One chapter of the psychologistic-philosophical essay book named "METAPERSPECTIVES, Humanist, psychologistic, anti-materalist, systemic argument" written 2012-2016, posted on the blog http://www.metaperspectiva.blogspot.com.ar/ where it comes first in the spanish original version, followed by the english translation.
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“The universe must expand to escape from telescopes through which we -who are the universe- try to capture that universe -which is us.”
George Spencer-Brown
“If we actually saw the universe, maybe we would understand it.”
Jorge Luis Borges
“You born alone and die alone and in the middle, loneliness is so big you have to share your life to forget it.”
Erich Fromm
The world or the universe may exist, but they are captured by us since our perceptual condition. And this same planetary, universal scope we knew is like we know it because are us those who are meeting: if it were another species or any other beholder, it would be different for sure.
We don’t know how a cat or an ant learns the world: we simply put ourselves at the cat’s place and attributing to him a human perceptual condition we imagine that he sees the world like we do. But we actually haven’t a thorough idea about how it sees and the same for each species and each potential observer that may exist. Even when we scientifically try to set us at a non-human observer’s spot, we do this from a human observation.
This was typical in the whole science so far: To compare the psychology of man and animals, or put man as owner of capabilities that other species don’t have (man is the sole creature that…). It is an example, a topic from the same Bertalanffy, a mighty representative star of the last century science: “Animals are safe inside their environment’s protective cocoon, woven with their sensitive equipment and their congenital responses. The rest of the world doesn’t exist for a particular species. But here we find a being lacking of such a cocoon but endowed with a matchless cerebral strength. [1968]” Bertalanffy, my teacher, whom the world owes not little, was contained into an epoch context and no matter how revolutionary his scientific attitude might have been, he did not stop belonging the world of Humanity, which yet does not stop to disesteem its anthropocentric seeing of science. Thereby, the human scientist observes the human animal from his human perception and concludes that it isn’t conditioned by the cocoon and features higher cerebral strength than the other animals.
No doubt, I could think exactly the same… but only till realizing I’m standing at a place from which can thoroughly observe only my own species and lack of any other means of analysis and holistic comprehension about the other creatures I can discriminate round there. Of course for me, and by several reasons, the human brain is unequaled; but if there is some cerebral strength that it’s time that I have, it is to understand my limiting circumstances and learn how to overcome worthily this item. From then on, I’d be in possibility of coming closer to the real world by suppressing the last sentence of that statement, which now would be this way: “Animals found us safe inside our environment’s protective cocoon, woven with our sensitive equipment and our congenital responses. The rest of the world doesn’t exist (entirely) for a particular species.”
Is to say, the world is nothing more than another human fact. Neither we discover a world outside of us, nor invent each the own one. All possible knowledge is within the species one, within the likelihood and the organization the species has to generate it. This must not be associated to the constant advance of the species' knowledge, which would suggest that at some point we’ll come to know everything: the advances, if they are such a thing, will never overtake the human perceptual barriers, unless occur an evolutionary leap that determines something different.
Nor mistake a cognitional boundary with a delusion: reality is not an illusion either. To speak about illusion I must contrast, I must find the real-reality or at least conceive it, that is, I must learn from a different perception than ours, which is impossible. That way it is, impossible, that we can set ourselves alongside the cosmos to see it, such we have been used to believe. All we have known so far has served to accomplish our natural mandates and to fulfill our symbolic fiction.
The eye of the beholder
Gregory Bateson says in respect of a Mc Culloch study, ‘What the frog’s eye tells to de frog’s brain’: “…he showed that any answer to the question ‘how can the frog know something?’ it would be limited by the frog’s sensory machinery; and sensory machinery of the frog could, of course, be investigated by experimental means or other… From this study turned out that to understand the human beings, even at very elementary level, one has to know the limitations of his sensory input”. And then adds: suddenly, I realized that indeed, the bridge between the map and the territory is the difference. Difference notions are the only thing that can reach from the territory to the map and this fact is the basic epistemological statement on the bond between all reality out there and all perception inside here… the mind… will always be intangible, will always refer to intangibles and will always have some limitations because it will never find what Immanuel Kant called ‘the Ding an Sich’, the thing itself. It can find border information only –information of contexts of differences. [1952]”
Varela and Maturana opine: “…very curious way, one gets much closer to the world around him. The word ‘objective’ slowly becomes obsolete; while the word ‘subjective’, which usually confines ‘you’ within your skin, also disappears”. “The world is no longer ‘out there’ in the same manner it seemed. Without being fully aware of this all along, yet I know that my images –specially the visual but also aural, gustative, of pain and fatigue- are ‘mine’ and that I am responsible in a very peculiar way for these images”… “There is a combination or a marriage between an objectivity that is passive towards external world and a creative subjectivity, neither sheer solipsism nor its opposite.
Moreover, you could even say reality is just what we have under the nose. For any of us may think that in addition to what is perceived and how it is perceived, there may be God knows what else that might perceive one way or another and don’t perceive because he don’t have it in front. The same goes for the species, groping through History perceiving itself and perceiving a universe which today is that way because we have just ahead the Twentieth Century relativistic and systemic science; and before it was like Newton and Descartes said; and before that, as Galileo and Copernicus; and before, as Thomas Aquinas, and before, as Ptolemy and Aristotle. And we know that tomorrow and the day after, everything will be other way because somebody is going to put us other things before the eyes.
All in Philosophy should be wrong because it speaks about man and the whole real, but from man’s point of view, which is the only existing and from which is not possible to see man clearly. To study man, you would have to see him from outside, a non human view, but farther, not invented by humans, given that all the visual displacement may man do with his intelligence will never be outside his human perceptual ambit. Man studying himself is like a man looking at his own body: he has a partial and particular vision, losing the whole vision that others watching from outside may have of him.
Philosophy intervenes in the intra-species space, on what happens within the human milieu, and projects inner visions fictionally placed at an external point of view. Boosts that sees man and when gets complicated, appeals to the highest external viewpoint: God, though not always names him.
Man is the measure of all things. Remains in force in science the anthropocentric concept that we have the measuring stick for the universe or that universe may be measured with our rod. Nonetheless, when one of those big scientific litterateurs who enlightened last century says the universe is this way or time is that way or matter is another way, he is speaking of possibilities and not of verified scientific facts; and is speaking of possibilities of our perception and not of the universe, time or matter. He is indefectibly speaking about the observer and not about the observed element, which, on the other hand, we don’t even know if it exists such as we appreciate. But also, not even is someone who can speak while observing the observer, since being human, he is the very observer speaking about the observer.
We could have not been. Or have been, who knows how many different ways, or maybe those ways could be endless. Having seen and perceived things in many other modes. But we are this way and perceive this way, we are this. That is all what we have and can have.
We live in a dome made of mirror and when we seek outside, find what is inside. The more we rummage into the mirror, the more we rummage into ourselves and the deeper we get in the search, the deeper get into us. And we will not reach beyond us, since as far as we are concerned there is nothing more. And if there were, as we intuit or need to assume or feel there is, it is at the other side of the mirror.
We want to reach the other side of the mirror: perhaps there is waiting for us the ultimate knowledge, or eden, or any other fullness. We want to get there and elsewhere. We want to reach, no matter where. But would give the impression of not being in our nature to get any site, but going, merely going. We go over there but what we now have is the journey, and the journey is the reality; the destination is not, it is just a desire, an emotional need.
“No where to go” concluded Roland Barthes. Hence perhaps it's better not wanting to reach so much and instead keep seeking inside the dome, among us and within us. “Step into the heart” St. Augustine urges.
To the masters Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Paul Watzlawick and Carl Rogers.
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