Thinking about Ordinary Things

A Short Invitation to Philosophy

Jan Sokol

KAROLINUM

Thinking about Ordinary Things
A Short Invitation to Philosophy

prof. PhDr. Jan Sokol, Ph.D., CSc.

Original Czech version of Malá filosofie člověka, Vyšehrad: 2010, translated by Markéta Pauzerová and Paul Cairn

Published by Charles University in Prague
Karolinum Press
http://www.cupress.cuni.cz
ebooks@karolinum.cz
Edited by Alena Jirsová
Cover by Jan Šerých
First English Edition

© Charles University in Prague, 2013
Text © Jan Sokol, 2013
Translation © Markéta Pauzerová, 2013

ISBN 978-80-246-2229-3
ISBN 978-80-246-2440-2 (online : pdf)
ISBN 978-80-246-3057-1 (ePub)
ISBN 978-80-246-3058-8 (Kindle)

Contents

1. Cover Page

2. Title Page

3. Copyright Page

4. Contents

5. Introduction

6. 1. Philosophy: between Science, Art and Myth

7. 2. How We See and Hear

8. 3. Perception and Attention

9. 4. Things, Words and Names

10. 5. Language and Thought

11. 6. Man in the World

12. 7. Holiday and Everyday, Myth and Logos

13. 8. You and I

14. 9. Action and Freedom

15. 10. Play

16. 11. Language as Play

17. 12. Time

18. 13. Science and Knowledge

19. 14. Truth

20. 15. Scale and Ratio

21. 16. Likeness and Imitation

22. 17. Life

23. 18. Nature

24. 19. Necessity and Chance

25. 20. Technique and Technology

26. 21. Society, Institutions and State

27. 22. Values and Money

28. 23. Custom and Society

29. 24. Morality and Ethics

30. 25. Law

31. 26. Text and Interpretation

32. 27. The City

33. 28. History

34. 29. What Happens in History?

35. 30. Civilisation, Culture, and Religion

36. 31. Tolerance and Pluralism

37. 32. Man and the World

Introduction

1. Philosophy: between Science, Art and Myth

2. How We See and Hear

3. Perception and Attention

4. Things, Words and Names

5. Language and Thought

6. Man in the World

7. Holiday and Everyday, Myth and Logos

8. You and I

9. Action and Freedom

10. Play

11. Language as Play

12. Time

13. Science and Knowledge

14. Truth

15. Scale and Ratio

16. Likeness and Imitation

17. Life

18. Nature

19. Necessity and Chance

20. Technique and Technology

21. Society, Institutions and State

22. Values and Money

23. Custom and Society

24. Morality and Ethics

25. Law

26. Text and Interpretation

27. The City

28. History

29. What Happens in History?

30. Civilisation, Culture, and Religion

31. Tolerance and Pluralism

32. Man and the World

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1. Cover Page

2. Begin Reading

3. Copyright Page

4. Contents

5. Introduction

Introduction

For the study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.*

This book is based on a series of lectures for an Introduction to Philosophy course, primarily aimed at students of other subjects which share some common ground with philosophy. But it can serve equally as an introduction to the colourful world of philosophy for students and teachers of that subject, as well as for the general reader.

Like many other subjects, philosophy today is a multifaceted and diffuse subject. No one person can possibly read all the journals and publications that exist and as a result philosophical discussion has broken off into various schools and circles, becoming more opaque, and harder to teach, in the process. For that reason, I have sought to avoid the traditional ‘history of philosophy’ approach, preferring to come at this introduction to philosophical problems from a different angle. Although I am sure that the history of philosophy will continue to occupy a fundamental place in the teaching of philosophy per se, I believe it does not serve especially well as a method of introducing the subject to the student of today. I will try to explain why this is.

The history of philosophy represents a tremendous amount of valuable positive knowledge, which can be taught, interpreted and examined. But this can lead the beginner to suppose, falsely, that philosophy is, like other sciences, basically a volume of knowledge. As the botanist is concerned with plants, the philosopher is concerned with philosophers, the development of their thought and their disputes with each other. If, in the exposition of the enormous bulk of the historical material, no place remains for the opinions and convictions of at least some philosophers, the whole point of philosophical research and discussion will be lost. All that will be left is a list of names, biographical data and wise sayings (‘You can’t step into the same river twice’, ‘Know thyself’, ‘I think therefore I am’, ‘God is dead’) which may serve well as rhetorical flourishes, but which have no value as a tool to help us think critically about life and the world. In this way, philosophy could easily become a closed discipline for experts who have learned it all and who simply carry on their investigations along these closed lines. But then why would we bother students of other subjects with it?

Encouraged by some positive recent developments, I have attempted an introduction to philosophical thought which is based on philosophical topics and themes. Its method is a sort of phenomenology, by which I mean a close-up analysis of our experience, but as far as possible expressed in plain language, without resorting to jargon. Let me nail my colours to the mast straight away: I named the Czech version of this book Malá filosofie člověka, which would translate as A Short Philosophy of Man. As we shall see, it does not deal solely with man or woman per se, but human experience, actions, knowledge and thought are the starting point. As opposed, for example, to the philosophy of science or the philosophy of language, our focus here is on humans as physical beings in the world, as historical, social and moral persons.

In this way, we shall be able to point to the relations between philosophy and other branches of human intellectual effort – mainly science, but also art, technology, law and religion. The goal which I have followed throughout is to show the omnipresence of philosophical questions and to encourage students of other subjects to think philosophically. For this reason I make only limited reference of such classic philosophical themes as being and consciousness, or spirit and matter. I hope that I have not lost sight of the heart of these themes in my lectures; it is just that they may appear under different headings. On the other hand, I have been bold enough to include several excursions into the realms of other subjects, such as linguistics, history, sociology and law; although naturally my work in these areas is that of a mere dilettante.

After many years of teaching, it has became clear to me that the danger of a relatively accessible text is that it can be read without a great deal of thought, so that the content of the book flows over the reader like water. For this reason I have included several questions at the end of each chapter. They relate to the preceding content, but the reader cannot find the answer in the text alone – he has to think for himself.

I need hardly add that I will be sincerely grateful for any criticism. That the book continues to need it after six Czech editions is not in doubt. On the contrary, to the extent that the book has any value, this is largely down to the contributions of others – most of all Zdeněk Pinc, who inspired me to attempt this book – to colleagues and students who read through the book patiently, pen in hand, and many others, alive and dead, who have through the years offered me the pleasure of philosophical conversation and also much food for thought. If I attempted to name some of them, I would certainly forget to name others.

Prague, October 2012

* Thomas Aquinas, De Coelo, Commentarius, 1.22.

1. Philosophy: between Science, Art and Myth

Art, religion and philosophy differ only in form;
their purpose is the same. (Hegel)

When we are hungry or in dire need of something, we can hardly talk or think about anything else. When we have toothache, when we are scared, or rushing somewhere, conversation stops altogether. But occasionally it might happen that we are in no dire need of anything, and we are in no particular rush to get anywhere, and in those moments philosophy may become possible. Or then again it may not – such free moments can be used in various ways. Often our first thought is to just ‘kill time’, perhaps by reading a newspaper, solving a crossword, or watching television. And before we know it, it is gone. Why do we seek to ‘kill’ this free time? For exactly the same reason as we would kill a lion or a snake: we are afraid of it. After all, free time is not as straightforward as we might think. We find ourselves alone with our own company. And this can quickly become intolerable for those of us who do not know how to deal with our own company. We are like a chain-smoker who runs out of cigarettes on Sunday evening when the shops are shut; we feel something akin to withdrawal symptoms. It is a blend of anxiety and boredom. So we bite our nails or drum our fingers on the table. We would dearly love to kill that time – but we don’t know how. If only it could be Monday already.

The ancient Greeks had a word to describe this stretch of free time, when we do not have to be anywhere and are lacking nothing – they called it scholé. The Romans adopted this word, and everyone else in turn from the Romans, until from scholé came our modern word school. So school, however ironic it may sound, ought to be a place we enjoy going to, where we don’t need to hurry, or be afraid of anything, a place where we have the time and leisure to think. But have you ever seen a school that looked like this? I certainly haven’t. And yet this is how every school should be. How is this possible? How could it happen that from free time devoted to thinking, from scholé, we could end up with school – a place where pupils and teachers irritate and bore each other, or worry about exams? If we were to look for a modern equivalent of scholé it would be our holidays, the opposite of school. How did we reach this state of affairs?

Most likely it has something to do with the fact that there is an art to handling the free moments in one’s life. To handle them in such a way that they are not lost to leisure pursuits, while at the same time ensuring that they are not empty, dull or irksome. The people best equipped to manage free time are little children, who are able to take pleasure in the most mundane things: a car passing by, an insect flying through the air, a stone lying on the ground. For the child, each one of these is an event. But over time, as they grow older, children become more used to such things – ‘I’ve seen that, I’ve done that, it’s no big deal’. And we adults provide them with powerful support in this direction: ‘Not that car again,’, ‘OK, so there’s a fly buzzing around – so what’, ‘Stop asking all those silly questions and watch where you’re going or you’ll fall over!’

And so here we are – ‘watch where you’re going or you’ll fall over.’ However strange it might sound, the history of philosophy begins with just such a trivial story, about the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus. The story tells how he was walking across a courtyard looking so intently at the stars that he tripped over and fell into a well. He had to be rescued by a servant-girl, who mocked him for being so concerned with what was in the sky that he could not see what was at his feet. How Thales answered her, the story does not say. Most likely he was unable to think of a suitable response at that moment and was just glad to be out of the well. But he does not seem to have learned anything from his mishap. After all, if he had abandoned his interest in the stars and the mysteries of the world and simply learned to walk safely across courtyards, it is very unlikely that we would know anything about him today. There have always been plenty of people who know how to walk safely across courtyards.

We will most likely never know what Thales said to the girl. But an answer of sorts is to be found, two hundred years later, with the greatest Greek philosopher, Plato. The answer Plato gives is very surprising and may on the surface appear to be nonsense. He wrote that all philosophy begins in wonder. Now Plato was certainly a great philosopher, but did he not perhaps go a bit overboard here? Surely philosophy is the realm of kindly old eccentrics with long beards who have little interest in (or aptitude for) ordinary, practical things, people who puzzle their heads over questions which nobody else worries about. Is philosophy not something we associate with wisdom, and wise men? And are wise men not men who have seen it all, lived through it all and who can no longer be shocked by anything? And they should be expected to fall over themselves with wonderment and amazement at every little thing, like children? Surely not.

And yet is quite certain that Plato made this statement in all seriousness. Indeed it is possible that he was thinking of Thales’ amazement at what was going on over our heads in the sky. Wait, something is going on in the sky? But isn’t it just the same thing over and over again, day after day, year after year? Yes it is, and this is precisely what puzzled Thales, and his student Anaximander. From the dawn of time people everywhere have known that the sun comes up in the morning and goes down in the evening, that from sunrise until evening is day and after evening comes night, that evening comes after day and, after night, day again. People have always known that this is simply the way it has always been and always will be and that we have to arrange our affairs accordingly, so we do not end up stranded somewhere in the wilderness when the sun goes down. This is all so simple and natural to us that when we want to say that something is certain we use expressions like ‘as sure as night follows day.’

But long ago, even before Anaximander, there were those who realised that there was nothing certain about it whatsoever. And it is those who think that there is any certainty in it who are the foolish ones. Of course, there is a stone lying on the path, it was there yesterday and no doubt it will still be there tomorrow, unless someone picks it up and carries it away. But the sun does not simply lie there like that stone. It is in constant motion, every minute somewhere else. It moves around like an animal, a living thing. It appears somewhere in the east each morning, then climbs higher up in the sky (even higher in the summer) then starts coming down towards the earth again until it finally sets in the evening, disappearing without a trace beyond the horizon. How does it manage to appear again the very next morning – and at the other side of the sky? Where has it been in the meantime? What happened to it? And will the same thing happen again tomorrow? Does it have to happen this way? And what if the sun fails to rise again tomorrow?

If the sun failed to rise again tomorrow, it would be the end of us all. And that is why, thousands of years ago, people started to concern themselves with why it rises. And because the sun’s rising was a matter of some importance to them, they also concerned themselves with what needed to be done to ensure it continued to rise. The outcome of their observations and thoughts were the ancient myths. According to the Greek myth the sun is the fire chariot of the god Helios, who travels in it every day across the sky before going down into the sea and the underworld for the evening, where the fiery horses rest before Helios harnesses them to the chariot and rides them out again across the sky. And so that people don’t come to take this for granted, the myth also tells of how Helios lent the horses to his son Phaeton. He was not able to control them, however, and the horses took fright, killing the boy. From this time on, Helios knows that he must not lend anyone else his chariot, and so it is certain that he will ride out with them tomorrow, just like yesterday and every day for thousands of years. However, if people were to cause any kind of offence to Helios – who knows what could happen?

Thales’ servant most likely heard a story like this in her childhood, and remembered that as long as she behaved respectfully towards Helios, he would come out with his chariot every day, and that there was no need to worry her head about the sun coming up tomorrow. Thales himself probably heard this story as well, but for some reason it struck him as unsatisfactory. Perhaps this was because he had also heard other myths which explained the rising of the sun in some other way. Or perhaps it struck him as peculiar that such an important function should be dependent on one individual – even if he was one of the immortal gods. Does the very regularity of the sun’s course through the sky not suggest that something else will be behind it?

We today are unable to read the myth of Helios and Phaeton as anything other than a fairy tale, a more or less entertaining story for children, but one which we would be foolish to take seriously. Like Thales’ servant, we do not concern ourselves with whether the sun will rise again tomorrow. And when our own children ask us about it, we will tell them something very different. It will be less entertaining and harder to understand, there will be all sort of difficult concepts and words like ‘gravitation’, ‘momentum’ and ‘planetary system’ involved. We will have to explain to them that it is actually the earth, not the sun, which is moving, although it doesn’t seem like that. The servant would laugh heartily at this account, just as we laugh at the story of Phaeton.

But there is a certain difference between the two. These days we have far more knowledge about the stars, the earth and the sun; we have a level of detailed knowledge that would have made Thales’ jaw drop. Even those of us who paid no attention to astronomy at school know that there are whole books about it, and that there are people who devote every waking hour to studying, measuring and contemplating the sun. We call these people scientists. And these scientists would perhaps be able to explain to Thales and Anaximander why the sun comes up every day, and even predict to the second when it would occur. They would be able to tell them the life span of our sun, where it gets its energy from, how old it is – a whole host of incredible, and more or less useful, information.

But would they be able to explain all this to people like Thales’ servant? Hardly. They would most likely dismiss the scientists outright before they even had a chance to speak. Anything they tried to teach them about the sun would go in one ear and out the other. So a good astronomer, able to give understandable explanations, could have useful conversations with Thales and Anaximander, with Plato and with the youngest children – but they would draw a blank with the people like Thales’ servant. Scientists, philosophers and little children – is this not a peculiar group? It might seem so at first sight. But we need only remember Plato’s statement about the beginning of philosophy and it all falls into place; these are all people who are capable of experiencing wonder.

There is another, fairly simple, connection between philosophy and science. Just as Thales’ interest and uncertainty gave rise to astronomy, much of what we call science has grown out of questions which were originally philosophical in nature. Throughout its whole history philosophy has been a kind of seed-bed of the sciences, a kind of ‘Technology Park’ dedicated to cultivating the conditions in which science can become possible. In the modern world, science constitutes an entire branch of human activity, employing millions of people. And like any other type of work, it is possible to view it as just work, a way to earn a living. But in our consideration of the dialogue between Thales and the scientist, we of course had in mind a scientist for whom science is something more than just a job. Only such a scientist could understand the questions of a child (or of a philosopher) and answer them in a way that they would be understood. They are able to do this because their science retains inside it something of the philosophy from which it sprang: the ability to understand and the ability to experience wonder.

We have seen that philosophy also developed out of something. The questions that philosophers asked – like, for instance, if and why the sun will come out tomorrow – had previously been answered by myth. And so as science is the child of philosophy, philosophy is the child of myth. As we know, relations between parents and children are often confrontational; the fifteen-year-old child seeks to break away from his parents, to be different from them, to stand on his own two feet. There are similarities to this in the relationship between myth, philosophy and science. Science, which came last, often seems like it wishes to disown its mother. Her wise old words sound hollow. Just leave behind all this philosophy, it seems to say, and try for once to invent something, measure something, prove something – like us scientists.

And so, by a process of historical justice, philosophy has received the very same treatment it once meted out to myth. This adolescent rebellion against myth is represented by the great flowering of Greek philosophy. The Greek philosophers were merciless in their exposure of the shortcomings of myth. According to them, myth was simply spouting nonsense, and was completely unable to provide reasons for the conclusions it drew. Myth was incapable of distinguishing between the truth and mere fancy. It forced a certain view of the world on people and prevented them from understanding how things actually are. This is what led Heraclitus to the judgement that Homer ought to be expelled and flogged.

And yet, true as all this may be, there is a certain superficiality to it. It hides a far deeper similarity, the fact that there is something very profound that connects myth, philosophy and science: wonder and amazement about the world, about the way things are. This fundamental ability, to see things that the majority of people do not see and to feel wonder in the face of them, is common to all three – myth, philosophy and science – and it is also shared by art. Along with philosophy, art has its wellsprings in myth. Unlike philosophy, however, art has never been ashamed of this origin. But unlike art, philosophy and science have made one significant step forward. After all, it is not enough simply to wonder at the world in which we live; man has also been endowed with the power to think, to contemplate and to evaluate – what we traditionally call reason. Therefore it behoves man to attempt to somehow understand, and communicate, what he has seen. And it is this attempt at understanding and explaining, in a way that others can understand, that separates philosophy and science from art and myth.

And so it is in the space between science, art and myth that philosophy has found its home. There have been entire periods in history where people have got by without philosophy. These were calm times, when nothing much was changing in the world, and people made do with the wisdom that had been passed down from their grandparents. When they could happily walk about their courtyards, devote themselves to running their farms, and the only thing to watch out for was that they didn’t go falling into wells. However there have also been other periods in history, when everything seems to be changing, when suddenly children no longer understand their parents and parents no longer understand their children. At such times we have no option but to think, and to find new questions to ask, and new answers to these questions, because the old answers no longer tell us anything. Not that we no longer understand them, but they no longer interest us. Not that we regard the old questions as incorrect, but they are no longer our questions. It was in precisely this kind of period that myth first arose, before giving rise to philosophy and philosophy in turn to science. And it is in precisely this kind of period that we find ourselves today. We do not know where we are meant to be headed. And people who do not know where they belong on this earth are easy prey for demagogues, who will tempt them with all sorts of ‘answers’ and who can drive them to commit the most awful acts. In the 20th century we saw this over and over again. And it was in part because, in all their rushing around to keep themselves comfortable, people did not find time to think.

And it is for this reason that we need to learn to think, so that we do not fall for false promises in this way again. Now, one can learn to think in two ways. One can learn in the way one learns history; that is, to listen and read about all the interesting things that have happened in the world. Or one can learn in the way one learns to swim or play the piano – that is, by actually doing it. Thinking, by which I mean philosophy, can be done in both ways. One can learn about what the ancient (and not so ancient) philosophers have had to say – that is, learn the history of philosophy. This can be extremely worthwhile and interesting, but it has one shortcoming. The history of philosophy can all too easily become no more than the mindless accumulation of facts – names, dates, mottos and ‘famous thoughts’. And in the process the most important thing gets lost – one does not learn to think. It is for that reason that we will attempt the other route here. We will learn to think by thinking about things. We have chosen many important themes that we will learn to ask questions about. All these themes are fairly plain and straightforward, and at first glance may not even appear to be worth talking about. We will aim to prove that this is a mistaken belief. It is in the most ordinary, everyday things that the greatest mysteries are hidden. You would have to be a dull and unobservant person to think that life’s mysteries can only be gleaned by exotic travel or the ingestion of certain drugs. If you cannot see secrets and mysteries in the here and now, you will not find them in Tibet either. But if you have learned to see them, then you have learned to think philosophically.

It is the rock-solid belief of all philosophers throughout history that philosophy is the most beautiful thing in the world. But like any meaningful human activity, it cannot be done in a sloppy, cack-handed manner. It demands time, and it demands it all to itself. You cannot philosophise while watching television. You have to dedicate yourself to it. To think philosophically calls for a clear head, concentration, honest endeavour, stamina and curiosity. But, as philosophers will tell you, it has never let anyone down.

Questions:

• Do you know any myths? What are
they about? What are they trying to tell us?

• What is the difference between myth and fairy tales?

• How is myth connected to poetry and literature and theatre?

• How did philosophy separate itself from myth and what did it criticise about myth? Was something important lost in this separation?

• How does science differ from philosophy? What questions does it ask? What do these questions deal with? Is there anything these questions ignore?

• Try to compare a philosophical account and a scientific account of the same thing, for example the sun, the earth, or man.

2. How We See and Hear

To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy. (Hegel)

We have said that it is possible to philosophise anywhere and about anything. So where do we start? With whatever happens to be in front of us at this moment? We will get to that soon enough, but let us go back one step further – what is it that we have in front of us, and how do we see it? How do we see? Surely that is no kind of question at all. We have two eyes that function like television cameras, giving us a stereoscopic picture of our surroundings. We have ears and we hear sounds, pressure waves in the air. Then we have smell and taste, which in humans do not play as great a role as they do for animals, except when we are eating, and then finally we have touch, with which we experience the surfaces of objects. We have a certain sense of orientation, we know up from down, we have a sense of balance – and that is about it. We have a nervous system which carries information through the body, and finally we have the control centre, the brain, which processes all this information like a computer.

This is roughly what we learned in school and this is how we think of it ourselves – if we bother to think about it at all. For the most part we are too engaged in the business of living to devote much time to such things. But at this moment we are attempting to philosophise – that means that we do have some time. Let us start with the most common and least mysterious of all the senses – sight. We know a great deal about how the eye works and we also know something about how visual information is received, transported to the brain and processed there. We know that for human beings sight is the most important of the senses, the one that receives and processes the most information. It is for this reason that the verb ‘to see’ has such a wide range of meanings. We can say ‘I’d love to see Paris’ rather than having to say ‘I’d love to travel to Paris’. And if we argue with somebody about something and we turn out to be right we can say ‘See? I was right.’

But what is it that we actually see? That is another question. We see what we have in front of us, what we look at. We notice multi-coloured dots as the lens transmits images to the retina. But wait – something is not right here. What the lens transmits to the retina can certainly be described as multi-coloured dots of various shapes, some lighter, some darker. But when we open our eyes we do not see dots, but rather things, objects. Even when we look at an inkblot on paper, we have a tendency to see things in it – one person may see an animal, another may see a car, a third may see a pear, and so on. There are various psychological tests which are based on this. It is only on those rare occasions when we find ourselves looking at something that we know nothing about and which, unlike our inkblot, does not seem to fall naturally into any kind of shape, that we can say that we see nothing but dots or smudges. This may happen if we are looking at an X-ray or a complex electrical schema. In such situations we could just as well say that we see nothing at all. What are all these dots and smudges for? Can we learn anything from them? Are we able to say anything about them? On the other hand an experienced doctor would not see dots but perhaps a spinal fracture. This is not because his eyesight is so much better than ours – he sees the same dots and smudges that we do – but because he has been trained to see fractures in them. Probably in the same way that we learned to see things in our bedroom when we were children.

So from coloured dots on the retina all of a sudden we have objects. We also see them in two-dimensional photographs. Where did they come from? Let us use another example. I walk into the kitchen and I see that the table is set for dinner. On the table are plates and I can see immediately that they are round – even though the retina sees them as elliptical. The table in front of me is a right-angled oblong, even though I see it as a trapezoid. You may well say that this is simply due to the distortion caused by perspective. But if nobody had told me that, I would always have had the impression that I am really seeing it as right-angled. I cannot possibly be removing perspective distortion as in projective geometry – anyone who has tried that can tell you how much work is involved. So we are not carrying out any such correction, at least not consciously, but we see the plate as round and a piece of paper as oblong.

You walk into a school classroom and you see tables and chairs. You could easily count how many there are if anyone asked you. Only when you start paying close attention do you notice that you cannot see any of the chairs whole. A part of the backrest sticks out above the table, a part of the leg is visible beneath it. But this would not cause you the slightest difficulty in your task of counting the chairs. It would not even occur to you to count the different parts of the same chair as two separate chairs. You simply know, beyond any doubt, that the armrest and the legs are part of one and the same chair, even though you cannot see the bit in between.

But this simple ‘operation’, the like of which we carry out a hundred times a day without even needing to think about it, turns out to be anything but simple. This revelation was brought home to us when scientists tried to get a computer to replicate it. You have probably heard of industrial robots. There are also more complex robots, which have within them TV cameras and computers, whose job it is to figure out what is in front of it. Among experts this is known as the ‘scene’. And to the great surprise of the scientists, it was discovered that it is extremely difficult for the robot to distinguish the ‘scene’ from a collection of multi-coloured dots. It turns out that the robot is only able to distinguish a small number of objects, and even then only when they had very simple shapes – cubes, cylinders and pyramids. If there is a larger number of objects in the scene, or if they have more complex shapes, the robot is entirely unable to cope with this task. Even a computer must somehow ‘know’ in advance what it can expect to see in its environment. The dots on their own are not enough.

For the most part we operate in the environment that we know. Even if we go into a stranger’s house or to another town, the things we see strike us as familiar. So the act of ‘seeing’ is for the most part made out of recognising objects that are already known to us. If we find ourselves face to face with something completely unknown, something we have never seen before, we instinctively try to compare it to something we know. When they first saw a train, Native Americans called it an ‘iron horse’, and when they first tasted hard drink, they named it ‘fire water’. And for the same reason we to this day refer to the dispensers at petrol stations as ‘pumps’ and we call hand-held computer controllers ‘mice’. We do this because ‘seeing’ consists mostly of recognising objects we know, rather than exploring what is unknown. This is also why we so often overlook and mistake things we know, a failing that makes possible all sorts of illusions, tricks and downright swindles. A fraudster makes a pile of pieces of paper cut to the size of banknotes, at the top and the bottom he places two banknotes of the right size, and then ties it all together with a band, just like bank clerks do. His victim ‘sees’ a wad of banknotes. On the theatre stage a few props and some painted canvas suffice to make the viewer ‘see’ a rustic cottage or the tropical rainforest. This may also help to explain why some white people may think that all Africans and Asians look the same (and the other way round, of course) – the white person is unable to distinguish between different faces, and sees only ‘an African person’ or ‘a Chinese person’.

Proof-reading provides us with another good example of how we do not necessarily see what is projected onto the retina. If you do not have any training as a proof-reader, you will often simply fail to see spelling and other typographical mistakes (typos). You will read, ‘correctly’, what is meant to be there – even if there are letters missing or words are completely misspelt. Clearly this is not being caused by the lens or the retina. If you are unfortunate enough to have impaired vision, you are bound to have difficulty reading – but that will be the case whether the words are spelled correctly or not. The instinctive ‘correction’ of misspelt words and other typos is further proof of how we often ‘see’ only what we are meant to see, or indeed what we want to see.

Now to hearing. We have been taught that one hears sounds. Fair enough.

You are sitting at an open window and someone walks past you whistling ‘Yellow Submarine’. Let us assume that you are not a musician and know nothing about notes. You would not be able to write the musical notation for ‘Yellow Submarine’ and you don’t know what key it is in. So you are not hearing or recognising individual notes – it is ‘Yellow Submarine’ that you are hearing. You would recognise it even if it was transposed into a higher or lower key from the original. You would recognise it even if you did not hear it right from the start. However, a song like ‘Yellow Submarine’ lasts a few minutes and, strictly speaking, it is not possible to ‘hear’ it all – from moment to moment we can hear only one note or chord. And yet, we do not listen in such a way that we have to remember every note that has gone before. We simply hear and recognise the song as a whole. Let us take another example. Next door a boy is learning to play the piano. He is playing ‘Frère Jacques’ over and over, and each time he plays the same wrong note in the third bar. When you hear this mistake for the fifth time in a row, you are almost ready to hit the ceiling. Why do we react so strongly? As the boy has never played it properly, how can we know that he is playing a wrong note? And why does it infuriate us so much?

A car is going along the street. It is moving quickly and yet I see it in sharp focus, not blurred as in a photograph. And I see the motionless street, the background in equally sharp focus – not like a photographer who sets up his lens to catch a sharp image of the car against a blurred background. How is it that I see movement, when from second to second the car is always ‘somewhere’ and film catches it in the same (motionless) way? Only when I look at the film do I see fluent motion – out of motionless pictures.

Our most important senses, sight and hearing, have very different characters. We can point our eyes in more or less any direction and we can even close them. In contrast, our hearing is omnidirectional and never shuts down fully, even during sleep. Our alarm clocks would never manage to wake us up if it did. Sight is the main active sense, whereas hearing is more of a ‘defensive’ sense. This is why our language gives us, alongside the verb ‘to see’, a further verb – ‘to look at’. We can give ‘penetrating stares’ and ‘glances’. In contrast to this, hearing is associated with paying attention and obedience (‘listen to the teacher’). It is interesting to note in this regard that birds of prey have an especially highly developed sense of sight, whereas rodents and the other animals they are likely to prey upon live by their hearing. Sight is what creates our picture of the world around us whereas hearing is the sense of speech and language, of interpersonal communication. The other senses, smell, taste and touch are entirely different again. They are the ‘short distance’ senses, according to Kant. We cannot give even a rough estimate of the informational content of these senses, as we do not know how to measure it. They do not have anything like the significance of sight and hearing for humans but they give the world the stamp of reality. It is hard to believe in the existence of something that we cannot smell, taste or touch.

There is something eerie about the experience of watching a silent film or the television with the sound turned down – precisely because the people we are watching are ‘dumb’. In the same way, there is something odd, even sinister, about hearing noises in the dark – even in the most familiar places. This is because there is no visual accompaniment to the sounds we hear. In normal circumstances, we do not notice sound and image separately – we experience them at the same time. One without the other strikes us as unnatural, sometimes comical and sometimes terrifying. This is why we are so sensitive to any ‘disconnect’ that occurs between sound and image, for example in a badly dubbed film.

Questions:

• Give some examples of situations where we ‘cannot see anything’.

• What do we do in such a situation? How can we orient ourselves in it?

• What changes for us when we learn a new alphabet, like the Cyrillic or Hebrew alphabet? Do we see the same things?

• Notice the difference between live music and recordings and recordings of recordings. Why is it that some sounds bother us when listening to a recording when we would not even notice it in a live performance?

• We often hear people use the word ‘unreal’ – ‘it was unreal’, ‘an unreal experience’, etc. When and why do we say this? Have you ever experienced this for real? How did you deal with it?

3. Perception and Attention

Imagine that you are sitting at home, with a TV wedged amongst the books on the shelves on the wall opposite you. The TV is on but you are reading or doing something else. Suddenly there comes a piercing scream from the TV. You look at the screen and the picture grabs your attention and you start watching. After a while you may lose interest and say to yourself that there is ‘nothing on’, or you may become engaged in the story. If it is particularly attractive and thrilling, you will soon ‘see’ only what is happening on the screen – as if you yourself were a part of the action. And only once the detective story is over will you rub your eyes and see the shelves, the books and the TV again. But if you try to recall a scene from the film, it will appear before your eyes without these surroundings – although they surely were registered by your retina at the time.

When concentratedly examining some kind of minute object such as a coin, a postage stamp, an ant or a watch mechanism, we will hold it as close to the eye as possible: the eye has a very wide angle of vision. However our field of vision is still large even at 20 cm: about 60 cm x 30 cm. If I need to focus my attention on an even smaller area, the eye’s optics will not help me there, as it does not feature a zoom and it cannot focus at a distance smaller that some 10–15 cm. On such occasions, the ‘zoom’ of fixed attention kicks in and performs real miracles. If you open, say, a wristwatch, you will see next to nothing at first. After a moment, you will find your bearings and start distinguishing certain shapes. And if you keep up your concentration, you may see minute details of less than a tenth of a millimetre in size. Just the sound of a telephone ringing will be enough to destroy the magic and you will have to start all over again. Although you will likely progress a bit faster the second time round, thanks to the previous experience.

Attention, that is the focusing of your aim at a specific part of your field of vision, probably also somehow governs the focusing of the lens. This is probably based on quite a different principle from the automatic focusing of a photographic camera. The eye does not emit any control beams. Perhaps it works on the basis of trial and error but certainly it happens subconsciously; we simply look here or there and the eye will focus automatically. Only when it cannot do this through loss of flexibility, does one need help in the form of glasses. Glasses do not ‘do’ anything though, they merely mechanically shorten or lengthen the focal length of the eye’s lens.

Even in a noisy environment, we are able to follow what another person is saying, although their voice is many times weaker than the ‘background’ noise. If such a conversation is recorded, it becomes much more difficult to understand what is being said, while all the distracting noises gain more prominence. This is what makes sound recording such an art. In direct communication we probably employ other senses too. Lip-reading does not only aid the deaf; even a person with unimpaired hearing will understand better when able to watch the speaker’s mouth move. We are able to separate a sound which is of interest to us from a concoction of various sounds. It can be one of the people speaking, an instrument in an orchestra, as well as a whistling or rustling noise which will help a mechanic diagnose a fault in an engine. How do we do this?

Perception is not a simple process. Any similarities with visual or sound recording are rather superficial. Our senses are more than just recorders or sensors and we are not recording devices, which would just faithfully record all sound and movement. Even as the act of perception is happening, we are very much able to filter what we will see and hear and what will become of the intrusive background noise. This selection does not in any way resemble the filtering mechanisms used by sound technicians: we do not operate on the basis of the sound’s pitch or the direction it is coming from. With a bit of effort, we are able to have a conversation even in a very noisy environment – just as, on other occasions, we can overlook or mishear the most crucial thing. This is why we are so impressed by fictional detectives who excel in noticing that which everybody else has overlooked. A magician can use this to his advantage in his show, making a distracting gesture with his left hand, so that the audience do not notice him pulling a ping-pong ball from inside his sleeve with the right. Our focus, concentration and attention are clearly key here: in other words, that which I do or do not want to hear or see. Philosophers speak of ‘intent’ – we will return to this term later.

Our remarkable senses and the miracle of focus in particular, must have evolved in an environment quite different to the one we live in now. When we are outside, we tend to look to the distance and follow much larger objects than we do when, say, sitting at home reading. That is why so many city dwellers need glasses. Our gift of attention and focus also developed in an environment much poorer in stimuli. Just a hundred years ago, brightly coloured objects (say flowers, birds or gemstones) were a rarity. Most things were grey, brown or green. In addition, movement in nature tends to be the gentle movement of trees in the wind, of running water and clouds. A bird will fly by overhead or we may catch a glimpse of an animal. Nowadays, our environment hammers us relentlessly with countless stimuli. We have come to take advantage of the gift of perception – often against each other. Brightly coloured spaces, beautiful booming sounds, neon signs, all these draw our attention. It is not just billboards and commercials, but also newspapers and magazines, product packaging, clothing, perfume or makeup, all that can be used to vie for peoples’ attention, while dulling the ability to perceive less aggressive impulses. The TV has become the climax of our day, the most effective attention-bait, reducing the viewer to a mere wisp of ever straining perception. Those who have grown fully accustomed to the levels of ‘TV attention’ can hardly be expected to pay attention to a reality much less bright and colourful, much slower moving and less thrilling. We might well end up like frogs who reportedly do not perceive immobile objects at all. And the providers of bright flickering eye-fodder will be able to manipulate us however they wish.

Questions:

• Pay attention to what you actually hear and see at a given moment.

• What attracts your attention the most?

• What does it mean to overlook something, to not notice it? What does it mean when we did not notice something, when we overlooked it?

• How can you tell if somebody’s attention has been attracted by something?

• Describe how you navigate your way around a supermarket, in a bookshop, when leafing through a magazine?

• How does advertising hook us in?

• What will you do to attract somebody’s attention?

4. Things, Words and Names

The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. (Bible)

We have established that we see and perceive ‘things’ – we see a table, we see the sun in the sky, we hear the sound of an ambulance. Where do these ‘things’ come from? A TV camera does not recognise them, and robots find it extremely difficult. People, on the other hand, cannot help but see just that – things. Even if we cannot remember what a thing is called, we see ‘this thing here’ and we can point at it. If we look at a microphotograph, an X-ray or an abstract painting, we are, in a way, seeing ‘nothing’. If we were to remember what we have seen or to describe it to someone else, we would first have to name the confusion of lines and colours for ourselves, dissect it into segments which would remind us of something, thus turning them into ‘things’. It was in this way that constellations of stars were named many years ago and it still is how every child interprets the shapes that clouds make in the sky, stains on the ceiling or cracks in the plaster on the wall. Just think of how Europe used to be depicted in old maps, as a queen with Spain for a head, Italy her right hand – and Czechs to this day proudly declare themselves to be ‘in the heart of Europe’.

In a familiar environment on the other hand, things simply ‘jump out’ from their surroundings: there is the table, the chair, the potted plant, the rug. Each of these things however contains parts which form the whole: a table has legs, a top and (sometimes) a drawer. Why do we see a table as a thing, and not each individual leg? This may be because all these parts are joined together – you can only move it from place to place as a whole. Also we can clearly identify the function of a table, why we need it and what for. Now a carpenter who makes tables most likely thinks of a table leg or a drawer as ‘things’.

This is the environment to which we have been accustomed since childhood and where we have learned to understand the world – in other words, our home, where we view the arrangements as beautifully uncomplicated and straightforward. If someone asked me to describe what our kitchen looks like, I would immediately say there is a table, a cooker, a sink, a shelving unit, a fridge, three chairs, and a bench. Things which you can move, separate from their surroundings, regard individually. I might add the window, the light, the door, although these cannot be moved so easily. The list of things would definitely not be infinite or particularly ‘subjective’. You could find a list like that on the wall of a hotel room; factories will have an inventory number for each ‘thing’ and the accounting department will have a copy of their list.

And what about the rest? The walls and the ceiling, are they ‘things’ too? Perhaps. And what if a young child notices a scratched surface on the cooker or a bit of fluff on the rug (something a grown-up will not notice)? What is that? ‘Well – how can I explain it to you – it’s . . . nothing.’ This answer is not as silly as it might seem at first glance. A scratch is really not a thing. And a bit of fluff? Is that a thing? It does not serve any purpose and it should not be on the rug in the first place. Just as when we are asked what’s in the paper today, or what we did at work or school, we tend to reply ‘nothing’ – by which we actually mean ‘nothing special’, nothing worth mentioning, easy to label and describe. After all, the Greek logos mean word, as well as sense and reason. Even the word ‘thing’ does not simply mean that which you can grasp with your hands, but more importantly the thing which is of interest to us, the thing we focus on, the thing that is being talked about.

So there are a certain number of ‘things’ in the kitchen. That does not mean the place looks like some sort of warehouse. These things contain other things – there are hobs on the cooker, it has an integrated oven (which I cannot pick up and hold on its own), the table has a drawer with cutlery in it. Also, these things are arranged in a certain way, you can relate them to one another; they all occupy their designated space. The crockery shelf is over the sink, the unit containing bags of flour and sugar is above the fridge. Everything has its place and everybody understands what it means to ‘tidy up’. And amongst all this, ‘we’, that is I, my wife and children, navigate our way around. We all have our favourite, or at least habitual, spots and if we need something, we know where to reach for it. ‘Our kitchen’ – that is not just a pile of things (what a mathematician might call a ‘set’) but also the sum of what they contain, the way they are arranged, the relations and spaces between them. The place where pots and cutlery go, the place where you do the dishes, Dad’s favourite seat, the corner where the dog usually sleeps. Young children are very sensitive about maintaining this usual order of things and, likewise, elderly people dislike changes to it.

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