“The Renaissance discovery of nature was an invention of nineteenth-century liberalism which played off the Renaissance delight in nature against the Middle Ages, in order to strike a blow at the romantic philosophy of history. For when Burckhardt says that the ‘discovery of the world and of man’was an achievement of the Renaissance, this thesis is, at the same time, an attack on romantic reaction and an attempt to ward off the propaganda designed to spread the romantic view of medieval culture. The doctrine of the spontaneous naturalism of the Renaissance comes from the same source as the theory that the fight against the spirit of authority and hierarchy, the ideal of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, the emancipation of the individual and the principle of democracy, are achievements of the fifteenth century. In all this the light of the modern age is contrasted with the darkness of the Middle Ages.”

— Arnold Hauser

Source: The Social History of Art', Volume II. Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, 1999, Chapter 1. The Concept of the Renaissance

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Renaissance discovery of nature was an invention of nineteenth-century liberalism which played off the Renaissance …" by Arnold Hauser?

Arnold Hauser 34

Hungarian art historian 1892–1978

Related quotes

“We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

“I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution — learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was the offering of the Middle Ages.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

“The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)
Context: The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.

“Development of Western Science is based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (Renaissance). In my opinion one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to J.S. Switzer (23 April 1953), quoted in The Scientific Revolution: a Hstoriographical Inquiry By H. Floris Cohen (1994), p. 234 http://books.google.com/books?id=wu8b2NAqnb0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA234#v=onepage&q&f=false, and also partly quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein edited by Alice Calaprice (2010), p. 405 http://books.google.com/books?id=G_iziBAPXtEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA405#v=onepage&q&f=false
1950s

“The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 161

“Implosion is no invention in the conventional sense, but rather the renaissance of ancient knowledge, lost over the course of time.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 83, p. 16 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

“The belief that science destroys culture is sometimes supported by historical statements that the arts have flourished only when the sciences have been neglected. This thesis is… directly contrary to history… [I]n the great age of Greece, art and science penetrate one another more closely than in any modern age. …The example of these men in science as much as in art set the modern world afire in the Renaissance. And the type and symbol of Renaissance man… remains Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, mathematician, and engineer. No man has shown more strikingly the universality and the unity of the intellect.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

“If we don't take that time (to be romantic), then it's karate, then it's ballet, and then there's Christmas, and then my husband is flying off to tour around the world.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Discussing staying romantic in a marriage with children. Quoted by Jennifer Weiner in InStyle, February 2010.

“The same Jewry now is seeking to smirch Germany's renaissance.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Nazis in the News" - Mar 5, 1933

“Is Spinoza baroque? No, but if we find, through this line of thinking, a spurious and worn-out figure that rejects the crisis, that repeats the utopia in its ingenuous Renaissance form, what we have found is merely Spinozism. When classical idealism takes up Spinoza, in effect it only takes up (or invents?) Spinozism, a Renaissance philosophy of the bourgeois revolution of the capitalist market!”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Selected works, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (1991)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Arnold Hauser 34

Related quotes

Related topics