veridiction:s

There are dead zones that riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility 
of interpretive depth that they seem to repel any attempt to give them value or
meaning. They are spaces, as I discovered, where interpretive labor no longer 
works. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t like to talk about them. They repel
the imagination. But if we ignore them entirely, we risk becoming complicit in
the very violence that creates them. - David Graeber, 2006

It is time to state a new understanding of cynicism, following a few developments within and without cynicism itself, to account for what cynicism looks like in a new climatic and catastrophic regime. It is time to detect and modify those new cynical modes of response that leave our environment in the hands of destructive forces.

I will propose cynicism as abandonment, in which cynicism will no more be recognized as an attitude, a negative one, in an economic environment, but a search for small uplifting regions of inner experience concurrent with abandonment of larger zones of ecological (including human) exhaustion.

The cynicism of the 20th century was, in retrospect at least, not sustainable. For Peter Sloterdijk, cynicism was a mechanism of coping with modern economies, building in security for self-identity from the caprice of working life to which one held on externally for earning a living but capitulating the meaning of labor and value in retaining (a sense of) control over one’s private feelings and intellect. This strategy was one of the mode of sacrifice, of one’s productive energies as well as the milieu of consumptive and productive economy. It was moreover a middle class strategy, suitable for those who did have work and a home to be cynical for.

The cynicism that fenced the inner experience from ongoing erosions, cleared the grounds for “identity.” Quite a lot of events culminated into a segmentation of populations into identities, e.g. market segmentation and later on social networks technology. These matters are critical now about but beyond the purview of this text. The contribution of the strategy of cynicism of fencing those parts of the mind that could justifiably be protected at the cost of whatever found itself beyond: an honest remark, the risk of speaking up, feedback on errors necessary for correction, moral engagement tout court, etcetera.

However, the juice is finished and people are burning out even while capitulating regions of their lives to save what’s left. Psychological coping with structural defect is untenable. Soft skills too wear out when dealing with hard problems.

What had taken place in human communications (“honest remark” and the like listed above), had increasingly taken place everywhere. Engagement with neighborhoods is relatively abandoned, by those who have to move out, those who feel too cosmopolite to bind with their hoods, those investors who only have one concern, those policymakers who have tried everything except addressing the root causes and those policymakers who cannot succeed in engaging sustainably all other stakeholders. Concern about sustainability is everywhere superseded by the stronger forces that are there to make things and humans move through: nothing should bind to the place, which must be soon ready for transformation for higher modes of exploitation.

The reader can extend this example of neighboorhoods to other “landscapes.” I mean to be very inclusive with what belongs to this category of landscapes. Otherwise I would be saying nothing new here. A good contrasting example can be a corporation of governmental department. Here too, we can see people moving around and doing things. But this place is in fact abandoned. The engagements are cynical. Not as an attitude, not consciously, but plainly in their extensions temporally, effectively, affectively. The contracts are temporary, the plans are watered down in every aspect so as to be affordable and insult no one, the risk of mentioning errors is too great, credits for accomplishments are distributed awkwardly, the communications are read carelessly, the social talks don’t touch on any matters of importance. Those who hang on have learnt not care, not because they are evil. No–and this is the point–they know they cannot afford caring.

Likewise we leave a piece of land empty of what we call biodiversity. This example is familiar.

Even if in all these examples the work of abandonment is never done, it is just a reason for further emptying out.

In numbers we abandon numerous landscapes sooner or later. The feeling of cynicism is avoided by leaving the landscape were cynicism germinates, even if this landscape is where living takes place, or decisions about a highway trajectory, future investment, or an algorithm that could discriminate is made. Thus cynicism as affect is no longer a concept that would help us detect this destructive version of the cynical reason.

These organizations learn to continue without care, and bind labor and force not by adding care but by punishing deviance and dissent. We speak here of organizations where bureaucracy is entrenched and institutions that hold on to out-of-touch calculations, trickle-up hierarchies, and an economy of expendable human resources (among other materials). But even if the feeling of cynicism is replaced with a new breath, the act of abandonment has been definitely and ultimately cynical.

Thus response is added on top of cynicism, because the way to taking on the root causes is diligently gated by those who, we are learning to say, “benefit from the current situation.”

I already implied that abandonment is not particular to those who, so to say, are exploited or exploit themselves. It is a general mode of response. These same groups who “benefit from the current situation,” those who we can call the irresponsible responsible guardians, their calculative organization that inflexibly call the shots and command the scripts, they divest from zones they consider unfit for business–zones previously exploited and sacrificed. They themselves feel abandoned, moreover, whenever they fail to reproduce the business identity. “In your suit you’re someone, without it you’re nobody.” They take not-caring as their ultimate motto, having learnt as MBA freshman or otherwise to minimize the cost of winning.

Let us be clear that the job of “business,” its birth right, is to only speak positively of solutions, solutions that are ready to be sold, or can be promised. Solutions that promise a future profit. It is its job to excavate new and cheerful opportunities. In this definitive sense every businessman is an idealist, just as any entrepreneur is “creating a better world” and pragmatic too. But on the same grounds business has to remain silent on the much larger group of problems that invite no business solution. Business speaks of cheerful opportunities even if the enunciator and the interlocutors are staring at a scene of a disaster, a ghetto, or tortured landscapes. As if one can pick and choose what critical and collective problems one finds attractive to tackle! It should be clear, business cannot replace the hard work of politics.

But also urban spaces and infrastructures, with the famous examples of Detroit or Flint Michigan, are left behind in their toxicity by the value that was extracted from them. Values that now “positively” infest other promising landscapes. And at the same time, castes of lower order leave their deserted lands where the slowly unfolding catastrophe has devastated their livelihoods. We can now put the movement of refugees out of their burning homes and the movement of  urban “human resources” leaving science, government, and (its subsidiaries,) and corporations, into one picture. We are all in a flight. The difference is that some of us can retreat into zen jobs and tiny green bubbles, based on what they have extracted and accumulated from the landscapes they now have left, while others end up between and within the walls that prevents them reaching the inhabitable bubble. There isn’t enough place on an earth that is becoming tinier and tinier as we abandon it further.

Surely, enough minions figure will remain to occupy existing positions in institutions. But trust and enthusiasm will everywhere plummet and recedes into a silence of negativity.

And I emphasize again. I speak of minions, but none of us, none of these groups are cynical in attitude, or cynical in consciousness. It is a basic fact of life, and it is that one thing that economics got right: that everyone does his and her best. So no, the landscapes are cynical and our strategy to deal with them are intelligible even if complicit.

Thus every landscape is abandoned, however differently, by its sustainable parts and supportive attachments, left either to decay or peak in exploitation.

Herein lies the advantage of talking of cynicism within a story that is otherwise not new to many ears. It identifies a concerted response in humans that allows us to put into a one picture the process of de-civilization, be it in an office within a skyscraper where bizarre talks about the newest conspicuous consumptions or advancements in exploitation take place, or be it large stretches of land skinned and devastated, a the good old distrust in the capacity of others to think. Its original point is that, as such, the retreat to a “local community” or “just doing one’s job” will be counted as a cynical reaction, an abandonment of a world which sooner or later will, once again, intrude our bubble; whereas re-engagement with abandoned zones, ruins, and decaying institutions will become a new question and a new invitation for amor mundi.

Its originality too is that it does not exempt anyone. It is about those lower on the ladders of hierarchy who abandon their ambitions, and also those higher in the hierarchy who abandon the care for their subjects. It is symmetrical and recognizes neo-cynicism as a common material condition, not a psychology. Hence my use of the word “landscape.” It is not a matter of “those others” who are mistaken, misinformed, misled, compromised, polarized, and those who want to retreat into their gated parcels. This is a direct warning to the reader. It should point toward us, more than it would point to “others,” those others in whom we have abandoned our hope and our connection.

We cannot go back, of course, to the never-resolving promise of a globalization. But neither is it possible to isolate a region of the earth from the havoc and toxicity that we have spawned elsewhere. Refugees will always try to reach our bubbles to which we fled first, awakening our bad conscience–a conscience which we will violently try to expel! Retreat is part of the problem, and the only solution moves in the direction of reclamation and distribution of all areas of responsibility, especially since we now have disturbed almost everything.

——–

Retreating into one’s mind and bubble, characteristic of both the 20th-century cynicism and the 21th-century zen neo-cynicism, will not save us; it will add to the destruction even if passively, by merely failing to act up against it. Retreating into smaller lives, moreover, is a privilege of those exactly who can nevertheless consume the world and inherit a better part of a still unjust distribution of the consequences of the environmental mutation. It means the evasion of our political prerogative, that is, our inevitably collective problem.

Retreat is a psychologization, neatly in line with the impoverished metaphysics of sorting things out in no more than two categories of being, psyche and world, culture and nature. It might make the greater world a little better, or a little less worse. But it does not compensate for the necessity to reclaim–a reclamation that will not be easy in any regard, considering that we are occupied with so many bad habits. We will have to work this out later, since this is an expansive topic. My focus here is on the subtle but crucial difference between cynical retreat, which is proliferating, and reclamation, its necessity. Most crucially we should dare to suspect cynicism in positive talk and as inconsequential–that is, merely psychological–attitude, if want to begin distinguishing problems from solutions at all.

I should say more on my meaning of psychologization. I mean by it examples such as promotion of psychological techniques, e.g. mindfulness meditation (which increasingly tends to desensitize than to sensitize to experience and experience of thought in particular), psychotherapeutic internalization of response to oppressive conditions, gaslighting and propaganda techniques, catering to mere images of facts, or more radically the fundamental confusion between information (the response to which is “OK”, meaning correctly received) and knowledge (the response to which is substantive and differential). I also mean the reduction to “opinion” of plain facts (not scientific facts; see H. Arendt’s Truth and Politics), expansion of the marketing and communication dispositifs that create mere images forming curtains between insides and outsides, etcetera.

These are historical movements that isolate experience from the world and have been positively employed in following the doctrine that nature is deterministic and a domain exclusive to science and scientists, whereas the psyche is the domain of the freedom of individuals, however impotent. However, an isolated psyche is nothing more but a psyche compromised and neutralized. The impotence is programmatic to a habitual 20th-century politics that misidentifies it as a solution to the problem of mass upheaval and popular uprising. Such impotent psyche cannot orients itself in the world except by following some external authority without an ability to examine and judge.

To understand, but also to modify the new cultures of coping, its neo-cynical variety, we should respond to the demand of de-psychologization and prevent falling back into nature-culture and mind-world dualisms. psychologization of human response to material exploitation has, in the end, exacerbated our condition.

This is no different than going from the perception of cynicism as attitude to cynicism as a material effect on all landscapes. For longer now, we have understood cynicism as a psychological condition and response. But now we can speak of factual abandonment, in line with reality. We can detect cynicism in its silence, a silence that is a very loud representation of those bio-poor landscapes that laying waste or are being wasted.

Even if things appear in a very positive light in a situation, we will nevertheless see the darkness that surrounds it: in the words of someone who speaks of ‘taking care of oneself’ (but did you give up on caring for the world?), ‘I leave that to the scientists’ (but they need your help), or ‘nature will resolve with or without us’ (and yet our irresponsible responsible guardians don’t let that happen).

The same holds for business talk. In its positivity we should learn to detect and name what it lays waste in silent darkness–both in its downtrodden back offices, its displaced sights of production, as well as the landscapes that it empties out. This is necessary because the prerogative of optimism and the entrepreneurial and networking etiquette of always being upbeat has become part of the problem. We don’t want to find ourselves remaining positive within an ever-shrinking area of life and experience.

We should dare to be integral and address the difficult silence. We have to become able to recall what we previously had given up personally and collectively, or in reverse, what landscapes have left us hopeless and are in need of our care. And thereby we can sense, again, what regions of existence are calling for our concern and care. And not only that, there might be a reward waiting for us: the experience that, yes, the world is more spacious than our enclosed and colonized psyches and lives, a world that can prove yet again that it is accommodating and inhabitable.

———

What happens after detecting, naming, and struggling to reclaim depends on particular and situated responses, not to be generalized. The net of generalization is now surely too thin and infirm to extend over all the complex landscapes. But above all, the point is to resist expelling those cynical landscapes from our minds and to resist being satisfied with one’s parcel only, leaving the movement of business as usual to its devices. However it happens, the lesson remains: out of sight is never out of existence.

This sounds like good sense and thus hopes to reach the being of the reader. But it can also be regarded as old news. “Of course we try to care.” “We are already working full capacity and cannot take on board more than that.” Or it can be seen as empty words or “it’s easy for you to talk.” It can read as a cynical text itself (it does not deny being part of the contemporary). Or the response can be “and what solutions do you propose?” I believe this text has done sufficient work if it has sensitized us to the displacement of cynicism and enabled us to spot it where is happens and shift course at any juncture in life where cynicism dissuades to care and have us close our senses.

“We already care” is indeed a legitimate reply, but I am certain that only a very small group can so exclaim. The persuasion of others to care also instills the hope that the task will become less difficult and exhausting. But the question of structures that dissuade care remain a question and to the same extent the task of care remains doubled too: one of caring for what is damaged, “a damaged planet,” but also care about the forces in place that do the damage.

Thus the in shifting the cynical response to one of care (to an old and healthy cynicism that does care about the state of the world and the varieties of existence), it will not be a matter of caring for what we encounter in peril, and caring for the landscapes where we now are, and those landscapes which we gave up previously. No, its second layer is that of following the lines from place A about which we care to place B and C and perhaps further, that is, Bs and Cs that are responsible for shaping place A.

…

And for those of us who keep to our humble contributions at the limits of home and work (and I have done both), this should be a question for us, one that demands examination, whether we are not living in a bubble that we have built to merely keep out of sight those parts of existence that make us feel desperate and cynical. Whether this neo-cynical way of life will prove sustainable. The real and good cynicism might after all be the one that actively engages with whatever is imperfect in the world. Our world is indeed not ideal and very complicated, the cynic knows, but it remains our world.

The School of Athens, by Raphael (1509-1511). Apostelic Palace, Vatican.

Acknowledgement: This piece, its style and reasoning, is indebted to historian of science Michel Serres.

Note: I suggest the reader to “View image” in a “New window” to switch back and forth when reading. The text points out to parts of the painting in studying it.

This story is oft-told: With our hands we point to the places in the world, where we want to invest the attention of others. “Show it to me,” demanded the person who wanted to found a claim of knowledge on evidence and demonstration. “Look, see? There it is,” was the response of the investigator who pursued the construction of evidence. To the extent that we can point to something we can persuade ourselves and others that that something is there. The index finger is an ordinary prerequisite of knowledge. But what does the other hand do?

In Raphael’s School of Athens, where all the fathers of Western knowledge figure, we can see those fingers. Most pointing fingers are on the right hands. How should we understand the function of the left hand? And what does this hand say about the Homo Sapien and his life of knowledge? Do the left hands play the mere supporting role? They seem to be supporting, but merely?

In the center of the Raphael’s painting are depicted Plato, on the left, and Aristotle on the right. Plato points upwards, as if that is the place the eternal forms have home, in unity. Aristotle’s gesture covers the world beneath his middle, to the myriad of things. “This is where we have to look.”

Plato and Aristotle are holding books. They are, moreover, holding them differently. Shouldn’t that tell us about a second difference between the philosophers? Shouldn’t the left hands reveal yet another variety in ways of relating to the world, or to text and words at least? What difference has Raphael imagined and depicted in their use of their left hands, or their use of books? Is it anything other than the imitation of his own painting gesture–the brush in his right hand and the color palette in his left? Or would he have held himself onto his place with his left hand, while he was painting this wall? Or maybe someone else gave him a hand?

Can the other figures in the painting help decipher what the left hand is supposed to do? Almost all visible left hands are holding something. To the left of the man beneath the stairs and leaning onto the stone block (it is said the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus figures here), a dark-skinned man stands to hold open a book. With the right hand he points to something in the book while with his face he is asking for the attention of a scribing figure, the bald man. Does the upright man know the difference between written words and the things to which those words refer? He does not get to receive the gaze of anyone; is he attached too obsessively to the text like the Arab scholars who ardently translated and preserved Greek texts? Anyway, whether this is a version of ‘orientalism’ or not, his gesture seems out of joint. The left hand holds too awkwardly onto the thinner half of the binding, already wanting to turn the page while the right hand desires to remain on the current page. His right hand and his gaze diverge and divide rather than unify the attention. A confused coordination of the body exemplifies a clouded mind; a clouded mind is visible through a confused body. Lastly, he is asking for the attention of someone who is already engaged with writing himself (the bald man, he could be Pythagoras) and who is already in a better learned circle, or learning circle; this bald man does not merely write, he writes in relating to an object (even though, and even more so, to an object that itself refers still to yet another thing…), to the small drawing board in front him, held with another left hand, with the hand of a boy–young Archimedes showing his “principle.”

And all the while a third and older figure is learning from him–Pythagoras–making notes with the usual distribution of tasks among the hands. This is Anaximander, another geometrician (it does not matter for the sake of our treatise what his contributions were). Paradoxically, Anaximander was born before Pythagoras. And Archimedes set foot on earth long after Pythagoras passed. The order of learning is depicted in the wrong direction! But no, the message is that they were all working towards the same orderly laws. If they would be alive at one and the same time, as they do in Raphael’s masterpiece, the older men would surely learn from the young Archimedes because his results are the purest and closest to the truth, all condensed onto one diagram. But this is so only because Archimedes had to learn from the prolific texts and tales of Pythagoras, who absorbed the scribbles and notes of Anaximander.

How could we know our world and coordinate ourselves within it, if not by learning to direct our gaze, fix our attention, and follow our wise elders even more closely than they have done themselves? And could they know anything if not by making things that also gesture towards, for example, the sun, even when it is night, to a building that is yet to be built, to the here-after, which is arriving but always beyond a horizon? And how could we know the greater existence and the dark side of the moon if not by somehow holding it here and now, and so, manipulate it?

How could we point out those things, sensations in our bodies, the force of wind, the order of the movement of the stars, the regularities of falling bodies, the process that gives forth new living creates, things do not lie in front of as objects and moreover objects that fit in our hands, between our arms and fall within the scope of our vision? Admittedly, this is the theme of “indexicality,” which itself is a meaning of objectivity, that Bruno Latour has ethnographically proposed as what scientists seeks to construct and maintain: we should be able to point at the difference or piece of evidence at any point of our investigation. What I seek to add is to connect this to a certain posture and bodily composition, so that we get to know how we insert our human bodies into environments where science is practiced. The reader has probably guessed by now that we can do this thanks to the genius of Raphael’s visual knowledge of bodies and his knowledge of the Greek men.

Let us study the painting further. Is the dark-skinned man a student, maybe a presumptuous learner? No, the learners are on the right. With a group of four they are collected around a board laid down on the ground on which an older man in a red robe (they say it is Euclid) is exercising geometry. Here we see the teacher drawing with his right hand stretched maximally, while he is supporting his bent posture, presumably, with his left. The floor not only holds the surface on which he exercises his art, but its flatness is a perfect match for the purposes of his drawing. And what do the pupils do? Their attention shifts to everywhere. The point here (imagine my right hand pointing) is not just that they are learning to grasp and master geometry, but that they learn geometry to the extent that they learn to properly use their hands and gaze. In this current situation only the learner closest to the board is close enough to retracing the circle that the teacher is producing, with fingers of the left hand imitating the teacher’s. Other pupils either lack coordination of hands and eyes (in the middle), have two left hands (upper right), or have reversed the usual functions of the hands and are (thus) pointing incorrectly (upper left young man).

To know the world is to know how to hold it and how to point to (clear and distinct) things in it. It is a matter of the right position, the right distribution of tasks int eh body, the right technical extensions for both tasks of holding (surface, paper) and pointing (pen, compass). It even includes privilege just as it is a question of proximity. It is a matter of learning how to use one’s body in the proper relations to what is to be handled.

Learning geometry, and doing philosophy, then are not very different from sawing wood, screwing a screw, knotting a knot, threading a thread. They are just another sort of practice, to them belonging certain disciplines of the body.

But perhaps this distribution of the holding hand and the hand that draws, saws, knots and threads, I mean this lateral function of our bodies, has changed more recently. Perhaps with driving cars we still give directions with the right hand and hold onto to the energies of the car with the left–at least outside the UK and some of its current and former colonies. But with the typing machine and the computer? Right-handedness and left-handedness have changed. It is a new meaning in construction, a new ambidexterity. What is clear is that it corresponds to a new distribution of things in our world, and thus a new bodily posture appropriate to it. What is clear is that this is as historical a matter as it is physiological.

I eye the painting once again; The man lost in thought, leaning onto the block to the left of the middle–not with a netbook but pen and paper. He is the quasi-Heraclitus who is said to have received his ideas exclusively from things in the mind: words, inspirations, epiphanies. His left hand does not hold onto a book but a head, his head. He is not pointing to his head (which, we’d expect by now, he would do with his right hand), which would have a very different meaning–one of which is: I am mad. Rather, he is evidently thinking–he is holding his head as if getting a grip on his thoughts. His left hand on its turn is supported by the stone table, which also keeps a paper on its place. Is the left hand the model for tables, and are tables substitutes for left hands? Is the table ever invented to free the left hand of its burdens of holding objects for the right hand to manipulate? Does the table makes the difference, among others, between the farmer, who holds a scythe (left) and swings it (right) and the man of knowledge who depends on others for holding, stands on their “shoulders,” so to say, whilst pointing to beyonds with a visionary finger? It is not an unusual hypothesis at all if one is familiar with the argument of “the extended mind.” That he places his left hand on his heap or grips a book, misguides us into thinking that he did all by himself, out of his head and merely by words on papers.

Do the hands refer to two complementary meanings of the world? That there are separable things and objects in the world to which we can give differentiated attention, all of which together form a supported and supporting whole? Do the differences between the right and the left hand, in Raphael’s depiction at least, point to the difficult relationship of wholes and parts? It is plausible that hands are differentiated in their functions. It is hopefully plausible too that this differentiation corresponds to the possibility of practicing deeds that produce knowledge of the world. Is it possible that what we call whole and parts, which still has an enigmatic place in the world of the sciences (especially that of the complex systems and also in the hypotheses on lateralization of human brain functions) is, at last, explicable thanks to the left and the right hand?

And a few more hands. Let us notice the old man on the stairs, beneath Aristotle. He does not care for his posture or his cover. His care is for holding the plate or paper at the right distance, on which he reads. His right hand is relieved of duty (he is retired and does not command anyone any longer, does not teach or communicatie), while his right arm is also a pillar that holds his reading shoulders and head (his energies go into sustaining his old days and his aging body). He does not point out anything even though we can see he has great interest in knowledge. We won’t know whether what is going on inside his dark head is genius or a lost mind–until he is tested and succeeds or fails in convincingly pointing out what he has learnt and can learn us too.

And this question of genius or madness, perhaps, brings about the dismayed hands of the young person who has his back turned to us. “Look at him”, asks the left hand, “what do we do with this condition of being”, asks the right hand. Is this young figure also learning, as his left hand is doing right hands’ work? Not possible to deny. But as our previous figures did, this left hand is actually holding the whole of the man, so that the right hand can pose a question about a part of him. Just notice how the left hand is meticuously oriented flatly towards the pith of old body’s matter, and the right hand is inviting to question by directing itself at him with open and undetermined gesture. It is the job of master painter, not to deny.

Possibly, what is under our attention is given by the right to the left hand to hold, so that afterwards we can lay our focus further towards the parts of what is now a whole in its own right–or better, its own left.

Prominent wholes, the earth and the heavens, are in fact held by noble figures to the right of the students of geometry–we can enumerate the variety of disciplines here in this one painting. A geographer is holding a globe with his left hand (young Ptolemy?), and the other has the sphere of the heavens balancing, curiously, on his right hand (perhaps the older Ptolemy, or Hipparcus). Does my narrative break down here? Is the neat distribution of functions of holding and pointing, supporting and manipulating, among right and left nevertheless arbitrary and wishful thinking on my part? (And looking at the statue of the soldier on the right, we have the functions of attacking and defending. With the musician, though also somewhat ambiguous, we also have holding and striking.) Not quite if we see how the sphere of the heavens are resting on the stretched fingers of the astronomer. Not, if we ask ourselves, as if we were contemporaries of Raphael, “could we get a hold of the stars?” It is impossible for Raphael to use the left hand when the heavens are concerned. They have a hold on us, not us of them. The astronomer can have the heavens spinning on his fingers, only as a puzzle, with a paradoxical look.

It is a beautiful lesson, if I am correct, that to know the heavens properly is to know that it is impossible to hold them, impossible, in fact, to map its infinity like we map the finite earth on a globe. And it is also to speculate, that it is already held for us (and what do we call the creature that hold the heaves for us?); we only need to point. It is a second marvel, another lesson, that to do geometry means a different repertoire of holding and pointing than doing astronomy.

Until, of course, left hands start to fix spectacles, series of lenses, telescopes, in front of our eyes. Heavens and stars can be brought closer to us. While the right hand is busy individuating heavenly bodies, the crafty left hand has not sit still. A little exchange between the hands has transformed quite a few destinies. A few instruments placed in between the eyes and ears on the one hand and the stars on the others have transformed the programming of our muscles.

And so the right hands of Plato and Aristotle have to point differently in our times, even if their concern remains with philosophy. The world of Ideas is now no more in the heavens than it is a supposed non-place, with no spatial coordinates. No more are the layered skies the greater place that holds us and our little world in its place. Nowadays we even find non-places on Earth. For them we have to look at any generic metro station, thanks to the point made by Marc Augé–at least before art works where especially commissioned to make it possible to tell stations from one another.

So, things have become somewhat more complicated now. But we still feel the need to give anything its proper place, and a way of pointing things out in trying to relate to them. And there is no other ways than to count our bodies in when we do so, no other way than to be ambidexterous about it. The ways we use our hands remain efforts towards such a world. We never stop using them some way or other.

—

For this text, to stay with Raphael’s philosophers, why, again, are Plato and Aristotle employing their left hands differently? With Aristotle we can play on his similarity with Pythagoras, the fuzzy scholar. Both of them hold their books in use, or ready to be used–more than Plato does, who pretends to already speak from the book. Left feet of both Aristotle and Pythagoras are visibly helping along. Their books are grounded in that way. What is written in their books is supported by what is here and near or is brought nearby. Yes, even Pythagoras brings things nearby with his art of numbers and geometry of distances.

But Plato understands Pythagoras differently (and Raphael agrees, in painting Pythagoras on Plato’s side). There is no point in closing in on anything or taking a distance, no use for manipulating and experimenting. What is there in the book is already as close as possible to the truth, which is in another world of Ideas. One has to have learned by heart. And this accomplishment is signaled by the restful way of holding the book under one’s arms. If for Aristotle the book must be constantly opened to consult, to check, make additions and subtractions, for Plato, the book is already finished. If for Aristotle the book must change steadily, as if there is no difference between a book and a notebook, because it refers to constant change in the empirical world, for Plato the book must refer to the ultimate truth and once written the book itself will be ultimate. For Plato everything is already at the right distance, including the paradox of knowing truths that are infinitely far away. And so, manipulation, experimentation is unnecessary. He is the armchair philosopher, with the left hand resting while the right writes. (At least, this is the received idea of Plato, in Raphael’s time and in our time still.) With Aristotle the left hand will never rest, even if from our point of view he misunderstood the varieties of change in the world.

We inherit both of these philosopher and others. Somehow they are united, or mingled, in our endless repertoire of gestures and meanings. Is the smartphone more Platonist or Aristotelian? Does it help us with accessing the world or does it alienate and confuse us? Does it try to clear up our place in the greater cosmos, or give us the feeling of a universal mind without a particular place, a mind in completely free relation to all things? Does it make us cosmopolitan, or creates new ways for us to be localized? The answer is not one or the others, but somewhere in the direction of having to learn anew how to properly grasp and index the new arrangement of things. This is what Michel Serres meant with the new law that will emerge out of the Internet.

And so, we live in a world with even more figures demonstrating an even larger diversity in the use of hands. Could we represent that diversity in an image or series of images? What would those series say about our skills and presuppositions about the cosmos? If the image and the appreciation of hands is in a rubble, because we hear and see so many things but hardly sense what they point out, at least the morale here is straightforward, and can hopefully be apprehended as more than a banality: that whatever happens we will have to make sure that we know the right hand from the left.

And not to forget the basic precondition that it is a privilege to have two hands free, and to be able to go to school–which indeed means: free time–a privilege that is still not universal as well as badly implemented in State education. As such the following ideals are both intelligible and sensible: to give others a (left) hand, to emancipate, to convene together in holding our world and join our gaze, and share knowledge. In the least, can we, come closer to this little justice, in accounting for the efforts of the left hand as much as we have praised the right in our historiography of knowing? For the care that must be given to all the things before we can point so effortlessly to them? And more broadly, to take on matters of our existence more evenhandedly? Not mere abstractions, but still an ideal to reach for.