Rational Philosophy

The Hotel New Yorker, Abu Ghraib, and surreptitious sampling.

Nikola Tesla, perhaps one of the most brilliant people of all time, spent the latter years of his life holed up in The Hotel New Yorker, Room 3327, a mental prisoner of sometimes odd thoughts. Tesla, who died in 1943, supported the idea of selective breeding: “A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit,” he said, “than to marry a habitual criminal.” “The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization.” Tesla clearly had a particular view of human rights.

Tesla also hoped to be able to capture and replay people’s thoughts by recording the impact of thoughts on the optic nerve, essentially photographing the mind through one’s eyes.

One thinks that perhaps Errol Morris has pondered on Tesla’s optical ideas. Writing for The New Yorker Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris explore the pathology behind the notorious photographs that exposed and compounded the wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. Gourevitch and Morris stitch together a careful and compelling perspective on the actions of the young MPs who debased, abused and documented their ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The structure of implicit and explicit endorsement by Military Intelligence, and, by association, the military chain of command, peels away the easy conclusion that the MPs were just bad people doing bad things. As one reads the article one begins to have the uneasy impression that one is somehow culpable, too.

And lawyers have begun to challenge the practice of “surreptitious sampling” of DNA by law enforcement agencies. Bypassing legislation that prohibits unwarranted search and seizure, law enforcement officers have been quietly and successfully collecting indirect DNA samples from suspects (from cigarette butts, coke bottles, drinking glasses, etc.). The lawyers claim that this violates the suspect’s right to privacy.

“Unlike garbage that can be withheld or destroyed before it is released into the world,” reads the motion to suppress the DNA evidence in one case, “we cannot do so with our biological tissues.”

“We conclude that under the circumstances, the expectorating defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his spittle,” the Mass Appeals court ruled in another case, “or in the DNA evidence derived therefrom.”

Does one have any particular right to the privacy of one’s DNA? How is a DNA sample different from a photograph or a mental picture? Could a suspect challenge a candid photograph or an eye-witness ID as an infringement of privacy?

I expect that most of us feel the emotional pull of the right to privacy. We live with ourselves, with our thoughts. We can withdraw into ourself. We can choose not to disclose. As we grow up we develop what we might call a sacred pact of privacy with ourselves. As Schopenhauer pointed out, we only know the world through our experience of it, and our only immediate experience is the experience of our self.

On the other hand, privacy is one wall of the mind’s prison. Just as Tesla locked himself into the habit of threes (he would only stay in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by three) we lock ourselves into a prison of the mind that reveres privacy. As Gourevitch and Morris astutely draw out, the MPs in Abu Ghraib took photographs in part as an attempt to break down that wall of privacy, to reveal themselves, to deprive themselves of some responsibility for their actions.

To exist, we must act in the world; we cannot avoid it. Existence sentences us to participation, however reluctant, however minimal. And, as we act in the world, we create and leave behind traces of ourselves, whether they be ideas, influences, creations, physical remnants. These traces, I would argue, must be embraced as the residue of our existence, for good or ill. We have a right to them only in as much as a prisoner has a right to the bars of his cell.
“He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene… His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.”

So said Nikola Tesla of Thomas Edison.

Monet’s “Le Pont d’Argenteuil” at the Orsay Museum in Paris - badly damaged by intruders Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007.

(You can see the 4 inch tear below the bridge.)

In a related article, the French Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, calls for better security and tougher sanctions against people who commit such acts of vandalism because, as she said “they are attacking our history.”

Another interesting aspect of the report is that it seems that the painting can be repaired. Presumably it would be impossible for a future museum visitor to know whether the painting had been repaired or not.

This reminds me of two other incidents: One from a New Yorker article, and one from my own life.

The New Yorker, September 24, 2007, article on Marie-Laure de Noailles - The Surrealist’s Muse, at one point describes how one of Marie-Laure’s lovers — a Spanish painter named Oscar Dominguez — made money by by copying Marie-Laure’s Picassos and selling the originals, leaving his forgeries in their place.

My wife bought me a lovely old Alfa Romeo “Spider” sports car for my birthday. It turns out that the car’s floor is rusted, a fatal problem. But in the course of investigating what could be done, if anything, to repair the damage, I discovered that, with old cars, enthusiasts value authenticity, including authenticity of a repair, so highly that an inauthentic repair (using a modern, custom-shaped floor panel rather than an original panel) would render the car practically worthless.

Is Albanel right in saying that an attack on a work of art is an attack on history? If a clever forgery can fool its owner, does the value of a work lie in the art or its pedigree? And if a car looks and drives as if it were intact, does the knowledge that it is patched with a modern piece of material diminish its inherent value?

All of these questions seem interrelated. The core question seems to be how and why do we attach the concept of value to an object or the idea of an object?

We may have several reasons for perceiving value in Monet’s painting of a bridge: We find the painting itself aesthetically pleasing. We find Monet’s work generally pleasing and therefore value this work as part of the body of his work. We value the effort and skill exerted in producing such a work of art. We find value in the work of art as a component of our cultural history… I’m sure there must be several other distinct reasons for perceiving value in the painting.

Likewise with my Alpha Romeo. I value it because I like the way it looks and drives. An enthusiast may value it for its authenticity and degree of intactness. A scrap metal merchant may value it as a heap of smeltables.

The concept of value in a forgery is a little trickier. Before we know it is a forgery, we may believe we value it for its place in a body of work, or for the skill of the original artist. But knowledge of its true pedigree makes it impossible to value a forged Picasso as a Picasso. (Although we could still value it as a skillful copy.)

All of which results in two important clarifications: When we think or talk about the value of a thing, it helps if we’re clear about the ground of the value, what is it based on from our perspective, allowing that others will have their own perspectives. The second clarification is that when we attach our sense of value to the idea of a thing (its pedigree, its place in a greater body of work, etc.) we are no longer valuing the thing itself, but an idea of the thing.

This second point, I believe, resolves the paradox that we can at one moment believe something very valuable, only to realize a moment later that it is worthless. The thing itself hasn’t changed, but our idea of it has.

For a work of art to have inherent value for us, then, that value must be attached to something immediate, such as its aesthetic impression.

This brings me back to my original conundrum. While I feel the emotional tug of the sentiment expressed by the French Culture Minister, that those who damage works of art should be more heavily sanctioned, I can’t find the logical support for it. What the idiots did was to damage a painting. Any attack on history resides only in the minds of those who perceive the idea of Monet’s painting as a part of French cultural history. Should criminal sentencing be influenced by something so subjective?