Representation through art and language
The value of representation lies in its ability to find meaning in our experience of the world, but how exactly does it do that? The work of Philosophy Professor Michael Morris, examines the relationship between reality and our representation of it through art and language.
The relation between art and reality
What is the relation between representations – in painting or words, for example – and reality? Do representations have to resemble the reality they represent? If so, what would the point of representation be?
The practical application of philosophy lies not in the invention of any new device or the discovery of any new substance, but in rethinking our understanding of the significance of the world and what we do by re-examining the nature of such fundamental things as reason, knowledge, mind, value, and representation.
One aspect of the work of Michael Morris is concerned with the relationship between the true nature of reality and our representation of it through language and art.
The aim of this work is to preserve our sense that the reality that we represent is altogether independent of all representation, and to question the common assumption that representations work by resembling reality.
Representing through language
This common assumption is given its classic expression in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
There Wittgenstein claims that language provides the fundamental means of representation of the world, and that the form of language is the same as the form of the world. This is a slightly startling view, since it means that the world must have something like a grammar.
In order to make sense of it, we find ourselves thinking of language imposing its form – its grammar – onto the world, to create, in a manner of speaking, a new world, a linguistic world.
Two things have happened here, though. First, the world that is represented in language is no longer thought to be really independent of language: what can be represented in language has to have been reshaped by language. And second, we have managed to forget an apparently obvious thing about language: that it is different from what it is used to represent – in particular, in having a grammar.
The same two things happen when the common assumption is applied to artistic representation – in painting, for example. When a new style of painting is introduced, such as impressionism or cubism, at first we find it startling.
Then the idea that the form of the representation must be the same as the form of that which it represents reasserts itself, and we think of the reality that is represented as having been reshaped so that it really does resemble the way it is painted.
Sometimes we think of this as something to do with the way that painters see things: impressionist painters are then thought of as having seen the world in terms of spots of bright colour, and cubist painters as having seen the world as made up of angular shapes.
In order to preserve the idea that the form of representation must be the same as the form of what is represented, we think that what is special about painters is that they have a distinctive kind of vision – instead of thinking the obvious thing, that they have a distinctive ability to use paint.
What is represented is no longer completely independent of the manner of its representation, and everything that is interesting and distinctive about the manner of representation has become just a literal translation of what is represented.
What is really problematic about the assumption that representations must have the same form as that which they represent is that it prevents us from making sense of representations as ways of understanding, or coming to terms with, the real world.
If a representation is to represent the real world – the world as it is entirely independently of representation – then, according to the common assumption, it must lose all of its distinctively representational features.
The result is that we would really do better just looking at the real world and forgetting about representation altogether.
On the other hand, if we want representations to be distinctive, we are forced by the assumption that representations must have the same form as that which they represent to think of representations as a distraction, or relief, from the real world, rather than as a way of making sense of it. We find ourselves making another world, rather than considering the real one.
The aim of Professor Morris's work is to make sense of representation, in both art and language, without accepting the common assumption that representations must have the same form as that which they represent.
This complicates the relation between representation and reality – perhaps even makes it indescribable – but it gives representation back its purpose.
Michael's perspective
Michael Morris, Professor of Philosophy, said: "Three different things came together to make me think about these issues in the way I now do.
"The first wasn't originally to do with philosophy. I used to paint a lot at school, mostly with oils.
"I was always fascinated by the surface of the paint, and came to realise that the surface was crucial for the way paintings worked – even when what was important was that you didn't notice the surface.
"My first book, The Good and the True, was largely concerned with the relation between reality and our concepts of it.
"After I'd finished it, it struck me that I hadn't really made sense of the way that language fitted in: it seemed to have been just stuck onto the concepts, but had no other character.
"Later on, I came to write on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the central claim of which is that language has the same form as the world: in fact, language, thought, and the world all have the same form. I came to see that what was wrong both with my first book and with Wittgenstein's Tractatus was that they made no sense of what had always seemed to me to matter about painting."