“The animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in the same way as the fissures and limestone formations. But they are not elsewhere. Pushed forward here, held back there, held up by the wall’s mass they use so adroitly, they spread around the wall without ever breaking from their elusive moorings in it. I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I do at a thing; I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.164).
As we look over the visual scene before us, and our eyes flick and drift from one fixation point to another, but sooner or later, we come to experience ourselves as ‘seeing something’ — and sometimes, as with Merleau-Ponty’s experience of the cave-paintings, to see such ‘somethings’ as expressing a meaning, as exhibiting a more that isn’t objectively present in the paint on the wall. However, it is not easy to ‘catch ourselves in the act’ of coming-to-see such somethings; in our everyday experience, we are not at all conscious of the process that leads to our seeing them, but conscious only of the result of this process. Hence we all too easily talk of it in after-the-fact terms; but this means that we get the process back to front — we try to understand a process in terms of its products.
We can, however, begin to get a before-the-fact sense of what is involved in coming to see a well-formed ‘objective’ result by resorting to situations in which the normally smooth-running process seems at first to be inoperative, situations in which we find it difficult to produce expected results. Encountering an autostereogram is just such a circumstance. At first, in looking over it, we can make nothing of it; we are bewildered, and we might easily come to dismiss it as a nonsense. But then others tell us: “No, if you persist, you can see a 3-D figure in it.” Indeed, some will go further and not only describe in detail what can be seen, but also give hints, such as ‘go glassy-eyed’, ‘start with your nose on the figure’, or tell of how to ‘squint’ ones eyes so as to create a set of ‘fixation points’ — points at which the two different views of our two eyes are brought into a clear, common focus — appearing either in front of, or behind, the plane of dots on the printed on the page.
Gradually, in looking over such displays, our body seems to teach us a way of looking such that we can come to see ‘something’ in the seeing, a ‘something’ appears within the act of seeing. Indeed, as Goethe has it: “Every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us” (Goethe quoted in Amrine, p.47). What we ‘see’ is ‘there’ in the relations between our outgoing visual activities of ‘looking’ and their incoming ‘results’ — where our outgoing ways of looking are directed, at first, in the expectation of ‘seeing something at all’, and later, in the expectation of ‘seeing something in particular’. We do not, as the standard empiricist story has it, simply see what is ‘out there’ to be seen — as the plethora of recent “invisible gorilla alertness tests,” “person swapping, or “change blindness” experiments show (see http://youarenotsosmart.com/2009/11/06/change-blindness/).
According to the standard story, seeing the world is a purely sensory experience. But as we can see above, the array of visual stimuli (the somewhat disorderly ink-marks on the paper), remain the same whether we can come-to-see a ‘cube-shape’ in one and a ‘camel-shape’ in the other or not. But ‘where’ are these ‘shapes’ located? They both seem to be ‘behind’ the paper-plane, and as we draw away from the page, they seem to retreat further behind it.
The two-worlds picture below is different. By holding a pencil point in front of the two worlds picture and focussing on it, so that the left picture is superimposed on the right, you can create a third 3D world floating in front of the paper-plane, which moves towards you as you move further away — an image which we are at great pains to say where it is (Merleau-Ponty). Clearly, there is more to seeing than meets the eye. Contrary to our after-the-fact accounts, what we ‘see’ is in the seeing and not ‘out there’ simply on the page.
What else, then, is at work in organizing our seeing such that we ‘see’, so to speak, only what we are looking for? Standard after-the-fact accounts have it that this work is done by ideal forms or shapes, ‘hidden behind appearances’, forms which, in practice, are described in terms of commonalities, regularities, nameable patterns, concepts, in short, in terms of abstractions. But what we see it in these figures is not at all general, it is quite particular and unique, i.e., not categorizable; it is seen in the same way by everyone (eventually) — as in the strange shaped figure in the display below:
How can this be? We seem here to be tapping into a very basic, embodied human capacity. As our gaze “wanders in it as in the halos of Being” (Merleau-Ponty), we gather fragments, sequentially, here and there, at different moments in time, yet in such a way that each fragment gathered is related to our bodily orientation at the time of its gathering; and gradually, with no specific intention other than to ‘see something’, a specific ‘thisness’ or ‘thatness’ comes into view.
The meaning-making process involved is, I think, similar to the hermeneutical process involved in our reading a text. As we move from one anticipation arousing word to the next connected to it, a flowing continuity of intra-connected anticipations and partial satisfactions begins to emerge.
The process begins with our focussing on an indeterminate textual whole as the unique whole it is, known to us only globally as situated within a particular genre (as a novel, textbook, instruction manual, etc). We then proceed to conduct a step-by-step movement, from part-to-whole and back again, in such a way that an already partially specified internally articulated order is gradually internally articulated further to accommodate the particular, discernible details in the original global whole relevant to an overall ‘end in view’. In the process, one’s understanding of what a particular ‘something’ is, i.e., what a particular detail means, is clarified by ‘placing’ it within the larger whole within which it has a part to play.
Thus, clearly, in such a process as this the hermeneneutical unities we constitute here are not at all like abstract generalities, defined in terms of a few distinctive features common to many instances; nor are they at all like objective, nameable patterns, observable out in the world at large; they are quite particular unities of unmerged particularities, within which the particularities are inter-linked with each other without losing their particularity. In other words, they possess a specific indeterminacy, and as such, they are open to being developed further, but only in already specific ways. In being already partially determined, they cannot just be determined further as we please, at each moment, only certain next steps are felt to be possible.
William James (1897/1956), also with a concern similar to mine here, used our sense of the space in which we live our lives — a “very paragon of unity” (p.265) — as one of “the three great continua in which for each of us reason’s ideal is actually reached” (p.264) — the continua of memory or personal consciousness, being the other two. In such realms “continuity reigns, yet individuality is not lost” (p.265), he insists. “In the realm of every ideal,” he suggests, “we can begin anywhere and roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity. Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong to each other by inward kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers of reaction, to see is to approve and understand” (p.264). Indeed, we can, so to speak, ‘zoom in’ and ‘zoom out’, to see more detail ‘close up’ or less to see ‘the larger whole’ — and perhaps further, to see the larger whole in its larger context.
Arriving at such unities, such concrete imaginative universals, cannot be done, after-the-fact, simply by an uncontrolled amassing of information (facts) — for they will remain unorganized into a unity — nor by making observations controlled by a pre-established conceptual framework — as the unique nature of the bewilderment we face in the circumstance will be ignored. The only way to avoid these two disastrous reductions, is by investigators coming to a qualitative sense of a situation as a whole. In short, we need to articulate the nature of the felt tension that a specific bewildering circumstance arouses in us, in linguistic terms intelligible to all involved within it; because, only if all involved can anticipate each others possible next steps, will they each be able to coordinate their actions with those of the others around them. In a flowing, not yet fully determined world, this ‘scene-setting’ activity must be prior to all else that we do, for only if all concerned come to operate from within the same holistic unity, in relation to the same particular imaginative universal, will all concerned by able to situate their concerns within the same shared space.
References: Amrine, F. (1998) The metamorphosis of the scientist. In D. Seamon and A. Zajonc (Eds.)
Goethe's Way of Science: a Phenomenology of Nature, pp.33-54. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
James, W. (1897/1956)
The Will to Believe. New York: Dover.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Eye and Mind in
Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, translated by Carleton Dallery (1964), and edited, with an Introduction by James M. Edie . Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, pp.159-190.
Simons, D.J. & Rensink, R.A. (2005) Change blindness: Past, present, and future.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(1): 16-20.
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