On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part 3, Chapter 3

Summary of Part 3 Chapter 3: Technical and Philosophical Thought

In this chapter Simondon lays out his prognostications for how a presumably emerging or soon to emerge “philosophical thought” will characterize, or help bring about, the passage from our current split world toward a world which renews the unity or wholeness or whatever, which had characterized the original, magical world. He goes through the different kinds of thought which characterize our stage in world history – technical, religious, and aesthetic – showing how they fail to reach the desired outcome, and yet all include aspects which need to be included in the coming philosophical thought. Technics “grasps” us and our world below the level of unity, and social and political thought (which are the “functional analog of religions” (223) (and which he later specifies as national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet Communism (231)) grasp us from above the level of unity (224).

but these two representations are not enough, because the human world can be grasped in its unity only at the neutral point; technics pluralize it, and political thought integrates it into a higher unity, that of the totality of humanity in its coming-into-being, where it loses its real unity in the same way that the individual loses its unity within a group.

Aesthetic thought “grasps” reality at the “neutral point” between these, and philosophical thought will as well; but it will have to go beyond the merely representational level which aesthetic thought is stuck at, it will also require an “aesthetics of aesthetics,” putting the different stages of aesthetic thought into relation.

S goes through the limitations of current technical thought: it focuses on technical objects instead of seeing at the needed level, of the concrete technical individual (226). Instead of focusing on discipline-specific understanding, it will be necessary to understand the similarity (or identity?) of schemas at the intersection of multiple sciences and practical domains (227). Philosophical thought will need to grasp the “polytechnic — both natural and human — universe” (228); though the term “network” (réseau) goes a way towards this, it is too imprecise, S argues, in that it “does not account for the particular regimes of causality and conditioning that exist in these networks, and that functionally attach them to the human world and to the natural world, as a concrete mediation between these two worlds.” [But “réticulation” totally nails it? This might be related to his critique of cybernetics as too focused in homeostasis, and too readily positing what S considers false equivalences between different kinds of system.]

The introduction of adequate representations of technical objects into culture would result in the key-points of technical networks becoming real terms of reference for the ensemble of human groups, whereas they currently are only key terms for those who understand them, which is to say for the technicians of each specialty; for other men, they only have a practical value, and correspond to very confused concepts; technical ensembles introduce themselves into the world as if they had no natural or human right of belonging, while a mountain or promontory, which have less concrete regulatory power than some technical ensembles, are known by all men of a region and belong to the representation of the world.

[I have to admit I have not been tracking to what extent Simondon’s concepts of “key points” (points clés) and “high points” (hauts lieux) correspond; this passage makes me think they do.] Anyway this sentence sums up “what is wrong with people and society today” in S’s view, and this is the situation which the coming philosophical thought will correct. S notes the different experiences of the human individual toward tools and networks:

one changes tools and instruments, one can construct or repair a tool oneself, but one cannot change the network, one doesn’t construct a network of one’s own: one can only connect to a network, adapt to it, participate in it; the network dominates and frames [enserre] the action of the individual, it even dominates each technical ensemble. (229)

S goes into a very interesting discussion of the human experience of the technical and natural world in terms of respect and the sacred. To non-technically aware people, big things like a harbor, a freeway interchange, or the aforementioned mountain peak, command respect; but the technical networks of which they are not aware of, do not command such respect. He describes an occasion in which the clock of the Paris Observatory was thrown off to some fractional degree (less than could cause any practical disruption at large) by “the tumultuous visit of science students passing by it on their way to the catacombs,” and the scandal this caused among the scientists who were attuned to this clock’s importance, and thus hold it in respect. S points out that humanities students would not have even thought to profane the workings of the clock, since they would not understand it to be sacred; likewise, a classroom experiment in disrupting a similar clock would not be scandalous, because such a clock does not hold the same sacred, key-point position in a crucial network. So, a future, better society in which we all had better technical understanding, would also be one in which we were more respectful of such networks and their “key-points.”

Turning to social-political thought, S lists its three main forms in the mid-20^th century (national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet communism), and how these are each related to technology (e.g., Soviet communism “gains self-awareness through the use of tractors, the foundation of factories” (231):

the distribution and integration of key-points of social and political thought in the world at least partially coincides with the distribution and integration of the technical key-points, and ... this coinciding becomes all the more perfect as technics becomes increasingly integrated within the universe, in the form of fixed ensembles, attached to one another, constraining [enserrant] human individuals into the links they determine.

Part of what S is doing through this chapter is noting the deficiencies of each of the existing forms of thought, and also the promising aspects which philosophical thought can draw on, when it unifies or transcends them or whatever. Technical and religious (including social-political) thoughts separate the world, when what is needed is to grasp its continuity (233). Part of the solution is the development of what S has elsewhere in the book called “technical culture” (cf. Combes 2013: 57ff.):

it is culture, considered as a lived totality, that must incorporate the technical ensembles by knowing their nature, in order to be able to regulate human life according to these technical ensembles. Culture must remain above all technics, but it must incorporate into its content the knowledge and intuition of genuine technical schemas. Culture is that through which man regulates his relation with the world and with himself; and yet if culture were not to incorporate technology, it would contain an opaque zone and wouldn’t be able to contribute its regulative normativity to the coupling of man and the world. For in this coupling of man and the world, which is that of technical ensembles, there are schemas of activity and conditioning that can be clearly thought only by virtue of concepts defined by a reflexive but direct study. Culture must be contemporary with technics. Culture must reshape itself [se reformer] and must once again take up its content stage by stage. (234)

Per S, contemporary culture fails in this regard because it lags behind technology, understanding it through concepts and ethics which were suitable for earlier stages of history, but are now no longer sufficient. [Though of course, what S does not appear to consider is why this should be the case other than the extent to which “nobody has figured it out yet.” He does not consider what role such “opaque zones” [aka black-boxing] plays in contemporary political and social structures; how, for instance, the fact that users have only an opaque idea of the workings of social media, AI, and so on, is not a bug but a feature from the viewpoint of those who control platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc.] Nevertheless, with such sociopolitical context added in, S’s vision has some resonance with thinkers like Bookchin or even Ruskin, who advocate a society whose technology is accessible to, and understood by, all members at large. Ruskin, however, would be susceptible to Simondon’s next argument, which is that

the confusion of technical realities with utensils is a cultural stereotype, founded on the normative notion of utility that is at once valorizing and devaluing. But this notion of utensil and of utility is inadequate to the effective and actual role of technical ensembles within the human world; it thus cannot be regulative in an effective way. (234-5)

S is here specifically arguing against Heidegger, but this also argues against Ruskin’s dream of a return to a day of independent artisans with their utensil-bound technical imagination, inadequate, per S, for the present and future of technical ensembles. The way for humans to learn how to understand technical ensembles is for them to experience, directly, certain situations:

In the same way one used to consider journeys as a means for acquiring culture, because they constituted a mode of placing man into a situation, one should also consider the technical experiences of being placed into a situation with respect to an ensemble, with effective responsibility, as having cultural value. To put it another way, every human being should to a certain extent take part in technical ensembles, that is, take on a responsibility, a definite task with respect to such an ensemble and be connected with a network of universal technics. Furthermore, individual man should not simply experience a single kind of technical ensemble, but rather a plurality of them, just as a traveler will have to encounter several peoples, and experience their mores.

Thus, a future philosophically-informed technical culture would encourage its members to experience a diversity of such situations. Interestingly, S then continues in a manner reminiscent of a famous passage from Marx:

However, this kind of experience must be conceived more as a way of experiencing the situating of each type of technics and ensemble of technics, than as an effort to participate in the condition of man in each of the technics: for in each technics there are technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers, and to the extent that conditions are strictly social, they can be rather analogous, at each level, in the different technics. It is the particular situating in the technical network that must be experienced, insofar as it places man in the presence of and within a series of actions and processes that he does not direct alone, but in which he participates. (235-6)

The resonant, oft-quoted passage from The German Ideology:

… in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (Marx 1978: 160)

Marx then continues, emphasizing why such a range of experience should resist the recreation of what he calls “partial identities:”

This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors of historical development up till now. (ad loc.)

The mere idealism of Simondon’s warning to avoid falling into the limited, socially determined perspectives of “technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers,” and so on (cf. his similar argument back in the Introduction) can perhaps here be supplemented with something like Marx’s materialist account of how this involves overcoming exploitation and alienation (cf. the discussion of alienation in the summary of Part 2, Chapter 2). It is also worth noting that Simondon’s earlier argument privileging a particular social-scientific position of the “mechanologist” now appears to have dissolved into a more general argument for a sort of society in which individuals learn such a perspective through their regular course of experience; and in what sort of society would this be more likely, than one in which agency, access to, and responsibility for technical (etc.) organization was evenly distributed? [Daniel Colson, most notably, has found numerous resonances with anarchism in Simondon’s otherwise “largely apolitical” work (Colson 2019: 13).]

The philosopher/mechanologist retains an important role, which is similar to that of the artist in contemporary society:

The philosopher, comparable in this role to the artist, can help in raising awareness of the situation within the technical ensemble, by reflecting it within himself and by expressing it; but, again just as the artist, all he can do is be the one who solicits an intuition in others, once a definite sensitivity has been awakened and allows the grasping of the sense of a real experience. (236)

Again, this has to be more than what is possible today with art, which is, essentially, [aestheticizing]:

All the prestigious color photographs of sparks, of fumes, all the recordings of noise, sounds, or images, generally remain a use [exploitation] of technical reality and not a revelation of this reality. Technical reality must be thought, and even be known through participation in its schemas of action; aesthetic feeling can emerge, but only after this intervention of real intuition and participation and not as a fruit of a mere spectacle: every technical spectacle remains puerile and incomplete if it is not preceded by the integration into the technical ensemble.

“Intuition” and “participation” are among Simondon’s consistent offerings for how to get past the divisions he charts, between the technical and religious, the practical and theoretical, the inductive and the deductive, the a priori and the a posteriori. Religion, “being the paradigm of deductive thought” (240), is responsible for a division between Being (as primary) and Knowledge (as secondary), which has detrimentally influenced non-religious ways of thinking as well. [This may not be what he is referring to, but what springs to mind is the interminable 20^th century epistemological debate, taking a form similar to: S can be said to “know” p if:

1: p is true.

2. S believes that p is true.

3. S has “valid reasons” for believing that p is true.

The subsequent debate then hinges over how precisely to word proposition 3 (and/or 4, etc.), without recognizing that propositions 1 and 2 have set up an insuperable Cartesian binary, namely that which Simondon is here criticizing.]

Besides the “participation” in situations which was discussed above, Simondon’s other important answer for how to get past these binaries is intuition, which he derives from Bergson. Intuition is distinct from both “idea” (inductive) and “concept” (deductive):

Now, it is not entirely correct to identify intuition with the idea; knowledge by way of intuition is a grasping of being that is neither a priori nor a posteriori, but contemporaneous with the existence of the being it grasps, and which is at the same level as this being; it is not a knowledge by way of the idea, for intuition is not already contained within the structure of the known being; it does not belong to that being; it is not a concept, since it has an internal unity that grants its autonomy and its singularity, preventing a genesis through accumulation; lastly, knowledge by way of intuition is really mediate in the sense that it does not grasp being in its absolute totality, like the idea, or on the basis of elements and by combination, like the concept, but rather grasps being at the level of domains constituting a structured ensemble.

Note that this also gets us past the limited perspectives focusing solely on element or totality. The new, philosophical intuition will follow on from, but surpass, the earlier stages of magical and aesthetic intuition (244). It will not grasp technical objects (and their users, ensembles, collectivities, etc.) as stable objects but genetically, in becoming. The essence will be going beyond previous, limited and divided ways of thinking, to grasp technicity through an understanding of concretization (thus establishing the importance of the rest of the book to this goal):

this conditioning of the technical object’s genesis are indeed effectively translated by a particular type of the technical object’s coming-into-being, what we have called the concretization of the technical object. The process of this concretization can be directly apprehended by the examination of a certain number of examples of technical objects. But the sense of this concretization, which is an inherence in the object of a technicity that is not entirely contained in it, can be understood only by philosophical thought following the genesis of the technical and non-technical modes of the relation between ... man and the world. Whence the use in this study of a genetic method applied first to technical objects and then to the study of the situation and role of technical thought in the whole [l'ensemble] of thought. (245-6)

Colson, Daniel (2019) A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze. Tr. by Jesse Cohn. Autonomedia, New York.

Combes, Muriel (2013) Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Marx, Karl (1978) “The German Ideology: Part I” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: WW Norton.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part III, Chapter 2

 

Summary of Part III, Chapter 2: Relations Between Technical Thought And Other Species Of Thought

This chapter is divided into two parts, “Technical thought and aesthetic thought,” and “Technical thought, theoretical thought, practical thought.” The first lays out a quite interesting theory of beauty, and the second sets the stage for the final chapter, on philosophical thought. The whole can be seen to be following through the relations established in the previous chapter, for which a diagram can be found in the previous summary.

in order for works of art to be possible, they must be made possible by a fundamental tendency in the human being, and by the ability to experience the aesthetic impression in certain real and vital circumstances. The artwork that is part of a civilization uses aesthetic feeling and satisfies, sometimes artificially and in an illusory manner, man’s tendency to seek a complement with respect to a totality, when he exerts a certain type of thought. (192)

S seems to be forging a path between a certain universalist or inherent “fundamental tendency in the human being” with a historical situatedness, in terms of a particular culture at a particular stage in the historical transition he has outlined, from magical to post-magical thought. Thus, in the post-magical world divided between science and religion, the role of aesthetic thought and the work of art is to recreate the sense of totality that had been lost with the end of unified magical thinking. However, S stresses again that this is not simply a survival or atavism of the older magical era, but something new and distinct; and also, as indicated in the above quote, that the sense of totality achieved may only be superficial and “illusory.”

He makes an interesting use of the term “metábasis eis állo” which is an abbreviation of the phrase “metábasis eis állo génos” from Aristotle, meaning a change from one genus (e.g., subject, line of reasoning, or discipline) to another. For Aristotle, and subsequent thinkers through Husserl, such metabasis has typically been considered a bad thing. Simondon, however, drops off the genos and transforms it into something more like “change into an other,” a positive thing in Simondon’s thought, and linked to his concept of transduction.

The aesthetic character of an act or a thing is its function of totality, its existence, both objective and subjective, as an outstanding point. Any act, any thing, any moment has in itself the ability to become an outstanding point of a new reticulation of the universe. Every culture selects the acts and situations that are apt to become outstanding points; but culture is not what creates the aptitude of a situation to become an outstanding point; it only forms a barrage against certain types of situations, leaving narrow straights for aesthetic expression with respect to the spontaneity of the aesthetic impression; culture intervenes as limit rather than as creator. (193)

The single reticulation of the magical world has been replaced with two separate reticulations of technics and religion in the modern world, but these cannot recreate the original unity, which can only be approached with aesthetics.

To this day, it does not appear possible for the two reticulations, that of technics within the geographical world and that of religions in the human world, to analogically encounter each other in a real, symbolic relation. And yet only in this way could the aesthetic impression state the rediscovery of the magical totality, by indicating that the forces of thought have once again found one another. Aesthetic feeling, common to both religious thought and technical thought, is the only bridge that could allow for the linking of these two halves of thought that result from the abandonment of magical thought. (194)

Aesthetic reality is “a new mediation between man and the world, an intermediate world between man and the world.”

Works of art recreate the power of key-points by their integratedness with their surroundings, a quality which distinguishes them from technical instruments, which retain their technical essence no matter where they are: “a statue is not placed just anywhere, a tree is not planted just anywhere” (195). It is not the imitation of nature [as presumed by some philosophers] but this integration with nature and the surrounding world, which defines the aesthetic object.

S develops his interesting theory of beauty in contrasting between technical and aesthetic objects:

technical objects are not inherently beautiful in themselves, unless one is seeking a type of presentation that answers directly to aesthetic concerns; in this case, there is a true distance between the technical object and the aesthetic object; it is as if there were in fact two objects, the aesthetic object enveloping and masking the technical object... (196)

His example is a modern water tower disguised to match an adjacent ancient ruin—a contemporary example of the same sort would be a cell tower masked to look like a tree. However, such an obvious example is not necessary for his argument. Way back in chapter one, S had distinguished between intrinsic, technical constraints shaping development, and extrinsic constraints coming from such silly and superfluous realms as marketing. Thus, for S, any technical object really is two objects, the pure, essential technical object corresponding to the intrinsic technical traits, and the second object a sort of aesthetic coating of all that is non-essential, but used for instance in marketing, corresponding for example to the “psychic and social inferences” which pollute the automobile as technical object (cf. chapter 1). Upon reading S’s claim that “technical objects are not inherently beautiful in themselves,” I thought of two drills I have near my desk; one, an old metal-green drill I inherited from my grandfather, very solid and elegantly curved in a way they don’t make them anymore; and the other, a garish plastic-rubber yellow and black thing I unfortunately had to replace it with. Both are, of course, both technical and aesthetic objects, equivalent insofar as they function as drills, but very different aesthetically—neither, perhaps, intended to be beautiful, per se, but rather to evoke various impressions of functionality, masculinity, and modernity. The older drill, however, has taken on a sort of beauty through its age and its association with an older aesthetic now flavored with nostalgia. Thus, while these drills as technical objects are completely interchangeable, and thus dissociated from context, as an aesthetic object, the older drill is beautiful through its integration into a certain sense of history and family belonging.

And this is the essence of S’s theory of beauty when applied to technical objects, that it is an effect of their integration into the world in the manner of an aesthetic object (another example he gives is that of a sail that is beautiful when filled by the wind). “But it is not only the technical object that is beautiful: it is the singular point of the world that the technical object concretizes” (197) “The technical object is beautiful when it has encountered a ground that suits it, whose own figure it can be, in other words when it completes and expresses the world.”

However, to return to the ugly, new yellow-and-black drill, this is also designed to evoke connotations and thus bind it into a meaningful cultural context. Thus the aspect of integration which S uses to explain the experience of beauty, no doubt actually informs not just beauty but a wide range of aesthetic reactions to objects, including ugliness, boredom, inanity, who knows what else—basically whatever reaction to an aesthetic object is possible.

S goes on to argue that although technical objects, by definition, are not beautiful in and of themselves (for reasons given above), they can come to be understood as beautiful in their technicity through education, e.g., in the mind of a student of science who comes to sense the beauty of their operation (his example is a radio relay). And this again is because this is an understanding of their operation as integrated into a universe: “The telephone call center is beautiful not because of its characteristics as an object, but because it is a key-point in collective and individual life” (198). As he states it later on, “it is never the object strictly speaking that is beautiful: it is the encounter — which takes place about the object — between a real aspect of the world and a human gesture” (202).

One can thus say that the aesthetic object is not strictly speaking an object, but rather the extension of the natural or human world that remains integrated within the reality that bears it … (199)

In addition to differing from technical thought in the above ways, aesthetic thought also differs from religious thought in that “it can neither be universalized nor subjectivized.” It does not take on the meaning that religion does:

the work of art remains artificial and localized, produced at a certain moment; it is not anterior and superior to the world and to man. The set [ensemble] of all works of art perpetuates the magical universe and maintains its structure: it marks the neutral point between technics and religion.

As this neutral point between technics and religion, aesthetics is thus not just a holdover from the time of magic, but a working part of this post-magical reality. “A norm of beauty exists within these two opposite modes of thinking [i.e., technics and religion], a norm that makes them tend toward one another by applying them to the same universe.”

Aesthetic reality is thus a surplus to given reality, but according to lines that already exist in given reality; it is what reintroduces the figural functions and the functions of ground into given reality which, in the moment of the magical universe’s dissociation, had become technics and religion. (200)

While technical thought is made up of schemas, of figural elements without ground reality, and religious thought is made up of ground qualities and forces without figural structures, aesthetic thought combines figural structures and ground qualities.

In discussing how aesthetic works relate to each other, he goes into an interesting discussion of analogy, then discusses the relation between perception and participation. The translators provide a lengthy footnote (202n5) discussing his Simondon’s term “appeal aspect” (Caractère d’appel) in terms of the Gestalt concept of valence. S surveys changes through the ancient Tragic, the Romantic, and the Classical periods of art. He intends an important distinction between superficial art which fails to achieve anything lasting or meaningful, and the more important art which does:

premature aestheticizing tends toward a static satisfaction, toward a false completion prior to a complete specification; true technicity and true religion should not tend toward aestheticism, which maintains a rather facile magical unity through compensation, and thereby preserves magic and religion at a rather poorly developed level. The real development of thought requires the different attitudes of thought to be capable of detaching from each other and to even become antagonistic, for they cannot be simultaneously thought and developed by a single subject; they require, in fact, that a subject realize them and assume them in a profound, essential way, turning one of them into the principle of the subject’s existence and life. (208)

This presence of multiple attitudes existing at once in the work of art [cf. Bakhtin] requires that such art be social and collective, part of a tradition; “a second function of aesthetic judgment thus becomes that of preparing for the communication between social groups representing the specialization of different types of thought.” After all, “the subject is a collective being.” He refers to the “aesthetic quest,” bringing to mind his language in earlier chapters, that magic is not about superstition but about the will to explore and to supersede the given; thus, this aesthetic thinking also motivates scientific and technical progress and invention.

Aesthetic intention in itself is already the exigency of totality, the quest for a whole reality. Without aesthetic intention, there would be an indefinite quest for the same realities within ever more narrow specializations; this is why aesthetic intention appears like a perpetual deviation on the basis of the central directions of a quest; in reality this deviation is a quest for the real continuity beneath the arbitrary fragmentation of domains. (210)

One could even ask oneself whether art, to the extent that it observes, is not also what somehow sums up [résume] and renders an ensemble of realities transposable to another temporal unit, to another moment in history. Art, in the celebration and final investiture that it brings about, transforms the fulfilled and localized reality hic et nunc into a reality that will be able to traverse time and space: it renders human fulfillment non-finite; it is commonly said that art eternalizes different realities; art, in fact, does not eternalize but renders transductive, giving a localized and fulfilled reality the power to pass to other places and other moments. (210-11)

The second part of the chapter focuses on relations between theoretical and practical thought as further splits within the technical-religious divide, setting the stage for philosophical thought’s “role of convergence” in a future, “post-aesthetic” order (211). In the current order, it is the breakdown of existing models in practice that generates the need for innovation, or in Simondon’s way of putting it, regarding technics:

But the failure of the technical gesture phase shifts the technical act into two opposing realities: one figural, made of schemas of action, habits, and structured gestures learned by man as a means, and the other a ground reality, the qualities, dimensions, and powers of the world to which the technical gesture applies itself. This ground reality that undergirds the technical gesture is the dynamism of things, that through which they are productive, and that which gives them their fecundity, efficacy, and useable energy. (213)

This proceeds through inductive thought:

inductive thought comes from the failure of direct, parceled, localized technical action; this failure provokes the disjunction of the figural reality and the ground reality that was associated with it; inductive thought organizes the ground realities. (215)

As an example he gives a problem which emerged in hydraulics, whereby the water in a pump could not rise above a certain height, which fact was inexplicable according to existing models.

It is in order to recover the broken compatibility that technical thought splits into praxis and theory: theoretical thought which arises from technics is the thought at the heart of which it is possible to think the totality of the conditions of operation in a way that is once again homogeneous and coherent; through hydrostatics the system of conditions of the rising of water within the body of the pump can once again be homogeneous... (216)

Like technical thought, religious thought also splits when encountering limits, in this case to its imposition of totality. In contrast to the inductive approach of theoretical technicity, theoretical thought in religious thought is deductive, presuming a totality, a given, and then reasoning to particulars:

For contemplative deductive knowledge, the effort of knowledge is only that of becoming aware of an already existing order, not that of an effective ordering; knowledge does not change being, and always remains partially insufficient for grasping being, which is prior to it and at the heart of which knowledge deploys itself like a reflection. (218)

S makes the interesting claim that “the use of number within the sciences appears to be of religious origin rather than of technical origin; indeed, number is basically structure that allows deduction and allows the grasping of a particular reality in its reference to the whole [l’ensemble], so as to integrate itself within it...” He contrasts Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on number, with Plato’s side correlating with the religious and also the dominant scientific use today. Religious ethical thinking also proceeds from totality to particulars, for instance Kant’s categorical imperative:

the categorical religious imperative is categorical prior to being rational; it is everything at once, because the totality of being pre-exists all particular action and infinitely surpasses it, just as reality envelops the particular being who is the subject of moral action. (219)

A “complete” knowledge and a “complete” ethics would unite the opposed inductive/[pragmatic] and deductive/totalizing approaches of technics and religion, and their instantiations in theory and practice (220). This synthesis is a path to grasping reality: “the real is the synthesis of the virtual and the necessary [i.e., between the theoretical/desired/possible, and the limits set to this by nature, existing knowledge, etc.], or rather the foundation of their compatibility; between inductive pluralism and deductive pluralism, it is the stability of the figure-ground relation taken as a complete reality.”

In order for the divergence within the coming-into-being of thought to be fully compensated, the distance between the theoretical order and the practical order would have to be overcome by a type of thinking that has a definitive capacity of synthesis, and is able to present itself as a functional analog of magic, and then of aesthetic activity; in other words, the work that aesthetic thought accomplishes at the level of the primitive opposition between technics and religion would have to be carried out anew at the level of the relation between theoretical and practical thought. This work is what philosophical reflection must fulfill [accomplir]. (221)

Philosophical thought has to return to an originary grasping of the coming-into-being at the end of which it (philosophical thought) intervenes as a force of convergence.

The ensuing chapter on philosophical thought will also be about culture: “this intermediate mode can be called culture; philosophy would thus be constructive and regulative of culture, translating the sense [sens] of religions and of technics into cultural content." (222)

Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic

John Ruskin (image from Wikimedia Commons)

John Ruskin (1900). The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter from the Stones of Venice. George Allen, London.

Summary:

Seeing as Cohen did not provide any definition of “Gothic,” in her discussion of Gothic Marxism, beyond a general suggestion of the noir, I thought I would turn to its most famous commentator, the fascinating and deeply problematic John Ruskin (Cohen does not cite Ruskin, and most likely did not have him in mind). It is of course somewhat anachronistic to try and modernize the political alignments of a person from another era, but Ruskin’s thoughts on the value of independence in labor can be read alongside, and contrasted to, such later arguments as the anarchist “abolition of work” argued for by Bob Black and others. Ruskin certainly had an influence on the anarchist and socialist tradition, as witnessed by the introduction to this volume, by William Morris; nevertheless he himself was, at least in this text, firmly conservative in the old sense of the term, pining for an idealized feudal order in which there is mutual respect up and down the rungs of a naturalized class hierarchy. Parts of his argument can also be read, somewhat against the grain though not completely, as an argument for a DIY punk aesthetic, along the lines of my (ahem) old band Yellow #5's aptly named 1987 debut album, Everybody Doing Their Own Shit At The Same Fucking Time.

Part of Ruskin’s charm, and his ability to write so many very long, multi-volumed books, is apparently his ability to go off on long tangents that would make Edward Gibbon envious. This chapter, from volume II of Ruskin’s three-volume survey of the architecture of Venice, starts off addressing the question of the form Gothic architecture took in Venice, leading to the question of how to define and evaluate Gothic in general; this leads on into discussions of the qualities of good art and architecture in general, on how and why architecture reflects the social order which produced it, and thus on the form of the ideal social order. That last topic is the one which has made this “chapter” (of 150 pages in the original text) so famous, and I read a version published as a separate book (though it was unfortunately lacking the plates, so I had to find and refer to a full copy of the Stones of Venice, anyway).

So: the question of Gothic architecture in Venice, leads to the question of how to define the Gothic in general; this is not just a question of various “Gothic” elements which may or may not be present, but of a unity they form; we all already have some idea of what we understand by “Gothic.” His plan is “tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within us” (3). If the reader has a different idea than Ruskin, “I do not ask him to accept, but only to examine and understand, my interpretation.”

Ruskin takes an approach akin in some ways to the “principles and elements” in discussing art: he focuses first on internal aspects (“certain mental tendencies of the builders”), before moving on the the mere external forms (arches, etc.)

Thus, the mental characteristics of Gothic, in order of importance: 

1. Savageness

2. Changefulness

3. Naturalism.

4. Grotesqueness.

5. Rigidity.

6. Redundance. (4)

Those are characters of the buildings themselves; to them correspond the following characters of the builders:

1. Savageness or Rudeness

2. Love of Change

3. Love of Nature

4. Disturbed Imagination

5. Obstinacy

6. Generosity

 In any given building, a few of these can be missing, but take away too many, it ceases to be “Gothic.”

I. Savageness

The name “Gothic” originated as a reproach for buildings with “a degree of sternness and rudeness” looked down on by commentators in the south (5). Should the name be replaced with something more fitting and respectable? No need, says R.

It is true, greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is rude and wild but it is not true, that, for this reason, we are to condemn it, or despise. Far otherwise: I believe it is in this very character that it deserves our profoundest reverence.

He gives a highly poetical climate-based argument for cultural and artistic differences between northern and southern Europe; there is a “look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp” (8). But savegeness is even better if it reflects religion, not just climate – this is part of his deeply Christian analysis: what is key to the Gothic is that it reflects the Christian belief in the sanctity and equality of every soul.

This leads him into his most interesting argument. He distinguishes between servile, constitutional, and revolutionary traditions of architectural ornament. Servile ornament characterizes the schools of ancient Greece, Nineveh, and Egypt, who subordinated enslaved workmen to rigid rules, and confined creativity and artistry to the overseers [shades of Braverman]. Revolutionary or Renaissance ornament involves some kind of overskilling – every worker is equally schooled and skilled, but the result is that “his own original power is overwhelmed, and the whole building becomes a wearisome exhibition of well-educated imbecility” (9).

Constitutional ornament is the Gothic one, and it reflects a double aspect of Christian thought: first, that every soul is equally of value and not to be subordinated; second, that imperfection is inevitable. “That admission of lost power and fallen nature, which the Greek or Ninevite felt to be intensely painful, and, as far as might be, altogether refused, the Christian makes daily and hourly, contemplating the fact of it without fear, as tending, in the end, to God’s greater glory.” The Christian exhortation is thus, “Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, not your confession silenced for fear of shame.” Gothic schools of architecture thus “receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole” (10). [It is not clear to me whether Ruskin would have been aware of the corollary concept of wabi-sabi in Japanese art.]

A desire for perfection should not lead us to “prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher;” we are “not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, what we may more surely enjoy the complacency of success.”

In every manual laborer there are “some powers for better things,” some level of higher thought, which is not allowed to develop under the current system, in which they are made to act like machines.

Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool. (11)

[There is a lot to unpack in that; the assumption the worker is somehow asleep like an automaton, that has to awake into manhood [definitely this is more about “manhood” than “humanity?”] “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.” [Granted this is in the language of one upper-class person talking to another about the plebs below, but it still beats Taylorism.]

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.

“On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool.” Once he starts to imagine on his own, he loses his precision and becomes unreliable; “but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.” [So what exactly is this “majesty?” For Ruskin it seems to be the sovereignty of the free, Protestant, [male] individual.]

Ruskin argues that factory work is even more degrading and dehumanizing than slavery or feudal serfdom, on the familiar existentialist argument that even in slavery you can remain “in one sense, and the best sense, free” (12). His argument seems to be that even manual labor, done by hand, requires some intelligence, and thus allows the worker to develop their own intelligence, and thus be “free” in their minds, despite being enslaved. Factory work, in contrast, will “smother their souls with them,” and make their skin “into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with.” By being tied to, and thus dependent on, machinery, workers lose even their intelligence; the perfection of modern English products is a measure of this enslavement. In contrast, the imperfections of old Gothic architecture are “signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.” (13)

[It seems R feels that subordination to machinery is more degrading than social subordination, even in such a condition as slavery. This can clearly be contrasted with Marx’s position in the Grundrisse; Marx agrees that automatic machinery reduces workers to “conscious linkages;” nevertheless what is most important is not the worker’s relation to technology, but the class relation that organizes production. R’s position in this light seems to be more in the line of “compassionate conservatism.”]

Ruskin is not against hierarchy, and feels that to “obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty – liberty from care.” (13) The man who has to oversee others is the one with more “care” and worry. The current struggles of the 19th Century seem, to R, to be misdirected when they are simply against the wealthy upper class – instead of being against the division of labor per se, we should seek a more just division of labor, in which there is no such degrading labor as exists in factories. Back in feudal times, “the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity...”

He goes through a sort of master-and-servant dialectic, which ends somewhat differently than Hegel’s, on the relation between the worker who “reverences” his master, and the master who shoulders all the burden of responsibility:

Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him – the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, who 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his chief? – as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, “Another for Hector!” (14) 

[The reference is to the history of Clan Maclean of Scotland. Perhaps it is not specifically English, but the nature of imperialism, to romanticize the peoples whom you have already colonized and beaten down, more than the ones who are still putting up resistance? The correct answer is that no, the Irish rebel has broken with any “serf mentality” the moment he took up his rifle, and is continuing the same battle against Cromwell, and all he stands for, that the seven Maclean brothers gave their lives in, back in 1651.]

So anyway, Ruskin feels that the current working class feels unthanked, their sacrifice in the factory is not honored like the reverent sacrifices of the past generations on battlefields, etc. In turn, the upper class folks who want to help should not teach or preach (presumably the standard attempts of the time; and still common today), since these are basically insulting the intelligence of workers; instead what is needed is a “right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them, and making them happy” (15), and centering the economy on this, giving up the forms of beauty, convenience, etc., which can only be gained by squeezing the life and soul out of workers. R suggests three “broad and simple rules:”

1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.

2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.

3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving records of great works. (15)

1. By “invention” he more specifically means inventiveness or creativity, on the part of the worker creating the product. His examples is the manufacture of glass beads, which are “utterly unnecessary” (16), and which involve mindless, repetitive labor. “And every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads, is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put down.” [the last bit there seems an unnecessary exaggeration. IIRC someone has made an argument somewhere that this frequent assertion in the 19^th century that factory labor is “worse than slavery” ultimately justified or normalized the existing slavery system.] However, glass cups or vessels can be “the subjects of exquisite invention,” and when we  buy and appreciate these, “we are doing good to humanity.” Similarly, wearing cut jewels merely for the sake of their value is wrong, but wearing fine gold jewelry which has been crafted by a skilled artisan is good.

[Ruskin can interestingly be linked to the current arguments for degrowth, on the shared point that we could do away with the production of a lot of useless and wasteful things (though his example is glass beads, not SUVs, etc.). This is also related to a problem with his argument for a return to an artisanal economy, namely that the exquisite glassware, etc. which we can keep can only be afforded by the wealthy, while the cheaper, “useless” decoration he wants us to give up, is that which the working class can afford.]

2. Ruskin is not against elegance and finish per se, just against it being prioritized over the freedom and thought of the creator. “If you are to have the thought of a rough and untaught man, you must have it ina  rough and untaught way .... Only get the thought and do not silence the peasant because he cannot speak good grammar, or until you have taught him his grammar.” (17) “So the rule is simple: always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painful effort, and no more.”

He discusses the difference between English and old Venetian glass: the former is always precise, the latter cruder but also more inventive at its best: “Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone” (18).

He imagines an objection, that the talented craftsman should be promoted to overseer or designer, and have less talented workers under him, and so we can get “both design and finish.” R replies:

All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mistaken suppositions: the first, that one man’s thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by another man’s hands; the second, that manual labor is a degradation, when it is governed by intellect. 

He defines large-scale architecture on this model as “the expression of the mind of manhood by the hands of childhood” [very much the Kantian “What is Enlightenment” here]. Starting to sound a bit more radical, he argues that the societal distinction between the gentleman thinker, and the working “operative” is a problem:

We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two [thinking and working]; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. (19)

Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

No master [or boss?] should be too proud to do the meanest or hardest work in their profession. So anyway, the rudeness indicated by the term “Gothic” should be seen as a good quality, not a reproachful one: “no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect” (20). [R’s theory of work and art are very appropriate to his own writing, because there is some beauty, depth, and insight there, that shines through a lot of crudeness and error.]

Ruskin now admits that his use of the terms “perfect” and “imperfect” so far has been inaccurate to his ends:

But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

This is for two reasons:

1) “...no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure;” that is, the truly great artist is always pushing beyond what they can currently do, experimenting instead of staying inside what they can comfortably do, which itself would lead to relative mediocrity. If they strain to actually achieve perfection, they end like Leonardo, spending ten years on a painting, then leaving it unfinished to go on to new projects which will end the same way. The results will necessarily be beautiful but imperfect.

2) Imperfection is in fact essential to life, and is a sign of progress and change in all nature. He provides examples from the natural world: “to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality” (21).

II. Changefulness

From Savageness, he turns to the second quality of the Gothic, Changefulness, or Variety. This is a natural benefit of allowing  workers more freedom over their own work. He contrasts the regularity of a properly built neo-classical home, using the correct styles for Greek columns, etc, with buildings that can be read like poetry, because in addition to regularity, they have something else, variety.

The idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our mind for a moment” (23).  Architecture and every other art should say new things, not just repeat itself. 

Nothing is a great work of art, for the production of which either rules or models can be given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, and from given models, it is not an art, but a manufacture... (24)

He turns to the superiority of a pointed over a round arch, as the former has infinite variability; ditto for grouped shafts and tracing in windows. There are, nevertheless, both healthy and “diseased” loves of change. He makes his appeal to nature (and music) for the distinction:  monotony and change are best experienced in alternation. The “diseased” love of change is when there is too much change, so it has become monotonous, and we seek “extreme and fantastic degrees of it” (27). Healthy love of change, acc R, led to the rise of Gothic, and diseased love of change led to its fall.

Monotony unbroken, like darkness, is painful (and even at its best it serves as a painful preparation or something for the relief of change): “...an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dark or dead architecture; and of those who love it, it may be truly said, ‘they love darkness rather than light.’” Yet “transparent monotony” is a good use of monotony; “endurance” of monotony/darkness is a good quality of mind.

R starts off a great discussion of the superiority of the Gothic by observing that it is “not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble” (28). Because it is not dominated by a rigorous symmetry like Romanesque, etc., it can grow or shrink in width or breadth or function. Gothic builders never let ideas of “outside symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the real use and value of what they did.” [in contrast, the miserably boring uniform façades of many European squares comes to mind, particularly those celebrated by A.E.J. Morris.]

If they wanted a window, they opened one; a room, they added one; a buttress, they built one; utterly regardless of any established conventionalities of external appearance, knowing (as indeed it always happened) that such daring interruptions of the formal plan would rather give additional interest to symmetry than injure it. So that, in the best times of Gothic, a useless window would rather have been opened in an unexpected place for the sake of the surprise, than a useful one forbidden for the sake of symmetry. Every successive architect, employed upon a great work, built the pieces he added in his own way, utterly regardless of the style adopted by his predecessors; and if two towers were raised in nominal correspondence at the sides of a cathedral front, one was nearly sure to be different from the other, and in each the style at the top to be different from the style at the bottom. (28-9)

He gives religious import to the “confession of Imperfection” and the “confession of Desire of Change:” “If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work.” [i.e., it would be hubris]

It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied. (30)

III. Naturalism

He defines naturalism as “the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws” (31) [this seems a problematic formulation]. “Naturalism” was sometimes used as a reproach in his day [in contrast to “Purism”], and he explains why, by distinguishing between composition (of colors, lines, etc.) and representation per se. “Now the noblest art is an exact unison of the abstract value, with the imitative power, of forms and colours. ... But the human mind cannot in general unite the two perfections; it either pursues the fact to the neglect of the composition, or pursues the composition to the neglect of the fact.” (32) Nevertheless, both of these serve their purposes, for communication, and for decoration. 

R says men are artistically divided into three “classes:” men of design, men of facts, and men of both. Each class has both healthy and unhealthy functions. The unhealthy forms are caused by despite or envy; errors on the side of design only cause inferior art, while errors on the side of facts produce idealogues who ruin everything.

Three more classes: good and evil are mixed in everything, yet one class seeks the good, one the evil, and the third perceives both. He calls these purists, sensualists, and naturalists, respectively.

He excoriates the sensualists at length, but more interesting is his criticism of the purists: “... this vulgar Purism, which rejects truth, not because it is vicious, but because it is humble, and consists not in choosing what is good, but in disguising what is rough, extends itself into every species of art. ... There is nothing, I believe, so vulgar, so hopeless, so indicative of an irretrievably base mind, as this species of Purism.” (44)

... the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things: the greatest men being, in all times of art, Naturalists, without any exception... (45)

He recognizes in passing the ranty and digressive character of this 100+ page “chapter:”

the reader may already be somewhat wearied with a statement which has led us apparently so far from our immediate subject... (45) 

So anyway, the Gothic workman confesses his own imperfection (rudeness) and that of his subject (naturalism). On page 48, R comes out strongly against historicism in a footnote: “All good art representing past events, is therefore full of the most frank anachronism, and always ought to be. No painter has any business to be an antiquarian. We do not want his impressions or suppositions respecting things that are past. We want his clear assertions respecting things present.” (48)

[Well, Benjamin would have a response, that we can have both, that the image from the past can resonate with the present.]

He discusses Gothic vegetation, and how it is far more interested in the actual forms of real vegetation, than many older sculptural styles, which were content with very stylized vegetation as ornament. R links this to the rebirth of scientific inquiry at the close of the Middle Ages. He notes a theory that the Gothic developed out of imitation of nature; he points out this is historically inaccurate, the Gothic only developed to be closer to nature in its most mature form, but this itself reveals how central naturalism is to the “temper” of Gothic builders:

It was no chance suggestion of the form of an arch from the bending of a bough, but a gradual and continual discovery of beauty in natural forms which could be more and more perfectly transferred into those of stone, that influenced at once the heart of the people, and the form of the edifice. (50-1)

IV: The Grotesque.

R unfortunately declines to discuss this until the third volume, other than describing it as “the tendency to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime, images.” (52).

V. Rigidity.

He immediately admits that the word “rigidity” is not really sufficient; “active rigidity” might be closer: “the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness to resistance.” [“Energetic” would perhaps be the best term]; he refers to the quality of Gothic architecture that uses tension to achieve lightness, instead of having stones just sitting on each other like southern architecture; and also how Gothic ornamentation does not simply sit on the walls but leaps forth, independently. R ties this to the need for people in northern climates to find joy in the cold season, as much as in the warm.

[This is of course belied by Moorish architecture, indeed, it has been argued, more recently, that Islamic and specifically Moorish architecture influenced Gothic.]

He emphasizes the importance of moderation: “The best Gothic building is not that which is most Gothic...” (55).

VI. Redundance

Last and least, Redundance, “the uncalculating bestowal of the wealth of its labour” (56). Instead of relying on elegance or economy, “a certain portion of their effect depends upon accumulation of ornament.”

For the very first requirement of Gothic architecture being, as we saw above, that  it shall both admit the aid, and appeal to the admiration, of the rudest as well as the most refined minds, the richness of the work is, paradoxical as the statement may appear, a part of its humility. No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple; which refuses to address the eye, except in a few clear and forceful lines; which implies, in offering so little to our regards, that all it has offered is perfect; and disdains, either by the complexity or the attractiveness of its features, to embarrass our investigation, or betray us into delight.

[Obviously, he would have some harsh words for modernist architecture.]

The inferior rank of the workman is often shown as much in the richness, as the roughness, of his work; and if the co-operation of every hand, and the sympathy of every heart, are to be received, we must be content to allow the redundance which disguises the failure of the feeble, and wins the regard of the inattentive.

[There is something in here, despite the classism carried over, regarding the way art could look in an anarchist society based on universal cooperation and sympathy; “failure” in the above just means not meeting certain elite standards or aesthetic expectations. What R is describing is how a more democratic, egalitarian work-process, reflecting a society of the same values, creates art with more “redundance,” or better put, variety of aesthetic judgments and innovations. This stands as a plausible response to Le Guin’s characterization of the anarchist society in The Dispossessed as being drab and uninterested in, or suspicious of, adornment; more likely, there would be greater diversity and “redundance” of artistic style, because there would no longer be any hierarchy of taste.] R then lists several interests in the Gothic “heart” which are quite relevant to this: “a magnificent enthusiasm, which feels as if it never could do enough to reach the fulness of its ideal; an unselfishness of sacrifice, which would rather cast fruitless labour before the altar than stand idle in the market; and finally, a profound sympathy with the fulness and wealth of the material universe...” (56-7). He goes on about the influence of nature on Gothic artists, that being influenced by nature they necessarily had no fear or revulsion of complexity or richness.

Having covered the six aspects of the inner spirit of Gothic, he turns to outward form. He reiterates that we can’t say that a building is or isn’t Gothic, only that it is more Gothic or less Gothic, depending on the extent to which it possesses those six aspects of inner spirit, and the elements of outward form which he will now enumerate.

He starts, naturally, with pointed arches, then turns to roof construction. Gabled roofs are even more important than pointed arches, being linked to the northern climate, and forming the basis of turret and spire, etc.

“It is not the compelled, but the willful transgression of law which corrupts the character. Sin is not in the act, but in the choice.” (59) This is his way of introducing the point that architects can stray from the rules of Gothic by necessity (shortage of room, etc.) and still be Gothic, it is when they do it willfully that they “sin.”

All of Gothic is developed from the relationship between the pointed arch for the bearing line below, and the gable for the protecting line above (62); he gives an illustration of this shape, basically the star trek insignia, but not off-center.

There are three ways of bridging space, with straight lintel, round arch, and angled gable; the Gothic “pointed arch” is properly speaking a rounded gable. All architectures of the world can be grouped by which means they use to bridge space. Examples: Greek, Romanesque, Gothic.

Per my above comment about Islamic architecture, R does mention a style he calls “Arabian Gothic” (as opposed to “pure Gothic”), of which he states that it “is called Gothic, only because it has many Gothic forms, pointed arches, vaults, etc., but its spirit remains Byzantine, more especially in the form of the roof-mask” (65) (i.e., with domes instead of gables).

Foliation is the inspiration for the trefoil arch, and for tracery: Gothic artists don’t necessarily try to imitate plants per se, but to reproduce their structural or geometrical beauty and the pleasure received from perceiving them.

He provides a final definition of Gothic based on physical characteristics: “Foliated architecture, which uses the pointed arch for the roof proper, and the gable for the roof-mask” (72).

There is now only one point more which he wishes to make, regarding foliation and sculpture, and the highest or purest form of Gothic, versus its final degraded forms. Early Gothic was “noble, inventive, and progressive,” whereas late Gothic was “ignoble, uninventive, and declining” (73) due to how they use foliation and figure sculpture.

He distinguishes between two styles he calls linear and surface Gothic; R gives two examples, one a gable from Abbeville, France, illustrating linear gothic; and the other from Verona, Italy, illustrating surface Gothic. R notes that the Italian example he has provided appears to have been executed less skillfully or expertly, yet this is not important: “The Veronese Gothic is strong in its masonry, simple in its masses, but perpetual in its variety. The late French Gothic is weak in masonry, broken in mass, and repeats the same idea continually. It is very beautiful, but the Italian Gothic is the nobler style” (76). 

Ruskin states a principle of economy in art: “a composition from which anything can be removed without doing mischief, is always so far forth inferior.” [Is it churlish to point out that “so far forth” could be removed from that definition, without any undue mischief?]

He provides some rules for recognizing “whether a given building be good Gothic or not, and, if not Gothic, whether its architecture is of a kind which will probably reward the pains of careful examination” (78): 

1. steep gable, high above the walls

2. windows and doors with pointed arches and gables over them.

3. presence of foliation

4. the arches in general "are carried on true shafts with bases and capitals." Exceptions noted for non-religious use.

Those identify Gothic; but is it good architecture? Some more rules of thumb:

1. “See if it looks as if it had been built by strong men,” if it has roughness, “nonchalance” mixed with gentleness, as “of men who can see past the work they are doing, and betray here and there something like disdain for it” (79). Mere precision is less likely to clearly indicate that it is of the “noblest” schools.

2. Irregularity, with “different parts fitting themselves to different purposes, no one caring what becomes of them, so that they do their work. If one part always answers accurately to another part, it is sure to be a bad building...”

3. It has “perpetually varied design” in ornamentation. (180)

4. “Read the sculpture.” The sculpture on a building should be legible from a distance. “Thenceforward the criticism of the building is to be conducted precisely on the same principles as that of a book” in terms of the knowledge and feeling communicated.

Ruskin would no doubt be depressed and disappointed upon trying to “read” the architecture of today with its almost total lack of sculpture or artisanal ornamentation whatsoever. More importantly, he would note that its ugliness, its drabness and arrogance, directly reflect the dissociation of designers from builders: the problem with modern architecture is that it reflects the hierarchical, exploitative relations through which it was built, and of the deeply unequal society which built it.