Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Concepts
Marius SIDORIUC
Faculty of Philosophy, University “Al.I.Cuza” Iassy,
B-dul Carol I, 11 Iassy, 700506, Romania.
mariussidoriuc@gmail.com.
The interest for the concept of ruin and ruin of concepts, I think, has a
very high stake if we follow the history of the concept from the perspective
of that which justifies the speech on something as a ruin and the way in
which marking the past, of anciens is delimited in texts (toposes), speeches.
From a political point of view, ruins have a relational steak of power-
language-legitimacy and, for example, the doctrine of political elites. Here
is an example: the communist powers initiated a struggle to erase a past
that was not convenient and that which was a trace, in ruin, was
recontextualized, thus offering a “different vision” on the past.
In other contexts and with other intentions, the ruins of buildings
such as castles, princely palaces, temples but especially those of ancient
Egypt, Rome and Greece, were a great force for the opening of a historic
corridor. Adolf Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, made not only the
architectural model for the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg but also how it
would appear in ruin, over centuries. Speer was inspired by the ruins of the
building site for the Zeppelin Field to devise a „theory of ruin value”
(Ruinenwerttheorie). „This distressing sight made me think of an idea, which I
Marius SIDORIUC, The Concept of Ruin and the Ruin of Concepts
1 Albert Speer, In umbra lui Hitler. Memorii, Editura Nemira, Bucureşti, 1997, vol. I., p. 76.
2 Idem.
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4 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Printed by J. F.
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7 Otto Liebman, Doctrina principala si principala eroare a lui Kant (fragment din volumul Kant
und die Epigonen, Berlin, reuthber & Richard, 1912, p. 18-19) în Filosofie neokantiană în texte,
Editura ŞtiinŃifică, Bucureşti, 1993, p. 49.
8 A more than generous bibliography was written on the topic of ruin. I will only specify
three titles; Roland Mortier, La poétique des ruines en France. Ses origins, ses variations de la
renaissance à Victor Hugo, Droz, Geneva, 1974; Murielle Hladik, Traces et fragments dans
l’esthétique japonaise, Editions Mardaga, Wavre (Belgique) 2008; Didier Maleuvre, Museum
Memories: History, Technology, Art, Stanford University Press, California, 1999, etc.
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2004, p. XVII.
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13 Ibidem, p. 15.
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„the guest hall”, „the warehouse”, etc., I understand the things which make
it possible and not the things that show that this was the guest hall, etc. In
other words, before we can say „this was the king’s room” archaeological
language states something like „this is the king’s room” because, according
to our measurements and to stories and documents we know this should
be „the king’s room”. What does this mean?
Measurements and maps of the ruins are mathematical and
geographical statements which show certain links between parts of the
ruins but they are not capable of saying‚ this was „the king’s room”, „this
was the cellar in which wine barrels were kept”. Only if we have certain
historical sources, if we know certain texts which talk about such things or
if we have written testimonies about the types of constructions in that
period or if we can find certain similarities and the usual mathematic and
geographic sentences tell us something.
This situation is less obvious with recent ruins because of oral
stories being more than texts, analyses, conceptualizations. In front of a
ruined church, we already know that it is a ruined church, just as well we
recognize a ruined castle, a ruined palace. But we do not know this a priori.
We make correlations between the two objects because we know that it was
a palace and now they are the ruins of a palace (certainly, we can find particular
elements of the church in the ruin but these, as simbols, mean nothing
without a prior knowledge of their meaning). Why is this distinction
important?
The ruins of something is a powerful source of conceptual
remodeling of the past exactly through that something. And this
reorganization of the past, of history has the power over the future. The
ruins of a „bourgeois” castle, in class struggle language, continues to show
„bourgeois” characteristics and because of this they try to change its
functions first of all materially then conceptually by classifying them as
outdated. But the proposed neologism, in fact, shows the conceptual change is
also made on the building’s history which, after becoming a ruin, took
other functions. A bigger evidence is the conversion of the St. Sophia
church in Constantinople into a mosque. Edward Gibbon admirably
described the moment in which the „symbol” of Orthodox Christianity
was resignified. This resignifying started with the ruins of the church
because, as a ruin it would have continued to transcend in time with all the
conceptualizations about Christianity, which would’ve been against the
intentions of Mahomed the second. The sultan, in order to encourage his
soldiers, entitled them to everything in the city, except the buildings. These
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have a capital steak for the remodeling of the past of the newly conquered
town. Otherwise, its conquering would not have counted in its architectural
geometry and thus would not have been so powerfull in historical texts.
”At the principal door of St. Sophia, he alighted from his horse,
and entered the dome; and such was his jealous regard for that
monument of his glory, that on observing a zealous Mussulman in
the act of breaking the marble pavement, he admonished him with
his scimitar, that, if the spoils and captives were granted to the
soldiers, the public and private buildings had been reserved for the
prince. By his command the metropolis of the eastern church was
transformed into a mosch: the rich and portable instruments of
superstition had been removed; the crosses were thrown down; and
the walls which were covered with images and mosaics, were
washed and purified, restored to a state of naked simplicity. On the
same day, or on the ensuing Friday, the muezin, or crier ascended
the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the ezan, or public invitation
in the name of God and his prophet.” 14
Thus, the ruin is not just a former building with certain functionalities. The
ruin, temporally speaking, is diferent, it was not part of the geography of
the „world long gone”. But it obtains the attribute of ruin by the
information on the world, the functions which animated the buildings.
Certainly, from the point of view of conceptual history, if I understood
Koselleck, it is necesary to make a distinction between history in eventu and
ex eventu because language cannot contain the whole process of the event.
If we take for example the history of Christianity, as it was present
in Cappadocia in the light of the ruins which are accesible to us, these can
only describe their history in a way that implies a certain orientation of the
values (concepts) of Christianity. As Koselleck concludes, „from a
linguistic point of view, we cannot say, at a given time, less or more than
the historical reality which we want to describe.”15 But, on the other hand,
ruins have the status of ruin in accordance to something so they already
interpret something from the concepts of history.
14 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Printed by J. F.
Dove, St. John’s Square, London, 1825, vol. VIII, p. 253.
15 Reinhart Koselleck, Conceptele şi istoriile lor, trad. rom. Gabriel H. Decuble şi Mariana
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16 Ibidem, p. 58.
17 Ibidem, p. 16.
18 Ibidem, p. 17.
19 Immanuel Kant, Critica raŃiunii pure, trad. rom. Nicolae Bagdasar şi Elena Moisuc,
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21 Roger Caillois, Fluviul Alfeu, trad. rom. Adrian Istrate, Editura Nemira, Bucureşti, 1997,
pp. 24- 25.
22Ibidem, p. 26.
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23 David Hume, Cercetare asupra intelectului omenesc, trad. rom. Mircea Flonta, Adrian-Paul
Iliescu şi ConstanŃa NiŃă, Editura ŞtiinŃifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 1987, p. 114.
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hesitated for a moment, then she lowered her voice and asked: Are you a
foreigner? No, I am a Greek. She took my answer as a sort of
encouragement and shrugged her shoulders: "Those fools!" she exclaimed,
bursting into laughter. (…) It was not the first time when I saw one of
those old women, a sort of guardians of the old temples and famous
churches with miraculous icons, sinfully laughing at the marble-made old
saints or demons on which they were keeping an eye.”24
This comparison between the Temple of Apollo Epicurius and
simple stones does not mock history itself. The whole Report is dominated
by the laudative tone used when invoking the ancient Greeks. Just as he
perceived the geometry of the Place of Minos at Knossos and the bloody
fights with the bulls, Kazantzakis tries to find the harmony of the past in
contemporary Greece. These reinterpretations are the world the Report
depicts. This is how he achieved his purpose by fulfilling his moral duties
to Greco. “The trifles” that the old woman mentions do not only suggest
the distance she takes from history, but they imply a conceptual
reinterpretation of the topical connections (the myths, the deities etc). How
is the topical connection between the edifice and the ruin achieved?
I will try and answer this question by analyzing the dialectical
concept of the “fusion of the horizons” introduced by H.G. Gadamer in
his book, Truth and Method.
The concept of the ruin entails a topical (or oral) connection which makes
the distinction between two temporal objectualities (the edifice – the ruin)
through their conceptual delimitations. Their cause-effect and conceptual
succession are conversed and "the reality" of the object is rendered not
only by their presence/absence, but also by the way they are disposed in
the conceptual geography.
In other words, this is how my thesis can be summed up: the
concept of the ruin is derived from the connections made between various
texts or oral traditions which alters one by one the causal relationship
between edifice and ruin as well as the conceptual one. But what must be
really taken into account is the differentiation it presupposes and which
legitimizes the reference to something which is considered a ruin.
24
Nikos Kazantzakis, Raport către El Greco, trad. rom. Alexandra Medrea-Danciu, Editura
Univers, Bucureşti, 1986, pp. 176 – 177.
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25 The Oriental Institute 2006 – 2007 Annual Repport, The University of Chicago, 2007, in Gil
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27 R.G. Collingwood, O autobiografie filosofică, trad. rom. Florin LobonŃ şi Claudiu Mesaroş,
Editura Trei, Bucureşti, 1998, p. 89.
28 Ibidem, p. 84.
29 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eseu despre originea limbilor, unde se vorbeşte despre melodie şi despre
imitaŃia muzicală, trad. rom. Eugen Munteanu, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 1999, p. 32.
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the only explanation is the fact that for him, the earth has really turned into
a ruin, otherwise Burnet does not tell us anything at all. The divinity, the
paradise were real, but Burnet realizes that this is no longer true. Here, it is
not necessary to invoke the correspondence theory of truth, but only to
believe, just like Burnet did, that Heaven was real, in order to understand
the arguments he had in order to sustain the idea of the earth seen as ruin.
However, these mutations the meanings of the concept of ruin
have undergone follow the principle of the causality between the edifice
and the ruin, to which historical, aesthetical or moral interpretations will be
added. But each of these cases does not speak only about the actual ruin-
object, but also about the histories reflected in the ruin, which suggest a
certain manner of reorganizing the world. Nevertheless, since the ruin does
not carry a meaning in itself, except for the correlations with the edifice, it
is not enough to understand the contexts in which one can speak about a
ruin and associate certain causes to it: the forces of nature or spiritual
(cultural) ones have been subject to moral and aesthetic interpretation. One
must also take into consideration the probable affirmations the latter infer.
30Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adevăr şi metodă, trad. rom. Gabriel Cercel şi Larisa Dumitru,
Gabriel Kohn, Călin Petcana, Editura Teora, Bucureşti, 2001, p. 233.
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31 Georg Simmel, Cultura filozofică. Despre aventură, sexe şi criza modernului, trad. rom. Nicolae
Stoian şi Magdalena Popescu Marin, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 1998, p. 125.
32 David Hume, Cercetare asupra intelectului omenesc, Editura ŞtiinŃifică şi Enciclopedică,
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this non-sense that we must take into account and understand, because the
ruins themselves could be interpreted in ways that some might consider
them futile or signs of melancholy, nostalgia, implicitly irrational accessories.
As far as Homer's work is concerned, “the fusion of horizons” can
be summed up in a few sentences. But by linking these sentences with
other ones which belong to numerous fusions of horizons that have already
been recorded by the literary history, astrology, philosophy, mythology, we
find ourselves in a difficult situation. In this case, we choose to either
interpret in a certain manner the sentences which belong to other fusions
(which have already been recorded by tradition) or apply ”the fusion of
horizons” to the latter as well. But in both cases, comprehending the
meaning will ruin the old texts, the ancient mentality (of the Alterity, in
short), since we do not take into consideration the fact that only
inductively we have the possibility of reconstructing the questions which
try to unveil the meaning of the text. In other words, Gadamer considers
that in spite of a plurality of meanings, the text will remain the same36 but
this also indicates that the “fusion of horizons” is a reevaluation of all the
interpretations which have been registered so far. In my point of view, it is
this type of comprehension which brings the plurality of meanings to ruin.
In conclusion, without further details, my opinion is that we can
speak about a ruin of concepts as long as the concept of ruin must provide
an answer which will be considered efficient for a “long time”. The fact
that a certain comprehension of a topos must be acknowledged for a“long
time” is a requirement for the conceptual stability, forgetting that, as
Gadamer suggests, the horizons are not enclosed, but are subject to
mobility.
The criticism of this type of realism, as Collingwood points out,
indicates how “unscientific” it is to comprehend the solutions of a problem
as answers to a question which is considered eternal. This situation
presupposes to establish a certain degree of stability related to the concept,
the problem. “Is it true", Collingwood asks himself, "that the problems
philosophy poses are eternal, even in the soft sense of the word? Is it true
that different philosophies are only different attempts to formulate the
answer to one and the same question?”37 The answer is negative. The
conceptual history, as Koselleck puts it, is aimed at a double mutation, of
both the concept and the reality it refers to. On the other hand, the fact
36
H.G. Gadamer, op. cit., p. 282.
37R.G. Collingwood, O autobiografie filosofică, trad. rom. Florin LobonŃ şi Claudiu Mesaroş,
Editura Trei, Bucureşti, 1998, p. 83.
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38 Michel Foucault, Ce este un autor? Studii şi conferinŃe, trad. rom. Bogdan Ghiu şi Ciprian
Mihali, Editura Idea Design & Print, Cluj, 2004, p. 48.
39.Ibidem, p. 49.
40 Ibidem, p. 51.
41 Michel Foucault, Arheologia cunoasterii, trad. rom. Bogdan Ghiu, Editura Univers,
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