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Robert Frost once asserted that his poems had criticism in them, and in
a similar vein, I would argue that works of art can have a lot of philosophy
in them. To the extent that we subscribe to the importance of philosophy,
we certainly don't want to confine it to philosophical texts. My working
premise is that art can make assertions about reality and the nature of
truth that are as philosophically complex as anything in the writing of
professional philosophers. Specifically, I want to use the paintings of
Thomas Eakins to explore the extent to which works of art can figure philosophical
stances. What might it mean to treat Eakins as the philosophical peer
of James or Dewey?
Insofar as I shall be using
works of art as my source material, it will be necessary for my argument
to be far more grounded in specific, observed details than the other sort
of argument. While social, legal, and cultural analysis may be conducted
at a fairly abstract level, if a work of art is to be taken seriously
as a way of knowing, it can only be by coming to grips with its particulars—in
virtually microscopic detail. Art is a classic instance of what Clifford
Geertz calls “local knowledge”—knowledge that, to some
extent, resists generalization. It is not knowledge of anything,
anywhere, anytime, but knowledge anchored in a specific sequence of experiences,
inflected by a uniquely personal point of view.
Artistic knowledge further
differs from social, legal, and cultural knowledge in that it is sensorily
embodied. It is not mental or intellectual in nature. It is a form of
knowledge that is inextricably intertwined in temporal, spatial, and experiential
particularities. It lives in the world and plays itself out along the
senses; it is brought into existence in the form of bodies, gestures,
movements, tones, and feelings.
However, far from making art's
ways of knowing an ill-fitting mismatch for pragmatism's, I would argue
that the qualities I have just described make artistic forms of knowledge
uniquely suited to expressing pragmatic understandings of experience.
In the first place, pragmatism is quintessentially the philosophy of particulars.
James summed it up in The Meaning of Truth when he wrote that:
“The whole originality of pragmatism, the whole point of it, is its
concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends
with it.” In the second place, one of the most important contributions
of pragmatism to the history of philosophy is its determination to force
philosophical knowledge to take account of the look and feel of sensory
experience.
The need for a sensorily informed
mode of knowledge is a theme that runs throughout James' work—from
his warnings about the dangers of “vicious abstractionism” to
his exhortations to his reader to “dive back into the flux [and]
turn your face toward sensation, that fleshbound thing which rationalism
has always loaded with abuse.” James repeatedly argued that in order
to “fathom” what he called the “thickness” of experience
we must engage ourselves with it in a temporally aware and spatially responsive
way. As he wrote in A Pluralistic Universe (with a possible allusion
to Satan's negotiation of Chaos in Paradise Lost): “Sensible
reality is too concrete to be entirely manageable [abstractly].ÖTo get
from one point in it to another, we have to plough or wade through the
whole intolerable interval. No detail is spared us, it is as bad as the
barbed-wire complications at Port Arthur, and we grow old and die in the
process.”
In a sense, James is telling
us how we should approach works of art as well. Applied to the activity
of artistic interpretation, James' point is that not to “wade
though the whole intolerable interval,” not to negotiate the
“barbed-wire complications”—merely to summarize the work,
floating somewhere above it, disengaged from the specific spaces, times,
and bodies that bring it to us—is to betray the very forms of understanding
art provides. To be anything other than close and detailed and concrete
in our readings is to miss out on the distinctive ways of knowing that
art offers. One might adapt James' metaphor and say that the pragmatist
shows us not only that we must creep and crawl through the work, but,
even more importantly, that such prickly intricacies of involvement are
the supreme value of the artistic experience.
Since, in the pragmatic view,
the only way to experience something truly is to experience it in all
of its “thickness” and “fullness,” the closeness and
sensory content of my readings of these paintings might be said to be
an attempt to be faithful to the pragmatic method itself. Precisely because
the works I shall be examining embrace pragmatic forms of understanding,
they require the closest of close readings. (As James' crawling-through-barbed-wire
metaphor suggests, the degree of closeness may even be uncomfortable.)
Sensorily concrete and experientially detailed methods of analysis are
the only way to deal with works that are so deeply committed to sensorily
concrete and experientially detailed conceptions of truth.
 Painting
and pragmatism may seem an odd conjunction, but it is a truism to observe
that intellectual revolutions are no respecters of boundaries. It is clear
to me that, however it came about, Eakins deserves to be regarded as a
pragmatist. At the same time, it is necessary to resist the impulse to
understand any parallels we may find between the work of James and Eakins
as examples of “influence.” If influence ever explains anything
(and it seldom does), it clearly does not apply here. Though James and
Eakins were almost exact contemporaries (Eakins two years younger than
James, and outliving him by six years), there is no evidence that either
of them ever heard of the other, let alone knew anything of the other's
work. Eakins' paintings did not reach a significant national audience
until after his death, and most of the ones I am going to be discussing
were in fact painted before James had published his major philosophical
work, so similarities will have to be attributed to the cultural milieu
that nurtured both (a milieu shaped, at least in part, by Emerson, who
hovers over all of subsequent American culture as a ghostly proto-pragmatic
presence).
But however we may account
for the family resemblance, I would argue that James' (and later Dewey's)
conception of replacing the philosophy of “being” with a philosophy
of “doing” finds a striking anticipation in Eakins' work. To
adapt the phrases in my epigraph, Emerson, Eakins, James, and Dewey can
all be understood to be exploring the ramifications of “forming the
hand of the mind” or “transforming mind into a verb.” All
four ask us to translate mental processes into practical activities. All
four ask us, as James might have phrased it, to reestablish the connection
between “conceptions” and “perceptions.” Eakins' paintings,
as I understand them, dramatize Emerson's, James', and Dewey's vision
of the possible merging our mental and our manual “grasp.”
—Excerpted from Ray Carney,
“When Mind is a Verb: Thomas Eakins and the Doing of Thinking,”
in Morris Dickstein (ed.) The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays in
Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1998), pp. 377-403.
To read more about Ray Carney's
thoughts on art as a way of knowing, click on any of the discussions of
Thomas Eakins' work in the Paintings section, any of Mike Leigh's
films in the Mike Leigh section, any of John Cassavetes' films
in the John Cassavetes section, or any of the discussions of independent
film in The Independent Vision section.
This page
only contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's writing.
To obtain the complete text as well as the complete texts of many pieces
that are not included on the web site,
click here.
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