The psychological mechanism of seeing the distant object in terms of the field ofmanipulation can in part be readily conceived. It consists in the assumption of theattitude toward the distant object that we have toward the same object near at hand. Weare ready to act toward the distant object as if it were near by. There is, however, aprofound difference between seeing the object "in its own dimensions, likeitself," and merely acting so as to bring ourselves to the object to manipulate it.The difference may be illustrated in the following of directions by which one reaches adistant goal which one does not place in one's perceptual landscape. Each corner andlandmark is a stimulus to turn and proceed in a fashion correspond-
Perhaps the most disturbing result of this modernist subversion of experience is its implicit disdain for the everyday. Whereas experience used to mean whatever wisdom one managed to gather in the course of one’s daily life, it has increasingly come to be seen as something outside of the everyday, as exotic. To become experienced in the modern sense one has to be an adventurer of some sort, as was immortalized in the Jimi Hendrix song from which the present chapter takes its title. We are now so accustomed to the idea of a boring, bland, routinized, empty, everyday life that the earlier concept of experience–found for example in Montaigne or Shakespeare who treat experience as the distillation of everyday experience into wisdom–seems alien. [12] But this equation of experience with the exotic is a disaster, psychologically, morally, and philosophically. If experience is only gained in situations outside the everyday, it quickly becomes a preserve of the hero or the specialist, and wisdom is transformed into mere expertise, increasingly divorced from everyday concerns. Even an individual with decades of painfully acquired first hand knowledge or skill can be seen, from this distorted perspective, as somehow not being experienced or wise (possessing only "intuitive skill," for example, not "real understanding.") This makes for such thrilling amusements as Byronic heroes or even the heroic image of the scientist. But the ultimate consequence of the separation of experience from everyday life is that fewer and fewer people will be in a position to develop their own experience into wisdom.
Perceptual Illusions: Philosophical and Psychological Essays
What Putnam needs is more than the assertion that his natural realism is consistent with natural science: he needs a theory of perception that is explicitly anti-causal but still scientific. Without this, the old Western philosophical anti-experiential reflexes will knock Putnam’s natural realism off the field. Luckily, as the examples I have used to amplify his argument suggest, such a perceptual theory has already been developed with a great deal of success by the psychologist James Gibson and his students. 2ff7e9595c
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