Cezanne’s portait of Gustave Geffroy

In “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses Paul Cézanne’s portrait of the critic Paul Geffroy (1895-6), which led me to some congruent reflections.

Merleau-Ponty notes that the table “stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture.” In a photograph of M. Geffroy, the table’s edges would form parallel lines that would meet at one point, and the whole object would be more foreshortened. That is how an artist who followed what we call “scientific perspective” would depict the table. Why does Cézanne show it otherwise?

Imagine that you actually stood before Paul Geffroy in his study. You would not instantly see the whole scene. Your eye might settle on your host’s face, then jump to the intriguing statuette next to him. The shelves would at first form a vague pattern in the background. Objects for which you have names, such as books, would appear outlined, as borders filled with color. On the other hand, areas of the fireplace or wall would blend into other areas.

You would know that you could move forward toward M. Geffroy, in which case the table would begin to move below you. Just as you see a flying ball as something moving–not as a round zone of color surrounded by other colors–so you might see the table as something that could shift if you moved your body forward.

A photograph of this real-world scene would be a representation of it, very useful for knowing how M. Geffroy looked in his study, and possibly an attractive object in its own right. But the photo would not represent anyone’s experience of the scene. Instead, it would be something that you could experience, rather like the scene itself, by letting your eye move around it, identifying objects of interest, and gradually adding information. You would experience the photograph somewhat differently from the actual scene because you would know that everything was fixed and your body could not move into the space.

A representation of this scene using perspective’s “laws” would make the image useful for certain purposes–for instance, for estimating the size of the table. Michael Baxandall (1978) argued that Renaissance perspective originated in a commercial culture in which patrons enjoyed estimating the size, weight, and value of objects represented in paintings.

But other systems have different benefits. Here is a print in which Toyoharu Kunichika (1835-1900) uses European perspective for the upper floor and a traditional Chinese system (with lines that remain parallel and objects placed higher if they are further away) for the lower floor. As Toshidama writes, this combination is useful for allowing us to see as many people and events as possible.

Print by Toyoharu Kunichika from Toshidama Japanese Prints

Perspective does not tell us how the world is–not in any simple way. The moon is not actually the size of a window, although it is represented as such in a perspectival picture (East Asian or European). Perspective is a way of representing how we experience the world. And in that respect, it is partial and sometimes even misleading. It overlooks that for us, important things seem bolder; objects can look soft, cold or painful as well as large or small; and some things appear in motion or likely to move, while others seem fixed. We can see a whole subject (such as a French intellectual in his study) and parts of it (his beard), at once and as connected to each other.

Merleau-Ponty writes:

Gustave Geoffrey’s [sic] table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped. It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on the canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and in which they tend toward the geometric perspective. This is also what happens with colors. Pink upon gray paper colors the background green. Academic painting shows the background as gray, assuming that the picture will produce the same effect of contrast as the real object. Impressionist painting uses green in the background in order to achieve a contrast as brilliant as that of objects in nature. Doesn’t this falsify the color relationship? It would if it stopped there, but the painter’s task is to modify all the other colors in the picture so that they take away from the green background its characteristics of a real color. Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.

The deeper point is that a science of nature is not a science of human experience. Third-person descriptions or models of physical reality are not accounts of how we experience things. And even when we are presented with a scientific description, it is something that we experience. For instance, we actively interpret a photograph or a diagram; we do not automatically imprint all of its pixels. And we listen to a person lecture about science; we do not simply absorb the content.

There are truths that can be expressed in third-person form–for example, that human eyes and brains work in certain ways. But there are also truths about how we experience everything, including scientific claims.

And Cézanne is a scientist of experience.

Quotations from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964); image by Paul Cézanne, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The image on the Mus?e d’Orsay’s website suggests a warmer palette, but I don’t know whether it’s open-source. I also refer to Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy : A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1978).

what you need to know for collective action

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The graphic with this post shows the outline for “Introduction to Civic Studies,” which I am offering for 50 Tufts undergraduates this spring, and also for my 2022 book What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (with an associated website).

To trace one portion of the argument: There is not much point in asking what’s wrong with the world or how things should be unless you can also address the question: “What should we do?” And there is not much point in asking that question unless you are part of–or can form–a functioning “we” that is able to act collectively, assembling and deploying assets.

Functioning groups require rules (broadly defined) as well as attitudes, such as trust.

In order to create rules and trust, it is helpful to know how to:

Develop explicit models (simplified representations) of the social situation that can guide your action and that you can modify in the light of experience
Analyze institutions in terms of components, such as their biophysical circumstances, the choices that they create for participants, and their outcomes. You should be able to analyze institutions that you want to launch or sustain, so that these entities can persist and even grow. You may also need to analyze institutions that you oppose, to reveal their vulnerabilities.
Treat your own group as a common-pool resource: that is, as a good that benefits everyone involved but that can be used up or degraded. Common-pool resources are difficult to finance and sustain, yet some flourish. The ones that succeed usually employ wise principles. Therefore:
Apply design principles that enable successful collective action, such as establishing clear boundaries around the the group and its assets, developing efficient processes for resolving conflicts, and using light but graduated sanctions for members who violate the rules.
Preserve and expand social capital (otherwise known as “collective efficacy” or “community cohesion”): the social ties and interpersonal commitments that enable further action.
Practice skills that organize people (rather than simply mobilize them to take specific actions), such as one-to-one interviews and decision-making meetings.

The second through fifth points come from the work of Elinor Ostrom, although you may decide to analyze institutions into different components from the ones she identified, or apply different design principles, if your experience yields different lessons.

This is not all you need to know, because additional challenges arise when you face conflicting beliefs about good means and ends or when you encounter oppressive power. We will move onto those topics for the rest of the semester. But the list shown here is necessary.

Rilke, The Grownup

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The Grownup

All this stood on her and was the world
And stood on her with everything, fear and grace,
As trees stand, growing and straight,
All image and imageless like the Ark. 
And solemnly, as if placed on a people.

And she endured it, bore it--
The flying, escaping, distant,
The immense, not yet learned--
Calm as a woman bearing water
In a full jug. Right in the midst of the game,
Transforming and preparing for something else,
The first white veil, gently gliding,

Fell over her open face
Almost opaque and never lifting again
And somehow to all your questions
Only vaguely offering an answer:
In you, you who has been a child, in you. 

        — Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Peter Levine)

The original poem, “Die Erwachsene” from New Poems (1907), is here. The title is the ordinary German word for “adult,” but etymologically, it means “one who has accomplished growth.” Rilke invents a word in his final line, “Kindgewesene,” which I translate here as “one who has been a child.” All of us (even the youngest) are both things at once.

The first lines describe a female person in the past tense. Every reading that I have seen presumes that she is a child, but that is not explicit, and the poem’s title names an adult.

She is with something. The phrase “all this” or “this all” (das alles) suggests that the narrator is referring to everything we perceive, the world. It exceeds representative language–being immense and fleeting–yet it has a heavy weight, which she bears calmly. It is likened to a tree and to the Ark of the Covenant. Trees do not intend anything; they simply grow. The Biblical Ark incorporated golden images of cherubim (Ex. 25:18), but it also contained the written prohibition against graven images, so that it was ganz Bild und bildlos–“all image and imageless.” A tree, the Ark, and perhaps a child are alike in that they have meanings for us but do not intend meanings.

At a specific moment, in the middle of an absorbing activity (a Spiel or game), a second object enters, a veil that descends permanently over this person’s face. Until now, she has seemed oblivious or absorbed in her context, but now there are things that are concealed from her, and vice-versa.

This veil–not the girl or woman–responds unclearly to “your” questions. With this evocation of “you,” there is another person in the poem: presumably, Rilke’s adult reader. The poem advises “you” to look for answers not through a veil but within yourself as someone who has been a child.

We might think of time as a series of instants, of which the present is merely one. That is how the time of clocks and calendars works: a system with which we analyze and control aspects of nature. One year we are children; another, we are grown. But consciousness is not simply located in the present. What we experience at any given moment is a set of meaningful objects that have various durations and histories, often extending into the future as well back into the remembered past. Like the objects that we experience, our selves have histories and hopes. Sometimes we are aware of the kind of time that clocks measure, and sometimes we are absorbed in an activity (bis mitten unterm Spiel) when a sudden change occurs.

Put another way: I am not merely an organism located at a time and a place but also a person who has been a child, who has grown, and who feels the weight of things “not yet learned.” The good and bad things that matter–both fear and grace–extend in time and carry me backward and ahead.

Kant deduced from the fact that we experience objects with duration that there must be a lasting self, but his deduction yielded an “I” that was invisible, simple, and identical for all who reason. As Merleau-Ponty writes, Kant’s argument “rids the world of its opacity and its transcendence. … There is nothing hidden behind … faces and gestures, no domain to which I have no access, merely a little shadow [the self] which owes its very existence to the light” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, xiii).

Looking inward, we should instead find a self that is complicated, dynamic, elusive, and situated. Rilke explores opacity and transcendence in this poem, which is about having both a past and a present.

Quotation from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (Routledge, 2002). The Rilke translation is mine and misses the tight rhythm and rhyme-scheme of the original. See also: Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall“; phenomenology of nostalgia; Kieran Setiya on midlife; three great paintings in dialogue (addressing Rilke’s 5th Duino Elegy); and the sublime is social–with notes on Wordsworth’s “Lines Above Tintern Abbey“.

Habits of Hearts and Mind: How to Fortify Civic Culture

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In June 2020, the the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship published its landmark report, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21^st Century, with recommendations concerning many aspects of politics and civic life. The AAA&S has continued to develop and promote the strategies of that document. Some of this work has been conducted by a Civic Culture Working Group, to which I belong. And yesterday, this Working Group released its report, entitled Habits of Hearts and Mind: How to Fortify Civic Culture.

The report defines “civic culture” as “the set of norms, values, narratives, habits, and rituals that shape how we live together and govern ourselves in our diverse democratic society.”

“Culture” can be a vague term applied to elusive aspects of groups or organizations–or even a way of avoiding sharper analysis. What we cannot explain, sometimes we call “culture.” But I believe this report avoids that trap by offering vivid examples of organizations that enhance civic culture, thus communicating a relatively tangible sense of what the phrase means.

For instance, Lincoln Center “held a group wedding for seven hundred couples with backgrounds and traditions as diverse as New York.” More than 100 “bikers with Black Bikers Vote joined When We All Vote for a motorcycle ride that stopped by drop boxes and polling places in Philadelphia. The community ride ended with a party featuring food, music, and entertainment to celebrate the West Philadelphia community voting together.”

The report derives eight principles from these examples, without presuming that there can be one model for fortifying civic culture. It uses a culinary metaphor: “This publication is a sampler of ingredients and recipes for creating a healthy civic culture. The aim is not to provide a generic formula or one-size-fits-all approach. We highlight nourishing recipes and methods that we enjoy and that can be enriching. And we encourage you to cook something up with your own unique blend of ingredients.”

The report discusses these eight major categories of “ingredients”:

Practice Civic Love and Joy
Promote Habits of Service
Create Space for Free Exchange of Ideas and
Model Being Unafraid
Engage People in Codesign and Decision-Making
Practice Mutualism and Mutual Aid
Spread Narratives of Common Purpose
Root Activity in Shared Place

The “recipes” are various programs and projects that use these principles to enrich civic culture.

I would recommend the report to anyone who is concerned about civic culture. It would make a good reading assignment in high school or college. But above all, it should be a useful cookbook for people who lead or work in all kinds of organizations that have the potential to fortify civic life in the USA. Often, these organizations have other missions. For example, Lincoln Center is a major venue for performing arts. But they can contribute to civic life by implementing their programs in the ways this report recommends.

how thinking about causality affects the inner life

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For many centuries, hugely influential thinkers in each of the Abrahamic faiths combined their foundational belief in an omnipotent deity with Aristotle’s framework of four kinds of causes. Many believers found solace when they discerned a divine role in the four causes.

Aristotle’s framework ran afoul of the Scientific Revolution. Today, there are still ways to be an Abrahamic believer who accepts science, and classical Indian thought offers some alternatives. Nevertheless the reduction of causes from Aristotle’s four to the two of modern science poses a spiritual and ethical challenge.

(This point is widely understood–and by no means my original contribution–but I thought the following summary might be useful for some readers.)

To illustrate Aristotle’s four causes, consider my hands, which are currently typing this blog post. Why are they doing that?

Efficient cause: Electric signals are passing along nerves and triggering muscles to contract or relax. In turn, prior electrical and mechanical events caused those signals to flow–and so on, back through time.
Material cause: My hand is made of muscles, nerves, skin, bones, and other materials, which, when so configured and stimulated, move. A statue’s hand that was made of marble would not move.
Formal cause: A hand is defined as “the terminal part of the vertebrate forelimb when modified (as in humans) as a grasping organ” (Webster’s dictionary). I do things like grasp, point, and touch with my hand because it is a hand. Some hands do not do these things–for instance, because of disabilities–but those are exceptions (caused by efficient causes) that interfere with the definitive form of a hand.
Final cause: I am typing in order to communicate certain points about Aristotle. I behave in this way because I see myself as a scholar and teacher whose words might educate others. In turn, educated people may live better. Therefore, I move my fingers for the end (telos, in Greek) of a good life.

Aristotle acknowledges that some events occur only because of efficient and material causes; these accidents lack ends. However, the four causes apply widely. For example, not only my hand but also the keyboard that I am using could be analyzed in terms of all four causes.

The Abrahamic thinkers who read Aristotle related the Creator to all the causes, but especially to the final cause (see Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 2:1 or Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q44). In a well-ordered, divinely created universe, everything important ultimately happens for a purpose that is good. Dante concludes his Divine Comedy by invoking the final cause of everything, “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”

These Jewish and Christian thinkers follow the Muslim philosopher Avicenna, who even considers cases–like scratching one’s beard–that seem to have only efficient causes and not to happen for any end. “Against this objection, Avicenna maintains that apparently trivial human actions are motivated by unconscious desire for pleasure, the good of the animal soul” (Richardson 2020), which, in turn, is due to the creator.

However, writing in the early 1600s, Francis Bacon criticizes this whole tradition. He assigns efficient and material causes to physics, and formal and final causes to metaphysics. He gestures at the value of metaphysics for religion and ethics, but he doubts that knowledge can advance in those domains. His mission is to improve our understanding and control of the natural world. And for that purpose, he recommends that we keep formal and final causes out of our analysis and practice only what he calls “physics.”

It is rightly laid down that true knowledge is that which is deduced from causes. The division of four causes also is not amiss: matter, form, the efficient, and end or final cause. Of these, however, the latter is so far from being beneficial, that it even corrupts the sciences, except in the intercourse of man with man (Bacon, Novum Organum. P. F. Collier, 1620, II;2).

In this passage and others related to it, Bacon proved prescient. Although plenty of scientists after Bacon have believed in final causes, including divine ends, they only investigate efficient and material causes. Perhaps love moves all the stars, but in Newtonian physics, we strive to explain physical motion in terms of prior events and materials. This is a methodological commitment that yields what Bacon foresaw, the advancement of science.

The last redoubt of final causes was the biological world. My hand moves because of electrical signals, but it seemed that an object as complicated as a hand must have come into existence to serve an end. As Kant writes, “it is quite certain that in terms of purely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even adequately become familiar with, much less explain, organized beings and how they are internally possible.” Kant says that no Isaac Newton could ever arise who would be able to explain “how even a mere blade of grass is produced” using only “natural laws unordered by intention” (Critique of Judgment 74, Pluhar trans.). But then along came just such a Newton in the form of Charles Darwin, who showed that efficient and material explanations suffice in biology, too. A combination of random mutation plus natural selection ultimately yields objects like blades of grass and human hands.

A world without final causes–without ends–seems cold and pointless if one begins where Avicenna, Maimonides, and Aquinas did. One option is to follow Bacon (and Kant) by separating physics from metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics and assigning the final causes to the latter subjects. Indeed, we see this distinction in the modern university, where the STEM departments deal with efficient causes, and final causes are discussed in some of the humanities. Plenty of scientists continue to use final-cause explanations when they think about religion, ethics, or beauty–they just don’t do that as part of their jobs.

However, Bacon’s warning still resonates. He suspects that progress is only possible when we analyze efficient and material causes. We may already know the final causes relevant to human life, but we cannot learn more about them. This is fine if everyone is convinced about the purpose of life. However, if we find ourselves disagreeing about ethics, religion, and aesthetics, then an inability to make progress becomes an inability to know what is right, and the result can be deep skepticism.

Michael Rosen (2022) reads both Rousseau and Kant as “moral unanimists”–philosophers who believe that everyone already knows the right answer about moral issues. But today hardly anyone is a “moral unanimist,” because we are more aware of diversity. Nietzsche describes the outcome (here, in a discussion of history that has become a science):

Its noblest claim nowadays is that it is a mirror, it rejects all teleology, it does not want to ‘prove’ anything any more; it scorns playing the judge, and shows good taste there, – it affirms as little as it denies, it asserts and ‘describes’ . . . All this is ascetic to a high degree; but to an even higher degree it is nihilistic, make no mistake about it! You see a sad, hard but determined gaze, – an eye peers out, like a lone explorer at the North Pole (perhaps so as not to peer in? or peer back? . . .). Here there is snow, here life is silenced; the last crows heard here are called ‘what for?’, ‘in vain’, ‘nada’ (Genealogy of Morals, Kaufman trans. 2:26)

Earlier in the same book, Nietzsche recounts how, as a young man, he was shaped by Schopenhauer’s argument that life has no purpose or design. But Nietzsche says he detected a harmful psychological consequence:

Precisely here I saw the great danger to mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction – temptation to what? to nothingness? – precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, standstill, mankind looking back wearily, turning its will against life, and the onset of the final sickness becoming gently, sadly manifest: I understood the morality of compassion [Mitleid], casting around ever wider to catch even philosophers and make them ill, as the most uncanny symptom of our European culture which has itself become uncanny, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a new Euro-Buddhism? to – nihilism? (Genealogy of Morals, Preface:6)

After mentioning Buddhism, Nietzsche critically explores the recent popularity of the great Buddhist virtue–compassion–in Europe.

Indeed, one of the oldest and most widely shared philosophical premises in Buddhism is “dependent origination,” which is the idea that everything happens because of efficient causes alone and not for teleological reasons. (I think that formal causes persist in Theravada texts but are rejected in Mahayana.)

Dependent origination is taken as good news. By realizing that everything we believe and wish for is the automatic result of previous accidental events, we free ourselves from these mental states. And by believing the same about everyone else’s beliefs and desires, we gain unlimited compassion for those creatures. Calm benevolence fills the mind and excludes the desires that brought suffering while we still believed in their intrinsic value. A very ancient verse which goes by the short title ye dharma hetu says (roughly): “Of all the things that have causes, the enlightened one has shown what causes them, and thereby the great renouncer has shown how they cease.”

I mention this argument not necessarily to endorse it. Much classical Buddhist thought presumes that a total release from the world of causation is possible, whether instantly or over aeons. If one doubts that possibility, as I do, then the news that there are no final causes is no longer consoling.

Secondary sources: Richardson, Kara, “Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.); Michael Rosen, The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History, Harvard University Press, 2022. See also how we use Kant today; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; does doubting the existence of the self tame the will?; spirituality and science; and the progress of science.