The tower of Babel - response

The tower of Babel - response

it's a beautiful contrast, the symbol of the tower upside down, heaven on earth glistening towards the sky. The tower of Babel seems to have been based on a real structure, what really happened? Surely the anger of God towards people devouring the sun, the moon, in pride itself, would not have sufficed in him dispersing this great community of people. If God was just and wise, surely he would not sacrifice men’s peace, even for their atheist beliefs.

The biblical story of Babel as well as it’s symbolic meaning must be an invention of man. Just like sickness and pest was always pronounced to be a punishment of God.

Babel is a reminder that the works of mankind are doomed to imperfection. If you look closely at the paintings of Babel (e.g Brueghel’s) it’s often built on a slant, in other words the very basis of it is unstable. I think the idea of a slant is quite interesting.

It’s builders reaching the limits of possibility, never being able to fulfil their perfect vision of the world, were forced to give it up. The reasons must have been political.  Visions and revolutions often produce results contrary to those fought for, as soon as a goal is achieved the groups are formed and eventually people are at war again. Even worse, those who dream up these visions are often misunderstood, their ideas manipulated and sometimes even punished. Dostoyevsky was sent into exile, into a world he was striving against. Even Brueghel’s  famous painting of Babel symbolized how Catholicism was forced onto the Flemish.

An aspect  of Babel reminds me of Existere (the meaning of coming together & falling apart, also failing in some way). Another aspect reminds me of human vices, greed, power to control.

Can we speculate about an author proceeding what ever comes before nothingness? It seems a dead road. Perhaps a god will help people become more moral because of a promised afterlife. And yet religion has seemed to achieved the opposite. Whilst smaller groups may life peacefully and in good faith, the larger groups are at war with each other. I guess it’s all obvious stuff.

As opposed to the thoughts on a author find the concept of nothingness as interesting topic to think about.  Nothingness does not exclude the idea of the author. But it instantaneously drives us to the limits of our own imagination. Perhaps through higher consciousness we are getting closer to a concept or it’s meaning. But nothing still seems a difficult thing to describe as it immediately becomes something. It’s kind of funny that my concept of nothingness is closer associated to the colour white. And yet white seems a fresh canvas onto which we can add something. Can something come from nothing?

For Heidegger, all logic is swept away by the whirlwind of a more original form of question- ing, which we might call metaphysics (in the good sense of the term). The deepest question that humans can ask is “why is there something rather than nothing?” There is no real answer to this question, since Heidegger will not be satisfied with any causal explanation of how God or the Big Bang created the universe. The question is not meant to be answered, but is designed to awaken the fundamental mood of Angst.

Tower of Babel

Dostoyevsky wrote about socialism, describing it as “the form taken by atheism”. He also drew a comparison between socialism and atheism and the tower of Babel, describing it [socialism / atheism] as “the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”

I thought this image of the tower working in reverse was quite interesting. There’s a sense of topsy-turviness, where instead of the tower leading up to heaven, heaven is led down to earth. Who needs heaven when we can have it on earth?

In the biblical story the tower fails because of God’s intervention; he creates confusion amongst the builders by introducing different languages and as a result the building of the tower is abandoned. However, in the socialist version I interpret it as ‘we’ (humanity) that confound ourselves in our efforts to realise unattainable ideals. The image is of heaven as a production of humanity rather than the other way round which sees man and woman as the seeds of God.

Perhaps these two versions of the tower of Babel story represent the philosophical debate of existence and its origin; whether there is an author or God, or not? Can we, alone, manufacturer our own existence or does there have to be a higher author? Or maybe even, does it matter whether we have knowledge of a God or not because the outcome is the same?

I realise that this leads back to a similar territory that the black space occupies, in the sense that we are asking existential questions, but perhaps it also adds a question to those previous debates.

In parallel to this I was thinking about ‘experience’ and what it means to experience. Josch also had thoughts about this. I thought that this might be a way of moving on from the black space.  By looking at what is blocking our path forwards (the need to experience) and looking at the language and method that frames that project. 

I’ll add this later, I need to rush to meet Jon before our meeting at Arts Admin... 

Ever since 'Existere' the amount of themes we have started to explore have widened, the topics have become increasingly philosophical. Here is a small summary of some of the things which we have been discussing: 

self-identity

perception

free will/ choice    /prediction

collaboration

existence/ consciousness

why we feel the need to experience (discussion with Joc in Egypt) 

nothingness/ absence/ gaps

anxiety

echoes/ repetition

vertigo

Before going into greater detail I am also using this Blog to drop down some of the ideas we have had, I think the individual words will be enough to remind of the vague ideas we were discussing

sea saw, ladder, flag, 

holes

mirrors

tunnels

staring project

possible existing work we may want to show in Sion:

cabinet 

white elephant

beast?

...to be expanded

I read this recently which I thought interesting in terms of the black space. Especially as you say you feel you can't go 'beyond' the black space before experiencing it.

I guess we have to find a direction, a train of thought we can all follow, consolidate our focus...

Extract from the Philosophy of Shadows

"Do we need light to see? In chapter 10, I argue that the black experience of a man in a perfectly dark cave is a representation of an absence of light, not an absence of representation. There is certainly a difference between his perceptual knowledge and that of his blind companion. Only the sighted man can tell whether the cave is dark just by looking. But perhaps he is merely inferring darkness from his failure to see. To avoid ambiguity, we need to focus on cases in which belief plays no role. After this and other safeguards are in place, I make my case that we do see the darkness. (So I am siding with general ver- sions of the causal theory—e.g., Michael Tye’s [1982; 2002, 157, 168 fn. 11]—that do not restrict the type of causal relation to that light transmission.) In terms of basic information, we see about as much as we do when the lights are on. Depending on what has been seen before and after, we may even see ordinary objects. I conclude that we do see in total darkness."