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Introduction
‘Epistemology’ is about how we know things, and its study is part of what
philosophers do. However, it has been suggested by Ken Wilber, polymath
writer on science and religion, that philosophers suffer from not having a
‘practice’ to underpin their speculations. He says this in respect to the
German Idealist philosophers in particular, that they lacked a ‘yoga’ or
spiritual practice to give weight to their ideas 1.
In contrast both Max Ernst and Ernst Mach had practices, one in art and the
other in physics, which formed the background to their speculations. Neither were philosophers as such, but had philosophical leanings,
which make them useful starting points for questions on the contrasted
epistemologies of art and science.
We are in a time where epistemological questions about art have resurfaced,
perhaps due only to the rather mundane circumstance of a changed attitude to
arts funding in the UK
– it now hinges on art practice as ‘research’. This presents both an
opportunity and a danger – an opportunity to reframe art practice as an
enquiry (or at least to make more explicit the questioning nature of art),
and a danger of falling into a pseudo-scientific mode of investigation. In
this context Ken Wilber again provides us with a useful terminology, that of
‘epistemological pluralism,’ to indicate that different domains of human
activity or enquiry have different methods and different knowledges 2. How then does the
domain of art differ from the domain of science in its epistemology? We shall
attempt to answer this by a close look at the practice of art, using
the example of Max Ernst, and the practice of physics, using the
example of Ernst Mach.
The choice of these two men to represent art and physics respectively grew
initially out of wordplay, but an investigation of their lives, works, and
legacies shows this to be a fortunate juxtaposition. Ernst Mach (1838-1916)
was a Positivist physicist from Austria, whose work led to the
Logical Positivists and their highly influential position in 20th century
thinking. Max Ernst (1891-1976) was an artist and founder member of the
Dadaists, who attended more philosophy lectures than art. Although Max Ernst
is some 53 years Mach’s junior, he is contemporary with the Vienna Circle of
philosophers who built on the writings of Ernst Mach. Max Ernst, working in
Paris in the mid-1920s, bases his explorations on the unconscious and the
irrational; the Logical Positivists, working in Vienna at the same time, base
their philosophy on the rational and scientific. Ernst and Mach then
certainly represent the juxtaposition of practices and philosophies that will
guide our investigation, but we also find odd resonances between them. On the
surface Ernst has a 20th century outlook, Mach a 19th century one; Ernst an
artistic practice, Mach a scientific one; while Ernst is an antinomian
maverick, Mach is a University professor. Yet behind these stark contrasts we
find similarities that are useful to our discussion: both are profound
thinkers about their practice, both have a questioning integrity, and we find
that behind Mach’s image of 19th century Viennese University professor there
is also something of a rebel.
Returning to the idea of epistemological pluralism, we have in the two men
exemplars of different fields of knowledge or ‘epistemes.’
But Wilber, rather disappointingly, does not develop the idea far enough,
merely saying that scientists wouldn’t accept the idea (and, as we shall see,
the Logical Positivists certainly wouldn’t). It has taken another polymath
scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, to argue the case, though he uses a different
terminology: ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ or NOMA
for short 3. Again he is
arguing in the context of the science-religion divide, but this time makes a
detailed and convincing case for the separation. Gould, as a scientist, is
alarmed at the recent ‘God-and-physics’ debate, which has seen a succession
of physicists arguing that physics proves mysticism or even the existence of
God, and fears that it will discredit science. I have recently published a
paper with the title ‘Against Scientific Magisterial Imperialism’ that makes
a case, as Gould does, for the separation of epistemologies, but this time
defending religion against the predation of science 4.
The science-art debate is quite different from the science-religion debate
however, partly because art does not seem to deal in the certainties
apparently peddled by the other two. Hence we don’t see science engaging with
the kind of magisterial imperialism with art that it recently has with
religion. However, the vague ‘scientism’ mentioned earlier, which is in no
doubt partly due to the influence of the Logical Positivists, does threaten
the debate on the epistemology of art with assumptions and methods unsuited
to art practice. We shall see however that this is more to do with the philosophers
of science than with the practice of science.
By contrasting the practice of art and the practice of science (before the
philosophers get their hands on either), we can explore at least the context
in which art as an episteme arises, and how it differs from science. One last
word on religion however, as the science-religion divide serves as a
contrasting case study to the science-art divide. If we can drop for the
moment the externals of religion, and also the modernist and postmodernist
hostility to its supposed truth-claims, then we can recognise that at its
heart is a practice again, either of prayer or of meditation. I am going to
suggest, and not in the least defend it here, that the pure practice of
science and the pure practice of religion, when carried out with integrity
and an open questioning, both lead to certain universals. However the knowledges thus attained, and we can use Einstein and the
Buddha respectively as exemplars of these knowledges,
are remote and seemingly inhuman. The pioneering psychoanalyst C.G.Jung famously called the Buddhist concept of nirvana
an ‘amputation’ 5.
The general theorem of relativity, with its concept of curved space-time, is
likewise divorced from our experience. But art, I would like to suggest,
lives between the two extremes of science and transcendent religion, as a
region of all that is human, compromised, dirty, warm and infuriating – a
hall of mirrors. It epistemology is therefore of direct relevance to us, but
at the same time harder to pin down, harder to identify and locate. Another
way to say this is that physics is about the ultimately objective, nirvana
is about the ultimately subjective, and art occupies the middle ground.
Leonardo da Vinci is often cited as the
paradigmatic Renaissance man, because of his contributions to art and
science. However I would suggest that art and science had not yet properly
bifurcated at that point, and that Leonardo’s practice is more homogeneous
than we might recognise. I would place the proper date for the emergence of
science as 1676, in agreement with Michael White, author of a critical
biography of Newton 6. By the mid-1920s, Max
Ernst and the Logical Positivists represent the complete sundering of the two
mind-sets. However, culture is not uniform, and we find in the Russian
Constructivists of the same period, and in the work
of Naum Gabo in
particular, an art that has its roots in science. In the period 1956 to 1986
we see the emergence of a group of artists, known as the ‘algorists’
working with the computer, and in some ways revisiting Constructivist
principles. Later on we shall be exploring the idea that we can trace a
bifurcation of art and science from the time of Leonardo, and a union again
in the ‘algorist’ computer artists. In-between we
find a clash of opposing epistemologies in the art of Ernst and the physics
of Mach.
Before looking in a bit more detail at the lives and works of Ernst and Mach,
a short discussion on science is in order. The term ‘science’ is a broad one,
as is obvious from the many arguments put forward that Islamic and Chinese
culture had ‘science’ long before the West. To focus the discussion here, I
want to talk about physics instead, physics as a discipline that emerged in
the West (I gave a date above of 1676 for its true birth), and transformed
firstly the West, and inevitably the whole world. Physics is a focussed study
of inanimate matter based on measurements of mass, length and time. It is
glitteringly successful, both in its analytical and predictive power, and in
the technologies it spawns, technologies that are incestuously and
recursively used to refine its ability to measure. From the epicentre of
physics all the other modern sciences radiate out, with diminishing claim to
certainty, and, I would suggest, a proportional increase in relevance to
human experience. Physics is inhuman and irrelevant to our subjectivity, to
our lived realities, but its certainties are deeply attractive, an attraction
that can be measured by the attempts to discredit those certainties. ‘Physics
envy’ is the term that has been coined to describe how other disciplines have
vainly attempted to ape its methods and successes, and is at the heart of the
‘scientism’ we have mentioned earlier. In fact I would suggest that the
entire Enlightenment project can be understood in this way, as the shocked
recognition (in the context of the Inquisition remember), that one can have a
personal rivalry but none the less reach agreement on something, simply
through the laboratory context. This realisation was a diffuse and slow one
throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th
centuries, leading to such oddities for example as Leibniz’s conviction that
political agreement could be reached by the same methods.
The reason for raising ‘physics envy’ is to point out that other
epistemologies live in the shadow of physics, glancing at it in envy, feeling
somehow ‘other’. Our job is to change that, partly through a better
understanding of physics itself (subject to so much mythologising),
and through the more difficult task of identifying the epistemology of art.
Ernst
Mach and the Logical Positivists
We start with a look at the life and physics of Ernst Mach. Although he
denied that he should be remembered as a philosopher, he is often referred to
as ‘Positivist Philosopher and Physicist’. In fact he was a deeply thoughtful
man, and wrote extensively on the theoretical underpinnings of physics, a
body of theory that can genuinely be called ‘Positivist’. As we have
indicated earlier, Mach was less conventional than his career would suggest,
and as a child he was certainly unusual. At the age of three he was plagued
with perceptual problems that led to his later interest in the physiology of
perception, and was a weakly child. At the age of fifteen he read Kant’s Prolegomena
to Any Future Metaphysics, and in his twenties spent some time alone in a
rented, ruined monastery, alone that is except for his horse which he
quartered in an adjacent room. During his period of study at Vienna University
he developed a popular reputation ‘based largely on his peculiar manner of
living and fearsome manly habits’ 7,
known also as a superior boxer and the best fencer in Vienna (so completing his transformation
from delicate and educationally backward child).
Mach secured lecturing posts in Graz and Prague (where he carried out the bulk of the research
that was to make his name), returning in 1895 to Vienna to a chair created specially for
him, making him Professor of ‘The History and Theory of the Inductive
Sciences’. He was a gifted experimental physicist, contributing to the fields
of ballistics and the physiology of perception, bequeathing his name to both
disciplines. In ballistics the ‘mach’ number, which is a multiple of the
speed of sound, is named after him, and in perceptual studies the ‘mach’
band, the striping effect in graduated tones, is also named after him. More
important for our discussion perhaps is the ‘Mach principle’ in the
philosophy of science, which we shall return to.
Mach studied Kant, Hume and Darwin, and ‘thus learned to approach his beloved
physics with a wary and sceptical eye.’ 8.
This gives us an insight into Mach’s approach to physics, an approach that is
complex and requires an understanding of both physics and the philosophy of
science to appreciate. There is not space here to expand on this theme, other
than to point out that the relationship between these two is problematic. The
development of physics seems to require no support from philosophy at all,
yet its best practitioners held all kinds of philosophies, all at odds with
each other, and often, for periods at least, at odds with the very physics
that the practitioners were discovering. Max Planck for example held certain
views about thermodynamics which were philosophically at odds with Ernst
Mach’s published philosophy of science (and made known in a public attack on
Mach). Yet Planck’s experimental work, which gave him title of the ‘father of
quantum theory,’ was in contradiction with Planck’s philosophy and in
agreement with Mach.
So what were Mach’s philosophical ideas? In short, they were Positivist.
‘Positivism’ itself was a philosophy originated by Auguste Comte, also the
founder of the discipline of sociology. Comte (1798-1857) believed that all
sciences went through three phases, first theological, second metaphysical,
and third ‘positive’, hence the name of his movement. Positivism denies
metaphysics and states that the data of sense experience are the only object
and the supreme criterion of human knowledge. Oddly, to our modern sensibilites, Positivism was also understood as a
religion, and there exists to this day in Rio de Janeiro a ‘temple of
humanity’ built for its sacraments and ceremonies. Of the latter Mach would
have had no interest in, as he was generally anti-religious, recognising only
late in life that perhaps his outlook had some common ground with Buddhism 9. It was the emphasis
on sense-data that was at the heart of Mach’s philosophy, and his great
contribution was to recognise that the data of physics not only had their
origin in the senses (regardless of the laboratory instrumentation and the
types of ‘reading’ it produced), but that all the measurements were relative
ones. This was the basis of his criticism of Newton’s conception of absolute mass, space
and time, and became known as ‘Mach’s principle’, alluded to earlier.
Einstein acknowledged Mach’s importance on the development of relativity,
even though not a direct contribution, furthermore Einstein characterised
Mach’s writings as ‘kind, humane and helpful’. Mach met both Einstein and the
American pragmatist William James, whose account of their meeting paints Mach
in an equally favourable light, both as a thinker and as a man. Mach’s
writings on science had in fact a wide impact, so much so that Lenin was
forced in 1908 to insist that the Bolsheviks must choose between Mach or Marx.
But why should Lenin find Mach a threat? Surely the advance of the purest of
sciences, physics, could only benefit the Revolution? The threat it poses relates
to the spectre of solipsism that haunts the positivist world-view, and which
on the surface of it should be implacably opposed to the objectivism of
science. Once one accepts, as Mach does, the basic Positivist position about
the primacy of sense data, then the next question arises, are the sense data
in the mind or in the world? This is a brief way of raising the idealist /
realist debate in philosophy, one that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and
which we cannot enter in any great detail here. It is to Mach’s credit
however that he keeps such an open mind about this issue, simply taking the
data of sense experience and following it wherever it takes his curious but
rigorous mind. This goes right back to his childhood where he suffered from
the perceptual difficulties mentioned above, mainly visual. He apparently
‘saw’ the front and rear edges of a table, for example, as the same size, and
complained about perspective paintings that foreshortened the geometries of
such objects. Even later in life he objected to perspective art as a foolery.
This might be a quirk of Mach’s personality, but his method is based on
observation, and he thought it essential to give weight to all his
perceptions. This implies both a discipline and a
freedom to ‘take what one gets’, an approach that Einstein pushed harder than
any other theoretical physicist. (Einstein’s genius was to say that as we
cannot distinguish the acceleration due to gravity and due to inertial
changes, let us ‘take what we get’ and say that they are the same in
physics – a revolution in science that reverberates to this day.) But if
we give credit to our senses as an individual, how can an outside ideology be imposed? If we trust in ‘what we get’ from our senses
instead of what is imposed by authority, how can we be manipulated? Lenin was
right to fear Mach. And we are right to pay him attention, because Mach’s
insistence on observation is also Leonardo’s, and also, as we will see, Max
Ernst’s.
A careful reading of Mach’s work is an education in physics and the
philosophy of science. Although his physics is simply absorbed into the
greater impersonal structure of the subject, an episteme of ultimate
remoteness, his personal encounter with the obduracy of the manifest sensorium that was his life is engaging. He often
reflects on the ‘ego’ as his pre-Freudian terminology had it (Freud’s work
only enters European thought in the 1920s, after Mach’s death), finding it of
‘only relative permanency’ or ‘as little absolutely permanent as the bodies’ 10. He dismisses the
Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’ as unnecessary, saying that ‘the world consists
only of our sensations’, ‘we have knowledge only of our sensations’, and that
the ‘antithesis between ego and the world, between sensation (appearance) and
thing, then vanish’. None of this is physics, but all of it has to do with
the epistemological conditions in which the ‘knowledges’
we term physics appear. And none of it would appeal to Lenin.
This can only give a flavour of the intellectual legacy of Mach, a legacy
turned into a philosophical movement by the Vienna Circle in the 1920s. Their ideas
are distinguished from Mach’s by the term ‘logical’ positivism, though some
prefer ‘logical empiricism’ or other variants. The Vienna Circle was founded by physicist
Moritz Schlick around the time he took up Mach’s
chair at the University. In fact this appointment had a curious and tragic
history: Mach was the first occupant but lived through the suicide of his
second son Heinrich, just seven days after Heinrich’s 20th birthday and his
graduation in chemistry. Mach himself suffered a stroke that paralysed half
his body, and was forced to resign the chair, making it available to his
intellectual rival, a physicist called Ludwig Boltzman.
Boltzman had a distinguished career, though showing
an intemperate side to his nature in a public lecture with the title ‘Proof
that Schopenhauer was a Degenerate, Unthinking, Unknowing, Nonsense
Scribbling Philosopher, Whose Understanding Consisted Solely of Empty Verbal
Trash’ 11. He also
changed the title of Mach’s chair to suit his own philosophy of science.
After his sight failed in 1906 Boltman hanged
himself, freeing the chair for its later occupation by Schlick,
who restored the title that had been created for Mach. Schlick
himself was murdered in 1936 by a Nazi student sympathiser, though not before
the Vienna Circle
had made an impact on the world of ideas. Middle-Europe through this period
had its dark side, one we also know through Freud’s analysis of Viennese
society.
Schlick’s circle included two other principle
members, Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, along with a host of lesser-known figures, and
one more prominent one, the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Their major initial
influence was Mach, but Wittgenstein, through his Tractatus,
also came to dominate their thinking, to the extent that by 1926 ‘the circle
was reading the book aloud sentence by sentence and analysing it in detail’ 12. Wittgenstein himself
never joined the circle, met only selected members on certain occasions, and
refused to enter into any debate on his philosophy. Later on Wittgenstein
became increasingly dissatisfied with the Tractatus
and the Vienna Circle’s
interpretation of it; in turn they drew closer to Mach’s ideas again. In fact
the more mystical elements of the Tractatus
had worried many in the Circle, though it may well be that these explain the
wide popularity of the text in the first place.
Let us return to the central propositions of the Vienna Circle, those that appeared in
their manifesto and were agreed to by the principle founders. Like Mach they
were unanimous in their rejection of metaphysics, and in a more technical
sense philosophically they also rejected one of Kant’s propositions, that
there could be a synthetic a priori knowledge. Their third important
idea is known as the ‘verifiability principle’, that a statement is
meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false, at least in
principle, by experience. The ‘verifiability principle’ and the rejection of
metaphysics may be clear enough, but the point about synthetic a priori
knowledge requires explanation. Kant (1724-1804) had invented this category
of knowledge as part of a larger scheme, which in turn was based on a
rejection of ideas put forward by David Hume (1711-1776). In examining the
Enlightenment philosophers of this period, we can use a rough guide to their
ideas which goes as follows: Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz are ‘rationalist’
philosophers, while Locke, Berkeley and Hume are ‘empiricist’ philosophers.
Kant attempted to achieve a synthesis of these opposing views. Or so the
story goes. The reality is much more complex, and I will tease out only one
small strand, that is how they responded to the emerging discipline of
physics.
I mentioned earlier, that science was born in 1676, on the 27th April at the
Royal Society. The event in question was Robert Hooke’s
demonstration of Newton’s ‘Theory of Light and Colours,’ and it cemented in
place a revolution in thought that underpinned the Enlightenment, gave rise
to the philosophies we are discussing, and ushered in the modern age. We may
find it hard to accept, but the context for Hooke’s
demonstration was an age of intellectual repression, with the Inquisition a
part of daily life throughout Europe; and in England, though relatively
tolerant, there existed fanaticism and suspicion of heterodoxy in all forms.
In this atmosphere we find that Hooke is actually Newton’s arch-rival,
and that a bitter feud and jealousy existed between them, that in any other
sphere of thought at that time could have led to physical violence. That Hooke could verify the theorems of a detested rival
through laboratory demonstration, in such a way as to convince a group of sceptical
and quarrelling thinkers of the day, was a completely new phenomenon. The
scientific method as we now know it depends on such verification, but at the
time the European mind had experienced consensus more usually at the point of
a sword. In our present day context it would be like the Pope carefully
reading the Islamic theories of Mullah Omar, one-time spiritual leader of the
Taliban in Afghanistan,
and announcing to the world that point by point they were all correct.
This one experiment on its own changed nothing, but the thinkers of Europe
were waking up to the new possibility for consensus with relief and hope,
Leibniz for example, as mentioned before, believing that it could be a model
for other spheres, such as politics. The problem was that such thinkers, in
fact almost all the Enlightenment philosophers, failed to grasp how physics
worked, and at the heart of that failure was the absence of a practice.
Descartes for example created a mechanics that was wholly wrong, because he
took no trouble to verify it in a laboratory, and even the eminent physicist
Huygens was slow to understand that his disagreement with Newton on the theory of colours could only
be resolved by experiment. Spinoza engaged with physics more directly, as
builder of microscopes and telescopes, and we even know of an amusing
incident where he attempted to reproduce an experiment by Robert Boyle, which
required a high-quality oil to provide a seal. The wealthy Boyle used olive
oil, whereas the impoverished Spinoza could only afford butter and milk, with
the result that the experiment failed 13.
Hume and Kant however never set foot in a laboratory, and so never engaged
with physics as a practice.
Hume’s highly influential criticism of science was therefore without
foundation, but fell on willing ears. He attacked the method of science for
using induction to derive knowledge, saying that just because we
observe a result from a given condition many times, there is no logical
derivation that can prove the result will take place in the future. There is
no absolute certainty about a method that uses induction. But Hume had
misunderstood the working methods of physics, which do not in fact rely on
induction. Yes, if Hooke had merely shown the Royal
Society that he could reproduce the laboratory findings of Newton, then it would not mean a great
deal, but behind the data was a theorem, expressible in a mathematical form.
In fact five elements make up the method in physics, which are as follows:
1) a technology for measuring data
2) the data itself
3) a hypothesis or theorem guiding the experiment
4) a mathematical model expressed in algebra, the differential calculus, etc
5) consensus: verification by the community
There is not space here to expand too much on these components, other than to
say they are not in a particular order, except perhaps that verification,
like the one carried out by Hooke, would come last.
Each component needs careful consideration and development, and it was pure
chance that all five fell into place that fateful day in seventeenth century London. To try and
characterise the complex activity summed up by these five components in a
single term ‘induction’ is quite misleading however, though Hume set in train
a philosophical journey that takes us through the Vienna Circle and beyond to
Popper and Khun. The history of the philosophy of
science is an odd one, reminiscent of those biographies where one gradually
realises that the author is ambivalent about the subject, or even hostile.
Karl Popper was close to the Vienna
Circle, though not part of it, and wrote an
influential book on the philosophy of science called ‘the Logic of Scientific
Discovery’. It rejects the ‘verifiability principle’ in favour of ‘falsifiability’ and in the introduction says of science:
‘The philosopher --- does not face an organised structure, but rather
something resembling a heap of ruins’ 14.
Popper is however the first to question Hume’s assumption that induction is
the basis of science, though A.J.Ayer, an English
disciple of the Vienna Circle ,
ridicules Popper on this. In turn Khun rejects
Popper’s emphasis and describes science in terms of ‘paradigm shifts’.
What then are we to make of the philosophy of science? Is it just a causal,
though sometimes circular, chain of disagreement, with no hope of giving us a
real epistemology of science? Probably. And we have identified a possible
reason for this state of affairs: – that the philosophers of science did not
have a practice. What they do have is a curious blend of interest in
the subject and hostility towards it, what we identified earlier as ‘physics
envy’. The hunger of the Enlightenment period for consensus made the
glittering success of physics very attractive, but at the same time the
investment required to participate (not just olive oil) and the remoteness of
its episteme, create ambivalence. Nevertheless the work of the Enlightenment
philosophers and groups like the Vienna Circle have ensured that a kind of
‘scientism’ pervades the intellectual climate of today, and which will impact
on the epistemology of art if not resisted. It is almost the definition of a
philosopher that they would not accept ‘epistemological pluralism’, because
they see their job as the unification of knowledge, and certainly the Vienna Circle
attempted this. But if we return to Ernst Mach, we find a physicist with a
strong laboratory record, whose philosophy is much less strident than we
might expect, a philosophy that represents a
thoughtful approach to sense experience. By denying that he was a
philosopher, he made it clear that his writings were about physics, but,
because of their originality and clarity, they became part of a movement that
insisted on seeing all human experience through a narrow scientific
worldview.
We can conclude this section by saying that physics is an episteme in its own
right, and that to understand the kind of knowledges
that it deals with requires a direct engagement with it. The attempt by
philosophers to make a logical reconstruction of it does not help us
understand its epistemology at all. At its heart there is a practice which is
not generalisable, though as a practice, we can
fruitfully compare it to the practice of art, as we shall see next. We are in
a position to say something about what a ‘practice’ is, perhaps we can say
that it is an engagement with an obdurate and bounded domain of human
experience. Mach demonstrates this well, with another quality, that of
humility before the given. He certainly does not regard the domain of physics
as a ‘heap of ruins’.
Max
Ernst and Freud
Turning to Max Ernst now, we have already noted that on the surface of it he
represents the antithesis of Ernst Mach, if only in the gulf of practice and
years. Max Ernst was born in 1891, some 53 years Mach’s junior, and exposed
to two cataclysms in Western experience that Mach was almost untouched by:
the theories of Freud and the horrors of World War One. Mach’s later life and
legacy was centred around Vienna,
while Ernst’s artistic development took place in Paris. But Ernst was born in Germany, mid-way between Cologne
and Bonn. His
father was a teacher in a school for deaf-and-dumb children, and part-time
painter of landscapes or religious works. The young Max found his
authoritarianism hard to bear and recounts several formative events in his
childhood relating to his father, including an episode where his father began
to paint from nature in their garden. A tree did not fit the composition he
had in mind, so rather than just leave it out of the painting he took an axe
to it, leaving the child with some interesting conclusions, that conventional
painting was firstly mimetic, and secondly dishonest. Much later Ernst says
of this episode:
‘To my mind that was a real crime against the imagination, a crime committed
in the name of the authoritarian principles of an art that is false because
it is limited by the blinkers always at the disposal of those specialists we
honour with the title of academicians, in order to maintain the established
order and a proper seemliness in their domain. My revolt took the form of a
deep faith in the powers of sedition, of instinct, of inspiration, and even
of an anarchic yet creative disorder which every established society tries to
restrain, repress or ignore.’ 15
Ernst’s revolt against his father took a deeper turn after the First World
War. Young Max had an imaginative childhood by any standards, including the
strange conflation in his mind between the death of his pet parrot and the
birth of his sister Apollonia, and the later
studies at Bonn university where he ‘carefully avoided any kind of studies
that ran the risk of degenerating into gainful employment’ 16.
He was also deeply influenced by a visit to a mental hospital near Bonn where he saw the
sculptures and paintings produced by the inmates. He then met August Macke, and through him the works of ‘Der
blaue Reiter’ and other radicals who were followers
of Hegel, Husserl or Nietzsche, and for whom
‘spontaneity was the order of the day’ 17,
and finally Jean Arp. It was Arp
who broke the news to Ernst that war was looming,
and what was for Ernst a dead or missing period of his life, four years of
blood and mud, in which he mused over the deaths of Appolinaire
and Macke, idealist fighters on opposing sides of
what Ernst saw as utter futility.
Paul Eluard, who was to become Ernst’s friend and
artistic collaborator in Paris
after the war, wrote in 1936:
In
February 1916 the Surrealist painter Max Ernst and I were in our respective
front lines, barely a kilometre from each other. Corporal Ernst, of the
German artillery, was shelling the trenches in which Private Eluard, of the French infantry was mounting guard. Three
years later we were the best of friends in the world, and since then we have
fought together stubbornly for the same cause: the total emancipation of
mankind 18.
Ernst returned from the war and showed in the ‘Dada House’ in Cologne, a shock to his
father, both artistically and politically. After absorbing the assault on
traditional values mounted by the works in the exhibition, his father’s pride
in his son as patriot and soldier turned to disgust, saying that Max had
brought dishonour on the family name 19.
Max Ernst was however to encapsulate for a whole generation the revolt
against authority that would be pursued as art, as a response to the carnage
of the war, and as an embodiment of Freud’s new theories. Ernst had read
Freud’s Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious and The
Interpretation of Dreams while studying in Bonn. It has been suggested that while
Ernst’s two major artistic styles, Dada and Surrealism, can be traced in
their influences to these two works of Freud respectively, it is a mistake to
subject Ernst’s work to a Freudian analysis 20.
Elizabeth Legge in her examination of the
‘psychoanalytic sources’ for Ernst says "The extent of the relationship
of Ernst’s paintings to Freud, ---, is difficult to define, and depends on arguments
based on internal resemblances." 21.
Elsewhere she adds: "As a Surrealist, Ernst would disallow the
therapeutic aim of psychoanalysis, attaching little value to enabling a
neurotic to function in a more socially normal way" 22.
Legge also points out that Ernst had by no means
accepted the psychological ‘project’ as a whole, for example he was highly
critical of the type of German experimental psychology practised by Emil Kraepelin, seeing it as repressive of the creative
unconscious. (Ernst used Kraepelin’s illustrations
in his collages to subvert and ridicule the ‘scientific’ work done in asylums
of the period.)
The ambivalent attitude of the Surrealists to the new science of psychology
is shown in a critical account that André Breton published in 1922 of his
meeting with Freud. (Note that this was the same year that Schlick took up his chair in Vienna and which marked the beginnings of
the influence of Logical Positivism.) By the time of the issue of the First
Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 the tone was more approving. Ernst had by
this time established himself in the household of Paul and Gala Eluard in Paris, having
abandoned his first wife and child in Germany, where he developed his
two great innovations in artistic technique: frottage and collage.
His overall aim in art had already taken shape in his rejection of tradition
and convention; his disgust with the war and his father’s authoritarianism;
his embracing of the creative power of the unconscious. All this manifested
outwardly by his abandonment of wife and child to live in a ménage-à-trois with the Eluard’s,
at the same time beginning the most fruitful collaborations of his early
artistic life.
That Freud’s ideas were an influence on the Surrealists is beyond doubt, but
we find in Ernst’s own accounts that his art practice was shaped by many
forces, some of which were quite consistent with the conventional history of
art. In Beyond Painting he cites a passage from Leonardo da Vinci, apparently written as an admonishment to
Botticelli, which recommends ‘gazing fixedly at the spot on the wall, the
coals in the grate, the clouds, the flowing stream,’ where ‘genius becomes
aware of new inventions’ 23.
Ernst explains how he developed the ‘lesson of Leonardo’ in his frottage:
The
procedure of frottage, resting thus upon nothing more
than the intensification of the irritability of the mind’s faculties by
appropriate technical means, excluding all conscious mental guidance (of
reason, taste, morals), reducing to the extreme part of that one whom we have
called, up to now, the "author" of the work, this procedure is
revealed by the following to be the real equivalent of that which is already
known by the term automatic writing. It is as a spectator that the author
assists, indifferent or passionate, at the birth of his work and watches the
phases of its development 24.
The ‘death of the author’ that Ernst is describing here becomes an essential
part of the art narrative in the 20th century (though Ernst’s adherence to
this idea does not mean a retreat into modesty and self-effacement – far from
it). In this and in his oppositional stance Ernst is intimately part of
contemporary art practice, even if, like in the philosophy of science, we
have a causal, sometimes circular, chain of disagreement as art movements
react against and contradict their antecedents, thus rendering Ernst’s work
merely a part of history. Yet Ernst shows universals in his thought and
workshop practice from which we can extrapolate an understanding of the
epistemology of art, as we can an epistemology of science from Mach.
Ernst is serious about art, as Mach is about science. His early works, prior
to his move to Paris,
demonstrate an energy and an eclecticism showing a great variety of
influences, including August Macke, Van Gogh, and
an anticipation of Futurism. Once he had established his own workshop
practices of frottage and collage, joined the Surrealists, and
settled into his own unique ouevre, he worked his
field as earnestly and with the same integrity as any physicist. He never
succumbed to the anti-art philosophy of Duchamp,
and undertook a training in the techniques of
sculpture when he turned to that medium later in life. We even find an
extraordinary anticipation of the digital art pioneers in an invention of his
combining drip painting with the Lissajou figure (a
mathematically-generated form at the heart of much of early computer art.)
The art of Ernst may live in opposition to science, but his odd invention for
painting Lissajou’s figures, comprising a tin
hanging from a string about four or five feet long, filled with paint that
leaked from a hole in the bottom and set swinging, showed a fascination for
the analysis of movement 25.
This technique was used in paintings such as The Bewildered Planet, Young
Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly, Surrealism and Painting
in 1942, and the Green Zone in 1970, and may have been a precursor to
Pollock’s drip paintings. Ernst kept the algorithmic quality of these
images in his paintings, unlike Pollock, a visual quality related to
planetary orbits. On a similar theme he completed a series in 1964 devoted to
the memory of Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel,
an untrained astronomer whose genuine findings were rejected by the
scientific establishment 26.
These examples are given just to hint at the breadth of Ernst’s interests and
lifelong ability to innovate, both in ideas and their realisation in his
studio practice. We have earlier placed an emphasis on practice and
initially defined it as an ‘engagement with the obduracy of a bounded
domain’, in Ernst’s case that of the visual arts, primarily painting and
sculpture. ‘Obduracy’ is an important term here, in that it
indicates both the obduracy of the art medium, whether paint on
canvas, or sculpture in marble, and the obduracy of the medium as a method of
communication. The simple rectangular canvas represents a small arena of the
most ferocious kind of struggle, and even if the artist may roam freely as
regards subject matter, the act of painting, of ‘arting’
takes place within a bounded epistemological domain.
Digital
Art Pioneers and Constructivism
We will complete this meditation on the epistemology of art, as exemplified
so far by the single oeuvre of Ernst, with a brief mention of the digital art
pioneers. They are included here simply to round off a process that is interesting
to consider: a bifurcation of art and science since the time of Leonardo da Vinci, shown in the polar extremes of the life and
work of Mach and Ernst, and a reunion in the relatively obscure artistic
practice of the early digital artists. These artists, often painters, who
took up the use of the computer during the period 1956 – 1986, can be thought
of as following through a Constructivist ‘impulse’, one shown for example in
the work of Naum Gabo. I
have written elsewhere on this phenomenon 27,
but for now it is just worth saying that the imagery is based on algorithms,
that is a mathematical basis for a relatively compact software programme, and
output via a plotter, which drives a pen or brush over paper. These pioneers
of digital art include Herbert W. Franke and
Manfred Mohr from Germany,
and Roman Verostko and Jean-Pierre Hebert in the USA 28, also the ‘father of
computer animation’ John Whitney Sr., whose artistic goal was a ‘new abstract
cinema’ based on the synthesis of images and sound 29.
He built extraordinary machines based on pendulums, reminiscent in principle
at least of Ernst’s swinging drip-bucket, and produced a series of seminal
films alongside his commercial cinema digital effects (for example in 2001
Space Odyssey).
All these digital art pioneers had to learn to programme their
computers, an activity that is logical, mathematical and rational, more in
the tradition of Mach than Ernst. Yet the best of their works, which often
find their way into reputable national and private collections, also contains
the emotional, and the serendipitous. The digital art practice
represented by these works includes both halves of what was one in Leonardo
and seemingly sundered in our Mach / Ernst juxtaposition, a practice that is
both an enquiry and an engagement.
Epistemology
Having presented some observations regarding the practice of physics and of
art, perhaps initally summed up as enquiry and
engagement, we can investigate what an understanding of this juxtaposition
can yield. First of all we note that while it might seem obvious to go to the
philosophy of science to understand the epistemology of physics, we caution
against it, as the philosophers are not engaged, at least not in the
way we define it here. Likewise the temptation to say that art has moved on
since Ernst, throwing up radically new ways of understanding its
epistemology, should be resisted. Of course the philosophy of science and the
history of art criticism cannot be ignored, but we prefer here to focus on practice.
What does Ernst Mach do, that sheds light on the way we can understand
Max Ernst, in epistemological terms? And what might a crude scientism, one
that no doubts exists today as a legacy of Mach, through Logical Positivism,
what might this impair in our investigation of the epistemology of art?
First of all, Mach has a tentative approach to science. Ideas and
theories are provisional, always subordinate to sense-data, always located
with respect to his sensorium, rather than to his
preconceptions. This was the basis of his stand about observations of mass,
length and time being relative rather than absolute, and which
prepared the ground for the relativity theories of Einstein. Mach also
promoted an economy of description, wanting theories to ‘wither away like
leaves’ 30. All this is
natural to physics, in particular the brevity of its descriptions. What Mach
also did was to show that a ‘humility before the given’ does raise questions
of solipsism (these become ever more difficult to avoid in modern quantum
theory and in relativity). In other words, despite the rigour of his enquiry
and the desire to go beyond ego, Mach conceded that all his science took
place in his own subjectivity.
Where Ernst differs from Mach is in his intentionality, and in how he relates
to his sensorium. Where Mach narrows it down to
measurable quantities, Ernst opens it up to include the emotional and further
still: to embrace the products of the unconscious. Like Mach he wants ‘to get
out of the way’, to allow his engagement with the obduracy of his discipline
to unfold in its own telling. Above all Ernst is an artist, a painter, and
his enquiry contains within it a remit to embody his findings in art.
What the populist, unthinking promotion of Logical Positivism has tended to
achieve in the 20th century is to take Mach’s methods and intentions, the
sense-data and enquiry appropriate to physics, and to insist that these data
and this method be applied to all areas of human experience.
Conclusions
We have seen that there is common ground between an artist like Ernst and a
physicist like Mach, a commonality of engagement, of integrity and of
humility before the given. Mach’s legacy, as a thoughtful writer on the
method of physics, has been, via the Logical Positivists, to create a
‘scientism’ that has skewed epistemological understandings of non-scientific
disciplines such as religion and art. However, by focussing on the practice
of physics, and taking a sceptical stance to the theories of the philosophers
who do not engage with the obduracy of such a practice, we can arrive
at a better and less arrogant epistemology of science. In turn, by granting
that the practice of the artist is an equally rigorous engagement, against
the obduracy of a quite different domain, we can begin to investigate its own
epistemological contours and boundaries. This approach, called
‘epistemological pluralism’ by Ken Wilber and ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ by Stephen Jay Gould resists the trap of
scientific magisterial imperialism that much 20th century thinking has fallen
into.
If we say that physics is knowledge tested against sense-data (the
verification principle of the Logical Positivists), while art is knowledge
tested as sense-data (in the visual or other sensory works of its
studio outcomes) then the following provisional definitions might serve to
sum up the epistemological differences of the two domains:
Physics: a knowledge embodied in its statements and mathematical
formulae, tested against sense-data, based on principles of economy,
rationalism and objectivism.
Art: a knowledge embodied in its works, tested as sense-data,
based on principles of profligacy, the irrational and the unconscious.
Endnotes
1 Wilber, Ken, The Marriage of Sense and
Soul, Dublin: Gateway, 1998, p. 112
2 Wilber, Ken, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, Dublin: Gateway, 1998,
p. 16
3 Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages, London: Jonathon
Cape, 2001
4 King, Mike, ‘Against Scientific Magisterial
Imperialism’, in Network, The Scientific and Medical Network Review, No. 78,
April 2002, pp. 2-7
5 Jung, C.G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections, London:
Fontana 1993, p. 306
6 White, Michael, Isaac Newton, the Last Sorcerer,
London: Fourth Estate, 1998
7 Blackmore, John T., Ernst
Mach – His Work, Life and Influences, Berkely, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1972, p. 13
8 Cohen, Robert S., and Seeger,
Raymond J. (Eds.), Ernst Mach – Physicist and Philosopher, Boston Studies in
the Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht Holland: D.Reidel
Publishing , 1970, p. 23
9 Blackmore, John T., Ernst
Mach – His Work, Life and Influences, Berkely, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1972, p. 295
10 Mach, Ernst, The Analysis of Sensations, Dover
Edition, 1959, chapter one
11 Blackmore, John T., Ernst
Mach – His Work, Life and Influences, Berkely, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1972, p. 211
12 Blackmore, John T., Ernst
Mach – His Work, Life and Influences, Berkely, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1972, p. 307.
13 Gullan-Whur, Margaret,
Within Reason – A Life of Spinoza, London, Jonathon Cape, 1998, p. 117
14 Popper, Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discovery,
London, New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 13
15 Quinn, Edward, Max Ernst, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1984, p.
27
16 Quinn, Edward, Max Ernst, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1984, p.
29
17 Quinn, Edward, Max Ernst, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1984,, p.
34
18 Quinn, Edward, Max Ernst, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1984, p.
45
19 Legge, Elizabeth M., Max
Ernst – The Psychoanalytic Sources, Ann Arbor,
London: U.M.I. Research Press, 1989, p. 5
20 Spies, Werner, Max Ernst 1950-1970, New York: Harry
N.Abrams, 1971, p. 38
21 Legge, Elizabeth M., Max
Ernst – The Psychoanalytic Sources, Ann Arbor,
London: U.M.I. Research Press, 1989, p. 1
22 Legge, Elizabeth M., Max
Ernst – The Psychoanalytic Sources, Ann Arbor,
London: U.M.I. Research Press, 1989, p. 2
23 Ernst, Max, Beyond Painting, New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc, 1948, p. 7
24 Ernst, Max, Beyond Painting, New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc, 1948, p. 8
25 Quinn, Edward, Max Ernst, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1984, p.
224
26 Quinn, Edward, Max Ernst, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1984, p.
342
27 King, Mike, ‘Computers and Modern Art: Digital Art
Museum’ in Candy, Linda and Edmonds, Ernest (Eds.), Creativity and Cognition
2002, Proceedings of the 4th Creativity and Cognition Conference,
Loughborough University, New York: ACM Press 2002 (publication pending)
28 The works of the digital art pioneers are archived
online at the Digital Art Museum (www.dam.org)
29 Whitney, John H. Digital Harmony, Peterborough:
Byte Books 1980
30 Cohen, Robert S., and Seeger,
Raymond J. (Eds.), Ernst Mach – Physicist and Philosopher, Boston Studies in
the Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht Holland: D.Reidel
Publishing , 1970, p. 220.
A version
of this article appeared in Working Papers
in Art and Design, Vol. 2 (2002).
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