The Age of Insight Quotes

“Art is an institution to which we turn when we want to feel a shock of surprise. We feel this want because we sense that it is good for us once in a while to receive a healthy jolt. Otherwise we would so easily get stuck in a rut and could no longer adapt to the new demands that life is apt to make on us. The biological function of art, in other words, is that of a rehearsal, a training in mental gymnastics which increases our tolerance of the unexpected.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

“Flat paintings are so commonplace that we seldom ask why flat representations work so well. If we really experience the world as 3D, an image seen in a flat picture would distort jarringly when we move in front of it. But it does not do so as long as it is flat. A folded picture, in contrast, distorts as we move around it. Our ability to interpret representations that are less than 3D indicates that we do not experience the visual world as truly 3D, and has allowed flat pictures (and movies) to dominate our visual environment as an economical and convenient substitute for 3D representations. This tolerance of flat representations is found in all cultures, infants, and in other species, so it cannot result from learning a convention of representation. Imagine how different our culture would be if we could not make sense of flat representations.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present

“The discovery of our mind’s largely irrational nature prompted what may be the most radical and influential of the three revolutions in human thought that, as Freud noted, determined how we view ourselves and our place in the universe. The first such revolution, the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century, revealed that the earth is not the center of the universe, but rather a small satellite orbiting the sun. The second, the Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century, revealed that we are not created divinely or uniquely but instead evolved from simpler animals by a process of natural selection. The third great revolution, the Freudian revolution of Vienna 1900, revealed that we do not consciously control our own actions but are instead driven by unconscious motives. This third revolution later led to the idea that human creativity—the creativity that led Copernicus and Darwin to their theories—stems from conscious access to underlying, unconscious forces. Unlike the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, the realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche in the middle of the nineteenth century. Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche, is most frequently identified with the third revolution because he was its most profound and articulate exponent. It was, however, a discovery he did not make in isolation: his contemporaries Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life. They understood women better than Freud, particularly the nature of women’s sexuality and maternal instinct, and they saw more clearly than Freud the importance of an infant’s bonding to its mother. They even realized the significance of the aggressive instinct earlier than Freud did.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

“In Vienna, Modernism had three main characteristics. The first was the new view of the human mind as being largely irrational by nature. In a radical break with the past, the Viennese modernists challenged the idea that society is based on the rational actions of rational human beings. Rather, they contended, unconscious conflicts are present in everyone in their everyday actions. By bringing these conflicts to the surface, the modernists confronted conventional attitudes and values with new ways of thought and feeling, and they questioned what constitutes reality, what lies below the surface appearances of people, objects, and events. Consequently, at a time when people elsewhere wanted to obtain greater mastery of the external world, of the means of production and the dissemination of knowledge, modernists in Vienna focused inward and tried to understand the irrationality of human nature and how irrational behavior is reflected in the relationship of one person to another. They discovered that beneath their elegant, civilized veneer, people harbor not only unconscious erotic feelings, but also unconscious aggressive impulses that are directed against themselves as well as others. Freud later called these dark impulses the death instinct. The”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

“The modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become as mathematically perfect, or as certain, rational, or enlightened, as advances in the eighteenth century had led people to expect. Truth was not always beautiful, nor was it always readily recognized. It was frequently hidden from view. Moreover, the human mind was governed not only by reason but also by irrational emotion. As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired Modernism. Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species introduced the idea that human beings are not created uniquely by an all-powerful God but are biological creatures that evolved from simpler animal ancestors. In his later books, Darwin elaborated on these arguments and pointed out that the primary biological function of any organism is to reproduce itself. Since we evolved from simpler animals, we must have the same instinctual behavior that is evident in other animals. As a result, sex must also be central to human behavior. This new view led to a reexamination in art of the biological nature of human existence, as evident in Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe of 1863, perhaps the first truly modernist painting from both a thematic and stylistic point of view. Manet’s painting, at once beautiful and shocking in its depiction, reveals a theme central to the modernist agenda: the complex relationship between the sexes and between fantasy and reality.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

“The immediate catalyst for the emergence of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which included three momentous discoveries in astronomy: Johannes Kepler delineated the rules that govern the movement of the planets, Galileo Galilei placed the sun at the center of the universe, and Isaac Newton discovered the force of gravity, invented calculus (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently discovered it at the same time), and used it to describe the three laws of motion. In so doing, Newton joined physics and astronomy and illustrated that even the deepest truths in the universe could be revealed by the methods of science. These contributions were celebrated in 1660 with the formation of the first scientific society in the world: the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, which elected Isaac Newton as its president in 1703. The founders of the Royal Society thought of God as a mathematician who had designed the universe to function according to logical and mathematical principles. The role of the scientist—the natural philosopher—was to employ the scientific method to discover the physical principles underlying the universe and thereby decipher the codebook that God had used in creating the cosmos. Success in the realm of science led eighteenth-century thinkers to assume that other aspects of human action, including political behavior, creativity, and art, could be improved by the application of reason, leading ultimately to an improved society and better conditions for all humankind. This confidence in reason and science affected all aspects of political and social life in Europe and soon spread to the North American colonies. There, the Enlightenment ideas that society can be improved through reason and that rational people have a natural right to the pursuit of happiness are thought to have contributed to the Jeffersonian democracy that we enjoy today in the United States.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

“Freud’s theorizing, Schnitzler’s writings, and the paintings of Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka had a common insight into the nature of human instinctual life. During the period of 1890 to 1918, the insights of these five men into the irrationality of everyday life helped Vienna to become the center of modernist thought and culture. We still live in that culture today. Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, was characterized by the idea that all is well with the world because human action is governed by reason. It is through reason that we achieve enlightenment, because our mind can exert control over our emotions and feelings. The”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present