CUNLIFFE PAPER 2 Wittgom''s_therapeutic_projects_double_spaced_6_sep__

WITTGENSTEIN’S AND GOMBRICH’S THERAPEUTICPROJECTS AND ART EDUCATION Introduction Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sir Ernst Gombrich were arguably the most important twentieth century thinkers in

WITTGENSTEIN’S AND GOMBRICH’S THERAPEUTIC

PROJECTS AND ART EDUCATION

Leslie Cunliffe is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education and Lifelong

Learning, University of Exeter, where he runs the PGCE art course His

publications have appeared in Innovations in Education and Teaching

International, the International Journal of Art and Design Education, The

International Encyclopedia of Communication, the Oxford Review of

Education, the Journal of Aesthetic Education, the Journal of Cognitive

Education and Psychology, the Journal of Empirical Aesthetics, and the

International Journal of Education through Art New articles have been

accepted for the Journal of Curriculum Studies and the Journal of Aesthetic

Education He has authored several chapters and exhibited at many

venues including the Edinburgh Festival, Royal Academy of Art, and the

Royal Exchange In 2009 he gave a keynote address at the M U S E

conference on assessment and creativity in higher art education in

Savannah, USA

Contact address:

Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Education,

University of Exeter, Heavitree Road, Exeter, EX1 2LU,

UK.

L.Cunliffe@exeter.ac.uk

Submitted to the British Journal of Philosophy of Education

Abstract

This article explores Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Sir Ernst Gombrich’s

therapeutic turn of thinking in relationship to art education The first

section gives an overview of the therapeutic approach that hinges

Wittgenstein’s and Gombrich’s work The second section explores some

misconceptions as common themes that were the target of their

therapeutic projects The final part extends the therapeutic insights to

dissolve some current misunderstandings in art education, which could

also open up the possibility of forming an alternative understanding

WITTGENSTEIN’S AND GOMBRICH’S THERAPEUTIC

PROJECTS AND ART EDUCATION

Introduction

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sir Ernst Gombrich were arguably the most

important twentieth century thinkers in their respective fields of

philosophy and art This article explores their thinking in relationship to

art education The first section gives an overview of the therapeutic

approach that hinged Wittgenstein’s and Gombrich’s work The second

section analyses some common themes that make up their therapeutic

projects, which is done by highlighting Wittgenstein’s and Gombrich’s

systemic thinking, as both tended to see a single issue as connected up to

its multi-dimensional background The final part extends their therapeutic

insights to dissolve some misunderstandings in art education, which

might also open up a new understanding Although the article is mainly

concerned with fine art, the therapeutic endeavour applies equally to

other areas of art education

The reader needs to keep in mind that the focus of the article is on art

education as opposed to practices of art that are not accountable to

reason or needing educational justification For example, one rationale for

an educational process is that it should develop and refine a variety of

skillful knowledge for use in practice This article condenses such

knowledge into two components: skills for making a variety of art, and

skills and insight for articulating an understanding of art from different

cultures and times

1 The Therapeutic Approach

Although Wittgenstein and Gombrich were born and raised in Vienna and

ended up living and working in England, they never seem to have met

Had this happened it is likely there would have been some disagreement

given Gombrich shared Karl Popper’s negative view of Wittgenstein’s later

philosophy Even so, their work is hinged by what, after Wittgenstein, can

be described as a therapeutic turn in thinking as both had the tendency to

deal with problems “like the treatment of an illness" (Wittgenstein, 2001,

#255) This aim has a double aspect: the first is curative or negative, that

is, it removes misunderstandings rather than produces an original

understanding; the second is preventative and could be positive, as

clearing up misunderstandings can create a potential space to establish a

more perspicuous understanding: “The problems are solved, not by giving

new information, but by rearranging what we have always known”

(Wittgenstein, 2001, #109)

Wittgenstein and Gombrich had unusual practices For example,

Wittgenstein’s later work does not advance new theories but is concerned

with eliminating misconceptions that cause confusion Gombrich was not

a typical art historian His range and depth of knowledge across a variety

of disciplines gets marshaled for the much bigger enterprise of exposing

inadequate theorizing about culture, and the way art is made and can be

justifiably understood (Gombrich,1996a) In this respect Gombrich’s work

manifested a parallel therapeutic purpose to that of Wittgenstein’s

Wittgenstein’s and Gombrich’s motivation to engage in a therapeutic turn

in thinking for philosophy and art can be linked to their formative years in

Vienna where there was an ongoing interest in reconceptualising

practices McGuinness’ (1998, p.39) description of the emergence of

psychoanalysis as a “vision of how a problem could (though with great

difficulty) be taken up by the roots and put into a quite new way of

thinking” reflects this wider concern to rethink academic disciplines.

Wittgenstein and Gombrich engaged the new way of thinking to map a

more satisfactory understanding of mind for their respective disciplines

For both thinkers, the operation of mind involved what Wittgenstein

(2001, #415) described as “the natural history of human beings” that he

tellingly contrasted with natural science, as the latter proves incapable of

doing justice to what it means to be human The natural history of human

beings is played out when a person acquires a culture’s picture of the

world and its related set of judgments, as: “Commanding, questioning,

storytelling, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking,

eating, drinking, playing” (Wittgenstein, 2001, #25) Such an entrance

into culture can easily become a form of entrancement: “A picture held us

captive And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and

language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein, 2001,

#115) Wittgenstein thought philosophy was not just a tool to be deployed

against philosophers who have beguiled people with false, captivating

pictures but also one that can usefully aid the philosopher in everyone

(Kenny, 1998), as described in this statement: “Work on philosophy, - like

work in architecture in many respects – is really more work on oneself On

one’s own conception On how one sees things (And what one expects of

them.)”(Wittgenstein, 1998, p.24)

To break out of captivity, a given picture and its related practices have to

be surveyed from an alternative aspect and more distant perspective

(Owen, 2003) This form of perspicuity can be illustrated by Wittgenstein’s

and Gombrich’s therapeutic rejection of Freud’s belief in psychoanalysis

as a science of the mind, while retaining his deeper insight that problems

are best surveyed from an alternative point of view Freud surveyed

individual illusions from the wider perspective of unconscious conflicts

(Heaton, 2000) Wittgenstein and Gombrich surveyed the illusions that

beguile people from the wider perspective of cultural practices, principally

by using genealogy and perspicuity

Wittgenstein (1981, #273) described the role of genealogy and

perspicuity for surveying the illusions ingrained in cultural practices in this

way: “The aim is a …… complete survey of everything that may produce

unclarity And this survey must extend over a wide domain, for the roots

of our ideas reach a long way.” Wittgenstein’s description overlaps with

Gombrich’s (1993, p.161) approach to art: “My ambition is to explain To

look at the development of art from a slightly greater distance To see

what is going on there.” Wittgenstein (2001, # 464) aimed “to turn latent

nonsense into patent nonsense” To achieve this aim, he adopted several

methods, not just one: “There is not a philosophical method, though there

are indeed methods, like different therapies.” (Wittgenstein, 2001, P1,

#133) When Gombrich was asked about his method, he replied: “I just

want common sense! This is my only method”(Gombrich, 1991a, p.139).

Moser (2001) states: “Never did Gombrich formulate a theory of art or

hermeneutic”, a remark echoed by Gombrich: "There is no "ism"

connected to my name I have never pledged myself to one theory,… My

ambitions were limited to not writing any nonsense" (Lepsky, 1991, p.9)

Wittgenstein’s and Gombrich’s use of genealogy and perspicuity to survey

practices is analogous to the way crime gets investigated Like detective

work, gathering the evidence can be a slow process (Blair, 2006)

Gombrich spent over fifty years working on the content that eventually

got published as The Preference for the Primitive and Wittgenstein at

least sixteen years writing Philosophical Investigations Both books aimed

to establish a better picture of mind for art and philosophy

2 Overlapping themes

Wittgenstein’s and Gombrich’s therapeutic projects were aimed at

dissolving what they felt to be deeply rooted misconceptions that

emerged in modernity but which continue to inhabit people’s mental

furniture and practices The misconceptions belong to two kinds The first

is to represent thinking and creativity as an inner process; the second is

feeding only one side of an argument The ramifications of these two ways

of thinking will now be discussed as a series of fallacies

i Inner processes

Psychoanalysis

Wittgenstein and Gombrich admired Freud’s persuasive, elegant style of

writing and deep learning For example, Wittgenstein respected Freud for

“having something to say” (Rhees, 1997, p 41) However, they had

misgivings about the way Freud’s work was used to explain the operation

of mind in their respective disciplines (Gombrich, 1984; Bouveresse,

1995)

Wittgenstein’s evaluations of Freud’s achievement are dispersed in letters

and notes students recorded from lectures and conversations (Barrett,

1997) In a letter to Malcolm (2001, pp.100-101) Wittgenstein described

Freud’s thinking as “fishy” and “charming” while simultaneously referring

to “Freud’s extraordinary scientific achievement”, a statement at odds

with the previous judgment that implies Freud beguiled people into

believing psychoanalysis to be a science of the mind This view is

corroborated by a comment of Wittgenstein’s recorded by Rush Rhees

(1997, p.44): “Freud is constantly claiming to be scientific But what he

gives is speculation – something prior even to the formation of a

hypothesis.” Wittgenstein thought Freud confounded reasons with causes,

which took the form of creating powerful myths

Gombrich (1973) drew on psychoanalysis in a light touch way to explore

the projective role of the beholder’s share in art including its erotic

content, and to discuss the way taste and desire can influence artistic

style However, he not only remained sceptical about psychoanalytic

accounts of creativity, which will be discussed later, but was also dubious

about psychoanalytic interpretations of works of art, the value of which

needed further testing by applying Popper’s (1972a) “the logic of

situations” to demarcate plausible from speculative accounts

(Gombrich,1978, pp.1-22) For example, it might not be possible to

understand all Leonardo’s motives for making art, but the logic of

situations can be used to constrain implausible interpretations

Physiognomic interpretation and understanding

Gombrich (1984) used the logic of situations to critique Freud's

interpretation of Leonardo's painting The Virgin and Child with St Anne.

This rests on the connection which Freud makes between Leonardo’s

illegitimate birth that resulted in having ‘two mothers’ and the

composition in which Christ is supported by the Virgin who in turn sits on

St Anne’s lap Gombrich’s alternative explanation for the composition

draws on the persistence of representational conventions in genres of art

In this case, the figure composition follows the conventions used for the

genre for depicting St Anne, who is also the patron saint of Florence, the

city that commissioned the work The logic of Leonardo’s situation makes

Freud’s interpretation implausible In failing to understand the significance

of the logic of situations for interpreting Leonardo’s work, Freud

succumbed to what Gombrich (1973) described as the physiognomic

fallacy, as summarised by Summers (1998, p 134): “The gist of these

arguments is that the meanings we simply see in works of art, although

not without their own value, are not historical, and therefore not

explanatory In order to gain such understanding we must actually do

history.”

Gombrich’s emphasis on the importance of understanding for art history

is consistent with Wittgenstein’s view that ‘understanding a sign is not, in

any way, interpreting it’ (Tully, 2003, p 36) To act otherwise,

interpretation would involve ‘a rule determining the application of a rule’

(Wittgenstein, 2001, #84), with each new application needing further

interpretations With Wittgenstein, understanding is the normative feature

of participation in practices: “It is not interpretation which builds the

bridge between the sign and what is signified // meant // Only practice

does that.” (cited in Tully, 2003, p 38) To engage in such practices

requires training in the appropriate cognitive stock, in which success

would be shown by the ability to justifiably demonstrate and challenge a

use of understanding (Patterson, 2006) In this respect, Freud’s

interpretation of Leonardo’s painting lacks the appropriate cognitive

stock

Gombrich’s (1973, 2002) therapeutic project extended to a genealogical

survey of the emergence of the idea of creativity as self-expression, an

inner process that taps a “primitive” aboriginal source The survey

explored the background artistic theory to Freud’s view of the unconscious

mind, and why it was so readily received by the art world

Gombrich (1984) traced Freud’s impact on modernism back to the

eighteenth century when Western art as a practice of the aesthetics of

effects informed by Christian forms of transcendence and versions of

Platonism, or a mixture of the two, got eclipsed when aesthetic responses

came to be understood as something immanent, as the result of biology

Burke (1990) inaugurated the new approach to aesthetics as conditioned

by the deeper biological drives of sexual reproduction and

self-preservation Responses to forms of beauty are the result of sexual

instinct, while self-preservation as seeking safety and avoiding threats

gets manifested in the appeal of moderate sensations of fear as

experienced in sublime responses to the forces of nature With

Romanticism the focus of attention switched from the emotional states of

the beholder to those of the artist, as such emotions were thought to

provide a natural, foundational anchor for sincere expression

The significance of the shift from what Gombrich (1984, p.94) described

as “objective to subjective criteria”, a change from the socio-cultural

practice of art as the aesthetics of effects to a less mediated, individual

practice of art as biological aesthetics as initiated by Romanticism and

developed in modernism, can be grasped by the way Freud’s

Interpretation of Dreams was received against three dominant theories of

the time: Nietzsche’s view of creation as intoxication, Tolstoy’s equation of

art with feeling, and Croce’s idea that authenticity in art is a form of

lyrical expression Given the dominance of these subjective theories, it is

unsurprising that Freud’s book on dreams resonated with the art world,

which had an established tradition of associating creativity with

dream-like, esoteric epiphanies as opposed to the articulation of shared

epiphanies, which had previously been the case

The dream as an analogy for creativity also explains why Wittgenstein

thought psychoanalysis fishy while admiring Freud’s work on wit This is

because humour, unlike dreaming, is constituted in an intelligible, shared

reality Freud understood the importance of this distinction:

The dream is a wholly asocial psychic product: it has nothing to say

to anyone else …., it remains unintelligible even to that person and

is wholly uninteresting to others … The joke on the other hand is

the most social of all psychic achievements aiming at pleasure …

thus it is bound by the condition of intelligibility (cited in Gombrich,

1984, p.105)

Furthermore, in his letters Freud readily admitted that an intelligible

account of art to include the significance of artistic ability, methods and

techniques, which the picture of creativity as an inner process ignores,

was beyond psychoanalysis to explain (cited in Gombrich, 1984,

pp.102-107) Neither can psychoanalysis provide insights about why some art

works are rated higher than others It fails to explain the technical aspects

of style (Gombrich, 1984, pp.97-102) For example, the style of

modernism does not result from aboriginal, inner processes, but is a

synthesis of two existing creative grammars: traditional Western ‘deep’

familiar creative grammar as structured by drawing and other deliberately

acquired skills, and the less familiar ‘surface’ creative grammar

appropriated from non-European art (Rubin, 1984) For a work of art to be

successful, many elements have to be carefully synthesized, most of

which psychoanalysis cannot explain

A good example of how the different elements in creativity get

synthesized can be found in the way wit is improvised and can be

deliberately crafted, revised, and assessed, all of which are made possible

by the life world and language meeting us half way Unlike dreaming, this

spectrum of socio-cultural practices enables the verbal dexterity found in

wit to fulfill Wittgenstein’s (1953, # 580) requirement that: “An inner

process stands in need of outward criteria.” The significance of outward

criteria for understanding why creativity is more analogous to joking than

dreaming links up to Wittgenstein’s wider therapeutic critique of the

Cartesian view of mind as an inner process, and Gombrich’s (1972a,

pp.304-329; 1973, pp.56-69) parallel exposure of the expressionist theory

of art as the unmediated representation of an inner-world In both cases

the inner process floats free from the fabric of socio-cultural reality and its

outward criteria, which explains why Descartes required God to be the

underwriter of true knowledge and aesthetic modernism had to give a

foundational role to the “beast in the basement” unconscious mind

(Claxton, 2005, pp.155-189)

The attempt of artists to represent a private, inner-world turns out to be

an inverted version of the fallacy of art as a mirror of nature, as it is no

more possible to directly represent an inner-world than it is to directly

paint the image on the eye In both cases what the artist has to do is

“make and match” (Gombrich, 1972a, p.24) Revealing a so-called inner

world, like representing the real world, is only achieved by the process of

“schema and correction”, a form of representational trial and error which

involves artists appropriating methods from tradition to scaffold their

creative activities which are then fine-tuned by corrective feedback

(Gombrich, 1972, p.24) In other words, tradition provides formulae that

the artist has to internalize through the process of personal experience

The balance of emphasis between formulae and experience in a particular

practice of art is linked to wider socio-cultural and ecological pressures,

with the relative weighting revealed in the way the available schemata

interact with individual experience Most cultural manifestations of art

have maintained rather than radically modified such formulae, the

exception being Western practices that emerged after Romanticism when

more prestige was given to innovation and individual experience, as in the

form of creativity as a sincere form of self-expression

That post-Romantic practices are unusual can be seen by the way art has

operated in ancient, old Western, and non-European cultures In such

settings, where art served a predominantly ritualistic function that

conserved shared values, formulae were only changed when the

underlying beliefs waned, or if an artistic innovation brought further

prestige and purpose to the way the shared beliefs could be articulated,

as was the case with the development of perspective in fifteenth century

Europe (Edgerton, 2009) In such contexts equating creativity with

innovation is inappropriate as the practices exhibit what Shusterman

(1995, p.258) refers to as “good use-value”, which more often resulted

from collaborative forms of creativity structured by the aesthetics of

effects The way art is produced from a spectrum with formulae at one

end and individual experience at the other highlights the key role that

schemata play in articulating expression and meaning, one that is

analogous to the intermediate function of language to structure verbal

thought

ii The single cause

Expressive individualism and the intermediary function of tools

Peters, et al (2008) discuss the merits of Bartley’s (1985) view that

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy was influenced by Bűhler Bartley

maintained that this can be found in Wittgenstein’s later emphasis on

language as used in different forms of life, which is revealed in

Wittgenstein’s analogy below that is remarkably similar to Bűhler’s

description of language as having the intermediary function of tools

(Lepsky, 1996, p.29)

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a

screw-diver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws –The function

of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects (And in both

cases there are similarities) …… Of course, what confuses us is the

uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet

them in script and print For their application is not presented to us so

clearly Especially when we are doing philosophy (Wittgenstein, 2001,

#11)

Gombrich (1982, pp.137-161) compared Bűhler’s (1990) typology of

language as a tool used for expression, arousal, and description with the

operation of visual symbols The human capacity to express symptoms,

for example, as in the form of blushing, is unlearned, and the separate

ability to arouse reactions in recipients through coding signals is shared

with animals, while description, a symbolic substitute for objects and

states of affairs, is more the reserve of humans Gombrich (1973, pp

56-69) drew on Bűhler’s typology of language as having the intermediary

function of tools to therapeutically dissolve the resonance theory of

expression, in which the artist’s symptoms and the viewer’s responses are

understood to operate on the same natural frequency The assumptions

underpinning the resonance theory of expression lead to a

disproportionate emphasis being given to the artist’s symptoms at the

expense of the orchestration of signals and use of symbols to

communicate meaning

In contrast, Gombrich (1996b, p.141-155) argued that in art, unlike the

way symptoms like yawning cause others to yawn, symptomatic potency

can only be harnessed through the intermediary function of tools, which

are acquired to signal expression from the culture’s repertoire of effects

To develop the argument, Gombrich contrasted the “centrifugal” theory of

self-expression with his “centripetal”, socio-cultural model of expression.

The centripetal explanation is able to account for the artist’s ability to

canalize their symptoms through the orchestration of signals, which have

their compound meaning in the wider symbolic field of art and culture

Wittgenstein (1980, p.43) made the same point but in a more concise way

when he wrote: “Within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed.” That

is, our animal-like symptoms need to be augmented by forms

appropriated from the culture Gombrich’s centripetal theory of

expression and Wittgenstein’s tamed wildness dissolve the requirement to

give a foundational role to an authentic expressive self, which fails to

account for the importance of tools for mediating cultural forms

To achieve the right balance “between the feeling and form, medium and

message” (Gombrich, 1996b, p.152), an artist who makes a work or a

beholder viewing it must draw on knowledge of previous output as

embedded in the broader background symbolic field, as “we cannot judge

expression without an awareness of the choice situation, without a

knowledge of the organon”(Gombrich,1972a, p.319) By referring to the

organon, Gombrich was not suggesting that art be considered a science

but highlighting the significance of artists and the viewers understanding

the principles by which skillful knowledge may be acquired and used to

articulate meaning, with skillful knowledge here equating with the ability

to show understanding in practice through having the appropriate

cognitive stock After all, the word ‘art’ has its origins in skill or mastery,

as in the art of building, the art of music As such, there is no disembodied

skill, only different levels of competency in the forms of know-how that

are used in practice

Understanding as a feature of participation in practices is central to what

Wittgenstein described as an “orthographic conscience” (cited in

Nyíri,1998, p.50), an ethical disposition that recognizes the significance of

certain forms of authority for determining judgments, as in the case of

dictionaries for spelling The significance that Gombrich gives to the

organon as the deposit of normative insights for developing and

articulating skillful knowledge in art is analogous to the way Wittgenstein

(2001, # 150) sees language as both scaffolding and constraining cultural

activity: “The grammar of the word ‘knows’ is evidently closely related to

that of ‘can’, ‘is able to’ But also closely related to that of ‘understands’.

(Mastery of a technique.)”

Conventionalism

Bűhler (1990) also developed a typology of non-linguistic symbols and

communication based on the principles of truth of relation, truth of

appearances, and fidelity to material The typology undermines the view

that visual images, like verbal language, operate by convention

Conventionalists argue that an image of a lamb and the word ‘lamb’ are

equivalent and arbitrary In this respect, conventionalists assume “reality

mirrors language” (Labron, 2009, p.52)

Wittgenstein (2001, II, p 165-178) therapeutically dissolved this

conventionalist assumption by making a distinction between language as

used in relationship to “seeing” and “seeing-as” Wittgenstein avoided

conflating seeing with seeing-as through his perspicuous treatment of

grammar A person who sees a pair of shoes on a floor does not say ‘I see

the things on the floor as a pair of shoes’ In the life world someone never

describes what they see in terms of something else unless, that is, when

using metaphors or trying to make sense of ambiguous stimuli (Finch,

1995) Wittgenstein distinguished the role of language for describing

phenomena from more abstract thinking in this way: “I should like to say:

there are aspects which are mainly determined by thoughts and

associations, and others which are ‘purely optical’ ” (Wittgenstein,1980,

#970)

The distinction Wittgenstein makes between seeing, a face-analogue form

of meaning, and seeing-as, a more conceptual, text-analogue way of

thinking, is consistent with Gombrich’s argument against representational

relativism Anyone can ‘see’ the representation of the animal in the centre

of the middle panel of Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece as it is based on

truth of appearances Seeing the same animal ‘as’ the ‘Lamb of God’

requires text-analogue knowledge of its Christian attributes, a case of the

use of truth of relations Like being able to read any text, this can only be

achieved by knowing the code

Gombrich (2000, p 5) argued that naturalistic images are “approximated

to the experience of reality” as they are consistent with “the eye-witness

principle” (Gombrich, 1982, pp 253-256) Another way to state the same

thing is that naturalistic images triangulate Bűhler’s truth of relations with

truth of appearances and fidelity to material Gombrich placed such

imagery at one end of a spectrum with signs without these properties at

the other, the intermediate zone being occupied by signs that selectively

incorporate some of Bűhler’s principles (Gombrich, 1982, pp.137-161) An

example is a chart that records employment rates over time The

trajectory of time is shown as moving from left to right The fluctuating

levels of employment are represented by a zigzag line The chart uses

truth of relations to convey logical and temporal meaning ‘Seeing’ such a

sign ‘as’ representing fluctuating rates of employment recorded over time

requires more knowledge of the background symbolic field than it does to

‘see’ a naturalistic image that triangulates Bűhler’s principles

Gombrich (1982, pp.172-214) maneuvered the discussion of such

naturalistic imagery away from the familiar territory of mimesis by

adopting Popper’s (1972b) negative principle, so that eliminating

inconsistencies in pictorial organization rather than providing an endless

chain of verifications becomes the criterion of pictorial efficacy With art

as mimesis there is no end to the problem of representation, for how

fine-grained should it be? The negative principle dissolves the conundrum of

needing to replicate ‘will-o’–the-wisp’ reality in all its detail, as naturalistic

images selectively sample rather than exhaustively represent The world

of experience is, by definition, multi-dimensional in its variety and

richness Images only simulate this complexity, which is why the

relationship of pictures to the world is not equivalent to the world to

pictures We live and move in a three-dimensional world and pictures are

flat This is why “the world does not look like a picture but a picture can

look like the world” (Gombrich, 1972b, p.138) A picture can look like the

world by the consistent use of foreshortening, perspective, and other

gradients, which condense the first person perceptual experience of the

real world into a compelling two-dimensional picture of an arrested

moment in time (Topper, 1996) The images not only have internal

consistency but are implicitly understood as episodes belonging to a

larger narrative or sequence of events (Tilghman,1996)

The spirit of the age

Wittgenstein and Gombrich were deeply suspicious of any thinking that

reduced the complexity of cultural processes to a single cause or grand

theory They shared an antipathy towards Hegel’s theory of history as a

dialectical unfolding of spirit that takes no account of local circumstances,

specific personal realities and commitments Wittgenstein’s heightened

awareness of the fallacy of the single cause can be traced to

Kierkegaard’s influential critique of Hegel’s grand theory

(Schönbaumsfeld, 2007), which is captured in a remark recorded by Drury

(1984, p 157): “Hegel always seems to want to say that things that look

different are in reality the same Whereas what interests me is to show

that things that are the same are in reality different.” Wittgenstein

therapeutically dissolved Hegel’s grand theory by emphasizing the way

language is used in different forms of life: “To imagine a language means

to imagine a form of life” (Wittgenstein, 2001, p.7, # 19)

Gombrich’s (1972a, 1979a) alternative explanation to the zeitgeist,

Hegel’s grand theory for why different epochs and cultures have

represented the visible world and used art in such different ways, is to

emphasize the feedback systems that operate between individual and

socio-cultural processes Psychological explanations for art prove

inadequate because they neglect the impact that socio-cultural contexts

have on individual experience Grand theories based on all-encompassing

forces like the 'spirit of the age', 'class conflict', ‘the collective

unconscious', 'cultural evolution', and ‘power relationships’, overlook the

personal realities, commitments, and possible reconstruction of meaning

by an individual agent

For Gombrich, any analysis of meaning and style in art has to maintain a

reciprocal relationship between collectivism and individualism,

socio-cultural and psychological processes He achieved this by highlighting the

way visual schemata are acquired and used to represent and

communicate meaning in different genres of art as nested in a variety of

cultural settings (Gombrich, 1999)

Culture and levelling down

Both Wittgenstein and Gombrich have been considered as thinkers who

were primarily interested in culture (DeAngelis, 2007; Fernie, 1995) Both

were interested in identifying meaningful as opposed to levelled cultural

differences Wittgenstein and Gombrich had a high regard for artefacts

that emerged in an organic way, and were particularly critical of the idea

of cultural progress, but without falling for Spengler’s view of historical

necessity (DeAngleis, 2007, pp.65-98; Gombrich, 1979a, pp.24-59)

Wittgenstein had a deep philosophical conviction that all individual

manifestations of culture result from broader, socio-cultural structures:

“What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what

one man [sic] is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly

of human actions, the background against which we see any action”

(Wittgenstein,1981, #567-569) Wittgenstein’s remark complements

Gombrich’s emphasis on the organon as the background that provides

formulae to scaffold individual experience (Gombrich, 1972a; 1979b), a

view shared by Vygotsky (1971, p 249): “Art is the social within us, and

even if its action is performed by a single individual, it does not mean that

its essence is individual.”

Culture can be surveyed in many different ways (Scruton, 2007) Cultural

historians evaluate artefacts in a tradition that goes back at least to the

eighteenth century when the word first made its appearance This

evaluative approach to culture involves absorbing the best lessons “of

human development in its richest diversity” (Humboldt in Barber, 2007,

p.291) Cultural anthropologists aim to describe the shared customs and

artefacts that bring cohesion to a tribe Ethnologists analyse how the

intellectual, emotional and behavioural features of a culture are

transmitted through social interactions Social scientists describe the

thoughts and habits that forge identities in various sub-cultures (Inglis,

2005) In this last approach, human cultures are often thought to be

analogous with bacterial cultures, as both are meant to be analysed

without ranking them in a hierarchy (Gombrich, 1979a)

The analogy between human and bacterial cultures turns out to be

misleading as bacteria are a natural kind and cultural artefacts a kind

fashioned by human beings (Scruton, 2007) Evaluating the two kinds

requires different criteria With natural kinds feelings and values are

superfluous as the judgments need only trade in causal explanations

Judging cultural artefacts positively requires the use of intelligent feelings

as a person cannot make aesthetic discriminations without a context of

understanding (Best, 1992)

Bourdieu’s (1979) research which found homologous relationships

between cultural preferences, levels of education, class, and values has

been interpreted by Freedman (2003) to imply that snobbery and power

rather than other, more meaningful differences account for the way

cultural artefacts get rated Chan’s & Goldthorpe’s (2007) research shows

Bourdieu’s homologous model of cultural participation and Freedman’s

extrapolation from it to be flawed The divide is not between the elite who

prefer ‘high’ culture and the rest who experience ‘low’ culture but in the

variety of consumption, with higher social strata engaging in a much

wider range of cultural products, which results from better education That

social background and education informs judgments about cultural

artefacts is unsurprising given that discerning meaningful differences

requires a “feeling for nuance” (Gombrich, 1979a, p.149)

Wittgenstein’s (1997, p 12 # 4) way of addressing nuance in aesthetic

responses is to highlight intermediate cases

Suppose you meet someone in the street and he tells you that he has

lost his greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his