Rudolf Arnheim - visual thinking

VISUAL THINKING

In the preface Rudolf Arnheim describes visual perception as a cognitive activity. He states that artistic activity is a form of reasoning and that perceiving and thinking are indivisibly intertwined. You could say that artists think with their senses. He quotes a review that points out that the way our senses understand the environment is the same as the operations of thinking. Rudolf Arnheim claims that productive thinking takes place in the realm of imagery. According to him the problem is that a split has taken place between senses and thoughts. This book is specialized on the sense of sight and is grounded on earlier works such as "Art and visual perception" and "Toward a psychology of art" which deals with the psychology of perception.

Chapter one - Early Stirrings

In chapter one Rudolf Arnheim states the in order to cope with the world the mind has to fulfill two functions: gather information and process it. Whereas he thinks that the collaboration of thinking and perceiving is essential for cognition he says that popular philosophy insists on a division. Gathering data is recognized as the higher cognitive function whereas perceiving as the inferior one. Our whole educational system is based on that idea. Young kids learn by seeing and shaping before they enter the school. School education discriminates perception. "The arts are neglected because they are based on perception and perception is disdained because it's not assumed to involve thought." Art is the most powerful means to strengthen perception which is essential for productive thinking and reasoning power.

Rudolf Arnheim looks back to early Greek thinkers to see how this split of perception and thinking come about. He goes back in hebrew tradition and states that there is a long hostility against graven images. Starting with the destruction of a sculpture (the golden calf) by Moses.

The senses mistrusted

The early thinkers located the split between perception and thought in the outside world. They thought perception to be misleading such as a stick in water seems to be broken. They thought of an objectively existing world and our perception of it. The heavenly versus the terrestrial: The heavenly with its reliability of events in astronomy and math versus the terrestrial with its disorder and unpredictable senses. The difference between the physical and the mental marks the beginning of psychology. "Psychology, as it cam to be practiced, has cautioned us not to identify innocently the world we perceive with the world that "really" is." (Sophists) Greek thinkers wanted perception to be evaluated by reasoning. "Sensory perception and reasoning were established as antagonists, in need of each other but different from each other in principle."

Plato of two minds

Plato has an ambiguous attitude. He believed that logical operations lead to stable generalities of an objective existence but he also has a deep believe in the wisdom of direct vision calling it "gazing upon truth". Still the mistrust of ordinary perception marks Platos philosophy profoundly.

Aristotle from below and above

Aristotle also has an ambiguous attitude. "Although the Greek philosophers conceived the dichotomy of perceiving and reasoning, it can't be said that they applied this motion with the rigidity the doctrine assumed in recent centuries. of western thought. The Greek learned to distrust the senses, but they never forgot that direct vision is the first and final source of wisdom. They refined the techniques of reasoning but they also believed that "the soul never thinks without an image" (Aristotle)"

Chapter two - The Intelligence of Visual Perception I

Perception as cognition

The central thought here is that cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. Operations such as active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion correction, comparison, problem solving, combining, separating, putting in context is not a matter of mind but of how cognitive material is treated. There is no basic difference between looking at the world and thinking. By "cognitive" Rudolf Arnheim means all mental operations involved in receiving, storing and processing information: sensory perception, memory, thinking, learning (in general psychology excludes activity of sense from cognition). Visual perception = visual thinking. Rudolf Arnheim acknowledges the reasons for the distinction between seeing (reflections of retina) and thinking BUT he talks about a difference between passive reception and active perceiving. Active perceiving is according to him contained even in an elementary visual experience. As an example the asks "is the raw image (sky, water, desk etc) the essence of perception? No! It's only the scene on which perception takes place. Through that world the glance roams, directed by attention, focusing the narrow range of sharpest vision now on this now on that spot. This active performance is what is truly meant by visual perception.

Perception circumscribed

Our thoughts influence what we see and vice versa. To illustrate: A persons view of the size of an object does not commonly correspond to the relative size of the projection of that object on the retina / so that, for example, a distant car whose optical projection on the retina is smaller than that of a letterbox close by, appears to have the normal size of cars. One can explain this by saying, as Helmholtz did in the nineteenth century, that the faulty image is corrected by an unconscious judgement based on facts available to the observer. S. 16 For the discussion of cognitive processes in this book it makes no difference in principle whether he are carried out consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or automatically, by the higher brain centres or by mere reflexes. Rudolf Arnheim acknowledges the risk of speaking of intelligence with regard to elementary biological responses but he argues that in a simple sense the vigilance of a lively human mind is the latest display of the struggle for survival that made primitive organisms responsive to changes in the environment.

Exploring the remote

Sensory responsiveness therefore can be said to be intelligent. Some senses can obtain information about whats going on in distance: hearing, vision, smell. Those senses go beyond the immediate effect on us. Vision in particular, is, as Hans Jonas has pointed out, the prototype and perhaps the origin of teoria, meaning detached beholding, contemplation.

The senses vary

Smell and taste are rich in nuances but rather primitive in the sense that one cannot think in smells and tastes. Hearing and Vision are senses for the exercise of intelligence. The great virtue of vision is that it is not only a highly articulate medium, but that its universe offers inexhaustibly rich information about the objects and events of the outer world. Therefore vision is the primary medium of thought. The facilities of the sense of vision are not only available to the mind; the are indispensable for its functioning.

Vision is selective

Senses evolved as biological aids for survival. They aimed at the difference between enhancement and impediment of life. Vision is experienced as a most active occupation. "In looking at an object we reach out for it. With an invisible finger we move through the space around us, go out to the distant places where things are found, touch them, catch them, scan their surfaces, trace their borders, explore their texture." Active selectivity is a basic trait of vision, as it is a trait of any other intelligent concern; and the most elementary preference to be noted is that for changes in the environment. To contemplate immobile parts of the surroundings is more nearly a luxury. Change is absent in immobile things but also in things repeating the same action over and over. There is a selective attention to change. We see colours as variations and combinations of a few primaries.

I'm skipping the pages from 23 to 37. The subtitles of these pages are the following:

Fixation solves a problem

Discernment in depth

Shapes are concepts

Perception takes time

How machines read shape

Completing the incomplete

Chapter three - The Intelligence of Visual Perception II

Visual perception is not passive recording of stimulus material but an active concern of the mind. The sense of sight operates selectively. The perception of shape consists in the application of form categories, which can be called visual concepts because of their simplicity and generality. Perception involves problem solving. Next to discuss is a more subtle perceptual operation.