A plate and a spoon

Photographers love to tell stories by means of their photos. These can be simple holiday pictures that tell where you have been, or family photos that say something about your family life, or the photos of a party that show with which friends you were there. Photos can tell also complicated stories, like the life of the Native Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, as Edward S. Curtis did; or the life in a refugee centre; or how the royals live, to mention a few arbitrary examples. One of my favourite photographers who tells stories is Walker Evans, who documented the effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Photographers see stories everywhere. That’s why they always take a camera with them. Nowadays that’s easy for everybody has a smartphone with a camera, anyway (and with a smartphone camera you can take excellent photos), but in the past you had to take a “real” camera with you. Photographers always see photographic themes, wherever they go. They see the world with a photographic eye. It is the same for me, being a photographer as well. My photographic eye is particularly specialized in seeing objects on the ground that people have lost or left behind (see here and here). So, lately I went to Utrecht, and when I left the central railway station via the passage under the station, my eye was caught by the food plate and the spoon of the picture at the top of this blog. Of course, I had a camera with me and I took the photo. Why was that plate with a spoon there on the ground? It is not obvious to find a plate with a spoon on the ground in a city. You could expect there wads of paper, packages, cigarettes, food waste, or maybe objects lost such as you can see in the links just given. But a food plate with a spoon? It was as if someone had been sitting there eating a meal. Maybe this was what had happened there, for covered passages, like the one under the Utrecht central railway station, often attract homeless people who sometimes even live permanently in such places. Although the latter doesn’t happen in this passage, it may have been a homeless person who went to this sheltered place for eating a meal. Or was it a traveller who had left the plate and the spoon there? Someone who had bought a meal in the railway station upstairs and had eaten it there? And had the background, the photo on the wall of the underpass, something to do with the scene? Had the person who ate the meal there chosen that place on purpose or had he or she ignored or not even noticed the photo? (By the way, once, some 50 years ago, the passage under the railway station was also used as a possible bomb shelter in case of war; to remember this photos on the wall show the technical room of the bomb shelter) So my thoughts went on about what might have happened there in this underpass; and about who this person who had eaten a meal there might have been and what this person might have eaten.

The railway station itself is very clean as it is permanently cleaned, but this pedestrian tunnel can be quite dirty because it doesn’t belong to the railway station. So when I passed it one day later again, the plate and the spoon were still there. However, there was a difference. Now the spoon was on the ground about one to two meters to the right of the plate, while the plate had been moved a little bit to the left (see the second photo). What had happened in the meantime? Had someone given a kick against the plate? But then the plate would have been moved much farther from its original place. More likely is that someone had accidentally kicked on the plate, so that the spoon was levered up and fell down a little bit to the right.
The story doesn’t end here, as the third photo shows. A few days later I walked again through the underpass: They still hadn’t cleaned it and plate and spoon

were still there! Again their position had changed, or rather the position of the spoon was still the same as in the second picture but the plate had been moved a few metres to the left. Now the most likely explanation is that someone had kicked the plate, as if it were a ball, but had ignored the spoon (or even hadn’t seen it).
Photographers love to tell stories. In this way they try to capture life. However, the story behind a scene is not always immediately clear, and maybe it will never become clear what happened. Just this can make a photo of a scene of life so intriguing! Or rather, not the photo as such is intriguing, but what we see in the photo, for a photo is a representation of what it depicts, and certainly a street photo as the one I analysed here is. At first, the subject of the photo discussed seems boring, but is it? As we have just seen, the plate and the spoon in the photos are not “just” a plate and a spoon, but there is a real person behind it. Like a homeless person who may have a tragic life story. Or maybe it was a traveller who had just left the railway station and was in a hurry to an appointment and had no time to take a meal in a restaurant. Seen this way the photos in this blog and the scenes they depict are not banal stories. They give a glimpse of life as it happens; life as it is lived by everybody. For doesn’t life exist most of the time of such banal scenes tied together? But are they really banal? I think they aren’t, for life couldn’t happen without a stream of such “banal” and daily events. They are the background of what people often see as the “real” life but this real life is not possible without such a background. That’s also the value of such simple, “banal” photos: They show the building blocks of life, the foundation of what makes life valuable. But alas, as in the photo discussed, often a photo that depicts such a building block can be no more than that, for often we don’t know and cannot find out to which and whose foundation the building block belongs.

Random quote
When someone asks a stupid question, one must ensure that one does not give him an answer: otherwise one is just as stupid as the one asking the question.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) 

Honouring the winner: Diogenes

The running track at Olympia, Greece, part of the sports complex
 where the Ancient Olympic Games were held

The Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (404?-323 BC), who lived in Corinth in his later years, was known for his provocative behaviour towards other people. Some would call him stimulating and challenging in a positive way, others would call him irritating or were even afraid of him and tried to avoid him. But Diogenes liked it to watch people and comment on what they did.
Once, during the Isthmian Games (a kind of Olympic Games) in Corinth, Diogenes went there, too, but not as a spectator to watch the athletes and for relaxing and eating and being together, as many people do, but for observing the people and their behaviour. For on such occasions people most show who they really are. Inhabitants of Corinth ignored him but people from elsewhere – and some came even from Libya or Sicily or Massalia (now Marseille, in France) – flocked around him and wanted to hear what he had to say or wanted to test him. But when cross-examined by Diogenes, many fled, afraid of his provocations. The poor and the ordinary, military commander or authority, whatever their position, Diogenes treated everyone equally. People saw Diogenes as he was, in optima forma (compare my blog “Diogenes in anecdotes”). The organisers of the Games didn’t know what to do. Diogenes’s behaviour was not provocative and irritating enough to chase him away, but ignoring him was also no option. But when Diogenes took a victory crown and placed it on his own head, the authorities found he went too far and ordered Diogenes to take it off and do nothing unlawful. “Why”, so Diogenes, “is it unlawful for me to wear a victory crown but not for others?” “Because, Diogenes, you haven’t won a victory.” But Diogenes returned that he had defeated many great competitors, formidable people; men who were greater than all those athletes around here, who were nothing but bundles of meat fighting against each other. So he was at least as entitled to wear a victory crown as these meaty victors. And by awarding the crown to himself it was he who made these Games famous.
By doing and talking so Diogenes held up a mirror to the organisers and admirers of the Isthmian Games for he showed that those who praise themselves and all who praise them and cheer them on are held in esteem, but that those who say the truth and show the mistakes and limits of those narcissists and their followers are despised and humiliated.
Then Diogenes saw a man coming from the running track, surrounded by a cheering crowd. He asked him what had happened “We have won!” the man said. “The men’s two-hundred-yard dash!” Diogenes was not impressed: “What kind of achievement is that. Did it make you more intelligent for having beaten your fellow runners? Or more moderate? Or less cowardly or less dissatisfied? Not at all! And it will not make your future life better.” “Maybe so”, the winner replied, “but I am the fastest man among all other Greeks.” “So what,” so Diogenes. “You are not faster than rabbits or deer, the fastest of all but also the flightiest. They are afraid of other animals and of humans and live miserably.” In this way the argument and Diogenes’s provocations went on for some time.
Dio of Prusa (c. 40 – c. 115 AD), the itinerant Cynic philosopher who handed down this story to us, concludes: “By conversing with the man in this way Diogenes made many in attendance look down on the footrace, and the man himself went away downcast and much humbler. Thus, Diogenes offered humanity no small service here: Whenever he saw someone putting on airs and going crazy over some worthless matter, he brought that person down to size a bit and removed a mote of ignorance, in the same way people prick and puncture swollen or inflated boils.” But alas, listening to wise words and understanding provocations and acting accordingly is only for the wisest and the greatest. Those who really have a say in what happens usually are not of that kind and don’t accept criticism. They prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of their egos. And most of their followers accept it.
On the same occasion, so Dio of Prusa, Diogenes saw two horses tied together fighting and kicking until one broke away and fled. Then Diogenes crowned the horse that stayed behind and proclaimed for it an Isthmian prize because it had won at kicking. How many people today take it seriously, when such a thing happens – and it does happen more often than most of us think – and don’t see the joke of it if not the point of it?

Source
Chapter 7. Best in Show (Dio Chrysostom, Oration 9, “Isthmian Discourse”), in: How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism. Diogenes and the Cynics. Edited and translated by M. D. Usher. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022.

An advice
Crates of Thebes (365-285 BC) to his wife Hipparchia of Maroneia ( c. 350 – c. 280 BC), who had given birth to their child:
When he begins to walk and talk, fit him not out with a sword … but with a staff, a cloak and a knapsack, which can give better protection against people than swords.

Double prevention

I find cases of multiple causation and especially cases of multiple prevention very interesting. To keep it simple, I want to present here a case of double prevention, which I read in Woodward 2021, pp. 303-305. I want to present it without much discussion. I mainly follow Woodward’s text. However, in fact the example discussed is not one by Woodward himself but it has been thought out by Ned Hall.
What are cases of double prevention? Woodward defines them as “cases in which the occurrence of some event or process, c₁, would prevent some outcome, e (which would occur in the absence of c₁), but in which some second event, c₂, prevents the occurrence of the potential preventer, c₂, thereby allowing e to occur.” Note that the type of causation used here is counterfactual causation (see my blog last week). Woodward discusses an example from Ned Hall 2004, which illustrates the basic idea, so he says: Suzy’s plane will bomb a target (e) if not prevented by doing so. An enemy pilot will shoot down Suzy’s plane (c₁) unless prevented from doing so. Billy, piloting another plane, shoots down the enemy pilot (c₂), and Suzy bombs the target. Suzy’s bombing counterfactually depends on whether Billy shoots down the enemy pilot. What makes this case interesting is that, so Woodward, some (or many) find the following claim problematic, if the case is given without additional information: Billy’s shooting down of the enemy pilot caused Suzy’s bombing. I must say that I find this claim also problematic, for isn’t it so that it is Suzy and not Billy who does the bombing? However, Billy could have refrained from shooting down the enemy pilot, so in this sense Billy has some responsibility for the performance of Suzy’s action, and in this sense he is guilty of the bombing. In the counterfactual sense Billy caused the bombing indeed, in the case as it is. Why then do we hesitate to say that Billy caused Suzy’s bombing?
Hall, so Woodward, mentions two reasons why many have their doubts about the claim:
- Locality: Billy’s shooting takes place many hours before the actual bombing and at a big distance from the bombing. There seems to be no direct spatiotemporal relationship between the firing and the bombing.
- Extrinsicness: One doesn’t feel that there is any psychological, practical or other relation between the Billy’s firing and Suzy’s bombing. For instance, – another example by Hall/Woodward – suppose that the enemy’s superiors were about to order him not to attack Suzy when Billy shot him down. Then Suzy’s bombing would no longer depend on Billy’s firing, even though the variant seems “intrinsically” just like the original case, with the exception that the intentions of the enemy’s superiors had changed. Then, so Woodward, we must admit that the connection between Bill’s action and the destruction of Suzy’s target, so between shooting and death, has become different. Suzy’s bombing would have taken place, anyway, whether Billy would or wouldn’t have shot down the enemy.
Much can be said about this case of double prevention, which I’ll not do, as said. Only this. Life situations as the one in the example are complicated and cannot be reduced to three factors, as in the original example. As the changed version illustrates, many intervening factors are possible. Here the enemy’s superiors are mentioned, but it could also be that Suzy’s (Billy’s) superiors had decided to send another plane as well to bomb Suzy’s target in case Suzy would fail, and without doubt other such intervening factors are possible. At most we can say that Suzy’s bombing is dependent on Billy’s (successful) firing but Billy’s firing does not make Suzy’s bombing and the destruction of her target happen. The latter depends on Suzy, the instructions of her superiors, a colleague who can replace her, if she fails, etc. However, in case we conclude that Billy doesn’t cause Suzy’s bombing, this doesn’t involve that we deny his responsibility for Suzy’s bombing. Responsibility is not the same as causation. It would be interesting to compare both. Because in the case presented many additional factors can intervene in Billy’s firing and in the relation between this firing and Suzy’s bombing, we can call the case open. We could compare it with a closed case, in which Billy’s and Suzy’s possibilities are limited to acting or abstaining from acting. We could call such a case also mechanistic. In his 2014 Woodward discusses also such a “mechanistic” case (pp.307ff). I’ll not treat it here, but then, maybe, we would conclude that the mechanistic actor or factor that takes the place of Billy would be “responsible” for what Suzy’s mechanistic substitute did, indeed, if not that he or it had caused it, surely and certainly.

Random quote
Digitalisation weakens the community bond insofar as it has a debodying effect. Digital communication is debodied communication.

Buyung-Chul Han (1959-)