Artistic Truth
Science & Common Sense
In both science and common sense, words are used to refer to specific things in the world. The word ‘hydrogen’ is used to refer to a gas that’s believed to make up three quarters of the matter in the universe. And the word ‘dog’ is used to refer to the hairy creatures that often wag their tails when people say ‘walk’.
The words, or the ideas behind whole patterns of thought, get their sense from being about certain things, and it doesn’t make much difference to the aboutness if the objects they’re about are real or fictional. An idea can refer to the current president of the USA, to Christopher Columbus, or to the Pied Piper of Hamelin with equal ‘aboutness’.
All that matters is that the idea points towards a form of life, and even fictional characters are forms of life, with patterns of existence that statements can be wrong or right about.
It is even possible for an idea to have aboutness when the object it refers to does not exist, as in ‘the present day king of France is bald’. France doesn’t have kings any more, but as soon as you mention one, one appears, picked out from the infinite pool of the possible by the light of the imagination.
Artistic Representations
Art works differently. A work of art doesn’t say anything specific about any particular part of the world. There is, instead, a resonance.
- A piece of music may resonate with emotions that are similar to the emotions that are felt when facing certain aspects of the real world, but the music itself does not point out any similarities. Its meaning is contained within it.1
- A poem may resonate with various features of the world, and make the reader feel a certain way, but the poem will not make explicit statements about specific features of reality. A poem can’t be fact checked.
- A landscape painting is not an objective representation of a particular vista. It is the product of a personal process and it’s up to the viewer to experience a resonance themself and find their own interpretation of the painting.
Isomorphic Forms
The resonance works because the artwork and the aspects of the world that it resonates with are always isomorphic, meaning that they always have some similarity of form.2
In a landscape painting, there might be similarities of colour or shape between what is on the canvas and the painted vista. A poem may capture something of what it is like to fall in love, or experience the death of a parent. And there may be a correspondence between the constellation of feelings a piece of music generates and aspects of what it is to be a human being that can’t be expressed in any other way.
An artwork doesn’t say what the world is like. It shows.
- Cf. Wittgenstein – “If we compare a proposition to a picture, we must think whether we are comparing it to a portrait (a historical representation) or to a genre-picture. And both comparisons have a point. When I look at a genre-picture, it ‘tells’ me something, even though I don’t believe (imagine) for a moment that the people I see in it really exist, or that there have really been people in that situation. But suppose I ask: “What does it tell me, then?” I should like to say “What the picture tells me is itself.” That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its own lines and colours. (What would it mean to say “What this musical theme tells me is itself”?)” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, remarks 522 & 523.
- Isomorphic, adjective, “the same or similar in structure or shape”, Cambridge Free English Dictionary.