Philosophy and ‘Experience’: A Conflict of Interests?*

Abstract

Material things are typically opaque. This corresponds to two facts about how they are seen. First, they always occlude themselves partly from view; their visual features never appear to you all at once. Second, they occlude what is behind them; you cannot look through them. Two fundamental traits of perceptual awareness have been expressed metaphorically by contrasting perceptual experiences to these two ways in which opacity determines the perception of material things:

First, the most fundamental feature of awareness is usually captured— faute de mieux—in the phrase: in presenting its object, a mental act is also implicitly conscious of itself. If it makes sense to say that an experience is itself presented, then its presentation is fundamentally different from the way objects appear. An actual experience appears all at once; it does not have further aspects. It is impossible to imagine how it could occlude itself partly from view; it seems transparent to itself. The term “transparent” is metaphorical, but it is not without descriptive value.1 It captures the fact that, for the perceiver of a tree, there is nothing more to this actual objectpresentation than what is there, which is in manifest contrast with the perceiver or tree itself.

It is not insofar as the eyes (ὂψιϛ) are made of water that they see but insofar as it [(the organ of) eyesight (ὂψιϛ)] is transparent.

Aristotle

If anyone can catch his consciousness in anything else than the existence of a content for him, I am unable to follow him.

Paul Natorp

*This text is an extended version of a presentation initially prepared for the “Philosophy – Phenomenology – Sciences” conference (Leuven, April 2009) with additional references to Kennedy (2009) and Byrne (2009).