The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman

Author:Arthur Herman [Herman, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553907834
Google: 4VH1Jcj6nq4C
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 13534181
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-22T05:00:00+00:00

Not many tourists go to the northeast Italian town of Padua today, except perhaps to see Giotto’s famous frescoes in the Arena Chapel. However, for more than one hundred years after Giotto put away his brushes and closed his paint pots, Renaissance Padua was Europe’s leading school of natural philosophy, or what today we call science.

The fiercely empirical spirit of Roger Bacon’s Oxford and Ockhamist Paris had found a new home in the University of Padua. Like Bacon, Padua’s teachers stressed the original principle of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature: that knowledge is a process of discovery using the power of our senses. As one of Padua’s most celebrated teachers put it, “All [knowledge] progresses from the known to the unknown.”5 The Paduan Aristotelians taught students that the scientist should never be afraid to venture into unfamiliar territory. He may not only discover something new, he can add new support for tried-and-true scientific principles—which, as far as Padua was concerned, meant Aristotle’s principles.

All this sounds very modern.6 So we aren’t surprised to learn that one of Padua’s distinguished alumni was Nicolaus Copernicus or that professors there were experimenting with rolling balls on inclined planes and swinging pendulums on horizontal crossbars. Nor are we amazed that the star of Padua’s school of medicine was Andreas Vasalius, who led the first classes on human dissection since the ancient Greeks; or that in 1592, the university decided to hire a twenty-eight-year-old mathematician from Pisa named Galileo Galilei.7

Padua sounds like the perfect environment for a sharp, inquiring mind like Galileo’s. But he was deeply unhappy there.8 Why?

There are rows and rows of books on Galileo. There is even a book about Galileo’s daughter. No one has yet written a bestseller about Galileo’s father, but Vincenzo Galilei may hold the real key to understanding his more famous son.

Galilei worked as a court musician for the Medici in Florence in the 1560s and 1570s and published treatises on the theory of music. Glancing through the pages of his works, we see diagrams that remind us forcibly of diagrams of planetary movement in his son’s works.9 The reason is that Vincenzo Galilei was a mathematician as well as a musicologist. His goal was to return musical theory to its Pythagorean roots. The father, like the son, understood the power of number not as a way to count or measure, as Aristotelians did, but rather as Number, reason’s window into the hidden order of nature.

Vincenzo must have demonstrated this to his son more than once, by picking up his lute and strumming a single note. Then he would put his son’s finger in the exact midpoint of the string and strike it again. The note would rise exactly an octave. Vincenzo would move his finger again, and the note rose proportionately to the next octave, and so on.*

Pythagoras was the first to demonstrate that mathematical proportion was the essence of musical harmony. He also passed to his disciple Plato the notion that proportion was endowed with creative power. By cutting the string in half, we create two octaves where there was only one.

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