The Philosophy of Perception

Phenomenology and Image Theory

Lambert Wiesing, Nancy Ann Roth

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780937083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

Lambert Wiesing's The Philosophy of Perception challenges current theories of perception. Instead of attempting to understand how a subject perceives the world, Wiesing starts by taking perception to be real. He then asks what this reality means for a subject. In his original approach, the question of how human perception is possible is displaced by questions about what perception obliges us to be and do. He argues that perception requires us to be embodied, to be visible, and to continually participate in the public and physical world we perceive. Only in looking at images, he proposes, can we achieve something like a break in participation, a temporary respite from this, one of perception's relentless demands. Wiesing's methods chart a markedly new path in contemporary perception theory. In addition to identifying common ground among diverse philosophical positions, he identifies how his own, phenomenological approach differs from those of many other philosophers, past and present. As part of the argument, he provides a succinct but comprehensive survey of the philosophy of images His original critical exposition presents scholars of phenomenology, perception and aesthetics with a new, important understanding of the old phenomenon, the human being in the world.

1

Philosophical Myths and Models

Dissatisfaction at the highest level

At the present time, philosophy is in a state that is difficult to understand, that is, distinctly odd; one could speak of dissatisfaction at the highest qualitative level. Conditions for philosophical research have never been remotely as good as they are today, and it would be a grave injustice not to humbly acknowledge this. As in every other science, specialized knowledge has expanded enormously and with increasing speed. When could it ever have been possible to familiarize oneself with a philosophical problem so quickly and comprehensively as it is today? Recent philosophical literature is overwhelmingly more accurate and diverse than that of any other human epoch or culture. Part of the reason for this is very simple and quantitative, and nothing to be proud of: there have never been so many people in a position to be concerned with philosophical problems. Whatever philosophical question one may choose to consider, more relevant contributions to its solution are under discussion now than ever before, and hardly a single contribution that is relevant in any way will be overlooked or ignored. It is no longer rare for an interpreter to fulfil the hermeneutic desire to understand an author better than the author understood himself. It almost seems normal for appropriate research into the thought of classical philosophers to provide more systematic knowledge of their positions than they themselves could have had during their lifetimes. In short, the history and problems of philosophy have never been illuminated so well as they are today – and yet this brings no real joy, to say nothing of euphoria. Who would want to actually claim, on the basis of this diagnosis, that the quality of philosophy has never been so high? It is a paradox that would be unthinkable in any other discipline. For, in every other discipline, qualitative progress consists solely in making better discoveries about a specific object of research. How could it be otherwise? Only in philosophy is this kind of progress not accepted as success, and for good reason: philosophical reflections are directed towards the whole; there is no empirical object of philosophical research for which the research is better simply because more is known about it.

The unique character of philosophy as a scientific discipline and the special task with which it is charged can be described with an image: a philosopher’s work is to report on a situation. In fact philosophical writing usually does take up concrete themes, but the questions are never completely resolved by the argument. Work on a special question in philosophy aims at something beyond that question: it is concerned with a kind of anthropological condition report. It tries to answer the question: what is the situation in which a human being finds himself simply as a result of the unequivocal, given condition of being human? What is it to be human? An engagement with this general concern is implicit in the various philosophical disciplines and many specialized problems. Whether one is concerned with perception theory, ethics or aesthetics, if the concern has a philosophical intention (and it does not have to!), then it is also about human beings, and that means, about the question: what can a human being know, given that he is constrained to the condition of being human? What should a human being do, inasmuch as he is saddled with the fate of being human? Given the inescapable condition of always being human, what can a human being hope for? At present this interpretation of philosophical sub-disciplines as feeder routes into anthropology is firmly associated with Kant. At least he explicitly considered classical problems in philosophy to be ultimately subsumable under the crucial question: What is a human being?

If it is fair to demand of philosophy that its work not be concerned exclusively with concrete problems, but that this work should be conducted in such a way as to also draw a picture of the human condition, of human beings’ presence in the world, then we encounter a difficulty in evaluating philosophical reflections. It is characteristic of site plans and situation reports that their quality is in no way enhanced by more precise detail; this is clear from area maps and city plans. Obviously there can be no authoritative depiction of any kind of situation without detail and precision; still, it is often the case that a rough map on a small scale is more effective in providing an overview of complex material than an extremely detailed map at a large scale. Something of this kind may be what is meant by the folk saying about not being able to see the forest for the trees. At least this expression applies to more than a few contemporary philosophical reflections which, despite their fascinating intricacies and subtle precision, can seem questionable overall, at least if we accept philosophy’s obligation always to reflect the human condition. With this in mind, it becomes at least understandable that one might speak of discontent at the highest level of contemporary philosophy. In the history of philosophy, the human condition has rarely been depicted with so few alternatives as it has been in the last decade. In professional philosophy, apart from some fine points of academic argumentation and no doubt some exceptions and outsiders, the human condition is evaluated with startling unanimity and, exactly because of this quasi-universal consensus, is actually not seriously researched any more: whether hermeneutic or analytic, de-constructivist, pragmatist, Kantian, Hegelian or Nietzschian, all are united: nothing touches human beings without mediation; for humans, being-in-the-world is a mediated being-in-the-world. A human being lives in a state of detachment that does not allow anything to be immediately present, whether through perception or action, thinking or imagination. A human being is not part of a world, but rather possesses points of access to it. Expressed implicitly as well as explicitly, this view characterizes the human situation as having no immediate present at all, although human beings themselves experience this present as unmediated. The experience is considered sheer illusion. The means through which the world and human beings bring a world and human beings into existence operate anonymously in the background; the means themselves are hidden, and so are working quietly and silently. Whenever someone believes something is something – if, for example, he gets the idea that there is a table over there, that a slap in the face was justified or that a given image is a work of art – he believes it because interpretations and representations have made it appear in this way. Whenever anyone believes anything, these processes are at work, inevitably and without exception. No matter what a person may think he knows, it is all known only through the medium specific to it. There is no other way. For even his own intentions and thoughts about his own situation are accessible to him only through mediation. Only because of media does anything happen, can anything exist at all. For only media offer the opportunity for something to exist. That is to say: a human being finds himself inextricably caught in the position of not being able to locate himself without mediation; he lives in a mediated world in which nothing is immediately present, an inescapable prison of media. For the boundaries of his media are the boundaries of his world, if not to say more pointedly that the world as it is medially transmitted and interpreted represents his actual and only world, for it constitutes the unreliable universe of the human. This is the myth of the mediate.

The accusation of ‘myth’ in philosophy

A detached look at the most prominent philosophical positions today actually reinforces the view that these positions are, in their most basic perspectives, pervasively determined by a belief in myths. This may seem like a harsh accusation at first glance, but it should be noted: as radical as this accusation is, the concept of myth has led to the formulation of a very particular kind of criticism that keeps its distance from anything so crude as it is all false and untenable. The concept of myth supports a form of criticism that simultaneously contains an appreciation. At least this is the reason the concept of myth has exerted a very particular appeal in philosophy. Not least among the pioneering uses of myth as a philosophical category would be Gilbert Ryle’s well-known account of Descartes’ theory of consciousness in The Concept of Mind of 1949. According to Ryle, Descartes, in relating his philosophy of consciousness, is narrating nothing other than a myth about a ghost in a machine. Ryle’s unique way of using the concept of myth has become a model for the analytic philosophy of language, much as Edmund Husserl’s talk about Kant’s merely ‘mythical constructions’ from §30 of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy of 1936 became famous within the phenomenological movement. How seriously and deliberately Husserl used the concept of myth as a critical category may be judged by the way he refined it, speaking of ‘still half-mythical concepts’ in the lecture on Erste Philosophie [First Philosophy] from 1923/4, for example (Husserliana, Vol. VII, p. 235). Even looking further afield, it is still easy to see that this way of using the concept of myth in the history of philosophy was and is taken up with enthusiasm. In recent decades the accusations of myth have been mounting up; there is one example after another: Wilfrid Sellars interpreted empiricism as the ‘myth of the given’ in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind of 1956; in an essay of 1988 with the programmatic title ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, Donald Davidson claimed that such a myth is represented by traditional philosophy of consciousness; and in 1990, Daniel C. Dennett saw a ‘myth of original intentionality’ emerging among the critics of artificial intelligence, again in an essay bearing the same name. Jean-François Lyotard’s account of the ‘grand récits’, the grand narratives of modernity in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge of 1979, too, may be included in this line of thinking. As early as 1969, in an interview published as the foreword to the German edition of Das Imaginäre [The Imaginary], Jean-Paul Sartre characterized Freud’s psychoanalysis as an integrated ‘mythology of the unconscious’ (p. 15) There is no doubt: the list of examples could be, and surely will be, extended. The only question is: why is it always a myth? What special sort of scepticism finds expression in the accusation of myth? More specifically, what do these accusations propose beyond merely indicating that the positions are false?

There is no doubt that the accusation of myth contains an accusation of falsehood. To describe a philosophy as a myth is also to say that this philosophy is flatly and finally logically untenable, that it is in error – but not only that: in the accusation of myth, the error, in its error, actually gets credit as an explanatory narrative. What is being criticized is in fact wrong, but is nevertheless a story. This is the way the accusation of myth stands within a contemporary understanding of myth: a philosophy that is accused of being a myth is not thought to be nothing, but rather a special story. For it is by no means the case that any epistemologically untenable explanation is a noteworthy literary narrative such as we find in myth. The diagnosis of myth is therefore as much a kind of recognition as it is an accusation. Not everything that is irrational and illogical, speculative and unscientific is, per se, on those grounds, mythical. In addition to the simple negative and necessary indication that the explanation is epistemologically unsound, there must also be positive and sufficient indications that this epistemologically unsound explanation should be designated a myth. These sufficient indicators lie in the specific way a myth simplifies and lends meaning to a complex situation: myths always start out as allegorical stories of origins and backgrounds. In ancient classical myth, an incomprehensible phenomenon – the example of natural forces comes to mind – is referred back, by way of literary comparisons, to powers that are hidden, yet effective behind the scenes. So the puzzling thing is as it is because of the hidden circumstances described in the myth. The classical myths of antiquity are remarkable in having given effects and explanations a tangible and representable form, in having thought them through theologically and anthropomorphically: Vulcan’s fire and eruptions may be understood by assuming that a man, this mythical Vulcan, is smelting his iron in the underworld – which however does not mean that every myth must personify hypostasized forces. If we were to unequivocally demand an allegorical personification from every myth, it would become very difficult to accuse a philosophical position of being a myth. In any case Ryle would not accuse Descartes, nor would Husserl accuse Kant, of having brought allegorical personifications into their philosophies. The understanding of myth that informs the accusation of myth in philosophy sees personification of explanatory underpinnings, crucial for the origin of myth in antiquity, as a contingent feature of mythical thinking. For it is entirely possible to narrate and argue on the basis of analogies and causes without necessarily having to lend these causes a human form. When philosophers refer to other philosophies as myths, it is because the philosophies purported to be mythical argue in a way that is comparable in form, not in content, to explanations that rely on allegorical personification. That is, philosophical argumentation does not become a myth because of its subject matter or its specific thesis, but because of the way its thinking is structured. What Ryle held against Descartes and Husserl against Kant is that instead of describing the realities and phenomena they took into consideration, they thought about how these might have come to be – and this is exactly the explanatory strategy that is in fact to be found in every myth. What is specific to myth, then, is not personification as such, but a form of thinking that may be conveyed through personification: the things we don’t understand become understandable if we assume that they came about as a result of one condition or another that we cannot experience. In short: a philosophy accused of being a myth is accused of constructing tales of genesis just by building on assumptions. For myth wants to reveal the true, hidden background of the incomprehensible, possibly absurd things that are in the foreground; this is the reason myths tell stories about the means through which phenomena came to be as they are; myths have ulterior motives. For the means are not themselves events or phenomena that can be experienced; they are rather constructions and underpinnings that serve to explain observable phenomena. In philosophers’ accusations of myth, the concept of ‘myth’ refers to a form of explanation employed even in scientific models.

Model-making philosophy, a contradictio in adjecto

In fact a myth’s way of explaining something can be formally compared to, even identified with, the way a scientific model explains it. This assertion may be astonishing at first glance, for models rightfully enjoy great prestige in scientific work, which is exactly not the case for myths. The reputations of models and myths respectively within empirical science could not be more different. But that should not deter us from recognizing a nearly fundamental relationship between the two. Myths function formally like scientific models and, vice versa, scientific models like myths. For both models and myths are thinkable ways of explaining puzzling empirical facts. As unlike as they may seem on the basis of their very different contents, myths and models are aids to explanation that refer back to perceptible, usually pictorially representable origins. The grounds for the explanation are actually not perceived in either case, but can still be thought reasonable with respect to the reasons and origins of the problem and the established facts about the problem. Models and myths make no sense apart from the one they produce in reference to a hidden agenda. Both make equally simplified constructions available that facilitate an ordering of the facts in question. Both start from the premise that a phenomenon is understood when its origin is explained in terms of a known narrative. In both cases – as Martin Heidegger would have written – something that exists is defined as existing by referring to something else in its genesis; in both cases – as Charles Sanders Peirce would have written – one searches by abduction for underpinnings that offer an explanation and that make sense. Whether we explain the properties of physical materials by referring to an atomic model or a mythology of origin, the problematic part will be interpreted as the result of concealed forces and mechanisms, and the interpreter will believe he knows how these hypostatized forces behave. The behaviour of concealed atomic particles, whose existence has been experienced by no one, follows gravitational laws, and the behaviour of the concealed Creator of the World follows patterns known from the religious heritage. Just as we know from Homer that Hermes is a deceptive and unreliable companion, we know through gravitational laws how electrons behave. Myths and models have an exceptionally successful heuristic effect exactly because they refer what we do not know back to things we do know. This is not to deny that what we know from a model and from a myth come from very different sources, whether these be religious belief, tradition or the idealistically inflected interpretation of scientific experiments. Yet leaving aside these differences in the way the known thing comes to be known, what is under consideration always behaves in a known way, as much for a myth as for a model. From a formal standpoint, then, there is no difference between a mythical history and a scientific model with respect to their cryptic explanatory strategies. That does not mean that there is therefore no difference between myth and model. The difference just does not lie in the manner of argument; rather it first arises as a different use of a comparable argument: myths arise in philosophy through a specific way of using models.

Neither a myth nor a model is in any way troubling or even objectionable independently of its use, its an sich, so to speak. If a myth or a model can be critically illuminated, it will always and exclusively be with respect to how well it handles the concrete situation. And what objection could there be to people trying to understand their world and their existence with the help of myths? What is there to criticize about scientists of the most widely diverse disciplines making models of their respective objects of research that function and fascinate in equal measure? Any model that does something well is a good model for exactly that reason. As long as the model is used only for those purposes to which it is suited, say, to calculate and predict certain events, the model is and remains a means of explanation to which there is no alternative in modern science. The model subordinates active reality with the justification that an apparent reality, which looks completely different from that of the model, can be understood, explained, predicted. Models are methods of explaining and, as long as we are interested in working models, there is no reason at all why several models should not be engaged simultaneously, even if their contentions contradict one another. In fact we can only decide whether an e...

Table of contents

• The Philosophy of Perception
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title
• Contents 
• Foreword
• 1 Philosophical Myths and Models
• 2 Phenomenology: Philosophy without a Model
• 3 The Me of Perception
• 4 The Pause in Participation
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright