Abstract
Activity in perception is often thought of as having its origin in either Plato or Platonic philosophizing. There is, however, another current or research that casts doubt on this idea, finding in Plato a receptive view of perception. This is a study of the crucial passages in Plato’s Timeaus, especially the material account of the stream of vision coming from the eye, and the question of the ontology of perceptual qualities. It will be argued that for Plato perception is a two-way link to the external world, a complex interaction between the perceiver and the external object. Mental activities are heavily innately specified but at the same time also capable of richly developing in response to interaction with environment.
Innate specification is warranted by the Platonic commitment to a soul capable of organization and recognition of intelligible structures, of similarities and differences, within perceptual input. The purely material account gives the perceiver a more important and an active role in the asymmetric interaction between it and the external body. Within that framework, however, perception functions as a crucial source of information. The process delivers perceptual qualities and is probably the origin of certain of our central notions, such as numbers. The account is further situated in the ancient teleological context: perception is seen as a potential source of both negative and positive effects on the soul, shaping its dispositions. This leads to a developmental picture where perceptions are formed and judged according not merely of fixed abilities, but also developed dispositions.
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Notes
- 1.
Whether there is any activity involved in this materialistic account has been challenged in some recent scholarship; Grönroos (2001, p. 46) contends that the perceptual qualities are mind-independent, at least in the case of vision.
- 2.
See, e.g. Simpson et al. (2005, p. 4).
- 3.
See, e.g. Scott (1995).
- 4.
Cf. Modrak (2006).
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- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
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- 12.
Also, whether the story about the creation or generation story involving the Craftsman is intended as a mere presentational device, a way of explicating nature’s laws and features, or whether it involves some kind of real proto-historical scheme, is a matter of scholarly dispute. Broadie (2012, Chap. 1) for instance, holds that the proto-historical structure is needed to ensure that the authorship of the Demiurge is distinct from its product. As regards perception, this question is not central. What will be of some interest is to which extent the account of perception is intended as an account of the development of this capacity in human beings.
- 13.
Strange(1998).
- 14.
Strange (1998) suggests that such a division is possible: Reasons’ creation of elements, soul and other things that happens entirely unimpeded; the entirely mechanistic elements, like random motions, elemental transformations etc. that are due to Necessity; and finally that which comes out of interaction between these, namely human body, plants, animals and their functions and dysfunctions. However, in making this division, Strange is sometimes at pains in saying where a given phenomenon belongs to. The account of vision, as he notes, is not an easy case: it is discussed within the first account, that of Reason, yet most of the description is highly mechanical in tone.
- 15.
This means that any results of studies that concentrate on the Theaetetus cannot be applied to the Timaeus without much further work. This goes, for instance, to the view of Frede (1987), who distinguished perception as a passive power and all judgements, even those of perceptual kind, due to another, active power of reason. While this division is inapplicable to the Timaeus, the flavour of the theory is nonetheless similar: even the simplest perceptual judgements display the presence of reason.
- 16.
Broadie (2012, p. 279).
- 17.
An oddity of the account is that there may not be animal souls at all—see e.g. Carpenter (2010).
- 18.
The word is challenging in itself: it has been argued that the verb, aisthanesthai, has still in Classical antiquity a broad rather than fixed meaning; Frede (1987).
- 19.
Whether or not we should or could read into the text a distinction made explicit much more later, namely the one between sensation as qualitative experiences and perception as something that goes beyond thus given, perhaps as the ways we take the external objects to be, is a question I cannot really go in here. I shall simply stipulate a broad and a narrow usage of aisthêsis: by “sensation” I denote the broad category of any encounter that the body has with the external world that is neither nutrition nor desire, but connected to sensing. I shall use the translation “perception” for those of the encounters that will reach the soul and its rational orbits.
- 20.
Even the soul is not defined as something non-material or non-physical. The soul, while not constituted of the four elements, is made of its own proper “materials”, that of the “same” and the “different”, in complicated pastry of mathematical relations (Timaeus 35–36). As this “soul-matter” is moulded into orbits that can be shaken by a flow of mass, it seems that the soul, too, is described as something with nearly physical properties and some kind of extension, and thus not purely as an abstract entity. Perhaps it is best described as geometrical, as having a possible but not necessary orientation and location in space.
- 21.
- 22.
An alternative reading is provided by Taylor (1928, pp. 277–278), according to whom the daylight here refers to the sunlight that the external bodies reflect, and there would thus not be any separate medium needed, only the fire coming from the object and that coming from the eye. Taylor’s interpretation suits better to the second account of the physics of perception given later in the dialogue (67c4–7; see below), where no day-light is mentioned, but where the bodies emit some light themselves. There are, however, three reasons to object to this view: first, the text itself suggests the medium picture, with its “peri”, “around”. The fire coming from the object, rather than surrounding the stream of vision, encounters and penetrates it. Second, the fires emitted from the bodies in the later passage are what constitute, or rather, as we shall see, give rise to colours, and it would be odd if Plato would here merely refer to them as daylight. Third, what is underlined in this first encounter is the likeness between the stream from the eyes and the fire of day-light. In the second encounter with the object there has to be, presumably, some similarity as well, but what is underlined there (see below) is the dissimilarity of proportions. Now, as to whether Plato thought that the colour-fire originates in daylight which the bodies reflect is another matter, for or against of which I do not see evidence in the passage. The interpretation involving a medium is also chosen by, e.g., Modrak (2006, p. 137); Broadie (2012, pp. 173–174); Grönroos (2001, pp. 32–34); Brisson (1999, p. 155).
- 23.
Grönroos (2001, p. 34) argues that the dependency of the visual stream on the day-light is not one of existence—the stream is composed and originated even without it-but one of strength: without the day-light the body of the stream is not strong enough to reach far from the eyes, or far enough to many external bodies.
- 24.
As suggested to me in a seminar by Miira Tuominen. I also differ from Grönroos (2001) who translates the lines 45c4–6: …“is united in one single body in straight course from the eyes; this happens whenever the stream issuing forth from within stands firm against that of the things outside with which it meets”. Grönroos wants to connect this passage with the idea that the day-light makes the stream from the eyes stronger. While the passage is compatible with such a view, I connect the passage with the line 45c7–d1, and consider the translation “direction” more plausible also because it is used by Plato in that meaning in Rep. 436e4.
- 25.
That this distinction is at work as early, already, as Augustine, see Brown (2007).
- 26.
Brisson (1999, p. 149).
- 27.
- 28.
Ierodiakonou (2005, pp. 225–226).
- 29.
Brisson (1999, p. 155).
- 30.
Ierodiakonou (2005).
- 31.
- 32.
It is interesting that the Philebus 34a introduces anaisthesia as a technical term for such bodily pathêmata that do not affect the soul. The point in the Timaeus seems different—it is about the mechanical encounter of two kinds of flames, and nothing is here said about the soul. The accounts are compatible, however, to the extent that an encounter between two fires the proportions of which were the same would not result in any transmission towards the soul, and can thereby similarly be called non-perceptions.
- 33.
Finally, one could say that this reading has a further benefit of bringing some unity to the interpretation of Plato on perception as a whole. The reading given is closer to that of the Theaetetus than a more securely realist, perceiver-independent reading. In both dialogues, perceptual qualities have an aspect which is perceiver-dependent. While Plato’s interest in the Timaeus is general, it is in kinds, in perceivable qualities and sense-modalities rather than in individual differences, in the Theaetetus he goes a step further. Perceiver-dependency leaves, as it were, the door open for individual or token differences, rather than merely those of type.
- 34.
As Johansen (2004, p. 168) points out, there are further places where the role of reason is underlined: e.g. 47d3.
- 35.
For an argument to the effect that the same and the different are used both in talking about forms, and about sensible objects, and in connecting perceptions to forms, see Frede (1997).
- 36.
Burnyeat (2000) provides a most thorough discussion of why mathematics is so central for Plato. His emphasis is on the Republic.
- 37.
- 38.
Johansen (2004, pp. 168–175).
- 39.
Ibid., 175.
- 40.
I am grateful to Deborah Brown for posing this question. It is a question that may be especially problematic for Plato, given that often his metaphysics seems to run into similar problems: what makes a collection of things like yellow, like, and just, a recognisable unity that we are used to perceiving and thinking about?
- 41.
Brisson (1999, p. 162).
- 42.
- 43.
Frede (1997, p. 46). The area is very complicated: on the one hand we have the question of the origin of the informational content (how much and what comes from the soul itself and what from the perceptibles?); on the other hand we have a question of whether general or universal thinking always presupposes recollection of a Form in Plato. In a study of recollection in the Pheado, Dimas (2003) makes space for a kind of thought of, say, the ”equal” which is general, retrieved from within the soul itself, but does not presuppose a definite view or proper knowledge of what equal or equality is.
- 44.
I wish to express my gratitude for the audiences of the history of philosophy research seminars both in Helsinki and in Uppsala, of the Finnish and Norwegian Institutes at Athens (October 2012), of the Persons and Passions -workshop in the University of Jyväskylä (December 2012) and of the Yorkshire Ancient Philosophy Network (April 2013). As usual, I have received too many crucial comments to be able to record them here. In addition, I am grateful for the comments of Amber Carpenter, Eyjólfur Emilsson, Katerina Ierodiakonou, Tua Korhonen, José Filipe Silva, and Holger Thesleff on earlier written versions of the paper.
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Remes, P. (2014). Plato: Interaction Between the External Body and the Perceiver in the Timaeus . In: Silva, J., Yrjönsuuri, M. (eds) Active Perception in the History of Philosophy. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04361-6_2
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