Momentums in the history of human civilization

This week’s readings center on the three most influential figures in the human history although their fame stem from divergent things. Will Durant sheds light on the role of “the most fascinating figure of Renaissance” , Leonardo da Vinci, in the history of civilization. Michael Hart similarly singles out the two other figures whose achievements bring about two distinct momentums in the history of science and civilization.

Will Durant, while admiring da Vinci, discusses over the life of the painter and looks at many different aspects of his work as well as his personality. This is the most detailed portrayal of da Vinci’s life that I have ever read. Not only does Durant scrutinize his attainments, but also illuminates why he has embarked on specific work or journey.  To this end, Durant closely investigates things like whether da Vinci was a homosexual, and then uses these in the analysis of his motives and inspiration for specific artistic work. Interestingly these considerations could yield a noble understanding; for instance, da Vinci is said to be left-handed; that is why Durant concludes that this made him write from right to left.

I believe that by reading the chapter, one could come up with two reasons for distinctiveness of da Vinci among his peers whether painter, engineer, or scientist. First of all, da Vinci was paying a whole lot of attention to nature and its features. Durant states that the repetition as an innate quality of nature never dulled for him the marvel and majesty of what was going on; he filled thousand pages with observation concerning them. He was also curious over the peculiarities of nature simultaneously; da Vinci wrote: “The Nile has discharged more water into the sea than is at present contained in all the waters of the earth, so all the sea and rivers have passed through the mouth of the Nile as infinite number of time.” This enormous interest in nuances of nature could have been a central reason for his work being so gifted.

Second, as opposed to the most of other artists or scientists, da Vinci was not a sole artist, engineer, scientist or what not. He is all of them; in fact he had integrated most of these outwardly disparate skills. When he was painting he was borrowing the law of proportion and perspective from other disciplines. Durant contends that he tried his hand at almost every science. He took enthusiastically to mathematics as the purest form of reasoning, and he used that perception in geometrical figures of The Last Supper.   As such, his acquaintance with mathematics, anatomy, physics, and chemistry and so on provided him with a multidisciplinary view which makes his work so distinct.

In the second reading, Hart believes that the invention of paper and printing technology can place both Tsai and Gutenberg among the first ten persons in the list of the most influential persons in the history. This is because Tsai’s invention of paper pushes the Chinese civilization as well as the whole human civilization rapidly. Gutenberg‘s invention subsequently contributed massively to outburst of knowledge.

The paper I have opted for puts Hart’s argument in a somehow different way. It puts forth that there have been three significant revolutions in the history of human thoughts.  The first one took place hundreds of thousand years ago with the advent of language. The change is deemed to be revolutionary as thereby we became the first specie able to explain the world in which we live. The second cognitive revolution unfolded when the writing emerged in the human societies. Written language indeed made the man capable of preserving the code (oral one) independent of any speaker. The third revolution was the result of the invention of printing press in our own millennium. This is where its taxonomy overlaps with Hart’s.

I think this classification seems more inclusive than Hart’s. It is more in line with the trajectory of human cognitive and scientific progress. In fact it spans more portions of history.  Second, it is not that oriented toward and dependent on material technologies. The invention of language, though not a tangible technology, has had a great bearing on the whole history. In addition, the paper maintains that it singles out only these three revolutions because they had a qualitative effect on how we think. In a nutshell, speech made it possible to make propositions, hand-writing made it possible to preserve them speaker-independently, and print made it possible to preserve them hand-writer-independently. All three had a dramatic effect on HOW we thought as well as on how we expressed our thoughts, so arguably they had an equally dramatic effect on WHAT we thought.  As such the rest of the technological development were only quantitative evolution of the media created by speech, writing, and print.

References:

Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53