You walk into the room, with your pencil in your hand,

You see somebody naked and you say “Who is that man?”

You try so hard but you don’t understand

Just what you will say when you get home

Because something is happening but you don’t know what it is,

Do you, Mr Jones?

( Ballad of a Thin Man Bob Dylan )

In philosophy there is a method of thinking with the daunting name of phenomenology. It is a method based on the belief that the best way to approach thinking about something is at first to simply describe it accurately without reference to extraneous matters such as received ideas and beliefs. These matters are called the “epoché”, the irrelevant concerns that should be set aside while you focus on the object at hand.

Importantly, this affects how you should view, think about – and talk about – art. Looking at, and talking about, a work of art in the light of your knowledge of art history, for example, leads you to think in terms of categories and to make false assertions about artists’ intentions. Good teachers, when asking students to write about works of art, remind them constantly to go back to the work itself, to describe what they see rather than make judgements from what they know about the artist.

Even more importantly, artists themselves think phenomenologically. The art critic Ernst Gombrich states that art creation is a balance between knowledge of previous ways of depicting reality and the wish to create new ones which are a better match with the way they see nature. So a good artist is a phenomenologist in two ways – he focusses precisely on what he can see and tries to avoid relying on “schemata”, received ideas of how to represent this. This is why Constable said that when he painted he tried to forget he had ever seen a picture. It is what Monet was getting at when he stated that he wished he had been born blind. In phenomenological terms great artists refuse to attend to the “epoché”; they put aside those things outside the object being observed – formulae, received ideas, schemata.

Which brings me to Bob Dylan. When have you ever seen a conversation between a journalist or critic and an artist where the artist does not appear uncomfortable and on the defensive? The reason is that in such interviews there is a phenomenological divide between the questioner and the artist. The journalist/critic is often asking questions about the very things the artist has tried to reject when making his/her art. The questions are referring to the epoché and not the art itself.

When in this situation, rather than be discomforted Dylan chose to give journalists a hard time. Most journalists he faced were of an older generation out of touch with contemporary popular music. They could hardly attend to the phenomenology of a music they had never listened to. So they fell back on the received ideas they had gathered about Dylan”s music – its place in the “protest movement”, its influence on young people, Dylan”s supposed role as leader of the younger generation. We can see examples of the kind of questions he was asked in Martin Scorsese”s film No Direction Home. “How do you label yourself?” “What’s your role?” “Do your songs have a subtle message?” “Do you consider yourself the ultimate beatnik?” “What message were you trying to impart by wearing a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited?” It is not just the fact that these questions are obviously plain stupid. They represent the wider problem of how non-artists approach artists. Even serious Fine Art critics often miss the phenomenological point. How often do we hear “What are you trying to say?” “What does this mean/symbolise?” “What point are you making?” “Would you call yourself a (apply label here)?”

Famously, Dylan wrote a song about what I call the phenomenological divide; about the journalist who puts his eyes in his pocket, the journalist who only knows of the epoché. In “The Ballad of a Thin Man” Dylan tells the journalist “You don’t know what is happening here, do you Mr Jones?” It has long been known that the song is about journalists and their stupid questions. Phenomenology explains why their questions are stupid.