TrME IN ART
AND
SCIENCE'
j't(
gion, science, and political thought are differentiated from one an–
other and that art as an independent pursuit arises.
It is beyond our scope to answer here the question about the
origin of this change from art as an essentially instrumental and
utilitarian activity into art as an autonomous, purely aesthetic form
-a change which is perhaps the most momentous event in the whole'
history of art. We can only hint at the fact that as soon as man
begins to feel more or less secure and relieved from the immediate
pressure of necessities, he begins to play with the spiritual forms and
resources developed as weapons and tools in his struggle for life.
In the classical period of Greek culture, art and science coexist,
independent of one another but not uninfluenced by one another.
Wilhelm Dilthey, the German historian and philosopher, speaks in
his work on the "World-View and Analysis of Man in the Renais–
sance" of the "artistic imagination" in the scientific research of the
sixteenth century; there are periods in the history of civilization in
which one could speak with equal justification of a "scientific imagi–
nation" in art. The illusionism and psychologism in the art of the
fourth century B.C. is unthinkable without the relativism in the phi–
losophy of the Greek enlightenment and the discovery of the ephem–
eral and transitory character of human valuations. But if the art of
this age is turned in the direction of science, the science and th:-:
philosophy of the following Hellenistic period are turned in the direc–
tion of art. In Neo-Platonism, an aesthetic conception of the universe
is the foundation of the whole system. Plotinus's
Demiourgos
is a
magnified, idealized artist, and every individual artist is, in his vie\!,
a small world-creator.
It is the aesthetic structure of this system which first .collapses
at the beginning of the Christian era. In the Renaissance the pen–
dulum swings again in the direction of aestheticism; but it is no
longer possible to speak of an entirely one-sided influence-art and
science become interdependent, and the ties between them so mani–
fold that one has to single out one problem and to follow up its his–
tory in order to see a distinct line of development.
The various conceptions of time, which have prevailed one after
the other in the history of western culture, reflect perhaps most con–
spicuously the points of contact between art and science, and allow
us to describe the present situation in the closest connection with the
past.
