Hi clavel-ga:
Some existential views on perception that I was able to find include:
The view of Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), a French Existentialist:
"...First of all, he observes that perception is not a simple
representation of an object to the sentient subject. Sensation
essentially consists in the act of perceiving, and this act is "mine."
To perceive an object means that the subject becomes mysteriously that
object. Thus by means of perception I am deepening in a new and
mysterious way my participation in the universe. Perception is like a
creation of the universe in me."
From: http://radicalacademy.com/philexistentialists2.htm
The view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, published in 1964:
"[Our experience of perception comes from our being present] at the
moment when things, truths, and values are constituted for us; that
perception is a nascent Logos; that it teaches us, outside of all
dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that is summons
us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of
reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth
of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover
the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is
lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the
contrary, rediscovered when it is made to appear against the
background of non-human nature."
From: http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/merleau.html
The view of Kierkegaard:
"If, for example, a person elevated himself above sense perception in
order to philosophize and someone else for the same reason doubted
sense perception, both would perhaps arrive at the same place, but the
movements would be different, and the movement, of course, was what he
was asking about in particular..."
From: http://home.infostations.com/malex/sk/kw7b_3.htm
For more information on existentialism, I highly recommend
http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/
They've done a great job of introducing the topic and the most famous
thinking in the field.
websearcher-ga |
