It all started, as usual, when McEvoy made an interesting passing
reference to Gombrich in response to an equally interesting remark by Omar K.
"Careful," McEvoy warned, with an implicated smiley. He went on: "Replace
"went
out of fashion" (which perhaps wrongly suggests some aesthetic or
conventional whim), with "became extinct or descended with modification given
selection pressures from cultural variations", and this kind of talk becomes
dangerously close to a problem-solving evolutionary theory of knowledge. Next
someone will be suggesting the same was true for the development and
adoption of different number-systems. (Which of course it was.) And that this
kind
of approach can throw immense light on the development of the sciences.
(Which it can.) And even of the law. (Which it does.) Famously, Gombrich has
applied this approach to the visual arts, where it is immensely useful in
drawing out "The Story of Art" - and probably the only approach that can
give adequate rationale to the misguided outreaches of modern "conceptual
art"".
So, the reference was to Gombrich's "The Story of Art", a 'famous'
application of a Popperian scheme of things. There was an extra passing
reference
to 'conceptual art', by which we may mean Kosuth.
So I thought of providing further extra material of the Gombrich-Popper
interface, throwing some Grice for good measure.
Popper and Gombrich were close friends for many years. They met first in
1936 in London (so the lyrics to "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't
know when" may apply"). Gombrich knew of Popper's work him while Gombrich
was in Vienna. Gombrich's father, a lawyer, was apprenticed to Popper's
father, another lawyer; so the families had always known of each other.
Gombrich claims that Æsthetic Theory was not really one of his main interests,
if
you believe it. He didn't see himself as an "Æsthetician". Gombrich
contributed to the Schilpp Popper volume (in the Library of Living
Philosophers)
with "The Logic of Vanity Fair," where he mentions that he attended Hayek's
seminar when Popper read on the poverty of historicism. It was THAT that
interested Gombrich, since he was engaged into an iconographic "story of
art", and 'story' and historicism are cognate.
It wasn't particularly Popper's attack to HEGEL that drew Gombrich to
Popper. Hegel is, after all, in Gombrich's view, an "ontologist". He believes
that he knows the plans of the Absolute, the way the Absolute evolves in
history, and he thinks that he himself was the mouthpiece of the Absolute.
Gombrich notes that the number "three" which features notably in Hegel's and
Popper's work is not a monopoly of either. While it may be true that
Popper's idea of World 3 bears some resemblance to Hegel's Objective Spirit,
Gombrich's explanation is historical, even biographical: nobody who has been
brought up in the traditions of German idealism as Popper has can escape
problems of this kind.
But as Gombrich notes, Popper saw rather as a Kantian. Now, Kant felt the
German school of idealists had betrayed him. He took things very
personally, Kant did. He repudiated Fichte, for example, and Gombrich surmises
that
he would have done the same with Hegel, for Hegel "betrays" (that personal
word again) the main thrust of Kant's philosophy by presenting a kind of
"gnostic" philosophy, an idea of knowledge which Kant always rejected.
Popper was good at reading Kant, who is an otherwise obscure German writer in
terms of style -- Grice preferred to read Kant in English and would use the
older translation. Kant constantly struggles with his formulations. If he
had allowed himself to write in Latin, as Baumann did in his Æsthetica, it
would have been easier. German was at that time Kant was writing it (his
original surname was Cant, since his father was from Scotland) a very unformed
language for philosophical formulation, while it fit Hegel, since he used
this kind of language often to impress rather than to enlighten.
And if Popper did criticise Hegel, Hegel was after all some pompous
fellow who invited this kind of ridicule. Popper writes that he means his
criticism of Hegel as a kind of "scherzo". His attack is light-hearted
because
Popper thinks that Plato and Marx were worthier opponents.
While Gombrich speaks of 'style', his view of the story of art is certainly
not Hegelian. Hegel thought the history of all branches of culture can be
logically deduced from the exact place from which they start. Every age,
Hegel claims, has an ESSENCE which expresses itself in a field such as art,
and that in a way if you dig deep enough in art you will find the same
spirit expressed as you would find in law or in religion. This is a sort of
unitary idea. One almost might use the term "totalitarian". Everything
hangs together logically because it is the unfolding of the Spirit. It's a
logical dialectic process in Hegel.
But Gombrich doesn't believe that. He defines himself as a INDIVIDUALIST.
Gombrich believes that individuals ARE influenced by each other and there
are such things as movements, and there are such things as the logic of the
situation, of inventions, of group formation, which accounts for
similarities of what various people do. But Gombrich notably rejects that
there is
a logical necessity of one thing deriving from another in the way in
which Hegel does. So, Gombrich rather agrees with Popper that the freedom of
THE INDIVIDUAL either to join or stay outside must always be asserted in
history, including the 'story' (as Gombrich preferred to spell this) of art --
informed by his aesthetic theory. Revolutions in art are thus very often
self-appointed and self-styled. But, as Gombrich notes, there are thousands
of artists working at present who are working in very different STYLES,
which would have confused Hegel. Perhaps the critics think they are not
characteristic of our age or whatever, but that is in a way done by fiat. As
an example, Gombrich notes that a critic who had tried to tell the story
of the art of his time in 1890 would certainly not have known of van Gogh
and hardly have known of Cezanne or Gauguin. And there is power in
hindsight. Also luck. As Gombrich notes, whatever rises to the top for a time
(say
Andy Warhol) you can NOT foretell. Gombrich was interested in this respect
in a metaphorical comparison, as when he talked of "currents" in history,
for example -- if not 'the story' of art. For a current and a wave can be
predicated up to a point, but when it comes to what is known as
"turbulence," when the pressure becomes too great, it is impossible to
predict where
a particular molecule will be. As Gombrich loved to say, and often in his
many public lectures, we are such molecules; here's always turbulence.
And Gombrich claims that it is RATIONAL to state that there are certain
things which can NOT be predicted. It is well known in many fields that
there are limits to prediction. Sometimes they are the limits of our
knowledge; sometimes, as in the case of turbulence, they go a little deeper
than
that. And then there's the famous Laplace Demon about which Popper has
written a certain amount -- which Gombrich read: the predictors in
"Indeterminism in Quantum Physics and in Classical Physics". There is, for
instance, in
any apparatus, random movement of the molecules, and you can't do much
about that. It is like a turbulence whose outcome you can't predict its
outcome. There's always "noise", as Gombrich would put it -- certainly a lot
of
noise in our system.
Gombrich applies what Popper calls 'evolutionary epistemology', which
Popper develops quite thoroughly. Popper differs here from Kant, for Kant's
view
of REASON is a purely anthropological one, even if a transcendental one.
Kant never asks himself how a squirrel [or squarrel, as Grice prefers to
spell this, Grice's squarrel is called Toby -- in his second book, "The
conception of value"] can jump from branch to branch, whether the squirrel
also has an a priori form of space. Yet that is something which is entirely
outside of Kant's interests. Gombrich thinks that the aesthetic theorist
can develop an aesthetic theory (where 'aesthetic concepts' as theoretical
terms) according to which "aesthesis" is a method of, as Gombrich puts it,
"creating responses". Popper writes that language enables us to tell
ourselves a story, to console oneself by telling oneself a story. You also can
whistle in the dark. There are all sorts of things by which an INDIVIDUAL
finds a kind of shelter and consolation in his own creation. This is for
Gombrich a very important part of an aesthetic theory. It creates, call it
a "third world," one which is of the individual's own making, and which
creates a kind of home fondle mind. This is not an "expressionist" aesthetic
theory, but more of an instrumentalis theory (vide Catherine Lord:
"Griceian instrumentalism", The British Journal of Aesthetics). It is
further, a
Popperian theory, rather, of "trial-and-error", even if Popper did not coin
this catchphrase. Gombrich applies this not to his field, which was
iconography, to the development of Western music. The story of music,
especially
in Italy, shows that somehow, gradually and step-by-step, a system has been
developed. Gombrich thinks there is something "objective" in the "effects"
of "great" music. Verdi called Wagner the tympanic-membrane-breaker, and
Grice did think that Wagner's Meistersinger was for children, but Grice
liked Mahler's Song of the Earth as the most sublime piece of music ever
written. Gombrich here brings in Plato, whom Gombrich sees as having been
mainly
right in this respect. In Plato's
aesthetic theory (not the mimetic one that Omar K. was referring to) what
is stressed are the effects, as Gombrich does, rather than anything else.
Plato had a magical aesthetic theory: certain keys have certain effects on
the soul, like a drug or spell; therefore certain things should be
avoided, since they prove displeasing, while other should be encouraged as
they
bring joy, or rather enjoyment -- and enjoyment in aesthesis is the keyword
to any aesthetic theory.
So, Gombrich believes that there are such aesthetic perceptual effects.
But he does believe that Plato probably underrated the plasticity of the
soul. Just as in food there is such a thing as an "acquired taste", so there
is an acquired taste, and aesthetic theory has to provide a conceptual
analysis for it. There is also "brain-washing' — the feeling that since
everybody likes something, I must try it myself, and maybe I can make myself
like it. All this plays a part for Gombrich. He would NOT say that
everybody starts from scratch in aesthetic theory, by any means. But you could
say
without overstressing it that tea (which has become a different type of
ceremony from that China), people obviously noticed a response, that this
rather elaborate affair in which you pluck leaves from a tree and brew them,
or pour hot water on them, has a PLEASANT effect of the kind that goes
much beyond individuals, from a culture that come to us via Russia, and
still is known by the Chinese name of "ch'a".
Gombrich uses Popper's idea of 'falsification'. His example is "The
Beatles". There must have been, the aesthetic story-teller must tell us, any
number of other Merseyside pop groups at that time who "tried to be original".
Yet they are forgotten, unless you read the local press you know, and
write about them. Cfr. this lovely compilation, "Songs we forgot to remember"
(Grice found that implicatural, in that 'remember' is for him, but not
Benjamin, a 'factive'). The Beatles, because of that brilliant manager they
had, Brian Epstein hit it off. They were not 'falsified'. That is, in
Gombrich's view, a kind of Darwinian survival affair. But then they
did started in "The Cavern", too -- another Darwinian landsmark.
Gombrich notes that there may be a 'cold' ring to speak of 'falsification'
here, for there are many variants that the aesthetic story-teller must
tell. We would NOT want to say that some of the variants which fall by the
wayside are not worthy, even if they never were given a chance, except as in a
footnote to Gombrich's "Story of Art", say. Even within the work of an
INDIVIDUAL, as Gombrich notes, there may have been starts which he might have
developed. Gombrich remembers while in Vienna listening to some VERY
early quartets by Mozart, where Gombrich (again not his iconographic field)
noticed "things" which Mozart never went on with — he followed another line —
and there's little the aesthetic historian can do about it, but mention it
in a footnote.
For Gombrich, INDIVIDUALS learn and study 'aesthetic theory' from their
predecessors, and therefore each individual starts from some base line or
other. Of course, some never get beyond the base line, and only do the
well-tried thing. Others, for some reason or other, which may be external
pressures, introduce variations or MUTATIONS which work. For example, Grice
liked to provide variations on a theme by Ravel, for
example -- back at Clifton, and for his graduation, he played the Pavane
'with a twist'). So Gombrich thinks it is quite possible to build up such
an aesthetic theory — it would be slightly arid and one-sided — by which
one could speak of a kind of "unintentional" creation of art -- very
UNGriceian on the face of it. It would be a little bit exaggerated, but after
all there are many art styles — think ancient Egypt, or Byzantium in Ravenna
— in which, as everybody says, the INDIVIDUALS were craftsmen. And as
Gombrich points out, English art and Latin 'ars' translates 'techne' which is
Greek for "craft". Tradition (or the -isms [as O. K might prefer] can be
very strong, but there is still a drift in a particular direction.
Intention, pace Grice, ain't everything for Gombrich. Gombrich gives an example
from not his field (iconographic aesthetic theory): Edgar Allan Poe, the
inventor of the whodunit. Gombrich casually refers to the incredible
snow-balling of one little story, which Poe possibly never dreamed of.
Gombrich's keyword is the iconographic-iconologic distinction, which trades
on another keyword: image. There is a "problem", Gombrich says, in
representing something -- as Peirce and Grice well knew. The starting point is
what is known as a "conceptual" image — and image is also a keyword in
Grice's philosophy of perception. You know, the emoticon, the iconic round
circle with the two dots and the nose and the mouth -- or just the smiley.
But if I want to make a portrait of Grice, or a statue of him, in Carrara
marble, I have to go beyond this pretty much. Here we have one
particular problem of creating a "CORRECT" or acceptable image of what you
are
seeing, Grice seating there, say. And in this respect, you can arrive at a
state where you say this is the "correct" representation (or portrait or
picture -- this is NOT Wittgenstein's 'picture' theory of meaning) of what is
seen from a particular point. There is a very artistic photograph of
Grice at Merton College. It's more than a photograph. It's art! Now there
are
two issues Gombrich thinks that have to be mentioned here and which are
sometimes confused. The first is that, in Gombrich's view, there is no real
problem in a three-dimensional representation. I mean, from an artistic
point of view, there are lots of problems; but you can make a facsimile of a
three-dimensional object, such as Grice, or a grice (a sort of extinct pig
once popular in Scotland and the north of England) A doppelgaenger Grice,
if you like. You see plenty of things like these grices in the Natural
History Museum -- They are "like life". Tthe two are nearly or fully
indistinguishable, unless you apply certain tests. So Gombrich doesn't think
this
is a very great problem. After all, there are artificial flowers,
artificial
teeth, artificial eyes, and why not, artificial Grice.
But Gombrich submits that there is the much GREATER problem of
TWO-dimensional representation of a
three-dimensional reality. Now this you can say is ALWAYS a bit of a
problem because by and large we don't keep our eyes still. Our reality is
always in motion because WE are in motion. And the question of what is
actually
involved is even a little more complex for Gombrich, because we usually
look with TWO eyes (In "The sense of the Martians", Grice speaks of
Martians having four eyes, but he is being a philosopher). However, from a
certain distance there is no such problem because we don't see 3-D in things
that are far away. And the photograph has shown that, well, you can record
very faithfully what is seen from a particular point of view. That is to
say, what is OCCLUDED (a term Gombrich loved) and "what is seen" (and
ordinary-language term Grice loved, and which is always factive) when one
stands ten yards from the window and look out into Central Park —this tree is
in front of this pond, and so on and so forth. You must keep your eyes
still, and you must measure, and you must do all these tricks, in order to
achieve this likeness of a particular view. An engraving on a wall is not
exactly what a person would see from a different point of view, because it
brings in things like the slanting walls which are different.
Gombrich thinks it is more interesting to ask why in aesthetic theory this
kind of "solution", of an accurate mapping of what is seen from a
particular point of view, has only been achieved once or perhaps twice, and
Italy
was involved on both occasions. The first was in ancient Graeco-Roman art
(the frescoes at Pompeii, say) the other in the Italian Renaissance. The
answer is, Gombrich thinks, because we don't relate to "the world" in this
way, in spite of what Grice says in his "Causal Theory of Perception". We
move through the world. I touch a thing, as J. J. Gibson would say, as a
thing "in the round", which I can grasp. And not only because I have
tactile memories. All these are "false starts" (cfr. Grice's discussion of
the
Molyneux problem in "Some remarks about the senses"), but because this is
how our sensory system works for Grice -- and for Gombrich. We really SEE
the world in three dimensions. And the REDUCTION of this experience to
merely two dimensions -- what Italians call a 'design' -- is a tremendous
achievement. But many civilizations didn't aim at this achievement and didn't
get it. (On the other hand, Einstein toyed with four- and five-dimensional
geometries, and see where it led him).
With the Ancient Egyptians, for Gombrich, it was a kind of pictographic
art. They wanted to say, here is a man, and here is a boat. It worked for
them. After all, even today, a street map of East Hampton still captures
reality. A diagram captures some sort of reality and the purpose of Egyptian
aesthetic theory is certainly a very static preservation of the world in
which a man had lived in his lifetime, the important things there. So there
is no contradiction there. But it was the narrative purpose of Graeco-Roman
statuary, and the underlying aesthetic theory, the dramatic evocation of a
particular event, which led to the other mimetic, more realistic approach.
And while Gombrich does believe that the Graeco-Romans had a cumulative
process by which they corrected the schema and came closer and closer to,
let us say, the rendering of the human body, Gombrich thinks that Egyptian
art (and their underlying aesthetic theory) was "marvelously" (an adverb
Gombrich loved) adapted to the purpose of aesthetic theory in that society.
Gombrich thinks this was more in the way of drift than in the way of
conscious search. And Gombrich thinks that is almost "analytic" (not a word he
would use), that art and its underlying aesthetic theory become adapted to
the needs of the society, or to this or that individual within the society.
For Gombrich, there's the ecological niche of the image. That's what we
do. There are needs, but there are
many needs. There may even be a dominant need. For instance, in the
Middle Ages, some say it was religious art that was the dominant need
(although
Grice preferred the chivalry narratives in their most secular aspects). In
Gombrich's society it is "Art" with a capital "A". To create something
which has prestige value and expression value. Something perhaps entirely
different, although not so for Christie's, who know -- cfr. keyword in
aesthetic theory: art world.
Gombrich hastens add, whenever pressed, that he is no subjectivist or
relativist. He thinks that there are very clear standards of accuracy, even if
you have to state them at first -- for example, the standards of fabricating
a Griceian urn. Another examples, since Gombrich loved maps (he would
never get lost in New York city, but found London more Wittgensteinian --
recall what Wittgenstein says about a city and a language -- By what standard
is
this an accurate map of Long Island? If you have a street map of East
Hampton, including the beach, you don't terribly worry about the curvature of
the earth -- Gombrich loved that phrase, 'terribly'. But if you have a map
of the whole of the United States of America, it becomes a bit of a
problem -- with the Colorado Canyon, etcetera.
So, back to the Ancient Egyptians, Gombrich thinks that it is the IMAGE
(the icon) that was different, not the world. Vide: Grice, "The Causal
Theory of Perception". Grice can get more complicated when he brings in the
Martians, side by side with the Aegyptians. (Grice is concerned with the
Martians having four eyes, and using the four of them, whether they would be
happy with the Earthian report that the Martian 'sees' things as humans do.
Perhaps they use two verbs: x-ing (for the upper set of eyes) and y-ing (for
the lower set of eyes). But the Ancient Egyptians, we can be sure, use
images for a purpose which is entirely different from that of the Martians.
Just
as in advertising, as Gombrich notes, a poster can stress very different
things to sell a product: map-like, or diagrammatic, or grotesque, or any
other way.
Gombrich even stresses the Darwinian point of view as far as realism is
concerned — the anti-relativistic point of view — by pointing out that
there are these astonishing things in "nature", if not 'artifice', like moths
which look LIKE leaves -- a living organism using mimicry, protective
colouring, and the like. A moth has all the characteristics of the leaf --
only it isn't one. It, to echo Wittgenstein, looks like a leaf. And surely it
must look like a leaf to a BIRD and not just to Kant. Otherwise, were it
not for the bird (nevermind Kant) ithe leaf-like mimcry of the moth would
never have developed. A moth looked like a leaf also to an ancient Egyptian
and to a cubist like Picasso (nevermind a Martian). One cannot deny this.
Gombrich goes further. He thinks that Nature has various "styles" (and D.
Ritchie was mentioning expressionism). If you want to be Darwinian, there
are these "eyes" which develop on a caterpillar which have a frightening
characteristic. They are expressionist "eyes". That is, they are exaggerated
"eyes." But, oddly enough, they do the trick of deterring, warding off the
predator -- again the bird -- because they look LIKE eyes -- as in "You
are being observed". And obviously predators (like the common-or-garden
robin) have some sort of inbred reaction. The robin is frightened by the
exaggerated, warning "eyes" of the caterpillar. And the caterpillar develops
and exploits the frightened reaction of its predators, if not in a Griceian
way (For the way to be Griceian, the caterpillar should intend that the
robin will recognise the frightening intention on the caterpillar's part and be
frightened by the RECOGNITION of this higher-order intention -- but this is
more like Walt Disney's 'haunted mansion' type of scenario). Nature is
simpler than Grice, and that's why he coined the phrase 'non-natural' for all
the phenomena that lie outside it (even if they have a 'root' in it -- he
was a naturalist at heart).
From this point of view, for Gombrich, aeshtetic theory comes back to the
problem of "response", so he is a latter-day behaviourist, if you like. If
you look at the matter of "likeness", it is NOT "A is like B", but rather,
"A and B elicit a similar response" -- a functional likeness. To use and
adapt an example by Gombrich, Wittgenstein might grant that the bait which
the angler puts on his hook creates a response in the fish to snap.
Sometimes, the bait is LIKE a fly, but, and this would possibly confuse
Wittgenstein, sometimes it ain't -- unless it's some sort of 'abstract style'
type
of bait. But the likeness is in the response. That is the key problem here
for Gombrich: a bait is as a bait does.
Gombrich is careful here, almost a conceptual analyst. For we sometimes do
speak of what "actually looks like. If you see a thing in infra-red light,
or under an electro-scanning microscope, the thing might look very
different. Grice was very interested in refuting Wittgenstein about all the
nonsense Wittgenstein says about
a fork not looking like a fork. Indeed Grice makes fun of Wittgenstein
who says in the "Philosophical Investigations" that a fork can only look
"like a flower", or a leaf. But certainly, to use Grice's example, a grice can
look like a grice, and a horse can look like a horse. Indeed, it may be
difficult for a horse NOT to look like a horse -- and look like a grice, say.
(A grice is a sort of extinct pig once common in the north of England --
near Hadrian's Wall -- that Hadrian, rude as he was, never visited). From
that point of view you can always quibble, and Grice loved that! But, as
Gombrich stresses (he liked to stress) the response is the same. And the
information value is always the same. If they send photographs from Mars or
from Saturn nobody quibbles with the telescopes.
Talking of telescopes, we are, as Gombrich liked to put it, keyed to a
certain scale -- what would be the point, except for Dodgson to be witty in
"Sylvie and Bruno", to have a 1:1 scale map of East Hampton. You might just
well use East Hampton as its own map (and in any case, who would get LOST in
East Hampton -- Bridgehampton is a totally different animal!). As Gombrich
puts it, we are even "programmed", as it were, to perceive a certain scale
in a certain way. Gombrich makes a reference from not his field
(iconographic story) but literature. The Irish writer Swift knew that very
well. He
had what Gombrich would call a "dreadful time" with the Lilliputians. But
also with the Brobdingnags! Gombrich knew HIS English literature! Can we
perceive the world as a Lilliputian or a Brobdingnag? Can we 'comprehend' the
world like them. Well, for Gombrich, it all depends on what we mean by
"comprehending", or as Grice would put it, how we come to provide sufficient
and necessary conditions for it: how we provide a 'conceptual analysis'
of it. But certainly there
are what Gombrich may call a "borderline case", like what is going on in a
Stephen Hawking black hole, where we are very doubtful whether we
'comprehend' what we 'see'. Even with an ordinary optical microscope, to use
another of Gombrich's usual exaples, we say that we "see" this or that very
little thing, and we speak of what they "look" "like". (Grice enjoyed
discussing with Albritton on this: a person may look dangerous-looking). And
we
can even IMPLICATE that they do not look like that. We make them, as Gombrich
would put it, "visible". And 'visum' is a coinage by Grice, which he
later rejected as otiose ("I see
a visum of a cow").
But aesthetic theory is about the pleasing, and the PLEASING is in the
human mind, or 'soul' as Grice would prefer, sure (He thinks that 'mind' is
overrated). But the geometry of the arrangement of the mushrooms in a
circle, as you wander down the Sussex downs, say, is surely an "objective"
fact
(if you have to use Gombrich's adjective). That is, we can say that if you
measure the circumference in relation to the diameter of the circle, you
get the figure "pi," or whatever else (even if as Grice notes, for Plato,
'circle' is an idea, not something we _see_ with our eyes. Circles we see with
our eyes are often imperfect (where "often" may get disimplicated, "if not
always"). As Gombrich notes, we know that green is a certain wave-length,
and that our eyes are so constructed that we only respond, our retina
does, to a very limited range of wave-lengths. And so whether it makes sense
to say that what is "really" there are waves or light quanta, well, from the
one point of view, this is what they "really" are. Goethe, for instance,
was furious with Newton's old fashioned mechanistic theory of colour, yet
Grice thought that 'nothing could be green and red all over" was synthetic a
priori, so there! On the other hand, Gombrich doesn't terribly worry --
he loved that phrase, 'terribly' -- because he sees things in terms of an
evolving organism: our eyes as instruments to catch certain waves. It's the
same with smells (only different -- and Grice was brilliant in bringing it
all together -- the five senses of aisthesis in "Some remarks about the
senses"). Think a hounddog's nose. It must have a very quick trigger reaction
(Watkins discusses this in terms of the smell of a fox emitting certain
types of "signals" to the hounddog's nose). It may be different with Grice's
nose, the philosopher, and still different with the grice's nose, the
extinct pig.
Gombrich always resisted the category of Latin ars' and Greek 'tekhne'.
What people call "art" in various civilizations differs enormously -- even
between the Upper East Side and elsewhere! In fact, Gombrich claims, HIS
'concept' of art is an eighteenth-century concept, as in the phrase, the
"fine arts" -- what the French call the 'beautiful arts', as opposed to the
ugly arts (F. N. Sibley said that many regards toads as ugly, but he didn't).
After all, even earlier and even later, as Gombrich notes, were the "art"
of healing, and the "art" of love, and the "art" of war, and the "art" of
who knows what. It really is a term for "skill". It's different with
Grice's favourite term, "Æsthesis", "sensatio". Now, like Popper, and unlike
Grice, Gombrich is of the opinion that one should waste a lot of time on
definitions or conceptual analysis, even if it's required at some point (or
other). But one must be aware that our grouping of, let us say, Lascaux
cavern paintings of bisons under "art," YET the arrow-heads which may be found
there NOT under "art," it is all about our point of view, our categorising.
People do enthuse how marvelously "naturalistic" these old representations
are. However, Gombrich is careful here: since few have encountered a
bison, one can only guess what a bison looks "like". On top of that, as
Gombrich
notes, we have very little idea of how those representations (or icons, to
use his catchphrase) were actually "seen". After all, it is a known fact
that those caverns were VERY _dark_. Gombrich thinks that these icon-making
people — these medicine men, or whatever they were, what can we know —
may have had something like pattern books. They may have walked around
with skins on which there were models.
On top of everything, when it comes to aesthesis and aesthetic theory, as
Gombrich discusses in the case of the robin being frightened by the
expressionistic 'eyes' on the caterpillar, the separation between
human and sub-human is not so clear, as Stephen Stich knows. Particularly
now after the works on
primates, Nim Chimpsky and company! A chimp, Gombrich might grant, has
some aesthetic sense. If Grice claimed the Martians did, one can't see why we
cannot claim the chimps see things in their own factive ways. Again it's
back to "The Causal theory of Perception". Gombrich gives the example of
Jane Goodall's chimps, who used to fish for termites with blades of grass. An
interesting thing. Gombrich reaslises that there are astounding abilities
in chimps to perceive things aesthetically -- if one allows the redundancy
-- to sense things aesthetically -- say a banana. An astounding thing
Gombrich mentions is a chimp who looks
into a mirror, and has a spot on his forehead. The chimp can go on and
remove it himself.
There is something Popperian about Gombrich. Mind, Gombrich, like Popper,
did not dislike criticism (the impicature is that that is not equivalent to
they liking it!). In Gombrich's view, Popper disliked FRIVOLOUS criticism.
Popper's standards of what he demands of a knowledge of his own work,
before he is criticised, are very exacting. This is understandable— Gombrich
shared this view. He found it iirksome and irritating to be told at great
length what you got wrong, when you actually said that this is not so. Grice
sometimes felt the same. Once Neil Smith approached him and told him, "You
just confuse the perlocutionary effect with the illocutionary effect".
Grice's answer was along the line: "Darling" (he was being ironic), "I might be
MISTAKEN, but not 'confused'". (Surely a result of his linguistic botany).
And since most people, Gombrich submits, don't like to read, and some
prefer to criticise without careful reading, it is quite true that most people
act, as you know, on rumours. All they know, let us say, of Popper's work
is falsification and such things. And all the qualifications and
discussions and examples he
used are missed — you have to _read_ him, or as Grice would put it, "his
books" ("I always found it very difficult to read Aristotle -- but his works
are an altogether pleasurable different thing"). And this takes time. And
therefore they prefer to rush in without having done it — this happened
to Gombrich, and it happens to everyone, only Grice was, unlike Queen
Victoria and her friends, 'amused'. People nowadays are not very patient
readers. And they think that if they ask "where does he stand?"—you know,
that's
a
famous way of looking at it—they have a kind of cognitive map, and they
think "ah, he's that fellow who is for this and against that," and then
they THINK they can build up the whole thing themselves. But they can't, or
they Kant (ouch!). So what Popper wants is to be read carefully. THEN he IS
very interested in criticism. But it's true that this is asking a lot (or
ALOT, as some prefer to spell this), for Popper might say: "Well, you
don't know that in the footnote to this and that I have discussed this
very question".
Gombrich goes on to mention an anecdote involving Popper. At the School of
Economics they wanted to introduce one of those rapid-reading courses --
"speed-reading." Well, Popper did go to the director and ask him whether he
could ALSO introduce a "slow-reading" course.
McEvoy comments:
"Popper is right: there is more need to train students in slow, careful
reading than in speed-reading."
Perhaps it all had to do with the 'also'. Consider variations:
POPPER (to Director): I hear you are considering offering a speed-reading
course -- with three credits, in my programme?
DIRECTOR: Yes.
POPPER: In fairness to stuff, perhaps you should also consider offering a
slow-reading course.
DIRECTOR: Are you joking?
POPPER: In a Viennese sort of way, no.
Cheers,
Speranza
REFERENCES
Aristotle, on aisthesis
Cicero on sensatio.
Gombrich
Grice, Some remarks about the senses.
-- The causal theory of perception -- repr. in Swartz, "Perceving, sensing
and knowing"
Kant, English translation cited by Grice, "The Kant Lectures".
Kosuth: analytic and synthetic.
Popper.
Sibley, Aesthesis
Warnock, On what is seen, in Sibley.
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