Lecture 1: The World of Perception and the World of Science
I shall suggest that much time and effort , as well as culture, have been needed in order to lay this world bare and that one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy (that is, the art and philosophy of the last fifty to seventy years) has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget.
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The real world is not this world of light and colour; it is not the fleshy spectacle which passes before my eyes. It consists, rather, of the waves and particles which science tells us lie behind the sensory illusions.
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Science subjects the data of our experience to a form of analysis that we can never expect will be completed since there are no intrinsic limits to the process of observation: we could always envisage that it might be more thorough or more exact than it is at any given moment.
The data of perception and, more generally, the events which compromise the history of the world, cannot be deduced from certain number of laws which supposedly make up the changing face of the universe.
The physics of relativity confirms that the absolute and final objectivity is a mere dream by showing how each particular observation is strictly linked to the location of the observer and cannot be abstracted from this particular situation; it also rejects the notion of the absolute observer. We can no longer flatter ourselves with the idea that, in science, the exercise of a pure and unsituated intellect can allow us to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it. This does not make the need for scientific research any less pressing; in fact, the only thing under attack is the dogmatism of a science that thinks itself capable of absolute and complete knowledge. We are simply doing justice to each of the variety of elements in human experience and, in particular, to sensory perception.
While science and the philosophy of science have, as we have seen, been preparing the ground for an exploration of the world as we perceive it, painting, poetry, and philosophy have forged ahead boldly by presenting us with a very new and characteristically contemporary vision of objects, space, animals, and even human beings seen from the outside, just as they appear in our perceptual field.
Pages 44-45
Lecture 2: Exploring the World of Perception: Space
….modern thinkers seek to render obscure even the simplest of ideas and to revise classical concepts in the light of our experience. Today I would like to consider, as an example of this approach, an idea which seems at first sight to be the clearest of all: the concept of space.
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Everything changes if, with the advent of so-called non-Euclidean geometry, we come to think of space itself as curved and use this to explain how things can change simply by being moved. Thus space is composed of a variety of different regions and dimensions, which can no longer be thought of as interchangeable and which effect certain changes in the bodies which move around within them. Instead of a world in which the distinction between identity and change is clearly defined, with each being attributed to a different principle, we have a world in which objects cannot be considered to be entirely self-identical, one in which it seems as though form and content are mixed, the boundary between them blurred. Such a world lacks the rigid framework once provided by the uniform space of Euclid. We can no longer draw an absolute distinction between space and the things which occupy it, nor indeed between the pure idea of space and the concrete spectacle it presents to our senses.
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It is intriguing that the findings of modern science should coincide with those of modern painting.
Hockney also mentions this (Weschler, 2008)
Classical doctrine distinguishes between outline and colour. Cézanne, by contrast, remarked that ‘as soon as you paint you draw’, by which he meant that neither in the world as we perceive it nor in the picture which is an expression of that world can we distinguish absolutely between, on the one hand, the outline or shape of an object and, on the other, the point where colours end or fade, that play of colour which must necessarily encompass all that there is: the object’s shape, its particular colour, its physiognomy and its relation to neighbouring objects.
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According to classical doctrine, painting is based on perspective. This means that when a painter is confronted by, for example, a landscape, he chooses to depict on his canvas an entirely conventional representation of what he sees. He sees the tree near by, then he directs his gaze further into the distance, to the road, before finally looking to the horizon; the apparent dimensions of the other objects change each time he stares at a different point. On the canvas, he arranges things such that what he represents is no more than a compromise between these various different visual impressions: he strives to find a common denominator to all these perceptions by rendering each object not with the size, colours and aspect it presents when the painter fixes it in his gaze but rather with the conventional size and aspect that it would present in a gaze directed at a particular vanishing point on the horizon, a point in relation to which the landscape is then arranged along lines from the painter to the horizon.
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But it is not how the world appears when we encounter it in perception.
It is only by interrupting the normal process of seeing that the painter succeeds in mastering this series of visual impressions and extracting a single, unchanging, landscape from them: he will often close one eye and measure the apparent size of a particular detail with his pencil, thereby altering it. By subjecting all such details to this analytical vision, he fashions on the canvas a representation of the landscape which does not correspond to any of the free visual impressions.
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If many painters since Cézanne have refused to follow the law of geometrical perspective, this is because they have sought to recapture and reproduce before our very eyes the birth of the landscape. They have been reluctant to settle for an analytical overview and have striven to recapture the feel of perceptual experience itself. Thus different areas of their paintings are seen from different points of view. The last viewers will see ‘errors of perspective’ here, while those who look closely will get the feel of a world in which no two objects are seen simultaneously, a world in which regions of space are separated by the time it takes to move our gaze from one to another, a world in which being is not a given but emerges over time.
As Jean Paulhan remarked recently, the space of modern painting is ‘space which the heart feels’, space in which we too are located, space which is close to us and with which we are organically connected. Paulhan added:
It may well be that in an age devoted to technical measurement and, as it were, consumed by quantity, the cubist is quietly celebrating – in a space attuned more to the heart than the intellect – the marriage and reconciliation of man with the world.
In the footsteps of science and painting, philosophy and, above all, psychology seem to have woken up to the fact that our relationship to space is not that of a pure disembodied subject to a distant object but rather that of a being which dwells in space relating to its natural habitat.
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Thus what Malebranche attributed to the activity of a pure intellect, psychologists’ of this school put down to a natural property of our perceptual field, that of embodied beings who are forced to move upon the surface of the earth. In psychology as in geometry, the notion of a single unified space entirely open to a disembodied intellect has been replaced by the idea of a space which consists of different regions and has certain privileged directions; these are closely related to our distinctive bodily features and our situation as beings thrown into the world. Here, for the first time, we come across the idea that rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things. We shall see in the next lecture that this is not only true of space but, more generally, of all external objects: we can only gain access to them through our body. Clothed in human qualities, they too are a combination of mind and body.
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