Category: Living

The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas. 

So wrote Mark Rothko, in a manuscript that he worked on in the early 1940s, while he took a break from painting.  At that time his pictures were figurative, later he experimented for a few years with a form of surrealism, before developing the large abstract colour paintings for which he became famous.  He is an artist whose work we tend to discover in reverse chronological order: the late works are the most familiar, and the transitional experiments in surrealism and abstraction are somewhat better known that his figurative work. Despite these radical changes in form and scale, his work pursues a consistent theme, namely his determination to draw our attention to the sorrow and suffering that is central to our experience of life.  Rothko’s abandonment of figuration midway through his career, was not an abandonment of interest in the human, rather it was his attempt to depict the full range of human experience, and especially our experiences of unhappiness, more convincingly.

Rothko’s manuscript, The Artist’s Reality, was published in 2004, more than thirty years after his death by suicide.  Like Paul Gaugin’s Recontars de Rapin, written in 1903 but not published until 1951, Rothko’s attack on contemporary art criticism is heartfelt and persuasive, but his ability to explain in words the meaning and importance of his art is less convincing.  Gauguin and Rothko were both great painters, but neither were great writers.  Nonetheless, their texts do tell us something about the questions that concerned them, the problems that they tried to address, the ideas that motivated them.  Knowing this helps us better to understand their most compelling paintings. 

Continue reading “Simply colour”

This is the year of elections: voters in Bangladesh, Russia, and India have already cast their ballots; voters in South Africa and Mexico do so at the time of writing; and voters in many other countries, including Uruguay and Namibia, and the UK and the US, will have the opportunity later in the year.  Not all of these elections will be free and fair, and not all will lead to good outcomes for the citizens: elections are imperfect procedures and voters sometimes have little real choice.  At other times, the voters come to regret the choices they made.   Nonetheless this year, more people have the chance to vote than in any previous year in human history, and that is something for us to celebrate.  (Not so, of course, if you are the loyal scion of an hereditary ruling dynasty, but for the rest of us, modest celebration seems to be in order.)

Dissatisfaction with political outcomes is not new.  In the Western tradition, the earliest historians and political philosophers spent considerable time reflecting on why their city states were not better governed, and whether the rulers or the ruled were mostly to blame.  When Solon, the famous lawmaker, was asked whether he had given the Athenians the best laws, he replied, the best they would accept.  Balancing the optimal with the consensual lies at the heart of politics, and in the long-run, we should expect democracies to achieve this balance more regularly and more sustainably than other forms of government, owing to their improved capacity to learn and innovate.  But this does not guarantee that they will be more successful always and everywhere.  Democracies are also to be preferred because they tend to exhibit higher respect for law and less deference to rulers.  

Continue reading “The rule of law”

Earlier this year, the TLS published my review of two books by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.  In the recently translated first volume of Also a History of Philosophy (2023), Habermas discusses a paradox in the genealogy of post-metaphysical thinking, that is, contemporary philosophical thought that is concerned with the character of our knowledge of the world, but which has abandoned any ambition to imagine, describe, or know anything beyond our world.  The paradox is this: despite the secular character of modern Western thought, its origins can be traced back to early Jewish theology and ancient Greek metaphysics.  In this respect, modern Western thought shares features common to other major intellectual traditions which also draw upon ancient religious texts, notably, Buddhism and the Vedic teachings of ancient India, and Taoism and the Confucian teachings of ancient China.  These traditions all experienced a gradual but decisive revolution in character during in the period known as the Axial Age (roughly, the eighth to the third centuries, BCE). 

Habermas’s argument is that during the Axial Age, previously well-established forms of reasoning ceased to provide convincing explanations for what was observed in the natural world, and that core religious beliefs and ritual behaviours ceased to provide effective forms of communal integration in the shared social world.  These failures, or blockages, provoked the intellectual revolutions associated with the teachings of Buddha, Moses, Laozi, and Plato.  The collective learning processes that overcame these blockages – which took different forms in each context – provide the template for Habermas’s theory of philosophical and social progress.  As a species, he argues, we are able to learn, to solve problems, to improve our knowledge of the world around us and the arrangements by which we organise our society.  While progress has taken different forms in the East and the West, there is an underlying continuity of shared learning and its application across the whole range of human thought. 

Continue reading “Unlimited endings”

Within five minutes’ walk of my London home there are a dozen Vietnamese restaurants.  They cluster together at the southern end of Kingsland Road, all offering broadly the same cuisine, but each with subtle variations to the menu, the décor, and the price.  In the evenings, they are often full, with groups of prospective customers spilling out onto the pavements, forming approximations of queues, waiting for tables to become available.  I sometimes head to one of them for lunch, when they are comparatively quiet, to enjoy catfish in a caramelised sauce, or a chicken curry with coconut milk, and maybe a bottle of Hanoi beer.  The easy availability of good quality Vietnamese food, has always been part of my experience of London life. 

The presence of significant numbers of Vietnamese restaurants in the London Borough of Hackney is partly due to the work of Thanh Vu, who died two years ago.  During the border war between Vietnam and China in 1979, he fled by boat with one of his daughters.  They were picked up by a British ship after two weeks at sea, and taken to Singapore.  From there, Thanh and his daughter made their way to London, two of the 30,000 Vietnamese refugees (known as the “boat people”) who were accepted by the British government of the day.  Initially they were widely dispersed around the country, a policy designed by the British to avoid the over-concentration of refugees in one area.  Many Vietnamese people, preferred to live closer together, to re-establish family and friendship networks, and to support each other as they adapted to life in a new country. 

Continue reading “Boat people”

Directly outside my home, level with the second floor, a train track runs along a cast-iron bridge that was built in the 1860s.  The track was disused for many years but re-opened just over a decade ago as part of the expanded London Overground network.  I like the shape and structure of the bridge, a reminder of London’s industrial past and the constant renewal of its material infrastructure, and I enjoy watching the regular passing of trains, especially since their noise is almost completely excluded by my secondary glazing.  On bright summer mornings, the sunlight that floods into my study through the east facing window, is supplemented by light from the glass of the moving train carriages reflected through the west facing windows.  When I catch the southbound train, from nearby Hoxton station, I sometimes glance at my home as we cross over the bridge, but the train moves too fast for me to see anything other than a blur of bookshelves.

Sometime later this year, this Overground line will acquire a new name: the Windrush Line.  The name refers to the ship, the Empire Windrush, which in 1948 brought the first sizeable group of postwar immigrants from the West Indies to London.  The Windrush generation, as they are now commonly described, comprise those who arrived in the late-1940s and 1950s, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  Many of this generation continue to live in the areas connected by this line: Dalston, Haggerston, New Cross, Peckham, and Penge, and they have contributed much to the vibrancy and variety of London life.  Transport for London, the body which is responsible for the management of this railway line on behalf of London’s Mayor, says that the new name celebrates the Windrush generation and the wider importance of migration that has created a lasting legacy that continues to shape and enrich London’s cultural and social identity today.    

Continue reading “Names for trains”