Gary Williams on Meillassoux, Perception and Ecological Realism

Gary Williams has a fantastic post up at Brains and Minds on his reading of Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Although Gary has some positive things to say about Meillassoux’s offerings, I agree with Gary in his critique of Meillassoux’s implicit acceptance of various metaphysical baggage - particularily with regards to human perception.

Gary goes on to use some of Heidegger's more 'realist' strains of thinking to make some very significant points about how perception actually works, and how a certain kind of “ecological realism” escapes many of the problems Meillassoux raises.

Check out the excerpt below and then go read the rest of his amazing post here.

My difficulty with Meillassoux is that he never even stops to consider if there are alternative ways to conceive of the organism-Earth perceptual relationship. He would be wise to read some of J.J. Gibson’s work on ecological optics. Indeed, for Heidegger (who I read in Gibsonian terms), sensations have nothing to do with perception. Accordingly, relation is simply the wrong term to describe the perceptual-intentional experience. For Heidegger and for Gibson, perceptual experience is not a matter of generating sensations or “having” sensations. If we examine his language, we can see that Meillassoux buys into the very object-metaphor that Heidegger critiques so vehemently in describing the sensuous process. Meillassoux always talks about “the” sensible, “the” perception, or “the” sensation, as if these things actually were things. But the sensible is precisely not something which comes into existence or is generated when a subject is alongside the Earth. To think this is to misunderstand the intentionality of perception.

Strictly speaking, the most primordial perceptual experience of an organism perceiving the Earth is not characterized by the “having” of things called “sensations”. To believe so is to fall prey to the object metaphors that Modern philosophy has corrupted the philosophy of perception with. As Heidegger says, perception is not about returning one’s “booty” of sensation back to the “cabinet” of consciousness. Instead, perception is a matter of encountering the phenomenon. And crucially, the genuine phenomenon for Heidegger is not the appearance within a consciousness, but rather, that which is known in perception, namely, the things themselves. “Phenomena are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light”. What lies in the light of the day? The Earth! Indeed, it is the planet Earth upon which the sun shines.

Accordingly, perception is a matter of encountering or attending to what is already presenting itself to us. As long as we are alive, we have no choice but to encounter the Earth. Understood this way, sensations are irrelevant for the achievement of perception. All that matters for the act of perception is the performance of the act. And it is only dogmatism which supposes that the act of perception involves re-presenting the phenomena. For this, there is no need. We only need to respond or react to that which is there in such a way as to maintain the unity of our bodily singularity. And of course, our entire history of responding to the Earth, from conception until death, is determinate for how we react to the phenomena. This is where circumspective interpretation and “temporalization” comes in. Every encounter with the Earth is an interpretation or “projection” based on what we bring to the phenomenon in accordance with the fundamental historicity of our factical life experience.

Gary Williams is a graduate student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His primary interests are at the intersection between phenomenology and cognitive science, with a special interest in the philosophy of perception. Gary describes his own project this way:

I utilize an ecological – or situated – approach to understanding the human-world interaction. By emphasizing the social and linguistic dimensions of human cognitive experience, I hope to update Heideggerian concepts in light of recent research in the 4EA paradigm (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, affective). I am also interested in reviving Julian Jaynes’ theory of consciousness by integrating it with a Heideggerian-Gibsonian framework for thinking about externalist perception.

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