A sociological walk through Paris

When I was recently in Paris, I was there for going to an opera. I also wanted to take pictures of statues of philosophers for this blog and pictures of monuments of the First World War for another website. That’s what I did and that’s what I looked at. However, this is what I saw, when I walked there:

A walk throught Paris from a sociological point of view

https://www.flickr.com/photos/photographybytheway/albums/72157693226583921

Also on my Dutch photo website:

https://www.henkbijdeweg.nl/fotos/264804426_Wandeling+in+Parijs.html#.WrztUi5uYkI

A walk through Paris

Condorcet (1743-1794)

When I went to Paris last week, it was because I wanted to see Händel’s opera Alcina. It was performed by a dream cast with the countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, who has a voice like an angel, and the mezzo Cecilia Bartoli in the leading parts. The story of Alcina has been taken from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso and it is about the knight Ruggiero who has fallen in love with the sorceress Alcina and who was in her clutches, just as the Greek hero Odysseus who was in Calypso’s grasp, as Homer told us.

However, I wanted to do more than just take the train to Paris, go to the theater, spend the night in a hotel and return home next day. It wasn’t the first time that I was in Paris and now I decided simply to take a walk downtown. Or rather, it would not be a simple walk but a walk with two themes: a sociological theme and a philosophical theme. I got the idea for the sociological theme when I walked from the railway station to my hotel after my arrival in Paris: To point my camera down and to photograph what I saw. I’ll upload this photograph report of Paris soon to my photo website, and I’ll tell you when I do. Here I’ll write about the philosophical theme: Taking pictures of statues of philosophers.

There are statues of gods, statues of persons and statues of animals. You find them in public and in buildings, like churches and government buildings. They tell a lot about whom and what society considers important and worth to honour. Since Paris is a big town, you find there many statues, and I had to make a choice. I could have made it myself easy and have gone to the Louvre: Hundreds of statues adorn its façades. Statues of scientists, writers, craftsmen, philosophers, and others who made France great (or so they think). However, I preferred to take a real walk and are you surprised that the first man I photographed was Montaigne? I found him somewhere on the side of a little park, sitting on a stone and friendly smiling. A statue of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, drinking milk from a she-wolf nearby. Montaigne loved Rome but even more he loved Paris. “Paris has my heart since my childhood”, as an inscription on the statue says. He came there often, although it took him a horse ride of more than a week from his castle near Bordeaux. Did you know that Montaigne spent a night in the prison of the Bastille? In one of the civil wars that raged in France then he was run in by one of the warring factions and shut up there. But as soon as Catherina de Medici, the mighty mother of the king of France, heard about it, he was released.

I find Montesquieu and Voltaire next together in another little park: The former represented by a bust, the latter full length with a coat on his shoulders and a book in his left hand. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu gave us the idea that there are three administrative powers: the executive power, the legislative power and the judicial power. These three powers must be separated and kept independent of each other, so he says; and many states do. And need I to introduce Voltaire, which is actually the nom de plume of François-Marie Arouet? He was an advocate of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and separation of state and church, although he defended the freedom of speech more for himself than for others. His literary production was enormous with 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. Like Montaigne, he spent some time in the Bastille: Not one day but eleven months.

Then Condorcet. I find him between the Mint and the Institute of France, on the border of the Seine. The full name of this politician, mathematician and philosopher was Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet. He has been a director of the Mint and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. In 1794 he died a mysterious death in prison.

Next I walk to the Louvre and take pictures of some of the philosophers’ statues there. Not Descartes, whom I had photographed already long ago in Descartes, his town of birth – which was later named after him – but Pascal and Rousseau. Then it’s time to go to the opera, and I walk to the Théâtre de Champs Élysées in the Avenue de Montaigne.

The looking-glass of society

A clean Córdoba is a reflection of you

Some philosophers have been forgotten and can be found back only in the archives. Other philosophers are yet only known by a few catchwords, but actually nobody knows anymore what they have written about. Georg Herbert Mead is as a philosopher of the latter kind, I think. Though he is still well-known among sociologists, most contemporary philosophers don’t know more about him than that he wrote about the self, I and me; if they do. Among philosophers he has been forgotten. Anyway, I haven’t come across his name in the discussions where he is relevant, namely those on the self and personal identity.

Many people, including philosophers, think that we are subjects who finally themselves make who they are. Mead doesn’t. For him a self cannot exist without the presence of others, the views of others and communication with others, for a self is a reflection of your society, and especially the people immediately around you. Mead says it this way: “The individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly, from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole to which he belongs. For he enters his own experience as a self or individual, not directly or immediately, not by becoming a subject to himself, but only in so far as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or in his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and behavior in which both he and they are involved.” (138; italics mine) This getting to know your self is done via your communication with others, which is here “a form of behavior in which the organism or the individual may become an object to himself”, so Mead. (138)

What is striking here is that according to Mead the self is not a subjective experience but the way others experience us and the way we reflect on it. The self is objective and socially made: “The self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience.” (140) However, seen this way, the self is only a kind of objective image of a person, constituted by the society around him – or her, which Mead ignores –. Therefore s/he needs an I: “The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitudes of the others constitute the organized ‘me’, and then one reacts toward that as an ‘I’. ... ‘[I]t is due to the individual’s ability to take the attitudes of [the] others in so far as they can be organized that he gets self-consciousness. The taking of all of those organized sets of attitudes gives him his ‘me’; that is the self he is aware of. ... [However, the] response to [a] situation as it appears in [the individual’s] immediate experience is uncertain, and it is that which constitutes the ‘I’.” (175) Briefly, a person arises in interaction with the social environment and doesn’t exist without this social environment. Actually we find Mead’s view already in the idea of the looking glass self, earlier developed by Charles Cooley: The idea that our self-image arises in an interaction between how we see ourselves and how others see us. Mead has developed it into a comprehensive theory.

Mead’s view on who we are and how we develop into who we are is still interesting for philosophers for it shows important aspects of us and how they come about. We are not our brains, and we are also not the self-centred subjects who many of us think they are in this Age of the Ego: We are where we grew up and where we live. Philosophically, for instance, Mead’s approach implies a criticism on those personal identity theorists who defend the view that it is our personal continuity in time that makes up our personality. According to them a person is formed by the subjective experiences of the past. What they forget, however, is that a person is formed as much by his or her present interactions with the social environment. A person is not simply a remembered past. Look in the looking glass of society and you see a reflection of yourself.

Reference

George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974 (1934). The numbers in the text refer to the pages in this book.

Forgotten philosophers

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a forgotten opera by an almost forgotten German composer: the opera “Siroe, Re di Persia” by Johann Adolph Hasse. Hadn’t this opera been rediscovered by the Greek conductor George Petrou, this beautiful piece of art would still have been hidden in the archives. How many beautiful operas and other pieces of music are still “waiting” to be brought back to the public? Really, one wouldn’t believe it today, but also much music by Johann Sebastian Bach was once more or less forgotten and his son Carl Philippe Emanuel was better known than the father. Also the now famous composer Antonio Vivaldi was once passed into oblivion.

Being known if not famous and then becoming forgotten is a common phenomenon. Each age has its own celebrities and one cannot look always to the past and honour the past celebrities as well. During the ages the number of celebrities would become so big that there is only one way to avoid to become overloaded with them: Forget them. When everybody will be known who is worth to be known, no one will be. In the end there can be only a few at the top, or everybody would fall down. So many outstanding composers fell into oblivion, and this happened to many philosophers as well.

The American philosopher Roy Sorensen tells in one of the mini-essays in his A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities that on a stroll through a graveyard in Edinburgh, Scotland, he passed the grave of Adam Ferguson, once – two hundred years ago – a professor of moral philosophy in the University of Edinburg, as the epitaph told him. He had never heard of him, so for him Ferguson was a forgotten philosopher. Actually Ferguson is not completely forgotten, for a building of the University of Edinburgh bears his name. Nevertheless, I think that for most of us Ferguson belongs to the category of forgotten philosophers, even though he has a page in the Wikipedia. Should he really have been forgotten, he wouldn’t even had such a page, but who reads it? However, a really forgotten philosopher will only be found in the paper archives of the libraries of universities, courts and monasteries. And when I think of Hasse’s beautiful opera, I wonder how many philosophical writings of value are hidden there. Probably a lot. Some may be known be specialized specialists but belong to the forgotten category for most of us; others are really forgotten. Much research in the records is to be done! Some forgotten philosophers may be still known by name, but apart from a few catchwords, nobody knows anymore what they have written about. Alexander of Abonoteichus, Wilhelm Homberg, Martin Knutzen, Adam Wodeham: Do you know them? And these are philosophers that can yet be found on the Internet! Thanks to the web, the chance to be forgotten these days is smaller than ever before, in the sense that once you are mentioned on the Internet or once you have published there, all this is public and not hidden in inaccessible archives. Nevertheless if nobody reads it, you are still forgotten.

Sorensen tried to find a solution for the problem that he would be forgotten. Maybe he could be remembered as the forgotten philosopher, he thought. I hope he will not, or rather that he will not be remembered as the forgotten philosopher, for I had reserved this title for myself. But if he will be remembered as a forgotten philosopher, it is okay. But perhaps there is a better way for me to prevent that I’ll sink into oblivion: I can be remembered as the forgotten philosophical blogger. In view of what I just said about the Internet, my chances are then better than his – or so I hope –. But Sorensen and I wouldn’t have been philosophers, if we shouldn’t have to conclude that our tries will end in a contradiction in terms, for, as he says, “Anyone who is forgotten is not remembered. I cannot be both remembered and not remembered.” But who cares, if everybody knows that it is me who has been forgotten?

Reference

Roy Sorensen, “Fame as the Forgotten Philosopher: Meditations on the Headstone of Adam Ferguson”, in A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities. A Collection of Puzzles, Oddities, Riddles and Dilemmas. London: Profile Books, 2017; pp. 244-250.

Prejudices

At the end of my last blog I used the word “prejudiced” in the sense of biased, partial or one-sided, and usually this is meant in a negative sense. Often the negative connotation of the word is even stronger. So the Internet version of the Cambridge Dictionary describes the substantive “prejudice” as “an unfair and unreasonable opinion or feeling, especially when formed without enough thought or knowledge”. Now it is so that there are also positive prejudices. Nevertheless, there is always a sense of reprehensibility attached to it, but is having prejudices only to be disapproved of?

The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has examined the concept of prejudice in his treatise Truth and Method. He defends there the view that there is a prejudice against prejudice. According to him “not until the Enlightenment does the concept of prejudice acquire the negative connotation familiar today.” (273) And Gadamer continues: “Actually ‘prejudice’ means a judgment that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined. In German legal terminology a ‘prejudice’ is a provisional legal verdict before the final verdict is reached. For someone involved in a legal dispute, this kind of judgment against him affects his chances adversely. Accordingly, the French prejudice, as well as the Latin praejudicium, means simply ‘adverse effect,’ ‘disadvantage,’ ‘harm.’ But this negative sense is only derivative. The negative consequence depends precisely on the positive validity, the value of the provisional decision as a prejudgment, like that of any precedent.” (ibid.)

So, actually a prejudice is a pre-judice, so a pre-judgment: a preliminary judgment passed before the final judgment. It will be changed into a final judgment when one has enough information for doing so. As such “prejudice” is a neutral concept, neither positive nor negative: “Thus ‘prejudice’ certainly does not necessarily mean a false judgment, but part of the idea is that it can have either a positive or a negative value.” However, “[t]his seems a long way from our current use of the word.” (ibid.) How did this come about? According to Gadamer, this change of the meaning of the concept must be attributed to the “spirit of rationality” during the Enlightenment: “The German Vorurteil, like the English ‘prejudice’, ... seems to have been limited in its meaning by the Enlightenment critique of religion simply to the sense of an ‘unfounded judgment.’ The only thing that gives a judgment dignity is its having a basis, a methodological justification (and not the fact that it may actually be correct). For the Enlightenment the absence of such a basis does not mean that there might be other kinds of certainty, but rather that the judgment has no foundation in the things themselves—i.e., that it is ‘unfounded.’ This conclusion follows only in the spirit of rationalism. It is the reason for discrediting prejudices and the reason scientific knowledge claims to exclude them completely.” (ibid.; my italics)

Gadamer shows then how the origin of the negative meaning of “prejudgment” is to be found in the supposed necessity of a “methodological justification” of the facts. The essence is that in the Enlightenment the view took root that all knowledge must have a rational – in this case methodological – foundation, but when the Enlightenment philosophers examined the knowledge acquired in the past, they saw that such a foundation was absent and that this knowledge was often obscure and so must be false. For them past knowledge was simply a prejudice. In this way the concept of prejudice got the negative meaning it still has. But was it rational that the Enlightenment philosophers saw past knowledge as prejudiced? For what else could their predecessors have done? Waiting until rational methods had been developed? And was all knowledge collected in the age of Enlightenment true and unprejudiced? Of course not.

I think that we must see it this way. Having prejudices belongs to the characteristics of man and necessarily so. Let’s assume you are a stone age man. You have ideas about how the world is like, such as “bears are dangerous”. Now a bear crosses your path. The bear sees you but does nothing and goes quietly his way. So, your idea that bears are dangerous is not confirmed. Should it be skipped as being a prejudice? Everybody knows that bears can be dangerous, even though the statement should actually be “all bears are dangerous under some [specified] conditions” (Just like many prejudices could be qualified so). Anyway, I guess that the necessity of prejudices has developed, because they were often functional and could save your life, even if they might be false, or false in some circumstances. It was often simply impossible or not practical to test them so you could better have them. Actually today it is still so. For often we are in a new or only partly known situation. Should we then first test what is the right thing to do, before we finally act? Usually it’s not possible, so we simply act, based on the views we have, even if they are prejudices in the sense of the pre-judgment described above.

Having prejudices is not problematic. What is problematic is having them and then deny that you have them and to refuse to change them, if they are false. However, that is what too often happens. Often we lack the facts and we cannot collect them for some reason or another, but nevertheless we must act. Then we act and must do it in pre-judiced way. But it is a challenge to get the facts right and to act according to them.

Source: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method: https://mvlindsey.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/truth-and-method-gadamer-2004.pdf