You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be?
— “Anton Chigurh” in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men
Der Bingle,
Before I talk about what you asked about, I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about just to show you that my priorities are well-ordered. At any rate, I’ll take any excuse I can to complain about David Hume. It’s my party and I’ll cry about the most overrated English philosopher if I want to.
The fascinating thing about David Hume is that his epistemology is a total joke. In his Enquiry into Human Understanding, a work that proves Hume does not possess the titular subject he’s investigating, Hume employs a distinction between experience and reason that ultimately becomes a kind of comic exaggeration of itself. Hume incidentally parodies the distinction by making it so stark as to uncover its absurdity. What I mean is, Hume treats sense experience and reason as totally discrete, completely separable, unbreakable categorizations of the elements of human experience. It’s on this ground that Hume goes so far as to insist that even reason itself depends entirely upon sense experience.
The oft touted problem with this assertion is that it is not itself based on experience, but on reason. The distinction, when taken to this absurd length, raises some interesting questions about the nature of human experience, though. Speaking of compartmentalization, Hume, like so many of his time it seems, was guilty of a rigid systematization, the demystified enlightenment science that seeks to dissect and disassemble everything. Take the example of a machine, thought of purely in terms of parts and their interactions. Hume implicitly assumes that human consciousness can and should be understood in the same way as a machine, a system of interlocking parts whose relationships are linear and monistic.
So, if I understand what you mean by compartmentalizing, I’d be inclined to agree that, if the problem itself is not modern, the framing of it certainly has a modern tinge. I would answer at first that compartmentalization is hard because it isn’t always natural, that is, it doesn’t always accord with nature. Nature is made out of distinctions, but there are also distinctions between distinctions. God’s pronouncements of distinction in the Beginning are themselves distinguished by days. Not all distinctions are created equal. Not all distinctions are simple and mechanistic, nor are all things. That includes the human mind.
Since you’re like a level 4 psychologist or something, you’ve probably heard about “the binding problem,” the question of how the individual powers of consciousness are experienced as a unity rather than actually as individual. But the problem, in my estimation, is at least partly one we’ve created for ourselves. Perhaps we put too much stock in the premise that consciousness is first a set of discrete powers and then, secondarily, subsequently, a unification of those parts. Sounds an awful lot like how we think of a machine, doesn’t it? Maybe this notion is too mechanistic to adequately describe what human experience actually is.
Okay, okay, I’ll talk about postmodernism a little. I’ve generally characterized postmodernism as a misguided attempt to escape these kinds of flaws in modern thinking. Namely, the mechanistic view of the human mind has come hand-in-hand with, as Spencer Klavan describes it in the book I just reviewed (with typically brilliant flair), an epistemic hubris that portrays the objective facts of the world as directly accessible to the mind. Just as a computer deals in raw data — unadulterated information unfiltered through any bias of personality or perspective — an impersonal, rational, machine observer made of human cells should be understood no differently. Sure, the data that the human senses extract from the world may never be complete, but it is just data. Postmodernism rightly cries foul on this view. Narrative becomes an important factor here as the medium through which the bare facts of the world are ordered for the human mind. I wouldn’t say strictly “in” the human mind, because something about this ordering takes place before the facts get that far, as the sights and sounds of the world are still entering the senses.
Once again, we see the merit of postmodernism in escaping the feigned objectivity of modernity, but its weakness lies in that its escape route is an even deeper retreat into humanity. If modernism forgets the fact of perception in the perception of facts, then postmodernism insists that perception is the only fact, that there is no world about which our senses inform us, but rather that our senses are the world. I suppose Hume and postmodernism have that in common, that they treat the world of human consciousness as identical with the world at large. The difference lies in which identity the two worlds are coerced into sharing.
Both the rationalists and the empiricists give too much credit to the human observer. Though separated by the aforementioned distinction in elements of experience, both tend to fall prey to the temptation to view the human mind as capable of attaining to the objective facts of the world as they exist hypothetically independent of human experience. But, as Klavan makes such a strong case, for something to exist apart from human knowledge is not just for it to be unknown, but to be unknowable, by definition. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” as the saying goes. A thing cannot be known without knowing it, obvious as it sounds. We cannot know anything independent of our powers of knowledge.
So, here lies the question: can we “compartmentalize” a thing as such and a thing as it seems? Even if we can’t know a thing apart from how it seems, can we truly know what a thing is by how it seems, or can we only know how it seems? And how distinct are these aspects, really? As regards aesthetics, I think it would be difficult for me to say that how a thing seems (its aesthetic) is not a part of what it is (its substance).
This problem could be framed in the language of “two worlds” as mentioned. My inclination is to draw a solid delineation between the world as such and the world of consciousness, to “compartmentalize” the two, but maybe this is the wrong approach. Perhaps these are not best represented as two worlds, but as two facets of the same world. I’m not even certain that “two halves” would suffice, unless we visualize the halves like a Venn diagram with significant overlap. Significant, but not total, I think.
Spencer Klavan is useful here again, as he invokes the ancient image of fire from the eyes and fire from the world drawing together to meet. Perception is a two-party activity, synergistic. We perceive the world, and the world presents itself to us. The latter may in fact be as active a process as the former. The cosmos does not lay dormant, inactive, passive, only accidentally visible to observers that happen to be in the neighborhood. Nothing about the universe is accidental, least not the fact that it is inhabited with little critters made in the imago Dei who are purpose-built to look at the world with piercing eyes and describe it with linguistic thought. Part of the very purpose of the world is to be seen. What does it mean for God to glorify Himself if not to reveal Himself?
This problem of perception is one I’ve wrestled with a great deal lately. I’d defer, as I have previously in our dialogue, to the great American sage Norm Macdonald’s expression that “it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is.” I suppose the thing that seems to make aesthetic substantive is that beauty is real, even transcendently real. Just as philosophy appeals to Truth, virtue appeals to Goodness, aesthetic appeals to Beauty. Then again, maybe there’s a beauty that’s fleeting, superficial, deceptive. A false beauty “whose feet go down to death.” Maybe a beauty divorced from Truth or Goodness is no Beauty at all. A fallen angel. Maybe the real question has always been where the Beauty in a thing is rather than whether or not it is there.
“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11 (KJV)
Indeed, nothing about the cosmos is arbitrary. With a discussion of Plato and Aristotle looming, I’d suggest that this is at least a contributing factor in my preference for Plato. Plato seems to more emphatically express that what Aristotle called “accidents” are fundamentally, inexorably, teleologically expressions of essence. The ties that bind what a thing is to what a thing is like are seemingly looser in Aristotle, which is what permits, as far as I can tell, the Roman catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Which is why, if I were to espouse any real presence view of the Supper, it would be something like the Eastern Orthodox opinion. A thing cannot be other than what it is. If this is true yet the Supper is other than what it is, it is a miracle. My real issue with transubstantiation is that it tries to explain how the impossible is possible. At any rate, maybe those old Greek guys will prove helpful in further analyzing this aesthetic/philosophic dichotomy — if it even lasts that long.
Die Wahrheit ist untödlich.
Ton frère,
M. Blanc
(‘M.’ as in monsieur, not Mel.)
Being Kindled 
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