Some random thoughts on the visible:
Vision, according to Aristotle is the 'highest' ---most spiritual sense. Attempts at explaining this sense, and its act are quite difficult for me to grasp. The viewpoint of Robt. Archer Smith is also very imponderable and yet vision provides me with no end of wonder and questionability!
What strikes me as ludicrous are contemporary psychological theories of light---the kind of thing I studied at university as an undergraduate. At the time I presumed to have learned something about the 'psychology of light' when I studied the textbook, and passed the exams. To be honest this kind of bookish learning has nothing to do with authentic understanding of the phenomenon. Never once did we experiment with the phenomenon or empirical fact of light---all was discussed hypothetically, speculatively. I can grasp now that such "learning" is a sleight of hand.
It has the wonderful effect of giving hundreds of thousands of educated people the sense that they have grasped something about light (the same goes for acoustics and motion). Such an effect has a beneficial quality for the government, giving the sense that there is an objective science of vision and light---that such things are in principle graspable by at least the authors of the texts and the profs who lecture on these subjects.
However, effect is all it is! When I honestly ponder the truth about light and vision, I must confess to ignorance and the difficulty of its grasp. Reading treatises are of no help whatsoever for the sleight of hand renders the wonderfully mysterious phenomenon (color-light) into pieces of a theory, each one finitely graspable. Now all of these added up are supposed to bring about an understanding of the phenomenon. The social-educative praxis based upon intellectual pride, social conformity and deceit (i.e. the American University education in toto.) confers degrees not for the amount of natural phenomena actually grasped and understood, i.e. truth, but for the effective handling of the text, lectures and exams in such a way that the proper GPA is achieved. Truth and actual understanding are bypassed entirely by sleight of hand.
Such a praxis is effective for governing and ruling over citizens who have been granted degrees for knowledge which they presume to possess. It produces a consistent theoretical framework in which to conduct science, industry, education and business. It is much more effective to operate upon a coherent, commonly held ignorance, than to admit that each individual faces imponderable mysteries such as light, color and vision which are experienced as true without the foggiest clue of how to explain the truth of these phenomena. And yet, each individual, if honest, would admit that his or her experience of light phenomena is indelibly true fact. But how rarely does this individual with their own personally held experiential truth muster the courage to join Socrates in declaring the wisdom of their ignorance (that is commonly held 'doxa' or culturally accepted "truths")? Without this commonly held ignorance it would not be easy to govern, in fact the nation-state would not survive. Ironically the natural state of human beings in ignorance without the pretension to learning is the best manner of government, which never rises to the behemoth scale of the nation-state, laden with its certain "scientific" dogma. Scale is preserved by the "learned ignorance" in other words, the perpetual sense of humility and intellectual humiliation in the face of wonder and the experience of truth. Such praxis of gigantism in economy and transport is only achievable upon a de facto achievement of institutional ignorance and dogma which the modern university effectively governs! What a paradox.
Vision, according to Aristotle is the 'highest' ---most spiritual sense. Attempts at explaining this sense, and its act are quite difficult for me to grasp. The viewpoint of Robt. Archer Smith is also very imponderable and yet vision provides me with no end of wonder and questionability!
What strikes me as ludicrous are contemporary psychological theories of light---the kind of thing I studied at university as an undergraduate. At the time I presumed to have learned something about the 'psychology of light' when I studied the textbook, and passed the exams. To be honest this kind of bookish learning has nothing to do with authentic understanding of the phenomenon. Never once did we experiment with the phenomenon or empirical fact of light---all was discussed hypothetically, speculatively. I can grasp now that such "learning" is a sleight of hand.
It has the wonderful effect of giving hundreds of thousands of educated people the sense that they have grasped something about light (the same goes for acoustics and motion). Such an effect has a beneficial quality for the government, giving the sense that there is an objective science of vision and light---that such things are in principle graspable by at least the authors of the texts and the profs who lecture on these subjects.
However, effect is all it is! When I honestly ponder the truth about light and vision, I must confess to ignorance and the difficulty of its grasp. Reading treatises are of no help whatsoever for the sleight of hand renders the wonderfully mysterious phenomenon (color-light) into pieces of a theory, each one finitely graspable. Now all of these added up are supposed to bring about an understanding of the phenomenon. The social-educative praxis based upon intellectual pride, social conformity and deceit (i.e. the American University education in toto.) confers degrees not for the amount of natural phenomena actually grasped and understood, i.e. truth, but for the effective handling of the text, lectures and exams in such a way that the proper GPA is achieved. Truth and actual understanding are bypassed entirely by sleight of hand.
Such a praxis is effective for governing and ruling over citizens who have been granted degrees for knowledge which they presume to possess. It produces a consistent theoretical framework in which to conduct science, industry, education and business. It is much more effective to operate upon a coherent, commonly held ignorance, than to admit that each individual faces imponderable mysteries such as light, color and vision which are experienced as true without the foggiest clue of how to explain the truth of these phenomena. And yet, each individual, if honest, would admit that his or her experience of light phenomena is indelibly true fact. But how rarely does this individual with their own personally held experiential truth muster the courage to join Socrates in declaring the wisdom of their ignorance (that is commonly held 'doxa' or culturally accepted "truths")? Without this commonly held ignorance it would not be easy to govern, in fact the nation-state would not survive. Ironically the natural state of human beings in ignorance without the pretension to learning is the best manner of government, which never rises to the behemoth scale of the nation-state, laden with its certain "scientific" dogma. Scale is preserved by the "learned ignorance" in other words, the perpetual sense of humility and intellectual humiliation in the face of wonder and the experience of truth. Such praxis of gigantism in economy and transport is only achievable upon a de facto achievement of institutional ignorance and dogma which the modern university effectively governs! What a paradox.
2 comments:
Here is what E.O. Wilson says in his book "The meaning of Human Existence" which is apropos of your blog: "Of all the continua mapped by science, the most relevant to the humanities are the senses, which are extremely limited in our species. Vision is based in Homo Sapiens on an almost infinitesimal sliver of energy, four hundreds to seven hundred nano-meters in the electromagnetic spectrum. The rest of the spectrum, saturated the Universe, ranges from gamma rays trillions of times shorter than the Human visual segment to radio waves trillions of times longer. Animals live within their own slivers of continua...." I find it significant that Wilson capitalizes "Universe" and his statement of "saturating the Universe" evokes the first lines of Canto I of Dante's Paradiso "The glory of Him, who moves all things, penetrates the universe, and glows in one region more, in another less. I have been in that Heaven that knows his light most, and have seen things, which whoever descends from there has neither power, nor knowledge, to relate: because as our intellect draws near to its desire, it reaches such depths that memory cannot go back along the track"
I have enjoyed Wilson’s film on ants: the most successful species on the planet and studied it in class. Unfortunately he has swallowed some of “the bad acid” as his remarks show---human perception based upon an ”infinitesimal sliver of energy”---bad metaphor, not the truth of perception! Entomology is his forte, not physics---the remarks that you quoted present a “view from nowhere”---how exactly can he discern how much is visible/invisible or audible/inaudible? This view that is skeptical and mindnumbing. This is precisely the dogma that is hoisted upon undergraduates en masse. “Continua mapped by science...?” Conceit after conceit---can science map? What does it mean “to map”? Continua? No, he begins in the speculative and never once touches upon his own individual perceptual truth! Nowhere does he address the phenomena---phenomena are given totally, not in slivers---he is wrong! There is no wonder there! Ah, but with Dante you get back into the truth---poetically. God is totally beyond the human perceptible, rational realm and can be described at best analogically. But not so with the material universe--its is perceptible and knowable, immediately here and now. E.O. Wilson shows wonder with ants but his take on human perception and knowledge is polluted by modern unthought prejudices concerning “400-700 nanometers in the electromagnetic spectrum”---he is not staying with the truth and wonder of the visible phenomenon, that place alone where truth dwells for the human person--in direct contact with the universe. There are no such things as nanometers of wavelengths, only true perception and lies (deceit).
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