‘Do we perceive the world or do we think it?’ Sundar Sarukkai on thinking in philosophy

Attempting to answer the question “What is Philosophy?” is a way of entering into the mode of philosophical thinking. Philosophy in its full richness can be unfolded through examining the many layers of this question.

Whatever our differences, there seems to be one basic simple fact – that we are all born into this world. Some philosophers like to describe this as being “thrown” into the world, thrown not as a physical act but as finding oneself in a world which exists prior to us. Imagine a just-born child opening her eyes for the first time. What does she see? Will she see colours, her mother, or the roof of the room in which she is lying? Can we imagine that moment of original sensation? The child perceives the world through her senses to varying degrees, but what happens inside the child is much more than just passively receiving all the information from these perceptions.

The child is active in the act of perceiving the world. Her eyes roam, little hands reach out. She smells just as she breathes. While she takes in the world, she also acts. She kicks her legs, cries. The body reaches out to the world not merely in terms of trying to perceive it, to sense it, but also to participate in it; to be part of other actions, to reach out and touch, to suckle.

If the body is the first entry into the world, perception is the first window that connects it and the world. Everything that the child perceives comes through its organs of perception. It is quite remarkable that as a child grows up, so much of the body changes but the basics of the perceptual system remains the same. But while the physical organs of perception may not change radically, something else does. What the body perceives and how it perceives keep changing all the time as the child grows up.

The human body is a mysterious entity. The organs of perception do not perceive by themselves. Seeing, for instance, needs more than the eye since the eye is only one of the elements needed for seeing. Undoubtedly, the physical eyes are needed to participate in the act of seeing but seeing itself, the experience of seeing something, is far more complex. Much before biologists described the process of seeing in terms of the relationship between the eyes and the brain, philosophers had described the relationship between the eyes and consciousness. Both these approaches - of the biologist and the philosopher – recognise that seeing is accomplished not just by the eye but by the whole body. Such is the case for all other sensory organs.

Early philosophers sound like biologists of later times. They described the body and the senses in great detail. They produce a theory of the senses. Buddha’s Abhidhamma (3rd century BCE) gives a detailed description of the senses, the physical body, and the way sensations can be described. The ancient Samkhya philosophical tradition provided a basis for many foundational ideas to other traditions in Indian philosophy.

A foundational text like the Samkhyakarika (4th century CE) develops a complex theory of the elements of the body and the structure of the senses. Aristotle’s (4th century BCE) description of the senses and the body has had a deep influence in Western and modern philosophy. There are important insights to be had from the consideration of the body/senses in sramanic/ascetic schools, as well as in counter movements, such as embodied in the Vacana tradition in Karnataka. There are also important philosophical insights that can be derived from the narratives of the labouring body of the subaltern classes and castes.

Although each of the philosophical positions of these schools differed in varying degrees, philosophical reflection as such began with giving an account of the perceptual capacities of the body. Furthermore, the descriptions of the biologists and the philosophers have one significant difference: the philosophers, for the most part, found that they could not reduce the body to its physical constituents, whereas biology finds a physical description sufficient for their account. To start thinking philosophically is to ask why these philosophers described senses in the way they did, and to explore whether one’s own experiences of their sensations support these and other philosophical positions. It is also to recognise how to evaluate our own experiences of the senses and the body.

Philosophers across different traditions and practices realised that the physical act of perception alone is not enough to explain its nature. The information that is produced by perception undergoes another process in the body. Just like food taken into the body has to be digested and absorbed within the body, so also information through the sense organs have to be digested, absorbed and unified. If the stomach and the digestive system do the job of digesting the food, what in the body does this job of digesting the perceptual inputs?

Some philosophers refer to the input as “sensory data”, the raw material needed for perception to be possible. There are two important agents “within” the body that digest and consolidate the inputs from perception: mind and consciousness. We cannot sense the world without the mind making “sense” of it. We cannot experience the senses without consciousness participating in it.

Both these notions of mind and consciousness are part of the earliest philosophies in Asia and Africa, including the ancient Greek philosophers who should perhaps be correctly seen as belonging to this milieu. These and related notions have been part of every culture’s description of the human body. Mind and consciousness point to the impossibility of reducing the world to a simple idea of the physical body, and the experience of sensation to physical organs of perception like eyes and nose. Something more complicated was happening ‘inside’ our body and philosophy’s task was to uncover these invisible processes.

The story of philosophy begins with this unseen presence, the hidden mechanisms that are foundational to every moment of being human. The history of philosophy is a testament to the struggle to explicate these hidden processes. But, over time the study of these factors such as mind and consciousness overrode the centrality of the body. Although the philosophical importance of the body has attained some prominence over the last few decades, the original impulse to philosophy as arising through a reflection on the body has been marginalised, at least in mainstream practices of philosophy.

The inability to explain the experiences of sensation through the physical body alone led to a growing emphasis on the internal, non-physical elements of the body, such as mind, consciousness, gunas, and subtle body. In particular, the focus on thinking and cognition became an important component of philosophical practice.

Perceiving the world or thinking the world?

Our own philosophical exploration of these ideas can begin with these questions: Do we perceive the world or do we think the world? Is the act of thinking necessary for perception? Does thinking synthesise and put together the information that we receive through our sense organs? (Incidentally, why do we continue to believe that there are only five sense organs as described in our textbooks? Modern accounts drawing from diverse fields such as anthropology and sensory studies suggest that there are many more of these senses.)

The question – as to whether we passively perceive what is around us or whether we actively produce meaning about the world – resonates through every philosophical school. If we passively perceive the world, then we produce knowledge about the world. So, what we say about the world is true of the world. However, if human cognition contributes to this knowledge-making, then we cannot discover the true nature of the world as it really is.

To illustrate these points, I will begin with a set of questions. These questions are more of a trigger to think about various dimensions of the problem before arriving at some possible solutions. When you describe what you see, are you imposing your “thinking” on this description? When you name something that you perceive, does the name “belong” to the world or to you? When you look at a creature on the road and call it a dog, are you not putting your concepts on an object in the world? When you describe two objects as being related to each other, is the relation a product of your mind or does it exist in the world? When you use language to describe the world, isn’t the world “contaminated” and influenced by the language that you use? Can we understand the world – as itself - without our inputs, influences and biases?

It is quite possible that a reflection on these questions might make one conclude that our description of the world is actually not really about the world as much as it is about the intricate intertwining of the world and the human subject. When I say that this table is brown, I am not talking about the real quality of the table but only how it appears to my eyes. There is enough evidence to show that many animals do not see the colours that we do, and so there are creatures which will not see the table as being brown. So, is the table really brown or not? More importantly, this intrinsic relation between the world and the human self makes it impossible to assert that what we perceive is what there really is. Support, as well as challenges, to the view that our knowledge of the world reflects something about the world as well as the humans who interact with it, constitute a very important part of philosophy from ancient to modern times. Through the length of the book, we will understand how this problem is so fundamental to the very idea of human knowledge in different domains.

Some questions seem more profound than the answers they might yield. The question, as to whether we perceive the world or we think the world, has many hidden dimensions. For example, a profound debate between the Nyaya and Buddhist schools illustrates one dimension of this problem. These two schools disagreed on whether all perception is conceptually influenced or not. Concepts are seen as the basic constituents of thought and if concepts influence perception, then that means what we perceive is influenced by how we think. The standard Nyaya claim was that perception has two valid cognitions, first a non-conceptual perception and the next a conceptual perception. The Buddhists only accepted non-conceptual perception as the valid cognition of perception. The task of philosophy is not to assert these conclusions but to give elaborate reasons to justify their respective claims. That is really what takes up most of the philosophical literature in Indian and other philosophies.

This theme peaks in the work of arguably the most influential philosopher in Western thought, Immanuel Kant. One of his important insights is what is referred to as Kant’s Copernican revolution. Kant’s argument was that we do not passively cognise objects outside us. On the contrary, objects conform to our cognitive structures. We look at the world through the conceptual categories of our mind, and thus it is impossible to know what the object really is in itself. Later in the book, I will discuss this theme in greater detail with some examples. These philosophical discussions, ranging from Nyaya and the Buddhists to Kant, are important not just for philosophy but also for understanding knowledge in other fields, as well as in our everyday interactions. For example, the influential idea of ‘theory-ladenness’ of observations in science can be seen as an extension of this problem.

Origins of thinking

Perception is the starting point of our engagement with the world as well as with ourselves. External perception is when we perceive what is outside us. But there is also internal perception where we perceive and experience events “within” us. We considered the possibility that perception and thought may be co-mingled, and that perhaps what we think we see is actually seeing what we think!

But what is thinking?

We began with the question “What is Philosophy?” and ended up with “What is Thinking?”

Part One in this series

Sundar Sarukkai on how philosophy can be a living tradition in our lives today

Another Story of Philosophy will be published by Westland Books. Sundar Sarukkai’s recent books include Philosophy for Children, The Social Life of Democracy, and the novel Following a Prayer. For more details, see the author’s website.