William wrote: > That leaves us with a question about form itself, which implies some kind of wholeness or unity among parts. Is that unity also projected? I suspect it is.
And you call me a Thomist! In any representative work--i.e., not a thing-in-the-world like a pair of shoes but a painting of a pair of shoes--or in works that are "non-representative" but are made in tandem with them (e.g., "abstract" paintings), the thing has ends, limits, terminal points. Everything within the limits is put there by some intention of the maker. Nature is not limited in that way. Things just go on and on, spatially in three dimensions and temporally, in history. Perhaps this is the juncture between Panovsky's man of science and man of humanist studies. A movie is only 2 hours long, and every event is the movie exists in its entirety on screen for a minute or five or twenty seconds. A novel is 300 pages or so, and it lasts as long as it takes you to read it, and the characters have no other existence than what is written in the pages. (It's a pointless pedantic exercise to suppose what Raskolnikov might have done if the police inspector had asked him another question, etc.--except perhaps in a lesson in how to construct fictional stories.) Likewise a painting. And all of these and other kinds of representations not only have ends, they have signals for us to find the ends: the frame of the painting, the covers of the book, the beginning and ending credits, etc. When Aristotle took pains to identify the beginning, middle, and end of a play, he was making a major distinction with everything else. I think often the emphasis is that the beginning is the place where the story is set up and it prefigures the main action (it "looks ahead" to the rest of the story) and that the end is the collecting together of the pieces to give a coherence to the story (it "looks back"). What is emphasized in both cases is NOT the fact that the beginning is an abrupt break from "reality" and that the end is the point of return to "reality." | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
