The difference between the natural sciences on the one hand, and, on the other the social sciences and humanities is in their subject matter. Yet, people’s evaluations of the two groups of sciences is based in a difference in methodologies.
The critical difference then is that one group of methods—the “scientific” ones—explains events in such manner that we can predict without exception the next occurrence of one; whereas the other group of methods—the social sciences or humanities ones—does not include any such capacity. Instead it has to accept the occurrence of certain events and then to look back at what might help us understand their occurrence.
The “scientific” group of methods could be said to be pro-active; the “humanities”-group to be retro-active.

The Retrograde in Physics

If someone drops something, physics can predict how it will drop … if it has a full view of the initial conditions. So, if the thing is a feather and while it is travelling down a sudden wind gushes out to carry the feather upwards, physical theory should be held able to predict how it would proceed, and so on. In experimental situations these initial conditions are controlled and hence prediction can be decisive. In the real world, however, due to complexity and sheer number, the initial conditions can only be controlled up to a point. I would want to conclude that in real-life the predictive powers of said scientific methodologies presuppose an infinite, total insight in all the relevant conditions (and which conditions would be relevant, and for which theoretical reasons?).
Pro-active explanation depends on accessibility of data. This means that in the absence of absolute knowledge these methodologies too must allow for an element of retroactive assembling.

The Pro-active in Humanities

The insights produced by interpretation and other humanities methods help us understand our own stance in life—to co-determine how we conceive of our selves. In this reflexivity humanities methods produce states of affairs, and, understanding such effects might allow us to predict certain events. This provides, both, an explication of how to deal with the relevant initial conditions and an argument for limiting the approach of humanities or social science experiments on ethical grounds.

Leibniz and Voltaire

The explanatory claims of science appeal to Leibniz’s ideal, that our world be the best of possible worlds.
Leibniz argued in his Essais de théodicée (1710) that our world is the best of all possible worlds: God would only have created this world because it is logical—even He has to accommodate logic. Leibniz concluded that this meant that the present is the best of all possible worlds: because everything hangs together with everything and the reality of the world simply assumes that this coherence is supportive. In plain language, this argument boils down to saying that this world is good because it is. The Only One capable of actually seeing this is, of course, God with His infinite understanding. Science has the beautiful task to reach for this divine perspective.
Voltaire thought differently about the goodness of this world, in Candide, ou l’optimisme (1759): everywhere where Candide, the text’s main character, came, he confronted misery and misbehaviour.

We could think of our world as determined by laws of the universe, and in a sense this is unsurmountably true. But knowing what is going to happen next is something different altogether.

If it isn’t objects that you perceive, but colours and forms, or, even, sense-data, then when will you know what to do? Which processes are required for your insight (in the nature of the whatever that is coming towards you) to surface?

The anticipation need not be all-inclusive, but will need to include all that the subject needs to keep feeling at home in his surroundings.

The advantage is that farmed out perception holistically involves the embodied organism as the subject of perception as the agent he is. It does not treat a perception as consisting of an atomistic slice of time providing (through difficult neurological physical causal processes issuing in some brain event) incommensurable data streams issuing from conceptually distinct aspects of the world which generate skeptical challenges to our intuitions of being able to perceive the real things.

Now, watch these two films on Youtube: the first, from the BBC-series The Mind’s Eye, gives you a nice impression of the illusions; the second shows the way the room apparently is built (a spoiler, so to speak). Try watching the films without sound (because the sounds will distract you from your own thoughts as they provide some explanation or other—neither one holds much promise, I think):
1. BBC
2. Ramachandran explanation (the simulation starts at 19 seconds).

Perception, Depiction, or neither?

First, is the Ames room a perceptual situation? We, the viewers, most certainly are not in the environment of the room. The simulation in the second film shows clearly how we are stood outside, and how we are supposed to look in through a small hole in one of the walls. That means that the situation is a trompe l’oeuil, requiring the viewer to be unnaturally fixed in a particular spot (because in any other spot the illusion would fail to show.) So our perception is non-egocentrical: if we move nothing changes in the thing viewed (Currie), which is very extraordinary, and hence it is fair to say that it is not at all clear what the Ames room tells us about perception. Would the twins take each other as growing and shrinking like we do, or would they, rather, be puzzled by what they see? (Has anyone cared to ask them?)

Why Fixation Inhibits Perception

It is not intuitively immediately clear that fixation inhibits perception, because, we want to think, if we see X that counts as perceiving X. My view here is that seeing merely counts as one aspect of perceiving—provided by abstracting from perception; but perception involves embodied agency (a spatio-temporal structure) and hence a veridical synchronicity of everything which enters the mind through he senses.

Holism about Perception

A holist theory of perception (which leads automatically, I argue elsewhere, to naive direct realism) involves someone who notices something visually to the effect of immediately attributing characteristics to be corroborated by many of the other so-called senses as well as by repeated and slightly altered vision (we see a chair and immediately expect it to look so-and-so from the back).

Depicted Trompe L’oeuil

The trompe l’oeuil is depicted, yes: we are watching a film of the trompe l’oeuil. The pictures clearly depict the twins as of different height: you can definitely measure the difference. Or, in different words: in Fig. 1.c. one can see how it is the camera who has made the right twin bigger than the left! We, the viewers of the picture are not fooled by the Ames room, but by its depiction. The picture clearly depicts the lines of floor and ceiling as symmetrical thereby enlarging the right girl, or diminishing the left girl.

a.	b.	c.
Figure 1. The Ames Room (BBC)

Perhaps the Ames room tells us something about depiction? I guess it does—like drawings by Maurits Escher do.

Pictures and Far-off Situations

The Ames room does seem to provide some insight in the similarity and the difference between what we see in a picture and what we see at large distances. First, egocentrical perception: if we see a table with books and a tea pot on it, we know we can grab either one of these objects or look behind them, and so on: if we move the interrelations between the objects change and thus we perceive depth, and we perceive how we might interfere in the world through our actions. Perception tells us all that; there is no need to actually do anything. Perception, however, does not provide us with that sort of information about the clouds above our heads. If we move the interrelations between the clouds do not change accordingly—they change all right, but not according to our movements. For all we know we might be watching a cloud movie.
(Cognitive science, and evolution theory might explain this by saying that we never developed perceptual means to anticipate on moving about in situations at such large distances, and why would we? We would first have to make sure to get there, and once there our perception will inform us in the right egocentrical manner. I am absolutely okay with that.)
Pictures do not present themselves as scenes where the perceivers might actually engage while all they do is put such interaction gradually out of reach on account of the distance. Instead, pictures present situations in a way which conceptually separates them from the perceiver—hence they do not fool us into some sort of illusion. Trompe l’oeuils however, do. They present us with situations which we may be fooled to believe to be able to enter into and interact in whilst demanding that we take up a place which puts us in the spot we are in when we look at the clouds: a spot disallowing us to actually move as perception dictates. Thus, the Ames room is neither a perception nor a picture (although it is presented to us now as depicted in a film).

a.	b.	c.
Figure 2. Construction of the Ames Room (Ramachandran)

Panorama Mesdag

The Panorama Mesdag (in Den Haag) provides a case where all three subjects are at stake at once: as a visitor you will be bodily aware of the railing and the sand just behind it; visually the sand can be seen to extend a certain distance, behind which the vista is taken over by pictures. The trompe l’oeuil is in this that it should be difficult to make out exactly where the real and the depicted sand meet, but little is done to fix the viewer because the situations are meant to be continuous with each other.

– Currie, Gregory. 1998. “The Aesthetics of Photography.” In Image and Mind, 72–74. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
– Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
– Johnston, Mark. 2006. “The Function of Sensory Awareness.” In Perceptual Experience, edited by Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne, 260–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
– McDowell, John. 1994. “Action, Meaning and the Self.” In Mind and World, 87–107. Cambridge, Mass and London, England: Harvard University Press.
____________. 1994. “The content of perceptual experience.” The Philosophical Quarterly 44:190–205.

In class, I posed the question whether or not Lenie Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is a piece of propaganda, or rather documentary as Riefenstahl herself has claimed.
Joseph Goebbels was the minister of propaganda. Propaganda, one could conclude from that, had not acquired the bad name it has today, yet (possibly it was the Nazis who gave it its bad name). So when Riefenstahl claimed that her film was documentary, not propaganda, she probably didn’t mean that there was no propaganda in it, but that she merely recorded whichever propaganda was in it, and did not add to it. That claim can be assessed by looking at the visual arguing going on in the film—like we did.

How might this film serve as source-material for Humanities researchers?

The next question would be whether Humanities researchers can use the film as a source to establish certain truths regarding the Nazi-party rally. That, I think, is still an interesting question. Which facts could be distilled from this film? There is obvious factual material in the shots, but which facts are proven to be true by this material?

Iconic images

After we discussed iconic images—and the thought that the persons in them do not address the camera-person—at one point we noticed that the visual material does not only not depict Hitler as a person (addressing the camera), but refrains from showing members in the audience as persons, as well. This is of course in part due to the fact that they simply weren’t aware of the camera (they used tele-lenses for most of these shots), but that is not relevant for the critical assessment of this film. What is relevant is that Riefenstahl chose to use these images in her film—surely, with the amount of money and cinematic apparatuses she had available she could easily have shot individual portraits of any one person present!

Steve McCurry “Afghan Girl” (The National Geographic girl).

Whether or not someone addresses another person is a subjective matter; something between the addresser and the addressee. How this is depicted is an aspect of visual argument. If we can establish that Triumph of the Will involved an elaborate effort to construct an iconic image, i.e. an image depicting an individual but sacrificing his individuality for the sake of allowing the audience to project a larger ideological tale onto the imagery, then we have identified an element of visual argument in the film.
Some photos seem to offer evidence of the photographed addressing the photographer. I am thinking of photos made by William Klein, and Rineke Dijkstra. (You might want to Google their names to see for yourself.)

When is a visual argument?

We watched the Delta Lloyd-ad and almost effortlessly identified visual arguments in it.
But we haven’t dealt with the question what a visual argument might be like? Can a picture assert (that something is the case)? Can it deny (that something is the case)? Can it question (that something is the case)? To all these questions the answers seems to have to be “no”. If that is so, then how do images argue?

Perhaps we want to conclude that the visual precedes the discursive in argumention? That propositions merely report the argumentation available in the perceptual world out there?

And he refers to how sometimes when a smell hits us we are transported back to a situation from the past. And that we don’t have a more direct, or a roundabout means to remember a smell: you cannot think of a smell and have it recur.

I also like the issue this brings up: is a smell something in us who perceive it or is it clearly an object in the world? I think the latter, and what it makes me argue, next, is that something similar goes for sounds (a piece of music), and, I go on, really only visual information seems to be retained in something similar to pictures in our memory, and: following Wittgenstein, I think our memories are in the objects, and we put them there, back in the old days.

“The concept of the ‘inner picture’ is misleading, for this concept uses the ‘outer picture’ as a model …” Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 196:d.

Imagine this: you are the only person in the world who moves in slow motion. You have no clue about this (of course you don’t), but everyone else can see it happening. So imagine a world where people see one person moving in slow motion, and that one person is you. So there you are.
Now ask yourself: how do you perceive the world?
For the record, it is part of the exercise that you imagine that this has always been the case, so it is not a momentary situation. You are not puzzled in that manner.

So you cross the street—slowly. And while you do it the leaves from the trees blow under you at high speeds, cyclists flash by, pedestrians make speedy gestures that you cannot understand.

Phenomenology is martial art for philosophers.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: “Behind the station”

Re-membering

Remembering could be viewed literally as putting the membered perceptions back into their embodied coherence.

Dreams

One reason why we have difficulty re-membering our dreams: their were never any membered perceptions of the scene dreamed to begin with. Other reasons for said difficulty: dreams consist of brain stimulations that have initially nothing to do with bodily stimulations: the same, or similar, brain modules are stirred during sleep as are activated in real-life, which should account for the fact that we “think” we are perceiving events, when there are none; also: dream consistency has a highly literary aspect: we are in this room and merely associating it with an event from the past transports us there. The associations are lived out in the dream, hence Freud’s interest in them.

Now, when at a reunion, I see, say, Peter, again and think about things he did in those days, things he had said in a certain situation. And I talk to him about these things, and he obviously feels embarassed.
What interests me is an issue to do with responsibility. The thoughts that came up in my mind about the events I then talked about, as well as the talking should be viewed as subsumable under my responsibility. A decision on my part made me talk about them; and the things thought and expressed where things available in my mind, not, yet, in his. These caused his embarassment. Tradition would seem to satisfy itself with this assessment.
But my question is: whence the association? Why did my meeting with Peter stir exactly these thoughts in my mind? Surely, I cannot be held responsibility for the arising of these thoughts which are, one way or the other, retained in my mind. The lay dormant in my mind under no conscious control.
And my hypothesis is that it is Peter himself, or better the perceptually available expressive body he is, who kept the triggers to my thoughts. Was he then responsibile for the arising of the thoughts in me? The further question would be: what is the scope of the attributability of responsibility? I think the mechanisms that make people associate thoughts with situations are epistemologically speaking responsible for how we think, then the thoughts themselves that are “located” in our minds, and, therefore, we should reconcieve “responsibility”.

Wollheim, Richard. 1984. “Cutting the Thread: Death, Madness, and the Loss of Friendship.” Chapter IX of The Thread of Life, 257–84. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gerwen, Rob van. 2009. “De psychologische werkelijkheid van het zelf.” In Vrijheid en verlangen. Liber Amicorum prof. dr. Antoine Mooij, edited by Frans Koenraadt and Ido Weijers, 13–23. Den Haag: Boom Juridische uitgevers.

In “Art and Morality” you study the debate on the possibility of a moral evaluation of art;
In “Mind and Art” collections of articles by one author are studied and taken to the task by comparison with the debates in the journals
In “Capita Selecta Philosophy of Art” a monograph is chosen of a modern classical author in contemporary philosophy of art.

All three literature modules can be done on three levels: 2, 3, and Masters, and may start in any period. (Of course, prerequisite must be met for the higher levels).

You should find the specifics via my academic site.

Since 2005, I have also included grade-lists with the literature courses, behind lock and barrel, but students enlisted have the key (when not, ask for it). I advise you to regularly check all the data on the grades list, and to immmediately contact me (preferably through email) should you find anything that seems wrong or incomplete to you.If your number is not on the list, this may be because I simply do not have it. Please provide me with your studentnumber.
By the way, the grade-lists have no official status and cannot normally be used as legal proof.

By the way, I am not bashing the distinction between real and fictional represented worlds. I am merely urging that our analysis start on the right footing.

Currie, Gregory. 1998. Image and Mind. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
van Gerwen, Rob. 2002. “De ontologische drogreden in de analytische esthetica.” Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 94:109–123.
____________. submitted. “An Ontological Fallacy in Analytic Aesthetics.”

Does it mean that our perceptions are projections of the perceiver and the world is not real? I don’t think so. But we should ask first how it is that we know that the world is real.

Srebnik’s Hopes Shattered

Moral witnesses have no smaller task than to prove that the atrocities were real, and to show the extent to which they were real. Srebnik standing in front of the church amongst fellow villageans, doesn’t say a word, and yet his mere presence, and the historical sensation this cuases in the others, proves the ease with which in earlier days the nazi-atrocities could have taken place—under the eyes of these or other people in their everyday surroundings.
The mere effort of guessing what Srebnik is going through exactly within this scene, can be interpreted in two ways. We may speculate as to how he relives the historical events that left him as the sole surviving Jew of the whole village. But such speculations are not even called for. The scene itself demonstrates the risks Margalit ascribes to moral witnessing: the risk of not finding that moral community one hopes for. The chruch scene unmistably brings home to Srebnik the realisation that these fellow villageans are not part of that hoped for community—Srebnik can be seen to resist judging them.
The audience of the film hopes to form part of that community when they don’t, but one cannot be sure, can one? What with the villageans–simple plain people–failing so bluntly.

In Defence of Lanzmann’s approach

In all, I think Lanzmann did a good thing confronting “his” interviewees with historical, or historically relevant sites. He did not trust the studios to be capable of stirring the memories sufficiently—both quantitatively, qua force, and qualitatively, qua detail. Of course, in any other situation, such as a studio, or a shopping mall, relevant narratives might come up. But the risk of these narratives to not surpass the stories told by the moral witnesses to themselves to try and control the historical events or to simply inform others of the necessary details, would be real. These narratives too would be vulnerable to attacks from holocaust deniers objecting to any particular claim made in these narratives as being objectively correct.
Next to this, Lanzmann provided the calmth necessary for the audience on the one hand, to fully recognise the historical site, and, on the other, the moral witnesses to show their own (psychological) reality before the camera. The camera movement generally is slow, the editing sparse and as non-intruding as possible.

Lanzman might have visited the witnesses in their homes, providing them with the secureness they might really need psychologically, but he didn’t. Had he done it, this would have contaminated what normal lives these people have been capable of mustering in the years since their humiliation in the camps, for themselves, and their next of kin. That would have repeated the Nazi genocide more than the approach that was eventually chosen.

Spielberg

In response to Lanzmann’s film, Spielberg did two things. He made Schindler’s List (you may want to read Lanzmann’s critique of that film), and …

[..] established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to gather video testimonies from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. [..] Within several years, the Foundation’s Visual History Archive held nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages, representing 56 countries; it is the largest archive of its kind in the world. (From: USC Shoah Foundation Institute)

Contexts for Testimonials

We discussed the legal and scientific flaws of (moral) testimonials as they showed in the trial against John Demjanjuk (read Draaisma about it). Is it safe to conclude that the courthouse is not the right context for a moral tstimonial to be induced, for one, because the questions posed there are far too restricting, “leading”—which in a court of law seems excusable as the aim is to find the truth about matters. The court needn’t be interested in how it felt–or should it be?
What then are we to think of the context the Shoah Visual History Foundation provided for the witnesses: a cold studio, utterly neutral to any historical existentials. Perhaps they chose these circumstances to interfere as little as possible with the lifes of the survivors, and to protect them from reliving the horrors.

Questions Concluding

I conclude by putting two questions before the reader:
1. What value are the latter types of testimonial if they are not based in a real reliving–for us?
2. What value do they have for the witnesses themselves? We can be sure that their testimonial will have reinduced the storm of nightmares that pesters survivors, if it has ever left them. Yet, the witnesses cannot be expected to have learned mucht for themselves of their accounts, which may have been rehearsed over the years, adn, now, are repeated in front of the cameras in a neutral place. The narrative rather than its experiential anchorage.

Perhaps someone feels confident enough to take up the challenge of charging a criticism against the Shoah Foundation Institute. The confidence is needed to ward one off of any too hesitant dismissals, as, obviously, in itself the project is important as an effort to retain the testimonials of those will die in the next few years. It is just that they might have been triggered in more fruitful conditions, such as those provided by Lanzmann.

farmed out perception

All this has to do with how people are in the world, as embodied perceivers. How their perception of the world surrounding them consists in the recognition of possible or effected actions. Memories, I think, consist in this that they are refound in the places where these anticipated actions were farmed out to.
That the reality of the memories does not necessarily require the site to be scientifically correctly real, shows from the devastating effects Auschwitz will have on its ever visitors, even though large parts of the camp were reconstructed to serve as a memorial site. It still functions thus, even though it is reconstructed. memory has little to do with the physical reality of the processes it refers to.
These latter remarks await further elaboration, though some of that can be found on my site:

on addiction; on tactile perception; on >> memory; on the self (in Dutch); >> Plato’s cave-myth

Finally a quote from Ewout van der Knaap, seemingly in support of my views, although I am not sure whether he would mean it as literal as I do. He seems to refer to cultural contexts, rather than the physical context the witness finds himself in:

“Every testimony is a choice of memories and is framed within the situation in which the testimony is put forward. We therefore need to consider the context in which the speaker remembers.” (14)
van der Knaap, Ewout. 2006. “The Construction of Memory in Nuit et Brouillard.” In Uncovering the Holocaust. The International Reception of Night and Fog, edited by Ewout van der Knaap, 7–34. London & New York: Wallflower Press.
Lanzmann, Claude. 1985. Shoah. An Oral History of the Holocaust. New York: Pantheon Books.
____________. 1994. “Schindler’s List: een onmogelijk verhaal (Schindler’s List is an impossible story—my tr.).” NRC Handelsblad 26/03/1994:11.
Margalit, Avishai. 2002. “A Moral Witness.” Chapter 5 of The Ethics of Memory, 147–182. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.

This concerns the following issue: is a representation of one particular event necessarily representative for its universalised variety, in our case the whole story of the holocaust? What is it that makes us think that, in the present case, our answer should be “no”?
Surely, a film about a particular love affair (say, Kramer vs. Kramer) is not automatically held to be representative for all love affairs, nor even only for all affairs in Western, or even, Norh American culture? We treat it as the depiction of the affair of two individuals.
What would our response be if someone were to critique Kramer vs. Kramer for giving the wrong picture of other love affairs, or of love, generally. To us, that might seem overstated. Yet, with regard to the shoah, this kind of critique does seem to be appropriate.

What is the conceptual relation between representing a token of a type, and being representative for the type?

Speciesism is the reproach that one discriminate members of the others species to privilege those of one’s own. There is an element of truth in this resistance to such self-upheaval. I would like to use the term in a different sense here, though. When one looks at ethical debates about the problems of contemporary life, and science, one finds that for each and every aspect of a decision tragic cases are presented which, it is argued, should be universalised over. The resultant stalemates are inherent in this approach. We know from centuries of literary texts that tragedies come up in every angle of human life. They are individual; they cannot, at least not straightforwardly be universalised over. Thus, a debate about whether or not we should abort embryos with a genetic disposition for some particular form of cancer ends with some or other political decision, to be run over in another ten years by the next debate, and, what is even more tragical—I think ethics itself is tragic—by law suits and new scientific developments. There is no stopping science.
One way to deal with this predicament is by speciesism. First, it must be established, as I did above, what it means to be a member of a species, then we can counter every development that tampers with such essence. We cannot discuss cosmetic surgery by pointing at tragic cases—even though they may teach us things—and universalise over them, as there are bound to be found tragedies on either side of the dilemmas. Instead, cosmetic surgery cannot possibly be defended by reference to what it means to be a member of the human species, as one’s children will not look like their beautiful, cosmetically constructed parents.

Margalit, Avishai. 2002. “A Moral Witness.” Chapter 5 of The Ethics of Memory, 147–182. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.

I should, though, rather speak about my philosophical heroes here. David Hume (and his openness to habit and association), John Locke’s openness to the existential powers of perception (though he, and Descartes, mistakenly initiated corpuscular physics), Martin Heidegger’s of what it means to be-in-the-world (apart from his magical linguistic trics), Jean-Paul Sartre (minus his cartesianisms, and his ontological reading of freedom), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (without the woolly language), but above all and with hardly any reserve: Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later thought (but I even got to loving some of his tenets in the TLP), and those faithful to his insights, which still need uncovering, such as Richard Wollheim and Graham McFee. Then, J.J. Gibson, John McDowell, and David Wiggins.

Now if something cannot be represented, then surely it can be misrepresented. (Rather, every representation of it would be a misrepresentation.) This leads to the question Berel Lang addressed: Is it possible to Misrepresent the Holocaust? Lang critically responds to positions, defended at a symposium, that the nature of historical representations does not depend on facts but on the narrative chosen by the writer, because, arguably, there are no facts and everything in this area depends on interpretation. Lang disagrees with this relativism, and tries to defend some sort of historical realism. His thesis: yes, the holocaust can be misrepresented; some representations are bound to be wrong.

Perhaps now we can ask whether Lanzmann’s resistance to representation of the shoah can be qualified. Perhaps, we can represent the holocaust (and is it too farfetched to say that Lanzmann himself proved the point: surely, he represented the holocaust), although, perhaps not by photographic footage (perhaps that is what Lanzmann meant, to begin with, when he said that he believed that there is a ban on depiction).

We see further corroboration (not: proof, of course) of this thesis in how Hotel Modern chose puppets in “Kamp”; how Art Spiegelman chose to draw a comic book, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; and how Roberto Benigni used comedy in La vita e bella.

Would one recognise exactly what is depicted by some piece of music? Try this experiment: Perform a piece of music notable for its pictorial nature, hand out a piece of paper to everyone in the audience, and have them sketch the scene depicted.

A translation

Perhaps it is a viable thought to take music’s meaning to consist of some sort of translation? From colours to tones.
How would a Rembrandt self-portrait sound? Would it sound the same way it looks? Would the music be a master piece too? Would it resemble Rembrandt? Would it express what the portrait expresses?
One will probably want to add the extra requirement that the musical result would be sui generis: it will listen to musical norms. But does this allow for all aspects of the painting to be transposed into music

Cross-Categorial Translation

The thought of Cross-Categorial Translation is about the various sense-modalities of perception:

1. From sounds to colour (synaesthesia): this counts as a species of perception if and only if all those who suffer from it agree on the criteria. As they don’t (or at least to my knowledge: seem not to), synaesthesia points to a cock-up in neural connections in these people’s brains. Intriguing though it is, it is a wet-ware failure rather than a cognitive faculty.
2. Movements (and the other primary qualities) can be translated cross-modally! Dropping leaves—visually perceived movements—can be translated into audibly perceived musical movement. (But check the debate between Scruton and Budd on this).

A Kind of Expression?

What is expressed in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? Would a listener with no prior knowledge of the work (or its title) know which season was expressed in either of its parts; would such a listener know that it was a season in the first place that was expressed?
Probably, musical expression is our best bet of understanding music’s meaning. But it is not a kind of representation, is it? (check Van Gerwen).

Budd, Malcolm. 2003. “Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43:209–223.
Gerwen, Rob van. 2001. “Expression as Representation.” In Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting. Art as Representation and Expression, edited by Rob van Gerwen, 135–50. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Scruton, Roger. 2004. “Musical Movement. A Reply to Budd.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 44:184–187.

Yesterday, I explained an argument to my class, and one of the students stared at me in disbelieve. Then, after taking my explanation into consideration, he smiled—some sort of smile of defeat.
Eliminative Materialism claims that that smile is all and only physiology—muscle contractions and neurophysiology.
In a sense, that is indisputably true, but in what sense? And is it saying much about why the student smiles and what the smile means (to him, or me)?

… is in the Configurational Mode

There is only one viable way to be Eliminative Materialist, and that is in the Configurational Mode of Comprehension. (My thesis, but Mink’s terms). We might imagine a post-human future where strong computers “survey” all the “details”, and “describe” the smile exhaustively, thus providing the whole configuration. The major problem with such a configurative survey is that its truth requires the survey to be total.
[I have to put all these terms in quotation marks, as they willl all, in that far future, have changed their present meanings into something inconceivable at present. Which will be the relevant details? What will surveying amount to? And what will describing consist in?]

But what does it amount to?

Of course, such an ultimate description may not involve use of the words “smile”, “defeat”, “response”, “consideration”, “explanation”, etc.—lest Eliminative Materialism would fail its claim of eliminating reference to meaning.
How would this description start, though? Surely, it may not base its beginnings on a description like the one I provided above? That would beg the question. Eliminative Materialism would lose all its acclaimed explanatory powers.

How would it start?

Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that these issues of semantics are successfully avoided—where would the description then start? With which physiological event? Birth? Conception? Any other particular moment? Sunrise at January 8th, 2008? The starting point would have to be legitimated without having recourse to any of the terms used in the description above.
Assuming we allow the eliminativist to start at some moment that we decide upon, for our obvious reasons, but without telling the eliminativist about those reasons—and, similarly, with regard to the moment where her description may stop; What would make the Eliminative Materialist’s description count as a reductionist description of the smile described above?
[What if our student was actually reminded of a certain situation where he himself triumfed over his dominant father, 18 years ago? And his smile concerned the entrance of his mother in that particular situation?].
An Eliminative Materialist scientist might claim he could discover such discrepancies, but how would he come to know what they entail? Surely he would have to reintroduce the semantics he claims to be able to eliminate.

No theoretical description of agency

As a corollary, Eliminative Materialism can never be in a theoretical mode, applying laws, predicting responses. It can, at best, provide us with that Leibnizian God’s eye point of view that is in the Configurational mode, meaning that it will at best provide us with a temporal slice of reality (without any semantic structuring)—correction: not a slice: all of time.
Lastly, supposing that this point of view will indeed ever be reached, what good would it do people in everyday circumstances—apart from providing it with a shadow world consisting of primary qualities alone. We could not relate to Eliminative Materialism’s conclusions and would be asked to obey them without being able to critically assess them.
[Embedded in the heart of modern democracy is a counterdemocratic movement.]

A world without objects or events

In all, Eliminative Materialism should ask itself which of the resultant data found a description like the one I provided above. Perhaps, in that far away future such questions are evaporated and inapplicable—we will have turned into non-logical, non-semantic, nonmoral, non-rational fleshy machines. Presently, no human can wittingly desire such a future that lacks love and hate, meaning and value, without objects or events even.

As to prediction

Can one predict a person’s next action on the basis of the processes identified within his neurophysiology? Could there be laws of agential consequences that go beyond the apparent existence of processes within this one particular person? Why did not all students in my class respond with a similar smile (why not: the same smile)?
Eliminative Materialism probably retorts by claiming the interference of other as lawlike processes—but shouldn’t such unfalsifiable claims remind us of other pseudo-sciences like astrology?

Consequences and Conclusions

From this, one might derive a moral argument against a certain type of scientific progress (which goes by the name of Eliminative Materialism).
Also, why would Eliminative Materialism’s description be restricted to what goes on in our nervous system? Surely, data from without should enter the picture as well. But again: which?
A Configurational narrative approach (Mink) is viable, tenable, and adequate to social “texts” (Ricoeur’s term), but Eliminative Materialism is neither.

Mink, Louis O. 1969. “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension.” New Literary History 1:541–58.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1973. “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text.” New Literary History 5:91–117.

>> The Language Game of Expression

What if we’d introduce a distinction between the epistemology of the narrative and the sincerity of testimonials of experiential memories that anchor the narrative—liberating the moral witness from having to answer epistemological challenges. the truth of a witnesses testimony is allowed to be idiosyncratic, because what it arguably does is contribute an idiosyncratic corroboration upon request by historiography. The criteria the moral witness answers to are moral, with an eye to their future audiences and the deceased others; as well as psychological, with an eye to their real, and truthful, authentic memories.

Margalit versus Lanzmann? Not.

The ambiguity at stake in one witness speaking on behalf of the many can now be readily understood. Margalit means: no moral witness should claim to be telling the whole historical narrative (the one historiography is after) as they are not experts in that. Of course, they are not—not normally at least. And thus Margalit comes to require the moral witness to relate their personal stories.
The fact that Lanzmann says that ‘his’ witnesses never say “I”, but say “we”, can be seen to expand on Margalit’s point of view: when Abraham Bomba, the barber, says “I had to cut the hair of these women”, although that is a statement describing what he as a person had to do, he is already talking about the others–the women whom he had to cut the hair, and tried to console, but could not on account of the SS and kapos–and for the others–the other barbers who were ordered similarly.
There is no way to tell a personal story without representing yourself and your actions as socially embedded. The fact that according to Lanzmann nobody in the film says “I”, merely goes to show how much the witnesses are conscious of their social embedding. How could they not be?

Expanding Moral Testimonial Beyond the Individual Witness

The moral witnesses in Lanzmann’s film Shoah speak for the rest, among other reasons, because their memories are stirred by the place they are put in. The moral witnesses find their memories in these places, where others left theirs as well. That should be construed like this: the way you sit in a chair, and how that feels is dependent on the nature of the chair among others (and this thought can and should be broadened to include further properties of the place, and the affordances recognised thereof.)
The moral witness is not saying I, or we, Lanzmann says. They are not speaking for themselves, do not relate their personal story about how they escaped a camp, and so on. Indeed, they describe the situation as, in fact, anyone in their position would have experienced it. That, of course, is an assumption, but one that cannot possibly far removed from reality. It is vastly incoherent to assume that, for instance, another barber in a position such as Abe Bomba’s would have had totally different experiences. That would call for a stretch of imagination.
One reason for the moral witness to refrain from saying “I” probably is this that thus they succeed in somehow making the story a little less personal; it may be a way to distance themselves a bit from the pain in their memories. Their desire to speak up, in fact is based in their will to speak for the lot, and not to cleanse their own memories; not for the sake of psychotherapeutic katharsis. So the very occurrence of their testimonial indicates an implicating of the lot. Abraham Bomba is more upset for talking about the experience of his fellow barber than about his own experiences. It is only when he relates the other’s horrible story that he drops silent (the silence that intimates so much more than anything he does say.)

Nuit et Brouillard

Jean Cayrol, in Nuit et Brouillard, in contrast, does speak in more generalising terms about what happened, and does exactly not refer to his personal predicament. He may be a moral witness, but he does not speak as one. Instead, he can be argued to abuse his status as a moral witness, to authorise his more general descriptions. (Thanks, Iris, for suggesting this latter objection).

Music

It has seemed that the reproduction of music (digitally, preferably) has emancipated music from the importance of performance: you do not need to see the musician to appreciate their music. Or, at a concert, performers may divert you from listening properly.
Yet, music might also be approached differently: from the point of view of sensuous synchronicity. Seeing a musician produce the sounds that make up the music teaches one exactly the visual, processual nature of sounds. Scruton argues for the importance of performance via an circuitous argument about the ontology of sound. According to Scruton we cannnot hear in the sound the event that caused it, because sounds are not in the space where the visual things are—such as the ones that cause sounds. (I have argued against this.)

Concepts

Hearing the sound of a hammer, means hearing someone hammer something in something—small nails in thin wood, large nails in massive wood, bumps in metal, what have you. The sound informs us of the events that cause it. And listening to music while watching it being performed, teaches such synchronous connnections.

Farmed Out Perception

When we perceive, we perceive polymodally. When we farm out our perceptions to the world, we do it polymodally. When we retrieve what we once farmed out to the world, in a memory, in our associations, we do it polymodally. Only real-life polymodal perception, of course, proves reality. But the synchronicity of real-life polymodal perception is retained in our conceptions, in our blueprints of the world, those that we fill in with the details received through our sense organs.

Expression

Polymodality explains the difference between our reciprocal understanding of another’s facial expression (as opposed to that of a depicted one, which is not perceived polymodally, but non-egocentrically), and, hence, it explains its crucial role in the evolution of a species.

Global Scepticism

We can be sceptical about our cognitive powers with regard to reality, but that is because cognition is conceived of as off-line, i.e. a processing of data, disconnected from the polymodally perceived. There is no similar need to be sceptical about polymodal perception. Our doubts should be asymmetrical.
Descartes argued that we cannot know for sure whether or not we are dreaming, perhaps he is right here. Yet, we can make out whether we are perceiving, because perception is polymodal, and the data provided by each of the senses synchronously fit those of the other.

Molyneux’s Problem

William Molyneux (1656-98) responded to Locke’s theory of primary and secondary qualities by sending him a puzzle about a man born blind gaining sight:
A Man, being born blind, and having a Globe and a Cube, nigh of the same bigness, committed into his Hands, and being taught or Told, which is Called the Globe, and which the Cube, so a easily to distinguish them by his Touch or Feeling; Then both being taken from Him, and Laid on a Table, let us suppose his Sight Restored to Him; Whether he Could, by his sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube? Or Whether he could know this by sight, before he stretched out his Hand, whether he Could not Reach them, tho they were Removed 20 or 1000 feet from him.
Locke’s response is disappointing: he argues that the man cannot visually distinguish the two because vision works with two dimensional flat patches of light which must be correlated to tactile forms, and without touch he would have no clue how to do that. Berkeley argues that since “the ideas of sight and touch are radically heterogeneous, connected only by contingent correlations known through sense experience.” (Lievers) the man cannot see the forms.
Leibniz argues how the man can work out which is which by comparing the geometrical forms.
Leibniz is phenomenologically more correct than Locke, it seems to me, but he seems not to say much about how he reconciles the distantial differences. (Of course, I would have to check his text to make sure). Apparently, the now seeing man would be troubled making sense of the measure of the objects if they were put in a far distance. He could not quickly deliver the reconciliation that comes with a distnatial sense such as sight. How would he know that the tree at the end of the lane is approximately as large as the one he is leaning against? Surely, he would perceive an immensely small tree?

Extended Mind

This is the tip of the iceberg of how our mind is an Extended Mind. Extended Mind is not the use of utensils and artefacts that might be built in in some near future, such as calculators or notebooks (to be built in in the near future by implanting chips in the brain) (Clark). Extended Mind is not just the use of external vehicles of meaning, it is the expanding of whatever happens in our minds into reality, but in such manner that the expanding is no added on contingency, but an integral component of what we might conceive of as happening in the mind. More to follow.

Budd, Malcolm. 2003. “The Acquaintance Principle.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43:386–392.
Clark, A., and D. Chalmers. 1998. “The Extended Mind.” The Philosopher’s Annual XXI:10–23.
Gerwen, Rob van. (in press). “Performers’ Personae. On the Psychology of Musical Expressiveness.” In Improvisation in the Arts, edited by Gary Hagberg.
Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hacking, Ian. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1987 (1790)a. Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft). Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company (orig: Berlin und Libau: Lagarde und Friederich).
Livingston, Paisley. 2003. “On an apparent truism in aesthetics.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43:260–278.
McDowell, John. 1998. “The content of perceptual experience.” In Mind, Value, & Reality, 341–58. Cambridge, Mass and London, England: Harvard University Press.
Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music, chapter 1. “Sound”. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wollheim, Richard. 1980. “Art and Evaluation.” In Art and its Objects. Second edition, 227–240. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

An easy way out of this objection might be that computer games are not appreciated artistically in any way.
Taking it more seriously than that, however, I still cannot see how the objection holds, because, surely, it is the point of the artistic attitude that one is to abstain from morally induced embodied responses, and even though computer games allow one to interfere, this interference is not: by embodied agency. In fact, one’s interfering answers to strict phenomenological restrictions that assume the workings of the software used, as well as the keyboard that is being used to activate the relevant in-game commands, and “moves”. Also, the avatar’s psychology is in no way like ours, and the game is not set up so as to make us identify with him (like we are made to do in cinema). No elaborate varieties of representation, such as ellipses, intimation, etc. We are simply led to experience the avatar as part of us, because of the interactivity. (I am not saying this is easily understood, but it is not relevant for the reference to artistic attitude.)
Lastly, the agential choices we make within the game, hardly, if ever, follow our moral intuitions, rather the contrary: in the game, we shoot and kill at will, merely for the fun of it.

The avatar is part of us

The thought that the avatar is experienced as part of us, reminds one of examples where spaces are crossed, but not by representation, but by some other means. Mirrors, for instance, tell one what is there in a place we do not directly perceive. As do fossilised animals and plants. Why would one think these are kinds of representations?
Something is a representation if through its own presence it presents one with something absent, something in another time and, or, place. The presenting at stake in representation, though, is not merely a causal chain of some sort, it is intentional. Representations are not mere traces. For that reason a mirror image is not a representation, nor is a fossil remnant.
But what about the avatar, whose actions depend casually on something we do? The mirror image we can conceive of as part of ourselves, because it is fully present, and presents no real absence. The star in the nightly sky, too, even though it may have “died” thousands of years ago, is not represented by the light spot we perceive. What we see out there is the star itself—it merely took a while to get here. The time and place of the original star are continuous with those of the perceiver. A similar story holds, with regard to the fossils: what we see in the rock is spatio-temporally, causally, continuous with the animal that turned into stone.

The avatar is a typical thing. We see it depicted before us an a screen, like a character in a film, but its actions are causally continuous with our movements, translated by rules inherent in the software, like the physical rules of petrification translate the animal in the fossil. The crucial difference is that the player gets to understand these rules and to respond to them, so as to induce the survival of his avatar: intentionality, not mere causality.

Gerwen, Rob van. 2004. “Ethical Autonomism. The Work of Art as a Moral Agent.” Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 2.

But, of course, it might very well be possibly that the woman at the register made some stupid mistakes, and the man is in a hurry, etc. The legitimate, and politically correct kinds of considerations that might make one person mad at another.
Racism is treating the other not as an individual but as an token of a kind, where the kind is a race.
Secondly, what is at stake is, also, the assumption that the agent choose to be racist. If everybody thinks thus and so a specific individual may not be culpable of holding on to these considerations: in that case, the system, not the individual, is racist.
Who knows, what future generations will get to think about how we treat certain people, such as our children, parents, or pet animals, or the trees or the molecules of the air. We may not be racists, but perhaps we are guilty of ecologism.

With such questions in your mind, ask yourself in what sense Conrad in Heart of Darkness can be held to have been racist.
Things may not be as clear-cut as postcolonial literary theory has it.

Though a core method for the natural sciences, most experimentation is prohibited for social sciences, for moral reasons (we are not allowed to manipulate people). This prohibition seems not to go against experimentation in the Humanities, since, here, the subject matter is the “products of human agency” (and not human agency directly, as is the subject matter for the social sciences), and the experimentation would not concern human beings directly. Yet, this argument fails to acknowledge the afterlife of these “products of human agency”. Thus, there, arguably, still is a prohibition against experimentation in the Humanities. It must be derived from another characteristic of our subject matter’s relation to Humanities’ research results: reflexivity.
Next to these moral issues, there is the one epistemological limit that the initial conditions necessary for an experimentation to be repeatable can never be controlled in social science and humanities research. Even if one were to rebuilt a certain situation, its prior instance will already have made its mark, and will be remembered. Try to find the lawlike regularities in, say, the second world war: could we make a situation resembling in everything the situation that led to WWII, and see how it would develop. As sai, apart from moral objections, this is epistemologically impossible.

2. Reflexivity

Again, in the Social Sciences, the reflexivity of the subject matter can be a problem, in a direct sense. If some social scientific research predicts a particular behaviour in a person, or group of persons, this person, or group of persons can decide to act differently, and to thus falsify the prediction. In the natural sciences the end of research is the establishment of law-like relations which allow us to predict an outcome with no exception. (All things drop at the same sped, according to the law of gravity). Due to reflexivity, though, there is no such such as an exception-less prediction in the social sciences. In the Humanities this reflexivity is less straightforward. Since Humanities studies the products of human agency, in a sense, the agency has already taken place and cannot be influenced by the outcome of the research. The big question, then, is: Is the past, indeed, merely a thing of the past? When not, then, one could say, Humanities is confronted with an extended kind of reflexivity. In one sense, e.g. the holocaust is a thing of the past, yet, because its history stretches its tentacles to ages ago, into developments in our thoughts and religions, and these stretch into the future, the results of Humanities research arguably reflect on their subject matter.
The result of this reflexivity for methodology: a Humanities research project never only aims at finding the truth of matters, but always also takes into account the effects of the results of the project, however difficult it is to establish these.

3. Sources

Basically, since Humanities is about the products of human agency, what a researcher would be looking for is information: either in remnants of human agency or in sources about human agency. Once remnants or sources are found (and the search for them is a method in itself) they must be interpreted. Before interpretation though, some of their properties must be established: are the sources true, authentic, and secondly, are they truthful (in a morally relevant sense: who wrote the sources, can they be trusted)?
Whether a source is true is of course a tough question to answer. To establish that, two methods are available: 1. do they cohere with the accepted theories? 2. Do they correspond to reality? The second question is difficult, because in that sense the reality scrutinised is gone. That seems to leave only the first approach: do the sources confirm our theories? The tricky thing, here, is, that coherence in itself does not guarantee the ultimate truth of something, because our theories may be due to an overwhelming mistake on our behalf (we may collectively believe something which in fact is not the case): thus coherence with flawed theories would not prove a source’s truth, but only … coherence with accepted (flawed) theories.

4. Interpretation

When the reliability of the sources is established satisfactorily, the labour of interpretation can start. How to interpret texts? Hermeneutics thinks that this is not a straightforward and easy method. Instead of trying to find what the author meant with his writings, a text’s meaning may depend on cultural assumptions that are not explicitly stated in the text, and the intentions—which are not available in the first place—may have been different from what the text came to mean. Also, a “hermeneutical circle” makes interpretation a risky operation: a reader works from his own background thinking, assuming certain things (of which they may not be consciously aware) about how people think, about the period under consideration, or lastly, about his own background—and although either of these may be flawed, they are necessary to provide a framework for the interpretation. Prejudices have their own particular value: they cannot be done away with, so it may be best to explicitly state them (Gadamer).

First, there are two aspects to a situation: i. its nature, and ii. its reality. In all three cases mentioned above, what the nature of the situation is depends on how one would want to interpret it (anti-realism about theory). You don’t prove whether something is real, though, by way of interpretation (you can prove something false). Two, to prove that something is real you need a polymodal access to it, such as is provided by embodied, synchronous perception (entity-realism).

Thus, in all three cases we have to interpret the situation at hand, but only in the first case can we really be sure that it exists.

To be sure, the distinction between discussed here concerns the experiential awareness of the audience, and, hence, their emotional responses.

Locke, John. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Printed for Tho. Basset. (For some good argument to dinstinguish between unimodal and polymodal access of secondary and, respectively, primary qualities.)
Gerwen, Rob van. 1996. “Intimation and Tertiary Qualities.” Chapter 7 of Art and Experience, Volume XIV of Quaestiones Infinitae, 134–70. Utrecht: Dept. Philosophy.
Hacking, Ian. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. (For the defence of anti-realism about theory and entity-realism).

The WWW-address of last year’s edition of this course: http://www.phil.uu.nl/~rob/2005/hum343