The Notre Dame Fire and an Ancient Greek Paradox

The relationship between objects and identity

Many were shocked when news of the Notre Dame fire broke out. The pictures of the flames eating at the 850-year-old wooden roof of the iconic cathedral in France even moved some to tears.

A shared sense of loss permeated through the world and the front pages of magazines and newspapers. Many of my own friends were quick to share in this feeling which prompted me to take pause. What is it that makes people connect with objects that they have never and may never see? an object that they have no tangible connection to?

Some may say that the loss of the Cathedral is like a loss of a work of art or a historical landmark. In losing it, it is as if we have lost a piece of the past. More appropriately, however, might be a more literal interpretation of loss, the loss of the opportunity to experience the Cathedral in its historical glory, or the loss faced by future generations who will never get to experience the cathedral ‘as it was’. Of course, this is rather irrational as the idea of losing something that was never there (in the context of future generations) doesn’t follow. In another interpretation, we can say that it is not a feeling of loss that is felt, rather a radical understanding of the Cathedrals causal place in history and an acknowledgement of how even if in a minute and cursory way the Cathedral has somehow landed an impact on us. In this way, it is not a loss but a sense of emotional gratitude that is being expressed — I am grateful that the cathedral was there to have even the smallest impact on history and how it may have in turn shaped me, even in ways I may be unaware of.

It’s worth noting that not everyone was moved into sadness by the burning of the cathedral. Graffiti spray-painted on a wall in France reiterated the Anarchist stance that “the only church that illuminates is the one that burns”. On a similar note, one cannot help but point to the irony in a cathedral surviving the revolutionary history of France and two World Wars only to meet its (partial) destruction while undergoing renovation work.

Thankfully, items of extreme historic value that were stored in the Cathedral, such as the Crown of Thorns, the tunic of St. Louis, the cathedral’s famous 18th-century organ and various works of art were saved/survived, as did most of the stained glass work. This means that most of the damage incurred was to the structure itself, and although the reconstruction work will not result in an exact replication of what once was (many of the materials/methods used to construct the cathedral are no longer available) the Cathedral will one-day re-open its doors with all its former glory. In fact, the French PM is even claiming that the Cathedral will be rebuilt “even more beautifully”.

Object-Identity

All of this talk of loss and the function of an object as a symbol of identity reminded me of an ancient Greek story of the ship of Theseus.

The ship of Theseus was a ship that was preserved. As time went by, some of the planks that made up the ship started to decay, and so the old planks were replaced with new ones the “ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same”.

The question that presents itself here is, if all the ship’s pieces were eventually replaced, does the ship remain the same?

The Paradox used by philosopher Thomas Hobbes and others adds an interesting twist to this simpler story. They ask, what if the planks that were being replaced were not just thrown away. What if instead they were used to build an exact replica of the ship they were removed from and this process went on long enough that you have two ships that are exactly the same, one built from the ‘old’ planks and one built by ‘new’ planks that have slowly replaced the old. Which then is the ‘original’ ship of Theseus?

We can further complicate this paradox in an infinite number of ways, what if the ‘old’ ship was split in half and both halves were then completed with new parts? Or, what if a single plank of the ‘old ship’ was used to complete N number of new ships all which contained one single plank from the ‘old’ one until none were left to be used up?

Someone may say that this entire thought experiment is useless, what does it matter which one is the original one if they are exact replicas? Others will flinch at this idea and claim that the ‘original’ ship possesses an essence (or in more colloquial terms a ‘feel’) that cannot be replicated, thus, it is important to solve this paradox.

In the case of the Notre Dame Cathedral, the same can be argued, although the new ‘parts’ that will go into reconstructing the Cathedral will merge into its identity and become a part of its historical story, its ‘essence’ has been irreversibly changed. Although here we notice that what the ‘essence’ is will depend on every individual's relationship with the object. For those who may not have seen the Cathedral and have no care for it, it is simply an object with no essence. For some Anarchists, the essence of the cathedral was that of the oppressive religious institution and it is a good thing that this ‘essence’ was destroyed. Interestingly here the Anarchist is closer to those saddened by the events than those who are indifferent in that both submit to the idea that Cathedral indeed had an ‘essence’.

The same can be said about Theseus’ ship. Which is the new and which is the old ship will depend on who's asking. During the time of Theseus, his ship will obviously be the one he captains; or perhaps even the more than one ship he builds becoming Theseus’ ships! For historical observers, it may be the ship that truthfully ‘experienced’ events — ‘this dent in the wood happened when the ship was moored’ vs. ‘this dent in the wood was replicated to signify when the ship was moored’. If we were to take a more religious approach to the idea of essence, we can also say that any ship that contains a plank of Theseus’ ship is imbued with its essence. This is something churches do with relics of which pieces may be given to ‘protect’ a person or a structure — obviously, this didn’t work very well for the Notre Dame.

Interestingly, we can also present the opposite of loss in the case of Notre Dame. For many today, and in the immediate future, the reconstructed bits of the Cathedral will signify a loss of the old bits, while as for those who did not witness or experience that loss or reproduction of the Cathedral, the Cathedral represents its own ‘full and new essence’ as the reconstructed version imbuing it with a new essence as any idea of an ‘old essence’ is lost with the progress of time. We can present this as a sort of ‘regeneration of essence’.

The formation of object relations

Another take away from this, and perhaps the most correct one, is that there is no such thing as an ‘essence’ merely a plurality and multitude of individual relationships with an object, some which converge and others which diverge. What we attribute as ‘essence’ may either be a result of our inability to linguistically explain our own relationship with an object (as that relationship remains hidden from us); or, what we attribute as ‘essence’ is a result of attempts to rationalise, as we observe, other peoples relationships with an object — everyone values the Notre Dame, thus, it must have an ‘essence’ that everyone sees and is drawn to. The essentialism here thus is not manifested in our own relationship with the object itself but is us ‘essentialising’ the pluralism of public relationships with an object.

As we have seen everyone’s perception of essence (or a lack thereof) in an object is determined by their subjective experiences and observations. It is this that allows the globe to come together and ‘mourn’ the ‘loss’ of the Notre Dame Cathedral in an act of shared consciousness even if this historic event has no tangible impact on the progress of our own lives.