There is, among philosophers a distrust of the use of images in communication. Evidence for this may be found at a superficial level, in their use of the medium of the written word itself. Those who may like a more engaged argument regarding the opacities of what, on the face of it is merely apparent in an image may refer to the early 1) Wittgenstein, or - why not, 2) Hegel's critique of the immediate in the beginning of the phenomenology.
The question that I would like to pose however is whether there is a kind of continuity we can find in approaches to this problem, and here I think we will better appreciate where we may be forced to take sides.
Is our apprehension of an image a step on the way to understanding, or is the cognition of the image understanding itself? Leaving aside dialectical critiques of sheer understanding - let us begin with this problem.
There is another way to pose the question we have presented above; what would it mean to cognize an image I have no concept of? And, I think this does place, more immediately the nature of our problem.
We may say that there is a way in which focusing on the act of a lack of nomenclature in confronting an image foregrounds paradoxically, our dependence on nomenclature to understand what an image is.
The discipline of philosophy has another way of posing this problem in a decidedly semantic register, and that is as the problem of representation. What is 🔺? You may say that this is a triangle. Is only that a triangle? No, 📐 too is a triangle. Does this represent an inadequacy in our understanding of what a triangle is? Here, there are two ways of representing this situation. Are we asking what 🔺 is? Or are we asking what a triangle is? If the former, we may state that the image is an isosceles triangle (that is, with equal sides), as opposed to the second image which may be a right triangle. If the latter, another way of representing what a triangle is is any polygon whose sum of internal angles is 180 degrees. Yet another way is any closed three-sided polygon. Yet, let us backtrack a bit. In trying to explain what 🔺 is, which of these trajectories seemed adequate? This is, in a simplistic analogy - what the problem of representation seeks to pose in philosophy.
A geometrician may of course point out the correlation between both these descriptions, yet the imagistic objection is not a simple one. You would rarely trade your slice of pizza for example for an outline on the drawing board. This however, while a bad joke - is also insincere. For a slice of pizza is not 🔺 and the reason my culinary jibe works is because of the specificity of its example. This is, as it were, the singularity - appears to remain the picturesque objection to our generic representations.
In approaching the dilemma of the image and the adequacy of a concept to it, if that is all a concept is, from a decidedly imagistic, pictorial or perhaps geometric angle we would find that a multisided polygon, located within a circle may appear as one in approximation. Yet, as Hegel points out, quoted by Andrew Cole, whose lecture on 'Hegel, Geometry and the Dialectic', presented in Ljubljana in January, 2018 - I do hazard a response to - an approximation of a magnitude regarding the other, is not yet the form in question itself. In other words - however similar a multisided polygon is to a circle, it is yet different. Or, as Plato teaches, likeness can be a form of difference itself.
We are reminded by professor Cole that it is Hegel himself, who elsewhere stresses that identity and opposition are themselves not necessarily in opposition; when united in the principle of contradiction. Such a logic takes opposition itself to be an identity in the first place. A point which Deleuze would later use to to build his ontological edifice.
The monkey in the room here is of course this question which my title undoubtedly suggested. Is there a teleology from image to concept? The grader dialectical observation which this links to is the one regarding quantitative changes issuing forth, or rather producing a qualitative difference.
The example here is of a field which may be an acre - and may have two more added to it. This is a change in magnitude, but is perhaps not what makes it a field, as opposed to a meadow or a forest.
There are objections however which Hegel himself places in the way of this. The representation, or should I say the presentation of a concept leaves a possible wealth of conceptual apparatus out of what an image may accomplish. Such perhaps in the form of a well laid out diagram. Or, it is one thing to say that a sphere is a circle made out of circles, ie. 'the circle of circles' - and quite another to draw it.
In wrapping up my observations; I think Mladen Dollar has a very concise, and near algebraic reading of the presentation delivered by professor Cole at Ljubljana. The figure is the other of the concept. Yet it is a true dialectical difference, because the figure itself is figurative, in other words - may be used to express a concept, and for the last twist figures may even produce a concept dialectically, that is as a product of antagonisms.
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