I am as worried about the future as everyone else is. But what interests me most about the current debate is not which disaster the author forgot to mention, but how deep into causes he or she is going to go, whether they will zero in on the heart of the problem, or just address current manifestations like neoliberalism, failure to connect, lack of humility, lack of democracy etc. An awful lot of words gets published that basically says the same thing. One can only read about a dozen or two essays in favor of more kindness and respect, more attention to nature, more courage in the face of temptation before one feels restless and starts looking at the clock, as if making moral arguments were just another form of bad behavior which it clearly isn’t, but which it becomes if the speaker goes on too long or gets dogmatic.

Everyone has his or her own theory about what we did to make the planet a bad place to raise children, and uninhabitable for ourselves and millions of other species. But may I suggest that by the time we listen to six or seven speeches on what’s wrong with humanity we’re going to be pretty numb. In my opinion, speeches are part of the problem.

So at the risk of adding one more faggot to the fire, I want to suggest another way to address what is clearly an ongoing crisis. It does not so much involve  persuading people that we need change the way we do things, as showing them a new aspect of the situation and letting it work its way through their consciousness.

I don’t know, of course, if this will help to initiate the transformation that is needed. It may be too slow or too cumbersome to make a difference in the short run. On the other hand, just like effervescent aspirin carries acetaminophen to the bloodstream more quickly than a solid pill, to suddenly see that you are not where you thought you were could be a better way to send a jolt through the system than all the great speeches on TED or dialogues at Cooper Union.

We use words to seduce each other into sharing our model of the way things are. But words accumulate, and after you’ve heard too many of them, you stop processing them because your brain is already full and cannot take in any more. Seeing things for yourself is a much better way to affect a change of outlook. But in order to make sense of what we see, we usually need words. The trick is to time the seeing with the making sense  As James Balog said about the melting of the Arctic in the film “Chasing Ice,” “We have a problem of perception. We don’t get it.” We look at those caving icebergs but don’t understand what we are seeing. I want to help people realize the tense drama we are in by showing them something. I want to show them that the universe is watching.

As I have argued elsewhere, perception is buried with us, and it’s going to take a huge act of resurrection to get it going again. Nevertheless, this may not be as difficult as it sounds.

Perception is a Pleasure

First of all, perception is usually a pleasure. Not everything, but most of what we see and hear is a feast. Even the most desolate landscape has something lovely in it, and if what surrounds you is unspeakably awful, your being there to witness bestows an obligation to be extremely attentive to detail. Whatever you do with the disturbing knowledge, you must take care to observe it carefully and commit your knowledge to memory because the world is a happening and every aspect of it counts.

Perception is Both Conscious and Unconscious

Secondly, we are perceiving whether we realize it or not, so to move what we perceive to the center of consciousness means cultivating what Diane Ackerman calls “presence,” what Annie Dillard called “centering down” — a state of mind where we pay close attention to something (a spoon, a moth, a crumpled envelope) and tell the worries and pressures of our lives to go fly a kite. This kind of focusing would be a lot easier to do if instead of telling us to go read or play for an hour, our parents showed us how to look for an hour, or listen. It’s hard to develop a taste for presence if you’ve never done it before. The constant communicating we do now leaves few opportunities for meditation, and public schools these days are hardly places where kids learn how to examine nature with a hand lens.

But savouring the world gets a lot easier if you just pull away from events every once in a while, take a breather, go for a walk, visit unused places. Things are waiting for us to perceive them. If you just give them a few moments of your time, they’ll work on you and cast their amazing spell.

Silence is Golden

Finally, being alone with your thoughts and observations is a joy if you allow yourself not to worry about the past or the future.  Earth is beautiful and good, so if you can separate out all the bad things people are doing, the messes they’ve made, and the mistakes they’re about to commit, you have a constant source of hope and beauty that will sustain you time and again. It’s surprising that a taste for simple meditation on the planet never seriously caught on in the West. (Wordsworth tried.) It’s simple. It’s easy, and it doesn’t cost anything. Then again, Western culture is a linguistic culture. We perceive the world through the representational system we use to think with i.e. language, and its derivatives like tv, film, radio. So the idea of exploring silence, of getting away from language so that you can just perceive the world for its own sake, without talk, is foreign, and hard to pull off without considerable preparation. Most of us are too busy trying to survive to take the time to learn how to experience the world firsthand. But if its benefits were more widely known who knows how common it might become?

The Eleusinian Mysteries

It was not always thus. For example, citizens in 5^th century Athens were comforted just by seeing an ear of corn. We still don’t know for sure if that is what they looked at because facts were kept hidden and initiates to the Mysteries were sworn to secrecy. But it is thought that after series of powerful purification rituals, fasts, and torch processions that prepared their minds and cleansed their souls of guilt, pilgrims to Eleusis looked at simple objects – seed cakes, the holy basket of Ceres, an ear of corn — and felt heartened by this evidence that life continues after death. The seed cakes were considered symbols of Demeter’s long search for her daughter Persephone in the underworld. In a way that now seems foreign to our consumerized souls, just the sight of an ear of corn calmed peoples’ fears about dying. Instead of being subjected to a cruel end with no hope for redemption – Homer’s eternity of Being in Hades — they could look forward to the miracle of regeneration.

What Deep Perception Can Show You

I’m not promising comfort from what I want to show you — more likely amazement and awe. But the recognition that where we are is set up like a theatre and we are being watched could make you not want to say anything for at least an hour or two, and that in itself might make you feel less bitter about the pickle we are in. It should at least calm any doubts you may have had about the purpose of human life.

I’m not talking about seeing a map or photograph of the sky. I’m talking about seeing that you are in the sky, that you are on a stage, within what can only be described as a very mysterious setup which has all the features of a theater except that the audience has vanished. It is nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, it looks as if we are being watched. It looks as if we are on a stage. And when you see this, when you see how where we are drops off at the edge, the shock is enough to force a revamp in your head. What’s going on? William Beckett thought there was no audience. But actually to see that there is none is another matter. It  changed my life.

Perception needs to be rescued because it is the doorway to this knowledge.  What we learn with our senses is very different from what we learn from newspapers and the Internet. It’s the difference between biting into an apple and talking about biting into an apple. We make contact with what actually exists when use our own eyes and ears to examine something or follow an event. Whereas when we read about it in the newspaper or follow it on the radio or TV we are getting a secondary representation of it, a version that has been passed through someone else’s brain and shaped to fit their model of reality.

Wittgenstein and Heidegger

Perception is definitely influenced by language. It’s hard not to see a slab of wood on hinges as something other than a “door” or smell an acrid odour and not think “gasoline” or “skunk.” But the extent to which the secondary representational system we use to think with affects what we see can be controlled. It’s arbitrary. It may not seem arbitrary. It may seem automatic. It may seem as if you can never see or hear something without identifying it on the map we use to organize reality. Wittgenstein and Heidegger wrestled with the difficulty of separating what we see from what we think without much success other than a number of fine books of philosophy.

But in my humble opinion that was because they did not respect perception enough. They did not realize that it is another form of knowledge.  Perception was buried for them too, though Wittgenstein started to be suspicious. And Heidegger intuitively knew that things were important.

Which meant they had no counter to the perfidious domination of the representational system we use to think with. Language must be controlled because otherwise it will bury perception.

Most People and Philosophers

Of course, most people don’t have this problem. Most people are living so close to the bone they’d like a little relief from perceiving that they are hungry or cold or scared of being blown up by an IED.

But philosophers live mostly at the other end of the social/economic spectrum. They run run the opposite risk. They risk losing touch with the laws of physics that determine things like food and water supply, housing, clean air, etc. Their circumstances are usually comfortable enough that they can sit around and talk. Have ideas. Take plans apart.

You may think I am being simplistic to characterize philosophers in this way, and indeed, I would jump on anyone making a similar claim with examples of novelists, academic sociologists, psychologists, economists etc. who are just as talkative and whose lives revolve around getting verbal constructions preserved for all eternity in a book or article of some sort. But just because others have fallen into the same trap that philosophers have fallen into just goes to show how philosophers set the pace in these matters, and how if there is going to be any kind of shift towards realism among publicly-supported thinkers, philosophy is probably the place to start.

But how do you persuade philosophers (and other thinkers) to stop talking and be more perceptual, i.e. look at where they are?

This is my big thought. My big idea. I want to resurrect perception not by saying it is “iconic” or “non-conceptual” (Ned Block) but by showing people how to find the universe on earth. I want to take them somewhere. However, I have to present my path in stages. I can’t just blurt it out. It’s like the Eleusinian Mysteries. It’s a process. Purification first. Fasting. Ritual. Then step by step through a “thing.” People won’t understand what I want to show them if I just shove a set of directions at them and tell them to take them to the end. That is the linguistic way. It is too wordy and it’s the wrong approach, in any case. I want people to use something that is buried, so I need to de-educate them one word at a time. You must be purified to receive the universe into your brain.

This blog is also about the burial of perception in Western thought, the unwillingness or inability of philosophers to use their senses to investigate the structure of the incredible scenes that surround us.

What’s my evidence for saying that  heavy thinkers consistently ignore what is right in front of them?

I can only point to signs of its burial, since aside from Plato and Descartes, I don’t know of any deliberate efforts on the part of philosophers to kill perception.

However, the trouble they have had with realism indicates that how we connect with the trees, ponds and garbage cans in our midst has been a problem for philosophers, and it could be because in their effort to elevate theory over observation, they felt it necessary to one-up common sense.

For example, those who followed Descartes after his experiment with the stove became skeptical about sense perception. They embraced representationalism — the idea that we need an intermediary to bridge the gap between us and the world. As a result, and for a long time, academic talk about perception was replete with entities like sense data, sense impressions, interfaces. We could not perceive the world directly because we could never know how much sense data were interfering with and distorting our point of view.

The correspondence theory of truth is another area where philosophers did everything they could to avoid acknowledging that our senses tell us things that are true about physical reality. This theory states that propositions are only true if they correspond to reality. But since it fails to provide any entities to which statements could correspond, this makes no sense. There is no there, there.

If they just admitted that perception is how propositions hook on to reality there would be no problem.

Another sign that perception has been downplayed or quashed is the strong dualistic bent in Western thinking. Dualism, reductionism, the separation of entity and behavior, are all signs that something other than direct contact with the rocks, trees and roads we live within and around, is determining our thought processes. As ecofeminists are fond of repeating, nature is not divided up into mind/body, spirit/matter, male/female, culture/nature etc. Nature doesn’t have hierarchies. Everything is interconnected in nature, which has a seemingly infinite capacity for beauty and regeneration. A more realistic approach to reality would explain self and society using metaphors based on nature.

So why don’t deep thinkers see this? Why do they reduce and dichotomize everything?

Feminists argue that the analytic mind-set that took hold after the Enlightenment with its emphasis on progress and technology prevents the adoption of a more earth-friendly (female) outlook, and that the division of everything into two parts is just a repetition of the larger separation between man and nature and the domination of one group over another, particularly men over women and first world over third world peoples.

I think the problem goes deeper than this. I agree that thinking the world is black and white neglects to observe how intertwined and interdependent entities and processes are. But thinking that everything is connected can be a trap too, especially if it leads you to ignore the integrity and intricacy of individual parts.

Finally, there is the extreme aridity of most philosophical writing. Forgive me for being blunt, but with the odd exception of Alfonso Lingis and David Abram and maybe one or two others, most philosophy is as dry as Melba toast. The writing is on such an abstract level you can barely breathe without oxygen support. References to concrete things or places are like blueberries in a poor man’s pancake. It seems that if philosophers were to write about the actual suitcases or fruit stands or bus stops that surround them, they’d be accused of an unforgivable softness no man would willingly admit to anyone but his doctor. To believe that when you look at the scenes around you, you perceive the world itself is disparaged as a form of philosophical infancy. It’s gauche. Undergraduate. Naive. You haven’t thought hard enough yet. To get from A to B you don’t use your senses. You use your neurons.

To be sure, there are plenty of reasons to doubt perception as a pathway to truth. It is easily manipulated and there are many situations where  it cannot be trusted. It is also not well understood. Nobody knows how it works. How do the visible and audible aspects of the scenes around us get transferred to our brains? Finally, there is a strong intellectual bias in Western culture that makes anything involving the body deeply suspect.

But, these are just quibbles. Using your eyes and ears to make sense of what you perceive is essential for survival. You wouldn’t question  perception if a car suddenly crashed into your home.

Or if you were outside coatless in minus 30 degree weather.

So why isn’t it more essential for Western thought?

I think the real problem with perception for us, is that Western culture is very linguistic and perception is how language hooks on to biological reality. That means it is both a partner and a challenge to the representational system we use to think with. And systems don’t like challenges.

When we want to be realistic we make close observation of the subject we want to talk about inform what we say.  We visit hospitals, schools, take notes and photographs, write down what we see and hear.

But if we do not care whether what we say is true or not, close perception (ours or someone else’s) gets in the way of what we are doing and can act as a brake on our plans. Therefore, unless we are trying to tell the truth, we are in constant warfare with it.

Mikhail Rakityanskiy

Could it be, then, that perception is as buried as it is because there have already been so many lies? Something like that.  Language’s ties to biological reality are arbitrary which means words can be about anything, real or not real, true or not true, possible or not even possible. On the other hand, perception lets us know that there are limits on what we can do because it informs us about the real features of our lives, each other and the physical world.

Wanting to be free of limits is not peculiar to the West. It’s a feature of every culture that uses language. But the destructive powers of language have been harnessed most completely in the West.

If perception stops you from saying what you want to say (and doing what you want to do) why put up with it?

Use it just enough to buy groceries, but then forget about it.

What About Phenomenology?

What about phenomenology? What about it? Its founder, Edmund Husserl was no friend of the so-called external world. In fact, he bracketed it off,  limiting discussion to that which appears to consciousness in the form of impressions, glimpses, suspicions.  He was an idealist whose curiosity stopped at the edge of the so-called “intentional object,” that is, the object as it is present to a conscious observer.   Although phenomenology called for a return to things themselves, paradoxically it considers them only insofar as they appear to the human brain.

Merleau-Ponty was a bit better (he inspired David Abram), but he too didn’t seem to be able to get out of his own head.

Now we have Object-Oriented Ontology, a promising label if there ever was one. The Kantian human-world gap – the idea that reality revolves around the conditions of our knowing it – is scorned. Objects are granted an independent existence outside intentionality that is knowable. Husserl’s distinction between an object and  its qualities becomes the opening through which a huge effort is made to plumb the depths of things-in-themselves. Heidegger’s tool-analysis is the rubric for a new metaphysics that finds in objects a fourfold structure of Real objects and Real Qualities (which are withdrawn) and Sensual Objects and Sensual Qualities (which are apparent in the world) The central mission of philosophy is “to theorize the deformations and breakdowns in the bond between an object and its qualities.”

It sounds very convincing. There is no human point of view to distort things. Metaphysics is re-instated. Objects are made the primary substance. Everything is an object, so what holds true of neutrons also holds true of governments. The whole cosmos can be mapped as a version of four tensions, three radiations and three junctions.

But where is perception in all of this? Where is the exterior of objects, the part that we see and touch? Where is the world that stares back at us inscrutably from all corners of the room?

By getting rid of the human-world gap we also got rid of the system that lets us pick up on an object’s physical presence, its beauty, its meaning and value, its life on the surface of the planet.

Was this deliberate? I think so.

To have a metaphysics of objects, it’s necessary to separate out the essence of objects from countless empirical details whose flash and odour get in the way of achieving piercing analysis.  An ontology that includes the way objects look or behave in real settings like your grandfather’s tent or the mountains in Banff National Park would not be a real ontology. It would not be a true metaphysics. Even though the physical side of objects and their particular location is what concerns most of us in daily life, this is not what interests object-oriented ontologists. They are interested in developing a new theory of overarching basic structures.

So if the nature of being does not include what we perceive with our senses because that would put objects back into human consciousness, and object oriented ontologists want to grasp reality in its own right, not just as it appears to humans (correlationism), object oriented ontology may be the final triumph of western thought over the external world. The nail in the coffin. The death of perceptual reality. It’s a strange world that cannot be perceived, that can only be conceived.  Graham Harman compares reality to a deck of cards. Particularly when the world we do perceive is so strange and beautiful, it’s troubling that even object-oriented philosophers don’t want to take it on. The most perceptive thing  they can say about reality is that it is weird. No kidding.

What about the argument that it’s not philosophy’s job to celebrate or raise questions about the “external” world? That  philosophy’s job is to take nothing for granted, subject all claims to critical scrutiny, and inch by inch show the warranty for different claims ?

There’s definitely truth in that. The history of philosophy is not exactly larded with realists, and we need a discipline that shows us how to think clearly.

Then who does want to systematically study the incredibly beautiful scenes that surround us and the way that objects fit into what can only be described as some sort of set-up or theater? Novelists? Physicists?

Owing to the extreme reductionism of physics, I’d go with the novelists, especially Iris Murdoch, whose descriptions of French villages, London, the English countryside were quite detailed and shrewd. But despite the fact that she was also a philosopher, I wouldn’t call her representation of the world she lived in systematic.

As you can tell, I want philosophy to be more realistic.

Hilary Putnam is helpful here. He started out thinking that successful theories and explanations captured something fundamentally true about the world by corresponding with it. But then he realized that explanations don’t correspond with the world in just one way. So he threw out the correspondence idea of truth to settle for something more modest, like “ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other.”  He accepted conceptual relativity. All we had to go on about the world was sense data and sense data could be interpreted in different ways.

However, he began to wonder about sense data too. Who said there was an interface between us and the things we see around us? It sounds reasonable because it provides an explanation for how aspects of the world get transferred to our brains. But is there any evidence that sense data exist? Why does perception have to be indirect? Maybe our visual and hearing equipment is capable of going all the way to the objects themselves, without help?  In fact, maybe we perceive the world directly after all, just as non-educated people have thought for centuries, and the only stumbling block is that we have different conceptual systems to interpret what we perceive?

Putnam’s willingness to go back and rethink what he once thought is delightfully cleansing. He was determined to try to bridge the gap between what we perceive and what we say about it. While I know there are some who disagree with his new-found respect for the realism of the common man, there is something very appealing about a philosopher who wants his work to reflect what ordinary people see and hear. It means that philosophy is not as elitist as it sometimes seems.  It also means that careful thinkers are tackling questions that mean something to you and me. I, for one, did not study philosophy in college but find myself reading it now and then because it is the only field that comes close to tackling the questions I am interested in. Back in 1994, for example, I was deeply pleased to read Putnam’s defense of direct perception in the Journal of Philosophy because I’d been struggling to explain something I perceive to people who claimed that direct perception was impossible  He also put me onto William James whose radical empiricism taught me so much about the relationship between language and perception.

But if other philosophers think their connection to the world is dicey, and they have a bad habit of splitting things in two, and they prefer theorizing about structure to using their perceptual powers to examine the physical world with care, how are they ever going to help us figure out what is going on?

They won’t, of course. Not unless they get off their idealist path and embrace common sense realism will philosophers tackle the complexity of our actual situation as inhabitants of the Blue Planet. Even then, it’s not likely they’ll stay realist for long unless they also get control over language, because language is the real source of our difficulties, both with dualism and the truth. Language interferes with perception. It causes us to lose touch with what exists. Not always. But enough to be dangerous.

What are the chances of that happening? I don’t know. I’m not a philosopher. I’m just a woman with a lot of questions. But I know that I didn’t start to question language’s advisability as a representational system until I looked at what is right in front of me carefully, and was silenced by its beauty and power. Maybe we’ll have to wait until philosophers undergo a similar experience.