Seeing Elephants: Visual Knowledge

October 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The language that we use to articulate different ways of knowing, and to talk about different types of knowledge, varies according to those ways and types. Our way of speaking about ‘emotional’ content is very dissimilar to our way of speaking about ideas we consider to be ‘rational’. One of the key ways in which the difference is revealed is in the use of terms which refer to the various sensory modes through which we access the world. When we talk about things ‘objectively’, trying to discuss topics rationally, (or at least when we want to appear as if that is what we are doing), we use the language of sight and vision. We ask ‘Do you see?’ when we mean ‘Do you think?”. This use of visual metaphor to organise our relationship to ideas treats those ideas as if they were solid objects somehow located outside of ourselves. This objectification of ideas and their putative location in the shared space beyond ourselves not only figuratively distances them, but also locates them in an imaginary shared space of intersubjective knowledge and experience. By locating my idea ‘out there’ in the world through the use of visual metaphor I am trying to give it the status of a physical fact, as solid and undeniable as an elephant.

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Zero Person Singular

October 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie

First and third person accounts are the dominant positions of phenomenological and physical enquiry; phenomenology uses the 1st person ‘I’, objective science uses the 3rd person ‘he’, ’she’, or ‘it’. Science usually uses the passive mode, such as when we say that ‘this measurement was made’, or ‘this experiment was carried out’, the 3rd person making the measurement or carrying out the experiment is implied rather than overtly stated or named.

An ongoing problem in areas of study which draw on the techniques of both phenomenological and physical enquiry, consciousness research for example, is resolving these 1st and 3rd person accounts into one single coherent account, taken from a single viewpoint. To rational science the 1st person is invalid, to phenomenology the 3rd person is irrelevant.

A possible means for establishing a hiatus in this problem is by developing a mode of discourse which is neither 1st nor 3rd person, and one possible candidate for such a discourse would be an enhanced version of the way of speaking known as e-prime, which draws on Korzybski’s General Semantics. In standard e-prime the verb ‘to be’ is suppressed, such that any statement which claims an objective physical fact by saying that some object is some property (such as ‘that elephant is grey), is disallowed, and must be re-articulated to include the viewing position (so that the sentence above becomes ‘that elephant appears grey to me’, or more pedantically ‘the side of the elephant facing me appears grey to me’). Clearly, standard e-prime favours a 1st person account, countering the implied 3rd person objectivity of the is statement. An enhanced version of e-prime would also eliminate this 1st person in favour of a zero person singular account, in which no reference is made, overtly or covertly, to any viewer whatever.

Posted in Elephant, Korzybski, Alfred, Language, Objectivity, Phenomenology, Science | No Comments »

Why ‘Enlightenment’? Seeing the Big Picture

October 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The term ‘Enlightenment’ refers to both a particular period of European history in which rational enquiry and the concept of a human-centred approach to knowledge became privileged, and also to the individual experience of ‘awakening’ that is found in many spiritual and religious traditions including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity.

This term, Enlightenment, is part of a complex set of metaphors which structure our relationship to knowledge. In this structure, light is associated with knowing, and darkness with not-knowing, hence the period preceding the historical Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as ‘The Dark Ages’. This association of light and knowledge may be because the presence of light allows one to be able to see, and in the absence of light one is effectively blind; this then correlates with a related metaphor, KNOWING IS SEEING, in which the abstract concept of knowing is comprehended by a mapping from the visual sense. So when we wish to indicate that we understand something we say ‘I see’, and when we do not understand we say ‘I just don’t see it’. In such circumstances we may even say we are ‘in the dark’.

What the light allows us to see, presumably, is ‘the big picture’; as the parable of the four blind men feeling their way around an elephant, all of whom take away different impressions, suggests, the visual sense confers a unity on experience which is absent from other senses. To ’see’ means not only to experience more but also to experience a unity.

In terms of personal Enlightenment experience, the darkness that one is assumed to be emerging from represents an inability see a unity of self and other, an inability which is resolved by the turning on of the light which allows the unity of all things to be percieved, just as one sees the unity of the world using the visual sense. The Enlightenment process allows this unity to be metaphorically ’seen’, resolving the apparent differences to produce the state of ‘non-duality’ or advaita, or divine union spoken of in scriptures.

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Elephant Knowledge

December 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The parable of the blind men and the elephant tells us something about the partiality of knowledge; that only having access to local information does not give us the ‘big picture’. It also suggests that our sense of touch (feeling) is individual and separate, whilst our visual sense is communal. So it is that our feelings, metaphorically mapped from our sense of touch, and the emotional knowledge that these feelings represent, separates us. Our visual sense, and the objectified knowledge it gives character to, brings us together. It is also noteworthy that the men in the story are blind, and therefore would have to take the reality of the big picture on faith.

Posted in Elephant, Feeling, Metaphor, Seeing, Sense, Touch | No Comments »