Philosophy Illustrated

Philosophy Illustrated David Carrier (bio) Words are the medium of philosophy, and images the basis for visual artworks. But sometimes it happens that philosophical theorizing can be illustrated in images. And then the cross-over between these two normally distinct forms of representations raises fascinating issues. Thoughtful Images: Illustrating Philosophy through Art, the first book to study these illustrations of philosophy systematically, starts with a lucid survey of conceptual issues. "An illustration ... transforms a written text into something visual" (25). Thoughtful Images provides something altogether different, a theory of how philosophical theories have been illustrated. Thomas Wartenberg's preface, "How I Came to Write This Book," motivates his claims. As a philosopher studying film, he wanted to understand how art can illustrate philosophy. And so he assembled examples. Throughout the vast changes in the ways that books have been printed and amid the large transformations of the concerns of philosophy, creating visual images of verbal texts has remained an important task. From Plato to Wittgenstein, he says, philosophers have used visual materials to illustrate philosophical arguments. Thoughtful Images thus employs an historical organization, taking us through the relationship of philosophy writing and its illustrations. The book starts with some illustrations of ancient Greek philosophers. Then it considers how, when hand-lettered philosophy manuscripts were copied beginning in the twelfth-century, sometimes instructive illuminations were added. And then starting in the mid-fifteenth century printing made possible the use of images alongside the text. There were regular attempts [End Page 105] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Frontispiece of Leviathan by Abraham Bosse with input from Thomas Hobbes, the author. [End Page 106] "to render philosophical ideas visually" (69). What then happened, so Wartenberg reveals, is that the focus of the arguments themselves sometimes changed. Thanks in part to these illustrations, for example, Aristotle as read in the Christian medieval period is a different figure from the Greek original. A further change of both practical and philosophical significance takes place with the addition of the printed frontispiece, which provides a visual introduction for the philosophical text. When, for example, the frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) shows a huge, towering figure, the sovereign, composed of hundreds of small human figures, the illustration conveys the crucial political argument (Fig. 1). When Wartenberg gets to modernism, roughly halfway through his book, his concerns change in an important way. Earlier he was concerned with how the various philosophical theories can be illustrated, while from here onward he discusses the ways that quasi-philosophical theorizing may guide the practice of some artists. So, for example, since Clement Greenberg had a historicist view of the essence of painting, after a brief summary, Wartenberg discusses Adrian Piper's critique of this formalism and the role of gender and race in contemporary art. I agree that there are real problems with Greenberg's account of modernism. But since Piper is a properly trained philosopher, whilst Greenberg only uses Kantian philosophy in a highly subjective way, his goal—providing a narrative for Abstract Expressionism—differs drastically from hers. Wartenberg concludes that "Piper's own art can legitimately be said to be doing philosophy" (160). But that's a confusion, for Kant doesn't offer a prescription for making any particular kind of art, but an analysis that applies to all artworks. Piper writes philosophy and makes art: and these are two distinct activities. Not every philosophical thesis can be translated into images. Descartes offers arguments about the relationship between mind and body; Spinoza describes emotion; and David Hume discusses the self. And in none of these three cases do illustrations play any role in the discussion. Were an iconoclastic regime to come to power in California, and forbid all academic [End Page 107] discussion of images, the Berkeley Department of Art History would have to migrate. (Apart, maybe, from some of the Islamic specialists.) But the philosophers could stay put by making only minor changes in their customary texts. Critical debate about Plato, Thomas Aquinas, and Arthur Schopenhauer could proceed exactly as before. Of course, the author-illustrations often found at the introduction to our translations of the books by these philosophical founding fathers...

Epistemology · Philosophical theory · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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