On the nature of evidence: revelation or gravitas?

Husserl distinguishes two types of evidence: "self-evidence" and "indication".  That which is "self-evident" is "seen" with "insight" and "clarity".  The idea of clarity and distinctness as the defining characteristics of evidence goes back to Descartes, at least.  That which is an "indication" signals something else; indications "point to" or "press upon" or "motivate" us conclude or presume something regarding something other than that which indicates.

If we are to take seriously that all knowledge is corrigible; if we are to be truly respectful of concepts such as "historicality" and "culture" and "the social," then we must grant that a perfectly secure grasp on meaning is impossible, that the ideal of self-evidence is precisely that, and ideal.  More importantly, it is the ideal of indication and not somehow different in kind, as Husserl asserts.  Heidegger, perhaps, begins to grasp this, yet remains committed to the metaphors of "clearing" and "shining."  Merleau-Ponty develops this theme most adequately.  He grasps the essential tension between the drive for clarity and self-evidentness--indeed, it is to be celebrated and valued--and the fact that this drive is but one amongst many that compete for attention, pushing and pulling our conscious lives down various paths.  Any phenomenal character of "self-evidence," of "insight," "grasping," or "clarity," is just motivation to the highest degree.  It is better characterized by "heaviness" and other gravatational metaphors.  That which we seem to grasp with the utmost clarity are really that which we are most committed to, that which we cannot help but take to mean a certain something. 

What Pauses my Gaze? (part 2)

Part 1 of my reply to the question “What pauses my gaze?” arrived at the general conclusion that tension leading to discomfort is one way in which a work of art can grip the viewer. The work of Francis Bacon reaches out and grasps me, which is not always a pleasant experience. Here, in part 2, I will move in the opposite direction, considering how a work of art grips the viewer calmly. Whereas Bacon’s work stops me in my tracks and takes hold of me, other works extend an inviting hand, appealing to the viewer precisely because of the comfort they invite. Thus, perhaps it is better to say “caress” than “grip” or “grasp.”

The work of the gaze is bound up with what Merleau-Ponty calls the “motility” of the body—i.e., the “motor significance” that the movements of our bodies hold for us. We have a non-conceptual, pre-reflective awareness of possibilities entailed by the various ways we can move our bodies. If we approach something, its details come into view more sharply. If we move away from it, we gain a broader view of the thing and the background which makes it stand out. We walk around things with the tacit anticipation of learning more about them. Our understanding of the world is pre-figured by the motility of the body.

The various ways the movements of my body condition what shows up for my gaze, revealing the importance of depth. Merleau-Ponty calls depth “the most existential of all dimensions,” in that it “announces a certain indissoluble link between things and myself” (Phenomenology of Perception, 298). The ever-increasing “screened” existence of contemporary life sacrifices the depth of experience for the sake of presenting information or content in an efficient, uniform manner. Representing something on a two-dimensional surface—“screening”—is without a doubt a great step forward for humanity. Screening arranges content in terms of breadth, and not depth. Breadth perceived as a relation belong solely to objects, thus removing, to a high degree, the perspectival involvement of the subject. In this limited space, I will not bother fleshing out all of the pros and cons of this sort of flat representation. I will just assume it.

However, as Merleau-Ponty’s words indicate, something important is lost amidst this screened existence. The basic motor significance that things hold for us is the result of the inextricable connection between our bodies and the world. Thus, the second part of my reply to the question, “What pauses my gaze?” is this: the promise of depth. Rather than grasping me in a state of tension, as Bacon’s works do, art that reaches out and offers the experience of depth pauses my gaze with a calm caress. How can artists, or designers of artifacts in general, achieve such an effect?

I think that a certain group of artists, designers, and fabricators are taking the phenomenological principles outlined above seriously. This can be found in the work of Simon Penny, namely his Fugitive 2, where the work of art envelops the viewer in an experience imbued with the motor significances prevalent in everyday experience.

The movements of the viewer have direct and immediate consequences for what appears. An essential feature of this sort of work is an emphasis on calmness, insofar as there are little to no instructions required. In other words, the viewer or user is not faced with a daunting learning curve. The learning is intuitive rather than laborious.

A perfect example of this feature I am calling “calmness” (or perhaps simply “intuitiveness”) can be found in the design of systems like the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinnect. Think of how the gaming experience for these systems differs from the experience of a typical video game. Typical video games rely on behaviorally pairing finger movements with images on a screen. It takes a while to master such games, and there is no way to learn them other than to memorize which combination of buttons is appropriate in a given situation. One instructs a novice Kinnect user, on the other hand, on how to play, say, a boxing game, by simply saying: “Act like you are boxing.”

How can this existential mode of interaction be elicited by the work of art? I have already mentioned Penny’s work, but it relies heavily on expensive technology. Sculpture affords walking around to better understand. Certain sculptural forms invite various kinesthetic, sensori-motor based perceptual attuning. Can painting do the same? I have difficulty answering this question. I would love to hear from others on this, especially painters. Can a painting appeal to one’s gaze in the same manner described through Penny’s works and Microsoft Kinnect? Is its flat objectual existence inherently limiting in this regard? Perhaps it could be said that painting grip the viewer in that they are best viewed from a single, stationary perspective; whereas sculpture and video-art installations such as Penny’s pause one’s gaze by calmly caressing the viewer. These works of art work through a certain intuitive appeal, based on the motor significance an object holds for one’s body. These works engage our bodies. We explore and understand them through the motility of the body. Where we were once gripped, we are allowed room to play.

The New Philosophy of Mind

Despite the popularity of criticizing Descartes’ understanding of the mind, philosophers and theorists remain in the shadow of Descartes. This is evident from the fact that endorsing a theory of mind largely means congratulating its author for being “thoroughly anti-Cartesian,” while criticism typically amounts to a theory’s remaining “too Cartesian.” Amidst the contemporary rush to de-center the mind and overthrow the Cartesian paradigm, two distinct trajectories emerge: the body and the environment. These days, there is nothing particularly radical to the assertion that the mind is thoroughly embodied. This is accepted as fact, with debates focusing on the conceptual particularities and the empirical substantiations. Slightly more radical is the idea of “the extended mind”—succinctly articulated by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in their 1998 paper by the same name—which de-centers the mind not only from the skull, but from the entire organism. Key to both trajectories are analyses of the complex set of causal relations that constitute cognition. In these analyses, something counts as a component of cognition if it plays a significant role in the causal network that enables a certain cognitive task. Debates in this field have largely focused on how significant a certain feature of the body or the environment must be in order to be counted among the causal components of cognition. For instance, the presence of oxygen is obviously an enabling condition for cognition, insofar as an organism requires it to be alive. For Clark and Chalmers, however, oxygen is not sufficiently proximal to the cognitive functions in question to actually be counted as a component of mind. Were we to extend the criterion of causal proximity too far, we would end up with a rather trivial insight, as all of the basic laws of nature would be included in cognition.

How then, are we to determine a criterion of causal proximity for determining whether a feature of the body or environment is to count as a component of cognition? This question exposes the shaky ground that theories of embodied and extended mind stand on. Malcolm MacIver, who argues that the unique structure of bat ears is responsible for a kind of non-neural cognition, falls prey to the same (ultimately Cartesian) presupposition as Clark and Chalmers when he reasons that “although we may not have a clear definition of cognition, we have some intuition about when we are closer to it or further away from it.” Indeed, we do have “some intuition” about proximity, but it is more likely than not based upon a Cartesian presupposition about what counts as cognition in the first place. I propose that we build on Descartes' insights rather than seek to demolish them. More specifically, I wish to focus on Descartes' conclusions concerning the consciousness that characterizes our cognitive states. Strictly defining cognition in functional terms (as contemporary rhetorics of embodiment and environmental embeddedness typically do) leaves out an essential property of mind--its irreducible qualitative and subjective character. The phenomenological tradition, especially Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, have never lost sight of this essential feature of mind, and thus provides a logical starting point for the reorientation that I am calling for. This is not to totally discount the value of functional analyses of cognition. To deny functionalism is not to deny function (as David Woodruff Smith often reminds us). However, if we wish to have an adequate understanding of cognition, we must account for its embodiment and environmental embeddedness without losing sight of what it is like to think--i.e., we must do the phenomenology of embodiment and the phenomenology of being-in-the-world. Only in this way can we gain a clearer understanding of our intuitions regarding what cognition is, thus putting us in a position to evaluate precisely how Cartesian we ought to be.