What defines Western civilisation?

[Eric the Green]

(01-29-2019, 11:54 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Objective naturalism in art. This really separates the Renaissance from earlier times, in part by making perspective relevant. People who violate the rules can get away with it, but only if they violate those rules for compelling reasons. Perspective allows people to see the world in three dimensions (with obvious limitations) , which allows for more detail in the expression of images.  

Perspective also makes analytic geometry and the calculus possible.

This defined western art in the Renaissance period, circa 1400 to 1890 CE, and objective naturalism but without the perspective device also characterized Green and Roman art. The Romans excelled with personal portraits. Architecture emphasized geometrical forms in these periods, and were not so big as to overwhelm and dehumanize the spectator or the client/worshiper using them.

However, for the thousand years roughly from 400 to 1400 CE The West abandoned objective naturalism and returned to art as symbolic and abstract, because the priority was to represent the divine, not the human. Architecture soared to great heights to represent the divine, much like in the days of ancient Egypt. And since circa 1890 CE, once again Western art has largely abandoned objective naturalism, and art became the forms and colors expressed on the canvas or in the building, not representational, objective or proportional. 

So it would not be accurate to define The West solely in terms of the objective, natural or rational; those "earlier times" were also "western." That goes for all forms of art and culture and belief, philosophy, science, etc. But it's the only world culture that took the rational and objective as far as it did, which it did during the more objective-tending periods (during what I call several of the civilization cycles). Now science and rationalism is part of our world culture.