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Husserl Studies 17: 155–164, 2001.

Book Review

Fred Kersten, Galileo and the ‘Invention’ of Opera: A Study in the Phenom-enology of Consciousness (Contributions to Phenomenology 29). Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. xviii + 280 pp. $ 164.00

For a number of reasons, this is not a pleasant book to read. It is a heavybook (literally and metaphorically); it weighs in at 1 lb., 8 oz. (0.8 kg.) owinglargely to its 280-plus high gloss pages. The page-gloss makes the book dif-ficult to read: angle and twist as I might, these pages reflected bright andspotted light however I bent. The crowded print of the text made mattersworse.

These matters of format are not unconnected to matters of style, and thematters of style are not irrelevant to matters of content. Emperor Joseph II isinfamous for saying of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, “Good, buttoo many notes.” Of Fred Kersten’s book I want to say something similar:“Good, but too many words.” The book’s virtue is too often its vice. Kerstenseems determined to tell us everything he knows about the epoch with whichhe is dealing – even when such telling obscures narrative structure and philo-sophical focus. The real insights of Galileo and the Invention of Opera (here-after GIO) are nearly lost in overwriting; the philosophy gets lost in the historyand the history is often made dense and opaque by the philosophy; there ismuch repetition. The primary thesis of the book, namely, that the Baroqueperiod opened a gap between everyday life and our ways of representing it,has been noted many times before; never, to my knowledge, has it been dem-onstrated in such painstaking detail.

There are some fundamental incongruities about GIO that are also relatedto matters of format and style. The book is written to be cute and personal (andsometimes it is), but this cute and personal approach is ungently mixed withtechnical language and a swollen, stodgy, and scholarly style. The effect ofthis mix is that the scholarly claims get confused by the cute and the cute losesits charm owing to the heavy argumentative demands made upon it. I willreturn to this problem in the final paragraphs of this review.

Fred Kersten’s goal in this work is to show that opera and modern scienceof the Baroque and early Renaissance periods shared an ideal possibility oressence (p. xi), a common way of comprehending the world. To achieve this,Kersten writes from the inside of the texts of these periods. The range anddepth of his knowledge and scholarship is truly impressive. Via this inside

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geneaology, Kersten manages an implicit “application of a Husserlian phen-omenological method to a set of problems of historical, musicological, liter-ary and philosophical research focusing on mutually interactive connectionsbetween opera and science, painting, architecture and sculpture from the fif-teenth through the eighteenth centuries . . .”(pp. xi–xii). The aim of this pro-cedure is “to develop a quite specific ‘Baroque formulation of consciousness’”(xii), a formulation of consciousness that in many forms persists “with thepresence of the Baroque in ordinary experience” (p. x).

The primary inheritance from the Baroque, Kersten calls “the gap” (p. 156).The gap refers to the distance and disconnection of ordinary life from “its‘representation’ in scientific thinking as well as in music and art in general”(pp. 1 and 156). Just as the mathematized world of natural science is for mostof us neither recognizable nor accessible from the world of ordinary life, so,too, is the world of opera initially foreign to that life. Borrowing from W. H.Auden’s analyses of opera (p. 5 ff.), Kersten notes that the behaviors withinthe operatic context resist clear mimetic correlation with those of everydaylife. To sing the semantics of a situation is in some sense to separate that situ-ation from everyday life. “How,” we must ask of opera as we ask of the natu-ral sciences, “can we get (back) here from there?” These representationaldomains tell us about our everyday world, but just how they do so is uncleargiven their fundamental structural differences from it. Throughout the book,using a rich and varied stock of examples from science, literature, the arts andeveryday life, Kersten shows how these representational gaps were generatedand how they now haunt the everyday world.

Throughout most of GIO, Kersten is dug so deep in the details of the gen-esis and constitution of various epistemic and artistic enclaves that emergedduring the Baroque period that he does not say just how we can segue to or-dinary life after sojourns in these interpretative domains. His answer is given,however, by interpreting the very specific descriptions and analyses given inchapters 2–7 in terms of the general phenomenological and existential frame-work given in chapters 1, 8 and 9. Let us look at some of the details in chap-ters 2 through 7.

In chapter 2, “The Gap Represented,” Kersten begins to draw a set of dis-tinctions between “the Classical formulation of consciousness” (hereafter,CFC) and “the Baroque formulation of consciousness” (hereafter, BFC). Thecharacteristics of these two formulations of consciousness are usually statedas binary oppositions; I will thus articulate them in contrast to one another.

The fundamental assumption of the CFC is that “whatever counts as real issomehow accessible to experience” (p. 21). By contrast, the BFC adopts thecounterfactual belief that if something is immediately accessible to experi-ence, then, ipso facto, it isn’t real, but rather an epiphenomenon or after-ef-fect of the real (p. 27). Another binary opposition: The CFC reads the lower

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off the higher, the near off the far (p. 25). By this, Kersten is referring to thefact that in Ptolemaic and Aristotelian physics the terrestrial is understood asa subspecies of the cosmic; the direction of inference is from the astral to theterrestrial. By contrast, the BFC reads the higher off the lower, the far in termsof the near (pp. 41–42 and 60–61). Kersten provides many examples where“earthly” experiments and terrestrial tactics serve as the basis for our knowl-edge of the rest of the cosmos (p. 62 ff., e.g., Alberti; p. 86 ff., e.g., Kepler; p.126 ff., e.g., Galileo). The significance of the terms “higher” and “lower”should not be missed here; they are value-laden as well as spatially descrip-tive. As Kersten notes, whereas the CFC “touches upon what we can contem-plate but cannot manipulate or dominate” (p. 24), the BFC begins and endswith manipulation – manipulation to confirm our epistemic claims, and ma-nipulation to attain our practical aims. Kersten’s favorite way of expressingthis distinction is to say that within the CFC “push does not come to shove”(pp. 24–25), whereas push always comes to shove with the BFC (p. 61). Saidanother way, the “fate of the classical formulation of consciousness is that akinetics replaces an architectonics” (p. 26), function replaces form. The firstway of knowing the world suggests a beauty and pristine distance of sorts,the terrestrial moves out of love and imitation of the extra-terrestrial; the sec-ond way of knowing, on the other hand, indicates a pragmatic grittiness, acloseness to the things of the world, a hands-on relation where the extra-ter-restrial is modeled upon the being and behavior of the terrestrial.

Another binary opposition concerns the basic modes of representation ofthe classical and Baroque formulations of consciousness. The CFC both makesand bridges the gap between the higher and lower (the real and the less real) interms of mimetic representation (pp. 30–37); the BFC does so via indicationalrepresentation (pp. 60–61). Mimetic representation involves some real resem-blance to the thing represented (pp. 35–37), indicational representation doesnot (pp. 104 and 254). The effect of this difference is that the gap widens, seemssomehow less bridgeable. If the far (deep and true reality) that is read off thenear (everyday life) does not even resemble the near, then how can we everbridge the gap?

The transition from the CFC to the BFC, which is most fundamentally ashift from understanding our world as like reality to understanding it as fun-damentally different from reality, is facilitated by shifting the privileged modesof knowing from mimesis to analogy (pp. 37–44) and from analogy to indica-tive (but non-resembling) representation (p. 51 ff.). With analogical reason-ing we start from something familiar and known, from the center of life. Theless known is contacted from that center, perched and grounded upon it. Withindicational representation, however, the less known becomes the ground ofthe (previous) ground; the indicated and appresented makes claim to the centerfrom which it was initially inferred (p. 58 ff.).

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It is in chapter 4, with Kersten’s full development of the BFC, that he notesthe fundamental shift from the CFC. This occurs when we become self-con-scious – conscious of the role of the mind – in the construction of the world-view we hold (pp. 93–103). And at this very moment we, too, must becomeobjects within that world-view. In Kersten’s words (p. 93):

[In the BFC] when made explicit, the taken-for-grantedness of ordinaryexperience reveals itself in its self-inclusive ungroundedness, exhibiting thegratuitous and fortuitous nature of that existential belief peculiar to ordi-nary experience. . . . this signifies that the accent of reality has shifted fromthe ungrounded existential belief to what is generated by the self-consciousexercise of the self-interpretation of ordinary experience made method. . . .[This leads to] the making of ordinary life an “enclave” separated fromwhat is produced by its own self-conscious exercise of its own self-inter-pretation.

In short, the self and its (view of the) world become one more thing-complexwithin the Baroque world-vision.

More impressively, it is also in this chapter and the three that follow thatKersten develops the principle of compossibility as it functions in the vari-ous formulations of consciousness (pp. 101 ff. and 124). Throughout chap-ters 2–7, he shows – concretely, through the use of many examples – how theconstitutive achievements of scientists, artists, composers, etc., operate in termsof compossible abstractive and idealizing methods. Doing this, Kersten hasproduced a fairly comprehensive collection of genetic, constitutive analysesthat chronicle the formation of the western world’s dominant world-views.And to this extent, GIO is truly a tour de force. But again, and unfortunately,this “force” would have been felt more directly and by many more readers ifit had occurred with less repetition and clutter in terms of format, style andcontent.

In chapter 5, Kersten briefly extends his analyses of the dislocative ener-gies of the BFC to sculpture, architecture, economics and politics; he therebyreveals the totalizing, hyper-rationalization processes spawned by the BFC.In this context, Kersten refers to Beaufret’s expression about the “totalplanification” of all that is (p. 144). In his own phraseology, Kersten writesthat we can now see developed from the Baroque period “. . . a formulationof consciousness compossible with every other to which it is reciprocally re-lated in a contexture, subsisting in and of themselves and for each other outof the internal necessity of organization. Precisely this is a fable [of the world]. . . Being or the ‘real’ is always being or the ‘real’ decreed and ratified.”(p. 144) The ratification processes to which Kersten here refers are the con-stitutive, cognitive achievements that he so thoroughly chronicles.

Kersten’s analyses of the Baroque period’s cognitive accomplishments areguided by a master metaphor: Leon Battista Alberti’s idea and use of the win-

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dow, and by extension, “the room,” is shown by Kersten to have constitutivecentrality in the BFC and the formulations of consciousness that have followedthereafter. Kersten convincingly demonstrates that a claim by Alberti in DellaPittura is the pivotal statement, the Urstiftung, if you will, for the develop-ment of the BFC and the scientization and technicization of the world that hasfollowed thereafter. Alberti stated that “First of all about where I draw, I in-scribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered tobe an open window through which I see what I want to paint . . .” (p. 64). Byadopting this method Alberti places the human being at the center of things,places us in position to shove and manipulate, and locates us at the center pointof all geometric, mathematizing and idealizing visions of the world. By mak-ing the world and universe enter the (humanly geometrized) room through the(geometrized) window, (by making the far known in terms of the near), thehuman being for the first time truly becomes the measure(er) of all things. AsKersten writes:

Living under the sway of the desire for the center itself becomes “geo-metrized,” transformed into a method that determines with exactitude andcertainty a “reproduction” of things in Nature as they are. Nature must berendered by a self-generating method or formula that produces exactitudeby its application so that the application of the method renders the “real”precisely as the “real” just as the centric point renders a perspective. . . .[This proves] to be one of the essential features of the Baroque formula-tion of consciousness.

The plane cutting the visual pyramid here (the window or, with Brunelleschi,the door frame) appresents the apparent magnitude and distance of the Far.With mathematical precision (in a geometrically recursive formula) the Faris measured off the Near and, moreover, the Near of my actual manipula-tory zone . . . (p. 67).

While I cannot develop the many specific uses and permutations of this ideathat Kersten identifies, I can abbreviate his point with the following syllogism:Humans make rooms, rooms fictionally constitute the universe as we know it(in science, in painting, in opera, etc.), therefore, human beings fictionallyconstitute the universe we know. (Although few of us know it!) Hence, theuniverse as known in this sense is a fable – a “new creation” constituted in“imagined space,” (p. 147) – the space of the room used as grid to articulateand restructure the hyperbolic space of the lifeworld (pp. 143–153). In a sum-mary of these ideas, Kersten writes

The room-milieu where the conditions are created for a unitary fantasticimage, where factors can be varied or persuaded to remain constant, orwhere factors can be eliminated, is the “laboratory.” Like the theatre, or theroom with a window, or the camerata, the laboratory is a milieu of a ma-

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nipulatory zone where push comes to shove, where the far is read off thenear, yet which has no expressive unity of its own. . . . To the extent that itis a milieu indifferent to affectivity, it is a milieu within which the fantasticbut verisimilar indifferently appresent the real or ideal, the beautiful or ugly,the sorrowful or the joyful. . . . the room-milieu is indifferent to the eccen-tricity of life . . . (p. 151)

And this indifference – the disconnection spawned by the hyper-rationalizedview from the room – is indicative of the gap. Hence, Kersten claims: “. . . agap [is] essential to the room-milieu. Galileo’s fitting room, extrapolated fromaction in ordinary experience of the world within actual and potential reachis the universe “created anew”[,] determined and further determinable ‘math-ematically.’ It is the ‘fable of the world.’ ” (p. 152). This “fable” is now the“real” in which all of us live. It is the most productive fable of all time – thevery one that Heidegger noted had transformed the world into an ordered, regu-lated, expeditable, standing reserve. In GIO, Fred Kersten shows in preciseand extended detail how this came about.

It is appropriate, then, that chapter 6 is titled “Life at the Gap.” In this chap-ter, Kersten shows how the capacity to see things from the room is a transfer-rable trait of human consciousness. This trait is grounded in the eccentricityof ordinary life, which Kersten defines as “the ability to transfer a center ofaction into the preindicated periphery, so that the periphery turns into a newcenter of activity pertaining to a distinct mode of being together” (p. 15). Oncethe objective world is constructed, then, it becomes possible to take the viewfrom the room from anywhere (p. 158), or, as Thomas Nagel might say, fromnowhere in particular. Nature itself, Kersten shows (p. 161 ff.), is mathemati-cally rendered from the view from nowhere, and thus is created “the newmeaning of the thingness of things” (p. 164) making all things conceptuallycompossible. “The ‘hanging together’ of the various aspects [of the world thatis thus made possible] is precisely the ‘fabulous’, the ‘fable of the world’ ”(p. 165). While this insight has been had before, Kersten’s genius is to showhow theater (p. 160) and especially opera are compossibly constituted withand connected to the same methodic procedures, the same form of conscious-ness. Monteverdi’s Favola d’Orfeo is taken as a prime case in point (p. 170ff.): Kersten describes in detail how in terms of both music and performanceBaroque theater and opera become “the means of access, the ‘window,’ to the‘true idea’ of human life . . .” (p. 188). But what makes it uniquely Baroque– uniquely compossible with the dislocated universe of natural science that“explains” the everyday world – is that “what transpires through the ‘window’least resembles” (p. 188) everyday life.

Kersten argues in the next chapter that science and opera are Baroque Twins.They present us with the world in terms of a world vision (the real decreed)that barely (if at all) resembles it. The stage settings, the dress, the music, thespeech, the singing, the plot and even the passions (p. 190) that are portrayed

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in opera, and which explain to us everyday life, are themselves “independentof the eccentricity of daily life and social status . . .” (p. 190). They tell us aboutthe world and ourselves by not being like the world and ourselves (p. 201).

Chapter 8 sights in on the “last stand of the BFC.” Kersten notes that after“the middle of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, trenchant andvituperative criticism was leveled at the marinistic labyrinth of the Baroquerepresentation of Nature and Society in the name of ‘common sense’ ” (p. 216).He turns to these eighteenth-century criticisms in order to get a final view ofthe BFC. Berkeley’s critique of the method of fluxion, of the infinitesimallysmall but real, and of “occult entities” of all sorts used to explain the phenom-ena of the world, was one such return to “common sense” (p. 217 ff.). A par-allel critique of opera, summarizing the theme of the critiques of the lateseventeenth and the eighteenth-century critics, is nicely phrased in the inter-rogative by W. H. Auden. He asked, “Now, when are men ever seen singingin the midst of their activities and while engaged in serious matters? Is ithumanly likely that a person beset by anger, full of sorrow or anguish, or talk-ing seriously about his affairs can sing?” (p. 219) Kersten summarizes the vari-ous critiques of the period this way:

For the Baroque formulation of consciousness, it is ‘reason’ which makesus believe that the true idea of the ‘real’ is the opposite, that the idea whichappresents the truth is the idea that least resembles it. The gist of eighteenth-century criticism, in those terms, is that what ‘reason’ really does is to makeus ‘suspend rationality’ so that the ‘real’ extrapolated from the center ofaction and ordinary experience is ‘confused’ with its opposite, the fantas-tic, the ‘illusion’, which appresents it. (p. 225)

And yet, Kersten argues, while the critiques of the BFC by the Enlightenmentformulation of consciousness (hereafter, EFC) seem at first to be grounded inthe common sense of the CFC, the EFC is ultimately as dislocated from, andyet dependent upon, the ontic convictions of daily life as was the BFC (p. 236).While he does not develop the formulation of the EFC with the detail withwhich he has the CFC and the BFC, Kersten notes that for the EFC: as me-chanics now becomes the decreed real for the motion of bodies, so melody issuch for the meaning of words in opera and music, so form is for poetry andliterature, etc. (p. 227 ff.). While the critical dimension of the Enlightenmentcritique of the BFC is launched by appeals to common sense, its own con-structive dimensions remain on the other side of the gap – a gap which, as istestified to by so many conditions of the contemporary world – still remainsopen.

It is only in the final chapter of GIO that Kersten reveals the method thatguided his investigation. Introducing a host of Husserlian concepts, Kerstenexplains how it is that (one or another version of) reality is decreed. Borrow-ing from Husserl, he notes that it is always a reflective attitude that explicitly

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decrees reality to be this or that, and that it always does so via some means ofextrapolation from the everyday world (p. 237 ff.). “What then distinguishesone formulation of consciousness from another depends on which existentialindex is reflectively and respectively made thematic and assigned the warrantand decree of ‘the’ concept of reality” (p. 240). Throughout his work, then,Kersten has attempted to reveal various forms of consciousness, and especiallythe BFC, in terms of the specific “warrant and decree of ‘the’ concept of re-ality” unique to each. In Husserl’s language, he has revealed the noetic archi-tecture of Baroque consciousness via noematic analyses of its constituted world(p. 251).

Kersten’s final argument attempts to contextualize and give its proper (lim-ited) place to the reality decreed and delivered to us by the BFC. He thus pro-vides content to Husserl’s statement in the Crisis that the metaphysics ofnatural science has mistaken a method for reality. Kersten’s manner of mak-ing this point is to note how the quasi-worlds of science and art are alwayslimited enclaves in relation to the daily world. As he puts this: “. . . theappresenting component of any quasi-world you please is always an event oraction or artifact of daily life, and by virtue of its priority, its status as para-mount, daily life and its experiential data are privileged: everything else is aphantasy modification (in a quite broad sense, to be sure) of daily life” (p. 246).The daily world, which seems so often threatened in its reality status, Kerstennotes, “. . . can be set aside, but not annihilated, it can be subject to phantasymodifications but only for the time being . . .” (p. 247); it is the place fromwhich all other realities decreed hail, and to which, after our visits to them,we must always return (p. 245 ff.). Said in another way, all worlds of art andscience that are consciously decreed operate always on “borrowed time” – theyoperate in time and space borrowed from the everyday world (p. 247 ff.). Butthis in no way makes such worlds merely parasitic, unuseful or insignificantworlds. They enlighten, enliven and enrich the everyday. Such decreed reali-ties are

an ‘achievement of fictive consciousness’ (Natanson), disclosing the ‘tran-scendental structure of daily life,’ the mutual illumination of daily life ofitself and of other orders of existence. The actuality of daily life allows fora point of view outside itself. The presentified, the quasi-possible, is a pointof view outside the actual allowed for by the actual . . . (p. 250).

And this point of view, just so long as it does not usurp the sense of the ac-tual, makes for the nearly limitless enrichment of daily life by the continuedcreations of consciousness.

I can conclude the direct textual analysis of GIO with a passage from Kersten.It summarizes nicely the means and ends he has set himself in the work, andfor the most part has successfully accomplished.

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. . . Nature is an ideal possibility which lends itself to fantastic, non-mi-metic “images” comprising that “fable of the world.” The “fable of theworld” . . . does not necessarily mean the disclosure of a pregiven, yet hid-den reality. Rather it means that the Baroque formulation of consciousnessis an “accomplishment” yet to be achieved, self-generative of compossible“worlds” yet to be accomplished. Taken over as a task by physics, paint-ing, music, sculpture, drama, poetry, each under the guidance of its ownmethodological norms . . . each constructs its universe by means of a con-tinuing process of feigning awareness (including idealization and math-ematization). The resulting unitary “fable of the world” is, as Husserl mightsay, a “tissue of ideas” which must never be confused with the “real” itself. . . (pp. 251–252)

Kersten’s accomplishment in GIO has been to reveal this process of constitu-tion in extensive, painstaking detail.

While a personal voice, metaphor and humor certainly may make a bookbetter, the attempt only partially succeeds in GIO. Ironically, the gap betweenordinary life and it’s modern, technical articulations – the gap that Fred Kerstenworks so arduously to clarify – splits this very work in two and makes it overlyopaque and taxing on even the most charitable reader. Fred Kersten’s voice,when it appears as itself in this work, is fascinating, clever, humane, deeplyknowledgeable, even hilarious; it made me want to know the man; it mademe want to hear him unmediated by so many other voices – “undefended” byso many retreats into well-walled, labyrinthine and baroque argumentation.But the quick swerves and mixes of this voice into heavy academic jargon andnotation fracture the personal and emotive dimensions of the work and oftenmakes them seem inappropriate and out of place. In fact, I am inclined to be-lieve that Kersten sees the fault-line that runs through the work in his verydenial of it: on the final page of the book he writes that his use of examples,fiction, and personal voice are not “meant as comic relief from the dark andheavy conceptual baroque furniture of the book . . .” (p. 256). And indeed, theyare not comic relief, but they too often seem so, or seem out of place, owingto “the dark and heavy baroque furniture” on which they uneasily rest. Kerstenalso recognizes this tendency as having been a problem of Baroque styles ofrepresentation in general; they were criticized for “losing sight of plot and unityof action, . . . [by] introducing sounds and scenes just for the sake of enter-tainment and the spectacle of virtuosity” (p. 216). Kersten’s book can be ac-cused of the same; it is indeed entertaining at times, and there is no doubt aboutKersten’s “virtuosity” with regards to his subject matter – but the excess andspectacle does become taxing. Hence, it is no accident, perhaps, that Kerstendescribes his own work as a “Baroque” one (p. 256). Is this a hidden self-criti-cism, a preemptive defense against critics such as myself, or simply a state-ment about matters of style and content?

These final comments are not meant to suggest that the gap can not in prin-ciple be overcome in academic writing; they are meant to note that the task

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will be neither easy nor automatic for any of us. After all, our social enclave– the academy and academic philosophy – has trained us to write the near interms of the far and the concrete in terms of the abstract; in the process, it hasalso too often taught us how to make the simple complex and the lucid opaque.In GIO, Fred Kersten retains all the traces of that training even while strain-ing to get beyond it philosophically and stylistically. Perhaps, then, this bookis best read as a bold and brave experiment – an experiment to overcome instyle, the very problem delineated by the book’s contents. The experiment hasmixed results – it succeeds, it fails, it leaves one simultaneously irritated, dis-appointed, impressed (at the wealth of detail at Kersten’s disposal) and awed(at the synthetic range of his thinking). And all that, perhaps, finally makesFred Kersten’s point about the gap more poignantly than any of the claims orfindings in the text itself; the strained and stressed style of the book may makeits point best.

In spite of the difficulties I have noted with GIO, it is an impressive work,a work of monumental scope. Fred Kersten deserves our thanks for it. GIOoffers a nearly comprehensive, synthetic vision of the constitutive accomplish-ments of an epoch. Rarely, if ever, in the annals of phenomenological litera-ture have such thoroughgoing, wide-ranging and intertwining constitutiveprocesses been so fully revealed and explicated. GIO is an instance of phe-nomenology at work; in it Fred Kersten has shown that the “promised land”of phenomenology is not always a land “littered with promises.” Thank you,Fred, for showing us that phenomenology can be done.

Charles W. HarveyUniversity of Central Arkansas, Conway

(E-mail: charlesh@mail.uca.edu)