Some ideas for material for this post and the next have been borrowed from:
1. 'The Western Intellectual Tradition' by J. Bronowski & Bruce Mazlish
2. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
The tremendous economical and social progress that mankind has achieved throughout the world since the Renaissance is too well known. In the medieval times the world was a stark place. Pestilence and disease would decimate large sections of the population. Slavery was widespread and men would subjugate fellow men. Suspected witches would be burnt at the stake. Superstitions were rife and humans were mercilessly subjugated by nature. There were many tragedies like the Spanish Inquisition and incarceration of heretics. A significant change was brought about by the Renaissance.
Renaissance witnessed the emergence of individualism. Art blossomed and numerous painters like Alberti, Verrocchio, his student Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michaelangelo Buanarroti have all created works that are characterized by a kind of impatience and self-assertion. There was a transition from classical to a popular culture, from an idealistic to an empirical Renaissance; from a worship of past humanism to a fierce belief in the human present. The Medici of Florence had given up the medieval ideal of an unapproachable godhead, but man and nature were still remote ideals to them. The self-made men of the new Renaissance wanted to grasp Man and nature through the senses, physically, in handfuls. The men of the Renaissance were interested in what was new. They were not willing to look back: their look was outward and forward into nature. They looked at her with two passions: a passion for the exact, which turned many men towards mathematics, and a passion for the actual, which urged them to experiment. These two strands, the logical and experimental, characterized the entire nature of artistic and scientific activity and have remained the two sinews of scientific method ever since. Thus there was a concomitant rise of empirical science and the close attention mankind paid to nature. Thanks to the Renaissance ‘The fitness of the individual, his worth and capacity, were of more weight than all the laws and usages that prevailed..’
The importance of what I have mentioned till now cannot be underestimated. Renaissance saw the sudden flowering of both art and science. This was no accident and the fact that both progressed together only underscores the importance and the intense need of both the spheres of human intellectual activity. Leonardo da Vinci’s works, especially his anatomical drawings with the hollows and blood vessels in the head are reputed to be so exact that even today it is striking to compare them point by point with X-ray photographs and with photographs taken with radioactive tracers. His notes reveal that he performed autopsies on corpses, a practice forbidden by the Church during his time. His artistic explorations were entirely scientific. His scientific personality helped him seek the unity under the chaos of natural phenomena but his artistic sensibility made him leap to the concrete and the particular. He made the artist’s eye for meaningful detail become a part of the essential equipment of the scientist. Observation of nature and nature’s laws revolutionized science. New realizations have dawned upon the Human Consciousness from time to time. The world was discovered to be round rather than flat, the earth was found to go round the sun, gravity force was recognized and a theory of electromagnetism to explain various phenomena like light, magnetism and electricity was formulated. Space and time were unified. Time was not a universal standard but was found to be relative depending on the frame of reference. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Shrodinger Wave Equation and quantum mechanics gave a new description of reality recognizing that perhaps an observer influences and changes the nature of reality! It was also discovered that LIFE as we know it had not existed throughout. Fossils were discovered. It was found that life had evolved and Man is a very recent appearance on the face of the earth. Scientific investigations also established that Earth, far from being the centre of the universe, is just one of the planets revolving around the Sun which is just an average star among the millions located in a remote corner of one of the spiral arms of a galaxy called the Milky Way which is just one of the millions of galaxies in the universe Science has transformed Man, the society and his beliefs.
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