Perceptual Movement
Perception is a complex philosophical concept. That is why so many have written so much over such a long a period without repeating themselves. The first thing that must be understood is the nature of perception existed in constant movement from visceral and literal toward the increasingly less tangible and abstract:
“beginning from such simplicities as seeing a cloud as a camel or a formation of stalagmites as a dragon, or a small child at a picnic seeing a tree stump as a table, we may move on to very diverse things: to the first application of the word ‘astringent’ to a remark or to someone’s personality; to Wellington at Salamanca saying ‘Now we have them’ and seeing the future course of the battle in an injudicious movement of the enemy; to the sensitive observer of a personal situation seeing that situation as one of humiliation for one party and triumph for another”
Only in Philosophy
Only in a philosophical text could imagery that engages turquoise decided to utilize it as imagery in a way that makes it confusing. For most writers, turquoise as imagery is like candy from baby: the reader will easily understand the point. For writers of philosophy, the uniquely identifiable property of turquoise becomes purposely difficult:
“We are inclined to get muddled over sentences like ‘Turquoise exists’. This might be used to mean ‘There are things which are turquoise’ – an ordinary empirical proposition, which could be false – or ‘There is such a color as turquoise’ (i.e. ‘ “Turquoise” does have meaning as a color-word’).”
Why Students Hate Wittgenstein
Even students who pursuing a degree in philosophy or require philosophical writings for their degree face Ludwig Wittgenstein with dread. He is to haters of philosophy what those poets who never want to actually write about what their poem is about is to haters of poetry. Few writers can take such a simple subject and transform it into a thing of absolute confusion like Wittgenstein:
“Wittgenstein…first invokes these notions in connection with the drawing of a triangle, a right-angled triangle with the hypotenuse downmost and the right angle upmost. ‘This triangle’, he says, ‘can be seen as a triangular hole, as a solid, as a geometrical drawing; as standing on its base, as hanging from its apex; as a mountain, as a wedge, as an arrow or pointer, as an overturned object which is meant to stand on the shorter side of the right angle, as a half-parallelogram and as various other things."
Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth
The Macbeths of Shakespeare are drawn into the discourse as imagery to analyze (in great detail overall) a very particular and specific sort of perception termed M-experience. To explain what M-experience is and how it differs from other experiences would require too much space here. The point is to reveal how allusions to fictional characters and dramatic situations which never actually happened can prove useful even in philosophical discussions about the nature of truth and perception:
“It would require little enough calculation for that rugged soldier, Macbeth, who rightly identified his M-experience as a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain, to appreciate that the additional fact of an actual dagger there which made no difference, would make no difference; or for his wife’s nurse to appreciate that she couldn’t cure Lady Macbeth’s delusion (‘Here’s the smell of the blood still’) simply by spreading some actual blood on her hands.”
