Picture Post #68 The Sitting Room

by Martin Cohen

Photo credit: Micelo

There's something a little spooky about this picture, emphasised by the face in the mirror above the fireplace – but there too in the ‘empty chairs’. Where are their proud occupants? What did they talk about or do those long evenings in their high-ceilinged castle? For this is a room carefully restored (if not quite brought back to life) by some French enterprise or other.

Indeed the French – and English too – do seem to live in an imaginary past, of posh families in big chateaux / country houses with not much to do except count their silver cutlery. I think it's rather a sad way to live, and so perhaps it is appropriate that this picture seems to me to speak only of a rather forlorn and empty existence.

The Recounting of History: Getting From Then to Now

Double Herm of Thucydides and Herodotus

Thucydides was a historian of the wars between Athens and Sparta, in which he championed the Athenian general Perikles. Herodotus travelled and wrote widely and tried to be more impartial.

Posted by Keith Tidman

 

Are historians obliged to be unwaveringly objective in their telling of the past? After all, as Hegel asserted: ‘People and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it’.

 

History seems to be something more than just stirring fable, yet less than incontestable reality. Do historians’ accounts live up to the tall order of accurately informing and properly influencing the present and future? Certainly, history is not exempt from human frailty. And we do seem ‘condemned’ to repeat some version of even half-remembered history, such as stumbling repeatedly into unsustainable, unwinnable wars.

 

In broad terms, history has an ambitious task: to recount all of human activity — ideological, political, institutional, social, cultural, philosophical, judicial, intellectual, religious, economic, military, scientific, technological and familial. Cicero, who honoured Herodotus with the title ‘the father of history’, seems to have had such a lofty role in mind for the discipline when he pondered: ‘What is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’ The vast scope of that task implies both great challenges and vulnerabilities.

 

History provides the landscape of past events, situations, changes, people, decisions, and actions. Both the big picture and the subtler details of the historical record spur deliberation, and help render what we hope are wise choices about society’s current and future direction. How ‘wise’ such choices are — and the extent to which they are soundly based on, or at at least influenced by, how historians parse and interpret the past — reflects how ‘wise’ the historians are in fulfilment of the task. At its best, the recounting of history tracks the ebb and flow of changes in transparent ways, taking into account context for those moments in time. A pitfall to avoid, however, is tilting conclusions by superimposing on the past the knowledge and beliefs we hold today.

 

To these ends, historians and consumers of history strive to measure the evidence, complexities, inconsistencies, conflicts, and selective interpretations of past events. The challenge of chronicling and interpretation is made harder by the many alternative paths along which events might have unfolded, riven by changes in direction. There is no single linear progression or trajectory to history, extending expediently from the past to the present; twists and turn abound. The resulting tenuousness of causes and effects, and the fact that accounts of history and human affairs might not always align with one another, influence what we believe and how we behave generations later. 

 

The fact is, historical interpretations pile up, one upon another, as time passes. These coagulating layers can only make the picture of the past murkier. To recognise and skilfully scrape away the buildup of past interpretations, whether biased or context-bound or a result of history’s confounding ebb and flow, becomes a monumental undertaking. Indeed, it may never fully happen, as the task of cleaning up history is less alluring feature than capturing and recounting history.

Up to a point, it aids accuracy that historians may turn to primary, or original, sources of past happenings. These sources may be judged on their own merits: to assess evidence and widely differing interpretations, assess credibility and ferret out personal agendas, and assess the relative importance of observations to the true fabric of history. Artifacts, icons, and monuments tell a story, too, filling in the gaps of written and oral accounts. Such histories are intended to endure, leading us to insights into how the rhythms of social, reformist, and cultural forces brought society to where it is today.

And yet, contemporaneous chroniclers of events also fall victim to errors of commission and omission. It’s hard for history to be unimpeachably neutral in re-creating themes in human endeavour, like the victories and letdowns of ideological movements, leaders, governments, economic systems, religions, and cultures, as well as of course the imposing, disruptive succession of wars and revolutions. In the worst of instances, historians are the voice of powerful elites seeking to champion their own interests. 

 

When the past is presented to us, many questions remain. Whose voice is allowed to be loudest in the recounting and interpretation? Is it that of the conquerors, elites, powerful, holders of wealth, well-represented, wielders of authority, patrons? And is the softest or silenced voice only that of the conquered, weak, disregarded, disenfranchised, including marginalised groups based on race or gender? To get beyond fable, where is human agency truly allowed to flourish unfettered?

 

Therein lies the historian’s moral test. A history that is only partial and selective risks cementing in the privileges of the elite and the disadvantages of the silenced. ‘Revisionism’ in the best sense of the word is a noble task, aimed at putting flawed historical storytelling right, so that society can indeed then ‘act on the principles deduced from it’.

The Cow in the Field and the Riddle of What Do We REALLY Know?

Pi looks at a wide range of things that go well beyond the scope of academic philosophy, but that shouldn't mean that we can't occasionally return to the narrow path. Talking with existentialists at a new website (that I would recommend to everyone) called Moti-Tribe,  brought me back to thinking about one of my favorite philosophical problems,

This is the story of ‘The Cow in the Field’ that I came up with many years ago at a time when the academic (boring) philosophers were obsessed with someone who had some coins in his pocket but weren’t sure exactly what they were, and calling it grandly, the ‘Gettier Problem’.

You’d have been forgiven for being put right off the issue by how the academics approached it, but indeed, the riddle is very old, can be tracked back certainly to Plato and is indeed rooted even further back in Eastern philosophy where the assumption that we don’t know things is a part of mysticism and monkishness that we don't really understand anything about.

It’s a kind of koan, which as I understand them, the point of which is to startle you out of your everyday assumptions and oblige you to think more intuitively. The conventional account is that they are a tool of Zen Buddhism used to demonstrate *the inadequacy of logical reasoning* - and open the way to enlightenment.

Well, once you explore the origins of Western philosophy, and the ideas of people like Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato, you soon find out that there is a lot of riddling actually going on. And the reason why is exactly the same: in order to demonstrate this inadequacy of logical reasoning and provoke enlightenment.

Slightly bizarrely, conventional books and courses on philosophy seek to reinvent ancient philosophy to make it all about ‘the discovery’ of logic! But Western philosophy and Eastern mysticism are two sides of the same coin, we can learn from both.

So on to the puzzle!

THE COW IN THE FIELD

Imagine a farmer who has rather fine cow called Daisy. He is so proud of his cow that he often checks up on her. In fact, he is so concerned that one day, when he asks his dairyman how Daisy is doing, and the Dairyman tells him that Daisy is in the field happily grazing, the farmer decides that he needs to know for certain.

He doesn’t want to just have a 99% idea that Daisy is safe, he wants to be able to say 100% that he knows Daisy is okay.

The farmer goes out to the field and, standing by the gate, sees in the distance, behind some trees, a white-and-black shape that he recognises as his favourite cow. He goes back to the dairy and tells his friend the dairyman that he knows Daisy is in the field. 

…

Okay, so what’s the ‘problem’? Simply whether, at this point, does our farmer really ‘know’ it - or does he merely think that he knows?

Pause for a moment and ask yourself what your intuition is. Because we have to allow that the farmer not only thinks that he knows, he has evidence - the evidence of his eyes we might say - for his belief too.

Anyway, you maybe still think that there’s some doubt about him really knowing, but then we add a new twist. Responding to  the farmer’s worries, the dairyman decides that he will go and check on Daisy, and goes out to the field. And there he does indeed find Daisy, having a nap in a hollow, behind a bush, well out of sight of the gate. He also spots a large piece of black-and-white paper that has got caught in a tree. Point is, yes, Daisy WAS in the field, but the farmer could not have seen her, only the piece of paper.

So the philosophical debate is, when the farmer returned from the field after (as he thought) checking up on his cow, did he really KNOW she was in it?

Because now you see, it seems that Farmer Field has satisfied the three conventional requirements for ‘knowledge’.

• He believes something,

• he has a relevant reason for his belief,

• and in fact his belief is correct...

Philosophers say that he had a ‘justified true belief’. And yet we would not want to say that he really did know what he thought he knew. In this case, that his cow was in the field...

It's a simple story, okay, silly if you like, but entirely possible. And what the possibility shows is that the three conventional requirements for knowledge are simply not enough to give certainty. What THAT implies, is that we know nothing!

Which is back to the Eastern philosophies, which put so much more emphasis on what we don't know - and seek exotic ways to compensate.

The Play of Old and New

by Andrew Porter

In trying to figure out what's valuable in the old and the new, what should we keep or discard? Should change be invited or checked?

We know there is a relationship between the old and the new. It's both complex and fascinating. What is established may stay in place, or it may be replaced and perish.

If we want to help change society, or government, or ourselves for the better, how much of the old should we keep, and how much discard? Is modest reform in order, or a revolution? Should the depletion of, say, rain forests be allowed or prevented?

Aristotle delineated 'potential' as material, and 'actual' as form. We gather, therefore, that what exists is often on its way to completion, whereas the goal is the actual. This contrasts with the view that what exists is the 'actual', while future possibilities are 'potential'. Added to this is the fact that the old was once new, and the new will become old.

It might help us clarify the relationship if we can articulate the flow of old to new in real time.

Should we see it as a flow, or as a fixed contrast? What does a dynamic tension mean in this case? Is the new a rejection of the ossification of the old, or is it in harmony with it? How do old and new relate to the metaphysical principles of Order and Freedom? Are the old and the new in a dance with each other, the new emerging from the potentiality which already exists? Does novelty merely help advance and develop what has been?

Something that goes on throughout nature may sort much of this out. We regenerate skin and bone and muscle tissue, while certain sets of brain cells endure past these changes. It is all us. We are old and new.

Take a reformer, in politics or elsewhere, who wants to enact significant change. They have to deal both with the old and with the new. Existing patterns to overcome, new ideas to consider and implement. How will society change? How much hold ought it to have? The old is a mixed bag. How justified is the new? Potential beckons, but is it in that which exists, or in the ends at which a process aims?

Old and new act as permeable membranes to each other, each in flux in relation to the other. Novelty is in the potential of current things. A reformer usually tries to jettison a large chunk of the old, but, like their own body, must keep a substantial part of it. Imagine if both current existents and new emergences followed a reason. Would it be different in nature than in human life?

I'll skip away now with the questions. I blithely leave the answers to you.

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Photo credit GharPedia

Picture Post #67 Unperturbed

by Nada Spencer *

Sculpture by Nada Spencer, 2020.

It was the first of three COVID-19 lockdowns which moved me to create this sculptural piece. 

The ropes bind tightly around the figure, thereby symbolising the anxiety we feel while facing a worldwide pandemic. Not only do the ropes wrap tightly around the torso, but they have become part of the figure, punching deeply through the skin. These ropes are the same colour as the skin, which further blurs the lines of external struggles and internal personal identity. 

The face, however, is thoughtful and calm, and not in anguish, as we might expect. This signals that, despite the pressures and struggles of life, we can retain hope and persevere. ‘Sometimes even to live is an act of courage,’ wrote Seneca, but ‘he who is brave is free.’

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* Nada Spencer is a ceramicist in Cape Town.

On the Terrorism of Suicide

by Chengde Chen *

Approaching the 20th Anniversary Commemoration of 9/11, Pi is pleased to bring you a poem which originally appeared in The Guardian, in 2001. It is as relevant now as it was then—a poem, wrote Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, ‘to help us commemorate and try to understand’.

When released from the fear of death

men can be MC² times more powerful

Once they turn their mass into energy

the power is as great as our fear

The terrorism of killing with suicide

is different from that of only killing

Killing is terror

while suicide is a philosophy

 

Men who don't fear death are dead men

because fearing death is part of life

But by cancelling this premise of psychology

they have invalidated all we can do

 

We may talk to ordinary terrorism with war

but it makes the suicidal one more suicidal

If a death sentence is a home-delivery gift for them

cruise missiles would answer the wrong question

 

The way to conquer the suicidal

is to make them fear death again

That is to find the reason why they don't

and to eliminate it as a psychiatrist would

 

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* Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems, and of the novel: The Thought-read Revolution. chengde.chen@hotmail.com

The Case of Hilbert’s Hotel and Infinity

In Hilbert’s infinite hotel, a room can always be found for newly arriving guests.

Posted by Keith Tidman

 

‘No vacancies. Rooms available’. That might as well be the contradictory sign outside the Hilbert Hotel of legend. Yet, is the sign really as nonsensical as it first seems?

 

The Hilbert Hotel paradox was made famous by the German mathematician David Hilbert in the 1920s. The paradox tells of an imaginary hotel with infinite rooms. All the rooms were occupied by an infinite number of guests.

 

However, a traveller wondered if a room might still be available, and approached the receptionist. The receptionist answered that the hotel could indeed accommodate him. To make the solution work, the receptionist asked all the current guests simply to move to the next room, making it possible to assign the new guest to Room 1.

 

This was a scalable maneuver, accommodating any number of new lodgers, whether a hundred, a hundred million, or far more. Because of the infinite rooms, importantly there was no last room; the receptionist could therefore keep moving the current guests to higher room numbers.

 

But the challenge was to get a bit harder. What showed up next was an infinitely large coach occupied by an infinite number of vacationers. To accommodate these guests, the receptionist shifted people so that only the infinite even-numbered rooms were occupied. 

 

Increasingly complex scenarios arose. Such as when an infinite number of coaches, each carrying infinite travellers, pulled into the hotel’s infinite parking lot. But we don’t need, for our purposes here, to delve into all the mathematical solutions. Suffice it to say that any number of new travellers could be lodged.

 

The larger significance of Hilbert’s thought experiment was that an ‘actual infinite’ is indeed logically consistent, even if on the surface it’s counterintuitive. As with Hilbert’s hotel, the infinite exists. Infinity’s logical consistency has further consequence, tying the thought experiment to the cosmological notion of an infinite past. 

 

That is, a beginningless reality. A reality in which our own universe, like infinite other universes, is one bounded part. An unlimited reality that extends even to the ‘far side’ of the Big Bang that gave rise to our universe almost fourteen billion years ago. A universe located within the continuum of the infinite. And a universe in which change gives us the illusion of time’s passage.

 

A common argument in cosmology (origins) is that the string of causes must start with the Big Bang. Or, rooted in a theological origin story, that it must start with a noncontingent divine creator, or so-called ‘first cause’. The claim of such arguments is that reality doesn’t reach back indefinitely into the past, but has a starting point.

 

‘Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude,

we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite’.

Alfred North Whitehead, philosopher and mathematician

 There are no grounds, however, to believe that our universe, with its time-stamped beginning (the Big Bang) and its one-way life-cycle toward net disorder, is the entirety of existence. Rather, an infinite history before the Big Bang, or beginningless reality, does make sense. As does the other bookend to that reality, an endless future, where infinity describes both before and after the fleetingly present moment, or what we might think of as the ‘now’. Nothing rules out or contradicts that unlimited scope of reality.

 

With an unchangeable beginningless reality, there is no need to evoke the concept of ‘something coming into being from nothing’; there is no need to interrupt the different laws of physics, or of time, governing each universe’s own separate reality; there is no time zero or insupportable moment of all creation. It’s infinity ‘all the way down’, to paraphrase British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s whimsical reference to infinite regress.  

 

We ought to avoid conflating the emergence of things within our bounded universe (like the making of new galaxies, of which there is a finite number) with the emergence of things within the infinite (like the formation of new universes, of which there is an infinite variety, each with its unique properties, life cycle, and natural laws).

 

‘No other question [than the infinite] has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect’, declared David Hilbert. Our bounded universe is simply one part of that infinite, that is, part of beginningless reality. Our universe existing among infinite others, like the infinite rooms in Hilbert’s hotel.

New Critical Theory

by Thomas Scarborough

Critical theory has been all in the news of late. In fact it goes back a long way. First developed in the 1930s, I myself studied critical theory in the 1970s. I may own the first paperback edition, too, of a dictionary of critical theory, published in 2001.

Critical Theory has become increasingly important. This is theory which ‘reveals and challenges power structures’, which is oppression. It is ‘critical’ because it is not neutral. It is normative. Professor Robert M. Seiler of the University of Calgary writes that ‘criticism involves ... judgments for the purpose of bringing about positive change’.

I here propose that critical theory, in fact, goes back to the ancients, in its core characteristics—and to something both deeper and broader than we have supposed.

Socrates, in defining the virtuous life, said, ‘Choose the mean, and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible,’ while Aristotle thought of ethics as ‘the golden mean’—the balanced life. Thus ethics represents the achievement of balance in the human person—and, of course, in society. Balance between unity and diversity, novelty and tradition, thought and feeling, economy and community, and so much more. It is not hard to see how this coincides with critical theory—which seeks to bring balance to social inequalities of various kinds.

What is this balance, so beloved of the ancients? It stands to reason that, as we seek to balance all things, we have knowledge of those things. We are informed of them before we begin. In fact, if information is lacking, as we make judgements about our society, our resulting balance must be askew. While imbalances may come about simply through apathy, they may come about deliberately, too. In the case of lies, deceit, and propaganda, one simply removes information from the balance—or adds it. Or, worse, if one cannot get one’s way, one turns to violence and oppression, eliminating unwanted individuals, or seizing control of systems, to neutralise the information which is not wanted.

Oppression therefore rests on the suppression of information. Alternatively, it rests on the failure of an uptake of information. One may have systems which seem perfectly friendly towards all information, yet in practice fail to take it up. Information itself goes hand in hand with its reception, incorporation, and, of course, pursuant action.

This has three implications for critical theory.

• Firstly, where information is suppressed, this may not in every case happen along recognised class lines—or lines of race, gender, privilege, and so on. This is my first reservation concerning critical theory today. In reality, information is suppressed along all kinds of lines, which critical theory may fail to identify—because it fails to identify and analyse the suppression of information. It may miss oppression which we had not imagined, or which lies beyond familiar categories. This should not be understood as a rejection of critical theory. Rather, critical theory as we know it does not drive deep enough.

• Secondly, when one speaks in terms of the suppression of information, one broadens the scope of critical theory. One may also speak of such suppression—therefore oppression—in connection with the environment. Where we fail to include the environment in our thinking, we oppress wetlands, insects, elephants, forests, fish, and so much more. Critical theory today is not equal to such forms of oppression, precisely at a time where they threaten the ruination of our world. Again, this should not be understood as a rejection of critical theory. Far from it. Current critical theory, I maintain, does not go broad enough.

• Thirdly, critical theory has often been associated with ‘cancel culture’. The purpose here is not to discuss the merits or demerits of cancel culture, but to note that one should be careful that cancel culture does not limit the freedom of information. The loss of such information to the system could signal oppression.

Let us now notice: in terms of philosophical categories, my view goes down to bedrock. It goes down to the things-relations distinction, which originated with the ancient Greeks. This is a distinction which philosophers have accepted almost universally, among them Aristotle, Hume, and Wittgenstein—with some exceptions.* According to such philosophers, philosophy deals with things and the relations between them—at best, expansively and holistically. Therefore we oppose the suppression of information.

Oppression may now be defined as a loss of information to the system, through various kinds of pressure, including physical coercion. In short, this describes critical theory, which exposes oppression—yet more than critical theory, it goes to the very heart of reality, which is the relatedness of all things. It goes beyond human oppression, too, and includes our long and sorry oppression of the environment, where we failed to take into account all the information we should have done. I shall call this New Critical Theory. 

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An important exception is F.H. Bradley, perhaps the foremost philosopher of the 19th Century. 

Poem: Speculating on Providence

Posted by Chengde Chen

Woodcut by Hans Schäufelein, Augsburg 1513.
Christ and Mary as intercessors /
God the Father shooting plague arrows.

 

Besides the known causes of the Covid pandemic

I suspect that God had a few more intentions

A coincidence cannot be counted as providence

But causality deserves logical proof nevertheless

 

He must have wanted to help us fight climate change

Otherwise why did Covid bring a hidden green hope?

We had almost lost our confidence in reducing CO2

The pandemic dropped it decisively to an ideal level

 

Galileo’s telescope showed Jupiter’s satellite system

Letting people 'see' how the solar system works

Isn’t Covid like a low-carbon possibility experiment

Demonstrating the non-inevitability of global warming?

 

He must have wanted us to cope with the lockdown

Otherwise why did Covid arrive behind the Internet?

People of the Net can be isolated without isolation

Meeting across the Earth redefines time and space

 

The lights of myriad families light up screens wherever

The digitalised joys or sorrows are shared whenever

Without the personal contacts in this semi-real space

The half-dead world may have been dead completely!

 

He must have also wanted Covid to warn science

Otherwise why was it as massacring as bio-weapons?

If a virus can turn the world upside down like this

Won’t genetic engineering threaten our existence?

 

Inside those labs capable of manipulating molecules

They are full of the scientific urge to take such risks

Human self-destruction has been a matter of time

Can the Creator not worry if His work is to be wasted?

 

It's hard to say if these were really His thinking

But, believing or not, you'd better so assume

So as to understand the philosophy of providence –

Turning empirical logic into the rationality of faith!

 

(Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems, and of the novel: The Thought-read Revolution. chengde.chen@hotmail.com )

Picture Post #66 What a Can Can Do

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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

Malaga, Spain  2021

Unlike randomly dropped trash, this Coca Cola can seems to have been placed in cardinal Ángel Herrera Oria's hand very carefully. Tiny gestures, what thoughts do they provoke? The photo seems to conjure up three phases in time:

• Materially, the alloy metal of the bronze statue and the aluminium can link together. The originally clay molded figure reveals striped structures on the cloak of the statue—and somehow striped movements are very human gestures indeed. These connect to the stripes of the bar code on the industrial can.  

• The deformed horizontally placed can offers more dynamism to the inclined direction of the Cardinal’s hand. The sky, a stone church in the background, the bronze statue, the can and the bar code together offer a kind of idea about a tangible timeline. So far, we can follow it.

• But lately, when thinking of algorithms, or something like crypto currencies, digital data creates ‘new images’ which are mostly only comprehensible to programmers, and for a vast majority of people remain invisible. No tiny tangible innocent gestures can interfere there, and perhaps we’ve come to the time in which: what a can, cannot do…