ACADEMICS
AND THEIR BOOKS
Hanoch Ben-Yami
Wittgenstein Graphic
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This is a present from a student of mine, Ákos Polgárdi. He was doing PHD in philosophy under my supervision at the CEU. While he was working on his PHD he developed strong interest in design, especially typography, and now he is a well-known designer mainly in typography not only in Budapest but also outside Hungary. While working with me, he was working on the philosophy of Wittgenstein (apart from my historical interest in Descartes, I am very much interested in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, I teach it and it influences my own work and Ákos was working on this as well). He made me this present which is a passage from Wittgenstein’s “philosophical investigations” “philosophische untersuchungen” I am saying it in German because this is in the original German and this passage describes Wittgenstein’s idea of what should be the result of the philosophical investigation, what the philosophical problems that bother us should become: ‘because the clarity to which we strive, is certainly a complete one, but this means only that the philosophical problems should completely disappear’.
Hanoch Ben-Yami is a Professor and Head of Department at the Philosophy Department at the Central European University.
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We talked about his book on Descartes, and two graphics in his office.
Descartes’ Philosophical Revolution: A Reassessment
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The book is on Descartes’ philosophical revolution and I am trying to show that the mathematics and technology of the age had major influences on Descartes’ philosophical – not just scientific – thought. In order to convey this through the cover I put as a background is a page from his Geometry and an automaton from the 16th century. I use this image of the automaton because it in a way embodies the transformation that Descartes made with the ideas of life, soul, spirituality… This is a 16th century automaton, most probably built by an Italian engineer, Torriani. He built it for Philip II of Spain probably, and the automaton is now kept in the Smithsonian museum in Washington. It has been restored and it is operating, you can see it moving around in a YouTube video. When you just look at the cover first, before knowing anything, you think that this image stands for something spiritual, a monk carrying rosary and the cross, so it appears to stand for something spiritual. But when you read the book you see that it is an automaton, very far away from the spiritual, it is a mechanical thing with all sorts of cogwheels and springs inside and that is it, a mechanical toy in a sense; and in a way, this is what happened with life and soul in Descartes’ philosophy.
Until Descartes, people thought of life as if it is due to a special principle, a principle which does not exist in the nonorganic nature, the soul, something spiritual, something special. But Descartes, influenced by the automata of his age, reached the conclusion that life is a mechanical phenomenon and he took this special thing which exists around us and took the spirituality out of it and turned it into a mechanical phenomenon. So in a way what happens given the impression from the cover, is exactly what Descartes did to life, took the spirituality out of it and turned it into the mechanical phenomenon, so that’s why I like this use of the image on the cover. Apart from that, these are wonderful pieces of art and technology, so I am attracted to them because of their aesthetical, engineering and technological value as well and I love renaissance art; so there are other reasons for having this on the book cover. Originally I chose a different automaton but then I decided to take this one. Of course, I worked with the publisher exactly how to design the cover but both the page from “Geometry” and this specific choice in the background and the image of this specific automaton is mine.
Descartes Graphic
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This is work done for me by student of ours, Kat (Katsiaryna) Suryna. She is from Belarus, a doctoral student at our program. We decided on it together, the general idea was mine and she made drafts and we discussed it; the work is eventually hers. I added a small piece of paper at the bottom of it which is a scan of the front page of Descartes’ first edition of the Meditations. It needs to be here in order to explain what this is all about. This is an image of Descartes’ meditations on first philosophy, so when you first look at it, you think you see here a column with six parts, standing there in front of you, but when you come closer, you see that it is not what it first seems to be, because these six parts don’t really stand on each other; well, the first one stands on the ground and the second one stands on it but not quite, and the third is held from the sides and does not touch the second and the forth is on the third and the fifth and sixth are hanging apart, so the construction is not really a construction. Also, look at what it is made of: the column has six parts and you can see, if you know a little bit about history, that one part is a Greek column, another one is Roman, and two different medieval pieces, one renaissance, one baroque, you can also see the ruins of the Greek and medieval structures from which parts are taken.
Descartes presents what he is doing in the Meditations as if he gets rid of all former opinions or theoretical views and starts from the beginning, building everything without any presuppositions on secure grounds and one piece comes after the other, everything is supported by the foundations. But this is not how it works, it is not a construction, very little there is original, many things like the dream argument, the skepticism with regards to the senses, the Cogito, some of the proofs of the existence of God, all these are taken from various sources, going back to Plato, Augustine, to medieval philosophy, so what we actually have is a kind of synthesis of earlier ideas with some new material coming in, so they are not really built upon each other, it is not that one thing supports another, it is an illusion and this illusion is conveyed here, most of the pieces are not original but taken from the previous constructions. They are not supporting each other; it is only at first sight. This is how it looks but you take a closer look and what is actually going on there is very different.
Wittgenstein thinks that philosophical problems are the results of misunderstandings, misunderstandings of our language, of our concepts, we misunderstand how things work and that is how we create these philosophical problems for ourselves. The resolution of the problems is not by adding to our knowledge, but by seeing how the misunderstanding came about. And by removing the misunderstanding the problem disappears. It is not like asking what is the weight of gold, making an inquiry and discovering what’s the weight of gold, or it’s not the question who was the first human being to arrive in the Americas and to make an inquiry; no, you don’t find an answer, you eliminate the problem! This is the idea and Ákos incorporated it nicely, visually because when he writes: “die philosophische Probleme vollkommen verschwinden sollen”, he writes the phrase: “philosophische Probleme” in a more vague manner and the “problems” almost completely disappear, it’s even hard to read what is written there. This is a nice typographical incorporation of the Wittgensteinian idea and apart from this very nice font which he developed. I like the visual expression of this philosophical idea very much.
Interview by Ana Lolua
Photography by Damian Aleksiev
November 21, 2017
