The Painting Was Already There

I don’t always experience understanding as a process of putting information together. Sometimes the painting is already there. I notice a symbol, a belief or an unfamiliar practice, and it seems to belong to a wider picture of humanity that I have been carrying for years.

The connection arrives before the explanation. Then comes the slower work of finding words for it. That is often the awkward part: trying to explain a relationship I can already see without pretending I have investigated every detail.

What I seem to recognise is how people make a world intelligible. I can imagine how an experience becomes a story, how a story acquires authority, and how its meaning might change when the people repeating it no longer share the world in which it began.

My mind moves quite readily into those possible worlds. I imagine the assumptions someone has inherited, what they fear, what they take for granted and what would count, to them, as a convincing explanation. I can become absorbed in that perspective without adopting it as my own.

I don’t have to believe what someone believes to understand why, from where they stand, it might make sense.

Finding words for the experience

There is something of a Gestalt quality to this experience: the relationship between things comes into view before I have named each part. In Gestalt theory, an organised whole helps determine how its parts are experienced. I borrow that language to describe the feel of my thinking, rather than to give myself a psychological classification.^[1]

Michael Polanyi’s account of tacit knowledge offers another useful companion. Some of what we know exceeds what we can explicitly explain. Recognising a face is an ordinary example: we may know immediately whose face it is while struggling to specify exactly how that recognition happened.^[2]

That distinction matters to me. Being unable to provide an instant account of an insight does not make it empty. Equally, the feeling of recognition does not establish that every connection I make is correct. It gives me something to investigate.

The person inside the history

When I turn towards history, R. G. Collingwood feels particularly close to the questions I ask. His idea of historical re-enactment concerns rethinking the thought expressed in past actions: grasping the problem an agent confronted and the reasoning through which they responded. It is more demanding than imagining how an ancient scene might have felt.^[3]

I am drawn to that demand. A ritual can look bizarre from the outside and become comprehensible once we understand the world of obligations, fears and possibilities surrounding it. The challenge is to find evidence for that world, even when my imagination has arrived there first.

Hans-Georg Gadamer adds a useful complication. We do not approach the past from nowhere. We bring our own historically formed expectations, and understanding can change the horizon within which we see. An encounter with another perspective may alter the questions we thought we were asking.^[4]

So I cannot simply step outside myself and become an original listener, untouched by everything I know. But I can let that listener interrupt me. I can notice when my own familiar categories have made someone else’s world unnecessarily small.

Giving the picture a form

I remain open to spiritual dimensions of intuition. I am interested in what psychology can explain, and also in philosophical possibilities that reach beyond what I can presently settle. I don’t need to close that conversation in order to take the work of understanding seriously.

Writing gives an inward recognition somewhere to become visible. Once an idea is on the page, I can meet it differently. I discover where it has substance, where it relies on an assumption and where a question is more interesting than the answer I first imagined.

This is one reason identity and creation belong together in my work. Expression lets me discover the shape of my own thinking. What felt private and almost impossible to communicate becomes something another person can encounter, question and perhaps recognise.

The painting may feel as though it was already there. Making something from it is how I learn what I am actually seeing.

Edlin