I recently finished reading Richard Wollheim's "Painting As An Art".

I found much of it stimulating in the close attention paid to particular pictures and thought provoking with regard to his theory of "seeing in" as the way to understand our perception of paintings.

On the other hand, his use of psychoanalytic theory left me with questions.

Surprisingly, his use of this theory reminded of some recent reading of mine in evolutionary psychology. Both Wollheim and the evolutionary psychologists stress the significance of a common human nature and are inclined to downplay the importance of systems of symbols or culture in general.

I do think that a substantive concept of human nature makes sense, and I am open to the possibility of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalytical theory contributing to an understanding of of human nature.

Altogether less agreeable to me is the tendency of these theories to smuggle in a social ontology in which culture is merely the creation of atomized individuals. One can believe in the evolved nature of the mind and allow for the possibility of certain kinds of psychic forces at work in the individual without denying the importance, still less the existence, of social facts. Thinking about languages as at once learned and used by individuals but also existing as entities external to those individuals is helpful here.

Image: The Construction of the Tower of Babel -- Folio xvii, The Bedford Book of Hours -- 1423 - 30 - The British Library.

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