Entartete Kunst - Degenerate Art

“Entartete Kunst” or “degenerate art” was the name given by the Nazis in Germany to modern art that wasn’t according to their norms of what art should be. The term was especially in use during the years 1933-1945, when the Nazis were in power. Degenerate art was removed from state-owned museums. Generally it was banned in Germany, as it didn’t fit the Nazi idea of Germanhood, meaning that it allegedly was un-German, Jewish, Communist, and the like. “Degenerate” artists, so artists that made such art, were boycotted, forbidden to exhibit or sell such art, or sometimes even forbidden to produce it. Their art was often abstract. Also music could be degenerate, like “negro music”, as the Nazis called it, so jazz.

In 1937 some 5,000 works of degenerate art was confiscated from museums and art collections, including work by Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and many German painters. A selection of 639 works was exhibited in a special exhibition called “Degenerate Art”. The exhibition was shown in many towns in Germany. It’s intention was to horrify the visitors. Now that from then on artists who made degenerate art were seen as official national enemies, many fled abroad or went into “internal exile” by stopping to make the kind of art that had been forbidden.

It’s striking that one of the artists who was branded as degenerate was Emil Nolde. Nolde was an expressionist artist but he was also a committed member of the Nazi party. However, after a bitter ideological dispute, also expressionist art was seen as un-German, and in 1936 Nolde was ordered to stop his artistic activities. Among the 5,000 works confiscated in 1937 about 1,000 had been made by Nolde. The artist was upset for he didn’t understand what the problem was, but of course it was no help. After the Second World War Nolde became world-famous. He was known as an artist who had been classified as degenerate by the Nazis and whose work had been boycotted by them. That Nolde was a fanatical Nazi and an ardent anti-Semite even till 1945 had been more or less forgotten. After the war he did as if he had been persecuted by the Nazis. And so it happened that two of his paintings were on the wall of the office of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A few weeks ago an exhibition dedicated to Emil Nolde has been opened in Berlin, titled Emil Nolde. A German legend. The artist during the Nazi regime. The makers of the exhibition had made a thorough inquiry into the life and political views of the artist and had disclosed the truth: That Nolde was rather a dedicated contributor to Nazism than a victim. The intention of the exhibition is to show this. It was a shock to many.

And Merkel? She decided to remove the two paintings by Nolde from her office and to replace them by two “innocent” works. I fully understand, and I certainly would have done the same. Nevertheless there is something problematical about doing so. The removed paintings are beautiful, at least in the eyes of the highest political authority of Germany – I assume – and of others. From an “objective” point of view they are outstanding works of art. That’s the artistic side. But politically? From that point of view the paintings were not allowed to be beautiful and outstanding in a sense, not by the Nazis and not by many people today, including Angela Merkel. However, there is a difference: The Nazis banned Nolde’s paintings because of their content; now they are banned because the artist himself is considered “degenerate”, so to speak. But whatever the reason may be, apparently art is always political, anyhow. Even “innocent” art fundamentally is, for society changes and what is “innocent” today may be “unacceptable” tomorrow, both because of what or how a work of art represents and because of the ideas the artist stands for. Does innocent art really exist? I am afraid it doesn’t.

Actually, the matter is more complicated than only the political aspect just discussed. A work of art represents something, namely what you see in it (or what you think to see). By doing so, it excludes what the work of art doesn’t present, incidentally or on purpose. Take by way of example my photos. Most of them don’t have an explicit political content. However, the image in the photo takes the place of everything that is not in the image, not only because it has been incidentally left out – for I can’t capture the whole world in one shot – but also because I intentionally didn’t want to photograph it. This can happen – and usually happens – because what’s outside the image didn’t fit my feelings but also because I didn’t want to include in the picture what’s not in the image because I consider it ethically and/or politically not acceptable. Everything has a meaning, also when it hasn’t. Nobody is innocent and nothing is innocent. Which does not need to mean that everybody is also responsible, though.

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You can find my photos on https://www.flickr.com/photos/photographybytheway

Discourse on Method. Descartes

Descartes stressed that we must talk and write in a clear and distinct way. We have seen this in my blog last week. However, for him it was not only a manner how to say things but it was essential for his whole scientific approach. According to Descartes science in his time was an unsystematic gathering of facts. Moreover he was not satisfied with the syllogistic logic that had been developed by Aristotle and the logic of the scholastics, which were the accepted methods of learned thinking in those days. As such these were valuable methods, so Descartes, but they were only useful for arranging knowledge but not for acquiring new knowledge. New facts were fitted into the existing dogmatically accepted systems with the help of these systems of logic, but if this wasn’t possible, so the worse for the facts. Galileo’s problems with the roman-catholic church are a case in point. Descartes saw that the old ways led to stagnation in the development of science and that the old ways of thinking had become obsolete. Methodical thinking should have to replace the old dogmatism. For him “method” became the essence of investigating and discovering new knowledge. This made him the founder of modern science.

Trying to systematize the acquirement of knowledge, Descartes first asked what we know anyway, as an unquestionable starting point for knowledge, a so-called Archimedean point (named after the Greek scientist Archimedes, who was looking for a solid point in space in order to move the earth with a lever). This led him to his famous idea “I think so I exist”: The fact that I think shows that it is unquestionable that I exist. For Descartes this was the “first principle of philosophy”. But why is it so sure that I know this? According to Descartes this can be only so, because I see it in a clear way. By reasoning this way he got his main rule of thinking: “The things that we receive in a very clear and distinct way are all true”.

Descartes made this rule the foundation of his method. Essentially this method says that in order to get knowledge, we must either reduce existing or newly acquired insights or sense impressions to clear and distinct views or deduce them in a clear and distinct manner from other clear and distinct views. Although observations are important for getting new insights, they are not central. Most important are reason and doubt as means to determine whether the acquired knowledge is really so certain as assumed.

For Descartes “clear” and “distinct” are not vague concepts. He gives them a well defined meaning. He tells us also how to get clear and distinct knowledge and how to order our data. His method consists of two phases: First comes analysis and then synthesis. Here I cannot specify them in detail, but by analysis a phenomenon is unravelled into its most elementary parts, until one knows each element in detail and knows what makes it different from the other elements and what the relations with the other elements are. If possible one must try to grasp not more elements in one thinking than one can handle. In the phase of synthesis a theory is built up. It’s just the opposite of analysis. All the elements are fitted together into a deductive system in such a manner that one gets insight into the way the elements cohere. In a sense, the situation that existed before the analysis begun is restored but there is an important difference: Before the analysis took place the coherence of the elements was confused, after the synthesis it has become visible how the elements cohere. In short (my words) confusion has been transformed into knowledge.

Descartes’s systematization of knowledge acquirement led to a methodological turn in science. No longer the fixed and usually traditional ideas became the measure of new knowledge, but the question whether we got our knowledge in the right way. Knowledge was no longer true because it fitted our till then justified ideas but because we could justify the way we got it. Doubt became central to science but not the sceptic doubt that says that in the end there is no truth, but the methodological doubt that asks whether the method used is right; the doubt that says “better is not good enough”. This kind of doubt doesn’t bring the idea of truth into discredit but it brings truth nearer, step by step just by questioning it.

Sources

Descartes’s ideas on method can be found in his Discourse on Method and his Principles of Philosophy. 

Rules for the mind

If I say “Descartes”, many people will say “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think so I am”, and that’s it. Even if they can explain what was meant with this sentence and why it was important, I think that most who are not philosophers, and maybe also many who are, don’t know that Descartes contributed to many different fields of philosophy and science. So, if it wouldn’t have been William Harvey who discovered the blood circulation, it might have been Descartes who had already made much progress in his research. He invented also analytic geometry.

Some of Descartes’s ideas are weird from the current point of view, and I assume that also already in his days they were. For instance, he thought that animals have no feelings, since they have no souls. They are not different from machines. So if you give a dog a kick and it screams, this screaming is merely a sound and not an expression of pain. Therefore vivisection was not a problem for Descartes.

If you think that philosophy is obscure, maybe you have read Hegel and Kant, but you haven’t read Descartes. Descartes is one of the most clearly writing philosophers who ever lived. His maxim was: Everything can be said in a clear and distinct way, say in plain words that everybody can understand. Otherwise it’s nonsense. He didn’t use this only as a rule of thumb but he wrote even a book with methodological rules for clear and distinct philosophical and scientific reasoning: The Rules for the Direction of the Mind. It contains 21 rules with extensive explanations. It’s a pity that he didn’t finish the book, but nevertheless it is worth reading. His explanations are as interesting as the rules themselves are and they contain also a criticism on the way many people reason. The rules are not only useful for philosophers, scholars and scientists, but for everybody who is arguing. So keep these rules also in your mind when you listen to a politician. (If enough British had done so, maybe they would never have voted for the Brexit). Take for example this quote from the explanation to Rule IX:

“It is a common human weakness to consider most beautiful what is difficult. Most people think that they know nothing when they see a very transparent and simple cause of something. Yet they admire grandiloquent and far-fetched argumentations by philosophers, even though they are usually based on foundations that nobody ever fully has understood. ... [I want to stress that] knowledge, how hidden it is, must not be deduced from important and obscure things but only from what is easy and general.”

Descartes is right, but how often does what is difficult seems more important to us than what is simple? And not only words can mislead us, but also the pose of the speaker often does, as Descartes explains in his comment on Rule XII:

“The self-confident allow themselves to put forward their conjectures as true proves; in cases they absolutely know nothing about they think to see obscure truths, as through a fog. They are also not afraid to present them and to connect their concepts then with certain terms. With the help of these terms they are in the habit to talk and to reason about many things that in fact neither they nor their listeners understand.” The modest, so Descartes continues, keep silent and let finding the truth to others, because they think that they themselves are not competent enough and they belief what the self-confident say.

Have I to add anything? Isn’t this what we everywhere see around us? But even if we have the right attitude and are honest and open, language can block mutual understanding and prevent to express what we mean. For for one a word means this and for another that and as Descartes says in his explanation to Rule XIII (a bit adapted and generalized by me) : “Questions about words happen so often that almost all controversies between philosophers would disappear, if they always agreed about the meaning of the words.”

There is a joke that says that there are two philosophical main laws:

The First Law of Philosophy: For every philosopher, there exists an equal and opposite philosopher.

The Second Law of Philosophy: They are both wrong.

Alas, often this seems true, for most philosophers didn’t read Descartes’s Rules and don’t use it as a guide. If they would, they would know that they “ought to give the whole of [their] attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts, and remain a long time in contemplation of them until [they] are accustomed to behold the truth clearly and distinctly.” (Descartes’s Rule IX)

I don’t think so I am not?

I start with a joke:

René Descartes is in a tavern. He is drunk. The bartender cautions: “Monsieur, I think that you have had enough.” Descartes slurs back “I think not” and vanishes.

I hope that you understood and that you laughed, but now I become serious, for the reasoning implied is fallacious: Descartes’s famous statement “I think so I exist” may be true, but it does not imply that I don’t exist if I don’t think. And it is not so that if I exist this implies that I think. For would it be so then that I don’t exist when I am sleeping? And how about a tree? But okay, as for the latter you can object that a tree hasn’t an “I” (which is something to discuss about in another blog).

In philosophy we call this fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc, literally “after this so because of this”. In this case the fallacy is the reasoning that I exist because I think. However, thinking is only an aspect of human existence, but the cause of my existence must be found elsewhere.

I don’t know whether Descartes would have laughed about the joke, but actually he worried about the question whether he would exist, if he didn’t think. Although the “I think so I exist” doesn’t imply that I exist because I think, nevertheless it is quite well possible that I don’t exist if I don’t think. Descartes worded his worry this way in the “Second Meditation” of his Meditations on First Philosophy:

“I am; I exist – this is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking; for perhaps it could also come to pass that if I were to cease all thinking I would then utterly cease to exist. At this time I admit nothing that is not necessarily true.”

On purpose I have quoted Descartes from Sorenson’s A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities where he gives an explanation of this passage. For immediately after it Sorenson continues:

“Compare Descartes’s principle connecting thinking and human existence with another Cartesian principle connecting being extended in three dimensions with physical existence: Necessarily if a body exists, it is extended in space. If a physical thing ceases to be extended, then it ceases to exist. Similarly, if a mind exists, it thinks. And if the mind ceases to think, then it ceases to exist.”

So, after all must we conclude that if we don’t think then we don’t exist, albeit on other grounds than the false post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning? Not so, for here we have the fallacy of false analogy. Above I raised the question whether one still exists if one sleeps (and so doesn’t think). The answer is, of course, “yes”. Why? Because thinking is not a property that a mind simply has and manifests itself but it is a disposition: a property an object has even if this property is not active at a certain moment. This makes thinking different from the property “being extended”, which points to the way an object appears (in this case by having the three dimensions width, height and depth). If the disposition “thinking” isn’t active, it still doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist as a disposition. A glass remains brittle, even if it will never fall from the table on the floor and break, although it is always possible that this will happen. But if we can’t pour water in it, because it is not extended, it is not a glass. It is similarly with thinking. Even if a mind doesn’t think, the property “thinking” is still there and the mind can start to think when it needs to, for example when one wakes up in the morning. When a man is absent-minded, it doesn’t imply that s/he hasn’t a brain.

Sources

- Roy Sorensen, A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities. A Collection of Puzzles, Oddities, Riddles and Dilemmas. London: Profile Books, 2017. The quotes are from pp. 42-43.

- There are several versions of the joke on the Internet. You can find it also in Sorensen’s book on p. 42.

Terrorism

Oslo: Flowers for the victims of a terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011

In his study of evil, Roy F. Baumeister tells the story of a North Korean young woman who had been chosen to become a special agent for the foreign intelligence service and then to carry out a bomb attack on a South Korean airplane. She was “explained that the airplane’s destruction would create a broad sense of chaos and uncertainty that would prevent South Korea from hosting the upcoming 1988 Olympic Games as scheduled. This in turn would lead to the reunification of Korea ...”. Later she wrote that she didn’t understand how this could happen, but she saw herself as politically naïve and she wanted to be a good patriot. Also any feeling of moral responsibility that more than hundred people would die did not come to her mind. The bomb attack was purely a technical operation, she thought. The woman successfully performed the action, but, as we know, the 1988 Olympic Games took place as planned and Korea was never reunified. The woman was captured, sentenced to death but pardoned by the South Korean government. Gradually she also begun “to feel terrible guilt much of the time” because of the innocent passengers killed, and she got nightmares.

In this case, so Baumeister, we see three characteristics typical of a terrorist act. First, the actor is not troubled by guilty thoughts that many innocent people will be killed, although such thoughts often come after the deed. Second, vicious terrorism is motivated by the highest ideals and principles, not by personal hate towards the victims or by personal gain. Third, the action doesn’t lead to the desired goal; neither a possibly short-term goal is reached, nor a long-term goal is. Even more, I want to add: What the goal is, is often vague and unrealistic. It is usually only stated afterwards, so that there is nothing to negotiate about in order to prevent it. An act of terrorism happens. (pp. 27-30)

Terrorism is a rather new phenomenon that could only develop since the end of the 18th century. There are at least two reasons for this. The media must have been developed to such an extent that the news about a terrorist act can get around on a rather wide scale and relatively fast. Otherwise it has no sense to perform it. Moreover, a human life must be seen as valuable. Before the Enlightenment life expectancy was short; not much more than 30 years. People could be sentenced to death for all kinds of crimes, including petty theft. Many people were murdered. This gradually changed since the end of the 18th century.

Although the motives for a terrorist act can be complicated and, for instance, can involve also revenge and punishment, actually such an act is a deed meant to create an atmosphere of fear: the intention is that people fear that they might be killed and that because of this they take all kinds of preventive measures that disturb their lives, if not society as a whole; or that then people or governments give in to the demands of the terrorist or his/her group. Therefore terrorism needs not be aimed directly at persons but it can also exist in, for example, poisoning water supplies. However, as said, a problem is that the demands are often vague, if the possible victim would be prepared to negotiate at all (which is often not the case). In the past revenge or punishment of a certain person was more important than it is today. Usually victims were carefully chosen and it was not the intention to kill people arbitrarily or to kill innocent passers-by. The murder of archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, which led to the outbreak of the First World War, is a case in point. Also the Red Army Faction in Germany in the 1970s and later chose its victims precisely. Today terrorists just want to kill innocent victims – as many people as possible –, although the killing of the editorial board of Charly Hebdo in Paris in 2015 shows that sometimes the victims still are purposefully chosen.

This shows another characteristic of terrorism: Man is seen as a mere instrument, as Camus makes us clear. This does not conflict with the point that for terrorism being possible man must be valuable. Just because people are valuable in the view of others, terrorists see them as instruments to draw attention to their causes. For the terrorist the ideal is higher than man, which makes man instrumental. That’s also why ultimately the terrorist is prepared to kill him or herself in the act, or that, in case of state terrorism, the people may be oppressed, for their oppression is seen as a step on the road to the ideal state. As Camus quotes Nechayev, a Russian communist revolutionary and nihilist from the 19th century: “It’s not about justice but about our duty to eliminate everything that can harm our cause.” Everything is allowed.

And this is what we see in all kinds of terrorist acts today, whether performed by representatives of organised groups or by lone wolves. Locked up in their brains they see only abstract ideals and instruments but no people, like in the recent terrorist acts in Churchland, New Zealand, or in Utrecht, here in the Netherlands. In fact, man is absent in the ideals of the terrorist. Terrorists only care for ... yes, for what?

Sources

- Baumeister, Roy F., Evil. Inside human violence and cruelty. New York: Henry Holt and Cy, 1999.

- Camus, Albert, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.