While I was meditating today, the guide was to notice sounds. To notice that you can't choose them. But, I thought, when you're really focused or distracted, you don't hear a lot of what's going on. I only hear the birds from my kitchen if I listen. Then it struck me that when I hear the sound of the cat settling into the pillow next to me, I'm also recreating mentally his actions and seeing him in my mind. What I'm getting at is a) that we often fail to notice stuff and b) our concepts affect our perceptions and judgements.
That made me recall another meditation, from a book about the environment - Animate Earth by Dr. Stephan Harding. He suggested sitting or lying in some outside space and thinking about being on a spinning globe in a solar system, a galaxy, a vast universe. That one is held by the embrace of the earth, the downward pressure of the atmosphere and the force of gravity. Up and down are just concepts we impose on experience. In the grand scale of things, they're irrelevant. There's no sky above. It could as well be below, that we are thankfully prevented from tumbling into. For eternity.
We see the sun rising. But although we know that the sun doesn't rise - we spin - the phenomenology of the experience leaves us feeling static and watching the sun move in relation to us. The ancient idea of the sun circling us 'makes sense'. And although we know that it's wrong, we have kept the terminology. It rises and sinks; it passes across the sky.
In a similar way, we think of the table as solid, but it's mostly space. Spinning electrons, or whatever.
The manifest and the scientific image. Yes, that covers much of this. And surely we can only function in the world by taking the world as it seems to us.
Yet it goes much deeper. Bob Solomon, whom I've had cause to refer to recently, says, following Heidegger, that we 'see' the world through our prevailing mood. And, further, points out that when we are angry, we 'see' the person we are angry with as offensive, to such an extent that it's rather hard to see anything good about them at all.
Our culture and our history changes the way we see female beauty, for example. Now, there may be a general and ongoing favouring of symmetry for good evolutionary reasons (it suggests health and absence of diseases and so on), but the preference for curvaceous or rail-thin; high or low foreheads; fine or wide noses; full or fine lips and so on is culturally and historically distinct. In a given place and time, such and such a face or body will be 'seen' as beautiful, but travel around the world or back in history and the evaluation might be different. It seems to me that the same general story is true of moral valuations. Expressions of anger or compassion are not universally regarded in the same light, to take two examples. In these cases, there are some core constants, related to the type of creatures we are, and many variations outside that.
We are willing to allow, though, that beauty may be in the eye of the beholder; that the manifest and the scientific image serve different purposes - but we are less willing to believe that there is not a more ultimate, or at least a superior reality to morality.
That said, how we see the world in a state of anger or depress, or from a narrow political or nationalistic perspective, surely could be said to be limited. Although maybe that's because the moralistic lens insists on a greater truth which such restrictions deny us.
This is more, I suppose, on my on-going theme of seeking greater clarity.
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