It might be a lot simpler if it were the case that every proposition, every argument, can stand on itself without regard to the greater picture of the world. It is indeed the basic assumption that we sometimes hold when examining whether an argument is sound or not, or even whether an argument is rational or not. However, as we have seen in my previous writings, even the soundness of an argument, or whether it is considered to be rational or not, depends in part on whether the whole picture of reality a person holds allows it to be thought so in the first place or not. Keep in mind that this does not mean that every idea, no matter how wild or incoherent, could be thought of as sound or valid as long as there is a picture of reality which the idea fits into. After all, we can indeed differentiate between someone who is delusional or having an episode of psychosis from someone who isn’t delusional nor is he having an episode of psychosis but is just thinking in a different way than we do. But then someone might ask, if it is possible for someone to believe in something which supposedly does not exist just because his frame of the world allows him to do so, such as ancient doctors believing that there were four humors in the human body even though the idea is false, and not be considered mad, then how or why is it any different from someone who is indeed having a delusion of grandeur, i.e. believing that he has been appointed by God to speak on His behalf? Such a question cannot be answered without looking into the frame of knowledge a person has first before investigating how it is both public and private at the same time.
Picture of Reality
Before we engage ourselves in that line of thought, let us first examine what does the picture of reality means in the first place. The reason I call it the picture of reality is due to the lack of a better term. It is not exactly the same as worldviews. Worldviews, even though it can be so ingrained in our way of viewing the world, does not necessarily equate to what I shall call “picture of reality”. Worldviews can be considered to be a system of beliefs which includes a system of values and supposedly knowledge of how the world might work. But even if worldviews at times contain within themselves a system of how the world supposedly works, it is still rational in a sense that it is still a result of some study, both intentional or not, and deliberations on multiple propositions. Therefore even if a worldview is considered to be somewhat distorted, or even unrealistic by some people, like for example ancient doctors thinking that the human body consists of such and such parts, or that the world is created through such and such means, even such worldview is based on judgements and considerations, even if some might think such a worldview is flawed or outright false at the moment. The “rationality” of worldviews, then, is a contrasting feature to the “picture of reality”. While it is true that worldviews are a part of it, the “picture of reality” isn’t only just made out of worldviews. It is made from multiple layers of experience, ranging from “proper” knowledge to how we interact with the world.
Perhaps it is possible to say that what first forms the foundation of the “picture of reality” is something that first has to be arational. If rationality is a tool, then this foundation is what makes this tool possible in the first place. It is based on which judgement is to be made on whether something is true or not. If it is something based on which judgement is to be made, then it is a given that while it is used in that way, it itself has to be relieved of the possibility of being judged, because no standard could ever act as one if it is not being treated as such. This means that in our first years of education, or even for a long duration of our life, it is impossible to judge something to be true or false with reason when we encounter it. If there is no standard, then there is no rational judgement. This means that the foundation of the picture of reality, first and foremost, is not based on rational judgement. For the first few years of our lives, and indeed what forms the foundation of knowledge which we receive later, is no other than how we experience the world, or to be more precise, our form of life.
The Human Form of life
The form of life consists of several layers of experiences, for a lack of a better term. We shall start by discussing the makeup of our body and its influence on our picture of reality, since it is what comes first before we get “socialized” into a particularly “human” (or “cultured”) way of living. If the first interaction between a person and the world is through his body, or to be more precise, if it is the person as his body that is a relation with the world, then it should be the case that our orientation of the world should be our orientation as a body-in-the-midst-of-the-world. This is best stated by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. Our first interaction of what is possible, of what needs to be done, of how the world is at its core is dependent entirely on the body. The positional knowledge of the body, for example, is essential in realizing the world as we know it. The world can only be thought of as one if it is seen from a perspective, which means instead of perspective being a sign of finitude and a limitation in our ability to know, perspective is first of all the condition under which the objective reality of the world can be brought to light. If the world is filled with relations among things in exteriority, it can only be known if the world is totalized, and this totalization is only possible if the human mind is distinct from the opacity of the world. For Sartre, consciousness is a negation of the world, it is a nothingness that nihilates being-in-itself. While it is not entirely the subject of our current discussion, it is prudent to investigate just a little bit further why it is so, and why it has to be so, primarily those which have some bearings on our investigation. First and foremost, we must not have a slip of understanding. What Sartre means by “nothingness”, is really a nothingness as a nihilation of being, a hole in being-in-itself. It is not a substance called “nothingness”, for if it is, then it is nothing more than being-in-itself but with a new label.
First, if consciousness has the same substance as the world, or in this case, inert materiality, then there will be no world as we experience it for a number of reasons. One, if consciousness is full being-in-itself, then there will be no question regarding the possibility of understanding. To explain this more clearly, we can use John Searle’s “Chinese Room Argument” for this particular part, because his claim that machines wouldn’t have the capacity to understand anything at all can be used here as well for there are a number of essential similarities between his analogy and our situation. Imagine a room with two slits, and inside the room, a man, sitting on the floor with a guidebook which tells him how to give a response in the face of certain input. From the two slits, a random passerby can insert a Chinese sentence written on a piece of paper, a question, for example, into one of the two slits, which we will now call the “input” slit. The man inside the room then receives the input sentence, opens his guidebook, then tries to match the “squiggles” on the input card with the guidebook, then tries to make an appropriate response following the rulebook with a bunch of “squiggle” cards in front of him. After he finishes arranging his squiggles, he then writes it down on a piece of paper then slide it out of the output slit. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just imagine the answer is recognizable as such, and even if the answers are simple, if we are to relax the quality of the guidebook a bit, the answers are no less bad than from a 4-year-old child born and raised in a Chinese family. Now, can we say that the man in the room understands mandarin as good as the 4-year-old child? Probably not.
If consciousness is thought of as purely made in exteriority, then what makes understanding in our usual sense possible? Is a machine made out of transistors and cables capable of understanding its surroundings, or can we say that the machine only gives responses which give the illusion of understanding, similar to the man in the room producing an output similar to a 4-year-old child but without the capacity to understand what output he is producing? While it is true that consciousness is indeed a part of the body, and even, at certain times, it can be reduced to fit exterior rationality for the sake of simplicity, the exteriority that is at times attributed to the body needs to be included into a bigger rationality which sustains the phenomenon that is the human life.
However, it conceivable that someone might object to this criticism. Isn’t it the case that if one wants to know whether a child has understood what a “cube” is, it should be judged based on the child’s performance, i.e. on whether the child can consistently point to a cube when asked which of the following forms is a cube and which one is not a cube? Therefore, shouldn’t it be valid to assume that understanding is still possible even if consciousness is thought of in terms of exteriority as long as it is capable of giving outputs that are considered to be appropriate/correct for a particular situation in question? However, such a conception misses the experiential side of understanding. First, to understand something, it is necessary that the person grasps what he understands. Understanding something means the thing understood is the direct source of guidance for action. If I understand how a certain machine works, then when I attempt to fix it, the machine in front of me should be the guide for me to search for what’s wrong with the engine and how to fix it. It involves knowing where to look, which part of the machine I should pay attention to. However, if I were to fix it without understanding it, then the source of knowing what I need to do next doesn’t come from the machine itself, but from a guidebook, or from a person telling me how to fix the machine. To return to our use of Searle’s analogy before, it means the man in the box understands the guidebook but doesn’t understand what the squiggles are about because he’s not guided by the squiggles, and instead guided by the guidebook. Likewise, the child’s response should be guided not by the looks of the child’s mentor, but from the drawings themselves. This precludes the possibility of thinking of consciousness in terms of exteriority, since if it is thought of in exteriority, then it’ll be necessary for there to be internal mediations between the external situation and understanding itself. For example, if we are to think of understanding as having an internal mental guide, let it be in the form of an internal voice guiding me, or in terms of mental pictures, then we are not following the external situation, but an internal mental picture. And yet, how do I know what to look for from the mental image, and how do I form the necessary mental image if I know not where to look first? This means that the formation of useful mental images is impossible before knowing which part of the problem which I should attend to, which is just another way of saying before we understand what it is that we’re doing. It is necessary for us to directly grasp the outside world and respond to it just as we reach it without any internal mental mediation. Therefore, even if representations are formed when I am fixing a machine, it is not the representations which make understanding possible. Instead, representations are formed based on what is understood from the machine, from what I can see from it. And even if we form mental images to help us better understand the machine, we still do not understand it based on the image, nor even the image being the understanding that we seek after. Instead, the use of a mental image, in this case, only serves to highlight what we have understood of the machine, not the other way around. In short, representations are responses based on our understanding of the world.
The idea of this direct relation between consciousness and the inert materiality is then related to our second reason of why consciousness is of a different nature from being-in-itself. The second reason why there can be no world, nor any experience, if consciousness is totally being-in-itself is because, as Sartre said in his book Being and Nothingness, there can be no awareness as we experience it at all if consciousness is thought to be inert materiality. For how can consciousness be a transparent being capable of reaching into the outside world if it is being-in-itself? There can be no act planning, of grasping an object as a source of understanding, nor any activity with intention as we know it. Awareness is only possible when there is an interior relation between the inert materiality and consciousness, but if consciousness is thought to be being-in-itself, then such a relation won’t be possible. Will someone say that a rock is capable of having relations with another rock? Even if these two rocks are part of the same structure, structure as such is only intelligible only if it is totalized in light of activity and significations. In itself, the relative position between each and all materials used in the building are contingent, and hence, without meaning.
But then, a rock is a rock, and consciousness sustained by the human brain is a complex thing. Is it not possible to think of consciousness in terms of exteriority and still gain intelligible actions out of it? After all, is it not conceivable for a computer to execute a complex response based on its assessment of its surrounding environment? And is it not the case that people die when they get shot? If consciousness is so dependent on the brain, both for it to function properly and for it to exist in the first place, surely it is not a far-fetched conception that the brain is the “hardware” and consciousness is the “software”, in short, both different from one another (after all, the experience of the color red isn’t the same as the neural impulse we get from seeing the color red), but both conceived in exteriority and in a contingent relation with one another? While it is true that indeed consciousness is dependent on the brain, this only shows that consciousness is meaningless in abstraction, and also that a living body that is totally dissolved into mechanistic exteriority is also inconceivable, something which we will discuss shortly. But for now, if the mind is thought of as consisting of disparate items all in relations of exteriority with one another, which one can be called the real me? Well perhaps these items are what I am, or to state it more clearly, these are all what make me what I am. But then, how am I to conceive of a unity in the experience of these separate items? Even though my arms are made out of bone and flesh, and that it is true that pain in transmitted by a nervous system capable of being dissected and which falls under the rule of exteriority as being made of inert materiality, the pain I feel in my arm is not a distant pain; it is not a pain-thing, but my pain as I experience it in my activity. It is not a hindrance which prevents me from using my arm properly (like for example my arm is tied to my back), but instead, it is in a direct relation with me without any internal mediation. It is not an object of comprehension, but it is comprehension itself. A burning fire is an object of comprehension since I can inspect it as a thing outside of me. But pain isn’t a thing, not even an internal item. It is the same as seeing the color red or hearing the sound of a clock; it is an experience without any discernible line. It spills over to the background of my activity, being one with my thought, and even being the comprehension of a situation itself as me (e.g. fire is dangerous because it’s painful, just like the color of fire is red).
However, it is important to stress that it’ll be a mistake to think that it all boils down to the conception that the body and consciousness are two different things, just as conceiving pain as a pain-thing, separately signaling my consciousness that my body is being destroyed. This is a mistaken line of reasoning all too easy to fall into, in part because we tend to mistake metaphors for the real thing. First, it is true that the act of understanding anything is impossible if consciousness is thought of in inert materiality, and second, it is also true that experience as we have it is also impossible if consciousness is thought of as inert materiality. However, it’ll be a mistake to think that consciousness is then separate from the body. It is wrong to think of consciousness as a being capable of sustaining itself and be intelligible without its surroundings. I have said again and again that consciousness thought in abstraction is meaningless, just as conceiving a living body that is totally inert is an impossibility. For consciousness to be intelligible as such, it needs to be in the world, i.e. a situated consciousness. Talking about consciousness in abstraction is only possible within the background of the life which we have, that is, the life that is filled with interactions with inert materiality. The human form of life isn’t just defined by consciousness as we experience it, for there can be no experience of consciousness if there is no relation with inert materiality. The world is a part of what makes life as we know it to be possible. There can be no awareness of consciousness without experiencing the world, and there can be no awareness of the world without the negating consciousness. This can be seen from the most basic experience of them all: the perspectival view of inert materiality as the world. Every experience which we have of the world takes the form of a perspective on things, the perspective of me being the center of the world. This does not mean that the world revolves around the perceiver in some idealist sense, but it is just that the perceiver is in a such and such relation in the world that it brings “relative position” into the world. To perceive the world and to be in the world is to see the world from a certain perspective relative to the position of things. This is so not because of a certain limitation, but precisely because we are in an idealistic world, but because the world itself is the result of an interaction between consciousness and inert materiality. I am one existence among the midst of being-in-itself. With differentiation comes the positioning of consciousness relative to the world. The fact that I cannot see the table that is hidden behind the wall which is in front of me is not due to some form of limitation, but due to the fact that the wall is a solid and opaque thing. I interact with the wall, I act upon the wall. The wall is real, it is a part of the world as an interaction between me and inert materiality. Based on this perspectival view of the world, based on this interaction between inert materiality and consciousness, can then come the intelligibility of the world. Because the mountain is so high and I cannot reach the tip of the mountain can there be knowledge about height and the inclination of the path leading to the tip of the mountain. Even a bird’s eye view, a result of an abstraction, is still a perspective, but just one from above.
The body is the canvas against which the possibility of knowledge is possible, even if that knowledge at times is to be gain from somewhere else. If knowledge is to be built based on the interaction with the world, then the possibility of knowledge is only possible under the possibility of an interaction with the world, and since this possibility can only be an interaction as a body with the world, then knowledge is first of all possible under the context of our body as such. A clear example would be this: it is true that in inspecting a microbe, the possibility of vision will not enter into our consideration when it comes to answering questions about the object of inspection. It is true that the question of vision will only come up under the context of the question of method, such as whether the apparatus used to inspect the microbe is satisfactory or is in need of some improvement. After all, our eyes are limited, it can only see something so small before needing an apparatus such as a microscope to go further. However, this is not true that vision itself is not important under the pursuit of knowledge. The possibility of vision lies beneath the possibility of using a microscope to inspect a microbe, or indeed to inspect any other thing such as the wavelength of light, etc. In essence, the relation with the world as a body which includes the possibility of vision means that there is a certain area of knowledge which we have an awareness of, such as the possibility of using light, or even vision itself, as a possibility of knowledge. And it is not just vision itself. The fact that we have two hands that have such and such forms, that we have two legs and a body shaped like this, shadows the possibility of knowing things in a particularly human way. This is not to say that if our body has a different form, we would not be able to form any knowledge of the world. In fact, if we have no possibility of vision, it is possible that we can still construct the knowledge of gravity in some other way. But how we come to that knowledge, or even how that knowledge is constructed, cannot be completely detached from the fact that we are a body in the midst of the world. Perhaps a knowledge born from a different form of life can be said to be not a “human” one, but it is still knowledge nonetheless.
Based on our investigation so far, we can sum it in the following: our form of life isn’t just limited to how our body is constituted. It is also our faculties, our activities in the world, our interaction with it which also defines our body. Our body in itself is just a body, it is no different than a corpse lying on an autopsy table if we do not also take into account how the body is used. While at times it is easy to try to distinguish between the body and the mind (and hence the birth of the mind-body duality and its associated conundrums), it should not be forgotten that the mind is precisely the body in so far as the body is the manifestation of the project which is the mind in the midst of the world. Without the mind, the body is not a person as such, and without the body, the mind is nothing more than just a fleeting dream. The body and the mind are nothing more than two moments of a single unity which can only be separated in abstraction.
This is not to say that the mind is precisely the same as the body as such, for we first have to consider what kind of body are we talking about. Even if the body is a biological masterpiece, and that even if it is subjected to the same material conditions as that of a rock and also to the same laws of exteriority, it is so only if we are to see the body as the body-for-others, that is, the body as seen by the biologist. However, in our everyday life, even if we have to subject ourselves to that of exterior things, the body which we move is not the body as seen by the biologist. Instead, what we move is the body as the facticity of consciousness, that is, a part of consciousness itself as it is a nihilation of inert materiality as its surroundings and transcends being-in-itself into the future in the midst of inert materiality. Our experience of our own body is not suffered in exteriority, but our body is the focal point to which everything in the world points to. While this might at first glance appear to give consciousness some form of primacy, this is not the case, for consciousness itself is nothing without the body, and people die when they get shot. Therefore, it has to be stressed that the body as a part of consciousness embedded in a situation is no different than consciousness being a part of the body as a living form of life. Consciousness is not an addition to the body, nor the body a secondary addition to consciousness for it to move around in. Consciousness is the body itself as long as it is alive. It belongs to the body as much as the body belongs to consciousness. When we see things, we do not see things as if we are using an apparatus to check on things. It is true that our eyes are the apparatuses for seeing, but this is so only in abstraction. In our everyday experience, our eyes are the act of seeing in as much as it is the act of consciousness itself reaching out into the world.
Before we end our discussion about the form of life, it is important that we dispel another myth regarding the relation between consciousness and the body. If we are to follow the conception of the cartesian cogito, that consciousness having a different substance than the body, it is then easy for us to be led into thinking that consciousness is only accessible to the person itself and not anyone else. After all, I cannot experience the experience of another person, and I cannot experience his body as his. My consciousness is trapped in my body and my body only. For this, it is important to follow up on what we’ve understood so far. Once we’ve established that the body, though biological, isn’t necessarily limited to mechanical connections between the world and our mind; once we’ve established that the body is consciousness itself (note that I talk as if the body is separate from the mind, but this is only so because we’re right now dealing with abstractions), we can see that discussion about consciousness inevitably leads to the body, since both are two moments of the same unity. Therefore, we can now see how the activity of consciousness itself isn’t a total secret from anyone else. The way the body is used, that is, the distinctively recognizably “human”, its activities, the manifestation of a conscious project, gives intelligibility to every movement that we make. Here we have to realize the public nature of our behavior. A person just doesn’t jolt out into the abyss without any reason nor any goal. The stabs into the abyss are intelligible ones, every person’s behavior can be understood even without the person stating his intention, nor without us knowing what’s going on in his mind at that very moment. When my friend stands up from his chair to close a window that is letting cold air in, his body speaks his intention based on our comprehension of the environment. Such intelligibility means that there is homogeneity between my body and his, and between our way of being. I can understand his actions because first, we have the same comprehension of our surroundings (both of us are cold, or because I can see him shivers and we share the same situation and biological needs, and because his body conveys the same efficacity as that of mine).
Here we can clearly see that despite the individual manifestation of it, our way of being, is not exactly personal. While it is true that its manifestation is personal, it is by no means unintelligible to the person next to me. Our response to our situation, or in this case, our response to the cold, can be understood only if such activity is undertaken under the context of the public idea of decency and culture (for example, our use of language to express ourselves and our choice of wearing winter clothes for the month), and even based on similar biological needs, such as the need to protect one’s self from the cold air. Of course, this is not to say that just because we are similar it conveys a certain intelligibility to the other’s actions. Saying that would simply ignore the point that we’ve been building up to now, that is, the fact that a body, including the person, is intelligible as such not just because it is limited to exterior laws of exteriority. It would be more correct to say that the reason why we can understand each other is because first and foremost, any activity is based on the comprehension of the environment, which means that in its bid to transform the environment according to what consciousness wants it to be, comprehension as the totalizing act of the situation and the subjugation of its surroundings into an instrument for its own ends, it reaffirms itself based on these acts as sharing the same constitution as that of the other. Simply put, it is through the act of subjugating of nature, and through the affirmation of the same ends (or the recognition of differing ends through antagonisms meditated by nature), can a person’s consciousness recognize another person’s consciousness as long as it is objectified in nature and competes with each other to turn nature into each own respective instruments, can there be a shared form of life. It is as what Sartre said in Critique of Dialectical Reason, the recognition of me as a person and the other as a person is mediated by our activity in inert materiality. In the case of the cold room, I comprehend his intention through his action on the world, in this case, by closing the window, based on the fact that he shivers, signifying cold in his body, or that he expresses his sensation of cold through language, and then I share his goal of making the room less cold, etc.
However, while the body is a part of the form of life, the form of life itself isn’t exactly similar from one culture to another. There are different ways of comprehending the body, and therefore of expressing it. While it is true that in generality we can find certain structures, similarities from one place to another, at times the concrete is what makes them so different. For example, having a disability, such as blindness, will certainly affect how a person relates to his environment, since now there exists an entire field of perception inconceivable to him that those with healthy eyesight can access without any difficulty at all. It is true that this does not make him incapable of relating to other people, since after all, differences in forms of life do not mean that the other person will be seen as an alien, but now there is something which neither of us can have the same comprehension of. But then this is nothing more than living people, as a conscious body, to look into different things using their respective body. The situation of a blind person is in essence not that dissimilar from our own situation, since we both relate to inert materiality by using our body as the canvas. Even if we are not struck by any disability, we are still incapable of seeing a wide spectrum of light, and that we have to experience the world with these two hands instead of having tentacles for hands. These comparisons are nothing more than affirmations that a person’s consciousness and body are one, and that the world is brought forth by the interaction of a living person with inert materiality, and finally, that the human form of life has to be in this form and no other.
However, the “picture of reality” does not consist of only the human form of life. On top of the human form of life, rest what can be called as “certainties”, knowledge that isn’t really knowledge and actually serves as the foundation of knowledge and judgement. This is what Wittgenstein in his book On Certaintycalls “the river bed on which the river flows”. This layer of experience is what we’re going to discuss next. And on top of “certainties”, there are knowledge and thought, although thought itself cuts through all three layers of experiences, and these three layers’ divisions are less distinct than what might have come across in this work. However, this is nothing more but the result of the necessity of abstraction to easily explain the “picture of reality” in a systematic manner. But since this essay has been long enough, discussions on “certainties” and knowledge will have to wait and will be discussed in a separate work after this one.