Having sketched the concept of artistic meaning, I turn to the consideration of the human capabilities and capacities whose exercise makes artistic meaning possible, and further which are mobilized in the seemingly automatic, everyday creation of artistic meaning in making and perception. Or so I shall argue. As stated at the end of my previous post, I’ll treat the basic sources of artistic meaningfulness through consideration of human embodiment, gesture, pointing, technics, and language. Each of these topics merits at the very least book-length consideration, but in the interest of finishing this book in my lifetime I’ll give highly schematic accounts of each of these, and always with an eye to how they are mobilized and employed in artistic meaningfulness.
I’ll also try to bring out the distinctiveness of my account by regularly contrasting it with what I take to be two deeply entrenched ways of approaching the relevant issues. One way, and which I have already briefly discussed, is accounts that begin with the alleged distinction between form and content. The great originator of all such accounts surely is Aristotle, who in the first books of his Physics considers the problem of the intelligibility of change, and introduces the so-called doctrine of the four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final), and who goes on in many treatises to apply, develop, and adapt this type of account to a great range of phenomena in nature and human life. The basic distinction underlying the four causes is between form (morphe) and matter (hyle), and so in technical or scholarly philosophy this range of accounts is referred to as ‘hylomorphic’. The tendency in the twentieth-century to approach the arts through the form/content (or sound/sense, manner/topic, how/what, etc.) distinction is a late flowering of hylomorphism. The second manner of considering the arts that I’ll contest is harder to place, perhaps because of its omnipresence: I’ll call it ‘presentism’, by which I mean the tendency to treat artistic meaning as something that is given all at once—or not given--to anyone who happens to encounter and perceive the artwork. Presentism ignores and shields from consideration two basic features of artistic meaning. One feature is indicated in Richard Wollheim’s formulation that artistic meaning is perceived by a ‘suitably attuned’ viewer. Presentism ignores the conditions of suitable attunement, and so diminishes the role of tradition, dismisses training and apprenticeship, and is blind to sociological and anthropological dimensions of participation and audience. Secondly, presentism imagines that artistic meaning is all there at every moment, and so misses the frequent difficult and temporally extended ways in which artistic meaning is revealed and grasped. Above all, it misses a fundamental point that I first mention here: that artistic meaning is non-finite, in the sense that no one is ever in a position to give a definitive and exhaustive account of the artistic meaning of an artwork. (I shall argue for this claim later)
I turn now to what I’ll call the first great reservoir of artistic meaningfulness, the human body. Extended philosophical reflection upon the human body as something other and more than a hindrance to intellectual and spiritual advancement begins with Aristotle’s late and great treatise De Anima (On the Soul). Along with a hylomorphic conceptualization of the relation between soul and body (412a19-20: “the soul is a substance as the form of a natural body”), Aristotle considers the characteristics of perception for each of the five (traditionally considered) senses, as well as the character of the perception of objects by more than one sense. (I’ll return to these latter two topics) Most of what I’ve read in the past half-century on human embodiment is in, or explicitly indebted to, the discussion of the embodied character of perception, movement, and self-awareness in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception; although in recent decades there seems to have a shift in interest to a discussion that Merleau-Ponty must have drawn upon, that is, the account of the body in Edmund Husserl’s manuscript Ideas II. Husserl opens with the statement that “The Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception”, and further is “the bearer of the zero point of orientation, the bearer of the here and now . . . each thing that appears has eo ipso an orienting relation to the Body” (p. 61) Husserl notes a two-fold aspect of the body, as so-to-speak a thing among things, but also as something that is mine as the localization of my perceptions and sensations. So as mine, it also admits of further conceptualization in terms of my perceptions: Husserl speaks of a ‘tactual Body’ and a ‘visual Body’ (pp. 158-9). And as the zero point of orientation, it is involved in all lived spatial distinctions (near/far; above/below; right/left) (p. 166).
Independently of Husserl, the poet Paul Valéry proposed that each of us has four bodies, or, perhaps more carefully put, four fundamental conceptualizations of the body: (i) “the privileged object of which, at each instant, we find ourselves in possession (Valéry, p. 35) [so something like Husserl’s second sense]; (ii) “the one which others see, and an approximation of which confronts us in the mirror or in portraits” (p. 37) (something like the concept of ‘body-image’, which I’ll briefly consider in the next post); (iii) the body considered as a physico-chemical mechanism (p. 38); (iv) a conceptual construction, which could equally be called ‘the real body’ or ‘the imaginary body’, something upon which Valéry charges with solving all the dilemmas arising from reflecting upon the first three bodies: the origin of life, the nature of death, whether we’re free, etc. (pp. 39-40).
In the most recent major statement known to me, the philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin proposed a four-fold distinction of the body, but more specifically of the body considered in relation to its environment. Gendlin asserts that the body and its environment are in some sense one (p. 4),and suggests conceptualizations of the body that focus upon its environment. First, if the environment is considered from the point of view of a spectator, the body is something that ‘interacts’ with its environment. Then if environmental processes are highlighted, the body and its environment are just functions of each other: the foot strikes the ground which resists the strike; the process of breathing is ”air-coming-into-lungs-and-blood-cells”. Thirdly, there is the environment considered as the accumulation of instances of the body-environmental processes of the second sense, and correlatively the body considered as “the result of the life process”. Finally, there is the body-environment life process considered together with its non-actual others, its possibilities and impossibilities. There is everything that never happened and “the seemingly infinite richness of the unborn, something [that] may happen which has not yet” (Gendlin, pp. 4-7).
Which of these conceptualizations of the body are relevant to our question of the resources for artistic meaningfulness? In my next post I’ll present and develop the suggestion that it will be not just the body-image as part of the material for artistic depiction, but more fundamentally of a mechanism of projection that is usually referred to as the ‘body-schema’.
References:
Aristotle, De Anima/On the Soul (mid-4th-century B.C.E.)
Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005)
Eugene Gendlin, A Process Model (2017)
Edmund Husserl, Ideas II (1912-28)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Paul Valéry, ‘Some Simple Reflections on the Body’ in Aesthetics (1964)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)