Philosophy and the Invisibly Near

"How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!" (Wittgenstein., Culture & Value, 39).

"Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning" ("" 16).

"The entity which in every case we ourselves are is ontologically that which is farthest" (Being and Time, 359).

"Teaching is a giving, an offering; but what is offered in teaching is not the learnable, for the student is merely instructed to take for himself what he already has" (Heidegger, "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics," Basic Writings, 275).

"[M]ost thought-provoking for our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.... The reason is never exclusively or primarily that we human beings do not sufficiently reach out and turn toward what properly gives food for thought; the reason is that this thought-provoking thing turns away from us, in fact has long since turned away from man.... And what withdraws in such a manner keeps and develops its own incomparable nearness" ("" 381).

"'Here too the gods are present'" (Heraclitus, via Aristotle, via Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism" Basic Writings, 256).

Last but not least, from the Theaetetus: "Just like Thales, Theodorus, while star gazing and looking up he fell in a well, and some gracefully witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a jest at his expense--that in his eagerness to know the things in heaven he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy. For someone of this sort has truly become unaware of his neighbor next-door, not only as to what he's doing but almost to the point of not knowing whether he is a human being or some different nursling. But what (a) human being is and in what respect it's suitable for a nature of that sort to act or be acted on that's different from all the rest--he seeks that, and all his trouble (pragmata) is in exploring it" (174a-b).

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The Heraclitus-via-Heidegger quote graced my dorm-room door, written over a pastoral sketch; and in high school I wrote a paper attempting to explain why the line from Being and Time is not paradoxical. (And it took me hours to remember where the quote was from, or where I could find it!) What I liked in Heidegger back then amounts to that one idea--that we need to think about the things that are too near to be seen properly. The rest of Heidegger...is pleasantly slow and poetic, but too foreign to actually be addressing anything 'near.' What is near, in my modern, empirical view, is something we are capable of experiencing; it's our experience as it happens--what 'phenomenology' ought to mean.

Philosophy, of course, has always looked at the simplest things and found them problematic. And indeed they are. The best way of identifying my interests is: the places where words fail us; the questions we can ask ourselves but can't answer, not from lack of information, but because there simply aren't any ways of using words that are applicable. What is it like to see red? There is something it's like to see red; you can imagine seeing something red right now. But 'red' is the only applicable word. Colors are basic. We can describe seeing colors from a detached point of view, as the reception of a wavelength on eyes with the right color-receptors; or we can describe it via metaphors to other kinds of sensory experience. But that's all.

The ordinary language philosopher could address this problem in several ways. First, he might (they are all 'he's) say that we have no use for descriptions of 'what it's like to see a color,' and that's why we can't come up with any. This strikes me as superficial. I think the fact that we have 'no use' for such descriptions (which seems itself dubious--how many people have wondered at how difficult it is to adequately describe visual experience in a way that could convey it, intact to someone else?) is itself the result of some deeper fact. The ways we use words are dependent on the ways we live, and thus ultimately on the way the world is biologically and physically made up. If butter continually changed its weight, we might not price butter by weight. Similarly the regularities in our sensation-language are not attributable only to the social uses of those words; they are attributable also to....sensations. For us to learn color terms light must reflect off surfaces in the ways it does, meeting our eyes in the ways it does, causing sensations of the various colors, which we can then react to, and coordinate our reactions, the labels we give different colors, with others. The sensations, as well as the physical makeup of the world that makes them possible, are important parts of the account.

Thus there is quite a lot 'behind' our inability to describe color-experiences in the way that we might describe the propositional content of a perceptual experience. Is it necessary that there cannot we cannot achieve more precision in conveying our own experiences to others via descriptions? That I don't know yet.

What I am most interested in doing, always, is digging into what philosophers call the 'first-person perspective,' not by taking it apart from the outside, but from inside it. I suppose I want to do this because it is a frontier, and one easily left unexplored. My attitude towards what I may find is nevertheless not unlike the attitude one might take towards empirical results. I want to get anything that touches our experience right. Thus I'm not terribly interested in giving accounts of normative notions ('knowledge,' 'right action,' 'justification') in abstraction from experience, and what determines the accounts I will want to give will be what fits with how those things figure in experience, if they do. (They don't always.) Philosophers who do conceptual analysis of normative notions are often in love with a particular view of how we should be; if I am in love with any such view it's with the view that we shouldn't be overly enamored of any ideals that prevent us from seeing our experience as clearly and completely as possible.

And there is an appearance/reality distinction here; not all descriptions of an experience are equally good. We do make discoveries. Why can we make discoveries here? That's what I want most to understand and to be able to explain. I take it for granted that the old dichotomy--sense-experience v. concepts--isn't right, but I think the Wittgensteinian/Sellarsian/McDowellian rationalists (yes! Wittgensteinian rationalists!) have gone too far. The statements we cannot 'get behind'--like my color statements above--are also statements that can't be justified. What justifies them is our experiences, our sensations, being the ones that go with 'red.' There we have a wedge between the space of concepts and that of experience; for this reason, however much concepts have a top-down effect on what we directly perceive, these concepts are, as it were, attached to something.

We can have direct misperception; and the way in which we find out we're wrong--that, say, that tree is a beech--is by being informed that in fact some part of what we see (see!) is not consistent with beechiness. The leaves are actually, if you look at them closer, not beechy. And we look at the leaves closer; or we look at our memory image of the alleged beech closer. Thus some of our 'experience' must not be wedded all the time to concepts. We have to be able to see for ourselves that something is true, and this is only possible if something in our experience is detachable from the incorrect concept-application.

I suppose what it comes down to is I think being 'empty' is much worse than being 'blind'--though a total lack of concepts is (sorry) barely conceivable. If you're 'blind,' you still have something.
Of course more often we lack one concept, or maybe a few; but we can easily learn or create some to fill the needed role. 'Blindness' must be rare indeed, limited perhaps to visual agnosics like 'John,' who never identifies anything as one of a type on sight. (Bias towards visual experience noted; I wonder whether that agnosia carries over into other modalities.)