Kristóf Nyíri Images in Conservative Education 3rd Visual Learning Conference – Budapest, Dec. 7–8, 2012

Kristóf Nyíri

Images in Conservative Education

3rd Visual Learning Conference – Budapest, Dec. 7–8, 2012

Kristóf Nyíri



Upper half of the draft from which this presentation emerged…

Kristóf Nyíri



conservatism and epistemological realism traditions dissolved, images binding

conservatism not a right-wing ideology & never a populist one

Lower half of the draft from which this presentation emerged…

Kristóf Nyíri



The message: conservatism is an indispensable but seemingly paradoxical attitude/mission/theory, its paradoxes however are dissolved by allotting, prac-tically/philosophically/educationally, a proper role to images.

Kristóf Nyíri



the visual mind – the verbal, the pictorial, the motor the meaning of conservatism – premodern, modern, postmodern the conservative concept of knowledge conservatism and education images and conservatism

■ images conservative■ from traditions to images ■ images and the unknown future

Kristóf Nyíri






Kristóf Nyíri


the visual mind – the verbal, the pictorial, the motor

Taine, writing in 1870: “beneath the incomplete image a dull agitation is going on, and as it were, a swarm of feeble impulses which usually sum themselves up in an expressive gesture, a metaphor, a visible summary”.

Adolf Hildebrand, writing in 1893: “Wie das Kind die Mimik des Lachens und Weinens verstehen lernt, indem es diese Mimik mitmacht und an dem eigenen Muskelvorgang, den es hervorruft, auch die innere Ursache des Behagens oder Unbehagens zu empfinden imstande ist, so wird uns alle Mimik, alle Bewegung bei Anderen ein verständlicher Ausdruck für innere Vorgänge, eine verständliche Sprache.” –– “Es liegt in unserer senkrechten Stellung zur Erde, andererseits in der horizontalen Lage unserer beiden Augen, dass die senkrechte und wagerechte Richtung, als Grundrichtungen aller anderen, uns eingeboren sind.”

Hildebrand: the facial gesture of smile understood via muscular feelings; the vertical and the horizontal as embedded axes [Nyíri: Ah! recall the cross!]


Kristóf Nyíri


the visual mind – the verbal, the pictorial, the motor

Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form, 1977: “the cross form as such can symbolize the conjunction of opposites, the action of centrifugal or centripetal forces, … crossroads, the relation of vertical striving to horizontal stability, and so on.”

The cross image, Chauvet cave, cca. 30 000 years BC

Kristóf Nyíri





Kristóf Nyíri





Kristóf Nyíri



the meaning of conservatism – premodern, modern, postmodern

Thomas Mann: “Der Lebensbegriff, dieser … im höchsten, religiösen Sinn konservative Begriff” (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918).

What does the conservative conserve? Life in all its forms, and in particular the chances of life for future generations.

Premodern conservatism: my children should grow up in the way my parents did… The age of binding traditions. Collective memory in an oral culture.

Modern conservatism: the role of literacy and the printed word. Change is in-evitable, but it should be slow, and not driven by speculative theories. Tradi-tions fail to bind; the ensuing paradox.

Postmodern conservatism: the role of digital/online communication. Change is rapid, and entirely unforeseeable; the ensuing paradox.

Thomas Mann: the concept of life is the conservative concept in the highest, religious sense… Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner..

Kristóf Nyíri









Thomas Mann: the concept of life is the conservative concept in the highest, religious sense…

Kristóf Nyíri









Thomas Mann: the concept of life is the conservative concept in the highest, religious sense…

Kristóf Nyíri




Robert Musil, writing in 1923: “Having freed himself from all the old bonds, man is recommended to subject himself to them anew: faith, community, a concept of civic duty, and abandon-ment of capitalist individualism and all its attitudes. … – The belief is that a decay has to be cured. – … I can think of hardly any account which conceives of our present condition as a problem, a new sort of problem, and not as a solution that has miscarried.”

Kristóf Nyíri





Kristóf Nyíri





Kristóf Nyíri



the conservative concept of knowledge

John Gray in Salisbury Review, 1983: “Hayek’s … insight that all our theoretical, propositional or explicit knowledge presupposes a vast background of tacit, practical and inarticulate knowledge. Hayek’s in-sight here parallels those of Oakeshott, Ryle, Heidegger, and Polanyi; like them he perceives that the kind of knowledge that can be embod-ied in theories is not only distinct from, but also at every point depen-dent upon, another sort of knowledge, embodied in habits and disposi-tions to act. Some of this practical knowledge is found in rules of ac-tion and perception imprinted in the nervous system and transmitted by genetic inheritance. But much of the significant part of the practical knowledge expressed in our dealings with each other is passed on mi-metically, in the cultural transmission of traditions or practices… … tacit knowledge…”

Kristóf Nyíri





Kristóf Nyíri





Kristóf Nyíri



Conservatism and education

• decentralization• hardcopy vs digital / does the internet debilitate? • there never was a Golden Age• respect for people, respect for nature, respect for the work of creation (the religious tinge) • word and image

Kristóf Nyíri





Kristóf Nyíri





Kristóf Nyíri



images and conservatism

Kristóf Nyíri




images conservative

• images conserving the status quo

Kristóf Nyíri




images conservative


• images storing details not purposely intended to record

Kristóf Nyíri




images conservative



• images giving a true picture of reality

Kristóf Nyíri




images conservative

images giving a true picture of reality

Arnheim in his 1969 “Wertheimer and Gestalt Psychology” paper: a “respect for the structure of the physical world as it impinges upon the nervous system has been stressed by gestalt psychologists in conscious opposition to the sub-jectivism of British empiricist philosophy… – … the two antagonistic theories were based on opposite world views: the one, proudly asserting the dominion of the individual's views and judgments over the environment; the other, … af-firming that it was man's task to find his own humble place in the world and to take the cues for his conduct and comprehension from the order of that world. In the social realm, gestalt theory demanded of the citizen that he derive his rights and duties from the objectively ascertained functions and needs of so-ciety.”

Arnheim the epistemological realist

Kristóf Nyíri




images conservative



• images giving a true picture of reality

• images also expressing what might be experienced as a higher reality

Kristóf Nyíri




images conservative

images expressing what might be experienced as a higher reality

For a disc

ussion se

e Nyíri,

“Images

in Natural

Theology”, in The O

x-

ford Handbook of N

atural Theo-

logy, to be p

ublished in

Jan. 2

013.

Kristóf Nyíri




images conservative

modern/post-modern con-servative archi-tecture

Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University – model

Arnheim conservative but not backward-looking

Kristóf Nyíri



images and conservatismLe Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (different angle)images conservative


Kristóf Nyíri




Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (1977): “the vis-ual, functional, and social chaos of modern life. … an individu-alistic civilization… … the very nature of religion and its tasks are now so open to question that their external expression is no longer governed by reliable standards. … all the more rewarding those examples of church architecture that succeed in translating dignity and spiritual devotion into twentieth-century idioms. …the architect … reinforcing … deep-seated spiritual connota-tions … is contributing to the healing of a split in our civiliza-tion. He can do this by cultivating the expressive qualities in the shapes he invents…”

images conservative


Kristóf Nyíri



images and conservatismLe Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp

images conservative


Kristóf Nyíri




Arnheim, “Notes on Religious Architecture” (1993): “In re-ligious architecture … a good designer such as Mario Botta gave up most of the literal applications of tradition, not to ig-nore them but to probe once again the deeper core of human feeling and thought.”

images conservative


Kristóf Nyíri




from traditions to images

Kristóf Nyíri





the modern paradox of traditions resolved by the rise of the image

Written by me in 1981… Transl.: “Two and two are four, and the only explana-tion we can give here is that this is the way we count. Arithmetical knowledge is based on a conformity in behaviour that is not replaceable by any kind of insight. More generally, traditionalism as here conceived maintains that in the absence of in-dubitable truths of fact and value there can be no communication, argumentation, or discussion, that society is held together by the uniform acceptance of such truths; and that it is education in the family and in the school that has to confer the proper author-ity upon these truths.”

Kristóf Nyíri






From my paper 1982 paper “Wittgenstein 1929–31: Conservatism and Jewishness”: “Witt-genstein's later writings, beginning with the manuscripts of 1929–31, imply an image of man which stands in glaring contradiction to the enlightened, liberal view. The concept of the in-ternally or mentally autonomous, rational individual, of the human subject acting in accord-ance with the light of his reason, sovereign within his own mental world, reveals itself as ab-surd in the face of the realization that the meaning of a word is not a mental image, but the use to which the word is put; thinking, believing, expecting, hoping, and so on, are not pri-vate mental processes; mathematical insight is grounded in exercise, in drill… Thus a number of years later Wittgenstein wrote: "Counting (and that means: counting like this) is a tech-nique that is employed daily in the most various operations of our lives. And that is why we learn to count as we do: with endless practice, with merciless exactitude; that is why it is in-exorably insisted that we shall all say 'two' after 'one', 'three' after 'two', and so on" (RFM). This conception of mathematical insight and of the ways in which | arithmetic is learned, is rooted in the same psychological attitude as Wittgenstein's general conception of education. The latter may be illustrated, for example, by his remark: ‘When you say NO to a child, you should be like a wall and not like a door’.”

“Not a mental image”

Kristóf Nyíri






Giaquinto: “So far from being language based, the origin of our knowledge of simple sums seems to be a kind of finger ex-pertise.”

The real Wittgenstein opening up unexpected avenues…

Kristóf Nyíri




images and the unknown future

the role of animations / simulations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hubVd9nmJBc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hubVd9nmJBc

Kristóf Nyíri



[email protected]

www.hunfi.hu/nyiri

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.hunfi.hu/nyiri

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Kristóf Nyíri Images in Conservative Education 3rd Visual Learning Conference – Budapest, Dec. 7–8, 2012