Seeing and Showing Arthur C. Danto The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 59, No. 1. (Winter, 2001), pp. 1-9. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28200124%2959%3A1%3C1%3ASAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism is currently published by The American Society for Aesthetics.
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Symposium:
The Historicity of the Eye
Arthur C. Danto Seeing and Showing The thesis that the eye itself is as historical as human knowledge itself-that there are to and changes in v i ~ u a l i e r c e ~ t i oindexed n possibly reflective of historical changes, and that there is a history of seeing entirely analogous to changes i n artistic production-attributes, in my view, a far greater plasticity to our optical system than the facts of perception seem to me to allow.' There is a weak form of the thesis that few would disallow, namely, that one often sees the world through certain works of art, as when Swann, in Proust's novel, finds himself able to fall in love with Odette de Crecy only when he sees that her face is the very face of Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, in a Sistine fresco by Botticelli; or when we see people spread out in such a way as to appear a tableau vivant of Seurat's Grande Jatte. But my sense is that philosophers who subscribe to the eye as historical have in mind the far deeper sense alluded to above, as when Marx Wartofsky sees "human vision itself as a cultural artifact shaped by our own historical change in practices (in this case of pictorial representation)."2 And, to leave no doubt that it is the strong sense that concerns him, Wartofsky advances the bold thesis that "ways of representing become ways of seeing, that canonical styles of representing the seen world change . . . and introduce transformations of vision. [So] the space of vision is itself a function of such changes in representational praxis."3 At a level higher than that of optical reality, there is no doubt that people see the same things differently at different cultural moments-the hot springs seen by devout medievals as evidence of hellfire are seen by
nineteenth-century entrepreneurs as thermal sanatoria waiting to be exploited-but a robust theory of the eye as historical would require that whatever accounts for these differences penetrates the optical system in such a way that the eye itself changes with history so that, at the level of ophthalmology, individuals see the world differently, or even, in the strongest version of the thesis, see different worlds. Since the main evidence for the thesis is drawn, certainly in Wartofsky's case but no less so in the many contemporary theorists who have argued one version of the thesis or another, from the considerable diversity of representational schemata in art works from one era or culture to another, I shall begin by discussing what this admitted diversity entails. I shall concentrate for the moment on systems of pictorial notation, in which the same thing-a horse, say-is differently represented by different schemata. To be pictorially competent in the use of such a system, one must be able to distinguish pictures of one kind of thing from pictures of another-horse-pictures, say, from hawk-pictures-and call them by their right names. Usually, the names appropriate to pictures are identical with the names appropriate to what they are pictures of: the term "horse" indifferently designates horses and horsepictures, which is why Magritte's celebrated Ceci n'est pas un pipe* (whose true title is Le trahison des images) is at once true and false. It would not only be pedantic to insist that it is only correct to say "horse picture" rather than "horse" when confronted by the former, as Tolstoi makes clear in his story "Das Fischbuch," which targets such pedantry as
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 591 Winter 2001
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism bad pedagogy. It would also conceal something important about pictorial perception itself, for it may be true that much the same neural pathways explain our ability to identify horses when we see them and pictures of horses when we see them. It has been demonstrated that someone growing up in a picture-free environment will, when at last presented with pictures, instantly identify them by the name used to identify whatever the pictures are of: "horse" picks out a class of pictures as well as a class of animals. The ability to recognize pictures in this way is a dividend of our ability to recognize things, perhaps through mechanisms that code for outlines. This ability, moreover, is universal in that it enables us to identify pictures from most known pictorial notations, however greatly they differ from another. However a pictograph of a horse may differ from a realistic picture of a horse, we know the former to be a horse because we know what the latter is. And we will unhesitatingly distinguish pictures of horses from pictures of hawks, in whatever notational system they co-occur. If we thought of language as a pictorial system, as Wittgenstein did, we would not have to learn it. There is an immediate perceptual connection between pictures and things, as there is only in rare instances between words and things. In any case, this ability to recognize pictures for what they are exemplifies what I term nonassociative learning, very much of a piece with recognizing another hawk when we have learned to identify hawks. Or vice versa: we teach children a basic vocabulary from "apple" to "zebra" by means of picture books, enabling them to recognize apples and zebras when they see them. It is important to distinguish between pictures used to denote what they resemble and pictures with extrapictorial meanings: in the hieroglyphic system, hawk pictures sometimes simply stand for hawks, but sometimes operate in a syllabarium, and carry the sound the word for hawk makes when pronounced, somewhat in the manner of a rebus. So one has to decide, in seeing a hawk-picture, which use it is intended to have. (Egyptians used a special stroke-a "pictorial stroken-to disambiguate logos with different functions, depending
upon whether the text is about hawks, or about something altogether different, the word for which might have the sound "hawk" makes as a morpheme, say, in a name like "Mohawk." It is like Frege's Urteilstreich, which transforms a sentence into a theorem.) Anyone who knows what hawks look like will be able to pick out the hawk logos, however stylized. But one would have to know spoken Egyptian to know the phonetic values of the (Egyptian) word for "hawk." The former, as I see it, involves what I term nonassociative learning. If we indeed recognize pictures of hawks in virtue of the same procedures through which we recognize hawks, then once we have learned to pick out hawks, we have nothing more we need learn in order to pick the hawk pictures out correctly. Learning that they are called "hawks" in English is associative: the ability to recognize hawks will not tell us what they are called. We have to learn the words for things, if not through ostension, then some other way. But learning the meaning of the word "hawk" will not teach you one single thing about the word for hawks in Russian, German, Norwegian, etc. We have to acquire each vocabulary through separate pieces of learning, whereas whatever explains our ability to recognize the hawk logo in one pictorial system will suffice to pick out hawk logos in any notational system. There is a certain constancy over the class of pictures at the same time as there is great elasticity. I suppose it could be argued that pictures are topological transforms of one another. All this comes, so to speak, with the neural territory. What does not come with the territory is understanding symbolic meanings, when their vehicle is a picture, as when, for example, the hawk picture is intended to be understood as Horus, the god of light, and the offspring of Isis and Osiris. Symbols really do have to be learned one at a time, like words. It is almost certainly true that at the level of symbolism, the eye might be said to connect with something that has an historical dimension. That hawk pictures may have different symbolic meanings in different times and places is incontestable: a hawk- picture from the time of Charlemagne would certainly not
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Danto, Seeing and Showing have reference to Horus, Isis, or Osiris, and one would have to master the system of meanings to find out what the picture means, perhaps in a text on falconry. But none of this has anything to do with the way the eye works, nor does it entail that the eye is in any sense historical. Thus we can imagine a pair of indiscernible pictures from different notational systems that mean quite different things, between which the eye of course cannot discriminate. We can all identify the pictures in terms of their congruity with what, as pictures, they resemble and denote. But this will carry us only to the level of shape recognition, which is in no interesting sense historical. To understand the meanings requires an archeology of how pictures were used to mean when not used simply to denote their resemblata. Let us imagine a Notational Museum, in which all known pictorial systems are exhibited-something like an Alphabet Museum, in which all known alphabets are displayed. The museum will show horses or hawks as drawn by Egyptians, by Chinese, by Hawaiians, by European romantics, by Minoans, etc. My claim is that nonassociative learning will enable us to identify the shapes that differ in whatever way one notional system differs from another. We cannot imagine, for example, that a circle with an x would in any sense be a horse-picture, though it could easily be a symbol, standing for but not resembling horses. But horse-pictures, as contrasted with horse-symbols, perforce look enough alike-and enough like horses in the real world-to enable us to disregard differences in proportion and linearity, and to pick out the horses every time. Pictorial competence indeed requires that we have this skill. The skill transcends the differences between notational systems, in much the same way that vision does. This almost certainly has something to do with the eye, as the organ of visual information. But it has nothing to do with the eye as historical. The notational systems can undoubtedly be placed in historical order. But the eye, in point of nonassociative learning, is entirely transhistorical-with this exception. A notional system may contain pictures of things that did not exist when some of the earlier systems were in effect.
3
Pictorial competence alone would not enable one of its original users to identify a picture of something that did not exist at the time-an automobile picture, say, in Minoan times, or a television set. But it would certainly enable a Minoan to recognize an automobile when he saw one, say, after having been frozen in what science-fiction writers used to refer to as suspended animation. It is part of the analysis of pictorial meaning, already appealed to, that pictures of x resemble their denotations, whatever Nelson Goodman may contend. But there are degrees and degrees of resemblance between pictures and their denotations, from the most schematic to the most realistic-from a schematized horse made into a weather vane by an unknown folk artist to horses as Gericault painted them, or as Paulus Potter would have painted them, viz., in the same manner in which he painted cattle or dogs. We may base on the existence of different notational systems a claim about the plasticity of the eye only if we think that pictures in every notational system were seen by users of those systems to be as realistic as the realistic pictures in our own. Then the pictures in every notational system would be like a window onto the world, as their users perceived it: that the actual landscape of China was populated by calligraphic horses galloping past dotted and blotted trees. The Chinese world would, in brief, look just like Chinese pictures of the world. It is a charming but essentially crazy thought. Except (mainly) for artifacts, the world as perceived by Chinese must have looked just the way it looks to us. Gombrich offers the example of the late Chinese artist, Chiang Yee, who painted, entirely in the Chinese manner he was master of, a picture of cows at Denventwater. "It brings home to the layman how much of what we call 'seeing' is conditioned by habits and expectations."4 I would say, rather, that habits and expectations condition how things are shown, rather than how they are seen: we expect Chinese painters to show things in ways we are habituated to identify as Chinese. Chiang Yee was among my closest friends, and I knew perfectly well how he saw things. He was a political exile, living in England, where he conceived the idea-he was some-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism thing of a showman-to paint scenes in Yorkshire as if they were motifs for classical Chinese painting, and that became, so to speak, his meal ticket. He knew people would be charmed by this displacement, and that he would be able to live by his brush, as indeed they did and he did, both as writer and as artist. He wrote books on many places, under the title The Silent Traveler, using the same style. But he was at home everywhere. To derive the thesis that the visual system is plastic is to treat all notational systems on a Renaissance model, the model, namely, of visual fidelity, where the aim is to produce pictures that, ideally, cannot be told visually from the things they depict. But this is conceptual imperialism. It is to suppose that pictures everywhere have the same purpose, and that everywhere a criterion of illusion is the measure of success. But this means, contrary to cultural testimony, that the Chinese, for example, believe their drawings of horses look like horses to the point of generating illusion. They know their pictures cannot be mistaken for reality, and that has never been their aim, which explains the nonindividual convention of portraits: the Chinese knew about exact resemblances, especially in the nineteenth century, when photographs entered their culture. But they disdained them, as having nothing to do with what they felt portraits should be. Maybe they sought to capture in gesture the spirit of their motifs. The eye cannot tell us whether it does that or not. The eye can only tell us whether it is a picture of a man or of a horse. That it can do this is easily made subject to scientific test: simply present a lot of notational systems to as many cultures as you choose, and see whether members of the culture cannot pick out by nonassociative learning which are the man-pictures and which are the horsepictures. Consider at this point the phenomenon of linear perspective, which as a pictorial device was invented by Brunelleschi, but as a mechanism of optical perception is genetically defined, as binocularity is. The artist Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) was sent to China as a Jesuit missionary in 1714. As an artist, he was a follower of Andrea Pozzo, whose great
ceiling at S. Ignazio exploits perspective as a science. It is reported that when Father Giuseppe called on the Emperor, a eunuch chattered in Chinese, which none of the Europeans understood. The eunuch said that all Europeans looked alike, so if any understand Chinese, they all must. But of course nothing of the sort could be true, whereas a parallel point about pictures would, with irrelevant qualifications, certainly be true. Castiglione pursued his artistic calling in China, including two illusionistic frescoes drawn in scientific perspective. When the Chinese saw these works, they said: "The ancients lacked perspective method, and where it is used so skillfully as here, one regrets that the ancients had not seen it." This implies that these individuals immediately saw what was involved in such depictions, and recognized that the history of painting in China would or might have been different if this knowledge was possessed by the great masters. The Emperor commented on some pictures Castiglione painted of horses in 1683, "Occidental paintings and drawings transmit by other methods. . . . But while resembling, they only resemble, and so yield to ancient models."5 Again, it is perfectly clear that the Emperor saw that Castiglione's horses looked far more like horses look than Chinese horses do, but he felt that this was not enough. And indeed, it would have subverted the structure of Chinese artistic history to have accepted perspective as the way to show spatial recession. After all, the basic relationship in which an artist stood to the past was to paint paradigms from the past-to paint, for example, as the nineteenth-century artist Wan Shang-Lin did, a work of Ni Tsan half a millennium later. One could not do this if Ni Tsan did not know perspective and his successors did. That would have broken the connection to the past, and changed the entire structure of artistic life, which involved a powerful identification with figures in the often very distant past. The beauty of this example is that Castiglione himself became a Chinese artist-Lang Shining. It is interesting to note the way shading is used in a wonderful portrait of Prince Bao: Chinese painters did not
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Danto, Seeing and Showing shade at all, which gives a certain abstractness to their depictions. Chiang Yee told me the story of a favorite concubine portrayed, perhaps by Shining, who shrieked that the artist had painted her as half black. He painted the bamboos with botanical precision-quite un-Chinese-and he sought to portray the prince's character. But he uses Chinese perspective, which requires that further edges of tables, for example, should be longer than nearer ones, without the surface being any more trapezoidal than when the opposite is true. Chinese perspective does not show how things look: it is a convention of depiction that one might almost say declared the Chinese lack of interest in showing how things look. But Chinese pilots have no difficulty landing on Western airfields, to use the kind of example Gombrich borrows from the psychologist J. J. Gibson's theory of invariants, in his great text "The Senses as a Perceptual System." The beauty of Gibson's work lies in its demonstration of the complexity of the sensory system as against any pictorial system known to us; or the only plausible equivalent would be moving pictures, which use the camera to penetrate space, showing how things change as we move among them. Once perspective was known to the Chinese, it was a cultural and indeed a political decision to turn their backs on it, though such was the power of emperors that they could have ordained that Chinese painting henceforward be perspectivally correct. They weighed the costs of Westernization in this respect, and made a rational decision based on the cultural sacrifices this would entail. The Renaissance represents a cultural decision as well, namely, to represent the world the way it looks spontaneously to uninstructed perception. Foreshortening, chiaroscuro, perspective, physiognomy-these were discoveries that enabled pictures to look like what they represented. It was a cultural decision about how to picture, but not how to see, which is indemnified against political intervention. Not every pictorial system makes that decision. For the Chinese, the continuity with the ancients was far more important than the types of images they would soon learn could be achieved by a me-
5
chanical device, like the camera, which, in the Emperor's words, "resemble but do not do more than resemble." Relative to their interests, it would have been intolerably condescending to suppose the Chinese did not know how to draw, or, worse, that Lin Shining " should teach them how to draw correctly, meaning to draw things the way they look. They drew perfectly correctly, within their cultural agenda for pictures. The historicity of the eye supposes that they had the same cultural agenda as Renaissance artists, who were successful simply perceiving the - . world the way their pictures exactly showed. But that seems altogether inconsistent even with the Renaissance model, itself considered historically. I shall now argue this point. It has, since Vasari, been a matter of consensus that the history of painting has been developmental and progressive, so long at least as the governing ideal of painting was to show the world the way the world is seen. Indeed, the history of painting was in many ways a paradigm of the possibility of progress. "For many centuries," Thomas Kuhn wrote, "painting was regarded as the cumulative discipline."6 Historians of art, and Vasari certainly, "recorded with veneration the series of inventions from foreshortening through chiaroscuro that had made possible successfully more perfect representations of nature." It is not so much that in this respect there are parallels between the history of art and the histories of science. Progress in art really was progress in the science of representation, the way in which something of the sort could be said about the history of photography. One can regard the latter as the progress of techniques, to the point where Peter Galassi once said that he was taught the history of photography without reference to any images at all. Obviously there were images, and just as obviously paintings did more than show the world the way artists had learned to show it by mastering the techniques that stood as markers on the road to perfection. Still, it was central to the concept of painting that it be progressive to the point where perfection would have meant indiscernabfiity from visual experience: showing and seeing were indiscernible. Ernst Gombrich was unique in attempting
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism to explain how art could have had such a cumulative history, and his theory of "making and matching" in effect exhibits the structure his great colleague, Karl Popper, spoke of as Der Logik der Forschung. What this meant on Popper's view, with his severe anti-inductivist Dosture. was that one does not typically generate hypotheses by reasoning from samples to populations, but rather advances hypotheses as intuitive creative ideas, which one then has the responsibility to attempt to falsify (where again Popper set himself against the reigning verificationist biases in the philosophy of science). "Making and matching" corresponds to the two moments in Popper's theory: artists generate hypotheses, namely, forms of showing, and then they check this against the world or-better--check showing against seeing. If there are discrepancies, one adjusts, so far as possible, by projecting other representational strategies until showing and seeing coincide, as in aligning the two halves in a view finder. My assumption is that the schematisms tested against the seen were prompted by discrepancies, which they were intended to overcome. Consider the case of foreshortening. No one, so far as I know, is credited with its discovery the way Brunelleschi is credited with the discovery- of perspective, but one can imagine a malaise with pictorial representations that, artists might say, "look too flat." This would not have been an available criticism within Egyptian pictorial notation, or have meant anything in Africa. The ancients knew enough how to handle it that they compensated for the eye's limitation by making the head of a figure, meant to be seen below, larger enough than life to look like life from below. There is a rule of thumb I learned about perspective from the artist John Cederquist: "If it's right but looks wrong, it is wrong. If it's wrong but looks right, it's right."7 There may only be the most general formula for foreshortening, the artist extending it over different cases, in each case matching it against a visual possibility. It may never. for the matter. become as scientific and, in a sense, mathematical as perspective. Still, one may measure progress, remarkably, for example, over the fifteen-year interval
Michelangelo devoted to the Sistine Ceiling, especially in the depiction of the prophets. The early figure of Zecharia is rigid: he is set in an alcove, reading a book. There is no depth to speak of. The contrast is strongly marked with the much later figure of Jonas, which amazed both Vasari and Condivi, who regarded it as the culmination of Michelangelo's vast vision. Jonas is struggling into the light from the "belly of the beast," and that energy with which Michelangelo handles this is read retroactively across the ceiling, as if everything in it exemplifies the same proficiency as Jonah does. But in truth Michelangelo, who sincerely insisted that he was not a painter, learned through something like making and matching to bring showing into line with seeing. One has to conclude that foreshortening became central in the sixteenth century and then became an artistic commonplace. Tiepolo, in the late eighteenth century, foreshortened effortlessly, since, after all, so many of his commissions were for ceiling decoration: even a drawing by him looks as though seen from below. It had become part of the lingua franca of realistic representation. It is clear from this account that what was historical in the progress was the hand rather than the eye. The development of representational skills was handed on, taught in workshops, tinkered with until it was right. It did not have to be reinvented. But this very progress presupposes that the eye itself was not historical-that seeing remained constant throughout changes in showing. If seeing were indexed to showing,as a strong version of the Geschlichtlichkeit des Auges would require, seeing would be so calibrated to showing that things would always look right! And there would be change without progress, somewhat in the manner in which Panofsky describes the history of art as a succession of symbolic forms that do not fall into a progressive scheme. Panofsky does not offer an account for changes from one symbolic form to the next. He did, however, famously write a text on perspective as a symbolic form, which meant, as I see it, that perspective drawing "fits" with all sorts of things that belong to the symbolic form in question. It would have no place in Byz-
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Danto, Seeing and Showing antine's symbolic form. By and large, Vasari's progress transpires under the auspices of a symbolic form .that endured for close to six centuries, and was still felt to be compelling by a writer like Gombrich when he composed the lectures that became Art and Illusion-his Mellon Lectures for 1956 -though somewhere in the nineteenth century the Vasarian paradigm was replaced by the paradigms of Modernism. This was not a progress but a substitution of different goals, still a matter of critical uncertainty, but marked by the fact that congruence between showing and seeing was less and less a goal. But when it was a goal, it was so against the assumption that the eye itself underwent no change whatever. One had to match showing against seeing, and this had to have been the same from one end to the other of the history. The eye serves a function under Modernism in that one would see that what was shown was so discrepant with reality as seen that congruence had to have been abandoned as a guiding ideal! Unless, that is-and these were and are familiar defensive tropes-the artists were hoaxers or inept. I have a favorite passage in Gombrich's account that helps make the point. Painting is taught at school and practiced at home as therapy and as a pastime, and many a modest amateur has mastered tricks which would have looked like sheer magic to Giotto. Perhaps even the crude colored renderings we find on a box of breakfast cereal would have made Giotto's contemporaries gasp.8
The magic, for Giotto, was how was something done. He could see how faithful showing was to seeing, and wondered how showing should have been perfected to do so. The same must be said for "Giotto's contemporaries." They would have gasped at the way milk glistens on the crisp surfaces of cornflakes, how silver looks metallic and bowls look ceramic, which was not possible for artists to do in Giotto's period, and the eye through its constancy underscored this truth. The eye has an evolution rather than a history. It changes through mutation rather than through historical shifts, and the eye as
we know it evolved as the human genome evolved, perhaps a million and a half years ago, perhaps longer. There in any case has been no major human evolution in the past 100,000 years, and certainly none in the bare 600 years from Giotto to Ingres and the French academicians. The history we might call the "history of the eye" (which sounds like a title from Bataille) has in a way the structure of making and matching: discontinuous molecular changes "made" the eye as we now have it, and natural selection underwrote its value in navigating experience down the millennia-which is part of the story of matching when pictures were first made with the intention of resembling the world as seen. One feels that almost no progress has been made since the walls of the Ardeche caves were painted in the Ice Age in Europe, about 20,000 years ago or so, when anatomically modem humans replaced the Neanderthals. Whether this entailed a difference in ocular structure remains a question, but one feels, looking at the astonishing works, that there was a cultural decision not unlike that of the Renaissance in the culture of the hunter-gatherer late Ice Age humans in the Ardeche. They did not perhaps have exact resemblance as a goal, but rather as a means to whatever further function pictures were intended to have. But on the evidence of what the paintings show, the eye as the eye has no further history to speak of. And in general, one surmises, a mutation would produce optical differences that evolution would weed out, were it not for interventions of the sort Nietzsche regarded as inimical to human perfection, finding optical prosthetics for the ill-endowed. Natural selection can be pretty ruthless. Darwin wrote: "I remember well when the thought of the eye made me cold all over."9 For the eye is so complex an organ that it would have been cited in evidence for an hypothesis of design rather than of the randomness of evolution. "Anatomize the eye: survey its structure and contrivance," Hume has one of the characters say in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. "Tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation."lo If it was design, God must have
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism been satisfied with it as it was: there has not been a generational change, as in computers. If it evolved, then it has to have been entirely adaptive and as such protected from historical change and yet, at the same time, capable of adjusting through all sorts of changesfrom plains to sea to jungle. Anatomically, the eye is an extruded part of the brain, and the fourfold layer of cells at the eye's back, along the bottom of the eyecup, is a piece of the brain resident in the eyeball. "Success of the production of the infant creature," Sir Charles Sherrington wrote, "is judged far more subtly by the truth of the working of the residual life than by any test which inspection by the eye or microscope imposes."ll Nothing so central to "the working of residual life" could be plastic to the degree that the historicity of the eye asserts. History-the history of representational art, that is-presupposes the reverse of what the thesis of historicity requires. Visual processes are-I appropriate this phrase from Zenon Pylushin-cognitively impenetrable. How we see at the basic level relevant to adaptation is unaffected by what we know, or what we believe, as much so as cell division. The visual system is, to use the deep conception of Jerry Fodor, modular. Modularity means a segregated default system, which functions in independence of other systems. Lucky for us that it does! There are two sorts of illusion it might at this point be advantageous to consider. There are illusions we live through, as in the classic Indian example of the piece of rope believed to be a snake. Once I see that it is rope, not snake, I can no longer see it as snake, and no longer feel afraid of it. And there are illusions that are not resolved by coming to understand that they are illusions, like the lines in the Muller-Lyer illusion, which still look as if they are unequal in length after we know they are equal. Our knowledge does not transform our experience. "In such cases," Fodor writes, "it is hard to see an alternative to the view that at least some of the background information at the subject's disposal is inaccessible to at least some of his perceptual mechanisms."l2 The rope-as-snake illusion exemplifies an epistemological pitfall to which the human per-
cipient is everywhere subject. Is that an enemy or a shadow? Is somebody in the kitchen or is the noise being made by a machine? The Indians, taking this kind of experience as paradigmatic, argued that one can see the world as illusory, and live through this knowledge to an enlightened understanding of that fact. The Muller-Lyer illusion, discovered in 1889, but in a way anticipated in the discovery of entasis by the Greeks-something one knew to be curved was seen as straight-is, according at least to Segall, Campbell, and Herskovits, perceived as an illusion by every culture in which the test has been made. It is commonplace to explain this as due to the fact that the eye perceives a fictive depth, which, if true, entails that it is built into the perceptual system to see pictorial depth, and hence that the possibility of a Renaissance paradigm is an artistic possibility for every culture. And possibly we can understand certain cultures as attempting to counteract the force of depth perception by pictorial strategies, appreciated almost in Greenberghian terms, as battling depth to achieve flatness. The importance of modularity is that we cannot help seeing depth in such cases. "The operation of the input systems appears to be . . . inflexibly insensitive to our utilities."l3 Finally, the rope-to-snake illusion depends upon there being snakes and ropes, though doubtless analogical deceptions exist elsewhere-the mother of pearl taken for a piece of silver is another standard example. But the perception of illusional space is like respiration or metabolism. It is what makes art universally possible, grounded in the physiology of the eye that we do not see images on surfaces but in space from the beginning. That gives a dimension of magic to picture making that I would suppose explains the cave art that flourished simultaneously in various loci in Europe at a time when there was little likelihood of direct cultural interchange. In some way, we know that there has to be an interfacing of input systems and central cognitive processes, in the sense that we interpret what we sense, relative to the system of beliefs. From this perspective, Ling Shining's prince was wrong in saying that Western images resemble but only resemble.
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Danto, Seeing and Showing They show what we see under higher-order descriptions, so that we do not typically see paintings that use models as simply resembling those models: we see them as showing what the model stands for-a dying general rather than a reclining man. To say of the great painting by Benjamin West, The Death of Montcalm, that it does not picture the death of Montcalm but pictures a model that has no relationship to Montcalm whatsoever is of the same order of pedantry as saying this is not a pipe but a picture of one. It is through this interface that history supervenes on perception. The history of perception is the history of central systems vesting what we see with meanings that have not entirely to do with what we see, since they are often relational terms that are conferred by things often not present in pictures. There is no doubt that perception so structured is historical, simply because there is a history of such systems. It is through that that we are historical beings as well, unlike animals, with whom we almost certainly share the main features of our visual input system. If human understanding changed through mutation the way the eye must, there would be no history at all. We can imagine some Achaian warriors resurrected in Midtown Manhattan, and seeing a different world by far from that in which they internalized the networks of beliefs and attitudes that defined their culture. The eye is not historical, but we are. The philosophy of art begins here.
A R T H U R C. DANTO
Department of Philosophy Columbia University New York, New York 10027
1. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as the inaugural Marx Wartofsky Lecture at Baruch College of the City University of New York on October 7,1997. 2. Marx W. Wartofsky, "The Paradox of Painting: Pictorial Representation and the Dimensionality of Visual Space," Social Research 51 (1984): 865. 3. Ibid., p. 877. 4. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 89. 5. Howard Rogers and Sherman E. Lee, Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting from the Forbidden City (Lansdale, PA: International Arts Council, 1988),p. 183. 6. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Resolutions, 2nd ed., enlarged (University of Chicago Press, 1970). 7.1n conversation with the author. See Arthur C. Danto, "Illusion and Comedy: The Art of John Cederquist," The Art of John Cederquist: Reality and Illusion (Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum of Art, 1997). 8. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 8. 9. Cited by Sir Charles Sherrington, Man o n His Na~ 1953), p. ture, 2nd ed:(New York: ~ o u b l e i aAnchor, 100. 10. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 11. Sherrington, Man on His Nature, p. 123. 12.Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (MIT Press, 1983), p. 60. 13. Ibid., p. 53.
