A View From The Hill
Caspar David Friedrich, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon
“The two, making and beholding, do not differ in the basic condition of their possibility. Making an image involves the ability to behold something as an image; and to behold something as an image and not merely as an object means also to be able to produce one. This is a statement of essence.”
“The artist sees more than the nonartist, not because he has a better vision, but because he does the artist’s work, namely, remaking the things he sees: and what one makes he knows. As the remaker of things “in their likeness,” pictorial man submits to the standard of truth. But the remaker of things is potentially also the maker of new things, and one power is not different from the other. The freedom that chooses to render a likeness may as well choose to depart from it. The same faculty is reach for the true and the power for the new.”
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, pp. 165 and 171-172.
Encountering an image is a two-fold act, both a making and a beholding. Our seeing the image is always the latter because the image, given the minimal condition of its intelligibility as an image, must bear a likeness to something. An indication of anything at all whatsoever, is an image of nothing. The image must have an internal constraint, an intelligible integrity, that enables it to bear a likeness to this, rather than that. There is a limit to the range of objects that the image can depict, and that is what allows the image to gather into itself an alterity. At the same time, no image, in its configuration, is without ambiguity. The likeness of the image is not determinate, and always requires the interpretation of the one who beholds it in order to stand as an image. Any configuration can show many things, and these possibilities are narrowed by the stance of its viewer. In our disposition to see, we cultivate a likeness in the image. Thus, seeing the image is not only beholding the image in its likeness to the world it reveals to us, but likewise the linking of that very image to the world by the act of beholding.
Humans are image making and image beholding animals. Cave drawings and engraved totems accompanying the deceased in the grave are the natural signs of the emergence of our metaphysical kindred on the earth, whether they be biologically homo sapiens, Neanderthal, or Denisovan. These are the marks of the humane, as the arrival of the image is part and parcel of the tenuous mix of spontaneity and determinacy, freedom and constraint, fidelity and creativity, theory and practice that is the human condition, the ground of both its glory and its foibles. For this reason, vision, the imaging faculty, has always been privileged among the senses by Western philosophers, at least since Plato, as being most closely allied to the kind of insight the philosophical endeavor is supposed to deliver. The image gathers Being for us, but we, its maker and beholder, are not merely passive recipients of the gathering. What one beholds in the image is an expression of his philosophy, something, ironically, he is both responsible for and responsible to.
In this, the first essay of this series, I want to give an expression of my basic philosophic dispositions. I do so not by listing my allegiances to well-known thinkers and schools of thought (all of that will likely be obvious to the initiated reader anyway), nor will I go any distance toward defending these commitments in what follows immediately. Rather, I am going to disclose what I behold in an image. In offering what I see, I reveal my stance toward the world to which it bears a likeness. That stance, like any stance, is as much a making as a beholding, which calls for a justification. The burden of that justification is the philosophical enterprise, and I will take it up in the essays to come. For now, I ask you to indulge me as I articulate what I see, which I believe is the most humane way for us to set the stage to philosophize together.
In recent years Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings have enhanced my thinking and teaching a good deal, and I ask you to look with me at Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1818-1824). Though there is much to be said about Friedrich both philosophically and critically, I am not going to wade into those waters here. Rather I only want to offer an interpretation of this painting, a disclosure of what I behold in it. First note how the ground on which the man and woman stand forms a partial arch or downward slope, and everything on the ground, the earth, leans downhill. The boulder to the right almost tilts out of the frame along this slope, and the decaying tree that dominates the viewer’s perspective is falling along the same line. The trees on the left of the scene, at the top of the arch, are more upright and vigorous, though not without their own intimations of decline; these trees seem to strain to lean against the downward pull with a greater degree of success than the other objects on their way downhill. I see in all this the movement of time. Not the succession discrete events tracked by physics, but the march of becoming that sweeps up all living beings in an inexorable process from their inception to demise: the living time of mortals. The picture, in the foreground most readily available to us, announces the succession of temporality, the inevitable movement from life to death that is our central concern, even though we struggle mightily to ignore it. This movement is the temporality of a drama, both comedic and tragic, rather than the quantity measured by the chronometer.
The man and woman stand on the hill. They exist in living time, and they too slide down the slope. Like everything in the image, the man and the woman are subjects of becoming, and their position basically splits the difference between the young resisting tree at the top of the hill and the tree that has nearly yielded to decay toward the bottom. The man and the woman appear neither young nor old, but in the middle. Standing upright, though well-along the way to the bottom, they are middle-aged, as we say. There are no children with them at this half-way point on the trip down the hill. In other paintings by Friedrich employing similar motifs, the couple is often depicted with their children. Here, however, the man and woman appear to be “empty nesters.” Their children are present by their conspicuous absence.
Maybe the absence of their children makes the contrast between the strong, young resisting tree at the top of the hill and the nearly dead tree at the bottom explicit to the man and the woman, especially the fact that they are now as close to the latter as they are to the former. They have planted strong trees at the top of the hill, but that, their most important work, is over, and the downward slope awaits. Though there is so much to admire in the strong young trees one has planted as they resist the gravity of the hill, these are grim realizations for the man and woman. Everything on the hill, even the currently upright trees, will eventually join them among the decaying lot at the bottom. The midpoint of temporality often occasions crises. I am touched, however, by the woman’s comforting hand on the man’s shoulder. The realization of their temporal precarity is an occasion not for crisis, but deepened affection. The man and woman’s solidarity only grows as they move down the hill. The love and the beauty of their common project are no less satisfying for their finitude. As Jack White puts it, “You’ve had too much to think. Now you need a wife.”
Notice, however, that the man and woman look beyond the hill. They contemplate the moon, which in Friedrich’s depiction can only faintly be seen and is nearly eclipsed. When I look carefully, I see a second celestial body that seems to form a sort of alignment with the moon, a glimpse of a cosmic order. In the terrestrial distance, seemingly on the far side of a valley, we see another hill, but there the trees all appear to be sturdy pines ascending the slope. There is the hint that the angle of the celestial alignment is the same as that far-off ascending slope. I also have the sense that the lean of the decaying tree follows that same line. Maybe even the process of decay is the work of the celestial order contemplated by the man and the woman.
This suggests other possibilities. Do the man and the woman, as they enter the contemplative leisure of their midlife, have a vision of an order behind living time? Is there Being behind even the downward slope of becoming and decay? Is the far away slope of ascending trees a suggestion that the man and woman are part of just one iteration of an infinity of ascents and descents ordained by the celestial order? Maybe they are riding one of an endless cycle of rolling hills. There is a certain consolation for participants in an eternal becoming ordained by the celestial alignment. Is the far-away hill a glimpse of a final point of rest, an end or fulfillment of time, to which the man and woman can look in hope? Is this celestial vision the source of the man and woman’s solidarity, or is their fidelity and affection what makes that stance available to them?
These questions are impossible to answer definitively from the viewer’s perspective. The far-side of the valley appears to be a great way off, and the decaying tree, what is most present from our point of view, obscures all else that seems to fall in line with the celestial ordering. We can only look past decay to see hints of another possibility. Notice, however, the decaying tree is not the only obscuring element: the man and the woman themselves partially block our view of what captures their attention. We do not see what they see; we only see them seeing it. As the viewer, I am uncomfortably aware that I am not the man in his contemplative act, and his very human form contributes to the obscurity of what he sees. Maybe our worries over our own nature get in the way of seeing anything else. Is our anxiety about the opacity of our perspective what ultimately obscures our vision? And yet, I cannot resist the invitation to believe that the man’s vision is a possibility for me. The very fact that I have a sense of both empathy and envy for his situation suggests to me that I could see what he sees.
Darkness from light.
Strife from love.
Are they the workings of one mind?
The features of the same face?
Oh, my soul,
let me be in you now.
Look out through my eyes.
Look out at the things you made.
All things shining.
-- Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line