Varieties of Presence
Alva Noë
Language: English
Pages: 188
ISBN: 0674062140
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The world shows up for us―it is present in our thought and perception. But, as Alva Noë contends in his latest exploration of the problem of consciousness, it doesn’t show up for free. The world is not simply available; it is achieved rather than given. As with a painting in a gallery, the world has no meaning―no presence to be experienced―apart from our able engagement with it. We must show up, too, and bring along what knowledge and skills we’ve cultivated. This means that education, skills acquisition, and technology can expand the world’s availability to us and transform our consciousness.
Although deeply philosophical, Varieties of Presence is nurtured by collaboration with scientists and artists. Cognitive science, dance, and performance art as well as Kant and Wittgenstein inform this literary and personal work of scholarship intended no less for artists and art theorists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists than for philosophers.
Noë rejects the traditional representational theory of mind and its companion internalism, dismissing outright the notion that conceptual knowledge is radically distinct from other forms of practical ability or know-how. For him, perceptual presence and thought presence are species of the same genus. Both are varieties of exploration through which we achieve contact with the world. Forceful reflections on the nature of understanding, as well as substantial examination of the perceptual experience of pictures and what they depict or model are included in this far-ranging discussion.
or to get a better look at things that interest us. In this way we exhibit our sensitivity to the fragility of our access to the world. Wittgenstein entertained the thought, in the Tractatus, that the eyeball is the limit of the visual field, the point from which the field is presented.2 But that’s wrong. The “visual field,” in this sense of Wittgenstein, may have something to do with geometry and artificial perspective, but nothing whatsoever to do with experience. True, we don’t see the eye
as exhibiting a characteristic sensorimotor profile. Likewise, the hidden parts of the apple and the cat are present, in vision, as accessible, not as given (as it were). What these considerations show is that how things visually seem to be is not explained by appeal to sensations (at least if we understand these nonintentionally as Smith does).9 We can’t explain the qualitative features of experiential states (veridical or nonveridical) by supposing that they depend on the instantiation of
just a particular neighborhood. I now turn, briefly, to a problem that has already been touched on in Chapter 2. We can depict what is not, or what is yet to be, just as we can depict what is or has been. The Garden of Eden, the Freedom Tower that will rise on the site of Ground Zero in New York, the destroyed but not forgotten World Trade Center towers themselves, and Hillary Clinton, all of these can show up in a picture. How is it possible in this way to depict what is not or what will never
modern science, have a hope of making sense of the fragility of presence, or of the close interweaving of the practical and the intellectual in our lives. 8. I have in mind here Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson’s “Knowing How” (2001) and Stanley’s forthcoming book by the same title Stanley, J. (2011) Knowing How. Oxford Oxford University Press. I discuss these writers directly in Chapter 7. 12 Varieties of Presence I want now to reorient this discussion, and to direct it to work not
this metaphor.1 We do not see the world insofar as it projects to a point. Examples of hidden presence are ready to hand. For example, you look at a tomato. You have a sense of its presence as a whole, even though the back of the tomato (for example) is hidden 1. I join Gibson, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein in rejecting the pictorial metaphor for seeing. See Noë (2004, Chapter 2), and also Chapter 5 of this book, for a more developed discussion of this. 16 Varieties of Presence from view.