Fido the Yak

Dermot Moran, commenting on Merleau-Ponty (blogged about at However Fallible and Perverse Egalitarianism), argues that seeing is tactile, that even when our gaze moves from one thing to another, "we do not drop into the invisible." After a thing drops from visual focus there remains a background of the visible, analogous to a tactile background that remains after something has been touched. Moran then presents what appears to be an exceptional case. "Reading is a kind of seeing that has transcended the seeing of the letters and marks on the page and resides in the pure incorporeality of the meanings," he says. I, having expressed the view here that reading is coporeal, will offer a few words to elaborate my sense of reading and then, hopefully, further a critical appreciation of reading.

Instead of the transcendence of our bodily experience of written signs–there are reasons, such as the eye strain Moran cites, to believe that such a transcendence could never be perfectly accomplished–we should think of rough transpositions from one bodily mode of experience to another. Reading represents a practically silent transposition of the visual into the vocal, or, in the case of those who read sign language, a practically motionless transposition into the manual. Naturally one can read aloud or gesturally or both, and one can respond demonstrably as one reads, affirming or denying, testifying, commenting, revising, thinking, speaking. All reading passes through the faculty of speech, which resides in the body and its assuetudes. In fact it has its genesis in assuefaction, the faculty of faculties, so to speak, and this being the case it never transcends bodily experience.

Reading never transcends bodily experience. The idea can be critiqued. Obviously. I've raised the problem of the noetic faculty before, which according to some views would be a transcendent faculty, presumably, being transcendent, transcending even assuefaction itself. Quite a conundrum, given certain definitions of noesis. A version of the conundrum appears to be presented to us by Moran's idea of the pure incorporeality of meanings. Does it make sense for me to talk about a faculty for speech separate from a faculty for language, pure language, which according to many reasonable definitions allows for, indeed demands, the disembodiment of meanings? I've sometimes taken the view that the incorporeality of meanings is such a fantastic notion that those who propose it bear an onus to explain it. I've spoken of *language. Have I blinded myself to a reality of language? Of thought? How do I know what a body is? What burden do I bear?

The case of reading does not appear to a simple matter of transcendence into pure incorporeality. As in the past, I ask that you attend to your own experiences of reading as you think about the issue. As much as the eyes, reading resides in the voice and in the hands.

Labels: assuefaction, body, Merleau-Ponty, Moran, reading, touch, vision

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:41 AM. 20 comments

The Phenomenology for East Asian CirclE has convened twice, once in Hong Kong, and once in Tokyo, each time harvesting a bumper crop of papers on phenomenology. Junichi Murata's contribution to the Hong Kong conference is called The Multi-Dimensionality of Colors (pdf). Murata favors a broad, pluralistic understanding of color that encompasses many types of visual recognition across diverse species of organism. Color vision uses a wavelength difference of light to gather information about the environment "in order to live in it" (p. 19, my emphasis). The ways to live in an environment are various. Therefore, Murata concludes that a wide variety of properties may be possibly considered as color, and a wide variety of ways of visually recognizing color may be considered as color vision (pp. 19-20).

In addition to hue, saturation and volume, Murata recognizes an affective dimension of colors, and, taking a cue from Michel Henry, he claims this dimension of color belongs to the world of life, which for Murata has a biological as well as existential meaning (pp. 12-13). (Murata refers to Michel Henry's Voir l’invisible, sur Kandinsky, though it is not listed in his bibliography.) Drawing on David Katz's The World of Colour, Murata says that the visual space in which color appears is intrinsically a kinesthetic space in which the movement of the body is realized (p. 14). He argues that the affective and behavioural dimensions of color are not independent of the spatiality of color, but rather that "how we are affected and motivated to a particular behavior is essentially connected with how the color appears" (p. 14).

So what can we say about the color vision of bees, one of Murata's examples? We don't quite know what it's like to ultraviolet light at the same time we see red, green and blue. Perhaps we know what it's like to be attracted or repelled by a color, and on this basis we can have understanding of what the bee sees. Possibly, however, human feelings of attraction and repulsion represent a quantum leap in feeling beyond what a bee experiences.

It's becoming clear to me that I will be having trouble with the phenomenological linkage between motility and perception on a number of different levels. Thinking about the evolution of color vision in primates, as I understand it there is an anatomical separation between the parvocellular system which processes colors and the magnocellular system which processes motion (see this post). The feeling that color happens in kinesthetic space could well be the product of a combination of several distinct neurological processes that could, in different circumstances, be arranged in other ways. More broadly, I am concerned with the reliability of our feelings. What do we know about the world on the basis of attending to our feelings? Well, I think there are some things we know surely becuase we feel them, and the validity of our feelings is not in doubt in my mind. Yet I'm not sure how this knowledge can be integrated with propositional knowledge. The lesson of feelings is probably one of inconclusiveness.

Labels: bees, color, Murata, perception, phenomenology, vision

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:54 AM. 0 comments

Robert Barton shows that "like brain size and neocortex size, relative expansion of parvocellular lateral geniculate nucleus layers is correlated with both frugivory and social group size" in primates¹. The parvocellular system is a part of the brain that specializes in processing colors, in contrast to the magnocellular system which processes motion². The link between frugivory and color vision doesn't require much explanation; if you specialize in eating fruit, color vision helps you spot the fruit amidst the trees, and allows you to discern qualities such as ripeness. A competing hypothesis holds that large brain size is correlated with frugivory in the primates because of a selection for spatial memory. Barton's case for the primacy of color vision should lead to a reexamination of the emergence of spatial memory in primates.

But that's not the end of the story. How do we explain the correlation between parvocellular elaboration and large social groups? Barton argues that the answer lies in another aspect of the parvocellular system: the capacity for high-acuity vision.

The parvocellular system mediates a range of visual processes in the neocortex, particularly those that involve the perception of fine details. This kind of processing is critically involved in facial recognition, and perception of gaze direction and facial expression. Several areas of the neocortex whose main visual inputs are parvocellular, such as [the] inferotemporal cortex, are specialized for processing social information of this type. These kinds of complex visual cues must be processed and integrated to achieve what Brothers calls "the accurate perception of the dispositions and intentions of other individuals."³

Barton wants us to understand social cognition not as a higher cognitive function over and above basic sensory processing, but rather as a "large array of sensory-cognitive operations occuring in parallel"⁴. Okay. What are the implications of that idea?

Aporiai, thoughts along the way:

• Hamblet's critique of Levinas' monadology still seems very wrong to me, though she obviously knows what she's talking about.




• Husserlian phenomenology will probably never satisfactorily resolve the tension between the transcendental ego and the lifeworld.




• Lyotard's coupling of the "image of the Other" with the addressivity of language struck me as insightful, but perhaps too abstract, too abbreviated. Is there a more primary orientation towards the Other? Can it be discovered through phenomenological reduction? Could we speak of an image to or from the Other? The imagination of the Other as a give and take of possibilities? Can that simply be a modality of intending? And why Other instead of others? (That's obvious, but is it so obvious in all primates?)




• The notion of "cognitive templates" has been bugging me, particularly with regard to human evolution. For instance what would a face template accomplish that an orientation towards others would not? For the species, I mean. Obviously, if you look at adults, whose relations to others are highly structured, it's stupid to deny the use of something like cognitive templates--I'd rather say "apperceptive schemata," but the idea is about the same. But how do they emerge? Were they the direct product of a genetic mutations that glommed onto the hominid lineage? At what points? Or do they instead owe their genesis to the habitus? And if the answer is by and large both, then we really ought to clarify what we mean by "cognitive template" or "apperceptive schema" because we may be describing radically different phenomena by the same term. Barton's research doesn't settle the dispute, but it may moot certain points of contention. What can we say about social cognition that holds true for all primates? What if anything marks social cognition in Homo sapiens as unique?




• If we imagine culture rather abstractly as a system of possibilities, or a bit more concretely as a matrix of cultivated dispositions and capabilities, then on what grounds do we limit its scope to Homo sapiens (or hominins, or Homininae)? Empirical evidence? It's not that cut and dry. And besides, we have to face the question of whether our thinking is circumscribed or distorted by biological facts of our being here.




• Stated positively, what can we discover about ourselves by virtue of our being born into the Order Primates? Suborder Haplorhini, and so on? Philosophers are wont to discuss life quite apart from the discoveries of the life sciences. Is this simply a question of method? Do we have any call to imagine that different methods might lead to similar insights? What would that say about how we know things? Ho de anexetastos bios ou biôtos anthrôpôi: Could Socrates have meant that it is only his elenctic method of inquiry that makes life livable for a human being? I rather suspect he was presenting a more general defense of free inquiry. But I have my doubts. Are the ideas of modern evolutionary science or indeed any rigorous discipline so embedded in a history of methodical applications and elaborations that they cannot be freely shared? How can we tolerate ideas being placed beyond scrutiny by virtue of their belonging to highly specialized traditions of inquiry? Does our knowledge of social cognition in primates suggest one kind of answer?




• Do chimpanzees play peekaboo? With their infants? The bonobo ethology is unclear to me. Which primates play peekaboo?




• If we think of an idea as an object, we can say that once we come upon an idea and grasp it, we can think it again. But the idea we come back to is never exactly the same as the idea we initially grasped. Does a monkey think, I'm eating the same fruit over and over and over....? How about a gorilla? How is it that most of us get over it, thinking about food instead of eating it?

  
  

• Are you looking at me?