I am sitting at a café, steaming coffee in a porcelain cup on the table next to me. I am reaching to take a sip of coffee, my hand goes to grasp the cup’s handle, as it begins to grasp it adjusts the strength, not too light a grasp, enough to lift the weight, I bring the cup to my lips, keeping it steady not to spill, my lips sense the heat, my hand tilts to take a sip or a gulp, depending on how hot the coffee felt, how thirsty for it I was. I have just taken a sip of coffee. On the table there is a plastic soft cup of water, I reach to take a drink, my hand grasps the cup, squeezing gently, not too tightly, it adjusts the strength as the cup gets squished, but there is enough strength to lift it. I empty the cup, and as I am still holding it, a waiter comes to refill it, I lift it for him and as he pours fresh water in, my hand adjusts its squeeze to hold the increased weight, maintaining the position of the cup. I have just gotten my cup of water refilled. I am browsing through the day’s newspaper, reading parts, while at the same time reaching at the table, barely looking, to get the cup of coffee or the cup of water to take a sip. I adjust my seat, my legs, my posture, mostly without realizing it. I am just sitting at a café drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Friends arrive and join me, as we begin to chat I adjust my breathing to handle the talking, actually I modulate the airflow during breathing to talk, as I change my posture my trunk and respiratory muscles adjust to handle the different loads for breathing, at the same time coordinating with the muscles that move my vocal cords, mouth, tongue, with those changing my facial expression, and so on. I have just been sitting chatting with friends. Later we take a walk, climb a long flight of stairs, my breathing adjusts to accommodate the increased demand. I have just taken a walk.
We are all familiar with what I am describing, with all the background support and maintenance and adjustments our body is continuously carrying out to sustain our interactions with our environment. An environment that may be pre-structured in certain ways to sustain, even guide, our interactions with it: the table and the chairs at the café for example instead of a rug with pillows, or the flight of stairs instead of a ramp for wheelchair access. Indeed, we typically consider this background activity trivial, we take it for granted. It is when due to injury, disease, or age that the bodily abilities that sustain this activity are impaired that they are focused upon, when for example we might have lost part of our visual field, or our sense of how tightly we are holding something, or our sense of where our limbs are with regard to the rest of our body.
These considerations extend Bian the wheelwright’s insight to the minutia of daily activities, highlight how much our verbal descriptions, our representations of what we do, leave out. Our descriptions are incomplete, can only be incomplete, as they edit out most of what is going on, while foregrounding only certain features of the material world along with aspects of our actions. The material world, our body included, is always in excess.
In short, there is plenty going on, allowing a host of different descriptions of our world, ourselves, and what we do. This may be obvious, but these descriptions, our understanding of our environment and of ourselves, play an important part in orienting us in the world and guiding our actions.
So, we have limits, but infinite possibilities within those limits. Some people talk about “the infinite use of finite means”.
In your two basic observations you asked: “Given that change is possible, is there a superior understanding of the world to inform the way to lead one’s life?” Can you give an answer?
The space of infinite possibilities is the material world and not some cognitive space. For a possibility to materialize we need to engage with our bodies, act, begin a back-and-forth with material reality, establish a novel way of going about.
The previous postings have begun to address your question by bringing to the fore our material body, which though it undergirds our knowledge and abilities, it is systematically ignored in many discussions about knowing – not to mention the dominant strands of Western thought. So, at the outset, the focus should be on the body, knowledge is embodied, is incarnate. In a previous post I hinted at the socialization of our bodies in specific ways that permit the coordination of our activities to maintain and reproduce the social order – in contemporary societies our bodies are being governed. I will begin sketching out a map of what this socialization and government looks like, and what it means for our bodies and the question of emancipation.
Before I begin that though I feel it is necessary to include a few more postings on socialization and on the questions of truth and science, as they are intimately linked with our conceptions of knowledge.
You wrote: ” For a possibility to materialize we need to engage with our bodies, act, begin a back-and-forth with material reality, establish a novel way of going about.” I understand how important your point is. I am impatient to read your next posts about socialization!! However, in the back-and-forth you mention, there is the problem of the generic and the concrete in the generation of concepts.
In “Funes the Memorious” Luis Borges presents the tale of one Ireneo Funes, who, after falling off his horse and receiving a bad head injury, acquired the amazing talent—or curse—of remembering absolutely everything.
” …a circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge – all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake..”’
“…He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).”
I think that Borges’ point seems relevant to your point. How abstraction, as a way of systematically reducing reality’s sensual complexities to manageable dimensions, relates to the back-and-forth with material reality?
Yes, as Borges writes in Fumes, “To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” But it is not abstraction that systematically reduces the sensory complexity, it is the back-and-forth with the material world that does it, by foregrounding out of our environment what we sense and act upon. Abstract concepts are a gloss that describes what we lump together in practice. Categories, such as rabbit, duck, tree, lion, gorilla, and so on, reflect the foregrounding of certain features of the world. This amounts indeed to a reduction, a reduction that is necessary for engaging with the material world, but it does not require abstraction. After all, animals clearly do it as well.
As for Fumes, whenever I read the story I have a vision of Borges with his tongue firmly in cheek.
Abstractions can however guide practice, by providing suggestions of what we might be able to lump together and what not, but then of course we need to learn to actually do so.