Having completed my blogging excursion to the artistic conceptions of nature on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains, I return to the first draft of my book on the philosophy of artistic meaning in the visual arts. I have completed my initial survey of the great resources of such artistic meaningfulness that are species-wide: embodiment, metaphoricity, gesture, language, and visual perception. Initially I had proposed a conception of artistic meaning, one inspired in particular by the writings of the philosophers Michael Podro and Patrick Maynard, wherein artistic meaning (a term that plays no substantive role for either philosopher) arises from the project of ‘sustaining recognition’, so the resources identified are meant to be understood in terms of their possible roles in sustaining recognition. I have indicated two major mechanisms of artistic meaning wherewith such resources are mobilized: projection and evocation (the former discussed at much greater length than the latter). Finally, I stated, at least half-seriously, a quasi-principle guiding the analysis of artistic meaning: All Restriction is (potentially) an Expansion. So now I turn to the task of the second major part of the book, which is introducing and explicating through demonstration kinds of resources of artistic meaningfulness that are more specific to the visual arts, which on my account will involve a heterogeneous range of elements, especially those involved in representation, expression, materiality, ornamentation, and masking.
As indicated at the conclusion of my last post of the first draft, my account of the more specific resources will be largely adopted from the one given by the art historian David Summers in his book Real Spaces. Before turning to that account, I’d like to offer a bit more on what our philosophical understanding of artistic meaning should include. To this end I shall consider in a brief and summary way some basic considerations for the analysis of meaning generally that have been prominently offered in philosophy in the past three-quarters of a century. If there is anything approaching consensus on this matter, it would be the statement that the term ‘meaning’ means many things. One crude way of approaching this range would be to divide it roughly into two major orientations. On one orientation the term ‘meaning’ has its focal sense in the phrase ‘the meaning of life’, and in related conceptions such as ‘a meaningful (or meaningless) practice’; in the other its focal sense is in ‘meaning in language’ or linguistic meaning. Again in a very rough way with a great many exceptions, the former orientation tends to occur more among so-called Continental philosophers, the latter in Analytic philosophers. For the past forty years one of my rules of thumb in my own philosophical attempts has been to try to maintain something of the existential seriousness of the Continentals combined with something of the concern for intelligibility and ‘precision’ (always for me a context-specific and non-binding conception) of the Analytics. How might this rule guide the investigation of artistic meaning?
Consider some of the most prominent investigations of ‘meaning’ from the Continentals. Mark Johnson suggests a minimal conception of ‘meaning’ as relatedness: “Human meaning concerns the character and significance of a person’s interactions with their environments. The meaning of a specific aspect or dimension of some ongoing experience is that aspect’s connections to other parts of past, present, or future (possible) experiences. Meaning is relational. It is about how one thing relates to or connects with other things.” (Johnson (2007), p. 10; for his explicit rejection of meaning as primarily linguistic, see his (2018), p. 51) Johnson goes on to explicate meaningfulness in the manner I have already summarized in the sections on embodiment and projection. Susan Wolf (an honorary Continental for our purposes) in her book on meaning in life writes that meaning “is commonly associated with a kind of depth” (Wolf, p. 7); that it arises from loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way” ( p. 8); and that it “involves subjective and objective elements, suitably and inextricably linked” (p.9). Johnson and Wolf go on unsurprisingly to explicate the concept of meaning in differing ways in light of their different concerns, but we can retain their marks of the concept of meaning of (a) something related to depth of understanding of the context of phenomena, insofar as the phenomena elicit and sustain interest, attachment, and/or involvement.
The Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi offers a maximal conception of meaning. Polanyi was concerned to analyze meaning in terms of his basic analysis of attention in terms of a ‘from-to’ structure, wherein something is focally attended ‘to’ via a backgrounding ‘from’ structure, frame, or element. On this account, meaning (in contrast to the bare linguistic conception of some linguistic sign ‘meaning’ (or standing for) some referent) is always a kind of holistic achievement wherein that which is attended to is also grasped as part of some non-focal context. As he writes in his master work Personal Knowledge: “The more clear-cut cases of meaning are those in which one thing (e.g. a word) means another thing (e.g. an object). In this case the corresponding wholes are perhaps not obvious, but we may legitimately follow Tolman in amalgamating sign and object into one whole. Other kinds of things, like a physiognomy, a tune or a pattern are manifestly wholes but this time their meaning is somewhat problematic, for though they are clearly not meaningless, they mean something only in themselves. The distinction between two kinds of awareness allows us readily to acknowledge these two kinds of wholes and two kinds of meaning. . . anything that functions effectively within an accredited context has a meaning in that context and . . . any such context will itself be appreciated as meaning. We may describe the kind of meaning which a context possess in itself as existential, to distinguish it especially from denotative or, more generally, representative meaning.” (Polanyi (1958), p. 58) The largest context for understanding the achievement of meaning is the basic human project of understanding oneself and the world and finding and/or making oneself at home in the world. As Polanyi put it in a generalizing mode characteristic of philosophical anthropology: “Man lives in the meanings he is able to discern. He extends himself into that which he finds coherent and is at home there. These meanings can be of many kinds of things.” (Polanyi and Prosch, p. 66) If nothing else, Polanyi’s philosophical anthropology provides a larger frame of intelligibility for the phenomenon of meaning that locates the concern for context, depth of understanding, and involvement with general human interests, needs, desires, and projects.
What of the Analytic tradition with regard to meaning? One might outline the Analytic concern by noting its major sources and influences. On a standard account this tradition arises in response to the logician Gottlob Frege’s late19th-century attempts to develop a new conception of logic suited to analyzing the foundations of arithmetic and geometry; a later part of this project a proposed analysis of thoughts as, first, expressed in language possessing a structure of function and argument, and then the beginning of an account of how aspects of linguistic expression in terms of the distinctions among reference (‘Bedeutung’, what is being referred to), sense (‘Sinn’, the manner in which the reference is presented), and force (the manner in which the thought is presented, in particular as asserted, entertained, or questioned). A crucial aspect is the so-called ‘context principle’ whereby the meaning of (logical and/or linguistic) parts is understood in terms of their contribution to the meaning of the whole thought or utterance. Frege’s writings were taken up Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and subjected to a great deal of criticism and re-formulation, contributions that in turn formed the basis of an efflorescence of Analytic philosophy of meaning most prominently in the writings of W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, Donald Davidson, and Gareth Evans, themselves stimulating countless further papers with criticisms and revised conceptions.
For our limited purposes I’ll sketch Michael Dummett’s account of meaning. Please keep in mind that this is an idealized re-construction that blithely ignores the lengthy arguments, re-formulations, qualifications, and nuances that Dummett gave in developing his account over a half-century. Put crudely, Dummett proceeds as follows: He starts from the thoughts that meaning is correlated with understanding (that is, when we understand something, we understand its meaning), that meaning is expressed in language, and that an account of meaning must be first of all an account of language and its meaning-bearing structures. He draws from two great sources: Frege’s conceptions (to which he devotes more than one thousand published pages), and the later Wittgenstein’s thought that ‘meaning is use’ (oddly, Dummett ignores the fact that Wittgenstein does not assert such a thought and such a claim, but rather says that if he were to propose something like a theory of linguistic meaning, it would be the slogan ‘meaning is use’; I can’t see that this nuance matters in the context of presenting Dummett’s own views). Dummett accepts the basic structure of Frege’s analyses (that is, the function-and-argument analysis of linguistic utterance, and the need in each case to make out the distinctions among reference, sense, and force) In light of Wittgenstein’s (alleged) claim, Dummett criticizes Frege for having neglected the conditions for recognizing and acknowledging the use of a linguistic utterance, and insists that these conditions crucially involve the question of the (possible or actual) truth or falsity of the utterance. So a further part of a theory of meaning is a theory of truth. Very crudely, then, one might say that Dummett’s paradigmatically Analytic account of meaning involves a theory of linguistic structure, a theory of the force of linguistic utterances, together with a truth-oriented theory of linguistic use.
The Continental and the Analytic traditions have for the most part in practice ignored each other. Among the rare instances of mutual regard, Dummett, for example, has sympathetically explicated Edmund Husserl’s account of meaning as intentionality, and shrugged that it seems to offer nothing comparable to the detail and precision of Frege’s account. On the Continental side (to which I adhere in orientation), A. W. Moore (another honorary member) has noted that with regard to metaphysical issues Dummett’s account is of a piece of the ‘linguacentrism’ that afflicts other Analytic figures (such as Carnap, Quine, and David Lewis) and so misses the more interesting and challenging questions of how we make sense, and whether and how we might need to invent new concepts and conceptual schemes in order to make sense of our making sense (see Moore, p. 366). Mark Johnson and the cognitive linguist George Lakoff have provided the most sustained and convincing critical rejection of the Analytic conception, noting (especially with regard to Quine) how that whole tradition contains enormous explanatory gaps relating to how formal analyses (such as Frege’s) relate to natural languages (Lakoff and Johnson, pp. 99-100) and generally presupposes a conception of disembodied minds and knowledge mysteriously related a fixed, mind-independent reality).
Despite endorsing Moore’s and Johnson’s and Lakoff’s criticisms, I wish to import something of the structure of Dummett’s account of (linguistic) meaning into my own account of artistic meaning, both in terms of the various elements that must be considered (structure, force, use, etc.) and specifically in adopting something like the context principle. For example, by keeping the context principle in mind we can perhaps give greater precision to Polanyi’s remarks about the relation between parts and wholes in meaning. In any case, with something like Dummett’s account energized with Analytic points, in the next I turn to the introduction and explication of the fundamental account of the elements of the visual (or spatial) arts given by David Summers.
References and Works Consulted:
Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973)
--‘Theory of Meaning (I)’, ‘Theory of Meaning (II)’, and ‘Truth and Meaning’, in The Seas of Language (1992)
--‘The Philosophical Significance of Gödel’s Theorem’ and ‘Can Analytical Philosophy be Systematic, and Ought it to Be?’, in Truth and Other Enigmas (1978)
--‘Meaning and Understanding’, in The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy (1981)
--‘Truth and Meaning’, in Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1994)
Gottlob Frege, The Frege Reader (1997)
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960)
--‘Meditations on a Hobby-Horse’(1950s), in Meditations on a Hobby-Horse
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007)
-- The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art (2018)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999)
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)
A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (2012)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958)
Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (1975)
Hilary Putnam, ‘How Not to Talk About Meaning’ and ‘The Meaning of ‘Meaning’’, in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language, and Reality (1975)
David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2012)