Perception as the Physiology of Soul

On the Primordial Nature of Direct Experience & Awareness

Dear Friends and Family,

While on a walk by the river on Wednesday, on a dirt path flanked with towering heights of milkweed, golden rod and jewelweed bushy on the bank down to the water’s edge, and honeybees hovering intoxicated on all the blooms, one touched to the ground beneath the looming shadow of my next step. Just then, we both changed course and in that motion, the bee and I avoided the end of the bee.

The bee’s sudden shift and mine were not due to the bee or me thinking “Change course! Now!” Such thought, if it occurred, occurred after the fact, and ostensibly, in me.¹ The bee was at the mercy of a perceptivity we share.

Today’s letter is a reflection on that perceptivity, following last week’s wonder about the perceptual cord and this month’s theme on direct experience. Reflecting on that moment with the bee took me down more rabbit holes than I can say on a topic far too complex than a short Sunday letter. C’est la vie! Let’s see where this goes on the page and where it takes you.

With love,

Renée

Just one of the many bees on my walk

The Accepted (Outsider) View of Perception (That Misses the Bee)

“Perception is man’s primary form of cognitive contact with the world around him.”²

These are the opening words of a paper delivered at a conference on the Philosophy of Science in 1966. And they reveal a little-changed, long-held scientific, empiricist—outside looking in “objective”—view of perception.

Mapped out, this view looks like this:

stimulus » sensation » perception » conception » response

Sensation is raw data from a stimulus. Lightwaves tickle the rods and cones (photoreceptors) in the eye. The lightwave data have no meaning. They may not be registered. Imagine if every sensation were to be registered in awareness!

When sensation does capture awareness, the sensation is perceived. A change in light occurs, perhaps the appearance of a shadow.

Conception follows, giving us an idea of what the impression is—a cloud overhead, a tree falling.

Now comes a response, which might be relief from the harshness of the midday sun. It might be fear that a tree is falling overhead. The response might be to drop back into the weight of you and enjoy a moment’s repose in the shade. It might be to run. Now!

In this view, contact with the world is plotted across a (rectilinear) map of neural coordinates. The path leads to the brain and from the brain into e/motion. In neurophysiology, this is referred to as the sensory-motor pathway. Perception is plotted along the afferent (to-brain) course.

Note that perception is a byway. It is not located.

We have learned much about the body and human psychology from this perspective. But there’s trouble. As an outsider’s view, it does little to reveal what we ourselves know already about a vital process of meaning-making as living bodies in a world of living bodies who perceive, too.

Perception in the Unfolding of Life

Aristotle paved the way for the outsider’s view. Surely, he did so inadvertently. He came to reflect on perception by reflecting on soul.

For Aristotle, perception came into being with the evolutionary coming into being of the animal domain. Believing all life is ensouled, Aristotle said that what separates the animal soul from the plant soul is perception, emotion, and movement (from this place to that).³

Some of what Aristotle said hasn’t stood the test of time. Consciousness studies in plant physiology now tell us that perception is just as vital to plant life as it is to animal life. Plants perceive touch and release chemicals in response. Plants perceive changes in temperature and moisture, the harshness of wind, and respond by becoming more phyto-chemically robust. Plants face the sun in the morning and follow it across the sky until it descends at day’s end, albeit in one place.

A teeming world of single-celled microbes, too, responds to changes in the immediate milieu.

These insights challenge some of Aristotle’s understanding of perception, that it might be more originary than evolutionary. But that points to something here we mustn’t overlook. This recognition of perception began for Aristotle with his concern for soul. What he means by soul long predates any religious ideations. He believed all life is imbued with a vital force that enlivens and precedes it. For Aristotle, soul came forth with expressive capacity through life itself. It is originary, primordial. We’ll come back to this.

On Perception from Within

In perceiving, we are aware.

We are aware that we are alive. We are aware that we are alive in the world. We are aware that the world is alive in us.

Understood from within, perception is not a byway so much as it is lived experience being grasped. Life grasps the experience of itself.

If we go back to the origins of the word, we find, in fact, the PEI root, kap, meaning to grasp. Note, too, that the word grasp has to do with an activity of the body, not the intellect. Conception is not the central player in this way of knowing.

So, from within, to perceive is to grasp the experience of something in its entirety with the entirety of our being. Perception is body and world in meaning-making unity.⁴ It intimates body’s desire to be.

The Lived (and Shared) Experience of Perception

When light rays touch the rod cells and cone cells of your eye that transmit to the whole of you in one immediacy the awareness of the light of day, the waveform of light has informed an impression on the totality of your being. The eyes are the portals of sight, but the experience is lived across the wholeness of bodily-being.

Amongst creatures in this world who have eyes or the semblance of eyes, we are not alone in this.

When a bird’s song sounds, the oscillating waves traveling through the cochlea of your ear whisper across the tiny hair cells. When they do, the waves bend the microscopic stereocilia (sound cells). The perception of (formless) sound is formed.

Amongst those of us who have ears or the semblance of ears, we are not alone in this.

When you move through space, be it with the wave of your hand to say hello, the whole-body gesture to embrace a loved one, you know where your body is in space by proprioceptors that translate motion as form.

Amongst those of us who can move through space, we are not alone in this.

When a loved one touches your hand, you know this because even though there is and will always be a gap between two hands touching, the touch is felt by the force of pressure on mechanoreceptor cells.

Amongst those of us who have a semipermeable boundary that establishes self from not self—i.e., all of life—we are not alone in this.

And on and on we experience the world and ourselves in the world and that we are not alone in this.

Perception as the Physiology of Soul

I venture one last reflective stretch.

I asked before: what if the world becomes living tissue by way of perceptual awareness?⁵

The sight of the bee and my movement and the bee’s movement do not leave me. When I reflect, the experience does not live singularly in proprioceptive hollows of my brain. The experience lives still in my hip flexors and iliopsoas. It lives in the weight shift onto the other leg. It lives in the rush of relief that still quickens inside the heart. It lives in the bee. It lives in the field of awareness itself. It lives as the meaningful desire to be and the inner feeling that we all share this desire.

I stretch this just a bit more in hopes of resuscitating the word soul in modern parlance without the burdens of over- and undertones. I wish to resuscitate this word for purposes that will become clear, I hope, in forthcoming letters. . . .

If Aristotle’s soul is a force intrinsic to all life, might we say this formless force comes into form with perception? Meaning, is perception the physiology of soul, the movement from formlessness to form in living bodies meeting the world? Last week, we explored the “threefold perceptual cord.” Might we say it is umbilical? That through perception, we’re tethered to the beginning? Could we say the pathless path is as primordial and entire as perception—which has no physiological path? And what in the world do these insights mean in our day-to-day?

I leave you with these questions for the week and extend a personal invitation to you who may be wondering if the “Pathless Path of Pilgrimage” retreat is where you wish to be in early December. A few spots remain.

Register by email: tanenbaumd@gmail.com or reply to this one.

CLICK HERE

---

For you who have asked about or wish to make a one-time donation, you can do so at “Buy Me a Coffee.”

1. Where thoughts take place could be debated as not in me but in the field between two beings in relation. The “where” of thought is for another exploration.

2. Robert Efron, ‘What is Perception?” in eds. R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky, Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science 1966/1968. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 4. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1969), p. 137.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-940010-3378-7_4

3. Aristotle, de Anima, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, 1907).

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).

5. Ibid.