Can Philosophy Be Visualized? A Case Study.
I was standing on the train platform with a friend recently discussing a theoretical idea. More accurately, I was struggling to explain The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The theory makes a brief appearance in the film Arrival (which takes the theory to its possible extremes, to say the least) which is why it was on the top of our minds, but my friend didn’t quite understand the linguistic contingencies that the theory proposed. I like to think that I’m a fairly articulate person, but sometimes things like this are just inherently convoluted. As I began to vaguely gesture with my hands, rambling about some sort of metaphor, it occured to me that I could visualize the example that I was trying to explain. I went home and promptly began drafting out illustrations. From there, it snowballed into a challenge: Can I visualize any philosophical concept?
Philosophy’s primary mode of expression is the written word, and its primary substrate is critical thinking. Design is often seen as a glossy, secondary surface to critical thinking, but I think as a designer it’s important to remember that designing is thinking. The same process by which we work through design problems is a parallel process by which we formulate thoughts and articulate them into written or spoken words. This should be an encouraging sentiment to anyone who has ever felt doubtful about devising a design solution to represent a complex idea. Of which philosophy is filled with many!
An illuminating learning for this case study emerged while working on a visualization for the ancient Buddhist parable “The Blind Men and The Elephant.” The parable has variations, but it goes something like this: Four blind men approach an elephant and each of them feels a different body part. One explores the tusk, another the trunk, and the others take the ear and the tail. When they reconvene to discuss this new animal, they unsurprisingly cannot agree on precisely what an elephant is. So, the story is a thought experiment about perspective and how multiple people can or cannot come to know the same thing.
I was attracted to this parable because of its ancientness: there exist hundreds of paintings and illustrations of the story already. So it begged the question, why did a graphic designer need to take a stab at this anyways? But in looking through these old drawings and representations, it occurred to me that all of them simply portrayed the scenario of the parable — not the core idea that you were supposed to glean from it. They all portrayed the scene from a third-person, omniscient point of view.
So I set out to try to elucidate the actual meaning of the parable instead of its linear narrative. I began to backtrack, and try to remember the experience of what it was like to realize the purpose. of the parable. Re-creating this cognitive spark of illumination became the design problem.
Visualizing this parable is difficult in part because we cannot, of course, unknow what an elephant is. Not to mention the paradox of visually constructing the experience of blindness. I decided to start by eliminating the four blind men from the depiction altogether, and instead try to swap their presence out for their 4 perspectives. Through a simple visual gesture of negation (a 4-way opaque panel structure) I depict a simultaneity of limited perspectives.
This is just one small solution for trying to work through the difficulties of visualizing complex, philosophical thought. The lesson to be learned here is that graphic design is its most powerful and transformative when it is doing some of the cognitive heavy lifting for and along with the viewer.
