René Magritte commented on his famous picture «The Son of Man»:
«At least it hides the face partly well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It's something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.»
T the first glance this seems to be just a vulgar opposition of phenomena and noumena, thing-in-itself. But Magritte stated that he created the auto-portrait. Actually, the first picture with the same subject he created in 1937 as a portrait of John Adams: he replaced face with a flash of light. «The Son of Man» differs due to the title which has a definitely religious meaning (God and Messiah) and due to the apple of Eden. The Fall as a desire to know good and evil, apple as a symbol of this desire, and the result: Adam lost the ability to know himself. This is an understanding in the space of traditional philosophy, philosophy of being. It makes no sense. Personality is not a combination of good and evil. Personality is the ability to communicate.
Plato’s image of person in a cave is about knowledge. Person in cave is absolutely healthy, he is deprived of freedom only. He can communicate with himself and others as Plato communicate (although dialogues of Plato are over-filled with sarcasm towards interlocutors because Plato knows that they don’t participate in communication ideally.) Our ability to communicate is rotten. Apples and material objects in general are not the barriers to communication, they are helpers in communication beginning from self-communication and up to love.
19 august 2023