by Hubertus Gassner (Director of Kunsthalle Hamburg)

Passing through the glassy skin of the observatory the visitor is confronted in the interior of the transparent steel and glass construction with an exposed human brain. The true-to-life model is suspended, pale and marked with blood clots, over a compact metallic cylinder. Directly above the brain a brilliantly bright tube rises upwards 10 metres in three increasingly narrow sections until, heavenwards, it pierces the apex of the architectonic casing. The tip of the telescope juts into space from the cone which opens out into a semi-circular dish at the top. Harnessed bet­ween the massive metal drum of the electron accelerator and the light, wafer-thin model of the astronomical telescope, the naked brain appears to rest weightlessly, a visible symbol of the incorporeal human intellect amid its own creations: the mass spectrometer which enables the natural sciences to analyse the atomic micro­cosm and the telescope used to explore the macrocosm and reach for the stars. The naked, disembodied brain between instruments used to master nature symbo­lises the intellect of scientists who, even today, act as if they were disembodied minds; the only way in which the natural sciences can conceive of themselves as objective. And despite being aware that they are not merely disembodied minds free from emotional influences, researchers still adhere to this unacknowledged myth. The assertion that scientific observation and research are strictly objective is not as remote from mythological forms of knowledge as the self-legitimating nomological sciences maintain.

The scientific intellect, supposedly detached from the human body, is in reality much more like the spirit of the shaman, capable of assuming animal form to travel through the underworld or soaring into the heavens as a bird. Likewise the natural scientist's intellect also journeys to the distant heavens from where, as if through a telescope, it observes the earth, the solar system and even the whole universe from the outside. And of course it can also travel in the opposite direction to explore the tiniest, finest material structures and to exploit the energy of the atoms. When we speak of the natural sciences being remote from real life we avail oursel­ves of the traditional myth of the incorporeal journey. It is precisely this elevation above the concerns of everyday life which makes the natural sciences so exciting -and this loftiness harks back to a long, magical and animistic tradition. Journeys such as these captivate and set the imagination aflame.

The French philosopher Rene Descartes was the first thinker to conceive of the intellect as an entity separate from the body. For Descartes the soul was simply the mind as a substance separate from both the body and nature. Starting from the basic principle "I think, therefore I am". Descartes concluded that thought was possible without the body, or that it was incorporeal. The mind was regarded as godlike and immortal. He was able to grasp the laws of nature with his intellect and thus partook in the mathematical mind of God. By defining his real self as a disembodied observer and not as part of the physical, animate world, he laid the philosophical foundations for the ideal of scientific detachment. This typically male ideal is not only subscribed to by scientists and technocrats however, but has influenced the whole of modern society and exacerbates the split between man and nature, intellect and body, head and heart, objectivity and subjectivity, quantity and quality.

The brain stretched by Sacharow-Ross between instruments designed to conquer the microcosm and macrocosm not only resembles Descartes' conception of the brain, the godlike master of'the world, but also the bodiless human eye which the French philosopher equated with the lens of the camera obscura and through which images of the outside world are projected into the interior of the camera. "Carefully cut away the three enclosing membranes at the back of the eye, without causing the eye to slip out." After the eye has been exposed and separated from the body it is set into the outside wall of the otherwise dark chamber. "No light may be permitted to enter the chamber except through the eye all the parts of which are, as you know, transparent. If you now observe the white body, you will be astounded and delighted to see a lifelike image in perspective of all the objects to be found in the surroundings." (Rene Descartes).
On separating the eye from the body of the beholder it should - according to Des­cartes - be capable of reproducing images of the world which are both more faith­ful to reality and more objective than those produced by binocular vision. The vi­sion of the monocular lens system with the lifeless human eye is superior to that of the living human because, unlike the body's vision, it does not produce two diffe­rent pictures which need to be integrated by the brain.
The dead eyes of disembodied vision present the world to us as a machine, imma­culately ordered and subject to mechanically reliable mathematical laws - a model universe, soundless, colourless, tasteless, odourless and, of course, lifeless. This is quite a different universe from that revealed to us by our living senses, however, and one which is consequently accessible to us only with our powers of mathema­tical reasoning and not through our senses.
Together the disembodied eye and intellect produce just such mathematically con­structed models of the world. In Sacharow-Ross' work, the electron accelerator symbolises such a "world machine" in miniature. The machine impresses through its clarity of form, the precision and unity of its design and its sheer if only implicit power. And yet this model universe remains hard and cold, like most physical mo­dels which only take account of those aspects of the world which lend themselves to quantification - form, size, position, proportion, movement, mass and electrical charge.

Sounds, smells, colours and sensations have no place in mathematical physics, because they are excluded from the very start. This, the fundamental procedure fol­lowed by physics, was expounded in detail by Galileo as early as the 17th century. Physics should concentrate its attention solely on the mathematical aspects of things, their primary qualities, as only these may be granted objective validity. Other qualities, those which may be discerned by the senses, are considered secondary, purely subjective, subsumed under physical experience. They have no existence in the objective mathematical world of the disembodied intellect. Galileo himself said: "Taste, smell and colour, etc., those things which appear to be typical of a particular object, are mere names and are located wholly and solely within the sensing body; if this is removed, these qualities disappear with it." In this scientistic and still widely-held view of the world, art whose function it is to address and activate all the senses finds itself marginalized in a position where it is permitted to embrace the apparently superficial and accidental "moods of nature", those elements which are assumed to be merely subjective sensations and feelings. The quantifiable aspects of the world are indeed amenable to abstraction and ma­thematical modelling. The practical success of the mechanical natural sciences testifies to the effectiveness of this method. And yet, as they are scarcely able to account for our actual, living experience, mathematical models only provide us with extremely limited knowledge. Nonetheless, thanks to physics, this method has achieved a high degres of prestige, and physics itself has become the discipline which provides the best model of scientific detachment - envied by biologists, sociologists, economists and all those who would like to confer the predicate 'objective' on their work.

It is no coincidence that the telescope was discovered in the time of Galileo and Descartes. The understanding of perspective arrived at in Holland around 1608 corresponds perfectly with these scientists' ideal of the disassociation of the ob­served object from the body of the observer, the spatially remote distance between the body and objects which was regarded as the precondition of scientific obser­vation and assessment.
And the "spyglass", as the telescope was also called, enabled large distances to be crossed at the speed of light whilst keeping the object observed at a distance. The extension of the field of vision brought about by the telescope only reduced di­stances in an optical sense without bringing the object physically closer to the observer. The distance of the viewer's body from the observed object and the simultaneous proximity of its image provides for an optimally distanced view where only the eye, isolated from the body and fixed to the telescope, is confronted with the observed phenomenon without itself being physically affected. With the tele­scope the eye begins its triumphal march against the senses of touch, taste and smell. The victory of our sense of the remote over that of the nearby has changed the world decisively and thanks to the distancing and objectifying view of the tele­scope it has finally become a "world machine".
In one of the earliest artistic representations of the telescope, the large-format painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens on the Allegory of Vi­sion and Smell (ca. 1618, oil/canvas, 175 x 263) now hanging in The Prado in Madrid, the close olfactory sense and the remote sense of vision still appear to­gether, although the instruments shown in the painting are for the intensification and augmentation of vision alone while the nose is left to its own devices. The or­gan of smell, in contrast to the eye, is not provided with any artificial aids to ex­tend and reinforce its sensations. Since Brueghel the Elder and Rubens the teles­cope has seldom been treated as a pictorial motif in the arts however, even though it has extended our vision so decisively. This might be due to the circumstance that, by reducing the mode of perception to the eye, the telescope has eliminated smell, taste, touch and hearing, senses which the arts wish to address alongside that of sight.
It is precisely the reduction of the mind to disembodied thought and of perception to incorporeal sight which has put mankind into a position which has made it at all possible for him to exercise such far-reaching control over nature. Today, confron­ted by the catastrophic and life-threatening effects of this conception and our way of treating both our own bodies and nature as a machine stripped of any of the characteristics of a vital organism, we are experiencing the rebirth of nature in the sciences.
This development once again endorses many aspects of a living and soul-filled na­ture, a conception of nature discarded during the mechanistic revolution; it is a development which has fundamentally reawakened nature itself to new life. Of course these developments do not take us back to a pre-mechanistic world, but point the way - at a higher turn of the spiral - to a post-mechanistic science of life. The current conception of nature conveys to us an even clearer sense of nature's spontaneous vitality and creative power than the world view which predominated during the time of the Greeks, during the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Every­thing in nature tends towards evolution. The cosmos resembles a gigantic, develo­ping organism, and evolutionary creativity is inherent in nature itself. Nature is once again regarded as a self-organising entity. The difference being that this organisation is no longer brought about by a World Soul and all the indi­vidual souls but rather by a universal field of gravity and all the other types of field contained within it. Uncertainty, spontaneity and creativity appear once again throughout the whole of nature.

Sacharow-Ross manifests the inverted perspective in the natural sciences and our day-to-day perception which leads to a post-mechanistic, holistic and ecological world view by reversing the telescope. The telescope is not, as might be expected, directed from the inside to the outside and from below upwards. Although the body of the telescope tilts upwards dynamically, it directs the line of vision from the outside to the inside and from above to below. The huge eye crowning the glass cone and formed like a sphere in a dish, looks through the telescope at its own brain. This brain, itself an energy field of millions of networked links, hangs above the energy field of the electron accelerator a symbol, as it were, of the field structure for the self-organising universe. The telescope, spiralling upwards appa­rently endlessly and simultaneously pointing back down, represents the permanent evolution of nature. The twofold movement from the brain to the eye and from the eye to the brain refers to the "feedback" which guides the self-organisation of living organisms. Only once this inverted perspective has reawakened the insight that our intellect and sight, whatever the scientific findings, do not exist indepen­dently of our body but are equally a constituent part of larger organisms, only then will we gain an unobstructed view of a universe evolving in its totality. Organisms are also the galaxies, the solar systems and biosphere, and include our earth. Momentous and noteworthy experiments are those which, using terms such as information, communication and control, attempt to generate a conception of the vitality of nature - and in this context the term "feedback" is of particular im­portance. This is the starting point for systems theory and holistic and organismic philosophy. Organisms in this view are a living totality. Biological organisms are only one particular type of organism. The earth is an all-inclusive macro-organism in which individual organisms evolve, develop and possibly multiply to die again in the long or short run. The earth is more of a great mother than a cloud-veiled slab of rock.

The article quotes freely from passages of The Rebirth of Nature by Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life, Hamburg 1994.