675
the Galerij Prins Willem V of Orange. Potter’s great bull, considered one of the five
most important masterpieces in the Netherlands, was taken by Napoleon in 1795
and hung in the Louvre for two decades, before being returned to the Dutch Republic
and to Mauritshuis, where it hangs to this day.
If so voluminous a density of luminaries were not enough, van Gogh’s five years
in The Hague saw him wandering repeatedly up and down the Dunne Bierkade and
commenting with great enthusiasm on the legacies of these giants of aesthetic and
intellectual passion (just as Jimmie Hendrix would move next door to Handel’s
house and spend a year there from 1968). Dutch geography, and the uniquely Dutch
sentience, has apotheosized the argument of transcendence, lending credence to the
capacity for resolving the dialectic at the heart of human variance (and the accompanying dilemmas of consciousness) in a small neighborhood, but giving no formal
clues to how it might be accomplished at rapidly increasingly complex macroscales, where evolution sways, heaves, and is lost between fixities of short duration,
the shortest terms of punctuated re-evolution events, namely, across the fleeting
span of human generations.
What these artists and philosophers accomplished was the elevation of the possible into a real series of physical coordinates—the choice of a precise terrain upon
which to live and to die, to love, and, as Spinoza remarked, to feel sadness. Just a
few miles away, the world of Leiden, where van Goyen as well as Rembrandt was
born, dreamed, sweated, and vanished (Fig. 73.3).
It is June 19, 2019, and the Lakenhal Museum in Leiden along the Ouder Single
canal has re-opened for a celebration of Rembrandt, van Goyen, and all of their
local contemporaries and regional successors: Jan van Steen, van Mieris, Jan
Lievens, Julius Porcellis, Gerard Dou, and David Bailly. Even the late nineteenthcentury Leiden pointillists are represented adrift the prolific air of passing genius.
As if from a scene of Parmenides’ short fragmentary poem of 160 remaining verses,
“On Nature.” Alexander P. D. Mourelatos suggests that Parmenides has conceived
of “the real as ‘nicely circular from every side’” and holds that “the real is that
which is perspectivally neutral,” as with a sphere. “The only thing that varies is its
size in our field of vision, and that is measured by our proximity to the object.” Such
deliberations, says Mourelatos, are “of great importance for the history of Western
Philosophy”.
13
And we would add to rudimentary molecular biology.
73.6 Ideations of Nature
At much greater variance, as intoned by Parmenides, is the relationship between
those artists and philosophers whose images of Nature are at once confined to the
idea of nature. Ideas that manifest in the Unity of multiplicity (hence, the one and
13 The Route of Parmenides – A Study of Word, Image, and Argument in the Fragments, by Alexander
P. D. Mourelatos, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1970, p. 129.
73.6 Ideations of Nature
the Galerij Prins Willem V of Orange. Potter’s great bull, considered one of the five
most important masterpieces in the Netherlands, was taken by Napoleon in 1795
and hung in the Louvre for two decades, before being returned to the Dutch Republic
and to Mauritshuis, where it hangs to this day.
If so voluminous a density of luminaries were not enough, van Gogh’s five years
in The Hague saw him wandering repeatedly up and down the Dunne Bierkade and
commenting with great enthusiasm on the legacies of these giants of aesthetic and
intellectual passion (just as Jimmie Hendrix would move next door to Handel’s
house and spend a year there from 1968). Dutch geography, and the uniquely Dutch
sentience, has apotheosized the argument of transcendence, lending credence to the
capacity for resolving the dialectic at the heart of human variance (and the accompanying dilemmas of consciousness) in a small neighborhood, but giving no formal
clues to how it might be accomplished at rapidly increasingly complex macroscales, where evolution sways, heaves, and is lost between fixities of short duration,
the shortest terms of punctuated re-evolution events, namely, across the fleeting
span of human generations.
What these artists and philosophers accomplished was the elevation of the possible into a real series of physical coordinates—the choice of a precise terrain upon
which to live and to die, to love, and, as Spinoza remarked, to feel sadness. Just a
few miles away, the world of Leiden, where van Goyen as well as Rembrandt was
born, dreamed, sweated, and vanished (Fig. 73.3).
It is June 19, 2019, and the Lakenhal Museum in Leiden along the Ouder Single
canal has re-opened for a celebration of Rembrandt, van Goyen, and all of their
local contemporaries and regional successors: Jan van Steen, van Mieris, Jan
Lievens, Julius Porcellis, Gerard Dou, and David Bailly. Even the late nineteenthcentury Leiden pointillists are represented adrift the prolific air of passing genius.
As if from a scene of Parmenides’ short fragmentary poem of 160 remaining verses,
“On Nature.” Alexander P. D. Mourelatos suggests that Parmenides has conceived
of “the real as ‘nicely circular from every side’” and holds that “the real is that
which is perspectivally neutral,” as with a sphere. “The only thing that varies is its
size in our field of vision, and that is measured by our proximity to the object.” Such
deliberations, says Mourelatos, are “of great importance for the history of Western
Philosophy”.
13
And we would add to rudimentary molecular biology.
73.6 Ideations of Nature
At much greater variance, as intoned by Parmenides, is the relationship between
those artists and philosophers whose images of Nature are at once confined to the
idea of nature. Ideas that manifest in the Unity of multiplicity (hence, the one and
13 The Route of Parmenides – A Study of Word, Image, and Argument in the Fragments, by Alexander
P. D. Mourelatos, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1970, p. 129.
73.6 Ideations of Nature