Eric Kandel - The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

The publication of this book benefited from the interest and support of Columbia Universitys Mind, Brain and Behavior Initiative. This initiative reflects the Universitys commitment to linking science and technology with the arts and humanities, through a deeper understanding of neural science.

Copyright 2012 by Eric R. Kandel
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kandel, Eric R.
The age of insight: the quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind, and brain, from Vienna 1900 to the present / Eric R. Kandel.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-930-7
1. Subconsciousness. 2. Perception. 3. Subconsciousness in art.
I. Title.
BF315.K296 2011 154.2dc23 2011025274
www.atrandom.com
246897531

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Pour Denisetoujours

W hen Auguste Rodin visited Vienna in june 1902, Berta Zuckerkandl invited the great French sculptor, together with Gustav Klimt, Austrias most accomplished painter, for a Jause, a typical Viennese afternoon of coffee and cakes. Berta, herself a leading art critic and the guiding intelligence of one of Viennas most distinguished salons, recalled this memorable afternoon in her autobiography:

Klimt and Rodin had seated themselves beside two remarkably beautiful young womenRodin gazing enchantedly at them. Alfred Grnfeld [the former court pianist to Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany, now living in Vienna] sat down at the piano in the big drawing room, whose double doors were opened wide. Klimt went up to him and asked: Please play us some Schubert. And Grnfeld, his cigar in his mouth, played dreamy tunes that floated and hung in the air with the smoke of his cigar.

Rodin leaned over to Klimt and said: I have never before experienced such an atmosphereyour tragic and magnificent Beethoven fresco; your unforgettable, temple-like exhibition; and now this garden, these women, this music and round it all this gay, childlike happiness. What is the reason for it all?

And Klimt slowly nodded his beautiful head and answered only one word: Austria.

This idealized, romantic view of life in Austria, which Klimt shared with Rodin and which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality, is also etched in my imagination. I was forced to leave Vienna as a child, but the intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Vienna is in my blood: my heart beats in three-quarter time.

The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my lifes work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-sicle Vienna and document its three major phases.

The first phase began as an exchange of insights about unconscious mental processes between the modernist artists and members of the Vienna School of Medicine. The second phase continued as an interaction between art and a cognitive psychology of art, introduced by the Vienna School of Art History in the 1930s. The third phase, which began two decades ago, saw this cognitive psychology interact with biology to lay the foundation for an emotional neuroaesthetic: an understanding of our perceptual, emotional, and empathic responses to works of art.

This dialogue and the ongoing research in brain science and art continue to this day. They have given us an initial understanding of the processes at work in the brain of the beholderthe vieweras he or she looks at a work of art.

The central challenge of science in the twenty-first century is to understand the human mind in biological terms. The possibility of meeting that challenge opened up in the late twentieth century, when cognitive psychology, the science of mind, merged with neuroscience, the science of the brain. The result was a new science of mind that has allowed us to address a range of questions about ourselves: How do we perceive, learn, and remember? What is the nature of emotion, empathy, thought, and consciousness? What are the limits of free will?

This new science of mind is important not only because it provides a deeper understanding of what makes us who we are, but also because it makes possible a meaningful series of dialogues between brain science and other areas of knowledge. Such dialogues could help us explore the mechanisms in the brain that make perception and creativity possible, whether in art, the sciences, the humanities, or everyday life. In a larger sense, this dialogue could help make science part of our common cultural experience.

I take up this central scientific challenge in The Age of Insight by focusing on how the new science of mind has begun to engage with art. To obtain a meaningful and coherent focus for this reemerging dialogue, I purposely limit my discussion to one particular form of artportraitureand to one particular cultural periodModernism in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. I do this not only to focus the discussion on a central set of issues but also because both this art form and this period are characterized by a series of pioneering attempts to link art and science.

Portraiture is a highly suitable art form for scientific exploration. We now have the beginnings of an intellectually satisfying understandingin both cognitive psychological and biological termsof how we respond perceptually, emotionally, and empathically to the facial expressions and bodily postures of others. Modernist portraiture in Vienna 1900 is particularly suitable because the artists concern with the truth lying beneath surface appearances was paralleled and influenced by similar, contemporaneous concerns with unconscious mental processes in scientific medicine, psychoanalysis, and literature. Thus, the portraits of the Viennese modernists, with their conscious and dramatic attempts to depict their subjects inner feelings, represent an ideal example of how psychological and biological insights can enrich our relationship to art.