Picture Post No. 15: Boulevard du Temple

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Boulevard du Temple, by Daguerre

This is one of those 'first ever...' photos- so a little history story could be told. But more than that, and unlike most of the early images,  it has quite an aesthetic. And the two stick figures in the foreground add a certain something human too... Are they children playing?

The Frenchified nature of the town is given by those shop awnings and ordered lines of trees - as well as perhaps more obscurely, by the slope of the roofs.

On closer inspection, the figures turn out to be adults, and one is offering his boot via an extended leg to the other, who presumably is a shoe-shine boy. Thus, the image captures in a frozen moment of time, a slightly sourer taste of social inequality.

It is a daguerrotype, an image recorded on a sheet of copper coated with silver and developed by mercury fumes, taken by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (after whom the process was named). The exact date of the photo is not known, but it is thought to be either 1838 or 1839.

One contemporary photographer says too that the matchstick figures are the first human beings to be photographed*, adding:

‘Their simple, everyday transaction has made them immortal.’

Following on from the artistic era of Romanticism, photography fitted well the artist's needs to express the real and natural. But above all, this mechanical medium seemed to fit the industrial revolution and the need for man to fix himself into particular roles.

Because, indeed, another quality of the image is that there are only these two figures, locked forever in their unequal relationship. What should have been a bustling boulevard is strangely deserted. This appearance is, however, also illusory: the first daguerrotypes took some minutes (10 to 15) to fix on the plate, and so all that moves is removed... moving objects, like coaches or even pedestrians, would leave little or no trace. They are the ghosts of early photography.

*Others would argue the point, including earlier images by Daguerre himself such as Foyer au Pont-Neuf, but if there are literally other figures to be found, none are as striking and problematic as these two.

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Just fancy that! Hardly any daguerrotypes have survived, but this one was still being lovingly preserved as late as 1974 in a museum. At that point, however, someone decided to ‘clean’ the tatty old silver plated surface, wiping the delicate image away in a moment ...

Poetry: BREXIT and 9/11

The City of London. Although some financiers played  a key role in the
LEAVE campaign, others fear loss of access to lucrative European markets

So Why Does BREXIT* Remind Me of 9/11?

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 A poem by Chengde Chen 

Why does BREXIT remind me of 9/11?
Because the exit is like a suicide attack.
Britain, like a plane hijacked by democracy,
With her island-shaped spirit and body,
Dives into her interdependent neighbour,
Regardless of the fatal consequences of
Isolation, recession, and dismemberment…

If an action of suicide bombing
Is to perish together with the enemy,
Brexit is to do so with friends!
But, world-shaking as it is, this isn’t 9/11 yet.
The “explosion” detonated by the referendum,
is time-consuming, procedural, and reversible.

If Britain regrets the decision, she can re-vote.
Some would cry “respecting democracy”, but
Should we democrats be so “respected”
That we’re not allowed to change our mind –
But must jump off the cliff-edge mistakenly-reached?

A U-turn would, of course, not be glorious, but
Should the UK trade her existence for pride?
Where would the pride stay, anyway?
If we must make the mistake into a full disaster,
Wouldn't democracy look crazier than al-Qaeda?

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* Editorial note. 'BREXIT' is the term used to signify the process of withdrawal from the European Union by the United Kingdom, a long-standing aim of both the extreme left and right in English politics, if rather less so in other parts of the United Kingdom.

Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Doublethink 23 - Silence is Offensive

 

Is 'Christian Healing' a Contradiction in Terms?

The Sick Child, by Edvard Munch

Posted by István Király V.

At the heart of the Christian faith and thinking about human illness lies a contradiction. If illness is accepted as a punishment from God, then 'Christian healing' and 'Christian medicine' resists the will of God – alternatively, compromises one's faith in his purposes.

The idea of the divine origin of illnesses, and their perception as a divine punishment for the sins of human beings dates back much before Christianity. It was shared for instance by Hebrews and Mesopotamians. However, this was not a hindrance for them – as it was, and is, in Christianity – to relate to diseases not merely, and not primarily with supplication by prayers and hoping for miracles in the expectation of healing, but in an actively medical way, namely with their empirical observation, interpretation and explanation, and with an attitude aiming at their prevention and healing.

For Christian faith and thinking, human illnesses are primarily the results and consequences of original sin, as well as the 'blows' of its original punishment and other, also divine, punishments associated with it, such as 'historical' punishments beyond the expulsion from paradise.

Secondarily, however, from a Christian 'point of view', illnesses are the punishments of yet another kind of divine sin of personal concern, and as such, in fact external to man, unappealable, unexplainable, and actually unforeseeable, and, while purportedly determinate, not clearly identifiable. These 'blows' are not meant to smite the human race in general, but specifically individual people, and of course, are exclusively designated to make them accept divine punishment.

Consequently, if we give deeper thought to the matter, then it emerges as highly problematic whether the naturally human-medical efforts of healing can indeed be considered as human activities worthy of divine contentment and respect. They are carried out, namely, as confrontation with 'illnesses' which are identified with all sorts of divine punishments in 'correspondence' with divine orders and intentions. Or, on the contrary, they should be considered a threatening insight into ever newer, very much determined sin, connected to, and branching further from, the original sin – that is to say, knowledge.

Paradoxically, Western science, purportedly, and also actually 'devoid of ethics', is precisely a product of Christianity – since, if the knowledge of the distinctions between good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly is considered and treated exactly as the original sin of mankind, then cognition and systematic knowledge, constitutive and indispensable for human life, can only be cultivated with a 'bad consciousness', and mostly with the ignorance of this 'ethics'.

And thus medicine and medical doctors were prosecuted during the Christian Middle Ages with special theological and ecclesiastical concern (and also afterwards, in fact to this day compared even to other sciences and scholars). Because medicine – as a search for knowledge and knowledge – is not only a further immersion into the original sin, like any other historically articulated science, but, more than that – as healing! – it comes into a direct confrontation with that indefinable, yet 'concrete' divine decision and will which punishes that particular person (!) with that particular disease.

While, of course, the cases of healing sometimes occurring nevertheless could only be regarded in fact from a consistently Christian viewpoint as miracles of divine grace. It is therefore this grace and only its penitent reception that, from a 'Christian point of view', an ill person, as well as his / her caretaker, can actually strive, urge, and hope for.

So it is no wonder, historically speaking, that the medieval, and especially early medieval meaning of medico had so much shifted towards the meaning of curo – namely an indeed 'positive' and sui generis Christian attitude and obligation, the nursing and attendance of the weak, the poor, and the sick - that it no longer means in fact 'healing' in an (ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, etc.) medical sense, but rather the caretaking of the sick and the suffering. Obviously, in the midst of a penitent supplication, and in the desperate hope of 'healing' as a miracle-like divine mercy.

The case is probably the same with Jesus, considered the son of God. Because, in a real and explicit medical sense – that is, in the sense of the medical conception, knowledge, and skills of his age, culture, and environment – he was not really a healer, but he only made all sorts of miracles connected (also) to illnesses.

This illustrates those deep ruptures which Christianity meant and represented in relation to – recte: against and opposed to – e.g. ancient Greek and Roman traditions, where truth was always tried to be knowingly and continuously thought and kept together with good and beautiful, as the noblest human modes of being. 

Strictly considering the relation of Christianity to illness – which actually seriously and decisively influenced two millennia – we must ultimately make it clear that, since illness, according to Christianity, is considered in its origin, source, nature, and purpose one of the main types of divine punishment for human sins, the liberation from these sins – recte, healing itself, or the recovery obtained in its historically articulated efforts – cannot actually and really be considered a blessed task of human, let us say, medical involvement (that is to say, one articulated in the sense of actual, all-time therapy, carried out with knowledge and skills).

Instead, it can only be perceived as a result and consequence of the 'workings' of divine grace, achieved by purportedly always exceptional, pious miracles. Consequently, the expression 'Christian medicine' in the sense of healing or therapy – because it is separated from God's purposes – is none other in fact than a mere contradictio in terminis, an absurdity.

'Yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, 

but to the physicians.' II Chronicles 16:12.

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Király V. István is an Associate Professor in the Hungarian Department of Philosophy of the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. This post is an extract selected by the Editors, and slightly adjusted for Pi, from his bilingual Hungarian-English Philosophy of Human Illness, which focuses on specific human reporting. Free downloads are available at Illness a Possibility of the Living Being or Illness a Possibility of the Living Being.

Doublethink 22 - Annoying!

 

How Shall We Re-establish Ethics in Our Time?

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

We have nothing to show today, writes Simon Blackburn, for ethical foundations. At the beginning of the 21st century, we are ethically adrift. Not reason, not religion, not intuition now seem adequate for grounding our behaviour.

Not only does this present us with a philosophical problem. On a social level, we are conflicted and disorientated with multiple ethics, while on a global level, our ethics increasingly seem to have come apart – with deepening poverty, social disintegration, and environmental destruction being the order of the day.

Philosophically, it was David Hume who first observed that we cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. We cannot, on the basis of a handful of facts, derive any values. Gradually, over the following centuries, this idea took hold – until, with Ludwig Wittgenstein, it achieved a wide acceptance. 'Whereof one cannot speak,' he wrote, 'thereof one must be silent.' He was referring, most importantly, to ethics.

How, then, shall we re-establish ethics in our time?

Many, today, would consider the very question to be foolish. Yet given two simple conceptual prerequisites, I propose that we may indeed re-establish ethics, philosophically:

• Prerequisite 1. The fact-value distinction would have to be set aside. This, I believe, should be possible by ridding ourselves of facts – and with facts, of things (facts are, after all, about things). This may not be as difficult as it seems.

• Prerequisite 2. We would need to reduce our world to relations, and only relations – without the existence of facts or things. Ethics – together with all other fields of inquiry – may then be defined in terms of relations, and relations alone.

With regard to the fact-value distinction then, it is important that we first understand that this rests on Hume's notion that all knowledge is subdivided into relations of ideas on the one hand, and matters of fact (and things) on the other. On closer examination, however, we find that this view cannot be sustained.

It was Francis Bacon who observed that the definitions of words have definitions. Similarly, we know that the features of words have features. Words, I have myself proposed, represent 'relations within relations'. Given that this is true, there can be no self-contained 'things'. Rather, our words (and thoughts) reach into an infinity of relations, and we speak about 'things' only by way of a truncated shorthand.

If, then, there are no self-contained 'things' in this world, and if our words (and thoughts) reach into infinity, then this must mean that we cannot speak truly about our world on the assumption that it is a closed system, in which we begin with axioms, origins, or specific reference points. This flies in the face of what we have before us. Rather, we need to step back from all systems, to view our world as an infinite canvas of relations.

I propose that we shall find, when we do this, that relations as a whole possess certain features – call them meta-features – many of which may only be recognised from a bird's eye view.

These features hold the promise of new ethical foundations:

• Feature 1. As we survey the infinite canvas of relations, we realise that some of the relations which we trace in this world do not in fact exist – and those relations which do not exist cannot form the basis of an acceptable ethics. Falsehood and deceit are, at bottom, attempts to trace non-existent relations.

• Feature 2. Since relations represent an infinite canvas – and any containment of relations detracts from this – the relations which we trace should range through all the world. The more we limit the scope of the relations which we trace, and the more we view things in isolation, the more we are at risk of fault or shipwreck, in any field.

• Feature 3. Since the relations which we trace should range through all the world, our ability to trace relations should not be obstructed or manipulated. This means that secrecy, propaganda, and misrepresentations are ruled out. Above all, an ethics of relations would favour an open society, since openness is a prerequisite for arranging our world.

• Feature 4. Relations are infinite, yet our minds are finite. Since our minds are capable only of encompassing limited regions of relations, this means that there will inevitably be relations which lie beyond our power to explain – and beyond our control. We need therefore to be acutely aware of our limitations of thought. There is no place for hubris.

• Feature 5. Infinite control is required to conquer infinite relations. Therefore our limitations may create within us powerful totalising urges. In view of our limitations therefore – which preclude any final ability to master our world – any ethics should avoid such totalising tendencies.

• Feature 6. When we elevate any given values above others in an infinity of relations, our (justified) fear that such values are empty and illusory grows. This may lead to a dysfunctional ethics, which drives us to fundamentalism – where fundamentalism is resistance to the fear of finding one's foundations to be exposed as baseless.

• Feature 7. We need to consider that we live in a world where new relations are continually emerging, which did not exist before, and in many cases were unimaginable just so many years ago. This means that ethics does not and cannot stand still.

Finally, when we view our world as an infinite canvas of relations, and only relations – having banished both 'facts' and 'things' – we may now define fact as those relations which are as we think they ought to be, and value as those relations which are as we think they ought not to be. In both cases, then – in all cases – we speak, at bottom, of 'ought'.

With careful consideration, we come to see that all of the natural and the human sciences, and all of our common life, represent value, not fact. Thus we escape the albatross of the fact-value distinction, and bring back ethics into the fold of philosophy.
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For a deeper exploration of these themes, one may refer to the author's Metaphysical Notes.

Doublethink 21 - Cost of Crime

 

Picture Post No. 14: On Otherness and Logic

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Photo credit Max Perissi .  Florence, Italy 1994

How can a woman in a semitransparent dress, passing on the streets of Florence, pass by unnoticed? Or should we question why a woman in a semitransparent dress is challenging? The above picture - inspired by Ruth Orkin’s 1951 photograph,  ‘American girl in Italy’, reworks the underlying issues of female freedom and independency.

Being foremost independent and possibly attractive stresses female power over men and the ability to challenge patriarchal behavior. The woman ‘out objects’ herself in claiming her ‘subjective freedom’. She, like He, plays this game in the face of gender difference, molding both men and women into objects. 

Challenging the other gender, even as we are controlled by a vision of being sexual bodies, is hitchhiking on a road where ‘the obvious will always be the driver, in a country of good reasons’, even when the road might be deceptive.

Less obvious is the question of whether we have distorted intimacy into something we can rationally justify? 

Have we made a confused exchange between the inescapable faults ascribed to the virtues of the male and female body and the awareness that intimacy informs all the conceptual relationships of Life?

Intimacy unties borders in which the other is disqualified - in a moral way. That this disqualification is unfounded might perplex us, but it will not make us doubt.

When intimacy is appropriated into a web of the already related, the lurking suspicion is that once we have sexualised the body, will we also not  find that we have destroyed intimacy?

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Read on: More ways in which images  are not always quite what they seem are explored in the post immediately below, by Keith Tidman.

People, Photographs, and Reality

A Deconstruction of Picture Post 13 - ‘The Worshippers’

Posted by Keith Tidman

Ludwig Wittgenstein succinctly observed in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The picture is a model of reality.” But was it ever that; and is it still that?

Photos can be bland, or they can powerfully evoke. Pi’s Picture Post 13: ‘The Worshippers’fell into the latter category—powerful, hauntingly moving. The photograph spotlights supporters of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump—what the posted text referred to as an ‘admiring throng’. The subjects in the photograph took on the persona not just as common supporters wanting to hear the regurgitation of policy positions, but potentially 'fans' celebrating celebrity. Or so it seemed.

At first blush, the supporters’ enthusiasm appeared almost over the top—perhaps why the text accompanying the Picture Post referred, in the opening words, to a ‘cartoonish air’ about the image. Those two words spoke volumes. The supporters really do appear absorbed in the presence of a celebrity-turned-presidential candidate. Yet photography captures reality only by means of analogy; and it always has a point of view—at some point, even at the (unintended) risk of transitioning to theatre. Meanwhile, what, and whose, reality political photographs capture often remains uncertain, even opaque. Made all the more challenging by how inspiration and aspiration—both the photographer’s and viewer’s—might affect the experience. An observation reinforced by the essayist Anais Nin, who poignantly noted, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

Even under the best of circumstances and with the best of intentions, photographs can sometimes prove unreal—and arguably, in the eyes of some, possibly unfair. They’re frozen moments in time and space, captured by one individual who's under intense pressure to quickly decide what’s important, and when. Given the fluidity of what happens in reality at any moment of, say, a public campaign appearance, eyeballs focused on what’s occurring may well be drawn by what's different, by what might set a photograph apart from the many others. In other cases, what gets captured boils down to simple serendipity. These are among the diverse possible circumstances in which photojournalists with serious, honest intent, including the creator of PP 13's image, perform their craft. Yet, as Marshall McLuhan noted, there’s a governing dynamic at play here, a reciprocity between photographer and camera that shapes outcomes: “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.”

Whether it matters if political photographs are not so subtly edited, as some circulating around the Internet are, depends on circumstances. Hence there’s the question as to what reality do photographs reveal and, largely unintentionally, conceal. In photojournalism, the standard is fairly strict—though perhaps disputable. The public expects that the photograph has not been edited, beyond such acceptable techniques as cropping. And it is expected that there has been a good-faith effort to preserve content integrity. People view such images with a degree of automaticity, whereby trust suspends critical judgment. Expectations are that the image is as ‘true’ as possible to what was going on. But photographers are human. Also, the risk in photojournalism is that some interested third party surreptitiously, but brazenly, ‘hijacks’ and manipulates an image of an unsuspecting photographer, to advance a political or social agenda. Pictures, after all, can stir up emotions as much as words can.

Accordingly, photographic imagery has obviously been used, historically, for political and social purposes—whether to amplify or as a sleight of hand. Even for outright ‘propaganda’—both the malign kind and the benign kind. Photography is a powerful medium, subject to far-ranging purposes and broad interpretation—hence a rich source for shaping the message. And in turn for shaping history. There’s a distinctly nontrivial element of trust—especially given that some viewers might accept image content prima facie. This is true, even though the sense of reality that people take away from looking at photographs can be skewed, notably by any ambiguity as to an image’s intent—not different in that sense than other media. So what was going on with PP 13, as best we can tell? And is there evidence, on the Internet, that people have digitally doctored this original photograph to create permutations for their own (political?) purposes, to make events appear other than they were when the photograph at PP13 was snapped?

Indeed, one must tread warily in the morass of online political imagery. Online searches can locate other versions of the photograph that appear to have been manipulated, and not always deftly. By some person, or some group, over the course of the photo’s Internet lifespan. The result of apparent distortion sometimes therefore taxes people’s ability to connect with the image, as something may not seem quite right. The Pi text characterized the supporters’ reactions in PP 13 as ‘zany’—the manipulated versions of the photograph found online are made, in some cases, to appear all the more so. Did the perpetrators doctor these photos to advance a political agenda? Did they wish to mock, disparage, or even demonize others of a different political persuasion? Was it just a prank? Or were there other motivations? This is just one area in which political photographs need to be decoded.

Online there’s a panoply of other photographs purportedly manipulated, resulting in distracting memes. Whether all the photographs are indeed manipulated, or some are not and have simply been swept up in the hurly-burly of the Internet, is germane, of course. Yet it’s clear from these myriad images, whether edited or not, that there is an intimacy between image and viewer. Or, as Vilém Flusser observed in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, it’s evident “there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.” At the same time, people bring all sorts of predispositions (ideological, political, personal, experiential) to interpreting photographs. Internet searches serve as a trove of when and how some photographs are morphed into something other than the original. This morphing, mixed with viewers' potentially complex predispositions, can muddy the experience of viewing the photograph all the more.

The idea that a picture is a ‘model of reality’, which Wittgenstein claimed, has to be critically parsed to be even remotely true in the modern era, when a picture’s digits can be handily manipulated, subtly or clumsily, by just about anyone, often to enormously dramatic effect. This ability to manipulate images is not only ubiquitous—rearing its head in every corner, with its results shared virally around the Internet—it challenges the very premise of photo ‘realism’. Both reputable photographers and the public alike become unwitting victims, whose caution about photos’ provenance—and the supposed window on the world of ‘realism’ they offer—becomes rich fodder for dissection.