The Renaissance Considered as a Creative Phenomenon

Explorations in Cognitive History

Subrata Dasgupta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000514902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del Renacimiento europeo

By using the fresh investigative language of cognitive history, a symbiosis of the methods of cognitive science and historical inquiry, this book departs from almost all previous approaches to Renaissance studies.

The Renaissance has attracted the attention of distinguished scholars from many different vantage points – political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural. In this volume, Subrata Dasgupta sheds an alternative light on the Renaissance by considering it as a creative phenomenon. To be creative is to make history by producing material and/or abstract artifacts that are both new and consequential; to be creative also entails drawing on history and on the culture of the time. Most significantly, the creative process occurs in individual minds: it is a cognitive process of a very special kind. Beginning with a 'prehistory' set in classical Greece and medieval Islam, this book explores a variety of inventions and discoveries through the 14th–16th centuries, mainly in Italy, in humanities, painting, architecture, craft technology, anatomy, natural science, and engineering.

This book will be of interest not only to Renaissance scholars but also to students interested in Renaissance history and the nature of the creative tradition.

1 The language of cognitive history

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240518-1

I Cognitive-historical questions

To reiterate: Cognitive history is the symbiosis of the methods of cognitive and historical inquiries. Its aim is to describe, understand, and explain creative phenomena and how they come into being.

‘Cognition’ and ‘cognitive science’ are, thus, key concepts in this book. Following psychologist Jerome Bruner,¹ I will take cognition to mean the mental processes whereby conscious beings make meaning of their experiences with and in the world at large. ‘Conscious beings’ include both humans and animals and, to the disciples of artificial intelligence, even some machines. My concern here, however, is strictly with human beings. ‘World at large’ embraces both the objective and the subjective, the natural and the artificial, the material and the abstract, in sum all that humans are capable of experiencing. Cognition, then, is a meaning-making enterprise.

Cognitive science constructs empirically plausible models and theories about such meaning-making processes. By ‘empirically plausible’ I mean models and theories that are both consistent with and constrained by observable human behavior on the one hand and with known physical and biological (in particular, neuronal and sensory-motor) attributes on the other. Cognitive science is both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary – it draws upon cognitive psychology, of course, but also on computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology as contributing disciplines.²

The cognitive historian, as noted, approaches the study of creative phenomena from a perspective that blends the historical and the cognitive. She asks certain types of questions pertaining to creative phenomena encountered in history:

What kinds and forms of knowledge and beliefs are brought to bear both individually and collectively in the making of particular creative phenomena? What needs, desires, and goals are engendered in such situations, and how do they originate? What forms of reasoning and/or other mental actions are manifest in the making of a creative phenomenon? How does affect or emotion influence it? How does culture interact with cognition in such situations?

II The cognitive-historical space

So the cognitive historian does not ignore the cultural or the affective in attempting to make sense of creative phenomena. Indeed, she ‘frames’ her inquiry within a hierarchical cognitive-historical space.³ In explicating this space, I will use the 14th-century Italian scholar-poet Petrarch (1304–1374; who will loom large in a later chapter) as a ‘running example’.

Ecological space. Imagine a person such as Petrarch. On the one hand, he is situated within a community – a society – which in one way or another nourishes him, stimulates him, and, in turn, is nourished and influenced by him. As we will see later, Petrarch’s community consisted of intellectuals and writers, as well as the nobility, of his time, distributed in both space (Florence, Rome, Avignon, Montpellier, and Bologna, among other places) and time (through the course of his life span). This is his social space. Petrarch is also embedded in a culture – a term used here in the anthropologist’s sense: a body of public, shared, widely distributed but relatively stable symbolic representation of things in the world with which Petrarch and others of his community interact. Petrarch’s cultural space contained, most significantly for him, the contents of a personal and substantial library (he was a passionate bibliophile), a form of external memory, but it also includes the customs and traditions of his time and place, of the manners and mores in which he was inculcated by way of his exposure to the communities in the university towns of Montpellier and Bologna where he studied law, in the papal center of Avignon, and in Florence, Rome, Vauclause, and the many towns and cities where he visited or stayed through his extensive travels.⁴

Petrarch is also embedded in a natural or physical space, which, like his societal and cultural environments, will have a role in influencing and shaping his thoughts and actions.

Collectively, these social, cultural, and natural spaces form Petrarch’s ecological space – his external environment. He interacts with this space in the sense of being stimulated and influenced by its features and also (as we will see) as a creative being in influencing and changing it, especially its cultural component.

Cognitive space. But Petrarch is a cognitive being; a profoundly creative cognitive being as it happens. And as a cognitive being, he is defined by a personal cognitive space that is uniquely his and no one else’s. It contains symbolic representations of a network of values, beliefs, facts, doctrines, dogmas, ideologies, rules, laws, procedures, percepts, theories – about the natural world, about the cultural world, about other individuals, and about himself. Generically and collectively, these form his belief/knowledge space, a component of his cognitive space.

Later, I will speak of an important way such beliefs/knowledge may be structured but suffice here to note instances of the kind Petrarch (for instance) would have harbored: knowledge of the Roman statesman and orator Cicero’s prose style, a belief in this style as model for his own literary endeavors in composing his letters, knowledge of the Roman poet Virgil’s poetic style, and belief in this style as a model for his own poetic projects.

Cognition and affect are inextricably entwined in that meaning-making is massively shaped by one’s emotional state.⁵ A person’s collection of emotional sensibilities as a component of cognitive space constitute his affect space. Petrarch’s love of nature as a component of his affect space prompted his pastoral verses; his long-suffering love for a woman called Laura stimulated composition of many of his love poems. Sometimes, beliefs/knowledge and affects are so deeply connected it is not always easy to separate the two. Petrarch’s belief in Cicero’s literary style as literary model and his feeling for Cicero as a father figure, and his belief in Virgil’s poetic style and his feeling for Virgil as a brother ⁶ are inextricably fused into one.

All creative endeavors begin with certain needs, goals, desires. There are some needs that are fundamental to one’s very identity: the need to write, to paint, to invent; the need to be original, to deviate from the past, to make history. I call these overarching needs or desires superneeds,⁷ and Renaissance creativity swarms with such superneeds. Petrarch’s “aspiration” to “progress beyond the tradition from which he had sprung” (in the words of Renaissance humanism scholar Nicholas Mann)⁸ is an example of one of Petrarch’s superneeds. Other needs and desires may be less compelling, less addictive, but they are still ones that drive one’s thoughts and actions. Petrarch’s desire to imitate (or emulate) Cicero’s prose style is an example; his goal in writing one particular historical work was to imitate (but go beyond) the Roman historian Livy is another.⁹ Collectively, I will call a person’s body of needs, desires, and goals her need/goal space. This is yet another component of one’s cognitive space.

Each cognitive being is armed with a repertoire of cognitive operations: mental actions whereby things are made to happen – to effect changes in one’s belief/knowledge, affect, and need/goal spaces, to effect changes to one’s ecological space. Examples of cognitive operations are retrieval of an entity from one’s belief/knowledge space, deducing a new piece of knowledge, drawing an analogy between an existing piece of knowledge in one’s belief/knowledge space and a new experience, generalizing a conclusion based on one or more particular instances, and so on. One’s repertoire of cognitive operations – his or her operational space – constitutes yet another component of his or her cognitive space.

Finally, there is problem space. This is where cognitive operations do their job: given a goal the cognitive being creates a temporary workspace – a problem space – by way of a structured sequence of cognitive operations – a cognitive process – and searches for a path toward the satisfaction of this goal – that is, for a solution for the problem defined by the goal – in problem space. As we will see, cognitive search processes in problem space are where all one’s cognitive and ecological resources are brought to bear in order to achieve goals; in particular, they entail retrieval of items of beliefs and knowledge from belief/knowledge space, goals from goal space, and cultural experiences from cultural space. When the problem is solved – that is, the goal achieved – the problem space disappears. Cognitive processes are thus the means by which cognitive problems are solved. In Jerome Bruner’s terms, such processes are ‘acts of meaning’.

Historicity. Neither these cognitive entities nor the cultural component of one’s ecological space is static. They are constantly changing. At best, we may capture a ‘snapshot’ reflecting the states of these spaces at a particular moment of time – a synchronic situation. But for a proper understanding of one’s creativity, a diachronic representation of the states of cognitive and ecological spaces – a representation over time – is necessary. Petrarch’s strongly secular values of his earlier years were tempered by his spiritual values in his later life. As significantly, the presence of the past may be represented in one’s beliefs/knowledge and affect spaces: Petrarch’s representations of Roman culture, Roman thoughts, and Roman ideas were as present in his beliefs/knowledge space as were aspects of his contemporary life. In other words, historicity may be manifested in one’s cognitive space in a diachronic fashion that connects beliefs/knowledge about the past, one’s changing beliefs/knowledge over time, and beliefs/knowledge in ‘present time’.

It is this historicity imposed upon one’s cognitive and ecological spaces that leads us to name the totality as one’s cognitive-historical space.

Shared belief/knowledge space. In contrast to cognitive space, which is personal and private to an individual, cultural space by its very nature belongs, and is shared by, a community. It defines that community’s shared identity. A particular component of cultural space that (as we will see) is relevant to our understanding of Renaissance creativity is the body of beliefs and knowledge that are shared by members of the relevant community. Its constituents are generated by individuals and communicated and deposited in this space. Conversely, members of the relevant community draw upon elements of the shared belief/knowledge space as ‘inputs’ in the course of their respective cognitive processes.

For the reader’s convenience, the hierarchical structure of cognitive-historical space is summarized as follows:

Cognitive-historical space

• Ecological space
  • Social space
  • Cultural space
    • Shared belief/knowledge space
  • Natural space
• Cognitive space
  • Belief/knowledge space
  • Need/goal space
  • Affect space
  • Operational space
  • Problem space
• Historicity as a time dimension

Thus, cognitive history as a mode of historical inquiry stands apart from related modes of inquiry such as cultural, social, intellectual, and emotional history in its emphasis on cognition.

III Levels and kinds of creative phenomena

The prologue speaks of the Renaissance as a creative phenomenon. What do I mean by ‘creative phenomenon’? And what kind of creative phenomenon was the Renaissance?

The first question is, to say the least, vexatious. It poses the dilemma of complexity of a concept or term that postmodernist theorists have remarked upon: that the explication of a term or concept or a piece of text necessitates the explication of another and this, in turn, demands the explication of yet a third, and so on until one finds oneself in a hopeless circularity; ascertaining meaning, th...