NORTHROOM

Agreeable Follies

Mental geography and thepolyoptics of place

by Paul Carter

Astronomers use the Greenwich meridian todefine standard time. Earthly travellers alsocalibrate their revolutions of the earth againstthis line of longitude. From a Chinese point ofview chronology is orientalist, implying agrowing deviation from the mean as you traveleast. For longitudinalists, if such a brethrenexists, the join at the back, the InternationalDate Line where the myth of linear time isrectified and brought back into accord withthe earth’s own turning, is a kind of NorthPole, a place where time contracts to avanishing point. Mundane chronology has its meridian, that is, its high point ofreasonableness: the convention of setting ourclocks to Greenwich times marks a momentof universal agreement. It could be a triumphof Enlightenment thinking. But I amwondering whether a comparable argumentmight be mounted around the associations oflatitude. Geographically, the meridian‘latitude’, as it were, would be the equator. At right angles to the celestial meridian, theequator is not equidistant between day andnight, but it is midway between two heavenlyhemispheres. Where north and south meet itclearly resolves the Zeno–like paradoxes ofdigital logic.

However, in common English usage, thelatitude of the meridian is set vaguelyelsewhere. The meridional is not exactly aplace but an idea of the southerly beyondwhere you are; for northern Europeans it isthe Mediterranean and beyond that benign

basin Africa’s burning shore. But is so vague azone reasonable? Isn’t that south altogethertoo fervent? Where, in fact, would a northernEuropean philosopher place the latitude ofreason? In what narrow zone does the sun ofunderstanding blaze forth most rationally.David Hume called the “manifoldcontradictions and imperfections in humanreason” that beset him “clouds”1: would hereason better under Naples’s serene skies?

Or, “having narrowly escaped shipwreck inpassing a small frith”2, would the correctionof the faculties benefit more from directinghis “weather–beaten vessel” to the north,where, by the eerie illumination of themidnight sun, the old day–and–nightconundrum of causality is surely resolved?Alternatively, perhaps it was best to stay put:if reasoning was meteorological, then themixed skies of Edinburgh or Dundee gave abetter allegory of the mind’s perplexities thaneither the parching solarities of the south orthe fitful auroras of the frozen north.

In fixing the optimal observatory of truth,another “equator”might have to be set—between the geographical equator and theNorth Pole. Here an environmental corollaryof the mind (at least according to Hume)obtains, providing perhaps the natural settingfor a sceptical view of human reason’scapacity to give an adequate description of thematerial world.3 Thus the contrast between“the intellectual world” Hume imaginedsurveying from his lonely tower and hisdiscovery that, “The essence and compositionof external bodies are so obscure, that wemust necessarily, in our reasonings, or ratherconjectures concerning them, involveourselves in contradictions and absurdities”,4

suggests the habitual mistiness of thecountryside around Ninewells where he livedand worked. The classical latitude of reasonmight have been set around 40 degrees north,running through Elea, Athens and Ionia, butwhat had it produced? According to HumphreyDavy only “new clouds of abstractedmetaphysics”: Plato’s theories, in particular,“like brilliant clouds of the evening, maydelight and affect the imagination, but theypresent nothing permanent. They cannot be

touched, they cannot be retained, and theyvanish without leaving in the mind any trace oftheir existence”.5 Here then was a soundreason for mistrusting the seeming claritiesof the south: the midday fairy had run awaywith their wits.

An empirically–based school of thinking couldbegin by offering a rational explanation of theclouds, whether aerial or mental—and wherebetter to conduct this enquiry than in alatitude where meteorology and thecloudiness of the mind converge? Such anenvironment, one may add, is not onlyclimatically chiaroscuro but exhibits atopographical complexity that lends itself toobservation. Edinburgh, for example, offeredthe abyssal geological cross–sections JamesHutton needed to read the hieroglyph ofnature. It also exhibited the uplift, at oncespiritual and physical, of promontories whereobservatories could be sited and epitaphscarved. In this spirit of intellectualcampanilismo Davy ridiculed the imaginedmise–en–scene of the 17th Centurygeo–philosopher Thomas Burnet, whoseAntediluvians enjoyed “a flat surface and auniform sky”. The implication was clear:corrugated surfaces and troubled skies betterstimulated the advance of knowledge. Thefact was that to these northerners the stuff ofreason (whether located in the mind or thematerial world) was obscure, its groundprone to landslide, its sky given to storm. Still,a mass of particularities, however shattered,combined, shattered again and once morefused, better modelled the movement of themind than any “ideas” about “matter”.

If Edinburgh occupied a propitious latitude forthe study of “contradictions”, this wasbecause it also occupied a social meridian, amidpoint between solitude and the crowd,between the living and the departed. In hisTreatise, Hume presents the drama of hisintellectual life as a struggle between therival temptations of “that forlorn solitude inwhich I am placed in my philosophy” and thecrowd to which he would fain run “for shelterand warmth”.6 He fantasises a society drawnto share in his interests, but, “Everyone keepsat a distance, and dreads that storm which

1

beats upon me from every side”.7 This is adecidedly Romantic self–image. With theadvantage of hindsight, it could be the settingof the Hume mausoleum, obscurelyremembered in the present installation,standing alone… “on the Brink of theCalton–Hill Rock”, it perfectly exploited thepicturesque possibilities of the dramaticlocation.8 In any case, the identification of thevocation of “following truth” with awithdrawal from the “deformity” of societyseems a distinctively northern trait.

Even that patient dweller amongst Naples’motley masses, Giambattista Vico, had hisyears at Vatolla, but they were an interlude ofstudy. Hume, by contrast, finds his thoughtalready densely peopled with deformities ofreason or, as he calls them “chimeras”. Andthese bodiless voices—in the succeeding agethey would have been summoned up byséance—are calling him over. If he turns thebarque of his quest towards the north, he isnot leaving society behind, but simplysubstituting one for another. As PeterDavidson succinctly remarks, “Ghosts inEurope are northern”.9

Anyone contemplating its imperial town plan,and measuring this against the modestpopulation, must assume that Edinburgh hasalways been half empty; that from the early19th century it was largely a design on theimagination, mortgaged to ghosts and onlyintermittently traversed by the living. Wherethe homeless gathered they have taken rootas graveyards; their unfinished conversationspetrified to form inscriptions. In this sense, itis not the press of the crowd that shapedHume’s work but the lightness of its touch.The panic of encountering others was lessthan the panic of there being no one at all.Delirium, defined as being out of the furrow,or trackless, was a form of nostalgia forrectitude: if only Cartesian deductionismstood to reason! A decade after Hume’s deathnostalgia entered the medical vocabulary as“the pain a sick person finds because he isnot in his native land, or fears never to see itagain”.10 Hume was exiled from the truenorth of reason, but it was only the lightnessof his attachment to the meridian of passion

that enabled him to keep to his course. Thiswas clear: landlocked by the senses, thehomo clausus must force a chink in thedarkness. He remained a monad, locked up inhis “system”, at the price of his reason. Evenif the ground were soft underfoot, or thewaters choppy, he had to scramble out of themind’s hold: “Blindness is a weapon againsttime and space; our being is one vastblindness, save only for that little circle whichour mean intelligence… can illumine”.11

Thus Canetti, evoking inter alia the Western tradition’s blindness to the reality of the crowd.

Obviously Robert Adam’s mausoleum forDavid Hume restages this mental drama. It isa squat architectural telescope, using itsroofless “little circle” to blind the observer tothe smoking chimneys, the haze of barewinter trees, and the ant–like deformity offolk in the streets far below. By this blindnessthe sky is enlarged; turned approximately intothe monocular gaze itself.12 At the sametime, for the living at least, these pleasures ofthe eye can only be imagined: the exclusiverondure of the heavens is reserved for thephilosopher’s ghost. And given theearnestness with which Hume sought a wayout of the mind’s self–sameness, reason’spropensity for going round in circles, onewonders whether Adam hadn’t unwittinglycreated a private purgatory rather than apublic monument. In any case the only ocularway out of this blind void would be obscurely,by way of skillfully–placed mirrors perhaps.Alternatively, to gain a better image of theworld, the roof should be filled in, plungingthe room into darkness. Another aperturewould have to be opened in the wall; then, asa camera obscura, the darkened room shouldfunction well enough. True, the image wouldbe inverted and partial, but at least it wouldbe a “true picture”, so far as it went. In thiscase, perhaps I maligned Adam: perhaps hiscircular open roof was a far subtler allegoryof Hume’s philosophical disposition. GivenHume’s scepticism about the evidence of thesenses, perhaps the fact that it did not relay aclear image of anything was correct—after allthe focus of “those lively images, with whichthe memory presents us” may make us

imagine they are effects springing from adefinite cause, but reason tells usotherwise.13

These antinomies—seclusion versus thetemptations of “the commerce and society ofmen”, the lively evidence of the senses versus“the deepest darkness” into which reasoningplunges him—fix the latitude of Hume’smental geography. It was a constitutionallyanxious place because, according to him,however effectively he demolished othersystems of thought, his own solutions wereriddled with “contradictions”, “absurdities”,“obscurities” and “perplexities”14 If youwanted an environmental justification forHume’s taking every step with hesitation, youwould find it in the volcanic history of CaltonHill itself, and more broadly in the generalgeology of Edinburgh, whose igneousintrusions supplied the faultlines whereimagination and inductive logic were fruitfullyjoined.15 Much as Hume might rue the fact,this zone had a distinctive psychic topography.It was the realm of fancy. Fancy, in Hume’spsychology, is a subset of the imagination thatleads us into “errors, absurdities andobscurities”. But this, Hume argued, wasunavoidable. As a mode of understanding,even the broader faculty of the imaginationproved on closer examination to possesscontradictions that were not methodologicalbut “essential characteristics of the humanmind”.16 What then? In this intolerablesituation, where understanding “entirelysubverts itself”. “We save ourselves from thistotal scepticism only by means of thatsingular and seemingly trivial property of thefancy, by which we enter with difficulty intoremote views of things”.17

Hume refers here to the natural propensity to“reason” associatively. Of course, his wholepoint is that associative reasoning is noreasoning at all—“Men of bright fancies may… be compared to those angels, whom theScripture represents as covering their eyeswith their wings”.18 But exactly hereNORTHROOM its decisive intervention: whatif, its three–dimensional architecture ofauditory and visual particulars, suggests, wedispense with the “difficulty” of trying to make

2

the world cohere. If, instead of trying toloosen the chains of association, we allowedthe interplay of different perceptions of place,we could dispense with Hume’s lineartyrannies. Instead of trying to paper over thecracks between one impression and the next,instead of trying to train memory toremember in the proper order, we could grantfragmentation, relocation, and even the voidbetween these pedestals of consciousness anontological value. Half a century after Hume’sinhumation, Thomas De Quincey wrote ofexperiences that connected themselves withhis life: “At so many different areas that, uponany chronological principle of position, itwould have been difficult to assign them aproper place; backwards or forwards theymust have leaped, in whatever place they hadbeen introduced… belonging to every placealike, they would belong, in the proverb, to noplace at all; or (reversing the proverb),belonging to no place by preferable right, theywould, in fact, belong to every place”.19

Hume’s contradiction is De Quincey’sstructural multiplicity. But the same could besaid of NORTHROOM’s enigmatic videoparticulars; they produce a rotational effect,not wholly unlike the new principle ofassociative thought that De Quincey alluded toin his term “involute”.

What’s more, including close–up pans of theexterior surfaces of the Adam mausoleum,they turn outside in. As a result, astonishingcontradictions come into view; a spider—perhaps it is the rare Sitticus pubescens—that has no difficulty in networking betweenthe remotest of things; or a flaking surfacethat propounds temporal association as a wayof being, one state leading to anotherchemically, without any effort of thought.Through the shattered polyoptic of theinstallation, things and relations areconserved because the gaps between themare allowed to thrive. In other words aprinciple of association is put into practicethat mediates between the solitary and thecrowd, that gives room to the environmentalpenumbra of thinking which, after all, goes onin many minds simultaneously, whethermistaken or not. When Hume, having“indulged a reverie in [his] chamber, or in a

solitary walk by the riverside”, was seized bya desire to communicate with his fellowhuman beings, he owed something to theenvironment of thought: its distractionsallowed him to concentrate. Now, inNORTHROOM, the mental optic is inverted,and the Orphic dismemberment of points ofview allows us to think differently and, notleast, to see how things as different as aphilosopher’s mind, a stone, the spirits of thedead and a northern city are associated.Unless the surface were cloudy, it is hard toknow how these obscure connections couldbe discerned.

“If I must be a fool, as all those who reason orbelieve anything certainly are, my follies shallat least be natural and agreeable”: thusHume, his italicized “certainly” tending toerode the foundations of his philosophy,committed as it is to the uncertainty ofreceived wisdom of every kind, including hisown. It seems that even the austere Adamwas not above this sort of self–reflexive irony.Among the drawings for the mausoleum isone in which the masonry is “represented asif in decay, worn and weathered and withparts of the frieze and cornice missing”.20

Architecture, too, could be a serious folly,toying with the monumental rhetoric ofimmortality. After all, however you looked atit, something always fell between the motiveand the act, the shadow of a cloudbackflipping over the edge of Calton Hill, say,as fleeting as a man’s life, and the seemingsolidity of rock. For such ephemeralmysteries as these it is also necessary tomake room. Hume requested that his epitaphstate only his dates of birth and death. He could not predict if a grateful posteritywould fill in the gap with its own memorial.He wanted to indicate that the primaryassociation between life and death, the onethat bound every human nature, was also the one that escaped imagination. No singleviewpoint existed in whose embalmingperspective it could be contracted andcalibrated. Life, even one as internallyordered as Hume’s was largely blindness. In this doubtful realm it was proper “to bepositive and certain in particular points,according to the light in which we survey

them in any particular instant.”21 In letting us meditate on the mystery of these particularities NORTHROOM is a true humument.22

Paul Carter is a professorial research fellowin the Faculty of Architecture, Building andPlanning, University of Melbourne.

3

1David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

(London: J.M. Dent, 1934) 2 vols, vol 1, p. 254

2David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,

vol 1, p. 249

3David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,

Book 3, Appendix

4David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol 1

5Siegfried, R. & R.H. Dott (eds), Humphry Davy on

Geology: The 1805 lectures for the general Audience

(Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1980) p. 28

6David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,

vol 1, p. 249

7 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,

vol 1, p. 250

8Iain Gordon Brown, David Hume’s Tomb: a Roman

mausoleum by Robert Adam, Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot,

121 (1991) p. 391– 422, 413

9Peter Davidson, The Idea of North, London

(Reaktion Books, 2004) p. 205

10Hamilton R., History of a remarkable case of

nostalgia affecting a native of Wales and occurring in

Britain. Medical Commentaries, for the year 1786

Edinburgh 1787; 1:343–8.

11Elias Canetti, Auto da Fe, trans. C.V. Wedgewood,

Harmondsworth (Penguin, 1973) p. 79

12After Adam’s initiative, Calton Hill became

associated with the graves of famous men. This led

in turn to the idea of creating a national monument

as a sort of “Caledonian Valhalla”: this eventually

became the unfinished replica Parthenon, but

the first proposal was a Pantheon.

http://www.19thc–artworldwide.org/autumn_05/

articles/fehl.html

13David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,

vol 1, p. 251

14James Fieser, Hume’s Pyrrhonism:

A Developmental Interpretation,

http://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/vita/research/

humepyrr.htm

15 The allusion is, of course, to James Hutton.

Keith Montgomery argues that most accounts

“present an excessively narrow, empirical–inductive

view of geological science that diminishes the

creative brilliance… and imaginative insight that lead

to the development of Hutton’s theory”. Keith

Montgomery, Siccar Point and Teaching the History

of Geology in Journal of Geoscience Education, vol

51, number 5, November 2003, p. 504

16James Fieser, Hume’s Pyrrhonism:

A Developmental Interpretation.

17David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,

vol 1, p. 252–253

18David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,

vol 1, p. 252

19Thomas De Quincey, The Collected Writings of

Thomas De Quincey (ed. D. Masson, London, 1896–7)

vol 1, p. 287

20Iain Gordon Brown, David Hume’s Tomb: a Roman

mausoleum by Robert Adam, p. 398

21David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,

vol 1, p. 258

22With apologies to Tom Phillips

Image Credits

P. 5

top left

Image of Hume’s Tomb

Artist Robert Adam

Design for Monument to David Hume

Copyright National Gallery of Scotland

All other drawings by Metis

Model image Metis

Small images Victoria Clare Bernie

Large image Peter Dibden

P. 6

All images Peter Dibden

4

5

Robert Adam’s original drawing of Hume’s Tomb, 1777

6