One of the great false idols of the Cartesian tradition, magnified by the empiricists and brought straight down to us through the many guises of positivism, is the Idol of the Spectator. You barely have to turn around in the philosophical world before you run into a conversation where it is assumed, without argument, that the human mind is a "passive receptor". That is to say, that as regards the "external world", we sit and watch as successions of impressions pass through our minds. We are left in their wake, to make sense of what they mean, but ultimately we have no other data from which to construct a general picture of the world.
It is no accident that the two greatest minds of this tradition, Decartes and Hume, wrote in the 'meditative' style. They did not write of their everyday experiences, of their working lives or of their social relations. Rather, they attempted to escape those ordinary frameworks, to assume as little as they could, and to quite literally just see what happened. Both, unsuprisingly, were lead to scepticism about the external world, because both suspended the use of the very faculties which regularly bring us into contact with the world.
When I think about my own philosophical education, I am startled by the ways in which the Idol of the Spectator has dominated many of my courses. We have spoken so freely of 'sense-data', of successions of perceptions, of Humean 'bundles' and of our bodies as "receptors". How little are we encouraged to think about the ways in which we create these experiences. Not in the idealist or Kantian sense, but in the simple, ordinary sense in which we choose to have experiences. We decide to look at something, and lo, our visual field is enveloped by its features. We choose to put our hands in warm water, we choose to pop Stravinsky into the CD player, we choose to squish our toes in the mud. The sensations we experiences are a direct result of our decicions, and without an independent external world towards which we could direct such attention, it is hard to know how we could explain the regularities so experienced.
I sometimes wonder whether the fact that philosophy is done by people sitting down in bland seminar rooms determines what those people see as obvious or 'intuitive' methodological presuppositions from which to begin. When one is engaged in productive activity, it is quite literally impossible to feel as though you are in the Cartesian theatre, with a series of ideas and impressions playing out on an invisible screen. You can only entertain this fantasy when you are not doing very much at all. Just pick up a book and open it, look out the window, hell, do anything and you will see that you have some kind of direct control over the content of your perceptions. It follows, at the very least, that we are not mere "bundles of perceptions", and that if we really are to construct a picture of the world from our sensations, that we may have a much more powerful set of resources than we thought.
It is no accident that the two greatest minds of this tradition, Decartes and Hume, wrote in the 'meditative' style. They did not write of their everyday experiences, of their working lives or of their social relations. Rather, they attempted to escape those ordinary frameworks, to assume as little as they could, and to quite literally just see what happened. Both, unsuprisingly, were lead to scepticism about the external world, because both suspended the use of the very faculties which regularly bring us into contact with the world.
When I think about my own philosophical education, I am startled by the ways in which the Idol of the Spectator has dominated many of my courses. We have spoken so freely of 'sense-data', of successions of perceptions, of Humean 'bundles' and of our bodies as "receptors". How little are we encouraged to think about the ways in which we create these experiences. Not in the idealist or Kantian sense, but in the simple, ordinary sense in which we choose to have experiences. We decide to look at something, and lo, our visual field is enveloped by its features. We choose to put our hands in warm water, we choose to pop Stravinsky into the CD player, we choose to squish our toes in the mud. The sensations we experiences are a direct result of our decicions, and without an independent external world towards which we could direct such attention, it is hard to know how we could explain the regularities so experienced.
I sometimes wonder whether the fact that philosophy is done by people sitting down in bland seminar rooms determines what those people see as obvious or 'intuitive' methodological presuppositions from which to begin. When one is engaged in productive activity, it is quite literally impossible to feel as though you are in the Cartesian theatre, with a series of ideas and impressions playing out on an invisible screen. You can only entertain this fantasy when you are not doing very much at all. Just pick up a book and open it, look out the window, hell, do anything and you will see that you have some kind of direct control over the content of your perceptions. It follows, at the very least, that we are not mere "bundles of perceptions", and that if we really are to construct a picture of the world from our sensations, that we may have a much more powerful set of resources than we thought.
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