“The emergence of spatial perspective for the first time gave consciousness the ability to fully accommodate a three-dimensional of perspectival worldview. This new awareness of perspective is seen clearly in the paintings of the Renaissance, but also appears in its literature, philosophy, and mathematics.” (Allan Combs. The Radiance of Being. 1996.)

1. Faculty Presentation
Psychology Lunch
Inner Sense and Experience
The Discovery of Perspective
and the
“Making of the Modern Mind”
Professor Peter Burmeister
Wednesday, September 21, 2011, 12 Noon
Webb 006

2. The Making of the Modern Mind
• By the end of the Middle Ages, with the demise of
the Roman Empire, much of Europe was peopled by
descendants of the former “barbarian” tribes from
northern and central Europe
• The last “Roman” emperor, Romulus Augustus, was
deposed (476 A.D.)
• Thereafter, “Germanic” tribes dominated much of
Europe, including Italy, Spain, Southern France

3. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• The “barbarians” from Northern and Western
Europe colonized much of what had been the
Roman Empire and its outposts
• Germanic tribes were the intellectual and
psychological ancestors of modern western
civilization
• Our psychology textbooks almost entirely reflect
this heritage in the contributions of the vast
majority of the “great men” that we study
• This is particularly true of the “outward-looking”
point of view that developed into Empiricism

4. 12/15/2013
4

5. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• “In a list of 538 individuals important to the field of
psychology (between 1600 and 1967) one-third
were workers in the German language, one-third
Americans and one-third British and French
together. Only 11 Italians figured in this list.”
(Robert I. Watson and Marilyn Merrifield,
“Characteristics of Individuals Eminent in
Psychology in Temporal Perspective,”1973)
• “Psychology has been mainly a creation of the
German language out of the German soul.” (James
Hillman, 1975)

6. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• “For the fatherland of the English race we must look far
away from England itself. In the fifth century after the birth
of Christ, the one country which bore the name of England
was what we now call Sleswick (Schleswig), a district in the
heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic from the
Northern seas.
• The dwellers in this district were one out of three tribes, all
belonging to the same Low German branch of the Teutonic
family, who at the moment when history discovers them
were bound together in some loose fashion by the ties of a
common blood and a common speech.” (J.R. Green. A Short
History of the English People. 1915.”)

7. Sleswick

8. Conquest of England

9. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374): his writings are often
considered to mark the beginning of the Renaissance
• Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux (central France): one of
the first recorded instances of a recreational climb, simply to
enjoy the awesome landscape.
• It represents a turning away from the soul, the inner life, to
the outer, the realm of experience
• Petrarch urged a return to religion based on personal faith
and personal feelings
• The Renaissance is primarily a period of experience,
observation and perspective; of anthropocentrism rather
than theocentrism

10. Mount Ventoux

11. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• Perspective, a Renaissance invention, separates the
observer from the observed; the land becomes
landscape
• Petrarch influenced Renaissance art and thinking by
placing man at the center of the Universe
• Renaissance art becomes secular and architecture
no longer encloses sacred space but looks outward
through vaults and windows to the world

12. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• Ordinarily, we think of perspective as optical or
‘vanishing point’ perspective, an arrangement of
objects within cubical space so that each object is
clearly ‘located’ in relation to the enclosing space and
to other objects by a system of co-ordinated lines
(‘orthoganals’) converging in a ‘visual pyramid’ toward
an exact focal point situated upon an implied or
defined horizon. This sort of mathematical
perspective – as artificial as any system of vision ever
invented – became an orthodox mode of representing
space in renaissance painting.” (Wylie Sypher – 1955)

13. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• “The emergence of spatial perspective for the first
time gave consciousness the ability to fully
accommodate a three-dimensional of perspectival
worldview. This new awareness of perspective is
seen clearly in the paintings of the Renaissance, but
also appears in its literature, philosophy, and
mathematics.” (Allan Combs. The Radiance of
Being. 1996.)
• Objectivity began to take on a new meaning as the
ego identified its location as a point separated and
distanced from the rest of the world. (Ibid.)

14. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• “Uccello, for example, who gave his life and his art to
exploring perspective, is one of those humanists who
used his painting for research.
• “Berenson complains that Uccello merely illustrates
scientific problems, that his zeal for converging lines
causes him to forget local color, so he presents us with
green and pink horses.” (Wylie Syhper, 1955)
• “Uccello's wife told people that Paolo used to stay up
all night in his study, trying to work out the vanishing
points of his perspective, and that when she called him
to come to bed he would say: ‘Oh what a lovely thing
this perspective is!’” (Vasari, “Lives of the Artists.
1568.)

15. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• “For his time his (Petrarch’s) is an epochal
event and signifies no less than the discovery of
landscape: the first dawning of an awareness of
space that resulted in a fundamental alteration
of European’s man’s attitude in and toward
the world.” (Jean Gebser 1949)
• Perspective is man’s effort to concretize or to
objectify space
• It detaches the observer from the observed

16. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• In spite of his experience on Mt. Ventoux, Petrarch suffered
great remorse at his desire to look outward
• Turning from the view of the landscape, he opens “The
Confessions of St. Augustine” at random, and finds this
passage:
• “And men went forth to behold the high mountains and the
mighty surge of the sea and the broad stretches of the rivers
and the inexhaustible ocean, and the paths of the stars, and
in so doing, lose themselves in wonderment.”
• Then Petrarch writes: “I was irritated for having turned my
thoughts to mundane matters at such a moment, for even
the pagan philosophers should have long since taught me
that there is nothing more wondrous than the soul, and that
compared to its greatness nothing is great.”

17. Francesco Petrarca

18. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• James Hillman in “Re-Visioning Psychology,” uses
the story of Petrarch's ascent to illustrate his
argument that the outer world of nature is mirrored
by an equally vast inner world of images.
• Both worlds exist apart from the human being. The
outer world may have motivated Petrarch to climb
Mont Ventoux, but the inner world is what he
discovered when he reached the top and read the
passage from Augustine's “Confessions.”

19. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• Hillman’s theory suggests that the use of
perspective “adds depth” to visual art and therefore
reflects the desire of the Renaissance man for
greater psychological depth
• This elegant theory directly contrasts with Gebser’s
sense of Petrarch’s pre-occupation with the outer
world as seen from the mountain
• Which hypothesis appeals most to you?
• Where is the evidence?

20. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• “So this is the natural order, that among
mortals the care of things mortal should come
first; to the transitory will then succeed the
eternal; from the first to the second is the
natural progression.” (Petrarch, “Letter to
Posterity)

21. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• The older mindset (Roman/Christian Empire)
emphasized looking within for spiritual guidance
and truth
• The Gothic mindset (Northern/Western Europe)
was dualistic: a tension between inward and
outward experience
• That tension remains current in the history of
modern psychology
• Much of the modern mind has its roots in the
zeitgeist of the European Gothic period

22. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• Petrarch’s life coincided with the “Babylonian Captivity” of
the Papacy
• 1305 – 1378, Popes resided in Avignon, rather than in Rome
• Petrarch (and many others) condemned the seven Avignon
Popes during this period for their “worldly”
lifestyle, emulating princes and nobles
• This schism in the church is a further indication of the conflict
between the inner and the worldly or outer mental and
spiritual life
• The Popes returned to Rome in 1378, but the schism
continued for another 40 years, during which the Protestant
Reformation had its beginnings

23. Papal Palace, Avignon

24. Uccello (1397-1475) : The Battle of San Romano

25. Uccello: Bernardino della Ciarda Thrown Off His Horse

26. Uccello: St. George and the Dragon

27. Sant’Andrea del Valle, Roma

28. San Carlo al Corso Roma

29. Chiesa del Gesu, Roma

30. San Francesco, Rimini

31. Church of Gesu, Rome, Interior

32. Structure of a Gothic Cathedral

33. Beauvais Cathedral

34. Beauvais Cathedral

35. Lincoln Cathedral Chapter House

36. Lincoln Cathedral Chapter House

37. Florence Cathedral

38. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• “The moment when man stepped out of the
Middle Ages and into the modern era, long
celebrated as a sublime act of self
emancipation, was in reality a neurotic flight
from a sense of narcissistic impotence into the
illusion of narcissistic omnipotence.” (HorstEberhard Richter, 1984)

39. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• Roger Bacon (1214 – 1292 A.D.): “Experience is
double: one is by means of the exterior senses; . . .
but this experience does not suffice man; . . . it
touches on nothing at all of spiritual things.
Therefore it is necessary that the understanding of
man be aided otherwise, and therefore the holy
patriarchs and prophets, who first gave the sciences
to the world, received interior illuminations and
were not dependent only on sense . . .”

40. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• William of Occam or Ockham (1285-1349 A.D.):
emphasized the role of sense experience over reason
• Not concerned with transcendent reality
• “Occam’s Razor”: no unnecessary assumptions should
be made; all such extraneous inferences should be
“shaved” from explanations or arguments. Less is
more!
• Argued that universal principals were no more than
verbal labels
• Occam was only concerned with how the mind
classifies experience
• Sensory experience defines the world

41. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• Council of Trent (1545-1563 A.D.): Catholic Church
reaction to Luther
• Sanctioned the veneration of images and relics
• Also, set forth the doctrine that during the Mass, the
bread and the wine actually (not symbolically)
become the body and blood of Christ
• “During this ceremony, therefore, the spiritual
experience can be represented and consummated at
the level of the flesh.” (Wylie Sypher, 1955)
• Christ is "really, truly, substantially present" in the
consecrated forms
• The “Word” becomes “Flesh!”

42. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• The emergence of perspective led to a threedimensional or perspectival orientation to the
world
• The ego became a point separated from the
rest of the world
• The result was objectivity: essential to science
and analytic thought, but it has its downsides

43. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• The perspectival consciousness that developed
during the Gothic period is evidenced in “nothing
but” statements
• For example, the statement: “Matter is nothing but
atoms.”
• Nothing but statements lead to nihilism; the death
of inquiry, calcification of creativity
• Contemporary psychologists such as: Alan
Combs, Ervin Laszlo, Rupert Sheldrake, Ken
Wilber, Michael Conforti and others are leading the
way to an aperspectival, Integral Consciousness

44. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• “For as far back as I can remember, my own consciousness has seemed
to me to be absolutely real and unwavering. I was fascinated by it, and
that fascination eventually led to a study and career in the sciences of
the mind and the brain. As a student, I learned to my amazement that
there were others who did not find it interesting or who denied its
existence entirely. Much has changed since those days, both in my
own life and in science as well. The study of consciousness has become
not only legitimate but even fashionable.
Nevertheless, conferences, professional meetings, and even popular
books on consciousness seem to entirely miss my original idea. They
speak of behavior, they speak of cognitive networks, they frequently
speak or neurons and the brain, but they all too rarely speak of the
simple crystalline reality that undergirds all experience –
consciousness. (Allan Combs, “The Radiance of Being”. 1996)

45. Modern Mind, Cont’d.
• “Compelled to emphasize his ego every more strongly
because of (its) isolating fixity, man faces the world in
hostile confrontation.” (Jean Gebser, 1956)
• The conscious mind has evolved and adapted to deny
our hostile reactions to threatening stimuli in the outer
world
• Our greatest mental resources lie outside conscious
awareness and thinking
• The future of psychology may be within the deep
unconscious psyche to decode the wisdom that
resides outside of conscious awareness

46. Jean Gebser