Observations on brucealderman’s essay

On Bruce Alderman's essay:

Let me preface the following observations by admitting that I have not yet read — apart from a few passages here and there — the works of Varela, Maturana, and others cited by Alderman (I have read some early books by Ken Wilber). Hence what I say may have already been covered in these works.

Alderman states: "According to the enactive paradigm, the representationist perspective is naïve and no longer can be sustained.  Using the example of color perception research, for instance, Varela, Lakoff, and other cognitive scientists point out that color is not a quality that exists ‘out there’ in the world; it is not an observer-independent, objective quality of things-in-themselves.  Rather, it is a particular experiential domain that emerges through the interaction of our color cones, our neural circuitry, our embodied history of structural coupling (our particular evolutionary trajectory in time and co-determinative relationship with our environment), the reflective properties of objects, and electromagnetic radiation."

A crucial element, which I would add to this statement, is the determining influence of artistic culture on the perception of color and of many other "qualities." In other words, humans began to experience colors when they learned to differentiate them through artistic representation (see the subtle and sophisticated use of an albeit limited color pallet in prehistorical cave paintings, e.g., Altamira and Lascaux). I claim a priority of artistic activity vis-à-vis other human activities in the world; there is no naked aesthesis (simple sensory apprehension) in the human which is not at least in germ an aesthetics of what is perceived. Names were given to specific colors consequent to the activity of reproducing them in artworks, or at least of representing them by similarly-colored objects. Even the color-coding of food became conscious because of the human effort to reproduce such and such a color. Hence also, children were instructed on the gathering of edible foods by showing them either the food itself or (e.g.) a flower petal having the same color. But this "showing" of colors was never solely utilitarian; archeological evidence of flower and bird-feather arrangements exists even in relation to pre-Homo Sapiens species (e.g., Neanderthal burial customs).

My narrating a cultural sequence of aesthesis-aesthetics-representation-instruction is not arbitrarily undertaken, nor is it based on a naive, constructivist notion of an observer-generated "reality." It is based on the intrinsic sociality of the human (humans are both social animals and culture-makers) and on the easily observed process of education in distinguishing and naming qualities, even in today's educative practice that employs technological means of reproducing and communicating such qualities, i.e., audiovisual media.

Hence while I do subscribe to the enactive paradigm that Alderman summarizes, I do not arrive at it through a dichotomization of biology-environment over against culture. If I am making a philosophical apriori assumption, it is in positing human artistic creativity at the heart of human consciousness itself, antecedent to the specialization of the arts. Every human is in some degree an artist. Artistic creation and fruition are not throw-away elements of human activity; they are necessary and obligatory for the formation of every human mind. It seems that the perception of art is even hard-wired: newborn infants are capable of distinguishing between music and random noise.

I might even dare to sustain that artistic culture in the human is biological, and that the environment of humans as such is not, nor can it be, a naked, "natural" environment, perceived independently of other humans and of human culture. We perceive qualities because we have art, and we have art because we are human. And both our humanity and our art are social, transactional realities. Of course, my audacious supposition finds comfort in Varela's affirmation, cited by Alderman, that "the mind is fundamentally a matter of imagination and fantasy." And I conclude that our "sensorimotor engagement with an environment" (Alderman, referencing Lakoff and Johnson) is initially and concomitantly a dance.

I might mention that Western spirituality also includes refined meditation practices that involve "sophisticated imagery and imaginal processes" no less than the cited Tantric practices (both of which I have referenced in my dissertation and several articles). I might even suggest that readers of Varela, Maturana, Jorge Ferrer, et al., could eventually become curious to know something of these authors' cultural background as found in Spain, especially in the Spanish mystics of the Renaissance as well as in the reflection on them by Thomas Merton and other contemporary Western mystics.