Iconophobia
As iconophobia or images fear is called the fear of images, or the rejection of portraits, certain particular as a feature of religions . The fear of images is possibly an archaic basic feature of human experience. In the sciences of antiquity and the Middle Ages , images were also rejected or underestimated. Only in the modern era did the sciences help overcome the fear of images in modern societies.
Possible causes
The causes of this fear of images have not yet been adequately researched. For example, a conflict is assumed between the mythical content of the image and the rational part of these structures, as Horkheimer and Adorno work out in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944); The cause of iconophobia would therefore be the archaic conflict between myth and logos . The myth "provides a picture of the world and surrounds the world with pictures" (Bolz 1991), resulting in the need to expel the myth from culture in order to broaden the horizons of man. Enlightenment is thus nothing other than eradicating the image character of consciousness, i.e. an enterprise of de-education. This figure of thought also appears in Nietzsche , who assumed an Apollonian-Dionysian tension in humans and recognized the abstract nature of modern thinking.
More recent research in image science in the context of the Iconic Turn is beginning for the first time to analyze this interrelationship in a value-neutral manner.
Iconophobia in Religions
The Jewish religion is evidently regarded as hostile to images, i. H. iconoclastic ; this trait is already expressed in the Old Testament in the story of Moses and Aron . The core of the problem here is the difference between the truth of the word and the appearance of the (idol) image (old Greek eídolon , Latin idolum ).
Similar anti-image traits can also be found in the Christian religion , at least up to the image decree of the Tridentine Council of 1563, and beyond that in some directions of the Reformation .
The Islam is similar pictures hostile as Judaism. In mosques you can find abstract frescoes and elaborate Arabic scripts , but usually no concrete representations of God, people, animals or objects. However, painting from the 16th to 18th centuries in the Islamic Mughal Empire in India is a significant exception .
Iconophobia in Science
Ancient and Middle Ages
The fear of images in the sciences, which has its origin in the philosophy of antiquity , reaches back at least to Plato , who in his theory of ideas makes a clear distinction between things in themselves (archetype or idea, ancient Greek eidos ), our external reality and its images . Accordingly, images are only shadows of shadows (ancient Greek skiá ), thus distorting the view of things in themselves beyond recognition; In the parable of lines , Plato speaks of “vague images” ( eikónes , skiaí and phantásmata ), i.e. H. Assumptions or premonitions ( eikasía ) in stark contrast to reason ( nóesis ). In Plato, the moral connection between knowledge ( epistéme ) and the beautiful and true as well as the good ( agathón ) and thus the moral devaluation of the imagery, i.e. H. of deception:
- “That is why Philosophy understands its mission to educate as a de-education company: Conceptual contexts take the place of imagery, which are per se illusory worlds. This is how the philosophical project of disenchantment and de-auratization of the world takes place in the battle of concepts with myths and metaphors ”(Bolz 1991).
In unusual unanimity with Plato, Aristotle and the scientists who followed him orientated themselves to the rejection of imagery until the Middle Ages. Scientific treatises usually consist exclusively of text that is handwritten in the scriptoria and, if necessary, illuminated , but does not contain any visual elements relevant to the content.
Modern times
The sciences of the modern age also separated themselves only to a limited extent from fear of images. Pictures were mostly added to a text as an illustrative accessory and only rarely achieved independence. After the invention of the printing press with movable type in the 15th century, an initially imageless book tradition developed during the Renaissance . H. an alphabetical monopoly that extends into modern times (cf. also Marshall McLuhan , 1962: The Gutenberg Galaxy ).
A rethinking is taking place in the natural sciences, for example, with Charles Darwin ( Origin of Species ) and Ernst Haeckel ( General Morphology , 1866); Descriptive explanations of picture diagrams are used here, which could hardly be expressed in pure writing .
A high degree of iconophobia can still be found today, for example, in jurisprudence ; Klaus F. Röhl is investigating this in the project visual legal communication . The following still applies here: “Right is text.” Fabian Steinhauer also proves fear of images as a hallmark of the modern constitutional state.
Overcoming iconophobia as a historical process
Numerous indications point to an ongoing process of overcoming iconophobia in the sciences of Western societies. So far, three decisive cuts have been made:
- With the development of the ancient Greek alphabet around 1000 BC Chr. Starts the visualization of language. Even Socrates and Plato fight vehemently the "separation of the knower of knowledge", but they can not prevail. This enables the exact storage and transmission of knowledge beyond the traditions of orality .
- In a second development step , the macrocosm and microcosm become visible through the invention of the telescope (around 1611) and microscope (around 1625). These developments lead to a paradigm shift in science: the Copernican turn and the replacement of spontaneous generation theory by preformation theory .
- In a last step for the time being, the discovery of X-rays made it possible to make the invisible visible (around 1895); for the first time something other than visible light is used to visualize objects; X-ray or computed tomography , electron and ion microscopy only represent a quantitative improvement, but no longer a qualitative leap (Peter Rumpf).
Overcoming the deep-seated iconophobia is therefore a process that extends over several millennia and could result in an emancipation of the application and analysis of images ( Flusser ).
literature
- Klaus F. Röhl: Visual legal communication, yesterday, today, tomorrow . In: word, image, sign. Contributions to semiotics in law. Heidelberg: Universitätsverl. 2012, pp. 127–149. [1]
- Norbert Bolz : A short history of the bill . Fink-Verl. 1991. ISBN 3-77052671-6
See also
- Iconicity
- Iconoclasm
- Technical picture in the sense of Vilém Flusser