The main focus of this week’s session of 6 Ways of Thinking About Art (Tate Modern course, ticket only, sold out) was the tension between treating works of art as catalysts for subjective musing and the idea that they might (or should, to be any good) have definite objective meanings. These may not be mutually exclusive angles to take on art.
The Eighteenth Century philosopher David Hume, in his short essay 'Of the Standard of Taste' recounts the story of two wine tasters one of whom declares that the wine he is drinking tastes leathery; the other says it tastes metallic. When they get to the bottom of the barrel they find an old key with a leather thong, so they were both correct about objective aspects of the wine. We'd like to be able to anchor our interpretations and understandings of art in similarly firm objective ways, but this is impossible for a discussion of David Hume's responses to the idea that our assessment of works of art simply comes down to individual taste listen to this podcast interview with Mike Martin)
A key question is the degree to which works of art are like Rorschach inkblots: stimuli for projective interpretation, where autobiography, mood, and mental set of the viewer play a substantial role and the viewer projects his or her own feelings on to the works (NB Andy Warhol's 'Rorschach paintings' were based on a mistaken view of how Rorshach used inkblots - read about them here). Whilst it is naive to believe it possible to enter a gallery with an innocent eye, the mind cleansed of all associations and expectations, and plausible to think that seeing is, as the philosopher of science N.R. Hanson put it, 'a theory-laden activity' ('There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball' and our mental set, the expectations and knowledge we have affect what we see), there are still limits to interpretation. We can't see absolutely whatever we want to see - our interpretations are based on something out there even if they are idiosyncratic or whimsical. Nevertheless, context and expectation have a significant role to play, as they do in most aspects of our life (read this interesting discussion of the psychology of why we like what we like)
Many appreciators of the visual arts are content that particular works of art should simply stimulate a range of interesting responses, and believe that art should be open-ended. It is an orthodoxy amongst views of contemporary art that didactic art tends to be bad art - it is in ambiguity and the possibility of generating new interpretations that art's value lies. In contrast to this view, Alain de Botton has recently asserted in his book Religion for Atheists, that good art can and should be didactic, that it should teach us through sensuous beautiful creations, to be good and wise.
You can listen to a short audio interview I made with Alain de Botton which includes a discussion of his view of art here.
In the gallery we looked at works on Level 4 West 'Structure and Clarity', particularly miminimalist and abstract works. The idea of focussing on these often austere works was they at first seem resistant to personal interpretations. These included
This last work is a large open-topped box made of copper and painted with a red cadmium bottom that is reflected in the internal sides of the piece. Judd’s work is declared to be about the material objects themselves, and is expressly not meant to evoke personal reflections (certainly that is the impression given by the captioning in Tate Modern: Judd’s art is not about representation or metaphor or suggestion, but rather presents the formed material objects themselves).
Yet the photographer Thomas Demand’s written reaction to the work in an extended caption is deliberately personal and subjective, describing the images the work evokes for him, well aware that this was not the sort of response that Judd would have hoped for... It is interesting in the context of an art gallery to have a contemporary artist legitimizing a highly personal, associative, and to some degree projective response to a work of art, one that goes against the known intentions of the artist.
Next week: Art as Form...(in particular we will be considering Clive Bell's approach to art).
For the 4th session of Playing with Meaning we re-visited the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern, exploring the possibility of describing the works entirely in musical terms. Klee was himself a talented violinist, and his parents and wife were all musicians. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke even wrote this of him:
Even if you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many occasions his drawings were transcriptions of music."
So the idea that music was an influence on Klee, in various ways, has historical backing. The point of the excercise was in part to explore the idea of aspect seeing - the notion that the same physical object can be seen in very different ways depending on our mental set. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously used the Duck-Rabbit picture to illustrate this (for illustrations of duck-rabbits see 9 examples of the duck-rabbit, also this article about the claim to have found the oldest pictorial illusion). Wittgenstein's discussion is in Part ll of Philosophical Investigations. The sudden awareness of the previously unseen animal in the picture is an example of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the dawning of an aspect’. The visual stimulus doesn’t change. The retinal image that we have is presumably also unchanged. Yet we suddenly see what we thought was just a duck as a rabbit. This example emphasises the degree to which seeing is linked with expectation and concepts and is far from the passive reception of incoming visual data that some early empiricists believed it to be (Hans-Johann Glock in his A Wittgenstein Dictionary p.37 calls this ‘concept-saturatedness of perception’).
Last night's exercise also was an illustration of a game in the sense of its involving the voluntary acceptance of unnecesary obstacles to achieving an end (see last week's notes about Bernard Suits' account of games), rather than of unstructured play.
The exercise worked well, and resulted in different sorts of attention - we found visual analogues for rhythm, tone, scales, accent, key, echo, modulation, musical genre, and much more in Klee's work, and generally we spent more time discussing non-representational aspects of pictures than we might otherwise have done. It was also fun.
These notes are from the course Playing with Meaning, Tate Modern, (by ticket only, sold out).
Session 1 The artist's intentions and other contributions to meaning
What does a work of art mean? Possibly nothing at all. Possibly many different things. We all engage in projective interpretation (finding our own meanings in someone else's art) to some extent. But often artists want you to recognize features of their style, content, etc. So does that mean that the artists have the last say on what their work means? The debate is polarised between those who say No (labelled 'anti-intentionalists here) and those who say Yes (Intentionalists). Some philosophers have also suggested that what matters is not actual intentions, but virtual intentions, those which, based on the work and context, might plausibly be attributed to the artist...
Anti-Intentionalists see the principal appropriate activity of an art critic/viewer as scrutiny. That is, the viewer looks to see what is there, is not unduly influenced by art historical detail, facts about the artist's life, the subject matter, and so on. Clive Bell's views in his book Art (1914) are an extreme example. Bell believed that what all art has in common is that it possesses Significant Form. Not all form is significant, but when patterns of lines, shapes and colours (and some depth) combine they can produce an aesthetic emotion in a sensitive viewer. For Bell, we should bring nothing of life to art. All art through ages has achieved its status as art from these formal properties. The emotion they produce, aesthetic emotion, is not characteristic of everyday life. For Bell its power almost certainly came from its potential to put us in touch with the noumenal world (a Kantian term), that is the world of deeper reality that lies behind the veil of everyday appearances and is not usually available to us.
Another famous defence of anti-intentionalism was Wimsatt and Beardsley's famous paper 'The Intentional Fallacy'. ('Fallacy' in this context is simply an unreliable way of arguing) There they argued that we shouldn't treat the author of a poem as an oracle about its meaning. Rather, readers should focus on the words on the page, and not get embroiled in author psychology. Their main argument was that appeals to authors' intentions were either misleading or unnecessary. If the poem failed to achieve the poet's intentions, then it was misleading to refer to the intentions as the source of its meaning; if the poem did achieve the aims, then appeals to intention were redundant since the meaning was there to be discerned in the poem.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell used a knock-down argument to make the first of these two points:
'...it no more counts towards the success or failure of a work of art that the artist intended something other than is there, than it counts when the referee is counting over a boxer that the boxer had intended to duck' (in 'Music Discomposed').
Difficulties with the anti-intentionalist position include the fact that as Ernst Gombrich often pointed out, there is no innocent eye. Also it is hard to appreciate irony if you don't have some access to the artist's or writer's intentions. Extreme anti-intentionalists would say that to appreciate a Rembrandt self-portrait the fact that the artist intended (if he did) to potray himself ageing, is irrelevant to our appreciaton of it as art - this seems wrong. Subject matter has to be part of some art. It also seems a bit perverse not to find out as much as you possibly can about the circumstances in which a work of art was produced.
For more about Clive Bell and why is theory of art fails, see Chapter One of my book The Art Question. Wimsatt and Beardsley's paper 'The Intentional Fallacy' is reprinted in my book (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed.
In contrast, intentionalists, such as Richard Wollheim, argue that the job of the critic or viewer involves retrieval, retrieval of an artist's intentions, motivations, historical milieu, and so on. Understanding a work of art involves understanding how it came to be as it is. Obviously information is incomplete in many cases, but this does not prevent it from being a worthwhile goal where we do have access to background information. Nor would Wollheim want us to forego spending time looking very closely at the work itself; it is just that the history of how it came to be as it is, its aetiology is important for understanding it.
For more on Intentionalism see Richard Wollheim 'Criticism as Retrieval' supplementary essay in the second ed. of his book Art and Its Objects.
A third position, taken by Jerry Fodor, amongst others, in his article 'It's Deja Vu All Over Again' (a quotation from the accidentally brilliant Yogi Berra - my favourite quotation of his is 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it') is what might be called Virtual Intentionalism. Here the facts don't matter so much about what the artist's actual intentions were. The point is to try to reconstruct what they might reasonably have been. The artist can't overrule your interpretation here.
Fodor's article is in Danto and His Critics.
There is a further issue of whether this sort of discussion of artist’s intentions implies a misleading picture of what it is to do something intentionally. Many writers in this area describe intentions as if artists always had introspectible mental events that are the precursors of and causes of their works. But is this so? What of R.G. Collingwood’s account of art (in his The Principles of Art) where he described the artist as beginning with an inchoate emotion that he or she makes clear to him or herself in the process of producing a work of art. On that picture (which rings true with many artists), the idea that an artist has a clear intention that precedes the creation of the artwork is implausible in most cases.
Led by Nigel Warburton author of The Art Question and A Little History of Philosophy.
Works of art have meanings, meanings that are intended, accidental, contextual. Often they play with questions about meaning itself, whether obliquely or overtly. They can also be quirky, playful, humorous, poetic, conceptual. In this six-part course we explore some of the general philosophical questions about art and meaning, as well as specific questions about particular artworks. Each session begins in the East Room at Tate Modern with a combination of a short introductory lecture with discussion in small groups, followed by a visit to the galleries including the Paul Klee and Mira Schendel exhibitions. Topics covered include the role of artistic intentions and context in the creation of meaning, art and daydreaming, the nature of humour, art that alludes to philosophy, and the relationship between the visual and conceptual elements of art. Philosophers whose work is discussed include Richard Wollheim, Arthur Danto and Noël Carroll.
This course is open to all levels and experience of philosophy and art history. Ticket price includes drinks in the Members Room after each session.
You might also be interested in two other Philosophy courses led by Nigel Warburton: 'Philosophy in a Day' and 'Philosophy: the Basics' further details and booking information here
Sorry for the delay in posting these notes for sessions 4 and 5. Look out for further courses at Tate Modern or possible Tate Britain.
Session 4
Picking up on the previous week's discussions about power and sexuality in relation to particular images, we began Session 4 by discussing Thomas Nagel's ideas on sexual perversion. His view that 'normal' sexual desire involves escalating reciprocity (in a kind of interaction which gets its power from the individuals' arousal at being found arousing as well as from the arousing caused by the partner) gave a way of thinking about the relationship between artist and subject in some of the more overtly sexual paintings and photographs we had examined the previous week.
It is important to recognise that Nagel was not using 'normal' and 'perversion' as moral terms, but rather as descriptive: just as someone who preferred to eat pictures of food above eating food itself could be said to exhibit a perversion, so someone who engages in forms of sex that lack the recriprocity that he thinks normal may not be doing anything immoral.
In the exhibition A Bigger Splash we looked at a range of images that involved expressive bodily movements in various ways, from the film of Jackson Pollock in action ('I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them'), rhythmically applying paint in his trademark style through to Yayoi Kusama's 1968 hippy film 'Flower Orgy' in which a group of naked young men and women covered in painted spots cavort and squirm together. The film was part of her deliberately provocative protest campaign to stop the Vietnam War on the grounds that human bodies were 'too beautiful to be killed in that way' (see a recent interview with Kusama)
Session 5
For the final session of the course we began by considering some of Erving Goffman's (1922-82) insights about role playing and the self. Goffman, a social psychologist, is famous for giving a dramaturgical account of human interaction - one that takes seriously the idea that 'all the world's a stage'.
People give performances. They act roles to each other, idealized roles that in part embody how they think others want them to behave, sometimes using props to draw attention to their roles. We read non-verbal cues very quickly and accurately. We look for symptoms, the impressions people give off, and we are sensitive to anomalous role playing. For Goffman, in his classic 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
there is no underlying 'true' self, just a series of masks or roles. (There are brief notes on the key features of his work here)
Returning to the Bigger Splash exhibition, we focused on a several images and videos in the room Transformations, including a series of self-portraits by Cindy Sherman. This review of a retrospective of Cindy Sherman's photography draws attention to an important feature of her approach: although she is taking on a series of roles, and implicitly commenting on the expectation of roleplaying for women, she is never so far into the role that she herself is unrecognizable - she combines being in the role with drawing attention to th fact that she is playing a role in a manner akin to the eager student in the front row of a lecture that Jean-Paul Sartre describes who is so intent on giving off the sense of being a good student that it actually interferes with listening. With Sherman's work, there is an uneasy sense that she is both in role and directing our attention to the roleplaying itself. If you are interested in Cindy Sherman, there is a superb online catalogue of her images on the MOMA website here (you can scroll through images from the retrospective and click on individual ones to enlarge them).
There is an interesting video here of Cindy Sherman discussing roleplaying in her self-portraits:
For this session we focused on 3 paintings and five photographs in Poetry and Dream, Level Two West, Tate Modern, examing how the body was represented and the issues that emerged from thinking about these images. Previously we have been moving from general philosophical issues to specific illustrations; this week we reversed that and explored a range of questions that arise from consideration of specific works of art.
Key issues that emerged:
The use of nudity as titillation under the guise of fine art (vs honest eroticism or pornography)
The represented body as a catalyst to formal experiment (in line, pattern, texture, colour)
Representation of the body as the body of an individual naked portraiture vs types)
Relations of power - the extent to which the subject has relinquished power to the artist and how the artist uses that power
I've included some links for those who want to find out more about the particular works.
You can get a better sense of this artist's recurrent themes from the Paul Delvaux Museum website, (the museum that Simeon mentioned in our discussion)
See the video below for more context: it is about a retrospective of Hendricks' portraiture and includes comments by the artist. The emphasis on individuality in portraiture and the artist's connection with his subjects that emerges here is very relevant to the discussion we had in the gallery: 'He's representing her in terms of her attitude, her style..'
We also looked at five nudes by Manuel Alvarez Bravo (images unavailable from Tate) in Room 11, including his famous 'Good Reputation Sleeping' (1938) - click on the photograph's title on the MOMA site) You can read an interesting short essay about Bravo which explains how 'Good Reputation Sleeping' came to be made.
You might enjoy John Berger's musings on the female nude from Ways of Seeing (1972):
These notes are longer than usual (i.e. don't expect me to write 2,000 words of notes each week - and after this you may think less is more). I want to try and pull the different elements discussed lat night together online here and to suggest further reading, listening, and viewing for anyone interested in exploring these ideas further.
For notes and links on Descartes' view of the mind and on Frank Jackson's thought experiment 'What Mary Knew' and on qualia see last week's notes. We began by reviewing this topic. Below is a short video that illustrates and discusses the Knowledge Argument, Frank Jackson's thought experiment which he originally intended to undermine physicalism and support dualism (he's since changed his mind on that, but the thought experiment raises interesting questions about the 'feely' aspect of our conscious existence, and how mysterious and as yet inexplicable that is). In the video the philosopher John Searle emphasizes the importance of the question raised:
'The answer to this question ‘What is
consciousness?’ is the answer to the question ‘What sort of beings are we?’ And
it’s the different definitions of ourselves that’s at stake when we try to get
a theory of consciousness.’'
The qualitative experience that is essential to consciousness lies right at the heart of our experience of the visual arts - both in terms of the artist's experience, the role art has in our own self-definition, and that of the viewer (indeed, one theory of the nature of art, R.G. Collingwood's, which I mentioned in passing, suggests that the process of making art is a process of grappling with an inchoate notion of our own experience - art brings into sharper focus the particularity of the artist's feelings, expresses these, and thereby allows the viewer to experience a similarly precise and individualised emotion - more on R.G. Collingwood's theory of art.)
The new topics for this week were the related ones of Crying and Sentimentality:
On Crying and the Meaning of Tears
Crying is a physical visible emotional activity that is largely involuntary (though can be resisted to some degree) and as a result can be a mark of sincerity (though, of course, some people can will themselves to cry - there are some fascinating advice pages on the Internet such as this one that pass on actors' tips on how to cry at will - typically drawing on the actor's actual emotion and memories rather than using artificial means such as onions).
In art depicted tears can provide evoke a direct and even visceral response. In Picasso's Weeping Woman, for example, the depicted tears communicate instantly the intensity of a mother's grief at the loss of her child, despite the highly sylised and abstract nature of the depiction. There is undoubtedly a contagious element that encourages empathy triggered by seeing another person crying or even an unrealistic depiction of someone crying.
Of course not all crying is indicative of grief or distress: there can be tears of joy, laughter, embarrasment, humiliation, rage, and much more. From the outside, the context of the crying determines how we interpret the emotion. Perhaps this is true from the inside too: one - somewhat crude - theory of emotion, the so-called James-Lange theory, suggests that we don't cry because we're sad, but unexpectedly, we're sad because we cry: we have a physiological reaction due to some aspect of our environment, and the emotion is the secondary interpretation and feeling of that physiological change - we feel something and then search around for an explanation of that feeling and the resultant emotion that we feel is not governed by how the original physiological change feels to us, but rather by how we interpret that in context.
The issue of what crying is has been little discussed by philosophers, though the philosophy of the emotions has always been important in moral philosophy since the Ancient Greeks (even for the Stoics who were for the most part keen to control emotions as irrational and essentially useless responses to reality that interfered with doing the right thing).
There is also a short audio clip about the nature of crying here (frustratingly the Radio 4 programme from which it was exerpted is no longer available).
Read a short discussion about the science of weeping 'Why Humans Like to Cry' (there are short reviews of the interviewee Michael Trimble's book on crying here and here) .
The art historian and theorist James Elkins has written a book about people being moved to tears in front of paintings Pictures and Tears: a history of people who have cried in front of paintings. The implication is that the tears are symtoms of an intensity and sincerity of emotional reaction, a kind of reaction that is not encouraged by art historical study. You can read his Chapter 5 on his reaction to the beautiful Bellini St Francis of Assisi that is in the Frick collection in New York. He reproduces the picture here on his website.
Philosophers are rarely depicted as crying. There is one exception though. The philosopher Heraclitus is sometimes called 'the crying philosopher'(because he couldn't step in the same river twice?): in this Renaissance painting by Bramante he is shown alongside the laughing philosopher Democritus:
There are contexts in which crying is socially inappopriate and can betray a degree of sentimentality. Crying typically reveals strong emotions (perhaps triggered by something deep in an individual's psyche, personal associations, unresolved conflicts, or hurt) - when these seem indulgent and to some degree disproportionate we may label the individual as guilty of sentimentality. But what is sentimentality?
Sentimentality
Sentimentality can mean inappropriate emotion, in the sense of an excess of sentiment that is overblown, or of the wrong kind given the trigger event or context. The word is used almost exclusively in a pejorative way now, though historically 'sentimental' was a word that described one who relied on emotions, and 'sentimental value' is a concept that does not have negative connotations. To label a person or attitude as guilty of sentimentality though is to draw attention to a shortcoming, a failure. It is a judgement - perhaps a moral judgement and depends upon the thought that some emotions are appropriate to a context and others not (and as such must be to some degree culturally or even subculturally relative since cultures differ considerably in expectations about emotional expression and response). The person who is absolutely overwhelmed with emotion at the cuteness of a kitten, or who idealises a lover to the point of nausea is guilty of sentimentality. Someone prone to sentimentality has inappropriate and often gushing responses to the world, and typically uses this as a strategy of avoidance, a way of refusing to confront unpleasant truths (such as that the kitten has worms, or the lover's bad breath).
Sentimentality is a fault, not a virtue since it involves avoiding unpleasant truths (and in this respect links to kitsch). It is a common psychological block to clarity of thought that often involves wishful thinking in that the sentimental person is unwilling to confront facts, but rather is much happier in a soft cuddly world of their own imagination. Sentimentality can even involve blindness to the way things really are. It can be a kind of magical thinking that involves reacting to the way the individual would like the world to be rather than to the way that it is. Oscar Wilde famously declared a sentimental person one ‘who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.' In James Joyce's Ulysses has Stephen Dedalus echo this when he sends a telegram that reads 'The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.' Sentimentality is somehow unearned, or unpayed for - a kind of indulgence in feeling that doesn't fit the situation.
For example, the mother of a child who has been caught bullying another child may simply refuse to believe that her son could be a bully. In her eyes he remains this sweet innocent child who could never harm anyone else, and she experiences nothing but warm and comforting feelings in his presence. How could he possibly be the culprit? There must be some mistake. This is a sentimental reaction, a way of avoiding the unpalatable truth that her son is a bully. It is a kind of dishonesty, or at least self-deception (which may be largely unconscious and is considerably easier to spot in others than in oneself).
Sentimentality and Art In art the accusation of an artist's sentimentality usually involves a judgement of the implied attitude of the artist towards his or her subject matter - an endorsement of a kind of unearned emotion rather than a distance from the depiction of that emotion. The artist invites us to share this attitude and our revulsion, or feelings of discomfort amount to a critical judgment about taking this stance to this subject matter. It is possible to depict or explore sentimentality without endorsing it or inviting a sentimental attitude to a work.
A viewer's reactions to art can be sentimental in a pejorative sense even if the artist has not displayed sentimentality in the sense just outlined. The viewer who responds to a kitsch Jeff Koons puppy with tears welling up at the cuteness of the depicted animal would be guilty of this and certainly of misunderstanding the nature of the object as work of art which has an ironic stance on sentimentality and is far from an endorsement of it (in complete contrast with Picasso's implied stance toward the woman's grief in Weeping Woman, 1937).
Further Reading on Sentimentality
There is an interesting philosophical paper online about sentimentality and art by Nado Gatalo here that touches on a number of these issues. You might also be interested in Theodore Dalrymple's (irritating) polemic on the alleged toxic effects of sentimentality on British life which furnishes several interesting examples.
These are among the best known of Lichtenstein's painting, and are icons of Pop Art. They were made by selecting frames from comics that implied a story, in many cases simplifying the image. Perfectly coiffeured idealized women in apparent emotional turmoil about their relationship stand in contrast with with macho men firing rockets or otherwise being strong and active. The emotions of the comic book women for the most part seem sentimental, and to some degree indulgent 'I don't care! I'd rather sink than call Brad for help!' The comics seem to endorse a sentimental and stereotyped view of romantic passion and women's dependence on their men for happiness and fulfilment - it is today hard not to read Lichtenstein's stance on these women and their turbulent emotions as ironic, cool, and antithetical. Surely he saw the comic book depictions as sentimental. But...
Watch this fascinating short video from a Tate exhibition of Lichtenstein's work in 1968 - some of the images we disucssed were on show there. Towards the end of the video Lichtenstein talks about how he liked the idealized images of women he found in comics. There is no hint of an ironic highlighting of a sentimentality about romantic love and women whose happiness always seems to depend on their man's attitude to them. Perhaps in reality Lichtenstein was not so critical of the comic-book view of women. In 1972 in the televison series Ways of Seeing and the book that came out of that John Berger wrote as if women had a fundamentally different way of existing in the world from men:
'Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight'
This was his take, roughly, on how women had been depicted in art and advertisements, but also on this (socially constructed) male gaze generally...The exagerated role contrasts in Lichtenstein's depictions were, perhaps, typical of his time...and he was perhaps holding a mirror up to it rather than presenting a critical angle.
These are notes from the first of five sessions of the Tate Modern Mind-Body-Art course (ticket only, sold out) led by Nigel Warburton (Monday evenings, meeting in East Room, Level 6, by 18.45).
The aims of the course
To explore a range of philosophical issues relating to mind, body, and art
To discuss these in relation to works currently on display in Tate Modern
Throughout the history of philosophy there has been a great deal of philosophy of mind, but hardly any philosophy of the body.
An important starting point for modern philosophy was René Descartes' Meditations (first published 1641).
Descartes wanted to find something about which he could be certain. He had accepted many views on trust, and was aware that many of his beliefs were erroneous. His method of Cartesian Doubt involved subjecting every knowledge claim to very close scrutiny: if there was room for the slightest doubt then Descartes rejected it.
He recognised that although much of his knowledge came via the five senses, these senses sometimes mislaid him: a straight stick looks bent in water, a round tower in the distance can look square, and so on. Consequently he rejected sensory information as a wholly reliable source of knowledge. But surely he couldn't be mistaken that he was in a room, now? Descartes at this point remembered that he had had dreams in which he'd thought he was awake when in fact asleep in bed. How did he know he wasn't now dreaming? Well even in dreams 2+3 = 5, doesn't it? But what if there were an evil demon systematically deceiving him about this? Unlikely, but it might conceivably be having (or it could be that an evil scientist is manipulating the electrodes sticking in to your brain in a jar and that you are nothing more than this brain in liquid nutrient). This is Descartes' nadir: he seems to have argued himself into a whirlpool of doubt. But he extracts himself by means of his famous Cogito argument (from 'cogito ergo sum'): even if there is an evil demon, the fact that he, Descartes, is having some kind of thought or experience proves that he must exist...assuming that thoughts have thinkers).
The important point here is that Descartes is more certain of his own subjective experience even than the fact that he has a body (something that requires sense experience to ascertain). This prioritization of the subjective over any experience of the world was extremely important and influential (far more important and influential than Descartes' constructive phase in which he argues for God's existence and the notion that clear and distinct ideas must be true...and ends up more or less where he started in terms of his beliefs). Descartes believed that for human beings mind and body were distinct and interacted (he quaintly located the point of interaction as the pineal gland).
Although much 20th Century philosophy of mind assumed a physicalist standpoint and ridiculed Cartesianism as 'the myth of the ghost in the machine' (Gilbert Ryle's phrase), physicalism is not without difficulties. That doesn't mean that we need to adopt Descartes' approach, but the question of how consciousness arises out of physical matter (if indeed it does) is a tricky one. Thomas Nagel's famous paper 'What is it like to be a bat?' emphasized the difficulty of explaining 'qualia' the experiential nature of consciousness, as did Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment about Mary (who is brought up in a black and white world, is an expert on the neurophysiology of seeing, and then gets to see something red - does she learn something new? If yes, where does that come from on a physicalist account?).
Taking off obliquely from the discussion of subjectivity and conscious experience, we examined a number of works in Transformed Visions, asking questions about the weight given to the subjective viewpoint of the depicted individuals vs the viewer's viewpoint, and the viewpoint of the artist. So, for example, with Giacometti's Man Pointing (1947) there is an interesting question of whether the viewer is encouraged to identify with the viewpoint of the man pointing or see him as other from either the viewpoint of the actual viewer or an implied one who is part of the imagined scene. The fact that Giacometti originally conceived the work as having another figure, with the pointing man's left arm around his shoulder, suggests that we could see the implied viewpoint as the one of the absent person standing next to the pointing man, looking with him at the subject of his pointing, complicit with the judgement of the pointing man...
Part of the point of such activities in the gallery on this course is to look at perhaps familiar works from a fresh viewpoint and see them differently. For further examples of this approach applied to different topics/works of art, see my notes from a previous course 7 Ways of Thinking About Art or notes from a range of previous Tate Modern courses (you need to click on 'next' at the end of pages to scroll back through them all), and also an earlier post on my experience of teaching at Tate Modern.
For this session we focussed on human relations, and in particular love and desire, as described by Jean-Paul Sartre. The point of the discussion was to provide an angle on some of Edvard Munch's paintings - a way of exploring the implied human relations between depicted lovers, and also the painter/viewer.
In Being and Nothingness Sartre gives a somewhat bleak description of the nature of human relationships. Although Sartre's existentialism begins from the subjective viewpoint, Sartre is no solipsist - his example of the voyeur looking through a keyhole being transfigured into awareness of himself as a 'looked at look' is intended to demonstrate to us how much through emotions such as shame we are committed to awareness of the existence of others as centres of their own consciousness and corresponding freedom.
Relationships involve a struggle between conscious beings each presenting themselves to the other in a way that they hope will make them attractive, but constantly at risk either of turning the Other into something less than a free individual, or else, in Bad Faith, of becoming fixed as a self for the Other, in a kind of assimilation into the other person, which ultimately is a form of masochism (in death we become prey to the other - perhaps we should say that in love we constantly risk becoming prey to the lover)...or else sadism (when we seek to curb the other's freedom).
According to Sartre, the lover wants his or her facticity to be necessary not contingent: we are thrown into a meaningless existence by chance and there is much about us that we did not choose, yet there is a widespread desire to be more than an absurd empty consciousness that we fill through our commitments. For Sartre the lover wants to take on the role of God according to the Ontological Argument (the argument for the existence of God that makes God's existence necessary - by definition): for the one who loves us, each of us wants the contingent aspects of what we are to seem as if they had to be so - no other individual could take our place. Described in this way, this is a hopeless wish - given that, at least according to Sartre, our existence is in no way necessary.
Sexual desire, for Sartre, is not simply an animal instinct, but is desire for engagement with animated flesh, bodies as conscious. Something as apparently straightforward as a caress, for Sartre, takes us straight to metaphysical reflection and awareness of our own facticity.
Disentangling Sartre's dense account of love and desire in the section 'Concrete Relations with Others' in Being and Nothingness (both terrifyingly abstract and at times disconcertingly concrete) is no easy task - perhaps ultimately it is confused and contradictory. For more straightforward analysis of sexual desire (influenced in both cases by Sartre), try Thomas Nagel's 'Sexual Perversion' in his book Mortal Questions (but remember that 'perversion' isn't a term of moral condemnation for Nagel here) and Roger Scruton's book Sexual Desire (at times idiosyncratic, occasionally moralistic, but nevertheless a serious attempt to make sense of our lived experience in this area - his appendix 'The First Person' gives a clear critique of some of the assumptions of phenomenology, and he summarises and discusses what he calls the 'paradox of lust' - Sartre's view that we both want to engage sexually with flesh incarnated with freedom, yet at the same time want to possess and fix the lover - on pp120-125).
In the gallery we looked at some of the works in Room 2 of Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye exhibition at Tate Modern - paintings which in their implied reading of human relationships and desire resonated with the Sartrean themes we had been discussing.
. The sudden awareness of the previously unseen animal in the picture is an example of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the dawning of an aspect’. The visual stimulus doesn’t change. The retinal image that we have is presumably also unchanged. Yet we suddenly see what we thought was just a duck as a rabbit. This example emphasises the degree to which seeing is linked with expectation and concepts and is far from the passive reception of incoming visual data that some early empiricists believed it to be (Hans-Johann Glock in his 
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there is no underlying 'true' self, just a series of masks or roles. (There are brief notes on the key features of his work