Jun 21 2008
How do you know when you can see?
This question was asked of me yesterday by Dayve.
I said I would consider it. I think the first answer that comes to mind is: you know you can see when you remember yesterday, and you realise that things looked different then. Or: when you find yourself comparing your accounts of the world to those of other people around you, and you can tell that you’re talking about different things.
Using my earlier example, Peter Vardy’s prime numbers, I know that I’ve learned something new because yesterday I didn’t know what prime numbers were, and now I do. I can show you what’s changed.
But this is different. After the list of illusions I gave the other day, I said that there was something else, that I find hard to express. Mystics always have. Time for a quick philosophy lesson…
In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant revolutionised western philosophy in many ways. He was a tedious, boring man, and the way he wrote and expressed his conclusions is tiresome to read. The things we tend to be most interested in, when we are forced to delve into Kant’s work, are his ethics and his metaphysics. The latter was probably his most revolutionary idea. The science of the day was revealing just how sophisticated the human mind/brain was, and Kant began the train of thought that breaks the world into two realms:
- The world of human experience, which he called the phenomenal world. This is how we interpret things, the world that is reconstructed within our minds after it has been filtered by our senses, our memories, our beliefs, our assumptions… . The list of things that can influence how we see the world around us is long and hotly debated, even today. The point of this world is that it is not real. It may be conditional upon some kind of stimulus, but even that is debatable.
- The nouminal world or, as my favourite philosopher Schopenhauer called it, thing-as-itself. This is whatever lies beyond our interpretation. Different philosophers suggest that we’re very close to this world, that we’re utterly removed from it to the point that there’s not reason to suppose that it even exists, and everything in between.
Philosophers in this traditional are called Idealists, because they believe there is a world of reality, and then a world that exists only as an idea within the human mind.
Let’s leave Kant behind. Much more interesting was Schopenhauer, who followed in Kant’s footsteps but wrote in the most beautiful language possible. Here is the opening to the second book of his The world as Will and Representation (you’re probably able to work out what he means by “representation” now):
In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust; on this crust a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings: this is the empirical truth, the real, the world. Yet for a being who thinkings, it is a precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space, without knowing whence or whither, and to be only one of innumerable similar beings that throng, press, and toil, restlessly and rapidly arising and passing away in beginningless and endless time. Here there is nothing permanent but matter alone, and the recurrence of the same varied organic forms by means of certain ways and channels that inevitably exist as they do. All the empirical science can teach is only the more precise nature and rule of these events. But at last the philosophy of modern times, especially through Berkeley and Kant, has called to mind that all this in the first instance is only phenomenon of the brain, and is encumbered by so many great and different subjective conditions that its supposed absolute reality vanishes, and leaves room for an entirely different world-order that lies at the root of that phenomenon, in other words, is related to it as is the thing-in-itself to the mere appearance.
“The world is my representation” is, like the axioms of Euclid, a proposition which everyone must recognise as true as soon as he understands it, although it is not a proposition that everyone understands as soon as he hears it…For only after men had tried their hand for thousands of years at merely objective philosophising did they discover that, among the many things that make the world so puzzling and precarious, the first and foremost is that, however immeasurable and massive it may be, its existence hangs nevertheless on a single thread; and this thread is the actual consciousness in which it exists. This condition, with which the existence of the world is irrevocable encumbered, marks it with the stamp of ideality, in spite of all empirical reality, and consequently with the stamp of mere phenomenon. Thus the world must be recognised, from one aspect at least as akin to a dream, indeed as capable of being put in the same class as a dream. For the same brain-function that conjures up during sleep a perfectly objective, perceptible, and indeed palpable world must have just as large a share in the presentation of the objective world of wakefulness…
…Accordingly, true philosophy must at all costs be idealistic; indeed, it must be so merely to be honest. For nothing is more certain than that no one ever came out of himself in order to identify himself immediately with things different from him; but everything of which he has certain, sure, and hence immediate knowledge, lies within his consciousness.
When Dayve set me this question, he could have meant a lot of things. Indeed, it isn’t necessary for him to know what he meant when he asked. In my list of illusions, I gave a few erroneous assumptions that underpin much human motivation. When someone learns for themselves that they’ve been labouring under and illusion, and the make a choice to break free from it, they see differently. This could be what Dayve meant. How do you know when you see through an illusion? You recognise that it is an illusion, that it is false, and you choose to live a different life that reflected your new authentic approach to the world.
But as far as I’m concerned, this is not truly seeing. These are minor illusions. I think that it is possible to step outside of the phenomenal and grasp the noumenal. I can already hear Phil’s objections, and as yet I don’t know how I’d go about explaining why I think that it is possible, or how I think that I do it, when I think that I do. But to me, this is truly seeing.
How do you know when you truly see? Perhaps it is the same: yesterday I didn’t see this, today I do. Yesterday I was trapped within time, causality, illusion, self-obsession and the need to enforce my values on my perception. Today, sometimes I can see beyond.
Talking to others certainly helps, but that takes time and patience. When I met Phil, he was trying to wind me up by denying the roots of anything I said. It took a long time for us to begin to see the commonality in our approaches, influencing each other as we explored. The same was and is true for others in my life. You will meet people, if you’re lucky, who can see something you can’t. Working together, you can share your perceptions, learn about new illusions and new escape routes.
Any other answers to Dayve’s question?
