Thursday, April 19, 2012

It's all a matter of perspective

File:Hogarth-satire-on-false-pespective-1753.jpg



I’ve discussed this issue on other occasions, but I’ll return to the issue from a somewhat different angle. According to liberals like Paul Seely, the ancients judged by appearances. They thought the world was flat because, to all appearances, it seemed to be flat, and given their prescientific ignorance, they had no reason to question their naked-eye perception. Hence, we’re treated to that widely circulated diagram of the triple-decker universe.

I grew up in the Greater Seattle area. That’s a hilly, mountainous region. Depending on weather conditions, and where you’re facing, you can see rows of hills–hills behind hills. These turn into foothills, behind which you can see mountains or mountain ranges, like the Olympics, Cascades, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Rainier.

It looks like mountains are the most distant objects. There’s nothing between the mountains and the sky. The mountains appear to be right up against the sky. So it looks like mountains ring the outer edges of the flat earth. The only thing beyond the mountains is the sky.

But there’s a problem with that inference. For sightlines depend on the vantage-point of the observer. If you stayed in the same area all your life, I suppose you might labor under the illusion that you were at the center of the world, while the mountains marked the outer limits of the world.

But, of course, ancient people also traveled by boat or by foot. If you took a boat down the Pacific coast, if you saw Mt. Hood looking East rather than looking South, then you’d see that Mt. Hood wasn’t the end of the world. The world continued on the other side of Mt. Hood. There was something between the mountain and the sky. That wasn’t the edge of the world. Your perspective undergoes a radical shift. The viewpoint is relative to your particular position.

Surely lots of Indians did that sort of thing. Moreover, explorers like to brag about their discoveries. So is it realistic to think ancient people were that clueless about the world they inhabited? And that’s even before we bring inspiration to bear.

Here’s another thing to consider: before the invention and popularization of three-point perspective, how could the ancients accurately depict a landscape even if they knew better? Many of us have seen geometrically inaccurate Medieval paintings. But lack of foreshortening doesn’t mean the painter lacked depth perception. He knew that what’s farther looks smaller.

And even if a painter knew three-point perspective, he might still paint objects out of scale because that’s a way of indicating the comparative importance of different objects: bigger is better. His culture assigns great importance to some objects.

3 comments:

  1. Good post, Steve. I, too, have a hard time believing that everyone saw the world as "flat" before the Renaissance understanding of vanishing points. But probably there's no simple explanation for how people conceived of, and conceive of, the third dimension.

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  2. "I, too, have a hard time believing that everyone saw the world as 'flat' before the Renaissance understanding of vanishing points."

    1. Of course, the question is over whether the people of the ANE and specifically the ancient Hebrews who authored the Bible held this view. But as Steve has cogently argued in numerous posts including this one, the arguments in favor of this view from the likes of Enns and Seely are quite weak at best.

    Plus it seems to me Seely and Enns are arguing since ANE peoples held this view then the Hebrews must have too. For starters, the Hebrews aren't identical to other ANE peoples. Just because the Enuma Elisha might depict a flat earth does not necessarily mean the Hebrews thought the same.

    Not to mention those who authored the Bible were literate. I don't know how widespread literacy was in the ANE or in Jewish society. I could be wrong but I can't imagine literacy was very widespread. If so, then I would think the Hebrews who authored the Bible were among the more educated in society, whether Jewish or ANE. As such, I would think they'd tend to be among the educated and probably among the more intellectual in society as well. So even if we grant for the sake of argument most ANE peoples including the Jews may have thought the earth was flat, it doesn't mean the educated among them thought so too. It doesn't mean those who authored the Bible thought the world was flat.

    And even if those who authored the Bible may themselves have conceived of the world as flat, this doesn't necessarily mean Scripture teaches the world is flat.

    2. As for others prior to the Renaissance, there are artifacts including coins of the Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great (482-565) holding a globus cruciger, which was meant to represent Justinian's authority over the entire world. But note the orb or globe in the globus cruciger isn't flat.

    Prior to Justinian, there are coins of the Roman emperor Carinus (d. 285) which also feature an earth which wasn't flat (e.g. the personification of victory standing on a globe).

    Educated ancient Greeks knew the earth wasn't flat (e.g. Pythagorus, Parmenides, Aristotle).

    "But probably there's no simple explanation for how people conceived of, and conceive of, the third dimension."

    Hm, if you're talking about conception in terms of physics, neuroscience, or philosophy of mind stuff, then, yeah, I guess it could be true there's no "simple explanation" for the question!

    But the ancient Hebrews could've simply looked at the world around them. Likewise the average person today.

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  3. Hey, common ground again, rocking!

    cheers from cloudy Vienna, zilch

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