The Pigeon within Us All: A Reply to Three Critics

Abstract

Marx Wartofsky and I struck up a friendship when we were fellow graduate students at Columbia in the early 1950s. The basis of the friendship, apart from the peculiar chemistry of any personal relationship, was the fact that we both had considerable interest in what Richard Wollheim was felicitously to call painting as an art. Each of us had some practical experience in painting, but Marx had in addition a philosophical interest in it that I did not especially share. I was, I think, closer than he to the artworld of that time, in which at least the kind of aesthetics on offer at Columbia seemed to have nothing whatever to contribute. It was, moreover, a moment when aesthetics was pretty marginal within philosophy itself. Abstract Expressionism and Analytical Philosophy had little in common in those years except that both were novel and exciting, so I was able to compartmentalize the two interests, which I saw no special reason to bring together. Marx, by contrast, was eager to show that art was far more significant for the mainstream questions of philosophy than would readily have been allowed under prevailing attitudes. For him, aesthetics rightly done would be the queen of cognitive studies, in that the way the world presents itself to is in some way inflected by the changing representational strategies of pictorial art: we what we paint, to paraphrase what Gombrich wrote in Art and Illusion.2 This was a fairly daring view. Art would have been regarded as one of the symbolic forms recognized in Cassirer's philosophyand a way of worldmaking in the later views of Nelson Goodman, who was much influenced by Cassirer. Both of their philosophies tended to keep art pretty well confined to its own domain, however, so that what went on in it was largely independent of what went on elsewhere in the symbolic array. There was a somewhat different view of that array in the air, that of Irwin Panofsky, according to which each component of a cultural array expressed a single overarching view of the world-what one might consider the defining form, or the Geist, of a given culture. So the theology, philosophy, architecture, moral codes, costumes, etc. of a given culture all expressed in different modes and media the same outlook and attitude, which Panofsky thought it was the task of a new science-iconology-to identify and differentiate. These cultural homologues would collectively be what I imagine Walter Benjamin had in mind by a in the passage that Noel Carroll cites. Each culture had a different perception in the sense that people in Byzantium perceived the world differently from members of different iconological wholes. Perceptions are more or less what we might call outlooks or philosophies: to be a Byzantine was to see the world in ways that can be recovered by attending to the various symbolic forms of Byzantine culture. There was no implication that the sensory system was itself a cultural transform-not, at least, until Panofsky proposed that perspective was a symbolic form. He meant to imply that perspective was a key to Renaissance culture, refracted through that culture's other symbolic forms. But that may have suggested that perspectival vision itself belongs to the cultural array, rather than to the sensory system of normal humans, leaving us to wonder how the Byzantines themselves saw objects receding in space, since they did not, any more than the Chinese, employ our perspective in rendering the world pictorially. This would weaken if not obliterate the distinction between perception as cultural outlook and as an innate precultural mode of relating to the world, of a piece in this respect with the sensory systems of animals. I do not know the extent to which Wartofsky concerned himself with the larger picture I have crudely sketched. That com-