Passages

Look at the photo. I took it many years ago in Beja in Portugal. It shows two men walking across an open space that keeps the middle between a street and a square. Many people like it. However, it is not only photographically a good photo, but it is also a meaningful photo. Why?
My blog last week was about waiting. A related idea is passages. While waiting evokes a feeling of a standstill and the idea that it is fixed to a certain place, passages evoke a feeling of going from one place to another or the idea of a connection between two places, or sometimes also events that we have to go through, like passage rites that connect two phases in life. All this is expressed in the word “passage”, which means “going through”. So “passage” adds movement to waiting. We can also say that passage is waiting on the move. If a passage is a space, like in the photo, passages add a physical aspect to waiting.
If a passage is physical, for example a street or a corridor, it makes that we can abstract from the aspect of time and that passages can be there when nothing is happening, which is not possible for waiting. Waiting always involves the presence of people; of at least one human being. We can talk about a waiting room, if nobody is there, but actually we see the space involved then as a passage; the waiting as such is absent when nobody is there. On the other hand, a physical passage can be a passage, when nobody is there, so long as the idea of being used by humans is present at least in the background. When this idea lacks, there is no (longer) a passage, but there is simply a space.
Passages are an important aspect of the physical infrastructure of daily life. Take a town. It is a kind of infrastructure of people living together at some place. Living together doesn’t involve that they all need to know each other and go along with each other, but these people at least share a common space to live and in addition they share certain functions which make them to some degree dependent on each other. There are shops where you can buy what you need. There is a town hall where people work who make that the activities of the townspeople can go on in a smooth way. Etc. Of course, towns are open infrastructures in the sense that everybody, including non-townspeople, can go in and out. With this superficial description I want to give you an idea of what I am talking about.
To make that the physical movements of the townspeople are not a mess (going to the baker or to your work; to friends or to a meeting, and so on), a town has streets, squares, canals, and the like. They are the passages of a town. Note that a passage need not be only a passage. The function of a street can also be that it has houses where people live; squares can also be places where people meet. Both streets and squares can have shops or they can be marketplaces. They can have been made for concentrating just there important buildings, like government buildings or museums. But one of the main functions of streets and squares is that they are connections. In this way, streets and squares are planned spaces where people can pass from one place to another. They are passages (maybe besides something else). They are not the only passages you find in a town. I mentioned already waiting rooms, which are a kind of indoor passages, or I could mention railway stations and bus stops.
I began asking why the photo of this blog is meaningful. Unlike the photo in my last blog, which I took only because I was filling my time because I was bored, I took the photo of this blog, just because of its meaning. This photo doesn’t simply show a space that is neither a street nor a square. I didn’t take it just because it shows a photographically interesting town scenery. No, the socially significant aspect of this photo is that it is a passage and that’s why I took it. That it is a passage is stressed by the two men passing the space. They are not just walking there. They are a bit in a hurry. Apparently, they are passing the space on their way from one place to another. They unintentionally stress that the space is a passage. And that’s what the meaning of this photo is and what makes it interesting.
You find more photos of passing taken by me here and here.

Random quote
Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

Waiting

Look at the photo. I took it a few weeks ago, when I visited a concert in Dortmund in Germany. The concert was excellent and one of the best I ever heard, but that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the photo.
The photo is very interesting, I think. I have taken it in the entrance hall of the concert house, so the hall where you come, when you enter the building. In the background you can see photos of artists who have performed in the hall in the past. I recognise the French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, one of my favourites (third photo from the left). It’s a pity that he’ll not sing this evening, though he certainly would have fit in the cast, which performed Nicola Porpora’s opera Carlo il Calvo. What’s just outside the photo are the bar, where you can buy a drink, and the box office and information desk. However, most interesting is not the entrance hall itself and what you find there but the people in the hall.
In the centre of the photo, two attendants are standing behind a desk in front of the door that leads to the auditorium. They’ll check the tickets, when the visitors go to their seats. On the right, two women come from the toilet room. In the centre, in front of the attendants, a couple is standing near a table. They look bored. More to the left, a couple looks at something one of them has in his or her hands. Is it the programme of the concert? Apparently, they are talking about it. Far left, groups of people are talking with each other. In the foreground you can see two other attendants with things around their necks: they sell programme booklets. A woman opens her handbag. She wants to buy a booklet. Behind this woman, a man has two glasses with wine in his hands. Are both glasses for himself? One glass will be for the woman in front of him, although she makes the impression to ignore him. Then, a little bit more to the right, a man is reading in a programme booklet. The glass of wine on his table is already empty. His wife seems to be bored.
I’ll leave it to you to describe what the other people in the entrance hall are doing. All these people seem to do different things. In a sense this is true. Nevertheless, their activities – if you can call them activities – have one thing in common: the people in the hall are waiting. The concert has not yet begun, you cannot yet enter the auditorium and you have come well in advance, so that you need not to be in a hurry. The consequence is that you have to wait, and that you must fill the time that you are waiting. Each person does it in a different way. Some enjoy drinking a glass of wine. Others buy a program booklet and read yet some information about the concert. Again others have a social talk with partner, friends or acquaintances. Others are bored. Only the programme sellers are not really waiting but they are actively working.
I think that waiting is one of the most underestimated and ignored human activities. I have searched for studies about it on the internet, but I couldn’t find them. Nevertheless, we spend much time in life on waiting! Many people find it boring and look for useful activities to fill their waiting time. In the entrance hall, you buy a programme booklet and maybe you find yet some information there about the concert that you didn’t know. You drink a glass of wine, not because you are thirsty but because you simply enjoy it, and it fills your time. Other people “work” on their social contacts: they are networking. It’s not that they are preparing business contracts, but just talking with others helps maintaining their social relations. Again others don’t know what to do: they are bored.
I can say a lot more about this photo; about what the people there are doing and what the meaning of what they are doing is. However, I think that you understand what I want to say. At first sight, the photo seems to show nothing that is worth to talk about. Maybe, technically it is a good photo, but why would you take a photo of a group of people standing together or apart in a hall? Upon closer understanding, however, this photo is not trivial at all. It shows one of the most common pastimes in life and how we fill it: waiting. This photo also shows that all waiting is not the same, even when we are waiting for the same, which is a concert in this case. For some waiting is being bored; for others it is reading the programme booklet; for again others it is social talk; etc. All these activities are not activities of their own, but they are ways of waiting. In this sense, this photo captures in one image a sociological theory, a theory of waiting (a theory that must yet be written, though). The photo shows real life; life as it is.
By the way, I took this photo because I, too, was waiting for the concert and I didn’t know what else to do than taking this photo. Also this photo is waiting. The photo depicts itself. 

Random quote
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there.

Ludwig Wittgenstein  (1889-1951)

How to become inspired

Inspiration does not come out of the blue. Everybody can become inspired, but you have to work for it. The essence is: fill your brain. Once your brain has been filled with the right stuff, ideas will get flushed out. This is the main lesson from Dijksterhuis’s book Inspiration and this is how creativity works. But all this is yet very abstract, although in my past blogs I have written already a little bit about the practice of inspiration. In order to get a better idea of how inspiration works, let me now follow the process step by step. Again this blog is based on Dijksterhuis’s book, but I don’t literally follow it. Below is how I see it after having read the book.
Ideally, we can discern six steps in the process of inspiration. Once, Gandhi was travelling somewhere in South Africa, but was thrown out of the train because he travelled first-class and non-whites were not allowed to do so, even when they had a first-class ticket (as Gandhi had). This inspired Gandhi to fight for the rights of the Indian people in South Africa. Fighting against repression became his leading theme of life, his evocation. However, how often doesn’t it happen that people think that they feel a calling, an evocation, to do something, to become someone, like a philosophical blogger, or someone who fights against repression, but then they see so many obstacles, or their plans are so vague that they don’t know how to realize their calling. Or after some time the evocation simply fades away. The process that started with your evocation can only go on when your motivation is big enough to try to overcome the obstacles, to avoid that your evocation fades away, etc.. In other words, you must be so motivated that you really begin to work on your plan. Such a motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic. In Gandhi’s case it was both. He was simply outraged about his treatment in the train (intrinsic motivation) and if he didn’t want to accept the injustice done to him, he would have to change the law (extrinsic motivation).
If we have come that far, so if we have a theme of action and a motivation to act on it, the actual inspiration process starts. We can work on it hap snap, but then probably we’ll not come very far. In order to reach your goal, you must concentrate on it. For Gandhi this meant that he had to study the South African laws and the problems of the Indian population in SA caused by those laws; he had to win the support of the Indians in SA; and so on. However, such a concentration on the problem and on the world it belongs to can only be effective, if you are open to the opportunities that the world offers you. Look with an open eye at the world and let yourself being stimulated by the world you are in. By doing so, Gandhi developed his methods of nonviolent action. But often, ideas do not develop immediately after you have studied a problem, have listed your action possibilities, etc. Often it doesn’t immediately pop up in your mind what to do. You need some time to process the information you got. It needs some incubation period in your mind. This is not an activity you can do, for it is an unconscious process in your unconscious mind. I don’t know how Gandhi did it, but in India he lived some time in an ashram, a place of retreat. Moreover, Gandhi spent a lot of time spinning yarn, which is just the type of quiet activity that stimulates your unconscious mind. And when you do all this, then sooner or later, you’ll get ideas what to do, with a sense of eureka or in a flow.
And the sixth step? In fact, it’s not a step. It’s the grease that makes the steps seamlessly go into one another: transpiration. Or simply: work hard.

Random quote
Scientists live in a world full of controversies about what to accept as true.

Arjen Kleinherenbrink paraphrasing Bruno Latour (1947-2022)

The eureka feeling

Everybody knows it. Suddenly you have the feeling “I got it!”. You got an excellent idea. You got the solution of a difficult problem. You were already looking for it for a long time and you had invested a lot of time in it, but you couldn’t solve the problem. Then suddenly, during a walk, or when you take a shower or who knows when; at a moment that you were not thinking about it; then all at once: “I got it”. And even more, the solution seems very simple. “It cannot be true”, you think. Such a simple solution for such a complicated problem? You become euphoric. When this happens, you have the eureka feeling.
Not only problem solvers can get the eureka feeling. Artists can have it, too, when they get a brilliant artistic idea. Writers can also have it. Everybody can have the eureka feeling in the right circumstances.
The story goes that Archimedes (287-212 BC), a Greek mathematician and scientist, was asked to determine the volume of a certain object with an irregular shape, namely a golden crown. At that moment Archimedes didn’t know the answer, but, (and now I quote the Wikipedia) “while taking a bath [Archimedes noticed] that the level of the water in the tub rose as he got in, and realized that this effect could be used to determine the golden crown's volume. … Archimedes then took to the streets naked so excited by his discovery that he had forgotten to dress, crying ‘Eureka!’ ”, which is Greek for “I have found it”. (Greek: ηὕρηκα). Since then, this happy feeling of excitement to have made an important discovery, having got an important idea and the like is called the “eureka feeling”. If
Archimedes would have been an Englishman or an American, maybe we would have called it the “I-got-it feeling” or the “I-have-it feeling”.
The Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis tells us in his book Inspiration , chapter 7, that Wolfgang Goethe called the eureka feeling a “brilliant experience of the mind”. According to him, so Dijksterhuis, it had three characteristics: 1) It gives us a sense of god equality; 2) the eureka experience comes suddenly; 3) the eureka experience gives us “an idea of the eternal harmony of our existence”. A recent scientific article ascribed four characteristics to the eureka feeling, so Dijksterhuis: 1) The experience comes suddenly; 2) it causes a positive affect; 3) the person having the experience is convinced that the idea is correct; 4) the idea enters our conscious mind in an easy, smooth way.
The feeling involves also that the new idea is too good not to be true. Moreover, it is often very simple. However, this can make that after some time you start to think: The idea is so simple, so is it really new? Has anyone else not thought the same before and used the idea? This can make that you tend to keep the idea for yourself, for some time or for always.
More about it in my next blog, but how do we get an idea; especially an idea that can give us an eureka feeling? No, new ideas don’t come from nowhere. It’s not so that I, a philosopher and sociologist, suddenly can get a brilliant idea about, say, the origin of dark matter in the cosmos. Getting ideas is a matter of working hard. You must delve deep into your subject before you can get the kind of ideas that will give you a eureka feeling. You must study the ins and outs of your subject and be continuously busy with it. You must fill your unconscious mind with all knowledge you can find about your subject. And then, while you don’t know it, when your unconscious mind has time for it, it begins to process all you have put in it. Your unconscious mind is especially busy with it, when you are relaxing, so when it has some free time to pay attention to it; when it is not busy with your other daily sores, like your marital problems, the education of your children or how to become a better runner. And then suddenly, during a walk, when you take a shower or who knows when, at a moment that you are not consciously thinking about it, then suddenly it happens. Suddenly, it is “I got it!”. “It cannot be true”, you think. “Such a simple solution for such a complicated problem?” And then you become excited: “It’s true; I got it.” You become euphoric. When this happens, you have the eureka feeling.

Source:
Ap Dijksterhuis, Inspiratie. Hoe we tot grootse prestaties komen, chapter 7.

Imagination

No blog this week, because I have been on holiday. Instead, this photo. I hope that it triggers your imagination and gives you inspiration. Next week a blog as usual!