Richard Woodfield, 'Peetz and Wollheim on Gombrich's Illusions: a note' more

PEETZ AND WOLLHEIM ON GOMBRICH'S ILLUSIONS: A NOTE Richard Woodfield Gombrich s views on illusion have been so frequently misrepresented, particularly by philosophers, that the time has come again to set the record straight. This time the offender is my good friend Dieter Peetz.1 It is a fact of the English language that the connotational range of the word `illusion' is greater than that of the word `delusion'; this may be checked by consulting a clutch of ordinary dictionaries. One can, if one likes, handle the situation in the manner o fJ. L. Austin: `Sometimes the plain man would prefer to say that his senses were deceived rather than that he was deceived by his senses the quickness of the hand deceives the eye, &c.'2 Alternatively, one may point to the empirical fact that while there is a familiar range of delusions (of grandeur, brilliance, etc.) which entail false belief on the part of the people experiencing them there is another familiar range of illusions which do not. Shadow Antiqua3 appears to be letters formed of ribbon standing off the page, but no one believes that it consists in ribbon standing off the page. The Fraser spiral4 does not look like a series of concentric circles but a single spiralling line, and everyone who knows the Fraser spiral also knows that. The same is true of all the other illusions cited in Art and Illusion:5 their illusory effect can be recognized and known without any damage to the effect itself. No amount of knowing or intellectual recognition will change the `spreading effect'.6 It seems to me that an important part of Gombrich's account of naturalistic representation is the way in which illusions are built into pictorial structure. Perhaps the most dramatic display of this is to be found in the operation of constancies. I have tried out Evans's photomontage of a street scene7 on hundreds of art students and they never cease to be surprised by the way in which the lamppost in the distance shrinks when juxtaposed to the lamppost in the foreground; knowledge does not change the effect. While it would be paradoxical for a person to claim to know that he was deluded, there is no paradox in a person claiming knowledge of the experience of an illusory effect. In case it should be thought that recognition of an illusion does not entail any change in belief (that one continues, in fact, to have false beliefs after having the illusion pointed out) there is a straightforward operational refutation of this. One knows that by using a ruler, masking off spaces, tracing lines, etc., the illusion will be exposed but that doesn't make the illusion itself disappear. Gombrich has written a letter to this journal8 and repeatedly pointed out in published lectures that there is a difference between delusion and illusion. It seems perverse to insist on conflating the two. 1 `Some Current Philosophical Theories of Pictorial Representation', British Journal of Aesthetics, 27 (1987). Sense and Sensibilia (London, 1962), p. 13. See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (henceforth AI) (London, 1968), ill. 172. 4 AI, ill. 184. 5 AI, ills. 2, 220, 225, 232, 237, 250, 251. 6 AI, ill. 251. 7 See E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye (Oxford, 1982), ill. 6. 8 Published in volume 13 (1973), p. 99. 3 2 Perhaps the conflation continues to exist through the authority of Richard Wollheim's article `Reflections on Art and Illusion': if ... we take illusion literally, which, I maintain we are required to do by the theory. In the first place such an equation completely distorts the attitude that we adopt to naturalistic painting. It is surely quite untrue to suggest that, in looking at the masterpieces of Constable or Monet, we have any temptation, even a partial or inhibited temptation, to react towards them in a way similar to that in which we would to the objects they represent; that we in any way wish to stretch out a hand and join in the picnic, or to assume dark glasses against the glare of the sun.9 Of course philosophers are fond of reductio ad absurdum arguments, which this has to be. I can't really imagine Gombrich going into the National Gallery with a shotgun to protect himself from the variety of wild beasts that inhabit its paintings. But he doesn't have to do this even if he does take the word literally, which he is quite entitled to do. Stalking an illusion to find out how an artist creates an effect is part of a perceptual psychologist's job. An art-lover is simply sensitive to the effects: when Fuseli called for greatcoat and umbrella in the face of Constable's landscapes `he showed he understood the kind of truth the master was aiming at. Not the dry but the humid, not the linear but the atmospheric, not the lasting but the transient'.10 Paintings excel in the degree to which they provoke imaginative response through their internal characteristics. Projection is not, pace Dieter, ancillary to Gombrich's notions about illusion but central to them. To see the humid, the atmospheric and the transient in a Constable is to be imaginative and to call for greatcoat and umbrella is witty. Perhaps today's humour takes different forms. Having disposed of the notion that illusion is the same thing as delusion it is appropriate to move on to the notion that Gombrich treats trompe l'oeil paintings as paradigm cases for picture viewing. As this would only be true if the business of naturalistic painting were to delude, it is clearly false. This also obscures the important point that as painters aim at capturing a variety of effects, picture- making itself has a multiplicity of functions. The most telling picture of a person may be a caricature, the most informative picture of a house may be a rotating computerized image of ground-plan and elevation, the most useful X-ray may be one which does not aim for high resolution and the most accomplished `illusionist' painters might be Renoir and Rembrandt. Indeed, we are reminded that the term `illusionism' was introduced into art-historical writing `by Franz Wickhoff in 1895 in his famous publication of the Vienna Genesis, an early Christian manuscript, to characterize the deft style of brushwork which had survived from Hellenistic times. The idea that anyone should have confused the illustrations of the manuscript with reality obviously did not enter his mind.'11 This seems to me to be a suitable place to end, for the moment. 9 In On Art and the Mind (London, 1973), p. 277. 10 11 AI, p. 325. E. H. Gombrich, `Illusion and Art' in Illusion in Nature and Art, ed. R. L. Gregory and E. H. Gombrich (London, 1973), p. 195.