§11. The Senses Cannot Think

Before Plato, the distinction between sense perception and intellectual un­derstanding was unclear and little attended to. For earlier thought these are two ways of becoming aware of something, both construed on the model of vision.

Plato imposed a regimentation that usage did not support (or resist), and made the word a philosophical term of art. His way was eased because the word itself was new in Greek at his time, aisthesis (sensation, perception) and aisthanomai (to perceive) being unattested before him. Heraclitus never used this or another word for “perception.” He knew about sight, hearing, even learning by experience (mathesis), but not perception, and in this he was of his time. A scholar of this material finds that in all the pre-Socratic evidence, the various perceptual senses are always mentioned separately and never brought together under one designation as aisthesis.⁹³

Not until Plato. He groups the usual senses and feelings of pleasure, pain, desire, and fear, in one ensemble as perception, and ties the whole package to the body (soma), in distinction from the reasoning mind (nous). Perceptual acts of seeing, hearing, and so on occur in the soul (psyche), but the power that these acts activate is corporeal, and the body obtrudes upon the soul with its perceptions.

Plato relies on another concept that was not available to earlier philosophers, a new idea of the body (soma) as the being for which the sev­eral senses are organs, not unlike the other organs of the living body. The idea begins in the Hippocratic authors, from whom Plato may take it. Before them, soma referred to something animate, but from the end of the fifth century the word applies to basic stuffs like earth and fire and to their compounds. To describe something as soma entails three-dimensionality and the capacity to be affected and to act. For physicians, the visible, vital soma conceals an inner volume where invisible goings-on crucial to health can be detected from per­ceptible signs.⁹⁵

Platonic perception happens to the body, body on body, ballistically. Life for such a body—an animal body, bereft of rational soul—is nothing but waves of these impressions, affections, and passions. Perception is like a wild animal, always on the move, responding frenetically to change. The qualities that perception discerns have no enduring existence, color for in­stance vanishing with the light. These qualities are also private (no one sees as Theaetetus does) and species-specific; dogs and fish do not see as we do. “Black or white or any color you choose is a thing that has arisen out of the meeting of our eyes with the appropriate motion. What we say ‘is’ this or that color will be neither the eye which encounters the motion nor the motion which is encountered, but something which has arisen between the two and is peculiar to each several percipient.”⁹⁶

Plato’s argument is that perception cannot think ousia (being).

There are some things which all creatures, men and animals alike, are nat­urally able to perceive as soon as they are born; I mean, the experiences (pathemata) which reach the soul through the body. But reasonings (logismos) about their being and their advantageousness come, when they do, only as the result of a long and arduous development, involving a good deal of trouble and education Then knowledge is to be found not in the experiences we undergo (pathenasin) but in the reasoning (sullogismo) we do concerning them. It is here, seemingly, not in the experiences, that it is possible to grasp being and truth.⁹⁷

Two differences distinguish perception and intellect. First, they have dif­ferent objects, perception perceiving qualities and intellect contemplating substantially real things. Additionally, perception is an affection, a colli­sion passing forcefully through the body like a shiver, while mentation is the mind's own activity, an internal discourse of logical judgments. When the objects are sensory, the judgment (“The tree is green”) is a phantasm (image), which Plato explains as “a blend of perception and judgment.” This blending, a collaboration with the body and sensation, ensures that images are no more than a plausible spectacle from which no philosopher expects the truth. “What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes but never is? The former is grasped by understanding, which involves a reasoned account.

The coordination Plato establishes between body and perception complies with his distinction between opinion or belief (doxa) and scientific know­ledge (episteme). Doxa is a corporeal effect of sensation, which gives it an object completely different from that of scientific knowledge. This know­ledge is not doxa with additional qualifications (belief-plus), being instead a completely different quality of a completely different subject. Perception takes one no distance toward scientific knowledge. Writing in Timaeus, Plato contrasts the things the senses perceive with something that “keeps its own form unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed, which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, nor itself enters into anything else anywhere, [and] is one thing.” What the senses perceive “has been begotten” and “is constantly borne along, now coming to be in a certain place and then perishing out of it.” This becoming and change “is apprehended by opinion, which involves sense perception.” The other thing, which alone truly is, “is invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all—and it is the role of understanding to study it.”⁹⁹

Science requires philosophers to turn away from perception, which is not easily done. Plato urges a view of the body and perception as seductive obstacles to divine truth. Empirical inquiry is pointless. Whenever we at­tempt to examine anything with the body we are deceived. It is by reasoning, not perception, that reality becomes clear, and “the soul reasons best when none of these senses troubles it, neither hearing nor sight, nor pain nor pleasure, but when it is most by itself, taking leave of the body and as far as possible having no contact or association with it in its search for reality.” Bodies are nothing to know. Sights, sounds, perceptions, sensations—these are cognitively null and void. No attention to them, methodical as it may be, yields knowledge. “If anyone attempts to learn something about sensible things, whether by gaping upward or squinting downward, I’d claim—since there’s no knowledge of such things—that he never learns anything.”¹⁰⁰

In modern usage, “aesthetics” refers to the philosophy of art and beauty. Plato had notorious views on these topics, even if he didn’t have the modern concept of aesthetics. His thought on beauty is as ascetic or asensual as an “aesthetic” theory can be. The apprehension of beauty is an act minimally contaminated by sensory interference. Sensuous beauty is no more than a hint, and must not become a halt. It intimates something higher that finally leaves perception behind: “the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality.”¹⁰¹