565
Thus
Early in the Meno, Socrates demonstrates how an uneducated slave-boy can be brought to see that a square B with an area exactly twice that of a square A can be drawn by using the diagonal of square A as one of the four sides of square B (Plato 1924, 315). The Loeb edition, in common with others, includes a little diagram, showing what Socrates must be assumed to be drawing in the sand, though presumably we are meant somehow to be able to visualise it for ourselves from the rather painful passages of interrogation to which the boy is subjected. It cannot be said that the boy does not see the square, but he does not see everything there is to see in it, that is all of its possibilities, or internal relations, and in particular the fact that one can draw a diagonal across it, and that a square made of four lines of which the diagonal of another square is one will be bound to have an area exactly twice as large as it. The square is evident, literally open to view, but its relations, and in particular the relation that square A would have to square B, are not, until they have themselves been made evident.
So where and what is the relation? Is it visible, or invisible or, more strictly, perhaps, anoptic, not of the order of seeing, but of saying? Writing of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, a painting which shows us that it is not showing us everything about what it is showing us (we see the back of the portrait that the painted painter is painting of a figure standing where we are), Michel Foucault is led to this conclusion about the interdependence of seeing that (as a pronoun, seeing that thing, there) and seeing that (as a conjunction, seeing the things about that thing that we should be able to see):
The relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax. (Foucault 2001, 10)
The relation between evidence (what we see), and that of which it is evidence (what we say we ‘see’) is never simply and self-evidently to be seen. But it is never simply to be said either, because we need to see it, see that it could indeed be seen in that way, to understand it.
Astonishingly, Socrates thinks, or says he thinks, that the boy sees the relation between the two squares because he somehow recognises something he already knows innately, having learned it in a previous life (Plato 1924, 319-21). Socrates’s hair-raising supposition about what the boy’s responses seem to be evidence of doubles what goes on when the boy is shown the relation between the sides and the diagonal of a square, in that it is far from being self-evident. I can see perfectly well what Socrates is saying, but I just don’t see it, that is, I cannot make out the relation that he posits between the boy’s capacity to understand and the likelihood of it being down to recognition of something he knows already.
We point to evidence all the time, and rely on the relation between evidence and what it is evidence of. What is a relation? Or where is a relation? Is it in the world, or is it in the mind of the one who perceives it? Is a relation a thing or an idea? Is it something there is, or something that occurs, or is done to things? If the latter, does this idea of a relation as we say ‘bear no relation’ to anything in the world? Can we even think about relations without placing some reliance on the idea of relation that we therefore cannot quite close our fist over?
This seems particularly to be the case of the evidence of absence, of which the absence of evidence is often fallaciously presumed to provide evidence. The absence of things that seems positively not to be there is often, as we say, somewhat mysteriously, ‘in evidence’ in poetry:
Yesterday, upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today. (Philip 1996, 137)
on the notched horizon
So endlessly a-drip,
I saw all of a sudden
No sign of any ship (Peake 1998, 33).
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief? (Shakespeare 2011, 619)
Certainly, it feels that we can ‘see’ things that are not there, or, at least, see for ourselves the fact that they are not there, in some way that seems to make their absence something of which we can bring forward evidence. In seeing the relation between a presence and an absence, a footprint and the fled foot, do we see an absent relation, or a relation of absence? What is a nonrelation in any case? Is it a kind of relation? And if so, is there an infinity of nonrelations waiting to be affirmed, brought into being through demonstrations of their nonrelation?
What does it mean, for example, to be ‘asymptomatic’? I do not currently have any symptoms of SARS-CoV-2, though, according to our current way of thinking about diseases, I could nevertheless be demonstrably infested, abundantly enough even to pass the infection on to others in whom the symptoms may then become emphatically, even operatically apparent. What then of the other diseases of which I am currently showing no symptoms (leprosy, yellow fever, angina)? If there are traces or premonitions of my development of these diseases, ways of demonstrating my propensity to develop them, may I be said to be an asymptomatic patient-in-the-making, like the hypochondriac ‘J’ at the beginning of Three Men in a Boat, who concludes he has ‘premonitory symptoms’ of every disease in the medical dictionary, except housemaid’s knee (Jerome 1998, 5-6). It appears that one may be discovered on autopsy to have the telltale neurofibrillary tangles that are almost always present in patients who have suffered from dementia without having apparently suffered from dementia oneself. Physicians are continuing to struggle with the puzzle of the relation between neurofibrillary tangles and the dementia sufferer and the nonrelation of neurofibrillary tangles to the non-sufferer from dementia. Does the latter not have dementia, or do they have a special kind of asymptomatic dementia, a dementia that isn’t there? If so, I wouldn’t mind going down with that.
If all evidence is evidence of relations, and relations are never self-evident, but in need of being made out, could there ever be any evidence that has not been fabricated? It is often said that our decisions and deliberations should be based on evidence, but there is rarely in fact any shortage of evidence for any action or belief, only a shortage of evidence that is both conclusive and exclusive, that is, can be taken as evidence of nothing else but what it is taken to be. But this means that conclusive evidence must rest on a claim which is widely and wisely regarded as inadmissible, namely that absence of evidence itself constitutes conclusive evidence of absence. We should always be on the lookout for evidence, but we will very likely want to keep decently under wraps the awareness that there can never be sufficient evidence of its being self-evident.
References
Foucault, Michael (2002). The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Jerome, Jerome K. (1998). Three Man in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel. Ed. Geoffrey Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peake, Mervyn (1998). A Book of Nonsense. London and Chester Springs: Peter Owen.
Philip, Neil, ed. (1996). The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plato (1924). Laches. Protagoras. Meno. Euthydemus. Trans. W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Shakespeare, William (2011). Complete Works. Ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan. London, New York, New Delhi and Sydney: The Arden Shakespeare.
