The Apparent, the Hidden, and the Conceptual

“A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.”

Samuel Beckett, Company

We’re beginning to see a pattern emerging.

Recall that with Kant we saw how “reality”, if you like, was divided very roughly into the realm of
human experience (phenomenal) and the realm of things as they are in themselves
(noumenal). On the side of human experience we have things as they appear to us as human
beings. What we experience and how we experience things depends, at a fundamental level,
on our perceptual capacities. We, as embodied beings, are sensitive to a wide range of
phenomena. But our ability to apprehend and detect features of things in our environment is not
unlimited. We see colors, hears sounds, detect smells that our eyes, ears, and noses are able
to detect and discriminate from other similar colors, sounds, and smells. Other organisms
perceive different features of the environment. Bees see a variety of shapes and colors in
flowers, for example, where human beings see only one. Dogs hear sounds and discriminate
scents that are well outside the range of normal human beings. Reptiles see in the infrared part
of the spectrum, bats navigate by means of sound, and microscopic organisms find their way
around in a world that is hidden from the naked eyes of humans.

So when we talk about “experience”, we must accept certain basic limitations. We can describe
the world as it appears to us, but cannot fully grasp how it appears to other creatures. And we

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have no access to how things are in themselves—outside the confines of our human bodies,
from an objective or “God’s-eye” point of view. Thus, for all creatures, every view is a view from
somewhere.

So Kant gives us an ontological distinction between two realms—the phenomenal and the
noumenal. He also claims that, even though we can say nothing particular about the nature of
the noumenal realm, i.e. what things are like “in themselves” independent of human experience,
we can infer that there must be such a realm—that things must have an existence independent
of human experience. Why? Because there must be something that causes us to have
experience. When I see a tall glass on the table in front of me, there must be something that
produces that visual experience. It appears cylindrical, smooth, relatively clear, about an arm’s
length away. I can’t say what it is “in itself”, but I can assume there must be something there to
cause this ordinary perceptual experience.

Kant’s distinction posits a radical split between sensation and the hidden cause of sensation.
But, of course, there’s more to experience than that. We typically recognize and identify the
things we perceive, and sort them into groups of things with similar characteristics. Our ability
to focus on phenomena, identify them, and organize them into groups is made possible by
concepts. This gives us another major distinction, in this case between things as they appear
to us and the way we think about, or represent, them. When I see the tall, cylindrical, smooth,
clear object an arm’s length away from me I see it as a particular thing of a general type—a
glass. Its appearance as a particular thing is due, in part, to the visual sensation it produces in
me. My seeing it as a glass is the result of applying a concept to it, a concept which is itself
labeled with a name in my native language—“glass”. This simple perceptual experience
depends on an empirical concept of the object—a concept I have acquired—linked to a name
or word I’ve learned to associate with objects of a certain kind. And my ability to perform such
acts in a consistent and reliable way constitutes a little bit of knowledge on my part. I know a
glass when I see one. And, furthermore, I can think about glasses even when they’re not
present at hand, i.e. when I have no immediate sensation of a glass, because I’m able to
produce, in my mind, the concept of a glass.

Now I have three aspects to my experience:

1. the glass as it is in itself,
2. the glass as it appears to me, and
3. my concept glass.

The glass as it is in itself is independent of me and not an object of immediate experience.

The glass as it appears to me depends on my ability to sense some of its properties. And the
concept of a glass that I apply to the object of sensation depends on what I’ve learned through
my experience of such objects and also on the language I’ve acquired from others in my
environment.

We see this division of things into the apparent, the hidden, and the conceptual coming up
repeatedly and in different guises. This is due, in part, to a history and tradition of theorizing
human experience in modern western european culture. It becomes increasingly influential in
the so-called “human” or social sciences as they took shape in the first half of the twentieth
century. And it gives us a large scale interpretive framework that will be helpful in
understanding some of the key concepts and principles of structuralist, semiotic, and
psychoanalytic theory.

Timothy Quigley
29 March 09