Opticks

"Yes, I put those books in an order – not really an historical order, nor precisely thematic – more a way of describing how I’ve come to think of the Enlightenment. Some of the ways in which I think it’s interesting. Exactly, and about seeing. The idea of light and vision seem to me to be behind the fundamental breakthroughs of the Enlightenment. They can be taken as the principles or the maxims of almost all moments in intellectual history where people see themselves undergoing a revolution or transformation. “The classic symbol of the Enlightenment is simply light – truth emerging from darkness.” The idea that you are seeing something familiar differently, even as capable of changing the world, seems to be the essence of all intellectual and social revolutions. So we’re taking the Enlightenment here as the single most important of all intellectual revolutions in the West and I picked Isaac Newton’s Opticks as my first text in order to flag the main themes of this revolution. Yes. Newton’s a genius whose most obvious contribution to science was to formulate the laws of motion and of gravity and to come up with breakthrough theories about light, colour, vision and so on. But in the Queries to the Opticks he treats these questions as philosophical problems as much as scientific problems. He sees his work not simply as changing the way that scientific inquiry is going to happen for the next 300 years, but also the way that people think about what it means to be human. So if we’re using optics as a key figure for how people think about revolution then Newton gives us another word: ‘Query’, the idea of questioning, investigating, of opening up problems to people at large."