The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation (review)

"A small child once said to me, 'You don't draw Bugs Bunny, you draw pictures of Bugs Bunny.' ... That's a very profound observation because it means that he thinks the characters are alive, which, as far as I'm concerned, is true." Chuck Jones, cited p. 80.

It is taken for granted, in certain circles anyway, that art is important—that it matters to our lives. Commonplace and readily exemplified as this belief may be, it is something of another order to explain why this is so. Why do we care about literary characters whom we know to be mere figments? Or why are we moved by a painted human figure when we know it to be just pigment? Alan Paskow, an eminent philosopher and specialist in the thought of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, is one of many to address the problem. His solution, or at least his contribution, is to posit an ontological state of affairs that many would regard as unconventional in current philosophical terms. To set up the argument, Paskow addresses the wisely discussed "paradox of fiction," which, stated simply, is this:

We would not be convinced by Rick's acts of self-interest and selflessness in Casablanca if we did not believe he were a "realistic" depiction, and that the circumstances of his life and personality were veridical determinants of his behavior. Few viewers, however, would also argue that he is really real—even if he were based on a true-life person. We know just as well that Bogart is acting a part (very well) such that he brings the character of the troubled bar owner "to life." Yet knowing this does not diminish the emotional force of the portrayal.

Philosophers (and others) have long puzzled over this conundrum (usually citing loftier literary examples) but as with many similar paradoxes have failed to defuse its inherent contradiction. Paskow's move is to return to Heidegger, principally Being and Time, and extract from that a counter-intuitive worldview at odds with much current scientific and philosophical discourse. The position he defends can be summarized as follows:

By hopping over the Cartesian boundary that putatively separates mind from world, the imagined from the real, Paskow helps to revivify the sterile debate about whether beauty is objective or subjective—whether it exists in the minds of the beholders or the world they behold. His argument draws intellectual sustenance from Heidegger's most important work and, in particular, his contention that "self" and "world" is a unitary phenomenon. The world for Heidegger is not an external, remote domain we observe through slits from within a Cartesian mind-bunker; the world is the very thing we are, including our outlooks, dispositions, cultural and philosophical orientations, and so on. In a sense "being-in-the-world" amounts to "being-the-world." On this basis, Paskow can claim,

when we are captivated by a painting [the characters in the painting] are not merely taken to be the subjects "in our minds," but ... beings who are "out there," thus not simply in an "ideal world" that is somehow related to our world ... but, strange as it may seem, "in our world"

(p. 26).

Insofar as works of art represent people, places or objects we would respond to in certain ways in the "real world," so we respond in like manner to the same thing in imaginative form, and it is this that accounts for the veridicality and vitality of works of art. To take as an example Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Paskow argues we should not regard such an artwork

as just a concept or image merely in a person's mind ... but as a being in its own right (e.g. a particular young woman wearing a silver earring, out there) as well as a being with a meaning and significance that one takes implicitly to pertain to one's life

(p. 64).

Given this, how then do we...