The Skin of Perception

Phenomenology as a Cartesian Proposition

Page II

The reason for the sensitivity is clear: We die. More precisely, we know that our bodies die, and unless the dichotomy is maintained, and maintained as a parallel dispensation—such that the two do not intersect, do not coincide at any point, but retain each a status independent of the other, even given the need for a principle of interaction across the distance of categorical difference—we die with them. What is touched by the very suggestion of the mind / body dichotomy is not just a nerve, but the nerve, for as Schopenhauer observed in a remark that sets the “fulcrum absolute,” the discretionary fixed point of speculation without which speculation is not possible (and in this case, not so discretionary), to philosophy: “Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing. . . . All religions and philosophical systems are directed principally to this end, and are thus primarily the antidote to the certainty of death which reflecting reason produces from its own resources.”

The reported responses from von Hagens to the outrage his version of the exhibition has provoked indicate a lack of awareness of the intrinsic sensitivity. His explanations regarding what he claims are the educational values of the exhibitions, the effort on his part to dispel the elitism of the medical profession and return to a time, as he sees it, in which the function of scientific inquiry was to promote the general enlightenment and during which dissection arenas held public examinations of the dead, possess a touch of blithe insouciance—in short, he gives little indication that he gets it. The tone of it all resembles the responses we often encounter from contemporary artists when they manage, as they seem to do with diminishing frequency now, to outrage the general sensitivities. (One may consult a list of Turner Prize winners for a typical roster; other line-ups will do as well.) They often respond with a “who, me?” attitude, as if not quite aware of what all the fuss is about. Their defenses and explanations are unconvincing, mere excuses tailored to the audience, the dropping of words that appear suitable for forgiveness, a vocal pantomime of penance, and particularly so in that their statements so often seem off the point—a deliberate or unconscious shifting of the question, discussing their intentions in place of their unwitting insults or abuses, coupled with a tone of naïve astonishment, which might entirely be sincere, that anything seems wrong to anyone. Other than in their implicit testimony to the insularity of the art world society—an inadvertent diagnostic, an unintended confession—these sensitive souls defend themselves by claiming a complete lack of comprehension of how anyone else feels: a distinctive confession on the part of anyone claiming to be an artist.

There is testimony to a severe lack of conviction in this. The simple fact that they are not prepared to outrage, that they claim not to get it, distinguishes them from those who have in the past found the need to outrage to make a crucial point. Think of the Surrealists, the Futurists, even the Dadaists—they knew precisely what they were doing. And of course, we know how this situation arises, how such a falling-off is there: like professionals in any field, artists now follow the money, they do what the industry asks them to do, they attempt to master the game they wish to play in order to get along in the world, to make their way, to make their living. Young artists appeal to established expectations, knowing frequently nothing of them other than that they are established expectations. The dedication is circumstantial, a commitment to whatever standards and expectations presently prevail, to whatever it is that will get them into the sub-society in which they wish to dwell. Unlike the truly dedicated, who are not slaves to circumstance but the authors of it, elsewhere they would do or have done differently. Had they been born in another place, at another time, they would have done what would have served there and then, they never would have fallen upon what they now dedicate the only life they will ever have to accomplishing. Here is the herd instinct in full flower.

Of course, one has no business speculating about the personal motives of specific individuals, von Hagens or the organizers of the exhibition under consideration here—one cannot possibly know. It is sufficiently difficult to know one’s own motives. However, the apparent tone of these defenses, the touch of blithe if bemused unconcern that seems to be there, is not anomalous—it is authorized by the age.

We live in a time of philosophical oblivion. In fact, we are in the business of philosophical smugness. We find the inherited dichotomies and the questions they entail to be quaint, as if we are smarter than the entire tradition of philosophical inquiry, as if we were naturally capable of out-thinking, by dint of our historical position, many of the greatest minds who have bequeathed us their most ardent intellectual efforts. Several months ago in these pages, I wrote about the naivety of disregarding Pascal’s horror at the infinite spaces in which we figure so little, about the continuing, the permanent pertinence of his observations. The same should be said of Descartes and his conception of the res cogitans and the res extensa. The mind / body distinction is not so easily dismissed, not so easily relegated to the scrapheap of historical reflection, not so readily dispelled with posturings about the folly of dualistic thinking, which, like poised cadavers, strike a pose of pretended intellectual animation but fail to argue an alternative formulation. To disregard out of hand Descartes’ dichotomy is comparable to shrugging off Pascal’s dread. It is simply obtuse, and, like our art, fails to comprehend how other people feel. Descartes speaks to a perception that not only has a certain self-evidence—the most rudimentary examination of the quality of circumstance demonstrates that the aspects of the mind are all categorically alike, as are the aspects of the body, and each group is categorically different from the other. Further, his perception appears to be a necessary view of the species regarding its own condition.

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The recognition of the mind / body distinction is not only necessary—necessary by all appearances to the emotional equanimity of the typical person—it is necessarily religious. For the Cartesian position postulates this world and then another world beyond this one, it posits something outside this world. And, as an intellectual formulation that requires a parallel arrangement of equal status, the dichotomy collapses, for the localization—the identification of my mind as my mind, tied to my body and no other, and vice versa—necessitates an intersection that violates the conditions of the formulation, and as a result, one of the two worlds becomes paramount. This world becomes a dependent of the other world—the mind, or what is now the soul, possesses the body as an attribute, until it doesn’t, when it is free to waft to its proper environment. The mind becomes essence. In the end, the other world becomes the truth, this world the veil of appearances, and we have the core religious proposition, and the core metaphysical proposition, as Nietzsche employed the word. Thus, the complaint concerning the violation of the sanctity of the body, a complaint that ought to be a contradiction in terms, for the body is the mundane portion of the pairing. But the body obtains its sanctity from the mind, from that of which it is an attribute, from that which provides it its nature. And thus the shock at seeing the body opened to reveal mere machinery, immediately below the surface.

And as a religious proposal, the dichotomy is reactive, or if one likes, an article of faith. One can argue it forward to tease out the implications, but one cannot argue it backwards, to work through the premises upon which it rests. There are no reasons behind it for there is no reasoning underlying it. It is a posture, an attitude, a willfulness not to think. As an article in the life of the mind, it is lifeless.

One can see this collapse throughout the exhibition. There, one is a mind, gazing upon bodies, as if we thinking, living beings—living beings among not mere models of us but actual cadavers, beings authentically like us but inanimate—were witnessing the bodies as existing elsewhere, in some other realm, as if on earth whereas we, the ones seeing them, are viewing them from the realm of truth, knowing them for what they are. We are at the eyepiece of the microscope; the body is on the slide, beneath our gaze. There, we look upon bodies as we would look upon anything else—from outside, from above, subject to our examination.

And so, with the inevitable collapse of the dichotomy—with the recognition that there must always be a collapse in the dichotomy, for the positing of a dichotomy implies a relation, a continuum of identity, an alignment of each half of the dichotomy exclusively with the other, a principle of alternatives as opposed to irrelevances, a hole in the wall between—philosophy breaks down. Thought resorts to thoughtlessness, to the refusal to reason out the conundrum. Something is wrong with the formulation.

The error is, as it must be, in the unexamined assumption. The assumption in the Cartesian dichotomy that goes uninquired is that of existence. In the initial position, each half of the dichotomy, both mind and body, is assumed to exist and to exist in a degree comparable to the other. Both are, and each is as thoroughly as the other is. The one quality both minds and bodies share is existence, and in that, and in that one attribute alone, they share an identity. The moment one recognizes the distinction between the two, one asserts the reality of each alone. Such is taken for granted, and the automatic proposition has implications, for it connotes that both mind and body are capable of existing alone, each independent of the other, if it could depend only from its own terms of constitution. Hence, the space is cleared for the supposition, at minimum, that the mind may well come to exist on its own terms, divorced of its body once it must be, that it may survive the body’s death. But this assumption of factual circumstance does not denote demonstrable fact. We see in this exhibition and could see elsewhere bodies divorced of minds, but we have never seen living human bodies that are mindless, nor have we witnessed minds apart from bodies. The alternatives are hypostatized, and there is a literalism in this—proposed as separate, the mind and body are taken to be potentially extant as separate entities, taken for granted to be in fact as proposed in theorization, and that is not the same thing. Facts are not theorizations. There is a categorical difference.

Theorizations are values and variables in a developing line of thought and need no more be capable of reification than is the square root of negative one, as long as the ultimate result of the line of thought is an illumination of a heretofore inexplicable state of affairs. The dichotomy of mind / body is credible and is not directly resolvable. Clearly, an approach differing from immediate reification is required.

An approach is available, for it presents itself upon the rejection of another unexamined assumption: that the mind / body dichotomy is a special circumstance, a problem unlike any other. Assume, rather, it is not. What we have then is a distinction between formal patterns of examination, two ways of viewing that which is not self-revealing and appears to possess contradictory qualities—two ways of mapping a problem.

Congenitally, we approach, conceive, and deliberate about our circumstances by two different strategies, what may be termed two different geometric models: we think laterally, and we think in depth, or vertically. The results of these alternate approaches are so different that we may be said to as much as live in two different worlds, for they render for us perceptible realms of utterly unlike entities, processes, calibers of existence, and principles of causal linkage whereby what we do and suffer, and the ways in which these matters come about, can be instigated, and can be prevented, are thoroughly in discrepancy.

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We as much as live two lives, if it can be said under this consideration that we live at all. Much of our confusion, much of our standard disputation, can be traced to a category confusion, tracked back to an attempt to blend or reconcile the explanatory strategies of one realm with those of the other. Much of our misunderstanding occurs in the borderland between the two lives we live.

There are two worlds we simultaneously occupy, and which we can take with equal sobriety, with equal seriousness: the world of theorization and the world of sentiment; the world of facts and the world of emotional significances, of emphases, of values, of degrees of importance; the world of logical implications and the world of moods; of argument and of narrative; of what things mean and of what things mean for us. We are, perhaps by our very nature, incapable of seeing these two realms as thoroughly divorced from each other. At minimum, we take a moment of attention in one as signifying or symbolizing some moment of attention in the other. Generally, we take them as inextricably linked together, as superimposed if not as identical. Yet, they have little in common—they are not identical, not mutually intricated. They are parallel and of divergent provenance. They are the worlds of lucidity and sentimentality.

Theorization is thought in depth, vertical thought, the attempt to build models of underlying structures of causality that are capable of accounting for the ways in which observable events come about. The principle of explanation seeks its answer in unobservable recesses, taking the approach that the motivating factors for results in the world lie within, in the heart of the event. The theory builds on the basis of hypothesis, proposing a formulation of potential causal arrangements, a geometric arrangement of interacting parts, supposing a reason for what can be seen, and appropriately refusing to assume a literal fidelity to what cannot be observed—as noted, not requiring a capability of literality regarding the internal machinery of causation. The causation is mechanical and efficient—mechanical in the sense of geometric analysis, even if the elements are immaterial rather than physically stabilized forms, and efficient in that what is proposed is a conditional necessity of inner events undirected by an intended result. The model proposes that, once the hypothetical is set into action, what would happen must happen. It is like attempting to explain the capabilities of a clock one has discovered and cannot pry the back from—one can build various dispositions of gears and pendulums and springs, but it would be folly to presume that any one of the workable constructions accurately reflects the inner workings of the found clock or the comparable turnings of the sun and moon and stars that, gauged by an accurate timepiece, have enabled sailors to navigate out of sight of land. Any supposition regarding the machinery of nature is a permanent hypothesis.

Sentiment is the thinking of emotional investment, and it is lateral. It works across the panorama of appearances, along the line of what our senses bring us, and it assumes what we witness interact with each other, thereby bringing about results. Of course, any explanatory approach will note interaction between different elements apparent to the senses, but what counts as an apparent element and as an apparent principle of interaction among the appearances of elements is dependent upon which approach is taken. The lateral approach can be termed thinking along the skin of perception. What it takes as apparent is that which appears to the uninflected human senses, primarily human sight, and the appearance that is paramount is the individual, independent, self-directed human being—the human being as an unimpeachable unit.

The human being thus becomes the measure of all things, the reference for all meaning. Things mean what they mean for us, they mean what they do to us, and how we value them is among their implications, principal among their implications. Thus, the causation sought for explanation is final—things are moved by the purposes they serve, the ends toward which they are aimed. And the principle of causation is energeticist rather than mechanical—there is a motive force directing eventualities; the automatic falling of dominos is not the issue of significance. Thereby, all perception serves as the foundation of value judgment, and all value judgment is determined by the import of things and events for our desires and purposes. The world is our story. This view of things works across the surfaces of what it observes, rather than digging for the inner machinery, an hypothesis of which would redefine by amplification the roster of accepted facts. Thus, the human being is not a set of organs and organization of tissues—when the focal length of the microscope is changed and the body dissolves into a colony of cells, something is wrong: the sanctity of the body has been violated, the soul is suddenly unapparent. Meaning is thus construed by identification, by projection, by anthropomorphization. We can recognize what there is to the degree we find it to be somewhat like us.

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