Non-rational Grounds and Non-conceptual Content

The phenomenological tradition has long contended that natural perception is neither conceptually articulated nor governed by deterministic laws, but rather organized according to the practically articulated structure of bodily being-in-the-world. But this leaves the problem of explaining how perception can provide justificatory support to thought. The phenomenologists’ answer is to say that the meaningful (but not conceptual) structure of natural perception makes it possible for us to think about objects by motivating particular thoughts about the objects as they present themselves in perception. I show how this view provides a way out of worries that plague contemporary philosophy of mind. A measure of the remarkable influence of cartesian dualism is found in the fact that it often constrains even the ways in which it is rejected. Few accept, it is true, the basic picture of a dualism of mental and physical substances. But a dualism still shapes the philosophy of mind – for instance, in that almost everyone sees as central the task of figuring out the relation between mind and body. And it sometimes seems as if the only possible accounts of human beings consist in either giving a mental description, or a physical description, or explaining how the mental descriptions and the physical descriptions relate to one another other. This same dualism constrains the ways in which perception is understood. Much of the controversy over the nature of perception is driven, however, by the way that the objects of perception seem to resist categorization as either mental or physical. They stand in an odd position in the sense that, while they are available for thought, they are also independent of thought. This independence is manifest, for instance, in the way that not every feature of a perceived object is presented in perception at once. It is also manifest in the way that no single thought or series of thoughts we have about the object could exhaust all there is to be thought about it. As Merleau-Ponty notes, »... each aspect of the thing which falls to our perception is still only an invitation to perceive beyond it, still only a momentary halt in the perceptual process. If the thing itself were reached, it would be from that moment arrayed before us and stripped of its mystery. It would cease to exist as a thing at the very moment when we thought to possess it. What makes the ‘reality’ of the thing is therefore precisely what snatches it from our grasp.«