Sunday, May 25, 2014
Rembrandt or Matisse: How Do You Know What You Know?
During late nights, after a few beers, or when you want to
wind up your mom, people ask questions such as “How do you know that what you
see is real?” This question is one of the oldest ones in philosophy. The simple
answer is “You don’t”. You trust your instincts to give you a true impression
of the world, and you are wrong, of course. What you see is not reality, but
your construction of it.
Painters have known
this for ages: every painting is a personal rendering of what the artist sees,
what he deems important and what he chooses to ignore. Some schools have taken
this to extremes, such as surrealism.
Take Rene Magritte’s “The Promenades of Euclid”, a singularly clever
painting, skilfully executed. You look out the window and you see a city, with
a street leading off into the distance. The artist has also set up his easel,
but instead of a canvas you see what looks like a glass pane. So did he paint
the view accurately, or is this just what he sees? And is the turret really
there, or something inspired by the shape of the promenade fading into the
distance? Magritte and his surrealist friends would say “It does not matter, it’s
what you want it to be!”
Relativists and deconstructionists have developed this ad
absurdum, negating any meaningful sharing of truth, but a lesson can
nevertheless be learned. Remember the last time you recounted a story from your
childhood, and somebody corrected you, because they remembered it differently?
Or- if such a thing happens in your life- think of your last argument with a friend or spouse. What really happened? Your perceptions differ: you blocked
out what seemed secondary to you, your friend heard what he wanted to hear. In
other words, each of you painted a different picture of the same scene, yours
was a Rembrandt, his was a Matisse. And just as nobody would claim that one of
those painters is more accurate than the other, perceptions of reality vary and
you need to negotiate shared meaning. Maybe before your next altercation,
remember Magritte?
