We need look no further than Uexkull’s own theory to be forced to acknowledge that it would be self-undermining if it was thought to encompass our own species. If we were truly closed off like bees in our own umwelt we could not recognize that bees have a different umwelt from ourselves or that cows have a different umwelt from bees. We would not be able to access a viewpoint from which these profoundly different umwelten are perceived and understood – sufficiently to be compared. Significantly, our ability to imagine the world of other organisms as being different from our own is not reciprocated: bees do not apparently busy themselves about our mode of experiencing the world. Most importantly, we would not be able to form the very idea of an umwelt and of our being confined to it.
The same point applies to the suspicion that our consciousness is not only perspectival but irremediably so, such that we are imprisoned in viewpoints (ranging from literal angles of vision to personal, national, or cultural interests that frame cognition). If we really were thus imprisoned, we would not be able to form the complex notion of “perspective” that we have. As already noted, the intuition is explicit even at the ground floor of our perception, when I not only see a scene but see that I see it from a viewpoint and see also that what I see is bounded by what I cannot see; and that you see it from a different viewpoint and can see and not see different things. The very fact that I am conscious that I perceive things from a viewpoint shows that I am not deceived into thinking that the item that I perceive is identical with my perception; the idea of perspective is a marker of a liberation from perspective. My seeing that I see something from an angle means that my seeing is not entirely hostage to that, or any other, angle.
This is not to say that the suspicion that I must always see things from a personal or shared (say, cultural or disciplinary) perspective, is entirely without foundation. To the contrary, every correction confirms the underlying notion. Even so, the idea of our subjectivity, and of experience, as being a kind of prison, even an open prison, is not upheld. While we cannot think ourselves as ultimately entirely escaping the intersubjectivity of our shared humanity, our being embodied subjects should not be seen as a barrier to our gaining access to a putative reality – indeed to reality itself – beyond appearance.
In support of this, we note that the very idea of the “real” borrows its meaning from the opposite: “unreal”. Austin characterized “real” as a “trouser-word”: “it is the negative sense that wears the trousers”:
That is, a definite sense attaches to the assertion that something is real, a real such-and-such, only in the light of a specific way in which it might be, or might have been, not real … the function of real is not to contribute positively to the characterisation of anything, but to exclude possible ways of being not real.16
If we were permanently denied access to reality, we would have nothing with which to contrast our experience, or the world we experience, to justify the notion that we have access only to unreality, to “mere” appearance. “Reality” would become an idea without content or the possibility of content; rather like Kant’s noumenon, an intellectual intuition, lacking any features or specific content. The global possibility of getting things (locally) wrong does not imply the certainty of getting things globally wrong.
There is, however, a deeper argument against the idea that we are denied access to reality by being imprisoned in subjectivity. It is the necessity of a conscious subject for there to be anything answering to the concept “reality”. Basic stuff, matter, what-is, substance, Being – whatever you call it – does not of itself count as real (or of course unreal). A pebble may be part of my reality but it is not in itself real (or unreal). We need something – more precisely someone (individually or as part of a community of minds) – to turn what-is into The Given so that it is available for judgement as real or unreal. It is the subject that transforms, upgrades, Being into reality. There is no Given without the Taken, no Givenness without Takenness. To say this is not to espouse either a realist or anti-realist view of objects: without the subject the very idea of “reality” (as well as, more obviously, “unreality”) is impossible. Whatever one thinks of Kant’s transcendental idealism, it would be difficult to deny this, one of the fundamental assumptions that motivated it. The natural world is not self-given; so the idea of reality is on the borderline between ontology (“what there is”) and epistemology (“what we know or experience of what there is”).
The idea that the subjectivity of the subject is a mere obstacle to cognitive progress is therefore sheer ingratitude if we think of reality as that which would be evident not merely to an undistorted view but to no “mere” view at all. This would locate reality beyond Nagel’s “view from nowhere”17 to a view from “no-one”, a view without a viewpoint, without a viewer; in short, a view that isn’t a view at all. The nearest we get to this is the mathematical portrait of the world, drained of phenomenal content, of time and place, and of course of any inhabitants. There is nothing in a mathematical equation that guarantees that anything exists: it is not enough to secure actuality, only the form of possibility. Furthermore, the variables in the equations have to be given values, and of course meaning, from outside. The mathematical view is, at best, an abstract structure without content. Such a view is not even a glint in a glass eye.
It is not surprising that mathematics is void of content, given that it attempts to be the view from an (actual) everywhere rather than (possible) anywhere. Such a view would have to harvest, add up, and reconcile all appearances. The impossibility of doing so is best appreciated if we start on the epistemic ground floor and imagine a gaze that saw what-is simultaneously from all possible angles. Take a homely example. What would a rock look like if it were seen from the front, back, underneath, inside, and outside at once? No such look would be possible. But this is what we would require if we were to demand the appearance of the rock in itself, as opposed to its specific and distinct and mutually exclusive appearances to you or to me – or to the dog running past it or to the insect crawling over it. The idea of an (unmediated) appearance that corresponds to the reality of the rock, to its intrinsic appearance, is clearly contradictory, since appearance is “appearance to”.
The epistemic ascent from the perspective of individual subjects is not towards say “the correct appearance” or “the canonical view” or “aperspectival view” of the rock – a hypothetical view that gives their appearance when they are not being seen, how they would look as they intimated themselves in the absence of a canvas, mirror, lens, or conscious subject. As we proceed from direct perception to verbal description and from the latter – via measurement – to mathematical characterization, appearances are not replaced by ever more truthful or ideal appearances. Rather, appearances are shed and the rock loses its place in space and time and its individuality. Atomic or quantum reality is faceless. We overlook this because space, time and individuality may seem to be recovered in descriptions. This is an illusion. “Six miles from London”, “2 feet from Rock 2” and “2, 3, 4 in coordinate framework x, y, z”, are not places comparable to the real place occupied by a real rock when it is in front of me. As explanation ascends, so it becomes de-localized as well as drained of phenomenal content. The highest vantage point is not a point or a view from a point. Nothing could be further from a world-picture than an equation, although the laws expressed in equations do form the skeleton of a world-picture.
We should therefore discredit the idea that “reality” is an asymptote we can arrive at by entirely disinfecting our cognition of any (subjective) viewpoint; that there is an end-point of intelligibility at which we reach the immediate language of Being, its self-portrait, so that we can tune in to the auto-pandiculation of the universe, somehow expressing its true appearance to no-one and nowhere, unmediated by an aware subject, the look of a world not being looked at, in the absence of the distortion of sight-tinted spectacles. I express it in this way in the Wittgensteinian spirit of passing “from a piece of disguise
d nonsense to something that is patent nonsense”18 to expose it more clearly to critical examination.
Sense-making requires a distinctive “other” as its object or substrate. The theme of the next chapter will be the necessary gap between the knower and the known, between the two that is the quorum for the cognitive tango. In Chapter 7, I will focus on the necessary insolubility of the known in knowledge for there to be an object of knowledge. What we may conclude for the present is that “what-is” or Being requires something other than itself to become “reality”. That other is the subject who is not therefore a mere distorting lens, or just a ladder to be cast aside at a certain stage of cognitive advance. While measurement draws us out of our individuality, this does not mean that the subject is superseded. The idea that reality is “the Given” unpeeled of putative distortions arising out of the experiencing or knowing subject fosters the illusion that those distortions could be removed by – and only by – removing the subject entirely. Behind this is the further idea that, as objective knowledge and understanding have progressed by getting ourselves as individual subjects out of the way we could arrive at complete knowledge of reality by getting rid of subjects. But, to develop an earlier point, reality would not be given (or The Given) and Being would not be Reality without there being a subject to receive what is given and to make Being “real”. This remains true, notwithstanding that we progress towards objectivity through the extraordinary action of measurement that delivers a “result”, a dephenomenalized data-point, a pure quantity represented by a numerical token whose experiential features are irrelevant and, indeed, are “looked through”.
Regarding the subject as a mere obstacle to knowledge and understanding is the end-point of an ingratitude that overlooks the extent to which the subject creates the very framework, “the outside”, within which sense is to be found. We cannot entirely wake out of our putatively parochial selves because we would not have anything to wake with or anything particular to wake to. “Reality” is inescapably an image of what-is and such an image cannot be perfected by removing all lenses. The knowing subject is not only necessary but cannot be entirely passive, as if it were a transparent Reality-detector. The entirely passive mind would be a succession of experiences that would not be able to transcend itself to ascend towards objective reality. That is the enduring truth at the heart of Kant’s emphasis on the active role of the mind in the passage from sense experience to knowledge.
Galileo, and many thinkers before and after him, have thought that there is a language of nature – namely mathematics – in which a truly transparent, undistorting knower would think the world to himself. The native tongue of nature, or of Being, is quantitative and it is composed of geometrical figures, numbers, matrices, and the like. I have elsewhere criticized this notion at length.19 Suffice to note, for the present, that a purely mathematical portrait of what-is lacks most of its characteristics: phenomenal appearance and temporality for a start. What is more, mathematics itself is an historical accumulation of procedures, methods, results, etc., and it is difficult to imagine nature speaking in this cacophony of tongues.20 The assumption that there is a point of convergence of all mathematical activity in an ideal mathesis is just that: an assumption.
But there is a more fundamental point. Even if nature spoke in a mathematical Esperanto that combined (say) all the dialects of arithmetic, algebra and geometry, it would not say anything unless there were a subject facing and making (partial) sense of it. The subject as the point at which the world is sensed, known, and made intelligible, remains indispensable. Nagel’s suggestion that “reality probably extends beyond what we can conceive of”21 seems to misconceive reality, overlooking that it takes two to tango. This alone is sufficient to justify Nagel’s fundamental point that “reality is not just objective reality”.22 There is an inescapable sticky reality in the fear experienced when facing a bully, a predator, a threat to one’s life and limb. There is an equally inescapable reality in the shame of an individual caught lying, betraying another, or transgressing in some other way. The reality of the justified, or even unjustified, contempt of others, of being stigmatized or discredited, is reflected in the sense that it is out there, inescapable. Such existential realities may be ultimately connected to basic laws of nature via the customs and cultures that have been established to protect the collective from unfiltered exposure to the threats that are inherent in the fragility of the living organism. The connection, however, is established by a long and winding route that places lived reality at a great distance from the properties of objects as they are described by natural science. There is an unignorable sense according to which “reality” is that which has to be taken account of when we are achieving our ends, meeting our needs, fulfilling our duties. It is co-produced by the subject and that which it encounters.
This may seem to be both obvious and misconceived. It is obvious that knowledge requires a subject, so how could this be overlooked? Possibly for this reason: knowledge and understanding can seem to exist “uncurated” by conscious subjects. Because they can lie dormant in documents, between their moments of being consulted, these things seem to be able to continue as knowledge existing independent of conscious beings. But the contents of a sheet of paper or a computer screen are, until they are being read, only potential knowledge: it is a mistake to ascribe the status of knowledge to ink marks or symbols on a screen. It is the same mistake that authorizes expanding the idea – discussed in Chapter 4 – of information until it encompasses items such as fossils and clouds that might be informative to a conscious being able to interpret them.23 However, the focus on existential realities in affirming the inescapable need to the subject may seem to be misconceived. Surely these are what we should or must or at least try to escape when we pursue truth in the (relatively) disinterested way of science. It is certainly true that the field equations of general relativity, for all that they are indissolubly associated with Einstein, are not mired in the kind of things I have spoken of. They – and indeed more homely pieces of knowledge such as ordinary facts about the time of the Battle of Hastings and the location of Adelaide – do not have subjects, not at least in the way that pains and worries do. They are not dependent on the accidents of the position, culture, and make-up of any individual. The thought “The Battle of Hastings took place in 1066” has a core that is not affected by whether the person who says it is short of breath or not, angry or happy, old or young, in the dark or in the light, and so on. Even so, the knowledge of the knowing subject is to some extent self-based cognition. While it is general knowledge, that is available to all, it still has to be realized or tokenized in individual persons, at a particular time in their lives. The field equations may exist in their uncontaminated purity in the text book but as soon as they are incorporated into the life of someone who can understand them, they are like corks bobbing in the sea of his or her preoccupations.24 The continuation of that life is dependent on the marshy reality of the biology of a largely mindless body – its organs keep themselves to themselves without consulting the person whose daily existence they service. The body – a bag of blood, bone and gristle, hosting urine, faeces and the like – is experienced by its subject in a way that is remote from anything corresponding to the experience of objective biological knowledge.25
There is no “what it is like” to have an item of objective knowledge. There is nothing – or nothing relevant – corresponding to “the experience of knowing that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066”. Any associated experience is accidental, a contaminant. A feeling of pride at possessing such knowledge, an image of a falling soldier, a particular light ascribed to the date are not part of the fact that the battle took place on a certain date. Unlike the subject of experience, the subject of knowledge – while owing its cognitive capacity to her body – is essentially disembodied.
We shall return to this in Chapter 8 but a final thought from Philo of Alexandria might be in order, to help us focus on the mystery of the knowing
subject who is inseparable from a body that has many functions that do not rank very highly in the cognitive realm: “Now, when we are alive, we are so though our soul is dead and buried in our body as though in a tomb. But if it were to die, then our soul would live according to its proper life being released from the evil and dead body to which it is bound.”26 He is, of course, repeating the view that has echoed down the ages, especially since Plato – Parmenides’ footnote – declared the body to be a serious obstacle to knowledge and truth.27
We have argued against a too simplistically negative account of the necessary embodiment of the knowing subject. The ascent to pure, untethered, knowledge is a loss as well as a gain; for knowledge truly to count has to be felt on the pulse as well as in the mind. We should be cautious therefore when assessing the putative constraints that the necessary residual subjectivity of the knowing subject applies to the scope and validity of knowledge. One such reason is well expressed by Nagel, where he argues that it is a mistake: “to assume that if any conception has a possessor, it must be about the possessor’s point of view – a slide from subjective form to subjective content”.28 The version of this slide we are concerned about is from the (material, biological) conditions under which the conception is formed to the content of the conception. If they were identical, then by the same token, what we would see would not only be permitted by neural activity. It would be neural activity, mysteriously seeing itself or, more precisely, seeing itself as a view identical with that which caused it – a position whose problem we have already discussed in Chapter 4.
As knowing subjects, we are in part engaged in building a picture of the sea in which we are at least partly dissolved; or of the forest in which we are a tree – or, less, a leaf. The process is made possible because there is a party other than I, the body of the I, and the outside-of-the-body: namely, the “we”. But “we” does not swallow up the “I”. Because of the unique trajectory and history of our bodies, we are not liberated from being windowless monads merely to be dissolved in the solvent of our togetherness. While we are intimately woven into the collective world, we are at the same time offset from, and able to think and act independently of, it.29
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