Random quote
Economic values are the product of opinions

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Chance

Fortune has many sides and can fall in many ways

The subject I am going to discuss in this blog is a bit tricky. It is not so that as such it is difficult (it is, but that’s not the problem), but the concept I want to treat is a bit difficult to translate into English. In Dutch we call it “toeval” and for this blog I have translated it as “chance”, which, to my mind, is the word that best covers the Dutch concept. However, actually both words do not cover exactly the same ideas. The internet translator reverso.net translates “toeval” also as coincidence and accident. So, if this blog is a bit confusing to you, it may have a linguistic background. Doesn’t the Sapir-Whorf thesis say that our language determines how we think? Although the strict interpretation of this thesis is not right, there is a kernel of truth in it.
Anyway, I want to try to understand what it means that things happen unexpectedly to us; that we did not foresee them; and that we couldn’t foresee them in our present situation. They are not predicted and not predictable, at least not at the moment they happen to us. They just happen and we don’t know why. If they are not random, they have at least an air of randomness. Therefore, we have to live with such ev
ents as they happen. They happen by chance or by accident.
Now you may think: “What happens happens and I can only adapt myself to what happens to me unexpectedly. If it is positive for me I have luck and if it is negative I have bad luck.” However, it is not as simple as that. For such an attitude supposes a unitary idea of chance (“toeval”), while in fact there is not one type of chance that happens and that’s it. Chance has many faces, or rather, there are several types of chance. Each type requires other reactions or makes other reactions possible. Following Jeroen Hopster in his recent book about chance (especially chapter1), I want to distinguish six types (and without a doubt you can find a few more).

1) Things happen as they happen because the world is shaped that way. Is your child a boy or a girl? You had no influence on it. It just happened. At least that is the present situation for most of us. Or take the colour of your eyes: Nobody had an influence on it. It was decided “by nature”. That such things happen is a matter of existential chance.
2) Chance as contingency. Things happen as they happen but could easily have gone in a different way. A footballer wants to score a goal, but just then a gull flies by and the ball hits the gull, so that the keeper can catch the ball. If the gull hadn’t been at the same place, because the wind was blowing a little bit harder, the match would have gone differently.
3) In a general way, I spoke already of “by accident”. However, chance as such can be accidental. In a narrow way we can say that something happens by accident or that what happens is incidental and doesn’t belong to the essence of what is happening. The steeplechase runner falls, not because he has touched one of the obstacles, but because there happened to be a stone on the track that he hadn’t seen. That he should jump over the obstacles belongs to the essence of the race, but the stone should not have been there and should have been removed by one of the officials.
4) Things can also happen by coincidence: Coincidental chance. Things happen to go together and are seen as meaningful for that reason, but they were not planned to go together. I take the train to Utrecht and meet by chance a friend in the hall of the Central Railway Station. However, my train was late and had it been in time, we hadn’t met, because we hadn’t appointed to meet.
5) Chance as a matter of statistics, so statistical chance (not to be confused with the next point). Population distributions often have a certain pattern. Statistically, pop concerts are more visited by younger people and concerts of early music more by older people. If you like both kinds of music and you want to meet young people, when you go to a concert this evening, go then to a pop concert. If you want to meet old people, go then to a concert of early music (but avoid there the musicians, since they are often young!),
6) Often we don’t know the determining factors of what happens, but we know that there are regularities in what happens. Then we can only resort to probability theory in order to explain what is happening, if we can. But I think that in the human sciences we can ignore this type of chance, since it is probably only a useful concept in physics and biology.

Chance has many faces. It is covered by many concepts: existence, contingency, accident (in a neutral meaning), coincidence, statistics and probability. In Dutch these faces are summarized by the word toeval. In English, we can call it “chance”, although this is maybe a little artificial. However, the idea is the same: What happens to us in an unforeseen way, unpredicted and unpredictably, without a known reason, or accidentally cannot be seen as the consequence of a general abstract phenomenon. For practical reasons we can say “it just happened” and we go on with what we are doing, but if we want to understand what happened, we must explain what we mean with this “it just happened”. There is no chance as such but there are only chances. But there are also chances in a different way, and not only in the way described above. For each chance is not only an event that just happens but also an opportunity and possibly a lucky coincidence you can profit by. What actually was a contingent coincidence that happened by accident and may have not been statistically very likely may turn out well for your existence, if you seize the chance.

Random quote
The learning of many things does not teach understanding

Heraclitus (about 540-480 BC)

Montaigne in Innsbruck

“a very beautiful little town and well built, standing in the bottom of the valley..."

When the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was 47 years old, he decided to make a long journey through Europe. Why exactly he made this journey is not known. Was it only for pleasure? A kind of “Grand Tour”? Did he have a secret mission? We don’t know. What we do know is when he made the trip and which places he visited, for Montaigne kept a diary of his journey. It has apparently been written for private purposes only. He didn’t mention it in his Essays and it was found 180 only years after his death.
Montaigne didn’t travel alone. He was accompanied by four other gentlemen, including his youngest brother, plus a number of servants. After having arrived in Rome, Montaigne travelled without the company of the other gentlemen. They left Paris in September 1580, and went via Augsburg and Munich in Germany through Austria to Venice, Florence and Rome in Italy. From Rome Montaigne made also a round trip through central Italy. He returned to France in 1581, when the king had ordered him to do so, because he had appointed him mayor of Bordeaux. Montaigne did so reluctantly and he didn’t hurry to reach Bordeaux. 

Fernand II

One of the places where Montaigne stayed during his travel was Innsbruck, in Tirol in Austria. This summer I spent a holiday near this town, and I decided to take photos of places visited there by Montaigne. After his stay in Seefeld in Austria, which I have described in another blog (see here), Montaigne’s next stop was Innsbruck, where he (and his company; but I’ll leave this mostly implicit) arrived in the evening. Innsbruck was (and still is) the capital of Tirol, and it was also the residence of Fernand II, Archduke of Austria. Montaigne describes Innsbruck as “a very beautiful little town and well built, standing in the bottom of the valley and full of fountains and running water… The houses are almost all built terraced, and we found lodgment at the ‘Rose’.”

The Golden Rose today

There are still many fountains in Innsbruck, and also “the Rose”, usually called “the Golden Rose”, is still there, although it is no longer an inn. Since about 40 years this old inn from the 14th century houses a shop of a well-known glass crystal company. The day after his arrival, Montaigne makes a trip to Hall, a town situated two miles east of Innsbruck and known by its salt industry. Hall has several beautiful churches, so Montaigne, and he tells us that he visited the church of the Jesuits there (just as he had visited the church of the Jesuits in Innsbruck).

Hall, Church of the Jesuites

When I was in Hall, I found the church closed, but an information board on the front wall told me that the present church dates from 1608, so it must have been the chapel of the Jesuits, built in 1573, that Montaigne visited. Also the church of the Jesuits in Innsbruck visited by Montaigne was another one than the present baroque church from the 17th century.
On their way back from Hall to Innsbruck Montaigne and his company decides to pay a visit to Archduke Fernand, who stayed at that moment in his castle in Amras, halfway Hall and Innsbruck. Also in the morning, on their way to Hall, Montaigne c.s. had tried to see the archduke, but the archduke had given the message that he was too busy to receive them. Actually, it was, as a court official told them, because the archduke didn’t like the French. They even didn’t get permission to visit the castle, built in 1563 and

The Ambras Castle

housing a large art collection. So, Montaigne returned a bit irritated to Innsbruck, where he turned his steps to the Hofkirche (Court Church): “We next saw in a church eighteen magnificent bronze statues of the princes and princesses of the house of Austria.” What Montaigne doesn’t tell us is that this church houses the tomb of the Austrian Emperor Maximillian I (1459-1519) (The tomb is a cenotaph and the body of the Emperor has been

Innsbruck, Hofkirche

buried in Vienna). It’s true that the tomb was then still under construction, so Montaigne will not have seen it in all its glory. The bronze statues, which Montaigne does mention, surround the tomb as a guard of honour. Maximilian’s idea was that he wanted to be surrounded by his ancestors and role models. Montaigne writes that he saw eighteen statues there, though in fact there are 28, the last one being cast already in 1550. A mistake?

Cenotaphe of Maximilian I surrounded 
by bronze statues

After having left the church, Montaigne “went to sup with the Cardinal of Austria and the Marquis of Burgant, sons of the archduke”. No, not as a guest but as a spectator, for in those days it was customary to watch the meals of princes, as if it were a spectacle, as my Dutch edition of Montaigne’s travel diary explains.
The next day Montaigne left Innsbruck and travelled via the Brenner pass to Sterzing (Vipiteno) (see here).

Random quote
The fool is fluttered at every word

Heraclitus (about 540-480 BC)

Passing and waiting

More and more I am intrigued by the simple things of everyday life, for often they appear to be not so simple as they seem on the face of it. Many simply daily activities appear to be basic. Look, for example, at the photo at the top of this blog. It is a picture of the hall of the most important railway station in the Netherlands: Utrecht Central Railway Station. I have used this photo before in another blog, but then in another context. Actually, I should have put here a photo of the Central Railway Station of Amsterdam or the one in Rotterdam, as will become clear in a few moments, but I haven’t such a picture, and this photo will do as well. The hall of the Utrecht Central Railway Station is not just an ordinary station hall of an average railway station. So it’s not just a space where you enter a railway station, where you can buy tickets, where you find a shop where you can buy magazines and books and maybe flowers as well and which maybe has also a small supermarket, and that’s it. Actually, such station halls have become somewhat old-fashioned – at least in the Netherlands – but that’s not important here. I’ll concentrate on two characteristics of this modern station hall. You must pass it when you want to go to the platform for your train. You can buy there train tickets. You find there shops. All this is like in an old-fashioned station hall. New is that you must pass through this hall from one side of the town to the other side, also if you are not a traveller (if you don’t want to take a long detour). Or rather this was so, when I took the photo, but now there is an alternative route that avoids the station hall, when you want to go to the other side of the town. But in Amsterdam you still must walk through the station hall for doing so in order to avoid a long detour, and in Rotterdam it is the same. This makes that in the photo above you see many people moving there, travellers and people who want to go to the other side of the town. The travellers are passing the hall when they go to or come from the platforms. Some are standing still for a moment for looking at the information panels: They want to know at which platforms their trains will stop. Those who don’t go to or come from the trains are just crossing the hall. Both the travellers and those who only cross the hall use it for passing.
Not all people are walking through the hall or watching the information panels. Some are sitting on the benches. Why? There can be many reasons why people are sitting there in this public space. Since the space is the hall of a railway station, at least some of them, if not most, are waiting: Waiting until they must go to the platforms for catching their trains; or waiting for people who will arrive by train; or waiting for another reason. Since Utrecht Central Railway Station and other railway stations have no separate traditional waiting rooms any longer, as old-fashioned railway stations had, the benches in the hall replace the waiting rooms that are not there. It’s true that also the platforms have benches and simple spaces for waiting for your train or for passengers that will arrive soon, but many people prefer to wait on the benches of the station hall instead of on the platforms.
So, two important characteristics of the station hall in the picture are that the hall is a space where people pass, not only for going to the platforms but also for going from one side of the town to the other side, and that it is a place where they wait. As for this, the Utrecht Central Railway Station is not unique. There are more railway stations like that, for example the Central Railway Stations of Amsterdam and Rotterdam (but, for instance, not the one in Antwerp, Belgium, or Gard du Nord in Paris). A station hall like the one in Utrecht is, what I want to call, a passage and it is also a waiting room or waiting space. Most of its other characteristics are dependent on these two main characteristics. For instance, the small supermarket there doesn’t sell what you find in the average supermarket in your town, namely your daily shopping, but it sells what you need as a passenger or a passer-by: fast food, sandwiches, drinks in bottles, coffee, sweets and such things. It’s the same for the other shops there and for the restaurants: they focus on passers-by and on travellers who are in a hurry.
Passing and waiting belong to the life of a traveller and generally to the life of people on the move. It is no coincidence that the station hall is both a space for passing and a space for waiting. Passing and waiting are two sides of the same coin. Passing is about space and waiting is about time, and that makes them different. However, passing can also be seen as waiting in space or waiting on the move. On the other hand, waiting can be seen as passing at the same placing so while standing still. Both connect past events to future events in their own ways. And just this makes them basic in life. They are the infrastructure of life in the abstract.

 Random quote
Thought is common to all.
                                                                     Heraclitus (about 540-480 BC)

Waste

Actually, it is possible to philosophise about everything; about what is lofty till about what is banal. Take Montaigne. He wrote about the education of children and about friendship but also about thumbs. Here I have written about Montaigne (of course), about the philosophy of Descartes (and criticized him) and about such an everyday event like passing a square (is it really a banal action?) or even about banality. Often, things appear to be not so banal and unimportant as they are at first sight. Take waste, trash, or garbage, or how you would like to call it. What could be more banal? For ultimately, we throw it away. But also in this case, the banality of waste (to use this word in this blog) is only superficial. Isn’t there a saying that “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”? As for this, Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher, who founded the philosophy of everyday life in the francophone world, wrote: “A social group is characterized as much by what it rejects as by what it consumes and assimilates. The more economically developed a country is, the more it throws away and the faster it throws things away. We waste. In New York, the garbage cans are huge and all the more visible since public services, in the homeland of election and free enterprise, function poorly. In the underdeveloped countries, nothing is thrown away. Every scrap of paper or string, every box is used, and even the excrements are collected.” (p. 338) Lefebvre wrote this in 1961, and although since then the world has changed a lot, and although it has been recognized that we waste too much and that waste is a problem and a threat to the world, in essence the tenor is true: What you throw away says who you are. The difference with 1961 is that in New York and everywhere else we still waste a lot but we throw things away in a different way: We recycle. Or at least, we pay lip service to recycling, for here in the Netherlands, for instance, plastic refuse is collected for recycling, but in fact it is only about a third of the collected plastic refuse that is really re-used; the rest is allegedly impossible to recycle for several reasons, and as yet it is burnt in the incinerators (as if a need for recycling doesn’t exist). This use of plastic waste says something about the Dutch, though I wonder whether it is different in the countries around the Netherlands. Anyway, really recycling plastic waste is apparently not important for the Dutch, for otherwise a solution would have been found.
Waste is the mirror of the soul, in the way we as a society deal with waste, but also what we see as waste. If you don’t live in a big town, at least you have been there, I assume, and probably you’ll have seen there people, usually drifters, hunting around for something in the litter bins along the streets. A good chance that they’ll find something useful, for people throw away a lot that is still useful for others, and maybe for themselves, too. They don’t take the effort to have it repaired, or they don’t like it any longer, because it has become old-fashioned, even if the object thrown away is still almost new. This says something about society (“we are that kind of people: consumerists”) and even more about the individual, both the one who throws away and the one who collects what is thrown away (“that person is like that”). Waste as the mirror of the soul.
These two examples show both sides of the waste problem: The social side – society doesn’t handle its waste well; it still throws away what could be recycled – and the individual side – individuals who throw away things that are still usable (and others sometimes collect this “waste”). A problem it is, for waste contributes to the global warming. In order to solve the waste problem, recycling is seen as a kind of solution, and in a sense it is: It makes that waste products are used anew, with the consequence that less waste is produced. However, for a part recycling is also a kind of waste; at least it is waste supporting, for so long as we recycle what actually was already waste (i.e. a not useful product) when it was produced, it helps to continue our waste economy. It functions as a fig leap for the bad conscience. The only solution is to stop producing what is not necessary (I know, the word “necessary” raises many questions, but we have made already a step forward when we start to raise these questions). And we must simply stop throwing away, what is still useful. Only after this step has been made, recycling will be a partial solution and no longer contribute to the problem. Should we ever come that far? In older blogs, my answer was “no”. I am pessimistic about stopping the global warming, let alone about undoing the global warming. But that’s another problem. If we would stop wasting what must not be wasted, we would have taken a leap forward. Can we? The quantity of waste we’ll continue producing will tell us.

Source
Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne. Édition intégrale. Montreuil: L’Arche, 2024.

Random quote
An image is more expressive than words and more often penetrates deeper into the heart.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)

Changing the world

If you want to change the world, you must first interpret the world, for if you don’t know what you want to change and why, in what way then would you change it? But once you have found a good reason to change the world and once you have a good theory that describes what is wrong in the world the next step consists of the practical measures to implement the changes considered necessary. In short this is the problem we face in this world that is threatened by a serious climate crisis, a crisis that is so serious that it could mean the end of the human civilization as it is. This is why these days world climate conferences are organised and why national governments and international agencies are developing plans of measures to fight against the global warming and have started to execute these plans. However, as Henri Lefebvre has made clear, changes cannot be brought about without penetrating into everybody’s everyday life. For if everyday life doesn’t change and if not everybody – or at least most of us– cooperates with the measures proposed from above and acts in accordance with them, so if the measures that attack the threat of the climate change do not penetrate into what everybody every day does, in the end climate plans will be frustrated and thus fail.
In the past, the churches have understood the importance of everyday life and their power was based on this understanding. They “created both a ceremonial external to the human, an official sumptuousness, an extra-national state, an abstract theory; and on the other hand, a psychological and moral technique of extreme finesse and precision. In every act, however small, of immediate life, religion may be present; in the ‘interiorised’ form of a rite or in the external form of a priest who listens, understands, counsels, is moribund, or ‘forgives’ ”. (Lefebvre 2024, p. 262) Communist states tried the same and made a quasi-religious and political structure in order to penetrate the thoughts and actions of the people. Although they were more or less successful in building the required communist institutions, they didn’t succeed to penetrate everybody’s everyday life. Superficially they did, but in depth they failed and people secretly and sometimes openly found ways to circumvent an ideology that wasn’t theirs. In the end, this undermined the communist ideology and the communist practice and so toppled the communist states.
Today, climate activists and institutes and organisations that see the need and are actively trying to implement measures to stop and if possible to reduce the global warming that is clearly taking place face the same problem as once the churches and political ideologists and theoreticians faced: On the one hand they must present a science-based and credible theory of the need to fight global warming and on the other hand they must come with a good strategy to penetrate daily life. Although on a theoretical and scientific level the danger of global warming is well substantiated, as is the need to act as quickly and effectively as possible, still too many people don’t see the urgency to implement right now the measures needed. Moreover, too many politicians and others who are or should be involved in fighting global warming have hidden agendas behind their plans and measures; agendas that centre on power maintenance by paying lip service to the need to take measures, while in fact for these politicians these measures are only ways of maintaining their power instead of solving an urgent problem (while delaying or postponing measures that do the latter but not the former). Some politicians even deny the problem despite all evidence. But once enough people, especially people in strategic positions like politicians, have been convinced to act now, then the next question is how to take measures (and which measures) that penetrate daily life. One problem is mistrust of the government and other authorities (especially in authoritarian states but certainly not only there). Another problem is that even the right measures always will harm certain groups. Such measures can make that some groups feel themselves unjustly made responsible for what in fact is not their problem but the problem of society as a whole and of those who lived before them (and often they feel so with right); they may feel themselves even scapegoated. Even if they are compensated financially, this will not yet mean that they are also compensated psychologically, and just the latter is important for getting their support. Farmers are a case in point. Moreover, despite its urgency, climate measures must be balanced with other measures that are at least as important to keep life liveable; if not to say that even fast grinding mills grind slowly and that it takes time to penetrate everyday life, also in case of people of good will.
Is there a solution? There isn’t and there will not be if it is not realized that the transformation of life in the end involves the transformation of everyday life, not only superficially as among communism, but in its details. Moreover, people must not be forced but be convinced, but this is only possible if the changes needed are their own changes and not enforced changes. If humans do not create their own world, there will be no world. That’s what the past has taught us and that’s the challenge.

Source
Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne. Édition intégrale. Montreuil: L’Arche, 2024; esp. pp. 262-4.

What are they waiting for?

Look at the photo. What are these people doing there? They are waiting. Apparently they are waiting for something special, for all have their faces in more or less the same direction, the direction where the object they are waiting for is or will come from. It is obvious what this object is: It is the tram in front of them. By they don’t go into the tram. Why not? It is because the doors of the tram are closed. So, these people are waiting till the doors of the tram will be opened, so that they can go into the tram. They are not so much waiting for the tram itself but for a certain event related to the tram. While waiting, some people are watching their smartphones. Others do nothing special. They are just waiting.
But look to the people at the right. They are looking at something: They are looking at the man near the front door of the tram. What is the man doing there? He is opening the door of the tram, for the man is the tram driver. Yet a few moments waiting and the doors of the tram will be open; people will enter and the whole scene has disappeared. And that was actually what these people were waiting for: for the end of the waiting.

Random quote
When you’re just trying to “neutralize” the opponent, you’re being nice to them. More often, you’re trying to “crush” the opponent.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) 

The importance of waiting

Most of the time, sociologists pay attention to striking social phenomena and philosophers do so as well in their way. Or they study problems that need to be solved. Usually they study problems that catch the eye. However, some sociologists and philosophers study less striking if not inconspicuous phenomena of everyday life, or phenomena that just happen, because they just happen, like those who use an ethnomethodological approach often do (mainly in the Anglo-Saxon countries; for example Erving Goffman), or (mainly in the francophone area) those who apply and develop the ideas of the French scholar Michel de Certeau, who studied society from philosophical, sociological and other perspectives, and the ethnologist Marc Augé. They and their students investigated or still investigate such everyday practices like living in a house, cooking, or making a ride on the metro. Indeed, some sociologists and philosophers do pay attention to themes of everyday of life in their studies. However, as Kalekin-Fishman has shown “From the diversity of theoretical approaches to everyday life it is clear that this area of study has no single empirical orientation.” (Kalekin-Fishman, 2013, p. 718) Moreover, “[d]espite the fact that everyday life has been important to social theory since the initiation of sociology as a science, the interest in investigating it as a phenomenon in its own right is relatively recent”. (id. p. 724) In fact, till today the study of everyday life has been a casual approach and not an independent field of interest, as it should be for such an important aspect of life. Even more, everyday life is not just an aspect of life, but it is life. Be it is it may, and whatever the approach is and whether it is embedded in other studies or whether it isn’t, studies of daily life are very interesting and important, if not significant, since they touch real life as it is lived most of the time. Nevertheless, the present investigations of everyday life still ignore or overlook some of the most basic but also frequent human activities. Take waiting. A closer look at it makes clear that waiting is one of the most common “activities” we perform. Moreover, it is an “activity” we spend much time on, maybe more than on anything else we do, with the exception of sleeping (which should be investigated, however). Nonetheless, when searching the internet, I haven’t found any study that pays attention to waiting. It is, as if from the perspective of the social sciences and from the philosophical perspective the phenomenon doesn’t exist or at least that it doesn’t deserve attention. But can an activity we spend so much time on be so trivial that we can ignore it? To ask the question is already to answer it. I think that it is weird to ignore waiting in sociology and philosophy, since it is an essential activity in life. It is not without reason that so much money is spent on making waiting spaces, like at bus stops, in railway stations, in airports, etc. Why spending this money if waiting is a ghost idea. Why spending this money if nobody would be waiting, not only now and then but often and sometimes for quite a long time? It’s true, planners think about where to make waiting areas; what is the best place for them; how many people probably will use a certain waiting space; and so on. I don’t doubt the value of their capacities and their work, but on a general social scientific and philosophical level the idea of waiting doesn’t exist. The most common is often the least perceived, and just this makes that it deserves attention.

Some literature
- Augé, Marc, Non-Lieux, Paris: Seuil, 1992.
- Augé, Marc, Un ethnologue dans le métro. Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2013.
- Certeau, Michel de, The practice of everyday life. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1984.
- Certeau, Michel de; L. Giard; P. Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life. Volume 2: Living and
Cooking. Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press. 1998.
- Goffman, Erving, Relations in public. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1972.
- Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986.
- Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah, “Sociology of everyday life”, in Current Sociology Review, vol. 61 (5-6), 2013, pp. 714–732.

Random quote
The world is the future of man, because man is the creator of his “world”.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991)

The nature of the countryside

The peatdigger

It’s summertime. Many people go on holiday and many people visit the countryside. Or it’s just a beautiful day, and people decide to leave the city and to go for a stroll in nature or to take their bikes. It’s nice to be outdoors and to enjoy the sunshine and to feel the wind blowing through your hair. And so you took your bike and made a ride. You hear the birds singing, especially if it is yet early summer. Later in the season, you’ll see birds gathering together in the fields, preparing their soon to come long flights to southern countries, where they’ll stay in winter. By nightfall, huge flocks of thousands, no tens of thousands of starlings are looking for their sleeping places, moving as black clouds through the sky in spectacular movements. You hear a cow mooing. Other cows follow the sound with theirs. The bleating of sheep completes the choir. In the distance, a boy is singing a sad song. A dog barks. Other people enjoy the landscape as such: The woods they are walking through; a rippling stream; fields enclosed by hedges. The world around is wonderful and they enjoy its peace and its beauty. You feel yourself in nature and so do many with you.
Nature? Sometimes I wonder whether nature yet exists, for a deeper awareness will tell you that, especially around the cities, but not only there, most of the countryside is human-made. Even, where it isn’t, the human impact is inescapable. Some countries – mine, the Netherlands, in the first place – are completely human-made. There is a saying that “God created the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands”, but I think that it applies to many parts of the world in its own context. However, many people don’t realize it when walking in the countryside; or they don’t know it. As Henri Lefebvre makes clear in its Critique de la vie quotidienne (p. 163): when looking at the countryside and at much that we call “nature”, we confuse the facts of nature with human facts. When we walk through the countryside and see it as nature, we look at it in the way as “we look at the sea or the sky, in which each human trace is wiped out.” In the countryside “the human facts escape us.” We even don’t know anymore where to see them, where to look at them, where to find them, namely in the simple, familiar everyday objects, like the forms of the fields, the courses of the streams, the routes of the roads, the positions of the houses, the places of the forests. They are not simply there, guided by the will of nature. Everything in the countryside is human-made; even each grain of sand and clump of soil is, so to speak. The simple facts of human construction and artificiality are everywhere. And – what also many people don’t know – there is often much human misery and suffering behind these human facts; behind this human-made landscape. The work to make it often has been done by people enforced to work there, by direct force or enforced to take work because of the misery of their living conditions. People got meagre wages, too much to die from, too little to live on, and they lived as slaves or were enslaved. A plunge in history will make this clear to everybody who is interested in it and wants to know it. Enjoy your walk!

Random quote
Man will be daily or he will not be.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) 

Bread and games

I think that I could fill this website each week with a blog about Montaigne and his Essays. The man and his work are very inspiring. But that’s not what I want, so after two blogs about Montaigne, I should switch again to another theme. However, this time yet another Montaigne blog, so that you get a kind of trilogy. Next week, I’ll write about something else again, although I don’t know yet what it will be.Last week we saw Montaigne as a psychologist. As a psychologist, he had to be a good observer, which he certainly was. This is especially clear in the journal he kept during his journey through Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy. But also in his own country he looked around with a sharp eye. He praised what he liked and he criticized what he didn’t like or considered stupid, like in the essay “Of vain subtleties” (Essays I-54). This essay starts with a remarkable sentence: “There are a sort of little knacks and frivolous subtleties from which men sometimes expect to derive reputation and applause: as poets, who compose whole poems with every line beginning with the same letter…” This was done in Montaigne’s days, indeed, and I can understand that he thought that such artificialities were stupid. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable sentence, for what Montaigne probably didn’t know is that some time before, a Dutchman had written a long poem and the first letters of the fifteen verses of the poem put in succession made the name Willem van Nassov (= William of Nassau). William of Nassau was count of Nassau in Germany, and also, prince of Orange and Stadtholder of Holland (representative of the Spanish King there). Willem of Orange-Nassau, became the leader of the Dutch rebellion against the Spanish King, which led to the independence of the Netherlands. The poem just mentioned describes William’s doubts, problems and struggles as a leader of this rebellion. Now it is the national anthem of the Netherlands and it is also the oldest national anthem in use today. Moreover, the author of the poem is not known, so who got the reputation and applause of this poem? And was it the product of a vain effort? Yes, and no. In the same Book I of the Essays, Montaigne had written an essay titled “That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death”. Analogously, we can say that this also applies to the first sentence of his “Of vain subtleties”. But if we would apply this statement rigorously, it would be difficult to have an opinion, and that’s not what we want.
Must we accept then any activity as potentially useful, since later history may show it is, even if this would be very unlikely? Also in essay I-54 Montaigne tells us about a man who was praised and rewarded, because he “had learned to throw a grain of millet with such dexterity and assurance as never to miss the eye of a needle”. This made Montaigne remark: “Tis a strong evidence of a weak judgment when men approve of things for their being rare and new, or for their difficulty, where worth and usefulness are not conjoined to recommend them.”
If he had lived now, Montaigne could still make this remark. I know of a TV show that is about such “vain” activities. Central are questions like: Could this man throw hundred grains of millet with such dexterity and assurance as never to miss the eye of a needle? Is such a TV show senseless? Yes, it is, but then one should ask: Is amusement senseless? I think it isn’t for humans cannot live without it. Nevertheless, it can be a problem. Nowadays, we can see many videos with such “vain” activities in the internet. Many people like them. No problem. No problem? No, unless you see then another one, and another one, and another one… for hours, as some people do. And the next day maybe again, etc. No problem, unless you become addicted to them and spend your time on them and not or no longer on things that must be done. People may feel guilty that they have spent so much time on vain activities and that other things are not done. That’s already bad enough, but more and more websites have videos that are made that you become addicted to them; and especially that children and young people become addicted to them. It’s the revenue model of such websites. Is it a problem? Yes, it is. Since then the choice to become addicted (if such a choice exists) is no longer yours but the choice of another: You are manipulated. In view of this, Montaigne is right. Of course, he did not and could not foresee the internet and all that belongs to it. Montaigne warned us for the weakness of the human mind, which is of all times. Humans have a weak judgment, because they approve of things that are rare and new. Others try to misuse this weakness and make you addicted so that they can manipulate you. And then I haven’t talked yet about the political side of this. Bread and games, is that all we need?

Random quote
It is generally surprising these days that war could arise in our time, in our Europe, between civilized states. … But waging war, that is, trying to give themselves justice through the arms, at some point does every person and every group, who feel no law, protective or threatening, above them.

Albert Verwey (1856-1937)

Montaigne as a psychologist

When psychology did not yet exist as a separate science, so before the mid-19th century, it was part of philosophy and especially philosophers wrote about psychological themes. So, if you didn’t want to follow the commonsense psychological advices of your family and friends or other persons you trusted, or if you didn’t trust your own commonsense views, you tried to find out what philosophers had written about your problem or how philosophers could provide an answer to your question. So you turned to Aristotle, or Spinoza or to another thinker. Also Montaigne wrote sometimes about philosophical themes, for example in essay 4 of Book I of his Essays: “How the soul expends its passions upon false objects, when the true are missed”. Here, Montaigne tells us that people who are frustrated often direct themselves to the wrong object in order to take it out; especially, when there is no other way or no decent way to do something about your frustration. For instance, Montaigne tells us that “a gentleman of [his] country] marvellously tormented with the gout … [said] in the extremity of his [pains] he must needs have something to quarrel with, and that railing at and cursing, one while the Bologna sausages, and another the dried tongues and the hams, was some mitigation to his pain.”
Some other examples mentioned by Montaigne: Pulling your hair out of sorrow. Or the Persian King Xerxes who whipped the Hellespont because a gale had destroyed the bridges he was building. Or “Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace for the pleasure his mother had once enjoyed there.” Some wanted to punish even God or their gods, because they hadn’t helped them or had obstructed their plans.
I think it is a kind of behaviour that most of us know or even have performed themselves. You give a kick against the door or other object, because you are frustrated, although these objects don’t have any relationship with your frustration (and if they would have, even then they couldn’t help, for objects have no will). Others become aggressive, for instance football supporters, because their club has lost a match. Examples abound, and you’ll certainly find more, either because you sometimes behaved so, or because you have seen others doing so or have heard of it.
At first glance, it seems that Montaigne mocks this kind of behaviour, and some Montaigne interpreters explain the essay this way. Doesn’t Montaigne mention such behaviour “folly”? However, a closer reading of the essay shows a deep psychological insight into the matter. For Montaigne doesn’t only ridicule the behaviour, but he explains also its causes: “So it seems that the soul, being transported and discomposed, turns its violence upon itself, if not supplied with something to oppose it, and therefore always requires an object at which to aim, and whereon to act.” And if we cannot find an object that fits the frustration, we look for something else, even if it has nothing to do with the frustration. “And we see that the soul, in its passions, inclines rather to deceive itself, by creating a false and fantastical subject, even contrary to its own belief, than not to have something to work upon.”
This is a deep insight, for once we know the causes of our frustrated and irrational behaviour, we can try to do something about it and to look for a reasonable alternative or to learn to behave ourselves. And that’s what modern psychologists do. On the internet, for instance, you can find many tips how to control your frustration and how to lead it in a positive direction. To give your soul an object, in Montaigne’s terms. Montaigne himself did not do so, but at the end of the essay, he gives us the good advice to restrain ourselves, for it has no sense to let yourself go. Or address your frustration to yourself: “We can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.” But isn’t this what we do, when we pull our hair out of sorrow?

Random quote
A lot of the ideas that appear silly only appear silly because you’ve looked at the surface of them

Anthony Gottlieb (1956-)

On sorrow

“The Grieving Parents” by Kathe Kollwitz, a memorial to her son Peter,

killed during the First World War (German war cemetery, Vladslo, Belgium)

Emotions are complex, and we all have them. It’s why Montaigne writes so often about them. For example, the second essay in Book I of his Essays is dedicated to the emotion “tristesse”, which can be translated as sorrow, sadness or grief. It’s an emotion many people have and maybe he has it more than the average people, Montaigne says. And – what he doesn’t say in this essay, though –wasn’t his whole essay-project built on this same emotion? Hadn’t Montaigne started to write his essays because of his grief for his late friend Étienne de la Boétie, a grief that again and again comes to the surface in his Essays? And the whole world is steeped in this emotion, whether we call it sorrow, sadness or grief, which are all aspects of the same, to that extent that the world “is pleased to grace it with a particular esteem, clothing therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience.” Montaigne doesn’t like this. It is “foolish and sordid guise”.
Sorrow is a fickle, multi-faced emotion. It’s not “what you see is what you get”. The emotion you see on the face or in the behaviour of a human, doesn’t need to be the emotion that this person feels in the heart. It’s so for all emotions but maybe in particular it is so for the emotion of sorrow (to use one word for the sorrow-sadness-grief emotional complex). Montaigne illustrates this with several examples. First he tells us the story of Psammenitus, an Egyptian king who was defeated and taken prisoner. He saw his daughter passing, who had been made a slave, and he showed no emotion. Then Psammenitus saw his son led away to execution, and still he showed no emotion. Then he saw one of his domestic and familiar friends brought in among the captives, and only then did Psammenitus show extreme sadness. Why only then? Didn’t he care about his daughter and son? No. When asked, Psammenitus said: “It is … because only this last affliction was to be manifested by tears, the two first far exceeding all manner of expression.” Our sorrow can be so great and intense that we cannot express it.
A second case told by Montaigne is at first sight the same. It is about “a prince of our own nation, who is at Trent and has news there brought him of the death of his elder brother, a brother on whom depended the whole support and honour of his house, and soon after of that of a younger brother, the second hope of his family.” The prince received the news apparently emotionless and cold-hearted. However, when a few days later one of his servants died, the prince was overcome with sorrow to that extent that “that some thence were forward to conclude that he was only touched to the quick by this last stroke of fortune”. However, “in truth, it was, that being before brimful of grief, the least addition overflowed the bounds of all patience.” Sorrow can become more than we can bear.
We can become petrified with sorrow, as these and other examples by Montaigne show. And just this is the deepest, the strongest sorrow. Quoting Petrarca, Montaigne tells us that those who can tell us how much they suffer, actually don’t suffer very much. However, as Montaigne also shows in this essay, sorrow is not too different from joy. They are the opposite poles of the same emotions and in that respect they are the same. Actually, pure emotions don’t exist, so Montaigne tells us in his essay “That we taste nothing pure” (Book II, 20). Both our sorrows and our joys, both our negative experiences and our positive experiences are mixed and contain at least a bit of the opposite. “Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience”, as he says there, which he illustrates with a quotation from Lucretius: “From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is bitter, which even in flowers destroys”. “Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it…”. Montaigne would certainly agree with the opposite, since it follows from what he writes in both essays discussed here. Death often means the end of suffering. A soldier who has fallen has contributed to saving his country. In his essay “That we taste nothing pure” Montaigne tells us that the “confusion” between joy and sadness can be seen well, when painters hold, “that the same motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for laughter too”. This is actually an exemplification of the fact that both pure delight and pure sorrow do not exist. Besides this, expressions of joy are often not too different from expressions of sorrow. We don’t know what to say when an extreme happiness overcomes us.
And Montaigne himself? Sadness of the death of his dear friend Étienne de La Boétie is in the background of his essays and sometimes it comes to the surface. It is also the background of his life. But as we see in Book III of the Essays, in the end gradually the sadness fades away, although it never becomes zero. The good memories remain, but sorrow is seldom eternal in the sense that it remains to dominate life. As such, Montaigne has never been very subject to violent emotions, he says. “I am naturally of a stubborn apprehension, which also, by reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.” After a difficult time, we often come back stronger.

Random quote
It’s quite remarkable how much of what gets into print, especially in journalism but also, I’ve found, in books, is wrong, just because people copy what they’ve seen elsewhere.

Anthony Gottlieb (1956-)

What is true

Theories are like bubbles: In the end they splash

anarchism                     anthropomorphism          atheism

atomism                       Bayesianism                    behaviourism

Buddhism                     capitalism                       Cartesianism

Christianism                  cohenterism                   communism

communitarism             compatibilism                  computationalism

conceptualism               Confucianism                  connectionism

consequentialism           constitutivism                 constructivism

contextualism                conventionalism              critical rationalism

cynism                          Daoism                          Darwinisme

decisionism                   deconstructivism             deism

determinism                  disjunctivism                  dualism

egalitarianism               eliminativism                   empiricism

enactivism                    Epicurism                       epiphenomalism

essentialism                  existentialism                 expressivism

externalism                   fallibilism                       falsificationism

fascism                         feminism                       Fichteanisme

fictionalism                   fideism                          finitism

formalism                     foundationalism              foundherentism

functionalism                Hegelianism                   Hinduism

historicism                    holism                           humanism

hylomorfism                  idealism                        illusionism

incompatibilism             indeterminism                inductivism

infallibilism                    infinitism                       innatism

internalism                    interpretivism                Jainism

Kantianism                    Leninism                        liberalism

libertarianism                Marxism                         materialism

mentalism                     mercantilism                  modernism

monism                        nationalism                    naturalism

Nazism                         Neo-Marxism                  Neo-Platonism

nihilism                        nominalism                     normativism

objectivism                   Orthodoxism                   panpsychism

particularism                 personalism                    perspectivism

physicalism                   Platonism                       populism

positivism                     postmodernism               pragmatism

probabilism                   proceduralism                 Protestantism

Pyrrhonism                   quietism                          rationalism

realism                         reductionism                    reformism

relativism                     reliabilism                        representationalism

republicanism                Roman-Catholicism          scientism

secularianism                situationism                     socialism

skepticism                     solipsism                        Spinozism

Stalinism                       Stoicism                         structuralism

subjectivism                  Sufism                           Taoism

theism                          Thomism                        totalitarianism

transactionalism             utopism                         veritism

verificationism                vitalism                         voluntarism

                                     wokeism 

Etc. 

The above list is an arbitrary list of -isms that I have found on the internet and in my own computer files. It is certainly not all there is! Moreover, many of the specific -isms in the list have a different meaning according to the theme you are interested in. For example there is realism in political science and in philosophy. The -isms in this list are mainly philosophical but not only. Besides this, many -isms can be subdivided. Take dualism. There is an ontological dualism and a methodological dualism. Ontological dualism can be divided into three types of dualism: substance dualism, property dualism and predicate dualisms. Seen that way, my list is not more than an introduction to the ism-theory. In addition, many -isms have a neo-, post-, and/or anti- version (some are in the list). So, besides positivism, there is a neo-positivism, an anti-positivism and a post-positivism. Or, to mention another limitation of my list: It refers mainly to Western philosophy. The list is also arbitrary and one-sided since it contains only -isms and no -ologies, -anities, etc. (it’s up to you to make such lists).
However, with so many -isms inside and outside philosophy, the main question in this blog is: Which -ism is true or which -isms are true? But is this important? There simply is a view for everybody. Suum cuique (To each their own) 

Random quote
The most common mistake people make is to have got part of the truth and to think they’ve got all of it

Jonathan Wolff (1959-)

Polarisation

Who we are and what we do depends a lot on the people in our social environment; especially on those we directly interact with in one way or another. We see some we interact with as “us” and the rest as “the others”, and we behave accordingly, even to that extent that we may come to see “the others” as enemies; and sometimes even to that extent that we behave violently towards “the others”. It’s a well-established fact from social psychology. To see how it works, the Turkish-American social psychologist Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues performed in 1954 the so-called Robbers Cave Experiment. In this experiment, two groups of eleven 11 years old boys took part in a summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma, USA. The boys in each group didn’t know about the other group. During the first part of the experiment the boys

“spent time with members of their own group... The groups chose names (the Eagles and the Rattlers), and each group developed their own group norms and group hierarchies. After a short period of time, the boys became aware that there was another group at camp and, upon learning of the other group, the campers group spoke negatively about the other group. At this point, the researchers began the next phase of the study: a competitive tournament between the groups, consisting of games such as baseball and tug-of-war, for which the winners would receive prizes and a trophy. [From now on] the relationship between the two groups quickly became tense. The groups began trading insults, and the conflict quickly spiraled. The teams each burned the other group’s team flag, and raided the other group’s cabin. The researchers also found that the group hostilities were apparent on surveys distributed to the campers: campers were asked to rate their own team and the other team on positive and negative traits, and the campers rated their own group more positively than the rival group. During this time, the researchers also noticed a change within the groups as well: the groups became more cohesive.” (quoted from the ThoughtCo website)

Before I’ll describe how the experiment ended, I want to look at what is happening around us in many countries in the world and especially in the Western world, but not only there. It was important for the experiment, that there were no fundamental differences between the Eagles and the Rattlers. The researchers had composed the groups (the background characteristics of the boys) as equal as possible, and the boys didn’t know each other before the camp started. So it was not this that the group rivalry could explain. Nevertheless, once they knew about the existence of each other, they began to see each other as rivals if not enemies. Just this makes the Robbers Camp Experiment interesting and important for understanding the growing polarisation in many countries, like the USA, the Netherlands, France, etc. For are the differences between the poles – let’s call them R and L for short – really that large that it is obvious that the present societies become polarized? Is there a real basis for the polarisation in the countries concerned and is the R-L split a reflection of real differences? Although I don’t want to deny that such differences exist, I think that the basic ground for the growing polarization is different, namely a sharp decrease in the number of contacts between different groups, views, ways of life, etc. in society. Nowadays. people interact with, deal with and get along with other people who are different from themselves less frequently than they did in the past. People interact less with people who are unlike themselves, have different views and opinions, have different lifestyles, are younger or older, etc. It is not that we should adopt the opinions, lifestyles, etc. from the people we meet, but by meeting others who are unlike “us”, we see that they are in many respects like “us”; they are as human as we are. In such a situation, if we disagree with “the others”, we are more prepared to try to make a deal with them, to find a consensus and to find common solutions, in case of conflict. However, nowadays it’s just the opposite that happens: People tend to limit their contacts more and more to their own bubbles. What happens then is shown by the Robbers Cave Experiment: Limited to your own bubble, more and more you tend to think: We are right and they are wrong. You tend to see those in other bubbles as rivals and enemies, with the use of violence against those you don’t agree with as the ultimate consequence. Society becomes polarized and once there this polarization increases itself.
But let me tell now how the Robbers Camp Experiment ended. I quote again from the ThoughtCo website:

To reduce the group conflict, the researchers “tried having the two groups work on what psychologists call superordinate goals, goals that both groups cared about, which they had to work together to achieve. For example, the camp’s water supply was cut off …, and the Eagles and Rattlers worked together to fix the problem. In another instance, a truck bringing the campers food wouldn’t start (again, an incident staged by the researchers), so members of both groups pulled on a rope to pull the broken truck. These activities didn’t immediately repair the relationship between the groups …, but working on shared goals eventually reduced conflict. The groups stopped calling each other names, perceptions of the other group (as measured by the researchers’ surveys) improved, and friendships even began to form with members of the other group. By the end of camp, some of the campers requested that everyone (from both groups) take the bus home together, and one group bought beverages for the other group on the ride home.”

So, once there, polarization can be reduced: Create common goals. Moreover, I think that as important as common goals – which creates an external enemy, and I wonder whether that is a good idea – are the interpersonal contacts that common goals involve. Since the present polarization in society is largely the consequence of the decrease of interactions between people with different backgrounds, I think that it is very important to restore such contacts again. Try to demolish interpersonal barriers between people and even more between groups of people. Make that people of different backgrounds come into contact with each other again. Institutionalize that people talk with each other; and then better in a café than in an official meeting. Mix them!