Resolution’s genesis
From what is known, “resolution” first appeared in English during the fourteenth century. Originally the word was used to refer in a very basic sense to the material composition of something. So, for instance, one might say that the resolution of a salt is sodium and chloride. However, while that usage was common a second use also existed: “The time of my resolution,” John Wycliff wrote in 1382, “or death is near.” To understand the relationship between these two meanings and how it informed the subsequent development of the word, we must look firstly into resolutions’ medieval origin and its intertwinement with Christian mythology.
The English fourteenth century was a time that was at once deeply religious and deeply superstitious. Night-fall brought total blackness into the homes of peasants who often had only their hearth fires to interrupt the evening’s ponderous darkness. Swamp flares were thought to be faeries and mishaps the work of small devils. Lest we forget, this was a world created in seven days that, in the beginning, was “without form, and void,” where there was “darkness upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” It is upon this stage of absence that we should examine the etymology of resolution. Rooted in the Latin solvere meaning to loosen or disintegrate, resolution carries a general sense of going back or returning to a point of formlessness. To resolve something, to the mind of the fourteenth century, would be to reimagine genesis. It would be to bring the object of resolution once again to a perspective that sits right on the point where the horizon vanishes and the object begins. To resolve something would be to behold it in its most fundamental state, to the greatest degree to which an individual could do so.
The resolution of ideas
This original usage of resolution persisted in the literature until the early modern period when a shift occurred and it began to appear in the writings of mathematicians. At this time, resolution, most simply defined, referred to the reduction of a formula to its most basic level. However, more generally, resolution was used to describe the limits inherent in mathematical systems themselves. This notion is clearly illustrated by Sir Henry Billingsley, a sixteenth century translator of Euclid’s The elements of geometry, who wrote that “the first principles and grounds, which are indemonstrable, for their simplicity can suffer no farther resolution.” In some ways this is a fitting progression in the meaning of the word. Looking back to the early modern period, we find that it was a time when thinkers like Descartes and Newton were acutely interested in providing rational and mechanical accounts of the universe. Indeed, the era was marked by a sort of preoccupation with the limits suffered by systems of thought.
We see in Descartes a project concerned with founding a resolution of knowledge. By positing cogito ergo sum, Descartes is in a sense outlining something fundamental about what resolutions are possible. As one of those deeply anthropocentric words, resolution is the reduction of the world to the limit of what the individual is capable of grasping. For Descartes that capability for thought is the very basis upon which the truth or falsity of the world is a consequence. It is the cogito, the thinking subject, that becomes the prism of the world, that interface which renders resolutions.
For Newton, the resolution of the physical universe could be expressed in a set of mathematical principals. Indeed, by demonstrating that objects on earth are subject to the same laws that celestial bodies are, Newton’s resolution had a transformative effect on how the world was viewed. His findings helped propel a pervasive belief in a rational universe that was governed in every way by regular and discoverable laws. From foreign policy to economics to art, the implications of this seemingly irreducible resolution came to constitute not just a physics but a mode of inquiry and, more broadly, a worldview. It is perhaps this sense of interplay that best illustrates the important movement that occurred in the meaning of resolution between the medieval and early modern periods. While the basic definition of resolution as the ultimate level to which a thing can be reduced is preserved, it also becomes in a sense the very interface which allows for that reduction. To think back to Euclid, the resolution of geometry could be located at his fundamental theorems but is almost more properly situated at the very system of geometry that emerges from those theorems and consequently the conditions of understanding that system implies or enables. It is almost as if resolution becomes the stage upon which relationships can exist to the imagination. And, as we will see, across the next several centuries this connection will be the central key that modulates.
The industrial era and the technical resolution
Following this, the next substantial shift in the usage of resolution occurred in the nineteenth century. One of the important, if less discussed, developments of this period was an exponential increase in the size and purity of optical lenses. The consequence of this was a boom in the construction of deep space astronomical observatories. Suddenly new discoveries of stars and galaxies at ever further distances from the earth accompanied each new iteration in telescopic technology. It was upon this scene that the modern conflation of resolution into a distinctly technological and visual vocabulary emerged. At first it was found in astronomers’ writings about an increased knowledge of the celestial universe, and a related expansion of man’s understanding of himself in the world. Indeed, as J. Norman Lockyer, a commentator in 1868 had it: “Each new triumph of optical skill results in a resolution of some nebulae, before irreducible.”
In a way, Lockyer’s remarks catch the usage of resolution at a moment when it is between two meanings. On the one hand, his usage allows the fullness of discovery to be the very thing of resolution while simultaneously, on the other, embedding that resolution within that physical apparatus which broke down the blackness of the sky into the fire of distant suns. This shift in the focus of resolution’s meaning was to complete in the early twentieth century when the word became a wholly technical term. As it was, the standardization and rapid expansion of complex technological knowledge that thrived in the early twentieth century created the need for a marked precision and rigor in its vocabulary. Consequently, we can observe that by the 1930’s the word had settled quite rigidly in a particular posture, as summarized in an issue of Nature:“The remarks on numerical aperture may give rise to confusion, as the term ‘definition’ is used, instead of the correct one, ‘resolution’.” Resolution had become something measured specifically and which was a sort of rationalized conduit through which the whole universe could be laid out for the scientist to study. Indeed, Encyclopedia Britannica, estimating the limit of the universe in 1902, wrote: “a resolving power of 100,000 would suffice for the resolution of the closest lines in the spectrum.” Surely, should only this level be reached, the quest of resolution would have been concluded.
