The Emergence of New Perspective Practice in Vincent Van Gogh

Patrick A. Heelan

If the problem of emergent complex systems is seen as that of constructing a theory that would provide a measure of the probability of emergence of a range of new complex structures not definable in terms of the properties of the lower strata that constitute the environment of the emergent event, the problem as so stated can have no solution because there are no constraints other than negative ones proposed for what would constitute a new emergent complex structure. Any solution must then involve unknown factors in the actual environment of the emergent event and these factors must then, to begin with, belong to a practice rather than to a theory, hence to some local community that first develops a successful practice in which the emergence of a new complex system is recognized to have occurred. The theory -- or a theory -- of such an emergence can then be sought a posteriori with some hope of success, just as the quantum theory was a retrospective search for an explanation of line spectra.

I propose then to take emergence to be the unveiling of new local knowledge in the lifeworld of the discoverer and the availability of that knowledge beyond the local community in which the discovery is made. Emergence as new local knowledge is local in the sense that it is made by a particular community, at a particular historical time, and within a particular cultural environment; as new knowledge, it changes the lifeworld of the discoverer(s) through new technologies and new institutions that propose its evidentiality and give it legitimacy; as knowledge, it is public and communicable through new linguistic and other cultural representations that have the capability of making the new objects of knowledge phenomenologically present in principle to all those who share or who come to share (i.e., to understand) the changed lifeworld of the originating discovering community.

The task of my presentation will be:

1. to illustrate some aspects of what this statement means in relation to modern science and scientific discovery; the focus of the study will be the role of mathematical perspective (and its basis in geometrical optics) in representing a pictorial scene, here, Vincent Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles; graphic reconstructions of the bedroom will be used, the work of Wim de Boever, a computer graphics architect and artist;

2. to sketch the kind of philosophy that supports such a claim and where in the Western tradition this philosophy is currently to be found; the major focus will be the existential hermeneutic tradition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger with a minor focus on classical American pragmatism.

1. As for the first part, I shall use for illustration purposes Vincent Van Gogh's painting, Bedroom at Arles, a work I studied twenty-five years ago with words and numbers (ART BULLETIN 1972) and can now be studied with computer graphics which makes it possible to add truth-showing to truth-telling in presenting the experience of the phenomenological die Sache selbst as an accompaniment to the commentary on the viewing. The presentation will illustrate the point that scientific constructions of mathematical perspective are only infrastructures of vision (not objects of vision) and of themselves indeterminate in constituting the geometry of the viewer's phenomenological pictorial space; they depend in addition perforce on assumed or explicit background of which narrative is a part. A similar one-to-many dependence of theory on a background of multiple cultural practices and a many-to-one dependence of multiple theories for the explanation of a single cultural practice is a general philosophical thesis I propose for the understanding of scientific discovery.

Why use perspective? And why Van Gogh's painting? And why his Bedroom at Arles? Why not choose examples from the current literature on evolution, cognitive science, quantum theory, relativity, or other scientific areas, say, from Galileo's discovery of the Copernican system by his observations of the gibbous phases of Venus? This last we can no longer share; it is veiled from our experience -- though not from our historical understanding -- because the passage of time has definitively removed the local cultural lifeworld of Galileo from our midst. There are, however, other more recent discoveries, say, of the geometrical structure of DNA by Watson and Crick which because of the concreteness of their models and Watson's excellent narrative permit us in principle at least to share the phenomenon they experienced for the problem they posed in the background of the scientific culture of their times and through the models they constructed.

I choose Van Gogh's painting of his bedroom at Arles because the artist was skilled in perspective which supposes a Euclidean space of light rays and believed that he had found a new way of using it. Of course, the image that a viewer sees when looking at the original painting (Vasco Ronchi's "effigy") departs strikingly from a Euclidean image, but its narrative message is eternal -- two lovers are enough for each other to make not just a world but a whole universe. The context of viewing then is local even of us. The non-Euclidean image we see can be brought back closer to a Euclidean image just by additions to the original painting that do not violate perspective but suggest a different background and narrative. Thus, we can provide ourselves with a laboratory in which to examine the many-to-one functioning of a particular explanatory theory -- here geometrical optics as the basis for mathematical perspective -- and thereby the relationship between a theory and an emergent cultural phenomenon. The old theory remains as explanatory of infrastructure; but the emergent phenomenon supposes a non-Euclidean experiential world.

2. The second part of the paper sketches the relevance of existential phenomenology, particularly the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, to the analysis of scientific explanation and discovery illustrated above. The relevance comes from the hermeneutical character of experience in this philosophy and from the method of the hermeneutical circle (or spiral) as the abductive method appropriate to human creative inquiry in and about the world. In this account, the object of experience, die Sache selbst, is meaning-filled within the practical culture of a local and historical community independently of how its presence is explained in theoretical terms, for such explanations refer to the theory-laden means of production of the phenomenon within which the experience is generated. These include, for example, the physical infrastructure of the environment and the background evidentialities that make sense of the new practices. A scientific research community is such a local community though its members may be dispersed in many different places; it is theory-oriented relative to the production of phenomena, but praxis-laden relative to the recognition of phenomena, and therefore a research community connotes a synchrony of time, a coordination of places, and a community of viewers, who share a physical culture, a language, and a background of practical common sense. The effect of theory then is not to re-describe reality or lay bare some unchanging foundation of the real, but to change the lifeworld for the research community by adding to its practical capacities among which is to be counted the possible addition of new scientific furniture to its world. This lifeworld change can be communicated to other for in the larger community beyond science through the awareness of a richer lifeworld than previous generations were born into. Pragmatism shares a part of this philosophy, but only a part; the truth of alethia is not just pragmatic truth, but implicates the fundamental historicity of a finite human understanding that, though transformative of the world, is endowed with no guarantee of final truth or the possession of final goodness.

*The architectural graphics are the work of Wim de Boever, University of Ghent. I also thank Professor Marc De Mey, University of Ghent, for his help.