Currently I’m
into eminent historian Watson, Peter Watson’s The German Genius, a comprehensive 964-page repertoire of
scholarship that’s presented in such easy-to-understand prose - quite
impactful, informative and intriguing at once!
In especial, the
chapter titled, ‘New Light on the Structure of the Mind’, intrigued me much! Watson here puts forth his ruminations on the Kantian notion of ‘how the imagination forms images
in perception’!
And I quote –
Kant is saying that we do not have in our heads, as it
were, an image of the world “out there” instead we have an idea of how it
appears to us…
Kant’s underlying point was that our minds are “living,
actively operative organisms,” not passively receiving information from
without, through the senses and summed through experience; instead our minds
shape our perceptions according to their own laws…
In analogous fashion, for Kant the existence of God can
never be proved rationally. God is a notion, our notion, like space and time,
and that is all. “God is not a being outside me, but merely a thought within
me”.
Kant’s theory of art and genius became a rallying point
for the Romantic movement and its view that the aesthetic imagination is the
“begetter of the world and reality”.
says Watson, in
such ‘elementary’ fashion! ;-)
Something akin to
the Kantian take, Hawkes, Terence Hawkes too doth make, in his famous primer on Structuralism titled, Structuralism and Semiotics.
Says Hawkes –
In fact, every perceiver’s method of perceiving can be
shown to contain an inherent bias which affects what is perceived to a
significant degree. [Any observer is bound to create something of what he
observes]. In consequence, the true nature of things may be said to lie not in
things themselves, but in the relationships, which we construct, and then
perceive, between them.
Superimpose it on
Postcolonial studies, and you have again, almost a similar take!
McLeod, John
McLeod in his famed primer on Postcolonial Studies titled, Beginning Postcolonialism, says that, Colonialism suggests ‘certain
ways of seeing’, specific modes of understanding the world and one’s place in
it that assist in justifying the subservience of colonised peoples to the
(oft-assumed) ‘superior’, civilised order of the colonisers. These ways of
seeing, attitudes and values are at the root of the study of colonial
discourses’, says McLeod, John McLeod!
The French
philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, explicates on a similar theoretical premise
which he calls the ‘the primacy of perception’.
You may want to
compare Ponty’s primacy of perception with Brentano’s (Husserl’s guru) take on intentionality of consciousness!
Well, coming
back, these ‘musings on seeing’, have much in common with an equally amazing
2003-book on ‘Seeing’ titled, Ways of
Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition by Pierre Jacob and Marc
Jeannerod.
Say Pierre &
Marc,
Many of the things humans can see they can also think about.
Many of the things they can think about, however, they cannot see.
For example, they can think about, but they cannot see
at all, prime numbers. Nor can they see atoms, molecules and cells without the
aid of powerful instruments.
Arguably, while atoms, molecules and cells are not visible
to the naked eye, unlike numbers, they are not invisible altogether: with
powerful microscopes, they become visible. Unlike numerals, however,
numbers—whether prime or not—are simply not to be seen at all.
Similarly, humans can entertain the thought, but they
cannot see, that many of the things they can think about they cannot see.
Museums are institutions purposefully designed to
promote the exercise of human sight and the enjoyment of visual experience.
If you visit the Louvre in Paris, for example, you can
see a famous painting by the late eighteenth-century French painter, Jean
Siméon Chardin, called Le gobelet d’argent (‘The silver goblet’).
Facing this picture, you will see three red and yellow
apples, a silvery beaker, a large brown dish with a silver spoon in it and two
brown chestnuts lying on a brown table.
Of course, what you call ‘brown’ in English is not one
but many different color shades: although you call them ‘brown’, your visual
experiences of the colors of the table, the dish and the chestnuts are all
different.
Nor do you see the full spoon: you merely see a tip of
the handle emerging from the dish, but you do take it that what you see is the
handle of a spoon the rest of which is being hidden by the dish in which it is
resting. The central apple partly occludes the other two.
The apple on the right partly occludes the brown dish.
As the light is coming from the top left corner of the canvas, it is reflected
in the silvery beaker and falling sideways onto the apples, the chestnuts and
the top of the spoon. The apples cast their shadows on the table.
So do the chestnuts. The dish casts a shadow on the
wall. If you look closely, you will discover incredibly subtle reflections of
the apples in the silvery beaker. You will also see a rich network of spatial
relationships between the objects: the silvery beaker stands to the left and
slightly behind the apples.
The large brown dish with a spoon in it stands to the
right of the beaker and behind the apples. The chestnuts are to the right of
everything else. Everything lies on the table.
These fascinating issues arise on the assumption that
one is indeed perceiving a visual array consisting of nine objects with their
shapes, contours, orientations, textures, colors and intricate spatial
relationships.
But, of course, none of this is literally true. Your
visual system with the rest of your brain is playing a trick on you: there is
no apple, no chestnut, no silvery beaker, no brown dish, no spoon, no table, no
wall.
All there is, is a canvas with two-dimensional shapes
and patches of colors drawn on it. How on earth does one see three apples, two
chestnuts, a silvery beaker, a brown dish and a spoon when there are no such
things to be seen? Or are there after all?
This is the
puzzle of visual art, say Pierre
& Marc!
Lovely-o-lovelyyy
ain’t it? ;-)
image: museum-essays.getty.edu