Wolfgang Korsus
Dipl.Ing. NT , Astrophysiker
Klingenberg 40
25451 Quickborn
TEL.: +49 4106 69295
Handy: +49 162 5680456
9Website : wolfgang.korsus.net
CULTURE OF THE NEW [ Knowledge / Thought / Action ]
At the beginning of the 17th century, we are at the dawn of globalization. (The term globalization refers to the process in which worldwide interdependencies increase in the areas of economy, politics, culture, environment and communication between individuals, societies, institutions and states. )
My new blog reminds me a little of physical training, because I say to myself: „I’m going to take a step back historically and do a short warm-up.Then I’m going full throttle into the 17th century……. Understood?
Back to ← ← ← Bartolomeu Diaz sailed to the southern tip of Africa for the first time in 1487, completely turning Ptolemy’s medieval view of the world on its head. According to Ptolemy, there was no southern tip of Africa!In his opinion, this continent should go to the end of the world, wherever that might be. But why was „he“ traveling in this area? I must remind you that the Portuguese, like the Spanish, were looking for a sea route to India, so „Diaz“ simply sailed along the African coast and eventually reached the Cape of Good Hope. His colleague Vasco da Gama then even boldly sailed around the Cape and reached India via the Indian Ocean!
But what matters to me is the thing with the „map“ … Bartolomeu Diaz basically completely dismantled the current Ptolemaic world view. As you can imagine, at the time, only a few people were aware of this. For Columbus, however, the „map of Ptolemy“ was even the prerequisite for setting off westwards, i.e. his erroneous, falsely assumed journey to India. The prerequisite for the „European expansion from the 15th to the 18th century“ are the new discoveries on the globe……., which in turn have a course that I will talk about a little more in a moment. As already mentioned, the earth was divided up between the two European powers of Portugal and Spain – let that sink in. It’s a slight exaggeration to say that they ruled the entire globe.
※ If that’s not globalization!
The valid reason for this was a total quest for power, wealth through trade and the missionary urge of wretched Christianity, because the church, which I disregard, was on board on both sides as always. You could say ……we are now dealing with a new era. So I ask: „What was the zeitgeist behind this development“? To put it bluntly, it was man’s eternal greed for gold and money, accompanied by an „innate“ thirst for power. We are still familiar with both today. There was a kind of intellectual current in Europe that made this possible in the first place. It has now become so entrenched that we can no longer imagine our modern world any other way.
There was now suddenly a connection between science and technology. The sciences now always appeared alongside the other old sources of knowledge such as philosophy and theology. Another horrible sentence from me:
⇑ In the Middle Ages, knowledge was only available to the church. Access to the world could only be found by going to „God the Invisible“. ⇓
…..I’m laughing my head off The essentials were therefore „Christian dogmas“ and „Christian behavior“. As I like to say……Alpha and Omega. When the old continent discovered the new, the sparkling intellectual current of the beginning modern age unfolded:
I notice……The wavering uncertainty „The doubt“
This is not a state of mind, but the method. ..put more simply:
The doubt about an assertion is now implemented in the form of „scientific investigation“ …..highly recommended…..
The time of just asserting the „big heads“ was finally over. Now you were required to show something and it was no longer a question of someone simply claiming something, but you were almost always encouraged to do an experiment. So to the front: ⇒ observation instead of assertion.
Even well-known intellectual greats now had to confess and put up with being criticized. The great minds of antiquity had to serve as crown witnesses in the medieval disputations – the knowledge of the ancients was practically unassailable – for which they were now criticized and it is certain that there was no longer any faith.
There is an urge for knowledge and insight, but it is independent of subjects who seek the path to objective science and is growing inexorably.
You can already guess where this is going:
Yes, of course, to measurements, to experiments, to observations with objective instruments.Then there is the invention of the printing press, a world-changing instrument! You should know that with the help of the printing press it became possible to make knowledge, including experimental experience, so-called empirical knowledge, accessible to everyone.
Speaking of books, they were practically hidden from the public in individual monasteriesg or in delicately shielded libraries. (Just think of the book „The Name of the Rose“) I’m just saying great, because suddenly the knowledge penetrated into public life. Simply…..man only had to „learn to read“, many could not yet do so. So the individualization of the cognitive process finally solidified. As far as the individual was concerned, this meant that absolutely „everyone“ could recognize something new.
A new face also emerged in the philosophy of the early modern era. At the beginning of the 17th century, Francis Bacon published a work around 1620. Among other things, it contains a great sentence: „Knowledge is power.“ ……nowadays a wish for many citizens of the world.
This provides the impetus to find out much more about the world. Francis Bacon not only said this one sentence, but also strongly argued that knowledge is cumulative. In other words, there is no such thing as complete, finished knowledge, but it is easy to imagine that more and more knowledge can be accumulated.
A typical procedure today: „One provides this, the other that“ and so there is a corpus, a collection of texts so to speak, a real body of knowledge that is constantly growing. But as we thought, this is where the debate, the discourse, comes from. On the one hand, there is the old, sometimes filled with hair-raising dogmas, and on the other, a culture of the „new“ that is impressive.
Please think about it, the development of Western culture must have „something to do with curiosity“, doesn’t it? I’m thinking of the great, extensive sea voyages, because they were all about risk and curiosity. People wanted to get to know the frontiers and somehow there was also something playful about it. I’ll take one of the consequences to heart: so-called authorities are being recognized less and less. If I knew these authorities inside out, I’d say 80% gone, which is what happened…. death knows no exception. That was true then and is true now….and will be for years to come!
Many people back then didn’t realize that they were already sitting on a shaky chair. That’s why I say that criticism is now becoming a focal point of Western cultural history. Moreover, criticizing does not necessarily mean only describing everything negatively, i.e. completely negating what was done „before“. It is only to state that something is still missing! It is not complete. There are gaps in knowledge. But it could also be that the world view of the ancients is perhaps completely wrong. This comment may be made; on the one hand, it is even appropriate in criticism. To be completely honest: That a current of thought could prevail on a continent like this individualization, which has something to do with curiosity, risk and play, but also with greed for power, naturally has something to do with the theological landscape. Without Christianity, such a development would probably not have been possible. Christianity has secularized itself in a certain way – how should I put it? It sounds a bit strange that a religion should secularize itself, but this development actually already existed in the Middle Ages. Mystics had begun to bring the individual into direct conversation with God. There was no longer any need for a mediating church; a direct experience of God was possible. This mystical movement is also somewhat behind Protestantism. The secular (worldly form) of the Catholic faith leads to this: As a non-believer, I get a laughing fit again, but I’ll write down the ramblings of the time: You stand in the world and are dependent on the grace of God, you can do what you want.
↫ not true….. You have to hope for God’s grace in any case, ask for God’s grace. ↫ olala……Whether you get it is another question. First of all, you’re responsible for your life. ↫ I’d rather stand around…….You have to take responsibility for your life. ↫ Rejected……
I say the crucial thing is: this is no longer about the big picture, it’s about „you“ !!! The individual can gain something in a process of cognition in this world. The curious circumnavigators and explorers, for example, were clearly gamblers and gamblers in this sense, because they wanted to know what would happen „…beyond“ the horizon.
In 1562, something special happened in the sky that was enough to make anyone doubt. A „nova“ was visible in the firmament. With the naked eye. A new star. Tycho Brahe (a Danish nobleman and one of the most important astronomers) had also seen the new star.He bent the old world view to find an explanation for it. But he did. The celestial kingdom collapsed completely when Galileo Galilei j, using a new instrument, the telescope, saw things in the sky in 1609 that could not be explained according to the old doctrine. Jupiter’s moons revolved around it and not around the Earth. Venus eclipses the sun. Even the sun had spots.
All these findings were in conflict with the old world view. A line was drawn. It is clear to see that various thinkers, and above all calculators and experimental philosophers, were working on the picture of the world, of nature. 1600 The magnetism of the earth is discovered. Then Galileo in 1609. In the years that followed, in 1637, the philosopher René Descartes not only proposed mathematics as the language of reason, but it was a discovery.He proposes: When reason uses its instrument, the mind, it should definitely use mathematics in the process. Quantification becomes a topic. But not only that. Mathematics becomes reason’s means of finding the truth. To cut a long story short: yes, there are extraordinary occurrences and we are confronted with them as early as the beginning of the 17th century, namely something that had not existed in the rather extensive history of mankind until then. Well, can you guess? ……… It is the sudden turning away from the old traditions and the now very tenderly starting turn to completely objective values, to measured values and to values that emerge from calculations. By the way, gods were worshipped before, even the individual was worshipped, but now we have something abstract. Western society is changing into a society of the abstract. It is changing and moving violently as a result; it is moving away from the immediate view and, in the process, areas of science are literally being opened up anew. Today we realize that yes, we are generally familiar with them. But at that time they represented a revolution, equivalent to a turn towards the more general principles of nature.Many scientific societies were founded.One of these is the Royal Society. Its founder was Robert Boyle, one of the great naturalists working in both chemistry and physics. The Society also publishes a newspaper, the „Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society“. There is no need to present and publish all the knowledge of his time in the form of a book.There are other ways of doing it: essays and contributions on specific topics. Francis Bacon comes to mind, who foresaw and prepared for all this with his phrase „Knowledge is cumulative“. This journal made it possible for anyone who had gained knowledge about the world, about nature, to present it in this journal as their ideas. The general publication of content by „everyone“ was monitored by strict reviewers so that not everyone could publish what they wanted. Rules are also developed on how scientific knowledge: a) can be made, namely through experiments and through theoretical calculation and b) how these results are then also presented to the public.!!! 1687 !!!The climax has been reached. After a long period of intensive thinking, so my CPU is still working, I find an answer: The climax has been reached in the…..
※ GEISTESGESCHICHTE EUROPAS ※ I call a „still“ small heap „ad hoc“……
Newton summarizes the findings of astronomy and physics. He will use this to develop a mechanism that will make it possible to calculate planetary orbits more accurately in the future. There are comets that keep coming back and this was known. Comet Halley will become the great triumph of celestial mechanics. Lunar and solar eclipses that were calculated in advance actually occurred in exactly the same way. It was therefore reasonable to assume that we knew what was happening up there in the firmament. The stars had been taken from the sky and not only that. It was also discovered that light moves at a finite speed. Olaf Römer then determined the speed of light a little more precisely. He miscalculated a little, but his figures were very close. Light apparently travels at just under 300,000 kilometers per second. The invention of the telescope was followed by the microscope. A certain lens arrangement made it possible to magnify things very much.
So, at the end of the 17th century, we are at a point where the West can be described as the continent of great explorers. The Occident, I exaggerate a little, expanded across the entire globe and thus explored this globe. The investigations took place in the sky, here with the telescopes that had just been invented and built. Another beginning was the study of matter, followed by living beings and even man.This culture drew a new map not only of the globe, but of knowledge. These first steps towards the development that we refer to today with the very simple word „globalization“, which is not only a spread of „people from Europe“ or „North America“, but also an immense spread of the most diverse „ideas“. It is the expansion of a zeitgeist that pushes the boundaries far beyond this planet, which as a sphere has its own boundaries