The treachery of images

The painting reads:

1.     ‘This is not a pipe.’

This is how the painter describes the previous image:

2.    “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!” [1]

But is there really a pipe, or not?

3.    Imagine that I say: “This statement is false.” If this is true then the statement is false. If it isn’t true then the statement is true, which contradicts the statement. Thus no matter how I put it the statement is always false.

But is there a statement, or not?

4.      Even if the statement “This statement is false” is false, it is still a statement. Therefore it is real, thus true. Even if an argument is wrong, this doesn’t mean that the argument does not exist.

Thus we can also say:

5.     “This is not a statement.”

6.      As soon as we make the previous statement, we also make it come true, whether it is true or false.

Thus we can ask ourselves:

7.     “Is there a pipe, or any other kind of object?”

8.   Are the objects real, or are they just representations in our minds? What is the difference between smoking a pipe, and thinking that we are smoking a pipe?

9.    The answer may seem pretty easy: The difference is that we are not really smokers by thinking that we are smoking.

10.  However the problem goes much deeper: If thinking that we are smoking does not make us smokers, then thinking about reality does not make us real.

Thus we can also ask ourselves:

11.  “Do we really exist or not?”

12.  The hard problem of consciousness is an old one and remains unsolved. But the difficulty in solving the problem of reality is not that the problem is so hard, but that the answer is always improbable:

13.  If the world is what we have in our mind then consciousness is the only reality. If something lies outside our mind then we are unable to realize it. But as soon as we realize that there could be something lying outside our mind then we have already realized it.

14.  Such an identification of an object with our own consciousness is what makes the object real and our consciousness self-evident. The pipe in the painting is not real for the simple reason that we cannot touch it, thus we do not identify ourselves with the pipe in our mind and through our senses.

Therefore the question:

15.  “Does the pipe (or any kind of thing) exist before we know it?” does not have meaning.

16.  It is only valid within the confines of what the same question implicates.  

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images]

7/23/2018

Painting: Rene Magritte, The treachery of images