Wollheim

Richard Wollheim was born in 1923 in London. His father was Eric Wollheim who was at the time the London manager for Diaghilev. His mother had been a Gaiety girl; she left the stage when she married. Wollheim was educated at Westminster School and then, after active service in the Second World War, he went to Oxford to complete degrees in history and PPE (politics, philosophy and economics). Despite relatively little study of the subject he was recruited by A. J. Ayer for the Philosophy Department at University College London. He remained there for thirtythree years, becoming Grote Professor in 1963. In 1983 he moved to America where he taught at various universities before returning to England shortly before his death in 2003. Wollheim’s contribution to aesthetics needs to be understood in the context of at

least two aspects of his broader intellectual framework. First, he believed that insights derived from psychoanalysis were important in understanding both ourselves and cultural phenomena, including the arts; he himself spent time under analysis. Although he wrote an essay “Freud and the Understanding of Art” and a highly regarded book that covered the rest of Freud’s thought, his approach was closer to that of Melanie Klein (although he was by no means an orthodox Kleinian) (Wollheim 1973b [1970], 1971). Second, he had no respect for disciplinary boundaries; his work drew freely on philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, art criticism and art history. One final caveat: Wollheim’s work stands apart from the general thrust of AngloAmerican philosophy in that it does not pursue conceptual analysis or reductive explanation. His work remains subtle, sophisticated and elusive, and hence resists clear explication. Of the many areas to which he contributed in aesthetics, I will cover six: the nature and ontology of art; depiction; expression; intention, interpretation and evaluation; style; and modernist art theory. An element of Wollheim’s work that played a part in his thinking about several of

these areas was his notion of “complex projection,” a notion he attempted to clarify several times. Complex projection is a disposition we develop early in our psychosexual development. At some stage (during the working through of the Kleinian “depressive position”) the child will find itself with ambivalent and fluctuating attitudes to his or her parents, which we can summarize as love and hate. Inasmuch as the former dominates, it results in a tendency to “projection”: “the tendency to see the object as good or of value” (Wollheim 1986: 214). Projection is a notion familiar from

psychoanalysis. We can take as an example someone who finds it difficult to tolerate the hostile feelings they have towards another person. To cope with this they “project” those very feelings onto that person and form the false belief that that person harbors hostile feelings towards them. Wollheim calls this “simple projection” and contrasts it with the notion he will use. There are two differences between the former and the latter. In simple projection there is a great deal of latitude as to what it is onto which the emotion gets projected; as Wollheim puts it, “almost anyone can turn out to be the paranoiac’s enemy” (1986: 214). In complex projection, there “has to be a real match or correspondence” between the outer world and the inner state of the person doing the projecting. Second, the result of complex projection is not a false belief; rather the world is seen as “of a piece” with the projector’s mental states. What is imputed to the relevant part of the world is something that “corresponds” to the inner state. This is represented by the speaker describing the world using, as a metaphor, the term which would be used to describe the inner state literally, or using a term introduced into the language for this very purpose. Wollheim’s view is that value originates in the projection of “archaic bliss, of love satisfied” (1986: 215).

The link between this tendency for projection and the nature of art is not immediate. There are certain instinctual drives – paradigmatically the sexual drive – which manifest themselves in a fairly direct way in certain activities. Art is not like that; instead, Wollheim characterizes art as an instance of what Wittgenstein called “a form of life.” This is an elusive notion, but we can at least say that the impulse to produce art cannot be identified independently of the way art is produced in a certain society. There is a direct analogy with language: there is “a complex of habits, experiences, skills, with which language interlocks in that it could not be identified without them and, equally, they cannot be identified without reference to it” (Wollheim 1980b: 104). Pursuing the analogy, asking “is this item a work of art?,” is akin to asking “is this item a piece of language?” It is not a sensible question to ask in the abstract; a great deal will depend upon the circumstances of the item’s production, the intentions behind it, and how it is received. Three consequences follow which put Wollheim’s view in opposition to the standard contemporary discussion of the definition of art. First, Wollheim is skeptical of the approach that seeks to identify what it is to be a

work of art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. In a later essay (although it is not always wise to assume that he is consistent across his oeuvre) he distinguishes between “conditions of application” and “assumptions of applicability” (Wollheim 1993a). The former are necessary and sufficient conditions, while the latter are assumptions about what would be in place in order for an object to be what it is purported to be. While the latter must hold generally, they can fail in particular cases. The standard methodology of the contemporary debate over the definition of art is the “method of indiscernibles.” That is, a situation is considered in which there are two indiscernible objects, one of which is a work of art and the other of which is not. Anything which is true of both objects (including, crucially, their indiscernibility)

cannot be one of the conditions of application of “art.” However, this situation – even if it were possible in a single instance – tells us nothing about the “assumptions of applicability” of “art.” It may be that “the complex of habits, experiences, skills” that underlie the institutions of art could not survive were it true in general that there were not perceptual differences between objects which are art and objects which are not art. Second, as is apparent from the psychological springs which feed into the “form of life” another of the assumptions of applicability is that art is valuable. That there are individual works of art that are not valuable does nothing to show that we have a value-free “classificatory” sense of “art.” Such differences underpin Wollheim’s celebrated refutation of the “institutional theory of art”; theories that attempt to define art in terms of an object standing in a certain social relation to an institution (“the artworld”) (Dickie 1974). Wollheim argues that such views face a dilemma. Either there are reasons why they stand in such relations or there are not. If there are reasons, then it is those reasons that are of interest; that the work stands in a certain relation is simply confirmation that such reasons apply. If there are no such reasons, then the most such a theory can hope to deliver is a set of objects collected together for no reason at all (Wollheim 1980d). Neither alternative is attractive. Although perhaps not as decisive against the institutionalist as is sometimes thought, “Wollheim’s dilemma” would need to be confronted by any plausible institutionalism. Finally, as we shall see, Wollheim had a much narrower view of art than the contemporary debate allows. To take the case of painting (the art form about which he wrote most) he thought a painting could only be a work of art given certain constraints on the mental states of the painter, the way those mental states cause the painter to mark the object, and the mental state those marks set up in the spectator (Wollheim 1987: 22). Such constraints are met by a minority of paintings. Much of what counts as art on contemporary accounts (including, but not limited to, works of Sunday painters, people who paint for distraction or to relax, forgers, people who paint for therapeutic reasons, people who paint for the tourist trade, or to decorate corporate buildings) would not, for Wollheim, count as art (1987: 13). Although Wollheim did not return to the issue of the ontology of art after his first

work on aesthetics,Art and Its Objects, his thought has spawned a lively debate.Wollheim divides works of art into two kinds. First, there are those that bear a close relation to physical objects (he does not commit himself as to whether the relation is one of identity, constitution or some other relation). This kind includes paintings and sculptures. For the second kind, which includes works of music, literature and prints, he adopts Peirce’s distinction between types and tokens.David Copperfield is a type of which there are many tokens.Wollheim distinguishes types from similar means of classification, such as classes and universals (1980b: 74-84). Although he does more than is sometimes thought (including considering whether types are eternal and hence that works cannot be created) there is much that would need to be done to substantiate the view (Dodd 2007).

Of all his work in aesthetics, Wollheim is probably most associated with his work on pictorial representation. The experience of a pictorial representation of X differs from the experience of seeing X face to face in that (generally) the former experience

has an element of “twofoldness”; we are aware of the surface of the picture and aware of the “absent object” – that which the picture is a picture of. Ernst Gombrich had earlier provided an analysis of this experience, arguing that we switch between these two folds: first experiencing one (the surface) and then the other (the absent object) (Gombrich 1977: 4-5). Wollheim argued, plausibly, that such switching is not true to our phenomenology. In his early published views, he drew on Wittgenstein’s analysis of aspect perception to provide an alternative analysis: “X is a pictorial representation of Y” can be analyzed as “X can be seen as Y.” The manifest implausibilities of this view quickly led him to abandon it in favor of the analysis that “Y can be seen in X.” Seeing-in is a distinctive kind of perception. As we would expect, it is an experience with two “aspects”: the “configurational aspect” (which is an experience “modeled on” our awareness of the painted surface) and “the recognitional aspect” (which is an experience “modeled on” the experience we would have, were we to see the object in the picture face-to-face). Such an experience can be prompted by natural objects; we can see dragons in clouds, and figures in the ice on panes of glass. What is distinctive about pictorial representation is that there is a “standard of correctness” provided by the intentions of the creator. In short, for X to depict Y, it must be the case both the Y can be seen in X, and that whoever created X intended that Y could be seen in X (Wollheim 1980e). The distinction between a painted surface that is a representation and a painted sur-

face that is only a painted surface (such as a painted wall) is that the former provides us not only with an awareness of the surface, but with an experience of a three-dimensional space (which is not literally present) and a standard of correctness as to what can be seen in that space. Two consequences immediately follow. First, some paintings lack twofoldness. Some canvases by Barnett Newman lack the experience of depth and some successful trompe l’œils do not provide us with an awareness as of the surface. On Wollheim’s view, these are not representations (1987: 62). Second, for Wollheim the important distinction is between painted surfaces that are representations and painted surfaces that are not representations. Another distinction – between so-called “abstract paintings” and figurative paintings (paintings that do not and paintings that do represent things that we might meet with in space) – is a relatively minor division within painted surfaces that are representations (Wollheim 1987: 21). The view has been subject to criticism on two fronts. The first rejects the view

that pictorial representation should be analyzed in terms of a distinctive kind of perception. Alternatives that have been provided include a semiotic analysis (Goodman 1976; Kulvicki 2006) and an analysis in terms of the activation of certain distinctive recognitional capacities (Lopes 1996). The second accepts the perceptual analysis, but holds that Wollheim has not provided an adequate account of the experience. We can divide this criticism into three broad problems: that he has not described a possible experience; that he has not specified the relation between the two aspects of the experience; and that he has not characterized the two aspects of the experience. The problem with Wollheim’s characterization of the experience stems directly

from his rejection of Gombrich’s view that we experience each aspect of the experience separately. According to Wollheim, when we see Y in X we experience Y as within something of which we are also visually aware: X. However, it would seem that we cannot simultaneously see two objects where one is experienced as being within the

other (putting aside cases in which the first object is transparent or translucent, which are irrelevant here). Wollheim would argue that this consequence would follow were each of the two aspects of the experience equivalent to the experience of seeing face-to-face; however, this is something he explicitly rejects. However, as we shall see, this reply merely stores up problems for later on (for an interesting discussion of this problem, see Kulvicki 2009). The second problem concerns the relation between the two aspects. The issues are

murky from the outset as the notion of “aspects of experience” is not pellucid. Is seeingin a simple conjunction of the two aspects of experience or is the relation more complicated? Building on Wollheim’s work, Robert Hopkins has argued that rather than there being two aspects of a single experience the two aspects are an abstraction from a single complex experience. To see a Y in X is to have the experience of X resembling Y in respect of “outline shape” (Hopkins 1998). Whether depiction involves an experience of two aspects, or a single experience from which the two aspects are an abstraction, has proved a pivotal area of debate (Abell and Bantinaki 2010). The third problem concerns the nature of the two aspects. From Wollheim’s

reply to our first problem we know they do not have the features of the correlative face-to-face experience. However, such face-to-face experiences seem the only thing to which we can appeal in order to grasp the aspects’ nature. Wollheim was adamant that thinking about the correlative face-to-face experience would do nothing to illuminate our understanding. Instead, he relied upon the fact that we are all familiar with the experience of seeing-in, and hence he would only need to gesture at what was being talked about in order for us to grasp what was at issue. However, there are two problems with this. First, familiarity is not understanding; that we are familiar with an experience does make its nature clear to us. Second, although we are familiar with the experience there is no independent court of appeal to adjudicate as to whether or not Wollheim has given us a correct analysis. He provides no account at all of either the configurational or the recognitional aspect. In the words of Malcolm Budd, what Wollheim has given us is “an elusive construction of two will-o’-the-wisps” (Budd 1992: 272). Although the two aspects necessarily come together when we are experiencing a depiction, Wollheim rightly insists that, on occasion, each could fade into the background to the extent that it almost disappears. Bellini’s Doge of Venice is sufficiently illusionistic for the configurational aspect to be almost absent from our experience of it. An observer who focuses on (say) the way the painter has captured the stretch of a neck in looking at a John Singer Sargent might find the recognitional aspect almost absent. In each case, at just that moment when the one aspect drops away and the observer’s experience should be exclusively of the nonabsent aspect, his or her experience is of something different: an “as if” face-to-face experience of the Doge and a face-to-face experience of the painted surface, respectively (Budd 1992: 271-72). Others have attempted to supplement and complete Wollheim’s account, although there is no agreement that such efforts have met with success (Walton 1992).

Wollheim’s account of expression draws on his views of complex projection described above. Once more, his views changed over time; sometimes he applied the

same account to experiencing the world and experiencing art as expressive and sometimes he distinguished between the two (I shall consider only art). Sometimes we experience a work of art as the appropriate recipient of our projected mental states. Once such states are projected, we experience them as being “of a piece” with our minds. We then apply to such works metaphorically the same term we would use to describe our state of mind literally (Wollheim 1993c [1991]). There are a number of puzzles with this account. Let us put aside the fact that the

world is taken to be correlative to our mental states twice in the account – once as a precondition of projection and once as a result of projection – and focus on the role of projection itself. There are two roles that it could play in the account. First, it could be part of a causal account: it is part of the psychological story as to how we come to experience a work as expressive. Second, it could be part of the constitutive account: it could feature within our experience of the work as expressive. As for the first, that is not a task for philosophy. The correct causal account is an empirical matter about which philosophy has no commitments (Wollheim himself was inconsistent on this issue). However, the second is simply implausible. Not only does complex projection not figure in our conscious experience of expression, it is manifestly false that only people with the requisite mental states to project are able to experience works as expressive (Budd 2001). Wollheim attempted to accommodate this fact by talking of the experience somehow “intimating its actual history” in projection, although it is difficult to see how such an accommodation can be made credible (Wollheim 1993c: 153).