ON SENSING AND SENSE

Transcription

1 I ON SENSING AND SENSE

2 [S]ensation consists in being moved and acted upon, for it is held to be a species of qualitative change. (Aristotle 1907: 416b) Räumlichkeit mag die Projektion der Ausdehnung des psychischen Apparats sein. Keine andere Ableitung wahrscheinlich. Anstatt Kants a priori Bedingungen unseres psychischen Apparats. Psyche ist ausgedehnt: weiß nichts davon. 1 (Freud 1999: 152) Whereas sense perception is theorized in our culture in terms of action words, Aristotle already notes the passive dimensions that come with learning about the world through the senses. He characterizes it as a process in which the perceiver is moved and impressed. We can hear this latter adjective in a double way, both as a physical process, whereby the person is qualitatively changed especially salient when light is too strong, a sound is too light, an odor too strong and when the person is affectively changed. In this context it is further noteworthy that an interesting coincidence one researchers seldom point out and highlight is that between the term we use to denote our interaction with the world, sense and the senses, and what we make of it: sense. That is, most researchers do not attend to the fact that without the living body that can be impressed, there would be no mind, no world in the way we tend to speak of, no interpretation, and no thought. At the very end of his life, Freud uttered his suspicion that the psyche is not something ephemeral, not something in the mind, not the untouchable soul, but something (physically) extended 2. Psyche is extended, he says, but it does not know it. Psyche is body, and that is precisely what escapes it (Nancy 2006: 22). Even more interestingly, it is precisely this breakaway, this escapement that constitutes the psyche. The unconscious is the extendedness of Psyche, and that, which 1 Translation: Spatiality may be the projection of the extension of the psychic apparatus. No other derivation possible. Instead of Kant s a priori conditions of our psychic apparatus. Psyche is spread out, does not know thereof. 2 Descartes calls material things res extensa, extended things, and contrasts them with res cogitans, thinking things.

3 12 PART I after Lacan nobody calls subject, is the singularity of a local coloring or of carnation (ibid: 22). The philosopher concludes from such considerations this: The body is the archi-tectonic of sense (ibid: 25, underline added). In other words, the body of sense is the sense of the body. 3 This is to say that it is not that mind finds itself a body, as it may appear from the discourses on the embodied mind, or that mind and the sense it makes somehow get into the body. Rather, it is precisely the senses of the primary, self-affecting pre-reflective body that constitute the body of sense. Without the material senses, there would be no ideality that we call sense. Sense is irremediably connected with and indissociable from our living (primary) bodies with senses. Materiality takes us to bodies and the body, their weight and weightiness, and ultimately to the sense of touch, tact, and, therefore, to contact, contiguity, contingency, and contamination. The body, corpus, is of tactile nature leading us to a Tactile corpus: skimming, grazing, pressing, pushing in, squeezing, smoothing, scratching, rubbing, stroking, palpating, groping, kneading, massaging, embracing, hugging, striking, pinching, biting, sucking, wetting, holding, letting go, licking, jerking, looking, listening, smelling, tasting, avoiding, kissing, cradling, swinging, carrying, weighing... (Nancy 2006: 82). Even those senses that are not immediately associated with the senses of touch, hearing, smelling, and tasting, are listed here together with those other experiences that directly arise from contact and tact. When we talk and write about lived experience and take recourse to descriptions that people provide of certain situations, then we already draw on a system of expression that is decidedly ideal and ideological. When we study descriptions, we do not investigate how the senses constitute what we become aware of and then describe them in this or that manner but we precisely investigate the structure of the possibilities that a language provides for accounting of experience. When we ask the students in a physics lecture what they see in a teacher demonstration and some answer I see motion and others say I ve seen nothing move then we yield descriptions. We can analyze such sentences as much as we want: all we find out are properties and possibilities that come with the English language or the properties of the language in which the discussion was held. We may say that the students differently interpreted the focal display. But this does not take us further, as I do not interpret what I see when I look out of my office window, the plum tree and the roof of the chicken coop I just see a plum tree and a chicken coop roof. That is, what such research does not give us are the underlying conditions that lead to this or that pre-noetic perception given to me in the first place, that is, before I begin to reflect and realize that what I have become aware of is a plum tree or the roof of a chicken coop. To get us out of the quagmire, we may have to by-pass language and access the senses of the body, which, following Nancy, constitute the body of sense rather than the other way around. Much of the effort in 20th-century philosophy has been devoted, actually, to the problematic of the relation between experiences and accounts thereof. Thus, Edmund Husserl showed that the intentional consciousness 3 The body here needs to be understood as the original body rather than as the transcendental body, that is, our body in the way in which we are aware of it. A third kind of body is the material one, the one Descartes calls res extensa and that we theorize in and using the sciences.

4 SENSES AND SENSE 13 of sound is tied to retention and to the capacity to make it present again, represent it. Martin Heidegger subsequently showed in a number of analyses of early, pre- Socratic Greek thought the emergence of an approach that takes the representations (das Seiende) for the real thing that has given rise to them: Being (das Sein). We actually do know of experiences where language does not intervene, when we are completely absorbed in something or in experiences that nowadays are denoted by the expressions of being in the flow, being in the groove. In these instances, we do not make this presence present (again), that is, we do not represent it, which is accompanied by some striking consequences. For example, we lose any notion of time: precisely because we do not represent it or the situation. In chapter 8, I elaborate on methods for investigating such phenomena. The methods and results of psychological and phenomenological research on perception described are quite different. Many current psychological models take an intermediate level between neuroscientific and phenomenological inquiry. However, there are suggestions (including those by philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians) that such an intermediate level for explaining perception is not necessary. A fruitful approach lies in bridging directly between neuroscientific and phenomenological studies of human experience. Conducting research through a first-person perspective constitutes a useful way of investigating phenomena in their own right but becomes especially powerful as an objective constraint on the models that third-person approaches develop. Thus, if a third-person approach is inadequate for describing what I experience, it has to be changed. First-person methods therefore provide constraints on what are suitable and useful third-person descriptions. In the four chapters that constitute this Part I, I focus on how we might investigate sense experiences seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing and what we get from such investigations. The variation of sense experiences is easy to set up through particular experimental conditions. Throughout these chapters, I invite my readers to engage in the experiments as an integral part of their reading. It is in the doing of the experiments that the sense of the writing becomes possible: It is an experimental way of allowing sense to emerge from the senses of the body. This experimental method is much more difficult and perhaps prohibitive when we get to such phenomena as (identity) crises or (physical, emotional) suffering. Even everyday phenomena, such as forgetting or falling asleep, may be more difficult to set up precisely because intending these keeps them from occurring. The harder I might try to fall asleep by thinking about it, the less I am able to fall asleep; the harder I try to forget something, the longer it stays actively with me. It is the trying, my focusing on falling asleep or forgetting as an object of consciousness, that keeps this object present in my consciousness. Some readers might ask why we might be interested in investigating basic experiences, such as the visual perception of basic shapes, basic three-dimensional figures, simple objects or the processes by means of which we learn through touch, hearing, taste, or smell. For me, it has become quite evident that I needed to better understand these basic processes, for example, when I attempted to understand what perception is like when (a) second-grade children begin to learn about the geometry of three-dimensional objects, (b) even professors near retirement do not see first-year university graphs in the way that is required for providing the correct

5 14 PART I answers, (c) someone attempts to prove that the interior angles of a triangle on a Euclidean plane add up to 180, or (d) we try to understand why touch may be a better paradigm for understanding cognition than visual perception. When I wrestled with these issues, I drew on first-person inquiries to be able to hold in check any preconceived common or scientific sense that we might have developed with respect to the phenomenon. The first-person method allows me to break with the normal perception and enact a process of radical doubt, which led me to a deeper and more selective understanding than what the literature appears to be telling me. There is another central finding about knowing and learning that comes from an exploration of the senses: whereas to construct [knowledge, meaning, sense] is a transitive verb, the verbs associated with the senses also have intransitive and passive uses that the verb to construct excludes. First, verbs such as to smell exist in transitive (e.g., I smell a rose ) and intransitive form (e.g., it smells ), which points us to the deliberative and non-deliberative acts of olfactory experience; and being affected by smell may occur both when we actively seek to smell something and when we are subjected to some smell (e.g., the odors of other people, a pulp mill). Moreover, the formulation it smells points to the object as the origin of our sensation rather than to the mind that somehow constructs the smell. Second, whereas others may construct me as a science nerd, involving the actions of others, the investigation of the senses shows that I am affected by my own actions, that is, that there are phenomena I undergo and am subject and subjected to. This is especially apparent in those situations where we attempt to sense something without sufficient caution: we burn or cut our fingers while touching something, we burn the inside of our nostrils when getting too close to a chemical, or we burn our taste buds when trying to taste something we are currently cooking. These basic sense experiences are foundational to learning and knowing. The investigation of the senses, therefore, also puts into relief and seriously questions the reigning epistemological paradigm not only in education but also in much of the social sciences: constructivism. However, such recent phenomena as aromatherapy should alert us to the fact that there are emotional and cognitive effects brought about by experiences based on very different sensory modalities, which work precisely because they by-pass cognitive, deliberate interpretation. Thus, one study that I found in the Web of Science reports that dart throwers improved performance (accuracy and consistency) after being exposed to peppermint scents as compared to a control condition and lavender scent. However, both peppermint and lavender scents significantly decreased anxiety levels. Other studies on aromatherapy for people with learning disabilities showed increased capacities to concentrate on cognitive tasks. For a good understanding of cognition, therefore, we have to ask questions including Why might there be a connection between smell and cognition? and How might this connection operate?