What Computers StillCan’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason by Herbert Dreyfus (review)

LEONARD0 DA VINCI: THE DAEDALUN MYTHMAKER by Giancarlo Maiorino. Penn. State Univ. Press, PA, U.S.A., 1992. ISBN 0-271-00817-2. h i e w e d by RudoyArnheim, 1200Earhart Road, #537,Ann Arbq MI 48I05, U.S.A. A new book on Leonardo da Vinci cannot but attract the attention of Leonardo readers. In dealing with the artist’s and scientist’swork, ideas, and attitudes, the author, a professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Renaissance Studies at Indiana University, discusses also Leonardo’s relation to technology. What interests him, however, is not the technical nature of inventions as such but their meaning for Leonard0 as a scientist and artist in the setting of Renaissance local politics. Maiorino points out that “thewars that condottia’ waged on behalf of Milan, Florence, or Venice often were games of chess in which checkmate was accepted with little acrimony, and still less bloodshed” (p. 127).The fancy contraptions Leonardo offered to the Milanese warlord Federico da Montefeltro were ingenious and in many ways revolutionary , but they were never actually executed and in fact would not have been usable under the given conditions . Similarly,Leonardo’s machines were, to him, inventions on paper. His “drawings of the flying machine, the helicopter , the submarine, underwater equipment and other attempts at working out ‘miracles’ in mechanics and anatomy prove that his lifework was a quest after the impossible” (p. 152),a mythical reflection of the ancient master magician Daedalus, with his hubristic aspirations and tragic outcomes. Leonardo ruminated on the human relation with machines-was the inventor and user the master or the victim? “If mechanics was the paradise of the mathematic sciences, his Deluge sketches and fluid mechanics must have been Leonardo’s nightmares” (p. 250). All this needs to be seen in the context of Maiorino’s basic theme, namely the double focus of quattrecento culture . Humanism, the philosophy and poetics of intellectual clarity and unchangeable truth and form, is reflected in painters like Piero della Francesca or Botticelli. Its opposite is called Antihumanism by Maiorino-an unfortunate term because what is meant is not hostility to Humanism but its counterpart in an antiphony, a dialogue of give and take. This double tendency is quite evident in the work and thought of the Humanist Leon Battista Alberti, as it is in Leonardo’s. As a scientist and an artist , Leonardo stresses growth, change and action; but Maiorino points out that there is an antinomy, for example, between the drawings of the embryo in the womb and the Vitruvian spreadeagle figure of a man frozen in symmetrical frontality. This “perfectcosmic figure”and some idealistic profiles are in contrast to the grotesque faces Leonardo liked to draw. They oppose the classical canon and display deviations from the norm, so typical of natural growth. His belief in the transitory character of natural and human existence showed in his stress of the sfumato in painting. As distinguished from the cold light of precisely outlined shapes, “Leonardo exploited the area of fluid interactions midway between the unflawed brightness of perfection and the brewing darkness of experience” (p. 24). the antagonistic tendencies comes in two works, SaintJohn the Baptist and Mona Lisa. The baptist is given as a youthful androgynous figure, in whom the contrast of the sexes is led back to their pristine Platonic unity. But the figure points beyond itself in the gesture of the raised arm, which indicates that the resolving solution is attained in the Gioconda, which gives the Leonardesque smile its definitive meaning. It is the smile of those who know the vicissitudesof human strife but who no longer laugh in contempt or weep in affliction. The Mona Lisa is an image of “self-contentment” (p. 255). The synthesis of the struggle between It is a pleasure to read a book that is an obvious insidejob. Maiorino has a family acquaintance with Italian life and attitudes, and he pays more thorough attention to Italian writers of theory and history than is generally the case. He also shares their scintillating intellect, which reinforces a similar stylistic fashion in American literary criticism . Whoever wishes to enrich the stereotype of the Renaissance universal man will be...