When we see a blind person we may naturally think that he is missing the real thing. We think that seeing gives us access to that real thing, and that other modes of access to the world, such as smelling and touching and hearing, are secondary; they are derivatives of seeing. But how true is this way of thinking about the world? Is it at all legitimate? And what led to this understanding in the first place? In taking seeing as the mode of access through which the real thing is presented to us, we are in fact exercising a historical presupposition: That priority and superiority of the physical over the metaphysical and non-physical. This means that what we call the physical presence of the object gives us the real thing, namely what the object truly is, and that our imaginings or thoughts of the object are just lower forms of its existence. But even this presupposition has another presupposition inside it, that is: There is such a thing as the true object, the object in-itself, what it really is. Thus the presupposition runs as: Among all of the different ways of appearing, there are certain appearances that give us the object as it truly is in-itself. This insistence on the primacy of the physical and physical presence as the best way of access to the real thing, is what forms and informs our present way of thinking about the world: We think that we see the real apple, and that the real apple is the apple that we see; what the blind person can touch as the apple is only a partial and lacking access to the apple. But this is also the case that the way a blind person can perceive the apple through his sense of touch and smell is never accessible to us. The same way that we are accustomed to viewing the apple through sight and from different perspectives, the blind person too has manages to capture the many sides and features of an apple through the complex structures of his touch and smell. Can he, too, claim that he has better access to the real thing than us who only see that apple and know it only from afar?! It is a perfectly legitimate claim and there is nothing to keep him from claiming so if there is also nothing that keeps us from claiming that seeing gives the real thing. But even both of these claims presuppose the superiority of the physical and physical presence over meta-physical. This, which has led us to think and conclude that if something has no basis if physical reality then can have no reality! But it seems that we have forgotten that there is something non-physical about the claim that only the physical is real: For the physical itself makes no such claim and doesnt even present us with its own superior status: It is always us who give to the physical the superiority that we have in fact metaphysically abstracted from the physical. How interesting we humans are!
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 01:37:58 +0000
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