Sunday, 19 April 2020


The distinction between the perceptual and the conceptual belongs, of course, to the latter. How would you identify a pure perceptual datum? The force of objectivity, of objective reality as what you are up against, is traceable to direct perception, to intuitive immediacy, but such immediacy is an idea which can only be cashed out by way of an asymptotic series of validations, or in other words by an even more abstract conceptual operation. This is just to recapitulate certain idealist arguments, to encounter them again on a different path. The kinds of sensory experiences you have in dreams, when recalled and reflected upon, can fairly easily be reduced to concept-driven fabulations - it is almost a cliche that the actual sensory content they are formed around bears no resemblance to what they are taken to be. The sensory qualities met with in waking life do not yield so easily, although we are told by researchers that this is only a matter of degree. The same fabulation takes place, but in under a stricter verificational regime.  In the end it is all conceptual, or noetic, and even if this is only true in a weak sense it is true in respect of any work that you wanted immediate intuition to do.

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