By Alan Paskow, 2004, Cambridge University Press, New York.
This chapter goes over a lot of what key people have written on aethetics - will be usefull later
Introduction
I am interested in discovering what a painting means to us, why it can matter in our lives. Nor am I assuming that a particular painting has a meaning awaiting our discovery, for I know well that different people have different responses regarding the significance of the same painting and that people sometimes bring special agendas to an artwork, perhaps unconcerned with what “it means”.
….I claim that we wish to feel its presence, to discover what it has to say to us and often what it has to say to other people as well. In short, we desire to make some sense of it.
Page 1
We may ask all sorts of questions about her (Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring). Who is this woman?….is she expressing surprise or innocence?….What is she thinking and feeling?….
Pages 2-3
When I view the reproduction, I look at the figure and see her in front of me, “out there”, and thus not in my mind. I simultaneously know that the painting is before me and that I am confronting a person. A real one? Well, I’m not only confronting mere oils and a canvas or simply a manikin, but of course I don’t talk to the woman, smile at her, or assume that she will begin to do something. Nevertheless, I would say – ambiguously at this point, to be sure – that the woman, as I dwell with her, is in a sense not simply imagined by me, but real to me. And real to you, too, as you dwell with her. What do I mean by “in a sense, real”? for me to explicate such a claim properly, I must provide an account of how the woman is to be understood in relation to the “truly real” people whom we know and with whom we have contact on a daily basis because I just conceded that I do not have the same kinds of sensory expectations about the woman with the earring that I have about a real human being….
….answering the question I posed requires me to challenge a way of thinking that Western philosophers have accepted as dogma for centuries.
It will emerge in this work that the distinction between what a thing is and that a thing is, between “essence” and “existence” and, by extension, the distinction between what is “merely fictional” and what is “actually real”, are not so sharp as virtually all Western philosophers have unquestioningly assumed, especially since, and in part because of, the work of Immanuel Kant.
….as I see it, depicted things, too, are not only “real to us” but are so in a way that is very similar to the way depicted people are “real to us”.
Page 4
I believe, that it is especially the content, as well as the form, of an artwork that affects us and, also contra Kant, that our individual histories ineluctably bear on the kinds of pleasure and meaning we derive from our viewings of the artwork.
Moreover, the precise nature of our appreciations of her face is, I feel, shaped and given particularity because of the kinds of psychological and cultural experiences that we have had as individuals.
Page 9
….it is difficult, if not impossible, to provide precise and justified accounts of our emotional responses to objects (such as artworks) both because we are dealing with qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, phenomena and because we must make more than passing reference to first-person events and statements – that is, to what I feel and say (so-called first-person avowals) from my standpoint or what you feel and say from your standpoint.
Page 10
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), arguably the most important analytic philosopher of the twentieth century, believed that his task and that of the other aestheticians was indeed to describe the ways in which people of a particular culture involved with artworks (e.g., in viewing paintings) spoke about their experiences, how they acted while doing so, as well as to bear in mind and, when needed, provide an account of the cultural and historical settings of such activities.
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What is of aesthetic importance is not what happens to us, [Wittgenstein] would insist, but what we say and do in the face of artworks.
Page 13
Analytic aestheticians such as Arthur Danto and George Dickie have separately devoted much thinking to answering the question, “What is an artwork”?….Roughly, their answer to their own question is that an artwork is whatever is designed to be an artwork by publicly acknowledged art collectors, curators, art critics, and other – in short, “the artworld”.
Page 14
Virgil Aldrich contended that we have two ways of perceiving an object – with respect to either its observable qualities (e.g., the hardness of a particular desk surface) or its “animating” features (e.g., the bear-like face in the surface’s wood grain)
Page 15
….over the past twenty five years, Kendall Walton has developed an influential, extensive theory of the imagination, contending that our ability to be affected by artworks is much like, and builds upon, our childlike capacities to use props in games of make believe. When we view a painting by Titian, for example, we use the figures the painter has depicted to define a world of fantasy in which we momentarily dwell.
(Walton, “Mimesis and make-Believe: On the Foundations of Representational Arts, 1990)
What I am suggesting, in other words, is that the scientifically minded analysts whose orientation I have been discussing fail to respond adequately to the most interesting issues in the field of what is called “aesthetics” because they are not able to do otherwise.
Page 16
There is “in us”, I believe, something that is not, in essence, reducible to and determined entirely by the explicit or tacit rules of our culture; we should not understand ourselves and the world we inhabit as wholly defined by historical “conventions” or see it and ourselves solely as intelligible through “social constructs”.
Page 17
Besides the legacy of Kant, there was another kind of philosophical response to his work in the field of aesthetics, a very different sort of methodological orientation. For while Kant’s reflections on all sorts of issues embraced by the word “taste” led some of his followers and disciples to concentrate their intentions on the public expressions of taste, other thinkers were ready to explore and draw conclusions from their own personal intimations – that is, from the first-person point of view. These thinkers viewed themselves as engaged in “phenomenology”, a term used by the founder of the movement, Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938), to name their long-term philosophical project of mapping the fundamental features of consciousness itself from the point of view of its subject.
Page 18
Husserl believed that the biggest mistake that previous philosophers had made was in fact close, but not identical, to the one that I have been lamenting as determinative of twentieth-century Anglo-American aesthetic theorizing: that they refused, or neglected, to observe and describe precisely their own experiences from the standpoint of oneself. The authentic first focus of philosophy, the data of one’s own consciousness, was established by Descartes in the seventeenth century….
Page 18 – 19
As both a homage and reaction to Descartes, Husserl sought to return philosophers to the “lifeworld” that we sense and feel, to the real data of experience, “to the real things and issues” themselves. To understand this world as the “object” of an individual consciousness, however, we must, somewhat unexpectedly, temporarily detach ourselves from it – regard it differently, critically – to avoid prematurely committing ourselves to it and thus simply repeating our deepest prejudices about it. We must, Husserl insisted, therefore and for methodological purposes, examine the data of experience apart from any initial commitment to them as externally existent. What this means is that I should at first describe my sensory data and affective perceptions as though they might have no reality distinct from my particular consciousness, as though they were simply my virtual reality and not of the independent physical world and of which I ordinarily take them to be a part. For example, I would describe the chair I am currently sitting on and the table I am sitting at as sheer phenomena or mere appearances that I cognize and not as physical things that necessarily exist when I am not perceiving them. Husserl thus called for a provisional resistance to our “natural attitude”, our commonsense involvement in the lifeworld, including its independence from our consciousness of it….
Page 19-20
….because everything we apprehend in and about the world, including ourselves, is based on and filtered through the structures of human consciousness, phenomenology was to be the absolute foundation or ground of all other knowledge whatsoever, the veritable “first philosophy” that Aristotle had arrived at more than 2,300 years earlier.
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According to [the] Hussurlian view, I do not, for example, recall an image of my boyhood friend, I recall him; I don’t dwell with the image of the young woman with the earring, I dwell with her.
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The philosopher who I believe offers the most promising stance for dealing with the questions that I have been posing throughout this introduction is Husserl’s most distinguished pupil, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
Page 25
….Heidegger, having taken that step, provides us with the epistemological and ontological resources for answering fundamental questions about what a painting is for us and therefore what it means to us.
Page 27
The work of art, according to Heidegger, “sets up” a world and “sets forth” the earth. Moreover, “[truth is an event that] establishes itself in the work. Truth is present only as the conflict between lighting and concealing in the opposition of world and earth”.
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….to put it bluntly, in my judgement Heidegger has not articulated a full or convincing theory of art, nor with his distinctions provide us with the ontological basis to offer decisive guidance for the understanding of artworks, including paintings (despite what he has presented to us about Van Gogh’s depiction).
The Reality of Fictional Beings
- Most (perhaps all, noninfantile) people at times have emotional responses to objects, characters, or events that they identify as merely fictitious.
- On the other hand, to have an emotional response to objects, characters, or events is to believe that they truly exist and truly have those features one apprehends.
- but no person who takes beings or events to be fictional at the same time believes that they are not fictional (i.e., that they are real).
Page 41
How…can I be emotionally affected by something I know to be unreal?
Page 47
Kendall Walton initially claims that those involved in artistic depictions pretend their emotions. This position, while logically solving the paradox of fiction, is psychologically false: no one simply ordinarily simply feigns emotions when steeped in a fictional artwork.
Page 52
Recall for a moment a movie in which one of the characters was fascinating to you. When you were engrossed in the film, wasn’t it true that you felt you were watching, as it were voyeuristically, a real person? Again, you weren’t involved with mere images on a white screen. Didn’t you take the images to be a person, just as you take certain distant images seen from a low-flying plane to be of real people? And when a character speaks, we would have a great deal of trouble simultaneously telling ourselves, “Well, that’s simply electronically reproduced sound that I translate into intelligible thought.” No, we hear someone speaking. Where is this person exactly? I would say he is in the world, in our world, not behind the movie screen, but in whatever setting the film depicts. Again, we posit that a character has a mind of its own – after all, we are not responsible for the thoughts you hear expressed – and (ordinarily) that he or she sleeps, eats, ages, will eventually die, and so on. In short, we regard this being (even if it is ageless or immortal) to be logically complete and independent of us, therefore in extramental reality and thus “out there”.
Page 61
Our consciousness is indeed twofold, not onefold: (a) an awareness that the artwork is a thing that is “there” (be it something visual, auditory, and / or tactile), but not (as Danto has correctly pointed out) just an ordinary thing, for one knows as well that it is about something other than itself; and (b) a separate awareness that it is involved in the representation as something meaningful and engaging in its own right, what Wollheim calls “seeing-in”.
….despite the monitoring and overseeing presence of one mode of cognition, the posited beings of another mode are permitted to be in out world, in a state of sheltered imagination. As such, they can truly provoke, annoy, delight, or terrify – in short, they can make appeals to us to which we can hearken and which over time can resound in our world, thereby informing us of who we have become, even when we do not explicitly attend to them.
Page 62
My view is, therefore, both similar to and different from Yanal’s, for while he maintains that when we are in thrall to fictional characters, our disbelief in their fictionality is fairly inactive (which is precisely my position), he then goes on to insist that we do not truly believe in their extramental reality in any way, shape, or form, that instead we are excited by our thoughts as thoughts (a view that, of course, is not mine at all).
Thus I believe that when we are engaged with absent things, be they “real” or “fictional”, we have a dual vision. Does this imply a contradiction? No, although I can imagine that analytic aestheticians like Walton and Yanal would be worried about this kind of problem as well as by a view like mine that gives psychological and ontological weight to our first-person, in-the-world experiences. Such aestheticians are unwilling to countenance the possibility that at some level we truly believe in fictional beings. As far as the contradiction is concerned, however, it exists only if we assert that the self-same agent at the one time believes and disbelieves in fictional beings. This is not my position. It is, instead, that our dual vision suggests dual consciousness, thus two agents of awareness: one, agent1, is credulous and fully engaged; the other, agent2, trained as it is by “the others” to see the world as they see it, holds back, so to speak, and assesses our feelings and participations, comments on them, allows or disallows further engagements by consciousness1. To locate my position in a larger context, I believe this dual sort of cognition, well understood by Hegel, is something that occurs virtually all the time and, thus, not simply when we deal with absent figures (“real” or “fictional”), accounting for our being both aware and self-aware in our daily activities, in being at once utterly caught up in a particular situation that is more cautiously and suspiciously contemplative of it, expressing to itself (agent2)as well as to agent1 all sorts of concerns about what one is doing and experiencing, validating or invalidating such events according to intersubjectively sanctioned as well as personal criteria, and demanding how these events are to be woven into the fabric of our past and anticipated lives. We may think of dreams, as manifestations of conscious1 unbridled by conciousness2, for our belief in the extramental, existential claims that dreams make on us is normally unqualified. It is also worth remembering that young children often respond to fiction solely with consciousness1…
Page 63 – 64
My contention is that we never, in fact, lose consciousness1, although as adults we may (wrongly) shed the belief that it is, in fact, always present.
Thus, I believe that part of what one should mean by “art”, as opposed to craft, is that which “comments on”, interprets, if only by reaffirmation, the way in which, in our everydayness, we view a sector of that world.
What I mean by the phrase “our everyday world” is vague, to be sure. At this point I shall only assert that the referent or signified of the artwork is, according to consciousness1, an independent existent thing with its own essence or nature, we, therefore, should not regard it as just a concept or image merely in a persons’ mind, as the thought theorists maintain, but as being in its own right (e.g., a particular young woman wearing a silver earring out there).
I see the young woman (depicted by Vermeer, for example) as open, sensitive, kind, accepting, and caring; therefore, as gently seeking from me a stronger resolve to implement these virtues in my own life. Consciousness2 partially contradicts my experience and reminds me that I am only looking at a picture and that, therefore, she is “out there” only as a representation. The net effect, however, is not the sheer overruling of my first-person consciousness, for the sense or felt-meaning that I derive from the experience of the signified being continues to reverberate in my world. She endures for me as one who might now exist, might have existed, or could in the future exist, again, in my world. She is able to do this even if her possible realizations might – as they almost always would – manifest themselves in very different forms, thus with features that would no longer be recognizable as hers, as “she” could be a “he” or an animal, or even an inanimate object. For although it is the individuated cluster of features of that woman – not simply her wide open, brown, glistening eyes, or her orange-red parted lips, but these features and countless others related to each other in precisely the manner they exhibit – that has a special, affecting significance, yet some substantial part or all of what has moved or persists in moving me about her presence could be analogously, but not identically, reproduced in me by another, quite dissimilar, (again) individuated cluster of features in a different picture, art form, or even with a person with whom I have become acquainted.
Page 64 – 65
….the controversial contention that I am putting forth is that when properly immersed in the world of an artwork, we actually take it as we gaze at it, or the moral characterizations of Shakespeare’s lover, as we read his work, to be about something or someone real, not simply in its or the persons nature or essence, but also in their very existence, to the degree that we hold in check our third person mode of awareness, our consciousness2. I have also asserted, controversially, that even after consciousness2 insists on its existential judgment, we still permit ourselves to regard the depicted beings as real in the dual sense that they partially determine what we commit ourselves to as truly significant and at stake in our lives as well as shape the very “feel” or being of the other things with which we are directly involved – and not just what they are, but how they are and thus the degree to which it can be said that they are.
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THINGS IN OUR WORLD
How We View Things
The mind…so it seems according to this [Western] way of thinking, is a sort of central processing unit within a box that draw in its “booty” from the outside and then sorts through it in order, among other purposes, to ascertain what is “out there” and useful to know. The mind is, according to this slightly theorized but basically commonsensical position, an extraordinarily complicated “thing” that stands in many kinds of physical relationship to all of the other “things” of the world. In Heideggerian terminology, the subject or self is taken, according to this commonsense perspective, to be a thing that is “just there” in space and time, externally or contingently related to the rest of its world, which is also “just there” in space and time (of a greater magnitude).
Page 86
…the world of things that is revealed to us phenomenologically is one that in the first place makes sense because the very items with which we are involved, or in principle might deal with (from cabbages to kings, from microbes to galaxies), are in some way enmeshed in the web of our individual and collective purposes. What this suggests to Heidegger is that the self and the world are not two discrete things, but instead, at the deepest level, one relational being.
Page 88
…self and world always go together, thus not accidentally but essentially, which is to say that it makes no sense to think of a human being without a world.
Page 89
To express Heidegger’s and my own position broadly and in slightly different terms, human beings collectively and in their essence are the world in its essence (although not in its totality). The same may be said, mutatis mutandis, about us individually: each of us does not merely relate to, possess, or find him- or herself in a world; each of us in his or her essence is at the same time his or her own particular or specific worldhood or Significance, which is the totality of our meaning-possibilities on the basis of which we care about and conduct our lives. Or, more simply, from an individual and collective standpoint, our nature is being-in-the-world, where the proposition “in” should be regarded as an existential term, signifying “inhabiting” or “dwelling-with”.
Page 90
Things As More Than Just Things
….right at the outset of our Dasein, we regard the others as “like us” in sharing similar tasks or projects. The world of the others is thus a co-world enabled by our co-being. We meet them at work or in other social contexts. We have a specific kind of concern for them as special beings, a kind of relationship that is not in some way reducible to the sort of concern that we have for the things with which and the activities in which we are engaged, for people, as I have said, are “worlds”, and things are not. The others are responded to, directly or indirectly, actually or potentially, at one fundamental level as beings who care about their own being and who point the way, or show us how not, to advance our own fundamental projects. Heidegger calls this kind of concern for other solicitude (Füsorge ; literally, “caring for”).
….it follows that the others will always also be of concern to us with respect to the way in which they conduct their lives. Therefore, if my (neo-Heideggarian) view is correct, “they” (i.e., those who become beings of our attention) touch us not just once in a while and as figures in a passing adventure, but always, necessarily, and essentially. We are “co-“ as regards them, to summarize, not simply in that we need their help or wish to avoid their real or imagined threats, and not simply in that we periodically or even frequently feel sympathy for their concerns or oppose them, but also in that their basic endeavors are (as possibilities) our basic endeavors, that our question of who we are is ineluctably linked our question of who they are, that, in other words, our being is defined by their being (or what we take their being to be) – and vice versa.
Page 94 – 95
What I wish to suggest at this point is that the category of co-being is relevant to our understanding of how we relate to “things” (e.g., tables and chairs, rocks, clouds, etc.): in fact, that it should rightfully be regarded as another mode of our relatedness to them. I wish to assert, in short, that at an important level of awareness, we deal with things in the mode of co-being and, consequently, we apprehend them as quasi-people; they “speak to us in a manner analogous to the way in which “the real others” speak to us.
I well know that here, once again, I risk straining the readers credulity. He or she may not be fully averse to acknowledging Heidegger’s intriguing claim that for us a “world” of things (e.g. , an array of tools in a workshop) is not just a random distribution of isolated physical objects that we identify in a piecemeal manner, mentally collect, and then generalize upon as “a workshop”; instead, and in the first place, it is, according to Heidegger, a workshop with its own background. The separate tools are identifiable, he maintains, because a region of concern is first grasped, not just “the workshop” but a whole area of endeavor that is affectively linked with other areas of endeavor, which are in turn and finally grasped in relation to a broad, felt goal, an ultimate “for-the-sake-of-which”, the core of the domain of Significance that gives sense to all of our concerns and aspirations. It is quite a leap, however, to go beyond this Heideggarian phenomenological description of the manner in which we apprehend things for use to one that regards them at the same time as enveloped – and not just once in a while, but at some level always – by a very different kind of meaning, such that the things suddenly and seemingly inexplicably assume “personalities” that, like people with whom we are closely involved, express to us, directly or obliquely, the existential struggles of our individual lives.
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I provide this example (describing an apple) to invite you, the reader, to reconsider your own experience more honestly and completely, to ask yourself if it is not true that things themselves “speak to you”, not literally of course, but as objective incarnations of fundamental issues of your life.
Moreover, and as I am implying, such communications are, I think, best thought of as originating from and being unified by quasi-personalities and not simply by corpselike beings in whom we are able to later dispassionately dissect their “sinews”.
…it seems to me, things themselves stand opposed to us as intending, quasi-living beings, hence with personality like characteristics. The embodied issues do not appear to be just “out there” as mere markings inscribed on things, although here also consciousness2 may insist that that is all they are. On the contrary, they “proclaim” themselves as kindred to us and, therefore, they claim something from us. Perhaps only person like beings, alter-selves, could present the issues that they do and how they do, with such unified specificity, and with such astounding pertinence to, and at least apparent insight to, our lives.
Page 98 – 99
This person, for us, possesses “a mind”, a consciousness that is the ultimate source or unifying ground of all his actions or reactions. Now, of course, the apple that I described does not at all act as the (imagined) man did. But even if the man did “nothing” (e.g. , sat motionless on a park bench), we would still apprehend his personhood directly and not regard him as “a thing”. On the other hand, the apple is not only motionless, it also does not speak, and will, naturally, never robustly display the traits of a living, sensate being. Nevertheless, I wish to assert, in the mode of co-being, the apple, like the motionless man on a bench, without speech or gestures communicates something to me as if it were a personality (the sort that I narrated earlier). How do I understand the nature of this source of this kind of message from the apple? As, it seems to me, something transmitted from a being that would say what I interpret it to be saying, were it able to talk.
….I am appealing to what I believe to be the intimations of consciousness1, for it not only takes so-called fictional beings to be real; it also, if I am right, regards inanimate beings, in its so-called disposition, as intendingly able to communicate something to us, although naturally not through direct speech or gestures. In short, the apple I contemplate is simply there as a piece of fruit. In a certain frame of mind, however, I find that it literally shares its message with me. (For very young children, it is unproblematic for kettles to dispute with frying pans. For certain primitive peoples, trees are able to tell them something of consequence. For a participant in the psychological exercises of Gestalt therapy, there is ordinarily little difficulty in imagining oneself to be an inanimate object, such as a flower or a knife or a watch, that in fantasy becomes animate, animated, and able to give voice to the objects complex and significant message to oneself, a message that the person almost always could not have anticipated and that he or she typically finds complex and enlightening).
The point that I would more assuredly stand by is that we do have a kind of noninstrumental relatedness to things, and that in this kind of mode we do experience an embodiment of our own existential issues, even if they do not for us always coalesce into what may be literally called a unifying, intending consciousness.
Page 99 – 100
….we can say that from the first-person point of view, we are all literally or metaphorically animists.
Page 101
Each thing encountered then, I believe, mirrors some important value issue and, in a general form, all existential issues of our lives.
Moreover, the same object may speak to me in different ways on different occasions. At one period of my life, an old but intact of burnished water buffalo hide may offer me an ideal acceptance in looming old age; a broken wineglass may remind me of the pain and finality of certain personal mistakes. Experienced at a different time (and especially in a different context), the object may link with different preoccupations. I may still perceive the wallet as “gracious old age”, but now identify it with the sacrificed buffalo, and therefore feel the wallet to be demanding gratitude and humility. The shattered wineglass may define a pattern of light-refracting pieces that urge me to destroy what is unhealthy in a relationship and look for a different constellation of possibilities. And finally, the object will speak to me in opposite ways at the same time: it will reinforce at once both the consonances and dissonances that I feel. Thus, the attractive leather wallet speaks to me of a satisfying old age, but the very fact that I seek this confirmation in the wallet implies that I have been anxious in that period of my life and about my death. If I inhabit the wallet experience fully, I will discover this dissonance, perhaps in the leathers creases or in the darkest areas of its brownness.
Page 102-103
…although the objects of our perceived world can , for my initial expository purposes, be regarded as “personalities” who objectify our own psychological preoccupations, it is all too easy from a theoretical point of view to infer then that “Reality” is still rightfully to be viewed as a neutral world of physical objects and that the “personalities” that I perceive in things are psychic impositions or projections upon them. But while the imagined preoccupations in my examples are somewhat narrowly sketched, I in fact believe that out involvements with things simultaneously reflect for us all sorts of other domains or concern in our lives (thus, e.g., the social, the political, the economic, etc.) and that all of these adjacent regions have ties to, and are instantiations of, our fundamental stance or orientation, our complex care for our whole world.
Page 103
In sum, while on one level the things we deal with from moment to moment may be thought of as discrete, animated individuals who haunt our world in some form or another always “speak to us” and deliver specific messages, at another level of apprehension these things may be viewed as offering us larger constellation of feeling-meaning, indeed, the very ground or basis of the more particular figures on which we happen to be focused.
Therefore, if I am right, in each dealing with a thing we are confronted, in an extraordinarily condensed, consolidated, and peculiar form, with an entire re-presentation of our lives and (our) reality itself. The experienced thing is thus a microcosm….which – darkly, uncannily – reflects the current struggles of our being-in-the-world, and the Significance of our lives.
Page104
I believe, in sum, that the great dissonances of our lives shape, but do not fully determine, the nature of our co-being relatedness to things, and thus how we respond to such dissonances in our responsibility.
Page 104
Referring once again to the apple, I can say that my whole life and world is, in a way, contained in the experience of it, then what I apprehend in it in a co-being mode will not simply be of private, and psychological import, but of ontological import, that is, a manifestation of what I take to be the kinds of being of all the beings in my possible perview. Here I suggest that although Wittgenstein is correct in asserting that we would never really be able to give reports of our first-person experiences without first grasping how to express ourselves according to what “the others” have shown us, one’s own individual personal standpoint and world is, nevertheless and from a different epistemological angle, the very starting point, as it were “the given”, that enables us to comprehend and develop our third-person perspective.
Page 108
In sum, I do not know that a (any) thing in itself exists at all, I only believe that it does. I do not know, a fortiori, that the willow oak that I in a special way perceive really has at its core the purposive characteristics that I attribute to it, even if things in themselves (i.e., things apart from human cognition of them, and that particular thing in itself) do in fact exist; I can only believe that it does.
In this chapter I have attempted to show that ordinary “things” have much more meaning and value in our lives than we might usually acknowledge, that they always reflect, usually at a preconscious level, our deepest existential concerns and that these concerns informed by a certain stance of disponibilité may help us to contact not just our immediate selves (our preoccupations) all over again, but also in a sense, “the things themselves”.
In this new way of conceiving, we may, I believe, begin to understand the power and significance that artworks have for us, because their production and presentation to us for our appreciation presuppose and build upon the everyday quasi-personalities that are ingredient in the very substance of our lives.
Page 115
Why and How Others Matter
How We Are With Others
On this [“role-playing”] plane of engagement with the individual other, he or she is for us in varying degrees an “alternative self”, incarnating another way that we might be, that we feel that we perhaps should be, or on the other hand a way of being that we dislike, even hate, but which contains for us certain possibilities with which we have not fully come to terms….
They are (virtually) always, additionally, the issue (albeit, to use Freud’s term, “displaced”) for us, as living incarnations of existential roles that we might assume or reject, if only provisionally and temporarily. Moreover, the others are for us not simply sets of bare, abstract possibilities of what or who we could be like; nor are they simply beings whose traits we detachedly observe and then decide whether we would like to have (or not have) them, but instead they are the beings whom we feel we ourselves truly could “become”.
Page 128 – 129
The Paradox of Identification
So it would seem, on second thought, that counterfactual statements about ourselves, at least those made from the first person point of view, require our briefly being in imagination that which we subsequently posit as not really the case.
As I argued in the first chapter, this point applies to fictional characters, like Anna Karenina, as well, because when I relate to her, I don’t merely assimilate her problems to my own and thus simply draw her into my orbit; I identify with them and with her. Isn’t that true of you, the reader, as well?
Page 130
Let us return to the phenomenological data pertaining to selfhood. No doubt there is some truth in the Cartesian and commonsensical assumption that each of us is a kind of center or agent of consciousness that perceives and thinks, remembers and anticipates, experiences sensations and emotions, imagines, and so on. However, this “center of consciousness”, Hiedegger maintains, is only one part of the self, a part that is wrongly baptized as the self; with such a truncated view of the self we are thus unwittingly compelled to proceed on paths that necessarily terminate in philosophical cul-de-sacs.
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Each of the acquaintances just referred too, therefore, is not merely “an other out there” or “an interesting other”, or even “a person whom I admire and some of whose traits I wish I had”; but more than that, “a person who embodies a potential trajectory of my life, a way of being that could be my own”. According to this (my paradoxical) view, I am the other, for the other always in some measure re-presents a fundamental way of being that I could, even might, assume. I, therefore, see myself in him or her; he or she exhibits a mirror image of my latent self. Yet, as stated, it is also true to say that I am and take the other to be another in his or her own right, thus a person affected by his or her own Seinkönnen, and I am and take myself to be a person in my own right, with my own Seinkönnen, and hence not the other.
My claim is that we all posit the other as another in his or her own independent being and that at the same time on another level the other embodies a story or narrative for us that is not only familiar, but also our own. If Dasein’s essence is the “to be” or “could be” of ones life, and if the other is and is taken in part an objectification of one’s own potentialities, it follows that one’s own essence is defined by “the other”.
Page 133
….for me, to listen sympathetically to a friend’s sad, disturbing story about himself requires that I bracket not only my own preoccupations, but also those of my assumptions about life and the world that are tacitly contradicted by what he tells me. If I am to sym-pathize (suffer with him), I must in a way become him and, therefore, very-fy (make true) his way of seeing things and hence cast doubt upon certain features of my own general outlook, thereby – however subtly – undermining the “real me” I ordinarily take myself to be. To assert this plasticity in selfhood is not to deny or even minimize my capacity to say “no” to these role identifications at a later point and thus to reaffirm my central commitments.
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In both the previous chapter and this one, I have discussed what Heidegger labels our Seinkönnen. This feature of our being, it will be remembered, makes an indefeasible claim upon us to be different from and “better than” we currently are; it calls us to authentic and full being.
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….Friedrich Von Schiller advises, we must learn to see others in ourselves, not ourselves in others….We must, in short, appreciate and cultivate the problematic, suppressed otherness in ourselves and, thereby and reciprocally, the others themselves in their significant otherness.
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Allowing Fictional Beings Entry
The simple response to these issues is that because at one level we ordinarily take the figures to be real beings, we can be affected by them in virtually the same way that we can be by “real others”; that is, we can care about them tremendously, and we are able to do this in our imaginative involvement by leaping in for them (in any of the three ways described earlier) or by appropriately identifying with and thus allowing their entry into our lives.
Thus, as I read about Ahab, just as when I meet some new person, I gradually associate him with some type (i.e., role of my own) with which I am already familiar. I can be involved with him in two of the three modes of co-being manifested vis-à-vis the “real” others: I can leap in for him or I can allow him entry into my world.
Thus, I may view and become Ahab only in a tentative and unenthusiastic manner, feeling him to be a fearsome person, a serious threat to my whole orientation toward life and the world and, therefore, someone whom I must in the end keep at a distance and “control”, by not lingering in his world and, through consciousness2, making critical judgments about him (e.g., that he is obsessive-compulsive of megalomaniacal). Or I can imagine myself uninhibitedly and sustainedly being Ahab, thereby giving free reign to values and beliefs to which I am less firmly committed or even to which I am ordinarily opposed, hence allowing myself to dwell for a while in a sub world into which I would ordinarily not be willing to venture.
The “World” created by Adolf Wolfli could illustrate this point. Also, allowing ourselves to “become” such fictional beings as Steerpike, Swelter, Barquentine, Peter Crumb and the guy from “The Wasp Factory”. – This would allow for some really good quotes from oddball stories.
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Having provisionally become Ahab, I can have effected an important change, perhaps many changes, in myself. I am now, and do not just momentarily and abstractly believe that I am, let us imagine, a different person. Because of the story’s emotional and intellectual persuasiveness, because I experienced what it was like to be Ahab-in-his-world and that sustained experience could be seamlessly woven into and give support and colouration to the world in which I had partially believed, I have a new and greater appreciation for the tremendous determination in those who passionately and single-mindedly pursue some great goal.
Page 146
….human consciousness (the psyche), as Aristotle stated, has the capacity in a way to be all things.
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This kind of dual consciousness oscillation that I perform – from one of varying degrees of identification, to distancing, to re-identification, to distancing once again (but sometimes of a modified, assimilative sort) – is a close analogue of the kind of involvement that I have in varying degrees on a daily basis with the “real others”.
….I frequently meet the “purely fictional” challenge. I enter into, feel, and believe in the people of this world, often with greater emotional abandon than I do with respect to the people of the “real” world. If in this subworld I am shown a new and multidimensional manner in which to exist – a way that does not too seriously threaten my usual self-definition, my primary roles, and which is felt to be in greater accord both with the way the world “really is” as well as with the requirements of my Seinkönnen – then I may assume new commitments, projecting myself toward, seemingly unconsciously, different worldly goals and thus a modified being-in-the-world.
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Now it seems to me that when I deal with fictional beings, my mode of relatedness to them (ordinarily) differs in two important ways from my mode of relatedness to “real people” when they are present to me. ….
Page 148
….I cannot change the events of a fictional world and, correlatively, I cannot provoke any of its characters to deal with me personally.
At any point, we can arrest our exploration and distract ourselves with a thought such as, “Naturally this is not real” or “Hamlet 9the man playing him) seems to have a cold”. Seizing upon common-sensical, intersubjectivley sanctioned assumptions, we retreat, reassuring ourselves that the audience is the reality and that the actors provide us with entertainment and mere pretence. Interestingly, however, we do read and view the play again and again, because at some level we know that Hamlet’s story is not just pretence and that we do need to participate in it (in the world, really) more fully and bravely still. A work like Hamlet is thus both alluring and terrifying, for it presents a beautifully articulated but simplified domain that in alien guise contains for us questions and issues that we do not yet and do not wish to confront. We can explore them as much or as little as we like, knowing all the while that there is “more” for us to confront and that the work will patiently await our courageous reentry into it. “For beauty”, Rilke writes in the first of his Duino Elegies (and here I assume “beauty” can refer to a work like Hamlet, as well as to natural phenomena), “is the beginning of terror we’re just able to bear. And we revere it so because it serenely distains to destroy us.”
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My contention is that painting are at base about others – on the face of it, fictional others, but in an important and overlooked sense, “real” others – their stories, their concerns, are, whether we acknowledge them or not, our stories, our concerns.
Page 150
….I want to distinguish a third level of spectatorial consciousness….
I believe that art historians and aestheticians have given insufficient attention to the most interesting features of the first two levels of awareness….
Page 160
….I have argued throughout this book thus far and especially in Chapter 2, the beings of our world (e.g., a raven or a shuttered window) are felt by us to be more than what we are inclined to say they are – for example “just a raven” or “just a shuttered window”. They are these things of course, but they are also, I have argued, “personalities” or rather “person – worlds” that speak complexly to us.
In short, insofar as theoreticians of art, others too (including ourselves), fail to appreciate the true ground of symbolism, they (and we) are disposed to think about and discuss individual paintings remotely and in prosaic ways that almost never seem to be isomorphic with and explanatory of the great emotional interest exhibited by many people vis-à-vis paintings, often, of course, by the theoreticians themselves. Thus, if our heads do not properly understand our hearts, we risk responding to paintings with either removed pedantry or uninformed rhapsody.
Page 162
The problem with this account, once again, is that it presupposes an opposition between humans and their world, a subject-object dichotomy or “distantiation” that precludes their ever conceptually coming together again in the right way.
In Chapter 2 I recorded my co-being experience of an apple as well as of my wallet. I tried to show that when we contemplate a particular physical object, it speaks to us in ways that reflect our own current, worldly preoccupations.
Correlatively, the painting as a complex whole does not seem to reflect my individual, worldly preoccupations, but instead something public and perhaps at times something of even universal meaning. For, in the first place, paintings that move me appear to teach me something; I feel stirred and, broadly speaking, enlightened after dwelling with a particularly striking work. Usually, I do not feel this way after staring at an object in the physical world, although, to be sure, I will have noticed some new features in it.
Page 164
Thus, although objects on one level contain personal co-being meanings for all of us in our every day affairs – for they are only contingently, unessentially, related to their environment, speaking to us as “quasi-personalities” reflective of our individual, existential concerns – paintings seem to signify something of public, therefore shared, consequence, although, like physical objects experienced in the mode of co-being, and a fortiori, of existential significance.
….we need to know how we should phenomenologically describe this pretheoretical kind of a response to painting. What takes place when we “just look at” a work and attempt to feel its power and significance?
Wollheim contends that when we stand before a painting, our awareness is almost always “two-fold, [involving] two aspects of a single experience”: we know that we are viewing a picture with a flat surface, and we also and simultaneously see a depicted “world”. This “world” may be abstract and, therefore, need not necessarily contain “representations”, such as flowers or trees.
….if…we somehow could focus exclusively on the subject matter of the painting, as might be possible in a drug-induced state or one of insanity, then we would regard the pictures subject matter as “totally real” (i.e., continuous in its depiction with the everyday world).
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The “first spectator” stands in the gallery; the “second spectator” creates a “virtual reality” and participates not in the gallery, but in the rendered scene of the picture. The second spectator (“in the picture”) allows him- or herself to be drawn into the depicted material; one “sees in” the marks on the canvas something familiar (e.g., the face of a boy or a tree) and thus one feels a special kind of demand being made on oneself.
[Wollheim] continues, “The marked surface must be the conduit along which the mental state of the artist makes itself felt within the mind of the spectator if the result is to be that the spectator grasps the meaning of the picture”. Thus, one mind (the artists) communicates with another mind (the viewers) via the marks on the surface. Or does it? What exactly is “in” the viewers mind? Does it really find a way to go out of itself to arrive at the intentions of the artists mind?
When I see a tree, I apprehend it, but when I project an image or a meaning, I do not see it. I cast something outside of myself and then apprehend it as though it were truly “out there”, when actually I am cognizing something that originates in me.
Despite my criticisms of other aspects of his thought, it should be clear that I see much of value in Wollheim’s theory of twofoldness and his corresponding psychological theory of dual and simultaneous orientation.
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Inhabiting a depicted subworld
We, as viewers of the photograph are steeped in a situation that is taking place; we are currently looking at an event that we know was and yet at the same time is before us.
We are, with the aid of the picture before us, imaginarily involved in a real world, one that we would have directly perceived had we stood in the place of the photographer years ago.
It is for us an image that is a reality to which we are transported and that we then contemplate, just as we might, from afar, decide to participate imaginarily, in a sense intimately, in the life of a cityscape viewed from the window of an airplane flying at 10,000 feet.
Page 171
As I have already indicated, precisely what is permitted by consciousness 2 to persist as “real” is both a matter of degree and a reflection of the psychological and worldly health and wisdom of the individual.
Let us return to Vermeer’s “Woman Holding a Balance”…..I think it…useful to label the world of “Woman Holding a Balance”, and virtually any world that is depicted in a (Western) painting (or in any other kinds of fictional medium, for that matter), incommercible as well. For although that subworld affects us, “speaks to us”, we know that the woman herself does not and never will change at all.
At the same time, we do take that subworld to be in our world as a possible event. The depicted scene, I argued earlier, is one that we believe might have existed, might now exist, or could in the future exist – if not as actually represented, then in a form conveying a meaning analogous to that contained in my viewing experience.
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The inhabited subworld of the painting, related to and intertwining with our concern, thus becomes real to us as well, for the same reasons and to the same degree that the initial concern does. Because of this important relational and ontological feature of the subworld of a painting to our world, it seems additionally appropriate to characterize the subworld in the moment of experiencing it as an incommercible existential event.
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Being With The Woman Holding A Balance
We look at the picture of the woman holding a balance and rather than immediately regarding it as, say, a lovely visual object or a famous work of a Dutch Master, or an objectified male fantasy, we enter into its world, visually and quasi-corporeally, and with our imagination and uninhibited emotions, gradually allowing its content and implied issues to be blended with those of our own world, just as we might do when we listen to a family member’s or dear friend’s complex personal problems. We feel the woman’s presence, about which we have a privileged, but not altogether exact, grasp.
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The scene now commands our admiration of and identification with the woman. For a moment, it could even be said that we in a sense become that woman insofar as she expresses our own wishes – in the face of necessity, trouble, and death, as well as before transcendent, encouraging possibility – for the tender embryonic person who is in us right now, for the careful and meticulous measures that we must daily take in order to give birth to and properly nourish a child within ourselves, our own goodness.
Page 178
What I am urging is that we at first view this world that Vermeer shows us as we might an accessible, gripping film. For in experiencing such a film, there is much that happens that we do not interpret but instead directly perceive. If, for example, in a mystery movie we watch one man stab another, we don’t say to ourselves, “that action by Gary with that knife and the subsequent bleeding of Jake implies that a stabbing has taken place”. No, we see the stabbing and know without interpretation that Gary intended to hurt or kill Jake.
Thus, my recommendation in viewing “Woman Holding a Balance” is that in the first encounter we participate fully – emotionally and bodily – in the reality before us, insofar as this is possible, a reality that could be regarded as an analogue of meeting openly and with a “thou” disposition an interesting and friendly person for the first time. Or perhaps a better comparison is the recollecting and exploring of one’s own dream, which, as Freud asserted, upon initial conscious reflection almost always appears strange and of not much consequence, but which implicitly contains many levels of psychological significance. So the viewed painting is to become, I suggest, a special kind of dream, not simply Vermeer’s own, but one’s own. Appropriately inhabited, the different features of the woman’s world become our world.
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An antiwar painting by George Grosz or Otto Dix is strongly political and social in its message, to be sure; yet, for the reception of it to make more than abstract polemical sense, the spectator must also associate it with previous experienced horrible people who, by virtue of their horribleness, have thrown into at least partial question the meaning and direction of his or her own life.
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Personal Verses Public Meaning
How, in short, do I reconcile my narrative of the painting’s significance, involving as it does an explicit, publicly recognizable, everyday naming of things, with the position on the co-being dimension of them that I put forth in chapter 2, asserting that for each of us objects have quite personal, idiosyncratic meanings, reflective of our own existential preoccupations, thus meanings not shared by “the others”?
Page 183
I agree with Wittgenstein that only if two people have had similar training in many of the often tacit aesthetic rules of a culture will they have an opportunity for significant agreement with each other about the perceptual value of the work….We can easily see a situation in which two similarly trained connoisseurs of painting perceived the same work differently and irreconcilably so. So why does this happen?
(b) The answer, I believe, is that one connoisseur has existential concerns that importantly differ from those of the other, and because of this these viewers sees the painting and the issues posed by it differently and, therefore, literally lives in a (somewhat) different world.
189
Our differences in response to a painting may, therefore, be conceived not so much as barriers that separate us from each other, but instead as doors that could be opened, if responded to properly and under the right circumstances, enabling us to become closer to each other, with complete agreement being only, as I have said, an asymptotic goal.
Page 190
Sensuous Matters
So the depicted subworld of the painting is at first, by virtue of our own stance and commitments, a kind of opponent to us. Later, we may gradually allow ourselves to submit, perhaps even surrender, to the claims of the subworld, just as we do, over a longer period of time, of course, when we meet a new person who becomes an extremely good friend. But our submitting to – if only temporarily – may require, I have asserted, great effort from us, for many parts of the work may contradict beliefs that we hold dear.
Page 191
…to appreciate the work fully (Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”), we need to do more than simply suspend our disbelief; we must instead make his vision absolutely true – that is, veri-fy it. We do this by (quite unconsciously) finding in our world precisely those usually suppressed feelings and dispositions expressed by Bosch’s work. For at least a little while, then, we can be dominated by his way of seeing the world (in all of its details) and be at one with his vision.
We assume this new identity because the painting represents a defining of Significance for our world that consciousness 1 regards as true and that consciousness 2 does not contradict but sanctions as “plausible”, albeit on a less literal level than the one that Bosch apparently intended, for most of us have known the psychological hell of our own moral errors. We feel that his vision, even if not literally correct and absolute, has some important place in our whole worldly orientation, and therefore has, with our determined assistance, the power to enlarge and clarify our own vision.
Concretely, however, and as is so with newly met people or with objects in the everyday world, certain works are much more likely to attract or provoke us because they have at least the appearance of alluding to concerns central to our lives.
Page 192
The artwork becomes an occasion and stimulus to better attend to, redefine, and give a different weight to certain of our feelings and existential concerns. After viewing the Vermeer painting, after initially taking in the scene as a whole, then dwelling with its parts – which both oppose and yet confirm one another, for each has a different “voice” and at the same time each contributes to the larger themes of the painting – and finally revisiting the whole once again, we allow ourselves to participate in a Vermeerian reality. We may thereby achieve a small but important advance. We may henceforth, as Proust pointed out, perceive certain everyday objects, people, or scenes differently, for example, in a Vermeerian manner. For what we open ourselves up to is not simply abstract meanings (as in the “ideas” that we might gain by reading, say, a text in psychology or ethics) but, again, feeling-meanings that collectively constitute more than a “story”, thus a living actuality that is incorporated into our lives.
Page 194
….as I have stated, these latter immersions in depicted subworlds are the living objectification of modes of our very being: a currently and fully experienced Vermeer painting becomes for me an important aspect of the way I feel the world right now, and it is an important dimension of who I am right now.
…the full meaning of the experience (insignificant though it may at first appear) is linked to all sorts of other concerns ultimately tied to the way in which I am orientated to existence itself.
Page 196
Now the experience of (a) an enormously intricate, yet somehow (intuited to be) correct, cognitive and emotional synthesis that we undergo while standing before a masterpiece and – assuming the correctness of my overall position – (b) the close relatedness of our aesthetic visually apprehensions to those of our ordinary, everyday lives, involving the sense of actuality and indefeasibility in the apprehensions, account for the power and significance that certain paintings have over us, I believe, for both kinds of involvement are based in and sustained by the felt claim that the fundamental meaning of our everyday lives is the core and “ever-mine” concern for each of us.
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