Picture Post #64: A and Not-A

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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.'

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Posted by Thomas Scarborough

I took this photo in South Africa’s Suurveld. What does one see? A beetle, naturally. Should one say good things about it or bad? It is the Cape Mounted Rifles beetle. It is strikingly beautiful. At the same time, it is potentially lethal. A few of these in a horse’s fodder will kill the horse. Let us call the beetle ‘A’—and like anything in particular, there might be very different things we can say about it. We might indeed disagree —sometimes violently. This may be as far as the pre-analytical mind goes.

But according to the law of non-contradiction—the principle of contradiction—‘A is not not-A’.

There is something besides the beetle in the photo. How could one miss it? The beetle is perched on—in Xhosa—inkondlwane. In English, it is the Golden Everlasting. This grows in colonies, in Southern Africa. It is used to kindle fire. Diviners use it to induce trances. It sustains the beetle. And unusually, its seeds will not be planted. Call this ‘Not-A’. It is what one finds outside the existing frame. The question is now: whenever one talks about something, where is the ‘Not-A’? The answer may reveal volumes about who the person observing, the person speaking, is.

In terms of “Picture Posts”, though, I use this image to show how what we see depends so much on a network of other mental and social connections.

Is the Real Crime of Political Bloggers Making Fun of the Powerful?

The Trabant was the regular butt of jokes in East Germany.

 Foto: Z1021 Peter Endig/ dpa

Posted by Martin Cohen

Last week saw a commercial jet effectively hijacked and diverted to the capital of Belarus on the orders of its dictatorial leader, Alexander Lukashenko, the only person to ever serve as president of this sad country. Elections were held in 1994, 2001, 2006, 2010, 2015 and 2020. They might as well not have been.

Roman Protasevich, the blogger at the centre of the Belarus plane hijack, had provoked the fury of Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko. The Western media said it was for facilitating protests in the country, and in so doing to some extent endorsed the paranoid thinking of Lukashenko.  On the contrary, I suspect if all he had done was poke fun at the dictator, he would still have been a target. Because dictators have no sense of humour at all.

At the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberalization of Russia and Eastern Europe, it seemed that political jokes had become interesting, yet nowadays under not only Lukashenko but his puppet-master, Vladimir Putin, political jokes are once again gaining popularity. So let's take a quick look at the role of humour as the sole survivor of authoritarianism. 

If the Cold War officially ended a long time ago, in the world of jokes, stereotypes hang on and so many play on Putin’s KGB background, such as this one in which Stalin’s ghost appears to Putin in a dream. Of course, Putin asks for his help running the country. Stalin says, ‘Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue.’ ‘Why blue?’ Putin asks. ‘Ha!’ says Stalin. ‘I knew you wouldn’t ask me about the first part.’ 

Another subversive barb, offers a man who is reported to have said: ‘Putin is a moron!’ and has been arrested by a Russian policeman. ‘No, sir, I meant not our respected leader, but another `Putin!’ he protests. ‘Don’t try to trick me’ snaps back the police man, ‘If you say ‘moron’, you are obviously referring to our President!’ Russians like jokes which play with the ‘referents’ of words, as philosophers might say. 

Another slightly more sophisticated version runs like this.

During the Second World War, a secretary is standing outside the Kremlin as Marshal Zhukov, the most important Russian general in World War Two, leaves a meeting with Stalin, and she hears him muttering under his breath, ‘Mustachioed idiot!’. She immediately rushes in to see Stalin and breathlessly reports, ‘I just heard Zhukov say ‘ Mustachioed idiot!’ Stalin dismisses the secretary and sends for Zhukov, who comes back in. ‘And just who did you have in mind with this talk of “Mustachioed idiots”!?’ asks Stalin. ‘Why, Adolf Hitler, of course!’ Satisfied, Stalin thanks him, dismisses him, calls the secretary back and explains what the Marshal had said. ‘And now, who did you think he was talking about?’

You have to laugh at this joke, with its deeply sinister undertones. And in addition there is an element of ‘just desserts’ in the informer-secretary’s predicament.

But back to ‘real life’ and when Vladimir Putin was elected President, in 2000, one of his first acts was to kill ‘Kukly,’ a sketch puppet show that portrayed him as Little Tsaches, a sinister baby who uses a ‘magic TV comb’ to bewitch a city - a humorous reworking of a German folktale in which a fairy casts a spell on an ugly dwarf so that others find him irresistibly beautiful.. Putin’s predecessor, Mr. Yeltsin, put up for years with the satirical barbs of the TV puppet, and even intervened when officials talked of prosecuting the makers of the show, NTV. But media management meant something rather different to Mr Yeltsin’s KGB-trained protégé. Putin simply threatened to shut down the channel unless it removed the puppet. NTV refused. Within months, it was under state control. According to Newsweek, ‘Putin jokes quickly vanished from Russia’s television screens.’’

The fact is, President Putin himself doesn’t ‘do’ jokes, at least not in the funny sense. He once remarked to a child, ‘Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere’—before adding, ‘That’s a joke.’

Perhaps President Putin would have allowed this joke though. It starts with the scene of two friends walking down a street. One asks the other ‘What do you think of the President?’ ‘I can’t tell you here,’ he replies. ‘Follow me.’ They disappear down a side street. ‘Now tell me what you think of the President,’ says the friend. ‘No, not here,’ says the other, leading him into the hallway of an apartment block. ‘OK here then.’ ‘No, not here. It’s not safe.’ They walk down the stairs into the deserted basement of the building. ‘OK, now you can tell me what you think of our president.’ ‘Well,’ says the other, looking around nervously, ‘actually I quite admire him.’

A New Theory of Language

by Thomas Scarborough

The way that we use language does not fit with the way that we theorise about it.  Linguistics professor Michael Losonsky writes, ‘Language as human activity and language as system remain distinct focal points despite various attempts to develop a unified view.’

I have been shaping a manuscript, in which linguistic observations play a major role.  Friends have encouraged me to describe a complete theory of language.  Naturally, it can only be done too briefly in 700 words. 

Language, as we know it, is assembled from a range of basic elements: morphemes, words, phrases, and so on.  These we arrange according to certain rules: semantic, syntactic, morphological and more.  Language, therefore, is seen as a constructive enterprise.  

Take a simple example, ‘This city is green.’  

‘This city’ is the subject.

‘is green’ is the predicate, which completes an idea about the subject.

‘This’ is a determiner—which identifies this particular city. 

‘is’ is the verb—which, among other things, points back to the subject.

We assemble these pieces, then, to produce a meaningful communication with another language user, or users.  This is the standard view.

I propose that language is quite the opposite.  Rather than beginning with basic elements, with which we assemble the ideas we communicate, language begins with the whole world.  The function of language then is to begin with this whole, and reduce it. 

Again, the simple example, ‘This city is green.’ 

‘City’ greatly reduces the whole, now encircling only cities.

‘This’ narrows these cities to one particular city.

‘green’ narrows it to just one aspect of one city.

‘is’ reduces the time window to the present.

In fact, we may note that we do much the same with the scientific method.  The scientific method minimises unwanted influences on independent variables.  It begins with the whole world, then screens things out until only independent variables are left, undisturbed by outside influences. 

A holistic view of language should have various consequences, if it is true.  There are certain things we would expect to ensue.  Here are just a few: 

• Since language is a reduction of the whole, even as we reduce it, our words will retain some involvement in the whole.  This, in fact, is the case.  In the words of the philosopher Max Black, our words 'trail clouds of implication'.  

• Since our language reduces the whole, we may expect to run into problems which one associates with partial views. Everything we put into words, because it is reduced, will overlook critical aspects of the world. The statistician George Box put it simply, ‘All models (which are reductions) are wrong, but some are useful.’

• Language originates in the whole, therefore no part of the whole can be focal. A holistic view of language will exclude origins or central ideas -- at least as a valid means of establishing truth.  We shall avoid all such schemes as, in the words of Jacques Derrida, 'return to an origin'.

• Since language is a reduction of the whole, the rules of language -- semantics, syntax, inflections, and so on -- will represent a tool by which we efficiently reduce the whole. Since there are various methods of reduction, we would expect that there would be various grammars. This, too, is the case. In the words of Max Black, ‘Grammar has no essence.'

• Since both ordinary language and science represent a reduction of the world, we would expect them both to work in the same way.  This should enable us to unite our ordinary language and science.  In fact, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin notes that, both in the common affairs of life and in our scientific pursuits, 'we use similar patterns of thought'. 

• The scientific method, being a reduction of the whole, would be tested not primarily by falsification within its own bounds, but by something I shall call ‘invalidation’ in the context of the whole.  The success of science (or otherwise) would be assessed within the context of the whole. 

• Different cultures have different physical and social worlds in their minds.  As they reduce this whole through language, it seems impossible that they could say anything partial which would contradict the whole.  Therefore even snippets of one's language will be a reflection of one's outlook on the world. 

On ‘Conceptual Art’: Where Ideas Eclipse Aesthetics

Fifteen Plaster Surrogates,

Allan McCollum

Posted by Keith Tidman

 

The influential French artist Marcel Duchamp once said, ‘I was interested in ideas — not merely in visual products’. As he put it, work ‘in the service of the mind’, not mere ‘retinal’ art intended to gratify visually. In this manner, conceptual art disrupted the art establishment’s long-held traditional expectation of artist as original creator of handmade objects: a painting, drawing, sculpture, or other. Normalised expectations about the roles of artist, art, observer, display venue, and society in conceptual art are defied; boundaries are both blurred and expandable.

 

To the point of ideas-centric artistic expression, the presence of agency and intentionality are all the more essential. The aim is to shift the artist’s focal point away from ‘making something from scratch’ to ‘manipulating the already-manufactured’. Hence the absence of the conceptual artist manipulating the raw materials that we might expect artists to conventionally use, like paint, stone, glass, clay, metal, fabric, wood, and so forth. 

Duchamp is regarded as the pioneer and inspiration of conceptual art, whose early-twentieth-century foray in the field included a signed urinal, titled ‘Fountain’. It was a classic example of the avant-garde nature of this art form. Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, as they got to be called, became a fixture of conceptual art, up to the present day: where artists select, modify, and position ordinary, everyday manufactured objects as thought-provoking artistic expression. An art of the intellect, where objects are ancillary to concepts.

The heart of ‘conceptual art’ is ideas, inquiry, and intellectual deliberation rather than traditional beauty or aesthetic gratification. The objective is to urge observers to reflect cerebrally on the experience. Conceptual art can thus be seen as sharing a bond with other fields, like philosophy and the social sciences. But what does all that mean in practice? 

The central aspiration to spur observers to reflect upon ideas — not to engage exclusively in the ‘retinal’ experience mentioned above — necessitates such agency. The overriding objective of the conceptual artist’s intention is to focus on ‘meaning’ (something with high information content) rather than on the illustration of a scene that’s directed more traditionally toward triggering the senses (something with high experiential content). Art where, as Aristotle once put it, the ‘inward significance of things’ governs.

 

The meaning that the observer takes away from interaction with the art may be solely the observer’s own, or the artist’s, or the professional art critic’s, or the museum’s, or a hybrid of those, depending on how motivated the observer is. Either way, the art and the ideas conjured by it are linked. Conceptual art thereby sees its commission as philosophical, not just another commodity. Notable to this point, all artworks, including conceptual artworks, are created within a social and cultural context. This context exerts influence in defining and nourishing whatever philosophical theories the artwork is intended to convey.

 

What conceptual art underscores, then, is that no single core definition of all art applies to it. Even within any one category or movement of art, attempts to define it authoritatively can prove thorny: Examples of artwork, and the artists’ intent, may be quite dissimilar. Definitions, beyond generalizations, may be fuzzy at best; opinions about what does or doesn’t fit within the category may prove fractious. Conceptual art only magnifies these realities about attempts to craft a universal definition. 

 

A distinguishing factor is that this kind of art rests not only in its provocative appeal to the intellect, but sometimes even more directly to issues that strike at the heart of social and political displeasure. Or perhaps a little less adversarial, the artist’s unapologetic desire to disruptively probe cultural values and norms. Yet, that’s not to say other visual art movements, including those whose primary tradition is aesthetics, don’t have cognitive, socio-political, or cultural appeal too, for some clearly do. 

 

Indeed, one reward we seek from the experience of art broadly is not only to derive aesthetic joy (a matter of taste), but also to incite thought and to better understand the world and ourselves (a matter of judgment and rationalism). There is philosophical history to this view: Immanuel Kant, for example, also differentiated between aesthetic and logical judgment. To aim for the resulting understanding, the interpretation of conceptual artwork may result in sundry appropriate explanations of the art, or a single best explanation with others ranked in order behind it.

 

One thing in particular that we might praise about conceptual art is its unorthodox interpretation of, and verdict on, societal, cultural norms — quite often, rebelling against our philosophical keystones. In this way, conceptual art’s zealous pioneering temperament forces us to rethink the world we have constructed for ourselves.

 

If enlightenment arises from those second-guesses, then conceptual art has met its objective. And if, beyond illumination, action arises to yield social or cultural change, then that is all the better – in the eye of the conceptual artist.

 

Super League Self Defeat

Posted by Allister Marran

Picture credit: Dan Leydon, The Beautiful Game.

The current Super League debacle is simply a good example of how modern capitalism destroys humanity and innovation in exchange for pure greed.

There is an investor in Japan who owns one share of Nintendo stocks, and every year he goes to the shareholder meeting and asks the dumbest of questions, always relating to something like, "Why don't Nintendo start making and selling X?” (replace X with dog food, or electric cars, or anything that is selling well) which will make the company more profits.

The Japanese, as courteous and likeable fellows that they are, always answer the same way, "We are a games company at heart. We make games that make people happy. It's about the fans, not the shareholders."

Many games and technology companies have come and gone, because they followed the Western model of profits and return on investment over customer experience. Atari, Sega, Intellevision, Colecovision, Sinclair, Commodore, IBM, Amstrad, the list is endless.

A small business owner exists to service the needs of a customer base. He puts his name and face to a product, and his personal integrity attracts new clients. 

A large listed corporate company insulates its investors from any liability, responsibility, personal association or any other kind of accountability. As a result, many people don't even know what companies they invested in when they modified their share portfolio. For all they know, they could have shares in a company that dumps nuclear waste into the water of an orphanage for needy children. They don't need to know or care, as long as they make money.

Manchester United were the richest sports club in the world until a takeover by the Americans a few years ago. Those investors did not use much of their own money, but took out loans and investment money and leveraged it back to the team. 

Overnight the club went from kings to paupers, owing hundreds of millions to banks and struggling to make loan and interest repayments, whilst disbursing any profits in the form of dividends and cash payouts to the shareholders who invested little in the first place.

Football is the game of the people. It is owned by the people. FIFA represents their interests, as small, poor local clubs vote for committees that vote for regional representatives that vote for national representatives who sit on the body of FIFA. They have their own issues, but they represent the small boy without shoes in a small township in Brazil who owns an old ball and a dream of playing for his country and winning a world cup.

The Super League is the very worst of corporate greed, return on investment and unaccountable capitalism ruining another important business sector. It removes the fans from the game, and funnels profits from FIFA who are supporting grass roots efforts to find the next Pele or Messi or Bale or Mane, and redirects them to the disinterested ultra rich in the USA or Dubai or the Far East. People who don't care about soccer, who don't watch the game on Saturday or Sunday, who don't buy the merchandise, or know the words to the team song.

It could be argued that Nintendo, the Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company, are still around because they continue to tell that one shareholder that the fans are more important than the profits. It's a bad strategy for annual ROI and dividends, but clearly great for long term sustainability and output. It allows them to plan for the bad times, when game machines start their cycle of decline before new technology renews it. 

I hope the fans of the English Big Six are ready to demand the same of their fat cat owners. 

Atari, Mattel, Intellevision, Commodore, IBM and many others were the big players in the games industry in the 80s, and for all intents and purposes they are gone today. Nobody believed they could fail, but they did not listen to the demands of the market and fell to smaller, nimbler, more attuned competition.

There is a chance that the same will happen to the Liverpools, Manchester Uniteds, and Chelseas of the world. No company is too big to fail. It is a lesson history has taught us over and over again. The philosophical theologian Paul Tillich put it radically: “The fundamental virtues in the ethics of a capitalist society are economic efficiency, developed to the utmost degree of ruthless activity.” But ruthlessness eats its own.

“You Will Never Walk Alone" are the words any Liverpool fan lives by. But trust is a two way street. Football is more than a business. Let us hope we are not left deserted on the roadside on our journey.  

Picture Post #63: The Audience

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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.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

Girl Dancing In Front Of Her Teddy Bear. Paris, 1961

I like this image. Obviously, it's gentle, charming, and fun too. But beyond that, there is a touch of magic, in that the little girl is dancing, yes, but the bear is watching and waving. The bear becomes the active element in the composition, the girl a mere puppet, seemingly held up by invisible strings.

Not that it matters, I think it is a still from the film Gigot, that was set in Paris, so that's where this dance takes place and it was directed by Gene Kelly. However, the little girl – Nicole, in the film – is played by Diane Gardner. I believe this was her starring role!

The Problem of Inauthenticity

Harry, Meghan and Oprah having a chat (Photocredit-HarpoProductions-JoePugliese)

What was the ‘intention’ of  Mister and Missus Harry Mountbatten–Windsor with THAT  interview? You know, the one with Oprah Winfrey in which they spilled the beans on life in the British Royal Family.

As one gushing website put it:

“The dust is still settling from Oprah Winfrey’s explosive two-hour interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on Sunday, and the revelations are devastating. Markle, pregnant with the couple’s second child, described the racist treatment she endured from social media, the British press and the royal family itself.”

Was the intention then to lift the lid on racism in the Royal Family? Certainly it seemed so when Harry revealed about their baby: 

“There were ‘concerns and conversations’ about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”

The British Royals are a venerable institution, and the Queen’s husband in particular, aka Harry’s grandfather, had a well-grounded reputation for off-colour remarks, including references to “slitty eyes” while visiting China and saying of a messy fuse box in a factory that it looked like it had been put together “by an Indian”.

Was the intention of the interview then to give Harry’s grandad (who would die only a few weeks later) a really bad day? Apparently not, although, of course, neither Meghan nor Harry would actually stoop to naming names. However, Oprah herself did clarify on CBS the next morning that Harry wanted it be known that “it was not his grandmother, nor his grandfather that were part of those conversations.”

Looking at the allegation and subsequent clumsy refinement, it looks to me like the intention was not so much to throw mud at the Royal Family, which after all, for Harry would be rather like throwing mud at yourself, as at some particular individual within it with whom there had been a disagreement. Also called settling scores in public. Is that, however, a worthwhile thing to be doing on Oprah’s highly moral show? I ask because Ms Winfrey has publicly set a very high standard for her interviews. Ever since the occasion in 1988, when she interviewed white supremacists in order to “gain insight into the source of their hatred”. 

To be honest, so venomous was the interview with Harry and Meghan, Oprah could almost have offered a similar motivation here. Alas though, truth is more prosaic, and it seems only that the two wealthy celebrities were being interviewed by the third wealthy celebrity merely as a way to promote themselves. Is self-promotion a worthy, moral endeavour? I suppose we should be careful not to be too puritanical about such things. After all, a celebrity is someone who gives the public some kind of pleasure. But there's a point where celebrities celebrating themselves, and attacking lesser figures, becomes rather dodgy. 

After Winfrey interviewed the racists on that long-ago show, she publicly regretted it and vowed that from then on the watchword would be “intention”. What’s that all about then? Well, the term, signifying the search for spiritual values, is central to the new age philosophy of Gary Zukav set out in his book, The Seat of the Soul. In the book, Zukav, who was already famous for his new-age investigations of personal psychology and quantum physics (including one of my own favourite reads, The Dancing Wu Li Masters), offers a grand cosmological theory: 

“Each soul enters into a sacred agreement with the Universe to accomplish specific goals, or take on a particular task. All of your experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it.” 

For individuals this means one thing. Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and “that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect.”

This is part of a broader theory set out in the book that humanity is evolving from a species that pursues external power into a species that pursues spiritual values. Zukav argues (rather predictably) that the pursuit of external power generates conflict—between individuals and lovers, within communities, and between nations – while “authentic power” infuses the activities of life with reverence, compassion, and trust. 

“Reach for your soul. Reach even further, the impulse of creation and power authentic, the hourglass point between energy and matter, that is the seat of the soul.” 

Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at MIT, praised the book as “remarkable” and complimented Zukav, calling him “one of our finest interpreters of frontier science”, able to explain and understand the human spirit.  

Anyway, the principle became a guiding light for Winfrey. “The number one principle that rules my life is intention,” Winfrey has said adding that  after reading Zukav’s book, she called a meeting with the TV show’s producers and announced a new strategy: “We are going to be a force for good, and that is going to be our intention.” 

Winfrey has also revealed that there had been plenty of times where she’d heard ideas for the show that had no positive intention, and so from now on she would turn these down. Nor, she said, would she accept ideas where she felt people were manufacturing an intention that they themselves didn’t believe in. She’d no longer accept this sort of inauthenticity.

But looking at the sight of a wealthy princeling, who once dressed up as a Nazi at a rave, and a model who in her brief visit to England was accused of bullying and humiliating staff, using her show as a vehicle to cast aspersions against friends and family alike, I can’t help but feel that either Zukav’s philosophy is worthless, or Winfrey’s adoption of it is, well, inauthentic. Or maybe both, of course!

The Simplicity of Power

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

One of the more important 'philosophies of ...' is political philosophy, which is the philosophical study of government.

The first and most important subject that this deals with is political order: whether we should choose, say, a republican government, or a constitutional monarchy, a gerontocracy, or an autocracy, and so on.

Next to this, perhaps the one major aspect of political philosophy is the issue of the powers of political agents and institutions: how these powers are granted, how they are circumscribed, what relationships exist between them, and so on. 

Today we have developed a distribution or balance of powers, which is crucial to the maintenance of the political order.  In some cases, this is overt--for instance, in the USA.  In other cases, it may be more subtle--as in the UK.  Whatever the case may be, there will be few countries where there is no balance at all.

Now in our common thinking, the balance of powers refers to the three great powers of state: the legislative, judicial, and executive branches, called the trias politica. Each has separate, independent powers, and each keeps the others in check.

Now when one asks what these powers really are, our thoughts often turn to stereotypes: the houses or parliament or halls of congress, stately courts of law and robed judges, rows of smartly dressed riot police, typically holding cudgels, and many other things which seem characteristic of these powers.

I propose, however, that in the tumult of our daily lives, and in the function of these powers from week to week, it comes down to something far simpler than this--namely, scraps of information which we deal with from day to day: receipts and signatures, sheets of paper, or words exchanged in telephone calls and side rooms.

Assume, by way of example, that a local regulator has refused to entertain a complaint against one of its members.  Say, a local Law Society has received a complaint against a solicitor--an esteemed solicitor--and suppressed it.  This is quite common in fact, throughout the world. We call it regulatory capture.

By way of analysis, an executive function (the regulator) has failed.  The matter is therefore handed to a judicial body (say, the Public Protector) to set the case to rights.  It is, in fact, just one of many ordinary instances of the separation of powers--and with that, of checks and balances.

In the process, the Public Protector produces certain rules--say, numbered from 1 to 10, and explains how these rules apply in this case. All things considered, the Protector then makes a judgement, and states how the situation should be remedied.

Power has checked power--and here we see the system of the separation of powers working at a more basic level.  In order to understand what is really happening here, we may say that it all works at the level of information.

Each step of our example rests on the disclosure of information. A citizen shares information about a problem. The Public Protector's rules represent information, too. The application of these rules demands information, and so, too, does remedial action.

In fact it goes further back than this, to the regulator itself. The Law Society, like the Public Protector, has certain rules, say again numbered from 1 to 10. But rule 11, they say (which does not exist) precludes the citizen's complaint. Or the complaint, they say, changed in an interview (which did not take place).

Again it comes down to information--often enough, simple information, too. And so the information which is required, in order to know that the crucial separation of the powers of state is working, may often be undermined or suppressed in quite ordinary ways.

The significance of this is that if citizens do not know the importance of each small item of information, and if this is multiplied hundreds, even thousands of times across the nation, the abuse of power creeps into the system while citizens mistakenly believe that the separation of powers is about the usual stereotypes.

In fact the separation of powers is about many things which may easily escape one’s attention: the denial of a receipt, the omission of a signature, a few lost pages, or the misrepresentation of a conversation. Such things may conceal a world of trouble, and are often critical to the system as a whole.

Wherever information is concealed or distorted, power may go unchecked—which is to say, people may be able to gain unfair personal and political advantage. Regulators are captured, crimes are swept under the carpet, the poor are exploited, foodstuffs are unsafe—and a thousand, ten thousand ills besides.

What Is Wisdom?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Wisdom is often offered as a person’s most-valuable quality, yet even ardent admirers might struggle to define or explain it. Some of philosophy’s giants, whether Confucius, Buddha, Plato, or Socrates, have concluded that wisdom is rooted not so much in what we do know, but in acknowledging what we don’t know — that is, in realising the extent of our own ignorance.

This humbleness about the limits of our knowledge and, further, ability to know — sometimes referred to by academics as ‘epistemic humility’ — seems a just metric as far as it goes. The term ‘epistemic’ referring to matters of knowledge: what we believe we know, and in the particular case of epistemic humility, the limitations of that knowledge. An important thread begins to appear here, which is the role of judgment in explaining the totality of wisdom.

To repudiate boundaries on our knowledge, or just as importantly on the ability to know, would amount to intellectual hubris. But, epistemic humility, while arguably one among other qualities of a person we might characterise as wise in some limited capacity, is not anywhere nearly enough to explain all that wisdom is.

Consider, for illustration, those people who might assume they know things they do not, despite the supposed knowledge existing outside their proficiency. What I’d call ‘epistemic conceit’ — and again, a key matter of judgment. A case in point might be a neuroscientist, with intimate knowledge of the human brain’s physiology and functions, and maybe of consciousness, concluding that his deep understanding of neuroscience endows him with the critical-thinking skills to invest his money wisely. Or to offer cogent solutions to the mathematical challenges of the physics of ‘string theory’.

Similarly, what about those things falling within the scope of a person’s expertise, theories claimed at the time to be known with a degree of confidence, until the knowledge suddenly proved false. Take the case of the geocentric (Earth-centered) model of the universe, and secondly of optical illusions leading to belief in the existence of so-called ‘Martian canals’. These are occasions of what we might call ‘epistemic unawareness’, to which we are humanly disposed no matter how wise.

Yet, while humbleness about the limits of our knowledge may provide a narrow window on wisdom, it is not definitive. Notably, there seems to be an inverse association between the number of factors claimed vital to fully explain wisdom, and how successfully the definition of wisdom may hold up as holes are poked into the many variables of the explanation under close scrutiny.

The breadth and depth of knowledge and experience are similarly insufficient to define wisdom in totality, despite people earnest chronicling such claims through the course of history. After all, we can have little knowledge and experience and still be decidedly wise; and we can have vast knowledge and experience and still be decidedly unwise. To understand the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and to make life’s decisions accordingly, calls on judgment.

Indeed, even exceptionally wise people — regardless of their field of expertise — can and do on occasion harbour false beliefs and knowledge, which one might call ‘epistemic inaccuracy’. History’s equivalents of such intellectual giants as Plato, Sun Tzu, Da Vinci, Beethoven, Goethe, Shakespeare, Fermat, and Einstein are no exception to this encompassing rule. Einstein, for example, proposed that the universe is static, of which he was later disabused by evidence that the universe is actually expanding and accelerating.

In the same vein, Plato was seemingly wrong about the imperative to define something as an ‘ideal’ before we attempt to achieve it, potentially hobbling efforts to reach practical, real-world goals like implementing remedies for inequitable systems of justice. Meanwhile, Shakespeare made both significant historical and geographical mistakes. And Goethe, wearing his polymath hat, erroneously refuted the Newtonian theory of the decomposition of white light, suggesting instead that colours appeared from mixing light and darkness.

More generally, how might we assess the wisdom of deep thinkers who lived centuries or even millennia ago, a large number of whose presumed knowledge had long been disproved and displaced by new paradigms? I doubt those thinkers’ cogency, insightfulness, prescience, and persuasiveness at the time they lived are any less impressive because of what turned out to be the demonstrated shelf half-life of their knowledge and insights.

Meanwhile, all this assumes we consider such exceptional intellects as not just exquisitely erudite, but also mindful of their own fallibility. As well as mindful of the uncertainty and contingency of what’s real and true in the world. Both assumptions about the conditions and requirement for critical mindfulness call for judgment, too.

Even a vast store of knowledge and experience, however, does not get us all the way to explaining the first principles of wisdom writ large as opposed to singular instances of acting wisely. A wise person’s knowledge and beliefs ought to match up with her behaviour and ways of living. Yet, that ingredient in what, say, minimally describes ‘a wise person’ likewise falls short of explaining full-on wisdom. Even highly knowledgeable people, if impulsive or incorrigibly immoral or amoral, may act unwisely; as in so many other ways, their putative lack of judgment here matters.

One fallback strategy that some philosophers, psychologists, and others resort to has been to lard explanation of wisdom with an exhausting catalog of qualities and descriptors in hope of deflecting criticism of their definition of wisdom. What I’d call the ‘potpourri theory of wisdom’. Somehow, as the thinking misguidedly goes, the more descriptors or factors they shoehorn into the definition, supposedly the more sound the argument.

Alternatively, wisdom might be captured in just one word: judgment. Judgment in what one thinks, decides, opines, says, and does. By which is meant that wisdom entails discerning the presence of patterns, including correspondences and dissimilarities, which may challenge customary canons of reality. Then turning those patterns into understanding, and in step turning understanding into execution (behaviours) — with each fork in this process warranting judgment.

Apart from judgment, notably all other elements that we might imagine to partially explain wisdom — amount and accuracy of knowledge, humility of what one knows and can know, amount and nature of experience — are firmly contingent on each other. Co-dependence is inescapable. Judgment, on the other hand, is the only element that is dependent on no others, in a category of one. I propose that judgment is both enough and necessary to define wisdom.

Picture Post #63: Paradise Lost

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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.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Italy 1960's .  Picture credit: Antonio Borrani

A nude man seems to sprout out of the earth, just like the vegetation. And in a way there is not much to say, except that most often people focus on people, and more so when these people are naked. 

The spectator’s interpretation depends on how they consider the naked body. Even when the nude figure has inspired general acceptance in the Western world, especially in forms of art, we might think it a bit strange if we would see an undressed person walking on the street. The quintessence of humankind certainly is undressed, although we are used to seeing the body covered up. 

Turning to the decade of the sixties when some of the younger generation longed for freedom from the conservatism at that time, the exaltation of the uncovered body symbolised that quest for freedom. No wonder the pureness of nudity is similar to taking off a mask. To live without pretence is nevertheless not an easy goal to set. 

Indeed, almost sixty years ahead, particularly at the beach and also on the streets, bodies are surely covered up less than they were. Although that progress of freedom seems to have translated itself rather into an imposed fashion these days, than the acquisition of a free spirit, as some were looking for when this picture was taken. 

In the West, nudity belongs to private atmospheres to this day, and the naked body, most often, is conflated with sexuality. To exploit nakedness is an optional which does not withstand the fact that we are all born naked. Yet somehow we seem to have trouble owning that nakedness, in which we become unspoiled by structures, and can accept ourselves not as objects or art-forms, but simply for what we are. To put it a bit crudely: for one of those standing upright animals.