of a single painter, Peter De Ho. In 1660, he was painting these beautiful pictures of clean, simple interiors. Ten years later, they were very elaborate, hung with gold Spanish leather. The people are richer, and the pictures are less beautiful.

Bourgeois capitalism led to a defensive smugness and sentimentality. No wonder that early Victorian painters imitated pictures of this kind. Every picture tells a story. It was a Dutch invention. This one is called a visit to the nursery. In addition to trivial anecdotes, the philosophy of observation involved a demand for realism in the most literal sense. In the early 19th century, Paul Potter's bull was one of the most famous pictures in Holland. It's one of the first pictures that Napoleon wanted to steal for the Louvre. It's fallen out of favor now, but I must say I do find it absolutely fascinating. There are many ways of achieving reality, and this simple hearted laborious way that Potter has followed does seem to me to achieve something which couldn't be done in any other way.

Isn't that fleecey neck of the sheep extraordinary? And look at those wild flowers. Above all, look at the cow's eye. The intensity with which Potter has looked at its forehead, at its strong hair, and wet nose, is obsessive, what we've come to call surrealist. Of course, it's a young man's picture. It has the intensity of the early pre-referited. And indeed, there is something almost nightmarish in the way that the young bull dominates the beautifully painted landscape in the distance. However, one must admit that virtual sentiment and realism can produce the most deplorable kind of art. And the determinist historian, reviewing the social conditions of 17th century Holland, would say that this was the kind of painting the Dutch were bound to get. But they also got remburet.

Remburet was a great poet that need for truth, and that appealed to experience, which had begun with reformation, had produced the first translation to the Bible, but it had to wait almost a century for visible expression. At first, truth meant realism. Behind me is his earlier self-portrait. Yes, that is the same man that you saw just now. In this vein, he painted the picture, which is most obvious link with the intellectual life of Holland, and his first great success in Amsterdam, the anatomy lesson. It represents a demonstration given by the leading professor of anatomy named Tulp. The men surrounding him are not of course students, or even doctors, but members of the surgeon's guild, sort of all trustees.

Vizelius, the first great modern anatomist, had been a Dutchman, and Tulp liked to be called Vizelius reborn. I found he was a bit of a quack. He recommended his patients to drink 50 cups of tea a day. However, he was very successful. His son became an English Baroness. But he wasn't in such external and quasi-official ways that Rembrandt associated himself with the intellectual life of his time, but by his illustrations to the Bible. An example is this picture of Bathsheba pondering the contents of David's letter. We may think that we admire it as pure painting, and in fact it is a masterly piece of design. But in the end, we return to the head, where Bathsheba's thoughts and feelings are rendered with an insight and a human sympathy, which a great novelist could scarcely achieve in many pages. From the first, Rembrandt wanted to record his experience of how human beings reveal their emotions.

Unless his heart grew deeper, he succeeded in doing so with ever greater subtlety. To my mind, one of the most moving examples is the picture known as the Jewish bride. Nobody knows what its real title should be, but the subject that Rembrandt had in mind is evident. It is a picture of grown-up love, a marvellous amalgam of richness, tenderness and trust. The richness expressed in the painting of the sleeves, the tenderness and the placing of the hands, the trust and the expression of the heads. Marvellous as Rembrandt's paintings are, I find more of his thoughts on human life, certainly his deepest and most intimate thoughts in his drawings and etchings. His etchings are the fullest communication any artist has made since Dura's engravings. And as with Dura, Rembrandt has put as much into them as into any of his paintings.

This is one of the most famous and elaborate of them, Christ Heading the Sick. And what a marvellous and completely original conception it is. Suffering humanity, poor people coming out of the shades like the prisoners in Fidelio, lugging their sick on wheelbarrows and bears into the light of Christ's divinity. On the left, these prosperous people, wondering, doubting, criticizing. How extraordinary that this great toastion picture of human life was done in the time of Rishliya and the beginning of Versailles. One can't talk about Rembrandt without describing the human and if you like the literary element in his work. His mind was steeped in the Bible.

He knew every story by heart down to the minutest detail. This is one of his favorite stories, the prodigal son. Just as the early translator has felt that they had to learn Hebrew so that no fragment of the truth should escape them. So Rembrandt made friends with the Jews in Amsterdam and frequented their synagogues in case he could learn something that would shed more light on the early history of the Jewish people. But in the end, the evidence he used for interpreting the Bible was the life he saw around him. In his drawings of dead shings, one often doesn't know if he is recording an observation or illustration of the scriptures. So much had the two experiences grown together in his mind. Did Rembrandt wish to illustrate some Peter prayer before the raising of Tabitha? Or had he seen a parallel neighbor whose attitude of devotion touched his heart and reminded him of the acts of the apostles?

Sometimes his interpretation of human life in Christian terms leads him to depict subjects that hardly exist in the Bible, but that he felt convinced must have existed. An example is this etching of Christ preaching the forgiveness of sins. It's a classical composition. In fact, it's based upon two famous Raphaels which Rembrandt had completely assimilated. But how different is this small congregation from Raphael's ideal human specimens? They are, as you see, a very mixed lot, some thoughtful, some half-hearted, some concerned only with keeping warm or keeping awake. And the child and the foreground to whom the doctrine of the remission of sins of no interest is concentrating upon drawing in the dust.

Rembrandt reinterpreted the Bible in the light of human experience, but it's an emotional response based on the belief in revealed truth. The greatest of his contemporaries were looking for a different kind of truth, a truth that could be established by intellectual, not emotional means. This could be done either by the accumulation of observed evidence or by mathematics. And of the two mathematics seemed to offer to the men of the 17th century the more attractive solution. In fact, mathematics became a kind of religion to the finest minds of the time, the means of expressing a belief that experience could be married with reason. The guiding spirit of this new religion was the French philosopher Descartes. He's become a symbol of the pure intellect, but I find him a sympathetic figure.

He started life as a soldier, he wrote a book on fencing, but he soon discovered that all he wanted to do was think. Very, very rare and most unpopular. Some friends came to call on him at 11 o'clock in the morning and found him in bed. They said, what are you doing? He replied, thinking. They were furious. To escape interference, he went to live in Holland. He said that the people of Amsterdam were so much occupied with making money that they would leave him alone. However, he continued to be the victim of interruptions, and so he moved about from place to place, all together he moved, house in Holland 24 times. In the end, he was run to earth by that Tassum woman, Queen Christina Sweden, who carried him after Stockholm to give her lessons in the new philosophy. She made him get out of bed early in the morning, there's a result he caught a cold and died. But earlier in Holland, at some point, he evidently lived near Harlem where he was painted by France House.

He examined everything rather as Leonardo da Vinci had done, the fetus, the refraction of light, whirlpools, all of Leonardo's subjects. These are the original illustrations of Descartes' ideas. He thought that all matter consisted of whirlpools with an outer ring of large, curving vortices and an inner core of small globules sucked into the centre. And whatever he meant by this, and perhaps he did only thinking of Plato, it's odd that he should have described exactly Leonardo's drawings of whirlpools, which I suppose he had never seen. But in contrast to Leonardo's restless, insatiate curiosity, Descartes had almost success, the French tidy mindedness, and all his observations were made contribute to a philosophic scheme. It was based on absolute skepticism, the inheritance of Montaigne's summing up Casseche, what do I know?

Only Descartes arrived at an answer. I know that I think. And he turned it the other way round, I think, therefore I am. His fundamental point is that he could doubt everything, but not that he was doubting. Descartes wanted to cut away all preconceptions and get down to bedrock of experience, unaffected by custom and convention. Well, one needn't look far in Dutch art to illustrate the state of mind. There has never been a painter who has stuck so rigorously to what his optic nerve reported as for me out of delft. His work is without a single prejudice arising from knowledge or the convenience of a style. It's very quite a shock to see a picture which has so little stylistic artifice as his view of delft. It looks like a coloured photograph. And yet we know that it's a work of extreme intellectual distinction. It not only shows the light of Holland, but what Descartes called the natural light of the mind.

In fact, Vermeer comes close to Descartes at many points. First of all, in his detached, evasive character. Vermeer didn't change house every three months. On the contrary, he loved his house in the square of delft and painted it continually. His quiet interiors are all rooms in his house, but he was equally suspicious of callers. He told one eminent collector who had made a special journey to visit him that he had no pictures to show him, which was just untrue because when he died his house was full of unsolved pictures of all periods. All that he wanted was tranquility in order to enjoy fine discrimination. Study to be quiet. Ten years before this picture was painted, Isaac Walton had inscribed these words on the title page of the complete angler.

And in the same period, two religious sects had come into being, quietism and the Quakers. As far as I know, the first painter to feel Descartes need to tidy up sensations by the use of reason was Peter Sandra, the scrupulous master of church interiors. He did drawings from nature in the 1630s and often kept them for ten or fifteen years until he could give them the stillness and finality, which makes them ideal meeting places for the society of friends. The precision with which he places each accent, those dark heads, for example, reminds one of Sarah. In a picture like this, the balance is tilted towards reason rather than experience.

For me, I managed to preserve an air of complete naturalism, yet what a masterpiece of abstract design he creates out of frames and windows and musical instruments. One is reminded of the most severely intellectual of modern painters, his compatriot Mondrian. Ah, Vermeer's intervals and proportions, the result of calculation, all that he discovered them intuitively. No good-asking such questions. Vermeer had a genius for evasion. But as soon as one mentions Mondrian, one remembers that one of Vermeer's characteristics separates him entirely from abstract modern painting, his passion for light. It's in this more than anything else that he links up with the other great men of his time. All the chief exponents of civilization from Dante to Gerta had been obsessed by light.

One could take it as the supreme symbol of civilization. But in the 17th century, light passed through a crucial stage. The perfection of the lens was giving it new range and power. Vermeer himself recorded the increased importance of scientific investigation in pictures like this. He used the utmost ingenuity to make us feel the movement of light. He loved to show it passing over a white wall, and then, as if to make its progress more comprehensible, passing over a slightly crinkled map. At least four of these maps appear in his pictures, and apart from that presently light transmitting surfaces, they remind us that the Dutch were the great cartographers of the age. Thus, the mercantile sources of Vermeer's independence penetrate into the background of this quiet room. In his determination to record exactly what he saw, Vermeer didn't at all despise those mechanical devices of which his century was so proud.

The man seated at table talking to a laughing girl. It's a fairly early picture later on, Vermeer's figures wouldn't have broken the stillness for the extrovert laughter. This man has the exaggerated proportions that one sees in photography. I fancy that Vermeer looked through a lens into a box with a piece of ground glass squared up, and painted exactly what he saw. He must have begun this scientific practice quite early. One finds it in this picture of a woman pouring milk, painted before he had perfected his peculiar stillness. The lights rendered by those little beads that one doesn't see with an naked eye, but which appear on the finder of a old-fashioned camera. And yet, this scientific approach to experience ends in poetry. And I suppose that this is due to an almost mystical rapture in the perception of light.

The enlightened tightness of the hoax and Vermeer and the rich imaginative experience of Remord reached the zenith about the year 1660. And in that year, on the night of May the 30th, Charles II of England dined in the mortgage's heist, and the next day he embarked from the Dutch beach at Scaveningen to regain his kingdom. And thus, indeed, the isolation and austerity which had afflicted England under crumble for almost 15 years. And as so often happens, a new freedom of movement led to an outburst of pent-up energy. On a wave that will sail us down the way, your length will be weighed ten times, your length will be raised.

Take a posi-short view of your nymphs on the shore, and silence the morning with walls of returning, but never intending to visit that moon. Never intending to visit that moon, never intending to visit that moon. On a wave that will sail us down the way, your length will be weighed ten times, your length will be raised. Take a posi-short view of your nymphs on the shore, and silence the morning with walls of returning, but never intending to visit that moon. Never intending to visit that moon, never intending to visit that moon. There are usually men of genius waiting for these moments of expansion, like ships waiting for a breeze.

And on this occasion, there was an England, the brilliant group of natural philosophers who were to form the Royal Society, Christopher Wren, the young Geometer, who had dead date with the Professor of Astronomy. Robert Boyle, who used to always be described as the son of the Earth of Cork and the Father of Chemistry, Halley, the discoverer of comets, and towering above all these remarkable scientists was Newton, one of the three or four Englishmen whose fame has transcended all national boundaries. I can't pretend that I've read the printure, but if I did, I wouldn't understand it. Any more than Samuel Peep's did when, as President of the Royal Society, was handed to him for his approval. I must just take on trust that he gave a mathematical account of the structure of the universe, which for 300 years seemed irrefutable.

It was both the climax of the Age of Observation and the sacred book the next century. Pope, who probably not has read as much of the principles as I have, summed up the feelings of his contemporaries, nature and nature's laws, they hid in night. God said, let Newton be, and all was light. Parallel with the study of light was the study of the stars. This is the octagon rumor, the original Royal Observatory, the Gwnitch found it as Charles II's world puts it, in order to find it out of the longitude of places and for perfecting navigation and astronomy. And it draws together the threads of this program. Light, lenses, observation, navigation, and mathematics. One can walk into that print, almost exactly as one can walk into the square in Harlem. And in this bright, harmonious room one seems to breathe the atmosphere of humanized science.

That was Flamstead's telescope warp, very like it. This is similar to the quadrant, with which he tried to establish the correct time. It was the great age of scientific instruments. High guinsies, pendulum clock, wave and hoax, microscope. Flamstead himself, who made a giant sextant. They don't look very scientific to us. Indeed the telescopes really look like something out of a ballet. I can't see through them at all, at least I can't. But nevertheless, the telescope, invented in Harlem, although perfected by Galileo, seemed to bring the heavenly bodies in reach of understanding. This is the view of the moon, which Newton would have seen. And the microscope, allowed a Dutch scientist, namely Irwin Hoek, to discover new worlds in a drop of water. This ferocious monster is a water flea.

What beautiful pieces of design and craftsmanship Astrolaves are, and continued to be for 400 years. And this armidaris sphere is really what we think of as a work of art, a mobile. By twiddling it around, one can produce a kind of visual counterpoint. Even this equinoctial dial shows the impress of human personality, what you can call a style. And what about this diptych dial? Oh, I can't imagine a prettier biebleau. And yet it was genuinely scientific, I suppose. Art and science haven't yet drawn apart. And these instruments are not only means to an end, but symbols. Symbols of hope that man might learn to master his environment and create a more reasonable society. And such they remained until the end of the 19th century.

When Tennyson was told that a Brahmin had destroyed a microscope, because it revealed secrets that man should not know, he was profoundly shocked, only in the last 60 years or so. Have we begun to feel that the descendants of these beautiful shining objects may destroy us? This room full of light, this shining enclosure of space, was designed by the Christopher Wren. It was built on the spur of a hill overlooking the old Paris and Greenwich, and this too was rebuilt by Wren, transformed from a palace into a naval hospital. How much of what we see is from his design, it's hard to say. By the time the buildings were going up, he was prepared to leave their execution to his two very able assistants at the Board of Works, Sir John Vambra and Nicholas Hawksmore. But he certainly provided the plan. And the result is the greatest architectural unit built in England since the Middle Ages.

It's so bowed out being dull, massive without being oppressive. What is civilization? A state of mind where it's thought desirable for a naval hospital to look like this, and for inmates to die in a splendid, decorated hall. In fact, one of the finest rooms in England, with a magnificent painted ceiling in the Baroque Mall. The . .

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from the other peoples of the world. And if you look at the average 19th century historian, and like Buckle, who will find that to him, your appearance civilization seems almost to begin with this achievement. The strange thing is that none of these writers, except perhaps Ruskin, seem to notice that the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism. If I look beyond the order of Ren's naval hospital, I see stretching as far as the eye can reach. The scolid disorder of the industrial society. It's grown up as a result of the same conditions that allowed the Dutch to build their beautiful towns and support their painters and print the works philosophers. Fluid capital, a free economy, a flow of exports and imports, and slightly interference, a belief in cause of effect. Well, every civilization seems to have its nemesis,

not only because the first bright impulses would come tarnished by greed and laziness, but because of unpredictables. In this case, the unpredictable was the growth of population. The greedier became greedier. The ignorant lost touch with traditional skills. And the light of experience narrowed its beam so that a grand design like Greenwich became simply a waste of money. The greedier became greedier by greed and laziness. The greedier became greedier by greed and laziness. The greedier became greedier by greed and laziness.

The greedier became greedier by greed and laziness. The presentation of this series in its entirety is made possible by a grant from Xerox Corporation

had its worldwide affiliates. Afterwards, to examine certain aspects of Western civilization in the 1970s, James Day talks with Lauren Eisley, anthropologist and author. In an age of specialization, Dr. Lauren Eisley is a determined generalist. He's a scientist who writes like a poet, an anthropologist who deals with all of nature and man's relationship to it. Dr. Eisley is professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is entitled The Invisible Pyramid and is a humanist's account of the century of the rocket. Dr. Eisley, Lord Clark observes that every civilization has its nemesis. What do you suppose is a nemesis of our civilization?

Well, let's put it this way, and I certainly have no crystal ball in these matters, but I think that one might venture about civilizations that there is a certain amount of perhaps of limited energy in any society. I mean, in terms of the way it is directed toward perhaps the rise of a great religion, or as in the case of Western civilization at the present time, at least, the rise of the scientific method and all that is done to our society, which again leads to a certain kind of secular conception of progress. And the history of the past, archaeologically, tells us that sometimes civilizations rise, flourish, and then for one reason or another,

either from the assaults of outside barbarians or from some inner decay that begins to take place, they vanish. Now, our particular society is peculiar and unique in that it has become increasingly a worldwide phenomenon, which means it is a little more difficult to exterminate, let us say, than my own civilization, or because of its size, but all right, we have to remember that it is something historically new and unique from this standpoint. We don't have anything quite similar to compare it with, and therefore we have to contemplate whether we in our turn are going to go down the dinosaurs' road, or whether we can by some control of our environment, some clinging to the scientific tenants

that we have developed survive the present crisis that is looming around us. What's the nature of that crisis that looms around us? Well, it involves many things. I know that, of course, everyone thinks of atomic weaponry, and this is spectacular, certainly, and dangerous, particularly in a world that is still in one way or another involved with war. But I think the more dangerous crisis, really, at this time, is the increasing pollution of the planet, its air, its waters, and that since this is accompanied by a world population which is mounting with explosive intensity, that it leads to a whole variety of questions,

questions of not alone feeding the population, but disposing of its waste, particularly in a society like ours, which is built on planned obsolescence, and where we're destroying an incredible tonnage of unreducible garbage around the planet. What couldn't be done? What can be done about this? Well, I think there's a vast educational problem that has to be carried on, and it won't be spectacular. It can't be because that is not the kind of science that is knowing to solve this problem. The whole business has to be brought home to the general public, and this is what worries me. It's much easier to get a large band of people concentrated on an engineering problem, like getting to the moon, and to take the recalcitrant human materials, represented by you and I and others,

and get us to change our entire way of life. Thank you.