The artist Rene Magritte was very conscious of symbols and objects. He used them in his work to provoke “powerful responses.” Take a look at one of his pieces titled Common Sense. How does your “common sense” want to describe the painting?
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The drawing stirs our thoughts on the concept of symbols and objects. Our intuition tells us that the fruit is real because it is realized to be three-dimensional. The shadows and color gradients are those we may have experienced in an actual fruit bowl (or even artificial fruit), which lends the drawing a life-like quality. However, the fruit is painted in such a way that it appears to be both sitting on top of the canvas and painted within another canvas! And this, of course is all within the context of a painting on canvas. Thus, the object (the fruit) now appears to be a mere symbol despite what our “common sense” wants to tell us.
Douglas Hofstader explains the symbol vs. object relation as a tangled hierarchy, as something that is visible to us yet appears to be a closed “loop” of sorts. These consist of symbol to object and object to symbol relations. He claims that there is an inviolate level in which we are able to step outside of this tangled hierarchy and view the whole picture. Is common sense transcending this symbol to object correlation? Or is Magritte’s drawing like Escher’s famous hands drawing one another?
From Chapter 20 Strange Loops, Or Tangled Hierarchies, Hofstader, D. , Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books: 1979