Sorry for the delay in posting these notes for sessions 4 and 5. Look out for further courses at Tate Modern or possible Tate Britain.
Session 4
Picking up on the previous week's discussions about power and sexuality in relation to particular images, we began Session 4 by discussing Thomas Nagel's ideas on sexual perversion. His view that 'normal' sexual desire involves escalating reciprocity (in a kind of interaction which gets its power from the individuals' arousal at being found arousing as well as from the arousing caused by the partner) gave a way of thinking about the relationship between artist and subject in some of the more overtly sexual paintings and photographs we had examined the previous week.
It is important to recognise that Nagel was not using 'normal' and 'perversion' as moral terms, but rather as descriptive: just as someone who preferred to eat pictures of food above eating food itself could be said to exhibit a perversion, so someone who engages in forms of sex that lack the recriprocity that he thinks normal may not be doing anything immoral.
In the exhibition A Bigger Splash we looked at a range of images that involved expressive bodily movements in various ways, from the film of Jackson Pollock in action ('I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them'), rhythmically applying paint in his trademark style through to Yayoi Kusama's 1968 hippy film 'Flower Orgy' in which a group of naked young men and women covered in painted spots cavort and squirm together. The film was part of her deliberately provocative protest campaign to stop the Vietnam War on the grounds that human bodies were 'too beautiful to be killed in that way' (see a recent interview with Kusama)
Session 5
For the final session of the course we began by considering some of Erving Goffman's (1922-82) insights about role playing and the self. Goffman, a social psychologist, is famous for giving a dramaturgical account of human interaction - one that takes seriously the idea that 'all the world's a stage'.
People give performances. They act roles to each other, idealized roles that in part embody how they think others want them to behave, sometimes using props to draw attention to their roles. We read non-verbal cues very quickly and accurately. We look for symptoms, the impressions people give off, and we are sensitive to anomalous role playing. For Goffman, in his classic 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
there is no underlying 'true' self, just a series of masks or roles. (There are brief notes on the key features of his work here)
Returning to the Bigger Splash exhibition, we focused on a several images and videos in the room Transformations, including a series of self-portraits by Cindy Sherman. This review of a retrospective of Cindy Sherman's photography draws attention to an important feature of her approach: although she is taking on a series of roles, and implicitly commenting on the expectation of roleplaying for women, she is never so far into the role that she herself is unrecognizable - she combines being in the role with drawing attention to th fact that she is playing a role in a manner akin to the eager student in the front row of a lecture that Jean-Paul Sartre describes who is so intent on giving off the sense of being a good student that it actually interferes with listening. With Sherman's work, there is an uneasy sense that she is both in role and directing our attention to the roleplaying itself. If you are interested in Cindy Sherman, there is a superb online catalogue of her images on the MOMA website here (you can scroll through images from the retrospective and click on individual ones to enlarge them).
There is an interesting video here of Cindy Sherman discussing roleplaying in her self-portraits:
For this session we focused on 3 paintings and five photographs in Poetry and Dream, Level Two West, Tate Modern, examing how the body was represented and the issues that emerged from thinking about these images. Previously we have been moving from general philosophical issues to specific illustrations; this week we reversed that and explored a range of questions that arise from consideration of specific works of art.
Key issues that emerged:
The use of nudity as titillation under the guise of fine art (vs honest eroticism or pornography)
The represented body as a catalyst to formal experiment (in line, pattern, texture, colour)
Representation of the body as the body of an individual naked portraiture vs types)
Relations of power - the extent to which the subject has relinquished power to the artist and how the artist uses that power
I've included some links for those who want to find out more about the particular works.
You can get a better sense of this artist's recurrent themes from the Paul Delvaux Museum website, (the museum that Simeon mentioned in our discussion)
See the video below for more context: it is about a retrospective of Hendricks' portraiture and includes comments by the artist. The emphasis on individuality in portraiture and the artist's connection with his subjects that emerges here is very relevant to the discussion we had in the gallery: 'He's representing her in terms of her attitude, her style..'
We also looked at five nudes by Manuel Alvarez Bravo (images unavailable from Tate) in Room 11, including his famous 'Good Reputation Sleeping' (1938) - click on the photograph's title on the MOMA site) You can read an interesting short essay about Bravo which explains how 'Good Reputation Sleeping' came to be made.
You might enjoy John Berger's musings on the female nude from Ways of Seeing (1972):
These notes are longer than usual (i.e. don't expect me to write 2,000 words of notes each week - and after this you may think less is more). I want to try and pull the different elements discussed lat night together online here and to suggest further reading, listening, and viewing for anyone interested in exploring these ideas further.
For notes and links on Descartes' view of the mind and on Frank Jackson's thought experiment 'What Mary Knew' and on qualia see last week's notes. We began by reviewing this topic. Below is a short video that illustrates and discusses the Knowledge Argument, Frank Jackson's thought experiment which he originally intended to undermine physicalism and support dualism (he's since changed his mind on that, but the thought experiment raises interesting questions about the 'feely' aspect of our conscious existence, and how mysterious and as yet inexplicable that is). In the video the philosopher John Searle emphasizes the importance of the question raised:
'The answer to this question ‘What is
consciousness?’ is the answer to the question ‘What sort of beings are we?’ And
it’s the different definitions of ourselves that’s at stake when we try to get
a theory of consciousness.’'
The qualitative experience that is essential to consciousness lies right at the heart of our experience of the visual arts - both in terms of the artist's experience, the role art has in our own self-definition, and that of the viewer (indeed, one theory of the nature of art, R.G. Collingwood's, which I mentioned in passing, suggests that the process of making art is a process of grappling with an inchoate notion of our own experience - art brings into sharper focus the particularity of the artist's feelings, expresses these, and thereby allows the viewer to experience a similarly precise and individualised emotion - more on R.G. Collingwood's theory of art.)
The new topics for this week were the related ones of Crying and Sentimentality:
On Crying and the Meaning of Tears
Crying is a physical visible emotional activity that is largely involuntary (though can be resisted to some degree) and as a result can be a mark of sincerity (though, of course, some people can will themselves to cry - there are some fascinating advice pages on the Internet such as this one that pass on actors' tips on how to cry at will - typically drawing on the actor's actual emotion and memories rather than using artificial means such as onions).
In art depicted tears can provide evoke a direct and even visceral response. In Picasso's Weeping Woman, for example, the depicted tears communicate instantly the intensity of a mother's grief at the loss of her child, despite the highly sylised and abstract nature of the depiction. There is undoubtedly a contagious element that encourages empathy triggered by seeing another person crying or even an unrealistic depiction of someone crying.
Of course not all crying is indicative of grief or distress: there can be tears of joy, laughter, embarrasment, humiliation, rage, and much more. From the outside, the context of the crying determines how we interpret the emotion. Perhaps this is true from the inside too: one - somewhat crude - theory of emotion, the so-called James-Lange theory, suggests that we don't cry because we're sad, but unexpectedly, we're sad because we cry: we have a physiological reaction due to some aspect of our environment, and the emotion is the secondary interpretation and feeling of that physiological change - we feel something and then search around for an explanation of that feeling and the resultant emotion that we feel is not governed by how the original physiological change feels to us, but rather by how we interpret that in context.
The issue of what crying is has been little discussed by philosophers, though the philosophy of the emotions has always been important in moral philosophy since the Ancient Greeks (even for the Stoics who were for the most part keen to control emotions as irrational and essentially useless responses to reality that interfered with doing the right thing).
There is also a short audio clip about the nature of crying here (frustratingly the Radio 4 programme from which it was exerpted is no longer available).
Read a short discussion about the science of weeping 'Why Humans Like to Cry' (there are short reviews of the interviewee Michael Trimble's book on crying here and here) .
The art historian and theorist James Elkins has written a book about people being moved to tears in front of paintings Pictures and Tears: a history of people who have cried in front of paintings. The implication is that the tears are symtoms of an intensity and sincerity of emotional reaction, a kind of reaction that is not encouraged by art historical study. You can read his Chapter 5 on his reaction to the beautiful Bellini St Francis of Assisi that is in the Frick collection in New York. He reproduces the picture here on his website.
Philosophers are rarely depicted as crying. There is one exception though. The philosopher Heraclitus is sometimes called 'the crying philosopher'(because he couldn't step in the same river twice?): in this Renaissance painting by Bramante he is shown alongside the laughing philosopher Democritus:
There are contexts in which crying is socially inappopriate and can betray a degree of sentimentality. Crying typically reveals strong emotions (perhaps triggered by something deep in an individual's psyche, personal associations, unresolved conflicts, or hurt) - when these seem indulgent and to some degree disproportionate we may label the individual as guilty of sentimentality. But what is sentimentality?
Sentimentality
Sentimentality can mean inappropriate emotion, in the sense of an excess of sentiment that is overblown, or of the wrong kind given the trigger event or context. The word is used almost exclusively in a pejorative way now, though historically 'sentimental' was a word that described one who relied on emotions, and 'sentimental value' is a concept that does not have negative connotations. To label a person or attitude as guilty of sentimentality though is to draw attention to a shortcoming, a failure. It is a judgement - perhaps a moral judgement and depends upon the thought that some emotions are appropriate to a context and others not (and as such must be to some degree culturally or even subculturally relative since cultures differ considerably in expectations about emotional expression and response). The person who is absolutely overwhelmed with emotion at the cuteness of a kitten, or who idealises a lover to the point of nausea is guilty of sentimentality. Someone prone to sentimentality has inappropriate and often gushing responses to the world, and typically uses this as a strategy of avoidance, a way of refusing to confront unpleasant truths (such as that the kitten has worms, or the lover's bad breath).
Sentimentality is a fault, not a virtue since it involves avoiding unpleasant truths (and in this respect links to kitsch). It is a common psychological block to clarity of thought that often involves wishful thinking in that the sentimental person is unwilling to confront facts, but rather is much happier in a soft cuddly world of their own imagination. Sentimentality can even involve blindness to the way things really are. It can be a kind of magical thinking that involves reacting to the way the individual would like the world to be rather than to the way that it is. Oscar Wilde famously declared a sentimental person one ‘who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.' In James Joyce's Ulysses has Stephen Dedalus echo this when he sends a telegram that reads 'The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.' Sentimentality is somehow unearned, or unpayed for - a kind of indulgence in feeling that doesn't fit the situation.
For example, the mother of a child who has been caught bullying another child may simply refuse to believe that her son could be a bully. In her eyes he remains this sweet innocent child who could never harm anyone else, and she experiences nothing but warm and comforting feelings in his presence. How could he possibly be the culprit? There must be some mistake. This is a sentimental reaction, a way of avoiding the unpalatable truth that her son is a bully. It is a kind of dishonesty, or at least self-deception (which may be largely unconscious and is considerably easier to spot in others than in oneself).
Sentimentality and Art In art the accusation of an artist's sentimentality usually involves a judgement of the implied attitude of the artist towards his or her subject matter - an endorsement of a kind of unearned emotion rather than a distance from the depiction of that emotion. The artist invites us to share this attitude and our revulsion, or feelings of discomfort amount to a critical judgment about taking this stance to this subject matter. It is possible to depict or explore sentimentality without endorsing it or inviting a sentimental attitude to a work.
A viewer's reactions to art can be sentimental in a pejorative sense even if the artist has not displayed sentimentality in the sense just outlined. The viewer who responds to a kitsch Jeff Koons puppy with tears welling up at the cuteness of the depicted animal would be guilty of this and certainly of misunderstanding the nature of the object as work of art which has an ironic stance on sentimentality and is far from an endorsement of it (in complete contrast with Picasso's implied stance toward the woman's grief in Weeping Woman, 1937).
Further Reading on Sentimentality
There is an interesting philosophical paper online about sentimentality and art by Nado Gatalo here that touches on a number of these issues. You might also be interested in Theodore Dalrymple's (irritating) polemic on the alleged toxic effects of sentimentality on British life which furnishes several interesting examples.
These are among the best known of Lichtenstein's painting, and are icons of Pop Art. They were made by selecting frames from comics that implied a story, in many cases simplifying the image. Perfectly coiffeured idealized women in apparent emotional turmoil about their relationship stand in contrast with with macho men firing rockets or otherwise being strong and active. The emotions of the comic book women for the most part seem sentimental, and to some degree indulgent 'I don't care! I'd rather sink than call Brad for help!' The comics seem to endorse a sentimental and stereotyped view of romantic passion and women's dependence on their men for happiness and fulfilment - it is today hard not to read Lichtenstein's stance on these women and their turbulent emotions as ironic, cool, and antithetical. Surely he saw the comic book depictions as sentimental. But...
Watch this fascinating short video from a Tate exhibition of Lichtenstein's work in 1968 - some of the images we disucssed were on show there. Towards the end of the video Lichtenstein talks about how he liked the idealized images of women he found in comics. There is no hint of an ironic highlighting of a sentimentality about romantic love and women whose happiness always seems to depend on their man's attitude to them. Perhaps in reality Lichtenstein was not so critical of the comic-book view of women. In 1972 in the televison series Ways of Seeing and the book that came out of that John Berger wrote as if women had a fundamentally different way of existing in the world from men:
'Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight'
This was his take, roughly, on how women had been depicted in art and advertisements, but also on this (socially constructed) male gaze generally...The exagerated role contrasts in Lichtenstein's depictions were, perhaps, typical of his time...and he was perhaps holding a mirror up to it rather than presenting a critical angle.
These are notes from the first of five sessions of the Tate Modern Mind-Body-Art course (ticket only, sold out) led by Nigel Warburton (Monday evenings, meeting in East Room, Level 6, by 18.45).
The aims of the course
To explore a range of philosophical issues relating to mind, body, and art
To discuss these in relation to works currently on display in Tate Modern
Throughout the history of philosophy there has been a great deal of philosophy of mind, but hardly any philosophy of the body.
An important starting point for modern philosophy was René Descartes' Meditations (first published 1641).
Descartes wanted to find something about which he could be certain. He had accepted many views on trust, and was aware that many of his beliefs were erroneous. His method of Cartesian Doubt involved subjecting every knowledge claim to very close scrutiny: if there was room for the slightest doubt then Descartes rejected it.
He recognised that although much of his knowledge came via the five senses, these senses sometimes mislaid him: a straight stick looks bent in water, a round tower in the distance can look square, and so on. Consequently he rejected sensory information as a wholly reliable source of knowledge. But surely he couldn't be mistaken that he was in a room, now? Descartes at this point remembered that he had had dreams in which he'd thought he was awake when in fact asleep in bed. How did he know he wasn't now dreaming? Well even in dreams 2+3 = 5, doesn't it? But what if there were an evil demon systematically deceiving him about this? Unlikely, but it might conceivably be having (or it could be that an evil scientist is manipulating the electrodes sticking in to your brain in a jar and that you are nothing more than this brain in liquid nutrient). This is Descartes' nadir: he seems to have argued himself into a whirlpool of doubt. But he extracts himself by means of his famous Cogito argument (from 'cogito ergo sum'): even if there is an evil demon, the fact that he, Descartes, is having some kind of thought or experience proves that he must exist...assuming that thoughts have thinkers).
The important point here is that Descartes is more certain of his own subjective experience even than the fact that he has a body (something that requires sense experience to ascertain). This prioritization of the subjective over any experience of the world was extremely important and influential (far more important and influential than Descartes' constructive phase in which he argues for God's existence and the notion that clear and distinct ideas must be true...and ends up more or less where he started in terms of his beliefs). Descartes believed that for human beings mind and body were distinct and interacted (he quaintly located the point of interaction as the pineal gland).
Although much 20th Century philosophy of mind assumed a physicalist standpoint and ridiculed Cartesianism as 'the myth of the ghost in the machine' (Gilbert Ryle's phrase), physicalism is not without difficulties. That doesn't mean that we need to adopt Descartes' approach, but the question of how consciousness arises out of physical matter (if indeed it does) is a tricky one. Thomas Nagel's famous paper 'What is it like to be a bat?' emphasized the difficulty of explaining 'qualia' the experiential nature of consciousness, as did Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment about Mary (who is brought up in a black and white world, is an expert on the neurophysiology of seeing, and then gets to see something red - does she learn something new? If yes, where does that come from on a physicalist account?).
Taking off obliquely from the discussion of subjectivity and conscious experience, we examined a number of works in Transformed Visions, asking questions about the weight given to the subjective viewpoint of the depicted individuals vs the viewer's viewpoint, and the viewpoint of the artist. So, for example, with Giacometti's Man Pointing (1947) there is an interesting question of whether the viewer is encouraged to identify with the viewpoint of the man pointing or see him as other from either the viewpoint of the actual viewer or an implied one who is part of the imagined scene. The fact that Giacometti originally conceived the work as having another figure, with the pointing man's left arm around his shoulder, suggests that we could see the implied viewpoint as the one of the absent person standing next to the pointing man, looking with him at the subject of his pointing, complicit with the judgement of the pointing man...
Part of the point of such activities in the gallery on this course is to look at perhaps familiar works from a fresh viewpoint and see them differently. For further examples of this approach applied to different topics/works of art, see my notes from a previous course 7 Ways of Thinking About Art or notes from a range of previous Tate Modern courses (you need to click on 'next' at the end of pages to scroll back through them all), and also an earlier post on my experience of teaching at Tate Modern.
For this session we focussed on human relations, and in particular love and desire, as described by Jean-Paul Sartre. The point of the discussion was to provide an angle on some of Edvard Munch's paintings - a way of exploring the implied human relations between depicted lovers, and also the painter/viewer.
In Being and Nothingness Sartre gives a somewhat bleak description of the nature of human relationships. Although Sartre's existentialism begins from the subjective viewpoint, Sartre is no solipsist - his example of the voyeur looking through a keyhole being transfigured into awareness of himself as a 'looked at look' is intended to demonstrate to us how much through emotions such as shame we are committed to awareness of the existence of others as centres of their own consciousness and corresponding freedom.
Relationships involve a struggle between conscious beings each presenting themselves to the other in a way that they hope will make them attractive, but constantly at risk either of turning the Other into something less than a free individual, or else, in Bad Faith, of becoming fixed as a self for the Other, in a kind of assimilation into the other person, which ultimately is a form of masochism (in death we become prey to the other - perhaps we should say that in love we constantly risk becoming prey to the lover)...or else sadism (when we seek to curb the other's freedom).
According to Sartre, the lover wants his or her facticity to be necessary not contingent: we are thrown into a meaningless existence by chance and there is much about us that we did not choose, yet there is a widespread desire to be more than an absurd empty consciousness that we fill through our commitments. For Sartre the lover wants to take on the role of God according to the Ontological Argument (the argument for the existence of God that makes God's existence necessary - by definition): for the one who loves us, each of us wants the contingent aspects of what we are to seem as if they had to be so - no other individual could take our place. Described in this way, this is a hopeless wish - given that, at least according to Sartre, our existence is in no way necessary.
Sexual desire, for Sartre, is not simply an animal instinct, but is desire for engagement with animated flesh, bodies as conscious. Something as apparently straightforward as a caress, for Sartre, takes us straight to metaphysical reflection and awareness of our own facticity.
Disentangling Sartre's dense account of love and desire in the section 'Concrete Relations with Others' in Being and Nothingness (both terrifyingly abstract and at times disconcertingly concrete) is no easy task - perhaps ultimately it is confused and contradictory. For more straightforward analysis of sexual desire (influenced in both cases by Sartre), try Thomas Nagel's 'Sexual Perversion' in his book Mortal Questions (but remember that 'perversion' isn't a term of moral condemnation for Nagel here) and Roger Scruton's book Sexual Desire (at times idiosyncratic, occasionally moralistic, but nevertheless a serious attempt to make sense of our lived experience in this area - his appendix 'The First Person' gives a clear critique of some of the assumptions of phenomenology, and he summarises and discusses what he calls the 'paradox of lust' - Sartre's view that we both want to engage sexually with flesh incarnated with freedom, yet at the same time want to possess and fix the lover - on pp120-125).
In the gallery we looked at some of the works in Room 2 of Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye exhibition at Tate Modern - paintings which in their implied reading of human relationships and desire resonated with the Sartrean themes we had been discussing.
In this session we focussed on Jean-Paul Sartre's view of the phenomenology of looking at images and of imagining. In his stimulating book The Imaginary, Sartre investigates the experience of experiencing images - ranging from mental images to photographs.
As a phenomenologist, Sartre was very interested in giving an accurate and detailed account of what experience is actually like, what, in this case, it feels like to imagine something that isn't present, or to look at a photograph of a friend. This interrogation of his own experience was at the heart of Sartre's existentialism, and, when successful, is what makes it so appealing (unlike, in my view, the prickly abstractions and re-using of Hegelian and Heideggerian jargon, which make his writing so hard to follow for the uninitiated - and probably for the initiated too). But it would be wrong to see Sartre as obsessed with introspection: for him consciousness is smeared across the world - when we think, we always think about something (this is the special meaning of 'intentionality' in this context - thoughts are intentional means thoughts are always directed at something beyond them), and our consciousness is filled with the world, not with a little internal picture gallery representing the world.
For 17th and 18th century thinkers like Locke and Hume, experience creates images which we somehow view internally. Sartre rejects this model completely. Even when we experience a physical representation, such as a photograph of a friend, our experience isn't straightforwardly of that depiction.
For Sartre, the act of experiencing a depiction is that of animating an analgon (a representation). If I look at a photograph of Pierre, after a while I no longer experience the photograph as a physical object, but am carried beyond the physical object the photograph - my conscious experience isn't of a photograph, but of Pierre, and not just Pierre snapped for 1/100th of a second, but Pierre himself. He is experienced as absent, though.
Another important aspect of Sartre's descriptions of consciousness is the way in which what is not present can be part of our experience. If you go to a café looking for a friend and that friend isn't there, then you perceive the friend's absence, even though there is no physical stimulus corresponding to that.
If you are interested in questions about imagination and mental images, then I recommend Colin McGinn's very readable and stimulating book (which discusses and builds on some of Sartre's ideas) Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning:
In the gallery we looked at Giorgio de Chirico's 'The Uncertainty of the Poet' - as an experiment considering it as a painting that dealt not just with what was depicted, but also with absences, the absence of people in imaginary spaces that look as if they should be inhabited - a source of the uncanny mood of the painting. We also considered two sculptures that, unlike most of the works we examine in this course, were probably directly influenced by existentialist thought: Germaine Richier's 'Diabolo' - which, with its strings tying the figure to the ground, hints strongly at themes of freedom and constraint - and Water (this suggesed questions about the images others project on to women, activity and passivity). Both sculptures, like many of the quintessential existential artist Giacommetti's, are single figures apparently alone - indeed the subjective starting point of the individual forced to make choices in a world without pre-existing values 'condemned to be free' is typically expressed artistically through lone figures. For Sartre we are all alone without excuses - and alone in the sense of 'abandoned' by God (meaning 'God is dead', non-existent)...and in our interactions with others we are frequently on the brink of falling into positions of sadism or masochism - in the words uttered by a character in his play 'N0 Exit': 'Hell is other people'
For other work directly influenced by existentialism and on the cultural impact generally of French existentialism, see this catalogue Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-1955:
To think about and discuss some key themes in existentialism
To view works in Tate Modern (especially by Damien Hirst and Edvard Munch) from an existentialist perspective
This week's topic was Death, a theme dear to existentialists, but one that has preoccupied philosophers frequently throughout the subject's history. It is also a subject that preoccupies the artist Damien Hirst, whose Tate Modern exhibition we visited.
Epicurus on Fear of Death
The Greek Epicurus (the inappropriate source of the word 'epicurean') was one of the most interesting of the ancient philosophers to have thought about death (his ideas about death in Lucretius's poem 'On the Nature of Things' - there is an excellent translation of this by Dryden - listen to a short podcast with Stephen Greenblatt on Lucretius). He was particularly keen to eliminate fear of death, which he felt ruined many people's lives. In his view fear of death was irrational, and could be significantly reduced by thinking clearly about the topic. His main arguments were these: first, most people make the mistake of imagining their own deaths as if they will be present and able to observe them. But death, as the extinction of consciousness, means that it isn't something that we could possibly experience or feel bad about at the time. We can experience the process of dying, but the moment of death removes us from the world. The 20th Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared along similar lines:
'Death is not an event in life.'
Epicurus's second argument was about asymmetry: most of us don't wory about the eons befre our births; why the get so worked up about all the time after our deaths when we won't exist any more. We could have been born a month or so earlier, but that loss of time doesn't worry many people; why worry about when we die?
Epicurus's epitaph neatly sums up this philosophy (which will only work if you believe that death does involve extinction of consciousness - if you believe in life after death in some form, it may not have any effect):
'I was not; I have been; I am not; I don't mind'
Jean-Paul Sartre on My Death
Sartre, writing in the 1940s in Being and Nothingness, took a rather different line about death. Consistent with his phenomenological approach he focussed on the subjective point of view, on the questions about death that arise from the individual contemplating his or her own death, rather than death viewed objectively from outside.
As an atheist he did not believe that death had been given any significance or meaning from outside the individual perspective. There is for Sartre no God and no afterlife. But he also completely rejected one humanist view of death as the equivalent of the final chord in life that brings the piece to a close not just with finality, but by somehow making sense of all that has gone before. For Sartre it is clear that death is absurd - an aspect of our contingency: we find oursleves thrown into a world we didn't choose, with no pre-existing values that are binding on us, forced to carve out values through our choices, and constrained by our facticity, which includes death. Death is simply a given (though we wouldn't have known that it was on the cards for us if there had not been other people around who die). The fact of my own future death contributes nothing to the meaning of my acts - it will not (as Epicurus noted) be something I experience. Our finitude comes not from death so much, but from the fact that we make our choices in time, and that each moment of choice can never be revisited. Death is not one of my possibilities - it is an absurd given, but not something that is part of me as a conscious choosing free being.
For Sartre all meaning for any act is created by the choosing individual. When you cease to be able to choose (at death), your life loses meaning from within. At every turn while alive you could re-evaluate your past, make choices in the present that affect the meaning of your previous choices, metamorphose, or decline. When you are dead 'the chips are down.' But that doesn't mean that your life's meaning is fixed at that point. Rather you as creator of meaning are no longer present. Your life is in other people's hands from then on, your life becomes 'Prey to the Other' and its meaning and significance may be transformed completely. He talks of the Other 'triumphing' over the individual at the point of his or her death - a view consistent with his bleak account of social relations as tending to fall into either masochism or sadism, with an me/them struggle to perserve authenticity in the face of people trying to impose their will or desires on to me. At death I will be turned from a choosing individual to an object for other people - another aspect of 'Hell is other people'
In the Gallery We visited the Rooms 1 - 10 of the Tate Modern Damien Hirst show, an exhibition centred on the theme of death. We had previously seen 'For the Love of God', the jewel encrusted cast of a skull, with real teeth, that drew world press attention when it was vauled at £50 million. It is plausible to see that work as being not just a game-playing gesture directed at the art market, but also as in the memento mori or vanitas tradition - the art work frequently featuring skulls, that drew attention to the inevitability of death, and the need to focus on living because of the ultimate future awaiting us all (see, for example Frans Hals painting of a young man, Hamlet-like, holding a skull, or the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors - both in London's National Gallery).
Many of us felt that the photograph of Hirst grinning next to a severed head 'With Dead Head' with its disrespect for the remains of someone who presumably donated his body to medical science and whose family may recognize him, was offensive and immoral and raised the issue why this sort of image was treated as acceptable within Tate Modern, but would have caused outrage had it had been taken in a military situation (an interesting piece on the topic of trophy-taking and laughing at corpses in war here). On this question, some people believe that artistic merit (assuming this particular piece by Hirst has it, which is debatable) should exempt work that would otherwise fall foul of censorship laws (that was essentially the legal decision in the Lady Chatterley's Lover case). I disagree. The philosopher Bernard Williams made the point nicely that such a view is confused: if you want to protect creative activity from censorship, you should also protect the right to make unsuccessful experiments (i.e. achieved artistic merit shouldn't give you a joker card - artists need to be able to attempt works that fail artistically). Special retrospective merit-based legal exemption from censorship is a model that is bad for artistic creativity - as Williams put it in his essay 'Censorship' (p.144): 'If one believes in freedom for artistic merit, then one believes in freedom and accepts censorship only on the narrowest of grounds'. Applying this reasoning to Hirst's 'With Dead Head' would mean that it should be treated like any other photograph of someone playing around with a corpse - probably the image-making shouldn't be illegal, and it is better to tolerate a degree of freedom that allows for immoral image-making - but even if the image had great artistic merit, that would not be a major consideration in relation to its legality).
To think about and discuss some key themes in existentialism
To view works in Tate Modern (especially by Damien Hirst and Edvard Munch) from an existentialist perspective
What is Existentialism?
A philosophical and literary movement that emerged from Paris in the 1940s and is particularly associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The term 'existentialist' was probably first used by Gabriel Marcel of Sartre in 1943 (Sartre then rejected the term, but later accepted it). Sartre was very influenced by Martin Heidegger and by Soren Kierkegaard and to some extent Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom have subsequently been declared existentialists retrospectively (at least in some aspects of their works). Other prominent existentialist thinkers who were contemporaries of Sartre include Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Here's what Sartre said, though, in a famous public lecture 'Existentialism is a Humanism' (mysteriously translated as 'Existentialism and Humanism') given in October 1945: what existentialists have in common is that they believe that for human beings 'existence precedes essence'. (For an explanation of this and more discussion of this lecture/book download this short article Existentialism). Sartre was an atheist and didn't believe that God had created human beings (we are 'abandoned') - so, unlike with a penknife (his example) - there is no pre-existing essence of what it is to be a human being. We find oursleves 'thrown' into existence, and only then define what it is to be human (he rejected the idea that there is such a thing as 'human nature' that shapes how we have to be, or that biology defines humanity). We are free - far freer than most of us realise, according to Sartre. We choose even our own emotions. The brute facts of the world (where and when we were born, who our parents are, etc. he describes as 'facticity', but we transcend this through our thought). The anguish of existence is that we have to create values for ourselves, choose them, rather than discover what they are. Add to this his belief that a human being is simply the sum of what he or she actually does, not what he or she might have done, and we see that there are no 'mute inglorious Miltons' in his world. We have to commit to doing something - inaction is still something we are responsible for. But this anguish is intensified, according to Sartre, by his belief that 'In fashioning myself, I fashion man' (i.e. humanity). In choosing for myself I create an image of what a human being should be like. If I choose not to choose (which for him is still definitely a choice) and accept a life 'off the peg' as it were, that is a form of Bad Faith (self-deception that involves a denial of my own freedom). We can't seek help outside of ourselves because any help we get about how we should live still needs to be interpreted and chosen or rejected: 'we are alone without excuses'.
For a general introduction to Existentialism listen to this short interview with Mary Warnock, who is no longer particularly sympathetic to the Sartrean philosophy: Mary Warnock on Existentialism
For a discussion of Sartre's concept of Bad Faith, listen to Sebastian Gardner on Sartre on Bad Faith. Gardner discusses the theme as it emerges in Sartre's book Being and Nothingness, which has been described as the bible of existentialism (it is, unfortunately, though, a difficult read, with occasional lucid novel-like passages among pages of jargon-laden prose - if you plan to read it, you will probably want to read it alongside a commentary, such as the one Sebastian Gardner has written, or Joseph Catalano's).
There is a useful overview of Existentialism here (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - a generally reliable source).
For those interested in learning about Jean-Paul Sartre the man, the documentary 'Roads to Freedom' (49 minutes) below is one place to start:
We then visited Damien Hirst's 'For the Love of God' see video below. This was a prelude to next week's discussion of the theme 'My Death' in relation to the Damien Hirst exhibition.
'Every art work that has ever interested me is about death' Damien Hirst (from the video below)
Monday evenings Tate Modern 11th June - 9th July. A 5-session course exploring existential themes in modern and contemporary art, led by Nigel Warburton (booking essential):
This week we focussed on one aspect of art as political: the subversion of stereotypes in art. Stereotypes are convenient general categorizations, but few people want to be seen as stereotypical and thinking in terms of stereotypes is often reductive and sometimes completely misleading. The use of stereotypes is a kind of essentialism, a way of suggesting that there is an essence shared by members of a group or class. For an interesting discussion of our essentialising (and over-essentialising) tendencies, read this interview with the psychologist Susan Gelman.
