Philosophical Perspectives on Ruins, Monuments, and Memorials

Jeanette Bicknell, Jennifer Judkins, Carolyn Korsmeyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351380638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This collection of newly published essays examines our relationship to physical objects that invoke, commemorate, and honor the past. The recent destruction of cultural heritage in war and controversies over Civil War monuments in the US have foregrounded the importance of artifacts that embody history. The book invites us to ask: How do memorials convey their meanings? What is our responsibility for the preservation or reconstruction of historically significant structures? How should we respond when the public display of a monument divides a community? This anthology includes coverage of the destruction of Palmyra and the Bamiyan Buddhas, the loss of cultural heritage through war and natural disasters, the explosive controversies surrounding Confederate-era monuments, and the decay of industry in the U.S. Rust Belt. The authors consider issues of preservation and reconstruction, the nature of ruins, the aesthetic and ethical values of memorials, and the relationship of cultural memory to material artifacts that remain from the past. Written by a leading group of philosophers, art historians, and archeologists, the 23 chapters cover monuments and memorials from Dubai to Detroit, from the instant destruction of Hiroshima to the gradual sinking of Venice.

Part 1
Honoring and Mourning

1 Life and Death in Rock

A Meditation on Stone Memorials

Kathleen Higgins

The pervasiveness of stone in the burial and memorialization of the dead is striking. William Wordsworth notes stone’s ubiquitous funerary role. Historian Thomas Laqueur summarizes the poet’s reflections:

with very few exceptions, even savage tribes “unacquainted with letters” put mounds of earth or rude stones over their dead in order to guard the remains of the deceased from “irreverent approach or from savage violation” and to “preserve their memory.”¹

Perhaps the effort to safeguard remains also accounts for tombs formed by cutting into the sides of cliffs, an ancient tradition in such far-flung places as Egypt, the Middle East, Rome, Japan, Peru, China, and Turkey. Even in India, where cremation and dispersal of remains in sacred rivers is an ancient custom, both mounds and stones have been used to commemorate the dead.²

Why have people in so many cultures turned to stone when responding to the deaths of loved ones? I will consider various associations that stone acquires as a consequence of the circumstances in which human beings encounter it. I will suggest that the multiple facets of our interactions with stone overdetermine the human penchant to use it in memorializing the dead.

The Human Condition and Stone

To answer the question of why people so often use stones for commemorative purposes, perhaps we should first ask why stones are so important in people’s lives. Stones, of course, serve diverse purposes that vary with context, but features of the human condition and the basic character of stones are constants, sufficient to ensure certain ubiquitous associations with stone. As Riva Berleant observes, “Any material with which humans live so intimately accrues meanings that elaborate, complicate, and mediate our sensory experiences of that material.”³ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen refers to stone as “a material metaphor.”⁴

Perhaps one of the most important bases for the evocative power of stones is the fact that they are part of the natural context in which human beings find themselves, whatever their cultural circumstances. That from early on human beings could utilize stone to pursue their own purposes depended on its being readily available. Stones are present wherever there is land. We might fairly describe the stone as the fundamental “thing” that human beings confront within nature.

Stones can thus appear to us as the epitome of natural stuff. “Stone is primal matter,” says Cohen.⁵ It is not accidental that Samuel Johnson kicked a stone when he wanted to refute Bishop Berkeley’s claim that to exist is to be an idea in the mind of God. The stone is the paradigmatic occupant of the material order of things. Dirt, comprising crumbled stone and organic matter, is less than a thing. It lacks tangibility, and it resists holding a shape. A stone, by contrast, has determined, palpable form. A stone is a primordial thing.

As basic “things,” stones’ character is nondescript, and this facilitates the tendency to use them to stand for things of virtually any sort. Stones serve well as representational symbols. Small stones among their fellows can play the role of tokens, as they did in the early abacus, utilized to enumerate things. This early technology demonstrates that stones could be aids to thinking, and this hints at the extent of stone’s technological importance.

Larger stones or stone en masse, on the other hand, can serve as shelter. The sheltering power of stone is likely to be especially important to those who live in harsh climates, but even in moderate zones, people need protection from storms and the sun. Functioning as barriers, stones provide shields from such dangers. But where human aims are concerned, stones can be barriers for better or worse. As barriers, they can be stumbling blocks, impediments to our movements.

Stones, in other words, are sometimes in the way; as a consequence they can command our attention. Stones intrude, and so they stand out. They draw attention all the more effectively if they are conspicuously individual in shape or character. Stones with notable idiosyncrasies are excellent landmarks. Mass alone, however, is sufficient for attracting notice and, indeed, for aesthetic power. The effect of mass was one of the characteristics that British author and artist Adrian Stokes sought in the art he considered ideal. Such art, which he termed Quattro Cento, would be shaped by a “love of stone” and emphasize the impact of mass.⁶

Mass effect … allows the immediate, the instantaneous synthesis that the eye alone of the senses can perform… . Purely visual matter is dissociated from noise as well as from silence, from past, present and future. Things stand expressed, exposed, unaltered in the light, in space. Things stand.⁷

Stone also connotes power, representing a force that resists us. Cohen draws attention to the reciprocal interaction of stone and human agency in relation to the myth of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus is condemned to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a mountain, each time to have it willfully return to the bottom.⁸ The image of stone as a metaphor for strength exceeding our own appears in the line from the Book of Job that Cohen cites at the opening of his book: “My strength is not the strength of stones.”⁹

Stones can represent unsurpassable power in part because they are often heavy and unyielding. The image of stone can suggest sheer weight, as in the case of a millstone tied around one’s neck or a “stone stomach.”¹⁰ Stones are also resistant. This connotation of stone is evident in the word “adamant,” meaning stubborn, a word also associated with the hardest stone and metal. Stone, at least many types of it, represents what is impervious. It is an objective correlative of will, whether withholding or active (as in the case of a landslide).

Because they are not easily moved, stones are also associated with human effort. Great expenditures of energy are necessary to move large stones, and thus the long-distance transportation and erection of bluestones at Stonehenge represents a remarkable achievement. Nevertheless, stone can also provide affordances in James J. Gibson’s sense of “action possibilities” inherent in objects within the environment.¹¹ For example, we can perch on rocks or climb them. We can use them as tables or lounge chairs or beds. The aforementioned potential of stones to offer shelter is itself an affordance.

Stone also figures in humanly devised technologies, as we have observed. Stones facilitated the development of human know-how, providing both tools and materials. The “Stone Age” as an image for early human times reflects this fact, although we often forget what a profound achievement it was to learn to wield stones for human purposes.¹² Berleant claims that stone was integral to human development: “Even before our ancestors made images on stone walls, they made stone tools. Their use of stone tools was one factor in the evolution of a truly human brain. Stone, therefore, is part of our being human.”¹³

Stones can accordingly be seen as potential or actual sites of human action. The aspirations accomplished with stone are almost as wide-ranging as human activity itself. Not all of the activities stone facilitates are benign. It has been used effectively in weapons and in brutal forms of capital punishment. But obviously, stone can be used as a material for building practical things, including buildings, the arenas in which we live and work. Stone can also function as a canvas or tablet, serving as a medium for communication.¹⁴ The expression “set in stone” draws attention to this role. As a communicative means, stones can have decisive rhetorical power through their perceived ability to make an unusually forceful impression. Thus, stone steles were erected in antiquity by powerful political rulers to mark significant historical events and victories. In this role, stones also preserve information for later generations, functioning as aids to memory.

Stones are able to serve such mnemonic functions because they are enduring relative to living things. They are ready symbols for permanence. By contrast with perishable human beings, stones endure. On this point François Berthier observes, “Stone is immutable—at least on the human scale—and almost indestructible.”¹⁵

Yet stone compares ambiguously with living things. On the one hand, it is often used to represent the mute and inanimate. Cohen points to the relegation of stone “to a trope for the cold, the indifferent, and the inert.”¹⁶ Indeed, he sees stone as a metaphor for the inhuman. We describe a person who lacks even a modicum of human feeling as having “a heart of stone.”

At the same time, stones mimic the animate and can serve as effigies for human beings. Stokes views the potential of stone to suggest what is animate as basic to the aesthetic value of artwork in stone: “whatever its plastic value, a figure carved in stone is fine carving when one feels that not the figure, but the stone through the medium of the figure, has come to life.”¹⁷ Graham Parkes similarly points to the “isomorphism” between stones and human beings, remarking on their characteristic demeanor and the common tendency to name rocks in anthropomorphic ways (e.g., “Sleeping Giant”).¹⁸ Cohen reports, “Albertus Magnus had to refute the idea that stones possess souls, so lively do rocks appear when examined not simply in comparison to humans but in their native thriving.”¹⁹

Dynamic and idiosyncratic, rocks are individuated, much as we are. Stones with distinctive features or unique character are often treated as intrinsically valuable. Berleant lists “aesthetic qualities of texture, hardness, shimmer, color, fracture, and susceptibility to polish” among the characteristics that can contribute to stones’ perceived value.²⁰ Stones can serve as symbols of value (as the case of diamonds and other gems), and jewelry is often prized more highly for making use of distinctive stones. Chinese “scholar’s stones,” large rocks that are exhibited (often in studies or libraries) for their unique convolutions, textural features, and characteristics suggestive of dynamism, are considered inspiring. The famous Japanese rock garden Ryōan-Ji emphasizes particularity in its specific rocks and their placement. Stones’ distinctive shapes show the effects of their long experience in the world, another basis for comparing them to animate beings like ourselves. Stones wear their history on their faces, as we do.

The sense that stones and human beings have much in common is intimated by what is often considered the greatest novel in Chinese literature, The Dream of the Red Chamber. The work is also known as The Story of the Stone, for a stone, incarnated as the text’s central character, is the narrator of the story. This frame conveys the Buddhist idea that the world of human undertakings and passions, which we take so seriously, is in reality an illusion. The vibrant, multigenerational tale presented over the course of the vast novel (around 2,500 pages in the Penguin English translation) amounts to a dream that floats on emptiness, just like the “Floating World” of Japanese ukiyo-e prints and paintings. And who would recognize the insubstantiality of this domain of human pursuits better than a stone?

Finally, stone is serviceable for achieving expressive goals through art. Stone is the traditional medium for sculpture. Stones have their own aesthetic characteristics, but stone can also achieve aesthetic effects by conjoining things. Cohen points to its aggregating power, “attracting to itself disparate matter.”²¹ One can take this as literal description, drawing attention to the capacity of stone to absorb multiple materials, some of them not mineral at all (as in the case of fossils). However, Cohen sees in this a broader metaphor: “Because of its ardor for unconformity, stone sediments contradiction, there to ignite possibility, abiding invitation to metamorphosis. It offers a stumbling block to anthropocentrism and a spur to ceaseless story.”²² Stone might even be taken as a metaphor for the aesthetic domain of human experience, where human beings bring elements together to unprecedented effect.

This survey of some of stone’s features suggests many points of departure for its serving symbolic roles. The multiplicity of the associations just adumbrated and their potential for interaction render stone a particularly resonant medium for memorializing the dead.

Symbolic Resonances in Tombstones and Other Stone Memorials

Stone, as an epitomization of the inanimate, might be seen as a cruel but apt symbol of death’s aftermath. Our impression of rock as alien and inhuman corresponds to our sense of what our dead loved ones have become. Formerly vibrant presences, they have been rendered mute, as still as a rock. Once active and living among us, they have been halted irrevocably, reduced to minerals and elements. The tombstone, bearing such associations, seems an objective correlative of survivors’ desolation.²³

However, we have observed that stones are ambiguous in their symbolism, and not merely inhuman in their aspect. The tombstone can remind of us of what is cold and devoid of movement, but it also bears witness to a panoply of human intentions and efforts. Its steadfast vigilance enables us to read various motivations that the living harbor in relation to the dead.

Traditionally, stone’s most obvious practical purpose in connection with gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part 1 Honoring and Mourning
• Part 2 Ruins Past and Present
• Part 3 Conflict, Destruction, and the Aftermath
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• Index