David Summers Replies

To begin, did Panofsky mean by what the scholastics call an 'intention' ? The scholastics did not mean one thing by the term the meaning of which was debated through the late Middle Ages.1 For Avicenna, who provided much of the basis of this debate, intentions were apprehended by inner over and above the apprehended by outer sense. The standard example of this apprehension was that of a lamb, which upon seeing a wolf for the first time runs away. Such instinctive behavior is possible because the lamb not only sees the species of the wolf, but simultaneously estimates the of the wolf, which is its voraciousness. The of the wolf was thus something like its inwardness, or its inwardness for the lamb, grasped in particular instances at the level of sense itself. Intentions were both of things and for consciousness, and in this way intentions were perhaps related to Augustine's intentio animi, which, as we have seen, meant the attention of the mind, the active and immediate response of mind both to sensation and to its own activity, its incessant directedness. But Panofsky seems to have meant something relatively simple. When we see a stoplight (his example) we apprehend its intention, meaning that we apprehend at once it is for, and we contravene this apprehension if we regard the stoplight aesthetically. Other human artifacts-works of art-demand that we do experience them aesthetically, and we go against their if we treat them practically. The of the work in this sense also implies in another sense, a more usual sense. Both the stoplight and the aesthetic object were made on purpose; but it is important that scholastic intention is located in the self-evidence of human artifacts. For Panofsky, then, the scholastic intention is simply evident in the work, but the implied of the maker (which he treats with great circumspectness) is much more problematical and difficult, and the question of its nature

Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical Philosophy and Science · History · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy

• On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts

  Erwin Panofsky, Jaś Elsner et al.•Critical Inquiry•2012

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