Thomas Wartenberg is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Mount Holyoke College. He has edited or co-edited books on the philosophy of art, the philosophy of film, philosophy for/with children, and the nature of power. His most recent book Thoughtful Images: Illustrating Philosophy through Art explores various illustrations of philosophical concepts and develops a beginning theory of illustration. About this work, Noël Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY, has said:
“In Thoughtful Images: Illustrating Philosophy Through Art, Thomas Wartenberg, a leading figure in the debate about the possibility of film contributing substantively to philosophy, has expanded his purview to what is often referred to as fine art (painting, engraving, etc.). In this truly groundbreaking endeavor, Wartenberg opens a surprisingly neglected topic to philosophical inquiry. Employing the notion of illustration that he introduced in his discussions of cinema and enriching it conceptually, Wartenberg eruditely explores the diversity of ways in which fine art abets philosophical understanding, including examples of how it can present original philosophical insight. Ranging across an extremely wide variety of cases—from illustrations of Plato’s cave to works by Adrian Piper and onto graphic novels—Wartenberg’s text is consistently historically informed and generous, contextually illuminating, aesthetically sensitive and philosophically astute. This literally pioneering treatise will undoubtedly provide a source for philosophical conversation for years to come.”
In the following interview, Wartenberg discusses some of the art that inspired this book, its connection to his work with philosophy and children, and where he’d like to take his work next.
What is this book about?
Thoughtful Images demonstrates that there is a rich tradition of illustrations of philosophy that originated in Ancient Greece, spread throughout Europe, thrived in twentieth-century America, and continues to this day in the work of graphic artists. Illustration is not generally regarded as a genuine art form on par with painting and sculpture and many believe that the abstract claims made by philosophers are not amenable to being rendered in visual images. I show that these claims are mistaken by examining the different ways in which philosophy has been illustrated by artists throughout Western history. To support my argument, I develop the rudiments of a theory of illustration, distinguishing among different types of illustrations, such as text-based and concept-based illustrations. I also discuss the role of two, often conflicting norms governing illustrations, fidelity and felicity. He applies this theoretical framework to artists’ attempts to illustrate philosophical ideas found in such different philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Wittgenstein, to name just some of the philosophers whose texts have been illustrated. The book concludes with an examination of four recent works of “graphic philosophy,” demonstrating that philosophy continues to be illustrated in a variety of different art forms. The book includes 46 images, the majority of which are color plates.
What inspired or motivated you to write this book?
I became interested in the topic of illustration when I was working on Thinking On Screen. I realized that both the critics and defenders of the claim that films can do philosophy uncritically assumed that films that illustrated philosophy could not contribute to philosophy. I started investigating the notion of illustration and discovered that there was almost no philosophical literature on the topic. I wrote a chapter on Chaplin’s Modern Times that included a discussion of how illustrations could be essential to understanding their sources. Later, while teaching a course on the Art and Philosophy of Illustration, I discovered Mel Bochner’s illustrations of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Exactly how an image such as the one below illustrates On Certainty is not obvious. I spent a lot of time figuring that out and the results are presented in the book. Bochner’s amazing works made me start thinking about the topic of artistic illustrations of philosophy more generally. Once again, I found this to be a topic neglected by philosophers. There were some studies by art historians of illustrations of philosophy made at a specific historical moment, but no general study of the topic. There was a gap that needed to be filled. That is what led me to write Thoughtful Images.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find the most exciting?
There are a lot of ideas in the book I find exciting. I was very excited, for example, to discover how many conceptual artists had illustrated Wittgenstein’s ideas in the 1960s and 1970s. Really important artists were fascinated by Wittgenstein’s ideas, such as Jasper Johns, one of whose works featuring images from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is on the cover of the book. These artists made works illustrating Wittgenstein’s ideas. I also discovered an artist who is not so well-known. Maria Bussmann is both an artist and a philosopher who made many drawings of the ideas of philosophers, including but limited to Wittgenstein. Seeing how many artists were not just influenced by Wittgenstein but also attempting to illustrate his ideas was very exciting. The drawing pictured below is a clear illustration of Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language in which he talks about an ideal language whose words refer to one and only one object. Since the idea of illustrating theoretical ideas might strike people as impossible, I was amazed to see how artists, like Bussmann, had managed to do it. I wanted to explain to people just how they had done so.
It was also exciting to discover works going all the way back to Ancient Rome that illustrated philosophy. There is a mosaic from Pompeii that is purported to show Plato’s Academy, the school that he founded. A group of men are sitting around Plato discussing a philosophical topic as he gestures with a long pointer. Although this work doesn’t illustrate a profound philosophical issue, it does show us how philosophy was practiced by Plato and his students, something we don’t get as clear an idea of from his written dialogues.
At the opposite extreme, I found several “graphic novels”—that term is a misnomer since they are not novels—that illustrate philosophical ideas in different ways. Nick Sousanis’ work Unflattening, for example, includes great illustrations of Herbert Marcuse’s idea of a one-dimensional society that make it much more vivid than Marcuse’s prose does. His illustrations are truly creative and it was very exciting to discover that book as well as the others I discuss.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
That’s a very interesting question. At a talk I gave on the book to my colleagues at Mount Holyoke College, one of them mentioned that she saw this book as related to my work with elementary school children with whom I have philosophical discussions based on picture books. That spurred me to recognize that my work on illustrations of philosophy has a common basis with my work on philosophy in films and in children’s picture books. All these projects have in common an attempt to get people to realize that they are often thinking philosophically if they only would realize it. I’m trying to show that philosophy is not some arcane area of specialized research, interesting as that mode of philosophy is to me; I’m trying to convince everyone—ordinary folks as well as professional philosophers—that all the arts—the cinema, children’s picture books, visual arts including drawing, etching, painting, even installations, graphic literature—all these address philosophical issues, so that knowing something about philosophy enriches our appreciation of the arts. Plato was just so wrong to see philosophy and the arts as opposed to one another. I want my work to help people see that, if they like films, paintings, or any art form, they should also be interested in philosophy if they want to understand art more deeply.
Could you provide an example or two of an illustration of a philosophical work and explain how they relate to the norms of fidelity and felicity?
The norms of fidelity and felicity were adapted by me from theories of translation. The original idea was that, in translating a literary work, you want to be faithful to the original—fidelity—while also creating a work that is itself a literary work of art and this might require a departure from the original in service of the felicity of the translation.
You can see the presence of these competing norms in many works of art. Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates is clearly an illustration of the scene of Socrates’ death as described by Plato in his dialogue Phaedo. I call this type of illustration text-based since its source is a philosophical text. The scene depicted in the painting is faithful to Plato’s dialogue, for it shows Socrates actively teaching as he reaches for the cup of hemlock that will kill him. But there are many details that can be attributed to David’s violation of a literal depiction of Plato’s dialogue in order to create a great painting. An obvious departure from fidelity is Socrates’ body, for what we see is the body of a buff 40-year-old, not the 79-year-old man that Socrates was at the time of his death. That feature of the painting accords with the norm of felicity, since it creates the heroic portrait of Socrates David wanted. You can really see how the two norms both are in play in the creation of this great painting. Incidentally, some art historians bristle at the idea that a great painting can be an illustration, but I think this work shows that that is not the case.
Let me also mention the figure of the elderly Plato sitting at the foot of Socrates’ bed. Initially, I thought of it as an example of felicity, a violation of fidelity, since Plato would have been a young man at the time of Socrates’ death. But upon further reflection, my interpretation of the painting changed and I began to see it as showing us the elderly Plato as he imagined Socrates’ death during or after writing the Phaedo. Notice the scroll, ink, and pen lying beneath Plato’s chair. This shows how the application of the norms depends on your interpretation of the work. But even when we see the work in this manner, there are still the violations of fidelity in how David renders the scene of Socrates’ death that I mentioned.
In the book, I give other examples of how these norms apply, but since this one involves a painting that many people many know, I think it’s a useful one to discuss here. Once you start applying these two notions, you start seeing them everywhere!
What is your favorite illustration that is included in the book?
That’s a hard one for me to answer because I like so many of them. One that I was really pleased to discover was Joseph Kosuth’s 276. On the Color Blue. Unfortunately, I’ve only seen photographs of the work because I can’t get the Brooklyn Museum to display it for me. What’s so innovative about that work, and two others I discuss in the book (Bruce Nauman’s A Rose Has No Teeth and Mel Bochner’s If the Colour Changes), is that they use an actual passage from Wittgenstein’s text to illustrate the very claims made in the texts they display. This is very different from the type of illustration I just discussed and I call it a quotation-based illustration since the work embodies a quotation from a philosophical work. In this case, the quotation from Wittgenstein is about how we understand color words and Kosuth’s blue neon sculpture provides us with an experience of seeing a color, blue in this case, that helps confirm Wittgenstein’s claim that our color words do not refer to internal states as philosophers going all the way back to Descartes had argued. It’s quite amazing once you realize what’s going on in this piece.
Bochner’s If the Colour Changes is an illustration of Wittgenstein’s claim that the three words “observe,” “look at,” and “view,” all of which seem synonymous with “see,” have subtly different meanings. You can’t really see the quotation in this work unless you observe it carefully, thereby illustrating Wittgenstein’s point. Just glancing at it won’t do. This is the first work in a series and it gets progressively more difficult to decipher the quotation in each of the works in the series.
How is your work relevant to everyday life?
I find the topic of artists’ illustrations of philosophy fascinating in its own right. But I think it also demonstrates how philosophy pops up in places where people don’t expect it. Take Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home. Bechdel shows that she uses philosophy to reflect upon troubling issues in her own life, such as whether or not her father committed suicide. People might not think that philosophy is relevant to that question since it’s a factual one, but Bechdel shows how her entire life is affected by her skeptical worries. Those are essentially philosophical as she recognizes. She refers to René Descartes, Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, and other philosophers in the book, although few commentators acknowledge the important role philosophy plays in her book. Nonetheless, Fun Home shows that philosophy is relevant to how life is actually lived and that’s part of what I tried to emphasize in the book. Philosophy is not some abstruse, theoretical discipline interesting only to expert practitioners, but a fundamental means for making sense of our lives.
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
There are two. First, I would like to focus on illustrations of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I discovered that this was one of the first texts that artists illustrated. But it remains one that has motivated philosophers all the way to the present. I found out about an exhibition called Plato in L.A. too late to include it in the book, but I’d like to work on how Plato’s Cave remains a subject that interests artists.
I’d also like to think more generally about works of art that are based on other works of art. At the moment, I’m calling this re-envisioning. Despite its privileging of the visual, this term subsumes illustrations, musical transcriptions, cinematic adaptations, and many other ways in which artists have created works based on other artworks. I recently saw a concert in which the composer explicitly tried to create a musical equivalent of a painting, and I am fascinated by that possibility which hadn’t previously occurred to me. The basing of artworks on other artworks is something that fascinates me and I’d like to pursue it in future work. These re-envisioned works do not involve plagiarism, but finding inspiration in works of art for your own artistic creativity. Again, this topic has not received much attention from philosophers. I think I’m always attracted to issues that haven’t attracted the attention I think they deserve.
Where would you like to go to do research in the future, if you could go anywhere?
Mostly, I’m afraid, I do my research sitting in front of a computer. I wish more museums were willing to haul out works of art for me to look at. The Tate Gallery in London was wonderful. They brought out all of Eduardo Paolozzi’s screenprints from As Is When: A Series of Screenprints Based on the Life and Writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1964-1965). They are brightly colored and it was great to see how striking these large prints were when viewed in person and not just on the small versions available on a computer screen. Other museums have been less helpful and I’m still trying to see some of the works I’m interested in. So, I’d love to go into the storerooms of places like the Brooklyn Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the works I haven’t yet seen, such as Kosuth’s 276. On the Color Blue and Robert Motherwell’s In Plato’s Cave.
Aside from that, I’d love to be in a cabin on the shores of Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand writing about art and its relationship to philosophy. Places like that inspire me with their natural beauty.
Thomas Wartenberg
Thomas Wartenberg is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Mount Holyoke College. Among his books are Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy, Existentialism: A Beginner’s Guide, and Thinking Through Stories: Children, Philosophy, and Picture Books. He has edited or co-edited books on the philosophy of art, the philosophy of film, philosophy for/with children, and the nature of power. He has also published articles in the history of philosophy on Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Foucault, among other topics.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
