Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story

by Lydia Goehr

A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas

Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale?

Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way , with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème , and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures ?

The book explores narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?

720 pages, Hardcover

Published December 10, 2021

Reviews

[TjeerdFokkens · Rating 1 out of 5]

“… it is no art (keine Kunst) to say something brief if, like Tacitus, one has something (etwas) to say. Only when one has nothing (nichts) to say, and writes a book anyway, does one upend the truth that from nothing comes nothing: ex nihilo nihil fit. That, Lichtenberg concluded, I call
a service (Verdienst): a result.”

With this work Goehr composed a symbolic opus detailing programmatic material concerning the history and interpretation of an anecdote, itself being an entity, symbolic in nature. These recursive structures reflect the significance of what Wittgenstein called the “puzzle [conundrum] about what we mean by saying that we understand a phrase or symbol”, which, incidentally, was not mentioned by Goehr. Nonetheless, asemicity and nothingness synergised into a conglomerate of wit and vie de Bohème, the relevance of which becomes clear by comparison to the acceptance of Einsteins relativity theory as described by E. Du Perron: “De relativiteitsteorie was menig jong-intellektueel, die zijn gevoelens semi-wetenschappelik zocht te rechtvaardigen, een soort vademecum”. Or by the Polish-Italian author Helena Janeczek: “Le coppie si lasciano o restano insieme per motivi imperscrutabili, magari anche perché lo stesso uomo che così spesso ti esaspera, riesce comunque a farti ridere.” In short, both colour and background (negative colour) have moved dynamically into the kaleidoscopic fabric of thought.

[Stanimir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lydia Goehr’s 'Red Sea–Red Square–Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story' is an expansive and poetic work that goes far beyond mere commentary, transforming into a significant philosophical contribution. It takes Arthur C. Danto’s brief discussion on how identical-looking artworks can have distinct meanings based on their context and elaborates it into a 650-page exploration of aesthetics, history, and politics.

Goehr connects Danto’s ideas to a vast web of cultural references, including Puccini’s 'La bohème', Malevich’s 'Red Square', Stendhal’s 'The Red and the Black', and even caricatures of monochrome paintings. She argues that Danto’s analysis of art’s meaning needs a broader historical and political lens, linking his ideas to themes like Jewish emancipation, communism, and revolutions. Her book blurs the line between philosophy and commentary, proposing that interpretation itself is a form of creative engagement.

Ultimately, 'Red Sea' is an ambitious and intellectually rich work, offering an alternative to Danto’s aesthetic theory by embedding it in historical and political narratives. While its exhaustive detail may be overwhelming, it is also deeply engaging, making philosophy of aesthetics both profound and enjoyable to read.