The Skin of Perception

Phenomenology as a Cartesian Proposition

Page III

The roots of this approach to the world can be traced back to Aristotle, in his definition of the soul as “the form of a natural body having life potentially within it. . . . it is ‘the essential whatness’ of a body.” Of course, what Aristotle means by “soul” is something closer to our sense of “identity”: that which makes a thing, in this case a natural thing, what it is, and thus an aspect that is an essence, what would be lost were that thing fashioned as something else. Yet, it is to the point that his immediate example is an axe, supposed as a natural body. Were it not fashioned by its nature as an axe, it would in fact not be an axe, but it is important to note that the entire proposition depends on an example of something that is defined by its human use—only we use axes and they are axes only in the orbit of our use of them and for them. From the supposition of a natural object with an innate human use tumbles a series of remarkable implications of thought, but that is a subject for another time. What matters here is that this approach is quite different from Plato’s geometric analyses of the laws by which, among other things, the stars and planets operate—the music of the spheres. As is so often the case, the two giants lay our options open before us.

It should also be noted that this is precisely the view of things that Nietzsche assaulted, in numerous places but perhaps nowhere so clearly as in section 142 of Daybreak. It is the human identification with the world that is the source of error. He tells us we are like the Danish king who “was wrought up to such a degree of warlike fury by the music of his minstrel that he leaped from his seat and killed five people of his assembled court: there was no war, no enemy, rather the reverse, but the drive which from the feeling infers the cause was sufficiently strong to overpower observation and reason.” Like the king, we infer the cause of things from the feeling we have of them, and the feeling comes from identification, what we now call projection: “Man has even applied this interpretation of all movements and lineaments as deriving from intention to inanimate nature—in the delusion that there is nothing inanimate.” We sense motives and monsters everywhere around us; we sense ourselves everywhere around us. In this view, the universe is us.

The difference between the lateral and the vertical approach is the difference between emotion and thinking, the first being implicitly projective and the other coolly analytic. It is the difference between the Romantic and the Classical in art, the first presenting the drama of the universe aimed at the isolated individual and the other a colder, more sophisticated, more reserved response to a depth of perception, which often struggles with a complexity to things beyond our comprehension and that labors to move the sympathies beyond an easy identification with anything observable, a “self-overcoming” that begins to appear not as an instruction to surmount our weaknesses of will and endurance but an attempt to leave behind our, so far, congenitally human-centered view of the world, what in some quarters is termed the “anthropocentric” view, to move beyond the sense that the feeling we have for things discloses their intrinsic causes and that the inanimate universe is staring back at us, that it is staring specifically and solely at we who stare at it—that that is the story we live. And it can be argued, in the beginning of an accounting of why so many Modernist artists claimed to be Classicists, that Modernism was, or is, an attempt at the same self-overcoming, possibly instigated in many instances by the influence of Nietzsche. Abstract painting can be seen as the try at presenting the world beyond the vision through human purposes and the interpretation by human needs. And abstract literature can make often the same claim. The literary equivalent of the human proposition is the technique of anthropomorphization—the animation of the inanimate for the sake of a vibrant, animated portrayal. It is the stock-in-trade of mediocre writing, for all its appearances in works of excellence. The primary Modernist examples would come from Joyce: Ulysses can be viewed as a novel finally withdrawing all central dependence on anthropomorphization, and Finnegans Wake a proposition that the aesthetic inflection of portrayal and the animation of the inanimate is a strange dream, an endless nightmare.

It is the difference between culture and science, for science is the search for credible—meaning workable, serviceable—hypotheses of deep structures, and culture is the world we construct around us, the world of human purposes and imports: a credible proposition so long as one takes nothing of it as fact, which is the purview of the scientific approach. (Fate is not a fact; it is a feeling.) And it is the difference between Heideggerian Phenomenology and philosophy. Like science, and in the areas science leaves for it to operate, philosophy is the search for hypothetical deep structures. Phenomenology, as the identification of the nature of things with their self-presentation within the range of human perception, on the stage of the human drama—as Dasein—is the anthropocentric view, the vision of the universe as a human event, for, as has been argued in these pages before, it locates the range of objective facts (if they can be said in this view to exist at all) within the circle of human perceptions rather than localizing perception within the confines of the objective world. It is we who envelop the universe, and the error becomes clear when psychology is introduced into the considerations: This is the error of narcissism, of failing to recognize where one’s mind ends and where the world begins.

Thus, the lateral view of things, the human-centered view, is a fairy tale, because it does not work, and it does not work because, to put it simply, facts are facts. We may perceive as we perceive, and claim ourselves the denizens of the world as we perceive it, but our bodies exist beyond that perimeter, we exist beyond that perimeter, and our actions can involve consequences that impinge upon our perceptions. They can alter the world of perception; they can decimate it, and us. We can know what we know, but we cannot be what we know, for a dichotomy is installed, entailed because the world of perception cannot be hermetically sealed. We exist beyond it, and the decisions we make, acted out in a world that is, in fact, not of our making, are capable of intruding upon what we perceive, of reconfiguring for us what we perceive. That is the lesson regarding Phenomenology—it cannot save us from ourselves, and in establishing the dichotomy between what our minds perceive and what our bodies commit as action, in separating the body from the mind such that the body is in a position for its actions and their results to invade the mind’s world of perception, to breach that “world,” Phenomenology is a Cartesian postulate. And thus, Phenomenology leaves us to recognize that there is an entire world that feels real, and is not.

And it is a fairy tale, and a proposal of the comfort of religion—it is a version of the religious impulse itself—because it is the proposition of our very existence. Under the microscope, we cannot find ourselves. At one level of magnification, we are individual bodies. Change the focus and there are colonies of cells, or geometric associations of molecules, or something more vaporous still. We are a choice of magnification, which makes us a discretionary appearance, one among many possible in the same localization of space and time. That is the vertical view. The lateral view renders us in that it renders everything as being about us—we exist only in reference to ourselves, only as an arbitrary proposition. We are a circular argument.

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The alternative to the naïve assumption of individual human presence, and thus to Phenomenology, is the conception of something existing that must, presumably, believe it is us in order to survive. I think, therefore something is, and that something thinks it is me. Or, as I once wrote in some other context: I sometimes think the brain is a parasite living inside an animal over which it deludes itself into thinking it has control.

Nietzsche saw this, as well. The realization that not only are we not the focus of the story of things, but that we do not exist in any unqualified sense, runs throughout his work. It is the tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy—the recognition of the impossibility of our own existence as individual beings, the recognition of the inadmissibility of the principium individuationis, of the existence of any individual thing—and it more soberly, and far less soberly, emerges in the first section of The Gay Science, in which Nietzsche realizes the folly of all our tragedies, our values, our ideals, our seriousness, and sees the human comedy as a comedy serving the preservation of the species. “Even laughter may yet have a future. I mean, when the proposition ‘the species is everything, one is always none’ has become part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become accessible to all at all times.” For Nietzsche, the animal, the beast, that must believe it is us is the species, and it can be complained this is a step too literal. (What unimpeachable facts do we have that even the species is real? Because we see there is one? And what makes it one?) But the point is much the same. The human dramas we live through as individuals serve a purpose of something other than us as individuals. And the force of the argument, the thrust of fact that demonstrates an achieved point to it all, is, unironically, a Cartesian one, again a revision of “I think, therefore I am”: “Still it is proven that [the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species] has preserved our race so far.”

And so the two approaches of the human-centered and the theoretical, the lateral and the vertical probe of hypothetical depths, are not revelations of two aspects of reality but two modes of comprehension, both inadequate to the challenge of the real, even of our own reality, or the reality of that which proposes us to ourselves. They are the mark of the inaccessibility of the real, and by them, considered in recognition of each other, we come upon not the limits of the world but the limits of our ability to conceive the world—modes of thought revealing of the edges and the characteristics of thought. It is all a Kantian exercise in the end, and a communication to ourselves that, as perceiving and thinking creatures, at least to all appearances, we live in a bell jar of hypotheses and delusions, and the world, including us, is somewhere else.

We cannot hypothesize and hypostatize simultaneously, or we will not continue to live. We exist now at a remarkable historical confluence. It is the folly, one among many, of cutting-edge philosophical thought, of Postmodern thought (if that term retains any meaning), that the Age of Reason is far in the past. But it is not. Reason as a common practice—theorization as, if nothing else, a tempering influence on the impulse to hypostatize our feelings about the world, to infer innate cause from feeling—is far from well rooted. The Age of Reason has barely begun, and we are clearly living through a surging of the Age of Faith. Perhaps the Age of Faith is in its death throes, but it is evident that we now exist at the intersection of the two, and a battle is raging.

It is a war between the opposing components of the dichotomy—the dichotomy in our means of understanding. It is the Cartesian moment writ large, as potentially an historical cataclysm. It is what we see in “BODIES... The Exhibition,” in the posed display of flayed cadavers—for in the final analysis, that is what we have—poised to pretend to be us and exposed to reveal what underlies us and is not us: the skull beneath the skin, the machinery below the surface. It is a vision that throws us onto the cusp in our ability to think, hurls us into the gap in our understanding. To see it is to be possessed by death, for each side in the essential discrepancy is death to the other. The God vision is the self-reflection in a mirror grown to concave, and it is become an enormity. It is become a fury from within, for we have become capable of hypothesizing our own non-existence, and we may get it. That which Nietzsche thought proven is about to be tested, finally, and the result may be the tragedy he saw first.

* It should be noted that the series of exhibitions titled “BODIES... The Exhibition” is, according to press materials, unrelated to a series of similar exhibitions titled “Body Worlds” that are on display in other cities and are connected to Gunther von Hagens, who claims to have devised an at least similar-sounding technique for preserving human remains, a technique called “plastination.” The press materials for “BODIES... The Exhibition” call its preservation technique “polymer preservation,” claim the exhibition has been organized by Premier Exhibitions, Inc., of Atlanta, Georgia, and identify Dr. Roy Glover, professor emeritus of anatomy and cell biology at the University of Michigan, as chief medical director for the New York exhibition. Their precise statement: “Premier Exhibitions, Inc. is not affiliated with any other organizer of human anatomy exhibitions, including Gunther von Hagens, Gerhard Perner, or Genlife Biomedical. BODIES...The Exhibition should not be confused with ‘Body Worlds,’ ‘Body Exploration,’ ‘The Universe Within,’ ‘Bodies Revealed,’ or any other human anatomy exhibition.” This writer has been unable so far to locate a public accounting of the precise relationship between these two series of exhibitions or between these two business enterprises. In addition, it should be mentioned that the specimens used in “BODIES... The Exhibition” are reported in the press materials to come from Dalian Medical University Plastination Laboratories in the People’s Republic of China, a fact, or at least claim, that has caused some controversy since there are reports that the facility accepts unidentified bodies as well as body parts from executed Chinese prisoners. The organizers of the exhibition have denied these charges and asserted that all the bodies and body parts come from voluntary donors.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2006)

To download the entire essay, Open PDF: | “The Skin of Perception: Phenomenology as a Cartesian Proposition”

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