Let us now look at the second objection to the claim of irremovable, residual opacity – that our concern is not with sense-experience but with sense-making; not with perception but with a mode of comprehension that encompasses and transcends it. My speaking of the “cup” makes it a referent. As a referent, it does not have angles from which it can be, or is necessarily, viewed only partially. Indeed, as a referent, it is not the object of any specific sense: it is no more looked at than it is touched. Does this mean that the seemingly necessary otherness of the object is overcome and sense-making can proceed to ever more complete transparency? It does not; because the gains are offset by losses. Let us develop this point.
Everyday objects such as cups as they figure in everyday discourse are no longer objects of vision or of touch but instances of general types. They have been stripped of qualities such as colour and weight, not to speak of location, being within or beyond reach and use. But the journey does not stop there: the passage from actual cups to “cup” is only the first step in the ascent towards the kind of higher-level comprehensibility that is our primary concern. Allocation of an entity to a general category sets it on the way to becoming instances of, or portions of, something yet more general; for example, matter or mass-energy (if we are en route to the latest physics) or “things”, “substance”, or “stuff” (if we are thinking metaphysically or mobilizing a folk ontology). Opacity, and the associated otherness, of the world that faces us thus returns in a different guise.
The obvious next step towards cognitive transparency – reducing things to concatenations of the values of variables – will achieve too much, taking away the very face of the world. To put it this way is simply to reiterate the view from which we began; namely that the primordial sense of some thing’s being real is shot through with the intuition that has a cognitively unbiddable residue – what philosophers used to designate by the term “obstance”. For hard-bitten realists, reality is incompletely soluble in the mind, irrespective of whether we are talking about perceptions or thoughts. Pukka objects not only exist when they are not perceived or unthought of but they can never become experiences or thoughts without a remainder of the unperceived or the unthinkable. There always has to be something beyond the solvent of cognition. Some basic stuff such as matter seems to be the ultimate guarantor that experience and knowledge are “of”, or “about” that which is other than themselves.
This much may be obvious but there is another tension within the aspiration to complete sense when the project is driven by the gaze of natural science. Consider the most advanced, or at least the most widely applicable, approach to sense-making: the mathematization of the stuff of the world, as described by Quine with his characteristic wit:
Numbers and other mathematical objects are wanted in physics anyway, so one may as well enjoy their convenience as coordinates for physical objects; and then, having come thus far, one can economize a little by dispensing with physical objects … As physicalists, we have welcomed bodies with open arms … On the other hand the mathematical objects attained the ontological scene only begrudgingly for services rendered … It is ironical then that we at length find ourselves constrained to this anti-physical sort of reductionism from the side of physics itself … Physical objects, next, evaporated into space-time regions; but this was the outcome of physics itself. Finally, the regions went over into pure sets; still, the set theory itself was there for no other reasons than the need for mathematics as an adjunct to physical theory.5
The consequence of rendering the stuff of what-is transparent in this way may vastly enhance our capacity to manipulate it (for reasons that are not entirely clear) but not necessarily to advance its comprehensibility. Everyone knows that quantum mechanics – the current ne plus ultra of our account of the physical world – does not translate into anything that makes other than mathematical sense. As has often been said, anyone who thinks they understand quantum mechanics clearly does not. More alarming is this suggestion by the American physicist, Robert Geroch:
[I]t seems to be the case that physics, at least in its fundamental aspects, always moves in this one direction: fewer things making sense … In quantum mechanics … such notions as “the position of a particle” or “the speed of a particle” do not make sense. It may not be a bad rule of thumb to judge the importance of a new set of ideas in physics by the criterion of how many of the notions and relations that one feels to be necessary one is forced to give up.6
The price of transparency seems therefore to be loss rather than a gain of intelligibility – as well as a loss of substance, the evaporation of a world that is being faced.
Something rather similar happens when we consider the evolution of the scientific account of the insentient powers that are thought to be expressed in the unfolding of the world – in the succession of events, and the apparent necessities connecting them. The first step is the abolition of agency from the natural world (an aspect of the displacement of Mythos by Logos): God, Providence, Fate, Fortune and Necessity are superseded by energies and forces that lack intentions, meanings and purposes; mindless causes that imbue matter with normless regulation. The first law of motion – F = ma – is light on sense, although it has gigantic scope. This, and other laws, pave the way to a unification of those energies and forces with which we are familiar because we can perceive them directly – light, heat, inertial, gravitational – into energies and forces with which we are unfamiliar: electromagnetic, intranuclear. Alternatively, familiar energies and forces are transformed out of all recognition as when gravity becomes curvature of space-time. The ascent to greater generality and power may take us even further adrift – shedding not only a Divine Mind underwriting the sense of the world but ultimately every aspect of ordinary sense. We see the limits to sense most blatantly in those nodes where laws intersect; namely, the constants of nature which are scotomata in the would-be all-seeing gaze. Nothing could be more contingent than the speed of light or the ratio of the mass of a proton to that of an electron.
They illustrate how arriving at the fundamental level is to run into a brick wall of brute what is. Indeed, that which is susceptible to further explanation seems to fall short of fundamentality. As if this were not bad enough, there is an additional conflict within explanation. Any explanation that seems to encompass the totality of things needs to leave particulars behind: explanatory terms, of necessity, leave out individual features. The tension between ascent to general explanation and truth and, necessarily particular, actuality is reflected in the notion of matter which seems to be at once inscrutable, because it is instantiated only in particular bodies, and at the same time is absolutely basic and general. The relationship between matter as stuff that is bumped into and “matter” as a concept that appears in scientific discourse is vexed, and has been a happy hunting ground for those who wish to engage in the debate about realism and anti-realism of science.
We have moved – risen or fallen according to taste – a long way from world-pictures in which what happens makes sense because it is willed by a Mind making it happen; or even because it is a consequence of the way things are sewn together as we see them in everyday life. Geroch’s observation about quantum mechanics seems more widely applicable: as the human mind advances into the universe, mind seems to retreat from it. The contribution of the theory of evolution to the disinfecting of the natural world of agency, intention, even consciousness, is only a small part of a much more general trend. The bigger picture is of the advancing mind encountering its Other at every turn, as it gives up qualities for quantities and even intelligibility in favour of generality of application. In extending its gaze, the collective consciousness extends the sense of blankness. We have to live with the trade-off in our world-picture between that which is intuitively satisfying and that which delivers extraordinary predictive power and hugely enhances our capacity to control nature. This is scarcely an unexpected outcome, given that scientific advance has been predicated on an ability and willingne
ss to set aside our common-sense intuitions. But there comes a point at which the divorce between how the world looks and feels and our scientific understanding of it comes to feel like a deep cognitive wound.
Thus, the first partner in the relationship of the subject facing the world from the (comparatively safe) distance of knowledge: the known object. What of the other member of the duo – the knowing subject? The story here is, if anything, even less promising.
To face the world, it is necessary to have a (literal) face, that is part of a body equipped with senses, to give it location, to lay fleshy claim to space that will make a conscious being a viewpoint. The embodied subject is something of a cognitive mess, being an ontological chimera that the literal-minded translate into a mind distinct from, and caught up in, a body. For many, the mess can be tidied up by neural accounts of the mind in which it is able faithfully to represent the world in virtue of being causally wired into it. Neural activity, it is claimed, is both a set of events clearly located in space and time, and a knowing consciousness, an openness to the world that belongs to the space of sense-making. In Chapter 4 and elsewhere, we have criticized the very idea that causal interaction between the world and the brain will generate an image of the world in the brain. But even if such an account were true, its picture of the mind as being woven out of the mindless physico-chemical operations of the brain, with the brain being innocent of what the person is up to and the person innocent of what her brain is doing, would highlight the fact that the human body, the condition of the knowing subject, is for the great part inhuman.7
The relationship between my body (a thing that is) and me (a person that “am”) – which we have touched on in Chapter 5 – has many dimensions which are worth a brief visit.8 There is a sense in which I am my body, inasmuch that it cannot be separated from me. When I am standing up, this is not distinct from my body being in the upright position. My body does not “stand in” for me. This identity is even clearer when I am cowering in anticipation of a blow. And much of the time we are (or am) parts of our body, as when we smile, or grip something, or dance.9
Nothing however is entirely straightforward. To take a trivial example, I can put on a smile in order to deceive someone, thus using my face – as if it were a kind of tool – as a signalling system. My whole body engaged in pushing a car can become an instrument which I utilize strategically to maximize my pushing power. And I can exploit my weight instrumentally, as when I sit on my opponent’s head in a fight (something I have not done recently) or on an overfilled suitcase I am trying to close (something I do all too frequently). The boundary between being my body or parts of it and using it is highly labile even during a single action. And one part of my body can use another – as when I use the left hand to steady the right or one part of a hand to support something the fingers are working on, or my left hand stabilizes the notebook on which my right hand is writing.
It will be noted that use is woven with possession: “my” hand, etc. Use and agency are two dimensions of a kind of distance from identity-with-this-body. They intersect with my awareness of “my” appearance. I look at and judge my face in the mirror through eyes that are not exactly my own but belong to an imaginary observer and I may manipulate it to make or ward off a certain impression. Woven in with body-as-possession, body-as-tool, and body-as-object-of-judgement seen through my own or others’ eyes, or my own eyes assuming the attitude of another, is the body-as-object-of-knowledge. Once we enter the realm of knowledge we are in very tangled terrain indeed.
The most direct experience of my body as an object of knowledge is when I note that my skin is cold to touch, even though I don’t feel cold, or I am surprised that it is damp despite my being unaware of sweating. I can discover the colour of my skin, even be surprised at it, and other features that I do not sense directly. Beneath the skin, the knowledge relation becomes even more tangled. Evidently, we cannot have direct knowledge of that which we cannot even sense and much of my body, not being sensed, is inapparent to me most of the time. The greater part of my fleshly being (for example my spleen, my bone marrow, my appendix, are typical denizens) never figures in my consciousness unless something goes wrong. Raymond Tallis’s body is largely terra incognita to Raymond Tallis. Mindlessness begins at home. My brain is enclosed in a skull that is insentient bone that has grown and moulded itself mindlessly. My grey matter is unaware that it is grey, my cortex does not know that it looks like a walnut. My body is for the most part “my-less” and “me-less” as well as mindless.
The darkness alienating me from my flesh may be illuminated by the expertise of others, expertise I may myself share. Foremost among this body of knowledge is the vast corpus of scientific facts about the human body in particular and living tissues in general. Seen through the lens of this knowledge, my body becomes anyone’s body, even though that “anyone” is also inescapably me. There are basic macroscopic facts such as my height, weight, and temperature and how these relate to desirable or recommended norms. There are facts about the way my organs work together and separately. There are facts about the dozens of physiological and biochemical parameters regulated by homeostatic mechanisms. There are facts about blood, lymph, other secretions, interstitial tissues, and so on. All of these bear directly on our well-being, our capacity for action, and our chances of survival, although most of us are unaware of most of them, and none of us can be aware of all of them. As organisms, we are the site of innumerable interlocking mechanisms. When we drill down to the level of cells and of their microscopic interactions we enter a labyrinth of pathways described in thousands of flow diagrams representing a bewildering dialectic between “the soup” and “the scaffolding”, the minute drops of chemical brew regulated by cytoskeleton on the border of structure and function.10
In the multi-layered darkness of my body grow the seeds of a multitude of shocks and surprises. Some are joyful, like the mysterious pleasure of orgasm; many are neutral, such as the feeling of satiety or of simply carnally being there; and many of course are unpleasant in the extreme. The latter may be straightforward, such as the swelling that follows its own course after we have turned over an ankle; more obscure as when a ruptured artery results in loss of speech and the capacity to make cognitive sense of the world; and yet more occult as in the case of impaired metabolism of purines resulting in deposition of uric acid crystals in a joint with agonizing results. In the darkness, too, may be prepared the ultimate shock that will bring all shocks to an end.
Thus, the incarnate subject: someone tied to something that breathes, aches, feels warm, stands up, is pleasured, urinates, and does all those things that are necessary to keep it capable of doing all the things it needs or merely wants to do, as it faces the world. Given the vexed and largely unconscious relationship that this partner to the cognitive relationship has to itself, or to the body that makes it possible, it may seem astonishing that the subject is not irremediably cognitively curdled. How can this salivating, pulsing, aching, sweating, mass of flesh, scintillating with showers of sensations from within as well as without, heir to a thousand ills and wells, wake up to the world sufficiently to arrive at the general theory of relativity that caused Einstein to marvel at the miracle of the comprehensibility of the world and set this book on its path of inquiry? To try to understand this, let us return to vision.
When I see the world clearly, with unimpaired vision, my body is out of the way. My eyes are invisible, my head is in the background, and the remainder of my carnal being is simply implicit as the physical and physiological support for my head. Such telereception enables me in a modest, intermittent, and conditional way, to transcend the flesh of which I am composed – and all the immediate physical self-presence it has that would otherwise occlude the world-as-scene – retaining it only as a cognitive partner. The intentionality of perception (dominated by vision) opens a crack in Being, such that part of it – a subject – faces it as a world populated by beings, transformed into “my surroundings”, and ulti
mately into the theatre of my activity and my ultimate destiny. This also opens the distance between the incarnate or embodied subject and the flesh of which it is made. The relations of possession (the body or parts of it as “my such-and-such”), explicit agency (my body or parts of it as tools), judgement (“my appearance”, “my performance”) and so on that I have discussed, are dimensions of that distance.
But that is not all. Between me and my body, and between me and that part of what-is that becomes my world, innumerable third parties intervene. The primordial manifestation of their presence is their reciprocating and reciprocated gaze. It is your gaze (before me in reality or in the idea of it) that helps to make the body that I am into a body that I have and that which I see, into something that belongs to all seers and consequently to objective, or at least intersubjective, reality. It fastens my seeing to a viewpoint that is itself located in a place in shared reality; and my mind in a community of minds. It is out of the latter, and not the sweating, pulsing, etc., flesh, that my world becomes less egocentrically defined as “the world”, a place of participation. Our individual understanding of the world, thus made aware of its individuality, its partiality, is equipped to begin its ascent through the lower slopes of general understanding towards a gaze implicit in the great cognitive achievements of science. An objective world, as the asymptote of inter-subjective reality, looms into view and grows beyond the bounds of the body and the sphere of its sensibility. It is with this assistance (whose medium is the semiosphere in which knowledge is shared through linguistic and many other kinds of signs) that we progress from sense experience, via that which is not present to our senses but made present through the testimony of individual or anonymous others, to world-pictures. While individually we never escape our bodies, collectively we can transcend them; and individually we can access collective transcendence.
Logos Page 24