HOMO PICTOR IN THE SPACE OF THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

Depicting and viewing images are closely related to imagination, a fundamental characteristic of human intelligence. Imagination relies on all the sensuality of a person, but the visual component plays a special role. The progress of digital technology today makes it possible to produce images, but it turns out that one still needs some experience of traditional drawing/painting and also a philosophical understanding of the circumstances leading to the figure of the Homo pictor. There is a double connection between landscape and drawing. A depicted landscape is often regarded as an aesthetic event; it becomes the subject of art studies. However, one can pay attention to the fact that drawing/painting unfolds inside the landscape, and the resulting image is already an artifact, an ontological event related to the level of being. Research of the Homo pictor is not a narrow field of aesthetic experience and artistic education, it is a problem of philosophical anthropology. The latter, relatively speaking, investigates the nature of human beings, their historical development in practice, cognition, communication. The common Latin expressions specify different projections of the species Homo – sapiens, faber, ludence, symbolicus, etc. Homo pictor in this series means a “person drawing/painting”. Under what circumstances and for what tasks did this ability develop? To clarify the general problem, consideration of a number of subordinate questions can help: What aspects of human bodily incarnation are the parameters of the landscape surrounding people associated with? How is Homo pictor (a drawing/painting person) and Homo loquens (a speaking person) related? What changes does drawing/painting make in the landscape space? Depicting continues the Homo faber line; however, the final product is not a material result, but new media, whose meaning is to be an intermediary between a person and his/her world. An image is not a goal, it is a medium. It is not enough to open one’s eyes to see an image, one needs to have a depicted image that will act as an eye-opening in a new way. The idea of intentionality is the most important for understanding imagination, hence the importance of the methods of phenomenology that reveal the dialectic of the connection between the experience of creating and viewing an image. The article discusses the ideas of the phenomenologist Hans Jonas, whose works are not well known in Russia. Homo pictor is driven by not only cognitive, but also affective motives, hence the importance of research on emotions and feelings. The work of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio shows the role of maps, neural network schemes, patterns underlying bodily movements and gestures that act as the basis of emotions and feelings. Schemes or patterns outside of an image remain at the level of the nervous tissue. But patterns can be objectified in movements, gestures, traces of lines and spots on some surface. An image is an externally rendered pattern of perception that can serve as a medium, a basis of emotions and feelings. The problem of drawing/painting in philosophy confronts both ancient problems of the relation of eidos and reality, and new problems concerning the connection of the cognitive and the affective in the experience of physicality, the connection of the presentative and the representational in the experience of vision. Homo pictor’s research concerns a number of positions that prompt questioning of the main dichotomies of modernity; these studies open up new horizons in understanding human creativity.

body, vision, movement, gesture, image, media, representation, eidos and reality, emotions and feelings, Hans Jonas