Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art: Maria Bussmann’s Drawings 9781350245136, 9781350245167, 9781350245143

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art

Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Series Editors: Tiziana Andina and David Carrier Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract terms. But the true significance of art for philosophy, and philosophy for art, can only be established through close analysis of specific examples. Art is increasingly being used to introduce and discuss problems in philosophy. And many works of art raise important philosophical issues of their own. But the resources available have been limited. Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the first series of its kind, will provide a productive context for that indispensable enterprise. The series promotes philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists, showcasing researches that exemplifies cuttingedge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic rigour and insight of the contemporary world. Editorial Board Alessandro Arbo (University of Strasbourg, Fr.), Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio), Leeza Chebotarev (Private Art Advisor), Paolo D’Angelo (University of Roma Tre), Noël Carroll (CUNY), Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick), Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin), Cynthia Freeland (University of Houston), Peter Lamarque (University of York), Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY), Luca Illetterati (University of Padova), Gao Jianping (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Birte Kleemann (Michael Werner Gallery), Joachim Pissarro (CUNY), Sara Protasi (University of Puget Sound), Shen-yi Liao (University of Puget Sound), Ken-Ichi Sasaki (Nihon University), Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Uppsala), Vincenzo Trione (IULM, International University of Language and Comunication, Milano). Forthcoming in the Series The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi edited by Tiziana Andina Visual Metaphor and Contemporary Art by Mark Stall Brands Faith in Art by Joseph Masheck

Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art Maria Bussmann’s Drawings David Carrier

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © David Carrier, 2023 David Carrier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xxvii–xxviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Spinoza. Love © Maria Bussmann. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-4513-6 ePDF: 978-1-3502-4514-3 eBook: 978-1-3502-4515-0 Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com ​ ​ and sign up for our newsletters.

For Thomas Micchelli

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Contents List of Figures Personal Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Philosophy as a Subject for Visual Art 1 Identity/Metamorphosis/Translation 2 An Introduction to Maria Bussmann’s Translations 3 Are Translations of Philosophy into Visual Art Possible? 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 6 Hannah Arendt 7 Lawrence Carroll and Maria Bussmann 8 Illustrations, Graphic Novels, Diagrams 9 An Art History Made by Bussmann 10 The Composition and Interpretation of Bussmann’s Art Conclusion: The Contribution of Bussmann’s Art to Philosophical Aesthetics References Index

viii ix xxvii 1 13 29 43 61 73 91 105 119 135 147 157 167 177

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

French Dictionary: Survivor. © Hilger Collection Wien French Dictionary: Clean Up. © Hilger Collection Wien Hegel: Philosophical trees. © Dom Museum Wien Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 4.461. © Maria Bussmann Franz in Florida (the crow). © Maria Bussmann I Have Never Been to Japan (donkey). © Maria Bussmann Franz in Florida (post horn). © Maria Bussmann I Have Never Been to Japan (room). © Maria Bussmann Robert Musil’s Flypaper. © Peter Engelmann Wien Spinoza. Affection. © Wien Museum MUSA Spinoza. Dislike. © Wien Museum MUSA Spinoza. Ambition. © Wien Museum MUSA Spinoza. Anger. © Wien Museum MUSA Spinoza. Affects. © Wien Museum MUSA Wittgenstein, Tractatus. Look At. © Maria Bussmann Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 3.25. © Maria Bussmann Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 2.151, 2.1511. © Maria Bussmann Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 3.03, 3.031. © Maria Bussmann Merleau-Ponty, Two Outlined Figures. © Maria Bussmann Merleau-Ponty, Facing Figures. © Maria Bussmann Merleau-Ponty, To Touch and Be Touched. © Maria Bussmann Merleau-Ponty 2, Body Holes. © Maria Bussmann Merleau-Ponty, Two Senses. © Maria Bussmann Merleau-Ponty, Reflexive Turn 2. © Maria Bussmann Lucy’s Toys (Kant and Arendt). © Hilger Collection Wien Heidegger, Search for the Origin (clearing). © Maria Bussmann Hegel. Coral. © Dom Museum Wien French Dictionary: Harshly. © Hilger Collection Wien Wittgenstein, Concordance. All. © Maria Bussmann The Dove and the Drone. © Maria Bussmann

For a list of Maria Bussmann’s Selected Solo and Group Shows and Exhibitions, please visit www.mariab​ussm​ann.org.

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Personal Preface The body of this book discusses Maria Bussmann’s art and its philosophical subjects. Here I offer a personal introduction, telling how I came to write about her and explaining what I aim to accomplish. I describe my background in philosophy and in art history, telling how those interests are relevant. I begin toward the middle of this story in order to introduce the issue that will be of central importance, philosophical skepticism. Soon, then, we’ll go back to the beginning. For some years in Pittsburgh, when employed by a philosophy department, my primary chosen teaching assignment was a large introductory class. I loved this experience, for it always was a good challenge to introduce smart students, most of them not humanities majors, to my subject. We always began with René Descartes’s Meditations, for almost inevitably these beginning students were engaged by his discussion of skepticism. You couldn’t ask them to read large doses of Kant, Hegel, or Wittgenstein. But Descartes’s vivid account of dreaming, and his argument resolving skeptical doubt, spoke to the students, who loved the drama of his presentation. And so we, the students, my numerous teaching assistants, and I had many productive discussions. Descartes’s First Meditation: “Concerning Those Things That Can Be Called into Doubt” begins by rejecting anything that we might doubt. What, he then asks, can we still believe? Since “the senses are sometimes deceptive” (2000: 105), best to suspend belief in all sensory knowledge. Descartes concludes that even if we can doubt everything else, still we certainly know the contents of our own mind. He argues that from this starting point, analysis of our idea of God reveals that God exists. And then we may conclude that in general our sense judgments can be trusted. Finally this analysis, he claims, allows us to understand the relationship between the mind and body, and our knowledge of other minds. Radical, systematic skepticism is the Cartesian starting point for a constructive account of experience. Descartes in effect offers a promissory note: from this introspective starting point it is possible to reconstruct all knowledge. Some of his successors then attempted to cash this note, while others, so we will see, wanted to take reflection in a different direction. All of them severely criticized his claims, but most retained a concern with skepticism. To successfully deal

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with philosophical skepticism, they believed, permits showing how our claims to knowledge can be justified. Needless to say, different philosophers have diverse views of skepticism. In an essay wonderfully titled “What is the Scandalous Skepticism?” Stanley Cavell organizes a complex intertextual commentary with reference to Kant, Heidegger, and his own prior writings. Kant, he observes, thought it a scandal that skepticism remained an issue, which led Heidegger to argue in response, “The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof (of the validity of cognition) has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again” (Cavell 2005: 133). As for himself, Cavell allows that “there is something fundamental to or in our existence that we do not know.” And so, he returns to discuss Cartesian skepticism. In a similar discussion, without reference to Cavell, Thomas Nagel says, “I believe that skepticism is revealing and not refutable, but that it does not vitiate the pursuit of objectivity” (1986: 7). This book will link Bussmann’s drawings to this illustrious, complex intellectual tradition. In aesthetics, so I will argue, we justify our claims by showing that they survive skeptical critique. When I was teaching Descartes, my research was focused on a different subject, the aesthetics of visual art. I had been a pupil of Arthur Danto at Columbia University, and often his work was the subject of my writing. Here, too, skepticism was important, for as Danto explains in his various books, most clearly in Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, his treatise on method, for him the writings of Descartes were always the starting point for philosophical reflection. Danto was, to be sure, a wide reader of philosophy. Indeed, he published books on two very different philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, and his first major personal book, Analytic Philosophy of History, was about historiography, a subject that was of no interest to Descartes. For Descartes, as Isaiah Berlin explains, knowledge involves philosophical reflection and the study of mathematics and science. Valid knowledge is to be obtained only by the methods of the sciences, which Descartes … contrasted with the unscientific hotchpotch of sense, perception, rumor, myth, fable, travelers’ tales, romances, poetry and idle speculation that … passed for history. (Berlin 1976: 10)

Descartes himself says, “When one is too curious about what commonly took place in past ages, one usually remains quite ignorant of what is taking place in one’s own country” (2000: 48). Danto’s Analytic Philosophy of History emphatically does not endorse that Cartesian viewpoint. For him historical



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knowledge was a legitimate and important philosophical subject. In that way, he took the side of Giambattista Vico, who objected strongly to Descartes’s analysis. But although Vico is mentioned in passing in Analytic Philosophy of History, he plays no role in Danto’s philosophizing. Indeed, Danto’s account of historiography is grounded in a discussion of the importance of Cartesian skeptical doubt about historical knowledge. In relating skepticism in aesthetics to its place in discussion of knowledge, human action, and history we link visual art to a larger picture of human activity. Art cannot legitimately be marginalized, for it has an integral place in a full account of how we act and know. Descartes doesn’t discuss art, for the visual art of his time didn’t pose philosophical issues, at least not for him. The skeptical problems that will motivate Danto’s analysis and our discussion of Bussmann involve novel kinds of artworks. Danto’s aesthetics deals with skepticism: a central question for him is determining whether some artifacts by Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp are works of art. When Warhol claimed that his copy of a banal Brillo box was art, as when Duchamp presented Fountain, a men’s urinal and some other ready mades as artworks, then a skeptic could readily deny that these were artworks. And as we will see, Danto’s way of dealing with this question is deeply Cartesian. But to develop this argument required a large-scale extension of Descartes’s analysis. Descartes argues that the existence of our idea of God demonstrates that God exists. And what follows is that some of our ideas are veridical. This appeal to theology doesn’t interest Danto. For Descartes, the mind, is like the soul, and so it exists over time independent from the body. This step doesn’t interest Danto either. His analysis really moves in a different direction. Skeptical concerns always arise when we need to justify our claims. Danto became well known in the academic world for his books about historiography, action, and knowledge, but it’s fair to say that his book on aesthetics, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace put him on the intellectual map. At that time, when his broader philosophical system was fully developed, thanks to that publication, he became a renowned art critic and, also, a most successful, much published commentator on aesthetics. “To interpret a work,” he writes, “is to offer a theory as to what the work is about, what its subject is” (1981: 119). That’s also to be our procedure here. Descartes himself devotes only a few words to any form of art. Some major philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre) have a great deal to say about the arts. But others (Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Wittgenstein) do not. And this difference, I should add, says less about personal concerns than about their conceptions of philosophy. Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics discuss

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European art’s history at some length, in ways that sometimes still inspire attention. Merleau-Ponty published an essay on Paul Cézanne that was much read by 1960s American artists. And Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition has a short but significant chapter on art, an account that is highly praised by the renowned contemporary sculptor William Tucker. But some other canonical philosophers say little about visual art. Kant, who never traveled, had in his home in East Prussia only one artwork, a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whom he admired greatly). Still, although he didn’t see much visual art, he developed a very important theory of aesthetic judgment. Wittgenstein had sophisticated experience of classical music. One of his brothers was a famous pianist, and he designed a modernist house for one of his sisters. But his philosophical remarks about the arts are brief. And Spinoza, who made some informal drawings, says nothing about aesthetics. In short, each of these philosophers who are Bussmann’s subjects is an individual case. This is hardly the place to survey my own now lengthy career as art writer, which often has involved commenting upon Danto’s claims. Nor would I aspire here to reconstruct the development of his aesthetic, which took place over a long period, from 1964 until almost the end of his life in 2013. What however is called for is some prefatory explanation about how my personal background will inform this philosophical study of Bussmann’s art. As announced in the Bloomsbury prospectus, the goal of this series “Aesthetics and Contemporary Art” is to promote “philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists.” This, in fact, is my second book in the series. Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll appeared in 2018. And so, it builds dialectically upon a critique of that earlier publication. Art writing is often an unpredictable process, an activity in which you’re never quite sure at the start how best to proceed or how you will end. My Bloomsbury book on Carroll drew upon Danto’s aesthetics. And, although I certainly had to rethink many details, on the whole that Dantoesque worldview was very productive for my purposes. Here, however, it was clear to me from the start that an entirely novel critical approach was required, for Bussmann’s art poses very different challenges. I knew that I needed to reread the philosophical classics but I wasn’t initially sure how to use that experience. This is how philosophy lives, through critique. This book will describe and interpret a number of Bussmann’s artworks. She is not just an artist whose subject is philosophy but a professional academic philosopher. Her work presents a substantial and critical philosophical worldview. To write a history of philosophical aesthetics, or even a full account of just the philosophers who are her subjects, would be an enormous task.



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This book, however, is focused on one narrow question: can Bussmann’s art present its philosophical subjects? Here, in preparation, I identify the essentially philosophical nature of this skeptical question. In Connections to the World, Danto draws up a list of the skeptical philosophical problems to be discussed. Descartes’s perceptual argument that dreaming is indistinguishable from waking; Kant’s claim that there is no external difference between acting morally and not; Hume’s contrast of two exactly similar universes, one deterministic in its ordering, the other a world of pure chance; Alan Turing’s demonstration that the output of a computer could be indiscernible from that provided by a person; Bishop Berkley’s belief that a world in which God exists would be indistinguishable from one minus Him; and, finally, Marcel Duchamp’s ready mades, which demonstrated that an artwork might be indiscernible visually from a mere thing (Danto 1989). And historical knowledge, which was the subject of Danto’s Analytic Philosophy of History could be added to this list. We can imagine that the world (including all of the historical records) was created five minutes ago. What links all of these cases together and defines the character of philosophical problems is that they all involve indiscernibles, things visually indistinguishable, though in fact they are totally different. When Descartes asks whether we could be dreaming when we believe ourselves awake; as when David Hume asks whether the self exists; or, in Danto’s book on historiography, when he asks whether the world together with all of the ancient fossils might have been created five minutes ago: then in each case we deal with a paradigmatically philosophical question. What’s characteristic of these skeptical questions is imperviousness to empirical evidence. If I wonder whether the painting that I see is a true Caravaggio, then there are useful practical tests. I can have the pigment and canvas dated and ask a connoisseur if it looks like a genuine Caravaggio. By contrast, what defines philosophical skepticism is the irrelevance of such empirical testing. Because this skepticism thus resists resolution, it can inspire productive discussion. For example, I might dream that I am writing right now this very sentence that you are reading. Is that absurd to imagine? Suppose that in ten seconds I open my eyes, wake up and find myself in bed, with this paragraph not written out! If that is possible, then maybe right now I am dreaming. As Descartes puts it: I see so plainly that there are no definitive signs by which to distinguish being awake from being asleep. As a result, I am becoming quite dizzy, and this dizziness nearly convinces me that I am asleep. Let us assume, then, for the sake of argument, that we are dreaming. (2000: 20)

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At the start of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto presents a thorough experiment. Imagine, he says, a red monochrome painting. Were its title The Egyptians drowned after pursuing the Israelites across the Red Sea,

It would be a different work than were it called Kierkegaard’s Mood

Or Red Square, a Moscow landscape

Or were it a geometrical minimalist work with the same title, or an illustration of Buddhist doctrine, Nirvana.

Or, finally, just a painted red surface, which is not an artwork at all (Danto 1981: 1–2). The title of each work projects an interpretation. And in the last case, the description identifies something red that is not art. If we accept these examples, then it seems to follow that we cannot know the subject of a painting just by looking; as, for Descartes, we cannot know whether we are asleep or waking merely by introspection. Richard Wollheim claimed that these sort of examples are convincing only when worked out in considerable detail. There are, he suggests, two conditions defining art: First, that it is generally the case that objects that have been made with the broad intention of being works of art will, as a result, stand out from objects that have not been made with such an intention; and, secondly, that it is generally the case that works of art that have been made with different specific intentions will stand out from one another. (1980: 33)

When we discuss Bussmann’s art, we will consider that claim. Of course, we also find skepticism relevant sometimes in everyday life. I ask myself, did I pay that annoying bill? I wonder, did I correct my footnotes? Or I worry, did I send birthday greetings to that distant relative? Such banal everyday doubts are uncertainties that usually I can readily resolve. I look at my checkbook, consult the computer file, or see if that stamped card is mailed. What by contrast defines philosophical skepticism is that the examples are constructed so as to be impervious to such checking. Whatever real experiences I seem to



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have, it is possible that momentarily I will awaken. And, analogously, perhaps some radical new artifacts are not artworks at all. No doubt it’s neurotic to worry too much. But what these examples show is not that philosophers are especially neurotic but that philosophical skepticism has a special character. It is ultimately a stepping point toward truth, not a merely personal concern. Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is an exemplary book for the philosopher interested in skepticism. Abraham receives a command from God, so he believes, to go up on the mountain and make a sacrifice of his only son Isaac, in contravention of all the laws of morality. How, Kierkegaard asks, can we know if such a command is truly from God? Not by any practical test—Abraham can’t ask anyone for advice. Obedience demands faith. How then may we know that Abraham is not a madman? We cannot! As Stanley Cavell indicates, Kierkegaard’s questions about faith are closely linked with philosophical debates about skepticism and also to the recent situation of art (1976: ch. 7). A great deal of modernist art puts the artist and spectator in a position of needing to believe in what may well be absurd. I may choose, against the critical opposition of almost everyone, to believe in the importance of a radically innovative work. Traditional visual artworks are often said to inspire aesthetic contemplation, which generally requires long, close looking. In the preface to his Mellon Lectures, Painting as An Art, Wollheim describes his process of slow looking, “massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding” (1987: 8). Waiting “for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down,” he then found that “the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was.” I know of no better description of how looking at visual art can be deeply rewarding. But of course, in reaction, a great deal of modernism sought rather to swiftly inspire all-at-once responses. It’s no accident, then, that Wollheim, a political leftist, had conservative aesthetic tastes, for his contemplative procedure is hardly suited to a great deal of present art. And Bussmann’s drawings demand prolonged close attention. When I am alone working in my study, I find it instructive to glance around at the numerous small, inexpensive works of art on paper that I have framed and hung on either side of my computer. I learn how to proceed, sometimes, by looking at varied images. And so, I have some old master Italian prints, a Japanese woodcut, and a number of drawings by contemporary artists right at hand. Then I return, refreshed and visually stimulated to my writing. In this book, a number of those framed works from around my desk will be presented as instructive examples. Sigmund Freud was famously inspired by the collection of small antique sculptures gathered in his study. My much more humble visual

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examples also inspire reflection. These case studies, of very varied aesthetic value, will serve to advance our discussion of Bussmann’s development. In order to understand her deeply original drawings, it’s essential, I believe, to relate them to a variety of artworks. And some of my examples are works relating to Nicolas Poussin, for I have published two books about him. For many years I have studied my tiny print by Jacques Callot, The Conversion of Paul. In the center, we see Saul-become-Paul, felled from his horse as the line of light from God-the-Father, whose words “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” inscribed in the bolt of lightning, descend upon him. There is an almost empty circle around the saint, as if everyone’s so frightened by the sacred thunderbolt that they keep their distance. But from the left a man with outstretched arms runs to Saul’s rescue. To his right, another man tries to rein in the horse, who has been spooked. In the dark heavens, you see a complex play of light and shadow. In the lower left hand corner is a marvelous figure on a charging horse, whose steed, too, has been startled by the commotion. And in the middle ground at the far right, you see more horses. All this and an inscription, too, on just three by four and a half inches of paper. In presenting my examples, I will often write as if we were looking at the subject depicted by the artwork. Obviously that’s a fiction. Still this is such a good way of thinking that I’m surprised that it isn’t used more widely. Such comparison images help us to interpret Bussmann’s drawings. Because she isn’t yet well known, I reproduce just her art. And so, it helps to offer as many such word painting comparisons of works by other artists as possible. And learning to describe her artworks in some detail is a good way of bringing philosophical concerns into focus. Michael Baxandall’s book on early Renaissance art writing, Giotto and the Orators quotes a second-century account by an obscure figure, Hermogenes of Tarsus that has provided the model for my humble descriptions: Ekphrasis is an account with detail; it is visible, so to speak, and brings before the eyes that which is to be shown. Ekphrases are of people, actions, times, places, seasons, and many other things … The special virtues of emphasis are clarity and visibility; the style must contrive to bring about seeing through hearing. (Baxandall 1986: 85)

We can easily identify every relevant element in this Callot because the story is familiar. You don’t need to read the two lines of inscription identifying the theme, which are at the bottom, to learn what’s happening. In Caravaggio’s The Conversion of Paul, in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, perhaps the most famous presentation of that event, we are pressed close up to the central scene. However,



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Callot sets St. Paul, who has fallen down from his horse, in the distance. The conversion is the central event, though the saint, around whom all the action is centered, is not the largest figure. It’s astonishing, then, what a deep roomy space Callot constructs in this tiny image, as you see when you move your eyes slowly from the foreground toward the back of the vista. There are uncountably many figures in the background. Callot inscribes his name in tiny print at the bottom, near the left edge. And since at the front at the very bottom a hill rises, we are looking down at the fallen sinner who miraculously has found salvation. Leo Steinberg told me: Never write about an artwork without having a good reproduction at hand. Even if you believe that you know a picture well, he said, you may forget important details. Of course, the computer makes it easier to call up images. Descriptions are most vivid when written in the present tense, as if the writer was looking at the artwork. But if my word paintings fail you, then turn to Google Image and look up these comparative illustrations. My examples are readily accessible online. And developing verbal descriptions is a valuable intellectual skill, a good exercise in looking. You learn to look with more care when you describe what you are seeing. Out next image is a scene of disaster worth of some upscale Hollywood action movie (Figure 1).

Figure 1  French Dictionary: Survivor. © Hilger Collection Wien.

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Six jagged black lightning-like lines converge on a tiny female figure who is at the center. She stands there, seemingly calm and uninjured, not registering any facial response. It’s hard to imagine a more vivid illustration of the word “survivor.” This image is Maria Bussmann’s le/la escape, e überlebende/r (Survivor), from her French Dictionary: The Words I Did Not Look For (2000–1). (I will discuss these drawings in detail.) The radiating jagged lines certainly focus our attention on the center, where there is a many-sided red star with yellow borders. It appears that there’s been a multi-vehicle collision, with a green truck running over an overturned red car coming from the lower right, a sinking boat in blue waters above it, and God knows what coming from the upper left hand top, below a whirling tornado, with lines running off the paper at the top, entering toward the center. And at least five stick figures, perhaps more who are hard to see, run around the center. A lot’s going on. The whole scene reminds me of the colossal bus, car, and truck crashes in the Terminator movies. In those films, as in this drawing, more is more. And as Edmund Burke observed in his account of the sublime, looking at images of disasters can be pleasurable so long as you are at a safe distance. Although it’s larger in reproduction than The Conversion of Paul, Survivor is much more difficult to understand. Once you know that Callot’s engraving shows Paul’s conversion, the details fit into place, with the action centered on the fallen sinner-become-saint. You don’t need much theology to grasp the significance of that famous sacred drama, the moment when a sinner discovers his divine mission. By contrast, because Bussmann has no such established iconography, it’s not clear how to understand her scene, or synthesize the details. We can’t tell which figures are most important, or how to identify their actions. And compared with The Conversion, her pictorial space is very flat. She shows a survivor but of what event—a car crash or a natural disaster? I have offered some ideas, which may just be my own projections. But you may disagree and, after all, everyone doesn’t love depictions of disasters. Unlike Callot, Bussmann doesn’t show any higher source causing the events. And so, where he centers the image on the relationship between God above in heaven, He who acts, and the saint, her survivor is alone, with no heavenly assistance at hand. Disasters look different in a secular world when they are not orchestrated from above. An art historian looking at Callot’s image of Paul’s conversion can cite numerous comparative examples, for this was a common Renaissance and Baroque theme. How different, for example, Callot’s scene is from the famous very late Michelangelo fresco (1542–5) of this subject. In his book-length account of that painting, Steinberg writes, “The Conversion must be one of the



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most difficult paintings in the world to see, to take in as a whole” (1975: 30). But he provides the reader with a great deal of pictorial and verbal help. By contrast, the interpreter of Bussmann’s Survivor is on her own. And as far as I can see, there aren’t any obvious precedents. And that makes analysis more difficult. Seeking interpretative clues, I compare Any Warburg’s fascination with Native American images of lightning, which he illustrated in the famous 1923 lecture on serpent rituals that he observed on his visit to the Southwest in 1896. Or, to cite another German example, Wilhelm Worringer’s account of the jagged lines in Gothic art. And also, I confess, Survivor appears like the drawing of a (superlatively talented) kid in the back row who is bored by my philosophy lecture. As we’ll see, Bussmann has a sense of humor. But you may have different interpretative ideas. And so, if I offer what you find to be puzzling or even wrong-headed associations, maybe that’s partly because Survivor is hard to pin down. What sets Maria Bussmann’s art apart from the work of many of her contemporaries is its demands that you slowly work at understanding the images. If you merely look quickly at Survivor and then move on, most likely you will get almost nothing. I’ve spent many hours happily puzzling over reproductions of her drawings. She reads philosophy slowly, reflects, and then is inspired to draw. To understand her images you need to move back and forth between reading and looking. Often, I have found, it’s useful to go away for a day or two and then return with my mind refreshed. And to understand Bussmann’s art requires a piecemeal analysis. Each group of drawings demands a diverse interpretative approach, and when you go from one body of drawings to the next, you may need to refresh your knowledge of the relevant philosophy texts. Certainly I did. Bussmann is an artist and she is a philosopher. But identifying her two activities in this way doesn’t tell how to understand her art. After all, many people practice two distinct, not deeply connected, activities in their everyday life. Someone may be both a parent and a doctor, for example, perhaps without their parental duties being reflected in their medical activities, or vice versa. The question, then, is whether there’s some internal connection between Bussmann’s art and her reading of philosophy. Of course, she says that there is a reason for depicting these subjects in her drawings. But that’s not enough to demonstrate that there is a connection. Maybe she is mistaken or deluded or just pulling our leg. A philosophical argument is called for at this stage, as often is the case in dealing with skepticism. The contemporary art world is extremely crowded. There are any number of justly famous artists, numerous challenging mid-career figures, and very

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many talented emerging painters. And Bussmann is difficult to place. She is not interested in most of the dominant trends of the contemporary art world. Her drawings don’t critique commodification or deal with identity politics. Often it seems nowadays that in visual art everything has been done. Bussmann’s drawings show that that’s not the case. How you write about an artist usually depends, to some degree, upon the quantity and quality of prior interpretations. Many contemporary artists are as much written about as the most-renowned old masters. One side of my crowded study is occupied with the Sean Scully literature. And on the other side, equally cluttered, are the major books and catalogues of Nicolas Poussin. Although my account of Carroll was the first full book about him, there were numerous good catalogue essays and reviews. And so, my interpretation took account of this literature. In the case of Bussmann, however, the crucial commentaries for my purposes are the essays by Thomas Micchelli. Once Sean Scully told me, “You are a philosophical art historian.” To explain that claim, which is relevant here, I need to say something about my evolving interests. When in the 1980s I started publishing art criticism, the first contemporary artist who inspired me as a philosophical art historian was, in fact, Scully. I wanted to understand how he was making ambitious abstractions at a time when many commentators thought that that was no longer possible. We’re looking at what appears to be a long horizontally oriented work composed of eleven separate canvases attached together. (Actually twelve, for the fifth from the right has two parts.) Each panel has bright stripes, some vertical, the others horizontal, some narrow, the others broad. The whole massive structure is twenty feet wide. Many figurative artists paint stripes, and some abstractionists employ them also. What’s singular, then, about this work is that the separate-striped sections appear joined together without regard for organic harmony. In that way, it’s like the roughly painted structures that one sees on decayed industrial walls. We’re viewing Scully’s breakthrough painting, Backs and Fronts (1981), the work that jump-started his American career forty years ago. At that time, it was remarkably difficult to understand. Backs and Fronts (1981) appears at first sight to be an urban landscape, perhaps a stretch of wall divided into multiple sections, … (Sean) Scully has often referred to the work as a reinterpretation of Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921), and indeed the first title Scully used for the piece was Four Musicians; however, as he continuously expanded the composition, originally comprising four panels, it no longer resembled a quartet but an entire orchestra, and then a city, so the title of the work also changed accordingly. And yet the starting point is revealing: the elements of the work, divided into stripes and arranged



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tightly against one another, conceal figures, offering an interpretation as bodies coexisting in harmony and disharmony. (Fehér 2020: 20–1)

Developing a plausible aesthetic adequate to Scully’s deeply original work was a significant philosophical achievement. Now we’re viewing a very different work, a small, almost casually presented image. In Bussmann’s French Dictionary: The Words I Did Not Look For (2000–1) each drawing is accompanied by a German word or words and its French translation. Her “assainir” (clean up) (2018: 22) really comes from another world (Figure 2). We see a drawing of a right hand spraying a stream of some cleaner fluid from a contained marked with a cross. Tiny bugs are dying in the lower left hand corner, and at the far upper left is a small drawing of a standing woman; her relationship to the spray isn’t obvious. And there is the outline of a large cross on the spray can and a smaller solid cross at the bottom. The three groups of pictorial elements are floating here, assembled in one relatively small space without any visual connection apart from the shared link with the subject, cleaning. The title identifies what we see, but the significance of this subject is still a little mysterious. In China, foreigners who don’t speak Mandarin sometimes navigate with directions written out in Chinese on cards. French

Figure 2  French Dictionary: Clean Up. © Hilger Collection Wien.

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Dictionary is the converse, an illustration of the words that Bussmann did not need to look up. If you don’t speak French and don’t need to know the word “assainir,” then you can consult this drawing. Well, obviously that doesn’t make much sense! Why did Bussmann choose to draw such a banal, unremarkable subject? When I first saw Backs and Fronts, I thought it puzzling, an abstract painting organized in a way that then was very unfamiliar. And so, it was only when the relationship of this painting to urban rhythms was discussed that it was possible to understand such a work. All those panels banged together looked very different from the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko, or of any of the other prior artists Scully admired. Had he not developed this highly original conception of abstraction in a large body of work in the 1980s, it’s hard to imagine that this work would be understood even now. In fact, I encountered this work at just the moment when I was starting to publish art criticism. And so, I met a number of gifted artists but none of the other younger abstract painters were developing such compositions. Bussmann’s “assainir,” like all the drawings in French Dictionary poses very different issues, and so calls for different theorizing. Without its title, we might take “assainir” to be an image demonstrating how to use a canned spray cleaner. And we might see the drawing as vaguely indebted to Roy Lichtenstein’s or Andy Warhol’s 1960s pop paintings. In context, however, amid the 119 other drawings in Bussmann’s French Dictionary, it’s a visual definition of “assainir” or its German cognate “desinfizeren.” But this title doesn’t really resolve our puzzles here. One might jokingly call this “an action drawing,” borrowing the phrase “action painting” sometimes used for Abstract Expressionism, to identify this depiction of the action of cleaning up. Bussmann’s concept of a visual dictionary makes sense but this entry is puzzling. Why would anyone want to look at a drawing to learn or recall the meaning of “assainir?” Sometimes dictionaries have illustrations. But those images aren’t artworks. We’re very familiar with contemporary art that presents extremely banal things. Still, this drawing has a really odd subject. Some contemporary artists have a real interest in philosophy. And a number of philosophers write about visual art. That said, what’s unusual about Bussmann, as I have said, is that she’s both professional philosopher and artist. She thus is effectively bilingual, to give that familiar word an unfamiliar sense that we will need to explain and justify. And so, her art offers an especially revealing perspective on both contemporary art and aesthetic theory. I know of no other artist who systematically employs philosophy as a subject in artworks anything



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like hers. No doubt they intrigue me in part because they take me back to my early education. When I was an undergraduate student at MIT, I did my senior thesis in the humanities program under a young faculty member, Samuel Todes. I wrote a comparative study of Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, an ambitious topic for an undergraduate who until his senior year had been a physics major. Todes did major pioneering American work on phenomenology; his Harvard doctoral thesis, published as Body and World (2001), provides a useful introduction to our discussion of Merleau-Ponty. Then when I was a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University, I mostly studied a very different contemporary approach: the analytic tradition of John Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and, in our program, my teacher Arthur Danto and some of his colleagues. Danto wasn’t yet discussing the philosophy of art. And so, my first teacher in aesthetics was Richard Wollheim, who was at Columbia for just a few years. His treatise Art and Its Objects (1980) had just been published in a series of handbooks on philosophy organized by Danto. I have a great fondness for this idiosyncratic book. I spent one summer in London, frequenting the National Gallery and reading Art and Its Objects in the parks, learning both that collection and Wollheim’s book by heart. And thanks to Wollheim, I met Michael Podro, a London-philosophic art historian whose interests were important for my development. At that point, the continental tradition of Hegel, Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Marleau-Ponty seemed to me very distant. Wollheim didn’t discuss those writers. The analytic and continental philosophers had different vocabularies, distinct styles of argumentation and, certainly, contrasting views of the history of the discipline. In graduate school, we learned an instructive joke: there are two kinds of philosophers, those who study the history of philosophy and those who study philosophy. You study some historical figure because his philosophy reveals his culture, because his claims are influential, or just because you find his arguments interesting. And if that philosopher is writing about some contemporary problem that interests you, then it can be worthwhile searching to find a relevant prior commentary, for otherwise you may be reinventing the wheel. But it is possible to do first-rate analytic philosophy without much historical study. And, conversely, sustained interest in textual exegesis of historical figures may hinder your philosophical development. You can read a great deal of Kant commentary without encountering discussion of actual artworks or art history. Some of the best analytic philosophy writing shows only cursory interest in the historical texts. When Heidegger begins Being and Time with an extended discussion of the linguistic basis of Greek philosophy,

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then he’s really in a different world. My training as undergraduate and graduate student raised an issue of importance for this present book. If your primary focus is on issues, as an analytic philosopher, then you may think that Spinoza and Hegel, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein are speaking of the same issues though obviously with different historical perspectives and diverse vocabularies. And so, you can think of them as productively debating with one another. But as we will see, that claim may be questionable. Richard Rorty was the one prestigious analytic philosopher who embraced this continental tradition, rejecting Cartesian ways of thinking: To think of language as a picture of the world—a set of representations which philosophy needs to exhibit as standing in some sort of non intentional relation to what they represent—is not useful in explaining how language is learned or understood. (1991: 295)

And also, he claimed: (Heidegger) is concerned to explore the way in which the West became obsessed with the notion of our primary relation to objects as analogous to visual perception, and thus to suggest that there could be other conceptions of our relations to things. (1991: 162–3)

If he is correct, then the analytic tradition is deeply flawed. Danto’s remarks about Rorty’s influential account are brief, unsympathetic, and dismissive. Rorty’s failure, Danto says, comes in reducing “philosophy as a whole to one of its positions—the idea that the mind reflects reality like a mirror—and mounting two or three not unfamiliar arguments against it” (1989: xiii–xiv). At Columbia, I studied many of the classic philosophers—Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. At that time, I didn’t read Hannah Arendt, who identified herself as a political philosopher; and I didn’t return to reread Merleau-Ponty. And then I moved into art criticism and art history, mostly pursuing very different concerns. My doctoral thesis dealt with one philosopher, Nelson Goodman; one art historian, E. H. Gombrich; and one art writer, Adrian Stokes. And I returned repeatedly to write about all three of these writers. But when I started doing this book, I thought that I had left that world behind. And so, I was genuinely surprised to find that my account of Bussmann’s art required that I re-engage with those concerns. I will appeal repeatedly, also, to Gombrich’s account of representation. For a long time, as I have noted, I composed my theorizing under the spell of Danto. Here, however, that situation has changed. If any readers of my prior publications should happen also to read this book, they



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will recognize that here for the first time I develop a sustained argument with that important philosopher and great friend whose ideas sustained my earlier writing. Every art writer (even, I suspect, those of the spell of October’s influential leftist purism) knows the pleasures of aesthetic experience. Many people love to look at visual art because that experience is often exciting and, at its best, happily exhilarating. But something should be said, also, about the pleasures of doing philosophy, for they are particularly relevant to Bussmann’s art. When you read Wittgenstein’s subtle account of the relationship between language and the world, Merleau-Ponty’s marvelous description of embodied experience, or Arendt’s distinction between labor and work: then there is real pleasure in understanding the complex persuasive power of these commentaries. Doing philosophy is hard work and fun, both at the same time, all at once. And that esoteric pleasure carries over, in my experience, to the interpretation of Bussmann’s art with philosophical subjects. Nothing’s more fun than working to understand her drawings. The writing of this book was begun during the plague year, 2020, at a time when travel was impossible. It was, however, a perfect time to focus on Bussmann’s drawings while I reread the philosophical classics she presents. Arendt, Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein write in very varied styles, offering very diverse arguments. And so, Bussmann varies her own drawing style tremendously in order to do justice to their claims. As an art critic, I admire her amazing virtuosity. And as a philosopher, I am challenged to identify and discuss her subjects. Bussmann is an artist who matters because her art gets us to rethink the basic concept of aesthetic pleasure, because it demands that we reconsider the activity of interpretation, and because it provides an original perspective on art history and inspires an original definition of art. Her art thus has a lot to offer to both the aesthetician and the art critic. I started to work on this book full of confidence that it could be completed relatively easily and quickly. After all, I had recently published my book on Lawrence Carroll, I had written a short book about Bill Beckley, and (also) I had done a great deal of art criticism. And so, I was unprepared for the initial difficulty of this task, or (finally) by how rewarding this rethinking of my fundamentals turned out to be. To speak in a personal way, as befits this preface, what I have gained from Bussmann is a challenge to my set ways of thinking. I had, so I thought, a reasonably clear picture of the options available in contemporary art. After publishing art criticism and academic aesthetics for forty years, I was ready to settle in. But her art brought about a need to rethink fundamentals.

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Bussmann is a mid-career figure, an artist whose work develops even as I am writing. In his Nicolas Poussin, Anthony Blunt remarks that his treatise is a study in Poussin’s sources and influences. Another author, he says, will have to write Poussin as an Artist. In fact, recently Richard Verdi has just done that, in a book with that title (Verdi 2020). Analogously, this, just a first book about Bussmann, a highly selective account, interprets some of her drawings; and it uses those interpretations to do philosophy. These goals are connected, for I use discussion of some canonical philosophers to develop an original, intellectually promising theory of visual aesthetics. And that philosophical theorizing will, I believe, inspires further interest in her work and also be of real value to art writers dealing with other visual artists. This book, done with her generous collaboration, is just one way of telling this story. Other commentators are sure to have different perspectives.

Acknowledgments I was introduced to Maria Bussmann by Thomas Micchelli, who edited the publication of my essay on her art, “When Philosophy and Art Intersect” (Carrier 2020b). This book is continuously indebted to his luminous accounts of her art, some of which are listed in the references (Micchelli 2012; 2016). Although she has exhibited on a number of occasions in New York, I did not know about those shows. Had Tom not provided an introduction when I went to Vienna on other business, Maria and I never would have met. I wish also to acknowledge the support of my colleague Tiziana Andina, who inaugurated the series in which this book is published. Thanks are due to Shyam Sunder, Suzie Nash and Colleen Coalter at Bloomsbury for their generous very patient editorial support. To Wilfrid Sieg, who provided a helpful discussion of Wittgenstein. And to Thomas Nagel for his note about one point of detail. Like all of my writing, this book is much indebted to the loving support of Sean Scully. And it owes massive debts to Paul Barolsky and William O’Reilly, who have always been my generous readers. During the period when this book was written, two journals have supported my art writing: Phong Bui and Charles Schulz at Brooklyn Rail, and Hrag Vartanian and Natalie Haddad of Hyperallergic. For many years Joachim Pissarro has patiently discussed art history and philosophy with me. I am enormously indebted to our very many always productive arguments. Marianne Novy has generously listened to and read many drafts of this material. The writings of Malcolm Bull have played a major rule in my thinking about philosophical issues, in ways I hope to explain in detail in a future publication. He writes: The Renaissance had fostered a third category between the true and the false, namely that of images that were acknowledged to be false but were nevertheless permissible, provided they were sufficiently naturalist or amenable to allegory. (Bull 2005: 394)

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As Bull’s own writing shows, that idea has legs. Above all, I thank Maria for tirelessly answering my questions about art and philosophy, and for going over this text. Pittsburgh December 31, 2021

Introduction: Philosophy as a Subject for Visual Art

A number of artists have expressed an interest in philosophy. We are looking at a charming old-fashioned painting by one of them. At the left is an aged, bearded, bald man who has his hands on a book. He is looking toward the lovely, richly adorned young woman on his left. Finely dressed, she holds with her left hand a small painting showing the holy family, which she gestures toward with her right hand. And through the window we see a beautiful Titianesque landscape with trees in the left foreground and distant mountains to the right. This painting, Philosophy and Christian Art (1868), by Daniel Huntington, an academic American artist, was successful enough to be published as an engraving ten years later by W. Ridgway. In context, the theme is clear. We see that Christianity (and nature, which is God’s creation) are more attractive than bookish philosophy. That’s why the man turns his eyes away from the books. As, also, we look left to right from the dark brown interior behind him to the brightly lit woman, painting, and landscape. The wisdom of the aged scholar, reading a book by lamplight, is contrasted with the intuitive perceptions of the young woman who examines a work of art by the daylight signified by the window. Huntington has cast in terms of ideal figures one of the pressing problems of his own times, when scientific findings seemed to challenge the truth and wisdom of religion conveyed by artistic and other nonscientific forms of perception. (Los Angeles Country Museum of Art 2021)

This announced theme is obvious enough. But for a present-day viewer, something different also seems to be going on. This seductive girl, whose youthful good looks are linked with nature and the virgin birth, attracts the aged philosopher away from his books. Judging from his other paintings, Huntington was a straightforward illustrator. Here, however, the seemingly

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simple opposition of philosophy/age/darkness on the left to Christianity/youth/ brightness at the right becomes a little complex. To raise one obvious question, what are we to make of the link between the beauties of nature and the birth of Christ shown in the painting within the painting? And how do we understand the role of philosophy? Huntington’s picture suggests a statement beyond and perhaps even in opposition to a verbal summary of his goals. Anecdotal visual images like this may make philosophical claims. Charles Baudelaire’s unfinished fragmentary essay “Philosophic Art” offers a remarkable analysis that is relevant here: What is pure art according to the modern idea? It is the creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself. What is Philosophic Art … ? It is the plastic art which sets itself up in place of books … Reasoning and deduction are the province of the printed book. (1964: 204)

In presenting this art in which “everything is allegory, allusion, hieroglyph, rebus” (Baudelaire 1964: 206), he might be describing Philosophy and Christian Art. Later Baudelaire adds, “Every art ought to be self-sufficient, and at the same time to remain within the limits set by providence” (1964: 210). Here he propounds a familiar modernist ideal. Compared with the Impressionists, figures of the “modern idea” as described in Baudelaire’s “The Painting of Modern Life,” Huntington was a retrograde artist because he presented bookish deduction. But then after this denunciation of philosophic art, Baudelaire, who could be marvelously inconsistent, changes his mind: “Although I regard Philosophic Artists as heretics, I have often come to admire their efforts by an effect of my own reason” (1964: 210). Bussmann, too, will pose that challenge, for her drawings also offer reasoning and deduction. Our second example is the image of a magnificent tree covered with small bright orange blossoms. It has masses of leaves covering its spreading limbs. And a few of the blossoms have fallen on the ground. Set in majestic isolation, with patches of green in the distance, this well-rounded tree looks very healthy. And so, I’ve enjoyed viewing it for many years. Seeing it in mid-winter, one looks forward to summer. And in summer, the picture can inspire you to go outdoors. This magnificent aesthetic drawing by Barbara Westman shows a plane tree. It has no particular allegorical or symbolic meaning. What more is needed, when all by itself her tree is so visibly life stimulating? Kant says that “there are two

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kinds of beauty: free beauty …” and beauty which presupposes “a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance of it,” (2000: 114) such as the beauty of horses, buildings, or human beings. This, then, is an example of free beauty. Without having any real idea of how it functions, I take great pleasure in this beautiful, life-giving tree. No symbolism here! This truly is an example of the “modern idea” of art. Now let’s look at some of Bussmann’s very different trees (Figure 3).

Figure 3  Hegel: Philosophical trees. © Dom Museum Wien.

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We’re walking in the forest outside of Vienna, looking at some trees that are close to us. One is cut down, with an axe marked with Kant’s name lying on the ground near its stump. Another has the name Fichte written on the bark. And yet a third, the large tree closest to us, has the name and dates, G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), carved onto it. A little higher up, the initials, H, H and S, are visible inside a heart—as if they were a romantic triangle. There are no people in these woods, but a human face and dog’s head appear within the roots of one tree. These are not particularly attractive trees. But with these philosophers’ initials marked on them, it’s fair to conclude that the subject of this image is aesthetic theory. Trees with lover’s names carved on them are familiar. But trees with the names of German philosophers cut into them are not so usual. Here, too, there are puns in German on the names. “Kant(e)” is German for “edge,” and “Fichte” means “spruce.” And the initials above Hegel’s name, which is written out—H, H, and S—stand for Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, two philosophers and a poet, who were classmates at the University of Tübingen. In an elaborate chart, Dieter Henrich’s Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism identifies the complicated relationships of Hölderlin, Schelling, and some thirteen other Germans who commented on Kant’s writings, and thus influenced Hegel’s early work (2003: 79). Most of these writers are known nowadays only to specialists. In opposition to Kant, Hölderlin and Hegel wanted to reconcile “mysticism and Kant’s philosophy of freedom” (Henrich 2003: 80). Kant, the drawing suggests, may have cut down the tree of traditional metaphysics, but Hegel inspired a new growth. And Fichte is in the background in this crowded forest, which is a memorial to German idealism. Needless to say, this complex tradition with so many philosophers engaged in contentious commentary is not easy to understand. You don’t find many trees with such inscriptions. And so, compared with Huntington’s image, this composition is not easy to interpret. Surely only an erudite student walking in the woods could have made these cuts. And so, most likely some major philosophy department is nearby. It’s not easy to unpack the intricate intellectual relationships presented so elliptically in these inscriptions. We have been looking at a recent untitled drawing by Maria Bussmann. To interpret it, you need to know German philosophy. Kant has a well-developed account of contrast between the beauty of art and nature: “Beautiful art displays its excellence precisely by describing beautifully things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing” (2000: 190). But these trees, disfigured by extensive carvings, are not beautiful. In some cases, Kant also says, the beauty of something “presupposes(s) a concept of the end

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that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection” (2000: 114). This influential theory was much commented on. And Hegel was the most important of Kant’s immediate successors. Hegel’s Aesthetics—based on student notes from university lectures given in Berlin between 1826 and 1829—also offers tantalizing hints about how to understand this drawing. “Landscapes and situations drawn from daily human life,” he says, “afford an extremely favorable scope for invention and execution” (1975: 270). What’s at stake in appreciating nature, Hegel adds, is “how far the symbolical itself is to be reckoned an art-form.” To interpret this drawing, which certainly is enigmatic, we need to understand Bussmann’s symbolical philosophical allusions. Later in his lectures, Hegel relates forests and medieval churches in a way that might be relevant to this drawing: Enter the interior of a medieval cathedral, and you are reminded less of the firmness and mechanical appropriateness of load-carrying pillars and a vault resting on them than of the vaultings of a forest where in lines of trees the branches incline to one another and quickly meet. But this is not to say that Gothic architecture has taken trees and forests as the actual model for the forms it uses. (1975: 688)

Here we find Hegel’s rejection of the Kantian account of natural beauty. Perhaps the most famous tree discussed in recent philosophy is the chestnut in Jean-Paul Sartre’s early novel Nausea (1938). There are no names carved on this tree, which is in a park in the fictional provincial city of Boucle. At that time, Sartre himself taught philosophy in such a place. The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping over, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty lump, entirely raw, frightening me. Then I had this vision. It took my breath away. Never, up until these last few days, had I suspected the meaning of “existence.” … When I believed I was thinking about it, I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word “being.” Or else I was thinking—how can I put it? I was thinking of properties. I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that green was one of the qualities of the sea … If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form added to things from the outside, without changing anything in

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art their nature. And then all at once, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the dough out of which things were made, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the patches of grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder— naked, with a frightful and obscene nakedness. (Sartre 2013: 23–5)

Sartre isn’t interested in the aesthetics of nature (he was a city man) but in metaphysics. In his vivid description of this encounter, Arthur Danto writes, Sartre’s antihero Roquentin “recognizes that the distance between the tree and any description of it is hopeless, and cannot be overcome by more words … there is no way in which this tree … can be transformed, as it were into language” (1975: 4). The cause of Roquentin’s anxiety attack is his realization that “the world lacks anything like logical form,” which actually belongs only to language. Danto suggests that we should contrast the account in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: (2.1) We picture facts to ourselves. (2.141) A picture is a fact. (2.151) Pictorial form is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture. (1961b: 8–9)

Wittgenstein asserts what Roquentin denies that language reveals the structure of the world. And as we will see, Bussmann has repeatedly taken a great interest in this aspect of the Tractatus. We are looking at a picture whose subject appears to be, as we say, “all over the map” (Figure 4). Around the center are some broken arrows and plus and minus signs, which are not in any discernible pattern. At the top is a human figure surrounded by two rings. In the upper left hand corner is a baroque door key. And on the right are two different keyholes but it’s obvious that neither of them has any connection to this key. The faint “x” penciled in the arrow at the top right-hand corner indicates that no more speech is possible. In Bussmann’s other pictures of the Tractatus, there is a square in this position, indicating that there are still coordinates and perceptive through which it is possible to catch some meaning of the statement. This thus is an elaborate image of a world in which nothing connects. It is Bussmann’s illustration of (4.461), of the Tractatus.

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Figure 4  Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 4.461. © Maria Bussmann. Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing. A tautology has no truth-conditions, since it is unconditionally true: and a contradiction is true on no condition. (1961b: 4.461)

Failure, easy to describe in words, is not easy to illustrate. Does an image of a man pushing a massive rock uphill show how much he has accomplished. Or does it rather indicate that he fails to move it uphill? In his commentary on (4.461), Max Black quotes Wittgenstein: “In a tautology ‘all its simple parts have meaning, but it is such that the connexions between these paralyze or destroy one another, so that they all are connected only in some irrelevant manner’ ” (1964: 229). That’s what Bussmann shows. And as we’ll see later, she draws a very different image to illustrate Wittgenstein’s picture theory of facts, showing what happens when propositions do connect and so correspond to reality. How different is this illustration from her picture of the Hegelian tree, a contrast that emphasizes the differences between the men’s relationship to philosophical tradition. Where Hegel builds his system upon a critique of Kant and numerous near contemporaries, Wittgenstein aspires to make the Tractatus

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an almost completely self-sufficient analysis. His book makes significant references only to Frege and Bertrand Russell. And where Hegel roots his philosophy in nature and a dialectical traversal of the entire European history, Wittgenstein offers a radically abstract account. No wonder, then, that the Preface to his Phenomenology is almost as long as the complete Tractatus. For Hegel, in order to understand the present you must traverse the entire history he presents, a way of thinking that is completely alien to Wittgenstein. Even if you haven’t done much reading of Hegel and Wittgenstein, you could deduce a certain amount about their differences by contrasting these two drawings. And so, it is astonishing that Bussmann can bridge the vast distance between the continental philosophical concerns of Hegel and Wittgenstein’s analytic ways of thinking, and make both subjects for her art. Sartre wouldn’t have read Wittgenstein. He didn’t have to because notwithstanding Wittgenstein’s general originality, his view of the relationship between language and reality, or what Sartre in his idiosyncratic vocabulary calls “absurdity” was traditional. Indeed, as Danto adds, in his later philosophy Wittgenstein too came independently to the same realization as Sartre, albeit coached in much less dramatic language. Roquentin has discovered that the “the shaping structures of language … have no objective correlates” (2013: 6–7). The world lacks these structures, or indeed “any structures at all.” Bussmann’s very unusual trees convey a different lesson from Sartre’s. You can do diverse philosophical studies using trees. Some artists depict landscapes, others historical events; and still others work abstractly, showing no subjects. The creation of paintings with landscape or still life subjects opened up novel aesthetic horizons, for these subjects had meanings that needed to be worked out. The same is true of Bussmann’s philosophical subjects. If an artist depicts city or landscapes, commentators naturally discuss those sites. It’s almost always useful to learn what particular choices of subjects are made. Or if he shows historical events or famous people, then interpretation needs to explain the significance of these subjects. Landscape painting led to novel ways of looking at the countryside. And still life works gave new appreciation for banal everyday foodstuffs. But when an artist’s subject is philosophy, then the relationship between her images and subjects is more elusive. What does the world look like according to Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, or Wittgenstein? It should look just the way that it appears according to their systems. But that doesn’t tell us how to judge Bussmann’s drawings of these subjects. Maybe, as some philosophers claim, there are alternative truthful perspectives. But perhaps these different systems are mutually incompatible.

Introduction

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Bussmann’s presentation of philosophical subjects is a real innovation. As we’ll see, it’s hard to cite precedents. And so, it’s useful to consider a related change, what happened when other novel artistic genres were born. E. H. Gombrich’s “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape” provides a well-documented story of the earlier introduction of an artistic genre. What defined such innovation, Gombrich argues, is not the employment of landscape backgrounds, which already occur in older pictures, but the creation of an “established and recognized genre of art,” pure landscapes (1972: 107). (He doesn’t trace the story in China or elsewhere outside of Europe.) Only when there was a recognized desire for paintings with such subjects could this genre be established. And in fact, Gombrich argues, “even before the first landscape had come into existence” (1972: 111) Leonardo da Vinci and other theorists described it. In this complex process, part of what was at stake was a national division of labor: Northerners specialized in landscapes, while Italians did mythologies and histories. Symbolic paintings are works having philosophical subjects. In the book Symbolic Images collecting his essays on this subject, Gombrich quotes a Renaissance humanist dialogue in which the artist Mantegna is commanded to paint justice by going “to the philosophers to consult them on the way she should be represented” (1972: 175). Then we get a discussion of Plato’s Republic, an account of St. Thomas Aquinas and, finally the view that Mantegna was advised to “represent Death, for death is the great leveler.” Gombrich deals with a very important topic, how do we understand the relationship between representations and symbols? In this broad sense, he notes, the dividing line between a represented figure and a symbol often is elusive and vague; Mars is personified as a young man, and Venus as a beautiful woman. And so, thanks to humanist advisors, even unbookish Renaissance artists were involved with Neoplatonic themes. We’re viewing one renowned symbolic artwork influentially described by Gombrich. It shows a giant walking into a landscape. He has a small man asking directions standing on his shoulder. And around his head, like a halo, is a field of dark clouds. But the larger more distant sky is sunny and clear. In the far distance is the sea. And high above, a small figure of a goddess is standing on a cloud. If he keeps walking along this path, which leads into a vast forest, eventually the giant will get to the seashore. But he cannot see where he is going, for he is momentary blinded by the clouds around his head. That’s why he needs the help of the man on his shoulder. Nicolas Poussin, who was a bookish artist, certainly did paint some unusual subjects. Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (1658), one of those, is an

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art

allegory. Whatever the artist might see, he can depict. And so, paintings can depict blind people. But it seems obvious that a painting cannot depict the experience of blindness. Do you see what I mean? She loves you—are you blind? He was blind to the consequences of his actions.

Such familiar metaphors show the deep links between sight and knowledge. Doubting Thomas had to touch Christ to confirm what was visually obvious. Still, this claim about the comparative verisimilitude of the evidence of the senses might be questioned. Touch can deceive, and sight often tells the truth. In this Poussin, I see a gigantic temporarily blinded man and four men and a woman who have their sight. But I don’t just see a blinded man. Because the clouds surround the giant’s head, I see what his blindness must be like. I see, to use a useful, obviously paradoxical phrase, the experience of blindness. The goddess in the clouds sees him but he cannot in return view her. Sight normally involves the possibility of reciprocity: I see you knowing that you, in turn, can see me. (Merleau-Ponty, we will see, develops this theme.) From where we stand, we see that this blind man’s left hand is in the line of sight in front of the sea on the distant shore. We view only a portion of his pathway but we see that if it continues toward the horizon, he will arrive at that distant beach. That is where he is being guided. But why would he be going there, why is he blind, and why is the woman watching him? That I cannot tell. I cannot entirely “see” the meaning of this scene. This picture thus resists the art writer. Although it is on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Blind Orion is not particularly well known. Nor, notwithstanding Poussin’s fame, was it imitated. And so, it would be interesting to see if someone who has never viewed the painting could imagine it just from my description. You cannot, however, fully understand Poussin’s picture without knowing that it is a kind of hieroglyph. According to the Greek writer Lucian (125–180 ce), the blind giant Orion was directed toward the healing rays of the sun by Cedalion, seen here standing on his shoulders. Poussin includes a meteorological subtext of the circulation of the elements by representing the earth’s vapors rising toward the moon (where Diana stands watching) that will return as rain (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2021).

Introduction

11

Our inability to fully comprehend Blind Orion without reference to its textual sources, creates blindness. Perhaps that was Poussin’s goal. Or, rather, maybe it shows that the culture has shifted. We have become blind to some part of Poussin’s achievement. Poussin is traditionally said to be the philosopher-painter. What this means, in part, is that he sometimes painted unusual esoteric and bookish subjects. The story is translated by the textual sources Poussin studied into a scene involving mythological figures. By contrast, Bussmann’s goal is to tackle essentially abstract philosophical statements. And this is an important distinction. Building upon this discussion of the relationship of visual art and philosophy, let’s return to Bussmann’s drawing of the trees. That the axe in front of the tree stump has Kant’s name on it is apt, for he aspired to critically demolish the delusions of traditional metaphysics. And that the tree with Hegel’s name on it is in the foreground also makes sense, for he aspired to critique the philosophies of Kant and Fichte, and develop constructively an analysis moving beyond theirs. But my thoughts about the face and dog visible in the roots of Hegel’s tree are unresolved. Might they allude to the strangeness of his system? Or do they just suggest that it’s possible to project too many meanings into this image? When, I am asking, should the reading of her artworks stop? What surely is visually unambiguous is the aesthetic status of this scene. We see nature defaced with human presence, not the beautiful trees in themselves but stumps cut down and marred by the carved initials of the philosophers. Kant doesn’t give many examples of visual artworks in his Critique of Judgment. To add a beautiful design to what is already beautiful because its form is adapted to its biological function is a mistake, for decoration detracts from its attractiveness. So, analogously, to add words to the beautiful tree, even were those letters beautiful, would be a mistake. But then, Bussmann doesn’t aspire to make a beautiful drawing. Her goal, rather, is to inspire philosophical reflection. The claim that Bussmann’s subjects are philosophical, certainly inspires challenging analysis. But more, we will see, is at stake. Bussmann’s goal is to inspire philosophical reflection with her images. She wants that her art enlarges our experience of its subjects. And that is a grand ambition, for achieving it has the potential to change how we understand aesthetics and think about art. The potential confusion, then, posed by my reconstruction of twenty some years of her activity is that it may make Bussmann’s development seem more systematic, and certainly more planned in advance than actually was the case. In fact, as happens with most artists her development usually involves piecemeal planning. Only now, looking back, does this development fall into the order that I present.

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1

Identity/Metamorphosis/Translation

How should we verbally describe changes of organisms, things, and institutions? Different disciplines have distinctly diverse vocabularies for that task. Philosophers speak of identity; literary critics discuss metamorphosis; and as art historians we will talk about Bussmann’s translations. We are interested in how philosophical concepts (and some other written materials) are translated by her into visual images. And as we will see, these three ways of describing change, though often closely connected, are not entirely identical. We need, in any case, some way to describe and identify the same thing, organism, or institution as some of its qualities change. And change is important to discuss, for as we’ll see, it’s hard to describe the world without some account of substances and properties, things whose qualities change. We view a curious twilight scene in which there are no people. There is an image of the solid dark letter “E” in a dark, tree-lined landscape, the “E” linked by bubbles with an elegant A/E suspended in a white irregularly shaped balloon that is high above it. And below is a caption written in two lines: “American Society for A/Esthetics. 50th Anniversary 1942–1992.” In this very black landscape it’s curious to see the “A/E” floating in the sky, an unusual object hovering above the ground. We are looking at what appears to be a site of mysterious rituals, a place whose identity the caption does not spell out. Every reader of comics is familiar with the distinctive ways that these artworks relate words and images. Words that are linked to the speaker are depicted inside of the word balloon. That balloon thus is not another object within the picture space, but, rather, a container for words. This convention, whose use was established in the early twentieth century, was quickly mastered by readers. The thought balloon, in turn, is a familiar variation on this convention. Attachment of words with a sequence of bubbles instead of a drawn line indicates that they are thought by the speaker, not said. In Western art since the Renaissance, there is a strong desire that visual works be self-sufficient. To include written words,

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art

apart from words on represented elements like signposts and, of course, the artist’s signature, was deemed inappropriate. A visual artwork should not be in need of textual supplement. And so comics with their synthesis of words plus image were criticized, for it seemed that they revealed a failure to either tell the story just using an image, as in successful narrative paintings, or merely with words, as in literature. For over a century, however, children and their parents have enjoyed comic books. We are used to seeing the words and thoughts of the comics characters. What’s more surprising, however, about this image is that because we’re not accustomed to seeing letters of the alphabet shown as thinking, it’s not clear what is the relationship between the “E” and its thought, the “A/E.” This artist adopts an interesting variation on comics’ convention, showing the thought not of a person but a letter of the alphabet. His “E” is dreaming of being AE, the diphthong. In fact, Saul Steinberg, who made this image, wasn’t a comics artist but a visual thinker who often created images including words. Thus in The Labyrinth, a book cataloguing his images, one sees the word “Help!” written with its four letters spread out and the explanation point falling off of a cliff into the water (Nicholson 2018: 73). And in a wonderful drawing presenting the word “Riddle,” he depicts the first five letters as large solids, with the “E” shown as a small form on the edge of the fifth letter, the “l.” This drawing of E/AE, which isn’t included in that publication, treats the letters as if they were figures who could think. The caption explains that this poster is meant to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the American Society for Aesthetics, 1942–92. This organization publishes a journal devoted to philosophical studies of art and sponsors conventions. For a long time, when an academic, I was a member. The word “aesthetics” has two spellings, “aesthetics” and “esthetics,” and also two related but somewhat different connotations. It may refer, as I have mentioned, to the philosophical study of art. But also, and this usage is probably more common, it refers to the work of a beautician, someone who improves your appearance as, for example, by manicuring your nails. As you can imagine, sometimes we aestheticians, who in America usually write the word as “aesthetics,” joke about this ambiguity. We see, then, an “E” dreaming of being an “AE,” as the aesthetics society then showed its name. (More recently, the society has abandoned that typographic tradition.) We can readily understand a comics figure dreaming, but who would have imagined an alphabet letter dreaming? But the power of comics lies in their supple employment of conventions that everyone readily understands. According to Sigmund Freud, in dreams, unconscious thoughts

Identity/Metamorphosis/Translation

15

are translated into visual images. Here the unconscious thought of the “E” is depicted as being translated into an “AE.” Interpret that! Do we see the thoughts of an aesthetician imagining being more glamorous? At any rate, once you have this information about aesthetics, the image is easy to understand. Steinberg was a friend of Arthur Danto, who had written about his work. And so, as president of the American Society for Aesthetics, Danto provided Steinberg with some recent copies of the journal of this society and asked him to design a promotional poster. And then, as Danto explains: We see in the thought balloon above it exactly the kind of E it wishes it could be—one with pointy serifs, and sporting an accent grave. If only, yearns the clunky E, it were crowned with an accent like that! Now the blocky E dreams of being a diphthong, the way the 90-pound weakling in old magazine ads dreams of having the abs and biceps that make the girls swoon and the bullies keep their distance. (2006)

Using a thought balloon, Steinberg created an image expressing this ambiguity of “aesthetics”/“esthetics,” an illustration of an alphabetic translation. His image can be read as asking a philosophical question: is aesthetics/esthetics about beautiful appearances? Philosophers of art have recently had a great deal to say about that question. Indeed, Danto wrote a book about that subject, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. We are now viewing another, very different image. An aggressive looking crow sits defiantly on a tree (Figure 5). These black birds “have often been associated with mysterious powers.” And “their slouching posture, and their love of carrion, have helped to make crows symbols of death, yet few if any other birds are so lively and playful” (Sax 2013: 13). Crows are usually sociable. Behind this singular crow are graceful slim tree branches, and in the distance six other birds flying in a line. I love that his upper body shape is framed by the branch curved around him. Compared with any of Bussmann’s twenty-four drawings made in 2015 of pigeons, this is a defiant creature. You don’t need to read Sax’s book The Crow to sense that this crow has attitude. But so far as I can tell, Bussmann’s pigeons are just pigeons. And compared with her philosophical subjects, this image of a crow looks pretty straightforward. But one detail is obviously puzzling: at the very bottom right hand corner is the number “15.” Why number this representation of a bird sitting in a tree? That number is the key to interpretation here, for this is the fifteenth image in a series, Bussmann’s Franz in Florida, a Different Winter’s Journey (2017).

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art

Figure 5  Franz in Florida (the crow). © Maria Bussmann.

This group of drawings involves a double translation: it is a translation of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise D 911 (1827), a song cycle set to poems by Wilhelm Müller into images; and, also, a translation of the site from Schubert’s wintery Austria to Bussmann’s temperate Florida. As Schubert’s cycle has twenty-four songs, so also Bussmann’s work has twenty-four drawings. Franz in Florida transforms the original poem (and songs) into visual imagery. By contrast, in the case of Steinberg’s “E”/“A/E” there is no such translation, for neither word “aesthetics” or “esthetics” is obviously the original. We have a play of two distinct meanings. In 15, “The Crow,” Müller describes a crow that followed him when he left town, until it flew above his head. (I give an English transcription of his words.) (Müller 1996). And he alludes to the clichés about crows—they feed on the dead. And the speaker says that he, that speaker, doesn’t have far to go, for he is headed to his grave. Imagine that someone looks at this drawing without its title and without noting the “15,” which is small and at the margin. This, they plausibly conclude, is an attractive bird image, perhaps a contemporary supplement to John James Audubon’s famous early-nineteenth-century masterpiece, Birds of America. But then, when this person is informed of “The Crow” ’s place in Bussmann’s body of art, they would need to interpret it entirely differently. They learn that this is an illustration for Bussmann’s translation of Winterreise, Schubert’s most famous song cycle. Later we’ll return to this series of drawings to

Identity/Metamorphosis/Translation

17

look at more of the sequence. Here, however, we need first to discuss translation of the song cycle into drawing. In Franz in Florida, we see a threefold transition from the original Schubert song cycle, we go from Austria to the Southern United States; from the early nineteenth century to the near present; and from music to visual art. Imagine Schubert’s winter journey translated to Florida, and the German text by Müller (which was set to music by Schubert) translated into images and you have the basic concept. Just as often operas are given contemporary stage settings, so Bussmann sets Winterreise in present-day Florida. That full reconstruction of her procedure makes Franz in Florida sound like a cumbersome Rube Goldberg apparatus, but in fact her image is immediately visually effective. It’s easy to “get” Bussmann’s artworks without any special instruction, beyond knowing the song lyrics and having a little patience with the translation. Like Steinberg’s “E” dreaming of being an “AE,” Bussmann’s Franz in Florida is an exercise in translation. He translates one alphabet letter into another, and she translates a nineteenth-century musical work into an early-twenty-firstcentury sequence of drawings. Bussmann is involved with illustrating how the qualities of Winterreise, but also, as we will see, words in German and some other entities (including, most especially, philosophical texts), can be preserved when translated into her drawings. In one way, however, comparing Steinberg and Bussmann as we have done is misleading, for while her drawings preserve something of Müller’s poem, Steinberg alludes to the two related but different meanings of “E”/“A/E,” playing on that ambiguity. Steinberg’s image thus has some relationship to the deconstructionist arguments that were much discussed in the 1980s art world. Philosophers traditionally make a basic distinction between substances and their properties or qualities. Substances are organisms, persons, things, or institutions that endure through time. And then we make a distinction between essential qualities, as Stuart Hampshire notes, which are necessary for identity, and those qualities that can change with time. “The subject of a judgment, that which we know about, may significantly be said to possess different qualities at different times, while itself persisting through time as an identifiable subject with a whole series of different qualities inherent in it” (1960: 31). Arthur Danto is an essentialist when it comes to defining art. The political implications of this way of thinking nowadays are, he notes, complex. The question here for the philosopher is not how much change takes place, but whether before and after change the same entity, that is, a thing with the same

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art

essential qualities, exists. To identify substances is to pick out the unchanging essence of things. And these substances have properties or qualities that can change. An acorn eventually becomes a giant oak tree, and a person is first a small child then a grown adolescent and finally aged and occasionally forgetful. After such changes the same tree thus has very different physical qualities and the same person acquires new mental and physical qualities. Still they remain the same organisms. Analogously, an automobile remains the same car while its physical parts are replaced. And the United States is the same country as that thirteen state nation that declared its independence in 1776, though many more states have been added to its territory, and its institutions and laws have been changed. Appeal to substance-talk is a way of describing continuity over time. We do that when we speak of the same person, the same automobile, or the same nation while acknowledging that the properties of these entities have changed, perhaps dramatically (Wiggins 1980). Some philosophers reject substance-talk. But then what’s needed is some alternate way of making these commonplace distinctions. The American philosopher W. V. Orman Quine took up this issue, which he called “radical translation.” He imagined a linguist learning an unfamiliar language with the help of an informant. A rabbit scurries by, the person says “Gavagai,” and the linguist notes down the sentence “Rabbit” (or “Lo, a rabbit”) as a tentative translation, subject to testing in further cases (Quine 1960: 29). How, Quine then asks, can we distinguish between thinking that “Gavagai” means, more or less the same as “rabbit” and that it means “rabbit stage”? On one translation, the entities are rabbits; on the alternative account, rabbit stages, and a rabbit consists of a sequence of those stages. These seem very diverse metaphysical models. The first commits us to speaking of organisms, “rabbits,” which the second rejects. But it’s not clear, Quine notes that experience permits us to distinguish between them. It would be worth asking, still, why we believe in the existence of rabbits, but find the account of rabbit-stages a strange metaphysical hypothesis. These seemingly abstruse concerns have affected the everyday practice of my scholarship. When I first studied writing about visual art, I faced a basic philosophical question: when did my subject, European art history writing begin? Some people think that it started in 1550 with Giorgio Vasari’s Lives. Or maybe even earlier with Alberti’s fifteenth-century theorizing. But others say that it only began in Germany in the early nineteenth century, when academic art history developed. If Vasari, too, was an art historian, then it’s fair to contrast his claims to those of his academic successors. And later, when I studied the art museum, I asked another, conceptually similar question: do old master European

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works survive when moved from churches, their original sacred setting, into museums? Some people do not think this possible. As Hannah Arendt puts it in her account of Walter Benjamin: The collector destroys the context in which his object once was only part of a greater, living entity, and since only the uniquely genuine will do for him he must cleanse the chosen object of everything that is typical about it. (Benjamin 1969: 45)

Maybe our concept of visual art was only invented when the public museums developed in the late eighteenth century. I call this much-discussed view “museum skepticism,” that is, skepticism that old art is preserved when it is placed in the museum. Hans Sedlmayr was a museum skeptic: Regarded as a temple, the museum is not the temple of any particular God but a Pantheon of Art in which the creations of the most varied epochs and peoples are ranged next to one another with equal claims to our attention. For this to be possible, however, it was first necessary that the divinities for whom the works were created in the first place should themselves be undefined. (1958: 20)

According to Martin Heidegger’s way of thinking, nowadays a great deal of visual art in museums shows the rootlessness of contemporary culture (2008: 149). Indeed, long ago once Greek was translated into Latin, he says, this rootlessness started. “Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking” (2008: 149). Many scholars have dealt with this concern but, so far as I can see, I am the first to coin this phrase, gather the various accounts, and make the link to philosophical skepticism. As a museum skeptic, Heidegger thought that older artworks could not survive when moved to the museum. “The work belongs, as work, uniquely within the realm that is opened up by itself. For the work-being of the work occurs essentially and only in such opening up … in the work there was a happening of truth at work” (2008: 167). When old sacred Christian works are moved to art museums, they lose their original function and become aesthetic objects. Museum skeptics doubt that old sacred works survive when they are moved from churches or temples into the secular public art museum. They contend that a functioning altarpiece and an artwork are different kinds of things, even if that altarpiece was not physically changed when it is placed in the museum. The same artifact, they argue, then is described and looked at very differently. Here as is the case with essentialism, the political implications are elusive. Some

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art

museum skeptics are conservatives, while others are leftists. What’s at stake is in large part feelings about how museums are understood. When I worked out my analysis of museum skepticism, some fifteen years ago, I initially thought that this was a rather specialized concern, of use only in critical discussion of the public art museum. But when more recently I wrote about art in the historic center of Naples, I found that again museum skepticism plays a prominent role. This question about identity thus turns out to have a general art historical interest. Here we deal with identity over time, focused on institutions. In art writing and in museums, as in the development of persons and nations, there have been a great many changes over time. Vasari writes and reasons very unlike a modern art historian. And art displays in contemporary museums differ dramatically from those in Renaissance churches. The question, still, is whether there is sufficient continuity in these two cases to speak of the same institution and the same artifact over time. Should we treat Vasari as a predecessor to the twentieth-century Harvard art history professor Sydney Freedberg, who also wrote about Renaissance art, or are his goals entirely different? Does movement of an altarpiece into a secular museum preserve that same work, or does the new context change how it is understood? In both cases we need to describe the consequences of change. Can art writing survive these drastic institutional changes? And can the object survive this radical transformation of its setting? These are philosophical questions in part because it’s not clear that appeal to the facts will resolve them. Here, then, we return to philosophical skepticism, as discussed in the personal preface. Vasari describes art differently than a modern art historian. His Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) doesn’t have the scholarly apparatus, bibliography, or illustrations of present-day art history writing. Nor does Vasari usually debate with prior interpreters. Analogously, it is obvious that seeing an altarpiece in a church, where people are praying differs from viewing it in a public art museum. These different settings often inspire diverse kinds of discussions. Still, no one would deny that Vasari and his artist colleagues had a sophisticated appreciation of aesthetic values. And very many of the artifacts they described do survive in our museums. The skeptic asks: does art writing really change? And do these old artifacts change? But no mere appeal to the facts about change will resolve these questions. I want, also, to consider one other important example of identity, the identity of philosophical arguments as discussed by diverse philosophers. This issue, which is an obvious concern for many people who have studied philosophy, will

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be of real importance for analysis of Bussmann’s drawings. The various canonical Western philosophers we will discuss who are presented by her, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt; and also some others who will be significant for our purposes, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, G. W. Hegel, and Martin Heidegger: they have very different literary styles and, also, very diverse philosophical worldviews. When an academic writes an essay, “The Self in Hume and Kant” or “Perspectivism in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein,” the working assumption is that there is enough overlap among these philosophers to make such discussion possible and productive. Hume and Kant or, conversely, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein deal with the same problems in different ways, which can be contrasted and compared. Is it legitimate, then, to think that they all are engaged with the same subject, philosophy? If that’s the case, then are they at some level arguing with one another? Or, alternately, is it a mistake to speak of them all as writing about the same activity—philosophy? Descartes wrote about epistemology, personal identity, and action. He also discussed optics, mathematics, and physics. Kant’s three critiques deal with knowledge, morality, and aesthetic judgment. And his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View considers a variety of materials that often don’t fit with our modern sense of philosophical concerns. When, for example, he explains why women, clergy, and Jews don’t ordinarily become drunk; says that a wife is the natural custodian of her husband; or offers accounts of the national character of the French, the Italians, and the Chinese (Kant 1978: 60, 105, 157), then most present-day readers are likely to move on quickly. These passages, like Descartes’s discussion of optics, mathematics, and physics reveal these writers to be men of their time. Writing as philosophers, present-day scholars are unlikely to focus on these themes, which are not, we may think, strictly philosophical. And we know that swiftly changing changes of political correctness mean that discussion of such subjects are likely to date very quickly. For Danto, then, what matters are the claims of Descartes and Kant that deal with the concerns of present-day living interest. Maybe sometimes philosophers don’t really share enough common ground to make debate possible. In the 1970s, Jacques Derrida and John Searle engaged in a would-be debate about John Austin’s ordinary language philosophy (Moati 2014). I say, “would-be debate” because it wasn’t clear that anything either of them said, either about the argument or Austin’s texts, would be accepted by the other. It appeared that they were just talking by each other. When this book discusses Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible in successive chapters it, too, may raise that issue.

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art

It’s hard to relate Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning to Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied perception. The working assumption of departments of philosophy is that there is, ideally! a certain unity to this subject. This, after all is why those departments include philosophers, but not chemists, literary historians, or physicists. Just as we have linguistic translation, from German to English for example, so we have translation of philosophical systems. We might, for example, compare and contrast the ways that Nietzsche’s or Sartre’s claims can be translated into Danto’s vocabulary. We ask, following Danto, what view do Nietzsche and Sartre take of the relationship between language and the world or of the self? Of course, as in linguistic translation, not everything gets across, but the constructive suggestion is that what matters can be translated. If that’s correct, then discussion is possible. It’s useful now to introduce two closely related, roughly equivalent concepts, metamorphosis and translation, both of which will be important for our discussion. Identity is an important philosophical topic, and so it’s useful to see how it relates to these two other ways of discussing change, which have been developed, usually in intellectual isolation from philosophy, in other disciplines. A great deal of old master art, and also some contemporary work, presents subjects from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. In Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (1622–5), for example, Daphne escapes the pursuing Apollo by turning into a tree. Daphne’s soft body is, at the instant captured by Bernini, partially covered by the fiction of hard wood, which conceals her soft abdomen. Apollo’s soft hand is pressed upon the hard bark that covers her soft flesh carved out of hard stone. What is hard is made to appear soft, what is soft becomes hard. (Barolsky 2014: 39)

The psychology revealed in this transformation is obviously complex: Daphne turns back horror-stricken because she feels the hand of the pursuer, but is not aware of the simultaneous transformation of her body. Apollo, however, notices with amazement the transformation at the very moment when he seemed to be sure of his victim; but his body has not had time to react and he is still chasing what he suddenly sees to be unattainable. (Wittkower 1973: 15)

In this change, still, something of the original person, that is, some of their qualities are preserved. That is true, also, in another of Ovid’s cases that inspired artists, when Arachne, who unwisely challenges the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest, is turned into a spider. Metamorphosis thus differs from strict

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identity: what’s preserved in these changes may be just some essential qualities. Goddesses and spiders are very different organisms, but both weave. And so in metamorphosis, as Daphne survives at the cost of becoming a graceful tree, Arachne survives by becoming a weaving spider. A classic case of identity in metamorphosis is found in Virginia Woolf ’s novel Orlando: Orlando had become a woman … But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex … did nothing whatever to alter … identity … Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since. (Woolf [1928] 1973: 86–7)

We are viewing a donkey drawn in white on black paper (Figure 6). Standing in a field, with a marvelous texture on the ground beneath him, surrounded by other animals, he extends his head to eat some roses. And we see him pooping furiously. His body is highlighted in white. Thought balloons attached to the three deer in the foreground at the bottom of this landscape show them saying “Hi” to their fellow animal. Why depict a donkey? And why is that donkey eating roses? In fact, it’s the last of fifteen drawings in her series “Donkey Reads Japanese” (2007). This Bussmann’s drawing of a metamorphosis only fully makes sense when we read the accompanying text. Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, or the

Figure 6  I Have Never Been to Japan (donkey). © Maria Bussmann.

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art

Gold Ass, from the second century was much influenced by Ovid. In that story, a man is by accident changed into an ass, not, as he intended, into a bird; and he only again becomes a man at the end of the novel, after many adventures, when he eats roses. Bussmann here shows that later scene. Her drawings are published in a book co-authored with Elfriede Czurda, I Have Never Been to Japan. Many European writers identify Japan as a very exotic place, a country whose art and culture disorient the Westerner. And so, frequently fascinated visitors document and interpret Japanese culture. Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs (1983), a frankly mythological commentary and perhaps the most famous such recent account, is in this tradition. And Heidegger, who never visited Japan, contributed to this literature, with a long dialogue, his fictional reconstruction of an actual meeting with Tezuka Tommie (1903–1983), a Japanese scholar of German literature, which took place in Germany in 1954. Taken, then, as episodes in a literary myth rather than a factual report, these commentaries are richly suggestive. In the original story, Czurda explains, the ass was a man who had been enchanted by a sorceress. By mistake, she had used the wrong salve so that he became an ass instead of a bird, had to roam with a bunch of robbers and became the observer of many adventures, including erotic ones. (Bussmann and Czurda 2010: 63)

At this very moment shown by Bussmann, the ass is about to again become human. And just as the donkey is metamorphosized, so the story itself is set by Bussmann not in its original site, the South Mediterranean Roman Empire, but in Japan. The man retained his human identity when transformed into an ass, which means that we learn of his thoughts; he cannot speak, but only bray. And so the novel tells of his often terrifying or humiliating experiences until, finally, he is able to save himself and become human again. The story, no doubt, is a suitable commentary on the situation of a foreigner in Japan who if unable to speak the language finds himself very much an outsider, unable to communicate except through translators. And maybe the employment of white-crayon-onblack-paper drawing, a reversal of the customary black-on-white of Bussmann’s drawings, underlines this dramatic cultural transposition. Metamorphosis thus is one form of identity through change and translation is another. The goal of translation from one language to another is to preserve as much of the original meaning as possible, knowing that inevitably there will be linguistic differences. The first full English-language translation of Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, by Scott Moncrieff, retitled the

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book Remembrance of Things Past, a phrase taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past” (Shakespeare 1997: 171). The recent translation has a more literal title: In Search of Lost Time. When you read Proust in English translation, you gain some partial but incomplete sense of the French original. Here, however, with Bussmann’s translations of philosophy into visual art, what’s possible also may be a gain, as we will see. Some book translations are more challenging. Georges Perec’s la Disparition (1990) is a novel without the letter “E,” which was translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void. Perec was a member of Oulipo, a group of writers, most of them French, dedicated to linguistic experimentation. Here, then, the translation preserves that convention, not using that letter of the alphabet, which often modifies the narrative. For example: Original: “Portons dix bons whiskys à l’avocat goujat qui fumait au zoo.” Gilbert Adair (p. 39): “I ask all 10 of you, with a glass of whisky in your hand— and not just any whisky but a top-notch brand—to drink to that solicitor who is so boorish as to light up his cigar in a zoo.” (Perec 2010)

Such translations can be philosophically challenging. Linguistic translation is one familiar form of translation, but we can speak, by analogy, also of musical translations, which present novel arrangements of familiar compositions. Piano transcriptions were very popular in the nineteenth century when families enjoyed these versions of operatic and symphonic music at home. Franz Liszt transcribed an enormous variety of operatic and symphonic music. And Glenn Gould recorded Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, accompanied with liner notes consisting of tongue-in-cheek fictional reviews that he himself wrote. Gould’s imaginary Hungarian Marxist musicologist asks: What would you say, beloved Franz … if you could know that this, your work … distorted, serves only to enrich a few, impoverish the many … Eighty men whose cold and sickly children will be colder still tonight. And all because one timid, spineless pianist sold his soul to the enslaving dollar. (Gould 1992)

Rossini’s opera Zelmira was transcribed for a wind band by Wenzel Sedlak, in an arrangement “incorporating arias, duets, trios, quartets, and quintets of uncommon beauty and emotional intensity” (Rossini 2012). And after the First World War the Viennese Association for Private Music Performances arranged orchestral music for chamber ensembles, in order to bring difficult recent

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symphonic music to a wider audience (Gherkin and Muxender 2009). Thus, for example, Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony was arranged for clarinet, horn, two violins, viola, cello, double-bass, piano, and harmonium. Instrumented classical music usually is interpreted by the performer. And so a great deal of the skill of performance involves interpretative decisions. A conductor chooses tempos, a pianist picks a cadenza (or even writes one), a soprano decides how to handle her solos. And then a great deal of the concern of critical listeners is to compare varied performances. Much debate is involved about whether some young conductor, performer, or soloist has found a convincing novel way to perform a familiar work. There is a partial analogy between these familiar concerns and the transcriptions we have discussed. Just as we ask whether the various transcriptions are true to the original, so we ask whether a performance is truthful to the music work. But there are no exact analogies in the visual arts. When some contemporary artist paints a scene after Caravaggio or Poussin, redoing a familiar older composition, those new pictures are not transcriptions in this sense. Frank Auerbach, for example, has done drawings and paintings after John Constable’s The Hay Wain, a work that is attractive today because its “sense of rawness and indigestibility” revealed “the shockingly unsuitable subject-matter of rotted stumps and wrecked barges” (Morphet 2000: 41). Analogously, Bussmann’s philosophical subjects are translations, not transcriptions. You can’t see Constable’s painting in Auerbach’s works or easily find the philosophical systems of Merleau-Ponty or Wittgenstein in her drawings in the way that you can hear the compositions of Liszt, Rossini, or Bruckner in the musical transcriptions. And so we will need to identify these visual presentations of philosophical arguments. Identity through time, metamorphosis, and translation are related. They preserve some essential qualities, the essence of the original, while perhaps modifying its accidental qualities. So, the same person, once a small child, becomes a senior philosopher; Daphne becomes a tree; and the translations of the Viennese composers by the Society for New Performances preserve the harmonic structures of symphonic works by Bruckner, Mahler, and Schoenberg, while not keeping all the original instrumentation. Identity often inspires slippery slope skeptical arguments. At what point does a fetus become a person? And when after mental decay does someone cease to be a person? Can a lifelike sculpture become a living woman, as in Ovid’s Pygmalion-metamorphosis? What are the limits on musical transcriptions? Probably a three-minute long accordion transcription of a Bruckner symphony is not possible. But how much of the original instrumentation is needed, then, in a transcription? And how

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many details of a philosopher’s system does Bussmann need to transcribe in her translations? To answer these questions, we need to distinguish the essential from the accidental qualities. Transcription of tonal music requires capturing the original melody. A wind band or a piano can replicate the melody originally performed by a symphony. And J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Ludwig von Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and Fredric Rzewski’s variations on The People United Will Never Be Defeated each offer varied piano variations on a single melody. If that melody is the essential quality of the composition, then transcription is possible. But of course, if the essential quality requires the complete orchestration, then transcription is not possible. In the two examples of her art we’ve discussed in this chapter, Bussmann translates sites of a song cycle and a book about metamorphosis. We can identify her visual transcription of the Schubert song cycle and her transcription of the Apuleius novel without difficulty. Her transcription of the Roman novel is a version of the familiar process in which an artist is asked to illustrate a novel. A successful illustration is one that’s true to the spirit of the original, a demand that can of course be highly subjective. The trouble with transcribing a philosophical concept or system is that it’s much more difficult to determine what needs to be preserved. When you hear the recordings by the Society for New Performances, you hear the original melodies, but with different orchestration. By contrast, it’s much harder to imagine seeing the concepts of Wittgenstein, Spinoza, or Arendt when you look at Bussmann’s drawings. Translating a text into an image is not easy. “Ut pictura poesis” (as with painting, so with poetry): a whole vast literature is devoted to the use of poetic themes in old master painting. Indeed, of course, the further problem here is that the very concept of a translation of a philosophical system is complex, or perhaps problematic. If Spinoza is correct, then Descartes’s philosophical system is incoherent. And when Heidegger begins his account of Kant’s first critique, by saying: The idea of laying out a fundamental ontology means to disclose the characteristic ontological analytic of Dasein as prerequisite and thus to make clear for what purpose and in what way, within which boundaries and with which presuppositions, it puts the concrete question What is human being? (Heidegger 1991: 1)

Then clearly we’re in another world from Kant’s. Philosophers are very interested in identity through change. A small oak becomes an enormous tree; a young child becomes a senior professor; a country changes its institutions and enlarges its territory: and we may say

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that the same tree/person/country has survived. Here then we have a series of related questions: Does a translation preserve the literary work? Does a transcription preserve the music work? And there are two other cases we will consider: Do various philosophical systems deal with the same philosophical arguments? And Do Bussmann’s drawings present their philosophical subject? Identity/metamorphosis/translation: each of these diverse ways of thinking about change involve complex conceptual issues. And that means that interpretation of Bussmann’s art will be philosophically challenging.

2

An Introduction to Maria Bussmann’s Translations

Three men in stately nineteenth-century dress are standing outdoors on a hilltop. A fallen pillar is on their left and behind them is a vast landscape. The man on our left holds a stylus in his right hand and a drawing pad in his left hand. The man at the center gestures and the figure on the far right listens attentively. The caption, “Claude Lorraine, Nicolas Poussin and Gaspar Poussin in the Roman Campagna,” identifies the subject of this engraving done from a painting by Jean-Baptiste Auguste Leloir (1809–1892), a successful Salon painter, but nowadays an obscure figure. Without the caption, this subject would be hard to identify. In the nineteenth century, Poussin, born in Northern France, but a lifelong expatriate in Rome, was identified as the founding father of the French Academy. Most of his best collectors were French. And he socialized in Rome with Claude, his fellow Frenchman and Gaspar Poussin, his son-in-law, who also was a painter. There are numerous such anecdotal pictures, imaginary scenes showing him with his colleagues or choosing the subjects for his history paintings. The architecture of antiquity and the Italian landscapes were essential ingredients for Poussin’s paintings. French art historians discussed Poussin’s pictorial sources in the countryside outside of Rome; and French narrative painters often imagined such scenes. Their nationalistic goal was to claim Poussin as the origin for French visual culture. We are looking at a very different image (Figure 7). We see a man driving a horse-drawn carriage headed left that is emerging from a tube. And below him is another such carriage, this one going right and headed into a regulation US mailbox, with the arrow set vertically, a signal that there is incoming mail to be picked up. This mailbox is mounted on an old fashioned ornamented table, with elaborately decorated legs. In the far upper left hand corner an enchanting horn is hanging from a plaque with the number “13.”

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Figure 7  Franz in Florida (post horn). © Maria Bussmann.

In the sequence of Bussmann’s drawings for Franz in Florida number 13, “The Post,” accompanies a verse of Schubert’s song. Hearing the sound of the postern, the singer is disappointed to find that it brings no letter for him, for his lover in town has not written to him. (I give an abbreviated English transcription of his words: Müller 1996: 11–12). In his book Schubert’s Winter Journey, Ian Bostridge, a tenor who often performed this song cycle, describes this scene: The posthorn itself may be ages old, but the mail coach of the 1820s which it summons up here was an agent of modernization, a form of speedy, purposeful, efficient transport which stands in stark and deliberate contrast to the aimless wanderings on foot of Winterreise’s protagonist. This is a confrontation with the busy world to which he does not belong. (2015: 315)

If you’re waiting for an important message, receiving the post can be a source of considerable anxieties. Here, more obviously than in drawing number 15, which we considered earlier, interpretation is needed to make sense of an odd scene, in which the mailbox is doubled, presumably to mark a coming (above) and going (below) of the mails. This post is delivered by a miniaturized horse-drawn chariot, similar to those which you see in Hollywood films about Roman history like Ben Hur. This is one of twenty-four images illustrating the successive verses, as if the song cycle were a graphic novel.



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In Franz in Florida, Bussmann illustrates a poetic text. Consider now a conceptually more complicated example of her art (Figure 8). We are looking at a very strangely appointed room: In the center of the ceiling there hangs a grand chandelier in the shape of a beetle, a spider. Its paired legs, shaped like those of a harvestman spider, end in two drop-shaped light bulbs that make the artifact somehow floral. Nothing is what seems be at first, second or third glance: everything is in transition. There is a realistic room, a real chair, a real lamp, windows and a door, but at the same time there are proportions, gradients and outlines; does an inside or an outside exist at all? (Bussmann 2010: 57)

Figure 8  I Have Never Been to Japan (room). © Maria Bussmann.

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This looks like a stage set for some drama set in an exotic culture. In fact it is an image from Bussmann’s I Have Never Been to Japan, 14 drawings (2006), published in a book with an interpretative essay by Elfriede Czurda. What a clinically strange, oddly disorienting room! It’s not clear what form of life it’s designed for. When Bussmann was asked what’s Japanese about her drawings, she replied, “The paper is original Japanese, mould made” (2010: 49). But there’s more, I think, to the story. Visual ambiguity is characteristic, as we will see, of many of Bussmann’s drawings. And a group of people and things are juxtaposed, without being related in a unified pictorial space. “While Bussmann abstracts space structurally into the symbolic, the perspective is considered accurately and remains visible” (2010: 50). In the account I just quoted, Czurda gives an inventory of the depicted domestic furniture and the window—which may be a scroll painting—on the left. And she observes that outside, or perhaps in the future, “sits a figure, with the back towards me, gazing towards a cascading waterfall on a hillside lined with conifers.” But even with all this information, it’s devilishly hard to orient ourselves in this pictorial space. Perhaps this drawing is akin to a Japanese scroll that plays with the dividing line between interiors and exteriors. Or, maybe, to stick with Western comparative examples, it’s akin to William Hogarth’s engraving, False Perspective (1754) in which there also are illogical effects. The man on the distant hill looks as large as the woman bending out of the window of the inn and can be seen to light his pipe at her candle. The trees on the hill appear to become larger the further their distance from us, and yet some of them overlap the inn sign. (Gombrich 1961: 243)

In short, Gombrich explains, this is “an impossible picture.” In Bussmann’s drawing, a similar effect is produced by the apparent inconsistencies, no doubt an apt way to describe a country she has never visited. We expect the world to be visually consistent, Gombrich argues, and so seek to make sense of inconsistencies before we give up. And we do the same when looking at artworks. What’s characteristic here in Bussmann’s drawing is the combination of this spatial disorientation and strange objects like the chandelier. Looking at some of her drawings reminds me of visiting a Hindu temple in India, where I didn’t have any idea which direction to face or even what I was looking at. If your model sacred building is a church, then you can make some sense also of the interior of a mosque or a synagogue. But an Indian temple containing a large statue of the Hindu money god was more challenging. At least for this Westerner.



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Here’s another challenge from a culture closer to home. We’re looking at a series of eight small images showing the seaside, on a single large page surrounding a depiction of a young boy, rather formally dressed, looking at a canvas in a studio, mounted so that we only see the back of this large picture. We see boats at sea, houses near to the shore, and people at the beach. There is a lot to look at and the relationship of these elements isn’t always entirely clear. In the first image, we see a sailing ship out at sea, in front of a misty shore. The caption reads, “One of his most frequent metaphors was indeed one which, comparing the land to the sea, suppresses every demarcation betwixt them.” But some of the other images clearly reveal the line separating land from the ocean. We see houses by the sea, boats being repaired, a stormy sea, people at the seashore, a group of fisherman launching a boat, and on the bottom of the page, a small sailboat headed out to sea. The last caption runs: The entire painting gave the impression of harbors where the sea enters into the earth, where the land has become wetlands, and its populace amphibian. The force of the marine element was bursting through everywhere. (Heuet and Brézet 2020: 34–5)

And the text tells us that we’re seeing the visit of Marcel Proust’s young boy-hero to the studio of Elstir. These images come from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Part Two: Within a Budding Grove, as adapted in a graphic novel. Marcel is doing a studio visit with an imaginary senior artist. In the English-language text, in the volume whose title is translated as In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Proust gives an elaborate description of this imagined seascape by his imaginary painter. As commentators, myself included, have noted, it’s not easy to imagine the picture from this verbal description, which cites many details, setting the painting in an account of Elstir’s development (Carrier 2012). The seascape has something to do with Claude Monet and Eugène Boudin, but also maybe with Gustave Moreau and some minor contemporary artists that Proust knew. And there are losses but also gains in translating the text into this combination of words and images. The original French words are lost but we see images of Marcel and the other characters, and, also Elstir’s paintings. To cite one detail, we see how formally proper young French boys and girls are dressed at the beach. Marcel wears suit and tie. And no bikinis for the girls. We are looking at a vast scene, not unlike one of those last judgments that are on the walls of Italian churches (Figure 9).

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Figure 9  Robert Musil’s Flypaper. © Peter Engelmann Wien.



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Here we are very far from Proust’s Norman beach scene. At the top and bottom are groups of small forms. They are dead bugs. And just below the center is a large hourglass, with skulls at the bottom. It’s unsurprising when a creative writer discusses human deaths, or even the deaths of large beloved domestic animals—cats or dogs. But since house flies are tiny and nameless, it’s more unusual to have so much attention given to them. Bussmann’s Drawings for Robert Musil’s Flypaper (2012) devotes six drawings to this short narrative. What a strange subject! It’s easy to understand why artists love to illustrate famous novels. But you could look a long time at one of these beautiful drawings without realizing that these are struggling dying flies. Just below the center, the hourglass measures out their lives, which are ending brutally. These minuscule insects take on the grandeur of the damned sinners depicted in a Renaissance Last Judgment. Robert Musil (1880–1942) was an Austrian writer best known for his novel The Man without Qualities, which can almost be set alongside Proust’s and James Joyce’s canonical modernist manifestoes. His Flypaper (1936) is an amazingly strange four-page essay describing how house flies land on flypaper and die. When a fly lands on it—not so eagerly, more out of convention, because so many others are already there—it gets struck at first by only the outermost joints of all its legs. Here they stand all stiffly erect, like cripples pretending to be normal, or like decrepit old soldiers (and a little bowlegged, the way you stand on a sharp edge). (Musil 1987: 1)

By stages, then, we get the story of how that sticky paper tightens its grip on them. “When after a little while they’ve overcome the spiritual exhaustion and resume the fight for survival, they’re trapped in an unfavorable position and their movements become unnatural” (Musil 1987: 3–4). They look, Musil says, “like crashed planes … or like dead horses.” Finally, all you see is “some tiny wriggling organ … it looks like a minuscule human eye that ceaselessly opens and shuts.” This, the most dramatic of these Musil drawings, is a fantasy worth of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s worthwhile looking to Japanese art for a comparative example. Parinirvana of Sakyamuni, the Historical Buddha, late seventeenth century, by Hanabusa Itchō shows the death of the historical Buddha, in 438 bce. It’s in the Minneapolis Museum of Art. We see the Buddha lying extended on his back. And all around him an enormous group of humans and also many species of animals mourn. Typically European scenes of Christ’s death show just a few mourners. But you don’t need to know a great deal about Buddhism to understand this picture, at least in a general way.

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We will discuss but not reproduce some of Bussmann’s drawings. Now we are looking at another, one that is relatively easy to describe verbally. We see an oddly dishevelled shapeless form. A mass of delicate thin lines run in all directions left and above the center. Above it is the outline of an oddly shaped smaller rounded object. And below is a brown round utensil. The title is “decoiffer/Haare in unordnung bringen,” messing up your hair. It comes from Bussmann’s early French Dictionary: The Words I Did Not Look For (2000–1: 22). The drawing is exquisite, but what a muddle, with all these fine strands of unruly hairs. This is beautiful chaos. How often in art do we see hair tangled like this? In 2001 when Bussmann was offered a residency in Paris, she composed a series of 120 pencil and watercolor drawings, each accompanied by a German word or words and its French translation. (I add translations into English.) We’re dealing not with the illustration of a literary text but with a vocabulary of word images. Some of the words Bussmann illustrates are verbs, “to nest,” is one, or descriptive nouns, “frying pan,” “omelet,” and “survivor” for example. Her images describe actions such as “clean up” or “muss up your hair.” She wanted to fine tune her French. That at least is the story she tells. Let’s also look at another of these images, “Loulou/Spitz (Hunderasse)/ Herschel Libeling,” Pet. (2000–1: 28). We see in bright red, the outlined head of a dog. Then imposed on the background in five small images drawn in black are pictures of loving dogs and, also, a number of Valentine hearts. In some of his 1980s paintings, David Salle superimposed images with diverse scales in this manner. Here, too, as in his art, the effect is to underline the unreality of the image. This might be an eccentric Valentine’s Day card for your family dog. An ordinary dictionary translates words or phrases from one language into another, occasionally with the addition of a descriptive picture of out of the way things. And a good unabridged dictionary provides a full account of the entire linguistic corpus. Obviously, Bussmann’s mere 120 translations cannot provide a complete dictionary. And while some of her words are quite ordinary, others are unusual. Nor is it clear why she has chosen to illustrate these particular words. Some words chosen by Bussmann lend themselves to marvelous drawing, as when “unravel”/“debrouiller” 18 supports a field of marvelous wavy lines, or “frying pan”/“la sauteuse” shows some poor soul ready to be fried (2000–1: 18, 29, 33, 35, 41, 43, 46), “Daub”/“bnarbouiller” is an irresistible subject, because it allows creating a field of drawn smears. Personally I love “la pesade”/“parade a horse,” in which a trainer gets a horse to stand up on its hind legs. And then “stallion”/“le etalon,” is an episode from the erotic life of horses. There are a number of scenes of disasters, such as “se taillader les poignets,” a beautifully



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grotesque knife wounding and “accident”/“le vvoltigeur,” in which a diver is about to crack his head, or “high tide”/“le mare,” in which tides engulf landscapes. Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinnies is a renowned alphabetized listing of comically perverse stories about children, “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs,” “B is for Basil assaulted by bears,” “C is for Clara who wasted away,” “D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh” (Gorey 1997). And so on through the alphabet. Like this American illustrator, who is a cult figure, Bussmann loves depicting disasters, though hers are harder to decipher. Now that we understand the visual logic of French Dictionary, we’re ready to move on to Bussmann’s larger units. Our model here is language translation, where the speaker learns first to translate individual words, then sentences and finally books. In that way, we will arrive by stages at her translations into drawings of philosophical systems. In general, literary translations are stop-gates, ways of making texts accessible to readers who can’t read the original language. Studying Proust or Plato in English usually is a limited experience. But there are occasional exceptions to this generalization. Because Charles Baudelaire was a greater writer than Edgar Allan Poe, his translations of that writer’s stories are superior literary works. And when Marcel Proust translated, with the help of his mother and a girlfriend, two of Ruskin’s works, The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies, those texts acquired a real literary interest all of their own. It would be interesting to seek similar musical examples, where the transcription is superior to the original or, at least, of legitimate self-sufficient interest. Bussmann’s translations of philosophical texts don’t just offer incomplete accounts of the original, doing as much as is possible visually with these verbal constructions. Rather her aim is to use philosophical writing to inspire her visual thinking, which has an autonomous value. The reliability of translation is often a concern when philosophers read a foreign language. To take a relatively straightforward and important case, the German “Geist,” an essential word for Hegel, has different connotations from the English “spirit.” In the Glossary of his English-language treatise Hegel, Charles Taylor writes, Geist/spirit is “used by Hegel to designate subjectivity as it returns to itself out of its embodiment; hence also used of the cosmic spirit, or God” (1975: xi). J. B. Baillie, who translated The Phenomenology of Mind says (Hegel 1967: 51) that “the self-comprehension of Spirit as supreme reality, complete spiritual self-consciousness, is the necessary demand, the inevitable outcome, and the final consummation of the entire process of experience.” And, as a commentary on Wittgenstein observes, “the German word Bild,” important in the Tractatus, means not only “picture but also model” (Pears 1970: 76).

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Translation is a particularly pressing issue when dealing with the German texts of Martin Heidegger, which frequently involves word play at variance with normal usage. Hubert Dreyfus’s Being-in-the World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time, Division I” begins with a three-page discussion of some important words. Augenblick means literally “the balance of an eye.” It is Luther’s translation of the biblical: twinkling of an eye “in which: we shall be changed.” Kierkegaard uses Oiebik as a technical term that is translated as “the moment”; since Heidegger derives his usage from Kierkegaard, I shall translate Augenblick not as “the moment of vision” but simply as the moment. Begegnen means “to encounter.” As Heidegger uses the term, things encounter us, but in the standard translation, we encounter things. In most cases, “things show up for us” captures Heidegger’s meaning. Rede literally means talk, but “discourse” is too formal and too linguistic for what Heidegger includes under this term. (Dreyfus 1991: x–xi; emphasis in the original)

Indeed, Heidegger himself says in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process … Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. (2008: 149; emphasis in the original)

This is why he thinks the study of etymologies is important. The nuances of Greek, which are hard to translate, carry philosophical weight. One might think that translation of Wittgenstein into English would be relatively straightforward. He had studied for years in England, the introduction to the Tractatus was written in English by Bertrand Russell and the book was immediately translated for an English audience. And so, it’s sobering to consider the long note in the index of the Pears/McGuinness translation about linguistic details. The earlier translation, they argue, was highly unsatisfactory. On occasion, an English expression is used to translate more than one German expression. Some German expressions have two or more alternative English translations. And, finally, “the German expression may be only part of a phrase that is translated by the English expression” (Wittgenstein 1961b: 75). G. E. M. Anscombe, the English philosopher who also was a Wittgenstein translator, discusses translating Sachverhalte as “atomic fact” or “possible fact,” words that have quite different connotations in English (1959: 30, n. 1).



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We are also interested in what might be called translations between philosophical traditions. In particular, we need to discuss transitions between the analytic tradition in which I was trained and the “continental philosophy” of Hegel, Heidegger, and Arendt. Arthur Danto, whose books on action, aesthetics, and knowledge lie firmly within the analytic tradition, discusses in two of his books such translations. In his Nietzsche as Philosopher, he presents that continental philosopher’s arguments in analytic terms. “In recent years, philosophers have been preoccupied with logical and linguistic researches,” he says, “and I have not hesitated to reconstruct Nietzsche’s arguments in these terms” (Danto 1965b: 13). But as he goes on to indicate, such translation is also a form of interpretation. I believe it is exceedingly useful to see his analyses in terms of logical features which he was unable to make explicit, but toward which he was unmistakably groping. His language would have been less colorful had he known what he was trying to say. (Danto 1965b: 13)

Here Danto implies that his translation of Nietzsche’s claims into an analytic vocabulary may improve the analysis, leaving aside what was unpersuasive in the original. And Alexander Nehamas, somewhat similarly, reports in his Nietzsche: Life as Literature that when he was a young graduate student, while he admired some elements of Nietzsche, “there were (other) parts which seemed to me at best incomprehensible and at worst embarrassing and better forgotten, or at least tactfully overlooked” (1985: vii). For example, one chapter of Nietzsche’s Ecco Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (German: Ecce homo: Wie man wird, was man ist) is titled “Why I Write Such Good Books.” Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals wrote: The ascetic ideal … is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacuum. It needs a goal—and it will rather will nothingness than not will. Am I understood? … Have I been understood? … “Not at all my dear sir!” (1989: 97–8; emphasis in the original)

No doubt in analytic translation he would learn to speak in a more restrained way. Translation is always interpretation, which is to say that it involves redescribing statements transferred from one language into another. Danto summarizes this view of the ascetic ideal: In committing themselves to reason, truth, history, science, or whatever else is it they believe to be higher and greater than themselves, men are but ascetics

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art in disguise, personae of the religious impulses which only incidentally are expressed in actual religious forms. (1965b: 190)

A different tone emerges here. Perhaps, indeed, Danto’s point is not entirely about conceptual or linguistic differences. His Nietzsche is a little like an overenthusiastic student who expresses challenging ideas in unrestrained language. Still, needless to say, to translate Nietzsche into an idiom toward which he was groping is to offer one, surely controversial interpretation of his texts. In Danto’s book on Jean-Paul Sartre, each chapter has two titles, one in the continental language, the other in the analytic idiom. They include “Absurdity: or, Language and Existence,” “Nothingness: or, Consciousness and Ontology,” and so on. Danto claims that the real issues are the same in both cultures, though the terms in which they are formulated differ. And Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy, his book on what he calls oriental philosophy, that is the various indigenous religious systems of China and India, argues that the claims of these exotic-seeming traditions can be analyzed in his familiar Western terms. Indeed, he compares these two philosophical vocabularies to two mutually translatable languages, English and French (1973a: xiv). What is at stake here, for Danto, is something more than a mere practical question. Danto’s strongly held view is that there is but one philosophy tradition. This certainly is a nontrivial claim, as any reader of Danto’s accounts of Nietzsche or Sartre can readily see. The two languages certainly seem extremely different, so the argument that translation is possible assumes some distinction between what’s essential and what is merely contingent or accidental in philosophical writing. Danto is not the only American philosopher to take up this concern with translation. In A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s “Phenomenology,” Robert Brandon translates the argument of that German classic into analytic idioms. And Dieter Henrich does a translation of the idealist tradition. Philosophy, they argue, ultimately is one, which is to say that these diverse traditions are inter-translatable. It would, indeed, be philosophically interesting to consider the counterargument, the claim that these seemingly divergent traditions really are incommensurable. For our present purposes, however, what’s of more immediate interest is a perhaps related question about the success of Bussmann’s translation of philosophy into visual imagery. The assumption or claim in all of these cases is that we can distinguish the philosophical argumentation from these other materials, which are of interest only in revealing the cultures of these writers. These cultures have changed in many ways. Still, it can be said that the philosophical arguments of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel speak



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to the present and enter into contemporary debate. At least, as we have said, with selective reading: the Descartes who speaks to Danto is Descartes the philosopher, not Descartes the physicist. Insofar as we cannot entirely separate a writer’s rhetoric, his style of presenting arguments from those arguments themselves, Nietzsche’s claims are transformed in any such translation. No one would deny that something is lost in a translation of Proust’s French into English. The interesting question, however, is whether a philosophical argument faces the same problems. On some deconstructionist accounts, we can never entirely separate our claims from the particular language in which they are coached. The historiographer Hayden White developed a version of this claim in his discussion of the languages of history writing (White 2014). How a history is narrated, he argued, heavily influences its claims. But in his essay “Philosophy as/and/of Literature,” Danto rejected that deconstructive view. I cannot finally acquiesce in the thought that philosophy is literature. It continues to aim at truth, but when false, seriously false, it is often also so fascinatingly false as to retain a kind of perpetual vitality as a metaphor. (Danto 1986: 161)

To be a fine writer is one thing and to make true claims, another. Bussmann’s relation to these arguments is complex. Her drawings don’t aspire to show whether the philosophical systems they present are truthful. Just by looking, you cannot tell if an image represents truthfully. But yet, as we will see, sometimes her drawings critique philosophical positions. What makes these disputes, like the discussion between Danto and Rorty, philosophical disputes is that they’re not primarily arguments about the facts. Some people say, what’s called for is a decision about what is the same thing. In some practical cases, that claim may be correct. After the bombing of Dresden in 1945, was the same city with its famous churches and museum rebuilt? Or, rather, was a new city with old-looking buildings constructed from the remainder of the old city on the ruins? To speak of a decision is to suggest that any answer given is ultimately somewhat arbitrary. When museum skeptics denied that altarpieces survived when moved into public museums, something more than a decision was involved. A whole tradition of responding to art was at stake. And of course when we get to persons and their identity, then the claim that mere decisions are involved is totally unsatisfying. Saying, in a seemingly conciliatory way that there are two branches of contemporary philosophy, analytic, and continental philosophy, is unhelpful. That doesn’t show how to understand the philosophical issues.

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We see two dice tumbling downward (Figure 10). Where they touch, near to the picture center, two “threes” are matching. To the left, a single dice with a “six” is tumbling down. Finally, above near the top of the drawing are two dice, each with a “one,” ready to tumble down. With its presentation of all of these matching dice, this is an image of true harmony. Below, on the left, a slim figure raises the right arm toward a red opened heart at the center, which is touched on the right top by another right hand. Those figures are discovering harmony, as shown by the agreement of the numbers. Maybe, the association here of dice with affection suggests that a certain amount of good luck is involved in this harmony. And perhaps, also, this harmony relates to Spinoza’s belief in determinism. As Stuart Hampshire writes in his Spinoza, “As we progressively acquire more and more scientific knowledge of the behavior and reactions of human beings, more and more of their actions are shown to be deducible from laws of nature” (1951: 159). This image is numbered “8” in Maria Bussmann’s Drawings of Baruch de Spinoza’s Ethik (theory of affects), one of a series of fifty-three drawings made in 2001. Let’s contrast another drawing from that same series, number “9,” in which two nude figures, a man facing away and a women facing us, stand in a vessel, with a single line of dice descending between them (Figure 11). One numbered dice shows a six, the other a five; and both people frown. Here then, clearly we have a picture of numerical and visual antagonism. Using the key to Spinoza’s writings that Bussmann provides, we discover that the first drawing shows affection and the second dislike. And so, in Ethics we can learn their subjects and discover how to interpret these images. By the word desire I understand any of a man’s strivings, impulses, appetites, and volitions … Joy is a man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection.

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Figure 10  Spinoza. Affection. © Wien Museum MUSA.

Disdain is an imagination of a thing which touches the mind so little that the thing’s presence moves the mind to imagining more what is not in it than what is. (1996: 104–5; emphasis in the original)

Affection and dislike thus are pictured. “The affects … of hate, anger, envy, and the like, considered in themselves,” Spinoza says, “follow with the same necessity and force of Nature as other singular things” (1996: 69). That is what Bussmann’s drawings show. Indeed, in the image of affection, the heart near the center is colored red, and the figures reach toward one another, while in the image of dislike, there is no hint of a positive relationship between the man and woman. And the vessel on which they stand is greenish. Old master artists were expert at presenting emotions. In Bussmann’s drawings of Spinoza’s theory of affects, the emotions she depicts include admiration,



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Figure 11  Spinoza. Dislike. © Wien Museum MUSA.

love, affection, dislike, veneration, fear, remorse, yearning, contentment, anger, timidity, ambition, and arrogance. All of those emotions are presented in one painting or another of Nicolas Poussin’s vast oeuvre. Thus adoration is depicted in Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus (1630–2), love in Cephalus and Aurora (1629–30), affection in The Testament of Eudamides (1645–50), and so on. And all of these works present stories that were well known to his erudite patrons. The Testament of Eudamides, for example, tells a story from Lucian, second century ce, retold by Montaigne in his Essays (1580). Eudamidas, who was a poor man, on his deathbed entrusts the care of his daughter and mother to his two closest friends, who accept this as an honorable debt owed to a friend (Verdi 2020: 72). Without the knowledge of this Stoic text, it would be hard to know that affection was being presented here. How, for example, would we understand the hand

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gesture of the man in the foreground, or identify the figure standing behind the dying man without this information? Once, however, we know the story, then we can easily read these expressive gestures. Or take another example. Spinoza says, “Love is joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause” (Spinoza 1996: 76). And Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora is a perfect illustration, as Richard Wollheim explains: In order to resist the charms of the exquisite Aurora, Cephalus recruits his love for Process, and he does so by summoning up, a physical picture of his wife, which is presumably a materialization of a mental image.

Look, for contrast, amongst Bussmann’s images devoted to Spinoza at her presentation of “ambition” (“schwelgerei”). (1987: 198)

Figure 12  Spinoza. Ambition. © Wien Museum MUSA.



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He writes: This striving to do something (and also to omit doing something) solely to please men is called ambition, especially when we strive so eagerly to please the people that we do or omit certain things to our own injury, or another’s. (1996: 85; emphasis in the original)

A lot is going on in her drawing (Figure 12). At the picture center is a top-like spinning apparatus, linked at its top to what appears a controlling mechanism. And at the bottom far left and right are two standing figures, who seem dominated by this machinery. This is an ambitious image of ambition. In Poussin’s The Crossing of the Red Sea (1633–4), on the far right the gesture of Moses, commanding the waters to separate is unmistakable. Poussin thus narrates a well-known scene about ambition. Bussmann’s task, however, is essentially different, for she depicts the emotions as such, without reference to any such particular story in which they’re manifested. To be sure, in the two drawings we’ve looked at, “8” and “9,” we interpreted her images with reference to some visual clichés. When, for example, two people grimly face away from one another, as in “9,” then we can infer that they dislike each other. Bussmann’s drawings focus on one section of Spinoza’s Ethics, his account of emotions. Ethics gives a general account of emotion or as Spinoza calls it “affect”: An affect which is called a passion of the mind is a confused idea, by which the mind affirms of its body, or some part of it, a greater or lesser force of existing than before, which, when it is given, determines the mind to think of this rather than that. (1996: 112)

She focuses on section three of the book, for this is the portion of Ethics most readily visualized. And, I think, it’s the part of the book that’s closest to our everyday pre-philosophical intuitions. Spinoza’s discussion of pity or sorrow is relatively straightforward. But her numbers on the drawings are small; you have to look to find them. One very dramatic image of the power of emotions can be associated with Spinoza. We are looking at a city scene laid out as if on a stage set. There are four buildings on the right and three on the left. And at the far left, someone wearing a hat sits under an arcade, with a container of stones at his feet. Around the center, a piazza between the tall buildings, are seven running men carrying stones to throw, and at the very bottom right hand corner a running figure carries a document in his right hand and exits to the right. The buildings have steeply slanted roofs, so this picture, which comes from an old German history, must have been done by

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a Northern artist. It’s not clear what’s happening, for we don’t see the target for these stone throwers. Taken in isolation, this is a strange scene, for the center of the action appears to be offstage to the right. A tiny image, four by three inches, it comes from a history book printed in traditional Gothic typescript. Masaniello, who was a Neapolitan fisherman, in July 1647 instigated a famous rebellion against the absentee Spanish rulers. In response to an increase in taxes, he led a mob, which ransacked the armories and opened the prisons. But after a few days, when this sudden success turned his head, the people, in turn, rebelled against his leadership. Masaniello was murdered and his would-be revolution brutally crushed. This event attracted attention throughout Europe, and even in the New World. And Spinoza, who says nothing in Ethics about visual art, “drew, for amusement, portraits of his friends with ink or charcoal,” and is said to have done a pencil self-portrait as Masaniello, copies of which survive (Spinoza 1951: xiii). The Ethics describes this sort of unruly situation: The mob is terrifying if unafraid. So it is no wonder that the prophets, who considered the common advantage, not that of the few, commended humility, repentance, and reverence so greatly. (Spinoza 1996: 144)

And in his unfinished Political Treatise gives some notes about revolution (Spinoza 1996: 297, 301, 303). In this image is the man who is carrying a paper at the far right hand edge Masaniello? That isn’t clear. But we get some information from an old account by Pietro Giannone, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, “Masaniello and his Boys, armed with Sticks, came, and encouraging the Mob, they all began to pillage the Office where the Duty was paid, and to drive away the Officers with Stones” (1723: 762). Though some of the details are puzzling, the general sense of this image is clear. Let’s contrast another picture that deserves interpretation. We are in Venice looking at a small painting that shows a very different scene. On the left at the front is a single soldier, who is standing. Just to his left is a single broken column and on the right, a bit behind him is a woman who is nursing a child. We see a beautiful summertime Venetian landscape, with a bridge running across in front of some houses. In the sky, there’s a clap of thunder, which was a brilliant painting innovation. This famous image, Giorgione’s Tempest (1506) is a notorious conundrum. Is the tempest some event in the contemporary history of the Venetian Empire? Or does the picture allude to some text? Giannone’s account of Masaniello shows how to interpret the image of that rebellion. Here, however, it’s not clear what text, if any is relevant. What, exactly, does the



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conjunction of the nursing woman and the soldier standing guard mean? Maybe it’s a scene from scripture or mythology. It’s been proposed that the figures are Adam and Eve, with their son Cain, just expelled from Eden. Hence the thunder. There is often a tendency to think that Renaissance pictures have highly complex textual sources. Here with a woman with child and a man in a landscape, many interpretations are possible. But perhaps, indeed, the image means just what it seems to show, nothing more. After all, it is a beautiful scene and not necessarily puzzling. There’s no contemporary information about its meaning. When Vasari described the picture, some decades after Giorgione’s early death, he was unable to get any useful information. Bussmann’s images of emotion call for very different interpretative strategy. Ethics and also Theological-Political Treatise present Spinoza’s remarks about love, anger, or the other affects she depicts. Spinoza defines each emotion, contrasts it to others and offers some context. But the texts by Spinoza aren’t narratives, like scripture or history writing. And so, translating them into images is a different exercise than was demanded of Giorgione or the other Renaissance artists. There are many painted images showing scenes of love. The question, rather, is how to use Spinoza’s account to represent his concept of love. In a drawing (Cover here) 85, Bussmann shows a woman, nude to the waist, seated before a mysterious lovely green contraption. Ethics says, “What constitutes the form of love … is joy … accompanied by the idea of an external cause” (1996: 163). The entire picture is needed to communicate this analysis. It’s revealing that Spinoza adds, “The more an image is joined with other images, the more often it flourishes” (1996: 168). Here we see surrounding this woman ideas suitable to be causes of the emotion of love. The feeling, we might say, is easy to identify, even if sometimes these causes are elusive. As Jonathan Bennett explains in his commentary, Spinoza offers a cognitive theory of emotion. “The object of an emotion is what the associated belief is in some sense ‘about’ ” (1984: 273). Some emotions thus have an object—there is, for example, someone or something who is loved. Other emotions perhaps have no object. Free floating anxiety or a vague sense of happiness might be examples. Here, at any event, without knowing exactly what or who she is in love with, we see that this is an image of love. One way to bring out the concerns of this cognitive theory of emotion is to contrast Danto’s account of basic actions. We are in Padua, Italy, looking at Giotto’s fresco in the Arena Chapel (1305), focusing on the six episodes in the middle band on the north wall, the scenes of Christ’s life. (This chapel is like a museum. You have to purchase a ticket to enter. And visitors come to look at art, not to pray.) The preface to Danto’s treatise Analytical Philosophy of Action

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(1973a: 6–7) has a description of the portion of the fresco showing Christ’s six actions. Christ’s raised hand serves to dispute with the elders, change water into wine at the Cana wedding, baptize, command Lazarus to rise, bless people at the Jerusalem gate, and expel the moneylenders from the temple. Taken in isolation, the represented raised hand appears basically the same in all six scenes. It’s the various visual contexts that show what action is being performed. The central concept here is what Danto calls a “basic action,” an action that is performed directly by willing. To raise your hand, as Christ does in Giotto’s images, is a basic action. Like us, but of course with much greater powers, He acts by willing, performing bodily actions. In her account of the will, Hannah Arendt writes, “When we deal with experiences relevant to the Will, we are dealing with experiences that men have not only with themselves, but also inside themselves” (1977: 63; emphasis in the original). That’s also what Danto says. Thanks to our own experiences of willing, we can thus comprehend the acts of Giotto’s figures. Basic actions are performed directly by willing, in contrast to those other actions that are performed by doing something else. Contrast, for example, raising my hand, a basic action, with lifting my left hand when it’s fallen asleep by using my right hand. The fineness of Danto’s book-length analysis lies in part in its intricate working out of a pregnant analogy between action and knowledge. In Analytic Philosophy of Action, Danto’s analysis is focused entirely on the willing of a single individual. For Danto, the analogy with Descartes’s discussion of knowledge is essential. A person is defined by the ability to will and know. Analytical Philosophy of Action opens with “Knowledge and Action,” a chapter contrasting these two modes of human experience. Our concepts “of knowledge and action,” Danto argues, are “mirror-images of one another” (1973a: 2). Although Danto’s book is ornamented with art historical examples, Analytical Philosophy of Action isn’t about art history. His basic philosophical analysis could be completed without reference to any of these examples. Still, what’s striking here are the philosophical assumptions implicit in this description. Where Merleau-Ponty and Arendt treat action in the context of physical embodiment, Danto analyzes it in isolation from its historical or social context. And that contrast reveals important basic philosophical differences. The essentially identical looking hand gesture has different meanings depending upon its context. (In fact, Giotto’s six hand images differ. But that doesn’t affect this argument.) Bussmann says that she reads philosophy and then makes her drawings. But mere temporal proximity isn’t sufficient to connect these activities. While Rubens painted, he sometimes also simultaneously dictated diplomatic correspondence



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and listened to literature being read to him. And nowadays many artists listen to music while working, as sometimes did Leonardo da Vinci, who hired musicians to accompany his studio labors. But this simultaneity of their activities doesn’t imply that these tasks are necessarily connected. We don’t necessarily think that the experience of Rubens’s diplomatic negotiations entered into his paintings. And the music that a painter is listening to doesn’t necessarily influence the works that he makes. When Jonathan Weinberg, who is an experienced portrait painter, did my portrait, we talked. And so, maybe his sense of me as a person entered into that experience, since his portrait shows some small pictures that I’d gathered on a recent trip to India. But perhaps he tuned out our conversation and just talked to help me keep the pose. For Bussmann, however, the relationship between reading philosophy and drawing philosophical subjects is something stronger than that mere temporal coincidence. Just as a mirage gives me the false belief that I see water on the road, so I may be mistaken about what I desire or fear, either because I am deceived about my true emotions, or, even, because what I desire or fear does not exist. Here we get to the much-discussed issue of intentional objects, the objects that I desire, fear or in some other way respond to. And so, an adequate picture of Spinoza’s philosophy must consider such cases. Many emotions involve intentional objects. I fear the wild boar or admire Mary’s wit: In those cases there is some thing or person that I fear or admire. But I can be mistaken about the nature or existence of that object, as when I fear a ghost. And in some other cases, such as a feeling of contentment or anxiety, no intentional object is involved. These examples suggest that we need a distinction between the object of my emotions, what I fear or admire, and the real source of my feelings. Even if I am not mistaken about the object of my fear or admiration, still I cannot be mistaken to believe that I fear or admire something, even if that intentional object is something imaginary. If, for example, there is no God, then we need to explain how to parse the statement, “St. Thomas feared God.” And of course there are interesting cases, some of them psychoanalytic, where I am confused about my true feelings, and so believe I fear what actually I admire. Right now I firmly believe that I am awake. I am looking at my computer, writing this sentence. But in ten seconds I might awaken and discover that I was dreaming. Analogously, I believe that Bussmann’s drawings depict philosophical themes from Spinoza. But then I discover, let us imagine, that the drawing that I am considering was sent to me by mistake. Actually, it is a diagram of her Vienna studio. In both these cases, the skeptical argument has a certain apparent plausibility. We are not saying in a vague way that anything whatsoever might be

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doubted. We are presenting in at least a little detail accounts of how we actually might be mistaken. That’s what a convincing case for philosophical skepticism requires. And so, these skeptical arguments are not so unreasonable. Imagine, again, that we’re in an artist’s studio, but consider now a simpler case: let us suppose that he is depicting some still life subject. Richard Wollheim describes this scenario: Though the correspondence between intention and action need not be exact … we cannot plausibly allow a relation of total fortuitousness to hold between them. If, for instance, a man drew a hexagon and simultaneously thought to himself, “I am going to draw Napoleon,” we might maintain that this thought showed something about him but it clearly would show nothing about what he intended to draw there and then. (1973: 17)

Whatever view you take about representation, something like this account is needed to link figurative images and intention. When an old master paints a landscape, given some clues, we have no hesitation interpreting that picture as a representation. The case of Bussmann’s philosophic subjects, by contrast, is more difficult to judge, for we don’t know what we should be looking for. When we see her drawing alluding to some statement in Spinoza’s account of affects, for example, we literally don’t know what we should see. We are looking at another Bussmann (Figure 13). In this image, there is one container shape on the left, and another on the right. And behind is a triangular form, with the descending sides sloping. On the left hand, spilling over the bottom edge are a group of bodies, and on the right a pattern. And at the far upper left hand corner, attached by a needle to the container, is what looks like a thought balloon, an oval shape with a landscape at the top. And the numbering takes you to Spinoza’s account of anger. The drawing makes me think of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black (1830), which presents the conflicts between the French clergy and the secular state. No doubt that’s a subjective response, but here, as in the novel, black and red are antagonistic colors. Spinoza writes: affects such as anger “considered in themselves, follow with the same necessity and force of Nature as the other singular things” (1996: 69). And he says, “The striving to do evil to him we hate is called anger” and; “anger is a desire by which we are spurred, from hate, to do evil to one we hate.” Also he refers us to his earlier statement (1996: 54–5), “If something is common to, and peculiar to, the human body and certain external bodies by which the human body is usually affected, and is equally in the part and the whole of each of them,



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Figure 13  Spinoza. Anger. © Wien Museum MUSA.

its idea will also be adequate in the mind” (1996: 91, 111). In context, it would be easy to see that by comparison with her images of Spinoza depicting admiration or love that this is an image of conflict. We’re looking at another figurative artwork. In this engraving, a man is working along the roadside next to a hut. It is a stormy day. At the far right, heavy lines of rain descend. That storm perhaps will soon reach left of the picture center, where he stands. In the background, we see some houses in the countryside. And in the right foreground is a slight hill. A path from left foreground would take us to that man. Finally, in the storm clouds I see the head of a gigantic figure, towering above this dark landscape. This is a print by Alphonse Legros, a nineteenth-century Frenchman who emigrated to live and work in London. A modest anecdotal painter, he was a gifted printer. Walter Pater’s famous essay, “The School of Giorgione” (1877) has but one contemporary example, an

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etching, a landscape scene not identified (perhaps this work, or at least one that is very similar) by Legros: In an actual landscape we see a long white road, lost suddenly on the hill-verge … In this etching (abstract language) is informed by an indwelling solemnity of expression … within the limits of an exceptional moment … Sometime a momentary hint of stormy light may invest a homely or too familiar scene with a character which might well have been drawn from the deep places of the imagination. (1980: 106)

This commentary contains Pater’s famous statement, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” Music, he claims, has a perfect unity of form and content, like this picture. I purchased it because of its Pateresque subject. Pater did not often discuss contemporary visual art. And so, I am unsure about my reading of this figure in the clouds, which has long haunted my imagination. Is it, I wonder, the sort of detail that Legros would employ? We see a drawing showing two sturdy vertically mounted narrow supports (Figure 14). And running between them are cross struts, some at an inclining angle, others level. On the right at the top of this construction, a finger is poised to propel a ball along the support. And further down, four balls are already descending. At the top left, drawn faintly, some sort of gun propels another ball horizontally. Just as these balls necessarily must roll along their supports, so humans must respond to the forces ruling them. This is Bussmann’s illustration of Spinoza’s account of affects. Some people, he writes, “believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself (1996: 68). As Spinoza says in A Political Treatise, many believe that the human mind “is so independent of other things, that it has an absolute power to determine itself, and make right use of reason” (1951: 293). But this view, he argues, is absurd, for it fails to recognize that we are part of nature. Spinoza rather proposes to consider human actions and appetites just as if he was discussing the motions of physical objects. Nature’s laws “are always and everywhere the same” (1996: 69). And so, it is a mistake to believe that we act freely. This Bussmann drawing thus is an image of the way he thinks about all emotions. We are looking at another Bussmann drawing, smaller and more mysterious (Figure 15). The subject, which comes from another philosopher, is relevant to our present discussion. At the bottom right, a nude man holding a shield, his back to us. He faces some sort of monster, who stands a little to the background at the left, with a scary head and tentacles behind a shield that has a large human



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Figure 14  Spinoza. Affects. © Wien Museum MUSA.

face. The annotation “ansehen” refers us, with the Wittgenstein Concordance in German, to two places in Tractatus where that German word, “look at,” appears: Our fundamental principle is that whenever a question can be decided by logic at all it must be possible to decide it without more ado. And if we get into a position where we have to look at the world for an answer to such a problem, that shows that we are on a completely wrong track. (1961b: 5.551) It follows from this that we can actually do without logical propositions; for in a suitable notation we can in fact recognize the formal properties of propositions by mere inspection of the propositions themselves. (1961b: 6.122)

Here I quote the standard translation and underline the words corresponding to “unseen.”

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Figure 15  Wittgenstein, Tractatus. Look At. © Maria Bussmann.

We can see immediately that the man faces a monster, who looks menacing. And so, we don’t need any more additional information to grasp the meaning of this image. Interpretation is no more difficult than is understanding most details of our Legros etching. Without knowing anything about Legros or his historical context, it’s possible to identify the pictorial subject; the difficulties



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come, as I noted, in looking at the sky. Were his print by some 1930s Surrealist, a follower of Magritte, I would not hesitate to find a figure there. But in describing a late nineteenth-century landscape, I am less secure with my speculative interpretation. Understanding Bussmann’s drawing is, in some ways, easier. Given the clue provided by the word “unseen” and the “2,” which tells us that that word appears twice in the German text of the Tractatus, we know where to look in Wittgenstein’s book. Whether, then, I’ve correctly interpreted the relationship of that text to her image is, of course, open to discussion. And I’m not imagining that she’s so sly as to give a deliberately misleading reference! Even the skeptic usually obeys the rules of the game. In a chess puzzle, there is some possible solution; and in a detective story, enough clues to identify the murderer. If a picture presents enough features of its subject, then it is a satisfactory representation. By analogy, if Bussmann’s drawing shows enough features of its philosophical subjects, then it works. A translation can’t preserve every feature of the original. Survival of a thing, a person or an institution through changes always is selective. An artist claims that she can draw a representation of a bowl of apples. And so, you put her drawing along those apples and compare her subject and the representation. Then, more ambitiously, she claims that she can do a selfportrait. Again, you can test by putting her drawing alongside her and compare. Finally, let us suppose, she claims that she can do an allegorical drawing of “time and truth conquering envy and despair.” Here testing is more complicated, for while we see the representation of the bowl of apples or the artist herself, it’s not self-evidently obvious what this allegorical subject looks like. Perhaps, however, her drawing resembles Poussin’s painting of this subject, which is in the Louvre. After all, Poussin, too, employed a motif discovered by earlier artists. A great deal of art is about other prior art in this way. Only when you get to an obscure subject like Poussin’s Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, not, so far as I know, depicted by any earlier painter, do artists make genuine discoveries. Still Poussin only did figurative works. And so, we can see that men and women are depicted, even if their subjects are elusive. By contrast, although Bussmann typically includes figures and other identifiable content in her pictures, often it’s unclear how to assemble them. When it comes to Bussmann’s philosophical subjects, we don’t have many prior models. The trouble, then, is that it’s not clear how to extend our discussion of earlier art’s subjects to Bussmann’s subject, philosophy. There are numerous Napoleon-portraits, so we understand how someone can draw Napoleon. But it’s not at all clear, I believe, to know what counts as an illustration of

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Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning or Spinoza’s account of emotion. How then can we evaluate her images of these philosophical subjects? Accounts of Poussin present and analyze his subjects from scripture and Roman history. Books about Camille Pissarro describe the Parisian scenes he presents. And discussion of Mark Rothko traces his movement from figurative works into abstract painting. Bussmann’s subjects are philosophical and so our discussion should identify and analyze them. In order to place them, the first step is to gather some relevant comparisons, other artworks that represent unusual subjects. The details of Pissarro’s and Poussin’s subjects are sometimes complex, but the idea that their artworks depict landscapes, cityscapes, and historical subjects is straightforward. And, in response to this tradition, the claim that Rothko paints abstractions is not hard to comprehend. But it is more difficult to understand how Bussmann’s art can present philosophical subjects. How, we need to ask, can philosophical subjects be presented visually? Landscapes can be seen and we can imagine viewing historical subjects; and, also, we can conceive, by contrast, of abstract art that doesn’t represent anything. But what exactly is a philosophical subject? Consider three statements from the philosophers that Bussmann discusses: A proposition must restrict reality to two alternatives: yes or no. In order to do that, it must describe reality completely (Wittgenstein 1961b: 4.023). If it is true that as soon as philosophy declares itself to be reflection or coincidence it prejudges what it will find, then once again it must recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished. (MerleauPonty 1968: 130) Consent entails the recognition that no man can act alone, that men if they wish to achieve something in the world must act in concert, which would be a platitude if there were not always some members of the community determined to disregard it and who in arrogance or in despair try to act along. (Arendt 1977: 201)

The literary styles and the philosophical concerns of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, and Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind are very different. It’s not obvious that they are discussing the issues in ways that allow for productive comparisons. How then do we understand the unity of Bussmann’s art when it presents their philosophies? To say, she deals with philosophical subjects, isn’t by itself to



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answer this question. Not when there are serious questions about the unity of philosophical concerns. In the next chapters we start to take up that concern by comparing and contrasting her images of the philosophies of MerleauPonty and Wittgenstein.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

We are looking at a small rectangle composed of vertical pink and white stripes enclosed in a background rectangular checkerboard field that is black and yellow. The inserts, windows set to the right of center, seem to come forward, giving a real dynamism to what otherwise would be a static image. In fact, if we look at the wording at the bottom, we realize that calling this an abstraction is misleading. We are viewing Sean Scully’s €6.70 French stamp, Irelande. Ireland, in which the country where he was born is shown in the background of the Irish Sea. In 1994, France asked artists from a number of different countries to design stamps. And Scully, who is Dublin-born, was chosen to present Ireland and so created this image. Were his picture extended just a little further to the right, it would include the Western coast of Scotland. As it is, we have a marvelously vivid image of a seemingly self-sufficient island, as indeed he thinks of his birth country. The stamp has the stripes characteristic of his paintings and works on paper from this period. There is a long tradition of map-like artworks, depictions showing our planet from bird’s-eye viewpoints. In premodern visual culture, these pictures must have looked miraculous. Now, however, thanks to air travel, such scenes have become familiar. Scully’s image derives from that tradition. If this exquisite stamp is too obvious in its figurative associations to be a true abstraction, it also is too much of an abstraction from the literal boundaries of Ireland to be usable as a map. Irelande transposes the shape of the country into vertical stripes and turns the surrounding sea into black and yellow squares. The literal shapes and colors of Ireland have thus been stylized to suit Scully’s visual thinking. Now let’s look at a very different artwork (Figure 16). We see two crystalline structures, intricate masses set left of center on the page. They could be rock formations. Or maybe they are inlets to twin caves. At any rate, they have hollow centers. No people are shown. Around the edges is a spidery web of delicate

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Figure 16  Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 3.25. © Maria Bussmann.

lines, and between them shown with darker, heavier straight edges, is a ruler running across through these structures. Unlike Irelande, this composition is not easy to interpret. It does, however, have a number “3.25” at the middle of the left edge. This is a curious impersonal structure. It’s really not clear if it’s some mysterious mechanical construction. Or, maybe, it might be some odd crystal



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formation found in nature. Certainly these massive drawn forms don’t look like any familiar abstractions. What is clear, however, is that the left and right sides mirror one another, in the way that Irelande mirrors Ireland. This is Bussmann’s illustration of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1961b: 3.25) “A proposition has one and only one complete analysis.” And also one other statement, not explicitly identified is relevant here: (1961b: 2.1512) A picture “is laid against reality like a measure.” Like Scully, Wittgenstein is interested in mapping. And this drawing deals with that philosophical concern. The skeptic asks: Are our representations true to reality? Wittgenstein asks: How do propositions map reality? Both of these processes can go wrong. And so, the philosopher needs to justify our knowledge against skeptical arguments. Bussmann has done two series of translations of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: Drawings about the Concordance of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” (2014– ongoing) and 92 Drawings on Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” (1996–9). As its title indicates, the more recent publication, which we will consider first, illustrates single words in the concordance. We consider the groups of drawings out of order in this way because it’s easier to first present her account of individual words and then discuss her drawings of Wittgenstein’s statements, which often are several sentences long. Using the concordance takes a little labor, especially for the English-language scholar. Take, for example, “Abmachung” (convention), a word that is used just once. In the Tractatus (1961b: 4.002) we read, “The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.” Bussmann shows an outstretched hand, an indication that someone is ready to come to agreement, as happens in a convention. And “Antwort” (answer) appears eight times, as in (1961b: 5.4541): “Men have always had a presentiment that there must be a realm in which the answers to questions are symbolically combined—a priori—to form a self-contained system.” What words a philosopher uses may have a real influence on his or her thinking. And so, the concordance can be most useful for tracing a philosopher’s verbal usage. Consider, for example Bussmann’s drawing for “auseinandergehen” (separate) (2018: 141). From top to bottom we see an assembled shoe, then that shoe taken apart, and finally toward the bottom its components. Like shoes, Wittgenstein’s propositions are assembled from discrete elements. And so, here we find a word whose depiction helps understand the process in which propositions are assembled. For our present purposes, the argument of the Tractatus falls into three parts. Pictures represent the world, truthfully or not; that relationship between pictures and the world can only be shown, without being made completely explicit; and the concerns of ethics and aesthetics are

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not representable in this pictorial fashion. The details of Wittgenstein’s book are complex and analysis is often controversial. Wittgenstein’s picture theory of propositions raises and answers two questions: How do words connect with reality? and how is the truth of propositions that employ words established? Just as an artist’s picture can be compared to what it depicts, so for Wittgenstein propositions are judged as truthful or not according to their correspondence with reality. In a number of drawings, Bussmann shows the world and its representations, revealing how they correspond—or, in some cases, fail to correspond to reality. We are looking at an image in which two lilacs droop from the plant, each of them mounted on a separate horizontal triangular bed (Figure 17). And then to the left, a male centaur and mermaid embrace. Above them are two matching hollow pear shapes, which nestle together, touching. And at the bottom left hand corner is a gently curved grid, with five points marked. Here we have illustrated one of Wittgenstein’s key ideas, that pictures have the same structure as reality:

Figure 17  Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 2.151, 2.1511. © Maria Bussmann.



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Pictorial form is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture (1961b: 2.151). That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it (1961b: 2.1511). Only the end-points of the graduating lines actually touch the object that is to be measured (1961b: 2.15121). Philosophers are interested in how our representations give knowledge of the world. And figurative artists are interested in making representations. There thus is a real analogy between their activities. And this analogy can be extended a little further. Just as our representations of the world are true or false, so we may have truthful representations, as in history, and fictional representations, as in literature. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s example of the law court in Paris that represented motorcar accidents with dolls implies that much (Kenny 1973: 53). Some such representations are truthful, while others are not. In his commentary on the Tractatus, Max Black asks, “How is a proposition linked with the world, in such a way that the facts make it either true or false?” (1964: 73). We need to ask the same question about Bussmann’s drawings for the Tractatus. How, for Wittgenstein, does language fit the world? And how in her drawings do we see this fit of language to the world? In his Notebooks, which were written soon before the book, Wittgenstein says that a hieroglyphic image showing two men fencing could stand for the proposition ‘A is fencing with B’ (1961a: 7). And in that analysis, which is more explicit than in the Tractatus, he draws a picture. His caption reads: If the right-hand figure in this picture represents the man A, and the left-hand one stands for the man B, then the whole might assert, e.g.: “A is fencing with B”. The proposition in picture-writing can be true and false.

He then adds an important cautionary note, “It can be said that, while we are not certain of being able to turn all situations into pictures on paper, still we are certain that we can portray all logical properties of situations in a twodimensional script” (Black 1964: 87). As Black’s commentary says: No picture can depict the “form of depiction” or the “form of representation” that enables the vehicle of that picture (the picture-fact) to be the definite picture that it is. In order for a picture to depict its own “form of representation” it would need, per impossible, to “place itself outside its form of representation,” i.e. to use some other form of representation in order to depict its own original form. And this is plainly impossible. (Black 1964: 87)

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We know from the direct comparison to a map that Irelande simplifies the actual shape of Ireland, for Scully’s image and the map are immediately distinguishable. But in Bussmann’s illustration of (3.25), which side is the picture and which is reality? That question is impossible to answer. Wittgenstein’s statement (1961b: 2.12), “a picture is a model of reality,” doesn’t tell us how to make that distinction. Earlier I identified the pictorial subject of this drawing. But it would be misleading to call her drawing a figurative representation. And, also, it would be confusing to describe it as an abstract image. It is an image of the general relationship between pictures and reality as described in (3.25). If Bussmann was asked to do an illustrated Tractatus, she could use this drawing. Still, it’s important to insist that this is an artwork, not a diagram. A bare diagram would just show the world, the picture, and the ruler laid against the world. Just as Scully adds colors and stripes to the map in his stamp, Bussmann includes a great many additional details, including, for example, delicious delicate spidery drawing, making this a mysterious artwork. Wittgenstein’s analysis is abstract and general. He argues that this is how language must map reality, without going into the details of how that correspondence works. Bussmann presents that argument elliptically, embellishing it. In Scully’s Irelande, as in her presentation of (3.25) from the Tractatus, we have to see that the representation corresponds to what’s represented. Here, with reference to mapping, we return to the issues of skepticism. To say that a picture succeeds (or fails) in matching reality usually implies that we have some reliable way of testing that claim. We can, with confidence, say that Irelande shows Ireland because we can see that shape of the red-stripped window matches, roughly, the outline shape of Ireland. And the title affirms that Scully intended to depict Ireland. But obviously his stamp doesn’t replicate every feature of Ireland. That country is represented by him in red and white, and the surrounding sea shown in in black and yellow. That comparison of the country and his image is easy to understand. Wittgenstein’s claim that true propositions match the world is more difficult to judge. Many paintings contain a painting within the picture, representations within the representation that often are used to comment on the larger scene (Carrier 1979). For example, in Johannes Vermeer’s Lady Standing at a Virginal (1672) there is a cupid depicted behind the woman. And there are the baroque scenes of picture galleries, which gather numerous works within one picture, sometimes depicting actual museums but often presenting imaginary collections. Then there are pictures within the picture that comment on the activity of picture making. Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, in which we see the artist making a



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painting of the royal couple, is a much-discussed example. There also are pictures with mirror images, making the reflected image a commentary on the complete picture. Édouard Manet’s, A Bar at the Folies Bergère is a famous modernist example. And, taking this process a step further, there are some recent artworks that include actual mirrors, so that the viewer is present in the image, as in a number of installations by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Pictures within pictures are philosophically interesting because they naturally inspire reflection about the concept of representation. In these examples, we see both the figurative image itself, as in all depictions, and some secondary image, which is an image of an image. Such images imply a self-consciousness about the activity of picture making. What philosophers discover by abstract reflection is found, also quite independently, by creative visual artists. And Bussmann’s art unites the perspectives of art and philosophy. We are looking at a line drawing, 17 × 22 inches. A nude female model is sprawling, head at the bottom left hand corner, with her feet extended toward the top at the right. And then in the bottom right hand corner is a picturewithin-the-picture showing the right hand of the artist making this drawing. Within that drawing, in turn, is a further small rectangle showing an image of this picture. In short, see an infinite regress in this picture of an artist making a picture. In many of his Nice paintings made in the 1920s, Henri Matisse depicts himself engaged in the act of picture making. Here in Reclining Nude in the Studio (1935), he develops that conception in a more radical way, as is readily possible only in drawing. In Nice, he did a number of paintings showing a selfcontained studio, windows closed, with the model and his painting on the easel. And, more dramatically, in a number of drawings, he showed a mise-en-abyme, the infinite regress in which we see the image (of an artist making an image (of an artist)). Matisse thus brings the spectator into the activity of creation. Other artists also developed this way of thinking. In this image by one of them, we see that the left hand is holding a round glass sphere. And in that sphere, we view a distorted reflection showing that hand, a middle-aged man, and behind him a room with books on the wall, chairs on the right, and a window in the far distance just to the right of center. We are looking at M. C. Escher’s lithograph, Hand with Reflecting Sphere (Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror) (1935), another version of Matisse’s motif (Locher 1982). It’s a motif also found in a number of old master self-portraits, because before photography using mirrors was the natural way to make a self-portrait: Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524) and Nicolas Poussin’s Self Portrait (1650) are two examples. When left/right is

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reversed, then you know that an artist uses a mirror. It has been argued that some baroque artists sought the same illusion (McTighe 2020). And recently the same motif has been developed by the contemporary artist Ellen Harvey using video (Carrier 2005–6). Seeing a work of art in these images as if in the very act of being created, you are imaginatively taken into the creative process, as if you were the artist making the image. Of course this is an illusion, for any such image has already been finished. This illusion is an extension of the familiar process in which you see a representation presenting what it depicts. In these images, the drawing or mirror shows the artist posing in the act of making the image, thus creating the illusion of a seemingly self-enclosed space. But then, obviously, there is no place in the picture for the viewer, for that viewer cannot also be the artist. And just as a representation cannot fully show the act of making that image, so an account of consciousness cannot adequately present the here and now. In one of her Concordance drawings, “abbilden/depict,” Bussmann achieves this effect. (This image I do not reproduce.) In the center, we see a smart phone with an image of flowers in a vessel. It is being drawn with a pencil held by a hand visible at the very bottom right hand corner. And at the top right corner, we see a hand drawing the same flowers. Here, then, we have a drawing itself and a smartphone, also drawn. This visual effect is described in the Tractatus without reference to artistic examples: Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye. (1961b: 5.633; italics added)

But what cannot be said can be shown. That is, we must just see that these pictures match reality, by putting them side by side with their subjects and comparing. As Wittgenstein says (1961b: 4.022), “A proposition shows its sense.” Otherwise you would get an infinite regress, that is, another proposition (showing a proposition matching) and so on. An artist cannot both depict the world and at the same time show the process of depicting the world: the eye that sees always escapes itself being shown. To put this result, too, in Wittgenstein’s vocabulary (1961b: 5.631), “There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas.” The subject is (literally!) not in the picture. That’s why there



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can be no picture showing the act of seeing that very picture being made. You can show that language matches the world. But you can’t make an additional image showing that match, and so on, for that would lead to an infinite regress. Earlier Wittgenstein said (1961b: 2.173), “A picture represents its subject from a position outside it.” Pictures thus represent the world but they don’t show that they do this. That they represent things is not something that they can show (1961b: 2.172). To put this differently in a useful way: pictures display but do not depict their pictorial form. We look at a landscape painting. This image includes a small portrait of the artist making the image. And so, we see both the landscape and a picture within that picture of the landscape. Finally, imagine that we see an image showing us looking at that picture. Now we are in the picture. Still, the very act of perceiving escapes pictorial presentation. Here, then, we replicate the argument of Wittgenstein’s pictorial theory of reality. Pictorial form is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture: (A picture) is laid against reality like a measure. a picture … also includes the pictorial relationship, which makes it into a picture. A picture cannot … depict its pictorial form: it displays it. Only thus by understanding the act of displaying can we avoid an infinite regress. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it. (1961b: 2.151. 2.15121, 2.1513, 2.172, 4.121)

Ultimately we need to see if propositions or pictures match the world. This same general principle holds for any explanation. If I don’t understanding your account, then I can ask for an explanation in simpler or clearer words. But ultimately if discussion is to proceed, we need some stopping point. You can’t go on indefinitely explaining the explanation, making everything explicit. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein again took up this point, offering a different account, in his discussion of rules. To measure the dimensions of a book, I set it alongside a ruler. Then I can see its length and width. And if I am uncertain about the accuracy of these measurements, I can employ another ruler to check my ruler. But at some point, this checking has to stop. Above the center to the left of the page we see the hand making a drawing (Figure 18). In this drawing, lines converge from below on a point, the right hand of the draftsman is working on a drawing held with both hands of another person at the upper left and right corners. A line runs across the center, intersecting the

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Figure 18  Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 3.03, 3.031. © Maria Bussmann.

outlined heads on the left and right sides of the drawing. And those drawn lines appear mirrored in a dense network above the paper, slightly displaced. To the right at the top, and much fainter, those lines extend below the lower edge of the page. And on the right edge, there is a fascinating negative shape outlined by the hand that is doing the drawing. In examples by Saul Steinberg, which Ernst Gombrich analyzes in Art and Illusion, we see a variety of ways in which an artist can call attention to that effect. Thus, for example, there is a drawing in which a drawing hand draws a drawing hand which draws it. We have no clue as to which is meant to be the real and which the image; each interpretation is equally probably, but neither, as such, is consistent. (1961: 203–4)

Here, again, we have a picture within a picture but this depiction of imagemaking is not easy to unpack. At least not until we see the numbers (3.03) and (3.031), which are from the Tractatus. This is Bussmann’s illustration of (3:03). “Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically” (1961b). It would be illogical to include in a drawing also an



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image of the making of that very drawing. Our thoughts can be true or false, depending upon whether they match or do not match reality. But they cannot be illogical. And adds that “we could not say what an ‘illogical’ world would look like” (1961b: 3.031). Here Bussmann takes her thinking in a somewhat different direction from her Wittgenstein-drawings we have discussed earlier. This time we get an image, partial it is true, of the basic process in which pictures mirror the structure of the world. In a square panel inserted above center, slightly to the left, we see a right hand making a pencil drawing on paper. And then, in turn, that panel is held by two hands. And on its right and left, we see outlined figures of heads, each marked with a square at the center. Some of the details here are obscure; I’m not sure what to make of the tiny slingshot at the very bottom left hand edge. Maybe that’s the point: illogical things are hard to understand. The general theme of this image is, I think, clear. In response to Wittgenstein’s (3.03), Bussmann offers a representation of an illogical looking world. This is a very different image of philosophy from that of Hegel and his trees. For Hegel, even what looks illogical can always ultimately be rationally understood. This is what Wittgenstein denies. Because we cannot say what an “illogical” world would look like, we cannot have a picture of it either. We look at the image of a swinging pendulum. (Another Bussmann that we describe but do not reproduce.) There are little people in the pendulum, which is above a faintly drawn cityscape. Many of Bussmann’s illustrations of philosophical subjects are difficult to decipher. But this image for the Tractatus (Bussmann 2018: 125) is relatively straightforwardly meaningful. It alludes to Wittgenstein’s much-quoted statement near the conclusion: It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.) (1961b: 6.421)

Many of the technical details of Wittgenstein’s book are difficult to unpack. But this claim can be readily explained. The picture theory of propositions matches these statements against the world. Ethics however does something different: it tells what should be. And aesthetics, analogously, tells how things should be. Thus neither ethics nor aesthetics describe the world. And as Wittgenstein says a little earlier (1961b: 6.41), “The sense of world must lie outside the world.” The Tractatus doesn’t discuss aesthetics or ethics in any more detail. But his Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief gives some

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relevant examples. Wittgenstein is interested in aesthetic judgments of rightness. For example, a tailor who picks a pattern for a suit, musical examples, styles of African art, attractiveness of pictures, architectural judgments (here one thinks of the house Wittgenstein designed in Vienna), drawings of an expressive face (1961a: 1, 13, 11, 32). To generalize, as he does not; and to place his remarks historically, as he does not: the common feature, the family resemblance of these cases is that they all involve judgments of correctness. And because they are intuitive, but not rule bound, these judgments are hard to state in words. Words and examples are needed to convey meaning here. Online, you find a great many such judgments about performances of canonical music works. Although Wittgenstein only once mentions Kant in the Tractatus, and in a different context, there’s a Kantian dimension to all of these examples. One very basic thesis of The Critique of Judgment is that judgments of taste are not rule governed. You judge a musical performance, a painting, or architecture intuitively without reference to any standards that can be written out. There are many stories of Wittgenstein’s dogmatic assertions about tempos and of him humming music works. Propositions either match reality or they don’t. And so, there’s no way to make aesthetic or ethical judgments. But whatever Wittenstein’s personal concerns, it’s deeply misleading to assume that there’s something deeply irrational or even mystical about this intuitive sense of rightness. It’s what a cook does when she knows how much salt to add to a dish, or when a wine connoisseur pronounces a vintage exceptional. The Kantian point, which Wittgenstein echoes, is that art making is not rule governed.

5

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

We see a man with dark black hair and beard wearing a black jacket. He is eating soup. A glass of red wine is on the table. And he’s surrounded by an elaborate apparatus, each element of which is labeled with an alphabet letter. His soup spoon, A, is attached by a string, B, to a mounted spoon, C, which sends a cracker, D, up to a bird, E. When the bird jumps to get the food, water in a small container, F, will fall into a bucket, labelled G and H, attached by another string, I, which runs to a levered line, with another string, J, linked to a rocket, K, which has a hook, L, so that when it goes off it cuts yet another string, M, which is attached to a napkin, N. Everything is arranged so that when the bucket falls, the rocket will be launched, and then L will cut the string M and the napkin will wipe the man’s mouth. This elaborate apparatus permits the man to automatically wipe his chin as he drinks the soup. We are looking at a tiny work of art that is on my desk. Issued in an edition of 300,000,000, this 32-cent 1995 US postage stamp is entitled “Rube Goldberg’s Inventions,” An Automatic Napkin. That image is by the American cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883–1970), who was famous for his imaginary, very elaborate machines designed to accomplish simple tasks (Wolfe 2000: 49). Although his machines look intricate, it’s always exactly clear how they will operate. According to influential modernist dogma, “more is less.” For Goldberg, however, the more elaborate the mechanism, the better. Between 2002 and 2004, Bussmann did 102 drawings about one chapter, “The Intertwining-The Chiasm,” of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished, posthumously published book The Visible and the Invisible (1968) (Figure 19). We are viewing one drawing in which at the top there are two outlined figures, male on the left, female to the right, labeled I and II on their foreheads. These figures are held together by hinges. The figure on the left holds in his right hand a bag. A label reads Psy(chology). A stream of liquid is running out at the bottom

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Figure 19  Merleau-Ponty, Two Outlined Figures. © Maria Bussmann.

front corner. The traditional psychological theories thus are disappearing. Below is a single outlined figure, also with two hinges placed along the center of the garment along the zipper coming down the center. If the two partial figures above were folded together on these hinges, then you could get this single figure. And there are seven eyes positioned above the head on the left, with small arrows



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running leftward from the three toward the bottom; and a hand on the right is a sense organ. To either side of this figure are large arrows, with the smiling faces contained in them directed toward the left and right edges. Male and female are repeatedly conjoined here. The faces of all three figures are completely blank, with their sensory organs moved to the periphery of their bodies. And the bodies of the two-sided figure above have been rotated to be brought together. Near the bottom left edge, we see another hinge, suggesting that the entire drawing is hinged. Arrows flow from either side of this figure. Familiarity with ordinary pulleys and levers permits you to comprehend An Automatic Napkin. But grasping the visual logic of Bussmann’s drawing requires studying Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. If at the top of her drawing Bussmann has taken apart the body, in terms of gender and also with reference to sight and hearing, this is in order to display its unity at the bottom. And this unity, so we will see, is very dear to Merleau-Ponty. As he says, “My body is not only an object among all other objects … but an object which is sensitive to all the rest” (1962: 236; italics added). The next Bussmann is a sequel (Figure 20), as if the two drawings were successive pictures in a graphic book narrative. In this second drawing, the fullbodied female and male figures face each other, the woman now on the left, holding together from beneath a detached head. With bulging eyes staring upwards, it looks upwards toward a small figure suspended at the picture top. These two figures are standing on a strange platform, composed of winding tendrils, with a support of tiny acrobatic figures, like the graceful dancers in Henri Matisse’s 1930s murals. This image is about human connections. And, I think, also about how the head, our mental center, is connected to the body. Merleau-Ponty observes, “Experience of one’s body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and objects from each other” (1962: 198). In both drawings, the faces are blank and in the large figures, the bodies are not shown in full. But these partial bodies are not the fragmented bodies of modernist expressionism but something that is quite different. Philosophers were much concerned with synthesis, with understanding how out of the distinct impressions or ideas we construct our unified experiences of the enduring things in the external world. And, also, with construction of the self that has these experiences. So, for example, Kant asks what categories are employed to organize units of experience. Phenomenology in effect turns this way of thinking inside out and starts with the given wholeness of experience. According to MerleauPonty, I cannot understand perception without recognizing that originally my experience involves finding “myself already situated and involved in a physical

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Figure 20  Merleau-Ponty, Facing Figures. © Maria Bussmann.

and social world—I am given to myself” (1962: 360). As he says spelling out this point in clear detail: I start from unified experience and … when … I break up perception into qualities and sensations, and when, in order to recapture on the basis of these the object into which I was in the first place blindly thrown, I am obliged to



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suppose an act of synthesis which is merely the counterpart of my analysis. (1962: 238)

How can drawings present Merleau-Ponty’s ways of thinking? Let us start by making a simplified summary of his argument. To begin, note the way that sight and touch are typically bound together. Things near to you can be both seen and touched. And so what follows is that experience involves a combination of visual and tactile awareness. Next consider the self that you see and touch with your own body. Each of us has a privileged relationship with one portion of this physical world, our own body. And as you both see and touch things and yourself, you are aware that you are seen and can be touched by others. You are thus embodied in a social space. And others are there too from the start. How, then, from experience of your own mental activity can you imagine or understand the activity of these others? By definition, my experience is of my mental activity. Given that I know what it is for me to see the color red for example, what is it like for them to have the same experience? Well! their experience is just like mine, but only for them. (Is that clear? Obviously not!) I am embodied, and other people also are embodied. I am in a space shared with these embodied individuals, and my self-awareness involves knowing that they are aware of me. As Merleau-Ponty says, “Our body is not primarily in space: it is of it” (1962: 148). And so “it is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive ‘things’ ” (1962: 186; italics added). This very tentative, extremely incomplete discussion doesn’t describe our everyday bodily activities. Nothing has been said about how I move my body. And in describing our relations with others, it says nothing about two important concerns, gender and race. (My account is modeled in part on Samuel Todes’s Body and World, which he calls the preamble to “a sequel: The Human Body as the Social Subject of the World,” (Todes 2001: 2; italics added), a book that he did not live to write.) Nor does it discuss the obvious importance of birth and death, our entry to and departure from the social world. And it says nothing about one special kind of experience important for our present discussion, looking at visual art. Merleau-Ponty writes, “Our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a focal point of living meanings” (1962: 151). That claim is very suggestive for our present purposes. In his Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Danto presents some of these ideas in accessible prose: My consciousness of myself is interlocked with my consciousness of others, and specifically with their consciousness of me: to be seriously aware of myself as

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art subject presupposes an awareness of others’ awareness of me as an object. Or better: I exist for myself at the level of self-consciousness just and only just when I become aware of existing for others. (1975: 115) I am an object for my own consciousness only through my having become conscious of others’ consciousness of me. Others cannot then be merely objects for my consciousness or I would not become an object for myself. (1975: 124)

But he didn’t incorporate them into his philosophical system. Other analytic philosophers have also dealt with these issues. Thomas Nagel writes: The question is how limited beings like ourselves can alter their conception of the world so that it is no longer just the view from where they are but in a sense a view from nowhere, which includes and comprehends the fact that the world contains beings which possess it, explains why the world appears to them as it does prior to the formation of that conception, and explains how they can arrive at the conception itself. (1986: 70)

We need, he explains, to understand both our subjective viewpoint and how to move from it to an objective perspective, what he calls the view from nowhere. This is exactly what Merleau-Ponty also discusses, though he is, of course, more critical about the conclusion of that reasoning process. We are looking at Still Life with Plaster Cupid (1885), a painting by Paul Cézanne that is in the Courtauld Institute, London. An unusual still life, it contains not only apples and onions but also two small artworks, a cast of Puget’s Cupid in the center, and at the top right hand corner, a sketch of that sculptor’s The Flayed Man. And behind the figures and apples are some additional picture frames. From a close viewpoint which places the foreground objects below us, we see behind them an intricate composition of tilted lines and planes, ambiguous in places yet so contrived as to belong together and re-enforce the down-stage world. A canvas set behind the Cupid is doubly tilted, and by a paradox of design parallels the main lines of the statuette. At its lower left corner, the canvas meets what seems to be the edge of the floor, but is also the edge of the beautifully formed blue drape and, by a startling artifice, coincides with the line separating the onion from its green stem. (Schapiro 1962: 98)

Meyer Schapiro describes how copies of the works of art and also the apples, onions and fabric coexist in an intricate pattern. The top edge of the flat surface behind the cupid is a broken line, as also is the table at the bottom, to name two



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of many such complexities, more even than Schapiro describes. As for the apples and onions, they are outlined with Cézanne’s patented heavy line, as is the oddly shaped dish at the bottom left. One recent commentary expresses the dilemma of interest to us: If, as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously has it, Cézanne’s oeuvre addresses the fundamental ambiguity of perception, and, in the case of the selfportraits, of self-perception, these late works are a kind of epitome. Cézanne’s incessant interrogation of visual reality and of his own reflection in the mirror exposes a central anxiety articulated by theories of modernity: the instability of the self and the erosion of faith in solid reality. (Elderfield: 189)

It’s understandable, certainly, that “Cézanne’s Doubt” inspired a great many New York artists who, in the generation of Willem de Kooning, were much concerned with the difficulties of finishing. Cézanne’s distortions provide a visual equivalent to the lived experience of touch. In effect, his picture asks us to see the subject from various viewpoints. The same is true, also, of his landscapes in which, the objects too far away to imagine touching are composed of proto-cubist planes of color. Still, all of these many elements are set in one, surprisingly complex space. By contrast, what’s visually puzzling about Bussmann’s drawing is that the things on the cliff at the bottom, the arcs at the center, and the people at the top are gathered without any obvious unifying spatial principle. Still when Schapiro says that Cézanne “is able to make his sensing, probing, doubting, finding activity a visible part of the painting” (1962: 20), I would apply the same description also to Bussmann’s drawings. Cézanne’s painting was paradoxical, Merleau-Ponty says, because “he was pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface, with no other guide than the immediate impression of nature” (1964b: 12). As Cézanne said, “Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting” (qtd. Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 13). By way of commentary Merleau-Ponty adds, “He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear.” That is why he spoke of “the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes” (1964b: 14). And, the philosopher adds, “distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception” (1964b: 15). In one extended passage Merleau-Ponty summarizes his concerns: We live in the midst of man-made objects, along tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art them to use … Cézanne’s painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself. (1964b: 16)

But to create a picture “all the partial views one catches sight of must be welded together; all that the eye’s versatility disperses must be reunited” (1964b: 17). And then Merleau-Ponty adds some words that will serve to guide us, “The … spectator who follows the clues of the … painting, by setting up stepping stones and rebounding from side to side guided by the obscure clarity of a particular style, will end by discovering what the artist wanted to communicate” (1964b: 19–20). “If you were a phenomenologist,” Raymond Aron said over drinks to JeanPaul Sartre, “you could talk about this cocktail glass and make philosophy out of it.” Simone de Beauvoir, who recorded this conversation, recalls that Sartre turned pale with emotion: “Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve for years—to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process” (Danto 1975:15). When I drink a glass of wine in the cafe, aware of holding the glass, I am also observant of the wine’s texture and taste. And if I have a drink with Albertina, then she, too, has an experience that is, so I imagine, like mine. How can we describe this scenario in a post-Cartesian manner, in a description that does justice to the intersubjectivity inherent here in this process? Here it’s useful to begin with another, more accessible book, Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception. In effect, The Visible and the Invisible is the poetic version of the historical commentary in The Phenomenology of Perception. Considering Bussmann’s drawings translating these verbal experiences into images, we seek depictions of the unity of sight and touch. And we wish to show how touch involves our body, which is touched by others. Thus far I am pretending as if we could introduce these concerns in a narrative sequence, as if by stages we became aware of them. That’s what Descartes does in his Meditations when he argues, first that we show that the external world exists and then that we prove that there are other minds and that we have bodies. In fact, of course, we need to deal with these stages all at once, for that’s what happens in everyday experience. We don’t see, then touch, then become aware of our body and, finally, discover the presence of others. No! we do all of these things all at once because right from the start we are in the world in which we are embodied and aware of others. Merleau-Ponty’s account is highly subtle and verbally elaborate because describing this everyday reality is not easy. Partly, I think, the problem is that we take a Cartesian viewpoint, which is presented



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in most traditional European visual art, for granted. Still, since analysis requires disassembling what in experience is unified, we will take apart and consider in stages Bussmann’s drawings of this phenomenological account using plentiful quotations of Merleau-Ponty’s difficult text. Let us begin, Merleau-Ponty proposes, by starting from experiences that are not already interpreted (Figure 21). We will rediscover in seeing and speaking how to understand ourselves. When we do that, he says, we find that “the visible about us seems to rest in itself ” (1968: 130). We discover how close we are to the visible world. And, in a curious passivity, our “gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh.” This intimacy leads him to say that in perception someone “cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it” (1968: 134). Here we see two hands touching a body, and one, the right hand, also touching the left. MerleauPonty wants to characterize the relationship between the perceiver and what we look at. He compares the intimacy of this relationship with the sense of touch in which when touching what is outside of me, I am also simultaneously aware of what’s felt from within. These two systems, he says, in a phrase that Bussmann illustrates several times, are akin to “the two halves of an orange” in what truly there is “a veritable touching of the touch, when my right hand touches my left” (1968: 133–4). Perceiver and perceived thus are intimately inextricability bound together. This analysis leads Merleau-Ponty into a discussion of the relationship between sight and touch. “Since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world” and we know that our body is “the sole means I have” to thus make for “myself a world” (1968: 135). It is the body that makes us aware that things are “beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above” (1968: 136). On the right in Bussmann’s drawing, we see the separate senses, touch, sight, and hearing (Figure 22). And on the left, they are conjoined together. Just as tentacles of an octopus are joined to the body of that animal, so in humans these “body holes” link together to constitute our sensory contacts. And at the very top, to the right of the double vertical dividing line, is a small depiction of a standing figure, diagraming the various senses that are gathered together here. How, then, can we properly describe our body? From one side, it is “a thing among things” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 137). But also it sees and touches, which is to say, “it unites these two properties within itself.” We thus know our body from within, but we can’t see every part of it; for example, “I do not see my back.” One might say, “the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is universal flesh.” Where then, Merleau-Ponty asks, is “the limit between the body and the world,

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Figure 21  Merleau-Ponty, To Touch and Be Touched. © Maria Bussmann.

since the world is flesh” (1968: 138)? My body, yet another visible thing, is in the world, in this “strange adhesion of the seer and the visible” (1968: 139). Because I thus see myself in everything that I see, “there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision.” Traditionally we speak of the flesh, but “the flesh is not matter.” Nor is “it a representation for a mind” (1968: 140). In fact, “flesh … is not the union or



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Figure 22  Merleau-Ponty 2, Body Holes. © Maria Bussmann.

compound of two substances, but thinkable by itself.” As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “When I walk round my flat, the various aspects in which it presents itself to me could not possibly appear as views of one and the same thing if I did not know that each of them represents the flat seen from one spot or another, and if I were unaware of my own movements” (1962: 203).

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When we are frontally facing something, we usually are aware that there is more to be seen. Phenomenologists identify what we are implicitly aware of that lies beyond the immediate field of vision. Thus Merleau-Ponty writes: The horizon … is what guarantees the identity of the object throughout the exploration; it is the correlative of the impending power which my gaze retains over the objects which it has just surveyed, and which it already has over the fresh details which it is about to discover. (1962: 68)

We find this effect when Cézanne seems to turn from one side to another of his subjects, as to show what we would see were we to move. The more complex effects of Bussmann’s artworks come when we are, as it were, not just moving our eyes but moving our position, so that the bits and pieces of her drawings don’t come together but remain scattered fragments. Sometimes when you start to focus on work, you find that your mind momentarily flirts here and there, until you settle in. Merleau-Ponty repeatedly considers the moment “when one of my hands touches the other” (1968: 141). What’s peculiar, then he says, is that they are “one sole organ of experience,” as my two eyes are “channels of one sole Cyclopean vision.” With one hand, I could touch everything; with one eye, see everything. And yet experience with two hands and two eyes is different (1968: 142). In these exchanges, “I see and touch” (1968: 143). And with my awareness of others who, like me, see “I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes.” When I analyze my bodily movements, consider how varied they are. In a remarkable exercise of defamiliarization, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “those strange movements of the throat and mouth that form the cry and the voice” (1968: 144). Kant and the other thinkers in the Cartesian tradition speak of our awareness of the mental act of synthesis as the ground of experience. For the phenomenologist, however, what matters is that we are immediately aware of the wholistic organization of experience. We need, then, to consider the embodied role of thinking. Here Merleau-Ponty redescribes the traditional Cartesian Cogito argument: We are asking precisely what is that central vision that joins the scattered visions, that unique touch that governs the whole tactile life of my body as a unit, that I think that must be able to accompany all our experiences. (1968: 145)

Again, for me the self is not known as the product of an act of synthesis but as the precondition for any such analytic activity. And the same is true for other people, for my sense of the world “does not notably differ from that of the others” (1968: 146).



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How difficult it is to describe my flesh, which is right at hand (Figure 23). Indeed, that commonplace phrase, “at hand,” is highly suggestive here. What we see touched by the hand in this image is quite literally at hand (1968: 147). “One cannot say that it is here or now in the sense that objects are; and yet my vision does not soar over them.” With hearing, as with touch, “I hear myself both from within and from without … and it is only as though the hinge between them,

Figure 23  Merleau-Ponty, Two Senses. © Maria Bussmann.

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solid, unshakeable, remained irremediably hidden from me” (1968: 148). Hinges, as we have already noted, appear repeatedly in Bussmann’s Merleau-Ponty drawings. Above all, what Merleau-Ponty communicates is a sense of wonder, not the wonder that we readily experience before what is unfamiliar but a wonder at what’s immediately present. Like Bussmann’s images, his text is designed to support slow moving looking. Jump ahead and you miss what matters. It’s difficult to describe verbally or visually what’s at stake, “Is my body a thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measure of the things” (1968: 152). There is no need to worry about a synthesis, because in passing from one viewpoint to another we deal with “two aspect of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth” (1968: 155). As the title of this chapter of his book, “chiasm” signals that Merleau-Ponty is interested in the crossings between the senses, those intricate transitions that mark out the elusive dividing line between self and world. As we have said, Arthur Danto’s book on Jean-Paul Sartre translates that philosopher’s claims into the terms of analytic philosophy. Thus, for example Sartre’s “Nothingness” becomes “Consciousness and Ontology,” and “Engagement” becomes “Knowledge, Action, and the World.” Emulating Danto, we translate Merleau-Ponty’s analysis into an account of Bussmann’s drawings. The Visible and the Invisible is difficult because the texture of the prose is elusive. Not because it employs an elaborate abstract vocabulary, but, rather, because it is so very concrete, so totally immediate. When you read the Tractatus, you are asked to think of the world in an extremely abstract way, which is difficult to grasp. Here, by dramatic contrast, you are plunged into total immediacy. And, paradoxically! That also is difficult, at least at first. Nor is The Visible and the Invisible like a novel in which there are many characters to keep track of. On the contrary, in a real sense there is only one character—you the reader. Nor is there any exotic environment presented. The book is entirely about the least exotic place imaginable, your everyday life. What’s exciting then is to see how surprisingly complex you the reader are. When Merleau-Ponty devotes a more than a page to understanding our ordinary experience of the color red, he asks that we be very patient. Here, then in Bussmann’s drawing we see a seated figure shown from the back, with that implicit awarensss of what lies behind the person (Figure 24). When we are frontally facing something, we usually are aware that there is more to be seen. The horizon … is what guarantees the identity of the object throughout the exploration; it is the correlative of the impending power which my gaze retains over the objects which it has just surveyed, and which it already has over the fresh details which it is about to discover. (1962: 68)



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Were you to look to the sides, you would see more of that object or what surrounds it, things that are hidden but implicitly present. Indeed, Descartes also makes this point: Painters, who are unable to represent equally well on a flat surface all the various sides of a solid body, choose one of the principal sides to place alone facing the light of day, and, by darkening the rest with shadows, make them

Figure 24  Merleau-Ponty, Reflexive Turn 2. © Maria Bussmann.

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Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art appear only as they can be seen by someone who is looking at the principal side. (2000: 65)

The Tractatus is based upon a picture theory of propositions, a way of thinking that phenomenology is extremely skeptical about. To depict Wittgenstein’s philosophy, it’s necessary to stand in effect outside of the scene, in what we described as the view from nowhere. But to imagine Merleau-Ponty’s worldview, we have to be inside of the depicted scene. He argues that I do not see the world from outside. No matching is needed, for I am directly in contact with the world. “I live it from the inside. I am immersed in it” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 138). The Visible and the Invisible has many run-on sentences and excessively long paragraphs, as if the whole book were just one continuous statement. And so we need to slow it down, quoting very selectively. In “Cézanne’s Doubt,” MerleauPonty seeks to understand, as if in slow motion, that painter’s procedures. Here we apply that same procedure to some fragments of his text. In his earlier The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes various pathological abnormal experiences, which reveal by contrast the intricacy of normal bodily experience. Here, however, he hardly digresses from description of ordinary experience. Why, then, is this description of what we all already know so difficult? Partly the problem is that this phenomenological perspective is unfamiliar and so needs to be motivated in detail. But also, I think, the danger, which his text resists, is falling into abstractions. There is my body, and I view yours: this abstract way of speaking, characteristic of traditional Cartesian philosophy, takes us away from precisely what Merleau-Ponty seeks to describe. And avoiding cliché is not easy. And analytic philosophers resist treating philosophy writing as a literary form. They are focused rather on the argument, which can be stated in varied literary styles. But the success of this phenomenological analysis depends heavily upon Merleau-Ponty’s literary skill. And his selfsame argument could no more be presented in different prose than Samuel Beckett’s novels could be rewritten in the style of Ernest Hemingway. Descartes’s Meditations is a convenient starting point for discussion of this French tradition. Descartes starts by surveying the contents of his own mind. My sensations are internal states, while other mental activities seem to refer to external reality. Merleau-Ponty observes that Descartes says very little about painting. Painting for him is not a central operation contributing to the definition of our access to Being; it is a mode or a variant of thinking, where thinking is



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canonically defined as intellectual possession and self-evidence. (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 132–3)

For him “the picture is a flat thing,” and thus “only an artifice that puts before our eyes a projection similar to the one things themselves would” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 133). In short, he stops just at the place where Merleau-Ponty’s account begins. What does Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy look like? In one way, the question seems easy to answer. If asked, what does Mont Sainte-Victoire look like, we can point to one of Paul Cézanne’s paintings. And we can contrast it with photographs of that site. But the philosophy is not a thing or a place. Merleau-Ponty aspires to describe the world as it is. And so, if his philosophy is convincing, to learn what his world looks like we need only see if Bussmann’s drawings match perceptual experience. What then we find, however, is that this apparently straightforward approach to our initial question, what does his philosophy look like, itself raises philosophical puzzles. Cézanne presents what Merleau-Ponty calls “the lived perspective” (1964b: 14), seeking to create in his purely visual terms an equivalent to this bodily experience involving sight and touch. He quotes the artist, “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness” (Cézanne qtd. 1964b: 17). What he means, Merleau-Ponty says, is: We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects … If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must carry with it this invisible whole, or else his picture … will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the unsurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real. (1964b: 15)

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Hannah Arendt

We are looking at three figures standing in a desert setting. A small mouse throws a brick. “Zip” says the caption as that brick is aimed at a large black cat; “Pow” reads another caption, showing that this brick has reached its target. And we see a heart in that cat’s thought balloon, demonstrating that this cat loves being beaned. To the right, the word balloon commentary coming from a dog dressed as a cop says “Transgression!!!” Mice don’t throw bricks, and if they did they wouldn’t throw them at cats; and if cats were hit by bricks, they wouldn’t be pleased. Nor, finally, do dogs normally protect cats. This thus is a very strange, totally illogical scene from a classic comic strip. The basic idea is slightly stupid and completely illogical: Krazy, a black cat who is not too bright, is in love with the mouse Ignaz who beans him with bricks, while the dog Officer Pupp, who wears a police uniform, tries and usually fails to protect Krazy, whose gender was never specified by Herriman (Carrier 2019). We see one typical single panel from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1939), a comic strip, appearing in many American newspapers from 1914 until the year of his death, 1944. Comics may have been intended primarily for children but many adults also love Krazy. Certainly I do. And I am constantly amazed by how much mileage Herriman gets from this simple scenario with three main characters, cat/mouse/dog. Admired by Pablo Picasso and many other artists, this Black illustrator was marginalized within the art world. Now we are looking at a very different artwork. We view two children’s stuffed toys close up in drawings by Bussmann (Figure 25). The one on the right has a finely textured face. It’s labeled “Arendt.” The one on the left, a figure drawn only in elegant outline, like a drawing by JeanAuguste-Ingres, has odd tubal constructions, as fat as macaroni, for hair. And there’s a stitchwork design on its face. It’s labelled “Kant.” The two toys almost touch. And behind the two dolls is a fabric that has a simple decorative pattern with irregularly spaced stars. Compared with most of Bussmann’s drawings of

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Figure 25  Lucy’s Toys (Kant and Arendt). © Hilger Collection Wien.

philosophical subjects, this image is easy to understand. In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt says: Without the assumption of progress, nothing would make sense; progress may be interrupted, but it is never broken off. (1991: 50)

In Kant himself there is this contradiction: infinite progress is the law of the human species; at the same time, man’s dignity demands that he be seen (every single one of us) in his particularity and, as such, be seen—but without any comparison and independent of time—as reflecting humankind in general (1991: 77). Just as he responded with passionate absorption to the grandest public event of his day, the French Revolution, so Arendt discussed most attentively in close detail the most important contemporary political happenings, German and Soviet totalitarianism, American racism, and the Holocaust. Obviously, however, Kant’s belief in progress no longer seemed plausible. We’re accustomed to seeing still life images of humble foodstuffs such as Paul Cézanne’s apples or containers like Giorgio Morandi’s bottles. And often we view what Heidegger calls equipment, “those entities which we encounter in concern … equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement,” (1962: 97) also can be a visual subject. T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism begins, for example, by listing a “handful of



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disconnected pieces” of art that attract him. The oddest is a drawing by Adolph Menzel, Moltke’s Binoculars (1871). “Are Field Marshal Moltke’s binoculars wonderful or silly? Here they are, snug in their carrying case! And here is the case empty, with magenta lining visible. And here it is shut tight and buckled” (1999: 2). It’s as if, Clark says after he quotes Walter Benjamin, that objects like these binoculars did not exist in this culture until they had a case. The binoculars certainly are eccentric subjects, instruments of war translated by Menzel into benign-looking images. Indeed, this representation deserves comparison with Bussmann’s Marchgepâck (Field Pack) (2005), one of her twenty drawings in a series Aug Heidegger’s Spuren (Following Heidegger). She shows a toy for adults, which thus compliments her toys for children. Bussmann did twenty-four drawings of her daughter’s, Lucy’s Toys with annotations on Hannah Arendt’s “Vita Activa” (2006) and seven drawings in another series, Homage to Hannah Arendt (2012). The drawings of the toys all show individual toys or pairs of toys close up. Bussmann’s Homage to Hannah Arendt—seven drawings, also are direct and affectionately personal images. One lovely drawing shows a very wellstocked sewing kit, and other images depict buttons and a large sewing needle. Also, there are buttons with portraits of Arendt. We see images from domestic life, unusual still life objects. As Bussmann explains: There is one of a sewing tool—its name in German means “putting the thread through the needle.” It is a little metal disk with a clip at the end that helps you direct the thread through the eye of a sewing needle. There is always a cameostyle classical profile of a woman decorating the disk. I substituted Arendt’s portrait … The idea was that, like the thread, she gets your thought going in the right direction. (personal communication)

Arendt doesn’t discuss toys. Nor do most other philosophers consider them. But toys provide a significant, unclichéd way of grasping some of the key concerns of the only female philosopher whom Bussmann has presented. Born in Germany in 1906, with a doctorate in her native country, Arendt focused serious attention on a theme not dealt with at any length by the leading male philosophers, “natality” or, if you will, birth, “a constant succession of new beginnings for a unique story, an unusual narrative, or a biography” (Kristeve 2001: 44). One Bussmann drawing shows three toys, rattles, each attached to a holder (2018: 107). The reader of Arendt’s The Life of the Mind will recognize the three titles written out here, thinking, willing, judging, the sections planned for that book. Kant only wrote his account of judgment in old age, the third critique, in 1790. When it came to writing about judgment, Arendt’s situation was sadder: “After her

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death, a sheet of paper was found in her typewriter, blank except for the heading “judging” and “two epigraphs” (1977: 242). Arendt’s published book includes sections about thinking and willing; the planned third part devoted to judging was unwritten, though portions of Arendt’s account have been published in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. The names of Kant and Duns Scotus, who both wrote about judgment, are inscribed on the drawing. Bussmann made drawings of individual toys, accompanied by handwritten inscriptions of Arendt’s writings. These are marvelous memorials of her child’s playthings, as immediately comprehensible as toys themselves. To understand, then, why these toys are philosophical subjects, you need to turn to Arendt’s writings. These images may seem straightforward, but they are intended as illustrations of Arendt’s political subjects: Normal things can be sinister, like the IBM cards used in the concentration camps. The buttons, the needles puncturing the sewing cushion. These drawings are much larger in scale than almost anything I’ve ever done. There’s one of a very large needle, taking up the whole sheet. It is not based on a text, but on the ideas that connect us to the text. It looks as if ready to inflict pain. I think of Francis Bacon’s paintings as the moment after the pain is inflicted. (Personal communication)

We presented Merleau-Ponty’s view of the embodied self and its relation to other persons. Now we extend that analysis in a natural way. Once you follow Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in considering the philosophical significance of the body in lived experience, then it can seem natural to describe the differences between male and female bodies, to discuss the end of the body, death, and to say something about the distinctive female activity of giving birth. And although Arendt was hesitant to describe herself as a feminist, and never had children, her concern with these topics links her to contemporary feminism. In antiquity, “hidden away were the laborers who ‘with their bodies minister to the (bodily) needs of life’, and the women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of the species” (Arendt 1959: 6). Here, she is quoting Aristotle. Everyone knows (how could they not?) about birth, but Arendt had the insight to recognize that this was a proper philosophical topic. We come into a life world that was already there before us. And so, a full analysis of the given must understand birth. That’s why her discussion of work, labor, and art places such emphasis upon the stability of the world; it’s that social place we enter at birth and exit at death. One of Heidegger’s limitations, Arendt notes, is a refusal to consider birth as well as death. We are born into this social world and fall out of it in death.



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Near the start of The Human Condition, after explaining that she will discuss labor, work, and action, Arendt says: “All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and morality” (1959: 10). We speak of childbirth as “labor,” a nomenclature that, Arendt’s account suggests, is revealing. What has always been private, she says, is “the bodily part of human existence … all things connected with the necessity of the life process,” the labor of slaves and the activity of “the women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of the species” (1959: 64). Like the physical labor of the slaves in antiquity, in birth the labor of women keeps the species going. As Julia Kristeva puts it in her book about Arendt, “The body never transcends nature; it avoids the world so it can remain exclusively a sphere of privacy” (2001: 177). This, of course, is why neither of those groups, both centrally involved in the replication of the culture, played an active role in premodern public life. In her account of Karl Marx, Arendt notes that his “theory of the modern age” is linked with “the oldest and most persistent insights into the nature of labor, which according to the Hebrew as well as the classical tradition, was as intimately bound up with life as giving birth” (1959: 92). Almost everyone’s had their own toys, and anyone who has children or works with them knows their importance. But sometimes important things that are right at hand are taken for granted. And so, the close relationship between children’s playthings and art deserves discussion. “The toy,” Charles Baudelaire, who himself was childless, wrote, “is the child’s earliest initiation to art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same feelings of warmth, nor the same enthusiasms, nor the same sense of conviction” (1964: 199). That seems to me exactly right. Children are passionately attached to their toys, as aesthetes are to their favorite artworks. No substitutes allowed—certainly not some “better” toy picked out by the parents. I would prefer one of my thrift shop paintings to anything but the very best Henri Matisse drawing. For aesthetes, as for children, choosing for yourself effectively confers ownership. The child doesn’t take any aesthetic distance on his toys. And we aesthetes don’t take any distance on our favored works. I don’t know if any philosopher has written a treatise about the significant parallels between artworks and toys. Maybe the problem is that interest in toys is seen as being, quite literally, just childish. There are, however, two marvelous short essays by Walter Benjamin, “The Cultural History of Toys” and “Toys and Play: Marginal Notes of a Monumental Work” and an immensely suggestive

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account by E. H. Gombrich, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse.” Writing in a psychoanalytic perspective akin to that found also in his early joint publications written with Ernst Kris, who was an analyst, Gombrich draws attention to the symbolic role of hobby horses, as substitutes for real horses, a process, so he suggests, akin to that grounding of pictorial representations. “All art is ‘imagemaking’ and all image-making is rooted in the creation of substitutes” (1971:9). Like the child with her hobby horse, John Constable has his image of Wivenhoe Park. Does the child believe that the stick figure is a hobbyhorse? That, Gombrich suggests, is the wrong question to ask. The child treats the stick figure as if it were a hobbyhorse, as adults look at the Constable as if we were seeing the English countryside. Representation thus involves playacting. This, after all, is why city dwellers find looking at landscapes to be refreshing. They imagine themselves to be in the countryside depicted in these pictures. And adults who carry a stuffed animal to bed know the power of these symbols. Certainly I do. Do I believe that my stuffed “Leppy” really is a tiny leopard? Of course not. But I do enjoy pretending that he watches over me. (Thanks to him, the monsters who prowl at night in my house never disturb me.) The child may toss aside the hobby horse once the game is over. And I put Leppy to bed when guests arrive. In an influential essay, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” the English analyst D. W. Winnicott discusses the ways that a baby normally takes external objects, often blankets, and makes them important: “the infant’s journey from the purely subjective to objectivity; and it seems to me that the transitional object (piece of blanket, etc.) is what we see of this journey of progress towards experiencing” (92). The mother may and indeed ultimately must choose to withdraw her breast, but the baby can control these inanimate things, and so in that transitional process prepares to learn about the boundaries of the self and relations to the external reality. A transitional object, like a toy, is important because it has an intimate place in play life. Arendt’s distinctive philosophical interests inspired a remarkable original aesthetic theory, an account that deserves our attention, so we will see, because of its suggestive importance for understanding Bussmann’s art. Arendt’s The Human Condition has a remarkable short chapter “The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art” that, without mentioning toys, sympathetically discusses these regressive ways of thinking. And because the argument is brief and very unlike the usual definitions of art, it deserves unpacking. Arendt says, because “works of art are the most intensely worldly of all tangible things,” they are of great importance in stabilizing the life world.



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The man-made world of things, the human artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever changing movement of their lives and actions, only insofar as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of objects produced for use. (1959: 147, 153)

Unlike equipment; artworks have no practical use. Here Arendt extends her account of labor and work. Of all the objects that women and men make, only works of art are designed to not ever change. That’s why they are guarded and displayed under glass or in vitrines, and that’s why we’re not allowed to touch them. Alan Wessman’s book The World without Us (2007) asks what would happen if suddenly human beings disappeared entirely from this planet. How long, he asks, would our monuments, our urban constructions, and the architecture of our civilization survive? Set on this time scale, few visual artworks would have a very long lifetime. That is, of course, why valuable paintings and sculptures need elaborate, expensive support systems. As we have seen, some of the philosophers Bussmann deals with give little attention to visual art. Arendt doesn’t say much about it, but in her account art has a highly significant political role. We live in a shared social space: Just as the actor depends upon stage, fellow-actors, and spectators, to make his entrance, every living thing depends upon a world that solidly appears as the location for its own appearance, on fellow-creatures to play with, and on spectators to acknowledge and recognize its existence. (1977: 21–2)

This space becomes our home—as, earlier, thanks to toys, very special useful things, a child’s world becomes her or his home. Each new generation, every new human being, as he becomes conscious of being inserted between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave anew the path of thought. (1977: 210)

Children’s toys, though not literally necessary for life, stabilize experience. Like artworks, “they are strictly without any utility whatsoever and … not exchangeable” (1977: 146). Any parent who has had to deal with their child’s loss of some treasured toy knows this. The world, thanks to “human artifice,” becomes a place fit for action and speech … activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an entirely different nature from the manifold acridities of fabrication by which the world itself and all things in it are produced. (1977: 153)

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Artworks thus are toys for adults. And the world they stabilize is a collective human creation. That’s why they are highly valued. They truly matter, not only to art lovers but also to the entire human community. Martin Heidegger had a very different view of art. Bussmann doesn’t deal with that issue in detail, but her drawing Search for the Origin of the Work of Art or on the Way to Heidegger’s Cabin (2005) comments on his chosen working place and on the social role of his philosophy (Figure 26). I read her title very literally. One way to understand the origins of his famous essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is to consider his working place, which was an isolated cabin. As he explains, “Origin here means that from which and by which something is what it is and as it is. What something is, as it is, we are its essence” (2008: 143). As she observes, images of woods have a certain tradition in her drawings. And the clearing in this image was drawn during a residency in a site close to the Swiss border, not far from the region where Heidegger’s cab was located. “To be a work,” Heidegger says later in the essay, “means to set up a world.” And he then explicates this concept, “The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand … World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being” (2008: 170). Inspired by Bussmann’s drawing, I am treating his essay, at least as it is represented by her, as an artwork. It was traditional to link spiritual and natural heights. But of course what’s most apparent nowadays is that this isolation can have problematic consequences. How far we are from the toys that Bussmann depicts in her Lucy’s Toys. That Heidegger chose to work in this tiny isolated hut is revealing. “His provincialism and cosmopolitanism were always there together, mediating each other and subsisting on their mutual tensions” (Sharr 2006: 108). You can learn something about Heidegger’s aesthetic theorizing from Adam Sharr’s Heidegger’s Hut, which is entirely about that little house. Today some intellectuals enjoy comfortable country houses. This remote house, however, was spartan. Heidegger didn’t want to move to Berlin, or even into the city where he taught, but chose to live in provincial isolation. And he associates the one painting discussed in detail in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” van Gogh’s Shoes, with the premodern country culture around his house, not the modern industrial city. The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at all, or is even aware of them. She stands and walks in them. (2008: 159)



Hannah Arendt

Figure 26  Heidegger, Search for the Origin (clearing). © Maria Bussmann.

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Where Danto’s aesthetic looks to Warhol’s use of consumer culture, Heidegger chooses a modernist work but one that, unlike the cityscapes of the postimpressionists, presents a very traditional subject. Heidegger’s analysis has been much discussed. Fredric Jameson, for example, offers a revisionist discussion of Shoes: Heidegger’s account needs to be completed by insistence on the renewed materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of materiality— the earth itself and its paths and physical objects—into that other materiality of oil paint affirmed and foregrounded in its own right and for its own visual pleasures. (Jameson 1992: 8)

And as Meyer Schapiro noted, almost certainly Heidegger’s description of his example was confused: most probably these were van Gogh’s own shoes, not those of a peasant woman. As Jacques Derrida adds, here we have among many other identifications, … Heidegger with the peasant and Schapiro with the city dweller, of the former with the rooted and the sedentary, the latter with the uprooted emigrant. (Derrida 2017: 260)

In this dispute between Heidegger and Schapiro, both Heidegger’s reliability about art historical issues and, also, his politics are being called into question. The idea that artworks are essentially unchanging is very familiar. Using even a very sturdy tool ultimately wears it out. But looking at a painting causes no wear or tear. And that children’s toys do wear out matters less, for normally kids outgrow them. What, however, is surprising at least nowadays is Arendt’s claim that the stability of artworks plays this larger role in stabilizing human life. After all, a great deal of contemporary work flirts with resemblance to fashionable consumer goods. Think of Andy Warhol and the other Pop artists, and all of their many successors who mirror or critique the consumer economy. When Arendt says, allowing that “even if the historical origin of art were of an exclusively religious or mythological character, the fact is that art has survived gloriously its severance from religion, magic, and myth” (1959: 147), then we sense her great faith in traditional aesthetic values. We find in art, she says, “a premonition of immortality … of something immortal achieved by mortal hands … to shine and be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read.” Here, without naming artists, she is very much under the spell of the old masters and also, I think, of Heidegger. And the very title of her treatise The Human Condition expresses confidence in the ongoing relevance of philosophical tradition. But, I should add, when she emigrated to the United States, she took a real interest in



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the intellectual traditions and culture of her new homeland. And as a political philosopher, she was of course much concerned with contemporary life. In dealing with art, it may seem that we have moved a great distance from the child’s transitional objects. The infant is attached to some blanket or stuffed animal, a perhaps homely artifact that they alone can love, a substitute for the mother’s nurturing breast. The aesthete often admires artworks that are in public museums, preserved there because they are generally admired. And so, drawing this analogy with the child’s toys may seem a bit of a stretch. That’s true, but just as, if Gombrich’s analysis be correct, the children’s hobby horse is the origin of figurative art; so, if we accept Arendt’s account, artworks play this symbolic role. In a museum, you can see a 500-year-old Italian painting; 1000-year-old Chinese painting; or even a 2000-year-old Greek sculptures. The art historian values these objects aesthetically and the historian identifies them as cultural expression. But what’s also at stake, Arendt suggests, is their role in stabilizing our lifeworld. Indeed, it’s because art has aesthetic value and is culturally expressive that we devote so much attention to its preservation. Our old art objects were created in very different cultures. When you exit the British Museum, London after viewing the Elgin Marbles, or leave the Basilica of San Francesca, Arezzo after seeing Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, then you cannot but be aware that the whole larger environment has drastically changed. But this old art allows you to be imaginatively in touch with the otherwise vanished distant past. When seeing these works you look as if into the past, into classical antiquity, or the early Renaissance, learning about the past in a more literal way than reading history makes possible. You are looking into the past, seeing objects that are essentially unchanged. That, at least, is the fantasy. Such artworks are artifacts that, by being changeless, stabilize our social world. More exactly, what concerns us are not just any changeless artifacts but works presenting the exalted subjects of old master art. Arendt’s analysis in “The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art” is highly Heideggerian. “The establishing of truth in the work,” he wrote, “is the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and will never come to be again” (1959: 187). If his name doesn’t appear anywhere in her The Human Condition, published just a decade after the war’s end, that I assume was for political reasons. Later in The Life of the Mind, Arendt does name him and discuss his ideas in detail, identifying some differences with her concerns. And so, it’s useful to relate her account to his famous early essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger’s text is very difficult. And so, I follow Arthur Danto’s procedure with Nietzsche and Sartre and translate the analysis into my more familiar analytic idiom. In doing

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this, I don’t claim that my way of thinking is superior to Heidegger’s, only that because it is familiar to me, it’s a good starting point. I focus on interpretation of just a few small parts of this seventy some page-long account in a way that will take us back to discussing skepticism. At the very start, I need to say something about an important, muchdiscussed, highly controversial subject: Heidegger’s politics. As we know now from the publication of his letters exchanged with Arendt and, also, more importantly, from the devastating recent accounts of Faye and, also, of Ferry and Renaut, he was not just foolish or naive but actively lent his considerable prestige to the importation of National Socialism into his university. He removed from the wartime edition the dedication of Being and Time to his teacher Edmund Husserl, who was Jewish. And after the war, he lied shamelessly about his actions, never repenting. The question now is whether his philosophy has become untouchable. This has been much debated. My sense is that Being and Time is compatible with any number of political positions or, indeed, with a complete disregard for politics. At least that’s true about the very summary reading I give. No doubt choosing to live in his isolated hut in the Black Forest hardly helped put Heidegger in tune with practical contemporary realities. And so, it’s instructive, then, to see that Arendt, who also was much preoccupied with Greek philosophy, drew such different political lessons from her study. Indeed, she self-identified as a political philosopher rather than a philosopher. At any rate, Heidegger’s philosophy has a minor role as a subject for Bussmann. And so, in this book, where Arendt has a much more significant role, my focus on Heidegger is primarily on his philosophy as one important source for Arendt’s ideas. This discussion of Bussmann’s illustrations of her daughter’s toys may have seemed like a digression or a mere eccentricity: for what have these toys to do with Arendt’s philosophical discussion of work, labor and willing, an account that makes no reference to toys, and says almost nothing about childhood? In fact however, I was describing one of Bussmann’s most pregnant insights. Just as the child’s transitional objects stabilize her or his world, preparing a person for adulthood in which significant human relationships can be intense and transient; so art has immense value because it ideally remains the same, existing in a world in which almost everything else changes. This, I am suggesting, is the true reason that we devote so much attention and expense to the preservation of art. Not merely because we are interested in the past for its own sake, as valuable as that knowledge can sometimes be; nor just because we enjoy aesthetic experience, as important as that pleasure may often be: but because we need this art to stabilize



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our lifeworld. Unchanging art, this argument implies, plays this stabilizing role. And Bussmann’s drawings, because they often present philosophical subjects, thus are doublingly stabilizing. Philosophical tradition identified and described the world, allowing us to have a timeless perspective. By presenting philosophy as an artistic subject, Bussmann’s art is engaged in this essential cultural role. And paradoxically, in her Arendt-drawings she uses images of things of very transient usefulness, her daughter’s toys that like all toys, were quickly outgrown, to accomplish this goal. On the last page of Connections to the World, speaking in borrowed Hegelian terms, Danto says: The realm of spirit is dark and difficult terra incognito so far as philosophical understanding is concerned, thought it is as well, so far as human understanding is concerned, the most familiar territory of all. It is in the realm of spirit that we exist as human beings. (1989: 274)

Bussmann’s art inhabits this realm of spirit. What happens, then, to his general worldview if we critically question his aesthetics? As yet, I don’t see how to answer that question. Arendt’s definition of art may initially seem surprising, because it’s not the usual way of understanding art. Visual art serves many diverse functions— entertainment, propaganda, religious worship, sexual stimulation to name just four. In the public museum, art serves to inform us about our own history and that of other visual cultures. Grand public collections are a source of national pride and a basis for instruction about history. And, of course, art’s a stimulus for aesthetic pleasure. Art education, which takes into account most of these goals, is unlikely to focus on this abstract metaphysical definition. Like Danto’s argument that Brillo Box is not a mere real object but an artwork, this definition seems distant from everyday practical experience. That is how it is usually with philosophy: its concerns are abstract. The tension in Arendt’s definition of art comes in the opposition between her radically ahistorical philosophical viewpoint and her acute recognition, as a political philosopher, that it’s essential to study the contemporary world, which in some dramatic ways is changing radically. And at this point, of course, her concerns do diverge from Heidegger’s. To value art because it is essentially unchanging, in a world where equipment and institutions change quickly, and where people are born and die, makes most sense, I think, with reference to art whose own values seem to be timeless. Often traditional writers speak of the eternal values of art. The world of classical antiquity is long gone, but we still

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value Greco-Roman art. No one believes in the Greek gods but sculptures of them remain important. And even if you don’t accept the Catholic worldview, you can admire the frescoes of Giotto and Raphael. As Arendt says, the art survives the disappearance of the world in which and for which it was created. Arendt’s definition of art says nothing about the Hegelian idea that art’s development has ended. But what we might expect, I think, is that if art traditionally serves to stabilize the social world, then contemporary marginalization of traditional art will mark or cause instability. This analysis implies that stabilizing the life world is inevitably a good thing. But that deeply conservative way of thinking may readily be questioned. When we look at the moral limitations of premodern societies, which are well identified in Arendt’s political commentaries, then it is surely plausible to claim that for almost everyone life is better now than under the old regime. And so, we may well prefer that contemporary art aspire to transform our world and that less emphasis be given to old master art, which, because it was created within the old regime, embodies traditional values. We may, still, accept this argument and restate Arendt’s basic argument in a way that acknowledges this situation of contemporary art. Visual art does change rapidly, but it does so in ways that build upon tradition. Here we find a version of the identity-over-time discussed earlier. In this way, art forms change while the artistic tradition continues to exist. Arendt herself had traditional artistic tastes, at least in visual art; but her theory is consistent with allowing for this radical change. The influential modernist critic Clement Greenberg developed this idea with reference to the importance of tradition. David Smith’s 1950 abstractions look very different from the sculpture developed by Donatello, Bernini, and Rodin, while extending that tradition. That is why in our world art history museums we find art from all periods from everywhere, displayed in ways that encourage identifying its commonality. But working out this analysis, which I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Carrier 2006), would take us away from focus on Bussmann’s art, which here must be our present concern.

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Lawrence Carroll and Maria Bussmann

We’re looking at a strange object hanging on the wall. There’s a plastic flower attached at the top. And at the bottom buried underneath the off-white paint and wax, we see traces of blue flowers on silk. It’s a medium-sized abstract painting, Untitled Flower Picture by Lawrence Carroll. He greatly admires Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns. But there’s nothing here akin to Pollock’s majestic brushwork or de Kooning’s magnificent painterly color. And the flower and fabric don’t create a grid, as in Johns’s White Flag. The artist has described his fabrics, “The pattern is a way of setting up painterly problems for myself once the materials (are) cut up and collaged onto the painting. Something to react against, to quiet down.” This is a pretty humble-looking artifact, not unlike some debris that you might find abandoned in the street. Why, indeed, then is it an artwork? And why bother to put this artifact on the wall and theorize it? Clearly a historical perspective on modernist abstraction is needed to make sense of this work (Carrier 2018b: 104). Now we consider a very different artwork (Figure 27). We are looking at a vast field of coral rising up from the ocean floor. Like the branches of a flourishing tree, the fine network of these strands expands upwards spreading in every direction. And at the bottom, the stems are anchored to the seabed. The words “Wissen” (knowledge) and “Werden” (becoming) are repeatedly inscribed in the corals. This very beautifully drawn image is filled with graceful organic forms. I’m reminded of some of Mondrian’s early images of trees, but here of course we are looking down into very clear waters underwater. It’s easy to view the slow growth of coral, which extends almost endlessly upwards as one image of the process of the gradual Hegelian development of philosophical knowledge.

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Figure 27  Hegel. Coral. © Dom Museum Wien.

According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV, 740ff), coral was created when after Perseus rescued the princess Andromeda, who was chained to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster: While washing his hands after slaying the monster, Perseus laid on the ground the head of Medusa, whose glance turned living things to stone, and whom



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Perseus had slain earlier. The blood of the gorgon spilled onto the seaweed, which was thus transformed to blood-red coral. (Ovid 2021)

Poussin illustrated this metamorphosis in a drawing, and Vasari showed it in a painting (Barolsky 2014: 172). Here, however, in Bussmann’s image, we see no human presence but only the end product of the process, the coral. Without some sense of context, as is provided by its descriptive title, it would be hard to know what to make of this graceful drawing. We might of course appeal to the Shakespearean lines, The Tempest, 2, 1: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (Shakespeare 1997)

As Hannah Arendt glosses this passage: Although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements. (Benjamin 1969: 51)

Bussmann’s drawing translates the “Preface” of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Her image of the coral that “swallows” and incorporates the letters “Werden” and “Wisen” (knowledge) shows how knowledge develops. In this context, however, there is an obvious unavoidable conflict between matching an image, which shows only one moment of ongoing events, with a text, which can narrate such a process. Earlier, we described her forest scene showing Hegel’s relationship with Kant and his other German precursors. That picture focused on philosophical rivalries, while this image offers a very different, much more harmonious image of this development. But both images, I would suggest, can accurately present his philosophy. At the start of his preface, Hegel says, “It seems not only superfluous, but, in view of the nature of philosophy, even inappropriate and misleading to begin … by explaining the end the author had in mind, the circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation in which the writer takes it to stand to other treatises on the same subject” (1967: 67). If his basic thesis is that you can only understand the state of human self-understanding by knowing in some detail its

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historical development, how then can there be a preface to that detailed, lengthy commentary? Logically speaking it seems that you should read the preface after finishing the Phenomenology. Indeed, that commonsensical claim probably doesn’t need the support of Hegelian philosophy. Often it’s best to write the preface for a book after completing the remainder of the manuscript, for only then do you know exactly what you will say that needs to be introduced. And perhaps what’s written last is best also read last. A preface to the Phenomenology might then seem essentially redundant, for you cannot really understand it until you have finished reading the entire text. Maybe, however, that shows that you need to read the preface twice, once before the book, and again after, then noting the differences. In an ordinary book, a summary at the start of the details of its argument may be useful. But since for Hegel what essentially matters is the developmental account, which takes the reader through the process of gaining knowledge, presumably that option is not really open. In philosophy it is superfluous, he says, to explain what the author has in mind (1967: 67). The critical question at the start, then, is how to describe the diversity of philosophical truths. What matters is not merely the result but “the process of arriving at it” (1967: 69, 73). For this reason, we philosophers need to go beyond what is of fleeting importance. Describing his epoch as a “birth-time,” Hegel says that his book presents the gradual development of knowing. At the start, we are without what’s essential, sense-consciousness, and so a long, laborious journey must be undertaken. His task is to lead us from an unreflective viewpoint to a scientific awareness of selfconscious spirit. Hegel appeals here to two models of organic development. In prenatal growth, “after a long period of nutrition in silence … there is a break in the process … and the child is born” (1967: 75, 75–6). And an oak develops out of an acorn, though “when we want to see an oak with allies vigor of trunk, its spreading branches, and mass of foliage, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn alone.” As we have noted, the identity of such natural kinds, people, and trees, is given by some internal principle of growth (Wiggins 1980: 80). The adult person develops from the once tiny fetus and the full grown tree is far larger than the acorn. In both cases, these organisms develop, thanks to an internal process of growth. And in her image of this Hegelian process of development, Bussmann substitutes coral for a child or an oak. It’s difficult to imagine two more diverse major contemporary artworks than Lawrence Carroll’s Untitled-Flower Painting #1 and Maria Bussmann’s drawing of the Coral. And so it’s unsurprising that they demand very different philosophical theorizing. My recent book, Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll



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developed a Dantoesque aesthetic designed to theorize his paintings, an account building upon and growing out of my prior publications, in a process not entirely unlike the growth of coral as described by Busman’s drawing. And this book will critique that discussion by offering and contrasting Arendt’s alternative definition of art. I thus build upon my earlier book. Nothing could be more Hegelian than this process in which my successive commentaries deal with such very diverse works, which demand distinctly different philosophical theorizing. Suppose that I find in the debris of an industrial neighborhood some artifact that looks like a Caravaggio painting. I would know that a significant work of art had been abandoned. But were I to discover something indiscernible from Untitled-Flower Painting #1, then I might not be tempted to rescue that artifact. Displayed in an art world context, Untitled-Flower Painting #1 certainly inspires interpretation. But the bare object is obviously similar to banal industrial waste products. In that way, of course, it is like a great deal of contemporary art— like Arthur Danto’s favorite example, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. Considerable discussion is required to explain why such initially unpromising artifacts are valuable works of art, while the indiscernible objects are of little interest. And that is, as Danto says, a philosophical question, because the answer does not depend merely on their appearance. What makes Brillo Box an artwork, Danto argues, is its place in relation to aesthetic theorizing. And the same is true, so I argue in my book about Carroll, also of Untitled-Flower Painting #1. Unaccompanied by theorizing, this artifact could hardly be identified as a work of art. There’s no reason to also doubt that Bussmann’s untitled drawing of the coral is a work of art, for, after all, it’s a drawing of a recognizable subject. By itself, however, it may not seem an especially unusual or interesting artwork. Why just looking would you think that this drawing has an ambitious philosophical subject, Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology? Imagine an image identical to this untitled drawing of the coral (but with the words removed) in a textbook devoted to Australian oceanography. That drawing might merely illustrate the growth of coral. To convincingly demonstrate that Bussmann’s drawing represents a philosophical subject requires extended commentary, such as we have provided. Art criticism describes individual artworks. Aesthetics provides general definitions of art. And so it is possible to do criticism without engaging in the philosophical concerns of aesthetic theory. But in practice, in interpreting Bussmann’s individual drawings almost inevitably we have engaged in theorizing. And that process is guided by general definitions of art. In the previous chapter we presented Arendt’s definition of art, and showed how it was

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useful for understanding Bussmann’s drawings. And so here we turn to discuss and contrast Danto’s definition, which proved essential for understanding Carroll’s art. Danto says, “To be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning” (1997: 195). Thus an old master figurative painting is about its depicted subject and Brillo Box is about being a Brillo box. Traditional painting embodies that meaning, as Warhol’s work embodies his concept of art. And Untitled Flower Picture is art because it embodies the meaning we have discussed. According to Hegel, art uses its medium in a sensuous way: Art has nothing else for its function but to set forth in an adequate sensuous present what is itself inherently rich in content, and the philosophy of art must make it its chief task to comprehend in thought what this fullness of content and its beautiful mode of appearance are. (1975: 611)

I suspect that Danto was thinking of something like this when he speaks of embodiment. Just as Descartes asks whether immediate present experience is distinguishable from a dream, so Danto skeptically asserts that Brillo Box is indistinguishable from a Brillo box if they are set side by side. What marks the difference between Brillo Box and a Brillo box is theorizing. Brillo Box is in museums. And it is a valuable artwork. But a Brillo box is just a cardboard box container. The difference is not related to some contrast in the visual qualities of these objects. Rather it depends entirely upon treating one of them, Brillo Box, as an instantiation of Danto’s aesthetic theorizing, and not applying that talk to the other, to Brillo box. In one case, but not the other theorizing is attached to the artifact. In fact, we could switch the two artifacts and attach the theorizing to the “real” Brillo box to make that claim. Analogously, roughly the same point, we have seen, could be made about comparing Untitled Flower Picture with some indiscernible industrial debris. Descartes does not define art. He focuses his skeptical analysis upon our claims to comprehend the external world, to know other minds, and to understand the mind-body relationship. He doesn’t need a definition of art because, as I have said, his seventeenth-century French culture visual artworks were highly distinctive artifacts. Danto, however, needs a definition to explain why puzzling things like Brillo Box are artworks. And we need a definition to handle artifacts like Untitled Flower Picture. Art has changed radically, so only now can we know its essence. That aspect of Danto’s philosophical account is entirely unCartesian. His analysis of art is essentialist, not historicist. This has always seemed a strange position to me, because it combines focus on the recent developmental history



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of art with the search for the essence of art. But of course, that’s not a reason to conclude that it is mistaken, or even implausible. Maybe reality really is strange. Descartes is not interested in historical knowledge. How we know and will, and how we understand these activities has, he believes, been the same throughout recorded history. There is no historical dimension to Descartes’s discussion of knowledge, the mind-body relationship, and other minds. Danto, as we noted, was from early on interested in historiography. Of course the ways that wars are waged, to take one example, have changed. But when it comes to writing history, Thucydides practiced the same activity that our present-day historiographers analyze. Novel explanatory modes have been developed, but, if Danto is correct, then the logic of explanation, as presented in Analytic Philosophy of History has not changed. And so when, for example, Arendt argues that German and Soviet totalitarianism was a novel development, she is not necessarily contradicting Danto’s view of historiography. Unlike all of these other human concerns discussed by Danto, visual art obviously has a developmental history. Descartes would be astonished at Impressionism, Cubism, and most certainly by the ready-made. This radical development now permits us to discover a satisfactory general definition of art, a definition that includes everything Descartes knew and all that has been made or discovered since then. Danto claims that thanks to Warhol, in 1964 the nature of art was discovered, once and for all. Like the planet Pluto, which was there before astronomers found it, this analysis just waited to be discovered, long before art’s development meant that the need for it was apparent. Now, however, we know the essence of art. And although Danto’s definition was inspired by Brillo Box, his account is absolutely general: It applies to Poussin’s history paintings, to modernist abstractions, and to art from everywhere. Hegel is a historicist, while Danto, who is an essentialist but not a historicist, claims that the definition of art was a discovery of a particular moment. Perception and action, which are rooted in the human body, may not have a history but visual art does. The analysis of knowledge and action can proceed without any reference to history, for in its essentials the body has not changed within historical time. Art making, however, is one human activity that has changed a great deal. When premodern philosophers defined art, they were tempted, looking at what they knew, to give definitions that were much too narrow. How could they have imagined Impressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism? When looking for forgeries of old master paintings, there’s an obvious test. We ask the critic to leave the room, shuffle the copy and original, and then see if

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he can tell them apart. Nelson Goodman argued in Languages of Art (1976) that even if now no one can see the difference, knowing that there may be a difference between, say, the original Poussin Holy Family on the Steps in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the very good old copy at the National Gallery, Washington, gives us reason to keep looking. In this case, when the paintings were finally set side by side there were real visual differences, small but significant. The wit in Danto’s analysis came in turning inside out both the terms of analysis and the conclusion of Goodman’s well-known account, both at once. On one hand, by hypothesis the two objects, Brillo Box and a Brillo box, are visually indistinguishable. You cannot tell them apart by looking. But, Danto argues, they are completely different. They are not just different in the often subtle and hard to see ways that an original artwork and a good forgery may be different, but dramatically, totally different kinds of things: for one is an artwork, while the other is not: How much more different could two artifacts be? And yet, this difference is not visible. Danto’s analysis unpacks this paradoxical-seeming claim. Brillo Box differs from a Brillo box because it was made as an artwork. And the source of this difference is the history of its making. As Danto notes, indiscernible objects can be made with entirely different intentions. In one way, then, to say that there is no visible difference between Brillo Box and Brillo box is misleading. There is an apparent difference once we don’t just place them side by side but look at their diverse histories. What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). (Danto 1964: 581; emphasis in the original)

Brillo Box, as much as a Brillo box is nothing more than a real object. But it’s an object made in a totally different way, by an artist, not by a worker in a container factory. Warhol playfully underlined this very real distinction when he called his studio “The Factory.” He emphasized the links between his activity and work in a factory. Still, his concerns were very different from those of an industrial manager. The Factory was in some ways more like Bernini’s studio than the industrial factory where Brillo boxes were made. Like Warhol, Bernini was an artist who employed many assistants to execute his works. Still, for the Cartesian what matters is the side-by-side test, in which Brillo Box and a Brillo box are indiscernible. All of Danto’s philosophical examples have this form: we compare and contrast things that appear identical but which turn out to be radically



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different. Analytic Philosophy of Action lays out the logic of action, which turns out to be intricate, without reference to the political or social context. As we have seen, it’s the context provided in Giotto’s Padua painting cycle in which “actions are converted into something more human and more social, and taken up into the fabric of communication, and deposited as part of human history” (Danto 1973a: x). Danto aims to abstract the diverse action from those varied settings. No one doubts that old master history paintings, Impressionist landscapes, or Abstract Expressionist works are art. They are representations, or they are personal expressions: they have aesthetic value: Aesthetics has many theories defining the artistic qualities of such older works. And so Danto’s aesthetic focuses upon the novel puzzling cases, Duchamp’s ready-mades, and the Warhol Brillo Box. The tension in his definition of art comes from the need to borrow a historicist Hegelian way of thinking in order to present a basically Cartesian aesthetic. Danto wants to explain why Poussins, Pissarros, Pollocks, and Brillo Box all are artworks, though they look very different. He seeks to define the essence of art. But as we have seen, although his analysis is very useful for considering Carroll, it is not challenging in reference to Bussmann’s drawings; Danto’s analysis doesn’t identify the philosophically interesting features of her works. That doesn’t show that his account is wrong, but it should inspire further reflection. Bussmann’s works certainly are artworks. Obviously the drawings devoted to Arendt and Wittgenstein could only have been made in the twentieth century. But otherwise, the style of the drawing in her works doesn’t embody any particular historical awareness; there is nothing like the sense that the works of Duchamp and Warhol mark of the development of art. The crucial question, however, is: How do we understand her subjects. We ask: can she depict philosophical subjects? The concerns of skepticism thus have shifted. And so a different definition of art is required. Arendt’s definition seems to me a good candidate. If someone who knew nothing of Carroll’s art asked for some comparative frame of reference, I would mention de Kooning, Giorgio Morandi, and Rauschenberg, artists discussed in my book on Carroll. Not because their works look particularly similar to each others’ or to his, but because they have a shared sensibility. Carroll sometimes hangs his paintings on the wall, like traditional European artworks. But he also often puts them directly on the floor, places them as low hanging shelves, or orients them vertically, with one edge attached to the wall. Some of his paintings are as large as classic abstract expressionist works. Many, however, are relatively small. He’s not an installation artist, but he likes to

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construct temporary installations from groupings of his paintings, usually using works that he made some time ago. Identifying the elective affinities between diverse paintings and finding the best setting for groups of those works are very important for him. Some of them are mounted not on the wall, but installed parallel to the floor, directly on the floor, or on a tripod. (Carrier 2018b: 1–2)

Carroll extends the traditions of recent American abstraction. His art lives by establishing a place for itself in late modernist tradition. Untitled-Flower Painting #1 could have been physically constructed a century ago, in the heyday of Cubism. But then it would hardly have been comprehensible. Not until the public had seen de Kooning’s abstractions, the collages of Rauschenberg and some Arte povera works was the art world ready for Carroll’s stripped down paintings. His work, like a great deal of the best recent art, thus embodies great sensitivity to historical context. In that way, it is like Brillo Box, for it too would have made no sense in an earlier art world. The 1980s really was Carroll’s time to emerge. By contrast, most of Bussmann’s drawings could have been displayed and understood in 1920. Carroll extends the history of art, while preserving its identity by doing radically original paintings; Bussmann is engaged in extending visual art’s range of subjects in unexpected ways, with art that is not particularly responsive to its present historical context. Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll was centrally concerned to show why his paintings are artworks, placing them within the development of modernism, relating them to Danto’s theorizing. Much (but not all) of that analysis, which relates the newest work to older artifacts is familiar to anyone dealing with contemporary art, even if Carroll’s paintings are not. This book, however, has developed a very different argument, because Bussmann’s drawings need to be theorized differently. I signaled this claim when in identifying some elective affinities with Bussmann’s drawings, I have cited M. C. Escher, Rube Goldberg, and Saul Steinberg, figures who are very marginal in the museum world. And our discussion of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Arendt offers a very different theoretical perspective from our Dantoesque account of Carroll. We are born into and eventually fall out of the social world, a place that our collective labor sustains, and where we work and act. Nearly everything that we use is soon consumed. Foodstuffs are eaten and the tools we employ in living eventually break and decay. So, too do our bodies. And periodically our political institutions also break down. There is, however, one special kind of artifact that is meant to



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escape this otherwise universal process of decay: the visual artwork. Unlike all of these other products of human activity, works of art are preserved as far as possible from change. Artworks are unique artifacts and not interchangeable, one with another. And so, they make the world, in Arendt’s fine phrase “the nonmortal home for mortal beings” (1959: 147). This is why we care about art a great deal—it’s why it matters. I have argued that Bussmann’s philosophical subjects are a highly original artistic concern. However, there are some revealing near-precedents in the art world. We are looking at a large grisaille picture. A cow is standing in a museum, in front of two paintings, accompanied by numerous museum attendants. One of them holds a mop. And there is a canvas on the floor. The cow is looking intently at a bull depicted in the naturalistic picture directly in front of her. This is a strange, almost surreal scene. Mark Tansey’s The Innocent Eye Test (1981) is described by Danto: A cow has been led into a picture gallery in which we see two identifiable paintings—Paulus Potter’s The Young Bull of 1647 and one of Monet’s grainstack paintings of the 1890s. The question is whether Paulus Potter has achieved a degree of realism in depicting a bull which will trigger in the cow the response that an actual bull will trigger. The cow, if she is responsive, is responsive to the bull … That is what it is to have an innocent eye. (1998: 15, 17)

Progress in naturalism is gradual, Gombrich notes, “because it is so hard for us all to disentangle what we really see from what we merely know and thus to recover the innocent eye” (1961: 14), a phrase discussed in his Art and Illusion. But just as you don’t need to know the Mondrian literature to understand the jokes about his geometric abstractions in New Yorker cartoons, so you don’t have to grasp the more esoteric details of Gombrich’s psychological theorizing to understand The Innocent Eye Test. “The innocent eye” has become a commonplace phrase, a useful way of identifying this theory of perception. If there really is an innocent eye, then the cow should recognize this naturalistic image of a bull, responding to the picture as if it were a bull. By effectively illustrating such well-known art historical stories, Tansy’s 1980s paintings reach a large audience. You don’t need to know much art history to identify these subjects, though Danto does say a lot of great interest about the place of Tansey’s works within the contemporary art world. His paintings are like old master works that depict

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the subjects everyone in Western culture knows—the last supper, the birth of Christ, or His crucifixion. Or, for an educated French audience they are like the nineteenth-century academic pictures showing Nicolas Poussin in the Roman countryside. As is the case with New Yorker cartoons, everyone in these audiences gets them instantly. By contrast, Bussmann’s presentation of her subjects is elliptical, and so her art almost always is in need of extended interpretation. One very distinguished philosopher published a picture that, so he claimed, illustrated his theorizing. At the start of New Science, Giambattista Vico’s famously enigmatic masterpiece, is a suitable frontispiece: Before reading my work, you may use this tableau to form an idea of my New Science. And after reading it, you will find that this tableau aids your imagination in retaining my work in your memory. (Vico 2009b: 1)

The woman in this allegory stands “on the celestial globe, meaning the world of nature, is Metaphysics,” for she stands above nature. And the triangle “with the seeing eye is God.” That globe rests on only one point of the altar, showing that “philosophers have contemplated and demonstrated divine providence only through the natural order” (2009b: 1, 2). The ray emanating from God to her breast “signifies that metaphysics must have a clean and pure heart” (2009b: 4). And it reflects down, in turn, “to the statue of Homer, who is the earliest pagan author to come down to us.” That Homer is “standing on a broken pedestal signifies my discovery of the true Homer.” This description goes on for twentysix more pages. Eventually all of the debris assembled at the bottom of this image is accounted for. Commissioned by Vico, this image by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro was engraved by Antonio Baldi (2009a: 145). Vaccaro’s frontispiece is a remarkably unaesthetic image. In presenting two gawky figures surrounded wiggly-piggly by an array of heterogeneous objects, this engraving lacks any proper organic unity. In fairness, there is a background story. Vico needed to fill the pages left empty by an exchange of letters with a Venetian scholar, the publication of which had to be suppressed at the last minute. Maybe, then, it’s a mistake to include this digressive account in the modern translations. In its historical context, however, Vaccaro’s image is not unusual. Such highly wrought subjects are found, also, in some other baroque and Renaissance artworks. In Pietro Testa’s Il Liceo della Pittura (1638), for example, an inscription reads, “Theory by herself is chained with bonds, and Practice alone is blind in her liberty.” In this extremely complicated picture, a synthesis of elements from Raphael’s School of Athens and Cesare Ripa’s



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iconographic studies, we see a vast multitude of figures, presenting a story that is difficult to read. In one related drawing by Testa, Genius is “bound to a rock with a chain.” In the completed etching, then, we see that “genius (the snake) is crushed by material poverty in the form of a rebus in which his head, testa, is crushed by a stone, pieta” (Cropper 1984: 78). Testa was a friend of Poussin, but his pictures lack the aesthetic harmony of that master’s work. Bookish allusions dominate, in a way that makes the etching cumbersome. Bussmann’s (Frontispiz/ frontispiece) (2004: #2) to her Merleau-Ponty drawings, an image too elaborate to be effectively reproduced here, has something of the same effect. At the center is a button labelled “press.” And above and below it are the spirals connected body elements. At the top, finally, is the statue of a winged figure, at the left edge is an open powerbook, and at the bottom right we see an outlined face. It’s as if we are viewing an inventory of the body as it’s presented in The Visible and the Invisible. Testa’s images deserve comparison with those of the American painter R. B. Kitaj, who studied art history with the iconographer Edgar Wind. Kitaj’s The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin) (1972–3), for example, is a complex allegorical image presenting Benjamin’s thinking about Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, the nineteenth-century social history of Paris, and Benjamin’s leftist politics. We see Benjamin at a cafe, with armed red Maoists, heirs to Marxist tradition at the bottom and shattered windows from Nazi Germany near the top. This panoramic scene is as richly suggestive, and as difficult to synthesis as Benjamin’s vast magnum opus about Paris, posthumously published as Arcades Project in the form of his research notes. Only someone who knows the story of Benjamin’s life and intellectual legacy could understand this picture. If your model modernist painting is a self-sufficient work, then the contents of this painting, like that of Il Liceo della Pittura will appear excessive and unaesthetic. Vaccaro, Testa, and Kitaj add more and more details, as if mere accretion would make their images more meaningful. Danto’s definition of art responds to art history. Thanks to Duchamp and Warhol, we know what an adequate definition must encompass. Now the long developmental story of representational art, as told by Gombrich; and then of modernism, as presented by Greenberg: all that history is completed. By revealing that this development had no place further to go, Brillo Box marked the culmination and conclusion of tradition. Bussmann’s art does not extend that story. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that her drawings are counterexamples to Danto’s definition. They are about something, their philosophical subjects, and embody that meaning: as I have said, they thus are

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art according to his definition. But her work certainly goes in a new direction. In response to Warhol, a great deal of contemporary art is involved with elevating all kinds of banal industrial artifacts into the art world. Bussmann, however, does something that really is completely different.

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What is the relationship between Bussmann’s drawings and their philosophical subjects? That is the central concern of this book. Thus far we have contrasted her drawings to artworks and visual artifacts that mostly have more familiar subjects. It’s important to note, however, that three other forms of visual images, illustrations, graphic novels, and diagrams, can also present philosophical themes. And so, it will prove useful to contrast Bussmann’s drawings with these other visual materials. Some illustrations have philosophical subjects. Some graphic novels deal with philosophers. And some diagrams present philosophical concepts. So we need to explain in each case how these visual forms, which differ from Bussmann’s artworks, also may have philosophical subjects. We are looking at a small sketch showing two men and Warhol’s Brillo Box. One of them is gesticulating while the other looks on pensively. Danto’s After the End of Art includes this funny cartoon by Anthony Haden-Guest, with the punch line that explains the image: “Professor Arthur Danto showing the peak of late 20th-century philosophy to his colleague, Dr. Hegel” (1997: 178). This illustration communicates effectively the basic argument developed at length with scholarly apparatus in Danto’s book. The details of Hegel’s account of the end of art’s history are complex, for this controversial claim requires some careful qualifications. How, for example, can that history have ended in Berlin circa 1829 when Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism all lay in the future? Haden-Guest’s sketch conveys Danto’s claim, which achieved fame, in part, because it could be plausibly condensed in this dramatic fashion. In context, the drawing thus is like Barbara Westman’s The Monochrome Show (1995), also published in After the End of Art, which shows a vast exhibition of monochromatic paintings. That illustration accompanies the chapter devoted to analysis of Robert Ryman’s singular place in art history. These illustrations both supplement without extending the analysis. In Kant: A Graphic Guide,

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to consider another example, there is an image (Kul-Want and Klimowski 2011: 161) showing Hegel touching an antique Greek sculpture of a female nude with the caption, “Art is the sensuous appearance of the Idea, a heightened shining of things.” Such pictures illustrate the words. In that way, they’re like cover illustrations on philosophy books. The cover of my Poussin’s Paintings, to give yet another example, has a detail from Ingres’s The Apotheosis of Homer (1827), showing Poussin gesturing toward the seated figure of Homer. That image is a reminder how in the nineteenth century, Poussin was identified as the founding father of the French school. But my argument could be presented without that image. Bussmann does something essentially different. As she says, she aspires to contribute to philosophical debate. Perhaps, she hopes, her art “can stimulate others to express with words what I tried to do with my drawings” (Bussmann 2004: n.p.). For Hegel, art “has ceased to be the highest need of spirit” (Taylor 1975: 479). Philosophy, he says, now offers “a fully adequate expression of the Idea.” This generalization is consistent with the more general claim: philosophy relies upon statements and visual images do not make statements. As Danto says, in his account of this view, “Hegel assigns to art a lower station in the realm of Absolute Spirit than philosophy, which is pure intellection unsullied by the senses” (1997: 195). Danto’s view of the ultimate comparative limitations of visual art is consistent with Hegel’s claims made at several points in the Aesthetics. Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. (1975: 11) Art, far removed … from being the highest form of spirit, acquires its real ratification only in philosophy. (1975: 13) Illustration by art is not … the highest way of apprehending the spiritually concrete. The higher way … is thinking. (1975: 71–2)

But this claim that for Hegel the history of art has ended is controversial, in part (Pippin 2015: 3, n. 6) because the text of the Aesthetics comes from his students’ notes. Heidegger, too, took up this point. Noting that Hegel never denied that there would be “many new artworks and new art movements,” he asked, “Is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence?” (2008: 205). In any case, Danto, Robert Pippin, and other commentators have productively applied Hegelian theorizing to recent



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artworks developed long after his death. And Wind developed Hegelian ideas in his book Art and Anarchy. For Hegel he says: As he saw it, the moment had arrived in the world’s history when art would no longer be connected, as it had been in the past, with the central energies of man; it would move to the margin, where it would form a wide and splendidly varied horizon. (Wind 1969: 12)

Perhaps, then, it doesn’t matter to whom this very challenging idea is credited. In any event, for Hegel the ultimate limitation of art is determined by its sensuous subjects. Philosophy, by contrast, spells out everything in words. And words are not, he implies, a sensuous medium. (Nowadays a theorist would likely take a different view. But that is another story.) What, however, happens if art’s subject is philosophy, if indeed that is possible? Does that change the possible future for visual art? So far as I can see, Hegel doesn’t consider that option. But Bussmann’s art does. We are reading yet another book about Wittgenstein. We’ve studied G. E. M. Anscombe’s An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus,” Anthony Kenny’s Wittgenstein, and David Pears’s Wittgenstein, all staples of the philosophical literature. And so, now we consider Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide by John Heaton and Judy Groves. Like Saul Steinberg’s image for the Aesthetics Society and the graphic version of Proust, this is adult version of a comic strip. A Graphic Guide uses a combination of images and words, including extensive quotations from Wittgenstein’s publications, to tell about his life and philosophy. Thus it quotes the Tractatus, “The world is the totality of facts, not of things”; explains that he refers not to the world in space or time but logical space; and correctly observes that for Wittgenstein things like chairs or trees, examples pictured, “are not independent of their surroundings and so are not facts” (Heaton and Groves 2009: 34). Here visual imagery is not just a supplement to the philosophical materials but an integral part of its exposition. Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide is a popularizing book for people who want to learn a little as painlessly as possible about a difficult philosopher. While the usual academic books summarize his life briefly, Heaton and Groves tell a great deal, including an account of his love life. I don’t say that to scorn it, for I purchased their book, read it with pleasure, and am analyzing it. This book is one in a useful series devoted to “name” philosophers and much-discussed movements, such as feminism, Islam, and postmodernism. What, then, is the difference in kind between a book like Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide and the serious academic commentaries? It cannot be a question of originality or quality.

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Nor can it be that Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide has visual materials as well as text, for as we have noted, visual materials do appear in the Tractatus. At one place, indeed, this book offers a good visual argument. In its discussion of Wittgenstein on solipsism, it says, “I look in a mirror. I can see my eyes but can I see the ‘I’ that sees them?” (Heaton and Groves 2009: 48). And a helpful mirror image is included. Consider another example from this series, Kant: A Graphic Guide by Christopher Kul-Want and Andrzej Klimowski that tells the story of Kant’s life, presents in images his philosophy and has a short account “After Kant” of his successors. There is a thirty-page account of Kant’s third critique. Kant introduces the antinomy of taste, explains his view of beauty with use of decorative designs, tells why he thinks that judgments of taste are disinterested, discusses his view of a common sense shared by everyone, contrasts judgments of nature and fine art, describes genius and its relationship to Romanticism, relates the various arts, sketches an account of the sublime, and mentions his account of teleological judgment. Kant: A Graphic Guide covers as much material about his philosophy as some academic summaries such as, for example, the imaginative account in Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic, which certainly is a major academic publication. Scholarly conventions effectively determine how books are received. There is a real felt distinction between serious fiction and graphic novels. And so, in bookstores, these two forms of fiction were sometimes housed in separate sections. But of course conventions can change when imaginative writers modify them. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1996), a graphic novel for adults, is a serious literary work. What subject could be more serious than the Holocaust? And so, there is no reason in principle why a distinguished scholarly account of Wittgenstein’s philosophy might not be presented in a graphics format. One art historical precedent is John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, an influential graphic book (based upon his TV show) developing his thesis about feminism and art history. Still there is a reason for conventions. Since Wittgenstein’s books have only minor illustrations and Kant’s third critique is not accompanied by any pictures, what do the numerous illustrations add in these graphic publications? Typically popularizing accounts depict the subject, his everyday world, and the subjects of his writings. But usually there’s not much significant relationship between a philosopher’s arguments and her or his life. To understand the Tractatus, it doesn’t help to know that Wittgenstein came from a very wealthy assimilated family; nor when studying The Critique of Pure Reason does it matter that Kant never traveled. This is why the illustrations in these two graphic books are mostly just ornaments.



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Sometimes reprints of the classic texts of Descartes, Hume, and the other major figures, provide portraits of these men. But those materials don’t contribute to the arguments. Danto thanks his friend Robert Motherwell for gifting him the image providing the cover illustration for Connections to the World. And indeed, this image is relevant to philosophical discussion of connections. As Danto says, “The image relates to its own edges in two main places, just as we connect to the world in two main ways” (1989: xxvi–xxvii). But altogether Motherwell was a serious student of philosophy, he didn’t claim to be a philosopher-artist. And Danto thanks Sean Scully, for providing the cover image for a selection of his essays, The Body/Body Problem. It relates to the representational themes of these essays. The mirror is, after all, the ground analogy for the mind, and its failures and successes are slyly mapped in Scully’s marvelous composition of thin and thick bars. (1999: x–xi)

But, again, such illustrations are just supplements to the argument. Visual imagery can occasionally legitimately extend the written philosophical argumentation. Bertrand Russell’s The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918) has a diagram of the relation of judgment and belief (Pears 1970: 220). But the ideas behind Russell’s diagram could be explained in words. And although Spinoza wasn’t a visual thinker, in part one “Of God” in The Ethics he draws a diagram to accompany the text: If we conceive that from one point of a certain infinite quantity two lines, say AB and AC, are extended to infinity, it is certain that, although in the beginning they are a certain, determinate distance apart, the distance between B and C is continuously increased, and at least, from being determinate, it will become indeterminable. (1996: 11)

This claim could be made by the text alone but it’s easier to grasp with the help of the diagram. But sometimes diagrams in philosophy are more significant. When Wittgenstein says, “For the form of the visual field is surely not like this,” and draws a diagram of the eye, it’s not obvious how to make this claim verbally without appeal to that diagram (1961b: 5.6331). In seeing, he argues, “really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye” (1961b: 5.633). Here, as is not usually the case, Wittgenstein’s account comes close to Merleau-Ponty’s concerns. When, however, his diagram shows how things are not, it doesn’t demonstrate how things are. In a mirror, to pose an obvious objection, I can see a reflected image of my eyes. And so, we need to learn why that does not count as seeing my eyes. His diagram suggests

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the answer. And Wittgenstein also presents a drawn figure that can be seen in two ways (1961b: 5.5423). It would be difficult to give a verbal description of this ambiguous figure, whose philosophical importance is easy to see. Bussmann’s drawings don’t aspire to supplement philosophical texts with illustrations. Rather, her goal is to depict the arguments of these texts, which is a quite different, less familiar concern. The graphic books we have considered raise no challenging philosophical problems. Diagrams, however, can pose interesting issues. In his account of Roy Lichtenstein’s pop painting Portrait of Madame Cézanne, an artwork indiscernible from a diagram made by the art historian Erle Loran for his book Cézanne’s Composition: Analysis of His Form, with Diagrams and Photos of His Motifs, Danto writes: Here, Lichtenstein uses the diagrammatic idiom rhetorically, Loran does not use the idiom of diagrams; he simply uses diagrams … Whatever Lichtenstein is doing, he is not diagramming. (1981: 147)

Loran’s diagram appears as an illustration in an analysis of Cézanne’s paintings, while Lichtenstein’s appropriation is not a diagram at all but an artwork. Conversely, Bussmann’s drawings of philosophical subjects, which are artworks, could be turned into cover diagrams for texts with the arguments they present. Lichtenstein turned an art historian’s diagram into an artwork. Inspired by his example, let’s consider an example that will help us to understand Bussmann’s art. Danto relates aesthetic theorizing to his philosophical system, linking the definition of art to theories of action, knowledge, and historiography. In Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, he presents a simple triangular diagram: subject/representation/world presenting everything that is. The subject acts on the world and the world causes my representations. The relations are between the world and the subject, between the subject and its representations, and between the representations and the world. The first relation is that of causality, and the third that of truth. (Danto 1989: xxiii)

And to understand the second relation, we need a theory of the self, an explanation of the connection between the representations and the person experiencing them. Danto claims that pretty much every basic philosophical position can be defined in relation to this structure. We are connected to the world; we are aware of the continuity of experience; we act upon the world: and these relationships are described by philosophy. Danto offers a comprehensive list of everything that exists: the subject, the representations, and the world. He refines analysis in his two additional versions



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of this diagram, also in Connections to the World, in which he presents true belief, a relationship between the subject, a proposition and facts, and action, when he describes the triangular relationship between the subject, an idea, and an object. In all three diagrams there are subjects, representations and what is represented, the world. And so, the task of philosophy is to sketch their relationships, as revealed in knowledge and action. How then should we understand the place of this diagram itself in his philosophical system? The diagram shows all that exists. And so, it should include the diagram itself. A painter must depict the landscape from some particular point of view. But Danto wants to diagram a view of the relationship between the world and representations that stands outside of the world. Can the philosopher’s representations transcend the need for a viewpoint? This diagram creates an interesting philosophical problem, which Danto (surprisingly in my judgment) didn’t consider. What exists according to him are three distinct kinds of things: subjects, representations, and the world. From what point of view, then, are these things presented in his diagram? Thomas Nagel speaks of “the view from nowhere” to identify the goal of this search for an impersonal point of view. Without reference to Danto, he identifies a philosophical problem. A painter depicts the landscape from some particular point of view. Often this is some physically accessible viewpoint. But in an example, discussed by Richard Wollheim, some landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich identify a high viewpoint, physically far above the depicted landscape (1987: 312). (Scully’s Irelande does the same.) Friedrich asked his viewers to imagine occupying a vantage point that now, of course, is accessible thanks to air travel. This thus was what might be called a contingent view from nowhere, because it’s contingent upon the development of technology. (That Friedrich painting, The Large Enclosure Near Dresden (1832) is the jacket illustration for Nagel’s book; and Nagel informs me that he discussed it with Wollheim.) What would be involved in asking that we take a viewpoint that is, in principle, outside of the world? There are two sorts of very different kinds of entities outside us in our world: the objects; and the other people. Descartes, who provides the basis for Danto’s account, gives an account of other minds. The interesting complication then, which is a central concern for Hegel, arises when we must consider also our relations with these other people, who also engage in mental activity. The view from nowhere needs, thus, to include their presence as well. But philosophical difficulties arise when we need to both discuss our first person viewpoint and the ways in which that viewpoint includes awareness that other also possess. Terry

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Pinkard spells out this claim very clearly with reference to The Phenomenology of Mind: To be a subject is not only to be aware of things in the world but also to be aware of oneself as having a point of view on that world. To see the other agent simply as an “object” in the practical field cannot be satisfying for the subject … since in order to see the other as capable of bestowing recognition, he must see the other not simply as an “object” in the world like other things but as a self-conscious subject, who also has his own subject point of view on the world. (1996: 55–6)

That other subject has a point of view to which I don’t have direct access. And so, a complete picture of the world needs to consider, also, that other person’s point of view. But how is that possible when all that I know is my perspective? I have one viewpoint and other subjects have others. How then can I understand what it is to be aware not just from my viewpoint or theirs but from a view from nowhere, a viewpoint that somehow transcends all of these individual viewpoints? Imagine, for example, that I’ve worked through the Hegelian dialectic and so am aware both of my viewpoint and also that of another agent, call her Ann. I can then imagine the world from my viewpoint and also from Ann’s. Good enough, but this doesn’t provide what we’re seeking, an impersonal point of view. I might try to imagine the viewpoint on both myself and Ann from a third subject, call him Ben. Now, then, I can conceive of three personal viewpoints. But, still, that doesn’t give me a viewpoint from nowhere. Indeed, even were I to continue in this way, until I had taken account of the viewpoint of everyone alive, that still wouldn’t resolve this problem, for, by definition, “a view from nowhere” is a view not of any particular individual. Danto wants to diagram a view from nowhere, an illustration of the relationship between the world and its representations that stands as it were outside the world. But is that possible? If you are above a city, then you can view it as a whole. And if you could stand above the earth, you would see one side of the entire planet. But there’s no way that you can look at the world from outside and describe its structure, as his diagram supposes. There is a contradiction in claiming that all that exists are subjects, their ideas and objects and also showing them in a triangular relationship, a diagram with a God’s eye point of view. We are looking at the world from a viewpoint that is, by hypothesis, outside of that world. In his treatise on historiography, Danto says, “It is always a fair question to put, whether a theoretical work on history can apply its theories to itself ” (1985: xiv). A book on historiography, he is saying, should be able to explain



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its own place in the history of ideas. The same point can be made here about Danto’s account of methodology. Since it shows all that exists, it’s a fair question to ask the diagram’s place. Perhaps, however, this diagram is akin to the illustrations of “impossible worlds” discussed by Ernst Gombrich in Art and Illusion with reference to examples by William Hogarth and M. C. Escher, structures that “cannot exist in our world” (1961: 244). They look like pictures, but the elements don’t fit together. As in William Hogarth’s engraving False Perspective (1754) there are illogical effects: The man on the distant hill looks as large as the woman bending out of the window of the inn and can be seen to light his pipe at her candle. The trees on the hill appear to become larger the further their distance from us, and yet some of them overlap the inn sign. (Gombrich 1961: 243)

Or maybe Danto could have omitted his diagram. Were Connections to the World printed minus these three diagrams, then no real loss would be suffered, though the argument might be more difficult to follow. But that doesn’t really resolve this problem, for it would be easy enough for some reader to redraw the diagram. At the start of this chapter, we said that we would focus on illustrations, graphic novels, and diagrams but not artworks. Here, however, let’s consider an artwork. We’re looking at a small drawing of a triangle. The three points are labeled subject, representation, and world, joined by three straight lines. This seems to be a simple linear drawing. But wait a minute, the reader may ask, is this artwork not one of those very diagrams by Arthur Danto that you analyzed? It is—and it isn’t. Danto claimed that after the early period when he both made artworks and did philosophy, that he quit art making. True enough, but in Connections to the World, you find three potential artworks. These diagrams are not works of art but, as Danto makes clear, illustrations of his argument. And a diagram differs in kind from a work of art. For example, the scale, color of lines, and typeface matter in an artwork but not for this mere diagram, which needs only to include the words and the three lines linking them in a triangle. Imagine, however, that an artist who is inspired by our account of Bussmann reads Danto’s books and chooses to make copies of his first diagram. A devoted reader of his numerous accounts of Warhol’s Brillo Box, she takes Danto’s diagram and turns it into an artwork, called Diagram, a drawing that is indiscernible from the image reproduced in the University of California Press paperback edition of Connections to the World. A mid-career figure who shows at an established gallery, she asks a good price for her image, a product she says

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of years of philosophical study and training as a visual artist, considerably more than what Amazon asks for Danto’s entire book, which with diagram included, costs $31.95 postage included for Amazon Prime members. Soon enough, the Museum of Modern Art is happy to purchase the drawing, put it on show, and sell full-size limited edition replicas in its shop. And then, taking my fictional story full circle, after visiting the exhibition a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University sends to The Journal of Philosophy her submission, “The Art-world,” whose title, she notes, is itself a Danto-indiscernible, though its contents are very different, she argues, from those in Danto’s 1964 publication, which it duplicates word for word. In her version of that essay, taking up the passage where we read of “the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art,” she writes, “It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification)” (1964: 581). Here, she says, we see the true difference between the artwork Diagram and the mere diagram in Connections to the World. After all, she observes, we know that “to be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning” (Danto 1997: 195). Here she quotes Danto’s words that reappear in her treatise in progress, tentatively titled After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. In his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges imaginatively tells the story of a writer who is resolved to rewrite word for word Cervantes’s novel, which of course comes out entirely differently. Cervantes “opposes to the fiction of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country.” Menard “on the other hand (on the other hand!) selects for its reality the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vaga.” These are of course descriptions of the same place and time, but the mode of referring to them belongs to different times. (Danto 1981: 35)

Analogously, when this graduate student rewrites Danto’s treatise, which was composed before she was born, her account alludes to the recent display of Diagram at MoMA, which took place after his death. Rewritten by her, this text thus now has changed meaning. In that story, a symbolist poet undertakes to reconstruct the novel without consulting the original. And when he does, then Borges argues that the very same words written by a modern author will have a totally different meaning. But how are we to imagine a modern writer attempting to rewrite a classic word for word and succeeding in creating a noteperfect portion of that text? The mere fact that we can describe this imagined activity does not show that it’s truly possible (Wollheim 2012).



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Here I am imagining that Danto’s diagram is turned into this artwork called Diagram. Perhaps, however, we should avoid making that last move. Following Wittgenstein, consider this counterargument: under penalty of infinite regress, any account of representation needs some concept of “matching.” You set the representation against reality and it matches. Otherwise you would need a representation of a representation and so on to infinity. When I measure a picture, I set it against the measuring stick and read the result. I don’t need another stick to measure the measuring stick and so on indefinitely. Here we return to concerns raised by Bussmann’s drawings of the Tractatus. When she presents Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning, if her images show how language matches the world, what then is their philosophical status? Sometimes it’s not easy to tell if a visual artifact is a diagram. We’re looking at a medium-sized painting, with circles on a red background. The outer circle is color coded, light blue on the right hand side, off-white on the left. Then inside it’s black on the left, with yellow surrounding red on the right. Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a Swedish artist who only recently has received serious attention. She wanted her art to speak only to posterity. And so, her will specified that for twenty-five years after her death, her paintings were not to be shown. This picture Group IX/SUW. The Swan, No. 17 (1915) is, arguably, one of the first abstractions, a work that deserves to be set alongside the early paintings by Kandinsky. Like him, Klint was involved with theosophical speculations. Recently the art historian Pepe Karmel has deciphered this picture: The stark black and white on the left side of the circle recall her more literal representations of the swan motif. The flowing colors on its right side offer an allegory of transcendence … yellow represents the male spirit and blue the female, while pink represents the love that joins them. The brick-red field surrounding the solar disk evokes a cosmos flooded with universal love. (2021: 199)

It’s hard to know how to interpret her art, for as this description makes obvious, she has an intricate, personal visual vocabulary. In the theosophical writings of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), who greatly influenced her and some other painters of the time, there are complicated diagrams that were not intended to be artworks. How, then, to interpret her visually brilliant images is, as yet, unclear. In any case, if Karmel’s account is at all correct, we are very far from the world of academic philosophy. These images have some claim to be the first abstractions, pioneering works by a previously marginalized woman artist. But if they are really diagrams—large,

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colored versions of the pictures found in spiritualist books—then maybe they are not meant to works of art at all. (Carrier 2015b)

Or perhaps that is a distinction without a difference. In any case, Bussmann’s art is very different, for although her visual associations often also are personal, her subjects are the public, published writings of some major philosophers. To understand Klint, you need to read Steiner and, perhaps also, her own voluminous writings; to understand Bussmann, you need to study philosophy. And although this intellectually fascinating theosophical literature was highly influential in the early twentieth century, philosophers have not taken a serious interest in Steiner. How then is philosophy related to visual art? According to one very influential Hegelian theory, they are related automatically, because both are forms of expression and products of their time. The connection thus is unavoidable, for philosophy and art cannot help but be connected. To some extent, it’s often said, everyone living in one place at one time shares a worldview. You don’t need to be an Hegelian to take this commonplace view. Everyone in that situation has somewhat similar views about how to act, think and organize experience. And so, there must be some relationship between contemporary art, philosophy, and social life. “A style of painting,” Meyer Schapiro writes, “is often likened to a worldview, a mode of thought, a metaphysical system” (1999: 11). A painter with a style picks distinctive subjects and represents them in a uniquely identifiable fashion. In that way, such an artist can be compared to a philosopher, whose arguments also are unmistakably original. Thus, he adds, we find Poussin compared to Descartes, Cézanne to Kant, and so forth. But these comparisons are inherently problematic, Schapiro argues, for unlike philosophy, painting “is not discursive”; it discusses “a concrete individual object” and Schapiro adds, in painting “truth is not in question” (1999: 17). Statements are true or false but paintings are not statements. That said, he goes on to indicate that this shared concept of a worldview can be useful. To speak of an artist’s worldview is to summarize in a short phrase his way of viewing the world. Indeed, Schapiro himself hints at such comparisons when he contrasts the seascapes of two nineteenth-century artists, Caspar David Friedrich and Gustave Courbet and, also, when he links Kandinsky and Mondrian, two very different artists interested in Theosophy. Since Schapiro’s essay, “Philosophy and Worldview in Painting” is sixtytwo pages long, clearly he found that there was a great deal to say about this subject. And although he is legitimately skeptical about comparing philosophy and painting, that doesn’t prevent him from developing such comparisons.



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In another essay “Cézanne and the Philosophers,” he finds real value in a philosophical tradition that presents “the enjoyment of sensation and sociability within the world of sensory things” (Schapiro 1999: 103) the “French tradition of empiricism and rationalism” that “conceives of the activity of the individual as a constructive one in which sensations are sifted and correlated and the world of objects, solid and flat, is put into an ordered form” (Schapiro 1999: 102). In his essay on Cézanne’s still life paintings, Schapiro develops a sustained presentation of this comparison. There are, still, reasons to be skeptical about any such analysis. Commentators seek affinities between Rembrandt’s paintings and Spinoza’s philosophy because they both are products of seventeenth-century Holland, a prosperous bourgeois mercantile society. Although the two men never met, Rembrandt took a special interest in his Jewish countrymen, who were subjects for his depictions of Old Testament figures. And this is presumably why the Penguin Classics edition of Ethics has as cover image, a painting, Man with a Beard by a follower of Rembrandt. But since Rembrandt doesn’t write about aesthetics and Spinoza never discusses visual art—his language as Schapiro says “has few words for the concrete”—that comparison is obviously limited (1999: 46). The philosophical problem is that cultures are not necessarily tightly unified. After all, not only Rembrandt but also Pieter Saenredam and Johannes Vermeer, very different artists, were contemporaries of Spinoza. And so, mere contemporaneity doesn’t prove much. One culture can contain very diverse personalities. If, then, we reject the view that this search for parallels between philosophy and visual art as two expressions of a shared worldview is satisfying, we need to rethink this issue. Many visual works depict some figurative subject. They show imaginary or real events, landscapes and cityscapes, and still life objects. One special group of artworks, abstractions, by definition depict nothing and so have no subjects. And we have focused on a third option: Maria Bussmann’s philosophical drawings are mostly neither figurative nor abstractions. When she presents Merleau-Ponty’s view of the self, Spinoza’s account of emotions, or Wittgenstein’s analysis of picture theory of meaning then she depicts a philosophical worldview, picturing the nature of things. Some of these things are mental, while others are physical: but as philosophical subjects, these are best understood as neither figurative nor abstract. Sean Scully very nicely describes this situation: I once watched a film of Cézanne painting … Back and forth in a triangular relationship between the painter, the subject and the painting. This Morandi did also, since [he] was painting his jars or the view … Always in a triangle.

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When I paint, I look at the canvas on the wall, and I paint it. I move back and forth between my seat and the painting, in a straight line, between me and the work. The painting being the subject and the object, all in one. There is no triangle. Everything I need to make the painting is in me when I start. (2016: 173)

A figurative artist keeps looking back and forth between his subject and image; an abstract painter makes no such reference to the world. Like Cézanne and Morandi, Bussmann has subjects, though strictly speaking she is not a figurative artist. And so, it’s natural to imagine here looking back and forth between readings of philosophy and her drawings. The classic philosophical texts presented by Bussmann’s drawings have been much discussed. They are the subject of a great deal of close, often contentious commentary. If you want detailed commentary, then you may find Bussmann’s images disappointing. Images cannot engage in such debate, in the manner of written interpretation. Jonathan Bennett’s commentary on Spinoza’s Ethics is four times as long as that book and Max Black’s reader on the Tractatus five times as long as the text it discusses. The canonical philosophers have been gone over with enormous care, both by gifted commentators and also, of course, by the more recent figures who have developed the ongoing philosophical tradition. Bussmann’s drawings have a very different status. As we have seen, there is a characteristic indirectness in the relationship of her art to its philosophical subjects. Art historians often discuss the relation between history or poetry and visual images. Ut picture poses: a history or poem can narrate a sequence of events, while a picture can only show one moment of the action. Only texts can present stories, while paintings alone may offer illusionistic depictions. Words and pictures thus have diverse comparative strengths and limitations. Historians describe causes and effects of events of Roman history, while painters like Poussin can only show a single moment of the ongoing action. We considered this problem when we looked at the etching showing Masaniello’s revolt. No single image can tell the entire story as is presented in the written histories. Still, an illusionistic representation has value for it makes, as it were, present, the imagined Neapolitan scene. Philosophical systems are not narratives but they too require extended verbal presentation. Sometimes, however, we do think that they can be summarized in a picture. This is what happens in Bussmann’s art. If we think of her drawings of philosophical subjects on the model of linguistic translations or the musical transcriptions that we discussed, then they will seem at best modestly significant translations of their original sources.



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Studying philosophy by employing these images would be like reading Proust in English or hearing a piano version of a Rossini opera. Literature or music in such translations is at best a reduced version of the original. Were this the entire story, then these drawings would be minor curiosities. In fact, however, there is more to the story. Sometimes visual imagery is described by philosophers in sweeping terms. Philosophy is said to provide a picture of the world. In his introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics, for example, Stuart Hampshire writes: Metaphysics is an attempt to present a coherent picture of reality as a whole, including a speculative account of the origin of things and of the place of human beings within the imagined scheme (italics added). (1951: xv)

In context that phrase “picture of reality” is a metaphor that needs to be unpacked; it means a complete and comprehensive account. To press the metaphor in a way that reveals its limits, you can’t see reality as a whole presented in one picture, for normally some things are invisible behind others. No world picture can ever show everything. Similarly Dieter Henrich’s Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant begins by explaining the significance of the phrase in his title, “an image of the world.” We may, Henrich says, imagine seeing the “world of objects and the world seen from the moral viewpoint” as “totally separate” (1992:4). But, in fact so he argues, they are connected. Here, again, “a viewpoint” is something more than a dispensable turn of phrase. And in his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Martin Heidegger says: The world picture would be a painting, so to speak, of what is as a whole. But “world picture” means more than this. We mean by it the world itself, the world as such … “We get the picture” concerning something does not mean only that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us— in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it—as a system. (1977: 129)

He develops a historicist view of the relationship between philosophy and the world it presents, an account in which his own aesthetics contributes a critique. Not every era, Heidegger argues, creates a world picture. The ancient Greeks, for example, didn’t think of the world in these terms. Heidegger rejects the Cartesian claim that visual experience provides the basic model for knowledge. Only in the modern period does art become “considered to be an expression of human life” (1977: 116). Indeed, the very conception of a “world picture” is a characteristic modern development. Now “the world (is) conceived and grasped

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as picture” (1977: 129). There was, Heidegger says, nothing such as a medieval or ancient world picture. And so, to think that these earlier eras made anything like our art is to foredoom interpretation of the works that we place in museums, as if they were anything like our contemporary works of art. And the Roman ways of thinking differed completely from those of the Greeks. “The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation” (1977: 149).

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Bussmann’s translations of philosophy into visual images suggest an important novel way of understanding art’s history. Usually art history writing narratives go from past to the present. In these familiar accounts, Giotto leads to Masaccio who goes on to Michelangelo. This is how Vasari tells the story up to his day and it’s how Gombrich extends this history of artistic progress, adding Constable and Pissarro to the narrative. And analytic Cubism is said to lead to Jackson Pollock whose painting then inspires Morris Louis. This is how Clement Greenberg presents his formalist history of modernism. You describe the influences of an artist in order to understand how he makes use of the traditions. But it is possible also, and nowadays may be more productive, to present a reverse narrative and thus rather see how contemporary art teaches us to understand the art from the past in new ways. The past truly is past and that cannot be changed: that’s a fact. But how past art is understood often depends to some degree upon experience of artworks from the present. My book on Carroll explored this idea: “The past cannot act on the present—it’s always the case, rather, that someone in the present acts in response to the past” (2018b: 126). This happens when a contemporary artist teaches us how to look at work from the past, in a way that’s decisively informed by contemporary work. Now, building upon that analysis, I argue that Bussmann’s art is more comprehensible if we see in retrospect how its development was anticipated. She herself identifies no immediate precedents for art with her philosophical subjects. And I know of no artist who influenced her choice of subjects. But we can identify art historical interpretations that make use of philosophical subjects, in ways that exhibit significant affinities to her artworks, and so aid understanding of her achievement. As Arthur Danto says in his account of Jean-Paul Sartre, “We define who our predecessors are, and create our own histories as effects of what we do” (1975: xii; emphasis in the original).

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When old masters represented landscapes or still life objects, they merely presented these subjects; they didn’t create landscapes or still life artifacts. But just as Jasper Johns’s subjects, flags and targets, really are flags or targets; and Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed also is a (paint-streaked) bed: so, too, Bussmann’s pictures of philosophical subjects are themselves exercises in philosophy. Usually philosophy is only done by philosophers when they write. But it’s possible, also, so we have seen, to philosophize by making art. Bussmann does that with her philosophical subjects. And Danto anticipated this development: Art has reenacted this speculative course of history in the respect that it has turned into self-consciousness, the consciousness of art being art in a reflexive way that bears comparison with philosophy, which itself is consciousness of philosophy; and the question now remains as to what in fact distinguishes art from its own philosophy. (1986: 56; emphasis in the original)

But he didn’t pursue these claims. The materials Bussmann presents make her works themselves a contribution to philosophy. Her art thus has both philosophical subjects and is itself a form of visual philosophical reasoning. We’re looking at a small creature with a skeletal body and who faces us. His gender is difficult to make out. He’s floating before a bright pale background. His mouth is open. It’s not at all clear whether he’s moving or standing still. Nor is it at all obvious what’s in the background. Angelus Novus (1920), a small painting, 31.8 × 24.2 cm, could be tucked into your carry-on luggage. Paul Klee, who was a prolific artist, painted a great many angels. But Angelus Novus alone became famous because it is the only painting discussed in Walter Benjamin’s legendary late essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). In fact, among literary scholars and intellectual historians, nowadays it’s probably the most famous visual art work. The story of how and why Angelus Novus became famous involves Benjamin and two of his friends, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. Benjamin’s essay was translated in 1969 in Illuminations, a pioneering American collection of his writings. Benjamin was little known and so Arendt’s introduction to that book provides a valuable account of the state of his reputation before he became famous. Without realizing it, she says, in some ways Benjamin had more in common with Heidegger “than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends” (Benjamin 1969: 46). Maybe! In just over eleven pages, Benjamin offers his thoughts about historical determinism, objectivity in art history, Fascism, and class struggle. Even by Benjamin’s standards, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is an enigmatic, highly condensed analysis. It’s as if at



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what turned out to be near the end of his life, that he wanted to get down quickly his whole worldview. The essay contains what is Benjamin’s most famous single statement: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1969: 253). As Theodor Adorno adds, “Knowledge … should … address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside” (2020: 161). Like almost everything associated with Benjamin, this legendary painting has a complex history. He purchased Angelus Novus in 1921 for fourteen dollars. The picture survived the war in Paris, while Benjamin died by suicide in 1940 while fleeing from France into Spain. And then after the war, Angelus Novus made its way to Jerusalem, where Scholem donated it to the Israel Museum. After quoting Scholem’s poem about the picture, Benjamin says that the angel sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in from of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise … This storm is what we call progress. (1969: 257–8)

Not surprisingly, there were ferocious debates between Scholem, who linked Benjamin’s writing with Jewish mysticism and Adorno and the other Marxists, for Benjamin studied and borrowed from both of these very different traditions. More recently the plot has thickened, in a way that is relevant. When in 1993 I dedicated my published account of Angelus Novus to Leo Steinberg, he told me that I had misunderstood the way in which a secret Jewish name, given to Benjamin by his parents, was believed to protect its bearer (Carrier 1993b). No doubt he was right, but the picture still puzzled me. I also had written about the abstract painter Harvey Quaytman (1937–2002), who painted cruciforms (Carrier 1987). And Steinberg, so I discovered, wrote a marvelous tribute to Quaytman’s 1998 show at McKee Gallery, in New York. He found it “astounding to see the most familiar of signs de-semanticized, de-centered, de-Christianized, and emancipated to exercise its own territorial power” (qtd. Carrier 2019b). But it wasn’t until I reviewed another exhibition of art based upon Angelus Novus by Rebecca Quaytman, Harvey’s painter-daughter and then, a few years later, finally saw Klee’s painting in Jerusalem, that I was ready to synthesize these puzzling materials (Carrier 2015a). There’s just one figure in Angelus Novus, an angel looking right at us. The puzzle comes when you try to match the picture to Benjamin’s description. It’s hard to imagine that Benjamin didn’t look closely at this image, which for many years hung in his study. The angel is looking outward. The storm of progress

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coming from there is blowing him toward the future. And Benjamin clearly says that the angel is looking toward Paradise, which is in the past. A Marxist, so I imagined, would rather hope that Paradise lies in the future when, thanks to revolution, a classless society is created. Should not the angel then be looking toward the future? That’s the obvious conclusion. And this presumably is why the veteran Marxist literary critic, Fredric Jameson recently suggested that Klee’s angel “has very little in common with Benjamin’s description of it” (2020: 262). For a long time I accepted this claim. An image thus seemingly more closely attuned to Benjamin’s argument appears in Introducing Walter Benjamin: A Graphic Guide by Howard Caygill. In this black-and-white altered version of the Klee, you see the wreck of history, the violent blowing winds and the angel, on his back, head turned upwards, looking backwards, with an attached word balloon: “I would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” And at the bottom stands Benjamin, suitcase in hand, ready to flee (Caygill 2015: 219). Still, that’s not how the real picture actually works. To resolve these puzzles, let’s go back to “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin distinguishes between historicism and dialectical materialism. By historicism he means, understanding the past as it really was in its own terms. And dialectical materialism involves understanding the past from the viewpoint of the present. (He explains these two terms in a personal way.) Thus he says that “the past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption,” what he calls “a weak Messianic power” (emphasis in the original). He tells that just as flowers turn toward the sun, so “the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.” He speaks of his desire “to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.” And he describes the necessary “notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.” Finally, he says that for religious Jews, “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Benjamin 1969). All these claims contrast historicism, which Benjamin rejects, with dialectical materialism. Benjamin’s analysis was inspired by his erudite readings in Jewish mysticism and Marxist theology. My reconstruction of the picture, however, takes a much simpler approach. This angel looks at the past from the viewpoint of historical materialism, not seeing the past “as it really was,” but looking back from the viewpoint of the present, seeing messianic hopes, awaiting realization in the future. And that is why the historical materialist needs “the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop” (Benjamin 1969: 262). The past, Benjamin is saying, holds promises that can only



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be recognizable from the viewpoint of the present. We often think in these ways. Thanks to Quaytman’s paintings from the 1990s, for example, we may now see traditional sacred cruciforms differently, in secular terms. And in his analytic philosophical mode, without reference to Benjamin, Arthur Danto defined what he calls narrative sentences, “descriptions of events under which the events could not have been witnessed, since they make essential reference to events later in time than the events they are about” (1965a: 7). So, for example, to have said “the greatest Italian baroque painter was born today” on September 29, 1571 is to describe Caravaggio’s birth in a way that no one could have understood at that time. Danto shows that historians regularly make use of narrative sentences, describing events from a later temporal perspective. You don’t have to be a dialectical materialist to think in these terms, which are eminently plausible. Here, then, I translate Benjamin’s analysis into the terms of Danto’s historiography. Benjamin meant his account to be an intervention in the struggle against fascism. How, then, to relate his analysis to present-day politics is not easy. We view another image of devastation (Figure 28). This seems to be a construction site but for what? In Bussmann’s image of the sources of Hegelian philosophy, we saw how the destruction of Kantian philosophy prepared for a constructive outcome. Here, however, all is destruction. To the right of the

Figure 28  French Dictionary: Harshly. © Hilger Collection Wien.

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center, three large trees are toppling. And in the foreground, we see the stumps of three more. On the right is a hand-held buzz saw and, at the far edge, in the distance a frightening looking large apparatus with a prickly roller that is used to work the grounds. On the left is a saw with menacing teeth. There’s a tree-cutting apparatus. And at the far left in the foreground, one tree has toppled. This is a scene full of mysterious destructive machinery. We are looking at Bussmann’s drawing for her dictionary entry, “crûment” (“Hischonungslos,”) harshly or crudely. Klee’s enigmatic angel is at the service of Benjamin’s historical vision, in which at the moment of messianic salvation, time ceases to flow and all the wreckages of history may be repaired. Does Bussmann’s drawing assume any equivalent textual weight? Here we see an inventory of the instruments of destruction, gathered around the earth. It’s too early, still, to know what will be constructed here. Maybe, then, we should see this as a close-up view of the ruins like those surveyed by Klee’s angel from afar. Benjamin offers a redemptive view of contemporary destruction, but it’s not clear that Bussmann’s view is equally positive. But then, she has a very different perspective on German history. We are looking at a panel that is a meter and half high. Number 79 in Aby Warburg’s Picture Atlas, has a long puzzling title: “Mass. Devouring God. Bolsena, Botticelli. Paganism in the Church. Miracle of the host Transubstantiation. Italian criminal before the last rites” (2020: 148–9). Twenty-two images of varied sizes are mounted here. They include drawings of the Chair of St. Peter from 875; Raphael’s The Mass at Bolsena (1512); a press photograph from 1929, Pope Pius XI Emerges from Vatican to Celebrate the Lateran Treaty; and a woodcut, Desecration of the Host, from a Florentine book, 1473–98. Warburg (1866– 1929) developed late in his career a picture atlas, sixty some screens, displaying over a thousand images, material now gathered in a very elaborate book. Not surprisingly, Warburg’s publications intrigued Benjamin. How should we read these images—left to right, or the reverse (as in Chinese fashion)? Or should we jump around and look selectively? And what in the world are the connections among them? When young, Warburg lectured and wrote brilliant art history. This unresolved panel is a product of his old age. Warburg had the financial resources to collect arrays of pictures, old master paintings, contemporary works, prints and also newspaper clippings, and other materials from popular culture, which he had placed on large screens. And the panels were titled. Some themes are relatively clear. Panel 20, for example, presents “Development from Greek Cosmology to Arab Practice.” So too, it’s easy to understand Panel 58, which is “Cosmology in Dürer.” But the significance of others is less clear. In Panel 79, I understand his interest in the relationship



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between the church and power, but the focus of this choice of images often eludes me. Why include Giotto’s Hope from his Padua fresco? I understand the inclusion of images of Mussolini’s treaty with the Church, from 1929, which legitimized Fascism. But what is the significance of a woodcut from 1492 showing the desecration of the host, taken from a Jewish lexicon in Berlin. Why exactly is Ammunition Wagon, a First World War photograph, included? And is there some particular importance to a German newspaper photograph from 1929 showing a dying man receiving the last rites? The erudite recent studies (Didi-Huberman 2017) and (Johnson 2012) that don’t answer this question. Warburg presumably wanted that we see the connections among these images. Of course, any group of images may, with ingenuity and persistent looking, appear connected. But how can groups of images like this communicate if there is no extended text accompanying them? What connections a viewer finds depends in part upon personal associations. When there are so many varied images, I hardly know where or how to look. Had Warburg lived long enough, then he might have spelled out in words the intended connections between these images. But maybe he rather wanted viewers to find unexpected free associations amongst his materials. In Bussmann’s Franz in Florida, a Different Winter’s Journey, her twenty-four images are linked to the poems of the song cycle. Still, we don’t know, for example, why she chose some of the particular subjects in Florida— the used van lot in number 16, the sinking ship in number 8, or the flood in number 7 for example. Warburg’s panel titles provide much less interpretative guidance. Maybe he, too, had an alternative view of art history, one which has failed, mostly, to be developed. Contrast another more accessible visual example. We are looking at a riverside with a small boat in the foreground. Two figures are in the boat. And above in the sky are men with wings, the older one moving upward, the younger figure falling downward. At the right lower hand corner, a figure seated on the riverbank amid the trees looks up at this scene. As described, this picture no doubt initially sounds mysterious. Why are these two men flying? Learning that this is the story, of the fall of Icarus resolves that question. Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book VIII (183–235) tells that Daedalus, seeking to escape from Crete, constructed wings with feathers attached using wax for himself and his son, and warned the boy not to fly too high. The wax in the boy’s wings was warmed by the sun and so he fell to his death, watched by the baffled figures on the shore who were amazed, Ovid said, that these gods could travel in the sky. Many artists depicted this scene. We are looking at an engraving by Annibale Carracci showing a detail from his frescoes in the Gallery Farnese ceiling. The

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interpretation of this image is relatively straightforward. You don’t need any controversial iconographic theorizing once you learn the title, as is penciled on the mount of my print by the Roman shop where I purchased it. Warburg was the founder of the Warburg Institute, which after his death in 1929 moved to London, where this library remains an important research center. Picture Atlas is an early product of the iconographic research developed influentially by Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind, a first draft of materials that later were employed in more straightforward ways when iconographers learned that they had to fill in the words. But it’s conceivable also, in light of Bussmann’s art, to think of Picture Atlas as offering a real alternative to these now very well developed ways of thinking. Iconography aims for a fit of a picture and its interpretation. All the visually puzzling elements are related to the textual source. For Annibale Carracci, there is a clear-cut distinction between the details necessary for telling the story (two figures in the air, one falling) and the way that their story is presented in a landscape with incidental figures. For example, on the left are two figures in a boat who are not necessary for telling the story. Bussmann, like Benjamin and at least in his Picture Atlas, Warburg, seeks a more supple relationship between text and image. Knowing that it’s not obvious which elements are essential and which are merely decorative, encourages unfocused prolonged looking, which is needed to make that distinction. Warburg’s book is one source, I believe, of the even vaster Atlas (1962– 2013) of Gerhard Richter, a collection of photographs, newspaper cuttings, and sketches. Unlike Warburg, however, Richter doesn’t present an implicit art historical thesis. Picture Atlas suggests a more flexible, less rigid connection between images and text than iconography offers. Imagine, for example, that Annibale Carracci’s engraving were seen not in relation to Ovid but in a history of premodern fantasies about flying. And here it’s worth considering, also, one recent book, Mary Anne Staniszewski’s Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (1995), a history of art and the museum, familiar materials but in a marvelously imaginative format, a text in which (without mentioning Warburg) the usual balance in art history of a few pictures and lots of text, is shifted rather to allow images to predominate. Precisely because Staniszewski says less and “shows” more than the usual art history, she opens up active participation on the interpretative reader’s part. Maybe, as I’ve suggested, that was Warburg’s goal as well. What in the world did Warburg have in mind when constructing his Atlas? Did he envisage himself as a creative artist, like John Heartfield, the German Weimar-era political activist who also did collages? Is the sequential arrangement



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of materials within individual panels important? Warburg presents many tarot cards and astrological pictures, materials from popular media set alongside old master prints, and paintings. Was he interested in theorizing the gap between high and low culture? Many themes of his panels relate to those of his prior publications. How, then, did he think of these materials that he added together? It’s apparently impossible to answer these questions, for Warburg died suddenly without settling on the final form of his presentation. That Bilderatlas is obviously open to varied interpretations perhaps means that it will influence contemporary artists. And maybe Warburg’s greatest gift now to art history is not his iconographic interpretative method, which has been well developed and so is often critiqued, but the daring visual philosophy implicit in this picture atlas. Bussmann’s drawings help us to imagine many possibilities. Warburg juxtaposed preexisting visual images, while she created her pictures. But like him, she asks for creative thinking in response. We view another picture, this a large single image. It shows a dark nighttime street scene with lighting only from a torch held by a figure at the center. This gathering is not easy to understand, for some of these fourteen people are barely visible, while others are partly obscured from view. Let’s imagine, then, that we’re doing a sociological report and so need to identify everyone. At the right, a young woman suckles a starving old man, who is behind prison bars. Next to her a man holds some large lit candles, which allow us to see the feet of a dead man who is being carried away. In the left foreground, a naked man lies on his back while a privileged youth facing us divides his cloak to clothe him. To his left is an almost hidden figure. Behind them in the background, a man drinks from an upheld flask. And in front of him are two other figures, facing each other but not looking at one another. Now let’s turn our eyes upward. In the heavens, above this crowded tangle of figures there are two muscular angels who hold aloft the Virgin and the Christ child. One of these angels reaches down toward the crowd, with extended right arm, unseen by them, just above their heads. A great deal is happening in a compact crowded dark space (Carrier 2020a). We are looking at Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy (1607), which is in Pio Monte della Misericordia, a chapel in Naples. Matthew (25:35–6) offers the brief: For when I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was a stranger you took me in to your home, when naked you clothed me; when I was ill you came to my help, when in prison you visited me. (Matthew 2021)

The picture shows these six actions: feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty; taking strangers in; clothing the naked; helping the ill; and visiting those

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in prison. And the medieval church added a seventh action, also shown: burying the dead. The commission was a challenge, for there were no real precedents for showing the acts in one picture. Seven Acts is as singular a picture as Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun. But where Poussin’s picture shows an unusual subject, here what’s unfamiliar is presentation of these seven distinct familiar actions within one visually unified picture. From the title, we understand that these images all depict the same virtue. The question, still, for the visual artist is: what is the principle of unity here? Seven Acts prophesies a modernist public sphere, a place not under topdown official control in which free public debate would be possible. In Paris, the revolution of 1789 changed everything. But in Naples that development was very belated. Masaniello’s rebellion was one stage in the failed modernization. In thus relating pictorial composition and political structures, I am of course drawing an analogy. The structure of typical old regime sacred altarpieces was like top-down autocratic political rule. And so, by contrast Seven Acts is an anomaly, a picture with no single center to the action, a proto-modernist picture. Obviously in 1607 Caravaggio did not envisage the deconstruction of authoritarian old regime life; he was not a utopian political thinker. Still, we may see in the pictorial unity of Seven Acts a truly prophetic dimension, which only now can be fully verbalized. Philosophy and history writing make statements and pictures do not: that’s an inescapable distinction. But if, inspired by Bussmann’s drawings, you adopt a flexible viewpoint on the word-image relationship, then you may find these correspondences that we have presented between visual images and texts richly suggestive. Bussmann’s philosophical subjects thus can give invaluable suggestions about how to write art history. Old master allegories typically work on two levels, the primary literal level and the secondary allegorical level. Thus Poussin’s Blind Orion shows a giant in a landscape and is an allegory of the circulation of the elements; his Arcadian Shepherds depicts four shepherds contemplating a tomb and is an allegory about the omnipresence of death; and Caravaggio’s Seven Acts uses the images of mercy to make an allegorical statement about public space. Success in old master allegorical image making depends upon getting the picture to work on both levels. We see a beautiful composition and learn that the picture elements have additional meaning. By contrast, Vaquero’s engraving for New Science, Testa’s print for Il Liceo della Pittura, and Kitaj’s allegorical paintings don’t work effectively on the surface level. In them we find an assortment of elements gathered together without any clear visual ordering. Typically Bussmann’s drawings really are meant to function only on the secondary level. On the surface they are puzzling gatherings of elements.



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As we have often seen, it’s not entirely clear why they are assembled or what to make of the pictorial order. And that’s why usually there isn’t a unified space, not because Bussmann deals with fragmentation for its own sake, as you find in a great deal of modernist art, but because that’s the best way to present her philosophical subjects. And that’s why I say that her images are neither figurative nor abstract—their subjects are philosophical theories.

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When you study the body of works by artists as varied as Caravaggio, Poussin, and Cézanne, understanding their development is crucial. You need to understand how Caravaggio moved from the early genre works to massive altarpieces; how Poussin, rejecting Caravaggio’s concerns, became a classicist; and how Cézanne sublimated the expressionism of his youthful pictures in his later work. In the case of Bussmann, a rational reconstruction of her development might proceed thus. First consider her literary subjects from Musil and The Golden Ass; then her musical subject, her version of “The Winterreise” and her French vocabulary words; and, again going in order of increasing interpretative difficulty, her subjects drawn from Arendt, Spinoza, Wittgenstein and, finally, Merleau-Ponty. But as glance at the chronology reveals, she did not work in this logical order. And so, her development needs to be understood differently. We’re on the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, looking at a classic American abstraction, Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A (1948). In his exhibition review Clement Greenberg provided a vivid description: Beneath the apparent monotony of its surface composition it reveals a sumptuous variety of design and incident, and as a whole it is as well obtained in its canvas as anything by a Quattrocento master. Pollock … avoids any connotation of a frieze or hanging scroll and presents an almost square surface that belongs very much to easel painting. (1986: 285–6)

History painting often is centered on the central actor, to whom the other figures respond in a setting that is effectively a stage set. By contrast, the allover composition of this Pollock without any central actor in which we are encouraged to look at every part of the picture surface threatens to be merely decorative or, as Greenberg says, monotonous. Many of our prior comparative examples have the structure of traditional history painting. George Herriman’s

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comics, the anecdotal image showing Poussin, Claude and Dughet, and Jacques Callot’s The Conversion of Paul are composed around a central actor or actors. And Saul Steinberg’s aesthetics society image and Rube Goldberg’s picture of the napkin apparatus have the basic same structure, with central actors (in the Steinberg, the A and E!), used to present novel materials. But by contrast, Westmann’s tree is a pure landscape, with no actor. Our image of Masaniello was hard to interpret, for that action is puzzling. And Scully’s Backs and Fronts and Irelande call for a very different understanding of composition. New artistic subjects call for novel modes of composition. And so, they also demand rethinking of how we understand the history of art and its interpretation. You see these developments in the birth of landscape and still life painting, and also, more recently in the creation of abstract art. Like many of these examples, the interpretation of Bussmann’s philosophical subjects also poses new challenges. Her compositions are as varied as their subjects. Her Tractatus images are concerned with representations matching the world; Hegel’s tree and coral with the genealogy and development of his philosophical system; her presentations of Spinoza’s account of emotions; the pictures from Arendt, children’s toys; and, maybe the trickiest case, the depictions of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy showing the relation between touching and seeing. In each case, then, Bussmann focuses on one central concern of these philosophers. And her images of French words, literary and music subjects also respect the varied nature of these subjects. When Poussin paints sacred and profane historical pictures, commentators seek the unity of his work. Cézanne does landscapes, portraits, and still lives, and so the relationship of these subjects needs to be examined. And since Bussmann draws diverse philosophical subjects, we want to understand the unity of her art. A second related question concerns her working in series. Her translations of Schubert’s “Winterreise” are akin to the variations on a theme of Herriman’s Krazy Kat, but how are we to understand the organization of her images of philosophical subjects? Let’s contrast another example, a well-known old master picture, The Judgment of Solomon (1649), a painting by Poussin who also depicted this subject in a slightly different pen and brown wash over black chalk drawing. The story from 1 Kings (3: 15–28) recounts that two mothers gave birth, but only one child survived. Both women claimed the baby, and so the king ruled that the infant be divided by sword between them. When one woman agreed to that plan, while the other, who was terrified, said that the child should be given to her rival, the case was decided. And so, the living child was restored to its rightful mother.



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Hence the expression, “A Judgment of Solomon.” Poussin presents the king on his throne at the center, with the two women to the front on either side. The ruler extends both of his arms, with his index fingers pointing horizontally. There is a splendid bas-relief on his throne. The soldier with sword, who is on the left, is prepared to divide the child. The composition is filled out with a multitude of spectators, young and old, who respond to the action. The figure arrangement is somewhat simplified from the drawing in the painting. And as Anthony Blunt notes, Poussin has made one inexplicable mistake in the composition by showing the wicked mother holding her own dead baby whereas it is an essential point of the story that it should be in the hands of the good mother. (1967: 67)

Most of these details chosen by the painter are not in the text. Scripture doesn’t describe the physical appearance of the king, the dress of the women, or the number of spectators. Nor does it tell us about the architecture of the palace. Poussin provides a suitable setting, and assembles the central figures and some spectators, who respond in appropriate ways to the action. Other artists presented this scene, which was often depicted, dressing the figures differently, and composing them differently. In a work from the school of Giorgione, for example, the king is seated on the right. And in the version by Gaspar de Crayer, (c. 1620), he’s seated on the left with the dead child at his feet. The comparative strength of Poussin’s composition, which makes it classical, is the marvelous mirror symmetry, with a mother and child on either side of the king who is at the center. In that way, it’s stylistically akin to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. When Bussmann depicts Spinoza’s account of “love,” alternate visualizations consistent with the text are possible. Spinoza has a great deal to say about love, but he doesn’t describe anything like Bussmann’s scene, in which, as we have seen, the bare-breasted woman sits facing an elaborate vertical green structure, with a similar but much smaller white structure mounted behind to the left. The same sort of point could be made about most of the examples we have considered. In short, Bussmann, like Poussin, interprets her texts. It’s important to thus acknowledge Bussmann’s power of poetic visual invention. Just as Poussin creatively composed images of scenes from Roman history and scripture, imagining their appearance, so she presents scenes drawing upon philosophy. Scripture tells the story, leaving it to the artist to determine how to present those events. He must decide which moment of the action to show, how to compose, and how to dress the actors. This, after all, is why other

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artists can present the story very differently. Analogously, in presenting her philosophical texts Bussmann merely offers one possible transcription. It will be interesting, then, to see whether other artists are inspired to present these subjects differently. At this point, it’s useful to reconsider our earlier analogy of Bussmann’s art with linguistic or musical translations. Just as there are various differing translations of a novel and diverse musical transcriptions; so, her translations of philosophy do not merely copy some features of the original but add distinctive visual features, which other artists may choose to handle differently. By presenting unfamiliar pictorial subjects a new artistic genre creates the need, indeed the necessity for novel forms of pictorial composition and for new styles of interpretation of these subjects. The landscape painters did not just eliminate the figures and put in the foreground landscapes like those already found in the backgrounds of old master history painting. In their landscapes John Constable, Joseph Turner, and Cézanne created new visual structures. Think, also, of how much original theorizing was inspired by abstract art. And so, it’s unsurprising that Bussmann’s philosophical subjects also demand new styles of interpretative thinking, such as we have presented. Old master history painting usually shows scenes from the Bible or GrecoRoman history. Typically artists make a basic distinction between the central autonomous figure who acts, and those secondary men and women who respond to his action. And the other smaller figures behind them are bystanders who are set in the landscape. Thus in Poussin’s New Testament pictures Christ gestures and his apostles respond. And in the images of Roman history, Romulus gestures and the Romans awaiting his gesture seize the Sabine women. To understand these pictures you start by identifying the key actor, Christ or Romulus. But in a landscape or in a cityscape, usually there is no such central actor. And so, they often have an allover compositions, with every part seemingly equal to every other. These novel genres prepared the way for abstract painting. Some abstractions are based upon landscape paintings, others structured like music or architecture or with decorative motifs. In any case, these compositions lack the usual central actor of history painting. Bussmann’s drawings pose such challenges as well. Consider, also, the composition of our examples of what we, Joachim Pissarro and I, have called wild art, art from outside the art world (Carrier and Pissarro 2018). Compared with almost all of the artworks of Rube Goldberg, M. Escher, and Saul Steinberg, Bussmann’s drawings are often difficult to interpret. The details of these three artists’ works are often complicated, for usually there are a



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great many parts; and sometimes understanding how they fit together is not easy. But once you know the general subjects, then very often (but not always) these images can readily be interpreted. Goldberg shows a complex apparatus, Escher a play of Renaissance perspective and Steinberg scenes of modern life, often from an unusual perspectival viewpoint. But in the case of Bussmann’s works, at least with her philosophical subjects, you often need to puzzle over analysis. Initially it may take some effort to master the visual languages of Escher, Goldberg, and Steinberg but once you have done so, then most likely you can interpret many of their works. But with Bussmann’s drawings, even prolonged practice doesn’t always speed the interpretative process. As we have seen, each of her subjects has its own demands. Even the most unusual figurative picture subjects, almost always draw upon precedents. But her basic conception, drawing philosophical subjects, is highly unusual. If we had only Poussin’s history paintings to go by, how difficult they would be to interpret. Since many other artists depicted the Judgment of Solomon, we are prepared to understand the ways in which his presentation of this subject is personal. But as we saw with Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, when sometimes Poussin’s subject is unprecedented, it is difficult to interpret his work. Viewing drawings yields aesthetic pleasure. You enjoy exquisite presentations of flesh and textile garments, subtle figural compositions, and of course appreciate the marvelous ways that the greater artists rework traditional motifs in pursuit of stylistic development. In reaction to this tradition, a great deal of modernist and more recent art presents aggressively rebarbative subjects often made using deskilling, the rejection of traditional drawing skills. In place of the fine drawing of Delacroix or Watteau, for example, we get the silk screening of Rauschenberg and Warhol. Bussmann’s own graphic style characteristically occupies a middle position, neither subtly refined nor wildly transgressive. Her visual skills are at the service of her subjects, and because it often takes a great deal of patience to identify these philosophical subjects, almost inevitably this looking process is prolonged. And so, Bussmann’s drawings hold your attention. Like old master artworks, they thus inspire aesthetic contemplation. When she depicts machinery, people, or vegetation, the goal is to present philosophical themes. And she has to invent her own iconography as she goes, which makes her development unpredictable. We are looking at a famous small old master painting that is in the Wallace Collection, London. Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1634) shows four graceful dancing figures clothed in classical garments. At the bottom left is a child blowing bubbles and at the right an old man with wings playing a lyre and

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another child, this one holding an hour glass. And in the sky above the dark clouds, a brilliantly lit figure rides his chariot. At the right the figure of Time strums his lyre accompanied by a putto … whose counterpart at the left … blows bubbles. Above, Apollo, holding the circle of the zodiac, drives his chariot across the sky. He is led by Aurora, goddess of the dawn, and trailed by figures of the Hours. In the centre, three women and a man join hands in a dance. They symbolize the conditions of human life. (Verdi 2020: 144)

The women stand for Pleasure, Luxury, and Labor with a male youth representing Poverty. Poussin’s painting thus has a literal subject, and also this allegorical significance. The two layers of the subject, figurative and allegorical are intermingled in a composition that, while readable literally, also has obvious symbolic significance. A Dance presents an allegory about the passage of time. Part of the brilliant success of this picture lies in the way that Poussin uses dancing figures to convey his meaning. You don’t need any knowledge of classical mythology to grasp the significance of a dance in relation to the passage of time. In the Wallace Poussin, we see the dancers and from their arrangement infer the symbolic meaning. The harmonious pose of the dancers amplifies the significance of a dance to the music of time. By contrast, as we have said, Bussmann’s philosophical drawings really have only one level, that of their philosophical content. And so, without knowledge of their subject, which often depends upon the titles or inscriptions, it would be hard to know what to make of them. Imagine that the title of any Bussmann drawing that we have interpreted were to be lost and you will understand this problem. Sometimes with figurative painting, it’s instructive to compare and contrast the ways that different artists depict the same motifs. We can see how Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin, two French-born residents of Rome, depicted the Compagna. And thanks to a very thorough comparison of the paintings of Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne during the years they worked together side by side in a Museum of Modern Art exhibition, it’s possible to contrast their works in close detail (Pissarro 2005). They depicted the very same motifs in strikingly personal ways. Analogously, if other artists take up Bussmann’s subjects, it will be very useful, for example, to learn how they depict The Visible and the Invisible, the Tractatus, or Spinoza’s account of Affects. One would expect that these subjects too could be depicted in personal styles. We are looking at a drawing on white paper that is fifteen inches wide and seven inches high. Within this horizontally oriented rectangle, the top half of a



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semicircle bounds a form that is divided right down the center by a vertical black line. The center portion has a thin grey background, red on the left, pale green on the right. And at the far left and right are areas of red, on the left, and white on the right. These colors are flat and thin. Two ovals are mounted vertically, one at the far left and the other toward the right. And one ellipse is turned so as to touch the oval on the right and intersect with the one on the left. This is a complicated arrangement of simple regular curved and straight forms. A stable composition, it has the feeling of sweet inevitability. We are viewing the drawing by Robert Mangold for a painting, circa 1995. His goal was to create nonfigurative forms that are neither graceful nor awkward, using subdued colors. It’s easy to conjure up historical precedents with the perspectival constructions of early Renaissance frescoes. And of course the shaped canvas also has obvious historical resonances. Still it would be a mistake to identify any specific meaningful correspondences with such older works. Mangold wanted to create purely abstract art, paintings that feel neutral because they have no visually obvious subject. He worked in series, creating a motif that then he painted in various colors until he exhausted its potential. Mangold came of age as an artist in the 1960s, in the era of minimalism when the expressive gestural Abstract Expressionism tradition felt exhausted. He sought a cooler, more nuanced sensibility. And he also made drawings like the one we view, small versions of his big paintings (Carrier 1996b). Now we are looking at a very different drawing. It shows a small image of the Statue of Liberty, which is in the waters of the New York harbor, at the center (Figure 29). And on all four sides are diverse bits of contemporary constructions: what looks like a spaceship at the top right; bits of skyscrapers at the bottom right edge; a dock at the lower left; and what may be a construction crane at the upper left hand edge. This is one of Bussmann’s drawings for the concordance of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. And here we find that she builds upon the model of her French Dictionary: The Words I Did Not Look For. At the upper left hand corner are the words “alle” and the number “426.” “Alle,” “all,” is one of the most common German words and so it’s unsurprising that according to the concordance it appears 426 times in Wittgenstein’s short book. When a word occurs just a few times in the Tractatus, then the German-language concordance is essential. But “Alle”, “all,” appears too often to be a useful reference. That’s the essential clue. This drawing shows everything—that is its subject. Wittgenstein claimed to offer a radical revisionist metaphysics. Her drawing reminds us, however, that even the most original philosophical book must make use of our common vocabulary. That’s the only way that even so original a philosopher

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Figure 29  Wittgenstein, Concordance. All. © Maria Bussmann.

as Wittgenstein can communicate. In that elliptical way, Bussmann’s drawing describes her philosophical subject. Just from looking, you cannot tell the subject of an artwork; nor, indeed, whether it has a subject at all. Mangold’s inherently abstract works have no subjects. By contrast, even when Bussmann’s drawings look like abstractions,



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they always have subjects. And yet mostly her subjects are not the subjects of traditional figurative art; rather, at least in most of the cases we have discussed. When a drawing shows a landscape or a historical theme, usually identifying that subject is relatively easy. But her philosophical subjects are harder to identify. What does one of Wittgenstein’s propositions look like? That question, which I mean altogether literally, can be a show-stopper.

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The philosopher seeks a general definition of art, an analysis that identifies the necessary and sufficient conditions picking out all art made anywhere, anytime. And so, as philosophers, we want to compare and contrast Danto’s and Arendt’s definitions of art. What are their comparative strengths and weaknesses, and what does that comparison reveal about Bussmann’s artworks? Arendt didn’t publish a treatise on aesthetics. But although there’s no equivalent to his Transfiguration of the Commonplace among her books, her philosophy does provide the basis for aesthetics. And so, I will use Bussmann’s art to help envisage what that treatise could say. This book began with a discussion of philosophical skepticism. We saw why it’s important for philosophers to demonstrate how beliefs are justified. And we identified the link of skepticism to aesthetics. The claim that a banal artifact like Warhol’s Brillo Box is an artwork is readily questioned. It’s easy to imagine why a Nicolas Poussin painting, with its elaborate historical subject; a Camille Pissarro depicting a marvelous cityscape; or a Jackson Pollock, with his skilled allover brushwork: why they should be artworks. They have intriguing, special objects. But a Brillo box is such an ordinary thing, and there are so many of them. Why, then should Andy Warhol’s mere copy of such a banal artifact be an artwork? And so we have considered how for Danto, aesthetics involves demonstrating that such artifacts can be artworks. Here, then, we return to again discuss skepticism but from a new angle. Now we are looking at the art of Bussmann and the aesthetic theory of Hannah Arendt. Bussmann asserts that philosophy is her subject. But the skeptic can readily question that claim. And so, we need to show that indeed it’s possible for her to depict such subjects. To do that, we need to defeat the skeptic’s arguments. As we have said, there’s no question

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but that Bussmann’s works are art. But how interesting they are depends upon how successful they are at presenting her subjects. Just as it’s easy to question whether Brillo Box is an artwork, so it’s not difficult to ask whether Bussmann really has succeeded in creating images of philosophical subjects. The concerns of skepticism that we considered at the start have thus not gone away but merely been displaced. Let’s construct another thought experiment. Arnold, an artist who lives and works in Budapest, is a philosopher who makes drawings. He is interested in Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, Spinoza’s treatment of emotions in Ethics, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. And so, he alternates between reading philosophy and trying to make art. “So far,” Arnold recently said, “I have not yet succeeded in depicting any of these philosophical subjects.” But he is patient. And so, he hopes that with perseverance he may succeed in this difficult task. It happens that Arnold visits Vienna and wanting career advice he seeks out Bussmann. Having heard about her images of philosophical subjects, he is hopeful of learning from her. He retrieves some of his drawings to show her. And then, to their mutual astonishment, it turns out that his drawings are indiscernible from hers. How in the world is that possible? Since they both are philosophers, they sit down to discuss this puzzling situation. The skeptic, who asks whether Bussmann succeeds in presenting her philosophical subjects will take a keen interest in this dispute. At the start of our inquiry, we asked what was involved in representing the claims of Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein. Now after we have developed our interpretations, that question reappears. What reason have we to think that Bussmann succeeded and Arnold fails when, in fact, their drawings are indistinguishable? Arnold regrets that he has failed, while Bussmann is pleased to have succeeded. How exactly should we articulate this difference? What do the beliefs of the artist contribute here to understanding their actions? Indeed, should we believe both of them, one of them or neither of them? To ask that question another way: could it be possible that she succeeds while he fails? This is a puzzling situation. What is going on here? Unusually there is a connection between an artist’s intentions and what he depicts. Constable intended to depict Wivenhoe Park in his 1816 painting Wivenhoe Park, and in fact that was what he depicted. Sometimes, of course, artists fail to depict their intended subject. Someone might lack the necessary skill. Or an artist might, for example, doodle while reading and discover that he had unintentionally made a portrait of Kant. These examples show: that an artist intends to present some subject is neither a necessary nor a sufficient

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condition for success. And so, knowing that Arnold thinks that he has failed, while Bussmann believes that she has succeeded doesn’t solve this puzzle. Often if you say that you did something, your claim is accepted without discussion. But not always! It’s especially tempting to question what you say when it seems implausible. If you claim to be able to levitate, then we want to see proof! How then should we understand skepticism about the claim that Bussmann has presented philosophical subjects? Intentions play a large role in determining an artist’s subjects, but they don’t tell the whole story: that’s the crucial lesson. In that way, making representations is like human action in general. Typically, but not always, there is a connection between intentionality and bodily actions. Normally when I will to raise my hand, my hand goes up. Sometimes, however, that action fails. When my hand is asleep, for example, I can’t raise it. And my hand can go up involuntarily if someone else forcefully lifts it. Consider again Ernst Gombrich’s account of Constable’s Wivenhoe Park. As Gombrich emphasizes, by 1816, the traditions of landscape painting were well developed. What then do we mean, Gombrich asks, when we say that the painting or a photograph “is like the landscape it represents?” (1961: 34). When we contrast a pale print and a contrast print, two rather different recent photographs of the site, or look at Constable’s varied drawings; and when we consider all the complications inherent in representation, which show that “all paintings must be interpretations” (1961: 384): then we recognize how complex is any plausible answer to this question. Wivenhoe Park is a truthful representation of its subject, Wivenhoe Park, so Gombrich concludes, because it gives the viewer who knows the codes a great deal of truthful information about its subject. Analogously Bussmann’s drawings are truthful translations of her philosophical subjects because they give a viewer who knows the codes a great deal of truthful information about those subjects. When properly cued, we see in them illustrations of these philosophical subjects. Gombrich discusses a copy of Wivenhoe Park by an eleven-year-old child, his niece: The copy is really a tidy enumeration of the principal items of the picture, particularly those which would interest a child—the cows, the trees, the swans on the lake, the fence, the house behind the lake. What has been missed, or much underrated, are the modifications which these classes of things undergo when seen from different angles or in different light. (1961: 293–4)

He explains very clearly why this copy, reproduced in color in Art and Illusion, differs from the original Constable. Details mark it as a recognizable child’s

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picture. Imagine, then, another more extreme case. A Marxist painter, inspired by John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840, announces that in his version of Wivenhoe Park Constable’s image of the splendid stately house, “that damned mansion of the oppressors of the people” as he puts it, will be replaced by an honest hut for the hard-working laborers. Here, as with the child’s image, we have an explanation of why this artist’s picture differs from Constable’s. There are diverse ways of presenting, or translating as you will, this basic landscape subject. Whatever our view of skeptical arguments about making representations, we often can compare and contrast the image and what it depicts, as Gombrich does with Wivenhoe Park. But there is no equivalent familiar way in which we can compare and contrast a representation of a philosophical system to the world. Of course, Wittgenstein and the other philosophers we discussed aspire to show the world as it really is. But as I have said, we can’t just see if their claims are valid. Danto says that there are three kinds of entities: subjects, world, and representations. Subjects act upon the world and, when we are acted upon by the world, that experience produces representations. And so, his diagram gives an accurate picture of his philosophical system. Some philosophers believe that there are only subjects and representations. Their worldview could be presented with a two-part diagram. Other philosophers claim that there are only subjects and world. And so, their worldview would be shown by a different two-part diagram, one without any representations. (That in effect is Merleau-Ponty’s view.) As we have seen, Danto’s diagram can be converted into an artwork. In fact, in all these three cases, a philosophical system can be represented in an artwork. Of course, this diagram doesn’t describe the intricate details of action and mental representation, which he works out. But then again, neither does Wivenhoe Park tell us everything about Wivenhoe Park. Representations are always selective. Just as Constable cannot transpose every feature of his landscape subject onto a pigmented canvas; so Bussmann cannot present every aspect of these elaborate verbalized philosophical theories in her drawings. Like figurative representations, her images are selective presentations. Here we have an answer to the skeptic who worries about our account of Bussmann: the test of her art’s ability to present these subjects lies in its capacity to present a great deal of information about philosophical subjects. Just as Constable tells you what surrounds the house, the lake and the landscape in Wivenhoe Park, so Bussmann’s drawings reveal many of the arguments of Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. In that way, her artworks thus are commentaries on these philosophical writings.

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What then can be said about Arnold’s drawings? It’s tempting to appeal to an analogy with Danto’s distinction between Brillo Box and the Brillo box. Just as the former is an artwork but the visually indistinguishable artifact is not, so Bussmann’s drawings are artworks whose subjects are philosophy but Arnold’s, by his own admission, are not. This proposal takes seriously Danto’s claim that an artwork is not defined purely by its visual qualities. But upon reflection, it’s clear that something has gone wrong here. If our description of Bussmann’s drawings convinces us that they have philosophical subjects, then why isn’t the same true of Arnold’s drawings? Could Arnold have failed to understand what he has achieved? The analogy with the account we’ve presented of Brillo Box doesn’t directly answer these questions. Ordinarily there is an intimate connection between what a skilled artist intends to depict and what is represented. Knowing that an artist intends to depict Wivenhoe Park, we see her image as showing the pond, trees, and so forth. And knowing that Gombrich’s niece was eleven, we interpret her image accordingly. Constable’s image could be copied in diverse pictorial styles—by a Chinese scroll artist, a Persian painter of miniatures, and so on. What happens, then, if someone presents us with a work in the style of Malevich’s famous suprematist compositions and proclaims that she has depicted Wivenhoe Park? Here, surely it’s obvious that something has gone seriously wrong. How could an image with blue, yellow, and red rectangles be a representation of Wivenhoe Park? When an artist says “I intend to depict X,” then we expect to find some visual connection between what she says and the image she makes. And that’s compatible, on one hand, with having diverse styles of representation, and, on the other, making what look like representations by accident. The connection between intention and image is not indefinitely elastic. If this last reasoning is correct, then it maybe explains why the intellectual confrontation between Arnold and Bussmann is so puzzling. Usually there is some obvious connection between what someone does and what they say they are doing. When there isn’t, we ask critical questions. If you see me extending my left hand straight out when we are biking together, then you know that I signal my intention to make a left turn. If, however, you hear me mumble in Mandarin, then you probably don’t know what to expect. Could I be looking for a Chinese restaurant? In the case of representing Wivenhoe Park, we allow a wide range of responses to count as depicting that site. There are, after all, many systems of representation. But in the case of Arnold’s and Bussmann’s philosophical subjects, we have much less idea of what to look for. That’s one reason why skepticism is philosophically interesting in this case. It’s not absurd to imagine that we have

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failed to properly identify Bussmann’s subjects. And here, as is more generally true in philosophy, responding to the skeptic’s concerns doesn’t mean that we can offer a knockdown resolution to these puzzles. Skepticism won’t easily go away. And perhaps if it did, philosophy would go with it. But before we give up, it’s possible for me to say a bit more that may be helpful here. We’re accustomed to thinking that philosophy frequently influences art making. Artists read or are told about bookish theorizing and apply these ideas to their art. Hence the claims that the Postimpressionists learned from contemporary optical theory or, alternatively, from anarchist philosophy; that Cubism was influenced by Einstein’s relativity theory; and that Abstract Expressionism is an artistic manifestation of Marxist theories of political action. Sometimes we can trace direct influences. We know, for example, from his correspondence that Camille Pissarro took an interest in anarchism. On other occasions, however, this theorizing appeals to speculative accounts of the Zeitgeist. Knowing that Albert Einstein upset traditional ideas of space and time, it’s possible to look at Cubism to find traces of his revolutionary ways of thinking. On this view, Braque and Picasso didn’t need to read physics to be influenced by relativity theory. A culture has a certain unity that embraces everyone living within it. Let’s consider a contemporary example. In our bookish visual culture, where artists get academic training in art school, it’s natural that philosophical theorizing makes its way into studio life. We are looking at a work by one of these painters. It appears to be a strange abstraction. The field is divided horizontally. And on the top, which is ochre, are sitting two black squares of different sizes. And on the bottom half of the picture, which is light gray, is one pale white square, corrected by red lines to the black squares above. Peter Halley writes, “Two Cells with Conduit and Underground Chamber (1983) emphasizes the role of the model within the simulacrum” (1988: 102). Quoting Jean Baudrillard, whose account of simulation was influential then, he explains, “In my work, space is considered just such a digital field in which are situated “cells” with simulated stucco texture from which flow irradiated “conduits.” He relates his painting to the development several generations ago of geometric abstraction. “Where once geometry provided a sign of stability, order, and proportion, today it offers an array of shifting signifieds and images of confinement and deterrence” (1988: 75). Halley thus explains why his cells have a very different meaning from the otherwise somewhat similar abstractions of 1930s painters. And he claims that Two Cells is a representation of the subjects of Baudrillard and Michel Foucault. As Constable’s Wivenhoe Park has as its subject that

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country estate, so Halley’s apparent abstractions also are figurative works but with abstract-looking subjects. Such works are possible because of what he calls “the great geometric orderings of industrial society,” which came about when “space became geometrically differentiated and partitioned” (1988: 78). Sometimes intellectual life is nicely inflected by most unexpected coincidence. Can philosophy be influenced by the practice of visual art, with the relationship thus working the other way around from how it’s usually understood? That idea’s not been much considered. Recently, however, Malcolm Bull offered a well-staged, highly original argument. His Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth: Vico and Neapolitan Painting (2013) presents a highly suggestive way of understanding the relationship between painting and philosophy. And this way of thinking is ideally suited to understanding Bussmann’s achievement. (One of his inspirations was my Truth and Falsehood in Visual Imagery, co-authored with Mark Roskill.) Bull developed his account without knowing anything about Bussmann’s art. She, in turn, developed her art without any knowledge of Bull’s theorizing. But since I have the remarkable good fortune, true luck it is, to know the work of both of these people, I am in the happy position to apply his theorizing to her art. As I noted earlier, in the usual art histories later artists are by what came earlier. And often these visual artists are said to be affected by philosophical ideas. Usually, Bull notes, we think that painters are influenced by philosophers but not vice versa. But the arguments of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), so Bull persuasively argues, were heavily influenced by contemporary painting. Here, then, this process of influencing goes the other way around, that is, from the art to philosophy. Vico doesn’t devote much explicit attention to visual art. But he was very familiar with Neapolitan painting, which was omnipresent in his everyday environment, and in many ways that Bull spells out, his published argumentation draws upon that knowledge. To understand Vico’s writings, Bull argues, you need to see how they draw upon Neapolitan art. Then perhaps those paintings themselves deserve a place within the history of philosophy. In which case, rather than being an art historical dead end, the Neapolitan baroque turns out to have been the site of a significant artistic and intellectual exchange, perhaps one of the passages through which modern consciousness was formed. (2013: 122)

Thanks in part to living among the very plentiful displays of baroque paintings in Naples, Vico created a historicist way of thinking. His New Science developed an important, influential account of the idea that diverse cultures have essentially

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different ways of making and understanding art. We cannot, he argued, understand work from other periods without taking into account these changes in the goals of artists. In his own day, Vico was totally neglected. But then he had a very large posthumous influence on nineteenth-century thinking about cultural history. And so through development by Hegel’s followers, Marx, and many other later writers who were much influenced by them, his ideas came to have a highly important place in the development of contemporary visual thinking. To take one of many examples, you cannot understand the enormously influential claims of Clement Greenberg without acknowledging his uses of historicist thinking, which are self-consciously adapted from this Marxist-Hegelian tradition. Thanks to its seminal influence on Vico, Neapolitan painting thus decisively influenced modernist theorizing about artistic historicism. Analogously, I have been suggesting throughout this book, Bussmann’s drawings of philosophical subjects are artworks that make substantial philosophical claims. Any philosopher would be proud to have developed these major claims about these important issues in aesthetic theory. Bussmann has done that in her visual art. Here, then, as with Vico, visual art influences philosophical theorizing. The aim of my book is to open up discussion, without claiming to close off inquiry, or prematurely resolve discussion. Bussmann’s drawings matter to the art critic because they are visually deeply fascinating. And they deserve attention by the philosopher because they suggest how to stage a marvelous novel aesthetic theory. These two concerns, this book has argued, are internally connected: because these drawings present visually philosophical arguments, they are fascinating. In the personal preface I discussed my intellectual background, to explain how I came to have a real fascination in Bussmann’s drawings. I indicated how my particular training in philosophy led me to respond to her work. Now, in conclusion, again adopting a personal note, I tell what as a philosopher I have learned from her art. Bussmann’s drawings suggest how to contrast the philosophical claims of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. They have taught me how to develop Arendt’s novel definition of art. And they have suggested some limitations about the way that Danto thinks about contemporary art’s history, showing how radically original art is possible right now. Finally, she offers a useful way of thinking about the question that concerned me long ago in graduate school: what is the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy? Her presentation of Arendt-drawings, so we have seen, motivates an alternative definition of art, which deserves serious consideration. Visual art, she thus demonstrates,

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is not merely a subject for philosophical interpretation. It can, also, creatively contribute to our understanding of aesthetic theory. The writings of Kant, Hegel, and Merleau-Ponty help us to identify the nature of art. So too do the drawings of Bussmann, whose artworks thus open up inquiry into the practice and prospects of aesthetics. The body of this book has been devoted to describing the philosophical implications of Bussmann’s artworks. But that achievement would matter ultimately very little were she not an extraordinary draftsman, an artist who can, when she wishes, make showstopping images that have no need for elaborate support from philosophy. Look if you will at her untitled recent drawing (Figure 30). Eagles, so we read in the news, are being trained to attack drones (Bussmann and Jürgensen 2022: frontispiece). Here, however, we see a dove and a drone. And the caption at the bottom presents this as a struggle of nature against reason, thought, and knowledge. It’s not obvious how this conflict might be resolved. If Bussmann were asked to design a cover for Theodor Adorno’s Dialectics of Enlightenment, she could use this image. For all of her obvious modesty implied by her chosen focus on relatively small drawings, Bussmann is a very ambitious artist. She takes on grand themes and wrestles with them. Out of seemingly slight materials, small informal drawings, she has made art deserving of close-sustained attention. In a fine phrase,

Figure 30  The Dove and the Drone. © Maria Bussmann.

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Merleau-Ponty says that his philosophy “becomes gesture when, in Cézanne’s words, he thinks in painting” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 139). To modify those words, Bussmann, one might say, thinks in drawing. If philosophy can be an artist’s subject, as she proposes, then the story of contemporary art looks very different than we expected. Bussmann’s drawings can thus cause us to rethink our settled aesthetic theorizing. And that is a considerable achievement. In a recent essay, Thomas Micchelli, alluding to Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, speaks of how art can resonate “with a past and future not of the artist’s choosing,” in a way that “affirms(s) our common humanity” (Micchelli 2020: 237). That’s a perfect description of what Bussmann’s works accomplish.

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176

Index American Society for Aesthetics 13–15 Apuleius 23–4 Arendt, Hannah xii, 19, 50, 91–104, 107, 109–10, 115, 136, 157 Arnold 158, 161 Auerbach, Frank 26 Barrell, John, 160 Barthes, Roland 24 Baudelaire, Charles 2, 37, 95 Baxandall, Michael xvi Benjamin, Walter 19, 95, 117, 136, 137 Bennett, Jonathan 49 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 22 Black, Max 7, 65 Blunt, Anthony xxvi, 149 Borges, Jorge Luis 128 Bostridge, Ian 30 Brookner, Anton 26 Bull, Malcolm xxvii–xxviii, 163 Bussmann, Maria Drawings of Baruch de Spinoza’s Ethic 43, 149– Franz in Florida, a Different Winter’s Journey 141 Franz in Florida (the crow) 15–16 Franz in Florida (post horn) 29–30 French Dictionary 36 French Dictionary: Clean Up xxi–xxii French Dictionary: Survivor xvii–xviii French Dictionary: Harshly 139–40 Hegel. Coral 106–7 Hegel: Philosophical trees 3–5 Heidegger, Search for the Origin (clearing) 98–9 Homage to Hannah Arendt 93 I Have Never Been to Japan (donkey) 23–4 I Have Never Been to Japan (room) 31–2 Lucy’s Toys (Kant and Arendt) 91–2Merleau-Ponty 2, Body Holes 82–3

Merleau-Ponty, Facing Figures. 75–6 Merleau-Ponty, Reflexive Turn 2 86–7 Merleau-Ponty, To Touch and Be Touched 81–2 Merleau-Ponty, Two Outlined Figures 73–4 Merleau-Ponty, Two Senses 85–6 Robert Musil’s Flypaper 33–5 Search for the Origin of the Work of Art or on the Way to Heidegger’s Cabin 98 Spinoza. Affection 43–4 Spinoza. Affects 54–5 Spinoza. Ambition 46–7 Spinoza. Anger 52–3 Spinoza. Dislike 45– The Dove and the Drone 165 Wittgenstein, Concordance 153–4 Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 2.151 64–5 Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 3.03, 3.031 69–70 Wittgenstein, Tractatus. 3.25 61–3 Wittgenstein,Tractatus. 4.461 6–7 Wittgenstein, Tractatus. Look At 55–6 Callot, Jacques xvi, xviii Caravaggio, Michelangelo. Seven Acts of Mercy 143–4 The Conversion of Paul xvi–xvii Cargill, Howard 138 Carracci, Annibale 141–2 Carroll, Lawrence xii, 105–14, 135 Cavell, Stanley x, xv Cézanne, Paul 78–80, 84, 89 Clark, T. J. 92–3 Constable, John 26, 96, 158–9, 160, 162–3 Czurda. Elfriede 24, 32 Danto, Arthur x–xi, xii, xiii–xiv, xxiv–xxv, 5–6, 15, 17–18, 22, 39, 39–40, 49–50, 77–8, 80, 86, 88, 101, 103, 109–10,

178 110–11, 113, 117–18, 119, 124–5, 126–7, 127–9, 135, 136, 139, 157, 160 Derrida, Jacques 21, 100 Descartes, René ix, xiii, 21, 80, 87, 111 Duchamp, Marcel xi Escher, M. C. 67 Freedberg, Sydney 20 Friedrich, Caspar David 125 Giannone, Pietro 48 Giorgione 48–9 Giotto 49–50 Goldberg, Rube 73 Gombrich, E. H. 9, 32, 70, 96, 115, 127, 159 Goodman, Nelson 112 Gorey, Edward 37 Gould, Glenn 25 Greenberg, Clement 104, 135, 147, 164 Haden-Guest, Anthony 119 Halley, Peter 162 Hampshire, Stuart 17, 133 Heaton, John and Groves, Judy 121–2 Hegel, G. W. F. 3, 4, 7–8, 37, 107–8, 120, 121 Heidegger, Martin x, xxiii–xxiv, 19, 24, 26, 27, 38, 92, 98, 101–2, 133–4 Henrich, Dieter 4, 133 Herriman, George 91 Hogarth, William 32 Huntington, Daniel 1–2 Itchō, Hanabusa 35 Jameson, Fredric 100, 138 Kant, Immanuel 4–5, 11, 21, 26, 72, 92 Karmel, Pepe 129–30 Kierkegaard, Søren xv Kitaj, R. B. 117 Klee, Paul 136–8 Hilma af Klint 129–30 Kul-Want, Christopher and Klimowski, Andrzej 122

Index Legros, Alphonse 53–4, 56–7 Liszt, Franz 25 Loran, Earle 124 Mangold, Robert 152–3 Masaniello 47, 132 Matisse, Henri 67 Menzel, Adolph 93 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 21–2, 73–89 Michelangelo xviii Motherwell, Robert 123 Musil, Robert 35 Nagel, Thomas x, 78, 125 Nehamas, Alexander, 39 Nietzsche, Friedrich 39 Ovid 22, 106, 141 Pater, Walter 53–4 Perec, Georges 25 Pinkard, Terry 125–6 Pissarro, Camille 58 Pollock, Jackson 147 Poussin, Nicolas 29, 45–6, 47, 57, 120, 144, 149–50, 151 A Dance to the Music of Time 151–2 Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun 9–11, 144, 151 The Judgment of Solomon 148–9 Time and truth conquering envy and despair 57 Proust, Marcel 24–5, 33, 37 Quaytman, Harvey 137, 139 Quine, W. V. Orman 18 Rembrandt 131 Richter, Gerhard 142 Rorty, Richard xxiv Rossini, Gioachino 25 Rothko, Mark 58 Russell, Bertrand 123 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5–6, 8, 77–8, 80, 86 Schapiro, Meyer 78–9, 98–100, 130–1 Schubert, Franz 16 Scully, Sean xx, 57, 66, 123, 131–2

Index Backs and Fronts xx–xxi, xxii Irelande 61 Searle, John 21 Sedlmayr, Hans 19 Shakespeare, William 25, 107 Sharr, Adam 98 Spiegelman, Art 122 Spinoza 131, 149 A Political Treatise 48, 54 Ethics 43–54, 123, 133 Staniszewski, Mary Anne 142 Steinberg, Leo xviii–xix, 137 Steinberg, Saul 14, 70 Steiner, Rudolf 129–30 Tansey, Mark 115 Testa, Piero 116–17 Todes, Samuel xxiii, 77 Vaccaro, Domenico Antonio 116–17 Van Gogh, Vincent 98–100

179

Vasari, Giorgio 18, 20 Vico, Giambattista xi, 116, 163–4 Viennese Association for Private Music Performances 25–6 Warburg, Aby 140, 142–3 Warhol, Andy Brillo Box xi, 109, 110, 112, 119, 157 Weinberg, Jonathan 51 Wessmann, Alan 96 Westman, Barbara 2–3, 119 White, Hayden 41 Wind, Edgar 121 Winnicott, D. W. 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig xii, 6, 7–8, 21–2, 38, 55, 56–7, 61–72, 88, 121–2, 123–4, 129 Wollheim, Richard xiv, xv, xxiii, 46, 52, 125 Woolf, Virginia 23

180