Incomprehensible Certainty

Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image

Thomas Pfau

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780268202477
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Thomas Pfau's study of images and visual experience is a tour de force linking Platonic metaphysics to modern phenomenology and probing literary, philosophical, and theological accounts of visual experience from Plato to Rilke.

Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the "image" ( eik?n ) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our "lifeworld, " Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato's later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function—namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, Cézanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau's previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.

Part I

IMAGE THEORY AS METAPHYSICS AND THEOLOGY

The Emergence of a Tradition

1

A BRIEF METAPHYSICS OF THE IMAGE

Plato—Plotinus

Mute is the Delphian god, and desolate, long now deserted

Lie the pathways where once, while hopes would gently escort him

Up walked the questioning man to the town of the truth-loving seer.

But the light above speaks kindly to mortals as ever,

Full of promises, hints, and the great Thunderer’s voice, it

Cries: do you think of me?

[Stumm ist der delphische Gott, und einsam liegen und öde,

Längst die Pfade, wo einst, von Hoffnungen leise geleitet,

Fragend der Mann zur Stadt des redlichen Sehers heranstieg.

Aber droben das Licht, es spricht noch heute zu den Menschen,

Schöner Deutungen voll und des großen Donnerers Stimme

Ruft es: denket ihr mein?]

—Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Archipelago”

OF IDOLS AND ANICONICISM: THE ONTOLOGICAL AMBIVALENCE OF THE IMAGE IN PLATO’S REPUBLIC

Any inquiry into how images, and visible phenomena more generally, bear on human cognition will have to begin with Plato. For his dialogic exploration of the nature and function of images fundamentally breaks with the way that archaic and early Athenian Greek culture had conceived of visual appearance and presentation. Prior to the fourth century, as Jean-Pierre Vernant has shown, the image is not yet conceived in terms of “imitation” (mimēsis) but as a form of simulation, be it in the form of a mime’s theatrical performance, an eidōlon conjuring an apparition or optical illusion, or a totemic substitute for the absent god (what Pausanias refers to as a choanon). Exemplary in this regard is Odysseus’s encounter with his mother, Anticlea, in the underworld: “And I, my mind in turmoil, how I longed / to embrace my mother’s spirit, dead as she was! / Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her, / three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away / like a shadow, dissolving like a dream.”¹ The visual phenomenon here is presented as entirely unreal, a mere “shadow” (skia) whose illusory nature is confirmed by Odysseus’s failed attempts to embrace it. Hence, insofar as such “pure ‘semblance’ . . . has no other reality than this similitude in relation to what it is not,” we are not yet presented with an image, either in the archaic sense of an idol or in the philosophical sense of the icon. Whereas in Homer moments of conspicuous visuality remain apparitional or shadowy, thus suggesting that the image in question lacks any objective correlate, the situation in Plato’s dialogues is fundamentally changed. Here the stress is consistently and “emphatically put on the relationship between the image and the thing of which it is the image, on the relationship of resemblance that joins and yet distinguishes the two.”² Indeed, as we proceed through relevant passages in his dialogues, it becomes apparent that during some twenty-five hundred years of pondering the image’s legitimacy (or lack thereof) the debate has remained fundamentally within the orbit of Platonic thought.

That this should be so is due, at least in part, to Plato’s deeply equivocal and gradually evolving understanding of how “appearances” (ta phainomena) relate to concrete “beings” (ta onta), to Being (to on), and, ultimately, to that which “lies beyond Being” (epekeina tēs ousias, Rep. 509b)—namely, the Good (to agathon). Given the indirect, often ironic, and performatively self-aware nature of Socratic dialogue, the following discussion of Plato’s theory of the image will have to dwell on various paradoxes arising from his deceptively forthright rejection of images (ta eidōla) in Book 10 of the Republic, paradoxes left unresolved until Plato succeeded in working out a comprehensive dialectical account of Being and non-being (mē on) in his Parmenides and, especially, in the Sophist.³ A first, fairly obvious paradox concerns the fact that, for all his professed hostility to images and mere appearance, Socrates throughout Plato’s writings makes copious and often highly inventive use of images, including conventional rhetorical tropes such as the statesman piloting the ship of state or the commonplace figure of the sun as an image of the good, though also other, elaborately constructed and highly self-reflexive images, such as the winged charioteer in the Phaedrus, the sophist portrayed as angler, the allegory of the cave, or the divided line as an image of our knowledge. Often intricate, such verbal images not only confirm Glaucon’s observation that “words are more malleable than wax and the like” (Rep. 588d) but also reveal “a fine line between the role of words in the formation of a verbal image and their role in the interpretation of that image.”⁴ Indeed, late antiquity frequently takes Plato’s view of images to have been affirmative, such as his contention in the Timaeus that the entire physical and perceptible universe (to pan), far from being a random assemblage of particulars, constitutes an overarching “order [kosmos] . . . modeled after that which is changeless” (29a), for which reason Plato insists that sensible matter is best viewed as a time-bound image of the original form as it obtains in the divine maker’s mind. Hence it cannot surprise to find eighth- and ninth-century Byzantine iconodules resting their defense of images on Platonic motifs even as their iconoclast opponents also invoke his authority to buttress their position.

At least in part, Plato’s equivocal role in this interminable debate stems from the fact that the image’s true valence reveals itself in the hermeneutic presuppositions the beholder brings to it, which more often than not will cause the deeper import of the visible to be misconstrued or missed altogether. As Plato notes in the Phaedrus, while “the soul of every human being has seen reality, . . . not every soul is easily reminded of the reality there by what it finds here.” And even those “fortunate few . . . whose memory is good enough” to recognize and be “startled when they see an image of what they saw up there” will ultimately find that “their experience is beyond their comprehension because they cannot fully grasp what it is that they are seeing” (250b). It is the image’s inherent plenitude, not its alleged deficiency, that accounts for this almost universal failure of visual comprehension. Time and again, Plato’s critique of images reveals that the central problem of mimēsis arises from ignorance of the productive tension in which the image stands vis-à-vis both its beholder and the object depicted. The confusion is further exacerbated by the fact that it appears to have taken Plato some time to work through the implications of image and the world of appearances. Thus, the strident critique of “images” (ta eidōla) advanced in Book 10 of the Republic entangles itself in contradictions whose gradual resolution in later dialogues (Timaeus, Sophist, Parmenides) paradoxically gives rise to the first truly comprehensive theory of the image in Western thought. As a result of the earlier argument’s productive miscarriage—as fine a demonstration of philosophical dialectics as one could ask for—Platonic thought ends up yielding the conceptual groundwork for most future thinking about images. Referencing Republic 10 (598b), Emmanuel Alloa comments that “the entire history of aesthetics . . . could be read as a single hypertrophic footnote to Plato’s original dichotomy,” namely, whether the image seeks to imitate being or its appearance. “In responding to [this dichotomy], aesthetics can either (in Hegelian fashion) frame semblance as the mode of access to Being or, conversely (in a vulgar Nietzschean approach), can unilaterally affirm the omnipotence of semblance.”⁵

As we shall see, Plato ends up demonstrating that the image can never be written off as a self-contained object but, instead, is ontologically (not just functionally) bound up with the very being of which it is the image. As we read in the Timaeus, “Since that for which an image has come to be is not at all intrinsic to the image, which is invariably borne along to picture something else, it stands to reason that the image should therefore come to be in something else, somehow clinging to being” (52c). Having no reality or being independent of the specific relation to both that which it depicts and, no less crucially, its addressee, the image thus mediates for the beholder the real being, which, in turn, furnishes the ontological warrant for such acts of mimēsis to begin with. Hence, as Plato appears to have realized only after completing the Republic, images must not be lumped together with other discrete objects (ta onta); for they are not fungible with what they depict but, instead, have independent ontological standing. In ways that remain to be scrutinized further, the image is relational (pros alla), for which reason “the measure by which we may appraise its valence must be sought in the being that it depicts. When measured against what has been depicted, it becomes evident that the image is other than, though not the other of what it depicts.”⁶

It is this decisive qualification, consistently overlooked by iconoclasts through the ages, that takes us to another paradox. For insofar as images neither stand autonomously apart from what they depict nor simply coincide with it, they demand of their beholder a commitment to interpretation that, even as it originates in an act of visual apprehension, can be brought to conclusion only in rational speech (logos). An image, then, is never a correlate of perception alone but, instead, a fusion of intuition, perception, and judgment: “To lend [images] an essence is to interpret them as the appearance of a coherent but non-appearing sense; to lend them existence is to interpret them as the index of existing things. Images crave this double interpretation, without which they would be incomprehensible. They cannot interpret themselves.” Hence, the reality of images is inextricably bound up with hermeneutic labor, that is, with a process of discernment ultimately consummated in some kind of articulate, meaningful, and revelatory speech or writing; and as Plato discovers, to meet this hermeneutic challenge is to concede that the image cannot be dismissed as mere “non-being” but, instead, possesses incontrovertible reality: “Images are altogether manifest. To deny them is impossible.” And yet “it is scarcely possible to describe their reality: they are not nothing, since they occur as images.” Instead, they “float without fixity between being and nothingness.”⁷

As the relation between visible things (ta onta) and their imitation in images (ta eidōla) is being rethought in the Sophist, it emerges that the image—the eikōn rather than eidōlon—never truly competes with Being for the same epistemological space. Rather, images are dialectically entwined with being (to on); they mediate its numinous essence for finite intellects and, in so doing, lay the very foundation for empirical and philosophical knowledge alike. Far from constituting a static and insurmountable antinomy, Being and non-being turn out to be part of a single, allencompassing dialectic. Thus, “non-being” (mē on) cannot simply be written off as the sheer negation of Being, a pure “nothing” (ouk on), any more than it can be validated as an entity of wholly independent standing. For in either scenario it would already have to be and, in apparent illogic, would be invested with a reality of its own. Instead, “non-being” (mē on) is intelligible only within a dialectic of revelation and concealment; and as the “visitor” from Elea will demonstrate to Theaetetus in the Sophist, nowhere does this dialectic manifest itself more clearly than in the medium of the image and the unique hermeneutic practice to which it gives rise.

Yet another of Plato’s many paradoxes has to do with the fact that what began as a thoroughgoing critique and refutation of the image ends up yielding an enduring and capacious metaphysical framework for our understanding of it. To that end, Plato’s Sophist not only has to dismantle the Sophists’ approach to knowledge, but, no less crucially, must also exhibit the incoherence of Parmenides’s strictly aniconic conception of knowledge. Neither the physicists’ radical empiricism, nor the Eleatics’ monistic idealism, nor the Sophists’ habit of nominalist equivocation can furnish an adequate model for philosophical inquiry. For each of these positions subverts the possibility of true knowledge of the world. In the case of the Eleatics, the dogmatic claim “that the all is one” denudes Being of all dialectical movement and, in effect, quarantines it from manifest “beings” (ta onta) susceptible of meaningful predication.⁸ Whereas Parmenides asserts that the One encompasses all and therefore cannot be subject to propositions (true or false) that would link it to the many, the Sophists take the obverse stance by maintaining that there can be no such a thing as a truly false proposition; for any such statement, simply taken as an act and event independent of whether its predicate can be verified or not, has already performatively established itself as a reality in its own right. Parmenidean monism fails in that the truth it posits can never become the property of consciousness. Thus, “Being is a phenomenon only when it is at a distance from itself,” when it has been imaged by consciousness; and the task of mimēsis “is precisely to institute the interval whereby Being can appear to itself.” The requirement of phenomenological distance qua presentation, moreover, is not a contingent or elective one but names the condition under which alone Being can become an object of philosophical awareness. Hence, “the dualism of Being and its proper image, which comes to be thought of as the phenomenal condition of Being, cannot be limited in its scope.”⁹

Yet philosophy’s essential task of surpassing monism cannot be solved by the Sophists’ obverse approach either; for to construe Being as merely epiphenomenal to representation, an equivocal mirage projected by the unlimited free play of rhetoric, is not to have explained reality but to have explained it away. “Non-being” (mē on) turns into sheer “nothingness” (ouk on). Hence, for Plato to succeed in forging a middle passage between Parmenides’s hermetic monism and the Sophists’...