Symposium:
The Historicity of the Eye
Arthur C. Danto
Seeing and Showing
The thesis that the eye itself is as historical as
human knowledge itself-that there are
changes in v i ~ u a l i e r c e ~ t i oindexed
n to and
possibly reflective of historical changes, and
that there is a history of seeing entirely anal-
ogous to changes i n artistic production-at-
tributes, in my view, a far greater plasticity to
our optical system than the facts of percep-
tion seem to me to allow.' There is a weak
form of the thesis that few would disallow,
namely, that one often sees the world
through certain works of art, as when Swann,
in Proust's novel, finds himself able to fall in
love with Odette de Crecy only when he sees
that her face is the very face of Zipporah,
Jethro's daughter, in a Sistine fresco by Bot-
ticelli; or when we see people spread out in
such a way as to appear a tableau vivant of
Seurat's Grande Jatte. But my sense is that
philosophers who subscribe to the eye as his-
torical have in mind the far deeper sense al-
luded to above, as when Marx Wartofsky
sees "human vision itself as a cultural artifact
shaped by our own historical change in prac-
tices (in this case of pictorial representa-
tion)."2 And, to leave no doubt that it is the
strong sense that concerns him, Wartofsky
advances the bold thesis that "ways of repre-
senting become ways of seeing, that canoni-
cal styles of representing the seen world
change . . . and introduce transformations of
vision. [So] the space of vision is itself a func-
tion of such changes in representational
praxis."3
At a level higher than that of optical real-
ity, there is no doubt that people see the
same things differently at different cultural
moments-the hot springs seen by devout
medievals as evidence of hellfire are seen by
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 591 Winter 2001
nineteenth-century entrepreneurs as ther-
mal sanatoria waiting to be exploited-but a
robust theory of the eye as historical would
require that whatever accounts for these dif-
ferences penetrates the optical system in
such a way that the eye itself changes with
history so that, at the level of ophthalmology,
individuals see the world differently, or even,
in the strongest version of the thesis, see dif-
ferent worlds. Since the main evidence for
the thesis is drawn, certainly in Wartofsky's
case but no less so in the many contempo-
rary theorists who have argued one version
of the thesis or another, from the consider-
able diversity of representational schemata
in art works from one era or culture to an-
other, I shall begin by discussing what this
admitted diversity entails.
I shall concentrate for the moment on sys-
tems of pictorial notation, in which the same
thing-a horse, say-is differently repre-
sented by different schemata. To be pictori-
ally competent in the use of such a system,
one must be able to distinguish pictures of
one kind of thing from pictures of an-
other-horse-pictures, say, from hawk-pic-
tures-and call them by their right names.
Usually, the names appropriate to pictures
are identical with the names appropriate to
what they are pictures of: the term "horse"
indifferently designates horses and horse-
pictures, which is why Magritte's celebrated
Ceci n'est pas un pipe* (whose true title is Le
trahison des images) is at once true and false.
It would not only be pedantic to insist that it
is only correct to say "horse picture" rather
than "horse" when confronted by the for-
mer, as Tolstoi makes clear in his story "Das
Fischbuch," which targets such pedantry as

bad pedagogy. It would also conceal some-
thing important about pictorial perception
itself, for it may be true that much the same
neural pathways explain our ability to iden-
tify horses when we see them and pictures of
horses when we see them. It has been dem-
onstrated that someone growing up in a pic-
ture-free environment will, when at last pre-
sented with pictures, instantly identify them
by the name used to identify whatever the
pictures are of: "horse" picks out a class of
pictures as well as a class of animals. The
ability to recognize pictures in this way is a
dividend of our ability to recognize things,
perhaps through mechanisms that code for
outlines. This ability, moreover, is universal
in that it enables us to identify pictures from
most known pictorial notations, however
greatly they differ from another. However a
pictograph of a horse may differ from a real-
istic picture of a horse, we know the former
to be a horse because we know what the lat-
ter is. And we will unhesitatingly distinguish
pictures of horses from pictures of hawks, in
whatever notational system they co-occur. If
we thought of language as a pictorial system,
as Wittgenstein did, we would not have to
learn it. There is an immediate perceptual
connection between pictures and things, as
there is only in rare instances between words
and things.
In any case, this ability to recognize pic-
tures for what they are exemplifies what I
term nonassociative learning, very much of a
piece with recognizing another hawk when
we have learned to identify hawks. Or vice
versa: we teach children a basic vocabulary
from "apple" to "zebra" by means of picture
books, enabling them to recognize apples
and zebras when they see them. It is impor-
tant to distinguish between pictures used to
denote what they resemble and pictures with
extrapictorial meanings: in the hieroglyphic
system, hawk pictures sometimes simply
stand for hawks, but sometimes operate in a
syllabarium, and carry the sound the word
for hawk makes when pronounced, some-
what in the manner of a rebus. So one has to
decide, in seeing a hawk-picture, which use it
is intended to have. (Egyptians used a special
stroke-a "pictorial stroken-to disambigu-
ate logos with different functions, depending
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
upon whether the text is about hawks, or
about something altogether different, the
word for which might have the sound
"hawk" makes as a morpheme, say, in a name
like "Mohawk." It is like Frege's Urteil-
streich, which transforms a sentence into a
theorem.) Anyone who knows what hawks
look like will be able to pick out the hawk
logos, however stylized. But one would have
to know spoken Egyptian to know the pho-
netic values of the (Egyptian) word for
"hawk." The former, as I see it, involves what
I term nonassociative learning. If we indeed
recognize pictures of hawks in virtue of the
same procedures through which we recog-
nize hawks, then once we have learned to
pick out hawks, we have nothing more we
need learn in order to pick the hawk pictures
out correctly. Learning that they are called
"hawks" in English is associative: the ability
to recognize hawks will not tell us what they
are called. We have to learn the words for
things, if not through ostension, then some
other way. But learning the meaning of the
word "hawk" will not teach you one single
thing about the word for hawks in Russian,
German, Norwegian, etc. We have to acquire
each vocabulary through separate pieces of
learning, whereas whatever explains our
ability to recognize the hawk logo in one pic-
torial system will suffice to pick out hawk
logos in any notational system. There is a
certain constancy over the class of pictures at
the same time as there is great elasticity. I
suppose it could be argued that pictures are
topological transforms of one another. All
this comes, so to speak, with the neural terri-
tory.
What does not come with the territory is
understanding symbolic meanings, when
their vehicle is a picture, as when, for exam-
ple, the hawk picture is intended to be un-
derstood as Horus, the god of light, and the
offspring of Isis and Osiris. Symbols really do
have to be learned one at a time, like words.
It is almost certainly true that at the level of
symbolism, the eye might be said to connect
with something that has an historical dimen-
sion. That hawk pictures may have different
symbolic meanings in different times and
places is incontestable: a hawk- picture from
the time of Charlemagne would certainly not
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Danto, Seeing and Showing
have reference to Horus, Isis, or Osiris, and
one would have to master the system of
meanings to find out what the picture means,
perhaps in a text on falconry. But none of
this has anything to do with the way the eye
works, nor does it entail that the eye is in any
sense historical. Thus we can imagine a pair
of indiscernible pictures from different nota-
tional systems that mean quite different
things, between which the eye of course can-
not discriminate. We can all identify the pic-
tures in terms of their congruity with what, as
pictures, they resemble and denote. But this
will carry us only to the level of shape recog-
nition, which is in no interesting sense histor-
ical. To understand the meanings requires an
archeology of how pictures were used to
mean when not used simply to denote their
resemblata.
Let us imagine a Notational Museum, in
which all known pictorial systems are exhib-
ited-something like an Alphabet Museum,
in which all known alphabets are displayed.
The museum will show horses or hawks as
drawn by Egyptians, by Chinese, by Hawai-
ians, by European romantics, by Minoans,
etc. My claim is that nonassociative learning
will enable us to identify the shapes that dif-
fer in whatever way one notional system dif-
fers from another. We cannot imagine, for
example, that a circle with an x would in any
sense be a horse-picture, though it could eas-
ily be a symbol, standing for but not resem-
bling horses. But horse-pictures, as con-
trasted with horse-symbols, perforce look
enough alike-and enough like horses in the
real world-to enable us to disregard differ-
ences in proportion and linearity, and to pick
out the horses every time. Pictorial compe-
tence indeed requires that we have this skill.
The skill transcends the differences between
notational systems, in much the same way
that vision does. This almost certainly has
something to do with the eye, as the organ of
visual information. But it has nothing to do
with the eye as historical. The notational sys-
tems can undoubtedly be placed in historical
order. But the eye, in point of nonassociative
learning, is entirely transhistorical-with this
exception. A notional system may contain
pictures of things that did not exist when
some of the earlier systems were in effect.
3
Pictorial competence alone would not en-
able one of its original users to identify a
picture of something that did not exist at the
time-an automobile picture, say, in Minoan
times, or a television set. But it would cer-
tainly enable a Minoan to recognize an auto-
mobile when he saw one, say, after having
been frozen in what science-fiction writers
used to refer to as suspended animation.
It is part of the analysis of pictorial mean-
ing, already appealed to, that pictures of x re-
semble their denotations, whatever Nelson
Goodman may contend. But there are de-
grees and degrees of resemblance between
pictures and their denotations, from the most
schematic to the most realistic-from a
schematized horse made into a weather vane
by an unknown folk artist to horses as
Gericault painted them, or as Paulus Potter
would have painted them, viz., in the same
manner in which he painted cattle or dogs.
We may base on the existence of different
notational systems a claim about the plastic-
ity of the eye only if we think that pictures in
every notational system were seen by users
of those systems to be as realistic as the real-
istic pictures in our own. Then the pictures in
every notational system would be like a win-
dow onto the world, as their users perceived
it: that the actual landscape of China was
populated by calligraphic horses galloping
past dotted and blotted trees. The Chinese
world would, in brief, look just like Chinese
pictures of the world. It is a charming but es-
sentially crazy thought. Except (mainly) for
artifacts, the world as perceived by Chinese
must have looked just the way it looks to us.
Gombrich offers the example of the late Chi-
nese artist, Chiang Yee, who painted, entirely
in the Chinese manner he was master of, a
picture of cows at Denventwater. "It brings
home to the layman how much of what we
call 'seeing' is conditioned by habits and ex-
pectations."4 I would say, rather, that habits
and expectations condition how things are
shown, rather than how they are seen: we ex-
pect Chinese painters to show things in ways
we are habituated to identify as Chinese.
Chiang Yee was among my closest friends,
and I knew perfectly well how he saw things.
He was a political exile, living in England,
where he conceived the idea-he was some-

thing of a showman-to paint scenes in
Yorkshire as if they were motifs for classical
Chinese painting, and that became, so to
speak, his meal ticket. He knew people
would be charmed by this displacement, and
that he would be able to live by his brush, as
indeed they did and he did, both as writer
and as artist. He wrote books on many
places, under the title The Silent Traveler,
using the same style. But he was at home ev-
erywhere.
To derive the thesis that the visual system
is plastic is to treat all notational systems on
a Renaissance model, the model, namely, of
visual fidelity, where the aim is to produce
pictures that, ideally, cannot be told visually
from the things they depict. But this is con-
ceptual imperialism. It is to suppose that pic-
tures everywhere have the same purpose,
and that everywhere a criterion of illusion is
the measure of success. But this means, con-
trary to cultural testimony, that the Chinese,
for example, believe their drawings of horses
look like horses to the point of generating il-
lusion. They know their pictures cannot be
mistaken for reality, and that has never been
their aim, which explains the nonindividual
convention of portraits: the Chinese knew
about exact resemblances, especially in the
nineteenth century, when photographs en-
tered their culture. But they disdained them,
as having nothing to do with what they felt
portraits should be. Maybe they sought to
capture in gesture the spirit of their motifs.
The eye cannot tell us whether it does that or
not. The eye can only tell us whether it is a
picture of a man or of a horse. That it can do
this is easily made subject to scientific test:
simply present a lot of notational systems to
as many cultures as you choose, and see
whether members of the culture cannot pick
out by nonassociative learning which are the
man-pictures and which are the horse-
pictures.
Consider at this point the phenomenon of
linear perspective, which as a pictorial device
was invented by Brunelleschi, but as a mech-
anism of optical perception is genetically de-
fined, as binocularity is. The artist Giuseppe
Castiglione (1688-1766) was sent to China as
a Jesuit missionary in 1714. As an artist, he
was a follower of Andrea Pozzo, whose great
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
ceiling at S. Ignazio exploits perspective as a
science. It is reported that when Father
Giuseppe called on the Emperor, a eunuch
chattered in Chinese, which none of the Eu-
ropeans understood. The eunuch said that all
Europeans looked alike, so if any under-
stand Chinese, they all must. But of course
nothing of the sort could be true, whereas a
parallel point about pictures would, with ir-
relevant qualifications, certainly be true.
Castiglione pursued his artistic calling in
China, including two illusionistic frescoes
drawn in scientific perspective. When the
Chinese saw these works, they said: "The an-
cients lacked perspective method, and where
it is used so skillfully as here, one regrets that
the ancients had not seen it." This implies
that these individuals immediately saw what
was involved in such depictions, and recog-
nized that the history of painting in China
would or might have been different if this
knowledge was possessed by the great mas-
ters. The Emperor commented on some pic-
tures Castiglione painted of horses in 1683,
"Occidental paintings and drawings transmit
by other methods. . . . But while resembling,
they only resemble, and so yield to ancient
models."5 Again, it is perfectly clear that the
Emperor saw that Castiglione's horses
looked far more like horses look than Chi-
nese horses do, but he felt that this was not
enough. And indeed, it would have sub-
verted the structure of Chinese artistic his-
tory to have accepted perspective as the way
to show spatial recession. After all, the basic
relationship in which an artist stood to the
past was to paint paradigms from the
past-to paint, for example, as the nine-
teenth-century artist Wan Shang-Lin did, a
work of Ni Tsan half a millennium later. One
could not do this if Ni Tsan did not know
perspective and his successors did. That
would have broken the connection to the
past, and changed the entire structure of ar-
tistic life, which involved a powerful identifi-
cation with figures in the often very distant
past.
The beauty of this example is that
Castiglione himself became a Chinese art-
ist-Lang Shining. It is interesting to note
the way shading is used in a wonderful por-
trait of Prince Bao: Chinese painters did not
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Danto, Seeing and Showing
shade at all, which gives a certain abstract-
ness to their depictions. Chiang Yee told me
the story of a favorite concubine portrayed,
perhaps by Shining, who shrieked that the
artist had painted her as half black. He
painted the bamboos with botanical preci-
sion-quite un-Chinese-and he sought to
portray the prince's character. But he uses
Chinese perspective, which requires that fur-
ther edges of tables, for example, should be
longer than nearer ones, without the surface
being any more trapezoidal than when the
opposite is true. Chinese perspective does
not show how things look: it is a convention
of depiction that one might almost say de-
clared the Chinese lack of interest in show-
ing how things look. But Chinese pilots have
no difficulty landing on Western airfields, to
use the kind of example Gombrich borrows
from the psychologist J. J. Gibson's theory of
invariants, in his great text "The Senses as a
Perceptual System." The beauty of Gibson's
work lies in its demonstration of the com-
plexity of the sensory system as against any
pictorial system known to us; or the only
plausible equivalent would be moving pic-
tures, which use the camera to penetrate
space, showing how things change as we
move among them.
Once perspective was known to the Chi-
nese, it was a cultural and indeed a political
decision to turn their backs on it, though
such was the power of emperors that they
could have ordained that Chinese painting
henceforward be perspectivally correct.
They weighed the costs of Westernization in
this respect, and made a rational decision
based on the cultural sacrifices this would
entail. The Renaissance represents a cultural
decision as well, namely, to represent the
world the way it looks spontaneously to un-
instructed perception. Foreshortening, chiar-
oscuro, perspective, physiognomy-these
were discoveries that enabled pictures to
look like what they represented. It was a cul-
tural decision about how to picture, but not
how to see, which is indemnified against po-
litical intervention. Not every pictorial sys-
tem makes that decision. For the Chinese,
the continuity with the ancients was far more
important than the types of images they
would soon learn could be achieved by a me-
5
chanical device, like the camera, which, in
the Emperor's words, "resemble but do not
do more than resemble." Relative to their in-
terests, it would have been intolerably con-
descending to suppose the Chinese did not
know how to draw, or, worse, that Lin
Shining " should teach them how to draw cor-
rectly, meaning to draw things the way they
look. They drew perfectly correctly, within
their cultural agenda for pictures. The histo-
ricity of the eye supposes that they had the
same cultural agenda as Renaissance artists,
who were successful simply perceiving the
- . -
world the way their pictures exactly showed.
But that seems altogether inconsistent even
with the Renaissance model, itself consid-
ered historically. I shall now argue this point.
It has, since Vasari, been a matter of con-
sensus that the history of painting has been
developmental and progressive, so long at
least as the governing ideal of painting was
to show the world the way the world is seen.
Indeed, the history of painting was in many
ways a paradigm of the possibility of prog-
ress. "For many centuries," Thomas Kuhn
wrote, "painting was regarded as the cumula-
tive discipline."6 Historians of art, and Vasari
certainly, "recorded with veneration the se-
ries of inventions from foreshortening
through chiaroscuro that had made possible
successfully more perfect representations of
nature." It is not so much that in this respect
there are parallels between the history of art
and the histories of science. Progress in art
really was progress in the science of repre-
sentation, the way in which something of the
sort could be said about the history of pho-
tography. One can regard the latter as the
progress of techniques, to the point where
Peter Galassi once said that he was taught
the history of photography without refer-
ence to any images at all. Obviously there
were images, and just as obviously paintings
did more than show the world the way artists
had learned to show it by mastering the tech-
niques that stood as markers on the road to
perfection. Still, it was central to the concept
of painting that it be progressive to the point
where perfection would have meant indis-
cernabfiity from visual experience: showing
and seeing were indiscernible.
Ernst Gombrich was unique in attempting

to explain how art could have had such a cu-
mulative history, and his theory of "making
and matching" in effect exhibits the struc-
ture his great colleague, Karl Popper, spoke
of as Der Logik der Forschung. What this
meant on Popper's view, with his severe
anti-inductivist Dosture. was that one does
not typically generate hypotheses by reason-
ing from samples to populations, but rather
advances hypotheses as intuitive creative
ideas, which one then has the responsibility
to attempt to falsify (where again Popper set
himself against the reigning verificationist
biases in the philosophy of science).
"Making and matching" corresponds to the
two moments in Popper's theory: artists gen-
erate hypotheses, namely, forms of showing,
and then they check this against the world
or-better--check showing against seeing. If
there are discrepancies, one adjusts, so far as
possible, by projecting other representa-
tional strategies until showing and seeing co-
incide, as in aligning the two halves in a view
finder. My assumption is that the sche-
matisms tested against the seen were
prompted by discrepancies, which they were
intended to overcome.
Consider the case of foreshortening. No
one, so far as I know, is credited with its dis-
covery the way Brunelleschi is credited with
the discovery- of perspective, but one can
imagine a malaise with pictorial representa-
tions that, artists might say, "look too flat."
This would not have been an available criti-
cism within Egyptian pictorial notation, or
have meant anything in Africa. The ancients
knew enough how to handle it that they
compensated for the eye's limitation by
making the head of a figure, meant to be
seen below, larger enough than life to look
like life from below. There is a rule of thumb
I learned about perspective from the artist
John Cederquist: "If it's right but looks
wrong, it is wrong. If it's wrong but looks
right, it's right."7 There may only be the most
general formula for foreshortening, the artist
extending it over different cases, in each case
matching it against a visual possibility. It may
never. for the matter. become as scientific
and, in a sense, mathematical as perspective.
Still, one may measure progress, remarkably,
for example, over the fifteen-year interval
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Michelangelo devoted to the Sistine Ceiling,
especially in the depiction of the prophets.
The early figure of Zecharia is rigid: he is set
in an alcove, reading a book. There is no
depth to speak of. The contrast is strongly
marked with the much later figure of Jonas,
which amazed both Vasari and Condivi, who
regarded it as the culmination of Michelan-
gelo's vast vision. Jonas is struggling into the
light from the "belly of the beast," and that
energy with which Michelangelo handles this
is read retroactively across the ceiling, as if
everything in it exemplifies the same profi-
ciency as Jonah does. But in truth Michelan-
gelo, who sincerely insisted that he was not a
painter, learned through something like
making and matching to bring showing into
line with seeing. One has to conclude that
foreshortening became central in the six-
teenth century and then became an artistic
commonplace. Tiepolo, in the late eighteenth
century, foreshortened effortlessly, since,
after all, so many of his commissions were
for ceiling decoration: even a drawing by him
looks as though seen from below. It had be-
come part of the lingua franca of realistic
representation.
It is clear from this account that what was
historical in the progress was the hand rather
than the eye. The development of represen-
tational skills was handed on, taught in
workshops, tinkered with until it was right. It
did not have to be reinvented. But this very
progress presupposes that the eye itself was
not historical-that seeing remained con-
stant throughout changes in showing. If see-
ing were indexed to showing,as a strong ver-
sion of the Geschlichtlichkeit des Auges
would require, seeing would be so calibrated
to showing that things would always look
right! And there would be change without
progress, somewhat in the manner in which
Panofsky describes the history of art as a
succession of symbolic forms that do not fall
into a progressive scheme. Panofsky does not
offer an account for changes from one sym-
bolic form to the next. He did, however, fa-
mously write a text on perspective as a sym-
bolic form, which meant, as I see it, that
perspective drawing "fits" with all sorts of
things that belong to the symbolic form in
question. It would have no place in Byz-
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Danto, Seeing and Showing
antine's symbolic form. By and large,
Vasari's progress transpires under the aus-
pices of a symbolic form .that endured for
close to six centuries, and was still felt to be
compelling by a writer like Gombrich when
he composed the lectures that became Art
and Illusion-his Mellon Lectures for 1956
-though somewhere in the nineteenth cen-
tury the Vasarian paradigm was replaced by
the paradigms of Modernism. This was not a
progress but a substitution of different goals,
still a matter of critical uncertainty, but
marked by the fact that congruence between
showing and seeing was less and less a goal.
But when it was a goal, it was so against the
assumption that the eye itself underwent no
change whatever. One had to match showing
against seeing, and this had to have been the
same from one end to the other of the his-
tory. The eye serves a function under Mod-
ernism in that one would see that what was
shown was so discrepant with reality as seen
that congruence had to have been abandoned
as a guiding ideal! Unless, that is-and these
were and are familiar defensive tropes-the
artists were hoaxers or inept.
I have a favorite passage in Gombrich's
account that helps make the point.
Painting is taught at school and practiced at home
as therapy and as a pastime, and many a modest
amateur has mastered tricks which would have
looked like sheer magic to Giotto. Perhaps even
the crude colored renderings we find on a box of
breakfast cereal would have made Giotto's con-
temporaries gasp.8
The magic, for Giotto, was how was some-
thing done. He could see how faithful show-
ing was to seeing, and wondered how show-
ing should have been perfected to do so. The
same must be said for "Giotto's contempo-
raries." They would have gasped at the way
milk glistens on the crisp surfaces of
cornflakes, how silver looks metallic and
bowls look ceramic, which was not possible
for artists to do in Giotto's period, and the
eye through its constancy underscored this
truth.
The eye has an evolution rather than a his-
tory. It changes through mutation rather
than through historical shifts, and the eye as
we know it evolved as the human genome
evolved, perhaps a million and a half years
ago, perhaps longer. There in any case has
been no major human evolution in the past
100,000 years, and certainly none in the bare
600 years from Giotto to Ingres and the
French academicians. The history we might
call the "history of the eye" (which sounds
like a title from Bataille) has in a way the
structure of making and matching: discontin-
uous molecular changes "made" the eye as
we now have it, and natural selection under-
wrote its value in navigating experience
down the millennia-which is part of the
story of matching when pictures were first
made with the intention of resembling the
world as seen. One feels that almost no prog-
ress has been made since the walls of the
Ardeche caves were painted in the Ice Age
in Europe, about 20,000 years ago or so,
when anatomically modem humans replaced
the Neanderthals. Whether this entailed a
difference in ocular structure remains a
question, but one feels, looking at the aston-
ishing works, that there was a cultural deci-
sion not unlike that of the Renaissance in the
culture of the hunter-gatherer late Ice Age
humans in the Ardeche. They did not per-
haps have exact resemblance as a goal, but
rather as a means to whatever further func-
tion pictures were intended to have. But on
the evidence of what the paintings show, the
eye as the eye has no further history to speak
of. And in general, one surmises, a mutation
would produce optical differences that evo-
lution would weed out, were it not for inter-
ventions of the sort Nietzsche regarded as in-
imical to human perfection, finding optical
prosthetics for the ill-endowed. Natural se-
lection can be pretty ruthless. Darwin wrote:
"I remember well when the thought of the
eye made me cold all over."9 For the eye is so
complex an organ that it would have been
cited in evidence for an hypothesis of design
rather than of the randomness of evolution.
"Anatomize the eye: survey its structure and
contrivance," Hume has one of the charac-
ters say in his Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion. "Tell me, from your own feeling, if
the idea of a contriver does not immediately
flow in upon you with a force like that of sen-
sation."lo If it was design, God must have

been satisfied with it as it was: there has not
been a generational change, as in computers.
If it evolved, then it has to have been entirely
adaptive and as such protected from histori-
cal change and yet, at the same time, capable
of adjusting through all sorts of changes-
from plains to sea to jungle. Anatomically,
the eye is an extruded part of the brain, and
the fourfold layer of cells at the eye's back,
along the bottom of the eyecup, is a piece of
the brain resident in the eyeball. "Success of
the production of the infant creature," Sir
Charles Sherrington wrote, "is judged far
more subtly by the truth of the working of
the residual life than by any test which in-
spection by the eye or microscope im-
poses."ll Nothing so central to "the working
of residual life" could be plastic to the de-
gree that the historicity of the eye asserts.
History-the history of representational art,
that is-presupposes the reverse of what the
thesis of historicity requires. Visual pro-
cesses are-I appropriate this phrase from
Zenon Pylushin-cognitively impenetrable.
How we see at the basic level relevant to ad-
aptation is unaffected by what we know, or
what we believe, as much so as cell division.
The visual system is, to use the deep concep-
tion of Jerry Fodor, modular. Modularity
means a segregated default system, which
functions in independence of other systems.
Lucky for us that it does!
There are two sorts of illusion it might at
this point be advantageous to consider.
There are illusions we live through, as in the
classic Indian example of the piece of rope
believed to be a snake. Once I see that it is
rope, not snake, I can no longer see it as
snake, and no longer feel afraid of it.
And there are illusions that are not re-
solved by coming to understand that they are
illusions, like the lines in the Muller-Lyer il-
lusion, which still look as if they are unequal
in length after we know they are equal. Our
knowledge does not transform our experi-
ence. "In such cases," Fodor writes, "it is hard
to see an alternative to the view that at least
some of the background information at the
subject's disposal is inaccessible to at least
some of his perceptual mechanisms."l2 The
rope-as-snake illusion exemplifies an epis-
temological pitfall to which the human per-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
cipient is everywhere subject. Is that an
enemy or a shadow? Is somebody in the
kitchen or is the noise being made by a ma-
chine? The Indians, taking this kind of expe-
rience as paradigmatic, argued that one can
see the world as illusory, and live through
this knowledge to an enlightened under-
standing of that fact. The Muller-Lyer illu-
sion, discovered in 1889, but in a way antici-
pated in the discovery of entasis by the
Greeks-something one knew to be curved
was seen as straight-is, according at least to
Segall, Campbell, and Herskovits, perceived
as an illusion by every culture in which the
test has been made. It is commonplace to ex-
plain this as due to the fact that the eye per-
ceives a fictive depth, which, if true, entails
that it is built into the perceptual system to
see pictorial depth, and hence that the possi-
bility of a Renaissance paradigm is an artistic
possibility for every culture. And possibly we
can understand certain cultures as attempt-
ing to counteract the force of depth percep-
tion by pictorial strategies, appreciated al-
most in Greenberghian terms, as battling
depth to achieve flatness. The importance of
modularity is that we cannot help seeing
depth in such cases. "The operation of the
input systems appears to be . . . inflexibly in-
sensitive to our utilities."l3 Finally, the
rope-to-snake illusion depends upon there
being snakes and ropes, though doubtless an-
alogical deceptions exist elsewhere-the
mother of pearl taken for a piece of silver is
another standard example. But the percep-
tion of illusional space is like respiration or
metabolism. It is what makes art universally
possible, grounded in the physiology of the
eye that we do not see images on surfaces
but in space from the beginning. That gives a
dimension of magic to picture making that I
would suppose explains the cave art that
flourished simultaneously in various loci in
Europe at a time when there was little likeli-
hood of direct cultural interchange.
In some way, we know that there has to be
an interfacing of input systems and central
cognitive processes, in the sense that we in-
terpret what we sense, relative to the system
of beliefs. From this perspective, Ling
Shining's prince was wrong in saying that
Western images resemble but only resemble.
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Danto, Seeing and Showing
They show what we see under higher-order
descriptions, so that we do not typically see
paintings that use models as simply resem-
bling those models: we see them as showing
what the model stands for-a dying general
rather than a reclining man. To say of the
great painting by Benjamin West, The Death
of Montcalm, that it does not picture the
death of Montcalm but pictures a model that
has no relationship to Montcalm whatsoever
is of the same order of pedantry as saying
this is not a pipe but a picture of one.
It is through this interface that history su-
pervenes on perception. The history of per-
ception is the history of central systems vest-
ing what we see with meanings that have not
entirely to do with what we see, since they
are often relational terms that are conferred
by things often not present in pictures. There
is no doubt that perception so structured is
historical, simply because there is a history
of such systems. It is through that that we are
historical beings as well, unlike animals, with
whom we almost certainly share the main
features of our visual input system. If human
understanding changed through mutation
the way the eye must, there would be no his-
tory at all. We can imagine some Achaian
warriors resurrected in Midtown Manhattan,
and seeing a different world by far from that
in which they internalized the networks of
beliefs and attitudes that defined their cul-
ture. The eye is not historical, but we are. The
philosophy of art begins here.
A R T H U R C. DANTO
Department of Philosophy
Columbia University
New York, New York 10027
1. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as the
inaugural Marx Wartofsky Lecture at Baruch College of
the City University of New York on October 7,1997.
2. Marx W. Wartofsky, "The Paradox of Painting: Pic-
torial Representation and the Dimensionality of Visual
Space," Social Research 51 (1984): 865.
3. Ibid., p. 877.
4. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the
Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1969), p. 89.
5. Howard Rogers and Sherman E. Lee, Masterworks
of Ming and Qing Painting from the Forbidden City
(Lansdale, PA: International Arts Council, 1988),p. 183.
6. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Resolu-
tions, 2nd ed., enlarged (University of Chicago Press,
1970).
7.1n conversation with the author. See Arthur C.
Danto, "Illusion and Comedy: The Art of John
Cederquist," The Art of John Cederquist: Reality and Il-
lusion (Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum of Art, 1997).
8. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 8.
9. Cited by Sir Charles Sherrington, Man o n His Na-
ture, 2nd ed:(New York: ~ o u b l e i aAnchor,
~ 1953), p.
100.
10. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Reli-
gion.
11. Sherrington, Man on His Nature, p. 123.
12.Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (MIT Press,
1983), p. 60.
13. Ibid., p. 53.