This is how you remind me, (of what I really am)

August 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Centre, Descartes, Rene, Harding, Douglas, Knowledge, Seeing |

Descartes’ logic of embodiment and cognition as essentially separate is based on the metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING together with a number of folk theories relating to essences and ideas.

The so-called Cartesian Body/Mind Split is partly a product of the spatialising metaphors employed in articulating the philosophy and the apparently inevitable here/there binary logic of spatial organisation. Harding’s formulation of centrality and viewpoint overlay this Cartesian divide with a subjective/objective layer in which Res Cogitans is associated with directionality of vision from here to there, inside to outside, centre to periphery, while Res Extensa is associated with the complementary trajectory of visuality, from there to here, outside to inside, periphery to centre. When I look at you I see your body and experience myself as the location of mind, but this difference is a functionality of the direction of vision, from in to out, rather than of a particular quality of the fixed point at this end of the perceiving path. This is evidenced when the direction of travel is reversed; when you look at me along the very same line of sight I become a body travelling toward you at the speed of light, whilst your looking out from the place where you are becomes an experience of mind.

Because I have consciousness I am able to report on the state of mind that is the looking from here to there. I can say what I feel(s) like, or what you (all of you) look like. Yet even if I did not choose to use this reportability, this would not deny the presence of mind in the directionality of my looking. I can speculate about a set of circumstances in which such reportability was completely lost to me, and in which my consciousness was made radically different, perhaps through accident, illness, or education, but even in that reduced/enhanced state the directionality of ‘looking’ that is inherent in being somewhere somewhen, exactly here, precisely now, implies the existence of mind in that trajectory. (Of course mind is not ‘in’ that line of sight as a thumb might be in a pie, or a coin in a pocket; the trajectory is the mind, wherever I happen to be).

Without the burden of a responsible, self-reflective consciousness holding down my understanding of mind I can extend my definition of ‘that thing my brain does’ and bring back Descartes. For every view in there must always be a corresponding view out. This is the case even if the trajectory of mind embodies an inanimate object: a rock, a tree, a star, a corpse. The existence of a line of sight from here to there, from this centre to that centre, demands that the polarity of this line is dual, and has a complementary trajectory from there to here, from that centre to this centre. Within the logic of this line I am embodied by my status as view in and the object whose non-consciousness lies at the origin of that line is ‘reminded’ by being the source and centre of the view out. When I look at you, you look at me. as myself, at the centre of my little world, I look out into you and yours, and in doing so I embody you and you in turn remind me of what I really am. From you point of view the favour is returned and I am embodied and you are reminded. Hello friend, wherever you are.