Question

By the way, regarding your reply in the column about Shalom Hanoch’s song, where you answered me that visual images (the example was an Escher drawing) are like language: it seemed to me better to open a new thread rather than dig into it over there… Hence this current question.
In my opinion, I think you’re mistaken here. There is an essential difference between the two phenomena, and that difference creates a different relation:
1. Language is built from arbitrary signs, and therefore the relation between it and the reality it describes requires the mediating action of the intellect. The intellect is a faculty that can create a fixed correlation between the word and a given reality (to connect the sign with the thing signified).
2. By contrast, the visual image—for example, Escher’s hands drawing themselves—is not a “sign,” and therefore it also does not mediate between itself and reality, as it were.
3. Because of its arbitrary status, the linguistic sign (the word) cannot carry on its back a comprehensive and detailed picture of reality, but at most encode such a reality.
4. Therefore the linguistic sign cannot function on its own, but needs a chain of such signs coming one after another. A “text” is required, proceeding from the starting point—the first word—until it reaches its full realization at the end (the last word).
5. You will not find such a “flowing forth” in a visual image.
6. Hence the difference between verbal paradoxes and visual ones. For example, the liar paradox, which includes the text’s self-reference, depends on the unfolding of the sentence from the first word to the last. There is here a linear, sequential phenomenon. Without the “event” of that sequence, the self-reference would not be created, and with it neither would the paradox. By contrast, Escher’s paradox is not sequential but rather “shows itself” directly, fully, and immediately. Therefore we also will not be able to find an Archimedean point in the drawing from which the paradox unfolds; that is, there is no first hand and second hand (there is no linearity).
7. The interesting result of this analysis, assuming it is correct, is the existence of two different, though parallel, paths by which paradoxes unfold. The first, verbal path is based mainly on the activity of the intellect and memory; the second, visual path is based on the activity of the senses and intuition.
What do you think?