wshhh...

It would be interesting if some real authority investigated carefully the part which memory plays in painting. We look at the object with an intent regard, then at the palette, and thirdly at the canvas. The canvas receives a message dispatched usually a few seconds before from the natural object. But it has come through a post office en route. It has been transmitted in code. It has been turned from light into paint. It reaches the canvas a cryptogram. Not until it has been placed in its correct relation to everything else that is on the canvas can it be deciphered, is its meaning apparent, is it translated once again from mere pigment into light. And the light this time is not of Nature but of Art.

One of my pet speculations is that philosophy will also become visual in this century. Objective IQ scores have been rising three points a decade in all industrialised nations (when they are not normed by decade). The discoverer of this effect, the philosopher James Flynn, shows that the gains have been greatest for tests that emphasise visual thinking such as the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. He traces the rise in IQ to a more visually stimulating environment.

I suspect this is why my students can understand Ned Block’s article about mirror reversal. Block advised me not to use it in class because a large percentage of his colleagues complained that they got lost in the mental rotations. But I found that some of my most inarticulate students started to speak up. Philosophy is prejudiced in favour of the discursive and needs to open to pictorial thinkers.