In previous posts I have argued that uncovering the capacities and resources that condition the possibility of artistic meaning in the visual arts can proceed on analogy with Richard Wollheim’s similar attempt with regard to specifically artistic meaning in painting practiced as an art. Wollheim argued that the core of such meaningfulness arises in artistic painting through representation, expression, and pleasure, as experienced by suitably attuned viewers of paintings. Each element is conditioned by the exercise of a certain perceptual capacity: representation requires the capacity for seeing-in, that is, for seeing something in a marked surface; expression requires the capacity for expressive perception, that is, to experience bits of nature or artifacts as embodying some mood, emotion, or feeling; pleasure (Wollheim calls it ‘visual delight’ (Wollheim (1987), p. 98)) arises, so Wollheim tentatively suggests, in the viewer’s shifting perspectives, from depicted subject to real subject, from figure to medium, from full-scale to detail. I have suggested that the conditions of artistic meaning in the visual arts are found first of all in human embodiment itself. But in what sense?
Recall from Michael Podro’s account certain pervasive features of artistic meaning, its production and reception, that a basic mechanism of meaningfulness is an existential urgency to unify, especially to bring together in artifacts the semantic dimension, that is, what they’re about or their subject-matter, and their manner of presentation, which is first of all their material medium, and then broader elements such as orientation. And the motivation for the ceaseless operation of this mechanism is the archaic piece of human psychology that seeks to pursue similarity through difference. What does, or might, Aristotle with his hylomorphic account make of this?
Perhaps the shortest route to Aristotle’s views, real or constructed, would be through his remarks on a ‘common sense’, especially at the beginning of the third book of De Anima. As with so much in that great book, there are tremendous conceptual challenges to understanding Aristotle, both because of the inherent difficulty of the topic, but also because of the compressed and seemingly ambiguous of the discussion. On one major line of interpretation, Aristotle claims in De Anima that the human psyche contains, along with the five canonical senses, a higher-order perceptual power, that is, a ‘common sense’, that grasps the ‘common sensibles’ of motion, shape, size, and pretty much any aspects of sensibles that are not the distinctive objects of the five senses. A different and recently prominent line of interpretation (for substantively different versions, compare Gregoric and Gendlin) urges that Aristotle’s remarks about a common sense aim to show that there is no such thing, and that the cognitive powers of grasping the common sensibles must be in some way located within the five senses themselves. Regardless of the variety of interpretations, Aristotle does say in a difficult line (425a19-20) that the senses are ‘one’, which must mean in part that in standard cases of object-perception the senses have a unified focus; for example, I perceive an apple qua single object as and via its color, shape, hardness, and smell. But there is nothing in De Anima, nor even in The Poetics, that attempts to come to grips with the kind of unity, or rather, striving for unity, that Podro has pinpointed as fundamental to artistic meaning.
By contrast to Aristotle, the lines of reflection arising from Husserl’s account of embodiment do, I suggest, permit us to grasp the conditions and characteristic actions of artistic meaning at its most basic level. Here I follow a fundamental analysis from the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who surprisingly suggests that Husserl’s account can be seen as an expansion and development of Aristotle’s conception. She starts from two interpretive points: First, by appealing especially to Aristotle’s biological writings, she stresses that form and matter are not as it were two distinct ontological orders that are contingently brought together in any organism or its parts. Rather matter, at least at the level of human experience, is always adapted to the form that it embodies, and form inheres in only a certain range of matter. As Aristotle’s explanations are always ultimately teleological, one could put the point by noting that with the aim of keeping an organism sufficiently warm, not any matter will work, but only a range that includes fur and blubber. Second, Sheets-Johnstone argues that, despite the apparent anomaly of the sense of touch, Aristotle offers a unified account of the senses wherein in the operation of each sense there is something perceived, an organ of perception, and a medium of contact between the perceived and the sense-organ. Then she recurs to the fundamental point that Aristotle conceives of the action of perceiving in every case as an instance of motion (kinesis). So perception, like organic action itself, is always kinetic.
With this bold interpretation of movement as always a fundamental characteristic of animation itself, the stage is set for Husserl’s account of the animate body. Husserl’s characterizations of the body read as if elaborations of Sheets-Johnstone’s Aristotle, for example, “given with the localization of the kinesthetic series in the relevant moving member of the Body is the fact that in all perception and perceptual exhibition (experience) the Body is involved as freely moved sense organ, as freely moved totality of sense organs” (Husserl, p. 61 (all italicized in the original)). Sheets-Johnstone gives further determination to Husserl’s conception of the animate body by speaking it as the bearer of ‘tactile-kinetic invariants’. Let us consider these three terms in reverse order. The invariants are features of human embodiment that are possessed by all human beings and have not changed since the emergence of human beings as a distinct species. Appeal to such invariants gives Sheets-Johnstone a short route to solving one of the seemingly intractable problems in the philosophy of the visual arts, namely ‘Why and how do we find so much of the great art of the Paleolithic both intelligible and moving?’ Despite our pretty much total lack of knowledge of the language, customs, and beliefs of the reindeer hunters of southern France and northeastern Spain, their art remains powerful. Part of the explanation must be that they are fellow human beings, and so much share with us a great deal of the features of human embodiment and the central mechanisms of artistic meaning-making. The philosopher Samuel Todes gave a similar insistence with “our body as source of our experience is cross-culturally and trans-historically invariant in the sense that it has not evolved in historical time” (Todes, p. 263).
Sheets-Johnstone devotes hundreds of pages to arguing for the claim that the animate body is fundamentally kinetic, but the direction of her arguments should be reasonably clear from the brief indication above of her interpretation of Aristotle. By great contrast, she gives relatively little attention to the term ‘tactile’. I’m accordingly uncertain how much weight or importance to give to the term, and she even at times refers indifferently to ‘corporal-kinetic invariants’ or ‘bodily invariants’ (for example, at Sheets-Johnstone (2011), p. 333). In her most careful account, she distinguishes ‘corporeal uniformities’, such as having “two legs of a certain form, teeth of a certain kind, a tongue of a certain shape”, etc., from the invariants, which are founded upon such uniformities (Sheets-Johnstone (1990), p.368; alternatively, the invariants are characterized as ‘regularities’ (p. 369), and yet otherwise as ‘tactile-kinesthetic concepts’ (p. 380)). As I understand it, what is important here is not ‘tactile’ as opposed to ‘corporeal’, but rather something of the following line of thinking: human bodies must be grasped fundamentally as animate forms; animation is so to speak equiprimordial with movement (kinesis); basic (and fundamentally non-linguistic) concepts arise out of regular movements and actions (so the action of biting into something is part of the experiential foundation of the concept of hardness); and (I have not yet mentioned this point, which Sheets-Johnstone stresses) by analogical inferences based upon shared animate forms, we can securely make empirical generalizations across human life cross-culturally and trans-historically, and so attribute, say, our concept of hardness to the human beings of the Paleolithic. The term ‘tactile-kinetic invariants’ is a place-holder for the indeterminately large number of actions, concepts, and feelings that can be so inferred.
Regardless of one’s estimation of Sheets-Johnstone’s precise views, her account seemingly provides the basis upon which we can consider the contents and structure of the basic features of human embodiment that are recruited into artistic meaning. So the next key questions here are ‘What are these invariants?’ and ‘What roles do they play among the conditions for artistic meaning?’ In my next post I’ll present considerations for thinking that among the most important relevant corporeal bases of artistic meaning are are those given in the conceptual pair inside/outside, the senses of uprightness, frontality, and rhythm, and that the key mechanism is a kind of projection.
References and Sources Consulted:
Aristotle, De Anima (mid-4th century B.C.E.)
Eugene Gendlin, Line by Line Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Volumes 1 & 2 (2012)
-----A Process Model (2017)
Pavel Gregoric, Aristotle on the Common Sense (2007)
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy II (1913-28)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1999)
Ronald Polansky, Aristotle’s De Anima (2007)
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking (1990)
-----The Primacy of Movement (2011)
Christopher Shields, Aristotle: De Anima (2016)
Samuel Todes, ‘The Subject Body in Perception and Conception: A Brief Sketch”, Body and World (2001)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)