Meaning and Perception
Is it selfish to see enchanted meanings, or selfish not to?
I. Unenchantment
At New Cartographies, Nicholas Carr has a gorgeous post on what he calls “unenchantment” and the contemplative gaze. Carr takes issue with the recent trend towards re-enchanting our view of the world. Instead, he says,
When we look at the quality of attention demonstrated by Heaney, Muñoz, and Hawthorne, we’re not seeing enchantment. We’re seeing an exquisite openness to the real. A sense of wonder does not require a world infused with spirit. The world as it is is sufficient. The reason the wording matters here is simple. What bedevils our perceptions today isn’t a lack of enchantment. It’s a lack of reality.
“Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them,” Iain McGilchrist wrote in The Master and His Emissary. He’s right, but it’s important to recognize that the changes take place in the mind of the observer not in the things themselves. The things, whether works of art or of nature, have a material integrity that’s independent of our own thoughts and desires, and the stance we adopt toward them should entail a respect for that integrity.
I love Carr’s post, and when I see a piece of writing that I love, I often find it worthwhile to read arguments against it. I regularly read the blog of Brad East, who has recently been a strong proponent of a Christian version of re-enchantment. Taking Carr’s post seriously, East writes that enchantment, or “spiritual depth” if you don’t like the word “enchantment,” actually is part of the world as it is. This is not, he insists, the perception of a false thing, but rather the acknowledgment of a true thing:
Christian attention to the world and to things as the creation of God makes no demands, imposes no extrinsic meaning, bends nothing to our will to power or pleasure. It is a response (bottom up) to what we discover the world and its things to be, in themselves apart from and prior to us, just as it is a quest (top down) to see the world and its things as we have been told by God they in fact are.
Given this worldview, East protests that seeing meaning only in the mind of the observer is failing to see the meaning that objects really do have in themselves. Carr finds it selfish to ask more of the world than it has. But East finds it selfish not to see the meaning that truly does inhere in the world, since this risks leading us to create a self-directed meaning for ourselves instead of taking the meaning that is truly there.
II. Scientific perception
Recently, I have been reading Steven Shapin’s well-known book on the scientific revolution. Shapin writes compellingly about some of the changes in worldview between Copernicus and Newton. Relevant to this discussion, he notes a common practice in the seventeenth century of distinguishing between “primary” and “secondary” qualities. This way of looking at things was frequently a feature of a mechanical or corpuscular natural philosophy, one in which all effects are produced by direct physical impacts between things, sometimes involving small particles (i.e. corpuscles).
Primary qualities were those which really belonged to the object in itself: its parts’ size, shape and motion. They were called primary (or sometimes “absolute”) because no object, or its constituents, could be described without reference to them. Secondary qualities—redness, sweetness, warmth, and so on—were derived from the state of an object’s primary qualities. The primary caused (and was held to explain) the secondary. So, in a corpuscular philosophy, a body’s constituent bits of matter were in themselves neither red nor sweet nor warm, but their size, shape, arrangement or motion might produce those subjective effects in us.
This was a departure from Aristotelian philosophy, in which, Shapin tells us, “a physical account of things always had an irreducibly qualitative character,” and “there was a qualitative match between how the world was and how we experienced it.” Mechanical natural philosophy proposed that certain apparent qualities are inside us and our perception, instead of belonging to the object.
You can see how this is relevant to the previous section, yes? For East, we can perceive a meaning that is inherent to an object. For Carr, it is important to be aware that many of the things we call “meaning” are inside our perception.
We are seeing, here, a direct way in which “science” conflicts with “religion.” I put those in quotes, because mechanical natural philosophy was not precisely the same as “science” as we now understand it, although it certainly prefigured it. Moreover, religion takes many forms, some of which were very congenial towards the natural philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with natural laws authored by divine Providence. The participants in what we now call the scientific revolution were generally not atheists. Still, Brad East’s notion of proper Christian enchantment certainly could conflict with some ways of making this split between subjective experience and objective reality, and this was an important element in the development of the modern scientific worldview.1
III. Social perception
How does it change us, to make these fine-grained attempts at separating what we perceive from what is actually there? This isn’t just a matter of how we understand physical objects. It can also have profound impacts on how we understand people.
Among other things, this is a fascinating feminist topic. Sex-positive feminists sometimes deny innate differences in the level of sexual desire between men and women by pointing to the odd fact that, in medieval times, it was common to say that women are lascivious and sexual. This shows, they say, that there is some kind of social construction of which sex is the sexual one. It used to be women. Now it’s men.
Without meaning any particular rancour towards sex-positive feminists, I think this may be an interpretive error. It may be, in fact, that these medieval men were saying that women are sexual in the same way that an apple is red—as a sense impression that necessarily indicates a quality present in the object. By contrast, these days we can, and sometimes do, consider sexual attraction to be primarily a quality of the one who feels attraction, rather than the one who is attractive.
If this is true, then the separation between subjective impression and the actuality of a thing has a serious moral dimension. It allows us to see that a person themselves may have an entirely different idea of what they mean and what they are, compared to our perception of them. It may not be coincidence that the scientific revolution happened alongside literary changes that slowly made more room for complex internal motivations. People are not just the impressions they produce upon us. They have their own internal lives and meanings.
You might think that, absent a persnickety pursuit of of truth or a desire for technological power, it doesn’t matter much whether nature intends not to allow a vacuum, or whether it is actually pressure from spring-like2 air corpuscles that makes a vacuum hard to create. But as soon as we consider people, we see how important it may be to refuse to ascribe intentions based purely on our exterior perception.
Then again, a Christian like Brad East might protest that the most important element of intention here is not that of air, or nature, or even people, but that of God. It’s true that we don’t always correctly perceive the true meaning and intention of other people’s actions—but they may also not perceive the true meaning behind their lives, the one that God intends. Yes, our perceptions of meaning are flawed, and yes, these flaws in our perception can be particularly acute where other people are concerned, but only modern secular liberalism could ascribe the deciding vote on a person’s true meaning to that person, themselves.
IV. Gracefully
Having thus expanded our field of view, let me return to the conundrum with which I ended my first section. Is it selfish to ascribe meanings to things based on our perception? Is it even more selfish to refuse to see meaning in things? Rather than lay the charge of selfishness on either side, let me highlight what I see as the least selfish version of each.
If we see the world as unenchanted, then it is important to remember that our own impressions of a thing and the meanings we perceive in it are not wholly under our control, even when they are subjective. In other words, even if our human perception is an irreducible element in the attribution of meaning as we understand it, that does not mean that we can simply impart meaning or remove it at will. An impression of meaning can be social, or human, without being easily changeable.
On the other hand, if we see a spiritually charged world, filled with meaning that is imparted by God, then we must never forget that our own perception of this meaning must surely be flawed. After all, different people see different meanings in things. Meanings are culturally mediated and also mediated by standpoint. Even when different people do see similar meanings in things, this can be a result of common human features of the perceiver that don’t inhere in the object. Men may, generally and cross-culturally, attribute common meanings to women that are nevertheless false, for example. Human beings may have a broad tendency to see things in terms of how they are useful to humans, but this does not mean that the usefulness of something to humans is the true, inherent meaning of the object. And so on.
If we bear both of these things in mind, then neither the unenchanted nor the spiritually charged worldview needs to be selfish. We can see things, in an unenchanted fashion, and recognise that the meanings we see are not fully under our control, and accept those meanings for what they are, even if we believe that some element of our human perception adheres to them that we ought not to confuse for the real thing in itself. We can see things, in a spiritually charged fashion, and recognise that our perception of meanings is nevertheless likely to be flawed, and that we do not have the right to demand that things truly be what we perceive them to be. Either way, if we are wrong, we fail more gracefully.
I am not the first to note that the split between primary and secondary qualities has the potential to conflict with certain kinds of religion. Pietro Redondi wrote a thoroughly argued book proposing that Galileo’s real heresy was in this area, and that the gentle punishment of confining him to his own house because he wouldn’t recant his Copernicanism was actually a way to shield him from more serious charges of having called the theology of the Eucharist into question, since some of Galileo’s arguments could be read as threatening the Aristotelian explanation of what it would mean for bread and wine to also be the body and blood of Christ, even though they do not appear as such to us.
Neither of these descriptions quite accords with our current understanding, of course.
Interesting essay, coming at this question of perception and reality from a different angle than the usual philosophical one.
You suggest there is a "best" version of each position that meets somewhere in the middle: the essentialists can acknowledge the meaning-laden essence of things while acknowledging that their senses might deceive them; the nominalists can say that things are just what we make of them, but a lion is definitely different from a sheep.
I wonder though whether even this compromise vitiates the affective appeal of the "spiritually charged" vision of reality. Isn't the whole point of thinking that things have (divine) meaning that you can know, with certainty, what that meaning is? Descartes gets around this by saying that a perfect God must exist who would not deceive his senses, and so the world must be real, at least insofar as we have "clear and distinct" perceptions of it. Kant says we can never know the thing-in-itself, but that reason shows us there are three rectilinear dimensions in which things phenomenally appear to us, and that our unity of apperception is assured a priori by a the transcendental unity of of self-consciousness.
(Kant is of course wrong about the a priori conditions of reason, as Einstein shows, but he does illustrate the problem: our experience is always mediated by senses that are simply given to us.)
East criticizes Sacasas for turning the "world into a mirror," where the observer only sees himself (or perhaps only what can be measured). East says that he sees the world instead as "full of life, intelligence, events, experiences, agents, and phenomena." Frankly, I doubt that Sacasas would take issue with what East says there. East counsels respect for the "real." But he doesn't really doubt that the world is fundamentally transparent. The real reveals itself to East in "clear and distinct" impressions that lead to certain truths. He claims that the Christian "makes no demands" of the world, because the world just "sings" the truth about itself.
The defenders of an "enchanted world," in other words, seem committed to the notion that they know something *true* about the world beyond their sense impressions. The arguments of the disenchanted, in contrast, are at least structurally committed—by the form of their argument—to the notion that our sense impressions are always provisional, and that our names for things are strictly arbitrary. Not arbitrary in the sense that the names don't matter or don't have consequences, but that the names could be different, that names are abstractions from sense impressions.
Of course, nominalists/constructivists aren't always consistent about this. Most of them don't say all this explicitly, or even think it to themselves. You might even say that most people naturally lean towards "enchantment"—a world filled with hidden essences that naturally exert their power. So we hear arguments about how "Woman" is a constructed category, but of course a person born in the "wrong" body is just trying to align their inner and outer essential natures.
The trouble with East's argument about the transparent nature of reality is that it ultimately relies on faith, a word that does not appear in his essay except in quoting Sacasas. He accuses the skeptic of turning the world into a mirror where the skeptic only sees themself. The skeptic might ask in response, "what is this divine principle you see at work in the world?" Is it more or less selfish to see the world as (your) God's mirror?
The point I am trying to make, then, is that talk about dis/enchantment and meaning seems to be driven by anxiety over uncertainty. Isn't an enchanted world one in which a divine being assuages this anxiety by telling us how to live and what our place is? Isn't a disenchanted world so very desolate not because we are alone (there are others all around) but because we don't know what to do with ourselves? That we are the ones responsible for making sense out of our senses?
> This shows, they say, that there is some kind of social construction of which sex is the sexual one. It used to be women. Now it’s men.
I know it's not the focus of your piece, but I'm surprised you didn't mention the other interpretation - women as Destroyers. There's a construction of women in mythology and culture in which they are both the force that civilizes men (see: Enkidu) and the force that destroys or corrupts them.
Basically, women are inherently anti-men in this construction, in that they sap the things that make men masculine. It's good in some instances and bad in others, but women don't appear, iirc, to earn credit for the former.